Rebuilding Coventry, Page 2

  The spottier of the two policemen imposed himself between Gerald and Norman, who were both pleased that a higher authority had intervened and relieved them of the responsibility of ending the fight themselves. Coventry again got up to leave, but the less spotty policeman said: ‘Sit down, madam, until this is sorted out.’

  Coventry protested, ‘But I’m not involved with either of them.’

  Norman shouted, ‘Oh yes you are, you lying cow … you’re Gerald Fox’s mistress, and have been for the past year.’

  They haven’t been mentioned earlier, being unimportant until now, but there were other people sitting in the Astaire’s bar that night and all of them heard Norman’s allegation clearly. Thirty per cent of them had problems and didn’t retain the information. However, seventy per cent not only retained it but relished it and told other people. And so it became widely known on the Grey Paths Council Estate that Coventry Dakin and Gerald Fox were lovers and had been brawling in Astaire’s and wasn’t it awful and her with two children and a respectable husband and him with four lovely little girls and a wife who had a nervous disposition and couldn’t watch horror films on the television.

  Greta left the pub a disappointed woman. Mr Patel would not prefer charges, as he preferred no publicity. The young policemen lectured Norman and Gerald dispassionately. They used many obscenities to prove that they were men of the world, then left, after refusing Mr Patel’s offer of free sausage rolls. They discussed Coventry Dakin in the police car and decided that Gerald Fox was a lucky man. Because of excessive overtime duties neither was experienced with women. They couldn’t wait to be transferred to Vice.

  3 I Leave the City of My Birth

  I was halfway through cleaning my chimney on Wednesday afternoon when I ran across the road to my neighbour’s house, opened the door, picked up the nearest object to hand, an Action Man doll, and brought its heavy little head hard down on the back of Gerald Fox’s bulging neck.

  Fox immediately stopped strangling his wife and fell down dead. Action Man’s hinged torso swung for a few seconds and then was still. I let go of his feet and the little soldier fell onto the carpet and lay there in a theatrical attitude with both plastic hands raised in the air. A trickle of blood escaped from Gerald Fox’s left ear.

  My neighbour’s children crept from behind a ragged sofa and attached themselves to their mother, and I let myself out of the house and started running. I was dressed in my chimney-sweeping clothes. I was covered in soot and I didn’t have my handbag.

  The first part of my escape route consisted of pedestrian pathways. I ran up and down ramps. I disappeared into the ground via subways. I grew bigger or smaller according to the size of the buildings. I was dwarfed by tower blocks and made gigantic by pensioners’ bungalows. I hurried along past the boarded-up windows in the Bluebell Wood Shopping Mall. I went by St Osmond’s, the concrete church with the stainless-steel spire, where I’d attended five ill-fated weddings. On towards Barn Owl Road, the main thoroughfare, which leads from the estate towards the city.

  Halfway along this road I stopped to catch my breath. In an adjacent house a family were eating. Their living-room was lit up like Madison Square Gardens. There were five of them, dispersed around a three-piece suite. Each of them had a plate of steaming food on their laps. The pepper and salt and a ketchup bottle were balanced on the arms of the sofa. The television had their full attention. Nobody was speaking. They were chewing the cud. I wondered at their willingness to display such an intimate activity to casual passers-by.

  Behind me, in my deserted kitchen, was a table laid with Wednesday’s table-cloth. Four places were set. A cruet stood exactly in the middle of the table. Four tubular chairs waited by each place setting. Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, two teenage Bears. But Mummy Bear would not be at home tonight.

  There is something heartbreaking about families. Such fragile blood ties. So easily snapped.

  As I ran along the pavement beside the dual carriageway I thought I saw my husband looking down at me from the top deck of a rush-hour bus. But it may have been another middle-aged man with a gloomy expression wearing a hat too big for his head. I was now going against the tide of people who were returning from the city to the suburbs. Few people were going in my direction. For who needs to travel from the suburbs into the city at six o’clock in the evening? Apart from office cleaners and murderers escaping from outlying districts.

