Purchase from Amazon from September 2017
1980 BROADWAY MARKET
A dull thud, the clang of a dustbin lid – a muffled oath. Footsteps shuffle away.
A streetlight casts a beam up through the long Victorian window. Slowly, shapes emerge; the carved hump of a wardrobe, a mound of clothes heaped on uneven floorboards, a suitcase. On a shelf, the dark torso of a woman, the top half of a shop’s dummy, stands, a siteworker’s hard hat silhouetted on her head. A strong smell of damp pervades the room.
‘Sylvie, Sylvie.
I think I hear my name.
Pulling myself up from the bed, a thin grey blanket around my shoulders against the cold, I lean against the iron-legged table at the window, staring out. A pub sign swings in the wind. The empty street of Broadway Market lies quiet under the lamps. Only some discarded white greasepaper from the nearby fish shop eddies slightly in the breeze.
No, I was wrong, the street is not deserted. There is a hunched figure down there in a doorway. Every night there is someone out there. Sometimes they do not sleep at all, just stand there – waiting for the dawn. But to what purpose? I often fall to sleep with their half-mumbled anecdotes and imprecations gradually fading away.
The enclosed quiet of this house is often punctuated by snatches of sound from the street below. One night there is a murder on the street, a knifing. On another, a conflagration in one of the locked up shops. And here we are, three listeners above, all in our early thirties – listeners from a different world.
We watched the fire engines from my window – Chlo and Harry and I.
I was afraid, the flames shot so high, that a spark might land on our old house, ignite the faulty electrical wiring, creep up the wide staircase that leads to the shadowy rooms above, and send up like tinder the exposed rafters where the plaster has fallen away – but Chlo and Harry were fascinated. It was the bird’s eye view; the firemen way down below in their yellow helmets, their hoses drenching the street, the few spectators pressing dangerously near.
There are also fires within the house. At times, it is as though spontaneous combustion hangs in the air. Burning logs fall from the fireplace. Chlo’s cigarette catches fire on her mattress. Harry’s pan of chips combusts.
Below us, kids hang out on the street; aimless, kicking cans, screaming, dating, the occasional real assault – a cacophony of noise and the police turning up.
They throw petrol at the peeling door of the house. They also scrawl with a spray-can, ‘Chloe is a slag,’ but Chlo does not think this is directed at her. She has heard the name used among them before.
The kids’ names echo down the market and around the corner of the house, bouncing off the corrugated fencing that edges the alley. Eddies of old newspaper also come rolling down the street, gathering speed in the bleak night breeze, rounding the corner to come to rest in a heap at the side-door of the house.
Whenever one walks out of the door, winter or summer, there is always newspaper lapping at one’s feet; yesterday’s beauty queen, last month’s local murder, the headless corpse in the canal.
Rigid with cold and the early hours, but sleepless now, I gaze down at the flickering neon light, the terraces crouched in the moonlight, and am reminded of another place. It is like a memory at the edge of my mind, way back. Another era – another life . . .
1968 FIRST LIGHT
It was so cold the night we met, students in that Northern town.
You have often said to me, ‘Sylvie, don’t you remember the moon? There was a ring around the moon that night.’
Perhaps there was, and where you were sensitive to the moon and its magnetism, I did not attribute to it special significance – even a warning.
On several other occasions that winter you remarked on the moon, causing me a vague unease. Your face looking up was so remote, as though the cold rays were pulling your mind away into some fascination I could not follow – but I soon shrugged off the feeling.
Now, in the wastelands of East London, I notice a ringed moon, floating high above the market place, and am more ready to acknowledge the possibility of implacable forces operating in the universe than ever I was at eighteen.
That first night, we stood together in silence, looking down at the town, an icy wind blowing through the hawthorn trees. A black elder tree creaked and the first flurry of sleet tossed bare branches against a violet sky.
A sudden gust stung our cheeks with ice particles and you turned and drew me to you. I was too rigid with cold to take my hands from my pockets and you put your arms around me and lightly kissed me. As you drew back your face from mine there was a moment of intense stillness, like a stopped second, and I felt a detachment in you. Perhaps you sensed this would not be without consequences, while I entered in thoughtlessly, almost casually. We were very young. Our limbs and our skin felt young, fresh-faced under that northern sky, on that sleet-ridden night.
