Walking on, St Peter’s church stands floodlit, golden in the last few shakes of rain, a Saxon edifice rebuilt after the Norman conquest. A funeral service was held here for Uncle Chick, a wide boy in more ways than one: black marketeer of the family, he lost a leg in later life but not his splendidly unpleasant sense of humour, nor the knowing leer of a supernal toad with diamonds in his brow. The vicar eulogized him as a decent, law-abiding man, respectable in every way. Dad and Aunt Lou kept looking at each other in bewilderment throughout the service, having no idea who he was on about.
Here too the half-wit’s vision and the beggar woman, crippled by the gate. The bones of Ragener, unearthed in an unearthly light. The brother Saints, Ragener and Edmund; their remote November graves and separate miracles.
When they found Edmund’s severed head it was protected by a fierce black dog that would not let them near. The frilled pink gums, curled back across pale yellow teeth; the murdered saint with fly-specked gaze, a mouthful of dead leaves, his hair, alive with ants: these are the icons of a secret local heraldry, the cryptic suits that mark Northampton’s deck: Flames, Churches, Heads, and Dogs.
Down Black Lion Hill, still on the path suggested by Charles Bradlaugh’s finger, to the crossroads and the bridge beyond, the ancient heart of the community, where everything began. The Shagfoals, as described by local folklore, are believed to favour crossroads or a river-bridge, sites where the fabric is stretched thinnest between our world and the hidden place beneath. The town, of course, has crystallized around these very features; and so gets no more than it deserves.
St Peter’s Way curves south from here, and to the north extends St Andrew’s Road, childhood address and western boundary of the Boroughs, this town’s oldest, strangest quarter, sprung up where the neolithic track of the Jurassic Way that stretched from Glastonbury to Lincoln crossed the River Nene. Simon de Senlis’ castle stood here once beside the bridge, where Becket came to trial and was condemned, the castle itself suffering a similar fate not long after. Now Castle Station stands here, with the relocated postern gate a sole remaining fragment of the former structure like a dead man’s ear saved by his murderer as a memento.
On the corner sits the Railway Club, this evening’s destination. Since Mum’s death four months ago it has become the venue for a weekly meeting with the brother; point of contact now that the maternal Sunday dinner table is no more. Beyond the double airlock doors that grant admission from the street there is a single large, low-ceilinged hall that’s lit as though for neuro-surgery. A low stage at the far end where sometimes the bingo caller sits, charged with the arcane glamour and authority of his profession, audience hanging breathless on each syllable as on the utterance of a divine, or numerologist.
Other than children, it’s unusual to discover anybody here that’s under fifty. The collective ambience is overcast, abruptly lit by static discharge from a kippered laugh. This atmosphere is stable, soothing and familiar. These are people who have always been here, by the vanished castle, by the bridge. The words have changed but not the voice, nor yet the greater part of their complaint.
The brother’s here already, at the usual table with his son Jake, six years old, already either self-possessed or just possessed. The drinks are ordered and the conversation, easy as old shoes, turns to the week’s events. Mike, after five years, has discovered where Dad’s ashes ended up; where Mum’s will follow. Not that nobody’s been looking during all that time, of course. Simply that no one at the crematorium appeared to have the first idea of how to find Rose Garden B; had recently declared albeit wrongly that Rose Garden B did not exist. This had given rise to a brief flurry of unsettling suspicions: Soylent Green is people. Luckily, the matter was resolved and the parental plaque discovered quite by chance among the lanes of roses, ranks of men and women wondrously transformed to petal, scent and thorn.
Having concluded his account the brother sips, wiping antipodean surf from upper lip before he speaks again. ‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Just the book.’
‘That’s the Northampton book?’
Nod of assent, followed by a cursory description of the work, before professional imperatives assert themselves and the inevitable panning for material begins; the strip mining of every conversation for a word, a stolen fact or phrase. Mike is subjected to a wearying rag-picker’s litany: how old, now, is the Railway Club? Who built it? Any anecdotes? Any old murders, old celebrities, old iron? One eye on his eldest son, across the club’s far side and busy organizing other children into cadres of Power Ranger-Jugend, he considers.
