Collected Stories (2 page)

While she bent down and kissed Jimmy, and he rubbed his hand between her legs, Roy looked at the picture of Keith Richards and considered how he’d longed for the uncontrolled life, seeking only pleasure and avoiding the ponderous difficulties of keeping everything together. He wondered if that was what he still wanted, or if he were still capable of it.

When Kara had gone, Roy stood over Jimmy and asked, ‘What d’you want me to do?’

‘Quote the lyrics of “Tumblin’ Dice”.’

The girl in the hat touched Roy’s arm. ‘We’re going clubbing. Aren’t you taking Jimmy to your place tonight?’

‘What? Is that the idea?’

‘He tells everyone you’re his best friend. He can’t stay here.’ The girl went on. ‘I’m Candy. Jimmy said you work with Munday.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What are you doing with him, a promo?’

From the floor Jimmy threw up his protracted cackle.

Roy said, ‘I’m going to direct a feature I’ve written.’

‘Can I work on it with you?’ she asked. ‘I’ll do anything.’

‘You’d better ring me to discuss it,’ he said.

Jimmy called, ‘How’s the pregnant wife?’

‘Fine.’

‘And that young girl who liked to sit on your face?’

Roy made a sign at Candy and led her into an unlit room next door. He cut out some coke, turned to the waiting girl and kissed her against the wall, smelling this stranger and running his hands over her. She inhaled her line, but before he could dispose of his and hold her again, she had gone.

Marco and Jake had carted Jimmy out, stashed him in Roy’s car and instructed him to fuck off for good.

Roy drove Jimmy along the King’s Road. As always now, Jimmy was dressed for outdoors, in sweaters, boots and heavy coat. In contrast, Roy’s colleagues dressed in light clothes and would never inadvertently enter the open air: when they wanted weather they would fly to a place that had the right kind. An overripe gutter odour rose from Jimmy, and Roy noticed the dusty imprint of Marco’s foot on his chest. Jimmy pulled a pair of black lace-trimmed panties from his pocket and sniffed at them like a duchess mourning a relative.

This was an opportunity, Roy decided, to use on Jimmy some of the honest directness he had been practising at work. Surely it would be instructive and improving for Jimmy to survive without constant assistance. Besides, Roy couldn’t be sucked into another emotional maelstrom.

He said, ‘Isn’t there anywhere you can go?’

‘What for?’ said Jimmy.

‘To rest. To sleep. At night.’

‘To sleep? Oh I see. It’s okay. Leave me on the corner.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I’ve slept out before.’

‘I meant you’ve usually got someone. Some girl.’

‘Sometimes I stay with Candy.’

‘Really?’

Jimmy said, ‘You liked her, yeah? I’ll try and arrange something. Did I tell you she likes to stand on her head with her legs open?’

‘You should have mentioned it to Clara on the phone.’

‘It’s a very convenient position for cunnilingus.’

‘Particularly at our age when unusual postures can be a strain,’ added Roy.

Jimmy put his hand in Roy’s hair. ‘You’re going grey, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘But I’m not. Isn’t that strange?’ Jimmy mused a few seconds. ‘But I can’t stay with her. Kara wouldn’t like it.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘I’m over forty! They’re dying, they make me take my shoes off! They weep when they see me! They –’

Jimmy’s parents were political refugees from Eastern Europe who’d suffered badly in the war, left their families, and lived in Britain since 1949. They’d expected, in this city full of people who lived elsewhere in their minds, to be able to return home, but they never could. Britain hadn’t engaged them; they barely spoke the language. Meanwhile Jimmy fell in love with pop. When he played the blues on his piano his parents had it locked in the garden shed. Jimmy and his parents had never understood one another, but he had remained as rootless as they had been, never even acquiring a permanent flat.

He was rummaging in his pockets where he kept his phone numbers on torn pieces of cigarette packet and ragged tube tickets. ‘You remember when I brought that girl round one afternoon –’

‘The eighteen-year-old?’

‘She wanted your advice on getting into the media. You fucked her on the table in front of me.’

‘The media got into her.’

‘Indeed. Can you remember what you wore, who you pretended to be, and what you said?’

‘What did I say?’

‘It was your happiest moment.’

‘It was a laugh.’

