arms, hopeless conjugality, of Robin’s arms, of a young Englishman with a face full of indigo grooves, and I thought of my first embrace, with a teacher of French on a sofa in 1968. In her flat.
There had been oak trees in bloom outside, and she had remarked on the abortion law which had just been passed in England.
Last night, as we walked the streets of Soho, we met a tramp who said he’d been a music teacher until recently in a South London public school. A horde of destitute people passed us, heads bent, most of their rucksacks sooty but one of them bright orange. And before we got a tube from Charing Cross Station we passed a tramp who was sleeping just outside South Australia House, a picture of vineyards in the window above him and two white seals snogging.
I met Carl Witherspoon in a café in Soho.
He lived both in Berlin and London, his mother a rich German woman, his father English.
He’d recently spent a few days in a town on the border of Portugal and Spain. Sunday morning in a café, a boy in holy communion costume, red rosette on his white shirt, water-colour blue eyes, a few men in dove-grey suits, an old man with a bottle of red wine in his satchel staring at him. A mosaic of the Immaculate Conception on the wall, a swish of royal blue sash over her white robe. St Martin de Porres among the vodka and port.
Outside was flat land where white ignited cauliflower shapes bloomed.
Carl had wondered what had brought him here, what he was doing here. He went all over the place, a tickertape of journeys, sometimes losing tickets, sometimes foregoing a journey to one place at the last moment in order to go somewhere else. His life felt wasted, hopeless. He wanted to die.
A woman came into the café and asked in a religious tone, almost bowing her head, for a religieuse.
I’d been to Carl’s flat in Berlin two years before. In the bathroom, on a cabinet, had been numerous bottles of milk of magnesia tablets from England.
Carl had tributaries of black hair which vaporized over his forehead and he had asparagus-green eyes which could assume a popping effect at will. He got up, took a few steps away from the table, then came back.
I thought of the mental hospital at home, three particular sister buildings, bony windows, high chimneys, a batch of dead elms brushing against the windows, some of the windows savagely latticed, the lattices painted gleaming white.
The young man at the next table was talking more intently, as if to drown us, about the best poem in Bengali about premature ejaculation.
Carl looked at me, and it was as if he realized that I wasn’t of his class, that his madness, unlike mine, was immured, and as if to dissolve the sympathy he suddenly said, ‘I’ve been offered a job at £750 a week.’
I walked to the South Bank after we parted and met a beggar boy, one of his shoes pink, the other blue, who told me how he’d run away from home in the Midlands when he was twelve. Recently he had gone back for his sister’s wedding in the village he was from, Ashby de la Zouch, disguised in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Regiment, posing as boyfriend to a cousin; no one had recognized him.
I recognized the village as being that of a fisherman who used to come to our town each spring when I was a child and teenager, a place off the route north to Holyhead and Ireland.
Further along the South Bank some men were doing Morris dances against the orange sunset. They were adorned in beads, sashes, and were waving batons. ‘The size doesn’t matter. It’s how you use it,’ one little man cried as he threw his baton into the air, a middle-aged woman tramp with silver spikey hair looking on from her array of rags which were dolled up by the sunset.
Limerick Benny sat on a bench in Catford Arcade shouting: ‘I believe in the controls of 747s.’ He looked up, spreading his arms out. ‘All the cunts singing and dancing up there and me on the ground.’ An old man limped by, a green plastic flower in his lapel, a green handkerchief in his breast pocket, a pheasant feather in his hat and an earring which looked like a Russian cross hanging from his right ear. Further along the arcade, under the huge papier mâché cat splayed above it, there were four evangelists who looked like the Beatles, crew cuts, polo necks, little bibles unerringly in their hands.
‘Latecomers. End of the day people. They hear the call too late. Try to enter by the back door but often find it’s jammed.’
I rang up J. M. Tiernan looking for a job on a building site. They had no need of anyone.
I went to Catford Job Centre looking for a job. A honey-haired girl looked at me as if I was crazy.
An evicted family huddled beside a cluster of Tesco bags.
A man worked a glove puppet towards the traffic.
A youth cycled by with a mongrel on the trailer behind his bicycle.
‘My life means something since I met Jesus’ and ‘Love is something you do’. billboards said outside a hut of a church on Stanstead Road, which was surrounded by lavender bushes.
Outside the ancient tram man’s toilet at the top of Stanstead Road a dispatch rider paused. He wore a red bandana around his right wrist.
‘The worst danger is scatty-brained women. They’re suicidal. Rob, he worked as a courier in London, in New York; was killed when he went back to work on the buildings in Rye, walking down the street. It’s time to go. The English girls are only alive from the shoulders up. I’ll pick up a girl in France and work on the vineyards. It’s time to go.’
A postcard came from Prague. Wenceslas Square, a haze of salvia on the front of the museum, trails of cloud having made it half-way across the sky.
I could hear Robin’s affected worry.
Went to this café where a really old woman in a long red wig and crazy clothes came up and sat beside me, batted her huge eyelids, and whispered ‘Lasst Blumen sprechen.’
She was wearing a ra-ra dress the first evening she came up to me, blue with white polka dots, a little black cloak with a gold clasp – the lining rose-madder. A little bunch of paper violets on the cloak. Her wig was ginger, reaching down to her waist, tressed in many parts, confluences of tresses in it. Block high heels were sawdust-coloured and harlequin stockings cream. She batted her false, mahogany-coloured eyelashes, some of the pearl around her eyes lit up, bowed, sat down.
As she waited for her drink, her head coyly turned to one side, she hummed ‘Ich Kann es nicht Verstehen dass die Rosen Blühen.’ ‘I Know Not Why the Roses Bloom.’
Some soldiers in sandy uniforms came through the café, inspecting identity cards, and took off a young bespectacled man, somewhat unshaven, in a vermilion T-shirt.
The band resumed then with ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ Behind them was a painting of the Three Graces – one of them elderly, her white hair in a bun – being attended by monkeys, a parrot hovering overhead.
You could still see the red of salvia through the lime trees outside. The neon signs on the opposite side of the street were quiet ones – Diskotek and Machino Export Bulharska.
The old woman’s eyelids accelerated every few minutes.
There were huddles of young men at a few tables, many rings on their fingers, striped trousers popular with them, tongues on their
