How I Left the National Grid

by Guy Mankowski

  I need something to eat. I need to find a decent changing room to wash in. Remember how important your appearance used to be? Back then you’d have never shaved your head if your hair was getting at you. You’d only cut yourself in places that the camera wouldn’t find. You’d have never got up, pulled on a parka, prised yourself out into the world. If you’d had a night with the gargoyles you’d have slept it off. In the morning made a list of what to do, to fix yourself.

  You know what happens when you just keep going, Robert. You run yourself into the ground. Your body breaks when it hits concrete. Flesh is not as hard as metal and stone.

  I push through the gate of the tube station, for the street. What exit do I want?

  A guard is tapping his fat fingers on the turnstile. He knows I’ve got no ticket. He’s going to throw me in prison. I’ll have to fight him.

  Move over to the newsagent. If I buy something, maybe he’ll let me go. It’ll show I can contribute to society. I fish for dirty silver. When I turn around he’s gone. Gone to get another security guard. I run. Run run running.

  On the street outside all hands are outstretched. Trying to take my money or give me papers. It’s like being shoved into a dirty, hissing wind tunnel. I want to know what his agenda is, and his and his and his and his. Everyone’s hurrying, it must be for somewhere. They’ve all been set an assignment I’m kept out of. Why else would they be this focused?

  Capitalism throbs like a vein. About to burst. It nags everyone to move, over each other, trample each other down. I don’t dare turn. The man in the grey coat is always at the bottom of every set of stairs. Run raw.

  Where can I find out the plan? Can he tell me?

  I remember. I did have a plan.

  I push past the elbows and handbags. Towards Soho. There are stalls and strips all around, but they will soon fade back into the ether. Right now they’re stuck onto the shiny surfaces, but soon they’ll be prised off. In the cleansing flood.

  Everything here is temporary, everything is dirty. Everywhere has been used, violated, covered in fluid.

  I am. Missing. The. Part. Of. Me. That. Pretends. There. Is. Not. Too. Much. Dirt.

  Before, I was like everyone else. I pushed through the filth. Now I can see it all around, making fingertips stick to every surface. People walk, with other people’s fluid in their mouths and stomachs and wombs, other people’s dirt on their fingers and lips. Playing round the corner of their mouth. The dank sweat of their hair and the dried, rank sweat of the past.

  I’ve lost the ability to pretend it’s not there, and now the dirty tide spins into my ears. It’s drowning me.

  I push down the street.

  It’s not just the physical world that’s filthy. Language corrupts, coerces. The thoughts of a ruling class filter onto subservient creatures, coaxing them into apathy. Adverts sedate, seduce, arouse, pacify.

  There is no agenda, I tell myself. It’s the motion you want to look at. It’s this forward, impatient moment that is life. All the elbows and fabrics and answers swimming past you. You’ll only find the answer by joining the shoal.

  Like everything else, food here is hot and immediate. You can eat pieces of meat, different shades of brown, that fall off a silver stick. A stick that spins like a model on a catwalk.

  Who told you to put this in your body? Who decided that this is alright? When you look at it sat in that plastic it’s like the twenty-first century’s final, grotesque insult.

  I twist downstream, down the dirty canal. A carrier bag on the filthy surface. Flowing towards an unknown destination. I could get caught on a rock and flap there for years. Who is watching out for me, to prise me off?

  No one is.

  Look for a pub, a place that I can stop and make myself clean. A place I can drink myself right.

  I pass a Chinese restaurant, in the window a rack of ducks’ tongues.

  The display crammed with brown shining carcasses, rotating slowly. Like Victorian corpses, hung by the bridge.

  Knife left. Take a short cut down a small alleyway. Something compels me down it. I don’t know what it is. There’s an art gallery. One of the centre-pieces is a painted version of our album cover.

  I must have lost it, if I think I can see that.

  The paint inside each of the six grids speaks to me. Babbles with incoherent tongues. They have been injected with the artist’s pain.

