Moggerhanger

by Alan Sillitoe

  King of the world then, at having come back safe from a forlorn hope, with neither a scratch on the Rolls Royce or myself, I was nevertheless still nagged by thoughts of at least getting a bollocking from Moggerhanger. I could see no reason for it, considering the success of my mission. But if he went into a fit of cigar stained finger jabbing, I hoped it wouldn’t get too close to my face. In no mood to put up with unjustified wrath, I would think nothing, should it come, of standing up, or reaching across if I hadn’t been invited to sit down, and smacking him across the mug.

  Kenny Dukes, who saw me out of the car, wore a smart Bond Street cap, and a blue blazer with the garish badge of a non-existent yachting society stitched clumsily on the pocket. A pale blue bow tie was angled like the stopped propeller of an old aeroplane that had crash-landed, though his trousers had such a razor-like crease that only Mrs Blemish could have ironed. “You’re looking smart,” I said. “How’s that?”

  “The boss got onto me. Said he was fed up having scruffs working for him.”

  The flesh around his eyes was blue and black, mostly black. “You look as if you’ve been in the wars again. Did your mother lay into you?”

  He stood aside, to rub his elbow. “I crossed the boss, didn’t I?”

  “You did? What for?”

  “I went AWOL.”

  “Naughty boy. But why?”

  I suppose he had courage of a sort, the way he let Moggerhanger knock him about, though I couldn’t help but despise the daft goon for putting on such a smile. I would only have recognised him on the street by his long arms. “I went to call on Sidney Blood,” he said. “You’ll never believe it. He read me a bit of his latest book, and gave me a signed copy. He’s a great man, Michael, and it’s all thanks to you, for telling me his name.”

  “The boss knocked you about for that?”

  “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? I wasn’t here when I was expected to be, was I? He was in a real fucking spin because he’d been waiting for me to drive to Spleen Manor and sort out Eric Alport who’d given him some lip on the blower. The boss had ordered him to be at a certain place with packets of you know what, at a special time, and he wasn’t there. He fucked up all the coordinations, and you know what Moggerhanger’s like when that happens. Cottapilly said afterwards how he’d heard the boss shouting on the blower that Eric had got delayed in a pansy knocking shop when he should have been attending to business. So Moggerhanger was in a right temper when I got back from Sidney Blood’s. Wanted me to tell him all I’d said while I was there as well, but I was still so chuffed I couldn’t remember a thing.”

  Easy to understand how a lifetime’s battering had killed nine tenths of Kenny’s memory, as I began unloading the boot. “Didn’t you feel like landing him one back?”

  “You can’t hit the boss, can you? And I had gone off without telling him, hadn’t I? Can’t think what came over me.”

  “He shouldn’t knock one of his best lads about like that.”

  “Well, all I knew was I’d been to see Sidney Blood.” He looked at the ground. “That was all I knew.”

  “What did your mother say when she saw the bruises?”

  “She was in a bad mood, and said he should have given me some more.”

  “You’re not very lucky in your parents or employers. You deserve better.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I can live in all weathers. But she did alter her tune when I pulled out the signed copy of Sidney Blood. She snatched it from me, and started to read straightaway. Told me to go out and nick a few more.”

  I regretted the loss of stock in backstreet bookshops trying to make a go of it. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary. Sidney will give you another anytime. He’s generous with his fans. But lend me a hand to get these packets above the garage, then I can go in and see the boss.”

  He picked up two to my four. “He’s not in residence.”

  I wanted to get the encounter over as soon as possible but, on the other hand, I was thankful for some delay. “Where is he?”

  “You know how he likes to treat us as if we’re all part of the same family? He’s gone to Northampton, to be at Eric Alport’s funeral.”

  My heart thumped like an empty petrol drum. “Eric? You mean he’s snuffed it?”

  “Poor geezer. Somebody drove his powder blue minivan off the road in Yorkshire a week ago. He went over a cliff and died at the wheel. His boyfriend belled Moggerhanger, sobbing his socks off. Mogg thought he had to go to the funeral, after threatening with all sorts of things not long before. But he’ll be back any minute. He left word that when you came in you were to take it easy in the flat and wait.”

