By this time Val is praying quietly for him to find someone to thump. Please, please, please. Something soon, and something not too bad. The evening looks promising: they’re going to a gig up in Camden, a skin-friendly band of white boys making skin-friendly music. (Which means ska; which means Jamaican music; which means the hated nig-nogs are also somehow on the twisted quiet being loved, at least for their capacity to produce Prince Buster and Byron Lee and the Skatalites. It didn’t do to think too hard about this.) An expedition up to alien NW1, loads of strangers, a pint or three: surely there’s scope there to get Mike safely satisfied.
On the Tube going north they occupy the end carriage of the train. Peaky and the lads ensure that no one else gets into it by standing arms outspread at the opening doors at every station, and grinning. Mike seems subdued, though. He doesn’t even join in when they spot a possible pooftah on the down escalator at Camden Town while they’re all riding up to the surface. The others go leaping and stomping downward to try to cut the target off – he gets away before they reach the bottom – but Mike only stands there, staring at his feet, his jaw grinding. ‘Is your head still hurting, love?’ she asks. ‘No!’ he says vehemently, as if it’s a betrayal by her to even ask.
A pint helps. The second pint helps even more. And when they go into the Electric Ballroom he’s almost jaunty. There’s so many skins in there, BM skins and NF skins and casuals, from every point of the London compass, that it’s like a gathering of the clans. Boots and braces, pork-pie hats and Fred Perry shirts and crombies as far as the eye can see, and the stage lighting gleaming on hundreds of naked male heads, surging and shifting together like white crumbs, or like the beans in baked beans. (‘There you go, skinheads on a raft,’ Val says to Mike when she makes him beans on toast for tea. It makes him smile every time.) They’re all the same, or nearly all the same, and it’s good-humoured. There’s a certain amount of shoving and showing-out going on – the Bexford boys move onto the floor like a phalanx, with Mike at its tip, but the inevitable collisions are happy ones, as if everyone on all sides is on their honour not to care when they go sprawling. It’s a Home stand with no Away stand, it’s an Us with no Them to hate, and it seems to make the big-kids aspect of being a skin come to the fore, as if the whole venue (barring a few exceptions like Val, parked against a fire extinguisher on the back wall) is filled with man-sized nine-year-old boys, having a laugh. In the flow and crush of the crowd she glimpses Mike from time to time, skanking with his shirt off, beautiful in motion as ever, and for once almost innocent in his pleasure at carving a clean line through the world. Maybe, for once, this might be enough. Maybe an actual good time, with no broken skin, will send the beast to bed content?
But then the support act comes on, and it turns out they’ve got a black singer, which will have been a fine thing on the 2-Tone tour round the country the headline band were on just now: but it goes down like the proverbial cup of cold sick with this audience. Suddenly aggro is back on the menu. They won’t let them play. They roar, they boo, they bellow, they throw cans and bottles. The support band retreat, and the lead singer of the evening’s big draw, the head Nutty Boy himself, comes out to the mike to reason with the crowd.
‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘give ’em a chance, yeah? They’re great.’ And then when that doesn’t work, ‘Come on! I know you’re better than this.’ And then when that doesn’t work, he visibly loses his temper. Other members of the band come out and have a try. ‘You’re here for fun, not politics, aren’cha?’ says the one who dances about down the front in shades with his chest out. ‘Well, we’re not playing till they do,’ says the saxophonist in the end: and that does it, that causes a groan to run through the whole crowd; and splits it, and reveals that if you subtract the casuals and all the skinheads who really do care most about the music, there isn’t anything like a majority in the place for a firm Nazi no. Val can see Mike’s head turning from side to side as he discovers he isn’t there with a band of pure-bred brothers after all. The openers come back on, and this time the protests are small enough to ignore, this time when the first song kicks off most people politely dance, and the bassline drowns the rest.
