“I’m glad to see you, anyway.” She drained the soft brown blebs and spooned them into two soup plates, unable to stop looking soppily at Paula. “It’ll help us to keep up with our sinful pleasures, won’t it, love?” She turned on me. “How is the big-headed novelist, anyway?”
“Top of the world. He’s still giving Mabel hell.”
“They deserve each other. Come on, darling,” she said to her girlfriend, “get something to eat. I was always hungry, at your age.” They sat at the small table, foreheads almost touching, spooning away as if eating caviar. My stomach turned at the sight. “You can have the back bedroom,” she said. “I aired it this morning.”
“You mean you let the diesel fumes in?”
“Don’t be cheeky.”
“I don’t want to put you out.”
“If I thought you was going to do that I wouldn’t have let you into the house. And sit down. I don’t like people standing while I’m eating.”
“I’m not people.”
“You are while you’re standing up. Are you sure you don’t want a plate of this? It looks as if you could do with something to clean you out.”
“I don’t want cleaning out.”
“Everybody does.”
I nodded towards Paula. “She does, by the look of her.”
“You leave her alone. She’s my very special friend. Aren’t you, love?”
She spoke at last. “Am I?”
“Well, you were in bed last night.”
I wouldn’t have touched her with a barge pole. “Where did you pick her up?”
“I didn’t pick her up,” she flared, as I’d known she would. “I found her one evening sobbing her socks off in the Plough. Some man she lived with had tried to knock her about, and when she fought back he kicked her out. She said she’d got nowhere to go and was about to go down to the Leen and drown herself, so I took her in. The man came round here later looking for her, wanting to get her back. He started arguing on the doorstep. He threatened me. Me! I took the breadknife and pointed it at his guts. A real ratface he was. The blade went so close it ripped a bit of his cardigan. I always keep my knives razorsharp, for cutting up men who get a bit leery. I don’t know whether he was more terrified at that or at my laugh, the wicked prick. But he saw I wouldn’t stand any nonsense, and ran for his life. He never came back, either. I’d have chopped him up if he did. We women have to stick together, don’t we, precious?”
I could hardly believe it when the plump little scrubber gazed at my mother and smiled — “Oh yes!”—which made her look a bit more sexy, though it wouldn’t do to run your mother off. On the other hand she’d think nothing of doing it to me if I’d brought Dropshort’s baggage in for a cup of tea. Her flirting with Frances when we were first married didn’t bear thinking about. I thought I was going to lose her. Blaskin made a pass at Frances as well, but held back on noting my wound up fist. Was ever anyone cursed with worse parents? “I’m going out,” I told her.
“Don’t get into trouble, then. I know you. Just remember you’re in Nottingham. It’s not like the old days when you could walk around and feel safe. If you haven’t got good shoes on and you step on a needle you could be dead in six months. The town’s full of druggies.”
Searching out old acquaintances when you’ve nothing better to do is a good way of passing the time. If they’d been your girlfriends you wanted to see how much worse off they had become after you’d walked out on them. The first amenable sweetheart to consider was Claudine Forks, who had married my pal Alfie Bottesford on finding out she was pregnant. She told him the kid was his but in fact it had been mine, and he’d been so dim she didn’t have much persuading to do.
I found the phone book under a flowerpot in the parlour, and after a few flips got Claudine’s address. My mother looked up from splodging Paula. “If you come back late I’ll smell your fingers.”
“Don’t be disgusting.” I slammed the door to cut her laughter. It was four o’clock, and I hadn’t had lunch, but rather than call at Lord Jim’s fishbar on the main road I fetched a tuna and pickle sandwich from the car at the garage (which wasn’t yet being worked on) and munched a trail of original mixed grain brown bread crumbs along the main road. Space between clouds was a luminous duckegg blue, the air pure and refreshing compared to the old train smoke and factory smells I remembered, though I didn’t know which I preferred most.
I turned up over the bridge where the station used to be, hoping to stretch my hitherto pampered legs by a mile or two’s extra walk, happy enough to be floating around home soil as in my tadpole days.
I had seen so little of Nottingham in the last thirteen years it was like being in a foreign country, though one in which I at least knew the language. I’d met Alfie Bottesford in primary school, and one day he took me home to meet his fat mother, who wore glasses and worked at Player’s making cigarettes. A father was nowhere in the offing, meaning Alfie was as much as a bastard as I was. We played marbles on the cobbled street, till his mother called us in to eat bread smeared with black treacle, and drink such strong tea it stopped me sleeping for a week.
When Alfie took up with Claudine in his teens he tried to have it with her because that’s what you did at that age, whoever the girl was, but she wouldn’t let him near, though she was a passionate thing with a wonderful pair of breasts. I met her one night and talked her into it, so we were soon familiar with every field and copse on the outskirts of the city. Sometimes we even had it in her parents big fluffy marriage bed while they were out at Labour Party meetings. Thinking about it gave my John Thomas a rise.
After I left for London she went back to Alfie, and married him, with my little pea in her pod. So I didn’t know whether they would be glad to see me, though was big headed enough to wonder why they shouldn’t. Friends who aren’t friends for life aren’t worth having, and could never be too long apart not to call on one another.
I walked by the grey walled tobacco warehouse, seriously thinking — which I never liked to do — about the purpose of my life. Seeing no future, I wondered what it had in store. You could never go home again, so that wasn’t an option, and I wouldn’t now, but felt myself firmly in the grip of the unknowable, a state I had formerly regarded as of no importance simply because I didn’t like it. Useless speculation was futile, however, and all I could do to feel normal was to go where fancy took me. I’d never been imperilled by such trivial thoughts at Upper Mayhem so it would be best to go there and be still for a while, wait until something happened, and soon enough it would. The mind gets sick to make the body healthy again, and if it kills you in the process it only means you were too sick to recover and didn’t deserve to.
Claudine and Alfie lived in a matchbox bungalow at 24 Camomile Gardens, their address burned on the wavy wooden notice with a hot poker. I pressed the Swiss meadow cowbell button twice before the door opened.
“What do you want?” But she knew me straight away, and I didn’t have to wonder whether or not it was her. She was a little broader amidships, bristols pointing fair and square as if to push me back along the path and up the street, the same hungry though still pretty face, yet a daze of anguish from her fiery grey eyes as yet unexplained. Her all-black dress made her look like a lady-croupier in a gambling den. Surprise flickered away as she said: “You’ve heard, then?”