If I sound like I don’t like the people of my home town, it’s because I don’t. I don’t come from a better background, granted. But I will go to one. I’ll leave Dudley behind.
People from Dudley never leave. They distrust other places. Other places have sunlight and pavilions, trams and bright nights, oceans and waterfalls. Dudley has a fountain that doesn’t work.
Dudley people want Dudley and nothing else. Sunlight would give them headaches and rashes. Rivers would make them incontinent. In a shop like Harrods or Fortnum and Mason they’d be unable to find the tea towels and toilet rolls. Dudley women run to fat the way four-hundred-metre runners run a race; slow until the second bend and then hell for leather. At thirty, Dudley women expand like life rafts, get their hair permed and teach their children how to swear. Dudley men marry Dudley women, usually from the house next door, sometimes the next house but one.
Once in a blue moon someone marries someone from a different street.
This is frowned upon. They marry close neighbours for a good reason. Dudley people have special genes. They need them. In summer it rains and it’s cold. In winter it rains harder and is colder. They need to get fat. Women do it at the age of thirty by eating cakes and pies and crisps. Men start when they’re eighteen, building bulk with a diet of curry and beer. Dudley people need to be fat for the same reason Eskimos need to be fat. Thin people would die in a Dudley winter.
In the drizzle, Dudleyites queue at market stalls to buy tea towels. All but one of the market stalls sell tea towels. The inhabitants love them. Some collect tea towels. Others wear them. They queue outside the charity shops, too. Dudley has all of the charity shops, Barnardo’s and Oxfam and twenty others, all smelling the same and all with assistants who look as cast off as the merchandise. People queue outside Poundstretcher and Poundshop in the hopes of getting a good offer on tea towels. If Dudley burned to the ground no one would care except for the manufacturers of tea towels, who would go out of business inside a year. The locals queue in the rain waiting to buy nothing from shops that don’t sell anything you’d want. They stand swaddled in scarves and shell suits; they stand in their slippers in the street waiting for Shipleys to open so that they can have a cup of coffee and play the two-pence-a-play fruit machine. They push cheap cigarettes into their pasty faces and watch the same old clouds circle overhead as they have done, uninterrupted, for the last forty years. They queue and smoke and get fat without ever buying groceries. Then off they go, laden with tea towels, to get a kebab for tea.
It’s like a part of Russia was placed in the centre of England. It’s as though the Kremlin had thought: this place is too depressing even for us. So they got their scientists working in their bunkers far below the Siberian tundra and they found a way to transport the most miserable gulag to the West Midlands.
That’s Dudley, and Kingswinford is an outskirt of Dudley – a crossroads on the way to Dudley. My father works there in an office above a hairdresser’s shop. The hairdresser’s is owned by someone called Denise, as hairdressers always are. Denise does special rates for pensioners. Somewhere below her shop is a lake of blue rinse and perming lotion. My father works for an insurance company, which is even less interesting than it sounds. When I was younger my mother would take me to see him at work. I’d stand and fidget and fiddle and fart, and my father would sit embarrassed and silent at his dull desk amongst his boring colleagues.
I tell you something, I’m never going to work in an office. I’d rather move to Tipton.
My mother doesn’t work. She spends all day thinking of jobs my father can do when he gets home from the office. Then she tells him about them and he looks like he’s thinking of better places to be. My mother likes to try different recipes from time to time, and we like her not to. She’s good at root vegetables. Dudley women are. Give them a potato or a turnip and off they go, happy as Larry.
My mother invents well-known phrases. She just makes them up and claims they’re centuries old. No one else has ever heard them. They’re not in books of quotations or guides to linguistics.
I’d like to go and live with my uncle, Mickey Payne. He used to be something. No one will tell me what. He went to the Falklands and got scars. He comes round sometimes and he sees into me. Whatever I have, he has too. I think he knows what I’m thinking. I think he knows about the parchment, the ritual, everything. He tells me about things that my parents won’t tell me: where to get a proper knife, how to use it. He left Dudley, joined the army, sent me postcards from around the world. Then he caught a live one in the Falklands and returned home with a face like a jigsaw puzzle.
