I
thought she wasn’t coming, half wanted her not to come; hope is a harder thing
to cope with at my age than prostate cancer. At least you’re expecting prostate
cancer.
Then
she was in front of me, smiling, better, more beautiful by far than I remembered
her. I’d forgotten how tall she was, taller than me by nearly a foot. I felt
ridiculous.
‘Hiya,’
she said. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late. Shall we find this stall then?’ She linked her
arm through mine and steered me through the crowds. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she
said. ‘I have to warn you about this hat stall … and women there’s something
about a hat stall that sends women into erotic spasms. I don’t know what it is.
This bloke who runs the stall, he operates it at a loss simply because of the
pussy he gets. Here check it.’
We had
come to a Soweto of stalls crammed just before the bridge that spanned the old
Grand Union Canal. One of those that abutted the street was the hat stall and
as Mercy had warned, several women stood writhing beside it as they tried on
each hat and looked at themselves in the mirror. One teenage Finn unconsciously
rubbed her groin against a corner of the table. When the man who ran the stall
reached out and adjusted their hats, tilting them one way or the other, visible
shivers ran through the women and they let out low moans of ecstasy. Mercy led
me over to the stall. ‘Hiya, Guy,’ she said to the man behind it, then leant
across the hats and kissed him on the lips. An audible growling rose from the
other women.
To
regain the focus one stuck a Cornish fisherman’s cap, done in patent leather
with spikes sticking out of it, on her head and querulously whined, ‘Guy, Guy,
does this suit me, would it go with a rubber mini-skirt, Guy? And a red leather
bustier, would it, Guy, would it?’
But Guy
was gazing steadily at Mercy, peripherally conscious of the other woman but
deliberately ignoring her. ‘Hi, Mercy,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh you
know,’ she replied then she turned to me. ‘Guy, this is Hillary, he’s desperate
to find a grey Mau Mau hat, mid-90s I’d say, you got one?’
I shook
hands with Guy who said, looking me up and down, ‘It won’t go with that Savile
Row suit, homeboy.’
‘It’s
for a friend,’ I replied.
‘Right.’
He bent
down under the table and emerged some seconds later with a hat identical, as
far as I could tell, to the one the Million Pound Poet had been wearing. ‘Here
we are, I only bought this a couple of days ago off some bloke in the Midlands.
They’re quite a big collectors’ item, you know, early Nineties Mau Mau hats. It’ll
cost you sixty quid.’
‘Oh
come on, Guy!’ Mercy said. ‘He can’t afford that. Sixty squid for a hat.’
For an
instant a look of absolute hatred passed across Guy’s face. ‘I’ve done you
enough…’ he began to say, then the fight went out of him. ‘OK, thirty, that’s
what I paid for it.’
‘You’re
a doll,’ said Mercy and leant across the stall again, crushing several chapeaux
as she hugged him and licked his ear. I paid over the thirty pounds, Mercy
flattened some more stock saying goodbye to Guy, then she took my arm again and
we walked off as the tide of clamouring womanhood closed in around him.
When
you have fought bush warfare you develop an instinct for malevolent eyes and I
could feel Guy staring after us with baking anger, which in turn made me feel
inordinately pleased that I was taking her away from him.
‘You
didn’t say you were a poet,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘So I
read one of your poems last night in an anthology.’
‘Which
one?’
‘“The
Cat’s Pyjamas” .’
I said,
‘Are you still a poet if you haven’t written anything for thirty years?’
‘I
guess … if you haven’t done anything else. Have you done anything else?’
‘Not a
thing,’ I said and couldn’t help a sigh escaping from me, like a lilo being sat
on by a fat man.
‘How
sad,’ she sounded genuinely upset. ‘So you’ve written nothing for thirty years?
And you’re not going to start again or anything? You’ve not started again?’
