By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
16) Walking
Julie walks.
Fore Street's black bollards stick out of the patterned bricks like armless dwarves.
Paul being in police hands means that Paul is going to prison means that the whole of him is being stolen from her again. Not just parts stolen by jobs and time apart, the whole of him is again behind bars, separate from her.
"Doesn't the world like fathers anymore?" Julie asks Fore Street, and sees a girl sat on a shop doorstep, her head between her jellied knees, puking up her dreams of sophistication. Her friend is supported by the shop window and is looking off beyond Julie's head.
Julie walks.
Scraping by on benefits Julie often consoles herself that her children at least have in Paul a real father, an image in their mind that they'll be able to refer back to, whether they turn out to like him or not. Neither she nor Paul knew their fathers, save by reputation and speculation. Paul, possibly for that reason, does not want to leave his children even to go to work. But he does keep getting taken away.
But wait a minute, wait a minute, her sensible voice tells her. No need for all these dramatics. Because here, now, on Fore street's pedestrian bricks the sergeant's words come to her,
"No damage done. Just keep 'em here a couple of hours. Let 'em cool down."
And Julie hears her own words tumbling over one another to explain how she and Paul went for a drink on their way home from his grandparents, how they hadn't met the man before, didn't know the man, how could it be Paul's fault? An unprovoked attack... two little children at home... must get back to my mum's... we can't afford a babysitter... acting in self-defence...
The words came out of books and newspapers, didn't belong in her mouth, in her life.
"Bastard. Bastard," she hears herself saying.
Cars with yellow lights come over the bridge and go down towards the library. These are the same streets, she tells herself, same shops, same people, same river as in the day. But, because it is night, because it is past shops' closing time, because the people are fewer, this is a completely different town. One of arbitrary menace.
Three men are coming over the bridge. They are shouting and shoving at each other. On the other pavement a drunk is flopped over the side of the bridge, the rail running under his arms, his legs limp.
Face averted from the three men Julie strides onto the bridge. The draped drunk is singing dirge-like to himself. Hearing her clipping heels he swings his head around and swaying watches her approach. She looks beyond him.
The tide is full, the water coiling in incomplete whirlpools. Beyond the streetlights and the jagged roofs is a round umber moon. A few thin clouds lay like pencil shadings diagonally across its anxious face.
The drunk lifts one arm flapping off the rail. The three men across the road are laughing and grabbing hold of one another. One keeps slipping off the edge of the pavement, jerking himself back on to it, off again. Julie keeps to the edge of her pavement. The drunk, one of his supporting arms removed, slides further down the side of the bridge.
"It's a bore waiting for a bore," he singing tells her. He has a Midlands accent.
Julie steps smartly on, crosses the side road. Two more men are coming towards her along this narrow pavement. She crosses the road. Cars pass between her and the two men. She looks again to the moon.
"Next time you look up at the moon," Paul told her, "imagine you're looking down on it. It'll make you dizzy." It had.
"Bastard. Bastard," she says. On the long road ahead single lights carve empires out of the night.
commentary .... Julie's initial response, after Paul's arrest, had her falling into the grieving frame of mind that had become her habit after Paul's two imprisonments. Paul was in the hands of the police, therefore he was lost to her.
Only in a just society do the innocent have nothing to fear from the police. Unfortunately Paul and Julie did not live in a just society. Not that either of them committed unjust acts. Both were innocent of wrongdoing in that both tried to live as honestly as they could. This country they lived in, though, was a country where honesty was inherently penalised, whose language gave us the saying 'poor but honest.'
Previously, when Paul had had to stay away twice overnight on some furniture removals, and once when an inescapable job had had him working night shifts, Julie had found herself emotionally shutting down — during the day when Paul was occasionally around as well as during his night absence. Such behaviour on her own part had puzzled her, until she had realised its cause. Realising it she had thought herself cured of it. But the fear that created those emotional habits ran too deep.
So, on the first of these two Bridgwater nights, was Julie again made aware that her life was beyond her control. So, again, Julie was made to know that, in the big wide world, she and her penniless family were people of no account. The absolute certainty of that knowledge underlied her life.
True Stories
In August 1985 Peter Arthur Burrows, of Brooklands, Bridgwater, went late at night to the house of Mrs Josephine May Woodrow. 18 year old Peter Arthur Burrows had lived for a short time with Josephine May Woodrow. She refused to let him in. He banged on the door. Then he threw empty milk bottles against the walls of the house.
According to the Central Statistical Office car ownership in the South West, in 1987, was 373 vehicles per 1,000 population. For the rest of the country it was 320 vehicles per 1,000 population. The South West also had the highest rate of fatal or serious road casualties in 1986, with 161 per 100,000 population. In 1987 the South West had the highest number of home owner occupiers at 7l%. The South West also had, at 17%, the lowest proportion of people renting from local authorities. In 1986 the South West had the lowest household size, with 2.54 people per household, compared with a national average of 2.58.
On March 15th 1989 PC Douglas Shaw entered Cornhill gents in Bridgwater and saw John Wilkins going into a cubicle adjoining one which was already occupied. PC Douglas Shaw suspected that an act of gross indecency was taking place between John Wilkins and the person in the next cubicle. PC Douglas Shaw asked PC Andrew Owen to come down into the gents. PC Andrew Owen then pulled himself over the top of the cubicle door to see if an act of gross indecency was taking place. PC Andrew Owen then told John Wilkins that he was under arrest. Whereupon John Wilkins said, "But I haven't done anything."
After a visit to the underground gents in Cornhill, Sedgemoor Magistrates decided that the space between the top of the cubicle door and the lavatory ceiling did not allow sufficient room to see if an act of gross indecency was taking place in the cubicle. John Wilkins had no previous convictions. He was found not guilty.
