The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Wagwarn!’ said Nathan.

  ‘Wagwarn!’ said Nick.

  ‘Wagwarn!’ said Nathan.

  ‘Wagwarn!’ said Nick.

  ‘Safe, man,’ Nathan said, taking the bottle from Basil and capping it. ‘Basil, my man, you did it, man. You is the bossman, Basil, respect.’

  ‘Oh, that is strange,’ Basil said. ‘I feel all wavey now.’

  ‘Wavey, man, he said wavey,’ Nick said, laughing.

  ‘No, I really do, I feel wavey,’ Basil said, ‘my hands are almost wobbly, I don’t know why. But I don’t feel that this is like being drunk would be, well, maybe a little, but I feel wobbly, I don’t know why.’

  ‘I can’t believe you just like gave—’

  ‘I know why you is feeling a little bit wavey,’ Nathan said, ‘it is because ten seconds ago you had a massive snort off the poppers. Now give me

  6.

  ‘and in the end I suppose I spent about forty-eight hours on it,’ Carraway was saying. ‘It was a whole weekend, dawn till dusk, and in the end,’ he burped sadly, and looked down at his plate, smeared with rice and gravy, looked down at it with the sad realization that he had in fact told this story before, told it earlier in the same evening to the same people, wondered only whether he had told it when the fat divorced woman had been there, drawing some comfort, anyway, from the thought that one person round the table hadn’t heard it before, if he had told it before, which he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of, ‘in the end, I was really proud of it as a piece of work.’

  ‘He’s an odd boy in some ways,’ Vivienne was saying on the other side of the table, not listening to Carraway at all, ‘I would say rather old-fashioned. I don’t know who he takes after. He has hobbies in the way that children, these days, don’t seem to have hobbies, real, old-fashioned hobbies. Do your boys have hobbies?’

  ‘Hobbies?’ Caroline Carraway said, with a sharpness in her voice. ‘What do you mean, hobbies?’

  ‘Oh, things to pass the time, hobbies, you know,’ Vivienne said. ‘My son has half a dozen, and a strange couple of collections, too. It seems so old-fashioned nowadays – he plays the cello and the organ, he keeps a record of the morning temperature, he’s done that for years now, since he was seven. He did all the usual things that children do, like getting obsessed with dinosaurs, only with him it was cactuses, cacti I should say, he always corrects me.’

  ‘No,’ Charles Carraway said heavily. ‘I don’t think Nick or Nathan do any of that, actually.’

  ‘Can Bina take your plate away, Vivienne?’ Shabnam Khan said.

  ‘This was truly delicious, Shabnam, delicious – thank you – thank you! Well, children are all so

  7.

  ‘time we were at my friend’s house, my friend Alice, it was amazing,’ Anita was saying.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nathan was saying. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘This is this one time when her boyfriend Jonah wasn’t there, because he’s like always there, he and she, they’re like always all over each other with tongues and shit.’

  ‘I don’t know what you said,’ Nathan said. He was insistent. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What you saying, wallad?’ Nick said.

  ‘What did you say?’ Nathan said. ‘You said something like, This shit is booky, man.’

  ‘Yeah, man, I said this shit is booky, man,’ Nick said.

  ‘Oh, yeah, cool,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Am I just like talking to myself, or whatever?’ Anita said.

  ‘You don’t know what booky means!’ Nick said.

  ‘Yeah, I do, man, I invented it, wallad,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Yeah, well, what’s it mean then, you feel me,’ Nick said.

  ‘I ain’t dealing with you and you foolishness,’ Nathan said.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ Nick said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Nathan said.

  ‘What’s it mean!’ Nick said, and launched himself at Nathan with a chicken samosa in either hand, grinding them into Nathan’s face. They had disintegrated by the time Nick finished.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Nathan said, brushing the food from his T-shirt and trousers.

  ‘It means like when you ain’t sure what’s going on,’ said Nick, ‘you think there’s like a conspiracy, you think it’s gonna lead to something bad, then you’re like This shit is booky, man, that’s what it means. I ain’t believe you don’t know what booky means, man.’

