by Xan Brooks
Full credit to Skinny Boy Bill, who is leading the woodpecker song to places it hitherto had never dreamed might exist. He is sticking his finger in whatever hole he can find and never you mind who claims it as home, because it is Skinny Boy’s home for as long as he wants it. He keeps entering holes to find the one that’s the best fit until he enters the red vixen’s hole and that is where he gets bit.
At the edge of the stage, Ambrose Metcalf receives this information with an involuntary moue of distaste.
Sweetpea Long is soberly dressed and his short-cropped hair has turned prematurely grey. He could pass for a stiff-backed preacher or a middle-aged country schoolteacher, but this is his disguise and the music is so urgent that the cover soon slips. He dances with a second woman, and a third. Then he rediscovers the first girl and spins her again so that her skirt rises to her waist and her legs are exposed.
At this juncture the dancer’s partner feels that he has shared his girlfriend long enough. He pushes Sweetpea, and Sweetpea pushes back. He winds up and hits out and Sweetpea hits him back. The bandleader’s punch is well-aimed: it clips the man on the jaw and propels him into another dancer. And this causes a domino effect, so that a sizeable portion of the dancers at the front of the hall lose their bearings and balance and are abruptly falling or fighting or remonstrating and occasionally trying to manage all three at once. Some of the men are battling Sweetpea’s corner, while others have taken up the boyfriend’s cause. But the majority remain ignorant of the cause of the quarrel and simply mete out punishment to whomever it was who pushed or punched them last.
The woodpecker song squeals to a halt as Sweetpea closes with the dancer’s partner. Several of the more rascally members of the Islington street gang have brought knives to the venue and one of these is dropped and kicked and fortuitously fetches up in the banjo player’s vicinity. Skipping and shuffling, Sweetpea waves the blade like a wand, commanding his assailants to drop back a step, and in so doing conjures an arc of empty floor between his person and theirs. Still, it’s clear that somewhere somebody has already been struck because there are thin lines of wet blood on the scuffed wooden boards.
Now here come the Long Boys. They throw down their instruments and move to defend the bandleader. The musicians launch themselves from the stage and although this should by rights be a decisive act, it proves anything but, because the lighting has dazzled them and they confuse friend with foe. The guests in the hall are swept up in their tempo and now everybody is clawing at everybody else. The women are screaming. There are bodies underfoot and the clicking crocheting of switchblades at work in close quarters. On his perch by the wings, Ambrose Metcalf sinks to his knees, throws back his head and claps his hands to his ears. He could be a ham Othello contemplating Desdemona’s handkerchief.
The swaying, breaking, rippling crowd. The screams of women and the exhortations of men. The Long Boys appeared to applause and bow out in disgrace. All five musicians will spend that night in the cells.
In his determination to escape the crush, a slender man in plus fours has begun climbing the full-length curtains which rest against the outer wall. Ponderously he separates himself from the crowd, making a rope of the velvet and bracing his feet against brickwork so as to inch himself up and out by degrees. He clutches and clambers until he is beyond reach of the knives – at which point he turns his head and sees Rupert Fortnum-Hyde sitting in the splendour of the royal box opposite. Their eyes meet across the sea of bodies. The man has clambered so high that he has very nearly drawn level. And the look on his face is so ghastly, so stricken that Rupert Fortnum-Hyde can’t help himself: he is poleaxed by mirth. He stares across at this heroic mountaineer who has climbed up the curtains to avoid being stabbed and this is all that it takes for his lordly cool to fall away. The horror. The glory. The garish free-for-all. He finds himself laughing so hard that there are tears on his cheeks. He is laughing so hard that he fears he might choke. Before long he becomes aware of his companions adding their voices to his and the three of them sit with the bolted door at their backs; a trio of cavaliers come to relish the sport. Conway and Truman-Jones are hooting and braying, each engaged in a Herculean effort to outdo the other. Both men have learned, from long years of experience, that Fortnum-Hyde’s laugh is an instruction that should not be ignored.
