by Ted Lewis
“Wally, the light.”
A shadow scuttles in from off the landing and almost immediately the bedroom is suffused with the kind of glow my bedroom was suffused with and now I can see the figure I’m wrestling with and as I take it in it occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind the best of three falls with this particular opponent. The reason being that she’s got beautifully cut short black hair, she’s got a body that flatters the blouse and the satin trousers rather than the other way around, and in spite of the way I’m squashing her face I can tell that she and everyone who ever gazes on it will be more than happy with the way it’s arranged and the effect that arrangement has. But what, at the moment, is unavoidably more interesting is Wally’s reaction to the intruder.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. “What you doing here?”
As he speaks he walks forward towards me and the girl, looking for the first time tonight as though he’s got a set of balls. The girl stops struggling but she doesn’t relax and neither do I except to take my hand away from her mouth.
“What the bleeding hell’s going on?” the girl says, looking at me as if I need to blow my nose. “Just what is this?”
“What do you mean, what is this?” Wally says. “What is this? Just what the Christ you think you’re doing? Eh? I mean, what are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she says. “Trying to get in the flaming villa, wasn’t I?”
“Listen, don’t come the snot with me,” Wally says. “I’ll haul you one off if you’re not careful.”
“Yes, I expect you will, seeing as how you’ve got somebody to hold me first. Just your drop, that is.”
And as the girl says, Wally’s drop it appears to be, because he starts to do just that so I let the girl go and she’s fast enough to dodge the swinger, leaving me to catch Wally’s wrist in my hand and get a grip on him.
“Ease off, eh?” I tell him. “Evens?”
Wally looks at me, then relaxes. I let go of his wrist.
“Well,” he says. “I mean to say.”
I look at the girl. She’s massaging her wrists where I was holding her. She looks back at me and she hasn’t grown to love me any more over the last minute or so.
“Well?” Wally says to her. “What about it?”
“What about what?” the girl says.
Wally takes a step forward but I speak to him and he stops.
“Wally,” I say to him, “when are you going to introduce me to the young lady?”
“Young bleeding lady?” Wally says. “My arse she is.”
“Charming,” the girl says.
“Listen, my girl, the day I call you a young lady’s the day you start behaving differently from the way you been doing the last seventeen years, all right?”
I take out a cigarette and as I’m lighting up I say to Wally: “I take it, then, Wal, that this happens so to speak, to be your offspring.”
“Too bleeding right,” Wally says.
“I wish I could say there’s a family resemblance, but I’m glad to say there isn’t,” I tell Wally.
Wally and the girl glare at each other. I blow out some cigarette smoke. The girl turns her attention back to me.
“Could I have one of those?” she says, indicating my cigarette, her expression the same as it’s been since I took my hand from her mouth.
“You smoke, do you?” I ask her.
“When you start smoking, then?” Wally asks her.
“What for?” she says.
“What you mean, what for?” Wally says. “Since when could you afford packets of fags on your grant, then?”
The girl gives Wally the kind of condescending smile she’d reserve for a twelve-year-old in a blazer who’d just tried to chat her up.
“I don’t necessarily have to buy them, do I?” she says.
“I see,” Wally says.
The girl snorts and the snort coincides with taking a cigarette from the packet I’m extending to her. She then makes a big production of putting the cigarette in her mouth and accepting the light I offer her and when she blows the smoke out it’s like the last time I saw Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause on T.V.
“So,” Wally says, “let’s get back to starters. What the bleeding hell you doing here?”
The girl blows out some more smoke and says:
“Come for me Christmas vacation, haven’t I?”
“You what?” Wally says.
“Christmas with Daddy, isn’t it?” she says. “Dear Octopus time, isn’t it. Family ties and all that.”
“Christmas holidays?” Wally says. “Christmas holidays? You’re supposed to be in college another couple or three weeks at least.”
Another puff of the cigarette.
“Yes, well,” she says.
“You been slung out?” Wally says. “That’s what it is. You been bleeding well slung out. Jesus. I knew it. First off, when you first got the idea in your head, I knew it wouldn’t last, one way or another. Bleeding art school. I ask you. All your mates making themselves forty quid a week as temps and throwing it all over the place on the gear but you were so bleeding right, weren’t you. What you really wanted to do, wasn’t it?”
“I haven’t been slung out. I finished my exams, didn’t I? After you’ve finished them, there is bugger all to do, isn’t there? I mean, you just hang about, doing darn all. So I just left early. Lots of us did. Nobody cares.”
“Oh no,” Wally says. “Remember you said that when you’re out on your arse after you get back.”
The girl gives him her smile again.
“Anyhow,” Wally says, “what you mean turning up without warning? Why didn’t you let me know you was coming?”
The girl shrugs.
“Why should I?”
“ ’Cause it might not be convenient, that’s why. The Fletchers might be here. They might be entertaining or something. This isn’t my place, you know.”
“Really?”
“If you turned up and the Fletchers was here they’d be well pleased.”
“They would. The thinner one’s always fancied me.”
“Less of that.”
