The Trainor Diary: Feb 22 to Feb 27

I slept on the sofa that night, the washing up bowl beside me on the floor. Well, actually, I lay there motionless between the clenching gastric expulsions, mulling over every move of the thirty or forty disastrous seconds of physical intimacy with Hannah, which I knew to be the first & last. When the slice of dim light that cut a gap in the velvet curtains drifted towards me, brightening a little, to reveal the dappled surface of the slush inside the green basin, I struggled to a sitting position, & then, teeteringly, to my feet. I took the bowl to the kitchen to wash it, trying not to hear the liquid slapping gently against its plastic sides. I was still drunk, thank god. It was only about 5 in the morning. After emptying the bowl & sluicing bleachy water around it in the sink, I plodded into the study to collect a folder I’d put together, containing one or two things I wanted to hang on to: a set of keys I’d found in an encrusted old mug at the back of the desk drawer, a few papers — the Marx-Engels parody, ‘Unfencing Theory’ & the Penelope reversal. The kid was in there, asleep under the desk in his pushchair, breathing heavily through a snotty nose. I was sure he couldn’t have been there all night. The study comes off the kitchen. We would have made far too much noise for him to sleep. Hannah must have put him in there while I was unconscious... for some reason. Though I didn’t remember being unconscious at all. Perhaps you never do.

I crept round the pushchair, trying not to look at him, like it might cause him to wake up. I reached out to lift the folder by its flap. The papers around crackled louder than a spitting bonfire. The cardboard bent & made a dull thunk like an axe biting deep into a treetrunk. I froze. Not daring even to turn my eye muscles to glance at the slumbering little tyrant. I was Tom. I had Jerry, the folder, by the ear. The child was the lazy bulldog. I held the folder to my chest without closing it. Then I crept backwards out of the study, turned as soon as I passed the threshold of the door (again, not closing it) & scurried straight out of the flat. I did close the two front doors though, clicking their mechanisms open & shut as quietly as possible. Success.

I needn’t have bothered. It was extremely noisy in the street. There is apparently enough green territory in this part of Birmingham to support the level of avian claimants necessary to make a dawn chorus more of a dawn cacophony. What elsewhere might have sounded like the cheery whistling of a few early-rising gardeners competing in the music-hall vibrato stakes, in this part of Moseley seemed like the various alarms you’d imagine to be produced by a nuclear reactor going into meltdown... with all its squealing descants of expanding metal & escaping steam. Or, then again, it might only have been the overture to a hangover. Wodehouse captured this effect quite brilliantly (somewhere): ‘A cat stamped into the room’, he wrote. I understood precisely what he meant. I felt a little like a seismograph.

A little further down the street, two seagulls were swashbuckling over which one deserved the right to perch on the side of a yellow city council bin, attached part-way up a lamppost, & dip its bill into a pot of pink pakora sauce. Despite the fact I’d never worked out how a single seagull ever found its way to Birmingham, let alone enough of them to cause a run on pink pakora sauce, this made me feel suddenly much more at home than I ever did in Hannah’s typical Muesli flat, with its Organic handicrafts & Fair-trade bongo drums.

Directly in front of me, on the other side of the road, a figure hunched beneath a dirty orange Wolverhampton Wanderers benny hat shuffled into view, making little progress in the direction of an equally dirty orange sunrise. The reflections of the sky in the dewy surface of the kerb made the pavement look a bit like a fairy-lit catwalk. The figure — a beardless leathery-cheeked man — trudged down it, also sporting a torn tweed jacket with PVC elbow patches over a blue nylon parka, chocolate brown three-stripe joggers (from the 1978 Salvation Army summer/autumn collection) & a pair of filthy silver-shadow trainers, one of which had not been ‘laced up’ so much as tied directly onto the foot with a good length of that green garden string that stains your hands when it gets wet.

I found myself following him. I really don’t know why. To be honest, I was feeling sorry for myself & I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t go back to my mom & dad’s at this time of the morning... even if I was leaving today. I didn’t have my key. I think I felt a bit like an old tramp myself: just another of the urban dispossessed.

He passed the bottom of Springfield Road & turned left into Green Road. I kept pace with him about twenty steps behind as he approached the concrete bridge across the ford. It was actually quite difficult to keep my distance inconspicuously at first. He really wasn’t moving very quickly. I soon realised I had no real need to be inconspicuous.

