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The junction she’s approaching used to have a sweetshop owned by someone that she and the other children knew as ‘Pop’, a white-haired portly chap with glasses who sold homemade penny ice lollies and penny drinks. The latter had been half-pint milk bottles filled up with tap water and homeopathic doses of fruit cordial, a water-memory of having once been shown a molecule of rosehip syrup. Still, on thirsty afternoons, even the immaterial concept of a tasty beverage had been enough. They’d paid their pennies and had gratefully gulped down a fluid that looked pinkish if you happened to be drinking it at sunset. Looking back, she realises that she should have automatically mistrusted anybody who called themselves Pop. Ah, well. You live and learn.
Down at the bottom end of Castle Street, she passes on her left the little patch of grass, still seemingly unoccupied, where she had almost been abducted as a child. It’s one of the few childhood memories that she still can’t properly resolve, where she’s still not sure what was really going on. Her and some other eight-year-olds had found the rusted shell of an abandoned Morris Minor on the grass and, in an area that offered little in the way of free activities and entertainments, they had treated it as if it were a theme park or at least a proto-bouncy castle. They’d climbed on its bonnet and had sat inside behind its steering wheel. Alma had been on top of the wrecked vehicle, manically jumping up and down on its corroded roof, using it as a heavy metal trampoline, when a black car had glided out of Chalk Lane into Bristol Street to pull up suddenly beside the stretch of turf where they were playing.
When the thin young man with Brylcreemed hair and a dark suit climbed from the driver’s seat and started striding angrily towards the child-infested Morris Minor, all the other kids had been positioned so they could immediately scarper, leaving only Alma stranded on the creaking roof. The man – whenever she tries to remember what he looked like she gets only a false, superimposed photograph of Ian Brady – had grabbed her from atop the wreck and carried her, screaming and wailing, back to his own motor, shoving her inside. There was a youngish woman in the car, with mousy brown hair, although once again Alma’s melodramatic memory has pasted in a shot of Myra Hindley, slightly younger and without the bleach or vampire panda make-up. Alma had been pleading, crying, struggling in the back seat. The young man had said that he was going to take her off to the police station but then had suddenly relented, perhaps when he noticed that the woman with him was by now looking almost as frightened as the tubby, weeping little girl. He’d opened the rear door and let her out onto the pavement before roaring off, leaving her standing sobbing by the roadside for her pals to find when they emerged from hiding. What had all that been about?
Part of her is almost inclined to take the story as it comes. She can quite easily see her would-be abductor as a sour-faced and emotionally strangled young churchgoer of the middle classes and the early 1960s, taking his fiancée for a daring spin through the poor quarter, wanting to impress her with his moral rectitude by scaring straight one of the district’s infant vermin. That seems much more likely than the lurid child-molester narrative she’d retroactively imposed on the scenario, although it doesn’t make her feel a lot less interfered-with, or less angry. She recalls the young man’s pasty skin and his cold little eyes. Whatever he’d imagined he was doing and whatever his intent, he’d been no different from the current rash of curb-crawlers, using the Boroughs as their private zoo. She’d been disturbed to learn that during the alarming weekend of apparent rapes that had occurred last year, one of the victims had reported being dragged into a car in Chalk Lane, almost on the same spot where Alma’s attempted kidnapping had happened. Walking past the unkempt slope of yellow-green she wonders if the place has some malignant genius loci, something in the soil that gives it a predisposition towards a specific crime, repeated down the decades. She remembers hearing that a skeleton had been found at the site during some excavations in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t know if it turned out to be the product of an ancient burial or of a relatively recent murder, doesn’t know if it was male or female, child or adult. Lacking any contradictory evidence, she construes the remains as those of an abduction victim, lonely underneath the earth and calling out for company. Whichever way she looks at it, this is a haunted piece of ground. How typical, then, that she’s chosen this place for her preview.
