People :
Author : Alan Moore
Text :
Foul fanthoms five his farter lies, and office bones are cobbles made. Ah ha ha ha. Oh, bugger, let him stay down here and underwater in the warm, the sweaty linen currents drefting him away, aweigh in anchor chains and scrabble crabs and mermaids mermering to their slowmile phones, their fishbone combs, don’t make him swim up to the light just yet, not yet. Five minutes, just five minutes more because down here it isn’t any time at all, it could be nineteen fifty-eight and him a five-year-old with all his life uncoiled unspoiled before him, down here in the warm and weeds and winkles, with his thoughts bright-colored tetras streaming in among the tumbled busts, the dead men’s chests, but it’s too late, already it’s too late. A mattress-spring is poking through the ocean bed-sands, up into his back, and he can feel his jellyfish-limp arms and legs trailing around him in a salty sprawl as he reluctantly floats up through dream-silts in suspension, back towards the dappled dazzle of the surface, where his mother’s got the wireless on down in the kitchen. Bugger. Bugger it.
Benedict Perrit half-opened his eyes into their first wince of the day. It wasn’t 1958. He wasn’t five. It was May 26th, 2006. He was a coughing, farting wreck of fifty-two, a piece of nineteen-hundreds royalty in exile, traipsing back and forth along the shores of an unfriendly foreign century. Ah ha ha ha. Wreck was a bit strong, actually. He was in better shape than most his age, to look at. It was more that he’d just woken up, and he’d been on the ale the night before. He’d pick up later on, he knew, but morning always came as something of a shock to Benedict. You hadn’t had a chance yet to get your defenses up, this time of day. The thoughts that later on you could avoid or brush aside, they were all on you like a pack of dogs when you were just woke up and hadn’t had your breakfast yet. The cold unvarnished facts of his own life, by morning’s light, were always like a straight punch in the face: his lovely sister Alison was dead, a bike smash more than forty years ago. His dad, old Jem, was dead. Their house they’d lived in, their old street, their neighborhood, those were all dead as well. The family he’d started for himself with Lily and the boys, he’d messed that up, that was all finished now. He was back living with his mam in Tower Street, what had been the top of Scarletwell Street, up behind the high-rise blocks. His life, in his opinion, hadn’t really worked out how he might have hoped, and yet the thought that in another thirty years it would be over horrified him. Or at least it did when he’d just woken up. Everything horrified him when he’d just woke up.
He let his demons chew on him a minute or two more, then threw them off along with the top sheet and blankets, swinging down his knobbly, hairy legs onto the bedside floor as he sat up. He ran his hands over the mountainous relief-map of his face and back into the still-black tangles of his hair. He coughed and farted, feeling vaguely disrespectful to be doing so while in the presence of his bookshelves, up against the room’s end wall. He could feel Dylan Thomas, H.E. Bates, John Clare and Thomas Hardy staring at him pointedly, waiting for him to own up and apologize. He mumbled a “beg pardon” reaching for his dressing gown, hung on a chair beside the ancient writing desk, then stood and padded barefoot out onto the landing, farting once more to assert his independence just before he closed the bedroom door and left the pastoral poets to discern the romance in his flatulence. Ah ha ha ha.
Once in the bathroom he took care of his evacuations, which, thanks to the drink the night before, were wretchedly distressing but concluded fairly quickly. Next he took his dressing gown off while he had a wash and shave, stood at the sink. The central heating, that was one thing from the modern world that he was glad of. Down in Freeschool Street where he’d grown up it had been much too cold to wash more than your face and hands each day. Perhaps you’d have a proper scrub in a zinc bath on Friday nights if you were lucky.
Benedict ran some hot water in the basin – he would grudgingly admit hot water could be seen as an improvement, too – then splashed himself all over before lathering up with his mom’s Camay, utilizing his abundant pubic hair as an impromptu soap-pad. For the rinse he dragged a towel down from the rail to stand upon, so that he wouldn’t soak the bathroom carpet, leaning forward so his genitals hung down into the white enamel basin while he scooped the water up and let it pour across his chest and belly, sluicing off the suds. He used a sponge to wash away the foam beneath his arms, then gave his legs and feet a mostly-soapless rubdown before drying off upon another, larger towel. He put his dressing gown back on, then took his dad’s old shaving brush and straight-edge razor down out of the bathroom cabinet.
The bristles – hog or badger hair, he’d never known for sure – were soft and soothing, slathering the white froth on his cheek. He stared into the bathroom mirror, met his own sad gaze, then drew the open razor in a line across the throat of his reflection, some two inches from the windpipe, gurgling mortally, rolling his eyes and sticking out his long and only slightly furry tongue. Ah ha ha ha.
He shaved, washing the blade clean underneath the cold tap and depositing a scum of tiny hairs around the basin’s tide-line. It was like a tea-leaf residue, but smaller, and he wondered if the future could be seen among the random specks. They always used to say down in the Boroughs how if, for example, you had tea-leaves that looked like a boat it meant a sea voyage was in store, only of course it never was. Putting away the shaving kit he patted dry his face and risked a palm-full of Old Spice. He’d thought the fruity smell was girlish when he’d slapped it on the first time as a teenager, but nowadays he liked it. It smelled like the ’Sixties. Looking in the glass at his clean-shaven face he gave a suave, matinee-idol smile and jiggled his thick eyebrows up and down suggestively, a sozzled gigolo attempting to seduce his own reflection. God, who’d want to wake up next to that, next to Ben Perrit and Ben Perrit’s nose? Not him, that was for sure. If Benedict had only got his looks to go on, he presumed that he’d be sunk. It was a stroke of luck, then, that he was a published poet too, on top of all his other charms and virtues.
He went back into his bedroom to get dressed, only remembering the fart when it was too late. Bugger. He pulled on his shirt and trousers breathing through his mouth, then grabbed his waistcoat and his shoes and bolted for the landing, finishing adjusting his apparel once he was outside the room and back in a terrestrial atmosphere. He wiped his watering eyes. By Christ, that was the kind that let you know as you were still alive.
He clopped downstairs. His mam, Eileen, was in the kitchen, hovering by the gas-stove, making sure his breakfast didn’t burn. She’d have begun it, scrambled eggs on toast, when she’d first heard him stumbling to the bathroom overhead. She pulled the grill-pan out an inch or two to check the tan on the sliced white, and poked at the yolk-colored cumulus congealing in the saucepan with her wooden spoon. She glanced up at her son with old brown eyes that were as loving as they were reproachful, tucking in her jutting little chin, pursing her lips and tutting as if after all these years she was no wiser when it came to Benedict, or what to make of him.
“Good morning, Mother. May I say that you’re particularly radiant this morning? There’s some sons, you know, who wouldn’t be so gallant. Ah ha ha.”
“Yiss, and there’s some mothers as do ’ave ’em. ’Ere, come on and ’ave yer breakfast ’fore it’s cold.” Eileen retrieved the toast, skimmed it with marge and dumped the steaming, scrambled mass upon it, seemingly in one continuous movement. She pushed back a gray strand that had worked loose from her bun as she gave Benedict the plate and cutlery.
“There y’are. Don’t get it dayn yer shirt.”
“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha.”
He sat down at the kitchen table and began to wolf his way into what he perceived as necessary stomach-lining. He’d got no idea why everything he said came out as if it were a punchline or a previously unknown comic catchphrase. He’d been that way as far back as anyone remembered. Perhaps it was just that life was easier to get through if you thought of it as an unusually long installment of The Clitheroe Kid.
He finished breakfast, swilled down with the cup of tea his mam had meanwhile made for him. He gulped the brew … I can’t talk now, I’m drinking … keeping one bright, hedgehog-baking Gypsy eye upon the coat pegs in the passage where his hat and neckerchief were waiting, while he sat there plotting his escape. Escape, though, except into poems or fond memories, was the one thing that Benedict had never been successful with. Before he’d set his empty teacup down into its saucer and commenced his dash for freedom, Eileen shot him down.
“Shall yer be lookin’ out fer work today, then?”
This was yet another aspect of the mornings, quite apart from thinking about death the moment you woke up, that Benedict found problematic. It was two things, actually, that he was largely unsuccessful with. Escape, and finding work. Of course, the biggest stumbling block he had with finding work was that he wasn’t looking, or not very hard, at any rate. It wasn’t all the actual work that put him off, it was the job: all the procedures and the people who came with it. He just didn’t think he had the heart to introduce himself to a collection of new faces, people who knew nothing about poetry or Freeschool Street and wouldn’t have a clue what Benedict was all about. He couldn’t do it, not at his age, not to strangers, not explain himself. To be completely frank, he never had been able to explain himself at any age, to anybody, or at least he’d never managed to explain to anybody’s satisfaction. Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.
“I’m always looking. You know me. The eyes that never rest. Ah ha ha ha.”
His mother tipped her head to one side while regarding him, with fondness and bone-tired incomprehension at the same time.
“Ah, well. It’s a pity that yer eyes can’t pass the trick on to yer ass, in that case. ’Ere. ’Ere’s summat fer yer dinner. I expect I’ll see yer when yer get back in, if I’m still up.”
Eileen pressed ten Benson & Hedges and a ten-pound note into his hand. He beamed at her, as if it didn’t happen every morning.
“Woman, I could kiss yer.”
“Yiss, well, you do and you’ll get this.” This was his mam’s fist, thrust upwards like a haunted Aboriginal rock outcrop. Ben laughed, pocketing the tenner and the fags, then went into the hall. He fastened his burnt-orange neckerchief across the swallowed Carlsberg bottle of his Adam’s apple, squinting at the daylight filtered through the frosted panel by the front door and deciding it looked bright enough to leave his coat behind, though not so bright that he need bother taking his straw hat. His waistcoat looked like brothel curtains as it was. He didn’t want to over-do it.
He transferred the ciggies from his trouser pocket to his canvas satchel, where he’d also got some Kleenex tissues and an orange, with a copy of A Northamptonshire Garland edited by Trevor Hold and published by Northampton Libraries. It was just something he was dipping into at the moment, just to keep his hand in. Bag across one shoulder, Benedict called goodbye to his mam, drew in a fortifying breath before the hallway mirror and then, flinging wide the front door, he launched himself valiantly once more into the fray, and the frayed world it was conducted in.
Spit-colored clouds moved over Tower Street, formerly the upper end of Scarletwell. The street had been renamed after the high-rise, Claremont Court, that blocked out half the western sky upon his right, one of two brick stakes hammered through the district’s undead heart. On recently refurbished crab-paste brickwork were the words or possibly the single word NEWLIFE, a sideways silver logo, more a label for a mobile phone or for an everlasting battery than for a tower block, he’d have thought. Benedict winced, attempting not to look at it. For the most part, he found it comforting to still reside in the beloved neighborhood, except for those occasions when you noticed that the loved one had been dead for thirty years and was now decomposing. Then you felt a bit like someone from an item out of Fortean Times, one of those lovelorn and demented widowers still plumping up the pillows for a bride who’s long since mummified. Newlife: urban regeneration that they’d had to literally spell out because of its conspicuous absence otherwise. As if just bolting up the mirror-finish letters made it so. What had been wrong with all the old life, anyway?
He checked to see the door had locked behind him, with his mam now being on her own in there, and as he did he saw the big fat druggy with the bald head, Kenny something, lumbering down Simons Walk that ran along the end of Tower Street, at the back of Claremont Court. He had gray slacks and a gray sports-top on, which from a distance looked all of a piece, like one big romper suit, as if the dealer were an outsized baby who’d exceeded the safe dose of Calpol. Benedict pretended he’d not seen him, turning left and walking briskly up towards the street’s far end, a confluence of sunken walkways tucked away behind the traffic vortex of the Mayorhold. How could anybody get that fat on drugs, unless they ate them in a fried bread sandwich? Ah ha ha ha.
