Who's Sorry Now? (3 page)

Was the cyclist who shouted ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery' and deliberately all but ran Kreitman down on the corner of Broadwick and Poland Street gay? He rode as though dozing in an armchair, not remotely urgent, his head thrown back, his hands insolently off his handlebars, wearing green bulging lunch-pack shorts, a thunder and lightning sleeveless vest, a pink and purple nylon baseball cap reversed, with a matching pink and purple nylon backpack scarcely big enough to hold an eyeliner pencil and a couple of tightly rolled condoms – what did that say?

‘My fucking right of way!' Kreitman yelled after him. ‘Try that again, you moron, and I'll have you in the fucking gutter!'

Almost out of sight by now, for Kreitman delivered long sentences, the cyclist put one of his free hands behind his back and showed Kreitman his finger. Was it painted?

‘Make me Mayor of London for just five minutes, Charlie,' Kreitman fumed, ‘invest me with the power and I'll have every sanctimonious fucking faggot cyclist in the capital in clink.'

‘Only the faggot ones?'

‘What gets me is they think they've got some God-given dispensation, the lot of them, just because they're not punching holes in the ozone layer. I've seen the future, Charlie – we fetishise these arseholes and they run us down! Serves us right.'

What amazed Charlie was how furious Kreitman had become, how quickly and seamlessly furious, given the smallness of the offence and the number of reasons (five plus four) Kreitman had to be happy.

This didn't happen every time the two men lunched late in
town. Mostly they would plunge back peaceably into twilit Soho, enjoying the nightly handover, the silver cans of film spilling stardust as they skipped between production houses, the workers leaking home and the theatregoers nosing out, the shops shuttering, the rubbish piling, the bars starting to fill, the daytime beggars leaving with their sleeping bags over their shoulders, ceding to the night shift, and the mobs of inflamed teenage boys from penurious countries, bound in a sort of helix of indecision, drifting apart but always attached to one another, like the arms of a kindergarten mobile. In their different ways, both Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather felt at home here; nothing to do with the film and television industry, or the wholesale jewellery trade, or the silk merchants, or the Lithuanian lowlifes; what they enjoyed was the peculiarly English early-evening melancholy, the sensible damped-down expectancy, the scruffiness taking from the excitement, unless scruffiness happened to be what excited you …

‘What I can't decide,' Kreitman said, ‘is whether it's like peeling off an expensive whore and finding cheap cotton underwear, or undressing a scrubber and finding La Perla.'

‘I wouldn't know,' said Merriweather, setting his big chin. ‘I wouldn't know either way.'

Whereupon they would decrease their pace, ring their wives on their mobiles, and decide on somewhere to have dinner.

Tonight, and it was to be a night different from all other nights for both of them, they chose a big noisy Italian which Kreitman's window dresser had told him about and where, therefore, he couldn't take her mother – one of the new steel-cool New York Italians, sans napery and sans space between the tables, in which, supposing they let you in, you were laughed at if you asked for
fegato
or
tiramisu
and waitresses as touchy as grenades took you through pastas named after eminent Mafiosi.

‘Christ, Charlie, what's
cavatappi?
'

‘Ask the waitress.'

‘I'm frightened to. But it comes with a sauce of smoked turkey, seared leeks and brandied shallots. Nice and light. I'll have that. You?'

‘
Elicoidali
with five cheeses.'

‘What's
elicoidali?
'

‘What it sounds like. Italian for coronary.'

‘Then don't have it.'

‘Too late to start worrying about that.'

He rubbed his great dog's-paw hands together, daring death. Charlie the high-risk voluptuary. Around food he was still the prep-school glutton, smacking his chops and popping his cheeks to cram in one more lolly. Be the same around the you-know-what, Kreitman thought, deliberately courting ugliness, not himself yet, not recovered from the affront of being almost knocked down by a cocksucker. And lectured to by his best friend – was it a lecture? – about nice sex.

‘And a bottle of Brunello di Montecello,' he told the waitress. It was time to start that.

