Manners Read online

  If you don't fancy seeing a shrink they just put you on to another officer who's had a bad experience himself. I met up in a Holborn pub with a middle-aged DS from City police.

  'My friend Pete was about to be married, I was best man. We get a call that a squad car's crashed, we rush over and it's him, it's Pete, and I pull his dead body out the passenger door — chasing a couple of … joy-riders, weren't they? Next day I have to tell his fiancée, Ann, and all I remember thinking was I hope I don't get there just as they're pinning up her dress. I had this image in my head that she'd be standing there in the white dress with a seamstress pinning her up. It's funny what goes through your mind.'

  'Was she?'

  'Eh? No,' he chuckled, 'no, she was just having coffee in a denim shirt. So what happens Monday morning? Never happened before or since, but it happened then two, three days afterwards … I get slashed in the neck with a razor and nearly died.' The scar was tiny now but he told me he was in Critical.

  I believed him, the nick was just above the collar bone, bang on the carotid. It was an ordinary Wilkinson Sword, he said over his fourth IPA, but to this day when he goes into Boots and sees a Wilkinson Sword display or just sees it on sale it gives him a strange feeling.

  I left the pub, and felt a great relief looking at a woman's arse in a pair of grimy Levi's. Slightly pissed I rubber-necked all the way home.

  'How did it go?' asked Mickey when I got back.

  'Oh, it was all right, like, but I didn't really feel anything was said.'

  'Well, people who've seen the canceller say they found it helpful.'

  'I'll see how I go.'

  'OK.'

  In recent years they've made it so no one needs to know you've gone. They just leave the address of the counselling service up on the noticeboard. It also comes free — one of those double-edged perks of the job like bingo disability pension and the bereavement rollover.

  To my shame, I've been as guilty of macho bollocks in this regard as the dustiest canteen cowboy. Me and Kieran were sitting in the canteen one evening chatting to Perry, a dark, skinny, nervy CBO, and his partner Ellen. Perry asked the table if any of us had ever had to go to counselling for things we'd seen on the job.

  'So you're saying you have?' I leered (thinking I was being ironic at the time but really I wasn't).

  'Yeah,' said Perry courageously.

  'You all right now?' asked K.

  'Oh yeah, it was just this accident I was first on the scene for. The ambulance crew got me fucking shovelling bits of human off the motorway. I mean literally shovelling with a fucking trowel they have there. Plus I was first on the scene and it took ages for the ambulance to respond. I was there for about twenty minutes helpless and there was like this man with the fucking steering column embedded in his gut.' He paused. 'And loads of other stuff besides.'

  I put on a gravelly, low-life pervert voice like Dudley Moore does on one of the Derek & Clive tapes. 'Did the steering-wheel go, you know, right inside, you know, right in there … ?'

  'Fuck off, everyone knows you're the mental person here.'

  'Did it … ?'

  'How do you work with that?' the always-flustered-looking, untalented Perry asked K.

  'Well, there's that. But you know what he means, Perry. I mean there's nothing to be ashamed of. You drive past a car crash and you get so fucking turned on, you know, all that twisted metal.'

  'And like they weren't expecting it, were they,' I added with a connoisseur's wry cocking of the head.

  Perry raised his eyes from the formica, like, 'Have you finished yet?'

  'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' he said, 'but it's waiting for you and it's your own fears that's making you — '

  'Yeah, sorry,' said Keiran.

  'No, you're right, Perry,' I said, suddenly ashamed, suddenly wanting to be on the right side again. (All the while I'd been taking the piss I'd actually been admiring him, especially when he glossed over, And loads of other stuff besides.) 'Yeah, well the counsellor,' said Perry looking at Kieran, and winding up his riposte unconfidently but doggedly, 'she keeps saying, "When's Manners coming in?"'

