by Simon Ings
In a silence so total it is almost comical, you stand and walk to the door. For some reason you are the only one in motion. No one else thinks to follow you and investigate the sound. This, apparently, is your moment, though you would feel more the man of the hour were you able to walk in a straight line. Your early start this morning (did today really start in the West Riding?), a few mouthfuls of lager and those ridiculous work boots of yours have robbed your legs of their power; you might be tottering from a sickbed.
The door isn’t nearly as heavy as its thick varnish and bottle-glass panels suggest: when you pull it towards you, you practically hit yourself with it. The roadside air, though far from fresh, washes over you like water. You don’t have to go far to identify the source of the commotion. Bent over the pavement, his hat gone, his thin hair disarrayed, Wilkes dribbles blood into the gutter.
You catch him by the shoulders and ease him away from the road where the traffic is barrelling by. He has his hands over his face. You take hold of his arms to steady him and his hands come away. His nose is half-off, his left cheek horseshoed by neat triangular punctures. His chickie must have attacked him. He sinks to the pavement, his feet stuck out wide, like a toddler lost in a mall, and pats spastically at his jacket. He finds his cigarettes. The lighter’s in the packet but his fingers are bloody, the flint wheel will not catch. You bend down to help him. He kicks at you like a child.
You ask him: ‘Do you want me to call someone?’ Where is his chickie? Where has it gone? How long will it last, scampering back and forth across these busy roads?
Wilkes is still struggling with the lighter. You force it away from him and snatch the cigarette packet from his lap and stay out the way of his drumming feet while you light him a fag. He won’t even take it when you offer it to him. Some punters from the pub have joined you now. You throw the lit cigarette in the gutter, hand the pack and the lighter to the barman – one of the barmen, seriously, they must be twins – and, heading south, you take City Road back to the Barbican, trying very hard not to let the misery in.
Shit. He pronounced your houses shit.
You look about you. Yes, shit by any measure, though they might still be thought well of in the West Riding. You wish very much that you were home already, back in the valley, back in your father’s house, feet dangling off the end of your little truckle bed and freezing in the cold air. And, come to think of it, why not return tonight?
There is a sleeper service. If you’re not sticking around in town you could afford the ticket for that. Is there anything in the flat so very precious that you really need to fetch it? For a second, you pause, and the foot-traffic of City Road barges about you: secretaries and clerks are tottering sore-eyed from a day’s work in the Bund; shop assistants stride along in determined pursuit of happy hours.
Thinking to leave it all behind, you look around for a bus stop. Then you remember James’s picture in its frame. That’s a problem. You can’t leave that behind, can you? And once you are walking again, a dozen other vital articles spring to mind, things you simply cannot do without, though you’ve managed perfectly well without them for months.
You take a meandering route back to the flat, hoping to clear your head a little after this haywire afternoon. City Road is the line along which original London abuts the Bund. It is the civil boundary beyond which Bundist land purchases cease. The contrast between the two halves of the city – the unaccommodated West and the Bundist East – is stark. It is as though the city has been divided by war, rather than by the conscientious and passionate avoidance of it.
The border between old and new is clear, but it is not brutal. Finsbury Circus, which happens to lie on the Bundist side of the road, is hardly changed. Quality will out, and nothing has been allowed to interfere with the lines of Edwin Lutyens’ Britannic House. There is still a ring of limes around the park, though otherwise the planting is much improved, and the Bund have introduced lemurs to play about its stand of preternaturally matured baobab. Office workers sprawl exhausted on blue lawns, watching as the lemurs chase each other through the branches. Sometimes a lemur comes to ground, steals someone’s phone, settles on a high branch to study its blank screen, disappointed, then drops it in fright the moment it rings.
