Absolute Beginners (13 page)

‘Forty-five! You’re ripe for Chelsea hospital!’ I cried.

‘Really,’ said Henley, ‘you
do
exaggerate. Take all the top film stars – Gable, and Grant, and Cooper. How old do you think they are?’

‘They’re not trying to marry Suze.’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You think I’m senile. Anything else?’

‘Point number three,’ I said, ‘I leave to your imagination.’

Henley uncrossed his legs, put neat, clean, effective fingers on either knee (I hope the creases of his pants didn’t slice him), and said to me, ‘Young man …’

‘None of that “young man”.’

‘Oh, you’re a
pest
,’ cried Suzette.

‘You bet I am!’

Slightly raising his voice, Henley continued, ‘As I was about to say … do you know that a great many marriages between completely normal people are never consummated?’

‘Then why wed?’ I shouted.

‘It’s what the French call …’

‘I don’t care a fuck what the French call it,’ I yelled. ‘I call it just plain disgusting.’

Suzette was up, flashing fire. ‘I do think you’d better go,’ she said to me.

‘Not yet. I haven’t finished.’

‘Let him go on,’ said Henley.

‘Let me my arse,’ I said. ‘What I want to ask you is, do you really suppose a set-up of that kind will make Suzette happy? I mean
happy
– do you understand that word?’

Henley had also risen. ‘I only know,’ he said very slowly to me, ‘she’ll make
me
happy.’ And he went over and collected himself another drink.

I grabbed hold of Crêpe Suzette. ‘Suzie,’ I said. ‘Do think!’

‘Let go.’

I shook the girl. ‘Do
think
,’ I hissed at her.

She stood quite still, and rigid as a hop pole. Henley, from across the little room, said, ‘Honestly, I do think Suzette’s mind is made up, and I do think it best if you accepted the situation, at any rate for the time being.’

‘You’ve bought her,’ I said, letting go Suzette.

She aimed a swipe at me, but down I ducked. I moved over towards Henley.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you want to fight me.’

‘I suppose I ought,’ I said.

‘Well, if you really want to, I’m quite agreeable, though I should warn you I’m a dirty fighter.’

‘You’re dirty all right,’ I said.

‘Well, go on,’ he said to me, putting down his glass. ‘Do for heaven’s sake either begin, or, if you don’t want to, sit down and not spoil everybody’s evening.’

I noticed he had one hand inside his pocket. ‘Key ring,’ I thought, ‘or maybe a lighter in the fist.’ But I was only making excuses, because I knew I really didn’t want to hit the man – it was Suzette I wanted to hit, or hit myself, bash my head against a concrete wall.

‘We’re not going to fight,’ I said.

‘Bravo,’ he answered.

Suzette said very slowly to me, ‘This is absolutely the last scene of this kind I want to see. One more, and I just won’t see you ever at all, and please believe I mean it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for making yourself so clear. Goodbye for now, if I recover my temper I may see you down at the Lament’s.’

‘Just as you think,’ Suze said.

Henley held out his hand, but this was too much, so with a sort of a wave I stumbled out of the door and had to wait several minutes in the passage there, hearing them nattering behind me, because that bloody elevator kept going up and down with Serpentine House residents packed in it, and wouldn’t even stop when I managed to get the steel grille open while it was between floors, and stared down after it dropping into the abyss.

When finally I got out of that front door, aching like in a nightmare, as I dived down the streets, I heard a kind of death-rattle breathing just behind my ear, and whipped round to look, but there was nobody – was me. ‘None of that!’ I cried, and broke all my regulations and went into a boozer and had a quick double something, and shot out again. I thought I’d go over the park, across the wide, open, lonely spaces, which also would be a short cut to Miss Lament.

On this north front of the Hyde, the terraces are great white monsters, like the shots you see in films of hotels at the Côte de France. There’s the terraces for miles, like cliffs, then the Bayswater speedway with its glare lights and black pools, and the great dark green-purple park stretching on like a huge sea. The thing about the parks is, in day time they’re all innocence and merriment, with dogs and perambulators and old geezers and couples wrapped up like judo performers on the green. But soon as the night falls, the whole scene reverses – into its exact opposite, in fact. In come the prowlers and the gropers and the cops and narks and whores and kinky exhibition numbers, and the thick air is filled with hundreds of suspicious, peering pairs of eyes. Everyone is seeking someone, but everyone is scared to meet that him or her they’re looking for. If you’re out of it, you want to go inside to see, and once you’re in, you’re very anxious to get out again. So in I went.