‘Uncle Chick once had a crate of ale away from out the keg room where it opens on to Andrew’s Road. Dragged it along St Peter’s Way to Nan’s house up in Green Street. This was Christmas night. Snow everywhere. If he’d not been so pissed he would have thought. The coppers only had to follow back the trail to his front door. That was the only time they ever had the law down Green Street over Chick. He was more careful after that.’
The reference to Green Street strums a tripwire of association. Home of the paternal grandmother, the Nan, her house that smelled of damp and human age and withered apples. Mum’s side started out there, too, before the council shifted them to Andrew’s Road. The green sloped down behind St Peter’s church towards the bounding terrace at the bottom, a barricade against the industry and asphalt that encroached beyond. The houses are all gone now. Nothing stands between the dwindling, naked patch of grass and the encroaching office blocks that quietly and politely shuffle ever closer, buzzards on their very best behaviour.
Thirty years ago, Jeremy Seabrook wrote his influential work on poverty in Britain, called The Unprivileged, and focused sensibly on nothing more than an articulation of what Green Street was and what it meant: that aggregate of lives and incidents and want. Green Street was made the emblem of a disenfranchised class; of an impassioned plea that street and people both should be restored. The answer, demolition in both instances.
It would be near impossible even to formulate that plea today, the emblems and the archetypes long since worn down to cliché and self-parody. How shall we speak, straight-faced, about the local whore who turned a trick so Nan could buy a jar of Marmite for the kids? Maudlin Northampton shite, all tarts with hearts and we-were-so-poor-rickets-was-a-luxury. And yet a girl whose name has not survived would take a stranger up her in a back yard for her neighbour’s children, and how is it we no longer have a language to contain such things?
Back in the Railway Club, the conversation settles in a holding pattern orbiting the Jupiterian mass of Uncle Chick, a gravity that lack of corporate substance has not diminished. Mike recalls the first drink that he had with Chick after the leg was off. They’d been with Dad and Uncle Gord up to the Silver Cornet, stopping on the way back for a Sunday paper at the newsagent’s. Mike stayed there in the car with Chick, uncomfortably wondering how to broach the subject of his uncle’s missing leg, the stump propped up beside the gear-stick.
While they waited there in silence, they became aware of a lone figure that approached them with a painful slowness from the street’s far end, resolving as it neared into a wretched, downcast man afflicted both by a club foot and by a prominent hunched back. Chick watched the man limp past, eyes narrowed in the underdone puff-pastry of their sockets, finally dispensing with his silence to address the brother: ‘’Ere, Mick. Goo an’ ask that cunt there if ‘e wants a fight.’
Laugh. Get another round in. In the end the talk makes a complete lap of the circuit and ploughs back into the starting post.
‘So what’s this book about, then?’
It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare g
auze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable.
Instead, deliberate and gecko-eyed evasion: ‘Well, it’s difficult to say until it’s finished.’
Sup up. Jake stands grave and still while helped on with his winter coat, the robing of a midget cardinal. Outside, walking towards the station forecourt for a cab, he pauses by the repositioned postern gate, insists the placard there is read aloud. According to his dad, he shows worryingly early signs of a familial obsession with location and its antecedents. Town as a hereditary virus. Cancelled streets and ancient courtyards have become implicit in the blood.
A cab ride down St Andrew’s Road to the girlfriend’s. The Boroughs rise from here up to the Mayorhold, a triangular enclosure where the locals once held a yearly mock election and appointed some local drunk or Tom-of-Bedlam as the neighbourhood’s own mayor, an annual gesture of contempt directed at a civic process which excluded them. The Mayorhold now a stark and ugly traffic junction; the mayoral position has been vacant for some years, its tin-lid chain of office long since lost, forgotten. Only find it, and an older, truer town aflame with meaning would rise from these embers, from these lame parades.
