Been suspended nine months. Nine months out and still no trial date fixed. Nine months date still suspension fixed. Still. Trial suspension out fixed. Nine months. No out date trial fixed suspension. Out fixed date suspension trial. Nine months.
Suspension. Neither one thing nor the other. A mid-air feeling, not earthed. A bit of a distance between me and everything. Nothing looks quite real. I don't feel that normal interaction with the world, with things.
Can't sleep, can't read, can't listen to music.
I'm so tired all the time but I can't sleep. So tired. Every few days I get a clutch of ragged, merciful sleep.
Can't read. The words seem like the chatter of another life form. Irrelevant. Nothing to do with me. In an old magazine article lying around I tried to read some piece about manic depression, but she was writing in the ducky Esperanto of those who've already decided to live another day. Couldn't take it in. Something strange: reading the article, first one, then another, then every single word looked as if it was spelt wrong. Surely that's not how they are, how they've always been?
Can't listen to music. Makes me edgy and empty. Can't watch TV. Well, not properly. Channel-hop, three channels a second with the dibber. This goes on for hours. I flash through the friezes like a runaway train passing a station, a hundred stations. Me, the cable and the night. Sometimes I'm just sitting there slumped in front of the telly and it's so difficult to move that it crosses my mind just to piss where I'm sitting. So far I've resisted the urge.
Hope is an exhausting emotion and waiting-rooms are tiring places.
Waking up now I'm relieved to find that the depression and emptiness I was begging sleep to carry off has gone. But as always in the hour or so it takes me to get dressed (if I haven't slept in my clothes) and clean my teeth (for their full day's grinding ahead) and spill coffee on myself the black mood returns like an expanding hot stain. A sinking and rotting in the guts immobilizes me. And then — as now — I have to just sit there and suffer all these thoughts of suicide and despair and regret and failure and the ugliness of the world to come at me. It's like being on Public Order at a demo or riot when you just have to take the shit: a lightning-rod for all the ill-will in the world.
Late afternoon now.
Hard to get outdoors. I haven't got out the house for a couple of weeks now — when the milk ran out I did without.
House arrest. Solitary. I can't even talk to Kieran because of him being a defence witness.
At the start of my suspension I used to go driving. Though I had nowhere to go, the atmosphere of the car — all purpose and meaning — gave a partial relief. But now I've spent that reserve of purpose and my aimless journeys have left their spirit in the car's interior like a flat battery. A few months ago I sat in the car. I put the key in the ignition and jiggled the gear stick. It wobbled like a loose tooth, like it was broken. I pulled on the steering-wheel, but hadn't the will to make that extra effort to heave it through the steering-lock. I took the key out.
Time for a walk.
Been slobbing round the house in the same old grubby strides. But I'm not gonna get changed because the light's already failing and I don't want to miss all the daylight again. (Been trying to get it together to go for a walk for a few days.) Flick tiny salt'n'vinegar crumbs from the creases in my lap. There are some splashes of toothpaste or milk at the top of the leg. I check with the mirror that the white stain doesn't look like spunk (or that it isn't spunk). For the last few days I haven't bothered to get changed out of the comfy old shirt that I've been sleeping in. The collar's a bit rumpled, but I put on a tie which straightens that out and a jacket which covers the stain at the top of my strides.
I hit the street at the first attempt and head up into Archway in the fresh open air. Walking.
I feel curiously detached under this low-watt sky, perhaps because of not getting changed: it's like I've still got my indoors head on. A wonky, loose paving slab knock-knocks as I walk over it.
I've got to relearn just how to walk in the street: where to look, how to avoid bumping into people and a whole load of pedestrian etiquette besides. Outside Archway tube I walked smack bang into the Big Issue badge-vendor, knocking a whole stack of Big Issues out of his arm and on to the pavement.
'Sorry mate, I'm really sorry, I was miles away … '
'Fuck's sake!' he says, giving me a black look before bending down to retrieve the magazines which have slipped right under the railings, spilling into the gutter.
