Finally she squeezes past the barrier railings at the top of the pedestrian precinct and is in Abington Street, or at least in what’s left of it. Back a few hundred years ago this was the town’s east gate, called the St. Edmund’s End after the since-demolished church across the Wellingborough Road from the converted workhouse in which Alma had drawn her first breath, to voice the first of many furious and unreasonable complaints. Daniel Defoe, writing his guide to English towns, described Northampton as essentially a crossroads, with its north-south axis running along Sheep Street, down the Drapery and into Bridge Street while its east-west axis traced a line through Abington Street, Gold Street and Marefair towards the ruins of the castle. By pedestrianizing one end of this east-west passage, the town council have effectively stitched up a major vein, inviting gangrene. She can see it setting in already, read its symptoms in the plasterboarded windows and the bloom of estate agent shingles. There’s no passing trade and the shop rents are all ridiculously high. If this persists, Alma predicts, the town will turn into an economic crater where the money only circulates around the rim, through retail parks and giant chain-stores, while the centre is abandoned to the tumbleweed of repossession notices, transformed into an after-dark arena, to a Walter Hill set with more vomit, more teenagers lying in their own piss, and more incoherent war-cries. Incoherent wars. You know it’s a bad sign when you see bunches of commemorative flowers taped to lamps on the pink paving, with no road in sight.
Pigeons rise fluttering around her, blissfully oblivious to the mean-spirited poster pasted on a rubbish bin which states that feeding them is a variety of littering and therefore punishable by a fine. It isn’t that she thinks this will make any difference to the birds themselves, who after all can’t read and don’t depend on handouts from animal-lovers to sustain them in the first place, but she feels indignant at the sentiments expressed. What in the name of fuck is wrong with pigeons? If the council were attempting to discourage wasps, attack dogs or the Jesus Army she could see some sense in the campaign, but pigeons? With that green and violet shimmering on the ruff; that wobbling and fluffed-up coo? If the municipal authorities think getting rid of pigeons is their number one priority for the apparently-condemned town centre, then why don’t they just plant landmines on all of the window sills and get it over with instead of sticking up their pissy little threatening notices?
She carries on down Abington Street. There are very few other pedestrians but she is wading through a crowd of ghosts and memories, her killer robot hands deep in her jacket pockets like a 1950s badboy, Jimmy Dean after the menopause. She skirts around the dopey Francis Crick memorial erected in the centre of the thoroughfare, a piece of kitsch with silvery double-helix twists supporting what appear to be a pair of nudist superheroes, sexless manikins whose bald and featureless Barbie pudendas clearly won’t be passing on inherited genetic traits to anyone. Besides, the only thing connecting Abington Street with the local scientific pioneer is the conspicuous DNA evidence to be found following an average Friday night. Of course, the monument might be a comment on local inbreeding, with the figures diving upwards in a desperate spiral to escape a tiny, stagnant gene-pool, more of a gene-puddle if the truth be told. Alma recalls the rumour of an entire cyclops-village somewhere out near Towcester, full of cyclops postmen, cyclops publicans and cyclops toddlers, then remembers it was her that started it.
By curving round the structure to her left she is now walking down beside the library, the only building in the street that hasn’t changed since Alma was a little girl. She’d joined up at the age of five and visited the library several times a fortnight for the next ten years, mostly for ghost-stories and yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz science-fiction. She’d had haunting, memorable dreams about the institution as a child, walking through winding corridors of wooden shelving with impossible and fascinating tomes propped up to every side, books that you couldn’t read because the words would crawl around upon the page if they were opened. Her dream-library had padded flooring covered in red vinyl like a bar stool or a car-seat into which were set round holes that were most probably vaginal, so that the book-browsing clientele could climb from floor to floor.
The actual waking library had been almost as marvellous in its interior — the tiny section like an open wardrobe that hummed with the aura of the books on séances and mesmerism that were kept there — and from the outside it was still beautiful, the busts of benefactors set into the honey-coloured stone. Alma likes showing visiting Americans the library, just so she can point to the carven likeness at the upper right of its façade and ask them who they think it is. They generally assume that it’s George Washington, an English gesture of respect for their first president, seeming bewildered when informed that it is in fact Andrew, George’s older relative, back from before the Washingtons left Barton Sulgrave for America when the New Model Army were converging on Northamptonshire during the sixteen-hundreds. The family, reputedly, had even pinched the village crest of bars and mullets to provide a basis for the starry, stripy flag of their adopted home. To be quite frank, the only Washingtons she unreservedly respects are Dinah, Booker T. and Geno, whom she feels at least gave something back.
She’s just about to cross the precinct to the Co-op Bank on its far side when she becomes aware of an unusually solid-looking ghost from bygone times approaching from the opposite direction, walking up past the dilapidated mouth of the former Co-op Arcade. Dragging her hair back from the soot-ringed blast-sites of her eyes to take a closer look, she realises that the only thing which marks the figure as a ghost is the anachronistic clothing it affects: the pinstripe shirt, the neckerchief and waistcoat. With her spirits lifting out of their default disgruntlement, she recognises the bucolic spectre as perhaps her oldest mate, Benedict Perrit. Ah, Northampton. Just when you’ve decided that the planners have clubbed her into insensibility, she throws you a bouquet.
The moment Benedict sees Alma, he goes into one of his routines. First the appalled look, then the turning round and going back the way he’s come as if pretending that he hasn’t seen her, then another sharp reverse to bring him back in her direction, only this time quivering with silent giggles. Good old Ben, mad as a Chinese situation comedy, the only one amongst Alma’s associates and former classmates to consistently out-strange her without even trying, and one of the few artists or poets from her teenage years who didn’t jack it all in for a comfortable life when they hit twenty-five. Anything but. Benedict’s face is creased with lines of verse and looks like it resulted from an ill-judged one-night stand between the masks of comedy and tragedy. He has been killed by poetry, and at the same time poetry is all that saves him and redeems him. Good old Ben.
He sticks one paw out for a handshake, but she’s much too pleased to see him and she isn’t having it. Dodging around the proffered hand she plants her bloody lips upon his cheek and scoops him up into a python hug. Sooner or later he’ll breathe out, which will allow her to constrict him further and then when he loses consciousness she’ll dislocate her jaw and swallow him. Before she can accomplish this he flinches back out of her grip, frantically wiping at the Girl-Ebola she has left smeared on his chops.