He comes round and has a drink with my parents. I’m old enough to drink at home but my parents disapprove. They say it’s not suitable. My parents also disapprove of Uncle Mickey. He comes round and sits with a can of Kestrel and looks around the kitchen. It’s too orderly for him. It’s too bright. He sits there, a dark man in a light room, and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t seem to like my parents. It’s mutual.
He agrees with them about one thing, though. They all think I can do better for myself.
I could go to university and study. Something weird. Strange events in history, maybe. In the Middle Ages magic was fact. Magic was the truth.
This is the point. These things were real. They weren’t things people thought they saw, and they weren’t illusions brought on by tainted wellwater, and they weren’t mass hallucinations, and they sure as fuck weren’t anything to do with flying saucers.
I believe in magic, but flying saucers? Some beliefs are beyond a joke. In Kingswinford, people believe they live in a village.
My father was always at work. He went to work early and stayed at work late. I would see him just as I went to sleep, or just as I woke. At the weekends he would take us on long walks to places of no interest. He said this was rambling, and that it was enjoyable.
It was rambling.
We would trudge across fields, my father out in front, my mother taking second place, me some way behind, snagged on brambles or shoeless in mud. We went to the nearest available countryside, the closer edges of Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and then we ignored all that was scenic or interesting and walked across muddy fields for many miles.
My father liked to take us into fields already occupied by other inhabitants.
He liked to take us towards sheep, who would scatter, startled. He liked to take us through herds of cows speckled with their own dung. Cows upset my mother. As if sensing it, they would close in on her, making low noises, all innocent eyes and spindly legs.
He’d take us through fields that, he would assure us, didn’t contain bulls.
It’s not easy to run in mud.
His walks were in various places, and for varying lengths, but they had five things in common:
There would be livestock.
There would be an inconvenient fence, electrified or topped with barbed wire or both, that we would have to cross if we didn’t want to go a much longer way round.
There would be a swamp that we could not avoid.
At some point we would pass very close to a sewage farm.
They would go on much longer than you thought they should.
My father did enjoy them, in some strange way. I think he did. If it wasn’t the walks he enjoyed, it was seeing my mother in distress. As he strode off across the flat fields, veering away from hillocks or rocks or rivers, she would take up the midpoint between him and me. She didn’t want to let him get out of sight, and she didn’t want to lose sight of me. He wouldn’t walk any slower. He said that he went at a good speed. It would have been a good speed for a tractor.
I walked slowly. The walk would finish at around four, although it would feel much later. If I walked slowly, I didn’t have to walk so far. In those flat fields, as we passed signs telling us that trespassers would be shot, I had plenty of time to think.
There is no time to think any more. There isn’t any time; it’s thinner and running out.
>
I would sometimes see odd things: people who weren’t there when I looked again, trees that changed position, fat, scrotal mushrooms arranged in peculiar patterns. I once saw a toad the size of a cowpat. It was a foot across, round and brown and flat. I bent down to look at it, as cowpats were one of the more exciting things we encountered on those treks, and it opened a pair of enormous eyes.
I was reflected in them, in my anorak, eight years old and possessed of little knowledge. It stared back at me, produced legs from underneath itself, and waddled off. Moving, it looked as it had when it was still, as though it was almost liquid and might burst at any moment.
That’s one of my favourite childhood memories. I saw other things on those walks. Now they’re the only things that make my childhood seem anything special. Everything else was normal. I went to school, I had grandparents, I had friends I grew out of and a family I was stuck with. None of which has any meaning. Anyone from Dudley had all of that. I learned of magic because I saw it. I saw things that could not be explained in any other way. I didn’t see demonic dogs wielding sabres, but I saw enough.