Yellow leaves were plastered in a partial lino on the wet macadam at his feet as he passed the Salvation Army building, a prefabricated barracks that he didn’t think he’d ever been inside. He doubted they went in for tambourines these days, much less free cups of tea and buns. The twentieth century had been a better time to be a washout. Back then poverty had come with a brass band accompaniment and a cheek full of scone dissolving in hot Brooke Bond; kindly bosoms heaving under navy blue serge and big golden buttons. Now it came with flint-eyed teenage death-camp supervisors in the no-hiding-place glare of the Job Center, and whatever soundtrack happened to be playing in the shopping precinct outside, usually “I’m Not In Love”. The short street ended as it met the footpath to the underpass, where a high wall reared up to bound the robot shark tank of the Mayorhold. Patterned with a bar-code stripe of ocher, tangerine and umber, it was probably intended to provide a Latin atmosphere, whereas instead it looked like an attack of vomiting restaged in Lego. Benedict stopped walking for a moment so that he could take it in, the ground where he was standing, with its full historical enormity.
For one thing, it was near here that one of his father’s favorite pubs had been, the Jolly Smokers, although this was by no means the full extent of the locale’s historic pedigree. This spot was where Northampton’s first ‘Gilhalda’ or Town Hall had stood back in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, at least according to historian Henry Lee. Richard the Second had declared it in his charter as the place where all the bailiffs and the mayor were situated. Bailiffs were still seen down here from time to time, though mayors less often these days. Late on in the thirteen-hundreds all the wealth and power had shifted to the east side of the town, and a new Guildhall had been raised down at the foot of Abington Street, near where Caffè Nero stood today. That was the point from which you could most likely date the area’s decline: for more than seven hundred years the Boroughs had been going steadily downhill. It was a long hill, evidently, though as he stood there regarding the emetic tile-work Benedict believed the bottom was at last in sight.
Although the first Town Hall had been located here, that wasn’t why the former town square had been named the Mayorhold, or not as Ben understood things, anyway. His theory was that this had happened later, in the 1490s, at a time when Parliament had placed Northampton under the control of an all-powerful mayor and council made up of four dozen wealthy buggers, sorry matron, wealthy burghers that they called the Forty-Eight. Benedict thought that this was when the people of the Boroughs, like the folk of nearby Leicester, had begun their grand tradition of electing a joke mayor, to take the piss out of the processes of government from which they’d been excluded. They’d hold mock elections in the square here, hence the name, and would award a literal tin-pot chain of office made from a pot lid to whoever they’d randomly appointed, often somebody half cut, half sharp, half missing from a war wound, or, in extreme cases, all of the above. Benedict had a notion that his own paternal grandfather, Bill Perrit, had been one such appointee, but that was based on no more than the old man’s nickname, which had been “the Sheriff”, and the fact that he’d sit there all day blind drunk outside the Mayorhold Mission in an old wheelbarrow that he treated like a throne. Benedict wondered briefly if he could claim office based upon being descended from the Sheriff and on living where the first Town Hall had stood? He fancied himself as a Titchbourne Claimant, as a Great Pretender, one of those who’d put more forethought into getting crowns on heads than keeping heads on shoulders. Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and Benedict Perrit. Names to conjure with. Ah ha ha ha.
He turned along the sunken footpath, with ahead of him the steps that led up to the corner where the upper end of Bath Street met the top of Horsemarket. Even from this low vantage he could see the higher stories of both tower-blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, where they poked up above the Spanish-omelet tiling of the dyke wall hulking on his right. The towers, for Benedict, had always marked the real end of the Boroughs, that rich, thousand-year-long saga that had been concluded with these overly-emphatic double exclamation marks. Newlife. It made you want to spew. Two or three years back there’d been calls to tear the barely-habitable monsters down, acknowledgments that they should never have been put up in the first place. Benedict had briefly thought he might outlive the bullying, oppressive oblongs, but then Bedford Housing had made some deal with the Council – still four dozen of the wealthy buggers, still the Forty-Eight after five centuries – and purchased both blocks for what was reputedly a penny each. The urine-scented ugly sisters had been tarted up and then turned out, supposedly, as fit accommodation for “Key Workers” that it seemed Northampton needed, mostly siren-jockeys: nurses, firemen, policemen and the like. Newlife. New life that had been parachuted in, in order to contain the previous inhabitants when they got sick or stabbed or set themselves on fire. As things worked out, though, what the tower blocks had been filled with was a stream of human leftovers … outpatients, crack-heads, refugees … not obviously different to the people who’d been living there before.
The lefty Roman Thompson from St. Andrew’s Street had once shown him a list of Bedford Housing’s board, which had included former Labor councilor James Cockie in the roster. This might possibly explain the penny price tags. Benedict turned left before he reached the steps to Bath Street corner, taking the pedestrian tunnel under Horsemarket that was sign-posted for town center. Here the bilious orange-brown mosaic was all round him, rising to the arched roof of the tunnel where dim sodium lights at intervals emitted their unhelpful amber glow.
Ben’s gangling, insufficiently-lit shape sloped through the queasy catacomb that seemed to rustle with the ghosts of future murders. An abandoned shopping trolley rolled towards him menacingly for perhaps a foot, but then thought better of it, creaking to a sullen standstill. Only when he passed beneath a ceiling-lamp did his heroically-proportioned features or his tired, resigned smile flare into existence, like a head-and-shoulders sketch by Boz that somebody had put a match to. The unwelcome thought of Councilor Jim Cockie, possibly in combination with these subterranean surroundings, would appear to have unlocked a previously forgotten dream in which the councilor had featured, which Ben suddenly remembered from the night before, if only as a fuzzy string of cryptic fragments.
He’d been wandering through the generic terraces of elderly red brick and railway-arch-bound wastelands that appeared to be the default setting for his dreams. Somewhere within this eerie and familiar landscape there had been a house, a teetering old Boroughs house with stairs and passageways that never quite made sense. The streets were dark. It was the middle of the night. He’d known that family or friends were waiting for him in the building’s cellar, but he’d suffered all the usual dream-frustrations finding his way in, picking his way apologetically through other people’s flats and bathrooms, navigating laundry-chutes that were part-blocked by antique wooden desks he recognized from Spring Lane School. At last he’d reached a kind of boiler-room or basement that had blood and straw and sawdust on the floor, as if the space had been used as a slaughterhouse just recently. There was an atmosphere of squalid horror, yet this was somehow connected to his childhood and was almost comforting. He’d then become aware that Councilor Jim Cockie, someone that he barely knew, was standing in the gory cellar next to him, a corpulent, bespectacled and white-haired form dressed only in his underpants, his face a mask of dread. He’d said “This place is all I dream about. Do you know the way out?” Ben had felt disinclined to help the frightened man, one of that Forty-Eight who had historically destroyed the Boroughs, and had answered only “Ah ha ha. I’m trying to get further in.” At this point, Benedict had woken from what still seemed like somebody else’s nightmare. He emerged out of the tunnel, shaking off the bad dreams with the darkness of the underpass, and puffed up the steep gradient to Silver Street.
Across the other side of the dual carriageway that Silver Street now was, there rose the five-floor municipal car park, red and mustard yellow like spilled condiments. Somewhere beneath its stale Battenberg mass, Benedict knew, were all the shops and yards that had once backed onto the Mayorhold. There’d be Botterill’s the newsagent’s, the butcher’s, Phyllis Malin’s barbershop, the green and white façade of the Cooperative Society, Built 1919, Branch Number 11. There’d be the grim public toilets on the corner that his mam and dad had for some reason known as Georgie Bumble’s Office, and there’d be the fish and chip shop and Electric Light Working Men’s Club in Bearward Street and fifty other sites of interest ground to an undifferentiated dust beneath the weight of four-by-fours and Chavercrafts now piled above. The backside of the old Fish Market stood upon his right, itself erected on the synagogue attended by the silversmiths who’d lent the street its name. He added stars of David in a glittering filigree to the imaginary landfill languishing beneath the multi-story motor show. Ford Transit Gloria Mundi. Ah ha ha ha.
Growing from the brick wall near the Chinese restaurant where Silver Street joined Sheep Street was a solitary wildflower, mauve and flimsy like a mallow though he didn’t think it could be. From the pallid institution green of its limp stem stood gooseberry hairs, almost too fine to be distinguished by the adult eye. Whatever its variety, it was of humble, prehistoric stock, like Benedict himself. However delicate and dangling it seemed, it had pushed through the mortar of the modern world, asserted itself ineradicably in the face of a deflowered and drab MacCentury. He knew it wasn’t much of a poetic insight, not if you compared it to “The force that through the green fuze drives …”, but then these days he’d take his inspirations where he found them, like his wildflowers. Turning into Sheep Street he made for the Bear, where he intended to take up once more the burden of his daily challenge, which was trying to get hammered for a tenner.
Loud despite the relatively small number of customers that time of day, the Bear was simmering in sound from its own fruit machines: electric fairy-wand glissandos and the squelch of crazy frogs. Luminous tessellations rearranged themselves in the blurred corners of his vision, golds and reds and purples, an Arabian Nights palette. He remembered when a morning bar-room was a place of careful hush and milky light decanted through net curtains, not so much as a triumphal click out of the dominos.
The barman was a young chap half Ben’s age, a lad he vaguely recognized but whom he nonetheless addressed as “Ah ha ha. Hello, me old pal, me old beauty”, this delivered in a fair approximation of the voice associated once with now-forgotten Archers mainstay Walter Gabriel, neatly camouflaging, as he thought, the fact that he’d forgotten the bloke’s name.
“Hello there, Benedict. What can I get you?”
Ben looked round appraisingly at the establishment’s half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose.
He cleared his throat theatrically before he spoke.
“Who’ll buy a pint of bitter for a published poet and a national treasure? Ah ha ha.”
Nobody looked up. One or two half-smiled but they were a distinct minority. Oh well. Sometimes it worked, if there was someone in who knew him, say Dave Turvey hunched up gentlemanly in one corner with his feathered hat on, looking like an autumn day in the bohemian quarter of Dodge City, somebody like that. On this particular Bad Friday morning, though, Dave’s usual seat was empty, and with great reluctance Ben dredged up the ten-pound note out of his pocket to deposit on the bar, as a down payment on the pint of John Smith’s that he one day hoped to call his own. Farewell, then, sepia Darwin. Farewell green and crimson 3D hummingbird transfixed by swirling patterns in the Hypnoscope. Farewell, my crumpled little friend of this half-hour now gone for good. I hardly knew ye. Ah ha ha.
Once served, he let himself be drawn into the plush curve of the side-seats, taking with him in one hand his filmy, frosted fistful, getting on eight quid in change balled in the other. Hello to slate-blue Elizth. Fry and what looked like a nineteenth-century battered woman’s refuge except for the disapproving specter of John Lennon, sneering from the left of frame. This was quite possibly a fancy-dress campaigner representing Dads For Justice. With the fiver were two pound coins and some shrapnel. Grimacing, he shook his head. It wasn’t just that Benedict missed the old money, all the farthings, half-crowns, florins, tanners, though of course he did. But what he missed more, though, was being able to refer to pre-decimal coinage without sounding like an old dear who’d confused her bus pass with her kidney donor card. He was surprisingly self-conscious on the subject of self-parody.
He swigged the first half of his pint, plunging indulgently in the olfactory swim of memory and association, cheese and pickled onions, Park Drive packs of five pink in a green pub ashtray, standing next to his old man at the Black Lion’s diseased and possibly Precambrian urinal trough with a six-year-old’s sense of privilege. The rapidly successive mouthfuls were diluted gulps of vanished fields, the high-tech recreation of fondly imagined but extinct rusticity. He put down the half-empty glass, trying to kid himself that it was still half full, and wiped almost four decades of oral tradition from his smacking lips onto his pinstripe cuff.
He lifted up the canvas satchel’s flap, where it was set on the warm cushioning beside him, and pulled out A Northamptonshire Garland from within. Lacking Dave Turvey and a poetry discussion with the living, Benedict thought that he might as well strike up a conversation with the dead. The cheap and chunky hardback came out of the bag with its rear cover uppermost. In an ornate gold frame against a deep red background rubbed with cobblers’ wax was Thomas Grimshaw’s 1840s portrait of John Clare. The picture never looked quite right to Benedict, especially the outsized moonrise of the brow. If not for the brown topiary of hair and whisker fringing the great oval, it might be a man’s face painted on an Easter egg. A Humpty Dumpty with his mess of yolk and shell spread on the lawns of Andrew’s Hospital, and no one there to put him back together.
