Chapters V and VI

V

William Blackstock felt a shard of light burning his face. It came from a gap in the curtains and it shone an intense light across his cheek and the bridge of his nose and over his left eye. William squinted. It was Monday morning. He moved his hand over the other side of the bed. Kate was up. Must be past seven.

William was covered in a film of sweat and his face itched from not shaving. He pressed his tongue over the bridge of his mouth and round his furry brown gums. He tasted stale alcohol and food and tobacco. His throat felt harsh as though splinters lay in his windpipe, but he did not want to lubricate it by swallowing his evil tasting spit. His heart suddenly leaped. It often did this, especially after a night of drinking. It was the jolt that awoke him and told him he was alive and that the body in which his mind rested was indeed his own. He shut his eyes to go back to sleep but he felt too disgusting to be sufficiently at peace. A voice in his head said “I shall never drink again.” This is what he and his drinking friends often said to each other the morning after a heavy session. Another voice laughed. William smiled in his head though his mouth did not move. He heard the door open.

“William Blackstock, you might not like your job but you’ll like poverty even less.” There was a silence while Kate Blackstock looked at the lump which lay sprawled across their bed. The lump knew it was being watched, but did not move. “I don’t mind being a kept woman, even if you don’t keep me on very much. But – as God is my witness, William Blackstock – you do not want to make this wife into a pauper. You will not get a moment’s peace, so you won’t. You’ll be thirsting for that factory.” William had heard all this before. He quite enjoyed hearing it so long as he did not need to reply. “And she might decide not to cook for you anymore. Not that she ever has anything to cook with now.” It was all William’s fault. He knew. His fault that the family was poor. “And she might decide not to darn your socks or repair your trousers.” It was his fault that his clothes got damaged at the factory. “Or maybe she’ll decide not to come to church with you anymore. Maybe praying for her own sins will be enough!” Kate never drank or swore or slept with other men or coveted her neighbour’s ox. She was a good person. William, William always thought, was not a good person. He was not a bad person. But he only ever tried to abide by the eleventh commandment: don’t get caught. “And maybe she’ll sleep in a separate bed to you and never let you get your dirty hands all over her. Now get up, William, and go to work!” She dragged the blanket off him with a powerful pull. William made a groaning sound, turned his head to Kate and squinted at her. William was thirty-four but, aside from the toll which twenty years of hard labour had taken on him, he retained his laddish good looks. He still knew how to use the twinkle in his eye that he had first used on Kate when he was fourteen, when they first kissed outside the Baker’s Arms down in Lambeth.

“Kiss me,” he murmured, his voice cracking with his first words of the day.

“I don’t want to kiss you. You’ll have a mouth full of beer and tobacco.”

“Kiss my cheek then.”

“William, get up.”

“Kiss my cheek.”

“I’ll kiss your cheek when you’ve shaved. Your bristles are two days old. It’s be like kissing a steel brush.” Her tone softened. “Now get up, William. I’ve made you some porridge. It’s a bit watery but it’s not bad. The boys got us some honey last night.” Kate hated it that William got drunk on Sundays, but she hated it more that her husband had to work as a slave all day. She tried to be a good wife. She did not often complain, or she hoped she didn’t. She shouldn’t have threatened him like that. She would sleep with him whether they had money and food on the table or not. She would darn his socks as long as he had feet to wear them. The husband of a friend, an Italian called Marco, only had one pair of socks now, and he never took them off. His wife had tried to take them off a while back. He had been wearing them for months and the skin from the sole of his foot had peeled off with the sock, and he had yelled so much they had left the sock on. He hadn’t worked for several weeks now because he could no longer stand up. His leg would have to be chopped off. They had children too. What would they do? Terrible. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Kate pottered in the kitchen. The boys were outside, already on the make, trying to bribe the kids from down the road to sneak into the vegetable man’s shop and nick a couple of cabbages or a bag of potatoes. The kids from down the road agreed to anything. They were so poor that some people reckoned they sometimes ate clay to stop them from going hungry.

