Absolute Beginners (4 page)

But today I didn’t, partly because I was suddenly tired of his performance, and partly because I’d so much work to do immediately inside my darkroom. So out I
went and, would you believe it, found that horrible old weirdie Vernon had built himself a cuckoo’s nest there, which was something new.

‘Hullo, Jules,’ I said to him. ‘And how’s my favourite yobbo?’

‘Don’t call me Jules,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you.’

Which he has – perhaps 200,000 times or so, ever since I invented the name for him, on account of Vernon = Verne = Jules of
Round the World in Eighty Days.

‘And what are you doing in my darkroom, Julie?’ I asked this oafo brother of mine.

He’d got up off the camp bed in the corner – all blankets and no sheets, just like my Vernon – and came over and did an act he’s done with monotonous regularity ever since I can remember, namely, to stand up over me, close to me, breathing heavily and smelling of putrid perspiration.

‘What, again?’ I said to him. ‘Not another corny King Kong performance!’

His fist whisked past my snout in playful panto.

‘Do grow
up
, Vernon,’ I said to him, very patiently. ‘You’re a big boy now, more than a quarter of a century old.’

What would happen next would be either that he’d push me around in which case, of course, it would be just a massacre, except that he knew I’d get in at least one blow that would really cripple him, and perhaps even harm him for life – or else he’d suddenly feel the whole thing was beneath his dignity, and want to talk to me, talk to anyone, in fact, whatever, since the poor
old ape was such an H-Certificate product he was really very lonely.

So he plucked at my short-arse Italian jacket with his great big cucumber fingers and said, ‘What you wear this thing for?’

‘Excuse me, Vernon,’ I said, edging past him to unload my camera on my table. ‘I wear it,’ I said, taking the jacket off and hanging it up, ‘to keep warm in winter, and, in summer, to captivate the chicks by swinging my tail around.’

‘Hunh!’ he said, his mind racing fast, but nothing coming out except this noise like a polar bear with wind. He looked me up and down while his thoughts came into focus. ‘Those clothes you wear,’ he said at last, ‘disgust me.’

And I hope they did! I had on precisely my full teenage drag that would enrage him – the grey pointed alligator casuals, the pink neon pair of ankle crêpe nylon-stretch, my Cambridge blue glove-fit jeans, a vertical-striped happy shirt revealing my lucky neck-charm on its chain, and the Roman-cut short-arse jacket just referred to … not to mention my wrist identity jewel, and my Spartan warrior hairdo, which everyone thinks costs me 17/6d in Gerrard Street, Soho, but which I, as a matter of fact, do myself with a pair of nail scissors and a
three-sided
mirror that Suzette’s got, when I visit her flatlet up in Bayswater, W2.

‘And you, I suppose,’ I said, deciding that attack was the best method of defence though oh! so wearisome, ‘you imagine you look alluring in that horrible men’s
wear suiting that you’ve bought in a marked-down summer sale at the local casbah.’

‘It’s manly,’ he said, ‘and it’s respectable.’

I gazed at the floppy dung-coloured garments he had on. ‘Ha!’ was about all I said.

‘What’s more,’ he went on, ‘I’ve not wasted money on it. It’s my demobilisation suit.’

My heaven, yes, it looked it –
yes
!

‘When
you’ve
done your military service,’ the poor old yokel said, his boot face breaking into a crafty grin, ‘you’ll be given one too, you’ll find.
And
a decent haircut just for once.’

I gazed at the goon. ‘Vernon,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you. Somehow you missed the teenage rave, and you never seem to have had a youth. To try to tell you the simplest facts of life is just a waste of valuable breath, however, do try to dig this, if your microbe minibrain is capable. There’s no honour and glory in doing military service, once it’s compulsory. If it was voluntary, yes, perhaps, but not if you’re just sent.’

‘The war,’ said Vern, ‘was Britain’s finest hour.’

‘What war? You mean Cyprus, boy? Or Suez? Or Korea?’

‘No, stupid. I mean the
real
war, you don’t remember.’

‘Well, Vernon,’ I said, ‘please believe me, I’m glad I don’t. All of you oldies certainly seem to try to keep it well in mind, because every time I open a newspaper, or pick up a paperback, or go to the Odeon, I hear nothing but war, war, war. You pensioners certainly seem to love that old, old struggle.’

‘You’re just ignorant,’ said Vern.

