Engleby (25 page)

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I do know what you mean. It’s what I meant with Dad. That he probably never woke up at all.’

I didn’t want to talk about him any more. I said, ‘Do you ever feel you’ve lived before?’

‘Like reincarnation?’

Julie liked to give ideas a name familiar to her, and get them into boxes small enough to handle easily.

I smiled at her.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘It’s my greatest fear,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s too bleak,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you another day. Have some sweet. Take another look at the menu.’

‘Go on, Mike, tell me.’

I looked at her. ‘Well . . . I see a child in the back of a car . . . A face behind glass . . . And it might be me again . . . All that I know now, I’d need to learn again . . . And I look at the child’s parents and wonder if they’re kind . . . I saw a mother slap her child in the supermarket, hit him round the head and scream at him . . . And that’s the only world he knows . . . He’s in a nest of boxes he can never, ever climb out of . . .’

I was rambling a bit. ‘And, Jules, I feel it’s my fault. When I used to see the old men in the institution and the lights come on in the grey corridor . . . I feel I’m trapped in some loop . . . Some loop of time . . . I can’t face coming back and being one of them next time. Or that child.’

I don’t think she understood what I was trying to say, and anyway it was difficult to put into words.

London’s burning. You can hear the thudding of the helicopters in the night sky. South of the river you can see an orange stain of fire in the sky. I blame Wyn Douglas.

The police went to help a black boy who’d been stabbed by another black boy. A group of youths thought that instead of helping him to hospital they were beating him up. They broke police car windscreens. It stopped there, but stayed tense. Police saturated the area. I happened to be in the mag office, Friday, in the afternoon, and Wyn came on the phone to Jan.

He was very excited, I could hear. He kept saying, ‘It’s going to go off, it’s going to go off.’

Jan said to me, ‘If it happens, get down there.’

It didn’t seem to me the right sort of story for Michèle Watts, who was currently doing a four-parter on tampon-related toxic shock syndrome, but Jan said she wanted all available staff to ‘get their arses to the Frontline’.

I parked the car near Clapham Common Tube and walked down Clapham Park Road. It was quite a hike, but I didn’t want the 1100 being overturned and torched. I’d seen police versus black activity before, during the Notting Hill carnival when I was sitting outside a pub in Talbot Road. A cop came and told us they were about to charge. He shepherded us all into the bar and slammed the door from outside. It’s the first time I’d been to a police-sponsored lock-in.

There were signs of trouble in Acre Lane, before I even got to Railton Road. There was a look of joy on the faces of the young men, mostly black, who were kicking in windows and carrying stuff out. I got to Mayall Road and saw police vans on their backs, aflame. By the railway bridge another was burning under an ad for Golden Virginia tobacco that said: ‘Get the economy rolling’. Good place to sell roll-up gear, Brixton.

I didn’t take out my notebook or anything. I guessed I was meant to ‘mingle’, but I didn’t look black enough. What I remember is a bit patchy . . .

There are bricks in the air and a white boy is hit. Black boys help him. I don’t know whose side I’m on. There’s fighting with truncheons and fists. Head wounds and bloodstreams. Stunned people sitting in the gutter, holding themselves with blood running through their grasp. I run away into Coldharbour Lane where a Special Patrol Group Vehicle is on its roof with black smoke rising. I see a young man break the window of the jeweller’s shop. Then there are cheap earrings and necklaces all over the pavement. Next door is a ‘consumer advice centre’, whatever that is. My consumer advice to him is: help yourself.

Personally, I don’t want any of this stuff. A bathroom shop is gaping, but I don’t need any basins. A motor accessories shop is open house, but the 1100’s been running fine lately. It’s unbelievably loud, you can’t concentrate. All the shop alarms have gone off. The shops are screaming. The car alarms are panicking and shrieking and the police are hammering their shields as they regroup on Railton Road. They’re trying to seal off one end and make a charge, I think.

Black boys are shouting that someone’s killed a cop, but I think it’s just a rumour. A boy runs past me with a big stereo; the window’s being kicked in by an old lady. It could be his gran. There’s something in there she really wants, because she has to kick it several times before it gives. I can hear a police charge beginning in the next street. I can hear the thunder of the truncheons on their shields.

You get the feeling no one knows where this is going to end. We’re in uncharted country. For several hundred young men this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened, ever will, ever could. It could be war, there could be a thousand dead.

I ought to go home, but I have this odd desire to do the story right, plus I really want to see what happens. But I might get killed. It’s dark, it’s smoky, choking rubber tyre, petrol and bitumen; it’s night-time and it’s going to hell. It’s unbelievably exciting.

So I think what would make me feel better is a drink, and I have this idea I’ll go to the Windsor Castle, where Wyn had that party, so I’m doubling back up Mervan Road to get to the Frontline. A policeman on a horse is chasing a black youth towards me and I step aside. I remember that the first British action in the Great War was on horseback, at Mons, with swords.

When I get to the Frontline there are three lines of cops with their shields up. It’s raining bricks. They really should have pulled these buildings down, not left the job half-finished. A Molotov cocktail is thrown onto the shields and fizzles out. The other side of the road is a barricade of burning vehicles, a literal no-go area. Down Mayall Road, I finally push my way to get a view of the pub, but it’s on fire. It’s like newsreel of the Blitz, Victorian brickwork flaming, the skeleton of the building showing through.

I told you they didn’t like it here.

Before my eyes the pub collapses, brought to its knees like a prehistoric animal too heavy to survive. It just falls.

The fire from the ruins is the only light because along Mayall Road the electricity has failed. The houses are in darkness. There’s just the wah-wah howl of sirens and the beating sound of modern war.

Seven

I haven’t thought about Jennifer Arkland for years. I’ve been preoccupied, and the idea of her hasn’t been able to push itself into my mind – or at least not into the main auditorium there.

Your brain can only have one thought at any time. It’s odd, that, isn’t it? We accept it as normal because we’re so used to it. But when you consider how many million memories our brains can store, and with what ease, it’s rather surprising that we can only
think
one thing at any time. It’s like a Maserati whose windscreen washer works fine – but not if the engine’s running. What on earth are those gazillion unused synapses doing at any one time? Redecorating? Dozing? R and R?

That’s what people believe, anyway. Personally, I’m not so sure. I think I’m capable of having two or more thoughts simultaneously. I’m not talking about ‘beliefs’ here. You can believe many things about one subject; you can even, as George Orwell had fun pointing out in
Ninety Eighty-Four
, believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. But beliefs are what you ‘hold’; they’re like memories; and you only become aware of them when you explain, revise or put them into words. Everyone does that.

What I can do – and I gather this is rarer – is have two or more conscious thoughts at the same time. It’s as though the auditorium of my conscious brain has a split screen. Generally, of course, there’s just one picture; but frequently there are two. Each has its own soundtrack; each runs happily at its own pace; they do not snipe at, quote or contradict each other.

Also, they don’t depend for their existence on the relative point of view of the observer or any of that stuff. They just exist and run autonomously and I am equally conscious of each. Occasionally, my screen redivides and I can manage to be thinking three or four things at the same time. More than that, however, is troublesome. It’s tiring, and there comes a moment when I ask myself what I’m doing. Then all the thoughts tumble, like the batons of a juggler who has become self-conscious.

Given that capability, it’s a bit surprising that I haven’t thought of Jen – especially when you consider all the nonsense – all the guff – I’ve given mental houseroom to.

What brought her back to mind was a small item I saw in the newspaper. ‘Missing Girl’s Father Dies’, said the headline over a single column story, only an inch or so long, on an inside page. (It’s what they call a ‘nib’, which stands for ‘news in brief’.)