  “You mean I can’t go out and buy some condoms?”

  He pushed his squalid yet lively features close. “Aren’t thinking of humping the cat, are you?”

  “Don’t worry.” I laughed. “I shan’t get you into trouble by breaking my parole. If I did he might be tempted to go for that tiny clear patch on your right cheek, and bruise that up as well. But I would like to meet your mother some day. She seems a real old dragon,” I said, on my way for more parcels.

  “Oh, she is one of them,” he called proudly. “She’s all that and more.”

  “Sounds as if we’d hit it off like a bed on fire.”

  “You’d have to be on your best behaviour, Michael.”

  “I’d arrive with flowers, then.”

  He kicked the door open. “If you took some chockies as well you’d be in her good books forever. She likes Belgians. They make lovely Ovaltine.”

  I was beyond amusement at what he came out with. “When we’ve packed this stuff away we can sample some Greek beer I brought back.”

  “No can do. I’ve got to collect some cash from Lord Moggerhanger’s clubs. The managers’ll see these bruises, and pay up right away. They know they’ll soon have some of their own if they don’t.”

  “I’ll put a couple of bottles aside, then. You can give one to your mother, to mix with her stout.”

  When he took my hand I thought he was going to cry. “You’re a good mate, Mick. Nobody in this place treats me like you do.”

  “Fuck off,” I said playfully. He bent double to get out by the little door in the gate, taking the key, which made me laugh, because I could have gone over the wall like a rat on fire if I’d wanted.

  I went to see what Mrs Blemish had on the boil or fry for lunch. The kitchen was as big as a living room, every state-of-the-art stove and machine at her disposal, though there was no sign of cooking.

  In Moggerhanger’s study I patted the cool side of the six-foot whisky bottle, wanting to smash it and flood the room. Moggerhanger would suspect I’d done it, of course, and if I didn’t talk he’d wipe out his whole crew rather than get the wrong man. I decided such depredation would have to wait, but how tempting it was, to pick up the heavy cut glass ashtray and fling it at some vulnerable part.

  Instead I lifted the lid of his Monte Cristo box. Clever bastard, because a recorded message from a contraption bedded somewhere in the wood said: “Put that cigar back. They’re not for the likes of you, whoever you might be. In any case, they’re counted, and if you don’t get a move on you’ll lose a finger, or get a cut that will be a long time healing.”

  Discouragement was not in me. Under the box I found a tiny deactivate button which Moggerhanger used when wanting a smoke himself. I put it back on before walking out with a tube in my pocket. I wasn’t born yesterday, nor the day before, though I’d take care not to puff it away in the house.

  Alice Whipplegate was in the small office off the boss’s sanctum. Her desk and filing cabinets took up most of the space. Pins in a wall map marked Moggerhanger’s second homes and hideaways: Peppercorn Cottage, Spleen Manor, Upper Scroatham, Breezeblock Villa at Back Enderby, and a few I hadn’t heard about. I was surprised to see a pin in Doggerel Bank, where Ronald Delphick gave
poetry lessons and what he called workshops but which I could only think of as knocking shops. I was also shocked to find a pin in my country residence at Upper Mayhem. If Moggerhanger considered it useful to him I must get up there ASAP and rip up the floorboards to see what he had sent his men up to hide from the police while I was away, unless he’d only been having a bit of little boy fun with his pins. Or had be been so convinced I was going to get killed in Greece that he was already thinking of buying the place?

  “Michael!” Alice cried. “You’re back!”

  “No,” I said. “I’m the ghost of myself. I was done away with, after collecting a dozen parcels of hard drugs in Athens.”

  She was a slender woman nearing forty, whose husband had wrapped his car around a tree and killed himself some time back. At Spleen Manor, on Moggerhanger’s business a few years ago, I had slid into her bed, after so many preliminaries I thought I’d never manage it. But when I did it was more than worthwhile. Like so many women with flattish chests she usually wore low cut tops, which from her I took to mean: ‘If you don’t like me like this, too bad, mate. It’s my bosom, not yours. I love what I’ve got in every other department as well.’

