Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

  So far, so bad, because nobody was interested in Zesty-Boy’s creative efforts – particularly the way he marketed them – until one of the teenage yodellers who’d hit the big time remembered Zesty, and sold the whole idea of him (and of his songs) to his Personal Manager, and his A. & R. man, and his Publicity Consultant, and his Agency Booker, and I don’t know who else, and behold! Zesty-Boy threw away his own guitar and saved his voice for gargling and normal speech, and started writing for the top pop canaries, and made piles – I mean literally piles – of coin from his sheet, and disc, and radio, and telly, and even filmic royalties. It was a real rags-to-riches fable: one moment Z.-B. Sift was picking up pennies among the dog-ends and spittle with a grateful grimace, the next he was installed in this same Knightsbridge area with a female secretary and a City accountant added to his list of adult staff.

  ‘Those Aussies!’ he said, ‘have moved in for the slaughter. Did you know there’s 60,000 of them in the country? And ever seen any of them on a building site?’

  I didn’t reply (except for a wise nod), because the matter of the five pounds was now uppermost in my mind, and about borrowing and lending, of which of both I have a wide experience, I could tell you several golden rules. The first is, come straight up smartly to the point: to lead up tactfully to the kill is fatal, because the candidate sniffs your sinister intention and has time to put up barricades. So I said, ‘I want a fiver, Zesty.’

  Zesty-Boy, I was glad to see, observed, on his side, the first golden rule of lending, which is to say yes or no immediately – if you don’t, they’ll hate you if you refuse, and never be grateful if you agree. He took out the note, said, ‘Any time,’ and changed the subject. As a matter of fact, in this case we both knew it was actually a gift, because in his Cinderella days I’ve often enough handed Zesty-Boy the odd cigarette-machine money, and as a shilling then was worth what a pound is to him now, this really was only a repayment. And I could add – since we’re on this topic – that if you’re in a position, ever, to be a lender, the two kinds of people you should most watch out for are not, as you might expect, the dear old boyhood pals of Paradise Alley days, but any newcomer (because borrowers are attracted to fresh faces), or anyone you’ve just done a favour to (because borrowers think there where the corn grows, there’s sugarcane as well).

  ‘Eh?’ I said to Zesty-B. because, with these meditations, I hadn’t been following attentively the trend his conversation had been taking.

  ‘I said Dido’s out for blood this evening. She’s got the needle into Vendice, because he’s not buying any more space in her fish-and-chip organ, and she’s losing her cut on all the full-page spreads.’

  ‘Bad,’ I said, glancing over at the number he referred to, who was the one I’d met earlier outside the door, and who was under the arcade that ringed the patio, striplit with lamps all hidden, so that you always got only a reflection, and couldn’t read a book there, supposing that you’d wanted to.

  ‘What does he do, this Vendice?’ I asked Zesty-Boy. ‘And is that his baptismal name?’

  Zesty said yes, it was, and that Vendice Partners’ job was well up somewhere in the scaffolding of one of those advertising agencies that have taken over Mayfair, making it into a rather expensive slum.

  ‘And why has Partners’ pimpery taken their custom away from Dido’s toilet-paper daily?’ I asked Zesty-Boy.

  ‘It may be that Dido’s slipping, or the paper’s slipping, or just that everything these days is falling in the fat laps of the jingle kings.’

  ‘I wonder why Dido doesn’t do a quick change and crash-land in the telly casbah?’

  ‘Well – could she? I mean, can a journalist really do anything else?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  The time had now come for me to flatter the young Mozart in him a little. ‘I heard one of your arias on the steam, last evening,’ I told him. ‘Separate Separates’, if I remember. Very nice.’

  ‘Which of the boy slaves was it sung it? Strides Vandal? Limply Leslie? Rape Hunger?’

  ‘No, no … Soft-Sox Granite, I think it was …’

  ‘Oh, that one. A Dagenham kiddy. He’s very new.’

  ‘He sounded so. But I loved the lyric, and enjoyed the lilt.’

  Zesty-Boy shot a pair of Peckham-trained eyes at me. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘I tell you, man. I don’t flatter.’

  ‘Compliment accepted.’ I could see the cat was pleased. ‘You heard they gave me my first Golden?’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Boy, I was delighted. For ‘When I’m Dead, I’m Gone’, wasn’t it? A million platters, man – just fancy that!’ How could the Sift kid fail to be delighted? ‘How long will it all last, do you suppose?’ I said to him.

  ‘Companion, who knows? I gave it only a year, two years ago. And still they come – performers and, what’s more, cash customers.’

  ‘Still only boys for singers? No signs of any breasted thrushes?’

  ‘We’ve tried one or two of them, but the kids just don’t want to know. No, for the minors, it’s still males.’

  ‘And all those boys from Dagenham and Hoxton and wherever. You have to teach them how to sing American?’

  ‘Oh no, they seem to pick it up – get the notes well up there in their noses when they sing … Though when they speak, even in personal appearances, it’s back to Dagenham again.’

  ‘Weird spiel, isn’t it.’

  ‘Weird! Child, I’m telling you – it’s eerie!’

  You know the way that, when things start to go amiss at a function, everyone notices it long before they actually stop doing whatever it was they’re doing – drinking, dancing, talking and etcetera – and this was what now occurred, because a battle was developing between our hostess and the Partners number. But soon, just as no one can resist listening to a bit of hot chat over the blower, we all turned ourselves into spectators at the gladiatorial show.

  They started off with the mutes on, playing that English one-up game they teach you at Oxford, or is it Cambridge, anyway, one of those camp holiday camps, with Dido saying, at the point I managed to tune in, ‘I didn’t say barsted, I said bastard.’

  ‘It’s not your pronunciation. Dido, that I’m questioning,’ the copywriting cat was saying, ‘but your definition.’

  ‘Very well, I withdraw it,’ Dido said, ‘and say you’re just a harlot.’

  ‘Really, my dear, I don’t think I’m a woman. Surely, I’ve given you proof positive of that …’

  ‘Only just, Vendice, only just,’ she said.

  And so and so forth, guest and hostess, both very cool and, what was really rather horrible, without any emotion in it I could see – and the friends looking on and listening with that kind of grin the mob wear at a prize fight in the municipal baths. I must be a prude at heart, because this thing really shocks me – not bawling-outs and even fights, of course, but this methodical, public blood-letting. And I must be a snob, because I really do think that when an educated English voice is turning bitchy, it’s a quite specially unpleasant sound, besides being fucking silly, and an utter drag. So I was much relieved, and I think one or two others were, when into the middle of all this stepped wedding-bells Henley with my Suze.

  As it happened, I was adjacent to the stereo, so I slipped on some Basie, turned on the juice well up, and, with a low bow to Henley, grabbed the girl. Now if there’s one thing among many Suze has learnt from her Spade connections, it’s how to dance like an angel, and enjoy it, and I myself, though perhaps a bit unpolished, have studied on hard floors around the clubs and palais and in all-night private sessions, and besides which, we know all each others’ routines backwards – and sideways and front as well – so before long, there we were, weaving together like a pair of springs connected by invisible elastic wires, until we reached that most glorious moment of all in dancing, that doesn’t come often, and usually, admittedly, only when you’re whipping it up a bit to show the multitude – that is, the dance starts to do it for
you, you don’t bloody well know what you’re up to any longer, except that you can’t put a limb wrong anywhere, and your whole damn brain and sex and personality have actually become that dance, are it – it’s heavenly!

  When just a second we were in an electric clinch, I said, ‘Where you dine? He take you somewhere nice?’ And she said, ‘Oh, him!’ Boy! Can you believe it? She said it just like that! So when we were close again a second, and the Count playing wonderfully in our ears, and the whole Lament lot standing round us thirty miles or so away, I cried out to her, ‘Is he you? Is he really you?’ And Suzette said, ‘No, you are! But I’m going to marry him!’ And at that moment the music stopped, because I’d jabbed the sapphire down too near the middle in the earlier excitement of the moment.

