A taxi comes gliding up to us.
‘The usual,’ says the B.-in-B. to the driver.
‘He’s not going to throw up, is he?’ says the driver, as we pile Our Friend inside. ‘I’m not cleaning up after him if he does.’
The B.-in-B. ambles away at the regulation saunter. It is as though the taxi and we bumbling three are in the twenty-sixth dimension of the planet Aora for all he sees of us. There’s nowt so blind as reluctant officialdom. Or was it the Nelson Touch? Not tonight, thank you, Hardy.
10/‘If he pukes,’ says the taxi man as we settle inside, ‘stick his noddle out the window.’
But, like a child exhausted from play, The Drunk is snoring before we even move off.
I look at Barry; he looks at me and raises a questioning eyebrow. I shrug a ‘don’t know’, and he grins. There he is, enjoying himself again. This guy has an insatiable appetite, I think to myself.
Never was a righter word thought. He had.
We soon know where we are going.
It is less than half a mile from the station to the pierhead, the beginning of that once proud symbol of Southend’s uniqueness among resorts for all seasons. Blackpool has its tower, Brighton has its pavilion, Southend has its all but clapped-out relic of the longest pier in the world.
The taxi pulls off the road and stops in a darkish corner.
‘All change,’ says the driver, getting out and throwing open the door against which The Drunk is slumped, and begins unceremoniously dragging him out.
‘Give us a hand, then,’ he says. We sober two have not moved, being unable to register that this can possibly be our intended destination.
‘We stop here?’ Barry says as we help from inside to hustle Our Friend.
‘Where else?’ says the taxi man as though this is a fool question to which we should know the answer already.
By the time Barry and I have got ourselves out after him, the driver has The Drunk pressed up against the car and is making a very professional job of going through his pockets. The Drunk is not resisting, being now apparently incapable of resisting anything.
‘What’s this then?’ says Barry meaning no nonsense.
‘Got to get my fare ain’t I,’ says the driver. ‘Why?’ He laughs. ‘You paying?’
He pulls out a wallet from The Drunk’s back pocket. It is a fat wedge of notes.
‘Very handy,’ says the driver, about to stow the money in a pocket of his own.
‘What the hell!’ says Barry bracing.
The driver pauses and weighs us up askance. ‘Don’t worry, squire,’ he says, scornful, ‘you’ll get your taste.’
‘Look,’ says Barry, ‘I don’t know what your game is, but you’re not taking his money.’
So now he’s not satisfied with rescuing a suicidal drunk, he wants to get us both murdered as well. Loyal to the last, I step up to Barry’s side as though I am as brave as he. What am I trying to prove? I ask myself. That I really am his friend? In which case I hope he’s got that can of magic beans hidden somewhere because when things get rough he’d better give it a quick rub and get us back to the twentieth century double quick. I’ve got a sensitive skin. It bruises when it’s punched.
The driver is suspicious now. ‘What’s the joke?’ he says.
‘Just put the money back,’ Barry says. If he’s scared I wouldn’t know it.
‘O, I get it,’ says the driver, ‘you want me to put the readies back and leave you two to split them between you when I’m gone!’ He really laughs at that one. ‘Good gag that! Great!’
‘Think what you like,’ Barry says, ‘but put it back.’
‘Get knotted!’ says the driver.
He pushes The Drunk, who slumps onto the ground looking and sounding like a plastic bag full of squashy tomatoes, and is about to climb back into his taxi.
Barry leans against the door. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Have it your way.’
The driver is cracking the knuckles of one hand in the fist of the other. ‘There’s a clever boy,’ he says through his tight grin.
‘Registered plate HX 96310,’ Barry says deadpan. ‘And if memory serves, the copper who so kindly enlisted your aid was P.C. SO190. How about driving us back to the nick?’
The driver considers each of us in turn for a moment.
‘We’ve got a right one here,’ he says to me, as if I’m nothing more than his audience. To Barry he says, ‘You crafty young bugger. I’ve heard of some pretty sells but this one takes the biscuit.’
