invisible to her as I stood far above in the darkness behind nearly closed curtains, she often paused and, shading her eyes, looked up in my direction. Although her figure far below was tiny I could discern the colour of her eyes – somewhere between blue and green – read ‘AERO’ on the catch of her jacket’s zip and pick out on her back pockets the strainings of every single white stitch. I sometimes considered waiting around down there – to smile, strike up a conversation or follow her – but I never did: I liked things just the way they were.
Then, one lunchtime, as I lurched, refocusing, out of The Ram’s Revenge, I literally bumped into her. Laughing, she steadied herself with one hand on my shoulder. My mind raced, trying to adjust to how she’d suddenly blown herself up from half an inch high to – in those heels – slightly taller than me. Although she didn’t need it, she was heavily made up. It couldn’t conceal a cold sore at the side of her nose – my fingers automatically scratched the same place on my own face. Our eyes met and then her smile twisted into an expression of horror or disgust. She turned white, then beetroot-red, then ducked her head, clutched her boxy handbag as if it had been a threatened baby and went clattering and stumbling down the steep cobbles of Ivegate.
I stood there frozen. It was as if with that one look she’d taken in everything about me. How could she believe any more in her guardian angel on the seventh floor now that she knew that he was waiting for her every morning and evening, unzipped and ready, with a wad of Kleenex in his hand? On the way back to the block, without premeditation, I kicked-in her car’s passenger door. At five past five she stood with hands on hips and stared straight up at my window for a full two minutes before getting in and driving away. She never parked there again. It felt far worse than when my wife went, as if I’d destroyed the most important relationship of my life – but I didn’t think of her as a slag, just as I hadn’t blamed my wife for liking or not liking being hit. Probably I was no kind of man at all.
As soon as the quiz started I left The Puck: The only question that interested me was ‘What are you drinking?’ The craze would soon pass – like striptease, karaoke or stripkaraoke. Even on a Friday evening the city centre was deserted and silent, except for the starlings screaming from the roof of the Town Hall – the pavements below them were whitened over like snow. Every attempt to get rid of them – birdlime, nets, ultrasonic sound, hawks, stuffed and real – had failed. I loved Bradford at night: I felt light-headed and freed, like one of those kings who would roam unrecognized among their subjects – I never bothered with a disguise, though…leaving off my crown sufficed.
The Royal Standard, The Gladstone, The Peckover, The Perseverance, The Junction – most of my favourite pubs had been closed down. I ended up in The Shoulder of Mutton, drinking sweet weak Sam Smith’s, alone except for a muttering lunatic who Eleanor, good Catholic, had recently banned from The Puck for insisting that Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin had been one and the same person.
In my teens I scoured Bradford for the perfect pub. I used to see it in my dreams. The interior somehow combined patches of blazing white light and impenetrably dark shadows; it had a fifties jukebox with ‘Let there be Drums’ and ‘Endless Sleep’ on it. The landlady resembled Eleanor – but without the religious fanaticism – and although the landlord was permanently drunk you never needed to count your change. It served Taylor’s bitter, had Powers & Bushmills’ optics and Ram Tam Winter Ale on all year round. It was always packed, with good company when you needed it that didn’t need telling when you didn’t. There was no gossiping or talk of football. Search as I might, I’d never found it, but even twenty years later if I stayed in one place for more than an hour I still started to get restless, to feel that I should be out searching, that maybe there was one street that I’d missed. That was how I’d come to be a regular everywhere.
I used to hear tales of a group who I suspected of being on the same quest as myself. There were three men – one fat, one medium, one thin, one fair, one dark, one shaven – who, so it was rumoured, ran a waste disposal business together. Drinking didn’t fuddle them but inspired them: they’d argue brilliantly and interminably about everything under the sun. They weren’t universally popular, though, as they had a curious habit of killing any animals that were in the pub. Beautiful women – always different ones – were said to attend them, ferrying the drinks from the bar while themselves nipping from garnered hip-flasks as they waited to be served. Sometimes I just missed them, entering a pub that was still rocking with laughter as a grinning landlord cleared up the broken glass and splintered wood. Once I found the body of a mynah bird, torn out of its cage and throttled, still quivering on the counter. I never did catch up with them. I’d wondered whether as I sought them they might also have been seeking me, so I’d forced myself to spend entire evenings in one likely place but they were probably sitting across the street doing the same thing.
When The Lord Clyde closed I walked back through the still empty city. Even the starlings were quiet now as I crossed Town Hall Square and climbed towards the Central Library’s block of misted-over glass. On alternate windows large red words had been placed to spell out the lines:
HE WHO BINDS TO HIMSELF A JOY DOES THE WINGED LIFE DESTROY BUT HE WHO KISSES THE JOY AS IT FLIES LIVES IN ETERNITY’S SUNRISE.
It was OK but nowhere near as good as ‘In this block…’ On the ground floor slightly larger green capitals revealed the name of the author: BUTTERFIELD SIGNS. I passed the slate-grey statue of J. B. Priestley, depicted as part-golem, part-monkey, with his feet firmly planted against an eternal force nine that had ripped open his flasher’s mac to reveal him to be frigging the slender stem of his trademark pipe. In Bradford we never forgive the ones that go…or the ones that stay.
I crossed the empty tarmac, walking the white lines that had been marked out as spaces for cars that never came, then negotiated the ghostly six-lane cross-town ramp that linked nowhere to nothing, to reach The Karachi. Everyone I knew seemed to hate the Asians but to me they were angels, sent like Elijah’s ravens to sustain me. In fifteen minutes I had consumed a poppadum, meat samosa, onion bhaji and chicken karahi at a cost of £3.50. Who cared what they wanted to do to Rushdie? – after that meal, I’d have dragged him in there and helped them to bhuna him myself.
Around the blocks up ahead it seemed as if a lunar glow from the painted letters was outshining the streetlamps’ yellow light.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
The writing on the wall: it was like Belshazzar’s Feast. I pictured a disembodied hand crawling across the building like an enormous snail, sliming its white trail: MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN – ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting’. It had always seemed unfair to me: all the other miracles in the Book of Daniel had been to protect the Israelites or at least to keep their spirits up but this one was sheer cruelty. As poor old Belshazzar would be dead within a few hours, with no time to change his ways or even express contrition, what was the point of telling him, except to gloat?
I remembered a nursery rhyme that my gran had taught me:
‘How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.’
Babylon: the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth – I’d always wanted to go there. As a kid I used to check the departure boards at Forster Square Station
