by Tim Pears
One of the gardeners told Stanley he’d seen Edna stumble on the way to the compost heap, and then his sister Pauline called round because she’d heard that Edna had to be helped to a taxi at the open market that morning. Even Robert – who stayed most of the time God knows where and limited his appearances at home to Sunday lunch – telephoned the next day. As luck would have it, Laura answered.
‘Hello,’ she said.
There was a pause. ‘Is Simon there?’ came the familiar gritty voice.
Laura too paused, briefly. ‘I’ll go and see,’ she replied.
Simon came down and picked up the receiver.
‘You know my mate Radko?’ Robert asked him.
‘No,’ Simon replied. ‘Should I?’
‘Well,’ Robert explained, ‘he delivered dry-cleaning to the house today, he’s been doing it for years, he said Edna didn’t recognize him. She used to give him one of her pastries and come out to say hello to his dog in the van, but she didn’t recognize him.’
‘Thanks, Robert,’ Simon told him, surprised by his brother’s loquacity.
‘Is she all right, Simon?’ Robert asked.
‘She’s fine, Robert,’ Simon assured him. ‘I’ll let you know, I’ll look into it.’
‘Good. See you Sunday.’
It was a Sunday morning in the Easter holidays of 1977 when Charles asked Alice to gather everyone she could find, except Edna, for sherry in his study. When they’d all – including Zoe and one of Simon’s secretary friends – congregated there, Charles declared to Stanley that he had the feeling that Edna had been working too hard recently.
‘I thought you and I,’ he continued, ‘might impress upon these young people that we should all value her a bit more and demand of her a bit less. We’ve been taking Edna for granted.’
Charles finished his brief speech of a man-in-charge, and was disappointed to discover that the rest of the household were well ahead of him. But at least his leadership brought them all together in the same room, and in the ensuing half-hour of shared concern, observations and memories they began to realize, too late, that that cheerful, chubby aunt had been a mother to them all, not just since Mary’s death but before it as well.
They were interrupted by the emphatic ringing of the gong in the hallway, Edna calling them in to Sunday lunch. The conversation never let up throughout the meal, right through the main course of chewy beef, soggy roast potatoes, heavy Yorkshire pudding, insipid peas, bland parsnips and watery gravy, a conversation full of forced joviality and shrill expressions of appreciation they directed at Edna without looking her in the eye. She prodded the few peas on her plate with her fork, cleared the table, served up the dessert, sat down, and then suddenly slammed her bowl down and stood up.
‘For God’s sake,’ Edna said breathlessly, ‘do you all think I’m stupid? Can’t a woman suffer a little heartburn without it being the talk of the town?’
They all stared at their plates with expressions of anxious embarrassment; only Charles and Laura were actually looking at her.
‘This is one meal too many, Charles,’ Edna declared. She turned to Laura. ‘Do take that stupid look off your face,’ she told her. ‘And tell your father to get the car out. I’m going back to my sister’s.’
She marched towards the back door through to their quarters. Forgetting himself, Stanley blurted out: ‘Why do you want to go there?’
Edna turned round and addressed not Stanley but Laura. ‘Tell your father I haven’t seen my sister in too long, and it’s about time I had a holiday. Tell him Laura can take over the cooking,’ she added, confusing herself in the absurdity of their zig-zag communication. ‘If she can’t cook properly by now, she never will.’
Edna left behind a taut silence as she went to her room and packed a suitcase. I’ve had enough, she decided; I’ve had it up to here with this place, with that bossy buffoon, who does he think he is, Winston Churchill? With those sons of his, young Robert, I don’t trust him and I never have, and that pompous Simon treating me like a slave. What a bunch, feed them all day, every day, it goes in one end comes out the other without a word of thanks. For what? I’ve had it with that silly, feckless girl, how could she do it? She didn’t deserve what she got but how could she be so foolish? Alice wouldn’t let such a thing happen, poor girl, she should have been mine, Laura’s his, you can see that: just look at her, it’s clear enough; the bastard, beating our child for his own wounded pride, just because it was the boss’s son, and then crying himself to sleep every night, he’s had two years to say he’s sorry and he still can’t do it, how did I ever love him?
