of the window on the right now is the stretch of turf and trees that run down to the brown-green river, which in Eddie’s younger days is always known as Paddy’s Meadow although he expects they’ve got some different title for it now. He peers through bloodshot eyes at the old children’s playground at the bottom of the grassy slope there that he still calls Happy Valley. There’s a little sunlight falling through the clouds to strike upon the rusty roundabout and on the blade of the dilapidated slide, and Eddie feels a lump come to his throat because it’s all so precious. He recalls adventuring amongst the reeds down at the water’s edge with all the other grubby little boys, and how they liked to scare each other by pretending that there was a terrible long monster in the river what would snatch them if they get too close to it. He looks out at the empty meadow now and feels convinced somehow that all those days are still there, in the rushes, on the squeaking swings, still going on except that he’s too far away to see it all. That must be how it is. He cannot find it in himself to think that any moment, anybody, anything is ever truly lost. It’s just that him and everybody else moves on, and find themselves washed up in times and circumstances they don’t fully understand or like much, necessarily, without a way of getting back to where they’re happy and contented. There’s a lot about the world these days that Eddie doesn’t have the measure of. He’s not sure what to make of this new government that just got in, these Labour people who don’t talk or look much like the Labour people he remembers, and the business with Princess Diana getting killed in that car accident takes Eddie by surprise as much as anyone, how the whole country seems to have fallen to pieces for a while with all the crying. It appears to Eddie like there’s more news all the time these days, until he feels like he’s full to the brim with it and one more model with an eating disability or gang of raping footballers could make all of the knowledge that’s already in him spill out on the floor. By now his taxi’s at the traffic lights where Andrew’s Road crosses the foot of Spencer Bridge and Grafton Street, and he finds himself looking at the lorry park just past the lights and on the far side of the road, the Super Sausage place that used to be a meadow with a public baths up at one end. It’s still too light for any of the girls to be around, and Eddie’s glad because he hates to see that, how the women in that line of work are getting younger all the time. He’s tired. The world’s making him tired, and Eddie fidgets in the rear seat where it feels as if his seat belt is too tight, like it’s not done up the right way. The lights go green, the cars move on and now they’re coming past the fenced-in lorry park to where the train yards are behind the wall there on the right, and on their left is the short strip of grass between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street that was once a row of terraced houses. Eddie can’t help taking a long look up the street he was born in as his cab goes by the bottom of it, where that eerie single building still survives down near the corner there all on its own. The old slope rises up with the Spring Lane School playing fields on one side, and across the road there on the other are the flats they put up in the 1930s after they tore down the homes where Eddie and his family and their friends all lived. The rounded balconies are peeling and the entrances to the courtyard inside have all got gates on now. Up at the hill’s top there are those two blocks of flats bigger than all the rest, Claremont and Beaumont Court, the towers standing there victorious when everything around has been knocked flat. The street don’t look much, he admits, but it’s where he began and it’s still got that sort of light inside it. Eddie shuts his eyes upon his birthplace, and there’s all those floating jelly blobs of colour that you get. The accidental pattern that they have to them reminds Eddie of something and he can’t think what, then realises it’s the scar his dad’s got on his shoulder with the triangles, the wavy lines. He thinks about his parents and it comes to him that it’s one hundred years exactly, maybe even to the month, since they first came here to Northampton and laid eyes on Scarletwell Street. How about that? Doesn’t that beat everything? A hundred years. He kind of feels the car pull up outside the Railway Club and kind of hears the driver say “We’re here” which gives him satisfaction, but if truth be told by then Eddie’s already dead a good few minutes.
