A Long Walk to Wimbledon Read online

  He told himself, almost aloud, not to be fanciful.

  On the opposite side now there was a terrace of tall houses with longish gardens in front of them. Willowherb had struck particularly here and the whole stretch of rubbish-strewn ground was spiky with its once purple spears, now withered and brown.

  In the roadway at the far end of the terrace an articulated container-lorry had at some time been tipped on to its side. There was no telling how. Its twelve huge tyres had been slashed at for their rubber, useful in a dozen different ways, and its rear had obviously been forced open, although it was still possible to read on it the words ‘Europa Spare Parts – Munich-Dover’.

  Parts for cars that were all too spare themselves, hauled at much expense half-way across the Continent in some extraordinary complication of economics. How distant it seemed now. Angels on a pin’s point.

  He passed the wreck and slogged on.

  Then he heard, the first distinct sound that had come to his ears above the random distant clattering of galvanised sheets and the brisk rustle of dry leaves and rubbish in the wind, a faint mechanical throbbing. A generator, somewhere up on the slope of the hill to his right. It would be coming, he calculated, from the next small clump of habitation south of their own, perhaps half a mile away, people with whom they had had no contact. Evidently a community, though, with more fuel than they had. It had been a long time since they had done more than pump water for half an hour a day.

  The sound grew steadily louder as he walked.

  Then, just as he was about to reach a turning off to the right – he had forgotten what it was called, but the street name-plate was still there, thickly grimed but legible, ‘Causton Road’ – suddenly from underneath, as it were, the now heavy throb of the generator a new mechanical sound came through. The noise of a motor vehicle, clacking and badly maintained, approaching from the turning.

  It was a sound out of the ordinary enough to have made anyone stop and look round them warily. But, coming at him so unexpectedly, it froze him where he was, just at the corner.

  Poking his head round, he saw coming down weavingly towards him an ancient dusty green truck with, standing up in its back and leaning on the top of the cab, three swaying arms-linked figures. And at once he knew, without immediately being able to account for what it was exactly about them that told him, that these were Happies.

  Happies – yes, it was partly the length of their hair, though few nowadays managed to keep theirs cut, and it was partly a glimpse of bright shirts that had given it to him – these were Happies, as people called them, some of the ones who for years had contrived to live lives of idleness, doing little but growing enough cannabis to provide a constant supply of joints. They had been named presumably from the hippies of the sixties and seventies, and certainly before life had closed down, in the last days before the Second Riots, they were often to be seen wandering in groups or lolling outside one of the houses they had taken over. How they got food to eat, or whether they ever needed much, he had never known. Happies.

  And now, mysteriously, here was a bunch of them travelling. In the cab of the truck, he could see now there were three more – hard to tell male from female – and each of them, yes, was smoking a fat brownish cigar-cigarette, a joint.

  The truck, not going all that fast and making as it got near a tremendous racket, drifted from one edge of the narrow road to the other. The driver, one indolent hand on the wheel, hardly seemed to be looking where he was going at all.

  They might well mount the pavement. He backed hard into the blowsy hedge of the corner house behind him.

  And, as at last the truck approached the main road, it did seem to be heading straight at him. Clammy sweat at once came up all over his body. But the kerb saved him. Its edge was enough to deflect the loosely-held driving wheel, and with a creaking lurch, the battered dust-dimmed vehicle went back to the centre of the road, crossed the width of the highway and succeeded in getting into the turning opposite.

  A sudden shout of laughter from its occupants rose up.

  He stood, heart thumping crazily, gazing at the still meandering vehicle, as it receded clatteringly into the distance. In the back there had been another six or seven Happies, most dressed despite the cold in no more than jeans and bright-coloured shirts. Two of them, closely entwined, had been sitting up on one of the vehicle’s thin metal sides, looking as if a much slighter jar than the one they had had at the kerb would have sent them toppling off.

