‘I’m not even slightly interested in that chick.’
‘Oh, I believe you man, if you say so, of course.’
Ronson was dragging now, but still hadn’t paid me any money. I touched on his arm and gently held out my hand.
‘Will you take one of these instead?’ he asked me.
They were pawn tickets for various articles. All city Spades hold pawn tickets, and if the man’s honest they’re quite as good as money, often better if you can get them with the discount. I took my pick.
‘And Hamilton,’ said Ronson Lighter. ‘How does he keep?’
‘Bad. He’s using all his dope allowance now, not selling any. Even buying more of that poison whenever he can.’
Ronson lowered down his voice. ‘You know who put him on the needle and supplied him? It was that “Nat King” Cole.’
I said to Ronson: ‘Was it only Cole who did this injury to my friend? No one else you know of who was the person?’
‘Who else could it be, man? No one else.’
‘I thought maybe you could tell me who.’
Ronson was silent. ‘No man, not me,’ he said.
By now my brother Arthur had detected me, and over he came, as happy as a smiling hyena. ‘How’s Muriel?’ was how he greeted me.
‘She’s well.’
‘Ma’s told the Law you’ve taken her.’
‘She’s not under sixteen, is she?’
‘She’s a minor, brother, in need of care and protection. Ma wants her sent off to a home.’ Now he approached me closer. ‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘do something for me. Lend me loot.’
‘You spent all that which you took away from Mrs Macpherson?’
He smiled at me some more: I grew to hate that smile. ‘All gone,’ he said. ‘The gamble-house way, like you did. It sure goes so fast away in there.’
‘You get no more from this side of the family, Arthur.’
‘Listen, now,’ he said. ‘I see you’s selling weed. I’d like I go partners with you. I’d get you customers.’
‘Thanks, brother. I prefer I operate alone.’
‘You’re wasted, Johnny. No good to me at all.’
I saw the human being called Alfy Bongo standing just behind me. ‘What can I do for you, mister?’ I said nasty.
He answered me in a great whisper, with a lot of winks. ‘They tell me you’ve got some stuff.’
‘I don’t like your face,’ I said to him. ‘And if you speak to me again without you’re spoken to, they’ll have to send you into some hospital or other.’
This didn’t seem to be my lucky day for gay society, because the next person who accosted me was no one less but a well-known idiot from back home called Ibrahim Tondapo, a thoroughly gilded youth who, just because his dad owns two small cinemas that regularly catch on fire and burn up portions of the audience, allowed himself in Lagos great airs of class distinction, earning hatred and laughter everywhere around. He looked at me up and down and shook his body in his expensive suit as if he was shivering cold water off it. So ‘Hullo, chieftain,’ I said to him. ‘How is each one of your six mothers?’ (this being a reference to his not knowing really who his mother was, because his dad is volatile, and he quite unlike any of his brothers.)
At which this foolish man spat on the floor.
I ought not to have said what I did, of course, but nor ought he to spit – is an unhealthy habit. So I slapped him on his face, and a fight began, and I was seized on by eight people and thrown out through the doors. Stupid behaviour, with my pockets stuffed with weed, but poverty and misery cause you to act desperately, as all know.
‘You and I,’ I shouted back at Tondapo through the door, ‘will meet each other shortly once again.’
Out in the street, the boys were charging in the light of day, a habit dangerous in this city, where now the notable sweet smell of this strong stuff is well known to curious nostrils. So I crossed the road to where some builders were erecting a new construction, and among them I was surprised to see a tall West Indian toiling, one that I’d known in gamble-houses in my prosperous days. We gazed at each other quite politely, and he came over to say his word to me.
‘Just look at me,’ he said. ‘A member of the labouring classes.’
‘If a brick falls on your head, man, you’ll certainly go straight up to heaven for this honest labour.’
‘Yes, man, that’s authentic. But wouldn’t I much rather be sitting there in the Sphere consuming Stingo beer or something of that nature.’
