by Dave Wallis
“Aren’t you?”
“I still don’t see why they pay you these days.”
“All right, I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve got them all weighed off. Better than their own girls have. I know just how they like it and I’ll do things for them that the idiots are ashamed to ask their own girls to do. It don’t make any difference to me. I sometimes think I’m a sort of nurse really, you know running a clinic. . . .” She giggled. “In the old days the stupid oldies used even to call it that. You know, ‘sun-ray treatment and massage’, and a phone number.”
“Yes, and ‘French lessons. Strict lady tutor’.” They started to think of more and more euphemistic advertisements of the past and to laugh as they hurled them at each other.
“Physical culture. . . .”
“Moving photo models.”
All Robert’s hesitation of speech vanished. Still laughing she stood and took his hand and led him to the door.
Outside the café they fell quiet. Two Kings swung past in step, wearing fancy helmets with the inverted crown done in polished tin on the front. One of them nodded to her.
Robert, for some reason, asked, “What’s your name?”
“Julia,” she said, and added, “I have other names for business.”
They reached a row of empty shops with tall four-storey flats over them. The display windows were all broken and empty and a small pack of five wild dogs snarled and snapped around some decaying three piece suites. She turned a key in a heavy door and led him up a flight of steps curling around an empty, disused lift-shaft. There was a tightness in his throat and chest and a strange but familiar excitement made him feel tense and dizzy.
She opened another door and led him into a dark room.
“Wait,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“O.K.,” he said, not knowing what was in store, if she was hinting at some danger or only asking him to stand still while she fetched a lamp. They had started speaking in whispers but he could not have said why.
“There,” she said. The room was suddenly lit by an oil lamp and she put a box of matches carefully back in a plastic bag to keep dry. She slipped up to him and took both his hands. She wriggled against him and pressed his hands down over her own firm buttocks, as if demonstrating her nature to a blind man. He commenced to behave in the manner expected of him. “Stop,” she suddenly said. “Come over here.” They crossed to a wide couch covered in orange silk. “Curtain stuff, really,” she said. “One of the boys combed it for me from some place up West.”
“We could get you . . .” he realised his indiscretion and stopped but she took his sudden silence for an attack of speech impediment, or else was disinterested.
“Listen,” she took his hand and stared straight into his eyes. “She can’t be all that different.”
“Who?” he asked, but blushed.
“This girl you’re crazy about. I suppose some other boy’s got her already? You take my advice and just wait. You never know your luck. I’ll tell you before you go when she’ll let you have it, or even set up with you.”
“When? ttttttt-tell me.”
“I said ‘before you go’.”
She stood up, lowered the lamp wick slightly and stripped off her yellow jumper. She turned her back to him.
“Undo my bra,” she said. “I hate doing it myself. I don’t often,” she giggled.
A part of him could not help thinking, “I’ll bet not even Charlie’s ever had it offered him like this without even trying.”
“There,” she said. “That’s better.” She cupped her own high young breasts luxuriously.
She raised her arms above her head and stretched until her toes creaked.
“I’m really looking forward to this,” she said. “You’re nice. I have to do it so often with boys that are, well, you know, all right, but think I’m supposed to faint in ecstasy just because they’ve got one, like everyone else. Well, I knew you were different as soon as I saw you. My mum was on the game too, you know, years ago. She taught me a lot.
“She only went wrong in one thing. She used to say if ever the world came to an end some blasted man would be responsible – one with something wrong with him. How she used to put it, ‘One of those who can’t get it in for some reason so they don’t see why anyone else should either.’ Well, she was wrong because women started doing it just as much as men . . .”
“DDDDDD-did she, I mean your mother?” He was finding his pulse and breathing behaving as if he were not bound heart and soul to Kathy at all, as if there were no Kathy.
