Absolute Beginners (19 page)

‘By Christ, I do! I tell you, man, yes, I bloody well do, it
is
!’

‘That’s what I told them.’

‘So you answered?’

‘When they said that, I did, yes.’

‘What happened then?’

‘They said I was a mongrel. So my friend said, “When your mother wants a good f–k, she doesn’t bother about your father – she comes to me.”’

‘How’d they like that?’

‘I don’t know. Because when he said that, my friend also pulled his flick on them, and told them to come on.’

‘And they did?’

‘No, they didn’t. But that time, they were only eight or nine.’

A look had come into Cool’s eyes, as he stared at me, just like the look he must have given those Teds. ‘Don’t glare at me like that man,’ I cried. ‘I’m on your side.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s nice of you,’ said Cool, but I saw he didn’t mean it, or believe me.

I turned off the MJQ. ‘So what’s going to happen next?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know, boy. I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. All I
do
know, is this. Up till now, it’s been white Teds against whites, all their baby gangs. If they start on coloured, there’s only a few thousand of us in this area, but I don’t think you’ll see there’s many cowards.’

I couldn’t take all this nightmare. I cried out, ‘Cool, this is London, not some hick city in the provinces! This is London, man, a capital, a great big city where every kind of race has lived ever since the Romans!’

Cool said, ‘Oh, yeah. I believe you.’

‘They’d never allow it!’ I exclaimed.

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘The adults! The men! The women! All the authorities! Law and order is the one great English thing!’

Here Cool made no reply. I took his shoulder. ‘And Cool,’ I said. ‘You – you’re one of us. You’re not a Spade, exactly …’

He took off my hand. ‘If it comes to any trouble,’ he said, ‘I am. And the reason I am is that they’ve never questioned me, never refused me, always accepted me – you understand? Even though I am part white? But
your
people … No. The part of me that belongs to you, belongs to them.’

And after he said that, he went out.

So what with all this, I spent an evil night: sometimes waking with pains and itches, and the red-purple glow
hanging in the sky outside the window, sometimes dreaming those dreams you can’t remember, except they’re horrible, sometimes lying thinking, and not sure if it was me or someone else … But when I did wake, round about midday, I knew there were two things, anyway, that I must do: number one, call Dr A.R. Franklyn, on the pretext of tending my wounds, but actually to fix that rendezvous with Dad, and number two, to track down Wiz: because about all that Cool had told me, the only person who would really know – and who could match his danger, if he wanted to, with Flikker or anybody else – was Wizard. Also, I wanted to see the boy again.

When I went out, to rent a call box, the sun was busy at it, and the day was calm. But whether it was what I’d heard, or just that I was weary, there did seem a
silence
in the air; together with a sort of
movement:
I mean, as if the air was shifting not by the wind, but by itself, to and fro, then pausing. On the steps, after a while to take this in and wonder, I called down to Jill a moment to ask if she knew Wiz’s number, then checked in the area next door to see if Ed was there (he wasn’t), and set off up the street to where the phones are. The glass of one box, which lord knows, is tough as iron, had been splintered in most squares of it, and in the other, the mouth-and-ear thing had been ripped out at the roots. So I went back in the cracked one, and dialled Harley Street.

I got the secretary-nurse, who said she remembered me, and how was I, and that Dr F. was on his holidays, down there in Roma, at a congress, but back in a week, she thought, and would I call again? Meanwhile, was
there anything? My head seemed just a chemist’s job to me, so I said no, best regards to the doctor, and best to her, and thank you, I’d try another time. Then I got on the line to Wiz.

Now, as a matter of fact, I was a bit anxious about this call. In the first place, would Wiz like it? And in the second … well, I’d never exactly belled anyone in that kind of business before, and who would I get first on the line? The boy? The girl? The maid? One of the clients? So as
bzm-bzm
went the bell, I practised my possible openings. But I needn’t have bothered, it was Wiz, he said Big Jill had told him I’d be calling, and when was I coming round? He gave me the address, and said to hit the bell marked ‘Canine Perfectionist’ up on top. So I buzzed off down there at once, and did that.

