In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables

Within a month they all lost their various illusions: no longer wanting to explore or hide, seek or find, make love or fuck – at least not with me – they went their separate ways. They tired of me at about the same moment that I tired of them, but the farewell messages left on my answerphone or scrawled in Alma-Tadema greetings cards were oddly bitter. In what way had I been using them? – I’d never once mentioned the future or, indeed, the past…Whenever I turned up alone Jacob didn’t want to wrestle. He’d shake his head, wobbling his overshot jaw: ‘I can get you women OK,’ that look said, ‘But you just can’t keep them’. I told him how I only wanted to keep that first smile, first kiss, first night…how I wanted someone I’d never get used to, that intimacy would render yet more and more unfathomable and who would, finally, make me a stranger – ever stranger – to myself. Jacob just sighed and returned to his cropping. He didn’t get it, but then in certain matters he was still very much a sheep.

That final winter was the best time of all. Everything thrilled me: I’d sleep three hours a night but arise full of energy. I had life taped: I felt as if, after thirty-four years, I’d at last got up the courage to be young. Being on the fells was like an acid trip: I was really seeing things – not just the sweeps of peak and scarp but also every insect, every tiny blade of grass and flower beneath my feet…all the details, but God, not The Devil, seemed to be in them. Everything kept going pointilliste, as if my gaze was penetrating through to that dust from which Khnum had created the world. I wondered if I’d somehow learnt this from Jacob: was it a mystical vision or just a sheep’s-eye view? I was worried about him: some days he wouldn’t come out at all – from the shadows of his cabin I could sense a baleful stare. Perhaps while I’d contracted his blitheness he’d been taking on my fears and guilts?

I no longer endured work but actively enjoyed it. The houses seemed to vanish into their components – a whirl of bricks and mortar, of glass, scaffolding and rances gleaming in the January sun. Vista View and the Parthenon were both ultimately just piles of stones. As Sally the macrobioticist told me: ‘Everything is edible if you chop it up small enough.’ My relationships were getting shorter and shorter, as if my lovers were also perfectly content with intensity and evanescence: although I was slightly perturbed when the two I liked best both sat down the instant they got home – after the first, unforgettable night – to write that they never wanted to see me again. Both ended with the same phrase: ‘I’m sorry I can’t share your feelings’. I didn’t understand what this meant: maybe there were husbands or other lovers in the picture? I hoped that I hadn’t somehow made them afraid of me.

One Sunday the traffic was heavier than usual. We crawled up the valley: Easter. A charity fun run was assembling. Every car was full of nuns and spacemen, ballerinas and demons. The sheep fled in panic from pantomime cows and horses. My companion was annoying me. She said her name was Miki – ‘Short for what?’ I asked – ’Short for nothing,’ she replied. Thirteen years younger than me – a third-year music student at York – she didn’t seem to realize that I was supposed to be telling her things. I’d never heard of her favourite writer – Broch – or her favourite composer – Barraqué. She talked about performing the latter’s setting of the former’s Death Of Virgil, in which, apparently, the dying Nolan, embittered, contemplates destroying ‘The Aeneid’. I suspected a trap: perhaps she’d made them both up so that I’d either feel ignorant or – if I did claim some distant familiarity – run the risk of revealing myself to be a fake? She started singing: ‘Il sera possible de traverser la porte corne de la terreur pour atteindre a l‘existence’…To enter being through the horned gates of terror: I thought of the waiting Jacob’s baroque crown and smiled…

As we passed the farm he still hadn’t appeared: I could only see, at the bottom of the field, a motionless human figure. It appeared to be contemplating, in the lee of the wall, a last remaining snowdrift. The summoning shout died in my throat: by the time its echoes had finished rolling round the cliffs I had almost reached him. The farmer, looking up, scissored his dangling arms across his thighs, like a cricket umpire signalling dead ball. He’d taken off his cap, holding it folded and crushed in his fist: his scarlet scalp was dappled with greenish patches of hair, like moss. Two long creases had appeared in his face, conduiting the tears past his pillar box mouth to drop off his chin and on to the still mound of Jacob, lying collapsed on his stomach. The legs seemed to have disappeared, as if the dust had already begun to consume the god that had moulded it. I knelt and touched him: he was stiff, immovably heavy – harder and colder than the Badger Stone, as if he’d never been alive. A chill wind had begun stripping his fleece like a dandelion clock. I looked up and met Miki’s eyes – uncomprehending, hard, young…as she watched two middle-aged men sobbing inexplicably over a pile of dirty wool. And I knew that now Jacob – metasheep, laughing wrestler, Lord Of The House Of Sweet Life – was gone, no one – not for a few days or hours, not even for a second – was ever going to love me again.