‘You’re Mr Tamberlaine,’ I said to him. ‘I see you round some time ago, you may remember. Introducing people one to the other was your speciality.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly so. Pimping about the city, as you might call it, if you wanted to.’ And he gave me his harmonious smile.
‘And that’s all over now, that kind of business?’
‘Oh, no. I’m still in the market in the evenings, but find it prudent, don’t you see, to have some part-time occupation in the days to justify my movements and existence if there’s any police enquiries.’
‘Wise, man. You’s real educated.’
‘There’s something,’ he said, ‘as might interest you at a party taking place this evening, which is an exhibition by some boys from Haiti that I know of their special voodoo practices. So if your luck’s not all you’ve been aspiring to, you’ve only to come and ask them for their kind assistance to alternate your fate.’
While I said yes, that I’d accept this invitation, Ronson Lighter called to me from the public house. ‘This seaman’s here,’ he shouted out. ‘This Laddy Boy.’
He was a muscle man, this individual, his arms like legs, his legs like elephants’, and with a lot of rings and gold teeth and a happy look about him that these strong men have, especially when they’re loaded up with loot, as merchant seamen always seem to be. He gave me the note from Peach, which, when I opened it, said this to me:
Macdonald, what is this we hear? Bad news has reached us, by boys returning home, that you have engaged yourself with evil company, and thrown away money that Dad gave you, and broken the sequence of your serious studies. Dad says, ‘He’ll find his feet.’ But I do not believe this, nor does Mum, and she will send you the fare home (paid to care of the travel company, not in cash to you), if you agree that is what’s sensible to do, which our brother Christmas also thinks it is. Be wise, Johnny, and return among your own people for all our sakes that love you as you know we do.
I tell you, your younger sister Peach is worried. And if you do not return home before New Year, let me tell you of my intentions. They are to come out to England there, to train as nurse, which full enquiries prove can be arranged. And if I do, you know you will have me watching you each second I am not on duty, which will make you ashamed of yourself before the other men.
But come back freely, Johnny. It would be so much better for us all.
Dad says he thank you for what you discover of those Macpherson people. He has done what he can and will do no more at all.
Mum adds: a cable, and you have the fare home in a fortnight.
Your sister, and you have no other,
Peach.
‘You saw my sister?’ I asked Laddy Boy.
‘Your family entertained me very kindly, Johnny, at your home.’
‘They’re all of them well back there?’
‘They’re well, man, but a little worrying about you. You know why. Is not my business, countryman, but you know why … You take a drink?’
‘I’m barred inside that pub.’
‘Not with me, you’re not, man, no. You’re not barred in any public house that I go into.’
He took me inside, and there was no more reference to my recent wild behaviour. While I sipped my drink, I thought quite deeply. Yes, home would be beautiful again, but surely my duty was to try to rescue myself by my own efforts before seeking family aid?
In the nearby bar, I saw Montgomery talking with Larry the GI. This gave me a new idea of h
ow to raise some loot quickly in a last attempt, before throwing in my sponge and going back to Lagos tail between the legs.
I went to the phone box and asked for the radio corporation of the BBC, and for Miss Theodora Pace. After some secretaries, her voice came clear over the line towards me.
‘Miss Theodora, this is Johnny Fortune.’
‘Oh. One minute, please.’ I heard some mutter, and a door close. ‘Yes, how are you? What can I do for you?’
‘You remember those radio talks we spoke about, Miss Theodora? With me as possible performer in them?’
‘Yes … Why’ve you not contacted me again?’
‘Oh, there have been things, you know, so many. But this is to say I’m willing now, though there is one stipulation I should like to ask about.’
‘Yes?’
‘Would your officials consider a small payment in advance? Of twenty pounds?’
I knew, of course, that this was asking Theodora for the loot, but it seemed a way of doing so that could satisfy both our dignities.
‘When do you want it?’
‘Today. The soonest would be the best.’
There was quite a pause here before she said: ‘I dare say that could be arranged. Come to the building, and ask for me at Reception, please.’
The Sphere was now closing for the afternoon, and the Spades were scattering all over town on their various errands, from this their daily joint collecting-point. I went off myself quite quietly, without telling Montgomery of my personal intentions.
