Wild Cat Falling (9 page)

He finds the cash drawer on the counter and forces the cheap lock. Stuffs notes and silver into deep pockets and darts swiftly to collect sharp clothes. Finds an empty carton and shoves them inside.

Grouse! Fifty quid at least and all these new threads. Rent taken care of and money over for sharp shoes. Swingiest cat in town!

Off now before the luck runs out. Locks the back door and leaves the key in for kicks. Everything swell. No rain now to wet the loot. Damn! He's lost the bloody cosh! Hopes it's dropped in the mud so they won't find fingerprints. Cops haven't got his prints yet anyway, so should be safe enough. The night is a friend to the night cat. Nobody sees. . . .

The Town Hall clock strikes eight. Party is on in the loft! I go on reading.

“Let's pass on now to something else, do you mind?”

“I was just going to suggest it.”

“But to what?”

“Ah!”

“Suppose we got up to begin with.”

“No harm in trying.”

“Child's play.”

“Simple question of will-power.”

“And now?”

“Help!”

“Let's go.”

“We can't.”

“Why not?”

“We're waiting for Godot.”

To go or not to go? Read on.

“All the dead voices.”

“They make a noise like wings.”

“Like leaves.”

“Like sand.”

“Like leaves.”

Might find a clue in this crazy stuff.

“Leaves?”

“In a single night.”

“It must be spring.”

“But in a single night!”

“I tell you we weren't here yesterday. Another of your nightmares.”

“And where were we yesterday evening according to you?”

“How do I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.”

“Good. We weren't here yesterday evening. Now what did we do yesterday evening?”

“Do?”

“Try and remember.”

Denise. Dark hair on the pillow. Soft like silk. Waiting in the milk-bar now I guess. Keep out of that old trap, man, just for tonight. She likes you and she makes you soft. And what about that June doll? What about her? Don't know. Don't care, but might as well find out — for kicks.

 

 

 

A dingy lane leads to the party place. Muffled jazz beats the air that has swapped today's heat for the different animal heat of night. A sea breeze cools me a little as I stand wondering how to get in . . . nighttime, play-time, cool-time is wonderful.

A few others drift along and I go in with them. The music wails louder as we climb the stairs and are drawn into a room pulsating with rhythm and life. It's like a bodgie party in a way, but not really like. This mob is different, forcing die mood, too much highbrow talk, not drifting easily with the jazz current like the milk-bar gang. I feel like out of place, an outsider looking in, no part of this set-up. But now I'm here I guess I'll have to act out the night.

It's a broad low loft, the walls plastered over with unframed daubs, mostly in the same style as Dorian's psychological masterpiece in the Uni coffee shop. I turn my back on the room and fake the big-shot art critic, thinking culture thoughts. Dorian spots me and comes skidding across the room. He slaps me on the shoulder and calls me “mate”.

“Come over and have a grog,” he says. “There's beer and wine. Take your pick. I'm doing a fantastic picture I'd like to discuss with you, but got to get this party kicking on first.”

We down a beer together and the atmosphere of the place starts to grow on me. I begin to dig it in a way.

“Good boy! You came.”

I look round and June is there. She has on the same rig as the afternoon and I am glad. It would be awful if she was togged up flash. She sees me looking at her clothes.

“No time to go home and change,” she says. “I lead a dog's life.”

“Yeah?”

“First party I've been to in months.”

“Why?”

“One does have to work sometimes to pass exams, you know.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“It's a pity. You'd make a good student.”

“You're kidding.”

“No really. You've got the brains. You did Junior by correspondence, didn't you?”

“Yeah, in jail. How did you know?”

“Someone in the Department checked for me. He said you did a pretty brilliant pass.”

“So what? It killed the time.”

“Ever feel like going on with it?”

“What's the use?”

“There are such things as scholarships.”

Sure I've got brains and sure there are scholarships. I could blind this mob with science. Why not? Because it's too late. Too late from the day I was born I guess.

“You've mugged up all this psychology,” I say. “Why can't you understand?”

“Understand what?” she asks.

“What makes people tick who don't think your way.”

“That's what psychology tries to teach us,” she says.

“Schizophrenia, dypsomania, nymphomania, hydrophobia, paranoia. . .

She laughs easily. “All those things you suffer from? Like reading a medical book and finding you have symptoms of everything. You've had a lot of bad breaks and you've built up your own sort of defence against life. Otherwise you're as normal as they come.”

I search for words to explain the unexplainable.

“Wanting to win games and races, get top in exams, the competitive spirit, getting up and on — you'd say that was normal, I guess?”

“It's human nature,” she says.

“What do you call it if you just don't dig this success jazz? Or maybe dig it in a way, but not really inside you? That human nature?”

“Of a kind, yes.”

“Of another kind, see? My kind.”

She's a nice doll this one. I even think she believes there's not all that difference between her sort and mine.

“Anyway, who cares?” I down another beer. “Let's dance before I feel sober.”

