Hawthorn and Child (20 page)

You can watch it all. Over and over.

I watch it all, over and over.

Several items arising. The local health and mental health unit of the Borough of Islington have now discontinued my therapy a total of twice on two separate occasions, ruling that I was in both of these times incapable of benefiting, using this deception to cover over like a dog their ineptitude and possible encouragement of my self destruction, ignoring on three separate occasions my stated intention to kill someone, preferably Mr Blair or someone else like that, deciding that these were not serious threats and were instead manifestations of my own particular ‘illness’, as if the world was separate from the things in it, the events separate from the people, the people separate from the things they do, as if the done things do not come out of thought things, as if there were no traces anywhere, as if we had never noticed dogs and the way they proceed. What a remarkable ambush of shit. What a cloud of frayed cities. What a dust of blood. What a wound. What a pulse of broken teeth. I will fucking kill you. I WILL FUCKING KILL. YOU FUCK.

I am ugly. Ugliness has taken me over. It’s OK. The infection in my forehead has spread along the slight left centre of my nose and out into my left cheek. My right cheek. The slight right centre of my nose and my right cheek. I have red cleft marks along my thighs and under my right arm. One eye has failed. It rarely opens now. There is a stench inside my mouth. There are ruins in my corners. I cannot wash and carry on.

There is the problem of money.

When I left my job – left, left, I had a good job but I left – they gave me a certain amount, which I stored in a savings account, an ISA account, where you are allowed to put only a certain amount of money in different ways and you do not have to pay tax on what you earn there. That is my
understanding
. And the rest of it I put in another account which is an ordinary savings account and it earns interest in there and I suppose that somehow I pay tax on that though perhaps I don’t pay taxes any longer. I’m not sure. There’s the principle of it though. Then there was the house I had. I sold. I sold the house I had. That’s OK. All that money I put mostly in another savings account and another current account and all this money is all nearly gone now I’m sure of it, though my sister looks after my finances for the moment for the most part, and she hasn’t said anything, yet, except to get a job. But she says that gently now. These days. I am disfigured.

I will go and stand by the café. And watch them. They come and go. The policemen. By the square. He spent millions on the house. It’s in the public record. You can look it up. It’s where he lives. With his armed guard and his devices and all his perpetual shame, poor man. Sometimes I feel sorry for him.

Money is a problem. I find that I cannot spend it when I go out. I go out and I go to the shops, for example, and I try to buy food. I walk around the shop, the supermarket, with a basket on my arm, and I put things in it. Milk for example, bread, eggs, some pasta, some mushrooms and carrots, some orange juice, a fillet of fish or a pork chop. I fill the basket. I put in extra things that might be nice like some buns or a cake or a packet of biscuits. Extra things that might be nice. But when I get to the checkout I cannot. I cannot. In the air. My pains all sing their song. I cannot take the money out of my pocket. I cannot take the items one by one from the basket and have them sent under the bleeper. It cannot happen. This is so stupid. This is mad. There is something wrong with it. Something horrible. I don’t know what it is. I stand in the queue for a moment, maybe longer, and I try to stay, but I put the basket down and I leave – I go to the door and through it and the security guard looks at me and shakes his head.

Cash. I have a problem with cash.

I think.

In Sparrow’s though, for my breakfast, I can do that. Because it is four pounds. £4. It is always £4. So I have that ready. Or, I know the change I will get. A one-pound coin. Or a five-pound note and a one-pound coin. The crooked man in the suit does the same. He knows the price of scrambled eggs. It’s the way to do it. It really is.

And I can get a coffee when I go down to the square. I can do that. It is £1.85 in the place I get it. I give them £2. They give me 15p change. I drop that in the glass they leave on the counter for tips.

My bills are paid automatically. I’m on the Internet. And that will do. I have lost weight. My fingers sing to me. My sister comes on Saturdays and she brings what I more or less need.

