Alma walks on, past the arched entrance to a cobbled yard, an unmistakeably Victorian construction that has “Dickens Brothers, Ltd” hand-lettered up above the archway. She suspects that elsewhere in the town there stands a black-beamed Tudor premises called “Shakespeare’s” and perhaps a “Chaucer & Sons” half-thatched cottage out near Hardingstone. Northampton, after all, is a well-labelled town. Once, from her window, she saw two vans pass each other, travelling in opposite directions on East Park Parade. One, possibly belonging to a mattress company, had the word DREAM stencilled upon its side. The other one, perhaps a television or computer retailer, was blazoned with the word REALITY. She’d noted that REALITY was heading for town centre, which was unsurprising, while DREAM followed a trajectory that would eventually lead it to Kettering. She thought that it was more than likely going there to die.
Picking the pace up, on her right the storefronts melt into her slipstream, into one long smear of shop where you can get a Chinese meal, a drum-kit, a peyote cactus, a tattoo or a tattoo removed. She veers around a quorum of rough-looking blokes with beer-cans, who all nonetheless grin toothlessly and growl a cheerful “Hello, Alma” as she passes. Thirty seconds later a young policewoman in a Day-Glo lemon waistcoat beams and nods in recognition at the former menace to society turned local institution. She’s the queen of Kettering Road.
Tacking due west now, Alma executes a smooth curve opposite a shop-soiled Unitarian church and banks into Abington Square, past the unoccupied new properties which have replaced a scruffy row of shops that used to stand upon this rounded corner. She remembers her and David Daniels hiking round the newsagents and second-hand shops on Saturday mornings when they were thirteen, looking for comics or science fiction paperbacks, often paying a visit to the murky enterprise that hung on here, in the perpetual umbra of the church across the street. The owner had been an old lady with a bad cough who was always in her dressing gown and slippers, flecking ragged copies of Amazing Adult Fantasy and yellow-jacketed pornography alike with inadvertent sputum.
Alma feels protective of these vanished people, insufficiently noteworthy or attractive for the sepia retrospectives; these anonymous dust-bunnies who got lost forever underneath the huge, immobile wardrobe of the twentieth century. She wants to fill the crowd scenes in her paintings with them, wants to think of them suspended with their hours and habitats in time’s huge starry jelly, hanging there forever with their feuds and frailties intact, notes on the stave of a stupendous music.
On her right now is the Jaguar dealership, Guy Salmon, a name that has since become Alma’s pet euphemism with which to refer to male ejaculate. Abington Square unfolds around her. Up ahead, Charles Bradlaugh’s statue stands upon its traffic-island plinth, facing away from her towards Abington Street. Nice arse. She’s always rather fancied Bradlaugh, although more for his moral ferocity than for his physical allure if truth be told. Dishing out contraceptive literature with Annie Besant, knocking round with Swinburne, standing up for subjugated India so vocally that youthful devotee Mohandas Ghandi turned up at his funeral. A riot-precipitating atheist teetotaller and champion of the poor, Bradlaugh is Alma’s dream-date. Curiously, whenever she attempts to picture this she always sees herself arriving at the school dance with an animated statue, white stone splinters flaking from its joints with every step. During the slower numbers at the evening’s end they’d leave a swirling chalk-dust trail on the gymnasium floor behind them as they clung together for Wichita Lineman, and then afterwards he’d conscientiously discuss the need for contraception before trying to feel her up on the way home. She looks up at the chiselled figure with its finger pointing ever westward and can hear him bragging to his mates at the pub afterwards: “Here, Algernon, smell this.”
She’s giggling to herself as she strides on towards the junction with the Mounts and York Road, where the snarling, swearing horsepower of the trucks and Chelsea tractors is constrained by pretty lights. A small boy towed behind his carrier-laden mother stares at Alma disbelievingly. A man nudges his wife and mutters “Here, that’s Alma Warren” as she lollops past them, and outside the Bantam Cock three young lads produce copies of the Moorcock Elric book for her to sign. They don’t seem to be frightened of her, joking amiably as she scrawls her lazy autograph, and Alma finds she rather likes them. They inform her that they share a private fantasy about her, in which Alma lives on top of the Express Lifts tower and overlooks Northampton from a throne of human skulls. It’s an arresting image, and she’s beaming fondly as she waves goodbye to them. Before she’s reached the traffic lights two pretty girls who look like art students have smiled and nodded at her, she has made another three-year-old look haunted and another cab has chirped its horn as it purrs by, prompting another clueless raising of the silver talons and another jingling rattle of the finger-armour. She reflects that she is fortunate to have been blessed by an inflated self-image since infancy. Anyone else subjected to this much attention would most probably start acting strangely, she concludes while searching for a kabbalistic insight in the sequence of red-amber-green.
Her personality is a long-running radio drama that is broadcast chiefly for her own amusement, much as she suspects is true of many people. Obviously some prefer personas that are tuned into light comedy, while judged by their expressions the few individuals waiting at the lights with her have modelled their essential natures on the weather forecast. Or perhaps Religious Affairs, Alma reasons after a consideration of the Deco edifice that looms behind her while she stands there by the crossing. Opened in the 1930s as the Savoy Cinema and operating as the ABC throughout her back-row dating years, hosting the Beatles once, the place is now amongst the growing number of town properties owned by the Jesus Army, an expanding horde of sometimes-strident evangelicals that had begun recruiting from Northampton’s pool of derelicts or drunks back in the early 1970s, whisking them from park benches off to Army headquarters in nearby Bugbrook. She recalls an incident from a few years ago when the group had been censured after traumatising children with an unannounced alfresco re-enactment of the Crucifixion, but apart from that they seemed to be permitted to do what they wanted, pretty much.
Alma is unsurprised by this. The town has been a thriving hotbed of religious nutjobs since the fourteen-hundreds, many of whom Alma feels a certain retroactive fondness for. She likes the poetry, she likes the attitude, the heresy and anarchy that sought to brush aside the King and clergy, sought to recreate society as an egalitarian domain of ranting tinkers, mechanic philosophers, a whole Nation of Saints that answered to no temporal authority but only to a moral vision, to an enflamed state of mind, a level of both spiritual and political awareness that would be Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. She likes the Lollards and the Ranters and the Muggletonians. She likes the incendiary ravings of the founding Quakers, likes imagining that nice man on the oat-box tearing off his clothes and screaming for the violent overthrow of monarchy. She’s even partial to Moravians, albeit mainly for their freak-show value with that mental business about penetrating the messiah in his spear-hole and their influence on her enduring idol William Blake, but Alma doesn’t like the Jesus Army very much. She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.
The lights change and she crosses to an intermediary island in the middle of York Road. Alma reflects that she is standing on the spot that Doug McGeary’s vegetable truck had rumbled over nearly fifty years before, transporting her unbreathing brother to the hospital. She realises that today Doug’s mercy-dash would have to take a different route, with it no longer being possible to sail down from the Mounts into York Road. He would have had to turn left at the cinema, circle the Unitarian Church and come back at the square the other way, adding some very-likely fatal minutes to his journey. Mind you, by all rights her brother should have been a goner when the truck was still halfway up Grafton Street, so perhaps the diversion wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.