'Go on,' I said. 'It's not my money really. Buy a present for your girlfriend. Or your mother.'
'Now you take it easy now,' said Felix.
The black case lay on the bed beside the white box. I tugged the ribbon and lifted the lid and heard myself give a harsh shout of anger and rejection and probably shame. I tore it to pieces with my bare hands. Then I stood in the centre of the room thinking, whoops, hold it, hold on. But there were a good few tears backed up my tracks and now was as bad a time as any. Out it all came. I'll tell you what my present was and I think you'll understand. There was no message inside, only a plastic lady, veal-pale, moist-looking, with open grin.
You know, I've been told that I don't like women. I do like women. I think chicks are cool. I've been told that men don't like women, period. Oh yeah? Who does then? Because women don't like women.
Sometimes life looks very familiar. Life often has that familiar look in its eyes. Life is all vendetta, conspiracy, strong feeling, roused pride, self-belief, belief in the justice of its tides and floods.
Here is a secret that nobody knows: God is a woman. Look around! Of course She is.
4
ABOVE THE entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice. Haven't they got a better one? Did he really look like that all the time? You'd have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive. The beaked and bum-fluffed upper lip, the oafish swelling of the jawline, the granny's rockpool eyes. And that rug? Isn't it a killer? I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.
'Here, Fat Vince,' I said,'—what did you have for your breakfast this morning?'
'Me? I had a soused herring for my breakfast this morning.'
'Lunch?'
Tripe.'
'And what are you going to have for your dinner?'
'Brains.'
'Fat Vince, you're a sick man.'
Fat Vince is beer-crate operative and freelance bouncer at the Shakespeare. He's been in and out of this place every day for thirty-five years. So have I, in my head anyway. I was born upstairs, after all. He sipped his beer. Fat.Vince looks like shit too, and so does his son Fat Paul... I have a feeling for Fat Vince, partly because he's a fellow heart-sufferer. His heart keeps attacking him, as mine will attack me one day. Fat Vince has a feeling for me also, I reckon. Every couple of months he takes me aside and, his breath sweet with trapped drink, asks me how I am. No one else does this. No one. He talks to me about my mother sometimes. Fat Vince is a widower too.
His wife died from being too lower class. She wasn't up to it. My mother, she just entered a mysterious decline. I used to get into bed with her after school. I could feel her falling, dividing. Homesick for America. Too much Barry Self. Fat Vince doubles as the popular and permissive assistant-manager of a snooker hall in Victoria. He has a little scullery down there, where he cooks his mad grub. Fat Paul bounces and sharks and fills the pie-warmer. On the number-one table, the cue cleaving his chin, he hunkers down on the cush to draw his bead on the bone balls... Soon after my mother died Fat Vince took my dad out in a famous fight, by the gents' in the alley when the Shakespeare was young.
'That's real food, son,' said Fat Vince. 'You wouldn't know — spent your whole life in a fucking pub. Give you a bag of crisps, you think you're in heaven.'
'Here, you know Loyonel,' said Fat Paul.
'Yeah,' said Fat Vince.
Now Fat Vince isn't royalty but he speaks with a certain slot-mouthed restraint. Not Fat Paul — Fat Paul, with his full-breasted bulk, his impassive sloped slab of a face, his parched pub rug, and the cruel blond eyebrows which give the eyes themselves the glint of a veteran ferret who has seen it all in the hare-traps and rat-pits. Fat Paul, I would say, has few anxieties about his accent. He doesn't fudge or smudge. Every syllable has the clarity of threat. You could never do that voice justice, but here goes.
'I seen him in the street Sunday,' said Fat Paul. 'I said — Phwore! You just had a curry? He said, "Nah. Had a curry Froyday." I said— what you have today then? "Free spoyce pizzas and two Choynese soups." He's only on antiboyotics as it is, for this zit on his armpit and his impetoygo. Next day I seen him down the transport club. You know... they got a machine down there, Dad, that sells chips. Chips' Fat Paul still seemed to be reeling at this development. 'Fucking great tank full of gunge, once a mumf some bloke comes along and pours more fat down the funnel. Firry pee a punnet. Loyonel, he's there, leaning on the machine and stuffing himself sick. And these chips, I tell you, ah is fucking disgusting. Undescroybable. He's half way frew his forf punnet, he turns to me and says he can't fink why he has all these troubles with his skin!'
