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it’s like a flooded earthworks did I come here as a boy what what where was I
not prepared to work that’s right blame everybody else for their own problems blame the council blame the system blame me we’re all doing what we have to do and some of them down here I mean they knock their wives about they say it’s the frustration it’s the poverty but then why do they have so many kids with kids to hold you back how are you ever going to make it, get to where you want to be in life take me and Mandy children would have just got in the way of our careers and look at us we’re happy very happy but some people they’re just human rubbish they’re just
scalloped cliffs of mud a long way off across the grass and distant red brick railway arches I’ve been here before look there’s a toy a plastic elephant dropped in a puddle it’s I’m sure it once belonged to me the last time I was here and isn’t somewhere near a house an old what what did I
all of the roughs the scruffs the tough and rumble of them all their kids all violent doing drugs I used to read them ghost stories at Christmas mothers wearing short skirts fishnet tights effing and blinding you should hear them not brought up they’re dragged up it’s a shithole full of shits there’s paedophiles down here there’s sex offenders well they’ve got to put them somewhere crackheads and it’s all their own fault it’s not ours not mine they ought to pull their socks up but then
there’s that old well scarlet house that stands up from the wasteland on its own the grey sky overhead and in my pants in my grey pants and vest I walk towards it through the weeds I need the toilet weren’t there lavatories down in the cellar of that building if I can remember how to find them if they’re not all cracked and full of backed up
but then who am I
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THE ROOD IN THE WALL
It’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder.
Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for actors and theatrical types on the basis that they’re mostly sissies, horticultural lads and so forth. It’s a well-known fact. Still, Studs can sympathise with how it must be when they’re out of work and ‘resting between parts’. The inactivity, he knows, can drive a feller nuts. Why, even Studs can find himself just sitting, dreaming up some hypothetical and complicated case to solve there in his mind, and he’s a tough, unreconstructed Brooklyn wise-guy who thinks with his fists and punches people with his head. He doesn’t dream in black and white, he dreams in radio. What must it be like for some neurotic bit-part player when the studio doesn’t call? The weather-beaten sleuth would bet his bottom dollar that those precious flowers most likely spend their time rehearsing for some casting call that never comes, a cowboy or a big game hunter, something masculine like that. Who knows, maybe a private dick? He chuckles wryly at the thought and stubs his biro out in a convenient coffee-cup. Studs is a role that would require a lot of time in makeup.
Sure, he’s not a pretty boy. He likes to think he’s got a lived-in look, albeit lived in by three generations of chaotic Lithuanian alcoholics who are finally evicted in an armed siege after which the premises remain unused for decades, save as a urinal by the homeless. Then it all burns down in an insurance fire. He sits there at the dressing-table mirror in his seamy office and surveys his crime-scene countenance: move right along, nothing to see here. He takes in the seemingly haphazard corrugations of his forehead, a volcanic rock-face risen from the straggling tree-line of his brows to the combed-over pinnacle, whence it commences its descent through black and slippery long grass to the nape. The eyes are full of pessimism and what would appear to be some manner of unspecified disorder; eyes that have seen far too much from slightly different elevations and conflicting angles, roughly equidistant from the ice-axe nose, broken more often than a hooker’s heart. Then, over everything, a sparse but noticeable pebble-dash of Sugar Puff-sized warts to make sure no one misses the asymmetry, a laugh-track prompt sprinkled redundantly across his face for anyone who somehow hasn’t got the gag already. People used to tell him he sure wasn’t any oil-painting, although they were obviously unfamiliar with the cubists.
