City of Spades

by Colin MacInnes

  ‘They spat in your eyes and you enjoyed it, Mr Old-timer.’

  ‘You go spoil everything. You give me some weed.’

  ‘Blow, man. Go ask your white friends for it.’

  After Mahomed’s sodden chicken, we walked down the Immigration Road, Peter Pay Paul holding his weed packets in his hands constantly inside his overcoat pockets as these weed peddlers do, ready to ditch them at the slightest warning.

  ‘I must cut out of this weed racket soon, Johnny,’ he said. ‘No one lasts more than three months or so, because the Law puts the eye on you before too long goes by.’

  ‘How will you live, man, if you give it up?’

  ‘There’s the lost-property racket, but there’s not much loot in that … You go round lost-property offices asking for briefcases, say, or gold-topped umbrellas, and claiming the nicest object you can see.’

  ‘They give them to you without any proof?’

  ‘You speak some very bad English, and act ignorant and helpless to them, when they ask for explanations. They end by yielding up some article which then you can sell … If only I could get a camera from them, though.’

  ‘To take street photograph?’

  Peter Pay Paul stopped and laughed.

  ‘Man,’ he said, taking me by the scarf, ‘you’re crazy. No. Hustling with Jumble queers. You get yourself picked up by them, taken home, then photograph them by flashlight in some dangerous condition and sell them the negative for quite a price. Or sell a print and keep the negative for future use … Or else beat them up and rob them, but that’s dangerous, because sometimes they turn round and fight you back …’ Peter walked on again. ‘No, straightest of all, man, is finding sleeping accommodation and company for GIs, or buying cheap the goods they get from PX stores, but for this you need quite a capital. Best of all, of course, is poncing on some woman, but I haven’t got the beauty enough for that. Why don’t you try it, Johnny?’

  ‘My sex life is not for sale.’

  ‘Ah, well …’

  We turned down a side street through an alleyway into a big empty warehouse. We climbed up some wooden steps, and Peter Pay Paul knocked on a three-locked door.

  ‘Say who!’ a voice cried inside.

  ‘Peter, man. Let me in.’

  The door opened two inches, and we saw an eye. ‘And this?’ said the voice behind the eye.

  ‘My good friend Fortune, out of Lagos. Let us both in.’ And he whispered to me: ‘A Liberian – beware of him.’

  This wholesale weed peddler was a broad-chested cripple, who dragged his legs when he moved about the room, never keeping ever still. His eyes were very brown-shot inside their purple rings.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Ruby,’ said Peter Pay Paul. ‘Perhaps I could introduce you a new customer.’

  3

  Pew and Fortune go back west

  I meandered about Limehouse docks an hour or more before I realised that Indian had made a fool of me: there was no Rawalpindi Street. So I walked back, through the ships’ masts and abandoned baroque churches of Shadwell, in the direction of the Immigration Road. On the corner of a bombed site, surviving by the special providence that loves brewers, I found a pub called the Apollo Tavern. Coloured men inside were dancing softly with morning lassitude, and behind the counter there was an amiable Jew. I asked him for a Guinness, and he said: ‘One Guinness stout, right, I thank you, okey-doke, here it is, one and four, everything complete.’ His wife, if she was, a grim-faced Gentile, gazed at me with the rude appraisal only women give.

  I sat down. A voice said: ‘So you’s come movinx into this areas of London eastern populations?’

  It was the Bushman. I shook his hand. ‘And how is your instrument?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sold, man. Bisnick is bads juss at this mominx.’

  ‘I, too, have been unfortunate of late. This doesn’t seem to be our lucky month.’

  There was a gentle tap on my shoulder, and a black hand protruded holding two double whiskies in its fingers. ‘Who are these for?’ I asked the Bushman.

  ‘For you, man, and for me.’

  ‘But who is this kind person?’

  ‘Is my tribesmans. He offer some drinks to his sief’s son and to his sief’s son’s friend.’

  I turned and looked round. The donor was joining three others, all neatly dressed, who raised their glasses politely to the Bushman.

  ‘But who are they, Mr Bushman?’

