Jerusalem Read online

  “Aa, that’s all right, love. You’re all right. Ah ha ha ha.”

  Her eyes grew slightly wider and her painted liquid lips, like two sucked pear-drops, went through some suppressed contortions. She was staring at him quizzically, a rhyme scheme and a metre in her look that Ben was unfamiliar with. What did she want? The fact that their chance meeting was occurring on the street where Ben was born, and where he found himself this afternoon through no more than a drunken accident, began now to smack dangerously of kismet. Could it be … ah ha ha ha … could it be that she recognised him, saw by some means all the poetry that he had in him? Had she glimpsed his wisdom underneath the nervousness and beer breath? Was this the predestined moment, loitering across from Marefair’s ibis hotel, caught in shafts of timeless sunshine with pale stars of ground-in bubblegum around the Dr. Martens, when he was to meet his Sheba? Tiny muscles at the corners of her mouth were working now as she prepared to speak, to say something, to ask him if he was an artist or musician of some kind, or even if he was Benedict Perrit, whom she’d heard so much about. The glistening Maybelline-drenched petals finally unstuck themselves, peeling apart.

  “Fancy a bit of business?”

  Oh.

  Belatedly, Ben understood. They weren’t two kindred spirits pulled together inexorably by fate. She was a prostitute and he was a drunk idiot, simple as that. Now that he knew her trade he saw the drawn look that her face had and the dark around the eyes, the missing tooth, the twitchy desperation. He revised his estimate from mid/late twenties down to mid/late teens. Poor kid. He should have known when she first spoke to him, but Ben had grown up in a Boroughs that was something other than Northampton’s red light district; had to consciously remind himself that this was its main function now. He’d never used a pro himself, had never even thought about it, not through any notion of superiority but more because he’d always thought of street girls as a middle-class concern, predominantly. Why would a working-class man, other than through incapacity or unrelenting loneliness, pay to have sex with a working-class woman of the kind that he’d grown up amongst and had to some degree therefore been de-eroticised towards? Ben thought it was more probably the Hugh Grants of this world who treated adjectives like “rough” or “dirty” as arousing concepts, whereas he’d grown up in a community that generally reserved such terms for nightmare clans like the O’Rourkes or Presleys.

  He felt awkward, having never previously experienced this situation, with his awkwardness yet further complicated by his lingering disappointment. For a moment there he’d been upon the brink of a romance, of an epiphany, an inspiration. No, he hadn’t really thought that she was a Lemurian sultaness, but he’d still entertained the notion that she might be someone sensitive and sympathetic, somebody who’d glimpsed the bard in him, had seen the villanelles and throwaway sestinas in his bearing. But instead, the opposite was true. She’s taken him for just another needy punter whose romantic yearnings stretched no further than a quick one off the wrist in a back entry. How could she have got him so completely wrong? He felt he had to let her know how badly she’d misread him, how absurd it was for her to have considered him of all people as a potential client. However, since he still felt sorry for the girl and didn’t want her thinking he was genuinely offended, he elected to communicate his feelings in the manner of an Ealing comedy. He’d found this was the best approach for almost any delicate or sticky social circumstances.

  Benedict contorted his sponge-rubber features into an expression of Victorian moral shock, like Mr. Pickwick startled by a mudlark selling dildos, then affected an affronted shudder so vociferous that his fillings rattled, forcing him to stop. The girl by this point was beginning to look slightly frightened, so Ben thought he’d better underline that his behaviour was intended as comic exaggeration. Swivelling his head, he glanced away from her to where the television audience would be if life were actually the hidden camera prank show he’d occasionally suspected, and supplied his own canned laughter.

  “Ah ha ha ha. No, no, you’re all right, love, thanks. No, bless your heart, you’re all right. I’m all right. Ah ha ha ha.”

  It seemed that his performance had at least removed her certainty that Ben was a potential customer. The girl was staring at him now as if she genuinely didn’t have the first idea what Benedict might be. Apparently disoriented, forehead corrugated into an uncomprehending frown, she tried again to get his measure.

