Manners

by Robert Newman

  And there it is in your own heart: in a dark nook lies a girl passed out on a bench-seat. She lies on her side, knees raised slightly. White knickers visible where her short, shiny cream negligee has ridden up. And a shameful thought crossing my mind, as I walk past her once, twice, the shameful thought which writes its graffiti on the big white wall of the Kremlin until the Thought Police scrub it out and haul you off to the Corrective.

  Another beer. Trying not to look at the barmaid because that leads to hunger, emptiness. She bends over in shiny PVC trousers to get some lager out the fridge. Straightens up, sees me, ignores me routinely. I try to be pally with her to say I'm not like everyone here but that's what they all do, isn't it? She wears a super-tight T-shirt with Babe written in the Johnson's baby lotion logo. She has brilliant white hair, with a coy, toy plastic slide-grip pushing her collar-length hair into a Berliner side-parting.

  What am I supposed to be doing here? What should I be noticing? Where's Ellen? I'll find her and she can give some shape to my mind. I've heard something about they've got a bass level on the speakers here too low to hear but which vibrates some inner core of you. Nudge, shove, angle my way through the bodies. I hate everyone. I can't find her. Two circuits of the club, swimming against the tide, bumped and elbowed because I wasn't in the dance. Can't hear any shape or tune in the music. Just the ugly, cynical 0898 lyrics: 'Come inside. Take me deep, take me deep, take me all the way.' Two pushing searches through the club must have made me look like a cop with all that linear movement but I wasn't feeling like one with no straight lines of thought in my head. I needed to get somewhere the lights weren't flashing and where the music was less loud to try and regain my rational police head. I went to the bog, not really needing to go.

  Sitting on the white sink in the white light was a man with a jacket tied round his waist. His right hand moved to cover what his left hand was holding. Him and this other lad's discussion veered into neutrality as I walked in. I held the door open for some men right behind me, but didn't see them. The man on the sink looked up. 'All right?' he said to one or all of the men coming in behind me. But I couldn't look round and find out who knew who, who was on the firm. Too obvious. At the far end of the bright bogs were some innocent, hotfaced, gog-eyed ravers. The kids were filling mineral-water bottles from the tap which had been plumbed to a trickle so as to keep the profits bar-central.

  I queued for a space at the thin beaten-copper designer urinal. My turn at last. Bits of blue copper mould on thin metal hammered into tiny indentations. In mid-stream I hear the creak of a new leather coat as a body moves at speed. My forehead smashes against the tiles, knuckles in the back of my skull. Two hard, downward kicks in the back of my knees like someone trying to kickstart a seized moped. Black leather trainers. A rush of kicks, a punch in the back of my head. A rumble of boots stampede out. Door banging wall banging door.

  I lay there with my jaw slumped on the edge of the trough. I was grateful for the cool lemon mint-cake and the white butts which had peeled their brown filters close to my stinging eyes. I heard the door close again.

  'Mate, mate, are you OK?' asked one of the gaggle of ravers. The kind kids helped me up. 'Fuckin' 'ell, are you OK?'

  The rationed water from the taps won't wash this stench off me. Through a fire exit, on to steel lager barrels, over a tall wooden gate set in a high wall. The reek and pain were worse in the cool air ringing with the tinnitus sound of trebly, high-hat cymbals.

  Half a mile away in the Jet garage I upturned a row of green, plastic watering-cans over me. I noticed the twin filing-cabinets of Air and Water. I didn't have a twenty-pence bit so I had to go into the garage and get change. I was expecting the Asian on the till to be difficult with me because of the dangerous state I looked in. Daring him to be difficult. But no.

  'For sure,' he said with a kind, reassuring voice. 'No problem.'

  I put in the coin; the container's loud juddery-throbbing-knocking was numbed by the ringing in my ears. Stood under the rubber-handled hard jet of coruscating water which I wanted to clean down to the bone, to drill away the ugly event that had happened so quick. Why did it have to happen at all? So quick, why did it have to happen at all? Why couldn't I have been somewhere else?

  As the water puttered to a close with a knocking inside the tank I felt the Asian man standing watching. What you fucking looking at? I turned to face him. He held a pile of sealed, plastic-wrapped mini-tissues and an Elastoplast Travel-pack. On the floor by his feet was a clean roll of roller-towel cloth.

