“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that. Like when there’s people in the corners trying to pull you up?”
The youth looked dumbstruck, with his pink-rimmed eyes wide and his mouth hung open. All the panic and confusion fell away from him, replaced by something that was almost disbelieving awe as he stared, suddenly transfixed, at Mick.
“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”
Mick nodded, fumbling in his jacket for the brand new pack of fags he’d picked up half an hour back on the way down Barrack Road. He peeled the cuticle of cellophane that held the packet’s plastic wrap in place down to its quick, shucked off the wrapper’s top and tugged the foil away that hid the tight-pressed and cork-Busbied ranks beneath, the crinkled see-through wrapping and unwanted silver paper crushed to an amalgam and shoved carelessly into Mick’s trouser pocket. Taking one himself he aimed the flip-top package at the grateful teenager in offer and lit up for both of them using his punch-drunk Zippo with the stutter in its flame. As they both blew writhing, translucent Gila monsters made of blue-brown vapour up into the Boroughs air the boy relaxed a little, letting Mick resume his pep-talk.
“You don’t want to let it get you down, mate. I’ve been up where you’ve been, so I know how it can be. You can’t believe it’s happened and you think you’re going mental, but you’re not, mate. You’re all right. It’s just when you come back from one of them it takes a while before this all feels real and solid like it did. Don’t worry. It comes back. Just take it easy, have a think about it all, and gradually the bits all fall back into place. It might take you a month or two, but this will all get better. Here.”
Mick pulled a clump of cigarettes out from the pack, approximately half a dozen thick, and gave them to the barefoot psychotropic casualty.
“If I were you, mate, I’d go off and find yourself a quiet place to sit down where you can sort your head out, somewhere out of doors without the ceilings and the corners and all that. I’ll tell you what, down at the other end of Scarletwell Street over there, there’s a nice bit of grass with trees for shade. They’ll be in blossom around now. Go on, mate. It’ll do you good.”
Incredulous with gratitude, the youngster stared adoringly at Mike, as if at something mythical he’d never seen before, a sphinx or Pegasus.
“Thanks, mate. Thanks. Thanks. You’re a good bloke. You’re a good bloke. I’ll do that, what you said. I’ll do it. You’re a good bloke. Thanks.”
He turned away and stumbled barefoot off across the grit and shattered headlight glass of Scarletwell Street corner, where it joined with Crispin Street and Upper Cross Street, as the former had by that point technically become. Mick watched him go, tenderly picking his way over the rough paving by the chain-link fence of Spring Lane School like a concussed flamingo, stuffing the donated cigarettes into a misplaced pocket of his low-slung pants. As he began to head off down the hill towards Mick’s recommended quiet spot, he stopped by the school gates and glanced back. Mick was surprised to see that there appeared to be tears streaming down the youngster’s cheeks. He looked towards Mick gratefully and with some difficulty worked his face into a kind of smile. He gave a helpless shrug.
“I was just up the pub.”
Resignedly, he carried on away from Mick and was soon out of sight. Mick shook his head. Fuck knew what that was all about. As he resumed his own walk along Upper Cross Street, taking tight drags on his cigarette at intervals, it struck him that he felt in some way oddly lifted by the lunatic encounter. Not just by the dubious warm glow of having lent a modest hand to somebody in need, but by the hard-to-explain reassurance that the mad boy offered. An authentic Boroughs nutcase, just like he’d run into when he was a child, when the insane were that much easier to spot and someone walking down an empty street towards you yelling angrily into the air was certain to have paranoid psychosis rather than a Bluetooth earpiece. Mick just wished he could remember where he’d met the lad before.
The stuff about him being in the roof had knocked Mick back a bit, but that had got to be coincidence, or ‘synchronicity’ as Alma had attempted to explain it to him back when she was in her twenties and still had a crush on Arthur Koestler, before finding out he’d been a wife-beating bipolar rapist, which had rather shut her up. As far as Mick could understand the concept, it defined coincidences as events that had some similarity or seemed to be connected, but which weren’t linked up in any rational way, with one causing the other for example. But the people who’d come up with the word ‘synchronicity’ still thought that there might be some kind of bond between these intriguing occurrences, something we couldn’t see or understand from our perspective and yet obvious and logical in its own terms. Mick had an image in his mind of koi carp gazing upward from the bottom of their pool to see a bunch of waggling human fingers dipping through the ceiling of their universe. The fish would think that it was several separate and unusually meaty bait-worms, could have no idea these unconnected wrigglers were all part of the same unimaginable entity. He didn’t know how this related to his meeting with the barefoot boy, or to coincidence in general, but it seemed in some way muddily appropriate. Taking a last pull on his cigarette he flicked the smouldering butt-end to the ground ahead of him, its arc like space junk burning up upon re-entry, then extinguished the crash-landed ember underneath his shoe-sole without breaking step. Still thinking foggily about coincidence and carp he looked up with a start to find he was in Bath Street.
He’d been wrong. He’d been quite wrong to think that he was over his unsettling dream, his sojourn in the ceiling. He’d been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn’t. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you’d put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here.
He looked across the street at Bath Street flats, their front and not the rear he’d seen by dark a year ago with Alma. Since he’d had no call to venture through the Boroughs since that night, he realised that this must be the first time he’d been confronted by the bad side of his vision since he blinded himself, knocked himself out and recalled it, all those months ago. The sickening punch he felt, a bunch of fives impacting in his gut and driving all the air out of him was much worse than he’d expected. Leadenly, as if toward a scaffold, Michael Warren walked across the road.
Of course, he didn’t have to cut across the flats, up the wide central avenue with lawns to either edge, concluding in the broad brick-sided stairs that would deliver Mick practically to the doorstep of his sister’s exhibition. He could turn right and walk down to Little Cross Street, which would take him by the lowest edge of the shunned living units into Castle Street, thus circumventing the whole business, except that would prove Alma’s contention that she’d always been more of a man than he was, and he wouldn’t suffer that. Besides, this was all rubbish and Mick didn’t even know for sure if all that stuff that he’d remembered really was what happened when he’d choked that time, or whether it was all a dream he’d dreamed he dreamed, a spastic rush of images that had come to him only when he lay there flat out on the tarmac of the reconditioning yard with fireballs in his eyes. Even Mick’s youngest, Joseph, had long since ceased to let bad dreams colour waking life, had learned that the two realms were separate, that night-things couldn’t get you in clear daylight when your eyes weren’t shut, and Joe had just turned twelve. Attempting an indifferent air, Mick sauntered through the central gap in the low bounding fence and up the spacious walkway, heading for the steps just sixty or so feet ahead, just twenty paces off. What was it, anyway? For fuck’s sake, it was just a block of flats, in many ways more pleasant than the others that he’d passed that day.