Manners

by Robert Newman

  'Surely, it's people's choice — alcohol's much more dangerous. Surely, it's personal freedom,' repeated Glangela looking at me in the eyes beseechingly like she was my friendly defence attorney hoping to lead me into saying the right thing, wanting me to agree. Throughout all this Graham didn't say anything but was watching me with a scientist's curiosity. I kept checking him out but he was just turning his cigarette packet over and over. Waiting?

  'With drugs, though,' I said, 'you've got to ask "whose freedom?" I mean, not the people who live on the estates.' Graham was still staring at me like a scientist watching an experiment: drunk cop flailing around in the ideological bins. When was he going to talk? What did he have? A pair of kings? Two aces?

  'It must be difficult,' said Tom slyly, 'not to be racist if you only ever come into contact with black people through crime.' Ooh you subtle, tricksy New Ager, but I seen you clip-clopping round the hill a mile off!

  I wasn't about to say what I really thought any more than the accused woman in medieval times would turn to the Witchfinder-General and say, "I'd like to take this opportunity to read some lesbian love poetry I recently wrote." There's no Yes/No about it. Are you a racist? No is no answer. We live in a racist society and so, whether we like it or not, all kinds of racist stuff is going to get in there, going to pop up in your mind. Now, I believe that if you say it isn't there it gets stronger, it festers in the dark. But if white people were to talk about all the shit in our heads then we might get somewhere. What I really thought was, yes, it is hard to keep alive the sense of why they're doing what they're doing. Impossible, I've found. All the accurate reasons for why black crime is high give way and one day you find a terrible word on your lips, in your heart. But instead, all I said was, 'Well, I think the British situation is different from the American situation in that most of the time when people in this country talk about race they're really talking about class.'

  'You're obviously a sensitive policeman yourself,' said Harriet, 'but it's just that we've all met, at one time or another, a few really obnoxious policemen and they're the ones you remember, I suppose.'

  'Yeah, but imagine the sentence you've just said only with the word black instead of police … ' A couple of other people came in with different points, and I felt my coup de grace was in peril of not being seen for the matchwinner it was, and so I intoned, "Its just, you know, we've all met a few really obnoxious blacks and they're the ones that stick in your mind."'

  That got their attention because, but for the spin, it was what they'd always wanted to hear a policeman say. Nervously, I was drinking two shots of whisky to one of everybody else's.

  'I'm glad you mentioned class,' said Graham at last, emphasizing 'class' to rhyme with 'flat' and 'cap', ''cos it's still different rules for different classes … The financial markets are above the laws of property. If ah smashed up a factory ah'd go to jail … '

  'Yes, we're being reduced to piggy in the middle more and more, but what you've just said — that's just what villains say — "It's all right if we do it, 'cos they're doing it too," like it's some kind of justification. But what I'm saying is you shouldn't be allowed to do either and that both are immoral and both should be illegal.'

  'But they're not both illegal,' laughed Graham. 'It's a casino economy, the money market's destructive speculation — that's like anarchy, legitimized anarchy. How do you justify being a policeman in defence of that? The City's out of control, smashers and wreckers, trashing lives — out of control.' Holding lighter and fag-packet in one hand he made like a window-wipe gesture with them as if to say, 'It's so simple, why can't you see it?'

  I took a swig with the others all looking at me.

  'You all want me to say something eccentric,' I said, 'and so here it is … Policemen are seen in polite society as sort of throwbacks and yet I feel that in one way the police are perhaps the more truly modern people. People no longer feel that any feelings are "beneath us" because all that American psychotherapy culture locates all feelings as being beneath us, you know, subconscious. In the sixties repression became a dirty word and it was all about going with your feelings … We've forgotten how to be the master or, uh, mistress of ourselves, we blame everyone else … And I think a police officer — not by any higher virtue but perhaps just through a professional manner and seeing the consequences — has relearnt the forgotten art of mind over matter, how to master emotions, to draw arbitrary lines and say, "Over this I do not go."'

  'Tell that to a black man arrested in Stoke Newington!'

