I looked up, in alarm, bewilderment, in terror. A plump, pretty girl, with a sensible scarf, two badges on the lapel of her corduroy overcoat, her face and stance vibrant, unflinching, exalted ... Browsers paused in their shuffle. Someone near me stepped sideways, beyond the range of my sight.
'What are you doing?' she barked — she snapped. A middle-class mouth, the voice and teeth hard and clean.
I backed off, or veered away. I even raised an arm protectively.
'Why aren't you ashamed of yourself?'
'But I am,' I said.
'Look at that. Look.'
We stared at the fallen magazine. It rested half-open on a low shelf where the normal, the legal stuff was trimly stacked. One of the centrepages was curled over, as if tactfully averting the gaze of the girl spreadeagled there. A trunkless, limp and warty male member dangled inches from her greedy smile.
'It's disgusting, isn't it.'
'Yes.'
'How can you look at these things?'
'I've no idea.'
At this she gave off a pulse of hesitation. I don't think she had really been hearing me till now. It must have cost her quite a bit too, taking on a man who looks like I look, his fat shoulders and heavy head tensed over the spectacle of her lost or twisted sisters. Yes, even with her strong round face and unimpeachable teeth and her rectitude, it must have cost her something. She had done this before a few times perhaps, but not that many times. Now the full stare of her eyes individualized my human shape, and her questions became questions. She raised a gloved finger.
'Why then? Why? Without you they wouldn't exist. Look at it.' We looked down again. The lovedoll was turned almost inside out. 'What does that say to you?'
'I don't know. Money.'
She turned and walked the long clicking walk down the floor (the shop strangely quenched of sound and movement), tugged back hard on the glass door and with a shake of shiny hair had passed into the random straggle of the street.
There was laughter, a low surge of talk. Amused relief showed briefly on the faces of the two zonked chinks who worked the counter. I restored Lovedolls to its rack, then flapped defiantly through Plaything International and Jangler. I crossed the street and climbed on a stool and lost £20 on the 3.45. I felt awful, ill, all beaten up. Oh, sugar, Jesus, why couldn't you pick on someone else? Why couldn't you pick on someone with a little more to lose?
I walked back to my sock in the thin rain. And the skies. Christ! In shades of kitchen mists, with eyes of light showing only murk and seams of film and grease, the air hung above and behind me like an old sink full of old washing-up. Blasted, totalled, broken-winded, shot-faced London, doing time under sodden skies. In the ornate portal of a mansion-block department store an old man with buttoned overcoat and brown burnished shoes stood talking at the rain. Other old people flanked him expressionlessly and two younger women wearing indeterminate blue uniforms and faces of bleached sincerity underscored or punctuated his address with marching music from pipe and drum. 'It is never too late', said the old man diffidently, unassumingly, as one of God's grim janitors, 'to change your ways.' With narrow lips and eyes he faced the strolling irony of the afternoon crowds, the young, the robed incurious foreigners. 'There is no need', he said, 'for you to feel so ashamed.' You could hardly hear him anyway, what with the drum and all this rain and milk in the air.
Oh, but pal — you're wrong. The skies are so ashamed. The trees in the squares hang their heads, and the awnings of the street are careful to conceal the wet red faces of the shopfronts. The evening paper in its cage is ashamed. The clock above the door where the old man speaks is ashamed. Even the drum is so ashamed.
'How in Christ's name did you get yourself into this state?'
'Right, you bitch, this is it!'
'This is what?'
'You're never fucking here when I call from the States!'
'Can't a girl go to her own flat when she likes?'
'You're never there either!'
'Can't a girl disconnect the phone sometimes?'
'You little actress, you were off somewhere else!'
'Are you going to pretend you don't know why things are in this state?'
'You're cheating on me, you bitch!'
'Why are you so upset? I'm trying to tell you something, don't you understand?'
Selina unbuttoned her coat. She crossed her arms and stood there bristling with all the counter-strength of the street.
'Jesus,' she said, 'aren't you the one. For God's sake go to bed and try and sleep it off before dinner. Where are we going anyway?'
