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Alma is unsurprised by this. The town has been a thriving hotbed of religious nutjobs since the fourteen-hundreds, many of whom Alma feels a certain retroactive fondness for. She likes the poetry, she likes the attitude, the heresy and anarchy that sought to brush aside the King and clergy, sought to recreate society as an egalitarian domain of ranting tinkers, mechanic philosophers, a whole Nation of Saints that answered to no temporal authority but only to a moral vision, to an enflamed state of mind, a level of both spiritual and political awareness that would be Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. She likes the Lollards and the Ranters and the Muggletonians. She likes the incendiary ravings of the founding Quakers, likes imagining that nice man on the oat-box tearing off his clothes and screaming for the violent overthrow of monarchy. She’s even partial to Moravians, albeit mainly for their freak-show value with that mental business about penetrating the messiah in his spear-hole and their influence on her enduring idol William Blake, but Alma doesn’t like the Jesus Army very much. She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.
The lights change and she crosses to an intermediary island in the middle of York Road. Alma reflects that she is standing on the spot that Doug McGeary’s vegetable truck had rumbled over nearly fifty years before, transporting her unbreathing brother to the hospital. She realises that today Doug’s mercy-dash would have to take a different route, with it no longer being possible to sail down from the Mounts into York Road. He would have had to turn left at the cinema, circle the Unitarian Church and come back at the square the other way, adding some very-likely fatal minutes to his journey. Mind you, by all rights her brother should have been a goner when the truck was still halfway up Grafton Street, so perhaps the diversion wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.
Finally she squeezes past the barrier railings at the top of the pedestrian precinct and is in Abington Street, or at least in what’s left of it. Back a few hundred years ago this was the town’s east gate, called the St. Edmund’s End after the since-demolished church across the Wellingborough Road from the converted workhouse in which Alma had drawn her first breath, to voice the first of many furious and unreasonable complaints. Daniel Defoe, writing his guide to English towns, described Northampton as essentially a crossroads, with its north-south axis running along Sheep Street, down the Drapery and into Bridge Street while its east-west axis traced a line through Abington Street, Gold Street and Marefair towards the ruins of the castle. By pedestrianizing one end of this east-west passage, the town council have effectively stitched up a major vein, inviting gangrene. She can see it setting in already, read its symptoms in the plasterboarded windows and the bloom of estate agent shingles. There’s no passing trade and the shop rents are all ridiculously high. If this persists, Alma predicts, the town will turn into an economic crater where the money only circulates around the rim, through retail parks and giant chain-stores, while the centre is abandoned to the tumbleweed of repossession notices, transformed into an after-dark arena, to a Walter Hill set with more vomit, more teenagers lying in their own piss, and more incoherent war-cries. Incoherent wars. You know it’s a bad sign when you see bunches of commemorative flowers taped to lamps on the pink paving, with no road in sight.
Pigeons rise fluttering around her, blissfully oblivious to the mean-spirited poster pasted on a rubbish bin which states that feeding them is a variety of littering and therefore punishable by a fine. It isn’t that she thinks this will make any difference to the birds themselves, who after all can’t read and don’t depend on handouts from animal-lovers to sustain them in the first place, but she feels indignant at the sentiments expressed. What in the name of fuck is wrong with pigeons? If the council were attempting to discourage wasps, attack dogs or the Jesus Army she could see some sense in the campaign, but pigeons? With that green and violet shimmering on the ruff; that wobbling and fluffed-up coo? If the municipal authorities think getting rid of pigeons is their number one priority for the apparently-condemned town centre, then why don’t they just plant landmines on all of the window sills and get it over with instead of sticking up their pissy little threatening notices?
She carries on down Abington Street. There are very few other pedestrians but she is wading through a crowd of ghosts and memories, her killer robot hands deep in her jacket pockets like a 1950s badboy, Jimmy Dean after the menopause. She skirts around the dopey Francis Crick memorial erected in the centre of the thoroughfare, a piece of kitsch with silvery double-helix twists supporting what appear to be a pair of nudist superheroes, sexless manikins whose bald and featureless Barbie pudendas clearly won’t be passing on inherited genetic traits to anyone. Besides, the only thing connecting Abington Street with the local scientific pioneer is the conspicuous DNA evidence to be found following an average Friday night. Of course, the monument might be a comment on local inbreeding, with the figures diving upwards in a desperate spiral to escape a tiny, stagnant gene-pool, more of a gene-puddle if the truth be told. Alma recalls the rumour of an entire cyclops-village somewhere out near Towcester, full of cyclops postmen, cyclops publicans and cyclops toddlers, then remembers it was her that started it.
