‘Get off my bus. Now.’
‘You can’t do that, we got rights,’ says one of the younger boys, too adenoidal for menace.
‘Carriage of passengers is at the discretion of driver and conductor,’ rumbles Trevor, not taking his eyes off Mike. ‘London Transport by-laws. Hop it.’
But the other two skins are strategically irrelevant at this point. Without meaning to, Ben is blocking them from standing up. If they push him, they’ll just push him into the immovable obstacle of Trevor. It’s all between Trevor and Mike: the other two, like the woman, like Ben, are just audience.
Mike has thrust his face forward, right into Trevor’s. He is a bit shorter, but the way the bus roof forces them both to stoop leaves them on a level, nose to nose, brow to brow, Mike’s pale warhead of a profile up against Trevor’s sculpture in unyielding dark wood. They look as if they’re about to rub noses, like New Zealand rugby players do; or like one of those optical illusions where you either see two faces or the vase made by the space between. Trevor’s face has got no expression on it but refusal, while Mike is gleeful, enjoying himself to an extent Ben doesn’t really get. His mouth is open and his tongue is as red as his braces. The veins on his forehead are standing up. His hand, however, is in his jeans pocket, fishing for a hard lump the size and shape of a Stanley knife.
‘Mike, don’t,’ says the woman; and although her voice is drab and exhausted-sounding, it seems to have the power to reach him all the same, twisting his face into a spasm of irritation. Not collected, not self-possessed: a why-do-you-always-fuck-things-up-for-me? expression.
‘Fuck it,’ says Mike, to the floor, and then, into Trevor’s face with a shower of spit, ‘Lucky! Your lucky day! C’mon, then.’
As he goes he tries to shoulder aside Trevor, who has stepped back an ironically courteous six inches or so: but Trevor is planted, and gives no more ground to the shove than a plank would. Mike, followed by the woman, followed by the boys, moonstomps his way up the aisle, kicks a dent in the tin of curved stair-guard, and can be heard clomping down and off. There’s a muffled cry of ‘White power!’ from the pavement. Then they’re gone.
One of the pensioners applauds, not ironically. Trevor wipes his face with a hanky.
‘We’ll be on our way again in a moment, ladies and gentlemen,’ he declares to the top deck. Then to Ben, much more quietly, ‘Ain’t you got no sense at all?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben whispers.
‘Man! “Lucky” was right. I don’t know what you said to him, but look: you get yourself in trouble like that, you’re getting me in it too, and I don’t want to go home with no holes in me.’
‘I didn’t … mean to.’
‘I don’t suppose you did,’ says Trevor. ‘You’d be the last one I’d figure for picking fights. Off in a damn dreamworld, that’s you.’
‘Oh, come on, driver,’ says the pinstriped drunk, who has just woken up and sees nothing but the bus crew chatting. ‘Chopchop!’
‘Hold your horses,’ says Trevor, but he breaks the gaze he has locked on to Ben’s face. ‘You and me are not finished talking about this,’ he tells Ben. ‘At the garage, we are going to have some words.’
He sighs and heads back downstairs.
‘I was on your side,’ says the old dear at the back who clapped, as he passes. ‘Because you coloured fellas have such lovely manners.’
‘Thanks, darling,’ says Trevor after a fractional pause, and disappears down the stairwell with his eyebrows raised.
