I saw my first-ever real-live dead body the morning I arrived at 5a Bedford Row; and if that wasn’t a cue to turn right around and never go back, I don’t know what else could have been.
But I was soaking wet and starving hungry and absolutely knackered after walking from the station, and I really didn’t have anywhere else to go.
5a Bedford Row was about a hundred yards down a narrow sidestreet off the seafront in Worthing. It was the last week in August, 1967, and it was raining so hard you couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the town began. The clouds were racing north towards the Sussex Downs like a pack of wet mad dogs. I’d only had cornies for breakfast with no milk and my unemployment money hadn’t turned up before I left London. Apart from that the train had stopped for three-quarters of an hour at Christ’s Hospital for no apparent reason at all, and we’d all just sat there watching the rain run down the windows.
It was nearly eleven o’clock before we got into Worthing, and even then I had a twenty-minute walk down the back streets, past the police station and the art college and the Connaught Theater.
5a Bedford Row was a flat-fronted three-story house: typical Sussex coast mid-Victorian, faced with diseased gray cement, broken guttering, slipped slates. The doorbell didn’t work (or at least I couldn’t hear it and no bugger came to answer it) and when I opened the letter-box to shout hallo, anybody home, I was greeted by this steady breeze smelling of damp plaster and Izal toilet-blocks and other people’s stale chip-fat.
I was only a second away from seeing my first real-live dead body, though I didn’t know it. Because of the rain, I hadn’t seen the black Daimler hearse parked on the otherside of the Row, by the bus garage. I was still peering into the letter-box with rain running down the collar of my Millett’s anorak when the front door was suddenly jostled open and this tall red-faced chap with a noseful of broken veins came struggling out backwards, carrying the end of an open coffin.
“Will you watch out for Christ’s sake,” he snapped at me, out of the corner of his mouth.
Then he shuffled and swayed and blinked up at the sky. “Fuck it, it’s still fucking raining. And trust you to forget the fucking lid.”
He was addressing this abuse to a thin waxy-faced young chap who was holding the other end of the coffin, his lank hair swinging, his forehead greasy with perspiration.
But it was the occupant of the coffin who startled me the most. My nerves thrilled as if somebody had circled my forehead with elastic bands. She was lying in this coffin and she was dead. Well, I mean, it was logical that she was dead, you don’t usually lie in a coffin unless you’re dead, but she was actually dead, her head nodding as they carried her in a slack way that it never could have nodded if she had been alive.
She was skinny and drawn and worst of all she was whitish-blue, even her lips. The darkness of her eyes showed through her closed eyelids like the eyes of a dead fledgling.
“I’ve got the umbrella, Mr Pedrick,” said the young chap, in a hopeful voice.
“Oh, you’ve got the fucking umbrella, have you, and who’s going to hold it up? Our ladyfriend in the box here?”
I don’t know why, but I said, “It’s all right, I will.”
Mr Pedrick’s gray-blue eyes swiveled into focus. “Well, that’s a noble offer, now. Very noble. They may not feel it, you know, the dead” (jerking his head down at the body) “the rain” (jerking his head up at the clouds). “But they deserve our respect at the very least.”
The two of them struggled across the Row with the coffin while I kept awkward shuffling pace beside them, holding up their huge black musty-smelling umbrella, which must have sheltered a thousand widows at a thousand rainy gravesides. Mr Pedrick wrestled with the hearse door and at last they managed to slide the coffin noisily into place.
The waxy-faced young chap covered the body with the coffin-lid, and then sneezed.
“Oh God where’s your fucking hankie,” Mr Pedrick snapped at him, and then to me, “I’m most grateful, a noble act.”
“That’s all right,” I told him. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Mr Pedrick rolled his eyes toward the coffin. “You’ve never seen a –?”
I shook my head, feeling numb and peculiarly innocent and very wet.
“There’s one thing, they don’t argue. They can look accusing. Oh yes, and they can look very resentful at times. But they don’t argue.” He paused, and then he sniffed. “They’d better fucking not, anyway.”
From the tone of his voice, I took it that he would be quite prepared to beat up a body that even looked as if it might be arguing.
I stood and watched the undertakers drive away. I felt really weird, as if I’d blinked and missed a whole day out of my life. Eternity, I thought, that’s what it is. It was a bit like jet-lag, except that I’d never been on a jet then, so I didn’t know what jet-lag was like. I crossed the street slowly back to the house.
The door was still half-open and I could see a woman in the hall, polishing a small hall-table with a cloth that had once been a child’s nightdress. She was probably fifty; and twenty years ago she had probably been quite handsome, in a chubby sort of way. Now her face was oval and featureless, like a white dinner-plate. She wore one of those floral housecoats that women wore during the war, and her gray hair was pinned up with a crisscross fence of about eight thousand kirbygrips. She was smoking as if she was in a smoking race.
“Mrs Bristow?” I asked her. “I’m David Moore.”
She stared at me, sipping at her cigarette. Then she said, “Bit wet, aren’t you? Where’s your things?”
“Actually I haven’t got any things. I mean, not as such. I thought the room was furnished.”
She paused, sip, puff, sip, puff. “Well, it is. But there isn’t much. I mean there’s pots and pans, and a cheese-grater. But no sheets or blankets or anything. And I don’t supply soap or toilet-paper.”
“I, er – I left most of my stuff in London. I was thinking of buying some new sheets.”
Mrs Bristow folded and refolded the nightdress. “Well, then,” she said. “You’ll want to see the room.”
“Yes, smashing.” I smiled, although I felt so cheesed off I could have burst into tears. Mrs Bristow, wide-hipped in her housecoat, led the way upstairs, smoking and polishing as she went.
