Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  At least, he thought, at least my dream had the – something, the grace to change itself, to adapt itself a little to the changing circumstances of my life. At the beginning – when he began to dream it as a child in their little terraced house, the first house that had no garden worth speaking of – the garden in the dream was small, walled, circumscribed. He was still able, though, magically to step from his bedroom window on the first floor straight into that walled place, crammed with silvery plants and darkness.

  Later, when they moved – exchanging that barely remembered house on the red Victorian terrace on the hill for the long, sprawling, modern bungalow with its skylight and big back garden – the old dream and his new life, his real life, seemed to come to some hellish accord: in the new house, his bedroom was of course right there on the ground floor; how easy to creep through the bedroom window, creep outside into a moonlit garden! Although aspects of the dream of course adapted themselves too: the shape of the window, the form of its clasp, altered as the dream retold itself; the one became a ghostly facsimile of the other.

  And later still, Robert joined his mother, there behind the closing door.

  Robert. Medieval Robert, shadowed Robert, placed there in half-darkness on the tapestry, placed in the embrace of sullen-leaved ivy. Their mutual dislike was absolute.

  He had had such little practice at liking Margaret’s boyfriends: little practice at putting together a bland, dissembling face, false smile, falsely firm handshake. There had been none. Robert was the first and the last, really.

  Margaret had finished university and at once left Ireland for London. Magnetic London, a place with jobs, with air to breathe. Air with a different flavour, as Margaret put it. She would go to London, she would do her own thing, she would like it in a place with choice, with anonymity. She went – as it turned out, for a couple of years.

  The famous summer of 1976: the summer of the heatwave. The summer that Patrick, now at the unripe age of twenty-one, was visiting from Ireland, staying with Margaret, dragging her through the comparatively cool, echoing halls of the Tate to look at Victorian painting. The summer that she in turn ushered him onto a hot London bus on Millbank for the short – but stifling – journey up to Piccadilly Circus, and then on to Regent Street to do a little shopping.

  Margaret was living alongside half of Ireland: as she wrote in one of her infrequent letters home, she could have gone to a hoolie every night of the week, had she been minded to do so. Or pub crawls through Kilburn. But hoolies and Irish bars were not quite her style – or his, come to that: marches and killer demonstrations were one thing; but their mother had schooled them too rigorously in ways of thinking and behaving for hoolies and smoky Irish dives in Kilburn ever to attract.

  She lived, for her two or so London years, in a little flat in a little street at the bottom of the Caledonian Road. Caledonian Crescent: a dinky little half-moon of Georgian houses around the corner from King’s Cross: fallen on hard times, to be sure, but pleasant enough, and handy, too. Not at all bad, if you could avoid the King’s Cross prostitutes plying their trade; and the druggies shooting up on the basement steps. She didn’t have to step over these druggies though, because her little flat was the first floor of one of these Georgian houses: the druggies, then, could be circumvented easily enough; and with time she even found herself on nodding terms with some of the prostitutes.

  Patrick, watching the nurse slide a needle into his arm, watching a drip being administered, was reminded of the glint of a syringe on those basement steps, long ago.

  He was distinctly green about the gills on the evening he arrived. Fresh out of university: in Belfast, which meant home to Derry each weekend on the bus; set aside the political ferment and shaves with death, and you could almost say he hadn’t seen much of the world. And he had never been to London before. On that first evening, they went for a walk to see the local colour – the anarchist bookshop and the Greek grocer at the end of the road, both places soaked, to him, in extreme exotica; and then up the road, through the thick, hot air to see the gloomy walls of Pentonville prison – and then back; and Margaret made something to eat while Patrick hung around the windows and looked down into the London twilight as the first of the prostitutes took up her station nearby.

  ‘I could watch them all night,’ he said, absorbing like a sponge the girl’s get-up and hair and carriage.

  Margaret said, a faint pulse of pride in her voice, ‘A couple of them are my friends now.’