We turned to go. Looking back, I saw archaic, hunched shapes of hawthorn bushes, blasted flat and stooped under the winds. The curved thorns gleamed under the moon, which had floated, burning yet misty, from behind a snow cloud. A greenish-pink colour surrounded it so I guess you were correct to say there was a ring around the moon that night.
One thing I do remember. That moon shone down directly onto the elder tree under which we had kissed. The elder tree, I knew, had once held legendary significance, for gypsies and witches alike; Christ’s cross made of elder, Judas found hanging from an elder tree.
I hated the way the moon shone down on the tree, almost as though we were being mocked, yet why that should be I did not understand.
You were natural jazz, honkey-tonk, Peter the piano player.
I first saw you playing the piano in a student bar. You played like a fish that skims over the surface then flips its fins and dives down deeper. When I walked over you looked up at me and did a special fast-running trill with a slurring flurry at the end, like a skid on the road.
Quirky, off-beat, involved in the more fringe activities of the university, human rights, visiting poets, you were quite sought after by the girls, seen as ‘unusual’. You evoked for me striped pyjamas in a spartan forties bedroom, Glen Baxter style, before style really existed in that way. There was an elusive impression, as though you were always either in the process of arriving or departing, never quite actually there – a Graham Green character.
I once met you by the river bridge of the town where we studied. Fog wreathed the stonework and you emerged from it wearing a long coat. I have a snapshot of you in my mind; shoulder-length dark-brown hair, grey-green eyes, and a certain distance you had – which magnetised some people.
Yes, there had been that quality of remoteness.
Shortly after we met we stepped out of that student social world and never really returned.
You shared a house with two other post-graduate students in a small northern habitation on the edge of a bleak industrial moor; three pubs, a fish shop, corner shops and rows of red-brick terraced houses, sour and prim in their withdrawal. This is where we spent the early nights of our romance together. The other students in the house were largely at their girlfriends’ better-appointed places. I often did not return to my shared house, so that first winter we lived almost as a couple, owners of the house.
In our bedroom I would lie huddled under the damp sheets, waiting for you to cease playing the old out-of-key piano in the parlour down below. Idly, I would watch the light bulb swinging in the draught from the window, casting moving shadows across the damp patches and small white flowers of the wallpaper; a faded fresco.
I liked the room, with its large mahogany wardrobe and wide bed. I wondered if the original couple of the house had also slept in this room and felt safe and solitary, a life unto themselves.
The bathroom window overlooked a small back garden, unkempt but with a tree that came out in white blossom in early spring. I liked to stand there looking out, seeing our neighbour emerging from his back kitchen door to deposit ashes in his bin.
We were isolated living here. Students were not popular among local people because of the privilege accorded them in a region where life was hard. They knew we had no vested interest in the place and it never really did occur to us to stay. We were like a colonial element in that street, being educated into wider horizons – and London beckoned.
Yet for the time that we were there, we felt as though we were settled. We were at ease with the house and the bleak street and the pub around the corner.
In the evenings you would light a fire in the parlour. That is where we sat during those winter nights, after a brief early foray to the pub.
The light off, we would sit on the carpet watching the flames flickering. The coals formed volcano-like caverns and the heat scorched our faces. Flames illuminated my long strands of hair, which you would idly stroke, your face half in shadows.
It was the only room in the house where there was any form of heating and the only one with curtains. We would draw them against the night, shutting the parlour door on the freezing hall with its dark-brown paintwork.
There was a dead, motionless quality in the hall, yet it contained the only object of any real attraction in the house. This was an oval mirror in a dark wood frame.
In December I put holly around it and thought it looked rather fine.
*
You give me tulips for Valentine’s day. You would not have thought of flowers but I have hinted. They are red and yellow and rather garish. I have never really liked tulips but now they become my favourite flower. I keep them until the stalks have bent double over the rim of the jar and the petals are dropping.
