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In the standing church, a pram crouches flat by the altar, a dumb cricket. The melted tongue of the great bell lies on the flags near the confessional.
Burnt-out Renaults acquire a crochet of rust in garages of air. The sockets of their headlamps, dull o’s like choir mouths, rest on arches above blind axles.
The Singer machine, low voice of the humdrum, keeps mum. No thread of song, no hands to feed and guide the cloth. Weeds and the sun telling time by its dial.
I may have thought how strange it was that the sister I used to balance on hands and feet for acrobatic shows in the lounge, the little girl who used to dance on the wide ledge of the bedroom window with next door's boys, was now spread out on this trestle her swollen sex every shade of maroon.
But when the flamboyant red parted like a vertical lid and the blind white crown of my niece appeared, when she lay between my sister's slack knees, bluish and floury, her cry as mundane and miraculous as you could wish,
and when I watched the midwife draw down the perfect lobes of the placenta with its marbled cord, exotic as a water lily, for that moment I understood everything and the world hung ripe in my reach.
And isn’t it funny, like they say, how much you want something if your chances are reduced and you’re driving along the highway, wrinkles squinting at the rear-view, hands all knuckles and veins on the wheel, when, as if to add insult, you’re told by the DJ that the music pattering under wheel thrum and wind noise which, you realise only now, had got you picturing girls in pink tutus with ribbon straps over lark-boned shoulders, their bellies pouting, the music you’d half been humming was Frédéric Chopin’s Menopause.
The first Brylcreem boy to advertise the Bounce, his slicked-back charm smiling from all the papers, his dance routine with George Raft in the clubs, his girls, his Sobranies, he took after my uncle, the margarine king, but the factory wasn't for him.
He drove a gold Ford V8, the only car the kids in my street got to see up close: walnut dash, leather seats, he'd cruise me round Stepney, pointing out women. Though he married after the war, it guttered in smoky nights, his chrome lighter always snapping at some offered cigarette. He finished in a showroom, selling cars, a connoisseur of fine chassis to the last.
When I picture him, though, I see that grin as he circled the clock tower on Stepney Green where the Blackshirts were mustering, England for the English, punched out in dark armbands and lightning flash. Round and round he crawled in first, his hand jammed hard against the horn, blaring over Jews are the Financiers of Evil, daring Mosley's lot to make him stop, the smell of hair cream on his fingers as he cuffed my cheek, a curl of sweet smoke hanging at his ear.
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