Elsewhere in the building, perhaps out in his front office, there’s a telephone like a spoiled child demanding everyone’s attention. He calls to his dizzy secretary – “Mum? Mum, phone” – but evidently she’s on one of her unfathomable breaks, perhaps connected with the aforementioned dizziness. Whenever he’s up here from London stopping over for a few days he tells her that she should change her medication, but she doesn’t listen. Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t remember where you put your socks. Ten rings and then it goes to answerphone, his message that he’d taken the precaution of recording over hers when he arrived here yesterday. She doesn’t get a lot of calls, whereas a client or his agent might get on the blower to him, theoretically, at any time of day or night. That scatterbrained tomato could just rerecord her own apologetic mumblings after he was gone, and in the meantime would most probably be honoured to have his rich tones bewildering such members of her peer group as could still remember how to use a phone.
“Hello there. This is Robert Goodman. I’m not in just at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks. Cheerio.”
Studs has a flawless English accent. In his line of business, a guy never knows when he might need one, possibly while undercover and impersonating some variety of Duke or cockney barrow-boy, conceivably as part of a wild caper which involves the crown jewels and a blonde of independent legs. Though he could use a juicy case right now, preferably a tangled incest drama with Faye Dunaway though he’d make do with blackmail or divorce if needs be, Studs resists the impulse to go pick up the now silent instrument and interrupt the caller. If by any chance it should turn out to be a family struggle over an inheritance that’s escalated to a kidnapping or home invasion, Studs can find out later. The last thing he wants is for prospective clients to think he’s desperate from his tone of voice when they can work that out themselves, like everybody else who knows him has to do, from the gnawed furniture and the discarded, disappointed scratch-card dross around his flat.
Sat at the dressing table, zebra-painted with the shadow cast by the venetians, he reflects upon the grubby criminal career he’s led before becoming a hard-boiled investigator. He’s dealt non-specific drugs in Albert Square and been a scar-faced squealer up at Sun Hill nick. He’s loitered by a Lexus in a leather to increase the sales of car alarms, he’s growled and glared with Gotham City greasers, worn a Dr. Seuss hat for the purposes of his initiation in an early New York Irish street-gang and raped Joan of Arc’s big sister back in fifteenth-century France. That’s how it is with Studs. He’s a wild card, a maverick who won’t play by the rules. He’s in a big town where the streets aren’t always mean but can be pretty fucking ignorant. He’s back, he’s in Northampton, and this time it’s personal, by which he means it’s definitely not professional. If only.
Frankly, though it goes against Studs’ naturally coarse and testosterone-fuelled nature, he’d do pantomime, be one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters or kneel in his shoes for Snow White given half a chance. This calls to mind his since-departed sidekick, Little John Ghavam. Studs ain’t no sentimentalist, but not a heartless night of moral compromise goes by without him missing his toad-breeding dwarf pal and their reeling drunk Todd Browning escapades when they were headstrong, relatively young, and from the point of view of an observer, very disconcerting. John, like Studs, had been around the block career-wise, spending some time as a scavenger amongst the Jawa sand-people before he hooked up with a gang of similarly sized time travelling larcenists and soon thereafter banged a lot of former knitwear models for the specialist market. Studs thinks one such enterprise was called Muff Bandits but he may have made that up or dreamed it, like when he’d insisted the late local artist Henry Bird had been the husband of Vampira in Plan 9 from Outer Space when actually Bird’s wife was Freda Jackson, Karloff co-star of Die, Monster, Die. It was a dumb, rookie mistake that anybody could have made, but Studs is a P.I. who prides himself on his rep for reliability and he’ll most likely take the error with him to his grave. He figures that’s the kind of guy he is.
The thing that’s hard for Studs to live without is Little John’s extreme unlikelihood. When an unlikely person dies it just makes the occurrence of other unlikely people that much more unlikely. Characters like Little John or for that matter Studs himself are like statistical outliers of reality. They skew the figures. When they vanish from the picture then the graph relaxes back towards a bland and comfortable mean, whereas with Little John, he gave you the impression that the world was capable of anything. The laws of physics cowered in surrender every time the little fucker drank, perched on his barstool for eight pints, nine pints; you never saw him going to the toilet. Studs has theorised that his buddy was completely hollow, possibly some kind of toby jug that had spontaneously developed human consciousness. An unexpectedly resilient toby jug, admittedly: at the casino just off Regent Square he’d hurl his compressed mass onto the roulette table, hollering “All ’ands on dec
k” in customary helium tones. He’d been among the nightmare Crown & Cushion crowd providing the captive composer Malcolm Arnold with an audience. Out near Stoke Bruerne at the Boat, the pub by the canal where all the Sunday sailors used to congregate in yachting caps and polo shirts, their younger wives in sporty-looking shorts, the rampant Little John would thrust his face into the nearest denim crotch.