There was nothing in 5a Bedford Row to cheer your heart. The wallpaper down the stairs had obviously once been patterned with roses, but time and damp had strained all the color out of it, so that the roses looked like week-old cauliflowers. The banisters were stained with dark Edwardian varnish, and the staircase creaked and groaned as we climbed it.
“I met the undertakers on the way in,” I said, as we reached the first-floor landing.
Mrs Bristow stopped, and stared at me. “That was Miss Coates,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Poor Miss Coates,” Mrs Bristow repeated, louder, as if she thought I were deaf. “She used to do piecework, you know. Making up first-aid kits for some mail-order company. There’s dozens of them, in the cellar. I’ll have to ring up the company and get them to take them all away. She gave me a first-aid kit once, when her rent was late. Dear me, flipping useless, it was. Two sticking plasters and a tube of Germolene. Fat lot of good if you cut your head off.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. Then, “What did she die of?”
Mrs Bristow didn’t answer, but heaved her way up the next flight of stairs like an impatient rock-climber. Through a small window at the end of the landing, I could just glimpse a gray rain-ribbed roof and a haze of lighter greeny-grayness which I took to be the sea.
“Of course, she had Room Two,” said Mrs Bristow.
“I’m sorry?”
“Miss Coates. She had Room Two. That’s our best room. Sea view, self-contained kitchenette, ladies only. Newly decorated, too.”
“Oh,” I said.
We resumed our climb. “Of course it’s very coveted amongst my lady tenants, Room Two. So much bigger and nicer. It used to be my husband and I’s room.”
“Oh, nice,” I said. I wished she would stop puffing smoke in my face.
“Idyllic in the summer, Room Two. Absolutely idyllic. Miss Coates liked it so much, she said she wanted to spend the rest of her days there.”
“Well, she did, didn’t she?” I ventured.
Mrs Bristow stopped again, and turned to stare at me through a sliding wreath of gray cigarette smoke. “I do expect proper behaviour, you know,” she told me. “I don’t expect parties and I don’t expect, you know, overnight friends. Of either, you know, sex.”
I nodded obediently. I had about three-and-six in my jacket pocket for a half of bitter and a Cormish pasty, and she expected me to have parties, and to be able to woo somebody into an overnight friendship? But I resisted the temptation to say you must be bleeding joking missis.
We were almost up at the top of the house when we heard the sound of a small child grizzling, and the sharp clatter of worn-down high heels on the stairs. As we reached the top landing, Mrs Bristow stood back against the wall, like a railway lineworker waiting for an express to pass, and I did, too. Along the landing came a rolled-up pink satin quilt, walking on long fishnet-stockinged legs. The quilt was followed by a blonde boy of about two years old in a stripey orange-and-brown T-shirt and nothing else, grumbling and crying.
“I haven’t vacew-ummed Room Two yet, Nancy,” said Mrs Bristow, blowing out smoke from both nostrils.
The quilt was dropped abruptly to the floor. A girl’s white face appeared, with wild back-combed dyed-black hair, and huge eyes with two pairs of false eyelashes. Then a deeply low-scooped black sweater, into which were crammed the biggest whitest breasts that I had ever seen in my whole life. A wide black patent-leather belt, cinched tight. And then a cheap white cotton mini-skirt, with fraying seams.
“Oh ’allo, Mrs B. Didn’t see you behind me bedding.”
“Nancy, this is Mr Moore. He’s coming to stay in Room Seven.”
“David,” I said, holding out my hand; and then realizing that Nancy didn’t have a hand free to shake it.
“Pleased to meet you, David,” said Nancy. “This misery-guts here is Simon, aren’t you, Simon?”
Simon continued to grizzle unabated.
“Well, since you’re so keen to move in already, I’ll do the vacewming later,” said Mrs Bristow, puff, sip. “Come on, Mr Moore, I’ll show you your room.”
“See you later, aye?” smiled Nancy, and then, “Shut up, Simon, for God’s sake.”
Room Seven was high in the roof, with a dormer window propped open with an old hairless washing-up brush. I had a saggy bed and a red Parker-Knoll chair and a table with a tiny cream-colored Belling electric cooker on it, and about a million cigarette burns all the way along the edge.
“It’s very light in the mornings, Room Seven,” said Mrs Bristow. “And you can see the Dome, too. Just a peek, anyway.”
She waited at the open door. “It’s two weeks’ deposit and a week in advance,” she said. “That’s thirteen pounds ten.”
“Erm, I wonder if I could pay you at the end of the week. I’m afraid my cheque hasn’t come yet.”
Mrs Bristow’s head disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and she coughed. “I don’t usually,” she said.
“I’d be very grateful.”
“Well, all right, then,” she sighed, and disappeared down the stairs, leaving a trail of smoke behind her. “But Friday,” she called back. “Or else I’m afraid you’re out.”
I went to the open dormer window and stared out at the rainy slate rooftops. Below me I could hear traffic on the wet roads, and the insistent shushing of the sea. I felt depressed and lonely but at the same time I felt strangely content. I had come to Worthing because it was the most depressing place I could think of, and I needed a sanctuary that suited my mood. I was broke, and out of work, and my life didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Nineteen-and-a-half, with no prospects. What better place to get your head together than Worthing?
The only reason I knew Worthing was because my great-aunt had lived here when I was little, and we used to come and visit. The beach was all pebbles and smelled strongly of seaweed.
Worthing has a pier, and one of those grassy municipal squares that Sussex people call a Steyne, and a bandstand, and some public toilets, and several nasty department stores full of shiny reproduction furniture and place-mats with hunting scenes on them, and EPNS cutlery. It’s neither as vulgar as Brighton nor as self-consciously tight-arsed as Eastbourne. It’s just a gray British suburb by the sea. St-Despair-sur-Mer, as my great-aunt used to call it.