Now that seems to be the thing that was my childhood, those walks I didn’t enjoy. If I look back at all, it’s there I look to: my mother flapping hopelessly at the cows who wanted to love her, my father a distant figure ahead of us, always on his way elsewhere.
III
Magic has demanded a lot of me. Not literally. I haven’t had to cut anything off yet, but it has demanded that I change my attitudes. It requires me to be single-minded. It requires me to leave all else behind.
I haven’t given up human company. I’ve got a few distant friends, and one – Jack Ives – close.
There are so many myths about rituals. They don’t all require a black cat and a cemetery. I can think of half a dozen that don’t. Nudity is optional but generally encouraged. But magic and puberty caught me at the same time, so I wasn’t happy with nudity. My body was doing unexpected things and I didn’t want anyone catching sight of it. I didn’t see the need to involve other people in my magic.
People who gather for rituals are gathering, nothing else. They’d be just as happy at Tupperware parties.
Once upon a time I was getting ready for a ritual. I’d called Jack and he said he’d go with me. He was always happy to run through rituals. It didn’t matter whether we were trying to summon Asteroth or knocking together a love philtre. It didn’t seem to worry him that none of it worked. Though he could have done with a love philtre. If only for the sake of his eyesight.
It worried me that none of it worked. I knew how much I’d given – time, blood, all of that. I knew how much others had given. The books were full of warnings like the ones on film posters for ’40s horror movies. ‘Do not enter unless you are prepared for terror.’
You were supposed to enter. The warnings were there to entice you. So I went ahead and killed cats, chickens, dogs. Cats and dogs were easier to come by than chickens. Dogs were easy. Dogs aren’t too bright. Cats were trickier. Cats don’t trust anyone. It’s very difficult to get a cat into a bag if it doesn’t want to go there. Give a dog a biscuit and it’ll follow you into a combine harvester.
I also used knives on myself. On the arms, mostly. Nothing that’ll leave a scar. This time next year, there won’t be a mark.
The sort of magic I choose as a speciality is commonly called black. I’m a dabbler in the black arts. You kill fluffy things to get on. You let scaly things be. I’m not the first to have tried this in Dudley. In one or two of the books about the black arts there is the story of a wizard who took up residence in Dudley Castle sometime in the twelfth century. The dates are vague. He moved in with two assistants and moved out the occupants. One assistant was a mason, the other is variously described as unfinished or incomplete. The books tell us that they attempted to discover the way to eternal life. In a departure from the usual storyline, they succeeded. The three of them managed to gain eternal life, or perhaps greatly prolonged life.
I’d settle for greatly prolonged life.
After a century or so of hanging around they got bored and left for foreign climes. There’s a woodcut in one of the books, where the wizard and his two apprentices are stirring a vat of something undefined. As far as I know he was the first practitioner in Dudley, perhaps in the West Midlands. There were witches but they were just old women. In those days they drowned them in the village pond; now we give them bus passes.
Since then the castle has been used by other dabblers, without any success. From time to time the zoo keepers – the castle is inside Dudley Zoo, and to get to it you have to climb over surprisingly small fences – find goat skulls, occult symbols, and less clearly magical paraphernalia like cider bottles and cigarette ends.
I wonder about the devotion of some acolytes.
I wondered about Jack. He seemed to be most taken with the sacrifices. He watched intently. He had some sort of fetish about piercing flesh. He mentioned nudity from time to time. I’m not sure he approached the subject with entirely pure motives.
Bad motives were good enough for me.
It wasn’t that the invocations failed completely. I couldn’t say that. I’d managed some successes. I’d revived the dead, for instance.
IV
A year ago, I met Jack behind Scratto. Scratto is a popular Dudley store. It has no shelves and no decor. It has rows of pallets holding boxes full of cheap foodstuffs. All of the products in Scratto have names closely resembling those of well-known brands. Mr Coupling cakes. Mick Donald’s burgers. Zack Daniel’s whisky. They look like they could be all right and they cost a third of the usual price. This is because they taste like shit. The other thing about Scratto is that there is no way out other than through the checkout. If you don’t buy anything, you still get to queue.