  ‘Friends!’ Patrick said in pious horror.

  She backtracked a little. ‘Well, not friends, maybe. But during the snow back in January, a few of them set fire to a litter bin – you know, for warmth – and I was coming back from the tube, and one of them called me over –’

  ‘Called you over?’

  ‘For a gin.’ She laughed. ‘It was like the Girl Guides, you know, around a brazier.’

  She stopped. He was staring.

  ‘Maybe not really like the Girl Guides,’ she ended, limply. ‘Not with the gin.’ She added, ‘And there was no tonic.’

  An explorer’s heart? His exploring heart ought to have pulsed a little at the thought of hanging out with a clutch of prostitutes on a London street. But no: he preferred even then to skate around, to leave behind any sights disagreeable, challenging, unpleasant.

  ‘So what did you do?’ he said.

  Margaret glanced over from the cramped little kitchenette, a pan in her hand. She shrugged a little defensively. ‘Joined them.’

  ‘Joined them!’

  She spun from the little hob: put the pan down smartly on a cold gas ring; the overhead grill tinkled faintly. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick! You’re not in the suburbs now! And you’re my brother, not my mother!’

  Which stung. He felt a gap at that point: not one of emotion, simply of experience. She drank neat gin with prostitutes – well, she had once. And she had a boyfriend now, and he would have to meet this boyfriend the following evening. At the age of twenty-three, Margaret was an adult at last. More than he felt himself to be.

  How intimidating.

  The theme of the summer visit to London, in hindsight, was one of intimidation. He was intimidated by the anarchists and Greeks, the prison officers and gin-swilling prostitutes of the Caledonian Road – and so in turn he set out to intimidate Margaret. It was easily done: their mother had softened her up, over the years. She was duly intimidated, a little, by the Victorian art that Patrick insisted she look at the next day – before she rallied, applying her psychological insights to Pegwell Bay.

  And then another form of intimidation. It was Patrick’s idea to meet this Robert person and go for a walk on Hampstead Heath: he had a plan that involved showing off his knowledge of culture and history, to put this new man in his place. He and Margaret quarrelled their way through the hot day, then, through London’s grimy landmarks: in the Tate and then in Liberty; then again on the top deck of the red London bus as it jerked its way through Camden Town in the gathering rush-hour traffic. And then, at last, the rendezvous with Robert outside Hampstead Heath station.

  Patrick’s wickedness had not been leeched from him as a result of that long, hot day in central London. If anything, it had been concentrated still further: super-concentrated. He decided they should go the long way round to the Heath: climbing up the hill from the station to Hampstead High Street in the muggy evening air, passing under its barely heeded quaint gas lamps, before turning onto Flask Walk and down into the trees. Toiling, sweating, climbing: all in order to explore the area’s cultural heritage. To show off Patrick’s education, and to expose this new man’s relative absence of same.

  He was irked by his presence, yes. Of course he was. By his existence. By the look of him, his simian look, he thought then, and by the sound of him: that harsh Belfast accent capable of slicing through steel. By his presence in Margaret’s life. In – though here Patrick’s uptight Catholic sensibilities paused, retreated from the scene – in her bed in those nasty C
aledonian Road digs. And so he would get to him. He would wind him up.

  *

  Robert eyed the boy walking along in front of him. The brother: young, younger than he had imagined, and young for his age. Tall, skinny, not much to him at all. Walking like this: a few steps ahead. Who was kidding who?

  As he watched, the brother gestured at a house.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That one.’

  Margaret slowed, looked, took in the house, the scrubby garden. Robert stopped too, not that he had much choice. They stopped, they caught their breath in the hot, polluted air. They looked.

  ‘Doesn’t look like much to me,’ Robert said.

  The boy slid a glance. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  But something had altered here, in this moment. Robert heard his accent, his tones, his entire Belfast voice and manner carrying unpleasantly. Suddenly. Doesn’t it?

