by Joan Fleming
Though his babyhood had been a long, long time, the period between then to puberty passed quickly. The problem of this unruly thing in his trousers was easily solved with the help of two or three grubby little girls in his class at school, on old bombed sites or vacant lots near the World’s End or somewhere far enough away from their own neighbourhood, at the weekends.
Whereas at fourteen he had looked four years older than he was, a large ungainly youth whose features had gone ahead of him becoming sharp and pointed, as it were, at eighteen he looked twenty-five, smaller and neater as to body but still with the wild red hair.
“Well, Winston?” his exhausted schoolmaster asked him on his last day at school: “What are you going to be?”
“Me, sir?” It paid to be polite to authority, however much you might despise it. “I’m going for a night-watch-man.” Not for him the “tiny breakfast, trolley-bus and windy street.”
The schoolmaster laughed: “Ambitious, what?” and young Winston felt his guts wrung by bitter anger; he hated being laughed at, even when it was meant kindly.
Certain concessions, however, had to be made to the demon work, such as the carrying of a few bricks daily for some weeks; making tea in the portable huts for building teams; lowering the back of brick-loaded lorries, sometimes automatically and at other times actually jumping down and unhitching the back so that gravel could be shovelled out. He enjoyed working the concrete mixer, too. He became adept at the art of standing about near groups of workers, or amongst them, so that he gave the appearance of being at work but doing nothing more useful than a cow chewing its cud, less in fact, because he was neither feeding himself nor making milk. He joined a firm of subcontractors who employed men whom they sent round to various sites; a few days here, a week or so there; he could stay away from work whenever he felt like it, absenteeism becoming his favourite pastime.
And there were the final achievements of joining a union and later pouring sweet reason over the heads of the various clerks with whom he had to deal at the Employment Exchange. He spent so much charm on this that he was drained of it when it came to dealing with the old folks at home. He simply couldn’t be bothered with them, so interfering, so possessive; they irritated him. Until such time as he chucked them completely they got badly on his nerves and frayed the edges of his temper; his mother particularly, she would not “leave well alone” and let him “get on with it.”
In the meantime he opened a banking account because he could not trust that old harridan his mother not to go through his room with great curiosity when he was out. No questions were asked at the bank; he simply went in wearing his best suit and said he wished to open an account, handing over the neat sum of fifty pounds in notes, to start with.
It was all a matter of doing that which was within your scope and not trying for the biggest stuff, but above all working for yourself.
Pickpockets are on the wane now in comparison with Victorian days but there are still pickpockets around and, freelance as he was, after a great number of unsuccessful attempts, he got the knack. It was first a matter of choosing the right circumstances, not clumsily trying to do it on Saturday afternoons in a crowded High Street, for instance, the paterfamilias being, on these occasions, very conscious of his bulging hip pocket. A football match crowd, too, was not as profitable as one might think; folk didn’t carry money in bulk when they went to watch the game.
On the other hand, he had had some successful hauls at London Airport, not many but a few large ones, pocket books of flustered travellers from California, seeing to their baggage. The customs counter at Southampton after a big Cunarder had berthed had proved remunerative, too, if one appeared as a porter. Once a drunken old North Country manufacturer whom he had helped as he reeled out of a nude show in Soho had yielded just under three hundred quid.
Four years of hard, grinding experience, with its triumphs and its disappointments, had qualified him for the bigger stuff. All alone, in rubber-soled plimsolls and light clothing with capacious pockets, he had entered and stolen over the years. He felt wise and deeply experienced: observation was what mattered, and the knowledge resulting from this; he felt he could have written a manual, albeit a very, very short one: Axioms for beginners.
Don’t be greedy.
Start small.
Make sure it’s within your scope.
Have a careful look round first.
When you’ve decided, do it quick.
But the most important of all was the one which, owing to flaws in his character, he abandoned first:
Do It Alone.
The trouble was that, though he became a master of his art, he did not become master of himself. He indulged.
He did not gratify himself in drugs, or in drink or any other of the vices of the flesh; he allowed himself to enjoy the pleasure of having power over other people much less clever than himself. The same power, which in embryo, he had felt as a cherubic infant with marigold curls. Now that he was no longer a joy to look upon, of such physical perfection that he could make other people do anything he wanted them to do: now that he had been obliged to abdicate that role, he had to cultivate other kinds of magnetism. Thus, in a permissive society which allowed of no adventure in disobedience, no discipline which it was necessary to flout, no thrills in the way of National Service in which one might excel, leaving nothing in fact except a vacuum and the word bored, he specialised in the only thrill he could think up, that of leading others into breaking the law, showing them how; demonstrating the exquisite cleverness of robbing and stealing for a livelihood. That’s where the do it alone adage went, in self-indulgence.
As yet he was not confident enough in his pupils to allow them to take a major role but he was training his little gang of Wotchas in Perfection, with a big P. Though some of them were as old and even older than himself, he was the model upon which they were going to base their future solo efforts. His “Band of Buggers” he called them in his mind and sometimes out loud but secretly and almost tenderly, his “boys”; this only when he was in a good temper.