Up the line by just shy of ten years in 2006, Dave Daniels strolls down sunlit Sheep Street on his way to Alma’s exhibition. Other than the round church, everything is different and he can’t work out which of the windows might be those of his old house, the one that Andrew was excluded from, or even if his old house is still there. He’s got a vague idea it might be one of those demolished to make way for the huge corned beef-coloured premises belonging to the Inland Revenue, but isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter. He hardly remembers spending that first year or so here, anyway, and what with Andrew’s eldest taking his own life like that David has come to blame the situation back then in the early ’Fifties for his nephew’s death, although he knows the truth of it is probably a lot more complicated, much less black and white. Things usually are. Further along the street he peers in through the open gateway to the yard where the old beech tree used to stand, but after having talked to Alma on the phone the other night he knows what to expect. The tree is gone, a thing as old as the round church itself that had withstood all the crusades and civil wars, finally poisoned in the night by some bigwig proprietor of an adjacent business who’s got plans for the location that the beech tree and its preservation order are unfortunately standing in the way of, or at least if all the ugly local rumours Alma has passed on to David are to be believed. He shakes his head, suspecting that it’s just the way the world is going. When he reaches Sheep Street’s end he crosses a dual carriageway that wasn’t there before and walks beside the empty yawn of unkempt grass where the Matafancanta used to be, just down from the still-standing bus station recently voted the ugliest building in the country. He remembers Alma telling him that quite apart from being hideous the whole thing has its entrance at the wrong end so that busses have to do a complete circuit before entering, this due to a town planner working with the blueprints upside down. It’s nearly funny. He turns right before he gets to the old Fish Market that’s up there at the top end of the Drapery and walks down by a Chinese restaurant with a multi-storey car park just across the busy road. He doesn’t know this place at all. He’s looking at some sort of brutal traffic-junction where there used to be the cheery confines of the Mayorhold, which he knows for Harry Trasler’s shop that he and Alma, way back, scoped for comics almost every Saturday. He never looks at comics these days, even though they’ve become fashionable to the point where adults are allowed to read them without fear of ridicule. Ironically, in David’s view, this makes them a lot more ridiculous than when they were intended as a perfectly legitimate and often beautifully crafted means of entertaining kids. At age thirteen, David’s idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he’s in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response? David descends into a sodium-lit pedestrian subway system which takes him beneath the hurtling traffic to emerge on the far side of a broad auto-waterfall that he thinks might be called Horsemarket. Heading down beside the churning flow of steel David anticipates the Barclaycard Credit Control Centre that stands on Marefair’s corner at the bottom but discovers even that is gone, replaced by some variety of leisure/entertainment complex. Walking along Marefair almost to the Castle Station end he turns right into Chalk Lane, which he thinks should take him to the little nursery where Alma’s show is happening. He’s immediately drenched in poppies, spurting from the distressed mortar of a very old-looking stone wall there on his right. The sudden scarlet saturation brings to m
ind the news he hears a few weeks back, of how the extradition process that will see Charles Taylor tried for war crimes in a glass box in The Hague is just now getting underway. About time. Fifty thousand people dead in the ten years the civil war was going on until they finally declared an end to it in 2002, and the UN peacekeeping forces were required to stay there until, what, six months ago? It’s staggering to think that all that harm and carnage can be instigated by a single individual, pretty much. “I nearly killed your ma. I nearly killed your pa. Now give me clemency.” Not likely. Joyce and Bernard have been dead a year or two but David’s memories of those few frantic weeks spent trying to extricate his parents from Sierra Leone’s nightmare are still with him, just as sharp as if the whole thing were still going on somewhere. Ascending past a humble limestone building he believes is Doddridge Church, he notices a seemingly redundant doorway stranded halfway up one wall and thinks about his nephew, Marcus, who will now be frozen at nineteen forever in his thoughts. He thinks about the prejudices that his dad Bernard encountered when he first arrived here in the ’Fifties, and the prejudices he brought with him. His ideas of status, the defensive snobbery of Krio families escaped from slavery to populate a British colony and earn the deep resentment of Sierra Leone’s native people. All these little cogs that turn the bigger cogs, in history and in people’s hearts, a mechanism that’s almost impossible to perceive properly, its action taking place over the span of decades, centuries. The way that everything works out. For his own part he’s getting tired of Brussels, wants to maybe kick back for a while with Natalie and their two kids, live on the savings and Natalie’s income for a while and just see what comes up. He wants to enjoy life while it’s actually happening rather than retrospectively or as a thing deferred until the future. It can all be over just like that, a sudden civil war, a looming big exam, you never know, and David wants to live each moment like an ethically-sourced diamond. He can see the nursery up ahead, a modest crowd of people that he doesn’t know gathered outside and in the middle he sees Alma in a fluffy turquoise jumper, waving to him. Every moment. Every moment like a jewel.
In 1897 Henry and Selina stop dead in their tracks to gape, halfway down Scarletwell Street. It’s such an unlikely sight that for a moment it feels like they’re dreaming or enchanted, and they take each other’s hands without a word as if they were a pair of little children. Tied up to its lamppost there outside The Friendly Arms, the animal ignores them. After maybe half a minute, a stout little feller with big side-whiskers comes out from in the public house with a big glass of ale that he gives to the creature, what commences drinking it. The man, who they will later learn is Mr. Newton Pratt, looks from the animal to Henry and then laughs. “Blimey! Did you two know each other, then, back there in the old country?” Henry laughs as well. “Well, speaking personally, I never been to Africa, although I’ll own this feller’s mom and pop could very well have once run into mine. Where did you get him, you don’t mind me asking?” The man doesn’t mind at all. “Got ’im from Whipsnade Zoo when they’d not got the space and they were gunna sell ’im to the knackers yard for glue. Horace, ’is name is. It looks like ’e’s took a shine to your young lady.” Henry looks around and there’s Selina beaming like it’s Christmas morning while the rarity allows her to be petting its dark muzzle. He regards the beast, the black and white stripes of its hide like an amazing jungle flag staked proudly here amongst the cobbles and the chimneypots, the black whisk of its tail keeping the meat-flies off, its bristly mane what’s like the haircut of a Mohawk Indian and swaying like it’s kind of drunk into the bargain. Henry makes his mind up there and then that this is where he’s going to live, him and Selina. They stand talking to the man a while and he tells them that he’s Newt Pratt and that the place they’re in is called the Burrows, or that’s what it sounds like, and now Henry looks he can see creeping, jumping cottontails all over where there’s any grass. The veldt-horse belches. Mr. Pratt asks him his name and he says Henry George, and Newton Pratt says he’ll remember that. But, pretty obviously, he doesn’t.
