Rebuilding Coventry Read Online Free PDF

wait until everyone is off the train. You will then be
escorted from the station to the Underground. Anyone trying to leave the
station unescorted will be arrested and charged with …’ The inspector broke
off, a note of uncertainty had crept into his voice.
    A
foolhardy youth wearing a primrose-coloured sweater shouted, ‘Charged wiv what
… ?’ Baskerville was brought through the crowd to answer the youth’s
question. When everyone was assembled on the platform and the train had been
checked for damage, the youths, dogs and policemen began their sullen
procession.
    A youth
said, ‘I don’t wanna go on the Underground. I only live round the corner.’ A
policeman pushed him back into the ranks.
    Where
have I seen a similar sight? I think hard and remember. It was All Our
Yesterdays on television. People from the ghetto were being rounded up and
taken somewhere. A policeman is looking at me from across the concourse. I
blush under my soot, look at my nonexistent watch, remember an appointment and
walk out of the station and back into London.
    Outside
there is a little hut full of newspapers and pornographic magazines. I look at
the headlines: ‘HOMELESS — NEW SHOCK’. I riffle quickly through the pages. Nothing
about me murdering a man earlier in the day. The newspaper seller says, ‘If you
ain’t buyin’ get your dirty hands off that paper.’ I say I am sorry and cross
the road with a crowd of other people, grateful for the accidental shelter of
their umbrellas. The rain is dark and spiky; within a few minutes I am
saturated. Bubbles froth along the rubber edging of my plimsolls. There is no
point in trying to avoid the puddles, so I walk through them. I don’t know what
to do with my hands. There they are, jiggling away at my sides, carrying
nothing, holding nothing, pushing nothing. I try crossing my arms but it feels
wrong, all right for standing at my back door and taking the night air, but out
of place in London in the rain after midnight. Hands on hips? … No …
too suggestive. Hands behind back? … Ludicrous … looks like I’m being
satirical about the Royal Family. So I let them hang down and after a while I
forget them and am comfortable. This is how men walk.
    A sign
tells me that I’m in the London Borough of Camden, a place I’ve never heard of.
I look around and on the opposite side of the road I see a storybook castle with
turrets and spires and many-arched windows. Is it Westminster Abbey? Is the
River Thames around the next corner? Then I see a sign on the beautiful
building says: ‘St Pancras Station’ and I feel foolish. Is Buckingham Palace
nearby? Where is Piccadilly Circus? I think about my children. How will they
cope when they find out their mother is a murderess? I want an anorak, a
cigarette, a cup of tea, an umbrella, a bar of soap and a chair. I walk on. The
buildings are swirling over my head. I cannot encompass them; they are too
many, they are too high. They are built of yellow, dirty brick, when I am used
to red brick. They are not friendly buildings, they are too important:
headquarters and official residences, and further on shops with impossible,
unthinkable prices.
    I am
frightened of London, I want to go home. My feet are numb, I don’t know where
to go, or which street to turn down. I want to rewind my life on a video
machine and wake up yesterday morning. I can’t cry; my heart is frozen inside
me. There is no question of giving myself up to the police. What I have done is
wicked and I shall be punished; but I shall punish myself.. There is no need
for the law to intervene in what is now a private matter.

 
     
     
     
     
    4
Excitement in Badger’s Copse Close
     
    Greta was standing at the
stove, stirring tinned rice pudding, when Maureen crashed through the kitchen
door; coming from darkness into sudden fluorescent light.
    ‘Coventry
has killed Gerald