Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘She didn’t seem very fine the last I saw of her.’

  He did his comprehending wolf howl. ‘Oh-oo. That. That was nothing. You did get the point, I take it? That she thought she’d been rude by laughing when you hit your head and wanted to apologize? I mean you grasped that?’

  ‘Well, yes. Rather drastic, wasn’t she being?’

  ‘Nop by her standards, I can assure you. How is the head?’

  ‘Labouring. How’s the car?’

  ‘Try smice on it. Oh, it’ll be in dock a few days. You seemed so terrified of being late for your bloody recording that Gilbert forgot what the brakes were for. Nobody’s fault, really.’

  ‘No. Tell me, how did you join up with Penny again?’

  ‘Gilbert worked out, Gilbert stayed with the car and I just strolled up to the BBC and collected her. We had quite a jolly lunch at the Savoy eventually. Pity you couldn’t join us. She kept complaining that you hadn’t, incidentally, which Gilbert didn’t much care for.’

  ‘What does he think is happening on Saturday evening?’

  ‘Leave that to me. Yes, I don’t know what you said to her, but you seem to have made something of an impression. Fine as far’s I’m concerned. If you could, you know, reach her in some way it would be a splendid thing for all concerned.’

  All concerned, I thought when I had put the telephone down. Like Gilbert, for instance. Like Vivienne. Like the other bloke. Like me. But most of all like Roy. Was what he had said – he had said more in the same strain before ringing off – just a prophylactic against Penny’s probable conduct on Saturday, or had he a deeper scheme in train, of the sort I had glimpsed when, in his kitchen that afternoon, he had asked me what I thought of her looks? The real trouble with liars, I decided as I belatedly got Weber out of his drawer, was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.

  Saturday afternoon found me in reasonably good heart. Earlier that week, Harold Meers had accepted without question, and allowed to appear in his newspaper, a half-sentence of mine in praise of a Bulgarian soprano. I had given Haydn the modified rounds-of-the-kitchen treatment, cunningly laying off by warm praise of the performance and recording, and had sent the review off to The Record-Player. The Nonpareil label had commissioned me to do the sleeve-notes for the complete Mozart piano sonatas executed by some Paraguayan newcomer. Vivienne was no problem, having gone more than halfway to meet me, in fact a little further than I really wanted, when I suggested cancelling, rather than putting back, our date for that day. She said it would give her a chance to catch up with her letter-writing, thereby injecting such an authentic note of humdrumness that I almost wished she had told me a lie.

  Deciding what to wear took me longer than my usual three seconds. All things considered, the ideal outfit would have been a leather jacket that became the top half of a dinner-suit when turned inside out, a denim dickey over an evening bow, steel-tipped patent-leather pumps, and so on; but I did not possess any of these, and settled on dark everything from shirt to shoes, including a dark neck-scarf, with a little quick-change protective coloration up my sleeve, or rather stuffed into my hip pockets, in the form of two neckties, one psychedelic (a joke present from my sister), the other sane. At half past five I drank a pint of milk to protect my stomach from whatever Roy might have in store for it, transferred my wallet from my right to my left breast-pocket, and got on my way.

  A nasty dog-leg journey by Tube, nasty both topologically and as regards the quality of the experience, delivered me at length outside the Angel station. It seemed to me that a newspaper-seller there flinched slightly when I mentioned the name of the pub I sought, but from a distance it looked harmless enough. I had been rather expecting to find the streets deserted, the buildings uninhabited, having been quite recently told by a left-wing bassoonist friend and his left-wing harpist wife that they were among the first people to have moved into the area. On the contrary, there was every sign of occupancy, and throngs of young and old passed to and fro, no doubt in transit or going out for the evening, since at this advanced hour – very nearly six o’clock – they could scarcely have still been coming home from work. I moved freely among them and gained the front of the building unmolested.

