Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘I feigned madness to get out of jail. They kept on giving me these pills. Pills, all the time. It’s a madhouse.’

  ‘What about Binnsy?’

  ‘Binnsy did it,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you Clancy’, she said in her mother’s voice.

  ‘Yes auntie,’ he said, ‘are you going to give me the strap?’ He gave a slack-lipped leer.

  She looked at his pasty face and said, ‘Are you sure you’re only pretending?’

  ‘I wish I knew, darling.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Polly, ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  In the day room the billiard balls clicked and the nurse laughed loudly. ‘Oh mother,’ said a quiet voice from the next bed, ‘oh mother. Take me home.’ Polly chilled.

  ‘Of course I don’t love you. Alexander’s trying to get you out so you can do Blockade’s drumming.’

  ‘Even that—to get out of here. Oh—love me’, he said holding out his arms.

  ‘Oh Clancy,’ she said, fell against him and began to kiss him, ‘oh, no I’m leaving, now. I don’t even want to see you any more when I think about what happened.’

  ‘No—and I don’t want to see you, either.’

  The old spiked railings sprang between them.

  Polly stood up. ‘I hate your guts, Clancy, when I remember what you did to me.’

  ‘Think what you did to me, then.’

  ‘I didn’t do half of what you did to me. You tried to make amends too late.’

  His false tears came flowing. ‘You’re cruel. You make me feel guilty all the time.’

  ‘You are fucking guilty all the time’, Polly said, rolling barbed wire along the spikes of the railings. She stood up. ‘Do you know, Clancy I hate the sight of you. Here’s your bloody magazines,’ she threw them on the bed, ‘and a bloody book and your bloody flowers—and I’m keeping the chocolates to eat myself.’

  She had taken two paces when her bunch of roses hit her in the small of the back.

  ‘Balls. Balls. Balls’, he shouted over the mumbling old man, the black man who raved as the attendants pushed him down and plunged a needle into him.

  The flowers lay between the beds, petals on the polished floor, heads broken on their stems. Polly banged out.

  ‘Well I don’t know if he will or not. First he said he wouldn’t, then he said he’d do anything to get out. But he could easily get out and then not do it.’

  ‘Get him out anyway. What difference will it make?’

  Polly and Alexander were all alone in the chilly, dusty living-room.

  ‘Am I supposed to get him out?’ Polly demanded.

  ‘You’ll have to take over. I’m off to Holland with Blockade the day after tomorrow—I told you.’

  ‘So you did’, murmured Polly uncertainly. ‘Well, I suppose so. What are you doing for a drummer?’

  ‘Got to take old Fred—that doesn’t matter, but the recording does. There’s money in it for me. We can’t afford to fuck up now, because of Matthew. Look, can you get some of this stuff out of the way? I’m expecting Gascoyne at any moment.’

  He waved at the teacups, teapot in the fireplace, doll’s pram and blankets littering the room.

  Polly began to clear up. Get Clancy out. Gascoyne coming. Holland the day after tomorrow. Woodland Storybook due. Playgroup duty tomorrow. Max coming on Friday.

  ‘Is it Maurice Burns I go to about Clancy?’

  ‘That’s it. Oh—while I’m gone, people may start ringing about the campaign. Just take messages and say I’ll be gone a fortnight, no longer. I’ll be back on the Saturday.’

  ‘Saturday’, Polly muttered. ‘What campaign?’

  ‘The campaign to legalize dope—that’s what Gascoyne’s coming about. Where’s my stash? He’s an incredible pothead.’

  ‘You left it in the tea caddy—you know, the place the fuzz look first’, Polly said. ‘You mean you and Gascoyne, MP and others are starting a campaign to legalize pot?’

  ‘I don’t think you ever listen to me. There’s me, Gascoyne, a couple of other Labour MPs and Sir Martin Redd, the actor, various magistrates, Dame Mary Tarbutt, various novelists and playwrights, do-gooders, progressive sound-makers, left-wing doctors, all the odds and sods and the like. There’ll be an Albert Hall rally, big march to the Home Office—all that, nothing’s worked out yet. All between now and Christmas. Gascoyne’s put down a Private Member’s Bill.’

