Moggerhanger

by Alan Sillitoe

  Moonshine Cross was a convenient place to stop for a piss, petrol, and another cigar. In spite of Frances’s tearful demolition of my character she had packed a plastic bag of fruit and sandwiches, and filled two flasks with coffee. She may have come to dislike me—but only for the time being, I hoped—but didn’t want me to die of stomach cramps at some arterial lane eatery.

  In the toilets an old chap of over seventy in a thorn cloth three-piece suit and knitted tie, shining brown boots, and watchchain, was pumping packets of condoms out of a machine, his demented expression daring it to run out, in which case he would come back from his car with a cold chisel and give it what-for.

  He was long jawed, had on a nicky brown hat with a darker brown band around the rim, and heavy spectacles. His teeth were obviously false, as he opened his mouth and fixed another pound in the slot. “I can’t wait all day till the place is empty and there’s nobody to see me, can I?” He saw my gaze of wonder, if not admiration. “I want my supplies, don’t I, son? I can’t afford to be embarrassed at my age, can I?”

  “You could go to a chemist’s and get them without all this effort.” I was horrified at another rubber tree in Malaya getting sucked white. “It would be more discreet.”

  He stuffed the supplies into his pocket. “It’s all very well for you to say so, but there’s only one chemist in our little town, and my wife goes into it for all her medicines. She might see me. Or there might be talk, if one of the neighbours did. I wasn’t born yesterday, was I?”

  I didn’t want to speculate on how many yesterdays ago he had been born, yet I was taken by his brash confidence as I stood at the urinal for a splash at Shanks’s adamant. “Isn’t your girlfriend on the pill?”

  Two other men came in, so he said: “Let’s go outside, and I’ll tell you. We stood outside and he gripped me by the elbow. “I’m glad you enquired. She did go on it for a while, but she didn’t like the side effects, though going in raw was a treat for me, just like when I was a lad.”

  Over the fence was a field of placid Friesian cows, a sight making me want to start loving old England again. I didn’t like the thought of the poor beasts flying around the grassland in terror should my companion of the road run among them with a trail of cheese and onion condoms spraying out of his pockets. A lizard tongue went over his lips, as if he followed my thoughts. “She’s a vegetarian as well, though that doesn’t bother me.”

  “Is she young?”

  “She’s nineteen, if you call that young, these days. Her name’s Betty.”

  It’s no use denying my interest in his naive revelations. “I still can’t see why you’ll need all those rubbers.”

  “Can’t you?” He scanned the parking lot, as if he had forgotten in which row he’d left his car, or was fearful that someone had hotwired it and driven away. “It’s better to have too many than too few, that’s all I know. I haven’t seen her for a couple of months.”

  “Why not sooner?”

  “Her husband isn’t away all the time.”

  “She’s married, at nineteen?”

  “I appreciate that you’re very inquisitive, because I am as well. The inquisitive shall inherit the earth, eh?” He sent a sharp elbow at my ribs, and I was afraid to give him one back in case he turned out to be nothing more than brown paper and sawdust. “She got married at sixteen, then had another child to prove the first was no accident. So she got a council house. Her mother lives with her, and looks after the kids. They take it in turns doing it, because I have a go at the mother as well whenever I can. She’s not much above thirty, after all. Putting you in the picture, am I?”

  Too right he was. A man of his age, and he had a nineteen-year-old married woman with two kids hot for him, and access to her mother. What was the country coming to? It was enough to make me sweat, not to say envious.

  I can’t think why, but people often confided their foibles to me, and told stories with little if any encouragement, which was good when it entertained me, and bad when it bored me. And they still do it, perhaps deceived by the honest face I’m forced to wear so as to hide the seething villainy within. Or I catch them at the point when, if they don’t talk about what’s worrying them, they’ll either burst into flames or go out and do a murder. Maybe so many people opened their mouths to me as if I were a ghost, assuming that what information they spilled would not be passed on. If they had known of my relationship to the novelist Gilbert Blaskin they would have held back. Or they would have been even more forthcoming.

