No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (12 page)

‘I will be after Bristol.’ Her face is making concertina music again. She lays it on his shoulder, in parody of a woman waiting to learn her matrimonial fate. Will he or won’t he? ‘Why? Do you know one?’

‘I’ll drive you.’

She looks up at him, her face cocked like a parrot’s, her eyes puckered into little ruches of sardonic fat. ‘Is this a roundabout way,’ she asks, ‘of trying to get into my knickers?’

He rises abruptly from the table. Minutes ago she’d caught him out in a blush. Now he is quite white. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. He is distracted, unable to look at her, his hands reaching uncertainly for his wallet, has he paid, hasn’t he paid. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. He is ghostly, like a man who has seen a ghost. And then he is gone, out of the wine bar, into the street, running.

The palsied at the next table go on staring, squinting at D through their drinks, wondering what, as a telly celebrity, she will do to amuse and enrage them next. She turns to them, giving them her fat shagger’s shrug. ‘Funny response to the word knickers,’ she says.

Speaking conditionally, she isn’t all that wide of the mark. It
could
have been the word knickers that did it. It is not a word Frank likes. If that’s fastidiousness, it’s fastidiousness about language not about sex. A man who has passed so much of
his life with his head between women’s legs is hardly going to have an attitude to their pants, looked at libidinally. He can take them or leave them. In so far as he has preferences they are the universal ones – for the exiguous over the voluminous, for the fresh over the feculent. Otherwise they don’t matter to him. As decorations they have their place; as obstructions they are easily whiffled away. It isn’t what knickers are and what they do that upsets him – it’s how they sound. It’s their jocularity. They insist a culture of buffoonery and clumsiness. They intrude an ugliness he has never, for his own part, experienced.

Never? Well, seldom.

There is another reason, not quite so impeccably linguistic, for Frank’s distaste. Knickers are what fat women wear. Even when a thin woman talks about her knickers Frank immediately imagines her wearing what a fat woman wears. So when D, starting from a mountainous base, talks about hers – what’s more talks about
getting into
hers: a manoeuvre, an act of breathless clambering, a negotiation of hazards analogous to potholing – Frank’s imagination is stretched to its limits.

He has had fat girlfriends. In the beginning, when, like every other boy (except Kurt) he took whatever he could get, all his girlfriends were fat. Fat Susan. Fat Heather. Fat Reeny. Very fat Fiona. The rule was that you were allowed them – to practise on, as it were, like rough paper – so long as you weren’t seen with them. You met them inside the pictures at the other end of town. You called on them at midnight and walked them in the park.
Their
park, where nobody, except the previous fat girl, was likely to recognise you. Rainy nights were good because you could hide them under an umbrella. Fog was very good. Blackouts would have been best of all but he was born too late for them. His parents’ friends, his friends’ parents, were always talking
about what they had got up to under cover of a blackout. Those must have been paradisal times for fat girls. How their podgy hearts must have raced when the doodlebugs came over and the sirens began to scream.

The big mistake of Frank’s fat period was to get caught with one.

They’d rented themselves a gaff, a talf, a deelo-free empty lettee, he and his wide-boy sexual argot-naut chums, for the Christmas season. A festive shtuppenhaus in Wythenshaw, over a newsagent’s. They each had a key cut, agreed a rough timetable, decorated the place with balloons and streamers, stole sheets and pillowcases from home and shared in a carton of Durex, wholesale. The timetable reserved Saturday nights and all day Sunday for communal shtupping, teamhanders, persuadable au pairs, serial cocksuckers like Marcia, poker – whatever was going. Otherwise, they each had their own night. If they hadn’t pulled that night they could swap with someone else who had, in return for a piece of the action, or not. Whatever. They were cool about it. United in a common cause. All for one and one for all. They might fall out over other things but they were not going to fall out over nekaiveh. The point of all the pulling and the shtupping – the whole point of keife, Kurt – was that it brought you together, not drove you apart.

Frank’s night was Tuesday. A good night. The behavioural model on which they worked showed that girls from the social classes they routinely raided were contrite by Monday morning, were washing their hair on Monday night, and were hungry to rave again by Tuesday. Wednesday they were contrite again. Thursday they were saving their energy for the weekend. Friday they went out with one another. Saturday and Sunday they were dredged up anyway by the communal nets Frank and his chinas threw over the side. So for one-to-one shtupping, with time for a bit of a smooch
before and a snout each afterwards – romance, in other words – you couldn’t do better than Tuesday.

