Absolute Beginners (8 page)

‘You’re not referring to marriage, are you?’

‘No, no, no, no, no, Big Jill.’

‘
To
love
?’

‘Yep. That’s it. To it.’

Big J.’s eyes were pale, so that she seemed to be staring into herself, and not out into the room at me.

‘You ever had that combo?’ she enquired.

‘No.’

‘Not even with Suzette?’

‘No. Me, yes, I was ready for that everything stage of it, but for Suze it was only a head, bodies and legs thing, when it happened.’

Big Jill looked wise, and said, ‘So it was really you who broke it up, then.’

‘I suppose you could say so, yes. I wanted more from Suze than she wanted to give me, and I just couldn’t bear anything that was less.’

‘Then why you still trail round after her? You hope she’ll change?’

‘Yes.’

Big Jill heaved herself up, and said, ‘Well, boy, I can tell you something, which is she won’t, Suzette. Not for ten or fifteen years she won’t, anyway, I can promise you that. Later on, when you’re both a big boy and girl, you might be able to wrap a big thing up …’

I’d moved away, and was looking out into her area Kew gardens. ‘If I can work up the strength of will,’ I said, ‘I’m going to cut out seeing Suze at all.’

‘Don’t turn your back when you’re talking, son. You mean live on your visions like a monk?’

I turned round and said, ‘I mean shut my gate to all that nonsense.’

Big Jill came over too. ‘You’re too young for that,’ she said. ‘If you do, you’ll only do yourself an injury. You shouldn’t give up kicks till they don’t mean a thing to you any more.’ But she was quite a bit edgy, I could see. ‘You’re a romantic!’ she said. ‘A second feature Romeo!’ and she took back my coffee cup as if I’d tried to rob her of it.

Well, there it is. That’s what always happens if you try to tell the
truth
, they always want to know it, and nag you and persuade you against your better sense to tell it, and then they’re always angry with you when they hear it, and dislike you for it. And, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t even the truth I’d told Big Jill, in one respect: and that is, Suze and I hadn’t made it, actually, though we’d sailed right up close so often. But even when the scene was set,
and we both meant business, it hadn’t happened, and I’m not sure if the real reason for this was her, or me.

I thought of all this, as I climbed out of Napoli into London, up towards N. Hill Gate. And straining up the Portobello Road, I passed a crocodile of infants, and among them a number of little Spadelets, and I noticed, not for the first time, how, in the underground movement of the juveniles, they hadn’t been educated up yet to the colour thing. Fists and wits, they were what mattered, and the only enemy was teacher. And as I walked on along the Bayswater Road, just inside that two miles of gardens, so pretty and kind by day (but not by night), I went on thinking, as my Italian casuals carried me on.

Perhaps Big Jill’s right, I think too much, but the sight of these school-kids reminded me of the man who really taught me to think at all, and that was my elementary schoolmaster, called Mr Barter. I know it’s un-sharp to admit a schoolteacher ever taught you anything, but this Mr Barter, who was cross-eyed, did. I got in his clutches when I was eleven, and the glorious 1950s had just begun. On account of schools being blitzed when I was an infant (which I can hardly remember, only a bit of the buzz-bombs at the end), I had to walk a mile up into Kilburn Park, to the place where this Mr Barter gave his performance. Now, dig this – because this was it. Old Mr Barter was the only man (or woman, too) in all the schools that I attended, before I packed that nonsense in three years ago, who actually made me realise two things, of which number one is, that what you learnt had some actual value to you personally, and wasn’t just
dropped on you like a punishment, and number two, that everything you learnt, you hadn’t learnt until you’d really dug it: i.e. made it part of your own experience. He’d tell us things – for example, like that Valparaiso was a big city in Chile, or that x+y equals something or other, or who all the Henrys were, or Georges, and he’d make us feel this crazy stuff really
concerned
us kids, was something to do with us, and had a value. Also, he made me kinky about books: he managed to teach me – to this day, I don’t know how – that books were not just a thing like that – I mean, just
books
– but somebody else’s mind opened up for me to look into, and he taught me the habit, later on, of actually
buying
them! Yes – I mean real books, like the serious paperbacks, which must have been unknown among the kids up in the Harrow Road those days, who thought a book’s an SF or a Western, if they thought it’s anything.

