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Jericho in Chester

He has, in the few months since he settled here, become a familiar figure: the little blond boy, the pavement artist. Tourists are charmed by him. Those who stay in the city longer than a day find themselves looking out for him. They tire of traffic and Tudor buildings, shops and quaintly covered walkways and, remembering him, climb up to the Roman walls that circle the city and walk to the steps that lead down to the river. Here the bank is wide, paved and sloping. An avenue of cloud-headed trees offers protection from the summer’ s dry heat and the river's intense dazzle. It is here the boy works on the twelve paving slabs he has commandeered as his gallery.
         It is his age, his fair hair, the rapt attention with which he draws that makes them linger. They seldom interrupt him: he seems not to invite it. They give generously - although there is no box or cap in which to put the money. They leave it on the ground, glittering towers of sliver coins on green lakes of one-pound notes. He acknowledges the gifts with a nod and, sometimes, a smile so unexpected its sincerity is doubted. They move on, realizing, perhaps, that the boy had not so much charmed as disturbed them. Despite his skill, despite his almost adult beauty, they wonder if the child is quite normal, or even likeable.
         Others have wondered likewise. At his new school he sits alone at a double desk. He has no special friend, appears not to desire one. He is unliked. He is too blond, too bright, too quick to answer a teacher's question, too quick with questions of his own with which the teacher cannot cope. Next term a lady will come twice a week to teach him subjects his peers will not touch for four more years.
         'Your boy is gifted,' the headmaster tells his mother and new dad.
         Being gifted is expensive. His new dad pays, happy to do so. It is his way of proving he loves both the boy and his mother, which, sadly for all three, he no longer does.
         His mother, once so brassy, flash, is now smoothed into an aery gold, beaten by the weight of her husband's money, his brute good taste. She shimmers in smarter frocks and subtler face paints, but rarely speaks in company, ashamed of the thick accent she cannot shed and even thicker laugh that nowadays goes unheard. She has common ways and once she gloried in them. She forgets that these are what her husband loved about her. No matter, he is forgetting, too. He is friendly, civil, kind in the way of men who do not love their wives. If he beat her or was cruel, she would know what to do: she would hit him back, and leave. His kindness keeps her captive. Transplanted from a poor and dusty soil in which she thrived, she wilts in luxury while Jericho grows wild and is not to be contained.
         He loves it here, alone, at ease in the crowded streets, the shadowed rows and alleyways. He revels in the heat, the sharp light that turns the river into glass and coats with pearl the city's sandstone walls.
         At first he had been disappointed with the place. His new dad had told him the city was on a river. He had misunderstood. He had imagined a city floating like a ship at anchor, its streets a spiral of dark canals. In truth, the city stands on solid ground, a sandstone plinth: its decorous streets and timbered fronts have never known water, and the river, tired and sluggardly brown, is no wider than a road.
         Once, hundreds of years ago, the river had been much wider, deeper, and the city itself a major seaport. The river had silted millennia ago, but, in his head, he can make broaden it into the deepest of lagoons, and he fills that lagoon with brilliantly-masted ships. He makes the water rise, and the city rise with it so that it floats like an island state. He floods the streets with water, turns them into canals, black-veined arteries threading the circular city. He makes bridges grow. Great arches groan over black streams. Rotting planks squat over brown sewers. Japanese bridges, bony tents of bleached willow, zigzag over grander stretches. It is as real to him, this place, as the waking city that is now his home. He can see both cities at once, one superimposed on the other, as if brick and mortar, water and stone, air and light were no more than tracing paper overlays.
         When he draws the same thing happens: he is aware of two worlds at once; the one he draws in coloured chalks on the pavement by the river, and the one that revolves about him.
         The twelve paving slabs slope at an angle and so go untrampled. There has been no rain for weeks. The oldest of his drawings pale into ghosts in a way that rather pleases him.
         He can draw to scale the way some can sing in perfect pitch, but the people he draws are strange, even to him. They have Buddha bellies and massive melon heads, painfully large on tiny shoulders. It's how his own head feels sometimes, crammed with thoughts he has not time to consider fully.
         Horses have caught his eye of late. Horses are made of so many lines. Their bones and sinews are discernible beneath their burnished coats. They fascinate because, just looking at them, he can see exactly how they're made.
