Human Punk

by John King

  I go to the counter and pay Tracy, who punches the till, Terry out back frying bacon for a couple of pensioners, and she leans over for her pad, forgetting the tea for a moment, the gentle curve of her tits pushing into the Umbro top, her teeth perfect in the light. She’s always been a friendly girl, salt of the earth, and it’s people like Tracy who keep the world going, a constant smile on her face never mind what happens. I pay my dues and put a pound tip in the saucer, say goodbye and leave the cafe, start walking.

  I pass the police station and try to remember the times I’ve been in the cells. Once for knocking a man out in a fight outside a pub. Another after I was stopped and caught with some sulphate in my pocket. Once for putting a brick through the window of a bank. They did me for being drunk and disorderly for that last one, criminal damage thrown in, a fine I paid off at a tenner a week. The fight when I ended up inside. It’s best forgotten now, silly arguments, stupid coppers worried about harmless drugs, and I smile when I think of the bank window, the years of bricks, superglue and low-key damage. Can’t remember how much I was fined. Don’t care. Don’t give a fuck, turn and follow the road, cars blocked by a hole in the tarmac, men gathered round a bald navvy shaking with the drill, chips of concrete spitting back into the street, craters in his head, thick insulated cables with the sort of voltage that will burn a man to the bone, wires under the surface of his skin, veins on bone, down the back of his neck. I keep going and turn left, past the cemetery, my eyes drifting over, catching movement in among the gravestones, but I keep going, keep walking. I pass the mosque and go over the railway bridge, into the dip, two old women in saris at the top of the next bridge looking at the canal. They turn and walk away, so I keep going, don’t have to wait, go down the steps to the banks of the canal.

  I take off my clothes and put them in a pile next to the water. For some reason I fold them. I don’t know why. The wind blows across my skin and I keep my pants on, dark clouds smothering the sun, shafts of light feeding through the cracks. Light, dark, warm, cold. Doesn’t matter. There’s nobody around. No kids fishing for tadpoles or old men walking the dog. Traffic crosses the bridge, and I can see the tops of the lorries with their messages blazing out, moving on. If there was anyone by the canal I’d keep walking, wait till they’ve gone and come back. The water ripples from a breeze, and I’m not going to hang around, flash back to a summer night when I was a fifteen-year-old boy, a kid who thought life was straightforward. The memories have hardened, but the feeling is still in me, part of what I became. I sit down on the edge of the canal, shivering, the lining of the Grand Union ice-cold on the back of my legs. I dip them into the water, let my feet sink down till it’s halfway up my shins. The canal is freezing.

  A thick block of cloud shuts out more light. Goose pimples pock my skin and I see a woman plucking a white cockerel, the chilli-seed pattern of its featherless body, the pink flesh that a civilised country smothers with the Colonel’s secret recipe. People talk about headless chickens, and I’ve seen one with its throat cut, running in circles flapping its wings on the ground, beating its soul into the dust, blood vanishing in front of my eyes. These things make an impression, affect what you become, how you behave, seeing boys lined up outside a Chinese station with plaques round their necks. And I suppose when I came out of the canal all those years ago I was never going to be the same again. The world was different now, and everything had an edge. The colours were different, the smells, the way I felt inside. There’s a Coke can on the opposite bank, its logo slowly rotting away, changing colour as it melts down to a gold rust.

  I lift up and lower myself into the canal. The water’s cold and smashes into me, the shock racing through my heels to the back of my skull, stabbing into my brain. I keep moving, slowly, so I don’t go under, not yet, dipping my shoulders below the surface, like I was taught as a kid, head up, moving my legs. I swim to the middle of the canal, do a slow breaststroke, same as a frog. My movements are easy and I see thousands of peasants lining up early morning in China, before sunrise, dressed in the green and blue cloth of Chairman Mao, doing their t’ai chi for a party official with a loudspeaker, the same old cunt wherever you go in the world, doesn’t matter if he’s communist, fascist, anarchist, democratic, there’s always some wanker waiting to tell you what to do, what to think, telling you that you’ve never had it so good, never had it so bad, and the difference in approach depends on how much he can get away with. I see the faces of the Chinese peasants, clever enough to keep their peace, quietly dodging the authorities, staying alive as they flow this way and that, mouths shut, doing nothing that will give them away.

  I reach the middle of the canal, paddle for a few seconds, looking along the surface of the water which is smooth and grey. The canal’s been cleaned up, but is more dead than the last time. It used to be busy, when the brickworks were booming and there must’ve been ovens and kilns everywhere, I wonder if they’re still there, probably levelled and built over, and that was a long time before I was born, horses breaking their backs on the towpath wishing they were in a field, worked to death and sold off to the knacker’s yard, slaughtered for dog food, hooves ground down and soaked in jelly. And I can feel the slime covering the water, even though it’s not here any more, the tangled weeds long gone but the water still unused at the end of the Slough Arm. There’s nothing here, not even weeds, no life, everything ripped out, and when I listen I don’t hear anything except traffic on the road. There’s no frogs croaking, nowhere for them to live. And this is the moment.

