And Beauty?
I think we can safely assume that whatever business he ended up in, that boy was a success. With his looks, and his confidence, he was made for the coming decades.
There. I think that’s everything.
So — there he goes, our Mr F. Lost from sight. Absorbed back into the City, just like any one of countless other strangers whose body you can vaguely recall, but whose face or name you can’t now quite remember. Still, that’s what happens, isn’t it; their strange and lurid stories flare up briefly as you hear them, but then, when they are gone, eventually, they are forgotten — and you realise you never really knew anything about them except the story you were told.
There’s not much left by way of any physical traces, either; that whole world of which Mr F was part has pretty much gone now too. Garlick Hill is now a street of office-workers just like any other; no one loiters, and the brass name-plates announce credit brokers and shipping insurers. Even some of the streets themselves have gone; if you were to try and retrace Mr F’s original morning journey now, for instance, you’d find that the Miles Lane steps have been swallowed under an eight-storey office-block. The maze of alleyways and bombsites flanking Cannon Street Station has been tidied away into a concrete riverside walk, complete with benches and informative signposts; the bottom end of Dowgate Hill has been carved open by a road-widening scheme, and Upper Thames Street itself is unrecognisable, choked with traffic night and day. And, of course, the old London Bridge itself has gone. The spacious new pavements on its replacement never bring their crowds to such a black, thick boil as the ones Mr F had to carry his secrets through; nowadays, there’s room for everyone, even at ten to five. Of course, the water still heaves against the piers of the new bridge at the turn of the tide — but not quite so threateningly as people always say it used to. On the wide new concourse of London Bridge Station, the crowds still stream to and from their trains just as they always did — but that unnerving rush-hour fusillade of slamming doors is a thing of the past. The trains for Peckham Rye now arrive at platforms fourteen and fifteen, not eight and eleven — and of course, you could stand there at the ticket barrier in the morning rush hour and watch the 7.08, the 7.20 and even the 7.37 train come in, and you know — he wouldn’t be on any of them.
Extraordinarily, considering how much else has gone, the clock on the ruined fragment of the old station’s façade has survived. It still says ten minutes to midnight — not that anyone ever bothers to look up at it. No one ever thinks that’s really the time.
Number Four Skin Lane is still there — but only just. The site is now occupied by the late 1960s building that was erected after the fire. It’s more or less the same size and shape as the building that Mr Freeman knew, however — it gives you at least an idea of what it must have been like. You can still look up and see the long windows of a top-floor workroom, which was rebuilt almost exactly as it was. You can even see where they incorporated the four surviving stone steps in the flight leading up to the new front door; I suppose someone must have thought they made a good “feature”. If you peer in through the barred ground-floor windows you’ll see the new workrooms that replaced the old half-basement Mrs Kesselman and her girls had to put up with; spacious, better-lit, and well-equipped — but all under a heavy layer of dust. The new premises were built too late, you see; the trade was already faltering, and no one ever really succeeded in giving the reconstructed building a new life. It’s been empty for years now.
Like I said; he’s gone, and that whole world has gone with him. Took all their secrets with them — that’s what people who worked in the trade say about old-timers like Mr F. Ah yes, they say, smiling to themselves, those were the days — the bad old days! (They always laugh when they use that phrase: why is that? Do they miss them?) The bad old days.
Those bad old days which are gone, and over, and forgotten, and finished — we all know that — except
Except that of course, like me, I’m sure you can’t help but speculate about what happened to him. About how he
lived.
Well, he must have kept on buying his copy of the Standard to read on the train home every night — don’t you think? Most people do. And if he did, did he ever come to think that any of those stories might actually be about him? Did anyone ever tell him that? Do you think that if we went carefully back through the files for next ten years we might even find his name in one of those stories — or his face, perhaps, caught by the camera in the midst of a crowd on the Mall or in Trafalgar Square on one of those “historic” days when the Standard always tells you exactly how many thousands of people the police think turned up to cheer — still in his three-piece brown worsted suit, of course…
Perhaps not.
I agree; crowds are never going to be this man’s favourite thing. And those really aren’t his parts of town.
No, I expect he will just sit quietly at home on those days and watch the crowds on his television, cup of tea and rolling papers laid out on the arm of his chair as always — except, of course, that I doubt that even when he is old the corner of this particular customer’s living-room is ever going to be filled with a television set. I think he’ll always prefer the radio — prefer having just the voices. And I think any staring this man has left to do will still all be done out on the street, or up on London Bridge. Yes, that’s it; even when he passes fifty — and sixty — even in November, when all he can see are faces and backs of necks and hands, I still think this man will be keeping an eye out for beauty — if not for Beauty — on his daily walk to work across those newly-widened pavements.
