A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  While they were knocking back champagne and calling every two minutes for the Spaniard who looked after the table, I slipped away to visit Bridgitte. I hadn’t bothered to phone beforehand, and when I got there, going up in the lift and full of anticipation at getting her lips and body wrapped into mine, there was no answer to my ringing. That was bloody funny. I thought. Somebody at least had to be in, because they couldn’t all have gone out and left poor Smog alone. I rang again. I even knocked. Then I went down into the street, and phoned from the nearest callbox. My eyes were wide open, glued to the mirror, hypnotized by the continual buzzing that was never going to be answered. I unlatched myself, without getting my button-B money back.

  It was raining, so I pulled my mac around me, heading for the club I used to work at. I was in time to see June at the end of her act. Paul Dent called to me like a firm old friend, and even Kenny Dukes tipped me a no-hard-feelings wink. I had heard from June that he’d smouldered with dangerous envy for a week or so after I’d got my rather special job with Moggerhanger, but at the moment he seemed convivial enough. He even offered me a drink.

  A few minutes later June came to the bar: ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Claud?’

  ‘A foregone conclusion,’ I said. ‘Whisky?’

  ‘They were really out to get him, though. Tomato juice, love.’

  ‘He knows how to tie them up.’ We drank our doses and I sat in a stupor the rest of the evening, chatting her up between the times she was on.

  In the early hours I offered to get her home in a taxi, and she accepted. ‘Sometimes my working day goes like a dream,’ she said, nestling close when we were in, ‘but today was a drag, waiting for Claud to get off.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked her, my arm over her shoulder, the other in her lap.

  ‘He’s the only man I have anything to do with properly. But don’t talk about him. Kiss me.’

  I did, and she clung to me as if I were the last man on Earth, opening me and feeling me so that I began to be a bit embarrassed in case the driver turned round, or saw us in his mirror. I tried to do the same to her, but she wouldn’t have it. We were gasping and half choking, and I suddenly let go of myself completely, at which she gave me a final kiss and drew away.

  On the steps of the house she lived in I asked if I could come up to her flat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend I’m rather sweet on at the moment. Thanks for the nice ride, though.’

  ‘I’ll come up and serve you both if you like.’

  She smiled, giving the final rub-off: ‘I’ll serve her myself.’

  ‘As long as you enjoy it,’ I said, walking away.

  Sodium lights flared and glowed down Camden Road, and I walked in the blackest of hugger-muggers back towards town. It would have been better, as things turned out, if I had gone to sleep it off in my room at Ealing, but my feet wouldn’t move that way. That bastion of all-devouring Moggerhangers had kept me in thrall for more than I should have let it these few months. As far as I was concerned he could rot on the dungheap of his self-invented rules, because tonight I wanted to shake it off for a few hours and roam at my own will.

  Before I’d gone half a mile I dialled Bridgitte’s number again, but, like before, there was no answer. I went through multiple speculations as to what had happened, but every one of them was a tragedy, and so none sounded like the truth. There was nothing to do except wait some unspecified amount of time before getting to know what had happened, and it gnawed at my guts. I wanted to go to the flat and quietly break in, but when I got there the big front doors on the street were locked more firmly than those of a castle in the middle of a brigand-infested wilderness.

  A few taxis circled Leicester Square, and a copper eyed me as I passed a closed-up picture house. I walked down Villiers Street, then up the steps on to Hungerford Bridge. The water below was circling slowly as if only a foot deep. A skyline of buildings stood under the halo of their own light that seemed to be generated by the faint traffic noise. London was beautiful at night, when most of the eight million people were asleep and I could have the feeling that all of it was for myself.

  I lit a Dutch cigar and strolled on over the bridge, telling myself how good it was to be alive once all things that held me down had vanished from sight. In a corner at the top of the steps a body was hunched away from the breeze and drizzle, trying to sleep. At the noise of my footsteps his head lifted and said: ‘Got a smoke, mate?’

  I stopped, and passed him one. ‘That’s all I have on me’ – wanting to tell him off for being out on a night like this, give him a lecture on not providing for himself, and maybe at the end of it recite Moggerhanger’s rules. But I sensed that this might not mean much at such a critical stage of his life.

