Chris was in his forties, quite slim and not very tall. He had a broad forehead and some wispy hair on top, and nice big teeth which gave him a wide and friendly smile. He was humorous and serious all at once. He wore a business suit that was rumpled from so much driving about for his job, and he had the air of someone who didn’t really belong in a suit anyway. I thought he would have liked to have been twenty years younger, dressed up in jeans and headbanging next to the speakers at Who concerts. I’d say he was forlornly forty. That’s young and sad enough to be attractive to a younger woman.
I invited him to drop me home, and he was horrified at the thought of my being willing to get in a car with a strange man. He was an innocent, really. When I said goodbye to him, I asked him to come and visit me sometime. I could tell he was harmless, and there’s nothing like living in London to make you lonely and turn you into a ghost. The only person I used to talk to was the guy upstairs who played and sang Dylan songs all the time. I told him my stories so many times and from so many angles that I lost track of everything I’d said.
Anyway, the truth is that I felt sympathy between us. I didn’t like the thought of never seeing him again, and I regretted telling him that I was really worth five hundred pounds. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the most destructive thing I could have told him.
THREE
The Princess on the Dungheap
When I went back I had the vague idea that Roza might sleep with me one day.
Well, that’s the truth of the matter, but I didn’t really believe that there was any prospect of it. I was a reluctant travelling salesman with a daughter at university and a mortgage on a medium-sized house in Sutton. I was driving all over the place in a shit-brown Austin Allegro, carrying a freight of pharmaceuticals and medical hardware that I had to sell to doctors. You didn’t get enough of a turnover to earn the kinds of commission that made “bad girls” a feasible proposition. Even so, I started to put money away, five pounds at a time, sometimes ten.
Nowadays I look back and think how sordid that was, and I still wince at the memory. I have three excuses, however. One is that I was married to the Great White Loaf, and the second is that I don’t think I ever seriously intended to offer Roza five hundred pounds for sex. It was a sort of backup for the eventuality of life getting so lonely that there was no other prospect of consolation. It was like a ninety-year-old buying a pair of weighted boots just in case he has the chance one day of going to the moon. My third excuse is that after so many years of being undesired, it didn’t seem possible that anyone could possibly want me unless there was an extra incentive. I didn’t have any confidence any more.
I never lost the sexual attraction I felt for Roza, even long after we became friends. If anything, it increased because she began to touch my heart. It was like the yeast in the bread or the pepper sauce on the steak. There’s been a little nip of sexual attraction with any woman I’ve ever been friends with. I used to dream about having sex with Roza, and sometimes I still do. Old men don’t become virtuous just because age pins them up against a wall and snarls contempt into their ears. Time screws death into you through every orifice, but it never stops you yearning.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I knocked on her door after seeing Dr. Patel in Davenant Road. I’d tried the bell, but it was obviously disconnected, and I was thinking about how stupid I was being, at the same time as I was rapping on the door with my knuckles. I remember that the Vietnamese had just invaded Cambodia, because I’d heard about it on the car radio when I was turning the corner of the street.
I was surprised when the door was opened by a young man in jeans and bare feet. He had tousled curly hair and the air of someone who normally concentrated upon higher things. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. I said, “Is Roza in?”
“No idea,” he said. He was quite well spoken. “I’ll go and look.”
He went a little way up the corridor and knocked on a door. “Hey, Roza, there’s someone here to see you.”
“She’s in,” he said, giving me a businesslike smile, and then he disappeared into another room. I distinctly heard him locking his door, and there came the sound of that kind of music that I believe they used to call “psychedelic.” I was about forty years old back then and I had no idea at all what the youngsters were listening to, or even talking about. It used to make me feel I was being left out and that I was already past it. Now that I’m truly old, I don’t even care. All the stuff they take so seriously is just ephemera. I look at youngsters nowadays and mostly feel sorry for them, and the ones I don’t pity can go and jump in the lake. Still, at the age of forty I was young enough to feel young, but old enough to feel left out. There’d been a revolution and I’d missed it, and I didn’t even know precisely what the revolution was about. I just knew that my daughter wasn’t remotely like my sisters when they were her age, and fortunately she wasn’t like the Great White Loaf either.
