A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  At the same time I was so intimately connected to her, so dependent upon her for my emotional life, that I experienced her lust for him as if it were my own. I could have been the one with the yearning thighs, the wetness between my legs. I understood him better than she ever would and wanted to warn her.

  Yet Thirst showed no interest. Even when her eyes turned limpid in the chaotic blaze of his presence and I, many times, almost got up to leave, he still showed an indifference to those charms that most other men found irresistible. It was as if an unexpected purity of vision enabled him to see her in a way denied to others—as a woman corrupt and unwholesome. She was, after all, some years older than he, and he despised drugs.

  The occasions when Daisy and Thirst were alone together were few. Even when Thirst came over with his books, which he did from time to time, he and she would work together for an hour or so, usually with all of us in the same room, and then he would leave, often with a suggestion that he and I meet up for a drink together when I had the time.

  The only exception to this general rule that I can remember occurred one weekday afternoon when Daisy and I were sitting alone together. The trial in which I was involved had been adjourned early so that counsel could prepare speeches. I was working on the summing-up to the jury that I had to make the following morning; Daisy was experimenting with her latest fad, a new set of watercolors. The phone rang. Daisy answered.

  “That was Oliver. He’s at Swiss Cottage library. Seems to have convinced himself that he’s going to fail his entire English A level because he can’t understand a poem by John Donne.” She touched my cheek. “Do you mind? He sounds in a bit of a state. You know how fanatical he’s getting—he has a sort of identity crisis if there’s something he doesn’t understand.”

  I reminded myself that I was a civilized, enlightened middle-class man, and in any event it was doubtful that any infidelity would occur with Thirst feeling the way he did about Daisy.

  “No, of course—Daisy Smith’s intellectual ambulance to the rescue.”

  She smiled and kissed me. “I won’t be long.”

  About two hours later she returned. Her face was white and drawn, her hands were shaking.

  At first she avoided my gaze.

  “What happened?”

  She walked over to me. “Hold me—just hold me for a moment.”

  “What happened? Did he hurt you? Did he make a pass at you?”

  “No, no—nothing like that.”

  “Did you make a pass at him?”

  “Nobody made a pass at anyone. Stop being so jealous and just hold me.”

  I held her while the energy seeped out of her.

  “I’m exhausted—I’m going to bed.”

  She got into bed with most of her clothes on. I tried to return to my work, which was urgent. My client had contradicted himself about five times under cross-examination, but they were minor points. Did I tell the jury frankly that he was a bit of a liar but that didn’t make him necessarily guilty, or did I try to paper over the cracks? By a prodigious effort I was able to concentrate for another couple of hours.

  I went back to Daisy in the bedroom, sat on the bed. She was not asleep.

  “Daisy, don’t you think you should tell me? If nobody made a pass and nobody hurt anybody, what’s it all about?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too embarrassing.”

  —

  After the trial the next day (my client was convicted of burglary and given two years), I was half relieved to find a telephone message from Thirst. I phoned the number my clerk had taken. Thirst wanted to meet for a chat “about your missus.” I was still nervous being seen with him anywhere near the Temple, so we arranged to meet in a café in Piccadilly.

  It was about five in the afternoon; already a punk was lying propped against a wall near the underground ticket office. It was more than an ordinary case of narcotic poisoning; he looked dead. Police and ambulance men came as I took the escalator. I bought an evening paper while waiting in the café.

  Thirst wore a sheepskin flying jacket, clean jeans, new running shoes. He obviously had a modest source of income; it didn’t do to ask. I was in my new beige Burberry. I noted a posture of grim responsibility, which increased as he developed his account of the previous afternoon.

  When I returned to the flat, Daisy said, “He told you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. So can we talk about it now?”

  “Oh God, I’ve been thinking about it all day. Why am I so pathetic? All I wanted to do was make him a present. And it was a good book, too, the best criticism of John Donne to emerge for a decade. Only I didn’t have the cash on me. I don’t do it much anymore—hardly at all since that time in college—but when I do I’m bloody good. I swear nobody in that shop could have seen me. Especially not the store detective. I can spot them a mile off. Oliver was waiting outside the shop—it was uncanny how he knew, as if he could smell it. I’ve never had such a dressing-down in my life. He wasn’t going to do time for some little tart still wet behind the ears, a rank amateur, et cetera—and he made me throw the book away. All day I’ve been shuddering with embarrassment at least once every half hour. He was scary, though. Man, that was a real blue-collar talking-to he gave me! I see what you mean about potentially homicidal….Could you please not look at me like that?”

  I left her to go into my study. I was looking at a book, trying to concentrate, when she came in. It was unusual for her not to make physical contact. She sat in a spare chair, a yard or so away from me.

  “I suppose Oliver was pretty disdainful. What did he say about me?”

  A reservoir of resentment made it easy to tell the truth.

  “He said quite a lot of things, actually, but the basic message is that he thinks you’re ridiculously immature. The way he puts it is that you hide behind your good looks—a plainer girl would never get away with what you get away with. Eleanor’s right about his being perceptive—he asked if you have any close women friends. I had to tell him that you haven’t.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That only men will tolerate you. Your narcissism.”

