'How was — where d'you go again?'
'Holland,' she said. 'Bostin'!' She'd been rigging up the scaffold, rolling out the rubbermatted floor for a big grungy festival-thing over there; and being ogled at by Vikings in the beer tent, no doubt. Vikings lacking crisscross slashings over their bloated, red faces. 'The plane, right,' she started, 'I hadn't been in a plane since I was a kid, and you know when you look down from a plane just on take-off, when it's still quite low when it's just taken off, everything down below looks so peaceful, like a model city. You know, there's all these toy trucks and cars all moving calmly and slowly, a little blue lorry waiting all patient for a little white car at the roundabout. Neat rows of, you know, the freight things they put on the back of artics. All in a neat row. Everything spaced out all orderly.'
'Yeah, it's probably 'cos from up there you can't sense eye-level vibes and force-fields. Can't see lorry drivers scowling or hear the horn.'
'No … '
'No?'
'No,' she chuckled.
'Oh OK, then.'
'I'll tell you what it is — it's because it looks like everyone's involved in the same thing, you know what I mean? It looks like people all work things out together, as if that's how we sorted things out rather than by sending letter-bombs to the council. It's like all the citizens got together and they decide, "OK, we'll put the petrol storage towers here, and, tell you what, why not bung a few dinghies on the reservoir? That might be nice for a few people." And it's like one farmer says to another, "What are you growing in that field? Green? OK, I'll grow yellow in this one."'
'A model city.'
'Yeah, but that people-together tip you get looking down at the town from Economy is not, it's not — '
'Down in the din it's all being broken apart.'
'Yeah.'
She settled on a high stool and looked at me appraisingly.
'You look exhausted,' she said.
'Lates.'
'No, no, that's not what I meant.' She took her time looking down at the floor to one side of her, and then straightening up again in a neck-rolling, aerobic way until her head was right way up and settled again. 'I mean, uh, totally mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.'
I started telling her about a recent Public Order where they were all protesting about a man who'd died in custody. (It wasn't even in our nick; the death had occurred — surprise, surprise — at Stoke Newington.) 'They're all shouting and spitting at you, at me, like I'm a bad man because I'm a policeman, and you know they're slags — half of them. It's all about how we can't control ourselves and commit these acts, like we're bad or hollow characters, and yet as they stood there so close to me' — I held my hand up with the palm six inches in front of my face — 'and yet all the time they don't know just how much character it's taking me not to … '
'You should go on a holiday.'
'Holiday?' I said, like, 'What have I got to do with holidays?' I felt like Hitler in the bunker if Eva Braun had suggested an ABTA-approved adventure package on the island of Cos to take his mind off work. But that, of course, was the point. I told her about my weekend break in the country. (Except I left out the bit about the disabled car, which I'd left outside the local train station, hoping the police would find it and return it to the housebound man.) 'But you're so deliberately awkward,' she said. 'When you're with cops you have to be all Karl Marx and when you're with the country house lot and you have to be Mr Defender of the Status Quo.'
On Saint Beverley's Day I allowed myself to think it might be that simple. 'I've got you a present,' I said.
'Oh aye.'
'It's in the freezer bit.'
She opened the fridge and then the freezer flap and took out a heart-shaped red rubber ice-cube tray. She looked at me, then went over to the sink and pushed the ice-cubes out — pop-pop-pop.
'Oh this is great,' she said. 'From now on people will be able to have ice in their drinks!'
And then she smiles, comes my way and her hot breath on my fag-ash lips blows the coals.
'What's that all abaht?' I TSG-ed.
'I always feel very safe with you.'
'That's odd, 'cos I don't.'
'What, with me?'
'No, with me.'
*
After sex I felt connected to the world, to her, to myself. (And that state of affairs couldn't be allowed.) She left her book behind that night, in that other life. I get up now and with bruised hands take it from under a sprawl of cassettes, which slide off noisily in this silent flat. Hard to turn the pages with these swollen fingers, but flicking through her cookbook now I find: Shrimp Salad a la Benny One of the meals that I enjoy most is my Sunday night supper and here is a meal I always look forward to.
Some people walk through life hearing foreboding strings accompany creeping film-noir shadows on the stairs; others hear a light-comedy film score. And here we were going out with each other again. Going back out with her, it seemed like all the stuff in my head I thought was fixed was just furniture. Bad things were no more likely to happen if I was off-guard, looking forward to shrimp-salad supper every Sunday. I could change the soundtrack to flutes, kazoos and Tubby the Tuba any time I wanted. But try telling my subconscious that.
Me and the Bevster were always splitting up and then getting back together again. All the time that Beverley was showing me one way, a part of me pulled the other.
Outside the dustcart comes along now. A dustman roars, 'Whoa!'
*
After the controlled explosion at the country house I had an extreme swing back towards her. A week. Two weeks. Until another extreme force swung me back again, and away.