Instead of using the bridge, he stepped down into the road & crossed over to the cracked footpath beside the river. I thought for a second he might ford the Cole in his trainers, instead he went off up Millstream Way, managing somehow not to dislodge a single drop of milky dew on the taller clumps of grass or disturb the magpie strutting round the fringes of the path.

I had no idea where he was taking me. He didn’t seem like a man going to Small Heath, just one that happened to be heading in that direction. He never stopped to look through a bin or to collar someone for the price of cup of tea — a jogger, say — I would have been the obvious choice myself. He just carried on walking along like he was killing time by going for a constitutional along the river. Maybe he was. I was killing time, why couldn’t a tramp do the same? It really did feel as if he was leading me on though. More than that... it felt as if he wanted to encourage me to be like him. I quickly lost all curiosity about the purpose of this little journey & lulled myself into its plodding rhythm.

As I followed him downstream along the leafy footpath, veering around the occasional overhanging willow, trailing its tentacles like a colony of polyps, then trying not to let my footsteps echo in the bridge under the Stratford Road, I found myself imitating the way he walked: eyes down to the space a yard in front of me, only glancing up occasionally to check his steady progress & the river’s snaking route; my back hunched beneath my rucksack to maximise the amount of coat material insulating my torso; each foot lifting only just enough to clear the obstacles — a bit of root-cracked concrete, an uneven cobble, a grey spatter of Canada goose shit — & planting itself back down little more than a heel’s width from the standing foot; my fists unclenched but withdrawn deep into my sleeves as my arms hung loosely from my sides, as if there were no arms inside the sleeves at all.

I felt old. My tongue lolled thickly against unwashed teeth, which were aching to drop out. My skin hung heavy from my face, reminding me of Hannah’s velvet curtains: the sunlight on my right cheek only penetrating through the slight gap of my mouth, which tired facial muscles seemed incapable of keeping shut. My joints stiffened & my lungs rasped.

There were moves afoot at the time (there probably still are) to cash in on the film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings by getting this walkway from Solihull Lodge to the Ackers renamed ‘The Shire Country Park’. Something that soon appears ridiculous as you approach the brickworks at Sparkhill with a hangover. Try getting kids from Dorset or Herefordshire to think of all that celtic-twilight incidental music & the uber-teletubbies film-set as they trudge past the backs of the grey prefab hangars at Tyesley Industrial Estate. What the good folk of Hall Green seem to be ignoring — if their forgotten little corner of Middle Earth is supposed to be the Shire: the idyllic ‘tiny hamlet of Sarehole’ the Tolkien Society keep going on about, (with Moseley Bog as the Old Forest) whilst Mordor is to be found in the furnaces of the sooty industrial heartland of Birmingham — is that it only takes a gentle ten minute shuffle for an old rough-sleeper to get from one place to the other, & it always has done. Not much of a quest that. The ‘tiny hamlet of Sarehole’ was part of Birmingham well before that Jacobite South African rolled up like a peripatetic wizard with a head full of fantasy fireworks. Every willow, waterway & ‘bit of garden’ belonging to a local Gaffer Gamgees owes its very existence to the infernal forges of Birmingham Industry.

Nevertheless, as we approached the embankment of the Grand Union Canal, & climbed steadily up towards the towpath, I couldn’t shake the thought of the old tramp skipping about in an amdram puck outfit as Tom Bombadil, reciting that godawful Tolkien doggerel in some not-so-rare deleted scene on a special edition DVD. He reached the top, with me halfway up the bank, & shuffled on past the dry ski-slope towards town.

It seems hard to believe now, but it wasn’t until we got to the top of the Camp Hill locks & I watched him scuffing along the cobbles of the narrow-walled walkway up to the black & white cast iron bridge at Bordesley Junction that I remembered Amrit Singh. I was still amusing myself with the idea of this old tramp as Tom Bombadil traipsing blithely on against the backdrop of a redbrick factory wall almost entirely covered with three or four generations of multilingual graffiti, when it dawned on me... This was Singh’s Zomby.

I stopped in my tracks, trying to shake off my own dullness.

He had come from the direction of Moseley Bog & was walking silently around the Birmingham Canal Navigations, just like Singh’s tramp. What’s more, the ironic image of Tom Bombadil was Singh’s. I hadn’t thought it up myself, I must have read it a couple of days ago in one of the versions of ‘Unfencing Theory’ I’d unearthed.

