Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

  ‘Yes what?’ I answered.

  ‘You have business here?’ he said to me.

  ‘I have,’ I told him.

  ‘Business?’ the poverty-stricken pen-pusher repeated.

  ‘Business,’ I said.

  He still had his hands upon the door. ‘We’re closing now,’ he told me.

  ‘If my eyes don’t fail me,’ I replied, ‘the clock above your desk says 2.56 p.m., so perhaps you’ll be kind enough to get back behind it there and serve me.’

  He said no more, and made his way round inside the counter, then raised his brows at me across it, and I handed over Mr Pondoroso’s cheque.

  ‘Are you,’ he said, after examining it as if it was the sort of thing a bank had never seen before, ‘the payee?’

  ‘The which?’

  ‘Is,’ he said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to a deaf Chinese lunatic, ‘this-your-name-written-on-the-cheque?’

  ‘Jawohl, mein Kapitan,’ I said, ‘it is.’

  Now he looked diabolically crafty.

  ‘And how,’ he enquired, ‘do I know this name is yours?’

  I said, ‘How do you know it isn’t?’

  He bit his lip, as the paperbacks say, and asked me, ‘Have you any proof of your identity?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Have you of yours?’

  He shut his eyes, reopened them and said, ‘What proof?’

  ‘In the arse pocket of my jeans here,’ I said to him, slapping my hindquarters briskly, ‘I carry a perspex folder, with within it my driving licence, which is a clean one I’m surprised to say, my Blood Donor’s Certificate, showing I’ve given two pints of gore so far this year, and tatty membership cards of more speakeasies and jazz clubs than I remember. You may look at them if you really want to, or you could get Mr Pondoroso on the blower and ask him to describe me, or, better still, you could stop playing games and give me the ten pounds your client has instructed you to pay me that is, unless your till is short of loot.’

  To which he answered, ‘You have not yet endorsed the document on the back, please.’

  I scribbled out my name. He twiddled the cheque, began writing on it and said, without looking up, ‘I take it you’re a minor?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if it’s anything to do with anything, I am.’ He still said nothing, and he still didn’t hand me over my loot. ‘But now I’m a big boy,’ I continued, ‘I don’t wet my bed any longer, and know how to hit back if I’m attacked.’

  He gave me the notes as if they were two deformed specimens the bank happened to have it was ashamed of, then nipped round his counter and saw me out of the door, and locked it swiftly on my heels. I must admit this incident made me overheated, it was all so unnecessary and so old-fashioned, treating a teenager like a kid, and I headed away from Victoria towards my home in quite a rage.

  I must explain the only darkroom I possess of my own, without which, of course, I’d have to get my printing done commercially, is at my old folks’ residence in Belgravia South, as they call it, namely, Pimlico. As I expect you’ll have guessed, I don’t like going there, and haven’t lived in the place (except when they’re off on their summer seaside orgy) in years. But they still keep what they call ‘my room’ there, out in the annexe at the back, which used to be the conservatory, full of potted flowers.

  The family, if you can call it that, consists of three besides myself, plus numerous additions. The three are my poor old Dad, who isn’t really all that old, only forty-eight, but who was wrecked and ruined by the 1930s, so he never fails to tell me, and then my Mum, who’s much older than she lets on or, I will say this for her, looks certainly three or four years older than my Dad, and finally my half-brother Vern, who Mum had by a mystery man seven years before she tied up with my poppa, and who’s the number-one weirdie, layabout and monster of the Westminster city area. As for the numerous additions, these are Mum’s lodgers, because she keeps a boarding house, and some of them, as you’d expect if you knew Ma, are lodged in very firmly, though there’s nothing my Dad can do about it, apparently, as his spirits are squashed by a combination of my Mum and the 1930s, and that’s one of the several reasons for which I left the dear old ancestral home.

  Mum won’t let me have a key and, as a matter of fact, is even tough about giving one to her paid-up boarders, as she likes to see them come and go, even late at night, so though as a matter of fact I’ve had a key made of my own, in case of accidents, I go through the form of ringing the front doorbell, just out of politeness, and also to show her I regard myself strictly as a visitor and don’t live there. As usual, although she gets mad if you go down the area steps and knock on the basement door, where she almost always is, Mum came out from there into the area and looked up to see who it was, before she’d come up the stairs inside and open the front door for me which she might have done, if she’d been civilised, in the first place.

