THE DRENCHING ARMS: A GIRL AND HER DAD
(story to date at end of post)
With anywhere one knows well, the sense grows that it's watching you. When so much of your life has been spent there, something living forms. It doesn't matter if this is internal - 'just a feeling' - or personification. Time's accumulations and destructions stare back at you. There's no need for some Nietzschean abyss. It might be a street corner or a shop that's changed its name, again and again.
Raven could still lose himself in Oxford’s old stone and layers. That weird alley linking George Street with the top of New Road was a favourite, also Beef Lane off Pembroke Street. Hours of wandering until some refreshment and downloading became urgent.
He'd by now traipsed west, uneasily wondering how this indulgence would affect his daughter's schooling. Staring into the Manley Hopkins darksome burn of the Thames at Osney, a heron perched by the bridge. So many times he’d done this, staggering back from drinking in the Lamb and Flag.
Thinking over his time in teaching, he sometimes experienced pupils surfacing from his memory so clearly that he was back in the classroom or at a parents' evening. Running water encouraged such reverie. Perhaps it was the river's churn and disappearance, the drama subsiding into its relentless flow downstream.
*
One of his final appointments, though she'd not booked a slot. Something in her stance and downcast eyes - weariness and wariness - was heart stabbing. Nervous then embarrassed at Raven's offered hand and her father tremulously grasping it.
Raven slipped into machine-talk on projected grades and 'stretch' targets as the inebriated man blinked and nodded his head. He said nothing as his daughter spoke for them both, saying more than she ever had in a lesson. She mapped out her plans and Raven forced himself to be cheerfully optimistic, overdoing reactions whilst pretending not to notice the father's whisky stench.
To his discredit, he recalled nothing on what she’d hoped to become. Had the drunken dad insisted on coming - had she even begged him to? He couldn't bear to think of her feeling ashamed. But he remembered standing up and saying the bloke should be proud of his daughter. Then they were gone.
The horror and terror this encounter must have been to her. The tracking data and colour coding had said nothing, but what did EDI monitoring care about this child? Suffering like hers was never discussed in all his years of teacher training or 'continuous career development'. He hated his profession for this progressive idiocy, wrapped in self-congratulation but callously blind towards so many English children.
By the Thames now, he thought of Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend.
But what help was literature when it came to it?
*
Raven despised those who sat in cafes, tapping away - ‘laptop jockeys’ he called them. Yet now he sat writing a six-part sequence on True Crime in a Botley coffee shop, mixing memory and desire. He knew this obsessional interest was distasteful and spurred by his inner rage. But he refused to censor himself – as was happening in every element of his external life.
Without doubt his poetry seems crude and terrible, the cutting into it jarring in style.
How many people carry knives routinely now? They were a commonplace at the dump of a school he was terrified his daughter would get exiled to, in revenge for him bunking off the 'meeting' at his college. Hunger and thirst were stirring his creativity. He carried - for artistic purposes - a Japanese Higonokami pocket knife. Digging it into his palm was a vital spur.
Perhaps his Welwyn Garden City house now stood clear behind the lawn.
TRUE CRIME
His recurrent childhood nightmare was of getting caught burgling a house. He recalled the alien smells, the feeling of suffocating in the noisome dark, a certainty he’d lost any security forever.
Then he’d be awake, safely stretched in bed.
Now he was planning to make this reality. He was clearly mad. The place he’d chosen was a detached house, way up Cumnor Hill. It was to be a ritual desecration, a revenge attack on the class and character of its owners.
Talk with such types had become circular; nothing could breach their liberal certainties. Words no longer held any meaning for these people. It was pointless to contradict this through more argument. An empirical representation – an objective correlative – of his opposing thought was needed, for himself and for them. Hadn’t the husband unknowingly demanded it?
‘You’re a right-wing wanker. Worse than a Nazi.’
He was mad but not responsible for making himself so. His class was the target. To wear a Balaclava was essential, not to avoid recognition but from 70s memories of drying them on school radiators and images of terrorists.
*
You’ll need to know the details, what I took.
A penknife: small; portable; collectable.
I’ve kept some from my childhood,
lost the flick-knives from trips to France.
I waited at least an hour on the sloping lawn,
hidden from the house, the incline so steep.
The expected security lights didn’t activate.
Of course there was an alarm – I welcomed it.
Have you been inside a house when one goes off?
