by Ted Lewis
“You bastard,” he says. “What goes on?”
I spread my hands.
“Nothing at all,” I tell him. “Not as far as I know.”
“What’s the idea of standing over by the window?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d see if the boring view might help.”
D’Antoni looks at me, then he backs off and sits down on the end of my bed.
“I feel terrible,” he says. “I feel like the cat’s crapped in my mouth.” He stands up and staggers towards the door.
“I got to get some sleep on a real bed,” he says.
He bangs against the door jamb and goes out onto the landing and somehow manages to avoid Wally’s cot and staggers off to find his bed. Suddenly I’m overcome with the sleepiness I’ve been waiting for, so to myself I say sod it all and I put out my cigarette and crawl into my pit and I don’t have to anticipate the feeling because the minute my head’s down my eyelids are heavy as flagstones and my mind begins swimming away from me, but unfortunately it doesn’t get far from the shallow end because the most God-almighty shrieking starts up as though it’s never going to stop, and that’s followed almost immediately by Wally cockling out of his camp bed and trying to decide what the noise is and where it’s coming from. As I’ve already sussed where it’s coming from and I’m totally awake again I get out of bed and walk through the bathroom and switch on the light and open the other adjoining door thus illuminating the scene in front of me, which is this: Tina, her shoulders on the bedroom floor, her legs thrown wide still up on the bed, and D’Antoni, his torso straddling Tina’s, one hand gripping her throat, the other grasping the automatic, thrusting it into her left breast, making it rather less symmetrically attractive than when I was struggling with her earlier on. But what does add a certain attraction to the scene is that Tina is stark naked, waving and kicking her legs at whatever parts of D’Antoni are accessible, at the same time trying to grasp whatever hair D’Antoni has left on his head; from where I’m standing she’d be better off going for the hairs on his chest. Now, coincidentally to my opening the bedroom door, Wally appears on the scene, and his reactions are very interesting because whereas before, when D’Antoni mentioned Dunkirk, Wally was prepared to have a go and put his head on the block, now that he’s confronted with the spectacle of his naked daughter, legs akimbo and bollock naked underneath the heaving form of an American mafioso, he hesitates, weighing the consequences in the balance, and by the time he’s decided he should act in the role of the father, other things have happened to cause him to take several steps backwards, away from the forward motion he’d decided to execute; the other things being, that when I opened the door, and the shaft of light illuminated D’Antoni, which coincided with Wally’s arrival on the scene, D’Antoni obviously came to the conclusion that the naked girl, the shaft of light, the swift appearance of two other figures, all put together added up to a set-up, and that had caused him to loose off a couple of imprecise shots from his automatic, resulting on three other things; Wally’s retreat, my slamming shut the bathroom door, and louder and more hysterical screaming from the girl.
“You mothers,” D’Antoni screeches. “You bastards, you set me up.”
A couple more random shots hit somewhere or other and I lean against the bathroom wall and close my eyes and open them again as if in that way I might get to a state of waking. But it doesn’t work; I’m still back in the current dream-like situation, and that’s underlined by the presence of Wally, who’s scuttled round from the landing and through my bedroom and now he’s framed in the bathroom door behind me.
“Jack,” he says, “the cunt’s bleeding barmy. He’s just bleeding barmy.”
D’Antoni’s voice filters through the woodwork.
“You think I’m stupid or something?” he shouts. “You think I don’t know? Hey?”
Another shot crackles from behind the door. The screaming from Tina is constant.
“Jack,” Wally says, “you got to do something. What’ll he do to Tina?”
I give Wally a look and then I call through the door.
“D’Antoni, listen. You’ve got it all wrong. Let me explain.”
D’Antoni laughs. Tina stops screaming. D’Antoni says: “You must think I’m really sweet.”
“Listen,” I tell him. “That’s Wally’s daughter. She turned up while you were asleep. You just got in the wrong bed.”
“You bet I did,” D’Antoni says.
“For fuck’s sake,” shouts Tina. “What in fuck’s name’s going on?”
“Shut up,” shouts Wally.
Now it’s my turn.
“D’Antoni, it’s all right. We didn’t know she was coming. Nobody did. Just leave off and listen to what we’re saying.”
Tina speaks.
“Get your bleeding hands off me.”
“Leave her alone,” Wally shouts.
Then there’s silence, because nobody appears to be able to think of anything else to say.
Time passes.
Then the bathroom door bursts open.
I don’t have to look behind me to know that Wally has disappeared into the safety of the darkness in my bedroom. D’Antoni is stark in the bathroom’s light, as though he’s just been overdeveloped in a photographer’s acid bath.
“All right,” he says. “Tell me again.”
His eyes are bulging and his face looks as though he’s experiencing maximum Gs, but apart from all that I know I’ll be preaching to the converted. Even so, I’d still rather do the polka on a stack of eggs, because the automatic is waving about like a stamen at pollination time.