Kate listened to the bumps and muffled expletives of her sleepy, still drunk husband trying to navigate the bathroom. It was still bitterly cold out, but the sky was whiter than it had been the past few weeks. Clouds still filled the sky but they looked less threatening than before. In the middle distance was a patch of sky of such brilliance that Kate knew the sun must have been just behind, waiting for its chance to shine.

Kate sat on the chair by the kitchen table and folded a dirty dishcloth into her waistline. William would be late, which would mean he would get punished and possibly get some pay docked, but at least it meant that he was at home for half an hour more. She liked having time on her own, but she didn’t have anyone to talk to. The Blackstocks were the wealthiest family on the street and everyone knew it, which meant nobody spoke to them. Her boys stole, just like all boys, but her boys led the street’s juvenile crime ring, and they had more intellect than their subordinates to engineer a higher cut of the earnings. She and William were the only couple they knew who were happy together. Other couples had been happy at some point in the past. But now they were so poor that the basic instinct for survival had defeated any feelings of romantic love for one another. Kate didn’t mean to, but she looked down on some of the women. Almost none of them were pure, or faithful to their husbands, and especially not the girls. When Marco Pirelli had a gangrenous leg, the Pirelli family had to find an alternative source of income. As Kate had heard somebody say, morality on £5,000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.

Kate had a fantasy that one day she would have a maid to make breakfast and get everybody up and washed and dressed and packed off to work or school, and Kate would simply sit and watch. She would be the calm in the eye of the morning storm. It was a flight of fancy, she knew, and she usually felt miserable once she returned to her senses. She would always be the housewife, William would always break his back in that factory, and the boys would always be scavenging. They would never have enough to be really happy, but always too much to have friends.

Still, this morning she could catch her breath while William got dressed. The porridge was still warm on the stove ready for him. William had smelt it in the bathroom and had made approving noises. The Christmas tree stood in the corner of the room on top of an upturned wicker basket three feet off the ground. Its needles had mostly turned brown and lost the life to cling to the branches. The tree was now a sad, spindly looking thing, like a cage of bones, but Kate could not bear to take it down. On Christmas Day it had been the tree that convinced the Blackstocks that they were the equal of kings and queens. Just for that one day they had good food, including a round, succulent goose; they had beer and wine and home-made lemonade for the boys, which they mixed with William’s ale when he fell asleep; and they all had presents to give each other. They had a tree with a star and they played games and sang songs and talked into the night. And William had told the children the real message of Christmas and of Jesus, and they had told him that they were like Jesus and he was Joseph and Kate was Mary, and they made up extra people for the wise men and the shepherds. On the twenty-sixth they had a little less food and the tree began to turn, and on the twenty-seventh the boys were scavenging again and William was back at work and now it was like Christmas had never happened, except for the tree.



After William had washed and dressed he came through and ate his porridge. He and Kate talked a little, she remembering something one of the boys had said and he smiling. But somehow their hearts weren’t in it. They had flirted with each other, but Kate had been thinking of Christmas and how it was another year away, and William had been thinking of about the punishment he would get for being late. Neither of them wanted to speak, not to anyone. They both just wanted to think, alone. William kissed Kate goodbye and walked out the front door.

As he walked down the street, he had the feeling he was being followed.


VI

The Bubble had, as Reverend Dalrymple predicted, arrived safely in London in the early hours of the morning, though by this time it was hardly a Bubble. It was more like something between a marble and a snowball. Its surface was still transparent and permeable and still indestructible, and it had swallowed up more and more people and buildings and animals and crops – everything and everybody, in fact, from Ottery St. Mary to Croydon. What had begun inside Joanna as the thing she foresaw would save the world had made a curious journey at an amplified pace. It had dawdled for several days in and around the church, yet had just travelled 140 miles in a single night. Its rate of growth was swift too. By the time it reached London it was many times – perhaps a thousand times or more – larger than it had been in Devon. It was as if the south and south-west of England had gradually rolled itself into a ball and rested just outside of London. At around midnight, somewhere near Salisbury and not far from Stonehenge, the dry frostbitten earth had started to crack, just as mud cracks under the weight of heavy boots. Soon the cracks became wider and started to join up with each other. The Bubble continued to tear through Wiltshire and Hampshire, but now the ground had surrendered its attempts at keeping this thing above ground. The Bubble was burrowing through topsoil right into the earth. It groped and rummaged in every direction. By two in the morning, houses in the Berkshire Downs had succumbed to the Bubble’s forces. By four it had reached Woodstock in the north, Windsor in the east, and in the south had eaten up the seaside towns of Worthing and Littlehampton and Shoreham by Sea, and was making gains into the English Channel. By six, the Bubble had absorbed the following counties:

