IT’S RAINING, AND THERE’S this delicious smell, a smell of frying fish and damp raincoats, and this terrific sound, the splashing of chip fat and the beating of rain on Akrill’s plate glass window. I’m back in Villiers Street and I’m only third in a full house Saturday-night queue and at home there’s Man waiting with the wireless tuned to Saturday Night Music Hall. The mixed sound of the beating rain and the splashing fat gets louder and louder and the heat from the chip machine gets hotter and then I wake up and I realise that the heat from the frying chips is the breath of Wally on my face and the frying sound is the hissing noise he’s making and maybe the chattering of his teeth could account for the noise of the rain, but I couldn’t be too sure about that, not that I really care because I’m much too preoccupied with taking hold of Wally by his scrawny neck prior to putting one on him, but I don’t get round to doing that because somehow the tone in Wally’s strangulated voice makes me hold off until I listen to what he has to say.
“Jack, for fuck’s sake,” he croaks, “Listen. There’s some fucker outside. What I mean is, some fucker’s trying to get in.”
In the darkness I squeeze my eyes tight shut as an aid to concentration. And when I’ve concentrated I say to him: “Listen, you fucking chancer. All you fucking well heard was the sound of your bottle disintegrating.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t. Somebody’s outside.”
I begin to reach up for the light but Wally’s eyes, like those of a shithouse rat, have sussed out my projected action and before I know what’s happening he’s lying on top of me, gripping my wrist.
“Jack, no,” he says. “Don’t do it. They’ll see.”
I shake my wrist free and try and push Wally off the bed but he grips me like a demented leech and we both go off the bed, sheets and all, and as we cockle over the coffee tray is caught by Wally or the sheet and crashes down onto the floor. The noise is so startling that it temporarily stills our movement. We listen to the darkness. The only sound is that of D’Antoni’s breathing drifting off the camp bed.
“Listen, you cunt,” I begin, but Wally cuts me off.
“No, wait,” he says. “It’s right. I heard somebody. I mean, I couldn’t sleep out there, could I? Felt like Morden after the last train’d gone, didn’t I? So I’m just lying there on my back looking up at the darkness when I hear somebody walk up the front steps and try the sliding doors. The whole glass shuddered. So I got off my pit and went to the edge of the gallery and Christ if it doesn’t happen again. Straight up. So I come in here and tell you, don’t I?”
I lie there in the darkness and give Wally’s theory a little listen and I’m just about to tell him my views on everything when what Wally’s just said happens again. The shuddering sound drifts up into the gallery and along the landing. Wally’s in too much of a state of macaroni to tell me I told you so. I manage to unfurl the sheet off me and I scramble about and on the floor find my dressing gown and then I stand up and follow the sound of D’Antoni’s breathing. When I get to the camp-bed I carefully take the big shooter from his holster and reflect on how D’Antoni’s managed to live so long. Then I make for the lighter darkness of the door that leads onto the landing and walk along the parquet work to the gallery rail. Down in the lower reaches the fish is still dribbling away but apart from that there are no other noises. Somewhere there must be some kind of light source because a couple of pallid reflections dance slowly in the plate glass as a result of the recent shudderings; but there’s certainly not enough light to reveal any movement I might make to any observer outside so I start to puss-cat down the steps. When I get down to the hall level I wait for a moment and have another listen. Nothing. So I take another step forward and just as I do that there’s more hissing from up in the gallery. I turn and look upwards and I can just make out Wally’s vague shape craning over the rail.
“Jack,” he croaks. “They’re up here. They’re outside the bedrooms up here.”
I go back up the steps.
“You what?” I whisper.
“Up here. They’re trying the bedroom wossnames.”
“Windows?”
“Yeah, them.”
“Which one last?”
“The one next to yours, wasn’t it?”
I go back down the hall and into the bedroom next to mine. Like everywhere else, the curtains are drawn right across the expanse of plate glass. The bedroom is roughly the same size and plan as my own so I walk across to the windows and stand there an inch or so away from the curtain and listen. Whoever was there isn’t there now because they’ve moved along a room and they’re trying the windows to that one and whoever it is isn’t doing the best job in the world of keeping quiet about it. Very carefully I find the gap in the curtains and slide my hand through and locate the bolts on the sliding glass and ease them out. I listen for a moment. Whoever is outside is still having a go at the other window. Even more carefully than I slid the bolts, I exert some pressure on the window and it glides noiselessly open a few inches. Cool mountain air sidles in through the crack. The sounds from outside have ceased for the moment. I slide the window open a bit more and it’s as noiseless as before. It’s now wide enough for me to step through. If I want to. The attention the other window’s been getting starts up again. Very slowly I poke my head through the gap. I can just make out a shadow shaking at the handles of the next window. There only seems to be one shadow but that’s something I can’t be sure of so I straighten up and stand there and wonder what the Christ I’m going to do about it but as it happens I don’t have to come to a decision because the sounds from the other window stop and there’s the new sound of footsteps returning to the window I’m at. I step smartly out of the gap and stand shielded by the curtain, not moving at all. The footsteps stop and there is a short surprised breath from beyond the curtains and also I notice something else, and that is that there’s not only the aroma of the assorted mountains drifting in through the gap, there’s the smell of a rather cheap perfume, cheap and nasty but nice. Then the figure that’s wearing the perfume steps through the gap and into the bedroom and all I have to do is to reach out and grip the figure’s arms behind its back and slap a hand across its mouth and while all the threshing and squirming and suppressed squealing’s going on I call out to Wally, wherever he is.
“Wally, the light.”
A shadow scuttles in from off the landing and almost immediately the bedroom is suffused with the kind of glow my bedroom was suffused with and now I can see the figure I’m wrestling with and as I take it in it occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind the best of three falls with this particular opponent. The reason being that she’s got beautifully cut short black hair, she’s got a body that flatters the blouse and the satin trousers rather than the other way around, and in spite of the way I’m squashing her face I can tell that she and everyone who ever gazes on it will be more than happy with the way it’s arranged and the effect that arrangement has. But what, at the moment, is unavoidably more interesting is Wally’s reaction to the intruder.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. “What you doing here?”
