Archive Page 2
A taste of ammonia
It’s Halloween in the June Bride and I’m an invisible man sipping a large Irish behind a twist in the wallpaper. They’ve just discovered a body in Banglatown. Billy the Pill’s telling Crazy Carol and Zimmerman:
“So, Charlie’s having a curry in Brick Lane and he’s just about to order another couple of poppadoms and a beer when all of a sudden the waiters are running about like headless chickens and there’s coppers all over, creeping all about and eyeballing all the punters…”
He pauses for a swallow of his beer and a drag on his cigarette. Charlie nods to Carol to confirm what has already been said. Charlie isn’t too good with words, having had his tongue removed some years previously for speaking out of turn about a rather nasty face’s girlfriend.
“Anyway,” Billy continues, “Seems one of the boys has been out the back dumping some rubbish or something and he’s having a crafty Marlboroette when he sees these pins sticking out from behind a wheelie bin. Well, he streaks back into the gaff, shaking like a leaf and whiter than a sheet… ain’t that right Charlie?” Charlie nods again with his usual enthusiasm. A dribble of beer runs down his chin. Billy stares into an imaginary distance, and then, drawing his finger in a slow arc from ear to ear, and lowering his head level with Carol’s, says in a theatrical whisper:
“Throat cut! Almost took her bloody head clean off.”
Crazy Carol shivers and grips Zimmerman’s arm. He mutters: “Alright girl, alright,” and strokes her hair. Then he orders her another half of bitter and a Jack Daniels and Coke for himself. I order another Irish and scrounge a cigarette from a cruising cockroach.
“They know who did it?” asks Zimmerman.
“Bloody hell mate,” says Billy, “give them a bleeding chance. It only went down no more than two hours ago. Ain’t that right Charlie?” Charlie nods and holds up two fingers at Zimmerman, who responds with an uncomfortable shrug, handing Carol her half and pocketing her change.
The cockroach returns with my whisky, a pack of Camels and a green Clipper on a tray. The drink turns out to be Scotch but I decide not to complain. Just can’t get the help around here.
“Bet it was her boyfriend, anything you like, any takers?” It’s the Dwarf. He’s just come in, edging his way Spanish though the punters to get to the bar.
“Here we go,” chortles Billy the Pill, laying his finger lightly on the side of his nose and slipping Charlie a conspiratorial eye. “Here’s the man. Now we’ll get the inside story. What do you know boss? No, put your money away. I’ll get that. Now, come on, you’ve heard something haven’t you?”
“All in the fullness, young man, all in good time.”
Billy passes him his beer and the Dwarf takes a long pull on it. Meanwhile Crazy Carol, Charlie and Zimmerman track his every move with building expectation.
“As it happens,” he continues at last, “I have reason to be en-trammeled for a short period of time this evening in the rather unpleasant environs of Limehouse nick, wherein I stumble upon…” he pauses and eradicates what remains of the contents of his glass. “… a little whisper!”
His audience is entranced: Billy bites the crook of his thumb, Charlie tries to lick his beer off his chin with his absent tongue, Carol stares wide eyed and open-mouthed, Zimmerman orders another Jack Daniels, the cockroach winks at me and performs an obscene sexual mime with his tongue.
“Seems the unfortunate young lady is an acquaintance of yours, Carol,” says the Dwarf. “Part time brass. Lives down Shandy Street with some Greek nonce?”
Crazy Carol’s eyes pop, her features freeze, the cockroach’s thorax shivers.
“Bleeding hell, boss. It can’t be. Not her, not little Alice!”
Zimmerman mutters, “Poor cow. Don’t get upset babe,” and attempts a sympathetic embrace but Carol pushes him away and shakes her head, fishing a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, lighting one and blowing the smoke in his face.
“Poor cow my arse,” she growls. “Bitch owes me fifty f**king quid!”
There follows a Milli-second of stunned silence, after which Billy the Pill starts to laugh, the Dwarf sniggers, Charlie chortles and Zimmerman’s shoulders start to quake. I need another drink but I can’t see that f**king cockroach anywhere.
“Bloody hell Carol,” says Billy, “ain’t you got no respect for the dead?”
Crazy Carol totally loses control and collapses into hysterics, whooping with laughter and spraying everybody with beer and spit.
“Yeah?” she splutters. “Well I’ll tell you something else, Billy boy, the bitch was only pregnant, wasn’t she? Three months gone mate.”
Gales of hilarity shake the big bevelled mirror behind the bar. Glasses rattle on the shelves and the guffaw echoes like a dirty joke all through the pub and out the big swing doors into the street.
Somebody says later that you can hear it all the way down the Mile End Road.
The cockroach re-appears and, with a lewd smile, tells me he’s called us a taxi and it’s waiting outside. I tell him thanks but I’ve got a headache and I need to be somewhere in the morning.
