‘There are worse things.’
‘Not to me.’
‘If I had to live there I’d take a couple of cats,’ I said.
‘I hate cats as well. Kick the fucking things. And dogs.’
‘Who do you like?’
His face was flushed with sickly spite. ‘Women. I can hit ’em and love ’em.’
I shuddered — though didn’t let him see it. After a couple of minutes I said: ‘Want another drink?’
‘Got to keep a head on my shoulders. I’m waiting for a man who owes Claud some money. If he don’t pay, I’ve got to break his arms.’
‘Maybe he’ll break yours.’
He grinned again. ‘He’ll pay. He’s got lots of money. I’ll just frighten him.’
I stood up to go. ‘Do I know him?’
‘It’s Dicky Bush.’
‘Jazz pianist?’.
He nodded. ‘He wouldn’t like to lose the use of his arms.’
‘I only know him from the magazines. By the way, I’ve been most of the day with — you’ll never guess.’
He tried to look at me threateningly. ‘Who?’
I laughed at his half-closed eyes and hunched shoulders. ‘Your favourite author.’
He swallowed his bile and fumbled for a cigarette. ‘Sidney Blood? Yer don’t say!’
I nodded. ‘He’s in the middle of a yarn called The Mangled Duck. It’s a real snorter. He read me a couple of pages.’ I saw the question in his eyes. ‘Well, maybe one day I’ll see what I can do. He’s a very exclusive person. He lives alone at Virginia Water with a couple of Great Danes. Doesn’t like interruptions.’
Kenny understood. ‘Them fucking authors are funny people. I saw one once on telly.’
‘I’ll try and get you over there.’
‘I’d give anyfing to meet him.’
I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m off back to Ealing. I’m dead beat.’
Outside the street door, a tall thin black reeking of eau de cologne almost collided with me. ‘Are you Dicky Bush?’ I asked, quick as a flash. ‘If you are, you’re the greatest jazz musician in the world.’
His expression changed from absolute hatred to the most beautiful smile of goodwill. His hand came out: ‘Shake!’
I did. ‘By the way, there’s a beefy chap with fair curly hair down there wanting to break your arms because he says you owe money to somebody or other.’
A look of caution replaced the shining teeth of his smile. ‘Thanks, Whitey.’ He took out a knife and licked it. I went on my way, thinking that in the jungle the man with the blade is king, if not god.
I walked along Old Compton Street. There wasn’t much trade going on. One or two women plucked my elbow, but I thanked them for the compliment and told them not tonight, darling, wishing I had gone straight home rather than put myself between Kenny Dukes and Dicky Bush. They could take care of each other without my help. I pulled up my collar against the drizzle and walked across Cambridge Circus. Somebody was pushing a pram up St Martin’s Lane, and I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Delphick, how’s life?’
He glared at me. ‘Fuck off.’
London isn’t a very friendly place. It even brings out the worst in those who come from the North. ‘That’s no way to talk to somebody who not only gave you a lift to Stevenage, but bought you breakfast as well.’
He had another look. ‘You forgot to pay me for the poem.’
The panda also glanced at me resentfully. The pram was battened down with cord and canvas. Delphick wore a fashionable jacket and cravat under his duffel coat. ‘Did you give a reading tonight?’
‘Reading?’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose you’d call it that. The place was full, but when I sent the hat round it came back with six pounds fifty, four Deutschmarks and a Canadian cent with a hole in it. I sometimes think I’ll pack it in and get a job as a tally clerk in a corduroy factory, except that they’ve all closed down. I’m going back to Doggerel Bank tomorrow, but tonight I’ve got nowhere to stay, so I have to push this idle panda all over the place till dawn. The person who was going to put me up in Camden Town threw me out because his missis took a shine to me. Where do you live?’
I offered a cigarette, and he tried to take two. ‘I sleep above my employer’s garage. It wouldn’t be any good.’
‘I’m losing my faith in people, and that’s bad for a poet. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Nobody is happy to do me a favour anymore.’
I got annoyed. ‘When did you last do anybody a favour?’
A copper looked at us as he walked by. Being young, he didn’t know whether to wish me good night, sir, or take me in for questioning. ‘Me? Do somebody a favour?’
I heard an ambulance running in circles somewhere beyond the Marylebone Road. ‘You could give somebody a poem now and again. It wouldn’t hurt you.’
‘That’s my bread and butter. Poems are priceless and precious.’
‘I suppose you only give ’em to girls who sleep with you.’
He squinted. ‘How did you guess?’
A bundle of rags tied in the middle with a bit of rope, a bushy grey beard at the top, and a jellyfish of footcloths at the bottom, shifted down the road poking at cardboard boxes in shop doorways. Four bulging plastic bags, like airships at their moorings, hung from whoever it was, man or woman.
‘People like that should be shut up for life,’ Delphick exclaimed. ‘The place is crawling with ’em.’
The bundle of rags, about a hundred yards up on the other side of the road, stopped. He unclipped the plastic bags, rummaged in one, and took out a cigar. ‘Did I hear right?’ he called in a clear, loud and fairly unaccented voice. ‘Or did my hardened ears deceive me? Would my callous fellow man like to try shutting me up for life?’
‘You’d better run,’ I said to Delphick. ‘He sounds like the Son of Almanack Jack.’
‘I’ll throttle the bastard,’ Delphick said. ‘He’s not going to talk to me like that. He’s got to show some respect to a poet.’
‘Leave him alone.’
But he was halfway across the road with hands lifted, and the next thing I knew a remarkably agile fist shot out from the Bundle of Rags, and Delphick, after a suitably dramatic cry, was lying on the pavement. I suppose there was some justice left in the world, but when the Bundle of Rags lifted his beribboned footcloths to stamp on Delphick’s face I pushed him away so hard he nearly cracked the plate glass window of a car showroom. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘Piss off.’
He looked at me while lighting his cigar. ‘You must allow that I had a case.’
‘I suppose so. But don’t kick a man when he’s down, even though he would have done the same to you.’
‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said. Then he drew back. ‘No, I’d better not. Call me Sir Plastick Bagg, if you like. Suffice it to say that I come out on one night a week to see how the other half lives. I have no sex life, so what else can I do? The Madam sends me out, and I like it. It’s like being in the shit pit as a kid, old boy. So nice to have met you.’
‘I was going to offer you a fiver,’ I said.
‘Don’t bother. I’ll be home for breakfast. Knowing my proclivities, the Ministry of Defence allows me a day off each week, so that I can sleep in. Goodbye. I hear there are rich pickings on the Strand.’
It was a shattering experience. One learns only slowly what’s going on in the world. Delphick was back with his panda-pram. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ I said.
He dabbed his bruised face, and we stood without speaking, an occasional car moving up and down the road. He pulled at the rope covering his pram. ‘I’ll give you a poem. I’ve got just the poem. You’ll love it.’