Absolute Beginners (6 page)

After which, feeling maybe it perhaps was
me
, I walked into the little square behind the terminal, where there was the usual assortment of mums and prams and bubble-blowing occupants, and old men with boots and dandruff, and rolled fags with the tobacco dripping out at the ends, and I sat down on a wood bench beneath enormous planes, they must have been, with decorative beds and even a fountain, which is practically unknown in England, where they always remember to turn the taps off and economise with water, and noticed that hosing away there was a West Indian gardener, surrounded by a swarm of kids, all pulling at his hose, and he doing the benevolent adult performance I must say very well, and also the coloured man at ease among the hostile natives.

Now myself, I’ve nothing against kids, I realise that they have to be so that the race can continue, but I can’t say that I like them, or approve of them. In fact, I mistrust them, and consider they’re a menace, because they’re so damned wilful and
energetic
, and, if you ask me, in spite of their charming little childish habits, they know perfectly well what they’re up to, and see they get it, and one day, mark my words, we’ll wake up and find the little horrors have risen in the night and captured the Bank of England and Buckingham Palace and the BBC. But this West Indian, he must have had paternal instincts, or something, or been trained as a lion tamer, because he handled these little atom bombs
without effort, either kidding them so that they all screamed with laughter (and him as well), or else cracking down on them in a fury, and getting immediate results. And all between this, and the hosing, he’d say a word or two to the mums and the old geezers, flaunting his BWI charms, for which I don’t blame him, but was also attentive to the old chatterboxes of both sexes, till everyone I do declare actually beamed.

In fact, this coloured character struck me as so bloody
civilised
.

With which thought, I heaved myself up, there in that scented garden in the height of summer, feeling oh! so somehow saddened, and caught myself a bus. It took me across London to my manor in the area of W10 and 11.

I’d like to explain this district where I live, because it’s quite a curiosity, being one of the few that’s got left behind by the Welfare era
and
the Property-owning whatsit, both of them, and is, in fact, nothing more than a stagnating slum. It’s dying, this bit of London, and that’s the most important thing to remember about what goes on there. To the north of it, there run, in parallel, the Harrow Road I’ve mentioned, which you’d hurry through even if you were in a car, and a canal, called the Grand Union, that nothing floats on except cats and contraceptives, and the main railway track that takes you from London to the swede counties of the West of England. These three escape routes, which are all at different heights and levels, cut across one another at different points, making crazy little islands of slum habitation shut off from
the world by concrete precipices, and linked by metal bridges. I need hardly mention that on this north side there’s a hospital, a gasworks with enough juice for the whole population of the kingdom to commit suicide, and a very ancient cemetery with the pretty country name of Kensal Green.

On the east side, still in the W10 bit, there’s another railway, and a park with a name only Satan in all his splendour could have thought up, namely Wormwood Scrubs, which has a prison near it, and another hospital, and a sports arena, and the new telly barracks of the BBC, and with a long, lean road called Latimer Road which I particularly want you to remember, because out of this road, like horrible tits dangling from a lean old sow, there hang a whole festoon of what I think must really be the sinisterest highways in our city, well, just listen to their names: Blechynden, Silchester, Walmer, Testerton and Bramley – can’t you just smell them, as you hurry to get through the cats-cradle of these blocks? In this part, the houses are old Victorian lower-middle tumble-down, built I dare say for grocers and bank clerks and horse-omnibus inspectors who’ve died and gone and their descendants evacuated to the outer suburbs, but these houses live on like shells, and there’s only one thing to do with them, absolutely one, which is to pull them down till not a one’s left standing up.

On the south side of this area, down by the W11, things are a little different, but in a way that somehow makes them worse, and that is, owing to a freak of
fortune, and some smart work by the estate agents too, I shouldn’t be surprised, there are one or two sections that are positively posh: not
fashionable
, mind you, but quite graded, with their big back gardens and that absolute silence, which in London is the top sign of a respectable location. You walk about in these bits, adjusting your tie and looking down to see if your shoes are shining, when – wham! suddenly you’re back in the slum area again – honest, it’s really startling, like where the river joins on to the shore, two quite different creations of dame nature, cheek by thing.