  But they had contrived to stay up. It sent a rush of pure fury through his head. What irresponsibility. They could quite easily have been killed. Or the truck might, with just as little reason, have been going fast enough to have ridden up on to the pavement and carelessly brushed him himself under its wheels.

  Then, as his heartbeats quietened, there floated into his nostrils the sweet odour he recognised so well from his days with Jasmine, the smell of lazily smoked joints.

  He blew out furiously.

  Part Two

  For five minutes or more Mark stood at the corner of Causton Road, just where he had been, unable to move. The wind tugged from time to time at his old burberry and rattled the dry leaves of the bulging overgrown hedge at his back. Away on the far side of Archway Road the sound of the Happies’ clattering truck died slowly away. His heartbeats settled at last into their usual rhythm.

  Most of the Happies, he thought, would not even have seen him. And those that had would, in their cannabis dream-world, already have forgotten his existence. Yet he knew with a dead certainty that they threatened him.

  It was not that he thought of them in any way as turning round, coming back and this time succeeding in mowing him down. It was what that swaying meandering dust-thick vehicle and its gay-shirted lolling occupants stood for that was menacing. That they would have laughed if instead of lurching at the kerb their crazy truck had mounted the pavement and swept him under its wheels. That they would have laughed and have as quickly forgotten.

  He had been thinking before as he had slogged down the hill grim enough thoughts about the possible dangers ahead during the rest of this fading day and however much of the night he would need to get to Wimbledon. Notions of being chased by packs of dangerous drunks, of being leapt at from some dark hole, even of the zing of a rifle bullet close to his head, had been marching with nailed boots through his mind. He had not brought himself fully to face them, but he had at least been aware of them. But, though he had been apprehensive enough, he had retained a just-allowed hope that luck would get him through.

  The sight of that swaying swerving truck and the rich come-and-gone marijuana whiff it had left behind had put an end to that. It had unnerved him as if the very strings of his muscles had been slitheringly withdrawn from his body.

  No, luck was not a friend. It was the worst enemy.

  Now he knew with conviction that what lay ahead for him beyond any conjuring away was uncertainty. The territory he had pledged himself to make his way through was not simply a dangerous world. The journey facing him was not just a long walk where he would have to keep constantly alert, but which if he managed so much he might reasonably hope to complete with no more than some bad scares. No, ahead, he knew now, lay anything.

  His world was at the mercy of the unmotivated.

  Perhaps it had really been so for years. Perhaps that was what gradually, over as much as a century even, had been creeping up from beneath into the secure organised society which he had been brought up to believe he was living in and was entitled to live in his whole life long. The unmotivated.

  Yes, he would still have to be as alert as he had expected to be for prowling gangs and vicious individuals. But besides these there would be dangers that sprang up out of nothing, that threatened without malice, that just happened. And which in happening could all too easily be the end of him.

  To go back home after all?

  To turn now this instant and get back up the hill, run until he got again to the familiar turning taking h
im into the small area of relative safety he had known so long? The nightmare could be over in little more than ten minutes.

  And Jasmine’s mother could just wait to find out he was not going to respond to her plea. But would she then try to get through to him again? Well, if she did, couldn’t he just talk to Jasmine that way?

  But, no. Exchanging words over the tinny link of a long hither-and-thither route of telephone cables was not what Mrs Brilling had been asking of him in Jasmine’s name. Jasmine wanted to see him, to look him in the face, to clasp his hands. And she had the right to ask that, however far apart they had been at the end. She had the right of the dying, all the stronger for the enmity there had been between them in life.

  Wife, wife, bane of my life.

  With a jerk, almost as if he had been woken by the sudden clangour of an alarm-clock – how long, how very long, it had been since time had mattered – he started forward and crossed over Causton Road. He must get on. The walk to Wimbledon should be completed well within his limit, but if there were dangers which he could not even anticipate lying there in wait between him and that little pebbledashed house where Jasmine lay, then he must get on as fast as he could while the way ahead looked clear.