“Fetched after since I was twelve, he has.”
“You got a good opinion of yourself, you have.”
I decide to let the family discussion run its course without me. The brilliance of the exchange is making me feel thirsty so I cross the bedroom and switch on the landing light and go downstairs and into the lounge and pour myself a glass of champagne, and I stand in the middle of the room drinking it and while I’m doing that I reflect that at this time of night, back in the smoke, I’d be having the same kind of drink, in a different kind of quietness, in the club, after all the punters had taken their last illusions home with them. And there’d be the soft comfortable sounds of the staff taking care of their clearing up, and I’d be sitting at my table, perhaps with Con or with Audrey, not saying much, perhaps discussing the merits or not of the Hammers’ new goalkeeper, or how funny it was to learn that George Clark had been found a danger to shipping near Putney Bridge, how surprising, who would have thought it, that kind of thing. And then after the conversation, and the champagne’d finished, I’d leave and take the slow ten-minute, near-dawn walk across Soho to my flat, picking up the papers on the way, and when I got in, I’d put some bacon in the pan, and while that’s sizzling slowly, I’d have a quick shower and then I’d get into my pit with my bacon sandwich and the papers and a pint mug of tea and I’d spend an hour drifting towards drowsiness, a mood orchestrated by the sound of the hotel dustbins and rest of re-emerging Soho, and to wake five hours later to the mid-morning thin London brightness streaming in through the flat windows. But instead I’m here in the splendid silence of the mountains (the image of which will be carried back a million Kodachromed times to Blighty), listening to the droning whitter of a family domestic drifting down from the Spanish heights, sparring with the nail-driving of a tenth-rate member of the Brotherhood. So I pour myself another glass of c
hampagne and walk over to the window and draw back the curtain and look out at the mountains. It’s not yet quite dawn and that transitional thick uniform blueness flattens out all the different angles and perspectives, making the aspect look like a sketchy backcloth on BBC 2.
While I’m taking in this mind-reflecting monotonous aspect the sounds of Happy Families starts filtering down the stairs and the next thing I know the young bird has entered the room and has found the drinks and is pouring herself some champagne. Her entrance is closely followed by that of Wally, who’s opening line is this:
“I want to know how you got up here, that’s what I want to know.”
The girl takes a sip of her drink.
“I got a lift, didn’t I?”
“A lift? At this time of night? With a bleeding wop?”
“No, not with a bleeding wop.”
“Who with then?”
“Some students who were on the flight. They’d hired a car and they were going past here because they’re camping over at Solla, aren’t they?”
“All fellows, were they?”
“As far as I could tell. I mean, I suppose if I’d gone into the bushes with them I could have found out, like they wanted.”
“What?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, taking another drink.
“They asked you to go into the bushes?”
She looks at me in despair.
“What do you do,” she says, “in the face of such monolithic gullibility?”
“Where I come from,” I tell her, “what you do is that you very likely get a smacked arse.”
The girl turns on the look from upstairs again.
“And where would that be?” she says. “From under a wet stone?”
“Listen—” Wally begins, but I cut him off.
“It’s late, Wally. Let’s cut it all out, shall we?”
“Oh, Top Cat, this one, is he?” the girl says.
“Listen, Tina, this is Jack Carter. Know what I mean? Just leave it out, eh?”
“Oh yes? I heard about you.”
She pours herself another drink.
“You’re the one that does all the damage but never gets his name in the papers, isn’t that it?”
I just look at her and say nothing.
“Down our way you never buy a drink, isn’t that right?” she says.
I still say nothing.
“You on your holidays as well, are you?” she says.
That was the general idea, I think to myself, a happy holiday at the villa of your choice, under still warm Spanish skies in November, drinking Sangria with new-found friends while the friendly staff attend to your every whim.
“Wally,” I say, “I’m going back to my pit for what’s left of the night. If anybody else turns up, like, say, the Band of the Coldstream Guards, just leave me out of it, all right?”
I down my drink and walk out of the room and back up the stairs and into the bedroom. D’Antoni is still as he was left, feet apart, mouth apart, a human flytrap, miles apart from the reality of him being in the fantasy world of the Fletchers’ villa, miles apart from the real or imagined anxieties about the arrival of his own personal Furies. I wish I was as many points removed from my present, and none the less for the fact that when, for the third time that night, I get my head down, it’s lifted once more by the moth-like presence of Wally flitting by my bedside and whispering words of seduction. This time, he’s back on the theme of personal safety.
“Jack,” he says for openers.
So for openers I raise myself off the pillow and throat him and he coughs and splutters and I say to him:
“Wally, you really are pushing the good luck you’ve had all your life.”
Wally’s sweaty hands grip my wrists and try and force them off his neck; of course there is no danger of that but I don’t really feel like taking Wally’s lifeless form out of the bedroom and onto the patio and hurling him into the chasm and then going back to bed for the extra hour and a half. So I let go of him and I let him massage his neck and get his breath back in order for him to lay on me whatever he considers urgent enough to put his life in my hands.
