by Timothy Lea
‘Going to take her home, are you?’
‘I was thinking about it,’ I say. ‘But there are nine of them in the flat. You know what it’s like? Her mum’s just come back from Nightingale Lane with another one.’
‘You find a lot of them down there,’ says Sid. ‘Ah well, sup up. No sense in being downcast about it. Women aren’t everything, are they?’
‘You’re right, Sid,’ I say, trying to sound as if I am putting a brave face on it. ‘There’s comradeship, isn’t there?’
‘A few pints of ale between friends. What could be better. Drink up, Tim lad. You don’t fancy a short, do you?’
I have never known Sid so full of the milk of human kindness. It is practically curdling in the face of the unexpected warmth. As I stand in the gents’ wondering why anyone should want to write ‘I had my sister in a pair of Wellington boots’ on the pebble dash wall — I mean, it is so difficult apart from anything else — I also chew over whether Sid is preparing himself for the key role he intends to play in the bedding business — I must say it does seem the right business for Sid.
I later learn that my naive faith in Sid’s good nature was misplaced. I have just helped Pearl — yes, that’s her name — remove something rather unpleasant from her shoe — those platform jobs don’t half spread it around — and the lights at the edge of the common are in sight when she starts moaning. ‘I’d have taken your friend’s offer if I’d known,’ she says. ‘Do you want your handkerchief back?’
‘You must be joking,’ I say. ‘What offer?’
‘He said he’d take me up west for a meal.’ Sid only meant West Clapham but it is still a better offer than I came up with. The crafty sod! No wonder he was keen to get up to the bar.
You can’t trust anyone can you?
‘He’s got a Rover 2000, hasn’t he?’
I decide to ignore this remark. ‘Lovely night, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘I do like a stroll.’
I don’t mind a stroll. It’s hiking I object to. You told me it was just round the corner.’
‘Once we get off the common it’s just round the corner.’ She is not exactly overdoing the pre-foreplay, this one. I hope I am not dooming myself to disappointment. It is distressing how white hot favourites can sometimes turn colder than last year’s Christmas pudding. There is no accounting for women.
‘Cut across here,’ I say. ‘Sorry mate.’ I am addressing the uppermost of the two people I have just tripped over. It is so dark once you get off the path. The bloke makes a strange grunting noise but I don’t think he is talking to me.
‘Disgusting!’ says Pearl. ‘Why did you have to bring me this way?’
‘It’s a short cut,’ I say, trying to steer her away from the bloke who is throwing up in the waste paper basket. ‘If we go — no.’ I don’t think that couple against the tree are studying lichen. Knickers! It is not exactly the best introduction to a night of wild passionate ecstasy. Most of these people seem to know each other rather better than we do.
By the time we get to 17 Scraggs Lane I am humming to keep my spirits up.
‘Is this it?’ says Pearl. She sounds as excited as some bird being fixed up with Frankenstein’s monster on a blind date. I know they don’t live in rude mud huts in Trinidad — polite mud huts at the worst of times — but I was not expecting to be taken to task for the family home.
‘These houses are very sought after in Putney,’ I say, quoting something that Mum is always saying.
‘It must have heard,’ says Pearl. ‘It’s leaning towards Putney.’
‘Very funny,’ I say, opening the front door and sticking my tongue out at Mrs Tanner, our new neighbour. She is always peering through her lace curtains and it drives me round the twist. Once I took Dad’s moose head round and tapped it against her front window and she had a police car on the door step in two and a half minutes flat. I had only just closed the back door behind me when I heard it screaming down the street. I wish I could have caught an earful of what she told them. They didn’t hang about for long. ‘Now, tell me, madam. Was there anything particularly distinctive about this moose? Anything you would remember if you saw him again?’
‘No officer. I’m afraid he was just like any other common or garden moose.’
‘It makes it very difficult for us, madam. Are you absolutely certain he had no distinctive features? Listen. I’m going to read you a list of things he might have been wearing in order to jog your memory: surgical truss, bowler hat, long pants — over the trousers. MCC blazer.’
