Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

  So after quite another while, she got herself straightened out, and sat back on the grass, and looked at me with her face red as a tomato, as if I was suddenly going to disappear (which you can bet I wasn’t), and I said to her, because I just couldn’t damn well resist it – you must remember what I’d been through myself, and that I loved this girl Suze with all my heart – I said, ‘And so it didn’t turn out all right, then.’

  She just said, ‘No,’ and then kept on saying, ‘No.’

  Now, you must realise, all this time, I had Dad’s health, too, in my mind, and the anxiety to get him back quite safe, though God knows how I wanted to remain there, so I got a bit brisk and businesslike, which I admit must have seemed very unfeeling to her, and said, ‘Well, hon, why don’t you skip?’

  ‘I can’t, darl,’ she said.

  ‘He can’t stop you, Suze!’

  ‘It’s not that, I just can’t!’

  They won’t give you a reason, will they! They won’t ever give you a plain reason! ‘Suzie, why not?’ I cried.

  Here we had another session of those dreadful sobs, which, honestly, were ghastly. ‘Do stop that, Suzette!’ I cried, banging the girl quite hard. Because honest, I couldn’t take very much more of them.

  ‘Because it’s spoilt!’ she cried, all mixed up with hair and bits of clothes, so as I could hardly dig what she was saying. ‘I’ve spoilt what we used to be – it’s gone!’

  ‘Bollocks!’ I cried indignantly. She’d got me in a grip like an all-in wrestler. ‘It was a mess,’ she kept saying. It was just a mess.’

  I saw this was the moment for swift action. So I yanked her away from me so as I could see her (which most of the time had been quite impossible, because all I could see of her was her spine), and I said I had Dad there, and a car, and we’d both run her up to London – but though I said it at least half a dozen times or more, it just didn’t register with Suze. She only kept on saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  So I got up and stood. ‘Look, Suze,’ I cried. ‘I’m your boy – see? Your one and only. And I live up in London, and you know exactly where. And I’m waiting for you there, this evening, tomorrow, and every day until the day I die!’ I grabbed both her shoulders, and joggled her. ‘Have you heard what I said?’ I shouted.

  She said, yes.

  ‘And have you understood me?’

  Yes, she said, she had.

  ‘Then I’m waiting!’ I cried, and bent over and gave her a really fierce, everlasting kiss, then said, ‘See you very soon,’ and waved, and rushed off out of that garden like Dr Roger Bannister.

  There in the road, I had to stop, because suddenly I felt faint, just like Dad, and had to sit down on the ground, which was the only thing I could find to sit on. Then I got up, and grabbed the first cat I saw, and asked him to lead me to the car-hire number – which he did, very nicely – and the cat was fortunately in (I mean the car-hire cat), and he came round to the boat-building place, and we collected Dad, and said goodbye and thanks very much indeed to the old geezer and his wife, and made it off for London, which the driver said would cost us exactly eight-pounds-ten.

  Well, on the way home, Dad perked up quite a bit: in fact, he even started singing some George Formby numbers, and older songs he’d heard from his own Dad, of Albert Chevalier and historic old veterans like that, and apparently the Cookham driver knew quite a few of them too, and they had several rousing choruses, and argued as to which old music-hall artiste first sang what. But me, need I say, I didn’t feel a bit like that, and was car-sick as well, which I’ve always been prone to if somebody else is driving, and in fact I wanted to tell Dad about my troubles, but you can see how I couldn’t – and anyway, even at the best of times you can’t tell even your father and mother anything that really matters to you.

  Soon we were in the outskirts, and though I’d enjoyed the country, I was so glad to be back there in the town again – it was like coming home. And before very long we were in Pimlico, and when we pulled up, Dad had to go in and get the money, as even between us we hadn’t got enough, and that brought Mum and Vern out on the pavement, and out of his second-floor window, the beefo Malt.

