MODERN TIMES

Sir Francis Drake leaned up against a wall of printed bills outside the Palace of Varieties and let his oiled bonce settle back against the giant names in black and red. According to his pocket watch there was a good half-hour before he had to draw his face on with burnt cork for the Inebriate. He could afford to kick his boots here on the corner until then and watch the horse-carts and the bicycles and all the pretty girls go by, with possibly another Woodbine for a bit of company.

He’d been a six-year-old at school in Lambeth when the other boys called him Sir Francis Drake. That had been at the outset of his mother’s slide to poverty, when he’d been forced to wear a pair of her red stage-tights that had been cut down to look like stockings, although being pleated and bright crimson hadn’t looked like that at all, accounting for the name. In many ways, he thought, he’d got off lightly. Sydney, his big brother … or his ‘young ’un’ as they’d called big brothers at the Hanwell School for Destitutes … had been obliged to wear a blazer, previously a velvet jacket of their mother’s, which had red and black striped sleeves. Aged ten and therefore more self-conscious than his younger sibling, Sydney had been known as ‘Joseph and his coat of many colors’.

Standing at the junction of the high-street now he found that he was sniggering at the nicknames, or at least at Sydney’s, though they hadn’t seemed so funny at the time. Still grinning, he consoled himself that Francis Drake had cut a famously good-looking and heroic dash, while Joseph had been dropped down a deep hole and left to die by brothers outraged at his dress-sense. Anyway, Sir Francis Drake was better than the other names he’d had across the years, which had endured far longer. Oatsie, that was one of them, just rhyming slang from oats and barley. He put up with it, but didn’t like it much. He always thought it made him sound as though he was a yokel, and that wasn’t quite the picture of himself that he was trying to present to people.

Up the hill towards his corner came a brewer’s dray in the Phipps livery, a snorting dappled shire horse with its mop-head hooves as big as dinner plates, dragging its clinking, rattling cartload to a halt in front of him when it came to the crossing where he was. A weathered, chained-off tailboard kept its load in place: old ale-crates that had been stacked empty outside pubs come rain or shine, their damp wood dusted lime with mold, now filled again by brown and glinting cargo headed for some other hostelry, some other windswept corner of a beery cobbled yard. The cart was pulled up at the crossroads, waiting for a moving van and young lad on a bike to go across the other way, before it carried on uphill. He stood there leaning up against the posters, staring at it while it idled, and just for a laugh he thought he’d slip into his character as the Inebriate.

He screwed his eyes up, lowering the lids so he looked half asleep, and made his cake-hole into a lopsided smirk. Even without the cork this creased his face so he appeared some ten years older than his real age, which was twenty. Gurgling deep down in his throat with incoherent lust, he fixed his bleary gaze upon the brewer’s wagon and began a veering but determined drunkard’s walk in its direction, as though he were trying desperately to affect a normal swagger but with legs that barely functioned. He made three steps sideways off downhill but then recovered and took squinting aim again toward his prize, staggering off the curb and out into the mostly empty cobbled road as he approached the booze-truck standing on its far side. Reaching out his hands as if for all the chiming bottles, he slurred “I must be in Heaven”, whereupon the startled driver looked round at him once then geed the horse on, swerving her around the rear end of the moving van that hadn’t yet got quite across the street, and went on jingling up the hill as quickly as the vehicle could manage. Walking casually back across the highway to resume his place propped up against its corner wall he watched the cart go and felt half proud at his act’s success and half ashamed for the exact same reason. He was far too good at doing drunks.

Of course, the drunks were all his father, Charles, who he’d been named after and who had died from dropsy just a decade earlier, in 1899. Four gallons. That was how much liquid had been drained out of his father’s knee, and that was why the better the Inebriate went down, the guiltier he felt. He watched as the September sun fell slanting on the dirty old Northampton buildings hunched around the crossroad’s corners, turning brickwork flocked with soot to orange fire, and thought about the last time that he’d spoken to his dad. It had been in a pub, he noted without much surprise. The Three Stags, hadn’t it been, down Kennington Road? The Stags, the Horns, the Tankard, one of those at any rate. It had been round about this time of day, late afternoon or early evening, on his way back home to where he lived with Sydney and his mother along Pownall Terrace. Passing by the pub he’d had the strangest impulse he should push the swing-door open and look in.

His father had been sitting up one corner on his own, and through the two-inch crack by which he’d opened up the barroom door he’d had a rare chance to observe the man who’d sired him without being seen in turn. It was an awful sight. Charles Senior sat there in his drab upholstered nook and nursed a short glass of port wine. He’d one hand resting in his waistcoat as if to control his ragged breathing, so he’d still looked like Napoleon as mother always said, but bloated as though puffed up with a cycle-pump. He’d previously had a rather sleek, well-fed look, but had turned to an enormous, sloshing bag of water with his former handsomeness submerged and lost somewhere within it. The appearance he’d had once was smoothly oval-faced like Sydney’s, although Sydney’s father had been someone else entirely, some displaced Lord out in Africa, at least according to their mother. Even so, his brother still looked like Charles Senior much more than Charles Junior ever had, the latter favoring their mother more, with her dark curls and beautiful expressive eyes. His father’s eyes had been sunk in the risen dough that was his face that afternoon in the Three Stags, but they’d lit up with what he’d realized with a start was joy when they’d alighted on the small boy peering in towards him through the partly open doorway and the lapping tides of smoke that hung suspended in the air between them.

Even now, stood at the bottom end of what was it called, Gold Street, in the dead-end venue of Northampton, halfway through another disappointing tour with Karno’s Mumming Birds, even today he couldn’t quite get over just how pleased his dad had been to see him on that last occasion. Lord alone knew he’d not shown much interest in his son before then, and Charles Junior had been four years old already when he’d realized for the first time that he had a father. In the Stags that evening, though, the once-arresting vaudevillian had been all smiles and fond words, asking about Sydney and their mother, even taking his ten-year-old offspring in his arms and, for the first and last time, kissing him. Within a few weeks his old man was dying in the hospital, St. Thomas’s, where that bloody Evangelist McNeil had offered only “as ye sow, so shall ye also reap” as consolation, heartless dog-faced bastard that he was. ‘Old man’. Charles Junior chuckled ruefully and shook his head. His father had been thirty-seven, out at Tooting Cemetery in that white satin box, pale face framed by the daisies that Louise, his fancy woman, had arranged around the coffin’s edge.

Perhaps his father knew, there in the fug and mumble of the Three Stags, that he held his son for the last time. Perhaps in some way everybody had a sense before it came, as if it were already all set out, of how their end was going to be. He glanced up at a speckled cloud of birds that dipped and swung and flattened out like a gray flame against the sunset, as they flocked above the local inns and hardware shops before returning home to roost, and thought it was a pity that you couldn’t tell beforehand how your life was going to be, and never mind about your death. Things could go either way for him at present, and it was as unpredictable and random as the movements of those roosting pigeons, how events would finally fall out. Without a break of some sort he’d be spiraling around these northern towns until his dreams had all leaked out of him, had proven to be nothing but hot air from the beginning. Then there would be nothing for it but to live up to his mother’s bleak prediction, every time he’d come home with a whiff of drink upon his breath: “You’ll end up in the gutter like your father.” He knew he was standing at a crossroads in a lot more ways than one, put it like that.