I tried not to think of Suze in there – and did. ‘Suze, Suze, Suzette,’ I said, and stopped, and I swear the thought of her was more me then than I was. I sat down
on a bench, and my voice said, ‘Boy, do be reasonable.’

One thing was right, I had to admit, in Suze’s smelly plans. Until you know about loot – I mean really know, know how to handle the big stuff, know what the difference is between, let’s say, five thousand pounds and ten (which are exactly the same to me), or what it’s like to look at anything and say, ‘I’ll buy it,’ or how the mugs will dance for you if you fling them down a shower of sixpences – then certainly you’re still a mug yourself. The hard little biting brain inside Suzette was decided to understand this money kick, and my lord, she was going to do so, come what may.

I can’t say I really minded about Henley in particular, and that twin-bed marriage thing that he was offering. What I minded was that it should be
anyone
but me – anyone at all. When she played me up with her Spade Casanovas, it was just as bad … except for this very big except, that I knew those adventures had no permanence attached to them. I still had my way in.

Mannie had said, ‘Wait,’ but how could I possibly be that wise? Would he have waited long for Miriam?

Perhaps Suze isn’t me, I thought out suddenly. Perhaps I’m mistaken about this – she isn’t really Juliet for my Romeo. But what does it matter, even if she isn’t, if I feel she is?

‘Fuck!’ I cried out in a great bellow.

Three or so special investigators, who’d been approaching my bench cautiously from out of the dark green, stopped in their tracks at this, and some melted. I got up. ‘Can I have a light?’ the boldest said, as I passed by.

‘Don’t take a liberty,’ I said, and hurried on.

I got on a stretch of curving roadway that was so damn black I kept walking off it, and getting tangled in the whatsits that they put there to say please-keep-
off-the
-thing. A light shaft suddenly appeared from nowhere, and by me there flashed a pair of mad enthusiasts in track-suits, puffing and groaning and looking bloody uncomfortable and virtuous. Good luck to them! ‘God bless!’ I shouted after.

Then unexpectedly, I came out on a delightful panorama of the Serpentine, lit up by green gas, and by headlamps from the cars whining across the bridge. I picked my way down by the water, and trod on a lot of ducks, they must have been, who scattered squawking sleepily. ‘Keep in your own manor, where you belong,’ I told them, chasing the little bastards down into the lake.

I was now beside the waves, and I could just make the sign out, ‘Boats for Hire’, and saw them moored fifteen feet away from me out there. So thinking, why not? anything to relieve the agony, I sat on the grass, and took off my nylon stretch and Itie clogs, and rolled up my Cambridge blues, and stepped into the drink like King Canute. By the time I reached the first boat, I was up to my navel like the hero in an Italian picture, and hoisted myself into the thing and, after a lot of bother untying a skein of greasy cables, I managed to put out to sea. As soon as I was in the middle, I let her just float along.

I lay there, ruddy uncomfortable, gazing at the stars, and thinking again of Suze, and of how absolutely nice
it would be if she was there, she and me. ‘Suzie, Suzette,’ I said, ‘I love you, girl.’ And I washed my face off in the muddy, invisible slop.

Then I sat up inside that boat, and thought, how can I make a lot of money quickly, if that’s what she wants to get? Naturally, I thought of Wiz, of his plans for his prosperity, but knew I could never make it that way – honest, not because of morals, or anything like that, but because that life, though it may be glamorous in its way, is so really
undignified
, if that’s the word. I want to be rich all right, but I don’t want to be
hooked
.

Wham! we slapped into the bottom of the bridge, the boat and I. I looked up and saw a geezer looking over, and I waved up to the silly sod, and shouted out, ‘
Bon soir, Monsieur!
’ and he said nothing in reply, but started throwing pennies down on me, or maybe they were dollar bits, I couldn’t see, and didn’t care to, because this character’s idea of having a ball struck me as most dangerous. So I rowed on to the other bank, and disembarked just at the Lido, and had to climb a fence to get out of the enclosure, and ripped myself in several painful places.

