A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  “It’s real. People do what they have to do. It isn’t all a chickenshit game. You know the most used English word? ‘Sorry.’ Jesus Christ, sometimes I wonder if the men here have any balls at all. All this politeness is just a cover-up for no guts. Sorry, sorry, sorry—it’s all you hear.”

  Thirst winked at me. “Not polite in America, then, Daize?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s ‘ouda fuckin’ way schmuck ’fo’ I break yo’ face.’ ” She looked at us. “Okay, it’s aggressive, uncouth, possibly even homicidal. But it cuts the crap. You have this word ‘wanker’: it means compulsive masturbator, right? You people use it all the time. This is a nation of wankers. Maybe mockery is the only thing you have left.”

  There was fire in her eyes. I noted a flicker of interest in his, before he turned to me and winked again. “Owner’s a crook, you say? What’s the betting we don’t have to pay a penny? Tell you what, order anything you like. It’s all on me.”

  “Oliver,” I said.

  He raised a hand. “I promise you won’t be compromised. Daisy, what about a bolognese?”

  She looked at me, shrugged. She ordered lasagne, I ordered a cappuccino, Thirst ordered steak and chips. He ate three quarters of his meal before calling the waiter.

  “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind letting me have a word with the proprietor,” Thirst said in a soft, deferential tone.

  “Something wrong?” The waiter was medium height, stocky, with a grim mouth.

  “I’d prefer to speak to the proprietor,” Thirst said.

  “He’s not here.”

  Thirst stared into the man’s eyes, raised his eyebrows, smiled. “I think he is. And I think he’ll be very cross with you if I do what I’m professionally required to do without giving him a chance to make good.”

  The waiter seemed less mystified than I was. He nodded, disappeared into the kitchen area. A few minutes later a tall, heavyset man in his mid-forties appeared. Small eyes looked out from a hard face.

  “Well, you wanted to see me?”

  “Sorry to spoil your day, sir,” Thirst said, “but do the names Rattus norvegicus or Rattus rattus mean anything to you?”

  The man reddened. “There are no rats here. This is a clean restaurant. I don’t know who you are, but—”

  Thirst raised a placating hand. “I can see the names do mean something to you. You have my sympathy; you’ve been infested before. I understand how you feel, and let me tell you it gives me no pleasure to point it out to you, but look.”

  He pointed to the skirting board that led into the kitchen. “You see that mark about three quarters of an inch thick running parallel to the horizontal?”

  The owner peered, turned a shade of purple. “What are you insinuating?”

  “Oh, Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus are cunning, no doubt about it, hard to detect, but their natural caution, you see, makes them brush by the sides of walls, leaving their telltale scum.”

  The owner stared again, then gave a hollow laugh. “Nice try, sunshine, but it won’t work. That mark is caused by the rubber lining along the bottom of the door. Look.”

  He went to the kitchen door, which had a kind of rubberized flap at the bottom, opened it until it hit the wall. A ridge at the top of the flap matched the mark on the wall.

  Thirst smiled indulgently. He stood up, startling the owner. “I wasn’t talking about that mark, and please don’t call me ‘sunshine’—I always prefer to keep these things civilized. I was talking about that mark.”

  It was true that under the mark made by the door was another faint smudge.

  “Could be anything.”

  “I don’t think so. Not if you see how it is replicated elsewhere in your establishment.” He pointed to similar smudges along the skirting around the café. Daisy swallowed.

  The owner was finding it hard to speak. “Who the hell are you? Those are scuff marks from shoes.”

  Thirst shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. Let’s look a little closer, shall we?” He knelt down by the skirting near the kitchen, scratched with a fingernail at the join with the floor.

  “Are you a health inspector?” the man demanded.

  “Now, I think it very much in your interests if you don’t ask that question, don’t you? I mean, we don’t want this to turn into an official inspection, do we?”

  “Scuff marks,” the owner said again, in a small voice.