5
The southern performers at the Candy Bowl
Though Larry the GI had been wonderfully entertaining (telling me of how it was back home in Cleveland, Ohio, with Pop and Mom and his six young brothers, including the one who was in love with horses), I began to miss Johnny; and explored all the Sphere’s bar cubicles, until I met Ronson Lighter, and learnt he’d already left. These sudden disappearances I was by now used to, so I went back to Larry and suggested we both have lunch. ‘Man, here’s no food,’ he answered. ‘So why don’t we go down to the Candy Bowl?’
He said this was the club most preferred by coloured Americans, and he told me he had two swell southern friends of his he’d like to have me meet – performers in the Isabel Cornwallis ballet company, now visiting the city, and stirring up a deal of excitement in balletic and concentric circles.
How little one ever knows of one’s home town! I’d been in that courtyard a dozen times, but never sensed the presence of the Candy Bowl: which, it is true, looked from outside like an amateur sawmill, but once through its doors, and past a thick filter of examining attendants, it was all peeled chromium and greasy plush, with dim pink and purple lights, and strains of drum and guitar music from the basement. GIs, occasionally in uniform, but mostly wearing suits of best English material and of best transatlantic cut, lounged gracefully around, draped on velours benches, or elegantly perched upon precarious stools.
Sitting at a table by the wall, writing letters, were two boys in vivid Italian sweaters. ‘That’s the pair of them,’ said Larry, ‘ – Norbert and Moscow. Norbert you’ll find highly strung, but he’s quite a guy. Moscow’s more quiet, a real gentleman.’ We drew near to their table. ‘I want you to know my good friends Norbert Salt and Moscow Gentry,’ Larry said. ‘Boys, this is Montgomery Pew.’
Norbert Salt had a golden face you could only describe as radiant: candidly delinquent, and lit with a wonderful gaiety and contentment. His friend Moscow Gentry’s countenance was so deep in hue that you wondered his white eyes and teeth weren’t dyed black by all the surrounding blue-dark tones: a face so obscure, it was even hard to read his changes of expression.
‘Montgomery,’ said Larry, ‘is mightily interested in the ballay.’ (Not so: I’ve never been able to take seriously this sad, prancing art.)
‘I’ve not seen your show yet,’ I told them, ‘but I look forward immensely to doing so.’
They gazed at me with total incredulity. Clearly, anybody who’d not yet seen their show was nobody. ‘If you wish it,’ said Moscow Gentry, ‘we’d be happy to offer you seats for the first house this evening.’
‘Alternatively,’ said Norbert Salt, ‘we could let you and Larry view a rehearsal of our recital if you’d care to.’
‘Man,’ said Larry, ‘that’s something you certainly should not miss. If these boys don’t shake you in your stomach, then I’ll know you’re a dead duck anyway.’
I asked them about Miss Cornwallis and her balletic art.
‘Cornwallis,’ said Norbert, ‘isn’t pleased with the British this trip so very much. Two years back when we were here, we tore the place wide open, and business, as you know, was fabulous. But this time there’s empty seats occasionally, and that doesn’t please Cornwallis one little bit.’
‘She’s having to kill chickens once again in her hotel bedroom,’ said Moscow Gentry.
Even Larry didn’t quite get this.
Norbert Salt explained. ‘Cornwallis believes in voodoo, even though she’s a graduate of some university or other in the States. So when business isn’t what it might be, well, she gets her Haitian drummers to come round to her hotel and practise rituals that bring customers crowding to the box office.’
‘And it works?’
‘Man, yes, it seems to. At lease, it’s not failed to do so yet.’
‘And is Miss Cornwallis’s style Haitian, then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no – she choreographs a cosmopolitan style,’ said Norbert. ‘Being herself Brazilian by birth, and internationally educated by her studies and her travels, her art’s a blend of African and Afro-Cuban, with a bit of classical combined. It makes for a dance that’s accessible to cultured persons on every civilised continent.’
