- Time magazine cover features the JFK assassination, says he wasn’t the intended target.
No decent music. It’s all bloody Madchester and wearing flares like sailing ships in full sail. The Smiths are OK, I suppose, but if I want to be brought down I’ve got Leonard Cohen for that.
No money in the bank. A pile of blank copy paper waiting for words of brilliance to be hammered out, to earn the bread that might put bread on the table. Or booze in my belly, more like.
No sleep. What the hell’s that bell ringing in my head? Is it a phone? Don’t they know I’ve got a bloody hangover?
No peace for the wicked. That bloody phone keeps on ringing, and it’s possibly the worst hangover in my life.
No: score out that “possibly”.
It is definitely the worst. The hangover I am suffering right now is always the worst, and this was a humdinger.
Normally, most days I’d be wideawake by now, surveying the day’s agenda, what was left undone from the day before (too much) and what I could be achieving right now if I wasn’t lying in bed, hovering between alcoholic collapse and the shuffling 4am staggers. Instead, I couldn’t think for the noise of that bloody telephone bell.
So right, here I am: forty, I’m in bed in a first-floor walk-up on the unfashionable side of Hampstead Heath, and the bloody telephone’s ringing. And ringing. And ringing.
Of course, I’d forgotten to put the answering machine on last night when I staggered in. So it just kept on ringing. Bloody thing!
I have this thing about communications: telephones in every room of the flat, including the bathroom. These were the days before mobile phones, you understand. Even now, when I’ve had to move out of my Bloomsbury mansion flat into this tatty North London flop, which I still have problems paying the rent for, there’s still a phone in the single room which serves as kitchen and dinging room, and also one here, in the bedroom.
Just at this time I was not too pleased there was an extension in my bedroom, and not by the bedside, either. It shared the desk by the window with my portable Olympia typewriter, which I’d bought two decades previously out of my wages as a cub reporter on the Wimbledon and Merton Times. In between recording the local hatches, matches and despatches – births, marriages and deaths to the layman – it had also typed my juvenilia, the poems, the started, never finished and now forgotten novels, the political theorising that was my substitute for doing something about the way the world was. Now, all that was forgotten, or at least put away with the rest of my childish things, and the Olympia was simply a tool, like the phone.
Which clearly wasn’t going to stop ringing until I levered myself up out of bed and answered it. I peered bleary-eyed at my watch.
Four bloody a.m., though sunrise was three hours away, as the lack of even faint traces of light through the thin curtains confirmed. It better be bloody important, if someone was calling me at this hour! (Of course, I’d often done it myself, with small justification outside of a maudlin need to see if someone out there cared at all about me, but then I was a sensitive soul, an artist – manqué, if you will – with a need to explore those dark recesses of the soul, and similar self-indulgent nonsense.)
I was not feeling too happy about myself, this Tuesday morning at sparrows’ fart, coming down from the quick pint that had turned into a bender the night before.
Oh yes.
On my way to the phone I turned back to confirm my suspicions.
Yes, there was a tousled head on the pillow beside where I’d just been lying, and she was sleeping like the proverbial babe, damn her. I hate people who can sleep through doorbells, thunder-storms, telephone calls, Gabriel’s trumpet. Me, I’m awake at the slightest change in the aural status quo.
It might be handy if I could remember her name by the time she eventually got round to waking.
I clawed the phone out of its rest and mumbled a greeting. Then I was wide awake in a moment. It was a voice from the past, my ex-wife. I hadn’t even known she was in London. Last I’d heard, she’d married a lawyer from LA, or New York, or Dubuque, Iowa, or some other goddam place on the other side of the pond.
“Kay,” I said.
There wasn’t much more I could add, short of a long sequence of “long time no hear”, “how are you?”, “what’s happening?”, “what the hell do you want at this hour?” sort of clichés, so I left it lie. Clearly, she would tell me straight away.
“Jack,” she said (at least she remembered my name, what was that girl in the bed called?), “I’ve got to see you. It’s urgent. It’s about Adam.”
Adam being my son, adopted, since my loins are, as they say, barren. We got him, ironically, a couple of years before the break-up, and she’d taken him with her, which kind of broke my heart, since I’d always been sentimental about kids, though God knows I’d have made a terrible father, especially when the fun of having a real-live cuddly toy to play with had worn off.
“Jack, you there?”