There is a kind of stunned calm inside Ben’s head as the Routemaster shakes itself back into life and they chug on through the rest of the route. Queen’s Road, New Cross, Lambert Street, Bexford Hill, Bexford Garage. The long views back towards the cluttered basin of the city winch themselves free from the rooftops as they make the last leafy-green climb. The squalls of April rain are visible over there as little patrolling smudges, trailing tentacles of darkness over the wastelands where the docks used to be. It’s not a total calm inside him: he can feel that the fear is still there, faintly alive down in a sub-basement, and will be heard from again when the real-world shock has had a chance to recede. But it’s quieter than it ever is, pretty much, even on one of the good days. Meanwhile, and this is the thing that is enforcing the quiet, he can feel that his legs are like water, his chest is aching, his forehead is damp, his hands are cold and clumsy. His whole weak, skinny, urban-ape body is insisting minute by minute on its reality and vulnerability, is demanding that he notice for once that it is more than a container to tote his horrible thoughts around. It’s him, himself: the thing itself, the man itself, the ‘I’ itself, to all of whom something bad nearly happened. Your fingers are as real as your thoughts, his fingers are telling him. Realer, in fact. It’s an astonishing sensation, and to be honest not at all a pleasant one. Because if someone, some fairy godmother, had propositioned him up front and said, You can have a break from the fear inside, at the price of being frightened out in the world – well, he’d have taken the deal, wouldn’t he, like a shot; and he’d have done it thinking, as he always tends to think when in the grip of his fear, that the alternative to what grips him is some unimaginable, infinitely desirable state of calm. Compared to which a bit of skinhead-induced agitation would be a piece of piss. A straightforward bargain. But it’s not like that at all. The thing that has been strong enough to silence those charred ribs isn’t a perfect peace but another, stronger, more pressing emotion. Perhaps if he wants not to live in his private barbecue hell he has to consent to fill his life up with all the things he’d feel, many not nice, if he let his life have events in it. Large, vague, alarming thoughts stir: perhaps it is the emptiness of his life that gives hell houseroom, perhaps it is even his wish for peace that does it. Perhaps all this time he has been somehow hugging his hell to himself. Like the cruising clouds that smudge the grey levels of the London air, these are ideas without edges, that melt into the general sky as you draw close. And since they are disturbing, as well as hard to hold on to, they will probably blow by, as will Ben’s guilt at what he nearly made happen to Trevor.
Bexford Garage. Their Routemaster slotted into the oilyfloored brick barn, the toad in pinstripes tottering away baffled, clutching his puce brow and clearly with no idea where he is. Thanks to the jams, the return trip took so long it’s shift-end for Ben and Trevor. As soon as he’s dropped off the machine and the cash bag in the office and clocked out, Ben makes an attempt to slip away, seeing as over by the exit onto the East Hill he can see Rodney hanging about, waiting to sell him his regular solution to the problems of sleep and the night-time. But Trevor corners him in the red alley between their Routemaster and its neighbour.
‘So, what was that about, then?’ he demands.
‘I dunno,’ says Ben uncomfortably. ‘I’m not. I. I think I told him to shut up.’
‘You think you did?’
‘I was thinking of something else.’
‘But why’d you tell him that?’
‘I dunno.’
‘No, man, you do. Come on, out with it.’
Impossible to explain that he wasn’t speaking to the skinhead at all.
‘He said something to me. But I’m not sure what it was.’
‘How can you not—? Never mind. Okay, what d’you think it was, this terrible thing?’
‘I wasn’t really paying attention, you see. But I think he told me to stick my ticket machine up my arse.’
Having said this out loud, having put it out there in the conversation, and finding that fear has flipped over into absurdity, Ben suddenly gets the giggles, and it’s infectious; Trevor starts to laugh too, and for a moment they rock to and fro together between the buses.
‘Right, then,’ says Trevor. ‘Right. I see it now. Okay.’ He swallows his last chuckle. ‘And you lost your temper, right? Probably out of the blue, just like that, am I right?’ He snaps his fingers. ‘And you’re not an angry guy, are you, so I’m guessing you got not too much practice at keep
ing your temper, or getting it back when it’s gone all of a sudden like that. Now, the thing here is …’
And he launches into a speech which Ben guesses is probably a version of the advice that Deacon Trevor gives to young fighters at some boxing club or other, about how to keep your cool under pressure; or maybe to his own sons. It’s very well meant, and Ben has no idea how to tell him that it’s completely off-target. So he just goes quieter and quieter, waiting for the talking-to to end, and for his chance to go. You and I need to be alone together again, says the fear. And Trevor sees this, and grows puzzled and frustrated again.
‘Where’ve you gone, man? I thought we was understanding each other.’
And it’s at this point that Rodney, tired of hanging about, appears at the end of the metal alleyway in his unconvincing tam and his green khaki jacket with ASWAD written on it in marker pen, holding out Ben’s regular order of an eighth of Leb in its little baggie.
‘Go away, man, we’re talking,’ says Trevor.
‘I and I jes’ here to do a little business,’ says Rodney.
‘What?’ says Trevor.
‘Ya know, the holy herb.’
‘What?’ says Trevor. ‘That’s the worst Rastaman imitation I ever heard. Where’d you learn it from, listening to records?’
