GBH (5 page)

Later, in our bed, Jean had said as much to me. What had been strongest in her mind had been the publicness of knowing a lot of the people in there.

And if the participants had been unknown, and there had been no audience, I’d asked her?

She hadn’t answered my question with words.

THE SMOKE

W
HEN
I
GOT TO
the Steering Wheel, only Johnny Sheperdson was there. The other four were elsewhere for the moment. Naturally I got the full treatment from the management, just as the Shepherdsons would have got at one of my places. The only thing they didn’t do before I passed through into the main part of the club was to press my trousers for me.

Johnny was sitting in the deep red leather booth where they always sat, his artificial leg straight and rigid beneath the table. There was no one else in the place. On the table in front of him was a mix of Bucks Fizz. He was pouring some of it into a tall glass as I approached the booth. He was the youngest of the five of them by quite a few years. I made him around twenty-seven or -eight. If he hadn’t been family they’d have concreted him up years ago. In my opinion he drank too much.

The staff had arrived with the additional glass by the time I got to the booth.

“George,” Johhny said as I sat down. The staff filled the other tall glass for me and retired.

I drank some Bucks Fizz.

“Cheers,” I said.

I looked round the club. The cleaners had just about finished. Upstairs I could hear the muffled sound of a Hoover.

The place was very tastefully done out. Knowing the Shepherdsons, I always wondered why.

“Up and about with the larks,” Johnny said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve done my day’s work.”

“Neat.”

I lit a cigarette.

“Your brothers in?”

“No,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Which means they’re out, doesn’t it?” he said.

I nodded.

Then with my right hand I took hold of the front of his shirt and pulled very hard so that the side of his head crashed on to the table top. I brought my clenched fist down on the other side of his head like someone rubber-stamping an envelope. In the process of doing this Johnny’s head knocked over the jug of Bucks Fizz. When I’d hit him again, I pushed him upwards and backwards into the red leather. I looked at him a long time, until he was convinced that retaliation would not be a good thing. After that I let him go.

Two third-division heavies began to steam towards us but Johnny gave them a look that turned them round. They should never have set off in the first place.

“Now,” I said to him, “as your brothers are out, and not in, I’d like you to tell them this: as even they’ll already have guessed, Arthur Philips and Wally Carpenter and Michael Butcher no longer walk among us. Just tell your brothers that the four of them, and you, are still able to perambulate among those who are more or less alive because just at present I have no intention of starting 1973 all over again. Not that I wouldn’t win, of course. But because if it were to start all over again, Farlow would no doubt be brought into it and eventually brought down and he wouldn’t be selective about what he said, would he? And then nobody’d win, would they? Would they, Johnny? Eh?”

Johnny didn’t say anything.

“No,” I said to him.

I took a drink from my tall glass. Bucks Fizz continued to dribble from the jug and eventually onto the carpet.

“Do you know what I really hate about you and your big brothers?” I said to him.

He didn’t ask me.

“You’re crude,” I told him. “You’re all so fucking crude. That’s what I hate about you most of all.”

I drank the remains of my drink and stood up.

Then I took hold of the handle of the draining jug and stood it right way up on the table.

“For a lad of your age,” I said to him, “you drink far too much of this sort of stuff.”

Then I walked away from him, across the thick carpeting, and out of the club.

THE SEA

M
ABLETHORPE IS A STREET
that leads to a promenade and a funfair. The place is dominated by a gas holder and a ferris wheel, when it’s in season. When you drive into the town limits and into the street, you can see the promenade and the ferris wheel at the end of the flat straight street. The gas holder is slightly to your right, as you enter. The biggest building in town is a new supermarket built to cream off the summer caravan self-caterers. That’s Mablethorpe. People come here for their holidays.

But at the moment it’s like a gold town after the lode’s dried up. There are a half-dozen pubs. Four of them don’t open their saloon bars in the winter. All the gift shops and the arcades and the fish bars and the bingo parlours are shut up at the moment. If they could run to a pier that’d be shut up as well. Instead of a pier they have a huge visible sewage pipe that stretches out to sea, trying to hide behind one of the breakwaters. Whether or not that’s closed for the winter as well I’ve no idea.