I give you a silver-plated hip-flask, found in a second-hand shop. You keep it in the pocket of your jeans. On our forays onto the moors with the slag heaps you produce it, and we take a nip of rough rum.
Over time the silver starts to tarnish. Eventually the flask is lost.
*
I stand by the back door, in the wan winter’s light, surveying the sparse little garden. To my left is an outhouse with a rusting mangle. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself. I hear the nearby scraping of a shovel in a coal-shed. The distant shout of a mother to a child.
Frost bakes the soil and encrusts the withered stalks. The blossom tree is bare. Just as I turn to go inside, a sound of pure delight pierces the still air. There, high on a branch above me, is a robin, singing his heart out, the notes pure, soaring.
Never before have I been so happy, here with you in this student house.
*
That first summer together as students, we make a sojourn to Italy. It becomes our special country.
Varenna is a fishing village on Lake Como. It has narrow passages and tight-faced women in black. From a boat, one night, we see fireworks over the village. Rockets soar up into the blackness and illuminate the lake. Waves lap below the overhanging balcony of the hotel Olvidado, where I long to stay the night.
We are broke and we camp. We spend hours on boats, passing below the exotic gardens of the villas, and swim in the lake, gazing up at purple oleander spilling over high stone walls. One day we look through the wrought-iron gates at the garden of the Villa Carlotta. A statue of a perfect, naked youth arises from the lush foliage, with raised arm and archaic gaze. Years later, at Broadway Market, I find an old book of Lake Como – in it is a tinted photograph of the gates of the Villa Carlotta, as faded as the picture I hold in my memory.
The last day of the holiday, sitting under a yellow parasol in one of the yearned for grand hotel gardens, we spend our remaining money on a cocktail each. We have neither of us ever had a cocktail. A stone balustrade and shallow steps lead down to the lake. It is early September and a few autumnal leaves lie on the lichen-covered stone. Sunlight slants on your hair, drawing out glints of chestnut, and I feel my face bathed in golden light.
We laugh and chink glasses – the bubbles fizzing to the surface, popping in the light -and you feed me the cherry from your glass. We are utterly carefree – in the Garden of Eden – completely content with one other.
1980 BROADWAY MARKET EAST LONDON
‘Chlo, are you there?’ Harry’s voice, with its East London edge, floats up the stairs from below.
Chlo’s door thuds faintly across the darkened landing. The light but decisive sound of her footsteps disappears down the staircase. I often wonder at the smallness of her feet. She is like a doll at times, a knife-like madam of the geishas at others, that thick white skin and hint of the kimono.
Chlo leads an alternative life. She is freelance and during daylight hours she disappears into the darkness of her room upstairs. She emerges to work at night, for she is insomniac. Early in the morning, before going to work, I go into the kitchen, the ashes dead in the grate, and there she will be, sitting at the table surrounded by her drawings and acrylic pens and cigarette butts, the kitten sprawled out beside her. She gathers up her materials, picks up the exhausted kitten and carries it up to her room. The kitchen seems vacant without them and I stand eating a piece of toast, looking through the large window over the green and at the distant railway bridge.
Chlo does not tell. She is attractive with her long black hair and flat Mongolian-type features, yet her face is like a mask. I sometimes catch the glance of an acquaintance who has dropped by, resting on her, wondering . Her mind, the cogs whirring in complex rotations, is naturally subversive, clever. She shuns society. She has withdrawn, not put up barriers exactly, more, faded out.
I know she is capable of daring. For I have known a different Chlo in the past; the eyes khol rimmed, the click-click of the chopsticks, the jade rings of the snake lady, the crushing of the importunate with a small embroidered shoe. Now she is like the negative of her own photograph, ghostlike, blurred. She, like me, has turned away from the alien streets.
In the days when I had known Chlo and Harry before, the two of them sortieing out into the streets, or dropping in on one of the innumerable households they seemed to know, from Hampstead to Deptford, sharp Harry, with his fifties suits, and Chlo, with her high-heeled shoes and studied poses, her red fingernails resting lightly but determinedly on Harry’s arm, had seemed like a gangster and his moll.
