With anywhere one knows well, the sense grows that it's watching you. When so much of your life has been spent there, something living forms. It doesn't matter if this is internal - 'just a feeling' - or personification. Time's accumulations and destructions stare back at you. There's no need for some Nietzschean abyss. It might be a street corner or a shop that's changed its name, again and again.
Raven could still lose himself in Oxford’s old stone and layers. That weird alley linking George Street with the top of New Road was a favourite, also Beef Lane off Pembroke Street. Hours of wandering until some refreshment and downloading became urgent.
He'd by now traipsed west, uneasily wondering how this indulgence would affect his daughter's schooling. Staring into the Manley Hopkins darksome burn of the Thames at Osney, a heron perched by the bridge. So many times he’d done this, staggering back from drinking in the Lamb and Flag.
Thinking over his time in teaching, he sometimes experienced pupils surfacing from his memory so clearly that he was back in the classroom or at a parents' evening. Running water encouraged such reverie. Perhaps it was the river's churn and disappearance, the drama subsiding into its relentless flow downstream.
*
One of his final appointments, though she'd not booked a slot. Something in her stance and downcast eyes - weariness and wariness - was heart stabbing. Nervous then embarrassed at Raven's offered hand and her father tremulously grasping it.
Raven slipped into machine-talk on projected grades and 'stretch' targets as the inebriated man blinked and nodded his head. He said nothing as his daughter spoke for them both, saying more than she ever had in a lesson. She mapped out her plans and Raven forced himself to be cheerfully optimistic, overdoing reactions whilst pretending not to notice the father's whisky stench.
To his discredit, he recalled nothing on what she’d hoped to become. Had the drunken dad insisted on coming - had she even begged him to? He couldn't bear to think of her feeling ashamed. But he remembered standing up and saying the bloke should be proud of his daughter. Then they were gone.
The horror and terror this encounter must have been to her. The tracking data and colour coding had said nothing, but what did EDI monitoring care about this child? Suffering like hers was never discussed in all his years of teacher training or 'continuous career development'. He hated his profession for this progressive idiocy, wrapped in self-congratulation but callously blind towards so many English children.
By the Thames now, he thought of Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend.
But what help was literature when it came to it?
*
How many people carry knives routinely now? They were a commonplace at the dump of a school he was terrified his daughter would get exiled to, in revenge for him bunking off the 'meeting' at his college. But hunger and thirst were stirring his creativity. He carried - for artistic purposes - a Japanese Higonokami pocket knife. Digging it into his palm was a vital spur.
Raven despised those who sat in cafes, tapping away - ‘laptop jockeys’ he called them. Yet now he sat writing a six-part sequence on True Crime in a Botley coffee shop, mixing memory and desire. He knew this obsessional interest was distasteful and spurred by his inner rage. But he refused to internally censor himself, since this was now happening in every element of his external life.
TRUE CRIME
His recurrent childhood nightmare was of getting caught burgling a house. He recalled the alien smells, the feeling of suffocating in the noisome dark, a certainty he’d lost any security forever.
Then he’d be awake, safely stretched in bed.
Now he was planning to make this reality. He was clearly mad. The place he’d chosen was a detached house, way up Cumnor Hill. It was to be a ritual desecration, a revenge attack on the class and character of its owners.
Talk with such types had become circular; nothing could breach their liberal certainties. Words no longer held any meaning for these people. It was pointless to contradict this through more argument. An empirical representation – an objective correlative – of his opposing thought was needed, for himself and for them. Hadn’t the husband unknowingly demanded it?
‘You’re a right-wing wanker. Worse than a Nazi.’
He was mad but not responsible for making himself so. His class was the target. To wear a Balaclava was essential, not to avoid recognition but from 70s memories of drying them on school radiators and images of terrorists.
*
You’ll need to know the details, what I took.
A penknife: small; portable; collectable.
I’ve kept some from my childhood,
lost the flick-knives from trips to France.
I waited at least an hour on the sloping lawn,
hidden from the house, the incline so steep.
The expected security lights didn’t activate.
Of course there was an alarm – I welcomed it.
Have you been inside a house when one goes off?
Sickening disorientation and five-minutes’ panic.
Time for me to smash up some pictures,
piss in a wicker basket and their boots,
tear off a coat-rack then grab the knife.
