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Measuring 6.2 upon the Richter scale the earthquake ripples across Java.
Through an unglued eye she notes the woman’s kitchen clock: six minutes to eleven.
Something dreadful scuttles over Grafton Street in front of him. He screams into the swerve.
From Freddy’s monochrome perspective the black Escort mounts the curb almost in silence.
Mick imagines the Mercedes as it smacks into the thirteenth pillar under the Pont de l’Alma.
Houses fall, more than a hundred thousand, and some one and a half million homeless stumble out into erased streets wearing bloodied nightclothes, staring, calling people’s names.
In its enamel bowl the water is now carmine, she observes, concentric rings dilating from its epicentre. The old lady’s rung the ambulance and the police; asks if there’s anybody else that should be contacted, and in a voice she doesn’t recognise she soberly recites her mother’s number.
Up onto the pavement and straight at the lamppost in a series of bejewelled saccades, he impacts on the steering column with his breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, his heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Head punching through the windscreen, for an instant he believes that he’s been flung miraculously clear until he notices that he’s now deaf and colour-blind.
Idling towards the wreckage of the car, unhurried now, he glances from the driver’s body half emerged across the crumpled bonnet to the duplicate that stands amidst a pavement spray of shattered glass and stares at the black bloodstains soaking its white shirtfront in incomprehension. Someone else lurks at the end of Fitzroy Terrace, looking on, who Freddy takes at first to be a mortal passer-by until he spots the mismatched eyes.
“It looks like he could use a drink”, says sympathetic Sam O’Day.
Against his twitching eyelids Mick screens a montage, commencing with the buckled vehicle at rest against the tunnel wall, almost immediately lost in a dissolve of swarming flashbulbs which resolves to snapshot images highlighting the events of the next … had it really only been a week? Kensington Palace bleeding flowers and cellophane, New Labour’s rush to spin the shroud, newspaper editors demanding a response from those they’d helped bereave, the whole fast-forward flicker of activity concluding with a still shot of Westminster Abbey, hushed in dull September light.
At the approach to sunrise thousands clog the Solo-Yogya highway, fearing a reprise of the tsunami two years previously and fleeing inland, leaving ruptured homes to opportunist burglars who, in districts high above sea level, nonetheless spread tales of an impending tidal wave that never comes. Almost six thousand dead, six times that many injured and along the highway’s teeming margin in Prambanan a collapsing ancient Hindu temple complex spills its god-encrusted pinnacles into the dust below, cracked deities become unmoving obstacles for the incoming surf of refugees to flow between in curling eddies, with so many in pyjamas that it all seems a bewildering mass dream.
As though time isn’t really passing, she sits motionless beside the table while green swirls of paramedic and fluorescent yellow surges of police orbit her in a gaudy palette of concern, bright twists of colour artfully embedded in the great glass marble of the moment. Audrey – that’s the woman’s name – Audrey is telling the attending officer that she’s a former patient of St. Crispin’s Hospital up Berry Wood turn, relocated to this halfway house during the care-in-the-community initiative. Marla’s not really listening; not even really Marla anymore. The capable and unafraid perspective from which she’d viewed her backseat ordeal has not receded alongside the threat of imminent annihilation, and whoever she is now it’s somebody considerably older than eighteen. There in the vastness of the tiny kitchen objects are illuminated in church window hues: the muted turquoise label on a tin of beans, her forearms bruised to plush cinema-seat maroon and Audrey’s slippers, pink as sugar-iced flamingos. Every detail, every sound, each thought that passes through her mind is outlined with the glorious blood and gold of martyr-fire. She hears her own voice answering the policewoman’s questions and it’s strong, it isn’t weak. It isn’t ugly.
“No, he had a chubby build, with rosy cheeks and dark hair greying at the sides. I didn’t see his eyes.”
And all the time there’s part of her that’s still there in the juddering Escort; still there on the doorstep looking up at Audrey with her head all filament-glare and combustion, speaking that peculiar name from J.K. Stephen’s doggerel and a dozen spine-lined ripperbacks, as if she’d known it would be recognised. A brandied slur of syllables or an elaborate sneeze, a name that nobody was ever called just lying around empty, waiting for the individual singular enough to put it on: Kaphoozelum. New point of view, resuming black and white.