'He's fortunate to be alive,' said Fat Vince, 'eating what he eats.'
'Seen the gut on him?'
'His father died at fifty-one. On a diet for five years, he just got fatter. Then they found out he was eating his diet and his normal food. What he put away you wouldn't want to think about. When Eva came back she hid his teeth, but he splodged it all up and ate it anyway. He had a bit of money too.'
'Money,' said Fat Paul pensively, 'is not worf two bob, is it, without your fuckin elf.'
The French, they say, live to eat. The English, on the other hand, eat to die. I took my pint to the bar, and scored a bag of crisps — shrimp-and-rollmop flavour — and a sachet of Pork Scrunchies. I turned, eating these, and watched the people. No doubt about it, I'm not a badlooking guy when I hang out at the Shakespeare. I may not rate that high among Fielding and the filmstars, but in here I'm a catch. These working-class women, they're like a sheep trial. It obviously takes it out of you, being working class. There's a lot of wear and tear involved. And pubs can't help. I turned again and leaned on the panelled bar, flanked by the heraldic street-signs of the beer-pull logos, the tureen-sized plastic ashtrays, the furry, nippled mats that imitate wetness even when they're dry. Tacked to the square wooden pillar was the hand-written pub-grub bill of fare, with its obsessive permutations of pie-mash and fry-up, the ands and ors underlined, the "coffee" and "tea" in their exotic inverted commas. For a while I stared into the clockface of an antique charity-box. Let the Friends of St Martin's Hospital Tell Your Fortune. You put in a coin, a wand twirls, and a brief selection of perfunctory destinies is on offer. I surveyed the options: Don't get Gout, Stick to Stout. Luck on the Pools. You'll have Joy, Your next a Boy ... Nothing forbidding there. And I fear all portents. If the Friends of St Martin's Hospital had been peddling rug-loss, say, or bonk-famine, then they could fend for themselves. I slipped ten pee into the slot and the coin dropped with a contented click. The wand twirled: Money is On the Way. I slipped in another: Beware of False Advice. All right, it's a deal. I looked up, and the wobbly house-of-horrors mirror slipped its planes: the glass door opened, my father stared out and then gestured encouragingly, as if from a touchline. So I ducked in under the trap.
'Hi, Dad,' I said. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a white silk scarf. He's got a good rug, my dad, silvery and plentiful. I wouldn't mind looking like that when I'm his age. Actually, I wouldn't mind looking like that now. I wouldn't have minded looking like that five years ago, come to think of it, or even ten. It's the clock, the ticker. My heart's not right.
'Don't call me that,' he said with a flinch. 'We're friends. Call me Barry. Now,' he said, placing a creaky arm across my shoulders as he led me through to the parlour, 'I want you to meet Vron.'
'Vron?' He's doing it with robots now, I thought. He halted me with a tug of my hair.
'Yeah. Vron,' he said. 'Now you behave.'
Vron sounded bad enough when I said it. My father has trouble pronouncing his r's, owing to some palate fuck-up or gob-gimmick. Vron sounded a good deal worse when he said it.
The parlour had come on a long way since I was a boy. Now, it was close with money. The ribbed and pimpled gas fire in whose angle-poise heat I used to dress myself for school had been supplanted by a black eggbasket of counterfeit coal. The granny table where I ate my toast was now a cocktail cabinet, with studded plastic, three high stools, a Manhattan skyline of siphons and shakers. Vron reclined on a dramatic sofa of white corduroy. She was a pale brunette of comfortable build, my age. I had seen her before somewhere.
'Pleased to meet you,' I said.
'I've heard so much about you, John,' said Vron.
'Vron's a very happy girl today,' said my father huskily. 'Aren't you, my lovely?'
Vron nodded.
'It's a very special day for my Vron. Show him, Vron.'
Vron sat up, tightening the folds of her kaftan. She reached under the coffee-table and produced a pornographic magazine called Debonair... Now I know my pornographic magazines: Debonair belonged to the cheaper range, targeted at the manual worker's handjob, with many a salacious housewife or spotty-bummed Swede twisting herself in and out of chain-store underwear. 'Sit down, John,' she said, and rubbed the seat beside her with her palm.