Now, in their dun coloured fifties macs – Chlo, bleached out, lacking make-up or artifice, Harry tough but muted – they drift along these East End streets like refugees; effaced into the wastes that surround them. The impression is deceptive however. They are like negatives of a colour photograph, the negative as compelling as the original image, an essential part of the whole.
Perhaps the bond between her and Harry is their sheer lack of interest in making a conventional stake in society. It is indifference rather than rebellion. They both latch on to oddity, both observe with most interest what is out-of-kilter. At times it brings tears to Chlo’s eyes, the sadness of it all, then Harry will prod her and make her laugh. He briskly enjoys it all, the whole passing scene. She has a darker vision – but essentially they share the same oblique view of the world.
Harry never works – or not in the sense of paid employment – his is the life of the streets. He has little education and yet he knows London like the back of his hand, better than any person I have met. He knows its history, its architecture, its social nuances and levels, where you can find things and where you can sell them, which of the stall holders you can trust and which you cannot. He regards the scene with a detached curiosity and delight. He appears not to be looking but his eyes are sharp as a needle. He gives no pity but asks for none for himself.
Harry once fell in the canal at the end of the market street. Chlo and I watched him slyly for several days to see if he would break out into canal fever and go green. We could almost see his normal pallor begin to drip with weeds and slime. But Harry is tough as an old boot and had no intention of succumbing to our, perhaps not adequately veiled, curiosity. He looked at us sardonically over his cups of tea, brewing herbal infusions to beat any microbes and organisms that might attack his thin wiry body.
I never knew Harry to have an infection, even a cold. It is as though his system is completely in tune with his surroundings, has grafted onto them so completely that he is of the same element as the grit of the pavements in this market street. It is more than being street-wise – though this he certainly is – it is like certain species of insects that adapt so well to the polluted crevices in the city that their wings change colour to match. If there is a find amidst the rubbish in the street, Harry’s eyes will be the first to pick it out. If wood is needed for the fire he will disappear in his long mackintosh with his tartan holdall, and, miraculously given the urban area where we live, he will be back with wood. He never explains where he has obtained it – and somehow we never ask.
He is the one in the house who will disappear out for long periods of the day and later, unexpectedly, produce a new object; an old boys’ school annual, an art deco cup. One morning a display of old radios, quite a rare collection, is arranged where the staircase widens at the curve. As a background to the radios, few of which work, is draped the UK flag and some teasels in a spaghetti jar.
His daily journeyings take him far and wide, from Hackney to the Isle of Dogs, from Camden Town to Portobello. Snippets from his day will emerge at random over the teacups. Although he lives unto his own, he hates silence and talks a hundred to the minute; anecdotes, news, ideas, politics, observations spilling out. The radio is a constant background stream of sound to his life. Although he never appears to be concentrating, items, even of outlandish or obscure information, will be filed away in his jackdaw brain and pop up unexpectedly, with startling quickness. He is informed far beyond most people. He is also anarchically funny, each daily anecdote turned on its head and pushed to the extreme in his narrative.
The same quickness shows in his knowledge of the house. He can lay his hand on any particular item, at any given moment, despite the plethora of objects, used and discarded, that fill every room. Being now the longest-standing resident in the house he has taken on the unspoken rights of ‘householder’. I even suspect that he knows the details of every layer piled up in the junk room next to mine, the flotsam and jetsam left by waves and successions of people who have passed through the house. For at times, and I believe shortly before I arrived here, there were as many as seven people living in the house.
Yet, I never actually see Harry searching through these discarded objects. Maybe in the day when I am out at work, or perhaps at night as I restlessly sleep, he noiselessly paces around, checking, filing, cataloguing the objects in his mind.
When the house had been fully occupied Chlo and Harry had both lived in the same room but with so many rooms now lying vacant they have each taken over one for themselves.
Chlo’s room is high up in the house. Its window overlooks the desolate side alley and the rubble tip behind the corrugated iron fencing opposite. I think she is hardly aware of the view for she always has a thick shell-coloured piece of material nailed across the window. It blows gently into the room when she pulls up the sash on warmer days.
