by Timothy Lea
It starts pissing with rain on the way home and I don’t have Sid’s van so we are getting pretty wet. This is fine by me because I can’t see how she can refuse to let me in, just to dry off, at least.
She pauses with her hand on the gate and I know that this is the moment of truth as they say.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she says.
“Anything to get out of this rain. Yeah, thanks a lot.”
We go up the path and she fumbles with the front door key and looks nervously over her shoulder as if she expects to see the neighbours drawing up a petition to the local watch committee.
“Here, let me do that,” I insert the key the right way up and we go in. Inside it is just like your own house only it smells like somebody else’s, and we take our macs off with a great deal of nervous hairshaking and teeth-chattering on her part.
“Do you find it cold?” she says. “You go into the front room and I’ll fetch the electric fire. It’s up in my bedroom.”
Don’t bother, I feel like saying, let’s go up to your bedroom, it’ll save you a trip. But you can see by her blushes that she didn’t mean to say it, and thinks that I’ll imagine it was some kind of hint on her part so I keep my mouth shut.
The front room is cold and I wander around swinging my arms and looking at the photograph of what must be her Dad on the mantelpiece. It was probably taken during the war – God knows which one – because his haircut practically starts under his scalp and his shorts could pass for Greek trousers in a bad light. Whatever the older generation say about my lot, at least we don’t turn ourselves out as diabolically badly as they did.
Seeing Daddy makes me feel uneasy. I’m never very happy in a house I don’t know well and I keep feeling that the old man is suddenly going to leap up from behind the settee with a horsewhip in his hand. I sit down in one of the faded armchairs with the coloured, leather elephant motif on the back of it and try and prepare my plan of action. Best, I feel, to continue as I am, playing it dead cool, and see what happens. If nothing happens I can always come to the physical bit when it’s time to leave.
Elizabeth comes in with the electric fire and it’s obvious that she’s tarted herself up a bit. A splash of perfume under the armpits, by the whiff of it.
“You did say tea, didn’t you? You can have coffee if you like.”
She is kneeling down to plug the fire in and I have to admit she’s got a cracking body on her. I wouldn’t climb over her to get to Ted Heath.
“No, no tea’s fine.”
“You’re very quiet all of a sudden.”
“It’s such a surprise being invited in that I’m speechless.”
“Oh, I was meaning to invite you in when Mum and Dad were here but you know what they’re like. It’s so formal it’s embarrassing. They never turn the telly off and you have to talk and watch at the same time.”
“You’ve brought other blokes home, have you?”
“Not when I was on my own.” She’s blushing again.
“I should think not. You never know what they might try and get up to.”
She won’t look me in the eyes but she’s still kneeling in front of me and her tits are making a lovely pattern through her pink woolly jumper.
“Some of them had a try.”
I stretch out my hand and rest it gently on her shoulder.
“What about that cup of tea?”
My hand gently ruffles the hair at the back of her neck.
“They’re not coming back till tomorrow evening.”
I pull her towards me and kiss her very gently on the mouth and to my surprise she clings to me as hard as she can, and her kissing becomes clumsy and desperate, as if she’s trying to work my lips away from the rest of my face.
“You won’t give me a baby, will you?” she says.
Well, I didn’t give her a baby. In fact, to tell you the truth, I didn’t give her anything till about six o’clock the next morning, after I’d fallen asleep worrying about it a couple of hours before. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but faced with this innocent virgin, who made me get undressed outside the bedroom and come in when she had turned the light off, I couldn’t do a bloody thing.
She was very pleased about it though. She said that it was nice that we were both virgins.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I still felt pretty ashamed when I did eventually manage to do it. I can remember lying there listening to the rattle of milk bottles on the doorstep and Elizabeth rabbiting on about how it hadn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, and thinking: how could I have managed to make such a cock of it; and when I quite fancied the bird, too. If it had been some old scrubber like Brenda, that I didn’t give tuppence about, I’d have been through her like a dose of salts. Maybe I’d been spoilt. I mean, when you have women who go over you like they’re sorting out the dirty linen basket you begin to take it for granted. You’ve gone past the stage of the simple, straightforward little bird who wants you to take the initiative, and you’ve forgotten what to do when you meet her. I think affection had something to do with it as well. I mean, Elizabeth was the kind of girl I would marry one day and you don’t do things like that to the bird you marry, do you? Well, maybe you do but I still think the first time was made more difficult because I really liked her.
I mentioned marriage then but, of course, I was thinking of it in the distant future. Not Elizabeth. The second she lost her cherry she was planning her trousseau. It was as if by having it away with her I had put the down payment on a wife and three kids. She started fussing around and that very first morning I had to have breakfast in bed. A dead waste of time as far as I’m concerned, because you always get crumbs stuck in the most uncomfortable places and knock the teapot over when you try and fish them out. Then there was washing up together and going shopping together – she even starts looking in the window of furniture shops which turns me off a bit – and in the end I have to pretend I arranged to go to Chelsea with a mate before I can get away.
