Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Shouldn’t you at least take his blood pressure, Doctor?’ Val tried. ‘He’s talking about seeing flashing lights and all when he has one of his heads.’

  ‘I suppose that would be sensible. All right, roll up your right sleeve, Mr Stone.’

  ‘No!’ said Mike. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my blood. It’s Nordic.’

  Dr Sharma laughed.

  ‘Shut up, you Paki cunt,’ said Mike.

  Dr Sharma stopped laughing.

  ‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said.

  ‘What’d you do that for?’ Val asked when they were outside.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Well – it’s rubbish, isn’t it love; ’s all crap.’

  And he started to do his pavement-clearing strut, with her tagging along behind. Places to go, people to scare. Mike likes people, in a certain kind of a way. He certainly doesn’t like being alone, and he has arranged their lives so they hardly ever are. The top two floors of this block of the Park Estate are BM territory, acknowledged, and the flat is constantly full, evenings and weekends, with Mike’s crew of junior skins and the girls who hang around them, and the older hard men of the Leader Guard like himself. (Though none of the others are quite as old as Mike.) It’s rare that she has a moment to herself, like now, laying out the white squares of the bread to butter for round after round of sandwiches, wrestling open tin after tin of the corned beef they got for virtually nothing when the cash and carry closed. The little keys that you use to wind the cans open do their best to break off, with the slab of red meat and yellow fat inside only half-released. She could turn the radio on, but it isn’t worth the bellow of indignation from the bedroom if the song playing isn’t one Mike approves of. Instead as she works she watches a seagull diving and soaring in the spaces between the tops of the towers, as if the buildings, and the grid of lock-up garages and shopping precinct down below, and then the whole bumpy carpet of London beyond, were only unimportant blanks surrounding its true element.

  Twenty rounds of sandwiches done, ten more to go. Who’d have thought that national socialism demanded so many sandwiches? So much sewing, too. As well as Mike’s street clothes, which obviously have to be perfect, she had to make his Leader Guard uniform from scratch. There aren’t enough members of the white race’s vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the armband, to improvise the Sam Browne belt. When she and Mike went to that horrible Birthday do, and the wives looked at each other – all dogs, all with the same bleak sourness she sees in the mirror every morning – she saw that the uniforms were all slightly different. And he can’t even wear the thing otherwise. He got photographed in it for his membership card, and now it hangs in the wardrobe in a dry-cleaning bag.

  Twenty-nine, thirty: and as she finishes the sandwiches and starts wrapping them up in greaseproof, her little moment of solitude ends too. She hears the whine and clank of the lift, and then the knock on the flat door. It’s Mr Brocklehurst, with his golf club tie and his megaphone.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Mike!’ he says. ‘Is Himself available? Ha ha?’

  ‘Bit of a late night last night,’ says Val automatically. ‘I’ll just give him a knock, shall I. Cup of tea while you’re waiting?’

  ‘That would be splendid.’

  She bangs on the bedroom door and puts the kettle back on. While it reboils she can hear the sounds of Mike putting himself together. Brocklehurst lingers awkwardly. He comes here to pet his tigers, and he has no idea what to say to her. She can’t stand him. She can’t stand Mike’s deference to him, as if he represented something grand and serious, instead of a few middle-class weirdos and a cocktail cabinet full of daggers and helmets. It’s been a long time since she took any of it seriously, but at least when Mike talks about it it’s got something to do with … loyalty; with being proud of who they are and where they come from. You can usually rely on Mike’s bright-clean hatred for social workers, lawyers, probation officers, teachers: posh tossers and rich bastards of all descriptions, who were already offensive to him, already stank in his nostrils, before he decided they were race traitors as well. Alone among posh tossers who have had prolonged solo exposure to Mike, Mr Brocklehurst has not gone down in a welter of blood and teeth, and sometimes Val is slightly sorry.

  ‘What a marvellous spread,’ he says, looking at the mountain of sandwiches. ‘Heavens, how well you do do for us, Mrs Mike.’

  Do for us. As if she was a char-lady. She hands him the tea silently. He sips it, though it must be still hot enough to scald.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Home-making. The hearth. What it’s all about in the end, isn’t it.’

  ‘Is it?’ she says. If he thinks this place is homely he must be blind. Everything here is scuffed and trampled by the ceaseless traffic of big male boots. A knackered sofa faces a knackered telly across a knackered carpet. There’s a permanent smell of sweat. It’s like a barracks or a boys’ club, not a home. ‘D’you have kids, Mr Brocklehurst?’ She knows he doesn’t.