6
It is an era of change, that much is clear. Old things are knocked down to be replaced by new things. On Ermine Street a row of terraced houses is being removed to make space for a depot, and the business of destruction draws a crowd of onlookers. Labourers cordon off the street with a length of twine and the girl stands at the vanguard with it pressing into her midriff to watch the crane swing a ball into the front of the homes. When the frontage falls away, the ball is free to venture inside and nose at the interior. From her place at the kerb she sees the houses laid bare. She sees the rose-print wallpaper of abandoned bedrooms. She sees mounted gas lights, built-in wooden closets, and fireplaces marooned on the walls where a floor used to stand. Is that an oil landscape hung over the mantelpiece? The former tenants have fled. They put their belongings in boxes but decided to abandon the painting, or else looked right through it and forgot its existence until it was too late to return to claim it.
A reverent hush has fallen on the crowd. No one says a word; they might be onlookers at a funeral. The swing of the ball has them transfixed. They find themselves lulled by its lazy retreats and advances, by the way it turns aside and adjusts its approach to nuzzle the brickwork from a different direction. It wanders in like an amiable pig to root and forage among the walls, and each time it leaves it drags a little more of the building with it. The end terrace falls away to reveal a swatch of blue sky. The staircase collapses with a soft bonfire crackle. She thinks of all the people who must have trodden on those steps and wonders where they went next and where those feet are walking today.
Time and again, the ball turns back to revisit its meal. It erases bricks and mortar. It converts the row of houses to dust and this dust spills out past the length of twine to settle on the people who have gathered behind it. Lucy is aware of it in her hair, frosting her lashes and the inside of her lips. It is easy to spot who has been watching the destruction. One by one, they peel away from the cordon and walk back up the street, coated head to toe in grey dust that is fine as talcum powder. The girl slows her pace to let them overtake her. She allows herself to believe that she is observing a collection of phantoms, the ghosts of the people who once lived in these houses, and that the ball has released them and pointed them back towards London.
At a village fête in the west of England, adults and children gather to write messages on a hundred coloured balloons. These balloons are then inflated with helium gas and released. Each bears a homily, or a motto, or a personal dedication of love – although some of the younger children have not quite grasped what is expected of them and one boy’s message reads, “I like porridge now”. The balloons waft away from the green and bob over the rooftops where the wind begins to disperse them. The villagers raise a cheer and then they disperse, too.
One of the balloons removes itself from its neighbours. It proceeds to travel three miles east, drifting over a railway line and a river and a stretch of private woodland where the nobles shoot pheasant. It comes to rest in the garden of a young widow who lives on a pension with her son. At the very moment it lands the widow is considering killing herself. On seeing its flash of red, she steps from the back door and retrieves the balloon from the privet that has trapped it. The legend on its skin reads, “Chin Up, My Pet”.
Later, the widow will insist to herself that she was never actually serious about taking her own life and that, besides, even if that weren’t true, she would never have gone through with the deed because of her love for her son. But in her most honest moments she wonders whether the balloon might have saved her; the silly red balloon with its bland message written by someone who does not know h
er and almost certainly never will. “Chin Up, My Pet”. It saved her life – although she suspects that even that is a lie. People find omens when they look for them. Peer hard enough and you can read anything into anything. Unconsciously, then, she was casting about for an excuse not to do it. Were it not the balloon, it would have been the sight of a late-blooming daffodil, or a cloud in the sky in the shape of Bram’s face.
But still she is lonely and can find no solace for that. She won’t abandon the house because it is her connection to him, even though they only moved here in the first place because she was offered a job. Her mother’s in Bournemouth and her sister’s in Southampton and both of them claim that they have room for her and the boy and yet she will not leave the house because it was he who painted the walls and put up the bookshelves and replaced the sash windows where the putty had rotted. They used to make love on that rug by the fire. He must have banged his head fifty times on the beam at the top of the stairs. The whole house is haunted. It will not let her go.
