Need (34 page)

Suspended between sleep and waking, he let his eyelids close. Then he felt as though he was sliding.
I always did like
going down
, Anna Crow had said, descending the ladder. There was some joke in that, you could tell by her voice, but he was no good at jokes.
A fetching shade of quince
, she’d said, and he saw her by the boating pond. Her Da was swinging her higher and higher, then the rope broke, and she was flung into air, she was spinning, then falling and falling, oh love, on my love.
I wish I could see me
, she’d said. Five levels underground, in that lost land.

The dust and filth his broom had raised settled on his hands and in his hair, he tasted at its scum that coated his lips. Her tongue a sleeping slug. Some thief was playing a boombox in the street, the heavy bass thudding the beat like punches, and John Joe in his weariness began to move his feet in time.

He couldn’t dance, still he shuffled. Let the broom fall, and he moved through the Zoo. His hands came up, curled into fists; his elbows tucked in against his ribs. The man on the boombox was singing an angry song.
Never hesitate to put a nigger on his hack
was its refrain, and John Joe began to circle. Letting his fists travel as they would. A jab, a hook, a jab off the hook. A right cross, an uppercut, jab, jab, jab. A bolo, another left hook, and he saw his own person plain, a man of colours whirling, arms pistoning, the dust flying off him like silver spray, and a gold sword in flames.

A sudden flurrying behind him made him wheel. It was a bird returning; the bird was Pearl. Not a scratch on her it seemed, or any feather ruffled. She hopped aboard the counter, she started watching Billie and Bo. Of course, she must be half-starved. Having missed her breakfast and all. So John Joe began to measure out her feed. Nectar paste and pellets, a slice of cuttlefish bone. Then he brought her the filled bowl, he served her.

It was his duty, after all.

All of the characters in this book are my own invention, with one exception. There was indeed a famous cricketer named Fred Root, who played for Worcestershire and England between the World Wars. The facts of his career, to the best of my knowledge, are as given here; many of them have been taken from his autobiography,
A Cricket Pro’s Lot
. But everything else that I have written about him—his life after cricket, his sweet shop in Wolverhampton, his drinking habits and, above all, his relationship to Kate—is fictional. As for Ferdousine’s description of his bowling action, that is in large part derived from the late John Arlott’s portrait of Maurice Tate, one of Fred Root’s contemporaries.

During the writing of
Need
, I have built up a small library of reference books. From some of these I have borrowed; from others, shamelessly stolen. My thanks are due to them all, and so I list them in full: