I asked if she could give me a lift back to London and she said she could.
Elaine kept her eyes on Mark, who, one leg wiggling in his trousers, exchanged tall stories with his Dad about how quickly they had been known to get from London to the house, and back again.
‘That motherfucking …” She hesitated. ‘Christ. Sorry.’
‘Oh. Oh, that’s okay.’
So begins a stage in my descent to manhood which retrospectively seems avoidable, without significance, second rate, not worth it. The following three weeks form what might be called my Low, or the conventional nadir period. The only claim I have to originality here is that I didn’t fall behind with my work. Of course, I stopped going to school, but, without fail, I did some Maths in the morning and always an hour of Virgil in the afternoon. On top of this I conscientiously read the literature of nausea, melancholy and absurdity – Sartre, Camus, Joyce. I strolled the frosted symmetries of Graeco-Roman tragedy in Penguin translation. I unfurled myself once more to Lear and, not Hamlet, but Timon. I clocked up the jejune libidos of Shelley and Keats, and took Hardy’s Befuddled Will into account. I did my research.
Otherwise, I was careful not to wash, encouraged insomnia, failed to clean my teeth, smoked twenty Capstan Full Strength a day. I fidgeted with matchsticks to grime up my fingernails; I consigned my feet to cheesy death; I nourished ray-gun halitosis. I went for walks, wearing too little, sat in tube stations for hours lapping the soot, went to films in the sullen afternoons, coughed into dimly lit shop windows. I sipped whisky and played three-card brag with Norman most nights. I rang no one and no one rang me. I went to bed drunk, slept in my clothes and woke up every morning, terrified; I grew old painfully.
To pay back Norman (prick-fees and gambling debts), I even got a job, not on the railroad, but licking plates in a Shepherd’s Bush restaurant, just for a week, in the evenings, quid a night. The restaurant was such an immobile concern that all I really did was sit smoking fags in the well-equipped kitchen and listen to the grumbles of Joe, the cook. Joe, a young and ambitious cook, was fed up to the teeth with cooking steak and chips for the odd Pakki, would far rather have been cooking exotic dishes in a flash restaurant. Accordingly, when people ordered steak and chips, and soup, Joe tended to hawk in it, to show his contempt for such an unimaginative choice, and also because he had heard that flash cooks always hawked in the soup if given the chance. I washed up after him.
On my last night, we had only one order: steak and chips, and soup. After mature consideration, Joe offered to let me hawk in it, as a treat. I did so, with enthusiasm.
Joe looked at it and looked at me. ‘We can’t give them that,’ he said.
The turning-point, the cognito or anagnorisis, was hardly less corny than the Low itself.
I was joy-riding on the Circle Line one Monday afternoon. At High Street Kensington a youthful but hunchbacked tramp I knew got on. (I had seen him in the Gate – so often that we were virtually on nodding terms.) Because his legs were all gone to hell he disported himself about town by means of two second-hand crutches. These exertions caused him to sweat and smell a fair amount, enough, at any rate, to earn him the nickname of Mobile Armpit.
Mobile levered his way into the carriage and nose-dived on a greasy sweet-wrapper. I helped him to the seat opposite. He seemed to be in difficulty – sniffing, snorting, rifling through his damp pockets. Then he took a newspaper from the floor and was evidently about to offer its entertainments page up to his nose. Always well stocked with handkerchiefs, it appeared the least I could do to give him one, and I did.
The everyday response to this incident would be shamefaced reappraisal; comparatively, it was all right for me, etc. But what I found disturbing about my trite and rather appalled gesture of charity was an even triter and more appalled one of kinship. We’ll be underneath the Arches together, you and me, I felt I could have said, as Mobile yelped into bunched fists.