Gary looked behind him, trying to identify the girl singing the haunting song. It could be any of them, and they didn’t seem to notice him looking. Even Charlie with his loping gait and open weakness had ceased to interest them.
London was tired and stressed, and so were the people on which the city fed. Gary was still living with his mum and dad, carrying on with Lisa in the room above The Sovereign where she lived, and trying to take an interest in the things men were supposed to take an interest in, rather than the things that thrilled him. He wasn’t succeeding at any of these things. He dreamed of other places and other ways of living, but having experienced nothing else but the dirt and pace of London, the images were blurry and indistinct. It was more of a feeling than any concrete idea. But Danny’s disappearance was now giving him a perverse purpose. He had someone to find, and something to achieve.
I’m imagining things, he kept telling himself, as Charlie and Lisa keep telling me. Danny would be alright. Gary’s older brother knew how to handle himself, he was a top bloke, a sound geezer, a well-read and tough man, and all of that was true, but he still went missing didn’t he? People disappeared all the time in this city. Just look at the news reports. Why did they all believe Danny was somehow immune?
‘Perhaps we’re incapable of believing things can happen to us, even when they do. Things happen to other people. Whatever happens to you is just your life, and how could that be special or worthy of comment?’ he said to Charlie, suddenly. Charlie looked at him.
‘Things happened to me, Gary,’ he said, studying his cousin’s face carefully.
Gary knew the city could come and swallow any of its inhabitants at any time; especially those without the cushions of education, property and money. He and his brother had heard the dark rumours circulating, that had always circulated, the dirty undercurrents of narrative that were disturbing footnotes in the bright clean story that fuelled London. The book of London Incognita was not for the faint hearted.
Spirit of the Blitz and London can take it and swinging Carnaby Street and faded Beatlemania were all perfectly fine, and there was a kind of misdirected pride in that, but there were all the other stories to deal with and process.
There were mutterings in London Incognita about young children disappearing, their remains turning up in the undergrowth of London’s parks or in patches of scrub growing from concrete. In the choked and dying canals. They were used for things you didn’t want to think about too hard, by the men in power in the big buildings and the large houses on the tops of hills. So the stories said; so the street drinkers told them. These kids were always working class, often immigrants, and Gary had tried to listen seriously to the stories of missing little Irish girls, young black or brown boys swallowed up by the metropolis. All these people who weren’t allowed to be a part of the story could be consumed by the people who formed the official realities. Who the fuck was going to listen if anyone complained? So, the burnt and chipped bones occasionally found in Victoria park were swiftly forgotten. Gary saw nothing on the telly beyond the first report of a disappearance. But the stories kept coming to those who could hear and were willing to listen.
‘Don’t ask, and you’ll be happier. You can’t forget the answers,’ said Danny once.
And then there were the stories about the grinning men who were on telly every week introducing the latest pop songs. Gary knew something corrupt and rotten hid behind their smiles, smug smiles, like they were almost showing off the fact they were getting away with murder. They knew they were monsters, they loved it, and so did their audiences.
* * *
As Gary and Charlie ate a tea of fish fingers, frozen peas and mash with dollops of vinegary red ketchup, Gary looked at the picture of his dad that hung in the kitchen, a young man of about nineteen somewhere out in North Africa in khakis and holding a gun he didn’t know the name of. Gary looked at his cousin, another young man already injured by another stupid war. He remembered a time, the three of them – Gary, Charlie, Danny – on a family daytrip down to Margate. He couldn’t work out if he was backfilling in the key details, but Danny was crunching through a stick of rock and his cousin and brother made fortifications from sand which were always breached and broken by the powerfully indifferent sea. Their young pink skins were mottled with dark sand. Gulls bobbed in the air above them, like they were suspended from a baby’s mobile. Their parents watched them from deckchairs made from a blue and white canvas, frayed from use and bleached from sun and salt.
Was this image truth, or just based on a truth? He could not say. But the edited and embellished memory, filled with painful poignancy and nostalgia, was surely just as important. Here in London, as the seventies coalesced, Charlie was a cripple and Danny was missing. Gary realised that he was alive now, in this moment, and still had the chance to take control of his story.
As he thought of Margate and the damp sand and the past, he knew a new phase of his life was beginning. Something else had ended.
Charlie shovelled in a spoonful of mash and hummed a tune.
Your brother’s with the Judder. He’s all over now.
The telly was on at low volume, interference on the aerial creating strange patterns and glitches that distorted the newsreader’s face and words. Something grinned briefly through the static. In clipped BBC English, the newsreader talked about the heatwave, the war in Ireland, a flare up at the local football ground, and nothing about a disappeared Pakistani child Gary had heard about in Tower Hamlets. Same old same old, and all the worse for it.
Danny didn’t come back that night.
In the end, he just didn’t come back.