She turns left into Chalk Lane where she immediately sees the nursery with people moving round inside it, gingerly transporting canvasses from one side of the small space to another. Alma can’t see any obvious signs of damage or catastrophe and feels relieved, although to be quite honest she’s not in the least bit nervous about how tomorrow’s going to turn out. She’s confident that everything will be the way it’s meant to be.
Mounting the short flight of stone steps towards the door, she casts her mind back to when this place was the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dance school, an oasis of refinement that had been incongruously situated in the Boroughs, not known for its Terpsichorean accomplishments, a place where they discouraged having sex while standing up in case it led to dancing. Her distinguished actor pal Bob Goodman has confessed to having often visited the dance school as a child, presumably back in the days before his face had caught fire and been put out with a shovel. She imagines him, a nervous middle-class kid shuffling up these very steps each Saturday to take his hated lessons, dressed up in a kilt. It’s probably all for the best that little Bob and little Alma never met back then, not with him in a tartan skirt and talking posh. She’d have well kicked his head in.
Pushing open the swing door, Alma takes in the scene. Other than her there are three people present. Visiting from Wales, Burt Regan is the one officially entrusted with getting the pieces down here and set up in the right place, although it seems he’s being helped in this by wiry Roman Thompson. Burt calls out to Alma as she enters.
“ ’Ello, Alma. ’Ere, was that yer finger-armour that I could ’ear rattlin’ when you were comin’ down the street, or ’ave you ’ad yer fanny pierced?”
“Yes, actually, I have. I got a length of anchor-chain from the Titanic that I wear as jewellery. That’s probably what you could hear. It cost me thousands, and it would have been twice that if I’d have bothered to have all the rust scraped off. Hello, Rome.”
Setting Work In Progress up against the makeshift gallery’s end wall, Rome Thompson grins, crumpling the moth-eaten glove puppet of his face, a distressed Basil Brush after the Pytchley Hunt has finished with him. Crafty wrinkles in a windscreen shatter-pattern radiate from eyes that still burn like gunpowder fuses. Alma thinks that Roman Thompson is quite possibly the most dangerous individual she has ever met, and she means this in an admiring way. Why are the best blokes always gay?
“ ’Ow are yer doin’, Alma? D’yer like ’ow we’ve set up yer exhibition? I’ve been supervisin’, like. Burt needs a foreman so that ’e don’t fuck it up.”
“You lying cunt! I’ve been ’ere since eleven, and this fucker turned up ’alf an ’our back. ’E’s refused to lift a fuckin’ finger ever since. ’E says ’e’s only ’ere in ’is capacity as an art critic. ’E’s like fuckin’ Sister Wendy, only interested in the ones with cocks.”
Leaving the two men to their robust interlocution, Alma sidles over to the nursery’s fourth occupant, a pretty, goggle-eyed young woman standing at the room’s far end and looking moderately intimidated by Roman and Burt, a pair of nutcase ogres from another century. This is Lucy Lisowiec, a representative of the community association CASPAR, a group that provides one of the few remaining neural networks still holding the senile neighbourhood together. Alma met her through the Streetlaw rappers, for whom Lucy seems to be a combination of street-credible but sensible big sister and benign probation officer. It was Lucy who managed to secure the nursery for Alma’s exhibition, which means that it’s Lucy’s job that’s on the line if anything goes wrong. This is no doubt the reason why she’s looking nervously at Burt and Roman, who give the impression that there’s something going badly wrong simply by turning up, like uniformed Gestapo officers at a pet funeral. Alma attempts to reassure her.
“Hello, Luce. I can see just from that look you’ve got on your face that these two – well, they’re little more than hired thugs, really – that they’ve managed to offend you. You poor love. You’ve probably heard things that someone your age shouldn’t have to hear, things that will stay with you forever. All I can do is apologise. The man down at the pen said if I didn’t give them work, then they’d be put to sleep.”
