‘Hello, pet.’ I heard Delphick’s horrible Yorkshire twang behind me, the sort he put on when in London. ‘Having trouble?’
I turned, and at the same time he recognised Ettie. The half smile went off his face. She had been entranced by his reading, but the fact that it was over, combined with the callous neglect just evinced by me, wiped out the effect of his performance with surprising speed. ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you, you fucking thief. Where’s my ten quid?’
‘Ten quid?’ he laughed. ‘I’ve yet to meet a person who got even ten pee back from me, never mind ten quid. Anyway, I don’t owe it to you. I’ve never seen you in my life, you filthy little trollop. Piss off.’
The only thing wrong with Ronald Delphick, basically, was that he could speak, and he might just have been all right if he hadn’t added that unnecessary dose of invective. I suppose he got carried away, and even I couldn’t fault Ettie for the way she reacted, nor could I argue with Phyllis’s heavy-handed response. Ettie reached across the table, and put her fingers in the box to take out what she considered her property, even though I had repaid the ten quid at lunchtime, and Phyllis caught Delphick a fairly comprehensive swipe across his complacent mug. Then another smack sounded when Frances Malham, that superb creation of beautiful intelligence, clipped Ettie so hard that she spun several feet backwards and barely stopped herself toppling down the stairs.
Quick as a flash, as they say, I got hold of Delphick’s hands and pushed him beyond range. He’d been intent on battering Phyllis with clenched fists, which I couldn’t allow, though it was hard to say why. He hit the wall with an impact that caused him to think twice about bracing himself for more. Before Ettie and Phyllis could join forces to go for lovely Frances Malham I grabbed their arms and dragged them kicking and screaming down the stairs.
Perhaps I was saving them from a mauling, because Frances may have more than held her own. Their obscene threats I will not put down on paper, though I suppose Frances must have heard them, which gave me a pain at the heart, until I remembered that she was a medical student, and had heard far worse already, or if she hadn’t she would have to get used to hearing it in the future. I also remembered, when I had Ettie and Phyllis pinned against a wall downstairs, and was threatening to knee them both if they moved an inch, that I had left my books upstairs, one of which had Frances Malham’s address inside. ‘Wait here,’ I said, ‘or I’ll kill you both.’
I went up four at a time, scattering people still coming down. ‘I’ll never be able to write again. Look what you’ve done!’
I felt in an ugly mood. ‘Belt up, Delphick, or I’ll kick fifty poems out of your arse, you troublemaker. You shouldn’t rob a young girl who has to work for her money.’ I grabbed the books from Frances. ‘I apologise for that little outburst. I love you. I’ll see you again.’
She smiled, though she was clearly upset.
Slipping the books in my poacher’s pocket, I got back to Ettie and Phyllis at the bar. I put a hand on each shoulder. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like that.’
‘Oh bollocks,’ Ettie said. ‘I hate you.’
‘He ought to be flayed alive,’ said Phyllis, ‘doing that to poor Ettie.’
‘Forget it,’ I told them. I longed to see more of Frances, but not with those two slags around my neck. ‘Let’s go to my flat. I’ll give you a better drink than you can find here.’
We got out before Delphick appeared. ‘Do we go by tube?’ Phyllis asked. ‘Or bus?’
‘With me, you travel by taxi – and like it.’
Down the Mall and by Buckingham Palace, I sat between them in the back, and kissed them both, and had a good feel of their lovely breasts by the time we reached Hyde Park Corner. I don’t suppose Ettie knew I had my hand on Phyllis’s breast, nor that Phyllis realised I was getting to know the shape of Ettie’s, which was the best of sitting between two women in a half dark taxi. It was the only time in my life I prayed for arms as long as those of Kenny Dukes.
My idea was to lure both women into the same bed, an experience I hadn’t had in my so far sheltered life. But the first thing Phyllis did when we got to Blaskin’s flat was go into the bathroom and throw up. She said the taxi ride had upset her stomach, but I again remembered Moggerhanger’s remark that London was the salmonella capital of the world, and hoped my turn wasn’t coming. Perhaps it was only a case of gluttony. She came back with her blouse unbuttoned down the front. I already had my tongue in Ettie’s mouth and we weren’t far off trying to pack ourselves into each other. I pulled Phyllis to us and kissed her, then I kissed Ettie, and kissed Phyllis again. Phyllis kissed Ettie, and Ettie kissed her, and they smooched each other and me with gusto, and I smooched them, and our threesome went on, until I thought the time had come to carry things a stage further.
