Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

  A car backfired.

  “Hear the champagne corks?”

  Mr. Allingham is listening to my head, Samuel thought as he drew away from the fingers in the corner.

  “Piccadilly. Come on Allingham’s tour. That’s the Ritz. Stop for a kipper, Sam?”

  The Ritz is closed forever. All the waiters would be bellowing behind their hands. Gustave, Gustave, cried a man in an opera hat, he is using the wrong fork. He is wearing a tie with elastic at the back. And a woman in evening dress cut so low he could see her navel with a diamond in it leaned over his table and pulled his bow tie out and let it fly back again to his throat.

  “The filthy rich,” he said. My place is among the beggars and the outlaws. With power and violence Samuel Bennet destroys the whole artifice of society in his latest novel, In the Bowels.

  “Piccadilly Circus. Center of the world. See the man picking his nose under the lamppost? That’s the Prime Minister.”

  3

  The Gayspot was like a coal cellar with a bar at one end, and several coalmen were dancing with their sacks. Samuel, at the door, swaying between Mrs. Dacey and George Ring, felt his thigh, still frightened. He did not dare look down at it in case even the outside of the trouserleg bore the inexcusable imprint of his terror in the taxi.

  “It’s cosmopolitan,” George Ring whispered. “Look at the niggers.”

  Samuel rubbed the night out of his eyes and saw the black men dancing with their women, twirling them among the green cane chairs, between the fruit machine and the Russian billiard table. Some of the women were white, and smoked as they danced. They pussed and spied around the room, unaware of their dancing, feeling the arms around them as though around the bodies of different women: their eyes were for the strangers entering, they went through the hot movements of the dance like women in the act of love, looking over men’s shoulders at their own remote and unconniving faces in a looking-glass. The men were all teeth and bottom, flashers and shakers, with little waists and wide shoulders, in double-breasted pinstripe and sleek, licked shoes, all ageless and unwrinkled, waiting for the fleshpot, proud and silent and friendly and hungry—jerking round the smoking cellar under the center of the world to the music of a drum and a piano played by two pale white cross boys whose lips were always moving.

  As George Ring weaved Samuel through the dancers to the bar they passed a machine and Samuel put in a penny for a lemon. Out came one and sixpence.

  “Who’s going to win the Derby, Sam?” said Mr. Allingham, behind them.

  “Isn’t he a lucky poet?” George Ring said.

  Mrs. Dacey, in half a minute, had found a partner as tall as herself and was dancing through the smoke like a chapel. He had powdered his face to hide a scar from the corner or his eye to his chin.

  “Mrs. Dacey’s dancing with a razorman,” Samuel said.

  This was a breath and a scar of the London he had come to catch. Look at the knickerless women enamouring from the cane tables, waiting in the fumes for the country cousins to stagger in, all savings and haywisps, or the rosy-cheeked old men with buttonholes whose wives at home were as lively as bags of sprouts. And the dancing cannibal-mouthed black razor kings shaking their women’s breasts and blood to the stutter of the drums, snakily tailored in the shabby sweat-smelling jungle under the wet pavement. And a crimped boy danced like a girl, and the two girls serving were as harsh as men.

  Mr. Allingham bought four white wines. “Go on. He did it on a pintable. You could bring your Auntie here, couldn’t you, Monica?” he said to the girl with the bow tie pouring their drinks.

  “Not my Auntie,” Samuel said. Auntie Morgan Pont-Neath-Vaughan in her elastic-sided boots. “She doesn’t drink,” he said.

  “Show Monica your bottle. He’s got a bottle on his finger.

  Samuel dug his hand deep in his jacket pocket. “She doesn’t want to see an old bottle.” His chest began to tickle as he spoke, and he slipped two fingers of his right hand between the buttons of his shirt on to his bare flesh. “No vest,” he said in surprise, but the girl had turned away.

  “It’s a Sunday School,” Mr. Allingham said. “Tasted your wine yet, Sam? This horse’s unfit to work. A regular little bun dance. You could bring the vicar’s wife in here.”

  Mrs. Cotmore-Richards, four foot one and a squeak in her stockinged trotters.

  “A regular little vestry,” Mr. Allingham said. “See that woman dancing? The one who fell in the flour bin. She’s a bank manager’s niece.”

  The woman with the dead white face smiled as she passed them in the arms of a padded boy.