  'If you need to make a phone call, there's one in the shop, OK?' he said.

  I nodded a kind of reply, looking away, down. I felt him watching for a bit more. Then he went inside. I couldn't face him again, so I left the soiled roller-towel on the charcoal briquettes and walked the long walk home through side-streets to avoid people. Worried about urine in the cuts. It was a weird thing to be beaten up and not know who did it. As if a delegation of humanity had been appointed to cast out the impostor.

  *

  My neck is stiff sitting in this straight-back Shaker chair. My hand goes to the scrapes on my face from last night as if they were the scars from that incident at the Drum Club. Like they'd never gone away or as if the body was like the mind and long-forgotten psychic scars were visible. Like the body had as poor a sense of time as the subconscious. Whatever, I feel this memory still hanging around like I didn't get through it by just getting through it. I sip the black coffee with difficulty through my busted lip and sore gums. Swallowing is difficult too after Lee Andrew's arm on my windpipe.

  *

  'What happened to your face?' asked Beverley the night after the Drum Club.

  'Fell down some steps,' I said in a TSG voice. Pacing round her little flat, I issued directives: 'You should put a better lock on here. I'll buy you some security catches for the back window. Where's that fan I bought you?'

  'It made too much noise.'

  'Aren't you using it?' I demanded.

  'No one's gonna attack me.'

  'So you're still sleeping with the French windows open?'

  'It's fine. And if anything ever did happen to me, I'd never tell you anyway.'

  'Has anything?' I asked with low, husky urgency like a phone pest's 'What … what are you wearing!'

  'John, don't start!'

  'Has it?'

  'Don't start this shit again!'

  I once heard a woman on Radio 4 say that 'Rape is a way in which all men keep all women in a state of fear.' Then again, rape is a way in which all rapists keep all boyfriends in a state of fear, too. Me and Beverley split up that night. We split up because she walked on her own to the corner shop at night. We split up because she took unlicensed minicabs, because she got the last tube home alone in a short, vinyl lime-green dress. We split up because on hot nights she slept alone with her French windows open. Not much perhaps, but far too much for me. That night when I got out of her how she'd had a narrow escape from a minicab driver, I said 'I could kill him.' I've never thought about that since, seeing as we got back together two weeks later (after I scared myself at a country house).

  'I could kill him.' At the time I had a belief in acknowledging those feelings — to know that I could kill that minicab driver even though I never would. Being human means keeping those feelings in check. The hippies were all wrong: freedom goes with repression. Even though it feels vital to be that stoked up, that capable of harm, it's all bollocks. Passion and strength are in what you don't do, but then no one ever knows how close they came.

  Then again, maybe they do: I'm a scrawny six-foot coward and yet something happens when I'm in a stand-off. Something strange. Like when DS Jason Maddox came looking for me after I'd described him as the worst copper since the war. He found me standing on premises guarding the gate of the squad car park — which was humiliating — pulled me three paces to my right and out of sight of the security camera, giving it come-on-then fight stance. I squared up to him, thinking, 'Oh shit. What
am I doing? He's younger, bigger, stronger.' But then a strange calm descended on me and I started grinning mightily with no sense of fear. This is strange. I spend my whole life creeping about terrified that violence is going to happen to me, and yet once within the exclusion zone, the seven seconds to midnight I become this other dude. It's the only time I'm ever totally at ease and cheerily thoughtless, enjoying a sanguine interest in the future like a promising playbill.

  I watched his expression go through three spectrum shifts. Fancying it; not fancying it; then breaking into a face-saving leer and walking away. And trying to think back over what happened, all I did was smile.

  In civvies with Beverley one night we walked past two guys with gold architecture and prison tats standing outside the Vulture's Perch. One of them was bald-headed with a Virgin Mary pendant and Red Indian crossed feathers hanging round his neck, I remember. They wolf-whistled at her and went 'Carmencita!' I stopped and turned. They put their bottles down and stood up, screwing me out, ready for the off. As I stared back I felt the same strange merriness on my face, a smile like receiving a guest in my home. They turned away, faking bored expressions, as if they were just leaving anyway.

