Brighton Rock (8 page)

‘It don’t matter,’ the Boy said. ‘I’m not one for dancing.’ He eyed the slow movement of the two-backed beasts: pleasure, he thought, they call it pleasure: he was shaken by a sense of loneliness, an awful lack of understanding. The floor was cleared for the last cabaret of the evening. A spotlight picked out a patch of floor, a crooner in a dinner jacket, a microphone on a long black movable stand. He held it tenderly as if it were a woman, swinging it gently this way and that, wooing it with his lips while from the loudspeaker under the gallery his whisper reverberated hoarsely over the hall, like a dictator announcing victory, like the official news following a long censorship. ‘It gets you,’ the Boy said, ‘it gets you,’ surrendering himself to the huge brazen suggestion.

‘Music talks, talks of our love.

The starling on our walks, talks, talks of our love.

The taxis tooting,

The last owl hooting,

The tube train rumbling,

Busy bee bumbling,

Talk of our love.

Music talks, talks of our love,

The west wind on our walks, talks, talks of our love.

The nightingale singing,

The postmen ringing,

Electric drill groaning,

Office telephoning,

Talk of our love.’

The Boy stared at the spotlight: music, love, nightingale, postmen: the words stirred in his brain like poetry: one hand caressed
the
vitriol bottle in his pocket, the other touched Rose’s wrist. The inhuman voice whistled round the gallery and the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I’ll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he for one would never get mixed up, the music had its own retort at hand: ‘You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way.’

‘The watchdog on our walks, talks, talks of our love.’

The crowd stood at attention six deep behind the tables (there wasn’t enough room on the floor for so many). They were dead quiet. It was like the anthem on Armistice Day when the King has deposited his wreath, the hats off, and the troops turned to stone. It was love of a kind, music of a kind, truth of a kind they listened to.

‘Gracie Fields funning,

The gangsters gunning,

Talk of our love.’

The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the singer holding the microphone closer to his starched shirt. ‘You been in love?’ the Boy asked sharply and uneasily.

‘Oh yes,’ Rose said.

The Boy retorted with sudden venom, ‘You would have been. You’re green. You don’t know what people do.’ The music came to an end and in the silence he laughed aloud. ‘You’re innocent.’ People turned in their chairs and looked at them: a girl giggled. His fingers pinched her wrist. ‘You’re green,’ he said again. He was working himself into a little sensual rage, as he had done with the soft kids at the council school. ‘You don’t know anything,’ he said, with contempt in his nails.

‘Oh no,’ she protested. ‘I know a lot.’

The Boy grinned at her, ‘Not a thing,’ pinching the skin of her wrist until his nails nearly met. ‘You’d like me for your boy, eh? We’ll keep company?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’d love it.’ Tears of pride and pain pricked behind her lids. ‘If you like doing that,’ she said, ‘go on.’

The Boy let go. ‘Don’t be soft,’ he said. ‘Why should I like it? You think you know too much,’ he complained. He sat there, anger like a live coal in his belly, as the music came on again: all the good times he’d had in the old days with nails and splinters: the tricks he’d learnt later with a razor blade: what would be the fun if people didn’t squeal? He said furiously, ‘We’ll be going. I can’t stand this place,’ and obediently Rose began to pack her handbag, putting back her Woolworth compact and her handkerchief. ‘What’s that?’ the Boy said when something clinked in her bag; she showed him the end of a string of beads.

‘You a Roman?’ the Boy asked.

‘Yes,’ Rose said.

‘I’m one too,’ the Boy said. He gripped her arm and pushed her out into the dark dripping street. He turned up the collar of his jacket and ran as the lightning flapped and the thunder filled the air. They ran from doorway to doorway until they were back on the parade in one of the empty glass shelters. They had it to themselves in the noisy stifling night. ‘Why, I was in a choir once,’ the Boy confided and suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy’s voice: ‘Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.’ In his voice a whole lost world moved—the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music. Music—it didn’t matter what music—‘Agnus dei’, ‘lovely to look at, beautiful to hold’, ‘the starling on our walks’, ‘credo in unum Dominum’—any music moved him, speaking of things he didn’t understand.

‘Do you go to Mass?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Rose said. ‘It depends on work. Most weeks I wouldn’t get much sleep if I went to Mass.’

‘I don’t care what you do,’ the Boy said sharply. ‘I don’t go to Mass.’

‘But you believe, don’t you,’ Rose implored him, ‘you think it’s true?’

‘Of course it’s true,’ the Boy said. ‘What else could there be?’ he went scornfully on. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s the only thing that fits.
These
atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,’ he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments.’

‘And Heaven too,’ Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.

‘Oh, maybe,’ the Boy said, ‘maybe.’

Wet to the skin, the trousers sticking to his thin legs the Boy went up the long unmatted flight to his bedroom at Frank’s. The banister shook under his hand, and when he opened the door and found the mob there, sitting on his brass bedstead smoking, he said furiously, ‘When’s that banister going to be mended? It’s not safe. Someone’ll take a fall one day.’ The curtain wasn’t drawn, the window was open, and the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea. The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt’s sausage roll. ‘What’s this,’ he said, ‘a meeting?’

‘There’s trouble about the subscriptions, Pinkie,’ Cubitt said. ‘There’s two not come in. Brewer and Tate. They say now Kite’s dead—’

‘Do we carve ’em up, Pinkie?’ Dallow asked. Spicer stood at the window watching the storm. He said nothing, staring out at the flames and chasms of the sky.

‘Ask Spicer,’ the Boy said. ‘He’s been doing a lot of thinking lately.’ They all turned and watched Spicer. Spicer said, ‘Maybe we ought to lay off a while. You know a lot of the boys cleared out when Kite got killed.’

‘Go on,’ the Boy said. ‘Listen to him. He’s what they call a philosopher.’

‘Well,’ Spicer said angrily, ‘there’s free speech in this mob, ain’t there? Those that cleared out, they didn’t see how a kid could run this show.’

The Boy sat on the bed watching him with his hands in his damp pockets. He shivered once.

‘I was always against murder,’ Spicer said. ‘I don’t care who knows it.’

‘Sour and milky,’ the Boy said.

Spicer came into the middle of the room. ‘Listen, Pinkie,’ he said. ‘Be reasonable.’ He appealed to them all, ‘Be reasonable.’

‘There’s things in what he says,’ Cubitt suddenly put in. ‘We had a lucky break. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We’d better let Brewer and Tate be for a while.’

The Boy got up. A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit. ‘You ready, Dallow?’ he said.

‘What you say, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, grinning like a large friendly dog.

‘Where you going, Pinkie?’ Spicer asked.

‘I’m going to see Brewer.’

Cubitt said, ‘You act as if it was last year we killed Hale, not last week. We got to act cautious.’

‘That’s over and done,’ the Boy said. ‘You heard the verdict. Natural causes,’ he said, looking out at the dying storm.

‘You forget that girl in Snow’s. She could hang us.’

‘I’m looking after the girl. She won’t talk.’

‘You’re marrying her, aren’t you?’ Cubitt said. Dallow laughed.

The Boy’s hands came out of his pockets, the knuckles clenched white. He said, ‘Who told you I was marrying her?’

‘Spicer,’ Cubitt said.

Spicer backed away from the Boy. He said, ‘Listen, Pinkie. I only said as it would make her safe. A wife can’t give evidence. . . ’

‘I don’t need to marry a squirt to make her safe. How do we make you safe, Spicer?’ His tongue came out between his teeth, licking the edges of his dry cracked lips. ‘If carving’d do it. . . ’

‘It was just a joke,’ Cubitt said. ‘You don’t need to take it so solemn. You want a sense of humour, Pinkie.’

‘You think that was funny, eh?’ the Boy said. ‘Me—marrying—that cheap polony.’ He croaked ‘Ha, ha,’ at them. ‘I’ll learn. Come on, Dallow.’

‘Wait till morning,’ Cubitt sad. ‘Wait till some of the other boys come in.’

‘You milky too?’

‘You don’t believe that, Pinkie. But we got to go slow.’

‘You with me, Dallow?’ the boy asked.

‘I’m with you, Pinkie.’

‘Then we’ll be going,’ the Boy sad. He went across to the washstand and opened the little door where the jerry stood. He felt at the back behind the jerry and pulled out a tiny blade, like the blades women shave with, but blunt along one edge and mounted with sticking-plaster. He stuck it under his long thumb-nail, the only nail not bitten close, and drew on his glove. He said, ‘We’ll be back with the sub. in half an hour,’ and led the way bang straight down Frank’s stairs. The cold of his drenching had got under his skin: he came out on to the front a pace ahead of Dallow, his face contorted with ague, a shiver twisting the narrow shoulders. He said over his shoulder to Dallow, ‘We’ll go to Brewer’s. One lesson’ll be enough.’

