‘A career woman. She paid for all that. I owe her too.’ He shuddered and made a bedraggled flutter with his hands. ‘I’ve got to get out of this crap. You’re just a jammy yob riding a fluke. What do you care? Just shut up and give me the fucking money.’
This is what I wanted. This was what I needed to see and hear and feel, the salute of his fear as we passed each other by. Me going up, him going down. Perhaps this was what I was paying for.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s see what I can do.’
A sharp bell sounded, followed by three grim thuds on the outer door. Instantly Alec stood up and backed off with practised stealth towards the bathroom, miming self-erasure with his palm. He nodded fiercely at me, and vanished.
Holding my glass and cigarette, I unlatched the door and tugged it open. A heavy man with ragged hair was leaning as if exhausted on the jamb, rubbing his eyes with his fists. His smile was mean and weary but not yet quenched of amusement. Yes, he was big, about my weight. His shiny fat suit caught the real light at the end of the corridor.
‘Yeah?’
‘Mr Llewellyn?’ he said, and straightened his neck.
He wasn’t expecting me, someone like me. 1 don’t have Alec’s gaunt, dandyish look, the scuppered cunning of the top-drawer desperado. He wasn’t expecting me, someone of his own kind.
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Is Mr Llewellyn at home, by any chance? Have I caught him in? Mind if I take a look?’
‘You’re not coming in here.’
‘All it is’, he said, ‘is a little bit of silliness. He’s very silly, your friend. Us, we’re serious. We get aggravated when people start being silly.’ He stepped forward. ‘Now let’s sort this out.’
‘Oy,’ I said, and stepped forward myself. ‘I know your trade. You buy bounced cheques at half price, then go out on the squeeze.’ This was no arm-breaker or face-flayer. He served low down in the money army, a freelancer, a forager. He didn’t beat it out of you. He bored it out of you. He bored for money. ‘You’re hardly legal,’ I said. ‘You’re a cowboy. On your bike.’
The heavy man dropped his head and turned. For a moment I saw him sitting in his parked Culprit or 666, red-faced and winded, thinking how to save his day. But then he spat on the floor and looked up at me wryly.
‘You can tell your bent friend he’ll be seeing me again. And so will you.’
‘Oh you frighteners,’ I said. This guy had no future in the frightening business. He just wasn’t frightening.
‘Soon,’ he said, and walked off down the passage stirring his keys.
Feeling braced, I sauntered back into the flat. ‘He’s gone,’ I said as I tipped open the bathroom door.
… Ah, pornography. Eileen was up on the basin deck. She was naked. No, she wore white pants. No, she was naked: that milky rift was simply the phantom of her bikini line. This girl (I thought suddenly), she takes pains to be realistic — but then, how hard are dancers working, when they pretend to be marionettes?… Her legs dangled over Alec’s shoulders in the loutish white light. He turned to me with an expression of vexation and strain. She turned too. Her eyes were flat and reluctantly engaged, as if she were looking into a mirror without much prospect of liking what she saw. Her mouth was even stranger. So that was where the pants were hanging out. Their frilled edges curled from her lips like a crushed bouquet.
I left the cheque on the bed. As I walked back down the corridor to the stairs I heard something, exceptionally clear and rhythmical, the sound that imitates consenting pain, the sound of a child riding the brink of its sneeze, I heard something telling me that Eileen was a noisemaker who had slipped her gag.
——————
Now Fat Paul stooped, and worked the big black bolts. And now Doris Arthur stepped into the Shakespeare, wondering where to direct her grateful smile. But Fat Paul kept his head low, like all hell’s doormen, like all hell’s bouncers … Fielding Goodney had told me that Doris was ‘a feminist of genius’. I’d assumed that this was merely droll code for sack talent, but now I wasn’t so sure. I sipped my drinks and let her seek me out in the blinding gloom. After all, Doris was the beneficiary of a university education, over at Harvard there. She could find her own way. As a rule, I hate people who are the beneficiaries of a university education. I hate people with degrees, O-levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand diplomas … And you hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money.