In slow, badly choreographed movements the journalist’s body tightens and convulses, propelling him further into the entry. He heaves from the pit of his stomach, where last night’s port and brandy sits like a diseased, heavy pregnancy, and gropes at the brick wall. At the corner of his mouth his tongue lolls foolishly between his teeth, a copper-soaked sponge swelling awfully against each dry retch. Finally, he doubles over, legs crooked and uncertain, and vomits. For several moments he remains like this, hollow and tingling with relief, his eyes fixed on the strange flow of crimson below.
Do you see, he thinks, guiltily, how the colours blend?
The asphalt glistens dimly and he retches once more, causing a single line of wiry yellow phlegm to unfurl from his bottom lip and freefall magically, like jaundiced silk, down to the ground. He closes his eyes, collapses into the wall and whispers: ‘This has to stop.’
Back on Old Compton Street it is raining – not politely, as it had been in the alleyway, but heavily, horizontally. People weave around him, buttoned up, scarred with scarves and umbrellas and hurried expressions. The journalist weaves too. His feet fall in exaggerated strides to combat the bizarre weightlessness of his hangover. There is rarely a Morning After (or, more accurately nowadays, an Entire Day After) in which this feeling – as if he is watching the world on a television screen – does not take hold. It is like spiralling or spinning away: the pleasant numbness of intoxication turned on its head and distorted; the understudy to drunkenness, whose effects are infinitely more dizzying than her predecessor’s.
But already he knows this will not end today. There is only one way to soothe his current ills and that is drinking. A vicious, hideous cycle (he knows this too) but as he imagines only heroin withdrawal to be slightly more agonising than this, a nonetheless appealing prospect.
On days such as these he reflects upon his constitution with audible distaste. He is both enthralled and angered by alcohol’s empty promises; by the way it cripples and throttles his motivation. Today (there is no doubt about it now) is Re-Remembrance Day. In minor stages he will bring to mind everything he has ever thrown away. So nobody dares to wear poppies for people like him, and so they never stand with silent dignity (and collection buckets) outside banks and supermarkets, but there are people who sympathise with his cause. Their dirty fingernails, deathly coughs and tight skin punctuate London like spectres, each hoping for loose change and strangers to recognise their plight.
This last thought causes him to slow down and root inside his pockets for money. He finds nothing and picks up pace again. He knows where this kind of behaviour will take him. He has watched it happen in other people’s lives: the meaningless decline, the self-medicated implosion of men and women (but mostly men) as they stagger from modest and degrading jobs, to unemployment benefits, to public houses, to bookies, and back round again – this time without occupation. He sees them in pubs in Finsbury Park, and Ladbroke Grove, and Bethnal Green, nameless to all but their own, their harrowed skin stretched tight and drawn yellow by alcohol. And, yes, he keeps time with this crowd but he does not belong to them. Still, he feels it is neither snobbish nor delusional for him to think this way. Rooted, as he is, in this class, he both understands and empathises with its predicament. Hopeless and lacking opportunity, the weathered men crawl from boozer to boozer, effortlessly aligning themselves with one another as their complexions grow ever more pallid, their souls ever greyer.
And who can blame them? Born out of (and into) misery, bad luck and an inherited sense of failure, they have been worn down and beaten up since the day they arrived – unplanned, unexpected and unwanted. The journalist had witnessed it most obviously during his adolescence when the barroom of the Golden Cross had been occupied each night by his father’s cronies, and the entire place had filled up with cigarette smoke until it resembled an enormous concrete lung collapsing inwards.
He wonders now, as the early morning commuters bob and weave by sex shops and bars, hooded and faceless beneath their umbrellas, how many of Soho’s beautiful people are descended from the same stock he sprung from: that sub-class – no, that de-classed mob of non-workers which exists in council estates and tower blocks beyond the Westway. Away from the pink pound and the post-production houses (but not too far) there survives, stronger than ever, the filthy pennies and public houses of his upbringing. He goes back sometimes – against his will and better judgement he returns to the places that shaped him.
It is a bizarre existence he has sought out for himself. Beyond the newspaper’s King’s Cross offices – that glass and stone structure populated by an elite faction of the rational Left - there is little that distinguishes the journalist’s actions from those of his barroom piers. What he earns, he spends. His modest wealth is merely distributed, and re-distributed, in establishments strikingly similar to those his father had once frequented. Still, he often ponders the consequences of his consumption. At university, when the strength of his words had equalled and, he felt, justified, his intake, an entire universe of promise had lay ahead of him. During those hopeful term-time evenings, he was able to stifle the onset of alcoholic paranoia simply by convincing himself that what he wrote was ‘destined’ to be published. It had been enjoyable then too, the intense nights in front of a typewriter regulated by bouts of playing guitar and listening to Tom Waits. He cannot remember the last time he picked up a guitar. He cannot remember the last time he enjoyed writing anything. Neither, he realises now, can he bring to mind a recent occasion in which his drinking has been anything more than a formulaic, half-successful mechanism for dealing with a pre-existing hangover.
‘Feeling rough?’ Someone might ask him. ‘You’re just as well cracking on. That which kills you cures you.’ The collective reaction to self-inflicted ill health rarely changes, whether it be from colleagues at a broadsheet drinks meeting, or seasoned regulars at a lock-in. All very well so far as one never considers the inverted form of this helpless advice, which assures its dedicated followers that eventually even the cure will kill you.
The journalist slows and takes shelter beneath the canopy of a coffee and bagel shop. A mixture of sickly breakfast scents, entwined as they are in the morning air, pollutes the space around him and he is surprised to find his stomach does not flutter at their arrival. Perhaps vomiting, a sad and desperate act which as a younger man he found almost impossible, has set him on the slow road to recovery. With this minor grace in mind, he stares out across the street. Over the road, holed up outside yet another coffee shop (because Soho, in its infinite bohemia, is constructed almost entirely of coffee shops) a professional looking middle-aged man is talking on a hands-free mobile phone. He is smiling, and talking with great animation, and the journalist cannot help but smile too. Not because this is a peculiar sight, or even because he admires such energy, but because the only thing which tells the Casual Observer that this stranger is not trapped in the first stages of madness, is the small expensive device he is holding proudly in front of him. The world, he figures, has changed dramatically – and with such technological wonders still to come! In sixty years, when he will have almost certainly slipped from the mortal coil, what then will seem commonplace on Old Compton Street? What once unimaginable behaviours will have been adopted by the wealthy and longed for by the poor?
He turns his attention away from the man and considers buying a bottle of carbonated water - the latest in a series of hungover indulgences. The prospect of heightened dizziness, and withdrawing money, and standing in a queue, and pretending to be well, puts him off and he continues walking.
At the end of the street, outside the Palace Theatre, he pauses again. His face feels flushed and hot, his stomach empty. He turns clumsily into the wall and takes a hostile glance at himself in the glass frame of a Mamma Mia poster. For a moment he stares dumbly, terrified by the unfamiliarity of his own skin. Its default complexion, even in this tainted light, has faded.
The journalist looks back upon the street. God bless Soho, he thinks. God bless it for being here now, with its labyrinth roads and landscapes within landscapes. At home, there is writing to be done and, later, much later, when the world is a little steadier on its feet, he will return to the laptop with a concentrated ease to finish an article for tomorrow’s press, comforted by the insurance of its definite publication. He retraces his steps now, heartened by the proximity of his immediate destination. First, onto Wardour Street, then to Brewer Street, and finally to Beak Street, where there is a pub that will be open already. This evening, if it ever comes, is best left for this evening. He does not feel guilty. It is, after all, Re-Remembrance Day.
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
The Funeral
(for PW)
Outside the crematorium, at midday, the boy stands with his delicate shoulders hunched against the cold and watches the mourners arrive. They come slowly at first, and then in droves, until he is entirely unsure as to how many people might soon be huddled in front of the chapel doors, waiting nervously to go inside.
Until now he had been okay. He’d organised the wreaths, the cars, the short notice contract with the vicar. He had stood squarely, stalwartly, beside his best friend’s mother when she directed dark, tired eyes down to where her boy – whose cheeks had suffered an overdose of synthetic colour – lay stretched out in an open casket.
As the rain starts to fall, it begins: a creeping, unsettled nausea in the pit of his stomach, accompanied by a suffocating tightness across the chest. It comes on quickly and without permission – a circling, inescapable, writhing sickness.
The boy, unable to call upon the full experience of his twenty-four years, claws desperately to regain focus. Somewhere deep within there exists a powerful truth certain to save him. It swims like nervousness in his veins, ready and willing to assure the conscious mind that everything is alright (that this is all in your head) but like the answer to a tricky crossword clue it stays hidden.
The wind picks up and in its biting embrace he is able to steady himself for a moment. He stares out at the car park to where a small group of people have gathered. He recognises one or two of the faces - many of which belong to alumni of Manchester Metropolitan University - and quickly realises that the girl closest to him, a professional looking individual wearing a dark smile, is the girl he had lost his virginity to.
Her name is Arienette, and seeing her again produces in him a sensation similar to fever. They have not been in the same place for more than three years. The boy did not expect, after speaking with her on the telephone two days after Alex had died, to feel so strangely affected when she arrived.
He watches her, a vision of lost familiarity, as she raises a small black umbrella against the rain and politely offers it out over the others. She is attractive in a dark green dress and black shoes. Only her hair colour has changed. What was once naturally brown is now a deep red, worn stylishly an inch or so below the shoulders. A sudden tremulous desire stirs at the sight of flesh he had once known so well. He recalls the tiny hall of residence flat they had shared, its filthy frame set in concrete, stacked high above several others just like it. Apparitions of burnt out tee-lights watered down to nothing and transformed into make-shift ashtrays flood his memory.
Nostalgically, he recreates the room in his mind: Arienette’s discarded underwear at the foot of the bed; pillow cases stained black with make-up; scores of unwashed wine glasses and empty cigarette packets scattered across the floor, the writing desk, the nightstand.
It was there they had shaken the hips of their relationship and fumbled excitedly to make contact during the early hours of the morning, when it was still dark outside and the world seemed hours away. Such recollections are soothing, and the frightened trembling spreading upwards in his legs eases a little. He digs his heels into the ground to stop the world from spiralling away.
Six years on, he thinks, and this is where two former lovers are to meet again. Here, amongst well-tended and long-forgotten gravestones; between the gentle, ritualistic handshakes and tearstained commiserations of Alex’s dearly beloved.
He wonders if she has brought with her a boyfriend, or perhaps even a fiancée. They are, after all, almost twenty five, and despite the boy’s own distaste for ceremony there seems to be something paralysing about hurtling towards a quarter century of existence that unveils an unexpected conformity in people. The University Classes, for the most part, make no exception.
To the less than casual observer she appears to be strictly in the company of old friends. Beside her is Connor, a philosophy graduate both he and Alex had disliked at first, and grown close to only after a series of booze and narcotic fuelled evenings. Most of these had started as intelligent argument over film, music and literature, and ended in debilitating morning light comedowns several hours later, when Billy Bragg sang them to sleep from the record player.
Watching the foursome in this way – safe in the knowledge they cannot see him – inspires a strange contentment in the boy. Funerals, he figures, have an awful knack for bringing people together again; for formulating in one place, ever so briefly, a unique lineage of personalities specific to the one person no longer around to witness it.
To his right, people stir. A sea of black ties, pallid faces and uncertain expressions stand rigorously to attention, their bodies stiff and respectful, as the funeral cars appear in the distance and climb solemnly up the gravel hill. Arienette, Connor, David and Paul – all of whom are huddled closely beneath the umbrella – take this as their cue and start towards the chapel. Thin black smoke spirals from the chimney and dissolves into nothingness a few metres above the roof.
It had been the boy’s intention to slip away for just a few minutes, to momentarily escape the clammy palms and grieving eyes of others. He realises upon examining his watch, however, that time – rather contradictorily – has gotten away from him. He rushes through the car park, anxious and angry at the same time, cursing himself aloud for not being more organised. He had declined an offer to be seated in the second car as it accompanied the hearse to its final destination. Instead, he’d arrived early at the crematorium to speak with vicar, ensure the music was in order, and to set up a modest collection of photographs at the chapel’s entrance.
Each A5 black and white print, ghastly and beautiful at the same time, would serve well, he thought, as an individual puzzle piece in a larger scale eulogy.
‘Arienette!’ He calls, when he is close enough not to draw attention from anyone except his four former acquaintances. The girl turns on her heels and, upon recognition of the stranger’s voice, moves swiftly back across the cobbles.
‘Jack,’ she whispers, drawing the boy into her arms. They embrace, and when they pull apart he notices that Connor, David and Paul have hung back a little. It is a needless show of circumstantial respect but he finds himself grateful for it nonetheless. ‘I still can’t believe it.’
The boy wonders how many times he has heard these words spill out of people’s mouths this week, then imagines the countless number of other human beings in the world falling victim to similar statements at this moment, the tongues of the speakers swelling and slurring as they search for originality but fail to find it.
‘I know,’ he replies, and then: ‘He always was a selfish bastard. Now he’s really gone and put the boot in.’ Arienette laughs politely. ‘We should make our way over. The cars are about to arrive.’
He edges forward with a vigorous trembling in his limbs. He longs to be anywhere else, to be alone again, but there is nowhere to go and no place that will return him to normality. Connor, a man of relative confidence, is the first of the three men to step forward. He grasps the boy’s palm with one hand and places the other sympathetically on his back.
‘There are no words,’ he says, tenderly, and after similar exchanges with David and Paul, they press on together. To behold the congregation is to set one’s sights on an eclectic mix of tribute payers: the eldest members of the crowd regal in black dress; and the younger factions – at the request of the family – dressed in clothes more suited to a Saturday night out.
They come to a stop at the back of a loosely formed line. Those who have perhaps already tuned in to the low rumble of motor engines are quiet and still. Others continue speaking in hushed whispers, for the most part grave, punctuated occasionally by a stifled laugh or expression of humour.
The boy had been drinking the day Alex died. He remembers this as the procession – like a prophet of doom – arrives at the chapel doors.
‘He’d have fucking loved this,’ Connor whispers, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a regretful smile at the corners of his mouth. ‘Everyone lined up and waiting for him.’
The boy wants to laugh - for everyone to laugh in unison and break this miserable spell - but the blood is beginning to feel hot inside him, and his heartbeat feels irregular.
Not now, he begs himself. Not here.
A bitter, resentful weight of dignified expectation sits heavily on his chest. There is nothing he can do to stop the increasingly shallow breaths, the dizziness, the swelling throat. Panic climbs like nausea in his belly, and the more he struggles against it the worse it becomes. Connor, and behind him, Arienette, are oblivious to his slow silent horror. He knows he ought to be waiting by the car, ready to receive the coffin with an adult’s strength and grace, and this, he decides, is his salvation. He moves rapidly through the people, offering apologies to those he disrupts. The world is hazy and grey when he reaches the vehicle but he knows innately that he has made it, and as Alex’s mother steps out of the car, her eyes stained red with tears, the boy’s vision clears and – as if by intervention – equilibrium is restored.
* * * *
At the wake, the boy finds a dry spot beneath the smoking shelter and lights a cigarette, inhaling for the first time that day a guilty lungful of smoke. Alex’s mother, Maria, an unquestioning lifelong smoker who sees no link between the cancers advertised on the front of her cigarette packet and the disease that killed her son, settles beside him, a tormented agony stretched across her face.
‘A beautiful service,’ people had told her as they emerged, two by two, from the busy chapel, taking her hands in theirs in consolation. How composed she had been, how venerable, accepting each kind word with delicate appreciation. It had struck him then that William Blake was right; that with age comes experience. Maria understands what is expected of her today and, worse, the role she must play, because she had played it twelve years previously when her husband – Alex’s father – had suffered a crippling heart attack and faded painfully away in front of her.
The boy’s preoccupation with this injustice causes him not to see the man – whose face, twelve hours later, will pass feverishly before his eyes – walk straight past him and into the pub. If he had noticed him, he might have felt at once threatened by the stranger’s bulky frame, the army green of his trench coat, and the inconspicuous swastika pin fastened neatly to his collar. The boy and Alex had adopted The Crimson Moon pub as their local in 2002, and inherited with it a series of relationships founded on alcohol consumption. Still, it was not entirely out of the ordinary – during those hours when doormen were not employed – to stumble across the occasional thug. Most of them had been barred from various neighbouring establishments thanks to closing time punch-ups, or for none-too-crafty cigarettes in toilet cubicles when the rain outside was too heavy to brave .