I was filmed jumping over a hedge.
*
He sat and dug under his finger nails with the shining blade:
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Presumably the soil he removed was ‘forensic evidence’? In a true-crime documentary, trace-element analysis would pinpoint the Cumnor ridge and its famous clay.
His urine would obviously yield DNA.
But he doubted this bourgeois burglary would divert the police from queuing in Greggs or surfing internet porn.
He was safe.
SONNET ON STEALING A CAR
At fifty-nine I’ve stolen my first car.
In films it’s done with the utmost of ease –
glancing round, ruler down the driver’s door,
a rapid twisting of wires and away.
Reality? Smashing my way in then
electrocuted getting connection.
Alarm blaring, me waving and mouthing:
‘Don’t worry, it’s my car – temperamental!‘
Meanwhile, that burgled berk from Cumnor Hill
is bustling back, swinging his Waitrose bag.
Eventually it starts and I soak him,
aquaplaning through water, a puddle
for him and his wife. I flick salt-shaker
gestures and he feebly attempts to chase.
3. RACHE
Like A Study in Scarlet, red ‘Rache’ carved
inside their lives. He saw them smiling and
decided how to; who to trust. But the
rash sharing of an obsession was why
many got caught. If he acted alone,
only his thoughts had importance. He could
live inside those and switch to some dagger –
if he dared to – then slash without warning.
You think this mad but the pain seen in her
should not be forgiven. To know they had
enjoyed it ’caused his monstrous behaviour.’
True-crime documentaries said that and
‘Nobody thought he would ever do this.’
Each step was easily traced, if you tried.
UNMASKING OF A SERIAL KILLER
In the old Truman brewery, Brick Lane,
the world’s leading Ripper experts sipping
champagne while ruminating on some wretch;
Isaac Dipski – the mad kosher butcher –
lifted crusts from gutters, believed he was
conversing with Abraham using farts.
Five witness reports of him running past
Chapman’s death scene on the way to Nando’s.
The killer is named, to thundering applause:
‘Charles Allen Lechmere, found there in Buck’s Row,
we’ve tracked his mobile phone. Early for work –
claimed he thought it was on old tarpaulin –
standing by Polly Nichols, freshly slain.
And there’s six minutes lost he can’t explain…’
THIS BITER GETS BITTEN
Let's be honest about economic reality.
There are Slavs who'll work till midnight
in awful restaurants, places where you'd ask:
who can eat here? Then they take the
last bus and so do you. The English get
anywhere, to any place even when roads are shut –
our history says so. We might seem to be absent -
we're there. Those ribcage towns in hopeless dawns,
I can’t describe them nor Oxford (its pale lights
on cobbles) glowering high-rise block monoliths
marching through snow. They're here for the children,
not yours, they'd take yours and show them what’s worse.
I shouldn't be saying that and I am. Maybe rebirth happens in
sonnets? Or the whole thing starts again in something else.
*
It's at this point the decent reader wants
to see this writer receive what he's doling
out so here's a rambling account of how
I escaped through alleys and slippery
courts not in Oxford or London but
somewhere too Gothic to be safe as when
I went there it wasn't for tourists but exile.
That was just before the Berlin Wall fell
in Prague 1989, the country in freefall.
You know the old Eastern block cities
had terrible crime under Communism?
Actually it was more dangerous since
the causes couldn't be admitted as
social in a perfect society I went
for a walk along the river away
from anything picturesque towards
distant tower-blocks such numbers,
all of them in a line like that scene from
the Bourne film where he visits the Russian
girl – Moscow I think – whose parents
he's killed. Anyway on I wandered into the
Czechoslovak night lights were bright and
high up I think then I was hit from behind
and expertly robbed in a smell of vodka or
schnapps the bloke took very little since I
grabbed his legs and pushed him over easily.
The fear, I ran without wondering why it
was raining with no drops on the river – blood
of course from my broken head - sunrise back
in the Hotel Bristol reception called this doctor
who nodded uninterested and said ‘only a
fool walks to any of those places since now
the whole state is failing.’ My money was
gone only worthless Czech stuff I'd bought
at five times the official rate. It's not much but
I can say I've suffered from True Crime just
like we all have though I'd forgotten it and
how a friend from university got murdered
by a whack across the head in Battersea Park.
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