I got up and hobbled away from him into a street leading from the square. As I regained the feeling in my feet and legs, I walked faster, until finally I was running along the empty pavement. Passing somewhere called Charlotte Street, where the restaurant and café windows were being cleaned by young men in denims, I could smell coffee, real coffee, the sort that people make in little machines after grinding beans. I have never tasted real coffee. When rare visitors came to our house I didn’t say, like actors do in television plays, ‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’ In our house it was never anything but Maxwell House.
I enjoyed running, so I carried on, flying into a big street called Tottenham Court Road, past shops full of Japanese electrical goods. A golden sun rose on my right. My reflection flashed from shop windows as I ran, effortlessly and with increasing speed, dodging and weaving through people on the pavements. I now had something to do in London; I was an early-morning runner. Carry on, faster, faster, pony-tail bobbing, arms carving through the air, legs striding. Stop. I have arrived at the end of Tottenham Court Road. I have been here before. The street is called Euston Road. A shimmering angled building stands opposite. I passed it last night. A magical mirrored building, reflecting life and movement. I have come a full circle. St Pancras … Fitzroy Square … Tottenham Court Road. I have a territory.
The pavement is suddenly crowded. I wonder if there has been an accident but the crowd exists only for a moment and then disperses. People are coming out of an Underground station. They have the numb, hurrying look of people going to work. Chinese men with brief-cases, Arabs in flowing robes. An African woman, with tribal markings on her face and a squash of chiffon on her head, is holding her daughter’s hand. The girl is wearing a miniature school uniform. I am captivated by the sight of so many different nationalities. Although I stand and watch the Underground travellers emerge for at least five minutes, I am disappointed not to see a single bowler hat. However, a policeman’s helmet is visible through the crowd so, scared, I move on, running back in the direction I’ve come from.
A few cafés are open now. I’m so hungry that I can smell them before I see them. It would be very ill-mannered to stop and stare through the windows and watch people eating and drinking, so I pass by at speed. The traffic fills four lanes and moves in irritated fits and starts. It must be the famous London rush-hour. A Japanese television in a shop window is showing TV AM. The correct time is superimposed on Roy Hattersley’s feet: 7.35 a.m. John and Mary will be getting up for school and college. No, they won’t be going anywhere this morning. Today is the first full day of their new status. They are the children of a murderer. Opposite them live a widow and her four children.
I have created chaos in the dull street where I lived meekly for twenty-one years. I know I can never go back.
6 Inspector Sly Investigates
6.15p.m. 13 Badger’s Copse Close, Grey Paths Estate. Wednesday evening
Detective Inspector Sly was getting impatient. He hated slobbergobs and Derek Dakin had been talking for ten minutes and forty seconds non-stop. Sly took this opportunity to study Derek and the interior of the living-room. He made mental notes, later to be inscribed into his notebook.
1. Furnishings and carpets: beige (also curtains)
2. Wallpaper: beige (with cherry pattern)
3. Framed pictures of steam trains (seven)
4. Bookcase: box files, encyclopedias, tortoise reference books
5. Ornaments: few; tortoise trophies on TV, plus cup for third-year hurdles: winner, Coventry Lambert
6. Arrangement of dried grasses on small table
7. Pets: cats (two); one with conjunctivitis
8. Children: (two); boy and girl (clean types)
9. Husband: (one) boring fart
10. Proof that Coventry Dakin has been domiciled at this address: pair of fluffy mules (size 6½) by the fireside
11. Wedding photo on bookcase: bride beautiful, smiling; groom rat-faced, unsmiling
12. Brown plastic handbag, containing: child benefit book, hairbrush, pkt clothes pegs, keys, bus tickets, two tampons (regular size), one cat’s flea-collar
Sly broke into Derek’s consciousness by raising his voice and looking stern. ‘So what time was it when you last saw your wife, Mr Dakin?’
Derek started to whimper and examine his fingernails; tears gathered in his eyes. Sly mentally noted:
13. Husband: possible poofter?
Coventry’s children left the room. They had never seen their father display extreme emotion before. The sight of Derek’s distorted face, together with the undignified grunts heaving from his chest, drove them into the hall. Sly shouted after them, ‘Don’t leave the house, I shall need to talk to you next.’ Detective Inspector Sly offered Derek no comfort; in his experience it only started them off again. Nor did he loan his handkerchief; he never got them back.
