“I’m glad to see you, anyway.” She drained the soft brown blebs and spooned them into two soup plates, unable to stop looking soppily at Paula. “It’ll help us to keep up with our sinful pleasures, won’t it, love?” She turned on me. “How is the big-headed novelist, anyway?”
“Top of the world. He’s still giving Mabel hell.”
“They deserve each other. Come on, darling,” she said to her girlfriend, “get something to eat. I was always hungry, at your age.” They sat at the small table, foreheads almost touching, spooning away as if eating caviar. My stomach turned at the sight. “You can have the back bedroom,” she said. “I aired it this morning.”
“You mean you let the diesel fumes in?”
“Don’t be cheeky.”
“I don’t want to put you out.”
“If I thought you was going to do that I wouldn’t have let you into the house. And sit down. I don’t like people standing while I’m eating.”
“I’m not people.”
“You are while you’re standing up. Are you sure you don’t want a plate of this? It looks as if you could do with something to clean you out.”
“I don’t want cleaning out.”
“Everybody does.”
I nodded towards Paula. “She does, by the look of her.”
“You leave her alone. She’s my very special friend. Aren’t you, love?”
She spoke at last. “Am I?”
“Well, you were in bed last night.”
I wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole. “Where did you pick her up?”
“I didn’t pick her up,” she flared, as I’d known she would. “I found her one evening sobbing her socks off in the Plough. Some man she lived with had tried to knock her about, and when she fought back he kicked her out. She said she’d got nowhere to go and was about to go down to the Leen and drown herself, so I took her in. The man came round here later looking for her, wanting to get her back. He started arguing on the doorstep. He threatened me. Me! I took the breadknife and pointed it at his guts. A real ratface he was. The blade went so close it ripped a bit of his cardigan. I always keep my knives razorsharp, for cutting up men who get a bit leery. I don’t know whether he was more terrified at that or at my laugh, the wicked prick. But he saw I wouldn’t stand any nonsense, and ran for his life. He never came back, either. I’d have chopped him up if he did. We women have to stick together, don’t we, precious?”
I could hardly believe it when the plump little scrubber gazed at my mother and smiled—“Oh yes!”—which made her look a bit more sexy, though it wouldn’t do to run your mother off. On the other hand she’d think nothing of doing it to me if I’d brought Dropshort’s baggage in for a cup of tea. Her flirting with Frances when we were first married didn’t bear thinking about. I thought I was going to lose her. Blaskin made a pass at Frances as well, but held back on noting my wound up fist. Was ever anyone cursed with worse parents? “I’m going out,” I told her.
“Don’t get into trouble, then. I know you. Just remember you’re in Nottingham. It’s not like the old days when you could walk around and feel safe. If you haven’t got good shoes on and you step on a needle you could be dead in six months. The town’s full of druggies.”
Searching out old acquaintances when you’ve nothing better to do is a good way of passing the time. If they’d been your girlfriends you wanted to see how much worse off they had become after you’d walked out on them. The first amenable sweetheart to consider was Claudine Forks, who had married my pal Alfie Bottesford on finding out she was pregnant. She told him the kid was his but in fact it had been mine, and he’d been so dim she didn’t have much persuading to do.
I found the phone book under a flowerpot in the parlour, and after a few flips got Claudine’s address. My mother looked up from splodging Paula. “If you come back late I’ll smell your fingers.”
“Don’t be disgusting.” I slammed the door to cut her laughter. It was four o’clock, and I hadn’t had lunch, but rather than call at Lord Jim’s fishbar on the main road I fetched a tuna and pickle sandwich from the car at the garage (which wasn’t yet being worked on) and munched a trail of original mixed grain brown bread crumbs along the main road. Space between clouds was a luminous duckegg blue, the air pure and refreshing compared to the old train smoke and factory smells I remembered, though I didn’t know which I preferred most.