“Look, it’s like I say,” I tell him. “She turned up while you were sacking it. You were well away so we didn’t bother to wake you up. All right?”
“Why’d she come?”
“She’s on her holidays. School’s out, and all that.”
“Why’s she come here?”
I shake my head.
“Wally’s her old man, is why. The caretaker. Perks. Got it?”
D’Antoni looks at me as if I’m a figment of his imagination, but nevertheless what I’ve said seems to reassure him somewhere at the back of his mind, wherever that may be. So when, as a result, the automatic drops to his side, I take him by the shirt and slam him against the wall and slap him around the face a couple of times and when that doesn’t have the desired effect either on him or on myself I give him a knee in the crutch and as he gags and jackknifes forward I give him a wide clenched one at the side of his head which sends him grasping at the shower curtains, but by the time he gets to them there’s no strength left in his fingers to clutch onto them with, because he’s unconscious, and unconscious is how he finishes up in the bottom of the shower, that state having been achieved by a little encouragement from the porcelain that has come into contact with his left temple.
After that has happened, nothing happens for a while.
Through the re-opened door, I can see that the girl is now totally on the floor, staring through into the lighted bathroom at the memory of the events that have just taken place. Her train of thought is broken by the appearance in her bedroom of Wally who even though the action is now over has taken the trouble to avoid the bathroom and has gone round via the landing.
“You all right, girl?” he says.
Tina looks at him.
“You all right?” he says again.
“What the bleeding hell’s going on?” says Tina.
“Never mind about that. You all right?”
“Never mind? Never bleeding mind? Christ. Bullets going off and I’m half strangled and never mind? God, I always knew you were involved with some barmy bastards, but this—I mean, I know it’s only your only daughter, and this kind of thing happens every day, but you might have tried to row me out of it.”
“I was about to but the bleeding shooter started going off, didn’t it?”
“Oh yes, it did, didn’t it? Look after Number One. Real fatherly instincts, those
are.”
“I didn’t want to do anything to make things worse, did I?”
Tina laughs and stands up.
“You made things worse all your life. Why change at your age?”
Wally looks through into the bathroom and takes in what I’m taking in, which is not only the admirable character of the naked young lady in front of me.
“Look,” Wally says to her, “you just get some clothes on, will you?”
Tina looks at him.
“That’s all you can think of?” she says.
“Well, it ain’t right, is it?”
“Oh, fuck off,” she says.
Tina turns away from him and leans over the bed and starts straightening the covers.
“You what?” Wally says.
“You heard,” Tina says, not looking up from what she’s doing, but the next second she has to because Wally’s strode over to her and spun her round and hauled her off a couple round her ears. It really isn’t her night. But considering what’s happened to her so far she’s shown much character, and now instead of taking what Wally’s handing out she gives him a couple back. It surprises Wally no end, causing him to step back against the bed, and he has to sit down, very undignified. At the same time Tina walks away from the bed and into the bathroom, past me without looking at me, and through into my bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Wally gets up off the bed and comes steaming through after her but I stand in his way.
“Wally,” I say to him, “give me a hand with the geezer, will you?”
Wally looks at me. I bend over and start hauling D’Antoni off the bottom of the shower and of course Wally has to do the same. We carry D’Antoni through into Tina’s bedroom and dump him on the bed. Wally scratches his chest and looks down at D’Antoni.
“That’s bleeding torn it, ain’t it?” he says. “I mean, what the Christ’s he going to be like when he comes round?”
“You’ll find out,” I tell him.
“What you mean?”
“Because you’re going to sit here with him until he does.”
Wally looks at me.
“What you going to be doing?” he says.
“First of all I’m going to have a few words with your charmer of a daughter,” I tell him. “After that, I haven’t made my mind up.”
Wally gives me a different kind of look. I pat him on his face.
“Don’t worry, my old son,” I tell him. “I’d probably be too tired for that, anyway.”
I turn away from him and open the door to my bedroom and close it behind me.
The curtains have been drawn a little wider and now the dawn is bright enough to illuminate the fact that Tina is sitting in my bed, knees drawn up, looking out at the dawn light, smoking one of my cigarettes. As I close the door she inhales and the orange tip glows in the blueness of the room. The sound of the door closing doesn’t make her move in any way.
I walk round to the side of the bed where the cabinet is. She’s taken all my cigarettes out of the pack and they’re strewn all over the marble top and she’s using the pack as an ashtray, perched on top of her drawn-up knees. I take a cigarette from the cabinet top and pick up my lighter and light up. Although I’ve pushed through her line of vision she doesn’t waver from gazing out at the mountains. I put the lighter down on the marble.
“All right?” I ask her.
She looks up, blowing out smoke.
“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m bleeding smashing, I am.”
“What happened?”
“You saw what happened. Or do you want an action replay?”
I shake my head.
“No, I mean, I just wondered what he said when he stumbled in on you. Like, I imagine you were terrified, weren’t you?”
