I said nothing for a minute or two. Leaned on the railing beside him and stared at the sea. Another bout of symptoms synonymous started up as the light began to dawn. If all he wanted was a shop assistant he could have found plenty of people at the job centre who were eager for that kind of work and who had experience of it.
We set off for town again and I said, ‘I’ve never worked in a shop.’
‘You’d soon pick it up.’
‘But what about your mother?’
‘You heard her. She trusts you. Can’t think why! But she’d be all for it.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Stop fighting me, will you!’ he said, stopping me by the arm and making me face him. ‘Give it a try, eh?’
I felt he was hustling me and I didn’t like that. It was his worst side. If he wanted something he prodded and pushed till he got it. And if he didn’t get his way he pouted and sulked and went sour. I didn’t know that then, and wouldn’t have cared if I had. I wasn’t going to be hustled.
I said, ‘Look, Barry, I’ve told you. Give me time. I’ve got to work myself up to things.’
‘All right, all right. Relax!’
‘Well, you’re not just offering me a job, are you!’
‘You’ll be okay. You’re a natural. Just smile a lot, be polite, and stay cool. That’s all it takes. Honest. The customers will lap you up.’
‘It’s not the customers I’m thinking about.’
‘What then?’
‘Look, is this a game of telling truths?’
He started walking again. ‘If you want it to be.’
‘All right. It’s you. That’s who I’m thinking about.’
‘Me!’ The comic exaggeration! ‘What have I done?’
‘Ah come on, Barry, stop mucking about. You know what it is. You’re pushing me too fast.’
‘Why waste time?’
‘I told you. I’ve got to think things out a bit.’
‘Okay, okay. I’ll say no more. But you’ll give it a try? Just for a few days? A week? We’d be a great team.’
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
‘Done.’
5/There’s always a moment. The point of no return, when you know if you go on you can’t ever afterwards go back. I know that now. I learned it with Barry, then. And Ozzy showed me some lines the other day. They sum it up. They’re by T. S. Eliot in a poem called The Waste Land which Ozzy keeps trying to make me read. Here are the lines:
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender,
which an age of prudence can never retract.
It happens in the moment when that small word ‘Yes’ will be enough to change your life. Your stomach gets the jitters—or mine does, anyway. Your brain melts inside your head. Your tongue feels like it’s contracted elephantiasis and will shortly choke you. Your mouth gets lockjaw, and your hands get cramp. You start keeping an eye out for the nearest lavatory because your bowels indicate an imminent onset of dysentery. You tend to yawn a lot, and also grin, stammer, giggle, hiccup, shiver, sweat, break out in facial ticks, itch in crevices awkward to scratch in public, and unexpectedly to fart.
You’d think your body had declared war on you just because you are on the point of taking a risk. Nothing dangerous of course, in this case. Just telling someone for the first time what you really think of him, what you want of him, what you hope he wants of you.
I guess you—I—feel like that because knowledge is power. Once somebody knows that about you—knows how you really feel about them—once you’ve declared yourself, then they know about you, have power over you. Can make claims on you. You’re giving yourself into their hands, the Bible says, as I found out at the same time as I was finding out about D. and J.
The boys with the can of magic beans didn’t have anything to say about this. They didn’t go pale with dementia when they gazed into each other’s eyes while grasping their bleeding hands and swearing their pal-hood. Nor, I might add ruefully, did David need twenty-four hours to think about whether he wanted Jonathan to love him as his own soul and in some manner surpassing the love of women. Or if he did, he wasn’t telling. And who can blame him? It’s not the sort of thing you print in the school mag or rabbit about on the way home after school, never mind spilling it all out to a reporter from the Holy Bible so that it can be recorded for posterity. Heroes have to be made of sterner stuff. No dithering from heroes. We can’t have them getting the runs just because some bit of cheesecake wants to be friends with them. How could anybody believe in their heroism if we knew such things as that about them?
