Room at the Top

by John Braine

  I'd been measuring him up, wondering whether or not to leave her to him. I wasn't so drunk that I wanted to be beaten up in a Birmingham Road pub. But he was no Garth: he was as tall as me, but his shoulders were all padding and he had a look of softness about him; he was the type whose bones never seem to harden.

  "Leave her alone," I said.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "Jack Wales."

  "Never heard of you."

  "I don't expect that you have." I stood up. "You heard what I said." My hand groped about on the table independently of me until it found an empty beer glass. There wasn't a sound in the room. There was a decently dowdy-looking middle-aged couple at the next table who looked frightened. The man was small and skinny and the woman had pale horn-rimmed spectacles and a little button of a mouth. I remember feeling rather sorry for them, and an anger as smooth and cold and potentially as jagged and murderous as the beer glass started to grow inside me.

  "Take your hands off her." I lifted the beer glass as if to strike it against the table. His hand loosened and she pulled her wrist away. The compact dropped, and a little cloud of powder floated up from it. He turned and went out without a word. The ordinary noises of the pub began again, the incident obliterated as quickly as it had begun.

  "He's not my boy friend really, Jack," she said. "I'm sick of him. Thinks he owns me just because I've been out with him a time or two."

  "He's introduced us, anyway," I said. "Mavis. It suits you, darling."

  She stroked my hand. "You say that nicely," she said.

  "It's easy to say things nicely to you."

  "You're the best-looking boy I've ever met. And you have lovely clothes." She felt the texture of my suit. It was new, a mid-grey hopsack made from a roll of cloth that Alice had given me five months ago. "I work in a mill, I know good cloth."

  "If you like it, Mavis, I'll never wear anything else," I said. My words were beginning to slur. "I feel so happy with you, you're so gentle and bright and beautiful -- " I went into the old routine, mixing scraps of poetry, names of songs, bits of autobiography, binding it all with the golden syrup of flattery. It wasn't necessary. I well knew; a skinful of shorts, a thousand lungfuls of nicotine, and ordinary good manners, were enough to get me what I wanted; but I had to have my sex dressed up now, I was forced to tone down the raw rhythms of copulation, to make the inevitable five or ten minutes of shuddering lunacy a little more civilised, to give sex a nodding acquaintance with kindness and tenderness.

  "Let me buy the drinks," she said after we'd had two more.

  "That's all right," I said.

  "You've spent pounds, I know you have. I'm not one of those girls who's just out for what she can get, Jack. If I like a boy, I don't care if he can only afford tea. I earn good money. I took home six pounds last week."

  I felt the tears coming to my eyes. "Six pounds," I said. "That's very good money, Mavis. You'll be able to save for your bottom drawer."

  "You've got to find the chap first," she said. She fumbled in her handbag. It was a large one of black patent leather, with diamanté initials. There was the usual litter of powder and lipstick and cotton and handkerchiefs and cigarettes and matches and photos inside it. She slid a ten-shilling note into my hand. "This is on me, love," she said. The warm Northern voice and the sight of the open handbag gave me an intolerable feeling of loneliness. I wanted to put my head between the sharp little breasts and shut out the cruel world in which every action had consequences.

  I ordered a bottle of IPA and a gin-and-it. Time was beginning to move too quickly, to slither helplessly away; each minute I looked at my watch it was ten minutes later; I knew that I'd only that minute met Mavis, but that minute was anything up to a year ago; as I drank the sharp summer-smelling beer the floor started to move again. Then every impression possible for one man to undergo all gathered together from nowhere like a crowd at the scene of an accident and yelled to be let in: time dancing, time with clay on its hobnailed boots, the new taste of the beer and the old taste of brandy and rum and fish and cornflour and tobacco and soot and wool scourings and Mavis's sweat that had something not quite healthy about it and her powder and lipstick -- chalk, orris root, pear drops -- and the hot hand of brandy steadying me again, and just as it seemed that there wasn't to be any other place in the world but the long room with the green art moderne chairs and glass-topped tables, we were out in the street with our arms around each other's waists and turning in and out of narrow streets and alleys and courts and patches of waste ground and over a footbridge with engines clanging together aimlessly in the cold below as if slapping themselves to keep warm, and then were in a corner of a woodyard in a little cave of piled timber; I took myself away from my body, which performed all the actions she expected from it. She clung to it after the scalding trembling moment of fusion as if it were human, kissing its drunken face and putting its hands against her breasts.