  *

  She was in her late thirties, middle-class, no-make-up pretty, rounded. Light-brown, fine shoulder-length hair in a bob. She had small eyes, small nose and mouth in a round, intelligent face lightly dusted with freckles. Her sparse, brown eyebrows naturally petered out halfway. A rounded body with big tits under a loose, white linen grandad shirt. I could see a bit of white bra between the buttons of her loose shirt. It occurred to me that it might do me real good if I could just suckle at her tits for the remaining three-quarters of an hour. That would be truly comforting. 'There's a good boy,' she says, stroking my hair as thick warm milk spills over my greedy lips, 'Mummy's here,' milk dribbling down my gooey chin and out the corners of my mouth. Sucking harder and harder on the barrel peg nipple yummy yummy yummy I got love in my tummy.

  Her room had two chairs turned towards each other, watercolours and scatter-cushions designed so as not to induce a homicidal spree, and a glass-top table with a presumptuous box of Kleenex. Some rogue TSG voice in my head wanted to throw the box out the window, like, 'We won't be needing these, love.'

  Seeing as we only had fifty minutes, it vexed me that she spent five, ten telling me why the session had to stop dead on fifty minutes. Make that forty, then.

  We didn't talk that much about the old woman who melted, as it happened. She — the shrink — kept wanting to know why that should have made everything ugly, she kept on about why that one scene had made all life tainted, what it was in me. It was like being in the witness stand when suddenly the attack swivels from the crime to me, and the Crown start digging me out like I'm just as terrible, that the real evil lies in me and my crazy, whacked-out claim of what I saw!

  I can't remember much of the session — it was over a year ago — but I remember how she ended it. I remember her last words; what we were in the middle of when the clock that she could see and I couldn't politely clicked. I remember getting these two sentences next to each other: 'I think you're worried you're so angry that you might kill someone. But we must stop for today.'

  It had been strange getting up to see her at eight a.m., as I usually did the lates no one else wants to do. When I came home the curtains were still drawn, and I half-expected to find my unexamined self still asleep. Whatever was said was irrelevant back here in the stalled flat. Her long, accepting pauses, I felt then, were as nothing against the one long pause of my charged room.

  Beverley's New Curtains

  The struggling bluebottle has been reduced to sporadic buzzing in a moany key between longer and longer silences.

  It's weird to look at the phone now and think it used to be all right to call Beverley from it. (Lost in that past when I counted myself among all those people who'd never killed another human being.) Same phone, different life. Then I could phone her even if — and this was the glorious bit – I had nothing to say …

  'Hello?' she'd say, greeting a mean aggregate of all humanity that always phones us. Some people are hostile, guarded, suspicious in that moment before you know who or what is at the other end of the line, but she was expectant. On balance she had found she liked humans.

  'Hi, it's me.'

  'Hey, sexy.'

  'No, it's John.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it was my three o'clock.'

  'You prostitute.'

  'Mmnh-mmnnh,' she mock-moaned.

  'You're a disgrace.'

  'Why are you going out with me, then?'

  'I dunno. It's an extended sympathy shag.'

  'Oh, that's all right, then.'

  'What are you wearing … ?'

  'You always ask me what I'm wearing.'

  'Yeah, it gives me a picture.'

  'You an' all.'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'I had this prank phone call two days ago from these boys saying they could see me walking round the flat with no clothes on.'

  A
forty-minute response time before I'm pressing her entry buzzer clutching two pairs of thick, canvasy blue curtains, wrought-iron curtain rails, brackets and a cordless drill.

  'You're mad,' she said.

  'Which flats is it?' I say, looking out the window, hoping they'll clock Eternal Male Protector.

  'I dunno,' said Beverley, grinning, 'it could be front or back.' Front or back! Both holes! 'You can see in from both sides. It might not even be — you know they might have just been phoning random numbers and not even live anywhere near here.'

  'Yeah, but they know about the curtains.' I went to the window again to see if any men were looking in and getting more and more obsessed each night.

  'Well, they didn't specifically say — '

  'But if they can see you then they'll get obsessed and start brooding on … the whole thing.'

  'Well, it might not have been that at all: it might have been a complaint. "We can see you naked: please buy some curtains." You know, the Residents' Association.'

  'Yeah, case solved. Well done.' I put the bit in the drill.

  'Thank you, officer,' she smiled rawly. I held the drill in my hand next to my shoulder, pointing up at the ceiling like a gun. I pulled the trigger, eyes wide like Driller Killer and it whined frantically, hating to be spinning in mid-air.