It might also have inspired a curiosity in the boy, then, to witness the unbalanced wavering of the stranger’s walk, his precisely shaven head, and the aggressive manner in which he demanded – over the course of half an hour – four deep tumblers of whiskey.
But as he stands in silent contemplation, biting agitatedly at his lip, he is oblivious to all but his memory. He is certain now that something is horribly wrong with his health. On the day he received the phone call it had risen in him like rage, taking hold in the gut and surging up through his body in hateful fits of paranoia.
He’s gone, the voice on the end of the line had proclaimed, and in grief her sobs had sounded more like laughter.
It has been a part of the boy since adolescence: the treacherous abandonment of reason and balance, the inability to function. For years it had lain dormant, a woeful disease awaiting liberty, but of late it has realised its true potential.
Panic.
He despises its influence - the way it arrives in the night, like a Wodehousian aunt, to drag him from slumber and spit his jolting, trembling body into a world of lucid terror; a world in which he is painfully aware of his own mortality and convinced that death is imminent. In the daylight he carries the imprint of the attacks with reproachful fear of their reoccurrence, existing as if permanently hung-over but without the promise of recovery.
‘Can I get you a drink, Maria?’ He asks, realising she too has been staring longingly into space.
‘Gin and Tonic, please, Jack,’ she answers, forcing a smile which he feels, in time, will kill her. The emphasis on one another’s names amuses him. They have been doing this quite unashamedly these last few days, as if to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence.
At the bar, the boy passes the skinhead, who is stood defiantly next to the fruit machine, so as to be served by Carl, the manager.
‘On the house this time,’ he says, greeting Jack with a sympathetic, courteous smile.
‘What can I get you?’
‘Pint of Guinness and a G and T, if you would.’
How many patrons Carl, in his thirteen year management of this pub alone, had seen or heard of passing away was anyone’s guess. Like Maria, he had long ago completed his on-the-job training in how to deal with death, proven now by his tone of voice.
‘You know, we’ll miss the cocky little prick around this place,’ he says, scooping ice from a bucket into a tall spirit glass.
‘I know, I know. It seems like forever since he last came in.’
‘Bastard thing came on quickly though, eh? I mean, Jesus… he didn’t make it three months.’
Carl, with the prowess of a good bartender, conducts this entire conversation whilst simultaneously pouring the Guinness, readying the gin and loading pint glasses into the dishwasher. When he is finished he sets the drinks on the bar and deals two good measures of whiskey.
‘To the Student,’ he says, and they drink.
‘I’ll take one of those, mate’ the heavy set stranger shouts from across the room, in a thick, barely distinguishable accent born somewhere west of the Wirral.
‘Sorry, my friend, private stash, but we’ve plenty of others up there,’ Carl replies.
‘The same again then, friend,’ he retorts, tipping his glass aggressively. Then, turning to resume his position by the slot machine, he stumbles drunkenly into Jas, the Mechanic - a regular. The remainder of the man’s current drink splashes out of the glass onto his coat.
‘Fuckin’ hell, mate,’ he explodes. ‘Do you not watch where you’re going?’
The sudden loudness is excruciating. Jas, taken aback, is silent.
‘Can you hear me, you Paki bastard?’
The air, if such a thing is possible, is sucked from the room. That word. That fucking word.
‘What did you say to me?’ The Mechanic, by no means a timid man himself, demands.
‘I think you heard me, la’,’ replies the stranger, swaggering in front of him, too close for comfort, the empty spirit glass clasped between his fingers. ‘This isn’t Bombay now, and in England when you spill someone’s drink you offer to buy them another.’
‘Right, you’re out!’ Carl shouts, already half way around the bar. The boy wants to run, and, indeed, would run if it were not for having to pass this brute, this intruder, this breach of the peace. He does not know the man, but he recognises in him a familiar public house confidence - a jerky, overbearing self-assurance owing partly to the military but also to excessive cocaine use – that paints him as unpredictable and dangerous.
By the time Carl reaches them, the skinhead has dropped the empty glass and smashed a beer bottle. Brandishing it proudly, he grabs Jas by the collar of his polo shirt and draws him forcefully into his chest until the bottle is pressed against the Mechanic’s throat.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ Carl exclaims, coming to a dramatic stop, both hands held up in universal surrender. ‘Take it easy.’
‘Get back or I’ll cut him, I swear to God.’
The boy, drinks still in hand, looks desperately around the barroom. Surely somebody somewhere was equipped to deal with this. But it is Tuesday afternoon, it’s raining, and apart from an elderly couple at the back of the restaurant there is no one. The Mechanic chokes under the man’s arm, his strangled flesh bulging around the tip of the glass.
‘Do you know what this means?’ The skinhead bellows, groping at the pin badge, which is now clearly identifiable as the dark symbol of Nazi tyranny. ‘It means NOT FUCKING WELCOME!’
‘You’ve nothing to gain from hurting him,’ Carl explains, his voice firm. ‘So let him go and get out.’
‘Do you know who the fuck I am?’ The stranger barks. An angry blue vein has appeared above his temple, and it throbs now with cartoon-like vigour. His eyes seem to burst out of their sockets. Sweat glistens on his forehead. ‘I said, do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve never seen you before in my life, son, and if you leave now I’ll never have to again.’
This makes things worse. The skinhead, who had taken up arms so quickly, resumes shouting in the manner of an uneducated, overzealous politician, addressing everyone at once, his teeth bared in a furious grimace.
‘This country has been flooded with these, these terrorists for too long, and its people like you’ – he leers at Carl – ‘that let it happen. Suicide bombers, fuckin’ jihad... For what? A god that doesn’t exist? And people wonder why Britain’s going to the dogs. Even public transport isn’t safe anymore. Multiculturalism…’ He pauses, spits angrily on the floor. ‘Well, thanks but no fuckin’ thanks. From now on its England for the English, and anyone who doesn’t like it can get in line, because there’s a thousand bottles just like this one and a thousand people waiting to use them.’
If there had been any hope of talking the stranger into reason it disappears in the seconds following this last outbreak. An intense desire blazes in the whites of his eyes. His fingers tremble viciously on the bottle so that a series of indentations are produced on the Mechanic’s throat. Lost in the powerful paranoia of his own propaganda, the skinhead crumbles irreversibly into hysteria.
‘Decent white British families passed over time and again while the government hands out houses to anyone who gets off the boat. The dole queues are getting longer everyday as jobs fall into the hands of Polish immigrants. Unless the borders are closed, it’s only a matter of time before blood is spilt.’
His face is flushed and hot, and the force with which he projects his hate-fuelled soliloquy causes saliva to spray from his mouth with every plosive.
Then there is cause for optimism. As venom pours from the man’s tongue, Carl lashes out, catching him squarely on the chin with a perfect right fist. The man stumbles backwards, letting loose the broken bottle, and raises a dumbstruck hand to his jaw. The Mechanic, suddenly free of his captor, spins 180 degrees, throws an equally impressive punch – which lands just below his right eye – and the stranger goes down. Both men descend, but it is Jas who delivers the final debilitating kick to the man’s ribs. Drawing on his full weight, the Mechanic drops to his knees, forcing them hard into the stranger’s chest so as to deprive him of air and escape.
The boy looks on in hope and horror. With Carl and Jas standing over him the skinhead is suddenly pathetic. His only advantage had been at the sharp edge of the bottle, but now, unarmed and immobile, he is lost.
‘Jack,’ Carl says, without lifting his eyes, and at the sound of his name the boy feels strikingly as though he is coming up from under water. ‘Call the police. The phone’s behind the bar.’
* * * *
At midnight, Connor, David, Paul, Arienette and the boy stagger through the front door of the flat Jack and Alex had shared since University, their moods blissfully lightened by alcohol. By one o clock three more bottles of wine are gone but there remains amongst the five a certain cordial sobriety. To drink so much on any other day of the year would seem foolish and near impossible: today it is a necessary catalyst for coping.
In the spirit of remembrance they gather in the living room, play old punk records, roll cigarettes, share anecdotes, refill each other’s glasses, and hint at a comforting, almost childish spirituality so long ago abandoned in all of them.
‘I tell you what,’ Connor announces, abruptly. ‘If Alex is up there,’ – he gestures apprehensively at the ceiling – ‘they’ve gained a pretty decent size cock!’
The room loses itself in laugher. The boy is awestruck by the way in which the conversation oscillates so wildly. For a while they talk about nothing in particular – the standard subjects of reunited graduates – and then, every twenty minutes or so, the attention returns to the cancer, the funeral, or to recollections of days spent with Alex.
‘How do you know how big it was? David asks.
‘I had a sneaky look when we were in the pub toilets one night,’ Connor admits.
‘No shame in that’, the boy adds. ‘And it wasn’t as if Alex wasn’t proud of it...’
‘So, how was it?’ Arienette wonders, genuinely interested.
‘On a scale of one to ten? Seven.’
Laughter recaptures the room, and the subject matter changes again.
At a quarter to three, David sprawls out on the settee and is asleep in less than a minute, prompting Connor and Paul to top and tail in the spare room. Alex’s room – which has remained untouched since the illness forced him into a hospital bed, partly out of respect and partly in the unprecedented hope of his recovery – stays empty. In the dim light of the lounge, the remaining girl and boy conclude that it would seem intrusive to open up their friend’s former sanctuary as a guestroom. It strikes Jack that there are some tough times ahead, and he knows instantly that when the tenancy comes up he will leave this place and never return. It is a startling notion to consider: he can never go home again.
‘Come, sleep with me,’ Arienette says, leading him upstairs into his own bedroom. There, she stops and says: ‘We don’t have to. I mean, I understand if you can’t.’
But an inevitable desire lights up in him, strengthened by the wine, and by the nostalgic sensation of his body next to hers. They kiss, softly and sweetly at first, and then with a mutual passionate grief that passes darkly from one set of lips to the other. On the bed it is easy: they fall into one another, opening wide the gates of their anguish, ridding their physical selves of anxiety, and the boy admits himself to that Freudian essential self. He moves perversely to the rhythm of his sex, glimpsing in the collision of their bodies an unfamiliar confidence that assures him – for the first time since Alex’s death – that everything is in its right place.
* * * *
The boy wakes suddenly and bolts upright in bed, breathless, his heart racing. A tight pain strangles the muscles in his left arm.
( - heart attack heart attack heart attack heart attack - )
The skinhead’s face, bloated and bruised, taunts him from the dark corners of the bedroom. It is vivid, violent and cold, staring at him without expression, its pallid features hardly human; then, replacing it, the extinct motionless gaze of his best friend. A terrible decomposition has corrupted the eyes; the bridge of the nose is sunken and black. The boy claws at his own face, running trembling fingers through his hair, scratching savagely with sharp teeth at the surface of his tongue, in the fear he might swallow it.
Arienette is still asleep. A part of him wants to wake her - if only to share these deathly visions with someone - but he knows that to drag her from sleep is to burden her further. Instead, he presses his eyes shut and concentrates on breathing calmly.
It takes several minutes to steady the shallow tremors in his chest, and he struggles not to lose himself entirely in the hypochondria of his diseased mind. Eventually he eases his legs out of bed, feels the reassuring cold of the wooden floor beneath his feet. Mindful not to disturb the girl, he slips out from under the covers and moves to the window. The blinds are already drawn up, and it is raining in the dark. Dawn is still two or three hours away.
He pulls on a pair of jeans, and with intense fixation forces his trembling fingers to recover a near empty packet of tobacco from the pockets. It is not a good idea to smoke but he needs something to focus on, something mechanical and precise. Above all things he must not succumb to a full on panic attack. In realising this he begins tapping his right foot in irregular rhythms, another relentless action to occupy the limbs.
With the rolling papers between his fingers his thoughts return to the skinhead from the pub. Cautious not to let his mind reproduce the frightful apparition that stole him from slumber, the boy settles on recalling the manner in which the man had exploded into his life. This trenchcoat thug, this rough beast, had not slouched but roared to life before him, spitting poison from its
wretched lips.
With each second that elapses an inescapable distance is placed between the event itself and the boy’s memory of it, but he feels certain he will not forget the disgraceful nature of its consequences. He is angry, tired and sick of narrow-minded swine sent to fuck with his existence, to infect and to interfere with his life. A radical Leftism shocks his body, swelling wildly in the part of the torso in which he imagines the human soul to dwell.
He raises a hand that shakes with fear and rebellion, lights a cigarette, and nudges the window ajar to listen to the rain. Upstairs lights from two late dwelling houses fall across the back yard, illuminating a multitude of discarded roll-ups on the concrete below. The boy stares blankly into the gloom.
It is not just the skinhead that bothers him. There is something more; something that digs, and burdens, and weighs heavy on his heart. He knows this because it has surfaced several times in the hours since the stranger snapped out his muscular arms and put a broken bottle to Jas’s throat. The dusty bedroom air seems to move around him. His vision grows hazy. He draws deeply from the cigarette and –
That’s when he understands. It isn’t the beer bottle, or the racism, or even the skinhead himself that his mind won’t let alone: it’s the fact that he, the boy, had done nothing to stop what was happening. He had stood dead still as the face of the Mechanic gorged from behind the glass, afraid to make even the slightest gesture lest the stranger turn his wrath in his direction.
He closes his eyes and feels the wind touch lightly on his skin. Every sacred value, every treasured principle, abandoned in an instant. Tonight his politics are damaged, defeated, because he failed to make a stand. And Alex: how he hates his old friend now for deserting him, for no longer being there, just down the hall, sitting reading in the dim light of his bedroom. How he despises the cancer that tore through his able body, stealing first his balance then his senses.
Tears swell in the sockets of the boy’s eyes, too big and too premature to escape. He has been cheated out of friendship, out of kinship, out of time, and all that appears to remain is his own downward struggle to the grave.
Above the dull drumbeat of raindrops on the gutter comes the soft inhale/exhale of Arienette’s breath. She is turned on her side, distant, unattainable. He is a stranger in his own bedroom. In agony, he picks out Bob Dylan from the CD rack, searches up and down the track-list, settles on a song and queues it up.
I ain’t saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
The boy throws the last of the cigarette out of the window and watches the embers burn before collapsing into the corner of the room, where, anticipating dawn and awaiting freedom, he shivers violently until the first of the day’s light appears from behind the rainclouds.
Outside the crematorium, at midday, the boy stands with his delicate shoulders hunched against the cold and watches the mourners arrive. They come slowly at first, and then in droves, until he is entirely unsure as to how many people might soon be huddled in front of the chapel doors, waiting nervously to go inside.
Until now he had been okay. He’d organised the wreaths, the cars, the short notice contract with the vicar. He had stood squarely, stalwartly, beside his best friend’s mother when she directed dark, tired eyes down to where her boy – whose cheeks had suffered an overdose of synthetic colour – lay stretched out in an open casket.
As the rain starts to fall, it begins: a creeping, unsettled nausea in the pit of his stomach, accompanied by a suffocating tightness across the chest. It comes on quickly and without permission – a circling, inescapable, writhing sickness.
The boy, unable to call upon the full experience of his twenty-four years, claws desperately to regain focus. Somewhere deep within there exists a powerful truth certain to save him. It swims like nervousness in his veins, ready and willing to assure the conscious mind that everything is alright (that this is all in your head) but like the answer to a tricky crossword clue it stays hidden.
The wind picks up and in its biting embrace he is able to steady himself for a moment. He stares out at the car park to where a small group of people have gathered. He recognises one or two of the faces - many of which belong to alumni of Manchester Metropolitan University - and quickly realises that the girl closest to him, a professional looking individual wearing a dark smile, is the girl he had lost his virginity to.
Her name is Arienette, and seeing her again produces in him a sensation similar to fever. They have not been in the same place for more than three years. The boy did not expect, after speaking with her on the telephone two days after Alex had died, to feel so strangely affected when she arrived.