Had they not eaten Chinese for lunch they might well have gone for Indian tonight. Not the poncy stuff. Not cuisine vindaloo, served on big white plates – two dry lamb chops presented with their legs in the air, like Soho pole-dancers, in a baby-powdering of fenugreek. By Indian, the two friends still meant stainless-steel bowls of blistering brown slop, suddenly called balti. They had lived in Indian restaurants in their student days, shovelling down old-fashioned bhunas and madrases in Camden High Street before and after going to see Jack Nicholson movies. Kreitman's choice; Charlie Merriweather didn't care for movies and only went to have somewhere quiet to sleep off one curry and dream of the next. Kreitman (who could have passed for an Indian anywhere but in India – Sabu, they had called him at school) even got around to learning to cook festive Indian dishes, sitting
cross-legged in the kitchen of his too expensive digs, crumbling saffron and separating sheets of vark, the edible silver leaf of which angels' tongues are made, with a view to transforming the humble pilau into an offering to the gods. And Charlie? He rubbed his hands and watched. Sometimes he rubbed his stomach and salivated. ‘Knives and forks, Charlie!' Kreitman would shout. ‘Bowls! Pickles! Spoons!'

Considering their upbringings – Charlie left to fend for himself at an unheated minor public school near Lewes, Kreitman encouraged to run riot at a progressive in Farnborough and never once to make a bed or rinse a toothbrush if he wasn't minded – you would have put your money on Charlie turning out the housemaker. But Charlie had been awed by university and fell helpless the moment he got there. His bulk embarrassed him. When he went to lectures, he felt his head was too big and annoyed the people behind. He tried slumping, but that only drew sarcasm from the lecturer who told him that if he was as tired as he looked perhaps he ought not to have got up. He was ashamed of his voice which was too public school for the crowd he had half fallen in with, and too loud as well. ‘Don't boom at me,' a girl from Newcasde had told him on what couldn't quite pass for a date, and that had made him more ashamed and somehow, as though to compensate, more booming still. By the end of his first term he was racked with confusion, a person who was too noisy and too shy, who was too much there and yet not there at all. He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown on to the streets. ‘I'm just waiting for someone to take pity on me,' he told Kreitman. ‘I've taken pity on you,' Kreitman reminded him. ‘No,' Charlie said, ‘I mean a woman.' Someone to take pity on him, adore him, cook him breakfast and give him a good home.

Whereas Kreitman was putting mileage, fast, between himself and the idea of a man instanced by his father, the Purse King. Sullen at work, sullen back from work, whisky from the cut-glass
decanters on the solid-silver tray on the walnut sideboard, scoff without a thank-you, empty apron, count, curse, packet of Rennies, five spoons of Gaviscon, half a gallon of Andrews Liver Salts, gallstones, ulcer, cancer, heart attack, swear, snore, stroke. Maybe at first the decanters weren't cut glass, or the tray solid silver, or the whisky single malt, but Rome wasn't built in a day; by the time the purse empire had extended to two markets, then to three, then to the first of the shops in Streatham High Street – KREITMAN THE RIGHTMAN FOR SMALL LEATHER – nothing conducive to Bruno Kreitman's well-being, not that he ever enjoyed any well-being, wasn't of the best. Why did Kreitman hate his father so intensely on account of those whisky decanters? Because they bottled up curiosity. Because they denied the random mess of life. His father could have come home from the markets with funny stories, anecdotes of the pedlar's life, traveller's tales. Guess what happened to me today … ? Who do you think I ran into … ? Listen, you'll enjoy this … But he didn't see himself as a pedlar and therefore wasn't able to avail himself of any of the pedlar's consolations. The fact that it was small leather he was peddling only made it worse. You can't distance yourself from the public when you're flogging them small leather. Purses and wallets infect mankind with a distraction close to madness. But he could have made a virtue of that, couldn't he? Could have come home expert in the rich insanity of his trade – ‘You should see them at my stall, like perverts loosed into a playground. Fingering, poking, probing. Sniffing the leather. Rubbing the suede against their cheeks. You're the clever dick, Marvin, you explain to me why every woman over fifty, whether she intends to buy a new purse or not, feels she has to show you the contents of her old one.' Marvin Kreitman, growing into a speculative boy, would have enjoyed putting his mind to that. ‘Could it be love they crave, Dad? Could purse-buying be like exhibitionism, a cry of sexual loneliness?' Bad luck, in that case, if you happened on Kreitman
Senior. Nothing doing there. He rebuffed all cries for help and told the punters not to finger his goods if they weren't buying. Swore at them, too, if they persisted or grew tetchy or had the effrontery to haggle. Take it or fucking leave it. Sambo! Yes, Sambo as well, under his poisoned breath. Anybody call Bruno Kreitman a kike and he'd have had the Haganah in and instigated another Nuremberg. But Sambo awakened no consciousness of equivalence in him. He would still be swearing when he got home, reliving the mortifications of his day: the bleeders – curses aimed at his own chest, blows to his own heart – the bleeders! Turning Kreitman's soul to ash. It amazed the boy that with manners as gruff as his, his father ever managed to sell anything. But there's the mystery of the purse. In the end it will sell itself.

