Absolute Beginners (3 page)

‘Mr Pondoroso, I thought I was.’

‘You call me Mickey.’

‘If you say so,’ I said to him, playing it cool, and rapidly reloading my apparatus.

‘It’s like this,’ said Mr Mickey P. ‘I have a study to complete for my organisation on British folk ways in the middle of the century.’

‘Fine,’ I said, snapping him sitting down, his upper belly bulging over his ballet pants, so as to make my hundred quickly.

‘Well, I’ve observed the British,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got very few interesting ideas about them.’

‘How long have you been observing them?’ I asked.

‘Six weeks, I think, which I know is not very long, but even so, I just can’t quite get perspectives.’ Mickey P. peered at me between zips. ‘Even the weather’s wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s reputed to be cold in the English summer, but just look at it.’

I saw what he meant. An old sun from the Sahara had crept up on us unawares, one we weren’t at all ready for, and baked us into quite a different loaf from the usual soggy pre-sliced product.

‘Try asking me,’ I said.

‘Well, let’s take the two chief political parties,’ he began, and I could see he was winding himself up for a big performance.

‘No thank you,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t want to take any part of either.’

His face slipped a bit.

‘They don’t interest you, is that it?’

‘How could they?’

‘But your destinies,’ he said, ‘are being worked out by their initiatives …’

I clicked his unshaven face in a close-up horror picture. ‘Whoever,’ I said, ‘is working out my destinies, you can be quite sure it’s not those parliamentary numbers.’

‘You mustn’t despise politics,’ he told me. ‘Somebody’s got to do the housekeeping.’

Here I let go my Rolleiflex, and chose my words with care.

‘If they’d stick to their housekeeping, which is the only backyard they can move freely in to any purpose, and stopped playing Winston Churchill and the Great Armada when there’s no tin soldiers left to play with any more, then no one would despise them, because no one would even notice them.’

Mr Pondoroso smiled. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that fixes the politicians.’

‘I do hope so,’ I replied.

‘Then take,’ said Mr P., ‘the bomb. What are you going to do about
that
?’

Clearly, I had a zombie on my hands.

‘Listen,’ I said to him. ‘No one in the world under twenty is interested in that bomb of yours one little bit.’

‘Ah,’ said this diplomatic cat, his face coming all over crafty, ‘
you
may not be, here in Europe I mean, but what of young peoples in the Soviet Union and the USA?’

‘Young peoples in the Soviet Union and the USA,’ I told him, clearly and very slowly, ‘don’t give a single lump of cat’s shit for the bomb.’

‘Easy, son. How you know that?’

‘Man, it’s only you adult numbers who want to destroy one another. And I must say, sincerely, speaking as what’s called a minor, I’d not be sorry if you did: except that you’d probably kill a few millions of us innocent kiddos in the process.’

Mr P. grew a bit vexed.

‘But you haven’t been to America, have you!’ he exclaimed. ‘Or to Russia, and talked to these young people!’

‘Why do I have to go, mister? You don’t have to travel to know what it’s like to be young, any time, anywhere. Believe me, Mr Pondoroso, youth is international, just like old age is. We’re both very fond of life.’

I don’t know if what I said was crap, or if anyone in the universe thinks it besides me, but at all events, it’s what I honestly believe – from my own observations and from natters I’ve had with my old Dad.

Mr P. was looking disappointed with me. Then he brightened up a bit, raised his brows eagerly, and said, ‘That leaves us with only one topic for an Englishman, but a very important one … (here the pronk half rose in his ballet tights and saluted) … and that is, Her Britannic Majesty the Queen!’

I sighed.

‘No, please, not that one,’ I said to him politely but very firmly, ‘Really, that’s a subject that we’re very, very tired of. One which I just can’t work up the interest to have any ideas about at all.’

Mr Pondoroso looked like he’d had a wasted afternoon. He stood up in his gymnastic uniform, which
with his movements round the room had slipped a bit to show a fold of hairy olive tum, and he said to me, ‘So you’ve not much to tell me of Britain and her position.’

‘Only,’ I said, ‘that her position is that she hasn’t found her position.’

