across the dual carriageway, towards Boaler Street, beyond which he’d lived. Smouldering houses were heaped on mud, blocking his view.
The place was ruined. That troubled him less deeply than it might have; his sense of triumph was a cocoon. What did his street look like these days? Impulsively he crossed to the opposite pavement, resting his bad leg for a few moments on the central reservation. He wouldn’t use the pedestrian subway. He’d had enough of subways in Cantril Farm.
Where the subway emerged, the Palladium cinema had stood. He remembered the Saturday matinees, the darkness swarming with other children, hair-pulling and fights in the flickering dimness, children sneaking to the exits to let in their friends who couldn’t or didn’t want to pay, the great unison cheer as the film appeared. Once, not long after he’d started school, he had sat dismayed and blushing while everyone else shrieked with laughter at Stan Laurel in a kilt, at the tailor trying to put a hand between his legs.
He made his way to Boaler Street, along a road between untidy pyramids which had been houses. Something drifted towards his face: a spider’s strand? He gestured it away – but it was a telephone wire, hanging from its pole.
The far side of Boaler Street was intact, but the houseless pavement that faced it made the blocks of shops and houses look unguarded. Already some of the shop windows displayed debris. Half of the side of a house was covered by a poster that said TOLKEIN: DISCOVER HIS WORLD. The small butcher’s was still standing: BOALER MEAT MARKET – GIANTS OF THE MEAT TRADE. That made him smile, as it always had.
He walked along his street. A few slates clung to roofs. Curtains swayed behind broken glass, but nobody was peering down at him. Once he had begun to climb the ladders he’d been able to see into all those bedrooms. Mr and Mrs Craven had kept a whip and a tawse behind the bed, Mr Wallace had had Nazi medals in the back bedroom. He’d scrubbed their windows, he’d painted their bricks, and as he’d gazed down from the ladder the street and the people had seemed like his toys.
Here was his house. In the thin rectangle of earth that separated the house from the pavement, the hedge had grown long and spidery.
All the doors were missing; he could see straight through the four empty frames to the jumbled back yard. The front room was bright with a mosaic of paper, tin cans and peel.
What had they done to the end of the street? Beyond the crossroads there had been a similar terrace; he’d used to imagine he was gazing into a mirror. Now there was nothing but mud. He limped to the crossroads. Where four streets had stood, there was an enormous square of desolation, surrounded by derelict houses that looked shrunken by the waste. A sky the colour of watered milk glared through the latticework of their stripped roofs. Smoke wandered over the mud, where puddles shone in ruts left by bulldozers.
He’d once played in these vanished streets. The view made him feel hollow – as hollow as he’d felt after his father’s drunkenness had dragged him down. When his mother had become ill, his father had taken to drink. If Horridge had been given to self-indulgence, his father’s behaviour would have cured him.
His father had grown weak; he’d refused to face up to his duties. “Don’t go out now. Go up and see your mother,” he would say, in order to free himself for the pub. Horridge had sat by the gloomy bed, gazing at the pale collapsed face which he hardly recognised, hoping that she wouldn’t wake, dreading the feeble plaintive plea: “Where’s your father?” He had been his father’s donkey, something on which to pile all the burdens.
After her death, the man had drunk more heavily – out of grief, or because now there was nothing to stop him? He’d begun to talk loosely as an imbecile. One day, searching for him in the pub, Horridge had overheard him. “It was worrying about the boy that killed her. Sometimes I wonder if he’s my son. Maybe they gave us someone else’s baby by mistake. Never in my life before have the police been to my house.”
Horridge had fled unnoticed, but the sense of injustice had clung to him. All the street-corner gossips had fallen silent as he’d approached. Everyone blamed him. But gradually, as he walked, he’d come to the conclusion that his father must have killed her. That was why he was so anxious to shift the blame. Perhaps, in his drunkenness, he’d fed her too much medicine.