As he speaks he walks forward towards me and the girl, looking for the first time tonight as though he’s got a set of balls. The girl stops struggling but she doesn’t relax and neither do I except to take my hand away from her mouth.
“What the bleeding hell’s going on?” the girl says, looking at me as if I need to blow my nose. “Just what is this?”
“What do you mean, what is this?” Wally says. “What is this? Just what the Christ you think you’re doing? Eh? I mean, what are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she says. “Trying to get in the flaming villa, wasn’t I?”
“Listen, don’t come the snot with me,” Wally says. “I’ll haul you one off if you’re not careful.”
“Yes, I expect you will, seeing as how you’ve got somebody to hold me first. Just your drop, that is.”
And as the girl says, Wally’s drop it appears to be, because he starts to do just that so I let the girl go and she’s fast enough to dodge the swinger, leaving me to catch Wally’s wrist in my hand and get a grip on him.
“Ease off, eh?” I tell him. “Evens?”
Wally looks at me, then relaxes. I let go of his wrist.
“Well,” he says. “I mean to say.”
I look at the girl. She’s massaging her wrists where I was holding her. She looks back at me and she hasn’t grown to love me any more over the last minute or so.
“Well?” Wally says to her. “What about it?”
“What about what?” the girl says.
Wally takes a step forward but I speak to him and he stops.
“Wally,” I say to him, “when are you going to introduce me to the young lady?”
“Young bleeding lady?” Wally says. “My arse she is.”
“Charming,” the girl says.
“Listen, my girl, the day I call you a young lady’s the day you start behaving differently from the way you been doing the last seventeen years, all right?”
I take out a cigarette and as I’m lighting up I say to Wally: “I take it, then, Wal, that this happens so to speak, to be your offspring.”
“Too bleeding right,” Wally says.
“I wish I could say there’s a family resemblance, but I’m glad to say there isn’t,” I tell Wally.
Wally and the girl glare at each other. I blow out some cigarette smoke. The girl turns her attention back to me.
“Could I have one of those?” she says, indicating my cigarette, her expression the same as it’s been since I took my hand from her mouth.
“You smoke, do you?” I ask her.
“When you start smoking, then?” Wally asks her.
“What for?” she says.
“What you mean, what for?” Wally says. “Since when could you afford packets of fags on your grant, then?”
The girl gives Wally the kind of condescending smile she’d reserve for a twelve-year-old in a blazer who’d just tried to chat her up.
“I don’t necessarily have to buy them, do I?” she says.
“I see,” Wally says.
The girl snorts and the snort coincides with taking a cigarette from the packet I’m extending to her. She then makes a big production of putting the cigarette in her mouth and accepting the light I offer her and when she blows the smoke out it’s like the last time I saw Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause on T.V.
“So,” Wally says, “let’s get back to starters. What the bleeding hell you doing here?”
The girl blows out some more smoke and says:
“Come for me Christmas vacation, haven’t I?”
“You what?” Wally says.
“Christmas with Daddy, isn’t it?” she says. “Dear Octopus time, isn’t it. Family ties and all that.”
“Christmas holidays?” Wally says. “Christmas holidays? You’re supposed to be in college another couple or three weeks at least.”
Another puff of the cigarette.
“Yes, well,” she says.
“You been slung out?” Wally says. “That’s what it is. You been bleeding well slung out. Jesus. I knew it. First off, when you first got the idea in your head, I knew it wouldn’t last, one way or another. Bleeding art school. I ask you. All your mates making themselves forty quid a week as temps and throwing it all over the place on the gear but you were so bleeding right, weren’t you. What you really wanted to do, wasn’t it?”
“I haven’t been slung out. I finished my exams, didn’t I? After you’ve finished them, there is bugger all to do, isn’t there? I mean, you just hang about, doing darn all. So I just left early. Lots of us did. Nobody cares.”
“Oh no,” Wally says. “Remember you said that when you’re out on your arse after you get back.”
The girl gives him her smile again.
“Anyhow,” Wally says, “what you mean turning up without warning? Why didn’t you let me know you was coming?”
The girl shrugs.
“Why should I?”
“ ’Cause it might not be convenient, that’s why. The Fletchers might be here. They might be entertaining or something. This isn’t my place, you know.”
“Really?”
“If you turned up and the Fletchers was here they’d be well pleased.”
“They would. The thinner one’s always fancied me.”
“Less of that.”
“Fetched after since I was twelve, he has.”
“You got a good opinion of yourself, you have.”
I decide to let the family discussion run its course without me. The brilliance of the exchange is making me feel thirsty so I cross the bedroom and switch on the landing light and go downstairs and into the lounge and pour myself a glass of champagne, and I stand in the middle of the room drinking it and while I’m doing that I reflect that at this time of night, back in the smoke, I’d be having the same kind of drink, in a different kind of quietness, in the club, after all the punters had taken their last illusions home with them. And there’d be the soft comfortable sounds of the staff taking care of their clearing up, and I’d be sitting at my table, perhaps with Con or with Audrey, not saying much, perhaps discussing the merits or not of the Hammers’ new goalkeeper, or how funny it was to learn that George Clark had been found a danger to shipping near Putney Bridge, how surprising, who would have thought it, that kind of thing. And then after the conversation, and the champagne’d finished, I’d leave and take the slow ten-minute, near-dawn walk across Soho to my flat, picking up the papers on the way, and when I got in, I’d put some bacon in the pan, and while that’s sizzling slowly, I’d have a quick shower and then I’d get into my pit with my bacon sandwich and the papers and a pint mug of tea and I’d spend an hour drifting towards drowsiness, a mood orchestrated by the sound of the hotel dustbins and rest of re-emerging Soho, and to wake five hours later to the mid-morning thin London brightness streaming in through the flat windows. But instead I’m here in the splendid silence of the mountains (the image of which will be carried back a million Kodachromed times to Blighty), listening to the droning whitter of a family domestic drifting down from the Spanish heights, sparring with the nail-driving of a tenth-rate member of the Brotherhood. So I pour myself another glass of champagne and walk over to the window and draw back the curtain and look out at the mountains. It’s not yet quite dawn and that transitional thick uniform blueness flattens out all the different angles and perspectives, making the aspect look like a sketchy backcloth on BBC 2.