         When inspiration fails, there are seascapes - underwater worlds of lemon sand, purple weeds, fish that flash a prism of colours - although he has yet to see the sea for real. His mother said his father was a sailor and is dead. His mother tells several different stories, but this is the one that sticks.
         He erases at least one of his drawings every day, dissatisfied, eager to improve, or inspired by a new idea or subject. Today, he will erase the seascape he did a week ago; a band of banana yellow sand under a swathe of blue, studded with shells in red and purple and weeds in green, long waving tendrils through which he had woven fish in every other hue available to him in chalk.
He takes out a cloth from his duffel bag, walks to the river and swirls it in the brackish water, carries it dripping to his gallery.          Colour swims into colour: the seascape becomes a fog of plum and blue. It's as if the concrete has grown a bruise. He wipes it all away, thinking, 'I'll do trees. I'll do the trees at sunset with purple shadows along the leaves.'
         A pair of white court shoes intrudes upon his vision.
         A woman's voice says, 'What did you do that for? I was enjoying that.'
         He looks up. The sun, directly above, makes a halo for her head, blinding him.
         'Am I in your light? I'm sorry, pet.' She kneels beside him. She smells of peppermint. Her shadow cools him. 'You are very good. Really, you are. I'm proper impressed.'
         She is young and square-faced. Her cheeks are dusted pink, almost the pink of her wool skirt and matching jacket that must have been heavy in the heat, but still she looks so fresh. Her hair is bleached to white. Her eyes are lost behind dark glasses. Her lips are the red of Dennis the Menace's sweater.
         'I'm sick of doing the sea,' he tells her. His throat so suddenly dry, his voice cracks. People don't usually stand so close. It's as if there is a rule, and she is breaking it.
         'Oh,' she says, leaning closer, more confidential. The world narrows down to the pair of them. 'Why is that, then?'
         'I don't really know,' he tells her. When he does not know a thing, he invents. He tells her, 'My first dad, he died at sea. On a raft. I think somebody might have ate him. Mam says we can never be too sure.'
         'Oh no,' she says, putting a pink-gloved hand over her lushly painted mouth. 'It's proper sad is that. My dad died in bed with never a sniff of the sea. And, look at you, an orphan almost, but for your mam, and you're only young at that. So was I. We're alike, we are. Twin souls! I've read about them.'
         He blushes and looks away. Behind those dark glasses, her gaze is an assault, hungry and admiring.
         'Have a mint. They cool you down.'
         She dips into a handbag the white of her shoes and brings out a tube of Polo mints. Sweets from a stranger?
         He takes the mint.
         She smiles without showing her teeth.
         'Tell me about the others. I like that one, there. It's very faded though.'
         'That happens. I did that one the day before. The elephant I got from a magazine, but them trees are mine. I thought of them myself.'
         'You are clever. And that one I know is Minnie the Minx. Oh, I do love her.'
         'She's really easy to do, and I had loads of black to get rid of. And that's the sea again.'
         'Which you're sick of doing, you said. Mind you, I can understand, what with your dad dying the way he did. You tend to go over things in your head again and again until you're sick of thinking.'
         Her hand for a second is pure grief, white gloved, upturned, until she lets it fall, and her mouth, which was a thick red line, abruptly burst open as she giggles at her own wisdom. She sighs then, the mouth settling into sudden melancholy. Behind the dark glasses, her eyes are wistful with a suggestion of tears. Hear them in her voice, the catch in the throat, the reluctance to settle on any word for no word matches what it is she is compelled to say.
         'A lad I know died the age you are now. My best friend he was. I cried for days, no months. Drowned fishing in a pond the back of Burton's mill. I can't see a stickleback in a jar without a quiver deep inside. I was inconsolable for weeks on end. They said to me, you're not normal, you're ill, pull yourself together or you'll go soft in the head, what use is crying for the dead? I'd think of him night and day. I buried him deep inside. I still think of him, but not so often. Only the other week, in fact. Not morbid, you know, just nice, like how it would be if he was living still. Do you have much of a memory of your dad? It's not a recent loss?'
         'No, it were before I were born.'
         'Well, that's not so bad, is it. If you didn't know him, you can make stuff up about what he was like and what he'd be doing now. You can do that with the dead. They don't mind. They're dead, after all. So, it's just you and your mam, is it?'