  And now there was not the least sign of life that he could see. An empty silence with only the noises caused by the gusting wind breaking the stillness, the sharp flap of polythene in some window, the tossing of the burstingly overgrown hedges that sometimes forced him to the very edge of the pavement.

  He made progress.

  Cromwell Avenue off to the right came into view, and, shuttered and abandoned, the little post office that had been there as long as he could remember. All that system of letters. First class and second. Postcards, letter-packets, parcels, the range of postage stamps and the designs that time after time had been dreamt up for them. And Christmas cards, the rigmarole of them all, and the tiny threads of real communication.

  No, nothing in sight down the turning for as far as he could see.

  The faint remaining yellow trace of a ‘no parking’ line by the gutter as he stepped up at the kerb on the far side.

  And onwards, swinging step after swinging step, the water-flask tap-tap-tapping softly and regularly on his hip. And the irregular rhythm of the wind as it rose and fell, the grit on the pavement whirling up in miniature tornadoes and then falling again.

  Not long now and he would reach the house where once the family had earned its increasingly good livelihood. The ‘Winchester School of English’. Typical of Dad, the opportunist pounce that had seized on that resounding name from Winchester Road crossing Archway Road just a few doors away. And how it had paid off. All the foreigners who had cheerfully forked out for ‘English for Everyday’, ‘Cultural English’, ‘Commercial English’.

  He saw, when he came in sight of the tall old house, that it was not at all in good shape. The black paneless windows were open to the weather and a big sprawling patch of plaster had fallen away from the wall leaving the dull yellow inner brick exposed.

  No, he should not have acquiesced in it all, whatever loyalty he might have owed to Dad, however good the income that antfrantic, ultimately pointless scramble had brought them. But then, he had acquiesced in too many things, acquiesced only feeling uncomfortably that he should not.

  He turned sharply away and plunged on down the long slope of the hill.

  Jasmine, when she had come to work as a secretary for them. A temp, that was what they had been called, the great flock of itinerant typists encouraged never to keep a job for long so that their comings and goings could be developed into lucrative businesses. But Jasmine had tried so many other things, both before and after they had married. There was that place not far ahead now, just off from the Archway junction, the manicure parlour, though she had known precious little about manicure – perhaps there was little to know – Cats Claws as it had been called, Cats Claws at Alfredo’s. Alfredo, the swanky hairdresser, who might or might not have been her lover. And the money the mere decoration of that place had cost, the false ceilings, the light fittings in the latest fashionable extravagant style, the heavy curtaining. And the whole venture had lasted less than two years.

  Wife, wife, bane of my life.

  But, swinging into view now, spanning the wide sweep of the road there was Archway Bridge, carrying Hornsea Lane high above the southwards-leading traffic artery.

  He felt a lifting of the spirits, a sudden scorning of the fears that had been running rat-like through his mind. He had always, as long as he had known it, enjoyed, even loved, the sight of the great bridge. The massive certainty of those huge girders - the date cast in the metal, 1897, was still easy to see though the once cheerful blue paint had faded to nothing – had filled him despite their weightiness with the notion of flying, flying free. The triumph of strength. And the big smooth concrete slabs they had put underneath when the roadway had been widened to take the extra pulsings of traffic had done nothing to spoil the massive structure. The contrast in technologies, concrete and ironwork, even enhanced the pleasure.

  Suddenly an idea came.

  Climb up to it. Climb up as he had so often done as a boy. But climb up now so as to see ahead. Search for the dangers. Plan counter measures.

  Or search at least for the known dangers.

  He thrust this last qualm aside and walked on more rapidly. Tile Kiln Lane, off to the right, he remembered. A narrow side turning that wound stiffly up to the level of the road above.

  He found it and set off along it, feeling at once the pull on leg muscles unused to climbing.

  Tile Kiln Lane. The times he had pointed the name out to parties of his father’s students on Saturday afternoon ‘London Walks’ (One guinea extra). A little piece of living history, he used to say. Well, it had seemed to be so in the days when history had looked like one long continuous skein. Before the shears had cut.