  How did the brother manage that?

  They looked at each other.

  Though the tone was set just a few minutes before. The bus pulling in (late) and the introductions (awkward) in the middle of a cloud of diesel fumes, of anxious, clucking mothers and grannies and grim fathers getting their bearings, looking for the entrance to the Royal Free Hospital. Margaret tense – and then this proposal to go looking for this damned house.

  ‘We might as well,’ the brother had said, ‘we’re practically there already.’

  ‘Might as well.’ Margaret flashed an anxious glance: and Robert shrugged. But he knew the brother’s game. As long as he didn’t begin to recite some damned poem outside the house.

  And now here they stood. No, no recitation. But if anything, the brother looked far from crestfallen. He looked – pleased.

  ‘Not up to much, this place,’ Robert said, ‘is it?’

  Margaret looked at him again. Pleading, a little.

  But now the brother spoke. ‘I suppose it depends on your perspective.’

  Oh, perspective.

  ‘Let’s walk on, will we?’ Margaret said – and they walked on, labouring now up the High Street. It should be fresher up here, there should be a breeze – Robert looked back into darkness, a tunnel of limp-leaved plane trees on the slopes below; there should be a breeze – but no: the air stifled. And he was too warmly dressed, besides: a leather jacket he could not now take off for fear of showing the circles of sweat leaking from his underarms and onto his blue denim shirt. The wrong fabric, the wrong shade. They trudged up the ever-steepening High Street – and turned at Flask Walk and now he was aware with relief that the ground was beginning to fall away again, and that in the distance, ahead of them now, the trees on the Heath were swaying in something like a breeze. A pair of teenage girls clicked down a flight of stone steps from some other street, some other lane: they cut in front of them and walked ahead, talking busily, and he took in their tight jeans, packed arses, bare arms.

  Surely, he thought, Margaret will focus on him soon. Surely she will gather her attention together and take him in soon. The brother is – nothing, he is nothing, there is nothing much there. But – and Robert saw the way the brother had of carrying himself, a way that set Robert’s teeth on edge. An upward rush of temper. Young, yes – but there was more to him than that.

  The girls walked ahead along Flask Walk, they extended their lead. Robert quickened his pace now, forcing the others to do likewise: his footsteps clattered on the Hampstead cobbles, echoing a little in the narrow lane. The echoes ran up and ran down, they bounced on the dark brick houses to either side. The girls disappeared into the shade of an avenue of lime trees. He’d catch himself, he’d get himself together once they were on the Heath.

  *

  This was a mistake.

  Too soon for him to meet any member of her family: too soon in particular to meet Patrick, to take on the freight of this relationship.

  It entered Margaret’s mind, as a sort of pale consolation, that at least Robert wasn’t meeting her mother: that at least she wasn’t about to set off across the Heath with Robert on one side of her and her mother on the other: arm in arm, stride matching stride, like a troupe of chorus girls. She almost laughed, before the reality grabbed her, roughly, that this present situation was bad enough. That these two did not, could not possibly get along. That Robert’s best side was not being brought out: that it took an almost magical combination of forces to bring out this side, and that this combination was not at this moment present.

  That this manifestly was no laughing matter.

  That her brother was discomfited by this stranger with his rough Belfast accent – and that as a response he was at his worst, his most superior, his most acid.

  That she was hot and tired, and grimy and sweaty, after her day in the West End, and exhausted by this unwise climb through Hampstead. Keats and his house had not been worth it. Patrick should not have insisted on it. They should just have gone straight to the Heath and stayed there.

  That she could do better than Robert. That she shouldn’t be with a man like this, a man nobody else would take.

  She caught her breath, pushed this thought away.

  At least Robert hadn’t swung for Patrick.