  ‘I tells you: is my tribesmans. I come to this Immigrasions Roats for some tribal tributes. Here they will pay some offerinx to their sief’s son.’

  The Bushman caught me eyeing his soiled and greasy clothes.

  ‘Soon they will takes me out to eat him foots,’ he said, ‘and make me comfortables and give me presinx. Stay, now, and you will enjoy them toos.’

  ‘But why don’t you speak to them, Mr Bushman?’

  ‘When I reaty, I spik to them. They waits for me. Then I spik.’

  The offer of liquor was repeated several times. After the third double, I gave up. ‘Your father,’ I said, ‘must be a very powerful man.’

  He grunted with satisfaction. ‘And one day I. Then I invites you to my jungle home, and you stays with us for evers.’

  ‘I look forward immensely to it.’

  ‘Stay with us for evers, or we puts you in a pot.’

  ‘I’m bony – only good for soup.’

  ‘All him sames, we eats you as special favour.’

  ‘Thank you so very much. Goodbye now, my kind friend.’

  The Bushman shrieked with laughter, and, as I went out, I saw the tribesmen approach him with deferential smiles.

  Possessed now by that early morning drunkard’s feeling which suspends time by making all time worthless, and gives the daylight a false flavour of the dark, I sauntered up the Immigration Road. A girl’s voice hailed me from a ground-floor window. It was Johnny Fortune’s young friend Muriel.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, opening the door, ‘I want to speak with you.’

  Muriel was cooking something cabbagey. The boy Hamilton was snoring on a bed. She wiped her hands on her skirt, told me to sit down, and gave me a cup of very sweet thick tea.

  ‘Johnny will be coming in for his dinner,’ she said, ‘and I know he’d like to see you.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been looking for him. He lives here now?’

  ‘Yes, here with me. I work round the corner, and cook him all his meals.’

  ‘And Hamilton?’

  ‘Hamilton has no room just now, so he’s staying here.’

  She sat down too, and leant across the oil-cloth. ‘Can’t you do something to help Johnny?’

  ‘In what way, Muriel?’

  ‘With money.’

  ‘Surely he has some …’

  ‘It’s all been spent.’

  ‘Oh. Can’t he work?’

  ‘Johnny won’t work for less than twenty pounds a week. I tell him only clever men get those jobs, and he says he is a clever man. But he doesn’t get one …’

  ‘I could lend him something …’

  She stirred a cup. ‘If only we could get married,’ she said. ‘I’d help him in any job he wanted.’

  ‘Can’t you get married?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to.’

  She began to cry. Women are so immodest in their grief. Even when you don’t care for a woman much, to see her misery openly expressed is painful.

  ‘These boys are all the same,’ she said. ‘Never anything fixed or steady, they just drift …’

  There was a clatter at the door, and in came Johnny with Mr Peter Pay Paul.

  A change had come over Johnny Fortune. His body still had its animal grace and insouciance, but his face wore at times a slanting, calculating look. And though the charm was as great as ever, he was more conscious of it than before. He greeted me with what seemed genuine affection.

  ‘Where have you hidden yourself, Johnny?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, times have been difficult, man. And with you? Y
ou look sharp – real smart!’ And he fingered my third-best suit.

  ‘With me, times have been disastrous.’ And I told him about my exit from the Welfare Office.

  ‘That is one big pity,’ he said gravely, ‘because I thought perhaps you could help me with some new business.’

  ‘What is it? Perhaps I can.’

  ‘Come on one side.’

  He led me over to the window, though he stood away from view of the street in the half light.

  ‘This pack,’ he said, pulling a large oblong piece of newspaper from inside his shirt, ‘is wholesale weed. Five pounds’ worth, which I can sell in small packs for ten to twenty pounds if I can find five pounds now for Peter Pay Paul.’

  ‘Here they are, Johnny. Are you going to earn your living that way?’

  ‘Thank you, man. Well, what else can I do? I know no trade, no business …’

  ‘Wouldn’t your father send you money?’