I suppose I had a vague idea that I might make some money as a deckchair attendant, or working in a fish-and-chip shop, but I wasn’t really sure. I’d taken my A-levels in English and Geography and French, but my marks had been so bad that there hadn’t really been much point in trying to get a place in college. Lack of application, the teachers had called it. I think I’d just run out of any desire to carry on. I just didn’t want to participate any more. I wanted to think, and do menial, unimportant things. If I’d been religious, I suppose I would’ve joined a monastery; but going to Worthing was just about the next most mortifying thing.
There was a stringy roller-towel on the back of the door and I dried myself. I had a wet paper carrier-bag with yesterday’s shirt in it, which wasn’t quite as wet as today’s, so I changed. Then I counted out my last remaining cash, which was actually three-and-sevepence-halfpenny, and decided to go out for some lunch.
As I came down the stairs to the middle landing, Nancy was just closing the door behind Room Two.
“Settled in, then?” she asked me.
“Sort of. I’ve got to buy some sheets and stuff.”
“Is that where you’re going now?”
“I was going to the pub for some lunch, actually.”
Without hesitation, she linked arms with me. Even in her stiletto heels, she was only about five-three. She smelled of tangeriney hairspray and Shalimar. “That’s good, you can buy me some!”
“I’ve only got three-and-seven.”
“You’re joh-king.”
“No, I’m not. Look.” I held out a halfcrown, a shilling, and a penny and three ha’pennies. “The sum total of my worldly wealth.”
Nancy laughed. “Looks like I’m paying then, doesn’t it? Fancy the Thieves Kitchen?”
“Don’t know. Never been there.”
We borrowed Mrs Bristow’s broken pink umbrella and scampered out into the rain. The Thieves Kitchen wasn’t far, only two streets away. A large pub-restaurant offering Traditional Lunches. It was dark and smoky, with pretense oak beams and horse-brasses. We sat in a booth and ordered pork chops and fried eggs and pints of Red Barrel bitter. Nancy was chatty and flirtatious and changed the whole of my outlook on life in the space of one meal.
She talked and ate and laughed and I just ate. I watched her the whole time. She was absolutely smashing. Underneath those double sets of false eyelashes and that white pancake make-up she was deliciously pretty. She had a babyish face, with pouting lips and a little snub nose and big wide blue-lilac eyes, and I think I fell in love with her after the third mouthful of pork chop. Everything about her entranced me. Her cheapness, her outspokenness, the tiny gold studs in her ears, and that deep, pressed-together cleavage, which exuded Boot’s talcum powder and unimaginable promise.
“I should never ’ave married Vince, never,” she said, swallowing beer from a pint glass. “I was a fool to meself. But then ’e was ever so good-looking and ’e ’ad a bike and a sidecar, and ’e was ever so moody, do you know what I mean? And I was only sixteen. I was really stupid then. But ever since I’ve ’ad Simon … well, you ’ave to be more machewer, don’t you?”
“Where is Simon?” I asked her.
“’Aving ’is nap,” said Nancy. “I give ’im ’is lunch at twelve o’clock, and then ’e sleeps through till ’alf-past two; every day, regular as clockwork.”
She asked me what I was doing in Worthing; and I told her. She listened sympathetically but I don’t think that she really understood. It was like trying to quote Paul Verlaine to somebody at a noisy drinks party. “Les sanglots longs des violons de l’ automne … blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone …”
Nancy paid for the whole lunch herself, out of a white vinyl purse. “Oh, don’t worry, Vince is ever so good to me. ’E sends me seven pounds a week and I don’t usually spend it all.”
We walked back to 5a Bedford Row arm in arm, under Mrs Bristow’s wounded umbrella. Outside Room Two, Nancy said, “D’you want to come in for a cuppa coff?”
Room Two was almost four times larger than my room. Nancy had drawn the thin flower-patterned curtains so that Simon could sleep. He lay in his cot in the corner, his thumb planted in his mouth, his blonde hair sticky, his cheeks like fire. I stood over him and wished that he were mine, instead of Vince’s. I turned back to Nancy and she was just standing there, looking at me.
“Mrs Bristow says that Room Two is idyllic,” I told her.
“Can’t say that I’ve noticed,” Nancy replied, without taking her eyes off me.
“No, well,” I said, uncomfortably. I looked around. The room was freshly-papered with a strange yellowish crisscross pattern, Woolworths’ best. There was a 1950s dressing-table by the window, with a semicircular mirror; a large cheap varnished bed; a chest-of-drawers that somebody had painted powder-blue; and a huge Victorian wardrobe, in carved mahogany.
“Fantastic wardrobe,” I remarked.
“Oh, yeah, ’cept that she always keep it locked.”
I tried the brass handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. “What’s in here, do you know?”
Nancy sat on the edge of the bed. “Personal stuff, that’s all. Says she ’asn’t got nowhere else to keep it.”
I sat on her bed next to her. “You don’t ’alf talk posh,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re all kind of posh and poetic. Everything you say. Like the clouds being like mad dogs, that kind of thing. You ought to be a writer.”
“Hunh,” I told her. “There’s no money in writing. I’m going to be a deck-chair attendant.”
“Well, you’ll pick up some girls.”
There was a long silence. The room was silent; Simon slept silently. Then Nancy said, “Do you want to see something really shocking?”
I stared at her. Her eyes were deep lilac in the subdued light of Room Two.
“What do you mean, shocking?”
“Well, just look. Tell me if you’re shocked.”
Without hesitation, without taking her eyes off me, she lifted her black sweater and dragged it off over her head. Then she unhooked her lacy black bra, and bared her breasts. She gave a little wiggle, so that they swung and bounced.
Her breasts looked even bigger than they had before. They were full and white like two huge milk puddings; their skin imprinted with the pattern of her bra. Her areolas were wide and pale, and her nipples were crinkled tight. What fascinated me, though – and what was obviously supposed to shock me – was that both her nipples had been pierced with thin gold rings.
