When I’m surfing, I look at fake movie trailers and those Indian singers with subtitles, and stuff that makes me laugh. I just use it for stuff that makes me laugh. I’m not even allowed to be online for that long. I get limited hours in the week. I’m not a person who does bad things anywhere – not even online, which is where everybody thinks they’ll get away with it.
Nothing that happened can change that.
And I don’t feel bad when I think about the Thursday when we were all heading home. It was this Thursday when there was this woman over on the other side of the street – opposite the main entrance to the school – and she could have been anybody, anybody’s mum, until she started screaming.
I think I guessed then that she had something to do with Dobby. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because she was weird, or because the screaming made her look like her daughter.
After a while Mr Carlyle and Mr Porteous came out because of the noise and they didn’t quite touch her, but they got very close on either side of her.
Then the woman – Dobby’s mum – hit them. She hit Mr Porteous and then he held her arm and she started crying. They walked with her towards some man, just some guy from in the street, and they all got her in their arms and she was fighting them – all these people trying to help, I suppose. After that I didn’t see anything else, because we were all told to go away.
I wasn’t staring.
I wasn’t enjoying it.
I didn’t know for sure that the woman was Dobby’s mum.
It was nothing to do with us.
She only said it was – yelled at us and said it was our fault. She was blaming us for something, because she was upset and there wasn’t anything else that she could do.
That’s the truth.
She was blaming us for stuff we didn’t mean to do.
We wouldn’t have wanted a bad thing to happen to Dobby. Anything bad was Dobby’s choice.
People said that.
I agree with them.
And it’s all finished now, but it still upsets me.
“I have long been an admirer of the human rights legislation and declarations that arose after the terrible events of World War II. They represent some of the finest and most generous products of human imagination. I was delighted when I heard that Amnesty was putting together an anthology based on enshrined and essential human rights – rights which are now under threat for us all as they may never have been since WWII. I based my story on Article 39 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is easy for children to be victims and to find no support, or even to be blamed for the effects of their own suffering and victimized again for seeming strange.” A.L. Kennedy
BARLEY WINE
Kevin Brooks
Imagine a reflection in the silver convexity of a convenience-store mirror. That’s me – or something of me – in a long black coat and rain-darkened hair, making it winter in Victoria a lifetime ago.
Imagine it’s late.
The pubs have closed. Late-night cars ride the puddled street. A tired breeze sighs across the rooftops scattering rainwater in the gutters, and the starless sky is low and dull. The chemical glow of streetlights has reduced the night to little more than a second-rate day.
Inside the convenience store, Day-Glo stars advertise lonesome goods – Beans! Bread! Milk! Pies! Beer! – and the cramped aisles are stacked with things you might not even know you need: firelighters, salt, pens, playing cards, toilet rolls, combs, laces, shoe polish. There’s a perspex rack for car magazines and girly magazines, cardboard boxes of crisps on the floor, sweet potatoes loose in trays. Sitting on a high stool by the stockroom door is a white-haired old man mumbling through the Koran, while at the front of the store his daughter works the till. If you watch her carefully you’ll see how she pilots the counter with a natural indifference, as if the cigarettes and alcohol that surround her don’t actually exist. And even if they do exist, they’re nothing more to her than packets and bottles and cans. Although she’s a fair distance away, you can see her quite clearly. You can see the delicate lines of her face, her unblemished skin, the gloss of her long dark hair shining soberly in the fluorescent light. And on the wall behind her you can see a pink bikini girl pouting from a salted-peanut display.
There is no god but God.
That’s me, though, in the mirror, looking down at the cheese and cold pies. The curve of the glass has given my figure the distended look of a nightmare – shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, face loomed in back-of-spoon distortion – like something from the underworld. What I know – my wisdom – is that the big refrigerator is the place to look when you’re drunk and hungry, when you need some cheese or a cold pie.
It’s a question of faith.
What I’m thinking is, I could ask the old man about it. I could turn to him and say, “Excuse me, mister … hey, mister…” but I doubt if he’d want to talk to me. Why the hell should he? He has his own concerns. You can tell that by the way he’s sitting. And, anyway, what am I to him? An Englishman at the refrigerator, a customer, a potential thief. A profit or a loss. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Whatever it says in his book, it’s got nothing to do with me. So let’s forget about him and take a look in the refrigerator.
