“My ever-loving son Michael?” He sounded pettish. “Of course you’re disturbing me. I was halfway through a comma.”
“A coma?”
“Don’t insult a hardworking novelist. It’s too early before six o’clock in the evening, and then I’m in the pub. What is it you want?”
“I’ll be passing your place in half an hour.”
“Good. I’ll get Mabel to grind the poison with the coffee, after she’s finished making the beds, of course, and steaming my fedora. You can rest assured that the poison won’t take effect until you’ve told me what’s on your mind.”
“Something important’s happened to me,” I said.
“Good or bad?”
“Bad, you might say.”
A gloating liveliness came into his voice. “Tell me about it on the phone. Poison doesn’t come cheap.” I saw his smirk on hearing I was in trouble, as if he was able to see through those minute parts of the callbox windows not covered by prostitutes’ cards. “But do come and get your coffee. At least I can watch you die. Copy straight from life reads much better.”
To be idiosyncratic, cantankerous, and full of bile was a necessary state for his work, so who was I to upset the equilibrium? It wasn’t possible, though I often tried.
I put the tackle down. Oxford Street was crowded, giro day or not. Thatcher’s government had closed the factories, and was doing its best with the coalmines. They had kicked everyone out of the loony bins and left the poor sods to sink or swim. Mostly they came down to London and cluttered up the golden mile begging for the price of a fix to put them out of their misery. Overspilling garbage cans, split condoms and rusty needles were all over the place, on streets which ministers and members of parliament drove through in blacked out cars. If you can’t get on, get out, but when hadn’t it been like that?
A girl at the office last year rattled on about being a socialist, and one day said a bit too loud that Mrs Thatcher was a rotten old bag who should be hanged from a lamp post. I’d never say that about any woman, or man for that matter, unless it was Moggerhanger. But the girl was a feminist who loved it when one of us went to fetch her a cup of tea or coffee. Unluckily for her, her anti-Thatcherite diatribe was heard by Eric Pushpacker, who doted on Margaret Thatcher.
When he told Geoffrey Harlaxton what the girl had said, she was thrown out in no time. The rhythm of her language on being shown the door would have been a treat to march to. “We must go on proving that Darwin was right,” Geoffrey guffawed, but still red at the recollection of her curses. They laughed over their pints of directors’ bitter. “And careful not to let any such scrawny chit from the working class come into the office again,” at which I said: “I suppose your grandfather was selling night soil from all the shit-houses in Battersea before he made his pile,” another reason he wasn’t sorry to get rid of me.
A bomber jacket junkie in smart trainers, factory-stained jeans, and a red and green ethnic hat stood before me and asked for money. I pushed him aside, though hoped he’d try to hit me so that I could make up for having lost my job by booting him into Selfridge’s to do a bit of shoplifting. He was drugged up to the eyeballs. “Fuck you,” he spat, and looked for someone else to nail.
I’d never been uncharitable, and five years ago I’d have given him something, as I had to Almanack Jack, but he at least sold smelly old almanacks or packets of damp matches from a tray. I’d helped Bill Straw when he was down (as he had helped me) and picked up Arthur Clegg when I’d found him on the road and homeless, making him caretaker at Upper Mayhem. Even Ron Delphick had benefitted by a bob or two now and again. As the self-styled North country performance poet he still pushed an old pram with a giant panda on top, up and down the Great North Road, a pennant fluttering from a handle-mast saying: “Poems tenpence each, or as much as you can afford.” He got an MBE in the New Year’s Honour’s List, but continued sponging because — and this pissed him off no end — an income hadn’t come with it.
But three years hobnobbing with agency boyos had turned me sour and mean. They wanted people to buy — I’d heard them say — not beg. Begging was against all they stood for. The money people gave to beggars would be better spent on the trash they advertised. Beggars only got drunk, or bought drugs. The agency lads snorted drugs as well (though I never had) but were flush and could buy all they wanted.
I bawled at the junk-head that he should get a job, a suggestion so audacious and unexpected that he took his fingers from the lapel of a next victim and came closer to me than last time, to fathom the features of a bloke who could make such a cruel remark.
I nudged him from passing traffic towards Selfridge’s window. He had a General Custer hair-do, and an earring. It was impossible to stare him out. He must have trained his eyes to jump through hoops like fleas at a circus and never hold still. One of his teeth was missing, but if someone from an advertising agency had knocked it out I hoped this chap had smacked the fuckpig back.
Charitable, and by now halfway sorry for him, I sorted a pound coin from my pocket, but he looked as if it was a black widow spider, and threw it onto the pavement. A well-dressed little Crispin, on his way to Hamley’s I supposed, snatched it from the gutter and ran after his mother: “Mummy! Mummy! I’ve found some money.”
“You’re an insulting bastard,” my very own personal beggar said.
Well, maybe I was, and felt ashamed, and knew that I needed to make a real financial gesture against the view of my ex-colleagues at the advertising agency with regard to beggars, and towards me becoming my old sympathetic self again. Who could begrudge him a five pound note? He had been right to throw the measly coin away. “Take this, then, and buy a few custard pies.”
He held it to the light to make sure I hadn’t printed it that morning, and left the head on upside down, then turned his lit up face to me. “Cheers! That’s what I call generous. I come from Chesterfield, to work the patches down here now and again. I earn enough in a day to last a month in that hole. I’m studying for my ‘0’ Levels at night school.”
He ran off to get himself a pint, I hoped, and I zig-zagged the streets as if soaking up the geography to become a taxi driver, heels hot and toes sore from walking so little in the last few years. Frances had asked me to buy a few score stamps from the post office close to my pint and sandwich place, so I went into the one on Albemarle Street.
The woman before me in the queue had dark skin and a good shape, legs clothed by black slacks, hair flaring into a regal Queen of Sheba headdress, flashing teeth on smiling at a cartoon in the Evening Standard. I’d bring her pears and ripe black figs and damson-coloured muscatels to see her eat and imagine what she could do afterwards in bed. She was a feast for the eyes, so who wouldn’t relish her?
She gave in a couple of packets at the guichet, knickers to a friend perhaps. On putting the receipt and change into her Gracchi handbag she dropped a kleenex, and though I would pick up a woman’s handkerchief in the hope of a smile for gallantry, then get talking to her, invite her for coffee, or even lunch, whether I was nearly broke or not, and subtly by little pulling her into bed, I was damned if I would latch my digits onto a piece of tissue which might have a fleck of snot on it, no matter how lickerish she might look on devouring my platters of fruit.
To my astonishment and chagrin a man who had finished his turn at the pigeon hole handed her the kleenex back with such a smile you’d think it was pure silk and belonged to Marie Antoinette. She smiled oh so graciously, and from my turn at the counter I saw them talking amicably on the way out, his hand close to her elbow as if they might be heading for a smart bit of congress on the street.