  Maybe in spite of this old man’s lambent intentions he somehow sensed he had only half an hour to live, and I would see his burnt-out car a few miles up the road. I hoped not. “You’re looking a bit worried,” he said.

  “I am. What if the husband catches you?” I put out my hand, which he shook vigorously, and introduced myself.

  “Horace Hawksley, me. But what I say, Michael, is this: what’s life all about if you’re not prepared to take a risk? Life can be very monotonous after you’re retired, and being seventy-five what do I have to lose?”

  “I can see you’re too old to die young,” I said, “but what if, Horace, for instance”—recalling Blaskin’s misadventure—“what if, say, Betty’s husband went to the airport, and found the plane wouldn’t take off for five hours; or he went to the station and saw that the rails had so many leaves on them that trains wouldn’t be running to London for another week? In view of such a delay he would come home and catch you in bed with his wife. He’d be so devastated he’d choose a chopper from the coalhouse and split your head from top to bottom.”

  His face turned all shades from healthy pink to graveyard white. Then he smiled so widely I hoped his teeth wouldn’t fall out. “Michael, if I looked at it that way I’d never get anywhere, would I? Even though I expect to live forever, life’s too short to think like that.”

  “But your life could be cruelly cut short if you don’t use caution.”

  Anger sparked behind his glasses. “I’m not a bloody fool, am I?” The maniacal smile his girlfriend found such a come-on lit his clock. “I must be going. Never be late is my golden rule.” He winked, and gave another stab at my ribs. “Next stop Grantham! Wish me luck!”

  I did, and as I relished the ambrosial inhalations of another cigar, I watched him peering at the number plate of almost every car before coming to his own, certain that Alzheimer’s would get him before priapic decline, and then where would he be? I’d scour the tabloids for news of his trial. Then I spat tacks at not asking him what he took to keep himself banging away, which I might need in the not far distant future.

  I let him get well ahead, from an encounter which had touched my nerves unduly, felt myself sickening for either a cold or the flu. Frances never caught either, so many gunged up people in her pokey surgery that she was immune to all they could sneeze at her. Yet she frequently carried one home which I caught, and hid on going to work, in order to ravage the advertising agency. By the time I admitted to a cold all the others had it, and I claimed to have got it from them.

  I’d heard it said that you shouldn’t drive with a cold, but I was safer than otherwise, in knowing I had to be dead careful. It’s when I’m feeling the fittest man in the world that I splinter the tailgate against the only concrete post in sight in an almost empty car park.

  Driving along, I craved an alcoholic drink. A full leatherbound flask of prime malt lay in the glovebox, but I didn’t take it while at the wheel, in spite of knowing that if I supped a drop or two I wouldn’t be any less safe.

  The sky turned glum, as it tends to on going north. I thought of wheeling south but told myself not to be a coward. Raindrops at the windscreen made me want to piss again, so I swerved into a lay-by to let go, careful to avoid stinging my knob on tall fresh nettles. Fancying closer contact with the fields, and to get away from pools of diesel, old tyres, and things worse that went squish underfoot, I leapt over a ditch a
nd ran up a bank into an open stretch of green ending at an enormous creosote-painted barn that seemed about to fall in the next feeble breeze.

  Why my legs carried me that way I’ll never know. Actions which alter the peace and quiet of life are never realised at such a time. My turn-ups were soaked after bending double to get between strands of barbed wire without snagging my jacket. I picked open a slit of the barn with my faithful Leatherhead toolknife and looked inside, at some kind of furniture assembly depot. Workmen were scraping, polishing, buffing up, sawing and hammering industriously at various specimens of antique pieces, their trannies jingling the same tune from each corner while they worked, everyone busy and contented, though I wouldn’t have been happy with most of them smoking among shavings, sawdust and glue.

  At the front of the barn two pantechnicons were parked on the black cindered earth. A couple of subsidiary sheds were used as toilets, and a burly bloke who came from the nearest buttoning his dungarees ran towards me with both fists up. “You fucking snooper. I’ll blind you.”

