A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘You’ve got something else for next week,’ he said when I’d finished. As he swallowed his coffee the skinbone and ligaments of his throat shook and convulsed, as if he’d been hit there with an invisible rubber sledgehammer while it was on its way through. ‘They’ll tell you where to in the morning.’ He poured another cup, while Hazel sang to herself in the bedroom.

  ‘What are you going to do with the money you earn?’ I asked.

  ‘Haven’t thought about it yet, my old lad. Mother’s coming down from Worksop next week to spend a couple of days. I’m fixing her up in a hotel. I’ll shunt her round the usual tea-caddy places, like Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘Sounds lovely. In fact it’s touching.’

  ‘Don’t get bloody sarky, Michael. I’m only human, after all.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with both of us, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s splitting your tripes, though? I’ve seen plenty of blokes come back, and they’re usually cock-a-hoop with having done it in safety, but you’re a bit down in the sludge about it.’

  ‘I’m different. It wears me out, and I can’t help but show it.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You’re the genuine bloody article, and that’s a fact. It’s better you’re like that, right in touch with yourself, than some of the over-confident young hotheads we could get our hands on. Just the sort we need, you are. When you decide to put on an act your soul goes into it so that nobody would ever twig. Get some snooze, then we might go out for a quiet feed somewhere. I’ll pack Hazel off. She won’t mind. Won’t bloody-well have to.’

  ‘Thinking of getting married?’ I asked.

  ‘Not in this game. Later, maybe.’ Neither of us had our feet on the ground, but we belonged to the world, for all that. But as I lay down in the spare room and thought about Polly, I got frightened, as if only now the full trembles at passing the customs loaded with gold had come upon me. The sky seemed black and I shook in every limb. The reality of my trip seemed like a dream, and like a dream it made me more afraid than reality. I felt a coward, and thought I might not do it any more. Yet when I woke up I knew I would, because being with an aim, an ambition, or even a plan, robbed me of that final edge of courage that helped me to stand by a negative decision. All this is hindsight perhaps, but hindsight is still only part of what existed at the actual time. My memory is clear enough for me to know this. My only positive act, if it can be so called, and I believe it can, was to let myself drift with events, out of curiosity to see where it would take me, and out of lethargy because I didn’t have the wit or strength to do anything else. But I told myself to fight off the black and woolly dog, not to worry, to hold on, to calm myself and let life take its course since I wasn’t able to steer the crazy airship of it, comforting myself with the thought that maybe I’d be more and more able to as I got older. But this last was only half hinted at, a grain of dust in the middle of the moon that I might never be able to get out to the light of day. I wondered what was in that grain, whether I would ever catch it between my two thumbnails like a flea and split it from end to end so that blood ran out.

  William was waking me up but my head felt as thin as a post. He pushed a cup of tea towards my face and the smell of it went into me like jollop. ‘Get this,’ he said, a wide grin behind the steam. ‘It’ll help you to stand on your feet instead of your arse. You can’t stew in your own self all night.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You might well ask, but you can’t. Here’s your wage packet from the gaffer. There’s thirty tenners in it. The easiest putty you’ll ever earn.’

  I took the long envelope and put it under my pillow. ‘It wasn’t that easy.’

  He sat in the armchair and watched me with his gimlet grey eyes, that were full of expression when they were trying to read me, as they were now. ‘What’s biting you, then?’

  ‘The rats. They’ve been at me since last Saturday afternoon. Ever been in love, Bill?’

  His left leg jerked back, as if the reflexes under the knee had been hit. ‘It wasn’t the air hostess, was it? If it was, forget it. Under their white aprons they’re just like anybody else.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘The answer’s no,’ he said. ‘I was in love with my father, but he was killed down the pit when I was seven. While he was alive I didn’t know I was in love with him, but when he died I knew I’d never get over it and love anybody else – except maybe my mother, but she’s still alive, so it’s still only an infatuation. There’s lots of women I like, and some I wanted to marry, but as for love, I can’t say I have. I’ve often wondered about it, when it’s going to happen and if it ever will, but I’ve been waiting so long that I’ve given up hope. I broke my heart as a kid, before I could understand what was what, not altogether over my father, but over what came after. The general misery of our lives. There was nothing to live for except life itself, nobody even to say we were living like this so that tomorrow would be better. I couldn’t stand it. I was made to despair too young. After that I couldn’t fall in love – not at all.’ He flicked his ash halfway across the room. ‘I’m not moaning about it. I sometimes think that English hearts weren’t strong enough to bear that much.’

