No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (14 page)

So what does that leave, Frank wonders.

‘I’d be very grateful,’ he says, ‘if someone could get me my car.’

What it leaves are the whores.

Wherever he has lived Frank has known where the whores are. Call it instinct; like a squirrel knowing the whereabouts of emergency rations. As for employing whores, he came to that at a relatively mature age. Nineteen he was, back in Manchester from Oxford for a long weekend, driving home in his father’s car from a game of poker with the boys. He had won and was feeling affable, so the sight of a woman his mother’s age standing at the kerbside at midnight in shabby respectable Cheetham Hill, nodding her head at him, aroused his compassion. She was either a friend of his parents who
recognised the car and wanted a lift home, or she was a person in trouble, too well-brought up to signal her distress with anything more demonstrative than a nod of her head. He pulled up a few yards ahead of her, reversed, wound down the window, and smiled.

‘Business?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m on vacation from university.’

They sorted their misunderstanding out quickly enough. He could go back to her place for ten shillings. He could have full sex in the back of the car for seven-and-six. But what she recommended, given the time of night and his hesitancy, was a gam in the front seat for half a crown. Frank had never heard the word gam before. In his world you were sucked off, or you were plated, or you were given head. There were syllables involved; the operation required skill: co-ordination, sensitivity, patience; it partook of the civilised arts. Gam, in its flat unevocativeness, its unceremonial gummy functionality, its promise to be over before it had begun, opened up a stratum of society he had never before plumbed. Common he’d tried. But this was lower and more desperate than common. This was nothingness. This was life without meaning. For the price of your first bet on a lowly poker hand, for a mere tusheroon, you could stop your car by the kerbside, wind down your window, and pop your dick in a complete stranger’s mouth. Frank was electrified.

‘Take a right,’ the woman told him. ‘Take another right. Now take a left.’

She was neither old nor young. She was neither handsome nor ugly. She wasn’t anything. Frank was struck by how few concessions she made to the idea of glamour. Even pauperised glamour. No boots, no high heels, no stockings, no plunging neckline, not even lipstick. If she was dressed for anything it was housework. Had the idea of opening her mouth for passing motorists to pop their dicks into suddenly
come to her while she was cleaning out her cupboards? A mere spur of the moment whim, like making a cup of tea or nibbling on a Nice biscuit. I know, I’ll go out and gam for half an hour. Was she not even driven by necessity?

‘Now right again. See that gate? Turn in there, reverse, and switch your lights off.’

Frank is shocked to see that she has directed him into the playground of his old primary school.

She holds her hand out for the money. Frank’s pockets are full of tusheroons, his poker winnings. She hears them clinking. ‘Tell you what,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you make it five bob and I’ll take my teeth out.’

On the last day of every summer term at Frank’s old primary school the year’s batch of leavers would hokey cokey in and out of the classrooms in a ritual goodbye to those they were leaving behind. Every year the same mocking valedictory song:

Standard one, standard two,
Standard cockadoodledoo.
Standard three, standard four,
Someone’s knocking at my door.

Frank too sang it when it was his turn to leave. Full of tears, but full of expectancy as well. Who would be knocking at his door?

Now he knows. Now here he is, back. Parked under the wall against which he used to flick cigarette packets, weighing up the pros and cons of having a drab gam him with her teeth out.

He fights against all the obvious sensations. Is he a soldier of sex or isn’t he? Any old person, positioned as he is, might choose to wind down the window and throw up. Wouldn’t it be a more intelligent response to feel privileged? An hour
ago he was scooping up his friends’ loose change. What did that teach him about the world? Now he is being educated in the ways of people who have hitherto been as closed to him as a tribe of pygmies. Think of it: such indomitableness, such capacity to turn deprivation to advantage. Teeth fallen out eating crisps and candy bars for supper – all the better to gam you with, my dear.

The things they know, the northern industrial poor. The consolations they mine.

Frank hands her a second half a crown.

‘Right then,’ she says. ‘Where’s Fred?’

Fred, Frank gathers, is his penis. He ought to be taking notes. If he were back in Oxford at a C. S. Lewis lecture he’d have a pen and paper out. And he wouldn’t be learning that Fred is the name for a penis from C. S. Lewis.