No, I'll be okay, I said or whimpered — just get me some tea or something ... Selina, she's turned the tables on me somehow, that Selina. I wish I knew how she managed it. Sighing, I lay on the couch with my mug. Selina established herself at the circular steel table: evening paper, teacup, a single, deserved cigarette. She turned the pages briskly, paused, frowned, cleared her throat, flexed her eyelids, and leaned forward in cold concentration. I knew what she was reading about. She was reading about the palimony trial in California. Selina's been following the story. So have I. Palimony sounds like bad news for the boys. As I understand it, the ruling states that if a chick makes tea once a week for the same guy — she gets half his dough. Every evening now, Selina turns straight to the palimony page, and goes all quiet. I hope she won't be wanting any palimony from me.
'Let's be realistic for once, shall we?' she said, later. 'You're too thick to realize it but I'm your last chance. No, not those. They cut (into me. Who else is going to put up with you?' 'No, not those. We had them the other night.' 'Look at yourself. No, they need washing. I mean you're hardly a catch, are you. You're thirty-five. Act it." 'Yeah, that'll do. With these. Put them on too.' 'If you're waiting around for someone better—hang on. I've got it — then you're whistling Dixie, mate. Who would take you on anyway? Martina Twain?' 'Wait. Take those off and put these on.' 'She gave you that book, didn't she.'
'What book?' I asked, impressed anew by Selina's witch radar. 'The library book on your bedside table. The one you read the first page of every night.'
'That's good. That's good. It was sort of a present.' 'A present, my arse. Honestly, the ideas some people have about themselves.'
'Face the facts,' she said, later still. 'Grow up, for God's sake. I'd settle for you. Settle for me. I'd look after you. Look after me. Give me children. Marry me. Make a commitment. Make me feel I have some kind of base to my life. At least let me move in here properly.'
'All right. Yeah, okay,' I said. 'You can move in here properly.'
So the next morning when the crows in the square were still making their sounds of hunger I hired a van at the mews garage and off we chugged down the hill, Earls Court way, to collect Selina's stuff. Her flatmates Mandy and Debby flitted fanciably about the place, half-dressed, serving me coffee with the reverence due to a moneyman and debt-settler. I lounged on the couch in the attic sitting-room, pyramidal in shape with deep-set windows. Through these chutes of slates you could inspect the weather, which was making a comeback of the stalled-career variety, the sun all rusty and out of condition, glowing then failing suddenly like a damp torch. Selina donned an apron and put her hair up under a baseball cap and prickled with female make-do and knowhow, while Mandy and Debby took it in turns to amuse me downstairs. Mandy and Debby, they look like nude-magazines too. They look like Selina. Modern sack-artists aren't languid Creoles who loll around the boudoir eating chocolates all day, licking their lips and purring, their whiskers flecked with come and cream. No, they're business heads on business shoulders, keen-sensed and foxy, not young-looking either but tough, tanned and weathered. Selina falls in and out of love with these two, as she does with Helle. She once told me, in a voice full of hatred and contempt, that Mandy and Debby have been known to do escort work, the deal being as follows: the punter pays the agency £15 per date, of which the chick gets two. That's right: two quid. A scandal, isn't it? So naturally the girls do a bit of business on their own account. Nothing went on here, though, in this shacky walk-up: what went on went on in interchangeable intercontinental hotel rooms, in the private suites of corrupt clubs and thriving-speakeasies, in glazed Arab flats. Mandy and Debby looked thepart all right, they looked tough enough for this, particularly Debby, who gave me so much eye-contact and hand-on-knee and dressing-gown disclosure that I almost asked for her telephone number. But of course I realized that this would be a pretty gratuitous move, under the circumstances, I already had her telephone number.
I wrote out a cheque for £320 to cover various outgoings — 'kiss-off money' Mandy called it — and marshalled Selina's worldly possessions in the back of the van. She owned pitifully little, really. It would have all gone in the Fiasco, easy, if the Fiasco had been running. But the Fiasco has not been running. Three bin-liners full of clothes, a teapot, two photograph frames, a soap-rack, a chair, an iron, a mirror and a lamp.
There you go, girl,' I said at the other end, when I brought in the final batch.
'Thank you, darling,' said Selina. She stood in the middle of my hired front room. 'Now this is my home. Right then.'
