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It was eleven thirty-five. He was emerging from the Bird In Hand on Regent’s Square into the grunting, shouting dark of Friday night. Arterial spills of traffic light reflected from the paving slabs of Sheep Street, where there had apparently at some point in the evening been a shower of rain.
Girls in short skirts in gangs of four or five leaned on each other for support, a multitude of 15-denier legs all holding up one structure, turning inadvertently into components of a single giant giggling insect or a piece of mobile furniture as beautifully upholstered as it was impractical. Boys moved like chess knights with concussion, waltzing mice with Tourette’s, wandering clusters of them suddenly erupting into murderous bonhomie or well-intentioned bottlings and it wasn’t even closing time. There was no closing time. Licensing hours had been extended to infinity by government decree, ostensibly to somehow cut down on binge drinking but in fact so that disoriented visiting Americans would not be inconvenienced by funny English customs. Drunken binges hadn’t been eradicated, obviously. They’d simply had their lucid intervals removed.
Ben could remember having plaice and chips a few hours earlier and a few dimly lighted pub interior moments in between – had he been talking to someone? – but otherwise it was as if he had been newly born this instant, squatted out onto this windy street, into these gutters, wholly ignorant of how he came to be here. At least this time, Ben observed with gratitude, he wasn’t sobbing and he wasn’t naked. Underdressed, perhaps, with evening’s chill beginning now to permeate the riotous sunset of his waistcoat, striking through the insulating beery numbness to raise goose-bumps, but at least not nude. Ah ha ha ha.
A rubber-fingered fumble in his pocket reassured him that the treacherous whore Elizth Fry at least this time had not left Benedict for some ill-mannered publican who’d simply use her, wouldn’t love or need her the way Ben did. That said, finding her immediately raised the tempting possibility of popping back into the pub to get a carry-out, a few cans, but no. No, he mustn’t. Go home, Benedict. Go home, son, if you know what’s good for you.
He turned right, shuffling up Sheep Street to the lights where it met Regent Square, the ugly cross-hatching of carriageways that centuries ago had been the north gate of the town. This was where traitors’ skulls were placed on spikes like trolls on pencils, as a decoration. This was where the heretics and witches had been burned. These days the junction at the end of Sheep Street was marked only by a nightclub painted lurid lavender from when it had been a goth hangout called Macbeth’s a year or two ago, attempting to create a gothic atmosphere upon a corner deep in severed heads and shrieking crones already. Coals to Newcastle, wolfbane to Transylvania. Ben lurched over the various crossings that were needed to convey him safely to the top of Grafton Street, which he proceeded to descend unsteadily. A short way further down blue lights were circling, sapphire flashes battering like moths on the surrounding buildings, but he was too dulled by drink to lend them any great significance.
He glanced up to the higher reaches of the car repair place just across the road, where you could see the solar logo of the Sunlight Laundry still raised in relief, even through the piss-yellow sodium light that everything was bathing in. Fixed in its place, it shone down happily upon a day of 24-hour drinking finally arrived, when it need never sink again below the yard arm. Benedict turned his attention back to the uneven paving slabs immediately in front of him, and focussed for the first time on the lone police car pulled up on the curb ahead, the source of all the dancing disco lights. There was a wreck recovery going on, with a smashed vehicle of uncertain make being winched up on its surviving rear wheels by a tow truck. Grim men in fluorescent vests were sweeping shattered windscreen fragments from the busy road, with the police car evidently flashing there behind them to alert the other motorists to what was going on. A baffling spray of random items such as children’s toys and gardening gloves were spread across the tarmac where presumably they had been flung from a burst-open boot. Plant-misters, shower caps and a single flip-flop. Standing by his car and strobe-lit by its beacon, the attending officer was staring down morosely at a melted tyre-print where the now-disintegrated automobile had apparently swerved up onto the pavement, possibly avoiding something in its path, before it crashed into the wall or lamppost or whatever it had been. At Benedict’s approach the plump young copper looked up from his contemplation of the burned-in tread mark, and to Ben’s surprise he realised that he knew him from around the neighbourhood.
“Hello, Ben. Look at all this fucking mess.” The officer, pink choirboy cheeks now red with aggravation, gestured to the pulverised glass and assorted oddments that were carpeting the street. “You should have seen it half an hour ago, before the medics pulled the poor cunt off his steering column. Worse thing is, it’s not even supposed to be my shift tonight.”