  There she stood, her face lighting up at the sight of a pair of slacks, even her own son’s, with that sloppy sexy expression that always drove me mad, because, after all, tucked away behind all those mounds of highly desirable flesh, my Mum has got real brains. But she’s only used them to make herself more appealing, like pepper and salt and garlic on an overdone pork chop.

  ‘Hello, Blitz Baby,’ she said.

  Which is what she calls me, because she had me in one, in a tube shelter with an air raid warden acting as midwife, as she never tires of telling me or, worse still, other people in my presence.

  ‘Hullo, Ma,’ I said to her.

  She still stood there, pink hands with detergent suds on them on her Toulouse-Lautrec hips, giving me that come-hither look she gave her lodgers, I suppose.

  ‘Are you going to open up?’ I asked her, ‘or should I climb in through your front parlour window?’

  ‘I’ll send you down your father,’ she answered me. ‘I expect he’ll be able to let you in.’

  This is the trick my Mum has, to speak to me of Dad as if he’s only my relation, only mine, that she never had anything whatever to do with (apart, of course, from having had sex with him and even marrying the poor old man). I suppose this is because, number one, Dad’s what’s known as a failure, though I don’t regard him as one exactly, as anyone could have seen he’d never have succeeded at anything anyway, and number two, to show that her first husband, whoever he was, the one who goosed her into producing that Category A morbid, my elder half-brother Vernon, was the real man in her life, not my own poor old ancestor. Well, that’s her little bit of feminine psychology: you certainly learn a lot about women from your Mum.

  I was kept there waiting a considerable time, so that if it wasn’t for the need of my darkroom they’d have never seen me, when Dad appeared with that dead-duck look not merely on his face, but hanging on his whole poor old scruffy body, which makes me demented, because really he’s got a lot of character, and though he’s no mind to speak of, he’s read a lot like I do – I mean, tried to make the best of what he’s got in a way my Mum hasn’t tried to do at all, or even thought of trying. As usual, he opened the door without a word except ‘Hullo,’ and started off up the stairs again towards his room in the attic portion of the building, which is just an act because he knows, of course, I’ll follow him up there for a little chatter, if only for politeness’ sake, and to show him I’m his son.

  But today I didn’t, partly because I was suddenly tired of his performance, and partly because I’d so much work to do immediately inside my darkroom. So out I went and, would you believe it, found that horrible old weirdie Vernon had built himself a cuckoo’s nest there, which was something new.

  ‘Hullo, Jules,’ I said to him. ‘And how’s my favourite yobbo?’

  ‘Don’t call me Jules,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you.’

  Which he has – perhaps 200,000 times or so, ever since I invented the name for him, on account of Vernon = Verne = Jules of Round the World in Eighty Days.

  ‘And what are you doing in my darkroom, Julie?’ I aske
d this oafo brother of mine.

  He’d got up off the camp bed in the corner – all blankets and no sheets, just like my Vernon – and came over and did an act he’s done with monotonous regularity ever since I can remember, namely, to stand up over me, close to me, breathing heavily and smelling of putrid perspiration.

  ‘What, again?’ I said to him. ‘Not another corny King Kong performance!’

  His fist whisked past my snout in playful panto.

  ‘Do grow up, Vernon,’ I said to him, very patiently. ‘You’re a big boy now, more than a quarter of a century old.’

  What would happen next would be either that he’d push me around in which case, of course, it would be just a massacre, except that he knew I’d get in at least one blow that would really cripple him, and perhaps even harm him for life – or else he’d suddenly feel the whole thing was beneath his dignity, and want to talk to me, talk to anyone, in fact, whatever, since the poor old ape was such an H-Certificate product he was really very lonely.

  So he plucked at my short-arse Italian jacket with his great big cucumber fingers and said, ‘What you wear this thing for?’

