by Alexei Sayle
She thought about it. ‘Nawww. Sounds depressing.’ Then she said, ‘Look do you really, really have to have a Mau Mau hat?’
I said, ‘There’s a fellow who feels he really, really has to have one, yes.
‘Well, there’s a stall at Camden Market on Sundays, guy I know who might have one. I could take you there tomorrow if you want … I was going to go up there anyway, so it’s no big thing.’
‘Yes alright, that would be terrific. Where shall we meet?’
‘Outside Camden Town tube at one?’
‘Smashing. What’s your name?’
‘Mercy, Mercy Rush. What’s yours?’ ‘Hillary Wheat.’
‘See you at one tomorrow, Hillary.’
‘See you at one, Mercy.’
I felt silly with excitement and had walked half-way back to the station before I came around. I really needed to talk myself down from this ledge of giddiness; she was only being kind, she’d show me the stall then leave me, she’d invite me to a tango club where we’d … stop it, stop it, you silly old man.
Which left me with a choice. What was I going to do for the rest of the day? I supposed I could get back to Northamptonshire tonight easy enough. A newspaper hoarding saved me the trouble of considering that option:
‘Horrendous Rail Crash, Services Disrupted’, it shouted with glee. So I was stuck up in town on a Saturday evening.
Saturday evening has always seemed to me to be the most melancholy time to be alone in a strange town. Everybody else seems to be going home to have a bath before they attend huge dinners with their laughing, adoring families as you stand in the rain outside their houses looking through the windows into their fire-lit happiness.
Fortunately I had kept on paying the fifty pounds a year it took to be a country member of the Kensington Arts Club so I had a bed for the night and somewhere to eat my dinner at the large round table they kept for members who were dining on their own. I was glad to see that the Kensington Arts was still a bastion of disreputable elderly behaviour with no concession made to the modern puritanism. In the bar, hung from floor to ceiling with proper paintings of things and people and animals in gilded frames, everybody smoked and many who were my age or older were dazzlingly drunk. An old man was telling a story about golf which required him to roll about on the floor, a good-looking woman of forty with long dark hair took her top and bra off then danced on the mini grand piano while a man with an eye patch and a Van Dyke beard played jellyroll jazz, another older woman bit me on the arm while I was at the bar getting a drink at pub prices.
Say what you like about crack dealers they are not ageist: I was offered rock three times in the twenty minutes I stood outside Camden Town tube station waiting for Mercy. When I had last seen Camden Town it was a district of glum Irish drinking holes, black canals, economy cash butchers, Shirley Conran and Dr Jonathan Miller. Now it was as if all the various young peoples of the world had decided to come to this place in order to wear each other’s clothes and to talk in each other’s languages. Thus I saw what I took to be Nepalese boys in the garb of urban American blacks talking to each other in Spanish, four Japanese girls wearing Andean headgear yabbering to each other in Magreb Arabic, Saree-covered Tolchucks conversing in Cantonese, Malay-speaking Rastafarians, Portuguese-giggling Sikhs, English-speaking Hindu Swedes, Urdu-chattering Nigerian Orthodox Rabbis.
I thought she wasn’t coming, half wanted her not to come; hope is a harder thing to cope with at my age than prostate cancer. At least you’re expecting prostate cancer.
Then she was in front of me, smiling, better, more beautiful by far than I remembered her. I’d forgotten how tall she was, taller than me by nearly a foot. I felt ridiculous.
‘Hiya,’ she said. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late. Shall we find this stall then?’ She linked her arm through mine and steered me through the crowds. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said. ‘I have to warn you about this hat stall … and women there’s something about a hat stall that sends women into erotic spasms. I don’t know what it is. This bloke who runs the stall, he operates it at a loss simply because of the pussy he gets. Here check it.’
We had come to a Soweto of stalls crammed just before the bridge that spanned the old Grand Union Canal. One of those that abutted the street was the hat stall and as Mercy had warned, several women stood writhing beside it as they tried on each hat and looked at themselves in the mirror. One teenage Finn unconsciously rubbed her groin against a corner of the table. When the man who ran the stall reached out and adjusted their hats, tilting them one way or the other, visible shivers ran through the women and they let out low moans of ecstasy. Mercy led me over to the stall. ‘Hiya, Guy,’ she said to the man behind it, then leant across the hats and kissed him on the lips. An audible growling rose from the other women.
