Ten minutes later he was swallowing the last of what he thought was more than likely lunch, tongue probing optimistically in the mysterious ditches of his mouth for any lingering mince, tenacious pastry or recalcitrant potato. Blotting his lips in what he thought might well be the manner of a nineteenth-century dandy on the serviette the snack had come with, Benedict screwed up the tissue with its gravy kiss-print, dropping it into one of the litter bins in Abington Street, which he’d by now reached and was ascending. He was roughly level with the photographic shop close to the mouth of the most recent shopping arcade, Peacock Place. This crystal palace had taken the place of Peacock Way, an open precinct leading to the Market that had cake-shops and cafés where he’d munch gloomily through teenage comfort teacakes, mooning over whichever heart-stopping Notre Dame or Derngate schoolgirl had just told Ben that she liked him as a friend. Originally, this had been the Peacock Hotel, inn or coach-house for five hundred years. People still talked about the lovely stained-glass peacock, one of the establishment’s interior decorations, which had more than likely fallen prey to salvage men during the hotel’s senseless demolition in November 1959. Up on the glasswork of the arcade’s entrance these days was a pallid stick-on imitation, stylised craft-kit product from an overpaid design team.
Passing Jessop’s, the photography equipment shop, he wondered if they still had Pete Corr’s photograph of Benedict, framed and for sale up on their wall. Corr was a local shutterbug now married, living somewhere out in Canada by all accounts, under the mock-Dutch moniker of Piet de Snapp. Formerly just plain Pete the Snap, he’d specialised in portraits of the town’s outlandish fauna: Ben’s old Spring Lane schoolmate Alma Warren, posing moodily in sunglasses and leather jacket, mutton dressed up as Olivia Newton-John; the Jovian mass and gravity of much-missed local minstrel-god Tom Hall in customary daywear, individually-engineered playschool pyjamas and a tasselled hat swiped from the Ottomans; Benedict Perrit sat in state amongst the snaking roots of the eight-hundred-year-old beech in Sheep Street, smiling ruefully. As if there were another way to smile. Ah ha ha ha.
He carried on through Abington Street’s pink, pedestrianised meander. Without curbs to bound and shape all the frenetic motion that had poured along this main drag for at least five hundred years, it seemed as if these days the street mainly attracted those who were themselves similarly unfocussed and directionless. As Benedict himself was, come to think of it. He’d no idea where he thought he was going, not with only twenty-seven pence remaining in the wake of his impulsive pasty, gone now save for the occasional flavour-haunted burp. Perhaps a long walk up the Wellingborough Road to Abington would do him good, or would at any rate not cost him anything.
Continuing uphill, pleasantly numbed against existence in a warm cocooning fog, the entrance to the Grosvenor Centre crawled past on his left. He tried to conjure the thin mouth of Wood Street, which had occupied the spot some thirty years before, but found his powers of evocation blunted by the beer. The half-forgotten terraced aperture was too feeble a spectre to prevail against the glass wall of swing doors, the sparkling covered boulevard beyond where the somnambulists somnambled, lit like ornamental crystal animals by the commercial aura-fields they passed through. Everyone looked decorative in the all-round illumination. Everyone looked brittle.
Twenty-seven pence. He wasn’t even sure that would still buy a Mars Bar, though he could still savour the self-pity. Benedict picked up his pace a little passing by top Woolworth’s, these days more precisely only Woolworth’s, hoping the increased velocity would straighten out his veer. He gave this up for lack of a result after approximately thirty seconds, lapsing to a melancholy trudge. What was the point in walking faster when he wasn’t going anywhere? More speed would only bring him to his problems quicker, and in his state might lead inadvertently to crossing the blurred line between a drunken stumble and a drunken rampage. The unbidden vision of Ben gone berserk in Marks & Spencer’s, running nude and screaming through a hail of melting-middle chocolate puddings, should have been a sobering one but only made him giggle to himself. The giggling didn’t help, he realised, with his tactic of not looking pissed. This still made only four things he was useless at, namely escape, finding a job, explaining himself adequately and not looking pissed. Four trivial deficiencies, Ben reassured himself, and as naught in the sweep of a man’s life.
He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy. The retail parks outside the town had drained the commerce from Northampton’s centre, which had been an increasingly ugly proposition for some years now, anyway. Rather than try to stop the rot, the council had allowed the town’s main veins to atrophy and wither. Spinadisc, the long-established independent record shop that Benedict was now approaching on the street’s far side, had been closed down to make way for a rehab centre, something of that kind. Predictably, there were considerably less substance-users on the premises now that the music and ephemera were gone.
Around the public seating outside the dead jukebox of the former pop emporium, small crowds of black-clad teenagers still congregated in school holidays and at weekends. Ben thought they might be skate-goths or gangsta-romantics. Happy-stabbers or whatever. He had difficulty keeping up. Shifting his doleful gaze from the murder of hoodies flocked on Abington Street’s further edge, he looked back to the side along which he was walking. A vague drift of people flowed towards him past the still-magnificent façade of the town library, and there came a synaptic jolt, a minor judder and resettling of reality as Benedict realised that one of them was Alma Warren. Ah ha ha.
Alma. She always took him back, a walking memory-prompt of all the years they’d known each other, since they’d been together in Miss Corrier’s class at Spring Lane School when they were four. Even back then, you’d never have confused her with a girl. Or with a boy, for that matter. She was too big, too single minded, too alarming to be anything but Alma, in a gender of her own. Both of them sideshow novelties in their own ways, they’d been inseparable throughout long stretches of childhood and adolescence. Winter evenings shivering in the attic up above the barn in his dad’s wood-yard down in Freeschool Street, Ben’s telescope poking into the starlight through an absent windowpane when they were both on flying saucer watch. The tricky post-pubertal stretch when he began his poetry and she her painting, and when Alma would get furiously angry and stop speaking to him every other fortnight, over their artistic differences as she insisted, but most probably when she’d just fallen to the communists. They’d both made idiots of themselves in the same pubs, in the same stencil-duplicated arts-group magazines, but then she’d somehow managed to talk up her monomania into a prosperous career and reputation, while Ben hadn’t. Now he didn’t run into her much, nobody did, except upon occasions such as this when she came flouncing into town dressed like a biker or, if she were wearing her pretentious cloak, a fifteenth-century nun who’d been defrocked for masturbation, more rings underneath her eyes than on her ostentatiously embellished fingers.