Life Goes On

One

Old lives for new, and new wives for old: it began when I came out of prison and fell into the arms of Bridgitte Appledore, the one-time Dutch au pair girl who became my everloving wife. Our married life in the disused Cambridgeshire railway station of Upper Mayhem lasted through a decade of idleness. We lived on the money of her first psychologist husband, Dr Anderson, bringing up Smog who was the son of the said dead husband and his first wife. Then followed three children of our own, and life at our station dwelling place had been so ordinary that the heavenly years passed too quickly to be appreciated, until that smouldering blond beauty with big breasts and a mouth too small for her heart, who acted but never talked about what went on inside, took the children out one day for a ride in the car while I was still in bed.

Harwich was two hours away, and none came back, a fact explained by a phone call from Holland next morning. She had, she said between sobs and god-fer-dommering curses, left me, and didn’t know whether she would ever be back. To cover my shock and chagrin I told her she was full of gin, adding that as far as I was concerned she could stay away forever, and that I had always expected her sooner or later to go back to them old ways.

Grammar is always the first victim of a broken marriage. I knew my accusations to be a lie, which proved I was already halfway back to my old ways of lying, if I still had the backbone for it, which I had doubted till that moment.

I put in, for good measure, in case she misunderstood, that she was no better than a whore, which was a scandalous assertion because as far as I knew she had been as loyal as a turnip during our marriage. She shouted back, before this accusation was hardly through to the other side of my brain, and not yet fed into the wire, that I wouldn’t have said that to her if Jankie (or some such name. Maybe it was Ankie) had been there, at which I screamed out: ‘Who’s Jankie, you double, treble, quadruple whore’ — to which she retorted: ‘I’m not a horse, you idle sponging no-good coward.’

‘I never sponged,’ I bawled. Every word, good or bad (and they were all bad), was a mistake. The only policy was a cool smile and lips well buttoned, but murder smouldered behind my eyes, waiting for the moment when I could pay her out. Silence wasn’t my virtue, and it was too late to learn. ‘You were living in my house!’

‘You bought it on money you stole, you gold smuggler, you jailbird. I lived with you ten years in misery, hating every minute, with you hating me, and hating the children, and hating yourself, because prison turned you the bitterest man in the world.’

I buckled like a straw in the fire, because no man had spent a more contented time, with all the love from Bridgitte I needed, always thinking that no more was possible for her or anyone. I could have sworn to God she had been happy, yet here she was ranting her treacherous version: ‘You thought you had it good, all the looking after, and me happy, but I was hating you, and you with your pervert tricks you made me do and thought I liked.’

Was my phone tapped? Was some lickspittle from MI5 tuned in to her perorations? And what about at the other end? Could those nice Dutch folks understand her English? I wanted to put the phone down.

‘Wait till the children grow up,’ she said, ‘and I get them to know what ape and monkey tricks you’ve been up to, which I’ll tell them if they ask for you and you try to get at me.’

‘That’s racism,’ I broke in. ‘Anymore of that and I’ll get onto the Primates Liberation Organization.’

Nothing would stop her. ‘I didn’t want to live with you, because all the time it was rotten rotten rotten.’ She was weeping again. Her parents were by her side, listening with pious faces, putting calicoed arms over her shoulders, waiting to snatch up the phone and threaten me with instant death by being thrown from the Butter Mountain or drowned in the Great Milk Lake. Better still, they would send her eight upright brothers (and three sisters) to reason with me. ‘You were always looking around,’ she went on, ‘for every chance to get away from me. But you kept me like a dog chained to a post, just like your big, pig-headed father.’

She was half right, because during my early years at Upper Mayhem, after eighteen months in prison, the same thought nagged at me, so that I wondered, even before going for a drink at the village pub, why I hadn’t slipped my prized transistor radio over my shoulder, or my treasured Japanese zoom lens binoculars. I would almost turn back to get them, but the idea seemed stupid, though it persisted for more than a year, and was finally cured by wise young Bridgitte suggesting that on my strolls I did indeed take my radio, binoculars, bank book, and even her, as well as the children, so that if I didn’t come back it wouldn’t matter, because everything I valued would be crowding unmercifully in on me — so that I couldn’t help but come back, even if only to unload my burdens, by which time I would be too exhausted to care.

I was rueful yet full of wrath as I put down the phone. She had certainly picked up my language during our time together, so wasn’t completely right when she said I had given her nothing. All I could do after receiving a call for help from my old pal Bill Straw in London was lock up the house for the day and set off to find out why he wanted to see me, and maybe get a sniff of what the future might hold, before Bridgitte recovered from her fit and came back to carry on as before. If it was the end between us, there was nothing I could do, though such finality was hard to believe because in my experience the only final thing was death, and I’d never be ready for that.

Comparisons were painful, so I mulled over my break with Bridgitte, which was a supportable agony because it was familiar. It seemed as if she had left only yesterday, but the unexpected savagery of her departure with the kids had bitten two weeks out of my life, leaving a wound so raw it would never heal. I could hardly account for the subsequent days except to say they were a nightmare, hours of misery from brooding at my loss, and a relentless ache at wondering how the kids were faring.

Bits of food and empty whisky bottles littered stairs and tables, but by closing the door that morning on the piggery of ten years, an iron test had been passed. The marks of the experience had bitten so deep that it seemed the disaster had had no effect on me.

Life goes on, I thought, settling myself into a first class seat on a second class cheap day shopper’s ticket, which was tucked into a pocket of my Norfolk-style jacket. On the other hand, life had gone on since I was born, with little help from me, so there was no reason to suppose it would not continue until the day of my inevitable blackout. Even when my existence seemed too painful to last, or too good to go on forever, I stared side-on at the antics it played. After my stint in prison, ten years before, I preferred walking parallel to life rather than through the middle like a grenadier. But I was never less than up to my neck in it.

I reached for The Times left by somebody who got out at Cambridge. There was the usual front-page photo of a terrorist with a scarf around his head, trying to smile like royalty, and inside was the snapshot of an eight-year-old kid with a Kalashnikov which I supposed the photographer had given him a quid to hold so that he could get a good picture.

At thirty-five the grey hair had begun, which surprised me because I thought I never worried. Life had been calm, and nothing justified that hint of fag ash on the lower fringes of my sideboards. Worrying that I didn’t worry would only make it worse. Bridgitte pointed to the grey bits as if they were the marks of a beast that had always lurked there, and ruffled them to see whether or not they were real.

I hoped the tormented expression on my face in the British Rail looking-glass was only temporary, because it spoiled my almost good looks, at which the only response was a crackling breakfast belch before sitting down.

What I dreaded most was going bald, like that tall, gaunt, randy old prick-head Gilbert Blaskin I had been lumbered with as a father. As for my mother, she hadn’t been heard of for months, not since the old man began his new novel. While he was working he no longer tormented her, which meant that she was unable to get at him. Every so often they fled in opposite directions so as not to murder each other, and with Blaskin being a writer it worked out well. I imagined going to the flat and finding them dead on the mat by the door, a cleaver in her hand and an axe in his. They had struck each other’s heart at the same second and with instant effect, though I thought it more likely that while one would be dead, the other would be so wounded that he or she would be pushed around in a bottle-type wheelchair for as long as he or she lived. Mother or father — I didn’t care which — would gurgle reproachfully at me as the reason for their downfall. After a terrific struggle I’d get the bottle to the top of the Post Office Tower and let it go, hoping a gust of wind would swing it through a window of the Middlesex Hospital where they could accept it as an unsolicited gift from me.

My Irish mother of fifty-odd had a mop of Cullen-thick hair which was duly passed on. She’d thinned her own and sprayed it with silver and pink so that she wouldn’t look a day under thirty-five. Whether she was Irish or not I’d never really known, and neither had she, but she’d been unable to stand the thought of being taken for English, especially since Blaskin was a fairly pure specimen of the breed — at least, as she often said, in his talent for deceit and the versatility of his vices. I wanted to take after neither but, being my vain and pleasure-loving self, hoped I was closer to my mother’s side as far as keeping my hair till I was a hundred and ten was concerned, though I found it painful at times that a bloke of thirty-five should be lumbered with parents at all.

Clouds floated over the flat fields, a fine picture of altocumulus castellanus — as I had learned from Smog’s school books when I tested him for A levels, thus gaining qualifications which I hadn’t been able to earn at the proper time. Such cloud varied in its direction with the sine, cosine and tangent of the moving train. April smelled ripe and dead, bits of sun filing through to the blackening earth.

The reason for my journey to London was because a letter from my old pal Bill Straw begged me to come poste haste without restante to help him out of a jam. When Bill, a man with a long past, wrote about a jam it was no mere logjam in a river of crocodiles near a thousand foot waterfall with natives shooting poisoned arrows from either bank. It was serious, though I didn’t suppose he realized how much worse I might make his predicament.

A man wearing expensive clothes looked into my compartment as if to consider parking there. I had spreadeagled my coat, briefcase, cap and self in such a way that it looked filled, so he closed the door, gently for one so nervous, and walked down the corridor. I turned to The Times crossword, and tried to make sense out of nine down, a clue whose complexity made me feel like the kingpin idiot himself.

I noted in the car sales columns that the Thunderflash Estate had come onto the market, and was sorry I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy one. The tall pin-headed man dragged the door open and settled himself opposite. He stank of scent, and looked out of the window while filing his nails. I tried to guess his profession, or the source of his money, hazarding soldier, barrister, remittance man, stockbroker’s clerk, unfrocked priest, or of independent means, but none would fit. I observed a person of about forty who looked as if he had all his vices under firm control. With short, mousey, Caesar-style hair, he had more than a few, though I couldn’t decide what they were, but he certainly knew all about them because he had the sour expression of someone who trusted himself absolutely. Whoever he worked for had fallen for his air of reliability.

His preoccupied gaze took me back to when I had been put in prison by the machinations of Claud Moggerhanger, an experience which reinforced my impression that the man opposite was untrustworthy to the core, though he might not look so to others. There were many such types in England. A man of similar phizzog in some countries would be immediately under suspicion but, living in a land where the borderline between loyalty and treachery had never been properly surveyed, and where he blended well with the surrounding populace, he would be considered a safe enough bet.

He was so taken up with himself that he didn’t think I had noticed him, but a one-second flash over my newspaper told me more than any stare. I had been brought up in a place where, if you looked above two seconds at anyone, you were inviting him (or even her — sometimes especially her) to a fight. In prison, only one second was necessary, often less than that, so I had developed the knack of seeing all at a glance. Whoever the man worked for had put him through the aptitude tests and psychological probings of a foolproof selection board, but I knew they had boobed in the most basic way because they had never been in jail as a prisoner.

I was disturbed from watching the smoke of my morning cigar drift through the fitful sunshine by the ticket collector standing at the door. The passenger opposite gave his ticket to be punched.

‘Thank you, sir.’

He then went back to his vacant gaze out of the window, continuing his manic manicure. I noticed how startled he was on hearing the collector say to me: ‘You can’t travel on a second class ticket in here, mate.’

I had set out that morning determined not to cheat, lie or commit any action while in London which would offend those principles which Bridgitte had tried to instil in me. She had taught me how much better it was not to lie or cheat, even if it meant, she said, losing all idea of your own identity. I realised how much she had gleaned from her former psychologist husband and — too late — that she wasn’t as dreamy as she looked.

‘Is this a first class compartment?’ I asked, as if it was no better than a pigsty that had been used by humans for far too long. He was a middle-aged man, and fair ringlety hair fell to his shoulders from beneath a Wehrmacht-style hat. He pointed to the window. ‘It says first class, don’t it?’

I wanted to pull his earring. ‘I suppose it would have to before somebody like me would notice.’

He leaned against the door, and yawned. ‘That’s the way it is, mate.’

Under the circumstances he couldn’t be anything but honest, and do his job. The nail-filing man opposite, for all his preoccupation with the landscape flying by outside, took in every shade of the situation. And I, if nothing else, had my pride, which was all that ten years of peace had left me with. I took a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘How much extra?’

He looked at the few foreign coins, plastic tokens, luncheon vouchers and Monopoly notes from his pockets. ‘Can’t change that.’

I reached for my executive-style briefcase. ‘I’ll write you a cheque.’

‘It’d be more than my job’s worth to take a cheque.’

‘You’d better see what you can do about changing this legal tender, then.’ I crumpled the note into my waistcoat pocket and went back to reading a report in the newspaper about a woman of eighty-six who had murdered her ninety-eight-year-old husband with a knife. ‘He got on at me once too often,’ she said in court, hoping the beak would be lenient. Then she spoiled it: ‘Anyway, I’d always wanted to kill the swine.’

The judge sentenced her to fourteen years in jail. ‘A worse case of premeditated murder I’ve never come across.’

‘I’ll get you when I come out,’ she screamed as they dragged her down to the cells.

The ticket collector, reluctant to move, took a packet of chewing gum from his trouser pocket and put two capsules into his mouth. He lounged as if he had no work to go to, changing weight from foot to foot, happy enough to look at himself in the mirror above the seats. He swayed with the train, as if he’d not been long on the job and didn’t care whether he had it much longer. I took a whisky flask from my briefcase and held it towards him. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘No thanks. Not that as well. It’d blow my mind. A train trip’s enough for me.’

I wondered if he wasn’t one of those scoundrels who, after buying a cap and clipper in Woollie’s, hopped the train near a station, collected excess fares, then jumped off in time for the up-train. He did it every day for six months, and spent the rest of the year in Barbados. The millionaires there wondered where he got his money. He told them he was a plumber, but some of the snooty British thought he was only a window cleaner.

Yet he looked too genuine to be an impostor. His eyes, blue in white, spun like catherine wheels. With an effort he stood upright. ‘I’ll see what I can do about your change.’

We heard him dance his way along the corridor. ‘Stoned out of his damned mind,’ Nail-filer said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Even public servants. At least they’re still changing the guard at Buckingham Palace.’

‘For the moment,’ I said, not wanting to be unsociable. He didn’t turn his gaze from the window, and I noticed in the reflection that he held a map inside his newspaper on which he made pencil marks when a bridge, a cutting, a level crossing and, on one occasion, a pub swung close to the line. ‘Are you planning another Great Train Robbery?’

Even in the glass I saw him turn white. The porcelain flash spread to the back of his neck, and to the knuckles of both hands. It was his business, not mine. Probably no one else would have cottoned on. He smiled as if I must be loony to say such a thing, but he wasn’t reading that map for nothing, and that was a fact. Maybe he was doing a correspondence course from the Train Robbery Polytechnic, several of which must have opened in the last few years.

I don’t know why I had been so awkward with the ticket collector. I had the right change, and could only put it down to the fact that I hadn’t been to bed with another woman since before I married Bridgitte. I had banged a few on rugs and carpets, and behind summer hedges (and even on one occasion an aunt of Bridgitte’s had had me in Holland), but never actually in bed. No other explanation seemed possible or desirable, except that such unnecessarily bloody-minded conduct helped to pass a few minutes on an otherwise boring journey. Or maybe it was those little flashes of grey hair which made me act the way I did. Cheating made me feel young.

He put a folded map sheet away, and took another from his large sheer-leather hundred-quid briefcase, which was a far cry from the black plastic executive mock-up with a tin lock that I carried. I marvelled at his concentration. Sweat stood on his forehead. He wiped his cheeks, mopping the flood rather than the source. Anyone capable of such assiduous observation would certainly command a job whose salary allowed the purchase of such a briefcase.

The sun gleamed on factories as the train clawed its way closer to London. Well-kept houses reminded me that England was still wealthy, in spite of what the newspapers and the government wailed on about. Evidence of rich people made me feel better, though whenever I was on my way out of London the same fact depressed me.

The pin-headed, short-haired, well-shaven man sitting opposite put away his newspaper. ‘Of course, it’s entirely up to you, and I don’t want to interfere, but what’s the point of having a ticket which doesn’t entitle you to the proper seat? You must know it’s impossible to avoid paying.’

Just as I had whiled away a few minutes during my teasing of the ticket collector, so this nail-scraping fop was trying to pass the last half hour of our journey by a bout of moral finger-wagging, especially now that he had solved his calculations on the map. Having guessed his game, I could be courteous in reply. ‘You might think so, old man, but I haven’t coughed up yet.’

He laughed, as if he couldn’t wait to see me do so. The fact that I failed to place him irritated me so much that I wanted to smash his mug to pulp. Then I twigged that beneath the old veneer he was ineradicably working class. He couldn’t fool me, who was neither ashamed nor proud of having come from the mob, though my father was said to be descended from a long line of impoverished landowning wankers.

A lid of dark cloud stretched across the sky, a luminous mixture of blue up top and white below, which could only mean that it would rain the whole day over London. Such a prospect made the present conversation unimportant, but I played up to his need for chit-chat. ‘I’ve no intention of not paying the extra, though it’s true that by the time the ticket collector returns, if he ever does get back from the sort of trip he’s gone on, we could be at Liverpool Street.’

I stubbed my cigar out too violently on the window, and had to brush ash and sparks from my newly cleaned suit. I looked at the half-hunter gold watch in my waistcoat pocket, as if anxious about a business appointment in town. He was interested in seeing how I would manoeuvre myself out of the predicament, and because I was in a good mood I decided to fall in with his expectations as a way of discovering something about him. Most of all, it was as if I was a candidate for a job and he was testing my suitability.

‘I intended paying up from the beginning, yet I needn’t if I don’t want to. As soon as I see him coming with the change for twenty quid I can nip smartly back into second class, and nobody will be any the wiser. It pays to hold off till the last minute, because you never know what’s going to turn up. It’s because it’s good exercise racking my brains for a way out, and probably as near to real life as I can get. In any case, suppose my briefcase above your head was full of explosives, and I thought somebody might be on the look-out for it. To divert suspicion, I’d cause a fuss about something insignificant, as a way of practising the theory of the indirect approach.’

He had turned pale, in the lurid light caused by the darkening sky. ‘But what are you practising for?’

Raindrops splashed the window. ‘Fun, as far as you are concerned. But you never know when the fun’s going to turn nasty, do you? Or serious, for that matter. And therein lies the danger for anybody else who happens to be present. I just don’t like a jumped-up, swivel-eyed prick like you trying to fuck me around, that’s all.’

‘Seems like we’re going to become friends.’ He brought out a silver cigar case of real Havanas. I smoked Jamaicans which were just as good. He passed one across. ‘What sort of work do you do?’

‘Work?’ I dropped the crushed tube to the floor, and scuffed it under the seat with my heel. ‘Work,’ I said, ‘is a habit which I gave up when I started living off my wife.’

He smiled, not knowing whether to believe me. The only blemish in his otherwise well-bred presentation was that his teeth were rotten, though not too much for a forty-year-old who hadn’t yet got false ones, or too good for a perspicacious German not to recognise him for an Englishman. ‘What sort of work do you do?’

‘I don’t think I could describe what I do as work,’ he said. ‘I’m a Royal Messenger, flitting not only between the Palace and the Foreign Office in my powder blue Mini-van, but occasionally using trains, and even planes, when engaged on overseas duties. I go from place to place as a courier.’

‘I thought you were in something important. My name’s Michael Cullen, by the way.’

He held out his manicured hand. ‘I was christened Eric Samuel Raymond, and my surname is Alport. Call me Eric. At the moment I’m just back from Sandringham.’

I could only suppose that he had fallen arse backwards into that kind of an occupation, and yet I was convinced that he lied, and that if so he was more of an artist at it than I was — or used to be. He lied, right from the back of his throat, for he was no kind of Royal Messenger. I knew he had been in jail because the first thing people learn inside is how to lie. Learning how to become better criminals is only secondary. The lies they tell each other inside are picturesque. The lies they tell everyone they meet after they get out are calamitous and wild. It gives them something to do, and is a way of feeling their way back towards self-respect. But when they come out they betray themselves to people like me by the way they lie with such wonderful confidence. And lying is the first step that leads them back to jail where lying at least is safe.

He settled himself in his seat. ‘It’s a very nice occupation. The more responsible members of our family have done it for generations. It began when a great-uncle of mine worked at Tishbite Hall as a page boy. He was a bit of a dogsbody in those days. Whenever he made the slightest mistake in laying the table the butler kicked him up the arse and booted him out of the room. So my great-uncle soon learned to be good at the jobs he had to do. That kind of treatment went on even when he got to the age of twenty, but he had to put up with it because there was nowhere else for him to go. Then he fell in love with one of the kitchen maids, and decided he would marry her. That meant he had to give up his job, because at such houses only the butler was allowed to be married.

‘So he wrote out his notice, and put on it that he was leaving because he wanted to emigrate to Canada. Now the butler already knew he was leaving to get married, and told Lord Tishbite. In those days that was a good job for my great-uncle to have. His father lived in a village ten miles away, and every so often he would get the word that he should go over to Tishbite Hall. So the father set off over the fields by footpaths, carrying a sackbag folded under his arm. When he got to Tishbite Hall he was given legs of lamb, pheasants and rabbits and all kinds of game, so much that he could just about carry it away. It was stuff that had been thrown out of the larders to be given to the pigs. So the father struggled home with it, and after taking out all that his family could possibly eat for the next few days he handed the rest to the poor of the village. There was certainly no need to starve if you had somebody in service at a place like Tishbite Hall.

‘Anyway, when Lord Tishbite heard from the butler that my great-uncle had handed in his notice because he wanted to get married instead of emigrate he got him on the carpet. Lying was the worst thing you could do, in them days. It was almost as bad as murder. Well, my great-uncle, bless him, was trembling in his boots, because he thought this was the end. He wouldn’t be able to get a reference, and it would be impossible to find another job. He might be able to get married, but he’d damn well starve. That was the days before the dole, remember.

‘But Lord Tishbite, after rating him for a bit, told him he’d been such a good worker during his eight years in service that he wanted to do something for him. Maybe he’d taken a shine to him. I don’t know. But he asked him if he would like to live in London, and the upshot was that he got him a post as a Queen’s Messenger, in Whitehall. He was so outstanding at this that he eventually got his sons into the business, though he always put them in service first to make sure they had a good grounding in discipline and smartness. My early days, for instance, were spent working at a big house, mostly polishing boots. I could tell you a thing or two about shining boots! But I kept my eyes and ears open, and it certainly put the polish on me. Boning boots was the first step towards me becoming a gentleman’s gentleman which was, after service in the army, from which I retired as a sergeant, to lead me to the post I have now. The old great-uncle insisted that none of us should get the job easily. After serving Queen Victoria he eventually became a messenger for Edward VII, and then King George V.’

‘A very interesting tale,’ I had to admit. ‘If ever we meet again I must tell you mine. You’ve obviously rumbled the fact that I wasn’t telling the truth when I said I had no job.’

He took a miniature make-up case from his top pocket and extracted tiny tweezers, with which he began fishing about for a hair which he thought might be protruding from his nose, though I could see no such thing and knew that if he went on probing in so blind a fashion he would end up doing himself an injury. He took the telepathic hint, which somewhat increased my estimation of his abilities, and put the thing back into its box.

In prison you shared a cell with someone in a certain trade, and he talked so much about it that on getting out you could pretend to be in the same line of work. He couldn’t fool me. I ran through the list of prisons and wondered which he had been discharged from that morning. I knew the names, populations, locations and reputations, but none seemed to fit. I’d been in one, but my information was so out of date that I decided to rummage at the next station bookstall through the current issue of the Good Nick Guide. There were more people inside in England, per head of population, than in any other country in Europe, so maybe somebody had published one. They would sell over forty thousand copies right away. It was a captive market.

‘It’s been very interesting talking to you.’ He held out his carefully manicured hand as the train drew into Liverpool Street. I noticed a wad of yellow cotton wool in his left ear. ‘I find it pleasant travelling by train these days. Can’t think where that ticket collector’s got to with your change, though.’

His hand felt like five baby cobras nestling in my palm, so I shook it free and jumped out of the carriage, zigzagging through the crowd before he could catch me up to ask the loan of ten quid for a cup of tea. I won’t see that lying swine again, I thought. How wrong I was.

Two

Making my way into the underground with a 10p ticket for a 40p journey I passed a gaudy and shocking poster of four hefty policemen using their truncheons on a man against a wall, with the caption underneath saying: ‘Is it worth it for cheating on your fare?’

While waiting on the platform I noticed in the personal column of The Times a cryptic message meant only for me. ‘You can’t make hay out of straw when the cat is out. Bill.’ This indicated that I had been tracked by persons known or unknown since leaving home that morning, and that the first to put tabs on me was that so-called Queen’s Messenger. If Bill had got himself in trouble with Moggerhanger, or Lord Moggerhanger since the New Year’s Honours List, then I would soon be in the shit as well. Tangle with Claud Moggerhanger, and the razors came out, and when they came out they went in — into your flesh. Or you landed in the nick on some framed-up charge, after buying a second-hand car from one of Moggerhanger’s innumerable outlets, and driving off with a different number plate back and front so that the cyclops picked you up three corners away and had the laugh of their lives.

At Leicester Square I threw my ticket at the collector at the top of the crowded escalator and was through the barrier before he could pick it up. A fattish man in a shabby suit with wide trousers and a nicky hat rested his umbrella while browsing at a girlie-mag bookstall, and in passing I took the brolly and walked out into the open air, suitably equipped for my reappearance in the Metropolis. The London brolly was the equivalent of the Amsterdam bike, to be picked up without the stigma of stealing and dropped later on so that someone else could use it.

Rain splashed on dead beatniks, snow eaters and pavement artists. I felt sorry for a raving looney who stood by stills of big tits and fat arses outside a cinema shouting that they wouldn’t get him, he’d beat them all, because he knew a thing or two, in fact he would get them first, yes he would, because they’d never get him, ha, ha, ha! Japanese holidaymakers took photographs of the AA offices. A split-skirted woman walked up and down with a magnificent Borzoi hound that pulled something unmentionable, even to me, out of a dustbin and walked off with it trailing like a Union Jack. Traffic wardens, in fear of their lives but wearing flak jackets underneath their overcoats, patrolled up and down in twos.

I made my way to The Platinum Hedgehog on Barber Street, and stood in line at the cafeteria. Upstairs was a sitdown restaurant, and downstairs a standup stripclub. Next door was a gambling den, and on the other side was the head office of the Flagellation Book Club in a cupboard, all owned by Moggerhanger, proving (if proof were needed) that buggers can’t be choosers.

The man in front, who was certainly thin enough, took three apple pies, three custards and a cup of tea from the counter. Only Bill Straw could be so sweet-greedy, and I recognised him at once. ‘The pies are full of sugared turnip,’ I said, ‘and the custards are made out of mustard and brothel-come, and as for the tea, piss would be positively safe by comparison.’

He turned. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down. But thank God you’re here. Do you know, Michael, you are staring at the most stupid bleeder on God’s earth?’

‘When you sit down you can tell me why.’

He reached back for another custard and then lunged forward for a second cup of tea, so that his tray looked like a model of the centre of Calcutta. I was afraid to be seen with him. The last trouble had started after we had struck up an acquaintance on the Great North Road when Bill, straight out of prison, had begged a lift in my gradually collapsing car.

Instinct told me to put back the cellophane-packed sandwich from my coat pocket and run as far from the place as I could get in what time was left of my life. But I didn’t, due to the sight of Bill’s old-time face, plus a dose of curiosity, and a sense of boredom that hadn’t left since Bridgitte had hopped off to Holland with the kids.

We sat at a table near the door. ‘Just in case,’ he said, looking round every few seconds as if he owned the place and was anxious to see how good or bad trade was.

‘Keep your head still,’ I said, ‘because if anybody comes in looking for you they won’t need an identikit picture to pick you out. They’ll just look for the bottle of machine-oil on the table.’

He smiled like a dead man hoping to come back to life. The only time he was really unconscious was while slopping custard pies into his mouth. It was certainly a come-down for the smart man of the world and gold smuggler I had once known, the man in fact who had trained me at the trade. He was, however, well dressed in a smart suit, good shirt, tie, gold cufflinks and polished shoes, with a fleck of hanky at the top pocket, a briefcase of real leather by his feet, and a Burberry not made in Taiwan over the chair back. Only his manner had momentarily deteriorated. He still had a short back and sides, which was no longer the same with me.

‘Your hair’s a bit long, Michael. Get it cut,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t look good. You’re a middle-aged man now, or bloody close.’

I thanked him for the compliment.

He stared at a young man with hair down to his shoulders, who was demolishing a Sweeny Todd meat pie a few feet away. ‘I can’t stand all these hefty young lads with Veronica Lake hairstyles. They want a sergeant-major to sort ’em out. I sometimes walk behind one and don’t know if it’s a man or a woman. No good for blokes at my age.’

‘If you have short hair these days you’re a suspicious character.’

He didn’t have that total confidence he once had. ‘You think so?’

‘You’d better stick to the business in hand.’

Having finished his breakfast he took out a cigarette case and lit up a fag, blowing smoke rings in the direction of two young women at the next table. ‘They’re lovely, aren’t they? I wouldn’t mind one for supper. Two, in fact. Do you know, Michael, I’m fifty-six, but I still like a feed now and then.’ His lean features, suntanned and clean-shaven, wrinkled into anxiety when he saw my umbrella hooked onto the chair. ‘Where did you get that gamp?’

‘Oh, I just picked it up.’

The sight of it worried him. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘You can lump it, then. It’s mine, and I’m very fond of it. I’ll love it till my dying day. Uncle Randolph used to go to Ascot with it before the War.’

‘Nicked it, eh? Looks fishy to me. Anyway, do you want to hear my story or don’t you? I know you do, and it’s good of you to answer my call so quickly. Michael will always stand by a friend in need, I said. He’s a good six-footer who not only looks after himself in a tight corner, but never lets an old pal down. I didn’t have firmer friends in the Sherwood Foresters. I don’t like the look of that umbrella, though. Where did you get it from?’

I told him.

‘That’s hardly calculated to set my mind at rest. It looks very suspicious.’ He scraped the last stains of custard from all three dishes. ‘Times have changed, Michael. You can’t be too careful these days. Ten years ago things were comparatively civilised. If you strayed from the straight and narrow all you might end up with was a nasty scar on the lee side of your clock, but nowadays you might get chopped into bits and sprinkled over a Thames bridge from a plastic bag. You vanish without trace. The seagulls gulp every morsel. London pigeons are starting to eat flesh. A few months ago I happened to be the unwilling witness of a fight between the Green Toe Gang and Moggerhanger’s Angels, and as a set-to it made the Battle of Bosworth Field look like a pub brawl at the Elephant and Castle. Things have altered, right enough.’

He plucked the small feather out of his hatband and put it into his mouth. ‘You’ve been away, so you don’t know how things are. How could you?’ He spat the bedraggled feather onto a plastic pie plate. ‘Well, it’s not too bad, either, because otherwise I wouldn’t have asked you to come down here and see me, would I?’

‘Wouldn’t you? Listen, I’ll go right off my bonce if you don’t tell me why you asked me to leave my cosily furnished railway station on such a foul day.’

Raindrops were running down the window. They broke out in separate places and made a dash for it, as I should have done, increasing in force and strength, born from stationary globules on the way down, like a crowd gathering on the way to a riot. Sometimes they travelled horizontally, lonely figures going a long way, till thwarted by the end of the glass.

‘I’ll tell you why I’m here, Michael, and why you’re here. I want your advice and support. A few months ago I was at a loose end. My girlfriend had left me, my mother had died, and I was running out of cash. I’d earned fifty thousand pounds bringing back a consignment of don’t-ask-what from Kashmir. I carried it in the false bottom of a butterfly collection, and got through the customs a treat. I had a beard (grey, unfortunately), little pebbledash glasses and a bush hat. I looked so theatrical they never thought I could be putting on an act. My false passport, fixed up by the Green Toe Gang, said I was a lepidopterist. I even had forged documents from the British Museum of Natural History. When those lads of the Green Toe Gang do something, they do it properly. No flies on them, Michael. No flies, no files, as they say. There aren’t any marks where they’ve been, either, not like on the rest of us.