  ‘I’m afraid not, no. Never lucky enough to find the right girl!’

  Yeah, just you alone with your collection of Iron Crosses.

  A shadow appears on Mr Brocklehurst’s face, as if he fears he has dropped some terrible clanger.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear from Mike that you two can’t have children,’ he offers, shuffling his feet. ‘Terribly sad. And such a loss to the race, you know, he being the splendid specimen that he is.’

  Oh. Oh, is that what Mike told you? She supposes it’s not surprising he’s come up with something along these lines, but it would have been nice to be let in on it. The truth is that the female anatomy makes Mike go all to pieces. It unmans him, which is not a sensation he likes. So on the rare occasions when anything does happen between them, it tends to feature his dick and her mouth; and it’s true, you can’t get pregnant that way. The thought of explaining this to Mr Brocklehurst puts a sour little smirk on Val’s face. He takes a nervous half-step back. That’s a common reaction. Mike may not want her, but she is his, and terror of him puts an exclusion zone around her. She is not to be upset or offended, she is not to be touched.

  But then, to Mr Brocklehurst’s relief, the bedroom door opens. The noises in there have been rising: the getting-up noises, the gargling noises, the dunking-of-the-head-in-the-basin noises, the shaking-the-wet-head-like-a-dog noises, the towelling noises, the noises of clothes coming off hangers. The humming. And now here he is, here’s Mike risen from the couch of sleep, in Levi’s and green bomber jacket, grinning and momentarily posing in the doorframe, for the pleasure of all onlookers. A few blinks are the only sign of the head-in-a-vice ache he’s overriding. It’s a triumph of the will. And the familiar, ancient dread tightens its knot in Val’s stomach. When Mike gets up, the clock of the day is wound, and now it will tick on till the day ends; and the day will only end when Mike has had enough. Enough of a laugh. Enough aggro. Enough confrontation. Enough of other people bending to the force in him. Enough bruising and breaking. All day long, she’ll be asking Is this enough yet? Is this?

  Now the flow of people has begun, it keeps going, and the flat fills rapidly up with what feels like most of the skins in Bexford, the hard-core BM ones and the larger number of casuals who are into the style as a style, into the tribe for the sake of having a tribe. For them, as far as she can see, the swastikas and the Sieg-Heiling are mostly a matter of having a laugh and winding people up. Yeah, if there’s a ruck then tribal loyalty will do its thing and they’ll fight as Mike’s army. But he wouldn’t ever pick them for the vicious small-group stuff, the night-wandering in search of enemies to do serious damage to. That privilege will not be theirs; and as a result most of them stand a pretty good chance of growing up and growing out of being a skin – ending up as men very much like their dads, s
haking their heads over a pint at thirty about the crazy stuff they used to get up to. For that matter, even the hard core may get over all this, luck and prison and broken bones permitting. Even Peaky and Taff, maybe, Mike’s faithful wingmen and wannabes. They’ve got time to change in. They aren’t twenty yet. There was a time when she thought the years might work a transformation on Mike. The usual transformation, from bad lad to man with responsibilities. But Mike won’t let himself be changed. Or can’t. She knows that now.

  Once the number of skins in a confined space exceeds a certain density, they start to collide. The sofa is full of bodies already. A lad holding a mug of tea adds himself by sitting on the back of it and then just letting himself fall into the press as if it were a mosh pit, moonface beaming as he goes, tea slopping, everyone’s elbows going.

  ‘Watch out, the arms’ll break,’ says Val, unheard by anyone but Mike.

  ‘Oi!’ he roars. ‘Listen when the missus talks!’

  And he lessens the pressure on the sofa end by lifting a size-10 immaculately laced sixteen-hole oxblood DM and booting the last two in the row off onto the floor, jovially but not gently. They sprawl there, and with the pressure released, Moonface with the mug does a complete back somersault, tea flying like a twisted brown scarf, and ends up on the floor too, on top of the mug, which shatters. You can tell that the hard ceramic punch under the ribs must have hurt – it’s one of the oddities of shaving a male head that it sometimes lets the little boy show through more clearly in a face – but he’s up in an instant, grinning. Mike looks away. Enough? Not even close. She fetches a dustpan and clears away the bits of china, one of the boys trying to help until distracted by being put in a headlock by his mates. So far as they think of her at all, she can see a familiar confusion on their faces. What is she, this silent woman of Mike’s? She’s not a girl, and she’s not a mum either: mums do not let you behave like this indoors.