         'She got married and we moved here.'
         'Tell me,' she asks, cracking the Polo mint with her front teeth. Saliva fizzes, froths over her lips. A pink tongue licks it away. She leans close as breathing. 'Do you like it here?'
          'Yes,' he says with a passion that seems, momentarily, to disconcert her. 'I like it, the place. I like this, the drawing and all that.'
         'But you've no friends, have you?'
         'No,' he admits. He wants to say that it is a choice he's made - or that it feels like one - but the word 'No' is too solitary and short to express all that he invests it with. 'No,' he says again. He can say no more.
         She draws back, satisfied.
         'Well, you have now. You have me. You have me. For today, at least. If you like?'
         He would like. He would like very much indeed. He has only to confess the desire to feel it keenly. She puts him in mind of the Snow Queen, only shorter, pinker, made of an ice that smells of mint, which is warm and yet unmelting. He could tell her about fractions, how the Romans believed the wind carried seeds to make babies, and how, once, this was a city built on water, and she will smile as she is smiling now.
          'You'll have to meet my fella, though.' Her voice has a warning note, as if this is a test he must undergo to prove himself worthy. 'He drove us here.' She makes him sound like a knight, someone to be feared. 'It's right off our beaten track and I didn't want to come, but the day's so hot and lovely, we thought, what the flip, let's live, and landed here.'
         She turns and waves, it seems, to the crowd in general.        
         'He's pretending to ignore me. He's very moody, but I love him to bits, I do. I hope you like him, too.' She says it earnestly, as if it matters what the boy thinks. She waves again, calls, coos. People in the crowd turn at the sound of her. She ignores them, intent on her man at the water's edge.
         Black against the river's dazzle, a silhouette frayed by light, her man waves, just once, and comes over.
         He moves slowly, shambling and reluctant. He wades through the heated air as if it were an extension of the river, as if it shared its texture, pull, its mass. Close to, he is tall in a grey suit and dark glasses. A thin black tie exclaims against his white shirt.
         'Meet our new friend,' she tells him.
         The boy holds out his hand. It goes unacknowledged, wilts.
         A panther the sun's gleam turns grey, the man steps back from them. His great head thrown back, he sniffs the air, looks above their heads at the city walls. His throat is peppered with black bristles, but his face is bloodless, smooth with a gloss as if newly painted. Touch his cheek, and it will smear.
         He makes them at a loss for words. They are now an awkward trio. He imposes this silence, as tangible as the heat that covers the city like a layer of skin. The bells of a distant church toll three times. On the far bank trees toss the notes in their branches.
         The woman bites her lip. Underneath its pink, her face is a dark cloud. Her man has no liking for this small boy. She has done wrong. He is unwooable.
         The boy catches her anxiety - as she intends. He must be brave, and speak.
         'This city used to float on water,' he says. The words surprise him, make him gasp even as he utters them. He had drowned in the silence, but language suddenly makes him buoyant. 'Or so I think. So I like to think. I think of the streets as canals you can sail down in a barge, and this river is dead wide. It’s a lagoon, and the city's like this massive ship floating on the water.'
         His arms extend, embracing the imaginary flood.
         Her lips slant cynically. This fancy will not win her man.
         In the man's temple a long blue vein pulses. His thin lips pout, widen. Saliva glitters his teeth. His smile shines.
         'Yes,' the man says, the word a blessing. 'Yes, I know what you mean. It's what the city dreams. I think all cities dream. Cities are living, too. Anything living can dream. If I can dream I'm Napoleon, this place can dream it's Venice.'
         She rubs her pink-gloved hands. It is a form of applause. The boy has wooed the Dark Knight. The spell is broken, is litter at their feet. 'Venice!' she says. 'Of course it is. The things he says, like a poem sometimes. Mind you, he has a thing about Italy in general. A fondness for Mussolini, to be exact. He calls me Clara from time to time. Clara Petacci, you know?'
         The name means nothing to the boy other than it wakes him from a dreaming city, a vision of a pavement's heave and sigh, the snore of a traffic light, the river itself turning in restless sleep.