I had heard about girls piercing their nipples, I mean everybody’s heard about it, but I had never met a girl who had actually done it. Let along found myself face to face with one, on a double-bed, on a wet afternoon in Worthing. My cock uncurled inside my jeans, and I felt a hot flush color my cheeks.
“What do you think?” she asked me, giving her breasts another little jiggle.
“I don’t know. It’s fantastic.”
“Vince wanted it done. I didn’t want to, at first, but now I quite like it.”
“It’s fantastic,” I repeated. I didn’t know what else to say.
“You don’t think it’s shocking, then?”
“It’s surprising.”
“But not shocking?”
I shook my head.
She looked at me seriously. “You can touch them, if you like.”
I hesitated; then reached out, and felt both nipples, and rings. The rings could be rotated through the nipples quite easily.
“You can lift them up, if you like.”
I stared at her. It wasn’t what I liked; it was what she wanted. I hooked my fingers through both rings, and lifted her heavy breasts with them, until both nipples were stretched. She closed her eyes and arched her head back, while I gently tugged at her breasts again and again, as if they were disobedient puppies.
Without a word, she lifted my hands away from her breasts, and unfastened the hook-and-eye catches of cheap white skirt. Underneath she wore fishnet tights, no panties. The dark pink flesh of her vulva bulged through the fishnet in diamond patterns. I smelled the pungent erotic smell of sex and urine.
We made love tightly, quietly, fiercely, for nearly forty minutes. It seemed like a lifetime went by. Eternity. That same eternity I had glimpsed outside, when they were carrying Miss Coates away. But then I opened my eyes and we were lying together in Room Two, with the curtains drawn, under an embroidered sampler which said, Work Out Your Own Salvation With Fear And Trembling.
Nancy turned her head and blurrily smiled at me. There were pearls of semen still clinging to her false eyelashes. She said, “You’re good, you are, David Moore.”
I kissed her. I could have married her then and there. “You too, Nancy Whatever-Your-Name-Is.”
“Bright,” she said, and kissed me again.
It was then that Simon stirred, and coughed, and opened his eyes.
For the next two weeks we went everywhere together and went to bed at every possible opportunity. The August rain blew over and left us with warm and windy weather, and we took the bus to Littlehampton and made love naked in the grassy sand-dunes while Simon built a castle with a real sea-water moat.
Nancy was dirty-minded and mad and she didn’t care what she did. She never wore panties; she didn’t even own any. She lay face-down in the dunes with her bottom lifted and her vagina pulled open with her fingers and yelped like a seagull when I pushed myself into her. She loved rolling around and filthy language and sucking and kissing, and all the delights that the flesh can be heir to.
I had never met a girl like Nancy, ever. I’ve never met a girl like Nancy since. Vince could keep his bike and his sidecar. Nancy was everything I could have dreamed of. Perhaps I couldn’t have taken her home to meet my parents. (“Oh, mum, this is Nancy, she has a two-year-old illegitimate son and she wears nipple rings.”) But who cared about that? With Nancy, I was in nineteen-year-old heaven. With Nancy, I forgot about depression and despair.
I deferred looking for a job, and we spent days on the beach; or took the train to Arundel and walked around the castle; or climbed on the chalky dinosaur backs of the Sussex Downs, while the huge clouds sailed over-head and their shadows sailed across the water-meadows below. Days of sunshine and silliness and not much money. Days of country pubs and picnics with doorstep sandwiches and walks down fragrant Sussex lanes; kissing in the shadow of ancient oaks.
When the last day came, I didn’t even know it was the last. We’d been to the funfair at Littlehampton, and come back by bus. We finished up by walking along the seafront at sunset, one of those gray warm evenings with the sun stirred into the Channel mist like damson jam into a pudding. Simon was riding piggyback on my shoulders and Nancy was walking beside me in white hot pants and a black nylon blouse knotted over her midriff. Somebody was playing a tranny on the pier, Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix. “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand…” Jimi Hendrix was Nancy’s favorite, after the Stones.
“Do you think you’ll ever get married,” Nancy asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, guardedly. I suppose I was already convinced that I was going to marry her.
“I’m not goin’ to get married again,” she told me, emphatically.
“Oh.”
Simon tugged at my hair, and said, “Giddyup, horsey!”
“What about Simon?” I asked Nancy.
“What about him?”
“Well, he’ll want a father, won’t he? Especially when he’s older. My father used to take me to Farnborough Air Show.”
“There’s more to life than fathers,” said Nancy. She looked away, and for some inexplicable reason I knew then that I had lost her; that something had changed between us. Simon jiggled up and down and said, “Giddyup, horsey! Giddyup, horsey!”
I galloped along the seafront with him, in that gray-plum evening light, and Nancy followed along behind us with a tight distracted smile, looking small, and different. Goin’ down to shoot my ole lady … ’cause she’s been runnin’ around with another man …”
That evening I came downstairs from Room Seven and knocked gently at Nancy’s door. It was half-past eight, and Simon should have been asleep by then.
Nancy was a long time answering. She whispered through the closed door, “Who is it?”
“It’s David. Can I come in?”
“I’m not dressed.”
Not being dressed had never stopped her opening the door before. I stood on the landing, hesitant and confused.
“I thought we could go to the pub.”
Another long pause, then, “I haven’t got any money.”
“I’ve still got a pound.”
“Oh, great evenin’ out we’re goin’ to have on a pound.”
So that was it, I thought. She was fed up with my having no money. “Listen,” I called, “I’ll go out and get a job tomorrow. They’re looking for attendants at Peter Pan’s Playground.”
“Do what you like.”
I ran my hand through my hair. She was beginning to make me feel distinctly desperate. “Look, can we talk?”
“What about?”
“Well, us. You and me.”
“There isn’t anything to talk about.”