Selina had three paperbacks to add to the shelves, A to Z, Common Legal Problems and The Guide to Married Loving. What with Martina's present, my book collection is definitely expanding.
——————
'Don't tell anyone,' whispered Alec Llewellyn, 'but it's really quite cool in here. Don't laugh! They'll see us and think I'm not taking it seriously.'
'Have you got your own cell?'
He sat back. 'No. It's a cell meant for one but there are two other guys in it. We're very overcrowded. They're all burglars and swindlers and things in here. We've got our own little kettle. It's so laid back I can't believe it. On the first morning I woke up feeling great, like a kid, stretched my arms and thought, Now I'll have a cup of tea and stroll out for a —! Then it hit me.'
'Wow.'
'Yeah. But I'm incredibly relieved. With my accent I thought I'd be smashed to pieces or fucked in half after five minutes in here. But it's not like that. It must be the only place in England where the class system still works.'
I lit a cigarette, and waited.
'I think it's to do with the clarity of the voice. Everyone else, including the screws and the pigs, they all talk as if they've just learned how. They can't understand why I'm in here. They're all paranoid of me. The screws are paranoid of me. The assistant governor is paranoid of me. Even the governor comes down to hobnob with me in the cells.'
'What's the food like?'
'Awful. It's all that soya stuff. It fills you up okay but runs you down at the same time. You know, I always thought they put anti-bonk pills in the coffee. But they don't need to. They don't put anything in the coffee. They don't put coffee in the coffee. Butch Beausoleil could live here in the nude and no one would give her a second glance. I suppose they might try and sellotape her to the walls of their cells. All day you feel as if you've just had about ten hand-jobs. It's the food and the air, and the confinement.'
We sat in a gothic cafeteria. If you lifted your head, it felt like school. Up there among the coach-house windows it was all swimming light, free-style, and tolerance of the noise and warmth of the human commerce below. Below, the prisoners sat at the far side of a rank of yellow-decked tables, with their little visitors — women, kids, the old — ranged opposite on kitchen chairs. No booths or metal grilles. You could hold hands if you wanted to. You could kiss. The older jailbirds were a snouty, ferrety contingent. Some of them looked only half-made. They sat back easily on their benches, their gestures resigned, explanatory. Their women were tensed forward on their seats, almost in a crouch of inquiry or solicitude. The children simply stared and fidgeted, in a high state of nerves — they were on their best behaviour, no question.
'I got you a sleeve of fags,' I said, 'plus twelve half-bottles of wine.'
'Thanks. Did —'
'I was amazed when they told me what I could bring. Half a bottle of wine a day—it's not enough but it's something. I left it all with the guy.'
'Did you bring any books?'
'Uh?'
'Ah you fucking lout! Bring me some tomorrow, okay? Promise. What do you think I do all day, for Christ's sake? All they've got in here is a little heap of Westerns and thrillers with half the pages torn out or covered in tea and snot. I've been reading the fucking Bible for the last few days. Even that would be okay but everyone's beginning to think I'm bananas. Bring me some books.'
'I don't even know what kind of books you like.'
'Jesus, anything. I'll make a list. Novels, history, travel books, I don't mind. Poetry, anything.'
'Poetry? In here?'
'I'll take my chances.'
Alec wore a navy-blue romper suit — the outfit of a French workman, or indeed that of some little new-wave narcissist at a C.L. & S. screening... It was the sight of him in his issued clothing that made me sense just how far he had fallen. Not too far, don't take him too far down, I thought. He'll disappear the other way. Everyone in here, they had all transgressed, they had all sinned against money. And now money was making them pay.
'That reminds me,' I said. 'You haven't got six thousand quid on you, have you?'
Alec scratched his scalp. His sharp nose twitched. 'Yes well I'm sorry about that.'
'What happened?"
'I gave some of it to Eileen and tried to double the rest at roulette. Brill, I agree. It wasn't enough anyway. You should have seen me in the dock, man. I was just melting. When that old moron in the wig, when he read out the sentence — oh, I thought, he must be talking about someone else. Who, me? And this is just remand. If things go against me on the ninth, then I go somewhere serious.'
'Can I do anything?' I said in a quick voice.
'No. I'd need — with the guarantee I'd need, I couldn't even ask you. What did Ella say?'