I’d always assumed Singh made up his tramp. I never thought he was a real person, just a symbol of something. Or a ghost, perhaps. I genuinely shivered as I said that to myself.

A ghost.

I was spelling the word ‘horripilation’ out to myself (probably wrongly — I suppose as a way of stopping it from happening) when a cyclist in bright red lycra & yellow wraparounds dismounted on the other side of the bridge & waited for the tramp to cross, acknowledging the older man politely between deep gulps of air before he wheeled his racer up & over it. He hadn’t noticed me cowering in the dim corridor of sooty brick beyond the bridge’s hump, but had, quite obviously, seen the tramp. He didn’t seem at all disturbed by this.

So not a ghost then... or not a ghost except in Singh’s imagination. & for Singh this tramp was no average ghost, not a remnant of the past floating in the suddenly becalmed river of the present, but a beacon of hope sent back to lead the people of a frozen time (frozen in fantasies of the lost glory of a past that never existed) downstream towards the delta of a truly glorious future. This derelict old man, with his desperately unfashionable trainers tied up with garden string & his ironic Wolverhampton Wanderers woolly hat, was Marx’s Gespenst des Kommunismus: troubling only to those who resist the fate it represents.

I set off again, almost scuttling the cyclist over the side, as he swung his left leg up above the saddle & I loomed out of the shadow beside the entrance to the bridge. The tramp went down the Saltley Cut, carefully placing his soles down on the sloping cobbles so the string around his left foot fit in between them as he went.

If Singh’s idea was ingenious it was only because it was so utterly absurd. It took more than a simple leap of the imagination to cast this broken figure, shambling in & out of the chilly shade of the bridges that strap down the Birmingham & Warwick Canal, as the spirit of human progress & potential. He was patently a man whose life was behind him & who was resigned to spending what remained of it going nowhere in particular, achieving nothing whatsoever. This was no utopian flaneur. The fact that Singh was capable of walking the way I was (both in the footsteps of the tramp & very probably in this same rhythmic, imitative fashion) & hypnotising himself into the opposite of melancholic nostalgia — a dream of what Walter Benjamin would call messianic time (the ongoing progress of the irresistible & infinite perfectibility of humanity) — was proof either of Singh’s genius or his utter madness.

It was ridiculous, of course, like Hannah said it was: offensive even. To watch this poor old sod wandering aimlessly past the sunbleached beer-cans behind the aluminium fence rammed deep amongst the roots of the shrub-grass along the sidings & to think of the generalisms of social democracy & the human mind — rather than (say) where is his next meal coming from? or how does he stay warm at night? or what can I do to stop this happening to anyone I know? — was precisely what was wrong with arty-farty left-wing theorists like Amrit Singh... like me. Even Beckett had realised that.

It was strangely compelling though. You had to hand it to him. I replayed Hannah’s words in my mind — there’s nothing in the least bit admirable about a man who can’t even be trusted to watch a child for five minutes. I wanted her to be wrong, but I was also thinking this meant I should offer to babysit some time. A thought that was at least as terrifying as anything to do with ghosts. I couldn’t be sure I could be trusted to watch a child for five minutes either.

VAUXHALL

I gave up watching the tramp as I considered this. I sighed hungover sighs. I suppose I assumed he would carry on to Spaghetti Junction the way Singh’s tramp always had. When I finally dredged my gaze out of the glassy green canal water & my thoughts from the overfamiliar embraces of self-loathing, it was to see nobody at all in front of me. I turned & looked behind. I’d just emerged from a dank, wide road-bridge: no. 107, said an iron plaque. The tramp was nowhere to be seen: either in the shade of the bridge or beyond. Half-way up a set of locks, which I had no memory of passing, the only humanity visible was the top half of a middle-aged woman in a rather keen looking Gore-Tex anorak & a red silk scarf who was fitting a windlass in the paddle spindle of the gate.

A large truck trundled over the bridge. I ran up the steps towards the road & looked along the pavement. There was nobody on foot, just cars & lorries. I squinted through the traffic, still only half above the level of the street myself, desperately scanning the other side of the road from right to left like Luke Skywalker searching the Tatooine horizon with his binoculars for the two missing droids. What a prat. How could I lose an old man with a top speed less than half what C3P0 could muster with a Jawa on his (camp brass) tail?
I climbed all the way up to the street & finally caught sight of him again, emerging from behind a bus beyond the bridge over the Rea. I hovered on the edge of the kerb, waiting for a break in the persistent, pungent rumble of delivery vans, & watched him disappear slowly down the staircase into Duddeston Station. I could see there was a train coming, so I ran.