  ‘Eh,’ he said, ‘a cigar! I’ll take a puff, though it won’t be any use on an empty stomach.’

  I’d heard that voice before, that complained with such professional confidence. ‘I suppose you want a couple of bob for a sandwich?’

  ‘That’s cheap at the price,’ he said. ‘With five shillings I could get a bowl of soup as well.’

  I looked close: ‘If I’m not mistaken I’m talking to the well-known and notorious Almanack Jack.’

  ‘Are you a copper?’ he said, a well-developed snarl. ‘If you ate, I’m an innocent man. I’ve driven a few people into the looney-bin in my time, but apart from that nobody can point a finger at me. Still, we’ve all done that sort of thing. If you’re too young for it you’ve got plenty of time yet.’

  I told him who I was. ‘I don’t want to disturb your good night’s sleep, but I haven’t had a bite for fourteen hours, so I’m probably hungrier than you are. You can come to the market for a feed if you like.’

  He jumped up, surprisingly agile for a man of beard and rags. ‘I got rolled,’ he told me as we walked along. ‘Some young toughs from Lambeth jumped on me and took my almanacks. They scattered them all up Northumberland Avenue, then drove off in a souped-up Zodiac. It’s happening too often these days. I’m going to fix myself up with a knife. That’ll keep the young bleeders at bay.’

  I told him I was working for Moggerhanger, and he gave a whistle to show he was impressed. ‘I hope you hold your job. They say nobody works for him long.’

  ‘We get on fine, the two of us.’

  ‘Keep it that way, then you can buy me a meal now and again.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. He gradually straightened up while walking, till he seemed at last to be a little taller than I was.

  We found a place, and indulged ourselves at my expense. Bacon and cheese sandwiches got washed down by innumerable bucket-sized mugs of tea. The place was full of porters and lorry drivers, as if I were back in a Nottingham café near a factory, where the blokes go because they can’t stand the better food of canteen dinners. It was warm, smoky, steamedup, and timeless, and I began to feel as tired and done in as Almanack Jack looked. In spite of his bang-about life he seemed better fleshed with food than I was, and in the end he was thumping me on the shoulder and telling me not to look so depressed. Then he fell forward on his arms and went to sleep.

  He heard me stand up to get more tea and sandwiches, and when I came back he was wide awake, and started snapping into it. ‘I don’t know why you sell almanacks,’ I said. ‘You only frighten people half to death with the prophecies inside.’

  ‘That’s what they want,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t buy them otherwise. They’re only human, after all. If you can’t have a good earthquake or war to look forward to in somebody else’s country, life isn’t worth living.’

  ‘You don’t believe that crap.’

  ‘No. But they do. I think war is stupid as well.’

  He leaned back, lit a cigar of mine, and sent the first smoke out slowly, like a calculated trick, as if knowing that he could bring it back again when it began to stray too far. The unfamiliar smell fetched disapproving looks from a couple of men nearby, but Jack was enjoying himself, as if the smell of a cig
ar brought back a lucidity that he’d had, once upon a time. ‘Those that indulge in war,’ he said, ‘seem to like it so much that once they start they can’t stop, like two people fucking. In fact war is a male homosexual act between consenting nations, carried out in full view of God. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gone on so long. My almanacks make no difference, whether it comes or goes. Ever tried prophesying peace? You wouldn’t sell a single copy. You’d be a bloody liar, what’s more.’

  I didn’t like this idea from him, that I was a liar, but my hard-earned food was making him light-headed, so there seemed no way of stopping him, short of walking out. And I couldn’t do that because I still had half a mug of tea and a sandwich in front of me.

