by Ted Lewis
The snuggling sounds continue from my bed and it’s making me feel, well, ready for sleep, I can tell you. In the end I say to her: “Leave it out, will you?”
“Mmm?”
“I said leave it out.”
“Just tell me what it is you particularly want leaving out and that’s what I’ll do.”
“Leave it out.” I clench my teeth. “Listen,” I say.
“I’m listening.”
“Look, forget it. Just go to sleep and forget it.”
“I tell you what: I promise I’ll forget it if you promise to forget it. Do you think you’ll be able to do that?”
“Remember what I said about smacking your backside?”
“Never stopped thinking about it.”
“Well don’t think it’d be as pleasant as you might imagine, I can tell you.”
“You don’t know about that, do you?”
“What you been studying, for Christ’s sake? Do your thesis on Medieval Flagellant Engravings, did you?”
“Maybe I would if—”
“If you hadn’t got the elbow.”
This time she doesn’t answer. Instead she does a shuffle in the sheets and then all is stillness and silence and thank Christ for that. I lie there for ten minutes, tense, just waiting for nothing in particular, just something else that’ll stop me having at least half an hour’s kip, like my pyjamas catching fire or D’Antoni shooting Wally dead, or the whole fucking villa sliding off the top of the mountain and disappearing down the chasm. The ten minutes extend to fifteen and I’m just beginning to believe in Fairy Godmothers when of course it has got to be Wally who shatters my illusions, his voice materializing above my head like something from a fake seance.
“It’s no good,” he says. “I can’t bleedin’ stand it.”
I don’t say anything.
“It’s like keeping a flaming vigil, only you know at some point the corpse is bleedin’ well going to wake up.”
I close my eyes.
“I mean,” Wally says.
Very quickly I get up and the cot tips over and I walk out of the bedroom and downstairs to the enormous lounge and I cross it and part the curtains and slide open the windows and walk out onto the patio. The sunlight air has warmth in it even this early and the trace of heat seems to accentuate the silence of the mountains. I walk across the flagstones to the retaining wall that separates the neatness of the patio from the jagged mess of the chasm. I sit on the wall and light a cigarette and look across the breadth of the island to the uniform blueness of the sea, stretching to the horizon, a great big nothing.
Eventually Wally sidles out onto the patio and makes it over to me with the minimum of movement, hoping that I’ll be unaware of his presence until he’s close enough to engage me with whatever he wants to engage me with. Which is of course, the usual.
“Jack,” he says. “You got to stay. You just got to.”
I blow smoke into the still air. There is no way I would stay on account of Wally or his brat or D’Antoni due to the way those bastards in London have set me up. But unfortunately I’ve been set up in another way. And that is by Audrey. When she turns up at the hold and I’m not around to greet her in my own inimitable way she’ll wait a while, all right, she’ll wait because she’s a patient bird but when she’s tired of being patient, she’s the most impatient bird you’d be unlucky enough to make impatient, in fact she’s like something out of the Snake Pit, no regard whatsoever for anything or anybody, and after a while she’d make it up here to the villa and get Wally to tell her the story and Wally, when the wrath of Gerald and Les is pointed in his direction because of my departing, is likely to help himself out of it a little bit by mentioning the nature of Audrey’s visit and of her enquiries and what with her in any case supposedly in Hamburg drumming up talent; whatever way you look at it I’d be smiling out of my neck and wearing a red shirt, no trouble; however safe I tried to make myself there’d be no getting away from the razor’s edge, and I should know, I’ve ordered up more than a couple such retribution parties on behalf of Gerald and Les. And so, until Audrey’s arrival, when I can explain the situation to her and row us both out of it, which will be in approximately four days’ time, I will just have to swallow and sit in the fucking sun with this pantomime act and not only just swallow, swallow in front of a brat, a half-arse and a madman.
“Jack,” Wally says again.
I flip my cigarette away into the chasm and turn to look at Wally.
“A couple of days,” I tell him. “I’ll give it a couple of days. But on one condition. You keep out of my fucking way, and when you are in any fucking way, you keep your fucking trap shut, except maybe when it’s to tell me dinner is served, all right?”
My reply makes Wally look as if he’s just had a face lift.
“Christ, thanks, Jack,” he says. “I really mean it, I really do.”
“Yes, I know,” I tell him. “You can show your appreciation by fetching that camp bed out here and you can follow that by bringing me a Bloody Mary.”
“Right,” says Wally. “Right you are, Jack. No bother.”
Wally scuttles back inside and wrestles the camp bed out through the sliding windows.
“Where’d you like it, Jack?” he says.
“On the floor,” I tell him.
Wally makes a production out of appreciating my very funny joke and says: “Shall I put it in the shade?”
“Anywhere you like.”
“I’ll put it in the shade.”
I don’t say anything. Wally puts it in the shade. Then he goes back inside and a couple of minutes later he comes out with the Bloody Mary all nice and iced up, and he brings it over the wall, by which time I’ve lit up another cigarette. Wally hands me the drink and says: “There you are, Jack; you’ll like that one. Dead right this time of day, that is.”
I take the drink from him and take a sip. Wally hovers where he is.