There were more carts and vans about now and a few more people crossing back and forth over the intersection as the town made its way home from work to have its tea. Women with prams and men with knapsacks, loud boys playing vicious, agonizing games of knuckles with each other while they waited for the conker season to commence, all jostling along the streets that led to the four compass points and crossing over where they joined, doing a hurried trot between the coal trucks and the atolls made of horse muck and, just at that moment, a red tram with an advertisement for Adnitt’s gloves across its front. This came up from the west, along the road that he stood facing down with the inflated, sagging sun behind it, and continued on its iron rail past him on his right to hum away up Gold Street. He was living in a modern world all right, but didn’t always feel like he belonged here, in the first years of this new and daunting century. He thought most people felt as jittery and out of place as he did, and that all the optimistic new Edwardians you heard about were only in the papers. Looking round him at the passing people, from their faces and the way they dressed you wouldn’t know the Queen was dead eight years, but then when everyone was poor they tended to look much the same from one reign or one era to another. Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.

And it never would be, not in England. Look at all the business with the People’s Budget as they called it, where they’d made provisions for some money to be taken from the income tax and spent upon improvements in society, but then the House of Lords had thrown it out. Somebody ought to throw them out, he thought, and fumbled in his jacket for his pack of snouts. England was going down the plughole and he didn’t reckon that this twentieth century was going to be as kindly to the country as the nineteenth had been. There were all the Germans, for a start, making their ugly noises and their ugly ships. Last year they’d bragged about how much ammonia they’d managed to produce, while now they bragged about how many bombs. Then there was India kicking up a fuss and wanting their reforms. Not that he blamed them, but he thought it was a sign there might not be so many pink bits to school atlases in years to come. The British Empire looked as if it was decaying, inconceivable as that might seem. It had most likely died, to his mind, with Victoria, and now was in the long slow process of accepting its demise and falling quietly to bits.

Thinking about the old days, watching while a junkman cursed a grocer’s lad whose bike had shot across before his horse and cart, he was reminded of the first time that he’d come here to Northampton. He’d been nine, so it had been, what, 1898? Taking the box of ten Wills’s Woodbines from his pocket, he extracted one of the remaining six and balanced it upon his lower lip while he returned the narrow packet to his coat. It was this very same theater that he’d been appearing at, that first time more than ten years back, with Mr. Jackson’s troupe of child clog dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads. He’d stood on this corner with his best friend from the outfit, Boysie Bristol, and they’d talked about the double act that they were going to make it big with, as the Millionaire Tramps, decked out in fake whiskers and big diamond rings. This place had been the Grand Variety Hall back then, and Gus Levaine had still been running it, but otherwise it didn’t seem so different. There they’d been, Boysie and Oatsie, cutting off from their rehearsals to waste time here on this spot and think about the fame and fortune they could see stretched out before them, much the same as he was doing still today, all these years later. Contrary to what he’d thought about his father knowing he was soon to die, it seemed more likely to him now that people just made mostly hopeless guesses at how things would work out. While he couldn’t speak for Boysie Bristol, who he’d not seen in five years, for his part he was fairly certain that whatever roles the future held in store for him, Millionaire Tramp would not be one of them. He took a box of matches from his other pocket, turning to one side and pulling his lapel up as a wind-shield while he lit his fag.

Exhaling a blue plume, the west wind he was facing caught the smoke and dragged it back across his shoulder, off up Gold Street. He was looking at a little patch of wasteland halfway down the hill across the road from him and thinking vaguely of the Eight Lancashire Lads – four of them were from outside Lancashire and one of them had been a short-haired girl, but it was true that there were eight of them – when out of nowhere he remembered. This was where they’d met the black man, the first one he’d ever really seen except for pictures in encyclopedias.

Him and Boysie had been skulking here, debating the logistics of their double act, deciding that their diamond rings should be made out of paste until their turn had made them into actual millionaires, when down the hill he’d come upon his funny bike, over the crossroads and towards them. The chap’s skin was black as coal and not a shade of brown, with salt-and-pepper showing up already in his hair and beard so that the boys had thought he must be getting on for fifty. He was riding a peculiar contraption of a sort that neither lad had previously come across. It was a bicycle that had a two-wheeled cart fixed on the back, but what made it an oddment were its tires, the two on the machine itself and those upon the trolley that was dragged behind it. They’d been made of rope. Fitted around the bare iron rims were lengths of the same formerly-white hawser that had been employed to tie the trailer to the bike, now ridden through so many sooty puddles that their color wasn’t noticeably lighter than that of the cyclist himself.

The Negro, seeing that the boys were gaping at him as he came over the crossroads, smiled and pulled his bicycle-and-cart up to the curb a little past them down the hill. He did this with small wooden blocks that he had strapped beneath his shoes for brakes, taking his feet from off the pedals so that they hung down and scraped over the cobbles of the road until the wagon was brought in this manner to a halt. Its rider had looked back across his shoulder, grinning at the two boys who had been regarding him so rudely, and called out a friendly greeting to them.

“Ah hope you two youngsters ain’t bin gittin’ up tuh any trouble, now.”

The man’s voice had been marvelous, like nothing that they’d ever heard before. They’d trotted down the hill to where he was and told him they were waiting their turn to perform as clog dancers, which almost was the truth, then asked him where he’d come from. He’d be too self-conscious now, he thought, to just come out and say that to a black man, but when you’re a kiddy you just speak what’s on your mind. The fellow had black skin and had a foreign accent. It was only natural that they should ask where he was from, and naturally was how he’d taken it, without offense or anything. He’d told them he was from America.

Of course, that had set both boys off on a great stream of questions about Indians and cowboys, and if all the buildings in the cities were as tall as they’d been told. He’d laughed and said New York was “purty big”, though looking back he hadn’t seemed half so impressed about his origins as the two boys had been. He’d told them how he’d lived here in Northampton for about a year now, “down on Scarlut Well”, wherever that was, and then after some more chat had said he ought to be about his work. He’d winked at them and told them to keep out of trouble, then he’d lifted up his wood-blocks and careered away downhill, towards where the ornate gray drum of a gas-holder reared against the sky. After the man had gone, the two of them had enthused for a time about America, and then had imitated how the black bloke talked, his own impression knocking Boysie’s into a cocked hat. Then they’d gone back to all their Millionaire Tramp pipedreams, and he’d never thought about the curious encounter from that day to this.

He took a drag that was more like a sip off of his Woody and then blew the smoke out down his nose, the way that he’d seen others do and thought it looked quite stylish. There was now a fair old bunch of people heading back and forth over the crossroads, either riding or on foot, and he stood wondering what else there might have been from those times that he’d just forgot about. Not skull-faced Mrs. Jackson, wife of the Lancastrian former teacher who’d set up the company, sat suckling her baby son while overseeing the clog dancing troupe’s rehearsals. He’d remember that sight if he lived to be a hundred. Now he thought about it, there were more than likely very few things like that Negro chap, things he’d forgot about by accident, although he knew there were a multitude of things that he’d forgot about on purpose, as it were.

It wasn’t that he was ashamed of where he’d come from, but a lot of what this business was about was how things looked. He had an eye to how he wanted things to be reported if he ever managed to make something of himself. It didn’t hurt to come from a poor background: ‘rags to riches’ was a story everybody loved. The rags part of it, though, that had to be depicted in a certain way, touched up and made more picturesque with all the nasty little details painted out. Nobody would have shed a tear for Little Nell if she’d expired in childbirth or from syphilis. The public had an appetite for sadness and for sentiment, and what they saw as all the color of the worse-off classes, but nobody liked the taste of squalor. The Inebriate went down a treat for just so long as he was hanging round a lamppost, talking to it like a pal. The skit was cut off long before he shit his trousers or went home and put his wife in the infirmary by belting her until she couldn’t walk.

