A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘For a year or two Catherine went cold towards me, and I was put into a walk of death by it, getting thinner and, it seemed to me, smaller so that I was only a few inches above the earth. Once when I was walking alone along a lane I thought I was small enough to get into a pothole in front of me, curl up and go to sleep in it so that I’d be perfectly safe even if a car went over it. But I did very well at school, and surprised everybody by being best in the class at almost everything.

  ‘Catherine had been used to having her own way, and she’d been seeing a boy for a few weeks. I think they’d been making love because a group of us used to go out on our bikes at the weekend, and sometimes Catherine and her boyfriend would creep off for half an hour. Then he went away with his parents and didn’t write to her, and she was shocked as she’d never been before. I found his address and wrote, telling him how upset she was, but nothing came of that, which was good I suppose. She used to come into my room at night and weep, and get into my bed for some sort of comfort. Now it was my turn to put on weight, and for Catherine to get thinner – but only for a time because soon she more or less forgot about him.

  ‘We became very close to each other after that, and she loved me as if I’d been through her experience, as if it ran in my blood as well as hers. We were both young women by now, and our parents, apart from pushing us gently along the educational railway, more or less left us alone. They were generous with pocket money, so we were able to buy extra dresses and what paperbacks we needed, and go to the cinema now and again. Neither of us went with boys, though we were well looked at by any we happened to meet, and many of the boys in the sixth form were friendly with us. But I think we were both mad for a time. We talked crazily about books, films, paintings, plans for the future. We were going to become teachers or doctors and go to Africa together. It was a marvellous age of innocence. We took our baths at the same time. We often slept in the same bed, not being able to stay apart after an enthralling conversation. We even started to learn Swahili, so that we’d know at least one African language. If I told Gilbert any of this he’d mock me to death, but I know I can tell you. Our parents thought we were model daughters, because we helped in the house whenever we could, though this really wasn’t necessary because we were well-off enough to have an Austrian maid, and a man to look after the garden. We went to Wales or France for holidays, and life was good for all of us.

  ‘The boy Catherine had known two years earlier came back, and she went out with him. He left again after a month and she was pregnant. We didn’t know what to do. She was let down, and horrified. We talked for hours, wondering whether to try and find out how to get rid of it, or tell our parents, or whether she should say nothing, but just go off to university and perhaps have the baby in secret. The weeks went by and we even prepared an elaborate plan for both of us to kill ourselves. It was as if I were pregnant as well, I felt so much a part of her. What we did was worse than anything. We decided to run away together. We discussed it with such enthusiasm as the final, sensible, unalterable answer to the disaster, that all our troubles seemed to be over. I shall never forget the illumination I felt during those few days. I walked as if I were sanctified. It’s crazy. It was crazy, absolutely mad, yet it’s the most wonderful memory.

  ‘There was seventy pounds between us, and we decided to go to London, find a room, get jobs, and pool whatever we earned. It seemed as if she were no longer pregnant, for in our keenness to escape we almost forgot the blow that had caused it all. I had the insane idea of driving to London in our father’s car. Some nights he and Mother would go to see friends on the other side of town, which meant that if we went away in it it would have to be in the evening. Catherine had taken some lessons, and drove rather well. I had seen her, and I couldn’t drive at all.

  ‘We hurriedly packed our cases and put them in the car. She drove though the open gate, and both of us were trying not to laugh out loud at this easy getaway, all set as we were for a long and happy life together. It was a fine summer’s evening, with a few hours of daylight left, as Catherine took the car slowly but confidently along the lane and towards the main road. There was hardly any traffic, and she seemed radiant. But there were tears on her cheeks: “Do you think we should?”

  ‘“What else can we do?” I answered, touching her wrist. “It’s wonderful to be leaving everything behind.”

  ‘She smiled: “All right. It is.” From the other side a car was approaching the brow of a hill, not going very fast, and at the same time a lousy motorcyclist was overtaking the car. He actually missed us, but his sudden black appearance startled Catherine so that she screamed, and our car went through a hedge and down a slope. The world rushed over me like a blanket, hammers beating at me though the woollen padding. Then I was being pulled clear.

