by Nik Cohn
Was that all? Surely this couldn’t be the punchline? But Ferdousine said no word further. Merely waggled his birdy head sideways, staring at John Joe out of those yellow eyes, then he brushed the last crumbs from his hands, descended from his perch and, with one brisk nod of farewell, he went back upstairs to his quarters. Leaving John Joe with his broom and pail, and ten plastic bags filled to bursting.
Perhaps he’d missed something. Perhaps there was some hidden clue to that tall story he’d been too tired to catch. Or perhaps the old man had simply been gaming with him. Pretending to share a confidence, only to leave him dangle. In any case, there was disrespect involved, and he would not stand still for mockery. To slave and suffer as he did now, up to his udders in innards, and then be made a sport, he could get all that from Juice Shovlin, he didn’t need it from any man else.
A minute there, resting on his broom, he was tempted to sling his hook. Walk out on the whole damned set. But where was he to go? Not back to Scath, his room would be rented by now. Nor off to London either; England was destroyed. The sore truth was, he had no spot he fitted. On TV sometimes he’d hear some politician or golfer in polyester pants speak highly of patriotism. “How must that feel?” he’d ask himself then. “To hear the words My Country in your mouth?” But he had no way of knowing, and no likelihood of finding out.
If he didn’t lie, the Zoo was his best offer. His only offer, why pretend? So he went back to his sifting and bagging. It was turned one o’clock, Days of Our Lives must be on. Billie looked smashing in her bridal gown, but, as for Bo, he wouldn’t trust that man with Randall Gurdler’s mother.
Outdoors beyond the ruins, when he looked, it was pissing down rain. No, tell a lie, it was snivelling more than pissing. On Broadway the last of the looters were making their way home. A child and his mother passed, they were bearing a toaster-oven, a microwave and a CD player, their arms hung heavy with new clothes. The same child it was that John Joe had seen on the street that day, the first time ever he’d met Miss Root.
A golden boy, he’d been, curled up on his side with his one hand stretched out in the light, the fingers bent as if begging. And his mother at the door of Blanco y Negro, her fat fingers clustered with rings. And the way he rose like a whistled greyhound at Miss Root’s call. So now they went home with their spoils. Back to their fifth-floor apartment. Two rooms, John Joe saw, with a connecting corridor, the bathroom off to one side. He saw a portrait of the Virgin over a bed, an altar. Scented candles, Lucky Kentucky glasses full of pink water, green water and blue, a necklace made out of horse’s teeth, hanks of hair, a sequined crucifix, and one spent bullet, ringed by fairy lights. But there was no cause to hurry, they might as well save their shoe-leather. That place was up in flames.
The image exhausted him finally. He had to use his broom like a crutch, or he might have fallen out of his standing again, the way he’d fallen after Miss Root shaved him.
Suspended between sleep and waking, he let his eyelids close. Then he felt as though he was sliding. I always did like going down, Anna Crow had said, descending the ladder. There was some joke in that, you could tell by her voice, but he was no good at jokes. A fetching shade of quince, she’d said, and he saw her by the boating pond. Her Da was swinging her higher and higher, then the rope broke, and she was flung into air, she was spinning, then falling and falling, oh love, on my love. I wish I could see me, she’d said. Five levels underground, in that lost land.
The dust and filth his broom had raised settled on his hands and in his hair, he tasted at its scum that coated his lips. Her tongue a sleeping slug. Some thief was playing a boombox in the street, the heavy bass thudding the beat like punches, and John Joe in his weariness began to move his feet in time.
He couldn’t dance, still he shuffled. Let the broom fall, and he moved through the Zoo. His hands came up, curled into fists; his elbows tucked in against his ribs. The man on the boombox was singing an angry song. Never hesitate to put a nigger on his hack was its refrain, and John Joe began to circle. Letting his fists travel as they would. A jab, a hook, a jab off the hook. A right cross, an uppercut, jab, jab, jab. A bolo, another left hook, and he saw his own person plain, a man of colours whirling, arms pistoning, the dust flying off him like silver spray, and a gold sword in flames.
A sudden flurrying behind him made him wheel. It was a bird returning; the bird was Pearl. Not a scratch on her it seemed, or any feather ruffled. She hopped aboard the counter, she started watching Billie and Bo. Of course, she must be half-starved. Having missed her breakfast and all. So John Joe began to measure out her feed. Nectar paste and pellets, a slice of cuttlefish bone. Then he brought her the filled bowl, he served her.
It was his duty, after all.
Acknowledgments
All of the characters in this book are my own invention, with one exception. There was indeed a famous cricketer named Fred Root, who played for Worcestershire and England between the World Wars. The facts of his career, to the best of my knowledge, are as given here; many of them have been taken from his autobiography, A Cricket Pro’s Lot. But everything else that I have written about him—his life after cricket, his sweet shop in Wolverhampton, his drinking habits and, above all, his relationship to Kate—is fictional. As for Ferdousine’s description of his bowling action, that is in large part derived from the late John Arlott’s portrait of Maurice Tate, one of Fred Root’s contemporaries.
During the writing of Need, I have built up a small library of reference books. From some of these I have borrowed; from others, shamelessly stolen. My thanks are due to them all, and so I list them in full:
A Cricket Pro’s Lot—Fred Root
The Who’s Who of Cricketers
The Serena Technique of Belly Dancing—Serena
The Mole People—Jennifer Toth
Revelation Visualized—Dr. Gary Cohen and Salem Kirban
The Santeria Experience—Migene Gonzalez-Wippler
Knife Throwing: A Practical Guide—Harry K. McEvoy
King Mob—Christopher Hibbert
The Success Dream Book—Prof. De Herbert
The Pursuit of the Millennium—Norman Cohn
Western Reptiles and Amphibians—Robert C. Stebbins
Pet Birds for Home and Garden—Don Harper
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage
The Prophecy Handbook—William E. Beiderwolf
The Rattle Bag—eds. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
Cockfighter—Charles Willeford
Nineteen Acres—John Healey
The Barber of Natchez—Edwin Davis and William Hogan
Shah of Shahs—Ryszard Kapuscinski
In Conall’s Footsteps—Lochlann McGill
Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light—John Cornwell
Fast One—Paul Cain