Upon Ben’s right now, broad imperial steps swept up towards the soaring crystal palace that resembled a Dan Dare cathedral but was where you had to go to pay your council tax. Because of this, the place would always have the feeling of a place of execution, like the old Labour Exchange in Grafton Street, no matter how refined and stately its design. Bills and assessments and adult responsibilities. Places like this were faces of the whetstone that ground people down, that shaved a whole dimension off of them. Benedict moved on hurriedly, past the adjoining Guildhall where he wasn’t certain if the building had been lately cleaned or if its stones were simply bleached by countless flashgun fusillades from countless civic weddings. Geologic strata of confetti, matrimonial dandruff, had accumulated in the corners of its grand stone stairs.
This was the third and very possibly the final place that the town hall would find itself located, after the forgotten Mayorhold and the intermediary position at the foot of Abington Street. Ben looked up, past all the saints and regents decorating the elaborate façade, to where on his high ridge between two spires stood the town’s patron saint, rod in one hand, shield in the other, wings folded behind him. Benedict had never been entirely sure how the Archangel Michael had been made one of the saints, who, unless Ben had got it wrong, were human beings who’d aspired to sainthood through hard work and piety and pulling off some tricky miracles. Wouldn’t an archangel have an unfair advantage, what with being quite miraculous already? Anyway, archangels outranked saints in the celestial hierarchy, as any schoolchild knew. How had Northampton managed to recruit one of God’s four lieutenants as its patron saint? What possible incitements could the town have offered to perk up a posting so much lower down on the celestial scale of reimbursement?
He went on across Wood Hill and down the north side of All Saints, where John Clare once habitually sat within a recess underneath the portico, a Delphic Oracle on day release. Ben crossed before the church, continuing down Gold Street in a soar of shop fronts as if he were still sixteen and riding on his bike. Down at the bottom, while he waited at the lights to cross Horsemarket, he glanced to his left where Horseshoe Street ran down towards St. Peter’s Way and what had previously been the Gas Board yards. Local mythology suggested that it was around where the old billiard hall stood, a few yards from the corner Benedict now occupied, that some time previous to the Norman conquest there had come a pilgrim from Golgotha, from the ground where Christ supposedly was crucified, off in Jerusalem. Apparently the monk had found an ancient stone cross buried at the crucifixion site, whereon a passing angel had instructed him to take the relic “to the centre of his land”, which had presumably been England. Halfway up what was now Horseshoe Street, the angel had turned up again, confirming to the traveller that he had indeed lucked onto the right place. The cross he’d born so far was set into the stonework of St. Gregory’s Church which had been just across the road in Saxon times, the monk’s remains interred beneath it, to become itself a site of pilgrimage. They’d called it the rood in the wall. Here in this grimy offshoot of the Boroughs there resided England’s mystic centre, and it wasn’t only Benedict who thought that. It was God who thought that too. Ah ha ha ha.
The lights changed, with the luminous green man now signifying it was safe for workers in the nuclear industry to cross. He wandered over into Marefair, heading down what had for Benedict always been the town’s main street, westward in a bee-line for St. Peter’s Church. He was still thinking vaguely about angels, after the archangel perched up on the Guildhall and the one who’d shown the monk where he should plant his cross in Horseshoe Street, and Ben recalled at least one other story of seraphic intervention that involved the thoroughfare along which he was walking. At St. Peter’s Church, just up ahead, there’d been a miracle in the eleventh century when angels had directed a young peasant lad named Ivalde to retrieve the lost bones of St. Ragener, concealed beneath the flagstones in the nave, unearthed in blinding light to an accompaniment of holy water sprinkled by the holy spirit who had manifested as a bird. A crippled beggar woman witnessing the incident had risen to her feet and walked, or so the story went. It all tended to foster Ben’s distinct impression that in the Dark Ages one could barely move for angels telling you to go to Marefair.
Benedict had reached the top of Freeschool Street, running off Marefair on the left, before he realised what he’d done. It had been his excursion to the Billing Road, no doubt, that had inclined him to take his old cycle route from school back to a home here that had been demolished ages since. Blithely propelling a leak-shot canoe along his algae-smothered stream of consciousness, he’d somehow managed to blank out the previous thirty-seven years of his existence, adult feet reverting effortlessly to the trails worn in the pavement by their former, smaller selves. What was he like? Ah ha ha ha. No, seriously, what was he like? Was this the onset of damp pantalooned senility and trying to recall which was his ward? Frankly, for all that it was taking place upon a sunlit afternoon this was quite frightening, like finding that you’d sleepwalked to your dad’s grave in the middle of the night.
He stood there staring at the narrow lane, Marefair’s foot traffic bifurcating to flow round him like a stream with Benedict as its abandoned shopping trolley, utterly oblivious to all the babbling movement he was in the midst of. Freeschool Street was, mercifully, barely recognisable. Only the tiny splinters that you could identify still snagged upon the heart. The paving stones that had gone unreplaced, their moss-filled fractures subdividing to an achingly familiar delta. The surviving lower reaches of a factory wall that dribbled down as far as Gregory Street, ferns and young branches shoving past the rotted frames of what had once been windows, now not even holes. He felt a certain gratitude for the street’s bend that blocked his view of where the Perrit family once lived, the company forecourt stretching where they’d laughed and argued and peed in the sink if it was cold outside, together in that single room with the front parlour used entirely as a showcase for the family’s more presentable possessions. This, he thought, this was the real Atlantis.
Teenaged and pretentious, he’d bemoaned the loss of byres and furrows that he’d never known, that were John Clare’s to mourn. Benedict had composed laments to vanished rural England while ignoring the fecund brick wilderness he lived in, but as things turned out there was still grass, there were still flowers and meadows if you looked for them. The Boroughs, on the other hand, a unique undergrowth of people’s lives, you could search for it all you wanted, but that one particular endangered habitat was gone for good. That half-a-square-mile continent had sunk under a deluge of bad social policy. First there had been a mounting Santorini rumble of awareness that the Boroughs’ land would be more valuable without its people, then came bulldozers in a McAlpine tidal wave. A yellow foam of hard hats surged across the neighbourhood to break against the shores of Jimmy’s End and Semilong, the human debris washed up in a scum-line of old people’s flats at King’s Heath and at Abington. When the construction tide receded there’d been only high-rise barnacles, the hulks of sunken businesses and the occasional beached former resident, flopping and gasping there in some resurfaced underpass. Benedict, an antediluvian castaway, became the disappeared world’s Ancient Mariner, its Ishmael and its Plato, cataloguing deeds and creatures so fantastic as to be implausible, increasingly even to Ben himself. The bricked up entrance to the medieval tunnel system in his cellar, could that truly have been there? The horse that brought his dad home every night when Jem was passed out at the reins, could that have possibly existed? Had there been real deathmongers and cows on people’s upstairs landings and a fever cart?