  “Are you sure?”

  What would it take before this woman got the message? Was he going to have a do a full routine with plank, paste-bucket and banana skin to make her understand that he was too poetic to want sex behind a rubbish skip? One thing was certain: subtlety and understatement hadn’t worked. He’d have to spell it out for her with broader gestures.

  He tipped back his head in a derisive guffaw that he fancied was in the John Falstaff mode, or would have been if Falstaff had been best known as a gangly tenor.

  “Ah ha ha ha. No, love, I’m all right, ta. You’re all right. I’ll have you know that I’m a published poet. Ah ha ha.”

  That did the trick. From the expression on her face, the girl no longer harboured any doubts concerning what Ben Perrit was. Wearing a fixed grin she began to take her leave, keeping her wary eyes upon him as she backed away down Marefair, clearly scared to turn her back on him until she was some distance off, in case he pounced. She tottered off past Cromwell House in the direction of the railway station, pausing when she reached St. Peter’s Church to risk a glance across her shoulder back at Benedict. She evidently thought he was a psychopath, so he let out a carefree high-pitched cackle to assure her that he wasn’t, whereupon she took off past the church front, disappearing into the homecoming crowds on Black Lion Hill. His muse, his mermaid, vanished in a tail-flip and a shimmer of viridian scales.

  Five things, then. Just five things that Ben was unsuccessful with. Escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, and talking to a woman if you didn’t count his mum or Alma. Lily, she’d been an exception, been the one who’d genuinely seen his spirit and his poetry. He’d always felt that he could talk to Lily, although looking back it pained him to admit that most of what he’d talked was drunken rubbish. That was largely what had finished it between the two of them. It was the drink and, if he were entirely honest, it was Ben’s insistence that the rules in his relationship with Lily be those that had suited his own parents, Jem and Eileen, thirty years before, particularly those that suited Jem. Back then Ben hadn’t really taken in that everything was changing, not just streets and neighbourhoods but people’s attitudes; what people would put up with. He’d thought that at least in his own home he could preserve a fragment of the life he’d known right here in Freeschool Street, where wives would tolerate constant inebriation in their husbands and consider themselves blessed if they’d a man who didn’t hit them. He’d pretended that the world was still that way, and he’d been stunned right to the core of him when Lily took the kids and demonstrated that it wasn’t.

  Ben’s uncomfortable meeting with the prostitute had faded now to a faint, wistful pang. His gaze had drifted back to Freeschool Street, his boyhood paradise drowning in its own future with the water level rising day by day, moment by moment. He wished he could dive into the cladding of the mostly vacant office buildings and apartments, red brick droplets splashing up from where he’d pierced the surface. He’d dog-paddle down through forty years on one lungful of air. He’d swim through his dad’s woodyard gathering up whatever souvenirs he could retrieve to take back to the surface and the present day. He’d tap upon the window of the living room and tell his sister “Don’t go out tonight”. At last he’d emerge gasping, up from the meniscus of contemporary Marefair, his arms full of sunken treasure, startling the passers-by and shaking beads of history from his sopping hair.

  He was beginning to feel distantly in need of food. He thought he might walk back up Horsemarket to home, perhaps visit the chippy in St. Andrew’s Street. H
e suddenly remembered he had slightly more than fifteen pounds left, Darwin and Elizth Fry entangled in a crumpled ball of passion somewhere in the deep recesses of his trousers. That would be enough to get some fish and chips and also go out for a drink tonight if he should want to, though he didn’t think he would. The best thing he could do would be to get some food and then go back to Tower Street for an inexpensive evening in. That way he’d still have nearly all the money left tomorrow and he wouldn’t have to go through the humiliating pantomime of taking charity from Eileen in the morning. That was settled, then. That’s what he’d do. Preparing to vacate the spot and head off up Horsemarket, Benedict attempted to rein in his wandering attention, which was off somewhere at play amongst the gutted ruins of Gregory Street. Stranded dandelions were perched on the remains of ledges twenty-five feet up, hesitant suicides with golden hair like Chatterton …

  It was eleven thirty-five. He was emerging from the Bird In Hand on Regent’s Square into the grunting, shouting dark of Friday night. Arterial spills of traffic light reflected from the paving slabs of Sheep Street, where there had apparently at some point in the evening been a shower of rain.