‘What you say, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, plodding after. The rain had stopped: it was low tide and the shallow edge of the sea scraped far out at the rim of the shingle. A clock struck midnight. Dallow suddenly began to laugh.

‘What’s got you, Dallow?’

‘I was just thinking,’ Dallow said. ‘You’re a grand little geezer, Pinkie. Kite was right to take you on. You go straight for things, Pinkie.’

‘You’re all right,’ the Boy said, staring ahead, the ague wringing his face. They passed the Cosmopolitan, the lights on here and there all the way up the tall front to the turrets against the clouded moving sky. In Snow’s when they passed a single light went out. They turned up the Old Steyne. Brewer had a house near the tram lines on the Lewes road almost under the railway viaduct.

‘He’s gone to bed,’ Dallow said. Pinkie rang the bell, holding his finger on the switch. Low shuttered shops ran off on either hand, a tram went by with nobody in it, labelled ‘Depot Only’, ringing and swinging down the empty road, the conductor drowsing on a seat inside, the roof gleaming from the storm. Pinkie kept his finger on the bell.

‘What made Spicer say that—about me marrying?’ the Boy asked.

‘He just thought it’d close her clapper,’ Dallow said.

‘She’s not what keeps me awake,’ the Boy said, pressing on the bell. A light went on upstairs, a window creaked up, and a voice called, ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s me,’ the Boy said. ‘Pinkie.’

‘What do you want? Why don’t you come around in the morning?’

‘I want to talk to you, Brewer.’

‘I’ve got nothing to talk about, Pinkie, that can’t wait.’

‘You’d better open up, Brewer. You don’t want the mob along here.’

‘The old woman’s awful sick, Pinkie. I don’t want any trouble. She’s asleep. She hasn’t slept for three nights.’

‘This’ll wake her,’ the Boy said with his finger on the bell. A slow goods train went by across the viaduct, shaking smoke down into the Lewes road.

‘Leave off, Pinkie, and I’ll open up.’

Pinkie shivered as he waited, his gloved hand deep in his damp pocket. Brewer opened the door, a stout elderly man in soiled white pyjamas. The bottom button was missing and the coat swung from the bulging belly and the deep navel. ‘Come in, Pinkie,’ he said, ‘and walk quiet. The old woman’s bad. I’ve been worrying my head off.’

‘That why you haven’t paid your subscription, Brewer?’ the Boy said. He looked with contempt down the narrow hall—the shell case converted into an umbrella-stand, the moth-eaten stag’s head bearing on one horn a bowler hat, a steel helmet used for ferns. Kite ought to have got them into better money than this. Brewer had only just graduated from the street corner, saloon-bar betting. A welsher. It was no good trying to draw more than ten per cent of his bets.

Brewer said, ‘Come in here and be snug. It’s warm in here. What a cold night.’ He had a hollow cheery manner even in pyjamas. He was like a legend on a racing card—The Old Firm. You can Trust Bill Brewer. He lit the gas-fire, turned on a stand lamp in a red silk shade with a bobble fringe. The light glowed on a silver-plated biscuit-box, a framed wedding group. ‘Have a spot of Scotch?’ Brewer invited them.

‘You know I don’t drink,’ the Boy said.

‘Ted will,’ Brewer said.

‘I don’t mind a spot,’ Dallow said. He grinned and said, ‘Here’s how.’

‘We’ve called for that subscription, Brewer,’ the Boy said.

The man in white pyjamas hissed soda into his glass. His back turned he watched Pinkie in the glass above the sideboard until he caught the other’s eye. He said, ‘I been worried, Pinkie. Ever since Kite was croaked.’

‘Well?’ the Boy said.

‘It’s like this. I said to myself if Kite’s mob can’t even protect—’ he stopped suddenly and listened. ‘Was that the old woman?’ Very faintly from the room above came the sound of coughing. Brewer said, ‘She’s woke up. I got to go and see her.’

‘You stay here,’ the Boy said, ‘and talk.’

‘She’ll want turning.’

‘When we’ve finished you can go.’

Cough, cough, cough: it was like a machine trying to start and failing. Brewer said desperately, ‘Be human. She won’t know where I’ve got to. I’ll only be a minute.’

‘You don’t need to be longer than a minute here,’ the Boy said. ‘All we want’s what’s due to us. Twenty pounds.’

‘I haven’t got it in the house. Honest I haven’t.’