The river, guilty as ever, glimpsed between warehouses, stalled him: his heart went out, he spun on his heel, tramped back, head down, plodding in his extinguished footsteps; demanding sanctuary of The Spear of Destiny. He arrived just as the exanimous sun fell behind the Mosque, innocently emphasizing the glory of its bilious brickwork — against which lurched the lengthening shadows of the unquenched vagrants.
The immense hands — flashy with senile lentigo, trellised with hard blue veins — that Arthur had last seen gathering up the wicker basket, now lay, without threat, on the polished mahogany surface of the bar. This horizontal mirror of ancient wood played back the transaction as a sepia-tinted reverse-angle shot. A signet ring, the size of a Klondike nugget, stood out from the publican’s paw like a supplementary knuckle. Its owner seemed simply to have allowed it to grow, in situ: it was worth more than the pub’s freehold. The man himself was composed equally of bone and metal. His shoulders were Detroit fenders, and his bullneck would have blunted any chainsaw. He was formidable, long-skulled, spike-haired, with calcitic eyes and brows like cutlass slashes. He commanded the deck of the pub by the slightest twitch of his nostrils. He offered Arthur no greeting. A bottle of barley wine was opened and slid towards him. No payment was exacted, and no glass was produced.
Arthur retreated to his corner in the snug, to watch over the tables and to empty the ashtrays (usually, into his own pockets). If anyone else had been occupying Arthur’s favoured chair he would have thought nothing to plonking himself down directly in their lap: the social gaff was never repeated. But ‘The Boy’ — this decrepit and weather-stained adolescent — was not regarded by his peers as a serious drinking man. Half a dozen barley wines, and any dregs left in the pots, saw him through a single session. The Irish considered him, for all practical purposes, a teetotaller; a snivelling chapel-haunting bogtrotter who wouldn’t stand his round; a sheep-tickling gombeen eejit suckled on rainwater dripping from the arse-hairs of a spavined donkey. And that was when they were in a conciliatory mood, badgering Arthur to slip them a bottle of lavatory cleaner to give ‘a bit of body’ to the Hanger Lane stout.
The Paddies shared the front bar, in an uneasy truce, with a school of choleric and pop-eyed Jocks, who were ready, after a dozen Youngers, cut with blue, to let fly at anything that moved. These amiable exiles were easily recognized by their pinched and blistered lower lips; eaten away by spitting a perpetual stream of f-sounds, ‘Jimmie’, from behind what was left of their upper teeth. Rabid and posthumous men, without social identity, they had followed William Hare, the resurrectionist, on the long road south. ‘Hang Burke, banish Hare, / Burn Knox in Surgeon’s Square.’ Hare, having narrowly escaped the gallows — where Burke dangled for almost an hour — was released from gaol on 5 February 1829, and ‘put on a train south’. He travelled under the name of ‘Mr Black’; to vanish for ever into the streets of Whitechapel. Another blind beggar, another silent volume.
By day, the Micks worked Euston; not having the imagination to travel further afield than the spot where they fell off the Liverpool train. The younger lads walked about with their hands out, waiting for some philanthropist to stick a shovel in them. They mingled awkwardly with the wall-whores; drinking anything that was put in front of them, and stripping to the bone the first man to drop, or take a fit. Only the strongest warriors begged a path back to the safety of the Doss House. The unfortunate, and the sick, received abrupt cosmetic surgery on the end of a broken bottle, or were brutally culled by the refuse departments of the state — tumbling to their deaths from visionary staircases that appeared before them in solitary cells; gibbering-out in controlled pharmaceutical experiments.
But the landlord, Jerzy the Count, could call the whole pack to order by the simple act of heaving himself down the length of the bar, snapping open his personal cigar box, withdrawing a Cuban dynamite-stick, which he rammed between his lips, primed like a blowpipe, to spatter defaulters with high-velocity dumdums. He thumped the lid shut, causing the unboiled teeth, in the confectioner’s glass jar on the shelf behind him, to rattle. Jerzy acted as unofficial dentist to the Doss House; knotting a red handkerchief around the fangs of any swollen-cheeked supplicant mad enough to moan over his drink; he swiftly extracted the decayed stump. Then cleaned out the bone fragments with a pair of pliers. Many halfway-healthy canines, incisors, premolars, and molars had also been recklessly sacrificed for the free tot of neat Polish spirits that concluded the operation. The raw shock of the first gulp numbed the tongue, froze the eyeballs in tent-peg horror, and even, momentarily, silenced the Glaswegians. Some of Jerzy’s trophies, enamelled veterans, were capped in gold, souvenirs of plumier days; most were yellow pebbles, cabbagecoloured drachma.
All this Hogarthian stuff was beneath the notice of the Count’s wife, the Lady Eleanor, who kept to the burgundy-flock cave of the snug, standing guard over her inscribed portraits of Bobby Moore, Archie Moore, Kenny Lynch, Charlie Magri, ‘Babs’ Windsor, and assorted bracelet-waving gangsters. She perched, a silver-dipped cockatoo, on her high stool; scarlet of claw, dragging deep on menthol-flavoured fags, and tossing back thimbles of obscure but highly-scented liqueurs.
Joblard and his camarade were among the familiars of Eleanor’s bosky covert. They were, once again, in temporary retreat from the slings and arrows of bailiffs and bankers, estranged families, over-eager disciples and equally impoverished friends. They were potless, and squatting in a borrowed cell among shelves of authenticated nouveaux proles: dope dealers, outworkers, arts administrators and the like. But, while they lived within the shadow of the Doss House, it had not yet become a final reality, a fixed abode. The old vision Joblard suffered — of destitution, memory loss, vagrancy, wine — merely simmered on the back burner: his face returned to him from the scabs and rags of some passing mendicant. They were welcomed to the pub as friends, and courtiers, with no interrogation as to their past or their future. The Spear was gradually revealed, over the months of leisurely intoxication, as an independent principality — with its own laws, health service, banishments and forfeits.
One evening, two of the ‘potato-heads’ began to fight; ineffectively, a solid table between them — but with sufficient spunk to attract the sporting instincts of the assembled Jocks, who were so bored that they were watching a foam-flecked nutter spit out segments of his own tongue. Luckily for the amateur combatants, Jerzy was not in the bar. Occasionally he would withdraw — fingering a swiss roll of crisp new banknotes — to conduct a ‘bit of business’ upstairs with dark-suited associates, who arrived in the alleyway, bearing heavy suitcases and well-wrapped packages. And who left, unsteadily, without them. Bursts of strident martial music may have been timed to baffle obscure blood rituals, or overheated currency debates — but they led to rumours, never more, of planned coups: Knights of the Rosy Cross, Timber Wolves, worshippers at the flame of racial purity.