Clare stood posed uncomfortably before a nonspecific rural blur, a leafy lane at Helpston, Glinton, anywhere, just after sunset or conceivably just prior to dawn, one thumb hooked statesmanlike upon his coat’s lapel. He looked off to the right, turning towards the shadows with a faintly worried smile, the corners of the mouth twitched up in an uncertain greeting, with the slightest wince of apprehension already apparent in those disappointed eyes. Was that, Benedict wondered, where he’d got it from, his own characteristically amused, forlorn expression? There were similarities, he fancied, between him and his enduring lifelong hero. John Clare had a fair old beak on him, not wholly different from Ben’s own, at least to judge from Grimshaw’s portrait. There were the sad eyes, the faltering smile, even the neckerchief. If someone were only to shave Ben’s head and feed him up a bit, he could be stepping out of the dry ice fumes on Stars In Their Eyes, one thumb snagged in his jacket, madhouse burrs caught in his sideburns. Tonight, Matthew, I will be the peasant poet. Ah ha ha.
Beneath the owlish likeness in the cover’s lower right was pasted a discolored slug, fired from a price-gun fifteen years ago: VOLUME1 BOOKSHOPS, £6.00. To his consternation, for a moment Benedict could not even remember quite where VOLUME1 had been located. Had that been where Waterstone’s was now? There’d been that many bookshops in Northampton once, you’d be hard pressed to get around them all within a single day; mostly become estate agents and wine-bars. In Ben’s youth, even big stores like Adnitt’s had their book departments. There’d been trays of one-and-thrupenny paperbacks in both the upper and the lower branch of Woolworth’s, and there’d been a rash of secondhand dives shading into junkshops with invariably consumptive elderly proprietors, with yellow-covered 1960s pornographic classics glimpsed through dusty glass in unlit windows. Jaundiced Aubrey Beardsley nudes enrobed with Technicolor slapped Hank Janson sluts, a bit of sauce to liven up the casserole of Dennis Wheatley, Simenon and Alistair MacLean. Those grubby, spittle-lacquered archives, where had they all gone?
He raised his glass for a commemorative sip, a sip being approximately half a gill with eight sips to the pint. Taking the pack of Bensons and a street-bought three-for-a-quid lighter from his shoulder bag he gripped one of the cigarettes between eternally-wry lips, lighting it with the stick of liquid-centered amethyst. Ben squinted through the first blue puffs of smoke across the lounge bar. This had filled up, although not with anyone he recognized. Off somewhere to his left, a burbling audial cascade of virtual coins was punctuated with stabs from a science-fiction zither. Sighing nonspecifically, he opened the anthology of local poets to its John Clare section, where he hoped that “Clock-a-Clay”, written from the perspective of a ladybird, might prove an antidote to the contemporary flash and jangle that he felt so alienated from. The miniaturist imagery was certainly transporting, though disastrously he couldn’t help but read on to the poem that was reproduced immediately after, which was Clare’s asylum-penned “I Am”.
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
That was entirely too close to the nerve, instantly sinking Benedict’s half-decent mood, already holed below its waterline. He shoved the book back in his satchel, downing the three sips remaining in his pint and purchasing another one before he knew he’d done it. This relieved him of his small-change buffer and exposed his queen, Elizth. Fry, precariously. Her rainy turquoise eyes stared out of the remaining note into his own, with something of his mother’s look of worried resignation when she gazed appraisingly on Ben and Ben’s unjustly punished liver.
The next thing he knew, it was mid-day. He was emerging from the narrow barroom of the Shipman’s, basically a passageway that had a pub where most people have coatpegs, into Drum Lane. Down the alley on his right he could see All Saints’ Church across the road, with on his left the waning bustle of the Market Square. Elizth. Fry, apparently, had left him for another man, most probably a landlord. He lugubriously noted that he still had custody of several little ones, silver and copper orphans to the sum of eighty-seven pence. A bubbling protest from his long-drowned instincts for self-preservation told him he should probably invest this in a pasty. Turning right he made his way down the perpetual shadow-channel of Drum Lane, towards the bakery opposite All Saints’ in Mercer’s Row.
Ten minutes later he was swallowing the last of what he thought was more than likely lunch, tongue probing optimistically in the mysterious ditches of his mouth for any lingering mince, tenacious pastry or recalcitrant potato. Blotting his lips in what he thought might well be the manner of a nineteenth-century dandy on the serviette the snack had come with, Benedict screwed up the tissue with its gravy kiss-print, dropping it into one of the litter bins in Abington Street, which he’d by now reached and was ascending. He was roughly level with the photographic shop close to the mouth of the most recent shopping arcade, Peacock Place. This crystal palace had taken the place of Peacock Way, an open precinct leading to the Market that had cake-shops and cafés where he’d munch gloomily through teenage comfort teacakes, mooning over whichever heart-stopping Noter Dame or Derngate schoolgirl had just told Ben that she liked him as a friend. Originally, this had been the Peacock Hotel, inn or coach-house for five hundred years. People still talked about the lovely stained-glass peacock, one of the establishment’s interior decorations, which had more than likely fallen prey to salvage men during the hotel’s senseless demolition in November 1959. Up on the glasswork of the arcade’s entrance these days was a pallid stick-on imitation, stylized craft-kit product from an overpaid design team.
Passing Jessop’s, the photography equipment shop, he wondered if they still had Pete Corr’s photograph of Benedict, framed and for sale up on their wall. Corr was a local shutterbug now married, living somewhere out in Canada by all accounts, under the mock-Dutch moniker of Piet de Snapp. Formerly just plain Pete the Snap, he’d specialized in portraits of the town’s outlandish fauna: Ben’s old Spring Lane schoolmate Alma Warren, posing moodily in sunglasses and leather jacket, mutton dressed up as Olivia Newton-John; the Jovian mass and gravity of much-missed local minstrel-god Tom Hall in customary daywear, individually-engineered playschool pajamas and a tasseled hat swiped from the Ottomans; Benedict Perrit sat in state among the snaking roots of the eight-hundred-year-old beech in Sheep Street, smiling ruefully. As if there were another way to smile. Ah ha ha ha.
He carried on through Abington Street’s pink, pedestrianized meander. Without curbs to bound and shape all the frenetic motion that had poured along this main drag for at least five hundred years, it seemed as if these days the street mainly attracted those who were themselves similarly unfocused and directionless. As Benedict himself was, come to think of it. He’d no idea where he thought he was going, not with only twenty-seven pence remaining in the wake of his impulsive pasty, gone now save for the occasional flavor-haunted burp. Perhaps a long walk up the Wellingborough Road to Abington would do him good, or would at any rate not cost him anything.
Continuing uphill, pleasantly numbed against existence in a warm cocooning fog, the entrance to the Grosvenor Center crawled past on his left. He tried to conjure the thin mouth of Wood Street, which had occupied the spot some thirty years before, but found his powers of evocation blunted by the beer. The half-forgotten terraced aperture was too feeble a specter to prevail against the glass wall of swing doors, the sparkling covered boulevard beyond where the somnambulists somnambled, lit like ornamental crystal animals by the commercial aura-fields they passed through. Everyone looked decorative in the all-round illumination. Everyone looked brittle.
Twenty-seven pence. He wasn’t even sure that would still buy a Mars Bar, though he could still savor the self-pity. Benedict picked up his pace a little passing by top Woolworth’s, these days more precisely only Woolworth’s, hoping the increased velocity would straighten out his veer. He gave this up for lack of a result after approximately thirty seconds, lapsing to a melancholy trudge. What was the point in walking faster when he wasn’t going anywhere? More speed would only bring him to his problems quicker, and in his state might lead inadvertently to crossing the blurred line between a drunken stumble and a drunken rampage. The unbidden vision of Ben gone berserk in Marks & Spencer’s, running nude and screaming through a hail of melting-middle chocolate puddings, should have been a sobering one but only made him giggle to himself. The giggling didn’t help, he realized, with his tactic of not looking pissed. This still made only four things he was useless at, namely escape, finding a job, explaining himself adequately and not looking pissed. Four trivial deficiencies, Ben reassured himself, and as naught in the sweep of a man’s life.
He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy. The retail parks outside the town had drained the commerce from Northampton’s center, which had been an increasingly ugly proposition for some years now, anyway. Rather than try to stop the rot, the council had allowed the town’s main veins to atrophy and wither. Spinadisc, the long-established independent record shop that Benedict was now approaching on the street’s far side, had been closed down to make way for a rehab center, something of that kind. Predictably, there were considerably less substance-users on the premises now that the music and ephemera were gone.
Around the public seating outside the dead jukebox of the former pop emporium, small crowds of black-clad teenagers still congregated in school holidays and at weekends. Ben thought they might be skate-goths or gangsta-romantics. Happy-stabbers or whatever. He had difficulty keeping up. Shifting his doleful gaze from the murder of hoodies flocked on Abington Street’s further edge, he looked back to the side along which he was walking. A vague drift of people flowed towards him past the still-magnificent façade of the town library, and there came a synaptic jolt, a minor judder and resettling of reality as Benedict realized that one of them was Alma Warren. Ah ha ha.
Alma. She always took him back, a walking memory-prompt of all the years they’d known each other, since they’d been together in Miss Corrier’s class at Spring Lane School when they were four. Even back then, you’d never have confused her with a girl. Or with a boy, for that matter. She was too big, too single minded, too alarming to be anything but Alma, in a gender of her own. Both of them sideshow novelties in their own ways, they’d been inseparable throughout long stretches of childhood and adolescence. Winter evenings shivering in the attic up above the barn in his dad’s wood-yard down in Freeschool Street, Ben’s telescope poking into the starlight through an absent windowpane when they were both on flying saucer watch. The tricky post-pubertal stretch when he began his poetry and she her painting, and when Alma would get furiously angry and stop speaking to him every other fortnight, over their artistic differences as she insisted, but most probably when she’d just fallen to the communists. They’d both made idiots of themselves in the same pubs, in the same stencil-duplicated arts-group magazines, but then she’d somehow managed to talk up her monomania into a prosperous career and reputation, while Ben hadn’t. Now he didn’t run into her much, nobody did, except upon occasions such as this when she came flouncing into town dressed like a biker or, if she were wearing her pretentious cloak, a fifteenth-century nun who’d been defrocked for masturbation, more rings underneath her eyes than on her ostentatiously embellished fingers.
These were currently raised up in an arterial spatter of nail gloss and gemstones, pulling the distressed fire-curtain of her hair back from the pantomime that was her face. Her kohl-ringed and apparently disdainful gaze described a measured arc across the precinct as if Alma were pretending to be a surveillance camera, dredging Abington Street’s fast-deteriorating stock of imagery in search of inspiration for some future monsterpiece. When the slow swivel of her so-unblinking-they-seemed-lidless fog lamps got to Benedict, there was an anthracite glint suddenly alight deep in the makeup-crusted sockets. Carmine lips drew taut into a smile most probably intended to look fond rather than predatory. Ah ha ha ha. Good old Alma.
Benedict went into a routine the moment that their eyes met, first adopting an expression of appalled dismay then turning sharply in his tracks to walk away down Abington Street, as if frantically pretending that he hadn’t seen her. He turned this into a circular trajectory that took him back towards her, this time doubling up with silent laughter so she’d know his terrified attempt at flight had been a gag. He wouldn’t want her thinking he was really trying to run away, not least in case she went for him and brought him down before he’d got five paces.
Their paths met outside the library portico. He stuck his hand out, but Alma surprised him with a sudden lunge, planting a bloody pucker on his cheek, spraining his neck with her brief one-armed hug. This was some affectation, he concluded, that she’d picked up from Americans with galleries who put on exhibitions. Exhibitionists. She hadn’t learned it in the Boroughs, of that Benedict was certain. In the district where they’d both grown up, affectionate displays were never physical. Or verbal, or in any way apparent to the five traditional senses. Love and friendship in the Boroughs were subliminal. He flinched back from her, wiping at his stained cheek with the back of one long-fingered hand like an embarrassed cat.
“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”
Alma grinned, apparently pleased at just how easily she had unsettled him. She ducked her head and leaned a little forward when she spoke, as if to best facilitate their conversation, although really she was just reminding him how tall she was, the way she did with everyone. It was one of what only Alma thought of as her range of subtly intimidating mannerisms.
