Absolute Beginners (10 page)

‘What knot would you use,’ I said, coming up beside him, and speaking from the corner of the mouth into his ear, ‘to tie two ropes of unequal thickness, supposing you had two such ropes, and wanted to join the pair of them together?’

‘Oh-ho, it’s you, boy Mowgli,’ said this Outer-Space creation, stopping and slapping my shoulder till I sank four inches into the Soho pavement.

‘Me, me! How are the national problems shaping up? Give me the loaded gossip from the accountancy cats in the town hall.’

‘The budget’s balanced,’ said the O.-S. kid, ‘but the money it’s balanced up with is worth only a third of itself, these days.’

‘Dig! And how’s the scooter whatsit? How many legs you broken besides your own?’

The O.-S. kid looked sad. ‘I not got the scooter,’ he replied, ‘because my Ma preferred a telly.’

‘Boy – you a traitor? You let old Ma tell you how to spend your personal earnings?’

‘Well, son, she’s getting on, she is.’

‘Likes to sit there in her wicker rocker, with her eyes crossed on the commercials?’

‘Don’t be sarky, now. You sore about something or other?’

‘Very so, I am. Oh, yes!’

‘Don’t spread it round about, then. Not on me.’

‘Okay, colonel. I shall keep it private.’

‘Say what you like, see, there’s lots to be learnt from television. I know it’s for profits, but in its way it’s a big universal education.’

‘The population’s seeing through the door at last, you think?’

‘Well, isn’t it? Tell me.’

‘It’s seeing only digests, slants and angles.’

‘They kidding us then, those people? All those professors and authorities?’

‘Why, sure they are! You think they tell us any secrets that’s worth knowing? You think a professor who’s studied twenty years can pop up in a studio and tell you something
real
?’

‘It looks real, there up on the screen …’

‘Oh, oh well … I tell you, Wolverine,’ I explained to this simple, trusting soul, as we started walking down the boulevard, dodging prowlers, dodging gropers, dodging layabouts and tarts, ‘I tell you. All these things – like telly witch-doctors, and advertising pimps, and show business pop song pirates – they despise us – dig? – they sell us cutprice sequins when we think we’re getting diamonds.’

The boy stopped. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you got to believe
something
in this world.’

‘All right – you say so. Well, look right there!’ I said, and pointed at a coffee bar that’s even listed now
in serious guidebooks, because the legend is, the top pop teenage rages were all ‘discovered’ there. ‘See this establishment?’ I said. ‘See all the kids jam-packed in there beside the jukes, looking like they feel in at the prize-giving, the authentic big event?’

‘I know the place. I been there.’

‘I bet you have! It’s made for mugs like you. Well, let me tell you – no teenage nightingale ever was “discovered” in that place until the telly cameras and the journalists moved in there for the massacre. The singing kids had all found out themselves, across the river, south, or anywhere, before those vultures gathered round to peck the kitty. I tell you, Tarzan, that fishbowl over there is just as real as nothing.’

I could see what was happening: on account of my argument with the Wizard, and my earlier cul-de-sac with Suze, I was coming the acid drop with this young feller. So I did what I’ve found best on these occasions, namely, cut the umbilical, and I dashed into a club entrance with a wave and crying, ‘Moment!’, and picked up the telephone and dialled the operator, and said hullo to her and asked her how I made a call to the prime minister, as I was a tourist from New Zealand and had the same name as Mr M., and wanted to ask the poor old geezer if we were possibly related. And after she’d sorted me out – quite nicely, I must say – I hung up and dashed out again, and found the Outer-Space kid still standing there, with his mouth open, and asked him about his sporting activities, because he was a boxer, though the singlet kind.

He said there were good fights billed south of the river soon, with some boys from his club, so why not go together? I said, oh, yes. Then he said meanwhile, what about we take in a film this evening? But that was no good to me, because you don’t go into Soho to see films, because Soho
is
a film, and anyway, most times I go to cinemas I walk out half way through because all I see is a sheet hanging up there, and a lot of idiots staring at it, and hidden up behind all this there’s just a boy operating the machinery with a fag hanging in his mouth even when he puts the record on for the ‘God Save’, and the cattle down there rise up on their corns, but not he, no!
Life
is the best film for sure, if you can see it as a film. So when I explained this, he said what about a bite? – a steak was what he actually suggested. And I said sorry, I was a vegetarian, which I am, not because of the poor animals or anything, but just because you belch much less, and red meat gives me the horrors.