  ‘No, Montgomery, I cannot tell my dad my loot is gone and that I’m not studying meteorology. Also, he has sent loot at my request to Muriel’s mother. But my brother Arthur, so I hear, has stolen it away from her …’

  ‘Perhaps the time’s coming, Johnny, when you should think of going home.’

  ‘Not till I make some fortune from this city, man. To go empty-handed home would be my shame.’

  He gave the notes to Peter Pay Paul and, after removing a handful of weed, pushed the paper package up the chimney.

  ‘And how is Miss Theodora?’

  ‘Missing you, Johnny.’

  Muriel heard this.

  ‘She’d better keep on missing him.’

  ‘Who spoke to you, Muriel?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to give me some of that money? How do you think we’ll live?’

  ‘Be silent, woman. Go on with your cookery.’

  ‘I’m not an African, Johnny. You can’t treat me like I’m a household slave.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Come, Montgomery,’ he said. ‘This woman troubles me with her yap, yap, chatter, chatter, chatter.’

  Muriel clutched his arm. ‘But don’t you want your dinner, Johnny? It’s all cooked.’

  ‘I have had chicken. Hamilton, wake up! We leave this sad East End to go up west.’

  But Hamilton kept snoring, and Muriel wept again into the steaming pot as we went out.

  4

  Coloured invasion of the Sphere

  Montgomery and me left Mr Peter Paul at the Aldgate station, and started the long bus ride through the City to the west. I chose the special seat which bus constructors made for those who smoke hemp (I mean the private seat, top floor at rear, which nobody can overlook), and there, while Montgomery grew more nervous, I folded up little saleable packets of my weed. ‘I must kick my heel free of this miserable life,’ I told Montgomery. ‘I must climb back again into prosperity.’

  ‘You might marry a fat African lady whose father owns acres of groundnuts,’ he said to me.

  ‘Oh, I could do that, perhaps, you know. But I want to go back home well loaded from this city …’ I folded a little packet and said to him, ‘Has Miss Theodora money?’

  I saw he didn’t approve of this request of information, though a natural one, I thought, among two men.

  ‘She’s only her salary, I think,’ he told me. ‘But you mustn’t play about with Theodora’s feelings.’

  ‘Why not? She likes me – no?’

  ‘And you her?’

  ‘I could do, if it should prove necessary …’

  ‘I’d rather you ran a whore, like Billy, than do that. Business and no pretences …’

  What did my nice English friend know about that kind of life? ‘I may come to do just that,’ I said to him.

  ‘I hope you don’t mean it …’

  ‘This Dorothy pursues me some time now. Pestering and giving me no peace at all. She wishes to leave Billy, and for me to take possession.’

  ‘From what I can understand,’ Montgomery said, ‘it’s the woman who takes possession of the man. She can sell him down the river any day she likes.’

  Well, that was true enough from all I know of how those bad boys live – trembling, however brave, at every knock of the front door, and so afraid of the loot their women give them that they throw it all away in gamble-houses as soon as they’ve snatched it from her handbag. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘these whores are always masters of their ponces. One word to the Law, and the lucky boy’s inside.’

  Montgomery sat looking sad, like the Reverend Simpson. ‘I don’t like to think of you in that miserable world,’ he said.

  I smiled, and patted on his anxious back. ‘No real ill luck can come to me, Montgomery,’ I told him. ‘Look!’ And I opened my tieless shirt and showed him the wonderful little blue marks tattooed upon my skin by Mum’s old aunt, who knows the proper magic, and also the mission school badge I wear around my neck upon its chain. ‘These will protect me always,’ I explained.

  ‘You believe that, Johnny?’

  ‘So long as I believe it,’ I said to him, ‘they will protect me.’

  Though it was well after morning opening time when we reached the Moorhen public house, we were surprised to find it absent of any Spade. ‘There must have been some raid,’ I told Montgomery. But no. A strange old Jumble man he knew, who looked at me as if I wasn’t there, said all my race had left the pub and moved to another further down the road, one called the Sphere.

  ‘But why have they gone?’ Montgomery asked him.

  ‘Because they’ve shut the dance hall opposite – and high time too.’

