Life Goes On (32 page)

His face was flushed with sickly spite. ‘Women. I can hit 'em and love 'em.'

I shuddered – though didn't let him see it. After a couple of minutes I said: ‘Want another drink?'

‘Got to keep a head on my shoulders. I'm waiting for a man who owes Claud some money. If he don't pay, I've got to break his arms.'

‘Maybe he'll break yours.'

He grinned again. ‘He'll pay. He's got lots of money. I'll just frighten him.'

I stood up to go. ‘Do I know him?'

‘It's Dicky Bush.'

‘Jazz pianist?'.

He nodded. ‘He wouldn't like to lose the use of his arms.'

‘I only know him from the magazines. By the way, I've been most of the day with – you'll never guess.'

He tried to look at me threateningly. ‘Who?'

I laughed at his half-closed eyes and hunched shoulders. ‘Your favourite author.'

He swallowed his bile and fumbled for a cigarette. ‘Sidney Blood? Yer don't say!'

I nodded. ‘He's in the middle of a yarn called
The Mangled Duck
. It's a real snorter. He read me a couple of pages.' I saw the question in his eyes. ‘Well, maybe one day I'll see what I can do. He's a very exclusive person. He lives alone at Virginia Water with a couple of Great Danes. Doesn't like interruptions.'

Kenny understood. ‘Them fucking authors are funny people. I saw one once on telly.'

‘I'll try and get you over there.'

‘I'd give anyfing to meet him.'

I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I'm off back to Ealing. I'm dead beat.'

Outside the street door, a tall thin black reeking of eau de cologne almost collided with me. ‘Are you Dicky Bush?' I asked, quick as a flash. ‘If you are, you're the greatest jazz musician in the world.'

His expression changed from absolute hatred to the most beautiful smile of goodwill. His hand came out: ‘Shake!'

I did. ‘By the way, there's a beefy chap with fair curly hair down there wanting to break your arms because he says you owe money to somebody or other.'

A look of caution replaced the shining teeth of his smile. ‘Thanks, Whitey.' He took out a knife and licked it. I went on my way, thinking that in the jungle the man with the blade is king, if not god.

I walked along Old Compton Street. There wasn't much trade going on. One or two women plucked my elbow, but I thanked them for the compliment and told them not tonight, darling, wishing I had gone straight home rather than put myself between Kenny Dukes and Dicky Bush. They could take care of each other without my help. I pulled up my collar against the drizzle and walked across Cambridge Circus. Somebody was pushing a pram up St Martin's Lane, and I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Delphick, how's life?'

He glared at me. ‘Fuck off.'

London isn't a very friendly place. It even brings out the worst in those who come from the North. ‘That's no way to talk to somebody who not only gave you a lift to Stevenage, but bought you breakfast as well.'

He had another look. ‘You forgot to pay me for the poem.'

The panda also glanced at me resentfully. The pram was battened down with cord and canvas. Delphick wore a fashionable jacket and cravat under his duffel coat. ‘Did you give a reading tonight?'

‘Reading?' he said. ‘Well, I suppose you'd call it that. The place was full, but when I sent the hat round it came back with six pounds fifty, four Deutschmarks and a Canadian cent with a hole in it. I sometimes think I'll pack it in and get a job as a tally clerk in a corduroy factory, except that they've all closed down. I'm going back to Doggerel Bank tomorrow, but tonight I've got nowhere to stay, so I have to push this idle panda all over the place till dawn. The person who was going to put me up in Camden Town threw me out because his missis took a shine to me. Where do you live?'

I offered a cigarette, and he tried to take two. ‘I sleep above my employer's garage. It wouldn't be any good.'

‘I'm losing my faith in people, and that's bad for a poet. I don't know what I'm going to do. Nobody is happy to do me a favour anymore.'

I got annoyed. ‘When did you last do anybody a favour?'

A copper looked at us as he walked by. Being young, he didn't know whether to wish me good night, sir, or take me in for questioning. ‘Me? Do somebody a favour?'

I heard an ambulance running in circles somewhere beyond the Marylebone Road. ‘You could give somebody a poem now and again. It wouldn't hurt you.'

