Moggerhanger: A Novel

By Alan Sillitoe

A madcap, bawdy tale about an ordinary man who goes to work for a racketeer and has the adventure of a lifetime: the last novel by an iconic British writer.
 
Michael Cullen, from Nottingham, has a shady past, but nearing his forties, he’s settled down, married a doctor, and started working for an ad agency. That is, until the agency fires him. He’s not terribly upset though. Actually, he feels free—he hated that job. But he knows he’s disappointed his wife and isn’t sure what to do next, so he decides to hit the road for a few weeks.
 
Then, he’s contacted by his old boss, Claude Moggerhanger. A racketeer whom Cullen once tried—and failed—to put in jail, Moggerhanger seems to have forgiven him, and wants to hire him to do a little “job.” All he has to do is drive Moggerhanger’s Rolls Royce to Greece, get Greek food for Moggerhanger’s wife, collect a few packages, and deliver one in Belgrade. This sounds pretty suspect to Cullen, but he needs the money and has nothing else to do—plus, Moggerhanger can be very persuasive.
 
It’s only the beginning of a wild adventure with a cast of characters featuring Cullen’s father, who’s a famous writer, and his long-suffering girlfriend; crazed poets; endless women; rat catchers; Labrador retrievers; the highly menacing Green Toe Gang; and his old friend, Bill Straw, a former mercenary soldier. This novel will make you want to quit your job and go on the road, come what may.
 
Moggerhanger is the 3rd book in the Michael Cullen Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504018357

Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 and left school at 14 to work in various factories. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. His first stories were printed in the ‘Nottingham Weekly Guardian’. In 1958 ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was published and ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, which won the Hawthornden prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.

Book preview

Certain facts the reader might care to know before the novel begins:

I, Michael Cullen, have been a bastard most of my life, except for a break of legitimacy when my father the novelist Gilbert Blaskin met my mother again and married her. I was a grown man by then, so will never know why he did, for they parted two years later, and I reverted to my status as a bastard. Not that I had stopped being one, in any case.

I was born in Nottingham—where else for such as me?—but left at eighteen. At the time I was working, if you can call it that, in an estate agents’ office, till a way came of making a bit of ready on the sly. The scam paid off, but the manager rumbled me so I had to leave. Luckily, always with an eye to the future, I made enough to buy a car and set off for London.

I would have done better had my belongings been wrapped in a handkerchief and balanced from a stick on my shoulder, with a mangy cat mewing behind, because the car, which was not only British made but secondhand, dropped to pieces bit by bit on my progress down the Great North Road. After the engine’s massive cardiac arrest at Hendon Station I finished the journey by Underground.

On my way to London I had picked up a hitchhiker fresh out of jail, a sponger from Worksop called Bill Straw, and through him became employed for a while by Claud Moggerhanger, a racketeer who made Rachman seem like a charity worker from Oxfam.

I worked as a bouncer at one of Moggerhanger’s Soho clubs until, ever greedy for cash, I saw more to be made smuggling gold out of the country for an organisation run by Jack Leningrad, who conducted his operations from the inside of an iron lung. This business ended by my being banged up for eighteen months, though not before I had put by sufficient to buy a Beeching axed railway station at Upper Mayhem in the Fen country. Moggerhanger sent me to jail, because he was Leningrad’s rival in the gold trade of that time, but he also put me there on discovering I had been giving too much mutton dagger to his depraved daughter Polly.

When I came out of prison I married an ex-au pair from Holland called Bridget Appledore, and retired to Upper Mayhem, but after ten years of what I considered bliss at my railway station, she left me, and took the children to Holland.

In my despair I lit off for London, and worked for Moggerhanger again, who often took on those he had injured, in the knowledge that they knew the consequences should they be so daft as to do anything against him again.

He judged me wrong, my object being to find sufficient evidence to put him where he had so callously sent me. But he had meanwhile been ennobled into Lord Moggerhanger, and was even more cunning than he was rich. Suspecting my intention of contacting Interpol, he put Bill Straw to follow me onto the ferry at Harwich. Straw found his way to throw the briefcase, of carefully collected incriminations of Moggerhanger’s drug running empire, into the sea.

A few weeks before, I had met Frances Malham, a medical student. She was besotted by Ronald Delphick, England’s foremost performance poet, but I rescued her from him by marrying her, and we lived happily ever after, which is to say, for the last three years.

By that quick thinking, which a picaresque hero such as myself is born with, I had helped her Uncle Geoffrey out of trouble, because he’d fucked the Portuguese maid and made her pregnant. My untruths put him in the clear with his wife, and in recompense he gave me a job at his advertising agency, where he assumed my talent for telling lies would be useful.

Now read on.

Chapter One.

The funny-money City of London, on a clear spring day, put me into a philosophical mood. I’d heard that you became wiser as you get older, no matter how dodgy the start. Not me. Where’s the liberty in going along with that? Liberty, like the wine of a good year, doesn’t come cheap. It’s enough to keep on keeping on, and let wisdom take care of itself, which generally happens. All I had learned for sure was that fight against Fate and you’re done for, dropped by parachute—if you have one—into the middle of Dreckland.

The blue-skied day was so fresh I seemed to be convalescing after a long illness, or living in my carefree twenties again, though I was edging towards forty. Sound in wind and limb, and as footloose and fancy free as fancy could still make me, I felt at the acme of self-satisfied overconfidence, until a cornering taxi painted my turn ups black with diesel smoke, reminding me that last night I’d had the alarming notion that if I succumbed to sleep I would never wake again. Such premonitions I could live without, but since nothing could stop slumber on its wool bound iron wheels I knew on waking this morning that the day was going to be another fateful one in my life.