Roza came out of her room and didn’t recognise me for a moment. I said, “It’s Chris, remember? You offered me coffee.”
“Oh yes. Chris. Well, OK, why not? You come downstairs.”
I followed her, and was amazed by that extraordinary house. Great slabs of plaster had fallen off the walls, exposing the grey laths underneath. There weren’t any lampshades, and the wiring was that maroon-coloured plaited stuff that must have predated the war. It was just hanging off the walls in festoons. The floorboards were partly missing, so you had to be careful where you put your feet, and one whole step was missing from the staircase that went down into the basement. There weren’t any carpets to speak of, except for a grey one in the basement that was stiff with grease because that’s where the cooker was. The cooker was streaked all over with dark yellow and brown solidified sploshes of antediluvian fat. There was a gas fire down there too, and some unstuffed armchairs, and it was in those armchairs, face to face across the gas fire, that Roza seduced my spirit and unleashed on me the stories of her life.
She was like the Ancient Mariner in that poem, who used to buttonhole people and not let them go until the tale was over, except that in this case I never wanted to get away. As I said, I had fallen into fascination. I liked to watch her talking, even when I wasn’t listening, because she’d told me all the same things many times before. When I wasn’t concentrating on what she was saying, I was looking at her body and her mouth and her face, imagining that we were in bed, imagining what they could do to me.
She didn’t disclose very much on that first visit. We drank coffee in our armchairs and she questioned me a little, and then she offered to show me round the house, as a respectable woman does who has guests who have come for the first time.
The rest of the house was just as ramshackle as the bit I had already seen. The top floor was uninhabited because the roof leaked, and in one of the rooms an engine was being rebuilt on a Workmate. Roza said that it was the project of the young man who lived on the first floor and had a job in a garage. I encountered him lots of times, and I would say that he was one of those misguided middle-class boys who thought that slumming it was the authentic way of life. He used to sing Bob Dylan songs in his room, and his not unpleasant caterwauling and strumming would drift through the house like the soundtrack to the story that I was in with Roza. My daughter used to play Bob Dylan records on her gramophone, and I got to like it even though I complained, and that was how I recognised the songs that the youngster was bashing out. I expect he was lonely and was hoping to be a star one day. The Bob Dylan Upstairs was supposed to be somebody called John Horrocks, but the real John Horrocks had gone to Katmandu to be a hippy, and the Bob Dylan had taken over his name to save the bother of registering the new details with the landlord. The only things about the real John Horrocks that I ever found out were that he usually had several lovers and that he had enormous feet, because he’d left a pair of moccasins in the middle of the kitchen floor, and that was where they stayed for as long as I was a visitor, unless the Bob Dylan w
as wearing them. As for the Bob Dylan Upstairs, I never did discover his real name. I started to refer to him as the BDU, and very soon Roza did too.
There was another fellow there who was apparently an actor, and Roza used to laugh about him because she said he was the one Jew she’d ever met who was really as mean as Jews were supposed to be. He was the only one in the house with a telephone, and he would put one of those locks through the hole in the dial, so that no one else could use it. He had a pretty blonde actress girlfriend who used to arrive in a small red Renault, and the sound of them repeatedly making love would resonate through the house, mixing up with the sound of Bob Dylan songs and Roza’s musical voice. I liked the honesty of noisy lovemaking. I didn’t grow up amid that kind of honesty. I am embarrassed by it, though. The Great White Loaf would never have made a squeak even if there were no one else within a hundred miles.
The last resident was a young woman that I hardly ever saw. She was a pretty sculptress who dressed in dungarees, and she used to make clay slabs in the shape of sails, and put them in the Thames at low tide in order to take photographs of them. She wore one of those badges that said “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” but the reason I hardly ever saw her was that she spent almost all the time at her boyfriend’s house. That was the seventies and early eighties for you.
