Jerusalem

  it’s still mean-spirited the way they always think the worst of someone or at least they seem to think the worst of me it’s hurtful sometimes and across the way there Doddridge Church I’ve often wondered what that little door’s for halfway up the wall I’ll bet they used to spread their nasty little rumours about Philip Doddridge calling him a wanker calling him a cunt when he was practically a saint a man who really cared about the neighbourhood not that I’m trying to make comparisons but I mean you can see the similarities I feel good I feel good about myself and if there’s people who just want to think the worst who won’t give anyone the old benefit of the doubt then that’s their problem rolling downhill nearly home now car park on the right I think they put plague victims there and on the left another car park the old Doddridge burial ground dead people everywhere we’re temporary we’re not forever I suppose that it’s a blessing in a way free will or not whatever we’ve done wrong whatever we’ve supposedly done wrong time wipes it all away eventually and nobody remembers and the little things don’t matter everything’s forgiven when it’s gone the debts are cancelled and there’s no permanent record because nothing’s permanent the whole world’s temporary and that’s our what’s it called statute of limitations our get out of jail card ah now here we are Black Lion just over the other side of Marefair at the bottom it looks dead be lucky if it’s still here come next year when we moved in we had a little newsagents down at the bottom corner of Chalk Lane just opposite there was a balding bloke who ran it Pete Pete something and veer to the right around the corner on our little walkway you can

  see the valley floor the station and the traffic junction at the crossroads all the lights I

  didn’t have a choice in being who I am over Far Cotton Jimmy’s End there’s

  no ghosts nothing there and nothing’s haunted three doors down I find my key and there safe sanctuary home at last and none of it the Boroughs it can’t get you now I flick the light on in the hall and peel my jacket off it’s wringing wet it’s glistening looks like a dead seal hung there dripping from the coat-hook do you know I’m suddenly exhausted I’m completely knackered I suppose I’ve just done nearly a full circuit of the district and it’s not like I’m a walker in the general run of things of course there was that business at the Bird in Hand I can’t believe it now stood here at home I can’t believe I ran out of the pub literally ran and that, all the adrenaline, that’s probably another reason why you feel worn out through in the living room I flump down in the armchair and ugh fuck my trousers cold and soaking wet against my legs my arse where they’ve been rained on this is fucking horrible it’s not much after nine but I don’t know I might as well just go to bed it’s left me in a funny mood this evening has I might as well just go to bed and sleep it off feel better in the morning I know one thing for a certainty if I don’t get these trousers off then it’s pneumonia and I suppose I’m feeling a bit lonely I wish Mandy was at home but even then

  stand up and even that’s an effort put the lights off downstairs and creak up to bed the bathroom’s a bit dazzling I take my shirt and trousers off my shoes and socks the shirt is absolutely sopping its gone all transparent there’s a wet, pink-tinted oval where it’s sticking to my stomach for a second I thought I was bleeding leave the wet things draped over the bath’s rim till the morning I suppose my underpants and vest feel a bit damp but no they’ll just dry naturally I take my pills three of them every night it’s a palaver you don’t think about it when you’re young squint through the condensation on the mirror while I brush my teeth look at the state of me I’m like a garden gnome a stepped-on David Bellamy a hobbit stuck in quarantine with spearmint rabies dripping off my chin I’m sick of looking at myself pad over to the toilet bare feet on the chilly tiles lift up the seat so that it isn’t splashed and after a few moments’ waiting while my knob decides on what it wants to do there’s a pale golden rope of piss unravelling into the tinkling bowl it’s funny standing looking down we’ve got two rolls of toilet paper standing on the cistern lid and looking down beneath that there’s the lifted seat and lid and then the gaping bowl it looks like a white cartoon frog like an albino Kermit from the Muppets staring at me boggle-eyed with an indignant and betrayed look while I stand here pissing down his throat even the toilet blaming me for something there’s a thing you have to do you have to press the lever down two or three times before it flushes while its gargling I yank the string to kill the bathroom light and I’m along the landing and in bed before the cistern noise has died away to hisses drips and piddles it’s a sort of private superstition I suppose I don’t know what I think would happen if I didn’t make it into bed before the noises stopped it’s more a sort of game a sort of habit I’ve got no idea why I do it oh that’s

  nice the mattress creaks I can feel all the ache and tension soaking out of me I rub my feet together and they’re dry and cold but warming with the friction and that’s good hopefully I’ll sleep through tonight no dreams no cellars nothing running at me with its face unfolding safe now safe here in our little house our little corner of the Boroughs opposite the station ten years and I’m hoping that this place will be unrecognisable a big development exploding up from where the station is and most of this, this place, most of it cleaned up move the social stragglers out most of it swept away that’s if the money lasts the boom the money that they need to do it no the land down here the property it could be really nice it could be really valuable not that we’d ever sell part of the neighbourhood that’s us part of the furniture roll over on my side and drag a tuck of duvet up between my knees to stop them knobbling against each other ahh that’s nice that’s