“Nancy,” I said, on that gloomy wallpapered landing, “I love you.”
“No you don’t. You want somebody posh and poetic.”
“I want you. I want to marry you.”
“Oh, come on, Dave; don’t talk stupid.”
“But I do. You can take this as a formal proposal of marriage.”
“Dave, for goodness’ sake, go away.”
I rattled the doorknob but the door was firmly locked. And it was then that I heard heavy swaying footsteps on the stairs, and Mrs Bristow hove into view, in her stage-magician cloud of Guards cigarette smoke. She stood at the far end of the landing watching me, and there was nothing I could do but retreat back to Room Seven and close the door.
I stood on my chair with my head out of the skylight, miserably contemplating the rooftops and the distant Downs. It was growing dark now, and the seafront was necklaced with sodium lights. The sea shushed, and shushed, with its hollow mouthful of pebbles; and there isn’t a sound in the world more weary and lonely than that.
At about ten o’clock I heard Mrs Bristow bang and lock the back door, and so I decided to go down and give Nancy another try. Perhaps she’d been tired. Perhaps it was the wrong time of the mouth. But I missed her so much. Even after just a few hours I missed her. I couldn’t bear to think that she didn’t want to go to bed with me any more.
I crept downstairs, and stood outside Room Two. The timing switch on the stairs clicked off, and left me in darkness. I couldn’t hear anything at first except Radio Caroline playing in Room Four. “Waterloo Sunset… I am in Paradise …” Then I heard somebody talking; and it wasn’t Nancy. It was a man’s voice: thick and breathy and crackling.
Oh God, I though, she’s found somebody else. Somebody older; somebody more like her. Somebody who’s not all wet and poetic like me. Perhaps Vince had come back. I’d seen a photograph of Vince, black leather jacket, quiff, sideburns, and a BSA bike with a sidecar. How could a skinny Mod like me hope to compete with a heavy-duty Rocker like him? And he was Simon’s real father.
I heard Nancy saying something, but at first I couldn’t make out what it was. I knelt down beside the keyhole, so that the draft blew in my ear. She was saying, “… for ever? ’Ow can I stay ’ere for ever?”
“Because I want you to stay here for ever,” crackled the man’s voice, surprisingly loudly and distinctly. “Because I love you, and because you must.”
“But what about Simon?” asked Nancy.
“All children are damned, you should know that by now.”
“But ’oo’s goin’ to take care of ’im?”
“Fate will take care of him. He is only one more speck of flotsam on the ocean of the night.”
I slowly stood up. That couldn’t be Vince. According to Nancy, Vince had talked about nothing except Eddie Cochrane and motorbikes. And how could she say that I was too poetic if she was talking to somebody who said things like “one more speck of flotsam on the ocean of the night?”
In a fit of jealousy, I thumped at the door with my fist. “Nancy!” I yelled at her. “Nancy!”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Nancy!” I yelled again. “Open this bloody door!”
To my surprise, I heard the door unlock. Then it opened, only two or three inches. Inside, Room Two was illuminated by a single beside lamp with a mock-parchment shade. The number of times I had lain in Nancy’s bed and stared at the picture on that shade, the Spanish Armada in full sail. Nancy was naked; her skin was shining with sweat. Her blonde hair was stuck to her forehead in dark mermaid curls.
“What’s the matter?” she asked me. “You’ll wake Simon.”
“You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me,” I raged at her.
“Tell you what? What are you talkin’ about?”
“You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me there was somebody else.”
She stared at me. I had never seen her look at me like that before. It wasn’t unloving; it wasn’t angry. If it was anything describable, it was sad, remote; like somebody who’s being carried away from you for ever at a railway station. Brief Encounters, I suppose.
“There isn’t anybody else,” she said, with awesome simplicity.
“Oh, I suppose I was hearing things, was I? Specks of flotsam, for instance?”
Nancy shook her head. “Must’ve been the radio. There’s nobody ’ere.”
She pushed the door open wide. I looked into the room, but didn’t step inside. It was obvious that she didn’t want me to step inside. Simon was sleeping in his cot with a blanket draped over one side to block out the light. But apart from Simon, there was nobody else. Nobody that I could see, anyway – although I did notice that the wardrobe door was slightly ajar.
“Satisfied?” asked Nancy.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt clumsy and juvenile. I supposed I could have challenged her to fling open the wardrobe; but what if there were nobody in it? Worse still, what if there were? What would I say to Nancy’s new lover, face-to-face? “Oh, hallo, I’m David from upstairs. I used to fuck Nancy but now I’m just leaving, sorry.”
I looked at Nancy and her expression hadn’t changed. I knew then that she didn’t belong to me and that she never would.
I said, softly, “All right,” I bent my head forward to kiss her but she dodged her cheek away. I’ve really got to tell you, that hurt. I went back upstairs and sat in my Parker-Knoll chair in the dark and cried for nearly twenty minutes. Then I wiped my eyes on the bedspread and wondered what the hell I was going to do without her.
The next morning I got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar in Montague Street. It was run by a bullet-headed former wrestler who liked his staff to call him Mr George but whose fighting name had been Skull Thomson. I learned how to dip fillets of cod in batter and how to operate the potato-chipper and how to toss a whole bucketful of chips into deep boiling fat without killing myself. I also learned how to wrap a double portion of rock and chips in newspaper so that it could be dredged in salt and doused in malt vinegar and eaten while walking along the street.
After three hours of frying I reeked of fat, but at least I was getting paid, and I wasn’t going to go hungry. Mr George let us have all the fish-and-chips we could eat.
That evening, when we closed, I took two cod and chips back to 5a Bedford Row, with a saveloy for Simon. I knocked at Nancy’s door and waited.
She took a long, long time to answer, and when she did she sounded very tired. “What do you want?” she called.
