Plender (4 page)

A movement across the other side of the bar caught my eye. It was the couple getting up to leave. The man stood to let the girl get out of the booth. I looked into his face and immediately I was aware that I knew him. But I didn’t know who he was. In fact the face was so familiar the recognition had jolted me. It was like seeing a T.V. star in the street; the initial reaction was surprise that you remembered someone you didn’t actually know, and then when you realised who they were, that explained everything and you felt stupidly embarrassed. But in this case it was a matter of recognising someone without knowing who the hell they were.

The girl continued to drift over to the exit. The man went over to the bar to get some cigarettes. The girl waited in the doorway and looked at the man while he opened the packet, took out a cigarette and lit up. Then he threw the match into an ashtray on the bar and began to walk towards the girl. Head forward, shoulders bowed, walking on the balls of his feet. The walk. The walk was even more recognisable than the features. The last time I’d seen that walk was seventeen years ago. Marching out of assembly on the last day of school, three boys away. With his usual mates tagging on. The handsome hair flowing off the clever confident face. Striding out to meet the future his parents were going to pay for. I wondered what he’d made of it.

Peter Knott.

I hadn’t seen him since that day.

I wondered what he’d made of it.

Had he done as well as me? He should have. He’d had the start.

I looked at my watch. There was time.

I drank my drink and got up to leave.

KNOTT

The wipers whirred and I wondered for the hundredth time what I was doing, driving this silly cow to my studio to weave her into my web. And yet I always wondered and the wondering never did any good. It was like masturbation! Each time you finished you told yourself that that was it, that was the last time, it’s never as good as you imagine it’s going to be so why bother? But the next time you got a hard on it was always straight to the toilet for a quick one off the wrist. Sometimes it was just to stave off depression but the joke was it always made you more depressed. The same with birds like Eileen; female masturbation machines that were obsolete and boring the minute you came. And like masturbation the more Eileens I had the less they satisfied. The initial excitement was always the same, always as good, the thinking, mind’s-eye wanking, but when it came to the moment of too-real truth, after the ball play was over, then the fall, then the let down, then the desperation and the unnamed (unmanned?) fear.

So devices had had to be manufactured, introduced into my seductions for the purposes of enhancing the excitement and shielding me from the depressions and the realities of hard flesh. Gauzes and veils and wisps of fantasy had to drift between my eyes and my mind in order to keep my activities enjoyable. The sex act itself was the final necessary stopper to an ever increasing bag of tricks, all equally exciting and, like masturbation, self-defeating, evolving without any direction except perhaps towards some kind of madness.

I was like an addict. Girls were a habit I couldn’t shake. It was as if there was an empty space in my make-up that needed filling with some sexual experience. It wasn’t as if I was loveless. My wife and I didn’t get on but that was my fault, not hers: she still loved me, whatever I felt for her, whatever I got up to. And even if she stopped loving me, past experience told me I wouldn’t exactly have a job finding someone to take over where she left off. I’d always been someone who’d got their own way with people, male or female, although these days I no longer considered the fact with pleasure. These days it was just a fact. It had ceased to have meaning since I’d recognised it and admitted it to myself. I’d always wanted to be liked and I’d schemed and plotted in the subtlest of ways to achieve popularity but I’d only recently realised it and to think of it made me feel sick.

Neither was it night-starvation, my hang up. My wife was good in that department too. (In fact, she was the best screw I’d ever had. And she went along with my games and embellishments, not just for my sake but because she enjoyed them too, that is after she’d been persuaded that what we did was neither debasing nor purely carnal or indicative of any feelings I might have—or not have— for her personally.) And, wife apart, there were plenty of Eileens, a species of female that under normal circumstances I disliked intensely --- shallow, coy,
faux-naif,
deliberately petulant, the complete suburban, ushered into puberty to the strains of Telstar, sprung into a background where the myth figures of Bernie the Bolt and Robin Richmond entered the common consciousness and steered it along the paths of rightfulness. But it was the very awfulness of their environment that attracted me to girls like Eileen. It gave my intrigues an extra dimension; the thought that I was disturbing the bland subconscious of the great catalogue market, the audience I touched with the gloss of my own photographs.

