Breakfast on Pluto (7 page)

As I said to Silky – which he wasn’t called then, of course! – moving a little bit closer to him, and organizing a little nose-crinkling: ‘You’re nice!’

‘You really think so?’ he says then. And I nod. Simply because it was true. Neat suit, steel-grey hair and not a single speck of dirt on his fingernails. Or anywhere else for that
matter. ‘Do you like music?’ he says then and I said: ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I absolutely adore music.’ Then he looks at me and smiles. ‘Wonderful. So do I. So already we have
something in common.’ I have to tell you – I was really beginning to like Silky. And when it was Vic Damone and ‘Stay With Me’ that came over the airwaves just then –
well! I must have jumped a little or shrieked perhaps, because he started laughing and said: ‘You like that, don’t you?’ as I dropped my eyes and replied: ‘Yes.’

‘Quite old-fashioned for a boy your age, aren’t you?’ – to which I once more eagerly replied: ‘Oh, yes!’

‘So that’s another thing we have in common!’ he said, and gave my thigh a little squeeze. ‘For I love Vic Damone.’

As we sped along that night – going north but of course I didn’t know that then, I hadn’t the faintest clue! – I just cannot describe how happy I was! All of a sudden I
seemed to see the inhabitants of Tyreelin, all massed there in the square between the creamery and the petrol pumps, obligingly leaning forward, the better for me to inspect their individual
features.

‘Remember us?’ they said but what could I honestly do only shake my head? ‘Sorry,’ I said and were they sad. But, as I told them, ‘That’s life! We all now
must move on!’

‘Yes! True love!’ Silky was saying. ‘That’s what we’re all after! And Vic – boy does that man know how to sing about it. You reckon, my little
friend?’

‘I reckon,’ I said, all huggy-warm.

‘And Nat King Cole. “The Girl From Ipanema” – hmm?’

‘Mm,’ I purred.

‘You that little girl? You a little girl from Ipanema maybe?’

We laughed.

‘It’s so lovely to have met you,’ he says then and looks at me all glittery-eyed.

When I look back on it, I really have to hand it to Silks. To listen to him you would have thought he was the sort of person who started drenching the place with tears anytime anything remotely
upsetting came on the cinema screen, for whom the abuse of a dumb animal was a tragedy of awesome proportions. Which perhaps it was of course! Just because you get a kick out of strangling people
doesn’t mean that another side of you can’t be humane and kind and sensitive – perhaps even more so indeed.

In any case, that was all I saw in him as on we cruised with Vic still singing and the whole warm London night surging in through the open window. Crayon neon all about and jiggy-sparked inside!
With swells of emotion that went right through you as you thought: ‘At the end of this journey, something special is going to happen. My new lover is going to pull the handbrake and when we
look out the window we will see something that will look like a shining light. Then he’ll just turn to me and say: ‘We’ve reached it. We’re home.’

Which he did – turn to me, I mean – just as soon as he pulled the handbrake. But it wasn’t to say anything about love or home, I’m afraid! Although at first I thought it
was, because his eyes seemed to have something close to deep affection in them, which made me feel real yummy. Especially when he said again: ‘So you like Vic?’

‘Oh, yes!’ I replied. ‘I really like him.’

‘Why?’ he said and my first inclination was to chuckle because we both knew why, but then because it was so exciting just thinking about it again, I sort of shivered and closed my
eyes as words just wriggled out of me and I said: ‘Because he knows so well what it’s like to be in love and what it can do to two people, when they’re just dancing there and
everyone’s gone home and all you can hear is the sound of the city night as it slips now towards the dawn . . .’

‘Take off your clothes,’ he said then and I have to confess the abruptness of it did take me aback a little. But I took them off anyway, as neatly and decorously as I could –
because that was what he wanted: (‘Take them off – but not in a vulgar way,’ he said) – and laid them on the seat beside me. Did I say he liked that? He couldn’t take
his eyes off them – that little piles of clothesies sitting there (Oxfam glam-rock cast-off Department, Oxford Street, I’m afraid! O how my fortunes had changed! But which were about to
improve – I knew it! For without a doubt my newfound friend would give me lots and lots of cash with which to take myself to Biba’s fab boutique, there to pick and choose with
glee!)

