Absolute Beginners (5 page)

This thought, such as it was, really halted him in his tracks. You could hear his brain racing and grinding behind his red, crunched face, till he cried excitedly, ‘You’re a traitor to the working-class!’

I took the goon’s forefinger, which was still prodding me in the torso, and shook it away from me, and said:

‘I am
not
a traitor to the working-class because I do
not
belong to the working-class, and therefore cannot be a traitor to it.’

‘N – h’n!’ he really said. ‘You belong to the
upper-class
, I suppose.’

I sighed up.

‘And you reject the working-classes that you sprung from.’

I sighed some more.

‘You poor old prehistoric monster,’ I exclaimed. ‘I do
not
reject the working-classes, and I do
not
belong to the upper-classes, for one and the same simple reason, namely, that neither of them interest me in the slightest, never have done, never will do. Do try to understand that, clobbo! I’m just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the taxpayers – needle you all, whichever side of the tracks you live on, or suppose you do.’

He glared at me. I could see that, if once he believed that what I said I really meant, and thousands of the kiddos did the same as well, the bottom would fall out of his horrid little world.

‘You’re dissolute!’ he suddenly cried out, ‘Immoral! That’s what I say you teenagers all are!’

I eyed the oafo, then spoke up slow. ‘I’ll tell you one thing about teenagers,’ I said, ‘compared with how I remember you ten years ago … which is we wash between our toes, and change our vests and pants occasionally, and don’t keep empty bottles underneath our beds for the good reason we don’t touch the stuff.’

Saying which, I left the creature; because really, all
this was such a waste of time, a drag, all so obvious, and honestly, I don’t like arguing. If they think that all cat’s cock, well, let them think it, and good luck!

I must have been muttering this out aloud along the corridor, because a voice said, over the staircase balustrade, ‘Counting your money, then, or talking to the devil?’ and of course it was my dear old Mum. There she stood, holding the railings, like someone in a Tennessee Williams film show. So, ‘Hullo, Madame Blanche,’ I said to her.

For a moment she started to look flattered, like women do if you say something sexy to them, no matter how intimate it is, so long as they think it’s flattering to their egos, until she saw I was ice-cold and sarcastic, and her closed-for-business look came over her fine face again.

But I got in my body blow before she could. ‘And how is the harem-in-reverse?’ I said to her.

‘Eh?’ said my Ma.

‘The gigolo lodgers, the Pal Joeys,’ I went on, to make my meaning clear.

As if to prove my point, two of them kindly passed by at that moment, making it hard for poor old Mum to flatten me, as I could see by her bitter glare that she’d intended, which was now transformed into a sickly simper, prim and alluring, that she turned on like a light for the two beefo Malts who walked between us, oozing virility and no deodorant.

As soon as they’d squeezed by her up the stair, with much exchanging of the time of day, she whipped round on me and said, ‘You little rat.’

‘Mother should know,’ I told her.

‘You’re too big for your boots,’ she said.

‘Shoes,’ I told her.

In and out she breathed. ‘You’ve too much spending money, that’s your trouble!’

‘That’s just what’s
not
my trouble, Ma.’

‘All you teenagers have.’

I said, ‘I’m really getting tired of hearing this. All right, we kids have got too much loot to spend! Well, please tell me what you propose to do about it.’

‘All that money,’ she said, looking at me as if I had pound notes falling out of my ears, and she could snatch them, ‘and you’re only minors! With no responsibilities to need all that spending money for.’

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘Who made us minors?’

‘What?’

‘You made us minors with your parliamentary what sits,’ I told her patiently. ‘You thought, “That’ll keep the little bastards in their places, no legal rights, and so on,” and you made us minors. Righty-o. That also freed us from responsibility, didn’t it? Because how can you be responsible if you haven’t any rights? And then came the gay-time boom and all the spending money, and suddenly you oldos found that though we minors had no rights, we’d got the money power. In other words – and
listen
to me, Ma – though it wasn’t what you’d intended, admittedly, you gave us the money, and you took away our responsibility. Follow me so far? Well, okay! You majors find the laws you cooked up have given you all the duties, and none of the fun, and us the contrary, and
you don’t like it, do you. Well, as for us, the kids, we do like it, see? We like it fine, Ma. Let it stay that way!’

This left me quite exhausted. Why do I
explain
it to them, talking like a Method number, if they’re not interested in me anyway?