While I’m taking in this mind-reflecting monotonous aspect the sounds of Happy Families starts filtering down the stairs and the next thing I know the young bird has entered the room and has found the drinks and is pouring herself some champagne. Her entrance is closely followed by that of Wally, who’s opening line is this:
“I want to know how you got up here, that’s what I want to know.”
The girl takes a sip of her drink.
“I got a lift, didn’t I?”
“A lift? At this time of night? With a bleeding wop?”
“No, not with a bleeding wop.”
“Who with then?”
“Some students who were on the flight. They’d hired a car and they were going past here because they’re camping over at Solla, aren’t they?”
“All fellows, were they?”
“As far as I could tell. I mean, I suppose if I’d gone into the bushes with them I could have found out, like they wanted.”
“What?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, taking another drink.
“They asked you to go into the bushes?”
She looks at me in despair.
“What do you do,” she says, “in the face of such monolithic gullibility?”
“Where I come from,” I tell her, “what you do is that you very likely get a smacked arse.”
The girl turns on the look from upstairs again.
“And where would that be?” she says. “From under a wet stone?”
“Listen—” Wally begins, but I cut him off.
“It’s late, Wally. Let’s cut it all out, shall we?”
“Oh, Top Cat, this one, is he?” the girl says.
“Listen, Tina, this is Jack Carter. Know what I mean? Just leave it out, eh?”
“Oh yes? I heard about you.”
She pours herself another drink.
“You’re the one that does all the damage but never gets his name in the papers, isn’t that it?”
I just look at her and say nothing.
“Down our way you never buy a drink, isn’t that right?” she says.
I still say nothing.
“You on your holidays as well, are you?” she says.
That was the general idea, I think to myself, a happy holiday at the villa of your choice, under still warm Spanish skies in November, drinking Sangria with new-found friends while the friendly staff attend to your every whim.
“Wally,” I say, “I’m going back to my pit for what’s left of the night. If anybody else turns up, like, say, the Band of the Coldstream Guards, just leave me out of it, all right?”
I down my drink and walk out of the room and back up the stairs and into the bedroom. D’Antoni is still as he was left, feet apart, mouth apart, a human flytrap, miles apart from the reality of him being in the fantasy world of the Fletchers’ villa, miles apart from the real or imagined anxieties about the arrival of his own personal Furies. I wish I was as many points removed from my present, and none the less for the fact that when, for the third time that night, I get my head down, it’s lifted once more by the moth-like presence of Wally flitting by my bedside and whispering words of seduction. This time, he’s back on the theme of personal safety.
“Jack,” he says for openers.
So for openers I raise myself off the pillow and throat him and he coughs and splutters and I say to him:
“Wally, you really are pushing the good luck you’ve had all your life.”
Wally’s sweaty hands grip my wrists and try and force them off his neck; of course there is no danger of that but I don’t really feel like taking Wally’s lifeless form out of the bedroom and onto the patio and hurling him into the chasm and then going back to bed for the extra hour and a half. So I let go of him and I let him massage his neck and get his breath back in order for him to lay on me whatever he considers urgent enough to put his life in my hands.
“I’m not taking liberties, Jack, honest I ain’t,” he says, “but I got to put it to you, straight up, you can’t troll out of it, not now.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Not now, not now Tina’s here. On account of, well, if the geezers turn up, she’s going to be for it as well, ain’t she? They ain’t going to leave her out of it, are they?”
“You leave her out of it, Wally,” I tell him. “You leave her out of it by sending her back on the plane with me in the morning. That’s the way she gets left out of it.”
“How can I do that?” he says. “I’d have to tell her what for, and Gerald and Les’d nail me up if ever I did that. You know what they’d do.”
“How the Christ do you think they’re going to find out?”
“D’Antoni’d tell them Tina’d been and gone in a day and she’d left with you. They’d work the rest out for themselves, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re giving them a lot of credit, Wally.”
“Jack, you know what they’re like.”
I have to admit, yes, I do know what those bastards are like, but I only admit it to myself, not to Wally.
“Jack, you can’t leave us in the shit,” Wally says. “I know you been dropped in it yourself, but, I mean to say.”
I lie back on my pillow and stare up at the dark of the ceiling.
“What’s she doing now?”
“I put her in the next bedroom. It adjoins your bathroom.”
I don’t say anything.
“Jack?” Wally says.
“What she have to say about the camp bed on the landing?”
“I told her I was kipping down there as I was listening out for you to arrive.”
“She wear that?”
“ ’Course she did.”
“And what about the Sleeping Beauty?”
“Haven’t told her yet, have I?”
“He’ll be well pleased when he gets back from Paradise.”
“He’ll be better pleased if he knows you’re staying.”
I don’t answer.
“Jack?”
“Wally,” I say to him, “there’s only two things I’m going to guarantee right at this precise moment in time. One, I’m going to get some sleep and you’re fucking off out of it and back to your pit on the landing.”
“Jack—”
“Wally.”
