The Polish waitress handed us the wine list with a cool indifference. Edward lowered the dark glasses just enough to scan her and it, with one eye only. The other was black and blue and shut tight.
One of those little things, I supposed, as we settled for the Nuits Saint Georges.
Night Watch
When I climbed the stairs, heaps of dead wasps lay like the fallen in battle on the bedroom floor. Others wandered up and down the windows, to fall in their turn.
In the stifling silence of the house, there came a soft but ceaseless rustling and nibbling. A wasps’ nest on the roof, and a crack in the ceiling for them to drop into the room.
I’d previously got nothing against wasps. They didn’t sting if you left them alone. A point to reflect upon, as I lay wide eyed through the long night, nauseous and feverish, pulse racing madly from all those stings. Trying to shove a piece of paper into the crack wasn’t leaving them alone.
They weren’t there by accident, of course. After so many years, when I’d lovingly filled it with books and paintings and the incense of wood smoke, I was selling the house. I had betrayed its trust, and it had summoned those wasps against me.
The rustling and nibbling said it all. We don’t haunt places. They haunt us.
Tibbet’s Ride
Built like a tank, in brown-belted raincoat, woollen stockings and brogues, head ramrod stiff and eyes unflinching, Frau Goering (as good a name as any) strode every day to and from the shops. An atom bomb up her arse wouldn’t have made any difference.
Her other walk was up the Hill, where she always turned right at the Green Man, so allowing me, at a safe distance, to continue my stroll by the Heath as far as Tibbet’s Corner.
Incidentally, Mr Tibbet, highwayman and footpad, was supposed to have been hanged on that spot. Fact is, Mr Tibbet never existed, but he should have done. There was his monument, frock coat, tricorne hat, flintlock in hand, amid the circling traffic. That’s history for you.
Fact or fiction, he wouldn’t know busy Tibbet’s Ride today. But I knew that brown-belted raincoat and the plod of a fat Reichsmarshall coming up the side of the Heath.
Where was a gibbet when you wanted one?
Celtic Fringe
‘Shame about the parade.’ The blurred city skyline was dotted with those old rooftop water tanks, or beehives collecting the grimy pollen off street and subway. Saint Patrick’s Day in the rain.
‘Ah!’ Eamon our janitor lived on top of the block. ‘But they’re not what they were in my day!’ He added a drop of the hard stuff to our coffee and lit a joint that filled the room with peat smoke.
‘You’ll know of the Hill of Tara,’ he went on, ‘sacred site of the ancient kings of Ireland, and of Brian Boru, greatest of them all. He, who played the famous Irish harp that you can see on every bottle of Guinness.’
Another drop of the hard stuff, and he started to sing, ‘If You Ever Go Across the Sea to Ireland,’ unless it was ‘Danny Boy’.
Going back down the stairs was much more difficult than going up. So where was the bloody elevator? Where I’d left it, broken down again.
I knew there was something.
Open Wide
It sounded bad enough from the waiting room as the dentist dug out Lisa’s deeply impacted molar, piece by tiny piece. It was her first day out in years.
I knew Lisa when she was a children’s book illustrator and doing very well. That was before the agoraphobia kicked in and the work dried up. God knows what deeper psychosis had caused it. What must it be like to sit in that room, day in day out, year in year out, with your pills and your vodka, everything falling apart, dust and grime that made you cough and sneeze, and terrified to feel the fresh air and the sun upon your face. We literally had to drag her out to my car for that jolly trip to the dentist.
Back home, Lisa bawled through her butchered jaw, ‘I want a drink!’
‘You’ve had enough,’ Tom bawled back from somewhere. He hadn’t worked in years either.
They needed each other to yell at.
Little Otto
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call me that,’ Elizabeth protested as we drove past fields of sugar cane, cows munching at their fringes with a bovine indifference to heat.
‘Sorry darling,’ Sylvia replied absently. I’d joined them for their holiday in the sun, a harmless male to help out.