  Afterwards, when I re-inhabited my own body, I thought, 'What the fuck were you thinking? You can't fight! You never could! Second weediest in the school! They could've fucked you up!' And maybe all that saved me was just them thinking, 'This skinny bastard is so relaxed he must have a gun.'

  Am I just giving it the big'un here simply to ward off the fear and humiliation of remembering the Drum Club urinals? (Where I was finally reduced to what Kenneth the coach-driver said I was: 'Piss and breadcrumbs — that's all you are.') Is that what I'm doing here by re-running these other scenes?

  In my first year with the Met. there was a summer craze to Do the Bill. A couple of junior slags would taunt or throw bottles at a couple of beat officers and then give it toes. You'd peg after them round a corner, up an alley and into an ambush of about a dozen more scarved-up slags. One night that summer I was chasing a couple of youths who'd thrown rocks at me from under the spotlights of a steel-mesh-shuttered Tesco. I ran them into the delivery yard and there was the reception committee. Seven or eight older lads. Scarved up. I stopped, stood still, and was surprised to find that same perfect calm envelop me and the same involuntary, chipper grin. Intense fear all the way until I get to the epicentre and then it's this strange, weird ease which descends on me. If I'd pushed it and tried to take their masks off I would've got a hiding, I suppose. But as it was we just stood there for a bit before I turned and strolled back, heart pounding then in case I got rushed from behind. But I didn't. This saving gracelessness has worked for me every time except last night, when whatever bad spirit I host found its mate.

  A memory flashes across my mind: the ignition moments in the stand-off with dead Lee.

  'There's nothing on me,' he says, hand on heart and smiling. He halts at three paces and holds his arms out crucifixion-style in tike a stop-and-search mode.

  'You're nicked, Lee Andrew,' I say — letting him know l know what he's done.

  In that vile, sonar knowledge you get in a stand-off what impressions of my soul imprint themselves on his spent and overworked senses? We stare for a hit more and l can see him doing mental arithmetic. What does he see now in that moment before running? Is he scared? Is he running away? (The mental arithmetic of someone in a burning building before bolting for the landing?) His eyes widen, he shoots off across the road. He's changed his mind. He's not going to fight after all. He's going to try and get past me. To run for it. I chase after him, building to a sprint.

  Does he now turn only because I'm gaining? Desperate antelope? Was it calculation that made him run (knowing he too was going to stop, swivel and bust a move?) Or was it fear? (Or is this new doubt just an invasion of all the liberals' procriminal propaganda?) The way I've remembered it till now Lee ran from a policeman. But did he see something in my eyes? In me?

  Every policeman's favourite advert is that old Guardian one: Skinhead charges at businessman.

  Businessman terrified. Clutches briefcase tight.

  Skinhead steams right into him and his fear.

  Blackout.

  Caption: 'Only one paper gives you the whole picture.'

  Cut wide to show pallet of bricks falling from the top of the building right on to where businessman was standing. Skinhead has saved his life.

  Cops love this ad. and talk of it like it was still on, because that's how we feel a lot of the time. You're running after some innocent-looking kid and all the goodies and aunties are shouting at you, 'Leave that poor boy alone!' And you can't stop and tell them about the Indian girl sitting over the toilet, scooping cool water over the blood between her legs. And yet now it seems like that 'whole picture' effect might work against me the more I remember of the … incident.

  My face is throbbing again. I go to the bedroom mirror and check out the grazed cheek and the bumped mouth. This bruise under my eye might become a fat shiner tomorrow. The bumped mouth doesn't look so bad now. I hope it looks worse when I face the board tomorrow. I press my knuckles hard on my lip until my eyes scald.

  I take down the full-length bedroom mirror and carry it through to the living-room where I prop it on the floor. I'll rehearse running the gauntlet of press and TV cameras outside the steps of the court come the trial. I get undressed and catch my reflection in the mirror. So these are the boxer shorts I was wearing when it happened. And these are the socks. The boxer shorts I was wearing when it happened were black ones; the socks were navy blue, woollen, hiking socks, it turns out. If I rehearse naked, then perhaps come Judgment Day my threads will feel like armour walking past the jostling booms and arc lights.

