by Max Schaefer
‘Wouldn’t stop some of these toddlers, would it? This isn’t Borstal, it’s a fucking one o’clock club.’ The mother of a particularly young and particularly disturbed kid called Bowyer, who Tony can see killing and eating her in a few years, glares at Steve, and he winks at her.
He asks: ‘Fancy a fag?’ and produces a packet from his coat. When they have both lit up he says: ‘Why not keep the packet.’ Tony looks at him and he says: ‘Go on. Don’t worry about it.’ Tony shrugs. ‘Cheers.’
Steve has an odd way of holding his cigarette between two fingers of his balled hand, like a cripple’s claw. He keeps the hand before his mouth and blows smoke at Tony over the mound it makes, holding his gaze.
‘What’s your number then?’
Tony smiles. ‘F72393. Crawford. Sir.’
‘Shit that’s long. It’s a fucking phone number.’
‘Took me a couple of months but I think I’ve got it now.’
‘You the chap around here then?’
‘I don’t bother with all that.’
‘Just do your bird eh? Very wise. If they let you anyhow.’
The black with the tea trolley rolls up. He pours out two cups with milk and puts them on the table, avoids catching their eye.
‘Nice to see them putting the jungle bunnies to work,’ Steve says. ‘What did you do then,’ he asks the server, ‘mug a little old lady?’
The kid pushes the trolley on. ‘Talkative bloke,’ says Steve.
The tea is fiercely hot.
Tony says, casually, ‘You heard from Dennis?’ and Steve pauses before answering, as if translating the question from another language in his head.
‘Dennis? No, I haven’t seen Dennis in a long time. I heard he joined the circus or something. He was always a bit of a performer.’
He takes a long draw on his cigarette and looks vaguely around the room.
‘I always thought Dennis was one of them kind of lads that can never grow up. Didn’t you? Most folks grow up in the end, but there’s a few don’t have it in them. You and me though, we’re the growing-up kind, aren’t we Tony?’
He crumples his fag-end in the ashtray.
‘I come up here by car. Been living down in Charlton. It’s a nice drive on the weekend: see a bit of countryside. I’ve got my own motor now, did you know that?’
Tony says: ‘What are you doing here, Steve?’
‘Well I thought you could do with some burn didn’t I? Got a whole pack somewhere here.’ He roots in his pockets. ‘I know what it’s like in here you see. Done it twice myself. Portland the second time. F61938 Whitcombe sir. That’s probably why you and me lost touch, what with me being out of circulation. We had some right vicious screws over in Portland, some complete fucking cunts. Your lot look like cream puffs if you don’t mind me saying so. Ah. Here we go.’
He hands Tony a quarter-ounce packet of tobacco, unopened. ‘Anyway,’ he says, while they are both holding it: ‘I ! hear you done a nigger.’
More than a year earlier: Monday, 26 August 1974, around nine, the cemetery getting dark. In a while it would be very hard to find his way out. Still, he would stay put a bit longer: disgusting himself with his own sentimentality.
You could argue that lying all night with a bloke on some ; old bastard’s tomb was a bit sick in the first place, let alone being a cunt about it three years later when it’s not like you even want to see him again. Back then they had watched the pared moon drift and wondered, when it was gone, what the time must be; it had surprised them both when a lighter to Dennis’s watch revealed not yet eleven. Then Dennis had squeezed him: ‘Happy anniversary then, before it’s over.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Been a year mate. August Bank Holiday Monday. It’s ours. It’s us.’
Tonight the moon was the same, ugly and fat; clouds drifted before it on wind that sighed like the abandoned dead. Tony got down off three women who had emerged from each other like Russian dolls to be tidied at last, with their husbands, into one neat pile, and walked back in the ebb of visibility: between slumped, cracked stones; over rotting leaves.
The gate showed itself in gaps bleeding light from beyond. It was locked, with a heavy chain fed several times around the join. Tony was considering the chain as foothold when a voice behind him said, ‘It’s better in here.’
