You know, I’ve been told that I don’t like women. I do like women. I think chicks are cool. I’ve been told that men don’t like women, period. Oh yeah? Who does then? Because women don’t like women.
Sometimes life looks very familiar. Life often has that familiar look in its eyes. Life is all vendetta, conspiracy, strong feeling, roused pride, self-belief, belief in the justice of its tides and floods.
Here is a secret that nobody knows: God is a woman. Look around! Of course She is.
4
ABOVE the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice. Haven’t they got a better one? Did he really look like that all the time? You’d have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive. The beaked and bum-fluffed upper lip, the oafish swelling of the jawline, the granny’s rockpool eyes. And that rug? Isn’t it a killer? I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: ‘Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.’ It works wonders.
‘Here, Fat Vince,’ I said,’—what did you have for your breakfast this morning?’
‘Me? I had a soused herring for my breakfast this morning.’
‘Lunch?’
Tripe.’
‘And what are you going to have for your dinner?’
‘Brains.’
‘Fat Vince, you’re a sick man.’
Fat Vince is beer-crate operative and freelance bouncer at the Shakespeare. He’s been in and out of this place every day for thirty-five years. So have I, in my head anyway. I was born upstairs, after all. He sipped his beer. Fat.Vince looks like shit too, and so does his son Fat Paul… I have a feeling for Fat Vince, partly because he’s a fellow heart-sufferer. His heart keeps attacking him, as mine will attack me one day. Fat Vince has a feeling for me also, I reckon. Every couple of months he takes me aside and, his breath sweet with trapped drink, asks me how I am. No one else does this. No one. He talks to me about my mother sometimes. Fat Vince is a widower too.
His wife died from being too lower class. She wasn’t up to it. My mother, she just entered a mysterious decline. I used to get into bed with her after school. I could feel her falling, dividing. Homesick for America. Too much Barry Self. Fat Vince doubles as the popular and permissive assistant-manager of a snooker hall in Victoria. He has a little scullery down there, where he cooks his mad grub. Fat Paul bounces and sharks and fills the pie-warmer. On the number-one table, the cue cleaving his chin, he hunkers down on the cush to draw his bead on the bone balls… Soon after my mother died Fat Vince took my dad out in a famous fight, by the gents’ in the alley when the Shakespeare was young.
‘That’s real food, son,’ said Fat Vince. ‘You wouldn’t know — spent your whole life in a fucking pub. Give you a bag of crisps, you think you’re in heaven.’
‘Here, you know Loyonel,’ said Fat Paul.
‘Yeah,’ said Fat Vince.
Now Fat Vince isn’t royalty but he speaks with a certain slot-mouthed restraint. Not Fat Paul — Fat Paul, with his full-breasted bulk, his impassive sloped slab of a face, his parched pub rug, and the cruel blond eyebrows which give the eyes themselves the glint of a veteran ferret who has seen it all in the hare-traps and rat-pits. Fat Paul, I would say, has few anxieties about his accent. He doesn’t fudge or smudge. Every syllable has the clarity of threat. You could never do that voice justice, but here goes.
‘I seen him in the street Sunday,’ said Fat Paul. ‘I said — Phwore! You just had a curry? He said, “Nah. Had a curry Froyday.” I said— what you have today then? “Free spoyce pizzas and two Choynese soups.” He’s only on antiboyotics as it is, for this zit on his armpit and his impetoygo. Next day I seen him down the transport club. You know… they got a machine down there, Dad, that sells chips. Chips’ Fat Paul still seemed to be reeling at this development. ‘Fucking great tank full of gunge, once a mumf some bloke comes along and pours more fat down the funnel. Firry pee a punnet. Loyonel, he’s there, leaning on the machine and stuffing himself sick. And these chips, I tell you, ah is fucking disgusting. Undescroybable. He’s half way frew his forf punnet, he turns to me and says he can’t fink why he has all these troubles with his skin!’