‘It was the best job I ever pulled. Remember when we was smuggling gold ten years ago for Jack Leningrad Limited? Not a patch on that racket. At least this stuff doesn’t weigh a ton. I brought in a hundredweight, all nicely hidden. In the East a column of porters carried it, and at London Airport they provide them nice squeaky trolleys for you to zig-zag your stuff through the Nothing to Declare gates. A word of advice, though: always get the squeakiest trolley. It’s made for you these days. No rough stuff, or straining your muscles with three hundredweight of gold packed in your waistcoat pockets. No sweating with fear, either, as long as you act your part and keep a straight face, which we’re always able to do, eh? Get me another cup o’ tea and a custard, there’s a good lad.’

‘Fetch it yourself.’

‘I was brought up in poverty,’ he said, ‘at Number Two Slaughterhouse Yard. If I don’t stay at luxury hotels I feel deprived and underprivileged. You understand what I’m trying to say, don’t you, Michael?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then get me another cup of tea, then, and two custard pies, the ones with the pastry a bit burnt.’

His face had a pallor, and his eyes a shine, that suggested he was about to die. ‘What’s up, for God’s sake?’

He wiped a salt tear from his face. ‘I’m in danger. I can’t tell you — though I will. I’ll come to it. I’m not afraid of dying, not me, not after going through the war with the Sherwood Foresters. That Normandy campaign was very rough. I nearly got killed once or twice.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’ I’d never seen him so frightened. ‘Pull yourself together.’

He smiled. ‘Another custard and a cup of tea will see me right.’

I came back with his supplies, and watched him devour them. ‘Get on with your rigmarole.’

He wiped his lips. ‘That little courier job brought me fifty thousand quid, but money doesn’t stick to me, Michael. I like it too much to have it long. I give with my left hand, and grasp tight with my right, which means I get rid of it sooner than if I was just plain generous. I’m jittery with so much wadding in my pockets. I like to go round the clubs and have a good time. Shove fifty quid in a tart’s hand and not even go to bed with her, then give another woman a good pasting because she won’t let me have a feel. What’s life for if you can’t fix yourself up with an orgy now and again? Ever had three women in bed with you? You ain’t lived.

‘Anyway, I was broke, and then, providentially as I thought, I get this offer from the Green Toe Gang to be the driver of the third getaway car in a robbery. Now it ain’t a bank or post office or a wages snatch, but the flat of a former member of the gang who had half-inched a hundred thousand of their money, and now they wanted it back, meaning to deal with him later. The Green Toe Gangers had been told he was on holiday in St Trop, and had left his loot in a suitcase under his bed. You still get people like that, though to do him justice he thought it was just as safe where it was than in a bank with people like him and the Green Toe Gang around.

‘You can imagine how they trusted me absolutely? I’m a fool, Michael, always have been. You see, a few days before The Day one of Moggerhanger’s men, Kenny Dukes, that bastard whose arms are so long he ought to be in a circus, and who used to be chief bouncer at one of Lord Claud’s lesbian clubs, said Moggerhanger would like to see me. Well, I thought, I’ve nothing to lose, and let myself be taken to his big house at Ealing, and over a whisky and soda he persuaded me to drive the getaway car straight up north to a bungalow in Lincolnshire called Smilin’ Thru’ on the outskirts of Back Enderby, and deliver the cash there. Instead of me getting five per cent, which was what the Green Toe Gang had promised, he would give me half. Well, I ask you! Fifty thousand instead of five is quite a whack, and by the fifth whisky I’d agreed. I must have been stoned, pissed, and just plain crackers. Claud was in his element. He knew what he was doing. He must have had someone placed right in the middle of the Green Toe Gang to know their plans in such detail.

‘The actual robbery went smoothly. Nobody got knocked on the head. Not a gun was fired. Clockwork wasn’t in it. The individual always collaborates, Michael. He gets a glint in his eyes because he wants to be part of the gamble as to whether it’ll come off or not. It’s the regimented law-abiding swine who causes trouble when you ask him to be part of a team. Anyway, the case of money was put into my car by the second getaway car, which the blokes in it then abandoned and walked into South Ken tube station. I set off, cool as if I had just come back from Brighton and was on my way home to lie to my wife as to where I had been. I was supposed to deliver the money to a house in Highgate for the Green Toe Gang. But Moggerhanger had given me instructions to take it to Smilin’ Thru’, and when I stopped to wait at the red traffic light (I’ll never forgive that traffic light for being on red at that particular moment) I thought to myself: “A hundred thousand of real money is in the car, already checked and counted. It’s too good to hand over to the Green Toe Gang, or to Moggerhanger. I’ll keep it for myself.”

‘Ah, Michael, greed! That’s the downfall of the human race, and especially of yours truly. What commandment of the Good Book is that? One of them, I’m sure, so don’t tell me. Pure fucking greed, it was. I tell you I didn’t know what greed was till then. The idea struck me so strongly that I thought I would faint, hit another car, get pulled in by the cops and be marched off to the nick with the loot being shared out in the police car behind. But I pulled myself together. A blinding white light flashing GREED, GREED, GREED in front of my eyes got me back on an even keel. That sensation is described very well in one of Gilbert Blaskin’s novels, if I remember. It was on page one and I never got beyond it. But I was sweating, trembling, just how I was supposed to be. More than just a knee-trembler behind the dustbins in Soho would be mine for the asking with this amount of lolly. In a flash I wanted everything. You’re getting my drift, Michael? I wanted a yacht, a high-speed boat with six berths and me as Captain Codspiece flaring across the Channel to have a triple bunk-up in Cherbourg. Ah, what dreams! The likes of you don’t know one half.

‘Well, some bastard behind me in a powder blue minivan with a coat of arms on the side was blaring the horn to tell me that red had changed to green, and from thinking I would get my dusters out and give him short back and sides by breaking all his windows except the windscreen so that he would at least be able to drive off and get them repaired, I shot away, jet propelled by nothing else but good old-fashioned greed. Greedy but unashamed, that’s me.’

‘The material world is so dull,’ I said.

He winked. ‘It might be. But it’s got the best stories and the most money. I’ll never forgive myself, I told myself as I left that traffic light behind. And neither, I knew, would the Green Toe Gang or Lord Moggerhanger. You just don’t do that sort of thing. I’ve got two of the most vicious gangs in London (and that means the world) after my tripes to the last millimetre. They’ll even kill the tapeworm as it tries to escape along the pavement, poor innocent thing. I honestly don’t see how I can survive.’

‘Neither do I,’ I said.

‘Fortunately, or unfortunately I now think, I had my passport with me when I shot from the traffic lights towards Sloane Square. That was because I make it a rule never to go out without it, not even to cross the street for the Evening Standard wearing my dressing gown. I’m too old a hand to be caught out on something like that.’

I wondered how I would survive after having been seen talking to such a soft-headed vainglorious lunatic. ‘Stop boasting. Tell me what happened.’

He laughed, a tone of hysteria crossed by one of self-satisfaction. ‘You must admit it was a brave thing to do, or would have been if it hadn’t been so foolhardy. Daring and original, now I come to think of it. I just don’t like being a dead man, that’s all.’

‘Neither would I.’

‘But you won’t abandon me, Michael?’

‘First chance I get.’

‘I drove straight to Dover. I was no fool. In Canterbury I gave a lift to a young woman called Phyllis with two kids named Huz and Buz, and before we had got to Dover I’d invited them to come on a continental holiday. She lived in Dover, and had to go home to get their passports. We looked as if we were going on holiday as we got on the boat. Police and customs waved us in with a smile. I never realised I could look such a family man. I even let the matelot wash my car when he asked me, though I locked the boot before going on deck for a breath of air. I can’t tell you how good I felt. It was the high point of my life. Here was I, a man of fifty odd, with a car, a woman and two of the worst-behaved little bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune to lay my hands on, and a hundred thousand quid, on the way to lovely France. I felt like my old self again — rejuvenated, I think is the word.

‘I spent a week at Le Touquet, then put my temporary family back on the boat at Ostend with a few hundred to keep them in ice creams and lollipops for a week or two. I then set off via Brussels and Aachen down the Rhine motorway, nonstop to Switzerland, that wonderful refuge of runaways and political exiles with money. Once there I headed for Geneva, where I put the money into an account I’d opened years ago, and still kept a few francs in to hold it open. A nest egg for a cuckoo, but the only thing is I won’t live to enjoy it. That’s the long and the short of it, Michael.’

I offered a cigarette to calm his nerves. ‘But why did you come back? Why didn’t you head for Brazil like Ronnie Biggs?’

‘Have you got a cigar? Fags do my chest in.’

I gave him one. ‘The same old scrounger.’

‘I like generous friends. You’ll never regret your friendship with me, Michael, even though it might cost you your life. Greater love hath no man …’ He swung his head back, and hee-hawed like a donkey set free after twenty years going round and round the well. ‘Why did I come back here? You haven’t heard half the tale yet. I didn’t return of my own free will. You think I’m daft as well as stupid?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re wrong. No, you may be right. The trouble is, Michael, there’s no subtlety in my life, none whatsoever. I miss it sorely, and regret not having it. I feel what it is, and say that I must be subtle, and I spend hours deciding how I can be, but when the time comes, I act just like my old violent loud-mouthed greedy unlucky self. Anyway, to get back to Geneva, I was walking out of my hotel, on my constitutional to the lake. I like to keep up my walking. Five miles a day at least, one way or another. I even do a bit of running now and again. You never know when a sudden ten-mile sprint’s going to come in handy. There’s a gym I go to for boxing. I used to belong to a rifle club, just to maintain my marksmanship. I’m not that much of an idiot that I don’t keep myself up to scratch, Green Toe Gang or no bleeding Green Toe Gang.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘It was a lovely day. I was on top of the world. My cigar tasted like the very best shit, a newspaper was under my arm, my hat was set on my head at the usual jaunty angle — and then it wasn’t. Somebody knocked it off, and when I bent to pick it up, before lamming into them, I was lammed into by three of the biggest bastards you ever saw, and a shooter was stuck at my ribs. I didn’t have a chance. They made sure I’d got my passport, and before I could say my name was Jack Straw or Bill Hay or Percy Chaff or whatever it was at the time (I honestly forget) I was on the plane to London and no messing.

‘Everything looked normal as I walked to the check-in desk at Geneva, but there was one bugger behind me at four o’clock, and another chiking from eight, so that one false move and I’d have been bleeding all over the excess luggage labels. I went as quiet as a lamb. You see, they thought I’d left the money in England. Why? I’ll never know, although I can speculate. The chief of the Green Toe Gang employs one of the best psychologists to help out with any problems, personal or otherwise, that come along. Every consultation probably costs a cool hundred. Mostly it pays off. So I assumed that in my case they put the problem before him, and wanted to know where in his opinion I’d gone and what I’d done with the money. So after much sweating at the temples the twit comes up with this scenario that even the big chief of the Green Toe Gang couldn’t quibble about, since it had cost him so much. They traced me to Switzerland, which wasn’t very clever of them. I could have done the same. This Dr Anderson chap must have told them that before leaving Blighty I’d stashed the cash in a hiding place I knew of, and that they would never find it until they got me back to the Sceptic Isle and made me talk.

‘You see, Michael, the gangs aren’t so cosmopolitan as they were in our day. They’re too insular. They couldn’t credit the fact that I would leave with the money and be happy to potter around continental resorts of pleasure for the rest of my life. They’d probably fed into this psychologist’s computer-brain all the facts they knew about me, and he’d told them I had buried the cash under the floor boards of the house I was born in in Worksop — which had gone in slum clearance years ago. Well, when I said I’d left the money in Blighty they didn’t even listen. They knew, poor sods.

‘They got me back to London Airport right enough. Easy. There was a hire car waiting for us. All according to plan. When it comes to organisation, those boys are second to none.’

‘They should run the country,’ I said ironically.

‘They do, Michael, they do, believe me. Anyway, we steamed onto the M4 and I pondered on the fate they had in store for me. My imagination wasn’t up to it, though my expectations kept tormenting me. What those lads can do to you don’t bear thinking about, but they try the sophisticated way first by locking you in for a couple of days with Dr Anderson. It usually works. Not a mark on you. But if it doesn’t (and it wouldn’t with me) out comes the tool kit. I was just about ready to be sick, but keeping a good face on it, when the car slows, to curses from the driver. A car in front had braked and we were too close to swerve out and overtake, so had to brake with it. Another car behind homed in. We were topped and tailed, the oldest manoeuvre in the book. My brain clicked into action. When I’m not using my brain I think it’s turning into a cabbage and that I’m a walking case of senile decay. I can’t remember anything at times, or think through the simplest problem. But when it’s a matter of being in peril, a time when action is needed, I’m as clear as tissue paper and as quick as a snake.

‘The two cars were from Moggerhanger Limited, and I knew they wanted me safe in their manor because I was worth close to a hundred thousand when they got me. This was the hijack. The Green Toe Gang hadn’t known that Moggerhanger had suborned me, so clearly they didn’t expect it. Kenny Dukes got out of one car with three of his pals. One of them was Ron Cottapilly, the other was Paul Pindarry and the third I’d never seen before. Cottapilly had once been on footpad duty nicking wallets and jewellery after midnight in the West End. He held me up once with a knife — a terrible mistake for him, because I punched him so hard all round the clock and up and down the compass that he ended up pleading for his life. Him and Pindarry worked for Jack Leningrad, remember? Now they’re going straight, being employed by Moggerhanger.

‘Three blokes got out of the other car. One was Toffeebottle, one was Jericho Jim, and the other I didn’t know. All of them had claw hammers, and Kenny had a shooter. While the others smashed the windows, Kenny shot the tyres. Two of the blokes came for me, but I hit one, kneed the other, and was up the bank with more bullets whizzing at my brain box than I’d heard since Normandy. I zig-zagged. Do you know, Michael, every chap should do military service. A stint with the Old Stubborns is absolutely vital, because there’s bound to be some time in your life when you need the expertise, either to defend your country, or to defend yourself from it. It don’t matter which. But the old infantry training’s saved my life more times than I care to think about. Breaks my heart to see fat young chaps riding about on motorbikes or lounging on street corners. They should be learning unarmed combat, weapons handling, fieldcraft, marksmanship — basic training for life.’

My scornful look stopped him. ‘I’ve had none of that, and I can take care of myself.’

‘Ah, happen so, Michael, but you’d take care of yourself a lot better with it. Anyway, you’re different. But to cut a long story short, one of ’em chased me up that bank, but at the top I turned and kicked him so smartly under the chin he went rolling right back onto the hard shoulder. I don’t know what they feed people on these days, honest I don’t, because the others down by the cars, instead of coming up after me, just watched me kick this bloke as if they was at the theatre and we was actors on the stage. Honest to God, I thought they were going to clap. I’d have waited if I hadn’t seen Kenny Dukes reloading his shooter. Then I was off towards some houses in the distance.

‘It was afternoon and would soon be dark, so I had to get my bearings and reach civilisation. I tell you, Michael, I felt like an escaped prisoner of war, because listen to the state I was in. After landing and getting through the customs, while we were in the car park, they took my wallet and passport and my shoes as well. Would you believe it? I’m surprised in a way they didn’t give me the needle to keep me quiet till I got to a dungeon under Westminster Abbey or the London Mosque. They didn’t think the expense was justified, I suppose. Even so, they were taking no chances, though an ambush wasn’t expected.

‘Another thing was that when I shinned up that bank I didn’t realise I’d got no shoes on. Such was my impulse to get away I’d have run through hot coals and broken bottles. As for no money, a mere trifle. Identification papers had never bothered me. I’d never known who I was anyway, except that I was myself, and that’s all that mattered. If you know who you are, other people can get at you, and we don’t want that, do we? I can see those questions burning behind your eyes. Well, I’m in a right mess, I thought as I came to a lane. Luckily I’d done a bunk just beyond Junction Three, the London side, so the next exit for eastbound traffic wasn’t till Gunnersbury, about six miles away. It would take them fifteen minutes at the soonest to turn round, come back to Junction Three and swing north to try and head me off. In that time I could do at least a mile and lose myself in the streets of Ealing. I’d driven so much around London I’d got an A to Z in my head — of the main roads and districts anyway.

‘But money was the problem. It always is. It was what got me into the mess in the first place, and now it would have to get me out. I’d a few Swiss francs in coins in one pocket, and the equivalent of ten bob in the other — very useful for a bloke on the run, though not much cop for the likes of me. I had to think fast. I was walking so quick that in about twenty minutes — they hadn’t taken my watch — I got to Southall station. The sodium lights glowed, and I skulked along as if wanted by every police force or outlaw gang in the world. This wasn’t how I was feeling, Michael. It was tactical. I was really out of my mind with happiness at having got away. I knew that if they were looking for me they’d be expecting to spot an over-confident tall thinnish fellow walking along as if he owned the world — barefoot or not. So I pulled up the collar of my hundred guinea bespoke suit, fastened all three buttons, pulled my tie off and looped it round my waist, and sloped along in the shadows like a wino who’d just been given a talking-to by a do-gooder from Eel Pie Island. And as for that railway station, don’t think I would go into it in my present physical state. Not on your big soft cock. If they swung off that Gunnersbury roundabout and looked at the map that’s the first place their eyes would light on. They could be as tactical as I was when they’d been thwarted. I hope this tale’s something you’re learning a bit from, Michael. It’s a bit cautionary, like, in more ways than one.’

I gave him a nod.

‘Well, thank goodness the district was more like Bombay than Blighty, because I found an Indian Allsort store where I knew I could do a little trading, and went in out of the cold and dark. They had everything for sale, from cheap wristwatches and Russian junk radios to a second-hand clothes department behind a curtain. The chap who ran it was tall, very handsome and wore a turban. A couple of kids played on the floor, and his wife sat by the checkout.’

‘“What can I do for you?” he asked me.

‘“I’m in trouble,” I told him. You have to come straight out with it at such times. I have an instinct, Michael. I can always spot a face that’s going to help me. I knew he wouldn’t panic, or turn me in after offering me a cup of strong tea with all the sugar I want, like your average Englishman — or anyone else, come to that. I laid my case straight in front of him. “I’ve been robbed, and this is how they left me. I’d just got off the plane after two years in the States, and these white thugs stuck me up at gunpoint, bundled me into a car, took everything I’d got and threw me on the motorway. Can you help me?”

‘“Piss off,” he said. “Get away from my shop, you National Front pig, or I’ll call the police, and even if they beat me up, burn my shop, club my kids and loot any stock that’s left they’ll still pin something on you for pulling them away from their tea.” These Good Samaritans always begin like that, but after half an hour’s chat and several cups of liquid boot polish I sold him my hundred-guinea suit for two, bought a suit and a pair of shoes for a quid that he’d got from a jumble sale for two bob, gave him a quid for the loan of a razor and permission to use it in his lavatory, then gave my foreign coins to his kids in exchange for an old cap, and parted the best of friends. I’ll never forget him. He saved my life and, what’s more, Michael — forgive me if at this point I get sentimental — he knew it, too. The robbing bastard was the salt of the earth. Ah, Michael, I love people! They never let you down — most of ’em.’

‘If you shove all your platitudes up your arse,’ I said, ‘you’ll grow into an oak tree. Get on with your lies.’

He scratched his nose. ‘After that, it was easy. I didn’t get a train to Wales, or the Cotswolds — if trains run in them places anymore. Nor did I hitch as far out of London as I could get. Not your cunning old Bill he didn’t, as that fiendish psychologist would tell them I had when they woke him up next morning. I got into London unspotted, and went to my flat to get money I’d stashed away for emergencies, and a case of things to tide me over. Then I rented a little fleapit room in Somers Town, thinking it better to be in the eye of the storm than on the periphery where an unexpected hurricane can blow up at any minute. That’s bad for the nerves, and I don’t like things playing on my nerves, especially when it’s not necessary. We used to call it the indirect approach, Michael, remember? Nowadays it’s known as lateral thinking. When I was a kid it was plain common sense. So then I wrote to you, and put an advert in The Times and here we are. And that’s my story. Now you can see what a fiendish three-cornered fix I’m in.’

Three

I didn’t believe a word of it. The only fact I got from such a rigmarole was that Dr Anderson the psychologist was in the pay of Moggerhanger and the Green Toe Gang. That rang true enough, because he was the brother of the ex-husband of my wife Bridgitte, the father of Smog, and both Andersons were as villainous and devious as they come. The present Anderson was obviously selling information from one gang to the other.

It didn’t surprise me but, true or not, Bill seemed relieved that the story was off his chest and that he had found someone to listen to whom the information would be as deadly to know about as it was to himself. To me he was like the plague, and always had been, a carrier of downfall and death. Everything that had gone wrong in my life had been due to him, yet why had I answered his summons to London? He was brother, uncle and childhood pal rolled into one, and with me till the end of my life. It is only fair to record that a lot of the good things that happened had been due to him as well. ‘I’m thinking,’ I said, seeing the question on his lips.

‘You’d better be.’

‘I know you’re in trouble. I believe it now, but don’t you ever learn?’

‘Learn?’ He almost jumped off his chair. ‘Learn?’ he repeated, as if it was a new word he liked the sound of. ‘Michael, I learn all the time. Every minute of my life, I learn. I go to sleep at night asking: “What have I learned today?” And I wake up in the morning wondering: “What can I learn?” But the sad fact is that I’d need six lives to learn enough to do myself any good. I could learn everything there is to learn and still get stabbed in the fifth rib down by that little fact I’ve left out.’

‘But why someone like me, who can’t help you in the least? The logic is absolutely beyond me.’

He drained his empty cup for the third time. ‘You may not believe this, but the reason is, I’ve got nobody else. Nobody I can trust, I mean.’

I almost wept with pity. ‘I’ve been out of circulation for ten years, living a domestic though far from peaceful life at my railway station, so I can’t possibly be any help.’

He grasped my hands. ‘You can, you can, Michael.’

‘All I’ve done is wash up, play with kids, make do-it-yourself repairs on the waiting room, ticket office and station master’s quarters now and again, and a bit of planting in the garden. I’m out of condition, as flabby as a baby seal.’

He put on his sulky look, knowing I was as fit as a flying pike. ‘If there’s one thing I remember about you it was your quick thinking and the startling versatility of your ideas. Makes my blood run cold, some of the things you got up to — which is better than it not running at all, or spilling over the pavement out of control. Come on, Michael, put that thinking cap on and let’s have some good advice.’

‘You know how to flatter me. But give me a minute.’

‘Two, if you like.’ He looked as if his worries were over, though I could have told him that, having brought me back into his life, they were about to begin. I was in no mood to impart comforting advice too soon after he had made it obvious that perilous times were on the cards for me as well. ‘In view of the seriousness of your situation I believe the only game we can play is one of diplomacy. What I suggest is that you get into a taxi, drive straight to Lord Moggerhanger’s residence and give yourself up. It’s your only chance of survival.’

You’d have thought the National Anthem was about to be played, the way he stood up. I’d never seen him paler. ‘So that’s what Moggerhanger told you to say? I can see it all now. As soon as I escaped from the hijack he got straight onto you, knowing I would contact you sooner or later. He offered you a good fat fee — half at the time and half on delivery — to meet me, listen to my woes, and then advise me to “drive straight to Lord Moggerhanger’s residence and give yourself up”. Michael, I would have thought better of you than to try and pull a thing like that. I suppose this place is surrounded, is it?’ He looked out of the window, then sat down. ‘Or maybe not. It ain’t worth the expense, not when you can lead me there like a Mayfair poodle in a taxi. But it won’t work. They’ll never get me.’ He tapped his pocket. ‘I pack a little thing in here to help me.’ He stared at me, and stood up again. He was acting, but it was too early to guess what his game was. ‘I’m not such a fool as not to know that in the end I’ve only got myself to rely on.’

I did my best to look scornful, but I didn’t move, which is perhaps what convinced him. ‘Listen, if all you’ve told me is true, then you’re trapped.’ I was also a dab hand at acting. ‘It’s only a matter of time before you’re caught, though nobody’ll kill you, because they want the money back. That’s what they all want. And they won’t mind letting six months go by. They’re patient. They’ll only kill you after they’ve got their hands on the money. Now, if two gangs are out to get you (and they are, from what you tell me) then you’ve got to set them at each other’s throats even more than they are at the moment. Of the two gangs, I think Moggerhanger’s lot are the ones to deal with because both you and I know him from a long time ago. I don’t see any other possibility.’

‘You’re a lunatic,’ he said.

I put on a bright smile. ‘Lunatics survive.’

‘Michael, I don’t think you’re born.’

I disputed his flippant assertion. ‘I was born so long ago I’m dead. Bridgitte left me last week, and took the kids.’

‘I’m sure it served you right. Even so, I don’t see why you should want us both to commit suicide. The take-one-with-you attitude is all very well, but not among friends.’

‘I’m not suggesting you crawl to the Villa Moggerhanger and blurt out pointblank why you’ve come,’ I told him. ‘Approach him on another pretext. Tell him you want to join up with his organisation. The Green Toe Gang got their hundred thousand back. It was in your suitcase. You didn’t get your share, and you want your revenge. He’ll understand that. Anyway, let’s get out of here. I’m feeling like an alcoholic drink.’

‘I don’t think I need tell you, Michael, that I find our meeting particularly discouraging. I really do. Moggerhanger would just trade me in for half the money. He doesn’t mess about. During the transfer he would take the lot. Come on, then. Let’s go to The Hair of the Dog. They’ll be opening about now.’

He put on his coat, and took my umbrella — being in such a low state that I couldn’t tell the light-fingered bastard to put it back. We headed up Charing Cross Road, Bill in front, neither of us saying anything because of traffic noise and the difficulty of walking side by side among so many people. A middle-aged man with a dog on a lead intended passing us on our right but the dog, wanting to go along the wall for a sniff or two, got entangled in Bill’s legs.

Even Dr Anderson the demon psychologist would be hard put to it to find a reason as to why some people are born with an animus against our canine friends. Perhaps whoever hates dogs had a particularly hard life in his (or her) younger days, which of course was true of Bill. Such types resent dogs because they regard them as lower than human beings and don’t see why they should have a better and more carefree time than they did. Other people who dislike dogs may well be mentally unstable, or stricken with some physical ailment which makes them irascible and intolerant. In any case I don’t suppose they can stand the whining fawning bloody pests shitting all over the streets.

Not that Bill reacted violently when the dog tangled with his legs and sent a few squirts of amber piss against his trousers. He had his own troubles, and wanted to be on his way with the least fuss. But he prodded it quite gently, it seemed to me, who had by this time caught up with him, with the end of my umbrella.

The result was extraordinary, to say the least. The black dog, of medium size and uncertain breed, and no doubt a gentle and fetching creature as far as dogs go, gave a squeak and rolled on its back, shivered along the belly, shook all paws and howled.

Bill stepped over it, and so did I. Neither of us realised the seriousness of what had happened. The man bent to look at what was ailing his pet, not for the moment relating its peculiar condition to the seemingly light prod dealt by Bill. He may not even have noticed. We speeded up, to the tune of the man wailing that his dog was having a fit. Perhaps it was dead. As quick as that. It maybe wasn’t as bad as he thought, though something had certainly gone wrong as a result of the playful tap from the umbrella.

Running away from trouble seemed undignified, and I thought here was an opportunity to act on my idea of being more honest and responsible. ‘Let’s go back and see what’s wrong.’

He grabbed my arm, the berserker tone in his voice taking on a quality that I hated but which my blood could not ignore: ‘Run! For fuck’s sake, run!’

We trotted up the road, glad so many people were about. They always came out when the rain stopped. ‘Where did you get this umbrella, did you say?’ he panted.

‘I told you. I found it.’

‘It must be poisoned.’

We darted across Cambridge Circus, then doubled back towards Long Acre. ‘I didn’t know. But don’t throw it away. It might come in handy. And keep it away from me. My ankles ache already, it’s so close.’

The Hair of the Dog, like auntie’s parlour, was tarted up rather than down. The flock wallpaper was deep crimson and reeked of Jamaican rum. The corner of a condom packet showed from under the pseudo-Axminster carpet. I’d have known one anywhere. I looked around the walls at the plastic gold-leafed light-brackets for a sign of the condom itself. There was a framed picture of a child with big tears in its eyes, the sort that should have a microphone behind it. ‘Why did we come here? Isn’t it one of Moggerhanger’s clubs?’

He looked as if the question was unnecessary. ‘What I don’t like about you,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry to say there are some things I positively abhor, if you’ll forgive my strong language, is that you are so simple, so, in other words, fucking crude. It’s not even as if you’re trying to hide something. There’s virtue in concealment, when it’s necessary, and even when it’s not, providing you know what you’re doing. But to show yourself as simple when you really are simple is inexcusable. The first sign of leaving it behind would be for you to know that you are simple and, being ashamed of it, learn how to keep your soupbox shut.’ He leaned forward and held my hand. ‘Do me a favour and make a beginning, there’s a good lad. Then we might not only get somewhere, but reach wherever it is we’re going in one piece. Are you getting my drift?’

I now knew beyond doubt that the story he had spun was as false and fantastic as he was. Behind his deviousness there was just a great blank sea — but one in which I might well sink without trace. He was working for someone, either Moggerhanger or the Green Toe Gang or both, and he had been asked to recruit me for some project that needed the skill, expertise (or perhaps just plain simplicity), that I was supposed to have. I didn’t like it at all, if only because the pay wouldn’t be good enough. Yet I had passed the test of loyalty and, in my determination to prove that I was nowhere as simple as I looked, I used the excuse of curiosity rather than loyalty to stay on and find out what it was all about. ‘You’re just a funny old windbag. Just tell me why you really got me out of my railway station.’

If I didn’t like him it was only because he couldn’t be straight with me, not through any moral fault or basic unfriendliness either on his part or on mine. On the other hand I did like him. I liked him very much. His thin jaws had flesh on them compared to a few years ago, but you could still see where the lines had been. The mark of hard times that had raddled his face for the first twenty-five years was sufficiently padded to give it a look of nonchalant ruthlessness, and that was what I didn’t like.

‘You’re a bit of a chump, Michael.’ Judging by his smile, if the room had been above ground, and had a window or two, the sun would have shone on his face. ‘Untrustworthiness never got anybody anywhere.’

‘Let’s call it caution,’ I said. Never trust anybody, was what I had believed all my life, though for reasons I could never understand it hadn’t stopped me trusting more people than was good for me.

‘That’s different. If I thought you weren’t cautious I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I? Now me, I’m cautious. But I’m also careful. I think on two levels. All the time I’ve been talking to you I’ve been thinking. Do you know anybody else who can think and talk at the same time? About different things, I mean?’

‘Only an old school pal called Alfie Bottesford, and he went mad.’

He looked as if he’d like to kill me. If we’d been on a desert road fifty miles from anywhere, and he’d had a gun but I hadn’t, he might have considered it. I told him.

‘Too fucking right.’ He patted my hand amiably. ‘But seriously, Michael, let’s make a plan of campaign.’ After five minutes’ silence he asked ruefully: ‘Where shall I hide? That’s all I want to know.’

I told him, quick as a flash of lightning at a garden party. My best thoughts always came without thought. ‘We’ll get a taxi to my father’s flat in Knightsbridge. I can’t think of a better place for you to hole up in for a while.’

‘Not so loud. Even walls have ears.’

‘Not this one. It’s crawling with bugs.’

He snatched his hand away, as one bit the end of his finger. ‘Bloody hell, so it is.’

‘We’ll hide you in Blaskin’s flat, just behind Harrods. Very good for shopping. Their Chelsea buns are second to none. Not to mention the sausages. You can even buy a dressing gown if you want to go for a walk.’

