Peter Ackroyd - Hawksmoor

There was a woman in the doorway, her clothes as patched and torn as Ned's own. She was patting her hair with the palm of her right hand and saying, 'Do you want it? Come and get it if you want it.' She was peering at him and, since he had said nothing in reply, she knelt down on the floor by the entrance.

'I don't want it,' he said, rubbing his eyes, 'I don't want anything.'

'All you men want it. I've had experience of all types of men,' and she laughed, throwing her head back so that Ned could see the wrinkles around her neck.

'I don't want it,' he repeated in a louder voice.

'I've had them all,' and she looked around the abandoned building.

'Most of them in here. It's nice in here, isn't it? Snug.' Ned started twisting a lock of his hair between two fingers so that it became as hard and as taut as wire. 'Let's have a look at it,' she said, craning her head towards him, and he flattened himself against the wall.

'Look at what?'

'You know what I mean. Every man's got one. Wee Willie Winkie.'

'I've got nothing, I've got nothing for you.' And he clutched the book he had been reading.

She crawled towards him and put her hands down on the damp soil as if she were about to dig for something; Ned rose slowly to his feet, his back still against the wall, and he did not take his eyes from her face. 'Come on,' she whispered, 'Give it to me' -and then she made a lunge for his trousers. In panic Ned put out his foot to stop her, but she grabbed it and tried to bring him down to the ground: 'You're a powerful man,' she said, 'but I've got you!' And then with all his strength he crashed the book down upon her head; this seemed to surprise her, for she let go of him and looked upwards, as if the object had fallen from the skies. Then very carefully, and with a measure of dignity, she rose to her feet and stood by the entrance of the shelter, glaring at him. 'What kind of man are you, anyway?' And she wiped her mouth with her arm: 'Look at you, you pathetic object! They don't give you money out of charity, they give it you out of fear.' And he looked at her wide-eyed. 'Do you think they care about you, you daft bugger? They just don't want you coming after them, they don't want to see you in the mirror when they look at their fat faces!'

'I don't know about that,' he said.

'They think you're mad, talking to yourself and all. It wouldn't take them long to go mad if they had you around, oh no it wouldn't.' And then she mimicked a high, quavering voice: 'Pity me, oh pity me, can you spare me something for a cup of tea?' He looked down at himself as she went on, 'Don't hurt me. I've suffered enough. I'm ugly. I'm smelly. Pity me.' And then she gazed at him in triumph. She was about to say something else when she noticed the crumbs of the bread and cheese which Ned had been eating: and, lifting up her skirts, she kicked her legs in the air as she sang, When I was a little girl I lived by myself And all the bread and cheese I got I laid upon the shelf.

For a moment she too might have pitied him, but then she laughed, dusted down her skirt and left without another word. Ned, still fighting for breath after the struggle, saw that he had ripped the binding of his book and that the pages were now being carried by the wind across the park and towards the church.

It was some evenings later when Ned, preparing his meal in the red brick shelter, heard a confused murmur of voices outside; at once he grew alarmed and crouched in a corner but, after a few moments, he realised that the shouts and calls were not directed against him but were coming from the far side of the little park. He peered out of the entrance and saw a group of children jumping and shrieking in a circle: two or three of them had sticks which they were throwing at something in the middle, as their cries echoed against the walls of the church. Then Ned saw that they were surrounding a cat which was hurling itself in fear against one child and then another in order to break free, only to be caught and hauled back into the centre of the circle; it had scratched and bitten some of them but the sight of their own blood seemed only to have provoked more frenzy in the children who, in their joy and fury, were now smashing their sticks against the lean body of the animal. Their look of rage was terrible to Ned: he remembered it from his own childhood, which at this moment descended upon him again. And he knew that, if they became aware he was watching them, their rage would soon be turned against him: it was not unusual for gangs of children to set upon a tramp and beat him senseless, shouting 'Bogeyman! Bogeyman!' as they kicked or spat at him.

He left the shelter and hurried down the small path which led into Wapping Wall, not daring to look back in case he should draw the children's glances upon him. He walked beside the river up to Limehouse, and the damp wind unsettled him; when he reached Shoulder-of-Mutton Alley he could see an abandoned warehouse ahead of him but, in his haste to reach it, he fell and gashed his leg against a piece of metal which had been left on the waste-ground through which he now trod. He was tired and yet, when eventually he lay down inside the warehouse, he could not sleep. He looked down at himself and, suddenly disgused at what he saw, said out loud, 'You have dug your own grave and now you must lie in it'. He closed his eyes and, leaning his head against the rotten wood, he had a sudden vision of the world -cold, heavy, unendurable like the awkward mass of his own body as at last he slept.

And the years have passed before he wakes now, after a night in the same warehouse beside the Thames -although, during the night, he had returned to Bristol and watched himself as a child. The years have passed and he has remained in the city, so that now he has become tired and grey; and when he roamed through its streets, he was bent forward as if searching the dust for lost objects. He knew the city's forgotten areas and the shadows which they cast: the cellars of ruined buildings, the small patches of grass or rough ground which are to be found between two large thoroughfares, the alleys in which Ned sought silence, and even the building sites where he might for one night creep into the foundations out of the rain and wind.

Sometimes dogs would follow him: they liked his smell, which was of lost or forgotten things, and when he slept in a corner they licked his face or burrowed their noses into his ragged clothes; he no longer beat them off, as once he had, but accepted their presence as natural. For the dogs' city was very like his own: he was close to it always, following its smells, sometimes pressing his face against its buildings to feel their warmth, sometimes angrily chipping or cutting into its brick and stone surfaces.

There were some places, and streets, where he did not venture since he had learnt that others had claims there greater than his own -not the gangs of meths drinkers who lived in no place and no time, nor the growing number of the young who moved on restlessly across the face of the city, but vagrants like himself who, despite the name which the world has given them, had ceased to wander and now associated themselves with one territory or 'province' rather than another. All of them led solitary lives, hardly moving from their own warren of streets and buildings: it is not known whether they chose the area, or whether the area itself had callen them and taken them in, but they had become the guardian spirits (as it were) of each place. Ned now knew some of their names: Watercress Joe, who haunted the streets by St Mary Woolnoth, Black Sam who lived and slept beside the Commercial Road between Whitechapel and Limehouse, Harry the Goblin who was seen only by Spitalfields and Artillery Lane, Mad Frank who walked continually through the streets of Bloomsbury, Italian Audrey who was always to be found in the dockside area of Wapping (it was she who had visited Ned in his shelter many years before), and 'Alligator' who never moved from Greenwich.