THE STEPS OF ALL SAINTS
CAST
JOHN CLARE
HUSBAND
WIFE
JOHN BUNYAN
SAMUEL BECKETT
THOMAS BECKET
HALF-CASTE WOMAN
The three broad front steps and sheltering portico of a late Gothic church with Doric columns left and right, a foggy night-time. In the background beneath the portico, there are recesses set into the limestone front wall of the building, to either side of its locked doors. From off, the almost inaudible sound of a piano in the far distance, playing “Whispering Grass”. Seated in right-hand recess, JOHN CLARE, wearing dusty-looking early 19th-century rural dress, including a tall wide-awake hat. The sole is hanging off one shoe. He peers around into the surrounding gloom, hopefully.
JOHN CLARE: Well, this is a haunted sort of evening. Who’s about?
[Pause]
JOHN CLARE: Come on now, look alive … although for me I can’t be bothered with it these days. It’d be alright, perhaps, if not for all the walking and the disappointment. As for what there is of flesh and blood to the arrangement, I’m of the opinion that it’s much like shoes, in that the bodily side of the matter has a fresh smell and a lovely cherry lustre when it’s new, but that’s of no use once the tongue has withered and the sole’s worn through. It’s famously a poor show if the nails are digging in your feet. [Reflective pause as CLARE examines his damaged shoe.] No, in the main I’m happier with a gaseous posterity, so that the spectre of my backside might revisit all these spots that it was fond of formerly. The only pity is that life goes trudging on for as long as it does, since otherwise presumably there’d be more people of my own age and extinction here to talk to. [Cocks head, listening to faint music from off.] That’s a pretty air. I’d like to know who’s furious enough to gouge it into everyone.
[Dragging footsteps approach from off. Enter HUSBAND and WIFE, front right. They are dressed for an evening out, she in long coat and bonnet with handbag, he in loud yellow plaid jacket and dickey-bow with oiled dark hair and pencil moustache. They come to a halt, standing and staring at the empty church steps.]
HUSBAND: We could sit here.
WIFE: We can’t sit here. I can still hear the sound of her. It travels farther in the night.
HUSBAND: We’ll have to sit here. If you need to spend a penny there’s the toilets on Wood Hill not far away. She’s sure to cut it out soon, any road. I don’t know what’s got into her.
WIFE: [Snorts derisively.] I do.
[Resignedly, she goes and sits on church’s second step. Her husband stands staring at her for a moment. She does not look at him, but glares angrily into the fog. When he at last sits down next to her, she shuffles a couple of feet away from him. He looks at her, surprised and hurt.]
HUSBAND: Celia …
WIFE: Don’t.
JOHN CLARE: Hello? I don’t suppose that you’d be dead, now, would you?
HUSBAND: Is this how it’s going to be?
[She doesn’t answer. HUSBAND stares at her, waiting. JOHN CLARE rises from his alcove and walks hesitantly forward to stand behind and between the seated pair.]
JOHN CLARE: Excuse me, sir, but were you talking just now to myself or to the lady here? If, in response to my own querying of your mortality, you were enquiring as to whether this fogbound and uneventful continuity was how your afterlife was going to be, then in my own experience the answer’s yes. Yes, this is how it’s going to be. You’ll hang around in fog and nobody will ever come. If you’re anticipating a creator presently arriving to make lucid his intentions, then it’s my guess you’ll be waiting a long time. But, fair’s fair, if he should turn up, then when you’re finished with him, if you could point him in my direction, I’d be grateful. There were matters I was hoping to discuss. [The pair ignore him. Experimentally, he waves one arm up and down between them, as if to determine whether they are blind. After a moment he stops, and regards the couple glumly.] Of course, it may be that you were addressing your companion, in which case I hope you’ll pardon me for my intrusion. I intended no offence with my assumption that a couple as apparently ill-suited as yourselves might very well be dead. I am myself no stranger to the inconvenient marriage. When I was with Patty, it was always Mary that I thought of. Often did I –
HUSBAND: I said is this how it’s going to be, all night until the morning? If there’s something on your mind then spit it out, for God’s sake.