Rebuilding Coventry Read Free Page A

car and decided that Gerald Fox was a
lucky man. Because of excessive overtime duties neither was experienced with
women. They couldn’t wait to be transferred to Vice.

 
     
     
     
     
    3
I Leave the City of My Birth
     
    I was halfway through
cleaning my chimney on Wednesday afternoon when I ran across the road to my
neighbour’s house, opened the door, picked up the nearest object to hand, an
Action Man doll, and brought its heavy little head hard down on the back of
Gerald Fox’s bulging neck.
    Fox
immediately stopped strangling his wife and fell down dead. Action Man’s hinged
torso swung for a few seconds and then was still. I let go of his feet and the
little soldier fell onto the carpet and lay there in a theatrical attitude with
both plastic hands raised in the air. A trickle of blood escaped from Gerald
Fox’s left ear.
    My
neighbour’s children crept from behind a ragged sofa and attached themselves to
their mother, and I let myself out of the house and started running. I was dressed
in my chimney-sweeping clothes. I was covered in soot and I didn’t have my
handbag.
    The
first part of my escape route consisted of pedestrian pathways. I ran up and
down ramps. I disappeared into the ground via subways. I grew bigger or smaller
according to the size of the buildings. I was dwarfed by tower blocks and made
gigantic by pensioners’ bungalows. I hurried along past the boarded-up windows
in the Bluebell Wood Shopping Mall. I went by St Osmond’s, the concrete church
with the stainless-steel spire, where I’d attended five ill-fated weddings. On
towards Barn Owl Road, the main thoroughfare, which leads from the estate
towards the city.
    Halfway
along this road I stopped to catch my breath. In an adjacent house a family
were eating. Their living-room was lit up like Madison Square Gardens. There
were five of them, dispersed around a three-piece suite. Each of them had a
plate of steaming food on their laps. The pepper and salt and a ketchup bottle
were balanced on the arms of the sofa. The television had their full attention.
Nobody was speaking. They were chewing the cud. I wondered at their willingness
to display such an intimate activity to casual passers-by.
    Behind
me, in my deserted kitchen, was a table laid with Wednesday’s table-cloth. Four
places were set. A cruet stood exactly in the middle of the table. Four tubular
chairs waited by each place setting. Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, two teenage Bears.
But Mummy Bear would not be at home tonight.
    There
is something heartbreaking about families. Such fragile blood ties. So easily
snapped.
    As I
ran along the pavement beside the dual carriageway I thought I saw my husband
looking down at me from the top deck of a rush-hour bus. But it may have been
another middle-aged man with a gloomy expression wearing a hat too big for his
head. I was now going against the tide of people who were returning from the
city to the suburbs. Few people were going in my direction. For who needs to
travel from the suburbs into the city at six o’clock in the evening? Apart from
office cleaners and murderers escaping from outlying districts.
    I ran
because I am very frightened of policemen. As other people recoil from snakes
or spiders and yet others refuse to travel in lifts or aeroplanes, so I avoid
policemen. When I was a child I had black-and-white nightmares about Dixon of
Dock Green. The sight of a lone officer of the law strolling along a sunlit
street induces terror in me. I blame my parents for this irrational fear.
(Though now, in my present circumstances, of course, my fear was entirely
rational.)
    I was
now on the outskirts of the city. In the distance, coming nearer with each
step, was the redbrick hospital where once I’d screamed and burst a blood
vessel in my eye whilst giving birth to my son. Behind the tall chimney of the
hospital incinerator was the converted hosiery factory, now a sixth-form
college where the same son was studying for a better future.
    I