‘And the money.’
‘And the money. Hebe’s money. Skinned you out of it. You’re going back for the funeral, of course? … Have a read of that. And the other matter?’
‘Beyond all expectation.’
‘Gaw, I got to pinch meself with the price we’re getting on this one. Talk about a thrust.’ He brought his clawed hands together. ‘The double play. I tell you, darling, if it all goes through all right you can have my end of it. I give it to you, dear. Jesus, the satisfaction. It’s beautiful. Cora? We done them sweet.’
The green file went in the straw bag and Cora Susan kissed Joseph Andrews and walked away across the coarse sward. Moving with an air of dreamy purpose – always one step behind, one step beyond.
3. Denizen
About twenty miles to the north-east Clint Smoker was settling into his half of a cabana in the grounds of a Moorish mansion known locally as the Ponderosa. In Clint’s quarters, as in everybody else’s, there was a large and lavish reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation’ on the wall facing the picture window. Clint typed:
Chief: Got here all right. The hotel’s gorgeous. My companion, Kate, is particularly taken with the oiled dwarves who line the driveway day and night. Shop. You’ve got your gagging order and I hope you’re happy.
Yeah, thought Clint. According to Jeff Strite, Heaf was summoned, not to Downing Street, but to a sweltering basement at the FPA – along with every other e-zine and nude-mag chancer in the British Isles. A man from the Palace with a double-barrelled name came on and told them that the material on the Princess was a fake and a fiction, and would they please shut up about it. Heaf returned to the Lark shedding tears of pride.
I think you’re experiencing an accounting problem in the marble department, but that’s me: cynical. Still, we can pursue related and parallel themes on little Vicky. I have an idea or two. Here as promised is the revisionist editorial on the Walthamstow Wanker:
Over the past month, a tragedy has unfolded in the heart of Essex.
For two days and two nights, an innocent and injured man – and we’re proud to call him a Lark reader – languished without treatment in a Rotherhithe nick before being released on bail.
He now faces charges of public indecency.
And for what?
Health boffins have long agreed that a regular visit to Thumb Street is crucial to masculine well-being.
Every man-jack of us knows that a decent toss reduces tension, setting you up for the rest of the day.
And there’s nothing better for a good night’s sleep.
Imagine.
In the seclusion of an unoccupied area of a public baths, this stainless individual was seeking relief over his daily edition of the paper you now hold in your hand.
But who should burst in on him but some old boiler with a bucket and mop.
Congratulations, darling!
You f**ked that one up!
In his confusion, and sadly impeded by his clothing, he slipped on the damp stone steps, incurring serious injury.
Little did he know that his tribulation – yes, his martyrdom – was yet to begin.
We say to this man that he has not been forgotten.
We say to this man that we are with him and will stay by his side.
We say: fist your mister for the Walthamstow One.
Clint had briefly admired his bathroom but had not yet used it. Now he lifted the ox-collar; he bestrid the bowl. After a few seconds, he found he was undergoing a sense of gradual depersonalisation, as if about to receive the introductory chords and colours of a lifechanging illness. His stare moved to the left. The basin: how small it was. His stare moved to the right. The bogroll-holder, the actual gauge of the tissue: scaled down. And the can he straddled: like a potty. When you wiped yourself it looked … Yes, there was definitely a gain in contrast. And every little helped.
Strollingly he returned to his studio. Shower and change in a minute: off with the aeroplane-wear (the radiant trainers, the aerodynamic shell suit) and on with something smart. An inaugural drinks party was scheduled for half past five. Meet your fellow – clients? inmates? guests? What did the brochure call them: residents? No, denizens. Denizens of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission … The reproduction on the wall facing the picture window. Whew, the state of that Adam. Come on, you’ve got to fit him up a bit better than that. You can’t send him out there with that cashew between his legs.
Was Michelangelo taking the piss – taking the michael? Was God?
