I start trotting towards yet another part of the fence, even though it's furthest from my car. He gallops off to a neutral corner. Relief. I've got the whole thing wrong — he was just feeling frisky and playful but my nervy sudden arm movements made him nervous. He turns. Homes in. Charging. Is he playing? I run for the fence like a bullfighter. He gets there first. Cuts me off. Drops shoulder. Late swerve. His wheeling bulk at forty-five degrees to the steaming grass. Charges straight at me, high-stepping, front hooves as high as my neck. Head going up and down like crazy, nostrils flaring, gob dribbly. Throwing everything into it I punch the suede cheek block. His yellow, rotten teeth come right by my face as he rears up. His front legs in the air, I shoulder charge his stomach. We fall together into the threshing machine of his legs. Upturned hooves kicking out, his writhing rear legs make his hips slither like an 'S' on the grass. Both of us wild flailing and writhing and wrong-side-down. Is he fighting or just trying to get up? Am I fighting or just trying to get up, get away?
Apeshit. Eyeball to frenzied eyeball. His eye like an anchovy caught in amber staring with terrible knowledge, drawing me in until it becomes a rock thrown in a brown pond, and then a kaleidoscope as he makes a strange noise that I've never heard a horse make before. Like a human voice on film rewound, a whale yawn, low walrus whine.
The yellowy lights of the North Circular pass over my windscreen. My car has been accepted among the traffic like any other car. Thank you. Mud or blood on my face and hands. What happened I don't want to know. I'm driving a car. The radio broadcasts comforting words from the known world: Viking, Cromarty, North Utsire, South Utsire, Dogger Light Vessel Automatic. A terrible dread: what do those hot entrails tell me about the future?
*
Two a.m. All is quiet on this tidy, seventies, rabbit-hutch council estate. At this time of night it rests as peaceful as the one-inch scale model in the council-planning chamber. You see what the architect had in mind. You can see the plastic model poplars of the optimistic T-board. There is a copse in the drop off this cement walkway: concessionary trees and bushes give up their surplus scent in an end-of-day clearance. Expansive as the scent from council shrubs and trees, I shout, 'Two o'clock and all's well!'
I thread through Dalston Lane and veer off towards Shackle-well. It's safer for me to patrol the no-go areas. No chance of getting eyeballed by other cops.
*
Three a.m. The pool room empties. They're surprised to see me here.
'Want some gear?' asks the big feller and they all fall about. Stripy, jumbo strides and plenty architecture (that sovereign ring will hurt). I'm pretty sure the voices on the scanner were both white but you can never be 100 per cent and as Kieran always used to say, 'If in doubt rule it out.' (We always got stuck in, and he called other beat officers who didn't ball-watchers, farts in a trance, spectators.) I lift each baseball cap, check inside as if for controlled substances, looking all the time for a bloodstain shaped like a tree. They stare in shocked silence, which helps me concentrate. Maybe, like a Rorschach ink test, it won't look like a tree to me? I put each cap back on their heads one by one so as not to put the wrong cap on the wrong head, and look incompetent, occasionally stopping to count how many I've done so far so as not to miss one out or do the same head twice at the risk of annoying anyone. Nothing doing. Clean. A sixth sense tells me that to say, 'Thank you very much, gents,' would break the spell and lead to trouble, tells me that the silence is somehow a magical force-field for me, so I just turn away and head up Lower Clapton Road.
The deserted streets look as innocent and expectant as a film-set, as if tomorrow everyone might wake up, having slept on it, and do the world all different.
*
Four a.m. I'm somewhere near Euston.
A six-foot wall hides a seventy-foot drop on to railway tracks. I climb over the wall and drop ten feet on to a ledge. Someone has tagged the word SENSE in hip-hop silver. Below me a nuclear slow-train tiptoes through the night, taking the points warily. On the cylindrical container carriages is the zigzag in a circle code-sign which means radioactive material in transit, as only the MOD, emergency services and Mr Sands are meant to know. I throw a rock which whacks the cylindrical hull with a bang.
