A Start in Life (35 page)

What drew me most of all was a huge glass case built from the floor almost up to the ceiling, and a sort of bed inside this aquarium, with one large face – so large that it must have been in some way magnified – looking out of it at the top end. From this immense transparent construction came pipes and wires, and by the side at the other end was a huge rubber bag inflating and deflating the heart of the man inside this miracle of modern science set before my eyes. He lay under a counterpane, but with enough of his body visible to show that he was dressed in a normal suit, with a collar and tie at the neck. He sloped on a backrest, it seemed, though only a little, so that he could look sideways at the ceiling. Papers and booklets were spread over the bed, but at the moment he was mainly interested in me, as I advanced with William across the room, still carrying my briefcase. His face was pale, and rather fat, and his small brown eyes fixed me firmly. ‘Good morning, sir,' William said. ‘I've brought the new man along.'

‘Let's see him then,' a voice replied, not from the iron lung, but out of a speaker by the side, though there was no doubt that it was the man within the iron lung who had spoken. As I went close I saw, on a built-in ledge within reach of his hand, a Luger automatic pistol. What good that would do him in a dust-up I couldn't imagine, yet I suppose it gave him some comfort to have it close by.

‘A man,' said the rather cracky voice that came out of the speaker, ‘must be able to carry half his own weight, without showing it. Can you?'

I made a quick reckoning. Last time, the scales had spun up to well over twelve stones, so six times fourteen came to more than eighty pounds. The idea frightened me, but instead of telling him to hire a team of yaks, I said I could, providing the packer knew his job. The speaker laughed. It surprised me that during the whole interview he asked so few questions, but I supposed that William had kept him well supplied.

‘Ask Stanley to put the flak-jacket on him,' he called, and the tall dark pansy who had let us into the flat came back with a trolley laden with long thin blocks of metal. A coat was spread over the handles and I was told to put it on. William helped me. It had long thin pockets inside, which I supposed were to receive the metal on the trolley. These were said, by running commentary from the man in the iron lung, to weigh a pound each, and one by one fifty of them were put away there, while my shoes were getting so glued to the floor that I looked down to see if I were making a hole in it. My shoulders took the weight, but I also felt it at my ribs, as if they were about to be pulled apart.

‘Feeling all right?' he grinned from behind his perspex.

‘Fine,' I smiled, at the fortieth bar and ready to swing over on to his floor. I pretended my life was at stake, as if I'd be shot if I weren't able to put up with it. To take my mind off the weight (which, you must admit, wouldn't make that much difference) I began to think of all the things I'd done since reaching London. Flight into London it had been, indeed and by God, and the one bright star was Bridgitte Appledore, whom it looked like I wouldn't see till I got out of this madman's den. I wanted to see her alone, and make loose so that I got through to her warm sweet nut and full white breasts and lovely astonished face that frowned but enjoyed it all by the time it was nearly finished. But maybe she'd be hotter after her months with Dr Anderson, because husbands were often good for warming up whorish wives for their lovers to get the cream of – though my wife would never be like that, for I'd settle her myself. Be that as it may, I now had sixty bars in my thick gabardine mac and it was considered enough – seeing as they didn't want to break my back first go.

A smile made his face even paler. I felt one on my own, without having put it there. It was the smile of illumination that comes before death. I was lit up inside, ready and light in weight for what came next. ‘Go to the other end of the room and back,' the man said from the safety of his iron lung. I was prepared to fly, but for my sixty shackles. Maybe my convict ancestors had been laden like this when due for Botany Bay.

I knew before I started that the best trick would be not to walk too slow. That would bring me down. So I went with reasonable speed though not too quickly, one leg taking the weight of the other in an even balance, and the rhythm carried me along, though I don't suppose I looked too happy about it. But while I was going from them they couldn't see my face, and by the time I turned and started to stride manfully back the mouth was screwed shut and my gills, though in no way twisted, couldn't have been anything but purple.