Dropped off in Semilong, a kind of index to the Boroughs, compiled later. Rushed farewells to Mike and Jake before the cab continues with them to King’s Heath. The hill of Baker Street runs down towards the intermittent buzz of Andrew’s Road, to Paddy’s Meadow and the Nene, the freight yards ranged beyond. The meadow takes its name from Paddy Moore, ex-Army Irish lifeguard at the bathing place there in the slow faun river. Children, watersnakes and sometimes otters from upstream, he overlooked them all. Gave swimming lessons to crowds of naked boys, who were no doubt encouraged by the swagger-stick kept tucked beneath his arm and his occasional displays of corporal violence to the last chap out of the water. When they closed the baths and made him sweep the lanes instead it broke his heart and killed him. These enclosures are a patiently accreted coral of such days and lives.
Over the road down at the bottom of the street, is the spot where a remote acquaintance bled to death last year on someone’s doorstep, following a stabbing. Fiery Fred, who knew the victim better, was down here doing a loft conversion for the girlfriend and got pulled in by the Murder Squad, all anxious understudies for the next Lynda LaPlante production. Asked him if he was ‘The Amsterdam Connection’. Double Dutch to him: he’d just been somewhere near the killing ground the day it happened. Live here for long enough, you’ll end up round the corner from atrocity.
Here, at the furthest point inland, the navel of the nation, all the bad blood gathers, with eruptions not infrequent and more violent crime per capita than cities of far greater notoriety. These bloody sunspots of activity seem to be motivated only by the fluctuations of the town’s magnetic field: a sexual tourist fresh from Milton Keynes, his throat cut by a pair of rentboys. They drove him round for hours on the pretext of looking for a hospital while his identity leaked out on to the rear upholstery. The motive, robbery, according to the courts: a Ronson lighter, three pounds forty pence. A child found mutilated, burned and partly eaten in a garage, fifteen years ago. A retarded boy kept in a back shed, treated like a dog by his embarrassed mother till he killed her with a breadknife.
Darkness concealed behind net curtains. Madness. Harm. On even the most casual inspection of Northampton’s canvas, these hues dominate. Wonder and melancholy and a mordant humour are present, undeniably, but it is the blood that captures the attention. Why here? Why so much? Is there some primal episode lost in the county’s prehistoric past, a template for all such events to follow? ‘Murder Mecca of the Midlands’, Dave J calls it, Godfather of Goth living up by the town’s north gate among the heads of traitors and the ashes of burned women.
Meanwhile, back in Baker Street, the girlfriend is at home. Melinda Gebbie, underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California; former bondage model recently turned quarkweight boxer. Like so many others, sucked in by this urban black hole, utterly invisible to television, only made apparent as an absence by the way the light of media bends around it; by the devastation out at its perimeter. She strayed too close to this event horizon, where the lines of the A45 converge, and was absorbed. Though her perception of the world remains frenetic, to observers situated at a hypothetical location outside town, she would appear to be unmoving, frozen for all time upon the brink of this devouring singularity. Nothing gets out of here that is not pulled back in. The sheer escape velocity required is near impossible, a contravention of the special laws of relativity to which this place is subject.
It is a gravity to which Americans seem more than usually prone, perhaps responding to the atavistic tug of this, their birthmud. Washington and Franklin’s families were émigrés from Sulgrave and from the world’s end of Ecton, possibly escaping from the aftermath of Civil War. The Sulgrave village crest of bar and mullet, stripe and star, is resurrected in the banner of the upstart colonies. This link provokes the ominous mirage of vast glass-sided skyscrapers rising above the sleeping hamlets, yellow taxis jostling for position in the cobbled lanes. This landscape is the lost placenta of America, discarded but still dark and slick with nutrients. Attracted by ancestral spoor, the county’s prodigals are called back in, leaping upstream through the Atlantic billows to their spawning ground.
