Absolute Beginners (14 page)

‘Lots. How’s the price these days?’

She put her lips on my neck skin without kissing, actually. ‘You’ll tell me for love,’ she said.

‘Yes. All the dirt. A bit later,’ I assured her. But she didn’t hear me, because she’d swept on along her mossy hostess’s track.

I think Dido’s the most unscrupulous person I’ve yet met, though I don’t mean especially about money. What I mean is, she believes everything in existence is a
deal
. For example, when she came pounding around the teenage ghetto, collecting material for her articles I’ve referred to, she gave all the kiddos the impression that she wanted to
buy
the teenage thing, like somebody booking a row of ringsides at the circus. And when she looks at you – and she’s always very pleased to see you – her eyes say she knows just how much your price will be. She’s somewhere between thirty-eight and fifty-eight, I’d say, and this flat of hers in the Knightsbridge red-light district must be worth a bit more than ever her column pays her, so there are no doubt other items in reserve. The sex angle, so the chatter goes, isn’t bent in any direction, and no one in particular’s in evidence around her garret, though there are said to be favourites, and sometimes the industrial daddies from the North move in a while to look around.

I gazed at the saleroom, to see what sorts of customers
she’d mustered. I don’t know if I can convey this idea exactly, but the general impression they all gave was of being well stoked with nourishment, well decked out in finery, but all on someone else’s money. This is a curious thing – that you can usually tell who has their own loot, who not: rather as you can the really sexual numbers, boys and girls, from all the others, I mean the serious operators, by a sort of quietness, of purpose, of relaxation they possess.

Up came the Hoplite. He had on some Belafonte-style, straight-from-the-canefield (via the make-up room) kind of garments, with too many open necks, and tapering wrists, and shoes like tin-openers, all in light colours except for some splashes of mascara that gave his eyes melancholy and meaning. He plucked at my arm, and told me, with an agonising sigh, ‘Look, yon’s the Nebraska boy.’

I saw, chatting away beneath the pergola, a perfectly ordinary young US product – fresh, washed and
double-rinsed
as they manufacture them in thousands over there.

‘Cute,’ I told Hoplite.

‘
Cute!
Oh, lordy me!’

‘Well – dynamic, then.’

‘That’s a bit better.’

‘You hitting it off, you two?’

‘Ah, woe …!’

The Hoplite gripped my arm, gazing to and fro languorously from the Nebraskan one to me, and said, ‘It’s ghastly, you know. He’s ever so friendly to me, and cheerful, and sometimes even grins and reaches out and
ruffles my hair
.’

‘Painful. I feel for you.’

‘Have pity! Ah me, ah me!’

‘Ah you, all right. Where’s the lush hidden?’

‘It’s not. You help yourself from the sideboard, just like that.’

I worked my way over with young Fabulous, who eased aside the multitude with his shapely tail.

‘Ah-ha, you remind me,’ I told Hop. ‘The Call-
me-Cobber
number wants to sign you up for a television thing’ – and I told him about the Lorn Lover programme project. The Hoplite looked very dubious indeed. ‘Of course, you know I’d love to have my face and figure up there in between the commercials,’ he told me, ‘and naturally, I’d love to appear before the nation to tell it all about Nebraska. But do you think, really, public opinion’s ripe yet for anything so bold?’

‘You could say it’s a deep and splendid friendship that unites you.’

‘Well, in a sense it is.’

‘I’ll speak to C.-me-C., then.’

‘And I will to Adonis.’

Standing there alone, clutching my lime-and-tonic, I was accosted by one of those numbers you always meet up with at a party, and she opened up to me with,

‘Hullo, stranger.’

‘Hi.’

‘How are you called?’

‘And you?’

‘You tell me.’

‘David Copperfield.’

She shrieked. ‘I’m Little Nell.’

‘There you go!’

‘What do you do?’

‘Only on Saturdays.’

‘Naughty. No, I mean your job.’

‘Photographic work.’

‘For Dido?’

‘I’m freelance.’

‘Plenty of windmills to tilt at?’

‘That’s how it goes.’

‘Which end of town you live?’

‘The end I sleep in.’

‘No, seriously.’

Here they always give you the, ‘But I’m
interested
in you,’ look.

‘Round W10.’

‘Oh, that’s unusual.’

‘Not to those who live in W10.’

Here, having a little
thought
to wrestle with, her brain started pinking.

