Norwich Rock

Hen met the last of his five harpies coming back to Waveney along
the washing route. Lianne and Si?n ran into him on a fork and
recognised him from the social whirlwind - a night or two sitting on a
dustbin, caterwauling in their kitchen. So they said, "Hey, you! It's
Hen, isn't it?"

"Aha," said Hen, stopping with his hands in his pockets. "You must be
friends of Helen and Mary, right?"

"Yeah, we're on the same floor as them," Lianne replied. "Above you
guys. I'm Lianne, and this is Si?n."

"Hallo, hello," said Hen, and Si?n stepped in, saying, "We're going
into town to shop. You wanna come along?"

"Sure, sure."

Hen swivelled in his tracks and turned to follow them along the path
to the bus stop. Once there, they sat and waited for a bus into Norwich
city centre.

Norwich is unavoidable now Hen lives in it. It bears up on him in
large, ragged patches that are sewn very roughly with bricks, concrete
and roads. Hen has written on his wrist, underneath his watch,
"Norwich is a giant scrapbook of history." He has
added details of the scraps and patches as they occurred to him:
"Patches of woodland and lake - the broads along the river,
one down beyond the left flank of Nelson Court."

There are patches of the medieval city that all the brochures boast
about - the cathedrals, the St. Peter Mancroft church near the market,
and Norwich castle, which is built on top of a large bank and mound
rising forty feet above ground level and surrounded by high flint
walls. Patches too of Victorian ecclesiastical architecture, carved
monuments from the fifteen seventies and eighties, and of Tudor timber
in the secreted streets that might have survived the fires raging
through the early sixteenth century, setting thatched houses alight.
The nineteen-sixties are also in patchwork evidence - the University
itself, for example. The 'futuristic' ziggurats called Norfolk and
Suffolk Terrace, concrete monstrosities in day, pretty pyramids of hazy
orange windows at night.

All these historical pieces are hemmed awkwardly into the much larger
patches of modern consumerism and futurism. Around Norwich castle
stands a fleet of bus stops, and beneath it is the Castle Mall, a
multi-floored shopping centre that houses all the familiar chains, as
well as more unique outlets such as the Tea Junction. In the windows
are balsa wood boxes, decorated china teapots and tin saucers of nettle
tea, dandelion tea, raspberry tea, Japanese cherry green tea, Norfolk
Lavender tea, and onward and upward. Hen fell upon it, with Lianne and
Si?n in tow.

"See that, Si?n? You see that, Lianne?" Hen rallies, sucking in the
flavour of Mudslide coffee. "Mud is the stuff. Mud is it. Don't ever
believe that even mud is worth nothing!"

Hen bought some mudslide coffee, and South Sea Island tea, and Lime tea
for the mornings, as well as some Ameircarn chocolate peanut-butter
cakes. And they went on to the clothes shops, Hen busily writing more
and more across his hands and wrists.
St. Peter Mancroft, the great medieval church near the market, is
surrounded by the Tesco Metro, HMV, Next, and numerous other high
street stores, and the worn cobbled roads between and around them are
home to beggars, salesmen and performers - a violinist in a nook, a
South American pan pipe duo in the centre of the street, a
silver-painted man pretending to be a statue, a loudmouth selling cheap
wrapping paper outside a shop that routinely changes its name to fit
the season. The market itself is brightly coloured, and filled with
shouting. Hen and the girls do not venture into it.

Inside the many clothes boutiques of the city's bollarded sidestreets,
Lianne seems to feel most at home. Hen's and Si?n chase her around
autumn discount stores. Lianne - the youngest harpy, with her Romanic
tan and cocoa hair set against the Si?n's snowy pale and red night dye,
seems to go all lit up at the sight of the next high street shop. Hen
notes down, on the ox-bow white of his collarbone, "Lianne:
magpie, attracted to the fresh, new shine of things," then
crosses it through and writes, "Lianne: tigress. Hunting prey
when it's young and supple, the lean jungle stalker."

Lianne is leafing through the racks of t-shirts and tops.

"Grr schnarl," she hisses in frustration. "Oh, well."

Hen will later add more details about Lianne, gradually filling up the
space between his shoulders with transparent words.

"Family lives in Germany. Father a soldier. She loves new
films, but won't watch black and white films. She says her mother once
made her watch a black and white film, and it wore away at her sense of
colour. She blasts away at video games, she studies French, she paints
and sketches manga.

"'Ou!' she will exclaim. 'C'est mal! C'est tres mal,' and step
back from the errant brush stroke.

"Began fencing and karate, but gave up after the autumn. Takes
weekends away visiting family. Travels about a lot."

"Happy now, Hen?" she asks, as at last they leave the high street
fashion shops. Hen grins, because her pleasure is infectious.

"Good! That's the smile I like to see."

The three of them wander onto St. Benedict's street, a patch smelling
of curiosity and faint mystery. Familiar territory for Hen.

They stop beside a place with dusty tome-filled windows, framed by
viridian tiles, number 30 St. Benedict's, called 'The Scientific
Anglian: Booksellers and Scientific Consultancy.' Hen has already been
past twice before. The first time, it was closed. The second time, a
white-haired, cragged man sat in the doorway observing passers-by and
blocking the entrance. Now Hen notices the pane in the door is cracked
- a naked treetop of glass blades, like where a body has fallen through
ice - and no man. So he stops, and makes a note of the newspaper
cuttings taped to the door. Si?n and Lianne wait for him.

1845 - place was a pub, probably The Dog.

1967 - Norman Peake moved in, from Essex, a geologist and former member
of the Communist party (a real life Commie!) and CND National Council -
he chose the shop's unusual name in an effort to appease other
bookstore owners who resented his arrival. Six years ago, he was
clubbed unconscious by a robber and left lying in a pool of blood in
his office. For 35 years, he has worked and lived in the shop, along
with his beloved cats, and has become an integral part of St.
Benedict's.
There was a picture of Peake standing outside the shop, inspecting a
document with a face like the side of a cliff. Beside the cuttings was
a handwritten list of dates, noting various inspections of the shop,
and the resulting decisions. Since the back portion had no fire exit,
it was deemed unsafe as a boutique. At the bottom of the page, the city
slogan was written - "Norwich, a Fine City" - but 'Fine' was crossed
out and 'Safe!' written above it.

Hen peered inside and saw, among the literary rubble, a rust-caked can
of oil, a half-empty glass bottle of Super Andy Man Turps, dead leaves
and cigarette ends, a stepladder and various tools. One of the books
was called 'Food Made Silly.' Above him, the boards covering the
shopfront's overhang were missing in places, and among steel pipes,
white marks and rumples of green plastic, a pigeon blinked at
him.

"Go away, nosy Hen."