Chase the Morning

Now, though, even the idea of the place and all that went with it made me sick. The sight of the whole pettifled street clawed at my sanity. Its mere existence seemed to clash horribly with what I’d stumbled on that night, romanticized or not. I had to get out, or believe … Or believe nothing, trust nothing, my senses least of all. I forgot the car; I blundered blindly across the road, lucky that it was empty. If there was anyone to see me they must have thought me drunk. I plunged gratefully into the sheltering blackness of an alley mouth like an animal injured, desperate to hide. My fingers skidded along the still fresh paintwork of a window-frame, and struck worn stone beyond it. I blinked, and looked around. The alley was narrow and dark, now the sun had gone down; but that only made it look more like the ones I’d gone weaving through that strange night. Whatever had been done to it the shadow hid; the faint glimmer of twilight, sheltered from the harsh street lighting, draped its mantle of mystery around it once more. I looked back and laughed aloud at the contrast; all that newness seemed like a façade, a thin gaudy crust over what really lay here. Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to believe in myself again. Just as Jyp had predicted, I’d come back.

As Jyp had predicted – and what else had he said? ‘… you ask for Jyp the Pilot, right?’ It came back to me, clear as I’d heard it. ‘Ask anyone, they all know me …’ Well, that ought to be easy enough. But somehow I didn’t relish it round here, not in any of those dinky-looking little bistros, they didn’t seem suitable somehow. But at the far end of the alley there was a dim yellowish gleam of windows. That ought to be something.

It turned out to be a pub, not very large and anything but restored; in fact, it looked about as rundown as any I’d seen. It stood on the alley corner, defined by a curved fascia of Edwardian glazed tiling in dark red and blue, very cracked and dirty, and stained-glass windows, equally dingy and opaque, etched with advertisements for the forty-shilling ales of forgotten breweries. The light that escaped was glaring, the sound of voices raucous; it looked tough, and it made me nervous. But it was somewhere to start. The warped door squealed as I stepped through into a suffocating cloud of smoke.

I’d half expected the conversation to stop; but nobody paid me a blind bit of attention. Which was just as well, because in this company, this spit-and-sawdust setting, I knew I was a sharp contrast, my white designer anorak and grey houndstooth casuals an intrusion as stark as the electronic fruit machine flickering unheeded at the back of the bar. The fluorescent light showed it up all too brutally: the cracked vinyl flooring in its faded gaudiness, the smoke-yellowed walls, the crumpled walnut faces of the old men who were most of its customers, elderly labourer types hunched and shrunken in their grubby raincoats. And deaf, probably, since the loud voices were theirs; the few younger men, mostly fiftyish versions of the same, sat glumly contemplating them like a vision of destiny. By the door a handful of teenage skinheads swilled cans of malt liquor and moaned at each other. I plucked up my nerve, and pushed past them to the bar. The beefy landlord served me my scotch in a glass clouded by scouring, and wrinkled his brow when I asked if a fellow called Jyp had been in.

‘Jyp?’ He stared at me a moment with great incurious ox eyes, then rounded on his regulars, leaning over the peeling varnish. ‘Gentleman asking fer Jyp – anyone know him?’

‘Jyp?’ The old men turned their heads, muttered the name back and forth among themselves. Frowns deepened, one or two heads were shaken, others seemed less sure. But nobody said anything, and the landlord was just turning back to me with a shrug when one old fellow hunched up by the gas fire, browner and more wrinkled than the others, suddenly piped up with ‘Wouldn’t be Jyp the Pilot he means, eh?’

There was a moment’s silence. Then cackling chorus of recognition arose, and the landlord’s brow suddenly lost its furrows. ‘Oh, him! Haven’t set eyes on him in awhile! But –’

And, astonishingly, the whole place seemed to change, as if some subtle shift in the light, perhaps, transformed it. Nothing looked different; but it glowed like a gloomy painting suddenly well lit. Somehow the whole grim tableau came alive with an atmosphere that transcended its grime and depression, made it seem almost welcoming, comfortable, secure, the centre of its own small community. It was as if I was seeing it through the old men’s eyes. ‘Bound t’be around somewhere, he is!’

‘Down Durban Walk, maybe –’

‘Seen him up by old Leo’s yesterday –’