by James Brodie
“Well, we’re going to a party. You’ll love it.”
Earls Court is the sort of area that has led the word ‘cosmopolitan’ to come to be associated with seediness. At some time in the past it was colonised by Australian refugees, at another time the whores came, perhaps attracted by the guaranteed regular custom derived from the business efficiency exhibitions and the like held at the great halls. Philbeach Gardens was centrally positioned in this enclave. It left Warwick Road just north of the main entrance to the Earls Court Exhibition Halls and rejoined it just before the crossroads with Cromwell Road. By rights it should have been called a crescent. There were better streets than Philbeach Gardens in Earls Court, but there were also a lot worse. Its aspect was made daunting by the height of the houses, uniformly four stories, in conjunction with the relative narrowness of the street. It was not a joyous place. The cabby dropped us at the south end and Christopher pointed to the steps leading to a basement flat. The door was open and a red light cast reluctant illumination over the basement area. A lazy, recalcitrant Caribbean rhythm was coming up to street level and seeping along the pavement. We went down and stepped inside. What looked to be an ageing West Indian tart flung her arms around Christopher and started to move to the music with him. He not only acquiesced to this but soon took the initiative in turning it into an informal limbo competition to shrieks of delight from a couple of young white tarts sitting on a grubby sofa near the window. During this introductory turn of Chris’s I was beginning to feel like a spare number. The white tarts had given me a cursory glance and had dismissed me from their thoughts. I wondered whether anyone Christopher brought was automatically considered bent, or if they just didn’t fancy me at any price. I wandered into the back of the flat, into a bedroom. A white girl was sitting on a bed. She was so good looking I did the sort of double take you normally only see in cartoons. Her skirt was hitched up above her knees which were above her thighs as the bed was low. She was wearing a pair of black high heels which showed off her calves. Her legs were just perfect. She had long brown hair and a hard, intelligent face. She was talking to a gigantic black guy. As I walked in they both looked up at me and kept talking as if they wouldn’t mind if I pissed off. I got the message and walked back into a small kitchen. There was another spade sitting at a Formica topped table. He had a lot of cans of Long Life in front of him like chessmen on a board. He addressed me in a Jamaican patois.
“Hey Man. You had a slice of de cake?”
“What’s that?”
“Upstairs man.” He nodded to a flight of stairs just outside the kitchen door. I hadn’t noticed that the flat was on two levels. I went up the stairs; at the top was a hall with a front door that opened up three steps above street level. A wire light bulb frame covered with a pair of black women’s nylon panties set the tone of sophistication. A fat slob, very vulgar, lots of big rings, stupid frilly dress shirt, was having a suppressed argument with a white girl who looked like she was a classy scrubber. I pushed open a door. Inside was a double bed with a mattress and a blanket. No sheet, no pillows. There wasn’t much else. A hard chair in the corner, a chest of drawers. A man and woman were making it on the bed. They looked up.
“Fuck off. Come back in ten minutes.” The girl screamed at me.
“Plenty of time for everyone,” said the man without rancour. I closed the door on them and wandered back downstairs to get a Long Life. The Jamaican wasn’t so struck on the idea of me having one but he let me off with a cautionary warning. “Cool it on the juice eh!” He was a big bastard with a smile that made you nervous. I felt my arm being squeezed gently and looked up to see Christopher standing by my side. His limbo partner eased past me and struck up a lively conversation/argument with the drinks quartermaster. “Enjoying it?” whispered Chris.
“It’s great. So different, kind of zany.” In truth I would have liked to put three blocks between me and every character I’d met there so far, except perhaps the dark haired girl in the back room. He motioned me conspiratorially to follow him to the sofa which the tarts had just vacated but fearing his intentions I told him I was going to look for another drink. He let me go with a lingering squeeze of the hand and a look that signified that we had just undergone a blood brother ritual. Back in the kitchen the couple we had left had progressed from talking to shouting and were just contemplating screaming. I moved out quickly into the bedroom and found myself in the lone company of the girl who had been talking to the spade. She was still sitting on the bed, giving an eyeful of leg and I took it in at my leisure. “You with Christopher?”