You sidle through the crowd waiting to enter Moorgate Tube Station. These are unaccommodated workers who have spent the day working in the Bund. Serving coffee. Sweeping offices. Operating phones and reception desks. They are quiet and slow to move, each nursing the mild headache induced by hours spent on the Bundist side. Many unaccommodated men and women work in the Bund. The pay is good, though the jobs are menial. The Bundists’ treatment of their unaccommodated guest workers is always civil, and when you slip up, or seize up, or panic (it’s inevitable, sooner or later), passers-by are kind, though some of them sigh a little. Where is it you are trying to get to? What is it you are trying to do? Here, let me open this for you. Come over here. Have a sit down. Can I get you some water? Is there anyone I can call?
You turn right along London Wall. Where the Barbican estate overtops the road, making a tunnel, you turn right again on Wood Street, past maisonettes above green-painted garages, and left, into the estate by Saint Giles.
A scrabbling sound to your left startles you. You see a concrete spiral stair near a sign for ‘Gilbert Bridge’. Over the top of the curved pebble-dash wall, you catch a glimpse of something grey. A pork pie hat. Whoever is wearing it is no taller than a child, but (trust me on this) it moves much more quickly.
Slowly, cautiously, you take the stairs up to podium level. There is no one about, just a view across the ponds, and the maisonettes on the far side of the rectangle are half-hidden behind the foliage spilling from planters and window boxes.
Behind you, you hear a door click shut. You turn. Nothing moves. A few yards away there’s the entrance to a stairwell. You go over to the door. It’s locked, and access is gained by typing a code into a stainless-steel keypad. The code has not changed since you lived here. You pull the door open, take the stairs back down to street level, and in the crawl space under the last flight of stairs you find me crouching, clutching Wilkes’s pork pie hat in my nailless hands.
I stare back at you with blind-black eyes, giving nothing away.
You’re waiting for me to move, but you’ll never win that game. I can outstare suns. Slowly, carefully, you pull the corn dolly from your trouser pocket and hunker down, so that you are on a level with me.
I have shed my skirt of silver grass and my spangled bolero shirt, but there is still that black leather collar round my neck. You would help me take it off, but you are afraid to approach. The mess I made of Wilkes’s face is not something you’re going to find easy to forget.
You speak to me as to a dog of unsure temperament: ‘How did you get in here?’
Because you told me the code for the door. Dummy. I lick my teeth at you.
‘Hmm?’
Impasse.
‘Here.’ You hold the dolly out to me. ‘You like this?’
I lean forward a little, sniffing. I’ll play along.
‘You like it?’
I lean back into the shadows and nictitating membranes flash sideways over my black eyes. I paw the hat closer to myself, hiding my groin.
‘Was he a bad man? Was the man bad to you?’
I take the hat from my groin, straighten it out and place it at a jaunty angle on my head.
So that is that. What are you going to do? You mull the options. The council exterminator is just a call away.
Carefully, so as not to startle me (as if!), you stand. You go to the door, palm the green exit button to unlock it and push it open. ‘Out you go, little one.’
I hunker further into my corner.
‘Come on, now.’
I draw the whole business out for an age – I need you to think that I’m frightened – but as I sidle past, I can’t resist tugging the corner of my new hat in salute. Courtesy ought to beget courtesy. You laugh.
Wearily, you cast about, getting your bearings. Orientating yourself is surprisingly hard; you don’t normally approach the flat from this direction. You finally settle on a route that leads you around Speed Garden. It’s not direct, but it’s dusk now and you want to catch the last of the light. The corn dolly is still in your hand, or what’s left of it; you look for a bin, but when you get back to the flat the dolly is still in your hand.
Standing at the door, fishing for your keys, it occurs to you that maybe you should knock first. What if Fel’s removal men have arrived? What if Fel is here?
Oh, to hell with the whole situation! Savagely, you wrestle the key into the lock.
There’s no one inside.
Unlacing your boots takes the usual age, then you head into the bedroom. You can barely keep your eyes open. You figure that if you steal a nap, you’ll wake up just in time to buy something to eat at a convenience store. But if you sleep on, does it matter? This day has gone on too long already.
