It was the trains and the warehouses which forced the drill against the decay inside me. Each time a tram ground and swayed past me, missing unconcerned pedestrians by inches, I saw Alice under the wheels, bloody and screaming; and I wanted to be there with her, to have the guilt slashed away, to stop the traffic, to make all the bovine pay-night faces sick with horror. I didn't mind the other traffic, I don't know why; and I don't know why I thought of such an irrelevant kind of death. Nor why I didn't dare look at the warehouses. There was one with a new sign - Umpelby and Dickinson, Tops and Noils, Est. 1855 - that still gives me bad dreams. It had sixty-three dirty windows and four of the raised letters on those adjacent the main office were missing. Umpelb and D kinso are the three most terrible words that I have ever seen. I think now that I was frightened because the warehouses didn't care about what had happened to Alice; but why did I hate the innocent friendly trains?
I went on for about a mile, going farther and farther from the main road, but still with the sound of the trains grinding in my ears. It was a fine evening for the time of the year, with an unseasonably soapy warmth trickling along the mean little streets; most of the house doors were open and the people were standing inside them, just standing, saying nothing, looking at the black millstone grit and the chimneys and the dejected little shops. It was Friday and soon they'd go out and get drunk. At this moment they were pretending that it was Monday or even Thursday and they hadn't any money and they'd be forced to sit in the living room among the drying nappies looking at their wife's pasty face and varicose legs and hating the guts of the bastard in the next street who'd won a cool hundred on a five-shilling accumulator; then they'd stop pretending and gloat over their spending-money, at least three quid -
I stopped and leaned against a lamppost because I couldn't go on any longer. I should have gone into the country. You can walk in the country without wanting to vomit, and you're not hurt because the trees and the grass and the water don't care because you can't expect them to, they were never concerned with love; but the city should be full of love, and never is.
A policeman walked past, and gave me a hard inquiring look. Five minutes later he walked past again; so there was nothing else to do but go into the nearest pub. I went into the Bar first, where the customers mostly seemed to be Irish navvies; even when they weren't talking, they gave an impression of animated violence. I was out of place there, as they would have been out of place at the Clarendon, and they knew it. I sensed their resentment with a deep enjoyment. It was what I needed, as satisfyingly acrid as cheap shag; I took half my pint of bitter at one gulp, looking with a derisive pity at the stupid faces around me - the faces of, if they were lucky, my future lorry drivers and labourers and warehousemen.
I drank another pint. It changed taste several times: bitter, scented, sour, watery, sweet, brackish. My head was full of an oily fog that forced its way up through my throat, the pressure increasing until it seeped into my eyes, and the chairs and the mirrors and the faces and the rows of bottles behind the bar blurred together into a kind of pavane on the slowly heaving floor. The bar had a brass rail, and I clung to it tightly, taking deep breath after deep breath until the floor, under protest like a whipped animal, stayed quiet.
After two rums I moved into the Lounge next door. There were no vacant seats in the Bar and my legs were aching, but that wasn't the reason for my going there. The true reason was sitting alone near the entrance; as soon as I saw her I discovered that she was the one thing necessary to round the evening off, the one drug that I hadn't tried.
She was about twenty, with frizzy blonde hair and small bones; she wasn't bad-looking, but her face had a quality of inadequacy, as if there hadn't been enough flesh available to make a good job of her femininity. When she saw me looking at her, she smiled. I didn't like it very much when she smiled; the pale flesh seemed as though it were going to split. But one hasn't to be too choosy about pick-ups; they're not so easy to come by in peacetime as the respectable would suppose. And there was something about her that suddenly prodded to life a side of me that I thought had been dead for years, a lust that was more than half curiosity, a sly, sniggering desire to see what she was like under her clothes.
I sat down beside her. "I'm not squeezing you, am I?"
She giggled. "There's plenty of room."
I offered her a cigarette.
"Thank you very much," she said. "Oh, what a lovely case." She stroked the silver, her long thin fingers with their too curved red nails brushing mine. "You don't come from round here, do you?"
"Dufton. I'm a traveller."
"What in?"
"Ladies' underwear," I said. When she laughed I noticed that her upper teeth were scored horizontally with a brown line of decay.
"You're a devil," she said. "Will you give me a free sample?"
"If you're a good girl," I said. "Will you have a drink with me?"
"IPA, please."
"You don't want beer," I said. "How about something short? I've sold thousands of pairs of knickers this week."
"You're cheeky," she said; but she had a gin-and-it and another and another and then a brandy, and soon we were touching each other lightly all the time, coming closer and closer together and yet farther and farther apart; we were, I saw in a moment of clarity before brandy and lust closed over my head, only touching ourselves. But at least I wasn't thinking of Alice. She wasn't crawling round Corby Lane now with her scalp in tatters over her face. She hadn't been born, there had never been any such person; and there was no Joe Lampton, only a commercial traveller from Dufton having a jolly evening with a hot piece of stuff.
I think that it was about half past eight when I was aware of a nasty silence over the room. I looked up; a young man was standing scowling over us. He had the sort of face that one's always seeing in the yellow press - staring-eyed, mousy, the features cramped and shapeless and the mouth loose. He was wearing a light blue double-breasted suit that was so dashingly draped as to look décolleté and he had a blue rayon tie of an oddly slimy-looking texture. At that moment he was enjoying what a thousand films and magazines had assured him to be righteous anger: His Girl had been Untrue.
"Come along," he said to her. "Come along, Mavis."
"Oh go away," she said. "We were all right until you came."
She took out her compact and began to powder her nose. He grabbed her hands. "Bloody well stop that," he said. "I couldn't help being late, see? I was working over."
I'd been measuring him up, wondering whether or not to leave her to him. I wasn't so drunk that I wanted to be beaten up in a Birmingham Road pub. But he was no Garth: he was as tall as me, but his shoulders were all padding and he had a look of softness about him; he was the type whose bones never seem to harden.
"Leave her alone," I said.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Jack Wales."
"Never heard of you."
"I don't expect that you have." I stood up. "You heard what I said." My hand groped about on the table independently of me until it found an empty beer glass. There wasn't a sound in the room. There was a decently dowdy-looking middle-aged couple at the next table who looked frightened. The man was small and skinny and the woman had pale horn-rimmed spectacles and a little button of a mouth. I remember feeling rather sorry for them, and an anger as smooth and cold and potentially as jagged and murderous as the beer glass started to grow inside me.