  (Or to Lee Andrew I think now from here in the darkened vigil suite.) 'Other people have their belief systems, too,' said Harriet.

  'Yeah, except no, actually they don't because they're always moving the goalposts. They're stuck in the hippy idea that we can't deny instincts, and so are morally easier on themselves than a police officer is.'

  'No,' said Graham, 'you're moving the goalposts. You can't be moral working for an immoral system unless you wanna end up a schizophrenic!'

  The greasy smell of the roast chicken started to make me feel ill in my forehead. I'd lost the thread of the argument so I just picked up wherever. 'People who slag off the police have got no street-suss. They go: "How do you know he's a dealer?" But everyone on the estate knows he's a dealer, just like you know the man standing outside the grocer's shop is a grocer. These liberals are the same people who think boxers are forced into it, because they never grew up with people who loved to fight and whose Friday night was a failure if they didn't.'

  And now you're moving the goalposts of this discussion,' said the smug little four-eyed, brain-box lefty. 'You seem to think you're the last moral man in the land, that you're the only one who's not got a shortfall between beliefs and action — that's hysterical. In a utopia maybe law and morality would be the same thing, but you are, let me point out to you by the way, on the side of injustice because the law is opposed to social justice.'

  'Well, not all the law.'

  'Well, which laws are you gonna defend?'

  'I can't just pick and choose.'

  'Right! So don't come the Mr Morality then!'

  'You're just like the Nazis saying, "We were only obeying orders,"' said roly-Polly.

  Jesus, why not just up the ante, I thought. 'Well, I think you get into dangerous ground,' I said, 'when you say I'm gonna arrest for this and not for that. I mean then you are a fascist because you're sneering at democracy.'

  'No you're not, you're the opposite: you're listening to your conscience.'

  'No, there's too much right-of-the-individual shit,' I said. 'There's no collective responsibility. I'll leave the kids so l can be happy. For example, I feel very strongly about sexual assaults. Now suppose there's another officer who thinks these are just tiffs or human nature or … or there's no such thing as date-rape. Then what? You have to subdue, no, not subdue, subordinate your individual impulse to the collective idea, I mean that's what it's all about, that's what crime is … I mean, not listening to the civic, shared law.'

  'Whatever that law is?'

  'No … well … I … er.'

  'The law isn't social justice,' said Graham.

  Before I came here I thought I'd impress them by having political views they might find surprisingly leftish. I thought I'd get to say that we are the feminist's army, we are the footsoldiers of the women's Reclaim the Night march. They turn up once a year and we safeguard them all year, but that was all gone and torn up now as well.

  What I really wanted to say to them earlier on was that the reason Guardian-reading, middle-class liberals like you are anti-police is because you know we're really there to protect you, and to admit that would wreck your radical self-image — you seeing yourselves as somehow the counter-culture. But now things had changed and those words weren't available any more, somehow didn't apply, and the more it went on the more old certainties didn't apply and the more confused I got. Besides they'd all shuffled out to the front-room now. I felt that Graham had shown up that my se
lf-image was frozen years ago when I was a better man. There was me thinking that because I knew the words of 'Red Fly the Banners' that somehow made me the people's cop — so much so that I didn't need to go out and actually be the people's cop.

  Alone, I sat in silence and finished off my drink. I felt that everything was torn to bits. In shreds. I lined nine or ten bottles of leftover red in a row among the dinner wreckage. Each sounded a different note when I dinged them with my fork. Next I arranged them in ascending pitch like a xylophone. I sat there alone, drinking red wine and ding-ding-dinging with my tuning fork until they all chimed the same.

  Yes, there's a stillness, a containment about many policemen — but not this one.

  Ten green bottles, all of them empty.

  I thought of going to rejoin the others but suspected they'd all be having a smoke and so I decided as it was still around ten to find a nearby pub. I borrowed someone's coat off the back of a chair and left alone like a lecturer.