  Close to, it looked less harmless. Its fabric suggested, though not seriously, only to a fleeting glance or to eyes like mine when unassisted by glasses, that it was made of variegated planks of wood and strips of galvanized iron. Here and there archaic war posters, or reproductions of such, were somehow incorporated into whatever material composed the exterior. None the less I went in, and found myself in a small vestibule lit only by a number of signs and arrows: Wipers Bar, Blighty Bar, Cookhouse, Dug-out. Roy had said something about below ground, so I chose the last of these. At the foot of a steep wooden stair with no risers and a rope hand-rail, I beat aside a clinging obstacle that, seen by what illumination there was on its farther side, proved to be a plastic curtain got up to look like sacking, though here again the pretence was half-hearted. Two dimly seen couples crouched in sham-concrete alcoves. Replicas of rifles, gas masks, grenades hung on the walls. I took in no more of this, but went to the bar, where I was confronted by a girl in service-dress with medal ribbons and sergeant’s stripes. Just then a wordless yelling, recalling Ashley Vandervane’s but rather lower in pitch and accompanied by clashes and soggy thumps, burst from several invisible sources. Nevertheless I managed to get myself a Guinness, and went and sat down on a padded ammunition-box in a corner.

  After an hour or so of subjective time, in fact perhaps two minutes, I was preparing to go and wait in the street, but then Roy and Penny fought their way past the curtain. Penny was hatless and had boots on; I could not know what else she might or might not have been wearing. She settled herself mutely beside me while Roy went to the bar, and I asked her how she was, cunningly keeping my voice well down to normal volume.

  ‘What? I can’t hear with this row.’

  I moved much closer to her, close enough for a good noseful of the warm clean smell I had noticed in the car, and repeated my question.

  ‘I’m all right. Why?’

  ‘You didn’t ring me up.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. What it was you didn’t ring me up about. Because you didn’t ring me up.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was going to, did I?’

  ‘No, I said you could if you wanted to.’

  ‘What for?’

  Most of my brain seemed suddenly to have become unusable, cut off for ever by a massive haemorrhage. It occurred to me that these days, after so many precedents in film and TV drama, especially of the strong variety, people left questions unanswered whenever they felt like it, often shrugging their shoulders as well, so I silently shrugged mine. Then I realized that, in the gloom, Penny might mistake this gesture for an outsize nervous tremor, or even miss it altogether. Accordingly, I muttered for a few seconds. Penny did not pursue the topic. No doubt I had been inept, either in reminding her too early about the helping project, or in assuming she remembered having mentioned it in the first place. There was nothing like the society of youth for making one feel young: about fourteen, in fact, and an abnormally blush-prone, naïve and thick fourteen into the bargain. I found myself asking her if she liked this place.

  ‘Sodding wicked,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t see why they have to have it so dark. And noisy.’

  ‘What?’

  Roy turned up at that point, carrying what I could only assume were drinks for himself and his daughter.

  ‘We were just saying how much we hated this pub,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody awful, isn’t it?’ he agreed readily, drinking.

  ‘Why have we come here, then?’

  ‘Just that it’s convenient.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’

  ‘For where we’re going next.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Only round the corner.’
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br />   ‘No doubt, but what is it?’

  ‘I think you’ll both agree it’s fun.’

  I hoped very much that this brick wall had been thrown up out of habit, not so as to conceal a prospect so dreadful that any preview of it would send me, or Penny, or both of us haring down the City Road. I pondered the point intermittently while Roy took me more or less bar by bar through the rehearsal of the Mahler Fifth he and the NLSO had been engaged on earlier that day. The other sort of noise that still surrounded us would have made it difficult for him to address Penny as well without continuously shouting his head off, and her hunched-up silhouette told of withdrawal on her own part. After he had described for the second time a passage of arms he had had with the principal double-bass (was he, understandably enough, drunk already?), I broke in to say, not very ardently, but at least loudly,

  ‘You know, I think old Gus must have written out programme notes first and then worked back from them to his score. Sort of, after the strings have failed to reach the moment of reconciliation they had seemed to promise three-quarters of an hour earlier, trumpets and trombones solemnly deliver a message of—’

  ‘Here she is.’

