I feel strong and confident. I see where my body ends and the world begins. My whole body feels stony, placid, and yet my heart more open. Not with the tizzy of emotiveness that lasts the seven-minute song, where gangsters and dictators weep at the opera; no, more generally open and with a sense of what a fucking idiot I've been all my life.
Kalimankou Denkou. I don't know what the words mean and I don't want to know. That would just get in the way. And at times the women aren't singing in words anyway, more like the ululating wail from the minaret during Ramadan when consonants are not allowed. Aie — ohhhh — ah — aiie!
It's taken me a while to realize that it's just voices. One woman sings while the other women back her with sustained notes held like long, drawn bows on a 'cello, like low oboes, and then like flutes which hover high and still as a kestrel. A younger woman's voice rises full-throated above the others only to drop down enfolded by the other women's voices, as they come together at the end of a phrase like slow violins. Each time they go away it's like they might not come back — like Beverley's stezzy is playing up again. But again the singing returns, this time crashing in as a wave of passion rides the woman on her own and now all the other women rise up to join her, all rising up together like a Zulu woza!
Gathering and releasing, gathering and releasing. They are mapping a complex path. Not only listening to each other while they're singing but also, it seems, listening to the experience to make sure they describe its contours and the way through the Kalimankou desert, the way of making meaning of the pain and goodness. Navigating without words because we don't have the words in any language, but describing the shape of the experience in sound and emotion. A gorgeous spasm now, a strict compression as Ofrah-Hazi wail is reined in hard to sudden, choral control: the fiery sandstorm and the settled mist; the broken bridge you thought you'd never find and the power which carries you over.
At the same time as I feel removed I feel more here. I am aware of Beverley's flat. Of the light and shade on the brick wall — a lovely balance. Of the spinning, plastic air-vent set into the window whose slats, now I turn, are brown with the wind and its messages and contamination, spinning prettily and helpfully. Now almost stopping, then, on a whim, set whirring fast again.
The sound has fallen away totally this time. Beverley gets up and presses the stop-start stezzy and the women resume normal service. I'm not surprised by where they are when we come in because I know what they're describing, have a vague imprint of its shape. Even though the women went away they were still always there.
Maybe a quarter-mile away, dot children in white kit reach the cotton-twine finish tape of a hundred-yards dash. Last event of the school sports day.
The women slip away like Radio Free Europe fading down prior to announcing a State of Emergency …
Clothes are picked up, parents disperse and the school is emptied in dribs and drabs.
'It's like I don't know what Kalimankou Denkou means and I don't want to know,' I tell Beverley. 'I didn't know what they were singing, what the words mean, and I didn't want to know because they would only get in the way.'
A look of mischief on the Bevster's face: 'I know exactly what it means 'cos I read it on the sleeve.'
'Don't tell me!'
'OK,' she says and smiles mysteriously.
'All right, tell me.'
'Kalimankou Denkou is the name of this Bulgarian betting-shop and the women have all just spunked their kids' college money on Frankie Dettori. And that's why they're so upset.'
'Fuck off,' I say, affectionately, because there's a sort of care in her saying this. So off the mark that it still protects us from the intrusion of words. Not like the vindictive, prick-your-bubble tone with which, say, Heavy Polly would have resentfully, impatiently belaboured me off my high horse, and would have made a point of getting me off it, as it would have been her ancient duty to stand by a carousel and shout at children, 'It's not a horse! They're not horses!' (Maybe this spell is not so ethereal as I thought with all this hate left for Polly.) 'It doesn't sound Bulgarian, it sounds sort of Middle Eastern,' I go.
'Yeah. No they're these plump, middle-aged peasant women in headscarves and this comes out of them.'