Lucy is laughing, showing off her winsome overbite. She really is a little darling, working on a dozen projects with the Boroughs residents at once, minding their kids down at the CASPAR offices in St. Luke’s House on nights when she’s there working late, shepherding Streetlaw to their gigs, living alone above MacDonald’s in the Drapery, developing a stomach ulcer at the age of twenty-seven – Alma has been recently force-feeding her both Actimel and Yakult – all from trying to cooperate creatively with wonderful, deserving people who are also sometimes utter fucking nightmares, Alma herself certainly included in that category.
“Aw, no, they’re all right. They’re house-trained. No, I was just looking at the pictures and the model and all that. Alma, this is fantastic. This is really full-on.”
Alma smiles politely, but is much more pleased than she lets on. Lucy is an accomplished artist in her own right, mostly working in the risky medium of brick and aerosol. The only female tagger in the county and as far as Alma knows one of the only ones in England, Lucy had been for
ced to start out working solo as the 1-Strong Crew before an influx of new member meant that she could upgrade to the 2-Strong Crew. Under the nom-de-guerre of CALLUZ, an urchin enunciation of the spectrum or of street-worn calluses, she’s beautified a number of unprepossessing premises throughout the years, although she now protests that she’s too old to climb and run. Alma suspects, however, that this façade of responsible maturity is liable to evaporate after a second Smirnoff Ice. Lucy, whatever she pretends, is still an active artist, and so naturally her opinion means a lot to Alma. More than this, though, Lucy’s young, part of a generation that Alma has very little knowledge of and isn’t certain that her work appeals to. If Lucy at least admires her stuff enough not to spray over it in bold metallic Fat Caps with Day-Glo drop-shadow, well, then Alma must be doing something right. She lets herself cast an appraising eye across the works that are already in position, which is to say most of them. She finds, possibly unsurprisingly, that she agrees entirely with Lucy’s assessment of her full-on and fantastic show.
Up at the room’s north end is the large tile arrangement partly cribbed from Escher, mounted on its backing board and titled Malignant, Refractory Spirits. Sharing the same wall as this are a variety of what seem to be illustrations from a children’s picture-book, some in soft pencil monochrome and some in gloriously-realised watercolour, like the psychedelic stand-out image An Asmodeus Flight. The east wall, the biggest one, is dominated by the overwhelming mass of The Destructor, which Alma is pleased to see has been left mostly covered by a hanging cloth: it’s too much, too distressing to stand in its naked glare, just as she wanted it to be. It’s Alma’s Guernica, and she doubts that it’s going to be hanging in the Mitsubishi boardroom any time this century. Quite frankly, she can’t see it hanging anywhere that ordinary decent people who just want to get on with their lives might stumble over it. The painting is so forceful that only the strongest of the smaller pieces can be hung on the same wall. Forbidden Worlds, with its infernal hostelry, goes to the left of The Destructor. When she brings the final painting, Chain of Office, down here to the nursery tomorrow morning, she decides she’s going to hang it on the west wall, facing the more devastating piece as some kind of aesthetic counterbalance.
In the middle of the room there are four tables pushed together to support the papier-mâché model that she’d made with all those Rizla papers, chewing them and spitting them into a suitable receptacle. Melinda Gebbie, her best mate, had looked a bit revolted when Alma had demonstrated her technique, which had made Alma try to justify her processes by referencing the book-devouring 1960s visionary John Latham, whom she’d met once and was an admirer of. She’d also tried explaining the importance of using her own saliva, so that in a literal sense her DNA would be part of the complicated structure she was building. In the end she’d given up and confessed that she just liked gobbing.
If she is honest with herself, the model is the only item in the exhibition that she isn’t wholly sure about. It doesn’t seem as if it’s saying much, just sitting there like that, solid and unambiguous. Maybe she’ll see how it goes down tomorrow at the preview and then leave it out of the ensuing London show if she’s not pleased with the response. There’s no point worrying about it now, at any rate. Things tend to sort themselves out, Alma thinks, although she knows that this directly contradicts the laws of physics, common sense, and her political experience of the last forty years.