  I ran because I am very frightened of policemen. As other people recoil from snakes or spiders and yet others refuse to travel in lifts or aeroplanes, so I avoid policemen. When I was a child I had black-and-white nightmares about Dixon of Dock Green. The sight of a lone officer of the law strolling along a sunlit street induces terror in me. I blame my parents for this irrational fear. (Though now, in my present circumstances, of course, my fear was entirely rational.)

  I was now on the outskirts of the city. In the distance, coming nearer with each step, was the redbrick hospital where once I’d screamed and burst a blood vessel in my eye whilst giving birth to my son. Behind the tall chimney of the hospital incinerator was the converted hosiery factory, now a sixth-form college where the same son was studying for a better future.

  I ran across the recreation ground where, years ago, I’d played on the swings while my own mother was enjoying herself in one of the many outpatients’ clinics she frequented. ‘It gets me out of the house,’ she’d say, as she replaced her best underwear in the drawer until the next visit.

  The smooth, wooden swing seats had been replaced by pastel plastic replicas. I sat down on a swing and tried to control my ragged breathing. Automatically I pushed my feet off the ground and began to work myself higher and higher. The night air streamed through my hair. I stood up on the seat and from my new vantage point I saw the railway station clock. I decided to catch a train, any train. The first that came in. I would go anywhere so long as it was away. Far away from the policemen investigating Gerald Fox’s violent death.

  I jumped off the swing and ran up the hill towards the station. On my way I passed buildings that were no longer there. An opera house where I’d seen Cinderella arrive at the ball in a twinkling coach, drawn by four Shetland ponies wearing plumed head-dresses. A hotel which had a basement bar with pink lights and was frequented by young men who powdered their noses and were served drinks by a barman who wore high heels. A tea-shop where old women sat and caught their breath and sorted their shopping bags before making for the bus. A pub called the White Swan where, as a child, I had felt drunk just sniffing the beery smell which escaped whenever the door opened. A baker’s shop where the proprietor stood in the window icing tiered wedding cakes, proud of her skill and modestly accepting the compliments of the small crowd that always gathered outside on the pavement to watch. A pet shop where puppies frisked in too-small cages. A garage with two petrol pumps on the oil-stained pavements where, after rain, mad colours appeared for which no adult could ever give a logical explanation. The hardware shop where kettles and enamel mugs and calendars and a thousand more things were hung outside to chink and rattle in the slightest breeze. The drinking club where big men in loud suits used to emerge at four o’clock in the afternoon, wincing at the daylight.

  All gone. Everything gone. Bulldozed. Flattened and taken away in lorries to a tip. And nobody tried to stop it because nobody knew the words or the procedure and anyway they were mesmerized by the word ‘progress’, which was given in explanation. A road was built in the place of the buildings. The same road raced around the city, slicing off the river and the parks, forcing the pedestrians underground into stinking subways where security cameras monitored their nervous progress.

  I arrived at the top of the hill and stood opposite the station. I looked down on the little city. The spires of abandoned churches pricked the sky. To my left was a ‘Sandwich Centre’, to my right a ‘Money Centre’, behind me a ‘Transport Centre’. All three signs were made of daglo orange plastic and had tipsy black letters. I turned and looked into the w
indow of the ‘Transport Centre’. A tired-looking man was sitting behind a counter, speaking into a radio microphone. A sign above him said in multi-coloured felt-tip:

  Notice to Passengers

  1. No fish and chips in taxis (Also no hot food)

  2. No spitting in taxis

  3. No fighting in taxis

  4. No vomiting in taxis (Else pay £5 and clean up mess, £10 at weekends)

  5. After midnight £2 deposit to be paid to driver before commencing journey

  6. You travel at your own risk!

  7. Anyone leaving taxi without paying full fare will be found and dealt with

  Rule number seven frightened me quite a lot because I was planning to evade my train fare by forcing myself through the ticket barrier if necessary. But when I arrived at the station I saw that the interior had been modernized. The ticket barrier had gone. British Rail had kindly removed this obstacle to my escape and the station now had an ‘open policy’. Anyone could stroll in off the street and avail themselves of the facilities.