BEDFORD (part)
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
CARMATHEN (part)
CELIDIGION (part)
CORNWALL
DEVON
DORSET
EAST SUSSEX (part)
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
HAMPSHIRE
HEREFORDSHIRE
MONMOUTHSHIRE
OXFORDSHIRE
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE (part)
POWYS (part)
SOMERSET
SURREY (part)
WARWICKSHIRE
WEST BERKSHIRE
WEST SUSSEX (part)
WILTSHIRE
WORCESTERSHIRE

Its journey had been like that of a large and powerful steamer cruising through water, the driving force of its journey causing surges outwards, which in turn get forced back inwards. Eventually the direction of the water’s current returns to the centre. But water is fluid and earth is not, which meant that the shock waves of the Bubble’s direction of travel returned inwards and stuck to the ever-expanding mass of the Bubble. To get a rough sense of what England looked like on this morning, one should take a map of the British Isles and stick pins into the following towns:

BRIGHTON
EAST GRINSTEAD
BOREHAMWOOD
DUNSTABLE
DAVENTRY
REDDITCH
LUDLOW
KNIGHTON
TREGARON
CARMATHEN
REDRUTH
ST. HELIER

In doing so, you will create a perforated outline of a circle. If you imagine this circle bulging out of the map, as well as burrowing into it, this was England and Wales.



But at daybreak the following morning, the Bubble stopped with a start in Croydon in south London. Once again, it was like travelling on a train, and the Bubble’s passengers had barely noticed they had been on the move all night until this sudden halt. It did not seem to anyone that the Bubble had (to coin a phrase) ran out of steam. There was clearly some reason why it had decided to stop in Croydon, besides the fact that the sky had become lighter and it was clearly time for breakfast. As they had been settling themselves in to their new world, nobody had paused to think who might be in control of the Bubble, or who was in charge. As far as anybody was aware, the Bubble existed in an organic state. No decisions had been made regarding political structures such as governments or committees or boards, or at least if there had, such decisions had not been made public.

But Croydon represented an important, even historical, point in the short time of the Bubble’s existence. The weight of the Bubble – such as it was filled with several hundreds of thousands of people, from the poorest farm tenant to the richest proprietor, with their homes and furniture, and the fields and roads and woods and rivers of their erstwhile towns and villages – was too much to allow it to continue burrowing and churning and eating up the earth. Having consumed much of the English Channel, there was also a need to reconfigure its structure so that its million or so inhabitants did not drown in its million or so gallons of water. Anyhow, whatever its composition, everybody in the Bubble said that the Bubble would get the world it deserved.

And so, in a very short period of time and in a manner which nobody noticed, all its water molecules were redistributed to the Bubble’s surface; all the atoms which made up its earth and trees repositioned themselves along invisible strata which ran from east to west and north to south (although east and west and north and south no longer existed); and people drifted from earth to water, or from friend to relative, just as they pleased. Although it soon turned into something quite different, the Bubble began as a fantastical world. High in the sky, brownish yellowish clouds tinted with silver loomed, drawing the eye back to the cold black mystery of the old world where only a few unfortunates remained. Birds, bats and giant bugs patrolled the skies, dancing on cloudpeel or colliding groundwards.