  ‘Phew’, said Polly. ‘You do realize that next science fiction novel is due this June.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. Make us a cup of tea when you take those things down, will you? If you read Gorilla properly you’d see what it’s all about.’

  Passing with the doll’s pram, blankets and teapot Polly picked up a copy of Gorilla from a large bale lying near the front door, tucked it under her arm, picked up the teapot again and went downstairs.

  She put the kettle on and opened Gorilla, wondering why she bothered with all this garbage of doll’s prams, MPs, magazines, campaigns, lavatory cleaning, breakfast, dinner, tea. Better to hit the road the way she used to, in a sweater and jeans and a pound or two in her pocket. Why not zing along the motorways high up in the cab of a truck to Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff, drink cups of tea and listen to the jukebox in trannies, sausage, egg and chips, sleep in the cab of the truck, wake with the lights still strung out in front of her, stand in the rain, wanting to move on, bang on doors at two, four, in the morning, crash out on floors, wake with a stale taste in your mouth, aching, with people stepping over you to go to work, not knowing where you were going next.

  ‘Blimey, that’s libellous’, she thought.

  Holding the magazine in her hand she went to the door and shouted, ‘Alexander! This is libellous!’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It’s libellous, Alexander.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to get done for libel.’

  He came to the top of the stairs.

  ‘It’s libellous, Alexander. You know that. I wonder the printer printed it. This Lord Bec must be filing a suit this minute. What are you going to do?’

  ‘He won’t see it.’

  ‘People always see libellous things’, she said.

  ‘I’ll print a retraction.’

  ‘He may not stand for it. Look—para one, various cases of people getting busted for pot, sentencing anomalies, etc. Paras two, three etc—pot is good for you. Then paras eighteen and nineteen, all this about how this guy Bec got his money, bankruptcy, hushed-up scandals.’

  ‘I know Polly, I know. I wrote it. Make us some tea.’

  She made the tea. He stood in the kitchen and drank it.

  ‘How did you find out all this?’

  ‘From that old school friend, Jo. He’s a banker.’

  ‘Look, Alexander. He could be prosecuted if some of this is true. His dealings as an undischarged bankrupt, for a start.’

  ‘All the more reason for him to keep his mouth shut’, Alexander said.

  ‘All we need is a good libel suit, on top of everything else’, she said bitterly. ‘Anyway what have you got against him?’

  ‘He’s leading the campaign against us, isn’t he?’

  ‘As far as I can see,’ she said, ‘for a financier his career hasn’t been that bad. The three months dealing as an undischarged bankrupt ten years ago, and after all, he was in the process of paying his debts. The bankruptcy itself was caused by his partner absconding—you could argue he was more stupid than guilty. Then he’s clean except for this dodgy business of the tips from Government ministers, which is all part of the game, after all. And all this stuff about his shares in exploitive tea companies, tin mines and so forth—well, there’s no law against it. I mean,’ she said, ‘he’s obviously a case-hardened capitalist and he doesn’t give a bugger where it comes from or how it’s got as long as he can stuff it in his pocket. But, so what? And, anyway, it’s
got nothing to do with dope.’

  For Alexander the kitchen filled with Polly’s hard remorseless voice, like some seventeenth century cleric going over the seven main points of Divine Love in a white stock, white hands on the pulpit. He thought about dope, transformer, relaxer, donor of visions.

  ‘What a pain you are’, he sighed. ‘Have I got any clean sweaters? It’s bound to be cold in the Low Countries.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘have you looked?’

  ‘I thought you could pack for me. Coming to the gig tonight?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘If you can spring Clancy in time, send him to Holland. I’ll give you the gig sheet. Are you sure he’s all right?’

  ‘No’, she said. ‘He’s so full of the dope they’ve given him, you can’t tell.’

  ‘Oh—he’ll be all right.’

  The twins came in, falling over their doll’s prams.

  Lady Clarissa came in, just as Polly was drinking another cup of tea and screwing wingnuts on to the hood of the green one.

  ‘Out of sight’, she said. ‘Polly, you’re like a whirlwind.’

  Polly ignored the implied reproach.

  ‘Have a cup of tea, Clara’, she said.