  Sylvia approached, wearing what my night vision, eked out by such knowledge as I had of her, suggested was the rig-out of our previous meeting. Roy had risen and seemingly kissed her, and now introduced bird to daughter, gesturing, even gesticulating, in a way that faintly recalled his manner on the rostrum at a moment of drama. Then he and Sylvia went over to the bar. I turned to Penny, feeling by now several decades older than fourteen, but she surprised me by shouting first.

  ‘Where’s he taking us, then?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to it.’

  ‘I said I’d no idea where he’s taking us.’

  ‘I heard you. I don’t want to go to it. Wherever he’s taking us. Got it?’

  ‘You mean you’d rather stay here?’

  ‘Don’t talk like a bloody fool.’

  I found I could whimper to myself really quite powerfully, at a volume that would have carried across, say, the aisle of an Underground train in motion, without seeming to reach Penny’s ears. ‘What would you like to do?’

  She leaned forward to a point at which she could talk audibly at an almost normal pitch. ‘I wouldn’t like to do anything. There’s nothing I’d like to do. Ever. I can’t stand it up there with her’ – Kitty, I assumed, rather than the domestic or the Furry Barrel – ‘and there’s nowhere I want to go outside. I can’t stand being on my own, and I can’t stand being with one person, and I can’t stand being with a lot of people. Well, I can stand it, but I always feel I won’t be able to another second. I can’t think about anything, except about how I feel, and how I feel’s always just me thinking about how I feel. I don’t mind being asleep.’

  She spoke without the flat hostility she had displayed a few moments before, nor was there the least trace of self-pity in her tone. She might have been a television story editor in conference, briskly outlining in the first person a substantial minor character she was proposing to have written into the script. In a brief glow from her cigarette, I saw her looking at me as if she simply felt it was my turn now. I said conversationally,

  ‘Are you on drugs?’

  ‘Not at the moment. You always think they’re going to be good, but they’re not, not really. Not for me, anyway. It gets like seeing everything in a lot of mirrors, or through funny glass like a migraine, or looking up from the floor, but it’s the same thing really. Even when all the things look different, all covered with stuff or turned into lights and things, or even when you can’t see or hear anything you’re sort of used to, you know it’s all there really. Not just it’s going to be back when you’re back, it’s there all the time. Even when you can’t just remember what it’s like. Of course, I haven’t had anything . . .’

  I lost her voice under a short feu de joie of howitzers intended to lend emphasis to some crux in the performance that raged about us. ‘What?’

  ‘Heroin!’ she bawled. ‘What they call a hard drug, actually, where you—’

  ‘But you haven’t taken that.’

  ‘Not so far I haven’t.’

  ‘But you’re not going to.’

  ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Why not! Because it kills you. God almighty.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  At this point, the ambient uproar stopped. I stared towards Penny under the momentary illusion that now I should be able to see her better. She broke into laughter as hearty as if I had hit myself on the head a third time.

  ‘Don’t you worry, mate,’ she said with friendly contempt, ‘I don’t have any plans for the old needle just at present, thanks all the same. So you can afford to cool it. All safe and sound and wrapped up snug.’

  I had still not thought of anything to say when Roy’s shape loomed above us.

  ‘All right, chaps? I thought we might move on, if you’ve no objection.’

  At this I found speech. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  The illumination at the bar was slightly less minimal than elsewhere in the room. By it, as Sylvia took her time about drinking up, I saw a small, hairy young man turn his head and reveal himself to be wearing sunglasses. I moved on reflex, precipitating my frame between him and Roy’s line of sight before I had really got started on wondering just how far, given that incident at the corner of St John’s Wood Road, Roy would escalate his reaction to a sunglasses-wearer in these surroundings. In moving, I trod on Penny’s foot and collided with Sylvia’s elbow, not quite causing her glass to spill over.

  ‘Christ, what’s the muhtter with you?’ she asked me, swinging round and spilling her drink without my assistance. ‘You pissed already?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be that, darling,’ said Roy authoritatively. ‘Our Duggers is never pissed. Foreign to his whole nature.’

