The Suburbs of Hell

by Randolph Stow

  ‘Not natural not to have it,’ Harry insisted. ‘No man is an island.’

  ‘You know that,’ Arthur said, ‘do you?’

  ‘I think thass the name of a paperback I had,’ Harry explained.

  ‘There’s more of it,’ Arthur said, trying to remember. ‘It goes on something like this: But each man is a part of the continent, like a promontory; and if a clod of it is washed away, the whole world is the less.’

  Harry was looking at him wide-eyed. ‘Is that it? Thass deep, boy.’

  ‘In the war,’ Arthur said, ‘a lot of people like padres were very fond of quoting that, and there were reasons for it to stick in my mind. “Every man’s death diminishes me”—that I can quote you.’

  ‘Thass very strange,’ Harry said, ‘very strange that you tell that to me. I mean, here am I, spendin my days buildin up this sea-defence thing, to keep the clods from fallin off the promontory. And feelin the way I do about Paul and—oh Christ, poor little Ena. And you sayin that, that bring the two things together. And thass how it feels, just like that. Like clods was fallin off me, and I was gettin smaller.’

  ‘It tolls for thee,’ said Arthur quietly.

  ‘Howzat?’ Harry asked. ‘Does what for me?’

  ‘Therefore send not,’ Arthur explained, ‘to know for whom the bell tolls.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Harry said. ‘Crackin film.’ He looked at his watch, and scowled. ‘Shit, I’ve missed that one on the box, one of those about this good guy gooin around New York murderin all the bad guys. I like that kind of thing.’

  In the late light the harbour was all of one colour: dove-grey. The bare woods of the far shore could hardly be separated from the smooth water and heavy sky which they divided. All the remaining light of the day seemed to be drawn to the white paint of a small freighter moving down the estuary to the sea.

  Black Sam had got out of his taxi and was pacing up and down at the edge of the quay. His hands were deep in the pockets of a sheepskin coat and his body was tightened against the chill. He stopped to stare at the ship.

  A tough-looking small boy in an anorak wandered past him, muttering: ‘How do, Sam.’ At the sound of his name the black man came down to earth suddenly, and returned: ‘How do,’ but with a look at the child that failed to recognize him.

  The boy, pausing, identified himself. ‘Killer,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, sure. You keepin well, Killer. D’you know that flag, Killer? I bet you know them all.’

  ‘Thass Panama,’ Killer said. ‘You see a foo of them go by here.’

  ‘Long way from home,’ Sam said, absently, following the passing of the ship.

  ‘Home?’ Killer said. ‘Dunno where her home would be, but not Panama. Panama’s what they call a convenience. You ever been there, Sam?’

  ‘Been where?’ Sam asked. ‘Oh, Panama. Christ, no; I int never been out of England.’

  ‘Uh?’ said the boy, looking disbelieving. ‘I thought you come from somewhere near Panama.’

  ‘I come from Ipswich, boy,’ Sam said. ‘Born and bred there. I int travelled a lot in my life.’

  The boy seemed disappointed, but stuck to the subject of geography. ‘My dad says thass ever so hot, like so hot it’s steamy. You can see jungle, and big birds, storks or something like that. Thass a big thing, that Canal. My dad says the first time he went through there that give him quite a proud feelin about the hooman race.’

  ‘Your dad’s deep-sea,’ Sam reasoned. ‘Oh, I’ve got you. Your grandad’s big Billy what has the Galley, right?’

  ‘Thass right,’ Killer said. ‘You know, Sam, that surprise me that you int never been to them warm countries. I mean, I stand here watchin the ships go by, and I dream about them places, and I’m English.’

  ‘So am I, boy,’ said Sam, low.

  ‘I mean, I s’pose you’ve got relations you could go and stay with.’

  ‘Not a lot,’ Sam muttered. Turning away from the water, he gave the child a bleak glance. ‘I imagine you’ll see more of faraway places than I ever shall, Killer. Well, I’m off—see you around, I expect.’

  But when he had closed himself into his taxi he sat for a while, hands on the steering wheel and chin on his hands, watching the white ship glide by the grey woods and fields, on its way, presumably, to colour and the sun.