  ‘The Cosmopolitan? Why did they do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Moral degeneracy,’ the old man said fiercely at me. ‘Didn’t you read it in your Sunday paper?’

  ‘Good heavens!’ I cried out. ‘Have these Jumbles no mercy on our enjoyment?’

  ‘This place is improved out of all recognition now,’ the nasty old man informed us.

  Dismal, dark, dreary, almost empty, I suppose that was improvement to his eyes.

  We found that this Sphere was a small pub divided into more segregated sections than is usual even in these English drinking dens. Boys flitted in and out from one box to the other, and the publican, I could see, was not used to our African habit, which is to treat such places like a club, with no dishonour to be there even if you have no loot to spend. The barman, a young boy with a face like cheese, seemed worried also; and as I held my lager beer, casting my eyes around, I spoke to him freely of his look of great mistrust.

  ‘But those lads over by the piano,’ he said to me. ‘They come in here for hours and never buy a thing.’

  ‘Why should they not? This is their meeting-place, for exchange of gossip, information, and other necessities of life.’

  ‘But if they come in here, then they should spend.’

  ‘Man,’ I explained, ‘you will find when they spend, they do spend. You will make more profit from them in one evening than of your bitter-sipping English customers in a whole week.’

  He seemed to doubt me. ‘The guv’nor tried turfing them all out at first,’ he said, ‘but he’s given up the struggle.’ He leant across the counter. ‘Tell me something,’ he went on. ‘You don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Speak, man. I listen.’

  ‘How do you tell which is which among you people?’

  ‘You mean we all look the same, like sheep?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I mean, which is African, and which is West Indian – all I can tell is the Yanks, and then only when they open up their mouths.’

  I shook my head at such enormous ignorance. ‘Do you know,’ I said to him, ‘my grandmother cannot tell any one Englishman from another?’ I left Montgomery with his whiskies, and went round into the larger bar to look for customers.

  And there I caught sight of many quite familiar faces: Ronson Lighter, playing the pin-table, and Larry the GI, and also my brother Arthur, who I was not all that pleased to talk to because of the theft of all tha
t loot my dad sent his mum, and also, lurking away in an evil corner underneath the stairways, that one-time champion boxer, Jimmy Cannibal.

  ‘What say, man,’ I said to Ronson Lighter. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘Well, look now, who’s here! Where you been hiding yourself, Mr Fortune? Somebody here’s been searching out for you.’

  ‘Called what?’

  ‘A seaman from back home who won’t tell his real name, but says just to call him Laddy Boy. He has a letter for you from your sister Peach.’

  ‘He’s in here now, this seaman?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed him around yet, but if he calls, I’ll hold him for you.’

  ‘Thank you, my man. And tell me now. I’m in business, Ronson Lighter, in this article,’ (and I showed him some). ‘You interested at all?’

  Ronson put his body so as to hide mine from the general view. ‘Be careful of that little white boy Alfy Bongo,’ he advised me. ‘He comes here to meet our African drummers, so he says, but I think he’s a queer boy, and you cannot trust them.’

  I looked at this blond and pimply creature, chatting and giggling to some West Indians, and I made a clear note of his skinny, feeble frame in my recollection.

  ‘I’ll take a stick or two,’ said Ronson Lighter.

  ‘Here, man. How’s our Billy?’

  ‘I’m worried about that man, Johnny, and so is he. He thinks the Law has got the eye on him real hard. The house is being watched, we know.’

  ‘Why should they turn the heat on Billy after all this time?’

  ‘Is averages, Johnny. Six months they turn you loose, then one month they turn the heat. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you’re next man on their Vice Department list, that’s all. Or perhaps somebody been talking. Cannibal, say.’ (And Ronson Lighter looked across at him.) ‘Or maybe even Dorothy.’

  ‘Not Dorothy?’

  ‘I don’t know why, man, but I believe this Dorothy plans to cut away from Billy, and she thinks the best way is to get him put inside. Perhaps,’ said Ronson, lighting up his charge, ‘it is because of you, who she prefers to Mr Whispers.’