The man, tall and with mad-scientist hair in an unbalanced mass, sat on the ground, leaning on one of a batch of headstones near the wall. In his lap was a notebook and torch, which lit his face from below like in a horror film, making shadows of his slug moustache and big owl specs. Indistinct objects lay before him in a semicircle. Tony said, ‘You locked in?’
‘I’m working.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I cut grass.’
He giggled, and Tony saw the cigarette in his hand (Cancer stick, he thought suddenly, coffin nail), caught the scent of dope.
‘You the gardener? You got a key?’
‘Not for here.’
The man reached for one of the things disposed around him, like a rough black golfball. He touched it, as if to adjust its position.
‘We cut goldfinches last week,’ he said. ‘With the mowers. We were eating ice cream when we found them. Babies that couldn’t fly.’
‘Yeah well,’ said Tony, turning, ‘say hi to the devil if you raise him. Think I’ll just climb over.’
‘What do you think of this?’
Tony looked back. The man had raised the book and torch to his face. He read: “‘Dreams are back-tracked, names & symbols mated, cooked, released. It lies on the tongue like a grub. It climbs out of the book into a vertical energy—’”
For a moment the top of the gate was a fulcrum on which he heavily pivoted, pressing into him from sternum to crotch, and then he was over and down. He followed the road as it narrowed into Solebay Street, not once glancing back at the witching gardener behind his bars. A few houses here held out against the encroaching park, but they were marked for death, or dead already, having given up the lives inside. King George’s Field spread across the gaps in patches, lichen over their graves, and he veered off the pavement into it. Away from the dark well of the cemetery, electric light seeped generally enough to see, and as he approached the canal the odd lit window on the other side was caught on its quivering surface like an insect in a web.
He followed the towpath beneath the bridge. He would not think of Dennis. Over the water a great desolate expanse had been partly cleared of rubble, which was piled up at its far edge by warehouses that rose like prison walls. It was maybe stupid to be here alone like this. The gardener had been doing more than writing in his book.
And then, as if formed by that thought, and heralded as he passed under it by the mantic rumble of Mile End Road, a figure: perhaps thirty feet ahead, rippling like an emanation from the water. It was the gardener again — impossibly, but still — the same tall frame, dark halo of hair. Realization chilled Tony, and the sense of a new reality clicking into place on a ratcheted dial.
The matter-of-factness, the alreadyness, of the shift rattled him, his shocked lack of surprise, as if the world had turned through a slight degree and he now saw through a gap whose breath he had always felt. It was confirmation merely: the darkness that pulsed thick in the veins of things now simply bled a little. Like the knowledge of what you could at every moment do, the violence and noise, the gardener called you from among the graves: he read, spoke, rose from the water. He led you along it, where empty houses had turned their backs and dark breaths rippled their abandoned gardens.
Without breaking his step, the gardener turned. It was as if Tony noticed immediately, in the first few degrees of the head’s rotation, and watched it revolve in luxurious slow detail. He saw again the glasses and moustache in the torch’s glow and awaited their actual revelation, nearly upon him now: whatever had pursued him in the graveyard, or maybe adhered three years ago to his naked body and waited. The surface of the canal spun up.<
br />
But when the hair was pulled aside, like a curtain with the face following, he saw it wasn’t the crazed mop of the gardener at all, but an afro, and a black youth, his own age or a little older, glanced at Tony, whose footsteps he had heard, and glanced back, and carried on walking.
The dial clicked back, and Tony’s crazed hypotheses, terrifying in their immediate precision, collapsed into vagueness like a receding dream. The houses next to him gave way to industrial buildings: factories, simplified silhouettes. Here was the ground and here the sky. Here is the church and here the steeple. Tony walked forward automatically, gratefully. It’s only a paper moon, he thought illogically, one of his mother’s songs; and then: A silly tune, a walking coon, a big baboon. He gave a little ta-da shuffle of his feet at that, the way he had tap-danced for her as a boy when she played her records. The stuttered steps echoed beneath the railway bridge and the black turned again at the sound. He caught Tony’s eye and held it for a moment. Tony didn’t know what that meant. And then it happened again, too soon and for too long, and Tony remembered they were like dogs, in the eyes was a challenge, but to look down at his feet would be weak, so he defocused and looked towards the black’s eyes but not at them. He counted to himself: One, two, three, four. Finally the black turned away; yet he seemed to walk more slowly now, and with intent.