He was impatient. ‘Will your old man mind?’

‘If he does though, you’re made. He’s an eminent novelist.’

‘I know. I’ve met him, though I don’t suppose he’ll remember the occasion. It was in the railway station at Upper Mayhem the first time he came to see you there. He nearly went mad with pleasure when he climbed the iron ladder to get at the railway signal. He set it to derail the London express because he thought his publisher was on it, then burst into tears when you told him the line had been closed two years. I’ve never heard such language about poor old Beeching. It was all your fault though that he was so upset. I don’t think I’ve known anybody as callous as you. The things you’ve done.’

‘He wasn’t upset. He’s a novelist, don’t forget. He was just dying with chagrin, but he wasn’t by any means upset. If he got upset he wouldn’t be able to describe the situation in a novel. He’s far too canny to get so upset that he couldn’t write about it.’

Bill looked worried. ‘I hope he doesn’t write about me if he catches me hiding in his flat.’

I squashed a bug on the table. Bill dropped one in his vodka and it died immediately. ‘He may write about the situation in ten years. But he won’t know you’re there. He’s got the top flat these days, and there’s an attic he never goes to. With a bed and a pisspot, you can hide there for as long as you like.’

He gripped my elbow as though to break it. ‘Michael, I know that some poor Jews had to hide like that in the war from the Germans, but I couldn’t take it.’ He pointed to his temple. ‘I’ve seen that house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank lived. I’m not that strong. I’d go ga-ga after half an hour.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Die. I suppose I’ll be sorry if you do, but I’ll have done my best, so you won’t be on my conscience when I read about them fishing ossobuco from Battersea pond, Peking duck from Putney Reach, and searching vainly for the plain roast beef.’ I stood up to go. ‘I know Blaskin’s loft isn’t Claridge’s, but at least it’s central and you can almost stand up in it. Try it for a few days. What have you got to lose?’

I was bored with the situation and wanted to get back to Upper Mayhem to see if there was any sign of Bridgitte and the children. I was missing my pall of misery, because I thought, in my superstitious fashion, that being steeped in agony for lack of her might bring her back quicker than if I stayed to have a good time in Soho.

He squashed another bug, then pulled me back into my chair. ‘All right. I’ll do it. And I appreciate it. But I’ve got a request to make, and I hope you’ll say yes.’

‘The answer’s no.’

‘You haven’t heard it yet.’

‘You’ve got several score of the most ruthless mobsters in London after you, and you’re making conditions.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m finding you a job. I heard a couple of blokes say yesterday that Moggerhanger wanted another chauffeur. Why don’t you apply for the post? He’s good to his employees. You worked for him before, didn’t you? No, don’t take it like that. Sit down, old son.’

I did, before I fell. ‘That was ten years ago, and I ended up in prison.’

‘Didn’t we all? You got mixed up with Jack Leningrad. And you shagged Moggerhanger’s daughter. I don’t know which was worse in his eyes. But Polly’s married now, and Jack Leningrad’s moved to Lichtenstein.’

My head spun, yet I was tempted to work again for Moggerhanger because I would get behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce. Secondly, I would earn some money, and thirdly, I might have another go at Polly, married or not.

‘What’s in it for you?’

‘The reason is,’ he said, ‘that if you’re working for Moggerhanger — who as well as the Green Toe Gang is after my guts — you might pick up bits of information as to whether or not he’s on my trail. I’ll have a friend in the enemy camp, and feel safer with my own intelligence and security system.’

I was silent for a while. So was he. I didn’t mind thinking myself at the turning-point of a long life, because I sometimes imagined it as much as twenty times a day, but what sent shivers up my backbone was to have Bill think it as well. I was horrified at having no say in whether things happened to me or not, so gave him my view on the matter as gently as I could. ‘Drop dead. Get cut to bits. Count me out.’

‘I can’t fathom it,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘Here I am, telling you that if I’m alive six weeks from now I promise on the sacred memory of my dead mother to share with you — and to share equally — the hundred thousand pounds I’ve got stashed away. If that’s not making it worth your while, nothing is. I know loyalty and friendship are precious commodities, Michael, but even they should have a price. I’m nothing if not realistic and generous.’

I was as greedy as the next man, and thought of all I could do with fifty thousand pounds. Corn in Egypt and the Promised Land rolled into one. I would turn the railway station into a fitted carpet palace. I’d repave the platforms, repair the footbridge, lay ornamental gardens on my stretch of line, as well as put in a new stove for Bridgitte and buy her a vacuum cleaner. I’d also give a flashing-light chess set to Smog, and if he failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge I’d buy him a degree from an American university, so that if he wanted a job he could become a secret member of the communist party and join the Foreign Office. Then, in our old age, after he’d become a colonel in the Red Army, we could spend our holidays in his nice cosy flat in Samarkand — or even Moscow, in the summer. Oh, the best laid plans of mice and men.

He grinned. ‘Is it on?’

‘You superannuated clapped-out Sherwood Forester,’ I said, ‘I suppose so.’

‘You leave my old regiment alone. Sometimes I quite like your gift of the gab, but not when you insult the Sherwood Foresters. Best regiment in the British Army. We had four battalions wiped out on the Somme, and God knows how many in the last lot.’

I apologised. What else could I do? ‘I don’t stand a chance of getting a job with Moggerhanger.’

‘Who knows? He’s allus got a soft spot for a reformed rake. Nothing’s guaranteed in this life, but you might just land it. You allus was game, I will say that for you. You don’t get anything in this life unless you try.’

I was irritated by him. ‘I’ll just be able to stand you for as long as it takes to install you at my old man’s flat. Let’s get out of here.’

‘Don’t forget your umbrella,’ he said when we were halfway up the stairs, and daylight struck my eyes like ball-bearings from a catapult. ‘It might start raining.’

Four

The first new thing I saw while snooping around Gilbert’s study — as he called it: he’d never studied anything in his life, except women — was a large coloured chart on the wall above his typewriter, showing the ages at which every well-known home, foreign and colonial novelist had died. His own name had a question mark by the side in brackets, at which I didn’t know whether to laugh, or dab my eyes with his clean white blotting paper. He might be nudging sixty, but I didn’t realise he was afraid to die.

The sheet in the typewriter seemed to be page one of a novel called The Hijacked Vampire. Below the line saying Chapter Three he had written:

The privilege of learning from experience is only given to those who survive it. Many do survive, yet it is both pitiful and amazing to discover the numbers who do not, especially when one tries to imagine those people as individuals. Each life starts innocently enough, grows side by side with its dreams, and ends with its limbs broken amid pints of blood.

I crossed out ‘pints’ and wrote ‘litres’.

If we could profit from the experience of death, would we go more readily to die?

Such drivel went on for a few more lines, ending in a paragraph of exes. Maybe he was halfway human after all.

Bill lay on the settee in the living-room, smoking one of Blaskin’s cigars and tippling a glass of Glenfiddich whisky. ‘Can you get me something to eat, Michael?’

There was no reason to lose my temper at this late stage, but maybe the Age Chart on the study wall had depressed even me. ‘If he comes in and finds you in that condition, with delirium tremens and lung cancer, he’ll slit your throat and tip you out of the window just as efficiently as a member of the Green Toe Gang or Moggerhanger’s Angels. So let me show you to your six-week hideaway, then I can clear out. He won’t be happy at finding me here, either.’

An old-fashioned antique gramophone with an enormous tin horn stood on one of the tables. In a cabinet behind was a lavish (locked) display of netsuke, such art and handiwork as I had only seen in museums. Some lovely old oil paintings of sailing ships and rustic scenes decorated the walls — as well as a portrait of Blaskin as a five-year-old, hardly recognisable except for the unmistakable signs of vice and wilfulness in that lovely face. I wondered how safe these treasures would be with a born marauder like Bill eating his heart out upstairs.

He swallowed the whisky and stood up, an athletic leap showing how fit he was. But there was panic in his eyes and voice. ‘What am I going to do while I’m up there?’

‘I’ll schlep down to World’s End and find you a harp.’

‘I must have provisions, or I’ll starve. You can last only so long trapping pigeons. And I’ll tell you one thing, Michael, they don’t taste very nice with all that petrol and grit inside ’em. I tried it once.’

I took a bottle of wine, a loaf, a German sausage and a jar of olives from the larder. He put them in his pockets. ‘What a friend you are.’ He was almost crying. ‘I’ll never forget you. A real friend.’

Maybe he hadn’t invented the tale of his trip to Switzerland after all. He was too sentimental to be imaginative. Proper lies were beyond him. If they weren’t, he’d be far too dangerous to himself. As it was, he was only a threat to others, me in particular. I had to help him for two good reasons: friendship and money, a combination impossible to deny, so I led him to the box-room at the end of the corridor. A bare light bulb illuminated water and wastepipes and old picture frames leaning against a pile of steamer trunks. A ladder with the first rung broken led up to a trapdoor — square in the middle of a map of water stains. He hung back. ‘I’m not going up there.’

‘Yes you are. Just imagine you’re in prison and the lads have selected you as a volunteer to do a roof protest. Only don’t start chucking slates on people going into Harrods. They might not like it.’

He relaxed. ‘I’ll never know why I let you twist me round your little finger. But before I go up, just nip back for a couple of candles or an oil lamp, will you? I draw the line at living in the dark.’

As I was opening kitchen drawers he shouted: ‘And a blanket, while you’re at it. And some more of them delicious Havanas. Oh, and a bottle of whisky and a few pats of best butter. And two pounds of sugar to put on my bread.’

Needless to say, I got him nothing except the candles and a blanket. We went up into the roof. ‘You didn’t happen to see a camp bed down there, by any chance?’ he said.

The tank was part of the hot water system, so at least he wouldn’t freeze to death. The roof arched above the whole flat, huge beams curving to an apex in a sort of cathedral for dwarfs. ‘You can paint The Last Supper on the end walls.’

‘I would if I could eat it,’ he answered morosely, clasping my hands. ‘You will come up and see me, won’t you? And let me know how you get on with Lord Moggerhanger. I take a friendly interest in your career, Michael, you know that. I feel a bit like your elder brother.’

Only my head was visible above the floorboards. ‘Stop it, or you’ll make me swear. I’ll come and see you as often as I can.’

Or as often as I dare, I thought, treading carefully down the ladder and hoping he wouldn’t make any noises that would lead to his discovery.

I sipped whisky and smoked a fag in the living room to think things over, wondering if I shouldn’t phone the police, or Moggerhanger, or the Green Toe Gang, or all of them together, and tell them where Bill Straw was hiding and then get quickly back to Upper Mayhem before the cyclone struck. The police were just as interested in putting the fetters on Bill as was the underworld, though I supposed he was right to go more in fear of the latter, since legal capital punishment had ended years ago. If I did send out a general call to all interested parties even Blaskin might get winged in the crossfire for harbouring a man on the run, though it was futile trying to damage him because he’d only use the inconvenience as material for his writing, and end up richer than before.

I only mulled on the options of treachery so that I would never act on any of them. Then I wondered whether I should apply for the chauffeur’s job with Moggerhanger. A spot of work would take my mind off Bridgitte which, after all, would be better than wallowing in misery at home. London always put me in a free and easy mood. With the naïvety of a newborn babe I thought that at this stage of my life I had nothing to lose, no matter what I did. The catch of the door sounded, and my father came in, singing a little ditty to himself:

‘I knew a man who couldn’t write

He sat up brooding half the night

Not because he couldn’t write

But because his shoe was tight, tight, tight!’

He stumbled in the hall as he took off his grey leather overcoat. ‘Is that you, Michael? I can smell my cigars. Or is it the odious breath of yesteryear?’

How can a son describe his own father? Luckily I hadn’t known about him till I was twenty-five, so that makes it easier. As for his description of me, I read it in one of his recent novels and it wasn’t very good. It was slightly disguised, of course, as every fictional description must be but, slashing away the trimmings, he called me lazy, untruthful, mercenary and — words I hadn’t heard till then — uxoriously sybaritic. Where he got such an idea I couldn’t imagine. The description was so skewwhiff it’s a wonder I recognised myself, and the fact that I did worried me for a while. And if it wasn’t me, I was either trying to see myself as someone I wasn’t, or I was someone I couldn’t bear to see myself as. But such a description, bare as it was, certainly convinced me as nothing else that I was his son.

As for him, he was tall and bald, so bald that with the cleft in his head where a crazed husband had hit him with the blunt end of a cleaver, he looked like nothing less than a walking penis. I didn’t for a moment suppose that this was the only reason many women found him attractive because he also, presumably, had a certain amount of what passed for charm. He had dead grey fish eyes, rubbery lips and a shapeless nose, but he was tall, energetic, talented (I supposed), and incredibly randy. As my mother, who knew him well, once said to me (though she hardly ever really knew him well for more than a few minutes at a time), ‘Even a man has to stand with his back to the wall when that bastard comes into the room.’

‘Well, Michael — it is Michael, isn’t it? — what brings you here so early in the morning?’

I stood up, not wanting to act in any unusual way when I knew that Bill Straw was sobbing disconsolately in his upstairs prison. ‘It’s afternoon. I just thought I’d come and see you. Is it strange that I should want to visit my father now and again?’

He came back from the kitchen with two raw eggs in the bottom of a tall glass, poured in whisky to halfway, beat it to pulp with a fork, and slid it down. ‘Breakfast. It isn’t strange at all. It’s positively perverse. How’s Bridgitte?’

‘She’s left me. She’s gone to Holland with the kids. I’m devastated. I’m lost without the kids around. I don’t know which way to turn.’ I encased my head in my hands, acting the hackneyed bereft husband in the hope of giving him some material for one of his novels.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I never liked the bitch for giving me what, with a proud simper, she called grandchildren. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the thought of grandchildren. Even if I die at a hundred-and-two I’ll be too young to be a grandfather and I’m only fifty-eight. Or is it forty-six?’ He poured another whisky. ‘No matter. At least not after last night.’

He wasn’t even good to me, so I didn’t have fair reason to hate him, but I knew one way of making him jump. ‘How’s work, these days?’

He belched. ‘Don’t use that word. I’ve never worked in my life. A gentleman never works. I write, not work.’ His eyes took on sufficient life for someone who wasn’t in the know to imagine not only that he was alive, but that he was a normal human being. ‘The worst thing I ever did was marry your mother so that I had no further right, in the technical sense, to call you a bastard. But you are a bastard, all the same. I never did like your insulting insinuations that I might be capable of the cardinal sin of work. All I do is write, and fuck. And never you forget it.’

‘It’s hardly possible,’ I said, ‘since you begat me.’

‘So your mother said. But you’re rotten enough, so it might well have been me.’

I poured another tot for myself. ‘In my view the greatest disaster of modern times was when you first got blind drunk on the power of words.’

He threw his great cock-head back and laughed. ‘You’re right, Michael. I’ve vomited over many a sofa in a dowager’s salon. There aren’t many decent homes I can visit anymore, but then, who wants to visit a decent home?’

We had something in common at least. ‘All I wanted to know, in my clumsy fashion, is how the writing is getting on?’

‘Why didn’t you say so? If I have any love for you at all it’s only because you’re so ineradicably working-class — hell’s prole, and second to none. Just like the lovely lads I had under me during the war. I’d acknowledge you much less if you came from within sniffing distance of the Thames Valley and had been to Eton — like me. The writing’s getting on very well, since you ask. I’ve got so much to do I don’t know which way to turn. I can’t keep off it. Just a minute.’ He went into his study, and I heard the clack of a single key on the typewriter. He came back, smiling. ‘I wrote a comma. Now I can go out again, though not while you’re here. You’ll smoke the rest of my cigars. What did you really come for? I might be a writer, but I’m not a bally idiot.’

‘I was on my way to Harrods to buy a waistcoat, and I nipped in on impulse.’

‘A waistcoat? What colour?’

‘A leather one.’

‘Hmm! Not bad.’

‘With horn buttons.’

‘Better.’ Then he went back to being nasty. ‘And you thought you’d come here to disrupt me from my life’s work? You’d like to stop me writing the novel to end novels, wouldn’t you?’

‘I expect it’s been done,’ I said, ‘fifty years ago.’

‘That’s what you think.’ He threw his empty glass on the sofa. ‘I’d rather write a novel any day than a scholarly treatise on dumb insolence at the first Olympiad.’ He laughed. ‘But the thing is, Michael, my boy, I’ve got a commission to do something which is right up my street. A job wherein the research is going to take me to all the porn shops, strip clubs, lesbian hangouts, camp brothels, cat houses and underground cinemas in Soho. I can hardly believe it. I’ve just had a ten thousand pound advance to get started on it right away.’

‘You fucking writers have all the luck.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing so charming as a working-class chap who doesn’t swear. But as soon as he swears you know he’s trying to pass himself off as middle-class. It sounds so uncouth. Mind you, I did swear when I was a young man, but it was only a happy-go-lucky fuck-this fuck-that sort of thing. I don’t do it anymore. It restricts my vocabulary.’

‘Don’t tell me how to behave. But who’s commissioned you to write that book?’

He chuckled. ‘A peer of the realm. One of your self-made salt of the earth boys from the provinces who are periodically ennobled so that they won’t cause more trouble to the body politic than they have to. He thinks he’s God’s gift to England because he has all the vice dens in the palm of his hand, and can be trusted not to let them get out of hand. He wants me to do his life story, a whitewash job if ever there was one. His wife read one of my novels, apparently, and didn’t like it, so he thought I was just the writer to do it. But if he thinks I’m going to get much mileage out of making him into little Saint Claud Mogger-donger he’s wrong. I’d much rather write the true story about him, except that I’ll save the real material for one of my later novels, though I suppose I’d better go to his ancestral Moggerhanger village in Bedfordshire to write a nice lyrical opening chapter on his antecedents and their hanging ground. There’s bound to be a gibbet or two I can go into raptures over, like Thomas Hardy. Why, Michael,’ he shouted when I ran into the bathroom, ‘have I said anything wrong? If I make you sick, you’ve made my day.’

The cold porcelain of the toilet struck my forehead. I tried to throw up, but not a grain of bile would rise. The hammer of a metronome was going back and forth, a decade one way, and a decade the other. It wasn’t fear that turned my guts as much as that old familiar sensation of helplessness at being in the hands of fate. I tried to look on the bright side, but only a forty-watt light-bulb glowed. I couldn’t imagine what side-swipe of chance had brought Blaskin and Moggerhanger together, especially when, unknown to the former, one of the latter’s most wanted men was fretting in the attic above. I washed in cold water and, braving myself to meet whatever might come, went back to the living room.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ Blaskin said, with malicious perkiness. ‘You look as pale as Little Dorrit, and you’re trembling like the Aspern Papers. Do you have an appointment with fear?’

‘I’ve got problems,’ I admitted.

His eyes glowed. Sidney Blood wasn’t in it. ‘What are they?’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t have them, would I?’

After a two-minute silence he said: ‘Michael, we’ve all got problems, but a writer, like a soldier, goes through life with his problems unresolved. I’ve been both.’

I was fed up with his penny packets of wisdom. ‘You disgusting old bastard,’ I spat back. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that everybody goes through life with their problems unresolved.’

He stared, maybe thinking there was something to the slum brat after all. He didn’t like it. There was certainly no point in hoping for a bit of human kindness from a writer. He rubbed his head as if wanting it to come, then rubbed his eyes as if he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of what did. ‘I had a bad night last night. I spent it with Margery Doldrum, and didn’t get anywhere. So leave me alone. I’ve got work to do. The heart of darkness is within. It used to be outside in jungle or desert where we could handle it, but now it’s back on home ground. It crept in to roost, with most of us unaware of its movement, but in reality it never left — not all of it, anyway.’

I hoped to cheer him up. ‘You should write that down. It’s not bad.’

‘You think so?’

‘I would, except that I’m not a writer, like you.’

He found a pencil and scribbled on the back of an envelope. There was an unopened pile of mail on the low-slung Swedish-type table. ‘I’m going to give a talk on the modern English novel, so it’ll come in handy. Sometimes even a son like you can be useful.’

‘How is the novel going?’ As his son, I thought I should at least show an interest in his work. But I only thrust him back into despair. You can’t win.

‘It isn’t a novel, it’s the Dead March from Saul, a chain-and-ball half-page a day, sometimes down to a comma a day, up a narrow valley with no blue horizon visible to cheer me on. I’m one of the poor bloody infantry lost in the moonscape south of Caen but soldiering on in the knowledge, but mostly the vain hope, that I’ll get there soon and still have my feet left at least. But the joy of endeavour and solitude comes in now and again, Michael, sufficient to keep me going on this first draft route report. Fortunately, doing Moggerhanger’s biography — or ghosting his autobiography, I’m not sure which yet — will bring in a few thousand, so I’ll at least have enough hard cash to keep your extravagant mother at arm’s length. I wish you’d stop turning pale when I mention Moggerhanger, by the way. It unnerves me. It’s not that I don’t love your mother, but I can’t even write commas when she’s around. So I’ll deliver fifty pages of Moggerhanger’s trash now and again to line my pockets. If there’s one thing he knows nothing about, though he thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything else, it’s writing. I can put one over on him there.’

‘I don’t suppose he knows what he’s let himself in for.’ I looked glumly at the netsuke to cheer myself up. ‘It must be good being a writer, and able to make people so unhappy.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘but do you think it’s easy? If anybody comes to me and says they want to be a writer I tell them to get lost before I cut off their hands, blind them, and burst their eardrums. In any case, it’s going to be impossible for a writer to flourish in the future. The manuscript of every book will have to go to the Arabian Censorship Office before it’s published. So will all radio, and especially television scripts. The Foreign Office don’t want us to offend anybody whose hands are on the oil taps. Every book and newspaper article will have to be passed by UNESCO after getting the go-ahead from the Third World nations to make sure you don’t irritate them in their state of perpetual envy against better-off countries. No, it’s not going to be so easy.’ An unmistakable scratching sounded from the other side of the ceiling. His big head jutted up. ‘What the hell’s that? Are they up there already?’

I started to sweat. ‘It’s pigeons, I expect.’

‘They must have broken in again. They don’t breed. They multiply.’

I reached for my coat and briefcase. ‘Must go. It’s getting late, and I’ve got business to attend to.’

He came over to count the netsuke which he had seen me looking at.

‘Shurrup!’ I shouted, putting all the Nottingham ferocity into my voice, while hoping my eyes bulged and my cheeks quivered.

‘What did you say?’

I laughed in his face. ‘Shurrup!’ I bawled again. ‘Shurrup! I think I’m going mad.’

‘Do you mind leaving, and coming back when it’s a bit more advanced and so obvious I can’t ignore it? Maybe you’ll let me observe you then, and write about it. I’ve got work to do in the meantime.’

He followed me to the door to make sure I didn’t whip a painting under my coat, and all but pushed me into the corridor, whose blank walls and escape route I was never so glad to see in my life.

Five

On the wall behind Moggerhanger’s glass desk a notice said: ‘While you are thinking about it, you can be doing it.’

I studied this cracker motto from The Little Blue Book of Chairman Mog, knowing that if wild horses pulled him apart, a thousand others would spill out. Even his big toe must have been packed with them. I remembered from ten years ago that if you tried to live by such rules you fell under his spell, so I knew I had to watch myself, especially when, on turning to the door I had come in by, I saw in a place where only the particularly anxious or the peculiarly double-jointed would look, a framed embroidered text saying; ‘If you haven’t tried everything you haven’t tried anything.’

I wondered if there wasn’t a microphone behind, but supposed the television scanner was in the fancy light-bulb above his desk. The furnishings had altered since I had last been there. A framed picture of the Queen stood on a shelf of the bookcase otherwise crammed with manuals on natural history and birdwatching. Behind the desk was a coloured map of England with a dozen pins stuck in different places, which I assumed were localities at which Moggerhanger had business properties, retreats of pleasure or hideaways. A single chair behind the desk suggested that everyone but Moggerhanger stood when in that room. Before he had become a Lord there were several chairs, but not anymore. He was even more English than Blaskin.

On the desk was a duraluminium model of his private twin-jet in flight which he kept at Scroatham aerodrome north of London. By the desk was a black-handled bottle of brandy six feet tall fixed in a brass frame on wheels. God knows how many gallons it contained. The cork was as big as a sewer lid, but the liquid shone like something out of heaven. I longed for a drink but didn’t know how to tackle it. One false move and I would be missing, presumed drowned. I visualised Kenny Dukes pushing it through the Nothing to Declare door at London Airport, the contraption disguised as an old lady on her way back from a recuperative sojourn on the Riviera.

The bookcase swung open, then closed with the delicacy of a powder puff going back into its box. ‘You seem to be fascinated by my exhortations.’

‘I was admiring the needlework, Lord Moggerhanger.’

‘As well you might. My daughter Polly did it. She went to the best Swiss finishing school.’ She certainly had. I’d finished her off a fair number of times ten years ago.

He wore the best quality navy-blue pinstriped suit and waistcoat, a thin silver watch chain across his gut. He had lost weight, though not much. Nothing ever gets lost, he once said to me. It only goes missing. He had decided on his reduction at the time of his appearance in the New Year’s Honours List, being unable to abide the idea of a fat lord. Vanity, I thought, will be his undoing.

‘What brings you here, Michael?’

‘I heard you wanted a chauffeur, Lord Moggerhanger.’

I noticed the dullness of contact lenses when he looked at me. ‘Who from?’

‘Kenny Dukes. I met him in The Hair of the Dog.’

‘Kenny’s in Italy, and not due back till tonight. He goes once a month to get the family shopping from Milan. So don’t lie to me. Your wits are in cement. Do you want your feet to be? Why did you call, when you could have phoned first?’

‘I didn’t have your number.’

‘It’s in the book. You don’t seem as sharp as you were ten years ago, Michael. I’m surprised at you. You see, it’s always been my contention that those whom the Gods wish to drive mad they first make ex-directory. All those pop stars and writers who scrub their names from the phone book as soon as they think they’re too well-known are crazed with self-importance. Anybody wants to talk to me, all they have to do is look me up in the book and pick up the phone. I may be a Lord — and don’t you forget it — but I’m still a democrat at heart.’

He was the only person I knew who you couldn’t lie to, and get away with it. There was nothing to say. He looked at me for a while, with a gaze that seemed more pregnant than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The last time I had worked for him I’d gone to prison because I was one of the expendables and now, facing him for the first time since, a thought flashed into my mind that promised danger and pleasure. The only emotion that can combine the two so neatly is revenge, yet how could someone like me dare to contemplate getting a Peer of the Realm put behind bars for a good long spell, even though he was the most crooked bastard in Great Britain — and that meant the Commonwealth, which probably meant the world? I let the suicidal, self-destroying notion go. ‘It was a bit remiss of me. I’ll know better next time.’

‘I’m sure you will, if there is a next time. Are you sure you want to be my driver? I’ve had a few more applicants, as you can understand. One of them was Kenny Dukes’s brother Paul, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more wicked villain than that. On the other hand, he’s the sort of driver who’s been practising on stolen cars since he was twelve. Now he’s twenty-five and in his prime.’

‘I crashed my first car when I was five,’ I said, which was true, ‘and now I’m thirty-five.’

He took a box from under the desk that was big enough to put his feet on, and lifted out a cigar. To smoke it he needed one of those forked supports an arquebusier used to have. ‘So you see, Michael, I’ve got a decision to make. However, I’m a born judge of men. I always was. I’ve got to be. I wouldn’t last five minutes if I wasn’t. I know that you and me had a little trouble ten years ago.’

I’d been waiting for that. ‘It was my fault.’

‘That’s for me to say,’ he snapped. ‘But I suppose it inclines me more towards you than otherwise. You might say it taught us a lot about each other. Almost makes you part of the family. I like to learn from the past, and don’t like starting with somebody from scratch unless I have to, or unless he’s an exceptional case, as you were in those days, and as Kenny Dukes’s brother isn’t. They’re ten a penny, that sort, in south and east London. They’re well built, cocksure and clever, but if you stop looking over their shoulder for a second they get too clever. And even the cleverest of them can’t think. Oh yes, they can move with cunning and alacrity in an emergency, but they can’t think.’

‘What do you expect?’

‘I know, but there comes a time when you hope that a subordinate might be able to think to the advantage of the man who’s paying him. I regard you as being in a different category. What’s more, you’re looking quite distinguished. Ten years in the wilderness seem to have made a man of you. In those days I didn’t so much mind a young roustabout for my wheel man. Now I like a steadier chap, but one who still knows the tricks. I’ll start you at five hundred a month, and you can have your old quarters back above the garage. You’ve got twenty-four hours to move in.’

The answer to everything was yes. His handshake was the grip of an earth remover, and my hands were neither small nor weak. He called me back from the door. ‘How did you hear about this job?’

‘I bumped into Bill Straw at Liverpool Street this morning.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me.’

‘What time was it?’

‘Just before half past nine.’

He reached for the telephone. ‘I wish you’d come earlier.’

‘I didn’t know it was important.’

‘Piss off.’ He didn’t even look up. ‘I want a call to Holland,’ he was saying into the mouthpiece as I closed the door.

If poor old Bill had got on that Harwich boat train, as Moggerhanger wrongly surmised due to my quick thinking, he would have been met at the Hook, made to tell where the money was and put to a particularly grisly death before being dumped into the ooze. Luckily, he was safe in Blaskin’s aerial foxhole, a fate which in no way would faze an old Sherwood Forester.

Not wanting to get back to Upper Mayhem too early, where I would only brood myself to death over Bridgitte’s callous desertion, I decided to go into Town and get something to eat. A few hundred yards from the tube station a little dark girl who looked about ten but must have been thirty, judging from her big tits and almond eyes, was trying to carry a suitcase full of stones along the pavement. People passing were in too much of a hurry to help. Then she pulled the suitcase, till she had to stop. Then she pushed it. At that rate she’ll get to the underground in the morning, I thought. It’ll take another day to reach the platform, and she’ll tumble into some railway station — the wrong one — in about three weeks. Luckily, it wasn’t raining.

I passed her, but a soft heart forced me to turn and pick up the case. She thought I was a footpad after her worldly belongings and looked at me, raising a little bun fist, though realising that she couldn’t win. I expected the weight to pull my arm off, but for my gold smuggling muscles it was no real burden, and I walked at a normal quick-march rate, with her half running by my side. ‘I’ll help you with it to the tube station. I’m not trying to steal it. It’s on my way.’

She also had a satchel and a shoulder bag, so I slowed down. Her accent was foreign, and so was her lovely smile. ‘Thank you very much.’

She was about four foot nothing, but full of promise. I asked her name, and she said it was Maria. ‘You going on holiday?’

I thought she hadn’t understood. ‘Holiday?’ I said. We got to the ticket office. ‘Where to?’

‘Victoria.’

I bought two fares, thinking to leave her after setting her luggage on the train. She’d clamped up since her first big smile and trotted by my side, while I was still wondering why Moggerhanger had given me the job so readily. It was as if he had been expecting me, though I couldn’t dredge up a reason to prove it. ‘Maria,’ I said when we were on the platform, ‘you going on holiday?’

A bearded wino in his twenties knocked her so hard as he pushed by that she almost fell onto the rails. I pulled her back, which was as well for him that I was so occupied, but then I elbowed him onto the bench. ‘No holiday,’ she said. ‘I want to die.’

I laughed. ‘You want to fly?’

‘No, die.’ She tried not to sob. Her accent was thick, but I could understand her. ‘No more job.’