Not being any kind of hero, I admit myself glad that evening to get inside the cinema and sit down in its dark cocoon. Public privacy. Reality-with-consequences exchanged for reality-without-consequences for the price of a ticket. A womb with a quadrophonic heartbeat and an image of the world-to-come moving tantalizingly on the membrane of the uterus.
My embryo mate twinned beside me, shoulder, arm, thigh and knee making us Siamese if you please. Which was close enough for now. Enough to rest on. Suspended animation. A still from coming attractions.
Everybody needs a rest now and then.
And I had had enough direct action for one day. The movie’s simulations were what I needed. I wanted to be a spectator for a while.
I also thought that would be the end of it for today. We would see the film, wander home, let today slip comfortably away.
But life isn’t like that.
I had reckoned without The Drunk.
And without Barry. Who never gave up.
Ever.
6/Scene: Southend High Street.
Time: 22.45 hours. Thursday. Summer.
People; a jostle of holiday-makers, most of them young and hearty, behaving themselves in that joyously decorous way that distinguishes civilized homo sapiens from all other beasts. Happy bantering words fly across the traffic-busy late-night street, between rival groups of mob-handed mates. They sometimes smash the odd window here and there as a mark of the affection in which they hold their playground by the almost sea. Their home away from home.
Barry and I weave our way from the cinema through this milling throng of gaiety, out of the pedestrian precinct, under the railway bridge and onto the traffic-driven part of the High Street leading to the pierhead. Just there, at the corner of Tylers Avenue, comes stumbling across our path The Drunk. He has on his face that concentrated, poleaxed expression of determination, and the floppy-doll body that betrays in his system the presence of enough alcohol to give a Breathalyser a nervous breakdown. He has some purpose in mind, but whatever desire the drink has provoked it is also taking away in the performance.
Even so, he manages to stagger to the kerb unhindered by the passing hordes, who avoid him by pretending he isn’t there. Without pause for consideration of the dangers he might encounter by doing so, he hurls himself head first into the road as if taking a dive into a quiet swimming pool.
Luckily the traffic is moving at funeral pace. The Drunk flops down, full length splayed between two cars.
Brakes screech. Horns blow. ‘Run him over!’ quips a happy holiday-maker from across the street.
No one does anything but carry on as though nothing untoward has happened. As indeed, given what passes for normality at such times on Southend High Street, nothing has.
Barry however darts into the road, drags The Drunk to his feet, and hauls him onto the pavement, where I join him in holding The Drunk upright.
‘Wanna swim,’ The Drunk says, making movements that might be either an attempt to escape our rescuing clutches or a few practice strokes for the crawl.
‘You can’t swim here,’ Barry says.
‘What are we going to do with him?’ I ask Barry.
The Drunk smells like a midden and I am not keen to remain too long in the vicinity of this human gasworks.
‘Get him somewhere safe.’
‘Try the morgue.’
‘You have death on the brain.’
&nbs
p; ‘Have you caught a whiff? He’s decomposing already.’
The Drunk has attended to this exchange like a tennis spectator who is a head’s turn behind the flight of the ball. Now he says, ‘Ss the tideout?’
‘Yes,’ says Barry.
We struggle with a renewed attempt to test the popular theory that God takes care of babies and drunks.
‘I’ll av adip in the Ray,’ The Drunk says.1
‘Where you from?’ Barry says, speaking with that slow and extra loud voice people reserve for babies, foreigners and inebriates, apart from the deaf.
‘Ackney,’ says The Drunk after a pause for thought.
‘Wouldn’t you like to get the train home?’ Barry says, Adult humouring Child in Difficult Circumstances.
The Drunk grins with pixilated devilry into Barry’s grinning face. (My God, I thought, Barry is actually enjoying this!) ‘Lass trays gone,’ he says, naughty-boy, and giggles.
‘Great!’ I say, my cool hotting up. ‘We’ll be here all night. Let’s dump him. Why are we bothering?’
‘He’ll do himself an injury if we leave him. You saw.’
‘So what!’ I say, exasperation and argumentative displeasure doing the talking. ‘He got himself into this state. Let him get himself out of it.’