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Textuality
The situation has long since ceased to puzzle or hurt me. Oh, for a long while it did. Every-time I saw a mother and child in the street. Real pain, like my heart being torn out with pliers. And the loneliness, all those terrible nights. But that’s all in the past now and everything’s normal. I accept events on a day to day basis, no worries, no responsibilities, no problem.
And I lie a lot. It’s Springtime forever.
The song comes back into my head and an irony born out of a contradictory epigram, which seems to have been falsely whispered by some under-voice possibly related to my own, squints at me teasingly through the imperfectly recalled notes like the glow of a row of tacky, coloured bulbs.
What does pain mean and when does it begin? At the end of love, that’s where. Pain is the end of love. A cut is forever like lost love. A broken bone never entirely heals and neither does a bruise. Pain always and forever leaves a memory.
Memory of pain, Mary-Jane.
Wounds haunt. Wounds last forever. They signify differences of opinion that echo down the years and change your life forever.
Breaking up is hard to do.
Of course it is; so is waking up and making up, shutting up, putting up and shooting up. Then the music changes.
I live at just a few degrees below room temperature — depending on the room — and if my blood was ice it would be not quite frozen. When she gets angry I wake and when she sleeps I may cease to exist. If I loved her I’d be alive and if I could hate her she’d be dead and live forever somewhere.
She lights a cigarette and smokes while I splash some cold water on my hands and face, my features unclear in the cloudy mirror. Then I dress slowly, feigning invisibility. She is silent; nothing more need be said. She’s paid and the emptiness is returning. I do everything slowly. That’s the way I work: move too quickly, think too fast and you don’t feel it happen. It’s as if you didn’t do it at all, as if nothing happened. A wasted effect, a corrupted effort.
There’s nothing morally wrong about sex with prostitutes. If I never experience love, if, through some neurological malfunction, I am incapable of love or of being loved, if I am a psychopath, a cold, hard killer…
I could look at her now and love her. The tears she doesn’t shed. And when it’s all over and she is not she and I am still less we will know each other none the less for the loss.
Should I deny the existence of gangsters? I don’t deny it. Will I affirm their existence? I won’t. I can no more affirm than I can deny. Is there evil in the world? If there is, am I responsible for it? A cabal of like-minded criminals, particles of an evil colossus? If gangsterism exists is it because there are gangsters or do gangsters exist because there is gangsterism?
In the hotel bar I’m almost alone. A few early evening people. A gentle saxophone weeps some lonely jazz and makes me think of the injustice of a single magpie, the irony of a slow death by vacuum-cleaner. I’m not usually intimidated by ornithology but the absence of a second magpie makes me feel uneasy and the thought of assassination by household appliances drags me back to uncomfortable memories of my broken marriage. So I finish my drink prematurely and leave.
When this is over I’ll leave the city, go to a small seaside town up north, perhaps, Bridlington, Whitby; or maybe somewhere in Devon, somewhere with an esplanade and small clean streets leading up to the town.
Should I call her? No. Perhaps I’ll just drop in semi-unexpectedly. She knows I’m back in the city. I wrote from Crete the day before I flew out, told her about the woman and her daughter and the funeral march. Told her about how I almost fell in love again. She should have received the letter by now.
Then I’m back out on the street and for a couple of blocks it’s the same old thing. Breathless Pete’s still around somewhere with the monkey and that razor shine suit that’s never fitted, the shoe slip and hungry snake-eyed Gerry and Ted the burnt out journalist ordering Perrier with gin and bitters in the Café Royal and a beer for the handsome waiter. But the city’s quieter than it seemed before, even after the mountains of Crete.
Then I’m walking the wheel around the big black and deep dark. No eye contact, not a familiar face until I catch Ted hanging around smoking in a subway entrance, drunk, cheap, drip-dry shirt-tails hanging out, yellow sweat stains at the armpits, nicotine-brown thumbs, broken glasses held together with Sellotape.
Ted is a piano player working in a basement dive off Old Compton Street every night till three, four in the morning. In the afternoons he gets drunk and tries to write songs with his partner, Mickey. They’re out of place, a pair of depression era Yiddish Tin Pan Alley sheet music hawkers. They work for hours turning into years chugging out that music, turning tears into tunes, finding a million ways to go CHINGA SHINGA CHINGA BIP BAM BOO and never getting anywhere.
“One day somebody’s going to care,” says Mickey. Ted tells him to f**k off, he’s living in a f**king dream world. And then he wakes up and realises that they both are, by choice. If only he could get his dreams back, live them again and have them dashed and taste that sweet disappointment.
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Subway, someday
Down there in the big black, beyond the turnstiles and the ticket machines and the spies, there’s only the grinding pain and the emptiness and all the money gone, lost or wasted or cheated away.
The grey trains stop and go and stop and go in endless revolution, picking up and dropping off, making it and losing it, just like the boys, the endless boys, nothing caring, nothing singing, nothing seeing, aware only of the long wait for the good and the sleep and some hidden sense of the possible in the dark.
A soft sensibility, like the existence of solace in the act of leaving or someone to kiss you goodbye or a new beginning in the face of a new arrival.
