Young Man, I Think You're Dying

by Joan Fleming

“Oh, my man!” (as she had been instructed to call him), “what have you done with yourself?”

  “Get out of my sight!” he snarled and, going through to the bedroom, he looked for and found, where they had been tidied away, the clothes he had worn the night before last, the orange polo-necked jersey, the fisherman’s knit pull-over, the jeans … the beads. He ranged round, looking for a brown paper carrier.

  “But why do you …?”

  “What …?”

  “Please, my man …”

  With each of these small sorties he brushed her off. “If you start to be a nuisance … finish!” he told her sternly. At which, of course, she sat down and cried.

  “Is anyone coming today?” she managed through her sniffing and tears.

  “No … no! That’s all over, no more brothel-stuff, it doesn’t pay.”

  “But it does, you have said so many, many times. It pays! It pays the rent, you have said, and the rates, you have said, and the electricity, you have said. Otherwise, you have said many times, if I did not work during the day I could not stay here in this flat and have the electric fires on all day long. I have to earn my keep, you have said …” Her voice rose to a thin eastern whine.

  “Look, it’s over, don’t you understand, that part of it is over, o, VEE, EE, AR!”

  She stared at him with her strange eyes which were chocolate drops, plain and simple, there being no discernible difference in texture or colour between the iris and pupil. He had thought it many a time but had considered it would be impolite to say so; now he didn’t care whether he was impolite or not.

  He stared at her with distaste and rudely said: “Chocolate drops!” out loud.

  She gave an extended edition of her former wail; she had now fully received the message and it was one she had received before, from other men; she was being shaken off, stood up, ditched, given the push. She knew an Indian girl called Push-Pam whose name had given much amusement amongst the boys. Push-Pam had cried very much in a “Ladies” once when Amrita had found her there, and had explained to Amrita the joke of her name: “… and I get pushed out always, in the end …!” she had screamed hysterically.

  It was so much worse for an Indian girl to get pushed out than for a European girl; her family would never receive her back; her father would announce that he wished her dead rather than back home after living with any man as his wife without a ceremony.

  “I understand, I understand,” she moaned, “I am just another Push-Pam!”

  “Oh shut up, shut up!” W. Sledge cried, shouting down the tiny Calvinist inside him screaming to get out. “What do you mean, anyway, ‘just another Push-Pam’?” he couldn’t help asking.

  “You’re pushing me out and where am I to go?”

  “A young beauty like you won’t take long getting fixed up again. Go to the club or something!”

  “You don’t understand …”

  “No, I don’t. You’ve had all these chaps coming along to make love to you. Don’t any of them want a lot more of it?” he asked crudely.

  “I belong to you, to you!” she cried on a dying fall.

  “Not any more, you don’t!” W. Sledge was looking thoughtfully at the soles of the elastic-sided boots he had worn the night before last in Kensington and had wiped barely clean. They would have to go, too; they would have left quite a distinctive dent in the soil of the shrubbery where he had hidden the ladder. What a lot to be thought of, and that girl moaning and creating … it was enough to drive anyone up the pole. Push-Pam, indeed! Not a bad idea, if it came to the point.

  “Push-Pam, indeed!” he said as he rummaged about the bedroom: “All girls like you get the push in the end, didn’t you know?”

  She was silent now, hard, hard chocolate drops looking at him in horror.

  “Where the hell is that carrier?” he shouted at last. “That brown one we’ve had for months?”

  She said nothing, only stared.

  He came close to her and thrust his face up so that it was nearly touching hers: “Where is it, where is it, where is it?”

  “So you reelly are going to push me out?” she murmured in a low voice.

  “Well …” he gesticulated vaguely that that was what he had in mind.

  “But where do I go?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “… you don’t know …” she repeated drearily.

  “Look, you’re probably a lot older than I am …”

  “You know I’m not …”

  “You look it.”

