A Start in Life by Alan Sillitoe
Comparisons were painful, so I mulled over my break with Bridgitte, which was a supportable agony because it was familiar. It seemed as if she had left only yesterday, but the unexpected savagery of her departure with the kids had bitten two weeks out of my life, leaving a wound so raw it would never heal. I could hardly account for the subsequent days except to say they were a nightmare, hours of misery from brooding at my loss, and a relentless ache at wondering how the kids were faring.
Bits of food and empty whisky bottles littered stairs and tables, but by closing the door that morning on the piggery of ten years, an iron test had been passed. The marks of the experience had bitten so deep that it seemed the disaster had had no effect on me.
Life goes on, I thought, settling myself into a first class seat on a second class cheap day shopper’s ticket, which was tucked into a pocket of my Norfolk-style jacket. On the other hand, life had gone on since I was born, with little help from me, so there was no reason to suppose it would not continue until the day of my inevitable blackout. Even when my existence seemed too painful to last, or too good to go on forever, I stared side-on at the antics it played. After my stint in prison, ten years before, I preferred walking parallel to life rather than through the middle like a grenadier. But I was never less than up to my neck in it.
I reached for The Times left by somebody who got out at Cambridge. There was the usual front-page photo of a terrorist with a scarf around his head, trying to smile like royalty, and inside was the snapshot of an eight-year-old kid with a Kalashnikov which I supposed the photographer had given him a quid to hold so that he could get a good picture.
At thirty-five the grey hair had begun, which surprised me because I thought I never worried. Life had been calm, and nothing justified that hint of fag ash on the lower fringes of my sideboards. Worrying that I didn’t worry would only make it worse. Bridgitte pointed to the grey bits as if they were the marks of a beast that had always lurked there, and ruffled them to see whether or not they were real.
I hoped the tormented expression on my face in the British Rail looking-glass was only temporary, because it spoiled my almost good looks, at which the only response was a crackling breakfast belch before sitting down.
What I dreaded most was going bald, like that tall, gaunt, randy old prick-head Gilbert Blaskin I had been lumbered with as a father. As for my mother, she hadn’t been heard of for months, not since the old man began his new novel. While he was working he no longer tormented her, which meant that she was unable to get at him. Every so often they fled in opposite directions so as not to murder each other, and with Blaskin being a writer it worked out well. I imagined going to the flat and finding them dead on the mat by the door, a cleaver in her hand and an axe in his. They had struck each other’s heart at the same second and with instant effect, though I thought it more likely that while one would be dead, the other would be so wounded that he or she would be pushed around in a bottle-type wheelchair for as long as he or she lived. Mother or father – I didn’t care which – would gurgle reproachfully at me as the reason for their downfall. After a terrific struggle I’d get the bottle to the top of the Post Office Tower and let it go, hoping a gust of wind would swing it through a window of the Middlesex Hospital where they could accept it as an unsolicited gift from me.
My Irish mother of fifty-odd had a mop of Cullen-thick hair which was duly passed on. She’d thinned her own and sprayed it with silver and pink so that she wouldn’t look a day under thirty-five. Whether she was Irish or not I’d never really known, and neither had she, but she’d been unable to stand the thought of being taken for English, especially since Blaskin was a fairly pure specimen of the breed – at least, as she often said, in his talent for deceit and the versatility of his vices. I wanted to take after neither but, being my vain and pleasure-loving self, hoped I was closer to my mother’s side as far as keeping my hair till I was a hundred and ten was concerned, though I found it painful at times that a bloke of thirty-five should be lumbered with parents at all.
Clouds floated over the flat fields, a fine picture of altocumulus castellanus – as I had learned from Smog’s school books when I tested him for A levels, thus gaining qualifications which I hadn’t been able to earn at the proper time. Such cloud varied in its direction with the sine, cosine and tangent of the moving train. April smelled ripe and dead, bits of sun filing through to the blackening earth.