On the street there’s no promise but you hit back and lash out at a thought or a face or a lie just to humour the beast, all the while knowing that nothing that hits or slashes or harms you in any way will avoid you.
Avoidance is not the will of demons.
The concourse is middle ground and the concourse is no man’s land and the concourse is purgatory and here the stationary expiate their sins while they wait for movement.
And here is where you find her, networking and begging for pills or demanding money with promises, drinking or loving or seeking security or searching for pain, like a screamer out for sentiment and babies as if all of those are one and the same.
You see the boy by the coffee stand?
And the gesture that starts from within becomes a look and then a beckoning smile and a head movement that can’t be ignored.
And then he’s there, like a falling angel at the mouth of the subway, swimming in the smell of urine and tobacco, before the panic costs him his breath and he drowns in the wonderful redolence of fear and power and expensive leather coats now safe in the big black, half way to Knightsbridge or Earls Court or Fulham or Chelsea.
They leave him asphyxiating in the stink of the sweat and the breath and the alcohol that is the miasma of all the subways of the world and in the fog of which the same events occur or are about to occur and will endlessly repeat.
She greets him like an old acquaintance and he invents a name for her out of the air, while a man to whom she’s been talking shuffles his feet and coughs awkwardly in obvious discomfort, his hands obscuring his features from the beam of the overhead cameras and passers by, knowing the situation isn’t quite right but failing to walk away, just as the boy knows that she isn’t quite right.
But he also fails, because she fascinates and transfixes him with her swaying rhythmic motion and strange accent, which he thinks may be Greek or Italian with east London vowel sounds.
And then she’s offering him a drink from a bottle of cheap brandy mixed with something sweet and slightly carbonated. But the neck hardly reaches his lips before she snatches it back with terrible laughter and hands too large to be feminine. Then it’s in her mouth and…
a sense of weird sex, devoid of tenderness and existing alone and dangerous for its own sake, entrances him and…
He sees the demon.
For a moment he’s repulsed but it draws him back and holds him close and firm and he can’t break away but grabs the man’s arm and pulls him close so that their faces almost touch and he smells the fear on the guy’s breath and the power in his own and in the demon’s voice growls:
PAY HER, PAY HER. GIVE HER THE F**KING MONEY. GIVE HER SOME F**KING MONEY NOW. F**KING PAY HER OR I’LL F**KING KILL YOU. I’LL MESS YOU UP FOR GOOD. I’LL F**KING KILL YOU F**KING C**T. PAY HER. PAY ME. PAY US. PAY HER. GIVE US ALL YOUR F**KING MONEY. DON’T LOOK AT THE CAMERA…
DON’YA LOOK AT THE F**KING CAMERA BASTARD…
And the man’s coat collar clenched tightly now in both the boy’s hands as he head-buts him once, twice, then once again and pulls him by the hair deeper into the subway, out of range of the camera, with the hair ripping from his scalp and the sound of his own screaming and sobbing echoing in his head.
And the boy head-buts him again and again until there’s a sickening crack as the man’s nose bursts and the back of his head hits the wall with a ragged swath of blood exploding across the white tiles, before he slides to the ground, the girl’s big hand tearing his wallet from his coat pocket and the boy finishing him off with a final, terrible kick to the head.
They exchange a glance and leave the subway by the stairs up to the street. At the top of the stairs she links her arm in his and, smiling, gently kisses his cheek.
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Animus
He insists on the move. But her garden means everything to her and all they have at the new place is a small square of paved-over back yard with a potted plant and some creepers. She isn’t happy and she deeply resents him.
All attempts at communication fail. He smells her resentment all over the house. It’s in the living room, the kitchen cupboards and the fridge, in the dust on the bookshelves and between the pages of the books themselves. It’s especially pungent on the first floor landing around the closed door of her room. Something has to be done.
There’s a lot of door-knocking, a daily pageant of young men with large hold-alls full of dusters and dish-mops. Double glazing and home improvements salesmen in bad ties. Matronly market researchers with clipboards. Prospective burglars. Gypsy rug sellers and roof repairers…
He particularly dislikes the evangelists. They hit the street mob handed, middle aged men and women in hats and overcoats, even in the summer. And they never simply rap once and then go away. Sometimes they loiter for hours, flipping through their Bibles, chattering about God knows what, periodically rattling letterboxes and knocking.
He peers at them through a crack in the curtain. There’s one of each: regulation hats, overcoats and Bibles, big white teeth and cavernous eyes full of spiritual luminosity. The man rattles and knocks and says something he can’t quite catch. The woman giggles.
His breathing grows intense. They must know he’s home: Big T and The Badda-Bings blares out of the stereo — The Girl From Ipanema — and at one point the man comes right up close to the window and peers in. Eventually they give up and move on to the next door.
He gathers together a saw and a kitchen knife, a pair of secateurs, some black plastic sacks purchased from one of the hold-all men and a large wooden chopping board. She looks up from her pillow as he enters, watches in silence as he goes to work.