  A pair of young girls appeared ahead of them: fourteen, fifteen, they talked confidently, they laughed. They certainly hadn’t been trailing around central London all day long. The world was their oyster. She eyed them as they clipped ahead, laughing: she felt old, just looking at them, like someone’s aunt. But the Walk was opening up a little now, Flask Walk turning into Well Walk and she took her eye off the girls: she looked to her left, at rampant, flower-laden gardens sloping in front of marching Georgian houses, and to her right, where the houses were narrower, and set directly onto the street. Margaret caught glimpses into these worlds as they passed: in the depths of one house, a woman setting flowers on a table in front of a window, through which a view of London opened up magically; in the depths of another, a family at a table before the same view. English families, in this English city – and now she thought of the big, rambling bungalow at home, of their table set beneath the skylight. She thought painfully of her mother. She peered, looked away, walked on.

  The girls vanished into the shade of the lime trees that lined Well Walk. Patrick was pointing out this feature and that feature; another Keats reference, the eponymous well, the health-giving qualities of Hampstead well water, dark with iron. He was talking away, lecturing away: she murmured a question or two and then tried to fade him out – but this was impossible, so aware was she of Robert’s nerves being screwed up and up, a spring ready to explode outwards, releasing who knew how much energy. And now the dark, brick-built eighteenth-century houses gave way to bigger houses, showier and more exuberant Victorian mansion houses in red brick, and now at last they reached the end of Well Walk and crossed the road and passed through the narrow gate and entered the Heath, where the trees were immediately dense, cooling, shadowing. And she felt an immediate relief: at least, she thought, I can keep my face a little hidden now.

  How could this have ever been a good idea? Margaret had had an ideal of tranquillity, and had imagined that it might be found up here on the Heath, on the windy summit of Parliament Hill, amid the kite flyers and dog walkers, with London indistinct and silent below. She had imagined tranquillity – not that this was a quality familiar in her life. And now she was here, under the shadows of the trees on the Heath, with twilight not far off. Tranquillity though: this remained unattainable. It would always be unattainable. She felt caught, suddenly, in a web of relationships: these two men who flanked her; her mother and father, in distant Ireland. She would be better off on her own – but no: her soul flinched at the idea.

  Never alone.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Will we make for Parliament Hill?’

  *

  ‘High thinking, plain living and small economies. So they said.’

  Margaret murmured, ‘Who said?’

  ‘Some commentator. About Hampstead at the turn
of the century. Gas lamps and poets and intellectuals. The Hampstead women bought their necklaces one bead at a time, from a bead shop on the High Street. Not much money, you see, but they needed to keep up appearances.’

  Patrick was filled with malice. A spirit of wickedness, his mother would have said: ready to sweep away any happiness, any smoothness or comfort or tranquillity. He pointed to the old well still in place there on Well Walk.

  ‘Dark as sherry, they said, with the iron content. You could draw the water right here. Set you up for the day.’ He thought of cholera, himself, and typhoid: these were his associations with London pumps and wells – but iron and in particular sherry served his purposes better at this moment than typhoid and cholera.

  Robert might be at his ease around typhoid and cholera. Sherry, though – never.

  Not much going on with Robert at the moment. Patrick watched him lope along in his heavy jacket, silent. He seems to have run out of juice, he thought, our simian friend. And she was silent too.

  Never mind, thought Patrick. There was a whole lot left to say. He moved on to Well Walk itself.

  ‘And Keats again: he lived at Number Forty-Six, and DH Lawrence in Number Thirty-Two,’ he rattled on, winding up the tension, ‘and Constable lived – somewhere too. Somewhere along here. Maybe it’s been demolished.’

  Nobody said anything. A hot, dirty breeze rattled the dry, heat-struck leaves of the lime trees: and it occurred to Patrick that in fact, he was not, now, enjoying this very much. He had checked his references, he knew all these irritating facts in advance, Margaret had filled him in on Robert’s background with quite enough detail for him to set about pressing all the correct buttons. And he had been pressing them and watching the result.

  And yet now the results were in, and there wasn’t much satisfaction to be had.