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Life Goes On
A Michael Cullen Novel
Alan Sillitoe
Preamble
I, Michael Cullen, King Bastard the First, dodged the traffic like a London pigeon in its prime. Some got caught, but only the old ones, or the sick. Old ones shouldn’t try to dodge the motors. Sick ones should stay at home.
Moggerhanger threatened to kill me. I believed he would like to. No matter how much of a bastard I was, there were always bigger bastards in the world. Moggerhanger was a rich bastard (he still is), which made him more effective than a poor bastard like me. He was also an older bastard, and we know what that means.
Come and get me. What else could I say? Bravado cost nothing, and he’d have to catch me. Maybe he’d have a fatal accident, though no doubt it was a condition of his will that the beneficiaries would have to deal with me before laying their maulers on the cash. He had many paid helpers, which was why I dodged the traffic like a pigeon. I ran across the light-on-green at Oxford Street. That was very close indeed. I didn’t know his henchmen were driving buses.
Volume One of my memoirs was scribbled in a disused railway station in the Fen country. Where I am penning this account of even more extraordinary adventures will be explained at the end. If this tale is pasted on the billboards, Moggerhanger’s a ruined man, though only in reputation. He is far too clever, and has too much influence in places that matter, to worry about going to prison, where he belongs. In any case, he is Lord Moggerhanger of Moggerhanger (Bedfordshire), whereas I am Michael Cullen, of no importance to anyone except myself, and with no distinguishing marks – at the moment.
I used to be a 22-carat no-good bastard, in the opinion of friends as well as enemies, but since my father married my mother twenty or so years after the event, I have only been a bastard to myself, which isn’t saying much, because I am too fond of my own skin to be more of a bastard than is absolutely necessary. Once upon a time I was only enough of a bastard to keep myself sufficiently alert regarding what the rest of the world would do to me if I let it. I learned early on in life that the best form of defence is self-preservation. I’m more than halfway back to being a 22-carat no-good bastard because my mother and father don’t live together anymore, thank God. I’d rather be a bastard than a nonentity.
However, as this story will reveal, I’m far more gullible than I thought.
PART ONE
One
Old lives for new, and new wives for old: it began when I came out of prison and fell into the arms of Bridgitte Appledore, the one-time Dutch au pair girl who became my everloving wife. Our married life in the disused Cambridgeshire railway station of Upper Mayhem lasted through a decade of idleness. We lived on the money of her first psychologist husband, Dr Anderson, bringing up Smog who was the son of the said dead husband and his first wife. Then followed three children of our own, and life at our station dwelling place had been so ordinary that the heavenly years passed too quickly to be appreciated, until that smouldering blond beauty with big breasts and a mouth too small for her heart, who acted but never talked about what went on inside, took the children out one day for a ride in the car while I was still in bed.
Harwich was two hours away, and none came back, a fact explained by a phone call from Holland next morning. She had, she said between sobs and god-fer-dommering curses, left me, and didn’t know whether she would ever be back. To cover my shock and chagrin I told her she was full of gin, adding that as far as I was concerned she could stay away forever, and that I had always expected her sooner or later to go back to them old ways.
Grammar is always the first victim of a broken marriage. I knew my accusations to be a lie, which proved I was already halfway back to my old ways of lying, if I still had the backbone for it, which I had doubted till that moment.
I put in, for good measure, in case she misunderstood, that she was no better than a whore, which was a scandalous assertion because as far as I knew she had been as loyal as a turnip during our marriage. She shouted back, before this accusation was hardly through to the other side of my brain, and not yet fed into the wire, that I wouldn’t have said that to her if Jankie (or some such name. Maybe it was Ankie) had been there, at which I screamed out: ‘Who’s Jankie, you double, treble, quadruple whore’ – to which she retorted: ‘I’m not a horse, you idle sponging no-good coward.’
‘I never sponged,’ I bawled. Every word, good or bad (and they were all bad), was a mistake. The only policy was a cool smile and lips well buttoned, but murder smouldered behind my eyes, waiting for the moment when I could pay her out. Silence wasn’t my virtue, and it was too late to learn. ‘You were living in my house!’
‘You bought it on money you stole, you gold smuggler, you jailbird. I lived with you ten years in misery, hating every minute, with you hating me, and hating the children, and hating yourself, because prison turned you the bitterest man in the world.’
I buckled like a straw in the fire, because no man had spent a more contented time, with all the love from Bridgitte I needed, always thinking that no more was possible for her or anyone. I could have sworn to God she had been happy, yet here she was ranting her treacherous version: ‘You thought you had it good, all the looking after, and me happy, but I was hating you, and you with your pervert tricks you made me do and thought I liked.’
Was my phone tapped? Was some lickspittle from MI5 tuned in to her perorations? And what about at the other end? Could those nice Dutch folks understand her English? I wanted to put the phone down.
‘Wait till the children grow up,’ she said, ‘and I get them to know what ape and monkey tricks you’ve been up to, which I’ll tell them if they ask for you and you try to get at me.’
‘That’s racism,’ I broke in. ‘Anymore of that and I’ll get onto the Primates Liberation Organization.’
