The Suburbs of Hell by Randolph Stow Page A

Greg, and bein called a murderer as well. That wouldn’t have been a pretty scene, anyway, but with her takin it all in that was that much worse.’
    In the other bar a fisherman began to sing, to the tune of ‘Land of My Fathers’:
    ‘Whales! Whales!
    They’re bloody great fish in the sea…’
    Harry, cheering up, leaned towards the doorframe and bawled: ‘Hey, Beaky, you ought to sing solo. So-low we can’t fuckin hear you.’
    The fisherman concluded: ‘And they come to the surface to pee.’
    ‘Things are getting back to normal,’ Arthur remarked. ‘We even see some ladies now, and the gents have got brave enough to use the Gents again. Somehow everyone seems to have decided the shooting’s stopped.’
    ‘I know why that is,’ Harry said, gloomy once more. ‘The ones what weren’t already sure in their minds it was some foreign seaman have pinned it on to Greg now.’
    ‘You can’t blame them,’ said Arthur. ‘Well,
I
can’t, because it’s what I’ve been thinking myself.’
    ‘Then you’re wrong,’ Harry said angrily. ‘Sorry, Arthur, didn’t mean to snap at you. But talk sense, boy. You’re not thinkin who that was what got killed. You can’t believe he’d hurt
them
—them three particular people—or anyone else, for that matter. That poor sad kid, his trouble was he was just too harmless to survive in this world. And he int survived, poor little sod.’
    ‘Yes, but Harry,’ Arthur reasoned, ‘he’s out of his mind. You can’t argue like that in a case like this.’
    ‘I know a lot of people want to believe it,’ Harry said. ‘I’m pretty sure, and so is Diana, the police want to believe it. P’rhaps he’ll end up believin it himself, and forget about Black Sam. But I int goonna believe it: I just know that int
in
the boy.’
    ‘Why Sam?’ Arthur wondered. ‘Why him rather than me, for instance, or you?’
    ‘That might be my fault,’ Harry said. ‘When this thing started, people were whisperin in corners that it could be Sam, among others. You must have heard that. Well, I reckon this rumour got round to Greg and stuck in his mind. I don’t remember ever sayin anything about it to him, but—oh Jesus, Arthur, I think I must have.’
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ Arthur said. ‘Not to him, Paul’s brother. Nobody would.’
    ‘I dunno,’ Harry said. ‘A lot of times people just talk without thinkin who they’re talkin to. Believe me, I know. Some nights I sit up and I think about them people—my friends—and the tears come into my eyes, I int ashamed to tell you. And then young Dave will come hoom with a foo beers in him and want to tell me some joke that I s’ppoose would crease me if I weren’t twice his age, and my hand fair itch to smack him. Thass three months nor more now he’s been livin at mine, and he show no sign of movin on. Well, thass all right, I s’ppoose—on’y I never felt I understood that boy since he got to be about fourteen. Sometimes he get my rag out, talkin about Greg. Thass all “I told you so” with Dave. I took him with me once when I give Greg a look, and now he tell me he knoo all along what was up. “
I
could see he was a head-banger,” he say; “why couldn’t you?” I mean, that don’t seem natural, when they’re the same age. There ought to be more fellow-feelin.’
    ‘I think,’ said the old man, ‘that’s something that’s in most people, but in a few it just isn’t. A kind of imagination that’s lacking. He might be better off without it. In the war, I came to the conclusion I had too much of it, myself.’
    ‘Not natural not to have it,’ Harry insisted. ‘No man is an island.’
    ‘You know that,’ Arthur said, ‘do you?’
    ‘I think thass the name of a paperback I had,’ Harry explained.
    ‘There’s more of it,’ Arthur said, trying to remember. ‘It goes on something like this: But each man is a part of the continent, like a promontory; and if a clod of it is washed away, the whole world is