‘All right, all right, Grandad,’ says Rodney, trying to sidle past. ‘Just tryin’ to show some appreciation. Roots and culture, know what I mean?’
‘Not your bloody culture. Newsflash! You’re a white boy, boy. And take that shit away. You don’t want to be messing with this one’s head. He’s enough of a mess already. Look at him!’
Trevor isn’t even looking at Ben himself at this point, he’s just getting rhetorical because he’s getting exasperated, and while he does so Ben snatches the eighth, shoves a blue fiver into Rodney’s mitt in exchange, and scarpers, leaving Trevor making tooth-sucking noises of despair.
Across the road, past the old Odeon, boarded up now, around two corners, loping along on sore feet. The fear beginning to wake up, just as he knew it would charred ribs but at last with some medicine in hand for it, a reliable dose of mind-softening ahead to look forward to. Through the door of his sister’s house, fumbling with the keys; past her daughters doing their homework in front of the telly; refusing his tea; up the stairs and into his room, and bolt the door. And skinning up with his clumsy hands, and the flame sputtering on the little lumps of resin in the tobacco; and then the oily, thick, oblivious smoke, bringing a pause at last to today’s twenty rounds with the demon.
So many days like this.
Alec
‘No, leave it, I’ll do that,’ says Alec as Sandra starts automatically collecting up the cereal bowls.
‘You sure?’ she says, raising an eyebrow. He’s making an effort, but he’s not normally Mr Domestic.
‘Yeah, fine, my meeting’s not till ten and then I’m not on the picket till one. I’m a gentleman of leisure, me.’
‘Well, all right. Thanks, love.’
With a kind of twitch, she detaches herself from the groove of her usual tasks, and goes through into the hall to find her bag and put on her coat. He can hear the slither of fabric over fabric as the coat underneath hers falls off the peg, and has to be picked off the floor. Then she comes back to the kitchen to do her face in the mirror by the door, where the light is stronger. She lifts her chin and turns it from side to side as she does her cheeks, grimacing at herself with that weird objectivity women have when it comes to their own faces. Pout-stretch-blot with the lipstick. A bit sticks to a front tooth and she reaches a quick hand for a Kleenex to get it off. She’s got big front teeth, always has had; nicely racehorsey to go with her long, lean body, Alec thinks. He can remember her teeth and his teeth banging into each other the first time they kissed, in the bus shelter by Bexford Park it must be (good grief) twenty years ago. She must be changing with time, he supposes. Nearly-forty Sandra with two teenage sons can’t be the same as the eighteen-year-old with the hair-flip. But you don’t see it, do you, if you live with someone, if you see them all the time? The changes are too gradual. Or, more than that, the changes are additions not displacements, only ever doing their work on top of memory, in all its layers and layers. The girl doesn’t go away, she just gets added to. Maybe it goes on like that, he thinks. Maybe that’s what’s happening, he thinks, when you come across one of those pensioner couples down the pub who are all handsy with each other. Everyone thinks it sweet they’re still so devoted, considering the wrinkles and his arthritis and her having a bum as big as a barrel, but maybe they just don’t see those things. Maybe to them, the wrinkles et cetera are details to be brushed aside, because from their point of view they still fundamentally are the courting teenagers who started mashing tongues in the bus shelter in 1925.
‘Phwoar,’ he says gently, joking and not joking, teasing and not teasing, and reaches an arm for her hips.
She gives him a V-sign with her free hand, and skips out of the way. The Co-op checkout calls. She never had to have a job, before. She was busy with the boys, and Fleet Street wages gave them all a pretty good life. They talked about her going back to work, but without ever getting to the decision point. Now, with Alec on seventy quid a week strike pay, they suddenly need her to be earning, and she’s kind of enjoying, Alec would say, being back in the world. Having a bigger life than the family. She talks about people on the tills with her who he’s never met. But then he supposes he’s been passing on composing-room gossip to her for years which makes just as little sense.
‘I’m off, then,’ she says, coming back and ruffling his hair. ‘Be good.’
‘Also,’ he says carefully, ‘I thought I might try and have a word with the lazy lump upstairs – you know, if he surfaces.’
‘Oh, love,’ she says, frowning. ‘Is there any point going round it again? You just set each other off.’