  ‘I can pick up your thoughts like a man in the park stabbing bits of toffee paper with a sharp stick. Ever since you saw me dozing on Hungerford Bridge you’ve been thinking I ought to have a shave and get a job. Don’t deny it. But just because you’ve become someone’s bodyservant, don’t get feeling so superior to me. If it hadn’t been you on the bridge just now who’d felt guilty at seeing me shivering to death and got me something to eat, another mug would have turned up sooner or later. I feel superior to you, mate, because having slipped off the social scale altogether, I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. You can’t get any higher than’ that in the world, take it from me. So when you do me a good turn, I’m not too grateful because I’m doing as much for you as you are doing for me. The unemployed should be treated as great gifts to a nation, because if they didn’t in their largeness of spirit agree to be unemployed, all the other toffee-nosed bastards who’ve got jobs couldn’t hold them. The unemployed should be fed and pampered, given double pay to what they’d get if they were working. There should be special centres where they could queue up for a daily ration of cigars. One prominent motto of my Democratic Republic of Euphoria would be: Hail to the unemployable, because they should inherit the earth in payment for letting the guilt-ridden neurotics of the world work.’

  I suddenly felt the weight of Moggerhanger at one end pulling, and Almanack Jack at the other. His head fell forward, and in a few moments he was properly asleep. I got up and walked out, on foot all the way back to Ealing, brooding on the black ingratitude of such sly bastards as Almanack Jack. I took time off to phone Bridgitte’s place again, stood in a callbox at four in the morning, listening like a madman to that regular brain-sawing rhythmic buzz, feeling that if anyone were in the flat they’d have to get up and answer it or be driven as crazy as I was beginning to feel.

  I wasn’t called till midday, thank God, and then only for a short visit to the lawyers. Moggerhanger didn’t want a holiday after his strain of waiting for the trial. He wasn’t that sort of man, and I should have known he wouldn’t be. In fact he was more ebullient and bullying than ever, and I began to hate his guts, though I didn’t want to quit because I liked the job so much, wanting at least to hang on to it while the mystery of Bridgitte’s disappearance was clawing at me. I also found that my heart in some way was missing Smog, which made me wonder what sort of a person I was. He’d latched so much on to the secret life of Bridgitte and myself that it almost seemed as if he were our child and not Dr Anderson’s.

  My work was so hard that Moggerhanger should have had three chauffeurs instead of one, because now I was going at it from eight in the morning till sometimes ten at night. After his acquittal, business was surging. Clubs, brothels, and gambling pits were opening all over the place, and in spite of all regulations Moggerhanger was a law unto himself. The police had tried to get him, but he had beaten them with their own rules, and in consequence they treated him with far greater deference than before.

  I was going fifty miles an hour along Bayswater Road at ten one night when a motor cyclops stopped us. When he peered in he said: ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know it was you, Mr Moggerhanger.’

  ‘That’s all right. I was busy at these papers and didn’t know he was doing half a ton. Go a bit slower, you damned fool,’ he called to me. When we got going again he apologized: ‘I had to do that, Mike. They like to keep face, these coppers. Go as fast as you like beyond the Gate. We’re late already.’

  From the Arch to the Gate, through the Bush to the Scrubs, and my daily zig-zags continued. I felt a marked man going into some of the more bizarre clubs that Moggerhanger had under his thumb. There was a striptease joint in which men peeled off to the buff in some corny act or other. The spectators seemed mostly lesbians, hefty women in rural drag up from the country, or grey-haired bony-faced executive business women, too drunk and bawdy to go back to work after three in the afternoon.

  After a tour of such clubs and properties Moggerhanger told me to come to the house because he’d like a word with me. I was too dead tired to wonder what was up. We went into the living-room, and he didn’t tell me to sit down. ‘I hear you were at the club last week?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I also hear that you left with June, and that you took her home.’

  ‘I saw her to the door.’

  ‘Maybe. But you didn’t get back here till five in the morning.’

  ‘I walked around.’

  He laughed: ‘You’ve cooked your goose. I can’t have my chauffeur messing with my girlfriend. You can get out. I’ll pay you a month’s notice. Now. Tonight.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ I said.

  ‘Go in the morning, then. If you’re here when I get back for lunch tomorrow they’ll find your body – or part of it – in the Thames by the time it gets dark.’

  ‘It’s a bit sudden,’ I told him, trying to sound contrite so that he might let on who had told him about me and June. ‘What are you going to do for a chauffeur?’