Nothing would stop her. ‘I didn’t want to live with you, because all the time it was rotten rotten rotten.’ She was weeping again. Her parents were by her side, listening with pious faces, putting calicoed arms over her shoulders, waiting to snatch up the phone and threaten me with instant death by being thrown from the Butter Mountain or drowned in the Great Milk Lake. Better still, they would send her eight upright brothers (and three sisters) to reason with me. ‘You were always looking around,’ she went on, ‘for every chance to get away from me. But you kept me like a dog chained to a post, just like your big, pig-headed father.’
She was half right, because during my early years at Upper Mayhem, after eighteen months in prison, the same thought nagged at me, so that I wondered, even before going for a drink at the village pub, why I hadn’t slipped my prized transistor radio over my shoulder, or my treasured Japanese zoom lens binoculars. I would almost turn back to get them, but the idea seemed stupid, though it persisted for more than a year, and was finally cured by wise young Bridgitte suggesting that on my strolls I did indeed take my radio, binoculars, bank book, and even her, as well as the children, so that if I didn’t come back it wouldn’t matter, because everything I valued would be crowding unmercifully in on me – so that I couldn’t help but come back, even if only to unload my burdens, by which time I would be too exhausted to care.
I was rueful yet full of wrath as I put down the phone. She had certainly picked up my language during our time together, so wasn’t completely right when she said I had given her nothing. All I could do after receiving a call for help from my old pal Bill Straw in London was lock up the house for the day and set off to find out why he wanted to see me, and maybe get a sniff of what the future might hold, before Bridgitte recovered from her fit and came back
to carry on as before. If it was the end between us, there was nothing I could do, though such finality was hard to believe because in my experience the only final thing was death, and I’d never be ready for that.
Comparisons were painful, so I mulled over my break with Bridgitte, which was a supportable agony because it was familiar. It seemed as if she had left only yesterday, but the unexpected savagery of her departure with the kids had bitten two weeks out of my life, leaving a wound so raw it would never heal. I could hardly account for the subsequent days except to say they were a nightmare, hours of misery from brooding at my loss, and a relentless ache at wondering how the kids were faring.
Bits of food and empty whisky bottles littered stairs and tables, but by closing the door that morning on the piggery of ten years, an iron test had been passed. The marks of the experience had bitten so deep that it seemed the disaster had had no effect on me.
Life goes on, I thought, settling myself into a first class seat on a second class cheap day shopper’s ticket, which was tucked into a pocket of my Norfolk-style jacket. On the other hand, life had gone on since I was born, with little help from me, so there was no reason to suppose it would not continue until the day of my inevitable blackout. Even when my existence seemed too painful to last, or too good to go on forever, I stared side-on at the antics it played. After my stint in prison, ten years before, I preferred walking parallel to life rather than through the middle like a grenadier. But I was never less than up to my neck in it.
I reached for The Times left by somebody who got out at Cambridge. There was the usual front-page photo of a terrorist with a scarf around his head, trying to smile like royalty, and inside was the snapshot of an eight-year-old kid with a Kalashnikov which I supposed the photographer had given him a quid to hold so that he could get a good picture.
At thirty-five the grey hair had begun, which surprised me because I thought I never worried. Life had been calm, and nothing justified that hint of fag ash on the lower fringes of my sideboards. Worrying that I didn’t worry would only make it worse. Bridgitte pointed to the grey bits as if they were the marks of a beast that had always lurked there, and ruffled them to see whether or not they were real.
I hoped the tormented expression on my face in the British Rail looking-glass was only temporary, because it spoiled my almost good looks, at which the only response was a crackling breakfast belch before sitting down.
What I dreaded most was going bald, like that tall, gaunt, randy old prick-head Gilbert Blaskin I had been lumbered with as a father. As for my mother, she hadn’t been heard of for months, not since the old man began his new novel. While he was working he no longer tormented her, which meant that she was unable to get at him. Every so often they fled in opposite directions so as not to murder each other, and with Blaskin being a writer it worked out well. I imagined going to the flat and finding them dead on the mat by the door, a cleaver in her hand and an axe in his. They had struck each other’s heart at the same second and with instant effect, though I thought it more likely that while one would be dead, the other would be so wounded that he or she would be pushed around in a bottle-type wheelchair for as long as he or she lived. Mother or father – I didn’t care which – would gurgle reproachfully at me as the reason for their downfall. After a terrific struggle I’d get the bottle to the top of the Post Office Tower and let it go, hoping a gust of wind would swing it through a window of the Middlesex Hospital where they could accept it as an unsolicited gift from me.
My Irish mother of fifty-odd had a mop of Cullen-thick hair which was duly passed on. She’d thinned her own and sprayed it with silver and pink so that she wouldn’t look a day under thirty-five. Whether she was Irish or not I’d never really known, and neither had she, but she’d been unable to stand the thought of being taken for English, especially since Blaskin was a fairly pure specimen of the breed – at least, as she often said, in his talent for deceit and the versatility of his vices. I wanted to take after neither but, being my vain and pleasure-loving self, hoped I was closer to my mother’s side as far as keeping my hair till I was a hundred and ten was concerned, though I found it painful at times that a bloke of thirty-five should be lumbered with parents at all.