That was another element that needed getting rid of if you wanted to present your tale of poverty in the right light, all of the fights and beatings. If at some uncertain point in the uncertain future he was asked to reminisce, say for some little magazine on the theater, why, then he’d talk about Mumming Birds, he’d talk about The Football Match where he’d appeared with Harry Weldon, and he’d even talk about the Eight Lancashire Lads. The years that him and Sydney spent as the performing mascots of the Elephant Boys, though, they wouldn’t get a mention. Not a dickey bird.

A sudden gust along the west arm of the crossroads blew the cigarette smoke back into his eyes so that they watered for a second and he couldn’t see. He waited for a bit then wiped them with his cuff, hoping that all the people passing wouldn’t think that he was crying; that a girl had stood him up or anything like that.

There had been nothing else but gangs all over London back when he was growing up. You didn’t strictly have to be in one of them, and if you wanted to stay out of trouble it was better if you weren’t, but there was something to be said for being friendly with a gang and sort of on its edges. If you picked a mob to hang around who’d got a reputation that was terrible enough, then with a bit of luck the other gangs would see that you were left alone. There hadn’t been a crew in all the city or its boroughs half as frightening as the boys from Elephant and Castle, which was how come him and Sydney pallied up to them.

Him and his elder brother could both sing and dance by that age and had often done turns on the street to earn a penny when their mother’s luck was going badly, as it often was. The Elephant Boys, who’d think nothing of disfiguring or robbing adult men, had been impressed by him and Sydney, shrewdly noticing the brothers’ obvious entertainment value. They’d be called on as the gang’s performing monkeys, either as a means of bringing in some coppers when the funds were low or else to lift morale before and after some hair-raising punch-up with a rival bunch of lads, perhaps the Bricklayer’s Boys from Walworth, somebody like that. His specialty had been to jam his dainty feet into the handles on a pair of dustbin lids, then tap-dance on a metal grating just for all the deafening racket it would make. They’d called it Oatsie’s Stamp. In fact, the Elephant Boys were the first to call him Oatsie, now he thought about it.

It had been a horror. He’d be doing Oatsie’s Stamp with Sydney joining in on spoons or comb and paper, just whatever was about, and there the biggest thugs from out the gang would be, sat by the roadside, studiously sharpening their market-worker’s hooks up on the curb-stones, sometimes looking up and whistling or clapping if they thought that him and Stakey were performing well. Stakey was what they’d called his brother in those days, from steak and kidney. There they were, Stakey and Oatsie, hiding round the corner, watching while the scrap or massacre was taking place, then afterwards they’d both be called back on so he could do the victory dance with a white face at all the business he’d just seen – boys running home with one ear hanging from their head, a lad of fourteen screaming with the blood all down his legs from where a hook had caught him up the ass – and he’d be thinking about all of this while he was stamping on an iron grid, the dustbin tops wedged on his plates of meat making a noise like Judgment Day, with hot sparks shearing from the clattering metal up round his bare knees. He’d been what, seven, eight years old?

If he’d learned anything from all of that it had been that he couldn’t bear the thought of being hurt, of having something permanent done to his body or especially his face. They were the things he hoped would lift him out of all this grubbing round to make a crust. If anything should happen to them, that should be the end of it. Of him. He’d stood and watched once, sick with shame, while Sydney got a thumping from an older member of the gang who’d taken umbrage over something Syd had said. He’d known, and Sydney had assured him later, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to help, but all the same he’d felt a coward over the affair. He could have said something, at least, but then that might have meant that he was next, so he’d just stood there and watched Stakey have his cheek split open. If, unlikely as it seemed, he ever wrote a memoir, none of this would be included.

Arguments or shouting matches, those he was all right with, but a fight was something he’d try anything he could do to avoid. Some of the older entertainers that he knocked about with on the circuit reckoned things were looking bad between England and Germany and thought sooner or later there might be a war. He’d be just twenty-one next April and then he’d have the key of the door, never been twenty-one before and all of that, but he’d still be of army age if anything should start. He didn’t fancy that idea at all, and still hoped there was some way he could be safe in another country, if and when it happened. He’d been booked in for a month to play at the Folies Bergère for Karno earlier that year and he’d enjoyed it so much that he hadn’t wanted to come home. He’d seen more lovely women than he’d ever dreamed of, which was saying something with his dreams. He’d met Mr. Debussy, the composer, and he’d had the only real brawl of his life with the prize-fighter Ernie Stone in Stone’s hotel room after too much absinthe. Stone had won, of course, but he’d not done too bad considering and had surrendered only when the lightweight boxer hit him in the mouth so that he’d thought that he might lose his teeth. Returning to the old routines of Mumming Birds and touring gloomy northern towns after all that had been a disappointment, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he got to go abroad again, preferably not in a tin hat as a conscript of the army. Karno had been going on about America, but then Ferd Karno talked about a lot of things and only some of them would ever come to fruit. He’d keep his fingers crossed and see what happened.

Oatsie took a few more quick puffs on his fag, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out beneath a swiveling boot before he kicked it off the curb. The crossroads’ gutters brimmed with empty cigarette packs, Woodbines, Passing Clouds, and an unappetizing salad of dead leaves. He had to squint about a bit before he caught sight of the trees that these had evidently fallen from, some way along the crossroads’ westward route so that he only saw the tops of them, gold in the setting sun. Now that he looked he saw that there were also saplings sprouting from a couple of the chimneys closer to him, rooted in the dirty brickwork, like the one he could see growing up above the roofline of the public house across the street, the Crow and Horseshoe. Noticing a street-sign bolted up on the far corner and made near unreadable by soot and rust, he saw the slope he stood on was called Horseshoe Street, which helped explain at least the second part of the pub’s name. And if those further trees whose tops he could just glimpse were standing in a graveyard then that might explain the first part, he supposed. He pictured chubby carrion birds all perched there screeching on their tombstones where the names had been erased by moss, and then he wished he hadn’t.

He was only twenty after all. He didn’t need to think of all that morbid business for a long time yet, although there’d been lads killed in the Boer War a good sight younger than what he was now. For that matter, there had been kids in Lambeth who’d not got to their tenth birthdays. He wished he could still believe in God the way he had that night in Oakley Street, down in the basement where he was recovering from fever, when his mother had performed the most dramatic scenes from the New Testament to keep him occupied. She’d put all of the talents from a stage career she’d only recently abandoned into the performance and had almost done too good a job, with him left hoping that he’d have a relapse in his fever so that he could die that night and meet this Jesus who he’d heard so much about. She’d been that passionate, he’d never doubted any of the stories for an instant. Mind you, that had been before him and his brother were dragged through the workhouse with her, and before she had been put in the asylum for a spell. He wasn’t quite so sure today about the heaven that he’d heard described that night, so vividly he couldn’t wait to touch it.

These days, though, he’d lowered his sights and if he thought about what might be after death at all it was in terms of how he’d be remembered, or else how he’d be forgotten. What he wanted was his name to live on after him, and not just as a character from pubs around Walworth and Lambeth, how his father had been posthumously labeled. What he wanted was to be well thought of and well spoken of when he was dead, the way that someone like Ferd Karno would be. Well, perhaps that was a bit ambitious, given Karno’s stature in the business, but at least he’d like to be recalled as someone in the same division, even if he was a fair sight lower down in people’s estimation than what Ferd would be. Considering the future, when there’d be more people everywhere, he could see how the Music Hall would be much bigger and much more important than it was today, and Oatsie thought there was a chance that he’d get written up somewhere as a contributor to the tradition’s early days, at least if he could manage not to get killed in a war before he’d got his break.