  So I bid everyone good-night, and do sleep well, and thanks for having me, and went out of the flat into the London dawn. It was dawn, as a matter of fact, already: or rather, to be exact, it was that moment when the day and night are fighting it out together, but you’ve no doubt whatever who will triumph. A cab was passing by, and slowed down politely for the wayfarer, but I didn’t want to break into Zesty-Boy’s fiver at the moment, and also wanted to remember what Suze said about 10,000 times, so I set off to foot it back across the city to my home up the north in Napoli.

  IN JULY

  Picture me, up to the calves in mud at low tide beside the river, trying to pose the Hoplite and the ex-Deb up on a stranded barge. ‘Don’t fuss us,’ the Hoplite said; and, ‘Do hurry,’ said the ex-Deb-of-Last-Year.

  This was the spiel. Events of the last month had convinced me that the only way I could ever hope to make some swift dinero was by cracking into the top-flight photographic racket – i.e. produce some prints that would be so sensational that I’d make the big time in the papers and magazines, and even (this was my secret dream) succeed in holding a fabulous exhibition somewhere to which all my various contacts would bring their loaded friends. When you come to ponder on it, like I did for days, you’ll see it’s not so wild a notion as it might appear. After all, kids do make big money these days, as I’ve explained, and as for photography, well, it seems very fashionable just now to treat photographers like film stars, the reason being, I expect, that the culture-vultures get all the art kick they want out of snapshots, although actually they’re damn easy to understand – and, need I say, so far as that goes, to manufacture.

  But, as in everything here below, I had to find my gimmick, my approach, my slant, my angle. And after days of brooding on the problem, I hit on a plan that, so far as I can see, can’t miss. It simply is, to weave a story round the two contemporary characters that everyone is interested in – i.e. the teenagers and the debs. You dig? The teenager, of humble origin – Prince Charming in reverse – encounters the Poor-Little-Rich-Girl debutante. Daddy and Pop both disapprove (as well as Mum and Mummy), so Teenage Tom and Diana Debutante have to meet clandestinely in selected spots about the capital (which I would choose for their crazy picturesqueness), and the whole collection, when completed, would comprise a stark, revealing portrait of the contemporary scene.

  My chief difficulty was casting the two star parts, because although I know stacks of teenagers and a deb or two, I wanted persons I could rely on to keep the secret, and who would give me a lot of valuable time without immediate remuneration, and who, most of all, would look sensational when recorded for posterity by my Rolleiflex. The ex-Deb was the obvious selection for the female rôle, since her looks, though, to my taste, completely meaningless, are simply gorgeous – I mean, she’s so damn glorious she isn’t real – but the big question was, of course, would she accept? Well, thanks to Dean Swift, she did. Because the ex-Deb, though you couldn’t precisely describe her as a junkie, climbs on the needle when being beautiful is just too much for her, and the Dean, when I introduced them, was able to help her in the matter of supplies. If you’re going to tell me hooking her this way is unethical, I’m perfectly willing to agree to that, but please understand my situation in regard to Suze is urgent and rather desperate, as the performance at the registry totalizator can’t be long delayed, although I haven’t succeeded yet in discovering exactly when it is to be.

  Now as for the boy, the obvious choice was Wiz – or, in fact, anyone at all within the age bracket other than The Fabulous Hoplite. But Wiz isn’t my best friend, unfortunately, at the moment, so it was the Hop I picked. The reason is that, though Hoplite doesn’t consider himself, correctly, to be an authentic teenager at all, or, for that matter, exactly a Prince Charming, he really is extremely handsome and delicious and photogenic, and the boy always has a load of spare time lying heavy on his hands. The deal here was rather dodgy, because I had to reject on Hoplite’s part what the courts call a certain suggestion, and fixed it with him on the promise of a deluxe album of himself in classic poses, which he could offer as a birthday gift to his Americano.

