The mysterious attraction of the west window was no difficult matter to explain: the unashamed voyeurism of the incarcerated onanist. Monkeys in zoos, or lifers in strip-cell confinement, obey the same imperatives — without any visual stimulation. Before the ochre-brick ‘Espresso Mosque’ had been grafted on to Whitechapel Road it had been possible for these one-handed visionaries to stand unbuttoned at the grimy porthole, and to sweat cobs with the effort of focusing red eyes on the overnight lorry park beneath them. They stood through all the tedious hours of darkness, hammering against the sill, bruising strained flesh in an orgy of untargeted self-mutilation. They hung as if ‘on the rope’, suspended over the pulsing violet ghetto. They learnt to ‘see’ with their ears, to follow the subtlest shifts and arrangements of human commerce: tree-breath, water whispering under the paving stones. Their fathers rebuked them from the throats of birds.
Then, as dawn broke, blooding the slate and the wet tarmac, they caught the first tremble in the curtained cabs of the longdistance hauliers. They saw the gay girls stretch out their legs, skirts riding high, risking the drop back on to firm ground. The girls were inevitably overweight, with make-up spattered like an autistic action painting; or scrawny, nerve-ticked, scratched, pimpled, and frantic to score — wriggling in satin, torn fish-net, split and smeared saddle-leather. But the vagrants were not disillusioned. These were their saints. The distant mechanisms of exchange became a portfolio of detached details: knees metamorphosed to skulls, tangled in rat fingers; black gearshifts; elbow joints; neck hair; segments of wheel fur. Laughter died in blows; threats, whispers. Lights flared along the windscreens in promiscuous delight. Cigarettes burnt cruelly through the hooded darkness. Thumbs agitated belt buckles. Hands swallowed stiff banknotes. The watchers were implicated, mumbling, taking sides; making their selection from a repertoire of pain and pleasure; wanking themselves into vacancy, letting their brains run from their sudorific noses in streams of unwiped silver.
But that view was gone for ever. The Garden of Earthly Delights was strictly off limits. The muezzin who wailed his exotic arias over the pantiled roofs, the sprouting chimneys, and the glistening gutters, had captured the townscape. It was his: to curse, to anathematize, to hurl fire and brimstone on to the sublimely indifferent heads of sinners, as they gurgled like hogs, shoving their lips into the triangular wounds on cans of export lager. The gun turret of this Disneyland mosque, behind its bullet-proof glass, was empty. The summons, bringing the devout traders to their knees, was pre-recorded. Mercifully, the holy man was spared even a glimpse of these unamputated follies.
No need for Arthur to waste precious minutes on his toilet. He rolled from his mattress, fully dressed, in waistcoat, collar and cuffs, fingerless gloves: he reached for the once-white dustercoat that served as a blanket. He was lost without it; a disbarred hairdresser. The coat was his comforter, and his calendar. One pocket, when he inherited the garment, contained six limestone pebbles. Therefore, Arthur lived by a six-day week: the day of rest was an option he rarely needed to invoke. His existence was perfectly adjustable to the symmetrical paradigm of cricket. His philosophy discovered, in the end-to-end, turn-and-turn-about duality of the game, a Manichaean implication. The strictly regimented numerology satisfied him in a way that was too deep to articulate.
Each morning, buttoned into his overall, Arthur shifted one stone. ‘Another night gone,’ he would mutter, grimly. But when all the stones were disposed of, safely lodged in the originally barren pocket, it was necessary to begin the cycle again; using the untainted hand to trundle the heated pebbles back, one by one, to their starting place. Any small calculation (in the way of purchasing bread or a newspaper) that might require the aid of the stones had to be entered into only as a last resort: or the crucial mensuration of passing time was thrown into chaos. Midweek saw Arthur at his most balanced. By the end, he sagged; weighed down by the bias of a full pouch. A severe strain was placed on an area already disputed between ilium, ischium, and pubis. He walked like a man conscious of the fact that his trousers are held up by faith alone. He rattled: enemies were warned, friends scattered.
Nauseous, and light-headed with fasting, Arthur manoeuvred around the sharp spiral of stairs towards the street door. His coat-tails spun out; the pebbles striking the wall a muffled blow at each revolution. Once outside there was no return until dusk felclass="underline" the heavy door, operated by a cunningly weighted device, locked behind him.
He did not have far to traveclass="underline" jobbed on to the Palace of Dossers was a parasitical structure (which may, in fact, have preceded it), the Spear of Destiny; an inn distinguished by several entrances, close passages, and the dubious suggestion that a way might be found into the saloon bar from the cellars of the adjoining pesthouse. Unfortunately this dream, though much discussed, had never been realized. The bones of the searchers lay buried beneath a mass of ugly bricks, licked white by indigenous rodents.
Hands sunk in deep pockets, tolling on his rosary of pebbles, Arthur waited: exiled indefinitely at ‘square leg’. Two hours passed before the window above the pub sign opened — and a wicker basket was lowered on a rope. A swift inspection revealed four lonely coins, but no written instruction. No instruction was necessary. No word or glance was ever exchanged between Arthur and the invisible donor.
The Bangladeshi grocer who had inherited, along with the business, the title of ‘Mickser’ (the aka of a shady and excessively mobile Dubliner from the North Side), parked his Rover Vitesse on the kerb, set its alarms, and scuttled across Fieldgate Street to unchain his plate-glass door, before it was terminally violated by Arthur’s palsied fist. Mickser was genial, even at this ungoldy hour, smooth-skinned, balding more gracefully than Frank Sinatra: an incipient pot belly damaged the clean lines of his stylish shirt. The customer who took the till’s hymen demanded a certain deference. ‘What’s wrong with your bed, Arthur? Too much rub-a-dub, mate. No good at your age, you old bastard.’ Mickser was enjoying himself so much he didn’t bother to ‘adjust’ the change. Slowly, Arthur filled his basket: eggs you could see through, red-top milk, pilchards, sour cream, Mail on Sunday, sliced white loaf. It was calculated to the penny. Arthur pocketed the coins that were returned to him; his most regular income. The hooked rope was waiting, dangling from the pub window; the basket was rapidly pulled from his sight. His brief glory as a discerning consumer was over.
His tribute paid, and his crust earned, Arthur moved south, down Romford Street — a tight chasm between refurbished tenements — shuffling towards the Commercial Road, testing the cracks in the paving stones with an imaginary willow. He kept to his own warren, did not stray from the force-field of the gentle aliens, the brown faces and the unrequired artists: a plantation of sorrows. He had his routes, his benches; but they were fast cutting them down around him, nibbling at the violated brain-stem. The map by which Arthur navigated had been refined to a network of razor strokes on the palm of his hand: scarlet traces scabbing the ingrained dirt. His apparently unmotivated perambulations gave him the leisure to preach a recital of Jesuit sins, to muddy the skirts of the Whore of Rome. He pleaded his innocence to the skies, and caressed the rope burns on his neck: water, he shunned. In the window of a knife shop, he caught his own mocking reflection: how could he remain suspended in time, unaging, and soft as cheese? What was the nature of his crime? He spat a dry pellet of venom at the lying portrait. And cancelled it with a smeared circuit of his arm.