Buster

by Alan Burns

  “It’s not that. I’m getting a flat in town, on my own.”

  “Well well,” Bert said.

  Chapter 6

  Unshaved and unwashed because a spider stayed circling, shrivelling, still crawling round the washbasin, he lay on the hard bed, looking at the nude on the wall, the blackblistered cold fireplace, the gas ring squatting on the lino. He sat up. Some bright bits on the carpet were spots of daylight from the other side of the earth. Tunnels made by needles. He remembered when Grandma swallowed a needle and a year later it came out of her heel. Faces, camels, goblins, birds lived in the patterned curtains; behind the window, but almost flush with it, a darkbrick neighbour wall shut out the night.

  He trod down the quiet, creaking stairs, got outside. Street lights shone yellow madly at nobody. Sky men in purple overcoats and floppy pink hats played moon-football. His nose was cold. Fresh on his face light rain fell. He pounded over the ringing pavement. “Be twenty. Poise dizzy at an angle on a waterfall edge. Look down, see the white gas there. Plunge, splutter, shoot away and race away downriver.” Rain fell, bounced, danced, on his pavement, which he’d put there on purpose.

  He looked in at a workmen’s café. He wasn’t a workman. Water trickled down the misted window; it was warm inside and cold out.

  Home, he flopped on the bed. Spider’s a long time dying. Up once more, he put the bacon he’d bought into the saucepan he’d bought, watched the warmed fat become lucent, ooze, begin to crackle. He sniffed.

  Downstairs again, to the lavatory, taking things with him. The slightly slimy stone rim refused his body warmth. He stretched his leg forwards, pressed his foot against the door to keep it shut. He read the brown-paper-covered book he had taken from his father’s wardrobe. First acne, underwear, the Orient, spiritual awareness, conducive foods: cloves and saffron, black molasses. Then at last, love play, coital positions, perfect courtship, ideal marriage, advanced coital positions, notes for the obese. The other book, twisting nudes, lay on the floor. He tried to read the two together. O manufacturers of frosted glass for the windows of suburban lavatories!

  The gas ring still flared in the dark room. The bacon was charred dust on the ceiling and out of the window, the floor wet with liquid saucepan. He offered himself a saucepan sandwich.

  * * *

  Helen’s precise hand: two neat strokes sliced through the old address, and small, clear letters announced the new. The envelope contained an invitation to a party from Montague.

  Frantic in the frantic centre of the frantically crammed room, Montague stood with his hairy hands in his hairy jacket pockets. Dan walked right up to and on top of him talking immediately loudly continuously. Quel savoir-faire. He wore his pipe, and Montague told him how well it suited him – made him look much older. Dan joined the homosexual cowboys chatting cleverly at bubbly girls. What do you do? Me Yugoslav partisan – part-time. What’s your favourite colour eyes? The great eyes of camels and the eyes of men in Sainsbury’s. He stopped. He’d climbed over himself. Embarrassed girls looked at each other’s feet, drifted away. But she circled, dancing, a glance for him each time round. Her northern hemispheres bounced, wobbled, jumped. She looked, double-chinned, down at them, a basketful of puppies. He took her drunk, damp hand, led her into the room reserved for sexual intercourse. It was going to be lovely.

  He said: “Bell fling float kite cap kiss shell hill plough panther antler elegant bending rainbow rain garden grave—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just a game.”

  “Kid’s game,” she said; “one word leads to another. One two three. We all know that.”

  His head lay on her lap; he spoke to her tummy.

  “Words don’t describe, they point; and poets hit the source in history, the shadow behind each word. Don’t slip so quick from step to step. Rest. Words are abstract isolate ancient huge, flipping and floating in coloured balloons in fanlight air. Yelp. Out it flasht. Flashtitout. Timmy begoodboynow. Guttergone. Autumn eats trees with amazing flames, leaving the indigestible bones for deadwinter.”

  She stared across at the bodies fiddling and squeezing and heaving.

  “Why go on?” she said.

  “For the prize – to dirtily prise your knees and thighs, to deliberately split your delicious infinitive.”

  “Oh. Well, you can get off me.”

  In the main room people sank by stages to the floor, spilling drinks over each other.

  “Somebody stole yo’ gal?” Montague asked.

  “Seizing abandoned property is no larceny,” Dan said.

  “So you’re going to be Lord Chief Justice, after all?”

  “Never. My heart’s not in it. I don’t care who owns things.”

  “Your father—”

  “Forget him. One death was tragic, but two made him ridiculous. Now the weight’s on me, and brother, he’s in for a disappointment.”

  “Does he ever talk about Bryan?” Montague asked.

  “The dirty words in our home are ‘dead wife’ and ‘dead son’. Never mentioned. Not a picture, not a word.”

  “Because the alternative to silence is a scream?”

  “Because Helen’s a doll, a real doll, and she mustn’t be made miserable.”

  “If it weren’t for her,” Montague said, “if you were left alone with him, you’d soon find him hanging by his braces. Your father is living with Helen, and he’s alive with her. But you want to camp in galleries of tinted photographs. Why dwell on death?”

  “Why not wallow in it? Hell, how Grandma would have wallowed and wailed and bellowed and punched herself blue! With us each emotion is clipped like a privet hedge or a slick moustache. Throw away your lines, be polite, and after two gins be charming. That’s all. But I want to learn Latin, be in the desert, kill with an axe, cover my ear in gravy, piss on their carpet, fill that bloody television set with old cod. Ours is not an icon – it’s got doors, it’s a triptych. Them, their actual heads and legs I love all right. But they’ve been suffocated by junk. They can’t even cry for the dead.”

  He belched.

  His friend stood up: “You’d better go home.”

  “It’s too early,” Dan pleaded; “let’s go to the pictures, or—”

  “I’m taking you to the nearest Underground.”

  Alone and singing in a huge lift going down. No, there was a man with him, working the lift, listening, chewing. Two big eye teeth and a thin loose lip, which he chewed. He prodded a bellysoft thumbshape into shadow. A strong spring flung the steel gate across and slammed Dan’s ear out.

  “Eye-Teeth!” Dan bawled, “You’ve knocked my bloody ear out! You and the senior lift operator and the assistant stationmaster and the stationmaster and the designer of lifts and the constructor of lifts and the minister and Her Majesty and Hieronymus Bosch and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. And I’m gonna boot the lot.”

  Carefully he balanced on one foot, gave a quick swing and kicked himself out onto the non-slip floor. Eye-Teeth picked him up, leant him against the tiled wall and told him he’d had a drop too much. Scraps of rag and paper lay in the lift hole, cables and weights and wheels moved steadily. Miles above, a metal voice cried:

  “Stand clear of the gates.”

  Two hundred times a day he used to yell that – yelled himself hoarse. Now he does a new recording once a year and switches on whenever he wants. Dan saw three sharp little black studs with clear silver letters: nonsec, bel, bug. He tried to hang on to the smoothtiled wettish wall.

  Suddenly he was deep in people rushing on and off and anyhow. Crowds of girls, a porter with a watering can, soldiers, boys in striped scarves, actresses, dreary gentlemen. He swam along. He was going home.

  * * *

  They dined in the Temple, formally, on benches, enclosed by ancient coats of arms, by King Charles tiny and pointed on his thirty-foot cart hors
e, a gorgeous woodcarved ceiling, stained-glass windows scarlet and ultramarine, pockmarked servants, a macebearer with a mace, glossy collars and cuffs and teeth pinpointed against dark suits and the solid brown of panelled oak. Montague, Dan’s guest, was impressed.

  “When I went into my Dad’s dress business,” he said, “I never knew what I was missing. Twelve hundred a year and the night plane to Rome when the peaches are ripe is all very well, but this… this is big, Dan. It’s grand, it’s historical, it’s feudal. The Yanks should make a colour film of it.”

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said Dan. “Here comes the procession of judges. Something to tell the grandkids.”

  The line of old men doddered along between the tables, near close enough to touch. The senior judge thanked the Lord beautifully for His bounteous liberality, and everyone sat down.

  “Man, they’re the ancientest,” said Montague.

  “They are indeed incredibly old, and diseased,” said Dan. “And remember that I – if I sweat and strain – I may become one of those.”

  “It’s a great incentive,” said Montague. “Look at that little one – he’s fantastic. Those facial muscles, that premature bulldog look. How does he do it?”

  “Each morning,” Dan replied, “after gargling, he informs the bathroom: ‘I, Mr Justice Presley, enshrine the Constitution. I have never heard of rock and roll.’ He repeats this to his wife, who says: ‘Yes, dear.’ He pulls on his long pants, eats a very big breakfast, is conveyed to the Courts, where, robed and throned, ten miles above the multitude, he tells working-class witnesses to ‘Speak up, man!’, because he can’t hear a word.”

  “Seriously,” said Montague, “what makes you so bitter?”

  “Tell me why, in all history, a judge has never once said ‘Put a sock in it’, ‘Fuck you, Jack’, ‘My leg itches’, ‘I feel awful’, ‘You look a lovely bit of stuff’?”

  “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”

  “I failed my exam.”

  “Again?”

  * * *

  “You have proved that property law is a swindle, and therefore not worth studying,” his father said, “but you failed divorce too?”

  “Divorce is as big a fraud as marriage. Let people do as they please. They’re grown-ups. Live-together or not-live-together. Who cares?”

  “The children?”

  “Farm them out to mass crèches supervised by trained male nurses.”

  His father was counting pound notes from his wallet.

  “Here’s ten pounds,” he said. “Make it last two years.”

  “Did you discuss this with anyone we know?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Dan. Why didn’t you work? If you were a bloody fool I could excuse it, but you’re just drifting. Life’s been too easy for you. You need a shock. If only I had my time over again… I got to London with a five-pound note in my pocket and a wife and child in the back of the car.”

  “You had a car then?”

  “You know what I mean, Dan.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You think you do. You heard about the young man of nineteen who thought his father an idiot, and at twenty-one he couldn’t understand how—”

  Dan chimed in the last words: “—the old man had learnt so much in the last two years.”

  They smiled.

  “I mean it, Dan. When I was your age I worked from six in the morning till twelve at night. Sometimes drove up to Lincoln to fetch a big load, then a quick turn round and down to the Garden* by early morning. The other firms had drivers, but I was on my own. We lived on sandwiches – that’s what ruined my digestion.”

  “I thought it was booze.”

  “I did things then I’d never do now. I’m old.”

  “You’re a success. You’re well off. You’ve built up a business. You smoke cigars and drink whisky. You’ve a beautiful redhead and a 21-inch TV. What more do you want – ulcers?”

  “I was born at the wrong time. Ten years earlier and I’d have made a million. But those days will never come back. There isn’t the money to be made any more – not that kind of money. I remember them coming to me with the first idea for football pools, but I’d been caught too often.”

  “So you’re rich and successful and full of regrets. Why can’t you understand when I say my heart’s not in it?”

  “Who gives a damn if your heart’s not in it! My heart’s not in it! Go to your beloved workers on their way to work in the morning, if you can get up that early, and ask them if their hearts are in it. You’ll get some funny answers.”

  “Then what’s the point of it all?”

  “The posing of that question is a luxury you can no longer afford. You can start worrying about philosophy when you are in a steady job.”

  Chapter 7

  He found Montague seated in his maroon upholstered swivel chair, using his two white daily sterilized telephones, consulting his stainless-steel filing cabinet, blinking at graphs, confiding in his suedette secretary, fiddling with the thermostatically controlled central-heating system. Fitness for function. Montague’s function was to meet foreign buyers, note carefully that they were all unable to state precisely the quantity and quality of the goods they wished to import, and to have lunch every day with Dad and the other directors. He was able to spare Dan a few minutes, lend him four pounds and give him a note of introduction to Max Spencer, an appeals organizer for charities, who required an assistant secretary with a public-school background.