  I suppose the people down here in the main they’re not that bad it’s really in the pubs you see them at their worst and let them take the piss out of me if they’ve got a mind to I’ll still be on top of things when they’re all gone so let them have their bit of fun it’s not their fault they’re hopeless, living in a hopeless place, they’re and I’m speaking as a Marxist now modified Marxist they’re just victims they’re the end result inevitably of historical and economic processes but then I mean you look at them drunk all day it’s the kids who bear the brunt of it a lot of them the parents they don’t want jobs not prepared to work they’re not

  it’s like a flooded earthworks did I come here as a boy what what where was I

  not prepared to work that’s right blame everybody else for their own problems blame the council blame the system blame me we’re all doing what we have to do and some of them down here I mean they knock their wives about they say it’s the frustration it’s the poverty but then why do they have so many kids with kids to hold you back how are you ever going to make it, get to where you want to be in life take me and Mandy children would have just got in the way of our careers and look at us we’re happy very happy but some people they’re just human rubbish they’re just

  scalloped cliffs of mud a long way off across the grass and distant red brick railway arches I’ve been here before look there’s a toy a plastic elephant dropped in a puddle it’s I’m sure it once belonged to me the last time I was here and isn’t somewhere near a house an old what what did I

  all of the roughs the scruffs the tough and rumble of them all their kids all violent doing drugs I used to read them ghost stories at Christmas mothers wearing short skirts fishnet tights effing and blinding you should hear them not brought up they’re dragged up it’s a shithole full of shits there’s paedophiles down here there’s sex offenders well they’ve got to put them somewhere crackheads and it’s all their own fault it’s not ours not mine they ought to pull their socks up but then

  there’s that old well scarlet house that stands up from the wasteland on its own the grey sky overhead and in my pants in my grey pants and vest I walk towards it through the weeds I need the toilet weren’t there lavatories down in the cellar of that building if I can remember how to find them if they’re not all cracked and full of backed up

  but then who am I r />
  THE ROOD IN THE WALL

  It’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder.

  Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for actors and theatrical types on the basis that they’re mostly sissies, horticultural lads and so forth. It’s a well-known fact. Still, Studs can sympathise with how it must be when they’re out of work and ‘resting between parts’. The inactivity, he knows, can drive a feller nuts. Why, even Studs can find himself just sitting, dreaming up some hypothetical and complicated case to solve there in his mind, and he’s a tough, unreconstructed Brooklyn wise-guy who thinks with his fists and punches people with his head. He doesn’t dream in black and white, he dreams in radio. What must it be like for some neurotic bit-part player when the studio doesn’t call? The weather-beaten sleuth would bet his bottom dollar that those precious flowers most likely spend their time rehearsing for some casting call that never comes, a cowboy or a big game hunter, something masculine like that. Who knows, maybe a private dick? He chuckles wryly at the thought and stubs his biro out in a convenient coffee-cup. Studs is a role that would require a lot of time in makeup.

  Sure, he’s not a pretty boy. He likes to think he’s got a lived-in look, albeit lived in by three generations of chaotic Lithuanian alcoholics who are finally evicted in an armed siege after which the premises remain unused for decades, save as a urinal by the homeless. Then it all burns down in an insurance fire. He sits there at the dressing-table mirror in his seamy office and surveys his crime-scene countenance: move right along, nothing to see here. He takes in the seemingly haphazard corrugations of his forehead, a volcanic rock-face risen from the straggling tree-line of his brows to the combed-over pinnacle, whence it commences its descent through black and slippery long grass to the nape. The eyes are full of pessimism and what would appear to be some manner of unspecified disorder; eyes that have seen far too much from slightly different elevations and conflicting angles, roughly equidistant from the ice-axe nose, broken more often than a hooker’s heart. Then, over everything, a sparse but noticeable pebble-dash of Sugar Puff-sized warts to make sure no one misses the asymmetry, a laugh-track prompt sprinkled redundantly across his face for anyone who somehow hasn’t got the gag already. People used to tell him he sure wasn’t any oil-painting, although they were obviously unfamiliar with the cubists.

  Elsewhere in the building, perhaps out in his front office, there’s a telephone like a spoiled child demanding everyone’s attention. He calls to his dizzy secretary – “Mum? Mum, phone” – but evidently she’s on one of her unfathomable breaks, perhaps connected with the aforementioned dizziness. Whenever he’s up here from London stopping over for a few days he tells her that she should change her medication, but she doesn’t listen. Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t remember where you put your socks. Ten rings and then it goes to answerphone, his message that he’d taken the precaution of recording over hers when he arrived here yesterday. She doesn’t get a lot of calls, whereas a client or his agent might get on the blower to him, theoretically, at any time of day or night. That scatterbrained tomato could just rerecord her own apologetic mumblings after he was gone, and in the meantime would most probably be honoured to have his rich tones bewildering such members of her peer group as could still remember how to use a phone.

  “Hello there. This is Robert Goodman. I’m not in just at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks. Cheerio.”