You’ll at least leave the blinds open. You take off your trousers and dump them in a heap in front of the wardrobe. The duvet is folded, without a cover, at the foot of the bed. You pull it up over yourself as you lie down. You close your eyes.
Wilkes’s ruined face looms at you behind your eyelids. The shock of finding him bleeding on the pavement, never mind your potentially risky confrontation with the chickie just now, has left you trembling. You turn over, away from the window, willing on oblivion.
* * *
When you came off the moors behind Jim and his friends, you could still smell the smoke. It was in your clothes and stuck to your skin. You ran sooted hands through your hair and wished you could get away with shaving your head, the way Jim shaved his. You wanted, above all things, to be like your brother. It’s why you lit the match in the first place. It’s why you torched my nest.
* * *
You sit up in the half-light, confused.
A warm-milk smell is rising in the room.
You turn the pillow over to its cool side and something falls off the end of the bed onto the floor. You look over the edge. It is the corn dolly. You should get up and throw it away once and for all, but the kitchen bin has no liner, remember; anyway, you are far too tired.
You close your eyes, letting the smell rise and set around you. A fresh smell. Flour and milk and heat and sugar. You imagine afternoons with Fel. Cooking with her, listening to music with her, listening to her play. You imagine her warmth against yours in the night. As you drift off, you are dimly aware of your tears, and your hand, as if of its own volition, moves to cradle your erection.
* * *
You wanted to be like Jim in every way. You wanted to be a soldier like him. You wanted to leave home with him when his furlough ended. You didn’t want to be left in the valley with your maundering dad, your fading mum.
At the point where the path made its first, marked descent off the moors, Jim and his friends broke into a whooping run. They had forgotten about you. You paused a second, glancing back. The smoke rising from your fire was white at last. You figured that it had gone out, that it was just smouldering. Satisfied, you turned on the path and scampered after your brother and his friends.
Jim’s brothers-in-arms were gone the next day and Jim himself returned to his regiment at the weekend. Left on your own, you told yourself you would explore the moors, dig for treasure, practise the physical exercises James’s friends had taught you – their lunges and presses and thrusts – and intersperse these activities with long, punishing runs. That way, you would be in training. That way, even as you remained where you were, you would be beginning your escape. But, what with one thing and another, you did not set foot on the moors again that summer.
Jim came home for Christmas. On Boxing Day Betty, feeling as well as she would ever feel again, suggested a walk up the valley to the pub at Heptonstall. You begged her not to tire herself. You grew insistent. Bob, shying away from confrontation as usual, weighed in on your side, so that your mum never did climb the valley, but sat listening to the radio all day long, fidgeting and disappointed.
Jim came home again, but only briefly, the following summer. He asked you if you wanted to take a walk with him over the moors and you said no. Jim asked you why not, and you had no answer. He asked you what the matter was. You looked at him, quite blank: wrong? There was nothing wrong. You just didn’t want to.
‘I’ll buy you a pint in Heptonstall,’ he said.
‘You can buy me a pint here,’ you said.
‘If we’re staying here, then you’re buying.’
‘All right,’ you said.
Over your second pint, you asked him: ‘When do you think Mum will come home?’
Shortly after Christmas she had decamped to her sister’s in Islington, north London. There were treatments there she could not get locally. You had begun to wonder whether she was, after all, dying.
Jim finished his beer. ‘Honestly? I don’t think she’s coming home. I think she prefers it in the Smoke. Can you blame her?’
Naturally you blamed her. She was your mother and she had deserted you. Whatever was wrong with her, however serious it was, she had no business using it as an excuse to avoid you.
Another Christmas. Betty was still away at Stella’s.
‘Dad, when is Mum coming home?’
Bob told you to dubbin your boots. Tomorrow you and he and Jim and Billy Marsden and his new girlfriend were going for a Boxing Day tramp about the moors.
Somehow you contrived to stay at home.