“Benedict, you suave Lothario. This is an unexpected treat. How’s things? Are you still writing?”
Alma’s voice wasn’t just deep brown, it was infra-brown. Ben laughed at her query on his output, at the sheer preposterousness of her even asking.
“Always, Alma. You know me. Ah ha ha. Always scribbling away.”
He’d not written a line in years. He was a published poet in the transitive and not the current sense. He wasn’t sure that he was any sort of poet in the current sense, that was his secret dread. Alma was nodding amiably now, pleased with his answer.
“Good. That’s good to hear. I was just reading ‘Clearance Area’ the other day and thinking what a smashing poem it was.”
Hum. “Clearance Area”. He’d been quite pleased with that himself. “Who can say now/ That anything was here/ Other than open land/ Used only by stray dogs/ And children breaking bottles on stones?” With a start he realized that had been almost two decades back, those writings. “Weeds, stray dogs and children/ Waited patiently/ For them to leave./ The weed beneath;/ The dog and child/ Unborn inside.” He tipped his head back, unsure how he should receive the compliment except with an uncertain smile, as if expecting her at any moment to retract her praise, expose it for the cruel post-modern joke it doubtless was. Eventually, he risked a tentative response.
“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”
He’d meant to say It weren’t bad, as a reference to the poem, but it had come out wrong. Now it sounded as though Benedict thought of himself in the past tense, which wasn’t what he’d meant at all. At least, he didn’t think that it was what he’d meant. Alma was frowning now, it seemed reproachfully.
“Ben, you were always a considerable way beyond ‘not bad’. You know you were. You’re a good writer, mate. I’m serious.”
This last was offered in reply to Benedict’s plainly embarrassed giggling. He really didn’t know what he should say. Alma was at least Z-list famous and successful, and Ben couldn’t help but feel as though in some way he were being patronized. It was as if she thought that a kind word from her could mend him, could inspire him, raise him from the dead and make him whole with just the least brush of her hem. She acted as though all his problems could be solved if he were just to write, which only showed, in Benedict’s opinion, just how shallow Alma’s understanding of his problems really was. Did she have any idea, standing there with all her money and her write-ups in The Independent, what it was like having only twenty-seven pence? Well, actually, of course she did. She’d come from the same background he had, so that wasn’t fair, but even so. The troubling notion of his present finances, or at least relative to Alma’s, had bobbed up from the beer sediments currently settled at the bottom of Ben’s mind, and wouldn’t bob back down again. Before he even knew that he was going to do it, he’d broken the habit of a lifetime and tapped Alma up for cash.
“ ’Ere, you ain’t got a couple o’ quid spare, ’ave yer?”
It felt wrong as soon as the words left his mouth, a terrible transgression. He immediately wished that he could take it back, but it was too late. Now it was in Alma’s hands, and she would almost certainly find some way she could make it worse. Surprised, her flue-brush lashes widened almost imperceptibly, but she recovered with a deadpan look of generalized concern.
“Of course I have. I’m fucking loaded. Here.”
She pulled a note … a note … out of her drainpipe jeans and, pointedly not looking to determine its denomination, pressed it hard into Ben’s open palm. See, this was what he’d meant, about how Alma always made things more uncomfortable, but in a manner that obliged you to be grateful to her. Since she hadn’t looked to see how much cash she was giving him, Ben felt that it would be déclassé for him to do otherwise, slipping the crumpled note without a glance into his trouser pocket. He was feeling genuinely guilty now. The centers of his beetling eyebrows had crept up involuntarily towards his widow’s peak as he protested her undue beneficence.
“Are you sure, Alma? Are you sure?”
She grinned, dismissing the uneasy moment.
“ ’Course I’m sure. Forget it. How are you, mate, anyway? What are you doing these days?”
Benedict was grateful for the change of subject, though it left him grasping hopelessly for something that he could legitimately claim he’d done.
“Oh, this and that. Went for an interview the other day.”
Alma looked interested, although only politely so.
“Oh yeah? How did it go?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not heard yet. When they interviewed me, I kept wanting to come out and tell them ‘I’m a published poet’, but I held it in.”
Alma was trying to nod sagely, but was also clearly trying not to laugh, with the result that neither effort was what you’d call an unqualified success.
“You did the right thing. There’s a time and place for everything.” She cocked her head on one side, narrowing her black bird-eating eyes as if she’d just remembered something.
“Listen, Ben, I’ve just thought. There’s these paintings I’ve been doing, all about the Boroughs, and I’m having a preliminary viewing of them down at Castle Hill tomorrow lunchtime, in the nursery that used to be Pitt-Draffen’s dance school. Why don’t you come down? It’d be great to see you.”
“Perhaps I will. Perhaps I will. Ah ha ha ha.” Deep in his bitter-sodden heart, he knew he almost definitely wouldn’t. To be honest he was barely listening to her, still trying to think of things he’d done, beside the interview, that he could mention. Suddenly he thought about his visits to the cyber café and perked up. Alma was widely known to never venture near the Internet, which meant, astoundingly, that here was someone who, at least in this one area, was less adapted to the present day than Benedict. He beamed at her, triumphantly.
“Do you know, I’ve been going on the Internet?” He ran one preening hand back over his dark curls, while with the other he adjusted an imaginary bow tie.
Alma was now laughing openly. By mutual consent they seemed to both be disengaging from the conversation, starting to move slowly off, him uphill, Alma down. It was as if they’d come to the predestined end of their encounter and must both now walk away, whether they’d finished talking yet or not. They had to hurry if they wanted to remain on schedule, occupying all the empty spaces in their futures they had yet to fill, all at the proper predetermined times. Still visibly amused, she called back to him over the increasing gap between them.
“You’re a twenty-first-century boy, Ben.”
Laughter tipped his head back like a well-slapped punch-bag. Several paces off, he was half turned away from her, towards the upper end of Abington Street.
“I’m a Cyberman. Ah ha ha ha.”
Their brief knot of hilarity and mutual incomprehension was unraveled into two loose, snickering ends that trailed away in opposite directions. Benedict had reached the precinct’s topmost limit and was crossing York Road at the lights before he thought to reach into his pocket and retrieve the screwed-up currency that Alma had bequeathed him. Pink and plum and violet, the note sported a blue angel from whose trumpet fell a radiating shower of notes. Worcester Cathedral was bombarded by them in a joyous cosmic ray-storm, St. Cecilia reclining in the foreground as she soaked up the UV. A twenty. Welcome to my humble pants, Sir Edward Elgar. We’ve been only fleetingly acquainted previously, and you wouldn’t remember, but can I just say that The Dream of Gerontius is an outstanding work of pastoral vision? Ah ha ha.
This was a gift from God. Thanks, God, and do pass on my thanks to Alma who you’ve clearly made your representative on Earth. I hope to God that … well, I hope to You that you know what you’re doing there on that one, so be warned. But still, this was fantastic. He resolved he’d take his healthy walk up Wellingborough Road to Abington Park anyway, despite the fact that he no longer needed to, having sufficient funds to dally where he wanted. Benedict could dally with a vengeance when the mood was on him, but for now he stuffed the note back in his pocket and began to whistle as he walked towards Abington Square, only relenting when he realized he was giving a rendition of the theme music from Emmerdale. Luckily, nobody seemed to have noticed.
This had once been the east gate of the town, the strip that Benedict was pacing now, what they’d called Edmund’s End back in the eighteen-hundreds, named after St. Edmund’s Church, which had been slightly further out along the Wellingborough Road until it was pulled down a quarter century ago. Ben liked the buildings here, on the approach to the main square itself, if one ignored the tawdry transformations of their lower stories. Just across the road there was the gorgeous 1930s cinema, at different times the ABC or the Savoy. He’d been himself a dead shot with a flicked ice-lolly stick at matinees, although he’d never once had someone’s eye out despite all the warnings to the contrary. These days, like getting on a quarter or a third of the town’s major properties, the place was owned by a commune of Evangelicals known as the Jesus Army, who had started out as a small nest of rescued derelicts in nearby Bugbrooke and then spread like happy clappy bindweed, until you could find their rainbow-liveried busses organizing tramp-grabs almost anywhere in middle England. Still, it wasn’t like Northampton and religious mania had been strangers to each other in the past. Benedict sauntered on towards Abington Square, reflecting that the last time that these parts had seen a Jesus Army it was Cromwell’s, and instead of pamphlets they’d been waving pikes. It was a kind of progress, Ben supposed.
The square looked almost handsome in the light of early afternoon, unless you’d known it in its youth and could make the painful comparison. The slipper factory had gone in favor of a Jaguar showroom called Guy Salmon. The old Irish Center had been turned into the Urban Tiger. Benedict had never been inside the venue since the name change. He pictured the clientele as ranks of angry Tamils learning martial arts.
Charles Bradlaugh stood there dazzling white upon his plinth, directing traffic. It had never looked to Benedict as though the great teetotal atheist and equal rights campaigner was just pointing westwards, more as if he was in a saloon bar trying to start a fight. Yeah, that’s right. You. Fuck features. Who’d you think I’m pointing at? Ah ha ha ha. Ben passed the statue on his left, with on his right an uninviting new pub named the Workhouse. Ben saw what they’d done there: further up the Wellingborough Road, across from the wall-bounded space where Edmund’s Church once stood was what remained of Edmund’s Hospital, which in Victorian times had been Northampton’s workhouse. It was like putting a theme pub called the Whipping Post in a black neighborhood, or Eichmann’s in a Jewish one. A touch insensitive.
Ben found that he was traveling at quite a pace, even against the wuthering headwind. In what seemed like only moments the abandoned hulk of Edmund’s Hospital itself loomed up on his left side, a haunted palace smothered in a creep of weeds, its smashed eyes filled with ghosts. Ghosts, and if rumors were to be believed, with failed asylum seekers, refugees who’d been denied that status and had chosen to camp out in former terminal wards rather than risk being sent home to whatever despot or electrode-happy strongman they were fleeing in the first place. Home is where the hurt is, that was very true. It struck him that the workhouse, though dilapidated, must feel blessed in its old age. It had its huddled, frightened outcasts back, could take a secret comfort from their secret fires.
There on the other side, across the wall he was now walking past, was the palpable absence of St. Edmund’s Church, an empty yawn of green with intermittent tombstones jutting, carious, discolored, suffering from built-up birdshit plaque, the green and grassy gums beginning to recede. Upon the plus side, Benedict could make out lark song underneath the grumble of the main road’s traffic, bubbling notes erupting in a brilliant effervescence to distract cats from the fledglings hidden low down in the graveyard grass. It was a nice day. The eternal was still there, a promising suggestive bulge concealed behind the present’s threadbare drapes.
Heading on eastwards out of town along the strip of pubs and shops, he thought of Alma. At the age of seventeen she’d been a glaring giant schoolgirl up at the Girl’s Grammar, giving the impression her resentment was occasioned by the fact that she was really twenty-nine and couldn’t find a uniform that fit her. She’d been involved in an arty student magazine called Androgyne, providing wonky stencil illustrations for a curate’s egg of fifth-form verses. Benedict had been at the Boy’s Grammar School by that time, and despite the distance that there was between the two establishments, fraternization did occur. The two had seen each other now and then, and Alma, who’d been going through a period of lofty futurist disdain for Ben’s romanticism, had asked grudgingly if he might submit something to their alternately simpering and foul-mouthed rag.
Encouraged by this half-hearted solicitation, Benedict had written several movements of what had turned out to be an epic piece of juvenilia, only the shortest parts accepted by a clearly disappointed Alma, who dismissed the rest as being, in her critically mature opinion “fucking sentimental girly rubbish”. He was mortified to think that he could still remember the rejection, word for word, some thirty-five years later. At the time, with even less sense of proportion than he currently possessed, he’d been incensed and had resolved to patiently exact a terrible revenge. He’d take the off-cuts Alma had discarded from his poem cycle and he’d build them into a new edifice, a work to shudder the foundations of the ages. Then, when he was welcomed up to literary Olympus, he’d reveal that she had lacked the insight to appreciate his magnum opus and her reputation would be shot. She’d be a laughingstock and a pariah. That would learn her, her and all her Andy Warhol Bridget Riley migraine art. This grand endeavor would be a heartbroken hymn to conjure the departed world, the rustic landscape of John Clare, the golden-lighted lanes that Benedict was born too late to walk outside of reverie. He’d strung it out almost two years before he’d realized it was going nowhere and abandoned it. It had been called “Atlantis”.