But, as usual, no answer, no reply. I wondered if the knowledge would solve the problem, remove the addiction. I knew plenty of people with big sexual appetites who considered themselves perfectly healthy; why did I suspect my own? Was it the refinement of the appetite that caused me to be suspicious?

I turned the car into the White Lion car park. It was early yet and I could pick my spot. Not that the White Lion had much of a carriage track. The trawlermen that did the real spending moved from spot to spot in taxis, so as not to let anything like a fatal accident interfere with their drinking.

I pulled on the hand brake and Eileen said, “What, are we going for another drink?”

“No,” I said. “At least, not here. We may have one in the studio. This is where I park the car. I have an arrangement with the pub.”

We got out of the Mercedes and splashed our way across the car park’s reflected neon. We rounded the pub corner into the spitting rain. Facing the pub was a sheer eyeless row of old warehouses. Rain sidled across their faces in great drifting sheets. Beyond the warehouses, further down the road to our right, was a level crossing. The gates were closed and a sluggish goods train, black-wet, trailed across the cobbled road. Eileen shivered and I took her arm and led her across the road towards the warehouses. I stopped at one of the warehouse doors and unlocked the padlock on the smaller door inset in the woodwork. Next to the padlock, on the brickwork, there was a sign that said, PETER KNOTT, INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY.

I pushed the door inwards and leant in and found the light switch. Inside the loading bay and the string sacks of bananas were flooded with neon. I stepped back.

“After you,” I said to Eileen.

Eileen pulled a mock-nervous face.

“Bit creepy, isn’t it?” she said, tentatively lifting a nyloned knee to step into the ghastly light.

“The only thing that’s creepy in there,” I said, “is spiders.”

She withdrew her leg quickly causing her coat to fall open and her skirt to ride up and reveal even more thigh than was usual.

The dryness arrived in my throat and Eileen said, “Christ, I hate spiders, I really do. Can’t stand them. They make my skin crawl.”

“Shall I go first?” I said. “Then I can squash all such spiders that dare to cross your path as I go along.”

“Ugh,” said Eileen.

I stepped through the opening. The damp decaying vegetable smell immediately hit me and the cold of the stone floor seemed to chill my feet and my ankles.

I turned round and held out my hand and helped Eileen through the doorway.

“God,” she said, shivering, “isn’t it
cold
.”

I could see she was beginning to have her doubts. I smiled to myself. The surprise when she saw my studio would be more unbalancing than usual.

“Up the stairs,” I said, indicating the tall stairwell. The stairs themselves were rough planks put together in an open fashion that led without invitation up into the rank gloom of the upper storeys of the warehouse.

Eileen looked at the stairs.

“You’ve probably guessed,” I said. “It’s right at the top.”

PLENDER

The White Lion didn’t have any ice. They managed a piece of lemon that was all peel. I supposed that that was something. I took a sip from my glass. Fluff from the drying-up towel lined the dry part.

“Do you have a pay phone?” I said to the Mick.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Between the two bars. Next to the snug door.”

I went through a door with ornate opaque glass panes that carried flowery versions of the brewery’s name. I was in luck. The telephone directory had some pages in it. I found the Ks and then I found the Knotts. There were twenty or so of them. But only one P. A. Knott. Only one Peter Arthur.

I looked at the address: The Cottage, Corella. Corella was a river village that lay in the lee of the wolds, about twelve miles farther inland. A haven for the well-heeled businessman who considered the city’s richer suburbs suburban. A very nice little spot indeed, if you had the cash. The few locals that were left there must have been the greediest. The prices were fantastic by the standards of other places in the area. I knew that for a fact because I knew someone who’d bought a place there and I knew how much they’d paid.