“Yeah, sorry. Where are you?”
“Round the corner, you know the phone box? Can I come round now?”
Now? Well, why not? Curly-locks might be a source of some sardonic humour on Kay’s part, but on the other hand she was likely to sleep right through whatever cataclysm had brought my ex-wife of 14 years ago round to me in the early hours with dire reports of what my sixteen-year-old son had got up to. Probably found him in bed with the art mistress, or art master, perhaps, Kay had always been rather unliberated, sexually. Or perhaps he’d got his first dose of clap, what the hell?
“Jack?”
“Sorry, love. It is the wee small hours, you know.”
“But Jack, you know I wouldn’t ring you like this unless it was urgent.”
You wouldn’t ring me, period, unless the world was coming to an end, I’d guess, the messy way things had finished up.
“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I’m a bit hung-over. Yeah, come round. I’ll make a pot of coffee.”
“You haven’t changed, Jack.”
“Don’t suppose I have. People don’t, you know. See you.”
I put my head under the cold tap, pulled on my pyjamas (what was her name?) and ground some Colombian coffee while the kettle boiled. I was pouring the boiling water into the pot as the doorbell rang.
She looked older, naturally. Don’t we all? But there was still that something, which had knocked me sideways when I was just a teenager, and could still get me going nearly ten years later, even as I was motoring off down that country lane, and she was running after, crying to me to stop, please stop.
Yes, it had been that messy.
And now it was four going on five in the morning, and the coffee was ready and I had a red-haired moptop in my bed and here was the first woman ever I loved. And it still meant something, even though her eyes were red and her cheeks were tear-streaked, as I noticed, now I looked.
“Hey,” I said, “come in. It can’t be that bad.”
“Oh, Jack,” she gulped, and that was it: the tears flowed again and she was on my chest, her back heaving with the sobs, her hair inveigling its way up my nostrils the way it always did, even the same old perfume (Jean Patou’s Joy, if memory served) and a crazy fragment of me leapt, thinking that perhaps this could be a new beginning, forgetting for a moment the insanity of our life together, the incessant rows, the violence I’d never thought I was capable of, so I’d ended up certain I’d swing for her one day (those had been the days before they abolished hanging).
I led her into the kitchen and poured the coffee, black for me, white for her. She’d given up the two teaspoons of sugar I’d remembered, and as she sat there, smearing her mascara over her cheekbones with the back of her hand the way she always had when things had ended in tears, as they nearly always had, I took stock of the other changes time had wrought in the past fourteen years.
The cheekbones that had first attracted me to her (I lie, it was her small but prominent breasts, but she did have what people called a fine-boned face) were more prominent now, and the contours of her face were falling into the lines of middle age, and her taste in clothes, always a little excessive in its devotion to bright colours and figure-hugging cut (something I never tried to dissuade her from, to tell the truth) hadn’t become any more restrained. I was seeing her through the pink haze of memory, so to me she looked fine, but that still small voice of unquiet reason that tended to commentate upon the progress of my life like some nagging sportscaster at a cricket match, told me she was turning into a rather blowsy, slightly tartish and untidy woman.
Oh yeah, I snapped back at it, let’s see how good you look at three or four in the morning, when some catastrophe has sent you weeping to the threshold of your ex-husband’s abode, moptop and all.
She’d subsided by now and was repairing some of the damage in a hand-mirror. A last, tearless sob shook her whole frame, she took a deep breath, put the mirror away and faced me.
“It’s Adam,” she said, and her faced worked again, as if the self-control was too fragile to hold the tears in check.
“Aw shit, Kay,” I said, “spit it out, for God’s sake. What’s he done, got some girl pregnant? Can’t your husband, what’s his name . . .?”
“Robert,” she volunteered.
“Can’t Robert handle it? Or do you want to borrow the family shotgun?”
She ignored that last quip, which was, perhaps, not in the best of taste.
“Robert’s in Vegas.”
A divorce, soared my heart. I kicked it shut with my heel.
“A big case. His practice is doing quite well, you know.”
I didn’t, but then she’d chosen not to tell me much about him, not even the date of their goddamned wedding, and it was only on the family grapevine that I’d learned anything at all about him, even what his job was. But, as she’d told me when I’d complained about being kept in the dark during one of our rare meetings to discuss Adam’s future, it was none of my damn business whom she married and what he did, and of course she was right.
“I’ve tried to ring his hotel, but he’s not in his room” (at midnight in Vegas, she’d got to be joking, though if she was still as jealous as she’d been with me, she’d want to know where the hell he’d been when he did get in touch) “and anyway, Adam’s your son, so I thought you ought to know.”
“Know what, for Christ’s sake?”
“Adam’s been taking drugs.”
Haven’t we all? Even I, who practically went blue in the face with oxygen starvation at the merest hint of tobacco in my lungs, had blown the odd joint, though frankly it wasn’t my tipple. But every kid his age probably tried a few drags of the old weed, where’s the danger? The most dangerous part of a joint, said those who knew, was the tobacco in it, and the fact that for the best effect you had to hold the nicotine-tainted happy smoke down in your lungs for as long as you could bear to, thus increasing the risk of lung cancer in later life. Or so they said.
Like every liberal who’d survived the traumatic Sixties, I confidently expected marihuana to be legalised before the end of the century, along with sex between consenting males, abortion, divorce for incompatibility and a dozen other long-awaited reforms that would have given Queen Victoria apoplexy.
I began saying something reassuring like this to my ex-, but she cut me off short.
“Not pot,” she said. “I wouldn’t be knocking you up at this time of night for something like pot. No, I’m talking about – “
“Hard drugs?”
“I think so. I think he’s taking heroin.”
Heroin! No wonder she was going potty. A sudden rage welled up in me, all the harder to contain because I didn’t know who it was directed at, Kay and Robert, for not looking after my son better, Adam, for destroying all my hopes for him (he’d shown signs when he first went to school of some kind of musical talent, thus making up for my own significant lack in that department, despite my ten thousand jazz and folk albums), and even myself, for walking out on Kay when her son and mine probably needed stability more than anything else.
Someone as dedicated to music as I was had to have more than a passing acquaintance with hard drugs, though God knows the connection beat me. I’d read Mezzrow’s Really the Blues while I was still at school, and then when I got to know musicians in the flesh there’d always been the odd one out who’d made the deadly progress from pot to smack en route for the grave. Later, there’d been Bill Burroughs and his cut-up threnodies to mainlining, and while I admired his literary innovations, I’d kept studiously distant from the whole thing.
Even when one of my most admired friends, a guitarist who’d had a whole school of technique named after him, took to the needle, I’d edged into the background, shedding perhaps the odd critical tear to the memory of his devastated technique. Another guy wrote a rather awful song called The Needle of Death, and we’d all played it and dwelt on the horrors of addiction, but somehow it had never really touched my life.
Now, it had.
At that precise moment, as if to puncture the ballooning atmosphere of hysteria in my small kitchen, moptop took it into her curly head to check out the smell of coffee we were making.
My pointless guilt at having been discovered by my ex-wife to have a paramour half her age immediately eclipsed the horrors of heroin.
“Er,” I said.
She had wrapped herself in my duvet so it was hard to tell much about her shape, but she seemed of a height with Kay. She’d pushed her feet into my slippers, which were obviously four sizes too big for her. One bony shoulder pushed out of the covering.
Her eyes were creased to slits against the kitchen light, but they seemed to be a dark brown. Her hair was a mess of shattered lacquer. The ruins of her makeup made her look like some kind of discarded rag doll. I felt absolutely no emotion for her at all – apart from embarrassment – and yet presumably an hour or two previously I’d been dedicating all my attention to penetrating her, physically and emotionally.
Weird, the transitory nature of human affections.
“Won’t you introduce us?”
Oh yes, Kay was going to make a meal of this one. An icicle formed in the air between them.
“Um,” I said.
“I’m Jenny,” she said, over-brightly. “Who are you?”
“Kay Parry-Jones.” I always hated that double-barrelled shotgun of a surname, her sole concession to feminism, as far as I could tell, keeping her own Parry when she’d married Robert Jones, the promising young lawyer. I wondered if the two women were going to shake hands.
Quickly, I poured some coffee and pushed the mug at moptop (I was going to have to remember her name this time).
“Why don’t you take this back to bed?” I pleaded. “My ex-wife and I have some urgent family business to settle.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know it was a private conference. See you later, Jackie.” And made a shuffled, but dignified exit.
“Jackie? Is that what she calls you? How long has this been going on?”