  ‘Don’t you want revenge, then?’ I said, thinking how much better off I’d been than he had.

  ‘On who? Even if I knew I wouldn’t want it. I wasn’t so crushed that I wanted revenge. Revenge is the last resort of the dead in spirit. I enjoy life too much to think about that. As for love – we always get back to it, don’t we? – well, I’m resigned to it never happening, but don’t think I’m unhappy about it because I’m not. That’s the way my life went, and now that I know it’s settled that way, I feel easier in myself. It’s no use clamouring over things your common-sense tells you you’ll never get, is it? Some people I suppose would eat their own bollocks to save their fingernails, but not me, mate. I’m doing all right now, and I want it to stay like that till I decide what to do with the money I’m piling up. I’ll be worth a lot soon, and do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy a smallholding, go into the market-gardening business. I’ll get a cottage and three or four acres in Notts with the cash I’ve stashed. My mother can stay with me if she likes, and if I meet a woman who’ll team up and work at it the same as I do, then I’ll be satisfied.’

  ‘I hope you make it then,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s true that you have to be forty to realize what you want out of life.’

  ‘I’ve known that since I was twenty. But I’ve not admitted it to myself or spoken it out loud. It’s been laying low. I only yap about it now that there’s a chance of it coming about, and no fucking peradventure about it. But tell me the stuff on this bint that’s got your heart going up and down like a yo-yo. I can envy you that much at least.’

  ‘It’s somebody I met before I went away, but there’s no point talking about it.’

  ‘There’s every point. If you don’t talk you choke, and if you choke you rot. You go all black inside and explode when you’re fifty. Horrible mess. I believe it’s called cancer, the plague that afflicts the silent type with the stiff upper lip.’

  ‘Well, I’ll never get that disease. I’ll just have to get in touch with her.’

  ‘Let’s get out,’ he said, ‘and get in touch with some food. I’m hollow.’

  We went to the restaurant in Soho where I’d first met up with him again after our trip from the North, and drank a bottle of wine each, because William said it was his birthday. He insisted that we do no less because it was, he said, with beady eyes set on me, the first one he’d spent in affluence for a good few years. And not only that, but a birthday was always special and not to be treated lightly because it meant that you had survived another year of life, had fenced off death, maiming, starvation, and black night of one sort or another. You could put your fingers to your nose at the year that had gone, while setting yourself to greet the oncomer with respect. ‘A birthday is a time to count the miracles,’ h
e went on, ‘and tot up my luck. When I was a kid nobody bothered with them. They went by unnoticed because we were too busy breathing. The fact that I’ve got time to remember it these days shows how well-off I am.’

  ‘You’re in a fine mood,’ I laughed, ‘but how old are you?’

  He sliced up his escalope. ‘Thirty-nine’s the score, and I feel every year of it.’

  I went with him to St Pancras Station to meet his mother. When he saw her come out of a second-class carriage he started shouting, ‘I sent ten pounds for you to travel first class, and now you do this dirty trick on me. It ain’t right, Ma.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ I backed away because I couldn’t believe all that screeching came from her. In any case she aimed it at me, and for a moment I thought she was right off her pot and that she took me for William, but then it was plain that the mechanism of her eyes was at fault. ‘What would I do in first class, you great loon? You don’t know who you might meet in them places. And don’t snap at me like that. Nobody’d know you were my own son. After all I’ve been through! I’ve a good mind to get back on this train and go back to Worksop.’

  William turned pale, but bent down to kiss her. ‘Don’t do that Ma,’ he pleaded like a little boy, ‘I wanted you to do it in comfort, that’s all.’ This seemed a bit rare when I remembered his own journey. He’d certainly rung a lot of changes in his belfry during this last year. ‘Where’s your suitcase?’ he asked, when the circle of listeners began to clear off.

