City of Spades (12 page)

I meandered about Limehouse docks an hour or more before I realised that Indian had made a fool of me: there was no Rawalpindi Street. So I walked back, through the ships’ masts and abandoned baroque churches of Shadwell, in the direction of the Immigration Road. On the corner of a bombed site, surviving by the special providence that loves brewers, I found a pub called the Apollo Tavern. Coloured men inside were dancing softly with morning lassitude, and behind the counter there was an amiable Jew. I asked him for a Guinness, and he said: ‘One Guinness stout, right, I thank you, okey-doke, here it is, one and four, everything complete.’ His wife, if she was, a grim-faced Gentile, gazed at me with the rude appraisal only women give.

I sat down. A voice said: ‘So you’s come movinx into this areas of London eastern populations?’

It was the Bushman. I shook his hand. ‘And how is your instrument?’ I asked him.

‘Sold, man. Bisnick is bads juss at this mominx.’

‘I, too, have been unfortunate of late. This doesn’t seem to be our lucky month.’

There was a gentle tap on my shoulder, and a black hand protruded holding two double whiskies in its fingers. ‘Who are these for?’ I asked the Bushman.

‘For you, man, and for me.’

‘But who is this kind person?’

‘Is my tribesmans. He offer some drinks to his sief’s son and to his sief’s son’s friend.’

I turned and looked round. The donor was joining three others, all neatly dressed, who raised their glasses politely to the Bushman.

‘But who are they, Mr Bushman?’

‘I tells you: is my tribesmans. I come to this Immigrasions Roats for some tribal tributes. Here they will pay some offerinx to their sief’s son.’

The Bushman caught me eyeing his soiled and greasy clothes.

‘Soon they will takes me out to eat him foots,’ he said, ‘and make me comfortables and give me presinx. Stay, now, and you will enjoy them toos.’

‘But why don’t you speak to them, Mr Bushman?’

‘When I reaty, I spik to them. They waits for me. Then I spik.’

The offer of liquor was repeated several times. After the third double, I gave up. ‘Your father,’ I said, ‘must be a very powerful man.’

He grunted with satisfaction. ‘And one day I. Then I invites you to my jungle home, and you stays with us for evers.’

‘I look forward immensely to it.’

‘Stay with us for evers, or we puts you in a pot.’

‘I’m bony – only good for soup.’

‘All him sames, we eats you as special favour.’

‘Thank you so very much. Goodbye now, my kind friend.’

The Bushman shrieked with laughter, and, as I went out, I saw the tribesmen approach him with deferential smiles.

Possessed now by that early morning drunkard’s feeling which suspends time by making all time worthless, and gives the daylight a false flavour of the dark, I sauntered up the Immigration Road. A girl’s voice hailed me from a ground-floor window. It was Johnny Fortune’s young friend Muriel.

‘Come in,’ she said, opening the door, ‘I want to speak with you.’

Muriel was cooking something cabbagey. The boy Hamilton was snoring on a bed. She wiped her hands on her skirt, told me to sit down, and gave me a cup of very sweet thick tea.

‘Johnny will be coming in for his dinner,’ she said, ‘and I know he’d like to see you.’

‘Oh, I’ve been looking for him. He lives here now?’

‘Yes, here with me. I work round the corner, and cook him all his meals.’

‘And Hamilton?’

‘Hamilton has no room just now, so he’s staying here.’

She sat down too, and leant across the oil-cloth. ‘Can’t you do something to help Johnny?’

‘In what way, Muriel?’

‘With money.’

‘Surely he has some …’

‘It’s all been spent.’

‘Oh. Can’t he work?’

‘Johnny won’t work for less than twenty pounds a week. I tell him only clever men get those jobs, and he says he is a clever man. But he doesn’t get one …’

‘I could lend him something …’

She stirred a cup. ‘If only we could get married,’ she said. ‘I’d help him in any job he wanted.’

‘Can’t you get married?’

‘He doesn’t want to.’

She began to cry. Women are so immodest in their grief. Even when you don’t care for a woman much, to see her misery openly expressed is painful.

‘These boys are all the same,’ she said. ‘Never anything fixed or steady, they just drift …’

There was a clatter at the door, and in came Johnny with Mr Peter Pay Paul.

A change had come over Johnny Fortune. His body still had its animal grace and insouciance, but his face wore at times a slanting, calculating look. And though the charm was as great as ever, he was more conscious of it than before. He greeted me with what seemed genuine affection.

‘Where have you hidden yourself, Johnny?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, times have been difficult, man. And with you? You look sharp – real smart!’ And he fingered my third-best suit.

