‘Fuck me, man,’ Johnny said, ‘I gave him a quid.’
After wandering around for hours, off his head on booze and God know’s what, Melvin Morgan had passed out after being sick in the recess of a gateway leading into a pub yard at the side of Phoebe Twist’s mews house. Phoebe Twist was on CCTV going out at one o’clock in the morning with a beret on her head, slippers on her feet and a fur coat over her nightie, hauling the watering can she kept for her pot plants. It was a big watering can and she upended its ice-cold contents all over him. In the morning, covered in a thin film of ice and sick, he was dead. It was on the radio, the evening news. Twist said she thought he was a threat, he was mumbling and making peculiar noises. You would, wouldn’t you, lost, off your head, drenched in sick in a doorway? She said she’d asked him to leave twice and rung the police, but no one came. The water was meant to wake him up and move him on. Of course she regretted his death. Of course she hadn’t waited around to check on him, she was scared of him. Last she’d seen he’d been sitting up. She’d gone straight back to bed and taken a sleeping pill.
I’ve sometimes wondered: if Melvin Morgan hadn’t looked Johnny in the eyes the day before he died, how different would all our lives have been? Of the great archive of social injustice all around us, stretching back in the endless mirrors of infinity and unfolding still into the future, I’ve wondered why it was that this particular lonely miserable death shook him so to the core. The effect could not have been more harrowing if the man had been his sworn blood brother. We were all appalled, but Johnny grieved. I’ve searched what little I knew of his life before me to explain it, and all I keep coming back to is the cold at that school in Oxfordshire, the nine-year-old boy getting up in the winter dark and washing in freezing cold water.
‘Cold water,’ he said, ‘cold water. Cold water, my God!’ Over and over again. ‘Cold water, cold water, Lor, can you imagine, freezing to death?’
February for God’s sake, wind blasting in from Siberia.
‘She killed him, Lor. Murdered him sure as if she’d stuck a knife in his gut.’
The story on the page was depressingly familiar. Twenty-five years old, slow, dim, foster homes, young offenders’, prison. Booze, speed, H. He’d been staying on his sister’s couch in Leeds, she’d kicked him out, he’d come down to London looking for someone he’d been in prison with.
‘And that story of hers, full of holes as a colander. And they would back her up, wouldn’t they, the police? Where’s the report of her phone call then? Liars. All of them.’
14
One of my favourite walks is the track along the side of Gallinger’s field, takes longer to get home but it’s nice. A hedge runs all the way along on the left, full of the most wonderful wild flowers. The trees spread out their long arms, beseeching the arms of the trees on the other side, but they never get near enough to touch. They put livestock in Gallinger’s field, sometimes horses, sometimes cattle. It’s about two hundred yards across. At the other side there’s a narrow track leading away between the back of the farm and the meadows beyond, and there’s a wooden bench you can sit on at the start of this track but I never see anyone sitting there, although, very occasionally, I sit there myself. So I was walking along looking across towards the empty bench and watching the sky darken as the wind came up, when I saw the cold boy again. A whole field away, but that’s close enough for whatever he is. He was in with the cattle. It’s a very high field, and the shapes of the cattle and the boy were clear against the skyline like black cut-outs. The boy faced the back of the farm. I could make hardly anything out about him because he was so dark against the lowering evening sky. I stood very still and watched him for ten minutes or so, then my ears began to ache from the cold and I walked on. For a while I lost sight of him behind the hedge and some trees, but it was no more than half a minute, and by the time I could see the field again he was gone.
I didn’t want to see him, I swear. I never want these things to happen. But some things you can’t stop no matter how much you want to.
Someone whispered. The rising wind. Some witch must have loosed a knot.
Things are talking to me once more. I’m getting that feeling again.
Again I stood still, the wind in the thin upper branches soft but shrill. Don’t talk to me in that stupid voice, I said. Don’t just talk crap like the dishwasher at Childhallows. It used to go: shoe me mama, shoe me mama shoe me mama…
I got in before dark, made all well,
