He heard, ‘ All things bright and beautiful’.
He ran down the High Road, trying to outrun the voice. But it caught him up and mixed up the harvest festival with Christmas.
He gave us eyes to see them
He gave us leprosy
He made the highest mountains
To fall on you and me…
See? See? See what I mean? Stop! Stop right now!
And Paul stopped. And passers-by looked at the strange young man who was sweating and steaming while a heavy frost fell around him and turned the litterbins white.
Christmas, goose fat, a penny for the old man’s hat. Kick his head in more like. Steal his pension. Take that!
It was right, wasn’t it, that in a lawless society those with would soon be without? It was right that at Christmas the bosses and toffs should get their comeuppance, that they should be forced to sleep in a stable…in Africa. Yeah.
And then it was Saturday night for real.
The scene was set, the third act, and Paul was in heaven. It was his first time in the theatre, and it moved him to tears. He cried out loud and the people beside him were, for a while, amused. The barber had given him the ticket in exchange for a TV set. It was a complimentary given to the barber when he agreed to hang a poster in his window. The barber wasn't an Anthea Palmer fan. He liked Sophia Loren. He'd been keen on her ever since he'd seen Boy on a Dolphin in 1957. He remembered the year well, he told Paul. The EEC was formed. Macmillan was Prime Minister. Sputnik took off. But the highlight was Sophia's tits poking out of a see-through vest. Nipples the size of halfcrown pieces, the colour of a good claret. Technicolor. Remember
Technicolor? It was going to change your life. Right? Paul wondered what a half-crown piece was.
The stage was a hospital ward and Anthea Palmer had arrived with her best friend.
Anthea sang:
I'm looking for the gynaecology department.
And as she looked around for assistance, her best friend sang:
She's looking for the gynaecology department
She needs a professional point of view
A little sperm has found its way
And decided it wants to stay
And now she needs advice on what to do.
A male consultant passed by:
What have we here? Internal examination?
Cervical smear, dear? Contraceptive fitting?
Sit you on the end of a rubber glove, shall we?
Routine check-up, is it? High chair, stirrups and a…speculum!
Paul experienced an urge to kill the consultant. His eyes narrowed to slits and a muscle in his temple began to pop.
Anthea Palmer, lonely and beautiful and drawing yet more tears from Paul, moved to one side of the stage and sang:
We want more female gynaecologists
Who understand our feelings and our fears
Why should we have this humiliation
Each time we need an examination?
Anthea sounded innocent and fragile; he just knew that in real life she wore white underwear. He saw the girl on TV, in front of the map of the British Isles, pointing at clouds spitting three huge teardrops. And so Paul, Paul Knight, weeping, fell in love with Anthea Palmer, ex-weather girl, the blond-bobbed goddess of countless travel shows and tabloid front pages, and he couldn't get over her. His eyes were still red when he arrived at Avenue Road, the dangerous place of run-down terraced houses. But Paul had no option. Mr Lawrence had been right. He had to disappear for a little while and keep well out of the way of his ex-cell mate. He couldn't think of a better place to disappear than Avenue Road. People had been disappearing there for years.
The area was in the process of being demolished to make way for a new development. Huge diggers and concrete crushers stood idle; giant stick insects reaching out of the red-tinted darkness. In the morning they'd come to life, belching plumes of black smoke, flattening the earth. And then, in time, there'd be another Robot City, where robots shopped.
Half the road was already levelled but numbers four to twelve and three to eleven remained largely intact, two rows of five houses facing each other across a rutted road in the midst of devastation, piles of brick and jagged-edged concrete and twisted girders, like a war zone, like one of the scenes from… Where was it?
Over there. One of those places where all the troublemakers came from. Paul was more interested in the place in Africa where the civil war was killing millions, the war our politicians weren't interested in. No oil, no aerospace deal. No interest.
Four to twelve, as with three to eleven, surrounded by great mounds of rubble, had broken windows, some of them boarded, and front doors sealed by the shadowy authorities. When the wind was wrong it whistled through the windows and filled the rooms with an icy blast. Once, Paul remembered, he'd woken up with frost on his blanket. But it was that or the Big Issue and some newspapers in a shop doorway. And praying that the guy sleeping next to you wasn't from Glasgow or, worse, Edinburgh.
Paul knew his way about, like most of them did. You took a shower in the local leisure centres when no one was looking, you visited the charity shops before they opened and went through the black sacks that were left piled in the entrances.
Paul knew his way into the even-numbered row. There were various windows the occupiers used as bolt- holes and one of the back doors had been broken open. The local kids called the place the Warren because holes had been knocked through walls so that there were internal passageways to all five houses. There were a dozen or more people living in the row. No one was quite sure how many because people came and went. Some would stay for a night or two, particularly when the weather was bad, and it hadn't been good lately, and others had been there for months. The last house in the row, number 12, even though it was serviced by three passageways, one down and two up, was occupied by a single person and was out of bounds to all the others. That was just about the only rule. You didn't go into number 12.
An old-timer lived there. Rumour had it that he had South African connections but he didn’t have a South African accent, more like Huddersfield, Paul would tell you, for there were some odd people from Huddersfield. There was also a rumour that he was an ex-Druid who still, on occasion, wore his old robes and made his way to Stonehenge every summer solstice. Truth told, they didn't know much about him. But they did know that November the fifth and the weeks leading up to it was his favourite time. He'd spend those weeks going round the Paki shops, Londis and places like that, looking at the fireworks. He loved the fireworks, the big bastards in particular, those that cost a hundred quid a time and sent, like, a hundred bangers into the air that fanned out with colour and shook the earth. There was something about shaking the earth that he liked.
He liked to cook. But he wasn't very good at it. Not if the smell was anything to go by. Clouds of wicked steam that made your eyes water would pour through the passageways from number 12 and when that happened, which was often, then the occupants of number 10 moved down to 8, 6 and 4. It was inconvenient but no one complained. No way. The old-timer was in charge. That was never an issue. They called him Powder Pete.
Someone told Paul – he couldn’t remember who – that Powder Pete had once worked in a paint spraying place, spraying metalwork and turning the silver-grey into black and blue, and that’s how he got his name. But it was only hearsay.
Powder Pete was a bit special. That's why they respected his privacy. The authorities would turn off the water and he'd have it back on in minutes. They'd cut the electricity and gas but that made no difference either. He'd just go out in the night and an hour later the lights would be back on. He looked after them and, for that, they were grateful. People would pay him a little rent. Not much. Nothing if they were sick and couldn't go robbing or dealing. One thing Powder Pete didn't like was the kids on the game. Not the kids, just the game and the adults