“I’m not taking liberties, Jack, honest I ain’t,” he says, “but I got to put it to you, straight up, you can’t troll out of it, not now.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Not now, not now Tina’s here. On account of, well, if the geezers turn up, she’s going to be for it as well, ain’t she? They ain’t going to leave her out of it, are they?”
“You leave her out of it, Wally,” I tell him. “You leave her out of it by sending her back on the plane with me in the morning. That’s the way she gets left out of it.”
“How can I do that?” he says. “I’d have to tell her what for, and Gerald and Les’d nail me up if ever I did that. You know what they’d do.”
“How the Christ do you think they’re going to find out?”
“D’Antoni’d tell them Tina’d been and gone in a day and she’d left with you. They’d work the rest out for themselves, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re giving them a lot of credit, Wally.”
“Jack, you know what they’re like.”
I have to admit, yes, I do know what those bastards are like, but I only admit it to myself, not to Wally.
“Jack, you can’t leave us in the shit,” Wally says. “I know you been dropped in it yourself, but, I mean to say.”
I lie back on my pillow and stare up at the dark of the ceiling.
“What’s she doing now?”
“I put her in the next bedroom. It adjoins your bathroom.”
I don’t say anything.
“Jack?” Wally says.
“What she have to say about the camp bed on the landing?”
“I told her I was kipping down there as I was listening out for you to arrive.”
“She wear that?”
“ ’Course she did.”
“And what about the Sleeping Beauty?”
“Haven’t told her yet, have I?”
“He’ll be well pleased when he gets back from Paradise.”
“He’ll be better pleased if he knows you’re staying.”
I don’t answer.
“Jack?”
“Wally,” I say to him, “there’s only two things I’m going to guarantee right at this precise moment in time. One, I’m going to get some sleep and you’re fucking off out of it and back to your pit on the landing.”
“Jack—”
“Wally.”
After a moment or so the shadow of Wally shuffles away from my bedside. I close my eyes and I blank everything out of my mind and wallow in the wonderful relaxed tiredness that’s going to usher me into the arms of Morpheus, but like sometimes during National Service, particularly one time in winter, in Oswestry of all fucking places, I’d been on duty all night, just aching for my pit, sometimes nodding off for a half minute and dreaming I was actually between the blankets, only to jerk back into the reality of the ice cold—I remember, when I’d finally signed off, and actually got between the blankets, that I was buggered, really dead, but sleep wouldn’t come. The more I’d urged it, the less likely it got that it would come, and in the end, I’d dropped into a deep sleep about five minutes after my official kip was due to be up. And now it’s the same fucking question, how the hell am I going to get off listening to D’Antoni’s rasping and Wally’s thrashing about on the other camp bed? And coupled with that, I can hear Tina moving about in the bedroom beyond the bathroom, sorting her gear out. And then eventually she gets herself sorted and decides to use the bathroom, of which she makes full use for approximately three quarters of an hour. Bottles are placed, clinking on the ceramics, tissues are torn, taps are run, the toilet is flushed approximately twenty-five thousand times. After that she seems out of ideas and finally decides to go to bed and by that time I’ve given up on trying to sleep and I’m sitting in a cane chair, wide awake, smoking cigarettes, watching, in the half light, to pass
the time, the slight un-symmetrical movements of D’Antoni’s open mouth as he inhales and exhales his sleep of the unjust. Finally even that loses its fascination so I get up from the chair and go over to the curtains and part them a little way. The mountains are now ochre—sharp in the dawning of the day. Boring, but ochre—sharp, nonetheless. I look at the nothingness. You can take in the whole panorama, from right to left and in between, there’s nothing in the landscape to relieve the monotony, to hold the attention.
I light another cigarette and at that point D’Antoni awakes. Although I have my back to him I’m made aware of the event by D’Antoni crying out at his moment of consciousness.
I turn and look at him.
He’s propped up on his elbows, one hand squirming across his chest for the butt of the automatic and his head is flicking from side to side like a fish trying to get a hook from its gills. His eyes are squinty from the amount of champagne he’s sorted but the lids are not bunged up enough to prevent his eyeballs swiveling about like Catherine Wheels, trying to spin to some kind of focus, to get him to some kind of reference point about who he is and where he is and why he’s who he is.
I smoke my cigarette and watch while D’Antoni co-ordinates himself, while he manages to release the automatic from its holster, while his eyes slow down and come to rest on his surroundings and his situation and finally on myself. And when his gaze has settled on me he holds the pose, as if by concentrating on me the reality of his situation will achieve a sharper definition.
All I do is to carry on smoking my cigarette. Eventually D’Antoni manages to speak.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “What’s happening?”
I don’t answer him. Let him sweat.
“What’s wrong?” he says again, only this time his words are accompanied by actions, those being to try to get off the camp bed, but of course he’s not sufficiently together to execute it properly so he and the camp bed go over in a swirl of sheets and cursing but no sooner has he hit the deck than he’s on his feet, still with a grip on his shooter, looking at me as if somehow I’m responsible for his falling out of bed.
He shakes a sheet from round his shoulders and advances towards me, arms at full slope.