  “English women hate me, James,” she said quietly. “We both know that. It’s not news.”

  28

  And so for one reason or another it was I who received the bulk of Thirst’s attention, or whatever remained after his fanatical studying. He would emerge from the libraries where he worked with the look of someone suffering from shell shock. I suppose I did not wait for him more than twice outside a public library, yet so vivid is the image of him pushing, exhausted, through the dull brown doors—blinking distractedly in the alien light, a look of anger on his face, his clothes going slack on him, a certain yellowness around the gills—that this picture has remained in my memory ever since.

  “ ’Lo, James.”

  “Oliver. What was it today—Macbeth, or Jones and Metford on teenage criminality?”

  “Fucking Jones and Metford. Pricks. I tell you, they haven’t got a clue. How many motors did they pinch at fifteen?”

  I had expected him, by then, to have adopted some pliant sociologist as a mentor, one of London’s many tired-faced young men with well-practiced explanations of what’s wrong with society and only too eager to drink beer in pubs with reformed criminals. Instead he chose whenever we met to let me know his latest thoughts in a half-mad gush and then ransack my face with suspicious, earnest eyes.

  “Well, am I right? I must be! Christ, James, we’re living in a sewer, everyone shitting on everyone else and nobody admitting it. Nobody.” He checked my face. “I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I don’t always find it easy to walk into those seminars. The lectures are all right, but the seminars—four or five seventeen-year-old kids sitting about when I walk in, big hairy ex-con. I scare the fuck out of them, especially the teacher. Same age as me. To tell the truth, I have to force myself all the way.”

  On several occasions he took me back to his little room in Camden Town
. As he crossed the threshold his mood would change. Not sure how hosts were supposed to behave, he would become awkward, and at the same time he would be nonchalant, because it was, after all, his home. The bed-sit was of the kind that had suffered from a certain amount of pride the landlord had taken in it. A large and lurid picture of a brown girl on a tropical island (Thirst called it “The Tart”) hung over the bed. Frilly curtains were bunched like petticoats at either side of the windows. When you used the communal lavatory, a printed sign ordered you to clean up afterward and not to run a bath after eleven o’clock at night. It was a relief to see Lord Denning pacing restlessly in his cage in the corner of the bed-sit. Above him two shelves held a battered set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Next to the last volume was the latest edition of The Guinness Book of Records and a copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

  Thirst was eager to discuss his own process of rehabilitation.

  “Most people know nothing about changing themselves.”

  “Most people never really change,” I said. “Their programming is fixed early on; they just respond when the buttons are pressed.”

  “You know what it’s really like?”

  “What?”

  “Being in the nick, except the nick is in your own head, and you’re the screw as well as the con. One day I’ll write a book explaining that rehabilitation is just an internalization of the prison system.”

  “Good word, internalization.”

  “Stinks, though—life. You never get free. Never.”

  He did not keep alcohol on the premises, or any other medium of hospitality, and so we would often buy a pack of canned beer to drink with crisps while we talked. When drunk, he sometimes claimed to have killed a man, but it was impossible to tell if the alcohol had unleashed a true confession or merely inspired an extravagant development in his personal mythology. The story, though, was always the same: “I knew he had a shiv, see, left me no choice. Quick one in the balls, then straight fingers to the throat—all the way, as if you’re sticking them in mud.”

  In a confidential mood, I would sometimes talk about my mother, her courage, how much I owed her. The importance of mothers. He would listen quietly with a queer look on his face, almost as if he disbelieved me. Once he said, “I wouldn’t know, James; I was a Saturday-night bunk-up.”

  He was not always morose. When his studies were going well, he would show off his line in unnerving insights.

  “You know what I was thinking the other day? I was thinking about you and Daisy. Know what she is to you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “She’s your trophy. She’s what you use to prove to yourself that it’s all worth it. I’ve been watching you. You don’t care that much about money and status, not like she thinks you do. She gets you confused with her old man. You worship her, I mean in the book sense—she’s your icon. Wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t really know anything about her as a person; probably you don’t care. You took everything that makes life worth living for you and put it into a myth so you can carry on. A myth called Smith.”

  He grinned, proud of the rhyme.

  “Thanks for telling me that, Oliver.”

  “No, but I’m right, aren’t I? See, there’s a difference between you and me. I’ve gone further than you. I haven’t got any myths; I can’t use crutches. I have to go on pushing shit uphill every day without kidding myself that there’s a payoff. You couldn’t do what I do. You couldn’t shovel the shit if Daisy wasn’t there—the myth of Daisy, I mean.” He sipped some beer. “Tell you what, though—if I was to choose an icon, I’d choose a Yank, too.”

  “You would? I didn’t know you admired the States.”

  “Didn’t know anything about it till I started on this sociology course. There was a bit about the psychology of Europeans who emigrated—what’s that island they had to pass through?”

  “Ellis Island?”

  “Yeah. This book goes on about the psychological revolution, the optimism, the smiles on people’s faces, knowing they’d escaped…” He waved a hand to include The Tart, the frilly curtains, London. “All this. Course, I’d have to be a different person. There’s no way I’m going to shack up with a woman, not even a Yank.”