From somewhere down below we hear but can't see a collage of three, maybe four police sirens. Sounds like a couple of ARVs, a Trojan Land Rover and maybe a squad car. Must be something special for the armed response. An end-of-day armed robbery perhaps. They'll have been on since two so maybe they were just beginning to wane into mid-shift boredom. But now they are minutes away from a Beretta in the face. It could even be a named op that's been months in the planning. This is it and if it doesn't come off some DS will get carpeted and told how many tens of thousands of public sovs he's spunked. The multi-layered, four-track sirens fall out of earshot.
'What's it feel like,' Beverley asks, 'now that you've left, now that you're not part of it no more?'
'Just a real sense of failure and I can't even think about it.'
'Mightn't you go back after the trial then?'
'No … if they ever did have me back now I'd just be a shiny-arse, sitting in a roomful of VDUs at the nick, until the day I die and my arse outshines St Peter's Pearly Gates.'
'But you were a good cop and that.'
'"Were"?'
'Well, it's like for you the job is like drugs — it only ends up exacerbating the central problem.'
'Every time I hear a siren or see a cop in the street I feel ashamed. Ashamed that I wasn't up to the job. You know, every time I turn the telly on it's a cop show or there's a crime story on the news, or there's a policeman outside Number Ten. Jesus, you realize how much mention there is of the police.'
'That's how I felt when you left me.' There is a beat while we let the silence absorb this. 'You know,' she says, 'you going out on your own … all the people you've told me you homed in on, it's like you were depositing all these different bits of yourself before you could move on … to the next stage or something. I felt like that when you left me: it was like you were leaving the bit of you that you couldn't handle any more or that you couldn't be any more, like for safe-keeping … No, no, like disowning. Disowning.'
'Yeah, it's like now I can't believe it was me doing that, something so … nuts … but it didn't feel mad when I — '
'Yeah, but you're doing it again. Now you're disowning that part of you that went out in uniform. "Oh, I was mad, it wasn't me." But it was you and it's still you 'cos you've always — and it's something I've never understood about you — you expect the job to be about right and wrong.'
'Why's that strange?'
''Cos you go on about how there's no morality, only market forces, and yet you expect the job to be the one area in society where that's not true.'
'No, I don't. I know the laws were made by landowners and tycoons — '
'But you don't, 'cos you get a cob on about it. I think you were taking a stand but now you're saying you just had a funny turn.'
After a while I say, 'I'd forgotten that I was this familiar with anyone, and that someone else knew me this well and still liked me! Despite my faults.'
'Or because of them, even.'
'Yeah, you're right — and maybe they're not faults … '
'No, no — they're faults,' she says with a little chuckle.
There is a sense of things having been said. Done and dusted, laid to rest. Spells of conclusive silence. Words seem like an effort. An intrusion.
This calm, however, is interrupted now and then by a sense of looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope, and by the walls of the room tilting away from me.
She fills a black bin-liner with cast-offs for the Spastics Shop. The pizzas arrive.
'Are you allowed to have cutlery in your hand?' she asks.
'Yes.'
'Oh no, it's OK — phew, they've got plastic knives and forks.'
'Phew.'
'Are you allowed to eat cheese?' she jests.
'Yes, yes, that's fin
e.'
And you're — there's no reaction on olives?'
'Well, they haven't specifically said anything, so I'll … '
'You'll risk it.'
'Yeah.'
She gets up and comes back with a half-dead bottle of red and one glass from which she sips before sitting down.
'Are you allowed to drink wine?'
'Fuck off.' I grab the bottle and fill my mug.
Beverley sits on the floor of the darker room with her tucker on the coffee table. I chomp away at our cheese-dripping discs on the couch.
'What are you gonna do now?' she asks, gob full.
'I don't know.'
'I'll let you know if I hear of anything going. Would you be into that?'
'Yeah, anything. For now.'
Ha! Working alongside Beverley as a roadie only not for a band but for venues and festivals. Knocking up the lighting rig, rolling in the amps, laying the steel-tread hardfloor over the grass!
