Juggling the Stars (3 page)

‘You do realize that I admire you Dad. I admire you and hate you. And here's another interesting contradiction, if you will. My desire to humiliate is curiously mixed up with a desire to be
in the right
. I see that quite …'

But the whole thing had lost all sense of direction now. He'd noticed the same problem whenever he'd tried to write a letter to the newspapers. You began with a very clear idea - the change of heart, the looking up - and then halfway through you realized it wasn't clear at all. It was a mess in fact.

The dog started barking at two. Morris woke to a howl, long and bloodcurdling as a werewolf's. Then came repeated barks only a yard or two from his window. His jaws, as always when he woke, were clamped together tight, his tongue sore down one side and swollen. He lay listening to the dog, brain pounding with the most profound black anger, anger that seemed to bulge out from between his tired eyes. It wasn't enough to have your mother die on you then, the only person who'd cared for you, who'd encouraged you. It wasn't enough to have been born poor, to have a peasant of a beer swilling, stinking, pork-scraping father, to have fought upstream every moment of your life, to have been kicked out of university and rejected for more jobs than appeared in the
Guardian
in a month - no, to add to it all you had to have a dog next door shatter your sleep in the middle of every night, so that you could lie there rigid and horribly awake, going over and over everything again, the sense of frustration, of failure, of being taken for a ride, of having made the wrong decisions, been ignored, of having nothing, but nothing to look forward to, ever, nothing to show for all that effort.

The dog's tireless barking rang between courtyard walls and seemed to hack at his tired brain like a pick sinking into mud. Lying on his back, Morris began to cry, miserable tears of self pity. His cheeks ran. He was damned, merely. Damned. Nothing less. What gave it away was that nobody else seemed to worry about the animal. They were immune. The barking didn't wake
them
. But he was cursed with some terrible disease that brought these troubles to him. And he didn't deserve it. He really didn't deserve it.

Next morning, in Piazza Erbe, Morris bought a postcard and wrote the following polite and pleasant message to his father.

‘Dear Dad, hope all is well your end. You'll be working hard in the allotment to get things ready for spring I suppose. Everything fine here. Never rains. Splendid sunshine. Work going extremely well. Maybe if I find the time I'll book a flight for a week in summer. All the best. Dad.
MORRIS.'

That sounded all very enviable. (Why was it that life seemed a constant conversation with Dad sometimes?) He scribbled the address: 68 Sunbeam Road, North Acton, London NW10, Gran Bretagna, bought a stamp in the tobacconist's and posted the thing at the bottom of the square. Then off in search of a new shirt and trousers.

Dash or simplicity was the question. Modern or classic? What they wanted of course was basic business dress. A serious lad who could offer a girl something stable (even if they already had enough money to look after the both of them handsomely till kingdom come). It would be nice, Morris thoughts to go in something different and shock them into appreciation even admiration, of a different kind of person altogether not the man they had wanted but something they would see at once was even better. That was what a real artist would do. But he was feeling rather doubtful of his ability to pull it off just at the moment. Probably it would be better to keep the dress simple and then leave any inspiration to the moment itself, the conversation, the gestures.

In the end he settled for a very faint and tightly checked greeny shirt to go with his dark tweed jacket (an Englishy touch, along with the college tie, so dark against his blond skin), and then brushed wool Italian trousers that would be presentable anywhere. He was overspending of course and it did make him wonder briefly quite how the gas bill would be paid. But then the winter was over. Who cared if they cut him off? Anyway, Morris had a curious feeling that very soon he wouldn't have to be worrying about the odd thousand lire here and there, or whether he managed to find himself twenty lessons a week or not. He had reached the end of his tether was the point, surely, he had played the game their way too long, without success, too hard, too earnestly, too honestly. Either he strangled himself now, or the tether broke.

Shelling out a hundred thousand lire, Morris felt as one who is spending recklessly to be rid of a currency that will soon no longer be of use to him, and he was rather pleased with this metaphor and smiled generously at a dark young shop assistant.