Since we’re on the subject, and I can’t cause any more red faces than I already have, I’d also like to mention that the second great influence of my life was something even more embarrassing, and this is that, believe it or not, I actually was, for two whole years a
wolf cub
! Yes – me! Well … this is the fable. I got swung into that thing when, like all kids do, I was called up for the Sabbath school, and I soon told that Sunday lot it could please take a walk, but somehow got latched on to this wolf cub kick, because it started to fascinate me, for the following reasons. The first week I attended, dragged there by Dad, the old cub master, who I now realise was a terrible old poof, said that he wanted my attendance to be voluntary,
not forced, and if after a full month I found they made it so attractive I’d want to come of my own free will, then would that show? I said, sure, yes it would, thinking, naturally, the month would soon pass by, and they began to teach me a lot of crap I found, even at that age, absolutely useless and ridiculous, like lighting fires with two matches when matches are about the cheapest thing there are to buy, and putting tourniquets on kids’ legs for snake-bites when there aren’t any snakes in London, and anyway, what if they bit kids on the head or other sensitive parts? Yet gradually, all the same, to everyone’s astonishment, I did actually begin to be a raver for those weekly meetings in the Baptist corrugated iron temple, because I really felt – don’t laugh – that for the first time, here was a family: at any rate, a lot, a mob, a click I could belong to. And though that dreadful old cub master with his awful shorts, and his floppy khaki hat, was queer as a coot and even queerer, he didn’t interfere with any of us kids in any way, and actually succeeded in teaching us
morals
– can you believe it? Well – he did! He really did. I can honestly say the only ideas on morals I know anything of, were those that bent old cub master made me believe in, chiefly, I think, because he made us feel that he liked us, all us grubby-kneed little monsters, and cared what happened to us, and didn’t
want
anything from us, except that we look after ourselves decently in the great big world hereafter. He was the first adult I’d ever met – even including Dad – who didn’t come the adult at us – didn’t use his strength, and won us over by persuasion.

That brings me to today, and to the third item in my education, my university, you might say, and that’s the jazz clubs. Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz – quite frankly, I don’t really care
what
you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really understand it
all
– I mean, certain LPs leave me speechless. But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. The result of all this is that, in the jazz world, you meet all kinds of cats, on absolutely equal terms, who can clue you up in all kinds of directions – in social directions, in culture directions, in sexual directions, and in racial directions … in fact, almost anywhere, really, you want to go to learn. So that’s why, when the teenage thing began to seem to me to fall into the hands of exhibitionists and moneylenders, I cut out gradually from the kiddo waterholes, and made it for the bars, and clubs, and concerts where the older numbers of the jazz world gathered.

But this particular evening, I had to call at a teenage hut inside Soho, in order to contact two of my models, by names Dean Swift and the Misery Kid. Now, about Soho, there’s this, that although so much crap’s written about the area, of all London quarters, I think it’s still
one of the most authentic. I mean, Mayfair is just top spivs stepping into the slippers of the former gentry, and Belgravia, like I’ve said, is all flats in houses built as palaces, and Chelsea – well! Just take a look yourself, next time you’re there. But in Soho, all the things they say happen, do: I mean, the vice of every kink, and speakeasies and spielers and friends who carve each other up, and, on the other hand, dear old Italians and sweet old Viennese who’ve run their honest, unbent little businesses there since the days of George six, and five, and backward far beyond. And what’s more, although the pavement’s thick with tearaways, provided you don’t meddle it’s really a much safer area than the respectable suburban fringe. It’s not in Soho a sex maniac leaps out of a hedge onto your back and violates you. It’s in the dormitory sections.