Over towards the west, the frontiers aren’t quite as definite, and the whole area merges into a drab and shady and semi-respectable part called Bayswater, which I would rather lie in my coffin, please believe me, than spend a night in, were it not for Suze, who’s shacked up there. No! Give me our London Napoli I’ve been describing, with its railway scenery, and crescents that were meant to twist elegantly but now look as if they’re lurching high, and huge houses too tall for their width cut up into twenty flatlets, and front façades that it never pays anyone to paint, and broken milk bottles
everywhere
scattering the cracked asphalt roads like snow, and cars parked in the streets looking as if they’re stolen or abandoned, and a strange number of male urinals tucked away such as you find nowhere else in London, and red curtains, somehow, in all the windows, and
diarrhoea-coloured
street lighting – man, I tell you, you’ve only got to be there for a minute to know there’s something radically
wrong
.

Across this whole mess there cuts, diagonally, yet another railway, that rides high above this slum property like a scenic railway at a fair. Boy, if you want to admire our wonderful old capital city, you should take a ride on this track some time! And just where this railway is slung over the big central road that cuts across the area north to south, there’s a hole, a dip, a pocket, a really unhappy valley which, according to my learned Dad, was formerly at one time a great non-agricultural marsh. A place of evil, mister. I bet witches lived around it, and a lot still do.

And what about the human population? The answer is, this is the residential doss-house of our city. In plain words, you’d not live in our Napoli if you could live anywhere else. And that is why there are, to the square yard, more boys fresh from the nick, and national refugee minorities, and out-of-business whores, than anywhere else, I should expect, in London town. The kids live in the streets – I mean they have
charge
of them, you have to ask permission to get along them even in a car – the teenage lot are mostly of the Ted variety, the chicks mature so quick there’s scarcely such a thing there as a
little
girl, the men don’t talk, glance at you hard, keep moving, and don’t stand with their backs to anyone, their women are mostly out of sight, with dishcloths I expect for yashmaks, and there are piles and piles of these dreadful, wasted, negative, shop-soiled kind of
old
people
that make you feel it really is a tragedy to grow grey.

You’re probably saying well, if you’re so cute, kiddo,
why do you live in such an area? So now, as a certain evening paper writes it, ‘I will tell you.’

One reason is that it’s so cheap. I mean, I have a rooted objection to paying rent at all, it should be free like air, and parks, and water. I don’t think I’m mean, in fact I know I’m not, but I just can’t bear paying more than a bob or two to landlords. But the real reason, as I expect you’ll have already guessed, is that, however horrible the area is, you’re
free
there! No one, I repeat it, no one, has ever asked me there what I am, or what I do, or where I came from, or what my social group is, or whether I’m educated or not, and if there’s one thing I cannot tolerate in this world, it’s nosey questions. And what is more, once the local bandits see you’re making out, can earn your living and so forth, they don’t swing it on you in the slightest you’re a teenage creation – if you have loot, and can look after yourself, they treat you as a man, which is what you are. For instance,
nobody
in the area would ever have treated me like that bank clerk tried to in Belgravia. If you go in anywhere, they take it for granted that you know the scene. If you don’t, it’s true they throw you out in pieces, but if you do, they treat you just as one of them.

The room I inhabit in sunny Napoli, which overlooks
both
railways (
and
the foulest row of backyards to be found outside the municipal compost heaps), belongs to an Asian character called Omar, Pakistani, I believe, who’s regular as clockwork – in fact, even more so, because clocks are known to stop – and turns up on Saturday mornings, accompanied by two countrymen
who act as bodyguards, to collect the rents, and you’d better have yours ready. Because if you haven’t, he simply grins his teeth and tells his
fellahin
to pile everything you possess neatly on the outside pavement, be it rain, or snow, or mulligatawny fog. And if you’ve locked the door, it means absolutely nothing to him to smash it down, and even if you’re in bed, all injured innocence and indignation, he still comes in with his sickly
don’t-mean
-a-thing kind of smile. So if you’re going to be away, it’s best to leave the money with a friend, or better still, pay him, as I do, monthly in advance. And when you do, he takes out a plastic bag on a long chain from a very inner pocket, and tucks the notes away, and says you must have a drink with him some time, but even when I’ve once or twice met him in a pub, he’s never offered it, of course. Also, if you make any complaint
whatever
– I mean, even that the roofs falling in, and the water cut off – he smiles that same smile and does positively sweet bugger-all about it. On the other hand, you could invite every whore and cut-throat in the city in for a pail of gin, or give a corpse accommodation for the night on the spare bed, or even set the bloody place on fire, and he wouldn’t turn a hair – or turn one if anybody complained to him about you. Not if you paid your rent, that is. In fact, the perfect landlord.