I felt
a strange reluctance to talk about whether I was writing again or not, on that
day it seemed a distant and infinitely tedious thing. Apart from anything else
her sympathy had given me a tingle in my groin that I wanted more of.
‘If you
don’t mind I’d rather not talk about it,’ I said in a sad voice.
‘Sure,
no problem, it’s off the agenda.’ She considered for a moment. ‘You want to go
and get some lunch?’
‘Certainly,’
I replied. ‘Where?’
‘I
dunno …’ We were in a backstreet, uncertainty seemed to grip her. ‘If you don’t
want lunch, maybe if you want to get the train home instead …’
It was
slipping away, if I didn’t find a place for lunch it would end there. Looking
desperately around I suddenly saw a familiar doorway. It was the same basement
place Blink had taken me to all those years ago. ‘Here’s a good place,’ I
blabbed, ‘they do good food here.’ Before she could speak I steered her through
the doorway and down the stairs.
For
those in the basement the First World War was over and it had been won by
Kenyan Asians.
As soon
as I stepped into the dining room the smells of Rahman’s Café in Nairobi
forty-seven years ago were all around me. We sat down at a plain pine table,
stainless steel water jug and cups already present, a young man brought us
plastic-covered menus.
‘What
sort of food is this?’ she asked.
‘They’re
Asians from Kenya.’
‘Doesn’t
that make them Africans then?’
‘Not as
far as the Africans were concerned.’
‘Will
you order for me? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat meat or fish.’
‘I’m
sure it won’t be a problem.’
At
Rahman’s the others in my regiment had ordered hideous beef dinners of roast
camel and gravy that had come from a tree, boiled puddings composed of various naturally
occurring poisons and ‘fried breakfast meats with a egg’, which was a crocodile
mother-and-child reunion. I on the other hand had ostentatiously ordered in
Swahili: mogo, otherwise known as cassava, served with a tamarind chutney,
brinjal curry, karahi karela, tarka dhal and rotis to show my cosmopolitanism.
I ordered the same now, again in Swahili and I was twenty-five again.
Mercy
said, ‘Can I tell you what I did last night?’
‘Of
course.’
Mercy locked the shop up
at six and collected her Piaggio Velocoraptor 125cc scooter from the motorbike
bay in Great Marlborough Street, then she rode to a house in Hackney, East
London, parked over the road and stood watching the doorway of the house,
hidden in the entrance of a derelict shop directly opposite. About an hour and
a half later a man came out of the house accompanied by a girl of about
twenty-five. The man looked a little older than the girl, was good-looking and
fit. The couple paused on the step to kiss, the man sliding his hands down the
back of the girl’s jeans. They broke apart enough to walk twined up in each
other to the man’s gas engineers’ van parked at the pavement. They then drove
off.
Mercy
waited for fifteen minutes then went across to the house and opened the front
door with a key. Once in the hall she let herself into the ground-floor flat,
inside she did not turn on a light but instead felt her way along to the living
room which was lit by the orange frazzle of a streetlamp in the road outside.
The
room was tastefully furnished with chrome and leather furniture, framed movie
posters on the walls and racks and racks of vinyl records in bleached wood
cabinets. On a table there was a turntable and amplifier, the British-made sort
that only have one on/off switch and a simple big volume knob yet cost several
thousand pounds to buy. Mercy filled a kettle from a tap in the kitchen then
returned to the living room and poured tepid water down the back of the amplifier,
she opened a tin of cream of mushroom soup and tipped that over the turntable.
In the bedroom a number of Paul Smith suits were hanging in a closet; Mercy
decanted the contents of several cans of Thai Style Vegetables into the pockets
of these suits then dribbled Diet Coke down their inner linings. After that she
let herself out, got on her scooter and rode home.
Round
about eleven o’clock she was sitting on her couch flipping through an anthology
of twentieth-century poetry when the phone rang.
‘Hello,
Kitten,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Hello,
Dad,’ she said, ‘how’s it going?’