Wet tarmac glints in an abrupt theatre shush, as though some drama were about to start. The boot’s been sprung by the collision – fuck, what will he say to Irene, say to the insurers – and the children’s beach toys and inflatables are scattered in the road as pale and grey as uncooked crabs. Exasperated and confused he tries to kick a punctured armband to the curbside, but he’s either seeing double and he misses or his foot goes through it like it isn’t there. Given his probable concussion he decides the first of these alternatives is the most likely, although this still leaves him with the problem of that mangled body sprawling through the absent windshield. Did he hit somebody? Oh, shit, he’s in trouble now, but then how did they manage to go through the screen feet first, that isn’t possible, and finally he glimpses the glass-freckled ruin of the face but still can’t quite determine where he knows it from. That’s when he notices the two old boys stood watching him from further down the street, both of them wearing hats, which isn’t something that you very often see these days. The nearer of the two comes up to him, asks him if he could use a drink and Derek says yes just like that, grateful for anybody who might let him in on what’s just happened. The old dosser tells him there’s a place nearby, the Jolly Something, where he’ll have a chance to get his bearings now the sat-nav’s fucked. They start to walk together back up towards Regent’s Square and, actually, this could all still turn out okay. Remembering the tramp’s companion he asks “What about your mate?” They both pause and look back. The other man – one eye looks like it’s got a cataract or something – smiles and lifts his hat, at which point Derek understands exactly where he is. He starts to weep. The vagrant near him quietly takes his arm and leads him, unresisting, off into a soot and silver Friday night. New point of view.
As Freddy sees it, once he’s led the snivelling new statistic down Daguerreotype walkways to the Jolly Smokers, that’s him done, his duties and responsibilities discharged. Puzzlingly, at the ghost-pub there are two men made of wood that seem to have arrived from somewhere, one of them embedded face-up in the worm-drilled floorboards while the other one, more corpulent but similarly naked, stands beside the bar with tears of varnish rolling down his grain-whorled cheeks and Mary Jane’s initials gouged into his arm. As Freddy makes excuses and slips out the back door, he looks round and sees the distraught new arrival being introduced to the likewise disconsolate fat manikin by Tommy Mangle-the-Cat, fragments of a brutal smile sliding across his juggled physiognomy. There’s no need to see any more; no need to know the precise nature of the justice that’s administered above the streets. He smoulders out into the sodium-stained darkness at the top of Tower Street, where above a fast-disintegrating overcoat of cloud are stars that look the same to dead and living. He feels differently about things now, not least about himself. Some of the stains have gone from his escutcheon, blots evaporated from his copybook. When it came down to it, he’d done the right thing. He’s been better than the man he thought he was, the man who was resigned to an ink-wash eternity, too guilty and impoverished in his character to ever go Upstairs. He’s paid the district back for all its pints of milk, its loaves of bread, its disappointed doorsteps. Much to his surprise he finds his worn-out shoes are leading him down Scarletwell Street to his friend’s house, Audrey’s house there at the bottom with its crook-door, with its Jacob Flight. He’s hurrying now, past the deserted playing fields. He thinks he can remember yellow, thinks he can remember green. Cut to interior, night.