  ‘A sleep and a forgetting.’

  He had muttered the incantation aloud.

  With a rim of sweat at his hairline and breathing stertorously – dull diet and only the occasional exercise of keeping his vegetable plot going had made him pasty and short-winded – he got up at last to the bridge approach, and almost before he was on to the bridge itself he saw that the climb was not going to have been worthwhile. Already in the short time he had been out the day had closed in and a grey mistiness had reduced the view to no more than half what it had been when he had looked over Highgate Woods to the area of the city lying to the east.

  Going up close to the metal slatting of the bridge railing now, he could make out much less. Not a lot more than the tower blocks rising out of the chill dimness, oddly beautiful for all that they were mostly no doubt the fashion-conscious slabs of the property developers and municipal architects of the sixties and seventies, those needles dug into the body politic which had sent a gathering fever through the blood to break out in the hectic swirl of the First Riots. The televised Riots, you might have called them, he thought. He remembered once they had shown the body of a man, or of a woman, that had been not just trodden to death but trodden into a sort of straw mat, meaningless unless you had heard the pulsating voice of the reporter telling you what it was.

  He rested his forehead for a moment on the cold of the railing in front of him.

  Well, at least he had better check the immediate dangers there might be when he made his way down again to Archway Road.

  He walked along the rest of the bridge, keeping his eyes fixed on the roofs of the houses down below gapped with dark holes where slates or tiles had slid out of place. One house had no roof at all, just a pattern of fire-blackened joists with rising through them a small tree, still green. But nowhere did he see a sign of life, not even a questing dog.

  It should mean he was safe for a little. Perhaps as far as the big intersection at Archway Underground station.

  He took a last look along towards that in the misty distance. The wide road under him led straight down to the intersection
, where, his bus map had told him, he would have to fork right going away from the A1 which led down into Holloway Road and the City and taking instead – what was it? – yes, Junction Road, turning before long into Fortress Road and going on eventually through the West End to a crossing of the River wherever it was possible to get over. The stories he had had from his pupils had often been full of fighting at the bridges and when there had still been official radio bulletins high-sounding phrases had spoken of military action there too.

  But crossing the River would be a problem to deal with when he got there. It was the big intersection now.

  He decided to go down from the bridge on the other side. A steep path had run there along the foot of the tumbling gardens of the houses perched on the hillside. It had come out on to Archway road about a hundred yards further down. He had relished it as a boy because of its safe imaginary dangers. The possibly real dangers of such a comparatively unfrequented place, even in those distant days, had been thrust well to the back of his mind. Or had he even not been aware of their existence?

  He found the start of the path without difficulty. It looked much as he had known it all those years before, a narrow black asphalted track, perhaps a bit more greened over now than it had been.

  But before he had got half-way down its steep slope it had become very different. Evidently from the days when municipal refuse collections had first faltered and had then ceased altogether the place had been used as a dump, when there was still rubbish to throw out – how little there was now – and cascades of the stuff lay tumbled on the sharply sloping bank above and rested in ever-thickening layers on the path itself. Cans of every size and colour, bottles by the thousand in a thousand different shapes, plastic containers with their drumming reds, yellows and blues still not faded, pieces from cars by the hundred, old seats, torn-off doors, wheels, rejected refrigerators and obsolete washing-machines, television-sets everywhere with their grey eyes blindly staring, cartons and containers, sheets of anonymous rusting metal, toy tricycles, toy guns, toy typewriters, toy telephones, paper in great wads and spilling bundles, some pasty grey, some still garishly bright, polythene bags resisting decay to the last, armchairs and mattresses with springs and coils of amorphous foam-rubber spewing out of them, sagging bedraggled discarded carpets and long curls of superseded vinyl wall-covering twisting and turning, shoes and sandals, plastic jackets and nylon furs and the sodden remains of innumerable pairs of jeans, sunglasses and briefcases and transistors and tape-recorders and everywhere chunks and shapes of white-as-snow expanded polystyrene packing-pieces.