Wetting her fingertips, Vron plucked at the pages. With a sigh that was almost a gurgle of gratification, she found the slippery spread. She laid it on my lap in a soft caress. My father sat down too. I felt their arms on my shoulders and their ripe, expectant, human faces very close to mine.
I flattened the mag out in front of me. From the right-hand page Vron's face stared me in the eye. Across her bare throat was the legend "VRON" — again the double quotes with their exotic, their impossible promise. 'Go on, John,' I heard Vron whisper. I turned the page. There was Vron, in the usual silky bonds and tapes, doing all the things that these chicks are paid to do. I turned the page. 'Slowly, John,' I heard Vron whisper. Vron on a steel chair, with a heavy breast in either fist. Vron lying with back arched and legs raised on a tousled white carpet. Vron stretched out on the haunches of a drophead Hyena. Vron crouched over a flat mirror. I turned the page. 'There,' I heard Vron whisper. The final double-spread disclosed Vron on her knees, her gartered rump hoisted towards camera, splaying the busy cleft with magenta-bladed fingers. Now I recognized her: Veronica, the talented stripper, here at the Shakespeare.
Vron started to cry. My father gazed at me manfully. I believe there was a tear or two in his eyes also.
'I'm ... I'm so proud,' said Vron.
My father inhaled richly and rose to his feet. He slapped a hand on the cocktail console. He said explanatorily, 'Pink champagne. Well, it's not every day, is it? Come on Vron! Who's a silly then? Here's looking at you, my love.' He flexed his nose indulgently. 'There you go, John.'
'Vron? Barry?' I said. '— Cheers.'
——————
I drove home in my Fiasco, which, apart from the faulty cooling system, the recurring malfunction with the brakes and power-steering, and a tendency to list violently to the left, seems to be running fairly reliably at present. At least it starts more often than not, on the whole. I don't think Selina exercises the Fiasco much when I'm in the States, and of course Alec Llewellyn has no use for it, now that he's locked up twenty-four hours a day... The ride from Pimlico to Portobello took well over ninety minutes and it was gone midnight when I beached the car on a double yellow line outside my sock. Why did it take well over ninety minutes? A rush-hour style traffic jam at 12 p.m. Something to do with the fucking Royal Wedding. For the best part of an hour I sat swearing in a blocked tunnel under Westway. The Fiasco was overheating. I was overheating. Each car was crammed with foreigners and grinning drunks. The tunnel's throat swelled like emphysema with fags and fumes and foul mouths. Then we edged into the blue nightmap of stars. Join the dots .. .London has jetlag. London has culture-shock. It's doing everything the wrong way round at the wrong time.
Selina was sitting up in bed when I went through with my drink.
'What's happening?' I asked.
'Reading my book.'
'Your what?' She had a copy of Sugar on her banked thighs. There was also a TV-guide in there with her.
'How was Barry?'
'Oh. Okay.'
'Did you meet his new slag? He says he's going to marry her. He made another pass at me the other day.'
'He didn't. What happened?'
'He stuck his head up my skirt.'
'What?'
'I thought he was kidding until he tried to get rny pants off with his teeth.'
'Jesus.'
'Doctor?'
'Uh?'
'Doctor? I think I've bruised my inner thigh. Can you take a look at it please? An oilman offered me fifty petrodollars to blow him in the lift.'
'What did you do?'
'I asked for seventy-five. But then he wanted everything, and I think he was a little rough with my inner thigh. Would you look at it for me, doctor?'
I told her to forget this doctor nonsense and talk more reasonably — about the oilman and his petrodollars and what he had her do... In the dying moments she made a noise I'd never heard her make before, a rhythmical whimpering of abandonment or entreaty, a lost sound. I'd heard that noise before, but never from Selina.
'Hey,' I said accusingly (I was joking, I think), 'you're not faking it!'
She looked startled, indignant. 'Yes I am,' she said quickly.
Intriguingly enough, the only way I can make Selina actually want to go to bed with me is by not wanting to go to bed with her. It never fails. It really puts her in the mood. The trouble is, when I don't want to go to bed with her (and it does happen), I don't want to go to bed with her. When does it happen? When don't I want to go to bed with her? When she wants to go to bed with me. I like going to bed with her when going to bed with me is the last thing she wants. She nearly always does go to bed with me, if I shout at her a Jot or threaten her or give her enough money.