Voice of the Fire

That’s about the time that he woke up and started screaming and twitching about until he kicked the car door open, but by then, as I said earlier, he’d had his chips. I’ll tell you what was bad: he had one leg stuck out of the car and I don’t know how long I must have stood there staring, but it burned right through. It just fell off and lay there on the grass, this burning leg. To be quite frank I’ve never seen a picture like it.

In the strictest confidence, the thing that everybody thinks is cleverest about the operation was a thing I hadn’t even thought of for myself until the deed was done. To hear the papers talk, the idea is I did it all on Guy Fawkes’ Night so that the fire would be sure not to draw attention, which I must admit is very smart indeed. I wish I’d thought of it before the fact. The truth is, that’s just when the idea came upon me, on that night, there in that field. Came to me in a flash, from out of nowhere. That’s just how it happens sometimes, I suppose. It wasn’t until later as I stared into the flames I thought about it being Bonfire Night. I thought, ‘Well, that’s appropriate.’

After I’d stood there quite a while and made my eyes run with the smoke, it came to me I’d best be moving on. I walked across the fields to where a gap cut through the hedge led out on to the Hardingstone Lane. As luck had it, just as I came out on to the path I ran straight into these two chaps, both sozzled from the look of them, and coming home from some Guy Fawkes’ to-do down at the local Palais. The Salon de Danse, I think I’ve heard it called. As I approached, I realized that they could both see the car on fire across the field, and thought I heard them mention it.

I thought it best to put on a bold face and bluff it out, and so I said, ‘Looks like somebody’s had a bonfire’ or some words to that effect, the Guy Fawkes notion having come to me by now. They both stared at me and said nothing, so I hurried on towards the main road up ahead.

It was a clear night. Proper crisp. The moon was out and showed up very bright upon the dead Queen’s cross there by the London Road. Everything smelled exciting, frightening, full of smoke and gunpowder and like a war. My scar was itching so I stood there scratching at my head as if I was somebody gone out. I had a suitcase of unmentionables in one hand and a box of England’s Glory matches in the other. I was someone else, with their whole life in front of them, and I was scared to death but it felt grand.

I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to fill the world with babies, songs and lovely underthings. I’ll treat my Lily to a hat and go to bed with plain girls to be kind. I’m not a bad sort underneath, and I believe the jury know that. Oh, a rascal sometimes, to be sure, sharp as you like with no flies on him, but a character, a man with a romantic heart that leads him into trouble. I look down at them from out the dock and know I’ve one foot in the door already with them, how they look at me. It’s just an instinct. You can always tell, you know, when they look hesitant.

They’re buying it.

Phipps’ Fire Escape

AD 1995

They’re buying it.

The last words of the previous chapter, written in grey light, stand there upon the monitor’s dark stage, beneath the Help menu that’s lettered up on the proscenium arch. The cursor winks, a visible slow handclap in the black, deserted auditorium.

The final act: no more impersonations. No more sleight-of-voice or period costume. The abandoned wigs and furs and frocks are swept away. Discarded masks and death-husk faces are returned to Property and hanging on their pegs. The grub-chewed skull of Francis Tresham dangles next to the wax imprint of John Clare, moon-browed and lantern-jawed. A cast of Nelly Shaw, the lips drawn back across her teeth in burning agony, bumps up against the papier mâché cheek of Alfie Rouse, an unintended kiss.

On stage, although the set remains the same, the scenery is somewhat modified. Some of the buildings on the painted nineteen-thirties backdrop have been whited out and new ones added; Caligari hulks against the slate November sky. It’s 1995. The lights go down. The empty rows wait for the final monologue.

Pull back now from the screen, the text, the cursor and its mesmerizing trancebeat pulse. Become aware of sore eyes, overflowing desk. The hollow ashtray fashioned like a yawning frog, a gross cascade of cigarette end and sour pumice spilling from its china throat. The index finger of the right hand, poised above the keys. The author types the words ‘the author types the words’.

Stand, and feel the energy that crowds the room, a current siphone

d back through time from all those future readings, all those other people and the varying degrees of their absorption, their awareness half-submerged within the text and half-detached from moment, from continuum, and therefore reachable. Draw in a massive breath of it, its scorch and crackle. Everything feels right and powerful. Everything is happening correctly.

All around, the reference books relating to the town are heaped up into towers; become a small-scale reproduction of the town itself. There’s Witchcraft in Northamptonshire — Six rare and curious tracts dating from 1612, and the selected poems of John Clare. The Coritani, the crusaders, the compendiums of murder and the lives of saints in a topography of history made solid, cliffs of word some forty centuries deep that must be navigated to attain the door, the stairs beyond, uncarpeted and thunderous. Move down them like an over-medicated avalanche towards the living room; the television and the couch.

History is a heat, oppressive and exhausting. Fall rather than sit upon the at-risk heirloom sofa and attempt to locate the remote control by touch alone, groping among the permafrost of magazine and empty teacup that conceals the carpet, for its own good. It would be much simpler just to look, admittedly, but more depressing. Fingers close on the device, a fruit and nut bar as imagined by a silicone-based life-form, and locate the necessary stud. A vague southerly flail ignites the news on Channel Four. History is a heat. Zeinab Badawi nightly holds aloft the blackened crucible for our inspection.

Balkan ceasefire conference chopped up into seven-second mouthfuls by a motherly and helpful camera, to reduce the risk of choking. Both sides’ representatives appear embarrassed, blanching at the flashbulbs. Playground brawlers called out to the front, made to apologize and shake hands with an after-school resentment already apparent in the eyes and voice. Let’s not have any more talk about rape camps or genetic cleansing. Go back to your desks.