For that to happen we had to let go of each other, and no one wanted to. I sampled over and over the difference between Phyllis’s lips and Ettie’s. Phyllis’s were soft and warm, and she kept them closed so that I got the best out of them. Ettie’s were thin, and opened easily, so that my tongue licked around her little white teeth. I wondered what each of them felt towards the other, and towards me. While they kissed each other my hands went up their legs, and I wondered whose hand each of them thought it was, whether they imagined it was mine or suspected it was the other’s. The three of us were locked into a love knot so firmly that the perfume and powder which they had on took me back to the days when I fucked Claudine Forks and Gwen Bolsover (separately, however), and wrapped me into a feeling I’d never known before – and was never to know since, because before it could go any further Blaskin and my mother came into the flat.
Gilbert took off his hat, an instinctive politeness on seeing ladies in the room. ‘I sincerely hope I haven’t disturbed a gang bang. Or have I stumbled on a prime example of Knightsbridge tribadism? Sir Richard Burton would write reams on that.’
‘Who’s that bleeding geezer?’ said Ettie. I didn’t know whether she meant Burton or Blaskin, though I imagined it was both. I had hoped that Gilbert and my mother had torn each other so completely to pieces at the party that nothing would put them together again. I thought he would end up blind drunk and despondent at his club, and take a room for the night in which to lick his wounds. And I had assumed that my mother might have gone to Upper Mayhem to cool off, or found a corner for the night in some Hoxton squat. But here they were, and she kissed my father like a schoolgirl. ‘Shall I get you some supper, my darling?’
‘I’d be delighted to have something to eat, my love. Those poisonous titbits at the party created hollows instead of filling me up.’
‘You said your uncle was in Manchester,’ Phyllis accused.
Gilbert turned to me. ‘Michael, introduce us to your friends, there’s a good fellow.’
I didn’t like the way he said it, nor the way my mother put her hand over Ettie’s shoulder and asked her to come into the kitchen to get some booze and grub on the table. Ever since prick-headed Blaskin had entered the room Phyllis hadn’t been able to stop looking at him. She turned away to fasten her blouse, then smiled with simple-minded pleasure when he asked: ‘What kind of music do you like?’
She blushed. ‘Oh, I love Irish singers.’
‘Och, do yer, den, me goil, well we’ll see what we can foind for yer!’ He sorted among the records, and instead of being insulted by this mock-Irish, she started talking it herself, and actually caressed his fingers as he passed her Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and asked if that would do. She laughed, and said no. He suggested she have a drink, and went to the bottles on the sideboard. His hand was at the back of her neck as he poured an Underberg which, he said after much salacious talk about her recent vomiting, would cure her once and for all. He got her to knock it straight back, and she shook from toe to head like a fat adder standing on its tail. Then, as if fainting from the shock to her system, she flopped into his arms and stuck her lips to his.
It was too much, especially now that ra
ucous laughter from my mother, and a high-pitched giggling from Ettie in the kitchen had stopped. I felt I should get out of the flat and drown my sorrows in The Hair of the Dog, but my feet only moved as far as to allow me to lock myself in Blaskin’s study and do some more work on his trash-novel.
The saga of Peppercorn Cottage was over, I decided. Two years had gone by. The clatter of the typewriter closed off the sucking and moaning noises from other rooms. I knew exactly what was going on. I sweated mercury. I felt more like writing a Sidney Blood saga than a Blaskin crap-opus.
A shoot-out at Stonehenge was on the cards. Dawn on Midsummer’s Day. On coming out of prison, the husband in my tale bought a holiday cottage in Wales, but a year later it was burned down – cause unknown, ha-ha! – so he joined the Longest Day Society and limped on foot from Richmond to Stonehenge. His wife drove after him in her shining Volvo and brought The Child.
I dashed out to make some coffee, and noticed that Ettie was now with Blaskin, and Phyllis was in the spare room with my mother, and a more spaced-out set of fuck-drunk faces I had never seen. But I let that pass, and got back to my novel.