How right I was. In the office a letter on my desk told me I’d got the push. In so many words it informed me that my imagination and genius for lying weren’t needed anymore. The fact was that my obvious and endless contempt for the job had got under my colleagues’ pinstripes, and they didn’t like it. What had taken them so long? All they believed in was a load of bollocks, and they knew it, and they knew I knew it, but my frequent jokes on the matter were no longer allowed.

They diligently worked to persuade people what they should buy. They deliberated on what the folk ought to eat, the clothes they must put on their backs, the powders to wash their baths and shit pans with. They stipulated the sort of fire-hazard beds to sleep in, and chairs to fall back in while watching infantile entertainment on television. They decided in their toy balloon tinpot heads that people should believe what they would never believe themselves. But how wrong they were to think they ran the world.

The last account I worked on had appalled more than worried them, as I had meant it to, and because I had done my best to fuck up their values more than anybody ever had in the history of advertising it was no surprise when the guillotine kissed my clean-shaven neck. So here I was, free for as long as the quarter’s cheque lasted, knowing that three years with them had been more than enough.

I should have resigned with the usual psychiatrist’s report certifying I was off my trolley and not likely to clamber back for the rest of my life. Tendering for their understanding and goodwill I could have got a golden handshake and gone off like a dog with a tin tail to breed hamsters on a farm in Wiltshire. Not me. By making them sack me I had cut off my nose to spite my face, which my mother had always said was my usual way, and would do me no good.

Motorists barked their horns at an ambulance blocking Marchmont Street, while one of the crew helped a crippled old lady into her doorway. A chap in a white Mercedes leaned his pink head out and told them to get a move on: Or I’ll run her over.

While the ambulance driver gave an extended two-finger salute from his cab the ninety-year-old woman rested on her zimmer frame, as if to wind some breath back into her lungs, then shouted with the voice of a twenty-year-old King’s Cross strumpet to the impatient man in the Merc, that he should go away, find a quiet corner, and give himself a good fucking, a remark which changed his complexion from pink to red, and entertained the street no end.

With traffic so conveniently stalled I crossed the road and walked my uncertainties away, convinced that the only important person in the world was me. Who was next on the list it was impossible to say, but at least I wondered, and supposed it had to be my wife Frances, who I’d sooner or later have to tell about the loss of a job she’d expected me to hold for life.

As a general practitioner she slaved all the hours God sent, and would have put in even more time had the solar system made the day longer. Again and again she told me how she loved her job, and that the only worthy life was to help the poor and the sick, while at the same time having no illusions.

The poor are always with us, I had told her last night, and the poor are always sick, otherwise they wouldn’t be poor. She put hands to her beautiful ears, not to know I didn’t much believe what I said. As for the sick, I went on, they can’t help but be poor, because who wouldn’t feel poor if they were sick? The fact is, darling, that you never get any rest, not even during the night. Just as you’re snugged up in my arms and about to have an orgasm the bloody phone stops it because some mardy bastard’s run out of tablets and wants you to drive a couple of miles in the murk to give him the needle and send him back to never-never land. How can you go on living like that? And what about me in all this?

You’re a monster of selfishness. Her half smile indicated that no matter how irredeemable I was she’d go on putting up with me. You give me no encouragement, though I suppose it’s my fault, because that’s what attracted me to you in the first place. But don’t put me off. Some poor chap wants seeing to. I must go.

I switched on the bedroom light to see her lovely breasts hoiked into the little lacy bra, and knickers cover the auburn triangle, as if she was going to see a lover rather than a patient. A slip over all, she put on skirt, shirt, and sensible shoes to prove me wrong, then lifted her bag of gear. You have no sense of social responsibility, Michael. You’re even worse than Ronald Delphick used to be.

He still is like that, I called after her, then went back into the warmth and tried to sleep. I didn’t offer to drive her, as I sometimes did, for it was dark and raining, and I needed all the dreams I could get, though I remembered none, which was just as well, or they might have shown even more clearly the bastard I knew myself to be.

A motorist missed clipping me by an inch on crossing Malet Street. Such a bang and I would never have seen Frances again. What you halfway hoped for never came, though I didn’t much care for being carted home in a plastic bag and having Frances, with her usual puzzled frown and stethoscope poised, bending just so that I could see her exquisite décolletage, no longer to be delved into and got at.

But where do I go? I had lived in London on and off for thirteen years and it still seemed unreal. Patches I knew, and could get from one to another, yet felt I only belonged to the area around our house, regarding London as a place to own rather than live in, either that or forget it.

Changing course at every corner I wondered whether to call at the Cain and Abel pub in Soho, and say hello to my father, Gilbert Blaskin. He’d be on a high stool, holding a double brandy, a cigar between his teeth, and telling dropouts and media scumbags what angst he went through while writing his big successful novels.

If he wasn’t there I would look in the Box and Cox, or the Black Crikey, till I remembered he’d been blackballed from both because people would no longer put up with the lash of his insults—novelists having a way with words—or tolerate his boasting. As often as not he would burst into tears, and end by vomiting in the loo, behaviour so boorish it couldn’t even be put down to self-indulgence, a devil in him he was incapable of taming. Thank God I in no way took after him.

