The next morning, Paul visited the canal district for the first time. It was another hot, bright day; the city center was choked with traffic. Young army recruits hung around the shopping precincts, their faces marked by the sun with a look of perpetual embarrassment. The shop windows were like dusty mirrors. Days like this numbed your vision, so you couldn’t see properly in the shade. Paul considered going into the office to catch up with some routine subbing and admin work for next Sunday’s issue of the Messenger. But instead, he caught the bus out toward West Bromwich. It took him past the house on the Hagley Road where Alison had lived. Further north, Smethwick was a gray chessboard of terraces and factory walls, like an open-plan prison. From a hilltop, Paul could see the glint of water in the reservoir’s drying socket.
What was he looking for? Where he got off the bus, the street was empty. He walked through a circular shopping precinct, where only a few small offices were open. The shops themselves, including a bank, were boarded up, the boards sprayed with messages that overlaid each other into meaninglessness, like voices in a crowded place. This place felt crowded even though nobody was around. In the middle of the precinct, a hot-food kiosk had been literally plated with armor. On three sides, tower blocks reared up against the sky; their balconies overlooked the courtyard where Paul was standing. Each story was about eight feet deep. Looking upward, he had a terrible sense of the ground being hollow.
Farther away from the main road, the streets were lined with factory walls; rusty steel hooks and coils of barbed wire protected the interior. One large building had been demolished, leaving only a roofless square of gray wall around a salvage dump. The unreal blue of the sky framed each building. Then, suddenly, he was walking past a series of little housing projects, each one a flattened U-shape around a gravel courtyard. They couldn’t date back any farther than the nineteen-nineties, but already their model village effect was threadbare. Most of the flats were boarded up; in some cases, blankets or pieces of tarpaulin were nailed across the window frames. Doorways were padlocked and chained, but not sealed up. The courtyards and the entry passages between buildings were littered with black plastic bags and crates full of refuse. A few rusty shells of cars perched in driveways, without wheels. On a hilltop, a children’s playground contained various elaborate climbing frames, but no children.
Paul walked on for some time before he saw anyone. It was too hot for activity. The older part of the district was less visibly derelict than the estates; perhaps the tenants were harder to dislodge. Tower blocks, crusted with scaffolding like insects shedding their skins, broke up the pattern of terraced houses. Rubbish was everywhere—in gutters, beside doorsteps, blocking the entries to the alleyways—but it was too dry to smell really bad. A frail-looking dog clawed slowly at a heap of refuse bags; a few gnats flickered above the animal’s head like a heat-haze. Beyond, Paul could see a man crouching in the alley. At the sight of him, the other backed away and was lost in the shadows. Paul had a momentary sensation of being the hunter. Reporters were supposed to be witnesses; but forget that for the time being. If he didn’t do something, there might not be much to witness.
The alley was empty. They always kept themselves hidden. That was how they got away with it. At the far end, the boarding of windows in the terraced houses suggested occupation: it had been done clumsily, with odd pieces of broken blank. Pieces of black cloth were nailed to several of the boards, like a torn flag. It was evidently some kind of sub-community effort. The houses were about ten feet wide; Paul wondered who could have lived there in the first place. A gap between two houses looked like another alley, but turned out to be the bridge over a canal. Even from this distance, the water stank. Gnats made the warm air shiver. Paul bit his lip. If he vomited here, what could he rinse his mouth with? He watched a crow flap up from underneath the bridge, carrying a piece of refuse in its beak. Water dripped across the bright pavement. Within minutes, as Paul stared at the road, the splashes dried to faint red smears.
When Paul was six years old, his parents had taken him to the Welsh coast for a fortnight in the summer. That was when he’d started learning to swim. One of the days, they were walking inland across the fields. Paul had seen a sheep fence made of barbed wire, with tufts of wool hanging from it. Some of the wool was red. His mother had said it was the dye that farmers used to mark their own sheep. She’d also told him that taking communion in church meant drinking the blood of Christ. Paul stared at the sky. The sky stared back at him. It must be a stray dog in the canal. There were packs of dogs roaming around down there. It wasn’t courage that made him find the stone steps at the side of the bridge. It was something he didn’t have a name for.
The walls of the bridge were crusted with whitish deposits of lime. The water level was several feet below the towpath. Heaped in the water, not floating but piled on top of each other, were at least twenty human bodies. Some of them were too small to be adult. Though discolored and slightly swollen with water, they could not have been there long. Birds or rats had torn pieces off them, but Paul could see the marks of rifle bullets in their heads and bodies. Beyond the bridge, trails of blood had dried and blackened like tar. The only sound Paul could hear was the droning of flies, the same sound that had been in his head for weeks.
It wasn’t water flowing across his face. It was light. Paul woke up in a painful shudder that meant he’d lost whatever he’d been dreaming. He forced his eyes to stay open. The edges of red clouds were bleached by the sun. He must have passed out last night and forgotten to shut the curtains. He was sleeping in the spare bedroom now, which was Carol’s idea but suited him okay. Stella was with Carol, and Dawn was still recovering. But they were not foremost in Paul’s thoughts at the moment. He had an hour before he needed to go into work. It was Friday, the third day since his visit to the canal district.
Kevin’s reaction had upset him, but he was getting used to it now. The Messenger’s editor had listened to Paul’s story in silence, then told him to get on with the sub-editing for the next issue. “Remember what I said, Paul? The city needs an answer to this problem. If the army boys are sorting it out in their own way, all well and good.” He took a deep breath and looked straight at Paul, straight through the back of his head at the photographs and documents on the far wall. “You have to consider the effect of what gets printed. It’s for the benefit of the community. The real people of the city.”
Paul nodded and stood up; Kevin saw his hands shake. “Don’t go back there,” he said. “And get your drinking under control, unless you want to end up on the street.” It didn’t matter now, Paul realized. Human life was only the surface of things. As always in a crisis, faith comforted him and helped him to accept the way things had to be. With a strange sense of detachment, he wondered about the future: the lives of his children, his grandchildren. What memories would Dawn and Stella have of him? For a moment he felt cold. They’d heard him and Carol screaming at each other in the night, so many times. It was unbelievable, the things they’d come out with. But his parents had been just the same. Had that affected him?