Byron Easy (31 page)

In the end, poor Nigel was carted off to the Land of Nod known as council care. The Little Kid survived, though he had to spend four months with all his hair shaved off looking like an electrocuted gerbil as the twenty-five stitches did their reformatory work. For some reason he never seemed to grow any bigger, unlike the rest of us. And when we did grow bigger, the Lane grew smaller. The gangs and camps had become an official menace. Although our so-called posse had disbanded, I started running with the rough boys from the top estates. Soon you couldn’t sprint, kicking up explosions of slate and mud, down to the breaker’s yard at the bottom without encountering Mr Tombs and his two mangy sheepdogs. This self-appointed Cerberus was a rake-thin peggy old buzzard with a voice like a hacksaw who acted as guardian of the grounds after a series of burglaries. Mr Tombs was Dovecote Lane’s oldest resident, and he would glower from behind the permanently chained gates to the breaker’s yard with a look of harsh propriety. His voice would saw through a perfectly good afternoon with a sour threat: ‘Scarper you little buggers, or I’ll call the police.’ We jeered at him until he rattled the wire meshing, eyes bulging: ‘I’ll give you some! If your mums and dads weren’t just up the road, you’d have some from me, you buggers!’ No one knew quite how far he would go. Behind his lizard-slit eyes and gummy scowl he was an unknown and terrifying quantity. I had nightmares in which he broke the skulls of little children to dust between his thumb and forefinger.

Once the kids got out of hand, it soon became clear that the lane was populated by wheezing, gossiping geriatrics—like some kind of terraced old-folks’ home. Des and Sinead were the youngest couple on the block. This can have only contributed to my mother’s boredom. The most magnanimous of these valetudinarians was Mrs Hewson, who lived in the last house in the bumpy lane, just before it dipped to the ivy-devoured wall of the breaker’s yard. She had a breadloaf hair-do left over from the mid-sixties and boiled-sweet specs, behind which glimmered seemingly sane eyes. She didn’t appear to mind the rolling gangs of boys pelting each other with half-bricks just outside her net-curtained home. But then she had Colin to worry about. Even at that young age I, along with everyone else, harboured suspicions about Mrs Hewson’s son, so obviously unmarried yet in his early thirties. So obviously shy, yet simultaneously threatening. He was often seen at erratic hours with a plastic bag under one arm and a big snorkel parka done up in all weathers. The plastic bag undoubtedly contained pornography. Some of it ended up in our camps—left there purposefully? It wouldn’t surprise me. He was always sneaking around, friendless, trembling. Still fresh are the odd, vertigo-like sensations on first seeing the crumpled glossy pages with their gleaming stilettos, anguished expressions and detailed seething clefts. It took years before I, and probably the other astonished little boys, realised these women were largely chimerical. For Colin Hewson, with his pursued expression glimpsed in a greasy halo of fur, this was probably the closest he ever got to a real woman. People claimed he had a voice like a Dalek, but I cannot remember him uttering a single word to anyone in ten years.

So it came as no surprise when, arriving back after a desultory camping holiday in Torquay, we were greeted by police officers and their streamlined shiny vans in the lane investigating the sexual murder of an old lady on the allotments. Colin Hewson was the prime suspect. It was a sultry August afternoon. There was a flurry of nervous excitement when a journalist knocked on our front door and asked if he could use our phone. At that moment, the van with the mysterious, tarpaulin-wrapped cadaver in the back rolled past. As our door opened we were met with a pack of pressmen hovering on the step to gain some height for the photograph. Everyone was afforded a brief, terrible glimpse. The corpse was encased in a raw ebony body-bag guarded by a policewoman. No part of the anatomy was visible, but this only invested the mobile sarcophagus with potent questions about the human organism and its final destination. So this was death, then. A tremendous stillness at the centre of things while the living take photos, wring their hands, cry hysterically. In death, it seems, the focus for a short while is on you only. How pleasurable, if only one were conscious to reap the benefits of that sudden celebrity! And then, somewhere unseen, the dutiful worms take their turn. The human body begins its eternity of neglect. One becomes obscure. Literally non-existent. Only after this process is completed does activity subside and one is granted some peace.

