A Start in Life (29 page)

We were held, hypnotized, pushed into silence – except for a few ignorant bastards who let out a giggle now and again, and someone who called: ‘Pull the chain, Ron, pull the chain' – and nearly stopped the show. The tension was hardly to be borne as he got to the end of the roll, and especially when, with the final tear-off, he didn't intone the expected word but spelled it slowly, letter by letter,
S
–
H
–
I
–
T
. A great noise of clapping spread in the room, as if a wooden ship of long ago were grinding itself up a long stretch of seashore rocks.

His next poem was about a man who accidentally stepped on a butterfly and killed it, and ends in tears of remorse for his savage act. ‘After the last General Election,' Ron shouted, ‘my mother became Minister of Culture. She changed her name and put in for a new past, then marched down Whitehall to the marital music of a grenade of budgerigards.'

‘By God, he's got talent,' said Blaskin, lighting a cigarette and resting his head back on fag-smoke air, the schizophrenic's pillow he always carried about with him.

‘But I'm not a poet of the niggling moral doubt,' Delph shouted, picking a button off his jacket (which I'm sure he'd loosened deliberately hours before) and throwing it into the mouth of someone on the front row who yawned. ‘I'm in it for the quick quid and all expenses paid, and I want everybody to know it. I'm not a death-wish beetle eating away at the fabric of society. I'm just looking for a patron to buy me a coin-op laundry so I can sit in the warmth of it and spread my bed while my living goes on earning itself all around me. So if anybody knows a millionaire with the right incline I'll note his post-office box in my little black book and—'

‘Poems,' a voice shouted from the back. ‘You're a self-indulgent prole. Let's have a poem.'

Delph stared hard in the man's direction. ‘I'll put you on my death list, if you aren't careful.' He held us all by sleight of hand and slight of brain, took a pound note from his lapel pocket and passed it to the front row so that it could be certified as real. Taking it back, he held it by the tips of two fingers, as if not wishing to be too much contaminated by it. Then he drew the ashtray to the middle of the table, fished out a box of matches, and lit the banknote, holding it upright so that it burned slowly, shouting a slow incantation before the flame got to his fingers and he let go:

‘Smoke is no joke when you choke on it
.

It's even less funny when you're burning money
.

The smallest weevil knows that it's evil.'

He crumpled the charred paper of the note with an asbestos thumb, then blew the black powder of it towards the audience: ‘Go, little turds, God give thee good passage—' And for a moment I wished I had stayed at Moggerhanger's because then he went on to recite a poem called
Elegy on the Death of the Pennines
, which consisted in reading all the words from a pocket dictionary beginning with P, and this went on for about twenty minutes, so that I began to think I was going crazy, which may have been the effect he was aiming for, because I had a suspicion that under that crackpot flamboyant style was a sly and cunning bastard who had weighed up the balances of every pickled word. One or two people in the audience did in fact break under this sustained barrage and shouted out as if their hearts had cracked, but the teeth and tank tracks of Ron Delph's subliminal intelligence went on and on to the very end, so that they just had to sit back and sweat it out. Gilbert Blaskin's shanks began to twitch, and I thought maybe he's going to split at the fleshpot mouth, and then where will my typing job get to? – but the look on his face was rapt and angelic, and his zipped-up tailor-made boots beat time to that demonic shunting forth of just plain words. I stayed above it all, after that first shiver, sidestepped it, and kept my eyes wide open and my heart well dyked against the waves of pure emotion building up in the room. They were rapt and stoned while I was able to look around me at their ossified faces in the grip of this mad hypnotical impostor.

It took a few seconds for them to realize that he had finished. They were stunned. From the seabed where he had held them they started to cheer and clap and rave, getting themselves up to some sort of air again. He was sweating, worn out, haggard as he stood like a totem post in front of the table. Blaskin pulled along the row, ran to congratulate him.

When they stood talking together later, I heard him mentioning manuscripts, and a publisher for them. Delph flipped his ash at random and didn't seem much interested. A girl with green eyes and yellow hair had an arm through his, and giggled at Blaskin whenever he spoke. Delph patted her on the head, as if to encourage her. ‘My Pandy,' he said, ‘she perpetually takes the piss out of you metropolitan ponces' – unable to slip from his groove of the letter P. ‘She's a proper Persian pussycat is our Pandy, and I'm planning to get my pump into her, aren't I, pet?'

‘Oh,' she pouted, ‘what a plague you are.'

‘It's just that I'm hungry,' he said. ‘Let's pile downstairs for a pint.' The wave of the audience went with him, and it was my opinion that he wanted a pasting, but to hint as much to anybody else would have got a leg torn from me. So I picked up my case and pushed down after them.

‘I don't write
all
my poems,' Ron was saying with a sandwich in his mouth. ‘I find some of 'em, pick 'em up, practice 'em, polish 'em – purloin them from time to time and purvey them to you pansies down South. Pot of port, love?' he said, at Pandy. ‘Last time I came down I gave a great show. I read a Tube map, pure and simple, name after name, round and round. Went off. I was as cool as a landmine. Burnt my fingers on that map because some ice-cold swine in the audience ups and shouts. “What about copyright? London Transport wrote that poem.” So I read it again, went right back to Cockfosters and crept in little circles till I got to Ealing, and by that time he was on the floor with the rest of 'em frothing to death.'

‘Oh, Ron,' said Pandy, ‘you're perky tonight.' He slid another sandwich in his mouth, followed by a pickled onion: ‘I'm still steamed up, the pistons wumphing away. Allus like that after a perf.'

It became clear to Blaskin that he'd never get a word in edgeways so he said: ‘Let's be off.' I picked up my case and went outside into the lamp and starlight. He walked ahead down the alleyway, and Pearl Harby took my arm in hers. She was suspiciously quiet with me, but I didn't fancy a gang-bang with Gilbert Blaskin. It felt comforting nevertheless, and I was sorry when she let go as we hit the wider spaces of St Martin's Lane.

He was rocking a bit, after a few hours on double brandies, and when he swayed at his car door, trying to open it, a policeman who'd watched him from the shadows said: ‘I hope you aren't going to drive that Jaguar.' Gilbert swung round, a look on his face as if about to let go a flow of bad language or vomit.

‘I'm Mr Blaskin's chauffeur,' I said, ‘and I'm taking him home.' I pulled open the door, and Gilbert, having second thoughts on sending his richest prose against the copper's clock, bent to get in.

‘That's all right,' said the policeman, and walked away. Pearl hunched in the back, and soon I was steaming through Trafalgar Square. ‘I thought I'd save you a bit of bother,' I said.

He seemed sober enough now: ‘Perhaps it's just as well. I had a nasty bang a month ago, though it wasn't my fault. Some unthinking advertising yobbo pulled out too suddenly and I crunched him, spun off, bounced against a lorry, ricocheted into another car, scraped a bus, and hit the back end of a van. Came to rest halfway up a lamp-post. Hardly got scratched. The police were mystified at this, thought I must have been drunk. I enjoyed every minute of it, till I suddenly realized it was real, and that I might actually have been killed.' He held an arm over to the back seat, and in my mirror I saw Pearl take it with both hands and kiss his fingers passionately, not a word passing between them.

We went up to his fourth-floor flat near Sloane Square. He switched on a tape of Duke Ellington, but low so that we would be able to hear him talk if he said anything. Standing by the hall door he took off his hat and coat, and invited me to do the same. I was struck by the length of his absolutely bald head, a shining pink up from the palest of eyebrows, over the top and down to the back of his neck. Along the middle of his dome was a neat and curving scar caused, I was to hear later, by a murderous husband who happened to have a cleaver in his hand when catching Gilbert and his wife. The long-healed wound, which I thought must almost have killed him, made his head, especially from the back, look like nothing less than the limb that had got him into such trouble in the first place.

He sent Pearl into the kitchen to make coffee: ‘That's what women and disciples are for,' he said, sprawling back in a wide armchair, ‘to clean your glasses, fill your pipe, and tuck you up at night when you go to bed slightly drunk.'

‘I believe in treating them better than that,' I said, deliberately sanctimonious so as to draw him out.

‘That's because you're young,' he laughed. ‘You'll learn.'

I was always being told that, and it riled me. They said it in order to bring me round to their opinions. As far as I was concerned I'd learned already, but I had yet to find out how wrong I was. ‘They stay longer if you treat 'em better,' I said.

‘Who wants them to stay? There are plenty more where they come from. They never get wise, either, so don't tell me that.'

Pearl came in with a tray. ‘Do you take it black or white, Mr Blaskin?'

‘Better give it to me black, Pearly dear. That's the way I'm feeling tonight, so watch your bum when we get to bed. I'm the sex maniac incorporated tonight.'

Her face went vermilion at this, so she turned to pour coffee for me. ‘Do you want me to leave?' I asked Gilbert. There was a row of small pictures along the deep-blue wall behind his chair, of horses floundering to death, and jolly huntsmen in their bloody jackets lying on top of them with gritty smiles.

‘Not yet,' he said, ‘unless you can't stand my personal remarks to Pearl. You don't mind, do you, lovely?'

She didn't speak, tried to smile, but the coffee went down her wrong throat and she coughed to clear it out. I offered to start typing his novel right now.

‘The morning's better,' he said. ‘I can't be bothered to find it. I think I put it in the bread bin. Or maybe it's under my pillow. Or in the airing cupboard. Anyway, don't bother me with such supremely unimportant questions. I think I'm going to have a thought.' He lifted himself a little, and one of his profundities splintered the room.

‘It's all very well,' I said, ‘but how much are you going to pay me while I work for you? I was getting twenty a week at my last job.'

He threw his cigarette towards the electric fireplace but it landed on the carpet. ‘What's all the hurry?'

‘I've got to go out and find a room for the night.'

He glared at Pearl, who still had her nose in the coffee: ‘Stay here,' he said. ‘There's the spare room if you want it. We can talk terms in the morning.'

It didn't seem a bad place to hole up in if Moggerhanger should think to hunt me out for the theft of his cigarette lighter. ‘Darling,' Gilbert said to Pearl, singing like a canary, ‘are you going to sit there watching a hole burn itself in my best carpet? One of my great great-uncles looted it from India, and that would be a sad end for it.'

I found the spare room, and on my way called at the kitchen, taking half a cold chicken from the fridge, as well as a few slices of Miracle Bread from the bin, and a tin of orange juice and two bananas. So I lay in bed and puffed myself on Blaskin's goodies, while he was in the main room doing his best to stuff Pearl Harby.

I woke in the morning to the noise of Handel's
Messiah
, which seemed a mockery to the confusion I felt inside me, because for a while I didn't know where I was. Then the music made me want to laugh, because it was so great to hear first thing up from the dreams of oblivion that no matter where I was I felt glad to be alive and wanted to go on living for ever. Looking out I saw a great façade of drainpipes and back windows, lit up by the sun. By my pocket watch it was almost ten o'clock, and the smell of breakfast filtered under the door, together with the music singing ‘O my people' which, the longer it went on, made me want to cry with joy, booming as if the world was full of drums and voices, so that when I lay down again, with my eyes closed, it began to pull me backwards by the feet, back towards some great river I'd never get out of.

I dressed to my shirt and trousers, then hungrily followed my nose. Blaskin was sitting in a grandad-armchair at the end of the kitchen table, a wine-dark dressing-gown looped around him, frowning over the various plates of breakfast that Pearl had laid out. ‘Life,' he said, ‘is serious in the morning. In the morning you realize with deadly dread that the past is the present, because whatever has happened in the past is part of now. To know this gives you an angel's grip on life, but it's a bitter pill, just the same.'

He began eating, and Pearl, whiter than the night before and far more haggard, wrote quickly in a pad by the side of her cornflakes, maybe what he was saying, though I couldn't be sure, because at the same time she breathed heavily as if she were making up a shopping list. ‘My next novel is to be called
Motto
by Gilbert Blaskin. People may think I've gone crackers, using a title like that, but it's the thought that counts.'

I launched a thousand cornflakes into a dish of milk. ‘I'll give you two pounds a week with your room and food,' he offered.

‘Two pounds fifteen,' I haggled.

He glared at me. ‘Two pounds ten.'