  ‘Yeah, see him letting go.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I sort of tripped. Sorry, Penny.’

  ‘Easy enough to do in this bloody mausoleum, old lad. Come on, then – off.’

  Roy watched me over his shoulder as I weaved behind him, duplicating or trying to anticipate his movements and keeping a mental bearing on the position of the sunglassed young man.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ He leaned across to push the curtain aside and studied my shift to the relevant flank. ‘You seem a bit—’

  ‘Rather stuffy in here.’

  ‘I blame myself. I’d forgotten how crappy it was. No, actually I think they must have made it crappier since I was last here. But the food’s nop bad, or wasn’t. You used to be able to get quite a good sort of scampi, hamburger and salad kind of a lunch in the Cookhouse,’ he said, outlining in a few swift strokes the sort of meal he must have forgotten I knew he hated most.

  Hullabaloo was renewed behind us, and more of it came from all sides when we reached ground level. I had expected it to be at least fully dark out of doors, with perhaps even the eastern stars beginning to pale in presage of the dawn, but in fact the sun was still very much about. White-painted caffs and stores selling hooligans’ attire were mingled with murky places calling themselves bistros and boutiques. The two girls walked ahead of Roy and me, Penny seemingly looking at passers-by, Sylvia with her eyes fixed on the shop windows.

  ‘You were getting on a treat with young Penny, I saw,’ said Roy.

  ‘Yes, okay.’ I could not start about Penny now.

  ‘She’ll come round in the end, you know. All this drop-out stuff is just a stage. All talk.’

  ‘That sounds a bit authoritarian. What about her new ways of seeing things? Are they all talk?’

  ‘She hasn’t got them much. It’s more Sylvia who’s got them.’

  ‘So Penny isn’t really a part of youth?’

  ‘Not in that sense, I’m afraid, no.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Bugger it, she is my daughter.’


  ‘Yes, there is that.’

  We had turned a corner and come up to a large black car parked at the kerb. I could see some of the back view of a man in the driving-seat, and caught Roy by the arm.

  ‘That’s not Gilbert, is it?’

  ‘Christ no. Pull yourself together, Duggers. It’s a car-hire driver and this is a car-hire car. Just for the evening. Makes us more mobile.’

  He put me in the rear seat between the two girls and got in front. We moved off. Penny had turned her back on me as far as she could without kneeling up on the seat. I looked at Sylvia, who was smelling of carrots that evening, and said, neutrally I would have thought,

  ‘Do you know where we’re going?’

  ‘Why does it bother you so much?’

  ‘What do you mean, bother me?’

  ‘So much. Listen to you. Everything you do, you’ve got to have done it before. Whatever it is, it’s got to be part of a pluhn.’

  ‘I simply asked you—’

  ‘You can’t, you know, get into things properly if you always know what’s coming. You mustn’t let it all be like it was the last time. You can’t sort of get hold of it properly if that’s what you do. It’s all got to be something else. You know.’

  Roy’s head nodded once or twice, in approval or in response to the motion of the car, which was not well sprung. I tried to imagine his private conversations with Sylvia, and then tried not to instead. For the second time in the last couple of months, the possible virtues of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony presented themselves to me. Sylvia went on,

  ‘You’re half out of your mind worrying you won’t be able to fit everything in together. You call that living? Just making sure today’s like yesterday and last week and last year? You’re all frozen up. You can’t feel. I’d hate to get myself tied up with you, I really would. You wouldn’t go anywhere with anyone in case you had to do something you weren’t used to.’

  Her demonstration of new ways of seeing things closed at that point; after travelling perhaps as much as half a mile, we had apparently arrived. As with Penny in the Dug-out, Sylvia’s manner had not matched the content of what she had said: in this case thoughtful, troubled, sympathetic, that of one really concerned to advertise dangers and propound remedies. The total effect, on me at least, was not much improved thereby. Operating at reduced efficiency, I became part of a small crowd or untidy queue moving towards and into the stone porch of a large red-brick building. Posters abounded, some of considerable age and depressive quality.