‘The biscuit you can keep,’ Barry says. ‘Just hand over the cash.’
‘They get younger every day,’ says the driver eyeing us both with distaste now. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘take the bleeding money.’ He slips a ten quid note off the bundle and throws the rest onto the snoring body slumped at our feet. He pushes Barry aside and climbs into his car. ‘I’ll take my fare though, if you don’t mind,’ he says, flapping the note through his window. Then he starts up and reverses away fast. ‘I’ll remember you two,’ he shouts as he goes.
11/The pace was beginning to tell. We stood gormless, and watched the taxi lose itself along the esplanade.
A grovelling at our feet reactivates us.
‘Pick up his legs,’ Barry says, stuffing the bundle of money into The Drunk’s trouser pocket. ‘We’ll bed him down on a couple of deck-chairs under the pier.’
We struggle like corpse thieves with The Drunk’s lolloping body, finding him a spot as hidden as we can.
‘Am I dead?’ he moans as we lay him out on his makeshift bed.
‘Not yet,’ I say.
‘Feel like I’m dead,’ he says. He has reached the maudlin stage.
‘Nothing to what you’ll feel like in the morning,’ says Barry. ‘Have a good kip. You’ll be all right there.’
But he doesn’t hear. He’s snoring again already.
We stand looking down at him. I see for the first time—or take the fact in for the first time, I guess—that he is not much older than Barry. In his early twenties maybe. Sleep smoothed his features. The distortions of drunkenness had gone. He was handsome, I saw. A strong face, well fleshed. Tender in sleep. Only his hair was deranged.
Barry bent down and carefully combed Our Drunk’s hair into ordered shape again.
I knew then, in the way he took obvious pleasure in tidying the sleeping man’s hair, why he had rescued him. And was sure now why he had rescued me.
JKA. Running Report: Henry Spurling ROBINSON 21st Sept. 0930. Hal telephoned, saying he could not manage our meeting tomorrow, what about today? Thought it best not to question him, and agreed to his request, because I think it better that he talk, if he wants to, straightaway. He also asked why we had to meet in my office, which he said was ‘impersonal and official’. I made various suggestions of other meeting places. He did not like any of them. He suggested the end of the pier or a rowing boat on the children’s boating pool! I settled for Queen Victoria’s statue in the gardens above the esplanade at 10.30.
Hal was waiting when I arrived. He did not see me approach; he was sitting on the grass just beyond the statue watching some children playing nearby. I sat down between two old folk in the shelter and looked across the flowerbed at him on the other side of the monument. I hoped I might learn something by watching his behaviour when he was relaxed.
He was laughing at the kids playing and throwing their ball back to them. Of course, they started ‘losing’ their ball in his direction more and more. He was enjoying their attention and did not try and dominate their game, just reacted to what they did. I felt he was getting as much from watching them as I was from watching him! Whatever is the matter, or has gone on, the sight of him playing so naturally suggests to me that there is nothing psychologically deep seated to worry about.
I went up to him after a few minutes. He joked and put on his flippant front for a while. He asked about Vonnegut and what I thought of the book he loaned me yesterday. I fobbed him off by saying I hadn’t had time to read it ye
t.
Just the trouble, he said: there was never enough time in what he called my ‘official investigations’ to talk properly about anything.
I asked him what he wanted to see me about so urgently. He said he had been thinking over the situation and had decided he would like to tell me what had happened. But I would have to give him ‘proper time’ and he wouldn’t be able to talk if we met ‘officially’. We would have to talk ‘off the record’ somewhere else than my office. And at home his parents would always be hovering around.
I listened to all this, relieved in a way that he was now behaving normally: wanting to feel I was completely taken up with his case, giving him my time in preference to other people, etc. I decided the best thing would be to treat this a little firmly. I explained that I did have other cases to look after. That I could never talk completely off the record. That after all the whole point was that he explain to me what had happened so that I could recommend to the court a course of action that would suit the circumstances.
He would think about this, he said. But he couldn’t go on calling me ‘Mizzz Atkins’. I said that I called him Hal, he could call me by my first name if he liked.