“No, she just . . . she just died. I don’t know what. They told me a lot of big names for it at the hospital. I was on probation at the time and I remember that Miss Fairchild saying, ‘If I can help you in any way . . .’ and all that. They left it to her to tell me, see? So I said, ‘Bring her back then, that’d help’ and that shut that old cow up for once. Oh well,” she turned and faced him, took two short steps up to the couch and bent over him. He looked up at her. He felt a faint fragrance of young, clean flesh and the perfume of some cheap talc. She slid her arms around his neck so that her two warm pendulous breasts brushed his chest for an instant. Some self-destructive doppelganger whispered, “You’ve never even seen Kathy’s.” He started to fumble more urgently at her belt buckle and jean-zip so that she would not notice anything wrong. He thought, “she likes me. She’s a good sort. She could’ve had me beaten up by one of the Kings and all my stuff pinched. She doesn’t mind about the way I speak.”
She kicked off her shoes and wriggled out of her jeans. She sat, rather demurely, on the edge of the couch, waiting to be pulled down alongside him. He suddenly remembered the girl that Kathy and he had found with Ernie and the look she had given him as she said, “Thanks, Bob.”
“Stop thinking about her,” said Julia.
“I wwwww-wasn’t, well not exactly.”
“Exactly enough. Stop thinking about her for twenty minutes then.” She flicked his discarded trousers off onto the floor with a twist of her ankle. He did.
Afterwards she made some coffee. She had everything that was going there, even fresh eggs from some slave-run farm near Winkfield Street.
They sat side by side on the orange silk, lit by the light of the oil lamp and talked.
“What’s happened here reminds me in a way of a school I was at once. A lot of the teachers left because they couldn’t stand it and then some had flu all at once and things got right out of hand. At first I thought it was going to be fabulous, just doing what we liked, but then this gang got control. It was terrible. They used to get all the little first years and torture them to get their pocket money and get them to pinch stuff for them from Woollies or else have their arms twisted. They made us pay sixpence to go to the lavs and pinched us and all that. It went on for weeks and got in the local rag and everything before they sorted it out and sent some away. Well, that’s what happened here after the oldies gave up. This gang took the castle. There was some nut-case guardsman. He was old, nearly nineteen, but being nutty as a fruitcake kept him sort of young, you know? Anyway he was all for getting his revenge on this sergeant and on the army. He used to spend hours talking about it. He showed us the way in and planned how to knock off the sentries one at a time and so on. . . .”
“ ‘We’?”
“Well, I was going with one of the boys in that gang then and I was with them on ‘C Day’ as they call it. ‘C’ for castle. Then they found all the C.B. stuff and a lot of food and things left by the royals when they either did it or hopped over to Canada or Australia. The rumours got round about this stuff and the castle was always being attacked. That’s partly how the Kings got so bad. They’re scared now of losing it all. Then when the stuff started to run out they had to start going on these raids and bringing back prisoners to work there. The things they do! It’s terrible.” She shivered and snuggled against him.
“What sort of things?”
“Well, things they got out of history books l
ike hanging prisoners and slaves round the battlements and leaving them there. The smell was awful. How they ever stood it in the old days I can’t think. Then they got the worst things out of The Scourge of the Swastika and the Eichmann trial books and did them, the tortury bits, not the gas-chambers. Well, I didn’t really mind all that stuff, as long as they didn’t do it to me or one of my friends but then they started talking about it all the time. Especially the three or four leaders I was going to bed with then. . . . Oh, I forgot to explain, I had a job running the home comforts dept. at the castle. You know, if there was any good talent come in among the prisoners they used to turn them over to me to train, because of what my mum had taught me and what I could do myself. I did a lot of abortions too. Well, I was saying, they started talking about it all the time and giving reasons for it. ‘We have to keep the area scared and tame. We have to find out about this gang and that gang and how big they are. We have to get this girl to tell where her boy hid the tinned peas.’ Well, I knew they did it because they enjoyed it and the other stuff was the excuse. I knew this from what my mum had told me and what I learnt myself. That’s when I moved out of the castle and went into business here myself.