  As I walked along the covered wooden bridge which spanned the railway lines and led to the various platforms, I heard an announcement that the eighteen twenty-three from Nottingham would shortly be arriving at platform three. The train would not be stopping until it reached London St Pancras. The first-class carriages were at the front of the train, the second-class carriages at the rear. And the buffet car was conveniently situated somewhere between the two.

  Legitimate travellers came out of the Travellers Fare buffet on platform three, where a sign exhorted: ‘Grabba Bacon Butty’. The train arrived and I got on it and stood in a corridor. I lied my way to London St Pancras via a sympathetic ticket collector.

  ‘My husband is working in London. I’ve just had a telephone call to say that he’s been crushed by a pile of bricks.’

  By now I was sobbing genuine tears of shock. The ticket collector dabbed at my sooty face with a British Rail paper towel and said, ‘Give me your address, love, and we’ll say nowt else about it.’ I lied through my tears and gave the address of the type of house I’d always wanted:

  ‘The Hollyhocks’

  Rose Briar Lane

  Little Sleeping

  Derbyshire

  He wrote it down. Then he made his way to the buffet car and, following him, I heard snatches of his conversation. ‘Lovely woman … husband crushed by bricks … intensive care … cleaning chimney.’

  I stopped crying when a woman in an overall plonked a cardboard carton of sweet tea in front of me and said, ‘Don’t worry, love. My husband had a central heating pipe go through him once, but he plays snooker twice a week now.’

  With or without the pipe? I wondered and laughed.

  The woman looked nervously around the carriage and said, ‘You’d better come in the kitchen.’

  For the rest of the journey I sat on an upturned bread crate and sobbed while the buffet bar staff served, toasted, microwaved and bickered in the hot, confined space around me. To please them I swallowed two aspirins, washed down with a British Rail miniature of brandy.

  It was dark when I stumbled and fell off the train at St Pancras Station. I lay on my back on the platform and saw my first dark London sky through the mottled glass of the high-spanning arched roof. Eager hands helped me to my feet but I didn’t stop to thank them. I was off and running into London.

  Right or left? Left. I ran down dirty steps. An illuminated sign ahead said: ‘King’s Cross’. I stood at a crossing. A traffic light ordered red buses and black taxis to stop for me. I crossed and went into the station. I needed to go to the lavatory urgently. I looked frantically for a sign; it was there. The friendly symbol of an armless woman in a triangular frock.

  I ran down the steps towards a bad smell. A turnstile. A notice: 10p. I didn’t have 10p. My bladder was bursting. A disgruntled black woman looked up from her knitting. She was the attendant. Her eyes slid over my dirty clothes, my black hands and face.

  ‘Can you let me through, please? I must go to the toilet.’

  ‘Ten pee,’ the woman said. She didn’t smile. ‘I haven’t got ten pee,’ I said.

  A queue had built up behind me. A little girl was crying. Her legs were slapped; she cried louder. I moved aside to let the irritable mother of the little girl through. This woman had two large suitcases, a shoulder-bag and a crying child to squeeze through the turnstile.

  The attendant watched as the woman juggled her burdens. The backs of the little girl’s legs were marked with her mother’s palm-prints. The harassed mother passed through into the tiled paradise. Her little daughter’s pathetic crying echoed and was then muffled, as a cubicle door was slammed shut.

  I asked again, ‘Please let me in.’

  The attendant got to her feet. I sensed that rage was never far from her and it was present now. ‘You go away, you bad woman. You can’t get nothin’ for nothin’. You gotta pay like all the people. I ain’t havin’ you in here with your meths and your drugs and your nastiness.’

  She barred my way with her massive body. She was the Keeper of the Turnstile. The Controller of Bladders. The Director of Bowels. To enter her kingdom I needed a magical piece of silver.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked her. ‘Where can I go?’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ she answered. ‘S’your fault for livin’ like you does.’

  She thought I was a tramp. So did the women coming in and out of the turnstile. They were looking at my dirty clothes and skin. They avoided touching me with fastidious care. I went back up the steps to the station concourse. I saw other badly dressed dirty women; they had terrible teeth and flapping shoes. They were sitting on the floor passing a sherry bottle between them. There were three of them. I approached them and asked them for ten pence … ‘for the toilet’.