“No,” she says. “I wasn’t terrified: I thought it was you.”
I smile to myself.
“It’s just that the gentleman isn’t himself. He didn’t expect to find you in the bed. So he over-reacted.”
“How do you think he would have reacted if he’d have found what he wanted to find?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiles at me. There is a silence. Eventually she says: “I mean, who the fuck is he? What’s he want to go around acting like that for? Shooting bloody guns off.”
“He’s just staying here a few days. He’s been drinking. He didn’t know where he was.”
“So when he’s drinking he starts shooting. ’Course. Simple, really.” She stubs her cigarette out and leans back against the wall clasping her hands to the back of her neck, an action that displays her titties to extremely good effect. She looks me straight in the eye and says: “For a second or so I thought it might have been you.”
I look back at her and say nothing.
“You know, in the other bedroom,” she says.
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Why should you think a thing like that?”
She grins at me.
“You want me to tell you what you already know?” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“Come off it,” she says, still smirking away.
“You need your arse smacking,” I tell her.
“Promises, promises.”
I look at her and shake my head.
“I know Wally’s not the most perceptive geezer in the world,” I tell her, “but I don’t think even he believes the guff you gave him about why you’re here.”
“Why shouldn’t it be the truth?”
“No reason. Except that it isn’t.”
“So what is?”
“You’ve been slung out.”
“Oh yes? And why should a nice girl like me be thrown out of a place like that?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I mean, it’d have to be something pretty bad to get slung out of an art school these days, wouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I never did finish my thesis on Further Education.”
“Oh, you have heard there’s such a thing.”
“Vaguely.”
“And what about your education? When did that finish? Or did it ever start?”
“I learn something every day.”
She gives me the look my remark deserved.
“The one I expected was the one about being raised in a hard school,” she says.
I smile to myself and while I’m doing that there’s a knock on the other side of the bathroom door, followed by Wally calling my name in his low shifty voice.
“Jack?”
Immediately Tina says, in an urgent voice, loud enough for Wally to hear: “Quick, put your trousers on, it’s my old man.”
Then she falls over sideways and breaks up, face buried in the bedclothes. The bathroom door opens and Wally makes another entrance. This time he’s really torn until he sees his little girl’s been having him on.
“Yes, Wally?” I say to him.
“Er, it’s the geezer,” Wally says. “I think he’s stirring.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, I think he is.”
“Go and have another look, then.”
“Supposing he starts hauling off with his shooter?”
“Well you won’t have the bother of having to come back and tell me because I’ll hear it, won’t I?”
The girl’s still having hysterics into the bedclothes.
“I’ll knock seven kinds of shit out of you later on,” Wally says to her, turning back to the bedroom.
Tina sits up and wipes a tear from her eye.
“What a twit,” she says. “But then, he always was.”
I lean over and grab her by the wrist.
“Yes, and he’s your old man and he was always that, too,” I tell her. “So show a bit of respect.”
She shakes her wrist free. “Respect for him? You’re joking. Let him earn it. He’s been like this all his bloody life, a frightened little crawler. He make
s me sick.”
I grab her wrist again.
“He’s still your old man.”
“In name only. He’s here all the time, isn’t he, and I’ve always lived with my auntie Lillian, so what sort of a family feeling does that generate?”
“He done what he had to.”
“No he never. He didn’t have to come out here. He came out because he wanted to. He couldn’t believe his luck, dropping in this one. I didn’t even enter into it. He gets himself pensioned off lovely and I can bleeding well whistle as far as he’s concerned.”
I let go of her wrist. I have to admit that there isn’t a word she’s said that isn’t true and that my opinions and her opinions of her old man are approximately on the same level.
“Anyway,” she says, “where do you come off telling me how I should carry on?”
I pick up the cigarette packet and stub my cigarette out.
“Forget it,” I tell her.
“Full of the old-style values, aren’t we?” she says. “Who did you vote for last time?”
“I said forget it.”
I light another cigarette and go and sit myself carefully down on the edge of D’Antoni’s camp bed. Tina looks at me.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I don’t answer her. Instead I lift my feet off the floor and lie down on the camp bed and carry on smoking and do some more ceiling staring.
“You going to stay there all night?” Tina asks me.
“There isn’t exactly a lot of it left,” I tell her.
Wally’s voice drifts in from the far bedroom.
“Jack?”
“What, for fuck’s sake.”
“I don’t think he is coming round.”
I close my eyes and don’t answer.
Apparently Wally has no other information for me.
“Oh, well,” Tina says, “I think I’ll get my head down. If you see what I mean.”
There’s the sound of her sliding down between the sheets and making exaggerated snuggling noises, soft and feminine, at definite odds with the character that has so far been demonstrated. Just goes to show that having no parents to speak of can’t always be bad, I think to myself. I finish my cigarette and stub it out in the packet. Then I lie down on my back again.
