Felix in the Underworld (15 page)

‘Perhaps that's what you ought to do.'

‘What?'

‘Disappear. Forget everything. I have. I never believed it was possible to forget Sandra and our Barbara. But can you imagine? That's the first time I've thought about them since Christmas. Christmas Day, I thought about them but never since. Lucrezia and Sandra and even my Barbara. They're going away now. I can't even remember exactly what they looked like.'

But Felix didn't want to forget. He wanted to find Gavin.

Brenda Bodkin heard the news in her Fulham Road flat. It came from Radio London when she was having breakfast with Paul, her Australian boyfriend. She wore an old camel-hair dressing-gown, left behind by a previous lover, and was eating muesli. A pink towel covered her damp hair like a turban. ‘The police are anxious to trace the missing novelist Felix Morsom. They think he may be able to help them in the inquiries into the death of a publisher's representative, Gavin Piercey, who was found dead in his van parked in Carisbrooke Terrace, Bayswater. Anyone who has seen Mr Morsom or knows where he is to be found is asked to get in touch with Paddington Green police station. And now here is Miss Tina Turner with
What's Love Got to Do with It.'

‘
Felix
wanted by the police? I can't believe it!'

‘I'd think they're the only people who do want him.'

‘I wanted to make him a bit more newsworthy but not
that
notorious.'

‘Stop worrying about him, Pavlova.' (This was Paul's pet name for his recently acquired girlfriend. It was a reference to the pudding not the dancer.) ‘I mean, he's not that great is he? He's not Balzac or Martin Amis or any of those?' Although he had over-the-ears hair and the blond moustache of a professional footballer, Paul was, in fact, Professor of English at a Queensland university and was over on a sabbatical. The novel he was trying to sell to Llama Books was about a sensitive boy growing up in the remote Riverina district of New South Wales.

‘He was very talented. And he was extremely fond of me.'

‘What do you mean
was?
He's still alive and kicking.'

‘And I was fond of him too.' Brenda drank orange juice. ‘In a way he found me very attractive and I found him clever.'

‘You didn't do it, did you?' Paul lived through an unusual moment of insecurity.

‘No. As a matter of fact we'd already done it, if you want to know the truth.'

‘Done it where? On one of those tarty book tours of yours?'

‘No. We did it in our heads.'

‘Bloody funny place to do it, Pav.' Sometimes he shortened her nickname in this affectionate way.

‘Not funny at all if you've got a literary imagination.'

‘And are you saying I haven't?' The author of
The Budding Groves of Wagga Wagga
took offence.

‘I'm sure you have but not for doing it in your head. I should have kept in touch with Felix. I thought it was odd he hadn't called me for days.'

‘He called you here.'

‘When?'

‘Couple of days ago.'

‘You didn't tell me?'

‘You were out at some late-night book launch.'

‘The new Sandra Tantamount. We've taken her over.'

‘Well, he rang up and asked for you. I didn't think it was that important.'

‘Did he say where he was?'

‘Not a squeak on the subject. I asked him if he found you a good fuck.'

‘Because you thought he had?'

‘Because I knew he hadn't.'

‘That wasn't exactly kind!' But Brenda, in the act of lighting her first cigarette of the day, was suppressing laughter.

‘Kind?
He's
not exactly kind. Looks like he's wanted for murder.'

‘That's ridiculous. It can't be true.'

‘You didn't know he'd got a kid tucked away somewhere? It seems this scribbler is full of surprises.'

‘And I thought his life was uneventful!'

‘Ought we to tell the police?' Paul, the Australian, wondered.

‘What?'

‘About the call?'

‘No need. It can't help them find him. Poor old Felix.' She stood up and her dressing-gown fell open, revealing the still damp body of pale Pavlova.

Paul said, ‘I think we ought to do it.'

‘Tell the police?'

‘No.
It.
But not in the head.'

‘Where on earth?' But she was jabbing out her cigarette in a saucer.

‘The floor's nearest.'