  They set it up in the window so I would pass by and see my reflection in it. So I would stop trying to work them out.

  Must get out of the city.

  Reel back onto the street. Find my way back to the road with the ducks’ tongues.

  If only they knew how sorry I was. But repentance is just more pain.

  I remember my motto when I first came here, when I was on the twenties tightrope. An internal motto I used to say to myself. To make myself focus.

  ‘I am so fucked’.

  In toilets, looking down at the limp jet of urine, wallowing in the loyal smell of my own shit. Pale-faced in the mirror, looking like wreckage. Preparing for some absurd meeting I didn’t believe in. A photo shoot, an interview with a dead soul, a bright-eyed fanzine girl. Wanting to use my debris to build her own raft.

  I knew then that I didn’t fit. I knew even then that I was only a blip on the landscape, that the weather would change. The attempts to make me marketable would end. Attempts to hide my spots, shrink my belly, shield my past. There were only a few pieces of something unique inside me and the publicity machines didn’t know what it was or how to use it.

  There were moments of cleanliness, when I was young,

  Perfume on Frankie’s arms as she lay on the grass in Durham. Yes, it made sense there. In that city.

  Frankie would have gripped my hand, and calmed my nerves on the tube. Frankie would have assured me no one was looking. Frankie would have taken me to her favourite Chinese restaurant off Tottenham Court Road. The one with the ducks tongues in the window.

  We’d have had Peking duck. I’d have felt her strength. It would make me want to fight on.

  To our last recording session.

  To where we left off.

  I’d reclaim the moment. Meet Simon, for a pint, somewhere in the city. Become focused enough to go back into the studio.

  Get those songs back.

  But I can’t, not now. I’ve torn it. I took it too far.

  I need her. I need to feel clean again. I need to feel purified.

  That’s where I’ve got to go.

  15

  As he approached the front door, Sam felt his muscles harden. Did he need to grab a weapon?

  Elsa had left just one message to say she was going home but since then, nothing. What if the intruder had tied her up and killed her? He realised he was running on empty. A car freewheeling down the hill, with the brake-lines cut.

  The house seemed dead, like a show-home after hours. Edging down the hallway Sam could see a light in the kitchen.

  ‘Elsa?’ he called.

  ‘I’m in here.’

  In the muted light Elsa was ladling soup into containers, dripping it over the counter. Behind her the windows were covered in cardboard. As she turned to greet Sam, Elsa was ashen-faced.

  ‘Look at our house,’ she said. For a moment she broke down. ‘This is our home.’

  Sam put his knapsack on the counter top, unnerved by the bloodless feel of her body.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘What did they want? I’ve looked around, nothing’s been taken, Sam.’

  ‘They wanted to scare me off the book.’

  ‘Please, please tell me they have?’

  Sam looked at the shattered panes of glass. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Elsa couldn’t bring herself to nod. As she looked up at Sam she had an expression he hadn’t seen before. It was more than resignation, but he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I was hoping you would be home, Elsa. It feels like we haven’t seen each other in ages.’

  ‘I know
.’

  Elsa moved between the work surface and the fridge, moving the boxes around with tired precision. Sam wondered if he noticed a slight tremor in her hand.

  ‘I feel terrible for leaving the gallery opening the way I did. It looked as if it was going so well.’ He moved clumsily onto a kitchen stool, tried to read her muffled body language.

  He waited for her to turn, to respond. She didn’t. ‘But it wasn’t a waste of time. I’ve been told where Wardner is.’

  She smiled, weakly. ‘At least all this led to something, then.’

  ‘It’s not enough to get the money. On my way back I had a call from the publisher. He said that the public opinion is turning against Mason House. My book is being given as the reason why the band’s tour dates have been postponed. Martin told me that unless I speak to Wardner in the next day or so, he’s pulling the plug.’

  ‘You must be joking. We have to try and fix our home, Sam. Before one of us gets killed.’

