“You know, John,” said Jim, as John topped up his glass from the dangerous blue vodka bottle, “you’re a good friend to me.”
John consulted his naked wrist. “It’s a bit early in the evening for that kind of talk, isn’t it?”
“Yes, you’re right. Dare I ask how the fund-raising is going?”
“So-so,” said John, making the so-so gesture.
“Hm,” said Jim. “Well, cheers anyway.”
And John topped up his glass. “I think I’ll go and see if I can find that blonde choreographer,” he said, turning up the ghetto-blaster.
“Go with God, my friend,” called Jim. And Jim lounged back against his unspeakable worktop, a glass of dangerous blue vodka in his hand, and the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death playing havoc with his inner ears. In the front garden two men fought goodnaturedly and all seemed once more right to Jim with Brentford and the world.
“So God and St Peter are playing golf,” said Old Pete, now down from the roof and in the front room, “and St Peter’s winning. And God takes a swing at the ball and slices it into the rough and this rabbit picks it up in its mouth and races across the fairway, and then out of the sky plunges this eagle and it picks the rabbit up in its talons and soars away into the blue and the next thing this hunter shoots the eagle and the eagle plummets dropping the rabbit and the ball rolls out of the rabbit’s mouth and straight into the hole. And St Peter looks at God and says ‘Do you want to play golf or just fuck about?’” Two West London Wandering Bishops who had happened by laughed uproariously at this. A woman with a severe haircut and halitosis, who was at the wrong party, said, “Surely that joke is in very bad taste.”
“Shall I goose her, or will you?” Old Pete asked the bishops.
“Now crop circles,” said Paul the medical student, toking on a joint of Cheech and Chong proportions. “Crop circles are the stigmata of the Corn God. A visual expression of the agonies of the landscape’s Passion, brought on through modern day man’s rape of the natural world. Agrichemicals, intensive farming, the land cries out in sorrow and pain. But will anyone listen? Will they?”
“Don’t Bogart that joint,” said the lady in the straw hat, snatching it away.
“Anybody here got an acoustic guitar?” asked Paul.
“No!” shouted all within earshot, and those out of earshot also. And Paul was hustled from the party and flung into the street. Acoustic guitar indeed!
“Huh,” said Paul, “and I can do ‘Blowing in the Wind’ without even looking at my fingers.”
“And stay out!”
A well and truly out of it chap ran by shrieking, “Free, I’m free!”
“Would you like to dance, Jim?” asked the blonde choreographer with the amber eyes and the fascinating mouth.
“Yes I would,” said Jim. “It’s Suzy, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, but how did you know my name?” Jim took her most politely in his arms and, as the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies (right on cue) went into a slow and smoochy number, began that slow and dreamy turning round in circles dance that people such as Jim who can’t otherwise dance at all always seem to be able to do when holding on to someone really wonderful.
“What were you saying?” asked Jim, who even through the haze of cigarette smoke could smell the beauty’s hair.
“I said, how did you know my name?”
“Ah yes. Well, very odd thing. Someone put this hallucinogenic drug onto a council table and I got some on my fingers and started tripping. And I hallucinated you.”
“Was it a good trip, or a bad trip?”
“Oh, a good trip,” said Jim. “A very good trip.”
“You can hold me a little closer, if you want.”
“Oh. Yes please.”
“You are a very beautiful woman,” said John Omally. The very ugly woman he was dancing with laughed in a manner that was not unknown to Sid James.
“Now your standard engine,” said Paul, who had crawled back in through a hole beneath Jim’s back fence, “your standard warp-drive engine, functions through the ionization of beta particles creating a positronic catalyst, which bombards the isotope with gamma radiation, giving rise to galvanic variations and the transperambulation of pseudo-cosmic antimatter.”
“I only asked you what the time was,” said a young woman from the windscreen wiper works. “And you start coming out with all this Zen mind-boggling mystical all-encompassing trip into cosmic infinity.”
“That’s all right,” said Paul. “We’ll never remember it in the morning.”
“And then I fell into the hole and broke both my legs,” said Jim.
“Incredible,” said Suzy. “And do you still have the Porsche?”
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies thrashed back into Death Metal, and two police officers instantly knocked on the front door. “Turn that bloody noise down,” they said. Upstairs someone else was sick in Jim’s wardrobe and yet another couple who were making love told him to do it elsewhere.
“You are a very beautiful woman,” said John Omally. “Leave it out,” said Old Pete.
22
By three o’clock in the morning the PARTY began to thin. But this was three o’clock in the morning of the PARTY’S second day, so no one felt too embarrassed about that.
Paul strummed upon an acoustic guitar, but it was after three in the morning and he was strumming the blues (in A minor), so that was permissible.
Professor Slocombe had long said his goodbyes and left with two of the young women from the windscreen wiper works. These would later know such exquisite pleasure as to leave them smiling for a week.
Old Pete was asleep in the shed. And the lady in the straw hat was asleep on the sofa with Suzy’s uncle Rob.
Suzy and Jim were nowhere to be seen.
John Omally awoke in Jim’s bed to find himself gazing into a face that looked like a bag of spanners. “Oh dear,” said John. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
Suzy and Jim sat upon the canal bridge staring down into the moonlit waters.
“You could have made love to me, you know,” said Suzy.
“I know,” said Jim. “But actually I couldn’t. I never can the first time and often not even the second or the third. It puts a lot of women off. But it’s the way I am. Too emotional, I suppose.”
“You’re a good man, Jim. I like you very much.”
“And you’re a very beautiful woman.”
Suzy flicked a pebble into the canal waters. “What do you want to do with your life, Jim?” she asked.
“Just experience it, I suppose. When I was young I promised myself that I would experience everything I could. Travel the world, see exotic places, take it all in. As much as I could, before time ran out.”
“So, what stopped you?”
“What stops any of us? Habit, I suppose. You get into habits. They’re hard to break away from. But what about you? What do you want to do with your life?”
“Something wonderful,” said Suzy. “I think something wonderful is about to happen. I can feel it in the air. Can’t you?”
Jim put his arm about the beautiful woman’s shoulder and gazed into the stunning amber eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Oh yes, I can.”
The sun rose slowly from behind the windscreen wiper works and two young women crossed the bridge. Both were smiling broadly.
Jim took Suzy in his arms and kissed her fascinating mouth. “I hope I’ll see you again,” he said.
“You will,” said Suzy.
John and Jim munched upon egg and bacon at the Plume Cafe.
“I thought I might find you here,” said John, thrusting buttered toast into his mouth. “There’s no food left at your place.”
“You look a little, how shall I put this, shagged out, John.”
“I barely escaped with my life. If the woman hadn’t tripped over this bloke who was being sick in your wardrobe, I don’t think I would have made it.”
“I suppose a wardrobe full of vomit is not too high a price to pay.”