From nowhere a rat scurried in front of Tony’s feet, over the towpath’s edge. There was nobody else around. The row of abutting factories on his right now merged into a sheer wall that admitted neither witness nor escape, and across the water bare trains slumbered in their sidings.
It had been stupid to come down here alone like this just because he was in a mopey fucking mood. The danger was not some ghost-story crap, it was real, street crime, and this was when and where it happened, and this was who did it: blacks, emerging from the shadows. Tony wasn’t averse to a fight in the right circumstances, but this one was big, and he could have a weapon. A knife: its quiet slide into his flesh, his quiet slip into the canal. A retinue of nosing rodents as he sank. His knees went funny and then fixed themselves. The black turned again, the fourth fucking time.
Did he recognize Tony from the old mob? But that was two years ago. More. Tony realized he was walking in synchrony with the black, step step step step, and that seemed wrong, submissive or collusive or mocking, in any case some acknowledgement of connectedness and the looming encounter, so he stumbled his pace like another little tap ta-da, tried to establish his own independent rhythm, not accede to the other’s account of what would come.
Ahead of him the black slowed. He came to a bench and sat, sprawled, his big body thrown over it with assurance, with studied casualness, like an expensive coat, his splayed legs, it became visible as Tony continued his inexorable approach, strong, in tight trousers. The black found a cigarette somewhere, lit it with a little flare, even the sound of the struck flint carrying to the nearing Tony, and now threw back his head, threw out along the back of the bench his free left arm, and gave such an exaggerated mime of calm, of confidence and readiness, of luxuriating in the summer night and the tranquil prospect of the wharf, that it could have had a caption underneath.
What followed, as Tony neared the bench, was a smooth slow motion formed along one axis, his body walking forwards, and about another, his head turning to meet the black’s gaze, and locking with it like gears briefly engaged. In that moment Tony saw him in his eyes and saw there was no threat. This was not the kind to wound, but the herbivore sort, who saw only good, who went of a Sunday, with that weathered unyielding rock his mother, to a brimming church, and sang in charismatic harmony. And with this understanding, as he walked on, decoupling from their mutual scrutiny, in relief and gratitude and apology, Tony smiled.
He was past the next bridge when he heard the steps again. This time they were faster. Tony glanced back to see the black gaining, staring at him, leaning into his wake. He tried to walk on. The steps came quicker, louder, closer. His panic resumed full-blast, like a needle returned to its spinning disc. He would not show it, not speed up. He measured out a slow retarded pace, pallbearer at his funeral.
Had his smile looked a challenge? Perhaps the black had just remembered something. Had checked the time. Was running late.
And now the black began to sprint: an audible shift of gear, fast walk to all-out run, shoes no longer touching the ground at once but pounding it hard. Now it was too late there was no doubt. Tony felt air at his neck, soon to turn backdraught. Hunched his spine. The black’s soles slapped the towpath stone.
He would not turn. He would not run. Here it came—
… past him. Ten feet, twenty feet, past him. And there: the black stopped. Slowed to an amble. Strolled forward, casual as before.
Tony trembled with uncertain relief, with nervous bewilderment, with simple anger. What the fuck, what the fucking shitting fuck, did that mean? Was this some kind of game?
Still walking slowly, the black turned to face him again. This time Tony stared back. Better for it to come than this. He willed it on: the teeth, the flashing knife.
The canal curved left, its shape disrupted by jutting wharves and sudden recesses. The black passed the cut that branched out to the River Lea, and Tony watched him leech into shadow under Old Ford Road. For an uncertain moment he was gone, then re-emerged on the far side in silhouette, where steps led to the road above. In the thick frame of the bridge he looked at Tony once more. He walked to the steps and was gone.
Was that it? Tony let himself pause. That bridge was the finish line, beyond which he could mount the rise, into the park.
