Rebuilding Coventry (13 page)

We had
no credit cards or charge accounts. Derek’s subscription to the Tortoise
Society was only four pounds a year (including the biannual newsletter). I
wore little make-up, used no hairspray. Our video was a present from my mother,
who had given up trying to work out how to use it. Derek made most of our
furniture; consequently there was hardly anything in the house that didn’t
rock, tilt or stick.

Our
last holiday was a coach tour of Scotland five years ago. Both children were
travel-sick, and when we were all bitten by midges there was no spare money
with which to buy antihistamine cream. We had to cadge squirts from the
pensioners who made up the rest of the coach party.

In our
house money was a god. But it was an angry, careful god. It wasn’t a question
of worshipping money, but fearing it. Consequently we lived timid lives; only
the financially secure can afford to be spontaneous.

‘If
only the children would stop
growing,’
Derek would say. Because, of
course, it was the children who sapped our monetary strength. Without certain
things
they could not live. To Derek and me it was inconceivable that our children
would not be happy. We had both been unhappy children, you see. That’s why we
got married; to reproduce ourselves and have another stab at happiness.

Instead of being sensible
and finding a cheap hotel, I had my ears pierced in Regent Street. I was
surprised at how much it hurt. The girl with the stud gun told me that it was
strictly against the rules to remove the little gold studs she’d inserted.
Also, I must rotate them every four hours and clean my lobes with white spirit,
unless I wanted a ‘major infection of the ears’. She then lectured me on wild
life preservation. I explained that the leopard-skin coat was a gift, but she
told me that it was ‘the principle that counted’. She said this as if it were
the first time it had been said. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to walk around
with a dead animal on your back,’ she said, as she creaked about in her leather
suit. While we waited for my ears to stop bleeding, I agreed that it was a
callous thing to do, which pleased the girl. An expression of my mother’s
escaped out of my mouth before I could stop it: ‘Needs must.’

‘What
does that mean?’

‘It
means I’ve got nothing else to keep me warm,’ I said. As soon as I got outside
the shop I took the studs out and put the jade earrings in. Letitia was right,
they look lovely with my orange hair. I am now down to fifteen pounds and one
penny; and I’m going to be sensible and start looking for a hotel room.

21
John Goes to Bradford

John Dakin and Bradford
Keynes faced each other over the easels in the art room of the Workers’
Educational Institute. They were surrounded by grey and balding heads, as
pensioners bent over their Titian copies.

‘I’ve
come about my mum.’

‘Who is
your mum?’

‘Lauren
McSkye,’ lied John.

Bradford’s
heart tingled with a thousand electric shocks. He forgot to breathe. The blood
fled from beneath his skin. He was knocked off balance. He was twenty-six.

‘Do you
know where she is?’ asked John, wondering to himself if this scruff with paint
on his long, ridiculous beard was drunk in the middle of the day.

Bradford
had fallen violently in love with Lauren McSkye within three minutes of their
first meeting in January. Since then he only lived so that he might look at her
and listen to her voice. In between their twice weekly innocent meetings he was
bereft; during the night he painted feverishly: Lauren in her black outfit,
Lauren naked, Lauren … Lauren … Lauren.

‘No, I
don’t know where she is.’ Bradford’s voice wobbled out of control. ‘She’s
missed two lessons. She wouldn’t ever give an address, so I didn’t know where
to
begin
to look for her.’

There
was an obsessional tone to his voice. John put it down to Bradford being an
artist; everybody knew they were loonies, always cutting their ears off or
running away from respectable jobs to live on islands with a load of savages. ‘She
left her work here,’ said Bradford, who was anxious to detain Lauren’s son for
as long as possible. He needed more information about Lauren so that he could
suck on it and chew it and digest it, when he got back to his dingy terraced
house. Bradford held up a picture.

John
looked contemptuously at his mother’s daubing. ‘A kid could do better,’ he
thought.

Bradford
looked at the same painting. ‘A true primitive,’ he thought, ‘true and fine and
innocent.’

Lauren
McSkye/Coventry Dakin had painted, at Bradford’s request, ‘Heaven’. There was a
river with a slow-running current, boats were being rowed both up and down
stream. The banks of the river were stocked with fruit trees and oaks. Weeping
willows languished in the water. Geraniums, daffodils, foxgloves and buttercups
and daisies tumbled down the river banks. A woman who looked like Lauren lay
back against a pile of jewelled cushions. She was reading a book. A box of
Black Magic chocolates lay on the verdant grass. Bottles of wine and an Edam
cheese could be seen in the raffia basket at her feet. The sun and the moon and
the stars were out together in the sky. There was only one cloud to be seen. In
the far distance were a town, a mountain, a sea, a lighthouse and a sign which
said in tiny lettering: ‘At last, full employment, minimum wage £200 a week.’

‘Did
you know your mother could paint?’ asked Bradford.

‘No,’
said John. He thought, ‘She
can’t
paint: it’s crap.’ ‘Is your mother not
at home, then?’ said Bradford. ‘No, she’s gone off somewhere.’

‘I see.
I didn’t realize your mother had children. Is she married?’

‘Yes,
to my dad. Derek McSkye.’ ‘I see, and your name is
…?’
‘John McSkye.
I’ve got a sister, Mary McSkye.’

‘Is
your father an American?’ ‘No.’

‘Oh;
your mother’s accent
.
.
.
where do you live?’

‘Not
far from here.’

‘Exactly
where?’

Bradford
had searched the telephone book in vain. There were no McSkyes.