Many years later I discovered what had happened to this woman, my mother having hidden the local papers for weeks after the grisly event. She had been raped and strangled, with a broken broomstick pushed so far inside her that it was discovered only during the postmortem. I remember feeling damaged and sick at this revelation; startled that human beings had such unreal, bestial violence inside them. It was like the occasion when I discovered what the word ‘Holocaust’ actually referred to. The word itself was phonetically scary. Was it really true? Or were the revisionists deeply afraid that this mechanised, industrial-scale slaughter could be part of a so-called civilised world? How could it have happened? And so recently in world-historical terms too. A paradigm shift we are only just beginning to comprehend. It all seemed very remote from my secure embryo-world of trees and camps. The world that was always quiet on Sundays, tempered by the lovely soporific pipings of wood pigeons. So remote that it might have happened on another planet. After Colin’s arrest, and predictable release, the crime went unsolved for eighteen months. Then new evidence convicted a young welder who lived on nearby Annesley Rise. A skinhead and member of the National Front, he had been under the impression that his victim had been Asian. In fact, she was Portuguese, of Romany blood—Gemma Fernandez, a woman who had lived and worked in the country since the Second World War. She had escaped the Nazis in 1945 and had lived in the same gloomy bungalow until 1976. Thirty years of quiet living after the fevered diaspora had deposited her in a dreary commuter town in Hertfordshire. That’s a long time to believe you’ve finally evaded man’s inhumanity to man, his butcherings, his holocaust. A long time to carry the illusion that you were one of the lucky ones … Her killer got life. He was, as I recall, one of the roustabouts who used to wolf-whistle my miniskirted mother as we dragged a shopping wheelie down to the market.

Neither the murder nor Mr Tombs stopped us from investigating the land beyond the breaker’s yard. There we discovered the remains of an old school playground, the ramshackle schoolhouse gutted and overgrown. Populated by pheasants, foxes and blackbirds, broken glass crunched underfoot as we ran our heedless ways. It was overhung by tall silver birches and sycamores. Once I climbed one to retrieve an old man’s flat cap, only to tumble from the branches, the hat teeming with a devil’s cauldron of earwigs. I thought of Gemma Fernandez in the cold ground with only these for company. Here we would dig for fossils, play army, smash old TV sets, before it was time to return to the ticking house. Later, I would learn to cycle a stabilised bike on the gouged macadam, the tyres forever puncturing on scattered glass.

It was in the surrounding wooded wilderness, strewn with whacked-out radials and circles of bonfire ash, that Gemma had been strolling when she was attacked. Only cissies, however, let that worry them. By the time we were all approaching middle-school we knew every climbable oak and jungle shortcut in the area. Though sometimes, on darkening afternoons, venturing to the very edge of the wood, it seemed one would enter almost Narnia-like into another world. It was here we found the derelict remains of what once must have been a very grand house. There were submerged cellars with racks of blackened wine bottles, draped in a white mist of cobwebs. There was a drained swimming pool jammed with busted cookers and car bonnets, all dumped into a tarry inch of rainwater—water that seemed alive with belching, gangrenous frogs. Best of all was a piece of land which might once have been the tennis court. It was now a miniature meadow, overgrown and bordered on all sides by overhanging horse chestnut trees. For a brief time this became a very magical place for me, as no one in our loose agglomeration of tearaways seemed to know its existence, or were too busy hurling bottles and masonry into the drained pool to explore further. It is good to have an exclusive spot in the universe, somewhere that is yours and yours only—a virtual impossibility in adult life. It was a place I sought out, always alone, on summer days, to stand in the glossy waist-high grass and enjoy a resolute, uplifting solitude. The celestial light of July invested everything with the vivid stillness of a dream. The grown-up world seemed many years in the future then. A feeling of unparalleled peace, of timelessness, was achievable in that rectangle of hushing grasses. I can see now the blazing snow of elder flower; the quick-diving magpies hurrying to their partners in the dense chestnut canopies. It was as if the place were entirely and magically removed from the rest of the town, the world even. There I allowed the warm, giving silence of the field to fill me to the brim, like a slowly poured glass of wine; a towering summer paradise, the sun falling in retina-splitting arcs through the tree tops.