Nothing helps, she is sad to say. The loneliness grows more pressing with every passing day. Of course she ensures that the child is well fed and well dressed and she helps him with his drawing – she supposes he may even have talent – and yet she can hardly bear to look him in the face. The resemblance is too wrenching. It is like being slapped.
One weekend, feeling ridiculous, she attends a church service and positions herself in the back row of pews with her hymn book raised to her chin as though to ward off wicked spirits. The congregation is singing ‘All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name’ and from the opening verse this strikes her as amusing. In the first place the hymn is slipshod and ramshackle, not built for purpose, and the discordant singing soon cuts it clean off at the knees. And secondly, why should she? Why should she be bullied into hailing a name, and how, pray tell, has its power ever benefited her? Sod him, she thinks. Sod him and his name.
All she feels is emptiness. It is a time of beginnings for those who can make them and this is surely essential; the world must move on. But she suspects that it may well have set off without her. Not yet thirty and she is stuck in amber, stuck in the past, stuck down with the dead. The church is a sham and the child’s face offends her and long walks exhaust her body but leave her mind still aflame. What helps? Nothing helps. Maybe she needs to drink more heavily. Maybe she should masturbate more frequently; that might help with her sleep. And into all this fuss and bother comes an idiotic message written on the skin of a balloon that ducks into her garden and says, “Chin Up, My Pet”. She does not see this message as being any more profound than that of the verse in the hymn book – yet nor on reflection is it any less so. When the world has been shattered, nothing makes any sense. All hail the power of the bouncing balloon. In the absence of Jesus or him one must accept what one’s given.
Grandad is drunk. He thinks it’s his eyes playing tricks. When the girl pushes open the taproom door, he has to look over three times. He shouts, “What fresh hell is this? Why’ve you gone that queer colour?”
“It’s all right, Grandad. It’s just the dust from the house.”
“Thought you were sick.” And then, “What house?”
“Just away up the street. Actually more than one house.”
“Well, don’t walk it in here. Shake yourself off outside first.”
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Like a dog, innit?” Grandad says.
Only two o’clock and the taproom is empty, which means he has abandoned his position behind the bar to play-act the role of a carouser instead. He is sat by the window with his boots on a stool, an ill-fitting man who may once have been lithe. His wrists and ankles are too slim for his oversized hands and feet.
“Thought you were sick when it’s poor old me that’s sick.” Theatrically he motions at the empty glass on the table. “Run along and get me my medicine, Luce.”
Lucy hesitates. She doesn’t know whether she ought to clean herself off in advance.
“Medicine first. Always medicine first. Love of God, can I get some healing here?”
So she splashes scotch from the bottle, regarding him with some interest. “Is that what you want? Healing?”
Grandad grins. He smells of tobacco and carbolic soap. “You, me and everyone. What houses?”
“Those ones up the road. They’re not there any more.”
He drifts away, comes back again. “Bloody heck, look at you. Go get rid of that dust.”
“Sorry.” She steps gingerly towards the door. She can’t walk any faster; she would leave billowing clouds in her wake.
“Always remember, it’s a temple, the Griffin. We can’t have people trailing dirt and muck in.” Grandad downs half the glass and it’s if the afterburn makes him silly, because now he’s helpless with laughter and he’s not a man who is easily amused. “What we should do, girl, is have the bastards take off their shoes. Put on some white robes. Sit cross-legged on the floor.”
“Yes Grandad, all right.”
He shouts, “It’s our fortune, the Griffin. We must treat it like a temple.” Standing on the step, slapping pale dust from her clothes, she can still hear him chuckling inside the taproom.
7
He has been a fat child and a fat soldier and a fat tramp as well. But he thinks he likes himself best as a fat spiritualist. Hello world, the man thinks, I’m a spiritualist. Hello ladies and gents, look at my lovely fat belly. Roll up, roll up, and rub my fat belly for luck. You rub the belly and I’ll rub my hands and then my word, bloody hell, we shall see what comes out.