The reason for my journey to London was because a letter from my old pal Bill Straw begged me to come poste haste without restante to help him out of a jam. When Bill, a man with a long past, wrote about a jam it was no mere logjam in a river of crocodiles near a thousand foot waterfall with natives shooting poisoned arrows from either bank. It was serious, though I didn’t suppose he realized how much worse I might make his predicament.
A man wearing expensive clothes looked into my compartment as if to consider parking there. I had spreadeagled my coat, briefcase, cap and self in such a way that it looked filled, so he closed the door, gently for one so nervous, and walked down the corridor. I turned to The Times crossword, and tried to make sense out of nine down, a clue whose complexity made me feel like the kingpin idiot himself.
I noted in the car sales columns that the Thunderflash Estate had come onto the market, and was sorry I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy one. The tall pin-headed man dragged the door open and settled himself opposite. He stank of scent, and looked out of the window while filing his nails. I tried to guess his profession, or the source of his money, hazarding soldier, barrister, remittance man, stockbroker’s clerk, unfrocked priest, or of independent means, but none would fit. I observed a person of about forty who looked as if he had all his vices under firm control. With short, mousey, Caesar-style hair, he had more than a few, though I couldn’t decide what they were, but he certainly knew all about them because he had the sour expression of someone who trusted himself absolutely. Whoever he worked for had fallen for his air of reliability.
His preoccupied gaze took me back to when I had been put in prison by the machinations of Claud Moggerhanger, an experience which reinforced my impression that the man opposite was untrustworthy to the core, though he might not look so to others. There were many such types in England. A man of similar phizzog in some countries would be immediately under suspicion but, living in a land where the borderline between loyalty and treachery had never been properly surveyed, and where he blended well with the surrounding populace, he would be considered a safe enough bet.
He was so taken up with himself that he didn’t think I had noticed him, but a one-second flash over my newspaper told me more than any stare. I had been brought up in a place where, if you looked above two seconds at anyone, you were inviting him (or even her – sometimes especially her) to a fight. In prison, only one second was necessary, often less than that, so I had developed the knack of seeing all at a glance. Whoever the man worked for had put him through the aptitude tests and psychological probings of a foolproof selection board, but I knew they had boobed in the most basic way because they had never been in jail as a prisoner.
I was disturbed from watching the smoke of my morning cigar drift through the fitful sunshine by the ticket collector standing at the door. The passenger opposite gave his ticket to be punched.
‘Thank you, sir.’
He then went back to his vacant gaze out of the window, continuing his manic manicure. I noticed how startled he was on hearing the collector say to me: ‘You can’t travel on a second class ticket in here, mate.’
I had set out that morning determined not to cheat, lie or commit any action while in London which would offend those principles which Bridgitte had tried to instil in me. She had taught me how much better it was not to lie or cheat, even if it meant, she said, losing all idea of your own identity. I realised how much she had gleaned from her former psychologist husband and – too late – that she wasn’t as dreamy as she looked.
‘Is this a first class compartment?’ I
I wanted to pull his earring. ‘I suppose it would have to before somebody like me would notice.’
He leaned against the door, and yawned. ‘That’s the way it is, mate.’
Under the circumstances he couldn’t be anything but honest, and do his job. The nail-filing man opposite, for all his preoccupation with the landscape flying by outside, took in every shade of the situation. And I, if nothing else, had my pride, which was all that ten years of peace had left me with. I took a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘How much extra?’
He looked at the few foreign coins, plastic tokens, luncheon vouchers and Monopoly notes from his pockets. ‘Can’t change that.’
I reached for my executive-style briefcase. ‘I’ll write you a cheque.’
‘It’d be more than my job’s worth to take a cheque.’
‘You’d better see what you can do about changing this legal tender, then.’ I crumpled the note into my waistcoat pocket and went back to reading a report in the newspaper about a woman of eighty-six who had murdered her ninety-eight-year-old husband with a knife. ‘He got on at me once too often,’ she said in court, hoping the beak would be lenient. Then she spoiled it: ‘Anyway, I’d always wanted to kill the swine.’
