The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  It took some time to find the street, with Laurence irritably telling Audrey ‘No, no, we’ve been up here once already’ and Audrey yet again consulting the A-Z. Once more he remarked that she had never had any sense of direction, just like her mother. ‘How the other half lives,’ Laurence grunted in distaste at one moment, as they passed a black man in oil-stained shorts and vest, who was dismantling a car at one side of a narrow street, while two grubby, solemn children, presumably his, stood watching him.

  Finally they entered a canyon of high, narrow, grey houses. ‘This seems to be it,’ Audrey said. She experienced a mounting excitement as she screwed up her eyes and peered for the number. One house was boarded up and looked as if it was in imminent danger of collapsing. Another house, with five brightly-dressed young people, two white and three black, sunning themselves on its steps, looked as if squatters were in occupation. Eventually, they came on a square, concrete block of flats. ‘ Yes, this seems to be it.’

  Laurence felt an agonizing spasm in his neck as he turned to look out of the window beside him. ‘The way the other half lives,’ he muttered again. He peered at the street sign ahead. ‘Devine Street. More Devilish Street. And Number Four. Did you know that in Japan the number four is unlucky – meaning death?’

  The door of the block, raised above the street, opened at that moment and they saw a middle-aged woman with a stick in one hand and a plastic bag containing rubbish, standing on the threshold. Then slowly, crabwise, she descended the steps, gritting her teeth as she lifted one leg as though it were some terribly heavy object, not part of herself, and then lifted the other. Her face was crumpled with the effort. Audrey felt an impulse to rush out of the car to help her.

  Half way down the steep steps, the woman halted, steadied herself, and then hurled the bag away from her down towards the pavement. She turned and, laboriously heaving herself upwards, a swollen hand to the rail, began her ascent.

  ‘How can people live like that?’ Laurence asked. ‘Was she drunk?’

  ‘I wonder which is his flat?’ Audrey peered up at the sheer, grimy front of the block and Laurence peered up with her.

  Then she put her hand to the ignition key and turned it.

  Back in the flat, Meg raised the net curtain and looked out of the front window of her sitting-room at the disappearing car. What did those two Nosy Parkers want, staring like that?

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a bloody nuisance. An emergency over a delayed microchip order forced Adrian to cancel his Friday meeting with Mehmet, when he was feeling at his homiest, and instead to fly off to Seoul.

  Once there, he had had to endure a number of unsatisfactory meetings with the bosses of the Korean firm concerned, who at wearisome length either recounted to him every detail of the current slump in the economy of their country, of which he was already fully aware, or told him about the reasons for a strike in the largest of their factories, of which he had known nothing.

  In addition to these mental irritations, there was also soon a physical one. After a disgusting meal of tough beef and a kind of putrefying cabbage which his hosts had proudly told him was a Korean national dish and went by the name of kimchi, he had decided that he really had to cheer himself up. That meant only one thing. Having been seen back to the hotel by all six of his hosts in a black stretch-limousine, he at once went up to his bedroom, brushed his teeth and sprayed some deodorant under his arms, and then slipped out again. The breast-pocket of his white tropical suit, down the front of which, unaccustomed to chopsticks, he had managed to dribble a scarlet and therefore highly conspicuous sauce, contained one of his visiting cards, on the back of which he had scrawled the name of a bar found in the Spartacus International Gay Guide.

  Most of the people in the bar turned out to be white; one of them, a stout American in a rainbow-coloured shirt and huge, rectangular dark glasses, was black. Eventually, after Adrian had rejected a constantly smiling Korean with a squint and a pencil-line moustache reminiscent of some Thirties film star, a tattooed bruiser with a shaven head and an almost flat nose lumbered up. He was a far from attractive proposition, and he would not budge from his ludicrous price of a hundred dollars. But, having decided that it was too late and he was too tired to hang around any longer, Adrian finally went off with him.