‘Know everyone here?’

‘Everyone except you.’

‘But you
do
know me. I’m Little Nell.’

You see what I mean? Honestly, that’s what parties always turn out to be. All the pleasure of a party is going there, up as far as the front door only.

Bits of the company had started dancing, but I didn’t want to join in this activity, because either they were doing that one-two, one-two ballroom thing, which makes everybody look like waiters and usherettes out on
their annual rave, or else, if they were jiving, they were all of them frantic and alarming, like a physical culture demonstration by a bunch of cats with colic, knocking themselves out quite unnecessarily, because the real way to jive is to swing your body, not your legs and arms. I must admit some of the birds tried to get a hold of me, on account of the prestige of the teenage performance, but I pleaded not guilty, and made it over to the pergola. There I unhitched my Rolleiflex, and took a few pictures just to keep my hand in, and for a rainy day.

‘I’d like some of those, if they’re successful,’ said a gent standing there beside me.

This gent, who wore a north-of-Birmingham suiting, was the one exception to the thing I said earlier on about their all, myself included, being a lot of parasites and ponces: I mean, he looked as if it was on himself that he depended – you know, substantial, and not throwing it all up at once. And this turned out to be the case, because he told me he was a businessman, a manufacturer in the motor industry, and believe me, I got quite a kick out of knowing him, as I had never actually met a businessman before – in fact, hardly believed that they existed, though realising, of course, they must do, somewhere.

‘Good for you, chairman!’ I said to him, pumping his business-manly paw. ‘If you ask me, you commercial cats are the only ones that really keep the nation sliding off its arse.’

‘You think so?’ the number asked me, giving the ‘amused smile’ the seniors turn on whenever anything intelligent is said by an absolute beginner.

‘Naturally, I think it,’ I told him, ‘if I’ve just said it.’

‘Not many would agree with you,’ he said, beginning to latch on to my conception.

‘You don’t have to tell me! Turn on your telly, or your radio, and do you ever catch anything about businessmen? Does anyone write books about them in the paperbacks? And yet, don’t we all live off what you do? Without you tycoons, there just wouldn’t be the money for the rent.’

‘You’re very flattering,’ this industrial number said.

‘Oh, shit!’ I cried. ‘Will
no
one ever take my ideas seriously?’ The balance sheet product started to laugh soothingly, so I grabbed him by the lapel of his
family-tailor
hopsack, and said, ‘Look! England was an empire – right? Now it isn’t any longer – yes? So all it’s got to live on will be brains and labour, i.e. scientists and engineers and businessmen and the multitudes of authentic toilers.’

The cat looked surprised and pleased.

‘Mind you,’ I added, just to bring him down a bit, ‘I’m not saying business is
difficult
. I don’t think it’s difficult to coin loot, provided you’re really interested in it – provided it’s your number-one obsession.’

‘I’ll not disagree with you altogether there,’ the boardroom product said.

‘Most of us
think
we’re interested in making money, but we’re not: we’re only interested in getting our hands on someone else’s.’

He looked at me approvingly, as if he’d sign me up immediately as chief teacup boy in his twelve-storey office block.

‘And how is the car trade?’ I continued.

‘Don’t tell a soul,’ he said, looking around him, ‘but it’s prospering.’

‘Crazy!’ I said. ‘But of course,’ I went on, ‘you know you automobile producers are a bunch of murderers?’

‘Oh, yes? Would you say so?’ he said, smiling ‘tolerantly’ again.

‘Well, in a sense you are. You read the figures of the slaughter on the highways?’

‘I try to forget them. What are we to do?’ This automotive one was still looking a bit ‘amused’, but I could see I’d touched him on a nerve. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘if you took the cars off the roads tomorrow, the whole economy would collapse. Have you considered that?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘In addition, the export industry on which, as you’ve said, this country lives, requires a healthy home consumption to sustain it.’

‘There you go!’

‘So death on the roads is the price we pay for moving the goods around, and earning currency abroad.’

I looked at the cat. ‘You’ve said all this before,’ I told him, ‘to the assembled shareholders.’

‘Good heavens, no!’ the number said. ‘As a matter of fact, son, I say it chiefly to myself.’

