The Suburbs of Hell (11 page)

In the other bar a fisherman began to sing, to the tune of ‘Land of My Fathers’:

‘Whales! Whales!

They’re bloody great fish in the sea…’

Harry, cheering up, leaned towards the doorframe and bawled: ‘Hey, Beaky, you ought to sing solo. So-low we can’t fuckin hear you.’

The fisherman concluded: ‘And they come to the surface to pee.’

‘Things are getting back to normal,’ Arthur remarked. ‘We even see some ladies now, and the gents have got brave enough to use the Gents again. Somehow everyone seems to have decided the shooting’s stopped.’

‘I know why that is,’ Harry said, gloomy once more. ‘The ones what weren’t already sure in their minds it was some foreign seaman have pinned it on to Greg now.’

‘You can’t blame them,’ said Arthur. ‘Well,
I
can’t, because it’s what I’ve been thinking myself.’

‘Then you’re wrong,’ Harry said angrily. ‘Sorry, Arthur, didn’t mean to snap at you. But talk sense, boy. You’re not thinkin who that was what got killed. You can’t believe he’d hurt
them
—them three particular people—or anyone else, for that matter. That poor sad kid, his trouble was he was just too harmless to survive in this world. And he int survived, poor little sod.’

‘Yes, but Harry,’ Arthur reasoned, ‘he’s out of his mind. You can’t argue like that in a case like this.’

‘I know a lot of people want to believe it,’ Harry said. ‘I’m pretty sure, and so is Diana, the police want to believe it. P’rhaps he’ll end up believin it himself, and forget about Black Sam. But I int goonna believe it: I just know that int
in
the boy.’

‘Why Sam?’ Arthur wondered. ‘Why him rather than me, for instance, or you?’

‘That might be my fault,’ Harry said. ‘When this thing started, people were whisperin in corners that it could be Sam, among others. You must have heard that. Well, I reckon this rumour got round to Greg and stuck in his mind. I don’t remember ever sayin anything about it to him, but—oh Jesus, Arthur, I think I must have.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Arthur said. ‘Not to him, Paul’s brother. Nobody would.’

‘I dunno,’ Harry said. ‘A lot of times people just talk without thinkin who they’re talkin to. Believe me, I know. Some nights I sit up and I think about them people—my friends—and the tears come into my eyes, I int ashamed to tell you. And then young Dave will come hoom with a foo beers in him and want to tell me some joke that I s’ppoose would crease me if I weren’t twice his age, and my hand fair itch to smack him. Thass three months nor more now he’s been livin at mine, and he show no sign of movin on. Well, thass all right, I s’ppoose—on’y I never felt I understood that boy since he got to be about fourteen. Sometimes he get my rag out, talkin about Greg. Thass all “I told you so” with Dave. I took him with me once when I give Greg a look, and now he tell me he knoo all along what was up. “
I
could see he was a head-banger,” he say; “why couldn’t you?” I mean, that don’t seem natural, when they’re the same age. There ought to be more fellow-feelin.’

‘I think,’ said the old man, ‘that’s something that’s in most people, but in a few it just isn’t. A kind of imagination that’s lacking. He might be better off without it. In the war, I came to the conclusion I had too much of it, myself.’

‘Not natural not to have it,’ Harry insisted. ‘No man is an island.’

‘You know that,’ Arthur said, ‘do you?’

‘I think thass the name of a paperback I had,’ Harry explained.

‘There’s more of it,’ Arthur said, trying to remember. ‘It goes on something like this: But each man is a part of the continent, like a promontory; and if a clod of it is washed away, the whole world is the less.’

Harry was looking at him wide-eyed. ‘Is that it? Thass deep, boy.’

‘In the war,’ Arthur said, ‘a lot of people like padres were very fond of quoting that, and there were reasons for it to stick in my mind. “Every man’s death diminishes me”—that I can quote you.’

‘Thass very strange,’ Harry said, ‘very strange that you tell that to me. I mean, here am I, spendin my days buildin up this sea-defence thing, to keep the clods from fallin off the promontory. And feelin the way I do about Paul and—oh Christ, poor little Ena. And you sayin that, that bring the two things together. And thass how it feels, just like that. Like clods was fallin off me, and I was gettin smaller.’

‘It tolls for thee,’ said Arthur quietly.

