Horst Ibelgaufts
P.S. Please make sure that Daria and Melanie get home fine and well.
Daria was his one. Terribly skinny, ribs like lobster cages and no chest to speak of, but she was a lovely sort: kind; soft with her kisses and with double-jointed wrists she liked to show off in a pair of long silk gloves – set you back four clothing coupons at least. ‘I like you,’ Archie remembered saying helplessly, as she replaced the gloves and put on her stockings. She turned, smiled. And though she was a professional, he got the feeling she liked him too. Maybe he should have left with her right then, run to the hills. But at the time it seemed impossible, too involved, what with a young wife with one in the oven (an hysterical, fictional pregnancy, as it turned out, a big bump full of hot air), what with his dodgy leg, what with the lack of hills.
Strangely, Daria was the final pulse of thought that passed through Archie just before he blacked out. It was the thought of a whore he met once twenty years ago, it was Daria and her smile which made him cover Mo’s apron with tears of joy as the butcher saved his life. He had seen her in his mind: a beautiful woman in a doorway with a come hither look; and realized he regretted not coming hither. If there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance, he wanted the extra time. Not just this second, but the next and the next – all the time in the world.
Later that morning, Archie did an ecstatic eight circuits of Swiss Cottage roundabout in his car, his head stuck out the window while a stream of air hit the teeth at the back of his mouth like a wind sock. He thought: Blimey. So this is what it feels like when some bugger saves your life. Like you’ve just been handed a great big wad of Time. He drove straight past his flat, straight past the street signs (Hendon 3¾), laughing like a loon. At the traffic lights he flipped ten pence and smiled when the result seemed to agree that Fate was pulling him towards another life. Like a dog on a lead round a corner. Generally, women can’t do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. In this manner, a new Archie is about to emerge. We have caught him on the hop. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in a maybe this, maybe that kind of mood. Approaching a forked road, he slows down, checks his undistinguished face in the wing-mirror, and quite indiscriminately chooses a route he’s never taken before, a residential street leading to a place called Queens Park. Go straight pastGo!, Archie-boy, he tells himself; collect two hundred and don’t for gawd’s sake look back.
Tim Westleigh (more commonly known as Merlin) finally registered the persistent ringing of a doorbell. He picked himself off the kitchen floor, waded through an ocean of supine bodies, and opened the door to arrive face-to-face with a middle-aged man dressed head-to-toe in grey corduroy, holding a ten pence coin in his open palm. As Merlin was later to reflect when describing the incident, at any time of the day corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent men wear it. Tax men too. History teachers add leather elbow patches. To be confronted with a mass of it, at nine in the a.m., on the first day of a New Year, is an apparition lethal in its sheer quantity of negative vibes.
‘What’s the deal, man?’ Merlin blinked in the doorway at the man in corduroy who stood on his doorstep illuminated by winter sunshine. ‘Encyclopedias or God?’
Archie noted the kid had an unnerving way of emphasizing certain words by moving his head in a wide circular movement from the right shoulder to the left. Then, when the circle was completed, he would nod several times.
‘ ’Cos if it’s encyclopedias we’ve got enough, like, information… and if it’s God, you’ve got the wrong house. We’re in a mellow place, here. Know what I mean?’ Merlin concluded, doing the nodding thing and moving to shut the door.
Archie shook his head, smiled and remained where he was.
‘Erm… are you all right?’ asked Merlin, hand on the doorknob. ‘Is there something I can do for you? Are you high on something?’
‘I saw your sign,’ said Archie.
Merlin pulled on a joint and looked amused. ‘That sign?’ He bent his head to follow Archie’s gaze. The white bedsheet hanging down from an upper window. Across it, in large rainbow-coloured lettering, was painted: WELCOME TO THE ‘END OF THE WORLD’ PARTY, 1975.
Merlin shrugged. ‘Yeah, sorry, man, looks like it wasn’t. Bit of a disappointment, that. Or a blessing,’ he added amiably, ‘depending on your point of view.’
‘Blessing,’ said Archie, with passion. ‘Hundred per cent, bona fide blessing.’
‘Did you, er, dig the sign, then?’ asked Merlin, taking a step back behind the doorstep in case the man was violent as well as schiz. ‘You into that kind of scene? It was kind of a joke, you see, more than anything.’
‘Caught my eye, you might say,’ said Archie, still beaming like a mad man. ‘I was just driving along looking for somewhere, you know, somewhere to have another drink, New Year’s Day, hair of the dog and all that – and I’ve had a bit of a rough morning all in all – and it just sort of struck me. I flipped a coin and thought: why not?’
Merlin looked perplexed at the turn the conversation was taking. ‘Er… party’s pretty much over, man. Besides, I think you’re a little advanced in years… if you know what I mean…’ Here Merlin turned gauche; underneath the dakshiki he was at heart a good middle-class boy, instilled with respect for his elders. ‘I mean,’ he said after a difficult pause, ‘it’s a bit of a younger crowd than you might be used to. Kind of a commune scene.’
‘But I was so much older then,’ sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, ‘I’m younger than that now.’
Merlin took a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and frowned. ‘Look, man… I can’t just let anyone in off the street, you know? I mean, you could be the police, you could be a freak, you could-’
But something about Archie’s face – huge, innocent, sweetly expectant – reminded Tim what his estranged father, the Vicar of Snarebrook, had to say about Christian charity every Sunday from his pulpit. ‘Oh, what the hell. It’s New Year’s Day, for fuckssake. You best come in.’
Archie sidestepped Merlin, and moved into a long hallway with four open-doored rooms branching off from it, a staircase leading to another storey, and a garden at the end of it all. Detritus of every variety – animal, mineral, vegetable – lined the floor; a great mass of bedding, under which people lay sleeping, stretched from one end of the hallway to the other, a red sea which grudgingly separated each time Archie took a step forward. Inside the rooms, in certain corners, could be witnessed the passing of bodily fluids: kissing, breast-feeding, fucking, throwing up – all the things Archie’s Sunday Supplement had informed him could be found in a commune. He toyed for a moment with the idea of entering the fray, losing himself between the bodies (he had all this new time on his hands, masses and masses of it, dribbling through his fingers), but decided a stiff drink was preferable. He tackled the hallway until he reached the other end of the house and stepped out into the chilly garden, where some, having given up on finding a space in the warm house, had opted for the cold lawn. With a whisky tonic in mind, he headed for the picnic table, where something the shape and colour of Jack Daniels had sprung up like a mirage in a desert of empty wine bottles.