         'They were lovers,' she explains. 'Shot dead for their sins, hung up in the streets for all to gawp.' She looks up at the city walls as if expecting to see them there - as if such a sight would please her. 'Let's go for a coffee, the three of us. Espressos, why not? They'll have a coffee bar somewhere hereabouts?'
         'Yes,' he says, meaning that there is a place not far away, but that he does not want to go. A Polo mint from a stranger is one thing, a coffee is another, and he's not too sure of the man even now. He stands too tall and does not speak enough. His slack mouth disturbs. He has too many teeth.
         The woman smiles. He likes the way her hair catches the light. He wonders how to draw it.
         'I've a passion for meringues more than espressos. Do they do them an’ all?'
         The boy thinks so, nods, but he would like to stay here. He has trees to draw. Their branches scratch at his brain.
         'Then lead on, laddie,' says the man, and the boy does what he is told.
         'My bag!' he cries, his final protest.
         'I've got it,' says the man, stooping to catch the bag by the neck, throttling it.
         She takes the boy's hand. The man follows. It is not the sun that burns the boy's bare legs, but the man's black-lensed stare. The world through his glasses is darkly-sepia: the boy is an old photograph of someone born long ago and long since dead, a ghost the city dreams.
         'Three of them meringues, love, and a pot of tea. Tea's more cooling than coffee, but you can have pop if you like.'
         'No, tea's nice. I like tea,' he tells her.
         'Do you?' she asks, nodding as if it's a thing she has learned and will now keep and treasure. 'We're so alike, you and me, it's chilling. We're like that.'
         She holds up two fingers, crossed. Her nails, naked now of gloves, are the colour of her lips. When I get oils for my birthday, he thinks, I will do her first. She will be easy to do. He wishes she would take off her glasses. He needs to see her eyes.
         A tray of cake and tea arrives. The man shifts his long legs to let the waitress pass, and bumps against the boy as he does so.
         'I'm sorry,' he says flatly. 'Did I kick you?'
         He puts his hand on the boy as if too soothe. His hand is large, red against the tan of the boy's thigh. Around his wrist is tattooed a wreath of periwinkle. Black hair weaves about the purple flowers. He squeezes the boy's thigh. His fingers meet.
         'There's nothing to you, Thin as a spindle.'
         'Well, fatten him up with them meringues, and leave him be,' she snaps. 'My man here doesn't know his own strength. He could split a boy in two with a touch. I've seen him do it.'
         'I have,' the man assures him, and lets go of the boy's leg finger by slow finger.
         A cold thread of fear had run through the boy at his touch, but he relaxes now, melts like the first bite of meringue melts to sweet nothing in his mouth. He is truly happy.
         The woman senses it. 'Happy?'
         He nods, unsurprised at her insight, expecting it. They are twin souls.
         'We like it here well enough, but prefer the quieter spots. The Lakes sometimes. Calderdale. The Peaks. Todmorden. The Moors. Even Wales, sometimes. Bala Lake. Lovely. We go all over, but we're not one for crowds. No, we like the quiet, the private places. We're solitary, aren't we? Sensitive?'
         'Um?' The man looks up from behind a white fan of meringue. He has been licking the cream between the shells with a tongue pink, surprisingly small and pointed. The boy has been watching him and now looks away, embarrassed, unable to identify the feeling that thrums in his chest when he looks at the man - or not daring to give it a name.
         'You'd like it where we go. Some lovely pictures to be drawn. Rocks, and stones, and trees and such. You said you were sick of doing the sea. You could come with us. He likes art, well, photography, any road. Photography's an art. You could take his photo. He's got lovely hair, a true blond. Not like me, out of a bottle, false from root to tip.'
         'Not in here,' the man scowls. 'It's way too dark.'
         He has an accent, Scottish, the boy thinks. He makes a note of it as if it were something he could draw.
         'Outside then, later? I'd like a snap of him. He's a pretty lad. Lovely neck, do you not think?'
         'It's what I noticed about him,' says the man looking away and - is he? - blushing. 'I noticed it before you did, remember?'
         So they had been watching him. The man had seen him first, then her. Why did this please him?
         The blush dies from the man's face, regains its bluish white. He is monochrome again. In a worlds with more colour than the boy can deal with, this is the man's true charm.
         'I used to live near Manchester,' he tells them, tells him. 'Little Atherton.'