Back at Lungville he said to me: ‘Now write your name and address on that sheet of paper.' I bent stiffly to get at the pen and do as I was told, then stood straight again. I heard a murmur of ‘Good, good,' as if Lungy had said it to himself and not into the inside mike. ‘Now do
your
stuff,' he told William, who took the paper I had written on and pushed it into a tube contraption normally used in department stores for sending change from cash desk to counter. The next second it was inside the iron lung and being studied by Pasty-face through a magnifying glass. ‘While I'm doing this, you can walk up and down a few times.'

‘And take your briefcase,' said William. ‘Just to show what you can do,' he added with a wink, dropping something in front of me that looked like a passport: ‘Pick that up while you're at it, my old flower!'

‘Get it your bloody self,' I said, with a look of murder.

‘It's part of the job,' he told me, as if I'd hurt and insulted him.

‘I haven't clocked-on yet.'

William patted me on the back: ‘But you will soon, and this is one of the things you might have to do. So don't let me down. Just imagine you are carrying fifty thousand quid's worth of gold, and now that you've come to the customs bloke you've dropped your passport. You'd have to pick it up as if you'd got nothing in your pockets, wouldn't you?'

‘All right,' I said. ‘I get the idea.' I went out at a right angle and let my hand drop, coming up again so quickly with the passport in my hand that I astonished myself at having done it with such ease.

‘He's passed,' ‘I heard the voice say from inside the lung. ‘His writing shows it, anyway. Strength, caution, speed, confidence. It's all here. Put him on that job to Zurich at the end of next week.'

‘What about money?' I asked politely.

He coughed. ‘When you come back you'll get three hundred. Stanley will give you twenty pounds now on account, if you need it.'

‘I do,' I said, still having more than two hundred from my Moggerhanger days, but knowing that you could never have too much in hand.

The time until my first trip was spent in more training. I worked up the weights till I went into the streets with a full load of over fifty pounds, plus the briefcase, walking to a specified point, getting on a bus for a few miles, then sitting down in a stipulated café to a cup of coffee. I'd finally take a bus back to Knightsbridge, and drag a few hundred yards to the flat where I'd be divested of my straitjacket. When it came off I felt weightless and naked, and I'm sure I looked shiftier when I went out in normal gear than I ever had when loaded.

The night before the trip I phoned Bridgitte to wish her goodbye. A man picked up the phone and snappily demanded who it was, so I put on an imitation Dutch accent and said I was Bridgitte's brother. When I heard her call out that she had no brother, I raved that I had meant cousin – she must have at least one cousin. ‘Who is it?' she asked. I told her I was going to Rome in the morning for a few days, but that I'd try to see her as soon as I got back. I heard a blow, a cry, a sound of quarrelling. The line went dead.

*
Michael Cullen's mistake. As everyone knows, this novel was written by Tobias Smollett – though Cullen is by no means the first to make such an error.
Author
.

Part Five

They loaded me up at the flat and William drove me to the airport. He had only got back from a diamond trip the night before, but wanted to be the one to see me off. ‘You'll do marvels. You're a bloody wonder-boy. I've never seen anybody carry so much with such a cold look in his eye. I mean it. You'll be perfect.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘Stop the cackle. I can't stand it so early in the morning. I still need fifteen more cups of coffee, so I hope there'll be time at the buffet.'

I'd been to the airport the day before, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a cap as if going to wait for somebody, so I knew my way through. I said goodbye to William, then got out of the car so that he could drive home and get some sleep. I felt utterly cool and unconcerned about carrying gold out of the country, because it seemed such a harmless and easy thing to do. It wasn't stealing, and that made it all right. I was only a highly paid pack-mule.