On her wall, the size of a phone box, is a poster of a bearded but still young and red-shirted George Best, off-the-ball in pensive-stroll mode. There is a crowd in the background, but there are no other players on the green grass.
'Where d'you get that?' I ask.
'Skanked it off a venue wall.'
'It's fierce.'
'Yeah.'
'Do you like George Best?' I ask her.
'I was talking to someone the other day, and I was saying, you know, how everyone goes on about what a waste he didn't play longer and that, you know, "what a waste of talent". Well, I was saying he was so beautiful that if all he'd done was train and play then that would've been a waste as well. What about his talent as a drinker, and a party animal, talent for socializing and having a laugh or shagging. Maybe he was a brilliant pub talker. You know, just 'cos you can't put a pound sign in front of those skills or whatever like you can with football, doesn't mean to say they're not equally valid.'
'Well, that's, er, certainly an unorthodox view,' I reply.
Ugly furniture came with the flat. She has a navy-blue bedspread as a throw cover for the couch, but it keeps sliding down every now and then, exposing the stained white of the real sofa. I get up from the couch to pull the blue bedspread up again.
I tidy away the pizza boxes, ketchup, plates.
I stare out the black window. My stiff-faced, candle-lit reflection hovers out in the cold night above towerblocks, lights and cars. I can hear her tidying away a few things behind me. Now she draws the red-velvet curtains over the hovering ghost. The tall red curtains are unhemmed. Long black thread unravels at floor and ceiling, like human hair.
A half-hearted siren goes by somewhere. Doesn't sound like such a big deal now.
I'm relieved as we sit on the sofa to have a certain blurring of the physical-contact rules, to be able to sit with my arm round her feeling her bulging midriff with its familiar goose-pimples naked under my palm in the gap between her jeans and her top. Not to be slammed out.
My head lies on her black denim lap. It's only about ten but I'm falling asleep as she strokes and strokes my hair back, her hands still damp from washing-up, and her lemfresh thumb makes the sign of the cross on my forehead.
*
I awake on the couch at six a.m. under a sleeping bag and my trousers still, alas, on.
I watch a programme for the deaf with the sound down. I write her a little note on the back of an unopened British Telecom red bill envelope.
Dear Bevster, Thanks for a beautiful stay. Feels like I've been away days. Give us a call when you get reconnected.
Lots of love gorgeous girl, Johnny xxx.
I open her bedroom door and look in on her. Her face is sulky in sleep. Looking in on the sleeping woman I feel half like a fond parent and half like a home-invader sex criminal. I soundlessly shut the door.
I borrow her crushed toothbrush and catch myself in the bathroom mirror. Something's changed. A friendly face. No longer an inspection parade. This must be what most people see in the mirror all the time. Hello John. Hello you. We had a good time, didn't we, John?
Outside the front door the keen morning wind finds out my unwashed face. A white car starts up and drives away, its exhaust blowing out visible smoke like my breath on this chill morning.
At the end of her street I feel a strong urge to go back to her house. I turn and look at her flats once, and then a few steps on, I turn and look a second time. But now I can't tell which door is hers.
'Birmingham New Street, please.'
Leaning across, the cabbie speaks in a quick, hushed, undertone like he's not supposed to be doing this, or as if someone else was listening. 'Yeah, alroit, yeah.'
At the traffic-lights on Mosely High Street I see a kid trying to ponce some money off an old troubled cove. The kid gives up trying to cadge a dollar off him as we move on. Maybe if something had happened I might have tried to intervene and cool things off just like any good citizen might. But it feels good to drive on by and leave the scene. Now that I'm not personally responsible for every evil act committed.
Before I used to say about the job, 'There's nothing else out there, there's nothing like the buzz.' And as Beverley herself might say, when people talk about there being nothing out there they mean in themselves.
The murder would've happened by now anyway. Or else the killers have changed their minds, called it off, just given him a slap instead. Whatever.