He didn’t wig this, so giving me a kindly smile, he stepped away to make himself respectable again. I put a disc on to his hi-fi, my choice being Billie H., who sends me even more than Ella does, but only when, as now, I’m tired, and also, what with seeing Suze again, and working hard with my Rolleiflex and then this moronic conversation, graveyard gloomy. But Lady Day has suffered so much in her life she carries it all for you, and soon I was quite a cheerful cat again.

‘I wish I had this one,’ I said, when Mr P. appeared.

‘Take it, please,’ he told me, beaming.

‘Wait till you get my bill for the snaps before you make me gifts as well,’ I warned him.

His only answer, which was rather nice of him, was to put the record in its sleeve and stick it underneath my arm like as if he was posting a letter.

I thanked him, and we went out in the sun. ‘When you’re tired of your Vespa,’ I said wittily, ‘you can give me that as well.’

Boy, can you credit it, it functioned! ‘As soon as my automobile’s repaired,’ he said, slapping his hand down on the saddle, ‘this toy is yours.’

I took his hand. ‘Mickey,’ I said, ‘if you mean that, you’re my boy. And the photos, need I say, are complimentary.’

‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘That is another, separate business. For the pictures, I shall pay you cash.’

He darted in. I tried sitting on the scooter saddle for the feel of it, and when he darted out, with this time his mauve Thai silk jacket on, he handed me a folded cheque.

‘Thank you,’ I said, unfolding it. ‘But, you know, this isn’t cash.’

‘Oh. You prefer cash?’

‘It’s not that, Mickey – it’s just that you
said
cash, didn’t you, see? But let’s look where the branch is. Victoria station, lovely. And I see it’s not one of the ugly crossed variety, good boy. I’ll go there before they put up the shutters, fare you well.’

With which I blew, reflecting this, that if by any fragment of a chance he meant it, that is, about the scooter, and if I wanted to act quick and get the snaps developed, so as to keep contact with him and work on his conscience, if he’d got one, to secure the vehicle, I’d have to go home immediately to my darkroom.

So off I set, but stopping on the way to raid the bank, which was getting ready to close as I arrived, in fact the clerk had half the door shut, and he looked me up and down, my Spartan hairdo and my teenage drag and all, and said just, ‘Yes?’

‘Yes what?’ I answered.

‘You have
business
here?’ he said to me.

‘I have,’ I told him.

‘
Business
?’ the poverty-stricken pen-pusher repeated.

‘Business,’ I said.

He still had his hands upon the door. ‘We’re closing now,’ he told me.

‘If my eyes don’t fail me,’ I replied, ‘the clock above your desk says 2.56 p.m., so perhaps you’ll be kind enough to get back behind it there and serve me.’

He said no more, and made his way round inside the counter, then raised his brows at me across it, and I handed over Mr Pondoroso’s cheque.

‘Are you,’ he said, after examining it as if it was the sort of thing a bank had never seen before, ‘the payee?’

‘The which?’

‘Is,’ he said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to a deaf Chinese lunatic, ‘this-your-name-written-on-
the-cheque
?’

‘
Jawohl, mein Kapitan
,’ I said, ‘it is.’

Now he looked diabolically crafty.

‘And how,’ he enquired, ‘do I know this name is yours?’

I said, ‘How do you know it isn’t?’

He bit his lip, as the paperbacks say, and asked me, ‘Have you any proof of your identity?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Have you of yours?’

He shut his eyes, reopened them and said, ‘What proof?’

‘In the arse pocket of my jeans here,’ I said to him, slapping my hindquarters briskly, ‘I carry a perspex folder, with within it my driving licence, which is a clean one I’m surprised to say, my Blood Donor’s Certificate, showing I’ve given two pints of gore so far this year, and tatty membership cards of more speakeasies and jazz
clubs than I remember. You may look at them if you really want to, or you could get Mr Pondoroso on the blower and ask him to describe me, or, better still, you could stop playing games and give me the ten pounds your client has instructed you to pay me that is, unless your till is short of loot.’

To which he answered, ‘You have not yet endorsed the document on the back, please.’

I scribbled out my name. He twiddled the cheque, began writing on it and said, without looking up, ‘I take it you’re a minor?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if it’s anything to do with anything, I am.’ He still said nothing, and he still didn’t hand me over my loot. ‘But now I’m a big boy,’ I continued, ‘I don’t wet my bed any longer, and know how to hit back if I’m attacked.’