  ‘Did you see Clancy?’ she said greedily.

  ‘Mm’, she said.

  ‘Will he be out soon?’

  ‘If I go to see Burns. Maybe I should go today.’

  ‘Right’, said Lady Clarissa. ‘He must be something, Clancy.’

  ‘Something else’, Polly agreed.

  ‘You were kids together then?’ Lady Clara asked. The dead white tips of her fingers seemed to be probing Polly all over, looking for the sensitive spots, trying to poke out the information that would help her catch Clancy.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Was he always so weird?’

  ‘There wasn’t anything weird about him then and I don’t think there is now. He’s just one of your run-of-the-mill selfish sods.’

  ‘Talented though’, murmured star-fucker Clara dreamily.

  Well, Polly thought. Everyone was a something-fucker. Star-fuckers hung round stars, some people liked hairy men, bald men, there were cripple-fuckers, and nice-men fuckers just hung around nice men. You couldn’t blame Clara, who dreamt of having Jimi Hendrix before he died the way other people dreamt of what would have happened if they hadn’t just missed winning the pools or passing the eleven-plus. She saw the gangs of chicks in their trailing second-hand velvets and silks, trailing shawls, trailing hair, forever on their knees, cleaning up, rolling joints, plating, sitting on the floor sewing patches on faded jeans, tuning guitars, cooking up macrobiotic foods, looking after babies dressed in matted clothes from Oxfam, talking together in corners while their lovers played, smoked, got it together. The white niggers of the underground, squaws to the counter-culture.

  ‘I suppose you got it together when you were teenagers’, Clara insisted.

  ‘Clancy’s teens were spent in a very clean detached suburban home, drumming continuously upstairs in a bedroom with a ruffled bedspread and a picture of Elvis on the wall, and his mother shouting upstairs to cut it out because her friends were coming for coffee. He’s just like every wild, mad freaked-out musician you’ve ever spent a wild, mad freaked-out dirty weekend in a grotty room in Kensal Rise with. When he flung off his great big belt and boots and propped his guitar in the corner, couldn’t you see young Michael, Peter, John the bad lad of Adelaide Avenue in 1963, the one playing Love Me Do late into the night and annoying the neighbours? Blimey, Clara sometimes you remind me of some teenybopper on Top of the Pops. I suppose it comes of being brought up among a lot of haw-haws and Georgian silver in a big house in the country. Still, there you are.’

  Nothing of this meant anything to Clara, who, ignorant of everything in the world except sexual nuances said, ‘You and Clancy may get it together again—’

  Ulla Helander came in, heavily beaded and made up.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Polly. Alexander asked me if I would make a cup of tea. He said you were seeing Maurice Burns.’

  ‘The kettle’s on the stove’, Polly said neutrally, adding, to be friendly and show she didn’t care, ‘chocolate biscuits in a tin on the table.’

  Ulla put the kettle on and said, ‘Polly, about last night. I hope you weren’t upset. I know you and Alexander aren’t making it.’

  ‘Let me get on with mending this fucking doll’s pram’, Polly said.

  She took Pamela and Sue to Maurice Burns’s office. The doomed solicitor worked in a high building in Bloomsbury, in a Dickensian lawyer’s office filled with old legal tomes, bursting legal papers tied with ribbon and all wreathed in a dense pea-souper of marijuana.

  He spoke to her in a befogged manner while his clerk, a respectable family man, took down notes and asked the relevant questions.

  ‘Er, Polly,’ he said finally, ‘I guess we can get Clancy out, if you’ll guarantee to keep an eye on him. Right?’

  My son the lawyer, in his stained suit, joint smoking in the ashtray, eyes hollow with the knowledge of a thousand trips, stared at her.

  ‘Right’, she said.

  The children were undoing the ribbons on the papers now.

  ‘I’d better leave’, she said despairingly, last hope of manly support gone—husband, lawyer, perhaps the family doctor? ‘There, there, my dear. Take a holiday. Go away and forget everything for a fortnight.’ No, she even had an alternative GP, a scrip doctor who would give you speed for a broken leg and LSD for cancer.