‘Well, if I am, Vern, that’s quite okay by me. Because I tell you: not being a mug, exactly, I’ve no intention of playing soldiers for the simple reasons, first of all, that big armies obviously are no longer necessary, what with the atomic, and secondly, no one is going to tell me to do anything I don’t want to, no, or try to blackmail me with that crazy old mixture of threats and congratulations that a pronk like you falls for because you’re a born form-filler, taxpayer and cannon fodder … well, boy, just take a look in the mirror at yourself.’

That left him silent for a while. ‘Come on, now,’ I said. ‘Be a good half-brother, and let me get on with my work. Why have you moved in this room, anyway?’

‘You’re wrong!’ he cried. ‘You’ll have to do it!’

‘That subject’s exhausted. We’ve been into it thoroughly. Do forget it.’

‘What we done, you gotta do.’

‘Vernon,’ I said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you really don’t speak very good English.’

‘You’ll see!’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see.’

I was trying, as you’ll have realised, to drive him out of the room, but the boy is sensitive as the end of a truck, and just flopped back on his bed again, worn out by the mental effort of our conversation. So I put him out of my mind and worked on at my snaps in silence, till Dad knocked on the door with two cups of char; and standing there in the dark, with only the red light burning, we both ignored that moron, not bothering to wonder if he
was awake and eavesdropping, or dreaming of winning six Victoria Crosses.

Dad asked me for the news.

Now, this always embarrasses me, because whatever news I tell Dad, he always comes back again to his two theme songs of, number one, what a much better time I have than he had in the 1930s, and, number two, why don’t I come back ‘home’ again – which is what Dad really seems to believe this high-grade brothel that he lives in means to me.

‘You’ve found that he’s moved in,’ said Dad, pointing in the direction of the bed. ‘I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. The room’s still yours, though, I’ve always insisted on that all the way along.’

I imagined poor Dad insisting to my Mum.

‘What’s she put him here for, anyway?’ I asked.

‘He’s been quarrelling with the lodgers,’ Dad said. ‘There’s one of them in particular, doesn’t get on with him at all.’

I didn’t like to ask him which or why. So, ‘And how’s the book going?’ I asked my poor old ancestor. Which is a reference to a
History of Pimlico
Dad’s said to be composing, but nobody’s ever seen it, though it gives him the excuse for getting out of the house, and chatting to people, and visiting public libraries, and reading books.

‘I’ve reached Chapter Twenty-Three,’ he said.

‘When does that take us up to?’ I asked him, already guessing the answer.

‘The beginning of the 1930s,’ he replied.

I gulped a bit of tea. ‘I bet, Dad,’ I said, ‘you give those poor old 1930s of yours a bit of a bashing.’

I could feel Dad quivering with indignation. ‘I certainly do, son!’ he shouted in a whisper. ‘You’ve simply no idea what that pre-war period was like. Poverty, unemployment, fascism and disaster and, worst of all, no chance, no opportunity, no sunlight at the end of the corridor, just a lot of hard, frightened, rich old men sitting on top of a pile of dustbin lids to keep the muck from spilling over!’

I didn’t quite get all that, but concentrated.

‘It was a terrible time for the young,’ he went on, grabbing me. ‘Nobody would listen to you if you were less than thirty, nobody gave you money whatever you’d do for it, nobody let you
live
like you kids can do today. Why, I couldn’t even marry till the 1940s came and the war gave me some sort of a security … Just think of the terrible loss, though! If I’d married ten years earlier, when I was young, you and I would have only had twenty years between us instead of thirty, and me already an old man.’

I thought of pointing out to Dad that if he’d married so much earlier it might have been another woman than my Mum, in which case I wouldn’t have existed, or not, at any rate, in my present particular form – but let it go. ‘Hard cheese,’ I said to him instead, hoping he’d got the subject out of his system for this visit. But no, he was off again.

‘Just look around you, when you next go out!’ he cried. ‘Just look at any of the 1930s buildings! What
they put up today may be ultramodern, but at any rate it’s full of light and life and air. But those 1930s buildings are all shut in and negative, with landlord and broker’s man written all over them.’

‘Just a minute, Dad,’ I said, ‘while I hang up this little lot of negatives.’

‘Believe me, son, in the 1930s they hated life, they really did. It’s better now, even with the bomb.’

I washed my hands under the hot tap that always runs cold as usual. ‘You’re topping it up a bit there, Dad, aren’t you?’ I said.