We move into the centre and are swept away with the old life force pulsing from a black man's horn, weeping, wailing, laughing, loving. Mind blank to everything but rhythm and sound. Rhythm and girl. Getting to like this doll. Might even like her a lot. Mind and body heat with desire. Phoney emotion. Phoney crowd. Rich daddies and faking life. Got no place here. Don't want to stay.

“. . . jazz as an art form,” Dorian says to his partner as we pass.

I think he's telling someone the bull I put over in the coffee shop. Phoney stuff but this mob will swallow anything. The black man's jazz has got them like it's got me, but give it a name and they can fake they've put it in its place, put it back where it belongs. The master race, and all that crap. Got to show this girl they can't put it over me. Walk out on her when I like. Snap the fingers, just like that.

Music stops and she throws back her head.

“I'll say you can dance,” she says.

Damn her. Not the colour so much . . . the way I move . . . more supple than a white boy. . . .

“You'll be all right now, won't you? You know most of the crowd.”

“They're a phoney mob,” I say. “The bodgies are better any day.”

I want her to mind but she laughs and pats my arm. The music starts up again and another bloke swings away with her.

I get a drink and stand about listening to the talk. Phrases blur in my mind, twist and weave patterns of no account. Word associations rise like bubbles, break and dissolve in air. I flop on the floor with a glass of wine and smoke the long white sadness of a cigarette.

A girl sits down beside me. I don't look at her. Don't say anything. She can come crawling and I will reject her. Cool, like a god.

“You're with this jazz, aren't you? It means a lot to you.”

I thought it was June, but it's some other broad.

“Nothing means anything to me. I dig it, that's all.”

“It must mean something to you then.”

She is a fool.

“Meaning is an illusion,” I say.

“Don't you believe in anything — nothing at all?” She is drunk and leans against me with half-closed eyes.

“What is belief?” I ask.

“Got to believe in something,” she says.

“Like God and all that supernatural jazz?”

She wrinkles up her face. “Not God. Things like freedom, equality, rights of the common man.”

I grind out the butt of my cigarette. “They are the absurdest illusions of all — except love.”

“Don't you believe in love?”

“Love is lust.”

“Then you must believe in lust.”

“Don't believe in anything, only jazz. Jazz is love and love is lust and lust is nothing. So nothing is anything.”

Oh hell! Who cares about love and lust and jazz? I lapse into silence and look at her through the smoke of another cigarette.

A man drifts into my vision, smoke clears and I see that it is Dorian.

“What about that picture?” he says. “I'd like to know what you think of it.”

I look vaguely around the walls.

“Which one?”

“It's downstairs as a matter of fact.”

The girl hooks her arm through mine. “Go away,” she says. “He's my baby.”

He ignores her. “I'd like your advice on a title actually. We could discuss it after the others go.” He looks at me intently under drooping lids. “I want to get something cosmic into it.”

Suddenly my senses clear. My moment of clarity in drink has come. Everything stands out stark and separate.

“Call it
A Queer World
,” I say. “That ought to fit all right.”

The girl giggles. Dorian gives me a long strange look and drifts off to another group.

“You don't approve of poor Dorian,” the girl says. “Right, darling?”

“Wrong,” I say. “To disapprove of something means that I must approve of something else. It means that I must believe in right and wrong, but I don't. Both are illusions.”

“Your philosophy fascinates me,” she says. “Tell me more.”

I seem to be thinking clear thoughts and search for clear words.

“Nothing is right; nothing is wrong. Everything exists in itself and by itself. All things are separate and alien from each other.”

She snuggles closer.

“I don't feel alien from you right now.”

“All things are alien from me. I am rejected and I stand utterly alone. Nothing is mine or belongs to me and I belong nowhere in this world or the next.”

“Then you believe in a next world?”

“I believe in nothing and nobody. There is no refuge or comfort anywhere for me.”

We lapse into silence and I listen to the fragments of conversation floating to and fro against the rhythm of the canned jazz.

“ ‘They make a noise like wings,' ” I murmur sadly. “ ‘A noise like feathers, like leaves, like ashes, like sand.' ”

“Are you a poet?” she asks.

“That was a quotation,” I tell her.

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing and everything,” I say. “Like ashes, like love, like sand, like life.”

“Poor lonely darling,” she says and begins to cry.

“You're drunk,” I say.

“Beautiful boy, we are both so beautifully drunk and this little girlie wants to go outside.”

She gets up, staggering. I take her arm and we stumble out together. She knows where the place is and then she says: “Don't let's go back. Come in here and talk a bit.”

She pushes open a door and I feel for a switch. “Don't need any light,” she says.

I understand her now. She pulls me down with her onto a bed and sighs as her arms twist round my neck. My body is as warm as hers but my mind is detached and cold. This time I don't feel anything like hate or love. Only feel sick. I throw off her stranglehold and fling myself out the door.

A trumpet blares a cynical laughing tune as I run out into the lane. The buildings sway inwards on either side. The ground writhes under my feet. I look up and the sky is blurred with reeling stars. Nothing stable and true in all the universe. The footpath rises and sends me sprawling on hands and knees. I get up and struggle on. . . . Like ashes, like sand, like life . . . no refuge anywhere.

RETURN