In the end they settled for the bed and Brenda was half an hour late for work. Sandra Tantamount had called early and left a message that on book tours she wanted a suite at each hotel with caviar, Dom Perignon, Badedas and Prozac in the fridge. She never wanted to go to a literary lunch again where more than one person, that is, herself, was talking and she hoped that Llama Books would refuse to publish any book which Felix Morsom might write to make money out of crime.

It had been a long and fruitless search. They called in at King's Cross and Euston Station. Esmond advanced some of his begging money to obtain entrance to the Superloo, where middle-aged men entertain boys from the North on their first visit to London. They visited Victoria and Centre Point. They walked down to the Cut in Waterloo and on to the gardens round the Imperial War Museum, to Battersea Park and back, down the whole length of the Embankment and up to the Kingsway and Lincoln's Inn Fields. They asked the regulars they met in each place if they had seen someone called Gavin who had a turned-up nose and wore a maroon anorak. When asked for his name, Felix no longer said he was a Gavin in search of Gavin, but called himself Anton in tribute to his hero.

Under St Martin-in-the-Fields Esmond had his feet attended to, after a short wait, by the regular chiropodist, whilst Felix washed his shirt and underpants in the launderette which spun perpetually under Wren's calm and untroubled church. Then he took a shower and discovered how to work a spin-drier, surprised to find that he had not, as yet, met any smell, including his own, he found unbearable.

In a greasy-spoon café off Holborn, Esmond bought them both a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Felix, embarrassed by his lack of money, asked his host's advice.

‘You either beg or you go without,' Esmond told him. ‘In your position I wouldn't go near the National Assistance, and I wouldn't think you had much of a talent for stealing.'

‘I don't know how to set about begging.'

‘You've done it before, haven't you? In your work or in love. Everyone begs for something. You must be used to it.'

Felix thought about his propositions to Brenda. Were they begging? At any rate, they had been conspicuously unsuccessful.

‘Do it when the shows come out. The opera's best. People feel guilty about going to the opera and all that money they've paid. Bit near Bow Street nick for you, however. Try the theatres in the Strand. They've got the new musical
Anna Darling.
I believe it's loosely based on Anna Karenina. Wouldn't go near it myself but it's not a bad play to beg outside.'

In the evening when they were talking to an ageing Irishman who was preparing his bed and box for an early night in Great Turnstile Street, they heard drums and chanting and saw the yellow-robed Hari Krishnas advancing remorselessly towards them. ‘For God's sake!' Esmond gripped Felix's arm. ‘Don't risk the curry.' So they retreated to the back door of Rules where two big steak and kidney pies were being prepared for the homeless. They each got a generous portion when Esmond told the chef that he was a patron of the place and had enjoyed his last supper there before he opted out of so-called civilized society.

The boy said, ‘You can sit here if you like. I'm not afraid of competition. Anyway, I think we'll attract a different class of customer.'

He was good-looking, hollow-cheeked, deep-eyed, with long thin arms like a Blue Period Picasso. He sat cross-legged with a blanket over his knees, doodling on the cover of a paperback called
The Economics of Poverty.
His position was between two theatres in the Strand. Felix sat in his clean clothes in the shadows of a shop doorway. There was not much passing trade and he and the boy talked across the space between them for company. ‘What sort of customer do you hope to attract then?' Felix asked.

‘Men, perhaps. Mostly men who'll want to take me down a dark street.'

‘Will you go?'

‘Only if they put their money out first. Spent the night with an old bloke who showed me a fifty pound note, then kicked me out without a penny.'

‘Don't you mind doing it with them?'

‘I won't say I like it. You feel like a cut off the joint sometimes. That's why they call it the meat rack.'

‘What's the meat rack?'

‘Round Eros's statue. Where the boys go who ain't learnt their way about. You're new about here?'

‘Quite new.'

‘I thought I hadn't seen you. What's your name then?'

‘Anton.'

‘What sort of name's that?'

‘A Russian name.'

‘You Russian then?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Oh, right!' the boy said as though he understood perfectly. ‘I get called Yorkie Bar on account I'm from the North. You can call me that if you like.'