There’s a lot of blood. He almost slips over in it as he positions himself to begin sawing through the neck.
The spinal cord is tough but finally he succeeds in detaching the head. While he debates whether to remove the arms in one piece or cut off the hands first he notices the ring. The flesh has swollen around it and it won’t budge so he snips off the finger with the secateurs.
Once the head and limbs have been removed, the middle section is light enough to be carried through to the bathroom. He places it gently in the tub and slits open the stomach with the kitchen knife. The contents spill out into the bath. Then he opens up the chest cavity and begins to remove the various organs, laying them carefully on the chopping board. These he cuts up into small chunks and flushes down the lavatory in servings of about half a pound in weight. He then cuts out the ribs one by one with the saw and quarters the torso, placing each piece into one of the sacks ready to be taken downstairs.
He boils the head first, followed by the hands, feet and ribs, in a big, copper cooking pot. Once cleaned of flesh the bones are separated into smaller fragments, mixed with some general domestic waste and sealed away in another sack to be disposed of by the council garbage men.
It’s nearly daylight. He is left with several large bones. A pair of femurs, shoulder blades, other arm and leg bones on which some flesh still remains. Feeling suddenly exhausted and deciding it’s time for a break, he pours himself a whisky. He turns, sensing her presence in the doorway. She says nothing, just stares at him with that I told you so look of hers. He shrugs.
“All right, all right, I know,” he sighs. “If we only had a garden…”
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Cloudy
It’s just before dawn when I come to. I lie still on my back for a while just staring at the ceiling then I drag myself over to the desk by the window and open up my lap-top.
The people from the labyrinth are awake too, walking around inside my head, talking, watching television, having dinner, making love. As I start to type I can feel their presence in my fingertips like so many prospects of the cold.
There’s one — her name is Cloudy — who is a sexual con-artist. She plays the long game and loses.
Her possessions are laid out on a table in plastic bags: a packet of menthol cigarettes, Kleenex, a purse containing crumpled banknotes and some change, a matchbook from the Regent Palace Hotel, a green Clipper, an old subway ticket, keys, a broken watch.
Her dress looks new and expensive, as do the shoes, bright red court-shoes with real leather uppers, ankle straps and high heels…
It’s early evening, the evening of the night she dies. She gets out of the car in Holland Park, enters the restaurant on the man’s arm — the new dress, the shoes — smiling. I wait for the lights to change before turning into a side street and parking up. Then I walk in the rain to find a payphone.
There’s no answer. No. She must be there; it couldn’t be her in a dress like that, those shoes and the laughter and the smiles. She must be asleep. The phone keeps ringing.
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The Importance of mirrors
Everything stinks. There are no regions of close approach between spiritual latitudes. The psychic conjunctiva that seals in and protects the small details of self which help to preserve human sanity doesn’t exist. Only central issues matter, intelligence is collective, a broth of ersatz consciousness in a communal skillet, frozen, loveless and colourless. Normality skulks away from the light in the same way that the children shrink from a loving touch or a kind word. One day a spaceman may come and reintroduce humanity to this place. Then again perhaps he will simply destroy it.
The Sprite is West Indian Oriental, with an accent that suits the paper folding image. He’s busy with some coloured card and tissue paper.
“How will he find you?” he asks, not looking up.
I suck my teeth. “He knows everything, man. No problem,” I spit. “He rules this town – the whole damn world in fact – from a bunker somewhere, communicating to his agents by telepathic means.”
The paper folder looks up, still folding: “Seems to me you got yourself an evil demon.”
“What?”
“Yes sir, that’s what I reckon.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well there’s this guy, some kind of philosopher, goes back some ways… anyhow, he’s trying to find a method to suss out the meaning of existence, you know, as you do. So he posits this theory that God is actually a great and powerful deceiver who’s like fooled everybody, including himself, into believing that they exist, when actually, they don’t, yeah?” He pauses, fiddling with some particularly intricate piece of origami.
“And?” I snap.
“Oh, he gets out of that one, man. Oh yeah.”
“How?”
The sprite leans forward in his chair and whispers: “Cogito ergo sum, my friend. I think therefore I am. Get it?”
“No. But, anyway, everybody needs to believe in something, don’t they? What do I know about metaphysics. I’m a writer, a literary chemist.”
“Everything’s chemistry, bro. You said that.”
I shake my head. “Look,” I say, “I wish you wouldn’t quote me back at myself to back up your own position, you know? After all, I mean… not only are you a figment, a posit, you’re my figment, my bloody posit. You wouldn’t even exist without me. You know that, don’t you?”
The figment shrugs: “Since I don’t exist I can know nothing.”
“Look, don’t sulk. And don’t try to screw me up with philosophy, right?”
“Ok. But let me just say this: if, as you seem to strongly imply, I exist only through you and not as an independent entity… well, you can see where I’m coming from, can’t you? Like, who’s doing the screwing up, yeah?”
