A man on a grasshopper-green Kawasaki pulled up beside us. The bike sounded like a chainsaw stuck in knotty hardwood and when he blipped the throttle, a thick vapour of engine oil coughed out from three fluted pipes. He tapped his left foot, cut down a gear and swept into the lane ahead of us. His tail bulb, shaken loose by vibration, signalled a message in bursts of three: three long flashes. I remembered from my days in the boy scouts that this was the letter “O”. Oscar. Man overboard.
I thought about Chris, up to his neck, waving and looking for a ship, looking for friendship, bewildered and wrecked in the back of his taxi, the swell of London rising and falling around him. I thought about the girl in the chip shop. I thought about my mother in the ground and my girlfriend in another man’s bed. I thought about the letter “O”. Oscar. Man Overboard.
The cab driver caught me in the mirror, “Hey man, did you say something?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I said ‘Oh!’”
“Oh?” said the driver, as he turned up the radio.
19
EMPIRE
FRIDAY JULY 13, 1979
“Gosh Barry, haven’t seen you in ages! Do come in, do come in.”
Only in England could you have a polite drug dealer called Augustus. The dealers in Ireland are all vile little creatures with small moustaches and names that end with “o”. Anto, Philo, Dommo, Scummo.
“Is that a friend of yours?” asks Augustus, pointing to the car.
“No, it’s a mini-cab,” I say. “He’ll wait.”
Augustus is upset by this extravagance. His bike with its wicker basket almost blocks the hallway. A foot soldier in the great transportational war, he rarely uses cabs, buses or tubes. He closes the door after glancing one more time at the mini-cab. “Should we ask him in?”
“No”.
Like most college-educated Brits, he worries about the working man and his struggle with the forces of capital. My attitude is more fundamental: fuck ’em.
Augustus is a pale beanpole with a long, shaggy beard and a hefty dong. I know this last detail because of the picture over the mantle in the living room: Augustus and Deirdre on a shingle beach near Brighton, nude, cold and speckled with gooseflesh. Deirdre has small, uninteresting breasts and a bush the size of a tumbleweed. She waves at the camera: under her arm, more shrubbery.
I see that Augustus is holding a melodica. “I always wanted to learn an instrument,” he says.
“Is the melodica an instrument?”
“Gosh, it’s very difficult to master. It’s like playing a small piano sideways in your mouth.”
We stand in the shabby gothic hallway. A strong draft chases about our ankles and lifts the peeling wallpaper. A Belle Époque hat-stand rises up from the gloom like a three-headed serpent and the hiss of closed conversation comes from the other side of the living room door.
“Would you like to join us?” asks Augustus.
I say no, I’m not feeling too social. He hands me a small pill bottle and I give him £20.
“Mind if I use your bathroom?” I ask.
“My home is your home,” he says. “But do you mind if I say something? You really want to be careful with that stuff.”
I nod. He looks like a threadbare country doctor, and he cares. None of the dealers in Ireland – not Anto, not Philo nor Robbo – gives a damn about anybody’s health. They peddle powders laced with ground-up glass and gypsum, brick dust and rat poison. They are dark chefs in hell’s kitchen, forever spitting in the foul narcotic soup.
In the bathroom, I check the tablets. “OC” on one side and “10” on the other. Big guns. Bang-bang. I take two, crush them and put them under my tongue.
There is no mirror in the bathroom, just a small painting of a bridge on a sleepy river. It reminds me of the bridge at home, where young people waste time and watch each other.
One summer day, a man lost control of his motorcycle and cracked into the corner wall on the bridge. It didn’t happen with any great force. In fact it hardly seemed to involve enough energy to break a bone, but it did: it broke the long bone of life. We stood around him waiting for the ambulance. No one dared move him, but somebody opened the visor on his helmet. The last thing he saw was a motley collection of denim and worn corduroy. The last thing he smelled was patchouli oil and Major cigarettes.
The ambulance appeared and a guard arrived on a bicycle. The ambulance driver opened the back doors and pulled out a stretcher whilst the guard got down on one knee and whispered an act of contrition into a cold ear. The ambulance made a pointless journey to the District Hospital, where death could not be reversed, and the guard pulled the motorcycle into the post office gateway. The back tyre dragged on the warm tarmac and a cracked sump leaked engine oil in the shape of a question mark. With death swept away, the young people went back to watching each other.
The underside of my tongue is numb and the buzz is beginning to hit. How long have I been standing at the sink? One minute? Five minutes? Ten? I pull back the brass bolt and leave the bathroom. The hall is dark, except for the bright rectangle around the living room door. I should leave, but I go towards the light.
In the living room, Deirdre holds a candle aloft. She is a high priestess in tie-dyed cheesecloth, her earrings the size of piston rings. She makes her own jewellery, with more silver than restraint. Augustus blows into the melodica and for some reason I am reminded of St. Patrick’s day back home and the Presentation girls in navy pinafores. They marched behind a fat nun who pounded on a big bass drum that hung suspiciously close to her clitoris.