I turned up over the bridge where the station used to be, hoping to stretch my hitherto pampered legs by a mile or two’s extra walk, happy enough to be floating around home soil as in my tadpole days.
I had seen so little of Nottingham in the last thirteen years it was like being in a foreign country, though one in which I at least knew the language. I’d met Alfie Bottesford in primary school, and one day he took me home to meet his fat mother, who wore glasses and worked at Player’s making cigarettes. A father was nowhere in the offing, meaning Alfie was as much as a bastard as I was. We played marbles on the cobbled street, till his mother called us in to eat bread smeared with black treacle, and drink such strong tea it stopped me sleeping for a week.
When Alfie took up with Claudine in his teens he tried to have it with her because that’s what you did at that age, whoever the girl was, but she wouldn’t let him near, though she was a passionate thing with a wonderful pair of breasts. I met her one night and talked her into it, so we were soon familiar with every field and copse on the outskirts of the city. Sometimes we even had it in her parents big fluffy marriage bed while they were out at Labour Party meetings. Thinking about it gave my John Thomas a rise.
After I left for London she went back to Alfie, and married him, with my little pea in her pod. So I didn’t know whether they would be glad to see me, though was big headed enough to wonder why they shouldn’t. Friends who aren’t friends for life aren’t worth having, and could never be too long apart not to call on one another.
I walked by the grey walled tobacco warehouse, seriously thinking—which I never liked to do—about the purpose of my life. Seeing no future, I wondered what it had in store. You could never go home again, so that wasn’t an option, and I wouldn’t now, but felt myself firmly in the grip of the unknowable, a state I had formerly regarded as of no importance simply because I didn’t like it. Useless speculation was futile, however, and all I could do to feel normal was to go where fancy took me. I’d never been imperilled by such trivial thoughts at Upper Mayhem so it would be best to go there and be still for a while, wait until something happened, and soon enough it would. The mind gets sick to make the body healthy again, and if it kills you in the process it only means you were too sick to recover and didn’t deserve to.
Claudine and Alfie lived in a matchbox bungalow at 24 Camomile Gardens, their address burned on the wavy wooden notice with a hot poker. I pressed the Swiss meadow cowbell button twice before the door opened.
“What do you want?” But she knew me straight away, and I didn’t have to wonder whether or not it was her. She was a little broader amidships, bristols pointing fair and square as if to push me back along the path and up the street, the same hungry though still pretty face, yet a daze of anguish from her fiery grey eyes as yet unexplained. Her all-black dress made her look like a lady-croupier in a gambling den. Surprise flickered away as she said: “You’ve heard, then?”
“Heard? I just came to see how you and Alfie were getting on. I’m only up for the day.”
“I think you’d better come in.” She stepped back, and I followed, keeping my hands from her arse because something suggested it wasn’t the time. “You and Alfie have a nice little home. You must be very happy here. Does he still work at Golden’s place?”
She turned, and faced me squarely. “You really haven’t heard yet?”
What could I say? “Not a word. What is it?” I felt a fool, knowing I ought to have got some news or other.
A wad of ti
ssue from her sleeve mopped up the waterworks. “He died, six months ago.”
I was shocked, pole-axed, plain slammed. A slice of childhood and youth gone to pieces. I’d always thought Alfie would live forever, like me, and could only tell her so. If friends from so early on didn’t, who could you trust to do so? I asked, my tone as if blaming her, though I didn’t mean it that way: “What happened?”
She stood a few feet away, to tell the story as if for the umpteenth time. “He had a sore throat last year, and it wouldn’t go away. I made him see the doctor. I bullied him no end. He hadn’t been to one before in his life. Anyway I got him to go, and the doctor said he’d only got a bad cold, which would go away soon. It kept on, though, and Alfie thought he wasn’t being told the truth, and that the doctor knew he’d got cancer of the throat. When he went back to the surgery the doctor only laughed, and said again that all he had to do was wait long enough and it would go away. When Alfie went a third time he sent him for tests, and they didn’t show anything wrong, but Alfie wouldn’t be convinced, and got more and more miserable. I talked and talked, but it made no difference. Then one night he went out for a walk. I asked him where he was going, but he wouldn’t say. He never came back. They found him floating in Martin’s Pond three days later. He never had cancer at all.”