At ground-level, all aspects of the English countryside were piled on top of one another without rhyme or reason. The fields of Salisbury Plains rolled on the horizon, with the deep forests of Nottingham echoing damply below. As the eye followed birds floating from treetop to treetop, its journey would become interrupted by Dover’s chalky cliffs and Somerset’s apple orchards and fruit-pickers, kissing couples, small boys playing hide-and-seek. The busyness of the scene soothed the eye and the pensive spectator might well find himself looking heavenwards in search of a creator to thank: and there he would have seen, in the very ceiling of the sky, a large egg-shaped pod, pearly in colour, where Reverend Dalrymple sat looking on benignly. During that first dawn, when everybody and everything was trying to find its station in a new and uncertain world, it rained for four solid hours and no one was sure whether it would cause flowers or floods.

Upon reaching Croydon the Bubble developed feelers, and these feelers were covered in mouths. The mouths had a double function: to suck up and gorge on any creature or object which they felt would be to the Bubble’s advantage, and to spit out a sweaty saliva which they aimed at creatures, mostly people or dogs, who incurred their displeasure, and which turned them to liquid. By mid-morning they had eaten several thousand Londoners. By lunchtime the streets of every outer London borough from Greenwich to Harrow, from Kensington to Waltham Forest, were running with liquid flesh and blood.

CHAPTER VII OUT ON 8 AUGUST 2006.

Chapter IV

IV

The Blackstocks were too poor to live properly, but they did have enough money to live in a condition almost befitting human beings. This made them unloved and resented in their neighbourhood. A look around Kate Blackstock’s kitchen showed an iron pail, oblong and three feet and eighteen inches at its longest lines of longitude and latitude, standing in the corner beside a large antique bureau which had become mulchy through lack of polish. The pail was filled once or twice a week with tepid water (in fact, it was not filled: the water level was only three or four inches off the base). Kate, dressed in the dirty white blouse she wore everyday with sleeves rolled up, an equally dull skirt and an apron patterned with endless rows of diamonds, would kneel on the carpet, which had been kneeled on so much you couldn’t see the pattern. With a small pinched smile and blank eyes she would scrub the grime from her dirty husband’s torso and face while he knelt on all fours. The pail wasn’t big enough for a proper bath, but since they had no soap its size was irrelevant.



The smell in the house was awful. It was the smell of two adults and two children living filthily. Stacked up on the bureau were William’s mother’s china plates and milk-jugs. The bureau was his mother’s too. Everything in the house either had a grandeur rooted in the past, or else had no grandeur at all.

But the point was that the Blackstocks did own things. William’s pathetic wages and the boys’ game efforts at scrumping bought just enough food to keep skin and bones and muscles in their right places. And Kate had never miscarried and her two children were still alive and mostly healthy. Kate was the only mother in the street who could make these claims, and this was another reason why the street disliked her and saw her as puffed-up and above them. Jessica Tanner from no. 41 had lost two of hers within six months of each other – her sense of relief each time was palpable:

“I thank God for it! I am relieved from the burden of keeping them and they are relieved from the troubles of mortal life.” Jessica had worked as a seamstress and her wages were not enough to feed herself for breakfast for three days. With her husband who knows where, she had flown to the streets to make her living. She had nothing else, except her three other children, mother and elderly aunt. All six of them squeezed into a basement underneath the street which had originally been built to conceal rubbish. Kate had once had occasion to go into the Tanner’s house. It immediately struck her as appalling: joyless, pitiless and inhuman. Walking down the steps from the pavement, you entered the main room, which split its function between kitchen, sitting room and bedroom, depending on the time of day or the family’s needs. As soon as you were in this main room, your eyes were drawn to its various phenomena. Firstly, two wooden chairs which, like the other chairs in the house, were eaten up with woodworm and whose seats were made up of collapsed sacking. These two chairs stood at the back of the room, just in front of a stack of shelves. On the left hand chair sat Jessica Tanner’s mother. She was in her late forties but looked at least seventy. She was a large woman whose size, when compared to the waifs around her, made her look quite obscene. Kate had heard a story about old Mrs Tanner being visited by a doctor for some minor ailment and telling her friends afterwards, “I’ve got a good mind to report that Doctor Springer. He reckoned I should lose some weight. You know what he called me? He said, ‘Mrs Tanner, you’re a beast.’” Kate had laughed when she had heard the story. She couldn’t remember who had told her it. Perhaps it was the doctor. Nobody else in the street would tell her anything like that. Anyway, old Mrs Tanner would sit on the chair on the left and Baby would sit on the chair on the right. Baby was a doll which had been Jessica’s as a child. It was a biggish doll with a cherubic face and rosy-red cheeks. It still bore the marks of the seven-year-old Jess, who would draw eyeliner on Baby’s eyes with a graphite pencil. The doll had since lost all its hair, which drew attention to its weird, brick-red complexion. Its head was too big for its body; its tiny arms hung from its torso like flabby pink sausages and its legs had been sawn off above the knee. Its expression was one of censorious scrutiny. All the family secretly hated it, and it terrified the children, but Baby always sat there, judging them and never revealing its thoughts.



Elsewhere in the room there was a series of shelves, mostly dipping in the middles, which supported a jumble of chipped crockery, warped ironware and other bric-a-brac. Centre right was the dinner table, covered by last week’s newspapers, dragged out of the rubbish-bins on Sunday when they should have been at church. Centre left was the bed where the children slept. In the back right hand corner was a pile of dust and plaster where Jack Stubbs from upstairs had fallen out of bed and gone through the ceiling. All this sounds bad enough to the person who sees these things as the reader of a book, but the Tanners had to live in these disgraceful and disgusting conditions and only they really knew the darkness and misery of living there.

Kate did not see the other rooms: the bedroom in which Jessica’s baby, her mother and her grubby and silent great-aunt slept, and in which Jessica and her latest punter would sometimes spend a night. All generations of the Tanner household were party to Jessica’s dishonour. The scullery was equally hateful: crumbling walls, yellow with age and oozing damp; a stink of human excrement from the blocked drain where a toilet had once stood; the musty air where one could feel bugs of cholera and typhoid and tuberculosis penetrating the pans and plates and cups from which the Tanners ate and drank.

Kate had felt enormously relieved after she had seen the Tanner’s house because she knew she lived so much more healthily and respectably than them. But she also knew that, however much their vacant faces suggested otherwise, the Tanners were human beings: in nature, if not in existence. Their house should have been condemned, and Kate did indeed condemn it. But this did the Tanners no good at all. They continued their lives for the good of nobody, least of all themselves.

CHAPTERS V AND VI OUT ON 25 JULY

Chapters II and III

II

As evening came and the sky moved from grey to purple, it occurred to Reverend Dalrymple that he had not slept since he had entered the Bubble. He sat (though there was nothing physical to support his haunches) in the centre of the sphere of air and looked to his left and right, above him and below him. Everywhere there was hubbub: people swimming through the air, learning how to move again, trying to relocate their possessions, or their wives, husbands, children and parents. Reverend Dalrymple felt like he was on an early evening train, watching people who had just begun their journeys settle down before night. The Reverend had only brought the clothes he wore into the Bubble with him: these and the Bubble itself were his only possessions. He found it relaxing watching others rush about and it made him feel tired. As the Bubble rolled through Crewkerne and Yeovil, scarfing up more towns and villages on the way, the Reverend realised he didn’t need to steer it anymore. It would roll on through the night all by itself. He fell asleep, knowing they would be in London by morning.

That night the Reverend Dalrymple had a dream. It was Sunday and he was in St. Mary’s church. The choir had led a boisterous rendition of Joy to the World and now the hymn had come to an end. Reverend Dalrymple got up to the pulpit and began his sermon, which this week was a topical one, reassuring any doubters that the stories they may have heard from London of revolutionaries plotting the end of civilisation were false and that any such plots would never succeed and that God’s will alone would lead the righteous man into the kingdom of heaven. He believed not a word of what he preached, but he was under orders from the Bishop to perpetuate anti-insurgency messages, and so this he did.