To regain the focus one stuck a Cornish fisherman’s cap, done in patent leather with spikes sticking out of it, on her head and querulously whined, ‘Guy, Guy, does this suit me, would it go with a rubber mini-skirt, Guy? And a red leather bustier, would it, Guy, would it?’
But Guy was gazing steadily at Mercy, peripherally conscious of the other woman but deliberately ignoring her. ‘Hi, Mercy,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh you know,’ she replied then she turned to me. ‘Guy, this is Hillary, he’s desperate to find a grey Mau Mau hat, mid-90s I’d say, you got one?’
I shook hands with Guy who said, looking me up and down, ‘It won’t go with that Savile Row suit, homeboy.’
‘It’s for a friend,’ I replied.
‘Right.’
He bent down under the table and emerged some seconds later with a hat identical, as far as I could tell, to the one the Million Pound Poet had been wearing. ‘Here we are, I only bought this a couple of days ago off some bloke in the Midlands. They’re quite a big collectors’ item, you know, early Nineties Mau Mau hats. It’ll cost you sixty quid.’
‘Oh come on, Guy!’ Mercy said. ‘He can’t afford that. Sixty squid for a hat.’
For an instant a look of absolute hatred passed across Guy’s face. ‘I’ve done you enough…’ he began to say, then the fight went out of him. ‘OK, thirty, that’s what I paid for it.’
‘You’re a doll,’ said Mercy and leant across the stall again, crushing several chapeaux as she hugged him and licked his ear. I paid over the thirty pounds, Mercy flattened some more stock saying goodbye to Guy, then she took my arm again and we walked off as the tide of clamouring womanhood closed in around him.
When you have fought bush warfare you develop an instinct for malevolent eyes and I could feel Guy staring after us with baking anger, which in turn made me feel inordinately pleased that I was taking her away from him.
‘You didn’t say you were a poet,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘So I read one of your poems last night in an anthology.’
‘Which one?’
‘“The Cat’s Pyjamas” .’
I said, ‘Are you still a poet if you haven’t written anything for thirty years?’
‘I guess … if you haven’t done anything else. Have you done anything else?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said and couldn’t help a sigh escaping from me, like a lilo being sat on by a fat man.
‘How sad,’ she sounded genuinely upset. ‘So you’ve written nothing for thirty years? And you’re not going to start again or anything? You’ve not started again?’
I felt a strange reluctance to talk about whether I was writing again or not, on that day it seemed a distant and infinitely tedious thing. Apart from anything else her sympathy had given me a tingle in my groin that I wanted more of.
‘If you don’t mind I’d rather not talk about it,’ I said in a sad voice.
‘Sure, no problem, it’s off the agenda.’ She considered for a moment. ‘You want to go and get some lunch?’
‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘Where?’
‘I dunno …’ We were in a backstreet, uncertainty seemed to grip her. ‘If you
don’t want lunch, maybe if you want to get the train home instead …’
It was slipping away, if I didn’t find a place for lunch it would end there. Looking desperately around I suddenly saw a familiar doorway. It was the same basement place Blink had taken me to all those years ago. ‘Here’s a good place,’ I blabbed, ‘they do good food here.’ Before she could speak I steered her through the doorway and down the stairs.
For those in the basement the First World War was over and it had been won by Kenyan Asians.
As soon as I stepped into the dining room the smells of Rahman’s Café in Nairobi forty-seven years ago were all around me. We sat down at a plain pine table, stainless steel water jug and cups already present, a young man brought us plastic-covered menus.
‘What sort of food is this?’ she asked.
‘They’re Asians from Kenya.’
‘Doesn’t that make them Africans then?’
‘Not as far as the Africans were concerned.’
‘Will you order for me? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat meat or fish.’
‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem.’