I refuse to rise to the bait. “It’s just that I don’t think he’s evil, that’s all”
“Who?”
“Your demon.”
“Oh, so I don’t exist but now he’s my demon, right? Yeah? Hello? How does that one work?
“Shut up. You’re such a brat, you know that? I mean The Man, the magic gangster, you know, the one I’m waiting to hear from?”
The posit sits back in his chair and crosses his legs. “So, let me get this straight,” he says, “just so I know which way the candy’s melting here. He’s a gangster, right? A killer, a murderer and a kidnapper, an extortionist and a torturer – but he’s not evil, right? That’s what you’re telling me, yeah?”
“Shut up. Listen: he has no sense of evil. The concept of good doesn’t exist for him, and you can’t have one without the other, right? I mean… if you’ve only got one arm, then there’s really no question of it being the left or the right, is there? There’s only one arm. He’s beyond that, beyond good and evil. Differences between pleasure and pain, right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate don’t exist for him. Evil doesn’t exist for him, only power, that’s all, pure power, raw power, power for its own sake. Power is everything!”
“You mean like chemistry?”
“Don’t start that again. But yeah, if you like.”
“But you have no power, do you?”
“For pity’s sake that’s why I’m waiting for him to contact me, isn’t it, you bloody idiot, to give me the f**king power.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why should he give you anything? I mean, does he owe you for something? Can you do something for him? What can you do? Why should he give you anything, do you any favours? What is it about you? What the hell have you got that a guy like him needs so damn badly? Hmm? Tell me that.”
Light, bright and brittle, the morning sun cuts a swath through the dust that hangs in the air like the question. And the whore in the mirror cries and then I am awake and alone and wondering what it is I can do for the magic gangster.
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A Congolese evangelist
Nicodemus pilots Matilda through the doors of R&B Worthy’s Tea Room and African Bakery and motions for her to sit herself down at a secluded table near the back of the shop.
“If you want to know a man from Zaire,” Louis-Marie Ndosimau, the proprietor, tells a small Chinese woman at the counter, “You must first look at his appearance – the way he dresses is very particular, we like to dress smart. You know why? I’ll tell you. Our forefathers were very tidy people, extremely neat. In fact we may well have been the neatest people ever, in the world.”
He is dressed all in black, high waisted trousers, black shirt with cream detail around the collar and cuffs and a black and cream snakeskin effect belt and cream shoes.
“Our second great obsession is,” he continues, “of course, our music – we call it Ndombolo, like Rumba, but more raunchy – and it is something, it is in the rhythm, you understand, that is very peculiar to Cuba. But you know, that rhythm was brought over and introduced to Cuba by the African slaves, who came from Congo?” He pauses to light a cigarette.
“All Congolese, except the pious fringe,” Nicodemus feels his brother’s eyes swerve towards him, “love all music, but especially Ndombolo. Did you know the government of Cameroon once tried to ban it?”
Nicodemus pours Matilda a cup of tea and sighs. Motioning towards his brother with his head, he says: “You know, he thinks I am without sin?” He shakes his head with just a hint of a smile.
“I, Captain Nicodemus Ndosimau, who has lived by the gun.”
Louis-Marie sits at their table. He smokes a cigarette and occasionally pulls on a bottle of beer.
“How is my brother? How many souls has he saved today?”
Nicodemus sucks his tongue. “I should have stayed home,” he replies. “Perhaps I could have saved yours. You look like a pimp, Louis.”
“What I am wearing now is not expensive. Because I am neat like this it doesn’t mean I have to spend thousands of pounds.” then, turning to Matilda: “My brother thinks he is Papa Wemba.”
“And your Mercedes car?” asks Nicodemus, “You get that from being the keeper of an empty shop?”
“You think everybody that likes nice things is selling drugs or women. I think this white man’s religion has narrowed your mind. You know my car works for itself.”
Louis-Marie runs R&B Worthy’s Executive Car Hire service from the back shop.
“The Lord Jesus Christ is neither a white nor a black nor a yellow man’s God, my brother. But he will forgive you nonetheless, if you renounce the Devil of materialism.”
“It is not materialism, Nicodemus,” says Papa Nyoyi. He closes the street door and joins them at the table.
“If you want to know what it is, I’ll tell you. It is pride in appearance.”
Papa Nyoyi is the owner of the Congolese restaurant the other side of the road. He speaks flawless French without the slightest hint of an African accent.
“Even as children,” he continues, “we would never dream of coming to school without an immaculate appearance, poor as we were. Our teeth gleamed, our hair was always brushed, our shorts ironed and our shoes, that was the most particular thing: our shoes always shone. And we always had to put on a vest. Yes? In white hot Kinshasa? It’s true. So, you see, It is not materialism.”
He opens his shirt to reveal the clean white singlet underneath.
“It is pride, a habit from childhood.”