The ideas he was entertaining had begun to get him down. He swept his long-lashed girlish eyes across the passing throng in hope of spotting a big bust or pretty face that might distract him from his own mortality, but he was out of luck. There were some women who looked nice enough, but not what you’d call notable. As for their bosoms it was much the same tale. There was nothing that stood out, and so he drifted back to his uneasy contemplations.

What it was with death that worried him was that it made him feel like he was trapped upon a tramline that was only going to one place, that the iron rail was set already in the road in front of him, that it was all inevitable, although actually that was the thing that worried him with life as well, upon consideration. It was how life seemed sometimes like a skit that had been written out beforehand, with a punch line that was set up in advance. All you could do was try and keep up with its twists and turns while the momentum of the story dragged you through it, one scene following another. You were born, your father ran away, you sang and danced on stage to keep your family out the workhouse but they went there anyway, your brother got you a position with Ferd Karno, you went off to Paris, came back home, missed out on Harry Weldon’s former star role in The Football Match because of laryngitis, you got stuck with Mumming Birds instead and ended up back in Northampton, and then some time after that, a long time hopefully, you died.

It was all the “and then and then and then” of it that scared him, one scene following another, its events determining how all the acts thereafter would unfold, just like a great long line of dominoes all falling, and it didn’t seem you could do anything to change the way they fell, the prearranged precision of it, regular as clockwork. It was as if life were some great big impersonal piece of machinery, like all the things they had in factories that would keep rolling on whatever happened. Getting born was just the same as getting your coat lining caught up in its wheels. Life pulled you in and that was that, you were enmeshed in all its circumstances, all its gears, until you reached the other end and got spat out, into a fancy box if you were lucky. There seemed very little choice in any of it. Half his life had been dictated by his family’s financial situation, and the other half dictated by his own compulsions, by his need to be adored the way his mother had adored him, by his frantic scrabble to get somewhere and to be somebody.

But that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Oatsie knew that was what everybody thought about him privately, all of his so-called pals from in the business, how they saw him as a climber, always chasing something – chasing women, chasing any scrap of work he had a sniff at, chasing fame and fortune – but he knew they’d got him wrong. Of course he wanted all those things, wanted them desperately, but so did everybody else, and it was never really the pursuit of recognition that propelled him through his life so much as the great black explosion of his background rumbling behind him. Mother starving her way into madness, father swelling up into a stinking, sloshing water-bomb, all of the pictures flickering past to a percussion made by fists on flesh and dustbin lids on gratings, hammering and clanging in the rising sparks. What kept him on the move, he knew, was not the destiny that he was chasing but the fate that he was running from. What people saw as climbing was no more than him attempting to arrest his fall.

The flow of vehicles and people at the crossroads moved like shuttles on a loom, first shunting back and forth from north to south, up and downhill in front of him, then rattling from west to east along the road that had the Crow and Horseshoe in and Gold Street. All the day’s smells mingled there upon his corner, cooked by the unseasonably sunny afternoon and now condensed with sunset to a dog-blanket that hung above the junction. Horse manure was the most prevalent among the mixed aromas, giving the perfume its base, but there were other essences stirred into the bouquet: coal dust that faintly smelled of electricity and pepper, stale beer wafted from the ale-yards and another sweet yet noxious fragrance somewhere between death and pear drops that at first he couldn’t place but finally decided that Northampton’s many tanneries, most probably, were where the odor came from. Anyway, he put all this out of his mind because just then, ascending Horseshoe Street on his side, there was something that he definitely wouldn’t turn his nose up at.

She’d never be mistaken for a classic beauty, not the type he’d witnessed on the Champs-Élysées, he could see that even at this distance, yet there seemed to be a radiance she carried with her. Strolling up the slope towards him from down near its bottom he could note a plumpness in the girl that might be more pronounced when she grew older, but which at that moment manifested in an irresistible arrangement of well-balanced and voluptuous curves. Her contours were as generous and as inviting to the eye as a lush garden, with a little of the garden or the orchard also in the sway her walk had underneath the cheap, thin fabric of a flapping summer skirt, her thick thighs tapering to sturdy calves and tiny china feet, which lazily swung back and forth below the fluttering hem as in her own good time she climbed the hill.

Her clothes were drab and mainly brown but complementary to the palette of the landscape she was sauntering through: the leaves that choked the gutters with a fire and chocolate medley and the faded sepia handbills peeling torn from the façade of an antique rival theater, down there at the foot of Horseshoe Street. Setting the composition off, though, was the woman’s hair. Deep auburn as a bowl of polished chestnuts and like lava where they caught the early evening light her curls fell round her rose cheeks in a jiggling spill of brandy snaps. A little more than five feet tall, a pocket goddess, she burned like a lamp flame that was low yet still illuminated the smoke-cured enclosures that it passed among.

As this young bit of stuff came closer, he could make out that she carried something up near her left shoulder, one hand underneath it as she leaned whatever it was on the slope of her full breast, the other wrapped around the lump to hold it to her, as you would a shopping bag if both the handles had come off. Still only halfway up the steep climb to where Oatsie stood, she stopped now to adjust her grip upon the bundle, shifting it up higher in her arms before she carried on. A fluffy outcrop on the top end of the item seemed to suddenly come loose and swivel round to point straight at him, whereupon he realized that it was a baby girl.

To be more accurate, despite its size and age it was perhaps … no, not perhaps … it was most certainly the loveliest human creature he had ever seen. She seemed to be not much more than a year old, with her white-gold locks that dropped down in a shower of wedding rings and her enormous eyes the reassuring blue of police lanterns on a risky night. The infant girl was like a cygnet angel as she met his gaze unblinkingly, perched there in the embrace of the approaching woman. If he’d ever thought that his own beauty might one day lift him above the quagmire of his origins, here was a glory that they’d surely come to talk about the way they spoke of Helen. Nothing would prevent this child from growing to a diamond of her age, a face that stared out of a poster at you once and haunted you forever. She would never in her life go unappreciated or unloved and you could see it in the level, unassuming look that she already had, the inviolable confidence of a celestial orchid grown amid the clovers and the weeds. If he knew anything, he knew the tot would end up as a bigger name than him and Karno put together. It was unavoidable.

The fact that the small girl was being carried by the shapely little woman didn’t necessarily mean they were child and mother, he reflected, looking on the bright side, although even from this far away you couldn’t help but notice a resemblance. Still, there was a chance this chickabiddy was the tiny vision’s aunt, minding the baby while its parents were at work, and that therefore she might be unattached, despite appearances. It didn’t really matter in the long run in that all he wanted was to while away ten minutes with some pleasant and flirtatious talk, not scarper off to Gretna with her, but it somehow always made him feel uncomfortable if he was chatting up a married girl.

Climbing the hill, the woman gazed towards its far side and the patch of wasteland that he’d noticed earlier, dreamily contemplating the gone-over buddleia erupting from between its tumbles of collapsed old brick, seemingly unaware of his existence. He already had the baby’s eye, however, so he thought he’d work with that and see how far he got. He dipped his chin until it touched his collar and the fat knot of his tie, then looked up at the toddler from beneath his curling ostrich lashes and the jet-black hyphens of his brows. He gave the gravely staring little beauty what he knew was his most impish grin, accompanied by a brief, bashful flutter of his eyelids. Suddenly he broke out with a clattering burst of expert tap dance on the worn buff flagstones, lasting no more than three seconds before it was over, at which juncture he stopped dead and looked away uphill, pretending to disown his terpsichorean interlude as if it hadn’t happened.

