alone in front of my block. Goodman and Burns: it hadn’t been about football or even about how the old fall prey to the young, it had just been a perfect moment…an utterly unexpected intrusion of pattern and grace that had set off simultaneous explosions of somehow sugary warmth in my head, heart and gut, like when I’d stood by my window watching the stitched chevron of those back pockets moving around on that tight white arse far below.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
Since the afternoon the words seemed to have slid down the wall as if to create space for further bulletins. I felt that there was something about all this that I wasn’t quite getting, as if it was a code that I couldn’t crack – as if, on some other level, it had nothing to do with blocks and slags at all. When I closed my eyes I found that the letters were still visible on the red field of my lids.
There was a roar of approaching engines and then a loud squealing of brakes from behind me. At first I thought it was the boys in blue returning for a second shot but these three grille-windowed vans were smaller, blue and gold with Graffiti Removal Unit painted on the sides. The dozen men who came spilling out were all wearing balaclava helmets and dark uniforms with epaulettes and what appeared to be cartridge belts. Some of them had thick droopy moustaches like seventies TV detectives. They jogged past in step, in two precise lines, bearing gleaming steel ladders above their heads. Within thirty seconds they were high above me, scrubbing away at the side of the building.
The Council didn’t usually react so quickly – or at all. Most graffiti was just left well alone: my own favourite – WEBBO/VICIOUS/JEDI – still remained on the railway bridge – in its proud but fading letters of dripping scarlet lake – after fifteen years. Someone powerful had obviously found ours – whether because of size or content – unacceptable. Perhaps there were hundreds of such notices all across the city that were being immediately erased, with all reports suppressed, like they do with UFO sightings.
The sprays and brushes couldn’t shift the letters, so the men had to return to the van for their pressure hoses to blast them away. One of the moustaches ran so fast that he overshot and, in trying to turn, tripped and crashed to the ground. I gave him a mocking slow hand-clap and slurped my tongue round my lips. ‘I just love watching men at work,’ I said. He didn’t reply or even react, just strapped on his hose and shot back up his ladder. I was looking for a chance to make off with a bucket or torch, but then realized that a thirteenth man had remained by the vans with a mobile phone, mumbling incomprehensibly to somebody. Aloft, they worked on in total silence, \\ flat out. I couldn’t stand these new model working men. No talking, no tea or toilet breaks, always running, never walking – if the Council had tried that on when I started on the bins twenty years ago we’d have had the whole city out on strike. We used to work at half the speed for half as long: did we think the world owed us a living? – No, we knew it did. For working on Friday, after midnight, this lot were probably getting only time-and-a-half, at best.
Some of them were working inwards:
| n this | bl |
| ves | a s |
– While the others worked outwards:
| she’s h | ow |
| she | ay… |
Although I knew that they shared a shabby Canal Road hut with the dog-wardens and pest-controllers. it appeared that the GRU wasn’t merely another council department but something sinister, even supernatural. As I watched, it seemed as if they were ruthlessly wiping the words from my memory, as if I’d awakened in the middle of the night to discover them standing around my bed, sandblasting away my dreams, I felt sick and giddy, as when I’d once rested against the electric fence at the edge of a field of cows and thought it had been God’s hand that had struck me down. There was a strange ticking sound that I finally decided could have only been the knocking of my knees. Up until that moment I’d thought this to be merely a figure of speech: maybe my hair would have been standing on end as well, if my head hadn’t been shaved – or rather, bald.
Even when they finished the men didn’t relax, marching silently and expressionlessly back to their vans without looking at each other or at me. I didn’t turn around to watch them go, just continued staring at the empty wall. I was pleased to see that, in their haste, they’d missed the final dot, bottom right. I hoped that the words might also begin to reconstitute themselves but nothing further appeared. I’d always thought that my block was grey but now there was a golden, star-shaped patch where the letters had been. At least our prison had been built of the finest Yorkshire Sandstone. I realized that I was able to recall the words in two halves, by concentrating on the rusting drainpipe and shutting first the left eye:
| In this | |
| there lives | |
| she’s hurt Him | |
| she has |
and then the right:
| block | |
| a slag… | |
| and now | |
| to pay… |
– and then combining them.
I walked up close to look at that sole surviving dot. It hung about ten feet off the ground: I jumped up a few times but even with arms fully extended couldn’t quite reach. It was a perfect circle, slightly larger than my own hand, like the porthole of a ship.
I leapt once more and this time my finger-ends slapped against the whitened stone. Nothing happened for a moment and then it was as if I’d touched the button that opened some cosmic portal, as the hungry hole rapidly hoovered up everyone and everything. They all went past in a blur: a daisy-chain of coppers, Cockneys and GRU, then Goodman and Burns laughing together, Eleanor and the apostate, Doris and my wife, the innocent slags with their prams, a perfect arse and a pony tail…the pubs, The Karachi, the house in Thornton – despite its new slates and guttering…the Town Hall, the library and all its books…all the words in the world and all their meanings. Then there was no glass or grass under my feet anymore, no stars or moon, no light or darkness…I was suspended in nothingness for an instant but then – just as I was beginning to fret over why I’d been excluded or spared – everything and everyone came spewing right back out again…
Radiation salvoes, for a while, had held the cancer at the left lung, but then supposedly arthritic side-effects were revealed to be an all-out offensive on the spine that hadn’t – for some reason – shown up on the scans…Hopeless, so they moved my father from infirmary to hospice.
I was glad to see him out of there. When I’d heard talk of NHS demoralization I’d imagined longer queues in casualty, higher levels of sickness and staff turnover, more snapping and sighing, undusted window ledges, the odd mislaid corpse: I wasn’t prepared for the hospital’s descent – in the five years since my mother died – into an abyss of unfocused fear and hatred. Compassion and competence had been shut down