Stan first met Melissa in a church: they were both there for the free tea. Usually, Stan preferred to juggle his charitable institutions for the sake of variety, but he kept returning to that church each day in the hope of seeing Melissa again. A week later, she reappeared, and Stan convinced her to join him for a drink in the park. She agreed, but it was mid February, and as they sat together on a bench she shivered so hard she could barely speak. The next week, she invited him back to her bedsit. At first, he declined, but then she told him he could drink and smoke there, and Stan moved in for the next eight months.
'I really loved her, you know,' he said. 'Still do. Never had anyone like that in my life, before or since. But in the end I had to go. We weren't…' he paused and searched for the word, '… compatible.'
He rubbed his eyes and fell quiet. I wanted him to continue, but I had not seen him look so fragile before. Five minutes passed before he spoke again.
'When she was drunk, she was ruddy mental.' He breathed in deep and then exhaled with a hissing sigh. 'Completely nuts. One minute in hysterics on the floor crying over her kids, the next threatening to chop my balls off if I didn't give her another one, then suicidal, then hitting me, then hitting herself. It was like it flicked a switch in her, and there was nothing I could do except wait it out until she fell asleep and then woke up sober again. And when she was sober she was adorable, that was when I loved her. But she drank every night.'
'Had she always been an alcoholic?'
'No! That was the problem. She wasn't the alcoholic, I was! And how's she supposed to not drink when I start at three o'clock on the dot every day!'
'Jesus, Stan…' I muttered.
'What?'
'Why didn't you just stop fucking drinking? Just for once?'
I thought for a moment he might hit me, but instead he flicked his cigarette across the park, stood up, growled, 'Go fuck yourself, Charlie,' and then strode away.
10
I missed breakfast at The Wild Goose, and Stan was not there for lunch, but I found him in his usual spot in the park at three o'clock and sat next to him. He nodded and passed me a bottle of vodka. I took a swig and passed it back. Neither of us was sorry for what we had said the night before, but we let it pass, and the brief spell of awkwardness soon dissipated. Stan did not, however, mention Melissa to me again.
I bought a pack of beers from the nearby supermarket and the both of us set about getting drunk. I enjoyed the slow slip into inebriation out here in public, the growing warmth, the loosening of muscles, the descent from concern to indifference of what passers-by must think. 'Sod 'em!' Stan slurred, and stumbled off to piss in the river. Dusk and then night-time settled. Everything got funnier. A police car kerb-crawled along the road behind us, slowing to a stop, and we grabbed our plastic bags and sprinted off to find a quieter spot, giggling with excitement. The movement felt good and we continued to walk, the street lights becoming kaleidoscopic, our feet tripping and hopping. Sometimes we collapsed behind bins or leaned back against shop windowpanes, but mostly we moved. We could not go to The Wild Goose for dinner. We were too drunk to enter. We were too drunk to find it.
It was growing late; I usually liked to be asleep in my den by this hour. But the alcohol made me both fearless and energetic, and as I stomped along beside Stan, now in full storytelling mode, I thought perhaps that he was the best friend I had ever had.
'Did I tell you about Worcester, where I saw a guy eat dog-shit for money…'
'Then there was Northampton and the door-to-door salesman…'
'How about Bournemouth, where I saved that kid…'
We arrived at a tall and crumbling house. Next to it, set back somewhat, was an open garage and, inside that, a large and dirty sofa covered with a sleeping bag. The garage stank of stale cigarette smoke. 'Student house,' Stan said. 'Or, at least, I think it is. All the rest on this street are. But this one's empty. I tried to get in, it's locked up too tight, but this garage is always open. It's all right, eh?'
Stan had taken me to his sleeping-spot. We were best friends.
'Feel free to kip on the floor if you want. Couch is mine. I'm fucked.' He rolled himself into his sleeping bag. I sat on the floor and opened my last can of beer. It was dark in the garage, and Stan's face appeared in a jaundiced glow each time he puffed on his cigarette.
'Leeds,' he muttered. 'Have I told you about Leeds?'
He had not. He had repeated most of his other stories, but this one was new. I waited eagerly.
'Leeds was where it all started.' His words came slow and quiet. I suspected he would be unconscious soon. 'Where the tramping began. Back then, if I had the money I'd go to the pub. I don't any more. Too expensive. And the funny thing is I've now got a taste for this cheap shit. Good vodka makes me sick. But back then I drank cider, ruddy shitloads of it. I had been blacking out for a while, but didn't think much on it. One night, my last memory was in the pub with my mates. Next thing, I came to, and I was down this weird back-alley I didn't recognise. I was in nothing but my pants and a pint-bottle of cider in my hand. There were two women in front of me, younger than me, but not girls. One was shouting at me. Horrible things. I smashed the bottle over her head and then stuck the other one in the guts. I ran away. I haven't been back to Leeds since.'
