Most depressing, for some reason, are door knobs on the floor under the ash. It won't be loong, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah …
The exact same listlessness that I always used to feel here now makes it impossible to lift a melted, buckled TV aerial. You can destroy the structure but not the spirit! Charred it looks more like home than before.
I kick the blackened shell of a kitchen cabinet. It flings back vicious slake and I'm bent double in the garden coughing up a soot-storm, red eyes streaming.
In no mood to get on the case. To go all the way to a phone booth. To have to go and borrow some money off the corner shop, in case I need to make more than one call. Who to? Address book in the fire with all my phone numbers.
Spent, fucked over, all fight gone, down and out. I go back into the flat.
I sit down on rubble where the chair used to be. Maybe I'll bed down here the night and then hassle out the organizational stuff later. The repairs.
Hanging ash scours my eyes and stubble-burnt throat. The stink clings to skin and filthy fingers, soot fuzzy-felts my lungs. A singeing in my nose. I can't even sit five minutes in this chimney.
I find the scanner in the sooty jumble rubble of my old waste site. The black box in the plane crash. Except it's broken and useless, too. I'll take it. I pick up a rolled-up curtain that was lying with other debris in the garden.
Standing in a phone box of shattered glass, staring at the blood on my fists and trying to remember what happened.
Walking round the block I pass all the homeowners crossing to the other side of the street going home from work. I find a space in an alley behind some shops to sit down and cry.
Pride keeps me from a night in the cells.
Walking and choked-up walking. I still have the bag I've brought with me with spare jeans and jumper and this curtain with weather-whitened ridges in the cloth.
Walking and walking in a daze as far and wide as Lincoln's Inn Field. The homeless are all behind a mesh fence like a refugee compound. All around are offices of barristers, solicitors and judges, and here they are camped in the middle of all the bad laws that brought them here. With the grass and all I'd hoped it'd feel more like a camp-site than it does.
It takes me ages to walk back. Lost.
Lost now. So difficult to think where Pentonville Road is. Where's Euston? Euston Street? Euston Road? Euston? Which way is the centre? The centre of London? How do I get more central than I am now? Which way is it more built up? That way will be more central probably. I'll just be walking. Yes. That's the thing. I'll just walk until I hit a sign or something familiar.
It all looks very unfamiliar.
Embankment. The same Embankment where I policed demos (feeling schizophrenic if the cause was just. But then it was a double-time and I had nothing better to do.) Cold piss-stew stings my eyes.
Some crazy, ginger-beard tramp is stealing a sleeping bag with menaces. I caution him. He hits me while I'm trying to tug the sleeping bag off him. I hit him back. He kicks off with all the fury of a decider for the last two places in the pecking order of All-England. I run away and now I'll only be able to police the cardboard hamlet when he's not around or not watching.
Night comes down mercilessly. I go up to a young, scraggy, scouse couple. They both have sandy hair. I buy their cardboard den off them for the ten pound in my pocket.
It stinks. They didn't look that smelly, but maybe they weren't first-time owners. Ah shit, maybe it's not even theirs. I lay out my curtain for a blanket, neatly folding the spare coat which will be stolen by morning.
Lying In A Stone Cattle Trough
Now that I'm immune to piss-haze and the stewed, body-rot stench, other smells are detectable: the graphite smell from cars up on the street above, diesel gusts off weary trains hobbling in to Charing Cross, and the greasy, nettle-soup river smell.
A withered blue balloon floats over the river. One end like a scraggy blue belly-button, the other like an old woman's wrinkled pap. The knackered, light-blue balloon — hooked by the Thames breeze — is carried high, high, high in the sky until a dot and then just flotsam in my eye.
I am becoming invisible. My body is blinking like a tired bulb in a deserted hallway. Today, for example, the silver-haired cockney on the Embankment souvenir stall can't see me. Yesterday he shouted at me when I stole a plastic bobby's helmet. But now as I walk right past his stall (it's on my beat) he can't see me. He still can't see me now even though I'm standing right in front of him, arms behind my back in the too-small helmet, looking down at mini red phone-boxes, distant Dinky red buses, tiny black taxis, and small brass Houses of Parliament. He busies himself with trays of football scarves, muttering to himself. Alone. A woman comes up and wants a light. He won't give her one, so she has to buy a souvenir lighter. I'm right in his sightline when he gives her the change, but he looks through me.
