Around here, the murder of Lilian Edmeades and Malcolm Johnson still has a power to paralyse tongues. People can’t bear to talk about it, and they may change the subject very quickly if you mention it… or pretend they don’t remember.
1961 I went walking
Out by Denton
With a bucket for some eels
And an apple for the ponies.
There were lovers on the bank
And I saw Edwin
Out shooting rabbits on the dyke
But I just went home.
We go out walking still you know
Out past Denton to Shorne
Past The Ship And Lobster
(what’s left of it all these days?)
Hear the watermen yelling
Like lapwings on the marsh
Or skylarks in the mud
I saw Edwin
Saw Lily from the church and she’s kissing a boy
Mad Edwin’s whistling ‘Come Back To Sorrento’
Dreams of Connie Francis
Walking back
Hands in his bulging pockets.
There’s two graves
And one inscription
on a heart shaped stone
For Lily from church and her boy
She was kissing
‘Come Back To Sorrento’
Behind me
I just went home.
The double grave of Lilian and Malcolm who were murdered by Edwin 10/9/61
Unintelligible crackling static…a demented dalek walkie-talkie on my left shoulder.
‘Someone Call?’
The last firm I worked for used Motorola Dolphins… digital handsets…clear as a bell… the microwaves burn your skin…you end up with a red left shoulder, but they work all the way to Calais. This courier outfit takes pride in an antiquated ICOM system with an effective range of about a mile… less in the rain. It’s a joke. We only attempt to use our radios if we can actually see the tip of the office aerial up on Hither Green Lane…or we’re above it…Crystal Palace is good …and Forest Hill…and anywhere near the river…except New Cross and Deptford. My controller, Vicky, fails to see the funny side. Time and time again.
‘Nothing’s wrong with our radios…and anyway there’s no weekly rental…just the eighty quid deposit…count yerself lucky’.
Every rider complains, every rider is ignored and every radio is bordering on useless.
The wrong way Miss Controller….but Charlton it is.
Roger is never enough. It’s always ‘Roger Rodge’. It’s a courier thing.
I don’t know how you write the soul of static…that ‘kxkxkkxkx’ sound…it doesn’t matter much to you, but it’s a major part of my world; those anonymous, senseless interjections which corrupt meaning or memory in direct proportion to distance or time. It will be ‘kxkxk kxkxkx’ from here on. That will have to do.
This job, this kxkxkx of a job, is pretty much the only white trash job left in England. Name me another. The police? Haha.The army? Not as risky;not even in wartime. We have a sort of professionalism. We are brave.We are quicker.We have good hearts and firm arses. In winter we get colder than anyone else living and we get as lonely as the dead and we get smellier than the dead in summer. All for one and one for one unless you crash.
For most of us it’s a living come to via misfortune; a sort of Foreign Legion without the silly hats and guns. We are an anarchic democracy of misfits. It’s work that amplifies your foibles and obsessions. Do the job more than a couple of years and you will be partially crazy. Do the job for longer and the statistics you’d rather not know about come into play. Maybe you have a small problem or a troubled love, or cash worries, or you’re far from your Balkan home in an alien city? Well this is just the job for you. You’ll dwell and re-think and obsess until some mobile phone wielding cunt of a BMW driver sideswipes you into the gutter and then you’ll get up, climb back on and dwell some more. Right now I am dwelling on Dead Doris. Next week I may dwell on you.
I am a motorcycle courier called Kilo 72, or rather ‘Kilo Seven-Two Seven-Two’. So good they named me twice. I spend upwards of ten hours a day dancing around on my poor aching balls delivering trivia to soft faced twats who complain whenever the temperature of their ergonomically designed offices falls by a fraction of a degree and who’s idea of hell is probably a busted mouse. Mostly I risk my life carrying cosmetic samples or artwork from PR agencies to media companies; but I’ve carried almost everything that will fit on a bike at least once and a few things that almost didn’t.
On Friday I delivered Penhaligon’s organic face cream to Vogue, Marie Claire and Sophie Ellis Bextor. I did drops for the Ministry of Sound and the Ethiopian ambassador. I am faceless and anonymous. I can gain entry into any London office by wearing a helmet and radio, mumbling ‘courier’ into an entry phone. I have delivered packages to people who know me and they have had no clue as to my identity under these battle clothes. From 8 AM ‘til 6 PM the trusty tool between my legs is home. I am not fast. I ride a slow old Honda 250N…the Superdream…the original despatcher’s tool…useless above 60mph,but lithe in traffic, comfortable and tough.