So clearly, it wasn’t going to be a big night out with the O.-S. kid, and now, as always happened, after being so pleased to see each other once again, we were just as glad to say farewell … isn’t that like so many human relations? ‘Remember me to your old Ma,’ I said, ‘and don’t let her get ideas about a second telly.’

And all of a sudden I thought, I must get out of this fairground area, and have a bit of calm and meditation, so I hailed a cab and told the driver would he take me down by the Embankment, end to end, first one way, and then the other. He didn’t enjoy this much, because taxi-drivers, like everyone that has ponce activities, like
to pretend they’re necessary and useful as well as for hire, but he naturally agreed, because the adults love to take your money and make you feel they’re doing you a favour, both combined.

Whoever thought up the Thames Embankment was a genius. It lies curled firm and gentle round the river like a boy does with a girl, after it’s over, and it stretches in a great curve from the parliament thing, down there in Westminster, all the way north and east into the City. Going in that way, downstream, eastwards, it’s not so splendid, but when you come back up along it – oh! If the tide’s in, the river’s like the ocean, and you look across the great wide bend and see the fairy advertising palaces on the south side beaming in the water, and that great white bridge that floats across it gracefully, like a string of leaves. If you’re fortunate, the cab gets all the greens, and keeps up the same steady speed, and looking out from the upholstery it’s like your own private Cinerama, except that in this one the show’s never, never twice the same. And weather makes no difference, or season, it’s always wonderful – the magic always works. And just above the diesel whining of the taxi, you hear those
river
noises that no one can describe, but you can always recognise. Each time I come here for the ride, in any mood, I get a lift, a rise, a hoist up into joy. And as I gazed out on the water like a mouth, a bed, a sister, I thought how, my God, I love this city, horrible though it may be, and never ever want to leave it, come what it may send me. Because though it seems so untidy, and so casual, and so keep your-distance-from-me, if you can get to know this city
well enough to twist it round your finger, and if you’re its son, it’s always on your side, supporting you – or that’s what I imagined.

So when we returned again to Westminster, with the driver’s neck all disapproval, I asked this coachman to turn south, across the stream, down to the Castle: because the thought had come to me it would be nice, after so many mixed emotions, to look in on Mannie Katz and his spouse Miriam.

Mannie I first met at a jellied eel stall near the Cambridge Circus, when we both reached for the vinegar and said pardon. As you’ll have guessed, the boy is Jewish, likewise Miriam (and their one offspring), but I don’t think it’s only because I am a bit myself, as I’ve explained, on my Mum’s side, that I admire this couple so. Here I must explain my attitude to the whole Jewish thing which in a word is, thank God (theirs and ours) they’re here. I know all the arguments about them, back to front, and quite see what the Gentiles mean who are disturbed by them – but really! Add up all the defects that you can think of, please, and put them beside the great fact that the Jewish families
love life
, are on its side, are rinsed right out with it … and what do those debit things amount to? Just go inside a Jewish household, anywhere, I tell you, and however
dreadful
you may find them, what sticks out six miles and strikes you in your consciousness is that they’re
living
. It’s all a great noisy, boasting, arguing, complaining mess all right, but they’re
alive!
And how they handle whatever stuff life’s made of, like it was a material they were sampling, makes you
realise immediately that they’re an old, old, senior people who’ve been in the business of existence for a very long while indeed. I love London all right, as I’ve explained. But when the Jewish population have all made enough loot to take off for America, or Israel, then I’m leaving too. It would be turning out the light.