I'm becoming invisible like an old and unimportant memory: the face of the corner-shop keeper two addresses ago. Sometimes standing by the fire, I lift my jumper and pat my bare turn to see if I'm still here under this dead man's overcoat. When I start a-pat-pat-patting I can't stop. I strip off to look at my skin, patting and rubbing, until all the dossers start caterwauling and throwing bits of wood. So instead I've taken to crossing the road very, very slowly. I like to stop halfway and listen to the horns a-tooting: a sweet sound that says I can be seen. Beep-beep! And last night when they were a-beep-beep-beeping I saw the ghost of Lee Andrew, smaller and scruffier now he's in the after-life. He was behind the wheel of a white van with Repairs and Alterations written in black on the side-panel over a cartoon tailor holding giant shears. Stepping out the van the phantom said, 'Ready for death?', ignoring the hooting traffic in that way ghosts do, because they can walk through things and that.
'Yes,' I nodded, pleased that my contact had got in touch. Smaller now than he was, though, eyes popping with supernatural knowledge.
The ghost's familiars bundled him back into the van. 'Later, later,' they said, their hands going right through him time after time, but eventually closing the red-tail-light doors on him. I was on all fours on the central reservation with blood flowing from my nose and the traffic moving on.
In a locked-up deserted forecourt I find an old friend. What's it called now? It's not ragwort, what's it called? I used to put it in my bike pump when I was a child and fire it — pop! Groundsel. Is what it's called. It's called groundsel. Must remember that so if anyone asks me, 'Oh, John, what's the name of that weed that looks like a plant with little capsulelike buds, yellow-tipped, and with very fine fluffy bits like on a dandelion puffball?' I'll say, 'That'll be groundsel. Lots of people get it confused with ragwort, but they're different.' Must remember that. My memory's not what it was. Down among the groundsel just now I found a crumpled bit of purple card. Promised Land at The End it says. Capital Tango, capital Echo. I know this has to do with something. Or did have.
It's dark as I near the Embankment. Almost there when a black kid crosses the road tidily and comes up to me.
'Mr Manners.'
'Mr … Trevor row.'
'OK,' he huffs, holding up his arms out to the side like I just asked to search him. This confuses me. I stare at him for a bit. I put a hand down his back and run the other along his sleeve like we're about to tango. 'Tony Andrew knows where you are,' says my dancing partner softly. 'You gotta leave here. He knows you're here, he's seen you.'
'Tell me, what do you make of this?' I ask, looking for the flyer. 'Fuck it! Where is it? Here.' I hand him the flyer. It says: Promised Land at The End.
Techno + trance Billy Nasty, Sabresonic 10 p.m-4 a.m. Nearest tube Embankment.
'Yeah, that's where he works,' says Kyle. 'Now, you gotta — '
'Where who works?'
'What?'
'What's his name?' I ask. He stares at me.
'You know his name,' he says. 'Tony Andrew. He's on the door and, you know, all what goes with it.'
'The doorman at The End.' A tango echo.
'Tony Andrew's coming for you. Him and his team. Here's me car there.'
'What?'
'Just get in!' I stop at the black VW Golf. Pull back. I give him a look to say: 'You may think I've lost the plot, son, but I got enough wits about me to suss a trap.' He clocks this and just says, 'You've got to trust me.'
'So you can drive me to him?'
'No. He's coming here. Tonight. Tonight! Soon as he's finished at The End.'
'You want me to get in the car?'
'Yes. Please.' He holds the door open for me.
We're driving somewhere fast. It's cold out yet he has the window wound down and all the air blowers on. Strange … 'Satan?' I ask. 'Are you Satan?'
'No,' he says. He raises a riot scarf up like he was a-ram-raiding. 'Where else is there?' he asks from under the black cloth. 'Where else can you doss down? Is there a hostel or anything?'
'Arlington House.'
'Camden?'
'Can't remember. That's the problem I can't remember.'
