Jerusalem

  Once up the steps and inside number seventeen, there was the plain coconut doormat and the passageway, with ghostly ochre flowers fading into oblivion on its wallpaper and a flypaper-coloured light falling upon its worsted-burdened coat pegs. The first door upon the right led to the then-evacuated front room with its ponderous grandfather clock, its horsehair settee and its easy chair, its paraffin stove and its polished cabinet of fancy crockery that no one ever used, its table mat-sized rented television with a cabinet-style set of doors that closed across the screen. The second offshoot from the passage led into the similarly empty living room, while straight in front of you the stairs rose to the upper floor, carpeted with a writhing brown design that looked like catkins made from Christmas pudding. The top storey of the old house had got his and Alma’s room towards the rear up at the stairway’s top, then up one sideways step onto the landing where their gran’s room likewise overlooked the narrow L-shape of the semi-tiled back yard, with Tom and Doreen’s room, the biggest in the house, being along the landing’s end, its windows overlooking Andrew’s Road above the ones downstairs with the resigned white china swan. This upper level, being mostly uninhabited by day, he’d thought of as his home’s night-storey, lending it a slightly sinister and creepy air. Whenever he’d had childhood nightmares that had used his own house as their set, the scariest bits had always taken place upstairs.

  The ground floor was too cosy to be frightening, despite the shadows in the generally sunless kitchen and those in the living room, just off the gloomy hall. Here space was at a premium, occupied by the drop-wing dining table with two matching seats, a stool and rugged wood chair making up the set. Two comfy armchairs (one of which Mick’s cousin John had fallen back out through the window from years earlier) flanked the meteoric-looking iron fireplace (into which John’s sister Eileen had plunged face first at around the same time), with the tiny room also accommodating the large junk-sarcophagus that was the sideboard. A stepped plaster beading, once presumably intended to be decorative, ran round the edges of the ceiling and conspired to make the roof seem even lower than it did already. Hanging from the picture rail of the wall opposite the hearth were washed-out portrait photographs in heavy frames, beige and white images depicting men with knowing grins and bright eyes gazing from beneath the thickets of their brows: Mick’s great-grandfather William Mallard, and his gran’s late husband, Mick’s maternal grandfather Joe Swan with the moustache that appeared wider than his shoulders. There was a third picture also, of another man, but Mick had never bothered asking who it was and nobody had ever bothered telling him. Instead, he called to mind the face of the anonymous chap in the picture as a stand-in if somebody mentioned a dead relative he hadn’t known. One week the man might be Gran’s brother, Uncle Cecil, and the next he could be Cousin Bernard, drowned during the war whilst trying to rescue others from a sinking battleship. For a bewildering fortnight he’d been Neville Chamberlain before Mick had worked out that the Hitler-appeasing former premier wasn’t a close relative.

  Cut into the dividing wall between the front and living rooms there was a recess which contained a single panel of stained glass, a floral emblem in bright yellow, emerald green, and red like ruby port. Some evenings around teatime, when the sun was going down behind the railway yards across St. Andrew’s Road, an almost-horizontal shaft would strike in through the parlour window, glance across the dipped head of the china swan and blaze through the connecting pane of coloured glass into the dim-lit living room to splash its marvellous and trembling patch of phantom paint upon the bland-faced wireless, wall-mounted between the back-yard window and the kitchen door.

  The poky kitchen with its white distempered walls and chilly blue and red slabs making up its floor was down a short step from the living room. Descending this, you had the cellar door on your immediate left, a rusted meat-safe stood behind it there atop the cellar stairs. Upon your right was the back door which led out to the top half of the yard, with just beyond a coarse stone sink sporting a single brass cold-water tap, inlaid with verdigris, beneath a solitary window. Opposite had stood the gas-stove, the old woodworm-riddled kitchen table and the treacherous mangle, and above them, from a nail, had hung the one-size-fits-all zinc bath that the family used for its various ablutions. When required this would be half-filled with hot water from the copper boiler, a gunmetal-coloured cylinder pimpled with condensation at the room’s far end, next to the boarded-up and unused kitchen fireplace. Mick remembered the short wooden pole that would be propped beside the copper for the purposes of stirring up the simmering laundry, one end waterlogged and blunted by perpetual use, its grain and fibres turned to corpse-pale slime and given a cyanic tinge by the deployment of excessive Reckitt’s Blue, a small cloth bag of sapphire dye dropped in amongst the washing to ensure that shirts and sheets looked iceberg-white. He could remember shelves that weren’t much more than grubby planks on brackets, bowing with the weight of saucepans, iron frying pans, the pudding basin that contained a cloudy amber puddle of solidifying dripping in its rounded depths with their mosaic craquelure.

