“Aye. ’E’s ginger and ’e’s barmy and ’is dad’s still in the army.”
Several of the other fellows smirked at this old ragamuffin taunt as they prepared to man the scaffolding’s remaining ropes, but Bill was having none of it. A tubby bloke who had a piping voice he may have been, but Bill had won a medal fighting the Burmese and all the men, including Albert Pickles, knew they’d best not go upsetting him.
“ ’Is dad’s passed on, Bert, so we’ll ’ave no more of that, eh? ’E’s a decent chap who’s ’ad ’ard luck and just got a new baby. Now, let’s ’aul ’im down, then all of you can ’ave your break.”
The men accepted the reproof good-naturedly, then took the strain upon their cables as Bill ventured a shout up into the glorious well above them, telling Ginger to be ready so he shouldn’t spill his pots or knock them over when the platform started to descend. There was no answer, but with the suspended planking up at such an altitude Mabbutt had not really expected his announcement to be heard. He bobbed his ruddy chin in the direction of the labourers, whence they began to let sink the broad arc of wood down from the murmuring, gilded firmament of the cathedral to the brawny back-or-forth and subdued hubbub of its thronging floor.
The pulleys overhead struck up their measured, intermittent squealing like a horde of women lowering themselves by inches into the cold waters of a public bath. Pulling a hanky from his trouser pocket, Billy Mabbutt mopped the liquid glaze of perspiration from his rosy crown and thought of Ginger Vernall as he’d been out in Crimea, battering one of his fellow squadders bloody in their barracks when this other chap made some remark about the sort of background Ginger came from. Bill felt sorry for the man, that was the truth of it, to see how proud he’d been back in the war and see him now brought low by everything. No sooner was he back from fighting Russians when old John, his dad, went potty and then died not many years thereafter. Still shook up from all of that, Bill shouldn’t wonder, Ginger had took up with his young girl then married her, and right away she’d had first one kid then another. Billy never had a lot of truck with women, being more at ease with other men, but he’d seen such a lot of fellows get through muck and musket balls only to have their legs cut out from under them by wife and family. Ginger was stuck with hungry mouths to feed and no place of his own where they could live, still at his mam’s out Lambeth and a miserable old biddy she was too, from Mabbutt’s one encounter with her.
Ninety or a hundred feet above, the underside of Ginger’s podium came closer to a rhythmical accompaniment of groaning hawsers, grunting workers and shrill pulley-wheels. Stuffing the handkerchief back where it came from Bill turned round to face the trestle table where he’d put his mortarboard so he could give it a wipe down before he had a cup of tea. The clergy of St. Paul’s had been persuaded after an unseemly bout of haggling to boil up a big tub of water over the cathedral’s stove so that the two capacious teapots made of earthenware and brought along by the contracted labour could be filled. These steamed there at the table’s far end now, alongside a collection of the dirtiest tin mugs that Bill had ever seen, another loan from the begrudging clerics. Dented and dilapidated, these had blotchier complexions than poor Strawberry Sam, Bill’s young apprentice at St. Paul’s. Shit-coloured rust was crusted at their rims, and one was gnawed through by a bum-wipe of corrosion so you could see daylight. Rubbing the last scabs of grout from off his board, Bill made a mental note to see as neither him nor Ginger got the cup that had a hole, unless they wanted hot tea pissing in their laps.
He was made gradually aware of a commencing ruction somewhere to his rear and so looked back towards the scaffold just in time to see the platform winched down below head-height, now a yard or two at most above the ground. Old Danny Riley with his beard like Mr. Darwin’s and that same gent’s monkey mouth was saying “Who’s that? Blessed Mary, now, who’s that?” over and over like the village fool, so that Bill glanced about to see if some Archbishop or important man like that had stepped out from behind a post and come amongst them. Finding no one he looked back towards the wedge of boards that skimmed now only inches from the tiling and which with another scream from its four pulleys would be landed.
Coming from the figure squatting there at the construction’s centre was a stammering “hoo-hoo-hoo” noise, only audible once all the winches were at rest, and even then you couldn’t tell if it were laughter or the sound of weeping you were hearing. Tears rolled, certainly, across the figure’s grubby cheeks, but ran into the crevices of what might have appeared a blissful smile were not the eyes filled with confusion and with pain. Upon the boards in front of it, writ by a fingertip dipped in Venetian Yellow and with wobbling characters such as a you
ng child might attempt was the word TORUS, that Bill knew to be a term come from astrology by virtue of the fact that he himself was born in May. What Mabbutt couldn’t fathom, though, was how the word came to be written on the planks at all, when he knew full well as the man that he’d sent up there to retouch the frescoes couldn’t write his name, perhaps might copy out a letter’s shape if he were so instructed, although obviously that had not been the case alone there in the upper dome.