She looks up from the tabletop display, out through the nursery’s front picture-window, where she notices that Chalk Lane teeters on the brink of dusk. A skinny little mixed-race girl with corn-row hair and a fire-engine red PVC mac is clacking through the umbra, her arms crossed defensively across her chest and a preoccupied expression on her face. Alma thinks ‘crack whore’, then berates herself for her descent into class-profiling and for her lazy and mean-spirited assumptions. By then the young woman has departed, tottering away into the twilight that is gathering in the east, spilling out from Horsemarket and down Castle Street in an obscuring violet avalanche.
Alma stands chatting in the borrowed space with Roman, Burt and Lucy for a little longer. Roman tells her that he’s been out door to door, drumming up interest in tomorrow’s exhibition from amongst the local populace. She asks him how the cartoon poster that she knocked off for his Defend Council Houses group is selling, and is told that it’s still moving steadily. This image, which depicts a Godzilla-sized ‘fat cat’ looming from behind the NEWLIFE towers to rake through Scarletwell Street’s surface with its monstrous talons, while not a well-drawn piece by her usual standards, had provoked some small controversy. With his keen eye for free publicity Rome had involved the local Chronicle & Echo, thus affiliating Alma publicly with his extremely worthy cause. In the accompanying article had been some rather piqued, dismissive comments from a Conservative councillor, one Derek Palehorse, who’d insisted that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was over when so much was being done to help the neighbourhood already. Alma smiles now at the memory. How nice of him to stick his head above the parapet. She can recall the recent scandal when through Roman Thompson’s machinations, the town council’s very generous remuneration of a former colleague had been published in the local paper, prompting councillors to protest that their dealings should never have been made public. When the newspaper had polled its readers to see what their feelings were upon the issue, they’d been startled to discover that most of the votes supported the town council’s right to secrecy. Then they’d found that almost all of these votes had issued from Councillor Palehorse in one way or other. It was mentioned on the “Rotten Boroughs” page of Private Eye, to the deserved embarrassment of everyone concerned. Honestly, Alma thinks. These people. What a bunch of shitclowns. This is a new word that she’s picked up from columnist and splendidly ill-humoured television writer Charlie Brooker, whom she wants to marry, and a term which she already can’t imagine how she got along without for all those years, for all that endless line of shitclowns climbing out of history’s collapsing car. Don’t bother, they’re here.
Taking a sudden fancy to the thought of walking home through her old neighbourhood, she waves aside the offer of a lift from Burt and kisses everyone goodbye. Rome Thompson hints mysteriously of something that he’s got to tell her but first wants to check his facts; something about the stretch of river next to the gas-holder down on Tanner Street. He says he’ll let her know tomorrow morning at the show. Leaving the others to arrange the last few details and lock up, she zips her jacket to the neck and exits by the swing door, shuffling down the stone steps onto Phoenix Street. Glancing towards her left and down Chalk Lane she can see Doddridge Church, with that bizarre door halfway up its western wall. Alma imagines the celestial flyover, the Ultraduct, as she’s depicted it in one of the works that she’s just been looking at, an elevated walkway that seems to be chiselled out of light emerging from the blocked-off loading bay to curve away towards the west, with phosphorescent figures blurring back and forth across its span.
The church itself seems, in her eye, to sum up the combined political and spiritual upheavals that have typified Northampton’s history. It occurs to her that most of these have been linguistic in their origins. John Wycliffe had begun the process in the 14th century with his translation of the Bible into English. Right there, by insisting that the English peasant classes had a right to worship in their own tongue, Wycliffe and his Lollards were establishing an element of class-war politics in the religious altercation. In Northampton, Lollards and other religious radicals seem to have found a natural home, so that by Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the fifteen-hundreds there are Northamptonshire congregations singing home-made hymns in English rather than just listening to chanted psalms in Latin as the Church demanded. Lacking any earlier examples that spring readily to mind, she wonders if her town is where the English hymn originates. That would explain a lot, now that she thinks about it.