By the time I’d drum-rolled down the steps & rallentandoed onto the platform, the train was pulling off towards Curzon Street. I slumped into a plastic bench, breathing heavily & throwing back my head. I was desperately unfit. As the back end of the train chugged off & my chin lolled back towards my chest, I saw the tramp on the opposite platform staring straight back at me.

I looked away again. Danielle Steele had a new one out, I read (or someone of the sort). It had one of those pseudo-handwritten title-headers that are so effusively calligraphic that they’re virtually impossible to read. I remember thinking it was a shame they didn’t put the contents in that kind of font. Or maybe they did. I wouldn’t have known.

I glanced back. I’ve never been able to look a person in the eye for long. Not properly. I was actually unbeatable at those staring competitions you have as a little kid because I used to make my eyes go out of focus — not cross-eyed or anything, just totally relaxed, so that I only saw the blurry outline of a human being there in front of me — something that presumably made me look so gormless that the stoniest opponent couldn’t help but crack. But then I wasn’t looking.

He was staring straight at me. Or... maybe... he was staring at where I would have been if anybody else was ever visible to him. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe Singh was right: this tramp inhabited some other, better world that didn’t have me in it. If he did, it was a world in which you could sit on a railway station platform & piss yourself.

The tramp stared at the place I should have occupied, like a newly elected Pope practising his beatific gaze, & a patch on the left leg of his acrylic trousers began to darken. The opening that stood out slightly from his yellow ankle — despite elastication — dribbled liquid into his trainer... an exposed gutter pipe in a summer shower. Without making the slightest adjustment of his expression, or to the angle of his head, or shoulders, or revealing any other indication of a change in physical state beyond the puddle of urine spreading out from his left foot, he began to sing: Marta! Marta! tu sparisti... An operatic aria in misheard Italian belting out from the near motionless diaphragm of a ventriloquist Caruso.

This isn’t something you can look at for too long in real life. If it’d been a Dennis Potter drama, I’d have found it entertaining, but in the cold light of a summer morning, on the platform of a Centro railway station, it was embarrassing in the extreme. Hannah was quite right. This was a mad old alcoholic, waiting to die. I looked anywhere but at my micturating tormentor, praying some station master would emerge through one of the unmarked doors & shoo him off.

No-one came. I counted the pillars holding up the station roof, entirely numberlessly. His voice toppled over the cadences, fleeing before the onrush of incomprehensible Italian in exactly the same way I wished his body would collapse onto the tracks before an oncoming train. For his own sake as much as mine, I thought... but that just wasn’t true.

I read everything I could: adverts for broadband, bathroom suites, Sunny D, the Territorials. This was degrading. Even more degrading for me in my inability to witness it — plunging into any kind of text I could find, however mindless, just so as I didn’t have to wrench my eyes back there — than it ever could have been for him... even if I’d filmed him doing it & put it on the internet. I resorted to the graffiti on the sidings. Perhaps this was the real reason people read so much. It was just a way of avoiding looking at those around us for fear of what we might discover: something terrible lurking inside them — a bladder full of urine dying to burst out; a mind struggling to contain volumes of meaningless music... one glance & we might prick its distended surface, open up the floodgates.

That’s why commuters always read on the tube; it’s how the tabloids keep their sales up. You convince your readers the world is full of disgusting, predatory, stupid & dishonest people they wouldn’t want to look them in the eye & you give them something disgusting, predatory, stupid & dishonest to read as an excuse to look away. Gaze too deeply in a stranger’s eyes & you’ll uncover the desires of a paedophile or a fraudster.
It’s obviously all about death. What the eyes of every human being contain in the flesh (so to speak), which no photograph or cinematic close-up or television broadcast ever could, is that single thing: the mutual awareness of one other’s inevitable deaths. Even these words here, forming in our heads, are saying: keep on reading me & you won’t have to look.

I was desperate. This was the worst thing imaginable. I would have babysat Hannah’s drooling lump of pudge for weeks to get away from this. My gaze leapt on to the graffiti further up the tracks... & there it was: a single word in angular metallic spraypaint — bizarre & terrible...

the tramp’s piss may as well have shot out & hit me in the face.