Next to Standa to hunt out a cream for the document case. He liked taking care of beautiful things and chose his product carefully, reading all the instructions on all the tubes and tins there were. Normal things he was rather careless about (his scuffed shoes for example) but with beautiful things it was different (and that was the mystery in the end, to have opened one's eyes in North Acton and yearned for class and style before he even knew they existed). And Morris thought that when one day he had finally got a good number of beautiful possessions together he would spend a long time looking after them and get a great deal of pleasure from it. (He could train Massimina if it came to that. She seemed trainable enough.)

The main thing about the document case, though, Morris thought, rubbing in the cream with his fingertips at the school before lessons, was the aplomb with which he had taken it; precisely the kind of aplomb with which he would have liked to live his entire life, precisely the aplomb that was so miserably absent when you spent most days scuttling about in the street from one lesson to the next, grubbing together a few lire.

Morris had been on the train from Milan where he'd gone to renew his passport and there was only one other person in his compartment. Late at night this was. He had been feeling particularly buoyant after a day off work in a different town and when the other fellow insisted on striking up a conversation he had felt loath to admit he was a mere language teacher. What was a language teacher in the end? A nobody. A mere failed somebody else. Who would ever be a language teacher by choice? Morris said he was American (why not?), a member of the diplomatic service based at the American Consulate in Venice; he had been in Italy only six months so far but … His Italian was exceptional for such a short period the other man interrupted politely, and Morris had smiled and nodded pleasantly.

His fellow traveller introduced himself as a representative for Gucci's, and it was at this point that he had lifted the soft leather document case onto his fat knees and tapped the thing with such broad and chuckling satisfaction that Morris was rankled and almost told the man directly that he would have no truck at all with a lashy bunch of tricksters producing super-useless products that depended entirely on the name and sold at exorbitant prices to stupid fawning Americans who had to have everything preselected for them by this farce of legendary trademarks (so easily forged) that in reality meant nothing at all (while millions starved! - himself potentially amongst them, come to think of it). But the document case was extremely elegant, Morris couldn't help noticing, so he kept himself to himself and spoke politely about the leathergoods market and the admiration of his countrymen for Italian designers.

The conversation turned to politics and the man from Gucci's said how much the Italians were grateful to the Americans for having helped to keep the Communists out of government and Morris warmed to the subject and came out with an extraordinarily powerful invective against the red menace, even though he'd recently been seriously considering going to live in the Eastern bloc.
(LONDON LAD SEEKS BETTER LIFE IN
Moscow! banner headlines in the
Morning Star.)
He would work for Radio Moscow jamming the BBC since they'd always refused him a job. Why not? Who
needed
Brain of Britain., Radio Newspuke?

After about half an hour of this friendly conversation,the man got up to go to the lavatory and by pure chance his absence coincided with a very brief halt at the small station of Desenzano. Morris didn't think about it at all. Or if he did, he thought in Italian and so barely recognized it was himself doing the thinking. He placed one hand on the doorhandle and waited calmly till the train made its first slow lurch into motion again. Then, with quite perfect aplomb, he lifted the document case from the seat opposite and leapt out onto the platform. He had never felt less like a drudge in his entire life.

The train he had stepped off was the last one that evening; he was obliged to pass the night in a pensione near the station. But Morris didn't mind. He felt jubilant, exhilarated., surprised at himself. He should have started doing this kind of thing years ago.

Sitting on the narrow bed he went through the contents of the case, which were less attractive, frankly, than the thing itself - a sheaf of brochures with photographs of Gucci products, a copy of
Penthouse
(dirty bastard, with his polite conservative small talk), a bag of peppermints, various business letters and memos identifying the representative as a certain Amintore Cartuccio, based in Trieste, and finally, a big brown leather diary full of scribblings of appointments and their results.