‘Well,’ I told this industrial chieftain, ‘you know as well as I do, if you’re a driver, which I expect you are, that there’s stacks of goons sitting behind steering-columns who
like
the idea they may mow some victim down.’ I waited, but he didn’t answer. ‘An accelerator and a ton
of metal,’ I went on, ‘bring out the Adolf Hitler in us all. They know there’s no danger to themselves, sitting up there inside that tank, and if they make a kill, they know nobody’s going to hang them.’

The profit-and-loss one now began to look a bit uneasy – I mean, not at my ideas, but
me
– which always happens if you let loose an idea.

‘Car driving,’ I told him, twisting my knife round in the wound, ‘is the licensed murder of the contemporary scene. It used to be duelling and cut-throats, now it’s killing by car.’

I saw I mustn’t keep on rucking him, because, after all, this was a party, so I patted him on his hopsack, just like he’d done me, and struggled across to cut in on Call-me-Cobber, and have a spin round with the ex-
Deb-of
-Last-Year. But: ‘Fair goes, now, fair goes,’ the Cobber said, and he pulled the ex-Deb out of reach, and all I got for my attempt was her making apologetic faces at me over the Aussie’s beefo shoulders.

‘Aboriginal!’ said Zesty-Boy Sift.

This Zesty, who had come up now beside me, was the only other teenage product present at the barbecue, and I hadn’t spoken to him yet for two reasons: first, because I meant to borrow five pounds from him, and wanted to choose my moment, and second, because this Z.-B. Sift had come up very abruptly in the world since I first knew him, and I didn’t want to show I was impressed.

But in actual fact, I was. In the far dawn of creation when the teenage thing was in its Eden epoch, young
Zesty used to sing around the bars and caffs, and was notorious for being quite undoubtedly the crumbiest singer since – well, choose your own.
But
– here’s the point – the songs he sung, their words as well as harmonies, were his invention, thought up by him in a garage in Peckham, where he used to toil by day and slumber in an old Bugatti. And though Zesty caught all the necessary US overtones to send the juveniles that he performed for, the words he thought up were actually
about
the London teenage kids – I mean not just ‘Ah luv yew, Oh yess Ah du’ that could be about anyone, but numbers like
Ugly Usherette
, and
Chickory with
my Chick
, and
Jean, your Jeans!
, and
Nasty Newington
Narcissus
which all referred to places and to persons which the kids could actually identify round the purlieus of the city.

So far, so bad, because nobody was interested in
Zesty-Boy’s
creative efforts – particularly the way
he
marketed them – until one of the teenage yodellers who’d hit the big time remembered Zesty, and sold the whole idea of him (and of his songs) to his Personal Manager, and his A. & R. man, and his Publicity Consultant, and his Agency Booker, and I don’t know who else, and behold! Zesty-Boy threw away his own guitar and saved his voice for gargling and normal speech, and started writing for the top pop canaries, and made piles – I mean literally piles – of coin from his sheet, and disc, and radio, and telly, and even filmic royalties. It was a real rags-to-riches fable: one moment Z.-B. Sift was picking up pennies among the dog-ends and spittle with a grateful grimace,
the next he was installed in this same Knightsbridge area with a female secretary and a City accountant added to his list of adult staff.

‘Those Aussies!’ he said, ‘have moved in for the slaughter. Did you know there’s 60,000 of them in the country? And ever seen any of them on a building site?’

I didn’t reply (except for a wise nod), because the matter of the five pounds was now uppermost in my mind, and about borrowing and lending, of which of both I have a wide experience, I could tell you several golden rules. The first is, come straight up smartly to the point: to lead up tactfully to the kill is fatal, because the candidate sniffs your sinister intention and has time to put up barricades. So I said, ‘I want a fiver, Zesty.’

Zesty-Boy, I was glad to see, observed, on his side, the first golden rule of lending, which is to say yes or no
immediately
– if you don’t, they’ll hate you if you refuse, and never be grateful if you agree. He took out the note, said, ‘Any time,’ and changed the subject. As a matter of fact, in this case we both knew it was actually a gift, because in his Cinderella days I’ve often enough handed Zesty-Boy the odd cigarette-machine money, and as a shilling then was worth what a pound is to him now, this really was only a repayment. And I could add – since we’re on this topic – that if you’re in a position, ever, to be a
lender
, the two kinds of people you should most watch out for are not, as you might expect, the dear old boyhood pals of Paradise Alley days, but any newcomer (because borrowers are attracted to fresh faces), or anyone you’ve just done a favour to (because borrowers
think there where the corn grows, there’s sugarcane as well).