Next, at intervals, he darted shy and furtive glances back across his shoulder as though to establish whether the cherubic child was looking at him, though he knew she would be. Every time he met her look, which now seemed slightly more delighted and amused, he ducked his face away as though embarrassed and stared pointedly towards the opposite direction for a moment before letting his gaze creep, as though reluctantly, back round across his shoulder for another glimpse of her, like in a game of peek-a-boo. On the third time he did this, he saw that the pretty woman carrying the waif had been alerted by her charge’s gurglings and was looking at him too, wearing a knowing smile that seemed one of appraisal yet was at the same time somehow challenging, as if she weighed him up according to a measure he was unfamiliar with. The breeze was lifting more now as the day cooled off, smashing the dandelion clocks that grew upon the scrap-ground and then scattering their drifting cogs along the street. It shook the woman’s curls like burnished catkins as she studied him, deciding whether she approved of what she saw.

It seemed she did, although perhaps not without reservations. Only several paces from him now she called out cheerfully to Oatsie over the remaining distance.

“You’ve got an admirer.” Obviously, she meant the baby.

In a funny way her voice was like blackcurrant jam, which he was passing through a fad for at the time. Both hearteningly commonplace and fruity with suggestive undertones, its sweetness had a quality of darkly dripping plenty and, as well, the hint of a sharp bite. Her accent, though, was not the strange Northampton intonation he’d expected. If he’d not known better, he’d have sworn that she was from South London.

By then, she’d got to the corner where she stopped, a foot or so away from him. Up closer, now that he could see the woman and her baby in more detail, they were certainly no let-down. If the child had been more beautiful or perfect he’d have wept, while the adult companion, who he’d got his eye on, had a glow and warmth about her that if anything enhanced the first impression that she’d made on him from further down the hill. She looked to be about his age, and the hot summer that was drawing to its close had raised a crop of freckles on her face and arms that were like smaller versions of the specks on lilies. He became aware that he was staring at her and decided that he’d better say something.

“Well, just as long as my admirer knows that I was standing here admiring her before she was admiring me.” This wasn’t quite so obviously about the baby, necessarily, but he was happy with the ambiguity. The woman laughed and it was music, more that of a pub piano on a Friday night than of Debussy, but still music just the same. The western sky was being daubed in other colors now, in melancholy piles of gold like lost exchequers over the gas-holder, pastel smudges of pale violet and bruise mauve on its peripheries as she replied.

“Ooh, get away with yer. You’ll give ’er a big ’ed, then she’ll be spoiled and no one’ll want anything to do with ’er.” She changed her hold upon the infant here, switching its weight onto her other arm so that he now saw her left hand and the plain ring on its third finger. Oh well. He found that he quite enjoyed the bit of company, and didn’t mind much that it wouldn’t lead to anything. He changed his line of complimentary spiel so it was now directed solely at the baby and, freed from the need to make a good impression on the woman, Oatsie was surprised to find that he meant every word of it for once.

“I don’t believe it. She looks like it’d take more than flattery to spoil her, and I’d bet five bob that she’ll have people flocking round her everywhere she goes. What do you call her?”

Here the brunet turned her face towards that of the small girl in her arms, to smile fondly and proudly as she let their foreheads gently touch together. There were geese above the gasworks.

“ ’Er name’s May, like mine. May Warren. What’s yours, anyway, stood out ’ere on Vint’s Palace corner with yer pimpy eyes?”

Oatsie was so shocked that his mouth fell open. No one had described what he still thought of as his smoldering gaze in quite that way before. After an instant of stunned silence, though, he laughed with genuine admiration at the woman’s insight and her brutal honesty. What served to make the slur much funnier was that at just the moment it was said, the woman’s baby turned her head and gazed straight at him with a puzzled, sympathetic look, as if the child echoed her mother’s query, also wondering what he was doing out here on the corner with his pimpy eyes. This made him laugh longer and harder, with the woman chuckling deliciously along and finally her tiny daughter joining in as well, not wishing to appear as if she didn’t understand.

When they’d eventually stopped, he realized with a certain wonderment how good it felt after the months and years of scripted comedy to have a real, spontaneous laugh, particularly at a joke against himself. A joke that told him he was getting too big for his boots, and that the serious career concerns that were upsetting him not five minutes before were likely to be just as puffed up and inflated. It had put things in perspective. He supposed that was what laughs were for.

He nodded, with as little smugness as he could, towards his name up on the poster he was leaning on, but told her she should call him Oatsie. All his friends did, anyway, and he thought Charles would sound too stuck-up to a girl like this. When him and Sydney had been small their mother had been doing well at first, and would parade her boys along Kennington Road in outfits that she knew nobody else around there could have possibly afforded in their wildest dreams. That had made the collapse to poverty and pleated crimson tights for stockings more unbearable, of course, and ever since he’d had a fear of people thinking that he was above himself, so that they’d be less cruel if he should fall. Oatsie would do, he thought. Their two names even had a sort of harvest supper ring to them. Oatsie and May.

The woman looked at him, eyes narrowed quizzically, miniature fans of decorative wrinkles opening and closing at their corners.

“Oatsie. Oats and barley. Yer a Londoner.”

She cocked her head a little back and to one side, regarding him with what seemed like a frown of deep suspicion, so that for a minute he was worried. Had the girl got something against London? Then her face relaxed into a smile again, except that now the grin had something of a knowing, cat-like quality.

“From Lambeth. West Square, off St. George’s Road in Lambeth. Am I right?”

The baby had lost interest in Oatsie now, and entertained herself by bunching her small fists, painfully from the look of it, within the copper tangles of her mother’s hair. He felt his jaw drop open for the second time in just about as many minutes, although this time was no prelude to hilarity. Frankly, it rather put the wind up him. Who was this woman, who knew things she couldn’t know? Was she a Gypsy? Was all this a dream that he was having at the age of six, about the funny world there’d be when he was older, sleeping fitfully, his shaved head rasping on the rough cloth of a workhouse pillow? There and then he felt as if he’d let his hold on what was real slip from his fingers, and a momentary vertigo came over him so that the crossroads’ arms seemed almost to be spinning like the needle of a broken compass, chimney smoke and gilded clouds whirled into streaming mile-wide hoops, caught by the centrifugal tug of the horizon. He did not know, any longer, where he was or what was going on between him and this startling young mother. Even at a distance he’d known that she’d turn out to be lively, but the actuality of her went far beyond what he’d foreseen. She was a shocker, her and her unearthly daughter both.

Seeing the panic and confusion in his eyes she laughed again, a throaty bubbling that was shrewd and faintly lewd as well. He had a sense that she enjoyed putting a scare in people now and then, both for her own amusement and to show her power. While his respect for her was mounting by the second, the desire he’d felt when he first saw her was evaporating in direct proportion. This was someone who despite her modest stature was a bigger person than he knew himself to be. This girl, he thought, could eat him, then burp raucously and be upon her way without a second thought.

At last, though, she took pity on him. Disentangling her ringlets from the baby’s fingers while the younger May was suitably distracted by another gliding, jingling tram, she proved that she was no professional magician by explaining just how her mind-reading turn had been accomplished.