* * *
Danny never called. He never wrote. Though the pain of the loss was immense, a raw open wound turning septic, Gary admired his brother’s ability to disappear. He could see the appeal, felt the desire to release himself from the quotidian, to dissolve into the bloodstream of the city and become one with its dark narrative. To follow that juddering man into the dark recesses of the city. What a pleasure that would be, a kind of ecstasy. Perhaps that had always been Danny’s ambition, to truly disappear into the thing he loved. Perhaps Gary had always been destined to assume the role of detective, like the melancholy occultists in all the books they’d devoured together as teenagers. He already had the surly demeanour and the fondness for the drink. His fingers stained yellow and burnt with old cigarettes. A clear eye for the realities of London Incognita. He had always wanted to participate in the London sketched out by Arthur Machen and C.L. Nolan, and he adored the Vincent Harrier stories by Michael Ashman. Part of him had always wanted the opportunity to hunt through the remains of a haunted, damaged city, tracking down ghosts and the shades of memory.
Well, now here was Gary’s chance.
It took a long time for Gary’s mum, Linda, to accept that such a thing could happen. She still made Danny’s tea every night. Just in case, she said each evening, the words providing an insulating blanket for her. Gary never did accept it. Perhaps, growing up on the diet of novels and films he and his brother fed on, Gary still believed the world was something that could be solved. Even in the gloaming worlds of the occult detectives and the nebulous horrors they faced, there were things that could be beaten and explained, written down in books, pinned to pages and in that process somehow controlled. Words helped contain things and control them. Danny knew this. That was why he scribbled in his journal constantly.
Your brother’s with the Judder. That’s what the little girl on the wall sang.
In the first few months of Danny’s absence, nothing for Gary felt real. Brick walls looked paper thin and painted by idiot children. London’s iconic buildings looked as if they were made from papier-mâché at an amateur weeknight class in an outer London college. The pavements were doughy, and the tarmac on the roads like black sponge.
There is nothing natural about pretending things are okay when they are not. Gary could not suggest to the world that he was not falling apart and wracked w
ith the horror of not knowing. He could barely voice the fact that he loved his brother, but he did. He loved him, and he had lost him and didn’t know why. Gary craved meaning in a world that he suspected may have none.
‘You’ve gotta accept the mystery sometimes,’ said Lisa as they lay in bed at night, a worried look on her pale face. At times now she looked almost translucent. Fading away from him.
As things deteriorated, Gary saw Danny in his Hawkwind t-shirt stepping aboard the Victoria line a few carriages away from him, and he would shout his brother’s name loudly and with a tone of desperation. People would look at Gary like he was defective as they pushed past onto the train. Even Charlie began to find him embarrassing.
The few times Gary dragged himself to the football with Charlie and their dads he always saw Danny smiling, inexplicably kitted out in the colours of the away fans and comfortably stood in their end. He shouted his brother’s name until his voice was hoarse and the other fans angrily told him to fucking shut up. He stopped being invited to the matches, and didn’t care. His dad never tried to speak to him about the loss, but talked about Danny infrequently as if he were still in their lives.
Gary just missed his brother hopping flamboyantly onto a Routemaster and Danny waved cheerily as the bus pulled away in the direction of the West End.
Gary saw Danny drinking with other broken-down men and women by the rusting canals of the city, along the Lee Navigation, and under the bridges of London, cackling and coughing, warming himself around fires that flickered in metal drums as he and his companions swigged corrosive and blinding booze from plastic bottles.
Gary hunted through the stalls and bookstores and second-hand shops across London, and he’d see Danny browsing through a sack of fifties sci-fi paperbacks in Notting Hill Gate, or buying a Pan book of horror in Hackney, or sifting intensely through old wartime photographs in Spitalfields. He often saw his brother leaving Yaxley’s shop, before disappearing into the crowds.
‘It’ll be alright, Gal,’ said Charlie every night in the pub where they obliterated themselves. Fen coughed, the Barghest whined and watched the world through a milky eye. The summer sweated and ran its course.
Slowly the other parts of Gary’s life began to fall away. Obsession took hold, and who could blame him? Lisa said it wasn’t right and that he needed help from someone or he’d end up being locked up in the loony bin. A fucking psychopath, dressing like a fucking special-needs pikey, she said at the end. But she hadn’t lost her brother and she didn’t have to listen to the hopeless cheerfulness of a crippled cousin. She didn’t see her brother pushing through the crowds at Ridley Road market, or working the docks at Wapping, or stepping out of a newsagent’s in Turnpike Lane.
That’s how it all started. Gary was just looking for his brother, and he found a nightmare.
He’s all over now.
From Daniel Eider’s journal
The judderman is a myth. A myth of a city that invents its inhabitants. A city whose inhabitants dream their environment into being on a daily basis. We made it and it makes us.
The judderman is a thing born from brick and fright. The judderman is the hate that bubbles up between the cracks in the tarmac and spills over into riot and spilled blood. He is the spent fluid dripping down walls after desperate back-alley passions. He is the dereliction and the decay of London.
Observe the shadows cast by the city’s crippled buildings, designed sober and built drunk, and you’ll find him crouching in twitching anticipation with the rats and needles and the abstract patterns of broken glass that one day I will decipher. The architecture of brick and stone rots in a metropolitan hangover and the judderman is your stale beer breath the morning after the night before, the blood flowing from your gums as you scrub hard to wash all the poison away, and the overflowing ashtray unemptied and stained with thick black residue. He is the rattle in your chest. The damp in your bones. He’s that little old lady – you think you knew her somehow in childhood, was she a friend of your granny’s? – who was found keeled over and her head cracked open like an over-boiled chicken egg. She slipped on ice in that bad winter a few years back. You remember the one. It was as cold then as it is hot now.
