The Tyranny of Ghosts

Berwyn Mountain Press

Lisa Moran, an ageing and famous actress who lives in Cheyne Walk in London has met a young Welsh writer, Daniel Jenkins, in a literary launch party in Bedford Square and they’ve gone back to his disgusting flat in Dalston Lane in the East End where they’ve both fallen into a drunken sleep at his kitchen table.

Lisa only ever took short naps and was awake within a few hours. Dawn was filtering in through the curtains and Hackney pigeons burbled on distant ledges. Ah well, if he needed to sleep he needed to sleep. Real sleep in her profession was for late mornings or early afternoons and, feeling surprisingly relaxed and energetic, she took another tour of his flat, noticing that pictures seemed to have been recently taken off the walls, parts of the bookshelves were empty but not too dusty and there were piles of records but no record player. All this pointed to a woman who had deserted him and a bad patch on the bottle.

She knew all about such plights and understood completely what it was like being a writer, particularly when you were as unsuccessful as he was. That’s why writers learned to drink so much so early; why they saw so many dawns through a glass darkly. Drink was the only way a writer came to terms with his inherent failure. Even success often arrived dressed up as failure in the writing game and failures turned out in the end to be even bigger failures than they had at first appeared. She knew every line of the script on writers; she’d hung around enough of them and found it slightly amazing that anyone ever bothered to write a word.

He was still slumped at his table snoring into his hands. A strange one sure enough, Welsh she guessed by his accent. She didn’t usually get on with the Welsh and had actively hated Richard Burton, who had always tried to have her as another notch on his belt, although dear old Rachel Roberts had been one of her best pals.

Well, if Daniel couldn’t do anything for her at the moment she could do something for him so, with an enthusiasm which she found most depressing, she began cleaning up the flat, finding a black bin bag and throwing all the debris into it – the bottles, the pants, the mouldy loaves – everything went into the bag and, when she had filled it, she found another and filled that too.

It wasn’t likely he would have any furniture polish so she washed every surface with a damp cloth, breaking into a sweat which she wiped off her forehead with the insides of her arms, before clearing the fag-ends out of the firegrate. She had cleaners to do all this in Cheyne Walk but she had wanted to do something for him and this was all she could think of in the circumstances. But, oh, she always liked to impress with her difference too; she was always careful to arrange herself differently to everyone else in the landscape. What she feared more than most was that someone might perceive her as being the same as everyone else. That had never been a part of the Moran plan.

She took her lipstick out of her handbag and wrote her telephone number on his living room mirror, adding that her bill for the cleaning would be in the post. She then left the flat quietly, carrying two enormous bags bulging with rubbish and clinking bottles, which she arranged around a lamp-post in the street before jumping into her Mini.

She felt oddly warmed as she drove past the Stock Exchange, racing through the sleepy, pigeon-fluttered streets of the City, jumping one red light after another. There was a fair bit of promise about Daniel and she did hope he’d ring her. She hadn’t cleaned anyone’s flat since she’d left RADA or even way before that. You certainly wouldn’t have ever caught Hedda cleaning up after some man. Oh the stupid things girls do to impress boys. A couple of tears fell down her famous cheekbones as she decided she might have gone and fallen in love again. The sheer improbability of love always took her by surprise. Always made her cry too. Without fail.

After several dates they have finally gone to Paris for a weekend where they end up in bed for the first time in the Sheraton Hotel. It is a memorable encounter for her and she is surprised at the long-forgotten feelings he manages to stir up inside her.

Her body stretched out and stiffened slightly before relaxing and tensing again, feeling his hands holding her tightly around the small of her back, almost as if somehow, and she was not at all sure how, he was holding her high up in the air and about to eat her in full, not just a part of her, but the whole lot and, final and absolute though this meal might be, particularly for her, she felt she really didn’t mind it at all, quite welcomed it in fact. She found herself stiffening again, not at all sure where this was going but loving every minute of it anyway as she twisted her torso around again with a smile breaking out between her legs while his hands took a new, stronger hold on her. She felt like a butterfly, just pinned there to a board, skewered by her own mounting and collapsing pleasure.

He loosened his hold on her and she moved over him, holding him around his head as weeping broke out in the fires inside her and his tongue worked along the inside of her hidden flesh, making her stiffen and think about the end of her life again as her heart began straining on its guy ropes, wanting to break out of her chest and run free, just dance over the cluttered rooftops and into the Parisian night to get lost forever.

