Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Oh, the relief as the seconds pounded by… and nothing happened. There was a scare as the door of a flat nearer the lift opened and a man in overalls came out without even looking in my direction. A scraping noise, a girl’s voice saying, ‘No, Wednesday,’ and the slam of a door, must have come from within another flat-it was hard to be sure. I turned on my heel, but being so far in I knew I must ring again to be sensible and certain. Perhaps Mr Hope, sleeping out his jobless afternoon, would be disturbed, and come vacantly to the door.

A minute later I burnt off my adrenalin leaping down the stairs-which were bleakly concrete, like the long exit stairways at the back of cinemas. There was a smell of urine, and lines down the walls drawn by running hands. At the turn of each flight ‘NF’ had been scrawled, with a pendant saying ‘Kill All Niggers’ or ‘Wogs Out’. I thought with yearning of the Hopes, whom I did not know, forced to contain their anger, contempt and hurt in such a world.

It would be best to see Arthur on common ground-in a bar or club or out in the open air which I now re-entered gratefully. In view of the horror of the case it had been rather reckless to go to his home, and I was glad I had got away with it. Ideally, I suppose, I wanted to help, to give money to the friend or consolation to the grieving mother: though I was always hoping, expecting even, to see him, there was an assumption dully gaining ground in my mind that he was dead.

In the charmless passage between the buildings there were at least the skinheads to look forward to. I had once spent a weekend with a skinhead I picked up at a dance-hall in Camden Town; he called himself Dash, though that was not among the qualities of that ugly, passionate boy. I preferred to see it as a polite euphemism for one of the stronger words that were always hypnotically on his lips. They were a challenge, skinheads, and made me feel shifty as they stood about the streets and shopping precincts, magnetising the attention they aimed to repel. Cretinously simplified to booted feet, bum and bullet head, they had some, if not all, of the things one was looking for.

I came by easily, and shot a glance at the big one I had noticed before. He was leaning against the wall, by the entrance to one of the rubbish bays, his ankles crossed, and looking straight at me. ‘Got the time,’ he said neutrally, hardly as a question.

I virtually stopped, referred to my old gold watch. ‘It’s 4.15,’ I said.

‘Let me see,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and giving me a strange, private smile. There was a swastika tattoo on the back of his hand, very badly done, almost as though it had been drawn on with a biro.

Another of the group was across the alleyway, his eyes shifting with amazing speed, as if he was mad. ‘Give us your watch!’ he said, with extreme, petulant vehemence, though never looking at me for a second together. But the sexy one tossed my arm away from him, I gave a nervous gasp of a laugh, and decided I was in control of things. I stepped forward, and around the big boy, who had moved out to block my passage; the other one said, ‘Where do you think you’re going? We want your watch.’

I said rather crossly, ‘Well, you can’t have it.’

At this point a third youth, that I hadn’t spotted in the narrow shaft of the bin-yard on the right, clambered rapidly up one of the six-foot-high bins and sat throned on the top among the black bags of rubbish, banging his heels against the side of the container. ‘Fucking poof!’ he said, with a kind of considered anger.

Angry myself, I wanted simply to get away-but as I tried to do so was challenged with ‘Um-excuse me-no one said you could go.’

‘You can tell he’s a fuckin’ poof,’ said the one on top of the bin.

It was an old problem: what to say, what was the snappy putdown? Clever, but not too clever. I acted out a weary sigh, and said, tight-lipped: ‘Actually, poof is not a word I would use.’

‘Isn’t it, actually? ’ said the leader, again with a smile that seemed to say he knew my game, he knew what I liked.

‘Look, excuse me,’ I said tetchily, nervous, hearing my own voice in my ears as though they had played it to me on a tape-recorder. I felt I mustn’t flatten it, or pretend, but to them it must have sounded a parody voice, pickled in culture and money.

The jittery one, skinny, pecking forward with his oddly vulnerable neck and gulping Adam’s apple, said: ‘Yeah! What’s ’is game, any’ow? What’s ’e doin’ ’ere?’ His eyes ran up and down over me, as if wondering where to strike.

I knew I needn’t answer and blustered inwardly about a ‘lawless tribunal’. At the same time I had a terrible certainty that I was lost. They had decided on my fate and were nerving themselves up to it by humiliating me. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve come to see a friend.’ I was hopeless at this, and my looking about showed how I wanted to escape.

‘Fuckin’ shit-hole wanker,’ the skinhead on the bin said, then spat, hitting the ground just in front of me.

The leader took in his boys with an ironic glance, and said: ‘I think his friend must be one of our little coloured brothers, don’t you?’

The other one rocked his head about and punched at the air just in front of me several times. ‘Yeah! Fuckin’ nigger-fucker,’ he said, with an excited little laugh, then froze his features again. On his thin, hairless head he needed the biggest expressions if he was to make an effect, like actors in old silent films. He concentrated his malice in a frown, the lips slightly apart and firm.

My fat interrogator rested his swastikaed hand on my shoulder. He might have been going to give me advice, and checked the passageway in both directions to make sure we were alone. No one appeared, and the sounds of the kids playing went on riotously and unconcerned not far off. Then he glanced up at his friend aloft: it was like a prearranged signal, though it couldn’t have been. The boy reached into the bin, fished out a bottle-brown glass, Cyprus sherry, some pensioner’s empty-and dropped it down to him. Gripping me more tightly, smiling more broadly, the big boy swung the bottle round and knocked off the foot of it on the wall.

I bucked backwards to get free, to retreat down the serviceway, swinging my sports-bag ineptly round to buffet him. But his skinny mate rushed me, grabbing my jacket collar and shoving me forward into the enclosed space of the bin-yard, where we could not be seen. I lashed around with my right arm, catching him in the stomach with my elbow. He gasped, spat out ‘Cunt’-and as the leader held me from the other side, brought up his knee in the small of my back. I lurched forward, but my attacker had hold of my jacket, half ripping it off, and pinning my arms behind me in its sleeves. I was completely helpless and exposed.

The leader passed the broken bottle-end backwards and forwards in front of my eyes and under my nose. ‘I don’t think we like you,’ was his reasonable summary. The two of them pushed me down till I was almost kneeling in subjection, my legs twisted under me. Very carelessly, as if getting into bed or dropping into water, the boy on the bin slid forward, fell for a fraction of a second and hurled me over backwards, my head smacking against the concrete floor, a tearing pain in my knees, and a sack of rubbish toppling after him and bouncing down on us, sodden paper and peelings bursting over the ground. It was actually happening. It was actually happening to me.

I twisted my whole body sideways to throw him off, and he did tumble half over. The other two were standing over me. The skinny boy, as if slyly taking a tag in Winchester Football, kicked me sharply in the stomach. I was tensed and fit for it, but could not help curling up. I saw two things: my beautiful new copy of The Flower Beneath the Foot had been jerked from my pocket in the scuffle. It was just in front of my eyes, standing on end, its pages fanned open. There was a peculiar silence of several seconds, in which I thought they might be calling it off. I read the words ‘perhaps I might find Harold…’ two or three times. That must have been enough to show how I cared for it. A boot slammed down on it, buckling the binding, and then again and again, grinding the pages into the warmsmelling spilt rubbish, scuffing to pulp the lachrymose saint on the wrapper. The second thing, as my head was jerked back by the hair, my cheek squashed and grazed on the ground, was a boot drawn back, very large and hard, then slamming towards my face.