“ ’Lo, Hon Don!” bellows Mathew, and “ ’Lo, Dizzy, ’lo Anna!”
“Hullo, Mathew, hullo indeed,” carols back the amorous octopus, and then there is a shriek of outrage, because Anna has goosed him. They fall en groupe over the back of the sofa into the mess of cushions, and it is revealed that all three are wearing suspenders, although (for which relief, much thanks) the Hon Don’s are of the respectable sock variety. For sheer devilment, Mathew snaps off a picture, and there’s another cry of outrage from Donald, “Spork, you bastard, you’ll ruin me! Wait! Wait! Wait! Did you get Anna’s calves? Well, did you get Dizzy’s? Bloody hell, I want that picture! Can you get me a copy? Wey-hey, Spork’s the lad, he bloody is! Ho ho, me young lovelies, now I can take you with me wheresoe’er I go!” And more, but it’s muffled in lace and laughter.
All around, lounging aristocrats and whipcord sportsmen, singers and entertainers including—to Joe’s vast retrospective embarrassment—a noted cabaret act in which a white man from Torquay paints his face and sings Louis Armstrong numbers. But this is the seventies, remember, and no one bats an eye, least of all the three West Indian Cricketers or the Sudanese princeling who turn up at midnight to demand a dance with the great Harriet after she’s sung her set. If Mathew has one redeeming feature, it is an absolute lack of prejudice.
Joshua Joseph loves them all. In miniature flares and a cowhide double-breasted jacket from Tickton’s, he dogs his father’s footsteps as Mathew congratulates a new MP on his win and steals a kiss from the man’s overspilling wife, then dives behind the bar at the urging of Dave Tregale—the casino boss who’s making his way in the world with a few favours from the House of Spork. To the delight of the multitude, Dave pours absinthe and sugar into a shot glass and sets it on fire, and Mathew drops the lot into his mouth and closes his lips on the flames. Joe waits for steam to come out of his father’s ears, and so, it seems, does everyone else. Mathew tosses the glass in the air with a flourish, rolls it down his arm onto the table and grins. “That’s a man’s drink, David, and not a word of a lie!”
After which nothing will answer but that Dave do the trick for a Soviet Cultural Attaché, third class, lately arrived after the opera and gasping for a snifter. Very shortly the bespectacled Russian is singing and dancing and the whole crowd is thumping on the floor, faster and faster, and beside Tovarich Boris (whose name is not Boris) is Mathew Spork, matching him kick for kick and spin for spin. Hoy hoy HOY!
Yet all these are just appetisers for the young Joe. His favourite thing comes later, when the guests are mostly gone, and he is admitted to an even more select company of adults. When everyone has shimmied and twisted and the conga line is played out; when the Funkin’ Walrus and Lady Goodvibe have gone home, and the respectable, florid faces have departed, Mathew is left with his close court—and the real party begins.
The great treat of robbing a bank—really robbing it, not just grabbing the cash from the registers like a piker and running headlong into twenty coppers when you get home—is looking in the safety deposit boxes and seeing who had what squirrelled away, then arguing over whether to hang on to it or sell it on, and very occasionally uncovering something truly special or bizarre. Mathew once found, in a box from a bank on the Essex coast, a human jawbone wrapped in crumbling cloth, together with a card identifying it as a holy relic of Saint Jerome. In the same box was a collection of erotic icons detailing a very unconventional version of the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit which a second card asserted had been painted by Michelangelo. Even as forgeries, they were unique. If real…
Mathew donated them anonymously to the British Museum, and by coincidence was invited to a string of glamorous parties by the directors. The icons were not widely seen, though the Museum retains them for very special visitors.
Scotch and hot coffee have replaced absinthe. Harriet is smoking a cigarette in a long holder, others have cigars and pipes. The cash money is being counted elsewhere, there’s nothing so dull as watching two accountants tally and cross-check one another, licking their thumbs and getting paper cuts on their fingers, riffling and complaining and trying to enlarge, without appearing to, their one per cent cut, rising on the far side of the table in proportion to the main stack. All the same, Mathew’s working bag is at his feet, clanking when he puts his foot on it, and Joshua Joseph knows the tommy gun is within; it is his father’s iron rule that he does not put it back into the case until the count is done and the tally split.
So here are the safety deposit boxes, all in rows, and warming up to a box each are the best and most dishonest locksmiths in the country: Aunt Caro with a pipe in her yellow buck teeth and a low gown which reveals, as she leans forward, remarkably conical white breasts; Uncle Bellamy in his sheepskin, even here, indoors and hot as a greenhouse, and sweat coming down his red face from his comb-over; and Uncle Freemont, born in Bermuda and possessed of spiderlong hands, with his half-moon specs on the end of his nose and a hat in Haile Selassie’s colours to remind everyone to show some respect.
“Are you ready?” Mathew Spork demands from the sofa, where Harriet has her stockinged legs across his lap and is shuffling closer to snuggle against him.
They nod. Of course they are. Tensioners and picks in little glimmering lines, rakes in different sizes. Each pouch also contains a few bump keys, not for the competition, but for later, when it’s just about getting through the haul.
“Three, two, one… get ’em open!” Because this is a race, of great seriousness and intensity. How many boxes can each locksmith open in ten minutes? The outer locks are all the same, of course, but the boxes have a second, inner layer to which each customer must affix a lock of his own. And while they struggle and work the tough inner locks, the neophytes and apprentices whisper to one another about what’s being done. The young Joe learns the secrets of the vise and pin, the shunt and the bump key, the tension and the torsion, all wrapped up in laughter and delight, so that another curious skill is added to his repertoire and to his inner list of tasks whose execution is a joy and a matter for laughter and celebration.
Aunt Caro was the fastest, Joe remembers, muzzy and partway asleep on the Raspberry Room sofa. One might argue that she cheated. On the third round she complained that she was hot, and stripped off her top half altogether, letting everything hang out. Broad, muscular shoulders beaded with sweat, strong hands twisting, she carried on. The two men just watched and then Uncle Freemont asked her outright to marry him, to which she replied she’d never marry a man without credentials. She made the word sound so dirty even the infant Joe understood vaguely that this was about sex. Aunt Caro, with a mouth full of bad dentition and roomy about the bust and flank, was all the same a woman with a direct line to the male libido. They left together to pursue the formalities in private.
That merry evening marked the beginning of the end for Mathew Spork. Mathew had come to believe he should shift his game, build a power base and join—at least to some degree—the legitimate economy. The mob had Frank Sinatra, Mathew said. They had movie stars and casinos. Why couldn’t Mathew Spork do the same?
He bought into a chain of newsagents, Post Office concessions, car dealerships, and a pier by the seaside, joined a club called Hawkley’s, and tried without great enthusiasm to restrict himself to low-risk jobs and show thefts. He stole underwear from the bedrooms of visiting starlets and worked very hard to get caught in his domino mask going out of the door. He replaced a set of paste diamonds used in a stage detective story with real ones lifted from the owner’s wife. He lounged and sprawled and took meetings with American businessmen who wanted to touch a genuine English gangster.