Absolute Beginners Read online

  ‘Well, it’s too late to alter that, Dad, isn’t it. But hell, you’re not yet fifty, you could get out into the world a bit … I mean, you’re not really too old to get a job, are you, and travel around and see what sights there are? Others have done it, haven’t they?’

  My poor old Pop was silent.

  ‘Why do you stay in this dump, for instance?’ I said to him.

  ‘You mean here with your mother?’

  ‘Yes, Dad. Why?’

  ‘He stays because he’s afraid to go, and she keeps him because she wants the place to look respectable.’

  This came from the bed and my charming half-brother Vernon, who we’d quite forgotten, and who evidently had been listening to us with both his red ears flapping.

  ‘Ignore him, Dad,’ I said. ‘He’s so easy to ignore.’

  ‘He’s nothing to do with me,’ my father muttered, ‘nothing whatever.’ And he picked up the cups and made off out of the room, knocking things over.

  ‘You,’ I said to Vernon, ‘are a real number one horror, a real unidentified thing from outer space.’

  The trouble about Vernon, really, as I’ve said, is that he’s one of the last of the generations that grew up before teenagers existed: in fact, he never seems to have been an absolute beginner at any time at all. Even today, of course, there are some like him, i.e. kids of the right age, between fifteen or so and twenty, that I wouldn’t myself describe as teenagers: I mean not kiddos who dig the teenage thing, or are it. But in poor Vernon’s era, the sad slob, there just weren’t any: can you believe it? Not any authentic teenagers at all. In those days, it seems, you were just an overgrown boy, or an under-grown man, life didn’t seem to cater for anything whatever else between.

  So I said all this to him.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ he answered (which he must have got from old Clark Gable pictures, like the ones you can see revivals of at the Classics).

  ‘Yeah,’ I said to him. ‘And that’s what explains your squalid downtrodden look, and your groaning and moaning and grouching against society.’

  ‘Is zat so,’ he said.

  ‘Zat is, half-brother,’ I replied.

  I could see him limbering up his brain for a reply: believe me, even I could feel the floor trembling with the effort.

  ‘I dunno about the trouble with me,’ my oafo brother finally declared, ‘but your trouble is, you have no social conscience.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No social conscience.’

  He’d come up close, and I looked into his narrow, meanie eyes. ‘That sounds to me,’ I said, ‘like a parrot cry pre-packaged for you by your fellow squalids of the Ernie Bevin club.’

  ‘Who put you where you are.’

  ‘Which who? And put me where?’

  And now this dear fifty per cent relative of mine came up and prodded my pectorals with a stubby, grubby digit.

  ‘It was the Attlee administrations,’ said my bro, in his whining, complaining, platform voice, ‘who emancipated the working man, and gave the teenagers their economic privileges.’

  ‘So you approve of me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If it was the Ernie Bevin boys who gave us our privileges like you say, you must approve of us.’

  ‘No, I don’t, oh no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘That was an unforeseen eventuality,’ he said. ‘I mean you kids getting all these high-paid jobs and leisure.’

  ‘Not part of the master plan?’

  ‘No. And are you grateful to us? Not a bit of it.’

  There I agreed with him at last. ‘Why should we be?’ I said. ‘Your pinko pals did what they wanted to when they got power, and why should we nippers thank them for doing their bounden duty?’

  This thought, such as it was, really halted him in his tracks. You could hear his brain racing and grinding behind his red, crunched face, till he cried excitedly, ‘You’re a traitor to the working-class!’

  I took the goon’s forefinger, which was still prodding me in the torso, and shook it away from me, and said:

  ‘I am not a traitor to the working-class because I do not belong to the working-class, and therefore cannot be a traitor to it.’

  ‘N – h’n!’ he really said. ‘You belong to the upper-class, I suppose.’

  I sighed up.

  ‘And you reject the working-classes that you sprung from.’

  I sighed some more.

  ‘You poor old prehistoric monster,’ I exclaimed. ‘I do not reject the working-classes, and I do not belong to the upper-classes, for one and the same simple reason, namely, that neither of them interest me in the slightest, never have done, never will do. Do try to understand that, clobbo! I’m just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the taxpayers – needle you all, whichever side of the tracks you live on, or suppose you do.’