“It’s David, Dave. I’ve got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar. I’ve brought you some fish and chips, if you want some.”
“No thanks. Just leave me alone.”
“Listen,” I persisted. “I lost my temper yesterday, I’m sorry. It was all a misunderstanding. Look, just have some fish and chips, no strings attached. I’ve brought a sausage for Simon.”
“Leave me alone, Dave, do you mind?”
I stood in the hallway with my warm greasy newspaper package, and I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel like going back to my room. It was too pokey; too dark. I went for a walk along Marine Parade, and gave my fish and chips to an old tramp who was sitting in one of the concrete shelters with a bottle of cider and a cigarette-tip glowing.
After that, Nancy refused even to answer my knocking. I got another job, temporary carpet fitting for Vokins department store, and what with carpet-fitting in the mornings and fish-frying all afternoon and evening, I didn’t get much of a chance to think about her, either. In early September all the art students came back to Union Place, and I made quite a few new friends. I went out with a thin lithography student called Sandra. She had shaggy hair and baggy sweaters and drainpipe jeans, and although she made it clear right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to go the whole way, we had plenty of heavy snogging sessions. Whenever I got really frustrated, I bought copies of Health & Efficiency. Weekends with Sandra were all instant coffee and trad jazz and walks on the beach.
Occasionally, however, I would pause on my way back upstairs to Room Seven, and stand outside Room Two, and listen. Most of the time, I heard nothing at all. Sometimes I heard the radio, playing faintly. But once or twice I heard Nancy’s voice, oddly thin and unsure; and that hoarse crackling man’s voice.
On the last night of September I was passing Room Two when I heard the voice saying, “… love you beyond all conceivable loves …”
I hesitated, holding my breath. I heard Nancy saying, “… ever, not for ever …”
There was a muffled creaking noise. It sounded like the bed. Then some indistinct conversation, the man and Nancy both talking at the same time. Then the man saying, “Soon and soon and soon, my beautiful darling … soon and soon and soon!”
Nancy whimpered; then cried out. The she let out a peculiar strangled keening noise. I was horrified, electrified. I rattled the doorknob sharply. Then I wrenched at it in fury and temper. I heard Nancy screaming, “No!” I took a step back, held on to the banisters, and kicked at the door with my Chelsea boot.
The door juddered open, the catch swinging broken. Instantly, the wardrobe door, which had been wide open, slammed shut. Nancy was standing beside it, naked, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts. She stared at me wildly, whimpering, trembling, unable to speak.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. I knew it was Nancy, it had to be Nancy, but she was hideously emaciated. Her back-combed blonde hair had turned bone-white and bedraggled; her arms and legs were as thin as chair-sticks. I could see her hip-bones stretching against her white blue-veined skin. Her breasts had shrunk to empty dugs, although the gold nipple-rings still hung from her nipples, proving beyond question that it was really her. Her eyes were dark-circled; her lips were deeply-lined.
“Nancy?” I whispered. I was so shocked that I didn’t know how to move my legs, didn’t know how to walk. “Nancy, what’s happened?”
“It’s nearly over,” she told me. It sounded as if she had no saliva in her mouth at all.
“What? What’s nearly over? What are you talking about?”
She sat down unsteadily on the end of the bed, with all the stiffness of an eighty-year-old woman. “It’s nearly over,” she repeated, nodding her head.
I went across to the cot. Simon was sleeping deeply, whistling softly through one clogged nostril. A bottle of cherry cough mixture, three-quarters empty, stood on the edge of the basin nearby. The poor little kid was half-drugged.
I closed the door of the room so that nobody could see in. I had kicked the screws out of the latch, that was all, so it wouldn’t take much repairing.
“Are you ill, or what?” I asked Nancy. I was both impatient and frightened.
“Ill?” She gave a dry little smile. “No, I’m not ill. I’m in love.”
“But what’s happened to you? You look as if you haven’t eaten for a month.”
“Don’t need to eat. Don’t need nothin’.”
I glanced at the wardrobe. “What have you got in there?”
“Nothin’ in particular. Mrs Bristow’s stuff. It’s locked.”
“It’s not locked. When I bashed open the door, I saw it open.”
“It’s locked,” Nancy intoned. “Nothin’ inside it, only Mrs Bristow’s stuff.”
“You won’t mind if I take a look, then?”
Nancy lifted her head. Her eyes reminded me of poor Miss Coates, the assembler of first-aid kits, who had been carried out of 5a Bedford Row in an open coffin, in the rain. “Forget it, Dave. It’s nearly over, forget it.”
“I think I’ve got a right,” I told her, and I made my way around the end of the bed, and took hold of the brass knob of the wardrobe door.
“No!” pleaded Nancy. She climbed to her feet, and hobbled across to me, and seized my wrists with her claw-like hands.
Close-up, she looked as if she had walked straight out of Belsen. Her teeth were gone, her hair was coming out in clumps, her skin was scaly and blistered. She was so weak that she couldn’t have hoped to pull me away from the wardrobe; but I stepped away in any case, in sheer disgust. I couldn’t help it. It was almost impossible to believe that she and I had once made love in the dunes.
“It’s locked,” she whispered, throatily. “Please, Dave, it’s locked.”
I reached out again, and this time she didn’t try to stop me. I tugged at the knob and she was right. It wouldn’t open.
“I want to know what’s in there,” I demanded. “I’ve got a right.”
“No,” she insisted.
“For Christ’s sake, Nancy, I wanted to marry you once!”
“No,” she mouthed. “And that gives you no right.”
“Didn’t you love me, too?” I asked her.
She slowly blinked those dead-fledgling eyes. “I thought I did. But I didn’t know what real love really was, did I? I didn’t know what it was really like.”
“And now you do?” I challenged her.