Billy walked leadenly as in those nightmares of pursuit towards the heaping cage of scaffolding, pushing aside the navvies stood stock still and gawping in his way. Amidst the susurrus of gasps surrounding him he heard Bert Pickles saying, “Fuck me! Fuck my arse!” and heard the clattering footfalls of the priests come running to see what the noise was all about. Someone beside the figure shipwrecked there upon his raft had started crying. From the sound, Bill thought it was young Sam.
Looking up from the scattered pots and brushes that he sat amongst and from the inexplicable bright scrawl, the person who’d come down from the high gantry’s pinnacle stared back at Mabbutt and his other workmates, and then giggled in a sobbing sort of fashion. It was not as though there was no recognition there in his expression, but more as if he had been away so long that he had come to think his former occupation and companions all a dream, and was surprised to find they were still there. Billy could feel hot tears well in his own eyes now, returning that destroyed, uncomprehending gaze. His voice twisted an octave higher than it’s normal pitch when Billy tried to speak. He couldn’t help it.
“Oh, you poor lad. Oh, my poor old mate, whatever ’as become of you?”
One thing was sure. For the remainder of his life no one would ever, when they spoke of Ernest Vernall, call him Ginger.
Billy walked his broken friend home over Blackfriars Bridge and stayed a while with Ernie’s wailing family once they’d recognised the stranger brought home early from his work. Even Ern’s mam was weeping, which Bill was surprised by, having never thought she had an ounce of pity in her, though her son’s condition would have made a stone cry. Not so much the way Ern looked now as the things he talked about – trees, pigeons, lightning, corners, chimneypots – a tumult of plain, ordinary things that he would mention in the same hushed tones with which one might discuss a mermaid. The one person not in tears amongst the household was the two-year-old, young John, who sat there staring at his transformed father with those big dark eyes whilst mother, grandmother and baby sister wept, and all that time he never made a sound.
Ernest refused to speak about what had occurred up in the storm clouds over London, save to John and Thursa some years later, when his son was ten years old and Thursa only eight. For their part, Ernest’s children never would reveal what they’d been told, not even to their mother or to John’s own offspring when he married and had kids a decade later, at the tail end of the 1880s.
On the morning after and in fact on every day that week Ern Vernall, having by that point regained at least some of his senses, made a brave attempt to take up his employment in St. Paul’s again, insisting there was nothing wrong with him. Each morning he would reach the foot of Ludgate Street and stand there for a time, unable to go any further, before turning round in his despondent tracks and making back for Lambeth. He had some work for a while, just on and off, though not in churches anymore and not at any height. Anne had two further children by him, first a girl named Appelina, then a boy that Ernest was insistent should be christened Messenger. In 1868 Ern’s wife and mother for the first time in their lives agreed on something and allowed him to be placed in Bedlam, where Thursa and John and sometimes the two younger kids would make first monthly and then yearly visits until the July of 1882 when, in his sleep and aged just forty-nine, Ern perished from a heart attack. Except his eldest children, no one ever found out what he’d meant by the word TORUS.
ASBOS OF DESIRE
What Marla thought was, it had all gone wrong when the royal family had killed Diana. All of it was bad things what had happened after that. You knew they’d killed her, ’cause there was that letter what she wrote, how she’d thought, like, they’d do it with a car crash. That was proof. Diana was expecting it, what happened to her. Marla wondered if she’d had a whatsit, premonition, a prediction thing that night it happened. That bit what you always see with her and Dodie and the driver coming out the Ritz where it’s like on the hotel cameras and they go through the revolving doors. She must have known in some way, Marla thought, but it was like Diana’s destiny what couldn’t be avoided. Marla thought she must have known when she was walking towards the car.