  His curses I give were troy weight compared to the amount that came filthily out but, as Blaskin said, when dealing with obscenities which a character expletes you must never reproduce the full measure, because a careful rationing on paper gives sufficient indication of what is used to satisfy any reader.

  It was my advantage to recognise him first, and I stood with fists so ready that his halt gave time to say: “You touch me, Kenny Dukes, and I’ll drag you inside that barn and push your head into a bandsaw, even though you’d look a lot prettier with it off.”

  He drew back the longest arms of any man, which I’d once trapped in my car window when he was in Moggerhanger’s Rolls Royce driving parallel and trying to fire his gun at my brains. He must have remembered the incident, because his smile showed cracked teeth, such a ripple at the mouth that a scar on the upper lip began to redden. He rubbed it with a clean handkerchief. “Oh, it’s you, Michael Cullen. I thought you was a nark looking around. If it had been I’d have split all his works and sent him back to his mother in a black plastic bin liner. That’s what we usually do to ’em.” He took my arm, and led me towards the main door. “Did Lord Moggerhanger send you?”

  “I haven’t had any contact with him for a while.”

  A fragment of suspicion flickered at his eyes. “You found the place, though, didn’t you?”

  “Only by accident.”

  I knew him as a greedy reader of Sidney Blood novels, some pseudonymously penned by Blaskin, though even Bill Straw had done one, as I had as well. Kenny read them over and over, as much as three times, without knowing he’d read them before, wallowing in the violence, gore, bestial fuckery, and the quick running crazy plots. I offered a cigar. “I’m doing research for the next Sidney Blood novel.”

  He drooled. “What’s it going to be called?”

  “‘The Bandsaw Men’.” We lit up, and I blew smoke into his face, hoping to hide the worst of his features. South London born and bred, a remand home had been his prep school. He’d done ‘A’ Levels in Borstal, gone on to university at the Scrubs, then entered a lifetime of postgraduate work in Moggerhanger’s employ, though what use such a strong-armed dimwit could be had always puzzled me. He squeezed my elbow so affectionately at the unsolicited information about Sidney Blood that I waited for it to crumble. “You once said you’d introduce me to Sidney, but you never did, did you? Well, you haven’t yet. I remember your promise, though, whenever I pick up one of his books.”

  “It’s Mister Blood to you,” I said sternly. “He told me only yesterday how he took a chiv to a poor chap who called him by his first name without being invited to do so. He left him bleeding by Tower Bridge like a stuck pig.”

  I detected admiration, and a lick of fear. “He didn’t?”

  “He did. Sidney doesn’t lie. And he likes respect. All writers do, only he’s worse. But I promise I’ll let you meet him as soon as I can. He sent me out this morning to get background material for another book he’s got on the stocks called The Body Bank.”

  His eyes turned into Hallogen lamps. “Fucking hell! Sounds like a good ’un. Can’t wait to get my French fries on it. Tell me more.”

  “I won’t. Sidney would cut my throat if I did, and if you were there to see it you might come all over the place.” Such twitting went over his head, and he opened the barn door. “I only like you because you know Mr Blood.”

  I took a look inside. “You seem to have a nice little business going. Those commodes and cupboards must be worth a few hundred apiece.”

  “More than that,” he said. “It’s all fucking Chipperdale.”

  “Looks like chipboard to me.” The same old rogues of Moggerhanger’s long acquaintance were busily occupied. I spotted Toffee Bottle of stumpy figure and large bald head, and Cottapilly and Pindary the tall thin inseparables, wearing overcoats down to their shoes even in the hottest weather, as they did now, carrying a load of boards to the bandsaw. Matthew Coppice who used to run an old folks’ home and put their bodies in the deep freeze so that he could continue collecting their old age pensions, wearing the same Fair Isle pullover, schoolboy tie and tweed jacket, now having a stand-off with poofy Eric Alport over a bag of nuts and bolts. Moggerhanger had opened a trade fair for ex-jailbirds, and thank God I wasn’t among them, because I would never work for him again.

