and he had asparagus-green eyes which could assume a popping effect at will. He got up, took a few steps away from the table, then came back.
I thought of the mental hospital at home, three particular sister buildings, bony windows, high chimneys, a batch of dead elms brushing against the windows, some of the windows savagely latticed, the lattices painted gleaming white.
The young man at the next table was talking more intently, as if to drown us, about the best poem in Bengali about premature ejaculation.
Carl looked at me, and it was as if he realized that I wasn’t of his class, that his madness, unlike mine, was immured, and as if to dissolve the sympathy he suddenly said, ‘I’ve been offered a job at £750 a week.’
I walked to the South Bank after we parted and met a beggar boy, one of his shoes pink, the other blue, who told me how he’d run away from home in the Midlands when he was twelve. Recently he had gone back for his sister’s wedding in the village he was from, Ashby de la Zouch, disguised in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Regiment, posing as boyfriend to a cousin; no one had recognized him.
I recognized the village as being that of a fisherman who used to come to our town each spring when I was a child and teenager, a place off the route north to Holyhead and Ireland.
Further along the South Bank some men were doing Morris dances against the orange sunset. They were adorned in beads, sashes, and were waving batons. ‘The size doesn’t matter. It’s how you use it,’ one little man cried as he threw his baton into the air, a middle-aged woman tramp with silver spikey hair looking on from her array of rags which were dolled up by the sunset.
Limerick Benny sat on a bench in Catford Arcade shouting: ‘I believe in the controls of 747s.’ He looked up, spreading his arms out. ‘All the cunts singing and dancing up there and me on the ground.’ An old man limped by, a green plastic flower in his lapel, a green handkerchief in his breast pocket, a pheasant feather in his hat and an earring which looked like a Russian cross hanging from his right ear. Further along the arcade, under the huge papier mâché cat splayed above it, there were four evangelists who looked like the Beatles, crew cuts, polo necks, little bibles unerringly in their hands.
‘Latecomers. End of the day people. They hear the call too late. Try to enter by the back door but often find it’s jammed.’
I rang up J. M. Tiernan looking for a job on a building site. They had no need of anyone.
I went to Catford Job Centre looking for a job. A honey-haired girl looked at me as if I was crazy.
An evicted family huddled beside a cluster of Tesco bags.
A man worked a glove puppet towards the traffic.
A youth cycled by with a mongrel on the trailer behind his bicycle.
‘My life means something since I met Jesus’ and ‘Love is something you do’. billboards said outside a hut of a church on Stanstead Road, which was surrounded by lavender bushes.
Outside the ancient tram man’s toilet at the top of Stanstead Road a dispatch rider paused. He wore a red bandana around his right wrist.
‘The worst danger is scatty-brained women. They’re suicidal. Rob, he worked as a courier in London, in New York; was killed when he went back to work on the buildings in Rye, walking down the street. It’s time to go. The English girls are only alive from the shoulders up. I’ll pick up a girl in France and work on the vineyards. It’s time to go.’
A postcard came from Prague. Wenceslas Square, a haze of salvia on the front of the museum, trails of cloud having made it half-way across the sky.
I could hear Robin’s affected worry.
Went to this café where a really old woman in a long red wig and crazy clothes came up and sat beside me, batted her huge eyelids, and whispered ‘Lasst Blumen sprechen.’
She was wearing a ra-ra dress the first evening she came up to me, blue with white polka dots, a little black cloak with a gold clasp – the lining rose-madder. A little bunch of paper violets on the cloak. Her wig was ginger, reaching down to her waist, tressed in many parts, confluences of tresses in it. Block high heels were sawdust-coloured and harlequin stockings cream. She batted her false, mahogany-coloured eyelashes, some of the pearl around her eyes lit up, bowed, sat down.
As she waited for her drink, her head coyly turned to one side, she hummed ‘Ich Kann es nicht Verstehen dass die Rosen Blühen.’ ‘I Know Not Why the Roses Bloom.’
Some soldiers in sandy uniforms came through the café, inspecting identity cards, and took off a young bespectacled man, somewhat unshaven, in a vermilion T-shirt.
The band resumed then with ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ Behind them was a painting of the Three Graces – one of them elderly, her white hair in a bun – being attended by monkeys, a parrot hovering overhead.
You could still see the red of salvia through the lime trees outside. The neon signs on the opposite side of the street were quiet ones – Diskotek and Machino Export Bulharska.
The old woman’s eyelids accelerated every few minutes.
There were huddles of young men at a few tables, many rings on their fingers, striped trousers popular with them, tongues on their shoes. One young man with hair like Goldilocks kept looking over at the old woman.
When the band played ‘La Paloma’ she said, ‘My song,’ and sang with it.
Later that evening an accordionist played the same song at the top of Wenceslas Square, under the lime trees, and a couple danced and a man in a white workcoat let himself free from a sausage kiosk and put a lighted cigarette in the accordionist’s mouth.
The woman dancing was wearing a daisied navy dress and white bobby socks and I thought of Mrs Delaney who dressed this way when she was working for us. After her husband died she started getting electric shock treatment. She was very proud of it. Being strapped in, electrodes clamped on to her forehead. She used to walk in from the mental hospital, past the two-storey Victorian house beside an Elizabethan ruined castle.
Then one day her bones broke under the electric shock treatment and she died. That was the day her son played billiards.
The ninety-year-old lady who lived a few houses away from me was out sweeping the leaves the morning I left for Prague. ‘I was down in Margate yesterday, loafing around.’ She was eager to tell me. She wore a long adamantine necklace. Her husband was killed in the war and she still spoke about him as if he were alive. She frequently hummed ‘We’ll Be Lit Up When the Lights Go Out in London.’
Hedgehogs, owls, starlings lived in this grove.
She reached out her hand and touched my wrist. ‘Have a wonderful time wherever you go.’
On the train into London, in the middle of a conversation about work, a woman suddenly leaned towards a man and whispered, ‘You’ve got to suit the horse and the horse suit you.’ It was just as we were passing the tinker encampment, roses in pots that were swan-shaped outside modern caravans, and geraniums on ironwork above the doors of little huts.
In the latter part of 1968 there were two photographs in my room. One of Nguyen Thanh Nam, a prophet who lived up a coconut tree in Vietnam, and one of a woman, lamé stole around her neck, kneeling on the front of a tank in Prague, arms outstretched.
There were tanks at Prague airport the first time I arrived. Inside, people from sundry nations were having cocktails and beers. By the exit there were a row of stalls, one of which had matchstick angels with fluted dresses under glass. In a cavernous underground toilet there was a picture pinned to the wall showing a funfair by the azure waters of a Russian port.
I got the bus into the city. A broom stood at the back of the bus. An old couple walked by outside, holding hands, the woman holding a scarlet handbag in her other hand. Viburnum cut the avenue. A little man in a black beret and persimmon shirt kept consulting a little fat brown-covered dictionary he had with him. The high-rises on the way in were like the