  “I wish they were, sir,” Thirst said, “but how do you explain this?”

  He stood up, opened his hand. Half a dozen coarse white hairs lay across the palm.

  “Rattus norvegicus, or I’m a Dutchman. Of the albino variety. If you catch enough, you could sell them to laboratories. Set a few nonlethal traps in the kitchen, might make a few quid before they close you down. Of course, if you don’t believe me, we could call the local environmental health officer to take these samples away and have them analyzed?”

  The owner wiped his face with a handkerchief. “You’re bent, I know you are. What d’you want?”

  “It so happens that my brother-in-law runs a small but efficient extermination service….”

  Relief spread through the owner’s facial muscles.

  “Just give me his number. If he’s competitive—”

  “Oh, look, if you can find someone cheaper, use them with my blessing. My only interest is that you exterminate the vermin.” Thirst wrote a number on a paper napkin, paused, looked at the remains of his meal. “I must say I’m a bit put off the food, though.”

  The owner waved a hand. “Forget it. Just get out of here.”

  “Rat hairs,” Thirst said to Daisy when we were outside. “Never leave home without them.”

  “You’ve got steel balls,” Daisy said, shaking her head.

  He stopped in the street under a tree, avoided my eyes as he spoke. “No, see, that’s the mistake people make. Thieving, yes, it’s mostly just a question of balls, but a good con needs some of this.” He tapped his head. “It might have looked very simple just now, but it had a classic structure. The best way to work a con is to get the mark to think he’s conning you. He was in a hurry to get us out of his café because he had no intention of phoning that number I gave him. He thought not charging us for the food was a small sacrifice.” He searched Daisy’s eyes as if inspecting the progress of a slow student. “Got it?”

  “Got it,” Daisy said.

  26

  The next morning was even sunnier. Thirst returned with the van, Chaz, and a refrigerator which Daisy had bought from the two of them, strictly without my consent. I insisted she use her own money and refused to have anything to do with the transaction.

  I watched nervously in the street while Thirst lifted the fridge out of the back of the van. He managed to do this single-handedly, and in a display of heroics staggered across the pavement to the steps of the house. He set it down, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and grinned. “Used to be able to pick up the back end of a Mini.”

  “Did you do weight training?”

  “No. Don’t believe in it; got all my exercise running away from the Old Bill.” He grinned again. “Here, do you bet me I couldn’t carry this fridge as far as that lamppost?”

  He saw I was anxious about the origin of the fridge.

  “No. I’m not betting. Please get it in the house. I’ll help you.”

  He grinned. “I’ll do it anyway. Need the exercise.”

  Spitting on both hands, he crouched down to pick up the refrigerator. It was barely within even his strength, and for a moment I thought he would drop it. He staggered out of the gate. When he reached the lamppost he set it down, gave a great yell, and laughed.

  “Thought I’d ruptured myself. Well, I bet you I could take it to the lamppost—I never said I could carry it back again.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Why don’t you carry it back?” His eyes glittered. I was the same height as him but much slimmer and probably about half as strong. Perh
aps if it had not been June and Daisy was not upstairs helping Chaz with some furniture, I would have been more sensible.

  “How much do you bet me?”

  “Fifty quid.” He folded his tattooed arms, leaned against a wall, and whistled. Quite suddenly he seemed to have lost all humor and become ruthless. It was obvious that he was not going to lay a hand on the fridge, which sat surreally under the lamppost. To my mind it gleamed like an exhibit in a burglary trial.

  I crouched down to put my hands—they were the soft hands of a paper-pusher—under the refrigerator. I found that by exerting all my strength I could lift it but that it had a tendency to topple forward because I could not control its bulk. My hands were already cut. Thirst roused himself.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  He looked surprised. I tried again, this time stretching my arms as far as they would go and arching my back dangerously. I could feel the pressure in my lumbar region, the protest of muscles long unused. Slowly the refrigerator came up. I staggered to keep balance. Somehow I managed to set it down at the steps of the house.

