The Turks called by Dave's old flat in Agincourt Road as well. Mrs Prentice offered them a cup of tea, because they were well-spoken and she was a trusting soul. They accepted, because subterfuge was integral to their job performance and they enjoyed it in a sick way. She had nothing to tell them, though — her former neighbour had left no forwarding address.
The evenings were long at Phyllis's cottage, there was no television, and Dave found it hard to settle to any reading. It was a tiny weatherboard box cast down in the corner of a ten-acre wheat field, and hidden from the world by the dip and swell of an ancient Holloway. At dawn, the low-angled sun revealed pod-shaped depressions left behind by some lost village in the dew-soaked stubble. A few roses clambered over the bottle-bottom glass of the windowpanes, starlings nesting in the chimney scratched and chirred.
On the weekends Steve came home he would sit at the kitchen table drawing in felt tip on rolls of shelf-lining paper. His drawings were always of elaborate demons — many-headed, multi-armed, their fur green and spiky, their eyes purplish swirls. 'Better out than in,' his mother said, 'and that goes for you too, David.'
'You what?' The cottage was quiet save for the squeak of Steve's felt tips and the 'pop-pop' of a moth caught in a lampshade. There was no way he could have misheard her.
'It's time you wrote to Carl,' she continued. 'You've got to, you have to tell him the truth about all that mad bollocks you buried in their garden.'
'What for?' he snorted. 'I mean to say, what am I gonna do with this … I dunno … this letter if I do write it? Send it him, or bury it as well?'
'Whatever,' she countered. 'That's not the point, the important thing is you can't let all that stuff you wrote when you were off your' — she checked herself — 'when you were ill to be the final word. It's bad enough that it's there at all, up on that hill, cast in bloody metal, screaming' — she made a foray into the unmapped territory of metaphor — 'screaming at the future.'
They didn't make love when Steve was at the cottage; he slept on the other side of a plaster-and-lath wall as thin as matchboard. Dave, unable to sleep, thought back to when Carl was a toddler and he, back from a night's driving, would lie in the pre-dawn grey glimmer, desperate for repose but with the road still rearing up in front of him. There would be a creak, the stolid thump of little feet coming across the landing, the insinuation of a head. Dave felt no love on these occasions, only colossal irritation at the prospect of little toenails scratching his thighs. Now, years later, a sense of loss welled up in him, sweet and cloying as honey. The child hadn't been a part of him at all — he was from another species, half human, half something else. He had been engineered only to be loved and then sacrificed, his corpse rendered down for whatever psychic balm it might provide. Eventually, Dave slept, then woke in the pre-dawn of the present, with Steve stretched out beside him on the mattress.
He went into the village and bought three A4-sized, narrow-feint notebooks from the newsagents. They were the sort he remembered from childhood, the covers obliquely striped in shades of blue, the stripes wefted with what looked like massively magnified bits of bacteriological goo. Dave stared deep into the cover — another familiar thing that was, it transpired, altogether strange. Beside the shelves of stationery were racks of newspapers. On the cover of the Sport the gusset of a soap starlet's exposed panties was circled and enlarged; on the cover of the Daily Mail Gary Finch was being brought down from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a distant pygmy in top hat, cravat and frock coat. His police escort made it seem he'd only succeeded in engineering another failure. Behind him a banner hung from the parapet: FIGHTING FATHERS — BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS.
Dave and Phyl sat at the kitchen table, the notebooks in front of them on the plastic cloth. 'It's like the Knowledge,' she said. 'It's like what you've told me about when you were a Knowledge Boy — you know it's all there in your head, so you've got to call it over, don't you?' He did: he left on the right, then went into the tortuous pattern of mad DOCTRINES and madder COVENANTS. He summoned it up, the hellish DESIGN FOR LIVING he'd tried to foist on his LOST BOY. Each lunatic run across the mental metropolis was pulled out of him and coiled on the table to be picked over by the two of them, between ceaselessly refilled mugs of tea. Phyllis, in these mornings before she set out for the city, her white mask still in a pot in the bathroom, her ruddy features earnestly starred with burst blood vessels, helped Dave to recant. 'No,' she insisted, 'that's not right — you know you don't believe that, you know that's wrong. I don't care what went down between you and Michelle — you don't treat me like that, and now you've got to make things right. It doesn't matter what she did then — it's what you do now that counts.'
A new Book took shape. As Dave trudged along the laborious biro furrows, he turned up a new EPISTLE TO THE SON, which told the lad to RESPECT MEN AND WOMEN BOTH, to strive always for RESPONSIBILITY, to understand that WE MAKE OUR OWN CHOICES IN LIFE, and that BLAMING OTHERS is not an option. Children NEED BOTH THEIR MOTHERS AND THEIR FATHERS, yet if their union does not last there should be no CONFLICT, no tug of HATE. The new Book's composition was evidence of this harmoniousness, for its true author was Phyllis quite as much as Dave. And as for the KNOWLEDGE itself— the mad bigotry of the London cabbie, his aggressive loneliness, his poisonous arrogance, his fearful racism — that too, that had to go. What profiteth a man who can call over all the POINTS and RUNS, if he still does not know where he truly is? This extraordinary document took shape in the little weatherboard cottage, while outside valetudinarian bumble bees veered across the field under a hard rain of ultraviolet rays. Although their thoughts lay in a proximate future, yet the Book became inflected with a STOICISM worthy of Roman citizens hearing the barbarians at the gate, or Sumerian scribes setting down their monumental ataraxy. Between the narrow feint the new Book whispered: the ice caps may melt, the jungles shrivel, the prairies frazzle, the family of humankind may have, at best, three or four more generations before the BREAKUP, before they find themselves sundered from the MUMMY EARTH and compelled to lie down on a crunchy sofabed of a billion animal skeletons, yet there can be no EXCUSE for not trying to DO YOUR BEST and live right. Put a BRICK IN THE CISTERN, clean the ugly smear of motor oil from beneath your TRAINERS and walk away from the city. Abandon it, lose it, let it fall from your mind, for there cannot be — not now, not ever — a new London.
When they were done the two notebooks were filled and it was properly autumn. The harrows came chattering across the great field, tearing up the earth with their steely argument.
15. The Moto Slaughter: JUN 524 AD
The reception area was a long, sunlit corridor on the third floor of the Forecourts of Justice. Every few paces there were deep embrasures and through their windows Carl could see the workaday traffic of the Strand, its deep gorge full of bustling folk and trotting jeejees. Beyond this the high-gabled roofs of the ancient wooden gaffs tumbled down to the tangle of jetties and walkways on the quaggy bank of the Thames.
Foglight streamed through the panes of these windows, picking out every pock and liver spot on the brief's lined sullen face. Carl was closeted with this peculiar-looking bloke in one embrasure, while, three embrasures along, Antonë and his brief — a skinny fellow with a pronounced goitre — were in deep consultation. Both briefs were imposingly attired in thick woollen tracksuits and knee-high trainers. Their cockpieces were tasselled and their formal bald wigs gave them the guise — in Carl's eyes — of granddads at the Council of Ham. This was reassuring to him — while nothing else was.