'Yeah, it's Camden, Arlington Road. Arlington House, Arlington Road. I know it.'
'You got a licence?'
'No,' comes the muffled voice from under the black cloth. We stop at a red. I'm about to ask Kyle why he's got his scarf up when my shanks sting with sudden shame.
'I'm sorry,' I blurt, 'the smell … It's not me, really. It's where I've been. Sorry.'
'Well, the good news is,' he says, scarf sucked into his mouth as he speaks, 'I thought I'd lost me sense of smell with all the bugle but now … ' He breaks off. I look across. His head's turned away. Follow his gaze. A squad car beside us at the lights, the cop staring in. Kyle drops the scarf too late and says, 'Fuck!' The cop points at Kyle, drops his own window and leans across the empty passenger seat.
'It's all right he's with me,' I say to the cop, lifting the helmet off my lap and pointing at it by way of explanation. He stares at me blankly for a bit, blinks, slowly shifts his gaze back to Kyle and now points to the side of the road.
Kyle pulls over and switches the engine off. I look at him.
He's thinking. I'll start thinking too. The cop gets out of his car. Yes, thinking is good. Thinking, thinking. If word gets out where Kyle was and who with then that will go bad for him with the ghost and his familiars. This copper's on his own. He walks towards the driver door. I open my door a tiny, tiny crack. His serge trousers arrive Kyle-side. I jump out the car and give it toes.
*
I don't know where these streets are. It's like I've been beamed down from another point in history. I see as if for the first time that I am just in one particular space at a particular time, with its own peculiar noises, roofing styles and design of bottle. It's as if I've just landed on planet earth and am seeing everything fresh, and sort of objectively.
An old Kentucky box balanced on the rim of the green, plastic bin. I open the carton. Its bones have been sucked white. A fellow traveller must have been here before me. No one with a roof over their head ever sucks this shit clean to the bone. I'm glad I saved Kyle from trouble with his friends.
I hunt down a street name: Arlington Road. Ahead of me is Arlington House. I walk right past the lit door. The clever moth.
On a wall I find a nearly full bottle of Appletize, with the lid on. I sniff it to make sure it's not piss and empty the lot in two camel gulps.
Behind sandy polythene nightshift carpenters are fitting a shop. One of the fitters sings, a good voice like an old-style crooner. His steps on the concrete floor, the slide of one plank on another, his catches of song — each sound is distinct. So too the smells of wood and of sawdust burning on the worklight.
I turn off into a pretty, little curving road of four-storey Georgian houses with pillars and wrought-iron railings. A step ahead of me a black cat with white paws and white-tipped tail jumps through iron railings into a basement flat's 'area', activating an automatic security light. Like a magician's wand the cat's white-tipped tail turns the dark recess into a bright and beautiful garden: terracotta pots of sunflowers, hanging twirls of ivy, a curly bay tree in a wooden barrel and the grey stone statue of a cherub.
I pass a house which has a hand-painted 127 in the glass above the door — painted door-number 127. The two has come out really fat and so they've tried to make the seven and the one fat as well but they just look like blobs. And now here's 144. Same sort of home-made crisis in the glass above the door — real trouble. When it comes to '4's you're better off getting a professional in. The next time someone says to me, 'Oh, John, I'm not sure whether to paint my door number myself or get a signwriter to do it,' I'll say, 'What number do you live at?'
'Flat 144.'
'Get a properly trained professional signwriter in.'
I check the locks of offices and shops. Looking through their back doors I see a right old mess. Stacks of scattered yellow post-its, a fanned sprawl of phone books, telephones whose wires aren't quite long enough to reach the desk and have to go on the floor, botched splodges of polyfilla. A good-humoured voice in my head draws my attention to this (and to the botched door-numbers, too). All the time I spent thinking that everyone else has got life down pat except me. But, see, says the voice, it's not just you, is it?
I can hear a voice in my head now that's always been there. Through all my careering this sure voice has always been there, just as the liver and kidneys still function in a panic attack with slow mineral knowledge down where profound patterns are simple and complex molecules made easy. I half expect this voice to be angry with me for ignoring him so long when he's been the true measure all the time. But he's not angry. The voice speaks with patience, he knows how it is, this never-fazed voice, father to myself.