I said I had another appointment and would have to go back to my office. I asked him to think over what he had promised and that we would start from the beginning next time. I fixed a meeting with him at Tomassi’s coffee place tomorrow at 14.30 when I’ll have seen Mr Osborn and might be better prepared.
Hal was a little sulky when I left him, I think. But I felt the meeting had gone well and put our relationship onto the right footing.
12/I do like bed. I have to admit it. Not that I always did. But for the last few years, since I was about fourteen, I have liked bed. So the reason I did not get up till twelve o’clock (noon) the morning after the night of The Drunk wasn’t only to do with the fact that I did not get back home till one o’clock (0100 hrs!). Also, it helps explain why my ever loving father performed his stampeding rhinoceros act round my room on some unexplained slender pretext at seven-fifty a.m., before he went to work. He had entertained me with similar antics on many mornings before.
My doting parent was conducting a campaign against my liking for a lie-in. To show willing, and in hope of ending this latest skirmish sooner rather than later and without the shouting match attendant on a later ending, I gave my well-practised performance of waking up. I boast eight versions of ‘waking up’ in my repertoire. The day before I had chosen the sudden, startled ‘Ah! Eh? Wass matter?’ routine, jumping up and looking shocked as though I had just seen a ghost. Effective, convincing. No doubt of it. I could tell from the satisfied smile that spread across Father’s face. The only trouble with this version is that all the shouting and jumping about shakes me out of the pleasant, cosy, half-awake, day-dreaming limbo that makes a lie-in so enjoyable in its early stages. I really did wake myself up. Couldn’t settle again and so had to get up in the end, disgruntled because, after all, Father had won. Which is why I was roaming the seafront that memorable Thursday morning as early as ten-thirty—with such notably unexpected results as those herebefore described. Which only goes to prove once again that it is indeed the early worm that is caught by the birds.
I wasn’t about to make the same mistake today. So this time I performed my slow, quiet, languorously waking stir. Not that I needed to act much. I really was knackered from yesterday’s exploits.
Dad said, ‘You’re awake then.’
‘Hummm?’
‘Don’t moulder in that pit all day, mind,’ he said from the door, adding, ‘Your mother’s got work to do,’ which seemed something of a non-sequitur.
I did a bit of mouth-sucking-lip-smacking, waved a floppy hand, grunted. He seemed satisfied of victory and left, mumbling ‘Lazy bugger,’ on the stairs, as if to himself but just loud enough to reach my ears.
13/I lay for a while in the same position as I had woken, foetally curled. Womb warm. Pre-natally comfortable. And mused. Had enough to muse about, after all. Images of a Bean Boy. Montage of Gorman. Headbound simulacra of a seductive soulmate that, nevertheless, moved the body, mate, too.
For half an hour of days and nights we did everything together. And I wondered: Could it be? Would it be? Please let it be! But questions are death for wishfulfilled fantasy. You start noticing the improbables, the impossibles, the unlikelies, the life’s-not-like-that perfection. All fantasies are full of holes in the invention, and reality pokes through. I guess that’s why I can never stand that old fool Tolkien2 and his never-never land full of narks and nurds and magic rings. All sublimated sex of course. The same with that lion, witch and wardrobe rubbish by his pal—what’s his name?—Lewis. Made me puke at ten when some goofy teacher who drooled over the idiocy read it to us. I can still remember feeling amazed because almost everybody else in the room fell for it and was ooing and ahhing and getting wet-eyed at the death of that lion character, Asian, while I was enjoying a quiet chuckle. I thought the story was meant to be some kind of spoof, and couldn’t believe it when I was told the whole thing was deadly (yes, sir, deadly indeed) serious.
But back to my bean-boy fantasies, and the questions that punctured them. I shifted, taking up what I had come to think of as the Corpse Position. Flat on my back, legs and feet together toes pointing up, hands across chest. R.I.P.