In This Block There Lives A Slag… (#ulink_75c5263a-3890-55f8-98a5-831d37afe43e)

In those days I could really sleep. I’d never have woken up at all if it hadn’t been for the clocks. It was bad sleep though – I never remembered my dreams but I knew that they must have been nightmares. I had these three clocks set at thirty second intervals: first the bedside radio alarm that I’d tuned to a frequency of ghostly static, then, on the floor, the second, hooting like a robot owl, and finally, on the window ledge behind the curtain, the biggest – a great copper thing bearing a face with long-lashed eyes and a lipsticked mouth that smiled while, with twin hammers, it tried to beat its own brains out. I had to get over to it before, in detonating, it destroyed the world.

That morning, as usual, I wrenched the curtain off the end of the rail and down on top of me. For weeks I’d been chanting ‘baulk screws, baulk screws’ under my breath like a mantra but I never remembered to buy them. I even wrote the words on my hand but either they rubbed off or I forgot to look. The sunlight was dazzling me, reflecting off a fourth-floor window of the adjacent block: it looked as if The Yellow Man was hiding out in a Bradford Council flat. I was out of bread and milk so I breakfasted on a leftover half samosa and the dregs of six cans of Skol, crushing them as if to squeeze out any last drops. I knew that my depression wouldn’t lift until lunchtime, about halfway through the third pint.

To wake up fully, I threw myself down the stairs, Starsky and Hutch-style. I never used the lift: it smelled of burning and felt to be going not up or down but sideways or even somehow inwards, like a time machine. Outside, I could feel the glass from broken milk bottles even through my Air-Wear soles: although it had been there a year no one had cleared it up. The lad who cut the verges wouldn’t do it: ‘It’s not my job,’ he’d said, ‘I’m the gardener.’ So I’d kicked it onto his grass but he’d merely mowed around it. Still, it was useful for finding my way back when I was out of it: I knew to turn left when I heard the glass crunch under my feet, then to kick each stair riser until I recognized my floor by the sound of some liquid steadily dripping from somewhere. When I first moved in I was always getting lost, finding myself fumbling with a key that suddenly didn’t fit a mysteriously repainted door.

My lock-up didn’t lock – but it would only open if you banged the jammed shutter top left while simultaneously booting it bottom right, then, while it was still vibrating, pulled and twisted its handle so sharply as to nearly dislocate your wrist. It was thief-proof, but then who on earth would have wanted to nick my van?

This morning only the dogs were about, sweeping back and forth in splitting and recombining packs: they weren’t like ordinary mongrels – it was as if a transplant surgeon had crazily jumbled up a dozen pedigree breeds. Now as they mobbed together it seemed that the legs and heads were frenziedly trying to match themselves up with the right bodies and tails. The Health Department had been baffled by the speed at which our local typhoid epidemic was spreading until they’d established that it was through all those dirty nappies the young mums kept throwing out of the blocks’ windows: The dogs would lick them, then lick their owners’ faces.

I set out for a roofing job in Bradford 13. The van jerked and roared and pumped out black smoke. Even through the city centre they gave me ten yards clearance, front and back. I hated driving up Thornton Road. First its mills had closed, then its light industry, then the butchers and the bakers, until all that was left was dereliction and decay. I’d liked that fine but then bright new frontages had appeared with bewilderingly kaleidoscopic window displays: Waggy’s Fancy Dress Hire, Ken’s Kendo Accessories, The Moonchild Magick Shop, Pets and Patios…I was glad I’d had the sense to drink away my own redundancy money.

The woman who’d rung greeted me as if I was a Boy Scout on a Bob-a-Job. At five feet nothing she still managed to give the impression that she was looking down on me. Her pipe cleaner legs bent under the weight of her sack-like body and the skin of her face, above three rolls of chin-fat, was stretched taut, as if she was suffocating inside a plastic bag. She was wearing tight flowered shorts with a cake fringe border and a black Lycra sports bra that was gradually disappearing between folds of flesh. She pointed up at the roof and clicked her fingers, then went into the house and made a cup of coffee, without offering me one. I told myself that she must have had a lot of pain in her life – although probably it had been nothing like enough. I could hear her sniggering when I couldn’t get my ladders off the van rack. My usual granny knots had somehow mutated into a complex network of weird loops, hitches and twists. As I unpicked one, another three seemed to form: finally I took my Stanley knife and just slashed the ropes to pieces.

Most of the slates were missing on the roof’s west-facing side; even on a still day, gusts of wind kept exploding out of the two hundred square-miles of nothing much between here and Lancashire, sneakily trying to pitch me off. I started to clean the dead leaves out of the guttering. The woman sunbathed below: a thick book was propped open in front of her but she never turned its pages. Her tinny radio was tuned to Classic FM but I knew that she didn’t really like the music, just had it on to impress. To ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ she extricated her top and rolled over on to her front. I resisted the temptation to bombard her with the three slimy tennis balls I’d just uncovered. You came across some strange things in gutters: I once found a gold octagonal ladies’ watch – maybe it had been dropped by a jackdaw or fallen from the wrist of a passing angel? Suspicious of good fortune, I’d just left it there.

