The day she rang me and said help me, Harry’s in jail, I’m alone with the child, I went down to their flat at Oxford to find she had got worse alone, sitting rocking in a chair in her tweed overcoat with the baby on her knees with a blanket round it – the kettle and the pots she had taken pride in burned out and black and Julie herself much too small and neat now as the dead look.
I see no justice in it pissing down on the innocent under any circumstances, but it’s much worse when it’s your own blood, and I went in with their key I had and softly took the child from her and lit the fire and put the puzzled baby in the warmth, then took Julie by the wrists, pulling her up to take her by the waist as if we were lovers and said to her it’s all right, dear, it’ll be all right, as long as there’s the two of us still you’ll never go down, I’ll make sure. I said to her, even if you weren’t my sister, don’t you remember what you did for me when Dahlia died and how if you, and a couple of friends at work, hadn’t picked me up when you did I believe I’d have shot myself, don’t you remember, Julie dear? And now it’s my turn to play.
But she only smiled and said she was afraid that people get ill and die and I said no, but she said, remember Father, and I said, as if I could forget, and she said think of it, dear, a draper who defused mines. He was a part of old Britain, I said, and we can be proud of him, Julie, and she said, I know we can, and I said yes, because I can think of nothing more terrifying than unscrewing the cap off one of those, but Father did it. She drew herself up then and began to look like her old self again and I said listen, I’ve got money in the bank. You keep it there, she said, and I said no, don’t be a fool, Julie, it’s for you and the child, I’m a man on my own, I don’t need it, take everything you want. No, it wouldn’t be right, she said, and I said listen, I’m your brother, aren’t I, whereupon she gave me such a beautiful look that I felt stung to the heart and she said do you remember how we used to play together on Sundays out at Richmond Park, and I said, of course I do. So then she looked at me very earnestly and said, dear, remember those times.
It was difficult, but I got her to take five hundred pounds at last to tide her over and she said, well, it’ll be for the child, but I said, for God’s sake, Julie, you’re all I’ve got, you’re my sister, and she said, veiling her eyes the way some women do, I want to repay it, would you like it if I came over to Earlsfield with the child and made house for you?
But I said no, Harry’ll only draw three and do eighteen months, if that, the jails are crammed. You’ll stick with him, won’t you, and she said, yes, Harry’s a fool sometimes but I love him, besides, there’s the child to think of and I said, that’s it, we’re none of us perfect. After the case, when he’d only drawn eighteen months, she said, I know it’s thanks to you that he’s drawn so little and I said, I know the arresting officer and did a deal with him on another case. I don’t think he’ll do it again, he’s not really dishonest, he just got desperate, out of his depth and she said, I may have been to blame too, I made him overspend – but if you knew the neighbours on this estate, how they talk. Let them talk, I said, and get a sore throat from it. When he was arrested, she said, the day they came and took him away, when I was alone in the house afterwards, for a time I wanted to kill the child and die. You’d never do that, I said. You let me know if you get depressed; you just draw on me like I drew on you and Harry when Edie and Dahlia happened. Oh I’m all right now, she said, I’ve got over it, but it was the shock at the time, and the shame. Would you go and see Harry? Yes of course, I said, if he’d like it. Oh he would, she said. He told me when I went to see him the other day. I know he wants to thank you; he’ll send you a visiting order. She paused and said, you know what would be nice? When Harry’s back, perhaps we could go over to Richmond Park one day, the three of us and the child, like we used to. We could take a picnic, it would be good for us. Yes, I said, good idea, we’ll do it one day.
One day, Julie.
3
I am at Earlsfield. I go out on to my balcony overlooking Acacia Circus, its concrete pavement spattered with pigeon-shit, and watch the city stirring to the north – millions of people stirring and shifting in the anxiety of their half sleep.