  ‘Now I ain’t ‘eard that one before,’ said the eldest of the three.

  ‘I’m desperate to go,’ I said and danced a little jig on the marble floor.

  ‘Go round the back, then,’ said a purple-faced Scotswoman. ‘Dinna waste money on pissin’ and shittin’. Tha’s just throwin’ yer money away.’

  ‘Round the back?’

  The eldest got unsteadily to her feet. ‘She means the hotel. Nip in the hotel … the Northern. Wait till the receptionist has turned her back and just nip in.’

  ‘It’s lovely in there,’ said the youngest, wiping her mouth. ‘I ‘ad a wash in there last week. They’ve got flowered soap and a real towel. I did me feet ‘fore I got chucked out.’

  I now had to concentrate totally on keeping my bladder under control. I walked quickly round to the back of the station, past the lines of waiting taxis, until I saw the hotel. I hurried up the steps. I looked through the glass doors. Many people in uniforms were lounging around the reception desk. I could not wait. I walked through the doors and turned right. I saw a sign: ‘GENTLEMEN’. I walked towards it. I heard a shout behind me, a young voice … female… ‘Can I help you?’

  I didn’t look back. I pushed into the door marked ‘GENTLEMEN’. The smell was like another, invisible, door to be pushed through. A young man was standing at the urinal; his eyes widened and he turned his body away when he saw me. He splashed his white shoes. ‘Wrong place,’ he said.

  I crashed a cubicle door open … empty. I tore at my clothes and sat down. The relief was immediate, my body relaxed … I was floating. When every last drop was drained from my body I stood up and tucked my clothes about me. Glancing down, I saw a pair of white shoes at the bottom of the door. I stood very still, waiting for the shoes to move. Eventually the young man said: ‘Are you coming out, then?’

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. I waited. Water dripped, the smell intensified, I could hear his breath. He lit a cigarette. There was a commotion outside the door and a crowd of loud, masculine voices entered. White Shoes moved away.

  ‘There’s a woman in there,’ he said excitedly.

  There was rumbling laughter, then a knock on the cubicle door. ‘Anyb
ody there?’

  I didn’t speak… . Anything I said could only be ridiculous.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ A Midlands accent like my own, but overlaid with drink and laughter. ‘If you’re feeling poorly, I’ll come in there ‘n help you. I’ve gorra cistificate for First Aid.’

  His shoes were tightly laced, black and reassuring, with polished uppers and badly replaced soles and heels. When I didn’t reply he spoke again. ‘Come out and have a drink with us, duck.’

  Another pair of shoes appeared at the bottom of the door. Grey, tasselled slip-ons. ‘Come on, Arthur, there’s no time for a drink. We’ll miss the train. She’s bound to be a slag anyway, in’t she?’

  Arthur said sadly, ‘I’ve known some bleddy lovely slags in my time. First gel I went with wurra slag. You could ‘ave a laugh with a slag.

  You knew where you were in them days. Course it’s different now —unless you’ve gorra condom on yer, even a slag don’t wanna know yer. So, where does it leave yer? Yer forced to go to Soho and look for a pro. And she wants fifty quid for a bit 0’ light relief! How can I afford fifty quid? Who can, ‘part from bleddy stockbrokers and suchlike? Bleddy London. You’ve gorra be a soddin’ millionaire to live ‘ere. Two pound a pint! Three pound fifty for a fry-up in a caff! An’ the price of an ‘otel room! Well, ‘s’no wonder folks’re sleepin’ on the bleddy pavements. I tell you, I wunt live in London if you stuck diamonds up me bum.’

  White Shoes said: ‘They’re all slags … women, every bloody one of ‘em, when it comes down to it … wherever they live.’

  Arthur said, dangerously: ‘My Wife Is A Woman.’

  White Shoes went on, oblivious to the threat in Arthur’s voice, ‘So was my ex-wife but she ran off, din’t she? With a spade.’

  ‘Keen gardener, was she?’ said Arthur.

  White Shoes continued, ‘Your wife could be getting out of somebody’s bed right now… as I’m speaking…’