  As soon as I released it I felt a stabbing pain in my back. Daisy’s feet had appeared at the top of the steps.

  “Jimmy, what happened?”

  “Working-class machismo,” I said. “We were playing dares. You owe me fifty pounds,” I said. My hands were bleeding.

  “Right,” Thirst said. Daisy took in the situation. The steps gave her a natural platform. “You’ve probably slipped a disk, you dickhead. Don’t men ever grow up? You’re like a couple of troglodytes. All I did was turn my back. Why don’t you take your bows and arrows and go hunting saber-toothed tigers? Just don’t ask me to nurse you if you’ve slipped a disk.”

  She turned on her heel and went back inside the house.

  “What’s a troglodyte?” he said. “I haven’t got to T yet. What was she on about? I know she’s your missus, James, but sometimes I think she does too much dope—know what I mean? What was all that about bows and arrows and saber-toothed tigers? If it was me, I’d slap her around the chops.”

  “I think at the moment in a straight fight she’d beat the shit out of me.” I was holding the small of my back with the palms of both hands.

  “Best to lie down flat.” He took my arm, and putting it around his neck, he lifted me gently and laid me on the little patch of garden in front of the house. I could not help admiring his immense physical strength and the superior vitality that seemed to consume him. By any criteria he had won what Daisy would call our ego battle, but when, briefly, he caught my eye, I was reminded of that fleeting moment on Waterloo Bridge: something limpid behind the pupil; a sorrow, maybe, or even when all was said and done a fatal compassion, together with the perception that escape was impossible. Then he left me to go into the house.

  I lay on my back and found that the new green leaves of a plane tree cut out irregular patches of blue. Or was it the blue that cut out the shape of the leaves? The knowledge that Daisy was in the flat with Thirst and that I was lying temporarily crippled, as if a prophecy or fear fantasy had come true, put me in a strange state of mind. I found that I could alter my mood by focusing either on some primitive suspicion or on that fleeting look in Thirst’s eyes. It was ridiculous that I had never until then considered the possibility that his experience of life was identical to my own. I suspect that my mind began to close in the dead center of that morning while Chaz’s cassette player pumped out Eric Clapton. I woke up a few minutes later to find Daisy’s face over mine.

  “Sorry, Jimmy, for being such a bitch. Are you really hurt?”

  “It seems much better now that I’ve lain down flat. Help me up?”

  —

  Chaz and Thirst drove off as soon as we had emptied their van. A couple of hours later, another van arrived to deliver a pine table and chairs. That was as much moving as I could take for the weekend.

  I lay on my aching back on the new carpet while Daisy wandered light-headedly from one room to another.

  “I can’t believe all this space just for us!”

  Propped up against the wall and using pillows for cushions, we drank wine.

  “Isn’t it great?” Daisy said.

  “I just hope we can keep up with the rent.”

  “But you’re working so hard now—all those briefs coming in.”

  “There’s a credit squeeze, so solicitors take even longer to pay than ever. Do you know I was only paid last week for Thirst’s appeal?”

  “Have some more wine, cheer up; we’ll manage. I’ll do some evening classes if you like.”

  I drank. “Do you know what? I’ve just started looking at myself in a new way. Daisy, darling, I have to admit, I think you’ve been right all along.”

  “How’s that, dear boy?”

  “All my struggling, all that fighting for money and status—my endless searching for a state of arrival, of having arrived. It really is a stupid male game. Arriving is now, living is now.”

  “Of course it is. The mystic now. There’s nothing else.”

  “Man is a time-fragmented animal.”

  “Quite.”

  “Where has it got me? I’ll be thirty before too long, and all I’ve got is a rented flat with furniture I can barely afford. And if I do even better over the next few years, what will it mean—a little house somewhere in the suburbs with a massive mortgage repayment to meet every month.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you know what? I’ve made a resolution—no more commitments. No more waiting to arrive.”