So where is Fred? Frank reclines the driver’s seat, unzips himself, and fishes about in his trousers.

‘Come on,’ the woman says, ‘I haven’t got all night,’

This is Frank’s first experience of the love talk of the English whore.

By some profoundly mysterious law of inverse eroticism, that which is by no means arousing arouses Fred. In one flowing movement the woman coughs her teeth into her hand and drops her head on to his lap. Frank lies back in the seat and closes his eyes.

Sea-anemones pluck at him. Porpoise nudge him with their snouts. Loofah’d, jellied, suckered, he submits to the snuffling pull of the ocean, loses all sensation of weight and bone, comes apart in the arms of the water. Until the warm silent pullulating sea-bed claims his remains.

The things they know, the industrial poor.

Thereafter, Frank was an
aficionado
of street whores. He could smell them out. Dump him in any town at midnight and he could have driven you blindfold to where they
congregated. He had a feeling for their landscape. Something in him answered to their self-effacement. The blighted streets they idled on, the dispirited wastegrounds of the senses they half-heartedly haunted, nodding their mechanical siren invitations – what were these but the sites he’d been visiting in his imagination since he was a child, the shtupping fields outside the perimeter fence, where a man might do any ugliness he pleased?

Out of the blue he became a more affectionate son than he’d been in years, whipping up from Oxford to see his parents every couple of weeks or so, borrowing their car, putting five shillings in his pocket, and going in search of the woman who’d initiated him. Time works differently, he noticed, when you’re looking for whores. He could drive up and down the same street for hours on end, observing the subtlest changes in the shadows, slowing if so much as a sweet wrapper blew out of a boarded doorway. It was never boring. There was always the prospect of one more whore turning up on one more corner. He got to know the other whoremongers who worked the area. He recognised their vehicles, became familiar with their driving habits and patterns of concentration, what combination of hour, traffic and fishnet would induce them suddenly to slap on their brakes. There was no freemasonry of whoring; in an obvious sense you were competitors, like men with metal detectors combing the same small strip of beach; but there was some quiet comfort in such unanimity of purpose. And that could keep you going during the long hours when the streets inexplicably emptied and not a whore stirred.

He never did find the one he was looking for, the one who had started him off. Whoever she was, she had vanished like a mermaid into the deep proletarian sea. It pleased Frank to think that maybe she had just nipped out of her house on a whim that night, fed up with the housework, short of a few
bob and who knows, in the mood for a gam and a gobble herself. What if he were her first and only client? And if so, what contribution had he made to
her
understanding of society? Did she now suppose that no Oxford-educated gentleman would dream of popping his dick into a lady’s mouth until she’d taken out her teeth?

Back in Oxford he was carless and therefore, as far as the street went, whoreless; but he sometimes cycled late into the underworld of Cowley, just to keep his eye in.

Looking, anyway, was always mainly what it was about. There and back and round and round they drove, these Flying Dutchmen of the cobbled stews, often with no intention of ever stopping. You stopped when you were finally persuaded you wanted sex. But sex wasn’t the compulsion that united Frank and his fellow obsessionals – members of the skilled or spiritual professions, most of them, thinkers, carers, healers, teachers – as they swung and circled, stalled, juddered, peered, hovered, maybe even haggled, then swung again. Close shaves, that’s what they were after. Nearly-sex.

And nearly-seen. Eyes you think you know through whoremonger-misted windscreens thinking they know you. That your doctor? That your patient? That your wife’s father wondering that my daughter’s husband? Nearly-seen and nearly-caught. So who needs the sex?

They were in it for the money. Even more than the whores were in it for the money, the punters were in it for the money. Up until he’d been gammed for five shillings in the playground of his old primary school, Frank had toed the line in the matter of paying for sex. Who me? That’ll be the day! When I have to pay for sex I’ll be too old to want sex. But once hand over the cash and you know you’ll never want it free again. What pay for sex, me? Maybe not, since sex, strictly, is not the commodity you’re paying for. Shame,
that’s what you get for your pair of tusheroons. Yourself disprized. Which is where the driving round and round and never stopping comes in. Four hours up and down the same unlit street then home with nothing but an empty petrol tank to show enables a man to disprize himself without going seriously into overdraft.