It’s really good to be back home again, even with Mum going on at me for being out all night and not telling her anything. She’s worried about me but you can see that Dad just thinks I’ve been out nicking something. Not that he’d mind provided I cut him in for a slice. The fact is that since I fell into bad company and did a spot of lead stripping I haven’t laid a hand on anything. And that’s saying something with the chances you get as a window cleaner I can tell you.
Anyway, back to Elizabeth. The next few weeks she’s more difficult to shake off than a pixie’s french letter. I feel she’s taking over my life. And it’s not as if I’m getting a lot of the other from her, either. She doesn’t fancy it on the common, her Mum and Dad are always at home and if they do leave the house in the afternoon she doesn’t like doing it when it’s light. It’s not on, is it? If I had any sense I’d give her the bullet but of course the more she plays up the more I pretend to myself that she is a girl with what Mum would call ‘old fashioned values’. I’m dead simple you see.
Luckily it doesn’t matter too much that Elizabeth’s legs are shut tighter than a pair of rusty scissors because I’m getting more than I need elsewhere. Sandy is still shacked up with her spade and I’ve gone off Brenda in a big way but the rest of them are all ready, willing and very able. Of course Elizabeth knows nothing about this and she still reckons I’m practically a virgin. Not surprising really, because by the time I get round to her sometimes I’m so knackered I can hardly poke my old man through the zip of my fly. Maybe it’s because deep down inside I reckon I’m going to get married and have to settle down, but I’m screwing everything that moves at the moment. It’s as if I’m trying to build up a rich storehouse of memory before I go under.
Thinking about it, that’s probably why I was so glad to meet Sonia.
Sonia was a dancer, an acrobatic dancer. I don’t know what she was like because I never saw her do it – acrobatic dancing I mean – but she showed me an album of press cuttings and there were some picture
s of her doing the splits and jamming her leg up against the wall so it looked like a giant hard. She was billed as ‘Kismetta the Fantastica’ which might have gone down well at the Aldershot Hippodrome in 1942 but was hardly going to pack them in now. Somebody else had obviously had the same idea because when I met her she was ‘resting’ as she put it. Anyway, let me tell you the whole story.
One of the places I did was called the ‘Fitzroy Hotel’ but it was more like a doss house really. The glass sign outside was broken so you could see the bulbs inside and the lino cracked up like baked custard. There were never many people there and I can’t see how the place stayed open. I wouldn’t have passed water there let alone the night. The owner was a miserable old git who always tried to knock down my price and said that he’d do it himself if it wasn’t for his back and that I was taking advantage of him. I took this a couple of times and then I told him to stuff the job up his Jacksie, which put our relationship on a more professional footing. After that he never gave any trouble but just wandered round making sure no one had left a light on and that I knew he was watching me to see that I didn’t nick anything.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning when I first met Sonia. I didn’t expect anybody to be around then and I got a bit of a shock when this pile of bedclothes suddenly springs up and flashes a couple of tits at me. It’s worse for her because I’ve woken her up and she glares at me and pulls the sheet up to her chin.
She’s about thirty. I suppose; boney, sallow, hollow-cheeked, lank-haired; her tits are small but they droop like foxgloves which gives them shape. There’s a beat-up, world-used scruffiness about her which I feel at home with. Any bird that sleeps starkers always interest me and she looks better than a lot I’ve seen considering she’s just woken up. Elizabeth has never let me see her naked yet. She always wears a nightdress and though I’m allowed to mess about underneath it, it stays on, come hell or high water. I think it’s because she secretly thinks what we are doing is sinful and feels a bit better about it if she is wearing something.
The bird in the bed is saying something but I can’t hear what it is so I pull the top window down a bit and manage to drop my squeegee into the room. Then I find the bottom window is jammed so I have to indicate that I need assistance. The bint raises her eyes to the ceiling in a ‘you prick’ gesture and swings out of bed wrapping the sheet around herself but not quickly enough to stop me seeing that they’re the same colour as the hairs on her head. She stalks across to the window, picks up the squeegee and hands it to me over the top.
“Haven’t you got a hanky?” she says.
At first I don’t know what she means and I’m wondering if there’s a large bogeyman hanging out of one of my nostrils. Then I cotton on that she’s talking about dropping handkerchiefs.
“Hurrah,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I could see your mind working. You got there in the end, didn’t you?”
“I usually do.”
“What do you mean by coming and waking me up?”
“Somebody had to do it. Do you know what the time is?”
“About eleven?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I know what the time is, then, don’t I?”
I’m still standing on the window ledge and I am beginning to feel that this may be a position in which I have difficulty doing myself justice.
The bird obviously agrees with me because she shakes her head and wanders over to the door where there is a dressing gown hanging up. In one quick movement she drops the sheet and has the dressing gown round her shoulders. It’s a man’s dressing gown and it’s far too big for her. She feels in the pocket, pulls out a fag packet and sticks a dog end in her mouth. No matches. She points to her fag and looks at me and I nod. I don’t smoke but I always carry a box of matches for just such moments. It’s like boy scouts carry around those penknives with bits on them to get stones out of horses’ hooves. She shrugs her shoulders and with a feat of strength that impresses me almost as much as the view down the front of her dressing gown she pulls up the window.