He watches her, a vision of lost familiarity, as she raises a small black umbrella against the rain and politely offers it out over the others. She is attractive in a dark green dress and black shoes. Only her hair colour has changed. What was once naturally brown is now a deep red, worn stylishly an inch or so below the shoulders. A sudden tremulous desire stirs at the sight of flesh he had once known so well. He recalls the tiny hall of residence flat they had shared, its filthy frame set in concrete, stacked high above several others just like it. Apparitions of burnt out tee-lights watered down to nothing and transformed into make-shift ashtrays flood his memory.
Nostalgically, he recreates the room in his mind: Arienette’s discarded underwear at the foot of the bed; pillow cases stained black with make-up; scores of unwashed wine glasses and empty cigarette packets scattered across the floor, the writing desk, the nightstand.
It was there they had shaken the hips of their relationship and fumbled excitedly to make contact during the early hours of the morning, when it was still dark outside and the world seemed hours away. Such recollections are soothing, and the frightened trembling spreading upwards in his legs eases a little. He digs his heels into the ground to stop the world from spiralling away.
Six years on, he thinks, and this is where two former lovers are to meet again. Here, amongst well-tended and long-forgotten gravestones; between the gentle, ritualistic handshakes and tearstained commiserations of Alex’s dearly beloved.
He wonders if she has brought with her a boyfriend, or perhaps even a fiancée. They are, after all, almost twenty five, and despite the boy’s own distaste for ceremony there seems to be something paralysing about hurtling towards a quarter century of existence that unveils an unexpected conformity in people. The University Classes, for the most part, make no exception.
To the less than casual observer she appears to be strictly in the company of old friends. Beside her is Connor, a philosophy graduate both he and Alex had disliked at first, and grown close to only after a series of booze and narcotic fuelled evenings. Most of these had started as intelligent argument over film, music and literature, and ended in debilitating morning light comedowns several hours later, when Billy Bragg sang them to sleep from the record player.
Watching the foursome in this way – safe in the knowledge they cannot see him – inspires a strange contentment in the boy. Funerals, he figures, have an awful knack for bringing people together again; for formulating in one place, ever so briefly, a unique lineage of personalities specific to the one person no longer around to witness it.
To his right, people stir. A sea of black ties, pallid faces and uncertain expressions stand rigorously to attention, their bodies stiff and respectful, as the funeral cars appear in the distance and climb solemnly up the gravel hill. Arienette, Connor, David and Paul – all of whom are huddled closely beneath the umbrella – take this as their cue and start towards the chapel. Thin black smoke spirals from the chimney and dissolves into nothingness a few metres above the roof.
It had been the boy’s intention to slip away for just a few minutes, to momentarily escape the clammy palms and grieving eyes of others. He realises upon examining his watch, however, that time – rather contradictorily – has gotten away from him. He rushes through the car park, anxious and angry at the same time, cursing himself aloud for not being more organised. He had declined an offer to be seated in the second car as it accompanied the hearse to its final destination. Instead, he’d arrived early at the crematorium to speak with vicar, ensure the music was in order, and to set up a modest collection of photographs at the chapel’s entrance.
Each A5 black and white print, ghastly and beautiful at the same time, would serve well, he thought, as an individual puzzle piece in a larger scale eulogy.
‘Arienette!’ He calls, when he is close enough not to draw attention from anyone except his four former acquaintances. The girl turns on her heels and, upon recognition of the stranger’s voice, moves swiftly back across the cobbles.
‘Jack,’ she whispers, drawing the boy into her arms. They embrace, and when they pull apart he notices that Connor, David and Paul have hung back a little. It is a needless show of circumstantial respect but he finds himself grateful for it nonetheless. ‘I still can’t believe it.’
The boy wonders how many times he has heard these words spill out of people’s mouths this week, then imagines the countless number of other human beings in the world falling victim to similar statements at this moment, the tongues of the speakers swelling and slurring as they search for originality but fail to find it.
‘I know,’ he replies, and then: ‘He always was a selfish bastard. Now he’s really gone and put the boot in.’ Arienette laughs politely. ‘We should make our way over. The cars are about to arrive.’
He edges forward with a vigorous trembling in his limbs. He longs to be anywhere else, to be alone again, but there is nowhere to go and no place that will return him to normality. Connor, a man of relative confidence, is the first of the three men to step forward. He grasps the boy’s palm with one hand and places the other sympathetically on his back.
‘There are no words,’ he says, tenderly, and after similar exchanges with David and Paul, they press on together. To behold the congregation is to set one’s sights on an eclectic mix of tribute payers: the eldest members of the crowd regal in black dress; and the younger factions – at the request of the family – dressed in clothes more suited to a Saturday night out.
They come to a stop at the back of a loosely formed line. Those who have perhaps already tuned in to the low rumble of motor engines are quiet and still. Others continue speaking in hushed whispers, for the most part grave, punctuated occasionally by a stifled laugh or expression of humour.
The boy had been drinking the day Alex died. He remembers this as the procession – like a prophet of doom – arrives at the chapel doors.
‘He’d have fucking loved this,’ Connor whispers, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a regretful smile at the corners of his mouth. ‘Everyone lined up and waiting for him.’
The boy wants to laugh - for everyone to laugh in unison and break this miserable spell - but the blood is beginning to feel hot inside him, and his heartbeat feels irregular.
Not now, he begs himself. Not here.
A bitter, resentful weight of dignified expectation sits heavily on his chest. There is nothing he can do to stop the increasingly shallow breaths, the dizziness, the swelling throat. Panic climbs like nausea in his belly, and the more he struggles against it the worse it becomes. Connor, and behind him, Arienette, are oblivious to his slow silent horror. He knows he ought to be waiting by the car, ready to receive the coffin with an adult’s strength and grace, and this, he decides, is his salvation. He moves rapidly through the people, offering apologies to those he disrupts. The world is hazy and grey when he reaches the vehicle but he knows innately that he has made it, and as Alex’s mother steps out of the car, her eyes stained red with tears, the boy’s vision clears and – as if by intervention – equilibrium is restored.
* * * *
At the wake, the boy finds a dry spot beneath the smoking shelter and lights a cigarette, inhaling for the first time that day a guilty lungful of smoke. Alex’s mother, Maria, an unquestioning lifelong smoker who sees no link between the cancers advertised on the front of her cigarette packet and the disease that killed her son, settles beside him, a tormented agony stretched across her face.
‘A beautiful service,’ people had told her as they emerged, two by two, from the busy chapel, taking her hands in theirs in consolation. How composed she had been, how venerable, accepting each kind word with delicate appreciation. It had struck him then that William Blake was right; that with age comes experience. Maria understands what is expected of her today and, worse, the role she must play, because she had played it twelve years previously when her husband – Alex’s father – had suffered a crippling heart attack and faded painfully away in front of her.
The boy’s preoccupation with this injustice causes him not to see the man – whose face, twelve hours later, will pass feverishly before his eyes – walk straight past him and into the pub. If he had noticed him, he might have felt at once threatened by the stranger’s bulky frame, the army green of his trench coat, and the inconspicuous swastika pin fastened neatly to his collar. The boy and Alex had adopted The Crimson Moon pub as their local in 2002, and inherited with it a series of relationships founded on alcohol consumption. Still, it was not entirely out of the ordinary – during those hours when doormen were not employed – to stumble across the occasional thug. Most of them had been barred from various neighbouring establishments thanks to closing time punch-ups, or for none-too-crafty cigarettes in toilet cubicles when the rain outside was too heavy to brave .
It might also have inspired a curiosity in the boy, then, to witness the unbalanced wavering of the stranger’s walk, his precisely shaven head, and the aggressive manner in which he demanded – over the course of half an hour – four deep tumblers of whiskey.
But as he stands in silent contemplation, biting agitatedly at his lip, he is oblivious to all but his memory. He is certain now that something is horribly wrong with his health. On the day he received the phone call it had risen in him like rage, taking hold in the gut and surging up through his body in hateful fits of paranoia.
He’s gone, the voice on the end of the line had proclaimed, and in grief her sobs had sounded more like laughter.
It has been a part of the boy since adolescence: the treacherous abandonment of reason and balance, the inability to function. For years it had lain dormant, a woeful disease awaiting liberty, but of late it has realised its true potential.
Panic.
He despises its influence - the way it arrives in the night, like a Wodehousian aunt, to drag him from slumber and spit his jolting, trembling body into a world of lucid terror; a world in which he is painfully aware of his own mortality and convinced that death is imminent. In the daylight he carries the imprint of the attacks with reproachful fear of their reoccurrence, existing as if permanently hung-over but without the promise of recovery.
‘Can I get you a drink, Maria?’ He asks, realising she too has been staring longingly into space.
‘Gin and Tonic, please, Jack,’ she answers, forcing a smile which he feels, in time, will kill her. The emphasis on one another’s names amuses him. They have been doing this quite unashamedly these last few days, as if to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence.
At the bar, the boy passes the skinhead, who is stood defiantly next to the fruit machine, so as to be served by Carl, the manager.
‘On the house this time,’ he says, greeting Jack with a sympathetic, courteous smile.
‘What can I get you?’
‘Pint of Guinness and a G and T, if you would.’
How many patrons Carl, in his thirteen year management of this pub alone, had seen or heard of passing away was anyone’s guess. Like Maria, he had long ago completed his on-the-job training in how to deal with death, proven now by his tone of voice.
‘You know, we’ll miss the cocky little prick around this place,’ he says, scooping ice from a bucket into a tall spirit glass.
‘I know, I know. It seems like forever since he last came in.’
‘Bastard thing came on quickly though, eh? I mean, Jesus… he didn’t make it three months.’
Carl, with the prowess of a good bartender, conducts this entire conversation whilst simultaneously pouring the Guinness, readying the gin and loading pint glasses into the dishwasher. When he is finished he sets the drinks on the bar and deals two good measures of whiskey.
‘To the Student,’ he says, and they drink.
‘I’ll take one of those, mate’ the heavy set stranger shouts from across the room, in a thick, barely distinguishable accent born somewhere west of the Wirral.
‘Sorry, my friend, private stash, but we’ve plenty of others up there,’ Carl replies.
‘The same again then, friend,’ he retorts, tipping his glass aggressively. Then, turning to resume his position by the slot machine, he stumbles drunkenly into Jas, the Mechanic - a regular. The remainder of the man’s current drink splashes out of the glass onto his coat.
‘Fuckin’ hell, mate,’ he explodes. ‘Do you not watch where you’re going?’
The sudden loudness is excruciating. Jas, taken aback, is silent.
‘Can you hear me, you Paki bastard?’
The air, if such a thing is possible, is sucked from the room. That word. That fucking word.
‘What did you say to me?’ The Mechanic, by no means a timid man himself, demands.
‘I think you heard me, la’,’ replies the stranger, swaggering in front of him, too close for comfort, the empty spirit glass clasped between his fingers. ‘This isn’t Bombay now, and in England when you spill someone’s drink you offer to buy them another.’
‘Right, you’re out!’ Carl shouts, already half way around the bar. The boy wants to run, and, indeed, would run if it were not for having to pass this brute, this intruder, this breach of the peace. He does not know the man, but he recognises in him a familiar public house confidence - a jerky, overbearing self-assurance owing partly to the military but also to excessive cocaine use – that paints him as unpredictable and dangerous.
By the time Carl reaches them, the skinhead has dropped the empty glass and smashed a beer bottle. Brandishing it proudly, he grabs Jas by the collar of his polo shirt and draws him forcefully into his chest until the bottle is pressed against the Mechanic’s throat.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ Carl exclaims, coming to a dramatic stop, both hands held up in universal surrender. ‘Take it easy.’
‘Get back or I’ll cut him, I swear to God.’
The boy, drinks still in hand, looks desperately around the barroom. Surely somebody somewhere was equipped to deal with this. But it is Tuesday afternoon, it’s raining, and apart from an elderly couple at the back of the restaurant there is no one. The Mechanic chokes under the man’s arm, his strangled flesh bulging around the tip of the glass.
‘Do you know what this means?’ The skinhead bellows, groping at the pin badge, which is now clearly identifiable as the dark symbol of Nazi tyranny. ‘It means NOT FUCKING WELCOME!’
‘You’ve nothing to gain from hurting him,’ Carl explains, his voice firm. ‘So let him go and get out.’
‘Do you know who the fuck I am?’ The stranger barks. An angry blue vein has appeared above his temple, and it throbs now with cartoon-like vigour. His eyes seem to burst out of their sockets. Sweat glistens on his forehead. ‘I said, do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve never seen you before in my life, son, and if you leave now I’ll never have to again.’
This makes things worse. The skinhead, who had taken up arms so quickly, resumes shouting in the manner of an uneducated, overzealous politician, addressing everyone at once, his teeth bared in a furious grimace.
‘This country has been flooded with these, these terrorists for too long, and its people like you’ – he leers at Carl – ‘that let it happen. Suicide bombers, fuckin’ jihad... For what? A god that doesn’t exist? And people wonder why Britain’s going to the dogs. Even public transport isn’t safe anymore. Multiculturalism…’ He pauses, spits angrily on the floor. ‘Well, thanks but no fuckin’ thanks. From now on its England for the English, and anyone who doesn’t like it can get in line, because there’s a thousand bottles just like this one and a thousand people waiting to use them.’
If there had been any hope of talking the stranger into reason it disappears in the seconds following this last outbreak. An intense desire blazes in the whites of his eyes. His fingers tremble viciously on the bottle so that a series of indentations are produced on the Mechanic’s throat. Lost in the powerful paranoia of his own propaganda, the skinhead crumbles irreversibly into hysteria.
‘Decent white British families passed over time and again while the government hands out houses to anyone who gets off the boat. The dole queues are getting longer everyday as jobs fall into the hands of Polish immigrants. Unless the borders are closed, it’s only a matter of time before blood is spilt.’
His face is flushed and hot, and the force with which he projects his hate-fuelled soliloquy causes saliva to spray from his mouth with every plosive.
Then there is cause for optimism. As venom pours from the man’s tongue, Carl lashes out, catching him squarely on the chin with a perfect right fist. The man stumbles backwards, letting loose the broken bottle, and raises a dumbstruck hand to his jaw. The Mechanic, suddenly free of his captor, spins 180 degrees, throws an equally impressive punch – which lands just below his right eye – and the stranger goes down. Both men descend, but it is Jas who delivers the final debilitating kick to the man’s ribs. Drawing on his full weight, the Mechanic drops to his knees, forcing them hard into the stranger’s chest so as to deprive him of air and escape.
The boy looks on in hope and horror. With Carl and Jas standing over him the skinhead is suddenly pathetic. His only advantage had been at the sharp edge of the bottle, but now, unarmed and immobile, he is lost.
‘Jack,’ Carl says, without lifting his eyes, and at the sound of his name the boy feels strikingly as though he is coming up from under water. ‘Call the police. The phone’s behind the bar.’
* * * *
At midnight, Connor, David, Paul, Arienette and the boy stagger through the front door of the flat Jack and Alex had shared since University, their moods blissfully lightened by alcohol. By one o clock three more bottles of wine are gone but there remains amongst the five a certain cordial sobriety. To drink so much on any other day of the year would seem foolish and near impossible: today it is a necessary catalyst for coping.
In the spirit of remembrance they gather in the living room, play old punk records, roll cigarettes, share anecdotes, refill each other’s glasses, and hint at a comforting, almost childish spirituality so long ago abandoned in all of them.
‘I tell you what,’ Connor announces, abruptly. ‘If Alex is up there,’ – he gestures apprehensively at the ceiling – ‘they’ve gained a pretty decent size cock!’
The room loses itself in laugher. The boy is awestruck by the way in which the conversation oscillates so wildly. For a while they talk about nothing in particular – the standard subjects of reunited graduates – and then, every twenty minutes or so, the attention returns to the cancer, the funeral, or to recollections of days spent with Alex.
‘How do you know how big it was? David asks.
‘I had a sneaky look when we were in the pub toilets one night,’ Connor admits.
‘No shame in that’, the boy adds. ‘And it wasn’t as if Alex wasn’t proud of it...’
‘So, how was it?’ Arienette wonders, genuinely interested.
‘On a scale of one to ten? Seven.’
Laughter recaptures the room, and the subject matter changes again.