  He had always been one to let things pass, in the faith that difficulties and unpleasantness could be outlived. His mother, when she was in the mood to approve, had praised him for his good cheer. His father had sometimes wondered aloud whether he understood anything at all that was going on.

  He did seem to live in a world which was simpler than other people’s. It was a very limited world: until he was fifteen it had consisted of a tiny house in a red-brick terrace in an arid-looking part of Ipswich, a couple of schools of similar appearance, a gentle bowery countryside for cycling and angling, and the front at Felixstowe to import, now and again, a touch of carnival. Everything had seemed predictable, and he had liked that, the ordinariness of his routines.

  He had been born late and perhaps surprisingly in his mother’s life, and in the small red house was an only child. Three siblings, much older, had remained in the West Indies to be raised by relations when the parents emigrated and had not chosen to follow. His two sisters he had never seen; some visits from his brother, by that time a grown man, had not been a success. His brother had quickly found some friends of whom their father passionately disapproved, though to Sam, at about five, they had seemed glamorous and amusing. It was puzzling to him, but delightful, when they produced Bibles and declaimed passages at one another, with a curious manner in which gravity was mixed up with fooling. He could remember his brother’s arm around him while he intoned: ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’ One of the friends, a jolly but very ugly youth, was fond of reciting: ‘I am black, but comely,’ which he pronounced ‘coamly’. It was from them that Sam first heard the name ‘Ras Tafari’, and he had quickly learned not to repeat it in front of his parents.

  His father was a labourer, his mother a cleaner at a hospital. A more conformist working-class couple than the Boskums could hardly have been found in England. Over the gas-fire in their front room hung a picture of the Queen. They would have liked the Queen to be Prime Minister also. In religion they were faithful Baptists: English Baptists. In their little rented house they lived out the narrow, private, decent lives of the Victorian artisans for whom it had been designed.

  When Sam was about eleven a teacher called Miss Buxhall began to take an interest in him. This had puzzled him for a time, as at school he was good at nothing in particular, without being so bad at anything as to attract attention. Miss Buxhall, personally, left him with no strong impressions of herself, except that she seemed a sad old lady (she was in her forties, and single) and must watch television or read newspapers a great deal. By degrees he came to realize that she imagined him to be full of memories of some extraordinarily warm, extraordinarily colourful world: memories summed up in the print which she gave him of a painting by someone she called ‘The Douanier’, all weird trees and fantastic flowers with a glimpse here and there of black bodies, and in which she wanted to have a share. The picture did, in fact, stir something like a recollection in him, but as he had never set eyes on any such scene he supposed, and told Miss Buxhall, that he must have been remembering things described to him, when he was very young, by his parents or (this interested her) his Rastafarian brother, nowadays in Kingston.

  This conversation, and the picture hung beside his bed, led somehow to contact being established between the teacher and the hospital cleaner, and to a Sunday visit by Miss Buxhall to 10 Omdurman Terrace. It was a trying experience for the boy. Miss Buxhall, normal and dull enough in her own chalky habitat, seemed downright eccentric in his. She talked a good deal of the Third World, of which Mr and Mrs Boskum, though they prayed in a general way for all in need or distress, had only the vaguest notions. She spoke of the gre
at charge of energy which was coming into the arts from the newer lands, mentioning in particular a Barbadian poet whom she had actually met after his reading (‘electrifying’ was her adjective) of a long poem about his African roots. Mr and Mrs Boskum betrayed a little surprise at hearing such talk in their own front room, and Mr Boskum said rather gruffly that he had never heard of the poet but knew a man of the same name who was on the railways and came from St Lucia.

  If Miss Buxhall did not, in Sam’s eyes, show to advantage, neither did his parents. He had never heard his mother, usually economical with her words, speak so much as she did then, in her hospitality or nervousness. And it was quite clear to him that Miss Buxhall was enjoying his mother’s flow of language with the enjoyment of a keen tourist, that she found his mother quaint. He respected his normally garrulous father the more because he chose on that occasion to be reserved.

