There in the May sky over Marefair and Saint Peter’s a blancmange of cumulus set to a snoozing rabbit, moulded for a stratospheric children’s party. Whispered wind washed from Far Cotton and Mick felt the breeze’s skin brushing against his own as it politely slid around him and continued with its northbound journey. He was thinking about what his sister had just said concerning the impossibility of anything saving an arts-and-letters rescue or retrieval for the neighbourhood’s lost causes when he was reminded of Ben Perrit’s poem, creasing in his pocket. Leaning back at a precarious angle so that he could get his hand into the tight-stretched linen mouth he fished it out and handed it to Alma, who perused it with a softening of her belligerent brow and then, refolding it to fit in some compartment of her own pipe-cleaner jeans, looked up at Mick.
“Bless that poor, suffering inebriate bugger, but he does a lovely poem. True, they’re all about some loss that he can’t get past, although if he could he’d have no need to write. Or drink. I sometimes think that loss is all he runs on; that he never loves a thing so much as when the wheels have fallen off. I hope that he’s alright. I hope that everyone’s alright.”
She lapsed into another round of concentrated puffing on her spliff in order to prevent it going out again. The rabbit cloud was now two separate hamsters over Pike Lane, and Mick risked a sideways glance at his big sister.
“How is Ben not being able to get past his loss a different thing from how you handle yours?”
Alma tipped back her head and spat a thin beige genie at the upturned azure bowl above.
“Because what I’ve made, Warry, is a glorious mythology of loss. That back there was an older testament, a pantheon of tramps and kids with nits. I’ve squeezed the bricks till they bled miracles and filled the cracks with legends, that’s what I’ve done. I …”
She broke off, and a fireworks night of marvel and delight declared itself across her face.
“Here, did I tell you, about what Rome Thompson said, the thing about the mill?”
Mick’s blank look was her answer and her prompt to press enthusiastically ahead.
“It’s the gas-holder down on Tanner Street, the back of where Nan used to live. According to what Rome said, back in the twelfth century it used to be a corn-mill called ‘the Marvellous Mill’. If you go down by the river, underneath the bridge with all the beer cans and syringes and disembowelled handbags, you can see there’s the old stones along its sides which used to be the race that powered the waterwheel. In the twelve-hundreds it was claimed by the monks of Saint Andrew’s Priory, who controlled the other mill in town and figured that they might as well run both of them. Then, in the sixteenth century Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries and ownership reverted back to the townspeople. Two hundred years sail by and next thing anybody knows it’s the seventeen-hundreds …”
She paused to breathe in, although only drugs.
“1741, there’s this consortium of businessmen. One of them’s Dr. Johnson, which supports my theory that from Bunyan to Lucia Joyce this whole thing is to do with the development of English as a visionary language. Anyway, they buy the place and turn it from a cornmill to a cotton mill.”
Uncertain what whole thing his sister was referring to, and even more unsure how the discoverer of baby-powder fitted into the scenario, Mick pursed his lips and merely nodded.
“There were cotton mills in Birmingham by that time, turned by donkeys, but the one down Tanner Street was the first power-driven mill anywhere in the world. So it’s not just the crusades and the Cromwells. The Industrial Revolution kicked off up at the far end of Green Street. As you might expect the local cottage industries went down like ninepins, as would happen everywhere over the coming century. The mill had three big cotton looms, all working round the clock with no employees other than some kids to sweep the corners and to manage the untangling if the mechanism snagged.”
Mick listened, only partially distracted by the portly and diminutive form labouring up Chalk Lane towards them, white hair curled into a head of froth atop unusually pallid stout, the pint of cuckoo spit they draw after they’ve changed the barrel. Thinking to have previously seen the sweltering individual somewhere, Mick at last decided that it was that councillor who had a column in the paper. Cockie, was it? Lived down near Black Lion Hill, which would explain his presence in Chalk Lane. As he approached the man regarded Alma and her brother through his perching spectacles with vague affront. Oblivious to his presence, Alma carried on her narrative regardless.
“Then — and listen, this is brilliant. Adam Smith, the bloke who’s on the twenties, the economist, he either comes and sees the mill or hears about it, with its looms all working nineteen to the dozen and its shuttles whizzing back and forth and no one there, as though it were a factory being run by ghosts. He thinks it’s wonderful, tells everybody that he knows how it’s as though a massive unseen hand were guiding all this furious mechanical activity, some manner of industrial Zeus rather than basic principles of engineering. It’s what always happens with new science in a religious age, like all of these holistic fizzy water manufacturers who babble about quantum physics.”
Mick, who found both quantum physics and expensive fizzy water equally unlikely concepts, watched the fat man waddle by them on their right, seemingly headed for the lightly smouldering day nursery. Behind his lenses customarily complacent eyes regarded the pair sitting on the church wall with suspicion as he barrelled past, particularly Alma whom he more than likely recognised. Either unbothered by his presence or else unaware she pressed on with her tale excitedly.
“So Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idiot-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Reagan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone that we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.”
A dog barked, away on their left in the vicinity of Mary’s Street, one bark, then three, then silence. Not for the first time since getting up that morning, Mick felt an encroaching air of strangeness. There was something going on, something unsettlingly precise in its familiarity. Had this happened before? Not something like this but this exact situation, with his buttocks going dead from the stone wall’s chill striking through thin trousers. First one bark, then three, then silence. Wasn’t there something about Picasso, or had that not happened yet? Floundering in the déjà vu, he had a feeling Alma was about to mention a glass football.