Sickening disorientation and five-minutes’ panic.
Time for me to smash up some pictures,
piss in a wicker basket and their boots,
tear off a coat-rack then grab the knife.
I was filmed jumping over a hedge.
*
He sat and dug under his finger nails with the shining blade:
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Presumably the soil he removed was ‘forensic evidence’? In a true-crime documentary, trace-element analysis would pinpoint the Cumnor ridge and its famous clay.
His urine would obviously yield DNA.
But he doubted this bourgeois burglary would divert the police from queuing in Greggs or surfing internet porn.
He was safe.
SONNET ON STEALING A CAR
At fifty-nine I’ve stolen my first car.
In films it’s done with the utmost of ease –
glancing round, ruler down the driver’s door,
a rapid twisting of wires and away.
Reality? Smashing my way in then
electrocuted getting connection.
Alarm blaring, me waving and mouthing:
‘Don’t worry, it’s my car – temperamental!‘
Meanwhile, that burgled berk from Cumnor Hill
is bustling back, swinging his Waitrose bag.
Eventually it starts and I soak him,
aquaplaning through water, a puddle
for him and his wife. I flick salt-shaker
gestures and he feebly attempts to chase.
RACHE
Like A Study in Scarlet, red ‘Rache’ carved
inside their lives. He saw them smiling and
decided how to; who to trust. But the
rash sharing of an obsession was why
many got caught. If he acted alone,
only his thoughts had importance. He could
live inside those and switch to some dagger –
if he dared to – then slash without warning.
You think this mad but the pain seen in her
should not be forgiven. To know they had
enjoyed it ’caused his monstrous behaviour.’
True-crime documentaries said that and
‘Nobody thought he would ever do this.’
Each step was easily traced, if you tried.
IV. UNMASKING OF A SERIAL KILLER
In the old Truman brewery, Brick Lane,
the world’s leading Ripper experts sipping
champagne while ruminating on some wretch;
Isaac Dipski – the mad kosher butcher –
lifted crusts from gutters, believed he was
conversing with Abraham using farts.
Five witness reports of him running past
Chapman’s death scene on the way to Nando’s.
The killer is named, to thundering applause:
‘Charles Allen Lechmere, found there in Buck’s Row,
we’ve tracked his mobile phone. Early for work –
claimed he thought it was on old tarpaulin –
standing by Polly Nichols, freshly slain.
And there’s six minutes lost he can’t explain…’
V: AMONGST THE HALF MAD
I’m not complaining –
it’s where I’m meant to be.
An Internet discussion board:
Casebook: Jack the Ripper; I’m barred!
Was it him – Francis Thompson – my quest.
London, up from autumnal tree-tunnels
to border areas of Holborn, the City, those
streets I walked once, bored, lonely. no one.
Up past Newgate, St Mary-le-Bow down to
Watling Street with its views of St Paul’s.
St Stephen Walbrook, my days have
wandered then become a joke, his
‘have crackled and gone up in smoke’.
Praise God no tourists, just sentinel
towers from Wren dwarfed by capital.
It’s beautiful to live on visuals,
memories – bits of a building, a
childhood scout-hut, some adventure
playground. Schools are here, one
on Mitre Square where I’m going.
A lone muttering, others the same.
London can be taken by trackless
steps. Odd to arrive in Bevis Marks,
into Dukes Place & down the passage –
St Botolph Church, burial place of rebels.
So was I banned for posting my research:
‘I may have hitherto hidden my dismay,
at the seeming shambles that is “Ripperology” –
Simple experiments and observations.
It’s sorted! Took me twenty minutes on site.
Discovery of a new (highly unsavoury) ‘clew’ –
bagged and sent to forensics. All done after
a leisurely stroll from Drury Lane, through
old Holborn/City (some Wren churches) to
Mitre Square, where I solved the case!
I don’t want to be critical;
but what the hell have you all
been doing for these 135 years?’
VI: THIS BITER GETS BITTEN
Let's be honest about economic reality.
There are Slavs who'll work till midnight
in awful restaurants, places where you'd ask:
who can eat here? Then they take the
last bus and so do you. The English get
anywhere, to any place even when roads are shut –
our history says so. We might seem to be absent -
we're there. Those ribcage towns in hopeless dawns,
I can’t describe them nor Oxford (its pale lights
on cobbles) glowering high-rise block monoliths
marching through snow. They're here for the children,
not yours, they'd take yours and show them what’s worse.
