He went on like this, slooshing his tripes with brandy now and again, till he fell off the chair, and we had to drag him to bed. I left Pearl to tuck him in.
I sat in my room making plans for departure. Gilbert hadn’t yet read the typed copy of his novel. When he did there’d be a shock for him. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made a good job of it. The typing was clear and firm, the paper white and clean between the lines, and maybe even some people would consider it to be a novel. I’d started off with Gilbert’s true text, but halfway through I got bored by the story, and at the point where his hero was sitting outside a Paris café and wondering whether to go back to his girlfriend in London, or down to his boyfriend in Nice, I reached up to the shelf behind me and brought down Roderick Random by Henry Fielding* and typed twenty pages of that, which, if anything, lent a bit of quality to Blaskin’s thin-blooded crap. More pages were ploughed in from other novels, though I understood that this wasn’t exactly what the author wanted. Considering that I’d spent three weeks over the work, he might have been irritated by this and given me the push, so I decided to take fate once more into my own hands and light off before he got wind of the disaster. Then I thought I was being too hurried about it, that if I didn’t lose my nerve, and stayed, maybe he wouldn’t bother to read the novel before sending it to his publishers. And once it got there maybe nobody would tumble to what had been done, and print it with the fond thought that Mr Blaskin had at last set off on better and richer ways, something they’d been secretly hoping for ever since they’d mistaken his first novel for a work of art. Maybe the reviewers would even praise the newly emerging quality of his invention. In which case he’d actually have something to thank me for — if I was still around.
I decided to move on, though not at midnight, because it was always better to look for a bed in, the morning, when the memory of one was still with you. Another thing was that I needed a room of my own, an absolutely set pad where I could come and go of my quick will. I’d dallied long enough at Blaskin’s for Moggerhanger to have given me up as lost, if he’d even bothered to miss me or imagine I could ever be found, which I was beginning to doubt now that my hope and initiative were coming back, blinding me to all caution. Another fact was that Blaskin had given me no money, when he’d solemnly promised fifty bob a week. I’d reminded him of it in good terms a time or two, but like all people who are ultra-sensitive in everything, and don’t miss a splinter of what goes on anywhere, it went over his head completely — or at least he acted as if it did.
When I considered that all were asleep I crept out of my room and found his coat hanging up in the hall. I removed two five-pound notes, which I thought to be honest payment for all the work I’d done on his novel. There were sixty pounds in the wallet altogether, and I could have lifted all of it, but I knew in my heart that Blaskin would call the police without hesitation if he thought I’d robbed him unjustly, for he was one of those people who loved the world as long as the people in it interested him. After that, it was back to the jungle for all concerned.
I had to get out of the flat while he and Pearl were still asleep, and to save time packed my case the night before. I stood with the light off and my curtains open, watching the opposite buildings. A woman leaned in white underwear, and a man’s arms pulled her to him, out of my sight. Then the blind went down. A huge dog, as big as a man and with a head twice the size, pressed at one window, and seemed to be barking, though I couldn’t hear it, pawing the glass as if it were locked in and there was no escape. I wished someone would pull that beast away so that I couldn’t see it any more. I turned my head to another range of windows. In some, there was washing, because most of the rooms seemed to be kitchens. Light bulbs were often bare, a few were shaded. A shadow moved across a window now and again, too quick to see whether it was man or woman. I wondered how many of them had to get up in the morning and go to work. I felt hatred of those who didn’t, as if I was the only person in the world with the right to be idle. Just as I could never feel sympathy for anyone unless they were without food, so I would never go to work unless I were starving. But as I looked at those massed windows covering the whole sky, I felt this sentiment crumbling. It just wasn’t worthwhile. It cut me off too much, from all those people in the world I most wanted to know. It was as if I had to break my own bones in order to join them, that was the only trouble. The longer it went on like this, the harder it would be, though at the same time I devoutly wondered whether I’d have the brains to stay away from their terrible anonymity without falling as low as Almanack Jack. To join them, all I had to do was switch on my own bedroom light, and stand there, imprisoned in the oblong of window so that they on the other side could then see that I was a prisoner like the rest of them. But I got into bed in the dark.
A few hours later, with something lurking at my window that looked like morning, I was awake, croaking for a pot of liquid to drink but knowing I’d have to wait till I got clear and found a café. I dressed in two minutes and, taking one last glimpse around the flat, made for the door with my case attached to my hand. I shivered, as if I’d made too many departures in the last few months, and wasn’t sure that I wanted to go. I wasn’t even getting kicked out, but that didn’t seem to matter, for I was moving, and, at this time of the morning, that was that.
A man standing by the door, about to press the bell, got as big a shock as I did. He was tall, well built, had thinning hair, and wore a pale short mackintosh. I tried to keep my voice down: ‘What do you want?’
He lisped: ‘Mog wants his flash back.’
I didn’t know what he meant. ‘You’ve got the wrong house.’
‘Moggerhanger sent me. He wants his lighter back.’
‘I haven’t got it any more.’
‘He wants ’is flash back.’
‘I ain’t got the thing,’ and shut the door behind me: ‘Shift out of the way. I’m going down.’
He bumped me so hard that I dropped my case: ‘Mr Moggerhanger wants ’is flash.’ He took a cut-throat razor from his pocket, opened it, and grinned: ‘He told me to make the sign of the cross if you don’t hand it over.’
I saw that glint, and took the hint, and bent down to snap open my case, scrabbling under a heap of shirts and dirty underwear. ‘I was going to call in and bring it back today,’ I said, pushing it into his hand. He pressed the fuse, saw the flame, looked at it as if he thought it a pretty sight that he could gaze on all day. After a final grin at its beauty, he blew it out and put it in his pocket, the razor held all the time in his other hand.
‘That all right?’ I said, trying to stay calm and smile. He lifted the razor and drew it across my face, without touching flesh. I cried out, but he laughed, kicked my case down the stairs, and walked through the mess.
I picked up the bits and put them back. On his progress he’d trodden on a tube of toothpaste and squashed it flat, so that a white jet of it had shot across the carpeted stair. A cold sweat was all over me, and my hand trembled so that I could hardly put a necktie back into the case. I knelt to do my work, and thought of going into the flat, to fall asleep and tell myself afterwards, when I got up to a good breakfast and decided to stay, that this had been a mere bad dream. But the door was locked and I had no key, and in any case I would not have done it.