Desmond Barry - London Noir

He walked through Camden Town, through the streets he had walked since childhood, feeling that he no longer knew them. His mind was all over the place, dislocated and lost within the familiar maps of his life. Earlier he had been quite prepared to confront Pete about letting his friends use the flat, but now he felt like he just wanted to forget that he had ever met the boy.

He tried to eat an omelette at a café on Chalk Farm Road, pushing it around his plate until it got lodged in the cooling grease, and then walked up to Parliament Hill fields. There, he sat on a bench overlooking the athletics track, watching a group of girls messing about in the long jump pit. At one point, one of the girls ran across to the steeplechase water jump. There was no water in it, but she still jumped in and pretended to be drowning, waving her arms around and screaming. Her friends just ignored her and at last she returned to the sand pit.

The girls left when it started to get dark, but Coughlan felt too tired to walk home just then and stretched out on the bench to rest for a few minutes before setting off. The brittle summer stars spreading across the darkening ceiling of the world reminded him of a time during the war when he had dragged his mattress onto the roof of the outhouse to listen to the bombs dropping on the East End. Despite the noise and the threat of the bombs getting closer, he remembered it as being a time of calm for him, a time before he had met his wife, a time before the neighbor’s house had been crushed. He let his lids fall, so tired and with a persistent headache, and when at last he opened them again it had started to get light. Surprised, he rubbed hard at his face to wake himself up and then climbed to his feet. His back ached but the pain eased up as he started walking toward the gate. When he checked the clock outside the jeweler’s store on Kentish Town Road he was surprised to see that it was 5 o’clock in the morning.

He let himself into the flat and stood for a few moments in the hall, just holding his breath and listening. Minutes passed but all he could hear was the regular sounds of the flat creaking. He appeared to be alone, but to make sure he went round each of the rooms, checking in cupboards and behind doors, before going back to the front door and locking it. Then he went back into his bedroom and climbed into bed, still in his clothes.

When he woke again it was after 4 in the afternoon, a dull rectangle of orange light spread across the bed beside him. For a moment he did not know where he was, and then he remembered falling asleep on the bench and it all came back to him. But in that fleeting moment of not knowing, he had felt at peace with the world. And now the knot was back in his stomach. He looked at his watch again to check the time. Pete or some of his friends would be around soon and he did not want to be here for that. He went into the bathroom to check on the wound, and then back into the bedroom to dress in a set of thicker and more comfortable clothes. In the kitchen he took his pension book from the drawer, slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers, and headed back outside. He took a quick glance at the drug dealers sitting near the phone booths, then turned and headed back up toward Parliament Hill fields, calling in at a corner shop to purchase a couple of small pies and a carton of milk.

There were a few pensioners out on the bowling green, and a middle-aged couple were struggling to hit the ball over the net on one of the tennis courts. Coughlan stopped for a moment to watch them, aching inside at their casual grasp of the ordinariness of their lives, and then continued on to the bench where he had slept the night before. As he turned from the fence bordering the court, he started to panic at the thought that someone else might be sitting there. But when he reached the top of the rise and saw that there was no one else there, the feeling of relief that flooded his senses was just as great as if he had returned to his flat and found that Pete and his friends had decided to leave. He stepped up his pace until he reached the bench, took his seat, and then looked around, blinking in the high afternoon sun. There was no one on the athletics track, no one messing around in the long jump pit, nothing for him to watch and help pass the time. But on the main path there was a woman out walking her dog, and when Coughlan offered her a cheerful hello he was rewarded with a brief smile. It was the greatest reaction he’d had had in a long time, the greatest acceptance.

Through the birch trees on the far side of the track and the cranes that seemed to be forever stalking the streets of London, Coughlan watched the sun go down until he became shrouded in darkness. The shroud felt a little colder than it had the night before, so he pulled his coat tight around his chest. A slight wind had also started to blow across the hill, and he thought that perhaps he might be too cold on the bench. He tried to think of somewhere else he might be able to sleep. There was a small café near the tennis courts, and he thought that perhaps he might be warm snuggled up there at the back of the kitchen. But then he remembered the bandstand further back. Not the usual kind of bandstand with a wrought-iron railing circling the stage, but one with a solid wall facing the path. Whenever the bandstand was in use, the audience would sit on the hill to watch. If he crept in there he would be sheltered from both the wind and people passing on the path. Taking one last look across the track toward the failing light, Coughlan bundled himself up inside his coat and headed for the bandstand.

Within an hour he was asleep. He dreamed of black-and-white creatures diving from a concrete island and swimming free, at ease with both themselves and their surroundings. From the opposite bank he stood and watched them for a long time before summoning up the courage to dive in and join them. His arms and legs felt awkward at first, stiff and making little progress, but soon he too was swimming free. At first the other creatures kept their distance, but after a few minutes he was accepted into their fold, and when the swim was over the creatures let him climb out onto their concrete island. When he looked back at the place from where he had dived into the water, it had disappeared.

The following morning he awoke feeling like he had just had the best night’s sleep of his life, and he set off back to the flat with something approaching a spring in his step.

Walking across the estate, he saw that the door to his flat was wide open. Fearing that he had been burgled, he picked up his pace and hurried up the stairs. But as he approached the door, the fear was replaced with something else: huge relief that at long last he had no responsibilities and could do just as he pleased. On reaching the door, he stopped and listened for a moment, and then pulled it closed and carried on walking.

Dalston

A hundred wary eyes watched his approach through the yellow-stained sodium twilight. The cats were all around him, frozen as if ready to pounce, though whether toward him or away from him, he couldn’t tell. Heldon considered himself a cat lover, but their stares forced a shiver of unease.

The pinpoints of light punctured the night — under trolleys and cars, on corrugated roofs, though most of them, attached to near-identical scrawny brown bodies, surrounded an overturned plastic barrel that had spilled a neat chevron of part-frozen meat and bone onto a torn newspaper headline: Iran: Allied Generals Are Ready.

By day, Ridley Road Market is the heart of Dalston. A heaving babel of traders and shoppers — East End English, West African, Indian, Russian, Turkish — squeeze past each other in a permanent bottleneck. The stalls — Snow White Children’s Clothes, Chicken Shop, Alpha & Omega Variety Store — offer exotically colored fabrics and cheap electrical goods alongside barrels of unidentifiable animal parts, unfamiliar vegetables, and unlocked mobile phones.