Within fifty years of Queen Elizabeth’s demise, of course, the Civil War k
icked off with Parliament greatly emboldened by the radical sects that seemed to be clustered in the English Midlands, all the Ranters, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, most of them engaged in publishing inflammatory texts or fiery flying rolls. Some of the openly seditious ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts had been published secretly here in the Boroughs, and in general it seemed that the Protestant revolution hinged upon the word, with painting and the visual arts perceived as the preserve of Papists and elitists. To become a painter would require materials and means, while writing, strictly speaking, required only the most rudimentary education. Obviously, literature was still seen as the sole preserve of the elite, which is just one of many reasons why John Bunyan’s writings, crystal-clear allegories conveyed in common speech, were so incendiary in their day. His hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, was the anthem for the disenchanted Puritans migrating for America, while Pilgrim’s Progress would become a source of inspiration for the New World settlers second only to the Bible, and these weren’t the rakish, courtly witticisms or the fawning tributes of contemporaries such as Rochester or Dryden. These were written by a member of that new and dangerous breed, the literate commoner. They were composed by someone who insisted that plain English was a holy tongue, a language with which to express the sacred.
Of course, they’d banged Bunyan up in Bedford nick for getting on a dozen years, while art and literature are still most usually a product of the middle class, of a Rochester mind-set that sees earnestness as simply gauche and visionary passion as anathema. William Blake would follow Bunyan and, closer to home, John Clare, but both of these had spent their days impoverished, marginalised as lunatics, committed to asylums or plagued by sedition hearings. All of them are heirs to Wycliffe, part of a great insurrectionary tradition, of a burning stream of words, of an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor. At the stone meeting house in Chalk Lane, Philip Doddridge pulled all the diverse strands of that narrative together. Hanging out with Swedenborgians and Baptists, taking up his ministry here in the poorest quarter, writing Hark! The Glad Sound!, championing the dissenting cause, all from this scruffy little mound … Doddridge is Alma’s foremost local hero. It’ll be an honour staging her show in the shadow of his church. Alma elects to walk down Little Cross Street and then follow Bath Street round to Scarletwell and her beloved strip of bare grass on St. Andrew’s Road.
She lopes down through the failing light with blocks of flats to either side of her, the Bath Street buildings’ west face on her right and to her left the 1960s landings and the sunken walkways of Moat Place, Fort Place, outlying features of a long-demolished castle become streets where Alma’s great-grandfather Snowy Vernall had lived, getting on a hundred years ago. Mad Snowy, marrying the landlord’s daughter from the long-since disappeared Blue Anchor pub in Chalk Lane, which he’d visited on one of his improbably long strolls from Lambeth. All these chance events, these people and their complicated lives, the trillion small occurrences without which she would not be her; would not be here.
Across the street, incontinent lamps stand apologetically in puddles of their own piss-coloured light. She just about remembers when Moat Street and Fort Street were still standing, and when Mrs. Coleman’s gingerbread-house sweetshop was down at the lower end of Bath Street, although Alma was no more than four or five back then. A much more vivid memory remains from slightly later, when the maze of red brick terraces had been demolished and there was just wasteland here, before the blocks of flats had been erected. She remembers playing with the first of many best friends, Janet Cooper, on vast fields of rubble and black mud beneath a dirty fleece of Boroughs sky. For some reason there had been industrial off-cuts scattered everywhere and gingering the puddles, L-shaped bits of metal which Alma and Janet had discovered could be plaited into rusty orange swastikas and skimmed across the demolition site like Nazi throwing-stars. Just as with the abandoned Morris Minor, the brick scree and piled-up devastation were regarded as civic amenities, play areas provided for the district’s young, tetanus crèches of a kind then common in the neighbourhood. Mind you, this had been back in the Macmillan years, the later 1950s. Alma and her little pals, flying kites into power lines, opening veins climbing through ragged gaps in corrugated tin, had never had it so good.