By curving round the structure to her left she is now walking down beside the library, the only building in the street that hasn’t changed since Alma was a little girl. She’d joined up at the age of five and visited the library several times a fortnight for the next ten years, mostly for ghost-stories and yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz science-fiction. She’d had haunting, memorable dreams about the institution as a child, walking thr
ough winding corridors of wooden shelving with impossible and fascinating tomes propped up to every side, books that you couldn’t read because the words would crawl around upon the page if they were opened. Her dream-library had padded flooring covered in red vinyl like a bar stool or a car-seat into which were set round holes that were most probably vaginal, so that the book-browsing clientele could climb from floor to floor.
The actual waking library had been almost as marvellous in its interior – the tiny section like an open wardrobe that hummed with the aura of the books on séances and mesmerism that were kept there – and from the outside it was still beautiful, the busts of benefactors set into the honey-coloured stone. Alma likes showing visiting Americans the library, just so she can point to the carven likeness at the upper right of its façade and ask them who they think it is. They generally assume that it’s George Washington, an English gesture of respect for their first president, seeming bewildered when informed that it is in fact Andrew, George’s older relative, back from before the Washingtons left Barton Sulgrave for America when the New Model Army were converging on Northamptonshire during the sixteen-hundreds. The family, reputedly, had even pinched the village crest of bars and mullets to provide a basis for the starry, stripy flag of their adopted home. To be quite frank, the only Washingtons she unreservedly respects are Dinah, Booker T. and Geno, whom she feels at least gave something back.
She’s just about to cross the precinct to the Co-op Bank on its far side when she becomes aware of an unusually solid-looking ghost from bygone times approaching from the opposite direction, walking up past the dilapidated mouth of the former Co-op Arcade. Dragging her hair back from the soot-ringed blast-sites of her eyes to take a closer look, she realises that the only thing which marks the figure as a ghost is the anachronistic clothing it affects: the pinstripe shirt, the neckerchief and waistcoat. With her spirits lifting out of their default disgruntlement, she recognises the bucolic spectre as perhaps her oldest mate, Benedict Perrit. Ah, Northampton. Just when you’ve decided that the planners have clubbed her into insensibility, she throws you a bouquet.
The moment Benedict sees Alma, he goes into one of his routines. First the appalled look, then the turning round and going back the way he’s come as if pretending that he hasn’t seen her, then another sharp reverse to bring him back in her direction, only this time quivering with silent giggles. Good old Ben, mad as a Chinese situation comedy, the only one amongst Alma’s associates and former classmates to consistently out-strange her without even trying, and one of the few artists or poets from her teenage years who didn’t jack it all in for a comfortable life when they hit twenty-five. Anything but. Benedict’s face is creased with lines of verse and looks like it resulted from an ill-judged one-night stand between the masks of comedy and tragedy. He has been killed by poetry, and at the same time poetry is all that saves him and redeems him. Good old Ben.
He sticks one paw out for a handshake, but she’s much too pleased to see him and she isn’t having it. Dodging around the proffered hand she plants her bloody lips upon his cheek and scoops him up into a python hug. Sooner or later he’ll breathe out, which will allow her to constrict him further and then when he loses consciousness she’ll dislocate her jaw and swallow him. Before she can accomplish this he flinches back out of her grip, frantically wiping at the Girl-Ebola she has left smeared on his chops.
“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”
His laugh is that of Tommy Cooper, left marooned upon a desert island until it has morphed into the seagull-scaring cackle of Ben Gunn. Delighted, Alma tells him he’s a suave Lothario and asks him if he’s writing these days. When he tells her he’s still scribbling, she remarks on reading “Clearance Area” a day or two ago and lets him know what a good poem she thinks it is. He looks at her uncertainly, unsure if she is being genuine.
“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”
The use of the past tense and subtle shift of subject from the poem to its author registers as a small blip on Alma’s radar of concern. It doesn’t sound good, like a clichéd western gunslinger retired to the saloon, fondly remembering his cordite-scented triumphs through a haze of redeye. What a load of shit. She sternly reassures him that he’d been considerably better than “not bad”, then, realising that she too has used the past tense, she attempts to rectify her blunder by just coming out and telling him without condition that he’s a good writer, whereupon he taps her up for a few quid.
