If it had been possible, the hitman would have paled: his complexion was already on the unconvinced side of goat’s whey. He was a back-door johnny staggering home from an all-night blood-transfusion party.
He stared directly into the lens of Neb’s left eye; he gained entrance. The Mad One was head-clamped, zapped with a stungun. The heat drained from him. It was as if a mirror had been implanted between Neb and the world. There was no longer anything he could touch without passing this incorruptible guardian; the self that had died, one microsecond before. Therefore, he did not age. He was without purchase on life, a harmless thing. He stumbled from the market. And he never returned. He had, in that swift division of time, been emasculated; banished to the reservation of those who live without light. The inherited dog joined him; a protector to keep off the curious, a buddy to see him through to the end. Neb had found the beast, wandering half-starved, in Meath Gardens.
The Mad One was effortlessly replaced — a new boy was on the streets before he had reached Haggerston — but his charge stood. Masonry is a certain recipe for a bestseller. Anything on that topic will be bought by the brothers to keep it out of the hands of the uninitiated. And bought. And bought again. It is the ‘investigative’ author who does not always enjoy his royalties. He suffers: the mad late-night phonecalls; the handprinted letters, leavened with non-sequiturs; the blinding headaches. Is the paranoid, as William Burroughs says, in possession of all the facts — the only sane man in a tilted world — or has he merely initiated an irreversible conspiracy against his own sanity?
Neb was arrested two or three times, out beyond the cricket square, for exposing himself; but this was more carelessness than any desire to boast, or to engage yet again in human commerce. He was finished with all that. The tape was running backwards: as he circumnavigated the grass ocean, he re-enacted incidents from his past; he triumphed in ancient conflicts. The limits of the park became the limits of his world-picture. His childhood was visited among the swings and sheds: chapped legs, and the smell of warm pee. His adolescence was associated with water: the boating lake and its islands. Hiding from eyes and stones; scratchy with secrets, unregistered library books under his jacket. He missed the ugly plaster dogs on their plinths. They had been hacked off for renovation. And would be replaced by freshly painted fakes. Death lurked, Neb felt, in the misted windows of the Burdett-Coutts Tower. The evil moment of his conception kept him clear of the twin stone igloos culled from the block masonry of old London Bridge.
These igloos were the subject of one of Neb’s perpetual monologues. He muttered as he stalked: he clapped his hands. The mason’s marks, hidden behind the capstone, obsessed him. The triangle, the circle, and the cross. Shiva the Destroyer; flame on the funeral pyre. ‘Lifted from the river; the medieval bridge, the chapel,’ he nodded, as if making the discovery for the first time. ‘They stole the stones — two for Vicky Park, one for Guy’s! You won’t get me out on the water. Under the arch? Never!’ He prophesied disaster; drowning, lung-burst. What other kind of prophet was there?
He spoke of the alcoves as ‘dream-helmets’. And it is true that they were generally avoided. Cyclists kept cycling. Adulterers stayed in their vehicles, as if frightened of the lions. ‘Sleep in those things,’said Neb, ‘and you’ll incubate your own death. You’ll be forced to dream all the nightmares that have ever flowed down the river, all the plagues and executions. Why do
Mason’s Mark, found in the stone alcoves at Victoria Park and Guy’s Hospital, Southwark
you think they look like the Thames Barrier? Because the real job of the Barrier is to retain the sleep of the city; not to let our dreams — the most precious of all resources — escape.’
Neb was very tired now, but he kept on walking.
IV
The grass was flat and white where Colonel ‘Colt’Swinefoot’s tents had stood. The evangelist, his caravan, and his shock troops, had moved east, to offer a much-needed blessing for West Ham FC. But the colonel’s apocalyptic warnings hung in the air, like the heavy scorch of frying onions, compressed beef, and temporary repentance: ‘It is the hour of the Antichrist. The mark of the beast is branded into our cheeks. Our tongues shall blacken and swell, until our very mouths are filled. Amen! We will be dragged, cursing, into hellfire.’ And more of the same. Much more. Three hours on his feet was as nothing to Colt. Sweat rolled from his brow. The chorus stamped and sang. Fire buckets rattled with coin. Colt’s sermon, fiendishly amplified, blasted the walls of the old Victoria Park Lido; which had been recently ordained as East London’s first privately-funded lazaret. Neb took it on himself, unpaid, and uninvited, to become one of the angels.
AIDS was a fifth-floor disease, in a four-floor culture. There had to be somewhere — preferably outside the inhabitable zone — where a buck could be turned coping with one of the few genuine growth areas that was still, always excepting the West Coast, scandalously under-exploited. Fortunes would be made when a tested antidote was brought in — but that was the big one, Nobel stuff, the Holy Grail. Meanwhile the name of the game is counselling, care, discretion, and check the credit cards before the first transfusion. Things were happening fast. There was now a state far worse than being an ‘outpatient’. The agents of Venture Capital had identified a brand of ‘quarantine’ that had much in common with other hermetic encampments, kept for aliens in time of war.
The lazaret stood just inside the park gates, at the Grove Road end, beyond a notice announcing that ‘these premises are protected by Barbican Security Services’. The red-brick Stalinist folly with the sea-green pantiled entrance had functioned for many years as a swimming pool. Now it looked as if the set for Fifty-five Days at Peking had been requisitioned for a Living Dead video-quickie. Neb blundered among the enfeebled inmates in their fugitive exile; the HIV-positives, the ‘black spot’ carriers. He ran messages, he went shopping; and, if he was incapable of listening to any instruction, he was ready to talk without hypocrisy or fear. He rushed through the pallets, arms waving like a bird scarer, beating off the gathering darkness. Dame Nightingale: he buddied the sick. He gave them their first strange taste of life-after-death.
Spies reported a fierce debate in the council chambers concerning the fate of this abandoned municipal swimming pool, one of Lansbury’s finest lidos. It was a symbol of a vanished Health and Efficiency era; a huge, chlorine-weeping, corn-plaster-infested trench — where Neb had achieved some of his most spectacular conquests — which should, without doubt, be restored and streamlined as an ‘investment opportunity’. The public purse no longer ran to filling it with water (perish the thought, better to fill it with oil!) for the unbathed peons to splash about, urinating, exposing their unsightly flab, and floating their beer-cans and fag packets. No instruction had, as yet, been received from above to make a charge for entrance to the park: a ‘reserved vehicle area’ was being enlarged and fenced, marked out for the ticket machines. It was perhaps premature, before all the tenders were sifted, to pass any binding resolution. The decision-makers contented themselves, for the present, with covertly enclosing more and more of the open ground; creating a no man’s land, a causeway of conveniently storm-felled trees.
The Controller moved his office into the upper chamber of the Burdett-Coutts Tower; a structure that seemed to have evolved from an unlikely collaboration between Albert Speer and Rowland Emett. Hierarchic steps, and pillars of pink Peterhead granite, gave way to eccentric decoration; clocks, twirls, twists, stone fruits, and weather-damaged puns. The titular spirits were four seriously overweight cherubs: only one of whom had held on to his wings. Their eyes were debauched with red paint. Their pudgy feet rested on squirming fish. Unwillingly — and after an obvious struggle — they had been surgically initiated, made kosher: with full subincision rites. Their off-white pigeon bellies hosted the usual braggart scrawls: I ALWAYS FUCK MY MUM! BONGO + COLL + SPAM. Above their hydrocephalic heads, in Gothic Script, ran the sad legend, ‘For Love of God and Country’. Amen, Colonel, to that.