  “I can’t help that, you didn’t think so when I came here, eighteen months ago. If I now look aged it is because you have sent me so many men, to wear me out. And you yourself have worn me out, with your terrible tempers!”

  “Well, that’s your look-out, isn’t it, I mean …” he shrugged.

  “You’ve changed,” she wept.

  He had turned away and was continuing his search, indifferent to her pleading, her murmuring, her complaints, her whining. He had to be, he forced himself to be: impervious.

  “All right,” she said quietly, “I shall have to tell, I shall have to tell what I know, my man; if I have to leave here I have nowhere to go, nowhere I can lay my head down. I can only go to the police station, they may be kind, they may send me to … to a welfare centre. I’m only fourteen!” (Though she had, in fact, become fifteen some months ago.)

  W. Sledge felt his blood congealing. Of course … of course … of course; the old cliché, though he did not form the words because he did not know them, but the general gist came to him for the first time in his short life: hell knoweth no fury like a woman scorned.

  Her death was suddenly legalised, it was as though she had, with bowed head, willingly agreed to her own end. Indeed—suggested it.

  Though he did not realise it, he now worked slowly, his actions retarded by an incipient sadness. She followed him about.

  “So it’s blackmail, is it?” he said once and she did not answer. Slowly he took a tool out of the kitchen drawer, prised up the carpet behind their bed, pulled up a floor board and, feeling around with his hand he brought out a fairly big wad of notes, peeled off an amount which he counted carefully, replaced the rest, put down the carpet, hammered in the tacks exactly as they had been, pushed the bed back into place and all the time she was watching him, following him back into the kitchen. It did not matter now that she knew where he hid his fortune, that is, all that he did not put into a bank.

  He found some writing paper on the pad he sometimes used, an envelope, a ball-point pen. He wrote to the rent-collecting department of the council, he told them he was going away for three months and enclosed the rent for the period; the envelope was bulgy, he licked the flap and, turning it over, he banged the back of it with his fist, looking up into her agonised face, challengingly. Triumphantly he brought out a fivepenny stamp which he had remembered to buy.

  “Blackmail,” he repeated. “You wicked girl,” he shook his head sadly, “I am ashamed of you!”

  Unaccountably but as though prolonging his time with her, he started to tidy up the little kitchen, which was, in fact, not untidy. He cleared whatever dishes there were off the table and put them in the sink. With his back turned to her he gave her one more chance.

  “You could go now,” he said clearly, “you could walk out of that door and go down in the lift and I should never see you again, that is, if you would forget you ever lived with me. I must, I must be on my own … you understand?”

  She was so silent that he looked round to see if she was still there, she moved so quietly, gliding rather than walking, an indoor girl, a girl for the bedchamber only, unpractical, unintelligent, discardable, or was it, disposable? That was it, everything useful or useless should be disposable, these days. The useful always became useless in time.

  Chocolate drops …

  “Why don’t you go?” he suggested. “I should, if I was you.”

  She stood silent, staring.

  He peered out of the window
above the sink. “A nice day, at last!” he said. He walked past her into the tiny hall, he turned and clapped his hands: “Come!”

  Stiffly, but gliding still, she went to him as though sleep walking. He opened the entrance door which was both front and back door. The sun was beginning to burn the smoky fog off the city all round, no sun shone on their entrance balcony because the flat faced north, looking across to Hampstead. She had lived only to please him, her instinct was still to please, never to resist, always to please.

  He said “Come!” and clapped his hands for the last time. What could she do other than obey, if only to please him?

  Nobody heard the high, thin scream as she fell.

  But everybody on that side of Fiery Beacon heard the shouts, the roars, the cries, the screams of terror from young S. Ledge, who chose to run the whole way down the seventeen flights of concrete stairs rather than wait for the lift; as though there was anything he could do when he arrived at ground level. He was so dizzy from the effort that he allowed himself to fall to the ground, lying face downwards, shouting his lungs to bits. They ran to help him rather than her, what lay on the ground was beyond help; nobody wanted to look anyway.