         'Oh yes, I know there,' the woman says. 'Its near us - or on the way. Our house faces that direction. It shares the same air. We've been neighbours and didn't know it. ' She shakes her head, amazed at how life is like a belt pulling them ever closer, the boy and her. 'Little Atherton. Now there’s a dump, one mile of back-to-back housing and a slack heap in the middle. This place is nicer, more genteel, but you don't like it here all that much either, do you?' She tells the man, generously or triumphantly sharing her greater knowledge. 'He has no friends and a dad that drowned at sea.'
         'That's sad,' he says, but will not look at the boy.
         'And do you not keep in touch with anyone there?'
         'No. I sent a card to school once, and the best friend I had, he died.'
         'Died?' Her mouth is a red O of deep concern.
         He hesitates, but is committed to the lie. It achieved its intention: he can see himself twice in the black mirror of the man’s glasses. He had wanted to be thought interesting, to make the man look up, be tender with him. 'He was asthmatic, allergic to grass.' He can think of no more to add. He looks away, fingers the white crumbs of his meringue into a lumpy pyramid.
         'I had a friend die, too,' the woman tells him again, and bows her head in remembered grief.
         'You could always . . .' begins the man, his voice suddenly alive, musical in a way he had not suspected. The pause is deliberate, part of his song. '. . . visit his grave.'
         The words spill like dice onto the table, roll and come to rest.
         'Of course!' exclaims the woman. 'We like looking at graves. It's something we do.'
         'It's restful,' the man tells him, and the boy believes it, sees his imaginary friend's imaginary grave, marble and ivy-wrapped, inventing the image as he has invented the city, shimmering and water-logged.
         The man wisely stretches his legs so that his knee touches the boy's leg again. The boy shifts, but only slightly. Under his dark glasses, the man's eyes narrow contentedly. ‘You’ll be home before dark,’ he says softly, almost to himself.
         Outside the afternoon is yellow. Shadows lengthen, charcoal the streets. Their car, a white Ford Anglia, is parked on the other side of the river. They cross the old bridge, a zigzag of sandstone brick. Below them a weir breaks the smooth water into a thousand ungatherable pieces. Swans float questioningly amidst the debris.
         'In you pop,' she tells him, holding the car door open.
         Its interior is walnut and red leather. It smells of the heat, of Windolene, of cigarettes and mint. It is a gaping mouth, its seat a tongue: it would swallow him whole. He stands back abruptly.
         The man has laid his black jacket in the boot of the car. The boy sees a spade and swathe after swathe of clear plastic like a rush of water made solid. You could drown in it.
         'No,' he tells them, suddenly, unaccountably scared and yet anxious not to offend. 'I can't.'
         'Can't? Why ever not?' she wants to know. Her mouth is a sweet bow, a red ribbon on her party face. 'We'll be back before dark, won't we, love?'
         The man slams the boot shut. The sun is behind him, haloing him. His shirt glows like a perfect soul.
         'If he doesn't want to go, leave him,' he says coldly. The boy is no loss.
         'I'm sorry,' the boy says - and he is. 'I just can't.'
         They seem not to be listening, not to care. The woman is checking her lips in the wing mirror while the man adjusts his black tie so that it falls with perfect certainty to the silver of his belt. This done, he extends his hand to the boy. His grip is sweetly vicious.
         'Well, we'll be off.' she says. 'It's been lovely meeting you. Pity you can't come. Another time then?' She kisses him, a soft, lipsticky kiss that, unknown to him, brands him as her own, a bright circle of red on his cheek.
         He watches them climb into the car. She will do the driving. The engine starts. He is foolish in the heat, bereft.
         She turns, looks over her shoulder at him. She has taken off her glasses and her face is grim as if, for all the regrets and lipsticky kisses, she is angry at his staying.
         The man pays him no attention, and that is worse.
         She reverses the car onto the roadway, drives past him, pressing her hand against the window, a starfish, a thing he would have coloured red and green. Through the glass she mouths at him, 'Goodbye . . . goodbye.'
          Is this it, his last glimpse of them? The car is a glazed tank, a dim underworld in which their faces float like the fabulous fish he is compelled to draw.
         He watches as the car reaches the park gate and the man leans out to pay.
The boy's hand tingles still from being gripped. He feels his cheeks. His fingers come away, stained red.