  Spencer carried a yellow glove in his yellow-gloved hand. Dan had worked for him for a fortnight, and was learning to keep a special boyish grin for the chairmen of the various committees, to create an attitude rarely cringing, yet always sufficiently deferential.

  “I wonder, Graveson, whether you could take the minutes for the AOs tonight?” Spencer asked.

  His tone of voice implied: although I speak jauntily, this, young man, is your chance to prove yourself.

  Dan’s navy suit and blue-and-gold old school tie contrasted with the virgin whiteness and special glossiness of a brand-new Van Heusen collar, style eleven. He travelled by taxi to the Mayfair address. A pretty starched white-and-bright-blue maid opened the fine front door:

  “May I take your coat, sir? The AO meeting is in the front lounge, sir. Thank you, sir. This way, sir.”

  Three chaps in middle-aged sports jackets sipped sherry together. Dan stood close to the wall, holding the cardboard file Spencer had given him. He walked over to the table, took a glass of sherry from the silver tray, felt himself in the middle of the room.

  More people came: ladies with expensive legs, company directors who looked like company directors, talking together of maids and motor cars.

  “Mr Graveson?”

  The hostess beckoned to him.

  “Have you everything you need? A pen? Do use this card table for your papers.”

  Like a Jane Austen curate, he sat straightening his papers, while the guests finished their sherry and slowly settled elegant bottoms in elegant chairs.

  In a cultured voice Dan read the minutes of the last meeting, at which it had been decided that the ninth annual AO ball should be held at the Saveloy Hotel. The meeting then proceeded to the discussion of the main item on the agenda: the question of prizes for the tombola. The chairman of a whisky firm offered a case of whisky as first prize. He was congratulated, thanked, held up as an example. “Simply splendid,” said the treasurer; “if we had a few more Gerald Felthams all our problems would be solved.”

  The price of tombola tickets was debated passionately. Finally a compromise motion, referring the matter back for decision by the annual-ball tombola subcommittee, was carried by eighteen votes to nine with eleven abstentions. The treasurer estimated that the tombola should make approximately two hundred pounds profit.

  “What’s that in term
s of AOs?” he asked Dan.

  Dan read from the illustrated leaflet:

  “Two and sixpence will buy enough dried milk to maintain an Asian orphan in good health for approximately five days.”

  “Simply splendid,” the treasurer said.

  Dan didn’t go to Spencer’s office the next morning, or ever again. Spencer wrote, at first politely, then rudely, asking for the return of his AO file.

  Chapter 8

  Multilith operator, Adrema embosser, accounts clerk, upholsterer, Burroughs P6oo operator, invoice checker, delivery man, marine engineer, capstan-lathe operator, warehouseman, stove enameller, reinforced-concrete engineer, window dresser, pig man. He was none of these. He wasn’t even a hairdresser’s assistant. Two columns of vacancies for shorthand typists. He bought a Teach Yourself Shorthand book, explained to the landlady that, as soon as he got through it, say twenty-four hours’ solid work, he would be earning at least ten pounds a week. He reached chapter three.

  He was thrown out of his room. Bodily. There’s the rent and the state you leave your room in it’s not nice the smell and tins everywhere the bed unmade dust all over sink blocked up it’s not nice for the other tenants not that they’ve complained but it’s not nice. Be out by morning. He wasn’t. Her brother came. Headbutting bastard. Armwrenched body-buffeted buttockbumped bullied and socked downstairs and out.

  Bums in lines queued for jobs and thirty-bob-odd doled out by clerks from behind heavy wire.

  “Report three times a week to get your card stamped.”

  To make sure you’ve not got a job same time as you’re collecting. Dan waited all morning between tough blokes – Irish and Jamaican. Didn’t talk to them. Shuffled up as queue moved forwards. One bloke bounced on his toes, swinging a violin case so that everyone knew he was not an ordinary bum but a musical bum.

  By hungry lunchtime Dan found out he was in the manual-labour queue. Bricklayer’s assistants only.

  “All right, I’ll take that.”

  “No, son, you’ve got school certificate. Come next Thursday – ask for the clerical department.”