Nineteen Seventy-Four

My father used to say, 'If you want to know the artist, look at the art'. He was usually talking about Stanley Matthews or Don Bradman when he said it.

Leeds United had won but I didn’t care. I had lost.

It was raining so hard now that the whole city looked underwater. I wished to Christ it was, that the rain would drown the people and wash the place the fuck away.

The future, like the past, is written. It cannot be changed, but it can help to heal the wounds of the present.

I sat down on the arm of my father's empty chair, thinking of sea-view flats in Brighton, of southern girls called Anna or Sophie, and of a misplaced sense of filial duty now half redundant.

I was miles and years away and then suddenly aware my hour was at hand, feeling all their eyes on me.

Uncle Eric holding court, proud the only time he ever left Yorkshire was to kill Germans.

I wanted to sleep for a thousand years, to wake up when them and their like were gone, when I didn’t have their dirty black ink on my fingers, in my blood.

Back in my muddy clothes at the door of my room, swallowing pills and lighting cigarettes, wanting to sleep but not wanting to dream, thinking this’ll be the day that I die, pictures of Paula waving bye bye.

I lit my last cigarette and said my little prayers. Clare, here’s one for you. Susan, here’s one for you. Jeanette, here’s one for you. Paula, they’re all for you. And the unborn. I sat there, singing along to The Little Drummer Boy, with those far off days, those days of grace, coming down. Waiting for the blue lights. Ninety miles an hour.

I prayed for my mother and sister, for my uncles and aunts, for the friends I’d had, both good and bad, and last for my father wherever he was, Amen.

I pulled myself up on my elbows and lay on my belly staring down into hell. There below me in the basin of Hunslet Carr, just 500 yards beneath me, was my England on the morning of Sunday 15 December in the year of Our Lord 1974, looking a thousand years younger and none the better.

For the first time my prayers were not for me but for everyone else, that the dead were alive and the lost were found, and that all those lives could be lived anew.

If a man comes up to you in the street and asks you for an address, is he lost or is he interrogating you?

Never had the urge to deliver us from evil?” “No, never” “Devil triumphs when good men do nowt

Back at the house, first things first. Phone the office. Nothing. No news being bad news for the Kemplays and Clare, good news for me.

The Byline Boy at last, brining more death to the house of the dead.