Bloody hell, she thought, I’ve just about had it with these ridiculous palpitations. Calm down, woman, you’re not a calf, breathe easy, that’s it, sit down, push the suitcase on the floor. I’ve had it up to here with this hammering inside, like a muffled gong, boom-boom, at least no one else can hear it, but perhaps they can, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom.
Back in the kitchen Laura was clearing the table while Simon did the washing-up for the first time in his life. Zoe and Simon’s friend dried up in silence. Stanley was reversing the pick-up out of the garage. Charles and Robert remained seated at the table. No one said a word.
It was Robert who suddenly pushed his chair back and made his way with unfaltering stride to Stanley’s and Edna’s bedroom. He poked his head around the door and felt a great sense of relief: Edna was simply taking a nap. She lay peacefully on the bed, her hands crossed on her stomach. Robert began quietly to withdraw, but then he realized that he couldn’t, that the evidence in front of his eyes was less reliable than his own grim premonition, for he’d just – while seated at the kitchen table – felt the same burning sensation in his forehead and seen the same momentary and indescribable change in the light that he had walking home from school years earlier, on the afternoon he found Alfred’s body in among the moulting rose bushes.
‘Shit,’ Robert said to himself. I don’t want this, he thought.
Robert dragged himself reluctantly back into the room, and walked over to the head of Edna’s bed. Her bruised eyes and her twisted mouth were both slightly open, and on her pale face was an expression of surprise.
Robert didn’t grin this time; but neither was he intimidated by death. He closed her eyes, moulded her mouth into a more contented shape, and hoped that it wouldn’t fall open again, before stepping outside to break the news, first, to Stanley.
The first James knew of Edna’s death was at work the next day, because none of the messages Simon and Zoe left at his bedsit to call home reached him. It wasn’t until the next morning that he found out, when one of the typists downstairs rang through to the photography department and related the death notice delivered from the house on the hill. James sent a note of condolence to Laura, and went to the funeral with a wreath, but stood at the back and slipped away before having to commiserate with Stanley or anyone else.
Nineteen seventy-seven was the summer of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. By day James took photographs for the newspaper of street parties in her honour as the town, along with the rest of the nation, celebrated their monarch’s reign. Men climbed ladders and criss-crossed their streets with bunting hung from the gutters, and Union Jacks fluttering in the breeze. They blocked off cars and set up trestle tables, while the women prepared picnics of sausage rolls, potato salads, coronation chicken, paste sandwiches, vol-au-vents and trifles, jellies and fizzy drinks. Children stuffed themselves and became manic with sugar, fidgeting through pompous speeches and running in the streets as their grandparents had once done. Neighbourly feuds were forgotten, elderly people who’d been cast adrift by bereavement found themselves insisted back into the swing of things, and families that had disappeared behind DIY walls and garden hedges came out and conversed with each other, saying: ‘It’s for the kids, really, isn’t it?’ before standing unsteadily for the National Anthem.
Her Majesty’s image was everywhere: on posters, plates, coffee mugs and coins.
> Pat, the tenant on the ground floor below James, was in the hallway when he got home. ‘It’s bloody depressing, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea? Come on into the Republic of Gath.’
She was the only one at home: there was a party in their street, and weaving rapidly through it James was surprised – and disappointed – to discover that his eccentric fellow residents had joined in, and looked as normal as everyone else.
* * *
Nineteen seventy-seven: it was the summer of the Sex Pistols. By night James went into one or both of the two dingy pubs in the town where local garage bands and very occasional touring punk groups played. Youths with startling hair and safety pins through ears and noses, wearing mohair sweaters, torn army fatigues, ripped T-shirts and laddered tights, with expressions of sullen condescension, stalked in from hidden corners of the town to those two pubs, the Oranges and Lemons by South Bridge or the Queen’s Head near the railway station.