  ‘The blackness came back, and I opened my eyes in hospital. I asked about Catherine, and was told she was all right. She was in a better state, in fact, than I was. Both my legs were broken, my ribs were smashed, and I’d been concussed, apart from sundry other wounds. When I left hospital Catherine was married to her boyfriend, who’d been made to admit his part in getting her pregnant. She went to live with him near Newcastle, and now they have three children. I was able to say goodbye to her, but we hardly knew each other. I was said to be the evil one who had led her into bad ways, and I didn’t deny any of this. It would at least give her something to remember me by.

  ‘I haven’t seen her since, and we never write. I did my time at Bristol, and worked as a private teacher. Then I got the bright idea of doing some postgraduate work on the modern English novel, though whether I’ll ever get beyond Gilbert Blaskin I don’t know, because I’ve fallen in love with him. Not that that’s rare, because I fall in love rather easily. Don’t ask why. I miss my real parents still, and because I didn’t get that jealous and possessive love from my second parents, I’m still looking for it. But what you look for you never get – or so I’m beginning to think, and the idea frightens me a bit. But I can’t help looking. It’s a sort of heartless search that’s been built into my nature. I fall in love because I want something, not because I have something to give, and that’s what men see, and what puts them off when they’ve finally got to the end of me in bed.’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about anything,’ I said. ‘Everybody gets what they want. I’m convinced of it – even though I might not.’

  ‘I don’t want pity,’ she said, a wonderful smile which showed that she was no cynic about her life, though she’d try to convince everybody that she was.

  ‘You’ll get no pity from me,’ I told her. ‘I only feel sorry for people who haven’t got enough to eat, or who’ve got an incurable sickness.’

  ‘How right you are,’ she said. ‘I wish people often said that sort of thing to me.’

  I felt good at hearing this. ‘It’s true,’ I went on, ‘the body has to be seen to first. If that goes, there’s nothing left. If you’re fed and healthy you’ve always got a chance of getting through somehow.’

  ‘It’s easy to say that,’ she said, ‘but you’re right. I know you are.’

  ‘Forgive my big mouth,’ I said. ‘I’m worse than Gilbert in my own narrow way. But I know that what I say is true.’

  ‘Keep on saying it,’ she said, ‘so that I’ll believe it. Sometimes I feel like walking off the edge of the world because everybody I meet agrees with me when I say things are terrible, and I can’t see what the point of life is.’

  I got up to boil water for coffee. ‘If I ever write a book I’ll call it How to Stop Worrying – and Drop Dead!’

  She squeezed my hand affectionately, as if it were real love she felt: ‘Gilbert doesn’t know I love him. I’d never tell him. As soon as you tell someone you love them, they can then do their worst to you.’

  ‘But if you don’t tell them, they may never know.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll find out,’ she said, hopefully. ‘I’ve given lots of signs. Things can’t be worse than they are now, but it’s when I
think that things might start to get better that I get frightened, because that’s when the worst really happens.’

  She had me sweating at these twistings and turnings, burning through my flimsy front of simplicity and common-sense, so that I started to imagine that whatever she said was right, ‘I mistrust myself and my emotions all the time,’ she went on. ‘but only so that I might be able to get to know myself, not in order to destroy myself – which seems to be where it’s heading me.’

  ‘It’s a way of destroying others,’ I told her, a bit too strongly. She lifted my hand to her mouth, and I thought I was all set for a tender kiss. Her eyes closed, as if what I said was a revelation to her instead of the deadly insult she took it to be. Her small sharp teeth ground into the gristle of my wrist.

  ‘You bastard!’ I shouted, never having called anyone else such a thing in my life before, shooting back from the bloody witch. ‘What was that for?’ I had to move because the pain was killing me, so I walked over to the stove, but the kettle wasn’t yet boiling.