“Yuh.”
“You a fairy?” I shrugged.
“You look like one.” I moved right into the room and sat down next to her.
“Then you’ve got nothing to fear from me, have you?” I said and placed my hand softly on her knee.
“I wouldn’t let Winston see you do that. He’ll saw your head off with a butcher’s knife and chuck it out the window.”
“Where is Winston?” I asked, not without interest, at the same time withdrawing my hand.
“Just gone to look for a drink. He’ll be back in a minute.”
“Good,” I said in a sincere tone. A silence grew in which she looked at me as she might have looked at a television programme that was boring her.
“D’you know Christopher?” I said.
“Do I know Christopher?” She seemed to find it amusing.
“....Everybody knows Christopher, darling.” The door opened and the gigantic spade came back into the room with a bottle of Jamaican white rum, at least I assumed that’s what it was. It had no label. He seemed put out by my presence.
“He-e-ey Sandie, what gives huh?” He turned her jaw round to face him in a manner that could have been interpreted as clumsy affection.
“Friend of Christopher’s.” He seemed mollified.
“A friend of Chris’s eh?.... Well good luck to you my friend. You’d better get back to him. He must be wondering where you are.”
I took the hint and split. As I stopped at the door I caught Sandie’s glance. It expressed both contempt and interest and I thought for a moment that somewhere, sometime in the future there might be some mileage in that glance.
Back in the front room I found Christopher in earnest conversation with someone who stood out like a sore thumb from everyone else at the party. From his voice, which I heard as I entered the room, I knew he was American. He had a presence, partly from his physical stature but also from his slow considered control.
“Alex, meet Frank,” said Chris. “…Frank’s an admiral, full-ranking.”
“Whoah, whoah—easy Chris, don’t you go giving out state secrets quite so easy.” He emitted a loud raucous laugh at this slice of wit.
Admiral Frank Hough Junior, as I found out later - all the way from North Carolina. He had a typically American face. There is a whole gallery of typically American faces; his was the lean, high cheek-boned, honest country boy look. A sort of Jack Pallance or Sterling Hayden. I’d seen that face in Tennessee Valley Authority photographs of the dustbowl; I’d imagined it while reading ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ - it was part of the European mystique of the mid-west, or at least that part of America that is neither New York nor L.A., just out there somewhere in a state whose capital you couldn’t name. His whole personality came across to me that night in a five minute conversation. All I had to do as I got to know him was to fill in the colours to the right numbers.
Chris had managed to get hold of a bottle of scotch and offered it to him.
“Just an itty bitty drop Chris... Whoah, whoah - Jesus Christ, I’ll never drink that much.”
“Well, Alec…. “
“Alex.”
“What d’you do then, Alex?”
I sketched a few essays, largely descriptive, short on hard facts, that left him none the wiser.
“I see, I see,” he said earnestly. “In other words, you’re a bum.”
“Yeah. That’s a much better way of put
ting it.”
“Hey Chris, why d’you surround yourself with jerks like Alex?” he shouted across the room. He was, as I say, a tall guy, and big. In a way he was good looking and in a way he had charisma. But I could think of one young lady it would be lost on…… or perhaps two young ladies. But on that strange night what did I know?
I wandered out of the room and back up the stairs. At the top I was waylaid by another young lady. She introduced herself to me as Sheila. I thought it amusing as there was a pop song around at the time extolling the virtues of someone similarly named but with radically different qualities - if the song was to be believed. I chatted a bit to her. It turned out that she too was a friend of Chris’s. I asked her how she knew him and she told me he’d picked her up from his Daimler while she was walking along Regent Street. I asked her if she’d ever seen him before that and she said no. There’d been a woman in the car with him and they’d carted her off to a country house down past Sunbury and from then on she’d integrated into the set. She spoke highly of Chris; she seemed to like him a lot. I chatted to her for a while, gleaning what information I could on my prey, but it was plain that she didn’t see me as the focal point of her evening; she slid away downstairs, muttering about getting a drink.