“They never tried to stop me. Each of them knew I knew too much about them and was scared I’d tell. A lot of them come and visit at my other places.”
“Places?”
“This is my real flat. I have others for work. I only bring friends here.” He glowed.
“Tell me what she’s like,” she said.
“You jjjj – jealous?”
“Yes,” she giggled. “I suppose so. No; just interested really. I can never understand what makes boys get it bad about some girl. I’ll bet she’s no different from me. Except she don’t know how to do it as well as I do.”
He was about to say, “She can, she does,” but had to alter it lamely to, “She’s wonderful.” He went on to describe her, stammering whenever he tried to speak of Kathy’s hair or eyes or figure.
“Go on,” she kept saying cruelly. “What are her tits like?” and “I’ll bet you’d like to feel them, wouldn’t you?”
Furious, at last, he started to shout and scream at her and even raised his fist, “OO,” she shrieked in mock alarm and giggled. He smiled and his anger vanished.
“Who does she go with now?” she asked.
“With the leader of our gang, with Ernie . . .” he replied and stopped.
“Of course,” she said. “You want her because he’s the big boy that’s all.” She paused.
“There’s the other thing, of course.”
“What ‘other thing’?”
“You know.”
“I don’t, really, I dddd-on’t.”
“And, another thing: Stop that silly stammering lark as soon as you like! I’ll bloody well cure you of that as soon as say ‘Jack’. Go on say it!” She grinned at him.
“Jack,” said Robert.
“You see?” said Julia. “You see?” She paused again and looked at him somewhat sharply, as if to say “You bought this one!” “Well, tell me one thing: how long have you known this Ernie?”
“Since before the Crisis . . . since we wwwwww-ere at school. HHHHH-he and I wwwww-ere in the same class for a term. Before I found out I had some bbbb-brains. I mean, bbbbb. . . .”
Julia rescued him. “That’ll do. I’ve got it all. Listen, you thought he was marvellous, didn’t you? Go on, didn’t you?” she insisted. “Yes,” he said, after a series of glottal seizures.
“Well, then,” she said. “It may be you’re really in love with this leader of yours still and you’d like to be his slave but the only way you could ever do it is through – and I mean through – his girl. Meet and shake hands in the hall, like.” She suddenly shook in a peculiarly harsh series of chuckles, recovered herself and said, “It’s quite often like that, believe me. In the game you get to know, see? My mum had a bloke always on at her about had this other man been with her. I asked her if he was jealous or something and she said, ‘That’s what he’d call it. I call it something different.’ And then she explained it to me. It’s like an iceberg. There’s seven times as many boys really in love with other boys than shows, than’s known, I mean, even to themselves.”
Robert said, “We had a pair in our gang. No – bbb – no one minded but the girls hated them.”
“Of course,” said Julia and she looked at him and said, “I thought you weren’t in a gang, just a group of traders with a few of you holding stores of some junk.”
“Well,” he started to stammer out some cover story and then found himself telling her all about it. He reached the bit about the children the previous night and she nodded and said, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”
“I think that, really,” he replied. “What was yours?”
“When the American newsreels were here for the telly. Well, they hung around waiting for someone to do it so they could film it. And everyone kept telling them stories about what had happened, like the time that football crowd were supposed to have done it when their local team lost – taking hundreds of aspirins and Easyway pills, lying all over the field, heaps of them. It took the Disposal a week.