I heard the hollow thud of an empty bottle on the concrete floor, watched as the stub of a cigarette drifted down and gently extinguished itself. I felt sick. Stan had already passed out, and I backed from his garage and out on to the street. The London story had been upsetting. This one horrified me. I did not want to see Stan again. Everything had changed: all that drunken jollity was now stomach-churning and nightmarish.
And it was about to get worse.
11
Aimless, lost in drunken and swampy reflection, wanting nothing more than my sleeping bag and closed eyes, I pushed forward. It was gone midnight. I was so tired I could have slept in the river, but while alcohol bred fatigue it also bred obstinacy, and I was determined to make it back to the woods. By luck alone, I found my bearings at the southern edge of Greville Smyth Park. I had always avoided it after dark for it was large and unlit and intimidating, but I was drunk enough to be glad to see it. I knew that, walking through it, I could get on the right track 'home'.
A path began at the entrance and then forked off in myriad directions. I chose one which ran along the periphery of the park towards the river. Halfway along, I could dimly make out a globulous and moving mass in the darkness. As I drew closer, I saw it was nine teenagers clustered in an adventure playground twenty metres or so from the path. I heard the unmistakeable fizzing sounds of opened cans and unscrewed plastic bottle lids. A young and female voice sounded out above them.
'If yer wash yer dick, mate, I'll suck it for yer. Aww, that's right. Yer han't got nowhere to wash, have yer?'
All nine shrieked with laughter. I carried on walking. One of the boys, attempting to match the courage of his female friend, shouted: 'Oi, mate, she's fucken talken to yer!'
I continued to walk, head down.
'Fucken hobo scum!'
I did not look at them as I moved on. I was drunk enough not to feel particularly frightened – indeed, my overwhelming sensation was one of pity for the poor teachers who would have those kids in class tomorrow.
As the path rounded a corner and momentarily left the park to cut through a slim underpass, I became aware of someone following me. Shaped by the play of light from the road, a long and marching shadow stretched out before me, and I could somehow tell from the hunch, the quick steps, the hands in pockets, that it was cast by a male. Perhaps, I thought, it was one of the teenagers. Here to test his bravado. Hollering 'Fucken hobo scum!' had not been enough to impress. The thought worried me. It was one thing to shout insults at a lone, passing stranger; quite another to track him.
As the path rejoined the park and curved around another corner, I took the opportunity to cast an innocent and cursory glance behind me. The man I glimpsed was too
old to be one of the teenagers. I continued to walk. Ahead was another underpass. It was dark and secluded. I changed direction. Another path led up to the road, where it was bright and loud. I walked up it.
At the top, I understood I had made the wrong decision. The short path led down again into another underpass far larger than the one I had avoided. The man was still behind me. I considered sprinting across the dual carriageway, but it was dotted with 60 mph cars, and anyway I would have to vault the five-foot-high railings to get on to it.
Stay calm, I thought.
I came to the top of the steps down. I should have stopped walking, should have stayed above, leaned over the railings and pretended to watch the traffic. The man would surely pass, but what was to stop him waiting for me below? I could turn around, but that would lead me back into the park. If this man wanted to kick me to death, as my thumping heart suggested, then he would find only an applauding audience in those caustic teenagers – perhaps one could even film the beating on their smartphone.
Anyway, I reasoned, stopping would do me no favours, would betray my building anxiety. This man only knew me from the lines of my back. He had no idea who I was or what I was capable of. The enigma was the ball in my court. If he was going to attack, he was weighing it up, judging the risks, the potential falls. I am not a big man, but neither am I small. I pushed my shoulders back and pulled my hands from my pockets, clenching them into obvious fists. I was not a fighter, but I could pretend to be one. I knew from countless travels across the globe to seemingly dangerous countries that most victims looked like victims. Avoiding it was a question of visible self-confidence.
Don't panic, I thought.
I descended the steps and entered the underpass. It seemed to be made for crime. The kind of place people come to get murdered. The darkness was blackness, neglected by the refracted headlights of the cars above. Twenty metres wide and a hundred long, interrupted by a dozen thick pillars wide enough to obscure even the heaviest man from sight, it pulsed, spun, and enveloped me in fear.
Maintain, I thought.
I had been counting the acoustics of his footsteps. Until then, they had matched my own. But in the underpass their sudden acceleration bounced off the concrete ceiling, and I knew he would be at my side in seconds.
Fuck, I thought.
He touched my elbow.
'You want summin?' he said.
'No.'
'Cos I can get you summin,' he said.
'No.'
'Look, bruv.' His hand, still on my elbow, began to pinch, and we both stopped. 'I know you got no money. I ain't arksing you to pay me nuffin. But I can sort you out.'
For the first time, I looked him in the eye. His face was taut and wrinkle-free, young, and his cheekbones looked sharpened. An oversized Adam's apple bobbed up and then down his sinewy throat as he swallowed, and the motion looked painful.
'What you got?' I asked.
'Evryfin.' He smiled, and the missing incisors seemed to make the rest of his teeth jut forward beyond his shrinking lips.