We met at eight in the evening. Scratto was shut for the night, the pallets of dubious tat locked away.
‘Why do they lock it? Who’d steal this crap?’ Jack asked.
Jack was dressed in jeans and a rugby shirt. He didn’t play rugby. The only thing he’d played at school was the recorder. He’d been rubbish at that, but then, so is everyone else. The only thing anyone can play on the recorder is London’s Burning, and the only way you can recognize London’s Burning when someone plays it on the recorder is that it’s the only tune anyone learns.
Jack’s jeans had been clean at some point in their life. I couldn’t say the same for his rugby shirt. I don’t think that had ever been clean. Jack was good at technical things: metalwork and computers. He used to have a slide rule at school. He claimed to know how to use it but, unless you’re meant to use slide rules to hit other pupils with, I doubt that. He had the techie way of dressing: as long as nothing that’ll get you arrested is in view, you’re dressed. If you can bend it, it’s clean. Colours are irrelevant.
Lots of techies became goths, when goths were at their least unfashionable. That way they knew they wouldn’t have clashing clothes, because everything they had was black.
There were a lot of goths in Dudley.
We left the bright lights of Scratto behind and walked briskly to the castle. The castle is in the zoo, and the zoo is about as difficult to get into as a Gary Barlow concert. We went in through the gap in the fence behind the polar bear enclosure. There was no one around at that time of night.
One time, we’d bumped into thirteen Satanists, also using the castle for a ritual. Jack knew one of them, and another worked in the record shop in town. They’d let us sit in on their ritual. They had a goat.
I was impressed at the time, but I’ve gone beyond the goat stage now. I wouldn’t bother with goats now. They’re smelly and difficult, like elderly relatives.
Jack led the way to the canal. There are canals all over the West Midlands, interlinked and locked. This one was stagnant most of the time. It was overlooked by three tower blocks a mile or two away. The tower blocks were about to be knocked down. They’d been about to be knocked down twenty years ago, an
d twenty years from now they’ll still be about to be knocked down.
A tall wall of wet red bricks separates the canal from the edge of the town. We climbed the wall and dropped onto a steep bank of wet gravel. Gorse bushes held on to nothing. They pricked us as we made our way down to the mud and puddles of the towpath. Something jumped from the bank and into the water.
‘Rat,’ said Jack. More likely a coot, I thought. Whatever it was, it started to cross the canal but it was too dark to make out any details. It was the last week of November and the evenings had started to arrive before the afternoons had finished. It was only around half past eight, no later than that, and the canal water was dull silver, the gorse bushes black clumps. A quarter of the moon was visible, and one or two of the nearer stars.
‘Cold,’ said Jack.
‘This isn’t cold. This is winter. This is nothing,’ I told him.
‘Right, yeah, just a bit of a nip in the air? It’s fucking freezing. It’s going to be minus five tonight. More than that. Less than that. Minus ten.’
‘Why didn’t you wear a coat?’
I had a long thick overcoat like something from the Crimean War. Putting it on made me think of soldiers overlooking empty fields of thick mud, while teams of horses hauled cannon into position. It had two deep pockets at the hips, and another pocket inside. That wasn’t really a pocket, it was a place where the lining had come unstitched and hadn’t been repaired. It left an opening six inches long leading to a pouch. In it I had a small bag of herbs, a penknife, a watch and a matchbox containing a woodlouse. I’d taken the woodlouse from under a plank that had been lying in a neighbour’s garden. The watch was my father’s. I had a digital one and a digital one wouldn’t do. The ritual required clockwork. All the watch needed to do was stay in a pocket, so perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I was skimping on some of the other ingredients, and I didn’t want to cut too many corners.
Seeing the Wires Page 7