Of course, you couldn’t say that. You could only mumble non-committally and wish him luck, ask him to bring you back a winged horse or a flying carpet, duty free, safe in the knowledge that by the next time John sobered up, the fond, nostalgic jaunt to Mordor would have been forgotten. It’s too bad that Studs ignored his own unspoken words of advice, hadn’t realised until right this moment that what’s true of Tehran is as true of Freeschool Street. This scruffy piece of ground has seen its revolutions, tyrannies replaced by other tyrannies, its character revised by different stripes of fundamentalism, socio-political or economic: King Charles, Cromwell, King Charles Junior, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Now that Studs thinks about it, the terrain beneath his feet even shares Little John’s status as deposed royalty: the rough trapeze of land bounded by Freeschool Street on one side and Narrow Toe Lane and Peter’s Gardens on the other would have been the grounds of Offa’s Saxon palace, with St. Peter’s and St. Gregory’s as the two churches flanking the construction to the west and east respectively. The yawning entrance to Jem Perrit’s buried wood-yard might have opened onto royal stables once, and if he’d only had the foresight to be born twelve hundred years odd earlier then Jem’s son Benedict could have been Offa’s jute-clad poet laureate, or possibly his fool. Poor Tom’s a-cold and a sheep’s bladder on a stick. Ben would have been a natural.
The breeze seems cooler on his stubble, and Studs briskly shakes his head to clear it of the memories, the reverie that gets all over you like gunshot residue. How long has he been standing here on Gregory Street’s corner, uselessly deliberating on dead dwarves and how it’s usually the turf that ends up as the loser in a turf war? He detects slight changes in the local ambience which indicate that he’s been holding up this listing wall for quite some time. The western sky is clearer with its light diluted and more palatable, understated tints of colour in its thinning wash as the blue fresco of the day reaches its edges. Distant cars and lorries would appear to have run out of things to say, their conversation flagging and become more intermittent, trailing off to grunts in the post rush-hour hush. Birds arcing down to guttering shrug off their troubles and assume the careless air of almost-home commuters. Friday, May the 26th, makes for the pink, embarrassed blush of its conclusion.
He decides to cast his poorly-placed Mr. Potato Head eye over Horseshoe Street, check out what’s left now of St. Gregory’s other end before he heads for home, calls it a day as if there’s something else that he could call it. In the absence of a bitter wind he turns his leather collar up so that he feels more isolated, and with a last glance at the ambiguous dealership which has supplanted Offa and Jem Perrit and all points between he rolls his shoulders in a hoodlum strut away down Gregory Street with the declining sun behind him. To his left the dereliction of the corner property continues pretty much unchecked while on his right there’s simply nothing there, an agoraphobic stretch of flayed land tumbling uninterrupted down to Peter’s Way and overprinted with a schist of levelled floor-plans like the quantum ripples still discernible on the event-horizon ‘skin’ of black holes, our only surviving record of the cosmic bodies already ingested.
At the street’s bend where it angles sharply to the south stands a three-floor Victorian factory, a great cube of smoked stone which would appear to have been transformed into a recording studio. A fashionably minimal house logo is affixed high on the soot-blasted façade in a naive attempt to impose an identity on the amnesiac edifice, just now pretending to be Phoenix Studios, a well-intentioned effort to evoke the flames of rebirth from the ashes of the neighbourhood, which clearly isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that kind of a fire. In what looks like a disused yard to one side of the building is a heaped moraine of tyres, deposited here long ago as though by a black rubber glacier in the long cold snap following the era of the dino-dozers and tyranno-JCBs, their jointed necks craning and swivelling to take a bite out of a displaced family’s front bedroom, grey wallpaper weeds trailing from yellow metal jaws, an undiscriminating swallowing. He turns right into Gregory Street’s continuation only to discover that there isn’t one. Beyond the studio there’s nothing separating this end of the road from the dual carriageway of Horseshoe Street which runs downhill in parallel, save for a couple of ridiculous low barriers that Little John could have stepped over without noticing. Studs feels a fleeting obligation to walk all the way down and around the edge of where the depots, builders’ yards and houses should have been, out of respect for the dead properties, but that strikes him as both insane and too much trouble so he cuts across the empty dirt instead.
The wide road is to all intents and purposes bereft of cars or people from its foot by the picked skeleton of the gas-holder up to its far summit at the top there, where it runs into the Mayorhold. In the tumbleweed hiatus between clocking off and tying a few on, the district’s voices, both contemporary and ancestral, switch off as abruptly as a background tape-loop. He can hear the empty moments settling like dust on the abandoned highway, muffling its ghosts, the silence bowling off downhill to quiet the supper tables of Far Cotton. Later, almost certainly, comes a cacophony of sirens, retching, intimacies bellowed into mobile phones and all the hairy other, but for now there’s this unscripted pause, the welcome presence of dead air.
He takes his time mounting the incline, feels professionally compelled to notice everything, to let no nuance slip the dragnet of his razor-honed atten-
tion. Here a paving slab cracked into fjords at one corner, there a rear view of the Marefair skyline with its hidden back-yard complications fondly cluttering the rooftop architecture, aerials and fungal growths of satellite dish sprouting from the chimney bricks or drainpipe heights. Across the way, above the low relief of a breeze-block crash-barrier running up the slope’s spine, the far side of Horseshoe Street is in a noticeably better state of upkeep than the tattered edge that Studs patrols, falling within the relatively well-maintained town centre rather than in the forsaken patchwork of the Boroughs. While the one-time motorcycle-
pirate haven of the Harbour Lights is presently enduring the indignity of a rebranding as the Jolly Wanchor or however one pronounces it, the building is at least still standing and may one day see again its leather-armoured clientele. A little further up, an iron-gated yard appended to the 1930s billiard hall looks incomplete without a stumbling and cheery bunch of post-war dads still in their demob suits and taking too long over farewells as they make unhurriedly towards the exit.
Just beyond the snooker parlour is the Gold Street corner where a century ago there stood Vint’s Palace of Varieties, a venue at which the young Charlie Chaplin played on various occasions. Studs is unsure if the great screen hobo’s skittering skid row routines would work as well against a backdrop of contemporary poverty; a different destitution. He thinks not, though that might be because he’s not imagining the Boroughs in decade-evading black and white, nor with its miseries conducted to a tinkling piano soundtrack. Background music changes everything. If they’d stuck some Rick Astley or perhaps the Steptoe theme behind his impaled-sister-raping scene in Besson’s Joan of Arc it would have been hilarious. Or “Nessun Dorma” over his Hamburglar appearances.
As he draws level with the snooker joint across the road he pulls his focus back to the distressed concrete hypotenuse he’s currently ascending, on the scummy side of the street with its disinterred carcass aesthetic and an angry pseudonym on every lamppost. Reckoning that this must roughly be the spot on which the east end of St. Gregory’s once stood he halts his climb to take stock of the victim district’s injuries, to gauge the full extent of what seem almost frenzied mutilations to its substance, even to its map. The surgical removal of the vital organs, could that be the killer’s signature? Some of the shallower cuts to the masonry look like defensive wounds in Studs’ professional opinion, and he’d put good money on discovering skin traces such as planning application notices beneath the chipped slates of the area’s fingernails. Struck by the unexpected poignancy of his hardboiled analogy he finds he’s starting to fill up. The neighbourhood, it’s … you know. Raped and with her face smashed in, but she put up a fight. Good girl. Brave girl. Sleep tight.