I turned on the lamp by the chaise longue and settled there with the grappa and the ledger book open to the first page, and began to turn the overwritten pages, searching the palimpsests in the hope of finding a criminal connection. Perhaps I had, after all, led a narrow life, for I knew no one bad, no one bad in an organized way. Under H I found an acquaintance who sold dodgy secondhand cars. He had died of cancer. Under K, an old school friend who tended to depression and who worked in a casino for a stretch. He sank from sight into a rancorous marriage, and it was his psychiatrist wife who arranged for his electric shock treatment. Then they settled in Belgium.
I went on turning the friends, half-friends, quarter-friends, and strangers of a lifetime, most of them perfectly pleasant. One or two liars, perhaps, and a sloth, a boaster, and a self-deluder, but no one with a grip on illegality, no one functionally illicit. Here by the Ns was an English rose I had known back in the autumn of 1968, when we had shared a sleeping bag in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. Back in England a few years later, she had interested herself in systematic shoplifting. Now she was a headmistress in Cheltenham. No tenacity. Also born under the sign of N was John Nolan, convicted twenty years ago of murder. At a drunken party he had thrown a cat from a second-floor balcony, skewering it on a park railing. He was righteously prosecuted by the RSPCA and fined fifty pounds. But still he kept his job with the Inland Revenue.
This Domesday Book of human exchange and fleeting possession that I had been extending and revising for more than a quarter of a century told one particular story of modern badness. The cast was too finely sifted, too entwined with the slants and sleights of character defect to have appealed to the criminal justice system. The alphabet of my society described a limited degree of failure and a fair amount of success, and all of it occurred within a narrow band of education and money. Not great wealth mostly, but reasonable sufficiency. There was simply no need to take other people’s cash. Perhaps middle-class crime is mostly in the head, or in and around the bed. Battery, assault, abduction, rape, and murder were dourly fantasized when appropriate. But it’s something less than morals—more like taste, politesse—that holds us back. Clarissa had taught me Stendhal’s remark: “Le mauvais goût mène aux crimes.”
Disappointment rising, I continued to rifle my Domesday, ignoring jolts of curiosity or the vague guilt prompted by certain names, until I entered at last the scrub desert of the final reaches, the U, V, X, Y, and Z that aridly encompass the oasis of last chances—the W. Sheltering here among the bucolic Woods, Wheatfields, Waters, and Warrens, written in faint, spidery pencil not of my own hand, was the name of Johnny B. Well, no criminal in my book but in my mind as extensively connected as a neuron.
His name was John Well, the B. having been borrowed by him, or for him, from Chuck Berry’s kid hero who played the guitar like ringing a bell. As I remembered it, nothing ever came as easily to our Johnny as he roamed by public transport the suburbs of North and South London, bringing marijuana and hashish to the apartments of those too fastidious to descend to street level. By any definition he was a drug dealer, but the term was too harsh, too opprobrious, for Johnny B. Well was cast more in the type of a shopkeeper, the earnestly committed purveyor of fine wines or the busy proprietor of a delicatessen. He was careful with his prices, dealt only in the highest quality, and knew about his product to the point of tedium. He was also honest to the same degree—fussy and exact when he counted out the fivers in the change, showily punctilious when he returned the float on an unsuccessful deal. He was harmless and discreet, and acceptable everywhere. On his endless bleary rounds—for all fresh sales were sealed, or preceded, by a smoke—he might drift from tea with a consultant ophthalmologist to a bath at the home of a barrister friend, supper in a rock star’s ménage, and on down to an overnight bed in a nest of nurses.
He had his own place too, a plumbed-in broom cupboard in Streatham. One evening Johnny opened the door to four grinning Jimmy Carter masks—it was as long ago as that—and in each pair of hands a crowbar. They didn’t speak and they didn’t touch him. They shouldered past and wrecked his flat—it must have taken all of five seconds—and then they left. Organized crime was closing down the hippies.