I turn off into a quiet side-street, my pace slackens. Numbers painted in white on black plastic dustbins, sleeping policemen whose high humps have, by some later council edict, been shaved off so they are half-height. Halfway down the street a high window open despite the cold has old-school funk blaring out. Inconsiderate but not my concern. Not any more. Not for the time being.
Holloway Road's sealed off. Once again a chunk of the city is brought to a standstill and everyone is made just that bit more tense and uptight by the same, small group of committed Irishmen who work for Murphy's.
The Cancer Research Shop is so small it's like a shrine to the unknown family. Here is the dead man's overcoat, his wide-lapel jackets. Here are his knackered shoes for you to walk a mile in and know what life was like for him. His ties. The board-games the family liked to play, the albums you thought no one would ever have bought. A strange weird extended family whose money ran out in the late seventies, early eighties. They were stuck in time and life wiped them out. The musty, loser smell gets to me and I jump out the shop as fast as a booster.
I feel like a killer in these black leather gloves. No one else is wearing gloves. Then again I am a killer. In the New Year the court will tell me whether I'm a good killer or a bad killer. I'd like to know. It's all gonna be out there, the talk, but the answer is in a tiny inward balance in my mind or soul. And even I don't even know.
All the etched, grey, skew-whiff faces of the poor on Junction Road: old faces fucked this way by cheap teeth, that way by troubles.
The fact that I don't have anywhere to go in particular starts to slow me down. Crossing to the traffic-island by the Archway roundabout, feel like I haven't everyone else's energy as they dash across.
And so I stand where I am. Try to make up my dwindling mind whether to just buy milk, fags and go home or whether to carry on walking up Archway Road and get the milk and fags on my way back. Just then a student with pale skin in Levellers chic approaches. 'If you've come to stop the road being built,' I think, 'I'm afraid you're a bit late, Mr Cunt.'
Light brown tatty dreads, an orange nylon rucksack — full of juggling clubs, no doubt. He wears one of those stupid fucking Persian hats they all get on their year off in Goa: his little reality trophy. But all my prickliness melts as he walks up, smiles and becomes the first person to talk to me for seventeen whole days and nights.
'Excuse me officer, am I going the right way for the Forum, please?'
'No,' I replied, 'you wanna go back down that road you just came from, and then it's about, er, half a mile on your right.'
'Back down there and on the right? Thanks.'
Oh Jesus, that felt fucking good! Off up Archway Hill, my steps resprung with real purpose now. Not breaking my brisk stride I pull the chinstrap down, humming. I pound up Archway Hill in the chilly sunshine on and on, stronger and stronger, the rocket-shaped shadow before me travelling over the pavement like a guided missile.
The Doorman
Uniform back from the dry-cleaners. Felt more like a policeman the other day than I did when I was a policeman. Sometimes then I just felt like a security guard for all God's shareholders.
It's funny what they take away from you and what they don't. They take your warrant card but not your uniform; they take your nightstick but not your handcuffs.
Up at six a.m. Out the flat at seven. A cold, sharp, bright morning.
Walking, walking. Walking sorts out my head. I vault the railings at Euston Road. For the last eight months I've been so tired but now I've go
t all this energy to burn.
On the corner of Marylebone High Street and Baker Street stands a stocky, fifty-year-old down-and-out wearing a black dress-shirt and black bow-tie. A full head of fine, straight, ruddy-brown hair slicked back perfectly and still slightly wet.
He is with three standard-issue dossers. Not yet ready for the day the Night Shelter has issued them, they sit on the pavement in their filthy rags. But not him. He stands in black frilly shirt, bow-tie, and the cheap grey suit he folds under his pillow in the pissy Night Shelter and presses smooth with violent dreams.
His sand-blasted, ruddy face looks somehow like it used to be redder — suggesting that he's beaten the bottle and been on tea and tap water for some time now. A sand-blasted face, cold-shaven with some long-service, chipped, white plastic Bic and a bit of dry soap.
Maybe the black dress shirt and dickie bow is because he was once a bouncer. He has the face for it: a boxer's face, the boxer who refused to go down …
He stands with purpose against the day, present and correct as the world goes to its work. The entry for self-respect in the city's encyclopaedia.