Mike isn’t dancing. He’s standing there, scowling at the stage. He goes on not-dancing when the main set finally begins and the place goes crazy to the rising saxophone wail at the beginning of ‘One Step Beyond’. Now he’s on the outside of the tidal pleasure that’s lifting the crowd. Now he’s just part of a sour little refusal, a Sieg-Heiling sprinkle of holdouts, an outcast from shared joy.
And when the set’s done, the lead singer, lathered up with sweat and with the elation of being joy’s conductor, looks at the island of Hitler salutes, and sneers. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘I can see what you are. I’ve got eyes, haven’t I?’ It’s contempt in his voice, loud and plain.
What’s worse, when they’re leaving, when they’re all draining back out onto Camden High Street, it becomes clear that the split in the crowd is reproduced within the troop from Bexford. Most of the lads had a great time. Mike’s fury is a minority fury. Whatever their usual deference to him, just now they don’t want to hear about how crap it was, not when they’re buzzing, they’re laughing, they’re clomping off into the Tube station. They’re fooling about. They’re fooling about and being twenty. They’re ready to run down the escalator three steps at a time. ‘Cheer up!’ they say. ‘We’ll see yer tomorrow!’ Amazingly fast, there’s just her, Mike and Peaky left.
‘Never mind, love,’ she says, carefully.
He ignores her.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s not that late. I think we’ll go for a little walk’ – and he and Peaky exchange glances.
This is not a part of his life she has ever been taken along on, or ever wanted to be. The dread in her stomach clutches tighter.
‘P’raps I better go home,’ she says.
‘On your own? Nah,’ says Mike.
So she has to follow, picking along behind the bulk of them in the orange sodium lights. It’s busy, this unknown region of North London, with punters in the kebab shops and the minicab offices, the blue flashing lights of panda cars going by, and a different mix of human beings from the one down at home. Too many of them, considering it’s only Mike and Peaky. They turn off into a side street, and suddenly there’s nobody around at all, seemingly, just parked cars bumper to bumper, and tall prosperous-looking houses with thick curtains tightly drawn. Also no good for prey. But up at the end there’s a little concrete car park, a kind of baby multi-storey with only two levels, and somebody is in there. There’s a car down on the lower level with its inside lights on and its bonnet open. Someone is trying the engine and getting nothing but clicks and wheezes from the starter.
‘Problem, mate?’ asks Mike from the top of the ramp, and the marooned driver looks up. It’s a mild-faced, big-eyed, studenty-looking young Indian bloke, all on his own, and smiling uncertainly, for Mike is a skinhead, but Mike sounds friendly, genial. Something warm is stirring in his voice, and Val knows what it is.
‘Just a little bit of engine trouble, sir,’ says the student, and his voice is Indian-Indian, not London-Indian. Perhaps he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be afraid of.
‘Well, let’s have a look, then,’ says Mike. ‘Perhaps we can sort you out.’
Peaky giggles, but Mike is straight-faced. There was in fact a time last year on the way to Brighton when a family with a breakdown were sent on their way by a suddenly helpful carful of skins, ‘compliments of the British Movement’, Mike having seen on the telly where the Hell’s Angels sometimes did that in America, and liking the way it induced first fear and then relief. But that family was white. And that was Mike having a good day.
Down the ramp they go: concrete pillars and concrete floor and concrete ceiling, all stained shadowy orange. Mike and Peaky pretend to look under the bonnet, leaving her for just an instant alone with the student. (Peter Iqbal, she will discover he was called, at the trial.)
Run, she mouths at him. But he goggles at her politely, and doesn’t get it.