Once I had an urge for cornflakes, and I stole them from the corner shop. I had no milk. I went back and bought milk. I don’t know how I did it. I think I forgot that I was unable to use cash. I think I forgot – so perplexed was I by the theft – that I was mad. I wanted to pay him for the cornflakes too but he didn’t know what I was on about, and he shooed me out of it like more than two schoolchildren.

I watch them in the café. By the square. Down by the square. The same place I get the £1.85 coffee. There are several of them. They know I’m there. I’m sure. They have that training. Things attached to their belts. They don’t mind me then. They don’t mind me so much I don’t think. Maybe they don’t see me. Maybe it’s another division that sees me.

David Purley was born in Bognor Regis of all places. I have never been there.

Soldiers sing as they march. They sing as they march.

In his car as he burned to death Roger Williams sang. David Purley never mentioned it. He thought he was hearing things. He thought, when he remembered it, that he was making it up, that such a thing was ridiculous, that it was impossible, that it was impossible and wrong to remember it, so he never mentioned it. He never said a word. Roger had sung. Sang. Roger sang.

I am going to get better.

He sang a melody that Purley had never heard before. I don’t know what it was. Something lovely. Purley sang it himself when he crashed his aerobatic biplane into the sea in 1985. Off Bognor Regis of all places, in sight of home. He remembered the melody that Roger had sung. Sang. And he sang it too. It is a death song, I suppose. Death needs its orders, its boots, its motivations. Death needs its rations.

Poor death.

My sister brings most of the food I need. It lasts the week. I am embarrassed more than anything about my sister. About myself in relation to my sister.

I am tired of talking.

The pains in my stomach are now sometimes unbearable. I listen to them sing. The pains, I mean. They sing. They keep themselves chipper with songs. Because it is hard to be a pain in me. It is hard work. It takes all day to use up a minute of my time. It takes a great effort of all those little pains, working together, to make the song, the chorus, that sounds in my head like a world. These days they have learned their song and they seem happy in their work and they can on a good day lay me low and kill me. They kill me and I die. And I am resurrected.

What did I say to him? To Mr Blair? What statement did I make, what question did I ask to prompt his attack on me? Or was it something in my face or my bearing or in my eyes. Something in my eyes? Was it a story I told, of something in my life? Was it a joke I made? What did I do to Mr Blair? What offence or danger did I present? What was it about me that led to his decision? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it was an accident of timing. He felt the need to destroy something. Anything. Given his power. It would be a sin, perhaps he thought, not to use it.

Maybe he felt I would be better off.

He thinks a lot, I imagine, about sin. Uselessly.

Death will come to him as a terrible shock, I shouldn’t wonder.

Maybe he detected my unhappiness in my work. My unhappiness at home. Maybe he felt that I would be better off with all that misery behind me. Maybe he felt that my life needed shaking up. That I could do with a shock, upending and run through. The pains started the very next day, when I woke. I could not move. I could not move for days. All my limbs, my joints, my knuckles and my hairs, all my ducts and patches. They were all tuning up.

The man in Sparrow’s looked at me blankly.

– What?

– Are you a journalist or a writer?

He had a settled face. A man in control of his expressions. I couldn’t read anything in there. He’d finished his eggs, his toast. His plate was pushed aside. He had a second mug of tea on the go. Did he do that every morning? I didn’t know. He was reading about global warming in the newspaper. There was a picture of a glacier and sidebars with explanations. His phone sat on his notebook. There’d been no calls this
morning
, and no writing either. His voice was level. I couldn’t get the accent. Flat south-east. London, out of Essex or Kent. I don’t know. His face wasn’t as crooked up close. Odd that. I find it difficult to talk to people.

– I’m neither.

– I thought you might be. A writer. A journalist. With the notebook. You know.

He nodded, slowly.

– No.

– OK.

I didn’t know where that left me. If he said he wasn’t then he wasn’t. I couldn’t start an argument about it.

– I’ve seen you in here, you know. With the notebook. Writing. The odd time. I just thought. We’re often in at the same time.

