The worst part of the ordeal is now over. Alma’s giant head is now concealed within a church bell made of hair, so that if they should view her from the shoulders upwards, onlookers would have no clue as to which way round she was standing. Lifting both hands, Alma scrabbles with her scarlet fingernails down what feels like the middle of her Rushmore cranium in order to create a centre parting, dragging back the faded auburn curtains to each side so that she can peer at the mirror hung above the fireplace and weigh up the result. Alma decides that she particularly likes the vagrant ash-and-copper strand that snakes across her almost-blind left eye, which is her scariest one, possibly because it’s governed by the mad pre-verbal basilisk of her right brain. Alma’s right eye is the humane and twinkling one which understands that it’s preferable if people — humans as she calls them — like her and aren’t frightened off by her appearance or behaviour. Conversely, Alma’s left eye clearly doesn’t give a fuck. It glowers, grey and yellow and unfocussed, from beneath an overhanging forehead that swells gently into noticeable bumps, as if she’s either growing horns or a new frontal lobe.
Hair sorted, Alma paints a face on in the style pioneered by Mr. Potato Head. Her eyelashes soon sag beneath the weight of the mascara and resemble the deleted giant spider scene from the original King Kong. Next, pouting like Mick Jagger before the embalmers got to him, she coats her lips in a bloody impasto of red lippy. She believes that this wards off potential rapists and the like by making her appear to be the more voracious sexual predator. Finally satisfied, she grins at her reflection. Every day is Halloween for Alma.
Pulling on an ancient leather jacket, its lapels hung with a fat crop of outdated causes thick as August blackberries, she’s almost ready to confront the yammering planet and stare down reality again, but first she has to put her rings and finger-armour on. A splendidly malevolent array of jointed metal talons, sculpted scorpions and rearing silver snakes alongside a selection of big, colourful and bruising gemstones, these lethal adornments probably contribute more than the carnivorous lipstick to her rape-proofing, she realises upon the rare occasions when she thinks realistically. One slap and an assailant’s features would be hanging off in strips of soggy wallpaper. She’d do it, too. She’d once informed her brother Warry that although she almost thought of him as family, she’d open him without a second’s hesitation like a tin of Hula Hoops.
Making sure she’s got her chequebook and her key, she hurls herself along a cluttered hallway that has swathes of gold stars licking up its walls, out through a specially-carved front door with twin snakes in a caduceus design, down her front path onto East Park Parade. Its York stone paving slabs are bathed in clear blonde sunlight, a presentiment of summer, with the lovely trilobite erosions of an ancient riverbed picked out in sharp relief. Across the busy Kettering Road are the tall trees that edge the Racecourse, a green fringe around the immense parkland’s mile-wide lampshade sky. People walk on the broad grey paths in ones and twos or cut an independent course across the rolling sea of grass. Someone is trying to fly a kite, perhaps in an attempt to recreate some cherished illustration from a 1950s kids’ encyclopaedia, the washed-out yellow diamond faltering against a faded blue. Suspiciously enormous crows patrol the rippling turf, a bigger and more confident crowd of them every year, too many to be called collectively a murder these days. This is more a Harold Shipman of the fucking things.
Her indoor lungs adjusting rapidly to the cold draughts of breath that she sucks down, Alma turns left as she commences her walk into town. Her Dr. Martens scuff against the pavement’s fossil fronds and her mind floods with random ideas and associations, words and pictures snagging on the shop-front scenery that rattles by the other way as Alma hits her stride. She thinks about the flagstones vanishing beneath her tread, the only view afforded to the downcast, irrespective of which century they happen to be in. The old stones, obviously, remain unchanged since the nineteenth, but there are nuances to the discerning eye: deficiencies of dog-shit; chocolate wrappers that have been rebranded so as not to further mystify touring Americans; unfathomable particle-collider tags in whorls and spirals of white spray. Across the road a distant man attempts to steer some kind of sail-powered car across the Racecourse but the wind has dropped and he’s becalmed amongst the strutting crows and the abruptly plunging kites. If there’s no wind before it gets dark she supposes that the meadow-mariner is doomed. Despite the extra lighting that the vast and, by night, absolutely black expanse has relatively recently acquired, it’s still referred to as “The Rapecourse” by a healthy number of the town’s inhabitants.
She crosses from East Park Parade over Abington Avenue’s tail-end and carries on down Kettering Road. George Woodcock — Alma’s Arts Lab crony from her teenage years — had written a long, neon-lighted poem on this crumbling thoroughfare, a jewelled urban lament entitled Main Street, just before he’d jacked in all the literary bollocks and become a trucker. She can still see lines and phrases from the since-lost epic, smeared and tangled in the cobbled gutters; on the replaced plastic drainpipes. She can still see all the vanished incidents and nights and people that the lines referred to, former selves from several bygone decades striding up and down the shabby avenue, a noisy nineteen-year-old drunk girl in a posse of small-town bohemians, an angry-looking Gas Board office worker stamping her way home through drizzle on another Friday afternoon, a forty-something mad witch in a black cloak with a horde of Alcopop-emboldened simpletons calling her “Grotbags”, “lez” or “minger” from the safety of their passing vehicles if she goes out to do a bit of shopping. The town’s streets are like a living palimpsest to Alma, all the layers still intact, everyone still alive and everything still going on, the misguided romances and the rows, the shimmering acid trips, the hasty fucks in doorways.
This perception of a simultaneous eternity, while she’s had intimations of it on and off throughout her life, has only flared up into vivid actuality since she’s been working on these paintings. The idea, once fully formulated, was so dazzlingly obvious that she remains amazed at having reached the age of fifty-something without clearly understanding it: time as an everlasting solid in which nothing changes, nothing dies. It had been right before her eyes for all those years, and she’d not known what she was looking at until that moment with her brother in the Golden Lion when the penny finally dropped. The moment of apocalypse and revelation, almost like that time in Greyfriars’ flats when she’d been dawdling home from Spring Lane School at dinnertime. Down in the little patch of shrubbery at the bottom of the washing-line enclosure there’d been a single translucent grub or caterpillar hanging by a thread from one leaf of a bush that Alma didn’t know the name of. She had stood there staring at it for perhaps a minute, and then something strange had happened –