His breath so regular that he’s forgotten it, Mick falters at the brink of dream, that overcast September afternoon nine years ago replaying in an emptied cranial cinema. They’d watched on television, him and Cathy and the lads, and it had all seemed stage-managed and strange, more like a Royal Varie
ty Performance than a funeral beneath its Cool Britannia branding. Needing something three-dimensional and more authentic than a screen could offer they’d all climbed into the car and Cathy drove them out to Weedon Road, where they could watch the cortege on its way to Althorp. All the people that were gathered at the roadside there, as quiet as ghosts, nobody really certain why they’d come except the sense that something old was happening again and that their presence was required. Almost asleep Mick starts to misplace the dividing line between event and memory. No longer horizontal and in bed he’s helping Cathy shepherd Jack and Joe between spectators on the verge, somnambulists with tongues stilled by mythology. Finding a clear spot in the threadbare grass beside the curb it seems to him that these exact same people must have turned up to remove their hats for Boadicea, Eleanor of Castile, Mary, Queen of Scots and any dead queens who have slipped his slipping mind. An engine is approaching in the distance, loud for want of any other sound, even the birds remaining mute for the duration. It glides past them like a ship, imagined bow-wave rippling the asphalt, floral wreathes like lifebelts on the bonnet, bound for its pretended island grave. Having attended to her homecoming the crowd and vision both begin to break up like commemorative crockery, melting into the throng at Alma’s exhibition that’s tomorrow morning. Letting go of everything, Mick sinks into another of his five-and-twenty thousand nights. He fades to black.
AFTERLUDE
CHAIN OF OFFICE
With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamorous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare centre’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture.
Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mick with an unprecedented kiss that left his right cheek partially obscured by a wet crimson clown-print, Alma dragged him up onto the doorstep and excoriated him as she unlocked.
“No, seriously, Warry, thanks for only being twenty fucking minutes late. You must get loads of exhibitions based entirely on your mental problems, so, y’know, it means a lot that you’ve turned up at all. I’m really touched. You’re almost like a brother to me.”
Mick grinned, the disquieting barefoot teenager on Crispin Street and his severely localised depression on the walkway of Saint Peter’s House lost in the sooty deltas at the corners of his eyes.
“There’s no need to be nervous, Warry. I’m here now. I know I’m like a superstition with you, aren’t I? I’m your University Challenge lucky gonk. Why didn’t you just open up without me?”
Alma curled her lower lip, as if formally rolling back a no-longer-required red carpet.
“Because fuck off. This is the wrong door for this key. Can’t you just circulate amongst these …” Alma gestured inexactly at Ben Perrit. “… these gallery-going intellectuals till I get this sorted out? See that nobody starts a fight or pinches anything.”
Performing a constrained about-turn on the step, he overlooked a perfectly convivial crowd which nonetheless seemed to contain innate disorder. A fight, though unlikely, was not utterly out of the question, but there definitely wasn’t anything worth pinching. Nor did any of those present seem particularly larcenous, except perhaps the two old ladies he’d assumed were with Bert Regan’s mum. They stood apart from all the other attendees and looked like they were sharing recollections of the neighbourhood, one of them indicating something in the general vicinity of Mary’s Street while her companion grinned and nodded vigorously. The malicious glint in their crow-trodden eyes elicited a warm pang of nostalgia for the monstrous Boroughs matriarchs of yesteryear, and briefly made Mick miss his Nan. Miss his whole genealogy for that matter, with almost everybody gone except him and his sister, whom he didn’t really see as being representative.
Against a layered backdrop where decrepit 1960s flats blocked railway yards and distant parkland further down the slope, Dave Daniels smiled bemusedly in conversation with Rome Thompson’s garrulous and slinky boyfriend. Mrs. Regan told Ben Perrit that he was a silly bugger, a perceptive diagnosis based on just under five minutes of acquaintance. Blackbirds skimmed resurfaced plague-graves in the parking area off Chalk Lane and Mick allowed himself the thought that all the place’s previous warm weekends were also not far off, lingering atmospheres of cobbled pub yards, pocket money and the tuppenny rush infusing the frayed present as a pungent marinade. The light at that precise time, that particular day of the month, had fallen in exactly the same fashion upon Doddridge Church since it was raised. Some of those shadows over there were hundreds of years old, had settled their specific pall on insufficiently despondent pallbearers and hesitating brides alike, on Swedenborgians and repenting rakes. He’d heard of laws protecting something known as “ancient lights”, but couldn’t really picture any protest lobby fighting to conserve the ancient dark, save possibly for easily ignored depressives, Goths and Satanists. Behind him, Alma had eventually reasoned that it was in fact her Yale key rather than the lock, the nursery or the rest of England which was upside-down, and was approximately stating that the exhibition was now open:
