The Blackpool Highflyer

'How will he know which is mine?' George said, and then he smiled and then he frowned.

'It's a letter to my best girl,' he said.

'Where does she live?'

'She's out in Oldham,' he said.

'Do you get over there very often?'

'Not so very… It's a fair way, you know.'

'Matrimony on the cards, is it?'

George, who had wandered onto the road, now had to scuttle out of the way of a delivery bike and was nearly flattened in the process. His legs were too short. He was all brain and belly.

'That's… it's never quite settled,' said George. 'Your Mrs Stringer,' he said. 'She's got her own mind, hasn't she?'

'It's all the woman's role, and so on,' I said. 'She's ardent for freedom.'

'Bit hard on you though, old sort?'

'Well, she wants better conditions for all.'

'What about lodgers?' he said, quite sharply.

'How do you mean?'

'It's just that I'm in rather low water in present, financially speaking, and -'

'If you want a rent cut it won't wash, George,' I said. 'You've only been in a week.'

'But with all her beliefs about fairness -'

'No,' I said. 'As far as all that goes… You see, a part of freedom for her is being able to charge you five shillings a week rent.'

'Oh,' said George, and he stopped dead on the pavement, looking quite abashed. 'Anyway, it's quite all right,' he said, starting to walk once again. 'I'm a socialist myself, you know.'

'Yes,' I said, 'so am I, but I will not go to lectures on the minimum wage on Saturday afternoon.'

And I will not put grindstones on railway lines on account of being one either, I thought, and it came to me that I hadn't seen Paul, the socialist missionary, hanging about Horton Street since our conversation of eight days ago.

'There's just nothing to be done about it,' said George, who was still thinking of his rent. 'I shall have to reduce my savings.'

'Well you could stop going out for knife-and-fork teas every night,' I said. 'You do have use of the scullery, you know.'

'I do not have knife-and-fork teas,' said George, 'I have damn good suppers.'

'And I suppose you'll have a bottle of wine too?'

'I will take a carafe,' said George, and he said that last word with very great care. 'That would be nothing out of the way.'

'What is a carafe?' I asked him.

'It's a sort of small jug,' he said, and then he stopped and smiled: 'But not too small.'

We walked on, skirting past People's Park, where all the benches were full. I was trying to spy the rainbow in the fountain, while thinking violently about George and money. He either had too little or he had too much.

'Where did you lodge before, George?' I said.

But he ignored this question completely.

We were by now at the Albert Cigar Factory, whose two chimneys did look like cigars puffing away, but nothing had been made of this for advertising purposes. I took George round to the back of the factory, where there was a small blue door with a broken metal sign on it. The only words remaining read: 'always delightful to inhale'.

I knocked, saying to George, 'You sometimes have to wait a while.'

But the door was opened straightway by a young fellow in a dust coat. He was standing in a kind of shop – a take-it-or- leave-it kind of show, not out to please, where the goods were just left in crates and kicked about as needed.

'What ho!' shouted George, and the cigar man sprang back. For a minute I thought he was going to crown George.

"A's or 'B's?' the cigar man asked.

"A's for me', said George. 'Take a dozen.'

"B's for me,' I said. 'Half a dozen.'

Mine were two shillings, George's four, and they came to us in boxes without lids.

'Do you have any tubes?' said George to the cigar man.

'What sort of tubes?' came the reply.

'Cigar tubes,' said George.

The man turned to one of the crates and George turned to me, muttering, 'Extraordinary fellow!'

George got one tin tube, gratis – which he thought a great thing to bring off – and as we walked away he took a little clasp knife out of one of his dozens of pockets, chopped the end off his 'A', and lit it. It was more than twice the size of one of my 'B's.

'Sound smoke,' he said after a while, and he carried it off pretty well. Folk looked at him as he walked by. Then he stopped, and with the smoke racing into his eyes, unlaced his watch from his waistcoat: 'Fancy a stroll down to the Joint?'

I said that I did, and we set off down Horton Street, carrying our cigar boxes.

'You really ought to get 'A's, you know,' said George.

'Why?' I said, even though I'd been thinking the same thing myself.

'They're bigger,' he said, taking a puff, 'and better. You're an Ai fellow, so have an Ai cigar.'

'Thank you,' I said, because there didn't seem much else to say.

After a few paces he turned, with a flaring match in his hand, saying 'Won't you join me, old man?'

So I bit the end off my 'B' – which George frowned at – and started smoking it.

I might have taken two draws on the cigar when we came alongside the Thomas Cook excursion office in Horton Street. They were queuing out the door as usual, but the window was boarded.

'Hey!' I called to George. 'That's been smashed.'

George didn't even stop walking; didn't even remove his cigar from his mouth. 'Friday night, old man!' he called. 'High spirits!' Then he added: 'I've no use for that place myself. I won't go in for your whirligig holidays. Besides, the trains can be dangerous from all I hear.'

'It's not the trains,' I said, staring at the boarded window. 'It's the loonies with the bloody millstones.'

Without a word to George, I stood on my cigar, crossed over Horton Street and began pushing towards the front of the queue of excursionists, apologising as I went. As I did so, I realised that George was behind me, not apologising, but saying, every now and again, 'Step aside there', and the funny thing was that his big cigar allowed him to get away with it.

There were three clerks inside the excursion office, all looking very hot and bothered, and surrounded by posters of people standing at the seaside in golden sun, and grinning fit to bust under straw boaters. There were some Lanky posters up there as well, and two or three of the same one: a poster showing a steam packet, and the words: 'step on at goole for the continent'.

'Who smashed your window?' I asked one of the clerks, who was in the middle of serving an elderly party in a dinty bowler.

'Mr Bloody Nobody,' he said, and then, after a quick glance at me, 'It wasn't thissen, by any chance, I don't suppose?'

George was right behind me, smoking into my ear. 'Bloody sauce,' he said. 'Why, it's slander, is that.'

The clerk now turned to George: 'And will you get out of here, and leave off poisoning us all with that dratted great cigar.'

'That was slander as well,' said George, when we were back outside in Horton Street.

'Come here,' I said, and I led him back across the road to the wall of the old warehouse. The poster was still there: 'a meeting to discuss questions'.

'I reckon it was that lot that smashed the window' I said. "Ihey want to stop all excursions, and they want to frighten the railways off.' And I told George all about Paul, the socialist missionary-cum-anarchist, and how there might be a connection with the stone on the line.

'Anarchists…' said George, when I'd finished. 'There's a lot of those blighters in Germany, from what I read in The Times. Bomb-throwing's meat and drink to them, you know. Then there's the bloody Fenians too.'

'Well, that puts my mind at ease, I must say,' I said. 'Why do they do it?'

George puffed on his cigar, using it to think. 'Get in the newspapers' he said.

We walked on, heading for the Joint, and George said, 'Do you care to know my theory on your little bit of bad business?'