‘And has your art been well received in Europe?’
‘In Rome-Italy and Copenhagen-Denmark,’ Norbert told me, ‘we found they still liked us this trip as particularly as before. But as for here, I guess with all your thoughts of war you British haven’t so much time for spiritual things.’
‘Our thoughts of war?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Moscow Gentry. ‘You English people are constantly crazy about war.’
‘Besides which,’ said his friend Norbert, ‘you don’t appreciate the artistry of what we do. In Rome or Copenhagen, or even Madrid-Spain, we get all the top people at our recitals. But here, it’s only the degenerates who really like us.’
‘Can you fill a theatre in this city with degenerates for several weeks?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Norbert Salt.
‘Well,’ I told him, nettled, ‘you should be thankful to our degenerates for not thinking about war as you say the others do.’
‘We don’t thank anyone, sir. We perform, that’s all, and if they like us, then they pay. We don’t have to thank them for patronising an entertainment that they’re willing to pay for.’
I offered them a drink: they took lemon squash and tonic water. ‘And this rehearsal,’ I enquired. ‘It takes place soon?’
‘It takes place,’ said Norbert, looking at a gold watch two inches wide, ‘in forty minutes from this moment. I guess we should all be going to the theatre. In the Cornwallis company, we’re always dead on time.’
The two young Americans made a royal progress down the streets that lay between the Candy Bowl and the Marchioness Theatre: catching the eyes of the pedestrians as much by the extravagance of their luminous sweaters and skin-tight slacks as by the eloquence of their bodily gyrations, shrill voices and vivid gesticulations; and did anyone fail to look at them, his conquest was effected by their bending down suddenly in front of him or her to adjust an enamelled shoe, so that the recalcitrant bowler-hatted or tweed-skirted natives found themselves curiously obstructed by an exotic, questioning behind.
There was some opposition to our entry at the stage door – which was manned (as these doors are) by a person who would have been disagreeable even to Sir Henry Irving. But his rude rudeness was outmanoeuvred by an abrupt and d
evastating display of bitchiness by our two hosts. ‘These ain’t no stage-door gumshoes, they’re my friends,’ hissed Norbert, after an ultimate nasty salvo. He led us past the doorman’s corpse to a narrow lift of the alarming kind that receives you on one side and ejects you on the other. Norbert and Moscow preceded us along a clanging concrete corridor to their dressing-room, where they immediately stripped naked, and started painting their faces and bodies in improbable jungle hues. ‘The number we’re rehearsing’s African,’ said Moscow. ‘Cornwallis wasn’t pleased with our performance of last evening, and she’s called this rehearsal to get us in the ripe primeval mood.’
‘Come and meet the girls,’ said Norbert, and, still in nothing but his paint, he stepped down the corridor, and flung open the door of a larger dressing-room in which a dozen resplendent coloured girls were gilding the lilies of their beauty. He passed rapidly from one to the other, fondling each with gestures of jovial obscenity, and capering at times to the music of a portable radio they had. ‘Say hullo to Louisiana,’ he called out to us from a far corner. ‘Boys, this is Louisiana Lamont, our ingénue.’
She was a succulent girl with radiant eyes that positively shone. She smiled at Larry and me as if we were the two men in the world she’d most been waiting for, and said, ‘My, ain’t you both quite a size.’
‘Just average,’ said Larry, who was gigantic.
‘Louisiana is our baby,’ Norbert told us. ‘She’s just turned seventeen and she shouldn’t really be travelling outside her country yet.’
‘Why, Norbert! Where I come from, we’s married at twelve years old – that was the age my mom had me at. Why, honey, we’s grandmothers before we’re your age.’ She offered us some sponge fingers from a paper bag. ‘I do appreciate your British confectionery,’ she said to me.
‘Together with marmalade, meat sauces, and some cheeses,’ I answered, ‘biscuits are the only thing we make that’s fit to eat.’
Louisiana paused in the biting of the sponge. ‘Why, Montgomery!’ she cried out in amaze. ‘You said that just like an Englishman.’
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