‘Give me my Romeo,’ she said, reaching out to touch his cheek with her fingertips ‘and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.’

Christmas had arrived in London and Lisa, frantic with worry because they’d had a fierce argument, had gone out into the streets of the West End looking for Daniel who liked to sleep rough with his mate Ironing Board Dave but she didn’t know where.

A desk drawer landed with a splintering crash on the fire which burned with a vivid and angry fury under the arches at Victoria Station. People circled the fire, peeling off when they were properly warmed up, to be replaced by others for a while. They all looked as if they were suffering from the same illness, their heads bowed and shoulders hunched, their overcoats belted with rope and their legs so thick they might have been wearing four of five pairs of trousers. Fragments of stale food hung in the men’s beards and some of the women wore greasy caps or balaclavas.

Hell might look or feel like this, Lisa thought, as she joined the circle, bowing her head and shuffling along with them. They had strong, Hogarthian faces, often of spectacular ugliness. There were hare-lips and broken noses, eyes which were not level with one another, lobotomy scars, crooked mouths. Many, perhaps conscious of their ugliness, were unwilling to look anyone in the eye. No one paid her any regard; she wasn’t a star out here.

She had noticed subtle hints, however, of an abiding need for love, no matter how fallen the state. Two men had dogs; a kitten’s head poked up out of a woman’s overcoat. Crucifixes hung around many necks, the sight of which always disturbed her. Unlike Daniel she had almost no relationship with God but, rather like Daniel, she was afraid of him.

Another line of stooping figures was filing through the bluish glow of the railway station in the distance. Some pushed supermarket trolleys loaded with rubbish, all carried bulging carrier bags. She shuffled along in their wake for a while but soon saw none of their faces was his face. She asked a few if they knew Ironing Board Dave but they all looked at her as if she was mad. Perhaps she was.

This wandering was becoming pointless. She’d a better chance of landing a decent part in a decent play than finding Daniel out here. Yet she was surprised at how at ease she felt with these street people and how much she had learned about their blighted lives in such a short time. Life out here wasn’t nearly as hard as she had feared. She could survive out here easily. Perhaps she belonged out here after all. Her heart was at home out here or perhaps it was that Daniel was out here. Somewhere.

She continues searching for him throughout the West End finally, following a tip-off, ending up at a dance party for tramps behind the gasometers of Kings Cross where the drugs are free and the music is hot and loud.

The rock band were clearly on all manner of banned Class A drugs since, after the most perfunctory of tune-ups, they began tearing into number after number as if they had to perform somewhere far more important in about five minutes’ time. The well-zonked party was already getting higher and higher while the singer must have taken everything on the drugs tray in one big cocktail, the way he slurred his way through most of his largely incomprehensible lyrics. One of his arms was tied up with bloodied bandages, he had a hump back and, the way he was standing, it looked as if one leg was a good six inches shorter than the other. He was a complete mess so there was a fetching irony in his rendition of Free’s All Right Now. They continued with Everyone Wants to Shag followed by an equally tender working of the Rezillos’ Someone’s Going to Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight. The light show was furnished by a few lines of winking traffic bollards while occasionally – and only occasionally – they did a slow country ‘n’ western number like the gently satirical Take Your Tongue Out of My Mouth Because I’m Kissing You Goodbye.

This was shaping up to be the only Christmas Lisa had ever enjoyed as she held her special fag up high and jigged around and around in this seething, skirling sea of dope and stinking bodies. She had no idea who she was actually dancing with – sometimes it was the tart in the baseball cap, who seemed to have taken a fancy to her, sometimes a lively little whore with a Dolly Parton bosom. The Black Tarantula bobbed up at one stage, dealing Lisa a painful jab in her side with an elbow. Another sadistic nutcase, Lisa thought as she pogoed off to safety – only to fall into a jigging twosome with a bombed-out, slavering, overcoated tramp. No one took their coats off in the Maple, no matter how happy or hot they got and it might have been the first party she had ever attended where everyone wore at least three coats. The very air dripped with sweat.

The band swept into Jailhouse Rock and the dancers were but a community of stoned joy when, with the next number, the Monkees’ Daydream Believer, the band took everyone higher again. The Black Tarantula was edging alarmingly close to her again, now hoisting up her skirt with both hands and showing she had no knickers. A man collapsed on the floor, exhausted, legs and arms akimbo as others tried to revive him by pissing over him steamily.