I was beginning to feel that I had honourably discharged my duties to Toby and Pascale and that I would be justified in leaving. Just then a door off the landing opened. A woman came out zipping up her skirt. Anyone who wanted to look past her into the room, as I did, could plainly see a guy sitting on a double bed in the state of indecisive sloth that frequently follows sexual intercourse. The woman was Sandie. The man I recognised as a senior minister in the Foreign Office. He looked up and saw me looking at him and his face registered irritation, I wouldn’t put it stronger than that. The door closed.
“Hi Sandie,” I said in my with-it vicar voice, slightly breathless.
Time passed; the repetitive Caribbean beat pulsated through the house and, I imagined, the greater part of Earls Court. Further upstairs I heard a door slam and different sets of footsteps walk across the room. In the kitchen the argument was reaching its climax. One of the two tarts stuck her head into the room, saw me and quickly withdrew it. They all seemed to be nice people. Christopher came back with two glasses and a half full bottle of gin. He poured a couple of inches into each glass. I sipped it and winced.
“Bloody rough on its own.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers darling.” His manner had coarsened with the surroundings. I half expected him to take off his shirt and sit there in his vest and braces. He was well on the way to being pissed. He must have been drinking quite hard earlier in the evening because we hadn’t drunk much since. It took us about five minutes to finish the gin, then Christopher went off and came back with two glasses and some scotch swilling around in them. It didn’t seem like a very clever idea to go back to scotch, but there was nothing else to drink. He also brought back one of the two scrubbers who we’d first seen when we came in. She didn’t look any more attractive close up than she had at a distance but Christopher made a big thing out of trying to grope her. It wasn’t a very convincing performance and I wondered why he was bothering. Perhaps he was after his Boy Scouts Hell-Raiser badge. She turned away from him and found herself face to face with me. She recoiled instantly. We had a mutual antipathy which we both recognised. The blonde haired tart from upstairs wandered in with the fat slob. They were both trying to look cool and superior but she looked bored and he looked edgy. We all drank some more but there was no fun in the air. It was almost as if we were waiting for a factory siren to signal our release. Suddenly Christopher stood up and lurched away holding his hand over his mouth. The little scrubber also disappeared and the blonde tart came and sat next to me. She was good looking in the blatantly sexual way that men so despise. By now we were all too far gone for conversation. I put my hand round her shoulder and she snuggled into my arms in a manner completely devoid of emotional connotations. We started necking and I started moving my hands up and down her body and under her skirt and up between her legs. I squeezed her thighs and I realized she was going to let me do anything I wanted. I looked across to the fat slob. He was leaning against the mantelpiece looking as if he was waiting for a bus.
“What the fuck...,” I thought. “It’s all for free.” I slid my hand over her pants and down on to her cunt. For some reason the phrase ‘A handful of hairy minge’ came into my head, ringing back through the years from my schooldays. I rubbed my fingers over the lips and she looked at me in that surprised, shocked way that is not surprised or shocked at all, and I looked back with that look that says “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m thinking it too.” Suddenly all hell broke out in the kitchen. The row between the black whore and the Long Life custodian which had climaxed during our foreplay, instead of subsiding, took a step up the tonic scale to a previously unimagined pitch of frenzy. A window smashed, and then another and then another. Renewed screaming and sobbing broke out and I recognised the voice of the white girl who had been in the back bedroom. To this was added the sounds of the breaking of furniture and the smashing of built in fixtures. In the middle of this a man screamed and in so doing he transcended all the accumulated hysteria. Immediately oaths and female screams redoubled in fury and the guy who had been introduced as Winston staggered into our room, blood pouring from his arm and his shirt reddening by the second.
“He’s knifed him,” screamed someone outside the room. By now I was on my feet. The other black guy from the kitchen rushed in, his eyes wild and rolling and the flick-knife still in his hand. My brain told me he could do anything in that second. I didn’t wait to find out what. I was through the door, up the steps and out on the pavement before I really knew what had happened. The events had obviously been exceptional even by Earls Court standards for a number of windows, mainly on upper levels, were open and people were leaning out, looking down, as if they were in boxes at the theatre. I was joined on the pavement by the blonde tart.