I shouldn't be saying that and I am. Maybe rebirth happens in
sonnets? Or the whole thing starts again in something else.
*
It's at this point the decent reader wants
to see this writer receive what he's doling
out so here's a rambling account of how
I escaped through alleys and slippery
courts not in Oxford or London but
somewhere too Gothic to be safe as when
I went there it wasn't for tourists but exile.
That was just before the Berlin Wall fell
in Prague 1989, the country in freefall.
You know the old Eastern block cities
had terrible crime under Communism?
Actually it was more dangerous since
the causes couldn't be admitted as
social in a perfect society I went
for a walk along the river away
from anything picturesque towards
distant tower-blocks such numbers,
all of them in a line like that scene from
the Bourne film where he visits the Russian
girl – Moscow I think – whose parents
he's killed. Anyway on I wandered into the
Czechoslovak night lights were bright and
high up I think then I was hit from behind
and expertly robbed in a smell of vodka or
schnapps the bloke took very little since I
grabbed his legs and pushed him over easily.
The fear, I ran without wondering why it
was raining with no drops on the river – blood
of course from my broken head - sunrise back
in the Hotel Bristol reception called this doctor
who nodded uninterested and said ‘only a
fool walks to any of those places since now
the whole state is failing.’ My money was
gone only worthless Czech stuff I'd bought
at five times the official rate. It's not much but
I can say I've suffered from True Crime just
like we all have though I'd forgotten it and
how a friend from university got murdered
by a whack across the head in Battersea Park.
*
This is the entire story to date:
THE DRENCHING ARMS
CHAPTER ONE: EXILED TO NORFOLK
The rain fell as if the world was made from water.
Raven stood manacled to a seawall. The mounting waves would anyway soon drench him, though he'd probably escape drowning.
Across the pot-holed car-park lurked the pub where he drank twice weekly. A possibly cheery looking place but with violent undercurrents of dislike, boredom and gnawing frustration. Of course class was the real issue. Never more so than now, with EDI emblazoned on every public building - even in this bleak coastal outpost.
Yes, most likely one of the better regulars would persuade Worzel to relinquish the key so that, at closing time, he'd be unshackled and led back into The Drenching Arms, where a rough towel would be thrown over him and a pint of mulled cooking lager poured down his throat.
Such kindness still existed!
The obvious question was why he tolerated this? But his options were limited socially and he'd never needed more than a pub and a book. Unfortunately, conversation to him was pointless without any content, so he often overstepped the mark in intellectualism when talking with the grizzled regulars.
Worzel was a pontificating ex-hairdresser who brooked no interruption nor dissent, during his diatribes on the slights and insights gained from various Cambridge academics whose hair he'd cut. As was typical of the English class system, this left the man resentful and endlessly provocative, on topics he knew nothing about.
Mostly Raven kept schtum, but tonight he'd felt the need to pipe up when the man's lecture on global warming had become intolerable. Needless to say, he'd then himself been accused of interruption and lecturing - tendencies he harboured - hence his freezing confinement on the seafront after being dragged from the pub. And since Raven himself hated ‘experts’ and middle-class ownership of ideas, he was hopelessly conflicted.
Last September, he'd been expelled from the Party for hate crime, after disagreeing with a Muslim colleague who’d claimed Father Christmas was trans and probably pro-Hamas. But Raven’s crimes were existential and had been tabulated over many years in teaching. At least he'd gone down with a bang, posting an image in the staffroom of Santa in a red and white kaftan, pouring burning petrol down a snow-covered English cottage’s chimney.
Retribution had been swift. He'd been stripped of his middle-class membership and exiled to this Norfolk seaside town, ostensibly to oversee diversification of fast food outlets and net-zero compliancy in failing pubs and hotels. As always with such managerial tasks, this meant no actual work.
Obviously he was now failing at that too.
Despite the gathering storm and vast stretch of North Sea facing him, an inflatable dinghy seemed to be nearing shore. What looked like Kurds and Arabic tribesmen were peering at him anxiously.
Raven laughed grimly but genuinely for the first time in many months.
CHAPTER TWO: NEW YEAR'S EVE
A museum of yesterday’s rainbows,
guarding the memories of car lights by night.