‘Why are all these gas masks hanging in the hall?’ says Pearl. She sounds slightly frightened and very unimpressed.
‘My father collects things like that,’ I say. ‘He’s fascinated by anything to do with war.’
Pearl shudders. ‘Sounds unhealthy to me. What about the wooden legs?’
‘They came from North Staffordshire. We use them as firewood.’ That doesn’t sound very nice, does it? I wish Dad would nick a more superior class of article from the lost property office. It is difficult to explain the situation to visitors. They would never believe some of the things people leave on trains. Dad is like one of those Scavenger Beetles that goes around disposing of lumps of shit. He gets rid of the stuff that nobody claims. Society owes him a debt really.
‘Does the barometer wo —’
‘Don’t —’ Too late. The glass has fallen off again. People will keep tapping it. ‘It’s waiting to be mended. You didn’t see which way the hand went did you?’
It is difficult to see anything in the hall because after the cost of electricity went up again our wattage came down to a level which would cause complaints at a teenagers’ snogging party. You can hardly see your hand in front of somebody else’s tit. It does create rather a gloomy atmosphere and I can see that Pearl is having no difficulty in resisting the temptation to shout ‘Fiesta!’ and run round the front room with one of the plastic roses between her teeth.
‘Come into the drawing room,’ I say. I call it the drawing room because of some of the things my nephew Jason Noggett drew on the wall with his felt pencil — I don’t know where a child that age hears the words, really I don’t. Unfortunately they didn’t come off without smudging and this meant that the settee had to be moved against the wall to hide them. This liberated a large stain in the middle of the carpet and a pink latex brassiere which nobody claimed, neither of them. Sid said that Dad must have brought the bra home from the L.P.O. which didn’t go down very well. In order to cover the stain. Mum moved the fireside rug but this revealed all the scorch marks and holes where I had tried to pick out the pattern of the carpet with a red hot poker — of course, I was just a child at the time and I didn’t really know what I was doing — until the fire brigade arrived, that is. In the end, Dad solved the problem by bringing back a screen which we were able to put against the wall where Jason had done his stuff — I mean, the writing. At first, I thought the screen came from the L.P.O. but when I read that a bloke had fallen down a manhole on to some geezers who were repairing a power cable, I had another think. The initials L.E.B. were a bit of a give away, too.
‘There we are,’ I say proudly. ‘Do you want to watch telly while I get us a cup of tea?’
‘Have you got a colour set?’ she asks.
‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘What colour would you like?’
‘What do you mean?’ She sounds startled. Maybe I should have explained. It isn’t exactly a colour set. It’s a black and white set and Dad got hold of these strips of tinted perspex. You prop them in front of the screen to get a colour effect. It is not very realistic and the perspex is so thick it is difficult to see the picture. Still, it is quite ingenious, isn’t it? Unfortunately, Pearl does not seem to agree with me when I explain it to her and starts poking around the room — not a bad idea when you come to think of it. ‘What are the dentures doing at the bottom of the fish tank?’ she says.
The correct answer must be ‘growing a kind of green mould’, but I do not give it. ‘They
must be Dad’s,’ I say. ‘Jason — he’s my little nephew — was messing about with them. Dad will be pleased.’ At least, he will be pleased that they have been found. It is not surprising that nobody has noticed them up to now. The tank is pretty dirty and the dentures look not unlike an ornament as they sit grinning amongst the coloured gravel.
‘Don’t get them out now,’ says Pearl with a shudder as I start rolling up my sleeve.
‘All right,’ I say. I can see what she means. The sight of Dad’s best gnashers covered in green slime doesn’t exactly make you come out in a romantic flush. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘What kind of coffee is it?’
‘Nescafe.’
‘Do you have any real coffee?’
‘It is real coffee. Out of a jar.’ I suppose coming from Trinidad she doesn’t know about things like that.
‘I’ll have tea, thank you.’