“If we’re going to go on handing things backwards and forwards to each other you’d better come in. You’re not going to rape me, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pity. I feel like being raped this morning. Do you ever get feelings like that?”
“Sometimes. Only it’s different for me.”
“Of course. You’ve got to do the raping, haven’t you? I wonder what happens when somebody who wants to be raped meets somebody who wants to rape someone. It can’t be rape, can it?”
“No. I suppose it’s normal.”
“Or passion – yes. I think it’s probably passion.”
She sits down on the bed and crosses one leg over the other, which is something she does very well. I light her cigarette and start wiping over the inside of the windows.
“What’s that thing called?”
“It’s a squeegee.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of those. I always thought it was some kind of mop.”
“I think it’s that, too.”
“Well, I’m glad we thrashed that out, you learn something new every day, don’t you? Do you want a cup of fabulous, taste-bud tickling Nescafé while you’re here?”
“Yes, ta.”
She has an accent which is a mixture of posh and working class so you can’t quite tell what it is but the vaguely piss-taking way she talks has a definite style to it.
She puts the kettle on and washes out a couple of mugs in the washbasin.
“The milk’s off. Do you mind it black?”
“No, that’s fine. What are you doing here?”
“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? Well, I’m resting, dahling.”
She makes her voice go all husky.
“I’m a theatrical you see and at the moment no one wants to know about me.”
“But why here?”
“Well, I usually stay at the Ritz but when I heard the Aga Khan was staying there I thought it would be more diplomatic if I dossed down somewhere else. We were lovers for years, you know.”
“I hadn’t heard.”
“No, well you wouldn’t would you? It was a terribly well kept secret. I used to have a couple of fantail pigeons which carried messages backwards and forwards between us – “Be by the bandstand on Clapham Common at eight o’clock on Thursday. My private plane will collect you” – that kind of thing. Then we’d be off to Biarritz or Budleigh Salterton or wherever his exotic fancy took him, making mad passionate love until it was time for him to go off and be weighed in jewels or something. He was a slave to Islam you know.”
I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about but I’m impressed.
“You’re an actress then?”
“Brilliant. I could see you were a bright boy the moment I clapped eyes on you. Yes, sort of. Ooops – coffee time.”
She switches off the gas and hands me my coffee,
“What have you been in? Anything I’d have seen on the telly?”
She claps a hand to her heart and looks disgusted.
“Television? Oh! Goodness gracious me, no! I work in the live theatre – and besides, nobody has ever asked me.”
“So what have you been in?”
“You are persistent, aren’t you? Well, let me see. I was Becket in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ – no, actually, the last thing I did was to stand next to a girl with a very personal problem in the chorus of “Babes in the Wood” at the Granada, Tooting. You may not have seen the show, but you probably smelt it. You know: two balloons up your jumper and a string of jokes about baked bean commercials.”
“When did that finish?”
“You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you? My goodness, but you ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m sorry but I’ve never met an actress before.”
“Well, I misled you a little bit. I’m not really an actress, I’m a dancer
. An acrobatic dancer – or I was. Now, I’ll do anything within reason, and provided I can keep my knickers on. Would you like to see my credentials? I was waiting for a fan to show up.”
She doesn’t stop for an answer but goes and gets this book of press cuttings I mentioned earlier.
“Come with me down memory lane,” she says and pats the bed beside her. I sit down and she takes me through the book. It’s a bit sad because all the big cuttings are from a newspaper in Baldock which is where she must have come from and which would probably make it a front page story if one of the locals farted outside Covent Garden Opera House.
“Who’s the bloke?”
In some of the pictures there’s a good looking dago dancing with her, wearing some kind of gypsy costume. His hair is slicked down and parted in the middle so the parting looks as if someone made it with a meat cleaver. He reminds me of Valentino who Mum is always going on about, and he’s probably meant to. A few photos later he’s wearing a turban and a lot of boot polish and then he disappears altogether.
“That’s the Great Fakir, if you’ll excuse my pronunciation.”
“The what?”
“That was what he called himself in the act – in that one anyway. He was also known as ‘The Sheik’ and my husband – he wasn’t very good at that though.”
“Is that his dressing gown?”
She smiles and pulls it closer around her. “Yes, I – yes. How observant of you. But then I suppose it’s unlikely that I’d go out and buy a man’s dressing gown, isn’t it?”
“You’re divorced now?”
“No, we were never married. I said he was ‘known’ as my husband. Roy was doing you a favour just to live with you. He was too bloody clever to get married. I was married, though, before I met him. God! But I made a wonderful botch of things. Still, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; a complete stranger who suddenly appears on my window sill.”
“Probably because I ask so many questions.”
“Maybe. Perhaps it’s also – oh, it doesn’t matter. You’d better get back on the job, hadn’t you? – if you’ll excuse the expression. You’re losing money sitting here.”