Come Easter, your dad found your walking boots under the stairs and they were in a terrible state, all dry and cracking; you hadn’t been up on the moors for over a year. Did your boots even fit you any more? They did not. And so it went on. Until at last you matriculated and it was time for you to leave for London: an exhibition scholar, bound for the Bartlett School of Architecture!
‘Can’t keep him out of his books,’ Bob used to say to strangers, his voice always more puzzled than proud. ‘Can hardly get him out of the house, this one.’
It was true. Since burning my nest, you had found yourself unwilling to return to the moors. It was as if, beyond a certain altitude, all the oxygen left your lungs. You spent your days indoors, inventing playgrounds of your own with pencil and ruler and protractor. You grew monomaniacal. You grew proficient. The people you thought of as friends at school began to laugh at you, began to shun you, but you did not care. You built and built. And such a fortress you raised around yourself! Palaces of tracing paper. Moat-loads of Indian ink.
You weren’t much to look at when you left for London. Pasty, fat, stooped, white as a sheet. You looked self-buried. But what a fuss everyone made! Betty came back for a week or two to help get you ready. At night you had to lie there listening to her and Bob arguing.
To you she said, ‘We’ll be living in the same city soon!’
You managed a thin smile. Her friendliness was coming far too late. You’d needed her here, at home. You’d needed her to be your mum. Now that you were leaving, you did not need her any more. She was just one more part of the past you wanted to put behind you.
It took weeks to get you ready: days spent in and out of shops and the barber’s and rail stations and council offices in Halifax, in Bradford, and once as far as Leeds, all to outfit you for London. From up on the moors, on top of the barrow where once I had worked away with flint and wooden shovel, preparing and burying my dead, I could see you all rushing around, gathering and dispersing across the valley: what a carry-on!
You looked like so many ants plundering a heap of grain. Here they come, a dark column of Lanyons: cousins, aunts, family hangers-on, hauling their spoils along a narrow track through the grass! Some heave with t
heir shoulders against a large seed. Some push. Others tighten the ranks and punish delay. A whole river of expectation flows down the Calder, pouring you east and south, through the irradiated country’s strip-mined middle into London: Do us proud, son!
It was all you could do to stop your mum from marching all the housewives of the terrace to the station to wave you off. As usual, the train sat there for ages, but no one moved, no one left. They wouldn’t leave you alone.
‘Get some fresh air, lad, if you can.’ Your father’s sound advice.
At last you were away. Beneath you, the wheels squealed and rattled over a set of points. You closed your eyes, relieved, took a breath, then stood up and leaned out of the window to wave goodbye.
Do you remember it?
Your mother, your father, the people of your street are tiny swatches of cloth, twitching and shivering in the morning cold. High above the station the valley wall impends, and above that, rising into the clouds, clear as soft pencil on tracing paper, runs a line of thick black smoke.
TWO
4
Felicine’s father, the celebrated surgeon Georgy Chernoy, had no more time for chickies than any other Bundist. At a public dinner, one warm night in May, he made his views plain. Memories of the dinner have stayed with me, partly because this was the first time I met him in the flesh; mostly because this was the night I met his daughter.
The dinner was held in a corner of Windsor Castle. It was one of those uneasy cultural gatherings meant to preserve backchannels between London as it had been, and the Bund which was effectively colonising its eastern part.
I was still in the first year of my studies at the Bartlett and absurdly underqualified for this gathering. But I was not alone: scattered among the dignitaries – and, come dinner, sat one to a table, as a sort of mascot – London’s young ‘creatives’ (choreographers, actors, comic book designers, musicians) found themselves being told how they might, by their civic engagement, ‘foster dialogue’ between the two ever-separating halves of the city. We were also here (according to my invitation, embossed on heavy card) to celebrate our ‘promise’, which in my case consisted of a paper plan for a park-like green bridge across the Brentford arm of the Grand Union Canal. I looked forward to an evening spent representing Architecture. When I explained my evening’s mission to him, Stan Lesniak suggested I arrive dressed as a wall.