Most likely he was still in bed with a thundercloud hangover, moaning for Mabel Drudge-Perkins his paramour to put another cold wet towel across his scorching brow. He would be glad to see me if I told him about my downfall, and would use the fact of my being thrown out of the advertising agency as a paragraph or two of padding for his current novel. I knew him. Many’s the time I’ve picked up one of his books and read accounts of my misfortunes, though so distorted or magnified as only to be recognisable by me who had suffered them.

He once got me to write a novel which he could send to his publisher as his own, according to contract, while what he considered to be his good one went to a firm offering more money. My effort was the worst I could do. I’d never written a novel anyway. It was crap, a farrago of juvenile and semi-literate slop crammed with senseless magic realism—which was all the rage—written as quickly as I could work the typewriter, but it won him the Windrush Prize of ten thousand pounds, which he didn’t share with me.

The ways of the literary world were a mystery, and I still don’t think he has forgiven me. Such garbage pulling a prize shattered all faith in himself, for a couple of days, and when he got the news I had to dodge an empty brandy bottle that splattered too close to my head.

I jinked through the streets, glanced in the techno toyshops of Tottenham Court Road, and turned onto Oxford Street. Stopping at a phone box I dialled Blaskin, whose voice scraped into my ear: Whitehall 1212. His Holiness the Pope speaking, but don’t confess until I get my notebook.

I don’t care if it’s the Grand Mufti of fucking Mecca. I only hope I’m not disturbing you.

My ever-loving son Michael? He sounded pettish. Of course you’re disturbing me. I was halfway through a comma.

A coma?

Don’t insult a hardworking novelist. It’s too early before six o’clock in the evening, and then I’m in the pub. What is it you want?

I’ll be passing your place in half an hour.

Good. I’ll get Mabel to grind the poison with the coffee, after she’s finished making the beds, of course, and steaming my fedora. You can rest assured that the poison won’t take effect until you’ve told me what’s on your mind.

Something important’s happened to me, I said.

Good or bad?

Bad, you might say.

A gloating liveliness came into his voice. Tell me about it on the phone. Poison doesn’t come cheap. I saw his smirk on hearing I was in trouble, as if he was able to see through those minute parts of the callbox windows not covered by prostitutes’ cards. But do come and get your coffee. At least I can watch you die. Copy straight from life reads much better.

To be idiosyncratic, cantankerous, and full of bile was a necessary state for his work, so who was I to upset the equilibrium? It wasn’t possible, though I often tried.

I put the tackle down. Oxford Street was crowded, giro day or not. Thatcher’s government had closed the factories, and was doing its best with the coalmines. They had kicked everyone out of the loony bins and left the poor sods to sink or swim. Mostly they came down to London and cluttered up the golden mile begging for the price of a fix to put them out of their misery. Overspilling garbage cans, split condoms and rusty needles were all over the place, on streets which ministers and members of parliament drove through in blacked out cars. If you can’t get on, get out, but when hadn’t it been like that?

A girl at the office last year rattled on about being a socialist, and one day said a bit too loud that Mrs Thatcher was a rotten old bag who should be hanged from a lamp post. I’d never say that about any woman, or man for that matter, unless it was Moggerhanger. But the girl was a feminist who loved it when one of us went to fetch her a cup of tea or coffee. Unluckily for her, her anti-Thatcherite diatribe was heard by Eric Pushpacker, who doted on Margaret Thatcher.

When he told Geoffrey Harlaxton what the girl had said, she was thrown out in no time. The rhythm of her language on being shown the door would have been a treat to march to. We must go on proving that Darwin was right, Geoffrey guffawed, but still red at the recollection of her curses. They laughed over their pints of directors’ bitter. And careful not to let any such scrawny chit from the working class come into the office again, at which I said: I suppose your grandfather was selling night soil from all the shit-houses in Battersea before he made his pile, another reason he wasn’t sorry to get rid of me.

A bomber jacket junkie in smart trainers, factory-stained jeans, and a red and green ethnic hat stood before me and asked for money. I pushed him aside, though hoped he’d try to hit me so that I could make up for having lost my job by booting him into Selfridge’s to do a bit of shoplifting. He was drugged up to the eyeballs. Fuck you, he spat, and looked for someone else to nail.

I’d never been uncharitable, and five years ago I’d have given him something, as I had to Almanack Jack, but he at least sold smelly old almanacks or packets of damp matches from a tray. I’d helped Bill Straw when he was down (as he had helped me) and picked up Arthur Clegg when I’d found him on the road and homeless, making him caretaker at Upper Mayhem. Even Ron Delphick had benefitted by a bob or two now and again. As the self-styled North country performance poet he still pushed an old pram with a giant panda on top, up and down the Great North Road, a pennant fluttering from a handle-mast saying: Poems tenpence each, or as much as you can afford. He got an MBE in the New Year’s Honour’s List, but continued sponging because—and this pissed him off no end—an income hadn’t come with it.

But three years hobnobbing with agency boyos had turned me sour and mean. They wanted people to buy—I’d heard them say—not beg. Begging was against all they stood for. The money people gave to beggars would be better spent on the trash they advertised. Beggars only got drunk, or bought drugs. The agency lads snorted drugs as well (though I never had) but were flush and could buy all they wanted.

I bawled at the junk-head that he should get a job, a suggestion so audacious and unexpected that he took his fingers from the lapel of a next victim and came closer to me than last time, to fathom the features of a bloke who could make such a cruel remark.