“It’s great. Their husbands all just laugh and go, like, ‘Steady on now, little fellow. ’Ad a spot too much, ’ave we?’ and things like that. Nobody wants to ’it a dwarf.”
Studs pictures John stood in the garden of his house in York Road with the “Toad Hall” plaque outside the door, just standing there by the stone sundial cackling in delight with massive toads all over him, the flowerbeds, the sundial, everything.
Of course, the most unlikely thing about his late friend is that Little John was actually the grandson of the Shah of Persia. Studs shakes his unprepossessing head and chuckles ruefully, as if there’s someone watching. Grandson of the Shah. To Studs it’s much like quantum theory, women, or contemporary jazz in that it don’t make any sense.
He reaches for another biro and then cancels the reflexive gesture halfway through. His croaker tells him he should scale his habit down to maybe just a fountain pen once in a while, on weekends or at special celebrations. Ah, the hell with it. He pushes back his chair and rises from his dressing table in the hope that some activity might take his steel-trap P.I. brain-box off his cravings. Studs goes through to the front office, tricked out to resemble a carpeted landing, staircase and English suburban downstairs hall to throw his creditors and gangland adversaries off the scent, and checks the message on the answerphone.
“Bob, for fuck’s sake, what’s that voice about? You sound like you’re an old Etonian child-molester. This is Alma, by the way. Sorry to call you at your mum’s, but if you’re coming to the show tomorrow don’t forget to bring along the Blake stuff that I asked you to dig up, assuming you’ve come up with anything. If not, it’s no big deal. Just never speak to me again. And why is Robert Goodman not in at the moment? Is he playing polo? ‘Robert Goodman’. Bob, nobody calls you Robert. To be frank, most people aren’t polite enough to even call you Bob. Most people groan and make a sort of gesture with their hands. Then they sit down, and then they cry. They cry like babies, Bob, at the idea of your existence. Anyway, I hope to see the Blake material at the exhibition, with you holding it if absolutely necessary. Take care, Bobby. Never change. Talk to you soon.”
His blood, he notices, is not immediately turned to ice there in his veins. That’s storybook detective stuff and in real life the best that he can manage is pink slush, but, still, it ain’t a pretty feeling. Sure, Studs knows the name, the voice, the avalanche of undeserved abuse. He knows the dame: a long, tall drink of battery acid going by the moniker of Alma Warren. Think of those surprisingly large clots of hair you sometimes haul from a blocked bathtub trap, and then imagine one with eyes and a superior demeanour: right there’s a description that a police sketch artist could work from. She’s the kind of cast-iron frail you don’t forget without hypnosis, and yet somehow the whole Warren case has slipped Studs’ bullet-creased and woman-addled mind until just now, this moment.
How it is with Warren, she’s got some variety of modern art scam going for her where the rubes pay out big bucks to see her schizophrenic scribbles. Months back, Studs called in at her bohemian dump along East Park Parade, just up the street from where he used to flop when he was living in here in town, presumably at some point after his tough hard-knock boyhood in the Bowery district of New York, or Brooklyn, or wherever it was Studs grew up. It’s only backstory. He’ll figure it out later. Anyway, he’d dropped by at the artist’s squalid dive to find her working frantically amidst billowing cumuli of contraband, bewildering images in different media propped all around the parlour until Studs had felt like he was trapped inside some kind of busted Grateful Dead kaleidoscope. Between pulls on a reefer long enough to qualify as penis envy and erratic daubs at her unfathomable canvas, she’d explained she was preparing something like three dozen pieces for a new show she was holding in the run-down neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Studs frankly doubts it was as rough and desperate as his own upbringing in the mean streets of the Bronx – perhaps Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Bidet, somewhere colourful like that – although by all accounts the Boroughs is still having lousy luck. Warren’s old district ain’t just on the wrong side of the tracks, it’s on the tracks themselves, in pieces and squashed flat by near eight hundred years of rumbling social locomotion.