The bands all thrashed their instruments, torturing them into divulging noise in tuneless bursts, brief songs of angry, compressed energy. The audiences greeted them not with applause but spittle, a shower of gob that splattered the guitarists and increased their anger. Gradually, though, if they stood their ground, the bands won over their listeners, who squashed together and leapt into the air like demented salmon, pogo-ing, a dance of frantic liberation.
All through that year James took along an old camera and a battered lens. He snapped both the bands and the fans – for photos some of which he sold to the music press but mostly gave away, either to the proliferating fanzines of that era or to the bands themselves – and then he deposited his camera behind the bar for safekeeping and threw himself into the heaving mass of bodies. He couldn’t dance, had hated the various discos to which he’d been occasionally coerced, owing to his dodgy hips and a clumsy sense of rhythm. The pogo, however, was different. Anyone could do it. It looked ridiculous and felt wonderful. James pushed through as if into a crowded goalmouth and jumped on other people’s shoulders to gain height, bumped against their hips and shoulders, sweat spraying through the dark air from shocked hair in that asexual dance of sexual energy, in a din of music and feedback shrieking from the speakers, leaping into oblivion.
* * *
One evening early in the autumn of 1978 the council allowed the town hall to be used for the first and last time for a punk rock concert: a triple bill of Suicide – two lugubrious Americans in suits, sunglasses and synthesizers – a raucous female band, the Slits, and, headlining, the Clash.
The hard-core punks of the town were hugely outnumbered by a mish-mash of students, rastafarians, unrepentant hippies, greasers and, in the main, townies of no tribal affiliation, who included Laura and Alice – in that last summer between school and college – and Lewis, who was providing music in between the acts with his own mobile disco. The concert was a pre-sold sellout. The only youthful clan who didn’t seem to want to attend were skinheads from the southern estate, but they came into town anyway in order to attack the more flamboyant punks, buzzing them like irate wasps from out of the alleys around the town centre, until police vans arrived. And then a few of the skinheads, though without tickets, managed to shove their belligerent way through the front doors, up the wide municipal stairs and into the hall, where they scowled around and provoked the odd scuffle here and there, until they too were sucked into the fraught, anticipatory atmosphere.
The wide staircase led straight up to a landing and across it, through double doors, was the main hall. On either side were other doors which gave onto stairs leading up to a balcony that ran around the back and sides of the hall. These stairs had been roped off: the doors couldn’t be locked because there were also stairs leading down, for emergency fire exits.
When the first band played a lot of people remained in the bar back across the landing, or else were still arriving, and there was plenty of space in the hall. The audience was enthusiastic only in their spitting. A shower of gob increased in quantity until the unfortunate American musicians wilted behind their synthesizers – they looked as if they might be crying behind their dark glasses and left the stage in mid-song, looking fit to fulfil the promise implicit in their name (James took a photograph of their phlegmatic siege that was published in the following week’s New Musical Express alongside an editorial condemning a practice it had once championed, under the clumsy headline HAWKING FORBIDDEN).
By the time the Slits came on, after a long, unexplained interim, the hall was heaving. The hall wasn’t used to such numbers as were there, or at least to them displaying the exuberance that would soon manifest itself. Concerts were often held there, but they were of classical music, brass bands, and the town choir singing carols at Christmas. The floorboards were gently tested at Wednesday afternoon tea dances, and a little more vigorously at professional wrestling bouts, less by the wrestlers (their canvas ring was raised above the ground) than by handbag-wielding spectators enraged by villains fighting dirty.
It transpired later, however, that although the balcony was closed off for the evening, as many tickets had been sold as if it were being left open as usual. So that latecomers and boozers from the bar, barely able to squeeze into the back of the hall, let alone get a decent view of the banshees shrieking on the distant stage, began to step over the ropes and climb the side stairs to the balcony. There were too few stewards in that area to stop them and they soon gave up trying, using their initiative instead and unhitching the rope entirely so that at least no one would trip up.