Entrepreneur was a word with which he had become familiar and it exactly applied to Winston Sledge in that he was a man who ran his own business, and sociological study has recorded that those who run businesses for themselves work harder and strive more to succeed than those working for a master.
It was clever of him, he considered, to take a flat in Fiery Beacon; he had discovered that the best lies are those which most nearly approximate to the truth. Thus one can hide more successfully within a short radius of one’s home than in a city hundreds of miles away; if he were noticed coming in or out no one would remember because he would be (sic) a familiar face and/or visiting his parents. He thought the name under which he took the flat exquisitely funny, as well as clever: S. Ledge. He made fools of everybody. Above all, he was, at first, delighted with the choice of girl he had made. She lived only to please, that is, to please her lord and master. This suited Sledge down to the ground. He thoroughly enjoyed the delicious smell of curry which would greet him when he came home to the flat; he enjoyed lying in bed and clapping his hands, as though to a slave, when he required her presence. And most of all he enjoyed making love to her because she never grumbled when he hurt her, but thought it her privilege to be hurt by him.
Of course this, like everything else, became boring in time; at a very early age he had learned from his parents that anything that lasted any length of time at all became boring but after eighteen months he had not yet become so actively bored as to consider a change. Besides, he had not yet found an adequate substitute.
Or had he?
Or had he messed it up by bad temper or by the extremely careless snatching of her handbag and excellent quality hand baggage which he could not resist?
In the manner of an elderly man who feared for the lasting quality of his faculties, he asked himself if he were slipping. His mind must definitely have been elsewhere when he almost automatically pushed her away from the car and
drove off with her possessions.
Later in the evening he realised what it had been that distracted him; it was the girl herself. Even though several mornings a week he did a brisk business in pimping, his “home-life” with Amrita, when the day’s work was done, had become humdrum.
“How about a bit of class for a change?” he had been asking himself all the way down to Maidenhead when he drove her at 90 mph. on the M4. It would mean a fall in income, of course, because the “class” could be in no way in conjunction with the pimping activities. He considered the possibility of taking yet another flat for the “class” girl but decided against it because it was unwise to increase the weekly expenses when one’s income consisted mainly of lump sums collected only by virtue of skill and some luck. No, it would be foolish to increase the amount of rent, electricity and rates which would have to be paid regularly.
It never occurred to him for a moment that the “class” girl would not fall into his arms with a moan of ecstasy; he had never yet come across a girl who had rebuffed him (this was mainly because he had been careful to pick a girl of whom he was pretty sure, first; he couldn’t have stood a genuine rebuff).
It wasn’t that she was pretty, he told himself, there were lots better-looking girls about, it was just “that she had it written all over her.” She must have turned his head because he had driven off with her baggage absent-mindedly, automatically, on the side, as it were. At the time he’d completely forgotten that he had taken her round to the Chelsea dress shop and got her into a job of sorts and of course his chums in the dress shop, high though they had been, couldn’t fail to remember by whom she had been introduced to them. It was even possible that she went to the police after he left her on the pavement.
Of course he wasn’t too worried about that aspect of it because none of his friends, and that included the hash smokers in “I Was Napoleon’s Mistress,” would split on him.
And naturally, he didn’t believe that her name was Frances Smith, it was the kind of very simple name a girl who didn’t want her real name known would think up. He would keep an eye on the papers to see if there was a missing heiress.
He prided himself on not “taking a cut off the joint” behind a clump of bushes on the tow-path in Maidenhead; suddenly he was interested in the “gentlemanly” aspect of himself in the presence of a lady. He could become a real gentleman at the drop of a hat, he told himself; he could master the lar-di-dar after a bit of private practice at the driving wheel, with nobody to listen in.
However, the real reason for not taking advantage of the situation on the tow-path at Maidenhead was that he had the Kensington block of flats robbery lined up for the evening and he made it a rule to cut out sex during the hours before he went on a tricky job, thus he kept himself more alert.
But he fancied himself very much, not only in bed with Frances Smith, but married to her, living a bit farther east, which was smart, and voting Conservative.
He went through her handbag and, as he had expected, there was no identification at all, no envelopes, no driving licence, nothing to confirm that she was Frances Smith but enough cash in five-pound notes of pristine freshness to confirm that possibly it was true that she had left home and did not intend to be sent back, would deny strenuously her identity if caught up by the police.
It was Winston-in-Wonderland-Day all right because, when he opened her case, he was thrown. The faint marvellous smell which arose from her possessions entranced him; it was not a voluptuous smell but clean and fresh and delightful, a long way from his experience of a woman’s odour. Amrita smelt nice but exotic, faintly musty. In a moment of shocking weakness he buried his face in the clothes, then reverently shut the case without disturbing anything.
Since he could not go back home till the agreed hour of six o’clock, when any male visitors would have left, he drove round and round Chelsea and the better parts of Battersea, looking for her. He went to the coffee bar where he had found her and asked if she had been back; of course she hadn’t.
And in this way the Day-to-end-all-days (not quite but getting on that way) wore on until he could go home and have a good meal.
