The tramp had reached Narrow Street when he paused, recalling with sudden ferocity the back of the man who had walked away from him towards the river, although he could not remember when precisely this event had occurred. He turned around quickly and then, seeing nothing, with a slow step he walked into the house. The rain was being blown in as he entered the hallway, and he paused to look down at his cracked and gaping shoes; then he examined the moisture on his hands before rubbing them against the wall. He peered into the ground floor rooms to see if there were any faces he recognised as 'trouble': there were some who picked quarrels with anyone who came near them, and others who screamed or called out in the night.
There had even been occasions when, in a place such as this where tramps sheltered, one would get up in the middle of the night, kill another, and then go back to sleep again.
Three of them were already settled in the house: in the far corner of the largest room, a man and woman were lying against an old mattress: both of them seemed old, except that time moves fast for vagrants and they age quickly. In the middle of the room a young man was frying something in a battered saucepan, holding it gingerly above the fire which he had lit on the cracked stone floor. This is something, Ned,' he said to the tramp who now entered the room, This is really something, Neddo'. Ned glanced into the saucepan and saw food of an olive colour sizzling in its own fat. The smell made him feel uneasy: 'I'm off!' he shouted at the young man, although they were only a few inches apart.
'It's terrible rainy, Ned.'
T'm not happy here. I'm off!'
But instead of going outside he walked into the next room, which was used as a latrine; he pissed in a corner and then came back, glaring at the young man who was still bent over his fire. The old couple paid no attention to either of them: the woman had a dark brown bottle in one hand, and waved it around as she continued with what seemed to be an interrupted conversation. 'Dust, just look at the dust,' she was saying, 'and you know where it comes from, don't you? Yes, you know.' She turned her head sideways and glanced at her companion, who was bowed down with his head between his knees. Then she started singing in a low voice, Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky…
But her words became confused, and she repeated 'sky' or 'night' several times before relapsing into silence. She stared out of the window's broken panes: 'Now look at those clouds there. I'm sure there's a face in there looking at me.' She handed the bottle to her companion, who held it for a minute without bringing it to his lips.
Then she grabbed it from him.
Thanks for the drink,' he said abashed.
'Are you happy there?'
'I have been happy but I'm not happy now,' and he lay down with his back to her.
Ned had also settled himself into a corner, sighing as he did so. He put his hand into the right hand pocket of his capacious coat, which he wore even in the heat of summer, and took out an envelope; he opened it, and stared at the photograph which was inside. He cannot remember now if he had found it or if it had always been his, and it was so creased that the image upon it was almost unrecognisable; it appeared, however, to be a picture of a child taken in front of a stone wall, with some trees set back upon the right hand. The child had his arms straight down by his sides, with the palms outward, and his head was tilted slightly to the left. The expression upon his face was unclear, but Ned had come to the conclusion that this was a photograph of himself as a small boy.
The bell of Limehouse Church rang as each of them, in this house, drifted into sleep -suddenly once more like children who, exhausted by the day's adventures, fall asleep quickly and carelessly. A solitary visitor, watching them as they slept, might wonder how it was that they had arrived at such a state and might speculate about each stage of their journey towards it: when did he first start muttering to himself, and not realise that he was doing so? When did she first begin to shy away from others and seek the shadows? When did all of them come to understand that whatever hopes they might have had were foolish, and that life was something only to be endured? Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear: the four people gathered in this house by the church had passed into a place, one might almost say a time, from which there was no return.
The young man who had been bent over the fire had spent his life in a number of institutions -an orphanage, a juvenile home and most recently a prison; the old woman still clutching the brown bottle was an alcoholic who had abandoned her husband and two children many years before; the old man had taken to wandering after the death of his wife in a fire which he believed, at the time, he might have prevented.
And what of Ned, who was now muttering in his sleep?
He had once worked as a printer in Bristol, for a small firm which specialised in producing various forms of stationery. He enjoyed his work but his temperament was a diffident one, and he found it difficult to speak to his colleagues: when in the course of the day he had to talk to them, he often stared at his hands or looked down at the floor as he did so. This had also been his position as a child. He had been brought up by elderly parents who seemed so distant from him that he rarely confided in them, and they would stare at him helplessly when he lay sobbing upon his bed; in the schoolyard he had not joined in the games of others but had held himself back, as if fearing injury.
So he had been called a 'retiring' boy. Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady rhythm of the press, then induced in him a kind of peace -it was the peace he felt when he arrived early, at a time when he might be the only one to see the morning light as it filtered through the works or to hear the sound of his footsteps echoing through the old stone building. At such moments he was forgetful of himself and thus of others until he heard their voices, raised in argument or in greeting, and he would shrink into himself again. At other times he would stand slightly to one side and try to laugh at their jokes, but when they talked about sex he became uneasy and fell silent for it seemed to him to be a fearful thing. He still remembered how the girls in the schoolyard used to chant, Kiss me, kiss me if you can I will put you in my pan, Kiss me, kiss me as you said I will fry you till you're dead And when he thought of sex, it was as of a process which could tear him limb from limb. He knew from his childhood reading that, if he ran into the forest, there would be a creature lying in wait for him.
Generally after work he left quickly and returned through the streets of Bristol to his room, with its narrow bed and cracked mirror.
It was cluttered with his parents' furniture, which to him now smelled of dust and death, and was quite without interest except for a variety of objects which gleamed on the mantelpiece. He was a collector, and at weekends he would search paths or fields for old coins and artefacts: the objects he discovered were not valuable, but he was drawn to their status as forgotten and discarded things. He had recently found, for example, an old spherical compass which he had placed at the centre of his collection. He stared at in the evening, imagining those who in another time had used it to find their way.
Thus he lived until his twenty fourth year when, on one evening in March, he agreed to go with his work-mates to the local pub. He had not been able to concentrate on his work all that day: for some reason he had been experiencing a peculiar but unfocussed excitement; his throat was dry, his stomach tightened into cramps, and when he spoke he confused his words. When he arrived in the saloon bar he wanted to drink some beer quickly, very quickly, and for a moment he had an image of his own body as a flame: 'What'll you have? What'll you have?' he called out to the others, who looked at him astonished.