“I’m from Lambeth, just off Lambeth Walk in Regent Street, that little terrace. Vernall. That’s me maiden name. I can remember ’ow our mam and dad would take me out around there when I was a little girl. There was a pub they went to, up the London Road, and when we come ’ome we’d cut back across West Square. I see yer there a time or two. You had a brother what were older, didn’t yer?”

He was relieved, though hardly less amazed. The woman’s feat of memory, although far past his own capacity, was not untypical among those who’d grown up in crowded little neighborhoods, where everyone appeared to know the names of everybody else within a two-mile radius, along with all their children’s and their parents’ names and all the mystifying quirks and threads of happenstance that linked the generations. Having never learned the trick of it himself, perhaps because he’d always hoped he wouldn’t be stuck in those places very long, he’d been thrown off his guard when it was played upon him, here in this improbable location, in this far-flung town. Unlike the woman, he could not remember any childhood meetings for the life of him.

“Yes. You’re right, I had a brother Sydney. Still have, for that matter. When were you around there, then? How old are you?”

She raised, at this point, a reproachful eyebrow at his lack of manners, asking her about her age, but finally replied.

“Old as me tongue but older than me teeth. I’m twenty, if you must know. I was born the tenth of March in 1889.”

The more she reassured him that there was a natural explanation for her knowing his childhood address, the eerier the incident of their chance meeting struck him. This surprisingly imposing woman had been born within a month of him and lived perhaps two hundred yards from him while he was growing up. Now here they both were, sixty miles and twenty years away from where they’d started out, stood at one of a hundred corners in one of a hundred towns. It made him think again about his previously held opinions as regards predestination, and if people ever really had an inkling of the path ahead of them. He could see now that it was actually two separate questions that required two different answers. Yes, he thought that probably there was a pattern in how things occurred that had been drafted out beforehand, or at least it sometimes seemed there was, but then again he also thought that if there were such a design it would be far too big and too outlandish to be read or understood, so no one could predict how all its curlicues were going to be resolved, except by accident. You might as well attempt to forecast all the shapes a purple sunset-cloud would make before it burned away, or which cart would give way to which when they met at the crossroads’ corners. It was all too complicated to make sense of it, whatever all the prophets and the tea-leaf readers might pretend. He shook his head, replying to her, muttering something inadequate about it being a small world.

The lovely baby was now squirming restlessly, and Oatsie was afraid her mother would use this excuse to take her home and end their conversation, but she asked instead what he was he was doing at the Palace of Varieties, or the Vint Palace as she seemingly insisted upon calling it. He told her how he generally did a bit of this, a bit of that, but how tonight he was appearing with Ferd Karno’s Mumming Birds as the Inebriate. She said it sounded proper funny, and said how she’d always thought it would be nice to be someone who worked in entertainment.

“Mind you, it’s our kid, our Johnny. ’E’s the one who’s always going on about the stage. This is me youngest brother. Reckons that ’e’s gunna end up in theater or else playin’ music in a band, but ’e’s all talk. ’E wunt ’ave lessons, wouldn’t even if we could afford ’em. Too much like ’ard work.”

He nodded in response, watching a milk cart headed back towards its depot at the bottom of the street, downhill behind her. From where he was standing it appeared about an inch high, dragged by its disconsolate and shrunken mare along the girl’s right shoulder, losing itself in the autumn forest of her hair for quite some time before it reemerged upon her left and then slunk wearily from sight.

“Well, if your brother doesn’t want to put the hours in, he won’t get too far as a performer. Mind you, he could still make money as a manager or impresario, and then he could be as bone idle as he liked.”

She laughed at this, and said she’d pass on the advice. He took advantage of the pause to ask her why she’d called the venue the Vint Palace.

“Oh, it’s ’ad lots of names over the years. Our dad’s ’ad family in Northampton ever since I can remember, always going back and forth from here to Lambeth, so ’e’s kept up with the changes. It began as the Alhambra Music Hall, from what ’e said, and then they changed it to the Grand Variety around the time what I was born. Accordin’ to our dad there was a bad patch sometime after then, when it weren’t even a theater for a while. For getting on five years it weren’t the same place one month to the next. It was a greengrocer’s and then it was a place where they sold bikes. It was a pub they called the Crow before that moved across the street to be the Crow and Horseshoe, and I can remember when I was a little girl ten years back and it was a coffee house. All the free-thinkers as they called ’em used to go in there, and they were some right ’Erberts, I can tell yer. Anyway, the year the Queen died, that was when they done it up and christened it the Palace of Varieties. Old Mr. Vint, he bought the place a year ago, but still ain’t ’ad the sign changed.”

Oatsie nodded, looking at the old establishment in a new light. Because he’d come here as a Lancashire Lad all those years ago and it was a variety hall then, he had assumed that it had been one ever since, that it had always been one and, in every likelihood, it always would be. The young woman’s casual listing of the purposes to which the premises had been put in the meantime made him feel uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. Oatsie supposed it was because the world he’d been brought up in, horrible and suffocating as he’d reckoned it, at least stayed where it was from one year, often from one century, unto the next. Even this shabby corner of Northampton here, a place about as run down as the Lambeth he’d been born to, you could see most of the buildings standing round you were still housing the same businesses they’d housed a hundred years before, even if names and management were different now. That’s why the girl’s account of the hall’s changing fortunes had unsettled him, because the story was a relatively rare one still, although you heard more like it every week. What should it all be like, he wondered, if these here-today-and-gone-tomorrow fleapits came to be the rule, not the exception? If he were to come back here in, say, forty years time and found it was a place that sold, he didn’t know, electric guns or something like that, and no longer a variety hall? Perhaps by then there wouldn’t even be variety halls. Well, that was an exaggeration, obviously, but it was how May’s off-hand narrative had made him feel, uneasy with the way that things were going these days, in the modern world. He changed the subject, asking her about herself instead.

“You sound as if you know the place, gal, anyway. How long is it you’ve lived here now?”

She cast her eyes up thoughtfully at scraps of lilac cirrus on a field of deepening blue, while her astonishingly well-behaved and patient offspring sucked a gleaming thumb and stared, it seemed indifferently, at Oatsie.

“Ninety-five, I think it was, when I was six we come up ’ere, although our dad, ’e’s always goin’ back and forth, to get the work. ’E walks it, the old bugger, all the way to London and then back. Many’s the time when we’ve not seen ’im for six weeks, not ’ide nor ’air, then ’e comes waltzing in ’alf-cut with presents, little bits and bobs for everybody. No, it’s not a bad old place. This bit round ’ere’s a lot like Lambeth, ’ow the people are. Sometimes I ’ardly feel as if we’ve moved.”

Some of the narrow shops across the other side of Horseshoe Street were putting lights on now, a dim glow tinged with green around its edges that crept out between the sparse and shadowy displays in their front windows. Lowering her gaze from up among the chimneybreasts, the elder May looked proudly down now at the younger, cradled in her sturdy, tiger-lily arms.

“I think I’m ’ere for good. I ’ope I am, at any rate, and ’ope the little ’un shall be, too. They’re a straightforward lot round these parts, in the main, and there’s some real old characters. It’s where I met me chap, my Tom, and we got wed up at the Guildhall. All ’is people, they’re all local, all the Warrens, and we’ve lots of family up ’ere on the Vernall side as well. No, it’s all right, Northampton is. They do a good pork pie, and there’s some lovely parks, Victoria, Abington, and Beckett’s. That’s where I’ve just took this one, down by the river there. We saw the swans and went out on the island, didn’t we, me duck?”