‘It was the word “wife” that set me off,’ Derek explained to Sly, as soon as he had stopped gulping and sobbing. ‘A wife is a woman who wears an apron and has her arms inside a mixing bowl. A wife is gentle and kind, and speaks loving words to her family. A wife doesn’t murder her neighbour, and then run away from home. …’
Mary and John Dakin sat at the bottom of the stairs. They looked like the non-threatening type of teenagers to be found inside the pages of a Littlewoods catalogue, usually pictured lounging on bales of hay, or beaming ecstatically on clean motorbikes. They didn’t know what to think; nothing in their previous experience had prepared them for the shock of being told that their mother was a murderer. Neither of them knew what to say to each other. They listened to the rumble of voices behind the living-room door in silence. The door opened; Detective Inspector Sly stood there, imposing in his dark uniform. ‘Mary, be a good girl and make your dad a cup of tea … plenty of sugar … he’s in shock.’ Mary glanced into the living-room on her way to the kitchen. Derek was shaking his body about; saliva hung from his mouth; his fingers twisted together like mating snakes.
‘My mother’s a murderer, and my father’s gone mad,’ thought Mary. She conjured up the atmosphere in the house at breakfast-time that morning. It was normal… ordinary … average … conventional. It was dull … safe … nice … there was NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. John stared down at the hall carpet; he was thinking that now he could never go back to sixth-form college where he was doing A levels. Not unless he dyed his hair and took to wearing sunglasses during the day. Worse, Coventry, his mother’s stupid name, would be in the papers. He had told his friends at college that her name was Margaret.
Inspector Sly stood up; the interview with Derek was nearly over. Derek was howling like an upset wolf. Sly watched him contemptuously. He thought, ‘Give me five minutes alone with him in the cells and I’d make a man of him. A good kicking is what he needs.’ Detective Inspector Sly was an inveterate advocate of a good kicking. He’d seen it work wonders. Men had left the police station with their backs invisibly bruised but their heads held high.
Mary came into the room with two mugs of thin, milky tea. She averted her eyes from her father. Sly gave her one of his ‘strong man with heart of gold’ glances; this consisted of slightly inclining his head, while pursing his lips and twinkling his eyes. ‘I can see that you’ll be a great comfort to your father in the days ahead, Mary,’ said Sly, using his ‘I know how to talk to teenagers’ voice.
Derek burst into a loud crying fit again and Mary quickly left the room. She was repelled and disgusted by the snot and tears running down her father’s face. She felt sorry for him, but sorrier for herself. Her life was ruined; she could never leave the house again. She would lose all her friends and now, with her mother gone, she would have to do all the ironing and housework. She looked at herself in the hall mirror. She thought: ‘I’ve aged ten years, I look at least twenty-six.’ She sucked on her gold necklace and sat back on the stairs, waiting to be called for her interrogation.
John was now upstairs, watching as Gerald Fox’s body, after being photogra
phed, prodded, fingerprinted and measured, was being finally loaded into the back of an ambulance. The enormity of his mother’s crime struck John properly for the first time. Gerald Fox no longer existed. He was a husk, a nothing, a nuisance. John wondered about his own death. He thought he would prefer to die in his sleep, at the age of eighty-five or before he became incontinent, whichever came first. John looked at his mother’s clothes hanging in her wardrobe. They were sensible and dull. Her shoes were worse. He opened the top drawer of her bedside cabinet and saw a packet of ‘Handie-Andies’ and five pairs of white cotton knickers. Then he found a locked diary hidden inside a hot water bottle cover. John put the diary inside his shirt. He didn’t want Inspector Sly reading whatever his mother had written. The gilt lock felt cold against his chest. He quietly searched the room for the key but found nothing. He would wait until this awful night was over and his father and Mary were asleep, and then he would break into the diary and read his mother’s thoughts. As he closed the door he whimpered under his breath, ‘Oh Mum, Mum.’