“Anything else I can get you?” he says. “I even got bacon and eggs in the freezer, none of your Spanish muck, you can have anything you want.”
“Not now, Wally.”
“Well, all you have to do is shout. Any time.”
“Wally,” I say to him, “you like it out here? I mean, do you ever get a bit lonely, like?”
“Yeah, I like it, it’s great. I mean, I’m my own guv’nor, in’ I, and I have fuck all to do except when Gerald and Les come out; I mean, it’s a doddle. ’Course, I sometimes get a bit pissed off with my own company, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“I thought you must do,” I say to him. “I suppose that’s why you haven’t stopped mouthing it since I walked in the door.”
Wally actually looks as if I’ve hurt his feelings.
“I believe the L.S.O. are looking for a good jawbone soloist,” I tell him. “I should apply if I was you.”
Wally starts a game of pocket billiards with himself. I take another drink and look across the island again. Shining white hotels are like reverse negatives against the deep blue of the sea.
“You get down there much?” I ask Wally.
“Couple of times a week, maybe. Shopping, mainly.”
“Go down there for a bit of the other, do you, or do you send out for it, like to the Chinese Chippie?”
“You know me, Jack. Never was strong on all that. Lot of trouble to go to, all that.”
“Oh yes?”
“Well, maybe now and then. I mean, I can fix you up, no bother.”
“How do you fix yourself up?”
“Well, there’s this club, the Picador, you know, the one Gerald and Les got some money in. Biggest in Palma, that is. Very sprauncey, except for the block bookings from the four organizations that make it a bit untidy, but you also get the yacht class in from the harbour, film stars and that. It’s fronted for the investors by a geezer called Johnni Kristen, right fucking name that is; I believe he started out in life choreographing some of them post-war, tat-girlie shows what used to tour all over
the place. Anyway now he acts as if he’s a cross between Lew Grade and Paul Raymond. Majorca’s Premier Impressario. A big celebrity.”
“I didn’t know those two had money over here,” I say to Wally.
Wally doesn’t say anything, wondering what sort of shit he’s put his foot in this time, and while he’s considering that I’m reflecting on those two bastards and their never-ending capacity for deviousness; the point being, they neither of them have told Audrey about it, she being a partner, because if they had, I’d know about it, as Audrey transmits all relevant financial arrangements to me sufficient unto the day when the two of us become the non-natural heirs to the Fletcher Brothers estate. And my reflections lead me to ruminate on how many other little safety deposits the Brothers Grimm have stacked away the length and breadth of the western hemisphere. Well, I think to myself, come the day, the spare sets of books shouldn’t be too difficult to locate. It’s just that it boils me up that those fuckers, those Mastermind finalists of Brewer Street, should manage to score off me, Jack the fucking lad, their human roll of sellotape, the geezer that keeps them and their operation from falling apart like so much Hong Kong merchandise; all right, so in a manner of speaking it comes under the heading of enlightened self-interest, but it stokes me to think of them thinking they’re smarter than Audrey without whom they’d never even have had a backyard, let alone an estate.
Wally is still standing there wondering how much he might be figuring in my thoughts.
“So?” I say to Wally.
“What?” he says.
“You were talking about the other out here,” I say to him. “And how you get it.”
Once more Wally’s relief is visible. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “That. Well, I mean, it’s not generally for me, it’s mainly when Mr. and Mr. Fletcher come over, when they’re entertaining, like, or not. What happens is they go down the Picador for a knees-up and bring back some of the cast, you know, the dancers as is supposed to be Spanish what in actual fact comes from Ilford, those of them who aren’t averse to earning the odd hundred nicker or so, in whatever manner, or maybe Johnni Kristen’s just got on the blower and he sends them up in a Volkswagen bus and the same sort of events transpire.”
I don’t say anything.
“Why, you thinking along those lines, Jack?” Wally says.
I shake my head.
“It’s no trouble. All I have to do is lift the phone.”
I give him a look.
“The phone’s off, isn’t it?” I say to him.
“Oh, yeah, I was forgetting. In this case, I’d just nip down in the Merc and have a word, personal like. I could go anytime you wanted.”
I don’t answer him.
“ ’Course, there’s the Blues. Personally speaking they don’t bother me. They got it done out like a warehouse down in the basement. Which of course is what it is. There must be about ten thousand down there, in fifties, what they ship out and replenish from time to time. Even at a tenner a time you can work it out yourself.”
“I know the economics of the film industry,” I tell him.
“Yeah, course, well you would, wouldn’t you.”
“Yes, I would.”
“Got five hundred shipped in last week. And five hundred out.”
“You pass the long winter evening exercising your right arm, then do you?”
Wally actually blushes.
“No, not really, just occasionally run a few through, make sure there’s not a dicey batch so there’s no come back from the retailers.”
“Do me a favour,” I tell him. “Those goods always come over mint condition. Ray Creasey sees to that.”
Wally shuffles about a bit. I smile at him.
“I got you sorted,” I say to him. “I know why you don’t bother pulling stuff for yourself from the Picador. You prefer it off the wrist, so there’s no sweat in case you can’t score your performance full marks, eh Wal? That’s why you don’t mind being on your own. You got the Blues to keep company with. Isn’t that right, Wal?”