  At first Adrian was dubious about taking someone so inappropriate back to a five-star hotel, and he therefore asked if it might not be wiser to go somewhere else; but the man said that he knew that hotel, it was fine, he had often been there, his brother worked in the nightclub as a bouncer, there was a back entrance and a service lift. The sex was perfunctory and rough, and it was only by thinking of Mehmet that Adrian was able to achieve a perfunctory orgasm. The man then demanded a tip in addition to the agreed payment. Weakly, Adrian added this to the sum. A total balls-up, he bitterly decided, like the microchip deal. But at least after it he was able to sleep.

  In contrast, two nights later, prior to his early departure for London, he was not able to sleep at all. This was because of an insane itching in his crotch. He scratched away at it for a time and then, having reluctantly heaved himself out of bed, went into the bathroom. He had already guessed what was amiss; and an examination, with the aid of the torch that he always took with him on foreign journeys for fear of a sudden blackout, at once confirmed his diagnosis. Oh, God! He might have known that that brute wasn’t clean. If only a condom had been invented to protect one from crabs! No pharmacy would be open now, and he was leaving too early on the following morning to find one open then. With mounting self-disgust, he fetched down the disposable razor and a tiny tube of shaving-cream provided by the hotel – his own razor was an electric one – and, tongue between teeth, began gingerly to shave himself.

  Despite this, all through the flight his crotch went on itching, so that, looking surreptitiously at the man seated next to him to ensure that he was either immersed in his book or asleep, he from time to time inserted a hand into his trousers to scratch at the increasingly raw flesh. What sort of explanation was he to produce for Mehmet? The thought came to him that perhaps it would be better to forgo sex altogether, in order to give the pubic hair time to grow. But he could not bear to wait. He wanted once again to see that pale, muscular body on the stiff, linen sheet, and then to feel that arm almost throttling him from behind, until he all but fainted from a mind-blowing combination of pain and ecstasy.

  After much agonizing, Adrian had prepared his excuse. ‘I shaved off my bush because I was sweating so much in that heat,’ he told Mehmet, as he swiftly pulled off his Y-fronts and hopped into the bed in the flat.

  Mehmet showed no surprise. ‘Many Muslims shave down that place. I often shave so in Albania. Cleaner.’ That was all. The relief of it added to the fervour of Adrian’s love-making. But Mehmet’s was cool, even though in conversation he had been surprisingly friendly.

  Instead of taking Mehmet out to dinner, on this occasion Adrian cooked him scrambled eggs and bacon. ‘ My friends say that my scrambled eggs are the best they’ve ever tasted. I hope you’ll take the same view.’

  Having irritably reminded Adrian that he never ate bacon and demanded that the eggs be transferred to another plate, Mehmet ate stolidly. Having finished, he wiped this plate with a hunk of bread and then popped the bread into his mouth. But he offered no view whatever on the quality of the scrambling.

  ‘Oh, I know what I meant to ask you.’ Adrian had just peeled a banana and was holding it in his hand. ‘ Is it all right about the passport?’

  Mehmet helped himself to a banana from the bowl between them. ‘I meet him two day ago. I give him money. Now we wait!’

  ‘What!’ Adrian almost choked on the piece of banana he was swallowing. ‘You gave him all that money without getting the passport?’

  ‘Passport take time. Maybe two weeks, three weeks. Man say he must have money first. He pay other man.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Who crazy? You call me crazy?’


  Adrian quailed before Mehmet’s sudden anger, and at once adopted a conciliatory tone for what he next asked: ‘But don’t you think – don’t you think that it might have been better if you’d just given him an advance?’

  ‘Advance?’

  ‘Well, say five hundred pounds. Instead of that two thousand. I mean – he might just pocket the money and do nothing.’

  ‘He friend of landlord.’

  ‘Yes, but what sort of friend? How long have you known your landlord? And how long has the landlord known his friend?’

  ‘This banana not ripe. Who buy this banana for you? Igor?’ Mehmet seemed to be far more concerned about the unripeness of the banana than about the money.

  Adrian put his head in his hands. ‘You’ve really got me worried.’

  ‘No worry. No problem. Passport come.’

  The passport did not come. Repeatedly, at each of their subsequent meetings, Adrian asked about it, to receive the same answers each time: He must be patient, it was impossible to hurry things along, Mehmet’s landlord was honest, the landlord’s friend was honest, why was Adrian so upset?