He shrugs. “Anyway. It is Friday, and my son is home from architectural school. Tonight you can both forget your differences and eat with us in my restaurant. I have cassava, and goat barbecued on a wood fire, and tilapia with tomato and spring onion and my wife’s special chilli sauce, and,” he addresses this specifically to Nicodemus and Matilda, “good strong beer!”
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Mezuzah soup
It’s Sunday morning in her kitchen and Alice is boisterous in that dozy kind of way she often is after a good night out, still drunk, thinking and talking in pop song rhythms, Bappa Mamma Bip, Mappa Bamma Boom, as she makes the toast and brews the tea, meanwhile they’re striking up the band in the distance with a muffled Halleluja Bip Bam Boo.
“You believe in God, Gerry?” No reply. “You believe in God?”
“I don’t even believe in Sunday!” he shouts from the bedroom.
Alice has a flash picture of Little Bo Beep. He strokes the back of her neck. She smells cigarettes on his breath.
“Listen to them,” he whispers. Her spine tingles. “I mean just listen to that shit, all that cheap redemption crap. They’re all dead, like Sunday. The other lot too.” He’s talking about the Bengalis. “Kneeling shoeless with their heads bowed towards Mecca.”
He walks to the window and shouts across the courtyard at Alamandera Mansions: “Fifteen Quid on the Hashasheen’s nose and lose the lot. Like I did yesterday. That’s Mecca for you.”
She pulls away and pours the tea.
“I wish you wouldn’t gamble, Gerry. We needed that money,” she says quietly, a possibility of tears in her voice.
“There are those who kneel and there are those who deal,” he replies, rummaging in the fridge. “Anyway you can go out and get some more, can’t you? A bit later, maybe.” She lays a cup of tea in front of him on the worktop.
“You got any cigs, I’m out?”
“On the floor by the bed. Get me one too.”
He takes two cigarettes from the packet, lights them and puts the packet in his pocket. From her shoe, half hidden beneath the bed, he takes two twenty pound notes and puts those also into his pocket.
He passes her one of the cigarettes, takes a long drag on the other and lets the smoke sigh out.
“They’re out there Alice. They’re out there all right, waiting, keeping order in the courtyards and the squares, hustling for the muezzins, just as sure as those Jesus freaks can’t hold a tune with their dead beat tambourines and bashed up trumpets.”
“What’s one of them, Gerry?”
“What?”
“A mue… whatever you call it.”
He smiles, swallows a piece of dry toast and swiggs a mouthful of tea: “Come here.”
He leads her out to the hallway and the front door. “You see that? You know what that is? I’ll tell you. Before you came here, before the Bengalis arrived, these flats were mostly let to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They had… it was part of their religion – this voodoo, if you like – these little containers attached to their doorposts with small parchments inside inscribed with religious texts. Supposed to scare off evil spirits or something. Anyway, along came the Bengalis. They formed themselves into gangs and started roaming the estates at night, nicking all these little cases from the doors. They took them to their bosses, the muezzins, who broke them open, took out the parchments and made mezzuzah soup out of them, which they sold to the Christians from their corner shops. The soup put a hex on them and they all lost their faith and got drunk. The Jews got rich and moved to Golders Green, and the Bengalis took over the east end. Ethnic and religious cleansing by voodoo, got it?”
“You’re full of shit, Gerry.”
He laughs and leaves her standing in the hallway. She goes back into her kitchen. Leaning across the draining board to fill the kettle again, she knocks a dirty glass with her elbow. It falls to the floor, shattering on impact.
Outside the sun has almost completely disappeared and soon it will rain, rain all day. The courtyards and walkways are quiet. She watches television, eats toast and drinks tea.
Someone has seen her down Roman Road market with the bruises on her face. They tell her sister.
“One day he’s going to kill her!”
She comes round to the flat to find out what’s going on.
“I’m worried about my sister, Gerry.”
But Gerry won’t let her past the door.
“The house is infested with fleas,” he tells her, “you know, since the dog ran off. Best stay away. Alice is fine, fell over that’s all.” Then back indoors with the smile again and the running of fingers through her hair, softly stroking on the nape of her neck.
“I could kill you Alice, if I wanted to, and no one would care.
Five dream people laughing in the early evening. Brandies and coke and sitting by the window at a table facing the bar. Alice in the doorway wearing the Ativan veil. Toni’s plunging neckline in the big bevelled mirror behind the bar. She wears a gold crucifix low hanging on a braided chain, which catches a spark on Gerry’s sovereign ring and relays it back to the sleeper in her ear, completing a triangle. She fingers the chain as she speaks, smiling, rubbing her arm from time to time – a small insect bite there.
Strawberry Fields Forever and nothing forever no more. And the song keeps revolving and repeating like a carnival carousel, contradictions whispering in a thousand undervoices, sneering and squinting at Alice through the smoke and the mist like tacky coloured bulbs at a funfair. Everything deafens and blinds her: the bar buzz, the children screaming outside in the street, the devious pleasures and the false securities bubbling up through the brandy and the whisky and the vodka and the rum and the beer.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER…
And the song ends and the last notes echo. Alice and the Ativan veil still in the doorway searching through the clamour for him…
And sometimes my head just spins, my mind is a city, a totalitarian state, an autarky whose economy depends on the currency of human secrets.