On this particular Tuesday Frank pulled from the babyfood counter in Boots on Corporation Street. They all used Boots. He’d ducked in to see if Rita or Mona in photography had anything doing – they all used Rita and Mona – and walked slap into Dilys stacking shelves. She was new. New to Boots and new to Manchester. New to Manchester was always an added inducement. In an immodest age it approximated to modesty. If you were new to Manchester there was a fair chance you hadn’t yet met and fallen in love with Kurt.

Taken all round, Dilys wasn’t strictly one to snap up, new or not. There was a snagged look about her. She made you think of holes and breakages. And spillage. Shagging had not yet been reinstated. Its grand comicality was still to be reaffirmed. Dilys was a shagger in the earlier sense; a shlump of a girl with a Bath bun face and heavy legs, a shlong-puller out of dreary necessity, not high-spirits. On any other day Frank might well have kept on walking to the photography counter and let her pick up her own spilt cans of powdered milk. But this was Tuesday; an empty bed yawned; Wednesdays belonged to Morris and Morris wouldn’t let it go unremarked if he turned up for his shift and didn’t find at least two knotted sacs of asphyxiated semen floating in the toilet bowl. What also encouraged Frank to press his suit was the fact of Dilys living in Wythenshaw, a hop skip and a jump from the shtuppenhaus. He could pick her up at the other end of town, take her for a drink at the other end of town, walk her to the scene of her coming despoliation at the other end of town, and even walk her home – all unremarked. The gods could hardly have dealt fairer with him than that. It was even threatening rain. Only an air raid could have served him better.

They began kissing on the stairs. She had a soft, sweet mouth. Not a trace of the usual Babycham and Woodbine vomit. What a mystery girls were. You just never knew what you were going to find. No wonder there were some men who never stopped. Every Saturday morning Frank went to the Kardomah in Market Street to observe them, the hoarse-voiced grandpas in their camel coats and toupees, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, men in their fifties, sixties, God knows maybe even in their seventies, sitting watchful as spiders over their Russian teas and cappuccinos, still hungry for the dollies, more to the point still capable of opening their jaws and snaffling them up. Frank thought that he was one of those who would never stop. Fifty years later you’d find him in the Kardomah – the KD, as they called it, the Keife-Drome – his voice box worn out with all the chatting up, his putz worked to a frazzle, but not yet come to the end of his curiosity, not yet done marvelling that a face like this can come with a cunt like that, and vice versa. Take this Dilys, a nebbish with a ponim like an idiot Polak’s, fat fall-away tits, a sloppy belly, legs like the Parthenon, laddered stockings, bad skin, zero conversation – who could ever have guessed that such a meerskeit would have a wine gum mouth, a tongue as subtle as Satan floating on a breath as odoriferous as an angel’s. So what else is he going to find? There is not – there never was, there never will be – art to find the cunt’s construction in the face. I will be at the KD till I’m a hundred, Frank thinks, plucking at her skirt.

They fall into the living room of the empty lettee, bringing down a Christmas streamer. Frank can’t find the light switch, but Dilys wants it to stay dark anyway. She is self-conscious about her breasts. Feeling his way around her, under the blouse she won’t let him remove, Frank understands why. She has vanishing nipples, inverts, retards, agoraphobics. No sooner does he suck one out than it pops
back in again. If he’s not mistaken, she has large aureoles too, like a nursing mother. So the dark’s OK by him.

She is easier about her skirt coming off, her stockings, her girdle. The catch of his watch-strap snags in her pants. ‘Mind me knickers,’ she says.

He kisses her, to remind himself that there is an upside to all this.

He drops to his knees. What are the chances of her being ambrosial down there as well? He finds himself in a dense coppice of snarling bristles. Good. Where there’s hair there’s hope. He takes them, Frank the venereal flosser, one at a time, between his teeth. Savours their dry curling resilience. Enjoys their resistance to his bite, the way they spring back when he releases them, scratching the inside of his mouth, pricking his gums. Until he finds one that has a pearl of moisture, not of his making, too bitter-sweet for his making, upon it. And then another, and another. Like a dog in a desert he sniffs his way towards the source, pulling her down on top of him so that not a bead should roll anywhere but down the funnel of his throat.

‘In my mouth, Dilys,’ he tells her.

‘What?’

‘Come in my mouth.’