  Nobody seemed to dig how dangerous it had been to Dad: all we got was exclamations about why had I taken him away without telling anybody, and where the hell had we both been to, and why did a taxi cost us eight-pounds-ten – even Vern chipping in with helpful observations – till I was so embarrassed, in front of that Cookham driver, and the Pimlico population, that I went up to the bunch of them in a fury, and shouted, ‘If you’re going to kill my father, don’t kill him in the streets, but let him get into his bed!’

  This changed the atmosphere, we all tramped inside, and got Dad stowed away, and then Mum turned on me, and said now she wanted to know exactly what all this was about, and I said okay, I’d damn well tell her, and Vern tried to join in the party, but we turfed him out and went down into the parlour.

  ‘Sit down,’ said my mother.

  I got hold of both her shoulders (just like I had with Suze) and shoved her in a chair – though she’s a darn sight tougher – and said, ‘Now, you sit down, Ma, and just you listen to me.’

  Then I let her have it. I said she was the most selfish woman I knew of, that she’d made Dad’s life a torture ever since I could remember, that as for a mess like Vern he was none of my responsibility, but as for me, her son by Dad, she’s brought me up so that I just hated her, and was ashamed of her.

  ‘Is that all?’ she said, looking back at me as if she hated me too.

  ‘That’s about all,’ I said.

  ‘You want to go now, son?’ she said to me next.

  This took me aback a bit. I said nothing, but just waited there.

  ‘Well,’ said my mother. ‘If you can take it, you can stay and listen to this. Your father’s been no use to me at all ever since I married him.’

  ‘He produced me,’ I said, staring at her very, very hard.

  ‘He just about managed that,’ she said. ‘That was about his lot.’

  Now at that moment, I wanted to strike my mother: like she’d done me, a thousand times or more, when I couldn’t hit back, and I wanted to hit her real hard – hard, and get it over; and I took a step in her direction. She saw very clearly what was coming, and she didn’t move an inch. And I’m very glad to say that, when I saw this – though of course, all this happened in a moment – I didn’t hit at her, but said, ‘Whatever Dad may have been, or may not have been, you married him.’

  ‘Yes, I married him,’ she said, sarcastically and very bitterly.

  ‘And whatever you feel about Dad,’ I went on, ‘if you made up your mind to have me, you were supposed to love me. Mothers are supposed to love their sons.’

  ‘And sons their mothers,’ my mother said.

  ‘If they get a chance. There’s not one that doesn’t want to, is there? But they must get a bit of it back, a little bit of encouragement.’

  At this old Mum just sighed, and gave me a crooked smile, and looked very wise, I must say, in her way, though very nasty, too.

  ‘Now, you listen to me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t give a b–––r what you think. In the first place, I made you, here (and she banged her belly), and if you think that’s easy, try it yourself some time. Without me, and what I went through, you’d not be here insulting me like you are. And in the next place, although your father means nothing to me at all, in fact just the contrary, I’ve stuck by him, not thrown him out, as I could have done a hundred times if I’d wanted, and made things very much easier for me by doing so. And in the third place, as for you …’

  I interrupted. ‘Just a minute, Ma,’ I said. ‘Why did you ask me, just two months ago, to come back here again, if anything went wrong with Dad?’

  She didn’t answer, and I pressed it home.

  ‘Because you can’t do without a man here – I mean, a legal man – and you know it, don’t you. And you couldn’t have got rid of Dad, like you say you could, beca
use I know you, Ma, if you’d been able to, you would have, but you couldn’t help yourself.’

  She looked at me. ‘You’re getting sharp, aren’t you, boy,’ she said.

  ‘I’m your son, Ma.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose you are. But let me tell you this. Since that night you turned up in the tube shelter, eighteen years ago, which I don’t suppose even you remember, I’ve seen you’re fed and clothed and brought up, best I could, till you can take care of yourself, as you seem to think you can, and that was quite an effort, sometimes!’ She put her old, fetching face on one side, and said, ‘You’re not very easy, you know. You’ve not always been very easy.’

  ‘I dare say not, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘As for loving you,’ my mother went on, ‘well. Listen, son. You don’t love or not love because you choose to – even your own son. You love if you do, and if you don’t, you just don’t, and there’s no good at all pretending. You’ll find out it’s true what I say when you grow older. Or I dare say you’re so clever that you’ve found it out already.’