  After that their acquaintance with Miss Buxhall trailed away into civilities, and before long he left her to go to another school. But she had had her effect. His friends had always been white boys; he had always spoken like them, and thought like them, living his life in the midst of theirs. But after Miss Buxhall, he applied himself to ironing out any slight difference which might survive. He did not mean to be quaint.

  Nothing about him was very noticeable: he was of middling intelligence, of middling abilities in football and cricket, presentable but middling in his looks. He was popular, in a middling way, largely because of a vein of the dry humour which goes with the Suffolk voice, and because there was nothing in him to object to. He made sure that there was not. Disharmony distressed him; he was the peacemaker among his peers.

  At fifteen he left school and began work in labouring jobs. For what seemed a very long time he felt disoriented in the company in which he found himself, and rather clung to old schoolmates who clearly did not think as seriously as he did about their bond. But contentment returned when he was old enough to drive. He was not the sort of youth to delight in speed and noise and random journeys into the unknown. Instead, what delighted him was the orderliness of traffic, its civilized manoeuvres and conventions. On the roads, as in the rest of his life, he was an expert dodger of collisions.

  He felt that, to be happy, he had to make the roads his life, and after some time spent on the buses achieved his ambition of becoming a taxi-driver. His father died. His mother began to talk of her native island, and of the warmth and comfort her old bones might find there, in the bosom of her large and mainly female clan. They sold the little terrace house, which by then belonged to them. One day he drove her to London Airport, and returned that night to an insufficient little flat which he had had trouble in finding, and for which he had to pay too much.

  He was lonely after that. What he liked best in his work was the long runs, on which a passenger might share a little of his life with him, perhaps even ask for advice. Sam was good with advice: always very safe and comforting advice which left people feeling better.

  One evening, after delivering a fare to the train ferry at Old Tornwich, he wandered into the Speedwell for a beer. It was in high summer, and still light, and the view from the window over the broad blue estuary was calm as sleep.

  It was then that he met Ken Heath. The boy capitalist, flushed and already slightly bloated with drink, was unbuttoned enough to want to know more about the black man with the Suffolk voice. So Sam told him the simple story of his life, and the tycoonlet exclaimed and pressed his card upon him. He was himself, he revealed, the owner of a taxi firm in New Tornwich; if Sam should ever be interested, there was money to be made. He was touchingly friendly, and Sam, who was no drinker, was taken by surprise several times on the winding estuary road.

  A few days later he got out the card and rang Ken Heath. Ken sounded surprised, and a little doubtful, at hearing from him, but took his name and a telephone number at which he could be reached. Several weeks passed before he did ring, but then it was with an offer. He needed, urgently, a man to live in the flat above the taxi office. He had formed glowing opinions of Sam’s reliability, and knew that he was a single man, which was what was needed, because of the telephone at all hours, and because the flat was, frankly, more of a pad.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘I dunno quite how to put this. I don’t think there’s another—ah—black face, if you don’t mind me mentioning it, in this town.’

  ‘Thass fine,’ Sam said. ‘No problem, boy.’

  A week later he was again on the estuary road, with all his possessions on the seat and in the boot behind him.

  The cafe next to the taxi office was a haunt of jobless school-leavers, whose blue shapes he could see through the steamy glass as they played their electronic games, while the blare of their jukebox choices escaped into the open air, apparently through the extractor fan, and reached him as he parked. The warm office was also a favourite spot for hanging about, and when he went in he found two of them sitting on kitchen chairs watching a portable television set on the desk. The driver behind the desk had turned it away from himself and was talking to the boss, who paced and turned in the bare little room.

  ‘Ah, Sam,’ he said. ‘Hoped I’d see you. You well?’

  ‘A man who doesn’t drink,’ Sam said, ‘is always well. Did you want something with me, Ken?’

  ‘Nothing special,’ Ken Heath said. ‘Just to compare notes, you know. Bugger it, you can’t hear yourself speak in here. How is it all the teenagers today are deaf?’

  ‘So would you be,’ Sam said, ‘after ten minutes in the caff next door. Well, d’you want to come upstairs, or d’you want to go to the pub? Upstairs, you get a choice of Nescaff or Ribena.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Ken Heath, abstracted, and as Sam held open a door for him he began rather ponderously to make his way up.