  “Hullo, Ikey.”

  “Hullo, Lola. She’s pretendin’, see. Thinks she’s Starr Faithfull.”

  “Is she a prostitute, Mr. Allingham?”

  “She’s a manicurist, Sammy. How’s your cuticles? Don’t you believe everything you see, especially after it’s dark. This is all pretending. Look at Casanova there with the old girls. The last time he touched a woman he had a dummy in his mouth.”

  Samuel turned around. George Ring whinnied in a corner with several women. Their voices shrilled and rasped through the cross noise of the drums.

  “Lucy got a beating the last time I see her,” said a woman with false teeth and a bald fur. “He said he was a chemist.”

  “Lucille,” George Ring said, impatiently shaking his curls. “Lucille Harris.”

  “With a clothesbrush. He had it in a little bag.”

  “There’s a chemist,” said a woman wearing a picture hat.

  “He doesn’t mean Lucy Wakefield,” another woman said.

  “Lucy Wakefield’s in the Feathers with a man from Crouch End,” said the bank manager’s niece, dancing past. The boy who danced with her was smiling with his eyes closed.

  “Perhaps he got a leather belt in his little bag,” said the woman with the fur.

  “It’s all the same in a hundred years,” said the woman in the picture hat. She went down to her white wine, widening her legs like an old mule at a pool, and came up gasping. ‘They put hair oil in it.”

  This was all wrong. They spoke like the women who wore men’s caps and carried fishfrails full of empties in the Jug and Bottle of the Compasses at home.

  “Keeps away the dandruff.”

  He did not expect that the nightclub women under the pavement should sing and twang like sirens or lure off his buttons with their dangerous, fringed violet eyes. London is not under the bedclothes where all the company is grand and vile by a flick of the cinema eye, and the warm linen doors are always open. But these women with the shabby faces and the comedians’ tongues, squatting and squabbling over their mother’s ruin, might have lurched in from Llanelly on a football night, on the arms of short men with leeks. The women at the tables, whom he had seen as enamouring shapes when he first came in dazed from the night, were dull as sisters, red-eyed and thick in the head with colds; they would sneeze when you kissed them or hiccup and say Manners in the dark traps of the hotel bedrooms.

  “Good as gold,” he said to Mr. Allingham. “I thought you said this was a low place, like a speakeasy.”

  “Speak easy yourself. They don’t like being called low down here.” Mr. Allingham leant close, speaking from the side of his mouth. “They’re too low for that. It’s a regular little hellhole,” he whispered. “It’s just warming up. They take their clothes off soon and do the hula hula; you’ll like that.”

  “Nobody knows Lucille,” George Ring said. “Are you sure she isn’t Lucy? There’s a lovely Lucy.”

  “No, Lucille.”

  “ ‘She dwells beside the springs of Dove.’ I think I like Wordsworth better than Walter de la Mare sometimes. Do you know ‘Tintern Abbey’?”

  Mrs. Dacey appeared at Samuel’s shoulder. “Doesn’t baby dance?” He shuddered at the cold touch of her hand on his neck. Not here. Not now. That terrible impersonal Bethesda rape of the fingers. He remembered that she had carried her umbrella even while she danced.

  “I got a siste
r in Tintern,” said a man behind them.

  “Tintern Abbey.” George Ring pouted and did not turn round.

  “Not in the Abbey, she’s a waitress.”

  “We were talking about a poem.”

  “She’s not a bloody nun,” the man said.

  The music stopped, but the two boys on the little platform still moved their hands and lips, beating out the dance in silence.

  Mr. Allingham raised his fist. “Say that again and I’ll knock you down.”

  “I’ll blow you down,” the man said. He puffed up his cheeks, and blew. His breath smelt of cloves.

  “Now, now.” Mrs. Dacey levelled her umbrella.

  “People shouldn’t go around insulting nuns then,” Mr. Allingham said as the ferrule taped his waistcoat.

  “I’ll blow you down,” the man said. “I never insulted any nun. I’ve never spoken to a nun.”

  “Now, now.” The umbrella drove for his eyes, and he ducked.

  “You blow again,” said Mrs. Dacey politely, “I’ll push it up your snout and open it.”

  “Don’t you loathe violence,” George Ring said. “I’ve always been a terrible pacifist. One drop of blood and I feel slimy all over. Shall we dance?”

  He put his arm round Samuel’s waist and danced him away from the bar. The band began again though none of the couples had stopped dancing.

  “But we’re two men,” Samuel said. “Is this a waltz?”

  “They never play waltzes here, it’s just self-expression. Look, there’s two other men dancing.”

  “I thought they were girls.”

  “My friend thought you were a couple of girls,” George Ring said in a loud voice as they danced past them. Samuel looked at the floor, trying to follow the movements of George Ring’s feet. One, two, three, turn around, tap.

  One of the young men squealed, “Come up and see my Aga Cooker.”

  One, two, three, swirl and tap.

  “What sort of a girl is Polly Dacey, really? Is she mad?”

  I’m like thistledown, thought Samuel. Swirl about and swirl again, on the toes now, shake those hips.

  “Not so heavy, Sam. You’re like a little Jumbo. When she went to school she used to post mice in the pillarbox and they ate up all the letters. And she used to do things to boys in the scullery. I can’t tell you. You could hear them screaming all over the house.”

  But Samuel was not listening any more. He circled and stumbled to a rhythm of his own among the flying legs, dipped and retreated, hopped on one leg and spun, his hair falling over his eyes and his bottle swinging. He clung to George Ring’s shoulder and zig-zagged away from him, then bounced up close again.

  “Don’t swing the bottle. Don’t swing it. Look out. Sam. Sam.”

  Samuel’s arm flew back and a small woman went down. She grabbed at his legs and he brought George Ring with him. Another man fell, catching fast to his partner’s skirt. A long rip and she tumbled among them, her legs in the air, her head in a heave of bellies and arms.

  Samuel lay still. His mouth pressed on the curls at the nape of the neck of the woman who had fallen first. He put out his tongue.

  “Get off my head, you’ve got keys in your pocket.”

  “Oh, my leg!”

  “That’s right. Easy does it. Upsadaisy.”

  “Someone’s licking me,” cried the woman at the bottom.

  Then the two girls from behind the bar were standing over them, slapping and kicking, pulling them up by the hair.

  “It was that one’s fault. He crowned her with a bottle. I saw him,” said the bank manager’s niece.

  “Where’d he get the bottle from, Lola?”

  The girl with the bow tie dragged Samuel up by the collar and pointed to his left hand. He tried to slip it in his pocket but a hand like a black boxing glove closed over the bottle. A large black face bent down and stared into his. He saw only the whites of the eyes and the teeth.

  I don’t want a cut on my face. Don’t cut my lips open. They only use razors in stories. Don’t let him have read any stories.

  “Now, now,” said Mrs. Dacey’s voice. The black face jerked back as she thrust out her opened umbrella, and Samuel’s hand was free.

  “Throw him out, Monica.”

  “He was dancing like a monkey, throw him out.”

  “If you throw him out you can throw me out too,” Mr. Allingham said from the bar. He raised his fists.

  Two men walked over to him.

  “Mind my glasses.” He did not wear any.

  They opened the door and threw him up the steps.

  “Bloody nun,” a voice shouted.

  “Now you.”

  “And the old girl. Look out for her brolly, Dodie.”

  Samuel fell on the area below Mr. Allingham, and Mrs. Dacey came flying after with her umbrella held high.

  It was still raining heavily.

  4

  “Just a passing call,” said Mr. Allingham. As though he were sitting indoors at a window, he put out his hand to feel the rain. Shoes slopped past on the pavement above his head. Wet trousers and stockings almost touched the brim of his hat. “Just in and out,” he said. “Where’s George?”

  I’ve been bounced, Samuel thought.

  “It reminds me of my old man.” Mrs. Dacey’s face was hidden under the umbrella, as though in a private, accompanying thunder cloud. “In and out, in and out. Just one look at him, and out he went like clockwork.”

  “Oh, the Gayspot? Can’t go there, old man.” Samuel winked seriously in the dark. “Oh, carrying a cargo. Swinging a bottle around. One look at me, out I went.”

  “He used to carry a little book with all the places he couldn’t go to and he went to them every Saturday.”

  Fool, fool, fool, Samuel said to himself.

  The steps were suddenly lit up as the door opened for George Ring. He came out carefully and tidily, to a rush of music and voices that faded at once with the vanishing of the smoky light, and stood on Mrs. Dacey’s steps, his mane of curls golden against the fanlight, a god or a half-horse emerging from the underworld into the common rain.