Just then a gap opened up in the dancers and, rather like that classic, enchanted moment in West Side Story, when Richard Beymer first spots Natalie Wood in the local hop, everything went still for Lisa and she took off her sunglasses to get a better look. Right there was Daniel Jenkins, the Missing Link, The Great Visionary from Dalston Lane, with wild, dishevelled hair and dressed in an old coat, jumping around in the spotlight with a French loaf sticking out of his flies like the largest dildo she’d ever seen. He was so drunk or stoned his blue eyes were but tiny red buttons and, as he waved his loaf around, he bellowed in a drunken, Welsh accent: ‘Come on and get it boys and girls. Come and grapple with the monster of the deep.’

The dishevelled and drunk nutcase dancing with him was presumably Ironing Board Dave.

Stock-still she pondered, as she took another long toke on her joint, love’s bizarre malice. How could she have gone and fallen for that? All her friends frequently said she was potty but he was far pottier than her at her pottiest. He didn’t even have a shilling, didn’t own a thing of value. ‘As soon as you own something everyone wants to take it off you,’ he had once said. ‘Possessions are prisons. Destitution is the only key to freedom.’

Extremely shy, Natalie Wood finally walked over to her handsome Richard Beymer, stood in front of him and hoped he would recognise her. But he didn’t.

‘What I need is another drink,’ he grumbled to no one in particular. ‘Why can’t we ever get enough to drink? No serious drinker ever gets enough to drink. Two hundred drinks are never enough if you are a serious drinker. Bladders to it, I say.’

‘You’ve had enough, I’d say.’

‘Tell her Dave. Tell her I need that drink. Just tell her.’ Daniel was doing a lot of swallowing now, interspersed with hiccups. His unshaven face was ghostly pallid and she took a step backwards in case he decided to throw up all over her.

‘Give the man a f.....g drink,’ Dave told Lisa as if she was some kind of waitress. The band was making such a noise they had to shout straight into one another’s ears.

‘I think he’s had enough already. You shouldn’t give him all this drink you know. He’s not a well man and I think he should come home with me now.’

‘’Oo the f.....g hell are you then?’

Daniel was swaying dangerously as he began patting his overcoat pockets, perhaps hoping to find a bottle in there somewhere. The band began Heard it on the Grapevine and a fight had broken out about ten feet away. ‘Got to have a drink. Jus’ one drink an’ I’ll feel fine,’ Daniel said as he cupped his hand under his chin and coughed up blood into it. Another cough brought up more blood and he held it out for Lisa to examine. Richard Beymer hadn’t been like this in that West Side gym.

‘See? If you’d given me that drink this wouldn’t have happened,’ he told her in deadly earnest. ‘Ah,’ he added, cocking a ear. ‘Heard it on the Grapevine. One of my favourite records of all …’

He choked on something, his body whirled around and he let loose a torrent of blood spattering everyone in sight. West Side Story had turned into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Lisa started to scream for someone to ring for a f...... ambulance as he fell forwards into her arms and brought up another stream of blood which gushed straight over her shoulder and ran, monstrously, down the back of her coat. ‘Get a f...... ambulance,’ she screamed again as she laid him on the floor, noticing that his trousers had also gone red with blood. Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?

After Daniel is patched up they travel to Jerusalem together where she is acting in an ultra-violent film, Rebellion, in a role of which she is heartily ashamed but she needs the money. On her day off they wander Jerusalem in the rain.

Mid-morning and it was raining hard on the streets of Old Jerusalem. Huge black clouds sweeping in over the Moab mountains disgorging buckets of rain on the city. Raining on Arab and Jew alike, on Lutheran and Mormon, on women and children, tethered donkeys and wandering cats. Everyone was soaked in equal measure by this impeccably democratic downpour. Raining impartially on dome, spire and steeple, raining on the Hyatt Hotel and the Hebrew University, on Mr Whiskers’ Café and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the Hadassah Hospital, the police station, the Mount of Olives and the Dome of the Rock.

It was also sheeting down on the Via Dolorosa where Daniel and Lisa were standing, hand in hand, looking down it. The pipes and drains kept constantly gurgling with water; it came gushing over doorsteps and seeping out of holes in walls. Rain drummed on corrugated roofs and made waterfalls of the awnings covering the Arab spice stalls. At each junction of the alleyways torrent after torrent went flooding down the storm gutters, picking up the street rubbish and sweeping it away.

