Solomon's Song (42 page)

They all salute him. ‘Thank you, sir, have a beer or six for us, won’t you, sir,’ Numbers Cooligan advises their platoon officer.

Wordy Smith taps the small canvas kitbag he carries, ‘No, no, cliffproms splendspes, whato!’, which Library translates when they are out of earshot as ‘No, no, cliffs promise splendid specimens, what ho!’ Library adds, ‘He’s got all his stuff in his kitbag and he has his kneepads in his tunic. He’s taken the day off to paint his flowers.’

‘Do you think Ben knows?’ Muddy asks.

‘Jesus, Muddy!’ Numbers protests. ‘It don’t matter, not for now anyhow! Let’s kick the dust, the bazaar awaits such as us with wonders to behold!’

They walk down the quiet, neatly raked, white-gravel driveway bordered by brilliant red cannas and clipped lawns, shaded by poinciana trees, and out of the gates of the snooty club grounds into the harsh sun and baked earth where Britain’s orderly influence ends and Arab chaos begins.

Once through the gates, the lads are immediately engulfed by men in long white robes importuning them, plucking at their tunics and presenting their wares, most of which appear to be of a recreational kind. All of the offers begin with the words ‘You want…’ ‘You want jig-jig, soldier?’ ‘You want my sister? Very clean. You only first time, British guarantee!’ ‘You want jig-a-jig show, only one dinar, mans and womans, donkey and womans, very nice for you.’ ‘You want dirty postcard? Only one dinar, six, you pick also.’

‘Ere, give us a gander at them postcards,’ Hornbill says to an Arab, who has a dozen black and white pornographic postcards which he loops in a two-foot arc from one hand to another. The cards instantly stack into his left hand and he deals the first one to Hornbill as though a croupier in a Biarritz casino.

The card shows a bald bloke with a waxed and curled mustachio, he is barrel-chested with a protruding beer gut and is completely bollocky except for his socks and suspenders. He is chock-a-block up the back of a large female who is on all fours. She is looking directly at the camera, her face devoid of any expression. The centre of her lips is painted into a small bow, which extends above and below the lip line, with the remainder of her mouth visible on either side of the bow. The outlines of her eyes are heavily made up with black kohl and the eyebrows appear to have been shaved or plucked and then painted back in a more intensely arched line with the same substance. Two darkish circles of rouge are apparent on the cheeks of a face powdered a ghostly white. Her hair is swept up in the style of the Victorian era, the whole effect giving her the appearance of a tarted-up possum.

‘Shit, it’s him again!’ Hornbill exclaims as they jostle to have a squiz.

‘Him, who?’ someone asks.

‘Me uncle’s got some o’ these pitchiz,’ Hornbill explains, ‘he got ‘em from some sailors who were pissed and broke who swapped them for eight pies and a bottle o’ sauce.’ He stabs a finger at the man in the picture. ‘It’s the same bloke, me uncle’s got twenty o’ them postcards, that fat bloke’s in all o’ them and here he is again!’ Hornbill shakes his head. ‘No matter what possie he’s in, he don’t never take off his socks and suspenders.’ He turns to the Arab and hands the postcard back. ‘Let’s see the others, mate? I bet fat Fritz is in ‘em all.’

‘How do you know he’s German?’ Numbers Cooligan asks.

‘Sailors told me uncle they gets them postcards in Munich, it’s the world capital o’ dirty pictures and absolute filth.’

‘Gee, I’d like to go there,’ Cooligan says wistfully.

‘Well, you probably can when we’ve conquered the buggers,’ Crow Rigby says.

The Arab hands Hornbill the bunch of postcards and he shuffles through them all, the others jostling and craning their necks to get a clear look. Although the fat female changes from time to time, the bloke with the socks and suspenders is in every one of them. As if to confirm Hornbill’s uncle’s assertion, one of the poses shows him riding on the back of a buxom Fraulein, who is on all fours. She has whip slashes painted crudely on her enormous bum and he’s holding a riding crop aloft and wearing a German officer’s spiked helmet and, of course, the ubiquitous socks and suspenders with a set of Spanish spurs fitted to his heels.

‘There you go, told ya didn’t I, bloody German!’ Hornbill says triumphantly.

‘Ten dinar,’ the Arab says, holding up ten fingers, ‘very cheap, special price for you!’

Crow Rigby looks at the Arab and shakes his head sadly. ‘Sorry, mate, we’d be happy to buy the lot off yiz if only Fritzy weren’t wearing them crook-lookin’ socks!’

Hornbill hands the man back his postcards and, laughing, they depart for the bazaar followed by what is obviously, even to the untuned infidel ear, a string of profanities in the Arab lingo.