I heard the door of the room jar open behind me. I turned around, and there stood Mrs Bristow, in her brown candlewick dressing-gown, one eye squinched up against the cigarette that smoldered between her lips.
“I heard a commotion,” she said.
Nancy sat down again. Mrs Bristow came across the room, picked up Nancy’s nightdress from the bed, and draped it around her shoulders. “I think you’d better get back to your room, Mr Moore.”
“I think I want to know what’s happened to Nancy, Mrs Bristow,” I replied, belligerently folding my arms.
Mrs Bristow puffed smoke. “You heard her. She’s in love.”
“She’s half-dead, for God’s sake!”
“Love conquers death, Mr Moore. You’ll understand that one day.”
“I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this: Nancy’s coming out of this room and she’s going to stay with me, and she’s going to eat properly. She’s got a kid to look after, for God’s sake. So, out of my way.”
Mrs Bristow puffed, sipped, puffed. “She won’t come with you, Mr Moore.”
“Then I’ll carry her.”
“She’ll always come back, Mr Moore. And she’ll never love you, never. In fact, if you try to keep her away, she’ll grow to hate you.”
“I’m going to call the police,” I replied. “I’m going to call the police and a welfare officer, and then we’ll bloody well see.”
“No!” begged Nancy. “Dave, no, please, no!”
Mrs Bristow stared at me with wide warning eyes. “You shouldn’t have stuck your nose where it wasn’t wanted, Mr Moore. You should have stayed in Room Seven with your baked beans and your naughty magazines.”
“I’m still going to call the police,” I told her. I sensed that I had her worried, and I wanted to know why. Besides, if there was any chance of saving Nancy, I wanted to find out what it was.
Mrs Bristow said nothing for almost half a minute. Nancy, her bony shoulders bowed, began softly to sob. It sounded like the sobbing of an old, old woman, who suddenly and vividly remembers her girlhood. Cornflowers, sunshine, straw hats.
“Very well,” said Mrs Bristow. She reached over, and opened the wardrobe door.
To my total horror, a man was standing motionless in the wardrobe. He was stocky, heavily-built, about forty-five years old. His hair was oiled and combed back from his forehead. He wore a neat little bristle mustache. He was naked, with a huge reddened penis hanging down between his thighs. His legs were shaggy with ginger hair. His eyes were totally bloodshot, totally red.
“Is he dead?” I asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like me at all.
Mrs Bristow shook her head. She allowed me one last look and then she closed the wardrobe door.
“My husband, Mr Bristow.”
“I don’t believe this,” I protested. “That’s your husband, and he’s hiding in the wardrobe?”
“Not hiding, Mr Moore. He lives there. Or rather he ekes out his existence there. His real living is done inside his mind.”
She went to the window, opened it an inch, and flickered her cigarette butt out into the night. Then she turned back, and blew out a last puff of smoke. “He’s a great lover, Mr Moore. Greater than you’ll ever understand. He takes a great deal out of every woman who loves him; but he gives just as much in return; if not more.”
“But what the hell has he done to Nancy?” I demanded. “He’s killing her!”
“In one sense, yes, I suppose he is,” Mrs Bristow replied, patting the pockets of her housecoat to find her cigarettes. “But she won’t know greater ecstasy, I can assure you of that. Now and forever after. Real ecstasy. I envy her. I envy all of them. But somebody has to take care of things on the outside, don’t they? That’s what a wife is for.”
“He’s killing her,” I repeated.
“Almost gone, yes,” Mrs Bristow agreed. She lit another cigarette. “Just like poor Miss Coates; and poor Miss Unwin; and poor Miss Baker; and poor Miss Dadachanji. But they’re all still there; he has them all. And as long as he lives, so will they.”
I stared at her. “So when you gave Nancy this room – you knew – you did it on purpose.”
Mrs Bristow nodded. “We all have to live, Mr Moore, the best way we can.”
Something burst inside my head. It was like a melon blown up with dynamite. I lost all of my reason, all of my self-control. It was bad enough that this stuffed-dummy of a man had taken Nancy away from me; but now he was killing her, too. I shouldered Mrs Bristow aside, and yanked open the wardrobe door, and confronted the naked man who stood there with his shaggy thighs and his bloodred eyes and shrieked, “You bastard! You murdering bloody bastard!”
I was about to grab him by the shoulders and heave him out of the wardrobe when he stretched open his mouth and he roared at me.
I stopped dead in absolute paralytic terror. It wasn’t just a roar of anger. It was a roar like a blast-furnace; like the rumbling exhaust of a jet. It seemed to toss aside blankets and papers and tumble over bedside lights. It was deafening, and it went on and on and relentlessly on.
As he roared, the man’s face swelled. His veins stood out like pulsing snakes. Then his face stretched and twisted, and turned into another face, the face of a pale-skinned girl. Her eyes, too, were filled with red, and she was roaring.
I took a stumbling step backward. I was full of rage, full of anguish, but I wasn’t brave enough to face up to anything like this. The girl’s face knotted and contorted. Her forehead bulged, her nose folded in on itself, and another girl’s face appeared, slimy and dark-skinned, still roaring. I saw face after face, all women, roaring at me red-eyed, an unholy portrait gallery of hundreds of different personalities; all of them absorbed into one man’s body.
Mrs Bristow had talked of ecstasy, of love. But all I saw was agony and distortion and screaming helplessness.
Stiff-legged with fear, I reached down and scooped Simon awkwardly out of his cot. Nancy, her head bowed, did nothing to stop me. Mrs Bristow remained by the wardrobe door, her housecoat fluttering in the roaring draft, expressionless, waiting for me to leave.
I took one last look at that hideous naked creature in the wardrobe with its heads twisting and changing, one after the other, and then I hoisted Simon up against me shoulder and I hurried out of 5a Bedford Row and out into the windy, brine-smelling night. I didn’t realize that I was crying out loud until I was well past West Buildings.
I suppose I should have gone to the police right away. But I was too frightened and too numb, and too worried about Simon. God knows how much cough medicine Nancy had given him, but he flopped in my arms like a little hot doll. I carried him up to Sandra’s flat in Surrey Street; up three flights of stairs, sweating and gasping, and pressed the doorbell with my elbow.
Sandra came to the door in a striped man’s shirt and long socks. “David?” she frowned. “What on earth’s the matter?”
I spent the night drinking coffee and keeping a lonely watch over Simon. Around seven he stirred and opened his eyes and frowned at me. “Uncle Dave? Where’s mummy?”
I returned to 5a Bedford Row about eleven o’clock the next morning, accompanied by two police officers. As we drew up outside the house, I was just in time to see a black pickup truck disappearing around the corner on to the seafront. I couldn’t be sure, but in the back of the pickup truck, I thought I glimpsed a large wardrobe, half-covered with a sheet of tarpaulin.
On the other side of the road, next to the bus garage, a black Daimler hearse was parked without any consideration for any other traffic that might have wanted to get past.
The police officers rang the doorbell. One of them said, “D’you hear about Chalky collaring that JP for drunken driving? Laugh?”
The door was opened. It was Mrs Bristow. She looked at me sharply, and then at the two policemen. “Mr Moore? Is anything wrong?”
“You know bloody well what’s wrong,” I told her. “Where’s Nancy?”
“I’m sorry, Mr Moore; but old Miss Bright passed away this morning, in the early hours. We think it was probably her heart.”
“Old Miss Bright?” frowned one of the policemen.
We climbed the stairs to Room Two. The curtains were drawn, and the room was in semi-darkness, but I could see at once that the wardrobe had gone. Nancy lay on the bed, thin and white-haired and really dead; the same way that Miss Coates had been really dead. Mr Pedrick and his young assistant were preparing to lift her into her coffin.
“Who’s this, then?” asked one of the policemen.
“The name’s Pedrick,” said Mr Pedrick.
“I mean the deceased.”
“Oh, mistake me for a fucking corpse, please,” Mr Pedrick complained.
“This is Nancy,” I told the policeman.
“I’m sorry?”
“This is Nancy Bright. My girlfriend, Simon’s mother.”
The constable peered at Nancy closely. “Well, you’ll have to forgive me, Mr Moore, but she looks a trifle long in the tooth to be your girlfriend. And she can’t possible be young Simon’s mother now, can she? She must be eighty if she’s a day.”
“That’s how they killed her,” I insisted. “They took everything out of her – everything. Her youth, her looks, her blood for all I know. It’s Mr Bristow. Every woman he wants becomes part of him. Mixed up inside him, almost. It’s really hard to describe until you’ve seen it for yourself.”
“Too right,” said Mr Pedrick.
“Where’s this fellow now, then?” asked the constable. “This Mr Bristow?”
“He was in the wardrobe. The wardrobe was right there, almost exactly where you’re standing. Look, you can see the mark of its legs on the carpet. And it must have been really heavy, because the marks are so deep.”
“Oh, yes,” said the policeman, rubbing the mark with his shoe. “Sherlock Holmes strikes again.”
“So where’s this wardrobe now?” asked the other policeman.
“It’s gone,” I admitted. “They’ve taken it away.”
“With Mr Bristow still inside it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so.”
There was nothing more that I could do. The police just didn’t believe me and nothing I said could persuade them. I managed to telephone Vince and ask him to help, but apart from being ever so sorry that Nancy was dead, he didn’t want to get involved. All the same, his mum and dad drove down from Thornton Heath in their Cortina and collected Simon from Worthing Hospital, and promised to bring him up like a good young South London tyke. Nancy didn’t have a mother, and her father was in Hull, working as a printer. I phoned him up at his digs while he was trying to watch Coronation Street and he said, “I see. Well, it doesn’t surprise me,” and hung up.
A week later I called round to 5a Bedford Row to pick up my few belongings and Mrs Bristow had moved out. The rooms were being managed by a black-haired woman with a hairy mole and a bad hip. She didn’t know where Mrs Bristow had gone, except that it was probably the seaside.
I grew up, like everybody else. I got a job. I got married. The last time I went to Worthing they had demolished 5a Bedford Row and most of the rest of the town, too. I stood for a long time looking at the waste-ground of broken bricks and thinking that was the end of it.
Last week, however, I was walking through The Lanes, in Brighton, when I stopped to look at an antiquarian book and print shop in Duke Street. Right in front of me was a Victorian poster for THE GREAT BRISTOE, Prestidigitator Extraordinaire. He was supposed to be appearing at the Palace Pier, Brighton, on, June 4, 1879.
“Man of 1,000 voices! Man of 1,000 faces! The most remarkable series of Female Impersonations ever Achieved on Stage!! No Mirrors, No Trickery!! The Secret of the Arabian Harem Conjurors for you to witness in front of your eyes!”
Staring at me in the middle of the poster was a steel-engraved portrait of the man in the wardrobe. The man who could live for ever by absorbing the life and character of one young girl after another; the man in whose body the girl I had once loved still lay physically entangled. According to Mrs Bristow, she was experiencing some kind of unending ecstasy; or maybe some kind of unending purgatory, which is what unending ecstasy usually turns out to be.
I’ve never mentioned Nancy to my wife; nor to anyone else, before now. It all sounds too mad. It all sounds childish and ridiculous. But oh God, I loved her, you know; and oh God, I miss her. It hurts me so much to think of what unimaginable suffering she might still be going through now. I think of her sometimes and I still have to make an excuse and go out into the garden and sob like an idiot.
And I never, ever open other people’s wardrobes, in other people’s houses. He’s there somewhere, in somebody’s wardrobe, and believe you me, I don’t want to be the one to find him.