‘I’ve gotta
go to college now.’ John swung the strap of his canvas bag onto his shoulder.
Bradford saw that the bag was clearly marked in indelible ink:

THE PROPERTY OF JOHN DAKIN

13,
BADGER’S COPSE CLOSE

GREY PATHS ESTATE

The ink had smudged, but
the address still made an indelible impression on Bradford Keynes. There was no
need for him to write it down.

22
Cardboard City

Have you heard of
Cardboard City? It’s where I live.

It is
within sight of Waterloo Station and a mere bottle’s throw from the River
Thames. In other circumstances it would make an ideal
pied à terre
but,
as it is, it lacks certain facilities such as: a roof, walls, windows, a floor,
hot and cold water, a lavatory, a bath, electricity, gas, a front door. There
are no houses in Cardboard City, only homes, which have been constructed on the
DI Y principle from the detritus of other people’s lives. Cardboard is used, of
course, and plastic sheeting, and anything else that will keep the cold out and
the body heat in. The residents of Cardboard City are unusually well informed;
they are great newspaper readers. The larger, quality newspapers are preferred,
as they have superior insulating factors.

Nobody
asks questions in Cardboard City; information is either volunteered or not
given at all. Sometimes stories told drunkenly late at night are retracted in the
sober light of morning. The only thing the residents have in common is their
poverty and their will to survive. Perhaps one more thing: the inability to
manage money. This is why
I’m
here, after all. If I’d taken a cheap
hotel room instead of eating three meals a day, then perhaps I could have found
a job; but without an address nobody would employ me.

Then,
when my photograph appeared in the national papers, I had to hide. I spent my
last money on a pair of Woolworth’s sun-glasses. I wear them day and night.
Several people have helped me to cross busy road junctions, thinking that I am
blind or partially-sighted. I’ve been sleeping here for three days. I’ve got a
posh friend called Dodo. She’s exactly one month older than me. We protect each
other. The other residents are sometimes inclined towards noisy — and violent
—confrontations.

Dodo is
teaching me survival techniques. We are living off the thin of the land; but at
least we’re engaged in living. Some time ago Dodo had a nervous breakdown. She
used
to think that she was the chief constable of Manchester; God told her she
was, and she believed God and went to Manchester Police HQ and asked for a
fitting for a chief constable’s uniform. Naturally she was thrown out, but she
went back, twice a day for a fortnight, and eventually the police got fed up
with her and put her away in a safe place.

Dodo
liked the mental hospital. ‘You could be as mad as you liked,’ she said. ‘And
it was warm and safe, and there were lovely grounds to stroll about in when the
weather was fine.’

The
problems came when Dodo got slightly better — when God stopped talking to her.
The doctors decided that Dodo was well enough to live in the community. She was
sent to a halfway house, and made to live with five other half-mad people. One
of the five was an arsonist who had a penchant for burning down hotels. He was
not allowed matches or cigarette lighters or combustibles of any kind and he
was given weekly support from his social worker but, ungratefully, some would
say, he still managed to set fire to the halfway house. A neighbour who had
signed a petition against having the hostel in the street woke the other
residents and helped them to safety. As he did so, he composed a letter in his
mind: it was to the local paper:

‘Dear
Sir, Entirely as I predicted …’

Instead
of being sensible and reporting for a roll call, Dodo warmed her hands on the
flames, and then rain away. The firemen searched the gutted wreck in the
morning, looking for her burnt body.

According
to Dodo she comes from a well-known political family.

She
says
that her brother is the former — now disgraced — Cabinet Minister, Nicholas
Cutbush. I don’t believe a word of this. It’s just another variation on her
wanting to be chief constable of Manchester.

At
night Dodo and I cling together like passionate spoons. We need the warmth and
the
warmth.
Our present little house is made out of two fridge-freezer
boxes and is well insulated with polystyrene blocks; the pavements are cruelly
cold in London. During the day, when we are out begging, a fellow resident of
Cardboard City, called James Spittlehouse, guards our cardboard shelter. In
return for this kindness Dodo and I lay scraps of food at his feet. Mr
Spittlehouse has an unpredictable temperament and a terrible criminal record.
He has over a hundred convictions for stealing from church poor-boxes. ‘Well, I
am
poor,’ he says defiantly. ‘It cuts out the middleman, saves all them
committee meetings. They don’t have to decide how to hand the money out, do
they? ‘Cause
I’ve
already had it.’ He speaks longingly of the cosy cells
and companionship of prison. He even misses slopping out. His proudest boast is
that he is a virgin.

‘I’ve
never been touched by man, woman or beast. The last person to touch my secret
parts was my own mother, and even then a sponge intervened.’

Mr
Spittlehouse disapproves of fraternization between the sexes. He wears four
pairs of underpants in case a passing woman should be tempted to interfere with
him. Dodo and I have tried to reassure him on this point, but he won’t be told.

The
police turn a blind eye to Cardboard City; there are too many of us and there
is nowhere else for us to go. We are an embarrassment. Commuters passing to
and fro to the trains at Waterloo hate us. They hate us so much that they
cannot look at us. If one of us falls in their path (and there are many drunks
amongst us), the commuters step over the body and carry on walking. They hate
us because we have time. We are rich with time, we are overflowing with it and
they are short of it, always.

Gerald
Fox has been dead one week today.

23
Homo Impecunious Working Class

Professor Willoughby D’Eresby
looked up from the report on Gerald Fox’s autopsy.

Letitia
said, ‘Well, come on, you old bleeder, cough it up. Spill the beans; what does
it
say?’

‘It
says “Massive Cerebral Haemorrhage”.

‘Caused
by an Action Mam?’ scoffed Letitia.

‘Yes. I
note the doubt in your voice, wife.’