Benedict glanced up to find that he was some way out along the Wellingborough Road from the last place he’d noticed, which had been the peeling shell of the Spread Eagle, on the corner past St. Edmund’s Hospital. Now he was getting on for Stimpson Avenue and that end, starting to think twice about his planned walk in the park, already feeling footsore. Clare, who’d hobbled eighty miles from Essex back home to Northamptonshire, would probably have laughed at him. They’d built their lyric nutters sturdier in his day. Ben thought he might wander round Abington Park some other time, contenting himself for the moment with a visit to the Crown & Cushion, a short distance further up the busy street. He’d only taken to the notion of a leafy stroll when there was nothing else to do, before he’d met with Alma, but now things were different. Now he had a business plan.
He’d not been in the Crown & Cushion for a while, although at one time, just after he’d broken up with Lily, it had been his regular dove. He supposed that his relationship with the pub’s clientele was at its best ambivalent, but then the place itself was somewhere he felt comfortable. Largely unchanged, the hostelry at least still traded under its historically appointed name, hadn’t become the Jolly Wanker or the Workhouse or the Vole & Astrolabe. Benedict could remember, with a twinge of mixed embarrassment and pride, how he’d once stormed into the bar demanding satisfaction when he’d felt his fellow drinkers weren’t taking his claim to be a published poet seriously. A poem of Ben’s had just been printed in the local Chronicle & Echo, and when he’d burst through the Crown & Cushion’s swing door like a piano-stopping gunfighter he’d thrown the thirty copies of the paper that he happened to be carrying into the air with a victorious cry of “There! Ah ha ha ha!” They’d naturally barred him on the spot, but that was years ago, and with a bit of luck that era’s staff and customers would all be dead or memory-impaired by now.
Even if not, traditionally the pub had always shown tremendous tolerance and even fondness for the various eccentrics passing through its portals. That was another reason why Ben liked the place, he thought as he pushed open its lounge door and stepped into the welcome gloom from the bright, squinting dazzle of the day outside. They’d had far worse than him in here. There was a story from back in the very early 1980s which insisted that the great Sir Malcolm Arnold, trumpeter and orchestral arranger of such hits as “Colonel Bogey”, had been living in the room above the Crown & Cushion’s bar, mentally ill and alcoholic, guest in some accounts, virtual prisoner in others, dragged down almost nightly for the entertainment of a drunken and abusive crowd. This was the man who’d written Tam O’ Shanter, that delirious accompaniment to Burns’ inebriated night-sweat, the carousing highland hero chased by a Wild Hunt of fairies through the brass and woodwind dark. This was Sir Malcolm Arnold, who Ben thought had once been the Director of the Queen’s Music, a musical equivalent to Poet Laureate, banging out tunes on the joanna for a herd of braying and pugnacious goons. Old and tormented, ambisextrous, in his early sixties then, who knew what imps and demons, jinni and tonics, might have been stampeding through his fevered skull, glistening with perspiration and tipped forward over pounding yellow ivories?
Benedict stood there just inside the door until his pupils had sufficiently dilated to locate the bar. The staff and decor, he observed, were new since his last visit. This was just as well, especially about the bar staff, since as far as Ben knew he’d done nothing to offend the decor. Some, of course, might not agree. Ah ha ha ha. Benedict stepped up to the rail and bought a pint of bitter, slapping down his twenty on the freshly wiped and moisture-beaded bar-top with a certain swagger. This was undercut, though, by his deep regret at having said goodbye to Elgar. Some of this regret was purely on Ben’s own account, but mixed with this there was a genuine concern about Sir Edward, an uneasiness at leaving the composer in the Crown & Cushion. Look at what they’d done to Malcolm Arnold.
Taking his glass to an empty table, of which there were an unseasonable number, Ben fleetingly entertained a morbid fantasy in which, as punishment for the newspaper incident, he was incarcerated here in the same way that Arnold had reputedly been held. Each night intoxicated thugs would burst into his room and herd him down to the saloon, where he’d be plied with spirits and made to recite his earnest and wept-over sonnets to a room of jeering philistines. It didn’t sound that bad, if he was honest. He’d had Friday nights like that, without even the benefit of being plied with drink. Now that he came to think about it, he’d had entire years like that. The stretch just after Lily told him he should find another billet, when he’d lived in a house broken into flats along Victoria Road, had been like Tam O’ Shanter playing on a loop for months. Arriving home at 3.00am without a key, demanding as a published poet that he be let in, then playing Dylan Thomas reading Under Milkwood at top volume on his Dansette until all the other residents were threatening to kill him. What had that been all about? Creeping downstairs to the communal kitchen one night and devouring four whole chicken dinners that the surly and abusive tattooed couple in the flat above had made for the next day, then waking up another of the building’s tenants so that he could tell them. “Ah ha ha! I’ve ate the bastards’ dinner!” Looking back, Ben realized he was lucky to have come through those dire days unlynched, and never mind unscathed.
He sipped his bitter and, taking advantage of the sunlight falling through the window that he sat beneath, removed A Northamptonshire Garland from his satchel and began to read. The first piece his eyes fell on was “The Angler’s Song”, a work by William Basse, seventeenth-century pastoral poet with disputed although likely origins here in the town.
As inward love breeds outward talk,
The hound some praise, and some the hawk,
Some, better pleased with private sport,
Use tennis, some a mistress court:
But these delights I neither wish,
Nor envy, while I freely fish.
Ben liked the poem, though he’d never really done much fishing since his first youthful attempts, which had involved the accidental hooking of another child during the back-swing when he’d cast off. He recalled the blood, the screams, and worst of all his total inability to keep from giggling inappropriately with shame during the subsequent first aid. That had been it for Benedict and fishing, pretty much, though he approved of it as an idea. Along with fauns and shepherdesses it was part of his Arcadian mythology, the angler drowsing by the stream, the riverine crawl of the afternoon, but like the shepherdesses it was something he’d had little practical experience of.
On reflection, that was probably why Ben had let “Atlantis” go unfinished all those years ago, the sense that it was inauthentic, that he had been barking up the wrong tree. When he’d started it, he’d been a schoolboy from a dark house down in Freeschool Street, deploring all the grimy factory yards the way that he thought John Clare would have done; lamenting the bucolic idyll that, in his imagination, the contemporary mean streets of the Boroughs had displaced. Only when those slate rooftops and tree-punctured chimney breasts had been themselves removed had come belated recognition that the narrow lanes were the endangered habitat he should have been commemorating. Bottle-caps, not bluebells. He’d thrown out his central metaphor, the droning, drowning hedgerows of a continent that he’d reported lost but in all truth had never really owned, and written “Clearance Area” instead. After the neighborhood as Benedict had known it was no more, at last he’d found a voice that had been genuine and of the Boroughs. Looking back, he thought that later poem had been more about the bulldozed flats of his own disillusion than the demolition site his district had become, although perhaps the two were ultimately the same thing.
He lit a cigarette, noting that this left six still rattling loose in the depleted pack, and flipped on through the alphabetically arranged compendium, skipping past Clare this time to light on the inarguably authentic Boroughs voice of Philip Doddridge. Though the piece was called “Christ’s Message” and based on a passage from the Book of Luke it was essentially the text of Doddridge’s most celebrated hymn: “Hark the glad sound! The Savior comes!/ The Savior promised long!” Benedict liked the exclamation marks, which seemed to couch the second coming as a gravel-throated trailer for a movie sequel. In his heart, Ben couldn’t say that he was confident concerning Christianity … the ton-up accident that took his sister back when he’d been ten put paid to that … but he could still hear and respect the strong Boroughs inflection in Doddridge’s verses, his concern for the impoverished and wretched no doubt sharpened by his time at Castle Hill. “He comes the broken heart to bind, The bleeding soul to cure,/ And with the treasures of his grace T’ enrich the humble poor.”
He’d drink to that. Lifting his glass he noticed that its ebbing tide-line foam was at half-mast. Just four sips left. Oh well. That was enough. He’d make it last. He wouldn’t have another one in here, despite the seventeen-odd pounds he still had left. He thumbed his way on through the book until he reached the Fanes of Apethorpe: Mildmay Fane, the second Earl of Westmorland, and his descendant Julian. He’d only really settled on the pair through being taken with the names ‘Mildmay’ and ‘Apethorpe’, but soon found himself immersed in Julian’s description of the family pile, as admired by Northampton fan John Betjeman. “The moss-gray mansion of my father stands/ Park’d in an English pasturage as fair/ As any that the grass-green isle can show./ Above it rise deep-wooded lawns; below/ A brook runs riot thro’ the pleasant lands …” The brook went babbling on as he sipped dry his pint and bought another without thinking.
Suddenly it was ten minutes after three and he was half a mile away, emerging out of Lutterworth Road onto Billing Road, just down from what had once been the Boy’s Grammar School. What was he doing here? He had the vaguest memory of standing in the toilets at the Crown & Cushion, of a ghostly moment staring at his own face in the mirror bolted up above the washbasin, but for the life of him could not remember leaving the pub premises, much less the fairish walk he’d evidently taken down here from the Wellingborough Road. Perhaps he’d wanted to head back to the town center but had chosen this admittedly more scenic route? Chosen was probably too strong a word. Ben’s path through life was governed not so much by choice as by the powerful undertow of his own whimsy, which would on occasion wash him up to unexpected beachheads like this present one.
Across the street and some way off upon his left was the red brick front of the former grammar school, set back from the main road by flat lawns and a gravel forecourt where a naked flagpole stood, no ensign showing which side the establishment was on. Benedict understood the reticence. These days, targets were what schools aimed at, not what they aspired to be. Stretching away behind the calm façade and the aloof gaze of the tall white windows there were classrooms, art rooms, physics blocks and playing fields, a spinney and a swimming pool, all trying to ignore the gallows shadow that league tables cast across them. Not that there was any cause here for immediate concern. Though relegated from a snooty grammar to a red-eared comprehensive in the middle 1970s, the place had used its dwindling aura and residual reputation as brand markers in the competition-focused marketplace that teaching had become. Invoking the school’s previous elitist status and the ghost of poshness past would seem to have succeeded, making it a big hit with the choice-dazed well-off parent of today. Apparently, from what Ben heard, they even made a selling point of the monastic single-sex approach to education. Anyone applying for their son to be accepted had to first compose a modest essay stating why, precisely, at the most profound ideological and moral level, they believed their child would benefit from being tutored in an atmosphere of strict gender apartheid. What did they expect people to say? That what they hoped for little Giles was that at best he’d grow into somebody awkward and uncomprehending in all his relationships with women, while at worst he’d end up a gay serial murderer? Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict crossed the road and turned right, heading into town, putting the school behind him. He’d once been a pupil there and hadn’t liked it much. For one thing, having squandered his first decade on the planet in what his mam called “acting the goat”, he’d not passed his eleven-plus exams that first go-round. When all the clever kids like Alma went off to their grammars, Benedict attended Spencer School, on the now-feared Spencer estate, with all the divs and bruisers. He’d been every bit as smart as Alma and the rest, just not inclined to take things like examinations seriously. Once he’d been at Spencer for a year or two, however, his intelligence began to shine from the surrounding dross and only then had he been transferred to the grammar school.
Here he’d felt stigmatized, even among the vanishingly small minority of other working-class boys, who’d at least been bright enough to put the ticks in the right boxes when they’d been eleven. With the middle-class majority, especially the teachers, Ben had never felt he stood a chance. The other boys had in the main been nice enough, acting and talking much the same as him, but they’d still snigger if somebody stuck their hand up during class to ask the master if they could go to the lav and not the toilet. On reflection, Benedict supposed, such prejudice as he’d experienced had been relatively minimal. At least he’d not been black like David Daniels in the year above, a serene and good natured lad that Ben had mainly known through Alma, who’d shared Daniels’s fondness for American science-fiction paperbacks and comics. Ben recalled one math teacher who’d always send the only nonwhite at the school into the quadrangle outside the classroom window, so that in the full view of his classmates he could clean the board erasers, pounding them together until his black skin was pale with chalk dust. It was shameful.