Smoke over Stonehenge. The Druids have it. The Child is carried in, held high. Stoned bikers lying by their machines (mostly 1000 cc BMWs) laugh irreverently as they boil a kettle of opium tea over a fire of burning L-plates. A horsemeat sausage stall does good trade. For two pages I start every word with a capital letter. The next few pages are in italics. That wad of pages are intimately concerned with the pimples on people’s faces. Then comes a page with no capital letters at all, concerning a character called Snot, who drifts around crying, and putting people’s fires out. The bikers do for him. They have a whip-round, and send him back to Merton on the milk-train – with his head on the wrong way. I’m determined to make this the most trashy novel in existence. Even the trashiest Blaskin novel no longer strikes me as being a very hard job, as I tack-tick-tack away.
The end of the story is near, and so is the end of the world. Every year a new dawn, at Stonehenge. A man with a little moustache and a slick of hair across his forehead, wearing a buttoned and belted mac, makes a fiery speech in favour of CND. After a few minutes he is laughed into silence, and I move elsewhere. The Child begins screaming. Its painted eyeballs portray different hemispheres of the world, and it hates everything about the place. Nothing will quieten its screaming. It is the Noise of the World, I say, and move on from that as well. Babies don’t like New Dawns. They are new dawns themselves, and the false dawn of a New Dawn will destroy it. They want to stay snug in the womb of the zillions that have gone before so that none will come after.
All the other children are asleep. They don’t care one way or the other. People are singing hymns. A few wonder why they are here. Even midsummer is cold at midnight. It starts to drizzle, the sky’s answer, and the wail of tribulation turns into a police siren.
Dogs bark. The coppers are looking for drugs. Little packets are flying into the fires, even aspirin and Beecham’s Powders. A weirdo-nark makes incantations over the green and blue flames. A swivel-eyed biker thumps him. Another hits him with a wheel – 1000 cc BMW. One or two people are dragged off. Seven, actually, after I’ve counted. One person is an elderly novelist who protests that he’s only there for the research. They let him go. He bears an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to Gilbert Blaskin, but I called him Michael Blood. The inspector picks his hat up from the mud and hands it back to him: ‘Don’t be hard on us, sir, we’re only doing our job. Give us a fair write-up.’ The novelist brings out his cigar case to offer him a smoke, and half a dozen syringes, plus a few Moggapills, fall from his pocket. The policeman picks those up as well. He puts them in his own pocket, but refuses the cigar, then moves on to put down a disturbance. Some Hell’s Angels are overturning the soup kitchen.
The Child is taken back to the car, while its parents stand on the luggage rack to get a better view of the Dawn. Rain stops play, and clouds separate to show a rippled sky, grey rags and TB blood, God’s shirt in the morning, or the Devil’s, more like it, at this Pagan Festival.
I go on a bit more, and by three o’clock I’m so clapped out I end the novel with terror biting into thousands of hearts as, from the crossbar of a megalith, an enormous beastlike figure is seen stalking across the fields from the east with a terrorist’s floorcloth around its head, a machine gun in one hand and a whip in the other, shouting that Allah is Great, and vomiting crude oil over the countryside as people run to escape the tide that catches fire.
I stop the book in the middle of a sentence, as a few stoned bikers are revving up for a counter-attack, unable to take in what I’ve typed. That should fuck it up. Then I remember that that’s what Blaskin wants me to do, but I’m too sleepy to care and, stretching out on the couch, fall dead asleep.
Twenty-Two
My mother woke me at eight o’clock with a cup of coffee. ‘Here you are, son.’
She looked smart and fresh in a pair of olive-drab corduroys and one of Blaskin’s shirts. I wondered whether I’d also grow tougher as I got older. ‘Where’s Ettie and Phyllis?’
The place was too quiet for them to be there. She lit a cigarette and gave me a drag, then sat on the end of the couch. ‘You mean those dirty young trollops you brought back last night?’
‘You did all right out of it.’
‘Don’t get grumpy. Your father gave them some money, and we told them to go to Upper Mayhem for a few days. They’ll like it there.’
I jumped. ‘For God’s sake, that’s my secret retreat.’
‘Don’t be mean. You allus was a tight-arse. I don’t suppose they’ll go. Too quiet for ’em.’
‘They aren’t even battered wives, or unmarried mothers.’
‘They’re a bit battered, anyhow,’ she said. ‘I had that Phyllis so often she didn’t know whether she was coming or going by the end.’
‘What a rotten trick.’
