“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”
His laugh is that of Tommy Cooper, left marooned upon a desert island until it has morphed into the seagull-scaring cackle of Ben Gunn. Delighted, Alma tells him he’s a suave Lothario and asks him if he’s writing these days. When he tells her he’s still scribbling, she remarks on reading “Clearance Area” a day or two ago and lets him know what a good poem she thinks it is. He looks at her uncertainly, unsure if she is being genuine.
“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”
The use of the past tense and subtle shift of subject from the poem to its author registers as a small blip on Alma’s radar of concern. It doesn’t sound good, like a clichéd western gunslinger retired to the saloon, fondly remembering his cordite-scented triumphs through a haze of redeye. What a load of shit. She sternly reassures him that he’d been considerably better than “not bad”, then, realising that she too has used the past tense, she attempts to rectify her blunder by just coming out and telling him without condition that he’s a good writer, whereupon he taps her up for a few quid.
This startles her, even as she is fumbling automatically in her jeans’ pocket for a piece of crumpled paper that won’t turn out to be an old till receipt from Morrison’s. Alma has gladly dished out cash to the town’s homeless ever since they blossomed in shop doorways during the late ’Eighties, and especially since it became official policy that this was just “encouraging the beggars”. Having come from a community of beggars, this only spurs on her bloody-minded generosity, much the same way that she’s been idly planning to strew crumbled blueberry muffins up and down the precinct ever since she spotted that annoying pigeon notice at the street’s top end. A friend, like Benedict, is always welcome to some spare cash if she has it, but as she presses a note into his palm she’s more concerned about the shift in self-esteem that seems to have befallen him since the last time they met. Taken along with the “I weren’t bad, was I?” comment, Alma’s feeling a bit worried for him. Making matters worse, he’s looking guilty now about taking the money, which she brashly brushes over by assuring him she’s “fucking loaded”, anxious to get on to safer ground. The moment passes. Alma asks him to tomorrow’s exhibition, not expecting him to come, and when they’re saying goodbye some few minutes later Benedict is telling her that he’s a Cyberman and Alma’s laughing like a drain. Everything’s good again.
Waving farewell while still snickering down her nose at intervals, she wanders a few paces further down the street and then remembers that she had originally been heading for the bank, correcting her trajectory accordingly. She’s thinking about Benedict, about how one of the most blazing and important moments in her life had been provoked by Ben’s inspiring idiocy. They were both something like ten or eleven and had worked out an ingenious way to climb up to the rooftops of the copper warehouse which stood on the corner that connected Freeschool Street with Green Street. This ascent, which obviously needed to be made at night, had first required a trip to Narrow-Toe Lane, just around the block, where they could wriggle on their bellies underneath the locked gate of a builder’s yard. Here they had clambered up a borrowed ladder onto a rear wall of the adjacent Perrit property and scampered giggling along the ridge of Benedict’s dad’s woodpile in the starlight. This eventually allowed them access to the warehouse outbuildings, from whence it was an easy scramble up to the slate roofs and chimneypots above.
For months it had been their precarious kingdom, only shared with cats and birds. Dangerous games of chase evolved to suit the slanted planes of the new landscape, but these had their limits: dead-end precipices that the two kids couldn’t find the nerve to overcome. The worst of these was at the far end of a guttering, a rain channel between the slope of one roof and the upright wall that was the boundary of the next. Their chases would end prematurely at this point, night after night, because of the sheer drop into a narrow alley filled with metal scrap and probable impalement that plunged down into the dark immediately beyond. The threatening passage had been only four or five feet wide and had the angled tiles of a one-storey storage shed on its far side. If it had been a jump between two chalk marks in a sunny playground they’d have made it without hesitation, but to try the same thing on a rooftop in pitch darkness with an abyss full of tetanus junk beneath you was a very different matter.
Then, one moonlit evening, Benedict had upped his game. Alma was chasing him across the blue-grey hills some thirty feet above the street, pursuing him with an unsettling degree of relish through a Caligari world of chimneys, tilts, and shadows. Benedict, only a few paces ahead of her, was giggling with terror that was wholly justified and understandable: most people would get through their lives without being pursued across the skyline by a predatory Alma Warren anywhere save in unusually vivid nightmares, while for Benedict this had been his unenviable reality. Upon the night in question she had herded him into the dead-end fold between the rooftops, knowing that she had him trapped and slavering triumphantly as she moved in upon her shrill and tittering quarry for the kill. It was at this point that Ben’s fear of being caught by Alma had at last outweighed his squeamishness regarding getting speared by shards of glass or rusty railings in the alleyway below. Benedict jumped, shrieking with fear and somehow laughing at the same time, hurtling across the lethal gap to land upon the shed roof, five or six feet lower down on its far side.
Alma, still running at full tilt behind him, had just seconds to decide that she preferred the possibility of gory death at age eleven to the utter certainty of someone beating her at something. Having made her mind up, when she reached the edge she just kept going.
In the fraction of a second during which she hung in empty space above the snarl of rusted implements and broken windows down below, Alma had been illuminated. As the instant stretched itself, she realised that she’d accidentally jumped free of all her fears and limitations, fears of injury and death and ruin. Trusting only to the moment she’d propelled herself past doubt and gravity and in that moment had known with abiding certainty that there was nothing she was scared of, nothing that she couldn’t do.
Even as an eleven-year-old girl she had, of course, been both considerably bigger and much heavier than Benedict. She sailed across the treacherous alleyway to land on the shed roof beside him and immediately went through it, shattering its slates and ending up embedded in its gradient to her scabby knees. Oh, how they’d laughed, exhilarated and hysterical, once they’d checked to make sure that nobody had lost an eye. The incident had given Alma an important insight into overcoming psychological impediments, which she’d experimented further with. Having a morbid dread of drowning, as a twelve-year-old she’d swum out to the steel partition that divided one end of Midsummer Meadow’s lido from the other and had dived down to one of the railed vents that were some feet underwater. She had pushed her arm between the bars then turned it round so that she wasn’t certain she could pull it out again. For perhaps thirty long and awesome seconds she had floated at the still heart of her wholly self-inflicted terror, trying to absorb and understand it, and then she had calmly turned her arm the right way round to pull it from between the bars and strike back for the glittering surface. Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven’t got the first idea.
She knows all the bank staff by name, the Co-op having been her bank of choice for the last twenty years. She’d started with them solely on the basis of their ethical investment policies, but as the decades had ticked past on her milometer she’d come to notice that whenever there was a financial meltdown caused by banking improprieties, the Co-op’s frankly boring logo never featured in the cascade of shamed high-street brands that poured across the teatime news-screens. In the dizzying casino spin of a roulette economy, inside a threadbare circus tent stuffed with adrenaline-deranged rogue traders, oligarchs, and corporate bosses living beyond anybody’s means, the Co-op stood fast. Despite its refusal to invest resources with arms manufacturers, the bank stuck to its guns. Also, when Alma’s mum Doreen had died in 1995 they’d sent a big bouquet of flowers with personal messages from everybody at the branch. As far as Alma is concerned, they could be caught providing orphan baby seals for Rio Tinto Zinc to use as sex-slaves after that, and she’d most probably turn her blind eye.