Phyllis had the most honest face I’d ever seen that still had a trace of human feeling in it, and I wanted to make love to her there and then, but knew I had very little chance. ‘They all do,’ she said. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t drag the truth out of them. It’s enough to break your heart.’
‘If any of these knives were sharp enough, I’d cut his’n out.’
Blessing my luck that I hadn’t met up with her in some Cellar Carvery, I took a ten pound note from my wallet to pay her back. ‘If you can’t tell me who it is, it’s not fair.’
‘Fair?’ she said. ‘You use that word? That’s what that panda bastard said. He kept using the word fair. I said I hadn’t got ten pounds, but he said it wasn’t fair of me to hold it back while my boyfriend wanted it to get out of a jam. I borrowed it from the cashbox till I got paid that night. I gave it to him. And after I got my wages and went to put the tenner back in the till the boss saw me and threw me out. I had to hitch-hike to London, and nearly got raped twice on the way.’
‘You see what you’ve done?’ Phyllis put an arm around her shoulder when she went back to crying.
He must have committed the crime on his way north, the night after I’d given him twenty pounds. I had always thought I was rotten, but it didn’t make me feel good to have evidence that some people were worse. ‘Here, take this. I always repay my debts, even if somebody else has done the borrowing. But I never was on the Al with a puncture, and I certainly didn’t send Ronald Delphick to you for a loan.’
‘You didn’t?’ Ettie put the note in her pocket.
‘No, and I’m sorry, even though it wasn’t my fault. I’ll be responsible for what I do myself, but not for others taking my name in vain. But as a way to kiss and make up, I invite you both out to dinner at Raddisher’s. We’ll eat rare beef and drink red wine, and after dessert I’ll smoke a Monte Cristo cigar to get myself out of the cellar of depression that the inhumanity of man to woman has put me in. Is it a deal?’
Ettie laughed. So did Phyllis, who said: ‘I don’t think Banning the Bomb would be any good for somebody like you.’
‘There’s only one thing: when I next set eyes on Ron Delphick the Panda Poet I’ll thump him. No I won’t. You can’t take the incorrigible to task, a poet least of all. In the meantime I have to get out of this Nutcracker Palace, so I’ll meet you at the Covent Garden tube station at seven thirty.’
Before either could object I kissed them on the lips and left, allowing at least half the clientele to get back to demolishing nutburgers which to me looked like objects I’d rather not mention.
A taxi nearly ran me over near Charing Cross, but it wasn’t the driver’s fault. I can never wait for space between the motors before getting over the road, but dodge the London traffic like a pigeon in a kind of roulette which keeps me fit and alert until one day the big wheels will no doubt trundle over me. But after my encounter with Ettie and Phyllis in The Trough I felt able to tackle Blaskin with my usual filial impiousness. I also wanted to put a couple of finishing chapters to the shit-novel, and he reminded me of it as soon as I opened the door:
‘How can I live if you don’t get my books in on time?’
‘It might help if you wrote one now and again.’ I dropped my bag and coat on the floor. ‘Is there anything to eat? I’ve just been thrown out of a vegetarian restaurant.’
‘Who threw you in? By the way, your mother got back this morning. After the postcard arrived to say she was arriving, she knocked at the door. I was in bed with Mrs Drudge, so it wasn’t a very felicitous homecoming, though I should have known she would come without warning, because the card had no stamp on it. My heart sank so low when I saw it I’ll need a bathyscaphe to go down and bring it back. Or a drink. Have another.’
‘I’d love one.’
‘I at least hoped she’d get back too late for the cocktail party being given this evening to celebrate the publication of my twenty-fifth book. Now I’ll have to take her. You’re welcome too. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to play the family man now and again. I’ll know what I’m talking about when I plunge into a loving and horrific family saga.’
He opened the fridge for a jar of rollmops, a packet of Californian radishes, an Italian salami and a melon from Israel. German shepherd bread came out of a drawer. ‘Pity Mrs Drudge has gone, otherwise she could slice it for us. I always cut my finger. Be a good chap, Michael.’
I hacked off a few pieces, then got to work on the shit-novel, to bring some relaxation into my hectic life. I pumped out page after page. The lover of Tinderbox Cottage now had the husband and wife prisoner at Peppercorn Cottage, and he proceeded to tell them his life story — in justification for his bizarre behaviour — which included three murders for which he’d not so far been apprehended, though the worst atrocity was when he’d held a red admiral butterfly captive in a cellar and forced it to listen to similar confessions before pulling its wings off and then setting it free. I got three and a half pages but of that. The tension was mounting because, his shotgun being double-barrelled, no one knew whether or not he was going to make it five murders. I was almost sweating myself. Then the police surrounded the place and there was a siege, in which every nettle and blade of grass was an accessory after the fact.
At one stage they heard a scuffle and thought he was coming out to give himself up, but it was only a couple of rats fighting over a piece of bread. To keep the shotgun-lover calm, a policeman began to tell his life story through the door, about how he’d been underprivileged and poor, how he’d studied at home, but mostly at night school, and worked himself up the educational ladder as far as nine O levels and then joined the police force because he wanted that sense of belonging that you only got in the army or with the lads in blue. And he wasn’t disappointed. He’d do the same again, because life was worth living, no matter who you were, though a rise in pay would never be unwelcome, because he’d got a wife and two kids. On the other hand, he also had a Vauxhall Viva and a nice flat in a police block and perhaps (fumbling for his wallet), ‘you’d like to see a photo of my two kids taken at Morecambe last year …?’
This drivel continued for ten more pages, because the policeman had a lot to say about catching burglars and punching skinheads (with which no reader can disagree) or chasing terrorists when they landed from the Middle East at London Airport.
I could end the book any time because there were two hundred pages on the table, but I went on and on. One policeman, having pissed into the nearby stream, suggested to his superior officer that they withdraw from the vicinity and send a gunboat. He is commended for his sense of humour, then told to go back to the mobile canteen for an extra mug of tea and a Mars Bar.
I went into the mind of the man with the shotgun, who told his prisoners about how he believed in God, otherwise he wouldn’t be so ready to kill them, would he? He felt a great loneliness at the middle of himself. He dreamed of falling through it, and woke up screaming. It was a hole he could only fill with a holocaust. God is love, not emptiness.
‘Yes, sir, but you ought to put that shotgun down, you know.’ The policeman perspired under the searchlights. His wallet was sopping. The argument about God went on. Everyone was waiting. It was on television. The woman hostage began to have a baby. More arc lights were brought up. A chopper hovered overhead. The Japanese television rights were sold. When a camera lens came through the window the husband and lover joined forces and attacked it with hammers because the fees weren’t high enough. They tied a message to a rat and sent it to their agent waiting up the hill with a lump of cheese. But, unknown to any of them, a third, fourth and fifth camera took a film of their religious and human objections to having the world pry on them at this fraught time. They decided to brook no encroachment on the universal theme of the birth of a New Man but, dear reader, it availed them not — believe you me. Thomas à Becket was killed when a tip-up juggernaut shed its load of words.