Builders sit around waiting for my train to go. The 07.15 Birmingham New Street to Euston is the last train to leave before the station's closed for renovations. As my train pulls out and eases round a curve, hardhats who've been sitting vacantly on the roof drop down pulley-ropes. On the concourse a scaffold tower is wheeled into position.
The train accelerates. A sudden slew of rain falls across the city like a veil. I pull in my head.
We slip clear of Birmingham. Streets, houses, pubs and shops seen from the wrong end. Presenting themselves to each other but not to us passengers. Up and beyond and looking down from another tack. It is good not to know, in this strange town, what happens where and all that.
The rain stops or we've gone beyond it. The countryside now lies under a sharp, polished sky. Steam from the earth's crust escapes up through sheep-bitten turf. A transmission aerial with its precarious guy-ropes; pretty, pattern fields; brown power stations curved in the middle like clay thrown on a potter's wheel. All our weedy, brittle structures on nature's unimaginable violence.
A crooked stream in a crack of earth between two green pastures. Rivers are beautiful to everyone except police frogmen. As the train curves away from the stream, light catches its surface and it becomes a shining hard top of silver-plate.
I borrow a Mirror off the chap sitting on the other side of the train, facing forwards too. He's drowsing in the heat of the bright windows, though it's chilly out. I hand it back before Milton Keynes, page open on George Best's column.
'Thanks.' I tell him. 'You know, they always go on about George Best wasting his talent because of drinking and dancing and socializing, but maybe he was a great dancer and a great drinker. Perhaps he had a real talent for socializing, and it would've been a waste if he hadn't devoted himself to that, too.'
'Ye-es,' the suit replies uncertainly.
I lean back against the headrest, smiling like the advert, as a simpler country slides past.
I was stuck, and time is now moving. The fever has broken. I'm out of it. There's the trial still, but as for staying on the force, well even if they had me back I'd be shiny-arsed for ever. I know that now.
I am no longer a police-officer. Of course not. Not now I think about it. All that remains is one final duty. A funeral to attend.
Boxer Beat
If it wasn't for me phoning the morgue, getting the number of the hostel and then phoning the hostel, he would've been cremated with no one there. And now I know his name at least. A name like a boxer's: Ray Dunney. No middle name and no fixed abode. No middle name and no hot water to shave by. It
's like his parents knew there'd be nothing down for him. After all, you're only given a middle name to stop the bank computer confusing you with another investor. John Steven Manners — so I was one up from him.
I wear full uniform out of respect. Cap not helmet.
I am the sole mourner in the modest, 1970s Catholic crematorium brick-built like a kiln. I'm wondering whether the priest will drop the liturgical, declamatory style, seeing as it's just the two of us and I'm just the copper who found him. He doesn't. I'm glad. The cadences carry us through.
'And it is certain we leave with nothing,' intones the priest. He had nothing to leave, but the Thames turned his pockets inside-out to be certain.
There's a danger in sentimentalizing tramps, of course. When you've had to deal with a few you see their vagrancy more in terms of the merciful release their present lifestyle must be for the family they terrorized, rather than seeing the tramp as victim. Still, I shouldn't be having these thoughts here.
The priest commits Ray Dunney to the trundle-trundle curtains trundle-trundle fire. He smiles a puny-in-the-face-of-eternity smile at me. I get up and walk down the little aisle to his lectern. I tell him thanks and we shake hands.
'You were the officer who found him?'
'Yes,' I say, like it's as cut and dried as that.
'Did you know him before?' he asks, and suddenly I feel like he knows some guilty secret of mine. But why this shame about admitting I only saw him once, in the street?
'No, well, yes, I saw him once before, just on the street.' The priest turns his gaze sharp on me, like I've let it slip in Interview Room I. He doesn't say anything so I have to fill in the silence. 'He used to wear a bow-tie and a dress-shirt and, you know, dress smart,' I say, touching where a bow-tie would be on me. 'Not like … I suspect that was his old job, he was a doorman or something once.'
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