The fast don’t last. Couriers never describe each other as ‘fast’…that word is reserved for fun times or for deathwish amateurs. ‘Fast’ is an unlucky word. When we’re good we’re ‘quick’…and I am quicker than some.
‘Kilo 72-72 POB times 2… SE7 headed EC4 and KT13’
‘Er Kilo72 carrion threw kxkxkx easy four then kxkxkx Katie…thirteen’
‘Roger Rodge’
‘Summer Wunelsecall…69 to Mimi fuxkxkx Grub some grub… Roger Rodge’
I know what the controller is saying most of the time. Mind you, it took a few months. Translation: “Number 69 to me me me and grab some grub.” So Lucky Boy 69 gets to snack back at the office. Kilo 72 (me) has to ‘Carry On Through’ to postcode areas EC4 then KT13. No Bombay Bad Boy pot-noodle lunching for me today.
An easy one …Blackheath -> Deptford-> Rotherhithe -> Tower Bridge -> Upper Thames St -> Puddledock -> Tudor St -> Temple…16 mins.
Drop…
‘Print here please’.
Fag break.
Now off to KT13 Walton on Thames.
Blackfriars -> Stamford St-> Waterloo-> Vauxhall-> Wandsworth -> Kingston, then along the river on the gloriously secret A3050. Nice and smooth. Deceptively relaxed and in that emptiness zone. Thinking today’s obsession over and over. Self hypnotised into sharpened awareness through repetition of just one question or fantasy. You see every nail lying in the gutter, every face on the pavement, every one of the thousands upon thousands of cars you overtake. Then you forget them.
This rhythm of life is the the one that will keep you alive.
See ->Assess -> Pass-> Forget
Seen-> Assessed-> Passed -> Forgotten.
Sometimes I use the twenty-five percent trick for red lights. Jump one in four when it’s safe and the rest will be green. Bad you say? Well I drive defensively, with target avoidance skills engaged and escape routes constantly planned. I learned to ride in the seventies when brakes had single pot calipers and tyres were skinny.
The unpredictable always happens. See, assess, pass, forget.
I’d better get on to the Dead Doris stuff.
TWO:Peas kxkxkxkx
Windy Post Cross
“Lonely there, betwixt moor and sky,
Where great grey clouds go drifting by,
And the peewit utters her plaintive cry,
The windy post stands silently.
The hope of the gay little leat;
That through the gorse and heather was straying,
Singing and sparkling there at their feet;
Drowning their sighs and their cares in its waters’
From: The Windy Post V. L. Phillips, 1923.
She died. A long, long time ago. I was five. She was three. Her name was Doris Vanstone; an old woman’s name. A young Doris in 1963; named after Miss Day…a frump choice even then. There’s not many girls called Doris now. I met a couple of Dots but they were all Dorothies. We had a girl at school later on, ‘Piggin Doris’; a pretty, sweet girl but not my Doris. ‘Piggin’ Doris is well and fat and forty-five but she’s not my girl.
My Doris
Drowned in a canal
Four miles from home
On her own
Blue dress
One dirty white sock
No shoes.
My friend.
The kxkkxx job is about distance and time. Understand it. Know it. Some people never get the hang of it. Too late, or too early. I figured out time before I could read and Doris made me think about miles per hour. About just how she could travel from my side to nowhere, from catching eels in a small stream at the edge of Dartmoor to weed snagged whiteness in a stannary town canal.
The middle of Tavistock, not on our side of the town; a long, long walk from Windypost Cross for my three year old Doris. Maybe she did walk three mile just to drown. On a whim, in the wind, just before her lunch.
Tavistock Canal
Nobody ever asked me. Maybe no one thought to. Maybe nobody saw us playing. They didn’t think, “That’s just not likely.” We were always together. Mostly with my sister but not with my sister that day. I can’t remember why. Chickenpox maybe.
Grown-ups can be very thick. Nobody asked. No kindly red-faced Constable Knapweed enquired. Later we had a visit from Michael Heseltine while he was canvassing for the general election. Everybody fussed and smiled. He shook my hand, “Polite young man.” I wondered if he would ask me about Dead Doris. This tall blonde posh man.
He didn’t.
We were 20 yards from my back door and 30 from hers. I went home to lunch and so did she … at least as far as the narrow road which separated our houses. I called “sausages”. She would have squeaked “peas” back to me. Our joke… every day… when our mums called “Din-ner!”
That last word she said to me… ‘peas’. Not shouted…just a quiet high girl voice. A sunny, windy voice against a faded bracken and yellow flowered gorse Dartmoor backdrop.