I should have maintained my negativism, said one final 'No' and continued walking. But his offer intrigued me. Not because I wanted any of his wares, but because he seemed to be offering a one-on-one credit system. The audacity of his enterprise was shocking, and I saw in an instant how he worked. Target the vulnerable. Get them both in debt and hooked. Keep them coming back. Make him the world. Then bleed them for everything they had or would have. Work on the addiction. Work on the temporary highs. What else does a homeless person have in their lives?
I wanted none of this, but I did want clarification.
'Are you saying you're going to give me something for nothing?' I asked.
He released my elbow and stepped back. I saw his face, eyebrows raised and lips quivering, and realised what had happened. It was my voice. Up until then, my monosyllables had masked it. But my final question had betrayed me.
'Who are you?' he said, hands back in pockets and feet turning to ten to two. 'You fuckin' police? What you doin' here?'
'No…' I faltered, '… I'm not…'
'What you doin' here?'
'I'm… no…'
'Is this a set-up? What you doin' here? What you doin' here?'
I ran. There was no conscious decision. I don't remember starting. One minute I was locked in paralysis, the next I was running full-pelt. It was instinctive. Response became mechanism. I ran faster than the fear-fuelled adrenalin which coursed through my veins. Neither the weight of my knapsack nor its bungeeing rhythm against my back slowed my acceleration, and I cleared the underpass and the path back up into the light in thoughtless seconds. Finally, I stopped and looked behind. He had not followed me.
CHAPTER FIVE
WESSEX WATERWAYS
1
It takes a long time to enter a city on foot, and a long time to leave it, too. The city crumbles as it peters out, and its diminuendo can seem endless. Beyond the bus station and the railway underpasses, beyond the motorway even, the no-man's-land between city and country can be a frightening place with its industrial estates, its graffitied terraces, its unfriendly locals.
My head throbbed and my body ached as I walked. The alcohol which clawed at my blood cells was the root, but the fear and disgust of the previous day's revelations left me feeling equally sick. The night had held little sleep, just three hours of catatonic unconsciousness followed by awful dreams I awoke from at patchy intervals which I could not remember but which left the physical imprints of a thudding heart and a sweat-soaked brow. I rose before five o'clock, packed my belongings and, too anxious for breakfast, walked along the side of the River Avon with the sole intention of putting Bristol as far behind me as possible.
It was only by Canham, miles from the centre, that the transformation seemed finally complete: where city became country; where concrete became gravel and mud; where young men with baseball caps, low-slung trousers and pimp-walks became motionless fishermen and dog-walkers; where council houses became trees and the occasional riverside palace; and where modified Fords and Subarus became barges, riverboats and faux paddle steamers for sightseers journeying along the river between the West Country's two great cities: Bristol and Bath.
With the topographical metamorphosis came my own translation. The morning's sickness dissipated as the trees grew and the city dissolved. Thought became coherent and rational, unlike the fleeting flashes of regret and white-hot panic which had dogged my initial footsteps. Visions of the dealer, our mutual horror at that single moment, the view of my pounding feet and the walls of a tunnel, played through my mind like a glitching DVD. But it was Stan I always came back to. He would, I knew, wake in his garage soon, find me gone, think little of it, make his slow way down to The Wild Goose. He would sit at the table we had made our own, perhaps slide the free seat closer to him in case anyone tried to take it, silently rehearse a story to tell me. I felt guilty I would not be there, would perhaps never see him again, but the guilt slid into repugnance when I remembered his final story, and that led to images I could not shake while Bristol's walls remained: glass shards in a bleeding stomach, matted hair, fingers picking and poking at a torn gut, a red pool in a litter-strewn alley.
My only answer was to walk away from it all.
2
The walk helped, too: one of the best cures for a hangover I know. I was hungry again, and suddenly parched. It was agreeable to recognise such primitive desires. The strange sight of four ponies grazing on the escarpment beneath the A4 flyover would have sent me into an hallucinatory panic an hour earlier, but by now they became merely another odd instance on this weird journey, and I settled into the slope opposite theirs to boil noodles and neck water while a thousand cars played a ceaseless and resonating minor chord overhead.
It felt good to be beside water again, to be moving again. Up and along this river lay Bath, and my feet seemed determined to reach it as swiftly as possible. At times, they even seemed to want to send me into a run. Perhaps I wa
s still drunk. Stan's cheap vodka, I imagined, had a nuclear half-life.
At Hanham, the river arced north, passing the extinguished Cadbury's factory where, inspired by Roald Dahl's childhood stories, I had hoped to one day become a professional chocolate-taster; through miles upon miles of lived-in, stationary longboats alongside docks with barbecues, washing-lines and TV aerials; and then finally out into the open to wind below the undulations of the Cotswolds. These gentle hills felt like a watershed, for with them I finally left 'the West'.
Noon came, with it a lunch of beans and bread, and I left the river to join the Bristol and Bath Railway Path. I had meant to spend the night in Bath who, elegant lady that she is, gave the impression that even her rough sleepers would be of a superior quality, but Bristol had quenched my city-fix for now, and as soon as the concrete began I was eager to leave again.
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