Yet as he preached his message, designed to deter any latent radicals and placate Joanna and her more standpat brethren, he began to notice that the attention of his audience was waning. While their heads still faced him their eyes pointed upwards so that their eyeballs sunk into their skulls with only the whites showing. He continued with the sermon, for it was good one, full of mild menace, but it was clear that nobody, not even his faithful Joanna, was listening. Feeling a cold breeze on the top of his head he looked upwards. The high gabled roof of the church had opened up, as if on hinges, so that a ceiling of blue cloudless sky covered them. The Reverend persisted with his address but a mind-numbing metallic noise had started loudly and suddenly. It sounded like a thousand sharp fingernails shrieking down a blackboard and it soon flooded the church. Sometimes for a few seconds the roar stopped and a strange melody would take its place. It sounded like three saxophones having a fight with a petrified piano tinkling behind a mad grandmother. Then the wall of sound would return, sounding like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs. The noise was unbearable to the Reverend but his congregation all looked upwards with passion and zeal, as though what they heard was the sound of salvation. The Reverend, whose words were evaporating into the air, stopped his sermon and looked up at the sky. In precisely the middle of his field of vision he saw what looked like a bird, a roughly circular object with indistinct edges, high overhead. The bird grew larger as it fell closer to the church. The Reverend realised that the bird was the source of the machine-like noise and when it fell to within fifty feet of the church, the Reverend realised that it was not a bird but a man with a parachute. The man fell delicately to the stone floor near the altar and untangled himself from the fabric of the parachute. When the man’s mouth moved the Reverend could only hear those strange, awful melodies, and when the mouth stopped moving he could only hear white noise.

But his congregation (who, the sleeping priest decided, must be true believers) heard what the man had to say. While the Reverend heard the dreadful squall of noise, they heard a choir – four men and three boys – singing the most heavenly prayer they had ever heard. Their voices merged together in perfect harmony. The men sang with the wisdom of a hundred years and the boys with lustral simplicity. The hymn brought tears to the eyes of its audience and seemed to summon the man to the ground. When he hit the ground, he read out a lesson which Reverend Dalrymple did not hear. And with that he pointed to Joanna in the front row and demanded she accompany him to her house and cook him a large breakfast of sausages, bacon, eggs, tomatoes and fried bread. The congregation followed the couple and the Reverend realised that his part in the dream was over and that he did not exist anymore.


III

It was widely known that London, Manchester, Birmingham and the other big cities were no places to raise a child. No boy went to school, except those that had been turned into factories. The alleyways in which William Blackstock’s children once played had been colonized by rats. Where once Mrs Blackstock stood in her modest kitchen teaching her little ones the ABC while she roasted a joint, now there was an empty larder and a sunken child upstairs in bed with a towel on its forehead, drenched in noxious sweat. Laughter had given way to sobbing. Skin and gristle clung to people’s bones like seaweed on a shipwreck. Poverty had been removed because now everyone was poor.

The winter had been heavy and grey. The world had stayed multi-coloured, but it did not seem like it. The grass was the same colour as they sky. The faces of men had less spirit than the faces of buildings. Today was the same as yesterday and tomorrow would be the same as today. In the towns and cities life was especially harsh. The government had been in power for years – too many years – but since no one knew how to get rid of it, it went on ruling.