  ‘Excuse me, Vernon,’ I said, edging past him to unload my camera on my table. ‘I wear it,’ I said, taking the jacket off and hanging it up, ‘to keep warm in winter, and, in summer, to captivate the chicks by swinging my tail around.’

  ‘Hunh!’ he said, his mind racing fast, but nothing coming out except this noise like a polar bear with wind. He looked me up and down while his thoughts came into focus. ‘Those clothes you wear,’ he said at last, ‘disgust me.’

  And I hope they did! I had on precisely my full teenage drag that would enrage him – the grey pointed alligator casuals, the pink neon pair of ankle crêpe nylon-stretch, my Cambridge blue glove-fit jeans, a vertical-striped happy shirt revealing my lucky neck-charm on its chain, and the Roman-cut short-arse jacket just referred to … not to mention my wrist identity jewel, and my Spartan warrior hairdo, which everyone thinks costs me 17/6d in Gerrard Street, Soho, but which I, as a matter of fact, do myself with a pair of nail scissors and a three-sided mirror that Suzette’s got, when I visit her flatlet up in Bayswater, W2.

  ‘And you, I suppose,’ I said, deciding that attack was the best method of defence though oh! so wearisome, ‘you imagine you look alluring in that horrible men’s wear suiting that you’ve bought in a marked-down summer sale at the local casbah.’

  ‘It’s manly,’ he said, ‘and it’s respectable.’

  I gazed at the floppy dung-coloured garments he had on. ‘Ha!’ was about all I said.

  ‘What’s more,’ he went on, ‘I’ve not wasted money on it. It’s my demobilisation suit.’

  My heaven, yes, it looked it – yes!

  ‘When you’ve done your military service,’ the poor old yokel said, his boot face breaking into a crafty grin, ‘you’ll be given one too, you’ll find. And a decent haircut just for once.’

  I gazed at the goon. ‘Vernon,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you. Somehow you missed the teenage rave, and you never seem to have had a youth. To try to tell you the simplest facts of life is just a waste of valuable breath, however, do try to dig this, if your microbe minibrain is capable. There’s no honour and glory in doing military service, once it’s compulsory. If it was voluntary, yes, perhaps, but not if you’re just sent.’

  ‘The war,’ said Vern, ‘was Britain’s finest hour.’

  ‘What war? You mean Cyprus, boy? Or Suez? Or Korea?’

  ‘No, stupid. I mean the real war, you don’t remember.’

  ‘Well, Vernon,’ I said, ‘please believe me, I’m glad I don’t. All of you oldies certainly seem to try to keep it well in mind, because every time I open a newspaper, or pick up a paperback, or go to the Odeon, I hear nothing but war, war, war. You pensioners certainly seem to love that old, old struggle.’

  ‘You’re just ignorant,’ said Vern.

  ‘Well, if I am, Vern, that’s quite okay by me. Because I tell you: not being a mug, exactly, I’ve no intention of playing soldiers for the simple reasons, first of all, that big armies obviously are no longer necessary, what with the atomic, and secondly, no one is going to tell me to do anything I don’t want to, no, or try to blackmail me with that crazy old mixture of threats and congratulations that a pronk like you falls for because you’re a born form-filler, taxpayer and cannon fodder … well, boy, just take a look in the mirror at yourself.’

  That left him silent for a while. ‘Come on, now,’ I said. ‘Be a good half-brother, and let me get on with my work. Why have you moved in this room, anyway?’

  ‘You’re wrong!’ he cried. ‘You’ll have to do it!’

  ‘That subject’s exhausted. We’ve been into it thoroughly. Do forget it.’

  ‘What we done, you gotta do.’

  ‘Vernon,’ I said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you really don’t speak very good English.’

  ‘You’ll see!’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see.’

  I was trying, as you’ll have realised, to drive him out of the room, but the boy is sensitive as the end of a truck, and just flopped back on his bed again, worn out by the mental effort of our conversation. So I put him out of my mind and worked on at my snaps in silence, till Dad knocked on the door with two cups of char; and standing there in the dark, with only the red light burning, we both ignored that moron, not bothering to wonder if he was awake and eavesdropping, or dreaming of winning six Victoria Crosses.

  Dad asked me for the news.