  Adrian confided in Igor – reluctantly but he could not think of anyone else in whom to confide – when next he spent a weekend in the country. Mehmet had once again excused himself from coming to the ‘cottage’, on the old grounds that he must spend the weekend with his cousin. ‘ I just hope that nothing’s gone wrong. The poor lamb’s so trusting. He just has no conception how crooked the most respectable-seeming people can be in this country. Two grand is a lot of money – even for me.’

  Igor was holding the end of his greyish ponytail in one of his long, narrow hands, their nails caked with soil. Now he put it into his mouth and chewed on it reflectively. It was a habit that Adrian loathed. ‘I hope he’s not taking you for a ride.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Igor shrugged and turned his head sideways to gaze out of the window. There was a vague smile on his face that filled Adrian with irritation.

  ‘Oh, there’s no fear of that. Mehmet is totally honest – one hundred per cent.’ But doubt, an insidiously wriggling worm, was already entering his mind. People were always telling him how shrewd he was (behind his back, this became a cunning bastard). Could he have lost his shrewdness?

  ‘When he tells you he has the passport, ask to see it.’

  Ten days later, when Adrian yet again asked ‘Is there any news on the passport front?’, Mehmet produced none of the usual answers but instead looked glum, shook his head, sighed and then said: ‘Sorry, Adrian. Bad news. I have passport but passport no good.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Landlord’s friend meet me in pub. He give me envelope, say passport inside. Not to open in pub. Home, I open, see passport, French passport, look fine, my photograph, everything. Beautiful. I am happy, happy. Think, now job, now no more illegal. But I show passport to landlord. Landlord look careful. Then landlord say, Mehmet, passport no good.’

  Adrian, who had been listening with first relief and then joy, was now aghast at the last words.

  ‘No good?’

  ‘Date on passport 1988.’ Adrian was staring at Mehmet in horrified incredulity. ‘One – nine – eight – eight,’ Mehmet went on, as though to someone deaf or mentally deficient. ‘Passport too old. Out of date. No good.’

  ‘But your landlord – isn’t he going to speak to his friend?’

  ‘I ask him.’ Mehmet shrugged. ‘But … he say, difficult.’

  ‘What’s difficult about it?’

  ‘His friend big man in Home Office.’

  ‘Well, that’s all the more reason to speak to him. He’s sold us a pup!’

  ‘Please?’

  Suddenly Adrian’s face was suffused with scarlet, his small eyes popped. He had a way of suddenly losing his temper. On the last night of his visit to Seoul, he had done so with his Korean hosts, inflicting on them such a loss of face that, contrary to custom, not one of them had appeared to see him off at the airport. ‘This is fuckin’ awful!’ he shouted, his accent reverting to what once it had been. ‘ I’m not goin’ to stand for this. You just tell that mate of yours to tell his mate that if we don’t either have a proper passport or our money back, we’ll go to the police.’

  Mehmet put out a hand, as though physically to restrain him. ‘No, Adrian. No, no! Not good. No police.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Not good for you. Not good for me. Illegal to give money for passport. No matter passport no good, illegal. Police come, Mehmet become deported. Police come, big trouble for Adrian.’

  Adrian fell silent. He had had big trouble with the police once before. He did not wish to have big trouble again. ‘H’m. Yes.’ Then he wailed: ‘Oh, fucking hell!’

  Igor had been singing while pushing the vacuum cleaner back and forth in the bedroom. Adrian was changing his shirt and tie before going out to a business dinner. The noise of the cleaner irritated him more and more, until eventually he shouted: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake turn that off! I’ll be finished in a sec.’

  Igor turned off the cleaner and then, humming now instead of singing, flopped down on Adrian’s vast bed. ‘ OK! A little pause!’ He sat up, bounced up and down, and then turned over on to his stomach and crossed his legs in the air. Something in his manner, sprightly, mischievous, even flirtatious, as he had not been for years, disturbed Adrian. What had got into him?