I was about to run away and leave her when the train came in. The last thing I wanted was a waif on my hands. I pushed her inside, and we faced each other over the luggage. The red woollen scarf that went round her neck and over her shoulder was only half as long as the braids of black hair that descended her back. She wore a white blouse under her coat, a black skirt, black ribbed stockings and black lace-up boots. Her face was oval and pale, a clean parting down the middle of her skull. Her brown eyes were almost liquid with tears, and the effort she made not to let them flow almost brought tears to my own — and stopped me getting out at Acton Town. I leaned forward: ‘Where are you from?’

‘Portugal.’

I held her warm hands, and tried to cheer her up. ‘Nice place, Portugal.’

I wished I hadn’t said that, because she looked up full of hope. ‘You been there?’

‘Yes. Good country. Lisbon is a wonderful city. You go there now?’

She didn’t answer so I looked away, wondering where I’d go to eat before getting my train to Upper Mayhem. Something wet fell on my middle finger left hand, and I turned back to her. It was a tear. I don’t know why I lifted my hand and licked it off. It was automatic, thoughtless, but with the hand that still held hers I felt a shiver go through her. I looked into her eyes, and thought I’d done the wrong thing in licking up that tear because as sure as hell — and the stare she gave hinted as much — such a gesture was, in the part of Portugal she came from, a kind of pre-nuptial ceremony that was binding forever.

My next chance of escape was at Hammersmith. I had enough on my plate at the moment. When she spoke, the shiver went through me and not her. ‘I go nowhere. I lose my job working in English house. Missis Horlickstone throw me out. Mister Horlickstone hit me. Children hit me. Too much work. At six o’clock I get up, clean, do breakfast, serve tea, take children to school on bus, then go shopping, come back, clean, cook lunch, serve, clean up, make tea, get children from school on bus, feed children, bath children, cook dinner, serve, clean up. You know what money I get?’

I thought the cheapskates would have paid her about thirty pounds a week.

‘Fifteen. I also babysit. No time off. For six months I work, live in box room, no air, no sky …’

I couldn’t believe it. She was joking, but was breaking my heart. ‘And they sacked you?’ I said at South Kensington.

‘I ran away. They’re on holiday in Bermuda. They come back next week, so I leave.’

I wondered whether she’d got the family silver in her suitcase, but knew she couldn’t be anything but honest. ‘And now you want a better job?’

Another hot tear stung my wrist. I imagined a white acid spot when it dried. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I want to go home, but my family need money. They live on it. I have no money for train to …’ She named some place in Portugal I’d never heard of.

So here was a lovely little down-trodden self-respecting intelligent thing like her with neither job, money nor place to sleep, in vast wicked London, sitting on the Underground facing a soft-hearted villain like me who also happened to be the son of Gilbert Blaskin. I supposed I could put her on the Circle Line and tell her to get off when it stopped. Where she would end up, I couldn’t imagine. She looked blank, and dumb with suffering. I wanted to go to the house she had come from and burn it down, which would be futile because the owner wasn’t in it, and would get the insurance anyway. ‘Where will you stay tonight?’

She wiped her eyes with a white laundered handkerchief. ‘I have money for room. Tomorrow I don’t know.’

‘Haven’t you got any friends?’

‘Missis don’t let me out.’

‘So what will you do?’

‘Don’t know. It takes time to get job.’

I drew my hands away and sat up smartly, as befitted a man who was about to become an employer. ‘You’ve got one already, if you want it. Here’s Piccadilly. We’ll get out now, and go for something to eat. You hungry?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Good. While we’re eating I’ll tell you about your new job.’

We found a place which served flock steak, chalk chips, ragdoll salad, whale fat gâteaux and acorn coffee. She loved it, so I made out that I did as well. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.’ I lit my cigar. ‘I have a country house in Cambridgeshire, as well as a wife and three children. Now, my wife and children are away at the moment, visiting our property in Holland, and won’t be back for a few days, but I’m supposed to find a woman to help with the housework. I was going to put an advertisement in the Evening Standard, but don’t need to now. What I suggest, Maria, is that you come with me to the house this evening and look the place over. I’ll pay your fare. If you don’t like it, you can stay the night, and a few more nights if you like, and then come back to London. My wife should be there, so you’ll be quite safe.’

‘You really got job?’

‘That’s what I said.’ She tampered with my dessert, so I pushed it across. ‘Come and see the house. At least you won’t waste your money on a hotel.’

She looked even paler under the artificial light. It was dusk outside, and people were hurrying along the street. ‘Why are you good to me, mister?’

The question tormented me more than it did her. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get her into bed. Maybe I couldn’t stand living alone. She finished my dessert and I stood up. ‘Let’s go, then.’

Out on the street it started to rain, and I had left my umbrella at Blaskin’s. I stopped, as if pricked with it, and snake venom was trickling down my leg. I saw the newsflash tickertaping across the Swiss Centre: NOVELIST ON MURDER CHARGE. Then I rubbed it away in the hope that it wouldn’t come true.

‘What’s a matter?’ she asked when I dropped the case. ‘No job for me now?’

‘No job for anybody,’ I told her, hurrying on, ‘if we don’t get to Liverpool Street and hop on that train.’

Six

‘Never,’ I remember Blaskin saying, ‘bother with a novel that takes more than five pages to cover one day.’ Blaskin said many things. Blaskin is all wind and piss. Whatever he said, he meant the opposite. It was his silence you had to beware of. You were only safe when he had a pen in his hand. Even then, you had to be ready to duck in case, like James Cagney in G-Men, he mistook you for a fly on the door, and aimed it at you like a dart.

The day I got the job with Moggerhanger was one of the longest in my life, or so it seemed at the time, proved by the fact that when I got back to Upper Mayhem with Maria, my troubles were just beginning. There were more lights shining in our comfy little railway station than had ever been set glowing when main line expresses rattled through. You could see the light for miles over the flat Fen country, a glow in the sky as if a new hydroelectric dam had been opened in the Yorkshire Dales.

My first thought, walking with Maria and her suitcase from the bus stop, was that a band of squatters had occupied the place. I had often worked out what I would do if that happened. I’d phone Alfie Bottesford in Nottingham and tell him to get a posse of the lads together so that in one rough assault we’d have those squatters, including women, cats and kids, their pots and pans bundled into blankets, wending their lonely way in a refugee column across the Fens.

But I could hear no triumphant wassailing as I opened the gate and stepped silently down the platform. The radio was on, and I signalled to Maria to slow down and say nothing, which gesture alone should have indicated that all was not right with her prospects for the promised job. My adrenalin was whirlpooling too much to worry about her. I looked into the booking-office-cum-parlour. Three half-packed suitcases were on the floor, and Bridgitte sat at the table trying to hypnotise a cup of tea. I felt like a marauder, dagger in teeth, about to fade back into the countryside, as if I had come to the wrong house. But it was as much mine as hers, just as were the years we’d been together, whose miserable intensity came back the longer I stared.

She pushed the cup aside and reached for a sheet of paper and a pen, obviously intending to write the farewell letter she had been thinking about since the day we were married. Her expression of disgust caused a pain in my heart. I had never seen such a sad and saintly face. Though she may have been miserable for reasons known only unto God, both of us were locked in it together, and her despondency stirred up my muddy love for her, a love that was part of my marrow. Anything else might lack reality, but not what I felt for her. Whatever she said or did, wherever she went, whatever happened to me or to the kids, my association with her would never cease to have been the most vital of my life. I looked at her longingly and secretly.

She wrote a few lines, stopped, and stared in my direction without seeing me. With mouth open and head drawn back, she laughed, her fair tresses hanging down, so loud that I heard her though I was outside. It was a laugh of blind malice. Perhaps she thought I was funny, pathetic and useless. Scorn brought out the happiness in her. I’d never seen her so happy. She looked like a young and carefree girl I had never known.

I wondered what crime I had committed to have been lumbered with the catastrophe of meeting her. She had ruined my life with her humourless domesticity. I hated her. She was laughing now, but I’d never heard her laugh at anything funny while with me — if anything funny was ever worth laughing at. In our life together she had trudged unlovingly along, enduring rather than enjoying, and then, a couple of weeks ago, without warning, when Smog wasn’t too far from taking his A Levels, had lit off to Holland.

As if picking up my thoughts, she saw the framed photograph on the sideboard. I’d never liked it. For reasons known only to herself, she had set it there, a blown-up snapshot taken at Cromer by Smog with his first camera eight years ago. Bridgitte had refused to be in the photo because she was pregnant. She reached for the frame and cracked it on the corner of the chair. Then she hit harder, till nothing was left. She bent down, broad and luscious hips beam on, picked the ragged photograph from the bits of glass and threw it on the fire.

In a wild rage, ready to batter her to death, I kicked the door open. Striding through the hall I trampled over fifteen pairs of wellingtons, a corrugated footpath of walking sticks and umbrellas, a jungle of anoraks, and kneed so hard against the parlour door that the latch burst. I stood with fists raised, a pain in my feet because they weren’t yet kicking her.

She faced me four-square, and shrieked, ‘Michael! You bastard!’

‘You bitch!’ I cried.

‘Oh, my love,’ she moaned, a glint in her eyes.

I reached out for her. ‘Darling!’

We practically ‘gonked on’ in the middle of the suitcases, ‘gonked on’ being a phrase Smog used as a youngster when he brought two trucks together on his model railway. He once stumbled into the bedroom when Bridgitte and I were ‘at it’, and ever after would refer to the time we had been ‘gonked on’.

We stood, embracing and kissing, mumbling dozens of tender words, apologies mostly, endearments among the tears, promises of undying loyalty and love. ‘I’m so glad you came back,’ she said. ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael, I’ll never stop loving you.’

‘I never did stop loving you. You’re the one woman in my life.’ The sound of something scraping along the floor like the enormous bandaged left foot of a mummy coming out of a pyramid broke into my consciousness. ‘Rich, ripe, wonderful, beautiful! My only possible sweetheart.’

I kept it up as long as I could without turning back into a baby in the playpen until Bridgitte, looking over my shoulder, stiffened at what she saw in the mirror. I felt a stinging blow from my ever loving wife who then, stepping back a few paces, stumbled over a suitcase. She righted herself. ‘Who’s that?’

It had been obvious for some time who that was. First it was a suitcase, and then it was Maria, the waif I had rescued from a fate worse than death, pushing her luggage slowly across the threshold, panting as she did so.

‘It’s someone I hired in London to clean up the house and to look after you and the kids when you got back from Holland. Her name’s Maria. Maria,’ I called, ‘this is Bridgitte my wife who I told you about. She’ll show you what to do, though she may slap you around a bit in the process.’

Bridgitte stiffened, as if about to show Maria how right I was. But she held herself back. ‘So that’s what you do? As soon as I go to see my parents for two weeks you run off and get another woman. I should have known.’

It was no use trying to be angry. Yet if I wasn’t she would believe me even less. I gave her an equally stinging crack across the chops. ‘I was eating my heart out for you,’ I said, ‘and only went to London this morning. I met Maria tonight on the Underground. She’d just lost her skivvying job and had nowhere to go. So I thought we could use her here. I decided you worked too hard. You needed help.’

Bridgitte was crying.

‘It’s true.’ Maria’s tone was such that no one could disbelieve her, and I wanted to take her to bed from that moment on, but from that moment on knew I never would. ‘He help me.’ She pushed her case to the wall, took off her coat, picked a chair from the floor and set it against the table. ‘Tomorrow, I leave,’ she said. ‘But it true what Michael say. English people in Ealing no good. Woman shout at me. Don’t feed me. Children scream and kick. Mr Horlickstone put hand up my clothes, get drunk, laugh at me and say he want to stroke my tits. Englishmen, no good.’

I don’t know why, but these sentiments took Bridgitte’s fancy, especially the bit about Englishmen being no good. She swabbed her big blue eyes, and I was left sitting among the wreckage while she and Maria went talking into the kitchen to get something to eat. An owl sounded from outside, and an occasional car bumped over our level crossing. I sat, conscious that I had done the wrong thing ten times over, and that I wasn’t wanted on voyage. I would have gone back to London except that it was too late. In Soho things might just be starting to jump, but in the Fen country, after eight o’clock at night the social amenities of civilisation are rolled up like a carpet and put away till next day. I had to tolerate their crazy laughter while I went to my room and packed a case to take to my quarters at the Moggerhanger domain. Bridgitte would laugh on the other side of her face when I told her I’d found a job.

Downstairs, there wasn’t a sight of suitcases or broken glass. The table was set for a meal, hors d’oeuvres already laid out in dishes and platters, a bottle of Dutch gin and a packet of Dutch cigars and a box of Dutch chocolates and a red football of Dutch cheese. I almost expected to see a salt cellar windmill, a clog full of radishes and a wimple hat sprouting tulips. I’d known Bridgitte so long that lovely Holland was almost as much in my blood as hers.

The smell of roasting meat suggested she had ripped something from the deep freeze as soon as she got back. I was the luckiest man alive to have a Dutch woman for a wife, whether she hated me or not, but how long this lunatic confrontation could go on I had no way of knowing. Bedtime was on the cards and, after the meal, we made the most of it.

The Railway Inn, just across the road from the station, had the slowest service of any pub in the area. A quick drink was more of a possibility the further you got from that particular pot-house, and if you thought you could run into the Railway Inn for a pint and pork pie before catching your train you were bound to miss it — unless you left everything half finished on the bar.

The jovial bastard who ran that pub must have doubled his profits from unfinished drinks. No wonder he called you ‘squire’ and had his ninety-year-old mother serving behind the bar and washing the single glass they had for all their customers, while he looked out of the window at trains coming and going — mostly going — with a wide smile on his fat-chopped face. He had a sign saying ‘Quick Lunches’ tacked up outside, but even a paper plate of soapy cheese and sliced miracle bread took half an hour to cough up. No wonder he kept pigs at the end of his ten-acre garden. They were fed on the fat of the land, and produced pork that tasted of raw onions. He was notorious in the area for making people miss their trains due to slow service, yet the pub was often full. Perhaps it was a mark of the times that people didn’t mind if they lost their appointment in London. In Switzerland they’d have chucked him off the Matterhorn.

Bridgitte drove me there so that I could catch the twelve-thirty. She was in a good mood after our night of unsolicited passion. Often this wasn’t the case, orgasms making her itchy and nervous, like a hangover, but perhaps breaking the news of my job at breakfast, as she came in with a platter of sliced cheese, cushioned her morning mood. I suppose it did mine, as well, because after so many years together they often coincided.

‘A job?’ The shock was almost as great as the one I’d had when she went off to Holland. ‘What can you do?’

‘Chauffeur,’ I said. ‘And it’s living in. I’ll only get home at weekends. Unless I work weekends. Then I’ll get home in the week. I’ll get home as often as I can.’

She had become a person of order in the last few years. She liked to live to a pattern, to know what was happening and exactly when. Uncertainty depressed and irritated her, as it would anybody, so the fact that she might not know when I would turn up made her spill coffee on the cloth. I soothed her by saying I would never come home unless I telephoned from London first.

‘And who are you working for?’

‘An English lord.’ I forked up a slice of ham. ‘He’ll pay two hundred and fifty pounds a month. It’ll be very useful now that we’re employing Maria.’

‘She’s not working for us.’

In the pub I ordered two pints, and we sat at a table by the window. ‘Why not? She’s a godsend.’

‘I’ll let her stay a few days. That’s all.’

‘She loves it at Upper Mayhem. She was as bright as a daffodil at breakfast. She likes you, anyway.’

‘I like her, but we can’t afford to pay her, not on your two hundred and fifty pounds a month.’

I could have kicked myself, but sipped at the jar of ale and looked at the clock. There were ten minutes to go before the train came, and I had to buy my ticket. ‘I’ll get enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a bonus on top of my pay, every so often. Our financial worries are over.’

‘Lord who?’ she asked.

I hoped she wouldn’t recollect. ‘A chap called Moggerhanger. But I’ve got to go, or I’ll be late.’

I waited for her to rage at my foolishness. ‘If you go to prison again, that’s the end of us. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Come off it,’ I laughed. ‘Moggerhanger is an English lord. How can he do anything criminal? It’s not like the sixties anymore. He’s a reformed character. We all are.’

We had to get across to the station, so I picked up our glasses, the drink in them hardly touched, and followed Bridgitte to the door.

‘Squire!’ the publican roared. ‘You can’t take them glasses out there.’

I emptied the beer from both into a fever-grate, then took them back inside. ‘Sorry, squire!’ I hee-hawed aloud at his fury. ‘Bit absent-minded these days.’ Giving Bridgitte a quick kiss, I made a dash for the train.

A sixty-year-old grey-bearded chap in front of me emptied his leather purse on the counter and sorted his coins to decide whether any were false, in which case they were worth more than the real ones. I managed to get on board by jumping on the last carriage.

It would be untrue to say that nothing happened on the trip to London. Such a situation is unthinkable, certainly since Bridgitte had set the ball rolling by her strange behaviour in the last few weeks. But because events on the train had no bearing on subsequent occurrences, there’s no point in retailing them, the plain fact being that I got back to Ealing just inside the twenty-four hours Moggerhanger had allowed me.

I’d thought of calling at Blaskin’s to find out how Bill Straw was faring in his attic hideaway, but having got up so late after my night of homely passion with Bridgitte it hadn’t been possible. Not that I worried about him. He would have to fend for himself, even if he did starve to death.

The flat over Moggerhanger’s garage was furnished little better than Bill’s pigeon coop. There were plain wooden planks on the floor, and the walls were whitewashed. If I wanted a face-swill there was a tap and sink in one corner. A single bed, a chair, a small table and a hotplate completed the amenities. For sleep there were two horse blankets, but no sheets. A forty-watt light-bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling, at which I assumed the electricity was included in my salary.

A red-white-and-blue biker’s helmet with a hole in it was as far into a corner as it could get, as if it had been kicked there. I chose a paperback from a pile on the floor, and lay on the bed. Kenny Dukes’s name was pencilled inside the cover. The story — Orgy in the Sky by Sidney Blood — seemed to be about a gang of five-year-old six-footers doing a warehouse robbery with a fight, a shoot-out and a fuck on every page. Towards the end, one or the other happened every second paragraph. Whenever it said something like ‘He smashed his fist into his smirking face’ Kenny had underlined it as if wanting to commit the immortal words to memory. Heavy scoring in the margin highlighted an occasional comment like: ‘That’s good!’, so that with such marks the book was impossible to read without being brainwashed and ending up a replica of Kenny Dukes, the forty-year-old skinhead only half reformed. I honestly didn’t know why Moggerhanger kept him on, because someone of his limited intelligence was bound to be more of a liability than an asset.

Maybe Kenny knew too much, and it would be embarrassing to do him in because he came from a very big family and was related to every thug in south London. Yet Moggerhanger had some affection for him, treasuring his qualities of loyalty and dumb violence. All I knew was that I didn’t like Kenny Dukes and Kenny Dukes didn’t like me, but as I considered myself to be at least six pegs above him in the social scale it was up to me to keep our relationship on a diplomatic if not friendly level.

Someone came up the stairs — and Kenny Dukes crashed the door open. ‘Get off my fucking bed, or I’ll smash your face to pulp.’

His portly and upright carriage was spoiled by the fact that he was slightly round-shouldered. Otherwise I don’t suppose he was a very bad figure of a man, except that his arms were too long. In fact they were the longest arms I’d seen on a person who could still be called a human being. And he could — just. They were positively anglepoise, so that in a fight you had to close in as soon as possible to avoid their reach.

I leaned on my left elbow. ‘Don’t you ever use long words such as: “I’ll obliterate your features so that your own mother wouldn’t recognise you in Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoon”?’ Then I put on a pseudo-Yank accent straight out of Sidney Blood: ‘Anyway, if you wanna know where the dough is, there’s seventy-five thousand smackers under the bed, all cut out of newspaper. They passed us a dead duck, and we’ve got to get out and find ’em.’

He came in close, but recognised the style. ‘That’s my book.’

‘Come closer, Sunshine.’ The interior ratchet of my right arm drew back. I couldn’t go on reading Sidney Blood’s inspiring prose forever, without acting on it.

‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ he said.

I wound up the springs in my feet as well. During ten years at Upper Mayhem I’d done plenty of labouring on the station and its surroundings. I’d helped local farmers at potato harvests. Every morning I did half an hour’s jumping on the spot with dumbbells. Without being a fanatic, I believed in keeping the six feet and eleven stone of me supple and ready for action. Bill Straw wasn’t the only one to develop his physical abilities. As for shooting, I could get two rabbits on the run with the twelve bore, in view of which I wasn’t going to put up with any shit from Kenny Dukes.

I shot off the bed like a rocket, and his fist went by my face and hit the pillow so hard that the frame shook. Being heavy he lost his balance, of which I took advantage by gripping him at the neck so that he couldn’t move. He kicked around, but his boots couldn’t reach me. I’d always known him to be the sort of courageous coward who wasn’t afraid to come out from under his shell and turn into a bully.

‘What’s the excitement?’ I said. But he wasn’t the type who would plead for me to let him go, either. Whether this was due to obstinacy, or to a chronic lack of vocabulary I didn’t know. ‘We don’t want bloodshed, do we? Not this early on in our relationship.’

He gasped as if his chest would burst. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

I squeezed him harder into the half-nelson. ‘I’m Michael Cullen. We met ten years ago, remember?’ While his elastic-band computer was processing this bit of information I let him go and jumped clear, putting myself in such a state of defence that when he regained the vertical he made a rapid gut-decision not to carry on the feud, at least for the time being. ‘I’m working for Moggerhanger as well,’ I said, ‘so if there’s any argy-bargy he’ll fire us both. You know that. Now lay off.’

His pig-eye cunning, which hid softening of the brain behind, stood him in good stead for once. ‘You was reading my fucking book.’

‘I needed intellectual stimulus.’

‘And you was on my fucking bed.’

‘I can’t read standing up. And once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.’

He sat down, mollified for the moment. ‘Fucking good, ennit?’

‘Best book I ever read.’

He smiled. ‘Yeh.’

I sat on the bed. ‘You read a lot.’

‘Every minute, when I’m not fucking birds and ’ittin’ people, and driving one of Lord Moggerhanger’s flash Rollers with all the dazzle-lights on.’

I pulled on my whisky flask. ‘Like a drop?’

He took a swig. I wouldn’t trust him five minutes with a twenty-year-old banger. ‘Can’t drink much in case I’m called out,’ he said. ‘We’re on tap all the time. Could be four in the morning. There’s no night and day for Lord Claud.’

‘What about time off?’

A laugh made him look human. ‘When you’re dead you get time off. But now he’s got you, he might let me go home a few days.’

‘You’ve been busy?’

His eyes narrowed, perhaps at the notion that I was pumping him. ‘Just looking around for somebody to hit and kick.’

‘Who for? You might as well tell me. I expect I’ll have to find him sooner or later.’

‘The boss tells, not me.’

‘Fair enough.’ I opened my case, and found The Return of the Native which I’d finished on the train. Bridgitte had read it three years ago when she’d done an Open University course. ‘Try this. It ain’t as good as Sidney Blood, but it’s all right.’

He turned it over like a piece of cold toast. ‘Don’t like books about wogs.’

‘Wogs?’

‘Fucking blackies. Can’t stand ’em.’

‘It isn’t about blacks.’ I found it hard not to laugh. ‘I’m a native myself.’

‘You don’t fucking look it. You’re like me.’

I let that pass. ‘We’re all natives.’

‘You’re fucking pig-ignorant.’

‘You’re a native as well.’

He stood up, looked at himself in a piece of mirror by the door and straightened his tie. He wore an expensive grey suit and a silk shirt which was ready for the wash. Being of a similar build to his employer, I wondered if they weren’t Moggerhanger’s throwaways. ‘I’ve drunk your drink,’ he said, ‘but you ought to be careful what you’re saying.’

I don’t know why I persisted. ‘I’m a native of Nottingham because I was born there. Lord Moggerhanger is a native of Bedfordshire because he was born there. You’re a native of Walworth.’

‘Kennington.’

‘Kennington, then, because you were born there. The blacks in London aren’t natives, unless they were born here, and then they are. That’s all it means. The Return of the Native is about a man who comes back to the place he was born at.’

His mind veered off my explanation. It was too long. ‘I’ve got to be going. Got to go and see my mum. Knock her about a bit, otherwise she won’t fink I love her.’ He winked, as if he’d been taking the piss out of me. ‘Don’t break my wanker,’ he said as he swaggered out of the door.

I lay full length on the bed, and decided I liked being at work, and went to sleep wondering how Maria was getting on with Bridgitte. Being so different, they seemed made for each other. Perhaps Bridgitte would send for the children from Holland. Maria thought Upper Mayhem a paradise and would work for nothing as long as she was allowed to stay, though she wouldn’t go short of money — I’d see to that. She and Bridgitte would settle down and keep the place going for when I needed a refuge from the busy world. I laughed at the picture and, a final vision showing my homely settlement in flames, thought that at least I had done some positive good by finding Bill Straw a hiding place.

Kenny Dukes was right. At four in the morning the blower went. It was fixed to the wall by the door so I had to cross the room to answer it. ‘Come to the house,’ Moggerhanger said. ‘And I don’t mean in your pyjamas.’

I smartened up and, wide awake, crossed the yard to headquarters. The man by the door, no doubt with a gun under his coat, was Cottapilly, a big heavy swine who always went upstairs as quiet as a cloth-footed fly, so nimble on his feet that people expected to see a small man. He then put their surprise to maximum advantage. Afterwards, neat little turds of fag ash were seen on the stairs, as if someone had gone up on their hands and knees. He wore no collar or tie, but his boots were impeccably polished.

I was even more certain that some important scheme was being put into action when I saw Jericho Jim sitting in the corridor outside Moggerhanger’s office. He was thin and of medium height, with thick grey hair and an incredibly lined face, though from a distance you would have taken him for thirty instead of fifty. Each icy blue eye shone like the point of a pen torch that a doctor shoves down your gullet to look at your tonsils. He’d been most of his life in prison, but had escaped so many times, even from Dartmoor, that they called him Jericho Jim, though his real name was Wilfred. He always ate the middle from a loaf first, on the assumption that he might die in the next five seconds or in case some well-wisher had put a file inside. It was a matter of old habits dying hard, and that by their feeding shall you know them. He stopped pulling the comb through his wavy hair to run his hands over my jacket and trousers.

‘Do you think I’m barmy?’ I said.

‘Instructions,’ he lisped. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

The room wasn’t as empty as it had been the day before. Moggerhanger stood behind his desk wearing a flowered dressing-gown that came down to the floor, and smoking the kind of cigar that his doctor had said would put him in his bury-box. But I suppose it was a case of once a lord, always a lord. His manner hadn’t altered from when I first saw him. There was an open map on the table, and as soon as Pindarry closed the door Moggerhanger pointed to it. ‘Michael, can you read one of them?’

‘Like a book.’ I’d gone walking and cycling with Smog in the school holidays, and he was the one who had taught me to read maps.

‘You’re the only one who can, then,’ he said, ‘apart from myself. That’s why I took you on.’ The room was blindingly lit from a series of striplights flush with the ceiling. Two men I didn’t know sat at a table by the wall, earphones on and their backs to me, and I heard the crackle of police voices from one and the bird noises of morse from the other. Moggerhanger looked over his shoulder and said to Pindarry: ‘He’ll be in time if he sets off now. The boat gets in at eight o’clock.’ From behind his desk he asked: ‘Do you know where Goole is?’

I was about to say I hadn’t seen him in years, when I remembered it was a place. ‘On the Lincolnshire coast?’

‘It’s a river port in Yorkshire,’ said Pindarry.

I suppose I had to notice him. He didn’t have a pot belly, but he was beefy at the midriff, and that’s something you can’t hide. I liked him less than Cottapilly. Even in the presence of the chief he always wore a little Austrian-type hat with a feather up the side. One of his teeth was missing, which you wouldn’t notice unless he laughed — though he never laughed. He only smiled and then, so it was said, you were in trouble. But he had to eat, and Bill Straw told me he’d once shared a trough of rice and mutton with him on the pipeline road between Baghdad and Beirut in their smuggling days, adding that you no longer joined the Navy to see the world, but just signed on with Jack Leningrad Limited.

‘I want you to collect some packages,’ Moggerhanger said. ‘Leave at five and you should be there by ten. We’re sending you up in the Rolls-Royce, so take care of it. One scratch on the Roller means two on your face, only they’ll be deeper. You’ll be driving one of my prime motors, not a two-tone trapdoor estate with a battered right headlight and a crumpled wing, which has to be off the road before dark. If by any chance you should find yourself confronted by a police roadblock, don’t try a Turpin and jump over it. Just say what your business is, and they’ll let you through.’

He ran his organisation like the head of a country in wartime, and maybe not even he knew whether he made more money out of lawful business than rackets. He owned gambling houses, cafés and restaurants, hotels and roadhouses, caravan parks and amusement arcades, sex shops and strip clubs, escort agencies, garages and car hire firms, bucket shops for cheap travel called Pole-axe Tours, as well as loan and finance firms: ‘Twelve thousand mortgages a day: just pay your money and you’re safe for life.’ Shadier operations involved smuggling and putting up money for criminal enterprises. If his connection with the Inland Revenue was frosty but correct, his association with some members of the police force was cordial, as I knew from the hand-in-glove manner in which he and Chief Inspector Lanthorn had got me put away for eighteen months. Lanthorn had to have someone to charge when the customs broke the smuggling gang, and Moggerhanger opted for me rather than Kenny Dukes — or himself. I had made plenty of money, so took the sentence as it was deserved and because I’d had no option. But I had grown less philosophical about it over the years, though I don’t suppose I would have been bitten so hard by the cobra of revenge if Bill Straw hadn’t dragged me back into the mainstream of a job with Moggerhanger.

‘I can’t guarantee a rotten little A40 won’t drive into me,’ I said. ‘The roads are full of anarchists these days.’

He put an arm around my shoulder. ‘It’s only a manner of speaking, Michael. I want you to stay in one piece: drive carefully, collect the goods, and take them to a place in Shropshire, where you’ll wait till somebody collects them. Then come back here to me. If you want to know anything else, ask Mrs Whipplegate. She’s my private secretary, and knows everything.’

She stood by a filing cabinet on the other side of the room, a tall thin woman who didn’t have what I reckoned to be a good figure. But because she seemed inaccessible — with her grey svelte dress, a natty coloured flimsy scarf at the neck, and high-heeled shoes — I wanted to get to know her in the one way that mattered. Maybe because of her short darkish hair, slightly grey at the temples, and small black hornrimmed glasses, I assumed she was a widow (and if not hoped she soon would be) and reckoned she was in early middle age, though I learned later she was thirty-eight. The best part was her legs which, being shapely and plump, were out of character with her thin figure. I thought she might be one of Moggerhanger’s girlfriends, but told myself she wasn’t the sort he liked. She carried a handful of envelopes. ‘If you’ll come next door, Mr Cullen, I’ll give you your instructions.’

‘Before you go, Michael, I want to wish you luck,’ Moggerhanger said. ‘It’s an important job, and if you do it well there’ll be a bonus for you. I look after my lads, though I don’t buy ’em. You won’t see that sort of money. But I’ll make it right with you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s loyalty all the way. No fucking around.’

‘I haven’t been to Oxford, so you can trust me.’ But can I trust you, I wondered, you bombastic double-dealing bastard. He must have got my drift, so ambled over: ‘Get going, then, before you get a knife in your back!’

A sense of humour was all very well, but not when it was a camouflage for absolute villainy. He also used it as a trick to inspire confidence, and as a gambit to keep you energetic and alert.

I followed Mrs Whipplegate into her tiny office of desk, chair and filing cabinet, the advantage to me being that her unsubtle perfume filled the room and I was closer to her than when in the boss’s big sanctum. She handed me the first large envelope. ‘There’s one map for the road to Goole, two to get you to Shropshire, and a large-scale one to find the cottage.’

‘I love you.’

She blushed. ‘Here’s envelope number two, with your expenses of twenty five-pound notes.’

‘I’ll always love you.’

‘Keep an account of what you spend, and let me have the list, as well as any monies still unspent when you get back. There are no written instructions except for the two addresses clipped to the maps. The cottage has a six-figure map reference because it’s hard to find, and you’re not under any circumstances to ask anyone the way to it.’

‘I’d do anything for you.’

‘After you get to each place, destroy the instructions. Lord Moggerhanger has many business rivals and doesn’t like information to leak out. And please don’t mark the maps. They can be used again.’

‘When can we meet?’

‘I don’t see how we can.’ She looked at me with grey eyes, and I saw there was no hope, until I also noticed that the little finger of her left hand was trembling. ‘It’s now half past four, and you’re to start at five o’clock precisely. There’s a dual carriageway almost to Doncaster, but after that you’ll find the road somewhat twisted and cluttered …’

‘Not as much as I am, until I’ve been to bed with you.’ I regretted each stupid sally against her obvious impregnability, respectable demeanour, or plain distaste for the likes of me, but as usual in such situations I couldn’t control myself. ‘There’s something inordinately attractive about you.’

‘… as far as Goole. However, you should be in position by ten o’clock, and that will give you plenty of time.’

‘I’m not being flippant,’ I went on. ‘There’s something about you that I find profoundly interesting, and what I want is to get to know you a little better. I don’t really mean much else. Or I might — if I did get to know you better. But until then all I’m asking is whether or not you’ll have dinner with me when I get back.’

I was tired from my short night, but the effect was to sharpen the tongue and give me a hard-on for no particular reason. She passed a slip of paper, a form which I was expected to sign for receipt of the money. I picked up the envelopes, and brushed against her as I went to the door. ‘Or even a cup of coffee.’

She twitched, then put on a thoughtful expression. ‘I’m not sure whether Lord Moggerhanger likes fraternisation among his employees.’

Her naïvety frightened me, for she seemed to think he ran a lawful business and that this conspiratorial atmosphere was only a precaution against trade rivals. I wondered what the Green Toe Gang would think of that. A real clean-up, with a proper police force, would rope her in for ten years as well. I wanted to cry for her innocence, though mostly I craved to see her strip off that chic dress and clamber into bed with me. ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘perhaps he would like it to be kept in the family. Lord Moggerhanger is a very paternal sort of employer.’

‘You’d better leave. I didn’t have much sleep either.’

I brushed by her again. ‘Will you be on days next week?’

A smile was as far as she would go.

Back at the garage I collected my briefcase, which contained underwear and a spare shirt, and a high-powered heavy duty two-two air pistol with a tin of slugs, as well as a carton of cigarettes and a small tranny for news and weather. With the envelopes stowed inside I felt as if I was on some kind of official business.

The garage-hand was a toothless, grizzle-haired, battered chap with a heavy Glasgow accent called George, who had been chief engineer on a coastal steamer. He showed me to the Rolls-Royce. The dashboard was like that of an old-fashioned airliner, and I called out for him to pull the chocks away. Moggerhanger was right: it was quite different to Black Bess, the old banger I pottered about in at home. I felt a thrill as I rolled forward, out of the wide gate.

Seven

I schoonered towards the North Circular, a forlorn man and woman waiting on an empty road for the Dawnliner bus to take them to work. The All Night Radio Station came up with a weather forecast: ‘A warm and pleasant day everywhere. A real scorcher, in fact. Just a little mist on northern hills, perhaps, and some wind in the west bringing occasional drizzle, otherwise fine all over the country. A spot or two of rain in Central Wales and rather more prolonged downpours in the north, spreading south. Expect a little warmth, but a cold front developing in mid-Atlantic will reach the Midlands and north-east this afternoon to give snow and ice on high ground, with rain, fog, snow and hail just about everywhere. Further outlook dubious. Have a good day.’

Or something like that, causing me to wonder why I was in this floating palace and not in bed with Mrs Whipplegate, though at the first whiff of that lovely bleak romantic A406 my sense of adventure came back at the thought of going north again. The compass needle swung as I turned off into Hendon and passed a jam sandwich parked at the roundabout. One of the police lads inside waved in greeting, and I felt like the king of the road. Anyone driving around at five in the morning can’t be up to any good, but I got a clear way through the traffic lights as if I had a control button on the dashboard. Maybe they photographed each car and flashed the numberplate to headquarters. Lights glowed from inside a filling station, an old man sleeping in a chair reflected in the glass. Dawn was seeping through as I turned right at the island. Trees were tinged with green, and dead grass bordered the roadside. I drifted in and out of a daydream, praying to see the first breakfast shack promising something to eat. Housefronts marched out of the melting darkness.

I slowed down for a hitchhiker, then remembered that Moggerhanger had said I wasn’t to give lifts in his vehicles. In any case, I thought, he probably has fleas, muddy boots and concealed razor blades to slash the upholstery so slyly I won’t notice the damage till he’s got well away.

In the rear mirror I saw he was without luggage and wearing an overcoat. I got a clean snapshot of pink face and bald head, indignation and misery. Pylon towers stood grey against darker cloud. I speeded up, and saw him cursing me blind by the roadside. He waved his arms, and I knew that leaving him there was a bad business, not to say a sickly kind of omen, which kept me downhearted for the next two minutes. I wanted to go back and smack him in the teeth, but that idea made me feel even worse.

A bit of autoroute went by Stevenage (thank God) and not far beyond I saw a café that was open. I parked well to one side of a couple of decrepit lorries and a pantechnicon, and made my way between pools of water. The wind rattled two pieces of corrugated tin by the bucket-toilets. To the east there were clouds of dull red and gunmetal blue. I don’t know where that weather forecast had come from. Thirty miles in that direction Bridgitte was curled up in bed and, so I supposed, was Maria. I wished them luck and long life, and went into the warmth.

I ordered a full-house of egg-bacon-sausage-beans-mushrooms-tomatoes-and-fried-bread. The lorry drivers looked at me as if I was a piece of shit that had crawled off the fire.

‘Good morning,’ I said, the worst thing you could come out with in such a place at that time of the day. You could say anything else, no matter how insulting, or even irrelevant — but not that. My tone was neutral, but my voice was clear, so I was taking my life in my hands. Fortunately they were too afflicted with lassitude to give more than non-committal grunts. I considered myself lucky and left it at that. Mike, the working-proprietor behind the counter, looked as if he was dying of starvation. He smoked a fag, and had half a mug of cold tea by his elbow. He poured a rope of charcoal into a mug for me and pushed it along. His wife Peggy was a solid-looking country woman with round steel glasses and a white apron. She actually smiled while buttering my sliced bread.

‘How’s business?’ I had to say something, or lose the use of my vocal cords, but that, of course, was the second worst thing you could say — at any time of the day.

‘Can’t grumble,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you tell him the truth?’ her husband chipped in. ‘It’s fucking awful. We’ll be bankrupt in a fortnight.’

‘Sorry I asked.’ I swigged the tea, which was strong and good.

‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Don’t fucking kid me. Of course you’re not. You don’t give a fuck, do you?’

‘Well, not really,’ I said. My third mistake was in being honest. ‘Why should I?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ Peggy said. ‘It don’t do any good.’

Mike laughed, without mirth. ‘Not to him it fucking don’t. He’s not a free enterprise businessman trying to keep his head above water. It don’t matter to you, either, I expect,’ he said to his wife. ‘But it does to me, and that’s all as matters, innit?’

‘You’re always fucking whining.’ One of the lorry drivers had a slice of bacon half into his mouth. ‘Every time I stop off here I hear you whining. If you didn’t cook such good breakfasts, I wouldn’t stop. You’re a worse fucking whiner than the Aussies. I was four years down under, and I never heard so much whining in my life — except that they call it wingeing. But they do it in a loud voice, and only when they see no Pommies are around, so they don’t think it’s wingeing. But it’s bad in this country as well. That’s what’s wrong with it. Everybody whines if they aren’t making two hundred pounds a week just by lying in bed.’

‘They think the world owes them a living,’ said an older man, who had so many plates and cups on his table he looked as if he’d been lounging there all night. ‘But they are the world.’

Mike threw my eggs and bacon into a pan of hot fat on the primus, while his wife boiled the beans. ‘It’s all right for you, Len, bringing illegal immigrants up from Romney Marsh to Bradford twice a month. One trip keeps you in luxury for weeks. I expect your lorry outside’s full of Pakkies now, innit? Why don’t you unlock the doors and bring the poor buggers in for some tea at least? Be good for my trade as well.’

Len began to choke. ‘Keep your fucking trap shut.’

Everybody laughed.

‘Well,’ Mike said, ‘stands to fucking reason, dunnit? Two loads of Pakkies every week and I might break even.’

‘I do wish you’d stop swearing,’ Peggy pleaded, devouring an elderberry-and-nettle pie. I went to an empty table, having had my fill of early morning conversation, though it seemed marvellous what arguments you could set off with an unrehearsed greeting. The breakfast was good when it came, and I could feel each mouthful waking me up. During my second mug of tea I heard a lorry hit the tin by the toilets as it slid through a puddle and drew up outside. The first person to come in was the man I had seen by the road thumbing a lift. He stood in the doorway and looked around with glittering eyes, which stopped swivelling when they saw me.

‘I think I’ll sit by the Good Samaritan,’ he said to the lorry driver who came in behind. I was ready to punch him in the face if he did, but I didn’t. The hut was public property. He opened his overcoat, and showed a fairly good suit, with collar and tie. ‘People don’t get rid of me so easily.’

‘Come outside and say that,’ I said.

He gave me a particularly scornful look, then went to the counter to order breakfast.

‘Where are you going to?’ I asked when he came back.

‘What’s that to you? Anyone who’d leave his fellow man to die of exposure by the roadside at half past five in the morning hardly deserves to be greeted with cordiality when they meet later in altogether different circumstances.’ When I said nothing in response, he added: ‘I’m going to Rawcliffe, just before a place called Goole, which I suppose you’ve never heard of. You can drop me off at Doncaster, if it’s on your way.’

He wasn’t exactly reeking of aftershave, but he seemed decent enough. The trouble was, you could never tell. He looked amiable, with mild brown eyes, and smiled as he rubbed a hand over his bald head. ‘You don’t trust me,’ he said, ‘I can see that.’ He held out the same hand that had stroked his head: ‘Anyway, I’m Percy Blemish.’

‘Michael Cullen,’ I told him. ‘I can’t give you a lift because the person I’m working for has spies all along the road, and if he found that somebody else had been in the car, from that moment on I’d be seen to have a pronounced limp whenever the dole queue moved forward.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’ll just have to continue my journey with that uncouth lorry driver, in his draughty cab.’

The driver in question, who sat a few feet away, twitched his shoulders and turned. ‘I heard that. You can walk. Too much fucking lip, that’s your trouble. I was going to throw you out, anyway.’

‘Oh dear,’ Percy Blemish said, ‘I talk too much.’

‘We all do,’ I said sadly.

‘I do hate swearing,’ Peggy said, though nobody heard but me.

Percy’s hand was on the sauce bottle. Mine closed on the ketchup. It was a tie. ‘Drop dead,’ I told him, getting up to leave, and never wanting to see him again.

I took the map out of the envelope and saw that I still had a good way to go, but it was only half past six so I dawdled along. The sky was clear, except that red streaks in the east were turning yellowish. The wind was cold and damp, however, though after a mile or two the sun burned through the windscreen. I thought I saw a police car going up a slight rise in front, but it was a white car and a motorbiker just ahead wearing a blue helmet. The sight made me nervous, so I overtook them both.

While getting in the car after breakfast I’d noticed a container as big as a toolbox down by the back seat, and on opening it saw about three hundred Monte Cristos inside. I unscrewed a tube cap, and then drove effortlessly through green scenery on a full belly and with a delicious cigar between my teeth.

In the last few years at Upper Mayhem I had begun to wonder about the purpose of my life. Living modestly off Bridgitte and my savings no longer seemed the right existence for an active man. Prison should not have depressed me as much as it did, but what pushed me down even more was my natural born liking for idleness as long as life wasn’t too uncomfortable. I’d never seen the point of stirring myself as long as I had a few quid in my pocket. Not that it could have gone on forever. My money was running out and Bridgitte realised that if she didn’t withdraw her support she would never get rid of me. The call to London had come just in time.

Another factor was that the attitude towards idleness was changing. There were too many on the dole for it to be a virtue anymore. I lived on the edge of despair because I did not know why I was alive. It wasn’t even a matter of reforming. Moral imperatives left me cold. But I had reached the stage where I had to do something to convince myself that I had been brought onto the earth for a purpose instead of rotting pleasantly at the disused railway station of Upper Mayhem. Almost accidentally and, so far, painlessly, I had got out of it, even though working for Moggerhanger was not the kind of job one could be proud of. But it was a start, and no matter what Bill Straw said, nor what I saw, or what I felt in my bones, I had no reason to suppose Moggerhanger’s business affairs were anything other than legal. Even he, I hoped, had changed in the last ten years.

The thoughts that go through one’s mind during a purloined luxurious smoke! A mouth doesn’t show its true shape till a cigar’s stuck in it, and when I took mine out between puffs I had an impulse to sing. I had set off from Upper Mayhem, forty-eight hours ago, determined to be honest in all my dealings. To put the cigar back where it came from was impossible. To throw what remained out of the window would be a criminal waste. I would finish my enjoyable smoke in peace, and steal nothing ever after. In the meantime, I would have a little music to soothe my faculties and make life perfect, so shoved a tape into the deck and waited for the overflowing balm of Victor Sylvester or Heavy Metal.

Luckily I was slowing down before the Norman Cross roundabout, otherwise I’d have swung off the road with shock. ‘Remember,’ said Moggerhanger, ‘you are now driving for me, and don’t you forget it. I don’t want you eating, or sleeping in the car when you shouldn’t be, or spitting, or dropping cigarette ends and sweet wrappers, or getting mud all over the carpets. Neither do I want you to help yourself at the cocktail cabinet, or interfere in any way with the emergency hamper. And keep your thieving hands off my cigars. I’m particularly insistent on that. For one thing, they’re counted. And for another, if any are missing I’ll cut you to pieces, though if you’ve already had one, consider yourself forgiven, but don’t do it again. You have been warned. Just keep your eyes on the road and look after my car, which means never going above seventy. It’s better for the engine, but most of all I don’t want my employees fined for speeding. I don’t think I need tell you that if that happens, you’re out. And try not to let the fuel gauge show below the halfway mark. Now listen to the sweetest sound in the world. And have a good day.’

I looked around, as much as I dared, for the closed-circuit television, and wondered if there wasn’t a built-in black box to register every stop. But his little joke seemed to be over and once more I was the captain of my ship, except that instead of music the tapedeck played a selection of church bells from parishes all over Bedfordshire, which racket I stood till I told myself that if another Quasimodo hung on my eardrums I’d belt the car into the nearest bridge support.

I was drifting north and without thought went more quickly, finding it hard not to stray above the stipulated seventy-mark especially as, now that traffic was building up, young blokes floated by in Ford Escorts at ninety-five, and their bosses flew in BMWs at a hundred and ten. I could have overtaken them all, but not with Moggerhanger breathing down my neck.

Some cars that overtook were plumbers’ vans or salesmen’s wagons, or old bangers with five men inside running a collective that got them to and from work (or the dole office) in the cheapest possible way. Others were smart and fast, and from a BMW window Percy Blemish waved his fist and pulled me a megrim as the car slid effortlessly by. It was my third view of him and I hoped it would be the last. His gloating and frantic face behind the Plexiglass reminded me of a baby deprived of its rights at the nipple, and I supposed he held every person he came across responsible for his misfortunes, unless he was given a lift. Even then, judging from the face that he turned on me, and which the benevolent driver of the moment could not see (luckily for him), I didn’t reckon his chances of cheap and easy travel were very high, either.

I’d put back so much tea at breakfast that it was necessary to stop and wring out my bladder. I could get the petrol tank topped up at the same time. When I crunched slowly onto the petrol station forecourt, Percy Blemish was standing by the exit, waiting for another lift. I felt sure that the BMW man, goaded by one of his remarks, had dumped him there, and it was just my luck that I should be the next car along.

A Ford Cortina skidded in from the road and, by a fancy manoeuvre, the cunning bastard of a driver put himself before me at the pumps. It was a self-service establishment and in a few seconds he had the nozzle gangling into his tank. The manager came out and asked me, sir (seeing as I drove a Rolls-Royce), how much I wanted. He then motioned me backwards and wiggled another python into my tank to be sick. I was happy to let him do the work, while waiting to watch the Ford Cortina carry Percy Blemish away.

The driver was a young fair-haired chap in a polo-necked sweater who, having refuelled, went to the office to pay the clerk. I don’t suppose he noticed me smirking. He drove slowly towards the exit where Percy Blemish, giving the sign for a lift, placed himself halfway across the drive so that the car would be forced to stop. When he bent to the window to say where he wanted to go, hand already at the door, a fist shot out and knocked him flying.

It was as blatant a refusal to give a poor chap a lift as I’d ever seen, totally unnecessary in its violence, though maybe the driver was wiser than he thought (and maybe not), for if he hadn’t spoken with his fist he would have driven onto the Great North Road with Percy Blemish hanging onto his door. This did not make things look good for me. I went for a long piss to think things over, but was unable to decide on any viable course of action.

I strolled into the office to pay the reckoning. ‘That’s all right, sir,’ the manager smiled. ‘I’ll put it on Lord Moggerhanger’s account. He’s very good at settling the bills.’

Percy Blemish had already gone. I wouldn’t stop till I reached Goole, so there’d be no further trouble. A few spits of rain hit the window, but the road was still dry. I pushed in another tape, one of Tchaikovsky’s jackboot symphonies which tried to do a rush job on decorating the inside of my head. He was pasting away with three walls finished and one more to go, with only the woodwork to scratch and the door to burn off, to a ball-and-chain finale, so that I couldn’t stand it after five minutes, and flicked the button.

‘I was enjoying that.’ The disembodied voice came from behind, the second time I nearly had an accident that day. I was on the outer lane, overtaking a three-hundred-foot juggernaut which seemed to increase speed the faster I went, so that I was doing almost a ton by the time I came to a slight bend. But I got in front, left the lorry behind, and said to Percy Blemish who was grinning into my rear mirror: ‘You’d better get out, or I’ll stop at the next layby and do you in.’

‘Why did you take the music off?’

If I stopped, I’d have to overtake the lorry again. ‘Where did you say you were going?’

‘You switched that music off,’ he said. ‘I like Tchaikovsky.’

‘Why? He’s only a block and tackle artist.’ I decided to humour him until such time as I could get him outside and kick his teeth in. Then I saw the bruise caused by the young blood-pudding at the filling station, and decided it would be more humane to feel sorry for him. In any case, I had no option. ‘It’s better to talk than listen to that,’ I said, ‘and you certainly can’t do both.’

‘My wife liked it.’ He shuffled around on the seat. ‘At least she said she did, and I believed her.’

‘You have to believe your wife, otherwise life isn’t worth living.’

He sighed. ‘I suppose so. You see, I’m the sort of person who thinks that everybody I see is older than me.’

‘Interesting,’ I replied.

He kept quiet for a while. Then the back of my neck tingled, for he piped up again. ‘Do you know the best way to cause a fire?’ There was a more sinister tone to his giggle. ‘A friend of mine was in the fire service, and he told me.’ I thought it best to let the bloody pest babble on, on the assumption that while he talked he was harmless. ‘You put a couple of flashlight batteries in a shopping basket with a few packets of steel wool. Sooner or later they’ll ignite — in the house or car of somebody you don’t like.’ His giggle turned into a laugh, and he rubbed his hands. ‘If you put two tins of hair lacquer of the aerosol type in the bag as well, with a newspaper and a box of matches, with a few bits of shopping on top, an explosion will eventually ensue.’

‘That’s a lot of bollocks,’ I shouted.

He pouted. ‘It’s not.’

‘Have you ever tried it?’

After a few minutes he came back into the world with: ‘No, but I might. You never know.’

‘Just shurrup,’ I said, thinking my Nottingham accent might have more effect.

‘I won’t shut up,’ he retorted, in the poshest voice he could muster.

‘Why don’t you learn some poetry?’ I suggested. ‘Or learn to knit?’

‘Don’t want to,’ he said sulkily. ‘I was happily married, I’ll have you know, till I ran away from my wife. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’m either running away from her or running back to her. At the moment I’m running back. We live near Goole, in a lovely little isolated house called Tinderbox Cottage. I can’t understand why our marriage went wrong. I used to live in the south-east, and worked for Elfingham borough council as an engineer, but when I got ill they offered me early retirement and I took it, and came to live in the north with my wife. She can’t stand me, and I can’t stand her. We’ve tortured each other for thirty years. Out of what we thought was undying love has come unendurable suffering. Can you understand it?’

‘Yes, and no,’ I responded with perfect sincerity.

‘I think it’s economic,’ he said.

‘Economic?’

‘You see, if the gross national product was sufficiently buoyant, the government could issue an edict saying that all those who are married are to live apart immediately. No argument. And those who can’t afford to live apart get a pension in order to do so. Anyone caught staying married seven days from the date of this law will be shot. In twelve months, however, marriages can start again. You can get married to the same partner, if you feel so inclined.’ His eyes glowed in the mirror. ‘Good idea, don’t you think? I spent years working that one out.’

‘Good for some,’ I said. ‘But doesn’t it bother you that you can’t torment your wife when you’re not with her? You must have fun as well, otherwise how can you be going back to torment her again?’

He hiccuped. ‘I love her, so why shouldn’t I?’

‘It’s all the same to me.’

‘I’m going to kill her,’ he said flatly. ‘Or maybe she’ll kill me. It wouldn’t surprise me.’

I’d never met a loony who had a sense of humour, but then, if you were loony how could anything seem funny? It was too painful. I hoped he’d go to sleep, though because I was feeling sleepy myself I wanted him to keep talking. ‘Do you spend all your time hitching lifts on the Al?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a brother living in London, in Streatham, and I visit him every so often, and stay till he says I have to leave. There’s enough money for the bus, but I prefer hitch-hiking because when I speak to someone on the bus the conductor puts me off for disturbing the passengers.’ Grantham passed on the starboard and then Newark on the port bow. I lit one of my own cigars on crossing the Trent, always an obligatory and satisfying gesture at such a point. ‘My brother burst into the room at four this morning and said I had to get out or he would strike me with an axe. That’s why I’m on the road so early.’

‘Life’s difficult.’

‘I’m really beginning to think it is.’

‘You must be tired,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get your head down?’

He sighed, like a boiler about to burst. ‘I can’t. Sometimes I’m unable to sleep for days. I’m in such a phase now. That’s why I’m going back to my wife.’

I felt like a cat having its fur rubbed backwards. Maybe I would murder him before he murdered his wife. ‘Do you have any children?’

‘Two daughters. Janet and Phyllis. Janet lives with another woman and Phyllis lives in Dover with two children but no husband. We don’t see them, but they write now and again. They’ve got their own lives. Like all of us. Phyllis’s two children are boys. She calls them Huz and Buz. When they last came to see us I told them a bedtime story, so she never brought them again.’

I was reminded of an incident from Bill Straw’s adventures, but couldn’t believe there was any connection.

‘Phyllis left home at sixteen. We had a blazing row one day because she’d been hanging around the docks. I didn’t receive a word from her for two years. Somebody told me she’d met an Irishman. Even the Salvation Army couldn’t find her. Then she wrote to say she was married and having a baby, and asked for money. Her mother sent five pounds, and it came back by return of post, cut in two — longways. I don’t know what we’d done to her. It’s amazing what people can be like. Have you ever seen people who are happy?’

‘I’ve seen them dead,’ I said, ‘so I suppose they were happy enough. But I’ve been happy from time to time.’

‘There should be a happy medium, don’t you think?’

‘A happy tedium, more like it,’ I said.

The smell of soot was in the air, the delectable breath of the north, which partly made up for the gloom descending on the car. It was impossible to throw him out. Nor did I want to. I was neither dead nor happy. There was a stage in between which he didn’t know about, and that was his trouble. I thanked God first, and Moggerhanger second, and myself a close third, for including me in on it.

‘If you had given me a lift right from the beginning,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have had this black eye.’

‘This is my employer’s car,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m not supposed to give lifts. In my own car I always do. But not in this one. Do you understand?’

‘And you switched off the music.’

‘It was driving me crazy.’

A beautiful cream Mercedes passed us, and I glanced at it.

‘You signalled to that car,’ he said.

‘You’re off your head.’ If he wasn’t, I was — or would be soon.

‘It must mean something — what you do.’

‘It does if you want it to.’

‘Everything means something.’

I’d never been so glad to see the Bawtry signpost, because it meant I would be back on the twisting arterial lanes and have to pay closer attention to driving. It also began to rain, big splashes coming at the windscreen, so I put on the wipers and hoped their rhythm would hypnotise him into sleep.

‘It means something whether you want it to or not,’ he said.

‘Oh, bollocks.’

‘Swearing reminds me of that horrible transport café.’

‘I’ll swear if I like.’ I overtook a coal lorry, so that we missed dying by inches. That would have meant something, but he was in no condition to notice. I could see the faces of drivers who were coming to pass me on the other side of the road. Those with their mouths open hadn’t yet learned to drink properly. The nipple still shaped them. One chap wearing a cap drove with a look of horror, as if death by fire could strike at any instant. Another man drove with so little of his face showing, he must have been three feet tall. Often the mouth was a circular hole in the middle of a plate of lard, just distinguishable between the dangling good luck charms and the India-rubber Alsatian behind. Most faces seemed angry, as if belonging to a body taking part in a bayonet charge, and set to kill every oncoming driver — unless it was the expression they put on at the sight of a Rolls-Royce. It was too common not to mean something, though I was inclined to think it their normal state. Those faces that didn’t look rabid were gritted tight in concentration. A fair proportion of phizzogs sported a benign idiot smile, looking about ten years of age and as if delighted to be at the wheel of a lethal machine. I didn’t know why, but most of the women’s expressions seemed more or less normal. I wondered with a smile what my face looked like to those able to take it in — and immediately took the smile off it and assumed a mature sternness befitting the captain of a ship.

‘What are you laughing at me for?’ Percy Blemish said sharply.

There were pools of water in the fields, pylons crossing the road and colliery headstocks in the distance. I was too tired to give him a run-through of what I’d been thinking. ‘There was something stuck in my teeth.’

‘I’m sorry to have to insist, but you were laughing.’

If I ignored him I could expect a savage blow at the back of the head. If the car hit a pylon and exploded he would be laughing — for a split second. It was unjust that so many advantages should be on his side, and even more that he saw them as being only on mine. ‘Would you like to tell me in what way you consider me to have been laughing?’ If talk wouldn’t calm him, nothing would.

‘It wasn’t so much your face, as the gesture of your body.’

I had met such people before, often worse than him, as well as a few marginally better (like myself), but in no case had I been imprisoned with one in a motorcar that wasn’t my own and travelling along a road by whose side it was forbidden to stop, a road so narrow and winding that if you did stop a fully laden coal lorry would crush you within half a minute. I could drop him at the cop shop in Bawtry, double yellow lines in front of it or not, yet I was reluctant to because putting up with him till the end of the journey was a test of character I ought to be able to pass. If I had been old enough to fight in the War I don’t suppose I would have survived with such sentiments. I decided that a little sharp talking-to was the only fitting response. ‘You’d better be quiet, or I’ll black your other eye. If I want to laugh I’ll laugh, and if I want to cry I’ll cry. It’s fuck-all to do with you.’

He was offended by bad language, as I’d hoped he would be, so kept quiet till we were past Bawtry. On the other hand I was offended by the moral tone of his silence. He looked on me not as the personal agent of Lord Moggerhanger, but as a common chauffeur for someone whom he, with his superfine sensibility, was bound to scorn, in spite of the fact that he had hardly got two ha’pennies for a penny.

The country was flat, desolate, newborn, as if it had no right to be land at all. I thought that if I lived there I’d be suffering in no time from Backwater Fever. I got nervous if I didn’t see rising ground, even if only a slagheap or a pimple with a tree on top in the distance. I had crossed some kind of frontier, and it didn’t seem the right type of country for me.

Percy slept, or at least dozed, and I envied his ability to turn himself on and off like a well-oiled spigot, though even with closed eyes he didn’t look peaceful. Tremors over the lids and flickers at the left corner of his downturning lips told of torments I would never have to put up with. But then I wasn’t Percy Blemish, and I wasn’t fifty-eight years old. I hoped I never would be, though when a souped-up black Mini with four young men inside, hooter going and headlights full on, came screaming around a bend, I took sufficient evasive action to suggest that my subconscious, such as it was, might have other ideas about that. Blemish stirred. ‘You may set me down soon. I’ll have only a short walk.’

I thought he was going to be with me forever. ‘Is your wife expecting you?’

His laugh didn’t seem quite real. ‘She always is, though she hopes I’ll never arrive. When I’m not there she sits by the telephone waiting for the police to call and say I’ve been killed. Or that I’ve been found by the roadside with a heart attack. It’s understandable. I don’t know what I’d do without her.’

‘Why don’t you get a divorce? Maybe it would make things more exciting.’

‘We’d only marry again.’

‘At least you’d have another date to remember. You can’t have too many. The more you have, the longer your life will be. After all, you’ve only got one. You might as well make it as long as possible.’

The line of his lips straightened. A half-second glance in the mirror gave me a fully developed snapshot image to add to my vast store of underground photographic material, many of them taken from as far back as I could remember. His eyes were glazed, and as he stroked his olive-drab cheek they became sadder. ‘You make me sick.’

It was as if he had hit me. My foot accidentally slid off the clutch. I recovered, said nothing, and maintained my harmony with the bends of the road. Rain stopped, so I switched off the windscreen wipers.

‘They were getting on my nerves,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ll sleep when I get home. Anyway, it was good of you to give me a lift. You see that house just ahead? Set me down there, if you would be so considerate.’

He could be charming when he liked, and I was sorry for him. I wondered which of the two cottages in the distance he would head for. ‘I hope you go on all right.’

There was a bit of cinder-ground for me to park in, so I got out and opened the door as if he was Edward VII. He walked along an unpaved lane, while I sat in the car and looked at my map before driving the last few miles to Goole. This took almost as much time as doing fifty miles on the A1 because a car in front pottered along at twenty and it was impossible to overtake with so many lorries coming from the opposite direction. But as soon as we got to the outskirts of Goole, and past a thirty mile an hour speed limit, he increased his rate to fifty and left me behind, a phenomenon I’d often come across.

Caught in the usual scrag-end outskirts at a red light I watched a woman with grey hair and a blue overall-coat flicking a yellow duster at her door knob. She looked at me as if I ought to be at work instead of driving a Rolls-Royce. That’s how they are around here, I thought. Then I got caught in a gaggle of Volvo lorries going over a wide bridge by the docks. Before I knew where I was I was across the river into Old Goole. Then I had to turn back, whereat a similar gaggle of Volvos swept me west again.

I turned right into the centre and pulled up not far from the town hall, where I oriented myself from the map and got to an unprepossessing thoroughfare on the outskirts called Muggleton Lane, on which I was to wait. It was nine thirty, so I set my alarm clock for five to ten, then put my head back and dozed. The sun shone on me, and I faded from the world, but after what seemed a few seconds the gentle pipping brought me back to life. Following instructions, I got out of the car, opened the boot and sat in the rear left seat reading a newspaper with the headline ‘Terrorists state terms’.

Two minutes after ten o’clock (bad marks for being late) a powder blue Mini-van with a coat of arms on the side drew parallel. To my surprise Eric Brighteyes (otherwise Alport) who I had met a few days ago on the train into Liverpool Street, got out and opened the van door. He wore a blue boiler suit and a yachting cap, and gave no sign that he knew who I was, though I would have recognised him anywhere. ‘Give me some assistance with these dog powders,’ he said.