‘That's my bread and butter. Poems are priceless and precious.'

‘I suppose you only give 'em to girls who sleep with you.'

He squinted. ‘How did you guess?'

A bundle of rags tied in the middle with a bit of rope, a bushy grey beard at the top, and a jellyfish of footcloths at the bottom, shifted down the road poking at cardboard boxes in shop doorways. Four bulging plastic bags, like airships at their moorings, hung from whoever it was, man or woman.

‘People like that should be shut up for life,' Delphick exclaimed. ‘The place is crawling with 'em.'

The bundle of rags, about a hundred yards up on the other side of the road, stopped. He unclipped the plastic bags, rummaged in one, and took out a cigar. ‘Did I hear right?' he called in a clear, loud and fairly unaccented voice. ‘Or did my hardened ears deceive me? Would my callous fellow man like to try shutting me up for life?'

‘You'd better run,' I said to Delphick. ‘He sounds like the Son of Almanack Jack.'

‘I'll throttle the bastard,' Delphick said. ‘He's not going to talk to me like that. He's got to show some respect to a poet.'

‘Leave him alone.'

But he was halfway across the road with hands lifted, and the next thing I knew a remarkably agile fist shot out from the Bundle of Rags, and Delphick, after a suitably dramatic cry, was lying on the pavement. I suppose there was some justice left in the world, but when the Bundle of Rags lifted his beribboned footcloths to stamp on Delphick's face I pushed him away so hard he nearly cracked the plate glass window of a car showroom. ‘That's enough,' I said. ‘Piss off.'

He looked at me while lighting his cigar. ‘You must allow that I had a case.'

‘I suppose so. But don't kick a man when he's down, even though he would have done the same to you.'

‘Allow me to introduce myself,' he said. Then he drew back. ‘No, I'd better not. Call me Sir Plastick Bagg, if you like. Suffice it to say that I come out on one night a week to see how the other half lives. I have no sex life, so what else can I do? The Madam sends me out, and I like it. It's like being in the shit pit as a kid, old boy. So nice to have met you.'

‘I was going to offer you a fiver,' I said.

‘Don't bother. I'll be home for breakfast. Knowing my proclivities, the Ministry of Defence allows me a day off each week, so that I can sleep in. Goodbye. I hear there are rich pickings on the Strand.'

It was a shattering experience. One learns only slowly what's going on in the world. Delphick was back with his panda-pram. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,' I said.

He dabbed his bruised face, and we stood without speaking, an occasional car moving up and down the road. He pulled at the rope covering his pram. ‘I'll give you a poem. I've got just the poem. You'll love it.'

‘Save it for somebody else.' I was in no mood for verse, but remembered he had nowhere to go, so pulled a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘Take this, to get a bed somewhere. Or you can borrow it till I'm in trouble and want you to help me.'

He ran to a lighted window and held it up, then came back and pushed his panda-wagon a few yards along the road. I decided that if he walked away without saying thanks I would give him a pasting and kick his panda-wagon to bits.

He was in tears, the bloody actor. ‘I'll never forget this. I know you aren't rich, and I appreciate it more than I've ever appreciated anything. And thanks for saving me from that madman in rags. Can I have your address?'

You had to think quick with Delphick. ‘I shan't be there much longer. I expect I'll see you around some time. I might call on you at Doggerel Bank.'

‘Well, cheers then, mate. And thanks a lot.' He went up the street, while I traipsed down to Trafalgar Square and hailed a taxi that took me to my cosy room above the garage at Ealing.

Seventeen

The business trips Moggerhanger sent me on were mostly short hops by air to the Channel Islands, from which place I returned with hundreds of Krugers stitched into the game pockets of my tailor-made shooting coat. God knows what the customs thought when so many sportsmen and hunters started coming through. It was as if caribou had become the blight of Jersey, and stags were stampeding around on Guernsey. They just loved tomatoes, I could have told them if they'd cared to ask.

I made six trips altogether, for a hundred-pound bonus at the end of each, and soon I had nearly a couple of thousand in the bank. We took a risk, the one condition being that if we were caught we were to say nothing more than that it was our first time and that we were on our own. We had various bits of paper to suggest it, and proof of a bank account in the Channel Islands with ten quid on deposit. It was worked out so that nothing could be traced to the Big Firm itself. One morning Moggerhanger called me in and said he wanted me to go to the New World in a couple of days. ‘Where's that?' I asked.