At a quarter to three, David sprawls out on the settee and is asleep in less than a minute, prompting Connor and Paul to top and tail in the spare room. Alex’s room – which has remained untouched since the illness forced him into a hospital bed, partly out of respect and partly in the unprecedented hope of his recovery – stays empty. In the dim light of the lounge, the remaining girl and boy conclude that it would seem intrusive to open up their friend’s former sanctuary as a guestroom. It strikes Jack that there are some tough times ahead, and he knows instantly that when the tenancy comes up he will leave this place and never return. It is a startling notion to consider: he can never go home again.
‘Come, sleep with me,’ Arienette says, leading him upstairs into his own bedroom. There, she stops and says: ‘We don’t have to. I mean, I understand if you can’t.’
But an inevitable desire lights up in him, strengthened by the wine, and by the nostalgic sensation of his body next to hers. They kiss, softly and sweetly at first, and then with a mutual passionate grief that passes darkly from one set of lips to the other. On the bed it is easy: they fall into one another, opening wide the gates of their anguish, ridding their physical selves of anxiety, and the boy admits himself to that Freudian essential self. He moves perversely to the rhythm of his sex, glimpsing in the collision of their bodies an unfamiliar confidence that assures him – for the first time since Alex’s death – that everything is in its right place.
* * * *
The boy wakes suddenly and bolts upright in bed, breathless, his heart racing. A tight pain strangles the muscles in his left arm.
( - heart attack heart attack heart attack heart attack - )
The skinhead’s face, bloated and bruised, taunts him from the dark corners of the bedroom. It is vivid, violent and cold, staring at him without expression, its pallid features hardly human; then, replacing it, the extinct motionless gaze of his best friend. A terrible decomposition has corrupted the eyes; the bridge of the nose is sunken and black. The boy claws at his own face, running trembling fingers through his hair, scratching savagely with sharp teeth at the surface of his tongue, in the fear he might swallow it.
Arienette is still asleep. A part of him wants to wake her - if only to share these deathly visions with someone - but he knows that to drag her from sleep is to burden her further. Instead, he presses his eyes shut and concentrates on breathing calmly.
It takes several minutes to steady the shallow tremors in his chest, and he struggles not to lose himself entirely in the hypochondria of his diseased mind. Eventually he eases his legs out of bed, feels the reassuring cold of the wooden floor beneath his feet. Mindful not to disturb the girl, he slips out from under the covers and moves to the window. The blinds are already drawn up, and it is raining in the dark. Dawn is still two or three hours away.
He pulls on a pair of jeans, and with intense fixation forces his trembling fingers to recover a near empty packet of tobacco from the pockets. It is not a good idea to smoke but he needs something to focus on, something mechanical and precise. Above all things he must not succumb to a full on panic attack. In realising this he begins tapping his right foot in irregular rhythms, another relentless action to occupy the limbs.
With the rolling papers between his fingers his thoughts return to the skinhead from the pub. Cautious not to let his mind reproduce the frightful apparition that stole him from slumber, the boy settles on recalling the manner in which the man had exploded into his life. This trenchcoat thug, this rough beast, had not slouched but roared to life before him, spitting poison from its
wretched lips.
With each second that elapses an inescapable distance is placed between the event itself and the boy’s memory of it, but he feels certain he will not forget the disgraceful nature of its consequences. He is angry, tired and sick of narrow-minded swine sent to fuck with his existence, to infect and to interfere with his life. A radical Leftism shocks his body, swelling wildly in the part of the torso in which he imagines the human soul to dwell.
He raises a hand that shakes with fear and rebellion, lights a cigarette, and nudges the window ajar to listen to the rain. Upstairs lights from two late dwelling houses fall across the back yard, illuminating a multitude of discarded roll-ups on the concrete below. The boy stares blankly into the gloom.
It is not just the skinhead that bothers him. There is something more; something that digs, and burdens, and weighs heavy on his heart. He knows this because it has surfaced several times in the hours since the stranger snapped out his muscular arms and put a broken bottle to Jas’s throat. The dusty bedroom air seems to move around him. His vision grows hazy. He draws deeply from the cigarette and –
That’s when he understands. It isn’t the beer bottle, or the racism, or even the skinhead himself that his mind won’t let alone: it’s the fact that he, the boy, had done nothing to stop what was happening. He had stood dead still as the face of the Mechanic gorged from behind the glass, afraid to make even the slightest gesture lest the stranger turn his wrath in his direction.
He closes his eyes and feels the wind touch lightly on his skin. Every sacred value, every treasured principle, abandoned in an instant. Tonight his politics are damaged, defeated, because he failed to make a stand. And Alex: how he hates his old friend now for deserting him, for no longer being there, just down the hall, sitting reading in the dim light of his bedroom. How he despises the cancer that tore through his able body, stealing first his balance then his senses.
Tears swell in the sockets of the boy’s eyes, too big and too premature to escape. He has been cheated out of friendship, out of kinship, out of time, and all that appears to remain is his own downward struggle to the grave.
Above the dull drumbeat of raindrops on the gutter comes the soft inhale/exhale of Arienette’s breath. She is turned on her side, distant, unattainable. He is a stranger in his own bedroom. In agony, he picks out Bob Dylan from the CD rack, searches up and down the track-list, settles on a song and queues it up.
I ain’t saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
The boy throws the last of the cigarette out of the window and watches the embers burn before collapsing into the corner of the room, where, anticipating dawn and awaiting freedom, he shivers violently until the first of the day’s light appears from behind the rainclouds.
Sunday, 6 September 2009
Bend to Squares (a Love Story)
Alice Brooker, eighteen years old and blonder than nature had intended, was dragging behind her boyfriend on the Oxford Road, only half listening to what he was saying. The pavement was wrapped in a thin grey frost, and the long heels of her boots made it difficult to keep up. She was accustomed now to his quick stride, to the expansive footfalls that propelled his body forward at a pace reserved for the hurried and the tall.
Concert dwellers lined the street on both sides, in factions, in style, the majority bound in the same direction but taking their time about it. And here was her boyfriend: awkward, long and frenzied, lighting an endless string of cigarettes as he weaved in and out of people. His hand trailed behind, unclasped and unnoticed. He only ever got this way about music. Art, literature, politics, even film – these things he appreciated from a distance, but with music he became almost evangelical. He conversed, ranted, argued and soliloquised – and with a fair deal of eloquence.
‘Got no talent for it,’ he had explained one evening, ‘but I know how it works.’
Sarah’s boyfriend, David, played in a band and Alice’s – Alice’s boyfriend consumed bands instead. Entire walls of his Whalley Range flat were layered with stolen posters and crumpled gig tickets; racks of CDs and homemade cassette tapes (many of which she had never even heard of let alone listened to) lined his bedroom floor. Oh, and there, in the corner, stood a dusty, anciently-strung acoustic guitar which nobody played.
‘ – classical music for the twenty-first century,’ he was exclaiming now, to nobody in particular. ‘They’re up there with fucking Beethoven!’
Still she had not taken his hand. Unsteady on the ice, she slowed again. Tomorrow morning would be worse: early, dark, hazy, and she would have to rise especially early to get the 86 bus to University. Friday morning meant a Modernist Movement lecture followed by a Romantic Revolution seminar. Half an academic year down, she had little time for the so-called Romantic Poets: the legendary Byron, the opiated Coleridge, the inane William Wordsworth. They taught her nothing of love.
‘Give me Orwell over this tripe any day,’ she had announced on one occasion. ‘In his darkest moment he knew more about Beauty than Blake.’
Her tutor had laughed sweetly at this but there was a look in his eye, like Alice had insulted a member of his extended family.
Now, all about her reigned the shadows of indignant rock n roll stars: Doherty, Winehouse, Alex Turner… The last of the Rock Romantics. Some legacy the counter-Enlightenment canon had left. Even worse when you thought about all of those eighteen-to-thirty year olds who ran around the place carved in their image. Was her boyfriend any different? Was she being too harsh on them all? Yes, she thought perhaps she was, but that was okay. She knew she wasn’t innocent either, and that was okay too. Better to be a cynic than an over-zealous, celebrity-eyed groupie. She saw those girls everywhere: the hairstyles, the Libertines chic, the blissful middle-class eyes gazing dutifully on as their skinny-jeaned boyfriends took to the acoustic night stage to strum joyless major chords.
He shared the apartment with five other boys - three floors spiralling up to a knackered skylight that let the cold in. The whole place smelt bizarrely of floor polish and cannabis. It was this same sickly mixture of scents that greeted Alice like an old enemy when they finally arrived home. She had mixed feelings about where he lived. It was cold and unwelcoming, and people only washed up when it was absolutely necessary. The cooking process was ruined by having to clean every plate, pot and pan and surface. His bedroom was the only saving grace – otherwise, it resembled a slum.
‘I should shower,’ he said, pulling his shirt up over his head ineloquently.
‘I’ll choose some music,’ she answered.
She picked out a record by Godspeed You Black Emperor!, undressed slowly and climbed into bed. On the floor below, the shower let out a panicky scream. She imagined her boyfriend beneath a heavy flow of lukewarm water, and waited nervously for the whir and whine of the boiler to give way to the sound of rain on tin.
He’d said it already, of course (on the bed, six weeks ago) but he hadn’t said it first. It was Alice who had gone there, maliciously, self-servingly, just to see what the words felt like in her mouth. She wondered now if, without her own perfect delivery of that three word gesture, he ever would have admitted it. She guessed not.
De Quincey was right where she’d left him, on the nightstand, his spine broken, his pages torn. The book - a charity shop steal - opened naturally at page ninety-three. The print was small and dense. She pictured an ancestry of owners, each of whom had played their own tiny part in forcing the book into its present condition. Now here was a Romantic she could stomach: debt-ridden, shadowy, nauseous, addicted… A child of Manchester’s Cross Street. She wondered why people didn’t make more of a fuss of it. Before the laudanum, before the narcotic London rambles, before the Confessions, he had been here.
The boiler yelped and squealed in pain. He spent more time in the shower than anyone she had ever known yet his fingernails remained dirty, and his long shapeless hair stayed sodden with grease. Alice flicked through the book until she found exactly where she’d left off. She was not William Wordsworth. Beauty did not come naturally. Like De Quincey, she needed a catalyst; something to speed up her emotions, her reactions, her abilities. She said things she didn’t mean. Her love, she figured, was an illusion.
The day it happened she had skipped a class, and then, three weeks later, she skipped her period. Stretched out on his bed (on this bed) they exchanged the second in a mini-series of ‘I Love You’s’ and he told her that he didn’t have any condoms. She told him she wanted to anyway and rapturously, carelessly, they joined at the hip. It was a foolish desire she harboured for him. Between the sheets it was Alice that trembled delightfully at their proximity. She knew now what her body was capable of, how it reacted to each precarious, intelligent advance. She had even thought of cheating. The idea thrilled her.
Suddenly he was in the room, a filthy towel hung clinging to his waist, his hair slicked back awfully behind his ears. He lit a cigarette and sat at the end of the bed. Alice made a point of reading a couple of sentences (if interrogated she would remember nothing of what they said) before setting the book down in her lap.
‘Better?’
‘Definitely. I feel fresh again.’ He reached for an ashtray. ‘Are you tired?’
‘Very.’ She wasn’t.
They did this almost every night. Despite the youth of their courtship and the immaturity of their years, they confounded one another with useless conversation. She felt sure this would be the overriding factor in the relationship’s eventual destruction.
‘What a fucking gig,’ he said.
‘Are you coming to bed?’ She asked.
He threw off his towel and lay on top of the duvet. It happened like this always - as if it was the first time, as if etiquette dictated the slowness of his actions. She wanted to sleep with him, and to read some more, and to watch a DVD, and to fall into a cosy, pleasant pre-sleep haze. She wanted everything that wasn’t this. Because this was interminable, and it was impossible to tell him she was –
He turned off the lamp beside the bed and slipped beneath the sheets. A single yellow streetlamp glowed outside the window.
‘I didn’t want to read anymore anyway,’ she said, sardonically, because she wanted to get a rise out of him and because she was too tired to carry on reading anyway.
‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he returned. The light was already on again.
‘Can you put this on the floor?’ She asked, handing De Quincey over. ‘I don’t want to forget it in the morning.’
‘Sure.’
She turned onto her side. He switched off the light for a second time and forced his body close to hers. He seemed more confident in the dark. Alice figured they were already twice as likely to have sex. Mind games and subtle suggestions, she thought - that’s how people got what they wanted.
When she thought about babies the world turned a little faster than usual. Objects –like books and CD cases and chairs and cigarette packets - appeared a lot brighter, as if they were spinning and she was spinning with them. She pushed herself into his groin and felt the predictable swell of his erection. Now would be the time to tell him, and to figure it all out. The most important decisions in life were made between two people in bed.
She almost came right out and said it then. Her brain formulated the sentence; her mouth framed the first word. But still it did not come. Pointedly, she turned her body further away from him and stared soberly at the wall. He turned with her, and placed a lazy arm around her waist. Perhaps she would tell him on Facebook. Or Twitter.
Alice Brooker is pregnant. (P.S. Rob, you’re the father…)
It would be unexpectedly modern. Indeed, without status updates, how else would she have first heard about her father’s second engagement or the untimely death of an old school friend? The internet could be such a wonderful place.
She pressed her lips together and kept quiet. He need never know. She would go to the clinic alone and he would be none the wiser. Yes, she knew now what her body was capable of.
‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.
She said nothing in return. As far as he would know, she was already asleep.
Concert dwellers lined the street on both sides, in factions, in style, the majority bound in the same direction but taking their time about it. And here was her boyfriend: awkward, long and frenzied, lighting an endless string of cigarettes as he weaved in and out of people. His hand trailed behind, unclasped and unnoticed. He only ever got this way about music. Art, literature, politics, even film – these things he appreciated from a distance, but with music he became almost evangelical. He conversed, ranted, argued and soliloquised – and with a fair deal of eloquence.
‘Got no talent for it,’ he had explained one evening, ‘but I know how it works.’
Sarah’s boyfriend, David, played in a band and Alice’s – Alice’s boyfriend consumed bands instead. Entire walls of his Whalley Range flat were layered with stolen posters and crumpled gig tickets; racks of CDs and homemade cassette tapes (many of which she had never even heard of let alone listened to) lined his bedroom floor. Oh, and there, in the corner, stood a dusty, anciently-strung acoustic guitar which nobody played.
‘ – classical music for the twenty-first century,’ he was exclaiming now, to nobody in particular. ‘They’re up there with fucking Beethoven!’
Still she had not taken his hand. Unsteady on the ice, she slowed again. Tomorrow morning would be worse: early, dark, hazy, and she would have to rise especially early to get the 86 bus to University. Friday morning meant a Modernist Movement lecture followed by a Romantic Revolution seminar. Half an academic year down, she had little time for the so-called Romantic Poets: the legendary Byron, the opiated Coleridge, the inane William Wordsworth. They taught her nothing of love.
‘Give me Orwell over this tripe any day,’ she had announced on one occasion. ‘In his darkest moment he knew more about Beauty than Blake.’
Her tutor had laughed sweetly at this but there was a look in his eye, like Alice had insulted a member of his extended family.
Now, all about her reigned the shadows of indignant rock n roll stars: Doherty, Winehouse, Alex Turner… The last of the Rock Romantics. Some legacy the counter-Enlightenment canon had left. Even worse when you thought about all of those eighteen-to-thirty year olds who ran around the place carved in their image. Was her boyfriend any different? Was she being too harsh on them all? Yes, she thought perhaps she was, but that was okay. She knew she wasn’t innocent either, and that was okay too. Better to be a cynic than an over-zealous, celebrity-eyed groupie. She saw those girls everywhere: the hairstyles, the Libertines chic, the blissful middle-class eyes gazing dutifully on as their skinny-jeaned boyfriends took to the acoustic night stage to strum joyless major chords.
He shared the apartment with five other boys - three floors spiralling up to a knackered skylight that let the cold in. The whole place smelt bizarrely of floor polish and cannabis. It was this same sickly mixture of scents that greeted Alice like an old enemy when they finally arrived home. She had mixed feelings about where he lived. It was cold and unwelcoming, and people only washed up when it was absolutely necessary. The cooking process was ruined by having to clean every plate, pot and pan and surface. His bedroom was the only saving grace – otherwise, it resembled a slum.
‘I should shower,’ he said, pulling his shirt up over his head ineloquently.
‘I’ll choose some music,’ she answered.
