Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

  The house throbbed with the sound of Blockade’s rehearsal. Frederick’s voice came, amplified and hoarse, down the stairs: ‘bomb, bomber, bomb, bomb, over here, over here’; and the sound of amplified explosions, a lot of screaming feedback which went on and on.

  She bent to pick two bills off the tiles.

  Over the explosions she heard someone yelling. She straightened up. Seymour King, Blockade’s manager, thin and ratty, stood on the stairs.

  ‘Polly!’

  She adopted a defensive attitude, rapidly straightened her shoulders and shouted back.

  ‘Seymour. Why are you rehearsing here?’

  ‘Where’s that bloody transit? Did you take it?’

  ‘I don’t want you rehearsing here. I’ll have the police round again.’

  He came up to her, still shouting. ‘You can’t even fucking drive. You’ll smash it up. You must be out of your skull.’

  ‘Get them out of here, Seymour. They’re making the children cry.’

  There was a howl from the amplifiers, the noise stopped, feet began to bang about overhead.

  ‘I needed that fucking van, Polly. I had to hire a mini-van to get the stuff over here. If you fucking touch it again I’ll report it stolen, I’ll put a bomb in it.’

  Polly put her face close to his. ‘The wiring in this house is horrible, Seymour. You’ll blow the place up under you. I’ll be done for Noise Abatement.’

  ‘I’ve got too much on my mind to talk to you, Poll. Just leave that van alone.’

  ‘Get them out of here’, she called, as he ran back upstairs. Long Tall Timmy was on the landing. ‘It’s no good, Seymour,’ he said, ‘we’ll blow the fucking place up.’ He winked at Polly. ‘A copper’s walked past twice in the last five minutes, looking up.’

  ‘The vibes are terrible here’, Alexander said, appearing, even longer and taller, behind Long Tall Timmy’s back. He looked sad. His face was very thin, carved in two by a high, bony nose. His blond hair gleamed on his shoulders.

  The doorbell rang. Alexander ran past her and opened the door, shut it quickly.

  Dealer Ben stood in Polly’s hall. Alexander began to talk to him. Polly ran down.

  ‘I told you I didn’t want him in here again’, she said to Alexander.

  Benny looked at her with flat brown eyes, blank as a Mexican’s sitting under a wall in the sun.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

  Benny stared her down through his lizard’s eyes. He did not blink.

  ‘Band upstairs?’ he said to Alexander.

  Alexander nodded. Benny went upstairs. Polly stared at his back. Alexander was following him.

  ‘You’re ridiculous you know’, he said, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘He shopped Sarah when he got caught with all that heroin on him—made a deal so he only got six months.’

  The phone rang in the kitchen. Polly ran down and answered it. She stood beside the table which carried newspapers which had once held fish and chips. An empty bottle of champagne lay beside a jar of gherkins. Polly stood on one leg in a ray of sunshine and leant over to fill the kettle.

  ‘Blockade’s not here’, Alexander mouthed from the doorway.

  ‘It’s your agent in New York’, she said, putting the kettle on the gas.

  Timmy came in and put his arm round her. ‘I’m sorry about being here, Poll’, he said. ‘Seymour messed up the bookings—you know.’

  Upstairs Pamela began to cry. Polly suddenly felt tired.

  ‘I’m splitting Polly’, he said. ‘See you tonight at this turnout in Chelsea?’

  She nodded. ‘I expect so.’

  She saw his long legs in jeans, spangled boots, going up the stairs. Blockade travelled all day, screamed, played and stamped at gigs all night, got back in the van and travelled on. Sometimes in winter, when they dragged themselves in, tired and red-eyed, booted, long haired, fur-jacketed, they looked like the crew of a Spitfire coming back from a dogfight over the Channel.

  ‘Getting any sleep these days, Timmy?’ she called.

  ‘It’s OK now, Poll’, he said. It probably wasn’t, she thought, but it was a man’s life in the regular heavy rock and roll army.

  Alexander jumped up and down by the gas stove, screaming, ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Only lost me two thousand dollars.’

  ‘Look Alexander,’ she said desperately, ‘have we any money coming in at all?’

  ‘Not unless you have. Not till June. I’ll get the second payment on my book then.’