  But the small kerfuffle on the sofa has served as a signal to get going, and so bumping, jostling, spreading as they go out into the hallway like a gas expanding, they set off. Mr Brocklehurst and his megaphone and his leaflets and two Union Jacks on broom handles go down in the lift; the rest go whooping down ten flights of stairs. She’s in the rearguard, as ever, walking down with the carrier bags of food and the small contingent of girlfriends. (Not a category that includes Fat Marge, who’s been to borstal. She’s an honorary boy.) Being a skin is such a male style that there isn’t really a look for the girls to conform to, as such, except for the compulsory truculence. A couple of them are doing a version of the boys’ style, but braces and tits don’t combine well, and one has got a spiky blonde fringe above massively mascara’d panda eyes – a pretty little thing, that one, only about fifteen, and every time Val looks at her she thinks, What the fuck are you doing here, love?

  First stop is the market. On Saturdays it’s in the long slot between Lambert Street and Talbot Road, a double row of stalls between the gas showroom and St Saviour’s. A lot of the streets around have vanished, ploughed under in the making of the Park Estate, but in here Bexford still looks pretty much the way Val can always remember it looking, changed detail by detail rather than being wiped away wholesale. And maybe Brocklehurst has thought about that – or maybe they’ve just gone where the people are – because when the mob of them have pushed their way onto the war memorial steps, and they’ve got Brocklehurst set up between the flags, glaring heads all around his blue blazer, what comes reedily out of the loudhailer, and floats across the stalls selling veg, and the stall piled with acrylic jumpers, and the one doing socks and clock radios, is:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, do you even recognise the place you come from, these days? The place you were born? Look around you. Look around you. They’re taking it away from you – from you, madam, from you, sir. From all of us!’

  And people do turn their heads. But the white shoppers don’t look poison at the West Indian and Sikh ones as they’re supposed to do. They cluck their tongues and bob their heads and hunch their shoulders and shrink back without actually moving: all body language saying, stop it and leave us alone. And on the dark faces there’s a stonier refusal to react, though people are also picking a path through the market crowd that keeps them quietly away from the memorial steps. Val, nodding at whatever the girl next to her is saying and not listening to a word, sees a woman her own age two stalls away, buying plantains. (Which they didn’t use to sell on Bexford market, it’s true.) Her face is the colour of a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, she’s wearing a plaid raincoat, and her hand is on the shoulder of a little boy of about four who is too young to do stoicism, whose face flickers with fear behind the piles of green bananas. The hand is holding him steady. The back of the hand rubs against his cheek. It looks as if it belongs there very comfortably. Shame and envy, envy and shame, flow wearily in Val, and for a moment, yes, kindle to something like the spark of anger Brocklehurst wants her to feel, for why should they have what she lacks, and have it here, in front of her, in her place? But she goes on watching them till they’re out of sight behind backs.

  The only person who does react is the punk boy selling Socialist Worker over by South Thames Gas’s window full of cookers. He threads around the back of the market to the phone box and makes a call, and a little later, while Mr Brocklehurst is explaining that the closure of the docks is down to unfair competition from ‘the coloured countries’, the opposition stroll in. Not so much a counter-demo as a counter-mob, in their donkey jackets and ANL badges, wearing boots just as big as the skins’, and with expressions Val finds extremely familiar. She glances at Mike and, yeah, sees the same eagerness, mirrored. This is the fun stuff, this is what they’re there for, not Brocklehurst’s speech. A metal shutter goes down on the shoe shop by St Saviour’s; the nearest stall holders start to pack their stock away.

  But before the tooth-baring grins and the pointing fingers and the rest of the male fighting display can wind itself up to actual blows, an elderly drunk comes wandering into the space between, at the foot of the steps. Skinny, with several days of white stubble, wearing an ancient none-too-clean suit, and clearly with several pints in him from the Feathers (open early on market day).

  ‘Get out the way, Grandad, you’ll get hurt,’ says one of the lads in the front row of the antis, impatiently.

  The drunk dismisses him with a vague fluttering hand over his shoulder, and points a finger of his own at the skinheads.