To this forty-year-old it all felt as if I had been secretly flung into the centre of the Alternative Society, as we used to call it, except that the revolution fizzled out and never went anywhere in the end. It was quite nice at the time, though. I didn’t feel so left out, although I was frightened of the disorder. When punk appeared and all the hippies vanished, that was when I finally realised there was no point trying to join in. Middle age makes you dignified, and if it doesn’t, then you’re a sad case. Sometimes you’d see a middle-aged punk, and you’d just think, “How pitiful.” The only thing more pitiful than a middle-aged punk is a white Rastafarian. I did meet one of those once, and he was lonelier than I was.
It’s funny how in those days all the marginal people managed to make it seem as if it was the rest of us who’d really been marginalised. It was a neat trick. I didn’t like knowing that all the youngsters thought I was boring, mostly because I suspected that it was true. What’s sad about being boring, about being nobody in particular, is that it means you’re the same as everyone else. You’re just taking up space on this earth. Theoretically you could make up a certain poundage of sausages, and that’s all you amount to. You’re just flesh that exists for a while and then stops existing. I wonder now if it was those youngsters who were really the boring ones. At that time it did feel as if it were me, though.
Roza didn’t find me boring. I was just what she needed. I was someone who drank her coffee and looked at her affectionately and listened to her stories, and then pecked her on the cheek when I left. She was very self-obsessed, which is usually a fault, but at least it prevented her from getting fed up with me, as I didn’t really have to say very much.
On that day, after she’d shown me round the house, she made coffee on the sordid cooker, using one of those double-decker Italian contraptions, and we sat opposite each other in the armchairs. She lit the gas fire with a match which she then used to light a Black Russian. They were her favourite cigarettes, though she sometimes smoked Abdullahs. She sipped on her coffee, and blew smoke up to the yellow ceiling.
I didn’t really know what to say, and she didn’t seem to expect me to say anything. I was perplexed by her. She dressed in expensive clothes and smoked aristocratic cigarettes, and everything about her was immaculate, but she lived in that dirty hovel. She was like a princess perched on a dungheap.
“Where are you from?” I asked eventually.
“Yugoslavia,” she said. “Actually, I’m a Serb.”
“I don’t know much about Yugoslavia,” I said. “Is it nice?”
She shrugged. “It depends. Is England nice?”
We smiled at each other, and I said, “Not at the moment.”
“What you want to know,” she said, “is why I am living here, like this, in this dirty place.”
“I am curious,” I admitted.
“I pay five pounds a week for it.”
“Good God, that’s cheap!”
“Not when the roof leaks. Anyway, it belongs to the Cooperative Housing, and one day they want to knock it down, so until then they rent it out at five pounds a week, and they call it ‘Hard to Let’ housing, and the waiting list is years long.” She laughed at the irony of it.
“But that doesn’t entirely explain why you’re living here.”
She looked at me as if I was stupid and said, “I am saving all my money. I want to do big things with it.”
“You have lots of money?”
“Like I told you, I was bad girl. Now I have enough, and anyway I got fed up, and I stopped. Now I am good girl again. I am resting.” She looked genuinely pleased with herself. “Also,” she added, “I don’t really exist, so I have to hide, and this is good place. You know the boy upstairs? He pretend to be someone called John Horrocks, and I pretend to be Sharon Didsbury. The real ones were here before, and we take the rooms and the names to save doing it official. Too much trouble, too much paper.”
“You don’t exist?” I asked. I thought she was making a metaphysical point about the state of her soul.
“No visa, no work permit,” she said. “I am tiny little parasite.” She showed me how tiny she was by pinching a centimetre of air between thumb and forefinger.
“Haven’t you got any qualifications?” I asked.
She looked offended. “I got degree at Zagreb. Anyway, I started one.”