‘One of our best.’

‘One of many.’

They slapped hands.

Jimmy said, ‘The next day she left me.’

‘Sensible girl.’

‘We’d exploited her. She had a soul which you were disrespectful to.’ Jimmy reached over and stroked Roy’s face. ‘I just wanted to say, I love you, man, even if you are a bastard.’

Jimmy started clapping to the music. He could revive as quickly as a child. Nevertheless, Roy determined to beware of his friend’s manipulations; this was how Jimmy had survived since leaving university without ever working. For years women had fallen at Jimmy’s feet; now he collapsed at theirs. Yet even as he descended they liked him as much. Many were convinced of his lost genius, which had been perfectly preserved for years, by procrastination. Jimmy got away with things; he didn’t earn what he received. This was delicious but also a provocation, mocking justice.

Roy had pondered all this, not without incomprehension and envy, until he grasped how much Jimmy gave the women. Alcoholism, unhappiness, failure, ill-health, he showered them with despair, and guiltlessly extracted as much concern as they might proffer. They admired, Roy guessed, his having made a darkness to inhabit. Not everyone was brave enough to fall so far out of the light. To Roy it also demonstrated how many women still saw sacrifice as their purpose.

Friendship was the recurring idea in Roy’s mind. He recalled some remarks of Montaigne. ‘If I were pressed to say why I love him, I feel that my only reply could be, “because it was he, because it was I”.’ Also, ‘Friendship is enjoyed even as it is desired; it is bred, nourished and increased only by enjoyment, since it is a spiritual thing and the soul is purified by its practice.’ However, Montaigne had said nothing about the friend staying with you, as Jimmy seemed set on doing; or about dealing with someone who couldn’t believe that, given the choice, anyone would rather be sober than drunk, and that once someone had started drinking they would stop voluntarily before passing out – the only way of going to sleep that Jimmy found natural.

Roy no longer had any clue what social or political obligations he had, nor much idea where such duties could come from. At university he’d been a charged conscience, acquiring dozens of attitudes wholesale, which, over the years, he had let drop, rather as people stopped wearing certain clothes one by one and started wearing others, until they transformed themselves without deciding to. Since then Roy hadn’t settled in any of the worlds he inhabited, but only stepped through them like hotel rooms, and, in the process, hadn’t considered what he might owe others. Tonight, what love did this lying, drunken, raggedy-arsed bastard demand?

‘Hey.’ Roy noticed that Jimmy’s fingers were tightening around the handbrake.

‘Stop.’

‘Now?’ Roy said.

‘Yes!’

Jimmy was already clambering out of the car and making for an off-licence a few steps away. He wasn’t sober but he knew where he was. Roy had no choice but to follow. Jimmy was asking for a bottle of vodka. Then, as Jimmy noticed Roy extracting a £50 note – which was all, to his annoyance, that he was carrying – he added a bottle of whisky to his order. When the assistant turned his back Jimmy swiped four beer cans and concealed them inside his jacket. He also collected Roy’s change.

Outside, a beggar extended his cap and mumbled some words of a song. Jimmy squatted down at the man’s level and stuffed the change from the £50 into his cap.

‘I’ve got nothing else,’ Jimmy said. ‘Literally fuck-all. But take this. I’ll be dead soon.’

The man held the notes up to the light. This was too much. Roy went to snatch them back. But the bum had disappeared them and was repeating, ‘On yer way, on yer way …’

Roy turned to Jimmy. ‘It’s my money.’

‘It’s nothing to you, is it?’

‘That doesn’t make it yours.’

‘Who cares whose it is? He needs it more than us.’

‘ … on yer way …’

‘He’s not our responsibility.’

Jimmy looked at Roy curiously. ‘What makes you say that? He’s pitiful.’

Roy noticed two more derelicts shuffling forward. Further up the street others had gathered, anticipating generosity.

‘ … on yer way …’

Roy pulled Jimmy into the car and locked the doors from inside.

