Born Yesterday (11 page)

Dr Koshihara concludes:

Michael’s father had gone to the culvert where his son was trapped. The owner of ‘Kingston Koi’ had telephoned him. Michael had worked there for twelve years, from leaving school, a talking textbook on koi. Police officers
kept his father back and advised him that he should either stay in a police car or go home. As he watched television, he heard ‘that the young man trapped in the drain had died’. He then waited for a number of hours for police to come and confirm what had happened.

Did Michael imagine he could feel his favourite nishikigoi using its mouth to caress the tips of his fingers as consciousness ebbed? That it was Ghost koi, the modern metallic hybrids, at play around his feet, stirring the substrate, increasing the brown turbidity of the water, rather than contaminating slime and human effluent? I’d like to think so. A stream of limpid water never ceases to flow all the year round. It is this water that flows into the pond in which Hanako lives.

The solidity of the external world dissolved. The feel of life in this new waterlogged reality.

Astral Close.

Some say the drains are heaven’s guts.

He didn’t know why he made this list of everything he had just bought from the late shop whose lights he could still see spilling into the village from his upstairs window. The Sudocrem was to draw the heat out of the sunburn he had suffered on his face and scalp. The forecast had been rain, more rain. The forecast was wrong. The afternoon had brought strong sun and he had toiled up the hill between the Trimdons like an old Chinaman, thinking (too late) to use his pocket-size umbrella with the broken spoke as a sun-shade, tilting it to obscure his face every time a car approached on the near side. Maybe he saw the list as a diary – a displacement diary of the depredations of being away from home.

He knew writers had to travel away from home sometimes in order to gather material – it was part of the writer’s life. But he always fell avidly on writers writing about their (preferably fed-up and futile, preferably seedy) on-the-road existences. He often went back, for instance, to Naipaul’s tender description of his eighteen-year-old self, spending his first night in a New York hotel, on his first night away from his island. He has with him half a roasted chicken that his family, at the ritual family farewell, has pressed on him at the airport, thousands of miles away and many hours earlier. ‘I ate over the waste-paper basket, aware as I did so of the smell, the oil, the excess at the end of a long day … like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal. I dumped it all in the waste-paper basket. After this I needed a bath, or a shower.’

Of the many descriptions of the erotic possibilities of down-at-heel hotel rooms in Graham Greene, he particularly remembered the one from
England Made Me
about Minty, the expatriate freelance hack: ‘The room was cold … it was bare. He tore the coloured cover off an old
Film
Fun
and stuck it against the wall with a piece of soap … He tore out a picture of Claudette Colbert in a Roman bath and balanced it on his suitcase. Two girls playing strip poker he put above his head with more soap.’ The older Greene, he knew – the established, mysterious, debonair writer – always stayed at the Ritz on his visits to London. But he preferred to think of the younger man in some bare
and shabby rented room, like the character in his novel, arranging his trousers under the mattress before turning in, to press the creases in them.

Only the day before, on the train travelling north from King’s Cross to Darlington en route to Sedgefield where the by-election to pick Tony Blair’s successor was about to take place, he had come across a story which he sensed even before he had read a whole page was going to become one of those pieces of writing he would return to when he wanted to be reminded of the special pleasures as well as the privations of being in a strange place, following a story. ‘A man likes to be alone sometimes. Being alone doesn’t mean being where there are no people. It means being where people are all strangers to you.’

Idly flipping through the pages, at the same time watching the colours of the countryside go by, those words had instantly drawn him in and made him go back to the start of the story.

Looking for an excuse to put aside the various press releases and printouts going over the issues in the Sedgefield campaign (it was a non-campaign – there was no way that Phil Wilson, the Labour candidate and a longtime confrère of Blair’s, wasn’t going to win, and he couldn’t pretend that the state of Newton Ayclffe health centre or the regeneration of Aycliffe town centre held any real interest for him, any more than they had for Tony Blair, who had appeared to do nothing about them in his twenty-four years as MP), he had opened a paperback book of stories by Sherwood Anderson that he had had for
several years but had never looked at until then. The lines that trapped his eye were from a story called ‘In a Strange Town’, which he worked out had been written around eighty years earlier by a writer who had always had to live in the shadow of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and his friend William Faulkner. It didn’t seem so old. It still seemed fresh, with romantic unpoetic sentences that rang with an arresting off-note.

