This morning only the dogs were about, sweeping back and forth in splitting and recombining packs: they weren’t like ordinary mongrels – it was as if a transplant surgeon had crazily jumbled up a dozen pedigree breeds. Now as they mobbed together it seemed that the legs and heads were frenziedly trying to match themselves up with the right bodies and tails. The Health Department had been baffled by the speed at which our local typhoid epidemic was spreading until they’d established that it was through all those dirty nappies the young mums kept throwing out of the blocks’ windows: The dogs would lick them, then lick their owners’ faces.
I set out for a roofing job in Bradford 13. The van jerked and roared and pumped out black smoke. Even through the city centre they gave me ten yards clearance, front and back. I hated driving up Thornton Road. First its mills had closed, then its light industry, then the butchers and the bakers, until all that was left was dereliction and decay. I’d liked that fine but then bright new frontages had appeared with bewilderingly kaleidoscopic window displays: Waggy’s Fancy Dress Hire, Ken’s Kendo Accessories, The Moonchild Magick Shop, Pets and Patios…I was glad I’d had the sense to drink away my own redundancy money.
The woman who’d rung greeted me as if I was a Boy Scout on a Bob-a-Job. At five feet nothing she still managed to give the impression that she was looking down on me. Her pipe cleaner legs bent under the weight of her sack-like body and the skin of her face, above three rolls of chin-fat, was stretched taut, as if she was suffocating inside a plastic bag. She was wearing tight flowered shorts with a cake fringe border and a black Lycra sports bra that was gradually disappearing between folds of flesh. She pointed up at the roof and clicked her fingers, then went into the house and made a cup of coffee, without offering me one. I told myself that she must have had a lot of pain in her life – although probably it had been nothing like enough. I could hear her sniggering when I couldn’t get my ladders off the van rack. My usual granny knots had somehow mutated into a complex network of weird loops, hitches and twists. As I unpicked one, another three seemed to form: finally I took my Stanley knife and just slashed the ropes to pieces.
Most of the slates were missing on the roof’s west-facing side; even on a still day, gusts of wind kept exploding out of the two hundred square-miles of nothing much between here and Lancashire, sneakily trying to pitch me off. I started to clean the dead leaves out of the guttering. The woman sunbathed below: a thick book was propped open in front of her but she never turned its pages. Her tinny radio was tuned to Classic FM but I knew that she didn’t really like the music, just had it on to impress. To ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ she extricated her top and rolled over on to her front. I resisted the temptation to bombard her with the three slimy tennis balls I’d just uncovered. You came across some strange things in gutters: I once found a gold octagonal ladies’ watch – maybe it had been dropped by a jackdaw or fallen from the wrist of a passing angel? Suspicious of good fortune, I’d just left it there.
I went to the pub for lunch: four pints of Landlord, to wash down a Brontë Booster – an enormous egg, bacon and sausage fry-up. I tried to imagine Emily, Charlotte and Anne, born just across the road, getting their teeth into that. I watched a coachload of Jap tourists videoing each other being blown up and down Main Street; why were they so obsessed with the Brontës? Whenever I was driving over Haworth Moor I’d stop and twist the new signposts of Japanese characters to point in the opposite direction.
When I got back, my employer had turned over, her poor little tits slopping on to the grille of her rib cage: the sun seemed to be not tanning but bleaching her. The beer had restored my courage or my balance: from the roof I looked down like a God into the bowl-shaped valley that contained Bradford. My block and the others were sticking out of the heat-haze like the clutching fingers of a drowning man. I began to replace the corroded section at the back with the grey plastic guttering I’d nicked from the site of the hospital extension: I still felt guilty about this, so I wedged two blackbirds’ nests back in place. Sometimes they come back, year after year – what must it feel like, living in a nest?
A red Audi swung into the drive. Hubby was home: she didn’t even twitch as the car door slammed. I watched him enter the house: the top of his head, like a tonsured monk’s, looked familiar. He returned in matching floral shorts, carrying two cans of Heineken: he popped one and threw the other up to me. It was the manager of the Jobcentre where I signed on: I hoped that he hadn’t recognized me, silhouetted against the sky. He lay down alongside his wife in the shrinking patch of sunlight, his bare yellow feet next to her head.
When I finished he was waiting ready with another beer. He knew me all right. ‘Seventy for cash,’ I said. He smiled and counted three tens into my hand, paused, added two fives and then tucked his wallet back down the front of his shorts. There was nothing to be done. I glanced over at his wife, then at him, then dropped my hand and checked my flies but he wasn’t falling for it. His grin broadened and he shook his head slightly: he gave me credit for more taste.
After tearing my T-shirt into strips to tie the ladders back on, I let my van slide down into the city. At every red light I expected them to shoot off their rack and go through the windscreen of the car that crawled in front all the way, pulling out whenever I tried to pass, its driver’s billiard-ball head bobbing on a long, easily-severable neck.
As I was readying myself to lay into the shutters of my lock-up, coppers suddenly came at me from north, south and west. Two of them pinioned my arms while Mark the Community Policeman strolled up. He’d never decided whether he wanted to be a hard cop or a soft cop: one day he was all smiles, the next slamming anyone he saw up against the nearest wall – he even looked different, alternately fat and jolly or thin and mean. His hands dropped gently on to my shoulders, as if in a blessing: ‘So why did you do it, then?’ he asked me with a sigh.
‘Do what?’
The scrum broke up as they all skipped aside like chorus boys to point dramatically towards the windowless rear of my block.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
The enormous gloss letters were bisected by the leaking downpipe, their ultrawhite glare almost bringing tears to my eyes.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I told Mark.
‘You’ve got paint and ladders.’
‘It’s not my writing. You can check.’
‘Clever bastard. No one has ten foot handwriting.’ His hands returned to my shoulders, this time squeezing hard.
‘Have you been hurt by any slags lately, sir?’ asked a pale, earnest constable who looked to be about twelve.
‘Dozens,’ I said, ‘but none in this block.’
Mark’s grip tightened. ‘Where were you last night?’
‘The Puck, The Harp of Erin, The Castle, The Queen’s, The Bedford, The Station, The Armstrong. Then the Karachi. I got back about one.’
‘So you just walked past and didn’t notice it?’
‘You know how it is; you never see anything unless you’re looking for it.’ I put a slight quaver into my voice: ‘I couldn’t have done it, lads. I get vertigo. I can’t go too high since they drained my sinuses.’
All I had to do was keep denying everything. Coppers these days have shorter attention spans. If you can keep them talking for longer than three minutes you’re in the clear: a few at the fringes had already begun to slope off.
‘Did you see or hear anything unusual?’
I thought it best not to mention my re-tied ladders: ‘You know how it is: it’s only unusual if there isn’t something unusual round here.’
As I switched from laughter to a fake coughing fit they