Drifter
I've walked through the whole night and now day comes to relieve me. Miles from home.
I sit on the edge of a canal-cut section of the Thames, thick with green flotsam. A hot sunny morning burns through dawn mist.
A lean young man cycles to work on a mountain bike. He seems surprised to see a cop sitting down on the towpath, contemplative. Stops and asks, 'Are you OK?'
'Fine thanks, just tired. Lovely day … '
'Yeah it is!' he says. Puts earphones back in and cycles on with a smile. (I've probably conformed to some crusty notion of how even fascist pigs can be chilled out by a beautiful day. Yeah, tell your friends.) In the new-issue shadows cast by towpath on river, a blackened three-litre oil can or a block of slimy wood or something bobs towards me, very, very slowly.
My arse aches bonily from the cement. I feel tired now as the sun warms my back. Think I'll get up soon and find somewhere that's open for coffee. Yeah. Coffee and a sausage sandwich. Mmm.
I watch the bobbing object. Bulky, weed-covered oblong. A piece of material snagged up with it, floating four feet behind like a trailer. The driftwood moves towards me as imperceptibly as a minute hand. Sometimes it seems it isn't drifting towards me at all but is static. I'm imagining a current that isn't actually there. The tiny, white, duck feathers and little white gobbets of moorhen spit in the green flotsam right near me don't seem to be moving. Maybe the driftwood isn't moving either.
No, it is definitely drawing nearer and flowing ever-so-slightly swifter now; perhaps because it has found a fast-track current in the nearside shadows of the canal, or perhaps it can move easier now that it has resolved what it is: a dead man floating face-down.
Let him come to me. Neither of us has any reason to rush. I wait maybe three more minutes for him to nudge my DM dangling in the sun above the scuzz of thick jetsam.
I get on my knees, lean over and pull at his collar. It's all I can do to lift his upper body a foot out the water. His slack neck whacks his head against the cement back with a sickening force which would've killed him if he wasn't dead.
I turn him round so that his head and shoulders are at right angles to the edge and haul the waterlogged dead feller out the water. His pockets are inside-out, jacket and trousers dark with canal water.
What to do? What do I do now?
The dead old man's watery-blue and bloodshot eyes look past me at Kieran who hovers high against the sun with his familiar twinkly self-confidence. 'Wait till someone comes along: it doesn't look suspicious if no one can see it, and as soon as someone does come down the towpath then you can get them to call an ambulance,' he says, vanishing.
Yeah, why not wait? No pressure in waiting if there's no one else around to see, is there? And as soon as someone else is around then I'll have help.
I wipe the gunk off his face. He doesn't look at rest, he just looks bone-tired, face slack with exhaustion, his drained mouth falling open in last gasp. Still knackered after death. I close his eyes which squelch water out shockingly.
I look up. Fifty yards away, a woman is watching me while her dog makes elaborate preparation before taking a piss. The dog, a lurcher, is on one of those extender leads and she has another lurcher trotting free.
I clear my throat and hum a single note with my mouth open to make sure I'll be able to talk normally when she gets in range.
Her brown hair has streaks of blonde highlighter and is tousled from sleep. She has a River Island sweatshirt on and grey jogging pants. She hasn't put any makeup on yet. She is a breakfast-sexy, slightly overweight council housewife in her mid-thirties.
'My radio fell into the water when I dragged him out. Can you call an ambulance, please.' She pulls a mobile from her pocket and holds it out to me. 'Just call an ambul
ance, please,' I repeat (not knowing where the fuck I am). I busy myself in trying to close his mouth while she makes the call, but it won't stay shut unless I tilt his head back.
'What happened?' she asks, slowly pushing the aerial back in with her cheek after she's made the call.
'Dead tramp. They fall in the river at the Embankment and they fetch up anywhere.'
'Poor soul.'
'Yeah.'
'Will you be able to find out who he was?' she asks. I put my hand in his inside pocket but it's empty.
'No. Probably not.' I stand up. Smile. She smiles weakly back, impotently commiserating. I get out my notebook. 'I just need your name and address, please.'