She fell into my arms, and I was beginning to wish I had never left London. “Oh, Michael!”
Poor daft Alfie. If I’d been there the idea of topping himself would have been knocked smartly on the head. “Didn’t he have pals at work to put him right?”
“One or two, but even they began to believe him after a while. He’d tell them again and again, with this mad look in his eyes. The more they tried to talk him out of it the more he said he knew he’d got it. He told me one night that the doctor had been to talk to them, and they were all laughing behind his back. Then he would only think they were trying to cheer him up. If only the doctor had given him some pills to calm him down.”
“You can’t blame the doctor.” I pressed her close for a kiss on the forehead, as much to console myself as her. Alfie would never think of hurting anyone, but he had done worse damage to himself, and damned those he had left behind even more. He didn’t have the endurance to wait for Fate to do him in, and wasn’t in his right mind to wonder how those he loved would manage when he’d gone.
Suicide is the worst crime you can commit, yet looking back I realised that Alfie couldn’t have done anything except kill himself, only waiting for what he saw as a reason. Why had he left it so late? We’d known each other from playing ragball at six or seven in the schoolyard. He had no father—as the saying went—only a stout mother who loved him more than if he’d had two fathers. In spite of that I couldn’t help thinking how good it was that he had killed himself sooner rather than later, because if he had found out that Claudine’s child wasn’t his he might have taken her and the daughter with him.
Yet it was anger more than guilt that wouldn’t go away, and I decided that if there was an afterlife I’d give him a pasting he’d never forget when I got there. On the other hand if he’d done nothing else he had proved himself to be a man who knew his own mind, and had died on his own terms. Having to think in such a way was my temperament, so I mumbled into Claudine’s ear to show how much I was affected by her plight, suitably adult condolences that opened her lips on mine, and I wasn’t slow in melting my grief with hers.
“It was so awful, Michael.”
“He was my oldest friend,” I said. “I liked him more than any other kid. We were as close as brothers”—which I supposed was why I had played the dirtiest trick of all on him, and if that didn’t make us close I couldn’t think what would. I kissed her again. “I’ll never believe he’s gone. Not like that, anyway. It’s terrible. I can’t believe it.”
On the sofa, face to face and holding hands, she kissed me as if I was the only comfort she’d had since Alfie’s death. “I’ll never get over it, I can tell you that.”
My arms went around her. “I didn’t imagine in a hundred years I’d hear such tragic news when I rang the bell. I was looking forward to a happy reunion, talking to you both about old times. The three of us would have gone for a night on the town, laughing and drinking together.” The more I went on the wetter her lovely but foxy face became, arms firmly around me. The only way to stop her tears was to lean back with her.
“I’m so wound up, Michael, I don’t know what to do. I’m even wound up when I’m sleeping. I don’t know what to do.”
I did. The pitchblend of misery was the breeding ground of lust. It seemed I had come into the world to do Alfie down, though now that he was out of the world it couldn’t much matter what I did with Claudine, could only look on her as a farewell gift from someone who all those years ago hadn’t realised it had been mine.
The settee was long enough for her while I was kissing her ears, but it wouldn’t suffice for me when fully stretched out. “Let’s go to your bed,” I said.
Her eyes stayed closed as she led the way into the room smelling of scent you sprayed over the bath. She slipped off her drawers with no help from me, and went for my zip like a banana girl in the Amazonian rainforest. My underpants got tangled in trousers, socks and shoes till I reached to push the whole lot away. Even at my age I’d never quite worked out how to avoid that hiatus in the proceedings, when both parties were in so much of a hurry.