‘Howzat?’ Harry asked. ‘Does what for me?’

‘Therefore send not,’ Arthur explained, ‘to know for whom the bell tolls.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Harry said. ‘Crackin film.’ He looked at his watch, and scowled. ‘Shit, I’ve missed that one on the box, one of those about this good guy gooin around New York murderin all the bad guys. I like that kind of thing.’

In the late light the harbour was all of one colour: dove-grey. The bare woods of the far shore could hardly be separated from the smooth water and heavy sky which they divided. All the remaining light of the day seemed to be drawn to the white paint of a small freighter moving down the estuary to the sea.

Black Sam had got out of his taxi and was pacing up and down at the edge of the quay. His hands were deep in the pockets of a sheepskin coat and his body was tightened against the chill. He stopped to stare at the ship.

A tough-looking small boy in an anorak wandered past him, muttering: ‘How do, Sam.’ At the sound of his name the black man came down to earth suddenly, and returned: ‘How do,’ but with a look at the child that failed to recognize him.

The boy, pausing, identified himself. ‘Killer,’ he said.

‘Oh, sure. You keepin well, Killer. D’you know that flag, Killer? I bet you know them all.’

‘Thass Panama,’ Killer said. ‘You see a foo of them go by here.’

‘Long way from home,’ Sam said, absently, following the passing of the ship.

‘Home?’ Killer said. ‘Dunno where her home would be, but not Panama. Panama’s what they call a convenience. You ever been there, Sam?’

‘Been where?’ Sam asked. ‘Oh, Panama. Christ, no; I int never been out of England.’

‘Uh?’ said the boy, looking disbelieving. ‘I thought you come from somewhere near Panama.’

‘I come from Ipswich, boy,’ Sam said. ‘Born and bred there. I int travelled a lot in my life.’

The boy seemed disappointed, but stuck to the subject of geography. ‘My dad says thass ever so hot, like so hot it’s steamy. You can see jungle, and big birds, storks or something like that. Thass a big thing, that Canal. My dad says the first time he went through there that give him quite a proud feelin about the hooman race.’

‘Your dad’s deep-sea,’ Sam reasoned. ‘Oh, I’ve got you. Your grandad’s big Billy what has the Galley, right?’

‘Thass right,’ Killer said. ‘You know, Sam, that surprise me that you int never been to them warm countries. I mean, I stand here watchin the ships go by, and I dream about them places, and I’m English.’

‘So am I, boy,’ said Sam, low.

‘I mean, I s’pose you’ve got relations you could go and stay with.’

‘Not a lot,’ Sam muttered. Turning away from the water, he gave the child a bleak glance. ‘I imagine you’ll see more of faraway places than I ever shall, Killer. Well, I’m off—see you around, I expect.’

But when he had closed himself into his taxi he sat for a while, hands on the steering wheel and chin on his hands, watching the white ship glide by the grey woods and fields, on its way, presumably, to colour and the sun.

He had always been one to let things pass, in the faith that difficulties and unpleasantness could be outlived. His mother, when she was in the mood to approve, had praised him for his good cheer. His father had sometimes wondered aloud whether he understood anything at all that was going on.

He did seem to live in a world which was simpler than other people’s. It was a very limited world: until he was fifteen it had consisted of a tiny house in a red-brick terrace in an arid-looking part of Ipswich, a couple of schools of similar appearance, a gentle bowery countryside for cycling and angling, and the front at Felixstowe to import, now and again, a touch of carnival. Everything had seemed predictable, and he had liked that, the ordinariness of his routines.

He had been born late and perhaps surprisingly in his mother’s life, and in the small red house was an only child. Three siblings, much older, had remained in the West Indies to be raised by relations when the parents emigrated and had not chosen to follow. His two sisters he had never seen; some visits from his brother, by that time a grown man, had not been a success. His brother had quickly found some friends of whom their father passionately disapproved, though to Sam, at about five, they had seemed glamorous and amusing. It was puzzling to him, but delightful, when they produced Bibles and declaimed passages at one another, with a curious manner in which gravity was mixed up with fooling. He could remember his brother’s arm around him while he intoned: ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’ One of the friends, a jolly but very ugly youth, was fond of reciting: ‘I am black, but comely,’ which he pronounced ‘coamly’. It was from them that Sam first heard the name ‘Ras Tafari’, and he had quickly learned not to repeat it in front of his parents.

