‘Gareth, I worked in Birmingham, remember?’
‘Of course, of course. Well…Colmore Circus. You’ll find it. The other thing is — Rachel Murchison would like to touch base with you before the meeting. Talk to her, won’t you? The sooner the better. She’s waiting for your call, Diane.’
Fry exited the Expressway and found her way via back streets through Aston and Newtown. Aston Cross was unrecognizable without the familiar background of the HP Sauce factory. Its old site was now just an expanse of soil and rubble.
Her last posting in the West Midlands had been here, as a detective constable based at Queens Road. D1 OCU, the Operational Command Unit for Aston. The building still looked the same. Marked police vehicles stood out front. Round the back, she knew, parking places were marked in strict hierarchical order from the entrance — Chief Superintendent, Superintendent, DCI, Chief Inspector, right down to the IT department.
She wondered if every cell in the custody suite still had the Crimestoppers number printed on a wall just inside the door. Somebody must once have decided that a prisoner in the cells might use his one call to report a crime. Hope sprang eternal, even in a custody suite.
Fry frowned at the boarded-up wreck of a pub under the shadow of the Expressway. She couldn’t recall its name, or whether she’d ever drunk there when she worked at Queens Road. Maybe they’d tended to go into The Adventurers a few yards down from the nick. Some memories were just lost, she supposed.
Driving up Aston Road North reminded her of a snippet passed on by one of the lecturers over coffee during her course in Criminal Justice and Policing at UCE. Apparently, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had lived on this very road when he was a poor medical student, helping out a local doctor. That was pre Sherlock Holmes, of course. She might even remember the name of the doctor, if she tried not to think about it.
This was part of her old patch when she was in uniform, and later as a divisional DC. She ought to know this area well, but things had changed. New buildings had gone up, entire streets had disappeared.
Worse, every pub she remembered in this area seemed to have closed. The Waterloo in Wills Street, the Royal Oak on Lozells Road, even the Cross Guns in Newtown. All gone, and more besides.
But Birmingham had always been a work in progress. The city’s oldest buildings came down faster than new ones went up. The old Bull Ring shopping centre had been state of the art, not many decades ago. The early seventies, maybe? The late sixties? But the place had already been looking tired when Fry herself had hung around its walkways and escalators as a teenager. Now the city had a new Bull Ring. Borders and Starbucks, and the rippling metallic girdle of Selfridges, known to locals as the Dalek’s Ballgown. Award-winning, that Selfridges design. A sign of Brum’s arrival in the twenty-first century. But how many years would it last, before Birmingham decided to move on, ripped it down and stuck up something new?
She checked her watch. She was early yet. Not that they would mind her arriving a bit sooner than expected. They would probably be delighted. She could imagine them chuckling with excitement in the hall, fussing around her, patting her arm, ushering her into an armchair while the kettle boiled. But she wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
Beyond the underpass at Perry Barr, she turned into the One-Stop shopping centre and parked up. Inside the mall, she walked past Asda and Boots, and out into the bus station.
She had studied for her degree in Criminal Justice and Policing at UCE, the University of Central England, right here in Perry Barr. From the bus station, she had a good view of her old alma mater, though it had now been renamed Birmingham City University. She could see the Kenrick Library and the golden lion emblem high on the main building of the City North campus.
Instead of going back to her car, she crossed to the other side of the bus station and walked towards Perry Barr railway station, past a few shops that stood between here and the corner of Wellington Road — The Flavour of Love Caribbean takeaway, Nails2U, the Hand of God hair salon.
But there was no point in avoiding the call. She was caught up in the machine now, had voluntarily thrown herself into the mechanisms of the criminal justice system, and she had no escape.
‘Diane, are you well?’ said Murchison, answering her phone instantly, as if she had indeed been sitting at her desk waiting for it to ring.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘I just wanted a few words with you, before our meeting this afternoon.’
‘You just wanted to make sure I was actually on my way, perhaps?’
‘No. I think you’ve made the commitment now. I’m sure you won’t change your mind. But if you do — ’
‘I won’t,’ said Fry.
‘All right. Well, I know you might be feeling isolated and vulnerable at the moment. But don’t forget, you’re not alone in this. We’re all on your side. Any support you need is available, twenty-four hours a day. Anything you want to talk about is fine. Don’t hold it back. Call me, any time.’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’
‘Don’t worry, Diane. It’s my job.’