*
A binman bangs the side of the dustcart, shouting, 'Go! OK! Off you go!' and the cart drives off. Six o'clock and all's shite.
Zero Tolerance In King's Cross
I get up and fix a sugary coffee. Outside I can hear the quick tut-tut-tut of early high heels on their way to work. A car starts and I hear the first front doors closing.
I lie down gingerly on the couch. My ribs ache from a kick or punch I got there. The soreness of my busted, fat lip comes in waves. It hurts now. My body feels drained. It could do with sleep to go about its repair and regeneration. But my mind is separately alive like a blue control room.
I lie for a bit with my forearms over my eyes, pushing the lid-black to orange smash. A memory flashes. I pull my arm away and shout, 'No! Wait Bev! No!'
*
I met her off the train. Watched them all coming up the platform. All the male passengers were sparking up post-coital biftas, all looking slightly shagged-out as if their journey had been one long, exhausting, racketing orgy. I stared out the other men walking up the concourse, chatting with her in extreme gratitude at the hundred-mile blow-jobs she'd given the lot of them.
Her ragga-style hot-pants were shape-shagged, frayed and run ragged by trying to hang on to her hips and arse. Gym-knicker blue good-God and held up by a thick black belt with bits of leather crumbling on to the buckle. Her black hold-ups left a freefall of exposed pale thigh flesh until my eyes crawled into the fraying hem of her shorts. That gap of upper-thigh which always gets such a hold on a man, like a bedroom door ajar. As the navy hem of her shorts rode the crests of her buttocks I felt — as always when we were in public — that there'd be a riot. But there never was, just the riot inside of me.
'I like your leather jacket,' she said. 'Is that new?'
'No.'
We went and sat in a cramped Italian cafe. I said something nasty then couldn't listen to what followed. I tuned out the better to concentrate on getting a handful of grains back into the sugar holder. It was quite difficult — you have to go really slow but if you keep your hand steady and make sure the sugar grains come down that deep palm-line about a fingertip's distance beneath the little finger it can be done. I poured another handful of sugar into my palm. While all this was going on we may have been splitting up. I may have been the one to chuck her. I can't rememb
er.
'The closer I get to you,' she was saying in a wild voice, 'the more you panic, terrified that I'm gonna find out that you're some kind of bad person, rotten to the core.'
The sugar was flowing less freely now from my palm. But by taking a bigger handful I was able to get a good steady stream into the silver hole. I spilt more this way, but I was playing the numbers game: more grains actually going in the hole, but more grains being spilt.
She hadn't said anything for a bit. Then she started again: 'You're always going on about downsizing, when you have to cover for someone else all the time or can't get a new radiopack … evil capitalist downsizing, all that … yet that's exactly what you're doing with me. In fact it's exactly like downsizing.' I heard the rattle of her metal coat buttons on the table-top as she leant across the formica. 'Because it's like the quick hit, the short-term profit the banks make when they pull out of a business or whatever and flog it.'
I couldn't see how the analogy worked. Clearly hanging out with me had had some effect: her insights were now as showy and hollow as mine. Yes, it was certainly time for her to go.
I crane-winched my head up to look at her for a split-second, then wished I hadn't bothered as there were tears in her eyes. 'How's it the same?' I managed to say, dredging words up from the silt.
'Because', she insisted, 'you'll get a quick hit off the rejection if you leave me, you'll feel impregnable and streamlined, all set free from your past, your weaknesses, all the "so terrible" things I know about you, all the non-perfect stuff, but it will only last a few weeks … '
How did she get to that? You chat about X and you chat about Y, go shopping together and go to the cinema and — WHOOMPF! — they've seen into your nuclear core! How do people break in like that? Was this a secret knowledge she had in her head all the time and never told me, or did she just hit on it in this crisis? I tried raising my hand a little higher to let the grains fall further, more noisily. This was more successful for a couple of seconds, but the next palmful of sugar missed completely, sliding off the silver nozzle-cone on to the table. I wiped the damp crumbs away to start again. Hand lower this time.
'This is what happens when I cook for you,' she said strangely, her voice breaking as she stood up. What the fuck did that dinner two weeks ago have to do with anything? I rubbed the last clump of moist sugar off my palms I sat for a bit more after she'd gone. 'But it will only last a few weeks … ' Why don't you just put a curse on my future while you're about it? A curse on my future.
An Italian shouting 'Hey!' behind me on the High Street. An Italian padrone at my side waving the bill, about to speak, changing his mind.
*
A humid night midway through my first late back I went to a disturbance in Mercer Road. A fat boy — only about eighteen — had gone back to his ex-girlfriend's. She wouldn't let him in. So he tried a Holloway serenade: crying and throwing dustbins and stones at the windows! Shouting and bawling until she came down to talk to him.
I took him for a walk round the block. Before and after the harsh stuff about what the law could and would have to do if he came round bothering her again, I let him talk and gripe and get it all off his flabby chest. On one level I knew exactly how he felt; on another level, looking at this snotty blubbering fatboy in search of a mum, I was with the girl. Surprised by fury, I wanted to smack his face off and run away.