He remembered how unfairly the whole learning process had been handled then, with kids’ lives and careers decided by an exam that they’d sat at age eleven. Mind you, wasn’t it just this last year that Tony Blair had set out his performance targets for the under-fives? There’d be established fetal standards soon, so that you could feel pressurized and backwards if your fingers hadn’t separated fully by the third trimester. Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides would become commonplace, the depressed embryos hanging themselves with their umbilical cords, farewell notes scratched onto the placenta.
Benedict became aware of railings passing in a strobe on his left side to vanish at his back, dark conifers beyond them, and remembered he was walking past St. Andrew’s Hospital. Could that have been the reason why he’d taken this route home, as an impulsive pilgrimage to where they’d kept John Clare for more than twenty years? Perhaps he’d muddily imagined that the thought of Clare, his hero, having been more of a hopeless circus-turn than Ben himself, would somehow be uplifting?
Instead, the reverse was true. As with his earlier envy of pub-prisoner Sir Malcolm Arnold – who had also been a former grammar school boy and a former inmate of St. Andrew’s, now he thought about it – Benedict found himself visualizing the extensive institution grounds beyond the rail and envying John Clare. Admittedly, St. Andrew’s hadn’t been so lush back in the 1850s when it was Northampton General Asylum, but it had still been a gentler haven, in all likelihood, for lost and bruised poetic souls than somewhere like, say, Tower Street. What Ben wouldn’t give to trade his current circumstances for those of a nineteenth-century madhouse. If somebody asked why you weren’t seeking work, you could explain that you were already employed as an archaic mental. You could wander all day through Elysian meadows, or else take a stroll downtown to sit beneath the portico of All Saints’ Church. With your expenses paid for by a literary benefactor, you’d have time to write as much verse as you liked, much of it on how badly you felt you were being treated. And when even the exertion of poetics proved too much (for surely times like that afflicted everyone, Ben thought), you could abandon your exhausting personality and be somebody else, be Queen Victoria’s dad, or Byron. Frankly, if you’d lost your mind, there were worse places to go looking for it than beneath the bushes at St. Andrew’s.
Clearly, Ben was not alone in this opinion. In the years since Clare’s day, the asylum’s tittering and weeping dayroom had become a hall of damaged fame. Misogynist and poet J.K. Stephen. Malcolm Arnold. Dusty Springfield. Lucia Joyce, a child of the more famous James, whose delicate psychology had first become apparent when she worked as chief assistant on her father’s unreadable masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, then titled Work in Progress. Joyce’s daughter had arrived here at the pricey but quite justly celebrated Billing Road retreat in the late 1940s, and had evidently liked the place so much she’d stayed for over thirty years until her death in 1982. Even mortality had not soured Lucia on Northampton. She’d requested she be buried here, at Kingsthorpe Cemetery, where she was currently at rest a few feet from the gravestone of a Mr. Finnegan. It was still strange to think that Lucia Joyce had been here all the time Ben was a pupil at the grammar school next door. He wondered idly if she’d ever met with Dusty or Sir Malcolm, picturing abruptly all three on stage as a trio, possibly for therapeutic reasons, looking melancholic, belting out “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”. Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict had heard that Samuel Beckett was one of Lucia Joyce’s visitors, here at St. Andrew’s and then, later, at the cemetery in Kingsthorpe. Part of Lucia’s madness had been the belief that Beckett, who’d replaced her as assistant on the Work in Progress, was in love with her. Disastrous as this misunderstanding must have been for all concerned, the two had evidently remained friends, at least to judge from all the visits. Ben’s good chum Dave Turvey, cricketing enthusiast companion to the late Tom Hall, had informed Benedict of Beckett’s sole entry in Wisden’s Almanac, playing against Northampton at the County Ground. Among the visiting team, Beckett had distinguished himself not so much upon the pitch as in his choice of entertainment afterwards. He’d spent that evening in a solitary trawl around Northampton’s churches while his colleagues had contented themselves with the other things the town was famous for, these being pubs and whores. Benedict found this conduct admirable, at least in theory, though he’d never cared for Beckett as an author much. All those long silences and haunted monologues. It was too much like life.
He was by now beyond St. Andrew’s, crossing over at the top of Cliftonville as he continued his fastidiously measured stumble, onward down the Billing Road to town. This was the route he’d take each weeknight as a schoolboy, home to Freeschool Street astride his bike, riding into the sunset as if every day had been a feature film, which, very often in Ben’s case, it had been. Duck Soup, usually, with Benedict as both Zeppo and Harpo, playing them, innovatively, as two sides of the same troubled personality. A drift of generally pleasant and only occasionally horrifying recollection, like a fairground ride through Toyland but with horse intestines draped at intervals, conveyed him on into the center. Where the Billing Road concluded at the crossroads with Cheyne Walk and York Road, near the General Hospital, Ben waltzed over the zebra crossing and along Spencer Parade.
Boughs from St. Giles churchyard overhung the pavement, off-cut scraps of light and shadow rustling across the cracked slabs in a mobile stipple. Past the low wall on Ben’s right was soft grass and hard marble markers, peeling benches scored with the initials of a hundred brief relationships and then the caramel stones of the church itself, probably one of those inspected on Sam Beckett’s lone nocturnal tour. St. Giles was old, not ancient like St. Peter’s or the Holy Sepulcher, but old enough, and here as long as anybody could remember. It was clearly well-established by the time that John Speed drafted the town map for 1610, which Benedict owned a facsimile edition of, rolled up somewhere behind his bookshelves back in Tower Street. Though state-of-the-art technical drawing in its day, to modern eyes its slightly wonky isomorphic house-rows looked like the endeavor of a talented though possibly autistic child. The image of Northampton poised there at the start of the seventeenth century, a crudely drawn cross-section of a heart with extra ventricles, was nonetheless delightful. When the modern urban landscape was too much for Benedict to bear, say one day out of every five, then he’d imagine he was walking through the simple and depopulated flatland of Speed’s diagram, the vanished landmarks dark with quill pen hatch-work scribbling themselves into existence all around him. White streets bounded by ink curbs, devoid of human complication.
Benedict continued down into St. Giles Street, passing the still-open lower end of the half-destitute, half-empty Co-op Arcade, its redundant upper reaches gazing bleakly onto Abington Street which ran parallel, a short way up the gentle slope of the town’s southern flank. Some distance further on, past Fish Street’s gaping cod’s mouth, was the Wig & Pen, the disinfected and rebranded shell of what had once been called the new Black Lion, as distinct from the much older pub of that name down on Castle Hill. Back in the 1920s, the St. Giles Street Black Lion had been haven for the town’s bohemians, a reputation that the place had suffered or enjoyed till the late ’Eighties when the current renovations were afoot. Another reputation that the dove endured, according to authorities including Elliot O’Donnell, was as one of the most haunted spots in England. When Dave Turvey had been landlord here, around the time when Tom Hall, Alma Warren and indeed the greater part of Piet de Snapp’s outlandish portrait gallery had been the Black Lion’s customers, there had been footsteps on the stairs and items moved or rearranged. There had been presences and scared pets throughout Turvey’s tenure, just as there had been with all the previous proprietors. Ben wondered idly if the apparitions had been made to undergo a makeover, been themed along with the surrounding pub so that if rattling chains or mournful shrieks were heard one of the specters would put down his plowman’s lunch and reach inside his jacket, muttering “Sorry, guys. That’s mine. Hello? Oh, hi. Yeah. Yeah, I’m on the astral plane.” Ah ha ha ha.
Upon Ben’s right now, broad imperial steps swept up towards the soaring crystal palace that resembled a Dan Dare cathedral but was where you had to go to pay your council tax. Because of this, the place would always have the feeling of a place of execution, like the old Labor Exchange in Grafton Street, no matter how refined and stately its design. Bills and assessments and adult responsibilities. Places like this were faces of the whetstone that ground people down, that shaved a whole dimension off of them. Benedict moved on hurriedly, past the adjoining Guildhall where he wasn’t certain if the building had been lately cleaned or if its stones were simply bleached by countless flashgun fusillades from countless civic weddings. Geologic strata of confetti, matrimonial dandruff, had accumulated in the corners of its grand stone stairs.
This was the third and very possibly the final place that the town hall would find itself located, after the forgotten Mayorhold and the intermediary position at the foot of Abington Street. Ben looked up, past all the saints and regents decorating the elaborate façade, to where on his high ridge between two spires stood the town’s patron saint, rod in one hand, shield in the other, wings folded behind him. Benedict had never been entirely sure how the Archangel Michael had been made one of the saints, who, unless Ben had got it wrong, were human beings who’d aspired to sainthood through hard work and piety and pulling off some tricky miracles. Wouldn’t an archangel have an unfair advantage, what with being quite miraculous already? Anyway, archangels outranked saints in the celestial hierarchy, as any schoolchild knew. How had Northampton managed to recruit one of God’s four lieutenants as its patron saint? What possible incitements could the town have offered to perk up a posting so much lower down on the celestial scale of reimbursement?
He went on across Wood Hill and down the north side of All Saints, where John Clare once habitually sat within a recess underneath the portico, a Delphic Oracle on day release. Ben crossed before the church, continuing down Gold Street in a soar of shop fronts as if he were still sixteen and riding on his bike. Down at the bottom, while he waited at the lights to cross Horsemarket, he glanced to his left where Horseshoe Street ran down towards St. Peter’s Way and what had previously been the Gas Board yards. Local mythology suggested that it was around where the old billiard hall stood, a few yards from the corner Benedict now occupied, that some time previous to the Norman conquest there had come a pilgrim from Golgotha, from the ground where Christ supposedly was crucified, off in Jerusalem. Apparently the monk had found an ancient stone cross buried at the crucifixion site, whereon a passing angel had instructed him to take the relic “to the center of his land”, which had presumably been England. Halfway up what was now Horseshoe Street, the angel had turned up again, confirming to the traveler that he had indeed lucked onto the right place. The cross he’d born so far was set into the stonework of St. Gregory’s Church which had been just across the road in Saxon times, the monk’s remains interred beneath it, to become itself a site of pilgrimage. They’d called it the rood in the wall. Here in this grimy offshoot of the Boroughs there resided England’s mystic center, and it wasn’t only Benedict who thought that. It was God who thought that too. Ah ha ha ha.
The lights changed, with the luminous green man now signifying it was safe for workers in the nuclear industry to cross. He wandered over into Marefair, heading down what had for Benedict always been the town’s main street, westward in a bee-line for St. Peter’s Church. He was still thinking vaguely about angels, after the archangel perched up on the Guildhall and the one who’d shown the monk where he should plant his cross in Horseshoe Street, and Ben recalled at least one other story of seraphic intervention that involved the thoroughfare along which he was walking. At St. Peter’s Church, just up ahead, there’d been a miracle in the eleventh century when angels had directed a young peasant lad named Ivalde to retrieve the lost bones of St. Ragener, concealed beneath the flagstones in the nave, unearthed in blinding light to an accompaniment of holy water sprinkled by the holy spirit who had manifested as a bird. A crippled beggar woman witnessing the incident had risen to her feet and walked, or so the story went. It all tended to foster Ben’s distinct impression that in the Dark Ages one could barely move for angels telling you to go to Marefair.
Benedict had reached the top of Freeschool Street, running off Marefair on the left, before he realized what he’d done. It had been his excursion to the Billing Road, no doubt, that had inclined him to take his old cycle route from school back to a home here that had been demolished ages since. Blithely propelling a leak-shot canoe along his algae-smothered stream of consciousness, he’d somehow managed to blank out the previous thirty-seven years of his existence, adult feet reverting effortlessly to the trails worn in the pavement by their former, smaller selves. What was he like? Ah ha ha ha. No, seriously, what was he like? Was this the onset of damp pantalooned senility and trying to recall which was his ward? Frankly, for all that it was taking place upon a sunlit afternoon this was quite frightening, like finding that you’d sleepwalked to your dad’s grave in the middle of the night.