Maybe thirty paces to his goal. He counted down in his head as he walked. Ten, ten, ten, nine, nine, nine. Beneath the bridge, whose undersurface he could almost feel through the air above his head, even the canal disappeared. Four, four, four. Three, three, three.
And out.
The steps up which the black had gone stood empty. Tony walked, unsteady with relief, up the incline beside the lock, and where it came level with the park he jumped the fence and let its expanse unfurl before him, nestling the lake ahead. He stumbled gratefully on the sloping grass. There was space everywhere.
From a nearby tree, across the threshold of darkness, the black stepped in front of him.
Tony yelled, an involuntary childlike ooahl!, and stumbled backwards.
The black said: ‘It’s OK.’
Tony said, ‘Fuck. Shit. Fuck.’
He heaved, bent double, facing the grass.
‘Man, I made you jump.’
He touched Tony’s shoulder.
Tony looked up. Looked, for maybe the tenth time on their shared walk, into his eyes. The black smiled anxiously, said, ‘I thought …’ and stopped. He removed his hand. He said, ‘It’s all cool.’
Tony stared at him. With the understanding his eyes were pricking with tears. He pressed his arm over them to stifle the hot soak. ‘Fuck off,’ he said into it.
‘Hey … hey man, don’t cry.’
Tony shook off the careful, second touch. ‘Fuck off,’ he repeated, leaning on his knees, shouting through the shakes in his voice. ‘Fuck off you black bastard. Fuck off coon.’
That weekend a Jamaican kid outside the station made a remark. Tony broke his cheekbone and three of his ribs, and, according to a doctor’s written testimony read out in court, somehow managed to blind his right eye.
A month after his first visit, Steve returns with more tobacco and a middle-aged man in a suit called Arthur Niven. Niven has a professional air. Steve and he look like chalk and cheese, but seem to get on well enough.
Niven asks what Tony’s plans are when he gets out. ‘Will you stay with your parents? I imagine you’ll feel a bit old for that, won’t you?’
There’s a network of retired Borstal officers who provide accommodation for lads on their release, while they find work. Tony has heard stories about these men. They are the ones who feel the loss of the place most personally.
Niven says t
hat he and his wife know several people who would be keen to help out someone like Tony, who he calls a victim of the system who has displayed, however misdirected, considerable strength of character.
He gives Tony some leaflets. He says: ‘Don’t do anything silly in here.’
Jones holds Tony’s chin and looks him in the eye. He says: ‘They’ll go after you for this, you know that? You’ll get stop-all-privileges. Maybe the block.’
‘Yeah well,’ says Tony, ‘I could do with some peace and quiet.’
They are locked into a toilet cubicle. Tony sits on the lowered seat.
He asks, ‘How many times have you done this exactly?’
‘Enough.’
The point of the straightened paperclip sways above his left eye. Jones has done his best to sharpen it by scraping it at an angle against the bricks in the yard. He says: ‘It’s got history, this paperclip. It’s lasted well.’ The end is shiny with ink where he dipped it in the biro’s barrel.
Jones says: ‘Hold still.’
The first prick is aimed badly: instead of being skewered straight against the cheekbone beneath, Tony’s flesh is pushed over it into the well of his eye socket. The makeshift needle slips with it, and Tony, feeling this, shouts and jerks back his head. Jones reacts fast and aborts the attempt, so no damage is done.
‘Sorry,’ says Jones. ‘Wrong angle. Try again.’
Tony swears quietly and sucks air through his teeth but it’s not really too bad. Each little stab refocuses the pain away from its predecessors.
Up close, Jones’s hands look older.
‘How many tears shall I do you?’ he asks.
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
‘Hold still,’ Philip said.
The rim of his bath, over which I knelt, pressed a chill bar across my chest. Philip stood over me, operating the clippers. The pub below was only patronized by unexcitable locals, so noise was not a problem; but in this room, its expelled air, drawn by some quirk of architecture through the vent, gave the permanent atmosphere of stale cigarettes. When I rented Philip’s spare room, in my first blush of proper independence, I got so used to the bathroom’s smell it barely registered; now it recalled, once more, the mood I had first associated with it: a tired and introspective kind of cleanliness.