In the town square, the shabby men sell their wares. They lean into their crutches and brandish handkerchiefs and matches. They arrange tarot cards and crystal balls on trestle tables and purport to commune with lost souls for three shillings a pop, despite the fact that none of them hears voices the way he can hear voices and none of them is able to produce the magic he can. The buyers mill about like docile sheep, and he spies a number of child pickpockets darting here and there through the throng, as elusive as ghosts. He admires the pickpockets, whose hand-speed is electric. He has heard that they train themselves by plucking coins out of saucepans filled with boiling water.
He finds a free space in the square and promises miracles. He introduces himself as a fat-bellied firefly and invites passers-by to rub his stomach and then stand back and watch what happens. But his claims are too vague and vulgar; the buyers don’t take to him. They remove themselves quickly from his presence, noticing but not noticing, as though they have stumbled into a pocket of bad air. Besides which, he is nervous, which inhibits his gift. He persists for an hour but the flames will not come. An elderly couple eventually take pity and hand him some coppers for food.
For five happy days he was convinced the amulet was his fortune. He would sell it for one hundred pounds and live like a king. He would sell it for ten pounds and check himself into a hotel. He would sell it for one pound and eat until he was sick. But the pendant is worthless. It is cheap costume jewellery, a thing of plaster and paste, and if the first pawnbroker was lying, that meant that the second pawnbroker lied too. And the one after that, and the one after that. So it still hangs off his neck, tapping his chest when he walks. This means that the joke was on him and that he killed Uriah for nothing.
“Oh Uriah,” he says. “What a silly-billy I am.”
He is what he is: he is God’s ultimate bad imp, the Lord’s sprightly monkey, the last lonely vestige of an irrational age. Fitfully he sleeps in the draughty nave of the church. Eagerly he positions himself by the bakers, clamouring for day-old loaves, crying, “Look at this big belly. It needs food to fill it”. The brim of his bowler is detaching itself. The hems of his trousers have been trod upon ’til they tatter. The odour of stale sweat is coming off him in waves.
It has now reached the stage where he even welcomes the voices. The voices at least speak to him when nobod
y else can be arsed. He only wishes that the voices would address him more clearly – how nice that would be – or that they would make more sense when they do. Most of the time the voices blow about his brain as an unintelligible murmurous storm. On other occasions he is able to isolate disconnected phrases, although these tend to leave him none the wiser. He is bedevilled by one hushed, feminine voice, which returns at intervals to inform him that she has dropped all of her shopping in a dirty green stream. Another, gruffer voice says, “Chilly out. Chilly out. Chilly out. Chill.” He believes that the voices may be those of the dead. He listens for Uriah, but Uriah remains silent.
“Uriah,” he cries. “I’m truly sorry I hit you.”
“Uriah,” he says. “You were like a father to me.”
Unable to sleep, he thinks back to the war. Cor blimey, the war – the war always soothes him. Crash bang and wallop, what a wonderful thing. The partridges flushed in droves from the bushes. The horses screaming. All the clowns falling over, like some children’s circus. Whenever he’s feeling downcast, the war picks him up.
He had been posted to Cambrai and before that to Cape Helles. Cambrai was all right, but Cape Helles was the best. He was given a job disposing of the bodies. Nobody wanted to do it but it really wasn’t so bad once you got used to the smell. First he found an old communication trench that had fallen into disuse, lifting his spade to dig into the sand. Next he dragged in the bodies and packed them like sardines, underfoot and in the walls. There were so many bodies there was hardly space for them all. The only problem was the sand, which had a tendency to crumble so that all the dead soldiers slid free or rode up. No sooner had they stiffened than their limbs jutted out. Hard, bony hands extended from the walls on either side. He had a game, he recalls, which helped pass the time. He would walk down the trench, shaking each dead hand in turn, pretending he was a high-born gent greeting a line of dignitaries. He’d grip the hands one by one and cry, “Good day to you, sir!” and “A pleasure to meet you” and “Upon my soul, you are looking well.” It got so he enjoyed stealing back during spare minutes to say hello to the hands and check which new ones had got free.