  *

  Usually I get terrible 'drinker's remorse', wincing and jolting as ECT memories of the night before lash through me. The furious police-state clampdown after a night of harmless revels, fearing what the vacuum of its flouted authority invites. Usually I get terrible drinker's remorse, but not that morning. Something about this magic place had given me a pardon. I came down for breakfast next day around eleven feeling well-rested and good. All the others were standing in the big kitchen where we always ate.

  'I was listening to the World Service last night,' I said, speaking slightly posh. 'I kept the volume down very low but I do hope I didn't disturb anyone … ?'

  They were all standing and looking at me with frosty expressions. They all had their coats on, too. It seemed, at first, like some kind of visual pun.

  A dog barked far away. There was something wrong with the sound. Too clear, too loud. I looked at the window. Smashed. All the windows smashed. Shattered tusks of glass sticking in the razor frame. I looked at the wonky, splintered back door. It was hanging on only by the top hinge, like Exhibit A held between thumb and forefinger of Counsel for the Prosecution.

  I looked at the accusers. I looked at Amy but her face was just like the others. Then I followed her gaze down to the well-swept black grate of the dormant fireplace in which lay a healthy pile of moist and glistening human shite.

  I ran out the door, which was surprisingly difficult to get past.

  Out in the woods I pondered my next move. What I wanted to do was just leave, but there was no way to.

  I tried to remember the night before. I couldn't. I walked along the lane.

  Car coming. I ran, found a gap in a hedge, escaped into a field until it went by. Not them anyhow. On the road again, walking, walking.

  Two cyclists went by, a man and a woman. I smiled and said 'hello'. They smiled and said 'hello' back. I enjoyed the illicit feeling of innocence: for all they knew I was just a saintly rambler. Not evil. Listening to the retreating sound of their wheels as the woman behind the man free-wheeled buzzily, I remembered spokes. Spokes. And then I remembered I'd been drinking at a lock-in in an isolated pub and that one of our number was in a wheelchair. Silvery wheelchair spokes. Remembered other faces. A man with a beard, a woman with a shiny Japanese Kimono top over black leggings. Yes, I definitely remembered fancying her. Then I remembered that I'd driven home drunk in charge along rural lanes, just like my father on his last journey, except in an internal blizzard.

  My groan echoed off frozen trees and iced puddles. Oh no — I'd walked to the pub. Hot prickly sweat on a cold day. What car? I felt the keys in my pocket. Gaps in the memory. Maybe … maybe one of those decent sorts at the pub must have, er, maybe, er, lent me their car. Yes, that must be … Now there was a way out of this: I could just get in the car and drive off.

  I warily approached the front of the house and there was my escape vehicle blocking the drive. The steam coming out of his mouth meant Rees was saying stuff. I nonchalantly entered the sky-blue three-wheeler. I turned the ignition. The engine made a funny noise. Oh no, don't say it won't start. I don't want to have to face them all. But then I cottoned on that this was a battery-powered car. It had started. Holding the hand throttle like an indoor motorbike, I accelerated mildly up the road.

  Outside I hear the ferrety dustman who goes ahead of the truck, taking all the black plastic bags out of their cubbyholes, dustbins and wheely-bins, and stacks them on the kerb ready for the lorry.

  I get up and go into the bedroom.

  The mattress is bare. The orange sheets I stripped this morning or rather yesterday morning lie balled on the floor. I remember now. I was going to put the sheets in the machine when I got home from work. Nearly made it.

  When you strip the sheets in a rented flat the mattress is a forensic scientist's lab top: blood, fluff and semen of the long-gone stranger. You see that it's not your mattress, but the mattress of the last few tenants and the next. Stripping the sheets is the nearest you come to moving out without moving out. Apart from laundry day, you only ever see a bare mattress in the street: after eviction, repossession, a fire, or final and total disgust at the seedy slab.

  Beverley haunts me in these sheets. She helped me choose them. The orange sheets make me think of the life I might have led with her, a crusty Turin shroud of better things. Changing these sheets always brings regret, but as they say you makes your bed …

  *

  She'd left a message with her new Birmingham number just before I'd gone to the county house and said to call if I wanted a chat when I got back. And, what with one thing and another, I did, as it went.

