The bottom entrance to the inner rectangle is gated off with black iron rails and has been for some years. Residents only, which she finds entirely understandable. She can still stand there at the gate and peer along the path to where the little patch of shrubbery is partly visible. As she recalls, it had been on a chilly day in early Spring when she’d been eight or nine, sauntering home for lunch from Spring Lane School up at the top of Scarletwell Street. On a whim, she’d taken a diversion through the flats purely because she’d thought it might make a more interesting view than the plain slope of the old hill, the empty playing fields that bordered it, the rear windows of their surviving terrace on St. Andrew’s Road. Idling down the concrete pathways of the block’s interior amongst the flapping sheets and baby-clothing, she had reached the triangle where all the bushes grew down at the bottom end. She might have walked past and paid the familiar vegetation no attention were it not for the intriguing detail that had caught her junior miniaturist’s eye.
Hung from the thinnest needle of a twig, there on a waxy evergreen, was a translucent white grub that appeared to levitate, so fine was the material by which it was suspended, its minute head blind and glistening. Dangling in the cold crystal of the morning air it curled and shimmied like an escapologist, albeit one whose act worked in reverse and hinged upon secreting his own straitjacket. Twisting and contorting it deliberately wound itself up in the near-invisible strands that it was somehow producing. Alma had stooped closer to the bush in awe, her nose only an inch or two from the dependent caterpillar. She remembers wondering if it was thinking anything and making up her mind that probably it was, if only squishy little caterpillar thoughts.
She’d never witnessed this precise form of activity before, and she had puzzled over why the tiny creature was alone in its pursuit. She’d realised that she must be looking at the manufacture of a rice-grain sized cocoon, but hadn’t previously understood that this was such a solitary operation. It was then that Alma had observed to her relief that the grub had at least one little friend, another pallid maggot that laboriously inched along a nearby shoot, where there were …
Alma had gasped noisily and taken a step back. Reality had shivered, reconfiguring itself before her startled eyes. On every branch, on every twig and under every leaf of the coniferous shrub had been a thousand more identical white worms, all patiently engaged in the same task. The bush itself was an immense white cobweb, suddenly alive with writhing threads of alien purpose. How could she have stood there for five minutes and not noticed this spectacular and otherworldly sight? The moment had been an apocalypse, in the sense that the poets of that school might use the term, people like Henry Treece or Alma’s favourite, Nicholas Moore. She’d realised in that instant that the world about her was not necessarily the way she saw it, that amazing things might constantly be happening under everybody’s noses, things that people’s mundane expectations stopped them from perceiving. Watching what she’d later realised must be silkworms colonise what she’d belatedly construed to be a mulberry bush, she’d formed a vision of the world as glorious and mutable, liable to explode into unlikely new arrangements if you simply paid enough attention; if your eye was in.
She stands there, a suspicious figure peering through black bars and evening murk into the Greyfriars courtyard, and feels phantoms swarming everywhere around her. She is always here at this precise location and this moment, her ordained position in the simultaneous and unchanging 4D gem of space-time. Life is on an endless loop, her consciousness revisiting the same occasions for eternity and always having the experience for the first time. Human existence is a grand recurrence. Nothing dies or disappears and each discarded condom, every dented bottle-top in every alleyway is as immortal as Shamballah or Olympus. She feels the unending marvel of a beautiful and dirty world swell to include her in its fanfare music. Lowering her caked lashes, she imagines everything around her wriggling and alive, suddenly made out of a billion glossy organisms that she has not previously noticed, the whole landscape covered in a spectral gauze, a fresh-spun silk of circumstance.
At length she turns away from the locked gate and carries on down Bath Street into Scarletwell Street and on to St. Andrew’s Road. The short strip of ancestral grass is still the same. As usual she puzzles over the still-standing corner house and tries without success to work out where the Warren residence had once been situated. Actually, she’s pretty sure it was the spot between two young and sturdy trees about halfway along. It feels appropriately eerie, but she can’t be certain. Finally it strikes her that to be stood motionless beside the road down in this quarter of the town might possibly be sending the wrong signals and she turns away to walk the long route home, up Grafton Street to Barrack Road and then around the Racecourse back onto East Park Parade.
Crossing the Kettering Road up by the oddly decorative sheltered tram-stop where the town’s principal gallows at one time resided she is thinking about art in the Charles Saatchi era; art become mono-dimensional commercial gesturing directed at an audience so culturally lost it feels it has no platform from which it can venture criticism. Only other artists — and then only renegades — seemed confident enough in their opinions to effectively mount a rebuttal. She recalls the last time that she’d had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin’s work which Alma wishes that she’d said herself: “My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everyone you ever slept with in a tent?” Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestions for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda’s list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.
Making her way along the gorgeously eroded pavement of East Park Parade she at last reaches her own door, fumbling in her too-tight trouser pockets to retrieve a temporarily elusive key before effecting entry. Inside Alma switches on the lights and winces ruefully at all the mess and clutter. Why can’t she be tidy like a proper adult? Inwardly, she blames it on the influence of Top Cat. When she and her brother Warry were both growing up they’d both aspired to live in a converted dustbin like their feline hero, somewhere where you could just brush your teeth then switch the nearby streetlamp off with a convenient pull-cord before pulling on the battered lid and bunking down. Only much later had she wondered where he spat the toothpaste.
Alma stuffs her peppers, covers them with feta cheese and sticks them in the oven. As they roast she rolls a joint and smokes it while she makes a start on leafing through her copy of New Scientist. After supper she has three or four more reefers while she finishes the science magazine, reads Private Eye and then re-watches two more episodes from the last season of The Wire. Around eleven she stubs out her final fatty of the day, gulps down her Red Rice Yeast pill and her ineffectual Kalms and turns off all the lights before retiring.
Naked underneath her duvet, Alma rests on her right side and pulls a tuck of quilt between her bony knees. Off in the smash and puke of Friday night are sirens, catcalls, curses from over-relaxed young men and women navigating their ways back and forth along East Park Parade. She rubs her feet together, satisfied by the dry rasp of sole on sole. Mulberry cobwebs creep across the inside of her eyelids.