  Kenny slopped the cigar around his lips till it was unsmokable. “The lads are clever at making antique furniture from bits and bobs. It all goes to the Continent. English antiques are at a premium there. The good stuff was burned by the Germans in the war, to boil their coffee. After it’s delivered our chaps bring furniture back to be repaired, and every piece is worth about a million dollars, because they’re full of powders that make your head go bang in the night. If a wardrobe fell off the back of a lorry going over the Alps in summer you’d think the snow had come early.”

  What an ingenious way of smuggling drugs. “Good to know the old firm is prospering.”

  “It always is, you should know that. Lord Moggerhanger hasn’t got no secrets from you.”

  If he had any left I didn’t know if he could keep them. The less I knew, the better. “I must be off. I’m going to call on my mother in Nottingham. Then I’ll pop down to Upper Mayhem and see how my caretaker is looking after the place. I’ll be sure and remember you to Sidney Blood, though, when I see him. He likes to know he’s got fans.”

  He trod the remains of his cigar into the cinders as if the prettiest toad in the world was underfoot. “Don’t forget your promise to let me meet him. I’d love to shake his hand that writes the books.” He grinned. “I’d cut my mauler off then, and have it framed, wouldn’t I? Give it to my mother for a birthday present. She loves Sidney Bloods as well.”

  “I’ll fix it up. He’ll like your sense of humour at least.”

  “Yeh, I’ll make him laugh. But come back here any time. If you’re a good lad Lord Moggerhanger might ask you to drive some furniture to Italy. Me and Toffee Bottle took a load last month. Toffee fell in a vat of wine at a truckstop, and he couldn’t swim, so I had to drag him out. We felt rotten all the way home.”

  Back on the dual carriageway I thought how lucky I had been bumping into Kenny Dukes instead of getting bludgeoned by someone else for my curiosity. The Picaro Estate shot me onto the outer lane, overtaking cars fast in case Moggerhanger’s thugs decided on second thoughts to come after me and do me in.

  I was soon enough out of their range, and beyond the Stamford roundabout stopped for a hitchhiker. If Moggerhanger’s lads did tail me they might think it was another car, with two in it.

  “Get in, mate.” Tall and slim, with a wispy beard and unstable blue eyes, he wasn’t much above twenty. “Been waiting long?”

  He threw in a small rucksack. “Long enough.” He may have been right, his forlorn face raw and windblown from sitting too close and long by a fire. “I’
ve been sweating blood in the fields for a Lincolnshire carrot farmer, the meanest bastard on earth. He paid me a pittance, and now I’m off to Leeds.”

  “You’re a student, then?”

  Fed up with getting wet in the fields, he was on his way home for some dry socks and a cup of tea.

  “How did you know?”

  “Experience.”

  “Were you ever a student?”

  I put on speed. “All my life. Still am. Can’t afford not to be. Of people mostly. If I stop studying them, I’m dead.”

  “It’s like that, is it?”

  “You mean you’ve heard it all before?”

  “A million times, mostly from people who’ve never had the brains to study.”

  I introduced myself, to put him more at ease. “I’m Michael Cullen.”

  He shook his own hand. “And I’m George Delphick. I’m reading sociology at York, if you want to know.”

  I didn’t, particularly, but I’d heard that in the Kremlin there was the biggest bell in the world, and it gonged now at the name of Delphick. “Sociology,” I said, “what’s that?”

  “How should I know? I’ve only done a year.” He glanced at the instrument panel. “You’re doing a ton.”

  I threaded the needle of half a dozen hundred-foot juggernauts. “I like to keep up with the traffic. The faster you go the longer you live.”

  “That’s a new one on me,” the opinionated bleeder said, thinking I was serious.

  “It seems I’ve heard the name Delphick before. Are you any relation to the poet?”

  “I didn’t expect you to ask that, because how can somebody like you know about them? On the other hand I’m glad you did. I used to deny it, but why should I? He’s my cousin, and a lot older than me. When I was twelve he borrowed the money I was saving for an electronic calculator. They’d not long come out and were expensive, but he talked me into parting with my cash. When I met him three years later he denied I’d lent it, and threatened to hit me if I didn’t stop whining.”