Having had, presumably, a hand or at the very best a chubby finger in the neighbourhood’s brutal demise while still in office, even if entirely passively, Jim Cockie fits the profile. There was that look in his bugged Tex Avery eyes, furtive and guilty, right before he’d turned around and walked off in a hurry. Don’t they say, if you wait long enough, the murderer always returns to where it happened, to the crime scene? Sometimes it’s to gloat, or sometimes in a panic-stricken effort to conceal incriminating evidence. Occasionally, so they tell him, it’s to masturbate, although Studs doubts if that would be the motive in this current instance. Once in a long while, of course, the perp’s compulsion to revisit the chalk outlines of their killing ground might be born of a genuine remorse.
Uphill, the new prime suspect is diminishing away to nothingness like a white phosphor dot shrinking into the starless vastness of a cooling 1950s telly. Curling his lower lip until he’s worried that it could roll up and travel down his chin, the stumped P.I. turns south and heads back down the way he came. He knows that Cockie is protected; knows that he could never get a case to stick. Forget it, Studs. It’s Chinatown.
The triangles and diamonds of a stencilled sky behind the old gas-holder hulking further down the slope are starting their decline to indigo, and he can feel the utter jet of night descending on whatever narrative he’s in, the big obsidian coming down upon this over-complicated continuity with desperate hours to go before tomorrow morning and his rendezvous with Warren at her exhibition. He heads back to where he left the, oh, he doesn’t know, time-travelling De Lorean or something, with his craggy head a place of gothic transepts and determinism, the soul-crushing clockwork of the hackneyed, billiard-ball plot trajectory, this character-arc passing for a life.
He thinks of crosses, double-crosses and the Mr. Big behind the scenes pulling the strings for Hervey, Wesley, Swedenborg and all the rest, the man upstairs who’s always careful to keep out the picture, an elusive boss of night and mortal intrigue, frequently reported dead but always with some wiggle room left for a sequel.
He locates his car in the protracted slow dissolve of twilight, drives home, checks to see if any casting agencies have left a message, eats his warmed-up dinner, goes to bed. After a great while and a mug of Horlicks, everything goes noir.
THE JOLLY SMOKERS
Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone
On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet
Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,
Ground to which he feels no entitlement
Nor any purchase on the sullen street;
Unpeels his chill grey cheek from chill grey stone
Then orients himself in time and space.
The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor
With on one wall some obsolete decree
Meant for the Cypriot community
And at the near end an iron-studded door,
A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face,
Or that of some more academic tome.
He struggles up onto one threadbare knee.
Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day
Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway
Thanks to the shame of university
And a conviction that he can’t go home,
Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves
Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch
Through furthering Den’s literary bent.
He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent
To shelter in this all but disused church,
A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,
This sentry-box in lieu of an address.
Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men
With targets, goals to which they must adhere,
Themselves regretting the proffered career
That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den
Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness
In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.
Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,
Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,
A student loan he dare not think about
Here in his hutch, its corners harbouring
Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes
When all he’s ever craved is poetry,
The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.
To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear
Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair
Nor the reproof of hard-up Mum and Dad
Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.
Thus one door closes, while another shuts
Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.
To doss in Saxon palaces and forts
Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts
So with a sigh he stands and gathers up
His bag as though it were his spilling guts,
Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night
With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:
Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,
Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.
An unaccustomed surge of urgency
Propels Den out into a tired rose light
From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,
Across worn flags that vandal time deletes
Where names and mortal numbers disappear,
Erasing status, sentiment, and year.
Dead information sulks beneath these streets
And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld
Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,
The war memorial’s black memo-spike,
Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls
When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,
Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like
Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate
Then over Marefair, observed with disdain
By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;
White hair and beard, officious little sod.