And was about that particular development – re: fortunes! – Sweet Puss soon proved right! But not for the better, dreary! For no sooner had I my gold chain removed and my long brown
hair tossed back than he had slipped his hand in his pocket and removed his silky string – although if it was indeed from that fabric fashioned, I could not say for sure. All I can accurately
state is that it was a ligature of some sort, soft but not so when about your Adam’s apple it’s drawn tight as it will go. For some reason, at that precise moment, when he began to
strangle me, I saw Charlie standing there tossing back her scarf and going: ‘I want to read you a poem. It’s by Adrian Henri from Liverpool. It goes like this: “I want to paint
two thousand dead birds crucified on a background of night . . .”’

As I’m sure you can imagine – each and every one of those silly birds I saw as Silky String pulled tight. ‘So you believe in love?’ he was saying – hammering away
at his tootle now, of course, into the bargain! ‘So you believe in true love? Well – let’s have some of that! Let’s have some true love, then – true fucking love,
let’s have it!’ He released me for a moment to turn up the music – the theme from ‘A Summer Place’ now, would you believe! – and it was now playing so loud I
cannot understand how someone didn’t hear or see us. I suppose he knew the area well – I can remember Hammersmith Bridge in the distance, but it was obviously some sort of disused
industrial estate – and he knew what he would and wouldn’t be able to get away with. With the little bit of sight that was left to me in those bulging eyes, there seemed to be a dump
outside the window. I could have sworn a seagull walked past on top of it. But then maybe that was one of Charlie’s imaginary birds. ‘All the things I’m going to paint,’ she
said, as Silky forced his tongue inside my mouth. The music was absolutely deafening now and why a passing snatch of
South Pacific
came into my mind just at that precise moment I to this day
do not know why but it did and then – the moment in fact he twisted that stupid fucking string around my neck again – it
really
was Mitzi Gaynor who was coming across those
airwaves and perhaps because it seemed so beautiful and pure, it made me feel ashamed. It was as if she was standing there on the beach with her hair pinned back and her hands on her hips going:
‘Patrick – why?’ How I got a grip of his ear but once I did I sank my teeth into the flesh as hard as I could. What made getting away easier was the fact, of course, that his
other organ was still pronging away.

In my mind I called to Charlie: ‘You want to paint: “One blood-pumping liar crucified against a background of refuse!”’ Which was what he was now, yelping as he stumbled
out of the car, howling: ‘You fucking Irish bitch! I’ll murder you! You facking Irish facking filth! My eyes! I’m facking blinded!’

Which was lies – he wasn’t blinded. I hadn’t connected properly with my nails.

What on earth they must have thought, poor drivers, looking out through their windscreens to see me pulling on my clothes in the middle of a motorway, with the eyes still bulging out of my head.
All I was worried about was that it was going to turn out like the horror stories where you leave one madman and climb into a car with Mr Nicey who’s going to save you – except it
transpires he’s madder than the first one!

Fortunately, however, it didn’t turn out like that. He was as nice as pie, the driver, all concerned – and even drove me to the hospital. Except that as soon as he dropped me off, I
ran like fuck away out of there when it occurred to me they would probably ask me lots of questions like: ‘Where do you work?’ For somehow I just don’t think: ‘The Meat
Rack, Piccadilly Circus’ was the sort of thing they liked to hear!