I nudged him from passing traffic towards Selfridge’s window. He had a General Custer hair-do, and an earring. It was impossible to stare him out. He must have trained his eyes to jump through hoops like fleas at a circus and never hold still. One of his teeth was missing, but if someone from an advertising agency had knocked it out I hoped this chap had smacked the fuckpig back.

Charitable, and by now halfway sorry for him, I sorted a pound coin from my pocket, but he looked as if it was a black widow spider, and threw it onto the pavement. A well-dressed little Crispin, on his way to Hamley’s I supposed, snatched it from the gutter and ran after his mother: Mummy! Mummy! I’ve found some money.

You’re an insulting bastard, my very own personal beggar said.

Well, maybe I was, and felt ashamed, and knew that I needed to make a real financial gesture against the view of my ex-colleagues at the advertising agency with regard to beggars, and towards me becoming my old sympathetic self again. Who could begrudge him a five pound note? He had been right to throw the measly coin away. Take this, then, and buy a few custard pies.

He held it to the light to make sure I hadn’t printed it that morning, and left the head on upside down, then turned his lit up face to me. Cheers! That’s what I call generous. I come from Chesterfield, to work the patches down here now and again. I earn enough in a day to last a month in that hole. I’m studying for my ‘0’ Levels at night school.

He ran off to get himself a pint, I hoped, and I zig-zagged the streets as if soaking up the geography to become a taxi driver, heels hot and toes sore from walking so little in the last few years. Frances had asked me to buy a few score stamps from the post office close to my pint and sandwich place, so I went into the one on Albemarle Street.

The woman before me in the queue had dark skin and a good shape, legs clothed by black slacks, hair flaring into a regal Queen of Sheba headdress, flashing teeth on smiling at a cartoon in the Evening Standard. I’d bring her pears and ripe black figs and damson-coloured muscatels to see her eat and imagine what she could do afterwards in bed. She was a feast for the eyes, so who wouldn’t relish her?

She gave in a couple of packets at the guichet, knickers to a friend perhaps. On putting the receipt and change into her Gracchi handbag she dropped a kleenex, and though I would pick up a woman’s handkerchief in the hope of a smile for gallantry, then get talking to her, invite her for coffee, or even lunch, whether I was nearly broke or not, and subtly by little pulling her into bed, I was damned if I would latch my digits onto a piece of tissue which might have a fleck of snot on it, no matter how lickerish she might look on devouring my platters of fruit.

To my astonishment and chagrin a man who had finished his turn at the pigeon hole handed her the kleenex back with such a smile you’d think it was pure silk and belonged to Marie Antoinette. She smiled oh so graciously, and from my turn at the counter I saw them talking amicably on the way out, his hand close to her elbow as if they might be heading for a smart bit of congress on the street.

Such knightly behaviour was of a very high order, I told myself, and I would remember, true or not, that he had even given up his place in the queue to play the cavalier. The old Michael Cullen would have beaten him to it, snot or not, and got off with her in a flash, and pushed any other intruding ratface out of the way with a look that melted him to sewer juice, but I had become soft and slow, if not stupid, in thrall too long to my lovely doctor wife (nevertheless more of a beauty than the woman in the queue) who would chuck me into the street when I told her I had lost a job which she had always seen as just right for the likes of me, and who could blame her?

I’d have to sharpen myself up. It could have been me, and should have been, walking with that personable woman to share a fourposter at a posh hotel in the Thames Valley for two hundred quid a night, but worth every penny. Having lost her made my liver ache. I had lived with Frances for three years, and no longer knew who I was, just as she didn’t much know who she was, I supposed, after living with me.

I walked along Piccadilly towards Knightsbridge, in a mood not at all like any of Michael Cullen’s in former times. Things had to alter. Maybe wisdom only came when they did.

Chapter Two.

There are more funerals to go to when you get older, Blaskin was saying. My appointment’s book is full of them, but I never go to any, in case I catch cold and die. I’m not much above sixty, but I crossed the good old River Rubicon a long time ago.

In the beginning was the word, which he would sooner or later use to start a novel. Whatever word was put into his mind switched him into full spate at the sight of me in the doorway.

"People are cracking up so fast you’d think God had auctioned off His old fashioned single shot musket and gone back to the Middle East to buy a machine gun for a guinea. I’m afraid to open The Times and read the obituaries of those who have popped off at my age or younger. Or I’m terrified at finding my own obituary—though I should be so lucky—and then where would I be? I’d have to get up from my cosy study and find out who it was had killed me, so that I could kill him, then do the right thing and die."

I sat on the sofa without waiting for the invitation. Nearer seventy than sixty, my father didn’t look much above fifty. Unlike most people, it was boozing, smoking, and humping young women that had stopped age crumbling him. He was tall and lithe, and not the man to get on the wrong side of.

I hadn’t called to hear about the dead and dying but to unload my troubles, if such they turned out to be, though I should have known that a walking penis like Blaskin would only hear me when he was ready, the drunken bastard so needing to whinge about his hard life as a novelist that he had neither time nor space for anybody else.

Of course, God does scythe down the young as well. He smiled at the notion, drawing red fire to the tip of a choice Havana, and giving the glass of five-star Napoleon a touch of his rubbery lips. If he didn’t, a superabundance of the vicious young would kill too many of us off in our prime, in their scramble to get old and enjoy the durian fruits of age themselves. Life is a battlefield, and no mistake.