  ‘You,’ he says slushily – he hasn’t got the teeth for the consonants – ‘should be fakkin ashamed of yourselves. Standing here—’

  ‘Come on, move it,’ says the anti.

  ‘Yeah, fuck off now,’ agrees Mike. ‘We’re busy.’

  ‘—standing here,’ the drunk goes on regardless, ‘wearing that. That!’ He’s pointing to Peaky’s swastika. ‘When all the men who’s’ve got their names on that wall behind you, they fakkin died to keep you safe from that, that … evil thing, you little prick.’

  ‘That’s enough, now,’ says the anti, again. But the one next to him, a curly-haired lecturer type who carefully took off his glasses as he stepped up, though he’s holding a plank, is smiling now. He thinks this bit of accidental street theatre is good politics.

  ‘No, let him have his say. Go on, mate; you tell ’em.’

  ‘I don’t need your fakkin permission,’ says the drunk, who in his own way is just as belligerent as all the other men there. ‘Where was I?’ he adds, less impressively.

  ‘I expect you was just about to tell us you was in the fucking desert with Monty,’ says Peaky.

  ‘No, I wasn’t, you cheeky little sod. I was in an AA battery on Blackheath, trying to shoot down aer-o-planes that had that on the fakkin side of them. And watching London burn. So if you don’t like it here, you know what you should do? You should complain, right, to your friends in the fakkin Luftwaffe who blew all the fakkin holes in it. Right?’

  ‘Look, sir,’ says Mr Brocklehurst unwisely, ‘no one is ungrateful
for your service. The European war was a tragic conflict, in many ways, egged on by international finance—’

  ‘Fakk off,’ says the drunk. ‘I’m not talking to you. Who are you? A ponce in a tie.’ At this, Peaky and several of the younger skins smile helplessly. ‘No! No! Don’t you grin at me! You’ve got nothing to fakkin grin about. It’s you I’m talking to. You are fakkin from here, and them names behind you are your dads’, and your grandads’, and your fakkin uncles’, and you know what you are doing, with this Narzy nonsense? You are fakkin spitting on them. And you should be ashamed.’

  He’s almost crying, the easy tears of drunkenness, and everyone is embarrassed.

  ‘Right,’ says Mike quietly, ‘if you don’t move out the way, you poxy old pisshead, I am going to break your fucking spine.’

  But the police have arrived by this time, a minibus full of the busies who come pushing into the stand-off with truncheons out. They aren’t always necessarily unfriendly to the BM and the National Fronters, or averse to putting the boot in themselves. The big march in Lewisham earlier in the year essentially turned into a gigantic three-sided punch-up, skins and anti-fascists and the boys in blue all whaling away on each other. Here and now, though, in front of this audience of shoppers and called out by one of the shopkeepers or maybe the vicar of St Saviour’s, they are the blue full stop to what both sides were looking forward to. Mike’s army withdraws, muttering. Val checks Mike’s face, and sees the disappointment she expects. Is that enough? No!

  And his luck doesn’t seem to improve as the day goes on. Mr Brocklehurst goes back to Surbiton in his Hillman Hunter. Then it drizzles on the rest of them in Bexford Park as they eat the sandwiches, a damping that takes the fun from the game of claiming territory and scaring the black families out of the adventure playground. Veils of wet blow slowly over the slide and the merry-go-round. Fat Marge knees Taff in the balls harder than she meant, and he goes limping off home. Then the girlfriends, getting loudly bored, manage to detach some of the younger casuals, and they go off to do what you can do in a bus shelter with a bottle of Mac Market cider whatever the weather, despite the lure of the footie to come. And then it turns out the match isn’t much of a lure anyway. Mike doesn’t believe in women on the terraces, so he parks Val in a caff outside the Den along with one of the older hard men’s wives: Jeanie, who in fact Val works with in the furniture shop in the precinct below the Park towers. Mike found her the job, of course. He likes her to be where someone he knows can keep an eye on her. Weekday or weekend, they don’t have a lot to say to each other. Val hasn’t got the currency of family chat to pay into conversation. Now they smoke and drink deep-brown teas and cock an ear to the sound coming out of the Den; and when the men come back, the pissed-off look on Mike’s face has only deepened, because the game was an easy 2–0 victory for the Lions against Bournemouth, and maddeningly good-tempered throughout, because who can be fucked to hate bloody Bournemouth. Enough? Fuck off.