Back on the beach, Elizabeth dug her sunshade into the sand while Sylvia and I stripped down for a swim. At the line of buoys she handed me the mask and snorkel and gave me a salty little kiss.
Through the mask, I spotted a baby octopus tuck himself into a crevice of rock till you wouldn’t know he was there. What you could do without any bones!
Elizabeth’s trouble was too many bones. She threw down her book. ‘I saw the two of you snogging out there.’
‘Lizzie darling, it was just a bit of fun.’
‘Fun!’ Elizabeth choked, trying to run up the beach in her flip-flops. ‘And I do wish you wouldn’t call me that.’
In Memoriam
A sharp little nip on my big toe made me jump, and from under the bed sheet came the long bristling whiskers and little black shining eyes of a field mouse. He raised himself on my chest, chocolate brown fur on top, snow white underneath. He’d never seen a human before; I’d never been so close to a mouse. We regarded each other at leisure. Back on the floor, ambling not scampering, he went in search of other things to explore.
Like, my bag. Stiff, cold and weary after a long day’s travel, I reached in it for my keys and touched something soft and limp.
Smothered by my pyjamas, little eyes now shut tight, tiny feet upturned in death, he’d said goodbye forever to the pine scented woods and rolling fields of sunflowers for the grey gritty corner of my street.
God rest his soul. And if he didn’t have one, none of us did.
Blue Note
‘All right,’ Henry said to Harriet’s request. ‘If you twist my arm.’ I’d like to see her try. Henry was built like a heavyweight, though he didn’t play Rachmaninov with the gloves on.
A useful guest at her dinner parties, he got up from the table and padded across to Harriet’s waiting baby grand. Late Brahms this time, the notes falling like autumn raindrops as she served coffee and passed round the chocolate mints.
‘Great stuff, Henry!’ I applauded. ‘Now how about some Blues!’ We’d had great fun after one of his town hall recitals when I’d joined him at the keyboard to have a go at Cow Cow Boogie, till the caretaker chucked us out.
Henry’s face lit up. It met Harriet’s stony gaze. He’d better be going.
I drove him to the station. ‘Any more recitals coming up?’ Henry shook his head. His agent had dropped him. A scholarship and three years at the Royal College of Music were not enough.
Even for a chocolate mint.
Jumbo Jet
‘Wake up, sleepy head!’ Sarah was banging on my door. She didn’t believe in jet lag.
‘Come on, slow coach!’ she beckoned from the serene and golden head of the reclining Buddha in the temple of Wat Po while I blinked at the inscrutable words of wisdom on his two big flat feet.
After lunch I hit the sack till the brazen hoot of a trumpet woke me again. Down in the heat-exhausted street a little bow-legged man in dhoti and turban walked ahead of a lumbering elephant, a box half filled with junk across his neck. Another hoot and they were gone.
‘Hey, you’ll never guess what I saw!’ I greeted Sarah when they all got back from the Floating Market. She smiled, and sat down to supper with this other guy.
Still with him on the flight home and waiting in the cheerless baggage hall. Two items came round on the carousel, his and hers.
She turned and waved. ‘Have fun.’
Bon Appetit
In the Middle Ages, I said, they’d have burnt Gustave at the stake for witchcraft
. With a gargoyle for a face, he lived in a filthy hovel down the hill from the village with a family of poor mangy cats, his gruesome familiars.
Actually, it was whispered that Gustave sometimes had one of them for supper. He spoke in squeaks and grunts, as though he had a piece of claw lodged in his throat. Not that he ever had much to say, working all alone down at the sludge tank till the day he died.
‘Listen,’ somebody said. ‘It’s stopped.’ Me, or the storm that had rumbled away over the hills? Whichever it was, it was time for my friends to depart.
After they’d gone, one last ember still glowed among the ashes of the fire, the heart going out of the old house again, soon to be shuttered and bolted through another long winter.
