by Alexei Sayle
‘Them’s the breaks.’
‘I don’t know. It wasn’t like the Mau Mau didn’t know what the Barlows were like, because we found out that it was their head boy who had organised the whole thing, he’d been with the Barlows twenty years, they’d paid for his son to go to university in Leeds. But all over, domestic servants were at the front of it all. You know Graham Greene was Out there at that time, we used to have a drink together sometimes at Rahman’s and he said that it was as if Jeeves had taken to the Jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had taken a blood oath to kill Bertie Wooster.’ I could see Bateman was wondering who and what I was talking about.
‘I couldn’t hold the chaps back. My sergeant shot the head boy and his wife and his son … A lot of that sort of thing went on, I should really have put them all on a charge but that would have made me terribly unpopular with my men.
‘They would’ve fragged ya like they did in Vietnam.’
‘I’m not sure there’s a lot of that in the British army. There was a terrible panic amongst the white settlers but you know during the whole thing only thirty-two whites died; as somebody said, that’s fewer than the number of Europeans killed in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the emergency. We, on the other hand, the settlers and the British army and our loyal native police, killed thousands of Kenyans and they, the Mau Mau, killed thousands of each other.’
Bateman, becoming bored with my historical contextualising, steered me towards hardware: he loved talking about guns and he bought all those rap records where gangstas sang lovingly about their ‘nines’. ‘Course you still had the old .303 Lee Enfield rifles then, didn’t you? And the 9mm sten guns and the .303 Bren guns for squad support. And they had …?’
‘Apart from what little they stole off the native police, the Mau Mau made their guns themselves from odd bits of iron piping, door bolts, rubber bands and bits of wire. Often, of course, these guns would blow up in their faces. I only once was in a thing you could call a firefight…’
‘You were in a firefight? Wow I bet a firefight separates the men from the boys,’ said Bateman.
‘A firefight certainly separates the men from their heads,’ I said.
‘Wow, you saw a guy’s head shot off?’
‘Not literally, I was being poetic. A lot of the fellows thought they’d shot a whole load of the Mau Mau but when we looked they’d all shot themselves: when your gun blows up the injuries are obviously facial.’ Then an idea came to me.
‘Bateman, I was wondering if you and Suki would like to come to my house for dinner on Saturday night, I’m … er, having a young friend to stay from London and erm … well, if you’d like to come to dinner—’
‘Sure, man, why not? What time?’
‘Eight?’
‘Great, give me a chance to wear my new dress.’
I didn’t want to appear as if I was trying too hard, as if I had thought of nothing else except her visit the whole six days, so I wore an old Donegal tweed sports jacket, with one of the original Pringle pullovers underneath, brown moleskin trousers, a good leather belt, soft rust-coloured cotton shirt, a dark-green knitted tie, Argyle socks, and my second-best dark-brown Lobb brogues.
I waited with my Honda Melody in the car park of Banbury Station. She was one of the first out from the three o’clock London train with her bouncing walk that made her black hair bob up and down. She had on a black leather jacket, turquoise T-shirt with a sparkling abstract design on the chest, and tight blue faded Wrangler jeans. Over her shoulders she had a backpack shaped like a pair of silver angel’s wings and on her arm she had brought her own crash helmet from London.
Angel’s wings not being the most space-efficient shape for a backpack she had had to put some of her spare clothes in the crash helmet. A lot of the ease we had with each other the weekend before had evaporated for the moment, still she kissed me quickly on the lips and I tried not to look as she transferred lacy red silk bra and pants underwear from her crash helmet into the little plastic box on the back of my scooter. Then we puffed the nine miles to Lyttleton Strachey, her arms wrapped tight around me, the brave little machine wheezing under the weight of two people for the first time since I had owned it.
