Their lips talk of misch.., p.1
Their Lips Talk of Mischief, page 1
Their Lips Talk of Mischief
Alan Warner
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Their Lips Talk of Mischief
Part One
1
2
3
4
Part Two
5
6
7
8
9
10
Part Three
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
For their heart studieth destruction,
And their lips talk of mischief.
Proverbs 24:2 (KJV)
1984
Part One
1
A fragile sheath of light lay across the great town, juiced-up pink in benign confusions of cloud at the far end of streets. Beneath this sunset I walked towards a hospital, chosen at random from the A–Z London in a newsagent.
The previous night I had sat until dawn in an overheated Accident and Emergency waiting room, amongst that cheerless faction with their lacerated thumbs and temporary eye patches. A teenage girl had leaned forward, vomiting liquid into a cardboard spittoon. The orderlies ignored her. After an hour of punishment, she slid her regurgitations beneath the seat then quietly departed with her whispering pal. I had felt like asking if I could tag along and sleep down on her bedroom floor, among the dolls of her recent girlhood.
I approached the institutional architecture of that evening’s hospital: aluminium chimney stacks, yellow night windows in 1930s darkened brick; the familiar, illuminated red and white Accident & Emergency light box suspended above automatic sliding doors.
I saw a tall and handsome young man of my own age, standing, leaning against the wall by the doors with one leg canted up, wearing a grey macintosh; he pulled a cigarette down from his mouth and tossed it like a dart so that it burst on the tarmac in orange sparks. Blowing out smoke straight through his lips, he observed me walking towards him and he put his foot down in a scraping motion to pulverise the scattered butt. He turned and strode straight in through the sliding doors of Accident and Emergency.
This waiting area was similar to the previous night’s, but busier. There was no sign of the man from outside and it crossed my mind he was a young doctor having a sly, hypocritical puff. About fifteen people were seated in bright blue bucket chairs which were connected by horizontal metal bars, all bolted to the floor so they could not be cast through the fluorescent air by impatient yet sufficiently agile sufferers.
There were no people with axes or knives embedded in blood-matted scalps. Several supplicants leaned into the palms of their hands with despair, as if this would give them priority. A man accompanied by a young child held one arm out before him in salute, precisely supporting it at the horizontal like a spirit level. His kid had assembled an arcane arrangement of health information leaflets and was playfully sliding them around on the floor by the dad’s feet.
An extremely fat, seated woman was calmly reading a magazine; she looked as though she’d drifted in for a manicure. Maybe she was waiting on someone undergoing treatment? You could bet she had somewhere to sleep that night.
Up back was an old man with red and watering eyes, white stubble against his black skin, calmly muttering, ‘Doctor will give me a little something. Oh. Yes. It’s okay, everyone. Doctor will give me a little something.’ He didn’t seem to have many teeth. I toughed up as I’m a sucker for such figures and soon fall into conversation. I bet even he had somewhere to sleep.
I knew the drill. Without checking in I settled, unobtrusively choosing a seat. I had a copy of Richardson’s Ultima Thule in my jacket but I didn’t want to get too comfortable and draw attention to myself. Reading would only come in the small nodding hours before I was noticed and asked to leave.
There was a clear perspex security cage with a colander of speaking holes. Nobody occupied the clear cage at that moment and a member of the public waited there for attention. After several minutes the door at the back opened and a short woman in white trousers and tunic came forth. I looked down at the floor and only glanced up occasionally.
‘Yes?’
The waiting man lowered his face to the concentric holes, ‘Could I see a doctor, please?’
‘Are you registered at a surgery?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Are you currently registered? With a surgery.’
‘Yes. In Willesden.’
‘Fill this out.’
He seemed frustrated that she had no apparent interest in his ailment. ‘I was bitten by a dog.’
A singular bleat of laughter came from far behind me. I turned. The fat woman was rolling her shoulders but, ambiguously, she still stared down at her magazine.