After some moments shivering on the doorsteps of Semilong, the knock is answered. Asked in, to a Fauvist pocket universe of colour, art materials, an insane proliferation of peculiar souvenirs, ornaments and a spectromatic range of pencils that defies imagination, some are only visible to dogs or bees. Upstairs, a pornographic tableau of transsexual Action Men and wayward Barbies, surgically augmented by imaginative use of Fymo. Brother Mike called round here once to water plants; was badly startled by a lifesize cardboard cut-out figurine of Mrs Doubtfire and a seemingly stuffed dog in the front bedroom; hasn’t been back since.
Sit, a hallucinating Gulliver among the Lilliputian robots, trolls and mutants. Feel immediately relaxed; at home. Drink tea and fill her living room with smoke. Say hateful, frightening things to her pet cat when she’s not in the room. Forget the novel for a moment, though no more than that.
She tells me she’s been having dreams of dogs: a bald, blind Shagfoal puppy taken to her bed in one; another with the huge skull of a spectral dog unearthed, identifiable by gaping, monstrous sockets. In the mind they take their exercise and need no wider yard to mark out with their scent. Although subjected to endless and tedious recountings of each work in progress, this is all Melinda dreams of, the giant black hounds that only bark in dream and manifest about the margins of this fiction, portents yet to be resolved.
Stay for an hour or two then cab back home. Climb up the ladder to the attic bedroom, ocean green rag-veined with gold. There is an altar set into the glazed brick recess of the chimney, crammed with statuettes of toads and foreign deities; an image of the beautiful late Roman snake god that is currently adored. The reek of myrrh. A greenish light infects the serried spines of books on Shamanism and Qabalah, Spare and Crowley, Dr Dee and the Enochian Host, keys to the crucial world of the Unreal. Five years ago, this narrative began in tales of antlered local witchmen, with no intimation of the personal involvement in that occupation yet to come. The text, predictably, melts into the event. The neolithic boy, his mother lately dead. The crematorium and its elusive rose-yards all within a half-mile of the Bronze Age burning-fields. Wake with a loose tooth fallen out and resting on the tongue.
Although at times unnerving, this was always the intention, this erasing of a line dividing the incontrovertible from the invented. History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in questio
n is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.
The task is not unthinkable. There are those weak points on the borderlines of fact and fabrication, crossings where the veil between what is and what is not rends easily. Go to the crossroads, and draw up the necessary lines. Make evocations and recite barbaric names; the Gorgo and the Mormo. Call the dogs, the spirit animals, and light imaginary fires. Walk through the walls into the landscape of the words, become one more first-person character within the narrative’s bizarre procession. Make the real a story and the story real, the portrait struggling to devour its sitter.
Obviously, this is a course of action not without its dangers, this attempted wedding of the language and the life; this ju-ju shit. Always the risk of a surprise twist ending with the ticket to St Andrew’s Mental Hospital; a painful, slow decline in company with the forsaken shadow of John Clare.
The Clare association hits a nerve. There is a public house in town, a former centre for the area’s artists, its bohemians, its chemically bewildered, recently remodelled and refurbished as the Wig & Pen in hope of pulling in a passing trade of briefs and magistrates that somehow never quite materialized. The owner of the bar commissioned a Sistine-type ceiling decoration with selected local figures interposed between the barristers and judges. The resultant work depicts the current author in an upper corner, deep in conversation with John Clare. What advice is he offering? ‘Don’t go too heavy on the working class thing’ possibly? More probably it’s ‘Find another job.’
The bed is comfortable and the attic room serene, another Fiery Fred conversion. Big John Weston did the pointing on the brickwork, overcome with hubris to the point of signing his creation with a chisel in the bottom right, above the skirting board. Weston, a former junky and, more recently, a former biped, is a hazardous anomaly put on this planet only to fuck up the fossil record: epileptic roofer; one-time skylight burglar. They told him it would end in tears. He broke both legs when he went through a warehouse ceiling and the door downstairs was unlocked all the time. On the occasion when he dived head-first from a third-storey roof while in a seizure he was lucky and his skull was there to break the fall.