This was directed at the baby, who was finally beginning to show signs of restlessness. Her mother stuck out her own lower lip and turned her brows up at a tragic angle, mimicking her daughter’s glum expression.

“I expect she’s ’ungry. Goin’ down the park I stopped at Gotcher Johnson’s for two ounce o’ rainbow drops, but I ’ad one or two as well, so they were finished up some time ago. I’d better get ’er ’ome up Fort Street for ’er tea. It’s potted meat, ’er favorite. It’s been nice to meet yer, Oatsie. ’Ope yer skit goes well.”

At that, he bade goodbye to both the Mays, and said it had been similarly nice to meet the pair of them. He shook the baby’s damp, minuscule hand and told her that he hoped to see her name on a big hoarding one day. To her mother he just said “Take care of her”, then as the woman chuckled and assured him that she would, he wondered why he’d come out with it. What a stupid thing to say, as if suggesting that she wouldn’t look after a child like that. The babe and parent waited until there was nothing coming, then they crossed the foot of Gold Street and went up the hill towards the north. He stood there on his corner and admired the woman’s bum, moving beneath her swinging skirt as she mounted the slope, with her imagined buttocks like two faces pressed together as their owners acted out a vigorous two-step. Or perhaps two wrestlers full of muscles in a crush, each one in turn gaining an inch on their opponent who immediately takes it back, deadlocked so that they merely seem to heave from side to side. He noticed at this point the baby, staring soberly across the woman’s shoulder at him as she was borne off into the distance. Feeling oddly mortified to think the child had caught him looking at her mother’s bottom he glanced rapidly away towards the plot of scrubland halfway down the hill, and when he looked back just a minute later they were gone.

He looked to see what time it was, then fished another Woody from his dwindling pack and lit it. That had been a funny conversation, now he thought about it. It had made an impact on him that was only just now starting to sink in. That woman, May, born just a few weeks after he was, raised not half a dozen streets away, and somehow they’d both met up on a corner in another town twenty years later. Who’d believe it? It was one of those occurrences that he supposed were bound to happen now and then, despite the odds, yet when they did it always felt uncanny. There was always the suggestion of a pattern in the way things worked that you could almost understand, but when you tried to pin down what the meaning or significance might be it all just fizzled out and you were left no clearer than you were before.

Perhaps the only meaning that events had was the meaning that we brought to them, but even knowing this was probably the case, it frankly wasn’t that much help. It didn’t stop us chasing after meaning, scrabbling like ferrets for it through a maze of burrows in our thoughts and sometimes getting lost down in the dark. He couldn’t help but think about the woman he’d just met, how the encounter had stirred twenty-year-old sediments up from the bed of him, and how that made him feel. The root of it, he thought, was how the similarities between his background and the woman’s had made all their differences stand out in just as sharp relief.

For one thing he was on the verge, or so he hoped, of an escape from the soot-smothered prison of his and the woman’s common origins, from poverty, obscurity and streets like this, where now the sky was cut to rich blue diamonds by the iron struts of the gas-holder. Escape from England, even, if he could. In the event of a forthcoming scrap with Germany, Sir Francis Drake hoped to be in his hammock and a thousand miles away. As for the spirited young mother, May, she didn’t have those opportunities. Without the talents he’d inherited or learned from both his entertainer parents, she had lived a life more limited in terms of both its expectations and its possibilities, and its horizons, which she did not feel compelled to cross, were that much closer than the boundaries around his own. She’d said herself she thought she’d live here in this district all her life, and that her gorgeous little daughter would as well. There were no hopes or dreams that she was chasing, Oatsie knew. In neighborhoods like this, such things weren’t practical, were only ever burdensome and painful liabilities. That lively young girl was resigned to live and die, it would appear, within the small cage of her circumstances; didn’t even seem to know it was a cage or see its grimy bars. He thanked whatever guardian angel he might have for giving him at least the slim chance to avoid a lifelong penal sentence like the one that she existed under. Every woman, man or baby passing by him through the tannery-infused slum twilight was to all intents and purposes a convict, serving out their time in harsh conditions without any likely prospect of reprieve or pardon. Everyone was safe in lavender.

But May had seemed content, and not resigned at all. May had seemed more content than Oatsie felt himself.

He thought about it, blowing out a wavering slate-and-sepia fern of smoke through pretty, puckered lips. Some of the carriages that moved across the junction had by now fired up their lanterns, as the lapis of the skies above grew gradually more profound. Chandelier snails, they crawled uphill and sparkled in the dead-end dusk.

He saw there were two sides to being poor, to having nothing, not even ambitions. It was true that May and all the others like her didn’t have his drive, his talents or his opportunities for betterment, but then they didn’t have his doubts, his fears of failing or his nagging guilt to deal with, either. These were people, heads down, crunching through the pavement’s autumn garnish, who weren’t on the run from anything, especially the streets they’d come from, so they didn’t have to feel as if they were deserters all the time. They knew their place, the worst-off, in more ways than one. They knew exactly where they were in so far as society should be concerned, but more than that they knew their place; they knew the bricks and mortar that surrounded them so intimately that it was like love. Most of the poor souls sluicing through this crossroad’s floodgates hailed from families, he knew, that would have lived around these parts for generations, just because the distance you could travel was more limited before there had been railway trains. They trudged these byways in the knowledge that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done just the same a hundred years before, had let their troubles soak in the same pubs, then poured them out in the same churches. Every mean and lowly detail of the neighborhood was in their blood. These knotted lanes and listing pie-shops were the sprawling body they’d emerged from. They knew all the mildewed alleys, all the rain-butts where tin waterspouts had rusted paper-thin. All of the area’s smells and blemishes were as familiar to them as their mothers’ moles, and even if her face were lined and dirty they could never go away and leave her. Even if she lost her mind, they …

Tears were standing in his eyes. He blinked them back and then took three quick puffs upon his cigarette before he wiped away the excess moisture with his fingertips, pretending that the smoke had blinded him. None of the passersby were looking at him, anyway. He felt abruptly angry with himself for all the sloppy sentiment that he still harbored and for just how easily the waterworks came welling up. He was a man now, he was twenty though he felt like thirty sometimes, and he shouldn’t still be blubbing like a little kid. He wasn’t six. He wasn’t weeping over his cropped curls in Lambeth Workhouse and it wasn’t 1895. Although he knew he hadn’t yet completely taken in the fact, this was the twentieth century. It needed people who were bright and up-to-date and forward-looking in the way they thought, not people who got tearful dwelling on the past. If he were to make anything out of his life he’d better pull himself together, sharpish. Drawing deep upon his fag he held it in and looked around him at the slowly darkening intersection, trying to regard it from a modern, realistic viewpoint rather than a maudlin and nostalgic one.