She can’t hear him. ‘What?’ She’s impatient with him. How is she supposed to hear him when she’s got her cunt in his face. ‘Eh? What?’ She raises herself slightly. Which isn’t what
he
wants.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.

‘Can’t hear you.’

‘I said, what’s the matter.’

‘Before. I couldn’t hear you
before.’

So he shouts it this time. ‘Come in my mouth, Dilys.’

And that is when the lights go on.

They are all there. All his chinas. One for all and all for
one. Neville, Gerald, Morris, Ian, Kurt. Laughing. Holding their stomachs. Rolling on the carpet. They are all there, where they’ve been throughout, waiting, listening, hiding in the darkness with their fists in their mouths. They’ve got keife with them. Rita and Mona. Also beside themselves with mirth. That was how his chinas knew what was afoot: Rita and Mona had blabbed, Rita and Mona had seen him that morning in Boots and sent out the encyclical – to keep him company on his Tuesday night at the shtuppenhaus Frank Ritz was bringing back the dog to end dogs. One for all and all for one, provided you don’t drop below a certain standard. Meerskeit – fine. Fat meerskeit – also fine. You do the deed of darkness
in
the darkness – you’re business. Anything left over we’ll have. If not, not. But in the case of Dilys, it seemed, all bets were off. Dilys was a class Z shtup too far. Dilys belonged to comedy, not to sex, and comedy was communal. Callous? Blame Rita and Mona. They were the ones who’d made the pronouncement: See Dilys and die.

Die laughing.

Frank knows not to say that Dilys has hidden depths; that despite every appearance to the contrary she kisses like an angel. And that she has a knish too, if they’d only have let him finish, that promised to be worth the eating. He knows his friends. He knows what amuses them, what would amuse him if he were them.

He lies where he is, burning with shame. His eyes are closed. His mouth is closed. His dick, out of his pants, looks as though it’s been shot by a sniper. Dilys has had the presence of mind to raise her rump from his face, but hasn’t had the presence of mind to do anything else. She stands above him wearing only her crumpled blouse, snail tracks of Frank’s saliva on her inordinate thighs, her belly slack, her buttocks loose, on her dim steamrollered face the ghost of an
attempt to find the situation funny herself, to join in the laughter. Which is more than Frank attempts at least.

How long do they go on rocking with laughter? A week, Frank reckons. A month. A year. You want to know the secret of perpetual motion? Begin with Frank Ritz asking a dog to come in his mouth.

In the end it’s the dog herself who silences them. She takes them upstairs, individually, Neville, Gerald, Morris, Ian, Kurt, and gives them one. One each. And why don’t they say no, since she was considered to be beyond the pale, an untouchable, the ne plus ultra of fat toerags, a joke, an anathema, dreck, only a half an hour before? Maybe they see it as an act of redemption all round.

How Frank sees it, reduced, betrayed, mortified, interrupted, and shtupless on his own Tuesday night to boot, only time will tell.

When he gets home he discovers he has Dilys’s pants in his jacket pocket. Did he stuff them there when he was undressing her? His way of minding them? Or did his chinas plant them on him, while he lay like a dead man on the floor? Did she? Something to remember her by.

A fat girl’s knickers.

So it
could
have been the word that did it. Pity the poor comedian. How could she have known what an associational minefield she was stepping into when she winningly pureed up her lips and questioned Frank’s intentions as to her underwear? D for Dilys. D for displeasure. Disinclination. Disgust. Distemper. Death.

(Unless, of course, distemper was the very effect she was going for, she being a comedian, and he being a man and all.)

But in fact – and whether or not – the reason for Frank’s abrupt and somewhat rude departure lay elsewhere. He rose
from the table, white as a ghost, as though he’d seen a ghost, because he had. The ghost he’d seen was Liz.

He saw her through the window, standing on the street, looking in. Then he saw her coming through the door and pushing her way into the bar. Then he saw her seeing him. Then he saw her go.

There can be no doubt that it is her. The eyes may be twenty-five years more tired than they were when he last leapt into them, ablaze in Montmartre, but they are the same electric green. The discontented brackets that qualify her mouth are also unmistakable. She always did look sour and cheated. That those brackets could be coaxed into quite other configurations, that she could be amused into an eruption of laughter lines and carefree creases, had much to do with her appeal for Frank. He loved changing the geography of her face. He could do it still. In the fraction of a second that is given him to learn what has become of her he sees that she hasn’t once and for all given up expecting to be diverted. Not bad for a woman of fifty. And a summons to him, if ever he saw one.