She picked out a record by Godspeed You Black Emperor!, undressed slowly and climbed into bed. On the floor below, the shower let out a panicky scream. She imagined her boyfriend beneath a heavy flow of lukewarm water, and waited nervously for the whir and whine of the boiler to give way to the sound of rain on tin.
He’d said it already, of course (on the bed, six weeks ago) but he hadn’t said it first. It was Alice who had gone there, maliciously, self-servingly, just to see what the words felt like in her mouth. She wondered now if, without her own perfect delivery of that three word gesture, he ever would have admitted it. She guessed not.
De Quincey was right where she’d left him, on the nightstand, his spine broken, his pages torn. The book - a charity shop steal - opened naturally at page ninety-three. The print was small and dense. She pictured an ancestry of owners, each of whom had played their own tiny part in forcing the book into its present condition. Now here was a Romantic she could stomach: debt-ridden, shadowy, nauseous, addicted… A child of Manchester’s Cross Street. She wondered why people didn’t make more of a fuss of it. Before the laudanum, before the narcotic London rambles, before the Confessions, he had been here.
The boiler yelped and squealed in pain. He spent more time in the shower than anyone she had ever known yet his fingernails remained dirty, and his long shapeless hair stayed sodden with grease. Alice flicked through the book until she found exactly where she’d left off. She was not William Wordsworth. Beauty did not come naturally. Like De Quincey, she needed a catalyst; something to speed up her emotions, her reactions, her abilities. She said things she didn’t mean. Her love, she figured, was an illusion.
The day it happened she had skipped a class, and then, three weeks later, she skipped her period. Stretched out on his bed (on this bed) they exchanged the second in a mini-series of ‘I Love You’s’ and he told her that he didn’t have any condoms. She told him she wanted to anyway and rapturously, carelessly, they joined at the hip. It was a foolish desire she harboured for him. Between the sheets it was Alice that trembled delightfully at their proximity. She knew now what her body was capable of, how it reacted to each precarious, intelligent advance. She had even thought of cheating. The idea thrilled her.
Suddenly he was in the room, a filthy towel hung clinging to his waist, his hair slicked back awfully behind his ears. He lit a cigarette and sat at the end of the bed. Alice made a point of reading a couple of sentences (if interrogated she would remember nothing of what they said) before setting the book down in her lap.
‘Better?’
‘Definitely. I feel fresh again.’ He reached for an ashtray. ‘Are you tired?’
‘Very.’ She wasn’t.
They did this almost every night. Despite the youth of their courtship and the immaturity of their years, they confounded one another with useless conversation. She felt sure this would be the overriding factor in the relationship’s eventual destruction.
‘What a fucking gig,’ he said.
‘Are you coming to bed?’ She asked.
He threw off his towel and lay on top of the duvet. It happened like this always - as if it was the first time, as if etiquette dictated the slowness of his actions. She wanted to sleep with him, and to read some more, and to watch a DVD, and to fall into a cosy, pleasant pre-sleep haze. She wanted everything that wasn’t this. Because this was interminable, and it was impossible to tell him she was –
He turned off the lamp beside the bed and slipped beneath the sheets. A single yellow streetlamp glowed outside the window.
‘I didn’t want to read anymore anyway,’ she said, sardonically, because she wanted to get a rise out of him and because she was too tired to carry on reading anyway.
‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he returned. The light was already on again.
‘Can you put this on the floor?’ She asked, handing De Quincey over. ‘I don’t want to forget it in the morning.’
‘Sure.’
She turned onto her side. He switched off the light for a second time and forced his body close to hers. He seemed more confident in the dark. Alice figured they were already twice as likely to have sex. Mind games and subtle suggestions, she thought - that’s how people got what they wanted.
When she thought about babies the world turned a little faster than usual. Objects –like books and CD cases and chairs and cigarette packets - appeared a lot brighter, as if they were spinning and she was spinning with them. She pushed herself into his groin and felt the predictable swell of his erection. Now would be the time to tell him, and to figure it all out. The most important decisions in life were made between two people in bed.
She almost came right out and said it then. Her brain formulated the sentence; her mouth framed the first word. But still it did not come. Pointedly, she turned her body further away from him and stared soberly at the wall. He turned with her, and placed a lazy arm around her waist. Perhaps she would tell him on Facebook. Or Twitter.
Alice Brooker is pregnant. (P.S. Rob, you’re the father…)
It would be unexpectedly modern. Indeed, without status updates, how else would she have first heard about her father’s second engagement or the untimely death of an old school friend? The internet could be such a wonderful place.
She pressed her lips together and kept quiet. He need never know. She would go to the clinic alone and he would be none the wiser. Yes, she knew now what her body was capable of.
‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.
She said nothing in return. As far as he would know, she was already asleep.
Monday, 1 June 2009
The Road to Brussels (a Rather Unfortunate Sequel...)
THE ROAD TO BRUSSELS
(a Rather Unfortunate Sequel)
On Friday, November 21st, 2008 I published an article for Love Music Hate Racism, a popular music campaign set up to combat the alarming rise in support for the far-right British National Party (BNP). It was a considered piece - written feverishly over three evenings in Manchester - it lacked any real purpose, and there was no intention for it ever to be printed anywhere. The only reason I wrote it at all was because the previous weekend I had attended a protest march in Blackpool to voice discontent at the New Kimberley Hotel’s staging of the BNP conference.
When finally I put down my pen (or, rather less poetically, hit CTRL and S for the final time) I felt certain – more certain than ever before – that the so-called ‘politics’ of Nick Griffin’s so-called ‘British’ National Party were divisive, ignorant, ugly and dangerous. Simply by writing those words, by delving into the history of the party, and by anticipating the European Elections in 2009 I was able to clarify exactly what it was I despised about the BNP. It can be argued, of course, that I have should have been able to articulate my own personal opposition to them before I went on the march.
Well, yes, you’re right. All I can say in my defence is that I felt like I had to attend the protest. Unfortunately, what I feel and what I can rationally explain are often two very different things, and I find that one’s political persuasion should either be greatly considered or – perhaps more charmingly – hardly considered at all. Confusion breeds contempt and so, for better or for worse (and it’s usually the latter) I have to write things down before I know what I’m talking about. Put simply, I had to know intricately what the BNP stood for – and why I stood so passionately against them.
It is with great sadness but, thankfully, a renewed faith in all of those opposed to fascism that I return to the laptop this evening. We are more than six months on from the Blackpool protest but it seems that, rather than fade from the national consciousness, the acronym which goes some way in disguising the race-hate politics of the BNP has only gained in popularity. Whether this increased familiarity will help or hinder Griffin and co. in the elections to the European Parliament on June 4th remains to be seen. Tonight I am sure of only one thing: we must ALL use our vote on Thursday to stop the BNP from securing any kind of foothold in Brussels.
I wouldn’t be here tonight, held up in sunny Coventry at twenty to eleven on a Friday evening, writing to you (whoever among you has had the misfortune of finding this over-zealous, deeply evangelical essay – bleurgh) if it wasn’t for the events of this afternoon. Because, you see, today - out of a wonderfully blue sky - a work colleague of mine spoke the following words:
‘I’m thinking of voting BNP, you know…’
Bollocks. Fuck. What to do? What to say?
I gave that most English of replies: ‘You’re joking… aren’t you?’
‘I’m not.’
‘But why would you vote for them?’
‘They’re the only ones who the other politicians are scared of. I think it’s disgusting how the government have cheated us over these expenses…’
Double bollocks. Double fuck. You mean it, don’t you? You’re thinking of voting for them. And it’s not because you’re racist, it’s because you’re disillusioned. I know it is. Tell me it’s a wind up. There’s still time… But there wasn’t still time. Her mind, as many an awful person has said, was made up.
Thus, we argued all afternoon. I won’t go into details because my typing speed isn’t able to keep up with my anger, upset and frustration. For half an hour, five of us openly debated what it means to vote for the BNP on June 4th. Two out of those five turned out in favour of the BNP. Huge leaps were leapt; terrible conclusions were jumped to.
‘This is what I don’t understand,’ I said, finally, voice full of venom and bile and self-righteousness. ‘How do you get from “those politicians are bastards for cheating their expenses” to “it’s the fault of every non-white and non-British person (whatever that means) that those politicians are expenses-cheating bastards?”’
Further confused conversation ensued. A sickening while later I tried one last thing to appeal especially to the prospective BNP supporters:
‘Think about the people you work with – people from Slovakia, from Russia, from Jamaica, from Pakistan, Poland, or British people whose families moved here at some point in history … They’re your friends and colleagues. Do they not belong here?’
No answer.
But the room did not grow silent because something had finally sunk in. No, it was because, as too many an awful person has said, their minds were already made up: voting for the BNP will send a message to expenses-hungry politicians from the Labour and Conservative parties. They had no more to offer on the subject, and debate was nearly impossible.
‘Why not vote Green? Or Socialist Labour? Or anyone? Why BNP? Why the National Front in shirts and ties?’ I asked.
The heartbreaking reply: ‘Why worry?’
There are two things that strike me about this kind of an attitude.
1. I believe the female colleague I have been referring to throughout is not a bad person. She is not, contrary to how she might appear here, a racist. Certainly, she has been raised in a specific kind of northern working class manner - which may, in this instance, make her more susceptible to tabloid misinformation and hearsay than, for example, me (who has been lucky enough to experience a politically-awakening University education) - but until now, a year and a half after meeting her, she has never said anything to align herself with the extreme right. Which, perhaps naively, leads me to believe that hers is entirely a –
2. Protest Vote. And it is protest voting that has the potential to boost support for the BNP in this election. We cannot, cannot, cannot allow this to happen. Yes, there have been let-downs from the Labour and shadow governments but let us not pretend that voting for a racist party who thrive on this kind of public fear and disappointment will resolve this. Expenses row or no expenses row, the BNP are manipulators of the democratic process. If we are to vote in protest against the three main parties then we need to consider anything apart from the BNP.
Clever PR and spin have gone some way in making a Nazi party appear legitimate. It cannot be stressed enough: the BNP do not belong in mainstream politics.
I suppose one cannot commit an indecency quite so vulgar as to quote oneself, but I fear I must break with etiquette here for I still believe the following to be undeniably true:
The BNP is an ugly organisation. Its website, campaign literature and beliefs are ugly. The violent attacks on people carried out in defence of its arrogant lies are ugly. Its exploitation of people living all across Britain is ugly. And, most harrowingly, the threat it poses to equality, democracy, peace and harmony as a result of divisive, racist, white supremacist policies is ugly.
Dearest Reader, the old dilemma never is resolved. They say it is easy to know what we are against; it is another thing entirely to know what we are for. Indeed, on June 4th, many people across Britain will want to punish and send a message to the politicians they feel have let them down. So, yes, it may be easy to know that you are against rising unemployment, MP expense claims and the recession but – please - ask yourself: are you really for the BNP? Are you really willing to align yourself with an organisation whose extreme politics promise ‘answers’, and yet whose beliefs disqualify all those who believe in peace and equality?
Let it be known: the BNP have no answers, and supporting them on Thursday is the political equivalent of (please forgive the cliché) ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.’ The BNP argue enthusiastically against Britain’s EU membership whilst stooping to the lowest levels in order to secure a Member of the European Parliament. They are contradictory and hypocritical because racism is contradictory and hypocritical. They have nothing to offer European or National politics and we must seek to stop them now. And the way to do it? Make your vote count on June 4th.
Tim Woodall
(May 30th, 2009)
(a Rather Unfortunate Sequel)
On Friday, November 21st, 2008 I published an article for Love Music Hate Racism, a popular music campaign set up to combat the alarming rise in support for the far-right British National Party (BNP). It was a considered piece - written feverishly over three evenings in Manchester - it lacked any real purpose, and there was no intention for it ever to be printed anywhere. The only reason I wrote it at all was because the previous weekend I had attended a protest march in Blackpool to voice discontent at the New Kimberley Hotel’s staging of the BNP conference.
When finally I put down my pen (or, rather less poetically, hit CTRL and S for the final time) I felt certain – more certain than ever before – that the so-called ‘politics’ of Nick Griffin’s so-called ‘British’ National Party were divisive, ignorant, ugly and dangerous. Simply by writing those words, by delving into the history of the party, and by anticipating the European Elections in 2009 I was able to clarify exactly what it was I despised about the BNP. It can be argued, of course, that I have should have been able to articulate my own personal opposition to them before I went on the march.
Well, yes, you’re right. All I can say in my defence is that I felt like I had to attend the protest. Unfortunately, what I feel and what I can rationally explain are often two very different things, and I find that one’s political persuasion should either be greatly considered or – perhaps more charmingly – hardly considered at all. Confusion breeds contempt and so, for better or for worse (and it’s usually the latter) I have to write things down before I know what I’m talking about. Put simply, I had to know intricately what the BNP stood for – and why I stood so passionately against them.
It is with great sadness but, thankfully, a renewed faith in all of those opposed to fascism that I return to the laptop this evening. We are more than six months on from the Blackpool protest but it seems that, rather than fade from the national consciousness, the acronym which goes some way in disguising the race-hate politics of the BNP has only gained in popularity. Whether this increased familiarity will help or hinder Griffin and co. in the elections to the European Parliament on June 4th remains to be seen. Tonight I am sure of only one thing: we must ALL use our vote on Thursday to stop the BNP from securing any kind of foothold in Brussels.
I wouldn’t be here tonight, held up in sunny Coventry at twenty to eleven on a Friday evening, writing to you (whoever among you has had the misfortune of finding this over-zealous, deeply evangelical essay – bleurgh) if it wasn’t for the events of this afternoon. Because, you see, today - out of a wonderfully blue sky - a work colleague of mine spoke the following words:
‘I’m thinking of voting BNP, you know…’
Bollocks. Fuck. What to do? What to say?
I gave that most English of replies: ‘You’re joking… aren’t you?’
‘I’m not.’
‘But why would you vote for them?’
‘They’re the only ones who the other politicians are scared of. I think it’s disgusting how the government have cheated us over these expenses…’
Double bollocks. Double fuck. You mean it, don’t you? You’re thinking of voting for them. And it’s not because you’re racist, it’s because you’re disillusioned. I know it is. Tell me it’s a wind up. There’s still time… But there wasn’t still time. Her mind, as many an awful person has said, was made up.
Thus, we argued all afternoon. I won’t go into details because my typing speed isn’t able to keep up with my anger, upset and frustration. For half an hour, five of us openly debated what it means to vote for the BNP on June 4th. Two out of those five turned out in favour of the BNP. Huge leaps were leapt; terrible conclusions were jumped to.
‘This is what I don’t understand,’ I said, finally, voice full of venom and bile and self-righteousness. ‘How do you get from “those politicians are bastards for cheating their expenses” to “it’s the fault of every non-white and non-British person (whatever that means) that those politicians are expenses-cheating bastards?”’
Further confused conversation ensued. A sickening while later I tried one last thing to appeal especially to the prospective BNP supporters:
‘Think about the people you work with – people from Slovakia, from Russia, from Jamaica, from Pakistan, Poland, or British people whose families moved here at some point in history … They’re your friends and colleagues. Do they not belong here?’
No answer.
But the room did not grow silent because something had finally sunk in. No, it was because, as too many an awful person has said, their minds were already made up: voting for the BNP will send a message to expenses-hungry politicians from the Labour and Conservative parties. They had no more to offer on the subject, and debate was nearly impossible.
‘Why not vote Green? Or Socialist Labour? Or anyone? Why BNP? Why the National Front in shirts and ties?’ I asked.
The heartbreaking reply: ‘Why worry?’
There are two things that strike me about this kind of an attitude.
1. I believe the female colleague I have been referring to throughout is not a bad person. She is not, contrary to how she might appear here, a racist. Certainly, she has been raised in a specific kind of northern working class manner - which may, in this instance, make her more susceptible to tabloid misinformation and hearsay than, for example, me (who has been lucky enough to experience a politically-awakening University education) - but until now, a year and a half after meeting her, she has never said anything to align herself with the extreme right. Which, perhaps naively, leads me to believe that hers is entirely a –
2. Protest Vote. And it is protest voting that has the potential to boost support for the BNP in this election. We cannot, cannot, cannot allow this to happen. Yes, there have been let-downs from the Labour and shadow governments but let us not pretend that voting for a racist party who thrive on this kind of public fear and disappointment will resolve this. Expenses row or no expenses row, the BNP are manipulators of the democratic process. If we are to vote in protest against the three main parties then we need to consider anything apart from the BNP.
