The Royal Standard, The Gladstone, The Peckover, The Perseverance, The Junction – most of my favourite pubs had been closed down. I ended up in The Shoulder of Mutton, drinking sweet weak Sam Smith’s, alone except for a muttering lunatic who Eleanor, good Catholic, had recently banned from The Puck for insisting that Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin had been one and the same person.
In my teens I scoured Bradford for the perfect pub. I used to see it in my dreams. The interior somehow combined patches of blazing white light and impenetrably dark shadows; it had a fifties jukebox with ‘Let there be Drums’ and ‘Endless Sleep’ on it. The landlady resembled Eleanor – but without the religious fanaticism – and although the landlord was permanently drunk you never needed to count your change. It served Taylor’s bitter, had Powers & Bushmills’ optics and Ram Tam Winter Ale on all year round. It was always packed, with good company when you needed it that didn’t need telling when you didn’t. There was no gossiping or talk of football. Search as I might, I’d never found it, but even twenty years later if I stayed in one place for more than an hour I still started to get restless, to feel that I should be out searching, that maybe there was one street that I’d missed. That was how I’d come to be a regular everywhere.
I used to hear tales of a group who I suspected of being on the same quest as myself. There were three men – one fat, one medium, one thin, one fair, one dark, one shaven – who, so it was rumoured, ran a waste disposal business together. Drinking didn’t fuddle them but inspired them: they’d argue brilliantly and interminably about everything under the sun. They weren’t universally popular, though, as they had a curious habit of killing any animals that were in the pub. Beautiful women – always different ones – were said to attend them, ferrying the drinks from the bar while themselves nipping from garnered hip-flasks as they waited to be served. Sometimes I just missed them, entering a pub that was still rocking with laughter as a grinning landlord cleared up the broken glass and splintered wood. Once I found the body of a mynah bird, torn out of its cage and throttled, still quivering on the counter. I never did catch up with them. I’d wondered whether as I sought them they might also have been seeking me, so I’d forced myself to spend entire evenings in one likely place but they were probably sitting across the street doing the same thing.
When The Lord Clyde closed I walked back through the still empty city. Even the starlings were quiet now as I crossed Town Hall Square and climbed towards the Central Library’s block of misted-over glass. On alternate windows large red words had been placed to spell out the lines:
HE WHO BINDS TO HIMSELF A JOY DOES THE WINGED LIFE DESTROY BUT HE WHO KISSES THE JOY AS IT FLIES LIVES IN ETERNITY’S SUNRISE.
It was OK but nowhere near as good as ‘In this block…’ On the ground floor slightly larger green capitals revealed the name of the author: BUTTERFIELD SIGNS. I passed the slate-grey statue of J. B. Priestley, depicted as part-golem, part-monkey, with his feet firmly planted against an eternal force nine that had ripped open his flasher’s mac to reveal him to be frigging the slender stem of his trademark pipe. In Bradford we never forgive the ones that go…or the ones that stay.
I crossed the empty tarmac, walking the white lines that had been marked out as spaces for cars that never came, then negotiated the ghostly six-lane cross-town ramp that linked nowhere to nothing, to reach The Karachi. Everyone I knew seemed to hate the Asians but to me they were angels, sent like Elijah’s ravens to sustain me. In fifteen minutes I had consumed a poppadum, meat samosa, onion bhaji and chicken karahi at a cost of £3.50. Who cared what they wanted to do to Rushdie? – after that meal, I’d have dragged him in there and helped them to bhuna him myself.
Around the blocks up ahead it seemed as if a lunar glow from the painted letters was outshining the streetlamps’ yellow light.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
The writing on the wall: it was like Belshazzar’s Feast. I pictured a disembodied hand crawling across the building like an enormous snail, sliming its white trail: MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN – ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting’. It had always seemed unfair to me: all the other miracles in the Book of Daniel had been to protect the Israelites or at least to keep their spirits up but this one was sheer cruelty. As poor old Belshazzar would be dead within a few hours, with no time to change his ways or even express contrition, what was the point of telling him, except to gloat?
I remembered a nursery rhyme that my gran had taught me:
‘How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.’
Babylon: the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth – I’d always wanted to go there. As a kid I used to check the departure boards at Forster Square Station but it appeared that there were no direct trains.
Babylon: last year I’d had a three-week plastering job down in London. My workmates were Cockneys who kept waving rolls of banknotes in my face and spitting to just miss my feet but I only smiled and called them all ‘love’ – it drove them crazy – while setting up a series of little industrial accidents for them. Otherwise I mostly slept in my van in the garage off Malet Street, except for Sundays which I always spent in the National Gallery. I liked those big fleshy Rubenses and the very old ones with dusty wooden doors but after a while I just walked straight past them to gaze at one painting, Rembrandt’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’.
I could still recall its every detail: a bowl of nectarines and grapes with a little gold and silver fruit knife, Belshazzar’s gut splitting open his waistcoat, his bitten fingernails, the crown perched absurdly on top of his outrageously tasselled turban. In turning to follow the progress of the glowing hand he upsets his goblet: The spilling wine is yellow, as if he’s pissing himself with fear. His women aren’t looking at the hand but at him, to see how they ought to be reacting. One girl, part-obscured by the others’ plumes, remains oblivious, still playing her recorder, cross-eyed with concentration as she goes for that tricky low D.
The real attraction for me, though, was that Belshazzar looked exactly like Kenny Burns, the fearsome centre-half from Nottingham Forest’s cup-winning team. As a veteran, dropping through the lower division, he’d played for Derby against City in our promotion season. Flabby and pale, with a crosshatched moustache and a layered haircut in need of darning, he cruised his ten square yards of pitch, dead-eyed as a shark. No one dared go near: even Crazy Bobby Campbell wouldn’t take him on. At one-all, late in the game, we brought on our teenage substitute, Don Goodman. ‘Oh God, here comes the headless chicken,’ Dave said. Goodman was lightning-fast but wildly uncoordinated, usually falling over in his sheer excitement whenever the ball went near him. This time, though, receiving his first pass, he managed to stay on his feet – he turned smartly and headed straight towards Burns’ sector. We cringed, awaiting the inevitable terrible impact…then, at full speed, Goodman feinted right and left then, having thus opened Burns’ legs, slipped the ball clean through them and went by him like the wind. In Rembrandt’s picture I relished again Burns’ horrorstruck expression as he’d turned to see Goodman, already twenty yards on, lobbing the keeper for the decisive goal. That win had put us top: we stayed there for the rest of the season.
I used to look at it for hours with the gallery attendants watching me like hawks. They knew that my presence – a man in stained overalls, his hair weirdly full of unmelting snow in mid-July, standing in front of a painting, laughing wildly – must be against all the regulations but – like the