That voice up the back went, ‘Doc’ll give you a little something for that.’
The dame in the tunic behind the screen raised her plucked black eyebrows and her forehead arched. ‘You need to wait,’ she told the bitten man.
I live to see her type shaken up. She passed a pen through the small slit; the chewed biro end was anchored back through the perspex by a string, as frantically as if it were a limited-edition Mont Blanc.
‘It’s okay. I’ve got my own pen,’ he stated.
‘Okay. Good.’ She smiled: she’d achieved a major breakthrough in community healthcare. ‘Fill those out and return them through here.’ She knocked her hand on the small gap at the base of the service window as if the geezer was blind and functioned by sound.
There was a swishing movement of air to my left. It was the smoker from outside in his private detective gear – the raincoat – folding himself patiently down. An empty seat remained between us. I glanced at him then quickly back down at the floor.
It was not just his clothes which were faintly anachronistic for a young man; he even had the looks of a handsome fifties English movie idol – the shapely head and neat symmetrical features, small ears close to the skull. He was pale, his slight stubble almost theatrical so you could pass the time counting each embedded hair on the white skin. His fingers moved, touching his fringe or confidently sweeping his rich hair back. He had intrinsic handsomeness – he stepped from his bed looking like that each morning without so much as combing his hair. Suddenly he levelled a finger at me and he frowned, as if ticking off facts; in a low, confidential tone he whispered, ‘You don’t look so unwell.’
Inwardly I cursed him. ‘Neither do you. Pal.’
‘Scottish?’
‘Guilty.’
‘Young Lochinvar is come out of the west.’
‘Aye. And he’s about to get sent back.’
‘Go on.’
I looked around but nobody was interested. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Student last year in Gower Street. University College.’
‘Subject?’
‘English Lit. I’ve just got booted out for not handing in any work. Or turning up for exams in May. They noticed after all.’
‘Go on,’ he grinned.
I didn’t know if that phrase meant I should continue, or if it implied I was kidding him. ‘I got a grant last year so I sat in the pub all day reading books and drinking beer. For a year. Paradise.’
‘This is the definition of paradise.’
‘Yeah. I’d a girl sat on my knee once or twice too. Rosie, but she transferred to Manchester or somewhere. Thought I’d start working properly this term. But I met my Director of Studies day before yesterday.’
‘Director of Studies, eh? He sounds like a shit already.’
‘She. Told the board in Scotland and now my grant’s been withdrawn.’
‘Harsh.’
‘I asked her out to dinner at this interview.’
‘Your Director of Studies?’
‘Yes. Thought I might as well go the whole hog while I was at it and I do have seventy quid left, so I could have taken her somewhere nice.’
‘Sounds like a deeply premature move.’
‘It was. She said no and didn’t take the long way round. My poor folks. They are going to go nuts when they find out. All my parents’ attempts at social engineering have failed on me. I can’t join the middle classes. I just want left alone to read my books. Now I’m booted out the digs and he won’t give me any of my books till the back-rent for summer is paid.’ I leaned closer and lowered my voice way down. ‘A foul rustication. And now, there is the very pressing matter of my adequate quartering in this city. I spent last night in an Accident and Emergency up Harrow or somewhere. Slept on the Circle Line all day. Tomorrow, I reckon to Victoria and the bus back to Scotland?’
‘I like the cut of your jib, boyo. Don’t worry, young Lochinvar. I’ll stand you a pint when I’m done in here.’
I paused a moment and clarified: ‘Walter Scott’s only honour was simply to be mocked by that scene in The Portrait – when the idiot calls him his favourite writer.’
His face changed and he studied me more carefully. ‘A Joyce man already?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Llewellyn Smith.’ He drew back his body very slowly, to suddenly project a hand forward. ‘I’m a Londoner, for sure, but really mad Celt too. Never set foot there but I’m Welsh. Li ke that bastard Dylan T. Now he’d written everything immortal by the same age I’d just found a girl’s bra strap at. The Death of the King’s Canary was the best thing. Fifty-two gin and tonics; it must be a record. Bless his glowing nose.’