Places can get just as lonely as people, who could skin a cat for the pot.
End Game
Yappy Popeyes was a large bug-eyed, bandy-legged beetle, unless he was a Chihuahua, a breed of so-called dog from Mexico. One of those famous hats would have snuffed him out. You could hold him in both hands, though I wouldn’t have advised it. He crapped and snapped at the same time. He’d just thrown up.
‘Poor darling.’ Pat clutched him to her bosom. ‘It’s the heat.’
It wasn’t the only thing. Corinne’s old cat ambled down the garden path looking for a spot of shade. Yappy Popeyes now began to tremble and to emit a half strangled wail. Pat clutched him even closer to her bosom. ‘Can you get rid of that cat!’
Never mind the cat. There was a crash from inside the house. Caliban had broken loose again. God knows what sort of a dog he was, but he thundered through Corinne’s garden door, all shaggy hair and dribble, heading straight for Pat.
Well, not actually for her.
Dinner Date
Embraceable You by George Gershwin. One of my favourites, seated at the baby grand in a corner of the big colonial dining room, doors and windows open to the boom of surf at midday, to the blood-red sun spilling into the sea come dinnertime, and me watching her watching me across the floor.
I’d seen her down by the pool, on her own and reading a book, no spring chicken but with a body that still had something to give. Now, one of a jolly dinner party, hair streaked with just a few strands of grey and brushed back over her ears, and in a silvery dress that sparkled as she moved, she laughed and chatted on cue, while watching me watching her across the floor.
Embraceable You. With a scraping of chairs they all got up to go, still laughing and chatting, and with one last glance over her shoulder for the two of us to remember.
Jolly Roger
Bang. Roger’s cracker contained a skull and crossbones paper hat and a joke. Why don’t owls make love in the rain? Because it’s too wet to woo.
Wendy had invited me to the office Christmas party, but get me out of there. And never mind the rain. I strode along to the Emperor Concerto. Now I remembered. Musical nicknames. A nice little item for the next edition of In Classical Mood. ‘Emperor’ Concerto, ‘Raindrop’ Prelude, ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. In the old days, a few words with Roger and I’d have the copy on his desk before you could say Dmitri Shostakovich.
That was before Wendy. She’d arrived as his temp. His personal assistant now, and you needed a bloody passport to see him.
At Hammersmith Broadway, a taxi pulled up at the lights with a splash. Was that her inside, next to a skull and crossbones paper hat, somewhat askew?
The lights turned green. ‘Where to now, guv?’
Wapping. Execution Dock.
Bon Voyage
Sid and Edna stepped off the train, looking like they’d landed on Mars. ‘Bit different from Lewisham,’ I said cheerily, as I drove them from the station.
Their daughter had booked them into my room upstairs, a present for mum and dad on their silver wedding. The South of France, though not the Côte d’Azur.
And not a whisper out of them till next morning. ‘The noise of them bloody frogs.’ Edna’s voice. ‘Kept me awake all night. And bitten all over.’ Sid said something. Edna again. ‘Go on, finish the bottle, why don’t you?’ Sid said something else.
Real-life violence isn’t the choreographed stuff you see on screen, it’s clumsy and helpless, just the sound of it, and the silence afterwards is even worse.
They wouldn’t let me drive them back to the station, so I left them at the bus stop, in what little shade there was, a black eye, a plaster, and the big brown suitcase between them.
Bunny Club
I’d only seen them for a moment, but as soon as she got on the train at Earl’s Court, I recalled those two buck teeth, resting on her lower lip to give her an expression of, how to put it, glum content.
All of twenty years ago, the dating agency had put us in touch, and we agreed to meet at Holborn station. She’d be wearing a lucky rabbit’s foot in the lapel of her coat.