Mum, who hadn’t been taking this in (and I mean my ideas, though she naturally grasped the general gist), now changed her tactics, which made me wary, for she came down the stair in silence and beckoned me into her private parlour, as in the old way she used to for some trouble, and also as in the old way, I thought it best just not to follow her, and take my leave. But she must have guessed this, because she popped out of her parlour again, and caught me with the front door open, and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I must speak to you, son,’ she said.

‘Speak to me outside, then,’ I told her, trying to walk out of the door into the street, but she still clutched.

‘No, in my room, it’s vital,’ she kept hissing.

Well, there we were, practically wrestling on the doorway, when she let go and said, ‘
Please
come in.’

I closed the door, but wouldn’t move further than the corridor, and waited.

‘Your father’s dying,’ Mum told me now.

Now, my first thought was, she’s lying; and my second thought was, even if not, she’s trying to get at me, because what does she care if he lives or dies? She’s going to try to make me
responsible
in some way for something I’m not at all, i.e. the old blackmail of the parents and all oldies against the kiddos.

But I was wrong, it wasn’t that, she wanted something from me. After a great deal of a lot of beating about the bush, she said to me, ‘If anything should happen to your father, I’d want you to come back here.’

‘You’d want me to,’ I said. That’s all.

‘Yes. I’d want you to come back here.’

‘And why?’

Because I really didn’t know. But what gave me the clue was Mum dropping her eyes and looking modest and girlish and bashful, at first I thought for effect, but then I realised it was partly for true, and that for once she just couldn’t help it.

‘You want me back,’ I said, ‘because you’ll want a man about the house.’

She mutely acquiesced, as the women’s weeklies say.

‘To keep the dear old place
respectable
, till you get married once again,’ I continued on.

Still Ma was mute.

‘Because old Vern, your previous product, is such a drip-dry drag that no one would ever take
him
for the male of the establishment.’

I got an eye-flash for that, but still no answer, while our thoughts sparred up there in silence in the air, unable to disconnect, because no matter how far you’re cut off from a close relation, cut right off and eternally severed, there always remains a link of memory – I mean Mum
knew
a whole great deal about me, like nobody else did, and that held us.

‘Dad’s very much alive,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t look like dying to me a bit. Not a bit, he doesn’t.’

‘Yes, but I tell you, the doctor’s told me …’

‘I’ll take my instructions in that matter from Dad, and Dad alone,’ I said. ‘And if Dad ever dies, I’ll take my instructions from myself.’

She could see that was that, and didn’t give me, as you might have expected, a dirty look, but a puzzled one she couldn’t control, such as she’s given me about six times in my life, as though to say to me, what is this monster I’ve created?

With which I blew.

Down by the river, where I went to get a breather, I stood beside the big new high blocks of glass-built flats, like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off, and watched the traffic floating down the Thames below them, very slow and sure (chug, chug) and oily, underneath the electric railway bridge (rattle, rattle), and past the power station like a super-cinema with funnels stuck on it. Peace, perfect peace, though very murky, I decided. Hoot, hoot to you, big barge, bon, bon voyage. There was a merry scream, and I turned about and watched the juveniles, teenagers in bud as you might call them, wearing their little jeans and jumpers, playing in their kiddipark of Disneyland items erected by the borough council to help them straighten out their thwarted egos. When crash! Someone thumped me very painfully on the shoulder blades.

I very slowly turned and saw the pasty, scabies-ridden countenance of Edward the Ted.

‘Bang, bang,’ I said, humouring the imbecile by pointing my thumb and finger at him like a pistol. ‘Bad boy!’

Ed the Ted said nothing, just looked sinister, and stood breathing halitosis on me.

‘And what,’ I said, ‘you doing pounding around down here?’

‘I liv ear,’ said Ed.

I gazed at the goon.

‘My God, Ed,’ I cried, ‘you can actually talk!’

He came nearer, panting like a hippo, and suddenly twirled a key chain, that he’d been hiding in his fist and in his pocket, till it buzzed like a plane propeller between the two of us.

‘What, Ed?’ I said. ‘No bike-chain? No flick knife? No iron bar?’

And, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t wearing his full Teddy uniform either: no velvet-lined frock coat, no bootlace tie, no four-inch solid corridor-creepers – only that insanitary hairdo, creamy curls falling all over his one-inch forehead, and his drainpipes that last saw the inside of a cleaner’s in the Attlee era. To stop the chain twirling, he tried to grab it suddenly with the same hand he was spinning it with, hit his own great red knuckles, winced and looked hurt and offended, then fierce and defiant as he put the hand and the chain in his smelly old drainpipes once again.