  I take a deep breath and duck under the water, turn over and pull myself down, reaching with my arms and stretching the muscles as far as they’ll go making sure I use my legs right the long legs of a frog with his popping eyes and croaking gossip baby frogs picked out of the ditches and skewered on a bent piece of wire legs clicking electrical currents charging the muscles legs eleven in the social club middle-aged women tapping their biros on halves of lager thrashing frog legs and pierced little hearts broken valves drowning in blood a jam jar full of spawn turning into tadpoles sprouting big bubble heads growing feet and we sit and watch them swim around the jar trying to escape getting bigger day by day the pressure building up inside me a heavy load to carry as I try and get deeper into the water leave everything behind dig into the water and when I’ve gone far enough I turn so I’m the right way up and get ready, 1–2–3–4, blow the air out of my lungs slow and steady then when I get to the end and think I’m going to bottle out I blow hard as I can so I choke and have a split second before I suck water back in open my eyes the lull before the flood my eyes misty as I look along the tunnel the light from up above broken and bent curving through the years and if I bottled it and went back up I’d come out at night during summer find the Major at the side of the canal waiting to help and there’s this big burst of joy that says this is my second chance and Smiles is still alive and I can do things different now the chance to change history and then quick as a flash faster than the happiness comes the horror knowing the impossible doesn’t happen and there’s no second chance no turning back the clock and my mouth is open and the water bursts in the pressure in my head growing as I remember now what it felt like when Wells threw us in the water and we got stuck the moment when you know you’re going to die think you’re as good as dead but I know it this time and this is the end of everything and because I never listened to the television and radio when I was young I never worried about the arguments going on around me life was about what I saw and did the voices loud now there’s no getting away from them Smiles and me sitting in the station cafe pretending we’ve got tea in our cups because we’re skint and he’s telling me he’s going to be a dad and while he’s feeling sorry for himself the girl he’s got in the club is carrying Luke around in her belly a foetus clinging to the walls of another child’s womb he was just a possibility and now he’s a young man beaten up by scum after spending the best years of his life in a home and institution what a fucking liberty-taker Wells is—was�
��and I can feel the lager in my belly cheap drink from the social club special-rate lager light and bitters cheese rolls behind the counter mushy dough from the slice of tomato that leaks juice into the bread the trickle of lager down the sides of a mug blowing the dregs against a car-park wall a bursting feeling in my bladder a Russian railway worker naked as we cross the world a local girl turning her head away from the mirror a lovely woman and my lungs are stretched ready to explode feet on the bottom of the canal airware soles of ten-eye Martens dragging me down boots I worked hard for saving the money I made stacking shelves with all those tins working for a manky cunt who treated me like shit and I got away from all that did my own thing and I’m drowning filling up a bloated corpse and this is the real thing back where I started struggling for life with my brother the rubber band twisting through Mum’s water my twin brother tangled up in his own umbilical cord and this time I’m staying behind want to die with him so neither of us ever have a name go in the oven together and Smiles isn’t as important as my own flesh and blood but I have to die to make what I did right the knife cutting into Wells and the thing is … it wasn’t me … it really wasn’t me who did the mutilating, and suicide is for the insane, I’m not mad, know I did nothing wrong, didn’t mean to kill the bloke just did what I thought was right, some sort of justice, and I push stretch pull towards the surface each split second thinking I’m almost there giving up as the light burns my eyes and a rush of oxygen races into my lungs big gulps of air roaring into my chest as I sink back coughing and spewing water, reaching for the side of the canal, try to pull myself out of the water, wait for helping hands that don’t come, do it myself second go, lie down in the long grass, sharp blades around my head, and I cough up water, get my breath back.

  The clouds blow away and light bursts out. The sun hits me and warms my skin. I watch the long trailing fizz of a plane trickle across the sky. My breathing gets easier and settles into some sort of proper pattern. I try to find a tune, but there’s nothing. No music. People forget quickly and I had to remember what it felt like being in the canal. Memories fade and I killed a man, or at least I think I killed him, but I never cut him up. Don’t understand any of that. And I have to remember what he did if I’m going to stay solid and get away with it. You have to know that what you’ve done is right. Life is too good to throw away, and imagine if there was no music in heaven, if you had to go to hell and burn for ever so you could hear a decent tune, surrounded by Stalin, Hitler and that cocky little fucker Mao off the Trans-Siberian Express. I put my clothes on quickly, before those women come back and see me, get upset and call the police, send for the dredgers and social services, the men in white coats, their syringes loaded and needles primed.