  Women with not much on their rib cases were invariably more interesting when you got there than those who walked on overload. Her thin face promised only as much as she wanted to give, but such an amount had satisfied me, her features having more wit written over them than could be expected from a more fleshy phizzog. Not that I had anything against those, however. All I knew was that though I hadn’t made love to her for a few years she had in no way lost her pull on me.

  She stood before the typewriter, a stylo in hand. “Michael, you know very well that Lord Moggerhanger has a perfectly legitimate import-export business.”

  Instead of falling over at this naive and startling untruth I put my hands on her waist and pressed sufficiently for her behind to go slightly back and out of true, then gave a tender kiss to find the direction of the wind before I tried something else. She didn’t look displeased, though her smile couldn’t altogether hide some anxiety. “You know Lady Moggerhanger has a passion for halva. And so has his Lordship, at times. They like the real thing.”

  “In that case I wish they’d sample some of the stuff in those packets. I’m not sure how sweet they’d find it, though. They wouldn’t sit down for three months, or they’d end up at the de-tox box at Charing Cross hospital. Or maybe the Old Bailey, for trafficking. And I’d get done as well for having brought it into the country.”

  I needed to find out how much she knew about the robber baron’s real business, but without her getting pulled in if the organisation dominoed down the chute. I wanted to see real sweat on Moggerhanger’s chops while led off in handcuffs to be charged with misdemeanours he had no hope of denying. What had to be done to make it happen didn’t bear thinking about, planning and good luck essential if I was to bring it off without landing myself in clink as well. Getting Alice to provide me with evidence would make it easier, for she knew all of it was stored in the filing cabinets flanking her desk. She played dumb, but I knew her as very much otherwise. I could burgle the place, with Bill Straw’s help, and carry the files away in a pick-up truck, but such a stunt would call for half the SAS as well, because Moggerhanger’s compound was the most protected area in Ealing, which as far as I was concerned meant the world. But if I didn’t fill myself with hope to do it, however hopeless the scheme, I’d be dead from the neck up.

  An utterly distrustful flutter of her lips passed for a smile. “Michael, I do believe you’re a romantic at heart. Of all the men I know, Lord Moggerhanger is the most honest and upright, and extremely generous.”

  “How generous? Does he fuck you?” I knew she wasn’t averse to such an expression, though a further smile persuaded me to believe she spoke the truth: “He’s never laid a hand on me.”

  Frances had told me that women often got randy in an empty house that was hardly ever empty, because she was tempted to masturbate, and occasionally did in such circumstances, which reflection led me to put my arms around Alice. “Where is everybody?”

  “Wherever they are, one or another will be back soon enough.”

  Maybe they wouldn’t, or if so she didn’t care, for there was no opposition to my kisses. “I love those warm little doves longing to be stroked, as I recall they did from our very satisfying encounter at Spleen Manor. I can’t help but remember your beautiful breasts.”

  She didn’t answer, so perhaps believed me, on giving the kisses back with more interest than could be got on a Tessa account. My hand went gently and surreptitiously under her skirt, and far enough up to plink her suspenders undone, the silk knickers of a power dresser like oil to my fingers, loose enough to get into and trawl her cleft. Her shock of laughter was tinged with the aphrodisiac of panic. “You’ll have to be quick.”

  She leaned against the wall, Moggerhanger’s speckled map above her dark hair and, speed being of the essence, I played her into coming, before cupping her narrow arse and floating in myself.

  She took a kleenex from the desk drawer. “That was a lovely dessert, after my luncheon sandwich. Totally unexpected, though none the worse for that. Very yummy. Do you do that to every woman you meet?”

  A red pin had dropped from the map during her transports and, peering at the inset plan of London, I stuck it in Buckingham Palace. “Not very often. I haven’t done it to anyone for at least six months. You’re irresistible.”