Another surprise was that, in addition to Wiz himself, there was Wiz’s woman, who somehow I expected would be out of sight – I mean not receiving me so socially, like someone’s auntie. She looked very young to me, and, as they say, ‘respectable’, in fact, if I’d seen her at the local whist drive (supposing I’d been there), I doubt if I’d have rumbled anything. The only point was, she had a way of
looking
at you as if you were a possibly valuable product – I mean a cake of soap, or leg of chicken, or something of that description. I suppose, too, I’d half expected to find all sorts of orgies going on – judges and bishops having a ball on voluptuous divans – but in fact the whole set-up was very ordinary – even a little prim and dainty or, as Ron Todd would say, boogewah.

While Wiz’s woman was getting us a cuppa, and some
Viennese gattos, I told him of Ed and Cool and Flikker and the whole scene up in Napoli. ‘There seems to be something
wrong
up there,’ I said.

‘An what you want
me
to do?’ Wiz said, not very nicely.

‘I don’t know, Wiz. Maybe come up and have a look.’

‘Why, kiddo? In this profession, you mustn’t get mixed in anything except you must.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘What you worrying about, anyway, boy? You’re not a colour problem …’

I saw I wasn’t getting my thing across to Wiz at all. There he sat, curled like a cheetah, dressed up in casuals that cost far more than usuals, smiling and smirking and fucking pleased with himself, I dare say.

‘It’s just, Wiz,’ I said, trying a final bash, ‘that I thought what I told you would disgust you, too.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact, it does. It does, boy, it does – all these
mugs
’ activities disgust me: hitting without warning, for example! The
games
people play!’

I apologised for that, and wanted to say he’d played a few, and still was, if it came to that, but you have to remember, with the Wizard, that the kid, somewhere there inside, is so very
young
. Really, in many ways, he’s just a short-pant product.

He’d got up, to play some music that he’d captured on his tape-recorder. ‘I know this Flikker kid,’ he said, pressing button A, or B.

‘Oh? Come on then, Wizard. Tell.’

He did. The Wiz, it turned out, and Flikker, were both old boys of an ecclesiastical baby farm in Wandsworth, down by the common there – which was news to me about the Wizard, as well as about the Ted. According to Wiz, the infant Flikker had been noted for his meek and mild behaviour, and much scorned for such by the other young lost property toughies, until the day came when, at the age of eleven, he’d drowned a junior in the Wandle river, by launching the nipper in an oil drum and dropping rocks in it till it submerged. Henceforth, the other kittens at the lost cats’ home kept Flikker somewhat at a distance, which, according to Wiz’s memory, surprised and pained young Flikker, who, it seemed, had no notion whatever he’s done something out of the ordinary at all. Wiz told the tale as I’ve just done, for giggles, but even he didn’t seem to think it all that laughable, I could see.

‘And then?’ I asked. Then, said the Wiz, the child had been sent away to all the delinquent cages that they have for the various age-groups, working his way upward year by year, until now, at the age of seventeen or so, he was as highly trained in anti-social conduct as any kiddo in the kingdom, and the law were only waiting for his next major operation to put him away for a really adult stretch. Heaven help, said, Wiz, the screws wherever they sent him to, because unless they beat him up and turned him mad, which they probably would do, the kid would certainly do one of them, the trouble being, so it seemed, that the boy wasn’t so much exactly bad, as having no grasp at all of what being bad really
meant
. Meantime, his chief exploit, since his last home leave from the
ministry, had been to wreck the Classic cinema in the Ladbroke basin, and, with some of his four hundred, drop the law’s coach-and-four into a bomb site, while others engaged the cowboys in pitched battle with milk bottles and dustbin lids. ‘In fact,’ Wiz concluded, ‘the boy should be put to sleep.’

‘No one should,’ I said. ‘Not even you.’

At that point the phone bell rang, and Wiz’s woman reappeared, and took over the captain’s bridge from Wiz just for the moment very obviously, because this was business coming up. If you’d happened to hear her conversation, over crossed lines – I mean, only her end of it – it would have sounded completely ordinary, because of the careful way she chose her words, but if you knew the whole picture as we did, you could see how her spiel all dovetailed with the arrangements she was making with the randy cat at the far end of the blower. And you couldn’t help wondering, from her answers, who this character might be – and whether he had any notion of the actual scene at the receiving end, and the
matter-of-
fact way his glamorous date was being organised for him, poor silly fucker.