Fry winced, wondering if she had just received the hand-off, the subtle reminder that this wasn’t a personal relationship but a professional one. She supposed that counsellors, like psychiatrists, had to be wary of relationships with their clients, and draw firm boundaries. Some of the people Murchison dealt with must be very needy.
Below her, the yellow front end of a London Midland City train whirred into the Birmingham platform of the station.
‘There’s a lot of noise in the background,’ said Murchison. ‘Where are you?’
‘Perry Barr.’
Murchison was silent for a moment. Fry thought she had shocked her in some way. But Perry Barr wasn’t that bad, was it?
‘Diane, is there a particular reason you’re in Perry Barr?’
‘Yes, a personal one.’
She thought she could hear Murchison shuffling papers.
‘May I ask…?’
‘I’m visiting someone. Family.’
‘Oh. That would be…your foster parents?’
‘Well done.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I know it’s all right. I don’t need your permission to visit them.’
‘No, no. Of course not.’
Tm just calling in for a cup of tea. So you can tell Gareth Blake I’m behaving myself.’
Murchison laughed. Fry thought she heard relief in her voice.
‘I’ll tell him. And we’ll see you later, yes?’
‘Of course. After I’ve checked into my hotel.’
Fry watched people hurrying down the concrete steps to the platform and getting on to the train. She thought about following them, getting on the train and riding past Aston, past Duddeston and right into New Street. As if she could ride by everything, without even a glance out of the window, and start all over again.
But she stood for too long at the top of the steps, and the train pulled out, the noise of its motor dying as an echo on the brick walls.
‘Diane,’ said Murchison finally, ‘everything will be all right.’
Fry ended the call, and looked around. Opposite her stood three tower blocks surviving from an early 1960s attempt at low-cost housing. A number 11 bus emerged from Wellington Road in a burst of exhaust fumes. A strong smell of burning rubber hung on the air from the plastics factory on Aston Lane.
She walked under the flyover and emerged on the Birchfield Road side. Kashmir Supermarkets and Haroun’s mobile phones. Money-transfer services and lettings agencies for student flats. Outside Amir Baz amp; Sons boxes of vegetables were stacked on the pavement. Fry stopped to look at some of the labels. Bullet Chilli. Surti Ravaiya.
Now she felt lost. Nothing seemed to be recognizable. The street signs still pointed to UCE, but there was no point in following them. When you got there, you would find it had ceased to exist. Its name had been consigned to history.
The disappearance of so many landmarks gave
her a strange sense of dislocation. Birmingham had been changing behind her back while she’d been away. This was no longer the place that she’d known. The Brum she saw around her was a different city from the one that she’d left. It was as if someone had broken into her previous life when she wasn’t looking and tried to wipe out her memories with a wrecking ball and a bulldozer.
But then, it was probably true the other way round. She wasn’t the same person who’d left Birmingham, either.
The Bowskills were the family she’d lived with the longest. She’d spent years in the back bedroom of their red-brick detached house in Warley. She’d been there when Angie ran away and disappeared. And she’d stayed with the Bowskills after her sister had gone. She’d needed them more than ever when she no longer had Angie to cling to.
And those times in Warley had been happy, in a way. Fry clearly remembered window shopping with her friends at Merry Hill, touring the Birmingham clubs, and drinking lager while she listened to the boys talking about West Bromwich Albion. Jim and Alice Bowskill had done their best, and she would forever be grateful to them. There had always been that hole in her life, though. Always.
There had been other homes, of course. Some of them she remembered quite well. She particularly recalled a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, and another placement near the canal in Primrose Hill, where the house always seemed to be full of children. But those families were further back in her past, too far upstream to re-visit.
Jim and Alice Bowskill now lived in a semi-detached house with a vague hint of half-timbering, located on the Birchfield side of Perry Barr, the close-packed streets in a triangle bounded by Birchfield Road and Aston Lane. As she drove towards it along Normandy Road, Fry had a good view of the Trinity Road stand at Villa Park, reminding her that Aston was only a stone’s throw from this part of Perry Barr. Here, everyone was a Villa fan.
There seemed to be home improvements going on everywhere in these streets. She saw an old armchair standing by the side of the road, bags of garden rubbish lined up at the kerb.
Most of these houses had been built at a time when the people who lived in them weren’t expected to own cars. So there were very few garages and hardly any off-street parking. It took her a few minutes to find somewhere to leave her Audi.