What have we got? Sausage rolls, pasties, pies, Scotch eggs, packs of meat, all kinds of things. And just along from the pies and stuff there’s a tray full of cheeses. Most of them don’t have much appeal, they’re just pale yellow slabs wrapped in clingfilm, but the piece of Edam is different. It stands out. Look at it, it’s like a red-rimmed wedge of golden sun in a frosty winter sky. Now you might think that’s rather fanciful – and you might be right – but don’t forget it’s late at night and I’m drunk-hungry. No doubt it would all look different in the cold light of day. But for now the sun’s made of cheese and I’m shuffling over to get a better look at it, pretending to check the price, and I’m simultaneously picturing myself walking back through the rain, peeling back the waxy skin and taking a good fat bite…
A gust of wind rattles the shop window and brings me back to now.
There are things to consider. Things to do.
Take another look in the mirror. The aisles are empty. Wet bootprints track the linoleum floor and a smell of heat hums from a vent on the wall. Over by the door the old man is still holding the Koran in his white-smocked lap, his head bowed as he reads with an arthritic finger. His hands are dark and moley, his lips fluttering silently in search of Paradise. At the till his daughter is swiping a debit card and wrapping a bottle of Thunderbird in a sheet of green tissue paper.
Zina.
I think she might be called Zina.
You can see by the way she wraps the bottle that she knows it’s a waste of time. She might as well just screw the tissue paper into a ball and throw it into the gutter herself, cut out the middle man.
The middle man in this case is a sad-eyed drunk in a rain-sodden cheap beige suit.
The shop door tings when he leaves.
And Zina looks up and catches my eye in the mirror. I know she can read my thoughts. Her eyes are blank to hide her desires, but I know it. She can read my thoughts. And I think to myself, wait a minute. Just wait a minute. Listen, Zina. Listen to me. Let’s say we’re somewhere else, like a nice quiet room somewhere, just you and me. A room that smells of flowers and spices. You wouldn’t have to say anything, just listen to me. All I want to do is to tell you what it’s like. You see, I’m not a bad person, just a little drunk right now. I don’t know what you think about that, you know, what with your religion and everything, but listen, let me tell you what it’s like for me.
And then I tell her.
I tell her how I arrived in London about a month ago, with my battered blue suitcase, my coat, my fur gloves and my anxious hat. How the short walk from Victoria station to the hostel was never going to be long enough, no matter how many times I stopped to rearrange things. How the weight of the suitcase ached in my arm as I shuffled up the broad length o
f Buckingham Palace Road towards the address that was written on the back of a folded envelope in my pocket. It was a hostel, that’s all I knew about it. A place for civil young men with reasonably good jobs but nowhere to live. I got a letter telling me I could stay there. I didn’t even think about it. I just went.
And then I tell her how I stopped by Elizabeth Bridge to rest my arms and smoke a cigarette. London raced and hummed its big city blues all around me and I knew already that I was nothing to it. Do you know what I mean? I was invisible. I watched the cars and buses and black taxis and thought it was like something in a film.
Meanwhile a pavement artist was kneeling on the ground near by, scraping coloured chalks into a concrete myth of curly-maned lions and magic trees. With his dirty old coat and his long hair flapping in the wind, he looked something like a maddened king. Every now and then a passer-by would lob a small coin into an upturned cloth cap, but he didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t say thanks or anything, just carried on drawing. I watched him for a while then finished my cigarette and moved on.
In the weeks to come I’d pass him every day, and it didn’t take long to realize that curly-maned lions and magic trees was all he could do. The same picture every day, meticulously chalked into the pavement only to be scuffed out by pedestrians or washed away in the rain of night. He didn’t care, though, that was his job.
As I’m telling her all this, I’m checking in the mirror to gauge Zina’s reaction, and what she’s doing right now is reading a magazine. She looks bored. Scanning a page, licking a finger, turning the page … scanning a page, licking a finger, turning the page…
But I know she can hear me. And I’m thinking to myself, this is OK, don’t stop now – tell her about the hostel.