At the end of a long day of dust and noise, a thousand importunings, strange smells, exotic wares, high-pitched wailing music that seems to drill through the eardrums, too many beers too weak to make them drunk but which sweat back through the pores of their skin within minutes of consumption, it’s almost time to get back to the ship.

They’ve all bought several cheap brass and enamelled trinkets which they fondly think their mums or sisters will find romantic and exotic. They stop for lunch at a cafe in the bazaar and order mutton, potatoes and chickpeas, which Library assures them is ridgy-didge because it all comes out of the same simmering pot and all the germs have been killed. After this Numbers Cooligan tries a small brass cup of Arabic coffee, thick and sweet, which he pronounces to one and all as delicious, but which collides with the warm beer, lamb, potato and chickpeas and persuades the resident contents of his stomach to retrace its steps so that he is violently sick in an alleyway a few minutes later.

They also visit three brothels, the first two have a line of British tommies and Indian troops in turbans a hundred yards long and they decide to try somewhere else. While the queue at the third is shorter, the brothel is in a mean street where they come across another dead dog. Far from the glamorous velvet-draped and silk-cushioned bordello they’d fondly imagined, the brothel turns out to be several small dark rooms, each of which is curtained off into four partitions only just large enough for a man to be placed in a horizontal position on a dirty mattress. Crow Rigby and Hornbill would certainly have had their heels intruding into the next-door partition.

Moreover, the Arab sheilas, except for darker hair and a somewhat duskier skin tone, are dead ringers for the ones on the postcards and even Numbers Cooligan, the only one who hinted of having had previous experience with a woman, decides to give them a big miss. The mandatory lecture Ben has given them about venereal disease suddenly comes into sharp focus. Losing one’s virginity is one thing, but being sent back home with a dose of the clap or something even worse is quite another.

Finally, with a little more than an hour to go before they have to retrace their steps to the Aden Club to meet Wordy Smith, they each part with a dinar, a day’s pay, to see a live show advertising itself in crude lettering painted onto the surface of a doorway:

Belly dunce Snakes

Plise pulled the bell.

‘Whatcha reckon, lads? Must be a classier sort of joint, no wogs trying to get us ter go in,’ Cooligan says.

‘Most likely the opposite, the rock bottom,’ Library Spencer suggests. ‘Even the Arabs must have some personal standards.’

‘I reckon with them whorehouses we’ve already hit rock bottom, we’ve got nothing to lose and if Crow or Hornbill gets bit by the snake it’ll only make ‘em ‘omesick! What say we go in, eh?’ Cooligan says, obviously feeling better after he’d emptied himself out in the alley.

‘Yeah, shit, why not? I’m game if you are,’ Muddy says.

‘You ring, Hornbill, you’re the biggest,’ Woggy suggests.

Hornbill steps up to the door and looks for the bell which is nowhere to be seen. ‘There’s no bloody bell,’ he calls out.

A short piece of dirty rope protrudes from a hole in the door directly under the lettering. ‘The rope! Pull it!’ Library offers.

Hornbill tugs on the rope and, without any apparent sound, the door is flung open by an old man sporting several days of white stubble on his chin, wearing a battered top hat and greasy tailcoat together with pyjama trousers and a pair of embroidered slippers just like the ones Muddy has bought for his mum in the bazaar.

‘Ladies and Gentlemans, belly dunce, welcome!’ he says, bowing with a flourish. ‘One dinar, plise, welcome, welcome!’ There must have been a peephole in the door or something, because the old man couldn’t possibly have responded so quickly to Hornbill’s ring.

‘Is that one dinar for the lot, squire?’ Numbers Cooligan asks hopefully.

‘No, no, naughty man!’ the old man says, chuckling and shaking his finger at Numbers’ joke. ‘Six dinar, you come all, very wonderful belly dunce.’

‘What about the snake?’ Crow Rigby asks.

‘Very, very wonderful snake also!’

They look at each other for affirmation and then Crow nods, ‘Yeah, bugger it, let’s go.’

The old man stands, blocking their way. ‘You pay me now, gentlemans.’

‘We pay five dinars for six, fair enough, Abdul?’ Cooligan offers.

The old bloke shakes his head. ‘Very wonderful belly-dunce snake, six dinars, five dinars belly dunce not take away clothers.’

That settles it, with the promise of a bollocky belly dancer the old man has instantly cancelled Numbers Cooligan’s need for a bargain and each of them hands over a dinar, which the old bloke slips into his pocket.

They are led down a dark passageway with half a dozen soot-eyed children with runny noses staring at them silently from passing doorways. Two of the smallest, both boys, wear no clothes and have protruding little stomachs, their tiny brown spigots pointing to their pathetically thin, dirt-encrusted legs.