I had washed all the bed linen in the spare room and re-made the single bed, I had had to leave the windows open for three days to drive out the musty unused smell. When I had first come to this place I had still entertained ideas of friends coming out to stay with me. I had thought Larkin might come. Though I didn’t know him that well we corresponded quite regularly and I think we were friends. For example in our letters we would use forbidden words as close friends do, words unusable even forty years ago, like ‘coon’ and ‘sambo’:
I thought we were doing this in a spirit of flaunting, between friends, the rules of liberal decency but now, in retrospect, I am not so sure about Larkin. I think he might have meant it. Anyway he never came.
At the end of our ride Mercy put her underwear back in the crash helmet and I showed her up to the spare room and told her where the bathroom was.
All the day before I had been cleaning my little house, I polished the good Fifties furniture with real wax furniture polish, silicon-based sprays like Mr Sheen are no good for fine furniture. What I was proudest of in my house were the paintings. I had known most of the important artists of the post-war period; this had taken no effort on my part, one simply bumped into them, in those days there simply weren’t that many places to go. By and by most everybody would come to the Stork Club, the Kensington Arts or The Mirabelle, in the other party would be someone from school or university or the army and an introduction would be made. In the dining room was a small Patrick Caulfield, in the living room I had several Henry Moore drawings and, in pride of place over the mantelpiece, a small Graham Sutherland oil painting. These I ran over with a feather duster and wiped the frames with a fine cloth slightly dampened, careful not to touch the precious surface of the paintings.
And all that morning I had been cooking and baking. Since all but me were vegetarians I had made a dinner of cream of spinach soup with steamed turnip tops, broccoli quiche, asparagus risotto, cauliflower cheese and a mixed salad. To drink I had got Sam to buy me two bottles of Bordeaux and two bottles of Sancerre from D’agneau et Fils in the Place Gambetta, Calais.
Bateman brought round a litre bottle of vodka he had shoplifted from the off licence in Middleton Cheney plus a gift for Mercy: to supplement his dole money Suki and he made small figures from bits of wire, nuts and bolts that they then covered in a black rubbery coating and which they sold, quite successfully, from a stall in the market at Northampton. They gave Mercy the figure of a cat arching its back and spitting, with its fur sticking up on end. ‘Wow,’ she exclaimed looking at it from every angle, ‘this is brilliant, just like my Adrian. I’ll put it on the mantelpiece in front of that painting, so I can look at it while we talk.’
‘So, Mercy,’ said Suki, ‘how do you like our village?’
‘Well, I haven’t seen much of it but it seems lovely. Really pretty and quiet and that.’
Said Bateman, ‘You won’t see anybody all day in the outside and all the nature and that around on the hills, trees and so on, makes you feel really calm and centred, know what I mean?’
‘Cows and such.’
Mercy said, ‘London’s so cold, I bet everybody’s really friendly here.’
‘Oh yeah we all look out for each other, everybody knows what’s goin’ on with everybody else.’
‘And safe.’
‘You don’t need to lock your door.’
‘Well you do, but if you didn’t you’d probably be OK if it was only for a couple of hours.’
After dinner we walked through the silent village to the noisy pub. The Young Farmers were holding a disco in the village hall next door, the DJ was playing an old Nineties hip-hop tune ‘Like A Playa’ by L.A. Gangz, the Notorious B.I.G. Remix I thought. On the door were stationed three or four beefy farmers’ sons and daughters; they kept
baseball bats tucked behind the door jamb but in easy reach just in case any drugged-up gangs came out from the estates of Daventry or Northampton. The beefy boys rather hoped they would come out, cherishing the opportunity to break a few working-class skulls. The same old story of town versus country, aristocrat versus prole, the General Strike of 1926 played out to the soundtrack of DaCompton Ghettoz.
Suddenly one of the farmers’ boys on the door gave a violent jerk then fell to the ground, all life gone from his body. His fellows gathered round, three or four trying to dial the emergency services on their mobiles at the same time and jamming the signal. The ambulance would take an hour to get here anyway, it being Saturday night and them all being in play and the nearest available being in the next county but one.
‘What’s going on?’ I said to Bateman.