After a moment or so the shadow of Wally shuffles away from my bedside. I close my eyes and I blank everything out of my mind and wallow in the wonderful relaxed tiredness that’s going to usher me into the arms of Morpheus, but like sometimes during National Service, particularly one time in winter, in Oswestry of all fucking places, I’d been on duty all night, just aching for my pit, sometimes nodding off for a half minute and dreaming I was actually between the blankets, only to jerk back into the reality of the ice cold—I remember, when I’d finally signed off, and actually got between the blankets, that I was buggered, really dead, but sleep wouldn’t come. The more I’d urged it, the less likely it got that it would come, and in the end, I’d dropped into a deep sleep about five minutes after my official kip was due to be up. And now it’s the same fucking question, how the hell am I going to get off listening to D’Antoni’s rasping and Wally’s thrashing about on the other camp bed? And coupled with that, I can hear Tina moving about in the bedroom beyond the bathroom, sorting her gear out. And then eventually she gets herself sorted and decides to use the bathroom, of which she makes full use for approximately three quarters of an hour. Bottles are placed, clinking on the ceramics, tissues are torn, taps are run, the toilet is flushed approximately twenty-five thousand times. After that she seems out of ideas and finally decides to go to bed and by that time I’ve given up on trying to sleep and I’m sitting in a cane chair, wide awake, smoking cigarettes, watching, in the half light, to pass the time, the slight un-symmetrical movements of D’Antoni’s open mouth as he inhales and exhales his sleep of the unjust. Finally even that loses its fascination so I get up from the chair and go over to the curtains and part them a little way. The mountains are now ochre—sharp in the dawning of the day. Boring, but ochre—sharp, nonetheless. I look at the nothingness. You can take in the whole panorama, from right to left and in between, there’s nothing in the landscape to relieve the monotony, to hold the attention.
I light another cigarette and at that point D’Antoni awakes. Although I have my back to him I’m made aware of the event by D’Antoni crying out at his moment of consciousness.
I turn and look at him.
He’s propped up on his elbows, one hand squirming across his chest for the butt of the automatic and his head is flicking from side to side like a fish trying to get a hook from its gills. His eyes are squinty from the amount of champagne he’s sorted but the lids are not bunged up enough to prevent his eyeballs swiveling about like Catherine Wheels, trying to spin to some kind of focus, to get him to some kind of reference point about who he is and where he is and why he’s who he is.
I smoke my cigarette and watch while D’Antoni co-ordinates himself, while he manages to release the automatic from its holster, while his eyes slow down and come to rest on his surroundings and his situation and finally on myself. And when his gaze has settled on me he holds the pose, as if by concentrating on me the reality of his situation will achieve a sharper definition.
All I do is to carry on smoking my cigarette. Eventually D’Antoni manages to speak.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “What’s happening?”
I don’t answer him. Let him sweat.
“What’s wrong?” he says again, only this time his words are accompanied by actions, those being to try to get off the camp bed, but of course he’s not sufficiently together to execute it properly so he and the camp bed go over in a swirl of sheets and cursing but no sooner has he hit the deck than he’s on his feet, still with a grip on his shooter, looking at me as if somehow I’m responsible for his falling out of bed.
He shakes a sheet from round his shoulders and advances towards me, arms at full slope.
“You bastard,” he says. “What goes on?”
I spread my hands.
“Nothing at all,” I tell him. “Not as far as I know.”
“What’s the idea of standing over by the window?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d see if the boring view might help.”
D’Antoni looks at me, then he backs off and sits down on the end of my bed.
“I feel terrible,” he says. “I feel like the cat’s crapped in my mouth.” He stands up and staggers towards the door.
“I got to get some sleep on a real bed,” he says.
He bangs against the door jamb and goes out onto the landing and somehow manages to avoid Wally’s cot and staggers off to find his bed. Suddenly I’m overcome with the sleepiness I’ve been waiting for, so to myself I say sod it all and I put out my cigarette and crawl into my pit and I don’t have to anticipate the feeling because the minute my head’s down my eyelids are heavy as flagstones and my mind begins swimming away from me, but unfortunately it doesn’t get far from the shallow end because the most God-almighty shrieking starts up as though it’s never going to stop, and that’s followed almost immediately by Wally cockling out of his camp bed and trying to decide what the noise is and where it’s coming from. As I’ve already sussed where it’s coming from and I’m totally awake again I get out of bed and walk through the bathroom and switch on the light and open the other adjoining door thus illuminating the scene in front of me, which is this: Tina, her shoulders on the bedroom floor, her legs thrown wide still up on the bed, and D’Antoni, his torso straddling Tina’s, one hand gripping her throat, the other grasping the automatic, thrusting it into her left breast, making it rather less symmetrically attractive than when I was struggling with her earlier on. But what does add a certain attraction to the scene is that Tina is stark naked, waving and kicking her legs at whatever parts of D’Antoni are accessible, at the same time trying to grasp whatever hair D’Antoni has left on his head; from where I’m standing she’d be better off going for the hairs on his chest. Now, coincidentally to my opening the bedroom door, Wally appears on the scene, and his reactions are very interesting because whereas before, when D’Antoni mentioned Dunkirk, Wally was prepared to have a go and put his head on the block, now that he’s confronted with the spectacle of his naked daughter, legs akimbo and bollock naked underneath the heaving form of an American mafioso, he hesitates, weighing the consequences in the balance, and by the time he’s decided he should act in the role of the father, other things have happened to cause him to take several steps backwards, away from the forward motion he’d decided to execute; the other things being, that when I opened the door, and the shaft of light illuminated D’Antoni, which coincided with Wally’s arrival on the scene, D’Antoni obviously came to the conclusion that the naked girl, the shaft of light, the swift appearance of two other figures, all put together added up to a set-up, and that had caused him to loose off a couple of imprecise shots from his automatic, resulting on three other things; Wally’s retreat, my slamming shut the bathroom door, and louder and more hysterical screaming from the girl.
“You mothers,” D’Antoni screeches. “You bastards, you set me up.”