I don’t argue with her but flash into the kitchen. It is now getting on for midnight and I don’t have a lot of time to waste. Dad should soon be taking Mum in his arms for the last mazurka. I clean the dribbles off the teapot spout with a rag I find in the sink and start bunging things on a tray. Some uncouth bugger has helped himself to the sugar with a wet teaspoon so there are unattractive brown lumps and streaks all through the basin. I get cracking with rag and fingers and try and clean things up. In the end I find it easier to bury everything under a fresh avalanche of sugar. The kettle is taking a long time to boil which I find is because I have switched on the wrong ring. Dear oh dear. I hope it isn’t going to be one of those nights. I try and put a gloss on everything by digging out some cakes I find at the back of the cupboard but it occurs to me that the little chocolate flakes may be mouse droppings so I abandon the idea. The yellow icing was going a nasty transparent colour anyway, as I find out when I try and scrape away the mould. Blimey, this bird had better turn up trumps after all the effort I am putting in. In the end, I settle for some soggy biscuits and lug the whole lot back on a tray.
‘I’m afraid we’re out of milk,’ I say.
She looks at me in a funny sort of way. ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ she says. ‘I can’t drink it without milk. Is this what you brought me all the way here for, a cup of black tea?’
I put the tray on top of the telly and sit down beside her on the settee. A straight question deserves a straight answer. ‘No,’ I say. I gaze into her minces and suck in my breath sharply as if her wild animal beauty defies description.
‘What is it?’ she says. ‘Has one of my lashes smudged?’
‘They’re perfect,’ I say. ‘Like — like —’ once again she can feel me struggling for words ‘— like you. You’re just too much.’
‘Do you feel all right?’ she says.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous me talking like this,’ I say. ‘But I can’t help it. It’s the effect you have on me. You draw the words out of me — words I never thought I could utter. It’s some strange kind of magic.’
‘Do you have a proper drink?’ she says. ‘Something alcoholic. The way you go on I should think you must have.’
I cannot help feeling that I am not getting through to her. The old verbal magnetism is dropping a bit short of target.
‘I’ll have a look,’ I say. ‘I know we were running low.’ Understatement of the year. Last Christmas we must have been the only family in the land toasting the Queen in Stone’s Ginger Wine. Ever since I was a kiddy I have looked at a bottle of scotch like it was inside a glass case. I open the lower door of the sideboard and glance inside. There are a number of cork table mats which have been attacked by mice, a paper streamer and a pile of yellowing Christmas cards going back to the early fifties. Mum says she keeps the cards because she likes the pictures but it is really because it is the only way we can get a mantlepiecefull. When we get a Christmas card it is like another family getting a present. Everybody gathers round and it is passed from hand to hand and turned over to see how much it cost and if it came from the 2p section at Woolworths. The best card we had last year was addressed to somebody else and came to us by mistake. First of all we opened it to look at it and then we kept it. It showed a lot of geezers in top hats blowing trumpets from the back of a coach drawn by six black horses which are approaching an inn called ‘Ye Swanne’ practically buried in a snow drift. Inside, it said ‘May all your Christmases be white, and future prospects mighty bright. Thinking of you this happy Yuletide, Harry, Doris and family — not forgetting Cuddles’. We thought about them a lot, especially Cuddles. I wonder what he was — or she, maybe. It was funny how the infrequent visitors to the house all picked up the card and nodded like they had known Harry and Doris all their lives. I hope we get something from them next year.
‘Oh dear,’ I say. ‘That’s amazing. You have to come at the one time when we’re out of everything. Isn’t there something else I can get you? We’ve got some cocoa.’
‘I like cocoa without milk even less than tea without milk,’ says my dusky dreamboat sulkily.
‘Anything good on the telly?’ I say. ‘I see you’ve got it going.’
‘Just an old movie,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where they dig them up from.’
‘It’s probably black and white anyway,’ I say, trying to cheer her up.
‘Ronald Coleman,’ she says. ‘I can’t see what anyone ever saw in him. That moustache.’