And I tell her it’s a big old four-storey town house just off Belgrave Road, near Victoria Coach Station. A world of broad streets, pillars and railings, plane trees and gated squares. A world that’s out of place and out of time, where bearded gentlemen in top hats should be hailing horse-drawn carriages or shooing away street urchins with a swish of their brass-topped canes. And there I am, look, standing on the front steps of this big old house, sweating in the cold city wind, gazing up at the high walls of whitewashed brick and black windows, scared to death. It never struck me then that I had a choice, and I don’t suppose I did. You see, I always knew I’d get there in the end.
Then I take Zina inside with me on that very first day and I show her the miles of polished wood staircases and halls and hard floors that echo to the sound of footsteps and voices. And I let her smell the viscid stink of disinfectant and homesickness that clings indelibly to everything. Put your hand there, I tell her, placing her hand on my chest. Feel that? That dull wooden thump is the beat of my heart.
Do you want to know what I’m thinking? I ask her. All I’m thinking is, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this – going up to a partitioned window in the hallway, telling the stern grey woman behind the sliding glass panel my name. The badge on her nylon dress says: Supervisor. I sign some papers and she passes me a key.
“Four-oh-seven,” she says. “Fourth floor, end of the corridor. There’s four to a room, no food, no drink, no visitors in your room. Breakfast between seven and eight, evening meal at six. Laundry in the basement, TV room down the corridor.”
At the end of each corridor there’s a toilet and a place for washing and shaving, a row of chipped sinks and mirrors. That’s where we stand in line in the mornings, farting, laughing, shaving with cold razors, defining ourselves through the degradation of shared ablutions.
It steels me. Do you understand what I’m saying? It steels me.
Up the stairs to Room 407, take a look inside. This is where I live. It smells bad. Imagine how it was on the day I arrived. Opening the door, not knowing who or what was inside … opening the door to the most spiritless room in the world. There was no one there, the room was empty, just four beds and four cupboards and a window. Three bedside cabinets showed signs of occupation so I guessed the fourth must be mine, the bed nearest the door. One cream pillow and a slate-grey blanket. Imagine that. I sat on the bed and stared at the wall. It was early evening, around five or six o’clock. Every few minutes the silence of the room was punctuated by footsteps on the stairs outside. Voices, laughter, jostling. Residents coming in from work, residents going out. Each time the sounds approached, my heart raced in anticipation. What were my roommates like? What would they think of me? What should I say? What should I do? I felt empty and numb. I hadn’t eaten all day, but the thought of food made me feel sick. I didn’t know what to do. So I just sat there studying the sparse belongings of my unknown roommates. Alarm clocks, a tie, an erotic paperback thriller, a copper bracelet, a packet of mints, cotton wool, a pair of boots, a tube of something … other people’s things.
After a while I went downstairs and found the communal TV room on the ground floor. It was dark inside, lit only by the flicker of a large TV screen at the far end. Chairs were ranged across the room, but the dozen or so occupants were concentrated down at the front, right up close to the TV. Their heads turned to look me over as I opened the door. I nodded – all right? – then found a chair at the back and sat down. The TV boys watched me settle then turned their attention back to the screen. I don’t remember what was on, probably London Tonight, or a quiz or something. Nothing remarkable. The colours were all wrong, too much red; it was like watching TV in a Chinese takeaway. I pretended to watch for about twenty minutes, then left and went back to my room.
Sometime later I was kneeling on the floor, unpacking my suitcase, when the door opened and a flabby fellow came in.
“Oh,” he said, surprised.
“Sorry,” I said, moving the suitcase to let him pass.
He was wearing pyjamas and a green cardigan and he had a towel draped over his shoulder. The way he walked reminded me of a sick old man – a kind of flat-footed, weary shuffle. He lay on his bed and watched me with idle indifference. He seemed harmless enough.
“When did you get here?” he asked eventually.
“About an hour ago.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything else. From the corner of my eye I could see that he was cleaning his fingernails with a small penknife. I finished unpacking, closed the cupboard doors and slid the empty suitcase under the bed.