Up the escalator and there she was, with her lucky rabbit’s foot and those two buck teeth. Why waste each other’s time. Straight back down the other escalator and back into the next train, the peristaltic wobble of pipes and wires along the tunnel wall keeping one big lump of shit on the move.
Suzie Rose. How long, I wonder, did she wait for me on that shameful day.
She got off the train again at Green Park without a hint of recognition. Of course not, you bastard.
For a second time, forgive me Suzie if you can.
Laughing Sal
Through the salt-caked windows in the basement of Cliff House, Diana stared out at the stretch of wet promenade to the hump of Seal Rock. She turned back to the dusty clutter of pinball tables and miniature cranes dangling over heaps of tarnished trinkets and charms. The graveyard of a penny arcade.
Not quite dead. I dropped a dime into a small organ or calliope. A wheezy pair of bellows fed pipes that suddenly blared out The Stars and Stripes Forever, as you’d never heard it before nor ever wanted to again.
Laughing Sal was still alive as well. A limbless torso in blue and white polka dot smock and a wicked shiny face beneath a ginger wig. For another dime she began to shake and shudder and to laugh and scream inside her glass case. You could be drowning out there, reaching for the slippery sides of Seal Rock, while Sal went on laughing and screaming fit to bust.
‘Some bloody holiday,’ Diana bawled even louder.
Last Rites
It wasn’t our funeral, but somehow we’d got stuck in the middle of a convoy of big black limousines and shunted back to what must have been the home of the deceased.
From our little car we watched them pass through the gates and disappear inside. ‘Come on,’ I said to Jill, ‘I reckon they owe us one, and with that crowd they’ll never notice us.’
Cognac, Armagnac, it hit the spot. ‘They should do a Michelin Guide to some of the cemeteries they have over here,’ I said. ‘Crosses for interest, skulls for atmosphere.’
Tables were laden with food and wine. ‘The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.’ I smacked my lips. ‘Hamlet .’
‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ Jill waved her glass. ‘Like one of your skulls.’
I handed her a plate and fork. ‘Better eat something.’
‘A Funeral baked bean?’ She collapsed with laughter and slid to the floor with a bowl of mayonnaise.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said next.
Happy Days
‘What a game, eh!’ He joined me on the seat, a white carnation in his buttonhole and clutching a bottle of bubbly. ‘Like some?’
‘Not your wedding, is it?’ I asked, as they gathered noisily and happily outside the big gothic house in the park popular for such receptions.
‘Not this time,’ he chuckled. ‘You been married?’
I wiped the neck of the bottle. ‘Divorced.’ You can sometimes speak more easily with strangers than with friends. ‘It’s love affairs that kill you,’ I began.
‘Terry!’ A no-nonsense young lady with floral hat and black shiny handbag stood a little way down the path. ‘What you doin’ here?’ She beckoned impatiently. ‘Come on, it’s goin’ to pour in a minute.’
The sky had turned the colour of a deep and wounding bruise, and with it came that rare and passing fragrance as the first swollen raindrops soaked into warm dry ground.
Terry clambered to his feet, crushed out his cigarette.
‘What a game, eh!’
Baby Face
‘Can you take Baby for a walk?’ Beth pleaded as she mopped up in the car. She was into pet therapy, but five minutes with Baby and you’d be ready to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Still, up here where the birdies sang in the trees things might be a bit less frenetic. So up verdant Chestnut Street, round the corner, and wow! A large gothic residence with more than a touch of Psycho about it stared back through empty windows from behind dark trees.
Stand very still and listen for the ghostly chime of the clock at the foot of the stairs, the creak of a floorboard up in the attic where the rocking horse tipped gently to and fro at the touch of an unseen hand.
Someone else had gone very quiet, crouched by the side of the road. Baby looked hopefully up at me, a superannuated, incontinent, off-white poodle in need of a bit of love.
‘Come on, for God’s sake.’ I tugged at his lead before anybody else saw what we’d just done.
Northern Line
Snap Shots Page 2