  Upon the day in question, Mick’s gran Clara had been working quietly and methodically out in the kitchen, juggling several tasks at once the way that she’d been taught to when she worked in service. Clara Swan, who’d died not far into the 1970s, would have been in her early sixties then, but to her grandchildren had always seemed as ancient and authoritative as a biblical papyrus. What she lacked in height she made up for in bearing, upright to the point where no one noticed that she wasn’t tall. She stood straight like an ivory chesspiece, scuffed by years of tournaments; was as impassive and as patient and as purposeful. Always a spare and slender woman in her iron-eyed youthful photographs, by 1959 she’d been more stick-like, the long silver hair that hung below her waist bound up in a neat bun. The broomstick spine topped with grey wool gave her the aura of a mop, if mops were seen as things of simple dignity, as endlessly reliable in their utility, were as revered as sceptres and not treated as a lowly household object found most often in the kitchen.

  Number seventeen was Clara’s house, with her name on the rent-book, and she ruled it unobtrusively. She never laid the law down and she didn’t need to. Everybody knew already where her lines were drawn, and wouldn’t dream of crossing them. Her power was a less obvious and ultimately more impressive kind than that wielded by May, Mick’s nan, his other grandmother. May Warren had been an intimidating rhino of a woman who would get her way through warning growls and threatened slaps and what in general was a bullying demeanour. Whip-thin Clara Swan, by contrast, never raised her voice, and never threatened. She just acted, swiftly and efficiently. When Alma at the age of two, already more foolhardy and impetuous than anybody else within the household, had decided to try biting Clara, Mick’s grandmother hadn’t shouted or announced a smacking. She’d just bitten Alma’s shoulder, hard enough to pierce the skin and hard enough to ensure that Mick’s sister never, ever tried again to kill someone by eating them. If only, he reflected, she’d cured Alma of the strangling as well. Or the attempts with poison gas, as when Alma persuaded her young brother to stay with her in the kitchen while she lit a mustard-yellow shard of sulphur. Or her pygmy head-hunter approach, like when she’d shot him with that blowpipe dart. No, really. Mick supposed, in fairness, that even his granny’s methods of behaviour modification had their limits. Clara had been in the kitchen on that drowsy afternoon, been shredding suet, baking a bread pudding, boiling handkerchiefs and shuffling back and forth from one task to another uncomplainingly, alone there with the aromatic bogey broth. The badly-fitting back door, hanging open on this fine day to air out the house, allowed the chat and babble of her daughter Doreen and the children to come floating in to Clara from where they’d been sitting just outside, on the slim draughtboard strip of cracked pink and blue tiles that formed the upper level of the house’s cramped back garden.

  Sitting now in his still, relatively spacious Kingsthorpe parlour, stinging from his honoura
bly-withdrawing-not-retreating hairline to his dimpled chin, he tried to reconcile the cluttered confines of his childhood with the streamlined TV Century 21 surroundings of his current middle-age. Mick looked once more at the reflection of his raw face in the glass front of the cabinet, deciding on the strength of his disaster-struck complexion that he must be Captain Scarlet. He tried fitting the mostly contented adult he’d become with the unspeakably contented three-year-old he’d been and found that the connection was surprisingly smooth and continuous, Mick’s recollection of his young self neither clouded by unhappiness nor tainted by that sorry wistfulness he sometimes heard in others’ voices when they talked about their boyhood days. Life had been good then, life was good now. It was just that life was different, in that it was being seen through different eyes, being experienced by a different person, almost.