‘Sauskxkxkxkes’ …… ‘Pekxkxas’… ‘Please?’
Time
Wind
Static.
Degraded by
Time-static.
Gone.
THREE: Fordson Thames Model E83
In 1965 there were hardly any cars… well of course there were loads of cars but not many makes and models. They all had a different sound. I could pretty much identify every one . Austin A40’s, Morris Travellers, Ford Anglias. That’s the thing about the old engines and more importantly rear wheel drive. The transmission tunnel, coupled with the gearbox and the resonance of the body shape combine to give each model a distinctive sound. Nothing sounds like a Morris Minor and nothing sounds like a Beetle. Vans were just as identifiable…even more so.
A Fordson Thames Model E83. They were ugly fuckers and unreliable. Someone had one. A no-name man but I knew his sound. Summer evenings just past bedtime, whining up the hill on the edge of the golf course, then left towards Down Road. A cream coloured…something… red brown seats? Nukmbkxkr plkakxte… kxkxkxkx? No chance. I think it had windows not panels; more like a small post bus.
The No-face Man. No-name Man. This man with van. Time… the crafty silent cousin of static kxkxkx’d it. Did I ever see his face? He spoke to us twice. A kind man … my sister and me… as we started the walk back from Whitchurch School. A van by the kissing gate which led into the fields…where we’d leave the road and cut through. That’s all gone now.
‘I know your mum. Hop in an I’ll take you home… quicker… big bull in that field…and creepy-crawlies.’
We knew better and walked. There were only silly sheep and cows there but we watched out for a bull…and wasps.
We told mum when we got home. She blew up.
“Don’t talk. Don’t get in cars. Don’t make up stories. Don’t lie.”
“But he was a nice man”
We knew she was right though.
When he tried again we decided not to tell Mum… less trouble. We talked to him and he showed us a trick and said our Mum was his friend and she’d be glad if we took a lift with him but we still walked home. We never saw him after that second time. Did I ever see his face? Heard him lots though. Fordson Thames E83. I saw one in that Heartbeat programme on the telly the other night. Groan,clatter,whine.
Doris didn’t go to our school. Too young. Anyway I reckon she was two years dead by then. I was seven. Her big brother Colin was fun. We used to play glove puppet shows with dead rabbits and chickens in the shed. Then we’d help him skin and pluck them. I loved playing with the rabbit skins best.
FOUR:Broken Rabbits
On the roundabout at the end of Beckenham High Street there is a large shop called “Pine Markets”. There are wooden samples outside on the pavement and its large plate windows are of frosted glass. Not much pine furniture is sold there. It’s the headquarters of Air Time Leasing; an ordinary, boring, corporate name. ATL Inc is the holding company for Tantalize TV who make, master and distribute pornographic movies. Good clients for us couriers. Small packages, well addressed.
Anyway, I was to take a master tape…”British Housewives III” (Dir: Ben Dover) to the Ann Summers HQ in Whyteleafe near Caterham. I used to go there a lot with the previous despatch company, delivering prototypes from a company called Bishop Designs Ltd in Sydenham; usually packages about 8 inches long by 2 inches wide.
So a nice easy run there, sun’s shining, bike knows its way. Pull into the yard… Shit… package is gone … every couriers nightmare. I had to drive back slowly, panicking all the way to Purley before I found it…a small black clenched latex fist, dusty in the gutter. It still looked serviceable but the jiffy bag nearby was mangled. So I did what good couriers do. I went to a corner shop and bought a large brown envelope and addressed it to the original recipient; one Rebecca Davies. I placed the dildo in the envelope. No-one the wiser.
Rushed back to Ann Summers Ltd, asked for Ms Davies.”She’s in the loading bay office”. I’ve been to the place a lot, but I’ve never been in the warehouse. I’m impressed. This is a huge industry. They have 40ft high narrow aisle racking with fly by wire cherry pickers. It’s almost as big as the old BT warehouse in Crayford. Crates and crates of sex toys, lingerie, astrolube, magazines and films. The thing that cracks me up though is the “Returns/Faulty bay. There are three huge cages full of reject Rampant Rabbits with a sign that reads “Crush/Recycle.” I advise you never to buy a blue one as they were far and away in the majority. There must have been 10,000 of the things in various states of desolation.
“Delivery.”
“Rebecca’s not here. I’ll sign.” said a bald sweaty man wearing an Ann Summers tie and carrying a shovel. He signs my docket. Unreadable scrawl. No good. I have to cover my arse on this drop.