‘Well, thanks. I just wondered' – Felix was taking the last chance of the day – ‘if you happened to see a bloke called Gavin round here? Perhaps sleeping rough. Pale sort of person in a maroon anorak?'

‘Why do you want him?'

‘Well, as a matter of fact, people are saying he's dead. But I know he's not, you see.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I saw him last night. Down on the Embankment. After it had said in the paper he was dead.'

‘Why was it in the paper? Is he famous or something?'

‘Not famous. Just that. . . Well, I'm supposed to have killed him.'

‘Then I don't know anything about him,' Yorkie Bar said firmly. ‘I don't know anything at all.'

Waiting for the theatre crowds to come out they chatted sporadically. Felix asked the questions. How long had Yorkie Bar been on the streets? Why did he start? What were his plans for the future? The answers were two years. Because his foster parents hated him, only wanted him for the money, and his probation officer wanted to trade a good report for sex. He supposed he'd go on as he was. It wasn't a bad life so long as hairy old men didn't take you home and cheat you. When Felix told him he was finding it pretty comfortable under the arches behind Shell Mex House, he said, ‘I wouldn't use it. There is none of my age group down there.'

So the time passed quietly until the theatres emptied. A group of girls out on an office party dropped a shower of pound coins on to Yorkie's blanket. An anxious-looking man in spectacles, who reminded Felix of himself, passed by hurriedly, his face carefully averted, and then stopped, wrestled with his conscience, lost, and gave Felix three pounds twenty p, all in small change. He put the money in his pocket and, feeling the weight of it against his leg, felt ridiculously secure again. A Rolls pulled up and was parked by a chauffeur who was playing loud country and western with the window open. He looked across the pavement at Felix and Yorkie with amused contempt.

And then the pavement was full of legs, feet and chattering voices. Felix found his arm irresistibly lifting, his hand held out like a cap or a begging-bowl. From time to time he heard himself say, ‘Can you spare a bit of change?'

Yorkie only grinned modestly, cast down his eyes and his blanket was heavy with contributions. A group of young men in blazers stretched tight across muscly shoulders came out of
Anna Darling,
found an empty Coca-Cola tin in the gutter and fan off dribbling and kicking it across the street, their girlfriends laughing as they followed. A man with a red face and suspiciously dark hair came out with a girl who looked not much older than Yorkie Bar. He was complaining loudly, ‘Whoever heard of a darkie playing Vronsky? Should've asked for our money back!' As he pushed his way towards the Rolls the girl, lagging behind, opened her handbag and sent a five pound note fluttering down towards Felix. It gave him the same feeling of unexpected joy as when he got a good notice for a book.

Felix was calling across to the girl, who was being helped by the chauffeur into the back of the now silent Rolls, ‘Thank you, lady. Good luck! God bless you' – words which he thought appropriate to such an occasion – when he saw something which made him retreat again into the shadows, lowering his head as he stuffed the note into his pocket. Brenda Bodkin had cried at the end of
Anna Darling
and Paul, who had only agreed to go because ‘someone wanted to do a musical of
Budding Groves
', clearly despised her for it. Now she paused, looking at Yorkie Bar. ‘Don't dream of giving them anything,' Paul told her. ‘Drug money. That's all it is! Every penny'll go on crack.' Brenda allowed him to pull her to the edge of the pavement where he was shouting for a taxi. But she was shocked to have seen one of her best-known authors, certainly the one who loved her most, begging in the shadows of a doorway. She also knew he was wanted by the police. For the moment she kept quiet about it.

By the end of the evening the score stood at Yorkie Bar twenty-nine pounds, Felix eleven pounds forty p. Felix felt his alcohol content had sunk to a dangerous low and realized he hadn't had a drink for two days. With his new-found wealth he invited Yorkie to join him in a pub. There were moments, and this was one of them, when he felt that his new way of life was, in itself, a hiding-place, and he had no need to keep his face in the shadows. Yorkie led him down a dark street between the Strand and the Embankment and into a pub called the Garden of Eden in which he was, apparently, well known. Felix bought them lagers and stood surveying a scene which was, living quietly in Coldsands, unusual to him.