‘The bird’s all right,’ I say, sliding on to the settee again. ‘Her clothes look quite modern, don’t they?’ I advance my hand along the back of the settee and let my fingers brush against her shoulders. Neither of us is getting any younger and my brooding, passionate nature demands an outlet.
‘Uum.’ She doesn’t tell me to piss off so I move my sensuous lips to her shell-like lobes and blow gently. She flicks her head like a disturbed cat. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘How long have you been over here?’ I ask.
‘Eighteen years.’
‘Eighteen years!’ The scent of bougainvillea blossom is obviously long dead in this bird’s nostrils.
‘I came over when I was a baby.’ She stifles a yawn. ‘Have you got a record player or anything?’
‘It’s at the menders,’ I say. In fact we do have a gramophone but it looks like the picture on an old HMV sleeve and was ‘rescued’ by Dad. I can’t see Pearl’s sophisticated tastes responding to it. Especially the selection of old Maurice Chevalier records that came with it. ‘Lets make love,’ I say. I suppose I could have built up to it a bit more but there is not a lot of time to waste and I need to know where I stand. It is also a fact that birds can sometimes respond well to the frank, straightforward approach. After all, they all know what it’s about and they must get bored waiting for you to wring out the words.
‘You don’t waste a lot of time, do you?’ she says.
‘When you feel the way I do, there’s not a lot of point.’ I say. It doesn’t mean anything but I put a lot of sincerity into it.
‘Nobody could accuse you of trying to buy me, could they?’ she says.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ I say. ‘I’m no saint but I do have a few scruples.’
This is another effective ploy. Just as birds are always prepared to believe you when you say something nice about them, they are also prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt when you say something nasty about number one. This way, you come out as being honest, in need of help, and slightly exciting. You can appeal to a number of their cravings with one simple approach. Frank Sinatra was a master of this gambit as a study of some of his old movies on the telly will reveal: ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from me, kid. I’m poison to dames. I just foul them up, see? Stick with me and you’ll earn yourself a groin-full of groans.’ Of course, once he’d said that, knocked back a couple of fingers of Jack Daniels and flipped his snap-brimmed hat on to the back of his head they had to plane the birds off him in layers.
‘It’s not very romantic down here.’
Note the use of words caref
ully. She does not say ‘in’ here but ‘down’ here. This clearly indicates that the possibility of being ‘up’ somewhere has clearly entered her mind — as indeed it has entered mine. In her case I think she is thinking about ‘upstairs’.
‘Let me show you round,’ I say, very casual. ‘There’ll be a collection for the National Trust at the end of the tour. Please give generously.’ I run my fingers up her body as I get to the last bit and turn the telly off with a flourish. When she has helped me pick up the tea things we go out into the hall. I wish I was not so clumsy. Still, maybe she will put it down to my impetuosity.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she says.
‘Top of the stairs. Follow your nose.’ She looks at me a bit old fashioned. ‘I mean straight on.’ I suppose I could have chosen my words better.
I take the tray into the kitchen and then I think of something. ‘Watch out for the —’ There is a shrill scream from the bathroom — ‘gorilla in the bathroom,’ I finish lamely.
Dad keeps his gorilla skin in the bathroom because of the steam and it can give you a nasty turn if you’re not expecting it — which, let’s face it, very few people are.
‘Oh my God!’ says Pearl when I get to her side. ‘I saw it in the mirror. I thought it was coming to get me.’ The skin is hanging on the door and I can see what she means. Grab a gander at your mug and there it is leering over your shoulder.
‘It’s all right. I’m here,’ I say, taking her in my arms and pressing my cakehole against her barnet. Well done, Dad’s gorilla! This is just the little ice-breaker I needed. As I have said on many occasions it is vital to establish unforced bodily contact at the first opportunity.
‘It’s horrible!’ she shudders. I think she is referring to the gorilla but it may be the pressure of my giggle stick against her dilly pot that is causing anxiety. Percy is coming on strong as they say. Nothing feeds his base appetites more than the sight of a damsel in distress.