A couple more random shots hit somewhere or other and I lean against the bathroom wall and close my eyes and open them again as if in that way I might get to a state of waking. But it doesn’t work; I’m still back in the current dream-like situation, and that’s underlined by the presence of Wally, who’s scuttled round from the landing and through my bedroom and now he’s framed in the bathroom door behind me.
“Jack,” he says, “the cunt’s bleeding barmy. He’s just bleeding barmy.”
D’Antoni’s voice filters through the woodwork.
“You think I’m stupid or something?” he shouts. “You think I don’t know? Hey?”
Another shot crackles from behind the door. The screaming from Tina is constant.
“Jack,” Wally says, “you got to do something. What’ll he do to Tina?”
I give Wally a look and then I call through the door.
“D’Antoni, listen. You’ve got it all wrong. Let me explain.”
D’Antoni laughs. Tina stops screaming. D’Antoni says: “You must think I’m really sweet.”
“Listen,” I tell him. “That’s Wally’s daughter. She turned up while you were asleep. You just got in the wrong bed.”
“You bet I did,” D’Antoni says.
“For fuck’s sake,” shouts Tina. “What in fuck’s name’s going on?”
“Shut up,” shouts Wally.
Now it’s my turn.
“D’Antoni, it’s all right. We didn’t know she was coming. Nobody did. Just leave off and listen to what we’re saying.”
Tina speaks.
“Get your bleeding hands off me.”
“Leave her alone,” Wally shouts.
Then there’s silence, because nobody appears to be able to think of anything else to say.
Time passes.
Then the bathroom door bursts open.
I don’t have to look behind me to know that Wally has disappeared into the safety of the darkness in my bedroom. D’Antoni is stark in the bathroom’s light, as though he’s just been overdeveloped in a photographer’s acid bath.
“All right,” he says. “Tell me again.”
His eyes are bulging and his face looks as though he’s experiencing maximum Gs, but apart from all that I know I’ll be preaching to the converted. Even so, I’d still rather do the polka on a stack of eggs, because the automatic is waving about like a stamen at pollination time.
“Look, it’s like I say,” I tell him. “She turned up while you were sacking it. You were well away so we didn’t bother to wake you up. All right?”
“Why’d she come?”
“She’s on her holidays. School’s out, and all that.”
“Why’s she come here?”
I shake my head.
“Wally’s her old man, is why. The caretaker. Perks. Got it?”
D’Antoni looks at me as if I’m a figment of his imagination, but nevertheless what I’ve said seems to reassure him somewhere at the back of his mind, wherever that may be. So when, as a result, the automatic drops to his side, I take him by the shirt and slam him against the wall and slap him around the face a couple of times and when that doesn’t have the desired effect either on him or on myself I give him a knee in the crutch and as he gags and jackknifes forward I give him a wide clenched one at the side of his head which sends him grasping at the shower curtains, but by the time he gets to them there’s no strength left in his fingers to clutch onto them with, because he’s unconscious, and unconscious is how he finishes up in the bottom of the shower, that state having been achieved by a little encouragement from the porcelain that has come into contact with his left temple.
After that has happened, nothing happens for a while.
Through the re-opened door, I can see that the girl is now totally on the floor, staring through into the lighted bathroom at the memory of the events that have just taken place. Her train of thought is broken by the appearance in her bedroom of Wally who even though the action is now over has taken the trouble to avoid the bathroom and has gone round via the landing.
“You all right, girl?” he says.
Tina looks at him.
“You all right?” he says again.
“What the bleeding hell’s going on?” says Tina.
“Never mind about that. You all right?”
“Never mind? Never bleeding mind? Christ. Bullets going off and I’m half strangled and never mind? God, I always knew you were involved with some barmy bastards, but this—I mean, I know it’s only your only daughter, and this kind of thing happens every day, but you might have tried to row me out of it.”
“I was about to but the bleeding shooter started going off, didn’t it?”
“Oh yes, it did, didn’t it? Look after Number One. Real fatherly instincts, those are.”
“I didn’t want to do anything to make things worse, did I?”
Tina laughs and stands up.
“You made things worse all your life. Why change at your age?”
Wally looks through into the bathroom and takes in what I’m taking in, which is not only the admirable character of the naked young lady in front of me.
“Look,” Wally says to her, “you just get some clothes on, will you?”
Tina looks at him.
“That’s all you can think of?” she says.
“Well, it ain’t right, is it?”
“Oh, fuck off,” she says.
Tina turns away from him and leans over the bed and starts straightening the covers.
“You what?” Wally says.
“You heard,” Tina says, not looking up from what she’s doing, but the next second she has to because Wally’s strode over to her and spun her round and hauled her off a couple round her ears. It really isn’t her night. But considering what’s happened to her so far she’s shown much character, and now instead of taking what Wally’s handing out she gives him a couple back. It surprises Wally no end, causing him to step back against the bed, and he has to sit down, very undignified. At the same time Tina walks away from the bed and into the bathroom, past me without looking at me, and through into my bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Wally gets up off the bed and comes steaming through after her but I stand in his way.
“Wally,” I say to him, “give me a hand with the geezer, will you?”
Wally looks at me. I bend over and start hauling D’Antoni off the bottom of the shower and of course Wally has to do the same. We carry D’Antoni through into Tina’s bedroom and dump him on the bed. Wally scratches his chest and looks down at D’Antoni.
“That’s bleeding torn it, ain’t it?” he says. “I mean, what the Christ’s he going to be like when he comes round?”
“You’ll find out,” I tell him.
“What you mean?”
“Because you’re going to sit here with him until he does.”
Wally looks at me.
“What you going to be doing?” he says.
“First of all I’m going to have a few words with your charmer of a daughter,” I tell him. “After that, I haven’t made my mind up.”
Wally gives me a different kind of look. I pat him on his face.
“Don’t worry, my old son,” I tell him. “I’d probably be too tired for that, anyway.”