  The little sitting-room above had the look of a hospital, it was so white and uncluttered. The only colour was in a large print, not a very good one, of Constable’s painting of boys angling in the Stour at Stratford St Mary. The one small window had a view, by daylight, of the same river at its widest, sometimes blue, sometimes billowing like storm-tossed mushroom soup.

  ‘You don’t sound very fit, boy,’ Sam remarked, as he joined his landlord. ‘Out of puff after eleven stairs.’

  Ken Heath’s father, a jobbing builder, had bought up a number of half-ruinous Old Tornwich houses when much of the place was half-ruinous, paying almost nothing for them. Therefore his heir, in his thirties, was running to fat.

  ‘I’m going to diet,’ he said. ‘Go to one of these health farms. They charge like wounded buffalo for starving you, but the sort of people who go don’t mind. Conspicuous non-consumption, Taffy Hughes calls that.’

  ‘Have a black coffee,’ Sam offered.

  ‘Shall I?’ Ken wondered. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. You’re a very tidy bloke, aren’t you, Sam?’

  ‘Drummed into me,’ Sam said. ‘My old mother was like that.’

  ‘They looked the place over, didn’t they? The law, I mean.’

  ‘Yeh,’ Sam said shortly.

  ‘That can’t have been very nice.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘I’m a law-abidin citizen. I don’t want killers runnin around loose. So I don’t complain.’

  ‘Did you get any idea of what they were looking for?’

  ‘The gun, I suppose. But they didn’t tell me nothing.’

  ‘Did they go anywhere else?’

  ‘You’re as likely to know that as what I am,’ Sam pointed out. ‘I heard they paid a call on Frank De Vere, because they know he’s a firearms nut. That’s as much as I can tell you.’

  ‘Why you, though?’ Ken Heath asked. ‘You’re not a firearms nut.’

  ‘I should think,’ Sam said, ‘because I was on the spot just before the Commander bought it. Plus, I keep funny hours. Plus, you can’t see me in the dark.’

  ‘Ah, Sam,’ said Ken Heath, uneasily. ‘Lots of people keep funny hours in this town. Which is why you do.’


  ‘All that was months ago, Ken. So why are we talkin about it tonight?’

  ‘It’s awkward,’ Ken muttered, beginning to pace. ‘Bloody awkward. In a way, it’s none of my business—but in a way, it is. I mean, we’ve got competitors. If people start phoning them because they’re scared of one of our drivers—well, that much is my business.’

  Sam was staring at him, out of a still face. ‘People are scared of me?’

  ‘I’ve got to admit,’ Ken said, ‘that a bit of talk has come my way. It’s started again, because of that boy Ramsey.’

  ‘That boy is mad,’ Sam burst out. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s in an institootion. Why should it be me? Why not him?’

  ‘Well,’ Ken said, ‘of course that’s the first thing that came into everybody’s head. But if the law have looked into it—and we know they have, and then some—and if they still don’t say they’ve solved it, well, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t that lad. So people start wondering: What if he knew something?’

  After a moment, Sam said quietly: ‘Less get this straight, Ken. People are talkin about what he said? They know about the phone calls? They know what he said to me?’

  ‘There were several listening,’ Ken said, ‘and these things get out and get about.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Sam muttered. ‘And I took them there myself. I asked them to protect me—the sneaking bastards.’

  ‘Well, that’s human nature,’ Ken Heath explained. ‘People talk to each other.’

  Sam was standing stock-still in the middle of the room with a hand up to his forehead. Abruptly he dropped his arm and turned to face the young capitalist. ‘Well, Ken?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘What you’re wanting is to break up our little partnership, I should imagine.’

  ‘Sam, you don’t understand me,’ Ken Heath protested. ‘You do not understand. I was preparing you, that’s all. If this doesn’t die down soon, perhaps you should spend more time in the office. At night, I mean—only at night.’

  ‘God knows,’ Sam said, ‘how many local drunks I’ve helped through their own front doors. I’ve even put some of ’em to bed. This is the thanks I get: they tell each other I want to murder them.’