So if he didn't see himself as a pedlar, what did Kreitman's father see himself as? Simple – a man with a round stomach and a bald head who wore silver-grey waistcoats and black mourning ties and drank whisky from cut-glass decanters. A sort of
maître d
' in his own house. Everything else took from his dignity. Kreitman went buying with his father sometimes, accompanying him in silence from warehouse to warehouse in Stepney and Stamford Hill, where it upset him to see how cheerfully other purse sellers embraced the ups and downs of purse-selling, and how much they reciprocated his father's icy loathing of them. There was always laughter in the warehouses, exaggerated comedy even when expected lines had not arrived, or returns were being dealt with, or someone was accusing someone else of pinching from his trolley. Everybody, from the smallest tuppenny-ha'penny stallholder in Brixton to the owner of the biggest bag arcade in Hammersmith, everybody including the person in the mobster suit and expensive wig whose warehouse they were in, rejoiced in the rubbish around which their lives revolved. ‘Look at this! Henry, look at what you're asking me to buy. The clasp doesn't fasten. The lining's hanging out. The zip's the wrong colour. And the dye's coming off in my hand.' ‘It's fashion. It's what
the kids want.' ‘Henry, you've been stocking this same bag since the Coronation. And it wasn't in fashion then.' ‘Morris, you know what your trouble is? You're a short-term merchant. If I've been stocking this bag since the Coronation, what does it tell you?' ‘That it's such drek you can't sell it.' ‘No, that it's such drek I can't get enough. So how many do you want?' ‘I'll take a gross.'

Everybody making the best of the worst except his father, Bruno the Bagman, known to his fellow bagmen as Bruno the Broygis – that's to say Bruno the Bad-Tempered, Bruno the Taker of Umbrage, Bruno the Bilious.

‘You're not a bad kid,' one of the bagmen took Marvin Kreitman aside to tell him once, ‘but if you want to know why we can't stomach your old pot and pan, it's because he acts as though there's a bad smell under his nose all the time, and we get the impression that the bad smell is us. He's a
gantse k'nacker
, you understand? He acts like a big shot, like he's superior to us. But there's something we all want to know. You tell me. What exactly is your father superior at?'

Marvin Kreitman, blushing to the roots of his hair, shrugged his shoulders. ‘You'll have to ask somebody else that,' he said. But he had no idea who that would be.

It also upset him to discover that his father stole from the warehouses, removing the newsprint and tissue-paper stuffing from briefcases and overnight bags when no one was looking, and filling them with key fobs and billfolds. Were they so badly off that his father needed to do that? No. His father stole as an expression of umbrage. He did it to spite. And who knows, perhaps to besmirch himself in his own eyes; to confirm his fall from a grace he hadn't attained. And was he never found out? Years later, buying on his own account, Kreitman learned that his father's petty thieving had been common knowledge, tolerated because he bought big – thought big, bought big – and also, it seemed, because those he stole from knew that Kreitman's father was thereby slowly poisoning himself, and were content, for the
price of a few key fobs, that his death should be as horrible and protracted as possible. Which it was. Not gallstones or ulcers or cancer that claimed him in the end. Strictly speaking there was no end. He just went on being himself until his constitution had had enough. Cause of death – if that which has never lived can the – gangrene of the personality. Unable to support it any longer, the body coughed up black bile streaked with black blood, collapsed in a bucket of Andrews Liver Salts and was gone. Six weeks after the non-event his mother took up with a man who didn't think the world owed him deference because he looked like a Hungarian waiter, and cleared out the previous incumbent's things. The market stalls she gave away. Washed her hands of them. The shops she sold. Kreitman got the decanters, which he donated, without unwrapping them, to Oxfam.