Clever PR and spin have gone some way in making a Nazi party appear legitimate. It cannot be stressed enough: the BNP do not belong in mainstream politics.
I suppose one cannot commit an indecency quite so vulgar as to quote oneself, but I fear I must break with etiquette here for I still believe the following to be undeniably true:
The BNP is an ugly organisation. Its website, campaign literature and beliefs are ugly. The violent attacks on people carried out in defence of its arrogant lies are ugly. Its exploitation of people living all across Britain is ugly. And, most harrowingly, the threat it poses to equality, democracy, peace and harmony as a result of divisive, racist, white supremacist policies is ugly.
Dearest Reader, the old dilemma never is resolved. They say it is easy to know what we are against; it is another thing entirely to know what we are for. Indeed, on June 4th, many people across Britain will want to punish and send a message to the politicians they feel have let them down. So, yes, it may be easy to know that you are against rising unemployment, MP expense claims and the recession but – please - ask yourself: are you really for the BNP? Are you really willing to align yourself with an organisation whose extreme politics promise ‘answers’, and yet whose beliefs disqualify all those who believe in peace and equality?
Let it be known: the BNP have no answers, and supporting them on Thursday is the political equivalent of (please forgive the cliché) ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.’ The BNP argue enthusiastically against Britain’s EU membership whilst stooping to the lowest levels in order to secure a Member of the European Parliament. They are contradictory and hypocritical because racism is contradictory and hypocritical. They have nothing to offer European or National politics and we must seek to stop them now. And the way to do it? Make your vote count on June 4th.
Tim Woodall
(May 30th, 2009)
Monday, 4 May 2009
HIV: The Musical... Comedy... Satire.
This is a public hindrance announcement.
This year I have mostly been making a short film.
It is a comedy short film.
I co-wrote and directed it with my talented friend and colleague, Joseph Patrick.
Whether or not it will make people laugh remains to be seen.
We are currently in the final stages of the edit.
A sort-of-brief-but-sort-of-not-brief background of events can be found HERE.
There has also been some nice publicity for the premiere, which will be happening at Shoreditch Studios, London, on May 14th.
You can find the aforementioned 'nice publicity' HERE, THERE and EVERYWHERE.
If - for whatever reason - you have found yourself reading this blogpost and would like to watch our film, it is possible to WIN TICKETS.
This year I have mostly been making a short film.
It is a comedy short film.
I co-wrote and directed it with my talented friend and colleague, Joseph Patrick.
Whether or not it will make people laugh remains to be seen.
We are currently in the final stages of the edit.
A sort-of-brief-but-sort-of-not-brief background of events can be found HERE.
There has also been some nice publicity for the premiere, which will be happening at Shoreditch Studios, London, on May 14th.
You can find the aforementioned 'nice publicity' HERE, THERE and EVERYWHERE.
If - for whatever reason - you have found yourself reading this blogpost and would like to watch our film, it is possible to WIN TICKETS.
Monday, 17 November 2008
Time to Unite Against Fascism
The Road to Blackpool Pier:
Stopping the BNP in the North West
Nick Griffin is likely to appear on your television screen. Dressed in the black suit and white shirt of a politician it might seem ordinary - acceptable even - to hear his voice in the middle of a Sky News broadcast. He speaks in the same tone and manner as a Labour backbencher or Conservative MP, and his presence will probably not immediately conjure images of the National Front or Combat 18. Indeed, just this morning he was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about an online publication that gives full details of members of the British National Party (BNP). There is, however, something important we must all remember whenever we see him.
Beneath the mask of respectability and legitimacy he has attempted to drape over the BNP there remains - stronger than ever - the despicable actions and offensive attitudes of a fascist organisation. In public Griffin presents himself as a well-dressed Cambridge graduate, family man and protector of the British way of life. Sadly, it takes very little research to realise the full extent of what 'Britishness' means to both the man and to the party of which he is chairman.
Griffin himself has a 1998 conviction for incitement to racial hatred due to his involvement in a far-right publication that denied the Holocaust. Now, ten years on, the policies of the BNP move openly against a multi-racial, multi-cultural Britain, and threaten our national sense of equality and acceptance. Why, then, are the BNP an increasingly dangerous concern? Surely people can see them for the offensive, ignorant and harmful collective they really are.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Like all manipulative fascist organisations the BNP operates on a largely grass roots level, targeting traditionally white working class areas in order to formulate and exploit tensions that have arisen as a result of complex global issues. It is not uncommon to come across people canvassing for the BNP. They appear quite like any political activists, going from door to door with pamphlets, pin badges and - most worryingly - a 'solution'. So, what exactly does the BNP offer?
Firstly, it must be understood that their entire manifesto, mission statement, list of policies and much-fabled 'answer' to the problems faced by people living in Britain is built on lies. One need only pay a short visit to the Refugee Council website to realise the information presented by the BNP on the issue of immigration is an unhealthy mixture of propaganda, misinformation and twisted fear. Their belief that Britons are gradually being turned into 'second class citizens' through 'positive discrimination schemes' is hyperbolic nonsense - not to mention totally unfounded. Equally as untrue is their promise to 'clamp down on the flood of ‘asylum seekers’, all of whom are either bogus or can find refuge much nearer their home countries.' Why is it untrue? Because no such 'flooding' exists. Despite a wealth of BNP literature claiming that native British people are headed towards being an ethnic minority in their own country, it is not difficult for any of us to seek out the facts and dissect such an ugly myth.
History has taught us how far-reaching and disastrous the effects of an economic crisis can be. The National Socialists, under Hitler, gained support by exploiting German people when they were vulnerable; by using Jewish people as scapegoats for the deep well of completely unrelated problems facing the country at that time.
We cannot let this happen again.
'Oh, all right, give it a rest,' you might be thinking. 'Surely death camps and genocide will never happen again - not in this country.'
Perhaps not. Nobody believes Nick Griffin has the ability to be as politically successful as Hitler, largely due to the fact Mr. Griffin has absolutely nothing of worth to say to anyone. He does not speak to us, and he certainly does not speak for us. This does not, however, make the unwelcome presence of the BNP any less real.
In Barking, Dagenham, Stoke, Derby, and throughout the North West, they are forcing the politics of division into our communities in order to incite racial hatred. This is a crime and we must work to stop it. We must look beyond the Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic lies presented by the BNP, and expose them for what they are: racists, bigots and bullies.
It is ridiculous, misinformed nonsense to blame recession, inflation and unemployment on immigration. You might as well blame envelopes, or tennis balls. It is a dangerous and unprecedented assumption, as clichéd as it ever was. It's hard to believe that in 2008 - the first decade of the 21st century, a decade in which America elected its first black President - one still hears the phrase, 'they come over here and they take our jobs...'
What lunacy.
In September 2004 the American television series 'Lost' appeared on our screens for the first time, grabbing the attention of viewers all around the world. It tells the story of a group of people washed up on a mysterious desert island after their plane - for a number of reasons, some plausible and some seemingly impossible - crashes into the ocean. After a while they realise they are not alone. The island is already inhabited by a community of people we rather unkindly come to know as The Others. As a result, a society of fear and suspicion quickly forms. Who are these Others? What do they want? How do they live? What are their rituals and traditions? And most importantly to the crash survivors: Are they a threat to us?
It is perfectly easy to see why the survivors feel this way. They are vulnerable, confused, out of their comfort zones. Whether they are under threat or not is secondary to fears for their survival. Modern Britain, it seems to me, is much the same. The majority of people recognise, understand and accept multiculturalism as a necessary condition for the continuing existence of a healthy society. But what happens when things go wrong? What happens when global food crises, recessions, unemployment levels and financial instabilities begin to affect everyone? What happens when people suddenly become vulnerable?
Put simply, we look for causes and solutions. It is at times like this that the BNP prosper. Instead of addressing the real issues, they add fuel to the fires of division and exploit tensions they themselves have helped to create. They push racism as a way out of hardship, targeting those members of the public most affected by worsening socio-economic conditions. By appealing to us with twisted facts and false statistics they seek to promote narrow-minded fascist opinions wrapped up in a disfigured and abhorrent version of the Union Jack. What we must do to stop them is dismantle this desert island mentality of Us versus Them. There are no 'others’; there never has been. At the risk of sounding too much like a wannabe political speaker, we are only ONE race: the HUMAN RACE. When Nick Griffin and the BNP talk about the indigenous peoples of Great Britain they are defending nothing more than fanatical far-right viewpoints that have no place in the world of politics.
On Saturday 15th November, the BNP staged a conference at the New Kimberley Hotel in Blackpool. Their decision to congregate there was part of an ongoing campaign to target the North West in an attempt to gain support for Nick Griffin, who is likely to stand in the 2009 European Elections. This is a major threat to democracy. Consequently, Unite Against Fascism organised a demonstration that mobilised people against the BNP and sent a clear message to everyone inside the hotel:
Fascists are not welcome in the North West.
More than 200 people marched through Blackpool at the weekend. We walked in unison from the Winter Gardens, past cars full of people along the promenade - many of whom beeped their horns, cheered and gave us the thumbs up - down to the grotty, run-down hotel itself. Outside, a number of key anti-fascist figures made speeches, followed by united chants that really summed up why we were standing out in the cold on a Saturday afternoon:
The BNP is a Nazi party: Smash the BNP.
The wonderful thing about a protest is that it takes politics out of its usual arena and puts it in the hands of ordinary people. It works once again on a grass roots level (literally - we were stood on a stretch of uncut, wet grass). A peaceful demonstration removes exclusivity and elitism; it abolishes a seemingly 'out of reach' political language in favour of making an honest statement of intent. Wherever the BNP seeks to divide and conquer, we will fight back. Students, teachers, workers, trade unionists - people from every corner of the country - will continue to stand up against the swastika, the jackboots and the tyranny of the BNP.
In 2005, at Nottingham Trent University, I found Oscar Wilde. Pursuing the ideas put forth in his plays, novels and children's stories, I found myself reading about the essayist and art critic, Walter Pater, and the notion of 'Aestheticism.' At its most basic, the aesthetic movement of the late Victorian period stated that one must live their life in pursuit of Beauty. It is not the place of this writer - or perhaps any writer - to describe people as 'good' or 'bad', 'moral' or 'immoral'. We ought, instead, to adopt this Wildean distinction of things as either 'beautiful' or 'ugly.' People are capable of doing things that belong to both of these definitions, but what is important to remember is that it is our choice as to which path we follow.
The BNP are an ugly organisation. Its website, campaign literature and beliefs are ugly. The violent attacks on people carried out in defence of its arrogant lies are ugly. Its exploitation of people living all across Britain is ugly. And, most harrowingly, the threat it poses to equality, democracy, peace and harmony as a result of divisive, racist, white supremacist policies is ugly.
We cannot allow Nick Griffin to secure a position of influence in Europe. Now more than ever we must unite against fascism, dispel the myths flaunted by members of the far-right, and fight to keep Britain beautiful. Saturday’s protest in Blackpool is an example of how we can do it.
(All quotes regarding British National Party policies are taken from their official website)
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
The Saturday Boy
Today is a contradiction. Henry realises this when he finally stops walking and takes a seat at the top of the steps. Beneath congregating rainclouds, his particular part of the world seems awash with silver. In front, the twisted, unpolished tin can frame of the Lowry looms, its rotrousse nose stretching skyward as if in sick desperation. Henry, perhaps strangely for a fellow of his sensibilities, admires the building intensely, but still he wonders whether this is because of the structure itself, or as a consequence of some inexplicable adopted sense of civic pride. Even the name fills him with excited curiosity.
He removes his jacket and curses himself for wearing it at all. The air hangs heavy and warm in Salford this evening and, despite the heavenly threat of summer rain, most of the folks ambling back and forth around him are in tee-shirts.
He glances across the water and is once again cast into a tender silvery orb. It has been nearly half an hour since he stepped out of the Imperial War Museum, back into the present, but he cannot shake the feeling he is somehow trapped inside.
Even from this distance, with gently glistening water dividing them, its jagged, unconventional carcass both exhilarates and terrifies him. If the Lowry is symbolic of a deeply hidden national pride, the museum exists as a beacon of personal guilt and despair; a slanted, fragile, distorted globe that expels the unity of the sphere and instead points accursedly and triumphantly at the sky. It is a deafening reminder of oppression and liberty, a joyous exclamation of the way things were and the way they are now, and Henry finds himself playing over familiar statements, clichéd but pure, in his mind: Not in MY name; Stop the BLOODY war; Your Country Needs YOU… Each war, he figures, requires a different word to be emphasised.
The quays are getting quieter now, and the sun is beginning to sink. He checks his watch, finds it is only twenty past six, and pulls himself up from the stone steps. Hushed voices are replaced by the tranquillity of early evening birdsong and the quiet exchanges of Saturday night couples.
Descending the stairs he passes a group of six holidaymakers, four of whom are in hysterics over something Henry will never know about. This pleases him and as he strolls alongside the water, away from the accusatory eye of the museum, he becomes excited at the thought of all the conversations he will never hear - those belonging to young lovers, old friends, inspired children and world-weary adults.
He settles on a bench directly across the water from Old Trafford. He has always had an affinity with the Wharfside and now, stationed centrally between two trees, he thinks he understands why. For Henry, this place is emancipation from urban existence. It resembles, at Sovereign Point, a kind of Northern Berlin. Here one can sit and inhale the people as they move over deep red bricks, not under the Linden trees, but beneath modest, beautiful replicas that – if you angle yourself correctly – entirely mask a ghastly sign for the Outlet Mall. It is here that one can gaze upon the elegant brown glass of Quay West and know that behind them stands a run-down roundabout directing people away from a picturesque island of wealth and taste, and towards poverty-stricken council estates. It is not the division of these landscapes that fascinates him, but rather the simple evidence of their co-existence.
He is torn from fumbled contemplation by the sound of a young couple arguing. They pass by, oblivious to Henry’s mounting interest in their quarrel, and each take a defiant seat on a waterfront bench. He watches them covertly for a few seconds before they slip into secretive debate and he can no longer hear.
That’s when the thought returns. It has had a grip on him all day and, although the War Museum has altered his mood in an as yet indefinable manner, Henry knows it will not be easily disposed of: today, like hundreds of days before it, is a contradiction. Alas, it had felt that way long before he decided to make an increasingly familiar pilgrimage to Salford. He remembers now the strange, burdened walk from the Lowry to the museum, still hung-over, left foot leading right across the blue and white footbridge, dragged onwards by an incredible overwhelming energy.
Since childhood he has been utterly infatuated with, perplexed by, and guiltily voyeuristic of war. When he was thirteen, his grandfather – a proud, intelligent man, both handsome and stylish – had given him a Pandora’s Box of wartime memorabilia and, with it, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In those days, war, to Henry, meant 1939 – 1945, and everything that followed with it: hideous, alien-looking gas masks, ration books, Anderson shelters, powerful propaganda. It was then – and remains now – an entire universe of microscopic stories waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. His mind continues to oscillate between the major events and the minor significances. By the time he was sixteen he was reading books that examined the state of Europe in the early thirties and discovering, perhaps belatedly, that war does not necessarily begin and end with specific dates. Now, as he slides towards thirty, he is finally savvy enough to know that everything – every assassination, declaration, attack and conflict – is a consequence of the tiniest detail and a spellbinding occurrence unto itself.
But life can be beautiful too. He knows this by sitting here, untouched and uninterrupted, whilst the couple argues, the water rolls, and a self-obsessed world of polluted consumerism stretches out across the dockland. Regardless of its imperfections, Henry feels privileged to be a part of it - albeit from a mocking distance.
There are scores of photographers around and Henry admires every one of them. Like all beautiful places, the Quays inspire a fundamental human desire to capture the present. Some, he figures, do it purely for aestheticism; others for art. He is envious of the latter. A sensitivity to the virtues of Art has pervaded his existence since childhood (he looks at the world and experiences a private, subjective wonderment), and there is little doubt in his own mind that he can comprehend and even respond to an artist’s work. But still he cannot create it.