Scenes from yesterday projected themselves. Like a French film. All of yesterday, from capsizing to after The Drunk. But jumbled, not in the right order. And slow motion for some sequences, and action replays for the best bits and the puzzling bits and the bits that needed thinking about. And the whole day ending as we strolled back from bedding The Drunk down under the pier. Neither of us talked about him, or about anything that had happened that day. Most of the way back to Barry’s house we walked in silence. Which I liked; it meant we could be together and not have to bother about finding the right words. The wrong ones just then could have ruined everything.
He wanted me to go in, but I wouldn’t. I was bushed.
We parted at his door.
‘Don’t forget,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
‘Waiting?’
‘For your answer. About working at the shop. I’ll be there all day from nine. Telephone when you’re ready.’
‘Okay.’
‘Better still, come in and tell me. I’ll take you to lunch. How about that? Very business-like!’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You think too much.’
‘Sure. See you.’
‘See you.’
‘Night.’
End scene: walking away into the moonlight.
All say Ahhh!
I played and replayed my mental video. Each time the me that is me detached a little more the me that was me from the me that is me. I became cold observer of me-that-was. Psychotechnology did pre-select close-ups of B.’s eyes and mouth, his hands, shifts of body, tones of voice. Searching for ambiguities. Finding plenty. The lexigraphy of flesh.
Frisson. Of danger? Of passion? Either/or. Take your pick: danger in B., passion in me. Both probably. Which knowledge gave me a frisson of frisson. With which tingle in the testes I drifted into dozy cozy daydream slumber.
14/Surfaced again at the sound of catcalls and fibrilose yelling. The wind must be easterly, the time 10.40: break-time at school blown in gobs up Man. Dr. from the playing fields. Emotional tumbleweed.
My body was still corpsed.
What’s it like to be a corpse? Who cares? The point being, presumably, that no one inhabits a corpse, the who having departed for that bourne from which no who returns. A pity really, I thought; I rather like my body. I’ll be sorry when the time comes to leave it. Or will I? By then, probably, it will be wizened, my skin blotched and creased like old bark. My breath will stink like an incinerator, my body like a sewer. My hair will be thin as the fur on a baboon’s bum. My nose be purple veined, a blodge that dribbles like a leaking tube of glue. I expect I’ll be stuttering about on slippered scrawny
feet, supporting myself with a cane clutched in a clawy mitt. My eyes will be palely vacant, staring with gaga incomprehension at all and nothing while weeping from no other sorrow than the blight of age. I will not be able to control my water; will spill my food down my chest where it will leave festering fungoid spots on my holey cardigan. And children will laugh at me in the street and call me unhappy names.
Will thoughts still worm in my cadaverous cranium? Will I still juggle with words? Will I remember enough words to juggle with? Will pictures invade my mind with power to give my body some gyp? Will I still feel the rush of blood and the stiffening of sinew? Will I know anything except maybe the longing not to be?
Will anybody make passes at me then? Will geriatric men and women give me the eye? And who will rescue me then from drowning in death and wave my pants from a flashy yellow streaker?
15/No body.
Those hanging about me at that time will be waiting for the moment when my deceased flesh and bones can be stowed safely away six feet under, or be popped into the burning fiery furnace and reduced to manageable proportions, to whit: five ozs of fine grey ash, suitable for the making of egg timers.3 And the only thing being waved will be a gravestone or memorial plaque upon which will be inscribed some pertinent epitaph.
GOOD RIDDANCE, perhaps, or GONE AT LAST.
Epitaphs have interested me since that day in the churchyard (cf. Part 1 Bit 21). I collect them. How about this one from a postman’s grave: NOT LOST BUT GONE BEFORE. Dad found this one in a cemetery near where we used to live up North:
WHERE ERE YOU BE
LET YOUR WIND GO FREE
FOR IT WAS THE WIND
THAT KILLETH ME
I guess he remembers it because he thinks it gives licence to the explosive excesses of his frequent ventilations.
It really is incredible what some people write on gravestones. Viz.:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF ANNIE MANN
WHO LIVED AN OLD WOMAN
AND DIED AN OLD MANN
and:
HE HAD HIS BEER FROM YEAR TO YEAR
Dance on My Grave Page 8