He stood there staring at the narrow lane, Marefair’s foot traffic bifurcating to flow round him like a stream with Benedict as its abandoned shopping trolley, utterly oblivious to all the babbling movement he was in the midst of. Freeschool Street was, mercifully, barely recognizable. Only the tiny splinters that you could identify still snagged upon the heart. The paving stones that had gone unreplaced, their moss-filled fractures subdividing to an achingly familiar delta. The surviving lower reaches of a factory wall that dribbled down as far as Gregory Street, ferns and young branches shoving past the rotted frames of what had once been windows, now not even holes. He felt a certain gratitude for the street’s bend that blocked his view of where the Perrit family once lived, the company forecourt stretching where they’d laughed and argued and peed in the sink if it was cold outside, together in that single room with the front parlor used entirely as a showcase for the family’s more presentable possessions. This, he thought, this was the real Atlantis.
Teenaged and pretentious, he’d bemoaned the loss of byres and furrows that he’d never known, that were John Clare’s to mourn. Benedict had composed laments to vanished rural England while ignoring the fecund brick wilderness he lived in, but as things turned out there was still grass, there were still flowers and meadows if you looked for them. The Boroughs, on the other hand, a unique undergrowth of people’s lives, you could search for it all you wanted, but that one particular endangered habitat was gone for good. That half-a-square-mile continent had sunk under a deluge of bad social policy. First there had been a mounting Santorini rumble of awareness that the Boroughs’ land would be more valuable without its people, then came bulldozers in a McAlpine tidal wave. A yellow foam of hard hats surged across the neighborhood to break against the shores of Jimmy’s End and Semilong, the human debris washed up in a scum-line of old people’s flats at King’s Heath and at Abington. When the construction tide receded there’d been only high-rise barnacles, the hulks of sunken businesses and the occasional beached former resident, flopping and gasping there in some resurfaced underpass. Benedict, an antediluvian castaway, became the disappeared world’s Ancient Mariner, its Ishmael and its Plato, cataloging deeds and creatures so fantastic as to be implausible, increasingly even to Ben himself. The bricked up entrance to the medieval tunnel system in his cellar, could that truly have been there? The horse that brought his dad home every night when Jem was passed out at the reins, could that have possibly existed? Had there been real deathmongers and cows on people’s upstairs landings and a fever cart?
Somebody narrowly avoided bumping into Benedict, apologizing even though it was quite clearly Ben’s fault, stood there staring into nowhere and obstructing half the street.
“Ooh, sorry, mate. Not looking where I’m going.”
It was a young half-caste girl, what they called nowadays mixed race, a pinched but pretty thing who looked to be in her mid or late twenties. Interrupting as she was Ben’s daydream of a submerged Eden she took on an Undine gloss, at least in his imagination. The faint pallor that her skin retained despite her parentage seemed a deep-water phosphorescence, hair brushed into stripes with twigs of coral and the wet sheen on her plastic coat all adding to the submarine illusion. Frail and exotic as a sea horse, Ben recast her in the role of a Lemurian sultaness, her earrings dubloons spilled from foundered galleons. That this rock-tanned siren should be saying sorry to the weathered, ugly reef where she’d fetched up through no fault of her own made Benedict feel doubly guilty, doubly embarrassed. He replied with a high, strangled laugh, to put her at her ease.
“Aa, that’s all right, love. You’re all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
Her eyes grew slightly wider and her painted liquid lips, like two sucked pear-drops, went through some suppressed contortions. She was staring at him quizzically, a rhyme scheme and a meter in her look that Ben was unfamiliar with. What did she want? The fact that their chance meeting was occurring on the street where Ben was born, and where he found himself this afternoon through no more than a drunken accident, began now to smack dangerously of kismet. Could it be … ah ha ha ha … could it be that she recognized him, saw by some means all the poetry that he had in him? Had she glimpsed his wisdom underneath the nervousness and beer breath? Was this the predestined moment, loitering across from Marefair’s ibis hotel, caught in shafts of timeless sunshine with pale stars of ground-in bubblegum around the Dr. Martens, when he was to meet his Sheba? Tiny muscles at the corners of her mouth were working now as she prepared to speak, to say something, to ask him if he was an artist or musician of some kind, or even if he was Benedict Perrit, whom she’d heard so much about. The glistening Maybelline-drenched petals finally unstuck themselves, peeling apart.
“Fancy a bit of business?”
Oh.
Belatedly, Ben understood. They weren’t two kindred spirits pulled together inexorably by fate. She was a prostitute and he was a drunk idiot, simple as that. Now that he knew her trade he saw the drawn look that her face had and the dark around the eyes, the missing tooth, the twitchy desperation. He revised his estimate from mid/late twenties down to mid/late teens. Poor kid. He should have known when she first spoke to him, but Ben had grown up in a Boroughs that was something other than Northampton’s red light district; had to consciously remind himself that this was its main function now. He’d never used a pro himself, had never even thought about it, not through any notion of superiority but more because he’d always thought of street girls as a middle-class concern, predominantly. Why would a working-class man, other than through incapacity or unrelenting loneliness, pay to have sex with a working-class woman of the kind that he’d grown up among and had to some degree therefore been de-eroticized towards? Ben thought it was more probably the Hugh Grants of this world who treated adjectives like “rough” or “dirty” as arousing concepts, whereas he’d grown up in a community that generally reserved such terms for nightmare clans like the O’Rourkes or Presleys.
He felt awkward, having never previously experienced this situation, with his awkwardness yet further complicated by his lingering disappointment. For a moment there he’d been upon the brink of a romance, of an epiphany, an inspiration. No, he hadn’t really thought that she was a Lemurian sultaness, but he’d still entertained the notion that she might be someone sensitive and sympathetic, somebody who’d glimpsed the bard in him, had seen the villanelles and throwaway sestinas in his bearing. But instead, the opposite was true. She’s taken him for just another needy punter whose romantic yearnings stretched no further than a quick one off the wrist in a back entry. How could she have got him so completely wrong? He felt he had to let her know how badly she’d misread him, how absurd it was for her to have considered him of all people as a potential client. However, since he still felt sorry for the girl and didn’t want her thinking he was genuinely offended, he elected to communicate his feelings in the manner of an Ealing comedy. He’d found this was the best approach for almost any delicate or sticky social circumstances.
Benedict contorted his sponge-rubber features into an expression of Victorian moral shock, like Mr. Pickwick startled by a mudlark selling dildos, then affected an affronted shudder so vociferous that his fillings rattled, forcing him to stop. The girl by this point was beginning to look slightly frightened, so Ben thought he’d better underline that his behavior was intended as comic exaggeration. Swiveling his head, he glanced away from her to where the television audience would be if life were actually the hidden camera prank show he’d occasionally suspected, and supplied his own canned laughter.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, no, you’re all right, love, thanks. No, bless your heart, you’re all right. I’m all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
It seemed that his performance had at least removed her certainty that Ben was a potential customer. The girl was staring at him now as if she genuinely didn’t have the first idea what Benedict might be. Apparently disoriented, forehead corrugated into an uncomprehending frown, she tried again to get his measure.
“Are you sure?”
What would it take before this woman got the message? Was he going to have a do a full routine with plank, paste-bucket and banana skin to make her understand that he was too poetic to want sex behind a rubbish skip? One thing was certain: subtlety and understatement hadn’t worked. He’d have to spell it out for her with broader gestures.
He tipped back his head in a derisive guffaw that he fancied was in the John Falstaff mode, or would have been if Falstaff had been best known as a gangly tenor.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, love, I’m all right, ta. You’re all right. I’ll have you know that I’m a published poet. Ah ha ha.”
That did the trick. From the expression on her face, the girl no longer harbored any doubts concerning what Ben Perrit was. Wearing a fixed grin she began to take her leave, keeping her wary eyes upon him as she backed away down Marefair, clearly scared to turn her back on him until she was some distance off, in case he pounced. She tottered off past Cromwell House in the direction of the railway station, pausing when she reached St. Peter’s Church to risk a glance across her shoulder back at Benedict. She evidently thought he was a psychopath, so he let out a carefree high-pitched cackle to assure her that he wasn’t, whereupon she took off past the church front, disappearing into the homecoming crowds on Black Lion Hill. His muse, his mermaid, vanished in a tail-flip and a shimmer of viridian scales.
Five things, then. Just five things that Ben was unsuccessful with. Escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, and talking to a woman if you didn’t count his mom or Alma. Lily, she’d been an exception, been the one who’d genuinely seen his spirit and his poetry. He’d always felt that he could talk to Lily, although looking back it pained him to admit that most of what he’d talked was drunken rubbish. That was largely what had finished it between the two of them. It was the drink and, if he were entirely honest, it was Ben’s insistence that the rules in his relationship with Lily be those that had suited his own parents, Jem and Eileen, thirty years before, particularly those that suited Jem. Back then Ben hadn’t really taken in that everything was changing, not just streets and neighborhoods but people’s attitudes; what people would put up with. He’d thought that at least in his own home he could preserve a fragment of the life he’d known right here in Freeschool Street, where wives would tolerate constant inebriation in their husbands and consider themselves blessed if they’d a man who didn’t hit them. He’d pretended that the world was still that way, and he’d been stunned right to the core of him when Lily took the kids and demonstrated that it wasn’t.
Ben’s uncomfortable meeting with the prostitute had faded now to a faint, wistful pang. His gaze had drifted back to Freeschool Street, his boyhood paradise drowning in its own future with the water level rising day by day, moment by moment. He wished he could dove into the cladding of the mostly vacant office buildings and apartments, red brick droplets splashing up from where he’d pierced the surface. He’d dog-paddle down through forty years on one lungful of air. He’d swim through his dad’s woodyard gathering up whatever souvenirs he could retrieve to take back to the surface and the present day. He’d tap upon the window of the living room and tell his sister “Don’t go out tonight”. At last he’d emerge gasping, up from the meniscus of contemporary Marefair, his arms full of sunken treasure, startling the passersby and shaking beads of history from his sopping hair.
He was beginning to feel distantly in need of food. He thought he might walk back up Horsemarket to home, perhaps visit the chippy in St. Andrew’s Street. He suddenly remembered he had slightly more than fifteen pounds left, Darwin and Elizth Fry entangled in a crumpled ball of passion somewhere in the deep recesses of his trousers. That would be enough to get some fish and chips and also go out for a drink tonight if he should want to, though he didn’t think he would. The best thing he could do would be to get some food and then go back to Tower Street for an inexpensive evening in. That way he’d still have nearly all the money left tomorrow and he wouldn’t have to go through the humiliating pantomime of taking charity from Eileen in the morning. That was settled, then. That’s what he’d do. Preparing to vacate the spot and head off up Horsemarket, Benedict attempted to rein in his wandering attention, which was off somewhere at play among the gutted ruins of Gregory Street. Stranded dandelions were perched on the remains of ledges twenty-five feet up, hesitant suicides with golden hair like Chatterton …
It was eleven thirty-five. He was emerging from the Bird In Hand on Regent’s Square into the grunting, shouting dark of Friday night. Arterial spills of traffic light reflected from the paving slabs of Sheep Street, where there had apparently at some point in the evening been a shower of rain.
Girls in short skirts in gangs of four or five leaned on each other for support, a multitude of 15-denier legs all holding up one structure, turning inadvertently into components of a single giant giggling insect or a piece of mobile furniture as beautifully upholstered as it was impractical. Boys moved like chess knights with concussion, waltzing mice with Tourette’s, wandering clusters of them suddenly erupting into murderous bonhomie or well-intentioned bottlings and it wasn’t even closing time. There was no closing time. Licensing hours had been extended to infinity by government decree, ostensibly to somehow cut down on binge drinking but in fact so that disoriented visiting Americans would not be inconvenienced by funny English customs. Drunken binges hadn’t been eradicated, obviously. They’d simply had their lucid intervals removed.
Ben could remember having plaice and chips a few hours earlier and a few dimly lighted pub interior moments in between – had he been talking to someone? – but otherwise it was as if he had been newly born this instant, squatted out onto this windy street, into these gutters, wholly ignorant of how he came to be here. At least this time, Ben observed with gratitude, he wasn’t sobbing and he wasn’t naked. Underdressed, perhaps, with evening’s chill beginning now to permeate the riotous sunset of his waistcoat, striking through the insulating beery numbness to raise goose-bumps, but at least not nude. Ah ha ha ha.