All I could think of to say was “Oh.”
Then she said, “I’m here because I made fuck-ups. Everything turns to shit. You know, I pick up potato and by the time it gets to my mouth, it’s turned to shit, with horsehair in it. I got used to shit and horsehair in my teeth, no bullshits.”
Roza blew more smoke at the ceiling, and said philosophically, “It’s OK now. No more shit for Roza. Do you want to know?”
“Know?”
“About Roza who ate too much shit, and made fuck-ups? It’s good for laughing.”
I shrugged. At that time I only wanted to sleep with her, really, but when you’re fascinated by a woman you’ll settle for her stories, because that’s how you stay en route.
“My whole life, one shit thing after another,” she said, blowing out smoke and laughing. “Still, you know, I like it when I think about it. It was my life, and I like it. I had adventures.”
FOUR
This Father of Mine
My father was a partisan with Tito.
That’s what I told him. I liked to talk about this father of mine. I never spoke harshly about him, and Chris found that surprising, in view of what I said about him. The thing is, if you want to seem to be interesting, you shouldn’t be predictable.
I said my father had an eyepatch that made him resemble a pirate, and he had five bullets left in him from the war. Every year he went to the hospital for an X-ray, and he’d come back and pin it up against the kitchen window. He’d check up on the meandering of the bullets from one part of his body to another. What he was hoping was that one day they would start poking through his skin so that he could pull them out and keep them, all in a line on the mantelpiece. That was his ambition. He liked to say, “One day one of these bullets might stray into my lungs, and I’d be dead, just like that,” and he’d raise an eyebrow and snap his thumb and forefinger.
He taught me a little routine about how he might die. I acted it out for Chris once when we’d had some wine and got a bit merry and I was going on about my father again.
“OK,” I said, mimicking this father of mine, “the bullet goes into my lungs, and I get a pain. It’s a big pain. I put my hand to my chest, and I go, ‘Aahhhhh,’ and then I wave my hands, like this, and then I cough, Uh! Uh! Uh!, and suddenly I get blood out of my mouth, OK? It goes
down my chin, and my mouth fills up, and I am coughing and coughing, and Mama comes out, OK? And she says, ‘Husband, you’re spoiling that clean shirt that I just washed,’ and I am lying on the floor dying and Mama is sprinkling salt on the bloody shirt to try and soak it out.”
By then I was on that greasy floor pretending to die, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. I said, “And then my father he always said the same thing, he said, ‘They’ll take me away wrapped up in the national flag, and I’ll go and be made into meat pies at the factory, and Marshall Tito, he’ll serve me up to the President of the United States who’s come on a visit, and my bones they’ll grind up and spread on the fields, and some bones will be made into glue for sticking books together, and that’s how I’m going to be useful when I’m dead.”
Chris looked down at me, and there was real affection and enjoyment in his eyes, and he said, “You did this every year when he came home with an X-ray?” and so I said, “Also at parties for his friends.”
“You must have been a sweet little girl,” Chris said, and I replied, “Even inside every damn fucked-up woman there’s some sweet little girl.”
Chris said I should have been an actress, and it was a miracle that I’d managed to put on that dying act without spilling any wine.
I said that my father liked to frighten me by raising his eyepatch so that I could see the eyelid sunken into the socket, and then he’d chase me about the house pretending that his hands were claws, and making animal noises. After he’d done it enough times, it stopped frightening me, and it was just another game that ended in tickling. My friends and my brother’s friends never stopped being impressed by the eye socket, however.
Chris liked me telling these tales about my father. He was a patient person and he thought that I really needed to talk about this other man who was such a big thing in my life. I kept telling him these stories as if they were the most important in the world, and he sat in the filthy armchair and sipped my coffee and just looked at me with his eyes full of pleasure. I probably could have been saying anything at all. I’d hooked him almost straight away, and I was giving myself a problem, wondering what to do with him now that I had him dangling on the line. I had to think about what it was that I wanted from Chris.