  ‘You deserved it,’ she said, beginning to smile. ‘I never wanted to destroy anybody. People can only destroy themselves.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, thinking about revenge. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please, love.’

  ‘Do you often bite people, or is it just when you’re hungry, like?’

  ‘Oh, stop it, can’t you?’

  ‘Drink this, then, you bitch.’

  Gilbert came in, slumped down in such a way that I knew the play had been no good. ‘The kitchen sink,’ he said. ‘A slice of life. Full of dirty dishes. They didn’t even throw them at each other. Very good dialogue, though. All talk.’

  Pearl put a hand on his shoulder and let him sip her coffee. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘Had supper,’ he said, ‘with the man who wrote the play. He thinks my novels are trash, and I drink his plays are bunk, so we drowned our mutual comradeship in wine. I was going to show a bit of solidarity by saying we were both writers after all, but he started talking about decorating the house he’d just bought, and wondering which was the best car to buy.’

  ‘But you’ve got these things already,’ Pearl reminded him, unnecessarily, I thought.

  ‘So’s he. But he wants more and more. But God forgive me, he’d be all right if only he’d write a play with a happy ending, and leave me to write my tragic novels. Still, I can’t expect to corner the market forever. I’m so incriminatingly selfish. What have you two been doing in my absence? Fornicating on my best bed?’

  ‘Wandered like a ghost around Victoria Station for a couple of hours, then walked up West.’

  ‘I see she’s bitten you,’ he laughed. ‘Somebody ought to punch some sense into her, the bloody vampire. Or am I talking to the woman you love?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said.

  ‘Like that, is it? Never mind. I had a letter today to say that an admirer of mine had produced my fourth novel in an edition of illuminated braille, so that it would be seen as a beautiful object while being read. Can you imagine that? But then somebody told the visionary who’d done it that the blind couldn’t see, so he shot himself in despair. I sympathize with him because he was trying to light up the darkness of the world, and though he was foolhardy and mad, as it turned out, it was a commendable thing to do. Light up your hearts! That’s what I’m for, to persuade people against their better instincts that life is worth living. Do not despair, says Gilbert Blaskin. He’ll do that for you. Gilbert will lighten the loads of all of you. But who, dear God, is going to lighten his load? Life falls twice as heavily on him ladies and gentlemen, but he’s not supposed to notice it because he’s helping you not to notice yours. The trumpets shall sound, but Gilbert will never be able to unload his load, caught as he is in the desert between Pimlico and Earl’s Court.

  ‘I saw my wife at the theatre with a gaggle of friends. I never left her, but caused her to leave me. I wanted to leave her for years but couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I made her life such a misery that she was forced to clear out to stop herself going mad or getting strangled. I wanted to get rid of her so as to have a free hand with my girlfriend whom I intended to marry. But as soon as my wife left me I lost all enthusiasm for my girlfriend. Don’t ask me why. The bullets of introspection don’t go that far. Maybe they do in the characters I conjure up, but not in me. So I broke things up with my girlfriend, and asked my wife to come back. But she laughed at me and wouldn’t, having discovered that she’d wanted to leave me for years, but hadn’t been able to do it till I’d forced her to. And now I’m here in these rooms of memory which even my delectable and scorching Pearl can’t rub out. And if she can’t, there’s no one else who can. The trouble is I’m not even in love with my wife, and if she came back I’d only get rid of her again after a month – no, a week. By God, Michael, life’s not easy. If you think it is just jump in the toilet and pull the chain after yourself. They say the sewers in New York are full of alligators because people have flushed them down there when they no longer want to keep them as pets. I think God or some swine has flushed a few into me to keep me lively and kicking. I’ll pop somebody into my mouth one day armed with a quick-firing double-barrelled rifle to hunt those alligators out, even though I die over it.’

  He went on like this, slooshing his tripes with brandy now and again, till he fell off the chair, and we had to drag him to bed. I left Pearl to tuck him in.