At Rahman’s the others in my regiment had ordered hideous beef dinners of roast camel and gravy that had come from a tree, boiled puddings composed of various naturally occurring poisons and ‘fried breakfast meats with a egg’, which was a crocodile mother-and-child reunion. I on the other hand had ostentatiously ordered in Swahili: mogo, otherwise known as cassava, served with a tamarind chutney, brinjal curry, karahi karela, tarka dhal and rotis to show my cosmopolitanism. I ordered the same now, again in Swahili and I was twenty-five again.
Mercy said, ‘Can I tell you what I did last night?’
‘Of course.’
Mercy locked the shop up at six and collected her Piaggio Velocoraptor 125cc scooter from the motorbike bay in Great Marlborough Street, then she rode to a house in Hackney, East London, parked over the road and stood watching the doorway of the house, hidden in the entrance of a derelict shop directly opposite. About an hour and a half later a man came out of the house accompanied by a girl of about twenty-five. The man looked a little older than the girl, was good-looking and fit. The couple paused on the step to kiss, the man sliding his hands down the back of the girl’s jeans. They broke apart enough to walk twined up in each other to the man’s gas engineers’ van parked at the pavement. They then drove off.
Mercy waited for fifteen minutes then went across to the house and opened the front door with a key. Once in the hall she let herself into the ground-floor flat, inside she did not turn on a light but instead felt her way along to the living room which was lit by the orange frazzle of a streetlamp in the road outside.
The room was tastefully furnished with chrome and leather furniture, framed movie posters on the walls and racks and racks of vinyl records in bleached wood cabinets. On a table there was a turntable and amplifier, the British-made sort that only have one on/off switch and a simple big volume knob yet cost several thousand pounds to buy. Mercy filled a kettle from a tap in the kitchen then returned to the living room and poured tepid water down the back of the amplifier, she opened a tin of cream of mushroom soup and tipped that over the turntable. In the bedroom a number of Paul Smith suits were hanging in a closet; Mercy decanted the contents of several cans of Thai Style Vegetables into the pockets of these suits then dribbled Diet Coke down their inner linings. After that she let herself out, got on her scooter and rode home.
Round about eleven o’clock she was sitting on her couch flipping through an anthology of twentieth-century poetry when the phone rang.
‘Hello, Kitten,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, ‘how’s it going?’
‘Fucking terrible! Your mad cow of a stepmother’s broken into my place again and vandalised all my fucking stuff!’
‘How do you know it was her?’
‘Who else would it fucking be? Whoever did it had a key, so that pretty much narrows it down.’
‘Does it? How many hundred women out there have your key?’
‘Not that many.
‘Really? What did she do anyway?’
‘Poured soup all over my Nazuku.’
‘Painful.’
‘Don’t take the piss, you know you’re the only one I can talk to, Kitten, about this stuff.’
‘Yeah, sorry … So how’s everything going with the new one, what’s her name, Apricot?’
‘Oh yeah, she’s great. I think she could definitely be your new mum. Dirty little baggage as well, she sucked me off at the traffic lights in my van last night . .
‘Wow …’
‘Yeah, she’s brilliant. We’re going to a leather fetish all-nighter in a minute, up at The Cross, you wanna come?’
‘Naww, I fink I’m staying in tonight.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, see ya, Kitten.’
‘Bye, Dad.’
Then Mercy said to me, ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.
‘Can I come and visit you in the country? Next weekend? I’m sick of this town.’
‘Of course you can.
After that we talked about cats and where she went to school and things like that, then it seemed the natural time to part since there was going to be next weekend.
Outside in the street, Great, well then I’ll see you next weekend.’ She kissed me on the lips and hugged me, then stood back and I walked to the tube station.
I tried to get back to working on my poem when I returned to Lyttleton Strachey but my mind would not fix on it, I could think of little else other than Mercy’s upcoming visit.