  There were houses very near on the dirt road at the top of the woodyard; I could hear voices and music and smell cooking. All around were the lights of the city; Birmingham Road rises from the centre of Leddersford and we were on a little plateau about halfway up; there was no open country to be seen, not one acre where there wasn't a human being, two hundred thousand separate lonelinesses, two hundred thousand different deaths. And all the darkness the lights had done away with, all the emptiness of fields and woods long since built over, suddenly swept over me, leaving no pain, no happiness, no despair, no hope, but simply nothingness, the ghost in the peepshow vanishing into the blank wall and no pennies left to bring him out again.

  "You've lovely soft hands," Mavis said. "Like a woman's."

  "They're not -- not lovely," I said with difficulty. "Cruel. Cruel hands."

  "You're drunk, love."

  "Never feltfeltbetter." I'd returned to my body, I realised with horror, and didn't know what to do with it.

  "You're a funny boy," she said.

  I fumbled for my cigarette case. It was empty. She brought out a packet of Players and lit two. "Keep these," she said. We smoked in silence for awhile. I was trying to will myself into sobriety, but it was useless. I honestly couldn't even remember where I lived, and I literally truly Fowler's English Usage didn't know whether I was awake or dreaming.

  "Jack, do you like me?"

  "From the veryfirstmomentthat -- that I saw you." I made another effort. "You'reverysweet. Like you verymuchveryverymuch."

  The lights started to wheel around and there was a clanging sound in my ears. "Those bloody engines," I said. "Those bloody engines. Why can't they stop?"

  She must have half carried me away; I don't know how she managed it. We stopped outside a terrace house eventually; I was trying to keep myself upright, and not succeeding very well. Finally I propped myself against the garden railings.

  "Are you all right now, Jack?"

  "Fine," I said. "Fine."

  "You turn left and keep straight on -- have you enough for a taxi?"

  I pulled out a fistful of notes.

  "You be careful," she said. A light came on above us, and I heard a man's voice growling her name. "Oh God," she said, "they've woken up." She kissed me. "Goodbye, Jack. It's been lovely, really it has." She ran into the house.

  I walked away, weaving my body from side to side in a pattern of movement which I felt to be not only graceful and harmonious but so exquisitely funny that I had to laugh.

  A hand on my shoulder broke the laugh in half and started the Unarmed Combat reflexes working. The gears were stiff, but any second now, I thought with joy, pain and humiliation would move forward to crush the stupid bodies of the two men who faced me.

  One of them was Mavis's ex-lover. I didn't know the other, but he was the one who had me worried the most. He seemed quite sober and his shoulders were broader than mine.

  "This is the -- " Mavis's ex-lover said. "Full of brandy and conceit, the bloody bastard -- " He swore at me monotonously; the words depressed me more than they annoy
ed me. "She's my woman, see? We don't like strangers muscling in, see?" His hand tightened on my shoulder. "You're going to be bloody sorry you came round these parts, chum."

  "Shove off," I said.

  " You're shoving off. But not before -- " He struck out with his fist; I sidestepped, but not quickly enough, and he hit my cheekbone, cutting it with something (a ring, I realised afterwards). But I thought it was a razor, so I hit him in the Adam's apple. He gave a sound halfway between a baby's gurgle and a death rattle and staggered away from me, his hands to his throat.

  "You dirty bastard," his friend said, and tried to kick me in the groin. More by good luck than good management I turned sideways; but not properly as the PT Sergeant had taught me; his foot landed home on my thigh and I lost my balance and went down with him on top of me. We rolled about on the pavement like quarrelling children; I was trying to keep him off and he, I think, had no idea in his head that wasn't based upon making me suffer as much as his friend (whom I could still hear choking with agony) had been made to suffer by me. He got both hands around my throat and began to squeeze; a black and red stream of pain spread like lava behind my eyes. My hands had lost their strength and I couldn't move my legs and I could taste blood from my cut cheek and smell his hair oil and the laundered stiffness of his shirt and orange and fish and dog from the gutter; the lampposts shot up suddenly to a hundred times their height like bean flowers in educational films, taking the buildings with them in elongated smudges of yellow light; and then I remembered another of the PT Sergeant's maxims, and I spat in his face. He recoiled instinctively, his hold relaxing for a second; then I remembered a lot more things and within thirty seconds he was in an untidy heap on the pavement and I was running as fast as I could down the street.