4. At Ewelme
‘Qi? Q, i? No no no. You can’t have a q without a u. Now if you let that stand I shall most certainly challenge … Challenge! … Where are we. Q, i, indeed. What does it mean? Ah, do you see, all the q’s have u’s after them. Hello, that’s very odd. “An individual person’s life-force, the free flow of which within the body is believed to ensure physical and spiritual health.” … Well God help us. What happens now? I get docked the points. Bother. And you’ve done it twice: two qis and an if. On the triple word.’
‘Sixty-nine.’
‘Sixty-nine? I’m now minus thirteen. And I’m changing my letters. Where’s the bag?’
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but please may I be excused?’
‘Oh don’t go up now, darling. We’ve barely started. Stay and have a lovely warm hot chocolate at least …’
A minute later Henry said, ‘What would you, Bugger? I’m trying to keep her spirits up and it’s exhausting her. And me. And when I try to draw her out …’
‘Write to her, sir,’ said Brendan. ‘Write.’
The King stayed up late, listening to the Irish Sea. Ewelme stood on the north-western tip of the Welsh peninsula, at the end of a mile-long single-lane causeway. Its situation, together with the infallibly dreadful weather, deterred all intruders – and indeed all visitors: no one who had stayed at Ewelme ever willingly returned. Henry, at his desk, in his overcoat, felt his ears vibrate as the tower bell sounded the quarter-hour. The wind was committing murders in the night, sudden abductions, terrible smotherings …
My dearest sweetheart,
My soul hurts for you, it truly does. I have never seen you so deeply low. Even after Mummy’s accident, the energy of your youth somehow seemed to carry you onward. Now you sleep sixteen hours a day and hardly eat anything. (And when you are awake you’re curled up with the Koran, or the Upanishads or the Targum or God knows what.) I do wish you’d agree to have a chat with Sir Edward, if nothing more.
My darling, I don’t know exactly what is troubling you. I know roughly what is troubling you. While you are in all things the chief sufferer, this ignorance is very heavy for your father. Rather than agonising about something in particular, I find I’m agonising about everything. I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see. I implore you to tell me what actually happened in the Yellow House, my dearest (who surprised you there?). And I earnestly do believe that you will feel the benefit. And if you had some sort of a romp with one of those pretty Arab boys, what of it?
The vultures. Our official position is that the material is faked. You and I are aware that the material, at least in part, is not faked. I was less confident than Brendan. None the less, there has been no rebuttal, let alone refutation, which is presumably in the enemies’ power. This is very much to the good (it has quietened things down a bit). Brendan says their silence reflects a certain incapacity on their part. And there is another fairly encouraging likelihood, which I will tell you about if you will only talk to me.
I have just read this through, and it’s such a curate’s egg! ‘Good in parts’ – albeit thoroughly rotten. I yearn to express the unconditional love and sympathy I feel, but I just sound selfish and pompous. It’s my poor character!
Sweetheart, my one, my only jewel, I beseech you: let us be in this together. I want to reach out and physically take some of the weight from your shoulders. Remember. It’s we two now.
5. February 14 (1.10 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: How’s our Flight Engineer?
First Officer Nick Chopko: Out cold.
Macmanaman: He can coax the computer along, I’ll give him that. I’d have killed it and gone to direct law … You know the rooftiles they have in England? Sheets of grey slate?
Chopko: Like machetes.
Macmanaman: This one, you could see it coming. Rennie thought it was a dead bird. It just twirled into him. Here.
Chopko: Jesus.
Macmanaman: … Royce Traynor was only ever going to fly CigAir when he was in the condition he’s in today.
Chopko: Dead.
Macmanaman: Dead. For him it was like a mission. Rennie said there was nothing – repeat, nothing – he liked more than telling someone to put a cigarette out. He’d get up in the middle of the night and call a cab if there was a good chance of telling someone to put a cigarette out. And get this. Rennie smoked a pack a day for forty-three years without him knowing. He would have killed her. Killed her. I think she did it to have something on him, to stick it to him. Why don’t people leave, Nick? Why don’t they just leave?
Chopko: I don’t know either.
Macmanaman: Addictive personality … I don’t like it up here. It’s too thin up here. I don’t like the physics of it up here. The difference between max and stall is just a couple of knots. It’s like a slide on black ice. Ask for three seven oh. Wait. The windshear: feel it’s moving around in back of us. It’s like … Uh, put everybody down, Nick. And the girls when they’ve secured the carts. This is my third time and I can feel it coming. There’s clear air [clear air turbulence] out there. I can feel it this time.
Four minutes later Flight 101 dropped a thousand yards at the speed of gravity: thirty-two feet per second per second. The coffin of Royce Traynor leapt from the floor of Pallet 3 and smashed into its ceiling. After a beat it smashed back down again. It landed corner-first on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. There was an atrocious sneeze of thick pink liquid, then a steadier, seeping flow. After twenty-five minutes the dominant pool of thick pink liquid would begin to fume.
* * *
6. Apologia—1
Joseph Andrews was in his office, upstairs. Two sloping sheets of glass formed an isosceles triangle with the floor. You could see every freckle, every nostril hair … He held a microphone in his hand: buxom, corded, the mike of a bygone crooner. The pause button gave a little click whenever he freed it or engaged it.
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story. Man to man. Let you be the judge. Let you be the judge … [Click.] … Gaw, where do I …? Go on then. Go on. [Click.]
‘I had such a reputation for enduring pain that when the prison dentist offered me an injection I felt pretty much duty-bound to chin him.
‘So he’ve gone off to see his dentist. And then of course the screws done me in the Strong Cell. Par for the course. Me cheek was out here. When the dentist come back [click] with his fucking jaw in a sling [click] … Well. They took a right liberty. I was in a straitjacket with me head in a clamp and me mouth wedged open with a sawblade. Ooh and that dentist, he’s give me abscess a right going over. Dear oh dear. They was watching to see if I’d flinch but I never. [Click.]
‘[Click.] There ain’t a form of punishment meted out in His Majesty’s Prisons that I’ve not took. Bread and water, deprivation of mattress, Refractory Block, PCFO. In the hospital wing they’ve give me the Blinder and the Crapper. They slip it in your coffee. The Blinder ain’t so bad – you just go all legless like. But the Crapper … you can kill a man in a week in that manner. I’ve had the Cat and the Birch. It’s a fallacy that I used to whistle while they was giving me the corporal. But on the thirteenth stroke I used to do a lovely yawn, and he’d come in with a will on the final five. Trying to make you cry out. No chance. The Birch is worst. It’s more uh, detrimental to a man’s dignity, being as how it’s on your arse. I mean you got some man on your shoulders, for the Cat. But it’s just a baby, your arse is.
‘Them’s only the official punishments. They’ve pissed in me tea and flobbed on me grub. For five weeks they’ve kept me in the Box on the Strap Plank: another right liberty. But what it is is: the niggles. Like me mum come up to see me in Durham – a two-day journey in them days – and an hour before she’s due they’ve gone and transferred me to Strangeways! That’s how low they’ll stoop. These are men who live to see other men confined. Like they take away your Association on a technicality – and there’s that little smirk. You see that look on they face, and you know you’ll have to do them. Just a question of when. And then of course they do you. Fact of life. [Click.]
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story, man to man. Right or wrong, let you be the judge.
‘Like many a face I was, in me youth, an avid boxer. I won four of me first eleven fights at Bermondsey Baths. Which don’t sound too clever. But I never lost one! In fact they was all knockouts. See, I had an unfortunate tendency to get meself disqualified. Instead of standing there with me hand held high, as victor, while the other bloke got stretchered off, I’d still be kneeling on the canvas and giving him what for. It was a struggle to uh, channel me aggression. In the eleventh fight I’ve left the ref for dead and all. So they banned me. [Click.] And Mr Shackleton, the Director of the YBPA, never knew what hit him – I come up on him that nice. [Click.] After that decision I had no choice but to turn to a life of crime.
‘Me first trouble with the Law was for possession of an offensive weapon. Not defensive, oh no. Offensive. The Old Bill gives you a spin and it’s one of them uh, circular conversations. “Oi. What’s this?” “What’s it look like?” “Why you carrying a knife?” “I always do.” “What for?” “I always carry a knife.” “Yeah but why?” “Because I always do.” Blah blah blah. I was eight. So then the social’s upped and packed me off to Approved School. And then of course I did me Borstal. And even in me boxing days I’ve had a spell or two in Pentonville for Smash and Grab. Smash and Grab: definition of a glass brassière, if you like. This’d be the late Thirties. Then the war come … Now don’t get me wrong. We was patriotic and that. In their struggle against the spectre of Nazism, we wished the armed forces all the luck in the world. But you wasn’t going to be donning togs for the powers-that-be. No chance. [Click.] And if a Tommy come your way on a dark night, the slag’d live to regret it. [Click.] So in the war years you was either inside or on your toes from the Conscription. In 1944, when I was finishing me three in Wormwood Scrubs, Sir Oswald Mosley, of Blackshirt fame, and his wife, Lady Diana, was interned there. There was a plan on to do him during Exercise, but he come over as a perfectly reasonable sort of bloke and we’ve left him be.
‘Things opened up beautiful after the war, with all the austerity. We was forging ration-books and otherwise like billy-o. Then in the year of your birth I get me first decent thrust – and me first serious bird. Swings and roundabouts. [Click. Click.] Funny word that: bird. Comes from birdlime, rhyming with time. Birdlime was the sticky stuff they put on the branches of trees to kill the birds. Sticky fingers, see: thieving. But it’s the birds that cop it, not the branches, so it don’t quite work out. Bird also means “girl”. A richard is a sort, Richard the Third rhyming with bird. [Click.] Rhyming-slang: load of bollocks. [Click.] But I’m told the word bird comes from bride, originally. Anyway.
‘It was the Airport Job. Heath Row – two words – it was in them days. Also known as the Protective Assurance Robbery. An overnight cargo of diamonds plus £160,000 in hard cash – millions in today’s money. The guards was supposed to be drugged: barbitone in they coffee. But when I give one a nudge [click] with me fucking iron bar [click] the others have jumped up and steamed in. They was Ghost Squad! Well, I don’t know, they must have expected schoolboys. They hadn’t reckoned on me, Ginger, Dodger, Gimlet, Whippo, Chick and Yocker, and we did them something gruesome. When we come out the coppers is there mob-handed and we’ve had another almighty mill. I reckoned I was well away. I’ve slipped under a police van and c
lung on to the exhaust. You know: first traffic-light and I’d be away. But they’ve only put the sirens on and roared off to Battersea nick – fifteen mile away. By then me chest and forearms was welded to the pipe. They had to cut me free before they banged me up, and I still bear them scars. One of the Ghost Squad boys was on the critical list, and offing a copper was a topping offence in them days. I even got me mum to send him a bunch of grapes – to a copper. But that’s one of them uh [click] them uh [click] them strange paradoxes you’ve stuck youself with when you gone and played the game I’ve played.
‘I served every hour of me fourteen. In them days, if you was flogged, you never lost no remission for subsequent misdemeanours. So me first week in Winson Green I thought: let’s do the Governor, and get the Cat. I done the Governor: spun the legs out from under him in the vegetable garden and come down on his face with me shovel. The screws’ve give me a right sticking – win some, lose some – but when me flogging come up, there’s questions from the Home Secretary in the House of Commons! And God stone me if they don’t go chucko. I’ve had some black hours on the in, but nothing compares to that morning when they’ve gone and cancelled me Cat. I had so many run-ins, thereafter, they was always trying to have me declared mental!