She’d been, what, ten? Ten when they’d had the car crash. She remembered it, just being on the settee with a blanket all that Sunday crying, in her fucking mum’s house up on Maidencastle. She remembered it, but then she’d thought she could remember watching telly when she was a baby, when Prince Charles and Princess Di got married in St. Paul’s. She could remember it as clear as anything and she’d go on about it to her mates but then, like, Gemma Clark had said how that was 1981 and Marla was nineteen now, what meant she’d been born in 1987 or whatever, so she can’t have done and must have seen it on a video. Or it was, like, Edward and Sophie and she’d got mixed up, but Marla wasn’t having it. They could do all this stuff now, where they faked things? Like September the Eleventh or the Moon landing and that, or like – who was it? – Kennedy. Who was to say they’d not got married after 1987, but it was all covered up and all the pictures changed with CSI effects? Nobody didn’t know nothing for sure, and they were fucking liars if they said they did.
What made her think of Di was she’d just popped back in her flat from where she’d been up Sheep Street, that way, just popped back ’cause she’d remembered where she thought she might have left some, and when she was looking down beside the sofa she’d found all her scrapbooks with Diana in instead. There was her Jack the Ripper books and all her Di stuff, where she thought she’d lost it or she’d lent it out to somebody. Other than that, what she’d been looking for weren’t down there, but she’d jumped on what turned out to be a bit of cellophane from off a fag-pack thinking it was something else, how everybody must have done one time or other, when you see that glint down in the carpet and you think you might have dropped some, or somebody might. But there was nothing in the flat except for Jack the Ripper and Diana. If she wanted it that bad she’d have to earn it, wouldn’t she?
She had a king-size Snickers, then she made herself boil up a kettle for Pot Noodle so as she could say she’d had a healthy meal, although who would she say it to, now Keith and them had cut her out? Oh, fucking hell. She only had to think about it and it made her stomach do that sort of drop thing and she’d go right into one, start thinking about everything there was might happen and what would she do and all of that, all of the usual, and it really made her need a smoke. She sat there in her armchair with its straps all busted under the foam cushion, spooning worms and gristle in hot dishwater into her mouth and staring at the wallpaper where it was starting to peel back up in the corner, looking like a book was opening. Whatever else she did, she wasn’t going out tonight, not on the Beat, not down the Boroughs. She’d go out and get the homeward traffic later on this afternoon, but not tonight. She promised herself that. She’d sooner go without it altogether than risk that.
To give her brain something to gnaw on until she could sort things out, she thought back to when she’d last had some and it had been good. Not just this Thursday, yesterday, which was the actual last time, obviously, ’cause that was shit. Not any time before that in the last five months, when she’d been getting fuck all out of it, no matter how much she was doing, but the last time it was good. That had been January, just after Christmas when her mate Samantha, who’d worked further up the Andrew’s Road in Semilong, had come to put her hair in rows. She was still in with Keith then – both of them were in with Keith – and things were still all right.
After they’d seen to Marla’s hair, which had took ages but looked great, they done a pipe and give each other half-and-half. She weren’t a les and neither was Samantha but it gave a boost to it, it was well known. It pushed it up another level, you’d be sucking on the pipe while they kneeled down and sucked you off, then you’d change round. Down on the fucking old Jamaican flag rug what her mum had given her when she moved out, still there six inches from her toe where she was sitting now, eating her noodles. It was January, so they’d had both bars on of the fire and had their knickers off, in just their T-shirts. Marla let Samantha have first go because she’d come and done her hair, so she could hear the whistling noise like blowing down an empty biro when Samantha sucked the smoke in and when Marla got down on the floor and licked her out. It tasted like the lemon from a gin and tonic, and Franz Ferdinand were on the radio, cassette, whatever, doing ‘Walk Away’. When it was her turn next, Samantha was well off her face and gobbled at her like a dog with chips while Marla stood and took it back and it was fucking perfect, not quite how it was the first time but still magic.
What it was, when it was good, it felt like that was you, that was how you were meant to feel, that was the life that you deserved and not all this, this walking round like you’re asleep and feeling like you’re dead. Up there it was so good you thought you were on fire and could do anything, even in just a T-shirt by a two-bar fire with red spots on your legs and someone’s pubes gone down your throat. You felt like fucking Halle Berry, somebody like that. You felt like fucking God.