Dad dropped his voice even lower. ‘And then, there’s another thing,’ he said, ‘—the venereal.’

‘Yeah?’ I said, though I was really quite a bit embarrassed, because no one likes much discussing that sort of topic with a Dad like mine.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘—the venereal. It was a scourge – a blight hanging over all young men. It cast a great shadow over love, and made it hateful.’

‘It did?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have doctors, then?’

‘Doctors!’ he cried. ‘In those days, the worst types were practically incurable, or only after years and years of anxiety and doubt …’

I stopped my work. ‘No kidding?’ I said. ‘It was like that, then? Well, that’s a thought!’

‘Yes. No modern drugs and quick relief, like now …’

I was quite struck by that, but thought I’d better change the subject all the same.

‘Then why aren’t you cheerier, Dad?’ I said to him. ‘If
you like the fifties better, as you say you do, why don’t you enjoy yourself a bit?’

My poor old parent gulped. ‘It’s because I’m too old now, son,’ he said. ‘I should have had my youth in the 1950s, like you have, and not my middle-age.’

‘Well, it’s too late to alter that, Dad, isn’t it. But hell, you’re not yet fifty, you could get out into the world a bit … I mean, you’re not really too old to get a job, are you, and travel around and see what sights there are? Others have done it, haven’t they?’

My poor old Pop was silent.

‘Why do you stay in this dump, for instance?’ I said to him.

‘You mean here with your mother?’

‘Yes, Dad. Why?’

‘He stays because he’s afraid to go, and she keeps him because she wants the place to look respectable.’

This came from the bed and my charming half-brother Vernon, who we’d quite forgotten, and who evidently had been listening to us with both his red ears flapping.

‘Ignore him, Dad,’ I said. ‘He’s so easy to ignore.’

‘He’s nothing to do with
me
,’ my father muttered, ‘nothing whatever.’ And he picked up the cups and made off out of the room, knocking things over.

‘You,’ I said to Vernon, ‘are a real number one horror, a real unidentified thing from outer space.’

The trouble about Vernon, really, as I’ve said, is that he’s one of the last of the generations that grew up before teenagers existed: in fact, he never seems to have been an absolute beginner at any time at all. Even
today, of course, there are some like him, i.e. kids of the right age, between fifteen or so and twenty, that I wouldn’t myself describe as teenagers: I mean not kiddos who dig the teenage
thing
, or are it. But in poor Vernon’s era, the sad slob, there just weren’t
any
: can you believe it? Not any authentic teenagers at all. In those days, it seems, you were just an overgrown boy, or an under-grown man, life didn’t seem to cater for anything whatever else between.

So I said all this to him.

‘Oh, yeah?’ he answered (which he must have got from old Clark Gable pictures, like the ones you can see revivals of at the Classics).

‘Yeah,’ I said to him. ‘And that’s what explains your squalid downtrodden look, and your groaning and moaning and grouching against society.’

‘Is zat so,’ he said.

‘Zat is, half-brother,’ I replied.

I could see him limbering up his brain for a reply: believe me, even I could feel the floor trembling with the effort.

‘I dunno about the trouble with
me
,’ my oafo brother finally declared, ‘but
your
trouble is, you have no social conscience.’

‘No what?’

‘No social conscience.’

He’d come up close, and I looked into his narrow, meanie eyes. ‘That sounds to me,’ I said, ‘like a parrot cry pre-packaged for you by your fellow squalids of the Ernie Bevin club.’

‘Who put you where you are.’

‘Which who? And put me where?’

And now this dear fifty per cent relative of mine came up and prodded my pectorals with a stubby, grubby digit.

‘It was the Attlee administrations,’ said my bro, in his whining, complaining, platform voice, ‘who emancipated the working man, and gave the teenagers their economic privileges.’

‘So you approve of me.’

‘What?’

‘If it was the Ernie Bevin boys who gave us our privileges like you say, you must approve of us.’

‘No, I don’t, oh no.’

‘No?’

‘That was an unforeseen eventuality,’ he said. ‘I mean you kids getting all these high-paid jobs and leisure.’

‘Not part of the master plan?’

‘No. And are you grateful to us? Not a bit of it.’

There I agreed with him at last. ‘Why should we be?’ I said. ‘Your pinko pals did what they wanted to when they got power, and why should we nippers thank them for doing their bounden duty?’