‘We’re sorry about that, sir,’ said the girl, and Keith slipped her his pained nod.
‘Now this is a bit more bloody like it,” said Terry to himself.
‘Right,’ said Keith. ‘Right:
We drink the champagne. We call for another. One by one the girls finish in the bog or the powder parlour and are redirected to the improved table. Mitzi, Keith’s assistant. Little Bella, the telephonist. And the predatory Trudi, an all-purpose vamp and PR strategist. (As for the hiring of girls, we have a looks-alone policy over at C. L. & S.) They will have to do a lot of laughing and listening. They can talk a bit, but only so long as we are the heroes of the tales they tell. The quenched light of this joke June, in the shape of a sail or a breast, swells its camber across the room. For a moment we all look terribly overlit in here: we look like monsters. For a moment, the whole restaurant is a pickle-jar of rug glue and dental work. But now the real fun starts. Terry is throwing bread at me, and Nigel is on the floor doing his dog imitation and snuffling at Trudi’s stockings. I notice that the middle-aged pair at the next table retract slightly and lower their heads over their food. As they huddle up, I give Terry a squirt from the shaken champagne bottle and join Keith Carburton in a few choruses of ‘We are the Champions’. No, the rest of the meal isn’t going to be much fun for those two, I’m afraid. I suppose it must have been cool for people like them in places like this before people like us started coming here also. But we’re here to stay. You try getting us out. . . Now the menus come, dispensed like examination scripts, and we hesitate and fall silent for a little while, frowning and murmuring over the strange print.
Four o’clock. In heavy, motionless, back-breaking light, Linex and Self stood swaying in front of the basement urinal. I heard the slow rasp of Terry’s three-foot zip, then the drilling of his leak against the ivory stall. There goes the day again, like so many others, just pissed away.
‘Whoar,’ said Terry with a wince.
‘How’s your dick?’
He glanced downwards. ‘Still green,’ he said in his piping, disembodied, fatman’s voice.
‘Still that thing you caught in Bali? What was it? Clap?’
‘Clap?’ he said. ‘Clap? No, mate. I caught the bloody plague.’
Then his shot face grew serious. ‘John. Have you fucked anyone’s wife recently? Run over anyone’s kids?’
‘Uh?’ I said, and pushed out a hand to steady myself against the cold wall.
‘I mean — is there anyone out to do you a bit of harm?’
‘Well yeah.’ I shifted my weight. Some days it seemed that everyone was out to do me harm.
”Real harm?’ he specified. ‘Something a little bit serious?’
‘No. What is this?’
‘I was down the Fancy Rat the other night,’ said Terry Linex. ‘We think we drink. They’re nutters down there. It’s a scotch contest. I was with this crew of villains, one of them says, “Oy. You’ve got a business associate, John Self, right?” I says, “What of it?” He says, “There’s some work out on him. Not sure what. But there’s some work out on him.” Now it’s true, as you know, that an awful lot of ballocks gets talked down the Fancy Rat. But there’s usually something in it… Want me to ask around?’
I looked into Terry’s fiery face — cheap churned hair, half an ear bitten off, penny-farthing nostrils. His teeth are as randomly angled as shards of glass on a Backstreet wall. Terry is one of the new princes, an improviser of fierce genius. His current dream is to hire a handicapped chauffeur: the Disabled sticker would give Linex unlimited parking anywhere he pleased.
‘Yeah, do that.’
‘Glad to,’ he said. ‘Better safe than sorry. Know what I mean?’
So now as I plod home through the crumpled afternoon, veering this way and that among my brothers and sisters, with eyes meeting and not meeting, it’s sort of nice to know that it’s all official.