‘Do you need help?’ a voice said. ‘Do you want me to call an ambulance?’
I looked up. Indecipherable against the dark brick and pewter sky. A patchouli-flavoured hand, dry and cool, reached down and took mine. My left. My right was clenched around some tiny object. ‘Can you stand?’
Apparently, I could, given that I found myself, after her braced yank, on my feet. Vertical, I found myself face to face with a stout woman in her late fifties. Ruddy cheeks, manly hands, a silver-grey ponytail, red corduroys and a battlescarred leather bomber jacket. Cheekbones. One earring of Chinese turquoise. Breath roll-up-scented and boots steelcapped.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You’re covered in blood.’
What does it say about the state I was in that I merely stood there opening and closing my mouth for a few moments? To my absolute astonishment, she started feeling me up. Or at least, so I thought, until I realised she was looking for the source of the bleeding.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please. No. I haven’t been – I’m not, ah, wounded.’
‘Just fucked over?’ she said, giving my elbow a compassionate squeeze. ‘You’ve got a shocking black eye, you know.’
Hard, really terribly hard, to describe my feelings at this point. First, I own, was incredulity. Do you, by any chance, have any idea how STUPID it is to go wandering around London’s alleyways in the small hours? And do you have any idea, dear Miss Ruth Bell, how FURTHER STUPID it is, given your presence in such locales, to extend a hand to a beaten body indisposed among the bins? Do you know who you could run into? But then that is Ruth, you see? Very seldom troubled by the gaps between knowing what the right thing to do is and doing it. (Whereas Gunn . . . Well, he’s all gaps, really.) She’s what we call Downstairs a Lost Cause. Course, being celibate helps. Leave sexual energy unspent and it’ll turn its hand to all sorts of creative activities (no wonder Gunn’s output was so poor), and dear Ruth hasn’t had a jump in three years. Claims she doesn’t miss it. Claims she’s too busy. But what irritates me is the stupidity, the ease with which such people keep themselves out of my grasp. There’s no reading, very little reflection, just the spirit’s rough expression through salubrious hobbies and a worthwhile job. She doesn’t even go to fucking Church.
‘What’ve you got in your hand?’ she said, lifting my clenched right mit up between us.
Well, I thought, as I opened my palm and struggled to focus, perhaps things are looking up after all. She’s going to be . . . disappointed when I repay this kindness with . . .
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling terrible all over again. ‘Oh.’
‘Is that one of your . . . Is that one of your teeth, love?’
In the café (‘Come on,’ Ruth said, as the light brightened around us, ‘I’ll buy you a cuppa. You look like you need it.’) I went into the bathroom to get a hold of myself. Lucifer, I said – I did, you know; I don’t spare myself when I need a right good talking to – Lucifer, I said, you are going to pull yourself together. Do you hear me? Can you imagine – for the love of Farrah can you imagine how this would look in certain quarters? Can you imagine how Astaroth . . . No, enough. Amusing in its way – but really: enough. Enough.
‘Got to go myself, now,’ Ruth said, when I returned to our table. ‘Keep an eye.’
You’d think she was loaded. Two full Veggie Breakfast specials, despite my protestations. I saw the ex-crim behind the counter sketching his London theory: Older bird, arty, bit a dosh from the family; younger bloke – but he came a cropper with it when he saw the state I was in. Probably not your idea of aromatherapy, a night between King’s Cross rubbish heaps, though I myself found my lately acquired odour whoreishly seductive. You’d think, as I say, that she had some middle-class wedge behind her, but the truth is she’s barely making ends meet.
All the more reason, therefore, to relieve her of her purse while she was in the loo. A laughable haul, obviously, £63.47, NatWest chequebook and Switch card, photo of her dead ma and pa, any organ you like as long as I’m dead, and a slew of useless contact numbers scribbled on aged scraps and tickets – but that was hardly the point. A faithshaking betrayal, that was the point.
It should by now be apparent that I’m no fan of mere brutality. Brutality is to evil what a Big Mac is to hunger: it gets a job done, it accomplishes something – but utterly without beauty. There is a job to be done, obviously. Big Macs from Moscow to Manhattan address hunger’s pragmatic agenda even if they leave the demands of its aesthetic untouched. I do require a certain quota of broken faces and crippled minds; there are targets. But what I’m looking for – what I’m really looking for – is the marriage of brutality to the higher human faculties: imagination, intellect, practical reasoning, aesthetic sense – and this pearl is found in but few oysters.
Consider, for example, my work in the thirties and forties. I’m not just talking about the boom, the record profits, the staggering numerical achievement (oh my brothers how the dark flowers bloomed in Hell, how we wallowed in blossom, how the odour dizzied us, how we swooned); nor am I talking merely of the clean lines of the System, nor the inspirational role of the mob. I’m talking, dear reader, of the sublime fusion of order and destruction. Like most alchemical grails it wasn’t sought or won without risk and hardship. (Speaking of grails, shall I tell you where the Holy Grail is? You’d never believe it. Actually I’ll save it for later. Some incentive for you to hang in there through the grizzly bits . . .) My boy Himmler spent a great deal of time worrying – about all sorts of nonsense (his bowels, whether he was undermined by his spectacles, whether his face really resembled – as an old school enemy had cruelly claimed – a brainless onion) but chiefly about the excruciating difficulty of torturing and murdering millions of people without damaging one’s humanity . . .