I turn away from him and open the door to my bedroom and close it behind me.
The curtains have been drawn a little wider and now the dawn is bright enough to illuminate the fact that Tina is sitting in my bed, knees drawn up, looking out at the dawn light, smoking one of my cigarettes. As I close the door she inhales and the orange tip glows in the blueness of the room. The sound of the door closing doesn’t make her move in any way.
I walk round to the side of the bed where the cabinet is. She’s taken all my cigarettes out of the pack and they’re strewn all over the marble top and she’s using the pack as an ashtray, perched on top of her drawn-up knees. I take a cigarette from the cabinet top and pick up my lighter and light up. Although I’ve pushed through her line of vision she doesn’t waver from gazing out at the mountains. I put the lighter down on the marble.
“All right?” I ask her.
She looks up, blowing out smoke.
“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m bleeding smashing, I am.”
“What happened?”
“You saw what happened. Or do you want an action replay?”
I shake my head.
“No, I mean, I just wondered what he said when he stumbled in on you. Like, I imagine you were terrified, weren’t you?”
“No,” she says. “I wasn’t terrified: I thought it was you.”
I smile to myself.
“It’s just that the gentleman isn’t himself. He didn’t expect to find you in the bed. So he over-reacted.”
“How do you think he would have reacted if he’d have found what he wanted to find?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiles at me. There is a silence. Eventually she says: “I mean, who the fuck is he? What’s he want to go around acting like that for? Shooting bloody guns off.”
“He’s just staying here a few days. He’s been drinking. He didn’t know where he was.”
“So when he’s drinking he starts shooting. ’Course. Simple, really.” She stubs her cigarette out and leans back against the wall clasping her hands to the back of her neck, an action that displays her titties to extremely good effect. She looks me straight in the eye and says: “For a second or so I thought it might have been you.”
I look back at her and say nothing.
“You know, in the other bedroom,” she says.
“Yes,” she says.
“Why should you think a thing like that?”
She grins at me.
“You want me to tell you what you already know?” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“Come off it,” she says, still smirking away.
“You need your arse smacking,” I tell her.
“Promises, promises.”
I look at her and shake my head.
“I know Wally’s not the most perceptive geezer in the world,” I tell her, “but I don’t think even he believes the guff you gave him about why you’re here.”
“Why shouldn’t it be the truth?”
“No reason. Except that it isn’t.”
“So what is?”
“You’ve been slung out.”
“Oh yes? And why should a nice girl like me be thrown out of a place like that?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I mean, it’d have to be something pretty bad to get slung out of an art school these days, wouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I never did finish my thesis on Further Education.”
“Oh, you have heard there’s such a thing.”
“Vaguely.”
“And what about your education? When did that finish? Or did it ever start?”
“I learn something every day.”
She gives me the look my remark deserved.
“The one I expected was the one about being raised in a hard school,” she says.
I smile to myself and while I’m doing that there’s a knock on the other side of the bathroom door, followed by Wally calling my name in his low shifty voice.
“Jack?”
Immediately Tina says, in an urgent voice, loud enough for Wally to hear: “Quick, put your trousers on, it’s my old man.”
Then she falls over sideways and breaks up, face buried in the bedclothes. The bathroom door opens and Wally makes another entrance. This time he’s really torn until he sees his little girl’s been having him on.
“Yes, Wally?” I say to him.
“Er, it’s the geezer,” Wally says. “I think he’s stirring.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, I think he is.”
“Go and have another look, then.”
“Supposing he starts hauling off with his shooter?”
“Well you won’t have the bother of having to come back and tell me because I’ll hear it, won’t I?”
The girl’s still having hysterics into the bedclothes.
“I’ll knock seven kinds of shit out of you later on,” Wally says to her, turning back to the bedroom.
Tina sits up and wipes a tear from her eye.
“What a twit,” she says. “But then, he always was.”
I lean over and grab her by the wrist.
“Yes, and he’s your old man and he was always that, too,” I tell her. “So show a bit of respect.”
She shakes her wrist free. “Respect for him? You’re joking. Let him earn it. He’s been like this all his bloody life, a frightened little crawler. He makes me sick.”
I grab her wrist again.
“He’s still your old man.”
“In name only. He’s here all the time, isn’t he, and I’ve always lived with my auntie Lillian, so what sort of a family feeling does that generate?”
“He done what he had to.”
“No he never. He didn’t have to come out here. He came out because he wanted to. He couldn’t believe his luck, dropping in this one. I didn’t even enter into it. He gets himself pensioned off lovely and I can bleeding well whistle as far as he’s concerned.”
I let go of her wrist. I have to admit that there isn’t a word she’s said that isn’t true and that my opinions and her opinions of her old man are approximately on the same level.
“Anyway,” she says, “where do you come off telling me how I should carry on?”
I pick up the cigarette packet and stub my cigarette out.
“Forget it,” I tell her.
“Full of the old-style values, aren’t we?” she says. “Who did you vote for last time?”
“I said forget it.”
I light another cigarette and go and sit myself carefully down on the edge of D’Antoni’s camp bed. Tina looks at me.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I don’t answer her. Instead I lift my feet off the floor and lie down on the camp bed and carry on smoking and do some more ceiling staring.
“You going to stay there all night?” Tina asks me.
“There isn’t exactly a lot of it left,” I tell her.
Wally’s voice drifts in from the far bedroom.
“Jack?”
“What, for fuck’s sake.”
“I don’t think he is coming round.”
I close my eyes and don’t answer.
Apparently Wally has no other information for me.
“Oh, well,” Tina says, “I think I’ll get my head down. If you see what I mean.”
There’s the sound of her sliding down between the sheets and making exaggerated snuggling noises, soft and feminine, at definite odds with the character that has so far been demonstrated. Just goes to show that having no parents to speak of can’t always be bad, I think to myself. I finish my cigarette and stub it out in the packet. Then I lie down on my back again.