It’s true that Alec being in the house more seems to mean more collisions between him and Gary. He and his older boy form an unstable mixture, it seems, liable to combust. The two of them must have depended more than they knew on Sandra acting as interpreter and go-between. Face to face, things go swiftly wrong. But Alec isn’t ready to give up on the idea of reaching him; of finding the right tool to jiggle open the mysteriously jammed lock of Gary, who not long ago, surely, was being helped to balance round by the garages on his orange Chopper.
‘I will walk on eggshells,’ he promises.
‘Hmm,’ she says, unconvinced. But she’s got to go. She kisses him and departs; and thirty seconds after the door’s clicked, and he’s dumping bowls in the sink, he sees her head go by above the trellis on the back wall of the pocket-sized garden, taking the short cut down towards Lambert Street and the shops. Just her head, with her straight fair hair flying, moving in quick jerks that mean she’s taking her long, downhill, almost-bounding strides, also unaltered (thinks Alec) from the girl who won the hundred yards at Bexford Secondary Modern and moved as if less secured to the ground by gravity than other people. She looked like a gazelle in running shorts. Such legs she had. Has. Had. Whichever. Her expression, though, thirty seconds away from him, has cooled, and gone resolute, and public, and unbetraying.
‘Private faces in public places,’ quotes Alec, adding too big a squirt of Fairy Liquid to the washing-up bowl, ‘are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.’
The sink grows a loaf of foam. Alec roots about in it for the crockery and the cutlery, and brings up each item he finds, one by one, for a careful scrub. He has to run the mixer tap hard to get the foam off again, and even then when he piles the clean dishes on the drainer they all have a slightly bubble-tufted appearance which doesn’t look right. He picks up the whole rack and tries to fit it under the mixer tap for a final rinse, but it won’t fit on top of the plastic bowl. He transfers the rack to balance on just his right arm, and uses the other to tip the bowl out. He has nowhere to put the bowl, though; if he puts it on the draining board, he can see th
at it will immediately foam up his post-foam recovery area. He squats and leans, and props the bowl down on his Hush Puppies – half on them, anyway – to try to keep the foam off the floor. He straightens, and with his left hand turns on the cold water to wash out the sink itself, also foam-bound. When enough seems to have gone down the drain, he manoeuvres the draining rack and its cargo under the flow and starts to sluice it. Success! The foam residue washes off the washing-up with pleasing promptness. But he tips the rack too far, and the bowls and saucers at the end start to slide off into the sink, and when he hastily tips the rack the other way, he overshoots, and crockery bounces off the other end onto the floor, while an icy jet shoots out of the undercarriage of the rack and squirts the leg of his jeans. He starts to laugh, and more bowls slide off the rack – bouncing not breaking on the floor, luckily, since they’re melamine.
There’s a sound from upstairs. Alec looks at the ceiling, and stops laughing. He picks up the mess, replaces the bowl, rewashes more efficiently. He finds a mop in the tall cupboard and sorts out the floor. All of this he does with a degree more clatter than he could have managed. But when the washing-up is really, truly, definitively done, and he squints at the ceiling again, there are no follow-up noises. He turns on the radio on the windowsill and gives the kitchen a dose of Radio 1. Still nothing.
So he puts the kettle on and makes Gary some tea. It occurs to him that he doesn’t know how Gary likes it, so he puts in one sugar, as the low-risk, consensus option, and carries the mug to the upstairs of the maisonette. It’s dim up there, he discovers as his head rises above the level of the swirly carpet on the landing. With the door of his and Sandra’s bedroom shut, and the shade still down in the bathroom to shield Sandra’s shower from being on view to the road, and Stevie’s door open but the curtain left closed when he went off to school, it’s as if the night hasn’t shifted upstairs, is still hanging about, a murk as thick as flannel pyjamas only softly punctured here and there by light, and smelling strongly of boy. Really strongly, in fact, now that Alec’s nose has been by purged by Fairy Liquid and is getting the chance to smell his household afresh. It smells of used Y-fronts and other teenage male laundry, and spray-on Brut 33, and spot lotion, and the general reek of newly exuding armpits and groins. Of, probably, (disgusting word, but useful for winning at Scrabble) smegma. S-m-e-g-m-a. The only feminine thing putting up a fight in the mix is the floral smell of Sandra’s shampoo.
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