This startles her, even as she is fumbling automatically in her jeans’ pocket for a piece of crumpled paper that won’t turn out to be an old till receipt from Morrison’s. Alma has gladly dished out cash to the town’s homeless ever since they blossomed in shop doorways during the late ’Eighties, and especially since it became official policy that this was just “encouraging the beggars”. Having come from a community of beggars, this only spurs on her bloody-minded generosity, much the same way that she’s been idly planning to strew crumbled blueberry muffins up and down the precinct ever since she spotted that annoying pigeon notice at the street’s top end. A friend, like Benedict, is always welcome to some spare cash if she has it, but as she presses a note into his palm she’s more concerned about the shift in self-esteem that seems to have befallen him since the last time they met. Taken along with the “I weren’t bad, was I?” comment, Alma’s feeling a bit worried for him. Making matters worse, he’s looking guilty now about taking the money, which she brashly brushes over by assuring him she’s “fucking loaded”, anxious to get on to safer ground. The moment passes. Alma asks him to tomorrow’s exhibition, not expecting him to come, and when they’re saying goodbye some few minutes later Benedict is telling her that he’s a Cyberman and Alma’s laughing like a drain. Everything’s good again.
Waving farewell while still snickering down her nose at intervals, she wanders a few paces further down the street and then remembers that she had originally been heading for the bank, correcting her trajectory accordingly. She’s thinking about Benedict, about how one of the most blazing and important moments in her life had been provoked by Ben’s inspiring idiocy. They were both something like ten or eleven and had worked out an ingenious way to climb up to the rooftops of the copper warehouse which stood on the corner that connected Freeschool Street with Green Street. This ascent, which obviously needed to be made at night, had first required a trip to Narrow-Toe Lane, just around the block, where they could wriggle on their bellies underneath the locked gate of a builder’s yard. Here they had clambered up a borrowed ladder onto a rear wall of the adjacent Perrit property and scampered giggling along the ridge of Benedict’s dad’s woodpile in the starlight. This eventually allowed them access to the warehouse outbuildings, from whence it was an easy scramble up to the slate roofs and chimneypots above.
For months it had been their precarious kingdom, only shared with cats and birds. Dangerous games of chase evolved to suit the slanted planes of the new landscape, but these had their limits: dead-end precipices that the two kids couldn’t find the nerve to overcome. The worst of these was at the far end of a guttering, a rain channel between the slope of one roof and the upright wall that was the boundary of the next. Their chases would end prematurely at this point, night after night, because of the sheer drop into a narrow alley filled with metal scrap and probable impalement that plunged down into the dark immediately beyond. The threatening passage had been only four or five feet wide and had the angled tiles of a one-storey storage shed on its far side. If it had been a jump between two chalk marks in a sunny playground they’d have made it without hesitation, but to try the same thing on a rooftop in pitch darkness with an abyss full of tetanus junk beneath you was a very different matter.
Then, one moonlit evening, Benedict had upped his game. Alma was chasing him across the blue-grey hills some thirty feet above the street, pursuing him with an unsettling degree of relish through a Caligari world of chimneys, tilts, and shadows. Benedict, only a few paces ahead of her, was giggling with terror t
hat was wholly justified and understandable: most people would get through their lives without being pursued across the skyline by a predatory Alma Warren anywhere save in unusually vivid nightmares, while for Benedict this had been his unenviable reality. Upon the night in question she had herded him into the dead-end fold between the rooftops, knowing that she had him trapped and slavering triumphantly as she moved in upon her shrill and tittering quarry for the kill. It was at this point that Ben’s fear of being caught by Alma had at last outweighed his squeamishness regarding getting speared by shards of glass or rusty railings in the alleyway below. Benedict jumped, shrieking with fear and somehow laughing at the same time, hurtling across the lethal gap to land upon the shed roof, five or six feet lower down on its far side.
Alma, still running at full tilt behind him, had just seconds to decide that she preferred the possibility of gory death at age eleven to the utter certainty of someone beating her at something. Having made her mind up, when she reached the edge she just kept going.
In the fraction of a second during which she hung in empty space above the snarl of rusted implements and broken windows down below, Alma had been illuminated. As the instant stretched itself, she realised that she’d accidentally jumped free of all her fears and limitations, fears of injury and death and ruin. Trusting only to the moment she’d propelled herself past doubt and gravity and in that moment had known with abiding certainty that there was nothing she was scared of, nothing that she couldn’t do.