‘A morning in a country town in a strange place’, it started. ‘I have come away from home. I am in a strange place’.

Slowly he read on, no longer agitated by the over-amplified customer announcements before and after every ‘station-stop’. No longer anxious that the trip was going to turn out to be a waste of time and money and tell him nothing about Blair he didn’t already know, or apprehensive about where he was going to end up spending the night. Bright colour seen from the train that went to Darlington.

Having made the list of items picked up from the late shop, next he felt he should add a description of the room where he was going to be for several nights (fewer nights than he told the man at the desk he was going to be staying – not hanging around for the count at the leisure centre, not even waiting for by-election day itself, he would bail out on day three) in case at some time in the future he should need to recall the details. It was a pub room of the kind he had stayed in all too often: stencilled dado line of green leaves and orange flowers, brought round slightly higher on one side of the doorframe than the other; small dusty Japanese-made television, missing the remote; cheap boxwood furniture stained coffin-like dark mahogany brown, with rust-mottled shiny gold hinges and handles; a loose-grouted tile on the floor in the bathroom which rocked every time you crossed to the sink. The only unusual feature was the windows which, from the outside, could be seen to be half the height of the traditional sash windows on the two lower floors. The room he had been given was at the top of the building and extended into the pitch. The windows in both bedroom and bathroom came up only as high as his waist and he had to bend like the giant peering into Goldilocks’ house to see through either.

That first night, as he sat on the edge of the bed eating his butter-roasted chicken salad sandwich and ‘Taste the Difference’ coleslaw, he looked up condolence messages and tributes on mydeathspace.com and gonetoosoon.co.uk, impressed as always by the way ordinary keyboard
symbols like +’s and ( )’s could be turned into representations of angels’ faces and bouquets of flowers, absorbed by the gap between the obviously genuine sentiments of many messages – ‘still to dis day i fink 2 myself y, y u but ima cum c u soon bruv, nuff love’ – and the texting shorthand they were expressed in; trying to decipher the lyrics of the rap songs that came on as the soundtrack to the details of many violent young deaths connected with petty crime and drugs and run-ins with the police and all the stuff of proletarian outsiderdom – lyrics he had a tin ear for.

‘Well, alright!’ is something he knew the young Blair, a Jagger fan, did a lot of during his few appearances as the singer with Ugly Rumours, the band he joined while he was studying law at Oxford in the early Seventies. ‘Well, alright! … I said, Well, alright!’ This – catastrophically – was Neil Kinnock’s attempt to show that he was youthful, modern, dynamic and ‘down with the kids’, leaping onstage at Labour’s famous ‘pre-victory’ election rally at Sheffield Arena in spring 1992, shortly before they were humiliated at the polls by John ‘warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, old maids bicycling to communion through the morning mist’ Major.

In addition to sending him to Nicki Clarke, hairdresser to the stars, for a style re-think and putting him into ‘softening’ fuchsia ties in the period leading up to his coronation, part of ‘Project Gordon’ had been to get him to boast
in public about being a toe-tapping, hand-jiving Arctic Monkeys fan. In terms of street-credibility this ranked alongside Kinnock’s stadium-rock shout-out and Blair’s ‘So what’s the scene like out there?’ to Damon Albarn the first time they were introduced, and ensured that Project Gordon was swiftly binned in favour of Plan A, the sober, statesmanlike sell.

The place he found himself staying was a former coaching inn with traditional lime-washed walls and black pointing and a deep arch that still opened on to a cobbled yard at the back of the building, and then open fields. The pub was part of a terrace running adjacent to the main road which acted as an effective baffle between Sedgefield village and the countryside around it. On one side were the tea-rooms and shops and pubs and the everyday commerce of the village, and on the other the woods and meadows; the Sainsbury’s Local selling ready-meals and magazines until very nearly midnight, and in the darkness just beyond the light from its window, the natural habitats of bats and cinnabar moths and green-winged orchids come into flower two months ahead of time.