But doesn't he know? Doesn't he know there's no way back for him? What's he gonna do? Stay standing and wait for a change in the world? That, my friend, will take longer than the collective lifetimes of all the dead men whose overcoats your slumped pals are wearing. Stay standing though you're gonna have more months than hot dinners?
Like all true heroism, it is unspectacular and long term and with nothing really to show for it among the Wonderbra billboards and radios booming from warm cars. It wins whatever obscure point heroism wins somewhere in the collective soul, and registers itself only in something beautiful about the man, for anyone in the mood to notice.
I keep walking. Fifty yards up Baker Street a young man in full nineteenth-century, stripy-cuffed police uniform stands outside the 221B Sherlock Holmes Museum. He grins sheepishly when our eyes meet. I do a kind of mock puffing-up my chest as if inspecting the parade, pretending to show the lanky, saggy-shouldered geek how to do it. He's not to know I'm off-duty. Way off.
'It's all changed mate,' I tell him, 'it's all changed.'
Then again, perhaps not. It hasn't changed because police work brings you into contact with the primeval, the primordial. You can hear it in atavistic terms like Caucasian — as if we were all still walking round the Mesopotamian Basin with clubs like the nightstick they took away from me. You can hear it in the pre-Roman geography of West Mercia or the Cambrian topography of Thames Valley (from whose limestone they exhume the remains of a Piltdown Woman, skull smashed with a rock, feet in Reeboks).
Night patrol brings you up against the evil beyond the edge of civilization. Only it's not as cut and dried as the first Roman wall built hard against the marshes of West Mercia. There's no simple geography. You can't separate it into areas, into individuals — it's happening within and without everyone all the time. That's why when the Super said, 'During the fight were you fighting as a policeman or as a man?' I wanted to say that no one is a policeman in a fight. They weren't invented then.
London Damage Control
Cranking up Lever Street, nine a.m. I stay out of division on my patrols: don't want to be eyeballed by police or thieves, friends or enemies, don't want to have to explain why I'm in uniform.
An engineer sits on the pavement. He has lifted a hatch out of London and his feet dangle in the hole above yellow plastic pipes and black cable. He sits in front of a green telecom cabinet, open to reveal clutches of delicate wires the colour of hundreds and thousands, where the exchange flex meets distribution wires. He clips his red phone to a series of wires, listening, listening … each wire a distilled hum of the talk of the town, the parish wail, the mean pitch of a thousand calls. He looks stressed-out, lethargic, his movements are heavy. Too big a responsibility for one man, all this. All this spiritual monitoring, listening, adjusting. He runs dirty thumbs over tired eyes. And it's only nine o'clock.
The sign on the busted black gates says LONDON DAMAGE CONTROL. Its derelict forecourt is overwhelmed with the backlog: chunks of plaster from a wall, empty plastic bottles, sweet wrappers, an old mattress, a cement-caked, punctured wheelbarrow full of filthy clothes, a smashed and splintered beer crate, worn-out engine parts and a perished fan-belt.
I pick up the pace. A few blocks further, in a side-street of council terraces, I spy a ground-floor window full of handwritten notices. Three sheets of A4. I stop to read the block-capital green felt-tip: YOU WATCH AND YOU WAIT AND WHEN I GO OUT YOU BREAK IN AND ROB. YOU WAIT TO SEE WHEN I GO OUT. I HAVE TO SIT IN ALL THE TIME. I AM TRAPPED IN HERE AND CANNOT GO OUT!
Sellotaped above this is another sheet of paper with more green, felt-tip block capitals: THREE TIMES YOU HAVE BROKEN IN. STOP WATCHING AND WAITING TO STEAL FROM ME. YOU DO NOT NEED TO STEAL. GET A JOB. I HAVE ASKED THE COUNCIL TO MOVE ME BUT THEY DO NOT LISTEN. NOR DO THE POLICE.
I knock at the door. No answer. I bang on the window, wincing in case she thinks I'm them. I stand in front of the doublethickness net curtains. If she's in, and not hiding behind the toilet, she will make out the conehead alien silhouette of a standing police-officer come to save her.
She lifts the bottom square of the nets. To do this she has first to pull out a drawing-pin holding it to the sill.