Benedict squinted at the workers sweeping up the debris. There was no blood he could see, but then perhaps the gore was all inside the mangled wreck.
“I see. A fatal accident. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, eh? Ah ha ha ha. Joy rider, was it?” Bugger. He’d not meant to laugh, not at a tragic death, nor had he meant to ask for whom the bell tolled right after delivering Donne’s admonition not to. Luckily, the copper’s mind appeared to be on other things, or else he was accustomed to and tolerant of Ben’s eccentric manner. In a way he’d have to be, with his own sherbet lemon police-issue waistcoat more flamboyant than Ben’s own.
“Joy rider? No. No, it was just some bloke in his late thirties. He was in his own car, far as we could see. A family car.” He nodded glumly to the bright, trans-generational litter, strewn across the road from the sprung-open trunk.
“He didn’t smell like he’d been drinking when they cut him free. He must have swerved to miss something and gone up on the path.” The young policeman’s downcast air briefly appeared to lift a little. “Least I wasn’t sent to tell his missus. Honestly, I fucking hate that. All the screaming and the blubbering and that’s just me. I’ll tell you, the last time I went to one of them I nearly – hang on – ”
He was interrupted by a burst of static from his radio, which he unclipped from his coat to answer.
“Yeah? Yeah, I’m still down the top of Grafton Street. They’re finishing the cleanup now, so I’ll be done here in a minute. Why?” There was a pause during which the cherubic officer stared into space expressionlessly, then he said “All right. I’ll be there soon as I get finished with the crash. Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
He reattached his radio receiver, looked at Benedict and pulled a face that signified resigned contempt for his own woeful luck.
“There’s been another tart done over down on Andrew’s Road. Somebody living down there’s took her in, but they want me to get a statement from her before she gets taken up the hospital. Why is it always me this happens to?”
Benedict was going to ask if he meant getting raped and beaten up, but then thought better of it. Leaving the embittered constable to supervise the tail-end of his clean-up duties, Ben continued downhill, curiously sobered by the whole offhand exchange. He turned along St. Andrew’s Street, thinking about the pr
ostitute who’d been attacked, about the man who’d been alive and driving home to see his family an hour ago with no suspicion of his imminent mortality. That was the whole appalling crux of things, Ben thought, that death or horror might be waiting just ahead and nobody had any way of knowing until those last, dreadful seconds. He began to think about his sister Alison, the motorcycle accident, but that was painful and so Ben steered his attentions elsewhere. Doing so, he inadvertently arrived at a blurred memory of the young working girl who had approached Ben earlier, the one who’d had her hair in rows. He knew it wasn’t her specifically who’d been the latest girl to be assaulted at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but he also knew that in a sense it might as well have been. It would be one just like her.
How could this have happened to the Boroughs? How could it have turned into a place where somebody who could have grown up beautiful, who could have grown to be a poet’s muse, is raped and half-killed every other week? The spate of sexual abductions and attacks over a single weekend during that last August, the majority of them had happened in this district. At the time they’d thought a single ‘rape gang’ was responsible for all the crimes, but ominously it had turned out that at least one serious assault was wholly unconnected to the others. Benedict supposed that when events like that occurred with the alarming frequency that they appeared to do round here, it would be natural to assume concerted action by some gang or some conspiracy. Although a menacing idea it was more comforting than the alternative, which was that such things happened randomly and happened often.
Still disconsolately dwelling on the probably doomed girl he’d met in Marefair and the fatal accident whose aftermath he’d witnessed just five minutes back, Ben turned right into Herbert Street, deserted on the slope of midnight. Silhouetted on the Lucozade-toned darkness of the sky behind them, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court were black as Stanley Kubrick monoliths, beamed down by an unfathomable alien intelligence to spark ideas amongst the shaggy, louse-bound primitives. Ideas like “Jump”. You couldn’t even see what little there was left of Spring Lane School from this specific viewpoint how you once could, not for all the NEWLIFE standing in the way. Ben shambled down as far as Simons Walk beneath a night made tangerine and starless. Turning left along the strip of turf-edged paving that would lead him to his mam’s house he felt irritated, as he always did, by Simons Walk and its absent apostrophe. Unless there was some benefactor to the area named Simons that Ben hadn’t heard of, he assumed the street’s name was a reference to church-and-castle-building Norman knight Simon de Senlis, in which case there should be a possessive … oh, what was the point? Nobody cared. Nothing meant anything that couldn’t be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers’ punctuation.