They moved a few steps down the sodden slopes and stopped again, soaked to the skin. Liturgical bells sounded through the swarming damp and spicy odours. Israeli soldiers in khaki oilskins kept up their ceaseless patrols and, from time to time, the droning call of the muezzin broke, with startling clarity, through all this pluvious turmoil.

All this rain and continuing argument about the script had given Lisa an unexpected day off from filming so Daniel was showing her the sights and they had begun working their way along the Stations of the Cross in the Via Dolorosa. A few other wet pilgrims appeared occasionally but mostly it was just the two of them with raindrops chasing one another off the ends of their noses. ‘This is the first Station of the Cross, where Christ was condemned by Pilate,’ Daniel explained. ‘There’s a Roman cistern down there and a stretch of the road where Christ is supposed to have walked. Somewhere near here a crown of thorns was fastened on his head.’

Lisa was a country child on her first visit to the big city, happy to let Daniel show off even if, in truth, all this Route-of-the-Cross stuff, with all these plaques, was extremely disappointing and all got up for pilgrim money, no doubt. But it all came down to money in the end didn’t it? Even the death of Christ, as old Judas would have undoubtedly attested. Nothing and no one had ever broken the power of money.

They came to the final station, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and this was an even bigger disappointment, its floors covered with vast puddles from the leaking roof. Even holy old Daniel hated it, she was pleased to learn: run by half a dozen quarrelling sects, each with its own patch of religious icons and collection plates. Never forget the collection plate, best beloved. ‘There’s more spirituality in my lavatory,’ she whispered to him. ‘And I would never trust that priest there; just look at the old git eyeing up that woman’s knockers.’

‘The priests don’t just eye them up either. I’ve been in here when they’ve been grabbed.’

But other parts of the city, which Ezekiel once called the centre of the world, were inspiring in the extreme: the Wailing Wall with its great grey oblong of free-standing stone, once part of the Temple of King Solomon and the Moslem Dome of the Rock, built over the actual rock from which Mohammed allegedly ascended to heaven. This whole building throbbed with centuries of believing prayer and, looking up at the great shadowy rafters alive with hurrying birds, Lisa said: ‘Now this is what I call a real church. I might even get to church regularly if I had a church like this in Cheyne Walk.’

Later that year Lisa is nursing her friend Harry Kirby who is in the final stages of Aids in Fulham and Daniel is in Brixton following the progress of a riot when, in all the swirling violence, he sees a vision.

Daniel took up a new position, deep in the darkness of Coldharbour Lane as a group of young blacks came sauntering along before gathering on the pavement outside a chip shop. They moved around one another slowly in the light of the shop window, not saying much although a few did break away briefly to kick a tin can around, which clattered with dead laughter, before being kicked over a wall and disappearing into the darkness.

A short while later a ball of fire came romping out of the window of a derelict house and they all ran to look at the hungry flames, remaining there even when the fire engine finally turned up - just as the fire itself was on the point of burning itself out. A few picked up bricks and threw them through the still smouldering windows. The thunderheads had fallen silent, leaving just the heat. News of another fire, on the corner of Atlantic Road and Mayall Road, could be heard clearly on the fire engine’s radio. The unit should get over there as quickly as possible. A police car came past slowly but didn’t actually stop as the youths jeered it on its way. Soon the fire engine left also.

Daniel remained well out of the way when he noticed a few of the youths going into another derelict house nearby where there was a flare of a flame caught in one of the broken windows and they both came running out before a fire began going up in that house at surprising speed. More people came along and there was a loud argument between them and the youths. Some were residents, worried about their properties. Yet more turned up together with a police car and Daniel stiffened when he heard a noise which sounded like a squealing mob riding along atop a medieval siege machine.

The squeals and creaks were becoming louder and louder and, as this huge truck began approaching, Daniel had to shield his eyes from its brilliant and vulgar dazzle. The wheels of the truck seemed to be made of fire and several separate lights turned and turned again on its roof, all glaring with incandescent whiteness. The silhouettes of three men were moving around inside these swirling white lights and they all seemed to be working a sort of giant television camera which was soon focused on the blazing house with the crowds gathering and quarrelling all around it.