  He glared at me. I could see that, if once he believed that what I said I really meant, and thousands of the kiddos did the same as well, the bottom would fall out of his horrid little world.

  ‘You’re dissolute!’ he suddenly cried out, ‘Immoral! That’s what I say you teenagers all are!’

  I eyed the oafo, then spoke up slow. ‘I’ll tell you one thing about teenagers,’ I said, ‘compared with how I remember you ten years ago … which is we wash between our toes, and change our vests and pants occasionally, and don’t keep empty bottles underneath our beds for the good reason we don’t touch the stuff.’

  Saying which, I left the creature; because really, all this was such a waste of time, a drag, all so obvious, and honestly, I don’t like arguing. If they think that all cat’s cock, well, let them think it, and good luck!

  I must have been muttering this out aloud along the corridor, because a voice said, over the staircase balustrade, ‘Counting your money, then, or talking to the devil?’ and of course it was my dear old Mum. There she stood, holding the railings, like someone in a Tennessee Williams film show. So, ‘Hullo, Madame Blanche,’ I said to her.

  For a moment she started to look flattered, like women do if you say something sexy to them, no matter how intimate it is, so long as they think it’s flattering to their egos, until she saw I was ice-cold and sarcastic, and her closed-for-business look came over her fine face again.

  But I got in my body blow before she could. ‘And how is the harem-in-reverse?’ I said to her.

  ‘Eh?’ said my Ma.

  ‘The gigolo lodgers, the Pal Joeys,’ I went on, to make my meaning clear.

  As if to prove my point, two of them kindly passed by at that moment, making it hard for poor old Mum to flatten me, as I could see by her bitter glare that she’d intended, which was now transformed into a sickly simper, prim and alluring, that she turned on like a light for the two beefo Malts who walked between us, oozing virility and no deodorant.

  As soon as they’d squeezed by her up the stair, with much exchanging of the time of day, she whipped round on me and said, ‘You little rat.’

  ‘Mother should know,’ I told her.

  ‘You’re too big for your boots,’ she said.

  ‘Shoes,’ I told her.

  In and out she breathed. ‘You’ve too much spending money, that’s your trouble!’

  ‘That’s just what’s not my trouble, Ma.’

  ‘All you teenagers have.’

  I said, ‘I’m really getting tired of hearing this. All right, we kids have got too much loot to spend! Well, please tell me what you propose to do about it.’

  ‘All that money,’ she said, looking at me as if I had pound notes falling out of my ears, and she could snatch them, ‘and you’re only minors! With no responsibilities to need all that spending money for.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘Who made us minors?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You made us minors with your parliamentary what sits,’ I told her patiently. ‘You thought, “That’ll keep the little bastards in their places, no legal rights, and so on,” and you made
us minors. Righty-o. That also freed us from responsibility, didn’t it? Because how can you be responsible if you haven’t any rights? And then came the gay-time boom and all the spending money, and suddenly you oldos found that though we minors had no rights, we’d got the money power. In other words – and listen to me, Ma – though it wasn’t what you’d intended, admittedly, you gave us the money, and you took away our responsibility. Follow me so far? Well, okay! You majors find the laws you cooked up have given you all the duties, and none of the fun, and us the contrary, and you don’t like it, do you. Well, as for us, the kids, we do like it, see? We like it fine, Ma. Let it stay that way!’

  This left me quite exhausted. Why do I explain it to them, talking like a Method number, if they’re not interested in me anyway?

  Mum, who hadn’t been taking this in (and I mean my ideas, though she naturally grasped the general gist), now changed her tactics, which made me wary, for she came down the stair in silence and beckoned me into her private parlour, as in the old way she used to for some trouble, and also as in the old way, I thought it best just not to follow her, and take my leave. But she must have guessed this, because she popped out of her parlour again, and caught me with the front door open, and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I must speak to you, son,’ she said.

  ‘Speak to me outside, then,’ I told her, trying to walk out of the door into the street, but she still clutched.

  ‘No, in my room, it’s vital,’ she kept hissing.

  Well, there we were, practically wrestling on the doorway, when she let go and said, ‘Please come in.’

  I closed the door, but wouldn’t move further than the corridor, and waited.