Then she finds him and he hears the words and the secret is a secret no more.
“I don’t want this,” cries a torn voice that moments before has been loud and confident and laughing, before it sinks and a blowsy jeer shaped shout looms up in its place. “It’s the same every time. Weak, lousy bastard!”
Then the torn voice groaning back to the surface. A twisted, ragged moan and the door slamming shut. Footsteps disappearing and the jeer shape shouting:
“Hey Gerry, don’t linger in the moonlight too long, there’s a hangdog moon out there tonight!”
“Moondog!”
“What?”
“Moondog! It’s called a moondog, when the clouds are over it that way.”
“F**k off!”
Leaning across the bar drooling over that slut, speaking his soft words to her. She can’t make out the words. So she pours some more vodka into her glass and empties it then repeats the whole thing like Strawberry Fields Forever but she can’t taste it. The music booms through the wall from the living room. The drink tastes of nothing and she can’t make out the words, can’t hear those words stolen from her and given to Toni. But she follows the shapes his mouth makes in the big mirror, watches as the sleeper in her ear flashes, its ricochet sparking a corona on his ring as he sweeps back his hair from his forehead. Her back in that mirror.
That cow. Don’t linger in the f**king moonlight. The phrase echoes in her head and no one’s there to answer. So she swallows some more pills and fixes another drink.
It’s his indifference that hurts her more than anything. It feels like dying. Imagine a fear so intense as to make the sufferer too scared to face it.
She’s always been frightened, since she’s a little girl. Way back then when she first lets the fear into her life. Now she embraces it. It has a space inside her, as if it is breath to her.
She sits half up in the bed smoking, her broken hair hard and ruined from too much hairspray. It has mixed with her sweat and then solidified during the course of the night. She stares at the room, at the bottle on the floor by the bed and her discarded underwear. She reaches out, hoists up the bottle and drinks. Then she lights a cigarette, going over and over in her head what she’ll say if he comes back, thinking from time to time that she might get up and have a bath.
The nuns used to say that a body always sleeps sounder when freshly scrubbed.
She rises and pulls on her pair of green cotton cut-offs with the broken belt loops and the torn pocket. Pulls up the zipper, cigarette dangling. The smoke curls up into the air and commingles with the dust. The zipper traps her hair and stings her slightly. A notion of a song in the sunlight lightly brushes her breasts with its beam and makes her think of softness, softness like a glow that is gently warming yet unsure in a cute kind of way, like a baby’s first smile, a baby like Gerry maybe, or a little Alice made of her trickle and his juice.
The photographs in an old National Geographic in Dr Leahy’s waiting room bring back something like memory to her. Leafing through its pages she recalls a child’s fingers and they become her own.
She poses in the mirror, head back swooning gently, brushing the hair back from her forehead, her eyes sinking back through teenage and misty, through the smiling lines, through the frost on the mirror, hair tingling at the middle of her back. She fingers her small, neat breasts with their brown nipples. The dark hair beneath her belly peeking out above the half fastened zipper.
When the bump gets bigger will she still be able to see that?
She sighs. Her breasts sigh, like the African women from the magazines, now trapped forever behind her eyes, spent, sucked dry and desperate. Disqualified from life. Hopelessly drowning in mezuzah soup.
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A sense of dogs
The cab at the top of the rank is a beige Escort, 80s registration. The driver, a black guy in a loose fitting shirt and sun glasses too big for his face, is sitting in the back listening to a Gecko Turner CD with the bass cranked up too far for the speakers. I nod through the window and sit in the front passenger seat.
The car reeks of palm oil and something I can’t quite place. The smell brings back the sick feeling that started with my non-existent breakfast and the early morning hangover realisation that I was back in London against my will and my better judgement. I trap it and seal it in a pressurised jar labelled unhelpful odours.
Sure, I don’t want to be here, but if I’m close to some kind of truth I have to find it, possess it, write it down, study it, pull it out of shape, stretch it, write it again until it fits. That’s the science: you start with a secret then you worry it until it becomes true or disappears. If the truth is there you’ll find it in the end, the same way the punchline to a joke you didn’t get suddenly dawns on you.
Holloway Road, Upper Street, The Angel, Old Street undergound, some back streets, blank faces in doorways, shuttered-up shop fronts, bagel bakeries, curry houses… back into traffic, turning into Whitechapel Road. We Pass the Blind Beggar, the Mosque on the right… History: A funeral cortege through Bethnal Green. It’s not a good day, a day full of rain and guys waiting for money nobody can afford… there used to be a cinema on that vacant lot – Scarface. Al Pacino, romance memories, movie gangsters, fantasies in the dark on summer afternoons collapsing into reality like flowers on a bamboo blade.
I get out of the car outside Stepney Green underground. London is a city of stations. Stepney Green, the Ocean Estate. Decay is everywhere, it’s the air they breathe and it stinks.