As if even speech wore him out—though it never could—he lay back in his armchair, the folds of his Mandarin-style dressing gown falling around a long body terminated at the top by a head utterly bereft of hair. The long white scar down the middle of his pink scalp, which he swore came from a too close encounter with German shrapnel at the Gothic Line in Italy during the war was, so I believed, the hatchet mark of a maddened husband.

His lips and nose were large, forehead noble—to be fair—but his big ears hadn’t been serviceable enough to hear a jealous husband on the stairs, nor his blue eyes sufficiently acute to see him, before the unclothed woman by his side could scream a warning. He used the incident, properly disguised, in one of his immortal novels—as he liked to call them—telling how the husband had gone to board a plane for Hong Kong and, finding the departure time put back five hours, went home to spend it with his ever-loving wife. Catching her in bed with Blaskin, he went calmly to the kitchen for a sharp and shining cleaver, and came out to do the business.

Back from the hospital, bandaged like a mummy of Ancient Egypt, Blaskin consoled himself that he had lived through an unusual experience. The marks of a lifetime gave such a raffish aspect to his appearance that even young girls, out of curiosity mostly, wanted to get closer, and he had never been one to turn them down.

How long he would maunder on didn’t bear thinking about, and I could have waited more patiently had a drink been on offer but, from malice rather than meanness, his generosity was erratic. Him being my father it would be difficult flattering him into pushing the bottle forward, so I had to wait on my feet till his drawling smatter of tabletalk came to an end, and he looked up as if seeing me for the first time. I might have been a piece of driftwood instead of his only son. And what, dear boy, brings you here, so close to dawn?

Mabel Drudge-Perkins came from the kitchen with a beaker of powdered chicory for me, and a silver pot on a tray with cup and saucer for Blaskin, the aroma of his coffee suggesting the best mocha. Did she think I was the window cleaner, or the plumber? She got a nod, but no thank you.

Mischief in Blaskin’s eyes led to a touch on her arse as she leaned gracefully to pour for him. How kind of you, my love, he said.

She was in her middle forties, fair hair neatly bunned, cold blue eyes, straight nose, censorious lips, and sculptured bosom under a white blouse buttoned to the neck. Her lips were set in a curve of eternal disappointment, perhaps after a decade of living with Blaskin, because if his first purpose on earth was serial philandering, and the next an indulgence in writing novels, a third was to torment her sufficiently to make sure she would never leave him.

Don’t go away, darling. I know you like your elevenses in the kitchen so that you can cool the coffee with your tears, but I prefer to have you with me now and again, and not only in bed. I’m a modern man, after all. Women’s Liberation rules my heart. He turned to me. As I hope it does yours, my one and only—or so I have to take your mother’s word for it—son.

Bollocks. I admired his tomahawk parenthesis, and was not unpleased when Mabel’s left eye flickered at my language.

You see, Michael, he said, it’s not done to use a swear word in front of a lady. The world is full of divine, courageous, energetic, beautiful, intelligent and self-sacrificing women, who are too often married—or otherwise associated with—brutal, ugly, unfeeling and treacherous men. It’s very sad, but that’s why, if you fall off the carousel of matrimony, it can be dashed hard to take up with someone again.

Mabel watched her lover sip from the superfine Meissen cup. That’s very true, Gilbert, she said, with a glint of fight in her eyes, so men such as you have to be careful, and not drive them too far.

The likes of me,—her phrasing clearly displeased him—were born careful, but this coffee, my love, tastes so good you must have put in a fair measure of deadly nightshade. You do excel yourself now and again.

Which reminds me, she said, isn’t it time you tidied your study? It’s in an awful mess.

Let it stay that way. Neatness is a sign of old age. As long as it’s in a state of squalor I know where everything is. Your passion for creating order out of chaos has cost me a novel or two in the past. Ever since we got together you’ve wanted to destroy me as a writer so that I’ll pay unremitting attention to you, and if it wasn’t for a beautiful foreign girl coming through the door now and again to talk to me about a thesis on my work I might forget I ever was a writer.

A glint in her eye told me she might think that would be no bad thing, while I began to wonder whether there could be any paternal connection when he rattled on so cruelly, but my mother, meeting him again twenty years after the event, had persuaded me, and him, that such was the fact. Around the time of my conception she had been a factory worker, and more liberated than most women today, as free as dandelion fluff, with maybe a different lover every night—or so my grandmother had once said, thinking me too young to understand.

How Blaskin had been deceived I didn’t know. There wasn’t much physical similarity between him and me, yet I dreaded living till sixty and going bald. I was the same height, and might still inherit a scar down my skull. He and my mother were convinced I was his son, and perhaps it was true. Only the uncertainty was precious, but if I was, everything being possible, how could I be disappointed? Whomever I came from I was still me.

Yes, he said to Mabel, I recall the heady days when I first got you over the bath and shafted you like the devil I was. Do you remember, my delectable ice maiden? Her scream, Michael, when she had an orgasm, sounded like another execution in Red Square. Then she said she hadn’t had one, to take me down a peg or two.

I hate you, Gilbert, I really do.

For God’s sake leave her alone, I said.

He laughed, hardly on his worst form. She loves it. Why does she sit there if she doesn’t? Oh, I know, she wants to see how far I’ll go, but curiosity will be her downfall. In any case, my delicious icing cake, you’ll be here forever. When we did a runner to the South Seas three years ago she tried to kill me, then got frightened at the notion of having nothing left to live for if I popped my clogs. So she nursed me back to health, and her sentimental attention almost put me back at death’s door. Being a novelist I know her better than she does herself, and she doesn’t appreciate the advantages of being so understood and affectionately cared for. He tinkled the silver apostle spoon around the empty cup. Whenever I hear your melodious voice, dear Mabel, my heart’s no longer a desert. Is that what you want to hear?