After that, Wiz’s woman looked at us politely, and didn’t say anything, but after a while Wiz got up, as if that was what he’d been planning to do now for some time, and said why didn’t he and I take a little stroll? and went out with me without saying anything to his woman, who didn’t say anything to him.

There in the air, after a bit of silence, we turned into a private square, that Wiz seemed to have the key to – as a
matter of fact, within sight of the department store where I mentioned earlier how we used to go together – and we sat down on two metal chairs, there in the late afternoon sun, and Wiz said, ‘Boy, it’s a drag: I tell you, it’s a drag. As soon as I’ve made a bit of loot, I’m cutting out.’

‘Will she let you?’

‘
Let
me?’

‘She seems to like you.’

‘Oh, she
likes
me all right!’ He laughed – quite horrible. ‘But I’m turning her loose as soon as I’ve got just that much I need.’

‘And what’ll you do with that just that much?’

He looked at me. ‘Kid, I dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe travel. Or start some business. Something, anyway.’

He aimed a pebble at a pigeon.

‘Unless you get knocked off first,’ I couldn’t help saying.

He gave me a shove. ‘Not likely, boy, honest, it’s not likely. Your bird on the streets – yes, it’s dodgy. But
call-girl
business – it’s really not so easy for them to prove.’

‘There’s a first time for everything, they say.’

‘Oh, sure they do.’

He aimed another pebble, and scored a bull.

I said, ‘You don’t mind if I ask you a question, Wizard?’

‘Shoot, man.’

‘Your chick’s had, let’s say, x men. The day’s work is over, and you come home to sleep. How do you feel about it?’

‘About what?’

‘The x men she’s just had.’

Wiz looked at me: I swear I really wanted to
do
something for the boy that moment – give him a thousand pounds and see him off to some lovely South-Sea island, where he could have a glorious, carefree ball. ‘I don’t feel about it,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘No. Because I don’t
think
about it. I don’t let myself –
see
.’

Some kids were running to and fro, and the flowers and everything were blooming, and the birds strutting – even the one he’d scored on – and I couldn’t bear it. ‘See you, Wiz,’ I said. ‘Come up and visit me.’ He didn’t answer, but when I turned back at the gate to look at him, he waved.

By now it was the evening, and I wondered whether to keep my date with Hoplite. Frankly, I was quite exhausted, and not only that, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see Hop display himself in front of the TV cameras to the nation. The fact was, you see, that
Call-me
-Cobber had decided the Lorn Lover thing wasn’t quite the suitable vehicle for Hoplite, but the kid was such a telly natural that they’d have to place him somewhere, which they were going to do this evening in a magazine series called,
Junction!
, where they threw unexpected and unsuitable pairs and groups together in the studio, to see what happened.

But after a quick bite at a Nosh, and two strong black coffees, I felt up to the ordeal, and headed it out to the studios in a taxi. I got past the commissionaires
and women at desks with cobra glasses by means I’ve always found effective: which is, walk firmly, boldly in as if anyone who
doesn’t
know what your business is just doesn’t know his own (this shames them), go smartly up the stairs, or take a lift and press some button, then knock at any door whatever, say you’re lost, and you’ll find a pretty secretary who’ll put you on the right track, and even show it to you personally.

The one I fell on took me along to Call-me-Cobber’s office, where the Aussie looked just a bit surprised to see me, but not much, because already he had a bunch of strange characters on his hands. There was Fabulous, of course, who ran up and hugged me, which was embarrassing, and four others who, I learnt from the secretary, were all going to be separately rehearsed from five quite different characters who were hidden somewhere else inside the building, and then be put together at the actual performance, so that we’d see Hoplite with a rear-Admiral, an Asian gooroo with a Scottish steak-house chef, an undischarged bankrupt and a cat from Carey Street, a lady milliner and a male milliner (that was a cute one, I considered), and finally, to wind the thing up before the commercials came on to bring relief, a milk delivery roundsman and an actual cow.