  “Never been in love, Oliver?”

  “Me? Leave off. All my life I’ve been in the nick or on the run. Tarts I know wouldn’t want any of that love crap. It’s always been a quick one up against the wall after the pub so she can have a good wash before she goes home to her old man. That’s the way they want it, nice and sordid. Turns them on. I’m a wild man to them, a hot cock and a bit of S and M—guaranteed not to leave bruises for the other bloke to see. I don’t reckon Daisy’s that different, really; you just don’t see it. I don’t reckon you know much about women, James, frankly.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

  “From all those quick ones up against the wall?”

  “What’re you getting so pissed off for? What did I say?”

  “I’m not getting pissed off. I just don’t think you know so much about women.”

  “ ’Cause I’m an ex-con? You think I’m queer?”

  “No, Oliver, I don’t think you’re queer. No more than the next man, anyway.”

  He sniffed. “Animals, women. In pretty packets. Just tarted-up bundles of animal cravings. Easily manipulated.”

  “Bullshit. Women are the only thing that saves us from self-annihilation.”

  His laugh was a sneer. “You got it bad, old son. An’ after what she did the other day in that bookshop. Could’ve been very embarrassing for you as well as me.”

  “I know.”

  “Better get her under control, mate, before she does some real damage.”

  “How do you suggest I do that?”

  “Teach her a lesson.”

  “You mean slap her about? Tie her to the bed and gang-rape her?”

  He feigned shock. “That’s very uncivilized, James. And very unsubtle, especially from a man of your standing.” He smiled. “I did have an idea the other night, though.”

  I had to admit it was ingenious, if a little cruel.

  —

  Later that week Daisy and I met him in the garden of a pub in Belsize Park. An unexpected improvement in the weather had brought out crowds of people, mostly in their twenties and early thirties. Daisy wore a V-neck cashmere sweater with no bra and a short skirt.

  On returning from a visit to the lavatory, Thirst beckoned us to lean forward while he whispered.

  “Look what I found just outside the gents.”

  He showed us a set of car keys with the letters VW on the ring tag.

  “Oliver!” Daisy said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. Tempting, though.”

  “But it could be any number of Volkswagens.”

  We all looked through the iron fence of the pub garden at the street on the other side. As far as I could see, there was only one Volkswagen, an old “Beetle” in poor condition.

  “What’s the betting it’s that one?” Thirst said.

  “Bet it’s not,” I said.

  “Why not?” Daisy said.

  “The keys are from a microbus, not a Beetle.”

  “You’re wrong,” Thirst said. “It’s the Beetle.”

  “Bet?”

  “Fiver.”

  “So how are we going to find out?”

  Thirst and I looked at Daisy.

  “Well, I can’t risk it, with my record,” Thirst said.

  “Me neither, for opposite reasons,” I said.

  Daisy looked at me. “Are you suggesting…?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Can’t do any harm, though, just to try the keys in the lock,” Thirst said.

  “After that heavy-duty lecture you gave me last week?” Daisy said.

  Thirst shrugged. “Maybe I was a bit hard on you. You do seem a bit of a pro when it comes to nicking things.”

  Daisy looked at
me again.

  “If you try the keys in the lock with no intention of taking the car, no offense will have been committed.”

  Daisy smirked. Without another word she stood up. We watched while she walked out of the gate and leaned back against the car with her hands behind her. She returned grinning.

  “Oliver won. It is that car.”

  I took five pounds out of my pocket, gave the note to Oliver. We drank our beer in silence.

  “That was pretty professional, Daize, the way you checked out that car,” Thirst said.

  “Thank you, Oliver.”

  “What did you think, James?”

  “Too professional.”

  “No, you can’t be too professional. You know what, there aren’t many people I would trust on a TDA these days, but with Daize here, I might be tempted.”

  “What’s TDA?” Daisy said.

  “Taking and driving away,” I said. “It’s an offense. Punishable on conviction with a fine or imprisonment.”

  Thirst leaned forward. “See how they allocate resources, Daize? Costs them millions to stop a little harmless TDA, meanwhile in the City, upper-class con merchants are bleeding the country white. It’s not justice, it’s repression of one class by another. That’s why I’d be tempted.”

  “The owner would see you,” I said.

  Thirst looked around. “Doubt it. Everyone’s too busy drinking and ear bashing.”

  He had a point. The rare warmth of the evening combined with large quantities of alcohol had made even Londoners loquacious.

  “It’s an offense,” I repeated.

  “But Oliver’s right,” Daisy said. “Think of the money they spend policing the working class, while the rich get away with murder.”

  “I forbid you to steal that car,” I said.

  Her face flushed. “What did you say?”

  “I said that I forbid it. You’d be risking my career.”

  “Forbid? You forbid? Take back that word or I will steal the fucking car.”

  “I repeat, I forbid you.”

  Daisy turned her enraged face to Thirst, who was grinning.

  “Don’t worry, James, she ain’t gonna steal it. Takes nerve to pinch a car, not like a little shoplifting.” Daisy stared at him. “But if you were serious, I wouldn’t mind a bit of a joyride myself.”