The law, as anyone who knows it will agree, has a genius for showing up not when you’re
doing
something, as it should, presumably, but when you’re quite innocent and
have
just done something. This cowboy flashed his lighthouse on me as I was putting on my shoes and socks, and stood there saying nothing, but not dowsing that annoying glim.

But I was determined he’d have to say the opening
word, which he did by asking, after several long minutes, ‘Well?’

‘Having a paddle, officer,’ I said.

‘A paddle.’

‘That’s what I told you.’

‘That’s what you tell me.’

‘In the old Serpentine.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Down there.’

‘Down there, you say.’

This conversation seemed to me quite mental, so I got up, and said, ‘Goodnight, officer,’ and started off, but he said to me, moving up, ‘Come here.’

So naturally, I ran.

One thing you learn about the law is that they don’t like running because their helmets usually fall off. What’s more, they don’t like any kind of physical effort – in fact, the one thing coppers all have in common, apart from being tramps, is that they have a horror of physical labour of any kind, particularly manual. Just look at the expression on their faces when you see a photo of them in the papers, digging among the rushes for the killer weapon! So if you’re fast on your feet, and there’s only one of them, you can fairly easily elude them, which I did now by dodging behind that Peter Pan erection, and diving in some smutty bushes.

‘Further on, mate – get further on,’ a voice said, as I’d inconsiderately got entangled with a bird and client, which of course wasn’t my intention, so I bowed myself out, and got up on the road again and over it among
the great dark trees, far darker than the dark sky up behind them, and I started walking normally, like some serious kiddo who’s gone out nocturnal birdwatching, or learning poetry by heart for a dramatic evening at the borough hall. After trampling by mistake over some flower beds, for which I apologise, I came out on the south side of the Hyde, and escaped through the ornamental gate into the embassy section that starts up round about there.

If attending a teenage party, or in fact one of any other kind, I’d naturally wear my sharpest, coolest ensemble – possibly even my ivy-league outfit a GI got for me last year from his PX. But the Lament would be disappointed if, billing me to her public as a teenage product, I didn’t show up in my full age-group regalia. So I wasn’t embarrassed by my non-Knightsbridge clobber, but only a bit at being drenched downwards from the hips: however, I was hoping they’d accept that as just a bit of teenage fun.

So I rang the Dido bell. And, as often happens when you attend a party, another cat arrived on the doorstep at the same moment. Usually, they don’t address you until properly introduced within, but this one was something of an exception, because, without even telling me his name, or anything, he smiled and said, ‘You for the tigress’s den as well?’

I didn’t answer that, but smiled back just as politely (and with just as little meaning) as the cat – who was one of those young men with an old face, or old ones with a young one, hard to tell which: anyway, he had a very
sharp top-person suit on, which must have cost his tailor quite a bit.

‘You’ve known our remarkable hostess long?’ he said.

‘That’s how it goes,’ I answered, and we passed inside the block together.

No need for a lift this time, because Dido has a ground floor thing around a patio out the back, which is even selecter than a penthouse, in my opinion, because it’s somehow more unexpected: I mean the patio, which was very large for London, and still full of gaps in spite of a fair number of hobos already milling around there. Lament’s one of those persons who, when she throws a party, and you’ve just arrived, you don’t have to hunt around for her under the cushions or in the toilet, to say hullo, because she’s felt you directly you come in, and is on the scene immediately with a merry word of greeting. Up she glid, wearing a white hold-me-tight creation, like an enormous washable contraceptive, and with her ginger hair wind-tossed and tousled (I’ll bet it took her all of half an hour), and with her radar-eyes gleaming on the target, and with her geiger-ears pinking big discoveries, and with her Casualty-Ward-10 hands slicing through the hospitable summer air, and with her feet, claws withdrawn inside the pads just for the present, very successfully and snakily carrying the lot.

‘Oh, hul-
lo
, infant prodigy,’ she said to me. ‘You’ve already met my ex-lover Vendice? Are you hungering for something? Have you wet your pants?’

‘Yes, yes, and no,’ I told her. ‘I’ve come straight up to your tenement from a bathe.’

‘But of
course
,’ she cried out, but in a low, rasping voice, as if someone had cut six of her vocal chords. Then she leant her head until her carroty locks swept by my neck, and said, ‘Any items for the column?’