She opens the jimmy-scarred door, saying, 'That was quick. For once.' She lets me in, looking out defiantly at the steps immediately opposite. 'That's where they congregate — on those steps, and that's where they live too.' We go in through the kicked-in door of her ground-floor flat.
She looks much less vituperative than her notes. Much less mad, too. She glances at me with an easy smile and raises her hands a few inches off the arms of the chair in a little gesture of resignation. She is about sixty, magnified eyes behind tinted-frame glasses. Her pretty, clear-skinned face has wrinkles in strange places. I wonder what possible expressions could put vertical lines on a face.
'Do you mind if I smoke?' she asks.
'It's your house,' I answer, perching on the arm of a green armchair with wooden insets designed to rest a cup of tea on during peaceful retirement by the sea.
'Do you want one?' She holds out the royal purple pack of John Player Specials.
'Well, I'm not supposed to but I think I will. No, it's OK, I've got my own here.'
'You don't need to perch there, you can sit down.'
'Thanks.'
'That's no bother. I'm just glad you're here. I've been phoning and phoning the police and they keep promising to send someone round and they never do. They just think it's that mad woman again — she's just paranoid. Well I am paranoid because I don't know when it's going to happen next.'
I don't know what comment will do, so I just say, 'Well, I believe you.'
'And I have to go out to phone. But I've not been back long this time before you've come.'
'What have they took?'
A big sigh …
'I had a rental telly went — not even mine; money — I try to keep it all in postal orders for security but they go too. Jewellery, not much, but all I've got, all I had. They even took a frozen chicken.'
'Plus you have to go out again to phone the council to get them to come and put new locks on.'
'Yeah,' she says, meeting my eyes for the first time, like a daughter.
'How long does it usually take them?' I ask.
'They're quicker than you,' she flashes. 'Well, your colleagues, anyway.'
'Well, if I go across the road and say we've had a complaint … but then they can just say it wasn't them.' She looks down at folded hands on her lap, a cigarette smoking out of the top of eight knuckles. She's heard all this before, but I carry on, unable to think of anything better to say. 'And even if I got a warrant it may be that your stuff isn't there any more.'
She looks sad at the thought of her stuff off on a long junket. 'Or we could mark your property and next time they steal, we can trace it all the way back … ' I trail off.<
br />
'Well, I appreciate you coming round anyway.'
We sit in silence for a bit. I watch our smoke form a hard-edged right-angle where it folds against the shaft of light through net-curtained window; light slanting down in the stare trajectory of those who watch and wait.
She nudges the ashtray towards me. I look around her room in silence.
Has she got any family? There's no photos anywhere. She is a woman alone in the world, and yet you always expect to see some photos. There aren't any.
'I'm John. What's your name?'
'Jill — '
'Hi Jill. Do you mind if I ask — um … er … I've noticed there aren't any pictures anywhere.'
She looks up again, levelly, defending her last patch. 'I've put them in a drawer. I don't want them seeing them when they break in, you know what I mean? Face-down in a drawer.'
I bought a six-inch wooden photo-frame the other day. Snappy Snaps. Saw it in the window. Shrink-wrapped with a photo of a model in place. A kind face, her light-brown hair blowing slightly over her face. She's grinning because we're halfway through a perfect picnic and she was right to fall in love. At first I left her in the frame as a kind of joke. But as the nights evaporated into chilly dawns, and the days blacked out again, I began to get a kind of comfort from her. Patron saint of a life we didn't lead, the path we never took. Smiling and waiting for us in some suspended-time parallel universe. Same sort of comfort I knew as a kid, staring at the kind woman on the sleeve of Top of the Pops compilation albums. Not the original artists. My friend. Looking at me with understanding and affection, big eyes in seventies black eyeliner, as she stood in string-mesh, hip-slipped bikini, the surf around her knees as the needle went everybody was kung everybody was kung everybody was kung everybody was kung …
'When did you last go shopping?' I ask embattled Jill, prisoner in her own home.
Everybody was kung fu fighting …
'Properly? Not for months. I have to live off junk food from the corner shop.'
Manners Page 14