The tenants come and go, as you might expect, but among the regular squatters I have a few particular buddies, of whom I’d specially name the following three.

The first of them, on the floor below me (I’m on the
top), is a boy called The Fabulous Hoplite. I’m hoping you’ll not scoff at his name, because Hoplite would certainly not care for it if you did, as he’s a most sensitive and dignified character, who was formerly a male whore’s male maid, if the truth be told, but has now retired from that particular scene. According to report, the Hoplite has been in business with some of the city’s top poof raves, and was even more in demand by the gentry than the costly glamorosos he’d shacked up with. How I know him, is on account of his being a friend of Wiz’s who he admires (but nothing doing), and it was through them that I actually got my room. What the Hoplite does for a living now, apart from a bit of freelancing on the side when conditions get too rough, is act as contact man for various gossip columnists, because though you might not think this credible, considering his background, Hoplite gets around on the Knightsbridge-Chelsea circuit in quite an important way, no doubt owing to his being very handsome in an elfin, adolescent sort of style, and certainly very witty, or should I say sharp-tongued, but most of all, because he’s really very
friendly
: I mean, he really
does like
people, which a lot of people think they do, but which it seems, as a matter of fact, is really very rare.

Next, on the first floor, is in fact the best room, but I somehow don’t think he’ll last there, on account of really critical moments with Mr Omar, is a young coloured kid called Mr Cool (which I need hardly say is not his baptismal name, I don’t suppose). Cool is a local product, I mean born and bred on this island of both races, and
he wears a beardlet, and listens to the MJQ, and speaks very low, and blinks his big eyes and occasionally lets a sad, fleeting smile cross his kissable lips. He’s certainly younger than I am, but he makes me feel about nine or so, he’s so very poised and paternal, though what the hell he does to keep himself in MJQ LPs I haven’t an idea – I really haven’t. I don’t think it’s anything illegal, which is what you might expect, because the kid is always so skint, he’s only one suit (a striped Italian black), and no furniture to speak of except for his radiogram, so that either business, whatever it may be, is bad, or else, for reasons best known, he’s covering up.

I miss out various rooms and floors, and come now to my particular pal, who lives in the basement and really is a horror, called Big Jill. Now Jill is a Les. and, what is more, you may not believe this, but a Les. ponce, that is to say, she keeps a string of idiotic chicklets on the game, and just sits back in her over-heated, over-decorated, over cooking-smelling basement and collects. She’s in all day, and goes out as sun sets to an overnight club where she’s behind the counter, and holds her court among her little Les.-ette fans. And then, in the wee small hours, she has a way, when she comes home, of stopping in the area before she goes in and yelling at the upper windows at the Hoplite or myself, to ask if we want to come down and have anything to eat. Which, as a matter of fact, we quite often do, not really for the food, but because old Jill is very wise, in spite of being not far in her twenties, and is my chief and only confidant about Suzette who I ask her advice about but, as I need hardly tell you,
haven’t produced for her inspection, for all my contacts with Suze are at her place over there in W2.

So by now, of course, I had arrived there, and shot up the flights of no-lino stairs, which nobody keeps swept and ever lit (and the front door’s always open) into my loft, which is one big room right across the whole top of the establishment, plus bathroom on the landing minus a bath (I use the municipal), but with basin and a convenient. And I’ve decorated it all in what I call
anti-contemptuous
style, i.e. ancient aunt Fanny wallpapers I got from some left-overs in a paint shop in the Portobello Road. I’ve got a bed, too, a triple one, and the usual chair and table; but no other chairs, and instead a lot of cushions spread out on the floor and on top of what is my only luxury, a fitted carpet. My clothes I hang on ropes with polythene covers for the BR soot, the rest I keep in my metal cabin trunk. I don’t have curtains because I like to look out, specially at night, and I’m too high for anyone to look in. The only other objects are my record-player, my pocket transistor radio, and stacks of discs and books that I’ve collected, hundreds of them, which every New Year’s Day I have a pogrom of, and sling out everything except a very chosen few.