'But I haven't seen anything.'
'Well, it's only — '
'I can't tell you anything,' she says.
'Well, obviously any dependants of his are gonna have to come and stay at yours now.'
'I'd help if there was anything to do, but what do you need my address for?'
'It's just to corroborate what I'm gonna write up.'
'But you're a policeman. You don't need me to back you up.'
'Yeah, but suppose I'd killed a string of tramps … '
'No, no, sorry,' she says, walking smartly away and making hand gestures like she's erasing herself out of the scene. She leaves the towpath and disappears into a cul-de-sac, shouting at her lurchers.
I prop the man against a brick wall among nettles that have no sting for him now. We wait for the ambulance.
I once heard someone describe seeing their father in his coffin at a wake. I remember the thing which seemed to upset them most was that the undertakers had combed his hair into a side-parting and that wasn't, they said, how he used to have it. The greasy water has plastered his hair forward in a centreparting over his face. I clear the wet hair out of his eyes. And recognize the face.
'Where's your smarts, old friend, eh?'
His rotting woollen coat has been pulled and sagged by this long-cycle rinse. The buttonholes have shrunk. The top button of his coat is wedged tight. Hard to unfasten, but now it comes. And there is the bow-tie and frilly dress-shirt of the old Irish down-and-out, the doorman I saw at the corner of Marylebone High Street, the boxer who refused to go down. 'Stay standing and wait for a change in the world, Pops?' I gently smooth his hair back, now that I know how he used to have it.
His clothes have soaked into mine. We both smell of river. A kind of musty algae, diesel and mud smell. The sun has warmed his face and hands. My legs ache from his dead weight but I'm not moving him again.
Earth spins from dark to light, a siren flashing in space. I look at my dead doorman. 'Time to go back now,' says the ventriloquist's dummy. Time to go back. This is the end.
How did I get here? I've got to stop and go back now. Got to go back now. Over.
Making my fingers into a comb I slick back his ruddy-brown hair some more, running my fingers through silty strands, smoothing it, slicking it back, smoothing and smoothing it down.
The dead old doorman's clothes leak river on to me, but it's cold and external unlike the hot leaking of the sunken, melted old woman. The ambulance is taking him to St Jude's Morgue in Teddington. I start the long walk home as the hot day begins. I've come to the end of something. Wet trousers chafe my sore legs like scurrying back from the Drum Club that time. Can't say why exactly, but it's like certain options have gone, and as I walk the long walk back to mine it feels like a summons.
A sore throat arrives. One minute I'm just thinking how it's only a few more blocks and I don't have a sore throat and the next I do. It's starting to hurt every time I swallow, every time I move my Adam's apple which I need to do a lot now with my mouth being so dry. I feel very cold, but I'm too tired to tuck my jumper in. Trying not to throw up.
I rush into the flat like sickness was my secret lover and we couldn't wait to strip and jump into bed, hot and trembling for it and my head is down the toilet.
Lying with my head on the lip of the bowl — like in the club urinal that time — every shitty thought I have makes me groan, like the memory of dicky mussels when you've got food poisoning. Solid chunks of fake belief come up like undigested poison; every repeated little mantra hurts my head like a sudden stab of brain knock in septic migraine brine. It's them, the big undigested slabs of rotten phrases that course jaggedly round my skull: conversational stock phrases I've been repeating long past believing. All the wank and the shite and the spume and the spout. Out, out, out, out, out. And all the incoming too, all that hurts my head: a bowl of Fruit and Fibres doubly ace, apples, hazelnuts, bananas, raisins, coconuts, sultanas, when we're on our hols we eat it by the case. The promised land at the end.
*
After sweating the night in bed I am this morning a tad shaky on my pins.