People, remember, jostle past us as this chat goes on; cars slur by in the road endangering our swaying persons. It is night. I am tired. It has been, as they say, a long day.
‘You didn’t say that,’ Barry snaps back at me, ‘when I helped you this morning.’
I think: Our first row. Jolly hockeysticks!
‘O, thanks!’ I say as tartly as I can and with a dash of real bile for flavour. ‘Sir Galahad to the rescue again, ducky. You’re so dashing!’
Barry is glaring at me. The Drunk is metronoming again.
Barry says, ‘I can’t see much difference between him being drunk and you single-handing someone else’s boat when you can’t even sail a rubber duck in your bath without sinking it.’
I am rendered speechless. Also angered, piqued, resentful, hurt, aggrieved, dismayed, subdued, nettled, and put in my place. So I pout.
What a rich life I lead. All that at one go.
‘Less av a drink,’ The Drunk says.
‘Too late. The pubs have shut,’ Barry says, the Brusque Adult now.
‘Nar,’ says The Drunk, The Irascible Wilful Child. He struggles to get free again. We do a tippy-toe tango down the pavement till a shop front gets in the way, barking my shin on its doorstep. The pain is inflammatory.
‘I don’t give a toss what you think,’ I crump. ‘I’ve had it with this lark.’
‘Go suck!’ Barry says. ‘I’ll cope.’
He will too, I know. How I hate such unyielding competence. I’ve had it laid on me all day.
7/At this very moment I spy in the throng on the other side of the street a patrolling Boy-in-Blue. The badge of his Noddy hat glistens in the neon. His walky-talky bristles on his chest. Another knight to the rescue.
‘Hang on,’ I say to Barry and nip off before his dissent restrains me. I am not going to waste my chance to become the competent organizer for the first time today.
‘Could you help me, officer?’ I say in my best law-abiding voice.
‘Not unless I have to, sir,’ says the P.C. He grins faintly to show he really has made a jest. Life in the nick’s canteen must be a permanent side-split. Perhaps I should join the Force. (It has been suggested, of course. The Head offered it as his opinion that as the only thing presently flourishing in Britain is crime, the Police Force as a career has a bright future. It took Ozzy’s daring to point out that the logic of this argument made it more attractive to join the criminals. The Head smiled painfully and changed the subject. The Head, being a sociologist by training, isn’t too great with language and hopeless at logic.)
I return the B.-in-B.’s grin to show willing and say, ‘There’s a drunk over there trying to chuck himself into the traffic. Could you take him in for the night?’
‘O no no no,’ says the B.-in-B., sucking at his breath like I’d given him an extra strong mint to tease his mouth ulcers. ‘I can’t help you there, squire.’
‘But he’ll cause an accident,’ I say, ‘and we can’t stay with him all night.’
‘If I was you,’ says the P.C. confidential-like, ‘I’d take your friend to the beach. Let him sleep it off.’
‘He isn’t my friend. He’s a drunk.’
The B.-in-B. expresses surprise. ‘You’re with him, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Well, then, you must be a friend of his, mustn’t you? Can’t arrest a member of the public for being a bit tiddly when his friends are looking after him, now can I? How’d you think that would look on the charge sheet?’
Suddenly I begin to understand Kafka’s The Trial for the first time. I say, ‘But we are not his friends. We just happened to stop him killing himself. Do you have to be friends to do that?’
‘No. No. But a friendly sort of act, isn’t it? And he’s not dead, is he?’
‘No. Because we saved him.’
‘There you are then. But I’ve only your word for that, haven’t I?’
What a Sherlock the man is.
‘All right,’ I say, ‘let me put it this way. What would you suggest we do? Let him go so he can chuck himself into the road again?’
The B.-in-B. takes my arm. Bends his head to my ear. ‘Look, mate,’ he says, ‘I’ll be honest with you.’
Does he mean our wonderful police are sometimes not entirely honest? My God, after all these years, now I find out! How can I ever again believe in the basic goodness of the human soul? What a cruel night this is turning out to be.