  ‘You know I haven’t. Can’t you get something out of the record company? They’ll cut everything off. I can’t even get Social Security.’

  ‘I’ll try and raise something tomorrow. Borrow from my agent on the strength of the payments in May. Tell you what—you do it. I haven’t the time. Where’s Timmy?’

  ‘He went upstairs.’

  ‘Christ. I must talk to him before he goes.’ He ran upstairs.

  The phone rang again. ‘Is Matthew there?’ asked a girl.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Jenny. Is that Polly?’

  ‘I think he’s left’, said Polly and ran upstairs.

  Blockade was packing up the equipment. ‘Girl called Jenny, are you here, Matthew?’ asked Polly of a back bent over a snare drum.

  A pale, tight look at her—he shook his head. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, after a pause, ‘can you—?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Just left’, she told the phone.

  ‘Er—do you know where he’s going?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry—no.’

  ‘Was he with the band?’

  ‘He was when he left.’

  ‘Oh—it’s Jenny, if he comes back ask him to call me. Jenny’, she said again.

  ‘I will’, said Polly.

  The phone rang again. ‘He’s out at present Mr Lightfoot. I’ll ask him to ring you when he comes in—oh, yes—come and see you.’

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me when you will be able to cover your overdraft.’

  ‘Not in the near future, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I see. Perhaps you’d better stop signing cheques until we’ve talked the matter over, Mrs Kops.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do understand me. No more cheques, Mrs Kops.’

  ‘I do understand. Goodbye, Mr Lightfoot.’

  A relaxing game of football in the garden, Polly thought, running off the premises with a striped ball under her arm feeling just like George Best. The phone rang again, she handed the ball to the little girls, who were jumping up and down and laughing.

  ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘Polly—Hi. Is Alexander in?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll get him. Are you over there or over here?’

  ‘I’m in Regent’s Park. Here for a month.’

  ‘Is Blanche with you?’

  A silence. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Oh—that’s too bad. Come to a party with us tonight.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Come here at eight.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  She ran into the garden as the phone rang again.

  They got all ten of them into Alexander’s Buick. Matthew, Blockade’s drummer and Timmy, lead guitar, Slasher and Mary, the girlfriend of one or other of them, and Hi, already drunk and stoned and looking for a girl to help him forget Blanche and be loved again, and Martin Sutcliffe, a mathematics don, coming down, and Tracy, frighteningly high after putting down too many pills because Toddy was at Sarah’s erecting shelves, and Jo, an old school friend of Alexander’s who had just turned up, and Lady Clarissa.

  They passed the rest of them, Frederick, Blockade’s singer, Ulla Helander, Alexander’s secretary, and Lester Dent, a science fiction writer, trying to flag down a taxi in Ladbroke Grove.

  Going the wrong way round the round-about they passed them again, and all gave each other a cheer. Polly, as always, wondered whether the children woul
d go to her mother or to the Kops’s to be reared when they were orphaned. Taxi-crash in Aberdeen, thirty-one Scotsmen killed, she thought. It’s a bummer, a bummer, she thought, in her purple Biba dress, her eyes heavy with makeup.

  ‘Acapulco Gold?’ Sutcliffe said politely, handing her the joint.

  ‘Too tired’, she said.

  Below, a police launch, small as a matchbox toy, swept downstream to Rotherhithe. A tourist launch, with tiny revellers crammed up against its knitting needle rails, ploughed along from Westminster Pier. Polly stood in the huge bow window of Angela Sandys’s flat in Cheyne Walk, watching. Behind her, two people spoke:

  ‘I say. I thought I ought to tell you your girlfriend’s injecting herself in the lavatory.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Well, she’s not lying on the floor with the syringe poking out of her arm, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘All right, man, cool it. Everything’s cool.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that she’s my sister.’

  Polly felt restless, held out her glass for more champagne, drank it. Behind her, people tried to chat over heavy rock. She turned her head a bit. The fireplace was genuine Adam, the silks, satins, denim, genuine King’s Road hippy, the rakes were in progress, stockbrokers, merchant bankers swung desk-bound bodies in abandon restrained only by their capital assets, girls turned-on by Mousie the Shetland, Prince the hunter, Miss Simms captain of games, Dr Macintosh, now forced themselves on to different stimuli. Tracy was swaying a suggestive bump against Martin Sutcliffe’s attenuated body. Alexander stood, one arm cocked in Ulla Helander’s purple satin, one in the grey-suited arm of Adam Gascoyne, the progressive Labour MP to whom he was talking earnestly.