Here was my kind of talk at last. I took the hand and I shook it. It was very cold. I said, ‘Douglas Cunningham.’
This Llewellyn said, ‘No relation to Cunninghame Graham? I guess not. A man once asked Joyce: “May I shake the hand which wrote Ulysses?” Joycey replied, “Certainly not. You don’t know what else it’s done.”’
I smiled, deliberately held on to the hand a while longer, then let go.
‘Douglas Cunningham.’ He nodded, leaning back a touch. His movements were oddly slow and graceful, weirdly cautious. ‘Now what was it in The Portrait, Stephen says to eh, young Cranly there? I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art using the only arms I allow myself to use: Silence, exile and cunning. That’s you. Silence, Exile and Cunningham.’
I laughed.
‘Well, well, wait a jiffy.’ He began to unbutton his mac.
That bad-tempered dame had appeared back in her glass shack. Llewellyn Smith stood up slowly and he strode forward in his polished brogues. I noted the slacks were ironed with a diligent crease up the middle of the leg. He nodded at the administrator in her den. He said, ‘I’d like Doc to attend me, if you please.’
‘Are you registered with a surgery?’
‘Yes, but I sort of really need to see him, pretty smartish.’
She gave him a compromising look through the perspex. ‘Well, what seems to be the trouble?’
‘Doc’ll know what the trouble is.’
Fury collapsed her face downward in a swift instant. ‘You wait your turn with everyone else. Fill out these and I’ll issue you with a ticket shortly.’
‘But I need to see the doc. Now.’
There was a pause. The woman drew herself up for further conflict. Llewellyn Smith opened the sides of his overcoat toward her, like a flasher.
The woman’s hand shot out for a phone.
He slowly turned round to all of us and the coat hung open. He wore no shirt; his pale torso was utterly hairless, slightly muscled – like that of a trained swimmer – but straight down, from six inches beneath his neck to just above his navel, was bright blood, coagulated around the black lip of a huge wound. I noted his belly button was pooled with a little ruby of tacky blood like an Egyptian dancing girl. I actually drew my head backwards on my shoulders.
‘Stabbed,’ a voice yelped. The kid sliding around the leaflets stared upwards, his hands frozen.
‘Sorry to jump the queue, everyone.’ Llewellyn Smith held his forearms high in surrender and I would swear I heard some air bubble in a sickly breath from that laceration between his ribs.
‘Doctor will give you a little something,’ a quiet voice promised from up back.
‘Done in by our old killer sofa once again. Having a little siesta, rolled over and me stitches ripped. Don’t hurt or nothing. Had a bit of a heart op a while back there.’
The woman behind the perspex banged on the clear plastic to get his attention, shouting repeatedly for an orderly down the phone. ‘Why didn’t the ambulance crew present you here, for God’s sake?’
‘There was no ambulance crew, love. I walked here. I only live up the road, on the estate.’
The waiting room was thrumming with ignited chatter. A nervous attendant rushed in, looked rattled by this broken man, then led him out. As he passed me, Llewellyn winked, ‘Hold your horses and stand by your guns. See you in half an hour, boyo.’ He motioned with his right hand the act of tipping a necessary pint glass towards one’s lips and I now noted a rusted dry bloodstain had been there, along the side of his pinkie.
2
Llewellyn Smith came back into that hospital waiting area and nodded only to me. Others watched and I felt privileged. The mac was on, hanging open, showing muslin or medical lint and some cotton wool sealed under wide white bandages which had been strapped and lashed around his torso to bind him together.
‘Silence, Exile and Cunningham.’ He sighed and pointed his thumb to his bindings. ‘I was starting to feel a draught in my cold heart.’