I compose myself for the shock of hearing the truth.
‘You see, sonny,’ the P.C. goes on (and I note the declension from sir to sonny), ‘if I arrest your friend, I’ll have to trot him down the nick, charge him, lock him up. You never know what some real villain will get up to here while I’m gone. Then I’ll have to get up early tomorrow morning, after working the late duty tonight, because I’ll have to get your friend ready for court. And putting him through court will take all morning, which I’m supposed to have off. Now what’s the point of all that aggro when your friend is just a bit under the weather and safe in your good hands? If I arrested every drunk I see along here I’d never be finished.’
I’m like a balloon tonight, puffed up and deflated by turns. The wind has been taken out of me again.
‘Well we can’t just leave him, can we!’ There’s desperation in my voice now. And worse, there’s the squeaky sound of boyhood breaking through. ‘He’ll only chuck himself under a car if we do, then you’ll have real trouble on your hands. He can’t stand up, never mind walk, so we can hardly drag him down to the beach, can we?’
‘Look, tell you what I’ll do, kid,’ says the copper. Kid now! ‘But it’s between ourselves, okay? If anybody asks, I don’t know anything, right?’
‘All right. We can’t mess about forever.’
‘Get your friend to the corner of Clifftown Road there, okay?’
‘It’ll be a struggle. And he’s not my friend.’
‘You’ll manage. I’ll be with you in five minutes.’
When I get back, Barry is pressing The Drunk up against the shop window.
‘Wa bout the boatin pool,’ The Drunk is saying. ‘Tide’s all ays in there.’
Barry says to me, ‘What the hell were you doing talking to the law?’ He is having trouble keeping Our Friend upright because of the slippiness of the glass.
‘Just getting a little help, that’s all,’ I say tartly. ‘We’ve got to take stinkpot to Clifftown Road.’
‘Why?’ says Barry. ‘You’re not turning him in.’
‘Fat chance. The law isn’t that helpful.’
The Drunk laughs coyly. ‘Ere,’ he says with simpering confidentiality, leaning into both of us. ‘I gotta sprise f’you.’
‘What’s that?’ Barry says with thin patience.
‘I juss piss mesell!’ The Drunk announces in a raucous shout like he’s just won the pools.
‘Bingo, our kid,’ yells a passing comrade, hardly better for wear than Our Friend.
Barry creases with laughter. ‘Well, you wanted to go swimming!’
‘Hey, thass right!’ says The Drunk, and they laugh together as if this were the century’s wittiest quip.
‘For God’s sake let’s get shot of him,’ I say.
Barry draws a straight face. He’s beginning to act as unpredictably as The Drunk. Maybe he’s getting inebriated by the fumes we’re breathing in.
‘Will you stop beefing,’ he says. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re getting hurt? You’re going somewhere? Eh? Look, you want to go—go. I care?’
Puling, I say, ‘But what are you bothering with him for?’
‘You want reasons?’
‘Yes, dammit!’
‘Because he needs help. Because we were there. Because nobody else wanted to know. Because it amuses me. Because I wanted to be bothered. Because I felt like it. Because I like him. Okay? Does that satisfy you? From me you want the sermon on the mount? Now do we get him to Clifftown Road or not?’
We did. Discordantly. The butt of passing jests. Pungently. But we got him there.
8/There is nothing, I discovered that night, like being sober in the company of an incontinent drunk for bringing home to you the eggshell brittleness of your pride.
I found myself remembering—I comforted myself with—graffiti collected from the town’s more intelligent loos.
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION PRODUCED BY ALCOHOLIC DEFICIENCY
I DRINK THEREFORE I AM. I’M DRUNK THEREFORE I WAS
IS THERE A LIFE BEFORE DEATH?
I am especially pleased and encouraged, as we stagger to our rendezvous with the constabulary, by this last remembered scrawl.
9/Our friendly neighbourhood Plod turns up ten minutes late. He must have been keeping police time.
He doesn’t say anything, just points his flashlight towards the railway station entrance not far down the road, and gives a triple flash.