I went to the pub for lunch: four pints of Landlord, to wash down a Brontë Booster – an enormous egg, bacon and sausage fry-up. I tried to imagine Emily, Charlotte and Anne, born just across the road, getting their teeth into that. I watched a coachload of Jap tourists videoing each other being blown up and down Main Street; why were they so obsessed with the Brontës? Whenever I was driving over Haworth Moor I’d stop and twist the new signposts of Japanese characters to point in the opposite direction.

When I got back, my employer had turned over, her poor little tits slopping on to the grille of her rib cage: the sun seemed to be not tanning but bleaching her. The beer had restored my courage or my balance: from the roof I looked down like a God into the bowl-shaped valley that contained Bradford. My block and the others were sticking out of the heat-haze like the clutching fingers of a drowning man. I began to replace the corroded section at the back with the grey plastic guttering I’d nicked from the site of the hospital extension: I still felt guilty about this, so I wedged two blackbirds’ nests back in place. Sometimes they come back, year after year – what must it feel like, living in a nest?

A red Audi swung into the drive. Hubby was home: she didn’t even twitch as the car door slammed. I watched him enter the house: the top of his head, like a tonsured monk’s, looked familiar. He returned in matching floral shorts, carrying two cans of Heineken: he popped one and threw the other up to me. It was the manager of the Jobcentre where I signed on: I hoped that he hadn’t recognized me, silhouetted against the sky. He lay down alongside his wife in the shrinking patch of sunlight, his bare yellow feet next to her head.

When I finished he was waiting ready with another beer. He knew me all right. ‘Seventy for cash,’ I said. He smiled and counted three tens into my hand, paused, added two fives and then tucked his wallet back down the front of his shorts. There was nothing to be done. I glanced over at his wife, then at him, then dropped my hand and checked my flies but he wasn’t falling for it. His grin broadened and he shook his head slightly: he gave me credit for more taste.

After tearing my T-shirt into strips to tie the ladders back on, I let my van slide down into the city. At every red light I expected them to shoot off their rack and go through the windscreen of the car that crawled in front all the way, pulling out whenever I tried to pass, its driver’s billiard-ball head bobbing on a long, easily-severable neck.

As I was readying myself to lay into the shutters of my lock-up, coppers suddenly came at me from north, south and west. Two of them pinioned my arms while Mark the Community Policeman strolled up. He’d never decided whether he wanted to be a hard cop or a soft cop: one day he was all smiles, the next slamming anyone he saw up against the nearest wall – he even looked different, alternately fat and jolly or thin and mean. His hands dropped gently on to my shoulders, as if in a blessing: ‘So why did you do it, then?’ he asked me with a sigh.

‘Do what?’

The scrum broke up as they all skipped aside like chorus boys to point dramatically towards the windowless rear of my block.

The enormous gloss letters were bisected by the leaking downpipe, their ultrawhite glare almost bringing tears to my eyes.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I told Mark.

‘You’ve got paint and ladders.’

‘It’s not my writing. You can check.’

‘Clever bastard. No one has ten foot handwriting.’ His hands returned to my shoulders, this time squeezing hard.

‘Have you been hurt by any slags lately, sir?’ asked a pale, earnest constable who looked to be about twelve.

‘Dozens,’ I said, ‘but none in this block.’

Mark’s grip tightened. ‘Where were you last night?’

‘The Puck, The Harp of Erin, The Castle, The Queen’s, The Bedford, The Station, The Armstrong. Then the Karachi. I got back about one.’

‘So you just walked past and didn’t notice it?’

‘You know how it is; you never see anything unless you’re looking for it.’ I put a slight quaver into my voice: ‘I couldn’t have done it, lads. I get vertigo. I can’t go too high since they drained my sinuses.’

All I had to do was keep denying everything. Coppers these days have shorter attention spans. If you can keep them talking for longer than three minutes you’re in the clear: a few at the fringes had already begun to slope off.

‘Did you see or hear anything unusual?’

I thought it best not to mention my re-tied ladders: ‘You know how it is: it’s only unusual if there isn’t something unusual round here.’

As I switched from laughter to a fake coughing fit they dropped me and returned to their vans, slamming the doors and gunning the engines to cover their embarrassment. They’d been overcome by the novelty of the situation: it was only unusually big graffiti, after all. What charges could they have brought? Trespass? Damage to Council property? Threatening behaviour? Nothing quite fitted the bill: they would have to make a new law. I turned to Mark. ‘Whatever made you think it was me?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re supposed to be some kind of poet, aren’t you?’