The dancing started at the front, towards the end of the Slits’ set, which had proceeded in tuneless disarray but none the less sustained the knife-edge atmosphere through the incessant hammering of the male drummer, the cool detachment of the guitarist, and the unpredictable yells of the singer, a striking schoolgirl with the hair of a Medusa.
When the group left the stage Lewis’s sound system pumped out reggae at a deafening level, the bass turned right up so that it prowled around the hall and thumped against the walls. The sweet smell of cannabis mingled with sweat and spilt beer, and from the balcony James – who’d gone up to get a new angle – saw the music insinuate itself into people’s defenceless bodies and a slow, sinuous movement ripple through the audience: the crowd was loosening itself.
The chief steward at the town hall that evening peered over the tops of heads, through the smoky haze, from the hall doorway up at inebriated youths and raucous girls leaning over the balcony. If he’d done anything, it should have been then.
James had come back down into the hall and wormed his way to the side of the stage by the time the Clash appeared. They burst from the shadows with guitars strapped to their shoulders and plugged them in without a word or a look or any kind of gesture that indicated their awareness of the expectant audience. One of them spat into the microphone: ‘One-two-three-four,’ and furious music leapt from the speakers and ignited the audience: instantly the hall became a cauldron, bubbling and seething.
By the third or fourth song the mayhem had spread to the balcony: there too people leapt and bounced and ricocheted against each other, shedding their sense of mortality in the liberating noise.
The chief steward stared up at the balcony in terror: it was vibrating insanely, and he realized that a catastrophe of hideous proportions was looming. He turned from the hallway. He felt for a moment the urge to run down the side, emergency, stairs and hide somewhere deep down in the basement, but he resisted the temptation and instead rushed down the main staircase and into the street, where he found the most senior police officer on duty and dragged him back up to the hall.
‘We’ll have to clear the building!’ he blurted out as they climbed the stairs.
In the doorway of the hall the chief steward stared again at the quaking balcony; the police officer, however, was studying the pulsating, surging audience. His main experience of crowds of hyped-up youths was at football matches, in those days of barbaric hooligans; and they never looked as fre
nzied as these.
‘If you think I’m telling this lot their party’s over,’ he yelled in the steward’s ear, ‘you don’t know a thing about crowd control. They’ll rip the place apart.’
They both studied the balcony. It sat on beams projecting out from inside the wall, and was supported by massive brackets, which were now vibrating; plaster dust and loose flakes floated from the wall.
‘Well,’ the steward hesitated – although he had to shout at the officer – ‘it might hold.’
‘Will it or won’t it?’ the officer yelled back.
The chief steward felt extremely lonely. ‘I don’t bloody know!’ he cried.
They split off, each to inspect opposite sides of the hall, and reconvened on the landing at the top of the stairs. ‘Well?’ the officer yelled, because even out there the noise ground the air at a deafening volume.
‘My side seems secure,’ the steward ventured.
‘Mine too,’ the officer declared. ‘I think it’s going to hold.’
And so they let the concert carry on. The steward was quaking almost as much as the balcony. The officer felt the strange elation of power withheld, of letting chaos free. He was more attracted by disaster than the thought of preventing it and then some engineer coming in the next day and saying: ‘This balcony was built to take such pressure, of course it was. Who the hell cancelled the thing? What moron was responsible for the riot?’
The crowd was oblivious to the danger. The crowd included James, who, once he was satisfied he’d got enough photos, had hidden his camera behind a speaker and pushed his way into the mass of bodies, where there were no longer any individuals but a writhing organism of ecstatic devotees of oblivion, provincial dervishes in Little England. When he found himself at one point leaping beside – and into – Laura, he didn’t quite register that she was real; and then they were swallowed up in different directions.
