They diligently worked to persuade people what they should buy. They deliberated on what the folk ought to eat, the clothes they must put on their backs, the powders to wash their baths and shit pans with. They stipulated the sort of fire-hazard beds to sleep in, and chairs to fall back in while watching infantile entertainment on television. They decided in their toy balloon tinpot heads that people should believe what they would never believe themselves. But how wrong they were to think they ran the world.
The last account I worked on had appalled more than worried them, as I had meant it to, and because I had done my best to fuck up their values more than anybody ever had in the history of advertising it was no surprise when the guillotine kissed my clean-shaven neck. So here I was, free for as long as the quarter’s cheque lasted, knowing that three years with them had been more than enough.
I should have resigned with the usual psychiatrist’s report certifying I was off my trolley and not likely to clamber back for the rest of my life. Tendering for their understanding and goodwill I could have got a golden handshake and gone off like a dog with a tin tail to breed hamsters on a farm in Wiltshire. Not me. By making them sack me I had cut off my nose to spite my face, which my mother had always said was my usual way, and would do me no good.
Motorists barked their horns at an ambulance blocking Marchmont Street, while one of the crew helped a crippled old lady into her doorway. A chap in a white Mercedes leaned his pink head out and told them to get a move on: “Or I’ll run her over.”
While the ambulance driver gave an extended two-finger salute from his cab the ninety-year-old woman rested on her zimmer frame, as if to wind some breath back into her lungs, then shouted with the voice of a twenty-year-old King’s Cross strumpet to the impatient man in the Merc, that he should go away, find a quiet corner, and give himself a good fucking, a remark which changed his complexion from pink to red, and entertained the street no end.
With traffic so conveniently stalled I crossed the road and walked my uncertainties away, convinced that the only important person in the world was me. Who was next on the list it was impossible to say, but at least I wondered, and supposed it had to be my wife Frances, who I’d sooner or later have to tell about the loss of a job she’d expected me to hold for life.
As a general practitioner she slaved all the hours God sent, and would have put in even more time had the solar system made the day longer. Again and again she told me how she loved her job, and that the only worthy life was to help the poor and the sick, while at the same time having no illusions.
“The poor are always with us,” I had told her last night, “and the poor are always sick, otherwise they wouldn’t be poor.” She put hands to her beautiful ears, not to know I didn’t much believe what I said. “As for the sick,” I went on, “they can’t help but be poor, because who wouldn’t feel poor if they were sick? The fact is, darling, that you never get any rest, not even during the night. Just as you’re snugged up in my arms and about to have an orgasm the bloody phone stops it because some mardy bastard’s run out of tablets and wants you to drive a couple of miles in the murk to give him the needle and send him back to never-never land. How can you go on living like that? And what about me in all this?”
“You’re a monster of selfishness.” Her half smile indicated that no matter how irredeemable I was she’d go on putting up with me. “You give me no encouragement, though I suppose it’s my fault, because that’s what attracted me to you in the first place. But don’t put me off. Some poor chap wants seeing to. I must go.”
I switched on the bedroom light to see her lovely breasts hoiked into the little lacy bra, and knickers cover the auburn triangle, as if she was going to see a lover rather than a patient. A slip over all, she put on skirt, shirt, and sensible shoes to prove me wrong, then lifted her bag of gear. “You have no sense of social responsibility, Michael. You’re even worse than Ronald Delphick used to be.”
“He still is like that,” I called after her, then went back into the warmth and tried to sleep. I didn’t offer to drive her, as I sometimes did, for it was dark and raining, and I needed all the dreams I could get, though I remembered none, which was just as well, or they might have shown even more clearly the bastard I knew myself to be.
A motorist missed clipping me by an inch on crossing Malet Street. Such a bang and I would never have seen Frances again. What you halfway hoped for never came, though I didn’t much care for being carted home in a plastic bag and having Frances, with her usual puzzled frown and stethoscope poised, bending just so that I could see her exquisite décolletage, no longer to be delved into and got at.
But where do I go? I had lived in London on and off for thirteen years and it still seemed unreal. Patches I knew, and could get from one to another, yet felt I only belonged to the area around our house, regarding London as a place to own rather than live in, either that or forget it.
Changing course at every corner I wondered whether to call at the Cain and Abel pub in Soho, and say hello to my father, Gilbert Blaskin. He’d be on a high stool, holding a double brandy, a cigar between his teeth, and telling dropouts and media scumbags what angst he went through while writing his big successful novels.
If he wasn’t there I would look in the Box and Cox, or the Black Crikey, till I remembered he’d been blackballed from both because people would no longer put up with the lash of his insults — novelists having a way with words — or tolerate his boasting. As often as not he would burst into tears, and end by vomiting in the loo, behaviour so boorish it couldn’t even be put down to self-indulgence, a devil in him he was incapable of taming. Thank God I in no way took after him.
Most likely he was still in bed with a thundercloud hangover, moaning for Mabel Drudge-Perkins his paramour to put another cold wet towel across his scorching brow. He would be glad to see me if I told him about my downfall, and would use the fact of my being thrown out of the advertising agency as a paragraph or two of padding for his current novel. I knew him. Many’s the time I’ve picked up one of his books and read accounts of my misfortunes, though so distorted or magnified as only to be recognisable by me who had suffered them.
He once got me to write a novel which he could send to his publisher as his own, according to contract, while what he considered to be his good one went to a firm offering more money. My effort was the worst I could do. I’d never written a novel anyway. It was crap, a farrago of juvenile and semi-literate slop crammed with senseless magic realism — which was all the rage — written as quickly as I could work the typewriter, but it won him the Windrush Prize of ten thousand pounds, which he didn’t share with me.
The ways of the literary world were a mystery, and I still don’t think he has forgiven me. Such garbage pulling a prize shattered all faith in himself, for a couple of days, and when he got the news I had to dodge an empty brandy bottle that splattered too close to my head.
I jinked through the streets, glanced in the techno toyshops of Tottenham Court Road, and turned onto Oxford Street. Stopping at a phone box I dialled Blaskin, whose voice scraped into my ear: “Whitehall 1212. His Holiness the Pope speaking, but don’t confess until I get my notebook.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Grand Mufti of fucking Mecca. I only hope I’m not disturbing you.”