  Girls in short skirts in gangs of four or five leaned on each other for support, a multitude of 15-denier legs all holding up one structure, turning inadvertently into components of a single giant giggling insect or a piece of mobile furniture as beautifully upholstered as it was impractical. Boys moved like chess knights with concussion, waltzing mice with Tourette’s, wandering clusters of them suddenly erupting into murderous bonhomie or well-intentioned bottlings and it wasn’t even closing time. There was no closing time. Licensing hours had been extended to infinity by government decree, ostensibly to somehow cut down on binge drinking but in fact so that disoriented visiting Americans would not be inconvenienced by funny English customs. Drunken binges hadn’t been eradicated, obviously. They’d simply had their lucid intervals removed.

  Ben could remember having plaice and chips a few hours earlier and a few dimly lighted pub interior moments in between – had he been talking to someone? – but otherwise it was as if he had been newly born this instant, squatted out onto this windy street, into these gutters, wholly ignorant of how he came to be here. At least this time, Ben observed with gratitude, he wasn’t sobbing and he wasn’t naked. Underdressed, perhaps, with evening’s chill beginning now to permeate the riotous sunset of his waistcoat, striking through the insulating beery numbness to raise goose-bumps, but at least not nude. Ah ha ha ha.

  A rubber-fingered fumble in his pocket reassured him that the treacherous whore Elizth Fry at least this time had not left Benedict for some ill-mannered publican who’d simply use her, wouldn’t love or need her the way Ben did. That said, finding her immediately raised the tempting possibility of popping back into the pub to get a carry-out, a few cans, but no. No, he mustn’t. Go home, Benedict. Go home, son, if you know what’s good for you.

  He turned right, shuffling up Sheep Street to the lights where it met Regent Square, the ugly cross-hatching of carriageways that centuries ago had been the north gate of the town. This was where traitors’ skulls were placed on spikes like trolls on pencils, as a decoration. This was where the heretics and witches had been burned. These days the junction at the end of Sheep Street was marked only by a nightclub painted lurid lavender from when it had been a goth hangout called Macbeth’s a year or two ago, attempting to create a gothic atmosphere upon a corner deep in severed heads and shrieking crones already. Coals to Newcastle, wolfbane to Transylvania. Ben lurched over the various crossings that were needed to convey him safely to the top of Grafton Street, which he proceeded to descend unsteadily. A short way further down blue lights were circling, sapphire flashes battering like moths on the surrounding buildings, but he was too dulled by drink to lend them any great significance.

  He glanced up to the higher reaches of the car repair place just across the road, where you could see the solar logo of the Sunlight Laundry still raised in relief, even through the piss-yellow sodium light that everything was bathing in. Fixed in its place, it shone down happily upon a day of 24-hour drinking finally arrived, when it need never sink again below the yard arm. Benedict turned his attention back to the uneven paving slabs immediately in front of him, and focussed for the first time on the lone police car pulled up on the curb ahead, the source of all the dancing disco lights. There was a wreck recovery going on, with a smashed vehicle of uncertain make being winched up on its surviving rear wheels by a tow truck. Grim men in fluorescent vests were sweeping shattered windscreen fragments from the busy road, with the police car evidently flashing there behind them to alert the other motorists to what was going on. A baffling spray of random items such as children’s toys and gardening gloves were spread across the tarmac where presumably they had been flung from a burst-open boot. Plant-misters, shower caps and a single flip-flop. Standing by his car and strobe-lit by its beacon, the attending officer was staring down morosely at a melted tyre-print where the now-disintegrated automobile had apparently swerved up onto the pavement, possibly avoiding something in its path, before it crashed into the wall or lamppost or whatever it had been. At Benedict’s approach the plump young copper looked up from his contemplation of the burned-in tread mark, and to Ben’s surprise he realised that he knew him from around the neighbourhood.