This wasn’t helping anything, it was j
ust making Marla want some even worse. Putting the empty plastic pot down on the coffee table that she’d covered with some gift-wrap paper under glass after she’d seen it done on a makeover show, she picked up her Diana book instead, from where she’d placed it on the sofa with her Ripper paperbacks. A great big thing with coloured sugar-paper pages, Marla had begun collecting articles to put in it when she was ten and when Diana died. The cover had a picture that she’d done stuck over it with Pritt Stick so there were all bumps and creases in it. It was an old photo Marla had cut from a Sunday magazine, showing a place in Africa at sunset with the clouds all lit up gold, but what Marla had done was cut a face of Princess Di out from another page and glued it over where the sun was, so it looked like Di was up in Heaven lighting everything. It was so beautiful she hardly could believe, now, that she’d done it, specially not when she’d been ten, and she’d not seen anywhere else since then where anyone had come up with a picture that was half as clever an idea as hers. She’d probably been like a genius or something back then, before everybody started going on at her.
She had another look beside the sofa, just in case, and underneath as well, then sat back in the armchair, sighing, running one hand back over her head, over the rows where they were coming all to frizzy bits. That was because Samantha wasn’t round there anymore. Marla had heard she’d gone back to her parents up in Birmingham when she’d come out of hospital, so there’d been nobody to see to Marla’s rows. It wasn’t like she had the money to have them done properly, so she was letting them unravel until some time when she could afford to have them seen to. Marla knew they made her look a state and they were bad for business, but what could she do? She’d had a tooth fall out three weeks ago from all the sweets and that weren’t helping neither, but at least with that she could still practice smiling with her mouth shut.
That was bad, what happened to Samantha. She’d got in the wrong car, or been dragged in. Marla hadn’t seen her since to ask her. These two blokes had took her over Spencer Bridge to do it, round the back of Vicky Park, and left her half dead in the bushes, pair of fucking cunts. There was a girl got done like that it must be every week, but it weren’t one in four of them that got reported. Not unless it was a big event, like that last August when there was the rape gang in the BMW took women off from Doddridge Street and Horsemarket, and that girl what got dragged from near the poolroom down in Horseshoe Street then took up Marefair round the green behind St. Peter’s Church. Five rapes in ten days that had been, got on the television news and everything, everybody saying something would get done about it. That had been a good six months before what happened to Samantha. Marla sat there in her busted armchair thinking about how Samantha had got up from off the floor wiping her chin when Marla finished coming, then they’d had a little kiss, still rushing, tasting all the smoke and love-juice in each other’s mouths. Later that night they’d had another go because it was just after Christmas, but it wasn’t such a hit and neither of them had got off that second time, they’d just kept at it ’til their jaws hurt and they’d got fed up.
Thinking about it – and it was one of the only things that didn’t frighten her to think about – Marla would bet there wasn’t a room anywhere inside these flats what hadn’t had somebody fucking in it. Not a kitchen or a lavatory or anything where someone hadn’t stood there with their pants off doing something or else having something done to them. She could still sort of see her and Samantha gobbling each other down on the Jamaican flag, and if she thought about it she could picture other people too, in the same room as she was but perhaps from long ago like 1950 or whenever. What if there’d been someone like her mum, some slag who’s in her forties and when the old man’s out, bang, she’s got some tramp in off the streets and giving her one up against the wall? Marla could see them, with the woman old and fat and wobbling standing with her hands up on the wall just over Marla’s mantelpiece above the two-bar fire, her great big bum out and her skirt up, while this comical old tramp with an old trilby covering his bald patch gives it to her from the back, still with his hat on. Marla laughed and was dead tickled at how she’d imagined it in such a lot of detail when she never normally called pictures to her mind like that, or even managed any dreams. What little sleep she got was empty darkness like a big black fag burn that you fell in and climbed out of later not remembering a single thing. She was still looking at the fat lass and the tramp that she imagined, doing it against the wall above the fireplace, when the doorbell rang and made her jump.
She crept along the passageway to the front door, past where the bathroom and her messy bedroom both led off, and wondered who it was. She thought it might be Keith come back to say he’d take her on again, but then she thought it might be Keith come back to say she owed him still and smack her round the room. She was relieved and disappointed both at once when she opened the door up on its chain and it was only that bloke Thompson from up Andrew’s Street, the ferrety old queer bloke who banged on about the politics and that. He was all right, and always sounded kind when he was talking to you, never talking down at you like most of the political ones did, the black ones and the whites. He’d called round once or twice in the past year or eighteen months, just going round from door to door and getting signatures for some petition or else telling people about meetings there were going to be, to stop the high-ups selling off the council houses and all that, and Marla always said she’d go along but never did, ’cause she’d be either working or else smoking.