  I sat down too, three feet away from her.

  ‘Okay, mother,’ I said, after a while, ‘let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘If you say so, son,’ she said to me.

  Then Ma did a thing she’d never done with me ever before, which is to get up and go to the glass cupboard with the orange lace cover on it, which I remember so well from all our other addresses in their turn, and which we were never allowed to go within a mile of, and she got out a bottle of port, and poured two glasses in green crystal goblets, and handed me one, and said, ‘Cheerioh.’

  ‘I don’t drink, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be a cunt,’ she said to me.

  So we had a tipple.

  Then Ma said, what about my father? Well, then – I hope it wasn’t betraying Dad, but I did think she ought to know – I told her all about Dr A.R. Franklyn, and how he really ought to go into hospital, and she listened without interrupting (the first time she’d ever done that with me in her life, either), and just shook her head, and said, ‘He’ll never go in there voluntary. But give me this doctor’s particulars, and if he’s taken really bad again, we’ll just have to put him in.’

  So I did that.

  Then, when I came to go, just by the doorway, there was a sort of pause, and what was in both our minds was, should we have a kiss or not? We looked at each other, then both laughed together suddenly, and she said, ‘Oh well, son, let’s skip it, you’re a real nasty little bastard, aren’t you,’ and I gave her a big clump and said, ‘Well, Ma, you should know about that,’ and hopped it quickly.

  I looked up at the clock at the Air Terminal, and saw if I made it quick, I’d catch the latter portion of the Czar Tusdie concert, with Maria Bethlehem singing with him as soloist. The venue was up in the north part, in a super-cinema with academy of dance attached, so on the rank there I grabbed a taxi (who’d been hoping for transatlantics at the terminal, and wasn’t pleased so much with only me), and shot off up across the town. I certainly felt in need of a lift and soothing music, after all the excitements of the day.

  And that’s what jazz music gives you: a big lift up of the spirits, and a Turkish bath with massage for all your nerves. I know even nice cats (like my Dad, for example) think that jazz is just noise and rock and sound angled at your genitals, not your intelligence, but I want you to believe that isn’t so at all, because it really makes you feel good in a very simple, but very basic, sort of way. I can best explain it by saying it just makes you feel happy. When I’ve been tired and miserable, which has been quite more than often, I’ve never known some good, pure jazz music fail to help me on.

  Now, I’ve explained a club for jazz people, and also a jazz club, but a jazz concert is something different still. In this, several hundred cats, and even often these days thousands, gather in as large a hall as the impresario can hire, and listen to the best selection of soloists and combos, English and American, that the impresario can offer for the price – which is by no means low. Of course, in these concerts, even the greats often disappoint you, because a big hall or cinema is no more the real place for jazz than a railway station would be for a tea party. But if your luck is in, they often overcome this disadvantage, and you hear some really marvellous sounds. And then what’s so nice is to hear them in company with so many hundreds of like-minded kiddos – sharp, and eager, and ready to give of their best, too, if the performance is up to standard – and although I know jazz addicts are supposed to be a lot of morons, you’d really be astonished how these fans will all sit and listen.

  Well, Czar Tusdie’s, of course, is one of the great bands of all time, and American, and coloured. And as for Maria Bethlehem, I’d say that, second to a great like Lady Day (who, to my mind’s right up there on an Everest peak all of her very own), she’s the world’s best female jazz singer that there is. So you can imagine I was thoroughly impatient in that vehicle, and kept advising the driver of short cuts and to accelerate, which he took no notice of whatever.

  He dropped me on the corner just before the picture-palace, and so I had to walk past the dance academy, and there, on the pavement, I paused a second, because I saw a notice on the wall which said, and I said out loud, ‘Boy, that one’s us! Although me, after my experiences, maybe I’m going to move up a category or two!’