  Only one brave old man tore off the art-silk bedspread he had just been pulling neatly into place over his bed, ran out and covered the obscenity lying there on the concrete.

  Someone rushed to the telephone box, someone else ran for the nearest policeman, several people held out friendly arms to the bereaved boy who seemed to be retching his heart out; they almost struggled between themselves to take him into their homes, to give him brandy or cups of tea, to comfort him. To help.

  “Push-Pam,” he babbled wildly, “her name was Push-Pam!”

  The evening paper carried a small paragraph: “Girl falls to death from tower block” and that was all. Three days later, after the inquest, the local paper carried a somewhat longer story but the episode was too ordinary to be of much interest to their readers; the whole thing was almost too clear-cut and simple. The man Mr. Sam Ledge, aged 22, with whom she had been living for eighteen months, did not even know her surname; or perhaps had heard it at some time but could not remember, even if he could pronounce it. He had suddenly to go abroad for three months “on business” and the girl had threatened to kill herself when he had told her he could not take her.

  When she saw him actually putting the three months’ rent in advance into an envelope she had realised that he meant what he had said, that he was making no arrangements for her during that period, and at the thought of being left alone she became hysterical. When he had at last believed that she was comforted, she slipped out and threw herself over the balcony wall.

  One more unfortunate …

  The neighbours knew nothing about the couple but the caretakers knew that she was a prostitute who received men in the flat during the day, when the man with whom she lived was “out at work.” No relative came forward; nothing was said about her age, no one seemed to know it. The status of prostitutes having been severely devalued in recent times, the coroner really was not very interested.

  S. Ledge, much to his disgust, was described as an “out-of-work” labourer.

  It was so very obviously suicide, or in common parlance: “just one of those things …”

  S. Ledge felt sad when, back home in his flat, he opened the drawers that had been Amrita’s and saw her neatly folded saris; he did not know what he was going to do with them, but somehow, for the moment, he did not wish even to see them.

  Something was happening to him; you can’t murder two people in one week and go on being the same person inside. He could not have described the feelings he had in words, he thought only that he felt very much better for the happenings; he felt very distinctly that he was “on his way”; that he was pressing on to bigger things, not words but today’s terms covering such actual words as “omnipotent,” “infinitely powerful.” He was now quite confident that he could make people do what he wished them to do (as he used to when he was a beautiful infant with red curls and an enchanting little face).

  He decided he would not go abroad today, he would stay for the funeral, and when he did go away it would be on his honeymoon “with the girl of his dreams,” i.e. Frances Smith. He was aware that she would have taken against him but he was now also quite sure that within a very short time of meeting her again, he would reverse the position.

  It was not surprising because it is one of the interesting phenomena of life in a tower block, that the Indian girl’s violent death was of interest to everyone on the north side of Fiery Beacon and to those on the south side, if they knew at all, it was of no more moment than if they had been living in the Antipodes. He barely remembered that these included his parents in their flat on the eighth floor, south side. He did not even wonder whether it would suddenly become clear to his parents that S. Ledge and W. Sledge were one person, their only child; they never did any thinking. When they remembered their son it was either to deny his existence or to grumble about his non-appearance; fault-finding was their only reaction to him, he thought viciously.

  After Amrita’s death, several people on the north side were kind, and would have continued to be kind but it was clear that their kindness was not wanted. It is possible that he could have made a number of friends; but it was unthinkable. He was on his own now, for a time, and when he was no longer on his own, he would be with Frances Smith. He was going on and up, without the help of neighbours or The Wotchas or anybody else.

  On his own.

  The Wotchas would have to dissolve quietly, as they would, without the leader; there need not be any ceremony or official farewell, the group must just fizzle out, and good luck to it. You had to be ruthless if you were going to get anywhere.