End Of Vigil
I get up and open the curtains. Night has left new litter behind in the yard: a crinkly, thin, plastic shopping bag, some chip paper and a beer can, like driftwood stranded high and dry at low-tide.
Most of us have no-go areas. Hollow ways and gristles of hate that can escape notice for a lifetime. Life doesn't always find you out but in my case it has. Under cover of darkness, last night, I kept thinking 'Why me?' Right from when Lee Andrew decided to stop breathing my first thoughts were, 'Why me, why did this have to happen to me?' When I first got back here tonight, last night, I felt that this disaster was like a dot on the horizon that had always been coming towards me throughout my life. But now I know different. I was the dot on the horizon, hurtling towards the future. Because it wasn't something that happened to me, it was something I did. I happened to Lee Andrew.
Everything I've remembered tonight seems like another link in the chain. If I hadn't done this or that then I wouldn't have been there at the end of Lee Andrew. This night's vigil has revealed that it could only have happened to me. And it's not down to arbitrary things — like getting the Twix or whatever. Last night happened because of deep decisions made in the very core of me. If I hadn't done my legs by deleting the Clantons' file, then I'd have been a DC and on a different rota last night. All the destabilizing things I saw, and crossing the threshold of violence with the bruises on Beverley's arse.
The compound panic of loving her when all around me I saw the terrible things that happen to somebody's loved one. It could only have been me. A lifetime forged the vicious will that killed the man. I wish I'd come to some other conclusion during last night's vigil. Now that I have to go in to meet my unmakers.
The bluebottle is dead. Daylight has finally reached the north-facing shadow of my back yard. The searchlight day has arrived to examine all God's creatures and pronounced this bluebottle dead. I flick the insect to the floor.
The front door closes behind me. The whippy morning wind reminds the cuts on my face of Lee Andrew's cold leather sleeve, his rasping coat. Walking to the nick I sign a petition against animal testing and answer all the clipboard survey questionnaire. A hundred yards on I give a fiver to a beggar.
*
After dawdling on the pavement on the way here, I'm whooshed straight through to the planning room. Never got my feet under the long, polished table here before. A slight feeling of having bombed my way to the conference table. There was three of them just like there was three when I first joined: gatekeepers of my beginning and my end. The Super, our DO and with them the Assistant Deputy Chief Commissioner with his medals sewn on his uniform. For seven years I've hoped to get my police work noticed by them, and now finally I have.
'The first thing l need to know', asks the Chief, 'is why you were hitting him when he was on the floor?'
'I know it looks bad, sir, but he was already dead.' They look at me, look at the table, look at each other. Maybe if l pretend to be out cold. Maybe that was what Lee was thinking, not me?
'It's gonna be very difficult to convince a jury it was self-defence, John,' says the Super.
I nod but don't say anything. When I spoke just now my voice sounded different — deeper, clumsier coming through swollen gums and fat lip, and from Lee Andrew's arm on my throat last night. The voice of a neanderthal to whom speaking is new, or a morning-after Dr Jekyll, still stuck with Mr Hyde's night teeth.
'During the fight, were you fighting as a policeman or a man?' she asks.
The inquisition goes on … inquest … deceased … other words too, but I find it difficult to follow. My only clean blow killed him. It must have had a delayed effect. Looking back on it now it was like the Benn-McClellan fight. Nigel Benn is losing heavily in the later rounds but he'd fired a punch in the opening round which, like a dum-dum bullet delay-kicks in and McClellan, on the offensive and winning, suddenly collapses into a coma.
A silence. A long silence. Why aren't they talking? I remember now. The Super is waiting for me to respond to what she said. Think hard. What did she say? I remember now: suspension. That is the word that has been hanging invisibly in the air for some time.
I turn to the Assistant Deputy Chief Commissioner. 'What's your name, sir?' I ask. He drums his fingers gently on the table without moving his thumb, each time more slowly so that on the last roll his fingertips don't make a sound.
'Alan Randall,' he eventually replies.
'I've got a medal, too.'
*
Here I am, back in the Shaker chair. Just me and time and what will time do to me now?
Book Two
The
Marquis de Sade … uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism … The capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects … [and] the subordination of all social relations to the market … stripped away the remaining restraints and mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life's only business — pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure — on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production.
The Culture of Narcissism — Christopher Lasch *
How can you imagine what particular region of first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude — utter solitude without a policeman — by the way of silence — utter silence … ? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness … You are being assaulted by powers of darkness.
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad *
Psychosis is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.
Jules Henry *
'Felt more like a policeman the other day than I did when I was a policeman.'
John Manners *
If a craftsman creates something beautiful, but does so on external command, we may admire what he does but despise what he is.
Wilhem von Humboldt
Distress Restrictions
Three a.m. Has been for weeks.
Manners Page 13
