“I don’t care. It’s only down York Road now. You just ’ang on.”
Almost at the gap-toothed railings, Michael thought he heard his mum’s voice over all the clamour of the devils and the high-voiced man who still sang the same hymn, but realised that he must have just imagined it. With John and Phyllis standing to each side of him, he stepped up to the short stretch of remaining balustrade and gazed down, between its pitch-painted bars, into the roaring, swirling mouth of the Destructor.
It was all the dogs, the drain, the smoke that everything was either going to, or down, or up in. It was rack, and it was ruin, and the destination of the handcarts. It was other people. It was where you led apes. It was what you rode for leather and what came in absence of high water.
Pink light broke on Michael’s cheeks, his forehead, and below the Mayorhold was a mile-wide maelstrom, all ablaze. Worse, as John had explained, this was not common fire that lit a cigarette or charred a house. This was instead a pure and awful poetry of fire, that set morality and trust and human happiness alight, that turned the fragile threads connecting people into ashes. This was fire enough to burn down decency, or self-respect, or love. Michael looked down into the spitting, crackling chasm. From the flaming debris turning in its magma stir he realised that it was consuming nothing physical, but only a more precious fuel of wishes, images, ideas and recollections. It was as if something had collected up a thousand different family albums full of corner-mounted photographs, remembered moments that had been important to somebody once, and in a fit or misery or rage had thrown them all into a furnace. Blistered incidents and scorching pictures circled sluggishly in the volcanic eddy, in the churning black and red.
He saw terraced houses fall against each other in a run of demolition dominoes, complex spider-webs of jitties and rear-entries simplified to blocks of flats like giant filing cabinets. Hundreds of heirloom prams rolled rattling and squeaking down a smoky gradient into the abyss. Everybody’s pets died, countless budgie-cages empty save for shit and sandpaper that tumbled endlessly through ruddy darkness. Everybody’s favourite toys were lost. Small girls who wanted to be nurses, show-jumpers or film stars played a skipping game, ageing with each turn of the rope to drudges, inadvertent mothers or hairnets and pairs of hands on a conveyor belt. Small boys who wanted to be football heroes kicked and kicked and kicked and never realised that their goal was unattainable, was only drawn in chalk onto the shabby brickwork. Envelopes fell with a sigh on bristly doormats bringing bad news from the front line, bank or hospital. A desperate landlord murdered a streetwalker with a hammer in the back yard of his pub, and at the head of Scarletwell Street men in black shirts with moustaches and their skulls shaved halfway up the back held rallies, shouted slogans and folded their arms like gods. Everything burned and didn’t know it burned. These were the pictures in that frightful, final hearth.
Sheep Street seemed to have broken in the middle, its near end a steep slope that was almost vertical, and toppling down it there were fifty years of Bicycle Parades. Girls dressed as fairies rattling their collection tins, deliberately wonky bikes with oval wheels and men whose papier-mâché heads with leprous, peeling paintwork were much bigger than their bodies — all of these poured down the chute into the gaping conflagration of the Mayorhold and were lost. A marching band assembled by the Boy’s Brigade went tumbling after them in a percussion-heavy clattering of drums and cymbals, a lone glockenspiel attempting to perform “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” before it was swallowed in the light, the thunder, the collapse. Eleven-year-old boys with plastered hair that smelled of chlorine and with damp Swiss rolls of towel and swimming trunks inside their shouldered kitbags skittered on the tilting cobbles, trying to arrest their slide. Nothing was safe, the district’s sense of safety having been the first thing to catch fire.
A line of butcher’s, barber’s, greengrocer’s and sweetshops all went in, and then a whole church that he thought might be St. Andrew’s. Michael watched it as it ground and slithered inexorably towards the glaring edge and then tipped over, limestone buttresses crumbling away from the main structure, falling to the firestorm in a shower of smashed stained glass and smoking hymnals. Pews that still had tiny people kneeling in them spilled out of the plunging buildings through its broken doors and windows, dropped into the all-consuming mortal bonfire like unwanted dollhouse furniture. Eyes stinging, Michael saw his own home on St. Andrew’s Road, its windows covered up with corrugated tin, as it sank helplessly into a quicksand of rough grass, its chimney at length disappearing underneath the patch of turf that was itself creeping towards fiery oblivion down an upended Scarletwell Street. Horses pulling tinkling milk floats shied and snorted in distress, dropped steaming fibrous pancakes, good for roses, which were quickly shovelled up into tin buckets by the grubby children who were plummeting behind them on the sudden incline. Everything went on the pyre, went down the flaming pan.
Michael understood that it was meaning that was being turned to ash here, and was not really surprised that many of the burning, blackening scenarios were only meaningful to him. He saw his stick-thin grandma, Clara, fall abruptly to a shiny kitchen floor that wasn’t red and blue tiles like the one they had down on St. Andrew’s Road. He saw his nan, May, clutching at her drooping bosom as she stumbled down the passage of a little modern flat somewhere that wasn’t Green Street, trying to reach the front door and fresh air, collapsing on her face and lying still instead. He saw a hundred other old men and old women moved from the condemned homes where they’d raised their families, dumped in distant districts with nobody that they knew and failing to survive the transplant. By the dozen they keeled over on the well-lit stairs of their new houses; in the unfamiliar indoor toilets; onto their unprecedented fitted carpets; on the pillows of magnolia-painted bedrooms that they failed to wake to. Countless funerals fell into the Mayorhold’s fires, and furtive teenage love-affairs, and friendships between relocated children sent to different schools. Infants began to understand that they would probably now never marry the classmate that they had been expecting to. All the connecting tissue, the affections and associations, became cinders. He became aware that he was weeping, had presumably been weeping for some time.
In the shifting lava patterns of the hell-well he could see that all of it, the wasting of his neighbourhood, had been, was, or would be for nothing. The decline and poverty that marked the Boroughs was a sickness in the human heart that would not be improved by pulling down its oldest and, inevitably, best-constructed buildings. Scattering the displaced occupants would only spread the heartbreak and malaise to other areas, like trying to put out a burning pile of leaves with an electric fan. It was that spread of the Boroughs’ condition, Michael knew, that was the worst part of this whole disaster. Michael knew how it had happened and how it would all work out. He saw both past and future in combusted rubbish circling the nightmare plughole of the astral town square.
There were sepia councillors and planners in Edwardian offices changing the way they thought about the poor, from seeing them as people who had problems to problems themselves, problems of cost and mathematics that could be resolved by tower-block proposals or by columns in a balance-book. He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down. Out of the hoardings she gazed condescendingly across a landscape where the clearance areas multiplied, England unravelling from its centre outwards until almost everywhere was drunk and out of work and in a fight, just like the Boroughs. Every region started to descend the same slope that led here, that led to soot, sparks and annihilation. On the posters, background colours altered and the woman’s picture was torn down to be replaced by those of men whose smiles looked forced or insincere, if they could even smile at all. Spy cameras flowered from lampposts and the pub names melted into gibberish. People waved their fists, then knives, then guns. He could see money, rustling flows of blue and pink and violet paper bleeding from stabbed schools and gashed amenities. He could see an entire world spiralling down into the incendiary maw of the Destructor.