I was also waiting for Porlock to phone about his hat but he didn’t and I didn’t have a phone number or an address for him which preyed on my mind as well. What I thought about most was how I would entertain Mercy over the coming weekend. One thing I intended to do was to impress her with a cornucopia of vegetables. I had my own extensive vegetable patch at the top of my field, but I had been neglecting it recently. I needed to get it in good order if it was going to produce a cornucopia of vegetables. Never mind, I had an established asparagus bed so I would be able to cut asparagus for our meals, also I could harvest early lettuce, broccoli and radishes, leeks and spring cabbages, winter cauliflower and winter spinach. Plus turnip tops, don’t forget turnip tops.
My house had come with a quarter-acre paddock across the lane running between the church graveyard and one of Sam’s fields with some of his concentration-camp sheds in it. Sam had made numerous attempts to get his hands on this triangle of land including hiring some bogus army officers who tried to requisition it for a supposed firing range. My vegetable patch was at the far end of this paddock.
On the Wednesday of the week before Mercy came I was in the field planting out late summer cabbages and purple-sprouting broccoli. Next I was planning to remove any rhubarb flowers, which you have to do as soon as they appear, when I saw Bateman coming up the lane. He waved to me and vaulted the gate into the field. This day Bateman was wearing an off-the-shoulder, knee-length Laura Ashley dress, black Lewis Leathers motorbike jacket and army boots with knee-length black socks. ‘Hey, Professor!’ he shouted to me. I put my trowel down, knowing I had finished gardening for some time. Bateman had come for a talk.
He liked talking to me, more or less always about the same thing. People I had killed. I had pointed out on more than one occasion that the people I had killed had been black people such as himself but he didn’t care, he said he was Antiguan not African so it didn’t matter.
‘Hello, Bateman,’ I said. He sprawled down on the grass next to me, his skirt riding up over his thumping muscled black thighs.
‘Professor … I just thinkin’ I’d come over an’ give you a chance to do some of your war reminiscin’ .
I said, ‘I don’t particularly want to do any reminiscing about my war. I never have.’
‘Course you do, all you old ones love the war reminis
cin’. Goin’ on about Churchill an’ Hitler an’ Elvis an’ all that.’
‘Tell the truth, you like hearing about it.’
‘No way, man, I’m being social servicin’ is all …’ he tried a pause but couldn’t hold it, his impatience getting in the way, ‘… so get on with it.’
‘Oh alright.’ I gave in as I always did. ‘What you have to remember about Kenya,’ I said, ‘was that while the rest of the British Empire was settled by those from all classes, more of those in Kenya came from the upper classes. They were famous before the war for the life they led.’
Eagerly he asked, ‘What sort of life?’
‘Drink, fast cars, hunting, extra-marital affairs, sexual perversion.
‘Brilliant … and nice weather too, innit?’
‘Yes and nice weather too. I don’t know why but somehow I always had the feeling the way the settlers carried on led to the Mau Mau uprising, after all it didn’t happen like that anywhere else in Africa, sort of brought it on themselves, a price to pay for their decadence …’
‘Why, they was just enjoyin’ theirselves.’
‘Maybe. The whole thing’s almost forgotten about now … odd, really, when you think about it. The Mau Mau starts out as a bloody insurrection and ends up as a hat.’
‘A hat, what about a hat?’
‘Nothing, sorry … You should have seen the settlers’ houses, ridiculous Cheshire wooden villas they were, set in acres of flame trees. In 1953 the Africans rose up. They called themselves the Mau Mau. I remember in my first week there, we were called to a farm. A family named Barlow … the son was in the yard … they’d hacked him with pangas …’
‘That’s like a machete, right?’
‘Right, yes, like a machete. He glistened, the son … like that sauce they put on spare ribs at the Chinese takeaway … purple and deep red … His parents were in the house … all over the house. And the thing was really that they’d got the wrong people, if that was their concern. Mrs Barlow was pregnant, ran a clinic for the Kikkuyu women and children, Mr Barlow was a model employer, had no intention of evicting the small native farmers which had started the whole thing … the son spoke Kikkuyu, the family had built lovely cottages for their workers. On the next farm over was a complete bastard called Magruder, he’d taken many a black woman and raped them, drove them all off his land, got very rich. They never touched him. He’s still there now. I think he’s in the government.’