Hollowed but happy, I sit out on the low wall in front of my flat and feel a sense of stillness and clean slate. The birds twittering on the green awning of the shop next door are unhampered by my ideas of birds twittering. Lived here, what, three years? — but I've never noticed before how pretty these streetlights are: little perspex cylinders topped off with a black hot-pot lid. Telegraph poles radiate wires to each house like bunting or rigging. It's a gently ruffled, mild, post-rain day and the air smells like essence of everything. A portly, blonde, red-faced woman walks past with her daughter. For some reason they both smile and say, 'Hello.'
Hello.
A Leave-Taking
I sit out on Beverley's fire-escape, my back against the brick wall. Out here I share the black iron platform with chunks of broken sink, a stack of plant pots, a set of rusted gears off a bike with a pile of nuts and bolts beside it. Washing hangs on the railings next door and down one.
The sky is still and gently fading. Lilac-grey clouds are static against a hard, flat, black-and-blue sky. Past the city's edge a spent mauve sunset flares and sputters over the hills and far away.
'Blackcurrant bracer,' Beverley says, setting a steaming mug next to my hip. She perches side-on to me, her feet on the top step.
In a garden down below, collapsed apples decompose in unmown grass, making the dusk dew a turned cider. The last squirrel of autumn pops out, stops, strobe-pumps its tail. Its movements are the usual melodramatic farce I've come to expect from squirrels. Frantically late! Fugitive! Fuck off, squizzer. Who still eats you anyway?
'I'm glad you were in,' I say at last. 'I tried to phone to confirm but there was no answer.'
'They cut me off again.'
Paul Weller's 'Above the Clouds' tails off midway as if Weller has spotted someone bad come into the room, or has suddenly become preoccupied with something else.
'What happened to the music?' I ask.
'The volume control's fucked,' she tuts resignedly. 'It plays all right for a bit but it keeps falling.' I can just hear the tin-tin high bits like when you're on the tube a few seats down from a personal stezzy. We go into the front room to inspect. The sound is nowhere but the orange graphic-equalizer bars still flicker up and down like a fake fire on one of those plugin heaters with plastic coal and ember lookalikes.
She tries another tape and ups the volume. We go back out on the fire-escape. I move the stack of plant pots so I can sit with my legs out. We listen to the music while it's there.
'This is beautiful, what is it?'
'Le Mystere de Voix Bulgare,' she replies.
'What?'
'Le My stere de Voix Bulgave.'
'Is that the song or the name of the, er – ?'
'No, the song's called "Kalimankou Denkou". I just got it.' A still ecstacy settles over Beverley and me. We don't need to ask each other to know we are both being taken somewhere by this, or taken back somewhere, resonating to something strange and anciently familiar.
A hush settles over the blood. My arms lie still at my side like they have been turned to stone and yet at the same time I feel more alive than ever and my arms feel very strong, like I could do many things with them. I realize my forehead
has been in a type of frown for the last however many years. I put the muscles of my face back how they were again for all that time and the unconscious expression which was mine seems very strange.
It doesn't sound Bulgarian, it sounds Middle Eastern, or maybe Russian or even Red Indian, and sometimes like classical choristers. The music is like another culture calling to those bits of us not activated in this culture. The music switches on our capitalist souls' silent areas, sets them vibrating because we're all the same and we always knew this, even though we forgot for a long time and will forget it again.
It sounds like a hero has died and they're singing an upbeat lament for the body. A requiem, maybe; or as if he's riding away to certain death and this is a blessing upon his head. A mixture of mourning and of strength and vindication got from his passing. And though I know the way I apprehend this music has all sorts of Western cultural grit in it — Charlton Heston riding out strapped to the saddle in the last frames of El Cid is at the back of my mind, probably — yet, listening to this music, there are things which seem beyond all those cultural motes in your eye. Whatever iron heaven I imagine my life under, I now know that it is a kinder place; that the store of human sympathy is greater than I imagined; that there have always been these women, representatives of the cloud of witnesses that look upon us with only love wherever we've been. The mixture of anguish and benediction in these women's voices knows my extremes. 'Aaah Kaa-li aach.' All the chatter and inane babble of papers and daytime TV and magazines and evening TV fall away like dead grass on the wind. Fall under a shadow, back to the shadow world they came from and always were.
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