This shocking loneliness! Some nights here, when I can’t face going to bed, I ask the dead to sit up with me and know that they do come and listen; the air in the sitting-room is thick with them. They sit down, get up and move around just as the living do, while I try to understand the great experience they have been through. I put questions about existence to them and frankly ask them for help. I ask after my grandmother who, her brain not working properly any more at eighty-six, died in the snow one January day on the steps of a house we had long ago sold; also my cousin, an intelligent woman who died of cancer and said to me as she lay dying in hospital: ‘If I just knew what it was for.’
Finally I go to bed and sometimes see my father in my dreams, rowing alone, far out from the seashore on dark water with his demob hat, which he kept as a war souvenir, cocked on the side of his head. I want to go to him but can’t reach him. His boat’s leaking, it’s full of water, it’s a nightmare; his head bobs obstinately against the twilit sky; he rows slowly away from me and sinks.
Long before I met my wife Edie I fell in love with a remarkable woman. Her father was British, her mother Arab; she filled me with a terrible excitement. We look so definite in this moment, don’t we, she said to me once after we had made love and were standing hand in hand at her window. We gazed at the plane trees bowing and rushing together in the spring wind far down in the garden and she said, you’ll remember this, won’t you? I knew I would never forget it and I said, I’m just completely in love with you and she answered, but I’ll cheat you, you know. What, I said, with another man? No, she said, giving me a strange look, there are other ways. Do you want to cheat me? I said. If so, I’d better know. It’s just that there are other seducers than men, she said. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.
She was writing a book (what else can you do in West Hampstead?) and was a philosophy student at University College. Her tongue was sharp, she hated errors and weak thinking; indeed, it was she who taught me to think (‘you know how to, but you don’t realize it yet’). My madness keeps me from going mad, she said, just after she had started to hit the cocaine (but I wasn’t living with her, and was too young then to know what she meant). She was left-wing and crossed picket and police lines with a flask of whisky in her pocket; she never had any fear of people at all. I don’t know how you can do it, I said, you’ve got more guts than I have, and she replied, it’s simply trust in people and in oneself.
I never forgot that.
We broke up, but there were times when she would sit for days and nights on end in some street where she thought I might pass, graceful and dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette (‘trying to get off it, you know’).
But I had joined the police and had met Edie.
One night when she was sitting like that on a street bench the law of course came up to her and said, waiting for someone, are we? and she nodded and said calmly, of course. My lover.
She had great class. I tell you class is everything, even as you fall: your name is graven as you fall.
‘My role as a writer,’ she said, ‘is to survive and record.’ (But her work was in ruins, her book abandoned.) She was on heroin by then (‘it’s nothing, darling, just a kick’).
On kicks get ill, on kicks get worse and die. Going up to London on the train from Maidstone where I was working when I heard she was dying, much too late to intervene, I felt her leave between my fingers at Malling, fly out into the dark air of late afternoon at Sydenham and breathe her last at Penge, marble white. At Victoria I got to a telephone and her mother explained about the overdose, the dirty needle – how she had spoken clearly of me once before coma and death. I walked up into Green Park. It was spring that terrible night and the trees in the park, buds scarcely formed, tumbled madly against each other in the wind, and there we were agai
n by the window, her hand surging expressly into mine.
My granny used to say there was hope in any garden; but I found none in Green Park.
When I was a boy I once went down to a farm in Kent with my father and we watched three men kill a sheep with its head at the top of a flight of steps. It wouldn’t stay still to die even with its feet tied together, so the owner smacked it across the face to keep it quiet – he was a big man with red hair on his chest. Then he sharpened his knife and put it straight in the animal’s throat. How it bled down those steps! The farmer’s wife washed the blood away with buckets of water. Afterwards, while the men were butchering it, I looked up and watched a cloud of rain coming towards us across the flat fields; it was March. Then, when the work was finished, after my father had paid for the sheep and we had put the meat in our car, we all went into the kitchen. The men talked about money and rationing (which was why we had bought the sheep), the importance of hanging a carcass properly and the best way to tan a fleece. One of the men was an army deserter from Liverpool; his name was Kevin. He had split the carcass down the spine with an axe and after he had drunk his beer carried the liver down for us on a piece of old sheet, but he kept the head for himself.
