all the beloved ghosts Read online

  We said we’d meet at nine at the usual place, the old covered well on the High Road. Sometimes we’d just stand there and try to imagine what Tottenham must have been like when it was a village, and what The Farm must have been like when it was a farm, with cows at the Pond. We never could.

  Most of the rest you know already. You saw it on your iPod Touch or in HD on your plasma. Maybe you watched it on YouTube on your day off.

  There must have been a thousand yutes and by the time I got there, looking for Valentine, they was already chanting loud: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ Then the Feds pushed up at the barricades near McDonald’s. Up close, they say their eyes was wide. Sometimes you wouldn’t change places for the world.

  But soon the snatch-squads rolled up with their riot gear and their horses and their Alsatians ready to chew the legs off anything standin’ still. So out came the ballies, the bottles, the bats, bars and bricks. Out came the fireworks, the hammers and the petrol cans. The barricades were set on fire. Blue lights strobed. Searchlights slashed the sky, and the helicopters overhead sounded like damnation. Boss cars – Mercs and Beemers – got wrecked. Petrol tanks went off like Christmas crackers.

  ‘Dead the fires! Dead the fires!’ I pinged that off as night fell, but two police cars was already shells, and by eleven, the double-decker on my father’s route was flamin’ high into the night with its automated lady saying: ‘This bus is under attack. Please dial 999. This bus is under attack . . .’ Until she couldn’t take the heat no longer.

  Then Aldi got torched and Carpetright too, with all those people burned out of their flats, and harassed on their way out, which was twisted. I don’t know no one who thinks any different.

  The night was like some kind of video game. For once, the yutes were bigger than the police. They were fightin’ like soldiers at those barricades, givin’ it large. They were the ones doin’ the stoppin’ and searchin’. They had the Feds under manners. On lock. On smash. Running away. Gangs from all over London put down their beef that night to come together. They had ransack of the place – and it was all being broadcast live, in real-time, on BlackBerry. ‘Let’s eat together,’ they said. ‘Eat’ means get. Let’s get stuff together. People was part of something. For once, they wasn’t nothing.

  Me, I just kept walkin’ the High Road, looking for Valentine. At the barricades, the front half was holding the Feds back so the back half could rip. Man, they had trollies and suitcases and wheelie bins. For a long, stupid while, I tried shouting that the looting wasn’t helping nothin’, but I might as well have been singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

  I saw kids as young as ten. I saw one take a golf club to the T-Mobile window. I saw an old geezer with boxes of trainers stacked high in his arms. I saw people dishing out lottery tickets and cigarettes like they was sweets. ‘Here comes the Revolution!’ one Paki guy was shouting. Hundreds was walking round with the Nike Air Forces, the G-Star jeans, the plasmas, the iPhone 4s, the iPads and stereos. They was trying on clothes in the front gardens of strangers. I saw women walking away with nappies, soap powder and bags of rice. I watched a skinny guy steal protein drinks from a health food place, while across the street, an old posh lady was waving a bottle of Lambrusco.

  I saw old and young, African and Caribbean, White and Asian working together to push up steel shutters. It was harmony for those guys, sweet and true.

  I never saw Valentine. I told myself she must have heard what was going down before she left the apartment. I didn’t check my phone because she didn’t have a phone. Her parents couldn’t afford even a pay-as-you-go.

  There was a fog of smoke all night. People were making jokes, like about not burning down McDonald’s cos they might need a burger later; cos all this ninja stuff could put a hunger on. Me, I thought, who will care about anyone rippin’ one box of Durex? I was still longing for Valentine, and the window at Superdrug was all smashed in. If Saturday was totalled, there was still Sunday at the Pond in the twilight in the long grass. There was still most of August.

  Girls were in there before me, taking shampoo, false eyelashes and pocketfuls of lip gloss. Hope is cheaper than you think. My eyes met theirs and we all laughed like we was old friends.

  The riot that night weren’t wrong and it weren’t right either. It’s just what happens when a man from The Farm is shot dead and no one knows why, and the Feds close ranks and won’t talk till they are made to talk, and people have been there before – literally at the door of that station waiting and asking for answers that aren’t in the leaflets they’re being told to read.