“He’s a nutter, that Tony,” she said. The door at upper ground level opened and a man and a woman came down. I thought it was the woman who had told me to go away earlier on.
The music had stopped and I could hear women sobbing and the sound of breaking, but it was the sound of a man taking out his anger on inanimate objects, or so I thought. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when the law arrived. I touched the blonde tart on the shoulder.
“See you,” I said and walked off down towards Warwick Road. As I got to the corner I heard the sound of a bell ringing and turned to see a black police Wolsley pulling up outside the flat. I slid out of sight and ran hard until I reached Old Brompton Road. In front of me loomed the isolated grey mass of the Princess Beatrice Hospital next to Brompton Cemetery. I walked quickly past it down to the Fulham Road where I turned left. At the bottom of Redcliffe Gardens I looked across to the Cafe Des Artistes, but even that was dead to the world. Five minutes later I slipped past the Worlds End pub. The dawn started to break as I walked past the houseboats in Cheyne Walk and turned right over Battersea Bridge. I could just make out the lettering on the Chelsea Flour Mills. Five minutes later I was in the flat and I hadn’t met a soul.
*****
For two days I didn’t speak to anybody except the man in the newsagents and the lady in the off-license. I looked in the newspapers and listened to the wireless, but there was nothing about a murder or a knifing, just the U.S. shipping sanctions on Cuba and the Labour Party Conference - Anthony Jay wanted to have a general election before we went into the Common Market. I ate bread and cheese and washed it down with quart bottles of Watney’s Pale Ale, sipping gently at the froth and letting the liquid trickle through and surprise me and then knocking it back in great mouthfuls. Then on the Thursday at about half past one in the afternoon Christopher Bryant telephoned.
“Alex!”
“Christopher. Are you OK?”
“Yes. Sorry about the other night. Bit of a mess.�
�
“What about the police?”
“Oh.... We saw them alright. There wasn’t any bother.”
“But that guy who got knifed.”
“Knifed? I don’t remember anything about a knifing. Really Alex, you have a vivid imagination.” Let it ride. What did it matter to me? We agreed to meet for a drink the next day.
Because the weather had turned we had agreed to meet inside the Serpentine Restaurant. He was late again and he came making the same apologies. I accepted them in good grace. His concern for the events of the other night was that I should think badly of him, but there was a twinkle in his eye as he made his excuses that told me he privately thought himself an incorrigible, lovable rogue, a sort of cross between Noel Coward and Jean Genet. To further erase the odious memory he took me to a French restaurant in Pimlico that wasn’t half bad. We relaxed over the wine and good food and luxuriated over the coffee and Russian cigarettes, and after he’d picked up the bill he got the waiter to get us a taxi. He took me back to his mews house in Pavilion Road, the cobbled street that links Harrods and Peter Jones department stores. And there, with the late afternoon sun filtering through the striped calico curtains, I started to seriously deliver on my deal with Toby and Pascale....... I was turning into the sort of person my parents had told me not to get mixed up with.
To my great relief Christopher turned out to be promiscuous. His tastes were catholic - men, women, straight, bent, with endless variations on a theme. I could never have hoped to detain him even if that had been my aim. But in friendship he was generous. From the induction course one graduated to his large circle of friends and acquaintances who could call or drop in on him at any time without warning. He might tell you to fuck off, but it would be without malice and one could call again. For me it was the perfect situation. And so after an intense ten days at the end of September when he had me believing that he wanted to make me the centre of his universe for ever and a day, all the hard work was done. Naturally there was no need for me to bore Toby with details of the facility with which all this had been achieved. It was far more uplifting for him, I reasoned, to be allowed to continue to cherish the image of me closing my eyes and thinking of the Soviet Union, crying myself to sleep, a lonely wretched ball of humanity, etcetera, etcetera. He was happier that way, so was I, and so was my bank manager.