How the tide of the whole world is changing,
even in this corner, where a tired wind
rattles a battered pub door and only
I glance up to see if some ghosts arrive,
blown in past the broken-down wind turbines
now sheltering seagulls and my people.
So writes Raven, spending his New Year’s Eve
adrift in the emptying Drenching Arms.
The pub karaoke bursts into life
and a recent boat refugee belts out
I will survive by Gloria Gaynor,
cheered by a pensioner dressed as Hitler.
CHAPTER THREE: RAVEN AND THE PAST
It’s true that in England, our past isn’t even an earlier time. It’s oxygen, mother’s milk - and gold.
Progressives hate it and see only a crime scene. But the True Crime was their murder of this country - slow, deliberate and shameless - and the evidence is piling up daily. Our towns are filled with abused girls, their rapists empowered by an establishment of diversity cretins enforcing an ideology of callous absurdity.
Raven sat staring into his battered laptop. Tonight he was too depressed even for the Drenching Arms, which lurked nearly empty beyond net-curtains and a lonely milk bottle rolling down Fore Street in the January gales.
Onscreen was a heart-breaking YouTube video, of 1935 London. He remembered that solidity, the purpose and unassertive self-assurance, even from his 1970s childhood. Left-liberals - many with no memories of the place nor roots there - painted a stygian pit of prejudice, basted in Dickensian poverty and monochrome ennui. But the feelings of freedom and belief negated this cartoon portrayal. Our elite’s obsessions with such ‘evils’ had reduced London to an uneasy shell, showy yet silly - and painfully aware of it.
He reread the opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend, in a first-edition inherited from his father. Maybe the city would survive, the Thames slowly carrying away the bodies of its wreckers.
As for his own writing, he’d just completed a belated Christmas ghost story. Not exactly an M. R. James setting but maybe Raven’s East Anglian exile had somehow inspired it:
A CHEERY GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMASTIDE
Somewhere that I'd driven past a thousand times but never entered. Reassuringly there, without the need for any thought or analysis: The George, a roadhouse outside Andover on the way to Salisbury.
Who's ever written about it? But whenever I saw the place, I'd imagine an evening's drinking. Entering without expectation and slouching into some 1930s tiled corner - unseen, seen or even scrutinised - it wouldn't make any difference.
This Christmas, I pulled over. My Jag seemed perfect for the pub and I'd not driven past since acquiring it.
And how my country has now vanished! What one always thought was bedrock - igneous, metamorphic, Jurassic, whatever - isn't even sandstone, just playground stuff which runs through your fingers.
The area is military. Dunkirk then D-Day troops once drank in The George. No nostalgia from me though; I've even given up watching Remembrance Sunday. Whatever their sacrifices, we've been invaded via invitation.
The place was full of ghosts; at Christmas everywhere now is. Except not figures from my past nor ones many young people would recognise. Maybe they'd know the column but who can see him on top? He was drinking Spanish lager in the corner, unmistakable with his hat, eye patch and wild hair. Ignored by the Polish bar staff let alone the public-sector office crowd in paper crowns, unleashing party poppers. Horatio was muttering to himself, one eye focused on a crumpled document:
‘I am a friend of Peace without fearing War; for my politics are to let France know that we will give no insult to her government, nor will we receive the smallest. If France takes unfair means to prevent our trading with other Powers, under her influence, this I consider the greatest act of hostility she can show us.’
Stirring words, as I told him without reservation.
'I sent it to Theresa May's government when she was surrendering all that I fought and died for.'
'Did she reply?'
'I got a postcard of wheat fields, some Waitrose vouchers and an application form for Disability Living Allowance.'
'What are you even doing here?'
He switched his eye patch so I was met with the blank socket, looking wrinkled and soft to touch. Before I could stop myself, I'd reached out and confirmed this.
'I'm in the area to go riding with Emma Hamilton, on Porton Down.'
At last, a link to myself! I'd been told how the couple would meet on that bare scrubland - almost savannah like - around the road to Porton. My father had been a director of the microbiological lab there, and his father had headed wartime research on gas attacks, at field stations in the wild grassland.
The door slammed open with that deafening crash, heard in pubs throughout the land when Christmas drunks enter.
Of course it was Sir Winston Churchill, completely bladdered, propped up by a squinting Rudyard Kipling. He chucked a box of his namesake mince pies at the office party group, landing on their table apparently out of thin air, glasses flying. The looping trajectory suggested only I could have thrown it.