  Now, this always embarrasses me, because whatever news I tell Dad, he always comes back again to his two theme songs of, number one, what a much better time I have than he had in the 1930s, and, number two, why don’t I come back ‘home’ again – which is what Dad really seems to believe this high-grade brothel that he lives in means to me.

  ‘You’ve found that he’s moved in,’ said Dad, pointing in the direction of the bed. ‘I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. The room’s still yours, though, I’ve always insisted on that all the way along.’

  I imagined poor Dad insisting to my Mum.

  ‘What’s she put him here for, anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been quarrelling with the lodgers,’ Dad said. ‘There’s one of them in particular, doesn’t get on with him at all.’

  I didn’t like to ask him which or why. So, ‘And how’s the book going?’ I asked my poor old ancestor. Which is a reference to a History of Pimlico Dad’s said to be composing, but nobody’s ever seen it, though it gives him the excuse for getting out of the house, and chatting to people, and visiting public libraries, and reading books.

  ‘I’ve reached Chapter Twenty-Three,’ he said.

  ‘When does that take us up to?’ I asked him, already guessing the answer.

  ‘The beginning of the 1930s,’ he replied.

  I gulped a bit of tea. ‘I bet, Dad,’ I said, ‘you give those poor old 1930s of yours a bit of a bashing.’

  I could feel Dad quivering with indignation. ‘I certainly do, son!’ he shouted in a whisper. ‘You’ve simply no idea what that pre-war period was like. Poverty, unemployment, fascism and disaster and, worst of all, no chance, no opportunity, no sunlight at the end of the corridor, just a lot of hard, frightened, rich old men sitting on top of a pile of dustbin lids to keep the muck from spilling over!’

  I didn’t quite get all that, but concentrated.

  ‘It was a terrible time for the young,’ he went on, grabbing me. ‘Nobody would listen to you if you were less than thirty, nobody gave you money whatever you’d do for it, nobody let you live like you kids can do today. Why, I couldn’t even marry till the 1940s came and the war gave me some sort of a security … Just think of the terrible loss, though! If I’d married ten years earlier, when I was young, you and I would have only had twenty years between us instead of thirty, and me already an old man.’

  I thought of pointing out to Dad that if he’d married so much earlier it might have been
another woman than my Mum, in which case I wouldn’t have existed, or not, at any rate, in my present particular form – but let it go. ‘Hard cheese,’ I said to him instead, hoping he’d got the subject out of his system for this visit. But no, he was off again.

  ‘Just look around you, when you next go out!’ he cried. ‘Just look at any of the 1930s buildings! What they put up today may be ultramodern, but at any rate it’s full of light and life and air. But those 1930s buildings are all shut in and negative, with landlord and broker’s man written all over them.’

  ‘Just a minute, Dad,’ I said, ‘while I hang up this little lot of negatives.’

  ‘Believe me, son, in the 1930s they hated life, they really did. It’s better now, even with the bomb.’

  I washed my hands under the hot tap that always runs cold as usual. ‘You’re topping it up a bit there, Dad, aren’t you?’ I said.

  Dad dropped his voice even lower. ‘And then, there’s another thing,’ he said, ‘—the venereal.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, though I was really quite a bit embarrassed, because no one likes much discussing that sort of topic with a Dad like mine.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘—the venereal. It was a scourge – a blight hanging over all young men. It cast a great shadow over love, and made it hateful.’

  ‘It did?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have doctors, then?’

  ‘Doctors!’ he cried. ‘In those days, the worst types were practically incurable, or only after years and years of anxiety and doubt …’

  I stopped my work. ‘No kidding?’ I said. ‘It was like that, then? Well, that’s a thought!’

  ‘Yes. No modern drugs and quick relief, like now …’

  I was quite struck by that, but thought I’d better change the subject all the same.

  ‘Then why aren’t you cheerier, Dad?’ I said to him. ‘If you like the fifties better, as you say you do, why don’t you enjoy yourself a bit?’

  My poor old parent gulped. ‘It’s because I’m too old now, son,’ he said. ‘I should have had my youth in the 1950s, like you have, and not my middle-age.’