  ‘It’s so worrying. I can’t think what to make of it. You know how I hate to be taken for a ride.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Adrian.’ The stick legs still swung back and forth. ‘But over the years you’ve been taken for a ride by so many people.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, what’s the point!’ Suddenly serious, Igor rolled over again and raised himself on an elbow. ‘There’s one thing you must do. As soon as Mehmet arrives tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes?’ Adrian struggled into his clean shirt, scrupulously ironed by Igor. Oh, shit! He had put on so much weight over the last weeks that a button popped.

  ‘You must ask to see this passport – this passport with the wrong date.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because perhaps – just perhaps – it doesn’t exist. Just as the friend of the landlord may perhaps not exist,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, what nonsense!’

  But Adrian was beginning to feel queasy.

  Adrian at once recognized the calm, deep, strong, voice on the telephone as that of Siegfried’s widowed mother. He had never met her, but he had often spoken to her when she had rung Siegfried during that period, paradisal it now seemed in retrospect, when the two of them had been together.

  A secondary schoolteacher of English, she spoke the language well. ‘Mr Martin – I am afraid I have bad news.’ Adrian at once knew what she had to say. He braced himself, as for the jab of a needle at the dentist. ‘My Siegfried passed away this morning. So peaceful. He had said he was tired, he had gone to sleep, and then … just like that.’ My Siegfried. Adrian resented that. Siegfried had been his as much as – or even more than – hers.

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Adrian had never been wholly sure whether she had ever grasped the nature of the relationship between her beautiful, wayward, idle son and this Englishman whom she knew only as a voice at the other end of a telephone line. Siegfried always maintained that she hadn’t, but that was difficult to believe.

  ‘He suffered so much. Perhaps – perhaps it is better this way.’

  Self-protectively, Adrian did not want to hear any more of the details; but, no doubt because she found it consolatory to go over them yet again, she proceeded to give them to him. It was soon clear that before that quiet drifting into harbour, the voyage had been ghastly.

  Eventually, Adrian wanted to shout down the telephone ‘I don’t want to have all those horrors to remember, I have enough already!’ But of course he could not do that. In mounting panic more than in grief, he made his occasional interjections of horror or sympathy. From the ca
lm exactitude with which she produced each detail in turn – the uncontrollable diarrhoea, the blotches on the skin, the fungus in the mouth, the mental confusions – she might have been a doctor or nurse describing a patient’s long dying.

  At the conclusion, she asked the question that he had been dreading: Would he be coming to the funeral, which would be held on the Tuesday after next? ‘Just a small affair, that was how he wished it, family, a few friends, close friends like you.’

  ‘When did you say it was going to be?’ He had taken in the date, but he wanted time to think of some excuse.

  ‘Tuesday twelfth. In the afternoon. You could stay here, if you wish. I’d be happy for that.’

  ‘Oh, lord! I so much wanted to come. But … That’s the date of our annual general meeting. I simply must be there.’

  ‘Oh. I am sorry. He would have wanted you.’

  He guessed, even though the calm, deep, strong tone of voice had scarcely altered that, with an intuition similar to her son’s, she had seen through the deception. In an effort to make amends, he said: ‘Of course I want to send some flowers.’

  ‘No flowers. But thank you very much. That was his wish. He said no flowers but a donation to some AIDS charity. Only if people so wanted, of course.’

  ‘Well, then I’ll do that, of course I will. I’ll send a cheque at once.’

  ‘That is kind of you … Oh, there is one other matter, Mr Martin.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your letters. My Siegfried kept all your letters. Shortly before – before it happened, he gave them to me. In an envelope. Sealed. Of course I have not read them. He told me to send them to you. I thought that I could give them to you at the funeral, but since you are not coming – cannot come – I will post them to you. Registered mail, of course.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. There’s no hurry. But, yes, I’d like to have them.’ In fact, he did not in least want to have them, redolent of those bitter-sweet years of quarrels, partings, reconciliations, jealousies, meannesses and, yes, in spite of all those things, a love that had less and less depended on their never wholly satisfactory sex and that, despite or because of that, had grown stronger and stronger, until that hideous illness had begun to eat away at its roots.