  If you’ve ever tried to assemble two colourful characters like the Fabulous and the ex-Deb in the same place, on several occasions, for a certain length of time, you’ll realise what I’ve been up against these last weeks. Particularly as, to get the London fairy-story atmosphere I’m aiming for, I’ve had to take them in a tanker down in Surrey docks, and in the reptile house at the zoological, and in both an ambulance and a hearse (that wasn’t as difficult as it might seem), and also, actually inside the stables where our national toy soldiers groom their animals – which was a Day-to-Remember I believe I shall never forget.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ I shouted from the foreshore, because the ex-Deb and the Hoplite had actually turned their backs on me.

  ‘No – what?’ cried my heroine, tossing her locks about, and turning in a practised pose that pointed all her salient features.

  ‘You do fuss so,’ the Hoplite said again, standing up to adjust his slacks, and looking like an are-you-weedy? be-like-me, advertisement.

  I waded forward, and appealed to their better natures. ‘Listen, amateurs!’ I cried. ‘It’s your fronts that I’m paying for – the parts where you show some expression.’

  ‘Paying us, infant!’ said the female lead.

  ‘If it’s expression you want …’ the Hoplite added. ‘Besides, you’ve cut short a delightful conversation.’

  I knew what that was. The Hop never tired of hearing of transactions in the debutante market, and chatted his leading lady endlessly on this subject, especially when I asked him for a heroic or a grief-ridden expression.

  ‘Just one more try,’ I pleaded, ‘and do please recollect the script. The current situation is that Lord Myre is going to horsewhip his daughter’s young heart-throb, and she’s breaking the news to him that daddy’s on the way down with his posse.’

  ‘Delicious,’ the Hoplite said.

  ‘It’s daddy who gets horsewhipped these days,’ said the ex-Deb-of-Last-Year.

  Picture, to recap, the scene. There, on the wharf, stood the ex-Deb’s bubble-car and M. Pondoroso’s Vespa (because yes, Mickey P. really had delivered the promised goods), and a band of onlookers with complimentary tickets, and up on the bridge above us, the City citizens scurrying to and fro, the men looking like dutiful school kids with their briefcases and brollies, the women as if they were hurrying to work in order to hurry home again, and out in the stream, the craft like Piccadilly circus-on-the-water, and there in the quagmire me, and this temperamental Old Vic duo. The fact is, it was rather difficult to concentrate, because the whole panorama was so splendid, with the sun hitting glass triangles off the water, and the summer with the season really in its grip, making the thought of those short, dark, cold days long ago seem just a nightmare.

  So we decided to break off for déjeuner.

  This we partook in a Thames-side caff up in a lane that, though I know the river frontage intricacies like the veins on my own two hands, I’d never discovered – but then, after all, who does know London? We found the caff by following some river toilers in there, and when we entered there was a mild sensation (whistles, stares,
and dirty remarks made sideways), because, of course, the Hop and Deb are both exotic spectacles in any setting, and the more so, obviously, here. But both were more than equal to the situation, neither being the least put out by blinkless stares, and neither being, in spite of all their camp and blah, the least bit snobbish – socially, I mean, at any rate – which is one reason why I like them.

  So the ex-Deb, between whiles of her salt beef, swedes and dumplings, chatted anyone who chatted her, and even did a tango with a hefty belted character when someone put some silver in the juke. And Fabulous, surrounded by gigantic, sweaty manual workers, did a great act of borrowing salt and pepper and miscellaneous sauces from lots of tables, giving as good as he got to the resident wittery, till some sour, quite exceptional, customer asked him, how was trade?

  There was a slight hush at this, and Fabulous asked the customer just why he wanted to know.

  ‘I thought you might fancy me,’ this troublemaker said, looking round for the applause which, actually, he didn’t get.

  ‘You?’ said the Hoplite, gazing at the monster.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ the cat rejoined.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Hop, in tones loud for all to hear. ‘I don’t really think so, no, I don’t really think that you’re exactly me. But if you bring your wife along, or your grandmother, or your sister, I dare say you’ll find they’ll prefer even me to anything they’ve had from you.’