‘We’ll have the chops with potatoes and mint sauce,’ said my father when we got home, then started talking to my mother about a dream he had had about an air raid in ’43, when he was with the bomb disposal squad. He said: ‘We only got thirty dead out of the building, but there were many more in there than that. The trouble was, there was a leaking gas main in the basement that we couldn’t seal off.’ He dreamed about that building till the end of his life: ‘Of course there were children in there; we never got to them.’
Life is made of slowly composed horrors.
‘Your father shouldn’t worry about it so,’ my mother said to us. ‘It’s all over now; he’s distracting himself for no reason.’
But as I know for myself, some things are never over. Later I tried to get my father to talk about it, but he wouldn’t; he only talked about it in his sleep and I remember Julie saying to me while she was looking after him just before he died: ‘He’s having those nightmares of his again.’
‘About that building?’
‘Yes, he was screaming about the children.’
‘That’s the dreadful thing about dreams, isn’t it, Julie?’ I said. ‘It’s always now.’
I try to sleep but can’t, and lie awake in the dark, listening to the rumble of traffic. Just once my father said to me: ‘We could hear them dying, coughing and choking somewhere under that mass of bricks. The stink of gas—’
People are horrified by death all right, but most of them don’t understand it at all, including the banal element – the practised fingers of a police surgeon opening a dead eye by a road, then turning to us to say: ‘She’s gone, leave a constable with her, the rest of us can go and have a drink while we wait for the ambulance – that pub over there.’
Where sheep may safely graze.
4
‘Hello, Charlie,’ I said to Bowman when I got into his office, ‘did you want to see me then?’
‘Don’t fucking start,’ he said: ‘I was just beginning to forget about you, and less of the Charlie.’
‘Look, forget that business the other day,’ I said, ‘it’s over and done with now and after all no one got hurt.’
‘No, but it was close. That time it was fucking close.’
‘And it will be again I daresay,’ I said, ‘but right now, let’s get down to it.’
‘There’s this man called Mardy down in the West Country whose wife’s gone missing.’
‘Missing how long?’
‘Six months’ worth.’
‘Yes, that’s a long time,’ I said. ‘Missing Persons turn anything up?’
‘Not a light.’
‘Local law taking an interest?’ I said. ‘Is it efficient, does it care?’
‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Bowman. ‘The place is out in the sticks somewhere. They tried to hand it over to us but there was no body and I decided we didn’t want it so I bowled it back upstairs – I’ve got enough on right now with this incinerated little bastard on Clapham Common, it’s all on page one, you mightn’t have noticed. Local law out in the middle of nothing flat – how should I know how they carry on down there?’
‘All right, all right,’ I said, ‘don’t give your garters a heart attack, where was she last seen, when and who by?’
He sighed, got a file out of a drawer and slapped it down on the desk top. He flipped the file open. ‘Name Marianne Mardy,’ he said. ‘Last seen August 1984 at her home.’
‘Seen by whom? Any names?’
‘No names. The request for our help came direct from the Chief Constable.’
‘But this is a carve-up,’ I said, ‘it’s totally irregular.’
‘It seems the countryside’s like that in places,’ said Bowman. ‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been hardly, except to Brighton.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to go potty about our open spaces. And this woman’s home, what’s home like?’
‘Christ,’ Bowman shouted, ‘I don’t fucking know. You’ll have to ask them down there about that. Go and find out – my life, that’s what you draw your bleeding wages for. I imagine it’s some old barracks where they grind out electric light by hand. I was born in Hackney, how should I bloody know?’
‘Mind your ulcer,’ I said. ‘Who reported her missing anyway? The husband?’
‘No, that’s the point,’ he said. ‘I tell you she was reported missing directly to the Chief Constable, not the local police, the local police knew about it but did nothing.’