It was an early case of market rationalization. Before that, import and distribution had been the province of venture capitalists, lone dharma bums staking all on a bulging, fragrant backpack. The suits and crowbars streamlined and democratized, narrowing the product to third-grade Pakistani hashish and pushing out into pubs, football terraces, and prisons.
For a few months it looked as though Johnny B. Well was going to have to find another job, until he was offered protection by the very outfit that had wrecked his home. A small basic wage and commission on sales. This was the time he had been obliged to extend the range of his contacts, and why I thought he might be able to help me now. An ambitious bunch of lads who occupied a chambre séparée in the rear of The Dog at Tulse Hill became his employers. They had many friends and they sent Johnny on many errands. The thugs took him for the honest shopkeeper he was, and he moved among them unmocked and unscathed. At the same time he managed to keep open for his old, exacting clientele his line in connoisseur produce—stitched-leaf cornets from Nigeria, woven sticks from Natal and Thailand, new seedless varieties from Orange County, weightless golden sheets from the Lebanon. Under the new regime, a typical dreamy day might require a lunchtime experiment in lager with the modernizers and afternoon tea with the silks who sent them down.
It was a lonely life, and hard, a lot harder than ringing a bell. And Johnny B. Well never got rich. He was too earnest, too honest, too stoned. He never took taxis. What other dealer in the world would wait thirty-five minutes for a bus in his trodden-out shoes? He kept simple, heady faith in himself as a philanthropist, convinced that resin or fruity, flowering leaves, ignited and inhaled, were steadily easing humankind into a good mood, and that public and private battles would cease as sweet tempers prevailed and souls opened to the light. Meanwhile, as the 1980s got cracking, the suits and crowbars, along with the barristers, consultants, and rock stars, concentrated on the money.
In my study the circle of light in which I sat appeared to have brightened and shrunk about me. The grappa had been drained, though I did not remember finishing it. I stared at Johnny’s spidery name and the seven digits beside it. Who better to help me? Why hadn’t I thought of him before? Why hadn’t I thought of him instantly? The answer was that I had not seen him in eleven years.
Like many before me, I had come to the slow acknowledgment that the mind-altering substance of choice in a pressured, successful middle life is alcohol. Licit, social, with one’s mild addiction easily concealed among everyone else’s, and in all its infinite, ingenious manifestations, so colorful, so tasty, the drink in your hand triumphs by its very form; its liquidity is at one with the everyday, with milk, tea, coffee, with water, and therefore with life itself. Drinking is natural, whereas inhaling a smoldering vegetable is at some remove from breathing, as is the ingestion of pills from eating, and there is no penetration in nature that resembles that of the needle, except an insect’s sting. A single malt and spring water, a cool glass of Chablis, may improve your outlook by only a modest degree but will leave unruffled the glassy continuum of your selfhood. Of course, there is drunkenness to consider, its boorishness, vomiting, and violence, and then craven addiction, physical and mental dereliction, and degrading, agonizing death. But these are the consequences of simple abuse, which flows, as surely as claret from a bottle, out of human weakness, defect of character. You can hardly blame the substance. Even chocolate biscuits have their victims, and I have one elderly friend who has led a fulfilling and useful life on thirty years’ supply of pure heroin.
I stood in the semidark of the hallway and listened; only the creak and click of contracting wood and metal, and, deep in the pipework, the trickle of retreating water. From the kitchen, the susurration of the refrigerator, and beyond, the soothing rumble of the nightt
ime city. Back in my study, I sat with the phone in my lap, considering the moment, this turning point. I was about to step outside the illuminated envelope of fear and meticulous daydreaming into a hard-edged world of consequences. I knew that one action, one event, would entail another, until the train was beyond my control, and that if I had doubts, this was the moment to withdraw.
Johnny picked up on the fourth ring, and I said my name. It took him less than a second.
“Joe! Joe Rose. Hey! How you doing?”
“Well, I need some help.”
“Oh yeah? I got some really interesting—”
“No, Johnny. Not that. I need your help. I need a gun.”
Twenty-one
The next morning I drove Johnny out to a house on the North Downs. In my back pocket was a seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound wad, mostly in twenties. Fifties, apparently, were unacceptable.