  Like all women, and quite rightly, she expected kisses of appreciation after the act, so I drew her close and spread a few from neck to forehead. “That was so marvellous I never want to do it again with anybody else. You’ve been in my dreams more times than I can say in the last three years. With my wife I think about being in bed with you at Spleen Manor, so my hard on comes up soon after it’s gone down. In those comfortable hotels on the way to Athens, the route to which you paved with good advice and preparation, I laid hands on myself whenever you came to mind. It was that wonderful way your whole body writhes when you come, like just now. I’ll never forget it.”

  Worldly she was, and sometimes hard with it, but she liked being talked into a lickerish mood. I remembered Kenny Dukes once accidentally, or maybe deliberately, putting a hand on her behind while following her into the office for his monthly pay cheque. She swung around with the face of a vixen and told him to soak his filthy hands in prussic acid before touching her. ‘I don’t want your black fingernails anywhere near me, you God-awful prick.’ Kenny might not have rated such a going over, but it wasn’t for me to pity someone who should have known that if you’re compelled to make a pass at a woman you should always try it from the front.

  My eulogy of her performance went on long enough between kisses to get her worked up again, and both of us knew we were in for more pleasure, but she pulled away when her sharp hearing detected the squeak and bang of the main gate. “I hear him coming. See me at home. You know where I live.”

  In the kitchen Mrs Blemish was unloading groceries into cupboards and fridges. “I’ve driven all the way from Athens,” I told her, “and I’m somewhat hungry.”

  The tail of grey hair swaying over her shoulder completed the presence of a tall and dignified woman, who had troubles no one deserved. Her husband Percy had always been prone to nervous crack ups, and I recalled giving her a lift some years ago near Goole when she was running away from where they lived in deadly antipathy at Tinderbox Cottage, unable to tolerate his schizoid antics any longer. She was going to seek her fortune in London, and because I was on my way to Peppercorn Cottage I had to let her off near Doncaster, but gave her my address care of Moggerhanger’s in case she ever wanted help. When she did, and came to Ealing hoping to see me, Moggerhanger met her at the door, and was so taken by her that he set her on as his cook-housekeeper.

  When Percy by some means tracked her down, and came into the kitchen intending to give her
a good hiding for abandoning him, Moggerhanger, never one to mess about, knocked him down but, perhaps intrigued by his curious mental condition, gave him work as an odd job man and occasional caretaker of Peppercorn Cottage. Even I had to admit Mogg could be generous at times.

  Mrs Blemish cooked three eggs, fried a thick slice of gammon whose smell reminded me of my Irish grandmother’s house as a kid, and put it on the table. As I ate, Moggerhanger walked by, followed by Toffee Bottle, Cottapilly and Pindary. “How are things these days, Mrs Blemish?” I asked when they had gone.

  “They’re not good, Michael, but I don’t complain.”

  Her mood could only have been caused by her friable and unpredictable husband. “Playing up again, is he?”

  She disciplined her tremulous lips, and wiped away a tear before it could fall. It was wicked how a swine could ruin such a fine woman. Percy was sick in the head, and tormented her only so that he wouldn’t get worse, making her ill in the process.

  “Lord Moggerhanger saw him about to have a turn the other day, and gave him a talking to. He sent him to Peppercorn Cottage for a week, with instructions to clean the place inside and out.”

  I could think of no worse habitat for Percy Blemish, because it was falling apart and overrun with rats. After a couple of nights there I was surprised my hair hadn’t turned white, and Kenny Dukes twitched with horror at the mention of the place. Moggerhanger didn’t think badly of it because he’d lived in worse as a child, or so he said, but to send Percy to do such durance vile among the rats was at least unrealistic, as I told Mrs Blemish, though thinking that on the other hand maybe a mad person could only feel sane in such a place.

  “Percy isn’t there,” she said. “That’s the truth of it. After a couple of nights he left the place with a rat in his pocket, and when the rat ran away he hitchhiked through the Midlands to Tinderbox Cottage. He swore terribly on the phone last night, saying that if I didn’t come up and look after him he would set the place on fire. He told me he had his lighter lit and a box of paper under the dining room table all ready, and that I had to promise to go straightaway, or else. But Lord Moggerhanger wouldn’t give me leave, and I didn’t want to go in any case, though my heart was breaking. I don’t know what to do.”