‘Bye,’ I said, but she’d already gone.
I stepped back into the sheets of piss and walked about Piccadilly for a couple of hours, going in and out of cafйs, sitting in damp booths with weak coffees, waiting, watching skinny black figures dancing through the rain, the lot of us dodging the raindrops, the memories, the pain.
I looked at my watch.
It was time to go.
Going up to five, I found another telephone box on Oldham Street.
‘Anything?’
‘Nothing.’
At five to five I was huddled at the bottom of the steps, ringing wet.
Ten minutes later she came down the stairs.
‘I’ve got to go back up,’ she said. ‘I’m not finished.’
‘Did you get the stuff?’
She handed me an envelope.
I glanced inside.
She said, ‘It’s all there. What there is.’
‘I believe you,’ I said and handed her twenty folded quid.
‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ she laughed, walking back upstairs.
‘Bet it was,’ I said. ‘Bet it was.’
I went down to Victoria where they told me the Bradford train went from Piccadilly.
I ran up through the cats and the dogs and caught a cab for the last bit.
It was almost six when we got there, but there was a train on the hour and I caught it.
Inside, the carriage stank of wet clothes and stale smoke and I had to share a table with an old couple from Pennistone and their sweating sandwiches.
The woman smiled, I smiled back and the husband bit into a large red apple.
I opened the envelope and took out tissue-thin pieces of duplicate paper, three in all.
There were lists of payments, cash or cheque for February 1974 through to March 1976, payments to photoshops, chemists, photographers, paper mills, ink works, and models.
I ran down the list, out of breath:
Everything stopped, dead.
Everything stopped.
I took out Oldman’s memo:
Everything -
Stopped -
Read Ka Su Peng.
Dead.
There on that train, that train of tears, crawling across those undressed hells, those naked little hells, those naked little hells all decked out in tiny, tiny bells, there on that train listening to those bells ring in the end of the world:
1977.
In 1977, the year the world broke.
My world:
The old woman across the table finishing the last sandwich and screwing up the silver foil into a tiny, tiny ball, the egg and cheese on her false teeth, crumbs stuck in the powder on her face, her face smiling at me, a gargoyle, her husband bleeding his teeth into that big red apple, this big red, red, red world.
1977.
In 1977, the year the world turned red.
My world:
I needed to see the photographs.
The train crawled on.
I had to see the photographs.
The train stopped at another station.
The photographs, the photographs, the photographs.
I was crying and I wanted to stop, wanted to pull myself together but, when I tried, the bits didn’t fit.
Pieces missing.
1977.
In 1977, the year the world fell to bits.
My world:
Going under, to the sea-bed, better off dead, that evil, evil bed, those secret underwater waves that floated me up bloated, up from the sea-bed.
Beached, washed up.
1977.
In 1977, the year the world drowned.
My world:
1977 and I needed to see the photographs, had to see the photographs, the photographs.
In 1977, the year -
1977.
My world:
An imagined photograph.
I didn’t stop in Bradford, just changed trains for Leeds and sat on another slow train through hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell:
Hell.
In Leeds I ran through the black rain along Boar Lane, stumbling, through the precinct, tripping, on to Briggate, falling, into Joe’s Adult Books.
‘By the door.’
‘You got every issue?’
‘I don’t know. Have a look.’