Well then, if we can imagine him in winter, what about in June — in the dog days, when ties are loosened, and the City begins to sweat; when the scaffolders appear high up on their building sites like so many gods — what then? Will anything be different, when he catches himself staring at them? Will he smile?
And let me ask you this; can you imagine Mr F ever standing in front of his bathroom mirror in a clean white shirt, slicking back his hair with both hands, and wondering how he looks? I mean, wondering how somebody else might think he looks on this particular Saturday, or even Saturday night? Can you see him smiling, as he steps onto an evening train? Is that possible? Surely
Surely it’s too late for that.
I don’t know about you, but this would be my only wish: that some several weeks or months or even years after that night when he slept so deeply and peacefully through the dawn (for who knows how long these things can take), this man will once again be disturbed by dreams. Dreams in which he hears that sentence of his — the one he never completed back there in that upper room. Dreams which dare him to speak out loud that dreadful word he has never yet found occasion say — taunt him with it; whisper it, lasciviously, in his ear. In the dark hours, or the early hours of the morning, as the strip of light grows under the curtains — I don ‘t really care. I just want them to come. I want him to wake up hearing himself say it.
I suppose I just don ‘t like to think (or believe) that once a man has acquired the gift of dreaming, he should (or even can) ever lose it.
Perhaps, of course, he’ll be fine. Perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much about this one man amongst so many — a man who, even after all this, I still don’t really know that well. Perhaps he doesn’t need my good wishes, this Mr F; perhaps it won’t be a dream that haunts him ten years from now, but a memory, the memory of some sordid or marvellous meeting which I am too timid to imagine on his behalf. Some marvellous lesson of the flesh that he’ll sit there in his armchair with his cold tea and his Golden Virginia and replay in his mind until he remembers exactly what sound his voice made when he said that missing word.
As I say; I can’t tell. It’s not the place of stories to tell you if dreams come true.
Now that I think of it, I said I’d told you everything, but there is just one more thing.
When the flat in Peckham Rye was cleared out by the council after Mr Freeman’s death in
late November 1995, one of the things that was found amongst all the rubbish was a letter. This was the same one that we watched Mr F sit and scrawl at his kitchen table at the very height of his miserable infatuation with Beauty, the one he never sent. It was found in a blank, unopened envelope, tucked away at the back of a drawer. As I told you at the time, he had left it lying in the middle of the table that night, and then the next morning screwed it up and threw it away without even rereading it. What I didn’t tell you was that he never actually got rid of it.
When, two days later, he went to empty the kitchen pail into the dustbin out by the front garden gate (a job he hated, because of the smell he always worried it left on his hands), he noticed the envelope sticking out from amongst some potato peelings. He slipped it in his pocket, and then when he got back upstairs opened it up, extracted the letter and smoothed it out with the back of his hand on the kitchen table. The notepaper was damp and badly stained, but he could still make out almost all of the words. When he first read them, he could barely remember writing them; the sentences sounded like somebody else’s (he didn’t know this, of course, but he shouldn’t have been surprised; it isn’t often that the words another man wrings out of you at three o’clock in the morning still seem to belong in your mouth when you recall them by the light of the next day). He read it through twice. Then, instead of tossing the letter back in the garbage, Mr F did something strange. After he’d sat there thinking for several minutes, he folded the paper neatly in half, and then went into the living-room and rummaged in his sideboard drawer until he found another, clean envelope. He sealed up the letter with one decisive lick, went back into the kitchen, and tucked it away in the drawer of the kitchen table. That is where it was found, twenty-eight years later, amongst all those annoying things that everyone always keeps, but never seems to use — the stray pieces of string and the packets of unused paper serviettes; the blunt pencils, the scraps of fuse wire, and the spare key for the kitchen clock.
Why did he do that?
Why did he keep it, this letter full of things that could never be spoken out loud? Surely he knew that it could never be sent? And why did he seal it up so carefully again in an unmarked envelope before he put it away, when he could have just shoved it into the back of the drawer as it was? Was it to hide its shameful message, blurted out in the middle of the night? To protect it from prying eyes? Or perhaps he kept it out of some obscure instinct that the day was bound to come when he would need proof that everything that was now happening to him had actually happened: but if that was the case, surely he would have got it out and re-read it at some point. The envelope, however, was still unopened, twenty-eight years later. Had he learnt it off by heart?
Is it possible that he simply forgot that he’d ever written it?