Something like that. I don’t know whether or not I love you, Gilbert, but you’re certainly a factor in my life.

Though I didn’t like having such a grand seat at the Wimbledon sex war they made it hard for me to go back on the street and think ordinary peoples’ lives were more exciting. Strawberries and cream would have been a help. I recalled Geoffrey Harlaxton treating me to prime seats once, but here I was at a different match, unable to escape Blaskin’s Great Game playing before my eyes and too close to the insides of my ears. If this was how Englishmen treated their women I was as Irish as my mother claimed our antecedents to be. I knew I was different. I charmed women, made them laugh and feel wanted, looked on older ones as queens, and younger ones as princesses, so as to get any of them sooner into bed.

Whenever, Blaskin began coolly, which I knew he wouldn’t be for long, somebody says you’re a factor in their life, especially your wife or paramour, tell her, in no uncertain terms, to spirit herself away and never come back.

I’ll remember that, I said.

Do. He turned. Mabel?

Yes, Gilbert?

I want you out of the flat for the rest of the day. I’m expecting a foreign research student in an hour, so go and spend a happy time shoplifting in Harrod’s. You’ve no idea how skilful she is at it, Michael. She takes a reticule, dresses like a Chelsea woman locked out of the Flower Show, and comes home laden with goodies. Nowhere’s safe in that establishment, from the furniture department to the food hall. I hope she’ll be caught one day and get put inside for a year, so that I can have a mite of peace. Trouble is though she would be in her element there, and set up a workshop for petty thieving in no time. But she’s too damned clever to get caught.

It’s fiction, Mr Cullen. She blushed, as I took out a cigarette and waited for Blaskin’s next serve. All fiction, she said, though with such a smile I couldn’t take it for the truth.

Oh no it’s not. She brought back that box of Romeo and Juliet cigars last week, which turned into scotch mist as soon as I had my hands on them. But to return to the topic of heretofore. Whenever I’m expecting a research student I contrive to be struggling with the vacuum cleaner as she comes through the door. She sees my sad attempt to get it going. I can’t even find the socket to plug it into, so the dear girl takes it with a smile of ‘Oh what can you expect from a such a great novelist?’ and ends by hoovering the flat more thoroughly than Mabel ever could, who’s English to the bone. Then, to reward my pretty little student, I fumble around the kitchen, as if to get something to eat. She gives a little tinkling laugh of disbelief as I put spaghetti into a saucepan with no water, and ends by cooking a wonderful continental meal, the sauce enough to melt the tastebuds. It’s not the watery soft cabbage, brown paper roast beef, rehydrated potatoes and tinned carrots I get from Mabel, who tries to outdo my old boarding school. Nothing like that. It’s a meal fit for a gentleman. I open a couple of bottles of choice wine, the label depending on her nationality, to encourage my gorgeous student further, and after the last delicious drops of her coffee we fall into bed for the best of desserts.

Every word he speaks is false, Mabel said. I can’t think why he doesn’t save it for a novel. It might be so much better there, though I doubt it.

He used it in the novel before the last, I reminded her. I’ve read them all, and it wasn’t very convincing, either.

She turned from me and said: Gilbert, I’m sick and tired of hearing you say such awful things before me over and over again. It bores and distresses me terribly. I can’t listen to anymore of it.

I was ready to agree, and take her part, until she came close to the tears he so much wanted to see. The next thing he’s going to say, Michael, is that I’m a lesbian.

I know she’s improving when she realises what I’m going to say next. But I only say such things to amuse her. A man who can’t make a woman laugh is the lowest of the low. Besides, darling, he said to her, you have such a wonderfully shaped behind to inspire me, like jelly escaped from its mould. Still I love you to madness, and you know it. I’ve never loved anybody else. There, what more can I say? In any case, you come from very good stock, a fact that means so much to me, such a line of nobility I’m sure your family has a long entry in the Almanac of Gotha.

I couldn’t have stopped her. Nobody could. I knew what was coming and so, I’m sure, did Blaskin, who went on full red alert, though he was unable to prevent a real life happening that would certainly read well in a future novel. Wasn’t his popularity with readers based on the fact that he could always ‘make something happen’? Now he had. Perhaps it was what he had hoped for all along.

Mabel stepped to the tray by his side, lifted it high, and let all that was on it fall squarely over him. Cup and saucer, milk and sugar, napkin and spoon struck his baldness and ricocheted over the carpet. There, you foul beast. That’s what you wanted, and now you have it.

He pushed the tray aside. You’ll only have to clean everything up.

Her eyes were gleaming. The student will have to do it, won’t she? If she comes.

Oh, she’ll come all right, much sooner than you ever did.

You never made me come, she cried. Never. You’re not capable of it.

I know. Only a lesbian could make you come, if she rowed you like a galley slave.

She turned to me. What did I tell you. I said he’d bring that up sooner or later.

I made such a good spectator my neck was turning to rubber. If I could write a book, I thought, I’d put him in it, and make sure he died by the end. Leave me out of it, I said.

I did make you come, he said, when I tried the other place, because you said that was what you wanted. You cried for an hour afterwards, out of guilt and the fact that you enjoyed it so much, and only stopped when I made you a cup of cocoa.