  Studs has a flawless English accent. In his line of business, a guy never knows when he might need one, possibly while undercover and impersonating some variety of Duke or cockney barrow-boy, conceivably as part of a wild caper which involves the crown jewels and a blonde of independent legs. Though he could use a juicy case right now, preferably a tangled incest drama with Faye Dunaway though he’d make do with blackmail or divorce if needs be, Studs resists the impulse to go pick up the now silent instrument and interrupt the caller. If by any chance it should turn out to be a family struggle over an inheritance that’s escalated to a kidnapping or home invasion, Studs can find out later. The last thing he wants is for prospective clients to think he’s desperate from his tone of voice when they can work that out themselves, like everybody else who knows him has to do, from the gnawed furniture and the discarded, disappointed scratch-card dross around his flat.

  Sat at the dressing table, zebra-painted with the shadow cast by the venetians, he reflects upon the grubby criminal career he’s led before becoming a hard-boiled investigator. He’s dealt non-specific drugs in Albert Square and been a scar-faced squealer up at Sun Hill nick. He’s loitered by a Lexus in a leather to increase the sales of car alarms, he’s growled and glared with Gotham City greasers, worn a Dr. Seuss hat for the purposes of his initiation in an early New York Irish street-gang and raped Joan of Arc’s big sister back in fifteenth-century France. That’s how it is with Studs. He’s a wild card, a maverick who won’t play by the rules. He’s in a big town where the streets aren’t always mean but can be pretty fucking ignorant. He’s back, he’s in Northampton, and this time it’s personal, by which he means it’s definitely not professional. If only.

  Frankly, though it goes against Studs’ naturally coarse and testosterone-fuelled nature, he’d do pantomime, be one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters or kneel in his shoes for Snow White given half a chance. This calls to mind his since-departed sidekick, Little John Ghavam. Studs ain’t no sentimentalist, but not a heartless night of moral compromise goes by without him missing his toad-breeding dwarf pal and their reeling drunk Todd Browning escapades when they were headstrong, relatively young, and from the point of view of an observer, very disconcerting. John, like Studs, had been around the block career-wise, spending some time as a scavenger amongst the Jawa sand-people before he hooked up with a gang of similarly sized time travelling larcenists and soon thereafter banged a lot of former knitwear models for the specialist market. Studs thinks one such enterprise was called Muff Bandits but he may have made that up or dreamed it, like when he’d insisted the late local artist Henry Bird had been the husband of Vampira in Plan 9 from Outer Space when actually Bird’s wife was Freda Jackson, Karloff co-star of Die, Monster, Die. It was a dumb, rookie mistake that anybody could have made, but Studs is a P.I. who prides himself on his rep for reliability and he’ll most likely take the error with him to his grave. He figures that’s the kind of guy he is.

  The thing that’s hard for Studs to live without is Little John’s extreme unlikelihood. When an unlikely person dies it just makes the occurrence of other unlikely people that much more unlikely. Characters like Little John or for that matter Studs himself are like statistical outliers of reality. They skew the figures. When they vanish from the picture then the graph relaxes back towards a bland and comfortable mean, whereas with Little John, he gave you the impression that the world was capable of anything. The laws of physics cowered in surrender every time the little fucker drank, perched on his barstool for eight pints, nine pints; you never saw him going to the toilet. Studs has theorised that his buddy was completely hollow, possibly some kind of toby jug that had spontaneously developed human consciousness. An unexpectedly resilient toby jug, admittedly: at the casino just off Regent Square he’d hurl his compressed mass onto the roulette table, hollering “All ’ands on dec
k” in customary helium tones. He’d been among the nightmare Crown & Cushion crowd providing the captive composer Malcolm Arnold with an audience. Out near Stoke Bruerne at the Boat, the pub by the canal where all the Sunday sailors used to congregate in yachting caps and polo shirts, their younger wives in sporty-looking shorts, the rampant Little John would thrust his face into the nearest denim crotch.

  “It’s great. Their husbands all just laugh and go, like, ‘Steady on now, little fellow. ’Ad a spot too much, ’ave we?’ and things like that. Nobody wants to ’it a dwarf.”

  Studs pictures John stood in the garden of his house in York Road with the “Toad Hall” plaque outside the door, just standing there by the stone sundial cackling in delight with massive toads all over him, the flowerbeds, the sundial, everything.

  Of course, the most unlikely thing about his late friend is that Little John was actually the grandson of the Shah of Persia. Studs shakes his unprepossessing head and chuckles ruefully, as if there’s someone watching. Grandson of the Shah. To Studs it’s much like quantum theory, women, or contemporary jazz in that it don’t make any sense.

  He reaches for another biro and then cancels the reflexive gesture halfway through. His croaker tells him he should scale his habit down to maybe just a fountain pen once in a while, on weekends or at special celebrations. Ah, the hell with it. He pushes back his chair and rises from his dressing table in the hope that some activity might take his steel-trap P.I. brain-box off his cravings. Studs goes through to the front office, tricked out to resemble a carpeted landing, staircase and English suburban downstairs hall to throw his creditors and gangland adversaries off the scent, and checks the message on the answerphone.