Mannie, as a matter of fact, has been to Israel, on a writers’ congress there, and just missed that
two-day
battle with the Pharaohs we’re all trying to forget. But being a Cockney kid, he’s not as aggressive as the genuine Israelis who, when you meet them round the coffee bars, describe the orange-grove they live in as if it was a continent, and know the answers to absolutely everything before you’ve even asked the questions. Mannie’s an authentic Cockney, by the way, not one of the suburban variety-bandbox imitations, and he’s hard, and sad, and humorous, and sentimental, just like they are. Miriam’s his second lady, and he must have married the first one from the cradle (she was one of ours – they came unstuck), because he’s only just now hitting twenty, like we all are. There’s also a young warrior of two years old called Saul who, in spite of all I’ve said in favour of Jewish family existence, is a bloody nuisance, and needs some of that Israeli discipline instead of being spoilt by the entire Katz clan, of every generation, and there are plenty.

This getting inside a Jewish home, if you yourself are not one, is a delicate operation, because although the place is yours once you’re inside it, they take their time before they ask you round, and don’t like sudden
unexpected visits, as at present. But this I can do to the Katzes, because some time ago I did Emmanuel a big, big favour without meaning to, i.e. I introduced him to a kinky character I’d photographed, called Adam Stark, who turned out to be a crazy let’s-make-a-big-loss publisher, and printed a bunch of Mannie’s poems, which hit the literary headlines for a while. So that, for Auntie This and Grandma That down in the Borough Road, I’m Fix-it Charlie, the clever boy who gave their young soothsayer a needful hoist. In this world, if you do the little kindly deed just at the right moment, the dividend’s enormous: otherwise, it’s soon forgotten. All the same, I took the precaution of stopping the cab down by St. George’s circus, and giving young Shakespeare
fourpence
worth of warning I was on my way.

The Katz lot – at least three dozen of them – live in a fine old reconditioned derelict, and Mannie himself came down there to admit me, wearing his uniform of
blue-black
corduroys, and brought me up into the best front room which I wish he wouldn’t, because that meant, as soon as they heard a visitor was coming, the rest of the Katzes made it over to the favourite son to entertain his honoured guest, and disappeared themselves into the purlieus. And there, looking just like someone straight out of the O.T. – those illustrated copies with Rebecca, or maybe Rachel, hearing something marvellous, three thousand years ago, beside a well – was Miriam K., and there, doing his berserk performance on the parquet, was their youthful warrior product, Saul. Neither of them asked me why I’d come, or why I’d not been for
an eternity, which in my book are two signs of civilised human beings – because, believe me, most hosts are bullies holding pistols at your head, but not this couple.

‘And how are the Angries?’ I enquired.

Actually, Mannie wasn’t in on the Angries kick, though he appeared in print about the same time that bunch of cottage journalists first caught the public nostril. Mannie’s verse, of which I can dig the general gist, I think, is angry only about the grave, which he disapproves of, but for the life of the kiddos living round the Borough and in Bermondsey, he pens nothing but approval. His poems are songs of praise of youthful London: but his conversation doesn’t approve of anything at all. In conversation, Mannie disapproves of
everything
, particularly of what you last said, whatever it may be.

‘I see they gave you that Memorial Prize thing,’ I said. ‘I meant to send you a Greetings through the post, but I forgot.’

‘They didn’t
give
it to me, son. I won it,’ Mannie said.

‘Next, they’ll be making you an O.B.E., or naming a street after you.’

‘An O.B.E.! You think I’d accept that?’

‘Yes,’ said Miriam, who was making some false curls out of her infant’s real curls.

‘Well, what’s high enough for you?’ I asked. ‘A life peer, would that do?’

‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ Mannie told me. ‘In
England, they don’t bribe you by money, but by trashy
honours
. People prefer them to mere money.’

‘Not me, I’d settle for a bribe.’

‘Flattery and respectability are sweeter than L.S.D.’

‘You’d better change your mind then, and accept.’

‘He will,’ said Miriam, who was changing junior.

‘Never. Not even the Laureateship.’

‘Duke – you’d like that. Duke Katz of Newington Butts would suit you fine. I can see you in your robes and ping-pong titfer.’

‘Unlike all my countrymen, I don’t care for fancy dress,’ said Mannie haughtily.

‘Why you wear that velveteen creation, then?’

‘Don’t expect Mannie to be logical,’ said his better half.

‘So I’m not logical.’

‘No.’

‘You sure of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when I married you, I wasn’t logical?’