For a while the men in the Cabinet had worried that its people would rise up. Rebel groups of workers had tried to revolt against their bosses every other week and pubs all over Southwark and Wapping hosted lock-ins after closing time. The pubs, if caught, pled guilt to the charge of furnishing their nocturnal punters with illicit alcohol, on the grounds that willing submission and subsequent penance would deter the authorities from the real raison d’être of these groups: dissent, revolution and the denial of God. At this time there were a number of more official working men’s clubs in London into which one paid a nominal weekly subscription. In becoming a member of such a group, a man would come as close as he possibly could to fulfilling his birthright through democratic legitimacy. Because of this, because they made a man feel like the ruler of his kingdom within, these groups were often very popular with local working men. They were much less often influential, however, and the police would frequently carry out night-time raids, arresting a brace of dissidents with a charge of treason or some such. To claim dominion of one’s kingdom within, let alone the kingdom without, was deemed by those in charge to be tantamount to anarchy, and so dissidents were treated harshly. In such a climate of fear, revolution was never really possible. The more level-headed and quietist workers knew that, while they could not forego the liberties that were their birthright, now was not the time for insurrection. Nowadays, most people were too weak and stupid to fight. They could barely raise the energy to get up and go to work in the morning.

Every sensible person knew that such inhumanity could not persist. But for each person who recognised this there was a different solution. Many saw salvation in God. There was Joanna and her lot; Moravians from central Europe; there were Quakers and Methodists and Anabaptists and all strains of faith in between. Others thought the cure to England’s illness was to be found abroad. From there came tales – urban legends most likely – of riots and revolts and mutinies against tyrants and despots. These stories travelled to London in the most fancy prose, and differed depending on whom you talked to. Some people pointed to Europe and made it known that every man had a vote or that every man earned enough money to feed his family. But others (most actually) said that the stories were made up or that the revolutionaries were un-Christian or that it was God’s will that some are rich and some are poor.

William Blackstock was brighter than anybody else he knew. He had received some education as a child – not much, but enough to persuade him that his enquiring mind was not the loathsome and perverted thing that some people suspected it was. He was also, somehow, less poor than almost anybody else he knew. True, the Blackstocks were poor. They lived on the breadline. But a small inheritance from William’s mother, a trifling salary from the factory and a certain hard-nosed enterprise meant that they were not disgustingly poor. They would always somehow, by fair means or foul, be clothed, sheltered, fed and watered. In this respect the Blackstocks were a rare breed indeed.

William was a rebel at heart but his sons’ school had closed down and even if he could afford to buy anything there were no shops. It was as much as he could do to get up in the morning, earn his measly wage, and enjoy the escape that sleep afforded him.

He worked in a factory which produced armaments. These were intended for use if there was an insurgency or a war and lay piled in warehouses or underground. The factory also produced some domestic items for export. They were very useful things, factories, because they let their owners get very rich a long way away from the public’s gaze. They also kept unemployment figures down. William was paid what his bosses considered enough for a four-week period. This was paid to him in vouchers on the first day of each calendar month.

“William, that wage of yours just won’t do,” his wife Kate said to him over and over. “We can’t stretch it across the four of us. Not for another month. What about the children?”

“It’s a good wage!” thundered William, knowing full well it was not. “What am I supposed to do? It’s our money. I’ve earned it. It’s hopeless but it’s ours. I earned it.” But William knew his boys would get no new clothes unless they stole, which they did. They were sent on errands by their mother and father to get loaves or potatoes from wherever they could. They did this with skill and zeal. Because of these sins, the church had an irresistible pull. It is a quirk of the human thirst for religion that God becomes most popular at times when He appears least interested. So while Charlie and Tom scavenged for food, William and Kate would pray forgiveness for their crimes. Their prayers rarely got a response.

“Well done, William,” the priest would say as they left. “Well done, Kate. Will I see you next week?”

“Can’t see why not.” With that, William and Kate would walk back home to look at their children’s spoils. And returning to find his cupboard bare, William would go to the pub and dilute his misery with cheap ale which he bought on credit. After a while – three or four pints, perhaps – the topic of conversation would always turn to violence. Blowing things up or blowing people up or bludgeoning their bosses or the government to death. Tonight the quarry was the royal family. There had been a story in the paper about increased protection to Her Majesty the Queen. Extra police were to guard the Palace or Palaces which were deemed by the government to be most vulnerable. The extra police would be mounted on horses and would stand outside the Palace or Palaces around-the-clock, weekdays and weekends, indefinitely, whether a member of the family was in residence or not.