  Walking back to the door, I think over my approach like a spin bowler. You've got to have an attitude. I walk right out into the hall and turn round. In sequence I try: Bemused Stroll (too callous).

  The Righteous Indignation Strut (too edgy, too violent, too angry).

  Heavy, Schlepp-Shouldered Resignation of the Wronged Man (too guilty-looking).

  Inspecting an Honour Guard and Nodding with Extreme Rectitude and Upstandingness (mental).

  I give up and walk to the mirror to take it from between my legs back to the bedroom wall: The Naked Defeated Man.

  Arrested by this I leave the mirror where it is, step back two paces and take a look. I straighten up, immediately, involuntarily I cringe under the generalissimo's stare. At first I think my hostile stare is because I'm still rehearsing a look for demonstrators and cameras outside the court. But no. I'm staring at me, and this, I realize, is how I always do: the stern generalissimo running a disapproving eye over the slovenly recruit. A look of appeal, girlish or child-like, is held a second in the mirror's gaze. Then quashed.

  Extremes. The skin is very, very white, the short, spiky hair very, very black and the eyes are very, very blue. I remember in O-level Human Biology finding out that there was no such thing as a blue iris. Blue eyes mean an absence of any iris pigment, they only look blue from reflecting rhodopsin or something. Like the empty sky poncing colour off the blue sea.

  Even though there's not an ounce of spare flesh on my girlish white skin I somehow look like I'm wearing the body of a bigger man. Wide, bony shoulders ride up on one side. Long arms dangle like outsize sleeves by narrow hips and long legs. Varicose veins in the legs are all that will tell the pathologist I was a cop. The generalissimo is pleased only by the grazed cheek and the bumped mouth.

  I can't stand this hateful scrutiny, but there's one more thing … I try out the beatific smile that saved me all those times. How did it look? What's it like? My eyes look like you could bounce stones off them.

  The mirror is back in the bedroom on the wall. I go to the back door and turn the key but don't open it. I sit back down in the chair. The coffee was too hot before but now it's too cold. I drink it anyway. It leaks out the side of my fat lip and swollen gum and runs cold down my chin.
>
  Kieran's House

  I think Kieran was worried about me after I got stoved in the Drum Club urinals. He invited me to dinner round at his a few days later. He picked me up from mine.

  'I thought you were bringing Beverley.'

  'No.'

  As we drove towards his house in Broxbourne near Hoddesdon, it was weird … we had nothing to say to each other. Odd being so close at work and then, meeting each other outside work, to find it awkward, to be searching for something. Kieran, with a clutch of manila files on the back seat, watched the road intently. I suddenly realized just what different types we were. It almost felt like a casual gay pick-up — a one-night stand where we had nothing to say to each other.

  'How's your wife?'

  I'd only met Becca once before at the dinner where me and Kieran got our Special Commendations.

  As we came through the front door, Becca, bending over a little plastic-nappied baby in one of those walkers, was not as I remembered her from that cocktail-dress night. Her movements were much more lively and cocky. She wore black jeans and her dark-brown, just-off-the-shoulder hair was pinned back above her ears.

  'Hello John, sorry about the mess! Say hello, Jack.'

  'You should see my place.'

  'Ha ha.' No really, you should see it, a septic tank of stagnant time, the bad spirit that hangs heavy over it.

  'I hope you like alphabetti-spaghetti and fun-size fish fingers,' she said, coming over to kiss me in her grey sweater.

  'Ah, Kieran's told you,' I joked. Ha ha.

  Are they both back yet?' Kieran asked her in that private voice of consulting parents.

  'Eric's upstairs, Shannon's on her way.' Parent eye-contact, shared flashes in secret code.

  The house was more tasteful than I'd imagined. (How little I knew my partner even though we'd discussed life and love, hate and fear.) I'd expected a Barratt home, but this was a roomy terraced cottage that was more liberal and middle-class than I'd have thought. Oatmeal carpet, fridge magnets and child's drawings, light pouring in from the kitchen window and garden. A little square wooden table. Exposed wooden stairs going up to bed. This was what the squalor patrol paid for. Good on yer, K.