I unloaded the van and then checked my shelves. Someone had tidied the place up: the paint brushes were glossy and restored, still slightly wet, and a new tin of white one-coat gloss paint had been left on top of the emptied one. Whoever it was must have been local, to have watched and learnt my trick of freeing the shutter.

I went back outside and looked up at it again: it seemed an awful lot of trouble to have gone to. Only an artist or a signwriter could have done that in the dark without a single drip or tremble, unless they’d clipped on an enormous pre-prepared stencil. Even the dots of the i’s and the ellipses were perfect little circles.

It reminded me of the opening of a song that we used to sing at school. ‘On Richmond Hill there lives a lass/ As bright as any morn.’ I tried humming it but it came out like ‘Old Mac-Donald’: ee–i–ee–i–o.

It’s always a bad sign when you start thinking of yourself in the third person, especially when you give it a capital letter.

Doris, my next door neighbour, had been standing by the main entrance since my return, watching the whole thing. She knew everything about everybody: if there was even a new dog in the pack she wouldn’t rest until she’d discovered its owner and, more importantly, its name. The unusual warmth of her greeting immediately confirmed my suspicion that it was she who had put the coppers on to me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you, love. It’ll be those lads in the seven-fives: they’re all on drugs. Nothing’s sacred to them: they’ve even scratched that new paint off the lift doors. As for the slag’ – she jerked her head towards a group of girls pushing prams up the ramp towards us – ‘It’ll be one of this lot.’

Having obviously decided that if it was to be open season on slags there was safety in numbers, they were advancing in a V-formation, like a motorcycle gang hitting a seaside town, flushed over their usual pallor, shouting at each other as if they were trying to drown something out. They wore tight calf-length denim sheaths that would have hobbled them if they hadn’t extended the fraying slits all the way up the back, allowing clouds of grey slip to billow out behind them like ectoplasm. Their bare legs were scratched, blotched and bruised, red-dotted with fleabites around the ankles. They ignored Doris and just nodded or blinked at me. The prams were all expensive, grey steel and rainbow-canopied, three-braked and togglewheeled, but the babies were thin and silent, with frightened eyes.

They hated children, I’d noticed, but loved babies. They needed something weak and dependent to make them feel strong and in control, keeping kittens until they grew into cats, puppies until they were dogs. They wanted to be babies themselves, to start their own lives over again, or to create happy childhoods that would somehow erase the miseries of their own…but after a while they started to feel even worse than before, under attack from unaccountable creatures that refused to chuckle and gurgle, just shat and ate, got sick and cried, cried, cried. And then the creatures would begin to speak, using words they’d never taught them, asking questions they couldn’t answer. Only blows would shut them up and then not even blows would make them speak again. But after the social workers had taken them away the mothers would bring forth yet another wave of magical babies. A lot of the boys were called Damian: maybe they were trying for the Antichrist.

Doris took the lift: I was up the stairs and back safe in my castle long before she emerged. The sun still filled the bedroom with light, still strangely reflecting in via the same window opposite. Standing on the sill, struggling to hook the heavy curtain back on to its rail, I looked down and registered that every flagstone on the pavement far below was cracked. Stifling in the summer, freezing in winter: it suited me here. I loved to lie on my bed, feeling the block swaying with the winds, listening to the toilet cistern’s whisperings as it took three hours to refill, watching as the ceiling seemed to slowly descend then recede, so that I felt deliciously claustrophobic or agoraphobic by turn.

It had driven my wife crazy, though: everything had been OK until we’d moved in here. ‘I’ve always hated flying,’ she said. Suddenly we were arguing about everything and nothing. All the food she cooked was burnt black or raw. She tried to kill a dozy wasp crawling on the window by throwing the kitchen chair at it. Soon we’d stopped talking altogether: it was soothing for a while, as if we were members of some contemplative religious order, but after we stopped screwing it got bad again – there seemed to be a permanent hissing in the air, like a pan of water boiling dry. The plaster of the bedroom wall was studded with little knuckle rounds from all the times I’d smashed my fists into it – not instead of her or to mortify myself but because I knew that Doris’ ear was pressed against the other side.

The explosion came one Sunday evening as I was singing along with Songs of Praise from Hereford Cathedral, feeling nauseated at the way the eyes of the congregation were opening and closing at the same intervals as their mouths. My wife came out of the kitchen, skidded across the carpet on her knees and turned off the TV. As she turned, straightening up, I hit her, for the first and last time, with closed fist in the face. I pulled the punch but too late, making it more of a twist than a pull. Leaving the ground, she seemed to float horizontally for ages as if weightless, until her head hit the far wall. She lay there motionless. Just as I was working out how to dispose of the body she abruptly returned to the vertical, like a round-bottomed bodhidharma doll.

‘You hit me.’

‘No I didn’t.’