  Sometimes, you just want to breathe. Sometimes you want to know nothing. You want to be pure and clean, like Valentine’s voice singing that ‘Lord God’ song up at the Pond. That night I saw a Fed dragged off into a back alley by maybe six yutes, each with a torn-off plank. I saw nails glinting.

  It took the Feds till midnight to grab back just 200 metres of the High Road, and by four, the riot had moved to the Station. I’ve been in there myself and knuckled and that, and when everyone was putting in their windows, I personally didn’t feel no inclination to stop nobody.

  Then, as the night started to thin towards day, I checked my BlackBerry and found the threads about the girl. One said she was ten years old. Another said she was pregnant. But most everyone agreed: it was a sixteen-year-old African girl what turned the protest into a riot.

  Later I pieced some of it together. While she was up at the Pond with me that Saturday, her parents was doin’ the march from The Farm to the Station – which was totally brave if they was illegal. Valentine’s mum and little sister was up at the front with maybe fifty other women. The women was leading, with their children, their buggies and their sad banners. It was a way of saying to the Feds, This is a peaceful protest. Behind them was their men, and behind them, was the yutes of The Farm.

  Five hours passed and the Chief Superintendent never appeared.

  Cherelle told me that Valentine walked from The Farm to the High Road to find out what was taking her parents so long. Her little sister would have been hot and hungry, and her mother, tired on her feet.

  At half eight, the women said they couldn’t wait no more. The children had to be put to bed. Their men followed, defeat in their shoulders. Only the yutes stayed, humming like wasps.

  Then out came the first of the Feds. That’s when the girl appeared, or so they say. They say she walked up to one Fed and, in a clear voice, much bigger than she was, told him that people needed answers. He told her to get home if she knew what was good for her. They say she threw a leaflet at him. A few others came, looked down and laughed. Or they did until she backed up, reached into her pocket and threw a stone.

  It bounced off a bullet-proof.

  Lord God.

  Them who was there say fifteen of them circled her. They licked at her legs with their truncheons. One raised his fist. She was bleeding, and people started screaming into the night. Which is when word was pinged off on BlackBerry, and London came to Tottenham.

  For days after, I went to The Farm, first in the heat, then in the rain, trying to figure out even which high-rise was hers. But people don’t want to talk after a night like that, not even to a black guy from the manor. By the time I found Cherelle and got the address, Valentine and her family was gone.

  Fact is, I don’t know what’s true and what’s story. I only know about Valentine up at the Pond, and the bats whistlin’ and wantin’, and her voice so pure it made a stillness of everything.

  Sixteen-year-old African girl. Solo, a cappella.

  The Heart of Denis Noble

  As Denis Noble, Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, succumbs to the opioids – a meandering river from the IV drip – he is informed his heart is on its way. In twenty, perhaps thirty minutes’ time, the Cessna air ambulance will land in the bright, crystalline light of December, on the small landing-strip behind the Radcliffe Hospital.

  A bearded jaw appears over him. From this angle, the mouth is odd
ly labial. Does he understand? Professor Noble nods from the other side of the ventilation mask. He would join in the team chat but the mask prevents it, and in any case, he must lie still so the nurse can shave the few hairs that remain on his chest.

  He can rest easy, someone assures him. His heart is beating well at 40,000 feet, out of range of all turbulence. ‘We need your research, Professor,’ another voice jokes from behind the ECG monitor. ‘We’re taking no chances!’

  Which isn’t to say that the whole thing isn’t a terrible gamble.

  The nurse has traded the shaver for a pair of nail-clippers. She sets to work on the nails of his right hand, his plucking hand. Is that necessary? he wants to ask. It will take him some time to grow them back, assuming of course he still has ‘time’. As she slips the pulse oximeter over his index finger, he wonders if Joshua will show any interest at all in the classical guitar he is destined to inherit, possibly any day now. According to his mother, Josh is into electronica and urban soul.

  A second nurse bends and whispers in his ear like a lover. ‘Now all you have to do is relax, Denis. We’ve got everything covered.’ Her breath is warm. Her breast is near. He can imagine the gloss of her lips. He wishes she would stay by his ear for ever. ‘We’ll have you feeling like yourself again before you know it.’