Along from Roy’s house, lounging by a wall with up-to-something looks on their faces, were two white boys who occupied a nearby basement. The police were often outside, and their mother begging them to take them away; but the authorities could do nothing until the lads were older. Most mornings when Roy went out to get his
Independent
he walked across glass where cars had been broken into. Several times he had greeted the boys. They nodded at him now; one day he would refuse his fear and speak properly. He didn’t like to think there was anyone it was impossible to contact in some way, but he didn’t know where to begin. Meanwhile he could hardly see out of his house for the bars and latticed slats. Beside his bed he kept a knife and hammer, and was mindful of not turning over too strenuously for fear of whacking the red alarm button adjacent to his pillow.

‘This the new house? Looks comfortable,’ said Jimmy. ‘You didn’t invite me to the house-warming, but Clara’s gonna be delighted to see me now. Wished I owned a couple of suitcases so I could stand at the door and tell her I’m here for a while.’

‘Don’t make too much noise.’

*

Roy led Jimmy into the living room. Then he ran upstairs, opened the bedroom door and listened to Clara breathing in the darkness. He had wanted to fuck her that night. When the phone rang he was initiating the painstaking preparatory work. It was essential not to offend her in any way since a thumbs-down was easy, and agreeable, to her. He had been sitting close by her and sending, telepathically – his preferred method of communication – loving sensual messages. As they rarely touched one another gratuitously, immediate physical contact – his hand in her hair – would be a risk. But if he did manage to touch her without a setback and even if, perhaps, he persuaded her to pull her skirt up a little – this made him feel as if he had reached the starting-gate, at least – he knew success was a possibility. Bearing this in mind he would rush upstairs to bed, changing into his pyjamas so as not to alarm her with uncovered flesh. He had, scrupulously, to avoid her getting the right idea.

He tried to anticipate which mood would carry her through the bedroom door. If there was something he’d neglected to do, like lock the back door or empty the dishwasher, arduous diplomacy would be imperative. Otherwise he would observe her undressing as she watched TV, knowing it would be only moments before his nails were in the bitch’s fat arse.

But wait: she had perched on the end of the bed to inspect her corns while sucking on a throat pastille and discussing the cost of having the front of the house repointed. His desire was boiling, and he wanted to strike down his penis, which by now was through the front of his pyjamas, with a ruler.

As she watched TV beside him and he played with her breasts, she continued to pretend that this was not happening; perhaps, for her, it wasn’t. She did, though, appear to believe in foreplay, at least for herself. After a time she would even remove all her clothes, though not without a histrionic shiver to demonstrate that sex altered one’s temperature. At this encouragement he would scoot across the floor and hunt, in the back of a drawer, for a pair of crumpled black nylon French knickers. Rolling her eyes at the tawdry foolishness of men she might, if his luck was in, pull them on. He knew she was finally conquered when she stopped watching television. Unfortunately, she used this opportunity, while she had his attention, to scold him for minor offences. He could, with pleasure, have taped over her mouth.

In all this there must have been, despite their efforts, a unifying pleasure, for next morning she liked to hold him, and wanted to be kissed.

Roy could only close the door now. Before returning to Jimmy he went into the room next door. Clara had bought a changing table on which lay pairs of mittens, baby boots, little red hats, cardigans smaller than handkerchiefs. The curtains were printed with airborne elephants; on the wall was a picture of a farmyard.

What had he done? She puzzled him still. Never had a woman pursued him as passionately as Clara over the past five years. Not a day would pass, at the beginning, when she didn’t send him flowers and books, invite him to concerts and the cinema, or cook for him. Perhaps she had been attempting, by example, to kindle in him the romantic feeling she herself desired. He had accepted it like a pasha. At other times he’d attempted to brush her away, and had always kept other women. He saw now what a jejune protest that was. Her love had been an onslaught. She wanted a family. He, who liked to plan everything, but had really only known what sort of work he sought, had complied in order to see what might occur. He had been easily overrun; the child was coming; it gave him vertigo.

He was tugging at a mattress leaning against the wall. Jimmy would be cosy here, perhaps too cosy, reflected Roy, going downstairs without it.

Jimmy was lying with his feet on the sofa. Beside him he had arranged a beer, a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels taken from the drinks cupboard. He was lighting a cigarette from the matches Roy had collected from the Royalton and the Odeon, smart New York restaurants, and kept to impress people.

There was no note from Clara about Munday, and no message on the machine.

Roy said, ‘All right, pal?’ He decided he loved his friend, envied his easy complacency, and was glad to have him here.