When the thin young man with Brylcreemed hair and a dark suit climbed from the driver’s seat and started striding angrily towards the child-infested Morris Minor, all the other kids had been positioned so they could immediately scarper, leaving only Alma stranded on the creaking roof. The man — whenever she tries to remember what he looked like she gets only a false, superimposed photograph of Ian Brady — had grabbed her from atop the wreck and carried her, screaming and wailing, back to his own motor, shoving her inside. There was a youngish woman in the car, with mousy brown hair, although once again Alma’s melodramatic memory has pasted in a shot of Myra Hindley, slightly younger and without the bleach or vampire panda make-up. Alma had been pleading, crying, struggling in the back seat. The young man had said that he was going to take her off to the police station but then had suddenly relented, perhaps when he noticed that the woman with him was by now looking almost as frightened as the tubby, weeping little girl. He’d opened the rear door and let her out onto the pavement before roaring off, leaving her standing sobbing by the roadside for her pals to find when they emerged from hiding. What had all that been about?
Part of her is almost inclined to take the story as it comes. She can quite easily see her would-be abductor as a sour-faced and emotionally strangled young churchgoer of the middle classes and the early 1960s, taking his fiancée for a daring spin through the poor quarter, wanting to impress her with his moral rectitude by scaring straight one of the district’s infant vermin. That seems much more likely than the lurid child-molester narrative she’d retroactively imposed on the scenario, although it doesn’t make her feel a lot less interfered-with, or less angry. She recalls the young man’s pasty skin and his cold little eyes. Whatever he’d imagined he was doing and whatever his intent, he’d been no different from the current rash of curb-crawlers, using the Boroughs as their private zoo. She’d been disturbed to learn that during the alarming weekend of apparent rapes that had occurred last year, one of the victims had reported being dragged into a car in Chalk Lane, almost on the same spot where Alma’s attempted kidnapping had happened. Walking past the unkempt slope of yellow-green she wonders if the place has some malignant genius loci, something in the soil that gives it a predisposition towards a specific crime, repeated down the decades. She remembers hearing that a skeleton had been found at the site during some excavations in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t know if it turned out to be the product of an ancient burial or of a relatively recent murder, doesn’t know if it was male or female, child or adult. Lacking any contradictory evidence, she construes the remains as those of an abduction victim, lonely underneath the earth and calling out for company. Whichever way she looks at it, this is a haunted piece of ground. How typical, then, that she’s chosen this place for her preview.
She turns left into Chalk Lane where she immediately sees the nursery with people moving round inside it, gingerly transporting canvasses from one side of the small space to another. Alma can’t see any obvious signs of damage or catastrophe and feels relieved, although to be quite honest she’s not in the least bit nervous about how tomorrow’s going to turn out. She’s confident that everything will be the way it’s meant to be.
Mounting the short flight of stone steps towards the door, she casts her mind back to when this place was the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dance school, an oasis of refinement that had been incongruously situated in the Boroughs, not known for its Terpsichorean accomplishments, a place where they discouraged having sex while standing up in case it led to dancing. Her distinguished actor pal Bob Goodman has confessed to having often visited the dance school as a child, presumably back in the days before his face had caught fire and been put out with a shovel. She imagines him, a nervous middle-class kid shuffling up these very steps each Saturday to take his hated lessons, dressed up in a kilt. It’s probably all for the best that little Bob and little Alma never met back then, not with him in a tartan skirt and talking posh. She’d have well kicked his head in.
Pushing open the swing door, Alma takes in the scene. Other than her there are three people present. Visiting from Wales, Burt Regan is the one officially entrusted with getting the pieces down here and set up in the right place, although it seems he’s being helped in this by wiry Roman Thompson. Burt calls out to Alma as she enters.
“ ’Ello, Alma. ’Ere, was that yer finger-armour that I could ’ear rattlin’ when you were comin’ down the street, or ’ave you ’ad yer fanny pierced?”
“Yes, actually, I have. I got a length of anchor-chain from the Titanic that I wear as jewellery. That’s probably what you could hear. It cost me thousands, and it would have been twice that if I’d have bothered to have all the rust scraped off. Hello, Rome.”
Setting Work In Progress up against the makeshift gallery’s end wall, Rome Thompson grins, crumpling the moth-eaten glove puppet of his face, a distressed Basil Brush after the Pytchley Hunt has finished with him. Crafty wrinkles in a windscreen shatter-pattern radiate from eyes that still burn like gunpowder fuses. Alma thinks that Roman Thompson is quite possibly the most dangerous individual she has ever met, and she means this in an admiring way. Why are the best blokes always gay?
“ ’Ow are yer doin’, Alma? D’yer like ’ow we’ve set up yer exhibition? I’ve been supervisin’, like. Burt needs a foreman so that ’e don’t fuck it up.”
“You lying cunt! I’ve been ’ere since eleven, and this fucker turned up ’alf an ’our back. ’E’s refused to lift a fuckin’ finger ever since. ’E says ’e’s only ’ere in ’is capacity as an art critic. ’E’s like fuckin’ Sister Wendy, only interested in the ones with cocks.”
Leaving the two men to their robust interlocution, Alma sidles over to the nursery’s fourth occupant, a pretty, goggle-eyed young woman standing at the room’s far end and looking moderately intimidated by Roman and Burt, a pair of nutcase ogres from another century. This is Lucy Lisowiec, a representative of the community association CASPAR, a group that provides one of the few remaining neural networks still holding the senile neighbourhood together. Alma met her through the Streetlaw rappers, for whom Lucy seems to be a combination of street-credible but sensible big sister and benign probation officer. It was Lucy who managed to secure the nursery for Alma’s exhibition, which means that it’s Lucy’s job that’s on the line if anything goes wrong. This is no doubt the reason why she’s looking nervously at Burt and Roman, who give the impression that there’s something going badly wrong simply by turning up, like uniformed Gestapo officers at a pet funeral. Alma attempts to reassure her.
“Hello, Luce. I can see just from that look you’ve got on your face that these two — well, they’re little more than hired thugs, really — that they’ve managed to offend you. You poor love. You’ve probably heard things that someone your age shouldn’t have to hear, things that will stay with you forever. All I can do is apologise. The man down at the pen said if I didn’t give them work, then they’d be put to sleep.”
Lucy is laughing, showing off her winsome overbite. She really is a little darling, working on a dozen projects with the Boroughs residents at once, minding their kids down at the CASPAR offices in St. Luke’s House on nights when she’s there working late, shepherding Streetlaw to their gigs, living alone above MacDonald’s in the Drapery, developing a stomach ulcer at the age of twenty-seven — Alma has been recently force-feeding her both Actimel and Yakult — all from trying to cooperate creatively with wonderful, deserving people who are also sometimes utter fucking nightmares, Alma herself certainly included in that category.