By now, Wally’s as scarlet as Reggie Eames’s shirt after it’d been discovered he’d taken a dead bleeding liberty. But I consider a little bit of jovial sadism isn’t exactly out of order considering what I’ve had to put up with all through the night.
“I bet you run them all day long, don’t you Wal. That’s why your tan isn’t all it should be, eh, Wal?”
“Leave it out, Jack, all right?” Wally says.
I laugh.
“Yeah, all right, Wal, I’ll leave it out.” I hand him the empty glass. “Just get me another one of these, my old son. No, tell you what, mix me a jug up, will you, there’s a good old boy.”
Wally takes the glass and registers the fact that he’s sulking by going back inside without saying anything. I get up off the wall and walk over to the camp bed and lie down on it. The shade is cool but not cool enough for me to be able to lie down and go to sleep in it; a hundred days out at Cleethorpes as a kid has vaccinated me permanently against goose pimples. Wally reappears with the jug and drags a wrought-iron table across the flagstones to the side of the camp bed.
“There you are,” he says, still a trifle formal.
“Gracias,” I say to him.
This time he doesn’t hover about and earhole me about how shit-scared he is about D’Antoni or how delighted he is that I’m staying on or anything like that. He just pisses off back inside and almost immediately, without availing myself of the Bloody Mary, I am off up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire, as my old mother used to enjoy saying to me.
Chapter Eight
I AM AWAKENED BY a splash.
For a moment I am unaware of where precisely in the world I am supposed to be. I open my eyes and I am blinded by bright sunlight which, I realise at once, is why my pyjamas and my robe feel as though I’ve just stepped from under a shower. The shade has moved but apparently Wally has had the nous to move the wrought iron table to where the shade is and the Bloody Mary jug has fresh ice in it. I walk over to the table and pour myself a drink and when I’ve done that I pick up the jug and turn round and walk to the end of the villa and turn the corner to find out what the splash has been caused by.
The chasm and the retaining wall make a turn at an angle similar to the right angle the corner of the villa makes, and between the second aspect of the villa and the retaining wall is the swimming pool. Dead centre of the pool, like a doll in aspic, is Tina, floating on her back, a rubber ring round her waist, staring up into the deep blue sky. Floating near her, spinning lazily in the wake of Tina’s entry, is one of those inflatable lilos. On the edge of the pool is a towel and that is the only piece of material in sight because Tina hasn’t bothered to put on anything except the rubber band or whatever it is that’s drawing her hair back from her face, making a pony tail that floats on the top of the water.
I watch her as she swans about, occasionally kicking a lazy leg to change direction, the rubber ring beneath her armpits pushing her tits even higher than ever so that her nipples are pointing skywards at an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees.
Sipping the Bloody Mary and watching the almost prehensile nipples is not in fact an unpleasant way of whiling away the following ten minutes, particularly as the warmth of the sun has by now crystallised the sweat on my soaking pyjamas, causing an aroma that makes me feel a little more at home, reminding me of the kind of smell I wash off in the shower in my flat after I’ve given Audrey one, or anybody else who might be present at the time, Audrey not being privy to that particular kind of information. Eventually the girl manoeuvres herself into a position from which she can see who’s watching her. When she’s taken that in, she closes her eyes and lazily does a half circle so that her toes are pointing towards the chasm and I’m presented with a view of the top of her head.
“Enjoying the view of the chasm?” she says.
“I was.”
“Dirty old bastard,” she says.
“Not so much of the old,” I tell her.
I sit down in a wrought iron chair by the pool’s edge.
“Supposing I called it disinterest?”
“That’s what I mean. Old.”
“Your old man wasn’t wrong, was he?”
“Has he ever been right?”
“What he said about you having a good opinion of yourself.”
“Well you have to, don’t you. No bugger else will.”
“Depends how you go about things.”
“Of course, people have a good opinion of you, don’t they? On the strength of how you go about things?”
“On the strength of it, yes.”
She makes the other half of the circle and her toes are pointing at me again. Her nipples haven’t changed direction at all.
“Oh, yes,” she says. “That’s something else I was thinking about.”
“What?”
“I was wondering if you were one of those persons who got their kicks by bashing other persons about. You know, rather than actually getting down to the other.”
This conversation seems to be resonant with vague echoes of the conversation I was having with Wally before I got my overdue kip.
“There are people like that, you know,” she says, looking straight at me.
“Oh really?”
“I mean,” she says, “they may not necessarily know it, might never occur to them in a million years, but they do.”
“They do?”
“Well, like you. Probably enjoyed yourself so much getting a grip on me and bashing that yank about and treating my old man like a piece of loo paper that you hadn’t any appetite left for crawling in with me.”
“Is that so?”
She closes her eyes again.
“It could be,” she says. “Personally, I couldn’t give a fuck.”
Another half circle, and I get the back of her head again.
I smile to myself and pour some more from the jug into my glass and I take a drink and continue to watch her still closed-eye figure suspended by the reflection of the deep blue sky.