‘With me, times have been disastrous.’ And I told him about my exit from the Welfare Office.

‘That is one big pity,’ he said gravely, ‘because I thought perhaps you could help me with some new business.’

‘What is it? Perhaps I can.’

‘Come on one side.’

He led me over to the window, though he stood away from view of the street in the half light.

‘This pack,’ he said, pulling a large oblong piece of newspaper from inside his shirt, ‘is wholesale weed. Five pounds’ worth, which I can sell in small packs for ten to twenty pounds if I can find five pounds now for Peter Pay Paul.’

‘Here they are, Johnny. Are you going to earn your living that way?’

‘Thank you, man. Well, what else can I do? I know no trade, no business …’

‘Wouldn’t your father send you money?’

‘No, Montgomery, I cannot tell my dad my loot is gone and that I’m not studying meteorology. Also, he has sent loot at my request to Muriel’s mother. But my brother Arthur, so I hear, has stolen it away from her …’

‘Perhaps the time’s coming, Johnny, when you should think of going home.’

‘Not till I make some fortune from this city, man. To go empty-handed home would be my shame.’

He gave the notes to Peter Pay Paul and, after removing a handful of weed, pushed the paper package up the chimney.

‘And how is Miss Theodora?’

‘Missing you, Johnny.’

Muriel heard this.

‘She’d better keep on missing him.’

‘Who spoke to you, Muriel?’

‘Aren’t you going to give me some of that money? How do you think we’ll live?’

‘Be silent, woman. Go on with your cookery.’

‘I’m not an African, Johnny. You can’t treat me like I’m a household slave.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Come, Montgomery,’ he said. ‘This woman troubles me with her yap, yap, chatter, chatter, chatter.’

Muriel clutched his arm. ‘But don’t you want your dinner, Johnny? It’s all cooked.’

‘I have had chicken. Hamilton, wake up! We leave this sad East End to go up west.’

But Hamilton kept snoring, and Muriel wept again into the steaming pot as we went out.

Montgomery and me left Mr Peter Paul at the Aldgate station, and started the long bus ride through the City to the west. I chose the special seat which bus constructors made for those who smoke hemp (I mean the private seat, top floor at rear, which nobody can overlook), and there, while Montgomery grew more nervous, I folded up little saleable packets of my weed. ‘I must kick my heel free of this miserable life,’ I told Montgomery. ‘I must climb back again into prosperity.’

‘You might marry a fat African lady whose father owns acres of groundnuts,’ he said to me.

‘Oh, I could do that, perhaps, you know. But I want to go back home well loaded from this city …’ I folded a little packet and said to him, ‘Has Miss Theodora money?’

I saw he didn’t approve of this request of information, though a natural one, I thought, among two men.

‘She’s only her salary, I think,’ he told me. ‘But you mustn’t play about with Theodora’s feelings.’

‘Why not? She likes me – no?’

‘And you her?’

‘I could do, if it should prove necessary …’

‘I’d rather you ran a whore, like Billy, than do that. Business and no pretences …’

What did my nice English friend know about that kind of life? ‘I may come to do just that,’ I said to him.

‘I hope you don’t mean it …’

‘This Dorothy pursues me some time now. Pestering and giving me no peace at all. She wishes to leave Billy, and for me to take possession.’

‘From what I can understand,’ Montgomery said, ‘it’s the woman who takes possession of the man. She can sell him down the river any day she likes.’

Well, that was true enough from all I know of how those bad boys live – trembling, however brave, at every knock of the front door, and so afraid of the loot their women give them that they throw it all away in gamble-houses as soon as they’ve snatched it from her handbag. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘these whores are always masters of their ponces. One word to the Law, and the lucky boy’s inside.’

Montgomery sat looking sad, like the Reverend Simpson. ‘I don’t like to think of you in that miserable world,’ he said.

I smiled, and patted on his anxious back. ‘No real ill
luck can come to me, Montgomery,’ I told him. ‘Look!’ And I opened my tieless shirt and showed him the wonderful little blue marks tattooed upon my skin by Mum’s old aunt, who knows the proper magic, and also the mission school badge I wear around my neck upon its chain. ‘These will protect me always,’ I explained.

‘You believe that, Johnny?’

‘So long as I believe it,’ I said to him, ‘they will protect me.’

Though it was well after morning opening time when we reached the Moorhen public house, we were surprised to find it absent of any Spade. ‘There must have been some raid,’ I told Montgomery. But no. A strange old Jumble man he knew, who looked at me as if I wasn’t there, said all my race had left the pub and moved to another further down the road, one called the Sphere.

‘But why have they gone?’ Montgomery asked him.