The memory of this experience has resulted in a peculiar idea: maybe there is no heaven—because we have had it already. In childhood. All notions of Eden may stem from this. A moment during a childhood day—not the photo-moment, misleadingly captured—but a real, living sun-gloried afternoon when time stood still. Usually in a sylvan setting. My hours in the long grass of the overgrown tennis court approached this notion of the paradisal. After all, the word ‘paradise’ derives from the Persian for ‘garden’. It is a memory unique to each of us: plural, though defiantly singular in its particularities. A seafront somewhere; a taste; a safe hand. The Godlike hour afforded every man. If we were to locate this moment, this second caught in a windfall of light, on the grid of memory it would be at the centre, the very apex. The absolute centre of experienced time, by which we judge all other moments. That flash of high balance, with the sun so sympathetic to the leaves, the leaves so sympathetic to the sun. That hour of splendour in the grass. Our adult memories can never compete with this paragon, this near-Platonic recollection. What can we provide to compete with it? The wedding day? The best night of sex we ever had? The great meal with friends that gives one the sensation of life deepening sensually and emotionally? All are shadowed by time, corrupted by time. They all tear past too rapidly, are located on the outskirts of the brain’s memory map. On the dim periphery. No, it is the childhood sun-epiphany that occupies the throne. It is eternal for as long as we are. So maybe there is no heaven. No eternity. Because we have had it already. In that moment.

Back at the ticking house, things were about to change for ever, though I did not know it then. One of the last occasions when my mother, father and their boy were together was the cold Christmas I was allowed to chop the firewood. I must have been six or seven years old. Frost had settled on the red-hot pokers of the back garden; Russian gusts troubled the high branches of the birches and evergreens. Puddles became mirrors, oozing up brackish water when broken with the heel. Inside the warm cocoon of number fourteen were a couple of sealed-up Victorian fireplaces that Des had uncovered with pickaxe and monkey wrench. He claimed that a house without an open fire was ‘barbaric’. Once they were functional, he would sit close to the flames, a book open on his lap, Mendelssohn’s violin concertos in the background. And my mother itching with tedium, no doubt. That Christmas, I was helping him to fetch the newly halved logs in a wicker basket.

‘Are you really moving to France, Dad?’

He gave me his evaluating look and scratched his sweating pate. ‘I’m afraid so, but you’ll still see me. I’ll be back every two weeks to keep everything shipshape.’

‘Do you have to go? That means I’ll be with Mum all the time.’

‘I’m there for as long as Diatrix need me. And what’s wrong with your mother’s company all of a sudden?’

‘She might bring Uncle Delph around again. I don’t like him. He’s a freak.’

My father ceased unloading the logs and looked suddenly apprehensive, though he quickly disguised this by seeming out of breath. He puffed, ‘I think you’ll find his bark is worse than his bite.’ Then, thinking of Mum, he let out a bizarre chuckle. ‘More’s the pity … Come on, why don’t you help me chop the last of the wood.’

In the easy way that children are distracted from their preoccupations, I gasped: ‘Can I?!’

‘Why not? You’re getting to be a big boy now.’

In my excitement I started to dance around the room. I was aware that my father was sharing in my happiness—in a reserved way, of course: he always appeared uneasy during open displays of high spirits. Uncomfortable, as if he wanted them to end as soon as possible. He stood there with a look of broad approbation, a grin opening up his face. To hide his embarrassment at this pleasure he massaged his temples—both at once with thumb and forefinger spread, a characteristic movement. Then I did the worst possible thing: a silly spontaneous thing that still causes me inexplicable shame. I accidentally knocked his glasses off. They narrowly missed the flourishing fire and landed in the wood basket. At once this lit the blue touch paper of his temper, and he began scrabbling among the logs for his spectacles, hissing and cursing. In my panic and shame I ran outside into the failing light and waited for him. At the bottom of the garden the tall evergreens swayed like the conifers in Chagall’s
Le Poète allongé.

He soon appeared, glasses replaced, slightly less ogreish, but still hassled, impatient. He took up the hand-axe and demonstrated how the logs should be split. Severely, he stated, on no account should the axe be brought down while holding the log. Instead, the sharp edge should be tapped into the wood, allowing enough purchase to lift both at the same time. Then he did a practice hit for my benefit. Smack! The wood parted effortlessly on the block.