A rubber-fingered fumble in his pocket reassured him that the treacherous whore Elizth Fry at least this time had not left Benedict for some ill-mannered publican who’d simply use her, wouldn’t love or need her the way Ben did. That said, finding her immediately raised the tempting possibility of popping back into the pub to get a carry-out, a few cans, but no. No, he mustn’t. Go home, Benedict. Go home, son, if you know what’s good for you.
He turned right, shuffling up Sheep Street to the lights where it met Regent Square, the ugly cross-hatching of carriageways that centuries ago had been the north gate of the town. This was where traitors’ skulls were placed on spikes like trolls on pencils, as a decoration. This was where the heretics and witches had been burned. These days the junction at the end of Sheep Street was marked only by a nightclub painted lurid lavender from when it had been a goth hangout called Macbeth’s a year or two ago, attempting to create a gothic atmosphere upon a corner deep in severed heads and shrieking crones already. Coals to Newcastle, wolfbane to Transylvania. Ben lurched over the various crossings that were needed to convey him safely to the top of Grafton Street, which he proceeded to descend unsteadily. A short way further down blue lights were circling, sapphire flashes battering like moths on the surrounding buildings, but he was too dulled by drink to lend them any great significance.
He glanced up to the higher reaches of the car repair place just across the road, where you could see the solar logo of the Sunlight Laundry still raised in relief, even through the piss-yellow sodium light that everything was bathing in. Fixed in its place, it shone down happily upon a day of 24-hour drinking finally arrived, when it need never sink again below the yard arm. Benedict turned his attention back to the uneven paving slabs immediately in front of him, and focused for the first time on the lone police car pulled up on the curb ahead, the source of all the dancing disco lights. There was a wreck recovery going on, with a smashed vehicle of uncertain make being winched up on its surviving rear wheels by a tow truck. Grim men in fluorescent vests were sweeping shattered windscreen fragments from the busy road, with the police car evidently flashing there behind them to alert the other motorists to what was going on. A baffling spray of random items such as children’s toys and gardening gloves were spread across the tarmac where presumably they had been flung from a burst-open boot. Plant-misters, shower caps and a single flip-flop. Standing by his car and strobe-lit by its beacon, the attending officer was staring down morosely at a melted tire-print where the now-disintegrated automobile had apparently swerved up onto the pavement, possibly avoiding something in its path, before it crashed into the wall or lamppost or whatever it had been. At Benedict’s approach the plump young copper looked up from his contemplation of the burned-in tread mark, and to Ben’s surprise he realized that he knew him from around the neighborhood.
“Hello, Ben. Look at all this fucking mess.” The officer, pink choirboy cheeks now red with aggravation, gestured to the pulverized glass and assorted oddments that were carpeting the street. “You should have seen it half an hour ago, before the medics pulled the poor cunt off his steering column. Worse thing is, it’s not even supposed to be my shift tonight.”
Benedict squinted at the workers sweeping up the debris. There was no blood he could see, but then perhaps the gore was all inside the mangled wreck.
“I see. A fatal accident. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, eh? Ah ha ha ha. Joy rider, was it?” Bugger. He’d not meant to laugh, not at a tragic death, nor had he meant to ask for whom the bell tolled right after delivering Donne’s admonition not to. Luckily, the copper’s mind appeared to be on other things, or else he was accustomed to and tolerant of Ben’s eccentric manner. In a way he’d have to be, with his own sherbet lemon police-issue waistcoat more flamboyant than Ben’s own.
“Joy rider? No. No, it was just some bloke in his late thirties. He was in his own car, far as we could see. A family car.” He nodded glumly to the bright, trans-generational litter, strewn across the road from the sprung-open trunk.
“He didn’t smell like he’d been drinking when they cut him free. He must have swerved to miss something and gone up on the path.” The young policeman’s downcast air briefly appeared to lift a little. “Least I wasn’t sent to tell his missus. Honestly, I fucking hate that. All the screaming and the blubbering and that’s just me. I’ll tell you, the last time I went to one of them I nearly – hang on – ”
He was interrupted by a burst of static from his radio, which he unclipped from his coat to answer.
“Yeah? Yeah, I’m still down the top of Grafton Street. They’re finishing the cleanup now, so I’ll be done here in a minute. Why?” There was a pause during which the cherubic officer stared into space expressionlessly, then he said “All right. I’ll be there soon as I get finished with the crash. Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
He reattached his radio receiver, looked at Benedict and pulled a face that signified resigned contempt for his own woeful luck.
“There’s been another tart done over down on Andrew’s Road. Somebody living down there’s took her in, but they want me to get a statement from her before she gets taken up the hospital. Why is it always me this happens to?”
Benedict was going to ask if he meant getting raped and beaten up, but then thought better of it. Leaving the embittered constable to supervise the tail-end of his clean-up duties, Ben continued downhill, curiously sobered by the whole offhand exchange. He turned along St. Andrew’s Street, thinking about the prostitute who’d been attacked, about the man who’d been alive and driving home to see his family an hour ago with no suspicion of his imminent mortality. That was the whole appalling crux of things, Ben thought, that death or horror might be waiting just ahead and nobody had any way of knowing until those last, dreadful seconds. He began to think about his sister Alison, the motorcycle accident, but that was painful and so Ben steered his attentions elsewhere. Doing so, he inadvertently arrived at a blurred memory of the young working girl who had approached Ben earlier, the one who’d had her hair in rows. He knew it wasn’t her specifically who’d been the latest girl to be assaulted at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but he also knew that in a sense it might as well have been. It would be one just like her.
How could this have happened to the Boroughs? How could it have turned into a place where somebody who could have grown up beautiful, who could have grown to be a poet’s muse, is raped and half-killed every other week? The spate of sexual abductions and attacks over a single weekend during that last August, the majority of them had happened in this district. At the time they’d thought a single ‘rape gang’ was responsible for all the crimes, but ominously it had turned out that at least one serious assault was wholly unconnected to the others. Benedict supposed that when events like that occurred with the alarming frequency that they appeared to do round here, it would be natural to assume concerted action by some gang or some conspiracy. Although a menacing idea it was more comforting than the alternative, which was that such things happened randomly and happened often.
Still disconsolately dwelling on the probably doomed girl he’d met in Marefair and the fatal accident whose aftermath he’d witnessed just five minutes back, Ben turned right into Herbert Street, deserted on the slope of midnight. Silhouetted on the Lucozade-toned darkness of the sky behind them, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court were black as Stanley Kubrick monoliths, beamed down by an unfathomable alien intelligence to spark ideas among the shaggy, louse-bound primitives. Ideas like “Jump”. You couldn’t even see what little there was left of Spring Lane School from this specific viewpoint how you once could, not for all the NEWLIFE standing in the way. Ben shambled down as far as Simons Walk beneath a night made tangerine and starless. Turning left along the strip of turf-edged paving that would lead him to his mam’s house he felt irritated, as he always did, by Simons Walk and its absent apostrophe. Unless there was some benefactor to the area named Simons that Ben hadn’t heard of, he assumed the street’s name was a reference to church-and-castle-building Norman knight Simon de Senlis, in which case there should be a possessive … oh, what was the point? Nobody cared. Nothing meant anything that couldn’t be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers’ punctuation.
Staggering along past Althorpe Street he could hear screams of laughter and discordant weirdo music made still more distorted by its volume, issuing from slaphead Kenny Something’s drug den down at the walk’s end. Off in the ocher gloom car engines vented jungle snarls across the darkening cement Savannah. Turning into Tower Street he walked up as far as Eileen’s house, then spent five minutes giggling at himself while he attempted to unlock the front door without making any noise by trying to fit his key into the doorbell. Ah ha ha.
The house was quiet with everything switched off, his mam having already gone to bed. He passed by the closed door to the front room, still filled with heirlooms and for show rather than use, the way things used to be in Freeschool Street, and went through to the kitchen for a glass of milk before he went upstairs.
His room, the one space on the planet that he felt was his, awaited him forgivingly, prepared to take him in once more for all that he’d neglected it. There was his single bed, there was what he still laughingly referred to as his writing desk, there were the ranks of poets that he’d earlier tried to gas. He sat down on the bed’s edge to untie his shoes but left the action uncompleted, trailing off across the carpet with the unpicked laces. He was thinking of the accident in Grafton Street, which meant that he was thinking about Alison, her ton-up boyfriend trying to overtake that lorry that had no wide-load lights. He was thinking about dying, how he did each morning soon as he woke up, but now there was no hope the morbid thoughts would vanish with the day’s first drink, not when its last drink was just then expiring horribly beneath Ben’s tongue. He was alone there in his room with death, his room, his death, its inevitability, and there was nothing to defend him.
One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn’t be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he’d been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He’d have been crossed off the guest list, he’d have been erased, as if he’d never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and …
It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out of him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life’s frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.
But then, Benedict had done that. He’d decided, rashly, back in his romantic youth, that he’d be nothing if he couldn’t be a poet. At the time, he hadn’t really thought about the lesser of those two alternatives, the possibility that he might well end up as nothing. It had never happened for him, the success he’d thought he might achieve when he was younger, and he’d gradually lost heart. He’d pretty much abandoned writing, but it was so much a part of his identity that he could not admit, not even to himself, that he had given up. He would pretend his inactivity was only a sabbatical, that he was lying fallow, gathering material, when he knew deep inside that he was only gathering dust.
He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he’d made. He’d been so anxious for success and validation that he’d come to think you weren’t really a writer unless you were a successful one. He knew, in this unprecedented patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his contemporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, in his three-score-and-ten, had never had a moment’s doubt that he was a true artist. Ben’s own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was simple failure of nerve. If he had somehow found the courage to continue writing, even if each page had been rejected by each publisher it was submitted to, he’d still be able to look himself in the eye and know he was a poet. There was nothing stopping him from picking up his pen again except Earth’s easily-resisted field of gravity.
This could be the night that Ben turned it all around. All that he had to do was walk across and sit down at his writing desk and actually produce something. Who knows? It might turn out to be the piece that would secure Ben’s reputation. Or if not, if his abilities with verse seemed flat and clumsy with disuse, it might be his first faltering step back to the path he’d wandered from, into this bitter-sodden and immobilizing bog. Tonight might be his chance to mend himself. The stark thought struck him that tonight might be his last chance.
If he didn’t do it now, if he came up with some excuse about it being better to approach it in the morning when his head was fresher, then it seemed quite likely that he’d never do it. He’d keep finding reasons to put all his poetry aside until it was too late and life called time on him, until he ended up as a statistic at the top of Grafton Street with an indifferent police constable complaining that Ben’s death had messed up his night off. Benedict had to do it right now, right this moment.
He got up and stumbled over to the writing desk, tripping upon his dangling laces on the way. He sat down and pulled out his notebook from a rear shelf of the bureau, pausing to ashamedly wipe thick dust from the cover with his palm before he opened it to a clean sheet. He picked the ballpoint pen that looked most viable out of the jam jar standing on the desk’s top ledge, removed its cap and poised the sticky, furry ball of indigo above the naked vellum. He sat there like that a good ten minutes, coming to the agonizing realization that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Six things, then, that Ben Perrit was completely useless at: escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, talking to girls and writing poetry.
No. No, that wasn’t true. That was just giving up again, maybe for good. He was determined to write something, even if it was a haiku, even if it was a line or just a phrase. He searched his cloudy memory of the uneventful day that he’d just had for inspiration and was startled by how many images and idle notions drifted back to him. The workhouse, Clare’s asylum, Malcolm Arnold and the mermaid girl, clover motifs worked artfully into the head of foam upon Ben’s dark and swirling consciousness. He thought about the aching crack of Freeschool Street and the drowned continent, the landscape that was gone. He thought about just packing all this drunken nonsense in and getting into bed.
Off in the blackness there were sirens, techno thumps, bear-baiting cheers. His right hand trembled, inches from the snow-blind, empty page.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 24, 2021 : Book 1, Chapter 7 -- Added.
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