Of course, what was in the drawer of that kitchen table meant nothing to the council workmen who cleared the flat — it was just part of the rubbish of somebody’s life. Even the table itself was hardly worth lugging down the stairs — a heavy, old-fashioned thing. It was the same with that stained-oak wardrobe in the bedroom — but lug it they did, giving the flaking paintwork on the frame of the stained-glass window another dent on the way down. They weren’t being particularly disrespectful, or careless; the detritus of a life means nothing unless you know its stories. To you, for instance, because you know some of the things that were once reflected in the bevel-edged mirror on its door, the sight of that wardrobe standing with the rest of Mr F’s furniture out on the tarmac of a station car-park, awaiting a buyer at a second-hand furniture sale, might have been a forlorn one — but not to anybody else. After all, it’s not as if it was worth very much. If you’d looked inside, you would have seen no one had even bothered to clear it out. There was still a whole row of those clumsy old-fashioned wooden coat-hangers, the ones your grandmother probably used to use, hanging up on the rail inside — and stuffed onto one of the shelves where the socks and underwear should have been, the jacket of some tatty old brown worsted suit, so badly worn at the elbows it was no use to anyone. Under the jacket, there was what looked like some sort of old shoe box, wedged in the corner next to a pair of ruined but still impeccably polished brown leather oxfords, and with a thick rubber band round it. Inside, tucked away amongst a litter of all the usual personal papers (birth certificate, ration card, demob notice, rent-books), was even more rubbish — why do people keep these things?
A photograph of a group of workers standing outside a black-painted front door.
A child’s ticket for Billy Smart’s Circus, Battersea Park, dated March 27th, 1929.
A ticket-stub from the Odeon, Leicester Square, and a torn ticket for the Regent’s Park Zoo — this last item still has the word Daddy written in clumsy pencil, faintly visible on the back.
A battered copy of an old children’s book of fairy stories, half its dog-eared pages missing — and tucked inside it, presumably for use as a bookmark, a creased and folded black-and-white newsprint photograph, carefully cut from the Evening Standard for Friday the 14th of October, 1967. Under the caption “Triumph”, this last shows part of a crowd of excited admirers surrounding the singer Marion Montgomery as she makes her exit from the stage door of the Talk of the Town. One of the women in the crowd is wearing far too much make-up, and what looks like a three-quarter-length red fox coat.
As I said, why do people keep these things?
Anyway, here is that letter. The handwriting is clumsy — childish, even. In places (especially in the scribbled note on the back) it is almost illegible, and I have had to fill in the occasional word. From its contents, you might think that it was tears that had blotted the ink; in fact, it was drops of sweat that coursed down Mr F’s face as he wrote it.
July 27,1967
I don’t think you’re ever going to write to me, are you, so I’ll just have to make the first move myself. Trouble is, I don’t know how to say it. I was reading the paper this week on the train, and it said that people like me are bound to have problems, and I think this is the biggest one of all for me really, this not knowing how to say things. The general gist of the paper seemed to be that its stupid, what I am, but I don’t know that, do I? I don’t know anything.
Which I think is probably your fault.
Where are you I wonder. Are you in bed my darling, if you are then won’t you let me lie down next to you when you are sleeping. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and to listen to the sound of your breathing. When I am sure you are asleep I will lean over and look at your face all over, at your eyelashes and your eyebrows and your hair. Then I am going to lean right over, because it looks as though you might be going to say something to me in the night, look your mouth is moving ever so slightly. 1 wonder do you talk in your sleep, probably I know I do. Then you frown a bit and I reach over and touch your face just between your lovely black eyebrows and that will make the frown go away. And then you’ll go back to sleep properly and I’ll go back to sleep too even though this bed is small for two people and too hot.
Goodnight then
PS I say I don’t know anything but that’s a lie. I know what you look like.
And here is what is scrawled on the back; his final words.
Still look on the bright side, not knowing anything doesn’t that mean anything can happen
And right across the bottom of the page:
Goodnight darling
Goodnight
Fuck me
How strange — strange, I mean, that he should have used those particular phrases; strange that a man who had never yet shared his bed with another should have had dreams of such accuracy. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I opened the envelope.
Some people of course may say that such dreams or convictions are hardly likely — but then, Mr F himself could hardly be said to be likely. In fact, a lot of people would say that a man like him should not, or could not, or most probably — and this I think is the worst thing of all — did not exist, but
But h
e did. And he did write that letter. How else are we to explain the fact that you are holding a copy of it in your hand?
Lights out now.
Goodnight.
‘I read Skin Lane with one eye closed out of sheer animal terror. Then, unimaginably, it brought me to tears; what a work of art — unexpected and heartbreaking and lovely’
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
Skin Lane Page 30