He nodded again. Maybe he was tired. He looked tired and sad and red-eyed. He didn’t seem to mind, but he wasn’t going to talk to me. He wasn’t going to ask me to sit down. He wasn’t going to ask me to sit down and tell him about Mr Blair and the device so that he could tell my story.

I thought I would tell him my name. I’d say my name, my surname, and I’d hold out my hand for him to shake. And I’d smile, and he’d pause and smile back and take my hand and ask me to sit down. So,
we eat breakfast here
, he’d say. Or.
You must be local, too
. Or something like that. A small talk interregnum. Then down to it. I’d duck into it. I’d use dialogue. I’d speak in dialogue. In lines.
You want to hear a story?
I’d say. He’d shrug.
Politics
, I’d say.
Politicians. Not quite what they seem, sometimes
. I’d pause.
Go on
, he’d say.
You remember Blair?
Interested.
Of course I remember Blair. What about him?

And so on.

I didn’t know what to say.

– Well. Nice to talk to you.

He nodded again.

– Bye now.

– Bye.

He sipped his tea and looked at me. I walked to the door and out on to the street. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.

Mr Blair is not the owner of his own evil. He is the host if you like – if you want to use the sort of terminology that he has adapted into his own life and heart, the vocabulary of the groping church – he is the possessed corpse of a former human, animated entirely by the spittle-flecked priests of Rome and by miserable justifications, by ointments of the sagging flesh, the night-time coldness of the awful touch. His skin is a manila envelope. It contains an argument, not a heart. But he has made choices and the choices are owned by him, and he owns those choices and he is the chooser of death. He is the chooser of death. He has chosen death and he has chosen to visit it on others when no such choice was
necessary
. He is the progenitor of the crushed skulls of baby girls. He is the father of the dead bodies of children and the raped mothers and the bludgeoned fathers. He has embraced the murder of his lord, and he has used the people to enact his fantasy and his perversions. He has masturbated over the Euphrates. He has rubbed History against his cold chest like a feeler in the crowd. Like a breather, interferer. Slack muscle of pornography, piece of shit.

I only know what I believe.

I go down sometimes to the square, and I wander with a coffee and I watch and I go around again. Nothing happens. I have to be careful. Even still, I’m sure I’m noticed.

I saw him once. Early in the day as I came from Marble Arch. He was no more than a blur between his house and his car; a man in a suit, moving as if it was raining, crouching out, ducking in. I stopped in my tracks. Words rose in my throat. I had no idea. I didn’t know what to do. It was such a beautiful morning.

He glanced in my direction and I saw his face. He did not look at me but I saw his face. He looked terribly familiar. Of course. But no. Not as himself. He wears a state of shock. He carries panic in his eyes. He bristles with tension and fear, as if he knows what he does not want to know – that any moment now, it will be too late.

I went home and slept.

There are too many photographs of David Purley attending to the dying of his friend Roger Williamson. There is too much film. His human body makes too much of itself, changing direction, pausing, giving up, resuming, going back, tensing in fear, resuming, slumping in despair, ragged in despair, resuming, going back, screaming, his voice, you can see his voice in the pictures, screaming,
somebody fucking help me, somebody fucking help
.

There are two sorts of pale skinny Englishmen in my nightmares. One is burned at the edges, frayed by fear, his blistered hands and scorched face taut with the effort of trying to save a life. David Purley. And the other, a coward and a traitor, who set his face against bravery, who embraced the dying man and swallowed his song. Tony Blair.

Tony Blair.

I wake to the rattling and the marching songs.

The poisoned evening spun a little. The sky was pink and the buildings black and the lights looked wet in the warmth, and people trickled out of the tube station like beads of sweat. He didn’t want to breathe. On his tongue he tasted distant cooking or the drains.

He had stopped shouting.

He looked at the sky. It was not far. He stamped his right foot to get his boot back on and thought of the soldiers by the cross and the grey and purple clouds closing over them and what they must have thought about. Very simple things. Supper. Money. Fucking.