“Horses!” cried Mickey Pabey, on his fifth pint. “Horses! As if your constabulary wasn’t bad enough, they bring in bloody great horses!”

“Appealing to your sympathetic side, Mickey.”

“Me?”

“You’d never shoot your way through a horse, would you, or blow one up. You’d blow up a policeman, but you’d never blow up a horse.”

“Never. But where will they get them? Farmers? Knacker’s yards? Racecourses and paddocks more like, racecourses and paddocks! Does that woman want to take any more of the few pleasures in life away from me?”

“Ah, you poor thing,” said Frank Boatwright without sympathy. “No horses for you to waste your money on.”

“You’ll have to go back to wasting it on women, Mickey.”

“Waste? It’s no waste. It’s my money to waste how I like.”

“There could be fame in it for them, Mickey. Heroic horses!” said Olin Bucarem, a second-generation Venezuelan who had recently returned to London from an extended five-year holiday in Ireland, and had been taken to heart by the boys for his prodigious drinking and aberrant sense of humour.

“Those horses don’t do anybody any good anyway. May as well give them a break.”

“Give them a break?” blared Mickey Pabey. “Give them a break he says! Since when has standing stock-still in a busy London street with some fat-arsed copper sitting on your back kicking your tits with his hobnail boots been a break?” William laughed. Frank Boatwright had just put his fourth pint in front of him. Ought to get a move on with this one now. Don’t want to lag behind. And they’re the ones doing all the talking. How do they do that? Good drinkers. Strong bladders too. Best store it up for now, until you really need it. Feel the full force of it gushing out. Proper oomph against the porcelain. And noisy too, like torrential rain or a waterfall. Thinking about it makes you want to go. Better go.

“’Scuse me lads. Call of nature.” William climbed out from the table and sauntered to the bathroom.

“Look – imagine you were a horse. Frank – all your life you’ve worked in parks. You walk the parks, pick up litter, mow the lawn. In the summer you look out for the girls with no tops on, the sunbathers. In the winter you sit in your cabin and dream of the summer. And then suddenly, some bastard comes along and tells you you’re going to be the man who stands between some psycho with a hand grenade and the queen. Yes, yes, it’s a break. It’s fame alright. Front of all the papers on Tuesday, your name in lights! It’s a load of bollocks. What’s she done for me? Tell me that.”

Henly’s was the ideal place for these sort of arguments, filled as it was with poets, mutineers, fraudsters, armaments workers, painters, faceless bureaucrats, runaways, freaks, and any other group of outcasts with nothing to live for. The punters at Henly’s had nothing in common and they had everything in common. They spoke different languages but all contained the same feeling that their spirits were stifled, their natural fervour kept at bay by a need to plod the dreary path that had been prepared for them. Henly’s allowed them a space where anything could happen at any moment: an opportunity to live out the fantasies that each knew should be their reality. By the window sat Son McLanahan, sometimes with a comrade or two, sometimes left alone (but never isolated), gazing up at the stars through wet, woozy eyes, concocting delirious designs to blow up the queen, and take the rest of society with her, so that human history could finally begin.



While Son dreamed and barked instructions to himself – and we will hear more of them later – the others would watch some cabaret artiste that the landlord had put on to titillate the lads after church. They all hated her, but what could they do? She would sing some well-known songs that all of them sang numbly along with, and then she would tease one of them. She would go from being a person to an artiste to an arrangement of flesh and suggestions – a moving object. The lads would get horny and feel like they were powerful. Sometimes they fought over her. They all thought they could fuck her if they wanted to, but when the landlord called time and the cabaret artiste got up off the floor and went backstage to change in the loo, the lads joked with each other and called her a slag or a whore or an easy lay and fantasised what they could have done to her had time been on their side. After this, William would return home, his belly too full of beer to yearn for food, his mind too fuddled to wish for a better life. “Do you love me?” said William thickly to his wife as he got into bed. But she was asleep and did not reply. Next morning he would awake to more clouds and smoke and fog and joyless, thrashing labour.

CHAPTER IV OUT 18 JULY 2006