Clouds floated over the flat fields, a fine picture of altocumulus castellanus – as I had learned from Smog’s school books when I tested him for A levels, thus gaining qualifications which I hadn’t been able to earn at the proper time. Such cloud varied in its direction with the sine, cosine and tangent of the moving train. April smelled ripe and dead, bits of sun filing through to the blackening earth.
The reason for my journey to London was because a letter from my old pal Bill Straw begged me to come poste haste without restante to help him out of a jam. When Bill, a man with a long past, wrote about a jam it was no mere logjam in a river of crocodiles near a thousand foot waterfall with natives shooting poisoned arrows from either bank. It was serious, though I didn’t suppose he realized how much worse I might make his predicament.
A man wearing expensive clothes looked into my compartment as if to consider parking there. I had spreadeagled my coat, briefcase, cap and self in such a way that it looked filled, so he closed the door, gently for one so nervous, and walked down the corridor. I turned to The Times crossword, and tried to make sense out of nine down, a clue whose complexity made me feel like the kingpin idiot himself.
I noted in the car sales columns that the Thunderflash Estate had come onto the market, and was sorry I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy one. The tall pin-headed man dragged the door open and settled himself opposite. He stank of scent, and looked out of the window while filing his nails. I tried to guess his profession, or the source of his money, hazarding soldier, barrister, remittance man, stockbroker’s clerk, unfrocked priest, or of independent means, but none would fit. I observed a person of about forty who looked as if he had all his vices under firm control. With short, mousey, Caesar-style hair, he had more than a few, though I couldn’t decide what they were, but he certainly knew all about them because he had the sour expression of someone who trusted himself absolutely. Whoever he worked for had fallen for his air of reliability.
His preoccupied gaze took me back to when I had been put in prison by the machinations of Claud Moggerhanger, an experience which reinforced my impression that the man opposite was untrustworthy to the core, though he might not look so to others. There were many such types in England. A man of similar phizzog in some countries would be immediately under suspicion but, living in a land where the borderline between loyalty and treachery had never been properly surveyed, and where he blended well with the surrounding populace, he would be considered a safe enough bet.
He was so taken up with himself that he didn’t think I had noticed him, but a one-second flash over my newspaper told me more than any stare. I had been brought up in a place where, if you looked above two seconds at anyone, you were inviting him (or even her – sometimes especially her) to a fight. In prison, only one second was necessary, often less than that, so I had developed the knack of seeing all at a glance. Whoever the man worked for had put him through the aptitude tests and psychological probings of a foolproof selection board, but I knew they had boobed in the most basic way because they had never been in jail as a prisoner.
I was disturbed from watching the smoke of my morning cigar drift through the fitful sunshine by the ticket collector standing at the door. The passenger opposite gave his ticket to be punched.
‘Thank you, sir.’
He then went back to his vacant gaze out of the window, continuing his manic manicure. I noticed how startled he was on hearing the collector say to me: ‘You can’t travel on a second class ticket in here, mate.’
I had set out that morning determined not to cheat, lie or commit any action while in London which would offend those principles which Bridgitte had tried to instil in me. She had taught me how much better it was not to lie or cheat, even if it meant, she said, losing all idea of y
our own identity. I realised how much she had gleaned from her former psychologist husband and – too late – that she wasn’t as dreamy as she looked.
‘Is this a first class compartment?’ I asked, as if it was no better than a pigsty that had been used by humans for far too long. He was a middle-aged man, and fair ringlety hair fell to his shoulders from beneath a Wehrmacht-style hat. He pointed to the window. ‘It says first class, don’t it?’
I wanted to pull his earring. ‘I suppose it would have to before somebody like me would notice.’
He leaned against the door, and yawned. ‘That’s the way it is, mate.’
Under the circumstances he couldn’t be anything but honest, and do his job. The nail-filing man opposite, for all his preoccupation with the landscape flying by outside, took in every shade of the situation. And I, if nothing else, had my pride, which was all that ten years of peace had left me with. I took a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘How much extra?’
He looked at the few foreign coins, plastic tokens, luncheon vouchers and Monopoly notes from his pockets. ‘Can’t change that.’
I reached for my executive-style briefcase. ‘I’ll write you a cheque.’
‘It’d be more than my job’s worth to take a cheque.’
‘You’d better see what you can do about changing this legal tender, then.’ I crumpled the note into my waistcoat pocket and went back to reading a report in the newspaper about a woman of eighty-six who had murdered her ninety-eight-year-old husband with a knife. ‘He got on at me once too often,’ she said in court, hoping the beak would be lenient. Then she spoiled it: ‘Anyway, I’d always wanted to kill the swine.’
The judge sentenced her to fourteen years in jail. ‘A worse case of premeditated murder I’ve never come across.’
‘I’ll get you when I come out,’ she screamed as they dragged her down to the cells.
Life Goes On Page 1