The snuggling sounds continue from my bed and it’s making me feel, well, ready for sleep, I can tell you. In the end I say to her: “Leave it out, will you?”
“Mmm?”
“Just tell me what it is you particularly want leaving out and that’s what I’ll do.”
“Leave it out.” I clench my teeth. “Listen,” I say.
“I’m listening.”
“Look, forget it. Just go to sleep and forget it.”
“I tell you what: I promise I’ll forget it if you promise to forget it. Do you think you’ll be able to do that?”
“Remember what I said about smacking your backside?”
“Never stopped thinking about it.”
“Well don’t think it’d be as pleasant as you might imagine, I can tell you.”
“You don’t know about that, do you?”
“What you been studying, for Christ’s sake? Do your thesis on Medieval Flagellant Engravings, did you?”
“Maybe I would if—”
“If you hadn’t got the elbow.”
This time she doesn’t answer. Instead she does a shuffle in the sheets and then all is stillness and silence and thank Christ for that. I lie there for ten minutes, tense, just waiting for nothing in particular, just something else that’ll stop me having at least half an hour’s kip, like my pyjamas catching fire or D’Antoni shooting Wally dead, or the whole fucking villa sliding off the top of the mountain and disappearing down the chasm. The ten minutes extend to fifteen and I’m just beginning to believe in Fairy Godmothers when of course it has got to be Wally who shatters my illusions, his voice materializing above my head like something from a fake seance.
“It’s no good,” he says. “I can’t bleedin’ stand it.”
I don’t say anything.
“It’s like keeping a flaming vigil, only you know at some point the corpse is bleedin’ well going to wake up.”
I close my eyes.
“I mean,” Wally says.
Very quickly I get up and the cot tips over and I walk out of the bedroom and downstairs to the enormous lounge and I cross it and part the curtains and slide open the windows and walk out onto the patio. The sunlight air has warmth in it even this early and the trace of heat seems to accentuate the silence of the mountains. I walk across the flagstones to the retaining wall that separates the neatness of the patio from the jagged mess of the chasm. I sit on the wall and light a cigarette and look across the breadth of the island to the uniform blueness of the sea, stretching to the horizon, a great big nothing.
Eventually Wally sidles out onto the patio and makes it over to me with the minimum of movement, hoping that I’ll be unaware of his presence until he’s close enough to engage me with whatever he wants to engage me with. Which is of course, the usual.
“Jack,” he says. “You got to stay. You just got to.”
I blow smoke into the still air. There is no way I would stay on account of Wally or his brat or D’Antoni due to the way those bastards in London have set me up. But unfortunately I’ve been set up in another way. And that is by Audrey. When she turns up at the hold and I’m not around to greet her in my own inimitable way she’ll wait a while, all right, she’ll wait because she’s a patient bird but when she’s tired of being patient, she’s the most impatient bird you’d be unlucky enough to make impatient, in fact she’s like something out of the Snake Pit, no regard whatsoever for anything or anybody, and after a while she’d make it up here to the villa and get Wally to tell her the story and Wally, when the wrath of Gerald and Les is pointed in his direction because of my departing, is likely to help himself out of it a little bit by mentioning the nature of Audrey’s visit and of her enquiries and what with her in any case supposedly in Hamburg drumming up talent; whatever way you look at it I’d be smiling out of my neck and wearing a red shirt, no trouble; however safe I tried to make myself there’d be no getting away from the razor’s edge, and I should know, I’ve ordered up more than a couple such retribution parties on behalf of Gerald and Les. And so, until Audrey’s arrival, when I can explain the situation to her and row us both out of it, which will be in approximately four days’ time, I will just have to swallow and sit in the fucking sun with this pantomime act and not only just swallow, swallow in front of a brat, a half-arse and a madman.
“Jack,” Wally says again.
I flip my cigarette away into the chasm and turn to look at Wally.
“A couple of days,” I tell him. “I’ll give it a couple of days. But on one condition. You keep out of my fucking way, and when you are in any fucking way, you keep your fucking trap shut, except maybe when it’s to tell me dinner is served, all right?”
My reply makes Wally look as if he’s just had a face lift.
“Christ, thanks, Jack,” he says. “I really mean it, I really do.”
“Yes, I know,” I tell him. “You can show your appreciation by fetching that camp bed out here and you can follow that by bringing me a Bloody Mary.”
“Right,” says Wally. “Right you are, Jack. No bother.”
Wally scuttles back inside and wrestles the camp bed out through the sliding windows.
“Where’d you like it, Jack?” he says.
“On the floor,” I tell him.
Wally makes a production out of appreciating my very funny joke and says: “Shall I put it in the shade?”
“Anywhere you like.”
“I’ll put it in the shade.”
I don’t say anything. Wally puts it in the shade. Then he goes back inside and a couple of minutes later he comes out with the Bloody Mary all nice and iced up, and he brings it over the wall, by which time I’ve lit up another cigarette. Wally hands me the drink and says: “There you are, Jack; you’ll like that one. Dead right this time of day, that is.”
I take the drink from him and take a sip. Wally hovers where he is.
“Anything else I can get you?” he says. “I even got bacon and eggs in the freezer, none of your Spanish muck, you can have anything you want.”
“Not now, Wally.”
“Well, all you have to do is shout. Any time.”
“Wally,” I say to him, “you like it out here? I mean, do you ever get a bit lonely, like?”
“Yeah, I like it, it’s great. I mean, I’m my own guv’nor, in’ I, and I have fuck all to do except when Gerald and Les come out; I mean, it’s a doddle. ’Course, I sometimes get a bit pissed off with my own company, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“I thought you must do,” I say to him. “I suppose that’s why you haven’t stopped mouthing it since I walked in the door.”
Wally actually looks as if I’ve hurt his feelings.