You think you can decode messages in the gum that sticks to the pavement, spongy braille for you to read with dead eyes, down on your knees and palms stretched lovingly over the pavement. You can see pyramids and temples and ziggurats form in the piles of crushed cigarette butts in the smoke-stained pubs. The dark stains left by spilled beer on threadbare carpets assume the aspects of faces, and it is there you see the judderman also. He is a rotten wooden windowsill that disintegrates into dust and flakes when you grasp it. He is the holes and tunnels dug by masonry bees that undermine and riddle our homes. He is the abandoned tube stations and their pale-skinned inhabitants who worship the old gods of London. He’s that junkie girl you saw sprawled on a mattress that crawled with lice, sores around her mouth, dried vomit beside her cooling body. He is the black lad you went to school with found with his neck broken in Tottenham police station. He is the pile of children’s clothing and burnt bone found in the bracken and nettle of Victoria Park, by the Regent’s Canal. The judderman is the story of how those remains came to be.
What the underground mutters to itself, and that others treat as salacious rumour, it’s true.
It is all true!
Those people, the ones in power, the ones who live on the tops of the hills of London and who sit in the seats of government, who run our police force, they are feeding on the forgotten and the unwanted. Worse: on the children of the forgotten. They know who people care about, and who they treat as something unworthy of seeing. They are feasting on the unseen. Is this what the judderman is? Does he do their work for them, these men and women in suits and sly smiles? I think I see him now lurking in crowds on kids’ TV shows.
The judderman is the pigeon with rotten stumps for legs, hopping around in decreasing spirals for the amusement of stupid tourists in Trafalgar Square. He is in the glass fragments of a pint glass pulled from a man’s face in A&E on a Saturday night. He is the bootboy’s steel capped boot as it connects with bone. He is the policeman’s baton and the grey-brown dust encrusted on a black maria with CLEAN ME thumbed in the dirt.
Once you know about the judderman, you see him everywhere; and I see him everywhere. I do not know how to tell people the things I know, other than, perhaps, through these words I write. I have seen too much and no one will believe me, not even my brother. How could I explain what lives in the shadows?
I will say it again: the judderman is a London thing. A myth of my city, born from grim necessity. I do not yet know its motivation or its reason for taking an interest in me. This trauma that we live through needs a form for us to understand. It needs a face; it needs grasping arms and pointed fingers and sharp teeth. It needs a voice like ink and velvet. And now the city has what it needs. Perhaps I am perverse in my thinking, but I daydream of how, in some obscure way, the judderman could be the city’s saviour. How I will find myself again if I can find and prove the existence of the judderman.
I have seen him, but that isn’t enough.
I saw him peel himself out of the shadows of the Woodberry Down estate by the reservoirs and grin right at me. Like he was taking the piss. Woodberry Down, that was where I’d heard he was, and the stories were true.
The stories are true!
The judderman’s grin replicates the flashed smiles given by Top of the Pops presenters. The smiling men who entertain us, who entertain the children. The judderman was leering, displaying openly the fact he was a thing of darkness.
The judderman is open knowledge no one goes on record about. We are all messengers not willing to be shot.
When I saw him, he was tall and slender with a BBC-toothed smile, onyx, inky like the night-time waters of the Lea, with a smell like the Thames at low tide. He had a violent grace, I admit. A kind of terrible beauty, the beauty of the bombed-out building, the abandon
ed school, the dried-up aqueduct in the stony ruins of a forgotten desert culture.
He moved like something out of old stop-motion animation. A British version of something Russian or East European. He had the melancholy quality of Bagpuss, and the tension of an unexploded WWII bomb.
I must trust what my eyes tell me: and I see that the judderman is the ‘pakis go home’ graffiti in white paint on the brickwork down my street. He’s the uneven lettering of ‘Keep Britain White’ daubed large on a doorway, and he is the look on my Bajan neighbour’s face. He is the worry I see in Gary’s face every day.
The judderman is the broken bottle at Millwall that scarred a friend’s face, the uneven line that connect his eye-socket to his chin. This city feels like it’s carpeted with broken glass, violent confetti left after a crimson wedding.
The judderman is the car-bomb that left shrapnel in Charlie’s leg out in Belfast, and it’s the way Charlie now limps to the pub for his nightly session of ale and reminiscence, despite the fact he’s only just pushing thirty. He was a squaddie, and I feel sorry for him. But he’s much more cheerful than my brother and me. Do not ask me why – he has no right to be.
The judderman is the unions on strike, he is a reimbursed thalidomide, he is my fear and loss, he is the dirty streets and he is a swastika inked indelibly in raw pink skin.
That night I saw him, he melted back into the shadows of Woodberry Down. More rumours came from Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill, Clapton, Seven Sisters, Tottenham, Enfield Chase, Turnpike Lane, the Hackney Marshes. Where the stories went, I followed.
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