  The blue curtains gave a strange new vibe to her drum, the afternoon outside stitched into the moody weave.

  'I don't have to have them drawn all the time just 'cos they're up, do I?'

  'Yeah, except when you go out, when I'd like you to be wearing them.'

  She'd got a new job working as a rigger for Neg. Earth, a lighting company for music venues: laying down the rubbermatting for outdoor gigs, hoisting the lighting rig, bolting the follow-spots.

  'The job's a grin 'cos if the get-in's early, we finish in time to all go absailing,' she said when I saw her a week later.

  How to describe her face? How to describe anyone's? If humans had spent some of the Middle Ages inventing words for types of human faces, we might have had less war. We'd have classified a gimlet-eyed, dewdrop-nose overbite face, say, as a gammelstad, and would have recognized it in all races. In a world without war the peaceful Swedes would dominate the discourse and a sten or friggesby; billy-80 or expressivo might have been types of face and not furniture and fittings. But the world being what it is, however, the best way we know of describing the human face is a police E-fit. Let us open the blue vinyl ring-book called Caucasian Female 20-30.

  Start with Elizabeth McGovern off of Once Upon A Time in America. Thin the lips out. Key in a wider nose. Buff that wide nose up till you get a good shine on it. Build up a strong clear jaw and chin. For her flesh-tone factor in a childhood diet of Fray Bentos pies, ketchup and chips under Birmingham skies as your base over which to update on all the different colours she does her hair. For her gait, click on the tall swagger of the toughest girl in the school walking up to the gates of a rival school certain of 'having' their top girl. For the look in her eyes send out the city's photographers to snap people who have just missed what everyone else is laughing at and have their mouths open in anticipation of getting it. Smelt 'em down and mesh 'em all in. For the feeling you get when you see her, merge in a photo taken by a nervous boy-virgin of a girl in a denim jacket at a funfair about to win an Elvis mirror at darts.

  That day she was wearing a tartan miniskirt, army boots and a loose-fit, white T-shirt.

  She went to open a bottle of wine. I followed her. 'Didn't you cause a riot on the tube?'

  'No,' she replied.

  'Weren't you pestered by everybody?'

  'No, I sat there and read.'

  'That's a very short skirt.'

  'It's a short skirt.'

  'Suppose someone came up to you and did this.'

  'Well, I think I'd notice,' she said as I pressed my palm over her exposed buttock, staring at the black cotton knickers.

  'Oh, sorry, miss.'

  She carried the bottle through to the table. She looked down to find me lying on the floor staring up her skirt.

  'Yeah, I think I'd notice that as well,' she said.

  'Are you sure?'

  'Get up, you pervert,' she said, smiling down at me. My eyes went from her eyes to her pale skin in shade. The cool scoop above the inner thigh where it turns into buttock, and the slightly creviced black cotton.

  The pervert got up. I went round the back of her T-shirt and slid it up over the sheer smooth skin of her hard back. 'Anyone could just come up to you,' I said, bringing my hands round to interfere with her nipples, 'and just do this,' exaggeratedly rippling my fingers so that it became creepy.

  'Oh for fuck's sake!' she scoffed, spinning away. 'Like I'd let them!'

  'Oh, OK.'

  She walked over to me and lazily climbed on to my back. I carried her round on piggy-back as I took the wine glasses to the table where I swung her down as gently and casually as a mum with a two-year-old. Sitting on the chair while I rattled the pack and heard just one answering fag, she put her palm on my genitalia and said, 'Well, suppose I just came up to you and did this.'

  'But you wouldn't because my dress is very proper and nonprovocative and I wouldn't put those sorts of thoughts in your head. You'd be thinking about good works or religion if you saw me.'

  'Not if you were lying on the floor looking up my skirt.'

  'Anyway I wouldn't have noticed you.'

  She drew my inflating cock out of my trousers and said, 'Have you noticed?'

  'At this point I'm just wondering if I did my flies up.' She put me in her mouth as I filled out. 'Madam!' I exclaimed, as if only just having noticed.

  She'd bought a new outfit, and took it out the bag with a grin all over one side of her face. I held the tiny silk one-piece in my hand, the size of a hanky.

