Two flies were having it off on a cube of sugar, and I was too fascinated by their lack of Kama Sutra expertise to wave them away. Everything has something to live for. The coffee came first, and I knew it was the real thing because it had froth on the top and tasted like cocoa. Breakfast was good, though, and while swabbing up the last of the liquid fat a face I’d seen before showed at the door.
Tall and rangy, he sloped in my direction, a tie hanging from his coat pocket like a dead snake, his previously immaculate boots mapped with milk chocolate mud, the hat in his hand had been through the mangle, a cut on his stubbled cheek had a bend in it, as if he had been interrupted shaving. With a hand deep in his trouser pocket, as if he had a hernia coming on, the other shook towards me as, I was sorry to say, a sign of recognition.
Someone had had it in for Horace Hawksley, a come down in a man of seventy-odd I’d never seen. He walked a few feet by, as if intelligent communication between brain and body had slowed since yesterday (though not impossibly damaged) then he swung back. “Michael Cullen?”
“So you never forget a name?”
“Nor a face.”
I noted a different angle to his lower dentures, as well as a slight bruise below his left eye, and that his watch chain was missing. “Sit down, if you like.”
He did, eyes shining. “I’m not who I say I am. You know that, don’t you?”
“I wondered about that, but then, I might not be who I say I am, either. Would you like a cigar?”
“After I’ve had something to eat,” he smiled. “Then I’ve got a story to tell you like no other.”
He expected me to listen, but why me? I wasn’t the only person in the place. I thought of telling him to get lost, knowing that the account of his misadventures so early in the day would wear me out. If Blaskin did this run he would pull in enough material to last him for life.
When the waitress brought me another rotten coffee she stared at Horace with a malevolence hard to understand, as he ordered the same thing I’d had. “You see,” he said, and I had no difficulty believing him, “things went a little less well than I expected.”
“I’m surprised. You were so confident and cock-a-hoop and, I must say, well prepared.”
“Yes, but in this case preparation turned out to contain nine-tenths of the enjoyment, so I got that much out of it, sufficient not to be demoralised for when I want to do the same stunt again. You see, I can’t afford to be discouraged. I’m too old for that, aren’t I?”
“You had one night away at least.”
“Only one? Are you sure? Is that all it was?”
“You should know.”
“I don’t, though. It seemed more like a month.”
I wondered who was off his block. One of us surely was, and more likely it was me. “There’s a calendar on the wall, if you want to check.”
“I’ve lost my reading glasses, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”
It didn’t matter what time I got to Upper Mayhem, except it wasn’t my intention to be stuck here till next week. “So what happened?”
“Oh, everything. But it went like clockwork.”
He did look as if he’d fallen off Big Ben. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“For a while, anyway. It’s all coming back. Betty and the kids were very glad to see me, especially when I gave them the presents I’d been secretly stowing in my car boot for the last month. After that, things went crackingly good.”
His language bordered so close to the archaic, with which I supposed he had been brought up all those years ago, that it was almost edible. You could hear it coming out of the BBC.
The waitress slapped his breakfast on the table as if he’d misbehaved with her in the past: “Get it down you, and then go, you old goat,” her tone somewhat diminishing what beauty I’d thought she had.
Taking care not to inconvenience his dentures, he slid half an egg into his mouth. “Yes, crackingly good. I left the car at the station. Didn’t want it to be burned out by rough lads on the estate, did I? But I was happy to foot the couple of miles, because walking always gets my gander up — if you catch my meaning.
“Betty threw herself into my arms when she opened the door. She was very loving, and glad to see me, though a bit foul mouthed when shouting at the kids for calling me grandad, but who could blame her for that? She’d got her pride, after all. Once we’d closed the bedroom door she was all over me. I started to wonder whether or not I’d stocked up with enough rubbers.”
I was dying to know. “What do you take?”
Nonplussed was hardly the word. “Take?”
“To get it up.”
“So that’s what you mean.” He was insulted. “I don’t take anything. Only protein, plenty of meat, with lots of fat on it. Cheese, extract of malt, cod liver oil. How the hell should I know what I take? All I know is we didn’t come out of the bedroom for a couple of hours, and that was only to have the tea her mother had ready for us.”
I was enthralled. He should have been in a Himalayan ice cave dishing out advice to flaccid lovers. “And what did you have for your tea?”
“Ham, Collared head. Fish roes. Eggs. Black pudding. They know I like powerful stuff that tastes good. The trouble was we’d just got stuck in when a tall thin chap with a cap on came in and asked who the fuck I was, if you’ll excuse me using his word. ‘He’s my Uncle Horace,’ Betty said. He looked a bit leery: ‘I’ve been married to you for five years, and this is the first time I knew you’d got an Uncle-fucking-Horace.’ She picked up the breadknife, which inclined him to believe her: ‘Well, now you fucking do. He’s my Uncle Horace, isn’t he, mam?’ ‘I ought to know my own brother,’ her mother said. The man in the flat cap swilled a mug of tea: ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ The upshot was he went out of the back door with a couple of bundles under his arm, and I never saw the blackguard again, I’m glad to say.
“I retired to the bedroom with my darling Betty. In and out, we played Box and Cox till about three in the morning. I was fairly knocked out by then, and half asleep, till the kids and Betty’s mother in the other bedroom began screaming at a couple of flashing blue lights on the pavement outside. Suddenly the front and back doors got kicked in, and police were all over the place.
“‘Don’t say a word,’ Betty told me. ‘It’s not us they want.’ Getting my teeth in from the glass on the table, I began to wonder who they were after. If it was me, though I couldn’t see how it could be, and my name got in the press, my wife would kick up no end of a fuss.”
“And you wouldn’t be able to blame her,” I said, giving him the opportunity for some punctuation.
“I know that, you young fool. Anyway, a policeman tipped the bed up with one hand, and held it against the walclass="underline" ‘He isn’t under here.’ Another called from downstairs: ‘Where can he be, then?’ A fist was pushed at Betty’s lovely eyes: ‘Come on, where is he?’ ‘He went out at teatime,’ she said, as cool as a cucumber, as if it had happened a time or two before. ‘I expect he’ll be halfway to Mablethorpe by now, even if he’s walking. He never tells me where he goes, does he? I’m only his fucking wife.’ ‘He’s not under the stove, either,’ another officer shouted. The one with me and Betty had the gall to laugh: ‘We’ve got an old geezer from a geriatric home up here. Must have done a runner from his minders.’ In all innocence I gazed round to see who he was talking about, but it was only his sense of humour.