'What's his fucking problem?' a huge Shireman hollered, advancing with fists ready to deliver a steam hammering on my puny frame.
Churchill had one Doc Marten back-lifted, about to crush this oaf's testicles. But my invisible protector wasn't needed. An enormous middle-aged woman, lanyard dangling, directed 'Geoff from Maintenance' back to their table then turned on me.
'I think it's time you left. We'd all prefer it if you went home then reflected on your actions.'
I'd rather have a steam-hammering than hear this management speak. To my delight, Kipling was also apoplectic from the horror of his beloved language being mangled and tortured. Although a reasonably short man, he was built like a bull. Ominously he slipped off his spectacles and handed them to Sir Winston.
An unseen whirlwind enveloped the table of these Yuletide revellers. I was remined of some jinni in one of his ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’.
'Even Joseph Conrad would struggle to describe that,' quipped Gigger, as all four of us stared in wonder at the devastation visited on the HR department from some Local Authority office.
As a child, if humiliated I'd relive in my head that scene from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, when his mule demands retribution on bandits and Clint Eastwood slaughters them all. I left The George elated, although aware that my victory was likely to be temporary. Sure enough, I heard Old Bill's sirens approaching. Urged on by my three jubilant companions, I stepped in front of a thatch-headed Hampshire plod.
'I've had my Islamic faith insulted with pork scratchings chucked all over my meal-deal Hunter's chicken.'
He informed me how I'd suffered a hate crime and urged that I pressed charges. As I completed the paper work, I saw several of the less critically injured being frog-marched into a riot van. Ambulances then arrived to remove the more serious cases.
I fired up the Jaguar and thanked a lone evening star for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, somewhere looking over us still - if we dare to ask.
CHAPTER FOUR: RAVEN IN WELWYN GARDEN CITY AND OXFORD
The childhood house he was haunted by still existed, nightly in his dreams and half-wrecked in this now-affluent area. Raven had driven to see it. As with any distance from childhood, the actual mileage was much smaller than he'd endlessly imagined.
And on the drive, he'd suddenly known exactly what was wrong with him and everyone he knew. Their online world had replaced reality, flattening the joy in beauty, knowledge - and discovery. Every experience, insight and idea got mediated through a human vastness which made nothing seem real. So obvious was this that he almost dared not think it.
It was why literature didn't exist, anymore. And how writers from the past - Dickens, Dostoevsky and Celine - certainly did; they weren't the past now. That was his only way. This new world had abolished time, so he'd no need to live in it or compete on its terms.
What if he moved into this Welwyn Garden City house? One look in the garden reified things. Trees actually growing - huge ones - through the back-lawn. Like the scene from Where the Wild Things Are, the sleepy boy in pyjamas finding woods around his bed.
Except now he was outside and could barely see the room where he'd slept. And men were working there, clearing the mess around the house.
*
Raven was at Oxford station, hours early for his reprogramming session. As ever, he was constructing fictional scenarios for the shabbiest looking people - including himself - wandering around this dismal place.
Pity was what he wanted to feel but anger was his unavoidable reaction, at what his country had become rather than the individuals he saw. Still, neither seemed possible starting points for literature. That was his limitation, not the world's. Hadn't some philosopher said we always confuse the two - presumably only the true artist could reconcile them.
What would they make of the man sat opposite, checking his watch constantly then staring at it with open admiration, even love? Possibly nothing, although the inconceivable filth of his clothes and the stench from them were incredible. No doubt this was why Raven had found an empty seat at his table.
'Nice watch!' he ventured.
'Couldn't you at least have attempted to disguise your surprise?'
The stinking man's voice was educated, almost aristocratic. Raven peered closely at the timepiece shown to him. To his delight, it was a Dirty Dozen British Army watch, clearly original, with patina and fading radium lume.
'Worn at D Day?'
'Possibly - everything they fought for has been lost.'
*
Raven's 'kindness counselling' took place on the first Monday of every month in his old Oxford college - despite his exile in Norfolk, or because of it. His car had been seized after his Welwyn Garden City epiphany and handed over to a 'boat person' (some Somalian drug dealer), so this re-education now necessitated an excruciating cross-country rail trip. If he refused, his beloved 15-year-old daughter would be moved from her current school into one notorious for bullying and drugs. His meagre pension would also be cancelled.