  ‘I know. I am so close to finding him, though.’

  He wanted to take her shoulders, but sensed somehow she would shrug him off.

  ‘There’s a message for you on the answer phone, Sam.’

  His papers were still spread on the floor. He thought of alien hands rifling through them and shuddered.

  He clicked the answerphone on. There was a long pause and then a voice growled. Low and steady.

  ‘This is Patrick Wardner. I am Robert Wardner’s cousin and I…we.’ He seemed to be addressing someone else in the room with him. ‘We want to talk to you.’

  There was something about the voice. He could imagine the owner of it smashing windows. Had he heard it before?

  Patrick’s brusque message ended with his number. Sam scrawled it onto on a scrap of paper.

  Elsa lingered in the doorway. As Sam turned she handed him a mug of coffee.

  ‘Sound promising?’

  ‘I will call him back later. I know we have more pressing concerns.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she replied. ‘You can call him now if you think he can help you.’

  ‘No. I don’t think he can, somehow.’

  The man at the other end picked up on the first ring, and grunted his name.

  ‘Mr Wardner, it’s Samuel Forbes.’

  ‘And you’re the hack writing about my cousin?’ He had the same, thick Mancunian accent as Robert. For a second Sam wondered if in fact it was him.

  He moved over to the living room window. Outside two young children stood over a bike, deciding who should mount it first.

  ‘Ex-hack. Now author.’

  ‘So are you the man hunting Robert or are you telling me I’ve made a mistake?’

  Sam could feel blood swell in his temple.

  ‘I am a huge admirer of your cousin’s work. I was the journalist who wrote about their first gigs, who brought them to a lot of people’s attention.’

  ‘You brought him attention? Well, what do we owe you?’

  ‘I am passionate about writing this book because I want more people to appreciate Robert’s work. I know this book is contro-versial,’ he continued. ‘But I really didn’t want to upset anyone.’

  ‘So it’s a labour of love, is it?’

  The voice sounded as if it had toiled through years of cigarette smoke.

  Sam hunched forward. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘So you’re not getting a fee?’

  ‘Patrick…’

  ‘Mr Wardner. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

  This isn’t our first stand-off, Sam thought. We had one through the kitchen door.

  ‘I apologise. I have had hate mail, bricks thrown through my window and the other day we were broken into. I am being paid a pittance for this.’

  ‘So you need to find my cousin to get paid?’ The voice rose. ‘I think I get it.’

  Sam went to speak, but stopped himself. ‘I want to speak to your cousin, Mr Wardner, to make this book as good as it can possibly be.’

  ‘Better for him, or for you?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘But he won’t be seeing any money from it, will he? It won’t help him with his treatment and that?’

  ‘Mr Wardner, I’m not sure why you first rang me.’

  He felt his temper rising.

  The question seemed to outflank Patrick.

  ‘I’m just giving you a call to see what you’re after.’

  How did he have his number? Sam certainly hadn’t sent him an email. In his mind, family members had always been out of bounds.

  ‘Ok,’ Sam said. ‘Perhaps we need to meet face-to-face. Would you be prepared to answer a couple of questions about your cousin?’

  ‘I don’t know him that well. But I know when a family member of mine gets in the papers all right. To step in if someone wants to cause him pain, when he’s already been through enough for one lifetime.’

  ‘Does Robert feel harassed?’

  ‘Someone starts calling your exes. Sniffing around your past. Wouldn’t you feel like you was getting run into the ground?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not if the book was being approached sensitively.’

  ‘He’s trying to ease himself back into his life, his family. People putting pressure on him now could make him crack, and we’d lose him forever. You got any idea what a hole he left in our lives when he vanished?’

  ‘Of course not…’

  ‘We’re not going to let you finish him off just so you can see your name in lights. You need to try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,’ Patrick continued. ‘I doubt if you’ve ever felt hemmed in. To the point where you want to leave it all behind.’