Part of the yard of the pub had been turned into a beer garden, with rickety-looking, rustically knocked-together furniture coated in black gloss paint; the arch, whose lower walls still bore the long scars of carriage axles, was used by smokers to stay out of the rain.

Next door to the pub was ‘Minsters’, a restaurant painted in the same traditional black and white colours
where the Blairs could sometimes be seen and whose owner had done the catering for ‘their Leo’s’ christening. Minsters was cosy and chintzy with satin-tasselled lamps and tassels dangling from the heavy, faux-leatherbound menus. It was on the main road and gave, local people felt, a good picture of Sedgefield. It was quiet, it was discreet; it was above the average pocket. This was the kind of place Sedgefield saw itself as being. It got their goat that outsiders confused their village, a market town since the fourteenth century that was sometimes described as looking ‘as though it could be in the Cotswolds’, with the larger Sedgefield constituency represented by the prime minister.

They took particular exception when visitors supposed that the famous Trimdon Labour Club, the setting for so many momentous Tony Blair occasions, had somehow something to do with them. For a start, they weren’t Labour. Unlike the retired pit villages that were at the heart of the constituency, they weren’t dyed-in-the-wool Labour; they were true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool Tories. Only the accident of a boundary line stopped them voting for that bonnie William Hague, just a few miles away in Richmond, in North Yorkshire.

The drug abuse and junkies, the crackheads and plonkies that other former mining communities in County Durham were now notorious for, the child neglect and glue-sniffing that was always getting written up in the papers – that had nothing to do with them. Tattooed tearaways. ‘Cut here’ written round their necks. Fishburn and
Trimdon Colliery, a few bus stops away, were like alien territory. And where was Blair’s favourite pub? Always the clincher. It wasn’t in Trimdon Village or Doggie or any of the Trimdons. It was the Dun Cow, here in the village, whose elderly owner could be spotted most mornings in his roomy army-surplus khaki shorts and open-toed sandals disappearing under the arch at the pub where he was staying, off for an outward-bound across the fields.

In common with most places that summer, the weather had killed the tourist trade. There was a gang of labourers in that he would hear tramping between rooms, horsing around at night. But by nine o’clock they had long gone and he was always the only one at breakfast.

By then – mid-July; the by-election was on 19 July – the smoking ban had only been in effect for a fortnight. The upholstery of the bench seats in the bar smelled strongly. They had soaked up smoke and nicotine over many years. They were sticky with it. There was a grease mark on the sugar bowl roughly the size of a thumbprint that would still be there next time he stayed; an area of dirt around the lip of the milk jug also seemed ingrained and indelible.

He was always given the same table – it was the one under the blackboard always chalked up with the same options – ‘chips & gravy or curried sauce’, ‘chicken goujons & 1 dip (choice of chilli, bbq, garlic, marie rose)’ – and waited on by the same person.

Breakfast service was the domain of a hefty youth, tall and well-padded as they say up there, prematurely balding and dimpled like a large grubby baby. He never saw him
wear anything other than a grey sweatshirt with a dark grease stain stretching from just below his chin to just above his generous belly. It was certainly his fingerprints on the crockery.

The breakfast waiter was talkative and curious, forever hovering between the tables and his place in the kitchen, a limp tea towel in his hand, a knowing expression on his face. Like many men in the ‘hard’ north-east, he had a pronounced feminine, almost skittish, side to his personality.

He seemed intelligent and gave the impression that he might once have been the victim of bullies at school, which had held him back and explained this menial, low-paying position. He hated Blair: ‘If I could, and I knew when he was coming, I’d tip off al-Qaida so they could come and get him,’ he said one morning. He seemed disaffected with all mainstream politicians, and to think of himself as some sort of edgy, anarchistic figure. ‘Politically deranged’. He liked this phrase. It was what Phil Wilson, Blair’s anointed successor, had called him on his doorstep when he was canvassing one evening.

It was through the breakfast waiter, who enjoyed being a conduit for useful, sometimes mischievous, information, that he learned that Reg Keys, whose son had been killed in Iraq, had had his room for the three weeks of the 2005 general election, Blair’s last.