  I walk back up to the road and the Major is sitting on the wall on the other side. He knows everything that happens in this town. He has to be the man with the knife, embarrassed in a court of law, a boy without a dad, a copper’s son with a sense of justice, standing at his table slicing up slugs. He smiles and nods. He’s in my head. Knows what I’m thinking. He must have been out on patrol and seen what happened. I don’t want to know the details. When I get in I’ll wash my clothes and clean up, go down the pub and have a drink. I turn away from the Major searching for a tune, but there’s just the sound of lorries rumbling past, and if I’d died in the canal when I was a kid, held down by a pair of heavy boots, the leather rubbed raw with a brick and polished till they shone, I’d have missed what came next. I lived and my brother died. He was stillborn. He never had a name. Smiles was a mate who went mental. Neither of them dying was my fault. Wells was an accident. If I’d drowned just now, I wouldn’t go round and see Sarah tonight, find out what happens next.

  I follow the road, the minaret and dome of the mosque up ahead on the right, the Co-op out of sight on the left past the pub, the greyhound stadium long gone, racks of bleach and tinned tomatoes filling the space, shelves packed with tinned carrots and tinned peas, tinned pears and tinned pineapple, tinned pork and tinned fish, workmen drilling at the foot of the railway bridge in their yellow tin hats, the sweet smell of diesel in the air. Someone sounds their horn on the other side of the road. I look over and see Dave stopped at the bus stop, and he’s hanging out of the window waving me over. I want to keep going, be on my own, but he starts shouting and the workmen turn round. I cross to the central reservation, climb over the railings and wait for a gap in the cars, fumes blowing into my face.

  The passenger door opens and I get in.

  –Why’s your hair all wet?

  He doesn’t wait for an answer, indicates right and inches forward, lorries barrelling past. When he sees a gap he accelerates away.

  –You’re a thick cunt signing your name like that, he says. Prints all over the badge and Wells half dead. He’d have grassed you up. They’d have given you five years, specially as you’ve already been inside. Probably a lot more. Sticking the badge in his face would’ve got you extra.

  He laughs and cracks my head with his knuckles.

  –You daft fucking cunT.

  The traffic slows down to a crawl.

  –You were right what you said about chopping people up.

  We reach the hump of the bridge.

  –Someone had to finish the job. You couldn’t leave it half done. I never cut his head off either. That’s just lies. But we’ll be alright. He was scum anyway.

  Dave’s talking to himself.

  –It’s a good job I followed you.

  Dave’s a good mate, the best friend I’ve ever had. He laughs long and hard.

  –We’re brothers, you and me, just like brothers.

  He reaches over and puts a badge in my hand. I look at the cut-out tabloid letters spelling GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, a dayglo background for a world that turned dayglo years ago. He’s turned the cassette down, but I can hear Black Grape’s ‘In The Name Of The Father’. I turn it up so the speakers vibrate with the heavy vocals. Dave’s killed a man. Cut him to ribbons for me. The police are after a drifter, an outsider, a maniac who acts without rhyme or reason.

  I couldn’t handle prison again, banged up on one of their stinking blocks, every last bit of freedom stolen. It’s no way to live. I’d rather top myself than rot away in prison. Dave’s saved my life.

  The sky’s jammed with jets queuing to land at Heathrow, suntanned passengers looking down on the glass, bricks, streets of our town, the people invisible, toy cars on the move. Dave puts his foot down and we race down the slope, the bright gold dome of the mosque sparkling in the sunlight, clouds washed away, and we have a laugh trying to match the ragga vocals of the song, the boom of the bass blowing everything into the past. We beat the red and slow down, circle the roundabout, the lights in our favour, moving faster now, the road ahead straight and empty.

  It’s good to be alive, don’t care what anyone says, and when it comes down to it we’re nothing special, just two ordinary blokes trying to do the right thing, going with the flow but keeping our eyes wide open, like you do.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John King is the author of seven novels to date. His first book, The Football Factory, was an instant word-of-mouth success and was later turned into a high-profile film. Sales in the UK now top a quarter of a million copies. The novels Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, The Prison House, and Skinheads followed. King’s writing reflects his interests—social history, music, literature, drinking, travel, soccer, and non-party politics. Before becoming an author King worked at a variety of jobs and spent two years travelling around the world in the late-1980s. He has long been associated with fanzines, writing for various titles over the years and running Two Sevens in the early 1990s. He currently publishes and edits Verbal, a fiction-based publication. Other interests include a regular Human Punk night at London’s legendary 100 Club. He lives in London.

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