“What’s it like here?” I asked.
He smiled blankly and shrugged. “It’s all right.”
I found out later that he bathes every day because he has something wrong with his glands. Apparently it’s a rare hereditary defect that makes his skin smell of uncooked meat. Not that it matters, given the overall stink of the place. The reason it smells so bad in this room is a man called Jackson, a squat young Scot with a stone-cold face. What he does, when he gets in from work, he strips half-naked and stands in front of the mirror lifting dirty great weights, grunting and straining and stinking the place full of sweat. And when he’s done, he doesn’t wash. He just peels off his jockstrap and drops it on the floor then pulls on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and goes out drinking until two in the morning when he lurches back into the room, drunk as a pig, and pisses in the wastepaper bin in the corner of the room. It’s a terrible wet metallic sound. I lie there, pretending I’m asleep, listening to him emptying his bladder and cursing at the dark – “Fookin bassa whassa fook up w’yse ya fooka…”
And I think to myself, then and now – is this how it’s meant to be?
I look up at the mirror and see that Zina is serving a customer. As she reaches behind her for a packet of cigarettes, her pale-blue T-shirt rides up, revealing a two-inch film of bare skin. The man buying the cigarettes stares, then looks away as she turns and puts the packet on the counter. I wait for Zina to give him his change, watch him go, then tell her some more.
I tell her I work in a tall building in Horseferry Road about fifteen minutes’ walk away. That I sit all day at a desk in an L-shaped office not knowing what the hell I’m s
upposed to be doing. That in my desk drawers are a mug, a box of tea bags and a tin of powdered milk. I hate powdered milk. I have a telephone, too, but whenever it rings it’s always for someone else. Every hour or so I go down to the hot-water urn at the end of the corridor to make another cup of tea. The tea tastes sick and dusty. At lunchtime I buy a thin cheese roll from the cafe across the road and sit on a wall watching the winos beg for wine money. Sometimes, when I can’t avoid it, I’ll go for a drink with the boys from the office, Dave or Sham, or Dave and Sham. They don’t often talk to me at work, but once in a while they’ll invite me out for a drink, and it’s hard to say no. Dave has long curly hair like a prog rock star and he wears a denim jacket over his suit. Music is his thing. He likes to talk about music – groups, concerts, records.
“Yeah,” I say to him. “Yeah, uh-huh, right, yeah…”
It does the trick.
Sham, I think, is a family man. He has nice white, even teeth, wears a navy-blue double-breasted blazer with gold buttons, and drinks very slowly. A pint will last him an hour.
In the afternoons I go to meetings. There’ll be a handful of people sitting at a long table looking at reports and tables and graphs and computer printouts, and they’ll all be talking, offering opinions, suggestions, ideas. I can never work it out. I have no idea what any of it means. I look out of the window and watch the birds.
After work, when I’m walking back to the hostel through the greyed height and breadth of Victoria, I feel so small that it frightens me. I could walk for ever and never get anywhere. I’m afraid to stop in case I disappear. When I get back, I eat alone in the hostel canteen. Some kind of meal – soup, a main course, a bowl of sponge pudding or something – and then more bloody tea from another bloody urn, surrounded by the clatter of plates and cutlery and the chatter of communal dining. After eating, and after scraping the plate scraps into a bin and self-consciously exiting the canteen, I go up to the pub near the coach station. It’s a long, narrow place with lots of tables so there’s always plenty of room. Most of the other drinkers are bone-tired travellers who’ve spent all day on a National Express coach from Leeds or Newcastle or wherever, and all they want to do is sit somewhere warm and get drunk. There are no regulars hogging the bar stools, no one I feel obliged to nod to when I go in. No one knows me. I can just sit there on my own, drinking, smoking, watching people, thinking. I think about the same things every night – I’m not staying in this place. I can do what I want. I’m young. I can choose. There are other places, other things, other lives. There’s got to be more than this. You only live once. I’m all there is. I know it. I know things. I’m not stupid. I could go home. If I wanted to. I could go home. Couldn’t I?
Here I Stand Page 17