Where my room is large and angled, hers is small but symmetrical; whitewashed walls and the window like a blind eye, so everything within is enveloped in semi-gloom. The room is plain, unadorned, the only decorative object the bed, its intricate wrought-iron frame painted a pale sage-green. On it lies a faded rose pink, satin eiderdown. It is like the bed from a fairy-tale.
Apart from this, the only objects in the room are illustrations at various stages of completion, paints, brushes, acrylic pens, pots of makeup, all mingled together on a trestle table. There are a few, highly stylised clothes, in grey and black. There are also heaps of crushed out cigarette ends.
Of her past, there is no evidence at all.
An investigator, would find no indications of Chlo’s plans for the future either. He might muse, if of speculative mind, that it is as though the young woman has been delivered from a UFO into this strange house in the wilds of Hackney.
A circular object, hovering in the side alley with a faint hum, inaudible to human ears but vibrating on the acutest nerve planes of the human psyche. A sudden gust of night air as the glass of the window in the upper room noiselessly cracks into splinters, contracts and dissolves into a ball then into invisibility, and the iron bedstead with the sleeping form glides through to take its place in the room. The liquid ball reverses, radiating back into splinters of glass which expand, seamlessly, and form glass panes again.
The spacecraft rises, circling gently above the roof of the house, then whirling at infinitesimal speed races low along the black ribbon of the canal, as though for take-off, and disappears over the Hackney marshes.
Harry’s room, on the same floor as the kitchen, is like a ballroom. It runs along the whole frontage of the house. Three very large windows, stretching from ceiling to floor, overlook the market street. Bare wooden boards stretch like a skating rink from a large marble fireplace one end of the room to a tiled fireplace the other. The only furniture, a mattress, an old sofa, and a beautiful small wooden desk.
Heaped around one of the fireplaces, and along the wall under the windows, are Harry’s memorabilia; fifties and sixties biscuit tins, Eagle annuals, coronation mugs, jigsaw puzzles, art nouveau cups and plates, and even the much sought after model of the 1950s gilt coronation coach. The room serves as a storeroom for the never ending supply of objects which initially pass through the kitchen, though only the favourites, such as the illuminated Weeping Wall of Jerusalem, remain permanently on display there. Most of the rest will ultimately be sold, sometimes for a good price – enough for Harry to get by.
At that fresh time of the early morning, before the rest of the world is awake, there he will be, ferreting and sorting to the accompaniment of the radio, breaking into snatches of song. He is by far the earliest riser in the house, always up as the light breaks, whilst Chlo is just terminating her nightly vigil amidst the dead ashes and the cigarette butts.
Harry’s room lies not in half-gloom, like Chlo’s, but bathed in flooding daylight from the large, uncurtained windows. I sometimes imagine him on crisp winters’ mornings weaving on skates around the wooden floor, pirouetting and leaping; the blades, click click like knives, gleaming in a pale shaft of sun. His thin indestructible body, in tee-shirt and jeans even on the coldest of days, leaning forward with the rhythm of the movement, bony arms bent at the elbow to speed him along, hands clapping above his head with glee as he leaps into his final spin.
*
Time seems to have passed by the market street, with its higgledly roofs and chimney pots and localised internecine life.
It is like a throwback to a Norman Rockwell cartoon of life in a small mid-Western town; faded fifties advertisements propped in shop-front windows, the junk shop opposite with its broken chairs and brocaded lengths of cloth, the chip shop, the ironmonger, the café with its fruit machine, the two rough pubs, the spiky stallholders.
*
I first saw the house from the back, framed by the high arch of a railway bridge. Red brick council blocks lay on each side of the road ahead. A bare stretch of grass ran between them, used only for dogs’ excretia and stalking cats, though filled in summer with wild grasses and dandelions. Beyond the green, the back of an imposing house floated high in the elements. It formed the end building of a terrace that fronted one side of the market street, towering in size over the other buildings. Immediately I knew it would hold a special significance for me.
I walked down the road ahead that merged into a cobbled alleyway, knocked on the side-door and was ushered by Harry up a narrow dark flight of stairs, the ground floor of the house being unused, and was shown into the warmth of the large kitchen, memorablia plastering the walls and crannies.