We took ten square packages, done up in brown paper and post office string, and laid them in a double row in the boot of the Roller. As I was signing the form on his clipboard he rubbed an open hand down over his face — once. ‘Forget you’ve seen me. Right?’

I slammed the boot. ‘No problem.’

We’d been together for two minutes, and he drove away in a cloud of blue smoke. All I had to do was exit from Goole the same way I had come, and though I anticipated getting lost in the maze of waterways and lorry routes, I was soon in the clear and on my way towards Doncaster.

Eight

Relieved at the completion of phase one, I lit a cigarette. The staff work had been exemplary, otherwise it might not have been such a skive. I was obviously working for a good firm. It was hard to believe that the British economy was in such a parlous situation with talent like that around. There was more of it in the country than was needed to compensate for the bone-idle, happy-go-lucky, feckless, come-what-may, jaunty, fuck-you-jack, how’s-your-father, let’s-have-a-lovely-strike sort of person which I had been up to a few days ago, and with which this country at any rate will always be overrun and no doubt affectionately remembered, at least according to the newspapers.

Fortunately the situation is generally saved by those with flair, improvisation, creative ability, hard work, love of money, flexibility, lack of panic in a tricky situation, luck (of course), a refusal to regard long hours as anathema and imaginative attention to detail when drawing up a plan or programme — which I hoped was the sort of person I was fast becoming.

Then of course there was the third type, which no country could afford but which England had somehow learned to tolerate, the one (he or she) who mixed up these qualities but was only held in check by a job that cradled them from start to pension and kept them out of harm’s way. It certainly made it a cosy and exciting country to live in, I thought, wondering which category I fell into and not really caring as I set out on an intelligently planned route to south-central Shropshire where I was to offload Moggerhanger’s batch of packages from abroad.

I saw someone standing close to where I had put down Percy Blemish, and my spine turned to ice at the idea that it might be him again, this time heading south. I didn’t want any more hitch-hikers in the car. Moggerhanger and I were now absolutely in one mind on the matter, though in my old Home Rule banger I gave plenty of lifts, which was no great sacrifice since I was never going very far. However, I decided to make an exception for an elderly woman of about sixty, because by the time I got close I hadn’t the heart to shoot off and leave her, especially as a sudden squall of icy rain from Siberia clattered against the car. ‘Where are you going?’

I hoped it would be to the next village.

‘London.’

‘I can take you as far as Doncaster.’

‘It’s very generous of you.’

‘Get in the back.’

I glided on my way.

‘It’s a very uncertain kind of day to be out on the road,’ I said.

She had lovely features, but her face was haggard and lined. I’d never seen anyone who looked less like a hitchhiker. She wore a travelling cape and carried a good leather shoulder-bag. ‘I suppose the bus services around here are lousy.’ Silence between two people seemed more and more difficult to maintain. ‘It doesn’t seem a very convenient area to me.’

‘It’s not London, I agree,’ she answered, ‘but I’ve lived here for some years, and I don’t think I have much reason to complain about the amenities. There’s a certain starkness in the scenery, but it can be very beautiful at times.’ It pained her to speak, as if she was made for better things than talking to someone from whom she had begged a lift.

‘Do you have family in London?’

‘Friends. At least I hope I have. I haven’t seen them for a long while. Maybe they don’t live there anymore. I also have a daughter, but she won’t want to see me. Nor do I want to see her. The last time I heard, she was working in a vegetarian restaurant near Covent Garden.’

‘You should be there by tea time.’ It was hard to think of anything lively to say. ‘I’ll drop you on the M1, so you’ll soon get a lift. I’m making for Shropshire.’

‘I’ll go there, then.’ I detected a powder trail of uncertainty, almost hysteria, in her voice. ‘I’ll go anywhere, in fact, to get away.’

‘Is it that bad?’

She leaned forward and said in my ear: ‘You’ve no idea.’

The words chilled me. ‘I probably haven’t.’

‘I can talk to you because you seem such a nice person. I can’t say I’ve had a hard life, except insofar as I’ve been married to someone who is highly strung, if not actually poorly. I come of Irish stock.’

Such quick turnabouts got on my wick. ‘So do I.’

‘That’s what most people say when I tell them. But I suppose it’s what’s given me the strength to support all I’ve been through. In our family there were five daughters which meant, going by popular belief, that my father was more of a man than most.’

Her expression of bitterness was not inborn, and I assumed it would go away with an alteration in her life. ‘In the nineteen-thirties,’ she said, ‘he could afford to be, couldn’t he? I rebelled, but against all the advantages, because I didn’t know any better. He wanted me to go to University, like Amy Johnson, he said, but I got a job instead, and left home to do so. I went south and worked in the council offices, and there I met my husband, who was in the borough engineer’s department. No one was happier than me when we got married, and no one, I thought, was more contented than him. Neither of us had to join up in the war. We stayed at work, and managed to save a bit of money. I had two daughters, and after the war we moved up here. You may well ask why.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I’ll tell you. It’s nice of you to give me a lift and let me talk to you as well. My husband had been very strange, right from just after we were married. I don’t know why. His family was as right as rain. That was why they disowned him when he started going funny. One day he disappeared. It wasn’t like him to do that. He’d always said when he was going out, even if only into the garden to water his onions. After a week he came back, filthy and in rags, his eyes glowing. “We’re leaving,” he said. “We’re going to live near a place called Goole.” “Where’s that?” I asked. He got out the atlas and showed me. “Why Goole?” I wanted to know. He glared at me, and then he struck me. I struck him back — I was so shocked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have returned the blow. He just wanted to do it once, and then life would have gone on normally. But life isn’t like that. Well, we didn’t go to Goole just then. He got stranger and stranger, until he lost his job. They called it voluntary redundancy, or premature retirement, but I knew what it was. They look after their own in this country, for better or worse.’

I was about to go off my head. First one, on the way up, and now the other, on the way down. If it hadn’t been true I wouldn’t have believed it. I was beginning to feel eaten, like the main course in the workhouse, as my grandmother used to say when I wouldn’t stop talking as a kid. I decided to get rid of her as soon as possible, though while the rain belted down it was out of the question.

‘Our married life has been decades of misery. He goes away for a day or two at a time, but the peace I get when he sets out is ruined by the thought that he could be back any minute. In fact I never know he is going till he’s been gone twenty-four hours, and he could show up in the next twenty-four, though often, thank God, he stays away longer than that. But just as I begin to hope he’s never going to come back, he kicks the door open and comes in like a whirlwind. This morning I could stand it no longer. After half an hour’s raving he fell asleep on the couch, so I got out by the kitchen door, and decided that this time I would be the one to go.’

I couldn’t believe it was the first time.

‘It is,’ she said. ‘Up to now I’ve regarded sticking by him and making sure he doesn’t go into an asylum as a test of character. That’s what my father drummed into all us girls. “The harder life is,” he said, “the more it tests your character, and the more you should be thankful it does because then you know it’s doing you good.” Growing up hearing things like that, and trying to believe in them, has ruined my life to such an extent that though I’ll soon be sixty I don’t feel older than thirty. I feel my life is yet to come, even though I may look worn out.’

She did, but only to a certain extent, because the more she talked the softer and more clear her features became, until she seemed nowhere near sixty. She folded her cloak and laid it on the seat beside her, and smoothed her grey hair which went in a ponytail down her back. ‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?’

I pulled two from my pocket and gave her one. ‘Are you going to stay in London, or will you go back to Goole?’

‘How can I tell? Maybe if he’d been in an institution years ago, as he deserved to be, he would have been out by now.’

‘That would have been worse.’

She laughed, a pleasant surprise, showing good teeth. A pair of gold earrings shook. ‘You seem to have had your troubles as well, the way you talk.’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘It’s a pity wisdom only comes to those who suffer,’ she said. ‘I used to believe in progress, but I don’t anymore.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘I suppose it is. Maybe I’ll believe in it again as time goes on. I’ll get a job in London.’

I was almost beyond caring. ‘What sort?’

‘Who’ll give someone like me a job?’

‘You never know.’

‘That’s true.’ She sounded more cheerful. ‘I have a bit of money in my post office book, so I can look around. I’ll get something, even if I go from door to door asking for work.’

‘I’d never go back if I were you,’ I said.

‘I don’t think I will.’

‘Maybe he’ll cure himself. Maybe he won’t. But if you go back it’ll be two lives ruined, instead of one. Troubles shared are troubles doubled.’

‘You almost talk as if you know him.’

‘I’ve just got a good imagination.’ I didn’t want to complicate matters. I was making headway towards Doncaster, and soon came within the suction area of the M1. It had stopped raining, and she seemed full of wonder as I scooted silently down the motorway. I couldn’t resist going up to eighty.

‘I can see why he likes getting lifts in fast cars,’ she said. ‘He often told me how it soothed him to be speeding along a wide straight road.’

‘A pity life isn’t like that all the time.’ We had a good laugh over the fact that it wasn’t. I quite took to her, and I think she liked me. I pointed out Hardwick Grange, a wonderful building up a hill to the left. ‘A woman called Bess built it in the sixteenth century.’

‘Hardwick Hall,’ she retorted. ‘I visited it with my father.’

Perfect signposting sometimes foxed me when I was tired and hungry, and coming off the motorway into a service area west of Nottingham I ended up behind the kitchens — though I soon got back to the proper place. In the cafeteria we sat with plates of steak and chips, sweet cakes and tea. She would be on her own from now on, because I was heading for Shropshire. ‘You’ll easily get a lift from the exit slip road,’ I said. ‘Anyone will stop for a respectable looking person like you.’

‘I wish you’d let me stay with you.’

‘It’s more than my job’s worth. But if things get desperate in London, here’s how to find me.’ I dribbled with the idea of sending her to Upper Mayhem, but couldn’t guarantee Bridgitte’s reception, so I gave her my address, care of Moggerhanger.

‘I know you can’t take me, and I didn’t really mean to ask. Maybe I was testing your kindness again. I shall try not to contact you in London. I’m a very proud woman.’

We parted like old friends. I couldn’t understand why I felt depressed after I left her by the slipway. Yet a mile down the road and she was out of my mind. I thought of nipping into Nottingham for an hour or two, to drive around the old haunts in my opulent maroon Roller. Maybe I’d see Alfie Bottesford cleaning school windows; or Claudine Forkes, now married with three more kids on top of the one I’d inadvertently given her before lighting off; or Miss Gwen Bolsover with her latest incompetent and tongue-tied lover. Or I might run into — or over, if I could — old Weekly of Pitch and Blenders the estate agents who gave me the push after I’d sold Clegg’s house to the highest bidder and claimed an unofficial deposit of my own.

Business came first. I hadn’t seen any of my Nottingham cronies for a dozen years. They could wait a bit longer for the pleasure, and so could I. Past midday I got onto the A52, and after the tangle of Derby was doing a header down the dual carriageway as far as Watling Street. Stirling Moss would have been proud of me. I was in my element at the wheel of such a car. Britain can make it. I sucked my way past two Minis and a lorry. A girl stood at an intersection thumbing a lift, black slacks and red hair, but even that didn’t tempt me to stop. In any case she was no doubt a policewoman acting as a decoy to find clues as to who had murdered a girl hitch-hiker last month.

On Watling Street, the old Roman road, the A5, the London to Holyhead, that military ribbon laid out to keep the ancient Brits in order, I watched my compass needle swing back on the straight and narrow, heading towards more bucolic horizons. The day wore on through rain, shine and back to rain again, and beyond Shrewsbury into hilly pastures mottled with sheep.

I stopped to buy provisions in a village shop that was so small you could hardly move, but there was a pile of supermarket baskets for you to help yourself while the woman sat at the till waiting for you to stagger over and pay. She looked sulky, thinking I only wanted a bar of chocolate, but thawed on seeing me pick up milk and bread and cheese and bacon and eggs and sausages and oranges and tea and chocolates and sugar and fags and vegetables — all to go on the expense sheet — sufficient for forty-eight hours of incarceration at Peppercorn Cottage where I was to hole up till the ten parcels were collected.

By three o’clock I seemed to have been on the road forever, and wanted to sleep, but a downpour of hail and sleet, perfect spring weather, made me fearful of being slid off the hillside or sinking without trace in the mud if I went too far up the track to find a more hidden position where I could switch off for an hour. This was the time, I supposed, for a benzedrine or valium, or other such tablets that people swallow to keep them alert, but I had nothing like that with me and in any case had never taken drugs except an aspirin now and again. All through the sixties I thought people were crazy, the way they popped pills like Dolly Mixtures or Smarties. If I wanted to relax or blow the mind or have a great experience or find a new horizon I would either get it by my own head of steam or not at all.

I chewed a bar of chocolate and had a smoke, comfortingly protected in the car, watching a man in oilskins and wellingtons walk along the hillside with a collie dog towards a huddle of sheep by a distant gate — a biscuit-tin picture come to life. The freezing washdown was so intense he almost disappeared. I felt deprived, looking at a man and his dog battling their way to a cottage which became visible when the hail stopped. A luminous green gap between the clouds showed the outlines of the hills and the sheen on their flanks, and I felt more at home than in the Dutch flat lands around Upper Mayhem.

I stared at the network of lanes on the map till the approaches to my cottage-rendezvous were clear. The obvious way was to reach it from the east, but I preferred — since there weren’t so many farms on that side — to come on it from the west, which meant doing a few extra miles. By seven the light was draining away. Rain washed dead gnats off the windscreen. I was at my worst because, in spite of the Royce’s dazzlers, I was prone to see double or to see solids where there was only shadow. Pale sky above the turning drew me along a valley whose damp air I could sense but not feel, across a river, into a side valley, over a col and down again. Beyond Bishop’s Castle and Clun I did a sharp sweep to the west and, when it was dark, drove through a tunnel of light with nothing but the black sides and the roof visible. I switched off the radio and counted junctions, forks and crossroads. There was a pub at one, a telephone call box at another, a farmhouse at a third. I passed Dog End Green, Heartburn Mill, Job’s Corner, Liberty Hall, Lower Qualm and Topping Hill — or so I called them — and finally, after one wrong turning and a look at the map, I found the lane leading to Peppercorn Cottage.

I drove through a strip of wood and along a hillside. A rabbit panicked in my headlights, but saw sense and zigzagged under a bush. The track was two bands of asphalt, grass in between brushing the underbelly of the car. A gate blocked my way and I disembarked to open it.

The lane rose gently for a further half-mile, then came out of another scattering of trees. At the top of the slope the stars were vivid, and I wanted to get out and walk, but dipped headlights and crawled along the narrowing track, worried that if the car broke down there would be no space to turn.

With the window down, flecks of rain hit my face and fresh air revived me. A bullock called from a field. A panel of tin clattered at some trough or hutch — from how far away I couldn’t tell. Village lights glistened like orange tinsel on a hillside. The lane descended steeply. I was close to my reference point on the large-scale map, but no house was visible.

I got out, torch in one hand and the heavy airgun cocked in the other, hoping to catch a rabbit in a beam of light. A slug at close range, aimed in the right place, would blind or knock flat anyone posing danger. The noise of running water covered my approach. Behind, the Roller’s shadow blocked out part of the sky. No human being was near for miles. I swore at getting my trousers splashed.

An owl hooted from the trees, and the stream rushed into a conduit under the muddy track which rose steeply beyond the dip. Then I saw a dark building to the left, a path leading to it through bushes and trees. There was space between the house and the stream to turn the car, but I was scared on each reversing manoeuvre that the back wheels would slip into the stream and get stuck, so that I needed ten minutes to get it facing outward bound.

I waded through a barrier of high nettles and, at the threshold, shone the torch on my watch. It was nine o’clock, and felt like two in the morning. I had been on the go for seventeen hours and was, to put it mildly, clapped out. Gun at the ready, I pushed the door open with my shoe, waited for a moment, and then jumped inside.

Nine

A large grey rat scuffled across the beam of my torch, and my senses immediately descended to a lower level of existence. The slug I fired knocked a crater in the plaster wall, ricochetted close to my head and went out leaving a hole in the window, spraying glass onto a truckle bed.

I lit a calor gas lamp hanging from a beam, and its hissing white light more or less illuminated the room. The damp air, one notch off being water, smelled of soil and foul rags, and I shivered with cold, sorry I hadn’t had a blow-out at some place chosen from the Good Food and Hotel Guide, which Moggerhanger kept in the car in case he needed to look after himself while on the road. I could have charged it to expenses. ‘You just don’t think,’ as Bridgitte used to say, ‘do you?’

I set my radio going on the wonky table. An effort was necessary to create civilised comfort. At the end of the room was a huge fireplace made of boulders, by which lay a heap of newspapers and a pile of logs with a blunt chopper on top. I hacked out some sticks and got a fine blaze, though a fire would have to burn for weeks to cure the dank atmosphere. Under the window stood a calor gas burner and a blackened kettle which I filled at the stream. In a cupboard I found tea (mouldy), sugar (damp) and milk (sour), all of which I threw into the bushes, and got fresh provisions from the car. The room was filled with the smell of frying bacon and eggs, boiling tomatoes and toasting bread. Within an hour of arrival I was sitting by the fire, smoking a cigarette, drinking the best mug of tea since Mike’s caff that morning and listening to a talk on the radio about a poet who killed himself while living in an isolated cottage in a remote and wooded part of the country.

To be cut off from the world, and from all normal life, was a not unpleasant sensation, though having been brought up in a street regarded as a slum, we’d at least had a tap and a gas stove, as well as a lavatory across the yard. At this place I dug a hole with a trowel at the side of the house, crouching with an umbrella in one hand, a flashlight in the other and a roll of white paper in my teeth. I supposed some shepherd had lived here with a wife and eight kids, as happy as the midwinter was long, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of bijou gem a woman would walk into with her knickers in her hand.

It was quiet — I will say that — except for the scratching of a rat but he, or she (they, most likely), kept a fair distance after my hello of a bullet from the door. I threw another armful of logs on the fire, then stacked the ten packages from the car in the dresser-cupboard, hoping that with its doors shut tight the rats wouldn’t get in and sample them. Above the dresser, just to give a homely touch to the place, was another pair of Moggerhanger’s framed exhortations (though these had fly shit in the corners) saying: ‘Eternal violence is the price of safety’ and ‘Morality knows no bounds’.

I went upstairs to see what condition the bedrooms were in. One to the left had heaps of rags under the window, and I didn’t care to investigate for fear of finding a rotting tramp underneath. The rest of the room was stacked with red and white plastic bollards for organising contra-flow systems on the motorway, as well as red lights, yellow lights, road works indicators, men-at-work triangles and police ‘Go-slow’ signs. It was as if someone had broken into the Highway Code, because my torch also lit up the happy insignia of two children hand in hand on their way to school; a deer leaping merrily across the road; a nightmare avalanche of rocks hitting a car roof and the sign of a car halfway sunk in water after driving off the quay. Another showed a bus caught between the two jaws of a drawbridge, people spilling out with arms waving.

Fuck this, I said, let me go downstairs; but first I looked in the room opposite. On a low table between two iron beds stood a copse of bottles with candles stuck in their tops. The carpet was so covered with patches of grease that I resisted walking on it in case I slipped and broke my neck. A spider as big as an ashtray scooted across the room, but he seemed friendly compared to the rats twittering by the skirting boards, because he came slowly back to have a look at me.

I pulled the truckle bed in front of the fire, and lay down fully clothed. The blankets weighed like a bearskin that had been forty years in a damp pawnshop. The swollen brook was reinforced by rain which first beat against the windows above my head. The door was so badly fitted, or warped, that wind drove through and kept the room cold.

It was hard to sleep, due to the two mugs of strong tea and the fact that there were at least half a dozen rats scratching and squeaking behind the skirting boards as they held a council of war. I read the Riot Act in rat language and fired a slug towards a pair of beady eyes, which brought quiet for a few minutes, though the shot, having missed its target, tore down another square foot of plaster. The prevalence of so many rats led me to wonder whether the time wasn’t far off when conventional weapons would no longer be appropriate, and I would have to go nuclear. Fortunately such an option was beyond my capability, and all I could do was reload the gun and lay it on the floor beside the bed. It would serve Moggerhanger right if the house was reduced to a ruin, for not providing a cosier relay post.

The road was in front of my eyes, pot-holes which I avoided, traffic lights suddenly on red when I was going at ninety. I came out of a café to find all four tyres flat (as well as the spare); then the Roller going backwards towards a cliff, with Moggerhanger, Cottapilly, Pindarry, Kenny Dukes, Toffeebottle and Jericho Jim ready to blast me with their shotguns if it went over. Or I was driving peacefully along a leafy road when a very peculiar kind of police siren, such as I’d not heard before, came in short loud squeaks.

Two rats scampered from the bed when I sat up. I felt my nose to see if it was still there. It was wet, though not from blood. I didn’t know whether to laugh or whisper. I laughed. They were invisible in the dark. Their eyes glowed, but their arses didn’t as they ran away. I shone the torch around the room and fired another slug at where their hole might be, just to show who was the boss as I wiped cold sweat from my face. I felt like an officer in the trenches in the Great War, except that I thought I might desert my post and make a bid for Blighty. There was a court martial in a room made entirely of mud. The rats sat at a table and condemned me to death. The joy of life induced me to fire off a dozen slugs. The noise of the stream outside affected my bladder, so I had a piss standing on the doorstep. Then I fell asleep. The human frame could stand only so much.

The light that woke me was like the reflection from a wall of cold porridge. I sat up, shot a rat, got out of bed, lit a fire, put a kettle on, laid sausages in the pan, then puffed at a cigar and awaited results.

The bullet had knocked the rat’s brains out, which was not a pleasant sight before breakfast, but I swept the remains into a pan and threw them over the bushes. By the time my sausages were cooked they looked like turds swimming for dear life in a pool of fat. When I extracted the fat and threw it on the fire the room stank like Akbar’s Snackbar. I was about to tuck in when I heard someone moving upstairs. Survival, a novelty at first, was becoming a problem.

During the day I’d intended sweeping away heaps of grit and plaster caused by my jittery gunplay. Then I would dust and wash where necessary, clean the windows to let in more light, and dry the blankets so as to make my second night a fraction cosier. But I was in no way inclined to share my abode, and if an old vagrant had shambled in during the night I was determined to get rid of him.

I went softly up, meaning to put a slug between his eyes if he showed any fight. The cargo enclosed in the dresser was too valuable to be at the mercy of a light-fingered tramp. If it was what I was beginning to think it was he would lick that white dust off with a beatific grin and at least die happy.

There was a noise of someone fighting his way from a cocoon of cardboard. A bottle fell on the floor and, welcoming the noise because it covered the creaking of the stairs, I leapt into the room and flattened myself at the door. Even full daylight wouldn’t let me see across the room. I seemed the only one in it, which proved how far apart my senses and feelings were.

On the other side of the bed, by a fireplace from which a hundredweight of rusty soot had spilled like dust from a cold volcano, was a handsome brown owl, its eyes staring as if I had no right to come into its headquarters without a permit. First rats, and now an owl. Crosswise, it was almost as big as I was, and far too big even lengthwise to be out of a zoo. He was unmoving, as if my only hope was to sit down and talk matters over calmly and sensibly.

When I made a gesture with the pistol it flapped straight for me. I ducked. It clattered around the room, scored a channel through the bank of soot, knocked over two bottles and positioned itself by the door so that I couldn’t get out. It had fed on the choicest rats — and now me. There was something human about its actions, so I couldn’t shoot. One of the windows was open, and I edged forward in a dance, hoping it would have the sense to go out the way it had come in.

Maybe I shouldn’t have frightened it, I thought, as it flew over the trees and I closed the window. Since it came every night and ate a dozen rats I should have kept it for a companion. It was just like me to scare away what would help me.

Consoling myself with a large breakfast, I thought what a good place this would be for Bill Straw to hide in, even though it belonged to Moggerhanger who was out for his guts — far better than being locked up in Blaskin’s rafters where his skeleton would be discovered in fifty years’ time when the block was knocked down for redevelopment.

It was blinding with rain, so I stayed inside. A band of trees along the course of the brook kept the place dim, and low clouds didn’t help. I had the light on all day. A shelf nailed to the wall held a score of paperbacks, stained and full of grit, and as I shook each one separately I saw they were written by Sidney Blood. One of them, called The Crimson Tub, had underlinings and comments in the margins which proved that Kenny Dukes had been to Peppercorn Cottage.

The light lasted only a few hours in that hidden cleft of land. After a cowboy’s lunch I lay on the bed and fell asleep for two hours, and was wakened by a rat running over my chest. I would suggest to Moggerhanger that the next courier to Peppercorn Cottage should bring a couple of tomcats from Stepney. I made tea and ate a packet of cakes, wondering how soon it would take me to go mad if I had to stay in this hotel forever.

Wearing wellingtons and oilskins I walked up the track, though now that I dressed for the rain, it stopped. Smoke came from the chimney of a farm about a mile away. I went into a field. A rabbit, young but fully grown, looked at me, and just as it thought to move, I pressed the trigger.

The isolation of Peppercorn Cottage had inspired me to do a bit of living off the land. The rabbit ran a couple of yards, then stopped and began to spin, so I grabbed its back legs and delivered the chop that killed.

I sharpened a knife on the doorstep, drew out the guts and stomach, cut off the head, skinned and jointed it. For a stew I threw in potatoes, carrots and onions, and a few bay leaves from a bush by the door. I stoked up the fire, feeling like a cannibal, and swung the black pot over the flames.

The light from the beam didn’t quite reach the four walls, so that the blazing fire turned the place into a cave. Perhaps the rats turned against me mostly because I wouldn’t allow them to get too friendly. Some people say they are very intelligent creatures. I heard more squeals of resentment as I chewed at my broiled rabbit and threw the bones into the fire than I had while devouring salty and tasteless sausages. But I refused to share my delicious and plentiful food. They were big enough to go out and catch their own rabbits.

Shadows moved on the walls. I saw rats everywhere. I turned and fired the pistol and, because I shot out of malice instead of self-preservation, a ricochet struck my ankle. I swear to God the little bleeders laughed in chorus. When I took my sock off there was a dark bruise, and I hopped around the room till there was more ache in my foot from the cold than the bullet.

I was stuck till someone came for the packages. Maybe they wouldn’t turn up for a month. I preferred not to think about it, as I pulled a stone from the fireplace and hurled it at a rat by the stairfoot door. I got it right on the arse, but a convenient hole swallowed it up. They were getting bolder.

The gap in the clouds when I stood at the open door showed brighter stars than I’d ever seen. One rat ran outside and another ran in. Then the one that ran out came in again. How long would they put up with me? I stood aside so as not to interfere with the traffic. All the same, I liked the isolation of the house. If it was mine I would set rat traps and lay poison, buy more lamps to hang up, bring stoves to heat the place, nail pictures on the wall, spread new carpets, install a battery television and record player, get a generator, and a pump to draw water from the stream, as well as fix a toilet in the shed by the side of the house and open a radio telephone line to the local exchange. I would clear the vegetation and lay out an ornamental garden, build a terrace and sun porch, and excavate a swimming pool. I would give parties and invite all the young girls from miles around.

I spat. Too expensive. Might as well buy a house in Clapham. When I slammed the door I almost trapped another rat on its way in. I decided to spend the night in the car which, seen from the window of this mud-smeared rat-infested hole in the hillside, seemed the height of civilisation. I wondered if being sent to this place wasn’t Moggerhanger’s notion of a test to see whether I wouldn’t turn grey-haired or go mad. I filled a flask and made bacon sandwiches. Several trips were necessary to transfer provisions, blankets and the gun to the car. I was careful to lock the cottage door after me.

The stars beamed, trees swayed, water rippled a few feet beyond the fender. I was full and content, though not particularly drowsy. There was little rain. I was comfortable, yet felt more vulnerable in the car than I had in the house, in spite of my squeaking and scurrying friends. I listened to the radio, ate, drank tea, and got out now and again for a stroll, careful to open and close the door quickly. At ten o’clock there was nothing to do but sleep. Then I felt a rat run over my hand.

No, it was a corner of the blanket tickling me. But, I said to myself, blankets don’t have little cold claws and damp noses, even at the corners. The tickling of a blanket is like that of a butterfly or moth, or even at the worst a bluebottle. In no possible way could even the edge of a blanket be compared to the snout of a fully fledged Shropshire rodent.

I jumped up, banged my head and the little bleeder ran squeaking under the steering column. To shoot in such a confined space would be foolhardy, and Moggerhanger wouldn’t like slug scars all over his interior decoration. I dived across the seats to get at the rat with my bare hands, hoping it hadn’t brought its mate as well, otherwise they would have at least two families by morning.

If I wasn’t safe in a Rolls-Royce, where would I be safe? I had to put a stop to the invasion. A live rat in a car was no joke. I lit a fag and took a few minutes to think the matter out and to lull the rat into a state of over-confidence. I wasn’t born yesterday.

I pulled on leather gloves from my overcoat pocket. The rat was near my boot, sniffing the leather. The light was on, and I could see it clearly — about eight inches long and quite pleased with itself. I actually saw its teeth, and felt them against the side of my boot.

That rat was never more surprised in its life — what was left of it. Neither was I. I gripped it like a vice around the soft belly then opened the window and threw it towards the stream. I listened for the splash, but to my chagrin it landed on the further bank, and then I heard the splash as it began swimming back. I battened all hatches and made as good a search as could be done with my torch, till I knew I was alone. I laughed like Boris Karloff after he’d strangled his seventh victim. I was safe from the rats, but even so, now and again through the night I heard one or two running over the roof of the car, and they sounded as if they had it in for me.

Ten

‘I say, you there!’

I thought the rats had invented a miniature battering ram, and were tapping it at the window, but I soon realised that the collectors had arrived. I yawned and sat up. The day of my deliverance was at hand.

‘Dammit, old man, why don’t you shake a leg?’

He had, at least on the face of it, the sort of public school hee-haw that to me marked him as definitely untrustworthy. I may have been wrong, and no doubt I was, and he was no more untrustworthy than I was, which was why I recognised it so instinctively. I was never against clearly spoken English, though I’d heard people in London say that a northern accent was homely and cute. I dropped my Nottingham twang as soon as I began working at the estate agents when I was seventeen, otherwise people might not have understood me as quickly as I wanted them to, which would have been bad for a conman’s chances of success. When crossing frontiers as a gold smuggler, a neutral twang was the first requirement, which even Bill Straw used on his travels.

The man outside the car looked, with his blue eyes and blond locks, as if he had just left the changing-room by the sports field, but I knew immediately that he had come for the drug boxes inside the cottage. He smoked a slender pipe and had a scarf around his neck, though whether university colours or football emblem I didn’t know. When he smiled there was something hard about the mouth. He was in his mid-twenties, but he could have been older. Whoever he was, he wasn’t himself.

I opened the door and got out. There were two of them, the other being dark-haired and wearing a scarf of a slightly different design. ‘Sorry we pulled you out of the land of shut-eye,’ the fair one said. ‘I’m Peter.’

‘I’m John,’ the other called from the bank of the stream, where he was tying a red-white-and-blue canoe to a sapling. ‘You may wonder what we’re doing here.’

‘So would I,’ said Peter. ‘We’re paddling the whole length of the River Drivel, from its source to the sea, for charity — a sort of sponsored paddle. We were dropped about four miles north by landrover, but on most of the route so far we’ve had to carry the damned kayak.’

‘It looks a shade better from here on,’ said John. ‘At least there aren’t any roadblocks.’

‘We need ballast, that’s all.’ Peter tapped his pipe a little too hard on the front fender of the Roller, and the bowl flew away from the stem. ‘Oh bollocks!’