‘Arve moved,’ he said. ‘Darn ear.’

‘And all the click?’ I asked him. ‘All the notorious Dockhead boys?’

‘Not v’ click,’ said Ed-Ted. ‘Jus me.’

I should explain (and I hope you’ll believe it, even though it’s true) that Edward and I were born and bred,
if you can call it that, within a bottle’s throw of each other off the Harrow Road in Kilburn, and used to run around together in our short-pant days. Then, when the Ted-thing became all the rage, Edward signed up for the duration, and joined the Teddy boy wolf cubs, or whatever they’re called, and later graduated through the Ted high school up the Harrow Road to the full-fledged Teddy boy condition – slit eyes, and cosh, and words of one syllable, and dirty fingernails and all – and left his broken-hearted Mum and Dad, who gave three rousing cheers, and emigrated down to Bermondsey, to join a gang. According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into the civilised sections of the city and had a coffee with me, he lived a high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing crockery in all-night caffs and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted.

‘And why, Ed,’ I said, ‘have you moved darn ear?’

‘’Cos me Mar as,’ he said. ‘She’s bin re-owsed.’

He blinked at the effort of two syllables.

‘So you still live with Momma?’ I enquired.

He beetled at me. ‘Course,’ he said.

‘Big boy like you hasn’t got his own little hidey-hole?’ I asked.

Ed bunched his torso. ‘Lissen,’ he said. ‘I re-spek my Mar.’

‘Cool, man,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me. What about the
mob, the click? Have they been re-owsed as well?’

‘Ner,’ he said.

‘Ner? What, then?’

At this point, our valiant Edward looked scared, and glancing round about him at the flat blocks, which towered all round like monsters, he said, ‘The click’s split up.’

I eyed the primitive.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that bunch of tearaways have thrown you out?’

‘Eh-y?’ he cried.

‘You heard, Ed. You’ve been expelled from the Ted college?’

‘Naher! Me? Espel me? Wot? Lissen! Me, Ar lef
them
, see? You fink I’m sof, or sumfink?’

I shook my head at the poor goof and his abracadabra. ‘Do me a favour, Ed,’ I said. ‘You’re scared of the boys, why not admit it? Old style Teds like you are wasted, anyway: they’ve all moved out of London to the provinces.’

Edward the Ted did a little war dance on the cracked concrete paving. ‘Naher!’ he kept crying, like a ten-
year-old
.

‘The trouble is, Ed,’ I said, ‘you’ve tried to be a man without having been a teenager. You’ve tried to miss out one of the flights of stairs.’

At the mention of ‘teenager’, Ed came to a standstill and stood there, his body hunched like a great ingrowing toenail, staring at me as if his whole squashed personality was spitting.

‘Teenagers!’ he cried out. ‘Kid’s stuff. Teenagers!’

I just raised my brows at the poor slob, gave a little one-hand one-arm wave, and said bye-bye. As I was crossing the yard between the house blocks, like an ant upon a chessboard, a hunk of rock, clumsily aimed, of course, thank heaven, flew by and hit the imitation traction engine in the kiddipark. ‘Yank!’ Ed yelled after me, ‘Go ome, Yank!’

Sad.

Up out in Pimlico, the old, old city raised her bashed grey head again, like she was ashamed of her modern daughter down by the river, and I went up streets of dark purple and vomit green, all set at angles like ham sandwiches, until I reached the Buckingham Palace road, so called, and the place where the air terminal stands opposite the coach station.

And there, on the one side, were the glamour people setting off for foreign countries, mohair and linen suits, white air-liner vanity bags, dark sun-spectacles and pages of tickets packed to paradise, every nationality represented, and everyone equal in the sky-dominion of fast air-travel – and there, on the other side, were the peasant masses of the bus terminal shuffling along in their front-parlour-curtain dresses and cut-price tweeds and plastic mackintoshes, all flat feet and fair shares and you-in-your-small-corner-and-I-in-mine; and then, passing down the middle of them, a troop of toy soldiers, all of them with hangovers after nights of rapture down on the Dilly, and wearing ladies’ fur muffs on their heads and sweaty red jackets that showed their vertebraes from neck to coccyx, and playing that prissy little pipe music
like a bird making wind – and I thought, my God, my Lord, how horrible this country is, how dreary, how lifeless, how blind and busy over trifles!