  “They’re awfully cross,” he said. “Mrs. Cavanagh ripped her skirt and she didn’t have anything on underneath. My dear, it’s like Ancient Rome down there and now she’s wearing a man’s trousers and he’s got legs exactly like a spider’s. All black and hairy. Why are you sitting in the rain?”

  “It’s safe,” Mr. Allingham said. “It’s nice and safe in the rain. It’s nice and rational sitting on the steps in the rain. You can’t knock a woman down with a bottle here. See the stars? That’s Arcturus. That’s the Great Bear. That’s Sirius, see, the green one. I won’t show you where Venus is. There’s some people can’t enjoy themselves unless they’re knocking women down and licking them on the floor. They think the evening’s wasted unless they’ve done that. I wish I was home. I wish I was lying in bed by the ceiling. I wish I was lying under the chairs like Rosie.”

  “Who started to fight, anyway? Let’s go round the corner to the Cheerioh.”

  “That was ethical.”

  They climbed up the street, George Ring first, then Mr. Allingham; then Samuel and Mrs. Dacey. She tucked his arm in hers.

  “Don’t you worry. You hold onto me. Cold? You’re shivering.”

  “It’ll be Cheerioh all right.”

  The Cheerioh was a bad blaze, an old hole of lights. In the dark, open a cupboard full of cast-off clothes moving in a wind from nowhere, the smell of mothballs and damp furs, and find a lamp lit, candles burning, a gramophone playing.

  “No dancing for you,” Mr. Allingham said. “You need space. You want the Crystal Palace.”

  Mrs. Dacey still held Samuel by the arm. “You’re safe with me. I’ve taken a fancy,” she said. “Once I take a fancy I never let go.”

  “And never trust a woman who can’t get up.” Mr. Allingham pointed to a woman sitting in a chair by the Speedboat pintable. “She’s trying to get up all the time.” The woman made a
sudden movement of her shoulders. “No, no, legs first.”

  “This used to be the cowshed,” George Ring said, “and there was real straw on the floor.”

  Mrs. Dacey never lets go. Samuel saw the fancy shining behind her glasses, and in her hard mousetrap mouth. Her cold hand hooked him. If he struggled and ran she would catch him in a corner and open her umbrella inside his nose.

  “And real cows,” Mr. Allingham said.

  The men and women drinking and dancing looked like the older brothers and sisters of the drinkers and dancers in the club round the corner, but no one was black. There were deep green faces, dipped in a sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-gray, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily white-washed, with violet-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, salt-cellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads.

  “All white people here,” Samuel said.

  “The salt of the earth,” Mr. Allingham said. “The foul salt of the earth. Drunk as a pig. Ever seen a pig drunk? Ever seen a monkey dancing like a man? Look at that king of the animals. See him? The one who’s eaten his lips. That one smiling. That one having his honeymoon on her feet.”

  AFTER THE FAIR

  The fair was over, the lights in the cocoanut stalls were put out, and the wooden horses stood still in the darkness, waiting for the music and the hum of the machines that would set them trotting forward. One by one, in every booth, the naphtha jets were turned down and the canvases pulled over the little gambling tables. The crowd went home, and there were lights in the windows of the caravans.

  Nobody had noticed the girl. In her black clothes she stood against the side of the roundabouts, hearing the last feet tread upon the sawdust and the last voices die into the distance. Then, all alone on the deserted ground, surrounded by the shapes of wooden horses and cheap fairy boats, she looked for a place to sleep. Now here and now there, she raised the canvas that shrouded the cocoanut stalls and peered into the warm darkness. She was frightened to step inside, and as a mouse scampered across the littered shavings on the floor, or as the canvas creaked and a rush of wind set it dancing, she ran away and hid again near the roundabouts. Once she stepped on the boards; the bells round a horse’s throat jingled and were still; she did not dare breathe until all was quiet again and the darkness had forgotten the noise of the bells. Then here and there she went peeping for a bed, into each gondola, under each tent. But there was nowhere, nowhere in all the fair for her to sleep. One place was too silent, and in another was the noise of mice. There was straw in the corner of the Astrologer’s tent, but it moved as she touched it; she knelt by its side and put out her hand; she felt a baby’s hand upon her own.