“I can’t believe you’re here with me, Michael.”
I could. It was like old times, a nostalgic flush of homeland and youth coming so powerfully back I didn’t wonder whether it was love or not, my head of steam blotting the whole world out. In up to the hilt, I stopped to unleash her breasts, then went into the sweetest coupling I’d had since having her so many years ago, only this time her second coming with its gobbling pressures and variations seemed to last far longer, fired not so much by me being in the cockpit but by her not knowing who or where she was due to the shock of Alfie’s death. Either that or she also wanted to obliterate the present by getting back to the days when she’d only known me in the way she was knowing me now, so I stopped wondering whether or not I was doing the right thing.
Her eyes were at all eight points of the compass while doing up her clothes. We’d both come so much that the disinfectant bluebell aroma had been satisfactorily vanquished, and she had no need to rush for the aerosol, since Alfie wasn’t in a state to kick open the door and sniff suspiciously. She fell into my arms. “I’ve always loved you and only you. Even when Alfie used to get on top of me I’d think of how we used to do it in mam and dad’s lovely big bed.”
What a slut, to come out with that, and Alfie not yet rotted into dust. Yet I had to feel sorry for her, and hoped she wouldn’t waste her life on such as me from now on. We smooched our way back to the living room, not as light as before, with gunmetal clouds wafting across the large windows. She sat in a chair, facing me on the settee. I had hoped to be left alone for a few minutes while she made a cup of tea in the kitchen, and shimmied in with a plate of biscuits. But such hospitality wasn’t in her mind. “You know Charlene’s yours, don’t you, Michael?”
Of course I did. “You mean your daughter?”
Her tone was edged with spite. “Ours. I was pregnant when I married Alfie, but he didn’t know. And if I didn’t tell him, how could he?”
“Not very well. I can see that.”
“You’d run off to London, so what else could I do?”
“Where is she now?” I might as well take a look, as long as I wasn’t asked to pay the arrears of her food and lodging for the last thirteen years.
“She always calls at her grandma’s on her way home from school. But she shouldn’t be long.”
“How old is she?”
“You know she’s thirteen, so don’t pretend you don’t. But she’s ever so clever at school. She wants to do her ‘O’ Levels. She does all the homework they give her.
And now she hasn’t got a father.” She was crying again. “I’ll never forgive Alfie for drowning himself. How could he have done a thing like that, with such a lovely daughter?”
It was plain a mile off. I would have gone the same way if I’d been caught in such a trap, but I’d had the sense enough to get out, while young and easygoing Alfie had been driven stupid by her, and killed himself. He’d been a lively kid, but I recalled the occasional blankness of his eyes, staring oddly into space. Never knowing why he was on earth had, in time, become a nightmare he couldn’t do anything but die to get away from. I was surprised he’d lasted so long, but he’d always seemed a late developer, otherwise he would have known that Charlene wasn’t his when he went with Claudine in her white finery up the aisle of the church.
Mulling on the matter, I was nearly as upset as she was, which comforted me because if I hadn’t been I’d have had as stony a heart as Alfie when he decided to kill himself in spite of a lovely wife and daughter. “I’m sorry to have to say this, but he did it because he only cared for himself. He was so selfish he could think of nothing better to do, and I can’t think why.”
She had no answer to this. Maybe she’d often thought it herself. I’d set out on a run up the Great North Road, hoping for some peace in which to reflect on my own life, and had found myself in a can of worms. I wiped my nose, though it wasn’t dripping from my cold anymore. Maybe I should run back to my mother’s and drive her mad by trying to get off with her girlfriend. “I’ll take you out this evening,” I said. “We’ll go on a pub crawl, and make merry. Cheer ourselves up in the Royal Children.”
She sat by me, and held my hand. “I’d love to, but I can’t. If the neighbours saw me walking out with another man already they’d think I was a right slag.”
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