‘Classy joint orright,’ Crow Rigby whispers. ‘Smell the cat’s piss.’

‘No cats here, mate, we had ‘em for lunch,’ Numbers Cooligan replies.

The end of the passageway leads directly to a door which, in another life, was once painted fire-engine red but its brilliance has long since faded to a mostly purplish-brown, the paint peeling in parts to show a dirty white undercoat. The old bloke removes Muddy’s mum’s slippers and places them at the door. ‘Very, very welcome, gentlemans.’ He points to Woggy’s boots. ‘Please to take off the shoeses.’

They look at each other, uncertain. ‘If he scarpers with our boots we’ll get our pay docked and a month’s kitchooty,’ Woggy warns.

‘Crikey, we’ve come this far, we might as well have a Captain Cook!’ Hornbill protests. ‘Besides, even Library could take the old bloke in a blue.’

‘We could keep them on our laps,’ Library points out, ignoring Hornbill’s remark.

They sit down in the passageway and remove their boots and puttees and the old man opens the door using a key tied to the end of his pyjama cord. ‘Please to enter, gentlemans.’

‘We’re not gentlemen, we’re Australians,’ Crow Rigby drawls, hugging his boots.

They enter a small room roughly the size of your average suburban bedroom. Two hurricane lamps with red-tinted glass, hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the room, cast a pinkish glow over a platform, which is about four feet square and eighteen inches high, and covered with a fitted carpet of Arabic design. The carpet is worn through to the boards at the centre where the belly dancer has obviously performed a thousand exotic gyrations. The platform and the wall directly behind it are vaguely outlined in pink light while the remainder of the room is in almost total darkness and smells of sweat and stale Turkish tobacco.

‘Sit, gentlemans, you like coffee? Arab coffee, very, very wonderful, only two shekels!’

They all laugh. ‘No thanks, Abdul, Mr Cooligan here may accept your kind offer, but we’ll give the wog brew a miss if yer don’t mind.’

Their eyes have grown accustomed to the dark and they can now see that the earthen floor is covered with several small overlapping carpets onto which have been thrown eight or nine leather cushions. They all sit down cross-legged facing the stage, preferring to sit directly on the carpet rather than the greasy cushions, their boots resting on their laps.

‘On with the show, Abdul, chop, chop!’ Numbers Cooligan calls, trying to sound cheerfully confident, though secretly sharing with the others the thought that they’ve almost certainly blown a day’s pay on what, judging from the surroundings, promises to be a real dud bash.

‘I fetch-ed belly dunce,’ the old man announces and disappears through the door, closing it behind him and, by doing so, further adding to the gloomy atmosphere.

‘Shit, what now?’ Muddy asks.

‘Look, there’s ashtrays,’ Hornbill announces, reaching out and holding up a large brass bowl he’s found on the perimeter of the carpet beside him. ‘Anyone got a smoke? I’m out, smoko’ll help kill the stink in ‘ere.’

Woggy Mustafa fumbles in the top pocket of his tunic and produces a new packet of ten Capstan and foolishly hands it to Hornbill, who removes one and passes the pack around. ‘Hey, fair go, fellas! That’s me last friggin’ pack!’ Woggy protests. The packet is returned to him five cigarettes short. ‘Jesus! Youse bastards all owe me one, ya hear, the next butt bot’s mine?’

‘I thought you said your mob were Christian? That’s blasphemy, mate,’ Numbers Cooligan says, happily lighting up. In the flare of the match he discovers that he too possesses one of the large brass ashtrays.

The door opens and the old man enters, staggering under the weight of a large wooden box with a beaten-brass speaker horn extending from it and reaching into the air well above his top hat. He is followed by a woman clutching to her enormous bosom what appears to be a wicker laundry basket.

‘That’s for the cobra, I seen it in books!’ Muddy says excitedly.

‘That’s only in India, Muddy,’ Library corrects him, ‘the fakir uses a flute to entice the cobra out of the basket.’

‘Well, the old fucker’s maybe gunna do the same here,’ Muddy persists.

‘Fakir, Muddy, an Indian holy man,’ Library laughs.

The woman, undoubtedly and disappointingly the belly dancer, is almost as wide as she is high and wears a red velvet cape which reaches down to her ankles. Even in the dimly lit room it looks much the worse for wear, the hem edged with dirty tassels, several of which are missing, like teeth in a broken comb. The velvet material to which it is sewn is worn down in mangy-looking patches and seems to be attached around her neck by a hook and a curtain ring. It gives every appearance of an old embassy or theatre curtain at the fag end of its life, pensioned off to do the best it can. The fat belly dancer also sports a pair of Muddy’s mum’s slippers with her big toe protruding through the pointy end of the left slipper.