‘Go on, she had the time of her life.’ She came closer. ‘You’re a good-looking chap, you know.’
‘You’re not so bad yourself.’
We looked at each other and laughed. She stood up. ‘Well, anyway, it wouldn’t do. You’re more like your dad than you imagine. Don’t ever go bald, that’s all. You’d better get a wash and come to breakfast. I’m making a big pan of scrambled eggs. And don’t say much to Gilbert this morning if you can help it. He’s not feeling too good.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘I know – but he’s your dad. And don’t fucking argue.’
‘I hate swearing,’ I said.
She was getting nasty, and dangerous. ‘You mean in a woman?’
‘In anybody. But don’t cook the eggs yet. I want a shower.’
‘Make it quick, then.’ She kissed me on the lips, and went to minister to Blaskin. I switched on the bathroom tranny and listened to a programme which I thought must be called Mob Rule. Between the whir of the shaver I heard howls and catcalls, jeers and hyena laughter. People in short periods of silence were trying to say something sensible, but others accused them of lying, defaming and vilifying – when anything could be heard at all. As I was fastening my tie the programme came to an end, and I learned that it was called Yesterday in Parliament.
Blaskin forked food into his mouth like a somnambulist. When the doorbell rang he said: ‘If it’s my publisher tell him I’m dead. I was buried secretly by the light of thieves’ candles on Hampstead Heath. He’ll read about it in The Times tomorrow.’ Then he closed his eyes and went on eating breakfast as if he’d live forever.
When the bell rang again a look from my mother told me to get up and answer it. Pindarry stood outside, hat in hand, the feather pointing towards my stomach. ‘Lord Moggerhanger expects you at a gathering tonight, seven o’clock sharp, dress informal.’ He went back into the lift, having left the door open. Arguing was useless. He was only the invitation card. It was the lack of an RSVP that I didn’t like. He was lucky to get back into the lift unscathed.
I laid the mo
rning mail on the table, and sat so quietly that my mother said it was like having two zombies at the trough. Gilbert mumbled that he never became conscious before twelve, unless he had it off immediately on waking up, and then he went back to sleep till one. I’d intended reporting to Moggerhanger that day, whatever the dangers, but his two-fingered summons put my back up, which was never to my advantage, so I made an effort to smile at my mother, and not to dig too obviously at Blaskin’s overhung condition.
She fussed over us, buttering toast and refilling cups when the rim line went a fraction below halfway. She’d had the time of her life yesterday, having been to a party, got drunk, lived through a terrible quarrel with Blaskin, made it up, gone out to dinner, then come back to a night of satisfying love; while all I had done was put the finishing touches to a miserable novel, had half a night’s sleep, and woken up to have Moggerhanger treat me like one of his lowest minions. To make up for it I decided to play the heavy mob, and frighten the guts out of Jeffrey Horlickstone.
When I had asked Maria what work he did, she indicated that he was very high up in advertising. Not only had he and his family tried to work her to death, but Jeffrey had also managed to get her preggers. If Maria had worked as much as she said, it was difficult to imagine when he could have done the deed, but nobody knew better than me that where a will existed, a way soon opened up.
Blaskin, sorting through the mail, slung a letter at me. He was very particular about the post. While he hunted for cheques and incriminating evidence against my mother, in that order, I opened an epistle from Matthew Coppice:
Dear Mr Cullen,
I hope you have not forgotten your promise to help me to bring Lord Moggerhanger to book. I have been doing my part, and the file of evidence I am getting together is growing bigger and bigger. What I am unearthing would astonish you as much as it pleases me. As soon as I think I have enough I will send it to you, and I trust you will do your best to make it strike home. I don’t know how you will do it, considering Lord Moggerhanger’s friendship with Inspector Lanthorn, but you seemed to be a very clever chap, as well as a good citizen, so I know you will find a way. I must tell you, before I sign off, that Wayland Smith the television man came snooping up here to find out about Lord Moggerhanger’s affairs. I wanted to help him, but I knew that that would put me under suspicion. So I shopped him, and that has made them trust me more than ever. I am their golden-haired boy. That was just what I wanted. I think Mr Wayland was taken to Peppercorn Cottage. I don’t enquire too closely because I want to stay in their confidence. You will be hearing from me again soon. Please eat this letter, or I shan’t be alive to send the next, which is growing apace.
Life Goes On Page 33