‘Because they’ve shut the dance hall opposite – and high time too.’

‘The Cosmopolitan? Why did they do that?’ I asked.

‘Moral degeneracy,’ the old man said fiercely at me. ‘Didn’t you read it in your Sunday paper?’

‘Good heavens!’ I cried out. ‘Have these Jumbles no mercy on our enjoyment?’

‘This place is improved out of all recognition now,’ the nasty old man informed us.

Dismal, dark, dreary, almost empty, I suppose that was improvement to his eyes.

We found that this Sphere was a small pub divided into more segregated sections than is usual even in these
English drinking dens. Boys flitted in and out from one box to the other, and the publican, I could see, was not used to our African habit, which is to treat such places like a club, with no dishonour to be there even if you have no loot to spend. The barman, a young boy with a face like cheese, seemed worried also; and as I held my lager beer, casting my eyes around, I spoke to him freely of his look of great mistrust.

‘But those lads over by the piano,’ he said to me. ‘They come in here for hours and never buy a thing.’

‘Why should they not? This is their meeting-place, for exchange of gossip, information, and other necessities of life.’

‘But if they come in here, then they should spend.’

‘Man,’ I explained, ‘you will find when they spend, they
do
spend. You will make more profit from them in one evening than of your bitter-sipping English customers in a whole week.’

He seemed to doubt me. ‘The guv’nor tried turfing them all out at first,’ he said, ‘but he’s given up the struggle.’ He leant across the counter. ‘Tell me something,’ he went on. ‘You don’t mind me asking?’

‘Speak, man. I listen.’

‘How do you tell which is which among you people?’

‘You mean we all look the same, like sheep?’

‘No, not exactly. I mean, which is African, and which is West Indian – all I can tell is the Yanks, and then only when they open up their mouths.’

I shook my head at such enormous ignorance. ‘Do you know,’ I said to him, ‘my grandmother cannot tell
any one Englishman from another?’ I left Montgomery with his whiskies, and went round into the larger bar to look for customers.

And there I caught sight of many quite familiar faces: Ronson Lighter, playing the pin-table, and Larry the GI, and also my brother Arthur, who I was not all that pleased to talk to because of the theft of all that loot my dad sent his mum, and also, lurking away in an evil corner underneath the stairways, that one-time champion boxer, Jimmy Cannibal.

‘What say, man,’ I said to Ronson Lighter. ‘Long time no see.’

‘Well, look now, who’s here! Where you been hiding yourself, Mr Fortune? Somebody here’s been searching out for you.’

‘Called what?’

‘A seaman from back home who won’t tell his real name, but says just to call him Laddy Boy. He has a letter for you from your sister Peach.’

‘He’s in here now, this seaman?’

‘I haven’t noticed him around yet, but if he calls, I’ll hold him for you.’

‘Thank you, my man. And tell me now. I’m in business, Ronson Lighter, in this article,’ (and I showed him some). ‘You interested at all?’

Ronson put his body so as to hide mine from the general view. ‘Be careful of that little white boy Alfy Bongo,’ he advised me. ‘He comes here to meet our African drummers, so he says, but I think he’s a queer boy, and you cannot trust them.’

I looked at this blond and pimply creature, chatting and giggling to some West Indians, and I made a clear note of his skinny, feeble frame in my recollection.

‘I’ll take a stick or two,’ said Ronson Lighter.

‘Here, man. How’s our Billy?’

‘I’m worried about that man, Johnny, and so is he. He thinks the Law has got the eye on him real hard. The house is being watched, we know.’

‘Why should they turn the heat on Billy after all this time?’

‘Is averages, Johnny. Six months they turn you loose, then one month they turn the heat. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you’re next man on their Vice Department list, that’s all. Or perhaps somebody been talking. Cannibal, say.’ (And Ronson Lighter looked across at him.) ‘Or maybe even Dorothy.’

‘Not Dorothy?’

‘I don’t know why, man, but I believe this Dorothy plans to cut away from Billy, and she thinks the best way is to get him put inside. Perhaps,’ said Ronson, lighting up his charge, ‘it is because of you, who she prefers to Mr Whispers.’

‘I’m not even slightly interested in that chick.’

‘Oh, I believe you man, if you say so, of course.’

Ronson was dragging now, but still hadn’t paid me any money. I touched on his arm and gently held out my hand.

‘Will you take one of these instead?’ he asked me.

They were pawn tickets for various articles. All city Spades hold pawn tickets, and if the man’s honest they’re
quite as good as money, often better if you can get them with the discount. I took my pick.

‘And Hamilton,’ said Ronson Lighter. ‘How does he keep?’