The Ocean begins on the eastern corner of the intersection of the Mile End Road and White Horse Lane, a wall of phantom grey concrete blocks ten levels high, with windows so small you can’t make them out, don’t realise there are windows there at all until you cross the street. Latticed metal fencing protects the street from them. It’s rusting: fifty years of keeping the dogs off the highway.
My father talks about the dogs, in the early hours when everything is still, in the monochrome moments when there are no jokes left, when the only important thing is to keep life running away from the east end, from the past, from poverty, from crime. That is his motivation: not to be like the dogs. And he never quite lives up to it. The dogs can conceptualise, the dogs are instinctive, the dogs are responsive, the dogs are reactionary — he too is all of those things and he feels what the dogs feel: comfort and warmth, pain and hunger, cold and fear, he knows the nights and the early mornings and he knows the city all of its secrets, its unmentionable odours and its unpublished skin. Years later he tells me, as he relaxes by the pool or gazes from the patio out across the bay, he imagines he can hear the dogs thinking.
Her hair is black, cut short like a boy’s. Soft rain on the shoulders of her jacket shimmers amber in the streetlight. Just for a few seconds the distance separating us diminishes. I see her face up close and sharp as if we are together in the same room with no glass mediating. Her eyes meet mine and there is a feeling of oneness between us. For a half breath of time I know her, really know her, and my consciousness of her knowledge of me is so intense that I feel naked.
I take a dive into the Global Lounge. It’s changed: used to be a spit and sawdust pit; now it’s gone all Continental bar, with video screens and an espresso machine.
I order a large Irish and it’s gone quicker than it takes to pay for. So I order another and take it to a table by the window. This one I approach with more leisure, sipping and smoking as I look out across the street at the Ocean. My mind goes back to New York and the last time I saw Tommy alive. Then a bit farther back than that, to when I first met him.
There’s something about Tommy that fights against his own gifts and talents: in a way it’s like this… thing, whatever it is, denies them completely. Oh sure, he has that magic intangible alright, that indefinable something that makes certain men out; but he also has the tragic flaw. It’s a kind of death wish and it has always been there, I guess. It’s in his eyes and in the muscles of his face, in his words, gestures, every nuance and each subtle movement. His success is his ruin. I remember going to the washroom and telling my reflection in the big mirror while I’m rinsing my hands: “It can’t ever become mine.”
As his writer my job should be easy; I could just let the scripts write themselves out of my perceptions of him, write his real character large, like they did with Hancock. He should be his own material. But he doesn’t want it that way. Pretty soon I start to hate him for it, for the fear of what his search for “a new kind of comedy” might do to me and my career.
Enmity: there’s just no reasoning about it. If tragedy is the comic in slow motion then comedy is adversity on Crystal-Meth. You can make comedy out of any human situation. Take any abomination: the holocaust, war, cancer. If you write out the solidity, the fear, the hate, if you distort the shadow you can make it funny. The public will laugh at the serious or the tragic if you invite them to; all you have to do is take away the fear.
But it’s in the hands of the writer, not the comedian. Tommy takes the comic too seriously, he becomes a freak, a grotesque.
Look, it’s like this: the public laughs at the contrast between the body and the shadow, at the difference between the character’s invented self and the actor’s psychological reality as it is perceived within the context of the character. When Tommy starts to play himself too closely, the comedy disappears.
Ruth is important. I file Tommy into a drawer labelled to be continued and try to get my mind back to the present, trying to figure it out: Nico the static boy speed-talking, words flailing out like chain-shot…
I sift through the pieces of conversation I can make immediate sense of, leaving aside the misty for future analysis. Eventually I get the kid reduced down to a chill-dude-wear-a-pork-pie-hat image, reflecting the street history of his cultural stereotype. In reality he is a closely shaven head with a hood, a black skull-face, a long black leather coat and a penchant for knives.
She’s at the centre of his life, that’s one sure thing. He calls her Aunt Ruth but he doesn’t know whose sister she is. He just goes there when he’s had too much of the cold air on his face, when he becomes too conscious of his own ricochet, when he doesn’t have a good enough reason not to go there.
The room she keeps empty just for him. He has his own key and she calls him Nicodemus and he doesn’t show that he minds answering to a cross-worshiper’s name. She’s always pleased to see him, any time, day or night, and she never asks questions she doesn’t know he’ll want to answer. She is sensitive to the secrets of youth, it’s her gift to him, a space in her life which is his, and there is nothing she expects in return but his company every now and then, a few words over sweet coffee or a glass of white rum, the gentle violence that warms her when his young breath commingles in her front room with her old treasures.
The night and the dogs always find them out. There are no secrets from them. Those caches they all try to keep hidden in the folds of their flesh or under the bed clothes, nestled snugly in with the unmentionable odours and the unpublished skin.
The kid tells me about the loose floorboard in Aunt Ruth’s secret room, beneath the sheepskin rug.
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