I detected a slight change in his accent.

‘Fact is,’ John said, ‘we need five little counterweights to stow athwart the keel.’

‘There are ten,’ I informed him.

‘We’ve been told to pick up five. I expect somebody else’ll call for the others.’ I noticed a scar down the left side of his face, and he hadn’t got it from duelling with sabres. ‘You get my drift, Mr Cullen?’

‘It’s in the dresser cupboard.’ I nodded towards the door and gave him the key. Early morning wasn’t my favourite part of the day, especially before breakfast, and I knew that with such people the fewer words the better, one trait which criminals have in common with the police. Talking never got you anywhere, unless you wanted it to.

He took the key grudgingly and opened the cottage door.

Peter saw the blankets in the car. ‘I say, did you spend the night in there?’

‘Sure.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘It’s more comfortable, for one thing, and for another …’

There was a scuffle from the house and John, if that was his name, fell over the doorstep as he hurried out. ‘Fucking rats,’ he cried with a look of terror. ‘The place is full of ’em.’

‘I saw one or two.’ I’d known there would be nothing more certain to establish his accent — which seemed to be mostly West Country. ‘But they were quite tame. They won’t harm you.’

He wanted to kill me, but realised that one or both of us would end up in the river if he tried. ‘I’ll make you some tea,’ I said, ‘if you’ve time. I haven’t had mine yet.’

They sat on the stone bench while I got the stove going. The cups weren’t of the cleanest and Peter wiped the rim with a folded white handkerchief. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘A couple of nights.’

John glanced towards the door. ‘Better you than me.’

‘I can take it or leave it.’

‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’d leave it. I read a book once about the future. I forget what it was called. I always do. But some blokes put a cage over a chap’s face with rats in it. I had nightmares for a week.’ He stroked the scar on his cheek and downed the scalding tea at one swallow. He’d been in prison.

‘We should be leaving.’ Peter set his cup on the bench. ‘Or we’ll be late at the off-loading point. The tide waits for no man.’

I helped him out with five of the packages, and we wrapped each in a plastic container while John pulled the canoe onto the gravel. They slotted in neatly. ‘I hope the stuff doesn’t get wet.’

‘No chance,’ Peter said. ‘If it does, we’ll turn boy scouts and dry it out.’

We manhandled the boat across the lane, slid it over half a field and down through some bushes to where the river came out of a gully. They hoisted a pennant saying SAVE ST DAMIAN’S and, laughing and shouting, wielded the paddles to avoid the banks in the swirling current. They certainly knew their job, I reflected as I went back to the cottage to wait for the next collection.

I ate breakfast in the feeble sunshine outside. The rats were already sensing victory, for I could hear them playing hide and seek. I lit my first fag, happy at the notion — mistaken as it turned out — that my job was half over. The weather was good, above the two walls of land. It was always the case that as soon as I got to thinking that life was improving, something bad happened to tell me that I should have had more sense. Optimism was never anything but a warning.

A car came down the lane, and I saw the blue flashing light through the bushes. Four of the biggest coppers I’d ever seen came running in, picked me up and flattened me against the wall. Thank God they hadn’t used violence. I shouted all manner of threats about my lawyers and the Civil Liberties Association, but it had no effect. They threw me on the floor and the tracker dog sniffed me up and down. I think it was a mixture of Great Dane and Labrador, crossed by the Hound of the Baskervilles, though who was I to question its breed? It was certainly the biggest canine bastard I had ever seen.

‘It ain’t on him,’ one policeman said.

I could have told them that, but they hadn’t asked. In any case, it was hard to speak with my face in the mud.

‘Where is it, then?’ Number Two shouted, bending down to my ear. He yanked my face towards him.

‘Where’s what?’ How could they have got at me so easily? I didn’t know what hit me. They use blitzkrieg tactics these days: one at the back, one at the front and one down the chimney. Without standing up, he waddled over my body to get to the other ear. Number Three pressed a boot on my neck and the pain was so intense I thought he’d break it. ‘You fucking well know where it is. Now where the fuck is it?’

I certainly did, and wasn’t going to take any stick for Moggerhanger. ‘In the house. In the dresser cupboard.’

I was pulled up like a rag doll, sat on the bench and given a cigarette. ‘Why did you make things so difficult? Why didn’t you say so?’

The inspector shouted to the bloke inside. ‘How many?’

‘Four, sir.’

‘There should be five.’

The copper came out with the five boxes on his arm. ‘It was too dark to count.’

‘I’ll deal with you later.’

The other went in, to fetch a biscuit for the dog. ‘Got any water for our Dismal?’

I pointed to the stream.

‘Don’t be so sarky.’

My blood was racing with speculation. Would I get sent down for twenty years? Or forty? Next time, I’ll do a murder and only get five. I wouldn’t take the blame for Moggerhanger over this job, even if he had me cut to ribbons in jail. I was ready to cry at the balls-up that had been made, and wondered how it was possible that the coppers had got to know I was down here with such a cargo. I could hardly credit the fact that the Blemishes had been the most sophisticated kind of narks. Yet it was hard to disbelieve anything in this life. Before the arrival of the canoeists I could have assumed that the packages contained nothing but Epsom Salts or sachets of aspirins, as advertised on television, and that I was a decoy, but they couldn’t have set up such an original and elaborate transport plan only for that.

‘I don’t know what you’re after.’ I stroked the dog, which seemed amiable after its biscuit and water. ‘There’s nothing illegal in those packets. In any case, I didn’t see a search warrant, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

I dodged a backhander, but it wasn’t seriously meant, otherwise it would have got me. ‘We don’t need ’em these days,’ the biggest bastard said. ‘Don’t you watch telly?’

‘Do you mind if I go in for a biscuit?’ I asked. ‘I’m famished.’ The inspector nodded. I came out with the packet, and Dismal pulled the first one from my hand. After a kick from the inspector it disentangled itself and went off for a piss.

In such circumstances my powers of observation go to pieces, but I saw that the inspector was, if nothing else, well built. He took his cap off to talk, and to scratch his bald head. I wouldn’t have described him as white, but as pink — and I hope I don’t go against the Race Relations Act in doing so. He had thickish lips, prominent blue eyes and a nose that seemed to have been broken more than once. He looked halfway civilised with his cap off, but the tone of voice was so reasonable it would have made anyone quail, except me. ‘Listen, we’re taking the stuff to our laboratories. It’s not for you, or me, or my officers here to say what these packages contain until they have been properly examined by competent authorities. So shut your fucking mouth. I strongly advise you to stay at your present domicile — meaning here — until such time as you hear from us. There may be further questions, following which, charges may well be brought. Is that clearly understood — sir?’

‘All right,’ I said.

He put his hat on. ‘Back in the car, lads!’

I waved them off with a smile, to show that I didn’t believe I had anything to fear, or like a guilty man who thinks it’s the best way to act innocent, but knowing that it’s the surest way to be taken as guilty. But when the car was out of hearing I only hoped that an escarpment had formed at the top of the lane in the last half hour so that they would drop five hundred feet and never come back.

No such luck. It was the end. Half of Moggerhanger’s precious loot was on its way to the cop shop, while I was condemned to stay in a rat infested hovel till such time, maybe two or three days, as they would come and take me away. I didn’t even have the heart to go inside and make another cup of tea. My morale had gone, and that was a fact. I couldn’t think for the noise of water from one direction, the triumphant scratching of rats in the other, and the rushing of wind through branches overhead.

But the one thing about your morale having gone bang is that you no longer need fear it will go. It’s gone, and good riddance, and under the circumstances it had had fair reason to evaporate. Reflecting further, once your morale has well and truly gone, it can only come back. Nothing stays the same. That’s the joy and excitement of life. I was more philosophical than in my early twenties.

The first indication of returning sanity was when Dismal the tracker dog came out of the bushes and licked my hand. It wanted another biscuit, and though my supplies were limited, I gave it one. The large brown head lay on my knees in gratitude. It was a big dog. If it stood on hind legs it would reach to the top button of my waistcoat, meaning that since he had become my guest we had exactly three hours supply of food left. How could those callous bastards, have forgotten such an amiable animal? By cheering me up it seemed anything but dismal.

The horrible truth came to me that they had left it behind to stop me getting away. What malicious ingenuity! I couldn’t believe it. But what else could I believe? In my rage I kicked the brute. It made no difference. The bloody hound came back and lay at my feet. I gave it a slice of smoked bacon. By the time they returned the dog would be whimpering by my skeleton. Such a scene indeed was dismal. My sense of humour was coming back.

I smoked another cigarette. I was too depressed to puff a cigar. The dog tried to pull it from me before I could light up, but desisted on being threatened by the flaming match. I walked to the edge of the stream. It was too wide to leap across. The dog pleaded for me not to drown myself. It had very expressive eyes for a police dog.

I went into the house, packed my things, including the remains of the food, and loaded them into the car. Then I locked the door, and settled myself in the driver’s seat. Because I acted like an automaton I knew that what I was doing was right. Whether it was sensible, I wouldn’t know for some time, but sense did not seem to offer much help in my predicament. It had always been my gut-feeling — and I can remember my Cullen grandfather saying so — that you never go to the cop shop on your own two feet. They have to drag you there kicking and screaming — after they find you.

It would not be tactically sound to depart from the place in daylight. I would pander to sense to that extent. I came in darkness, and I would go in darkness, like the thief in the night I was being made to feel. I would stay in the car and give Dismal more time to get used to me.

It rained, and he looked forlornly in. When he could no longer stand being wet he sheltered as much of his body as possible under the rotting porch by the door. Whenever I went into the house to make tea I was always careful to give him a dish, which he lapped dry. I spread the blankets in the back of the car, but would not let him get in till the time came. I was so bored waiting that I read halfway through the Good Food and Hotel Guide, trying to find out which establishment accepted overnight guests with dogs. There was a place called The Golden Fleece in an old fortress-and-market-town which had only survived from the Middle Ages because the Germans hadn’t bombed it flat. It had plastic coffin baths in the bathrooms and four-poster plastic beds with flock mattresses that you disappeared into, which gave proof of its antiquity. There was, I felt sure, a King Arthur Bar and a Friar Tuck Dining Room, where a thug in Lincoln green stood by with a bow and arrow to pin you to the wall if they found out that your stolen credit card was counterfeit. The waitresses were called wenches and they all but served their own beautiful dumplings as they slopped frozen this and microwaved that onto your vast oval wooden platter, a look of horror on their faces at the fact that you actually wanted to eat it. The manager acted the grand swell and called you ‘Squire’ because he was charging forty pounds a night and getting away with it.

An Englishman would rather die than expose himself by complaining. ‘These are jolly good turds. Aren’t they wonderful turds, darling?’

‘Eh? What? Turds? Oh, yes, excellent. Haven’t had such good turds since I was in India. Quite delicious. We ought to compliment the cook. As I was saying about Rupert’s school …’

‘They’re quite superior. You can’t find good turds like this everywhere.’

‘You could at one time, though. Now everything’s plastic and ersatz. Convenience food, nothing else. What? Well, as I was saying about Rupert’s report …’

When I’d played that one out, I perused a chapter of The Crimson Tub by Sidney Blood. Then I listened to my radio, fearful of using the one in the Roller because I had a horror of switching on the engine at zero hour and finding the battery dead. Acting senselessly did not mean that I could take chances like that.

Half an hour after lighting-up time I started the engine, and opened a door. Dismal climbed in as if used to such luxurious transport. The smooth movement over gravel and dead twigs onto the lane, all lights beaming, made me feel I was coming back to life. I only hoped I was right. My troubles at having lost half Moggerhanger’s precious cargo may have been just beginning, but I was mobile, and nothing else mattered. If I had failed in my duty it was through no fault of my own. I switched off most of the car lights as Dismal and I travelled like two outlaws up the lane and back onto public roads.

Eleven

Whenever I put the radio on, Dismal slept. When I switched it off he sat up and looked over my shoulder at the road. Being almost human, he was fair company. When I got out for a piss, so did he. When I ate a biscuit, likewise. He even lapped up half a slab of chocolate and when I said it would ruin his teeth, he bit me. Life was perfect, except that the police and Moggerhanger were out for my guts.

The direct route to London was through Hereford and Cheltenham, but I set off for Shrewsbury and the A5, making easterly across the country to slide unobtrusively into London via the Great North Road, the highway I had come out on when heading for Goole — full of mindless optimism — a few days ago. I was so tense that life seemed real.

I drove carefully, meaning not too fast in the darkness, along winding roads. When headlights frizzled behind me I slowed down to indicate that the driver could overtake. Mostly they were youngsters in souped-up bangers going from one pub to another. Forty miles out of Peppercorn Cottage I began to relax. Because of my previous care with navigation I found my way onto the Shrewsbury road with ease. ‘Dismal, I think we’ve got clean away.’

The car radio was an elaborate set, with extra wavelengths on which Moggerhanger could tune in to the police. I heard plenty of gabble about road accidents, abandoned cars, pub brawls and suspected break-ins, but nothing concerning a six-foot con-man and a kidnapped tracker-dog in a maroon Roller last seen heading towards the Severn.

Sooner or later I would get picked up, so I had to have sanctuary, and one place I reasonably expected to find it was at Moggerhanger’s homebase. If I got caught, so would he. It wasn’t my fault that the operation had gone wrong. If I got into London before anyone spotted me, Claud Moggerhanger, who was only human after all, would be obliged to keep me out of harm’s way. Such an assumption cheered me up. I had always been an optimist, even if only in order to survive, believing that any action was better than no action, and any thought more comforting than none.

On the outskirts of Shrewsbury I spotted a fish and chip shop and parked halfway on the pavement with hazard lights going. The Chinese bloke gave me a funny look when I ordered fish, chips, roe, peas, sausages and pie twice, plus two bottles of lemonade. Hugging the parcels, I went back to the car and tucked in, to the noise of Dismal’s disgraceful gobbling of his generous portions on the floor behind. I had brought a tin dish from the cottage, and poured out a bottle of lemonade so that he wouldn’t get thirsty. He lapped that up, and belched into the back of my neck for the next ten miles. When we stopped at a traffic light I returned an even riper series of eructations, but he didn’t take the hint.

After my stint at Peppercorn Cottage and my encounter with the police, I felt as if I had spent a fortnight going back and forth on an assault course at a very expensive health farm, and craved a wash and brush up. A public lavatory was still open, but there were no lights. Sinks were hanging from the walls, lavatory pans smashed, doors in matchwood, and the divisions in the urinal had, I assumed, been battered down with a sledgehammer. What they’d done with the attendant, I didn’t dare think about. Maybe they were part of an adventure training school, which sent kids out suitably equipped, with score cards and umpires, to see how many toilets they could vandalise in one day without being caught. It looked as if this particular class had got inside with a fieldgun. I propped my torch on a ledge, turned on a tap, had a wash and put on a clean shirt. Back in the car I combed my hair and buffed up my boots with Dismal’s tail. All spick and span, I could face the world again.

Huge raindrops thrashed at the windscreen. Dismal began to howl as if he’d never seen rain before. Or maybe the regularity of the wipers frightened him. I shouted for him to belt up. After passing Telford I was afraid of drifting into the never-never land from which you only wake up in death — or a very disagreeable fire. The clock glowed ten, and I fancied somewhere to bed down for a couple of hours. People would be coming out of the pubs and I’d need all my wits to avoid their antics, though I knew from experience that the worst time on country roads was before the pubs opened, when everyone was rushing to get their first drink. After closing time, when they were blind drunk, they at least tried to be careful.

Dismal was dozing, which didn’t help matters. I drifted through space. The yearning to fall asleep came and went. I fought off the worst attacks by reliving the sojourn at Peppercorn Cottage, from which place my troubles stemmed. I should have known that the rats would bring no luck. The two jokers who had taken half my stock in their canoe must have been hired by Moggerhanger from a school of actors. I envied the skill with which they had made the collection. Clockwork wasn’t in it. By now they had probably landed the stuff at some secluded bank of the Severn. The car that had picked it up was in London, and they were boozing with their girlfriends in some clip-joint roadhouse. Or they had transferred their cargo to a hired canal barge on the upper reaches of the Thames and were holidaying their slow way to Hammersmith — while I was driving east in Moggerhanger’s car with a police tracker dog in the back.

Things could be worse. When I pulled up at an all-night café, I should have left Dismal locked inside, but he leapt over the seat, and though I tried with all my strength to pick him up and heave him back, he insisted on following me in case he missed something to eat. He had a collar, but no lead, and at the door he cleverly pulled the handle down with his teeth so that I could walk in.

Half a dozen black-leathered bikers were eating toasted sandwiches and drinking tea when the best trained dog in the police force rushed in. The laugh on a tall blond biker’s face faded as Dismal sniffed forward and fastened his teeth onto the youth’s trouser pocket, whining a signal that it was time for the back-up force to do its work and take the drugs off him.

The biker eased away from the juke box. ‘I say, get this damned pooch out of here.’ The other youths laughed. The only method of calling Dismal to heel would be to get a whistle out of my pocket and blow it.

‘Jonas, you idiot, we told you not to bring that stuff back from school,’ one of the bikers called.

‘He’s only a cuddly brown Labrador,’ I said, taking a lump of sugar from the table and leading him to the corner of the room where I thought he would be safe. The bikers, donning their gear to leave, looked strangely at me, and made obscene comments about Dismal, to the effect that what did it feel like living off its immoral earnings? I wondered how I could get rid of him, because if the police who raided Peppercorn Cottage assumed I had taken him away I was a marked man. Riding in a Rolls-Royce down the Great North Road with such a conspicuous dog sitting in the back as if I was his lord and master would be too rash for safety.

‘I don’t allow dogs in here,’ the proprietor called from behind his counter. ‘Especially a big swine like that. He’ll frighten my customers.’

‘We only want some tea and cakes.’ I put my fiver on the counter and pulled Dismal’s ear to make him be quiet. ‘I’d like a bowl for him to drink his tea from, if you don’t mind. He hasn’t learned to use a mug yet.’

The man, too exhausted to care, slid the goods across. ‘Dogs are a damned nuisance, urinating and breaking wind everywhere, and bothering my customers.’

‘Dismal!’ I shouted in my best police sergeant voice, ‘let’s go, otherwise we’ll never get to Glasgow.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ the proprietor said. ‘Nobody’s got a minute to spare. This is the worst kind of job to tell a story in. While I still had my factory and I told a story, people would listen. That was because it was in my time and not theirs. I was paying them to listen and they didn’t mind at all. That was what ruined my business and brought me here, but having a café on a main road, nobody will listen because it’s their time that’s taken up. They run in, order their food, eat with a blank stare, then pay up and get out. It’s no wonder the quality of life is deteriorating. They just want to get going on their journey, back to their homes, wives, children and’ — a disapproving glance at Dismal, who took it well — ‘to their dogs. Or back to their work, or businesses which in these times no amount of energy and good old British precision will save from going under the hammer.

‘We live in times of change right enough. My factory manufactured doors, all kinds and sizes of door, but not so many doors were needed all of a sudden, or my doors were no longer competitive, or I hit a rough patch on the production line, or I didn’t keep up with the times, or I didn’t advertise, or the designs were no good. The order books were suddenly empty. The salesmen took too many days off. They came in late. They sat at home watching television when they should have been out on the road. When I spoke to one of them about it he said he was earning enough already thank you very much so why should he try to bump up his income when the tax man would take the extra money? He’d got a spare time job serving cream teas at the local stately home, and his wife did bed and breakfast in the summer, and they got paid in cash so that they didn’t declare what they earned. So the order books were empty and I called the receiver in. My fault, if you think about it. Then my father died. He had a few shares in South African gold mines and when I sold ’em I bought this café.’

Though his story seemed banal, his complaints might have been justified. Dismal and I stayed by the counter. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I have to go.’

When he rolled up his sleeve I actually thought he was going to start work. But he lit a cigarette. ‘Why can’t you be like Charlie over there? He’s never in a hurry.’

‘That’s because I’m on the dole.’ Charlie was a fair-haired blue-eyed relaxed sort of chap in his middle thirties. ‘Been on the dole seven years.’

I sympathised. ‘It must be awful.’

He looked up from his tea. ‘It’s a lot better than getting up at six every morning and going out into the rain and cold five days a week, month in and month out. I pushed loaded cartons from one department of the warehouse to another, but then they got fork-lift trucks and six of us got the push. I thought the end of the world had come when I couldn’t get another job, but I also saw that it was marvellous not having to go to work. I could do bits and bobs around the house, talk to my mates, go out on my bike, or sit in the public library reading dirty books. The dole’s a lovely system. If we got a few more quid a week we’d be in heaven. I often help here in the café and earn a few quid, and I don’t mind that because it don’t seem like work. And I vote Tory now, instead of Labour.’

I was aghast. ‘Tory?’

He laughed. ‘Sure. Think what the Tories have done for the unemployed. Got millions of us on the dole. All you hear them Labour bleeders go on about is getting us back to work. Back to work! They want us building motorways, I expect, though I’m sure that lot wouldn’t want to dirty their lily-white hands. If they ever did any work it was so long ago they don’t remember what it was like.’

He amazed me so much, I bought him a cup of tea and six cakes. ‘You’re a bit of a philosopher.’

That pleased him. ‘I never would have been if I hadn’t got on the dole. I’ve had time to think. Labour don’t want you to think. They think that if you do, you’ll vote Tory, and how right they are. Thinking’s always been the prerogative of the idle rich, but now it’s within reach of everyone, and it’s no thanks to Labour. The only time you’ll catch me voting Labour is when they promise to double the dole money and stop talking about getting us back to work. I only wish the Tories would give us more money, but I expect they will as soon as they can afford it.’

The light in his blue eyes changed intensity, an increase in candlepower that almost turned them grey. ‘I was thinking the other day what a nice place it would be if the whole world was on the dole. That’s the sort of future we ought to aim for. Work is the cause of all evil, and it’ll be heaven on earth when there’s no such thing. Universal unemployment is what we want, and England will be the envy of the world when we’ve brought it about.’

Weary as I was, I did my best to point out his errors. Most people were driven mad by being out of work, I told him, apart from the fact that they had to live in poverty. They lost their self-respect, and the respect of their children. They lost the respect of their wives. They became prematurely old. They sat at home wrapped in self-hatred, a feeling of uselessness paralysing them body and soul. They deteriorated physically, and in a year became unrecognisable to what they had been. The houses they lived in fell to pieces around them. Their wives left them and their kids were taken into care by social workers who’d been hovering around rubbing their hands for just such a thing.

‘That’s as maybe,’ he said, when I could say no more, ‘but my mates don’t think like that. As soon as they get the push they’re like Robinson Crusoe who’s just landed on that island after his shipwreck. They’re a bit dazed, but they start picking up the pieces and learning to live with what they’ve got. In no time at all, they’re happy, like me.’

A trio of white-faced young lorry drivers came in, and Dismal made a run for one in his capacity as a sniffer dog, but when threatened by a cowboy boot with glinting spurs, he ran after me to the door, changing his mind about whatever he knew to be in the man’s pockets. He was learning fast, and I sincerely hoped I would break him of such habits before getting to London.

‘Fucking dog,’ one driver shouted. ‘I’ll have it on fucking toast if it shows its fucking snout in here again.’ Such a crew must have cheered the place up no end, though I didn’t suppose bone-idle Charlie buttonholed them with his nirvana of unemployment as they shared their joints with him.

I only felt safe in the car. We steamed along the great dual carriageways of the A5, under streams of orange or white sodiums, with occasional traffic lights to break the monotony. To the south lay the Black Country, a desolate sprawl of industrial ruination and high-rise hencoops. Traffic multiplied, mostly private cars, though a fair number of HGVs were pushing on in both directions. I sometimes thought that most of the lorries and pantechnicons were empty — Potemkin pantechnicons in fact, whose drivers were paid to steam up and down the main roads to persuade visiting Japanese industrialists that the country was in better nick than it was.

I was doing sixty on the inside lane when an armoured juggernaut overtook me at ninety, Mad Jack from Doncaster blasting ten horns as he did so. I watched him for miles weaving in and out of the traffic with a degree of manoeuvrability that could only be done by an artist at the game. He was laughing his head off, I supposed, open shirt showing a tea-stained vest, glorying in his fancy footwork as he told his younger mate to watch how it was done. ‘All you’ve got to do is keep your eyes glued to the rear mirror for a jam sandwich.’

That, I explained to Dismal (in case he didn’t know), is the name we road-busters give to a cop car with yellow and red streaks on its side. In the mirror I saw him yawn, bored out of his canine mind, but contented at the same time, while I got us mile by mile along the wonderful flarepath, also keeping a lookout for any jam sandwich drifting up on the starboard bow. If it never got light we would steam happily and forever along this lit-up dual carriageway through the enchanted Land of the Midlands at night.

No such luck. ‘Down, Dismal!’

A blue flash worked overtime behind, as if to push me forward because I had strayed onto a runway at London Airport and a 747 was coming in to land. I looked at my speed, but the needle was pegged at sixty. Mad Jack had gone into the distance, so they weren’t chasing him. The game was up. ‘Get down, you melancholy bastard, or you’ll give me away, and you’ll be confined to barracks for fourteen days.’

He flopped off the seat, then began to howl at the flashing light, his perfect silhouette unmistakable even from a satellite wheeling in space. There was nothing I could do except stay calm, get ahead, whistle a tune, and wait for the four cops inside their Rover to overtake and slow down till I had to stop as well.

Dismal looked into their car. What other evidence did they need? They swung side-on, and I glimpsed their faces: fresh young lads out on patrol, the cream of the Staffordshire force, who seemed amused when Dismal flattened himself at the window as if pleading to be taken back to his air-conditioned kennel and ten pounds of gristle a day. I had looked after the ungrateful hound like my only begotten son, when I should have left him to live on raw rat and cold water at Peppercorn Cottage.

The jam sandwich slid ahead and was lost in other traffic. It seemed obvious, as Dismal lay on the seat and sobbed himself to sleep (or maybe it was indigestion after scoffing fish and chips, lemonade, chocky bars, several dishes of tea and three Eccles cakes), that they had got my number, if not my name and, radio communications being what they were, could afford to wait in a darker spot a few miles ahead, or pass me on to some of their more boisterous mates in Northamptonshire when I turned south for London.

But at this late stage I began to consider whether they really were after me. One of the coppers who had raided Peppercorn Cottage, on going in to search the dresser, had called out that there were only four boxes. At the time I thought maybe the rats had eaten one, but then the inspector answered that there should be five, and I was so numbed by their presence that it never occurred to me to wonder how he could have known what number there were. My brain, if it could be called one, spun like a millwheel. Questions came along on a conveyer belt like cars with one door missing. Who told them there were five boxes? There had been ten, until Peter and John — Peter and John, my arse! — paddled away with their half share in the canoe. The police had parked at the top of the slope and no doubt trained their binoculars to watch them paddling away, and only then came down to frighten the guts out of me and make off with the other five handipacks.

The only explanation was that the lads who had pinned me against the wall at Peppercorn Cottage hadn’t been policemen at all. If they had, they would have left no roadblock unmanned to get their purloined dog back to base. To lie, perjure, resist arrest, even steal and murder, or hijack one of their cars and drive it the wrong way up and down the M1 shouting obscene defiance through their radio so that even the policewomen operators back at base shivered with rage and horror, was all part of the game, but to drive off with a superbly trained and well-nurtured poodle was asking for trouble. The fact was that the Peppercorn Cottage task force had been as much hoaxers as those two canoeists who had made off with their share of the loot half an hour before.

I turned left at the Cross-in-Hand roundabout for Lutterworth, and went over the M1 knowing that soon I would have to find a suitable parking place and bed down for a few hours, unless I wasn’t to nod off at the wheel and wake up to find a policeman at my hospital traction-cot threatening to turn off my life-support machine if I didn’t talk.

There was never anywhere to stop on the twisting arterial lane without fear of being hit from behind, so I drove on, always expecting to see something interesting around the next corner, such as trestle tables under colourful medieval awnings, laden with real food served by nubile wenches. Instead, I barged into a grim pub, and was stared at by drinkers who went silent at my advent. Even the one-armed bandit, a coin already in and the handle pulled, stopped working while the surly and ulcerous landlord asked what I wanted. I debated taking Dismal a tin of beer, but settled on lemonade, a bag of onion crisps and some peanuts. He certainly appreciated the attention I paid him, but it wasn’t every day that I had a fully paid up member of the police force in my car.

Rain slowed me down, and the hypnotic rhythm of the wipers lulled me perilously. I rubbed my eyes so hard I almost mashed them back into my head and lost the sight of them altogether. When I switched off the engine and headlights beyond Corby, the sound of rain pounding on the roof was comforting. ‘Dismal,’ I said, ‘we’re on the loose. You’ve been abandoned by the world, but I’ll look after you. As for me, if I survive explaining to Lord Moggerhanger how I let his precious packages slip through my fingers to the wrong people, I’ll live forever, or for as long as makes no difference.’

A passing car lit up our habitation. Dismal yawned, and I let us both out, hoping dog piss wouldn’t burn the rubber off the tyres. We farted, and got back inside. Dismal slept on the spare seat in front, while I stretched my legs in the back.

Twelve

Dismal’s tongue felt like wet pumice on the back of my neck, and I came out of sleep as from a near fatal wound that needed a decent period of convalescence before I could consider myself halfway ready for the front line. I pushed him away. ‘It’s too early. Leave me alone.’

Crimson rags of cloud did not inspire me to be on the move, and for springtime it was as cold as winter. I lit a cigarette, glad I didn’t have to share it with anyone, though Dismal looked as if expecting a puff. We weren’t in the trenches yet, so I refused. To get him out of his sulk I threw a few scraps onto a sheet of newspaper and while he gobbled I looked at the map and listened to the weather forecast, which again was rattled off so quickly that I understood nothing, though perhaps I didn’t want to, because today would be the day of reckoning, and the future state of the heavens seemed irrelevant. No matter how much I dawdled down the A1, I would be face to face with Moggerhanger by the end of it.

I was happy in a manic and probably dangerous kind of way, as I walked along the road breathing deeply. To the wonder of passing motorists I trotted back to the car and jumped up and down a hundred times to get my sluggish blood flowing. Rummaging in the boot, I found a length of rope. Did Moggerhanger keep it so as to hang himself when news of his financial collapse came over on Radio Two? Or was it to strangle somebody else who had displeased him by losing a valuable consignment of drugs? I looped it through Dismal’s collar and took him for a walk, but it was too muddy underfoot to go far. He saw a rabbit, and almost pulled me face-down among the primroses and wood sorrel. A pigeon broke cover and climbed over the sheen of a bank of bluebells.

We floated down the ramp and joined the A1, and Dismal gave a half smile as I moved to the outer lane and overtook a macadam-breaking juggernaut. The sun polished my unshaven face through the windscreen, and instead of enjoying my run down the eighty-mile funnel to the Smoke I sweated at the prospect of getting there. Freedom ends where responsibility begins — or so I’d heard — but I would much rather have stayed in the muddy wood listening to the collared dove warbling mindlessly for its mate than come up against the Moggerhanger gang. In my feckless way I had fallen into the same mess that had forced Bill Straw to take refuge in the rafters of Blaskin’s flat, and little did he know that I might be joining him.

Insanity was my companion and I stopped in the next layby to consider the feasibility of driving to Athens or Lisbon. Even if I didn’t put the idea into operation, at least I would be delayed half an hour thinking about it. I stared at the map till its colours sent me boggle-eyed, then threw it flapping into the back, where Dismal, thinking it was some kind of toy, chewed it into tatters.

