She passes between the Abbey National’s Drapery Branch and the majestic colonnaded front of the old Corn Exchange, its chiselled steps ascending into what had once been the town’s other major cinema, called variously the Gaumont and the Odeon. Here she’d been forced to watch The Sound of Music three times with her mum Doreen, which she considered to be technically a form of child abuse. She’d been stood up twice, waiting on the cold steps for some acne-stippled tossrag who’d quite evidently only asked her out when dared to by his mates. She’d also come here several years before her teenage trials, when she had been a member of the Gaumont Boys and Girls club. Every Saturday they’d be let in for sixpence and would then be led by an enthusiastic adult, Uncle Something, in the singing of peculiar old songs like “Clementine”, “The British Grenadiers” or “Men of Harlech in the Hollow” before they were allowed to watch a short cartoon, a Children’s Film Foundation main show that would frequently involve an island, schoolboys and a foreign saboteur, then finally one episode from an ongoing eight-week serial, King of the Rocket Men or an old black-and-white Batman and Robin where the couple drove around in a completely ordinary 1940s car and Robin pushed his cardboard mask up on his forehead while conversing with his costumed pal in public. The main entertainment had been crawling under people’s legs along the rows of seats, or deftly flicking an ice-lolly stick to maybe blind a seven-year-old stranger several rows in front.
These days, of course, the building is another theme pub, a Hard Rock Café, and the town’s major cinema is a bog-standard multiplex at Sixfields, out past Jimmy’s End and a car-ride away. There’s almost a conceptualist brilliance to it alclass="underline" turn all the cinemas to pubs, get everybody ruinously pissed and then make sure that there’s no outlet for the spasms of imagination, fury or libido, nothing to drain off the clumsy fantasies that bob up to the surface of a seventh pint of Wifebeater. The simple-minded plotlines, absent motivation and pointless momentum of the cancelled celluloid will back up and spill out into the Saturday night streets. Before long you’ll have fascinating pieces of pure verité on every corner, budget Tarantino stabbings with assailants who hold their knives sideways and debate pop-culture trivia while giving you a Chelsea smile. The Oscars will be going to a flock of scattering shadows on CCTV.
Alma lopes across the woolly, shitty arse of Sheep Street to the gated entrance of the old fish-market, which she notices with some surprise is open. The big covered hall with its glass roof and glistening white slabs is part of Alma’s childhood landscape that she thought had been railed off forever. Vanished voices ringing from the wet tiles with an echo like a swimming-baths, and her nan May parting the crowds as she rolled through them like a black iron wrecking ball, lifting a liver-spotted hand and calling out to the fishmongers, all of whom she knew by name. The only one that Alma can remember is Three-Fingered Tunk, presumably so-called in order to distinguish him from all the other men called Tunk who had a different number of remaining digits.
She vaguely remembers hearing something about plans to turn the Fish Market into some sort of exhibition space or gallery, but has dismissed the idea as too fanciful. Not in Northampton; not in this world. It would never happen. The idea that she might have been wrong in her appraisal has, as usual, not occurred to her, which is perhaps why seeing the green metal concertina gates standing unlocked and open seems at first unreal. Feeling as if she’s stepping over the tiled threshold of a private dreamtime, Alma and her carrier-bags cross into the white emptiness of the interior.
The daylight falling through the dusty lens of the glass ceiling is diffused and milky, which transmutes the space into that of a realist painting. There are hardly any other figures to be seen about the echoing expanse, as dream-like and deserted as the streets in eighteenth-century prints. It’s early days yet, she supposes, with none of the promised art and fashion outlets up and running, but the church-like volume of the place impresses her. She’s never previously seen the Fish Market like this, denuded of its mumbling crowds, stripped of its cheery traders calling imprecations into the salt echo.
Now the slabs are bare and bloodless. The establishment is pared back to the bone, the trappings of its recent history sluiced away. Leftover shreds of topaz haddock, the prismatic gutter-silt of scales and staring collar-button eyes, swept off to join the horse-brasses and tankards of the Red Lion Inn that previously occupied this spot; join the menorahs and yarmulkes from the synagogue of a few centuries before. Its past removed, the market is a fertile vacuum waiting to be filled with future, a mysterious quantum void that hums with immanence and possibility. Alma is disconcerted by a sudden surge of hope, a cynicism override. Part of her is gloomily certain that the council will find some way to undo or undermine the venture, probably through sheer indifference rather than hostility, but the mere fact of its existence is a cause for optimism. It suggests to her that there are people in Northampton, people in the country, people in the world who have the will to make things be a different way. It’s the same feeling that she gets when she’s around her rapper buddies with their Boroughs-esoteric stage names: Influence, St. Craze, Har-Q, Illuzion. It’s the sense of social transformation that she sees, at least potentially, in art and occultism, even sometimes on the ragged Roman Thompson fringe of politics. This passionate desire to change reality into a domain more amenable to human beings, this is the ethereal fire that Alma can feel hanging in the brisk Fish Market air.
As if brought into being by her lifted spirits, one of the few blurred forms in Alma’s myopic middle-distance suddenly resolves itself on her approach into the unassuming and yet inspirational semblance of Knocker Wood, one of the greatest local antidotes for cynicism since the passing of the sorely-missed lyric barrage-balloon that was the late Tom Hall. Knocker — Alma had known him since they were both teenage hippies without ever learning his first name — had been achingly pretty as a young man, with his long black hair and the wild glitter in his eye that looked like poetry but turned out to be heroin. One of the town’s first junkies, Knocker had been part of that mysterious slapstick coterie who took part in their own Narco-Olympics every other Saturday, competitors in the 400-metre dash with stolen television set, haring along the Drapery to the cheers of the flowered-up bohemians gathered on the steps of All Saints Church.
Then everybody had got older. The majority of the long-haired spectators on the steps had straightened up and bailed out of the ailing freak-scene upon turning twenty, getting proper jobs and living up to parents’ expectations. This had left only the working-class contingent of the counter culture, who remained committed largely because they had nowhere else to go, and the addicted casualties like Knocker Wood for whom commitment was no longer the real issue. Knocker’s middle years had been a horror film, wilfully gothic in the way that only junkies can aspire to. Alma can remember scabby ghouls who held up their collapsing veins with safety-pins, a pre-punk gesture, or who’d ruefully announce that they were “forced” to shoot up in their eyeball or their cock.
While Knocker hadn’t been amongst this self-consciously morbid set, for long years he had been a babbling mess that Alma is ashamed to say she’d crossed the street in order to avoid on numerous occasions. He’d lost his wife to an overdose, their daughter to a strain of hepatitis, devastating blows that methadone and Carlsberg Special Brew could not completely muffle. He’d been on a hell-bound train that overshot its destination and ploughed on relentlessly for somewhere even worse when by some miracle he’d managed to leap off the footplate, tumbling helplessly down the embankment towards hard and cold sobriety. No-one had thought that he could do it. Nobody had seen it done before. Knocker had somehow managed to rebirth himself as a hill-walking rural rambler, a drink-and-drug-free boulevardier, a vision of redemption that these days Alma will happily cross several busy motorways to say hello to.