As I crossed the dimly-lit hall I was aware of a prevailing odour of damp and must. A pool of light fell on a yellow Mickey Mouse mat. On the wall alongside the wide shallow-stepped staircase hung a Victorian painting of a happy, white-frocked, breakfasting child, feeding titbits to a lapdog. Fallen plaster lay on the stairs. Dark recesses, where lights did not work, emerged on the upper landing, and doors leading off into shadowy rooms.
The room that was to be mine; whitewashed, high-ceilinged. Two tan and white china dogs guarded the small fireplace, the grating filled with apricot plastic flowers, tied with a dusty satin bow – like a wedding bouquet. A nude torso of a shop dummy on a shelf, an orange hard hat emphasising her model’s cheekbones.
The night poured in through the paned window over the market street and in the silence I could hear the inn sign creaking.
I had found my bolthole.
*
It is Harry who has surmised that the house may have been a Victorian public house, which is maybe why it reminds me of Jamaica Inn.
In high gales it stands starkly to the winds blowing across from the Hackney marshes. They batter around on winter nights and rattle the window panes.
Apart from the long window set into an angle of my room, there is also a large sash window that exposes the room to the night. A high-rise block of flats looms up immediately behind the market street. The brilliance of the lights from the block beams into my room, lending an element of Stasi spotlights. I cover the window with a long velvet curtain I have found in the house.
The street below my room mirrors that terraced street of student days, up in the North.
Now the machines will be lying dead and idle on the moor that rose behind it, mirroring the abandoned industrial buildings of Hackney.
At the end of the market street runs the canal. It is edged by the looming silhouette of the gasworks and the blank faces of empty warehouses, manufacturers’ names fading away under the weather and the years.
The broken glass of their windows glints into the night.
*
There is so often a feeling of the sea when the winds howl around the house at night, as though the house itself is battered by tides, crumbling under the sea-wash of rain and pollution.
It brings back how as a student, one Christmas, Peter walked into the raging waves around Blackpool pier thundering against the rusted iron girders, into the night. He told me he had been high on medical drugs and alcohol, befuddled by starlight and images of bold, chivalric deeds. If he could swim out to sea, to the end of that pier, if against all the odds he could beat those massive glittering waves, he would survive. He would finally have no insecurity to face. He could marry his girl. Myself.
At his first plunge into the sea the fury and savagery of the undertow, the intense morbid cold, knocked the breath from his lungs. Then a wave loomed above him, its crest gigantic against the night sky, rolling towards him at such speed that he knew his puny figure would be smothered by it, smashed against the girders.
He went under. He was not smothered or smashed but the shock of the blow and the cold and the way his legs were dragged, scraping along the gritty shingle, must have brought him to his senses. For he pulled himself out then lay on the sand under the night stars, his long wet hair clinging to his shoulders, roaring and howling with laughter.
Why he laughed, or at what, he did not know.
*
I dream:
Peter and I are walking down a one-way street, tall Victorian houses rising on either side. Night-lorries hurtle by. Streetlights cast a garish light onto his face.
We stop before a stuccoed house, with steps that mount to a portico, and I recognise it as a house we once inhabited. The house we knew was shabby, with lino on the staircase, but now it is full of life and people. Mexican rugs on polished floorboards, guests chatting on the staircase.
We walk up and up the staircase, to our previous attic room. Joyously, I fling open the door . . .
Inside, Peter is sitting cross-legged on the attic floor, hunched, mute. He does not look up. I hesitate in the doorway. He speaks.
‘I can’t stay Sylvie. I’m leaving.’
Suddenly, he is a stranger, hostile, apart, his body rejecting – an impassable barrier between us.
Panic, tears start to rise. The room is like a tomb, enclosed by white curtains over the windows, claustrophobic like a shroud. Maybe if I open the curtains, let some air in . . .
A winter sun floods through the uncurtained window as I wake. My cheeks are covered in tears. My heart searches frantically. I am alone in the high-ceilinged room in Hackney, with the shop dummy gazing down from the shelf.
Judithmeadows 