‘Bad. He’s using all his dope allowance now, not selling any. Even buying more of that poison whenever he can.’

Ronson lowered down his voice. ‘You know who put him on the needle and supplied him? It was that “Nat King” Cole.’

I said to Ronson: ‘Was it only Cole who did this injury to my friend? No one else you know of who was the person?’

‘Who else could it be, man? No one else.’

‘I thought maybe you could tell me who.’

Ronson was silent. ‘No man, not me,’ he said.

By now my brother Arthur had detected me, and over he came, as happy as a smiling hyena. ‘How’s Muriel?’ was how he greeted me.

‘She’s well.’

‘Ma’s told the Law you’ve taken her.’

‘She’s not under sixteen, is she?’

‘She’s a minor, brother, in need of care and protection. Ma wants her sent off to a home.’ Now he approached me closer. ‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘do something for me. Lend me loot.’

‘You spent all that which you took away from Mrs Macpherson?’

He smiled at me some more: I grew to hate that smile. ‘All gone,’ he said. ‘The gamble-house way, like you did. It sure goes so fast away in there.’

‘You get no more from this side of the family, Arthur.’

‘Listen, now,’ he said. ‘I see you’s selling weed. I’d like I go partners with you. I’d get you customers.’

‘Thanks, brother. I prefer I operate alone.’

‘You’re wasted, Johnny. No good to me at all.’

I saw the human being called Alfy Bongo standing just behind me. ‘What can I do for you, mister?’ I said nasty.

He answered me in a great whisper, with a lot of winks. ‘They tell me you’ve got some stuff.’

‘I don’t like your face,’ I said to him. ‘And if you speak to me again without you’re spoken to, they’ll have to send you into some hospital or other.’

This didn’t seem to be my lucky day for gay society, because the next person who accosted me was no one less but a well-known idiot from back home called Ibrahim Tondapo, a thoroughly gilded youth who, just because his dad owns two small cinemas that regularly catch on fire and burn up portions of the audience, allowed himself in Lagos great airs of class distinction, earning hatred and laughter everywhere around. He looked at me up and down and shook his body in his expensive suit as if he was shivering cold water off it. So ‘Hullo, chieftain,’ I said to him. ‘How is each one of your six mothers?’ (this being a reference to his not knowing really who his mother was, because his dad is volatile, and he quite unlike any of his brothers.)

At which this foolish man spat on the floor.

I ought not to have said what I did, of course, but nor ought he to spit – is an unhealthy habit. So I slapped
him on his face, and a fight began, and I was seized on by eight people and thrown out through the doors. Stupid behaviour, with my pockets stuffed with weed, but poverty and misery cause you to act desperately, as all know.

‘You and I,’ I shouted back at Tondapo through the door, ‘will meet each other shortly once again.’

Out in the street, the boys were charging in the light of day, a habit dangerous in this city, where now the notable sweet smell of this strong stuff is well known to curious nostrils. So I crossed the road to where some builders were erecting a new construction, and among them I was surprised to see a tall West Indian toiling, one that I’d known in gamble-houses in my prosperous days. We gazed at each other quite politely, and he came over to say his word to me.

‘Just look at me,’ he said. ‘A member of the labouring classes.’

‘If a brick falls on your head, man, you’ll certainly go straight up to heaven for this honest labour.’

‘Yes, man, that’s authentic. But wouldn’t I much rather be sitting there in the Sphere consuming Stingo beer or something of that nature.’

‘You’re Mr Tamberlaine,’ I said to him. ‘I see you round some time ago, you may remember. Introducing people one to the other was your speciality.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly so. Pimping about the city, as you might call it, if you wanted to.’ And he gave me his harmonious smile.

‘And that’s all over now, that kind of business?’

‘Oh, no. I’m still in the market in the evenings, but find it prudent, don’t you see, to have some part-time occupation in the days to justify my movements and existence if there’s any police enquiries.’

‘Wise, man. You’s real educated.’

‘There’s something,’ he said, ‘as might interest you at a party taking place this evening, which is an exhibition by some boys from Haiti that I know of their special voodoo practices. So if your luck’s not all you’ve been aspiring to, you’ve only to come and ask them for their kind assistance to alternate your fate.’

While I said yes, that I’d accept this invitation, Ronson Lighter called to me from the public house. ‘This seaman’s here,’ he shouted out. ‘This Laddy Boy.’

He was a muscle man, this individual, his arms like legs, his legs like elephants’, and with a lot of rings and gold teeth and a happy look about him that these strong men have, especially when they’re loaded up with loot, as merchant seamen always seem to be. He gave me the note from Peach, which, when I opened it, said this to me: