Swan River (24 page)

Kate came back carrying my pint and a bloody mary.

‘Thanks. Nice of you to come.' We sipped our drinks.

She was frowning. She sat back and crossed her legs, then uncrossed them and leaned forward with her elbows on the table. She looked into my eyes and then away and back again. She put her palms either side of the ashtray and moved it slightly. ‘David, this is really unfair… and hard to say. Bonnie isn't ill.' She looked down at her hands and up again. ‘She's got a new boyfriend… I'm really sorry.'

A shiver surged through my body; I could feel it on my face, in my arms, everywhere. I sat up, tried to swallow and reached for my beer. ‘Just like that. You mean… she doesn't want to see me again? …
Just like that
.'

‘She's behaving really badly. She should be here to tell you. She rang me from somewhere and asked me to come and tell you she was ill. I said I wouldn't. I would only tell the truth – '

‘She doesn't want to see me again? What?
Ever?
You
know
that?'

‘Yes.' She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

‘How do you
know
, if she just asked you to say she was ill?'

‘She's been talking about nothing else for about two weeks: how to let you down lightly… her new bloke… on and on.'

I drank some beer. Two weeks: that meant we had seen each other twice – and slept together – since she had met this other man. ‘Who is he?'

‘Oh, just someone she met at work.' She swallowed a mouthful of bloody mary. ‘An American, a producer who just started working at Rediffusion.'

‘Producer. How old is he?'

‘About thirty. Bit of a creep,
I
think.'

I drank some more beer. I found what she was saying hard to believe. Bonnie was twenty, and she thought I was nineteen; why would she want to be with someone who was thirty?

‘I'm sorry, David.' Her eyes were slanting downwards; she looked miserable. ‘You're such a beaut bloke. It's unfair.' She looked away, out of the window.

I stood up. ‘I'll be back in a minute.' I picked up my cigarettes and left the pub. I walked down the hill towards Archway, stopped and stared at my reflection, murky but complete, in an unlit shop window. I went a little further, leaned one arm against a bus stop and stared down into the gutter. She couldn't just end our relationship like that; we were such good friends – I had even met her parents over a stiff Sunday lunch. I dropped a cigarette butt at the foot of the bus stop, trod on it, and walked slowly back up the hill.

Kate was still sitting by the window. She was smoking. She didn't see me. I stood outside the door for a few moments, then went back in.

‘Are you sure?'

She pulled my hands towards her across the table. ‘Look. She would have told you herself… sometime. I just wasn't going to come here and lie about her being ill, so it's ended up being me who's told you… Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I – ' Her expression changed; she was looking at something behind me.

Bonnie was standing there in the red coat with the white furry collar that she had worn on the night we first met. There were tears on her cheeks. I stood up and hugged her. She sobbed into my shoulder, and kept saying, ‘I'm sorry.'

While Kate bought her a drink, she told me through tears that it was true: she loved this other man; she loved me too in a way, but not the same way; she had to choose; she couldn't have two boyfriends; she hated to hurt me.

‘Why choose him?'

She had been holding my lapels. She let go, her face puckered and there were more tears. My question had been angry and futile. I regretted it.

When Kate came back, I whispered to Bonnie, ‘I love you too,' kissed her and left.

I sat on the tube facing my own image distorted in the blackness of the window opposite, and paying attention to nothing except my own angry thoughts. I wanted to tell Bonnie to go to hell and I wanted to punch the smooth jaw of the American producer whose image was firmly in my mind – he had short dark hair with a sheen to it, like something I had seen in a hairdresser's window, and a perfectly pressed pink shirt with a button-down collar; at the same time I was going through the possible ways of rescuing my love for Bonnie and what I thought was hers for me – she had said she loved me.

* * * * *

Dave and I had found a flat around the corner from my mother and the Goat in Boots. It had two rooms: one with armchairs in the middle and a bed at each end; the other a kitchen with an old dining table on which Dave laid out his medical books and I put my new second-hand typewriter. We shared a bathroom with a pair of male Canadian accountants from the floor below and became adept at cooking eggs and bacon while shaving at the kitchen sink.

I had got a full-time job as an editorial assistant on
Humanist
magazine, which was published monthly by the Rationalist Press Association, an organisation with its roots in the nineteenth century – loosely allied to the British Humanist Association. It had ten or so employees and a narrow Georgian building in Islington. On the magazine, apart from me, there was just the editor, a genial man of about sixty, respected among humanists for his books and lectures and known to everyone as HH. I was taught how to put the magazine together using articles he gave me. As long as the magazine came out on time and looked as it usually did, he and the rest of the staff were happy. This was fortunate because, under the pretext of having to check proofs at the printer in Tufnell Park, I was soon spending time at the flat of a woman who came in to the office twice a day to make tea and coffee. She was twenty-eight and hid provocative messages under my teacup. For a few days I was surprised at myself; she was so old.

Sometimes at weekends and in the evenings I did the same sort of work for nothing for Richard, the Australian, but there was a big difference. The design of
Humanist
followed a pre-ordained style, and much subbing work was needed to make the text and pictures fit the page precisely;
Oz
was created by a long-haired designer called Jon, to whom every page was a work of art and the idea of a column of text aligning with the one next to it was anathema.

For both magazines I worked away quietly with a scalpel, Cow gum and a plastic spatula, but I had to go out in search of pictures – to picture agencies for
Humanist
and to Martin's flat above the Pheasantry in the King's Road for Richard and Jon. The picture agencies were little bureaucracies where I had a coffee and a cigarette with people who became friends while I searched their files and they filled in forms. Martin would be either alone, hatching and cross-hatching and showering the bare floor with ink, or surrounded by rock stars and models who were friendly in a restrained, you-look-a-bit-young-and-I'm-not-quite-sure-who-you-are way. Whether he was alone or not, there would be music and marijuana and sometimes charades, as I waited – often for hours – for the completion of a drawing or collage which would blow the minds of incipient hippies. Over several months I read a battered copy of Herman Hesse's
Steppenwolf
in Martin's flat, in between making coffee, rolling joints and looking for pictures he couldn't find.

Soon after my idyll with Bonnie ended, I had a drink with Peter the Painter. He listened to me bemoaning her treachery, nodded sympathetically and said that a similar thing had happened to him. ‘You didn't
really
know her, Dave. If you had, you'd have known she was the sort of girl who would come across all lovey-dovey – and, fair enough, let you fuck her, but I bet she enjoyed that too – while all the time she was on the look-out for something better, or maybe not better, just something that would build her career.'

‘No, Bonnie wasn't like that. She just – '

‘You'd be surprised, mate.'

‘All right, maybe I didn't know her well enough, therefore I shouldn't have fallen in love – but how could I have helped myself?'

He shook his head and his long curls flapped around his chin. ‘It wasn't love Dave. It was lust.' He swallowed a third of a pint, put the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘There's a difference.'

‘What about love at first sight?'

‘It's bollocks. It's what sensitive souls, like your good self, call lust. It's better just to accept that you and all of us men and quite a lot of women' – he laughed roguishly – ‘are lustful, and just act on it – not try to dress the whole thing up as something fancy and poetic and spiritual and all that bollocks.'

23

Lost in Earl's Court

Peter the Painter played rhythm guitar in a rock group called Ocean Daydream. He had talked about it a lot – it sounded like an English Jefferson Airplane – and had shown me a sketchbook, in which he wrote lyrics in large, clear handwriting in black ink, but, despite invitations to remote venues on the edge of London, I had never seen them perform.

On a cold evening in the spring of 1967, he took me to meet the other members of Ocean Daydream – friends of his from art school who lived together in Earls Court. They had got a recording contract; the record would be coming out quickly and Peter and the others were placing an advertisement in Richard's magazine, at their own expense. Being artists, they had designed the advertisement themselves and wanted to hand it over to me personally.

The flat was in the basement of a Victorian mansion block in a side street. We walked down a wide stone staircase littered with chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette packets. The door was ajar, lights were on and somewhere, someone was playing an electric guitar. Inside, we crossed the hall to a large room which looked as if it had been painted white a long time ago; there was a sofa, some upright chairs and a table covered in small bottles of paint, but no people. I followed Peter back into the hall where he pushed lightly on a door that wasn't quite shut. He put his head in and quickly pulled it out again. A man's voice said, ‘Come in Pete, it's OK.'

A man with long wavy hair was lying in bed under some blankets; his face was open and friendly. There was a woman lying on top of him; I could see bare shoulders and straight reddish hair. ‘Hi, come on in.' The woman moved sideways and pushed her nose into his neck.

‘This is Dave… about the ad. That's Eric. And that's Julia.'

Julia had turned her face away. She waved the back of her hand towards us. Eric laughed. ‘Go make some coffee, or get a beer. I'll see you in a minute.' He laughed again.

There was a large fridge in a large dirty kitchen, but no beer. As Peter filled a kettle, a man with straggly thin hair and tight trousers came in. A red electric guitar hung on a strap from his shoulder and glittered in the light; he was fiddling with the tuning. ‘Hello, mate.' He looked up at Peter and back at the guitar. ‘Who's this, then?' He glanced at me.

‘This is Dave.'

‘Hello, Dave. How are you, mate?' His face was pale and flat; he had brown eyes and it looked as if his nose had been broken.

‘Fine, thanks.'

‘He's come to talk about the art for the ad… remember? This is Chas, by the way.'

I nodded.

‘Yeah, I'll get the stuff.' He finished tuning the guitar and went away.

Peter told me that Chas was the one who cared most about the look of the ad. ‘He's got a visual concept. It'll be on the LP, posters, everything.'

Chas came back with a sheet of white cardboard and Eric appeared – dressed, with bare feet – and moved mugs and plates off the kitchen table into the sink. Chas brushed crumbs on to the floor with the back of his hand and put the cardboard down. A grainy black and white photograph of a calm sea, with a sandy beach in the foreground, was pasted on to it; in the sky, in square capital letters, were the words ‘Ocean Daydream' and underneath in smaller letters ‘is coming'. ‘What do you think?'

‘Great. Is it going to be in colour?'

‘Oh yeah. As colourful as possible.' He smiled laconically. ‘The transparency and camera-ready art for the type, with the colours specified, are in here.' He turned the cardboard over; there was an envelope taped to the back. ‘I'd like to see a proof… if that's OK.'

Two girls came into the room. One was Julia who had been in bed with Eric – I recognised her hair. The other was Deborah.

‘Is that OK? To see a proof?' Chas had picked up his piece of cardboard and was holding it in front of me.

‘Er… yes. Fine…' I mumbled at him and walked towards her. ‘Deborah?' She was a lot taller than when I had last seen her – and, when I got closer, I saw that she was a lot thinner.

She looked at me and put her hands up to her ears. ‘David? What are
you
doing here?' She shook her head and laughed. ‘God! That's amazing.' She held my arms and kissed me quickly on the lips.

I saw that I was holding Chas's artwork. ‘Picking this up. What are
you
doing here?'

‘I sort of live here, most of the time. It's incredible to see you.' She was gaping with wide eyes, and looked around at the others. ‘Everyone, this is my old friend – from when I was little. My oldest friend… We sort of lost each other.' The others smiled and looked at me with new curiosity.

I smiled back and shrugged. ‘Long time.'

Deborah touched my arm and frowned teasingly. ‘Where've you
been
?'

We left the others and went into the room with the sofa. I found it hard to stop staring at her, marvelling both that it was
her
and at how she was now, definitely, an adult. Her face had angles that hadn't been there before – a hardening of her nose and cheekbones – and her brown hair was longer and fell thickly to her shoulders. And she was so tall. She seemed taller than me – I looked, we were the same height, but she was so slim she seemed taller.