“Print please”. He prints.
As I leave the place I look down at the docket. The printed name is mine. My initial reaction was to mutter “Fucking joker” to myself…but how could he have known my name? It must be genuine. My namesake works in a warehouse shoveling condemned vibrators for a living. And I think I’ve got a shitty donkey’s job.
FIVE: Horsey Girl
I guess
You’d be the darkest one
Maybe more like the shadow
Of a Stallion
Or a river
You would be a still one
Perhaps running so deep
I would need to rent
A bathyscaphe
Nonsense?
So?
Chuck in a free verse curveball. As I said, the unexpected will happen. Poetry is a kind of distracting static here. It won’t kill you.
See
Assess
Pass
Forget.
SIX : Lavinia Parker
Lewisham Council meals on wheels van slicing through the junction at Lower Sydenham on a red light. Her red light not mine. In the rain she nearly got me. Blond hair, mouth like an ‘O’. On the bone… they often are.
Countersteering is a good skill, though many believe it to be a myth. It’s a phenomenon where a motorcycle can be made to jumps sideways by wrenching the bars in the opposing direction to the one you want to go. It feels all wrong, against instinct, but it’s bone saving conjury.
It’s risky in the wet but I have no option…and anyway it’s a reflex for me now.
Countersteering doesn’t work with a pony. Don’t try it.
I park up and roll a fag.
Park…Pony… Pony… Park Parkkxkxkxer… Lavinia.
Lkxkxinia Lavinia Parker.Where did she come from? Out of a near miss by the Sydenham gasometers. Blonde with an ‘n’ shaped mouth and a grey pony.
I’m back in 1965 . She rode most days. I ride most days. She came out of that field through the big gate and rode past the van towards the golf links.
“Well Hello Andrew…and Sarah… nice day at school?”
A hard voice she had. Muddy jodphurs. Did she speak to him? She would have. The Kind man, No-face man, No-name man. I bet Lavinia Parker’s long dead.
The Kind man had a record that second time he met us. A seven inch vinyl single. The first one I ever saw. He was balancing it on the tip of his left index finger, spinning it and holding an open safety pin in his other hand. Trying to play it. Our world was a very quiet place then and even quieter right there. He showed us something magic. A good trick. A tiny, tinny, broken-up sound…but what song?
“…Before you’ll see me cry”
‘Show us again. Again.’
“…kxkxkkxk kxkxkxkx just what you kxkxkx to do now”.
Magic trick: music from a pin.
“…Better go now.”
Go … now. GO NOW.
We loved that song, my sister and I. There in the sun by the kissing gate that led to the fields and the walk home from school. There is something else, a fragment, a corner of the eye glimpse, and maybe I imagine it.
No. Even allowing for static I can make them out.
Moody Blues……HE HAD HER SHOES.
SEVEN:Extrapolation.
A woman once asked me what the word meant. The explanation got me into a whole lot of trouble. Then we went to bed.
I got to be good at deciphering from poor data. Filling in the gaps left by noise. It’s not difficult if you know the limited vocabulary that fits a job, or the finite number of story plots, or the repeating characteristics of the human phenotype, or the Newtonian physics of relationships.
I get practice every day in this kxkxk-ing courier job; with incomplete addresses and a broken walkie-talkie. It takes practice but it gets easier. There’s satisfaction in figuring out a whole scenario from a couple of facts, or a slip of the tongue; building truth from the one vital thing that’s missing. We riders watch pavements, faces, weather and cars with utter concentration. We see the same deadly mistakes repeated over and over. We see the same flirty smiles on receptionists’ faces as we say “sign here please” a hundred times a week. We travel the same routes over and over again. It’s just patterns.
Seen-> Assessed-> Passed -> Forgotten.
Well it’s no longer important to poor dead Doris, or to me, but I’m buggered if I’ll ever figure this one out properly.
And this is where I’m up to, in early middle age, by the gasometers, heaving nicotine, in Lower Sydenham, forty-odd years on.
EIGHT: She drowned and the Kind No-face man had her shoes in his van and nobody asked us so we never said.
We grow up and we forget how stupid grown-ups are. All they ever had to do was ask but does it matter now? It might matter, though more likely it doesn’t after so long. Static stole the sense of it and a truth that will do no good to anybody was lost for a while. That’s all.
I dwell on it often enough to get me through these dangerous days. “Kilo 72-72 Home clear in SE13.”
You lost me Doris.
“I lost you.”
Breaking up. Go again…
Old blue Honda curving at the ragged edges of tyre adhesion.