“Barry, so nice to see you.” Deirdre kisses me on the cheek. I look around the room and recognize Edmund Walford, an old school chum of Augustus. He has a plummy accent, a wool suit and a loose black tie. Behind him, a skinny man whose name I think is Hughie sits at the dining table, looking nervous. He is Welsh or Scottish, but it doesn’t matter because he never speaks. Finally, resting like a pasha on a beanbag, is a big black man with a joint in his mouth. I don’t know him, but he gives me a thumbs-up, and laughs like a circus clown. His shoes are off and he wears tartan socks. I’ve never seen a man look more comfortable.
Deirdre puts some brown powder on a sheet of tinfoil and warms it up with the candle. The powder turns into liquefied pellets that dodge about like scared insects.
I glance at the portrait over the mantle, the chilly Augustus with his kielbasa unfurling and Deirdre with her tangled black alpaca. I realise something immediate and profound: nudists made my skin crawl.
Edmund Walford wags a finger in my direction as he tries to identify me. “Last time we met, you were in the company of a young lady. She was quite stunning. Irish lass. Am I right?” He presses his temples and forces out a thought. “I’m thinking of Kipling,” he says. “Why am I thinking of Kipling? Has it got something to do with her name?”
“Yeah,” I say, “her name is Rudyard.” I do not want to talk about my ex-girlfriend.
The black dude with the tartan socks, prompted by the name of the poet of Empire, launches into recitation in a deep booming bass:
“Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.”
The black dude laughs and slaps the floor with the palm of his hand, sending a cascade of hash sparks into the carpet.
“Her name is Kim,” says Walford, snapping his fingers. “What happened to her? Is she still around?”
I don’t answer. She is gone because she is sick of me. I am also sick of me, but I’m stuck with that.
One mid-summer night I sat on that bridge, on the wall close to the weir, where I always sat. I could see her approaching. She wore a light-brown jacket and a pair of cream slacks, slip-on shoes, no socks.
“I h
ad a dream about you last night,” she said. “We were throwing snow at each other.”
“Snowballs,” I said.
“No, just snow.”
Then she walked away.
A week later, there was a dance in the rugby club. I hated rugby and I hated dances, but most of all, I hated crap bands. Why do you need a licence for a fishing rod, but any cunt can pick up a guitar? A slow song started, and all the loaded Lotharios who were nursing their semi-erections through the protracted murder of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” hit the floor like launched torpedoes, aimed amidships at big girls who mostly looked unsinkable. I turned to leave, because it all seemed impossible and pointless – and there was Kim Sutton, looking at me looking lost, looking for her.
That was when the madness started. The courtship was fast and dangerous with unprotected sex and furious, curious fumbling in the double-seats at the Coliseum picture house, back row.
Once, we stayed out all night. The next day, her father summoned me. He sat me down in a chair deliberately placed too close to the stove. “She’s sixteen years old,” he said as I started to cook, “and you can keep her out any night you want, as long as you don’t mind marrying her.” He was a man with a cluster of good-looking daughters and he believed in a flexible, practical morality. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The sweat rolled down and I nodded.
He threw another shovel of coal into the stove and looked through the flames until his face lit up like a Halloween mask. “That girl gets into trouble,” he said, sliding back the iron lid with a heavy poker, “you’ll either be wearing a wedding suit or a shroud. Am I clear?”
I nodded again. There would be less unprotected sex in the future.
Kim Sutton laughed when she heard the details. “He does that to all the boyfriends,” she said. “We call it the ‘hot coals treatment’.”
Six months later, after her final exams, she hit the road, and I followed. It was all good, until it was all bad. I didn’t mean to become mean, but I did.
“Hello!” says Walford with a snap of his fingers. “Anybody home? I asked you a question.”
I don’t like his tone. “You’ll find it hard to snap those fingers when they’re stuck up your fucking arse,” I reply.
The room goes as quiet as the inside of a stopped clock. Augustus lets the melodica slide from his lips and Deirdre shakes her head in an effort to dislodge my rudeness. The Welsh Scot says nothing, but his eyes explore the darkest parts of the room. The big black dude blows out smoky air with a swivel of his neck, like a human oscillating fan. He alone seems unperturbed by my behaviour.
“I have to go,” I say, and no one asks me to stay. Augustus brings me to the hallway where the same cool breeze dodges around our ankles.
“It’s just a habit of his,” he says. “Edmund. He tends to snap his fingers.”
“He snapped, I snapped,” I say.
Augustus frowns and becomes the country doctor once more. “I think we’ll have to adjust your medication.”
He really does care. He is the sweetest dealer in the world, a darling dealer, and I don’t deserve him. I belong back amongst the Irish scumbags, the Mickos, the thickos and the sickos with their crushed glass and powdered laxative designed to cut holes in your nose.
I leave the house and walk down the garden path. The sky is full of sparks that look like stars. Everything wobbles. Parked outside the gate, the cab is empty, abandoned, but the meter inside is still running. I look around, expecting to see the driver relieving himself on a bush, or returning with a bag of greasy chips.
Nothing.
Off in the distance, the Post Office tower points upwards like a tottering pile of crockery. When you don’t know a city, you can head in any direction and end up nowhere.