  She was a small thin person, an absolute proud wreck, with a pale-blue coat and a powder-blue hat over her coal-grey hair. She had glasses and false teeth, and it wasn’t possible to tell her age, though in spite of these trimmings she was nearer sixty than forty, shall I say. ‘I forgot it. Like as not it’s in the carriage still.’

  ‘I’ll go and get it.’ When I came back with it, my socket tearing at its load, I saw them going towards the exit, where William had a taxi waiting. The taxi driver swore at the weight of it: ‘What’s in here, lead?’

  ‘Gold bars,’ Bill laughed. ‘She brings her own coal with her!’

  His mother pulled me into the taxi beside her: ‘It’s nice to have two young men with me, on my first trip to London. It is a big place, isn’t it, Bill? Bigger than Worksop, anyway.’ I got out at Cambridge Circus, not wanting to hear her comments on Nelson’s Column.

  I walked into the Square, nevertheless, and joined the throng. My hat was jerked off by the wind, and I ran across the flagstones to get it, under the spray of both fountains, scattering pigeons right and left. I looked at every girl’s face to see if it was Polly Moggerhanger’s. I don’t think I was in love with her. There was too much of a bite in it for that, as if I was the apple that Eve had bitten, rather than Adam himself who’d got booted out of paradise and must finally have felt proud of it.

  I bought a tin of corn from a stand and fed the pigeons, holding my palm flat and watching a bit of real greed as they jostled each other to gobble it up. I liked their button eyes, as they pecked and trusted me not to grab them while they had their fill. I bought tin after tin, and the more they scoffed the more wary they got, so that while I could have snatched them easily when they were hungry, I had only to lift a finger now and they went off in a cloud. I was a friend of all the world, in my coat of many colours, and the corn vendor gave me a couple of free tins till finally the pigeons were strutting over the corn without picking it up, because other people were podging them as well.

  I went into a callbox and dialled the Moggerhanger number. A woman answered, maybe her mother. ‘Is Polly in?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and hung up. I walked towards the Strand hoping to see her. A jeweller’s window interested me for a few minutes, then I doubled back and went into Lyons for lunch. I wasn’t hungry and left the plate spilling with cake-scraps and cellophane. I poured half a bottle of red sauce over it and shambled away.

  There was a queue outside a theatre, so I followed it in and paid thirty bob for a seat. When the National Anthem played I didn’t stand up, because I would have felt stupid if I had. But the rest of the herd were on their feet, and a voice behind said that I should show respect, so I called out, still on my arse, that if I did get up it would only be to push his patriotic face in. I didn’t hear anything more, and the lights went down.

  A man came on the stage and went rampaging through somebody’s living-room, shouting how rotten the world was. His wife came in, and he shouted at her till she couldn’t do anything else but burst into tears. He was well dressed and well fed, and didn’t look as if he had much to complain about, but when his wife’s brother came in and told him to pack it in, he went for him as well, bawling until he too sat on the settee with his head in his hands feeling like the biggest rotter in the world and not knowing what to do about it. The hero didn’t tell him, but just went on raving, and when the brother’s girlfriend came in he shouted at her till she went into hysterics and he had to throw water over her from the tap, still raging as he did it. When an older woman hove in who seemed to be his mother, he started on her, so that the scene looked like a cross between a looney-bin and somebody’s living-room where the television set had broken down. Then the mad bastard started shaking his fist at the audience, calling us some wonderfully colourful phrases. At this I got up and pushed along the row so that people threatened me for making such a noise, but with as much disturbance as I could muster, I went out into daylight. That’s what you get from joining a queue, I thought, though strangely enough I felt better than I had before I went in.

  I walked to Finchley Road and met Bridgitte coming up the steps towards Smog’s school. She was dressed more like her old au pair self in a set of black slacks and a mauve jumper. Her face was thin and pale, unlike her normally white and buttery Dutch skin, and she was dark under the eyes as if she’d been through a rough and sleepless time since we’d last met. She smiled and held out her hand.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone?’ I said, accusingly.

  ‘Oh, I did, but a man answered and told me you were out of the town.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘I went up to the estate, to see Mother. She’s had a stroke, and it don’t seem she can last much longer. If she does pop off I’ll come into half a million, though she threatened to leave it to a dogs’ home when I was there, speaking only from the right side of her mouth. Anyway, that’s unimportant. How are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. My husband went away yesterday, to Glasgow for a week, to a sort of conference. At least, that’s what he said, so don’t laugh. But it’s true because I saw all the letters he received about it.’