On Albany Street now I find a stone trough carved with the legend: Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association. I sit down on the ancient tub. Where was I?
Is it a voice or is it more like a face? A calm smile, a steady elephant eye on the slowest of slow-exposure time-settings and a step back from all my peaks and troughs. Only not the pitiless eye of time — which is where I started this journey — more like the partisan who knows I'm secretly stronger than I go around thinking. The easy, half smile of a logical man. Below petty rages, this sound inner core of sense is always level like a ship's compass. A good-humoured, benevolent voice. And all my hard rind of concerns and opinions I find are not actually shared here at my inner core by this lateral thinker. A still centre. Patient and encouraging, the voice suggests it might be more comfortable to lie down in the disused, stone cattle trough. Empty but for some mouldy leaves and sieved grit. I lie in the trough. Rest my feet up on the ledge like I'm in the bath.
Exhale, the unfazed father suggests. I exhale. By following this core voice it speaks stronger in me. It feels good to rest my legs.
All my long walking has been to hack a knowledge of what I did that night out of who I am (and to know now that I'm not a killer.) Through knowing who I am came knowledge of what went on with me and Lee back there. Before the long walk I felt that everything I'd seen was nothing I knew. Stranded from reality, God, and nature, they tell us, we stand alone in a pitiless universe from which nothing can be known separately from our perception of it. (Who ever wanted to know anything separately anyway?) It's all in our heads and nowhere else. But in the autopsy room at the Middlesex I saw a human brain once. Smooth as sea-snails its wibbly-wobbly foldings were the funny shape of ridged coral turf, shared the same intelligent pattern of sea-anemones. Our brain and its perceptions are shaped by the same intelligence that puts the finishing touches on a lamb, or decides when to rift a valley. Because the shape of my skull is a cast of my mother's uterus I know that the universe isn't mere crunch or spread but that it has the self-organizing suss of cells, spunk and shrimp's eggs, and the revealed pattern of dissolved air on the surface of the Thames, a pattern which intricately repeats to the end of space.
My eyelids are heavy. When I close my eyes I can make it night and when I open them as now I
make it day! Pink light is reflected on high white walls. A sweet-cidery taste in the mouth. My face feels like malty, baked bread, leavened, rich, toasted. I haul myself up to prop my arms on the side of the stone trough. One streetlight hasn't been turned off like all the others and burns yellow in daylight through the green leaves of a tree.
I climb out the trough and sit on the edge. I pick a few crackly brown leaves off my shoulders and out my hair and rub them into dust in my hands.
Every lie I ever told myself and others folded matter in on itself and things were not what they could have been. How could I ever have thought any different? To think that I could ever fold my soul and expect the world to be the same! Not just my perception, but the very medium I lived in was changed by every falsehood. All the energy I've wasted. All that hard this-is-me chatter and rind of opinion and fixity. Ach!
I flick brown dust out the lines on my palm.
Why have I never tried to be as virtuous as I could? Well, says the voice now, because I didn't want to miss out on anything and be less happy, when all the time I might have got the whole concept of virtue wrong anyway. Because in our time there's always someone who comes up and says, 'No, you've got it all wrong'. Because it looked like real virtue might be a looser affair: you know, all that intelligent stuff about how you might actually be a better person morally by being less rigidly upstanding. Why didn't I just go ahead anyway? In the olden days, your togaed nobleman's lifetime's project was to build an inner temple by living according to his best instincts. I can't think of an actual example, but a sort of ancient Greek on a mountain path thinking about other people, transcending lust in a grey beard and sandals, a temple in himself just for its own sake, or maybe because he lived when there was a cult of being in yourself as high a testament to human nature as possible. But I lived in a time when goods were made to be obsolete in a year or so. Because there was no audience and so no one would know. Why, though, wasn't it enough to have my own secret project? Because the world might end? Because no one else was doing it? Because I got the idea that everything you know is wrong? And the idea that who you think you are is always wrong, and therefore if you think you're living soulfully you're wrong? And besides, who you are is always changing, and so there's no stone to build on?
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