Then there was the evening to be got through, which he did, watching television. He already decided which of his Wotchas he would use this evening, old Joe Bogey, the best of the lot, reelly. The most reliable. The most unfussy and least nervous, the most steady. The one with whom he had been friends since they were ten. Good old Joe who knew him a lot better than his parents ever had. Anyway, it was his turn.
Like a young husband setting off to work, he bent over his mistress, his beads clashing, to kiss her upon the red caste mark on her forehead; it was his talisman for the moment and he made a habit of kissing it before starting out on a job, for good luck.
And talking about good luck … before entering the pizza bar he stood outside the side entrance studying the small writing on the nameplate of Madame Joan, Palmist, who practised above. He often had his fortune told, longing always to hear that he would become great. Good fortune was always one step ahead, however; what he particularly wished to know now was that he had already Met His Fate, i.e. his One True Love. Madame Joan, however, did not keep late hours, she went to bed early, as well she might, her hours being the banal ones of 11 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., with time off for lunch; wearing herself out in unselfish occult services to others, it was right that she should have regular meals and a good night’s sleep. He would come and see her, perhaps, tomorrow.
He came away with Joe Bogey when the bar closed. He took a taxi home with Joe Bogey. He unlocked his Jag, parked on the north side parking lot. He buttoned himself into his smart new Aquascutum. Joe took off his black sweater and threw it into the back of the car. Joe put on his zipped jacket and his chauffeur’s cap, kept under the driving seat. They started off.
They arrived at the Kensington block of flats.
W. Sledge slipped round to the back of the block. He found the ladder amongst the shrubs. He leaned it against the flat roof. He climbed it, on to the small area above the ground floor. He brought out the fresh putty which he kept in a plastic bag in his rainproof pocket and plastered enough of the glass surface for his purposes. He silently crushed a hole in the glass. Putting his arm through, he unhitched the skylight fastening. He pushed up the metal rod holding the frame and slid inside, dropping soundlessly on to the corridor carpet below, thin worn carpet as befitting the retired Indian Army inhabitant of the flat. He nipped across to the living-room, unlocked the door, in which the key had been left, as always, at night. He entered. He went over to the small table. (From his observations in sale rooms he thought it was called a specimen table.) He picked up a cushion and pressed the glass, it broke, not so silently this time. With a tiny pen-torch he chose carefully, rejecting the silver-gilt but picking up the silver: three caddy spoons, five snuff-boxes of varying shapes, all silver, and a big yellow tiger’s tooth, silver-mounted, which he would examine later; and finally a silver cigarette-case, gilt carved with a pattern of bamboos, Indian silver most likely, not very valuable but saleable … He filled his pockets.
The light went on. She was standing in the doorway pointing a gun at him. She was wearing a red dressing-gown and her hair was obscene with frightful old-fashioned metal curlers. She started to make a speech. He picked up the cushion and went across to her, stuffing it over her face as he held the back of her head, her ghastly curling-pins sticking painfully into the palm of his left hand, even through the kid glove. The gun fell to the ground. He thought of picking it up but didn’t touch it. He pressed harder. It wasn’t nearly enough; she was struggling like mad; he snatched off the glove of his right hand, holding it in his mouth. He could feel the vomit rising in his throat. He pressed her neck hard where he knew he should press. He put all his strength into it. It happened surprisingly quickly. She went limp as he was holding her. She was as fragile as a bird.
He laid her on the floor, quite gently. Her eyes rolled back. He threw the cushion down on her
face. He pulled on the glove. He turned out the light. He left the flat by the front door, which was locked, barred and secured by a chain. He let the Yale lock slide back into place silently as he stood outside. He ran downstairs. He was sick in the hall. He opened the front door and let himself out. He got into his car. The chauffeur drove away from the kerb. He was sick again.
It’s me nerves, it’s me nerves … the first words he learned at Mother’s knee. It was curious that when he grew up and understood their implication, they should have fitted so exactly his own case because he wanted to make it quite clear to himself that his frequent vomiting when things went wrong for him was no mere weakness but “me nerves.” Years ago, when he’d been young and naturally savage, he had practised strangulation on stray cats in the wilderness beyond World’s End; he’d never been sick then. No one could possibly have called him weak (by which he meant, in this context, squeamish).
Young Joe Bogey had got the message all right after the first few moments, he kept his mouth shut; he was frightened, he didn’t want to hear how it had gone; he drove home as fast as he dared. When they arrived back at Fiery Beacon he took off his chauffeur’s cap, shoved it back under the seat and went off without a word.
Sledge edged himself into the driving seat and shot away in the direction of Walham Green. But on the way he had an idea; slowing down, he felt about with his free hand just touching the back seat and found what he remembered was there: Joe Bogey’s pullover. With a flashy swivelling of the driving wheel he turned suddenly in a U turn, backing on his tracks for Kensington and the block of flats he had left so recently. Leaving the car some way down the street he ran silently and swiftly back to the block of flats Nos. 1 to 30, round the side, and in the shrubbery, where he had had the ladder hidden, he dropped the pullover. He also felt he had time to put the ladder back where he had put it two days ago. Soundless and swift, unobtrusive as a rat, he left, a dark shadow in a dark shadowy world.