It said: ‘Richard Arkland, father of Jennifer Arkland the university student who went missing in February 1974, has died at the age of 60. Despite a massive police hunt and a national television broadcast by her boyfriend, Jennifer was never found.

‘Mr Arkland did not return to his architectural practice in Lymington, Hants after the disappearance of his daughter. A neighbour said, “He died of a broken heart.” Widow Mrs Lesley Arkland, 54, asked for the family’s privacy to be respected. (See Page 24: Those Seventies: the Tasteless Decade.)’

My first response to this was that if his broken heart took eight years to conk out, then it must have been a doughtier muscle than my father’s. But I did feel sorry for Mrs A and I wondered what I could do to help.

Grief is a peculiar emotion. I used to think that widows grieved in proportion to the love they felt for the husband. They
missed
him – like a temporary parting, an
angoisse desgares
, but magnified. I also thought the shape of the grief was that of the dead person: they mourned the absence of particular characteristics.

But from what I’ve seen – in my mother and a woman who used to live downstairs – it’s not like that at all. The removal of the partner seems to precipitate a sort of top-to-bottom crisis in the way the survivor sees herself, her past and all her connections with the world. The long married life now appears to have been a species of delusion. She’s not sure it really even happened: for all the evidence of children and photographs, she doubts its reality. She reverts in some ways to life before it, to girlhood. She becomes a dowager-child. For some reason, even going shopping or making a telephone call seems to require a confidence that’s gone missing. She can no longer mediate with ‘the world’. So, grief, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t look like a deep feeling that symmetrically mourns the absent shape; it looks like a disintegration of the acquired personality. It looks like going mad.

In these circumstances, what comfort can you offer?

Well, I thought I should maybe send back Jen’s diary. That might be something.

I don’t keep it behind the toilet cistern any more – even though I’ve got one of my own now.

I’ve just moved from the bedsit into a real one-bedroom flat. The sum I had to borrow from the bank sounded like enough to buy two sides of Eaton Square. Not so. (The deposit was also hard work to lay my hands on.)

Anyway, I’m just down the road in what they call Bayswater, though close enough to the old place that I still use most of the same shops. I have a living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and a space known as ‘study/Bedroom 2’. I also have what the particulars called a ‘TV Ariel Socket’. I half expect Ariel to dance out from it; he’s always pretty much a t/v anyway, the way they play him capering round Prospero in a tunic. The main room also has a view of a ‘garden square’, in effect a grassless rectangle with a couple of horse chestnuts and some skeletal shrubs, where people track their dogs with polythene gloves, ready to swoop and grasp. Their failure rate is high enough to deter any non-dog-related traffic from entering the ‘garden’.

One thing occurs to me. If I return Jennifer’s diary, I won’t any longer be able to read it. I could photocopy it, but that won’t be necessary. I’ve memorised the whole thing.

Don’t believe me? Try me. Pick a date at random.

30 May, 1973?

OK. Easy.

Went with Anne this afternoon to look at a possible house for next year. A bit remote, the other side of the river, towards Cherry Hinton Road etc. and not very glamorous part of town. But therefore cheaper. Tiny house but can sleep four (one in ground floor back). I fell absurdly in love with it. Have already redecorated ‘my’ bedroom in my mind. I will sign the lease, if I can persuade Dad to stand surety, and will pay slightly more rent than the others in return for which Anne says I shd have first choice of room and who am I to argue with such a brilliant young woman, future leader etc.? V exciting prospect. Feel like putting on Crosby, Stills & Nash: ‘Our house is a very, very fine house . . .’ Freedom, no porters, no gate hours.

Back in the real world, meanwhile: early college brek with Sue Jubb and Liz Burdene. Poor Sue’s hair looks as though she has been electrocuted as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. They just have tea and toast, but I get hungry later, so had to have the fried egg etc. The egg had been sitting for a long time so had to lever off hard little cap from the yolk. Underneath, it was fine. At least, nothing that salt and pepper and a bit of tinned tomato couldn’t disguise.