He gave me the notes as if they were two deformed specimens the bank happened to have it was ashamed of, then nipped round his counter and saw me out of the door, and locked it swiftly on my heels. I must admit this incident made me overheated, it was all so unnecessary and so old-fashioned, treating a teenager like a kid, and I headed away from Victoria towards my home in quite a rage.

I must explain the only darkroom I possess of my own, without which, of course, I’d have to get my printing done commercially, is at my old folks’ residence in Belgravia South, as they call it, namely, Pimlico. As I expect you’ll have guessed, I don’t like going there, and haven’t lived in the place (except when they’re off on
their summer seaside orgy) in years. But they still keep what they call ‘my room’ there, out in the annexe at the back, which used to be the conservatory, full of potted flowers.

The family, if you can call it that, consists of three besides myself, plus numerous additions. The three are my poor old Dad, who isn’t really all that old, only forty-eight, but who was wrecked and ruined by the 1930s, so he never fails to tell me, and then my Mum, who’s much older than she lets on or, I will say this for her, looks certainly three or four years older than my Dad, and finally my half-brother Vern, who Mum had by a mystery man seven years before she tied up with my poppa, and who’s the number-one weirdie, layabout and monster of the Westminster city area. As for the numerous additions, these are Mum’s lodgers, because she keeps a boarding house, and some of them, as you’d expect if you knew Ma, are lodged in very firmly, though there’s nothing my Dad can do about it, apparently, as his spirits are squashed by a combination of my Mum and the 1930s, and that’s one of the several reasons for which I left the dear old ancestral home.

Mum won’t let me have a key and, as a matter of fact, is even tough about giving one to her paid-up boarders, as she likes to see them come and go, even late at night, so though as a matter of fact I’ve had a key made of my own, in case of accidents, I go through the form of ringing the front doorbell, just out of politeness, and also to show her I regard myself strictly as a visitor and
don’t
live
there. As usual, although she gets mad if you go down the area steps and knock on the basement door, where she almost always is, Mum came out from there into the area and looked up to see who it was, before she’d come up the stairs inside and open the front door for me which she might have done, if she’d been civilised, in the first place.

There she stood, her face lighting up at the sight of a pair of slacks, even her own son’s, with that sloppy sexy expression that always drove me mad, because, after all, tucked away behind all those mounds of highly desirable flesh, my Mum has got real brains. But she’s only used them to make herself more appealing, like pepper and salt and garlic on an overdone pork chop.

‘Hello, Blitz Baby,’ she said.

Which is what she calls me, because she had me in one, in a tube shelter with an air raid warden acting as midwife, as she never tires of telling me or, worse still, other people in my presence.

‘Hullo, Ma,’ I said to her.

She still stood there, pink hands with detergent suds on them on her Toulouse-Lautrec hips, giving me that come-hither look she gave her lodgers, I suppose.

‘Are you going to open up?’ I asked her, ‘or should I climb in through your front parlour window?’

‘I’ll send you down your father,’ she answered me. ‘I expect he’ll be able to let you in.’

This is the trick my Mum has, to speak to me of Dad as if he’s only
my
relation, only mine, that she never had
anything whatever to do with (apart, of course, from having had sex with him and even marrying the poor old man). I suppose this is because, number one, Dad’s what’s known as a failure, though I don’t regard him as one exactly, as anyone could have seen he’d never have succeeded at anything anyway, and number two, to show that her first husband, whoever he was, the one who goosed her into producing that Category A morbid, my elder half-brother Vernon, was the
real
man in her life, not my own poor old ancestor. Well, that’s her little bit of feminine psychology: you certainly learn a lot about women from your Mum.

I was kept there waiting a considerable time, so that if it wasn’t for the need of my darkroom they’d have never seen me, when Dad appeared with that dead-duck look not merely on his face, but hanging on his whole poor old scruffy body, which makes me demented, because really he’s got a lot of character, and though he’s no mind to speak of, he’s read a lot like I do – I mean, tried to make the best of what he’s got in a way my Mum hasn’t tried to do at all, or even thought of trying. As usual, he opened the door without a word except ‘Hullo,’ and started off up the stairs again towards his room in the attic portion of the building, which is just an act because he knows, of course, I’ll follow him up there for a little chatter, if only for politeness’ sake, and to show him I’m his son.