This was yet another aspect of the mornings, quite apart from thinking about death the moment you woke up, that Benedict found problematic. It was two things, actually, that he was largely unsuccessful with. Escape, and finding work. Of course, the biggest stumbling block he had with finding work was that he wasn’t looking, or not very hard, at any rate. It wasn’t all the actual work that put him off, it was the job: all the procedures and the people who came with it. He just didn’t think he had the heart to introduce himself to a collection of new faces, people who knew nothing about poetry or Freeschool Street and wouldn’t have a clue what Benedict was all about. He couldn’t do it, not at his age, not to strangers, not explain himself. To be completely frank, he never had been able to explain himself at any age, to anybody, or at least he’d never managed to explain to anybody’s satisfaction. Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.
“I’m always looking. You know me. The eyes that never rest. Ah ha ha ha.”
His mother tipped her head to one side while regarding him, with fondness and bone-tired incomprehension at the same time.
“Ah, well. It’s a pity that yer eyes can’t pass the trick on to yer arse, in that case. ’Ere. ’Ere’s summat fer yer dinner. I expect I’ll see yer when yer get back in, if I’m still up.”
Eileen pressed ten Benson & Hedges and a ten-pound note into his hand. He beamed at her, as if it didn’t happen every morning.
“Woman, I could kiss yer.”
“Yiss, well, you do and you’ll get this.” This was his mam’s fist, thrust upwards like a haunted Aboriginal rock outcrop. Ben laughed, pocketing the tenner and the fags, then went into the hall. He fastened his burnt-orange neckerchief across the swallowed Carlsberg bottle of his Adam’s apple, squinting at the daylight filtered through the frosted panel by the front door and deciding it looked bright enough to leave his coat behind, though not so bright that he need bother taking his straw hat. His waistcoat looked like brothel curtains as it was. He didn’t want to over-do it.
He transferred the ciggies from his trouser pocket to his canvas satchel, where he’d also got some Kleenex tissues and an orange, with a copy of A Northamptonshire Garland edited by Trevor Hold and published by Northampton Libraries. It was just something he was dipping into at the moment, just to keep his hand in. Bag across one shoulder, Benedict called goodbye to his mam, drew in a fortifying breath before the hallway mirror and then, flinging wide the front door, he launched himself valiantly once more into the fray, and the frayed world it was conducted in.
Spit-coloured clouds moved over Tower Street, formerly the upper end of Scarletwell. The street had been renamed after the high-rise, Claremont Court, that blocked out half the western sky upon his right, one of two brick stakes hammered through the district’s undead heart. On recently refurbished crab-paste brickwork were the words or possibly the single word NEWLIFE, a sideways silver logo, more a label for a mobile phone or for an everlasting battery than for a tower block, he’d have thought. Benedict winced, attempting not to look at it. For the most part, he found it comforting to still reside in the beloved neighbourhood, except for those occasions when you noticed that the loved one had been dead for thirty years and was now decomposing. Then you felt a bit like someone from an item out of Fortean Times, one of those lovelorn and demented widowers still plumping up the pillows for a bride who’s long since mummified. Newlife: urban regeneration that they’d had to literally spell out because of its conspicuous absence otherwise. As if just bolting up the mirror-finish letters made it so. What had been wrong with all the old life, anyway?
He checked to see the door had locked behind him, with his mam now being on her own in there, and as he did he saw the big fat druggy with the bald head, Kenny something, lumbering down Simons Walk that ran along the end of Tower Street, at the back of Claremont Court. He had grey slacks and a grey sports-top on, which from a distance looked all of a piece, like one big romper suit, as if the dealer were an outsized baby who’d exceeded the safe dose of Calpol. Benedict pretended he’d not seen him, turning left and walking briskly up towards the street’s far end, a confluence of sunken walkways tucked away behind the traffic vortex of the Mayorhold. How could anybody get that fat on drugs, unless they ate them in a fried bread sandwich? Ah ha ha ha.
Yellow leaves were plastered in a partial lino on the wet macadam at his feet as he passed the Salvation Army building, a prefabricated barracks that he didn’t think he’d ever been inside. He doubted they went in for tambourines these days, much less free cups of tea and buns. The twentieth century had been a better time to be a washout. Back then poverty had come with a brass band accompaniment and a cheek full of scone dissolving in hot Brooke Bond; kindly bosoms heaving under navy blue serge and big golden buttons. Now it came with flint-eyed teenage death-camp supervisors in the no-hiding-place glare of the Job Centre, and whatever soundtrack happened to be playing in the shopping precinct outside, usually “I’m Not In Love”. The short street ended as it met the footpath to the underpass, where a high wall reared up to bound the robot shark tank of the Mayorhold. Patterned with a bar-code stripe of ochre, tangerine and umber, it was probably intended to provide a Latin atmosphere, whereas instead it looked like an attack of vomiting restaged in Lego. Benedict stopped walking for a moment so that he could take it in, the ground where he was standing, with its full historical enormity.
For one thing, it was near here that one of his father’s favourite pubs had been, the Jolly Smokers, although this was by no means the full extent of the locale’s historic pedigree. This spot was where Northampton’s first ‘Gilhalda’ or Town Hall had stood back in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, at least according to historian Henry Lee. Richard the Second had declared it in his charter as the place where all the bailiffs and the mayor were situated. Bailiffs were still seen down here from time to time, though mayors less often these days. Late on in the thirteen-hundreds all the wealth and power had shifted to the east side of the town, and a new Guildhall had been raised down at the foot of Abington Street, near where Caffè Nero stood today. That was the point from which you could most likely date the area’s decline: for more than seven hundred years the Boroughs had been going steadily downhill. It was a long hill, evidently, though as he stood there regarding the emetic tile-work Benedict believed the bottom was at last in sight.
Although the first Town Hall had been located here, that wasn’t why the former town square had been named the Mayorhold, or not as Ben understood things, anyway. His theory was that this had happened later, in the 1490s, at a time when Parliament had placed Northampton under the control of an all-powerful mayor and council made up of four dozen wealthy buggers, sorry matron, wealthy burghers that they called the Forty-Eight. Benedict thought that this was when the people of the Boroughs, like the folk of nearby Leicester, had begun their grand tradition of electing a joke mayor, to take the piss out of the processes of government from which they’d been excluded. They’d hold mock elections in the square here, hence the name, and would award a literal tin-pot chain of office made from a pot lid to whoever they’d randomly appointed, often somebody half cut, half sharp, half missing from a war wound, or, in extreme cases, all of the above. Benedict had a notion that his own paternal grandfather, Bill Perrit, had been one such appointee, but that was based on no more than the old man’s nickname, which had been “the Sheriff”, and the fact that he’d sit there all day blind drunk outside the Mayorhold Mission in an old wheelbarrow that he treated like a throne. Benedict wondered briefly if he could claim office based upon being descended from the Sheriff and on living where the first Town Hall had stood? He fancied himself as a Titchbourne Claimant, as a Great Pretender, one of those who’d put more forethought into getting crowns on heads than keeping heads on shoulders. Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and Benedict Perrit. Names to conjure with. Ah ha ha ha.