Oh no, I tell a lie. One of the arcades does open, the one on the corner where the street meets the promenade. It opens Friday nights and all day Saturdays, when, as if by magic, handfuls of people appear and wander about not spending any money.

As I drive my motor to the end of the street there are no other cars going in either direction. There are a few parked on either side of the road, but nothing that’s actually moving.

I park my car on the promenade. As promenades go, I suppose you could say it’s all right. The only trouble, though, is that from the promenade you can’t actually see the sea. They’ve had to build this huge barrow-like mound that runs the whole mile length of the front to act as a barrier against the high tides. It was built after the east-coast floods of ’52. They’ve tried to make it nice, a couple of bits of concrete here and there, but it still remains a kind of marine Hadrian’s Wall, higher than the sea-front buildings, keeping the merry holiday-makers from gaining the beach or viewing the sea willy-nilly.

There is at least one gap through, and that is directly opposite the end of the street. This gap is bordered on one side by toilets and the other by the funfair, both of which are closed. I thought you ought to know that. The gap itself is a thirty-foot-wide strip of concrete, a ramp that rises seawards in modest imitation of the defensive mound, so that even through this gap you still cannot see the sea until you’ve walked to the top of the ramp, along which, parallel to the sea, is a string of half a dozen bollards, from promenade level, black against the huge sky. From the top of this ramp you have the impression that the sea is actually higher than from where you’ve just risen up.

Here, the sea is only a quarter of a mile out.

I park my motor at the foot of the ramp on the whitewash that says
NO PARKING
. Out of season it’s all right to do that, you see. Otherwise it would be against the law.

Because I’ve got a lot of time to kill, I get out of the car and walk up to the top of the rise and look at this different stretch of flatness. The sewage pipe glints blackly in the sunlight, like some giant turd being forced out into the sea.

An eight-foot-wide path, a mini-promenade, skirts the seaward base of the mound. Fifty yards to my left, it runs past a squat pill-box kind of a building that calls itself the Dunes Theatre. It has a stage, but that’s where the resemblance ends. The frontage is all glass, facing seawards so that in season the
boozers can watch their offspring dance back and forth along the sewage pipe and dive into the waves as they break past the pipe’s length on their way to the beach.

As I’ve said, inside the theatre, there is a stage. There is no regular seating, just folding plywood chairs. In summer, the kids who aren’t playing on the beach run about in this auditorium and knock the chairs over. The adult entertainment they have in the evenings is wrestling or amateur nights or local Country and Western. The bar is in the auditorium which suits one and all during the day’s different periods. The Dunes is never totally closed out of season. Sometimes it’s open a couple of days a week, for no particular reason other than perhaps to air it, but the days are never consistent. An old puff called Howard, who’s seen better days—wardrobe in summer shows at Yarmouth, stuff like that—he looks after the bar on its random openings. Summer is better for him; for three months he has authority to hire and fire and give his minions hell.

From where I’m standing I can’t tell whether it’s going to be open or closed. The glass frontage just reflects the placid movement of the distant sea. In any case, it’s academic; it’s not yet opening time. I turn around and from my relatively high vantage point I look back down the street as it stretches back to infinity between the paintwork of the arcades and the rest of the frontages, colours peculiar to seaside resorts, colours which are brilliant but somehow never quite primary. There is a little more activity on the street now; somebody is crossing the road.

I turn towards the deserted funfair and begin to climb the broad concrete steps.

Most of the movable equipment has been shifted out until the summer calls it back again. The base of the ferris wheel is still there, but no wheel. The superstructure of the speedway still stands but the track and the multicoloured cutouts that the track supports are gone. The helter-skelter is nowhere to be seen. The lorry that supports the crazy house stands unveiled for what it
is. The permanent shows and sideshows are shuttered and form three blank sides of the funfair’s square; the fourth boundary is the length of concrete steps I’m presently climbing.