The brightness in the sky is most intense in one particular place. It’s probably the West End. I start to walk. It’s a good time to think about Kim Sutton. The arguments and the tears, the punctuation of slammed doors, the light brown jacket, cream slacks, slip-on shoes, no socks.
We were throwing snow at each other and now she’s in fucking France.
I hear Deirdre’s voice: “Take it easy, Gerald.”
The black dude leaves the house and she closes the door behind him. He strolls down the garden path with the joint sizzling in his mouth. “Where you going, man?” he asks. “You know you can’t leave without me.”
I’m confused.
He shakes a bunch of keys and jumps into the taxicab.
I’m even more confused. “You’re the driver?”
He laughs and fires up the engine. “Who did you think I was?”
I get in on the passenger side. He hands me the joint as he fiddles with the radio. A voice tells us that the new pope will soon visit Britain. “After John-Paul,” I say, “what are the chances that the next pope is called George-Ringo?”
Gerald does his Barnum & Bailey laugh and takes back the joint. “You are so stoned, baby,” he says. “So, so, so, so stoned.”
20
WATERMARK
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 1979
I ran my finger down the column in the back of the Evening News and found a man in Ealing with a one-bed close to the tube.
“I’m looking for someone a bit more…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but the word he was looking for was “English”.
“I don’t need much space,” I said. “Just enough room to build a small bomb.”
He hung up.
A man in Camden Town with a raspy voice said, “I would like a young man to share. How do you feel about sharing?”
“I don’t mind doing the dishes or mopping the floor,” I said, but I knew he was talking about my body.
I came to a small ad that said: CHELSEA. BASEMENT. SUIT SINGLE MAN. There was no phone number, just an address on Ifield Road.
Maura was originally from Mullingar. She wore a white blouse, a plaid skirt and she had twice as many rings as fingers. “I knew I’d catch an Irishman with that advertisement,” she said. “The English won’t answer anything without a telephone number at the end of it.”
She made me a cup of tea and neatly arranged four biscuits around the saucer at twelve, three, six and nine. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke sideways, towards a sealed-up fireplace. She switched off the radio and studied me.
“You’re neat,” she said. “You don’t look like you work on the buildings.”
I told her I had an office job and she raised both eyebrows.
“An Irishman with an office job!” The way she said it, it sounded absurd, like a chimpanzee with a sports car or a Martian in a bungalow.
I told her about the open-plan office in Hayes, the coffee machine, the engineers, the architects, the secretaries, and my own role as draughtsman at Calder Hall, home of Britain’s military plutonium.
“They have a coffee machine?” she said, clearly impressed.
I asked her how she’d ended up in Chelsea, but she didn’t explain. She just coughed out a confusion of smoke and said, “An Irishman with a clean job and an Irishwoman with a fancy house. We’re quite the pair aren’t we?”
I heard something rustle in the corner. Close to the window, in a high-backed armchair, a man in his early sixties sat reading the newspaper. He had a little silver question mark of hair in the middle of his head and his cheeks had been rubbed with hard soap. One hand held the folded newspaper. The other was deep in a jacket pocket, as if he were expecting a gunfight.
“That’s Himself,” she said.
Himself nodded and I nodded back.
“Would you like to see the basement?” asked Maura.
I said yes. She brought me downstairs to a neat room with two beds, a kitchenette and a small bathroom. She pulled the floor-length curtain and revealed a French window that opened into the narrow front yard. A steep metal staircase led to the street.
“You can come and go as you please,” she said. “You’ll also have an upstairs key, just in case you want to v
isit us, but you don’t have to. The rent is twenty pounds.”
“Will I pay you now?” I asked.
“You haven’t lived here yet,” she said.
For three weeks the routine was unchanging. A low-level existence, a gentle drifting through space and doorways: leave the house at seven every morning, catch a bus, sit at a desk, then reverse the sequence. I didn’t read a book or a newspaper. I didn’t own a radio or a television. I spoke to no one. The world was beyond reach and time was endless.
Most evenings I came back to the room and sketched in charcoal, or scribbled bad poetry on the backs of old drawings, brought home from the office. Every Saturday I put twenty pounds in an envelope and slipped it under the door upstairs. On the fourth Saturday, the door opened before I’d had time to leave.
“I never answered your question,” said Maura.
“What question?”
“How did a little girl from Mullingar end up in a grand place like this?”
We sat at the round table and she filled two glasses with vodka. The football chants from Stamford Bridge rose up over Brompton cemetery, and the sing-song of hate sounded playful and sweet in the distance.
“Chelsea,” Maura said. “They’re playing Wrexham. Do you follow the soccer?”
I said I didn’t, and she said she didn’t. I thought it was a waste of time and energy and she thought it was a waste of green grass and open space. A roar went up. “Win, lose or draw,” she said, “they’ll break windows on the Fulham Road tonight.”
Himself stirred in the shadows, a sack of tired bones lifting itself from the armchair. As awkward as it must have been, his right hand never left his pocket. “I’ll go to the shop before the match is over,” he said.
A Ton of Malice Page 12