He first learnt this through music. At fifteen, having acquired a taste for Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton and BB King, Henry borrowed an acoustic guitar from his school’s music department and set about teaching himself to play. Just shy of fifteen years later, he is able to jam with the best of them. Sometimes, in the dusty yellow candlelight of his apartment, he catches sight of his left hand as it unconsciously frames a minor seventh, or stretches across the fretboard to conclude the resonation of some century-old blues riff, and is set alight by his ability to replicate the heartbreak, pain, misery and loss conjured up by the song’s creator – but this is as far as it ever goes.
Even as a teenager, devoid of the perilous insecurities that go hand in glove with trying to create, and in his early twenties when alcohol succeeded in temporarily liberating him from these shackles, he found it impossible to transform a love of music into inventive outbursts of his own. For six years he envisaged himself as a tortured composer: he could hear music everywhere and knew innately how its peculiar science worked, but any attempt at songwriting of his own sounded flat, diluted, troubled and uninspired.
Then he met Jenny, his first real girlfriend, and she introduced him to the music of Johnny Marr. It was unlike anything he had encountered before: sweet, subtle, melancholic notes weaving in and out of one another to form modern day concertos exploding with life. Henry turned his hand to learning these records, spellbound by the crashing cacophony of major and minor chords, and realised that by playing them he could lose himself, however briefly, in reflective sadness and swelling joy. A guitarist born only a few miles from where he is sitting now had saved his life.
Henry shifts his attention to a man of Eastern descent who is setting up a tripod. His movement as he takes aim behind the viewfinder carries a delicate professionalism, and there is grace and intelligence in the way his fingers glide and hover over the camera’s aperture controls. Henry would give anything to trade places with the photographer for a few moments, if only to see what an expert sees in that small rectangular box as he mentally divides the world into thirds and frames a shot that will transport whoever sees it in the future back to this precise point in time. He keeps his eyes fixed on the tripod, engrossed and anxious, suddenly sure that when the camera clicks it will sound like a gunshot resounding off the water. Weighted seconds pass and then –
‘I know you.’
It is not the sudden closeness of the voice that surprises Henry, but the sweet, softly spoken certainty of its tone. Only later, forced by the dying of the day to light a candle, does he recall those opening three words and understand their full importance. How different the statement might have been; how expansive and varied the connotations of the English language – ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘I recognise you’ resigned to the blacklist in favour of an honest, soulful declaration of assurance.
Henry turns to find a girl standing beside him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I know you,’ she says again. ‘From the museum. I saw you by the nuclear warhead. You looked lost.’
Henry smiles. Indeed he had felt lost, stood before a small television screen while a 1976 government film explained what to do in case of a nuclear attack; and, below, the black, slender, shark-like exterior of humanity’s most devastating scientific achievement. To look upon such a vile creature, so Henry believes, is to witness the struggle between Oppenheimer’s moral consciousness and the dark psyche of the American government.
‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ Henry starts, fumbling for the right words. ‘The bomb itself or that bullshit office-training-video excuse for a film.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the girl answers. ‘The bomb is much worse. It pretty much wins out against everything in terms of disaster, destruction, distaste…’ She trails off, steps out of the light, and takes a seat on the bench. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all,’ he replies, without thinking. Despite a natural inclination to greet confidence with a pathological shyness, and presently set somewhere between intrigue and apprehension, Henry cannot help but look at her. Without the sun obscuring her, he can make out green eyes and pink, thinly-pursed lips. She is beautiful, charged with an unconventional desirability that many would recognise but few understand.
‘So, is that the first time you’ve been?’ She asks, looking, for the first time, directly into his eyes.
‘Yes, but it definitely won’t be the last. Already I feel compelled to return.’
He considers holding back his full arsenal of feelings about the museum, partly because he does not want to erupt in flashes of hyperbolic nonsense, but mostly because he wishes to protect his own mind from dealing with the intensity of his experience inside.
‘I watched you while the show was playing,’ the girl says. ‘You passed me twice and there was a look on your face like… like you couldn’t get out.’ The girl is sincere – this much, at least, is obvious. When she speaks it is with the delightful insight of a comedy writer and not condescending self-confidence. Henry immediately likes her. He recalls entering the museum, penniless and at odds with his state of mind, convinced that beyond the gift shop, just up the darkened stairs, something illuminating lay in wait for him.
The World War 1 exhibition had been fine, and apart from a dehydrated shakiness in his limbs, Henry had floated around like all the others, distantly appalled by suicide in the trenches and lice-infected boots. It was when he arrived at the gates of the unsteady thirties – those years plagued by a gathering sense of disharmony and betrayal – that he began to withdraw. Powerlessly, unwillingly, he slipped into a world enveloped by twenty-foot black and white photographs: women from the home front stared down at him; tremendous film projections of Holocaust survivors set to a soundtrack of childish pencils scratching and scribbling words onto discoloured paper climbed the walls. A disorientating darkness prevailed and his chest grew tight. He pressed on quickly, his heart heavy, his will surrendered, shamelessly following small black arrows in the same way he had once excitedly followed former girlfriends across crowded dancefloors. Before long he had lost sight of the directions and found himself alone. Breathless and consumed by panic, he fell obliviously past windows boasting a wealth of curious artefacts, desperate to be near someone. It struck him then that he was operating on some primitive level, pre-historic in its purity, longing only for another of his species, craving nothing more than blind, unspoken belonging.
He turned a corner, the noise of the show solemn and deafening, and was confronted by an armoured tank. Totally in awe of its size, the extended gun barrel bearing down on him, all he could think about was Tiananmen Square, and that solitary figure facing down a demon similar to this one, motionless, unmovable, trapped forever in celluloid.
‘I don’t remember seeing you,’ Henry says, unevenly.
‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to.’ And then: ‘Wine?’ She fishes a glass bottle from a plastic bag Henry had not seen at first, and smiles. ‘It’s red. I can tell you’re a Communist.’
‘Thank you.’ He is unsure about which part of her statement he is replying to.
‘I’m a forward thinker.’ She says, and fiddles with the neck for a moment. ‘Screw top, see?’ And with a flourish she removes the lid. ‘No cups though, so we’ll have to have at this like a couple of winos.’
For the next minute or so nothing passes between them except for the wine. It burns pleasantly in Henry’s throat and he feels as though he ought to offer words of gratitude. Equally, it is a silence he does not wish to interrupt. He has experienced this kind of feeling before: a dizzying wave of connective awareness that occurs when you meet the gaze of a stranger on a passing bus, or catch the heavy eyes of somebody on a loveless nightclub dancefloor. There appears, in those moments, a fleeting glimpse of the self reflected in the uniqueness of another. It is comforting to have solid evidence that vulnerability is not without its virtues.
‘I’m leaving here tomorrow,’ the girl announces.
‘Leaving Manchester?’
She nods, coyly. ‘Forever.’
‘Do you feel sad to go?’
She considers this before answering. ‘Giddy. I feel giddy.’
A smile forms at the corners of her mouth and she glances at Henry very briefly as if in need of validation. She does not strike him as socially inept but he knows that those who truly are sometimes polish off the Wildean mask and become somebody else entirely. It is not easy to do, neither is it a particularly life-affirming role to play, but it does possess a reticent charm.
‘Why are you going?’ He asks, inwardly troubled by the premature loss of this curious stranger. One of the imagination’s primary beauties is its ability to race impatiently and vividly ahead of itself when it comes to other human begins. Though he cannot rationalise it yet, Henry already knows that he wants to be around her. By the time the question is out, friendship – or perhaps even a romantic relationship – is no longer a stretch of the cognitive faculties.
The girl – still nameless in his world, though it matters very little – gestures for the bottle and when it is back in her grasp she explains: ‘I made a pact with myself when I was sixteen never to live in the same place for more than two years.’ She takes a good gulp of wine, glances at the couple sitting by the water (who have given up talking in favour of a silent, passionate embrace) then continues: ‘Between you and me, I cheated. I’ve been here closer to three.’
‘This city will do that to you.’
‘And then some,’ she agrees. ‘I lived in Mile End before. Musical association aside, I couldn’t wait to get out.’
The bottle returns to Henry. He does not know how or why is here, let alone his reasons for remaining on the bench. Standard British etiquette dictates that when confronted by strangers one is to make their excuses and get as far away from them as possible, thus avoiding pity, sympathy and lengthy unwanted conversation. Today that is not the case and he feels elated to be rejecting his usual manner.
This morning he had been awoken by the sound of the Electric Light Orchestra harmonising over ‘Mr Blue Sky’, only to find that Emma had slipped into bed beside him sometime during the night. In spite of an indefinite, unromantic hiatus in their relationship, she has done this a lot over the past few weeks and Henry, constitutionally bound to believe that when the sun comes up all his love is wasted, finds it difficult to deal with. He has friends that have, in the past, continued to sleep with their lovers in the months following a supposed break-up, but it has always struck him as an unhealthy vice in which to indulge.
Not anymore.
Throughout the two and a half year tenure of their courtship Henry has become accustomed and, worse, addicted to sharing a bed with her. He enjoys the way they fit together: the tried and tested point at which their bodies meet, the curve of her breasts, an arch of the back that allows comfort and ease when they sleep. It is a synchronicity two people perfect over time and he is not yet ready to relinquish it.
How then did he come to be sitting here? He is - to his own mind - angry, ill, and ugly as sin; unapproachable to those who do not know him, aggravating to those who do. But there is something that burns within him – not the bright, illuminating spark of an artist – but something that draws human beings to him, and he to them. He both loves and hates people, and this is not based entirely on the flippancy of mood. Deep within Henry there is a contradictory soul - genetic, natural and true - that enables his feelings to fluctuate from day to day. Long ago he had believed - even longed for - it to be the building blocks of Genius; an exceptional ability to see a little further down the road, to read people in the same way he read Hemingway, Orwell and Blake. Later, when adolescence crossed the road into early adulthood, he questioned his faith, began to see it as hopeful arrogance, and contemplated instead the plausible absence of some pleasure-inducing biological reaction in the brain.
‘Where are you going to go?’ He asks, mindful of the prolonged silence.
‘Canvey Island. Then Brighton. At least I think so.’ She pauses. ‘And you? Are you going to stay here?’
Henry laughs. ‘I don’t know. Freedom is wasted on me.’ He swigs a huge amount from the bottle, a little too much to enjoy the full spectrum of flavour on his tongue, and passes the baton. She takes the wine - still nameless, still charming – and asks:
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘The museum,’ he replies. ‘How terrifying it is, and what my sort-of-is, sort-of-isn’t girlfriend would think about it all.’ His honesty surprises him.
‘And?’
‘I have no fucking idea.’ They laugh, in sync and in harmony, and it feels genuine. ‘There’s this thick grey cancerous wall of silent deception when it comes to that girl. Just when I think I understand how she works, or what we’re doing together, or whether we even are together anymore, the cloud descends and I’m screwed all over again.’
‘Sounds like the L word to me. Better to have it than to not. That’s a fact, and I should know.’ Her words are drenched in what could be sarcasm or bitterness. Either way, Henry wonders what has brought her here, to this point of existence, evidently versed in love and life, clever enough to make fun of them both. He tries to imagine the boy that broke her heart and his motivations for doing so. Was he inwardly beautiful, perhaps raised on jealousy, resentment and insecurity? Or pretty, cool and insincere? Had he been unfaithful? Did he crumble completely when she cried? Henry dismisses speculation, startled by the miserable pain he feels for a fictional infidelity.
That’s when she grabs his hand.
It is a familiar sensation: the reassuring touch of another person, made fresh by the unfamiliar softness of the girl’s flesh. At first he dares not look and, seemingly triggered by his lack of reciprocation, the girl squeezes tightly. It is everything he needs and Henry lets his palm flow into her grasp, their fingers entwined in a manner usually reserved for shy, nervous lovers. She does not know him and he knows nothing of her, but it feels right. Today the world is nothing more than a swirling contradiction and yet to be here, locked intimately into a person he may never have encountered if not for the bloody celebration of a thousand years’ conflict, is to welcome a dulling of the senses and the onset of an evening’s peace. The arbitrary nature of strange hands coming together for no reason other than to feel something injects him with a bizarre happiness.
They sit like this for a long time, not speaking or looking at one another, preferring instead to keep their eyes fixed on the diminishing glow of the Salford evening. Henry, his thoughts introverted and private, is somewhere else entirely when the girl speaks again.
‘And now you know,’ she says, turning towards him.
‘Know what?’
‘That in amongst the confusion and the dark clouds, for one day in June there was somebody else in the world that understood what you’re about.’
He takes a moment to consider this and feels her hand fall away. She downs the last of the wine, sets the bottle on the ground. He wonders if she feels light-headed now. He most certainly does, and he quickly remembers he has not eaten today.
The girl roots around in her pocket and removes a small black notepad. It strikes Henry that she is going to write down her name and telephone number, something he previously believed happened only in Hollywood.
Emma’s face does not need to spring into his mind. It has been there all along, waiting for this moment, the physical personification of his conscience.
The girl scribbles onto the first page of the book, and he can tell by the movements of her hand that she is taking time and effort to make it readable. She rips the sheet out, folds it in half and gives it to him.
‘Don’t lose it,’ she says, getting to her feet and collecting the wine bottle. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye,’ Henry says, but she is already walking away. He watches her, a little spellbound, and soon she is gone.
He does not read the note right away, happy in the knowledge that whatever it says will not match the infinite number of life-changing statements he is currently imagining.
Without her next to him things become hazy again. Alone on the bench, his mood lightened somewhat by the wine, he thinks about W.H. Auden’s immortal definition of what constitutes great art: ‘clear thinking about mixed feelings.’ This, Henry feels, is easier said than done, and very rarely do people uncover insightful truths about themselves without an element of blissful surprise.
With this in mind, he unfolds the note and reads what the girl has written. In dark pink lettering, the words:
This Day Will
Never
Happen
Again
And, beneath, a drawing of a heart.
Henry smiles, elated by the sentence’s shameless relevance, and when he stands to leave he is sure of only one thing:
He won’t let it get lost.
He removes his jacket and curses himself for wearing it at all. The air hangs heavy and warm in Salford this evening and, despite the heavenly threat of summer rain, most of the folks ambling back and forth around him are in tee-shirts.
He glances across the water and is once again cast into a tender silvery orb. It has been nearly half an hour since he stepped out of the Imperial War Museum, back into the present, but he cannot shake the feeling he is somehow trapped inside.
Even from this distance, with gently glistening water dividing them, its jagged, unconventional carcass both exhilarates and terrifies him. If the Lowry is symbolic of a deeply hidden national pride, the museum exists as a beacon of personal guilt and despair; a slanted, fragile, distorted globe that expels the unity of the sphere and instead points accursedly and triumphantly at the sky. It is a deafening reminder of oppression and liberty, a joyous exclamation of the way things were and the way they are now, and Henry finds himself playing over familiar statements, clichéd but pure, in his mind: Not in MY name; Stop the BLOODY war; Your Country Needs YOU… Each war, he figures, requires a different word to be emphasised.
The quays are getting quieter now, and the sun is beginning to sink. He checks his watch, finds it is only twenty past six, and pulls himself up from the stone steps. Hushed voices are replaced by the tranquillity of early evening birdsong and the quiet exchanges of Saturday night couples.
Descending the stairs he passes a group of six holidaymakers, four of whom are in hysterics over something Henry will never know about. This pleases him and as he strolls alongside the water, away from the accusatory eye of the museum, he becomes excited at the thought of all the conversations he will never hear - those belonging to young lovers, old friends, inspired children and world-weary adults.
He settles on a bench directly across the water from Old Trafford. He has always had an affinity with the Wharfside and now, stationed centrally between two trees, he thinks he understands why. For Henry, this place is emancipation from urban existence. It resembles, at Sovereign Point, a kind of Northern Berlin. Here one can sit and inhale the people as they move over deep red bricks, not under the Linden trees, but beneath modest, beautiful replicas that – if you angle yourself correctly – entirely mask a ghastly sign for the Outlet Mall. It is here that one can gaze upon the elegant brown glass of Quay West and know that behind them stands a run-down roundabout directing people away from a picturesque island of wealth and taste, and towards poverty-stricken council estates. It is not the division of these landscapes that fascinates him, but rather the simple evidence of their co-existence.
