Such an encounter was more worrying than fortuitous, the world getting too small even for me. Fate was weaving a circle around me, and no mistake. There were times when I was glad to see someone from the old days, and others when I didn’t know whether to like it or not, but I was talking to my old pal Bill Straw. “I thought you were in Portugal, cosily married to Maria? At least you were three years ago, because I remember waving you off. I was happy, if you don’t mind me saying so, to see the last of you.”
We talked among the moiling crowds. “It seems like thirty years to me,” he said, “though I sometimes think you live a lot longer if things turn out badly now and again. They don’t often go right with me, so I expect to live forever.”
“What happened, then?”
“I’d be happier to tell you if we were sitting in a nice café with a pot of coffee and a plate of cream cakes in front of us. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.”
We went into the main station and found a place. A waiter looked at Bill as if he was a tramp — which he was — and the scum of the earth — which he certainly wasn’t, his clothes being wrecks from good quality shops. He ate two cakes before starting his rigmarole, and I was glad to feed him because, unlike most people, he could be more dangerous in adversity than affluence.
“You see, Michael, I had it made in Portugal, at first, anyway. We lived like a king and queen on our little country estate, but after a couple of years she started going a bit funny. I found out she was having a bit on the side with my manager, and that they were cheating me so much I was like one of the blind mice. Well, I have to confess I was drunk most of the time on that delicious wine they have out there, so it was easy for them to sell my produce without me knowing, and spin some tale as to where it had gone. In that couple of years we must have had more blight and phyloxera than in the whole history of viticulture. Or so they led me to believe. It was my fault, but you know how trusting I am.”
I spluttered into my cup, for he was the most wary person alive, and whoever trusted him more than an eel in King John’s stomach would have to be blind dead dumb and completely daft. On the other hand, ever since we’d come to London thirteen years ago, he had been my friend, and if the first job I got through him set me on the road to prison it was no fault of his. “And then what?”
“The cakes are all gone. Let’s have some more.” A belch sounded as if a pig had been trapped in his guts since birth. Two French girl students at the next table laughed, especially when Bill, on seeing them, induced the first bars of ‘Colonel Bogey’ out of another ripe effort.
“You’re disgusting.” I stood up to go for the cakes. “Anybody can tell you were born and bred in Worksop, letting it rip like that.”
“Oh, and don’t forget another pot of coffee,” he called. “This one’s about cold.”
Three full packets of good quality cigarettes lay on the table when I got back, which I thought at first were a gift of the French girls, to encourage another sickening tune from his resident pig. “Where did you get those?”
“Michael, you are looking at the most resourceful down and out in London, which means the world. Have one. You look as if you could do with a puff.”
Perhaps in those deep pockets of his superannuated poacher’s coat he had more money than I suspected, and only sponged to gratify his second nature, and as a way of making life more interesting than if he had to work. Such cigarettes weren’t cheap, so maybe he was in Moggerhanger’s pay, I told him, set to spy me out as soon as I got to Liverpool Street, and make sure I went in the direction of Ealing.
“Your theory is all to cock, Michael,” he said. “You never could think straight, could you? The reason I’m never short of a smoke is this. I hang around Hampstead, or Dulwich, or Wimbledon — all good liberal middle-class areas — because at such places you’ll find not a few blokes about to give up smoking. When they see me grubbing around dustbins with a plastic bag, or swigging back a bottle of water which they think is pure spirits, they see it as only charitable to give me their fags because the wife’s nagged them at home to make them give up smoking. They consider it a sin to throw them away. Luckily they generally decide to give it up in the middle of a carton, or half a tin of roll up tobacco, which shows more determination to pack it in than if they’d waited till they’d got none left in the house. It usually means they’ll soon give in and start puffing away again, which is all the better for me, because then they’ll be throwing another carton away when they can’t put up with the wife’s jeering at their will power anymore. You could say they’re the moral scum of the earth, because they don’t care if I get cancer, and that in their heart of hearts they see it as a way of getting rid of scavengers like me.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” I said.
“I’ve never wanted it both ways. A single track for me. One way’s always been enough — hasn’t it, duck?” he bawled across to the French girls, who laughed delightedly at his attention.
“Leave them alone,” I said, “and tell me more about you and Maria in Portugal.”
“Michael, I will. As you well know, or should by now, the trappings and the goods of the world have never meant all that much to me. Easy come, and more than easy go. So you know what I did when I found Maria and my manager in bed together? You’ll never believe it, but I walked out, because I didn’t want to murder them. It would have been nothing to me, to get my maulers around their necks and put their lights out, but I knew that if I hung about one more minute I’d have rotted the rest of my life in a Portuguese prison.”
He was the most violent man I knew, when necessary, so he was being truthful. After pouring coffee he got stuck into the eccles cakes and custard tarts. “I enjoyed myself with a couple of women in Lisbon, and when I’d spent half my money got the plane to London. Maria could have the house. It’s still mine, so I might go back one day and boot her out. She was a sly little piece, though at times looked as if a tuppenny icecream wouldn’t melt on her belly button. I should have twigged when I met her that she was as deep as the Trent at Colwick. With her, every sleep was a different fever. She gave me hell.”
“And you’ve been living in London since?”
“Off the fat of the land, even though I do say so myself. That trick I tried on you in the Tube rarely fails, but if I’m really on my uppers I put my cap on the pavement, pull out this little tin mouthorgan,” he showed it to me, “usually outside a Tube station, and in ten minutes I’ve got the fare to wherever I feel like going.”
“And what do you do when you get there?”
“Play the mouthorgan again till I’ve got enough to go back to where I came from, and have a good feed on the way. I know a lot of places where a pot of hot soup is on the go, and a doss made ready for my head to plonk down. Another thing is that whenever I see a crowded supermarket I go inside with a newspaper under my arm, and there’s nobody quicker than me at drinking off a bottle of sherry, and walking out with half a pint of whitewash milk, with a smile for the girl at the till, of course, as I pay up.”
“You’ve got it made,” I said, accepting one of his cigarettes.
“Well, I think, don’t I? Just listen to this for a ruse. I go out to Gunnersbury and set off east along the main road. Then I stop a passerby and ask him how can I get to Peckam. The bloke scratches his head: ‘Peckham? From here? Well, you can walk on west for about four miles, then turn south for another few. But it’s a long way. Why do you want to walk? It would be far better to take a bus.’ ‘Maybe it would,’ I tell him, ‘but when I got up this morning the landlord threw me out of my bedsit, and now I’m going to my brother’s in Peckham, and don’t have enough for the bus fare. On the other hand I don’t mind a bit, because I like walking. As long as I get there by tonight.’ Nearly always I get a quid or two for my fare, though I can’t play the trick too often in case the same chap comes by.”