The place was cursed. Only that lunchtime Mick had seen a hoarding for the local Chronicle & Echo that reported yet another hooker raped and beaten in the small hours of the night before and left for dead down at the base of Scarletwell Street, only saved by intervention from a resident, such incidents reported every month although occurring every week. Nothing good happened in the Boroughs anymore but once, down Grafton Street towards Crane Hill there lived a woman that Miss Starmer who had run the post office would speak of, who’d been standing on her step one morning when a passing stranger thrust a newborn child into her arms and ran away; was never seen again. The child was taken in and raised, brought up as though the woman’s own, and fought in World War One. “You can tell what a lovely family they were to bring him up”, Miss Starmer used to say, “but they were in the Boroughs. That’s the kind of families that we had in the Boroughs then.” And it was true. Even confronted by the stark reality of how the neighbourhood had ended up, as an environmental head-butt where the woman’s stunning act of altruism was today unthinkable, Mick knew that it was true. There’d been a different sort of people then that seemed another race, had different ways, a different language, and were now improbable as centaurs.
He turned left from Grafton Street and into Lower Harding Street, a long straight track that would deliver him to Alma’s exhibition on the Boroughs’ far side by the most direct route. This was where his sister’s lefty activist mate Roman Thompson lived, another bloody-minded kamikaze from the ’Sixties just like Alma was. ‘Thompson the Leveller’ she called him fondly, probably one of her know-all references, and he lived with his slinky, stroppy boyfriend here in Lower Harding Street. Roman had been a firebrand since the UCS ship-workers’ strike four decades earlier, had broken through police lines to punch out one of the leaders in a National Front march through Brick Lane and had once wreaked terrible revenge upon a unit of drunk squaddies who’d made the mistake of thinking that this wizened terrier posed less of an immediate threat alone than they, en masse and army-trained, could muster. Rome was in his early sixties now, some ten years older than Mick’s sister, but still closed his jaws upon the arse of an oppressor with undimmed ferocity. At present he was on the militant arm of the local Boroughs action group, campaigning to prevent the sale and demolition of the area’s few remaining council dwellings. Alma had consulted with her old friend once or twice while she was working on this current run of paintings, she had told her brother, who would not have been surprised if Thompson and his chap should turn up at the exhibition Mick was making for.
Over a narrow road the yard of a car salesroom had replaced the wasteland on which he and Alma had amused themselves as children, scrabbling urgently across ‘The Bricks’ as they had called their improvised apocalyptic theme-park, clambering oblivious through spaces where once men and women had their rows and sex and children. Further on were business premises formerly owned by Cleaver’s Glass, the national interest where their great-grandfather, barmy Snowy Vernall, had refused a co-director’s job back at the company’s inception, spurning millionaire life for no reason anyone could fathom and returning to his family’s slum accommodation at the end of Green Street, where some decades later he would end his days hallucinating, sat between parallel mirrors in an endless alley of reflections, eating flowers.
Beyond the factory’s southern boundary Spring Lane went trickling down to Andrew’s Road past the rear side of Spring Lane School and its unmodified caretaker’s house, on past the factory yard down near the bottom where a baffling and precarious spike of brick rose up that had a single office shed just slightly larger than the tower itself balanced on top, the overhang held up by bulky wooden struts. This made Mick think about his unearthed memories from the year before and of the pointless loft halfway up Doddridge Church, subjects that had a feathered whisper of uncertainty about them, so that he directed his attention to the hillside school itself, its fenced top edge now passing slowly on his right.
It was a sorry sight, but didn’t have the morbid overtones stirred by that inexplicable brick spar. Alma and he had both been pupils here, when all was said and done, as had their mum Doreen before them. They’d all loved the huddled red brick building that had somehow shouldered the responsibility for educating several generations in that surely unrewarding province, had all been upset when the original establishment was finally dismantled and replaced by a prefabricated substitute. The school was still a good one, though, still with some of those qualities that Mick remembered from his boyhood. Both of Mick and Cathy’s children, Jack and Joseph, had attended Spring Lane Primary and had enjoyed it, but Mick missed the steep slate roofs, the bull’s-eye windows keeping watch from underneath a sharply angled ridge, the smooth gunmetal crossing-barriers outside stone-posted gates.
Down at the bottom of the hill, beyond the schoolhouse and its playing fields there stretched the strip of grass on Andrew’s Road where Mick and Alma’s house had been, a startlingly narrow patch, barely a verge, where by one estimate upwards of one hundred and thirty people had existed, there between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. There was only turf now underneath which the brick stump of someone’s garden wall could still be found, and a few trees that stood in the approximate location of their former home. The size and sturdiness of these always surprised Mick, but then, when you thought about it, they’d been growing there for over thirty years now.
Puzzlingly, towards the plot of ill-kept ground’s south end, two houses from the Warren’s block still stood unharmed, knocked into one and facing onto Scarletwell Street, all alone with everything about them levelled, taken back eight hundred years to featureless green Priory pasture. Mick thought that the dwellings might have been built after all the others in the row, possibly where the filled-in space of an old yard had been, owned by some other landlord who’d resisted when all the surrounding properties had been sold out from under their inhabitants and then knocked down. He’d heard that the anomalous surviving home had at one time been used as sheltered housing, possibly by those in care of the community, but didn’t know if this was true. The solitary structure that still hulked from the grassed-over reach where he’d been born had always struck Mick as in some way indefinably uncanny, but since his experience that nebulous unease had gained a new dimension. Now, he found, the place reminded him of Doddridge Church’s pointless aerial door or else the unbelievable brick growth protruding from the factory in Spring Lane; things from the interred past that poked up inconveniently into the present, halfway houses with their portals that went nowhere, that led only into a suggestive nothing.
Lower Harding Street had turned to Crispin Street just past its juncture with Spring Lane. Up on the left ahead two hulking monoliths rose up, the tall Kray-brother forms of Beaumont Court and Claremont Court, bird-soiled and lime-streaked headstones slowly decomposing over the community that had been cleared to raise them. Easily impressed, the soon to be dispersed folk of the Boroughs had all oohed and ahhed about what they mistook for the space-age pizzazz of the twelve-storey heaps, failing to understand the high-rise blocks for what they were: two upended and piss-perfumed sarcophagi that would replace the tenant’s back-wall badinage and summer doorstep idylls with more vertical arrangements, thin-air isolation and the tension rising with each number lit up in the climbing after-curfew lift, a suicide’s-eye view of what had been done to the territory around them that was inescapable.