As it happened, my injuries turned out not to be all that serious – except for the shock, I have to say! Why, for days after it, I didn’t know whether my legs were made of string or
straw or what. One thing for sure – they were not made of flesh! I felt so high I could have reached up and popped a planet or two in my pocket. My feet – one minute twelve inches long,
the next expanding half the length of the street, for heaven’s sake! I’d be walking along, just whistling to myself and all of a sudden I’d see him – Silky! Like some eerie
version of Robert Redford, standing staring into a shop window or checking his watch before jumping into a taxi. I’d have been running for over half an hour before it would occur to me:
‘Perhaps it wasn’t Silky after all!’ I would really like to be able to say that, like everything else, time began to pass and eventually my wounds they healed. But, I’m
afraid, getting throttled by the likes of Silky is not something you get over quite so easy. Particularly when you have to go on earning your living and are afraid every time some tootle-merchant
puts his lips to your ear or says, ‘I love you!’ it’s just a pretext and very shortly you will find yourself lying on a dump somewhere. To give you some idea – before I took
up my position at the railings opposite Eros, I was a little over nine stone in weight – and by the time two months’ hard work at my post had elapsed, I was barely over seven! I began
to give serious consideration to the possibility that one day I might at those very railings simply expire and that the end of it all would be! Much of this I attribute to police harassment, of
course – not forgetting my old friends the IRA. I was really beginning to get fed up with them and their antics. For now, a night never seemed to pass without: ‘
Clear the area! We
would appeal to you to clear the area!
’ And then – ‘Do you have ID? Let’s ’ave a look at you, Pat!’ Look you up and down then, winking at their mates, giving
you the old mince mince, hand-on-the-hip routine. ‘Lots of little fairy boys like you back home then, Pat? Not just murdering bombers then, after all!’

With which you could not remonstrate, otherwise lose your job!

But it was sad. There could be no doubt about it. Once, an hour’s tootling in a parked car in Great Portland Street just about ended, again it came a-crackling:
‘
Clear the area! Please clear the area!
’ But it was too late, and although I arrived just for the end of it, it still was very like what you’d imagine the end of the world
to be. A beacon on an ambulance revolving blue as the trollied dead were ferried out and a woman in some tattered rags kept laughing at a joke. Except nobody was telling her one. ‘Look at me!
Look at me in my rags!’ she kept saying. Radios were spitting like fat in a frier and on the telly we could see ourselves. The end of the world starring P. Pussy and all of England. How many
bodies, I really couldn’t say. ‘String ’em up, the Irish cants, each and every farking one of ’em!’, I heard a voice beside me say.

I liked to sit in the all-night cafés because it would keep you warm and with luck you might find business. On nights like that, you couldn’t taste the coffee. You’d just be
feeling like dog’s dirt upon a pavement, with well-dressed people standing over it and going: ‘Who on earth left that horrible mess there?’

Some weeks after the business with Silky, I was sitting there in my usual place, staring out into the night with its Clockwork Orange gangs and skinheads and hippy dealers falling in and out of
Ward’s pub and the theatres disgorging themselves and the SKOL sign flashing on and off when all of a sudden I realized that I could smell myself! And it wasn’t just the smell of dog
dirt – it was the smell of a dysentery-ridden mongrel. No matter how I tried to dispel it, it still kept getting stronger. It became so foul it utterly swamped me. ‘You’re going
to spill that coffee, mate,’ the owner said to me and it was only then I realized there was a little puddle of it all over the formica, ticking in small drops on to my stinky, balding velvet
loons.

It was in there I met my darling Berts – O yummy Bertie, I love you so, do it to me again! – although what took him in there only God in His heaven will ever know!
I mean, it was the type of place where all sorts of night-time flotsam and jetsam made their way – including many countrymen of my own, but most definitely not chiffon-sporting Pussies!
– who would while away the hours crushing cans of Holsten and alternating between blowing up England and vowing that they didn’t agree with the deaths of civilians. Then they’d
start crying when Philomena Begley or Larry Cunningham came on the jukebox telling stories about orphans and teddy bears. Sometimes they even danced with each other and one would most definitely be
prompted to consider: ‘Perhaps there are more pussies who frequent this estabishment than might at first appear!’ Although it must be said and firmly insisted upon that tootles did not
truly attend with interest of any depth until yum yum Mama songs they lit the night. ‘One has hair of silvery grey, the other has hair of gold. One is my mother, God rest her, I love her, and
the other is my sweetheart.’ Tears down all those ruddy cheeks now coursing! ‘I love my mammy!’ Of course you do, my darling dear, but then do not we all? But we don’t break
up an entire café over it! As Donegal Danny did once. ‘I’ll break this fucking place in two! I’ll bury it in rubble if you say that I don’t love her! I loved her more
than anyone that ever walked this earth! You hear me? You fucking hear me?’

And then in the plate of chips go sob sob sob. Poor Donegal Danny. Poor lonely man. His mama but bare bones upon the mountain!