  A heavy weight hit me in the shoulder, and when I spun round another one caught me in the gut. It was Smog’s satchel, packed with books that taught him how to read and write. I hoped it would be soon, then forgave him: ‘If you were two inches taller, I’d blow your block off. Don’t do it when you are older or you’ll get what for.’

  Bridgitte clouted him on the back of the head and sent one school cap skimming under a car. He was about to dive for it, under the bonnet of another, but I pulled him by the arm and saved his life. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘watch it.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Well I could.’ I picked the cap up and put it where it belonged. ‘Let’s go and stuff ourselves with cake and tea, shall we, Smog?’

  ‘We’ll go back to the house,’ said Bridgitte. ‘I can’t face one of those awful English cafés where you get nothing but thick tea and fatty cakes.’ The bus landed us somewhere on the rim of Hampstead, then we walked along a few quiet roads to the new Anderson home. The front of it looked like a British Railways airliner stranded on a hillside, and we climbed a flight of concrete steps to get to it.

  She showed me into a long living-room with windows from floor to ceiling, one side looking over a lawn. Smog threw off his coat and sat on the floor trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle that Bridgitte had three-quarters done, but he lost patience, broke it up, and
started to read one of his school books. Bridgitte pressed a bell and a swarthy middle-aged woman came in and said: What you want?’

  ‘Make us some tea, please, Adelida.’

  ‘You had it already,’ Adelida said, ‘before you went to the school.’

  ‘I want some more, for three, Goddamn it.’

  Adelida went off, grumbling.

  ‘A rough life,’ I said.

  ‘Impossible.’ She got up. ‘I’ll have to see to it myself,’ and went out, so that I fell to helping Smog with a page of his reading. His chaotic over-energized mind seemed to have grasped on to learning as something to steady himself by, for he read and wrote as well as I had on leaving school at fifteen. When tea was finished he asked me to play draughts, but after a couple of games he beat me at it, so I stopped thinking he was only a kid and played better, but even so it ended in stalemate. ‘Do you play chest?’ he asked.

  ‘Chess,’ I told him. ‘No, I don’t. I’ll learn, though, and next time I come we’ll have a game.’

  ‘You’re fairly ignorant.’

  ‘I’ll get better,’ I said, ‘and catch you up one day.’

  ‘But you’re old already, and that’s difficult for you.’

  ‘Who does all this to him?’ I asked Bridgitte.

  ‘His father,’ she said. ‘And his mother before that. He’s not as bright as he seems.’

  ‘I am,’ Smog said. ‘I’m top of my class at school.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said to him, ‘you shouldn’t boast, or you’ll turn into a monster.’

  He jumped on my knee. ‘Really? Then I can frighten everybody.’

  ‘You do already,’ I said.

  The idea of another Swiss trip was burning me, because I hoped to see Polly on it. I knew this to be a crackpot fantasy, which could have nothing to do with Bridgitte sitting on my knee in the living-room after Smog-the-limb-of-Satan had been put to bed. Life was overflowing, for while Bridgitte was loving me I was fixed with all my wants on Polly who was God knew where. I pressed back her kisses absent-mindedly, yet firm enough for her not to suspect anything or leave off loving me. Maybe she felt I was a little distant but this made her try harder, almost smothering me, so that I was shamed into making some semblance of matching her, until this brought us blow by blow on to the carpet and rolling around at the bottom of passion’s pit. When she pulled at my tie, I parted the buttons of her blouse to get her breasts close to me, for at the moment, that was the only part of her I seemed to want, and when she tried to get my shoelaces undone I eased the zip of her skirt and drew it off. Her blonde hair was down and swathed all over me, yet still I only saw the features of Polly who even in the extremes of her sexual throe kept that faint tilt of irony on the left upper lip. Our rolling drew us slowly towards the stairs, and halfway up I opened her legs wide and licked her there till she came, her head falling backwards. I was a thousand miles from her, my bowels as cold as underground moss, so there seemed nothing I could not do to her, and with me in this frosty and distant mood, she became wilder than I’d ever seen her.