Inspector Sly had found the video tape of Vile Bodies. He was holding it out to Derek, who was denying ever having seen it before. Mary was shaking her head. Inspector Sly said, ‘It must be the lad’s, then.’ John came into the room and put Inspector Sly straight. No, he’d never seen it before; he wasn’t into that sort of thing. Pornography was boring and demeaned women. Sly thought, ‘Sanctimonious little git.’ He said, ‘Well if it doesn’t belong to anybody here, it must belong to Mrs Dakin.’
John and Mary glanced at each other and decided to say nothing in defence of their mother. After all, she wasn’t here, but they were.
Derek blustered: ‘My wife wouldn’t allow that filth in the house, she wouldn’t watch The Benny Hill Show without a cushion over her face. She’s a lady.’
‘Yes, a lady killer, Mr Dakin,’ said Sly, pleased with the pun. ‘Let me tell you something, old cock. None of us knows each other. We live cheek by jowl for years. We congratulate ourselves on knowing our spouses, inside and out. And then one day it’s brought to our attention that we don’t know one iota about what they’re really like; happens all the time. My own wife, who’s failed five driving tests out of nervousness, did a parachute jump for charity last week.’
7 Nelson and Trafalgar
Centre Point. I’ve heard of this building. It used to be famous. It kooks empty and rigid. It’s surrounded by a wind which drags and pushes people around its concrete walls. I would like to be inside Centre Point, in a room on my own at the very top of the building looking down, because I don’t know where London begins or ends. Can I walk round it in a day, or would it take a week or a month?
As I walk down the Charing Cross Road I see two young men in business suits kissing. One jumps onto a slow-moving bus. The man remaining on the pavement continues to blow kisses until the bus is out of sight. I see a middle-aged woman, dressed immaculately in black and red. She catches the high heel of one shoe in a crack in the pavement. She stumbles and shouts, ‘Oh bollocks!’ She pulls the shoe out of the crack and looks despairingly at the torn suede. I see an old man, dressed in a trilby hat, ragged clothes and wellingtons, as he takes a saxophone out of a distressed case and starts to play ‘Blue Moon’. A Japanese tourist takes the musician’s photograph, stops to listen and applauds at the end of the number. He then requests ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. The saxophonist sways inside his wellingtons and goes into a routine, lifting his instrument, then lowering it, then inclining it from side to side. I can imagine him twenty-five years ago. I think that he wore a spangled tuxedo and played with a big band and never thought that he would get old… .
The Japanese tourist claps his hands and smiles and bows, but walks away without dropping money into the open case. ‘I wish I could give you something,’ I say to the old man, who is trying to catch his breath. ‘You’re very good.’
‘No, I’m not good,’ he says, wiping his cloudy eyes with the end of his check-patterned tie. ‘I’m a very wicked man. God is aware of my many sins and is punishing me. I’m in hell. This is hell,’ he says, indicating the exterior of a bookshop and half of the Charing Cross Road. ‘I’m an object of pity, I have lost my dignity.’
I say, ‘No, I meant that your playing is good.’
‘My musical abilities have deteriorated considerably. I have painful arthritis in my fingers. God gave me the arthritis to remind me of my many sins. I can’t afford the aspirins for the pain,’ he adds. He puts out his hand; he is wearing a copper bracelet on his scrawny wrist.
‘I haven’t got anything,’ I repeat. ‘Not one penny.’
‘Then go away,’ he says. ‘You are distracting me from my work. Aspirins are seventy-nine pence a packet.’ As I walk away he begins to play ‘As Time Goes By’.
I’ve always loved books. I’m passionate about them. I think books are sexy. They are smooth and solid and contain delightful surprises. They smell good. They fit into a handbag and can be carried around and opened at will. They don’t change. They are what they are and nothing else. One day I want to own a lot of books and have them near to me in my house, so that I can stroll to my bookshelves and choose what I fancy. I want a harem. I shall keep my favourites by my bed.