‘Ah somebody’s been pushing semi-fatal smack in Northampton, the scientists are baffled, they don’t know what’s wrong with it, possibly something to do with anthrax they ain’t sure … be that he took I spect.’
The car park of the pub was full of BMWs and Audis, Range Rovers and Mercedes; we had to slip in single file between them to get to the front door, the mud on their sides smearing our clothes.
Inside it was if all the noise that had been banned from the rest of the village was let loose in here.
The lads were at the bar, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul. I don’t know why in my mind I called them ‘The Lads’, they are all middle-aged men, all involved in some way or other, as everybody seemed to be in the village, in making the world a worse place.
As I’ve said before Miles Godmanchester was employed at Daventry Life Sciences, mutilating animals for the cosmetics industry, though I had heard him maintain at the bar in the pub that his work had saved the lives of many ‘sick little kiddies’. Marty Spen was supposed to keep it quiet but he was an engineer for a French arms firm whose UK base was in a long gold building, cloistered in a boskey, wooded valley to the east of Oxford. Their main product was the ‘Bunuel’ ground-to-air missile. Marty Spen was always off to visit some dreadful regime, Turkey or Indonesia, to help them more efficiently strafe their own populace. Such peregrination was not unusual; in any village pub round this way half the customers would be just back from the other side of the globe and half had never been anywhere at all and would need hypnotherapy before they even considered visiting nearby Northampton. And you couldn’t guess which was which either. Some yokel straight out of Thomas Hardy might be heard to say in the pub, ‘Oiv jarst been instarllin an ethernet modarl intranet system in that thar Yokahama, I bought I a DV camera at the airport …’ Marty Spen and his wife spent their holidays every year in Saudi Arabia, guests of a grateful government. Paul Crouch had something to do with tobacco promoting Formula One cars and Ronny Raul was a food scientist at US Abstract Foods Corporation on the Banbury ring road, whose factory would fill the air for miles around with the smell of whatever they were concocting that day, nutmeg and cinnamon, coffee and cardamon, saffron and chocolate, the smells of the Damascus souk amongst the tilting roadsigns and squashed-flat rabbit corpses of the A316.
The concentric rings of a sexquake ran through the lads as Mercy came through the door into the pub, then a following after-shock of perplexity when it was clear that she was with me. The other three sat down at a table and I went up to the bar to order drinks.
Miles Godmanchester said, ‘Hello, Hillary, who’s this? Your granddaughter, is it?’
I just smiled a silly smile and ordered drinks.
‘A friend from London…’ I eventually said.
‘You’re a quiet one, it’s gotta be said.’
‘Fucking gorgeous,’ said Marty Spen.
‘Blinder,’ from Paul Crouch.
‘Spectacular tits,’ said Ronny Raul.
On my way back to the table I sensed the men looking at me and felt ridiculous pride.
After the pub Bateman and Suki came back to my house and finished off the bottle of vodka so that Mercy and I didn’t go up to bed till 3 a.m. In the doorway of my room she said, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you a little bit.’
I could do nothing except emit a foolish little giggle. She put her arms round me and bent down to kiss me, her tongue in my mouth; I could feel the down on her upper lip. Then she pulled her mouth away and put her head on my shoulder. This gave me a good view of a Bridget Riley etching that I had stopped noticing was there years ago and which deserved a better spot than the upstairs landing. Its migraine swirls seemed appropriate to the moment. She went on, ‘You’ll understand if we don’t … you know, sleep together right now, though, won’t you? I’ve got to get my head straight about a few things.’
‘Of course I understand,’ I said.
Then she went to bed.
The next day I felt quite ill: I had had no reason to stay up late in a long while and even when I went to bed I hadn’t slept very well. By the time I got down to the kitchen it was nearly eleven o’clock. Mercy had the Roberts radio atop the window sill switched on, tuned to MidCounty Melody FM, soft rock trickling like treacle out of its speaker.
We went for a walk together along the bridleways. I showed her where the railways used to run, where the old fishponds and rabbit warrens were, named the few kinds of trees and the one wayside flower the chemicals had left behind.