‘Fucking
terrible! Your mad cow of a stepmother’s broken into my place again and
vandalised all my fucking stuff!’
‘How do
you know it was her?’
‘Who
else would it fucking be? Whoever did it had a key, so that pretty much narrows
it down.’
‘Does
it? How many hundred women out there have your key?’
‘Not
that many.
‘Really?
What did she do anyway?’
‘Poured
soup all over my Nazuku.’
‘Painful.’
‘Don’t
take the piss, you know you’re the only one I can talk to, Kitten, about this
stuff.’
‘Yeah,
sorry … So how’s everything going with the new one, what’s her name, Apricot?’
‘Oh
yeah, she’s great. I think she could definitely be your new mum. Dirty little
baggage as well, she sucked me off at the traffic lights in my van last night .
.
‘Wow
…’
‘Yeah,
she’s brilliant. We’re going to a leather fetish all-nighter in a minute, up at
The Cross, you wanna come?’
‘Naww,
I fink I’m staying in tonight.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK,
see ya, Kitten.’
‘Bye,
Dad.’
Then
Mercy said to me, ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.
‘Can I
come and visit you in the country? Next weekend? I’m sick of this town.’
‘Of
course you can.
After
that we talked about cats and where she went to school and things like that, then
it seemed the natural time to part since there was going to be next weekend.
Outside
in the street, Great, well then I’ll see you next weekend.’ She kissed me on
the lips and hugged me, then stood back and I walked to the tube station.
I tried to get back to
working on my poem when I returned to Lyttleton Strachey but my mind would not
fix on it, I could think of little else other than Mercy’s upcoming visit.
I was
also waiting for Porlock to phone about his hat but he didn’t and I didn’t have
a phone number or an address for him which preyed on my mind as well. What I
thought about most was how I would entertain Mercy over the coming weekend. One
thing I intended to do was to impress her with a cornucopia of vegetables. I
had my own extensive vegetable patch at the top of my field, but I had been
neglecting it recently. I needed to get it in good order if it was going to
produce a cornucopia of vegetables. Never mind, I had an established asparagus
bed so I would be able to cut asparagus for our meals, also I could harvest
early lettuce, broccoli and radishes, leeks and spring cabbages, winter
cauliflower and winter spinach. Plus turnip tops, don’t forget turnip tops.
My
house had come with a quarter-acre paddock across the lane running between the
church graveyard and one of Sam’s fields with some of his concentration-camp
sheds in it. Sam had made numerous attempts to get his hands on this triangle
of land including hiring some bogus army officers who tried to requisition it
for a supposed firing range. My vegetable patch was at the far end of this
paddock.
On the Wednesday
of the week before Mercy came I was in the field planting out late summer
cabbages and purple-sprouting broccoli. Next I was planning to remove any
rhubarb flowers, which you have to do as soon as they appear, when I saw
Bateman coming up the lane. He waved to me and vaulted the gate into the field.
This day Bateman was wearing an off-the-shoulder, knee-length Laura Ashley
dress, black Lewis Leathers motorbike jacket and army boots with knee-length
black socks. ‘Hey, Professor!’ he shouted to me. I put my trowel down, knowing
I had finished gardening for some time. Bateman had come for a talk.
He
liked talking to me, more or less always about the same thing. People I had
killed. I had pointed out on more than one occasion that the people I had killed
had been black people such as himself but he didn’t care, he said he was
Antiguan not African so it didn’t matter.
‘Hello,
Bateman,’ I said. He sprawled down on the grass next to me, his skirt riding up
over his thumping muscled black thighs.
‘Professor
… I just thinkin’ I’d come over an’ give you a chance to do some of your war reminiscin’
.
I said,
‘I don’t particularly want to do any reminiscing about my war. I never have.’
‘Course
you do, all you old ones love the war reminiscin’. Goin’ on about Churchill an’
Hitler an’ Elvis an’ all that.’