  ‘Your father’s dying,’ Mum told me now.

  Now, my first thought was, she’s lying; and my second thought was, even if not, she’s trying to get at me, because what does she care if he lives or dies? She’s going to try to make me responsible in some way for something I’m not at all, i.e. the old blackmail of the parents and all oldies against the kiddos.

  But I was wrong, it wasn’t that, she wanted something from me. After a great deal of a lot of beating about the bush, she said to me, ‘If anything should happen to your father, I’d want you to come back here.’

  ‘You’d want me to,’ I said. That’s all.

  ‘Yes. I’d want you to come back here.’

  ‘And why?’

  Because I really didn’t know. But what gave me the clue was Mum dropping her eyes and looking modest and girlish and bashful, at first I thought for effect, but then I realised it was partly for true, and that for once she just couldn’t help it.

  ‘You want me back,’ I said, ‘because you’ll want a man about the house.’

  She mutely acquiesced, as the women’s weeklies say.

  ‘To keep the dear old place respectable, till you get married once again,’ I continued on.

  Still Ma was mute.

  ‘Because old Vern, your previous product, is such a drip-dry drag that no one would ever take him for the male of the establishment.’

  I got an eye-flash for that, but still no answer, while our thoughts sparred up there in silence in the air, unable to disconnect, because no matter how far you’re cut off from a close relation, cut right off and eternally severed, there always remains a link of memory – I mean Mum knew a whole great deal about me, like nobody else did, and that held us.

  ‘Dad’s very much alive,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t look like dying to me a bit. Not a bit, he doesn’t.’

  ‘Yes, but I tell you, the doctor’s told me …’

  ‘I’ll take my instructions in that matter from Dad, and Dad alone,’ I said. ‘And if Dad ever dies, I’ll take my instructions from myself.’

  She could see that was that, and didn’t give me, as you might have expected, a dirty look, but a puzzled one she couldn’t control, such as she’s given me about six times in my life, as though to say to me, what is this monster I’ve created?

  With which I blew.

  Down by the river, where I went to get a breather, I stood beside the big new high blocks of glass-built flats, like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off, and watched the traffic floating down the Thames below them, very slow and sure (chug, chug) and oily, underneath the electric railway bridge (rattle, rattle), and past the power station like a super-cinema with funnels stuck on it. Peace, perfect peace, though very murky, I decided. Hoot, hoot to you, big barge, bon, bon voyage. There was a merry scream, and I turned about and watched the juveniles, teenagers in bud as you might call them, wearing their little jeans and jumpers, playing in their kiddipark of Disneyland items erected by the borough council to help them straighten out their thwarted egos. When crash! Someone thumped me very painfully on the shoulder blades.

  I very slowly turned and saw the pasty, scabies-ridden countenance of Edward the Ted.

  ‘Bang, bang,’ I said, humouring the imbecile by pointing my thumb and finger at him like a pistol. ‘Bad boy!’

  Ed the Ted said nothing, just looked sinister, and stood breathing halitosis on me.

  ‘And what,’ I said, ‘you doing pounding around down here?’

  ‘I liv ear,’ said Ed.

  I gazed at the goon.

  ‘My God, Ed,’ I cried, ‘you can actually talk!’

  He came nearer, panting like a hippo, and suddenly twirled a key chain, that he’d been hiding in his fist and in his pocket, till it buzzed like a plane propeller between the two of us.

  ‘What, Ed?’ I said. ‘No bike-chain? No flick knife? No iron bar?’

  And, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t wearing his full Teddy uniform either: no velvet-lined frock coat, no bootlace tie, no four-inch solid corridor-creepers – only that insanitary hairdo, creamy curls falling all over his one-inch forehead, and his drainpipes that last saw the inside of a cleaner’s in the Attlee era. To stop the chain twirling, he tried to grab it suddenly with the same hand he was spinning it with, hit his own great red knuckles, winced and looked hurt and offended, then fierce and defiant as he put the hand and the chain in his smelly old drainpipes once again.

  ‘Arve moved,’ he said. ‘Darn ear.’

  ‘And all the click?’ I asked him. ‘All the notorious Dockhead boys?’

  ‘Not v’ click,’ said Ed-Ted. ‘Jus me.’