She thought it was all wonderful. She said, ‘Hillary?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s quite a big thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘Can I come and stay here with you for a bit? I’ve really got to get out of London, it’s doing my head in.
My heart leapt though I was not sure with what emotion exactly. However I said quickly enough, ‘Of course you can.
When we got back to my house Bateman was standing by my front door. He waved a ziplock bag at us. ‘I got dis good scag in Banbury dis mornin, you wanna try some?’
‘Sure,’ said Mercy hurrying inside with an eager smile on her face. Turning to me she said, ‘Fuck, the country really is brilliant, isn’t it?’
We went into the living room, Mercy and Bateman sitting side by side on the couch while I took the armchair; we were like two kids and their dad. Bateman took a roll of tinfoil from his pocket, he tore off a piece and sprinkled some of the heroin onto it, then he rolled some more tinfoil into a tight little tube. Heating the drug from beneath with a little plastic lighter, he sucked up the snow-white smoke. ‘You want, Hillary?’ he asked. I said no, so he put some more heroin onto the foil and passed it, the lighter and the tube to Mercy. She put the tube between her lips and drew hungrily on the narcotic fumes.
I wanted to stay as alert as I could, although I was feeling drowsy myself from the effects of my late night: it was nearly four o’clock and time for this week’s omnibus edition of The Job on UK Gold, which I was eager to see as I’d missed a lot of episodes during the week. The reason I admired shows like The Job or the hospital drama Casualty was because although they were hack work, scripts turned out week after week for an audience who didn’t want their intelligence stimulated too much after they’d had their chemical-packed, ready meal dinners, they were good hack work providing the cleansing catharsis of Greek drama.
Once, a few years ago, I tried my hand at writing an episode of Casualty. We were all writers after all. Sitting at my desk day after day I thought I might become a different sort of writer. My idea was that as usual in that show the chemical tanker would leave the depot, its driver complaining of chest pains, the Sea Scouts would set out in their kayaks despite warnings on the radio of bad weather, the bickering couple would begin working on their house not having seen what we had seen, that the power saw with the whirling silver shark-finned blades was faulty and unsafe. We would keep cutting back to these scenes, the tanker on the motorway, the Scouts on the increasingly choppy sea, the couple arguing and slicing. However at the very end of the episode, after fifty-five minutes, the tanker would arrive safely at its destination with
no undue incident, the driver suffering from nothing more serious than wind, the leader of the Sea Scouts would decide it might be prudent to seek shelter from the bad weather so they would paddle to a safe bay where they would sit under a tree eating their sandwiches, and the bickering couple would notice that the saw was faulty and would immediately take it to a registered dealer for repair under its warranty. All this time Charlie and the rest of the cast at Holby A & E would sit around drinking tea and saying what a quiet day it was and how they’d like a bit of action and something would happen any second now. Then they’d all go home for an early night.
I got a very nice letter back from the producer’s assistant saying that they didn’t accept unsolicited scripts but she had included a signed photo of the cast.
Bateman and Mercy slowly slid sideways on the couch, their arms lying twisted under them on the cushions, drifting steeply into narcotic dreaming. It felt like a traditional English Sunday afternoon. Everybody in a coma and the TV on.
One of the cable TV companies was currently running an advertising campaign: it featured two office workers standing by the water cooler on a Monday morning. One is handsome, tall and confident, the other is shorter, uglier and more nervy. The Nervy one says to the other, ‘I had a fantastic weekend. Went to a club …’ — we then see the club which is crowded and noisy — ‘met a great woman…’ — we see the woman slapping his face — ‘didn’t get home till 3 a.m.’ — we see him walking home alone in the rain. Then he says to the handsome man, ‘What did you do?’ We cut to all the great cable TV programmes this man has watched over the weekend. ‘Oh, just stayed in and watched TV,’ he says and smiles smugly. The tag line of the advert is: ‘A Life Worth Watching.’