He remembers having an unpleasant run-in with the place back in his childhood, when his parents had insisted that he take dance-classes at the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School in Phoenix Street, around the back of Doddridge Church. Or was it him, insisting on the dance class? Studs, his memory crammed full of bodies, barrooms and the brunettes he’s let slip between his fingers, can’t recall. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he had to wear a kilt. A nine-year-old boy in a kilt, taken to dancing classes in a thug-menagerie like Alma Warren’s former neighbourhood. Studs thinks that ought to count as child abuse. He’s mentioned it to Warren and her only comment had been that if she’d encountered him back then she’d more or less have been compelled to beat him up: “Posh kids in kilts, it’s one of the unwritten laws”. Now that Studs thinks about it, he was beaten up more often as a soft-centred young schoolboy than as a hard-bitten private eye, and on the great majority of those childhood occasions he was wearing ordinary trousers. He suspects the business with the kilt is only part of the equation.
The real kicker is that the dishevelled artist’s show is scheduled for tomorrow, and that furthermore it’s taking place at the day nursery in Phoenix Street which used to be the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School. This exhibition is connected with the case she wanted Studs to take up when he called to see her that day on East Park Parade. As Warren had explained it to him then, she had twenty or thirty pieces finished but the subject matter wasn’t all connecting up the way she hoped it would. From Studs’ perspective it was like she’d loaded up a sawn-off shotgun with a buckshot of significance then fired it at a wall expecting the blast-pattern to make sense. There were some images inspired by hymns, a tile arrangement based upon the life of local Holy Joe Phil Doddridge and some nonsense that concerned a stone cross brought here from Jerusalem. One picture seemed to be a likeness of Ben Perrit, a poetic rummy Studs knows from back in the day, and there was some mixed-media business meant to represent determinism and the absence of free will, or at least that’s what the pot-saturated painter claimed. In Studs’ opinion, Warren’s exhibition is a random four-lane pile-up of ideas with nothing joining them together, and to make things worse she seems to think the whole mess should somehow connect with William Blake.
“I mean, I’ve got a lot of references to my family having come from Lambeth, but I’m thinking it needs something more substantial, something that pulls all the themes together. So, Bob, that’s what I want you to do. Find out how Blake ties into all of this. Find out what links Blake with the Boroughs and I promise that I’ll paint you, Bobby. I’ll immortalise you, and together we’ll inflict your face upon a blameless future. How’s that for an offer?”
Studs’ opinion, which he didn’t venture at the time, is that the offer is a standard Alma Warren contract in that it involves no actual money. Immortality and £1.50 will buy Studs another pack of biros. Still, it’s work, and he accepted it. The paint-flecked hag has Studs over a barrel and if he can’t make good on the case he knows he’s finished in this town. Warren will see to it. She knows too much about him, all those stories buried in his violent past that he prefers to keep that way. He grimaces as he recalls the time he bumped into her on the Kettering Road and she’d asked, no doubt in an affectation of concern, why he was limping.
“Well, I was, uh … I was in Abington Park last night, up by the bandstand. As you know, I like to keep my hand in with the acting. What I do is, I rehearse parts so that I’ll be ready if I’m offered them. It was a sort of secret agent role where the scene opened with me standing on the bandstand and then, at a signal, what I do is vault over the handrail and land on the grass so that I’m in a cat-like pose. I look around, scanning the darkness, then run off into the shadows.”