  I should explain (and I hope you’ll believe it, even though it’s true) that Edward and I were born and bred, if you can call it that, within a bottle’s throw of each other off the Harrow Road in Kilburn, and used to run around together in our short-pant days. Then, when the Ted-thing became all the rage, Edward signed up for the duration, and joined the Teddy boy wolf cubs, or whatever they’re called, and later graduated through the Ted high school up the Harrow Road to the full-fledged Teddy boy condition – slit eyes, and cosh, and words of one syllable, and dirty fingernails and all – and left his broken-hearted Mum and Dad, who gave three rousing cheers, and emigrated down to Bermondsey, to join a gang. According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into the civilised sections of the city and had a coffee with me, he lived a high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing crockery in all-night caffs and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted.

  ‘And why, Ed,’ I said, ‘have you moved darn ear?’

  ‘’Cos me Mar as,’ he said. ‘She’s bin re-owsed.’

  He blinked at the effort of two syllables.

  ‘So you still live with Momma?’ I enquired.

  He beetled at me. ‘Course,’ he said.

  ‘Big boy like you hasn’t got his own little hidey-hole?’ I asked.

  Ed bunched his torso. ‘Lissen,’ he said. ‘I re-spek my Mar.’

  ‘Cool, man,’ I said. ‘Now, tell me. What about the mob, the click? Have they been re-owsed as well?’

  ‘Ner,’ he said.

>   ‘Ner? What, then?’

  At this point, our valiant Edward looked scared, and glancing round about him at the flat blocks, which towered all round like monsters, he said, ‘The click’s split up.’

  I eyed the primitive.

  ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that bunch of tearaways have thrown you out?’

  ‘Eh-y?’ he cried.

  ‘You heard, Ed. You’ve been expelled from the Ted college?’

  ‘Naher! Me? Espel me? Wot? Lissen! Me, Ar lef them, see? You fink I’m sof, or sumfink?’

  I shook my head at the poor goof and his abracadabra. ‘Do me a favour, Ed,’ I said. ‘You’re scared of the boys, why not admit it? Old style Teds like you are wasted, anyway: they’ve all moved out of London to the provinces.’

  Edward the Ted did a little war dance on the cracked concrete paving. ‘Naher!’ he kept crying, like a ten-year-old.

  ‘The trouble is, Ed,’ I said, ‘you’ve tried to be a man without having been a teenager. You’ve tried to miss out one of the flights of stairs.’

  At the mention of ‘teenager’, Ed came to a standstill and stood there, his body hunched like a great ingrowing toenail, staring at me as if his whole squashed personality was spitting.

  ‘Teenagers!’ he cried out. ‘Kid’s stuff. Teenagers!’

  I just raised my brows at the poor slob, gave a little one-hand one-arm wave, and said bye-bye. As I was crossing the yard between the house blocks, like an ant upon a chessboard, a hunk of rock, clumsily aimed, of course, thank heaven, flew by and hit the imitation traction engine in the kiddipark. ‘Yank!’ Ed yelled after me, ‘Go ome, Yank!’

  Sad.

  Up out in Pimlico, the old, old city raised her bashed grey head again, like she was ashamed of her modern daughter down by the river, and I went up streets of dark purple and vomit green, all set at angles like ham sandwiches, until I reached the Buckingham Palace road, so called, and the place where the air terminal stands opposite the coach station.

  And there, on the one side, were the glamour people setting off for foreign countries, mohair and linen suits, white air-liner vanity bags, dark sun-spectacles and pages of tickets packed to paradise, every nationality represented, and everyone equal in the sky-dominion of fast air-travel – and there, on the other side, were the peasant masses of the bus terminal shuffling along in their front-parlour-curtain dresses and cut-price tweeds and plastic mackintoshes, all flat feet and fair shares and you-in-your-small-corner-and-I-in-mine; and then, passing down the middle of them, a troop of toy soldiers, all of them with hangovers after nights of rapture down on the Dilly, and wearing ladies’ fur muffs on their heads and sweaty red jackets that showed their vertebraes from neck to coccyx, and playing that prissy little pipe music like a bird making wind – and I thought, my God, my Lord, how horrible this country is, how dreary, how lifeless, how blind and busy over trifles!