He is torn from fumbled contemplation by the sound of a young couple arguing. They pass by, oblivious to Henry’s mounting interest in their quarrel, and each take a defiant seat on a waterfront bench. He watches them covertly for a few seconds before they slip into secretive debate and he can no longer hear.
That’s when the thought returns. It has had a grip on him all day and, although the War Museum has altered his mood in an as yet indefinable manner, Henry knows it will not be easily disposed of: today, like hundreds of days before it, is a contradiction. Alas, it had felt that way long before he decided to make an increasingly familiar pilgrimage to Salford. He remembers now the strange, burdened walk from the Lowry to the museum, still hung-over, left foot leading right across the blue and white footbridge, dragged onwards by an incredible overwhelming energy.
Since childhood he has been utterly infatuated with, perplexed by, and guiltily voyeuristic of war. When he was thirteen, his grandfather – a proud, intelligent man, both handsome and stylish – had given him a Pandora’s Box of wartime memorabilia and, with it, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In those days, war, to Henry, meant 1939 – 1945, and everything that followed with it: hideous, alien-looking gas masks, ration books, Anderson shelters, powerful propaganda. It was then – and remains now – an entire universe of microscopic stories waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. His mind continues to oscillate between the major events and the minor significances. By the time he was sixteen he was reading books that examined the state of Europe in the early thirties and discovering, perhaps belatedly, that war does not necessarily begin and end with specific dates. Now, as he slides towards thirty, he is finally savvy enough to know that everything – every assassination, declaration, attack and conflict – is a consequence of the tiniest detail and a spellbinding occurrence unto itself.
But life can be beautiful too. He knows this by sitting here, untouched and uninterrupted, whilst the couple argues, the water rolls, and a self-obsessed world of polluted consumerism stretches out across the dockland. Regardless of its imperfections, Henry feels privileged to be a part of it - albeit from a mocking distance.
There are scores of photographers around and Henry admires every one of them. Like all beautiful places, the Quays inspire a fundamental human desire to capture the present. Some, he figures, do it purely for aestheticism; others for art. He is envious of the latter. A sensitivity to the virtues of Art has pervaded his existence since childhood (he looks at the world and experiences a private, subjective wonderment), and there is little doubt in his own mind that he can comprehend and even respond to an artist’s work. But still he cannot create it.
He first learnt this through music. At fifteen, having acquired a taste for Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton and BB King, Henry borrowed an acoustic guitar from his school’s music department and set about teaching himself to play. Just shy of fifteen years later, he is able to jam with the best of them. Sometimes, in the dusty yellow candlelight of his apartment, he catches sight of his left hand as it unconsciously frames a minor seventh, or stretches across the fretboard to conclude the resonation of some century-old blues riff, and is set alight by his ability to replicate the heartbreak, pain, misery and loss conjured up by the song’s creator – but this is as far as it ever goes.
Even as a teenager, devoid of the perilous insecurities that go hand in glove with trying to create, and in his early twenties when alcohol succeeded in temporarily liberating him from these shackles, he found it impossible to transform a love of music into inventive outbursts of his own. For six years he envisaged himself as a tortured composer: he could hear music everywhere and knew innately how its peculiar science worked, but any attempt at songwriting of his own sounded flat, diluted, troubled and uninspired.
Then he met Jenny, his first real girlfriend, and she introduced him to the music of Johnny Marr. It was unlike anything he had encountered before: sweet, subtle, melancholic notes weaving in and out of one another to form modern day concertos exploding with life. Henry turned his hand to learning these records, spellbound by the crashing cacophony of major and minor chords, and realised that by playing them he could lose himself, however briefly, in reflective sadness and swelling joy. A guitarist born only a few miles from where he is sitting now had saved his life.
Henry shifts his attention to a man of Eastern descent who is setting up a tripod. His movement as he takes aim behind the viewfinder carries a delicate professionalism, and there is grace and intelligence in the way his fingers glide and hover over the camera’s aperture controls. Henry would give anything to trade places with the photographer for a few moments, if only to see what an expert sees in that small rectangular box as he mentally divides the world into thirds and frames a shot that will transport whoever sees it in the future back to this precise point in time. He keeps his eyes fixed on the tripod, engrossed and anxious, suddenly sure that when the camera clicks it will sound like a gunshot resounding off the water. Weighted seconds pass and then –
‘I know you.’
It is not the sudden closeness of the voice that surprises Henry, but the sweet, softly spoken certainty of its tone. Only later, forced by the dying of the day to light a candle, does he recall those opening three words and understand their full importance. How different the statement might have been; how expansive and varied the connotations of the English language – ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘I recognise you’ resigned to the blacklist in favour of an honest, soulful declaration of assurance.
Henry turns to find a girl standing beside him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I know you,’ she says again. ‘From the museum. I saw you by the nuclear warhead. You looked lost.’
Henry smiles. Indeed he had felt lost, stood before a small television screen while a 1976 government film explained what to do in case of a nuclear attack; and, below, the black, slender, shark-like exterior of humanity’s most devastating scientific achievement. To look upon such a vile creature, so Henry believes, is to witness the struggle between Oppenheimer’s moral consciousness and the dark psyche of the American government.
‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ Henry starts, fumbling for the right words. ‘The bomb itself or that bullshit office-training-video excuse for a film.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the girl answers. ‘The bomb is much worse. It pretty much wins out against everything in terms of disaster, destruction, distaste…’ She trails off, steps out of the light, and takes a seat on the bench. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all,’ he replies, without thinking. Despite a natural inclination to greet confidence with a pathological shyness, and presently set somewhere between intrigue and apprehension, Henry cannot help but look at her. Without the sun obscuring her, he can make out green eyes and pink, thinly-pursed lips. She is beautiful, charged with an unconventional desirability that many would recognise but few understand.
‘So, is that the first time you’ve been?’ She asks, looking, for the first time, directly into his eyes.
‘Yes, but it definitely won’t be the last. Already I feel compelled to return.’
He considers holding back his full arsenal of feelings about the museum, partly because he does not want to erupt in flashes of hyperbolic nonsense, but mostly because he wishes to protect his own mind from dealing with the intensity of his experience inside.
‘I watched you while the show was playing,’ the girl says. ‘You passed me twice and there was a look on your face like… like you couldn’t get out.’ The girl is sincere – this much, at least, is obvious. When she speaks it is with the delightful insight of a comedy writer and not condescending self-confidence. Henry immediately likes her. He recalls entering the museum, penniless and at odds with his state of mind, convinced that beyond the gift shop, just up the darkened stairs, something illuminating lay in wait for him.
The World War 1 exhibition had been fine, and apart from a dehydrated shakiness in his limbs, Henry had floated around like all the others, distantly appalled by suicide in the trenches and lice-infected boots. It was when he arrived at the gates of the unsteady thirties – those years plagued by a gathering sense of disharmony and betrayal – that he began to withdraw. Powerlessly, unwillingly, he slipped into a world enveloped by twenty-foot black and white photographs: women from the home front stared down at him; tremendous film projections of Holocaust survivors set to a soundtrack of childish pencils scratching and scribbling words onto discoloured paper climbed the walls. A disorientating darkness prevailed and his chest grew tight. He pressed on quickly, his heart heavy, his will surrendered, shamelessly following small black arrows in the same way he had once excitedly followed former girlfriends across crowded dancefloors. Before long he had lost sight of the directions and found himself alone. Breathless and consumed by panic, he fell obliviously past windows boasting a wealth of curious artefacts, desperate to be near someone. It struck him then that he was operating on some primitive level, pre-historic in its purity, longing only for another of his species, craving nothing more than blind, unspoken belonging.
He turned a corner, the noise of the show solemn and deafening, and was confronted by an armoured tank. Totally in awe of its size, the extended gun barrel bearing down on him, all he could think about was Tiananmen Square, and that solitary figure facing down a demon similar to this one, motionless, unmovable, trapped forever in celluloid.
‘I don’t remember seeing you,’ Henry says, unevenly.
‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to.’ And then: ‘Wine?’ She fishes a glass bottle from a plastic bag Henry had not seen at first, and smiles. ‘It’s red. I can tell you’re a Communist.’
‘Thank you.’ He is unsure about which part of her statement he is replying to.
‘I’m a forward thinker.’ She says, and fiddles with the neck for a moment. ‘Screw top, see?’ And with a flourish she removes the lid. ‘No cups though, so we’ll have to have at this like a couple of winos.’
For the next minute or so nothing passes between them except for the wine. It burns pleasantly in Henry’s throat and he feels as though he ought to offer words of gratitude. Equally, it is a silence he does not wish to interrupt. He has experienced this kind of feeling before: a dizzying wave of connective awareness that occurs when you meet the gaze of a stranger on a passing bus, or catch the heavy eyes of somebody on a loveless nightclub dancefloor. There appears, in those moments, a fleeting glimpse of the self reflected in the uniqueness of another. It is comforting to have solid evidence that vulnerability is not without its virtues.
‘I’m leaving here tomorrow,’ the girl announces.
‘Leaving Manchester?’
She nods, coyly. ‘Forever.’
‘Do you feel sad to go?’
She considers this before answering. ‘Giddy. I feel giddy.’
A smile forms at the corners of her mouth and she glances at Henry very briefly as if in need of validation. She does not strike him as socially inept but he knows that those who truly are sometimes polish off the Wildean mask and become somebody else entirely. It is not easy to do, neither is it a particularly life-affirming role to play, but it does possess a reticent charm.
‘Why are you going?’ He asks, inwardly troubled by the premature loss of this curious stranger. One of the imagination’s primary beauties is its ability to race impatiently and vividly ahead of itself when it comes to other human begins. Though he cannot rationalise it yet, Henry already knows that he wants to be around her. By the time the question is out, friendship – or perhaps even a romantic relationship – is no longer a stretch of the cognitive faculties.
The girl – still nameless in his world, though it matters very little – gestures for the bottle and when it is back in her grasp she explains: ‘I made a pact with myself when I was sixteen never to live in the same place for more than two years.’ She takes a good gulp of wine, glances at the couple sitting by the water (who have given up talking in favour of a silent, passionate embrace) then continues: ‘Between you and me, I cheated. I’ve been here closer to three.’
‘This city will do that to you.’
‘And then some,’ she agrees. ‘I lived in Mile End before. Musical association aside, I couldn’t wait to get out.’
The bottle returns to Henry. He does not know how or why is here, let alone his reasons for remaining on the bench. Standard British etiquette dictates that when confronted by strangers one is to make their excuses and get as far away from them as possible, thus avoiding pity, sympathy and lengthy unwanted conversation. Today that is not the case and he feels elated to be rejecting his usual manner.
This morning he had been awoken by the sound of the Electric Light Orchestra harmonising over ‘Mr Blue Sky’, only to find that Emma had slipped into bed beside him sometime during the night. In spite of an indefinite, unromantic hiatus in their relationship, she has done this a lot over the past few weeks and Henry, constitutionally bound to believe that when the sun comes up all his love is wasted, finds it difficult to deal with. He has friends that have, in the past, continued to sleep with their lovers in the months following a supposed break-up, but it has always struck him as an unhealthy vice in which to indulge.
Not anymore.
Throughout the two and a half year tenure of their courtship Henry has become accustomed and, worse, addicted to sharing a bed with her. He enjoys the way they fit together: the tried and tested point at which their bodies meet, the curve of her breasts, an arch of the back that allows comfort and ease when they sleep. It is a synchronicity two people perfect over time and he is not yet ready to relinquish it.
How then did he come to be sitting here? He is - to his own mind - angry, ill, and ugly as sin; unapproachable to those who do not know him, aggravating to those who do. But there is something that burns within him – not the bright, illuminating spark of an artist – but something that draws human beings to him, and he to them. He both loves and hates people, and this is not based entirely on the flippancy of mood. Deep within Henry there is a contradictory soul - genetic, natural and true - that enables his feelings to fluctuate from day to day. Long ago he had believed - even longed for - it to be the building blocks of Genius; an exceptional ability to see a little further down the road, to read people in the same way he read Hemingway, Orwell and Blake. Later, when adolescence crossed the road into early adulthood, he questioned his faith, began to see it as hopeful arrogance, and contemplated instead the plausible absence of some pleasure-inducing biological reaction in the brain.
‘Where are you going to go?’ He asks, mindful of the prolonged silence.
‘Canvey Island. Then Brighton. At least I think so.’ She pauses. ‘And you? Are you going to stay here?’
Henry laughs. ‘I don’t know. Freedom is wasted on me.’ He swigs a huge amount from the bottle, a little too much to enjoy the full spectrum of flavour on his tongue, and passes the baton. She takes the wine - still nameless, still charming – and asks:
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘The museum,’ he replies. ‘How terrifying it is, and what my sort-of-is, sort-of-isn’t girlfriend would think about it all.’ His honesty surprises him.
‘And?’
‘I have no fucking idea.’ They laugh, in sync and in harmony, and it feels genuine. ‘There’s this thick grey cancerous wall of silent deception when it comes to that girl. Just when I think I understand how she works, or what we’re doing together, or whether we even are together anymore, the cloud descends and I’m screwed all over again.’
‘Sounds like the L word to me. Better to have it than to not. That’s a fact, and I should know.’ Her words are drenched in what could be sarcasm or bitterness. Either way, Henry wonders what has brought her here, to this point of existence, evidently versed in love and life, clever enough to make fun of them both. He tries to imagine the boy that broke her heart and his motivations for doing so. Was he inwardly beautiful, perhaps raised on jealousy, resentment and insecurity? Or pretty, cool and insincere? Had he been unfaithful? Did he crumble completely when she cried? Henry dismisses speculation, startled by the miserable pain he feels for a fictional infidelity.
That’s when she grabs his hand.
It is a familiar sensation: the reassuring touch of another person, made fresh by the unfamiliar softness of the girl’s flesh. At first he dares not look and, seemingly triggered by his lack of reciprocation, the girl squeezes tightly. It is everything he needs and Henry lets his palm flow into her grasp, their fingers entwined in a manner usually reserved for shy, nervous lovers. She does not know him and he knows nothing of her, but it feels right. Today the world is nothing more than a swirling contradiction and yet to be here, locked intimately into a person he may never have encountered if not for the bloody celebration of a thousand years’ conflict, is to welcome a dulling of the senses and the onset of an evening’s peace. The arbitrary nature of strange hands coming together for no reason other than to feel something injects him with a bizarre happiness.
They sit like this for a long time, not speaking or looking at one another, preferring instead to keep their eyes fixed on the diminishing glow of the Salford evening. Henry, his thoughts introverted and private, is somewhere else entirely when the girl speaks again.
‘And now you know,’ she says, turning towards him.
‘Know what?’
‘That in amongst the confusion and the dark clouds, for one day in June there was somebody else in the world that understood what you’re about.’
He takes a moment to consider this and feels her hand fall away. She downs the last of the wine, sets the bottle on the ground. He wonders if she feels light-headed now. He most certainly does, and he quickly remembers he has not eaten today.
The girl roots around in her pocket and removes a small black notepad. It strikes Henry that she is going to write down her name and telephone number, something he previously believed happened only in Hollywood.
Emma’s face does not need to spring into his mind. It has been there all along, waiting for this moment, the physical personification of his conscience.
The girl scribbles onto the first page of the book, and he can tell by the movements of her hand that she is taking time and effort to make it readable. She rips the sheet out, folds it in half and gives it to him.
‘Don’t lose it,’ she says, getting to her feet and collecting the wine bottle. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye,’ Henry says, but she is already walking away. He watches her, a little spellbound, and soon she is gone.
He does not read the note right away, happy in the knowledge that whatever it says will not match the infinite number of life-changing statements he is currently imagining.
Without her next to him things become hazy again. Alone on the bench, his mood lightened somewhat by the wine, he thinks about W.H. Auden’s immortal definition of what constitutes great art: ‘clear thinking about mixed feelings.’ This, Henry feels, is easier said than done, and very rarely do people uncover insightful truths about themselves without an element of blissful surprise.
With this in mind, he unfolds the note and reads what the girl has written. In dark pink lettering, the words:
This Day Will
Never
Happen
Again
And, beneath, a drawing of a heart.
Henry smiles, elated by the sentence’s shameless relevance, and when he stands to leave he is sure of only one thing:
He won’t let it get lost.
(Tim Woodall, 9th June, Manchester, 2008)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)