  CURRENT CLASSES

  MEDALLISTS CLASS

  BEGINNERS PROGRESSIVE CLASS

  BEGINNERS PRACTICE

  ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

  Well, as I went in through the foyer, and gave my ticket up to the appropriate cat, I heard, from outside, that really marvellous sound, which is the strains of jazz music when it’s real and true: truly a heavenly sound, it seems to me to be. And honestly, when I die – when that day comes that must come – I’d wish for no other ending of it all than to hear that Czar Tusdie band playing for me as it did just then: because their sound was so strong and gentle, just like it would carry you right up on its kind notes to paradise. And then there was a roar and whistles, and the fans all applauded like a football crowd, and I went in and got my seat just in time to catch the entrance of Maria.

  Maria is big, and no longer a young woman, but she walked on the stage just like a girl: quick feet, easy gestures, and a face that’s so darn friendly, though it can also be kidding you, and sometimes quite severe. She’s like a girl, yes, but she’s also, in a strange way, just like everybody’s Mum: she welcomes you all, takes charge of you all, and from the very moment she comes on, you know that you’re all there with her in safe hands. And straight away she swings into the song she’s chosen, no tricks, no crafty pauses, no hesitation whatsoever, and what she does to the songs is unbelievable: I mean, she takes even quite familiar standards and turns them inside out, and throws them right back at you as though they’ve become nobody’s but her own – Maria’s. And she can be witty as hell, throwing everything away and shrugging, but then, the next moment, rising like a bird, and sweet or melancholy. But whatever she does – and this is the whole thing about Maria Bethlehem – her singing makes you feel it’s absolutely wonderful to be alive and kicking, and that human beings are a damn fine wonderful invention after all.

  They rose to her at the end – all those hundreds of English boys and girls, and their friends from Africa and the Caribbean – and they practically had to gouge us all out of that auditorium. Cats I didn’t know from Adam said, hadn’t it been great, and one cat in particular then said, had I heard about the happenings at St. Ann’s Well, up in Nottingham, last evening? I asked him, what happenings? not taking it very much in (because I was still back there with Maria Bethlehem), when I realised he was saying there’d been rioting between whites and coloured, but what could you expect in a provincial dump out there among the sticks?

  IN SEPTEMBER

  I was up very early on that morning, as if with a private alarm clock in my brain, and it was one of the most beautiful young days I’ve ever seen. The dome of the heavens, wh
en I looked out up at it over my geraniums, was pale pink glowing blue, with nothing in it but a few stray leaves of cloud, lit up gold and green by sun you couldn’t see behind the houses. The air was fresh, blown right in from the sea, and there wasn’t a sound except from hundreds of thousands of pairs of lungs, still slumbering there in Napoli. Peace, perfect peace, I thought, as I sucked in the warm air of my native city. And it was also, as it happened, my nineteenth birthday.

  I put on some music and abluted, then made two Nescafés and carried one down for Hoplite. The cat was absent. Waste not want not, I decided, so carried them further down to Cool. Another cat out on the tiles last night. No use disturbing Big Jill that early, so I drank both cups on the front doorstep, and stood there taking in the scene.

  And I saw this. Coming down the street, from the N. Hill Gate direction, were a group of yobbos, who most probably had been out at some all-night jungle-juice performance too, and who straggled across the street and pavement in that messy way they have, and whose bodies were all wrong somehow – I mean with lumps and bumps in the wrong places – and whose summer drag looked hastily pulled on. And coming up the street, from the Metropolitan Railway direction, were two coloured characters – not Spades, as it happened, but two Sikh warrior products, with a mauve and a lemon turban, and with stacks of hair. Well, when the two groups met, the Sikh characters stepped to one side, as you or I would do, but the yob lot halted, so as it was difficult to pass by, and there was a short pause: all this just outside my door.

  Then one of the scruffos turned and looked at his choice companions, and grinned a sloppy grin, and suddenly approached the two Sikh characters and hit one of them right in the face: with his fist pointed so that the top knuckles got inside the skull. So long as I live, I swear, I shall never forget the look on that Asian number’s face: it wasn’t at all fear, it wasn’t at all rage, it was just complete and utter unbelief and surprise.