Monday was chosen so that he had to travel up on the Sunday, staying overnight in some shithole chosen by the authorities. Usually this was in London but last night he'd been forced into an Iffley Road guesthouse, notoriously the preferred venue for Oxford’s Pakistani rape gangs. Of course, he had to pay for this travel and accommodation.
At the last session, he'd been set the task of using three ‘key-concepts’ in a PowerPoint presentation, explaining the dangers from the ‘far-Right’. The specified words were equity; diversity; inclusion. He’d added two of his own: ‘desultory’ and ‘deracination’.
The first was one of his favourites; for some reason, it evoked his school days. As a child, he'd had few friends and none he actually liked. Sundays had stretched out endlessly, ending with the comfort of a Vosene hair wash.
He made his way into Oxford through the commuters, beggars and homicidal cyclists.
CHAPTER FIVE: BREAKFAST IN WETHERSPOONS
At some time, everyone needs to walk away, break loose, light out for the territory. Maybe just metaphorically, deliberately failing to arrive for something important. Walking out on an obnoxious class, or people who hate you and find ingenious ways of showing it.
So, Raven's decision to drop into Wetherspoons can be rationalised. He was due in his college at ten and left the station at nine. Typically for him, this made it just possible to consume a small breakfast and be on time, but introduced anxiety into an already toxic morning. Because he was always thinking of watches and time. His sight of the Vertex Dirty Dozen on the stinking man had both cheered and disturbed him. What its proud owner said - defiant but defeated.
Aeons ago he'd studied science at college and time's dimensionality had delighted him. He'd long felt some force communicating and weaving this narrative in more dimensions than could be comprehended, other than through feelings and beliefs. It was the nearest he got to anything spiritual, somehow linking the people and things he loved to something larger which could - maybe would - preserve them.
But there seemed no way of reconciling all this with society now. The bedrock feeling of permanence had gone. Previously, whatever the inevitable cascade of events, that sense of solidity had existed, however illusorily. It was even true in the 1980s, when he'd been at Oxford. Then Blair arrived and the systematic destruction began. Degrees, doctorates and entire ideologies ‘justified’ this, in terms of historical wrongs - some of them partly true. But you can't destroy a country's past without destroying its people.
What a joy Wetherspoons pubs are! Such a horror to the middle classes, with their loathing for unabashed Englishness and boozy camaraderie. The last remnants of our 'chop houses' and market pubs, open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and frequented by everyone except prim progressives. How relaxing to see pints of lager being unashamedly necked and even the occasional punch-up erupt.
Raven checked his Murph 38mm Hamilton. Of course no messages from the future - of planetary escape and rebirth - were moving its second hand. Yet the still-ticking beauty emboldened him.
He was off - after breakfast and a couple of pints. But not to some punishment meeting in his old college.
CHAPTER SIX: A GIRL AND HER DAD
With anywhere one knows well, the sense grows that it's watching you. When so much of your life has been spent there, something living forms. It doesn't matter if this is internal - 'just a feeling' - or personification. Time's accumulations and destructions stare back at you. There's no need for some Nietzschean abyss. It might be a street corner or a shop that's changed its name, again and again.
Raven could still lose himself in Oxford’s old stone and layers. That weird alley linking George Street with the top of New Road was a favourite, also Beef Lane off Pembroke Street. Hours of wandering until some refreshment and downloading became urgent.
He'd by now traipsed west, uneasily wondering how this indulgence would affect his daughter's schooling. Staring into the Manley Hopkins darksome burn of the Thames at Osney, a heron perched by the bridge. So many times he’d done this, staggering back from drinking in the Lamb and Flag.
Thinking over his time in teaching, he sometimes experienced pupils surfacing from his memory so clearly that he was back in the classroom or at a parents' evening. Running water encouraged such reverie. Perhaps it was the river's churn and disappearance, the drama subsiding into its relentless flow downstream.
*
One of his final appointments, though she'd not booked a slot. Something in her stance and downcast eyes - weariness and wariness - was heart stabbing. Nervous then embarrassed at Raven's offered hand and her father tremulously grasping it.
Raven slipped into machine-talk on projected grades and 'stretch' targets as the inebriated man blinked and nodded his head. He said nothing as his daughter spoke for them both, saying more than she ever had in a lesson. She mapped out her plans and Raven forced himself to be cheerfully optimistic, overdoing reactions whilst pretending not to notice the father's whisky stench.