Yes, you could come to look upon this haphazard array of weather-beaten hulks as like a mother, he could see that. At the same time, like a mother, it was not a thing that would eternally endure. Old age had ravaged it with change, and wasn’t done yet by a long chalk. Just as he’d been thinking a few moments back about how previous generations were restricted in their chances to go traveling, he understood that things should be much different in this new, enlightened age. The steam engine had altered everything, and on the streets of London now you could see motor-carriages, of which he thought there should be more in time to come. Communities of countless decades’ standing like the one around him would perhaps not seem as well-knit if the inmates stood a chance of easily and cheaply getting out, of going where the work was better without walking sixty miles like that girl’s dad had done. Even without a war to decimate its young, he doubted that the bonds connecting people to a place like this would last another hundred years. Districts like this were dying. It was no betrayal, wanting to leap out of them to somewhere safe before they finally went under. Anyone who’d seen the world, who felt that they were free to come and go just as they pleased, why would they want to be stuck in a dump, a town, a country even, that was like this? Anyone with any sense who had the means would be off like a shot, soon as they could. There wasn’t anything to keep them here, and …

Coming through the settled gloaming up the hill was an old black man, on a bicycle that had ropes fastened to its rims instead of tires, pulling a cart with the same kind of wheels behind it, juddering like a ghost-tale skeleton across the cobbles.

Oatsie wondered, for the second time within a half an hour, if he were dreaming. It was the same man, riding the same outlandish boneshaker, as on the afternoon twelve years before when he’d stood here with Boysie Bristol, here on this same corner, saying “Yes, but if they’re millionaires why do they act like tramps?”

The Negro paused his strange contraption at the top of Horseshoe Street, there on the corner opposite to Oatsie’s, waiting for a horse-bus to go by the other way. Of course, he’d aged across the intervening years so that his hair and beard were now a shock of white, but it was without question the same man. He didn’t, upon this occasion, notice Oatsie but sat there astride his saddle waiting for the bus to pass so that he could continue up the hill. He had a faraway and faintly troubled look upon his strong, broad features and did not seem in the same expansive mood as when they’d last met, back when the old queen was still alive and it had been a different world. Even if Oatsie had still been an eager, gawping lad of eight he doubted that the black man would have noticed him, as pensive and distracted as he now appeared to be.

The omnibus having by this time rumbled past, the man lifted his feet, which still had wood blocks strapped beneath the shoes. He set them on the pedals, standing up and leaning forward as he pushed down strenuously, gradually acquiring the momentum that would take him and his trailer past the crossroads and away uphill through the descending gloom, in which he was soon lost from sight.

Watching the black chap disappear, he sucked upon his cigarette without account of how low it had burned, so that it scorched his fingertips and made him yelp as he threw the offending ember to the ground, stamping it out in angry retribution. Even as he stood there cursing, waggling his fingers so the breeze would soothe the burn, he had a sense of wonderment at what had just occurred, at the whole atmosphere of this peculiar place where it would seem that such things happened all the time. To think that in the dozen years since he’d last been here, while he’d roamed the length and breadth of England and had his Parisian adventure, all those different nights he’d spent in all those towns and cities, all that time the black man had been still here, going back and forth along the same route every day. He didn’t know why he found this so marvelous. What, had he thought that people disappeared because he didn’t happen to be looking at them?

Then again, a fellow such as that, who’d already seen the America that Oatsie longed for and despite that had decided to stay here … it might not be a marvel, but it was a puzzle, certainly. Raising his eyebrows and his shoulders at the same time in a theatrical shrug of overemphasized bewilderment aimed at nobody in particular, he took a last glance at the crossroads as it drowned in indigo then walked the few steps to the Palace of Varieties’ diminutive front door. He pushed it open and went in, where it was slightly warmer, walking past the ticket office with a nod and grunt to the uninterested portly type inside. He wondered if it would get busy, if they’d get much of a crowd tonight, but you could never tell. Things didn’t rest so much in the gods’ laps as in how many laps they could entice into the Gods.

The whitewashed storage shed that was his dressing room was down a short but complicated series of bare-boarded corridors and then across a cramped and ancient-looking yard that had a water closet running off from it and stagnant puddles, which had taken up a permanent position in the sinks of the subsiding flagstones. He’d popped in the changing room a little earlier to stow some of his props and gear, but hadn’t really had a good look round yet. Much to his surprise the uninhabitable-looking quarters had a gas mantle set halfway down one flaking wall, which he was quick to put a match to so that he could shed some light upon the subject.

He’d seen worse. There was a yellow stone sink in the corner, with its brass tap bent to one side all skew-whiff, and dribbling spinach-colored verdigris in veins shot through the metal so it looked like putrid cheese. He found a cracked and book-sized mirror in a wooden frame hung by a bent nail from the inside of the door and stood himself before it while he groped in the inside breast pocket of his jacket for a piece of cork. With this produced he struck another match and held the stopper’s end that was already blackened in the flame so that it would be freshly charred and not too faint to see from the back row. Waving away the smoke and waiting just a mo for his impromptu stick of makeup to cool down, he gazed into the broken looking glass. Ignoring the black fissure that ran in a steep diagonal across the face of his reflection, he allowed his features to relax into the bleary bloodhound sag of the Inebriate, his sozzled and lopsided grin, with rheumy eyes that he could just about keep open.

First he crushed some of the greasy cork-ash to a dust between his fingers and began applying it beneath his jaw-line, working the black powder in around his tightly compressed mouth and up across his jowls to just below the cheekbones, where it was the shadowy gray stubble of a chap out on a binge who’d been without a wash and shave for some few days. Using the stub of cork itself he emphasized the creases underneath his tucked-in jaw until he had the onset of a double chin, then went to work around the sockets of his eyes to get the wastrel’s haggard look before progressing to the heavy, rakishly-arched brows. He daubed a drooping and fatigued mustache on his top lip where there was none, letting the ends trail down beside the corners of his mouth in straggling lines. Just about satisfied with how he had the face he wiped the charcoal from his fingers straight into his greasy hair, messing it all around on purpose so that bits of it stuck up and curls went everywhere like oily breakers on a choppy sea.

He checked his image in the fractured mirror, holding his own gaze. He thought that it was almost there. He started in on the fine detail, deepening the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, his whole face starting to take on a grayish pallor from the liberal application of the cork. It could be eerie sometimes, sitting in a silent, empty, unfamiliar room and staring into your own eyes while you changed into someone else. It made you realize that what you thought of as yourself, your personality, the biggest part of that was only in your face.

He watched as the persona that he’d carefully constructed for himself sank out of sight. The animated gaze that he used to get women’s sympathy or to communicate his eagerness and his intelligence, all that was gone into the drunk’s befuddled squint. The careful way he held his features to convey the breezy confidence of a young fellow of today, in a young century, this was rubbed out, smudged by a sooty thumb into the slack leer of Victorian Lambeth. All the hallmarks of his cultivation and the progress he had made in bettering himself, in struggling up from the ancestral mire, were wiped away. In the divided countenance that stared back at him from the split glass, his restricted present and big future had subsided to the sucking, clutching sludge that was his past. His father and the thousand barroom-doors he’d popped his head round as a child when sent to find him. Small blood vessels ruptured in the cheeks of lushingtons, pressed on the chilly pillow of a curb. Gore rinsed from hooks in horse-troughs. All of it, still waiting there if he were to relax that cheeky, cheery smile for just an instant, just a fraction of an inch.

There was a scent of damp and dereliction draped about the room. Beneath the smeared and ground-in ash he had no color to his face at all now in the wan, uneven light. Black hair and eyes stood out from a complexion that was silver-gray. Contained within the mirror frame, it was the fading photograph of someone trapped forever in a certain time, a certain place, in an identity that could not be escaped. The portrait of a relative or a theater idol from a lost time when your parents had been young, frozen eternally within the pale emulsions.

He put on the outsized, wrinkled jacket that he wore as the Inebriate, and filled his green glass ‘San Diego’ bottle from the tap. Somewhere not far away, he hoped, an audience was waiting. The gas mantle hissed a dismal premonition.