As we crawled through the choking dullness of Tooting, he was still messing with the electric seat controls and muttering to himself as he pressed the switches of the map light and the trip computer, “So you’ve done all right … Yeah, I always knew you’d be okay.”
From a near horizontal position he gave me a lesson in gun etiquette. “It’s like in banks. You never say money. Or in funeral parlors, no one says dead. With guns, no one ever says gun. Only pricks who watch TV say shooter or piece. If you can, you avoid naming it at all. Otherwise it’s the item, or the wherewithal, or the necessary.”
“They’ll provide the bullets?”
“Yeah, yeah, but the word is rounds.”
“And someone’ll show me how it works.”
“Christ, no. That wouldn’t be cool. You can take it to the woods and work it out for yourself. They hand it over, you put it in your pocket.” Johnny brought himself into a sitting position. “You sure you should be walking around with a gun?”
I said nothing. I was paying Johnny well for his help. Not explaining the background was protection for us both. We were still stuck in traffic. On the radio the jazz had been dishonestly succeeded by a program of atonal music, an earnest whooping and banging that was getting on my nerves. I turned it off and said, “Tell me more about these people.” I already knew they were ex-hippies who had made it rich in coke. They had gone legal in the mid-eighties and dealt in property. Now things were not so good, which was why they were happy to sell me a gun for an inflated price.
“Relative to the scene,” Johnny said, “these people are intellectuals.”
“Meaning what?”
“They got books all over the walls. They like to talk about the big questions. They think they’re Bertrand Russell or something. You’ll probably hate them.”
I already did.
By the time we reached the motorway, Johnny was horizontal again and asleep. He wasn’t usually up before noon. The road was quiet and straight and I had time to take a look at him. He still wore his mustache American frontier style, with the hairs, now whitened at the ends, curling over his upper lip, almost into his mouth. Was it flinty manhood women tasted, kissing a setup like that, or yesterday’s vindaloo? Thirty-five years of grinning and squinting through the smoke had drawn crow’s feet halfway to his ears. From his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, the smile lines ran deep with disappointment. I knew from my recent Streatham trip that apart from the shifting clientele and a new girlfriend, not much had changed for Johnny. But the marginal life was no longer original, the shortage of desirable possessions no longer a kind of lightness, and here came the universal message from the bones and sinews; the writing was on the skin, it was in the mirror. Johnny kept going in his trodden-out shoes, living like a student, like a charity worker, worrying that this newfangled Amsterdam skunk was too strong and bad for the heart.
A shift in key of the road surface rumble brought Johnny awake as we left the motorway. Still flat on his back, he fished a thin joint from his top pocket and lit up. Two lungfuls later he pressed the seat control and came looming and fuming into my field of vision with a whir. He didn’t pass it. This was a private thing, the first of the day, the one he took with his tea and toast.
He inhaled and spoke at the top of his breath in the old style. What a saint. “Take a left. Follow the signs to Abinger.” Soon we were dropping down past twisted boughs and trunks, through gloomy tunnels of greenery on a high-banked single-track road. I put on the headlights. We pulled into passing places to edge round the oncoming traffic. There was much grim-faced smiling and nodding among us car owners, pretending to be untouched by the insult of narrow spaces. We were deep in a countryside that was itself deep in a suburb. Every two or three hundred yards we passed a gateway in twenties brick and ironwork, or five-barred wooden gates with coach lanterns. There was a sudden clearing in the wood, a confluence of roads, a half-timbered pub, and a hundred cars parked outside, baking their colors in the heat. An empty snack packet jumped dreamily into the sunshine to touch our windscreen. Two Alsatian dogs were staring into the ground. Then we were back in the tunnel and the smoke was thick in the car.
“It’s good to get out of the city,” Johnny said. I lowered my window. I thought I might be passively stoned. The wad was pressing hard into my buttock, and everything looked too emphatic, as though invisibly italicized. Perhaps it was fear.
Ten minutes later we turned down a rutted driveway whose crumbling asphalt was pierced by weeds.