A policeman tried to arrest one of the youths and the separate lights of the truck came together and focused on the youth as he struggled in the merciless spotlight. A lot of shouting and pushing followed when the truck’s spotlight jerked up abruptly and focused on another fire which had broken out in another derelict house a little further down the road. Those screams straight from hell started up again as the truck creaked forward to that fire and everyone was busy roaring and cheering.

‘Did I ever tell you how much I’ve always enjoyed DH Lawrence’s work,’ Lisa told a plainly uninterested Harry as she washed down his scabbed chest. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever put together sentences like him, so long and fluent. There’s almost a condition of singing in some of them and, when you’re reading it, you often feel as if you are holding a hymn sheet and you want to sing out all the beautiful phrases. I so wish I’d met him. I’ve met a lot of famous men in my time but I would have loved to have met the old Nottingham nutter with his funny beard and even nuttier wife. Ah yes, Lorenzo, lover of my soul.’

She was washing around his neck when she noticed images from the television flickering soundlessly in his eyes. Groups were gathering around some house fires but, without the sound, she couldn’t quite work out where these fires were and, in the event, merely leaned across the bed to turn off the set. ‘You’re never going to get better watching all that crap,’ she told him.

‘And all your sufferings will drown in the mercy that will fill the earth; and our life will become as quiet and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith, I have faith … ’

Daniel followed the truck with the wheels of fire from a distance of about twenty five yards, stopping when it stopped and starting again when it moved on. He couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to be doing except that it was clearly some infernal force for disturbance since trouble was breaking out all around it with gangs of youths sprinting alongside it, some peeling off to smash windows and, as each window shattered, smaller groups scurried across the street, picking up small items at first then becoming bolder, carting off fully clothed mannequins, piles of this and boxes of that as yet more windows were broken.

The most peculiar feature of all this mayhem, for Daniel, was that all these hooligan acts seemed to be carefully framed in the intense white glare of the truck’s spotlights and it was almost impossible to work out if these acts only happened in the spotlight or were actively encouraged by its attention.

Gangs bowled down through the white spotlight, hotly pursued by police. All along Railton Road muggers attacked everyone that moved, snatched handbags and wallets, striking down anyone who resisted. A large woman, walking down an alley, spotted a gang running towards her, turned to run away and then noticed them running away from her.

With more people running out of doorways into the streets, which had become alive with police sirens and the baying cries of looters who had lost control of themselves, the truck pressed on, its white spotlight picking up a policeman falling backwards clutching his face which had become a mask of blood. A petrol bomb smashed into the front of the Post Office, then another. A police helicopter whump-whumped overhead. A phalanx of police with riot shields marched into the fray, beating their shields with truncheons in some hopeless effort to scare the rioters into behaving themselves. Smoke eddied one way and another as another group went running past the truck. A horse whinnied and metal-shod hooves clomped along the road. More white smoke swept around the advancing horse and the drumming of truncheons on riot shields reached a new crescendo.

The truck continued picking up all this savagery in its white glare and, despite its awesome presence to those with eyes to see, Daniel marvelled that no one seemed to be taking any notice of it at all: that, in all the mayhem foaming all around them, it could be almost invisible. Police cars were being surrounded with fists drumming rhythmically on the bonnets until the terrified police somehow managed to escape and their cars overturned and burned.

Another petrol bomb sent a sheet of flame steepling sharply up from the road and a police horse reared up on its hind legs in screaming, eyeball-popping terror. ‘Calm down, Beth. Stop it, Beth,’ its rider kept crying as, all flailing arms and elbows, he fought to control the horse in the unblinking gaze of the white light.

Further along the road the white light found another police phalanx trapped on a building site by a stone-throwing mob. Bricks fell on them, exploding against the walls or on their plastic shields which they held up over their heads to protect themselves against this punishing rain of mayhem and violence.

And then Daniel saw something, as terrifying as it was amazing, since all manner of strange colours were trembling and liquefying around the truck with the wheels of fire. All at once, these colours seemed to rush into one another and then shoot straight up into the sky like some strange, malevolent rainbow, black like sin and red like blood and yellow like pus, scorching a rising arc of evil into the very sky when, after a series of small explosions deep within it, the rainbow’s arc broke into thousands, perhaps millions of smaller rainbows which then broke from the others and then joined them again until the whole sky was but a criss-crossing mesh of conjoined rainbows.