  ‘You’re wrong. I feel that way now.’

  Patrick, surprised by the remark, seemed to sigh. ‘You do?’

  ‘I can promise you, Mr Wardner. I don’t want to do anything to hurt him. As a family member, you were there in the early days weren’t you? You saw how hard it was for him to get noticed, over all those London types? To teach himself, note by note, to write songs. After all that, doesn’t he deserve to have people finally pay attention to his work, while he’s still around?’

  ‘I don’t know you, son, and I don’t know how long you’ve been around for. But I do know when I’m being played. It might work on your college mates but it won’t wash with a man of the world.’

  ‘I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with him.’

  Silence.

  ‘I spoke to someone. Someone who thought he might be in a monastery,’ Sam said.

  Still no response.

  ‘I’d be interested to hear if you think that might be the case?’

  ‘No. Robert is not up there.’

  Up there? That seems to suggest north of here. Yet I never mentioned The Pennines, Sam thought.

  ‘Okay.’ Sam tried to sound disconsolate, but suspected he hadn’t managed it. I’m onto something here, he thought.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Patrick said. ‘But Sam?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Wardner?’

  ‘I hope your house gets sorted soon.’

  There was a few moments of silence before Sam acknowledged that he had rung off.

  ROBERT WARDNER

  There’s a cloud of smoke building over the drum risers.

  It happens, that. The music takes everything out of your body. Out of everyone’s body. It all merges into a cloud that hangs over us.

  Jack bangs out a slow, trembling beat with one hand. For a moment I don’t know if the song has started, but then I recognise it. It’s in my DNA. As I turn towards my men I see a faint map of the song already. I know its slow moments. Its tender moments. The moments I can miss and the moments I must grip. It’s a song I’ve sung when I’m half-alive and a song I’ll sing when I’m gone. I just know.

  I look up. In this golden light the members of the audience have altered. They have each shed their flesh. They’re no longer living entities now, just these distant silhouettes. They altered like a melody shifting key. We have all slipped into ano
ther realm. Rick starts this tremulous keyboard line over that aching beat. There is room enough between each note to live and die.

  Right now, gripping this dying microphone, I know it is my job to commune with these people. To guide them into another realm. I shake my head and remember to sing. Words that are now carved into my bones.

  As I open my dry mouth it’s as if I’m remembering words from a sacred scroll. We respond to the moans and urges of the mind and flesh as if they’re ours alone, but they belong to all of us.

  I recount those words for their benefit. To guide those waiting silhouettes towards their horizon.

  Every silhouette has got this aura around it now. On some people the aura is white, like spun gold, and just floats out from them. Sometimes it tries, cautiously, to merge with other auras. In one or two cases it eases out and combines with another. Forms this shared light.

  Mostly they just quiver, sadly, by themselves.

  Behind all of them is a row of darker silhouettes. As I sing, slower now, I squint to see if they are really stooping. These dark ones are waiting for me to fall, once my duty is complete. Then, I know, they will sweep my bones away. They are still. Their battles have been won and lost a long time ago.

  The silhouettes closer to me wait, as precious moments in the verse pass like wasted days. They do not yet know that I have been sent to sing them private messages of salvation. I have to convince them to hear my song, and once they have, they look up to me as if I am the light.

  But the silhouettes behind know my purpose all too well. Once it is done, they will take the light out of me, and then take my body away with them.

  16

  After letting the glazier into the house, Sam moved into the bedroom and collapsed on the sheets. He tried to piece it all together in his mind. The Marlowe quote. Manchester, The Pennines. A monastery.

  He engaged the laptop. At first the digital world, nonplussed by his sudden determination, resisted. He searched using various combinations of the key terms and, to his relief, the pieces quickly came together.

  Milfield Monastery. The only sheltered monastic community in The Pennine region. An Anglican community which, according to an article about their vineyard, offered individuals respite from the world and the chance to devote their lives to God.