She chuckled, showing her gums and wrinkling her nose; that hadn't changed, but her gestures, and the way she moved her eyes, were more mature – graceful and feminine. ‘You look just the same… It's incredible… I didn't think I'd see you again – ever.'

‘Nor did I… Think I'd see
you
, I mean. You look great… You're so… tall.'

We were standing a foot or two apart. She came closer and hugged me, her arms around my neck and her cheek against mine. I held her waist lightly, our bodies not touching. I felt oddly elated, a little as though I had suddenly found a favourite object, a book or a picture – something that had intrigued me long ago – that I had mislaid and forgotten about. But I was wary; naturally, she had changed. Would I like the new Deborah? I had been so fond of the old Deborah. Was this sufficiently the same person?

We sat down on the sofa and talked. Her father had died a year after they left Marlow, and she had lived with her mother and grandmother in Chippenham. She had gone to school, made some friends, but it had never felt like home – and still didn't. Then, she had won a scholarship to Chelsea Art School; she loved London, the galleries, the people, the streets and shops. Chas was her boyfriend – he did some teaching at Chelsea – and, though she had a room in a hall of residence, she spent most of her time here, in his flat. I told her what had happened to me and my parents, and we spent some time working out how long it was since we had last seen each other.

Chas came in. ‘I've known this man since I was a little girl, but haven't seen him for more than four years.'

‘Incredible.' He smiled as though he meant it, and sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘Maybe tonight was preordained by the great Yahweh.' He looked upwards and pointed towards the ceiling. He wasn't good-looking, but there was humour and kindness in his mouth and in the way he moved his eyes. I guessed he was about Peter's age, twenty-five. He put his arm round Deborah and looked at me. ‘We're going out to get something to eat. Come along, if you want… Pete's coming. Probably go to Dino's.'

Before we left the flat, Chas wrapped his artwork carefully in brown paper and handed it to me formally. ‘Don't leave it in the caff. That transparency is unique.
I
took it.' He laughed. ‘In California.'

Crammed together in a booth, six of us ate spaghetti and drank Valpolicella. I sat at the end by the aisle, opposite Peter and next to Deborah. I kept glancing at her profile; there was a gently curving ridge in her nose that hadn't been there when she was a child. I caught her looking at me and we both smiled. I felt more confident. This
was
my old friend, wasn't it? She had just grown up a little; that was all. I apologised for not answering her letter all that time ago, and told her about the day I had gone to look for her and found a strange man behind the sweetshop counter.

We listened to the others talking about their LP. All the songs had been recorded on to a master tape, and Chas and Peter were arguing about the ordering of the tracks. Eric didn't seem to care; Deborah whispered that he played the bass and was very easy-going. Chas and Peter wrote all the songs; some of them were joint compositions, but some, it was obvious, weren't. Deborah told me quietly that it didn't matter what order the songs came in; they were all good, Chas was a brilliant guitarist and she was certain the record would be a hit.

She ate very slowly, apparently avoiding the macaroni in her macaroni cheese, picking out just the cheese and tomatoes and olives, and told me about Chris, the group's drummer, who modelled himself on someone called Joe Morello who drummed with Dave Brubeck. Chris lived in the flat too. I wondered whether Peter, who lived alone in a big, chaotic room in the Fulham Road, was in some ways an outsider.

A sharp wind blew in our faces as we wandered back down Earls Court Road. Deborah and I arranged to meet at Finch's the next Saturday at eight – Chas and the others would be playing a concert in St Albans that night. As we said goodbye, she touched my shoulders and, for a moment, rested her cheek against mine; she was cold and shivering.

Peter and I walked down Redcliffe Gardens. ‘Can't tell you how great it is to have found Deborah again. Fantastic luck that you play with Chas and the others.' I had the brown paper parcel in one hand and slapped Peter's back with the other.