‘You'll do,' he said when he had stopped laughing. ‘It's a special mission to Toronto, and I want somebody with a head on his shoulders.'

I never anguished over making a decision, in the hope that one day I would make the right one. Be that as it may, what frayed my temper on setting out to get the one o'clock plane for America was the fact that I had such difficulty picking up a taxi, and didn't reach the airport terminal till half past twelve. When I asked Alice Whipplegate why Kenny Dukes couldn't drive me there in the Roller she said he was in hospital swathed in bandages, having told the police he had fallen on a crate of broken bottles in Bateman's Alley.

The plane was delayed and we were still in the airport lounge at three o'clock. I drank a dozen cups of coffee, ferreted my way through the
Daily Telegraph
from back to front and envied a grey-bearded man with glasses reading a fat book called
The Way We Live Now
which, judging by his expression, was telling him something he wanted to know.

At four o'clock I settled myself in a window seat on Shoestring Airways, my briefcase-type travelling bag stowed in the rack above. Our Jumbo 747 was so full that not even a man hoofing up the runway waving a first class single fully paid up ticket could have been taken on board. I thought I would rather spend a week at sea than travel with four hundred people in this sort of random meeting hall where, within two hours, everyone would jump up and start battering their way out through doors and windows. And the trip was scheduled to last for seven. My only consolation was in thinking of the millions of dollars in travellers' cheques pre-packed by Toffeebottle in my holdall and the ease with which I had carried it through the customs. I had been led to understand that the money was payment for goods gratefully received.

‘Do you mind if I have your window seat?' She liked looking out, she said, so I moved to the middle and read the tattered safety instructions card. The airline magazine was equally shabby, otherwise all was well in the Sardine Express. Four babies were crying from different parts of the plane, just to make us feel at home. Things had altered since the Glorious Sixties when, loaded with gold for the Jack Leningrad organisation, we had travelled first class.

Getting up to thirty thousand feet, we flew over Birmingham, Peppercorn Cottage, Manchester and the Scottish Highlands. The pilot announced that we would cross the Atlantic along the fifty-eighth parallel, then go over Labrador and Quebec. Every trip I took for Moggerhanger got me thinking that I should make it my last. But a mere hint, and I would have been sent on one in which I was caught and put away for as long as would make no difference to his operations. Once you began working for him, in all stupidity and innocence, you kept on till he in his own pleasure stood you down. I began to wonder whether Bill Straw wasn't his recruiting agent, who spun his likely tales to get candidates standing in line for a job. No doubt Moggerhanger's psychologist told him that those couriers who believed in loyalty to friends were not the types to run off with the gold or money they had to carry. Even racketeers had a use for industrial relations experts, and you could always rely on someone like Dr Anderson to sell his advice.

I saw the cauliflower tops of cloud through the window, when the woman leaned forward to take something from her bag. Maybe the psychologist's mathematical certainties fell to pieces when put to the test by flesh and blood. If every person is different, and they are, he can't be right about all of us, because what if I went missing in Toronto and started out all over again under a new name, using the money in my bag? Would Moggerhanger send someone to cut Anderson's throat? Or did Anderson protect himself with a rider at the end of each report saying that his conclusions were not guaranteed and he would not be held responsible if anything went wrong? A man like that was never without a good lawyer, which was a pity, since my possible desertion could not also be used as a way of settling old scores with him.

An indication of my disturbed state of mind was that I hadn't so far shown an interest in the woman by my side. Perhaps it was because she seemed so ordinary, but a couple of hours on board Air Steerage induced me to take in her short dark hair and pale face, with a skin so translucent I fancied I could see traces of veins underneath. She had a small nose and dimpled chin, and a faint vertical line in the very middle of the lower and slightly protruding lip. I took this in from a few seconds of side view and from what I remembered when she had asked me to change seats, a disturbance which now seemed a waste, because she leaned against the window and was trying to sleep, one arm folded over her head.