“I believe the L.S.O. are looking for a good jawbone soloist,” I tell him. “I should apply if I was you.”
Wally starts a game of pocket billiards with himself. I take another drink and look across the island again. Shining white hotels are like reverse negatives against the deep blue of the sea.
“You get down there much?” I ask Wally.
“Couple of times a week, maybe. Shopping, mainly.”
“Go down there for a bit of the other, do you, or do you send out for it, like to the Chinese Chippie?”
“You know me, Jack. Never was strong on all that. Lot of trouble to go to, all that.”
“Oh yes?”
“Well, maybe now and then. I mean, I can fix you up, no bother.”
“How do you fix yourself up?”
“Well, there’s this club, the Picador, you know, the one Gerald and Les got some money in. Biggest in Palma, that is. Very sprauncey, except for the block bookings from the four organizations that make it a bit untidy, but you also get the yacht class in from the harbour, film stars and that. It’s fronted for the investors by a geezer called Johnni Kristen, right fucking name that is; I believe he started out in life choreographing some of them post-war, tat-girlie shows what used to tour all over the place. Anyway now he acts as if he’s a cross between Lew Grade and Paul Raymond. Majorca’s Premier Impressario. A big celebrity.”
“I didn’t know those two had money over here,” I say to Wally.
Wally doesn’t say anything, wondering what sort of shit he’s put his foot in this time, and while he’s considering that I’m reflecting on those two bastards and their never-ending capacity for deviousness; the point being, they neither of them have told Audrey about it, she being a partner, because if they had, I’d know about it, as Audrey transmits all relevant financial arrangements to me sufficient unto the day when the two of us become the non-natural heirs to the Fletcher Brothers estate. And my reflections lead me to ruminate on how many other little safety deposits the Brothers Grimm have stacked away the length and breadth of the western hemisphere. Well, I think to myself, come the day, the spare sets of books shouldn’t be too difficult to locate. It’s just that it boils me up that those fuckers, those Mastermind finalists of Brewer Street, should manage to score off me, Jack the fucking lad, their human roll of sellotape, the geezer that keeps them and their operation from falling apart like so much Hong Kong merchandise; all right, so in a manner of speaking it comes under the heading of enlightened self-interest, but it stokes me to think of them thinking they’re smarter than Audrey without whom they’d never even have had a backyard, let alone an estate.
Wally is still standing there wondering how much he might be figuring in my thoughts.
“So?” I say to Wally.
“What?” he says.
“You were talking about the other out here,” I say to him. “And how you get it.”
Once more Wally’s relief is visible. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “That. Well, I mean, it’s not generally for me, it’s mainly when Mr. and Mr. Fletcher come over, when they’re entertaining, like, or not. What happens is they go down the Picador for a knees-up and bring back some of the cast, you know, the dancers as is supposed to be Spanish what in actual fact comes from Ilford, those of them who aren’t averse to earning the odd hundred nicker or so, in whatever manner, or maybe Johnni Kristen’s just got on the blower and he sends them up in a Volkswagen bus and the same sort of events transpire.”
I don’t say anything.
“Why, you thinking along those lines, Jack?” Wally says.
I shake my head.
“It’s no trouble. All I have to do is lift the phone.”
I give him a look.
“The phone’s off, isn’t it?” I say to him.
“Oh, yeah, I was forgetting. In this case, I’d just nip down in the Merc and have a word, personal like. I could go anytime you wanted.”
I don’t answer him.
“ ’Course, there’s the Blues. Personally speaking they don’t bother me. They got it done out like a warehouse down in the basement. Which of course is what it is. There must be about ten thousand down there, in fifties, what they ship out and replenish from time to time. Even at a tenner a time you can work it out yourself.”
“I know the economics of the film industry,” I tell him.
“Yeah, course, well you would, wouldn’t you.”
“Yes, I would.”
“Got five hundred shipped in last week. And five hundred out.”
“You pass the long winter evening exercising your right arm, then do you?”
Wally actually blushes.
“No, not really, just occasionally run a few through, make sure there’s not a dicey batch so there’s no come back from the retailers.”
“Do me a favour,” I tell him. “Those goods always come over mint condition. Ray Creasey sees to that.”
Wally shuffles about a bit. I smile at him.
“I got you sorted,” I say to him. “I know why you don’t bother pulling stuff for yourself from the Picador. You prefer it off the wrist, so there’s no sweat in case you can’t score your performance full marks, eh Wal? That’s why you don’t mind being on your own. You got the Blues to keep company with. Isn’t that right, Wal?”
By now, Wally’s as scarlet as Reggie Eames’s shirt after it’d been discovered he’d taken a dead bleeding liberty. But I consider a little bit of jovial sadism isn’t exactly out of order considering what I’ve had to put up with all through the night.
“I bet you run them all day long, don’t you Wal. That’s why your tan isn’t all it should be, eh, Wal?”
“Leave it out, Jack, all right?” Wally says.
I laugh.
“Yeah, all right, Wal, I’ll leave it out.” I hand him the empty glass. “Just get me another one of these, my old son. No, tell you what, mix me a jug up, will you, there’s a good old boy.”
Wally takes the glass and registers the fact that he’s sulking by going back inside without saying anything. I get up off the wall and walk over to the camp bed and lie down on it. The shade is cool but not cool enough for me to be able to lie down and go to sleep in it; a hundred days out at Cleethorpes as a kid has vaccinated me permanently against goose pimples. Wally reappears with the jug and drags a wrought-iron table across the flagstones to the side of the camp bed.
“There you are,” he says, still a trifle formal.
“Gracias,” I say to him.
This time he doesn’t hover about and earhole me about how shit-scared he is about D’Antoni or how delighted he is that I’m staying on or anything like that. He just pisses off back inside and almost immediately, without availing myself of the Bloody Mary, I am off up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire, as my old mother used to enjoy saying to me.