‘Aha!’ says Mike. ‘There’s your problem. In there – no, there, mate – right at the back – look—’
And then the bonnet slamming down on the boy’s head, and the kicking beginning, and Peter Iqbal hauled up against a pillar so Mike can work on him with his fists, and with every punch Val thinking Is that enough? Is that? and Peter Iqbal’s face a whimpering mess and Peaky having a go and Peter Iqbal falling down again and more kicking and the noises the kicks make getting more liquid and Peaky getting tired and being ready to stop and Val thinking Please God let that be enough and Mike stepping back and Mike’s face still working with an undischarged petulance and Mike stepping back in and starting to stamp on him and Peaky saying ‘Er – mate?’ and Mike not stopping and Peaky looking at her and Val swallowing and saying ‘That’s enough now’ and trying to grab his arm and Mike who has never once hit her throwing her off and Val bouncing off the Cortina next along and falling on the concrete and seeing under the car Mike’s boot coming down and down on Peter Iqbal’s head and Peter Iqbal’s head not being the right shape any more and blue lights coming too late too late and enough enough enough, that’s enough.
t + 50: 1994
Ben
The soft brown hill of Marsha’s shoulder is the first thing Ben sees when he wakes up. All he sees, in fact. He’s been sleeping tucked in so close behind her that his forehead is against her neck, and the skin of her back spreads as wide as a field, as wide as a map, when he comes blinking up to consciousness. He’s seeing it from so close to, it isn’t quite in focus. It is a deep caramel blur, stippled with the rose of freckles and the occasional dot of darker purple-black, which at the edge of his vision firms into the clarity of pores, fine down, tiny wrinkles, unrolling away from him around the cushiony curve of her shoulder blade, and seeming as inexhaustible as a real hill, a whole landscape he could browse across, kiss across, pore by pore, brown millimetre by brown millimetre. Blood warms it; it swells and shrinks minutely as Marsha breathes; it belongs to someone, is part of someone who, improbably, wonderfully, loves him. It is not it. It is her. It is all her. He lies in a glowing envelope that radiates from her, as if she is so full of life that it doesn’t stop at the literal edges of her but spreads around her, into the sheets, into the pillows, into the cave made by the quilt. She would say that they are keeping each other warm, but to Ben it is a kindness of hers, a gift she is giving and he is receiving. She smells of shampoo and last night’s supper.
He lifts his head to look, and though she stirs on the pillow, sleep still has her. She’s still within the fraying cocoon of the night, and does not know her mouth half-opens, half-closes; that she grimaces, a tiny bit, and rubs her lips on the blue cotton as if digging gently in it. In the day she is a talker, a doer, a person in motion, whose face shows constant quick laughter, quick irritation, quick bossiness. Only now can he admire her slowed, vague, languorous, with little impulses moving in her round face that come to nothing, but buffer back into stillness before they can expand into real expressions: the outward and visible sign that, within, the kaleidoscope of dream is shifting and sliding the panes of memory against each other, in combinations too strange and fleeting to call out definite reactions. She knows now (a knowledge made all out of ambiguous texture) what she will forget when she awakens. There is far more of her than there’s ever time to reckon with in the businesslike daylight. Marsha Adebisi Simpson is in the depths of Marsha Adebisi Simpson. But she is surfacing, getting closer to the light, drawn up, lured up, by Ben’s fingers.
He strokes her temple, where the wiry edge of her hair smooths away. She mutters. He draws the line on her scalp between two cornrows. She mumbles. He hunkers down, and addresses himself seriously to her beautiful back. With four fingertips he makes four parallel lines, slow as he can, dragging feather-light down from her right shoulder onto her shoulder blade, trying to move so that he makes only the faintest shivering trail in the down on her skin, teasing the envelope of her warmth. Then he does it again in exactly the same place, with his fingernails gently scratching, denting four paths southward, southward, southward.
‘Mm,’ she says.
And having scrived on her skin with this faint, faint harshness, this gentle abrasion, he turns back to softness again, and traces the profile of her side with a feather-finger that sets little shivers going. Down the soft skin under her arm, across the padding of her ribs, into the dimple of her waist (not a girl’s narrow waist but an honest middle-aged one) and up again around the flaring curve of her hip, and (getting to the end of his reach) onto the long roundness of her thigh. A soft touch and then a gentle scratch, soft and then a scratch. It’s as if he’s colouring her in, under the quilt, with a pencil that glides and shades and another one that etches and points. He’s making graphite love to her, or so it feels, 2B love and HB love. Only he’s not making her up, she’s really there. All those swelling riches, really being discovered. And astonishing all over again.