  He feels he might be sick.

  Then his choice of pre-op music – the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat major – seems to flow, sweet and grave, from her mouth into his ear, and once more he can see past the red and golden treetops of Gordon Square to his attic room of half a century ago. A recording of the Schubert is rising through the floorboards, and the girl beside him in his narrow student bed is warm; her lips brush the lobe of his ear; her voice alone, the whispered current of it, is enough to arouse him. But when her fingers find him beneath the sheet, they surprise him with a catheter, and he has to shut his eyes against the tears, against the absurdity of age.

  The heart of Denis Noble beat for the first time on the 5th of March 1936 in the body of Ethel Noble as she stitched a breast pocket to a drape-cut suit in an upstairs room at Wilson & Jeffries, the tailoring house where she first met her husband George, a trainee cutter, across a flashing length of gold silk lining.

  As she pierced the wool with her basting needle, she remembered George’s tender, awkward kiss to her collarbone that morning, and, as if in reply, Denis’s heart, a mere tube at this point, beat its first of more than two billion utterances – da dum. Unknown to Ethel, she was twenty-one days pregnant. Her thread dangled briefly in mid-air.

  Soon, the tube that was Denis Noble’s heart, a delicate scrap of mesoderm, would push towards life. In the dark of Ethel, it would twist and grope, looping blindly back upon itself. In this unfolding, intra-uterine drama, Denis Noble – a dangling button on the thread of life – would begin to take shape, to hold fast. He would inherit George’s high forehead and Ethel’s bright almond-shaped eyes. His hands would be small but unusually dexterous. A birthmark would stamp itself on his left hip. But inasmuch as he was flesh, blood and bone, he was also, deep within Ethel, a living stream of sound and sensation, a delicate flux of stimuli, the influence of which eluded all known measure, then as now.

  He was the cloth smoothed beneath Ethel’s cool palm, and the pumping of her foot on the pedal of the Singer machine. He was the hiss of her iron over the sleeve press and the clink of brass pattern-weights in her apron pocket. He was the soft spring light through the open window, the warmth of it bathing her face, and the serotonin surging in her synapses at the sight of a magnolia tree in flower. He was the manifold sound-waves of passers-by: of motor cars hooting, of old men hocking and spitting, and of delivery boys teetering down Savile Row under bolts of cloth bigger than they were. Indeed it is impossible to say where Denis stopped and the world began.

  *

  Only on a clear, cloudless night in November 1940 did the world seem to unstitch itself from the small boy he was and separate into something strange, something other. Denis opened his eyes to the darkness. His mother was scooping him from his bed and running down the stairs so fast, his head bumped up and down against her shoulder.

  Downstairs, his father wasn’t in his armchair with the newspaper on his lap, but on the sitting-room floor cutting cloth by the light of a torch. Why was Father camping indoors? ‘Let’s sing a song,’ his mother whispered, but she forgot to tell him which song to sing.

  The kitchen was a dark place and no, it wasn’t time for eggs and soldiers, not yet, she shooshed, and even as she spoke, she was depositing him beneath the table next to the fat yellow bundle that was his sister, and stretching out beside him, even though her feet in their court shoes stuck out the end. ‘There, there,’ she said as she pulled them both to her. Then they turned their ears towards a sky they couldn’t see and listened to the planes that droned like angry bees in the jar of the south London night.

  When the bang came, the floor shuddered beneath them and plaster fell in lumps from the ceiling. His father rushed in from the sitting room, pins still gripped between his lips. Before his mother had finished thanking God, Denis felt his legs propel him, without permission, not even his own, to the window to look. Beneath a corner of the blackout curtain, at the bottom of the garden, flames were leaping. ‘Fire!’ he shouted, but his father shouted louder, nearly swallowing his pins – ‘GET AWAY from the window!’ – and plucked him into the air.

  They owed their lives, his mother would later tell Mrs West next door, to a cabinet minister’s suit. Their Anderson Shelter, where they would have been huddled were it not for the demands of bespoke design, had taken a direct hit.