I tied him to the post of a litter bin while I walked up and down. All I lacked was Napoleon’s hat and Caesar’s sword. Lorries on the inner lane honked as they passed what seemed to be a man pushing a motorbike along the hard shoulder. To me it might have been a Japanese samurai on horseback — or on somebody else’s back — till denser traffic cut the spectacle from view, and whatever it was had shinned up the bank to safety. The life of the road went on.

Not wanting to leave the layby, all I could do was reflect on the idleness which had afflicted me since birth. The few jobs I had taken since quitting school at fifteen had only been ways towards not having to work at all. Even in those days I considered it my duty not to deprive a fellow human being of regular and paid employment. To be without work was, to me, as natural as having work seemed to nearly everybody else, so I never wasted time making a decision on the matter. I had no conscience, because not to work was hereditary rather than acquired. I hadn’t had the example of a father going out in overalls every day, which in any case would have convinced me as nothing else that I would never be so daft as to take on such drudgery myself. And seeing my mother go to work at the factory — though she had done it cheerfully enough — merely told me that no one ought to be subjected to it.

On the other hand, I sensed that it would not do for me to encourage anyone else to follow the same course into idleness. Somebody had to work and at the moment, thank God, a lot still preferred to. I had never wanted society to disintegrate into a state of chaos, because if I happened to be around I might get pulled in to help when the whole show needed rebuilding.

Before I could climb into the car I was transfixed by the apparition of a man in a blue forage cap with flowing hair and a dayglo orange cape pushing a laden pram along the hard shoulder towards the layby. A pennant said POMES A MILE EACH, and as he came into the space which seemed rightfully mine, with the tinny wail of music from a transistor, I saw that on one side of the pram had been aerosolled: POETRY COUNCIL ART-MOBILE and on the other RONALD DELPHICK’S ARTE-FACTORY. A huge black-and-white panda-doll in the pram looked as if it hadn’t had its nappy changed for a week, and Dismal went into a frenzy of barking, pulling at the rope as if the panda’s rotund guts were packed with the choicest hash.

‘Call your tiger off,’ he said. ‘That panda is my living. And I’m very nasty when I’m roused.’

Dismal seemed to understand, and came away. Delphick wiped the sweat off his face and parked his contraption behind the car. He sat on the ground, opened his cape, spat, shut his eyes, spread his arms and went into a rhythmic muttering, swaying back and forth. A deep grumble came from his stomach and he sounded like a gorilla trying to get at his loved one in the neighbouring cage. He had little bells on the ends of his fingers, but much of the sound was eliminated by passing traffic though Delphick, to his credit, didn’t seem to mind.

The name was familiar, and so the face might have been, except that over ten years had passed since Blaskin and I had stumbled into one of his Poetry Pub readings. I’d heard of him from time to time, when his antics hit the papers, as when he threw a heap of bedding from the visitors’ gallery in the House of Commons, which he said to reporters afterwards was intended to signify his blanket support for the IRA. No doubt he had moderated his opinions from those days, otherwise he wouldn’t have got so many grants from the Poetry Council, unless they had made them only to keep him quiet.

He stood up, looked at the sky and yawned. ‘That’s enough of that. I’ve done me mantra.’

‘How often do you do it?’

‘Morning, noon and night, I give the Gods a fright. Night, noon and morning, I give them another warning.’ He looked at me: ‘Three times a day to you. Haven’t I seen you sometime before? I never forget a face. You’re Gilbert Blaskin’s son. I saw you in that pub, when I was pumping a plump popsy’s pubes — or trying to. I’m allus trying to.’

‘That was ten years ago,’ I said.

He closed an eye. ‘It’s ten days, with my memory. I’m cursed with total and immediate recall.’

‘Lucky,’ I said.

‘Ain’t it? Do you want to buy a poem?’

‘What sort?’

His beard, and mane of black hair streaked with grey, swung around his face. He was about my age, but looked twenty years older because I was short haired and clean shaven. ‘There’s only one sort of poem,’ he said. ‘A poem-poem, a panda-poem, a polysyllabic pentameter poem. A Delphick ode, if you like.’ He moved his panda pram a bit further from Dismal’s frothing jaws.

‘How much is it?’

Quick as a flash: ‘What can you afford?’

‘Fifty pee?’

‘Drop dead. “Poems a mile each clean the mouth with bleach, though poems a killer-meter might sound a bit sweeter.” That’ll cost you a quid. I’ve got to have some toast with my tea. I ain’t had breakfast yet, and I’ve been pushing me panda pram all night. You want me to whine? I’ll whine if you like. Haven’t you ever seen a poet whine, you well-fed, Rolls-Royce-driving millionaire swine? What’s a quid to a well-fed underbled chap like you? That angry young man peroration will cost you two quid. I’d like a Danish pastry as well.’

I laughed. ‘You won’t get a penny out of me for a poem, but if you like to chuck your panda-contraption in the boot I’ll give you a lift to the Burntfat Service Station and buy you breakfast, which I suppose will cost me more than a couple of quid.’

‘I knew I could rely on you,’ he said. ‘If I remember rightly, we’re working-class lads together, aren’t we?’

‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘any of that working-class crap and you and your pervert panda will spill straw all over the highway. Don’t “working-class” me. I’ve never worked in my life, and neither have you.’

He looked at me through half closed eyes, while we lifted the pram off the oil-stained gravel into the boot. ‘I’ll talk to you after I’ve had my breakfast,’ he said sullenly. ‘The panda’s hungry.’

I pressed the belly button, but it didn’t squeak. ‘What’s inside?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

Dismal insisted on sitting beside me in the front. ‘I don’t think he likes me,’ Delphick remarked, when I wove through the mêlée of traffic.

I adjusted the mirror, flicked out of place by Dismal’s tail. ‘It takes him a long time to get to know people. Have you seen June lately?’

‘Not since last year. It was a lousy wet month, if I remember.’

‘I mean the girl you got pregnant in Leeds, and then left to fend for herself in London. She worked at a strip club to support herself and the kid. A little girl, wasn’t it?’

I saw that half his teeth were bad when he laughed. ‘There’ve been about five hundred others since then. You can’t expect me to remember every one. I’ve got to do something in my spare time. You can’t write poetry twenty-four hours a day. One of these weeks I hope to get married long enough to drive the wife into a loony bin. I’ll never be a great poet till I’ve done that. Unless she’s got a lot of money, then I’ll have to watch my Ps and Qs.’

I wanted to set Dismal onto him, though I knew he wasn’t as bad as he made himself out. ‘I thought you had total recall?’ But he didn’t answer. ‘What are you going south for?’

He took out a packet of cigarettes and didn’t offer me one. I reached for my cigars and he put his cigarettes away. I didn’t offer him a cigar, so he got a cigarette back from his pocket and lit up. ‘I’m on tour,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a gig in Stevenage tonight. I’m on a POEMARCH to raise money for a new mag, so I stop at every place to give a reading. The mag’s going to be run by the CIA — Community, Information, Arts. Some of it’s going to be poems — my poems under different names. The first issue will have a hundred pages. There’ll be a psychological analysis of the fiction of Sidney Blood and the difference between his influence on the working classes and the middle classes. Then some previously undiscovered poems from Bokhara by Ghengis Khan, each one a mountain of skulls made up of the word Delphick in tiny writing written by a German poet and translated by me. Chuck in a few Panda Poems, and there you have it. Maybe I’ll get a slab of the latest book Gilbert Blaskin is working on. His stuff’s real rubbish, but his name might sell a few copies.’

‘He’s writing somebody’s life story at the moment.’ For one dizzy second I saw a way of embarrassing this man who made my immorality look like the minor transgressions of a Sunday School teacher with TB.

‘Whose?’

‘Moggerhanger’s.’

Dismal snapped at Delphick’s hand, so that he dropped his cigarette. I punched Dismal and told him to behave in front of guests.

‘Lord Moggerhanger’s?’

‘Why not? A chunk of that should look good beside the poems of Ghengis Khan.’ Back on the inside lane, a couple of lorries walled by. ‘What are you going to call your magazine?’

‘Drop dead,’ he said.

I didn’t think I’d offended him. ‘Fuck you,’ I retorted.

‘No,’ he said too mildly for me to think we were arguing, ‘Drop Dead is what I’m going to call it.’

‘A good title,’ I said.

He pushed a form under my nose. ‘Sign a subscription form. Ten copies for fifteen quid.’

I screwed it up and threw it out of the window. ‘Come back next year.’

He didn’t seem to mind. ‘I’ll have the best table of contents any mag ever had to start off with. Every item the epitome of spontaneous art.’

‘How’s the fund-raising going?’ I passed Dismal a crisp from the glove box.

‘Awful. But I’ve got a grant from the Poetry Council, and some money from the CIA. It ain’t enough, because I need to decorate my house at Doggerel Bank in Yorkshire, and that’ll cost a bob or two.’

‘I thought it was all for the mag?’

‘I’m starting a poetry museum in the parlour of Doggerel Bank, so some of it’s got to go on that. I’ll need central heating, for a start. There’ll be an enormous plastic bowl for the public to slot money into as contributions for its upkeep, like in the Tate or the Royal Academy, and if they’re cold it’ll make ’em stingy. But with the old CH purring away they’ll give everything they’ve got.’

I shut up, out of admiration.

‘I’m only telling you all this because you aren’t a poet yourself. Or a journalist. Tonight I’m giving a reading at the leisure centre, me and the panda. I might make a quid or two. I charge one pound fifty entrance fee, only I don’t let anybody in. My poems, and Panda’s, have to be spoken to the empty air. People’s auras would spoil it. But they can hear us from outside, and they can applaud if they like. That’s allowed. The door’s locked though, and that keeps it a pure experience. Poetry is for space, the spice of emptiness. Emptiness eats it up, regurgitates it into the atmosphere so that it gets back into people in its purest form. They might not know it — how can they, the bourgeois pigs? — but it sweetens their soul. A single ear inside the hall when I’m speaking would desecrate it.’

‘They should kick the door down,’ I said.

‘Then I would read my poems silently. You’ve got to let ’em know that poet power rules. Otherwise, what’s life all about? Most of the time I’m at Doggerel Bank, but every so often I go on a Panda Tour to a different part of the country. It gets me out of myself. Doggerel Bank’s very cut off. Do you want to come to my reading tonight? I need all the audience I can get, but don’t bring the dog. They’ve had plenty of advance warning at the centre, so there’ll be lots of fab women lined up to meet me. I sometimes end with two, and copulate to the rhythm of coryambics. “Them Greeks knew a thing or two, but you never reach the end of an ode/come in the middle of a line/like dying out of life/halfway through.”’

He scribbled on a piece of paper, unable to speak for a few minutes. I was tempted to tip him onto the next layby, but unfortunately I’d promised him breakfast. When he looked up he was snuffling with emotion: ‘Is it far to The Rabid Puker?’

‘I don’t know.’ The sky in front was covered in broken jigsaw shapes, pieces of white and crimson cloud, with blue between. The light was orange and ominous. A car behind tried to tailgate me, but I pulled away with ease. Delphick snorted, a dead cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

I got the tank filled at the petrol station, then followed Delphick into the plastic dining palace. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ll start with a double whisky,’ he said. ‘I’ve been perished all night.’

‘You’ll have the basic meal, and pay for your own extras.’

He picked up the menu card. ‘Bingo Breakfast, love.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Full house.’

‘Make it three.’ Dismal had stayed in the car. Delphick grabbed the waitress’s wrist. She was a lovely young blonde with a fine figure but a very sarky mouth. ‘Do you want to buy a poem for fifty bob?’ he said.

‘You must be joking.’

He wouldn’t let go. ‘They make a lovely birthday pressie. Or a thoughtful wedding gift.’

‘If you don’t leave me alone I’ll call the manager. I hate this job.’ She looked at me. ‘Tell the tramp to let me go.’

‘Let her go.’

‘Bollocks,’ he said.

She glared, as if I was worse than him. ‘I wish people like you hadn’t got such soft hearts. You’re allus picking deadbeats up and bringing ’em here for a feed. I can’t understand what you get out of it. Makes you feel good, does it? Why don’t you leave the dirty old bastard to die on the hard shoulder?’

Delphick’s eyes softened with tenderness, but he had an iron grip.

‘Look, crumb,’ she said, ‘stop it, or I’ll call the manager.’

I was fed up. It was too early in the morning to tolerate unashamed con-men like him. ‘If you don’t let her go, I’ll smash you in the teeth.’

He looked at me, as if to start a fight, then released her. She went to the counter with the little order pad swinging at her arse. ‘The trouble with you,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t understand the courtship ritual.’

‘Neither does she,’ I told him.

He took the top off the sauce bottle and swigged a mouthful, and a few driblets at his beard gave him the look of a vampire at dawn. ‘I’ve been through the subtlety stage and, on balance, I get a few more successes by the direct approach. In war the indirect approach is best, but love is the opposite of war. Have you ever read the I Ching? Mao swore by it. He wouldn’t have done the Long March if it hadn’t been for the I Ching. But in matters of love, or lust, women get just as fed up with subtlety as men. A straight yes or no saves time. They’re too busy these days, most of ’em going out to work and keeping men just to show they’re more equal than we are. Lovely. So long as you say you love ’em you can just get straight in.’

I realised how much I’d been cut off in my ten years at Upper Mayhem. It was like listening to myself in the old days. I’d learned though, but Delphick hadn’t, and I taxed him with it while waiting for our grub.

‘I could learn if I liked,’ he claimed. ‘It’s not beyond me. But if I learned too much I might get no more inspiration — as a poet, per se, see? You’ve got to be careful, because poets don’t get pensions. If they did, it might be different. Some of the eighty-year-old versifiers might well want to pack it in, but they can’t.’

‘I thought poets got good money, these days.’

He looked like a poxed-up old pirate. ‘They earn a pittance now and again. There’s all kinds of spin-offs, like grants, and talks, and performances, and editing, or anthologising when you use all your mates’ poems and expect them to pay you back in kind for years to come. Then you might do an odd review and cut your enemies to bits; or you can waffle on on the BBC about a new working-class poet you’ve just discovered but who’s blind, eighty, and lives alone on a wet hillside in Cumberland with his dog — but whose poems you’ve written yourself. It’s not easy, but you can pick up a bob or two. For itinerants there used to be workhouses, now there’s local arts groups if you want to go on tour. All you’ve got to do is write letters, and plan it well. I can write forty letters a day when I’m in full spate.’

‘That sounds like work.’

‘Well, it’s better than filling in holes on the motorway. I never let work become a burden, though.’

The waitress put three plates of breakfast and three pots of coffee on our table. Delphick locked onto her wrist again, but she snapped it free and stood out of reach. ‘If you do that once more, you mangy fucking tomcat, I’ll pour a pot of boiling water over you. I will. I promise.’

‘That’s the stuff, miss.’

I took a plate of breakfast to Dismal. ‘Wake up,’ I said, opening the car door. His eyes widened, and a long purple tongue slid over an egg and drew it in. He paused, being a dog of good manners, and pressed his Button B nose against the back of my hand. I patted him a time or two, then left him finding his way around a piece of fried bread. I got back inside to see Delphick three-quarters through the second plate of breakfast — mine. ‘Hey, you bastard!’ I pulled it away. ‘Keep off my grub.’

He yanked it back without looking up. ‘I thought you’d gone outside to eat yours. Anyway, you can afford to buy two.’

I prayed for boots big enough to make an impression. ‘I don’t own that Roll-Royce. I’m only the chauffeur.’

A lorry driver sat at the end of the room. ‘Next time I see his contraption on the road I’m going to drive all twenty-four wheels over it. He’s a right pest, he is.’

Delphick kept his head down and wiped up fat with a folded piece of bread. I went to order another breakfast while my coffee got cool. ‘If that poet comes in here again,’ the waitress told me, her dazzling green eyes looking directly into mine, so that I saw in even more sensual detail the delights of her undressed presence, ‘I’m going to put rat poison in his grub, even though I swing for it. He don’t respect anybody. And I like to be respected.’

‘Why don’t you put it in now?’ My hand was at her waist, and she didn’t push it away. ‘You don’t swing for murder anymore. The most you’ll get is eighteen months, for aggravating circumstances. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?’

She smiled. ‘I’ll have to think about it, won’t I?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ettie.’

‘I like that.’

‘I’d have cut my throat if you didn’t.’

‘You are sarky, aren’t you?’

‘Sometimes. What’s your name?’

‘Michael. Do you want a drive in a Rolls-Royce to London?’

‘Not if it isn’t yours.’

‘It’ll be a lovely smooth ride.’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

Maybe she thought a lot when she wasn’t dishing up grub — which was most of the time. Her thoughts had to be short, though, which was the best kind to have, because they didn’t take up much precious time. Neither did they keep her from action, I assumed. She was the sort of girl I liked, and couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.

As a breakfast I could only compare it with the one from Bridgitte the morning I got out of prison. Perhaps because I had taken her part against Delphick, Ettie piled on bacon, two more eggs, beans, tomatoes, four slices of fried bread and half a tin of mushrooms. She either bribed the cook or she was having an affair with him. If she was, she wouldn’t be for much longer if I had anything to do with it.

Delphick’s eyes bulged with envy at the sight of my plate. ‘Did you put grease on her nipples?’

I pulled him up by his coat and held my fist the requisite few inches from the bridge of his nose. It stayed there for ten full seconds. He didn’t struggle or say anything, but turned whiter with each tick of the clock. I pushed him away, and he barely righted himself when the chair fell. ‘Get that panda out of my car before I set the dog on it.’

He went, such pain and hurt pride on his face that only now did I think he was real. I didn’t like him, because he was spoiling the day by making me feel sorry for him, and now making me feel guilty at an over-hasty reaction. But he’d insulted a woman, and I hated that, though I suppose I should have been cool and taken it like a man.

I sat down to eat, my appetite not entirely spoiled. In fact it returned, the more I put back. I hadn’t realised how famished I was. I drained the coffee pot, then ordered another, and two Danish-style pastries. ‘You’re hungry,’ Ettie said admiringly.

‘I can’t help it. It’s you that’s doing it. The more I look at you, the more I want to eat. And you know what that means?’

She blushed, the little trollop.

‘I’m six foot two and weigh a hundred and sixty pounds, but if I lived with you, and you kept on feeding me like this, I’d weigh as much as Ten Ton Tommy. They’d have to lift me on and off with a block-and-tackle, but I don’t think you’d be disappointed. I shouldn’t talk like this, I know, but I’m only having a bit of a joke, though I was quite serious when I said you’re the best-looking and most vivacious woman I’ve seen for a long time. You really are. I respect you enormously. I’m often up this way, so I’ll stop more often on the road and say hello, if that’s all right with you.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only don’t bring that fucking deadbeat ponce with the panda-wagon. I can’t stand him. He came here once before and we couldn’t get rid of him. The man who brought him suddenly took against him and wouldn’t give him a lift away from the place. So he fell asleep on the floor. We didn’t know what to do. He snored like a hacksaw. Then he woke up and started swearing. We couldn’t throw him out because it was snowing. He said he’d phone up the television news if we did. I told him to crawl across the dual carriageway and fuck off to Scotland, but he wouldn’t budge. In the end the manager gave a van driver five quid to dump him in Cambridge. But you’re different. Do you want any more to eat?’

My early morning hard-on came back, and I thought I’d said enough already to indicate that I had nothing to lose by spouting a bit more in somewhat plainer fashion. ‘Do you let rooms here, that’s all I want to know. I’d give my right arm and more to be alone with you. As soon as I came in and saw you by the hot water urn I knew I loved you. I wasn’t going to say so, though, because it didn’t seem right. I respected you. And besides, there’s a time and a place for everything, as it says in the Bible. My wife died five years ago, and I made a vow never to make love with anyone again, and as time went on it became easier to keep that holy vow’ — I made my voice miss a beat, and held my head as if in pain — ‘until I came in here and saw you.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she smiled, ‘but go on.’

‘That’s because you’re a very sincere person. I wouldn’t have told you this if I hadn’t seen straightaway that you were a very sincere person. What I’m saying is the truth, and I couldn’t have told it, except to a very sincere person. You’re the first person I’ve told it to, and I respect you enormously for not believing me. If you’d believed me I would have got up and walked out. There aren’t many sincere people left in the world, and now you’ve certainly made my day. You’re busy, I know’ — there was no one in now except us — ‘but I’d like to talk to you properly, just the two of us, in a private room somewhere, any room where we can be alone.’

My face got closer, and my hands crept around her waist. She shook, and I thought she was going to come out with some filthy language and run, but she held my hand and looked back at me so that while she melted at the touch of my fingers I melted at the crutch and pressed close enough for her to feel what, for better or worse, was coming between us at the hour of our tribulation.

The windows and door of the flimsily built café rattled at the passage of some particularly weighty giant on wheels. I knew the time had come, that it was now or never, so pressed even closer to begin whispering sweet nothings into her pretty eggshell ear, my lips brushing against the plain wire earrings. ‘I love you. I want to kiss your lips, suck your tits, and lick your sweet cunt till you come, then sink my prick into you, and grip your shapely arse and push your lovely guts around till my spunk shoots so far up you it comes out of your mouth and splashes against the opposite wall. Oh my sweet darling, I can’t wait.’

‘Oh, you dirty bastard,’ she said. ‘Come on, though.’

We leaned by the wall in a little cubby-hole of brooms and mops, and kissed ourselves into a frenzy. It was good to get back to somebody from the working classes (if I could find the right one, I’d always thought, and she was it) boiling for me because she didn’t think I was a slum-brat from the working classes. She came with a long moan, assuming I was somebody different (and I suppose I was by now), and then I shot, knowing that she could have been the girl next door, fully grown up, who I used to play dirty games with in the air raid shelter. It worked marvels, and was all the better for being over in a few minutes. Some say there’s nothing like a good fuck, and they could be right, but I say there’s nothing better than a quick fuck that comes off for both participants.

I asked her again to travel with me to London, and don’t know what I’d have done if she had said yes, but I only asked knowing she’d say no. ‘Next time I might,’ she said. Would I phone and write and call again, and then maybe we’d slowly get to know each other because she had never met anyone like me before. I was astounded and gratified that somebody could know me — or think they did, which was the same — in such a short time, when I’d been living in my own skin all my life, and was nowhere near knowing myself.

I thought, as I went out to the toilets, that you only had a chance of knowing yourself when you were acquainted with a lot of people who said they knew you and acted as if they did. But I also thought what a pity that somebody should fall in love with me, and me half in love with them, when I was on my way to London in a situation where, before many hours were out, I would get into an argument which might leave my face so cut up that Ettie wouldn’t recognise me anymore.

I felt as light as air because whatever was supposed to happen could never be said to have happened until it had, and between one and the other was always a wider space and a longer time than you could imagine. I glanced at the wall and saw a piece of paper stuck there, which I thought was something about not hurling your fag butts into the piss channel, but on zipping up and going close I read:

Ronald Delphick, poet lariot, roped into life with a naval cord, cabin-buoyed to the Wash and the Severn Seas. Yo ho ho on a fat woman’s hornipipe. Poetry performance, panda-wise, at Stevenage Leisure Centre half past seven tonight. Admission one pound fifty. Programmes two pounds. Books for sail.

I’d hoped he had vanished, but when I got outside he was wiping gnats off the windscreen with a piece of wet cloth. ‘Thanks for the breakfasts. I’m sorry for that bit of bovver in there.’

He seemed different, as if he’d been drunk in the café, or stoned, but was now fully recovered. While I’d been with Ettie he must have had a wash-and-comb-up in the toilet, because he looked cleaner and smarter. I couldn’t tell him to walk to Stevenage, so opened the door for him to get in. Dismal dashed out and left a squalid mess by a dustbin. When I looked for his breakfast plate Delphick said he’d already taken it inside. ‘I saw that waitress, and she was crying. What happened?’

‘It’s none of your business.’ I passed him a cigar. ‘Suck that.’

Dismal sat beside me, and I set off once more into the mainstream of motorised life. We were quiet for a while, Dismal like a statue in front, Delphick like a dummy behind and the panda sticking out of the boot like a waxwork. I didn’t feel lively, either, but was otherwise happy. The clouds were white and dense, like those on engravings of Greenland in picture books. I almost expected to see a whaling ship come from behind one, then braked to avoid hitting a Cortina, and swung out to overtake after checking in the mirror that all was clear.

A dual carriageway took us between stunted trees, and in spite of a few attractive laybys I decided to drop Delphick at the slip road into Stevenage, so that he could push in with his panda-pram in appropriate style. The southern weather was better, open sky with few clouds, so neither he nor his cargo of literature would get wet. I told him my intention.

‘That’s good of you,’ he said. ‘If you’re ever in Yorkshire, you’ll be welcome to stay a day or two at Doggerel Bank. There’s always a pan of stew on the Rayburn, and a demijohn of elderberry wine. Bring a sleeping bag, though, because I’ve only got one bed. And a bottle of whisky, if you can. It gets a bit damp at times, but you’ll manage all right.’

He meant well. ‘Thanks.’

‘And a few tins of cat food might be useful.’ He couldn’t think of anything else, a bad silence because I dreaded the time when I would have to let him off. I wanted to go back and plead with Ettie to come with me, and even for Delphick to stay on, so that at least I would be among familiar faces when the big chop came.

If my depressions ever lasted more than a few moments maybe I would have learned something. But they didn’t, and I never had the spiritual constitution to support mental pain long enough either to be destroyed by one, or educated and improved. I always sensed a feeling of regret when I began to come out of the gloom. ‘Tell me a poem,’ I said to Delphick, ‘and I’ll give you thirty bob.’

‘Two quid.’

‘Two quid, then.’ I’d have given him five. ‘There’ll just be time before I put you off.’

He rustled a few papers. ‘I’ll tell you a love poem.’

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘What’s wrong with a love poem? Panda and me perform love poems perfectly.’

‘Don’t you have a funny poem?’

His laugh nearly cracked the mirror. ‘There’s no such thing. Laughter and poems don’t go together. People only buy poems when they cry, or are moved. If I make ’em laugh they just feel good, and walk out by the overloaded table without buying one of my books.’

‘Any poem will do,’ I said.

He phlegmed out of the window. ‘Listen to this, then. It’s called “Dusk Queen” — by Ronald Delphick:

‘A rhododendron for a rudder

as we steer the wild canals:

slither-lines of silver between black and green.

Geraniums on cottage windows

claw golden glass,

smokestacks pouring eye-shadow

in God’s evening glare

grabbing the day and night to work in.

Headstocks of a coalmine draw

cages up at dusk as our barge

between the slag heaps steers its way,

and you on the burnished poop deck

sitting while you play

Gary Glitter on the wind-up gramophone.’

A Capri cut in a bit too close in front, playing his own little game. A Rolls-Royce is sport for everybody, and Delphick didn’t notice my smart avoidance procedure. ‘I know it’s not that good, and that I’m still working on it, but you might fucking well say something.’

‘If I had a lady in this car,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have given you a lift in a million years.’

‘Oh,’ he said nastily, ‘you’re power mad, are you?’

‘But I liked your poem. It was better than I thought it would be.’

‘Oh, bloody good. Bloody good. Now I know why I sweat blood. Just to hear something complimentary like that. You’ve not only made my day, but you’ve made my life.’

‘I enjoyed it.’ Praise cost nothing. ‘I was so engrossed you nearly made me have an accident.’ The straight dual carriageway was fabulous for speed. I remembered the cluttered and winding ribbon of death on my first motorised trip to London nearly fifteen years ago. ‘You really did.’

‘A real accident?’

‘Another split second and we’d have been a blazing funeral pyre on the central reservation: you, me, Dismal and Panda going skywards in a cloud of soot and flame — and maybe the four people in the offending car as well. A holocaust, in fact.’

‘Marvellous.’ He scribbled away. ‘Go on.’

‘There would be a multiple pile-up and a tailback for ten miles, and the sky would reflect ribbons of blue flashing lights, as police cars and ambulances tried to get to us. And if one car’s petrol tank exploded, so would the one behind, and the one behind that, and you’d have the domino theory in action right back to York, like Dick Turpin’s horse of flame called Red Bess jumping the turnpike gates.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ he screamed, causing Dismal to bark. ‘Don’t tell me. Now I’ve got it: “Like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” That’s it. Wonderful. What an image. Delphick does it again. “Dick Turpin rides a horse called Poker Lips through a multiple pile-up …” Now you can go on.’

His enthusiasm had dried me up.

‘Well, go on, then!’

‘Write your own poems.’ I signalled to get off the motorway. ‘Here’s the parting of the ways.’

We lifted his panda-wagon out of the boot, and he didn’t thank me for services willingly provided, but then, I was glad to see him go with pennant waving, making progress towards his triumphant reception in Stevenage.

I laid a hand on Dismal’s head as we got back to the big wide track. He seemed pleased that we were on our own again and nudged me fondly. I was tired. Composing Delphick’s poem had worn me out, making me realise how hard a poet’s life must be. A graceful road bridge spanned the motorway and gave a perfect side-on view of a jam sandwich, at which Dismal merely twitched. There was something reassuring about the sight, and in the apparition of a London taxi which overtook me and was soon well in front. I stopped dragging my heels and went a bit faster, thinking it time to show everybody that the Rolls-Royce was still king of the road.

When I overtook the taxi at eighty he flashed me, and Dismal breathed down my neck with full approval at our speed. I floated effortlessly up to a ton and wondered who had been in that cop car crossing the overhead bridge near Stevenage. Moggerhanger had many contacts among the jam sandwich fraternity, and both organisations were interested in my whereabouts, so maybe the cop car had radioed my progress to the metropolis. I slowed down to ninety, not wanting a speeding charge to be the first of many stepping stones to twenty-five years. ‘And it is recommended that he serve the whole of the sentence.’

There’s some benefit to having a split personality, especially when you have constant access to the most cheerful, positive and optimistic side. That was one of the things Bridgitte couldn’t stand, yet if I hadn’t had such an easygoing side to my nature we would have been divorced years ago, which maybe was something else she held against me. I felt a vivid and passionate longing to see Sam and Rachel, as well as Smog, but crushed it down as being counter-productive to my scheme of survival. It was no use driving to Harwich and onto the boat to Holland with so much unfinished business in the air.

I slowed down further on the long slope before the island at the end of the motorway and slid into the path of a lorry to get around. The driver didn’t like it, so told his mate to sit on the horn, the noise following me the whole way to Hatfield. It was bad driving, to bring such attention to myself. He tailgated me for a while, forty white halitosis headlights burning my neck and almost driving Dismal mad. Then he turned off, so I settled into a sedate trundle on the long grind to the North Circular.

From twenty miles away, on a rise of the road, I saw the sprawl of London. I could smell it, and the car seemed to speed up even though I didn’t put my foot on the pedal. Half a hoarding was missing, where a lorry had smashed into it, and a large signpost a few miles further along was so covered in mud it could hardly be read. The pull was definitely on when I got to Barnet, orange sodiums fully lit even though the sun burned bright. I threaded the denser but quick-moving traffic through the matchless boxwood villas of Mill Hill, till I was turning west on the North Circular, passing places I had ticked off a few days ago but which now seemed from another life.

Every traffic light turned green at my advance, and I got into London too early for comfort. I had imagined a night approach, on the understanding that if there was a barney when I handed the car back there would be a chance to vanish like a cat in the blackout. I stopped at every pedestrian crossing to let anyone over who stood within fifty yards of the edge. If a traffic light did turn amber I was pathetically grateful for the favour of being held up.

‘Are you going then, or aren’t you?’ I shouted to one old lady, who therefore felt she must hurry so fast to the crossing that I dreaded her having a heart attack. I should have gone to Delphick’s gig in Stevenage, got him to take me on as his manager and press agent (or pander) so as to hold back from London for another few days.

Instead I decided to visit Blaskin’s flat, and see how Bill Straw was starving along. I cut into Town on Watling Street and Edgware Road and an hour later found a parking meter near Harrods.