  The most striking thing about the past, at least as Mick remembered it, was not the obvious difference in how people dressed, or what they did, or the technology they did it with. It was something more difficult to grasp or put a name to, that by turn delightful and unsettling sense of strangeness that came over him on handling forgotten photographs, or suddenly recalling some particularly vivid reminiscence. It would come to him as the weak flavour of a fleeting atmosphere, an unrecoverable mood, as singular and as specific to its place and time as the day’s weather or the shapes its clouds made, just that once, never to be repeated. He supposed that the peculiar quality that he attempted to describe was no more than the startling texture of the past, the way it might feel should you brush your memory’s fingertips across its nap. It was the grain of his experience, composed from an uncountable array of unique whorls and bumps, from almost indiscernibly protruding detail. The string netting of the decomposing dishcloth hung by the back door, stiffened and dried into a permanently tented elbow shape, perfumed by dirty water and warm ham. The finger-sized holes in the blocks that edged Gran’s yard-wide flowerbed, beside the faded red and blue check of the path. A secret ant-nest gnawed into the crumbling cement between two courses of the kitchen wall, beside the steps that led down to a lower level of their closed-in yard. That afternoon there’d been the smell of sun-baked brick, black soil, the tinny scent of recent rain.

  Now that he thought about it, not without a faint vestigial flicker of resentment, the entire life-threatening incident that had occurred in the back yard that day had been as a direct result of being poor. If he’d not been one of the offspring of the Boroughs then he wouldn’t have been sitting on his mother’s lap in the sunlit back yard sucking the nearly-lethal cough-drop in the first place.

  Mick – or Michael as he’d been then – had been suffering from an inflamed gullet for about a week before that point. When Doreen’s homemade remedy of butter-knobs that had been rolled in caster sugar failed to work, she’d wrapped him up and taken him down Broad Street, off the Mayorhold, to the surgery of Dr. Grey. Though neither Mick nor any of his family had thought about it then, he understood now that the doctors who had tended to his neighbourhood must have resented every minute of their unrewarded, undistinguished toil in ministering to such a lowly and benighted area. They’d almost certainly be working harder than their more illustrious colleagues, just by virtue of the Boroughs being what it was and having more ways people could get ill. They must have come to hate the sight of all those over-anxious mothers wearing toffee-coloured coats and tea-towel scarves, parading half-baked snot-nosed children through their practices at the first sneeze. It must have been all they could do to feign an interest in the wheezing brat for the five minutes that it would be in their office. That was clearly the approach that Dr. Grey had taken with Doreen and Mick that time. He’d shone a torch down Michael’s carmine and inflated gullet, grunted once and made his diagnosis.

  “It’s a sore throat. Give him cough-sweets.”

  Mick’s mum would have no doubt nodded gravely and compliantly. This was a doctor speaking, who’d had training and could write in Latin. This was someone who, by just a glance at the small child she’d brought in with a poorly throat in which it was experiencing soreness, had seen straight away that this was a near-textbook case of Sore Throat that required immediate intervention from a bag of Winter Mixture. Nineteen-fifties social medicine: it must have seemed a step up from the days when laryngitis would be driven out by exorcism. Mick and Alma’s parents had been grateful for it, anyway, and Doreen would have thanked the general practitioner for his advice with touching earnestness before she’d wrestled Mick into his duffle-coat and carried him back down St. Andrew’s Road, possibly stopping off at the newsagent, Botterill’s on the Mayorhold, to buy the medicinal confectionery that had been prescribed.

  And that was how he’d come to be in their back yard, in his pyjamas and his scratchy tartan dressing gown, squirming on Doreen’s lap while she perched on the curve-backed wooden chair brought out into the garden from the living room. His mum sat just beneath the kitchen window with her back to it, the rear legs of her seat against the edging of the kitchen drain, a foot or so of gutter running from below the window to a sunken trap close by the ant-nest, hidden near the garden’s three rough steps. The kingdom of the ants had been the property of Mick’s big sister, and, as she’d explained it to him at the time, was hers by legal right of being eldest child. When she was playing Sodom and Gomorrah with the insects, though, to give Alma her due, she’d let Mick be a kind of work-experience avenging angel to her merciless Jehovah. He’d been put in charge of rounding up escapees from the Cities on the Plain, until Alma had fired him for preventing one of his six-legged charges running off by hitting it with half a brick. His sister, who’d been at that moment either drowning or incinerating ants herself, had turned upon him with a look of outrage.

  “What did you do that for?”

  Little Mick had blinked up at her guilelessly. “It kept escaping, so I stunned it.”

  Alma, half-blind even then, had squinted at the ant in question, which had lost a whole dimension, and then squinted at her brother in appalled incomprehension before stamping off to play alone indoors.