Jim Bowskill was wearing his Harrington jacket. Well, surely not the original Harrington — the one she always remembered seeing him in. It would have been worn out by now. But he was a man who had never been without a Harrington. He once told her he’d started wearing one as a mod in the 1960s, and just found that he never grew out of them. When he reached his mid fifties, he’d thought for a while about having a change. But then he’d seen Thierry Henry wearing one in the Renault adverts, and that was it. The current Harrington was a classic tan colour, with the Fraser tartan lining and elasticated cuffs. Seeing it made Fry feel an intense burst of affection for him. It was probably just nostalgia — a vague memory of hugging a coat just like that.
He was a lot greyer than she remembered him. Slightly stooped now, too.
‘Hello, love. It’s good to see you. We haven’t seen much of you since you left to go to Derbyshire. Having a good time away from us, I suppose?’
He said it teasingly, but Fry felt sure there was more than a hint of genuine reproach. She immediately felt guilty. She thought of all the reasons she’d given herself over the past few years for not keeping in touch with her foster parents, and all of them seemed petty and contrived. Fry supposed she’d only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldn’t have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.
‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy.’
‘We understand.’
Fry knew from the tone of his voice that he saw the lie, and forgave her. And that just made her feel even more guilty.
Jim Bowskill had been sorting out his blue recycling box for the weekly refuse collection.
‘How do you like it here?’ asked Fry.
‘Oh, it suits me. The house isn’t too big, so it’s easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didn’t have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?’
‘Yes, Dad. It’s been there for fifteen years.’
He nodded. ‘And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, it’s very handy.’
The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasn’t sure why — though Alice’s family was originally from this part of North Birmingham, so maybe it was another case of nostalgia, a woman drawn back to the past by those lingering memories.
In a way, this part of Perry Barr had come full circle. When the indigenous white community had first started selling their houses, the Indians had moved in. As the Indians became more prosperous, they’d moved on to other areas, and Pakistanis had come in. When the Pakistanis sold their houses, the Bengalis had replaced them. And now here was Jim Bowskill, living in his double-fronted semi off Canterbury Road, explaining that it was easy to maintain and handy for the shops, and close to a bus route, if he needed it. And it was in the heart of Perry Barr’s Bengali area.
Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldn’t find it. Instead you’d see a whole series of Asian communities — Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsider’s term.
And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.
Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:
‘In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation don’t see it that way. A lot of people don’t consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.’
‘But sometimes the old country is home, too, isn’t it?’
He smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes when people say “home” you have to ask which home they’re talking about.’
Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasn’t that old, really. But time hadn’t been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other people’s children.
Fry hugged her.
‘Mum.’
Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.
‘Do you still support West Brom, Diane?’ he said.
‘Me?’ said Fry. ‘I never did, not really.’
‘It was just because the boys did,’ said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.
‘Not the Blues, surely?’ said Jim, missing the significance of his wife’s comment.
Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.
But she wasn’t a Birmingham City fan. She wasn’t actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘A yam-yam, ain’t you?’
There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. ‘Not from round here’ might as well
be permanently tattoo’d on her forehead.
The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too — like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.
In some ways, those small Black Country communities were far worse than the estates of inner city Birmingham. Some of them were completely cut off, isolated by the collapse of the manufacturing industries from the affluence evident in the new apartment blocks, the new Bull Ring shopping centre, stacked to the roof with consumer goods and designer labels. It was in places like West Bromwich, rather than Birmingham itself, that the BNP were getting a foothold. It was there they found the disaffected white working classes, desperate to find a voice.
Jim sighed. ‘Moved allegiance altogether, I suppose. It’s Derby County, then. Tragic’
‘Dad, I don’t even like football.’
There weren’t many people like Jim and Alice, who would be willing to take on other people’s children, especially when many of those children were deeply troubled and disruptive. It took a lot of dedication and commitment. A lot of love.
She wondered about some of the other foster children who’d passed through the Bowskills’ lives. There must have been many of them. She supposed that most of them kept in touch better than she ever had. It had been too easy for her to forget the debt she owed them. She’d been too quick to put everything behind her when she moved from the West Midlands, cast the good aside with the bad when she started a new life in Derbyshire.
Fry remembered the Bowskills reluctantly producing her birth certificate when she needed to register at college. They themselves had obtained it from her social worker, by special request. Only her mother’s name had been on the certificate, the space to record the father left blank. It seemed her parents had never married, so the surname she carried was her mother’s, not that of an adoptee.
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