Staggering along past Althorpe Street he could hear screams of laughter and discordant weirdo music made still more distorted by its volume, issuing from slaphead Kenny Something’s drug den down at the walk’s end. Off in the ochre gloom car engines vented jungle snarls across the darkening cement savannah. Turning into Tower Street he walked up as far as Eileen’s house, then spent five minutes giggling at himself while he attempted to unlock the front door without making any noise by trying to fit his key into the doorbell. Ah ha ha.
The house was quiet with everything switched off, his mam having already gone to bed. He passed by the closed door to the front room, still filled with heirlooms and for show rather than use, the way things used to be in Freeschool Street, and went through to the kitchen for a glass of milk before he went upstairs.
His room, the one space on the planet that he felt was his, awaited him forgivingly, prepared to take him in once more for all that he’d neglected it. There was his single bed, there was what he still laughingly referred to as his writing desk, there were the ranks of poets that he’d earlier tried to gas. He sat down on the bed’s edge to untie his shoes but left the action uncompleted, trailing off across the carpet with the unpicked laces. He was thinking of the accident in Grafton Street, which meant that he was thinking about Alison, her ton-up boyfriend trying to overtake that lorry that had no wide-load lights. He was thinking about dying, how he did each morning soon as he woke up, but now there was no hope the morbid thoughts would vanish with the day’s first drink, not when its last drink was just then expiring horribly beneath Ben’s tongue. He was alone there in his room with death, his room, his death, its inevitability, and there was nothing to defend him.
One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn’t be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he’d been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He’d have been crossed off the guest list, he’d have been erased, as if he’d never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and …
It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out of him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life’s frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.
But then, Benedict had done that. He’d decided, rashly, back in his romantic youth, that he’d be nothing if he couldn’t be a poet. At the time, he hadn’t really thought about the lesser of those two alternatives, the possibility that he might well end up as nothing. It had never happened for him, the success he’d thought he might achieve when he was younger, and he’d gradually lost heart. He’d pretty much abandoned writing, but it was so much a part of his identity that he could not admit, not even to himself, that he had given up. He would pretend his inactivity was only a sabbatical, that he was lying fallow, gathering material, when he knew deep inside that he was only gathering dust.
He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he’d made. He’d been so anxious for success and validation that he’d come to think you weren’t really a writer unless you were a successful one. He knew, in this unprecedented patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his contemporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, in his three-score-and-ten, had never had a moment’s doubt that he was a true artist. Ben’s own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was simple failure of nerve. If he had somehow found the courage to continue writing, even if each page had been rejected by each publisher it was submitted to, he’d still be able to look himself in the eye and know he was a poet. There was nothing stopping him from picking up his pen again except Earth’s easily-resisted field of gravity.
This could be the night that Ben turned it all around. All that he had to do was walk across and sit down at his writing desk and actually produce something. Who knows? It might turn out to be the piece that would secure Ben’s reputation. Or if not, if his abilities with verse seemed flat and clumsy with disuse, it might be his first faltering step back to the path he’d wandered from, into this bitter-sodden and immobilising bog. Tonight might be his chance to mend himself. The stark thought struck him that tonight might be his last chance.
If he didn’t do it now, if he came up with some excuse about it being better to approach it in the morning when his head was fresher, then it seemed quite likely that he’d never do it. He’d keep finding reasons to put all his poetry aside until it was too late and life called time on him, until he ended up as a statistic at the top of Grafton Street with an indifferent police constable complaining that Ben’s death had messed up his night off. Benedict had to do it right now, right this moment.
He got up and stumbled over to the writing desk, tripping upon his dangling laces on the way. He sat down and pulled out his notebook from a rear shelf of the bureau, pausing to ashamedly wipe thick dust from the cover with his palm before he opened it to a clean sheet. He picked the ballpoint pen that looked most viable out of the jam jar standing on the desk’s top ledge, removed its cap and poised the sticky, furry ball of indigo above the naked vellum. He sat there like that a good ten minutes, coming to the agonizing realisation that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Six things, then, that Ben Perrit was completely useless at: escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, talking to girls and writing poetry.
