1. The Dickens Opening
A Swooping Panorama
Friday. Late morning, I’d say. Probably around 2005.
New Port. Summer coming in; the art students, the fine artists and photographers and graphic designers and ceramicists and sculptors and the ones who just throw mess at the wall are all gone home until autumn and there feels more room to move about, on the streets and in the pubs and clubs, but less evacuation of Saigon every June and more tourist season is over; in the charity shops the aisles get heavy with musty air and the rails and shelves heave with blazers and dresses and dead men’s shirts, and the volunteers outnumber sifters and drifters, and the ones on the corners by the market begin to look from the street like the glass cabinets of crazy old hoarders, frocks from the seventies pressed creased up against the glass; off around that market, shaggy in the ignored ironcast Victorian splendour of its yesteryear, a thin spread of people trundle, inspect the usual stuff of market stalls, and the bacon piles high next to the hot plate of the central greasy spoon, and the sullen faces peak up from the turrets of books and trinkets and the old bric-a-brac, and the butchers lop off limbs with a perfunctory thwack and they foghorn their sales pitches and spin those plastic bags closed tight; opposite, the record-seller with the collapsing face like Popeye the Sailor Man scratches his paunch and the t-shirt with the slogan that reads BEWARE INTERESTING PEOPLE rides up and reveals his pale hairless belly, and this moment when we look, he sells some Billie Holiday, some Manic Street Preachers, a Kevin Shields bootleg not worth the CD it’s been burnt on, and an ugly copy of Journey to the End of the Night by Ferdinand Céline with a glossy cover and tiny, itchy print, all to different people, each less chatty than the last; across from the market (down a tunnel and across a square) in the public library the sunlight hits that sweet spot in the skylight and shines up everything, all those chrome brackets and white Formica reading tables and old men with newspapers (we won’t mention the gap where the Céline had stood, unborrowed for years), and you can look out from there over the square, named after a lamb-chopped revolutionary from the nineteenth century, and the shoppers, women with arms hung down by heavy bags like the defeated scales of justice, kids on skateboards, thin men with old faces smoking roll ups on the benches; a Woolworths security guard goes full pelt after some kids in hoodies with Lion Bars stuffed in the pockets of their rip-off Harringtons, weaving a hundred miles an hour through the people who have stopped like automatons to watch that weird clock that breaks open on the chime like an old Bavarian curio filled with fibreglass goblins – you can stop, if you like, and look at the faces of these people for a moment, if you want to, if you’re interested in seeing the impossibility of life, the insecurity, the hand-to-mouth, the terrible things that the world can do to a person, all in the faces. And the kids in hoodies race up to the High Street, disappear into the hot grey day, become victors in their disappearing, the Lion Bars already melted. If this town is losing its mind, it’s all right by everybody in it. If they are misfits, they are sound at their core, or perhaps vice versa, but in this town, oddities can be explained by a duty to the integrity of the nucleus. The people here are, if nothing else, intensely, resolutely, very much themselves. And sometimes they are that under intense pressures. If God is dead and we have to find our way on without him, then that’s what the people of New Port have been doing. Because if God is dead then so is the municipality, and so is the structuralist hero, and even though there is a statue to Nye Bevan planted impervious in the centre of the town, he is quoted nowhere near as often as is Joe Strummer, or Johnny Cash, or Ian Curtis, or fucking Morrissey, for that matter. One witty anthropologist once said that if you wanted to understand the primitive life of a town then visit its courthouses, visit its hospitals, and spend some time with its politicians. But for New Port it would be better advised to visit its pubs, and, if possible, to walk the streets on occasion when the most frequent clients of those pubs are walking them. Walk with them. Listen to them. And you could also do well to do this when the sun comes out and everybody goes a little bit mad anyway. In the summer, there’s more room with all the students gone, but people come out for the sun. The energy of the place goes up, the edges of it become more defined. It’s hot, and the flagstone pavements glisten with the pockmark droplets of trodden gum, from the grey High Street up to each of the seven sacred hills and even the evergreen vistas of Little Switzerland at one end and Caesar’s Hill at the other; and all along is flagstones and gum, flagstones and gum, flagstones and gum. Cars line along the main roads in, windows open, talk radio, football scores, newsreaders, intermingle with growling guitars and trip-hop beats, a bit of jungle on one bridge, a bit of The Smiths on the next, Jefferson Starship on the other (Radio 2), and the three river bridges take on the car queues across them like conger eels, and teens ride BMX bikes upright and shirtless, hands to their sides, fizzing past old ladies who are the same the world over, shuffling along in too many layers, sweatless, determined and fearsome in the brightness, pulling their tartan carts. Flecks of rubbish boil and bend, mostly tell-tale signs of the night before, a polystyrene tray here, a square of chip wrapper there, pigeons warble and gather at foot level like encroaching dry ice. There’s Raul in his beret and beard and ponytail, eighteen-hole DMs scuffed and battle-worn, his wallet on a chain, his jewellery click-clacking as he walks out from the crowd, crossing the old bridge on foot like a sea dog Captain Sensible on shore leave, his arms swaying, on his way in for an early fry up, headphones playing a Public Image Limited bootleg he’s just ripped off Napster. Coming up the other way as he reaches the bridge is a nurse off nights he knows from the club on the weekend, small and round with violet streaks in her hair and dark rings around her eyes, she fires an ironic finger pistol at him when he asks if he’ll see her off her face tonight in one of the usual spots. You can fucking bet on it. Most people around now you won’t see again tonight, but some are there, lurking, breathing in the uncommonly warm air and hot bus exhaust fumes and fat clouds of unemptied pavement bins and mists of fetid body odour. There are eyes in the shadows, quivering lips, the communicating devices of those who know that the lifegoal of the masses, (that is: the amassing of the rules of the conduct of life), is nothing but a mountain of horseshit when it comes down to it. What matters is the vibe, the groove, the almighty roar of blood rushing through veins at an unlikely velocity, and it happens in this town all the time like a carnival. New Port is a lesson in disseducation, it is an experiment in humanity, it is a subversive joke. A real joke. A pure joke. Goddammit, a good solid old-fashioned fuckin joke. Subversive in that it rejects the idea that character is the property of the bourgeoisie, that boredom is the refuge of the intellectual classes, but also it’s a joke like funny ha-ha. Fuckin funny ha-ha. The joke is that the town breathes within a dome of its own making. At the roundabout and the castle ruins next to it, the town does itself proud with profuse blooming of the award-winning council plots, flowers and foliage overflowing copiously, yet not a drop of scent from a single flower pierces the natural smell of the people. And the sounds too. Trains roar and screech over the shoulder of the castle into the dank shadows of the corrugated station coverings. Horns beep, car engines chug and choke and occasionally snarl as the souped-up Fiat of some estate kids skids off from the traffic lights from a standing start. Raul makes the underpass where he’s been accosted more than once, strokes at his long full beard and comes up again into the light and heat and takes a deep breath, because here life begins, most days, at the edge of the eye of a storm that stirs the very bottom of the ocean.