  Alma had been at home that afternoon by virtue of it being the school holidays, probably wishing she could be out in the park or meadow rather than stuck there in the back garden with her mum and useless croaking bundle of a baby brother. While Doreen and Mick had sat there on the upper strip of path, Mick’s elder sister, then a tubby five- or six-year-old, had batted energetically around the yard’s brick confines like a moth trapped in a shoebox. She’d run up and down the garden’s three stone steps a dozen times, her white knees pumping back and forth like juggled dumplings, then raced in a circle round the nine-foot-by-nine-foot enclosure, half brick paving, half compressed black dirt, that was the bottom of the garden. She’d hidden from nobody in particular, twice in their outside toilet and once in the narrow rectangle of dead-end concrete alleyway that ran along its side, the left-hand side if you were sitting on the bowl and facing out.

  That little shed with its slate roof – their outdoor lavatory down at the bottom of the yard without a cistern or electric light – had been most notable to Mick amongst the Warren family’s various anti-status-symbols. Their back toilet, he had realised at the age of six or so, was an embarrassment even within a neighbourhood not known for its amenities. Even their nan, who lived on Green Street in a gas-lit house that had no electricity at all, at least she had a cistern in her lav. Trips to the loo after the sun went down didn’t require a stuttering Wee Willie Winkie candle or a big tin bucket filled near to its brim with water from the kitchen tap, the way they did along St. Andrew’s Road.

  As a small child, he’d hated their outside lav after dark and wouldn’t use it, far preferring either just to hold it in or else use the pink plastic chamber pot stuck under his and Alma’s bed. For one thing, he’d been slightly built back then, rather than a great hulking lummox like his sister. Whereas she could confidently clomp off down the garden path with a huge sloshing bucket in one hand and flickerin
g night-light in the other, he could barely lift the bucket using both his hands; would only have been able to affect a comic stagger as far as the garden steps before he’d spilled the ice-cold water down his leg and/or set his blonde curls alight with the incautious flailings of his candle.

  Anyway, even if somehow back then in his larval cherub stage he could have managed to successfully transport the heavy pail, their yard by night was altered, unknown territory, too eerie to negotiate alone. The gap-toothed stable roof across the bottom wall was a mysterious slope of silver slate where rustling night-birds came and went through the black apertures. Its grey, ramshackle incline with the dandelions and wallflowers struggling from between its cracks was a steep ramp that led up into night. The tiny five-by-three-foot stretch of alleyway between the toilet and the garden wall was plenty big enough to hold a ghost, a witch and a green Frankenstein, with lots of room left over for those black and spiky imps like charred horse-chestnuts that there used to be in Rupert. Mick had always had the feeling, during childhood, that the back yards of St. Andrew’s Road by night were probably a bustling thoroughfare of ghouls and phantoms, though that may have just been something that his sister told him. Certainly, it had that ring about it.

  It had been all very well for Alma. Not only had she been big enough to lift the bucket, but she’d always been much, much too comfortable with the idea of spookiness. It was a quality, he thought, that she had actively aspired to. Nobody could end up like Mick’s sister had unless it was on purpose. He remembered when, aged eight, he’d had a passion for collecting boxed battalions of minuscule Airfix soldiers: British Tommies just two centimetres tall in ochre plastic, ant-sized snipers sprawling on their bellies, others posed on one leg charging with fixed bayonets; or Prussian Infantry in bluish-grey, frozen in mid-throw with their funny rolling-pin grenades. You’d get a dozen soldiers sprouting from each waxy stem, fixed by their heads so that you had to twist them free before you played with them, perhaps five stems in every window-fronted cardboard box. He’d been halfway through an elaborate campaign – French Foreign Legion versus Civil War Confederates – when he’d become aware that both his armies were abnormally depleted. Ruling out desertion, he’d eventually discovered that his elder sister had been stealing soldiers by the handful, taking them down to the outside toilet with her (and her bucket and her candle) when she paid it a nocturnal visit. She’d apparently discovered that if you should light the soldiers’ heads using the candle-flame, then miniature blue fireballs made of blazing polythene would drip spectacularly down into the waiting bucket, making an unearthly vvwip – vvwip – vvwip sound that was terminated in a hiss as the hot plastic met with the cold water. He imagined her, sat there on the cold wooden seat beside the bent nail in the whitewashed wall where scraps of Tit-Bits or Reveille would be hung for use as toilet paper, with her navy knickers round her swinging ankles and her eager face lit indigo in ghastly flashes from beneath as a diminutive centurion was turned into a Roman candle. Was it any wonder that the thought of lurking back-yard spectres hadn’t bothered her? The moment that they’d heard her footsteps and the clanking bucket, they’d be off.