Scratch an Englishman, she smirked, and you find a Turk. We all know how true that is, don’t we?

Oh yes, Blaskin smoothed the top of his head, as if the old scar itched from the grains of sugar, people have been know to say I had a touch of the tarboosh!

I admired her dignified restraint on saying: It’s a mistake, Gilbert, to imagine you can get to know yourself through sexual promiscuity. That sort of thing is only for the beasts. Not that I think you have a real self, though if you did I wouldn’t like to know you. You’d probably be far worse than you are now.

He took a propelling pencil and a miniature notebook from his dressing gown pocket. Wonderful! Go on, my usually taciturn victim. Tell me more. It’ll fit very well into kickstarting a part of my novel.

She arched her back to get full height. I’m not a victim.

You are sometimes, he said moodily. And then, how victims strike harder when they do!

You have an ideal relationship, I said, though my irony was, for the moment anyway, beyond them. It’s like Darby and Joan.

Or Punch and Judy, she said.

Call it Box and Cox, Blaskin broke in. But she’s a difficult woman, Michael. She could only love a man if he satisfied her unfulfilled romantic yearnings, and I can’t do it because I never had anyone to practice on for when I met her. He put a hand to his brow to simulate despair. Oh God, but I’ve done my best to bring her to life.

I gave Mabel high marks for self-possession when she said: Please, Gilbert, I wish you wouldn’t talk in that way. I really can’t think you mean all you say. I’m sure you don’t mean it. You should be more dignified, and take yourself seriously.

More than six feet tall, he stood against the hangings of the high windows, and put a hand into his breast pocket. Whoever takes themselves seriously should never have been born, especially a novelist. Oh dear, why didn’t I save that for the thesis girl? What was it I said, Michael? I’ve forgotten already.

I told him. He was eternally spouting cracker mottoes, though I kept the observation to myself. If I’d said a tenth as many hard words to Frances as he diatribed to Mabel I would have been booted out long ago, and quite right. Perhaps they carried on in such a way only to entertain their guests, and had rehearsed this session during the night for my benefit.

Michael, he said, I can’t stand this life anymore. She’s killing me. The only relief is when I put in some work on my book, unless she’s thrown out what I’ve done so far into the Serpentine. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Everything to do with your work is precious to me, she said. You know that by now.

"Then where’s the handwritten manuscript of No Poppies in Eritrea, my first book of poems as a young subaltern? I was looking for it last week, to drool over how good I was in my younger days."

I remember you taking it to Bertram Rota when you were out of funds.

Hell’s bells and buckets of Flanders blood! You don’t say? I can’t believe it.

I saw you put it under your coat.

"What about my essays A State of Rage? And the novel I wrote under the name of Sidney Blood The Ogres’ Orgy? And Sonnets From Burnt Oak? I got the Wurlitzer Prize for that. I haven’t seen them anywhere."

Her expression was sinister. Gone. All gone. You sold them all.

"What, even The Secret Journal of the Ladies of Llangollen?"

That too.

He clutched his head. My heart’s breaking. I’m losing my grip on life, and you’re no help. He turned to me. She’s lying. She was probably drooling over the last one. You can never get the truth out of someone who’s trying to kill you.

I’m only doing it as your muse, she said, to encourage you. You can’t complain about that.

Let’s go into my study, Michael, he said. I’d rather hear what you’ve come to tell me.

We left Mabel humming to herself and clearing up the detritus from the tray. His study was the largest room of the flat, all available wall space fitted with mahogany bookshelves from floor to ceiling, except for one section where a framed chart—at which I looked with fascinated concern—depicted the ages at which every great writer of the past had died, from Antiquity to Sidney Blood and Gilbert Blaskin.

It was done by Mabel, he said. Her only work of art. She’s waiting to take it out of the glass and lovingly write in of my demise. He turned it to the wall. I took it to the dustbin some time ago but she brought it back. She swabs it clean of tobacco smoke every morning.

What a way to live. I sat in the armchair, while he lay on the sofa staring at papers stacked on his desk, waiting for the will to go across and start work. What are you writing these days?

I wish I could tell you. Two hundred pages done, and I don’t know what it’s about.

Does it matter?

Not to my readers, but to me it does. He opened a large wooden cigar box and gave me a tube. Light up. It won’t kill you. I’ve been hoping they will me for years, but nothing does, as long as I go on working. I survived the war, except for a scratch or two, and am too old to die young, so God can fornicate with Himself. There’s nothing like a good cigar after coffee, except brandy perhaps. And so, my only begotten son, and bastard that you are, what can I do for you?

I’m not a bastard. Not that I mind, but you did marry my mother. Or are you a victim of Alzheimer’s already?

How can I forget her? He went to the desk, and tapped out a word. It’s a few years since I met her. Did she go back to that commune in Turkey?

The last time I heard, she was in Nottingham.

Ah! What a divine place! He blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. That’s where we fell in love. I was walking by the Council House one afternoon, and she came towards me, but instead of passing by she took my arm, as bold as brass. ‘Tommy,’ she said—I was a Second Lieutenant, but it meant nothing to her—‘I like you. Let’s go into Yates’s and have a drink.’ We fell madly in love, even before we got to our second glass. What black passion! There’s no love like the first, Michael, and the first is always the last.

And I was the result?

