I felt in an ugly mood. ‘Belt up, Delphick, or I’ll kick fifty poems out of your arse, you troublemaker. You shouldn’t rob a young girl who has to work for her money.’ I grabbed the books from Frances. ‘I apologise for that little outburst. I love you. I’ll see you again.’
She smiled, though she was clearly upset.
Slipping the books in my poacher’s pocket, I got back to Ettie and Phyllis at the bar. I put a hand on each shoulder. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like that.’
‘Oh bollocks,’ Ettie said. ‘I hate you.’
‘He ought to be flayed alive,’ said Phyllis, ‘doing that to poor Ettie.’
‘Forget it,’ I told them. I longed to see more of Frances, but not with those two slags around my neck. ‘Let’s go to my flat. I’ll give you a better drink than you can find here.’
We got out before Delphick appeared. ‘Do we go by tube?’ Phyllis asked. ‘Or bus?’
‘With me, you travel by taxi — and like it.’
Down the Mall and by Buckingham Palace, I sat between them in the back, and kissed them both, and had a good feel of their lovely breasts by the time we reached Hyde Park Corner. I don’t suppose Ettie knew I had my hand on Phyllis’s breast, nor that Phyllis realised I was getting to know the shape of Ettie’s, which was the best of sitting between two women in a half dark taxi. It was the only time in my life I prayed for arms as long as those of Kenny Dukes.
My idea was to lure both women into the same bed, an experience I hadn’t had in my so far sheltered life. But the first thing Phyllis did when we got to Blaskin’s flat was go into the bathroom and throw up. She said the taxi ride had upset her stomach, but I again remembered Moggerhanger’s remark that London was the salmonella capital of the world, and hoped my turn wasn’t coming. Perhaps it was only a case of gluttony. She came back with her blouse unbuttoned down the front. I already had my tongue in Ettie’s mouth and we weren’t far off trying to pack ourselves into each other. I pulled Phyllis to us and kissed her, then I kissed Ettie, and kissed Phyllis again. Phyllis kissed Ettie, and Ettie kissed her, and they smooched each other and me with gusto, and I smooched them, and our threesome went on, until I thought the time had come to carry things a stage further.
For that to happen we had to let go of each other, and no one wanted to. I sampled over and over the difference between Phyllis’s lips and Ettie’s. Phyllis’s were soft and warm, and she kept them closed so that I got the best out of them. Ettie’s were thin, and opened easily, so that my tongue licked around her little white teeth. I wondered what each of them felt towards the other, and towards me. While they kissed each other my hands went up their legs, and I wondered whose hand each of them thought it was, whether they imagined it was mine or suspected it was the other’s. The three of us were locked into a love knot so firmly that the perfume and powder which they had on took me back to the days when I fucked Claudine Forks and Gwen Bolsover (separately, however), and wrapped me into a feeling I’d never known before — and was never to know since, because before it could go any further Blaskin and my mother came into the flat.
Gilbert took off his hat, an instinctive politeness on seeing ladies in the room. ‘I sincerely hope I haven’t disturbed a gang bang. Or have I stumbled on a prime example of Knightsbridge tribadism? Sir Richard Burton would write reams on that.’
‘Who’s that bleeding geezer?’ said Ettie. I didn’t know whether she meant Burton or Blaskin, though I imagined it was both. I had hoped that Gilbert and my mother had torn each other so completely to pieces at the party that nothing would put them together again. I thought he would end up blind drunk and despondent at his club, and take a room for the night in which to lick his wounds. And I had assumed that my mother might have gone to Upper Mayhem to cool off, or found a corner for the night in some Hoxton squat. But here they were, and she kissed my father like a schoolgirl. ‘Shall I get you some supper, my darling?’
‘I’d be delighted to have something to eat, my love. Those poisonous titbits at the party created hollows instead of filling me up.’
‘You said your uncle was in Manchester,’ Phyllis accused.
Gilbert turned to me. ‘Michael, introduce us to your friends, there’s a good fellow.’
I didn’t like the way he said it, nor the way my mother put her hand over Ettie’s shoulder and asked her to come into the kitchen to get some booze and grub on the table. Ever since prick-headed Blaskin had entered the room Phyllis hadn’t been able to stop looking at him. She turned away to fasten her blouse, then smiled with simple-minded pleasure when he asked: ‘What kind of music do you like?’
She blushed. ‘Oh, I love Irish singers.’
‘Och, do yer, den, me goil, well we’ll see what we can foind for yer!’ He sorted among the records, and instead of being insulted by this mock-Irish, she started talking it herself, and actually caressed his fingers as he passed her Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and asked if that would do. She laughed, and said no. He suggested she have a drink, and went to the bottles on the sideboard. His hand was at the back of her neck as he poured an Underberg which, he said after much salacious talk about her recent vomiting, would cure her once and for all. He got her to knock it straight back, and she shook from toe to head like a fat adder standing on its tail. Then, as if fainting from the shock to her system, she flopped into his arms and stuck her lips to his.
It was too much, especially now that raucous laughter from my mother, and a high-pitched giggling from Ettie in the kitchen had stopped. I felt I should get out of the flat and drown my sorrows in The Hair of the Dog, but my feet only moved as far as to allow me to lock myself in Blaskin’s study and do some more work on his trash-novel.
The saga of Peppercorn Cottage was over, I decided. Two years had gone by. The clatter of the typewriter closed off the sucking and moaning noises from other rooms. I knew exactly what was going on. I sweated mercury. I felt more like writing a Sidney Blood saga than a Blaskin crap-opus.
A shoot-out at Stonehenge was on the cards. Dawn on Midsummer’s Day. On coming out of prison, the husband in my tale bought a holiday cottage in Wales, but a year later it was burned down — cause unknown, ha-ha! — so he joined the Longest Day Society and limped on foot from Richmond to Stonehenge. His wife drove after him in her shining Volvo and brought The Child.
I dashed out to make some coffee, and noticed that Ettie was now with Blaskin, and Phyllis was in the spare room with my mother, and a more spaced-out set of fuck-drunk faces I had never seen. But I let that pass, and got back to my novel.
Smoke over Stonehenge. The Druids have it. The Child is carried in, held high. Stoned bikers lying by their machines (mostly 1000 cc BMWs) laugh irreverently as they boil a kettle of opium tea over a fire of burning L-plates. A horsemeat sausage stall does good trade. For two pages I start every word with a capital letter. The next few pages are in italics. That wad of pages are intimately concerned with the pimples on people’s faces. Then comes a page with no capital letters at all, concerning a character called Snot, who drifts around crying, and putting people’s fires out. The bikers do for him. They have a whip-round, and send him back to Merton on the milk-train — with his head on the wrong way. I’m determined to make this the most trashy novel in existence. Even the trashiest Blaskin novel no longer strikes me as being a very hard job, as I tack-tick-tack away.
The end of the story is near, and so is the end of the world. Every year a new dawn, at Stonehenge. A man with a little moustache and a slick of hair across his forehead, wearing a buttoned and belted mac, makes a fiery speech in favour of CND. After a few minutes he is laughed into silence, and I move elsewhere. The Child begins screaming. Its painted eyeballs portray different hemispheres of the world, and it hates everything about the place. Nothing will quieten its screaming. It is the Noise of the World, I say, and move on from that as well. Babies don’t like New Dawns. They are new dawns themselves, and the false dawn of a New Dawn will destroy it. They want to stay snug in the womb of the zillions that have gone before so that none will come after.