To his discredit, he recalled nothing on what she’d hoped to become. Had the drunken dad insisted on coming - had she even begged him to? He couldn't bear to think of her feeling ashamed. But he remembered standing up and saying the bloke should be proud of his daughter. Then they were gone.
The horror and terror this encounter must have been to her. The tracking data and colour coding had said nothing, but what did EDI monitoring care about this child? Suffering like hers was never discussed in all his years of teacher training or 'continuous career development'. He hated his profession for this progressive idiocy, wrapped in self-congratulation but callously blind towards so many English children.
By the Thames now, he thought of Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend.
But what help was literature when it came to it?
*
How many people carry knives routinely now? They were a commonplace at the dump of a school he was terrified his daughter would get exiled to, in revenge for him bunking off the 'meeting' at his college. But hunger and thirst were stirring his creativity. He carried - for artistic purposes - a Japanese Higonokami pocket knife. Digging it into his palm was a vital spur.
Raven despised those who sat in cafes, tapping away - ‘laptop jockeys’ he called them. Yet now he sat writing a six-part sequence on True Crime in a Botley coffee shop, mixing memory and desire. He knew this obsessional interest was distasteful and spurred by his inner rage. But he refused to internally censor himself, since this was now happening in every element of his external life.
TRUE CRIME
His recurrent childhood nightmare was of getting caught burgling a house. He recalled the alien smells, the feeling of suffocating in the noisome dark, a certainty he’d lost any security forever.
Then he’d be awake, safely stretched in bed.
Now he was planning to make this reality. He was clearly mad. The place he’d chosen was a detached house, way up Cumnor Hill. It was to be a ritual desecration, a revenge attack on the class and character of its owners.
Talk with such types had become circular; nothing could breach their liberal certainties. Words no longer held any meaning for these people. It was pointless to contradict this through more argument. An empirical representation – an objective correlative – of his opposing thought was needed, for himself and for them. Hadn’t the husband unknowingly demanded it?
‘You’re a right-wing wanker. Worse than a Nazi.’
He was mad but not responsible for making himself so. His class was the target. To wear a Balaclava was essential, not to avoid recognition but from 70s memories of drying them on school radiators and images of terrorists.
*
You’ll need to know the details, what I took.
A penknife: small; portable; collectable.
I’ve kept some from my childhood,
lost the flick-knives from trips to France.
I waited at least an hour on the sloping lawn,
hidden from the house, the incline so steep.
The expected security lights didn’t activate.
Of course there was an alarm – I welcomed it.
Have you been inside a house when one goes off?
Sickening disorientation and five-minutes’ panic.
Time for me to smash up some pictures,
piss in a wicker basket and their boots,
tear off a coat-rack then grab the knife.
I was filmed jumping over a hedge.
*
He sat and dug under his finger nails with the shining blade:
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Presumably the soil he removed was ‘forensic evidence’? In a true-crime documentary, trace-element analysis would pinpoint the Cumnor ridge and its famous clay.
His urine would obviously yield DNA.
But he doubted this bourgeois burglary would divert the police from queuing in Greggs or surfing internet porn.
He was safe.
SONNET ON STEALING A CAR
At fifty-nine I’ve stolen my first car.
In films it’s done with the utmost of ease –
glancing round, ruler down the driver’s door,
a rapid twisting of wires and away.
Reality? Smashing my way in then
electrocuted getting connection.
Alarm blaring, me waving and mouthing:
‘Don’t worry, it’s my car – temperamental!‘
Meanwhile, that burgled berk from Cumnor Hill
is bustling back, swinging his Waitrose bag.
Eventually it starts and I soak him,
aquaplaning through water, a puddle
for him and his wife. I flick salt-shaker
gestures and he feebly attempts to chase.
RACHE
Like A Study in Scarlet, red ‘Rache’ carved
inside their lives. He saw them smiling and
decided how to; who to trust. But the
rash sharing of an obsession was why
many got caught. If he acted alone,
only his thoughts had importance. He could
live inside those and switch to some dagger –
if he dared to – then slash without warning.
You think this mad but the pain seen in her
should not be forgiven. To know they had
enjoyed it ’caused his monstrous behaviour.’
True-crime documentaries said that and
‘Nobody thought he would ever do this.’
Each step was easily traced, if you tried.