He had never told his father that he’d heard. He’d behaved as though nothing had happened – polite but aloof. It had strained his nerves; he’d dreaded hearing his father enter the house, the cue for him to begin pretending. He wasn’t qualified for any other job, and he knew nobody besides his father who would take him on.
Did his father sense this change, or had he grown maudlin since his wife’s death? He’d begun to fawn on Horridge, to hug him drunkenly, calling him “son” for the first time in his life. But when the new batch of business cards was printed they’d advertised HORRIDGE, not HORRIDGE AND SONS. His son wasn’t a man, he was only a tool to be used without acknowledgment.
Had his son’s aloofness made him drink more heavily? He had begun drinking on the job, and that had caused the fall. Horridge had heard his sudden incoherent shout below him, which might have been a warning or a threat; he’d felt the support of the ladder wrenched from beneath him, the terrifying impact of the ground. Even before the pain grew, he’d known that his leg was irreparably damaged.
When they released him from the hospital, he’d found his father intolerable. The man had kept apologising, clinging hotly to him, breathing stale beer into his face. From disliking physical contact, Horridge had grown to loathe and fear it. Never before had the house seemed so cramped. It was full of his father’s sounds, threatening to close in on him. He had felt physically menaced.
Often he would spend the evening immobile in his chair, listening for the threat of the key in the lock, his father’s drunken blundering into the house. “I’m sorry,” his father would always begin, like the first ritual words of a confession. “I’ll make it up to you.” He’d taken Horridge on jobs, to carry the paint and to do such work as didn’t need a ladder. Most of all Horridge had detested his charity.
Drink had killed him. There had hardly been space in the front room for the crowd around the coffin. All the women who lived in the street had wept around Horridge. “Don’t you get lonely. Come in and see us whenever you want. We’ll look after you.” How many of them had talked about him behind his back? They were as bad as his father, lying there looking peaceful and gentle, the hypocrite. Gazing at his father’s sunken face, Horridge had been unable to remember anything good about him. He’d become merely an object, incapable of menacing.
Once the crowd and the coffin had left, the house had seemed the right size at last. Horridge had strode through it, occupying all the rooms. He had finally become a man, with his own house. He’d felt triumphant and free.
He hadn’t long felt so – not when he’d realised that there was no money to come from his father, who had squandered it on drink. He’d applied for jobs, but even when he concealed his limp they had noticed it. At last he’d had to rely on the government’s grudging charity. His father had dragged him down to that.
No need to depress himself. He’d achieved something today. The derelict houses looked like a low fence, pitifully incapable of containing the desolation that had already reached them. Smoke roved the mud as though in search of the destroyed streets. He turned his back on the waste.
The hedge swayed over the pavement outside his house. He made for the roadway to avoid it. Could he really pass his house without going in one last time? He glanced up at the front bedroom, into which he’d moved his bed when the house was his. Through the broken window peered a burst football.
He’d kick that ball out, if he did nothing else. He picked his way into the front room, over the doorstep scaly with broken slate. Water grew upon a stain on the ceiling, drew itself together, dangled, dripped. The wallpaper had been clawed down – by animals, or by people?
Between the communicating doorways of the front and back rooms the stairs climbed, hemmed in by walls. Fallen plaster crunched underfoot. The sensation reminded him of fever, of the impression that his skin was encrusted and crawling. He could hardly recognise the house; never before had it felt so grubby – as though it had been buried and disinterred.
A mattress drooped over the top of the stairs, bristling with rusty springs. He had never seen it before. Since he had been lured out by the housing planners, someone must have been sleeping here. And there was movement in the back bedroom, the skirt of someone who was trying to hide. It was wallpaper, flapping in a breeze.
He paced carefully into the front bedroom. Water had burst the paper overhead, which trailed sodden streamers. The scraps of paper which clung to the walls looked entirely unfamiliar. Had the absence of doors and house numbers tricked him into the wrong house? Or had that pattern lurked beneath the wallpaper all the time he had slept in this room?