  As she left, stuffing sweeties in the children’s mouths, Burns said, waving a document hazily in her direction, ‘Did Alexander say anything about this one?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Lord Bee’s solicitors are considering libel proceedings’, the clerk said.

  ‘Oh, Mr Robinson,’ Polly said, ‘I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll speak to your husband, Mrs Kops’, said Mr Robinson. ‘And speedily. They won’t wait. I suggest you advise him to print a retraction.’

  ‘Suppose he refuses?’

  ‘Lord Bec has a strong case. It appears that some of the information your husband printed was not merely damaging, but false.’

  ‘Oh Christ. I knew it’, Polly said.

  ‘Damages would almost certainly be awarded against him in court.’

  ‘Oh, Christ’, Polly said.

  Burns looked at her from brown, deep-sea eyes.

  ‘Nasty one’, he said, judicially.

  Hundreds of white arms rose from the dark sea of the audience, waving, trying to attract attention. On stage Blockade sweated, played, went into a continued madness. An hour and a half now in the heat and noise.

  ‘Can you get them to stop?’ the anxious dancehall manager said. ‘There’s a guy having an epileptic fit out front.’

  No one in the darkness on the side of the stage answered.

  ‘Turn off the strobes?’ he asked desperately.

  The chicks were continually walking up the steps to the side of the stage and being turned back. Below, in the darkness a voice raved, was calmed, the district nurse made a splint out of rolled-up newspapers and string. A roadie hauled an amplifier up the steps, said above the noise, ‘Polly. Can you go down to the dressing-room? There’s a chick there thinks she’s having a baby.’

  She went along concrete corridors to the little concreted dressing-room with its dirty washbasin. A girl writhed on the floor.

  Ulla Helander said, ‘I think she’s tripping out.’

  Another girl said, ‘She doesn’t look pregnant.’

  The girl, very young, writhed and cried out, ‘It’s coming. My baby’s coming.’

  ‘This is freaking me out’, someone declared, and left.

  ‘Oh, it hurts. It’s coming. My baby’s coming’, cried the girl, twisting on the concrete.

  Polly held her hand. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, Christ. It hurts. It hurts.’

  Pol
ly shook her head. ‘I don’t think so’, she said to no one.

  ‘Is my sister here?’ cried a child coming through the door in a mini skirt, her long skinny twelve year old’s legs ending in giant clogs. ‘Sandra! Sandra! It’s Judy.’

  Polly met her eyes across the body. ‘She says she’s having a baby.’

  The girl cried out, ‘The head is coming. The head is coming!’

  ‘No, no. She can’t be. Oh—what’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Is she even pregnant?’

  ‘No. She’s never—what’s happened to her? Sandra, Sandra, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Bad acid’, Ulla Helander said, and left.

  ‘I think she’s having a bad trip’, Polly said. ‘You should get her to hospital, anyway, if there’s no one to take care of her.’ She added, ‘There’s an ambulance coming. Perhaps we can get her on it.’

  The girl shouted, ‘Be born, be born, bastard, cunt, fuck—’ and together they hauled her along the passages to the back door. The band came past them dripping with sweat, tired, rubbing themselves with towels like footballers after a match.

  On the way back to London they all dropped some acid themselves. Polly, Long Tall Timmy and Toddy walked about all night in golden streets where gods came out of dustbins, the trees danced and the stars were big as moons.

  She came back in time for a cup of tea just as her mother arrived, greying, leading a gleaming Max, his face ruddy as the sun, his hair burning round his head.

  Mrs Turnbull was irritated by Polly’s intense staring at the boy.

  ‘Get on with the breakfasts, Polly’, she said sharply. Polly felt the pain of childhood.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Mum,’ she said gently.

  Mrs Turnbull sighed and turned her head slightly away from her child.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it’s all far, far beyond me. In my opinion, Polly, you’ve been taking drugs. I don’t know why you feel the need to live like this, or what you get out of it. It’s beyond all reason. You have enough to do, bringing up your children, your children’s books—at very least you’ll destroy a sound constitution, at worst—well, I tremble to think of it.’

  ‘It’s only like having a few drinks’, Polly said, talking down the burning Max, the two children who came running in in their pyjamas, the sunshine coming in from the fairyland garden outside.