  Daisy clapped her hands, switched to one of her New York accents. “Far out, dah kid’s a bum after all.”

  Happily tipsy from the wine, she turned me over on my front to massage my lumbar region. Her small hands caressed me with special care, then she turned me over and kissed me and slowly undid my jeans. When I reached for her she pushed my hands away. She continued to kiss my face and neck, then took her top off to hold her nipples up for me to kiss. I reached up and held her breasts in my hands.

  Suddenly she was vulnerable, bruised. “Jimmy, now that we’ve got all this space, do you want me to go off the pill?”

  —

  What happened next was entirely wordless. I disengaged her eyes and looked away for less than a second, as I had been doing now for many months whenever she posed this question in its various forms. When I looked back, her face was ravaged with disappointment.

  “I thought space was the problem,” she said, fighting tears.

  “You know it’s not just that. Ever since I left university I’ve been working my balls off. The only way I can handle it is by believing that one day I’ll be financially free. I just can’t stand the burden of a kid right now. It’s for life, right? I don’t want to spend the next twenty years feeling as though I’m buried alive. And how much time would I get to spend with a kid anyway? I’m really sorry.”

  Her face was horribly twisted, and she found it hard to speak. “I want a baby, James. Badly.”

  “Why?”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, got up and spoke with her back to me. “Think about what you just said. You labor for years and find in the end you’ve given birth to a bank account. I want to have produced something living. For life.”

  27

  Daisy continued to help Thirst with his A levels. He was able to obtain an educational maintenance grant from his local authority that enabled him to work incessantly throughout the spring of that year. He only raised his head from his studies to ask increasingly pertinent and academic questions.

  He had not, in the end, gone to the college where Daisy had taught, as I had suggested that day on Waterloo Bridge. He found one more to his liking near the Elephant and Castle; but he consulted her on such topics as the function of puns in Shakespearean dialogue, the use of pathos in the nineteenth-century novel, and the impact of the 1914 Education Act on modern English Literature. This last stemmed from his study of sociology, in which subject he was developing a passio
nate interest.

  We met up with him from time to time, ostensibly to keep in touch but in reality because we were the only friends upon whom he could practice his new vocabulary. This was full of words like “agency” (the police was an agency used primarily for the protection of vested interests under the pretext of maintaining law and order) and “presents as” (Chaz, his favorite guinea pig, “presented as” a moron chiefly because of a deficiency in communication skills, which agencies responsible for his education had neglected to assist him to develop).

  In the right mood his natural bravado enabled him to say such things without a blush. I was with him once when he said in his thick cockney, without stammer or pause, that “incarcerated persons experience a controlled violence applied chiefly through the medium of time which is equal and opposite to the violence that society inspired in that person before he was incarcerated.”

  It was one of his best. We slapped hands.

  “Hot shit!” he said.

  I knew, though, that his new persona was perforated with doubt. In front of Daisy he would always cover his fumbles with an ironic grin, but sometimes when he was alone with me he allowed his confusion to show.

  I had the eerie sensation that we were presiding over a Frankensteinian experiment that had gone badly out of control. It was not a sensation that Daisy shared.

  As he grew thinner and more serious, as his eyes blazed painfully in a combination of intellectual strain and dissolving identity, as the evolving power of disciplined thought was applied, inevitably, to his past life so that he now saw the seductive poetry of his crimes as no more than the reflexes of a monkey in a Skinner box—in short, as the great delusion of a secondary education (that there’s an expert somewhere who knows) made him ever more self-conscious—Daisy began to find him compelling.

  I realized that I had been quite mistaken in my earlier crises of jealousy. So long as he was no more than a muscular and aspiring young man, he had been merely an instrument to tease me with—or an object of fantasy. It was the disintegration of his soul that she now found so attractive.