I booked in, got on the escalator, and made straight for the departure lounge, feeling it would be better not to delay in case this feeling of righteousness deserted me. Bustling in the crowd around the newspaper and souvenir kiosk at the other end, I saw the bluff familiar head of Moggerhanger. What he was doing at the airport I didn't know, and had no wish to find out, but it made just one more good reason for getting through the formalities quickly. My ticket was checked, and then I walked towards the passport man, a real old Twitchbollock standing behind a pulpit. Nearby was a customs officer who glanced at everybody as they went by. I looked ahead, through the door, as if anxious to get at one of the coffee urns beyond, and this disinterested craving for another dose of breakfast put a normal look on my face at a point when I was about to get nervous. There was a beautiful dark-haired girl in front of me, and after my passport was seen to I took a view of her legs when I should have been giving the customs man a dirty look. I heard no voice asking what I was taking out, felt no hand on my shoulder, and then I was through, and in, and out, and at the counter, and sweating so much under my armour-plated coat that black spots flitted in front of my eyes. I deliberately lingered by the part of the counter that was still in sight of the customs man, not out of crackpot bravado, but only to emphasize to him, if he ever had any suspicions, that I felt no reason to vanish into the crowd.

With half an hour before my plane number came up, I had two cups of coffee and a sandwich, then strolled to the newspaper counter and bought a copy of
The Financial Times
. My legs and shoulders were aching from too much weight. It was still not ten in the morning, and due to the cups of poisonous coffee, I had to go to the lavatory. I was far too clever to take my coat off before sitting down, knowing that I'd find it hard to get it on again. At the same time all was not well, because when I had finished, I couldn't get up. The coat hung around me like a cloak of rock. In one way I didn't want to get up, but to sit there and muse in my own stink till someone found me, or until I recovered my determination and picked myself to pieces, bar by bar, when I'd walk away from the airport and vanish for ever – as far as the man in the iron lung was concerned. But having followed this line through to the stupid and bitter end, I began to consider how it might be better if I got upright and went on my way. After all, I was being trusted with a big job, and if I muffed it William Hay would get his face bashed in and get sent back to being plain Bill Straw on the run from all the right-thinking criminals in society.

I stayed a minute on my knees, hand resting on the rim of the toilet. It was hard to move from this position, but at least I was mobile, because even if I got no more upright than this I'd be able to shuffle across the departure hall and up the plane steps on my knees, giving out that I was on a pilgrimage to my favourite saint's shrine at Lourdes where I was hoping to get my mother cured of a fatal illness. No, that wouldn't do, so I crawled around the wall and back again. This hadn't been part of the training, though I saw now that it should have been, and would have to get the syllabus amended when I got back, if I got back, if ever I came out of jail. I was on top of the toilet now, and by a quick but risky flip backwards my feet hit the ground in the right place, and I was shaken but standing, just as the number of my plane was announced as departing from Gate Number Thirteen. I fastened my trousers, then the coat, picked up my briefcase, and was on my way to the pressurized unknown.

The plane sagged as I stepped on board – or I thought it did, and the heat of the jungle hung over me as soon as I sat down in that long stuffy plane. I'd often wondered whether I'd be afraid of going off the earth in this way, but now I was too exhausted to care. I had no reactions at all, except a heavy pressure pushing me back towards the seat – something I didn't need because I was well bedded there already. The plane went straight into the clouds, followed the white carpet all the way. I'd got by a window, and a young girl sat next to me. Her elbow pushed into my ribs by accident, then sprang back at the touch of solid iron that she met. The central heating must have been full on, because she took off her coat, then her jacket. A bracelet hung from her wrist, but there were no rings on her fingers. There was a bump under the plane, as if we were climbing a hill, and her hand clutched the seat. It was only now, five miles off the earth, that I wondered what it would be like leaving it.

My luggage allowance was wrapped around me like solid gold armour, and I was naturally led to wonder whether such padding would be any good if the aeroplane crashed on landing. Certainly, if the wings I could see out of my window were ripped off, it wouldn't help me. We'd go down like a stone, and maybe my weight would even pull it a bit faster, and later my body would be found twenty feet under the earth, a knickerbocker glory all wrapped up in the golden handshake.

At six miles up I noticed an ordinary housefly loose in this lovely immaculate jet. Such a scruffy little surviving bastard was a sign of reassurance, made me laugh at it, something more homely and normal than myself and the eighty others lined up and down. That fly will go far, I thought, having passed the survival test this far up, the only real eleven-plus of any life. The stewardess was selling drinks a few seats away, and swayed, grabbing an overhead rack when the plane banked sharply. Again the girl by my side gripped the armrest. ‘Are you nervous?'