He secured the large medallion buttons of the raincoat, using one hand as he moved towards the automatic sliding doors with a slight limp. He had a distinctive, purposeful way of walking which over time I grew to know very well; he always seemed just about to arrive somewhere that he had been rushing to, yet he didn’t seem frantic or at all hasty.
We moved together out onto the night streets, where he produced a pack of cigarettes with the heavy-looking Zippo and held out a gasper to me. He lit up our Regals in a puff of paraffin scenting.
I said, ‘Call me a right bore, but should you be smoking?’
He clicked the Zippo shut and exhaled. ‘Smoking’s good for me. My heart is very healthy cause the best consultants in London have all queued up to take a good old prod. I had a very rare ventricle-valve problem, so they popped a new component in. I noted it said Made in Taiwan on the box. Smoking gives the old ticker a bit of a hose down.’
‘And beer? Should we be drinking beer after you’ve just been filleted?’
‘Fillet me, smoke me, then sauté me in beer. It’s a famous recipe by old Bemelmans and I volunteer. Looks worse than it is, boyo. Hardly bled this time. Last time, cleared out the waiting room. This way, Lochinvar – this is my manor – over the purple heather to my grim local.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Up in the Sixth Arrondissement. Acton Town. Another night in this paradise where I place my roof over my head.’
‘The only roof I’m going to get over my head is on the Glasgow bus.’
‘Leaving so early? We’ll see about that. There must be a civilised solution.’
‘Aye. A thousand quid. Are you okay, you’re limping?’
‘Its affected, boyo. Always envied a limp and lusted for a collection of ivory-tipped sword sticks. A Penang lawyer with a soft lead ferrule which hits the pavement silently.’
‘You’re like Frankenstein’s monster.’
Was he nuts? God knows I had met enough visionaries on the pavements of London and I had a track record of falling in with such figures. We walked side by side – moving with the traffic, the car interiors so dark and the windscreens so reflective in that late summer night you could not see occupants within.
Curved railings forced a pause at every junction and made us utilise the pelican crossings; the pavement went down into a dip and up again. A high-rise block rose to our left but its edges were not visible and none of its square windows appeared curtained – so bare, clear light bulbs seemed to hang still and very high, way up in the Acton Town sky.
He pointed towards the park. ‘Look. Sean MacConnery used to live there, by the Acton Park gates. One of your pantheon. He cleared out the old nunnery to build his bolt hole. Honest. I used to wait outside when I was a nipper for his autograph. Not cause it was him. I thought it would add value to my Ian Flemings. Bond was a linguist, you know. So am I. I only speak the truth. James Bond displaces the Sisters of Seville.’
‘Did you get them signed?’
‘Nah. Bond gave me the slip.’
When I checked, much later, I learned all this was quite true. We ascended the High Street and over its top until he pointed at a pub on the corner with an ornate display of metal bells over the door, ‘Behold. The Five or Six Bells. I was brought up by my gran along that road and I live back there now in a penthouse suite. My old dead dad used to drink here. It’s The Six Bells. But the bloody Luftwaffe did for it one night in forty-one and the bells got blown clean off – Acton used to get blitzed bad cause of the industries; could only find five bells in the rubble so they strung them back up. Didn’t want to concede to Hitler and call it The Five Bells, but metal shortage precluded any replacement. So the name stuck with them hung there. The Five or Six Bells pub.’
I counted them and despite the painted sign for The Six Bells there really were only five. ‘Hitler only got one bell. The other’s in the Albert Hall.’
‘Precisely.’
*
The Five or Six Bells still had both saloon bar and public bar. The public interior was a great dead, hollow triangular space with a polished wooden bar focused and constantly beckoning up at the apex. This interior, in the evenings, had the brightest lights I’d ever seen within a pub, on chandeliers chained up among the high chicken-wire and glass skylights. In the evenings, the pub always reminded me of a Victorian operating theatre where a public autopsy might be about to take place.