  CHAPTER VIII

  IT WAS SHORTLY after Sledge had left the Bogeys’ flat on the day Amrita “fell” seventeen stories to her death that Mrs. Bogey arrived home unexpectedly; tired but smiling with pleasure that she had survived her air journey safely, even though it had meant a train from Manchester. Laden with presents from Ireland for her husband and son, she staggered out of the lift with her suitcase and entered her flat to find her son sitting on the hall floor with his head between his knees and a strange young lady in animated conversation with Mrs. Bogey’s dear but helpless husband. After kissing her family she took off her hat and coat and hurried into the kitchen to make tea; there was a lot to be explained and tea was essential. It was the sort of situation in which she excelled.

  There was an Irish tweed jacket for Joe and a toy leprechaun on a piece of elastic, which she pinned to the curtain in her husband’s room “for luck”; Miss Frances Smith was accepted without question and tea dispensed.

  The first thing had to be an ecstatic description of the twins, which went on for several minutes. When the tea was drunk Mr. Bogey thought it was time for her to have a little rest but Mrs. Bogey swept all idea of “tiredness after her journey” aside. There was a crisis on and nothing, to Mrs. Bogey, was more stimulating.

  She apologised for her delayed return; there had been trouble over the air ticket and she had had to wait at Dublin Airport until a cancelled seat on a plane had been available; she had had no opportunity to telephone. She looked from her husband to her son and across to Miss Frances Smith, half sitting on the window-sill, looking dreamily down to the bright, now shining river.

  “Now what’s been happening?” she wanted to know.

  “It’s Sledge!” Joe’s Dad said.

  Sledge’s ugly visit, seen and heard by Frances Smith and certainly heard by his father, had somehow made Joe’s troubles everybody’s; his mother could not possibly have arrived home at a better moment. Joe Bogey’s problem had become universal.

  “It would be,” Joe’s Mum nodded, tapping her fingers restlessly, but that was the only way in which her manner fell short of perfection. She detested Sledge and suspected that he had led her son into situations which he would never otherwise have considered, but for the
sake of keeping her small family together she had resolutely refrained from criticism. Nothing she heard about Sledge would surprise her; she only trusted vaguely in Joe’s being “all right”; that belief only had kept her mouth shut over the years; that, and the hope that Joe would “grow out of Sledge.”

  But she was prepared for the worst and the worst it was: “… I’ve driven him often,” Joe argued as though to himself, “you know that. Yes, I do know he often went on what you’d call ‘robbery expeditions,’ he always gave us an outline of what he was doing but we asked no questions. He went on a job, all I did was drive. Why did I? You might ask, Mum, but you haven’t, so I’ll tell you. (a) Because it was a bit of excitement, (b) Because I like driving (you paid for me to have lessons and I passed my test; what was I going to drive, eh?) And (c) biggest reason of all: I got paid well. Sometimes a fiver or it might be a tenner, and three or four times it’s been twenty-five quid, just according. It’s not gone on drink, girls or hashish,” he said humbly, but hoping this might tell in his favour, “but gone into the bank, the one in King’s Road near World’s End.”

  The question of his own pizza bar did not for the moment arise; you can’t start up a pizza bar from gaol and that was the only future Joe foresaw for himself now.

  “Last night, no, the night before, was the same as had often happened before; he came for me at work. We went off, nothing special, the flat of an old lady in Kensington, silver whatnots, that was all. I wore the chauffeur’s cap, like I’ve done often; drove him there; waited outside like it was for one of the people living in the flats … out he comes in his posh raincoat, the pockets swinging so I knew he was loaded, gets into the car and is sick all over his boots, so I know what …”

  His mother nodded. “Of course,” she agreed, “and so do I; he was always being sick when he went too far …”

  “He’d gone too far all right. She was a Lady somebody, Bellhanger, that’s it. He … he smothered her.”

  His mother nodded again: “I saw it in the evening papers; that was Sledge, was it?”