“About three or four hours, I’d reckon. But didn’t you come to talk about Adam? My sex life will keep to another time, I’m sure.”
We were on familiar ground now, loading our words with wounding fragments like a nail grenade. Hysteria had vanished, to be replaced by good old-fashioned dislike, tending towards hatred.
It had always puzzled me how I could be so strongly attracted to a woman who could inspire such feelings of antipathy in me. Whenever we met, it was barely five minutes before I began to remember all the reasons why we had split up, whatever sentimental feelings of nostalgia I might have in the midnight hours of my occasional loneliness.
All this time we’d been standing, so we sat on each side of the pine table, like diplomats in Geneva.
“Tell me about it,” I said, trying to soften my voice as much as possible.
“Well, he’s been difficult for several years,” she said after a short pause, “but I thought it was, you know, the problems of adolescence, a broken marriage, that sort of thing. And Robert’s not at home as much as he’d like – no, really, he’s very good,” she protested (a little too much?), as if anticipating some smart-arse remark from me, which indeed had leapt to my lips, “but his work does take him abroad a lot, especially lately. If Adam had seen more of you . . .”
“Are you saying it’s my fault?” This between gritted teeth.
“No, of course not, but, oh I don’t know. Why did we have him, Jack, when we were so near to breaking up already? Was it fair on him? Do you think that’s why . . .?”
Who can tell? If only . . . what if . . .
As my old mum used to say (a deep pain, almost hidden, as I recalled deserting her deathbed to be with my then girlfriend, probing into the agony like a tongue in a bad tooth), if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers.
“Where is he?”
“Adam? In some squat. But he comes home, and that’s when I find the evidence.”
So my ex-wife had become a detective now, had she? The Miss Marple of the wife-swapping set.
“Evidence?”
“Bits of burnt foil in the bathroom.”
“Needles?”
“No, thank God.”
“Anything else?”
“No, except his moods.”
Look who’s talking, Miss Mean Moody and Not So Magnificent herself.
“All kids have moods. I used to give my mother a terrible time when I was a teenager. In fact, I didn’t get myself together until I was nearly thirty, until – “
“Until you left me?”
“If you like. But the point is that he’s got to be given the benefit of the doubt. Have you asked him, straight out?”
I’ll say that for Kay, she usually came out with what was bothering her. Doing her John Blunt act was what I used to call it. “Speak as you find, that’s my motto.” An over-rated virtue, to my mind, but in these circumstances, it might be helpful.
“Yes, I did, but he denied everything. Said he didn’t know anything about the tin foil. Said it might have been one of my friends. We do smoke a bit of pot when they come round, admittedly, but . . .”
“You draw the line at mainlining.”
“Of course.”
“Would you like me to go and see him at this squat of his?”
“Oh Jack, would you? Try and set my mind at rest.”
“I’m frankly not that concerned with your state of mind, my dear. It’s the health of our adopted son that concerns me. If he’s on hard drugs we’ve just got to get him off.”
“Jack-eee, is there any more coffee?”
The voice from the bedroom.
“Look,” said Kay, “here’s the address of the squat. I wrote it down for you in case you were out.”
She pushed a bit of crumpled paper at me.
“I’ll go. I’m sorry to have intruded.”
I took her hands in mine.
“I’m sorry I was grouchy. I’ll go and see him. And call me, any hour of the day or night, if you need to. I’d like to stay friends with you, but we seem to find it difficult. But if you or Adam need me, I’ll try to be there. Don’t worry about . . . “
“Jenny,” she prompted.
“That sort of thing’s not important.”
“I thought you had a regular girlfriend.”
Jane, another writer, was away on assignment. She was more serious business than the moptop in the bedroom, but it, too, was beginning to get a bit messy.
“I have.”
“You don’t change, do you Jackie?”
“I wish I did.”
Actually, I’d been unfaithful to Kay very rarely, and that mainly towards the end, mostly with the lady writer we’d just spoken of. But that hadn’t stopped her infernal jealousy.
“I’ll call you later today. You’re still at the same number?”
“Yes, the 636 number.”
Still a little lovenest in Bloomsbury, though gone a little sour right now, what with the neighbours mainlining smack to your son.
“I’ll call you.”
I went back to the bedroom, but moptop was asleep, so I had a bath and got myself dressed. No point in calling on a squat too early. I knew the sort of hours they kept in squats.
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