The coffee spot where I hoped I’d find my two duets was of the kind that’s now the chicest thing to date among the juniors – namely, the pigsty variety, and adolescent bum’s delight. I don’t exaggerate, as you’ll see. What you do is, rent premises that are just as dear as any other, rip up the linos and tear out the nice fittings if there happen to be any, put in thick wood floors and tables, and take special care not to wipe the cups properly, or sweep the butts and crusts and spittle off the floor. Candles are a help or, at a pinch, non-pearl 40-watt blue bulbs. And a jukebox just for decoration, as it’s considered rather naïve to
use
one in these places.

This example was called Chez Nobody, and sure enough, sitting far apart from each other at distant
tables, were the Dean and the Misery Kid. Though both are friends of mine, and, in a way, even friends of each other, these two don’t mix in public, on account of the Dean being a sharp modern jazz creation, and the Kid just a skiffle survival, with horrible leanings to the trad. thing. That is to say, the Kid admires the groups that play what is supposed to be the authentic music of old New Orleans, i.e. combos of booking office clerks and quantity-surveyors’ assistants who’ve handed in their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing, when it all long ago began.

If you know the contemporary scene, you could tell them apart at once, just like you could a soldier or sailor, with their separate uniforms. Take first the Misery Kid and his trad. drag. Long, brush-less hair, white stiff-starched collar (rather grubby), striped shirt, tie of all one colour (red today, but it could have been royal-blue or navy), short jacket but an old one (somebody’s riding tweed, most likely), very, very, tight, tight, trousers with wide stripe, no sox, short
boots
. Now observe the Dean in the modernist number’s version. College-boy smooth crop hair with burnt-in parting, neat white Italian
rounded-collared
shirt, short Roman jacket
very
tailored (two little vents, three buttons), no-turn-up narrow trousers with 17-inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointed-toe shoes, and a white mac lying folded by his side, compared with Misery’s sausage-rolled umbrella.

Compare them, and take your pick! I would add that their chicks, if present, would match them up with: trad.
boy’s girl – long hair, untidy with long fringes, maybe jeans and a big floppy sweater, maybe bright-coloured never-floralled, never-pretty dress … smudged-looking’s the objective. Modern jazz boy’s girl – short hemlines, seamless stockings, pointed-toed high-heeled stiletto shoes, crêpe nylon rattling petticoat, short blazer jacket, hair done up into the elfin style. Face pale – corpse colour with a dash of mauve, plenty of mascara.

I sat down just beside the Misery Kid, who was eating a gateau and had everything horrible about him, spotty, unpressed, unlaundered, but with the loveliest pair of eyes you ever saw, brown and funny and appealing, I can only say, not that the Kid ever asks you for anything, as he only speaks in sentences of four words at his most voluble.

‘Evening, Kid,’ I said. ‘There’s been a small disaster.’

He just gazed like a fish: brows up, but not really curious.

‘You recollect the snaps I took of you as the poet Chatterton with your bird as your Inspiration in some nylon net?’

‘So?’ said the Kid.

‘It’s all right, my client’s not bounced the order, but I’ve developed the stuff, and your chick came out too indistinct by far.’

‘She not meant so?’

‘She’s meant to be vague, Misery Kid, but she’s meant to be visible behind that nylon net. Well? I expect she must have moved.’

‘You pay us for a second take?’

‘Certainly, Mr Bolden. But I can’t pay for anything till I give the prints to Mr X-Y-Z.’

‘Who he?’

‘The client.’

The Misery Kid picked his nose and said, ‘This client no deposit?’

‘No. We’ve just got to do it all again, Mr Kid, to get our money. Can you raise your partner?’

‘I dunno I know,’ he said. ‘Bell me tonight, I tell you.’

He got up, not showing his feelings, which was really rather heroic, because here was this trad. child, alone among the teenagers, in the days of prosperity, still living like a bum and a bohemian, skint and possibly even hungry, but still not arguing about the loot. If he’d argued, he’d have got some out of me, but to argue when the dirt dropped down on your head was contrary to his whole trad. ideology. As the Misery Kid passed by the Dean on his way out, Dean Swift looked up and hissed at him, ‘Fascist!’ which the Kid ignored. These modern jazz boys certainly do feel strongly about the trad. reaction.