‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re supposed to be some kind of poet, aren’t you?’
I unloaded the van and then checked my shelves. Someone had tidied the place up: the paint brushes were glossy and restored, still slightly wet, and a new tin of white one-coat gloss paint had been left on top of the emptied one. Whoever it was must have been local, to have watched and learnt my trick of freeing the shutter.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
I went back outside and looked up at it again: it seemed an awful lot of trouble to have gone to. Only an artist or a signwriter could have done that in the dark without a single drip or tremble, unless they’d clipped on an enormous pre-prepared stencil. Even the dots of the i’s and the ellipses were perfect little circles.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
It reminded me of the opening of a song that we used to sing at school. ‘On Richmond Hill there lives a lass/ As bright as any morn.’ I tried humming it but it came out like ‘Old Mac-Donald’: ee–i–ee–i–o.
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
It’s always a bad sign when you start thinking of yourself in the third person, especially when you give it a capital letter.
Doris, my next door neighbour, had been standing by the main entrance since my return, watching the whole thing. She knew everything about everybody: if there was even a new dog in the pack she wouldn’t rest until she’d discovered its owner and, more importantly, its name. The unusual warmth of her greeting immediately confirmed my suspicion that it was she who had put the coppers on to me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you, love. It’ll be those lads in the seven-fives: they’re all on drugs. Nothing’s sacred to them: they’ve even scratched that new paint off the lift doors. As for the slag’ – she jerked her head towards a group of girls pushing prams up the ramp towards us – ‘It’ll be one of this lot.’
Having obviously decided that if it was to be open season on slags there was safety in numbers, they were advancing in a V-formation, like a motorcycle gang hitting a seaside town, flushed over their usual pallor, shouting at each other as if they were trying to drown something out. They wore tight calf-length denim sheaths that would have hobbled them if they hadn’t extended the fraying slits all the way up the back, allowing clouds of grey slip to billow out behind them like ectoplasm. Their bare legs were scratched, blotched and bruised, red-dotted with fleabites around the ankles. They ignored Doris and just nodded or blinked at me. The prams were all expensive, grey steel and rainbow-canopied, three-braked and togglewheeled, but the babies were thin and silent, with frightened eyes.
They hated children, I’d noticed, but loved babies. They needed something weak and dependent to make them feel strong and in control, keeping kittens until they grew into cats, puppies until they were dogs. They wanted to be babies themselves, to start their own lives over again, or to create happy childhoods that would somehow erase the miseries of their own…but after a while they started to feel even worse than before, under attack from unaccountable creatures that refused to chuckle and gurgle, just shat and ate, got sick and cried, cried, cried. And then the creatures would begin to speak, using words they’d never taught them, asking questions they couldn’t answer. Only blows would shut them up and then not even blows would make them speak again. But after the social workers had taken them away the mothers would bring forth yet another wave of magical babies. A lot of the boys were called Damian: maybe they were trying for the Antichrist.
Doris took the lift: I was up the stairs and back safe in my castle long before she emerged. The sun still filled the bedroom with light, still strangely reflecting in via the same window opposite. Standing on the sill, struggling to hook the heavy curtain back on to its rail, I looked down and registered that every flagstone on the pavement far below was cracked. Stifling in the summer, freezing in winter: it suited me here. I loved to lie on my bed, feeling the block swaying with the winds, listening to the toilet cistern’s whisperings as it took three hours to refill, watching as the ceiling seemed to slowly descend then recede, so that I felt deliciously claustrophobic or agoraphobic by turn.
It had driven my wife crazy, though: everything had been OK until we’d moved in here. ‘I’ve always hated flying,’ she said. Suddenly we were arguing about everything and nothing. All the food she cooked was burnt black or raw. She tried to kill a dozy wasp crawling on the window by throwing the kitchen chair at it. Soon we’d stopped talking altogether: it was soothing for a while, as if we were members of some contemplative religious order, but after we stopped screwing it got bad again – there seemed to be a permanent hissing in the air, like a pan of water boiling dry. The plaster of the bedroom wall was studded with little knuckle rounds from all the times I’d smashed my fists into it – not instead of her or to mortify myself but because I knew that Doris’ ear was pressed against the other side.
The explosion came one Sunday evening as I was singing along with Songs of Praise from Hereford Cathedral, feeling nauseated at the way the eyes of the congregation were opening and closing at the same intervals as their mouths. My wife came out of the kitchen, skidded across the carpet on her knees and turned off the TV. As she turned, straightening up, I hit her, for the first and last time, with closed fist in the face. I pulled the punch but too late, making it more of a twist than a pull. Leaving the ground, she seemed to float horizontally for ages as if weightless, until her head hit the far wall. She lay there motionless. Just as I was working out how to dispose of the body she abruptly returned to the vertical, like a round-bottomed bodhidharma doll.
‘You hit me.’
‘No I didn’t.’
She dropped her hands from her mouth: her teeth were etched in scarlet. ‘Oh yes you did.’
‘It was lightning’ – I gestured at the placid grey sky – ‘A miracle: a ball of lightning rolled in, knocked you over, then left by the keyhole. Let that be a lesson to you: come not between man and his redeemer.’
She leaned forward and kissed me, hands fumbling for my zip. I tasted blood and gin: she’d been hiding the bottles again. It felt as if I’d knocked her upper front teeth out of alignment but she insisted that they’d always been like that. For the next few days it seemed as if that one blow had somehow broken the spell. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other, we laughed and chattered as if we’d just met – but then she was gone without leaving a note, taking only her clothes. I hadn’t heard from her in the two years since: Doris, I knew, was saying that I’d buried her somewhere.
I went into the living room and picked up my dad’s old dictionary: it stood where the television used to be. SLAG: I looked up the word. It came from slagen, middle low German, meaning to slay. ‘Has many senses or nuances, all pej’. Pej, I decided, could only be an affectionate diminutive for pejorative. It wasn’t only a slattern or a prostitute, then: it could also mean rubbish or nonsense. It was a limp, a watch-chain, a bully or a coward; flux, scoria, gangue, pyrites – whatever they might be – silicates or pigs. It was soft moist weather, a quagmire or a slough. It was to pain with severe criticism: to lag, to idle, to spend recklessly or eat voraciously. It was a dottle: dottle! What a wonderful word! It meant the unburnt remnant of tobacco at the bottom of a pipe bowl. I’d kept my dad’s old black bone briar: if I put it to my ear I’d seem to hear the distant