Forthcoming visits to the North of Ireland by President Clinton are expected to focus attention on a peace process that’s rapidly becoming an embalming process. Clinton, Kennedyesque if one measures things in hair and blowjobs, has announced that he won’t come to Ireland just to switch on Christmas lights, although if Congress has the White House phones cut off by then and the electric disconnected, he may think again. Two families of Irish Clintons, one from each side of the border, are contending for the honour of the presidential issue sprayed against their family tree, but hopefully it won’t erupt into sectarian violence.

An analysis of last night’s budget, which concludes the likeliest effect is that the wealthiest ten per cent will now be better off, the poorest better off dead. The Nigerian government has lynched Ken Saro Wiwa for protesting against the environmental sodomy inflicted on a homeland traumatized by petrochemical adventurism; Shell-shocked. Momentary whiteness under the lagoons of Mururoa.

Old editions of the local Mercury & Herald from the sixteen-hundreds list Northamptonshire’s then recent deaths from causes long since rendered utterly unfathomable: Rising Lights, the Purples. One man listed here as ‘Planet Struck’. Sat slack-jawed in the cathode aura of this photogenic Armageddon, the phrase seems overdue for a revival. The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us. Nothing is conveyed save for an underlying sense of landscape at its most unstable, pliable as sweaty gelignite. History is a heat, a slow fire with the planet just now coming to the boil, our culture passing from a fluid to a vaporous state amid the violent and chaotic seethings of the phase transition. Here, in the rising steam, a process moves towards its point of crisis, interrupted only by a break for the commercials.

Startlingly, amidst the beautifully modulated list of global thrills, spills and extinctions, comes a near-unprecedented mention of Northampton: council tenants in the Pembroke Road whose gardens back on to the railway line attempt to call attention to a new leukaemia cluster. You can hear the spectral squeal and mutter of the night freight on the other side of town when there’s a west wind. Brother Mike, who’s prettier, sometimes funnier, but frankly nowhere near as charismatic, lives just off the Pembroke Road with his wife Carol and their kids. They want to move, but showing their prospective buyers round the premises in Haz-Chem suits and helmets isn’t going to make things any easier.

To be quite fair, the whole spread of estates from Spencer to King’s Heath has had a post-nuclear appearance since the sixties. Just a decade earlier, King’s Heath had won awards for its design, seen as the perfect model for a future England which, unluckily, it proved to be. By 1970 even the sweetshop had steel shutters, and neglected dogs banded together into terrifying medieval hunting packs. The local nightspot seemed to have been decorated by a schizophrenic window-dresser who’d last visited the cinema for Barbarella, or perhaps Repulsion, with gaunt female mannequins emerging anorexic and concussed from wall and pillar into an emetic light show. King’s Heath youth struck matches on the plaster nipples, passing round ten Sovereign, and drank themselves into amnesia or animosity beneath the swirling biriani-coloured radiance of a faulty gel-wheel, later for the most part either knocked or banged up in accordance with their gender. The town shrugs, in timeworn response to its own physical decline: it’s not as if it was expecting something better.

Switch the television off, momentarily defeated. Partly concealed by three weeks of unread New Scientist and empty biscuit wrappings, is a draft of the preceding chapter. Still not sure whether the shop in Bridge Street that offered a job to Lily Rouse was a confectioner’s or not, but in the end decide to let it stand in deference to the processes of fiction rather than the less substantial processes of history. Lily remains between the sugar-cataracted jars; proclaims her husband’s innocence with wince-inducing loyalty while weighing out the Rainbow Drops. They drive him out to Bedford Prison, Bunyan’s second home, and he goes to the gallows, ultimate suspender, with her name upon his lips, no minor feat of memory when one considers all the wives and co-parents he might have thought to mention. What’s it all about, Alfie?

Bunyan: first to chart the land of spirit and imagination lying under middle England, mapping actual journeys undertaken in the solid realm on to his allegorical terrain. Likewise, it seems that the intention of his work was to awake the apprehension of a visionary landscape from beneath the subjugated streets and fields; fire an incendiary dream to make the dull and heavy matter of the shires and townships burn with new significance, and be transformed. September 1681 saw a new charter brought down by the Earl of Peterborough in Northampton, with these scenes reprised in Bunyan’s Holy War the following year, but relocated to the allegoric town of Mansoul. In this alias, the sense of mythic weight and moment wielded by the place and its inhabitants is underscored, the town’s huge and invisible centrality confirmed.

One great advantage that The Pilgrim’s Progress as a narrative enjoys over the current work is in its structure, with the pilgrimage progressing to a necessary ending in redemption. Here, however, there is no such tidy resolution within reach. The territory is the same, but here we have no single pilgrim save perhaps the author, or the reader, and only uncertain progress. While redemption’s not out of the question, it’s an outside chance at best. It’s hardly been a major theme thus far.

This final chapter is the thing. Committed to a present-day first-person narrative, there seems no other option save a personal appearance, which in turn demands a strictly documentary approach: it wouldn’t do to simply make things up. This is a fiction, not a lie.

Of course, that tends to place the burden of responsibility for finishing the novel on the town itself. If all its themes, motifs and speculations are to be resolved, then they will be resolved in actual brick and flesh. Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. All of the subtle energies pass through here on their journey into form. If properly directed, they’ll provide the closures that the narrative demands: the terrible black dogs shall come. There shall be fires, and severed heads, and angel language. An unlikely harmony of incident and artifice is called for, that may take some tracking down. There’s nothing for it but to take a walk.

Outside, the rain falls hard upon Phipps’ Fire Escape, a constant amber static through the Lucozade glow of the sodium lamps. This whole estate was raised by brewer and industrialist Pickering Phipps around the turn of the century as a last-ditch attempt at spiritual salvation. Long odds, from the look of things.