  ‘I know what it means, man,’ Nathan said with disgust.

  ‘This shit is booky, man,’ Basil said experimentally.

  ‘Poor little boys,’ Anita said. ‘I know where you can find something better than that poppers, though.’

  ‘Ah, fuck you, Anita, with your no more vodka and your Indian Cornish pasty or whatever,’ Nick said.

  ‘No, seriously,’ Anita said. ‘Look at this. My dad would go spare if he knew I knew about this.’

  She raised herself from the floor, and went over to the desk. She pulled out the second highest drawer on the left, and awkwardly felt under the bottom of the top drawer. She tugged, and came away holding a small key attached to a strip of Sellotape. She made a mock curtsy.

  ‘Yeah, what’s that, the key to your mum’s sewing box?’ Nathan said.

  ‘No, little boy,’ Anita said. ‘It’s the key to the top drawer. My dad thinks I don’t know where he hides it.’

  ‘So what the fuck’s in the fucking top drawer?’ Nick said.

  ‘Oh, you wait and see,’ Anita said. ‘You just wait and see.’

  ‘I don’t think you should be doing that, Anita,’ Basil said. ‘I just don’t think so. If your daddy hid the key like that, he really doesn’t want you to be using it or knowing that it’s there even.’

  She took no notice, and put the key in the lock and turned. She gave a little cry of triumph. She pulled something out, pushed the drawer to, and locked it again. She turned round. In her hand there was a small plastic sachet, half filled with some white powder.

  ‘Oh, my days,’ Nick said. ‘The fuck is that. That is never your dad’s, I don’t fucking believe it.’

  ‘He thinks my mum doesn’t know about it,’ Anita said. ‘He gets it and then he likes to have a little snort off it sometimes in the evenings when we all think he’s working up here. I saw what he looks at on the computer, and it’s all like lesbian porn – he has a snort of this stuff, and then he switches on his computer and watches these like whores going at it, and my mum’s like going don’t disturb your dad and shit, he’s working so hard at the moment, and I’m like trying not to piss myself like laughing.’

  ‘Man that shit is nang,’ Nathan said. ‘Yeah, this is like the best evening ever, turning into.’

  ‘Turning into, man, turning into,’ Nick said, and they bumped their fists together. ‘We is going to watch us some of that lesbian porn and get high. You ever see lesbian porn, Basil, my man?’

  ‘But what on earth is that stuff?’ Basil said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that. What on earth is Mr Khan doing hiding it in his top drawer?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Nathan said. ‘We is going to show you just how excellent a ting can be, and you is going to have yourself a good time.’

  8.

  ‘We’ve just stayed too late for the children,’ Vivienne was saying, helping Basil into his overcoat at the end of the evening. ‘Basil gets so tired, he sort of stops making sense altogether.’

  ‘Poor little boy,’ Michael Khan said. ‘I hope you all had a good time, children.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Khan,’ Nathan – or was it Nick? – said. The three others were in a line on the stairs, Anita’s head in a shadow from the upstairs landing. ‘We had a smashing time.’

  ‘Come back soon,’ Anita’s disembodied voice said. Michael Khan gave her a glance, a suspicious glance. What had happened? he seemed to be asking himself; but then his head clarified, and he smiled again.

  ‘Come on, you,’ Vivienne said to Basil. ‘It’s time you were in bed, real
ly.’

  ‘Time, yeah,’ Basil said, his head lolling from side to side with tiredness. ‘That is just so wrong.’

  ‘Poor little boy,’ Shabnam Khan said, laughing a little. ‘Your car’s not blocked in, is it, Vivienne? It was lovely to see you, too, Charles – Caroline. I guess the next time we see you, we’ll have been to Washington State, we’ll have lots of lovely boring whale stories to tell you.’

  ‘We look forward to that,’ Charles Carraway said. ‘Come on, boys. Had a good time, did you?’

  ‘Peak, man,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Yeah, peak,’ Basil said.

  His mother gave him a startled glance. And then, without any intervening time, Basil was apparently being driven away. He felt drowsy but full of ideas. It had been very nice, he had told his mummy. The others had been fun. It had been a nice evening. And she had had a nice evening too. He wasn’t going to tell her everything! About the vodka, no fear. She didn’t need to know about that. And the other stuff, that came later, the poppers, he wasn’t going to mention that. There would be a fearful row if he mentioned that, or if she found out about it somehow, she or Daddy. It had been strange and he wasn’t sure at first he liked it. But he had liked it, it had been fun to feel all wobbly and wavey for five minutes. The other stuff, the stuff that Anita had given them from her daddy’s secret drawer, the white stuff called cocaine, he didn’t think that was so good. She had said that he might feel frightened and he hadn’t felt frightened exactly, but he’d wanted to talk a lot and he was worried afterwards, and it made his nose hurt, and it felt really strange, the idea of doing that. He wouldn’t be doing that again, no fear. But it was interesting to have tried all those things and to have found out about that thing called anal sex, which Basil had never heard of before and then to have seen it even later on, that had been really quite a coincidence and Basil felt quite grown-up to know about all these things. Basil remembered that those twins had said that they had bought the poppers from a boy called Kevin or a brother called Chris and their name was Garry. He was fairly sure that there was another brother at his school, a boy called Adam Garry, and on Monday he would surprise him by telling him that he would like him to get some of those poppers for Basil, too. There was the Christmas money which he would spend on it. And then there were plenty of people at school who would be interested to try it. You could charge 50p for every time someone sniffed it. He couldn’t wait to tell people how nice and strange it was, and they carried on journeying the short distance into the night.

  BOOK 4

  1979

  1.

  There was something about the shop across the street. It never did well. Andy had been here five years, and in that time, he’d seen businesses come and go. There had been a florist’s, which had been on the point of failing when he got there. He didn’t think that had been there long. There had been a sort of health-food shop, selling beans out of old sacks – Andy could have told them that would fail. The sight of the sunflower painted on the window, that had sent Andy’s sale of bacon sandwiches across the road through the roof. It had been the making of him, that vegetarian bean shop. And then, till four months ago, there had been a luxury rug shop, which Andy didn’t believe had sold more than one rug a month throughout its existence, which added up to maybe four rugs in total. Nice bloke: no idea. Andy had watched the nice blokes come and go.

  Like farming land, some patches of retail were just barren, would yield no crop. Other patches, perhaps very close, were fertile ground. Nobody could tell you why definitely. If you had selling in your blood, from generations, you could tell whether a site for a shop would work or not, as a farmer could tell good land from barren by picking up a fistful and sniffing it. It might be just the way the sun hit the front of your shop in the morning. It might be on the road that people naturally walked down to get to the tube station, and preferably on the other side of the road to their path, so they would get a good look at your shop rather than walking straight by it, head down. Nobody really knew. But everyone knew that there were some sites, some shops, which never did anything, a tenth of an acre of barren land where no seed would grow, where it was not worth hoeing or labouring, because nothing would come of it. That shop opposite was one of those. Andy could have told them that from the start.

  Heatherwick Street, in general, was a good little street, tucked away but near a tube. If you knew it, and you lived within a mile, you would probably do your shopping there. There were plenty of people who made a good living there – not just Andy’s sandwich and coffee shop, but the hardware, the suitcase shop, the greengrocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the specialist Airfix model shop and the newsagent and sweet shop. That spot between the fishmonger’s and the barber’s: its windows were dark – was that it? Hard to say. Next to the shabby blue door to the flats above, it did seem to send custom away rather than bring it in. ‘Course,’ Andy would say, to his assistant Reggie and his son Chris, ‘if the right business settles anywhere, then they’ll make a success of it. We’re just waiting for the right business. When I came here from Cyprus five years ago, me and Chris and Chris’s mum, we looked around and Heatherwick Street needed a coffee-and-sandwiches. Phwoar, you should have seen this place when I took it – in a right state, it was. Look at it now. But then I saw the potential. I’d never have taken the shop opposite. Not even a good business can make a success if the site is total shit.’