  I sat in my room making plans for departure. Gilbert hadn’t yet read the typed copy of his novel. When he did there’d be a shock for him. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made a good job of it. The typing was clear and firm, the paper white and clean between the lines, and maybe even some people would consider it to be a novel. I’d started off with Gilbert’s true text, but halfway through I got bored by the story, and at the point where his hero was sitting outside a Paris café and wondering whether to go back to his girlfriend in London, or down to his boyfriend in Nice, I reached up to the shelf behind me and brought down Roderick Random by Henry Fielding* and typed twenty pages of that, which, if anything, lent a bit of quality to Blaskin’s thin-blooded crap. More pages were ploughed in from other novels, though I understood that this wasn’t exactly what the author wanted. Considering that I’d spent three weeks over the work, he might have been irritated by this and given me the push, so I decided to take fate once more into my own hands and light off before he got wind of the disaster. Then I thought I was being too hurried about it, that if I didn’t lose my nerve, and stayed, maybe he wouldn’t bother to read the novel before sending it to his publishers. And once it got there maybe nobody would tumble to what had been done, and print it with the fond thought that Mr Blaskin had at last set off on better and richer ways, something they’d been secretly hoping for ever since they’d mistaken his first novel for a work of art. Maybe the reviewers would even praise the newly emerging quality of his invention. In which case he’d actually have something to thank me for – if I was still around.

  I decided to move on, though not at midnight, because it was always better to look for a bed in, the morning, when the memory of one was still with you. Another thing was that I needed a room of my own, an absolutely set pad where I could come and go of my quick will. I’d dallied long enough at Blaskin’s for Moggerhanger to have given me up as lost, if he’d even bothered to miss me or imagine I could ever be found, which I was beginning to doubt now that my hope and initiative were coming back, blinding me to all caution. Another fact was that Blaskin had given me no money, when he’d solemnly promised fifty bob a week. I’d reminded him of it in good terms a time or two, but like all people who are ultra-sensitive in everything, and don’t miss a splinter of what goes on anywhere, it went over his head completely – or at least he acted as if it did.

  When I considered that all were asleep I crept out of my room and found his coat hanging up in the hall. I removed two five-pound notes, which I thought to be honest payment for all the work I’d done on his novel. There
were sixty pounds in the wallet altogether, and I could have lifted all of it, but I knew in my heart that Blaskin would call the police without hesitation if he thought I’d robbed him unjustly, for he was one of those people who loved the world as long as the people in it interested him. After that, it was back to the jungle for all concerned.

  I had to get out of the flat while he and Pearl were still asleep, and to save time packed my case the night before. I stood with the light off and my curtains open, watching the opposite buildings. A woman leaned in white underwear, and a man’s arms pulled her to him, out of my sight. Then the blind went down. A huge dog, as big as a man and with a head twice the size, pressed at one window, and seemed to be barking, though I couldn’t hear it, pawing the glass as if it were locked in and there was no escape. I wished someone would pull that beast away so that I couldn’t see it any more. I turned my head to another range of windows. In some, there was washing, because most of the rooms seemed to be kitchens. Light bulbs were often bare, a few were shaded. A shadow moved across a window now and again, too quick to see whether it was man or woman. I wondered how many of them had to get up in the morning and go to work. I felt hatred of those who didn’t, as if I was the only person in the world with the right to be idle. Just as I could never feel sympathy for anyone unless they were without food, so I would never go to work unless I were starving. But as I looked at those massed windows covering the whole sky, I felt this sentiment crumbling. It just wasn’t worthwhile. It cut me off too much, from all those people in the world I most wanted to know. It was as if I had to break my own bones in order to join them, that was the only trouble. The longer it went on like this, the harder it would be, though at the same time I devoutly wondered whether I’d have the brains to stay away from their terrible anonymity without falling as low as Almanack Jack. To join them, all I had to do was switch on my own bedroom light, and stand there, imprisoned in the oblong of window so that they on the other side could then see that I was a prisoner like the rest of them. But I got into bed in the dark.