‘She's a sweetie, Deborah. But she's got a problem. You ought to know.' He swept his hair behind his shoulder. ‘She's too keen on the old smack.'

‘Smack!'

‘Heroin.'

‘Jesus.' I knew what smack was. ‘What do you mean? She's an addict?'

He nodded. ‘Looks that way. Chas thinks so. He's worried about it, very… and feels guilty.'

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit.' I hated the idea of Deborah being taken over by a drug. I started walking more slowly. ‘Why's he feel guilty?'

‘Well, he gave her her first hit, didn't he? He just didn't think she'd get so keen… We all do it now and again. Well, I don't any more, actually.'

‘So… can he do anything about it? Chas.'

‘They don't keep any there any more. She cleaned them out anyway. But she gets it. She stole some money the other week.'

‘Jesus.'

‘From another kid in college. Chas took her to a doctor. So she gets prescriptions for methadone, but they say it's not working… It's a bloody shame, mate. She's such a sweet kid – and can she draw! She'd be a star if she could get hold of herself.'

We turned into the Fulham Road and walked on for a minute in silence. ‘Well, what can
I
do? I must be her oldest friend. We were almost brother and sister.'

‘Dunno… Talk to her. Be her friend… We all do that. We're like a bunch of uncles and aunts. She's so young.'

‘She's eighteen.'

‘I know.'

‘She's only been in London about six months.'

‘It doesn't take long, if you really like it… And don't ever give her money – however much she whines and wheedles.'

We reached his flat and he asked me in. It was late and I had work the next morning. We stood on the doorstep for a while talking about Deborah and heroin, but I learned nothing more – except that Chas had repaid the money she had stolen and persuaded the college to take no action; and that if it happened again, the police could be involved.

* * * * *

I waited for Deborah for more than an hour at Finch's that Saturday. Then I walked over to the flat. As before, the front door was open, but the only light came from the end of a corridor off the hall. I peered round a door into a room, dimly lit by a standard lamp. It had a bare wood floor. An easel with a pencil drawing of a still life stood in one corner, three or four guitars were leaning against the wall and several speakers and amplifiers were piled on top of each other.

Someone was lying under some blankets on a low double bed. I knocked on the door and the person moved a little, but didn't look up or speak. I tiptoed to the bed.

‘Deborah.' I said her name quietly in the silence.

She sat up, stared at me and put her hand on her forehead. ‘My God. My God. David. What time is it?'

‘Just after half-past nine.'

‘What are you doing here?'

‘We were going to meet. It's Saturday. Remember?'

Her eyes were open very wide and she was staring at me, as though my presence was alarming or even frightening. She was wearing a black T-shirt. ‘I'm sorry. Yes. I must have fallen asleep.' She lay back down.

‘Do you want to go out? Or do you just want to go back to sleep?'

She frowned. ‘I can't go out. I can't.' She put her hand over her eyes. ‘I'm not very well.'

‘What's wrong?' I thought of sitting down beside her, but decided to stay standing up.

‘Don't know. Don't feel good at all… Some kind of bug.' She sat up again and stared around the room. She seemed a little panicky.

‘Can I get you anything?'

She leaned over the side of the bed and rapidly pulled things out of a small leather bag, dropping them on the floor. It was as though she was angry about something and was taking it out on her keys, address book, make-up, comb. She found a brown envelope, pulled a piece of paper from it, and held it towards me. ‘Please, get this for me.' I took it and she lay down. It was a prescription from a doctor in Lillie Road.

I looked at my watch. ‘It's quarter to ten.'

She turned on her side and hugged her knees under the blankets. ‘There'll be somewhere open.' I looked at her and down at the prescription. The doctor's writing was the usual scrawl, but there was a word that looked like methadone. ‘I'm sorry… David. I'm really ill. If there is nowhere else, could you get to Boots, Piccadilly Circus? It never shuts.'