‘Mmm,’ she says, with much more emphasis, a waking person’s emphasis, and presses back against him. Ben stretches round and outlines her mouth with his artistic finger. Her lips have ridges on them like a brazil nut’s shell, if you look closely, but much much softer.
‘Hello,’ she says.
‘Hello,’ says Ben.
‘Who’s that?’ says Marsha.
‘Ben?’ he says, suddenly freezing.
She sighs a bit, and nibbles his hand. Then she reaches an arm back in turn, a strong and unambiguous arm, and holds him against her.
‘I know that, foolish man, lovely man,’ she says. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘Oh,’ says Ben.
‘Oh,’ says Marsha.
‘Ah,’ says Marsha.
‘Mmm,’ says Marsha.
‘Oh!’ says Marsha.
‘Oh!’ says Ben.
Among the things Ben didn’t know, until these last few years, Marsha having not till then taken him in hand and given him the chance to find out, was how after making love with your wife on a sunny Sunday morning in May, and going downstairs to put the kettle on, you find yourself wobbling, almost tottering, on the stairs. So much tension has been taken out of him, it’s as if his limbs have been almost unstrung. At elbows shoulders hips knees ankles, the strings are loose. Teetering across the spotless tiles of the hall, he feels like a young foal making its first parley with gravity, not the grizzled fifty-five-year-old he sees crossing the mirror. In the kitchen, it’s all bright. Marsha’s passion for cleanliness in the café gets even more so at home. The white blaze coming through the blind above the sink gleams on every surface. There are no grimy corners or lost spots where old envelopes or unmatched earrings gather dust. Everything is lifted and briskly scrubbed beneath, every day. You could lick the counter under the food processor or the coffee percolator and it wouldn’t taste of anything but fresh bleach. All the cups, all the plates, all the cutlery match. The sound of the water coming to the boil adds a terribly soothing music to Ben’s state of discombobulated comfort, and he props himself on the countertop while he fetches down tea things for the tray, in case he dissolves altogether into a puddle of happiness.
Under the circumstances, it seems entirely safe to make this the moment when he checks the floor of his mind for cracks, as he makes himself do at some point, explicitly, every morning. And it is. He stamps, internally, and nothing gives, nothing threatens, nothing cracks or creaks. It’s a crystal pavement inside him, metres thick. He is not afraid. He is not afraid. It sometimes seems to him that he is losing the ability to be as grateful for this as he should be. He doesn’t want to take it for granted. Surely he should be actively glad, positively and consciously jubilant, over such an enormous deliverance? But as the fear has faded, so in proportion has his sense of how far he has come, how much has changed in his soul’s weather. He could only really feel the measure of the change by being back as he was before: the last thing he needs or wants
. Now and again, now, he catches himself shaking his head over his past self as if that man were someone else, someone mysterious. How could he have wasted the whole of his twenties and thirties, and much of his forties, on fear? And fear of what, exactly? It had something to do with … bones; but he can say the word now, in his mind, without the reverberations of dread it used to have. So it leaves him puzzled, and sad, and, yes, a touch exasperated, to think of the two wretched solitary decades on the buses, and their thousands of desperately stoned evenings.
The kettle boils. He pours the water on the teabags, mashes them, slings them neatly in the right bin, adds milk; takes his pill and puts the bottle back in the cupboard. Then upstairs again. No toast because Marsha doesn’t approve of crumbs in bed. His joints seem to be reknitting. He rises up to the landing as if propelled by a friendly gust of well-being, and when he comes through the door and finds Marsha sitting up with her riches on display, he feels a wild urge to frisbee the tray into the corner, jump back between the sheets, and do it (and her) all over again. The Hercules of Bexford!
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