  The shelter was flattened and beside it, Denis’s father’s shed had caught fire. That night, George and a dicky stirrup-pump waged a losing battle against the flames until neighbours joined in with rugs, hoses and buckets of sand. Denis stood behind his mother’s hip at the open door. His baby sister howled from her Moses basket. Smoke gusted as he watched his new red wagon melt in the heat. Ethel smiled down at him, squeezing his hand, and it seemed very odd because his mother shook as much as she smiled and she smiled as much as she shook.

  As Denis beheld his mother – her eyes wet with tears, her hair unpinned, her arms goose-pimpled – he felt something radiate through his chest. It warmed him through. He felt very light. If his mother hadn’t been wearing her heavy navy-blue court shoes, the two of them, he thought, might have floated off the doorstep into the night. At the same time, the feeling was an ache, a hole, a sore inside him. It made him feel heavy. It made it hard to breathe. Something in his chest seemed too big. As the tremor in his mother’s arm travelled into his hand, up his arm, through his armpit and into his chest, he felt for the first time the mysterious life of the heart.

  He had of course been briefed in the weeks prior to surgery. His consultant, Mr Bonham, had sat at his desk, his chins doubling with the gravity of the situation, as he reviewed Denis’s notes. The tests had been inconclusive but the ‘rather urgent’ need for transplantation remained clear.

  Naturally he would, Mr Bonham said, be familiar with the procedure. An incision in the ribcage. The removal of the pericardium – ‘a slippery business, but straightforward enough’. Denis’s heart would be emptied, and the aorta clamped prior to excision. ‘Routine.’ The chest cavity would be cleared, though the biatrial cuff would be left in place. Then the new heart would be ‘unveiled – voila!’, and the aorta engrafted, followed by the pulmonary artery.

  Mr Bonham was widely reputed to be the last eccentric standing in the NHS, but he was reassuringly expert. Most grafts, Mr Bonham noted, recovered normal ventricular function without intervention. There were risks, of course: bleeding, RV failure, bradyarrhythmias, conduction abnormalities, sudden death.

  ‘But onward, what!’ he boomed, and Denis would have eagerly agreed had not a blush climbed up Mr Bonham’s throat as he closed Denis’s file.

  The allegro now. The third movement of the Piano T
rio – faster, faster – but the Schubert is receding, and as Denis surfaces from sleep, he realises he’s being whisked down the wide, blanched corridors of the Heart Unit. His trolley is a precision vehicle. It glides. It shunts around corners. There’s no time to waste – the heart must be fresh – and he wonders if he has missed his stop. Kentish Town. Archway. Highgate. East Finchley. The names of the stations flicker past like clues in a dream to a year he cannot quite summon. Tunnel after tunnel. He mustn’t nod off again, mustn’t miss the stop, but the carriage is swaying and rocking, it’s only quarter past five in the morning and it’s hard to resist the ramshackle lullaby of the Northern Line.

  West Finchley. Woodside Park.

  1960.

  That’s the one.

  It’s 1960, but no one, it seems, has told the good people of Totteridge. Each time he steps on to the platform at the quaint, well-swept station, he feels as if he has been catapulted back in time.

  The slaughterhouse is a fifteen-minute walk along a B-road, and Denis is typically the first customer of the day. He feels underdressed next to the workers in their whites, their hard hats, their metal aprons and their steel-toed wellies. They stare, collectively, at his loafers.

  Slaughter-men aren’t talkers by nature, but nevertheless, over the months, Denis has come to know each by name. Front of house, there’s Alf the Shackler, Frank the Knocker, Jimmy the Sticker, Marty the Plucker and Mike the Splitter. Frank tells him how, years ago, a sledgehammer saw him through the day’s routine, but now it’s a pneumatic gun and a bolt straight to the brain; a few hundred shots a day, which means he has to wear goggles, ‘cos of all the grey matter flying’. He’s worried he’s developing ‘trigger-finger’, and he removes his plastic glove so Denis can see for himself ‘the finger what won’t uncurl’.

  Alf is brawny but soft-spoken with kind, almost womanly eyes. Every morning on the quiet, he tosses Denis a pair of wellies to spare his shoes. No one mentions the stink of the place, a sharp kick to the lungs of old blood, manure and offal. The breeze-block walls exhale it and the floor reeks of it, even though the place is mopped down like a temple every night.