When I get to the top I wander across the funfair’s miniature wasteland until I come to the speedway and then I sit down on a section of its wooden steps, facing the direction I’ve just walked from. The mound is about the same level as the step on which I’m sitting, central to my point of view. I can see the squareness of the Dunes on the mound’s eastern side, and on its other side the endlessness of the promenade as it stretches past the diminishing frontages on its way to the trailer park. The hugeness of the sky diminishes everything. The foursquare shell of the dodgem car ride looks like a gutted matchbox against the sky’s breadth.

Someone of pensionable age rises up from the unseen steps, preceded by a dog not too far off state benefit itself. It doesn’t so much sniff the ground; it’s more as if it can’t be bothered to raise its head any higher. When the old bird gains the fairground’s flatness, she stops for a while to get a refill of air. I look at her. How old is she, seventy, seventy-five? I probably couldn’t even tell if I was closer to her. Has she spent all her years here? Is there an incontinent old man waiting on one of the ramp seats for her? Or is she on her own, waiting to join her partner in the grave?

I take out my flask and try not to think of the way Jean looked when I last saw her.

THE SMOKE

A
FTER
I’
D BEEN TO
the Steering Wheel I drove back into the West End. I wasn’t hungry so I dropped into Lulu’s for a couple of drinks. The minute I set foot inside, I wished I hadn’t. There was the usual mix of journalists from weekly political magazines, TV personalities, publishers, idiots, and advertising men in Levi suits. I thought perhaps Toby might be there, but he wasn’t. A girl from a current affairs programme pretended not to know who I was and showed out in the hope of getting God knows what, but I was polite to her and took her phone number, and said I’d give her a ring, probably Thursday. She knew I didn’t mean it and when I was leaving I noticed her former companion, a front man for the show, sending her up for having a go. She told him to fuck off which made him smile even more.

I walked from Lulu’s to Leicester Square and went to a movie showing at the Cinecenta. The movie, instead of being about sex and violence, being British made, was about sex and laughs. It was typical of the English attitude towards sex; if the sex was surrounded by humour the punter could absolve his guilt by telling himself he’d gone to see a comedy.

The movie was about as arousing as
Salad Days
and as funny as a Sunday afternooon in Scunthorpe. But it would make a modest fortune in proportion to its capital outlay. So
as I’d got a bit of money in it myself I didn’t go and invoke the Trade Description Act to the manager afterwards.

When I got back to the Penthouse, Jean was still in the office.

“Whoever’s creaming it, they’re being very clever,” she said. “Because I’m buggered if I can see where. If it wasn’t for the last three months …”

“Where is it happening?”

She shook her head.

“How?”

“Only an accountant could tell us that.”

I lit a cigarette.

“Well, we can’t ask Douglas because we can’t eliminate the possibility it might be him.”

Jean shook her head again.

“If it was him we wouldn’t know this much. Besides …”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Douglas wants to be able to collect his pension.”

I sat down in the chair by the window.

“Eighty-four agents,” I said. “I mean, we know they all skim a certain amount but we already allow for that. Then there’s twenty collectors. Which we also allow for. Then the four who collect from them.”

“Who we also allow for.”

“And finally Douglas.”

There was a silence.

“So what do you suggest?” Jean said.

“I suggest we get in another accountant. He won’t need to know anything but the figures. If he can tell us how, maybe we’ll be closer to where.”

“And if we’re not closer?”

“There’s over a hundred people involved. Let’s hope they’re not all at it.”

I stood up.

“Let’s go through and have a drink.”

Jean put the ledger in the desk drawer and locked it.

“The Bertegas are coming at seven thirty.”

“What’s Harold doing?”

“I told him to do the same as last time. They seemed to like it. He’ll be serving for eight thirty.”

In the lounge, I made us a couple of drinks. Jean didn’t sit down.