Morris sucked the peppermints one after another and studied the diary entries for upwards of an hour, finding a variety of figures written by the names of what must be shops he supposed, and then occasionally the name ‘Luigina', followed by an exclamation mark. This name, he discovered, always coincided with that of a certain store in Bologna and appeared at intervals of around ten to twenty days. Two visits to Milan were also accompanied by the name ‘Monica', in the margin of the page, and this time the definite hour of an appointment.

It had occurred to Morris once or twice since that night in the pensione that there might be some mileage to be had out of Cartuccio for anyone with a modicum of courage. He couldn't actually remember seeing a ring on the man's fingers, but he was just the type to be married. It was curious how all the piggish, salacious, conventional types would quite certainly be married, whereas a gentleman like himself was forced in that direction only by extreme poverty.

‘ ‘ello Meester Morees!'

His first student had arrived, a small nervous fellow with the inevitable, grey-black, sad Italian moustache. Morris started. Caught in the act of rubbing cream into the stitched seams of thirsty leather, he felt almost as if he'd been found out in some kind of lewd activity, caught with his hand in his pants.

‘l see you ‘ave the Gucci bag,' Armando said, taking his seat in the classroom.

'That's right.'

‘Ees very nice the Gucci bag.'

Morris said he had always admired the quality of Italian leathergoods and gritted his teeth ready for the lesson.

‘Have a good weekend, Armando?'

'Yes, I ‘ave,'

Morris was telling an apocryphal story about Stan. There were the mother, the grandmother, two older sisters (how was it he had understood there was only one?), a certain curiously-named Bobo, and Massimina herself who watched him with full dark eyes. The maid had served hors d'oeuvres of chopped spinach and sour cream in little balls (delightfully known as ‘priest stranglers'), a pasta course of lasagne and ham, a meat course of simple, lightly done and deliciously toothsome steak, and now a dessert called
Tiramisu,
 which seemed to be some kind of soft smooth coffee cheesecake, extremely swallowable and topped with cocoa. Morris had made appreciative but not overly enthusiastic comments on the food, giving the impression, he hoped, that he was perfectly used to meals of this kind. Despite a raging hunger he had not only managed not to wolf things down, but even to leave a morsel on each plate and to refuse (ever so politely) every offer of seconds. His clothes perhaps, and especially the college tie, had proved a shade more formal than those of his hosts, but that was rather as it should be, Morris felt, on a first and humble appearance. And his Italian was excelling itself. He was in form.

‘But the point is,' he wound up, ‘that Stan is really
very well off.
Yes!' His bright eyes gleamed at their surprise. The fabricated story was at its twist and they seemed to be enjoying it. Morris paused for effect and smiled. (It was always he who did the entertaining. He had noticed that. The boring people fed off anybody with a scrap of imagination.) 'Yes, his family owns
a whole string of motels in Los Angeles!
And he had no need to live in the abandoned house at all. No. In -fact, Stan could easily have taken up a nice fiat the very day they'd married,
if only they'd been allowed to marry
. In the centre even. And if he'd just had the good sense to sit down with Monica's parents and explain his real situation then they'd never have worried at all most probably. Because for all his hippy ideas and clothes and beads and beard and things., Stan is really awfully nice. You know these Americans. But as it was, of course, what could they do? They had the impression the boy was from the gutter and that their daughter was going to end up there too. So they sent poor Monica off to Paris to a convent school, even though she didn't know a word of French, and poor Stan was left destitute in his abandoned house with his vegetarian cookbooks and Oxfam clothes and all his money that he never wants to spend.'

Morris, narrating, shot regular glances at Massimina which the others could hardly fail to see. The story, in one sense, given the circumstances, was extremely ingenuous and pointed. But that was precisely Morris's intention. It would indicate at once his fears, his appreciation of their fears - their legitimate fears he seemed to be saying - and his explicit intimation that he was on their side and that there was no problem in his case anyway. No beads, beard or Gandhi posters with Morris. For a moment he almost wondered whether he shouldn't finish up the story with a real moral wallop, have the poor fictitious Monica hang herself in the loos at the Gare du Nord, or turn lesbian and make porno films or something. But perhaps it wasn't the moment for a risky self indulgence.