Froy had lived there for nearly two years now. I closed the book and went back into the bar. I drained my drink and ordered another. While it was coming I looked at my watch. It was nearly nine o’clock. The meeting at Peggy’s should have been getting under way by now but it didn’t look as though I was going to make it back there to keep an eye on things. Not now. Now that I was about to renew my acquaintance with my long lost mate, Peter Arthur Knott.

It was funny, but I could remember the day, the precise kind of day, the day we first met. Sunshine. Golden August sunshine. No clouds in the sky, the dust in the streets of the small rural town warm and static in the drowsy morning. The smell of the engine of the big green removal van outside number forty, the wet shirts of the removal men, the newness of the three piece suit. And the car. The shiny maroon car. An Austin—with a sparkling chrome grille. The first car in the street, at least as far as my short memory had gone back. A lot of people hadn’t liked that, I remember. Particularly my mother’s mate, Mrs. Parker, our next door neighbour.

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Parker, arms folded. “You can tell. Consider themselves a peg or two up from us.”

My mother filled the kettle again and sat down at the kitchen table and lit up. I wondered how Mrs. Parker knew, how she could tell. But my mother always agreed with Mrs. Parker, and so that meant Mrs. Parker was never wrong.

I wandered over to the side window and looked out at the shimmering road beyond the green corrugated shed. The omnibus edition of Dick Barton was droning out of the wireless in the dining room but this morning I was too interested in what was going on across the road.

A minute or two ago a boy of my age had come out of number forty with a bat and ball and had begun to play on the path that ran down the side of the house, bouncing the ball off the wall with the bat. Once he’d got started he bounced and returned the ball without making a mistake, not even the smallest slip. The regular sound was hot and hollow in the still of midday.

Then a different movement caught my eye on my side of the street. Robert Rankin appeared in his garden, bouncing a tennis ball on the iron-hard ground, pretending not to notice the activity over the road. Robert Rankin was second in command in my gang. He was a pretty good fighter, the best I’d got, and he’d found us our hideout in the fields at the back of the crescent as well. Obviously he’d come out to draw the interest of the boy across the road so that he could find out what he was like and report back to me all that there was to know about him. Then I’d decide whether he was fit to join our gang, whether he was going to be friend or foe, and if he was friend, what role he was to play in the gang’s structure. I hoped he was a good fighter; we needed some. The Butts’ Road gang had raided our hideout a few days ago and we were bound to strike back. We would use the new kid if he was any good. And if he wasn’t then we could have some fun with him. You could always find some kind of a game to play with sissies.

So I watched and waited to see what happened. The sounds of the different bouncing made a drowsy pattern in my ears. The new boy made no attempt to speak to Robert, but it was obvious he’d seen him because once the ball had bounced wrong and run loose, and to pick it up, the boy had had to walk in Robert’s direction, facing him, but it was as if Robert wasn’t there. The boy just went back to his bouncing. So eventually Robert left his garden and went into the road and kicked the ball against the curb so that he had to rush up and down in the road to collect it every time.

The new boy stopped his game and walked over to the fence and watched Robert for a while. Now Robert just carried on with his game. Eventually the new boy said:

“Are you all mad-heads round here?”

The sound of his voice echoed round the empty crescent. His accent was different to ours. Robert trapped the ball and looked at the new boy.

“You what?” Robert said.

“I said are they all mad-heads round here?”

“No,” said Robert. “Why?”

“Don’t you know it’s cricket season?” said the new boy. “You can’t play footog this time of year.”

“Yes you can,” said Robert. “You can play it when you like.”

There was a silence while the two of them looked at each other.

Go on, Robert, I thought, ask him if he can fight. Ask him.

The new boy said, “Do you like Dinkys?”

Robert stared at him.

“Do you?” said the new boy.

“Some of ‘em,” said Robert.

“Do you want to see mine?” said the new boy. “I’ve got thousands.”

“Where are they?” asked Robert.

“In the house.”