“Amazing how life does that,” Johnny said. “You know, just pushes through anyway?” This was a big question, surely a rehearsal for the company we were about to keep. I would have taken a shot at an answer to steady my nerves. But just then we came into view of an ugly mock Tudor house, and the words died in my throat.
The curving driveway took us to a double garage built of cement blocks and painted an unevenly faded purple. Its rusting up-and-over door was padlocked. In front, poking through the long grass and the nettles, were the skeletons and entrails of half a dozen motorbikes. It looked to me like a place where crimes could be safely committed. Running from an iron ring in the garage wall was a long chain with no dog on the end of it. This was where we stopped and got out. The nettles went right up to the Georgian front door. From the house came the sound of a bass guitar, a three-note figure fumblingly repeated.
“So where are the intellectuals?”
Johnny winced and made a downward-pressing movement with his hand, as though to stuff my words back into a bottle. He spoke in a near whisper as we approached the door. “I’ll give you some advice you might be grateful for. Don’t make fun of these people. They haven’t had your advantages, and they’re, uh, not too stable.”
“You should have said. Let’s go.” I pulled at Johnny’s sleeve, but with his free hand he was ringing the bell.
“It’s cool,” he said. “Just watch your step.”
I took a pace back and had half turned away, thinking I might walk off down the drive, when the door snapped open and habitual politeness constrained me. A powerful odor of burned food and ammonia rolled, or blared, out of the house, momentarily silhouetting the figure who stood in the doorway.
“Johnny B. Well!” the man said. He had a shaved head and a small waxed mustache dyed with henna. “What are you doing here?”
“I phoned last night, remember?”
“Yeah, right, we said Saturday.”
“It is Saturday, Steve.”
“Uh-uh. It’s Friday, Johnny.”
Both men looked to me. I had been reading up on the restaurant attack and the newspapers were in my car, all over the back seat. “Actually, it’s Sunday.”
Johnny shook his head. He looked betrayed. Steve was staring at me with loathing. I guessed it wasn’t his two lost days, it was my actually. He was right, it didn’t sound good here, but I met his look full on. He spat something white into the nettles and said, “You’re the guy who wants to buy a gun and some bullets.”
Johnny had located an object of interest in the sky. He said, “You inviting us in or what?”
S
teve hesitated. “If it’s Sunday, we got people coming to lunch.”
“Yeah. Us.”
“That was yesterday, Johnny.”
We laughed with effort. Steve stood aside so we could step into his stinking hall.
When the front door closed we were in virtual darkness. By way of explanation, Steve said, “We’re making toast and the dog’s crapped all over the kitchen floor.” We followed his outline deeper into the house. Somehow the news about the dog made the gun seem pricey at seven-fifty.
We emerged into a large kitchen. A blue stratum of bread smoke hung at shoulder height, illuminated by french windows at the far end. A man in dungarees and gumboots was mopping the floor with undiluted bleach from a zinc bucket. He called out Johnny’s name and nodded at me. There was no sign of a dog. At the stove was a woman stirring a pot. Her hair was combed straight and grew to her waist. She came toward us with a slow, floating movement, and I thought I recognized her type. In England, hippiedom had been largely a boys’ affair. A certain kind of quiet girl sat cross-legged at the edges, got stoned, and brought the tea. And then, just as the Great War had emptied the stately homes of servants, so these girls disappeared overnight at the first trump from the women’s movement. Suddenly they were nowhere to be found. But Daisy had stayed on. She came over and told me her name. Of course she knew Johnny and said his name as she touched his arm.
I guessed her to be about fifty. The long straight hair was a last rope to the bollard of her youth. Failure had written in lines on Johnny’s face, but with Daisy it was all in the downward curve of her mouth. Lately I’ve noticed these mouths in some women of my age. A lifetime of putting out, as they saw it, and getting nothing back. The men were bastards, the social contract unjust, and biology itself an affliction. The weight of all disappointment bent and locked these mouths into their downturn, a Cupid’s bow of loss. At a glance it looked like disapproval, but the mouths told a deeper tale of regret, though their owners never guessed what was being said about them.