  ‘Listen. I’m not saying anything about it. But there’s always something’, said a voice. ‘Well, look at it. Sunday there was the mental hospital. Monday there was her abortion—was it Monday? Well, Tuesday. Monday there was that business with the axeman where she works. All right—none of it’s her fault. But it’s a strain.’

  Strobe lights began to glimp and glitter. The faces behind were diabolical, heavenly, red, green, starry. Money was no object in persuading nearly a hundred publishers, politicians, poets, playwrights, musicians, rich and poor layabouts, knights, esquires and an IRA bomber, wives, sweethearts, mistresses and secretaries that they were part of a really cool experience.

  Hi, the forsaken American, was kissing Lady Clarissa’s shoulder. Lester Dent, the science fiction writer was trying a mind-fuck, talking very fast, to her. She stared groggily ahead, dreaming her dreams, as the drums and lights came and went.

  Polly, getting a bit more champagne, flowing tonight like water, five hundred bottles, she thought, lying in the deep freeze, bump supper night tonight, started to cross the room, goosed by an obvious stockbroker.

  ‘You remind me so much of a beautiful Italian girl I once knew.’

  ‘Spaghetti’s off tonight, dear.’

  She stumbled across Blockade’s drummer, Matthew. Dancers fell resentfully against them.

  ‘How do, Matthew’, she chanted.

  ‘I don’t half fancy a cuppa’, he said wretchedly. ‘Do you think this Angela bird would let you put the kettle on, Poll?’

  ‘I’ve taken ten milligrammes of Valium, which is five more than I normally take. But I still keep on crying.’

  ‘It makes you cry—Valium does.’

  ‘What shall I do? They tell me to try pot. Shall I ask one of these hippy-types if they’ve got any?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I’ve got to split’, said Matthew.

  ‘What—leave the band?’

  He was gone. She’d put the kettle on, find him, give him a cup of tea. Noise. Noise. That’s what she’d do.

  Out into the hall, green and gold. One woman, on a velvet couch, said, ‘suggested I have a friendly affair with her husband to do us both good. No thanks, I told her.’

  ‘He stayed on for nearly six weeks, during which time I naturally paid for everything, including his cigarettes.’

  ‘I love you, Polly’, Alexander said pulling at her, pinning her against the wall with his arms above her head. She stared at him. Light caught in his gold hair, beamed off his brilliant blue eyes.

  ‘Who? Do what?’ she said, sliding down under his arms, like a fox.

  ‘Degenerate types. Abnormal’, said a voice.

  People were sitting on the stairs.

  ‘Ooh, what a super kiss.’

  ‘I can see your knickers, lovely.’

  ‘—gazumped.’

  ‘—pitch-pine panelling.’

  Blockade was sitting round the kitchen table drinking cups of tea and playing cards. In the middle of the table were four mandies, two tabs of acid and a joint. Matthew was crying. ‘Tired, slagged’, he kept on saying.

  ‘Play your hand, Matthew,’ Frederick the singer said, ‘I’ll take you home in a minute.’

  ‘I saw Seymour lying on the floor as I came through’, Polly said. ‘His dog was sitting at his feet, like a dead knight.’

  ‘He went spare when Matthew told him’, Long Tall Timmy said. ‘Drank a bottle of champagne and fell down. A good manager, old Seymour.’

  ‘Can’t help it,’ said Matthew, ‘but the recording—’

  ‘Plenty of drummers—we can do it’, said Jo. ‘Come back when you feel like it. Where’s that cousin of yours Polly?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘No—Clancy Goldstein.’

  Polly’s hands turned into lumps of clay. ‘Still in Africa, last time I heard.’

  She took a half-empty bottle of champagne, filled her glass, went upstairs, still holding the bottle, baptizing people.

  ‘Introibo ad altarem.’

  ‘Who is that woman?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Maria all evening. Unless she’s got her wig on.’