His father was a labourer, his mother a cleaner at a hospital. A more conformist working-class couple than the Boskums could hardly have been found in England. Over the gas-fire in their front room hung a picture of the Queen. They would have liked the Queen to be Prime Minister also. In religion they were faithful Baptists: English Baptists. In their little rented house they lived out the narrow, private, decent lives of the Victorian artisans for whom it had been designed.

When Sam was about eleven a teacher called Miss Buxhall began to take an interest in him. This had puzzled him for a time, as at school he was good at nothing in particular, without being so bad at anything as to attract attention. Miss Buxhall, personally, left him with no strong impressions of herself, except that she seemed a sad old lady (she was in her forties, and single) and must watch television or read newspapers a great deal. By degrees he came to realize that she imagined him to be full of memories of some extraordinarily warm, extraordinarily colourful world: memories summed up in the print which she gave him of a painting by someone she called ‘The Douanier’, all weird trees and fantastic flowers with a glimpse here and there of black bodies, and in which she wanted to have a share. The picture did, in fact, stir something like a recollection in him, but as he had never set eyes on any such scene he supposed, and told Miss Buxhall, that he must have been remembering things described to him, when he was very young, by his parents or (this interested her) his Rastafarian brother, nowadays in Kingston.

This conversation, and the picture hung beside his bed, led somehow to contact being established between the teacher and the hospital cleaner, and to a Sunday visit by Miss Buxhall to 10 Omdurman Terrace. It was a trying experience for the boy. Miss Buxhall, normal and dull enough in her own chalky habitat, seemed downright eccentric in his. She talked a good deal of the Third World, of which Mr and Mrs Boskum, though they prayed in a general way for all in need or distress, had only the vaguest notions. She spoke of the great charge of energy which was coming into the arts from the newer lands, mentioning in particular a Barbadian poet whom she had actually met after his reading (‘electrifying’ was her adjective) of a long poem about his African roots. Mr and Mrs Boskum betrayed a little surprise at hearing such talk in their own front room, and Mr Boskum said rather gruffly that he had never heard of the poet but knew a man of the same name who was on the railways and came from St Lucia.

If Miss Buxhall did not, in Sam’s eyes, show to advantage, neither did his parents. He had never heard his mother, usually economical with her words, speak so much as she did then, in her hospitality or nervousness. And it was quite clear to him that Miss Buxhall was enjoying his mother’s flow of language with the enjoyment of a keen tourist, that she found his mother
quaint.
He respected his normally garrulous father the more because he chose on that occasion to be reserved.

After that their acquaintance with Miss Buxhall trailed away into civilities, and before long he left her to go to another school. But she had had her effect. His friends had always been white boys; he had always spoken like them, and thought like them, living his life in the midst of theirs. But after Miss Buxhall, he applied himself to ironing out any slight difference which might survive. He did not mean to be
quaint.

Nothing about him was very noticeable: he was of middling intelligence, of middling abilities in football and cricket, presentable but middling in his looks. He was popular, in a middling way, largely because of a vein of the dry humour which goes with the Suffolk voice, and because there was nothing in him to object to. He made sure that there was not. Disharmony distressed him; he was the peacemaker among his peers.

At fifteen he left school and began work in labouring jobs. For what seemed a very long time he felt disoriented in the company in which he found himself, and rather clung to old schoolmates who clearly did not think as seriously as he did about their bond. But contentment returned when he was old enough to drive. He was not the sort of youth to delight in speed and noise and random journeys into the unknown. Instead, what delighted him was the orderliness of traffic, its civilized manoeuvres and conventions. On the roads, as in the rest of his life, he was an expert dodger of collisions.

He felt that, to be happy, he had to make the roads his life, and after some time spent on the buses achieved his ambition of becoming a taxi-driver. His father died. His mother began to talk of her native island, and of the warmth and comfort her old bones might find there, in the bosom of her large and mainly female clan. They sold the little terrace house, which by then belonged to them. One day he drove her to London Airport, and returned that night to an insufficient little flat which he had had trouble in finding, and for which he had to pay too much.

He was lonely after that. What he liked best in his work was the long runs, on which a passenger might share a little of his life with him, perhaps even ask for advice. Sam was good with advice: always very safe and comforting advice which left people feeling better.