  'It's great,' I said. 'It's staying here!' I went and hid it in a cupboard.

  'But if I don't wear it, you look at women who do,' she called out to me. It was true, but I came back with a stupid, fixed grin on my face. A grin I kind of wanted her to dislodge. The fixed, stupid grin didn't feel like my own stupid grin. It felt like some 1950s posh bloke with a pipe who calls his woman honeypie or cherub. One of many ghost faces which come out in the slow exorcism of sexist fear when you're getting close.

  I had to leave her then because I was on a late. That night I was walking up the Gaily Road by Pentonville. In the same way you flinch before you hear a sound from far-off, my pulse was already lurching noisily even before I heard the sudden shouting and banging in the distance. Where was it coming from? Panel-beating. Joyous, malicious shouting. What was it?

  Someone having their head banged against something metal?

  I ran towards Market Road with its rows of VW vans that Australians sell after touring Europe and before they fly home. A pack of North London slags were besieging a converted Bedford van. Half a dozen white boys, fifteen-to seventeen-year-olds. Throwing rocks and banging on the curtained windows. Chillingly one of the slags was shouting, 'Have you got any women in there?' But then they saw me and scattered.

  A woman looked through the curtain of the silver bus and the bus-door swivelled open. She crouched at the top of the stair, inside where the NZ sticker promised rich and strange delights.

  'What if they come back?' she asked.

  'No, they won't,' I said, deliberately breezy because fear is the enemy. You have to allay fear because it's the agar nutrient culture of hell.

  'But what if they do?'

  'They won't.' They wouldn't.

  I said good-night and the coach door closed without the hydraulic hiss. Their shadows moved and murmured behind sheets taped over the windows. She was well fit, the New Zealand big-bus spokeswoman. Skinny with short, messy brown hair. Something confident or athletic about her hips which were in a pair of men's boxers, red hearts on white cotton, and with big thick Lapland slipper-boot-type things and a yellow, zipped-up, seventies Adidas tracksuit top. I resisted the urge to spend a fe
w hours banging on the bus, despite now knowing that they had in fact got a woman in there.

  Instead I headed off back towards the Caledonian Road, past the sickly, citrus smell of all the pulped orange skins in the forecourt of Johnson's orange drink factory. What was it about the silver bus, the converted Bedford, that made them bang on its side panels and shout, 'Are there any women in there?' I thought I knew. It was like that sense when you walk past houseboats and think, 'Wow, who would live here? There's only a thin bit of glass between you and anyone walking along the towpath at night'. But that's true of the houses built of bricks and mortar too, isn't it? What makes the houseboat feel more assailable? Is it the idea that they might not be on the phone? Is it the sense that the neighbouring boats might be unoccupied? Or is it really to do with the fact that somehow there's less of a taboo or less of a force-field about breaking in?

  Time was, it would have been less likely for them to besiege a house. Less likely not because a house is bricks and mortar — after all a house is easier to break into than a coach — but because of somehow still-standing bourgeois force-fields, see-thru' shields. And yet tonight on the Rockingham Estate families who aren't 'connected' cower indoors with the lights off, because if the slag youth see the lights on they bang on the windows and on the doors. The families sit in the half of the flat away from the balcony. If they go to the kahzi or turn the bedroom light on so you can see the lights from the balcony it attracts the slags and they're banging on the window. And there's nothing we can do about it. They won't phone us, and when we go door to door they want to show the kids how quickly they shut the door on us.

  There are the invisible barriers within yourself … In books they say, 'He was blah blah blah but somewhere inside him was a little voice which knew that he had done wrong.' I had no faith in that little voice. Could it be heard with all the other noise going on? The boom-boom stezzy within smoked-glass car windows; the loud rhetoric of slag self-justification; or those times when you're talking about what you'd like to do to a nonce, you can feel a distaste inside you when the wicked spirit of hate has possessed you, but engorged with its energy you let it carry you along. But in the UN of the mind that distaste is just a lone, elderly Swedish consul among a thousand Paraguayan generals. We get used to overriding these voices and the high street looks like a sci-fi film-set after the death of the soul.