  Andy’s conversation was like that: a monologue that took up two different positions and got them both wrong.

  You never knew, but the people who were doing up the shop opposite might make a success of it. He didn’t think so. There were a lot of them; they were friends of the new tenant; they dropped in, did a day or two painting, then went off again. That didn’t seem too promising. Chris had gone over with a tray of mugs of tea to welcome them to the neighbourhood, and had come back with the information that it was a bookshop – ‘The bloke said “a community bookshop”, Dad.’ That explained the shelves all round the inside of the shop that two carpenters had spent a week putting up. Community, bollocks, whatever that meant. Andy’s dad went to the Cypriot community centre twice a week to say kali mera to the old ladies and lose small sums at skat, the German card game he liked to play. That lot, they didn’t need a bookshop; they didn’t really need a community centre, but the local council had given them one. Over the road, there were professionals, in Andy’s view, like the electricians who did the lights, but the others were friends of the new tenant. They only had one pair of proper overalls to paint in, and the rest just in their old clothes – jeans and denim dungarees. They didn’t have a plaster-embedded radio playing Radio 1, like proper workmen. Andy, he liked to have some classical music playing in the kitchen. It was educated, but mostly he just liked it, making sandwiches to … the Emperor Waltz, it had been this morning.

  Over the road some days there were twelve of them, all doing the same bit of painting; some days there were just one or two. ‘If you rely on your friends turning up to do the work for nothing,’ Andy said, ‘you haven’t really thought it through, now, have you?’ But they seemed nice enough, though obviously not used to hard work. One day they brought along a hired floor sander. The bloke operating it, in bright yellow dungarees, had approached it gingerly – Andy had gone to the open door to watch, saying, ‘This’ll be good,’ to the customers. It had started with a roar, and the bloke had screamed, really screamed, a girl’s big shriek, and jumped back. ‘I don’t suppose he’s handled one of those things before,’ Andy said generously.

  The tenant was a nice bloke called Duncan. He’d come across to introduce himself the day after Andy had taken over the tea, and to get rounds of sandwiches for their lunch. He’d come into some money when a relative had died, and had always wanted to open a bookshop. He looked forward to finding out all about the business side of things. Andy didn’t think much of that. Business was in his family’s blood, his father’s restaurant, his grandfather’s cobbler’s shop and his great-grandfather’s as
well. People didn’t just wander into it and make a success of it. For a start, the bloke seemed to think a place between the barber and the fishmonger was perfect for a bookshop. For the kind of instinct that would see through that, you needed generations of restaurant-owners and cobblers in your family, Andy reckoned. Still, Andy wished him well, and he’d been in every day to get rounds of sandwiches for them all, and buying his paper at the newsagent and fruit from Denny the greengrocer, which was a good sign. Two days ago, he’d said that they’d recognized their limits when it came to painting, and though they’d managed all right painting the inside of the shop a nice neutral cream, they wouldn’t be attempting to do the sign themselves. A sign painter was coming in to do that.

  The sign painter came, in a professional white overall, a van and two ladders with planks running across. He was at it all morning, painting something white on a dark blue background. Andy himself never went inside bookshops. He didn’t know what they were called. They were just blank spaces in streets to him, not useful, not interesting, like a pub to a teetotaller or a William Hill to someone who didn’t bet. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Chris said, towards the end of the morning. ‘Do you see that, Dad?’ Andy came to the window. The sign painter was two-thirds of the way through, and what he had painted, in neat Roman capitals, was ‘The Big Gay Bo’.

  ‘They can’t call it that,’ Andy said. ‘They don’t know what it means. Gay. Not everyone understands what it means, these days.’

  ‘They know all right,’ Reggie said, doubling up laughing. And as if to prove it, out of the door came the tenant, followed by the bloke in the yellow dungarees and the fat woman who sometimes came, and they stood on the pavement and looked upwards at the sign, raising their hands to shade their eyes, and the one in the yellow dungarees suddenly started applauding with his hands at the same position, not crossing each other, like a small girl; and the tenant turned to him and the two of them, they gave a kiss, just there in the street.