“Well, these blokes, I mean it was their job after all, didn’t want stories. They wanted pictures, so they asked people to re-act the things they’d seen. They came to our street. Everyone had some neighbour who’d done it and they gave them packets of fags, that was the currency then, remember? to act it. They set up the cameras and started. People were putting their heads in ovens, tottering out into the street and making out they’d just taken Easyways and so on. The cameras were turning. It was funny really, the different things people thought of acting, some of the kids were even laughing. Then one man shouted out, ‘Get this, bastards,’ and he chucked his packet of fags in their faces and cut his throat right in front of the cameras. You never saw blood like it. I didn’t know there was so much blood in a man. He did it by bringing this razor down from behind his shoulder. I always thought you just sort of sawed away at your throat from the front but it seems that’s not the right way. Anyway this set them all off. The film blokes were so dumbfounded they just kept the cameras going. The kids started screaming and running up to them and asking them to stop, as if it was the cameras making their fathers and mothers do it. Maybe it was in a way. I don’t know. That was the worst bit, really, I just ran for it. Mum was alive then. She was still in bed, alone that is. Later that day she brought one of the yanks back. We had to feed him up and listen to him tell us all about it before he was in a fit state to go with her. She wouldn’t take money for nothing. It was her pride, see? She was a real pro.”
They spoke of their families, of things before the Crisis was out in the open, of school and childhood. He told her it was the plan of the Seely St. gang to take Windsor.
She said, “Well, I wish you luck. I think your lot might be better than the Kings. I mean they have straight ones like you in it.” She paused, “Suppose you come here and there’s fighting. How will I prove I’m the one was your friend?”
He reached for his trousers and turned one leg inside out. He ripped out a small bundle tacked inside and unfolded a Seely St. flag.
She giggled, “Dig that tiger,” she said. “That’ll scare them all right.”
“Hang it on your door,” he said.
“Time to go now,” she said. He got dressed and lifted his bundle.
“WWWWWW – meet again,” he brought out.
“Maybe,” she smiled at him. “I hope so. Goodbye. What’s your name? It’s about the one thing I don’t know about you. It’s often like that,” she gave her giggle. He thought, “That may be the last time I hear her laugh like that.”
“Robert,” he answered. The action of going out of the front door seemed to remind him of Kathy, as if he had left his real life outside and was about to pick it up again. “You said you’d tell me when she, when KKKK-Kathy’d bbbbb- when she would be nice to me. You said you’d
tell when I was going.”
“That’s easy; as soon as you don’t really want her very much. That’s if you’re still both around seeing one another every day and so on.”
“Perhaps I want you,” he said.
“No you don’t.”
They kissed a chaste goodbye. Going downstairs he heard her singing and felt such a longing to rush back to her that he dared not stop. On the last flight he met a young soldier of the Kings coming up. He was a handsome boy, tall and dark, but one side of his face was overlaid with a pimpled mauve birthmark. He carried a holdall which he swung. Robert stood aside to let him pass. There was a faint clank of tins and bottles from the holdall. Their eyes met, emptily.
9
Out in the street he drifted towards the castle itself. The former car park was full of motor-bikes and captured cars. It was an afternoon of watery sunshine and Kings had gathered at the castle gates. They sprawled across the seats of open jeeps and postured near high-powered bikes. Girls in light, unbuttoned coats hung about or walked past as if unaware of the lazily greedy stares.
He gazed up at the battlements like some rebellious serf. Frayed ropes still rotted dangling from the highest points. A few guards stared down. One turned and vanished and then came back with his arm round a girl and pretended not to be aware of him. They were not so much guarding and running the place as playing the part of soldiers guarding and running it.
He came to an abandoned kiosk, damply sinking into the uncut greensward and about to tilt over.
“Nothing in there, chum,” shouted a girl as he peered through the trap. Among a soggy layer of spilt postcards on the floor he saw what he was looking for and went round to the tiny door at the back. Two wild cats hissed at him and arched their backs but did not attack. Down in the damp shadows lay a sliding pile of papers bearing the words, “Visitors’ Guide and Map of the castle.” He took three or four and stuffed them into his pocket. The wet paper struck coldly against his thigh. He felt he wanted to get back to Julia, no, of course not, to Kathy. Well, away from here to somewhere safe and tell friends about it all.
