‘You dumb fucking monkey.’
I feel Rudkin’s hand on my back.
I turn away.
Noble winks.
Ellis stares.
It’s over.
For now.
I stand in the white corridor outside the canteen.
I call home.
No answer.
They’re still at the hospital or up in bed; either way she’ll be fucked off.
I see her father in the bed, her walking up and down the ward, Bobby in her arms, trying to get him to stop crying.
I hang up.
I call Janice.
She answers.
‘You again?’
‘You alone?’
‘For now.’
‘What about later?’
‘I hope not.’
‘I’ll try and get over.’
‘Bet you will.’
She hangs up.
I look at the bleached floor, at the bootmarks and the dirt, the shadows and the light.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to go.
The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Monday 30th May 1977
Chapter 2
Ancient English shitty city? How can this ancient English shitty city be here! The well-known massive grey chimney of its oldest mill? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Queen’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Commonwealth robbers, one by one. It is so, for the cymbals clash, and the Queen goes by to her palace in long procession. Ten thousand swords flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing girls strew flowers. Then follow white elephants caparisoned in red, white and blue, infinite in number and attendants. Still, the chimney rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the chimney so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry. Stay! I am twenty-five years and more, the bells chime in jubilation. Stay.