You were, my boy. You were born after I left. I was already in North Africa. But I never forgot Nottingham and your cavalier young mother. She would lead me into that little grubby house and, whenever there was time, and there always was, we’d go at it even before she got out of her overalls. The more she reeked of disinfectant from the factory the more I liked it. Life hasn’t been the same since, except in my novels.

It’s so long ago, though. I thought about my early affairs in Nottingham, when I’d had spiky Claudine Forks, and shafted Gwen Bolsover who I hoped was also pregnant when I left. I’m surprised you remember it.

All the past is like yesterday, he said, no matter how far off it seems.

Have you written about the time with my mother?

That would break the spell. We can’t throw magic away like that. There are some things that even novels don’t deserve.

He didn’t believe that for a moment, and I expected to see all the details soon enough in print. He went back to his desk, to type a phrase this time. So why are you in trouble? I want the whole truth, so help me Ghengis Khan!

White and curving vampire teeth seemed to grow out of his jaws. I had called for an hour, not to talk about my life, which was mine and mine alone, but to delay getting home, when I’d have to tell Frances I’d been thrown out of the agency. I explained to him nevertheless that I’d lost my job and why, no reason not to, it didn’t matter to me, and in any case it was my notion of good breeding to pay for the mouthwash coffee, the cigar and, such as it was, the entertainment. Having a father still alive at my age might be a bore, but it had its obligations.

He leaned at ease. Fact is, no son of mine ought to have a job. It’s undignified. Shows lack of style. It’s bad taste. I’d be ashamed to meet him on the street. I never had a job except in the army, but that was soldiering. You come from too good a line to have a job.

But you have one.

Writing? He laughed. If anybody asks me what I do I tell them it’s not work, it’s a crucifixion, but I certainly don’t use that ghastly word. No, you’ll have to pull yourself together and support yourself some other way. Jobs are for those with prolish souls.

My mother worked in a factory. He warranted a smack across the chops. Was she a prole?

Certainly not. She only did it during the war.

He was right. To my knowledge she hadn’t done a stroke since. I too thought nine to five work was anathema, proving in some way that he was my father. Why I had let myself be steered into a job I’ll never know. Geoffrey Harlaxton had flattered me about the efficacy of my lies, after I had stopped him being all but murdered by his wife for his carelessness with other women. And Frances might not have married me if I hadn’t shown some enthusiasm to become employed. So when offered a job at the advertising agency I said yes, because how could I resist her glistening eyes beneath those gold rimmed spectacles, winking me towards a walking yet very delectable doom?

He reamed his cuticles with a paperknife. Tell me what you intend doing.

I’ll take a fortnight to think things over. I’ll get in my car, go on the road. I can reflect while driving. A spot of aimless motoring will be the best way to flush that crooked advertising agency out of my system. I’ll go to Nottingham, and see how my mother is.

The point of the paperknife pricked his tender flesh. Oh hell! He leapt up. Now look what you’ve made me do! His pain and anguish was a rare treat. For God’s sake, he said, if you do see your mother, don’t encourage her to come and call on me.

I thought you still loved her?

I do, no doubt, but I don’t want her around my neck. I’m approaching the age when I can have all the women I want, but the trouble is, he added mischievously, so is she.

I would say he was longing to see her, that he couldn’t live without her, and that if she descended on him and seduced Mabel he deserved no less.

On your way out, he said, tell Mabel to stop sulking in the kitchen and bring some bandages to staunch this blood. It’s a task she’ll enjoy. I do like to give her at least one treat a day.

Chapter Three.

My only option is to light off for a week or two, I said to Frances, after informing her of my jobless position. I’d hoped she was too weary at the end of her long day to care what I did, though there was no other time I could have told her.

I tried to make my departure more acceptable by calling at Marks and Spencer’s for a bag of ready-made eatables and a bottle of wine, so that she wouldn’t need to think about feeding us both, which at least made her smile as I put things in the oven and set the timers. I gave her a glass of red, and began a spiel about how my work at the agency had become intolerable, leaving nothing out and throwing in a few adversities from my imagination. So all I want, before applying for another job—like hell I would—is to motor around awhile and consider what will be best for me to do. There’s no other way if I’m to stay sane.

On our second glass, and halfway through a tray of tasteful pickies, she managed another smile, and tapped the bun of her shining golden hair as if to stop it collapsing, though I’d never seen it happen. I suppose if you must, you must.

Perhaps she didn’t see my going as so outlandish because of her past admiration of the performance poet Ronald Delphick, and his free and easy way of spending much of his time travelling the country. Or she looked forward to me amusing her with details of my adventures on getting back from a world unlike the donkey circle of healing she was locked in.

I recalled Blaskin saying that the more you made a woman realise you knew her thoughts better than she did herself, whether true or not, the more she would love you. Thinking Frances might be half consciously longing to break free in the same way I was about to do, I said: So why don’t you come with me? We’ll be sure to have a good time.

She actually laughed. Michael, you’re incorrigible, not to say irredeemable. You know I can’t, which silenced me for a while. Then she reached for my hand, and for the rest of the evening we didn’t talk about my going anywhere.

After I had gone she might contact Delphick, go to one of the scumbag’s gigs, if he was in London. His advantage over me was that he stank rotten, always needed a shave, and was dead scruffy. Not that he couldn’t pay for a decent suit, and lay out a quid on a squirt of deodorant, but he relied on groupies and acolytes to slip a few fivers into his pockets, and tell him he was a genius as they did so.

His dropout aspect had once attracted Frances, but she hadn’t seen him for three years, and I hoped she never would again, though even if she did there