IV. UNMASKING OF A SERIAL KILLER
In the old Truman brewery, Brick Lane,
the world’s leading Ripper experts sipping
champagne while ruminating on some wretch;
Isaac Dipski – the mad kosher butcher –
lifted crusts from gutters, believed he was
conversing with Abraham using farts.
Five witness reports of him running past
Chapman’s death scene on the way to Nando’s.
The killer is named, to thundering applause:
‘Charles Allen Lechmere, found there in Buck’s Row,
we’ve tracked his mobile phone. Early for work –
claimed he thought it was on old tarpaulin –
standing by Polly Nichols, freshly slain.
And there’s six minutes lost he can’t explain…’
V: AMONGST THE HALF MAD
I’m not complaining –
it’s where I’m meant to be.
An Internet discussion board:
Casebook: Jack the Ripper; I’m barred!
Was it him – Francis Thompson – my quest.
London, up from autumnal tree-tunnels
to border areas of Holborn, the City, those
streets I walked once, bored, lonely. no one.
Up past Newgate, St Mary-le-Bow down to
Watling Street with its views of St Paul’s.
St Stephen Walbrook, my days have
wandered then become a joke, his
‘have crackled and gone up in smoke’.
Praise God no tourists, just sentinel
towers from Wren dwarfed by capital.
It’s beautiful to live on visuals,
memories – bits of a building, a
childhood scout-hut, some adventure
playground. Schools are here, one
on Mitre Square where I’m going.
A lone muttering, others the same.
London can be taken by trackless
steps. Odd to arrive in Bevis Marks,
into Dukes Place & down the passage –
St Botolph Church, burial place of rebels.
So was I banned for posting my research:
‘I may have hitherto hidden my dismay,
at the seeming shambles that is “Ripperology” –
Simple experiments and observations.
It’s sorted! Took me twenty minutes on site.
Discovery of a new (highly unsavoury) ‘clew’ –
bagged and sent to forensics. All done after
a leisurely stroll from Drury Lane, through
old Holborn/City (some Wren churches) to
Mitre Square, where I solved the case!
I don’t want to be critical;
but what the hell have you all
been doing for these 135 years?’
VI: THIS BITER GETS BITTEN
Let's be honest about economic reality.
There are Slavs who'll work till midnight
in awful restaurants, places where you'd ask:
who can eat here? Then they take the
last bus and so do you. The English get
anywhere, to any place even when roads are shut –
our history says so. We might seem to be absent -
we're there. Those ribcage towns in hopeless dawns,
I can’t describe them nor Oxford (its pale lights
on cobbles) glowering high-rise block monoliths
marching through snow. They're here for the children,
not yours, they'd take yours and show them what’s worse.
I shouldn't be saying that and I am. Maybe rebirth happens in
sonnets? Or the whole thing starts again in something else.
*
It's at this point the decent reader wants
to see this writer receive what he's doling
out so here's a rambling account of how
I escaped through alleys and slippery
courts not in Oxford or London but
somewhere too Gothic to be safe as when
I went there it wasn't for tourists but exile.
That was just before the Berlin Wall fell
in Prague 1989, the country in freefall.
You know the old Eastern block cities
had terrible crime under Communism?
Actually it was more dangerous since
the causes couldn't be admitted as
social in a perfect society I went
for a walk along the river away
from anything picturesque towards
distant tower-blocks such numbers,
all of them in a line like that scene from
the Bourne film where he visits the Russian
girl – Moscow I think – whose parents
he's killed. Anyway on I wandered into the
Czechoslovak night lights were bright and
high up I think then I was hit from behind
and expertly robbed in a smell of vodka or
schnapps the bloke took very little since I
grabbed his legs and pushed him over easily.
The fear, I ran without wondering why it
was raining with no drops on the river – blood
of course from my broken head - sunrise back
in the Hotel Bristol reception called this doctor
who nodded uninterested and said ‘only a
fool walks to any of those places since now
the whole state is failing.’ My money was
gone only worthless Czech stuff I'd bought
at five times the official rate. It's not much but
I can say I've suffered from True Crime just
like we all have though I'd forgotten it and
how a friend from university got murdered
by a whack across the head in Battersea Park.
Very atmospheric, Paul. It was clear to me on my abortive teaching practice, 20-odd years ago at a Middlesbrough inner-city school, that many white working class boys had been forgotten.