The Charing Cross Road is a celebration to books: they are everywhere, lolling about in piles. Displaying themselves in windows. Artistically arranged in pyramids. Fanned on tables. Thrown into boxes. Stacked to ceiling height and heaped on floors. As I look into the shops my mouth waters and my fingers itch. I want to handle the books, caress them, open and devour them.
A party of foreign schoolchildren passed me; they were carrying plastic bags. Most of them were eating. One boy was wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet. The elastic keeping the helmet in place was cutting into his chin.
As I watched, one of the children threw a paper-wrapped half-eaten hot dog into the gutter. If I’d been quicker I could have retrieved it and stuffed it into my mouth but I hesitated and a taxi squashed the hot dog and drove away with the remains stuck onto its front wheel.
I followed the children, hoping for more crumbs from their table. To my surprise, Trafalgar Square was at the bottom of the Charing Cross Road. The fountains frothed and sparkled in the sunshine. The foreign schoolchildren ran about with bags of birdseed, encouraging the pigeons to swoop down and feed, but when the birds enveloped them in a flapping mass, they screamed and waved their arms and sent the pigeons flying. A fat woman in a beige raincoat with a pixie hood was standing at the base of a metal lion, throwing pieces of stale bread and cakes onto the floor in front of her. Fragments of iced fancies, toasted teacakes, scones and granary baps scattered around my feet. The woman crooned to the birds. ‘Yes, my darlings, eat it all up, you’ll be big and strong. Now, now! No squabbling! Stop it, you naughty boy!’
She was addressing her remarks to a scruffy brown bird that had landed on her shoulder. I wanted to run into the feathery mass and snatch the crumbs off the floor; and I was preparing to do just that when another large gang wheeled out of the sky and obliterated the food. The woman stooped amongst them emptying the bag. The pigeons covered her; their claws clung to her permed curls; she was laughing and protesting. ‘Silly birds, get off at once, you’re hurting me.’
But the birds continued to sit smugly on their human monument. When they eventually flew off the woman looked up and followed their flight path longingly. Then, earthbound and clumsy, she picked up the carrier bag, took a tissue from it and tried to wipe the pigeon excrement off her coat.
I said, ‘They’ve ruined your coat.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It goes in the machine on a hot wash cycle and comes out as fresh as a new-minted sixpence. I come here every day so I must have a reliable washing machine. A Zanussi. It’s the only one. I can fully recommend it. It’s the only one that can cope with the pigeons’ little presents. Goodbye.’
She picked her way daintily through the birds with many apologies:
‘Sorry to disturb you, dears. May I
pass by, birdies?’
I watched her as she reached the pavement, then lost sight of her in the crowds. I sat on the side of a fountain and tried to formulate a plan. I’ve always planned my life in advance. I’m a great believer in lists.
Yesterday’s list was:
Order smokeless fuel
Clean chimney
Flea powder for Softy
Wash loose covers
Buy teen bra (34A cup)
Shave legs, pluck eyebrows
Pick Derek’s tortoise book up from library
Find odd socks
Phone Mum about Sunday dinner
Post Noreen’s birthday card
Has Bella got my big whisk?
Ask doctor if I’m going mad
Light bulbs
Christmas wrapping paper
Cancel the Sun
Find Derek’s bicycle clip
Tackle Big Mouth about rumour
Today’s list is:
Give myself up to the police?
Suicide?
Try to live in London?
I attempted to wash the soot away by using the water in the fountain but, even as I rubbed roughly at my skin, I knew that only hot water and a soapy lather would do the job.
I felt safe in Trafalgar Square; there were plenty of people about and they provided distraction from the cold and hunger and unhappiness I was feeling. In the afternoon a small crowd of demonstrators gathered to protest about something to do with South Africa. Somebody, Nelson Mandela, was in prison and the people in the square thought it was time he was let out. They crossed over the road and I went with them to the steps of a church. I stood in the most dense part of the crowd, to get warm and hide from the many police in attendance. A microphone couldn’t be made to work, so an ancient man wearing a green duffel-coat formed a megaphone with his hands and shouted towards the people watching him. The wind and the noise of the traffic blew his voice away. Only a few words reached us: ‘. . . oppression … imperialist past … shame … racists … Thatcher … Reagan … God…’