I looked up, in alarm, bewilderment, in terror. A plump, pretty girl, with a sensible scarf, two badges on the lapel of her corduroy overcoat, her face and stance vibrant, unflinching, exalted … Browsers paused in their shuffle. Someone near me stepped sideways, beyond the range of my sight.
‘What are you doing?’ she barked — she snapped. A middle-class mouth, the voice and teeth hard and clean.
I backed off, or veered away. I even raised an arm protectively.
‘Why aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
‘But I am,’ I said.
‘Look at that. Look.’
We stared at the fallen magazine. It rested half-open on a low shelf where the normal, the legal stuff was trimly stacked. One of the centrepages was curled over, as if tactfully averting the gaze of the girl spreadeagled there. A trunkless, limp and warty male member dangled inches from her greedy smile.
‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it.’
‘Yes.’
‘How can you look at these things?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
At this she gave off a pulse of hesitation. I don’t think she had really been hearing me till now. It must have cost her quite a bit too, taking on a man who looks like I look, his fat shoulders and heavy head tensed over the spectacle of her lost or twisted sisters. Yes, even with her strong round face and unimpeachable teeth and her rectitude, it must have cost her something. She had done this before a few times perhaps, but not that many times. Now the full stare of her eyes individualized my human shape, and her questions became questions. She raised a gloved finger.
‘Why then? Why? Without you they wouldn’t exist. Look at it.’ We looked down again. The lovedoll was turned almost inside out. ‘What does that say to you?’
‘I don’t know. Money.’
She turned and walked the long clicking walk down the floor (the shop strangely quenched of sound and movement), tugged back hard on the glass door and with a shake of shiny hair had passed into the random straggle of the street.
There was laughter, a low surge of talk. Amused relief showed briefly on the faces of the two zonked chinks who worked the counter. I restored Lovedolls to its rack, then flapped defiantly through Plaything International and Jangler. I crossed the street and climbed on a stool and lost £20 on the 3.45. I felt awful, ill, all beaten up. Oh, sugar, Jesus, why couldn’t you pick on someone else? Why couldn’t you pick on someone with a little more to lose?
I walked back to my sock in the thin rain. And the skies. Christ! In shades of kitchen mists, with eyes of light showing only murk and seams of film and grease, the air hung above and behind me like an old sink full of old washing-up. Blasted, totalled, broken-winded, shot-faced London, doing time under sodden skies. In the ornate portal of a mansion-block department store an old man with buttoned overcoat and brown burnished shoes stood talking at the rain. Other old people flanked him expressionlessly and two younger women wearing indeterminate blue uniforms and faces of bleached sincerity underscored or punctuated his address with marching music from pipe and drum. ‘It is never too late’, said the old man diffidently, unassumingly, as one of God’s grim janitors, ‘to change your ways.’ With narrow lips and eyes he faced the strolling irony of the afternoon crowds, the young, the robed incurious foreigners. ‘There is no need’, he said, ‘for you to feel so ashamed.’ You could hardly hear him anyway, what with the drum and all this rain and milk in the air.
Oh, but pal — you’re wrong. The skies are so ashamed. The trees in the squares hang their heads, and the awnings of the street are careful to conceal the wet red faces of the shopfronts. The evening paper in its cage is ashamed. The clock above the door where the old man speaks is ashamed. Even the drum is so ashamed.
‘How in Christ’s name did you get yourself into this state?’
‘Right, you bitch, this is it!’
‘This is what?’
‘You’re never fucking here when I call from the States!’