Even as an eleven-year-old girl she had, of course, been both considerably bigger and much heavier than Benedict. She sailed across the treacherous alleyway to land on the shed roof beside him and immediately went through it, shattering its slates and ending up embedded in its gradient to her scabby knees. Oh, how they’d laughed, exhilarated and hysterical, once they’d checked to make sure that nobody had lost an eye. The incident had given Alma an important insight into overcoming psychological impediments, which she’d experimented further with. Having a morbid dread of drowning, as a twelve-year-old she’d swum out to the steel partition that divided one end of Midsummer Meadow’s lido from the other and had dived down to one of the railed vents that were some feet underwater. She had pushed her arm between the bars then turned it round so that she wasn’t certain she could pull it out again. For perhaps thirty long and awesome seconds she had floated at the still heart of her wholly self-inflicted terror, trying to absorb and understand it, and then she had calmly turned her arm the right way round to pull it from between the bars and strike back for the glittering surface. Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven’t got the first idea.
She knows all the bank staff by name, the Co-op having been her bank of choice for the last twenty years. She’d started with them solely on the basis of their ethical investment policies, but as the decades had ticked past on her milometer she’d come to notice that whenever there was a financial meltdown caused by banking improprieties, the Co-op’s frankly boring logo never featured in the cascade of shamed high-street brands that poured across the teatime news-screens. In the dizzying casino spin of a roulette economy, inside a threadbare circus tent stuffed with adrenaline-deranged rogue traders, oligarchs, and corporate bosses living beyond anybody’s means, the Co-op stood fast. Despite its refusal to invest resources with arms manufacturers, the bank stuck to its guns. Also, when Alma’s mum Doreen had died in 1995 they’d sent a big bouquet of flowers with personal messages from everybody at the branch. As far as Alma is concerned, they could be caught providing orphan baby seals for Rio Tinto Zinc to use as sex-slaves after that, and she’d most probably turn her blind eye.
After she’s said hello to everyone, Alma inspects herself on the closed circuit television while she waits in line. The camera is over by the Abington Street entrance several yards behind her, and so only gives a rear-view long-shot of the leather-jacketed old woman with the hanging-gardens hairstyle, a good head and shoulders taller than the other people in the queue. This is the nearest that she ever gets to an objective image of herself and finds she doesn’t like it very much. It makes her feel obscurely isolated, and besides, she doesn’t see herself like that. She sees herself as bigger and a great deal nearer. And not from behind.
She checks her balance and draws out a random wad of cash to stuff in the side-pocket of her jeans. Just yesterday she’d had a chat with the incorrigible serial-sympathiser and unlikely innocent Melinda Gebbie, her best mate from Semilong. The other woman artist had remarked on how she always liked to have some reassuring totem in her pocket, useful Kleenex tissues, dead bees or particularly pretty leaves that she’d picked up. Alma had thought about it for a while and then said “Yeah, well, see, for me that would be money.” While she’s probably lost several high-denomination notes across the years she still resists the idea of a purse or handbag, reasoning that this would only be a good way to lose everything at once. She thinks it highly probable that she’d eventually leave the handbag in a café, whereas it’s unlikely that she’d leave her trousers. Not out of the question, but unlikely.
Exiting the bank she nips next door into the premises of Martin’s, the newsagents, so that she can stock up on essentials: Rizla papers, fags, Swan matches, magazines. She pulls the latest issues of New Scientist and Private Eye down from their upper shelves, wondering if their placement might be part of an entirely sensible campaign to make sure that only the tall receive appropriate intellectual stimulation. One day soon, when she and her kind have grown smart enough to formulate a foolproof plan, then Stephen Fry will give the signal and they’ll all rise up and massacre the short-arse numbskulls in their beds. Something like that, at any rate. Let a girl have her daydreams.
Alma takes the two mags to the till where genial, bullet-headed Tony Martin and long-suffering wife Shirley have already got her forty Silk Cut Silver, five packs of green Rizla papers and two boxes of Swan matches waiting for her. Tony shakes his shaved dome ruefully while ringing up the Rizlas.
“Alma, honestly! All o’ these Rizla papers! Surely you must ‘ave got that scale model of the Eiffel Tower completed ages ago? What’s the matter with yer?”
Shirley looks up from re-stocking shelves and tells her husband to shut up and not to be so rude, but Alma’s grinning.