  There was a flicker of doubt regarding my guilt: ‘Kenny Dukes is taking over.’

  ‘Is he then? He’s always been envious of my job, the fat snake. If he can get it as easy as this, then good luck to him. There’s never been anything between me and June.’

  ‘He tells me no lies,’ Moggerhanger said, as if losing my living was no more than a game to him. ‘He kept me informed which is what he’s paid to do.’

  I felt like going berserk in his contemporary mansion, but turned and went out, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and Moggerhanger. I didn’t think this would be so difficult, but regretted losing my job, though it couldn’t be said that my life crumbled because of it. My new suitcase hadn’t had time to get more than half filled in the time I’d been there so I carried it with ease towards the bus stop and headed for town, leaving the reddest sunset behind me that I’d seen in years.

  Part Four

  The fact that I had nowhere to go and no one to see didn’t worry me a bit. That is to say, it did worry me, because I was only human, after all, though it didn’t put me off doing what I had to do. The only flaw was that I had no idea what I had to do, or even what I wanted to do. But I was on a half-empty bus going east, and at the moment that was enough for me, because if there was one thing I liked doing in life it was watching buildings and people from the safe top deck of a bus, especially after having worked for a few months as a chauffeur, in which I’d been so engrossed in driving a car that it’d been impossible to see a thing. I felt like a king, able to smoke and relax, and touched my pocket to make sure the table lighter was still there. I’d lifted it on my final plunderer’s run through Moggerhanger’s downstairs hall, and it now weighed heavy and fat in its silver lining, something he’d never see again because I’d pawn it at the first opportunity. It was a lovely piece of work, and I’d had my eyes on it for some time, but now that it was in my pocket I began to wonder whether I’d done the right thing. The arm of Moggerhanger’s vengeance might reach a longer way than I imagined. He was the sort who valued even the most trivial of his knick-knacks, and the one that currently nestled in my pocket was a bit more than that. Still, even with Moggerhanger, possession was nine-tenths of the law, and I was after all only following the gist of his jungle commandments which, shuffled up t
ight into one slick pack, said that you must get anything you want no matter at what cost to others. Maybe he wouldn’t miss it till Kenny Dukes was well and truly taken on, and then would blame him for it, slit his throat like the no-good pig he was.

  I dropped off the bus in Piccadilly, and stood looking at the lights, but I hadn’t the sort of heart that got glad at them. I preferred faces, because they could at least look back, and who knows? I thought, one of them might recognize me at the same time that I recognized it. I walked on into Soho. Not that I was lonely. That would never do, and I’d deny it to my dying breath, but I did wonder again where Bridgitte Appledore had gone, and even cast my mind back to the days of Miss Bolsover and Claudine Forks. I stood by a pub bar with my case at my feet, supping a bitter pint and slewing a sly eye now and again at the women’s faces, but bringing no response. Even the men who were with them weren’t jealous enough to resent my stares. So I went into another house, and then up a curving alleyway somewhere off the Strand, careful not to get drunk because I wasn’t in the mood for that.

  One crumby pub was bunged up to the gills, but along the bar was a face I’d seen before, though for some moments I couldn’t say where, not knowing whether it was from months or years ago. He was a tall man, dressed in a high-necked sweater and an expensive tweed jacket, the sort of casual gear that must have cost far more than a good suit. His face was, I suppose, sensitive because of the thick lips, putty skin, and pale eyes. He wore a hat, but in spite of this I was struck by the length of his face and head, which did not, however, make him as ugly as it should have done. In observing to this extent what he looked like, it came to me quite quickly that I’d first glimpsed him in the pub where I stopped with June and Bill Straw on my way down from Nottingham, and it was sharp-eyed June who told me he was a writer by the name of Gilbert Blaskin. If I was mistaken in any way, it was only that I remembered him as not being quite so tall as he certainly was now, but I felt no doubt as to who it was because faces are about the only thing I have much memory for, except remembering what’s happened to me in the past – which I was able to do from a very early age, as soon as I realized that a certain amount of time had been put behind me in which events had occurred that I could look back on, especially those that in some way joined me to other people.