  My luck was in that night; I didn't see one policeman, and I heard no pursuing footsteps. After I'd been running for about ten minutes I came to the main road and caught a tram to the city centre. My hands and face were bleeding when I mounted it, and I saw from my reflection in the lighted window that my suit had big splotches of dirt and blood on the jacket, and that not one button on my fly was fastened. Fortunately there were a lot of other drunks on board, so I was not as conspicuous as I might have been. I was squeezed up against a woman who seemed the only sober person on the tram, white-haired, with an old-fashioned thick wedding ring, who kept looking at me with a disgusted expression. The words of a Salvation Army hymn erupted to the surface of my mind and, without knowing it, I started to sing under my breath -- The old rugged cross the old rugged cross I will CLING to the old rugged cross -- The disgust on her face deepened to contempt. She looked so clean and motherly, her blue boxcloth coat showing a vee of crisply starched white blouse, that I found tears coming to my eyes. I was grateful to her for noticing me, for caring enough to be disgusted.

  The lights and the noise and the cars and the buses and the trains and the people in the centre of the city were too much for me. I was nearly run over twice, and I was just as frightened of the people as I was of the traffic. It seemed to me as if they too were made of metal and rubber, as if they too were capable of mangling me in a second and speeding away, not knowing and not caring that they'd killed me.

  The Warley bus station was away from the city centre. I couldn't remember the way, and I couldn't remember the time of the last bus. I lit a cigarette which tasted of Mavis's powder and stood, or rather swayed, outside a milk bar near the railway station. I wondered if the police had picked up the two yobs; I'd probably hurt them badly. I thought of the first one's hands, red and scarred, with black ridged nails, clutching his throat, and the limp body of the other with his nice clean collar and new rayon tie spoiled, and I felt a deep shame, as if I'd hit a child.

  I walked around until I found a taxi rank. It took a great deal of finding; having visited Leddersford a few times, I kept a mental street map of the place, which normally I could unfold in a second. That night it had been turned upside down and all the streets had changed their names; I went up one street and found myself in Birmingham Road again, and twice I repassed the milk bar from where I'd set off. When I saw the row of taxis at the other side of the road, I paused for a second to see if it was safe to cross.

  Then I found myself falling. There was a kind of exhilaration about it; I imagined a mattress below me to break my fall, to bounce away from, higher and higher into the sky. . . . There was only the pavement, the cold stone that I wanted to lie upon, to kiss, to sleep with my face against. I struggled up to my feet when I heard a car stop beside me, holding on to a lamp standard. If it was the police, there was nothing left but to face them; I was too tired and confused to run away, and I knew that if I tried to cross the road by myself I should be killed. I braced myself for the official questions, staring at the dark green standard.

  "Time for you to come home, Joe." I turned. It was Bob Storr.

  "I have no home."

  "Yes, you have. We've all been worrying about you." He took my arm. Eva came out of the car and took my other arm; as soon as she came, I let myself be taken quietly, but I still insisted that I had no home. I sat in the back with her; I was trembling with cold, and she put a rug over my knees.

  "My God," she said, "what have you been up to? There've been search parties out all over Yorkshire for you. The Thompsons are nearly off their heads with worry .

  "Susan," I said. "What about Susan?"

  "You are pie-eyed, aren't you?" Eva said. "She went to London for a wedding dress this morning. Had you forgotten?"

  "Leave him alone," Bob said. "He's had enough for one day."

  "I murdered Alice," I said, and began to cry.

  "Don't talk rubbish," Bob said.

  "Everyone knows that I killed her. The Thompsons too."

  "The Thompsons knew that she was your mistress," Bob said. "They had a son themselves and they know what young men are like. They don't blame you. Nobody does."

  The car was climbing the eastern heights of the city now, away from the smoke and the dirt and the black fingernails scrabbling the pavement and the sad, lost faces that had tried to keep up with me; the engine purred smoothly, as it would have done if Alice had been beside me instead of Eva, as it would have done if Bob had suddenly grown talons and horns, as it would have done if the world were due to end in five minutes.

  I went on crying, as if the tears would blur the image of Alice crawling round Corby Road on her hands and knees, as if they would drown her first shrill screams and her last delirious moans. "Oh God," I said, "I did kill her. I wasn't there, but I killed her."

  Eva drew my head on to her breast. "Poor darling, you mustn't take on so. You don't see it now, but it was all for the best. She'd have ruined your whole life. Nobody blames you, love. Nobody blames you."

  I pulled myself away from her abruptly. "Oh my God," I said, "that's the trouble."

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