  Saint Beverley's Day

  The following Sunday she arrived on my doorstep. Hips, tits, lips, power. Six feet tall and carrying a mini Gladstone bag like some funky niece of Miss Marple's here to make it all OK again. Her eyes flashed like she'd just emerged from a dip in the winter Thames. She'd dyed her outgrown bob a deep, warm purple with streaks of blonde at the front.

  My hands on her high-rise, power-cambered hips at the front door, I wondered what sort of a kiss she'd give me, what our status was. She kissed me on the mouth with her lips slightly parted.

  On Saint Beverley's Day sins were washed clean. On Saint Beverley's Day, in the general amnesty of her presence, I always felt mad as in exciting rather than mad as in a sick menace to society. So I didn't have to think about how the country house had gone off, didn't have to give it another thought. Although I should have done.

  That afternoon in a junk-shop, she told me, she'd found a 1950s book: Cooking with the Stars — Hollywood's Favourite Recipes. She was cooking us Ava Gardner Tuna Marinade.

  In first dusk I lit a church candle; she stabbed the cork into the wine with a knife. The back door was open on to the yard. Peace settled like evening cinders of the sweet-smelling garden bonfires two blocks away. Above the mouldy garden wall appeared, for one night only, pink clouds on a grainy blue sky.

  We ate opposite each other. I sometimes get tense if people sit opposite me, directly opposite me, but that evening was in many ways … my night off.

  I was proud that I didn't need to ask how she had her tea because I knew: 'Lots of milk, lots of sugar, lots of tea,' of course. I went through the Gateway bags.

  'Oh you stupid fucking cunt!' I cursed myself.

  'What have you done!' she asked.

  'I've forgotten the fucking milk. I'm such a fucking stupid fucking cunt.'

  'You stupid fucking cunt,' she mimicked like a gleeful four-year-old who doesn't know what the words mean.

  'No,' I continued, refusing to lighten up. 'I'm so fucking stupid.'

  'People are,' she went on. She had lighter and bifta poised in each hand. From the delay before sparking up, I knew I was going to get one of her weird and wonderful little philosophies. 'It's just I been thinking,' she began in the sing-song voice that always went with them, 'humans, we're much more crap than we admit, and if we admitted it — it's like, look at that salt pot. They have to make it with a ti
ny hole in the top because we're clumsy and knock them over; same with sugar in caffs. And we have to have a big napkin over us because after years of food-fork practice we still can't always get our mouths in one.'

  'It's a tricky bastard.'

  'Innit! We expect to do things that we've never been able to.'

  'Go on, what else?'

  She thought for a bit then said, 'Well, carpenters are the best we've got at handling tools. Their hands are covered in black fingernails, stab-marks, missing fingers. There's usually a cut on their forehead. No one knows how to run the government, that's way over our heads, but if they just came out and said, "We've come up with this plan, probably be a disaster but, you know … " then that'd be no pressure.'

  'Yeah, that'd get voted for,' I said.

  I looked at the steamed kitchen windows, and felt a peace which, like condensation, was always waiting in the air to appear. There was a well-sprung feeling in my hand slowly gripping the bottle, lifting it, pouring it, hearing the wine make its noise like a top-dollar rockery.

  Talking to Beverley I invented a communication device and called it language. There wasn't much to it really, I just suddenly hit on the idea of using ordinary household words to express thought and feeling. (Maybe I'd have a crack at ice-cube trays or glue next.) With others I always heard myself reciting, speechifying and getting more and more lonely as my stock fillers drove out meaningful contact. This feeling reminded me of something I once saw on the job. I was called to a house after a neighbour reported noises. I rang the bell. A pensioner in his NHS glasses with milk-bottle lenses and a sad, tired face came to the door. No, there was only him at home, it must have been the people upstairs, he said, and closed the door. Miserable bastard, I thought, and rang the top bell. No answer, walked away. Next day I discover there'd been two youths in the kitchen holding his health visitor hostage, while a third was out caning her Mastercard.

  But with Beverley it always felt like my first-ever conversation.