All the same, Frank was grateful for his bike. No whore was going to gam him on the sprung seat of his bicycle. Whereas, if he took a car to Cowley he knew he’d blow his whole student grant there in a single term. Not because the whores of Cowley looked particularly good. But because they didn’t.

English whores have always understood the subtle seductiveness of dressing down. Where the whores of Italy get themselves up in promises of grotesquery beyond the invention of Boccaccio or Fellini, and the whores of France put on pearls and court shoes so that Frenchmen might realise their fantasy of sleeping with their uncles’ wives, or their brother’s daughters, the whores of England reach for the first items in their wardrobes, confident that as long as they are turned out more frumpishly than the women their punters live with they won’t go home empty handed. A shrewd comprehension of the nexus of sex, money and necessary dissatisfaction is at work here. And the whores of the West Midlands, taking that to be the carpet slipper of country bounded by the the M5, the M4 and the A40, comprehend it better than any. Let loose in Cowley, Frank would have pauperised himself in a matter of weeks, trying to figure out why he wanted to finger the fur of women who reminded him of dinner ladies.

Late as it is by the time he has his car back, the motor of insurgency that is now driving him decides not even
to try trolloping it in Cheltenham but to rev straight for Gloucester.

It’s ten miles to Gloucester and he isn’t sober. But Frank can’t be sure he’d have got it right in Cheltenham. He’s out of practice. No whores since Mel’s been in his life. Honour, partly. Love, partly. But mainly no need of them. Why go to whores to have himself disprized when he’s got Mel?

It’s also more difficult now than it was in his heyday to be certain that the nodding dolly propping up a lamppost with a fag between her fingers is in fact on the job. There’s every chance that she’s a company director just slipped out of a strictly non-smoking office to have a puff. Go anywhere you like in the West End during business hours and you see them, loitering on street corners and in doorways, one leg up behind, sucking hard on a Marlboro, and nodding with the stress of the job – whores for all the world. As always, it’s morality that makes for harlotry. True, there’s little likelihood of his hitting on a company director out smoking in a doorway in Cheltenham at one in the morning, but better to be safe than sorry. Gloucester has a meaner reputation. You can’t come to grief in Gloucester. That’s to say you can come to grief in Gloucester.

Besides, there’s a cathedral there.

‘Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester.’ It took an Italian prince, as imagined by an American novelist, to grasp the sissing loucheness of English cathedral cities. Until he read
The Golden Bowl,
Frank thought he was alone in associating infidelity with cloisters and tombs and towers. It was a joke at the Oxford language school that as soon as Frank fell for one of his charges he whisked her away for the weekend to Wells or Winchester. Before she threw in her lot with the Finn, the Swede had been earmarked for Salisbury. Before he met the Swede, he had the Finn’s name down for Lichfield. But these were just a young man’s trial runs. The simple sex that is a
prelude to the more serious business of betrayal. Later, when the golden bowl is cracked, you get the point of cathedral cities. Wives and lovers, other men’s wives and lovers, those are the ones with whom you do the gargoyles; best friends, best friends of
your
lovers, those are the ones you take to evensong. Had Liz not wanted Paris, she’d have got Gloucester. ‘Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester’ – like an old song, the prince’s unholy mistress marvels. In Gloucester he lost her. Except, in the case of the prince, he didn’t. In Gloucester he tossed her. It was only later that he lost her. But let’s not spoil the story.

Frank knows he shouldn’t be drinking and driving. But the part of him that cares what he should and shouldn’t be doing has been inoperative most of the evening. Even Mel’s talking spleen, still in the Saab’s glove compartment, gets short shrift. Fuck off, Mel. A man’s dick’s his own. And anyway, isn’t driving good for drunks? He has his roof down. The night fans him. The moon sucks the poisons from his system. The convention of having to stay roughly on his side of the road – to say nothing of having to stay on the road at all – keeps his eyes open. If he’s not careful, by the time he gets to Gloucester he’ll be stone cold sober.