Comparisons were painful, so I mulled over my break with Bridgitte, which was a supportable agony because it was familiar. It seemed as if she had left only yesterday, but the unexpected savagery of her departure with the kids had bitten two weeks out of my life, leaving a wound so raw it would never heal. I could hardly account for the subsequent days except to say they were a nightmare, hours of misery from brooding at my loss, and a relentless ache at wondering how the kids were faring.
Bits of food and empty whisky bottles littered stairs and tables, but by closing the door that morning on the piggery of ten years, an iron test had been passed. The marks of the experience had bitten so deep that it seemed the disaster had had no effect on me.
Life goes on, I thought, settling myself into a first class seat on a second class cheap day shopper’s ticket, which was tucked into a pocket of my Norfolk-style jacket. On the other hand, life had gone on since I was born, with little help from me, so there was no reason to suppose it would not continue until the day of my inevitable blackout. Even when my existence seemed too painful to last, or too good to go on forever, I stared side-on at the antics it played. After my stint in prison, ten years before, I preferred walking parallel to life rather than through the middle like a grenadier. But I was never less than up to my neck in it.
I reached for The Times left by somebody who got out at Cambridge. There was the usual front-page photo of a terrorist with a scarf around his head, trying to smile like royalty, and inside was the snapshot of an eight-year-old kid with a Kalashnikov which I supposed the photographer had given him a quid to hold so that he could get a good picture.
At thirty-five the grey hair had begun, which surprised me because I thought I never worried. Life had been calm, and nothing justified that hint of fag ash on the lower fringes of my sideboards. Worrying that I didn’t worry would only make it worse. Bridgitte pointed to the grey bits as if they were the marks of a beast that had always lurked there, and ruffled them to see whether or not they were real.
I hoped the tormented expression on my face in the British Rail looking-glass was only temporary, because it spoiled my almost good looks, at which the only response was a crackling breakfast belch before sitting down.
What I dreaded most was going bald, like that tall, gaunt, randy old prick-head Gilbert Blaskin I had been lumbered with as a father. As for my mother, she hadn’t been heard of for months, not since the old man began his new novel. While he was working he no longer tormented her, which meant that she was unable to get at him. Every so often they fled in opposite directions so as not to murder each other, and with Blaskin being a writer it worked out well. I imagined going to the flat and finding them dead on the mat by the door, a cleaver in her hand and an axe in his. They had struck each other’s heart at the same second and with instant effect, though I thought it more likely that while one would be dead, the other would be so wounded that he or she would be pushed around in a bottle-type wheelchair for as long as he or she lived. Mother or father — I didn’t care which — would gurgle reproachfully at me as the reason for their downfall. After a terrific struggle I’d get the bottle to the top of the Post Office Tower and let it go, hoping a gust of wind would swing it through a window of the Middlesex Hospital where they could accept it as an unsolicited gift from me.
My Irish mother of fifty-odd had a mop of Cullen-thick hair which was duly passed on. She’d thinned her own and sprayed it with silver and pink so that she wouldn’t look a day under thirty-five. Whether she was Irish or not I’d never really known, and neither had she, but she’d been unable to stand the thought of being taken for English, especially since Blaskin was a fairly pure specimen of the breed — at least, as she often said, in his talent for deceit and the versatility of his vices. I wanted to take after neither but, being my vain and pleasure-loving self, hoped I was closer to my mother’s side as far as keeping my hair till I was a hundred and ten was concerned, though I found it painful at times that a bloke of thirty-five should be lumbered with parents at all.
Clouds floated over the flat fields, a fine picture of altocumulus castellanus — as I had learned from Smog’s school books when I tested him for A levels, thus gaining qualifications which I hadn’t been able to earn at the proper time. Such cloud varied in its direction with the sine, cosine and tangent of the moving train. April smelled ripe and dead, bits of sun filing through to the blackening earth.
The reason for my journey to London was because a letter from my old pal Bill Straw begged me to come poste haste without restante to help him out of a jam. When Bill, a man with a long past, wrote about a jam it was no mere logjam in a river of crocodiles near a thousand foot waterfall with natives shooting poisoned arrows from either bank. It was serious, though I didn’t suppose he realized how much worse I might make his predicament.
A man wearing expensive clothes looked into my compartment as if to consider parking there. I had spreadeagled my coat, briefcase, cap and self in such a way that it looked filled, so he closed the door, gently for one so nervous, and walked down the corridor. I turned to The Times crossword, and tried to make sense out of nine down, a clue whose complexity made me feel like the kingpin idiot himself.
I noted in the car sales columns that the Thunderflash Estate had come onto the market, and was sorry I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy one. The tall pin-headed man dragged the door open and settled himself opposite. He stank of scent, and looked out of the window while filing his nails. I tried to guess his profession, or the source of his money, hazarding soldier, barrister, remittance man, stockbroker’s clerk, unfrocked priest, or of independent means, but none would fit. I observed a person of about forty who looked as if he had all his vices under firm control. With short, mousey, Caesar-style hair, he had more than a few, though I couldn’t decide what they were, but he certainly knew all about them because he had the sour expression of someone who trusted himself absolutely. Whoever he worked for had fallen for his air of reliability.
His preoccupied gaze took me back to when I had been put in prison by the machinations of Claud Moggerhanger, an experience which reinforced my impression that the man opposite was untrustworthy to the core, though he might not look so to others. There were many such types in England. A man of similar phizzog in some countries would be immediately under suspicion but, living in a land where the borderline between loyalty and treachery had never been properly surveyed, and where he blended well with the surrounding populace, he would be considered a safe enough bet.
He was so taken up with himself that he didn’t think I had noticed him, but a one-second flash over my newspaper told me more than any stare. I had been brought up in a place where, if you looked above two seconds at anyone, you were inviting him (or even her — sometimes especially her) to a fight. In prison, only one second was necessary, often less than that, so I had developed the knack of seeing all at a glance. Whoever the man worked for had put him through the aptitude tests and psychological probings of a foolproof selection board, but I knew they had boobed in the most basic way because they had never been in jail as a prisoner.