‘Doesn’t seem much point their having any local law down there at all,’ I said. ‘Amazing.’
‘I know you’re easily amazed,’ said Bowman. ‘I’m just telling you what we’ve got.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘and did the local people finally get pushed into moving on it?’
‘Yes,’ said Bowman, ‘it says here they finally went up in January, here it is, the fifteenth, 1985.’
‘And did they find anything? Do anything?’
‘Well of course they fucking didn’t!’ Bowman yelled. ‘Otherwise no one would have needed to send for you, would they, you stupid man?’
‘You radiate police charm, Charlie,’ I said. ‘You’re what tourists adore about Britain’s wonderful coppers. Pull your skirts down a bit, though; your knobbly knees are showing.’
‘I might be going to report this conversation, Sergeant.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, ‘you never do.’
He said with calm ferocity: ‘I’m going to try to keep my temper with you, it’s an order from your Deputy Commander.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it as well. I don’t know how we’re going to manage it quite but let’s have a good try, dear, shall we, and see if we can make the marriage work. Meantime, let’s stick to this file. This local trainband, did they get a warrant out to search the Mardy place?’
‘Seems not. And don’t ask me why not!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not the officer on this case, I’m just handing it over to you.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but you can read, can’t you, and you’ve got the file right side up on your side of the desk.’
‘All right,’ he grumbled, bending over it, ‘all the police down there have sent back is a load of official waffle ending up with no grounds for suspicion.’
‘Sounds funny them saying that,’ I said, ‘when here’s this woman been missing six months – everyone from the Chief Constable downwards seems agreed on that bit.’
‘Look,’ said Bowman nastily, ‘I’m tired of this conversation. Why don’t you forget about your fucking great brain and get your feet into your high-heeled boots? Get down there – do it now.’ He threw the file across at me and said: ‘Catch it, it’s all yours.’
It seemed as reasonable an order as you could ever get from him so I stood up and he
said: ‘Check with an Inspector Kedward when you arrive and mind your bloody manners.’
I said nothing but picked up the file and went down into the freezing street. I boarded a bus going up to the West End; I didn’t feel like going back to Earlsfield. I would buy a razor and a packet of blades at this country place. At Oxford Circus I let myself be jostled by office-leavers making in a flood for the underground in the teeth of a murderous east wind, having watched them sunk in their newspaper or paperback, frozen, exhausted in the world that meant the end of their day. I dropped off the bus in a traffic jam at a fast food; it was called the Lazy Jay. I went in and ordered a hamburger without the roll and plenty of sauce; a black girl served me.
‘How you like it cooked, man?’
‘Now if you like,’ I said, ‘I’m in a hurry.’
I paid, and a bit poorer, walked north from Oxford Street to a pub with drunks and cab-drivers sitting at raw plastic tables off Cleveland Street; it was called the Yorkshire Grey. Big black women with net bags filled with spices and ladies’ fingers complained or laughed fatly in a man’s ears – skinny white women examined the bar for likely punters and, finding none, settled for what wandered in and out of the gents’. I ordered a pint of lager and sat drinking it slowly. The trick about being invisible in a place like that is to be half well-known and never to look at anyone – then they never trouble to look at you, taking you for a drunk, a has-been, no matter what, or newly fired and on the dole, starting on the skids etcetera. I sat in my corner and lit a horrible cigarette called a Westminster, hoping that perhaps the straw taste would really help me stop smoking this time. It didn’t; I smoked it right to the end. I tried my pint again, lit a second Westminster, and opened the file Bowman had thrown me. It was a thin file. It was a funny business; it seemed to me there had been no proper procedure in it at the local end. I didn’t understand so far why the police down there couldn’t or hadn’t tackled it, nor where their Chief Constable came into it – all on his own to us, independently, as it seemed to me, of his own officers. It was all the more curious because no one had been reported dead, just missing – and then not by the person you would have thought most interested, i.e. the husband.
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 3