  “Hello, Ben. Look at all this fucking mess.” The officer, pink choirboy cheeks now red with aggravation, gestured to the pulverised glass and assorted oddments that were carpeting the street. “You should have seen it half an hour ago, before the medics pulled the poor cunt off his steering column. Worse thing is, it’s not even supposed to be my shift tonight.”

  Benedict squinted at the workers sweeping up the debris. There was no blood he could see, but then perhaps the gore was all inside the mangled wreck.

  “I see. A fatal accident. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, eh? Ah ha ha ha. Joy rider, was it?” Bugger. He’d not meant to laugh, not at a tragic death, nor had he meant to ask for whom the bell tolled right after delivering Donne’s admonition not to. Luckily, the copper’s mind appeared to be on other things, or else he was accustomed to and tolerant of Ben’s eccentric manner. In a way he’d have to be, with his own sherbet lemon police-issue waistcoat more flamboyant than Ben’s own.

  “Joy rider? No. No, it was just some bloke in his late thirties. He was in his own car, far as we could see. A family car.” He nodded glumly to the bright, trans-generational litter, strewn across the road from the sprung-open trunk.

  “He didn’t smell like he’d been drinking when they cut him free. He must have swerved to miss something and gone up on the path.” The young policeman’s downcast air briefly appeared to lift a little. “Least I wasn’t sent to tell his missus. Honestly, I fucking hate that. All the screaming and the blubbering and that’s just me. I’ll tell you, the last time I went to one of them I nearly – hang on – ”

  He was interrupted by a burst of static from his radio, which he unclipped from his coat to answer.

  “Yeah? Yeah, I’m still down the top of Grafton Street. They’re finishing the cleanup now, so I’ll be done here in a minute. Why?” There was a pause during which the cherubic officer stared into space expressionlessly, then he said “All right. I’ll be there soon as I get finished with the crash. Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  He reattached his radio receiver, looked at Benedict and pulled a face that signified resigned contempt for his own woeful luck.

  “There’s been another tart done over down on Andrew’s Road. Somebody living down there’s took her in, but they want me to get a statement from her before she gets taken up the hospital. Why is it always me this happens to?”

  Benedict was going to ask if he meant getting raped and beaten up, but then thought better of it. Leaving the embittered constable to supervise the tail-end of his clean-up duties, Ben continued downhill, curiously sobered by the whole offhand exchange. He turned along St. Andrew’s Street, thinking about the pr
ostitute who’d been attacked, about the man who’d been alive and driving home to see his family an hour ago with no suspicion of his imminent mortality. That was the whole appalling crux of things, Ben thought, that death or horror might be waiting just ahead and nobody had any way of knowing until those last, dreadful seconds. He began to think about his sister Alison, the motorcycle accident, but that was painful and so Ben steered his attentions elsewhere. Doing so, he inadvertently arrived at a blurred memory of the young working girl who had approached Ben earlier, the one who’d had her hair in rows. He knew it wasn’t her specifically who’d been the latest girl to be assaulted at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but he also knew that in a sense it might as well have been. It would be one just like her.

  How could this have happened to the Boroughs? How could it have turned into a place where somebody who could have grown up beautiful, who could have grown to be a poet’s muse, is raped and half-killed every other week? The spate of sexual abductions and attacks over a single weekend during that last August, the majority of them had happened in this district. At the time they’d thought a single ‘rape gang’ was responsible for all the crimes, but ominously it had turned out that at least one serious assault was wholly unconnected to the others. Benedict supposed that when events like that occurred with the alarming frequency that they appeared to do round here, it would be natural to assume concerted action by some gang or some conspiracy. Although a menacing idea it was more comforting than the alternative, which was that such things happened randomly and happened often.