  ‘Offer them ten thousand more—they’ll take it.’

  ‘Dirty weekend.’

  ‘Up yours, then, mate, with knobs on.’

  ‘With the gypsies. How frightfully interesting.’

  ‘Where’s my chain belt.’

  ‘—scrumptious. Do it again.’

  At the top, there was Tracy, clutching her stomach. ‘Ooh Poll, I do feel funny.’

  ‘Blockade’s having a cuppa in the kitchen’, said Polly in a muffled voice.

  ‘Thank Christ. That’s what I could do with.’

  Polly, clutching a bad thought, lost it again. At Elgin Crescent the roof was undoubtedly leaking, drip, drip. She wasn’t having a good time. Might as well go home and put the buckets out. A little peace, past people, over Wilton and Axminster, under chandeliers, fancy letting people come and tread on it, drop fagends on it, splash champagne all over it. Look at the marks on the wall—a lipstick kiss. She weaved upwards, her body bending and swaying like a bendytoy. She encouraged it a bit and nearly fell downstairs. What a ratbag—scuffed shoes, chiffon tat, paint running down her face, such huge boiled-red hands—she sat down on a quiet green landing, under a potted palm. May I have the pleasure of this dance? Anything that will give you pleasure, Monseigneur, will give me some, too. What about a water ice? How nice.

  Some clicks in the computer of her brain and the signal came; open the door on the right. Polly opened it.

  Muffled music and voices came from downstairs, and the popping of corks.

  There on the lace-coverleted four-poster bed lay her husband, Alexander Kops. Underneath him lay bare-thighed Ulla Helander. As she watched, Alexander strengthened his grip in her piled-up blonde tresses, and with his other hand pulled down her knickers from under the purple satin dress, drew them off and flung them to the floor with a strangled groan.

  Polly went out, leaving the door open. Going down she met Gascoyne, MP, red-faced and clutching a champagne bottle.

  ‘Have you seen your husband, Mrs Kops?’

  ‘Upstairs, first on the right’, she said bitterly.

  She went out through the open f
ront door and started to walk home. The traffic sped harshly past her as she paced along tipsily in her party dress.

  That was that, then. Kops and that pig. Not that she had ever believed the story about needing a secretary, believed in the business trips, believed that she bought that fourteen-guinea beaded bag out of her wages. Polly thought of her wedding at Caxton Hall, wearing a beige dress, carrying a black handbag and twins. Thought of the hospital, dressing them in their woolly going-away sets, taking them back to two rooms in Euston, trying to get her job back and failing, living on Heinz babyfood—oh, fuck you, Alexander Kops, she said, fuck you. Well, the lease is in my name, that’s a blessing. I’ll boot you out and turn the place into a toy factory. Had Tracy known for certain? An ambulance passed, clanging its bell. Polly knew without a shadow of a doubt, that it was for Tracy. Blockade knew about Ulla, that’s why they’d been so nice recently. Coming from poor homes, they weren’t keen on erring husbands. Spoilt bugger Kops, great big fat-ass Ulla. No, perhaps she was a warm human being underneath. Her roof didn’t leak either, she didn’t need to borrow from her mother to pay for children’s shoes. Filthy pig, Kops. Just a minute—just a minute—she’d slept with that man at Brighton herself, what’s sauce for the goose. Oh, Polly groaned aloud, oh, oh, oh.

  Two cars hooted at her. She flagged down a taxi, got in and burst into tears.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ said the driver.

  ‘I’ve had one too many,’ said Poll, ‘and I think my cousin’s miscarrying.’

  ‘That’s nasty,’ said the man; ‘is it her first?’

  ‘Yes’, said Poll.

  ‘Poor thing’, he said. ‘My wife had two miscarriages before she had our first.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame’, said Poll.

  ‘Got six of them, now’, he told her.

  ‘Phew’, said Polly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said, Phew’, she told him. ‘That’s a lot.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Tell her what I said though. Perhaps it’ll cheer her up.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  It must have started that week she went to Wales with her Mum, Polly thought. She thought it was funny he’d changed the sheets when she got back—not like Kops to change the sheets. Make an issue out of it, boot him out, turn the place into a toy factory. Stinking hypocrite, no wonder he kept telling her she needed a holiday.