The judge sentenced her to fourteen years in jail. ‘A worse case of premeditated murder I’ve never come across.’
‘I’ll get you when I come out,’ she screamed as they dragged her down to the cells.
The ticket collector, reluctant to move, took a packet of chewing gum from his trouser pocket and put two capsules into his mouth. He lounged as if he had no work to go to, changing weight from foot to foot, happy enough to look at himself in the mirror above the seats. He swayed with the train, as if he’d not been long on the job and didn’t care whether he had it much longer. I took a whisky flask from my briefcase and held it towards him. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘No thanks. Not that as well. It’d blow my mind. A train trip’s enough for me.’
I wondered if he wasn’t one of those scoundrels who, after buying a cap and clipper in Woollie’s, hopped the train near a station, collected excess fares, then jumped off in time for the up-train. He did it every day for six months, and spent the rest of the year in Barbados. The millionaires there wondered where he got his money. He told them he was a plumber, but some of the snooty British thought he was only a window cleaner.
Yet he looked too genuine to be an impostor. His eyes, blue in white, spun like catherine wheels. With an effort he stood upright. ‘I’ll see what I can do about your change.’
We heard him dance his way along the corridor. ‘Stoned out of his damned mind,’ Nail-filer said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Even public servants. At least they’re still changing the guard at Buckingham Palace.’
‘For the moment,’ I said, not wanting to be unsociable. He didn’t turn his gaze from the window, and I noticed in the reflection that he held a map inside his newspaper on which he made pencil marks when a bridge, a cutting, a level crossing and, on one occasion, a pub swung close to the line. ‘Are you planning another Great Train Robbery?’
Even in the glass I saw him turn white. The porcelain flash spread to the back of his neck, and to the knuckles of both hands. It was his business, not mine. Probably no one else would have cottoned on. He smiled as if I must be loony to say such a thing, but he wasn’t reading that map for nothing, and that was a fact. Maybe he was doing a correspondence course from the Train Robbery Polytechnic, several of which must have opened in the last few years.
I don’t know why I had been so awkward with the ticket collector. I had the right change, and could only put it down to the fact that I hadn’t been to bed with another woman since before I married Bridgitte. I had banged a few on rugs and carpets, and behind summer hedges (and even on one occasion an aunt of Bridgitte’s had had me in Holland), but never actually in bed. No other explanation seemed possible or desirable, except that such unnecessarily bloody-minded conduct helped to pass a few minutes on an otherwise boring journey. Or maybe it was those little flashes of grey hair which made me act the way I did. Cheating made me feel young.
He put a folded map sheet away, and took another from his large sheer-leather hundred-quid briefcase, which was a far cry from the black plastic executive mock-up with a tin lock that I carried. I marvelled at his concentration. Sweat stood on his forehead. He wiped his cheeks, mopping the flood rather than the source. Anyone capable of such assiduous observation would certainly command a job whose salary allowed the purchase of such a briefcase.
The sun gleamed on factories as the train clawed its way closer to London. Well-kept houses reminded me that England was still wealthy, in spite of what the newspapers and the government wailed on about. Evidence of rich people made me feel better, though whenever I was on my way out of London the same fact depressed me.
The pin-headed, short-haired, well-shaven man sitting opposite put away his newspaper. ‘Of course, it’s entirely up to you, and I don’t want to interfere, but what’s the point of having a ticket which doesn’t entitle you to the proper seat? You must know it’s impossible to avoid paying.’
Just as I had whiled away a few minutes during my teasing of the ticket collector, so this nail-scraping fop was trying to pass the last half hour of our journey by a bout of moral finger-wagging, especially now that he had solved his calculations on the map. Having guessed his game, I could be courteous in reply. ‘You might think so, old man, but I haven’t coughed up yet.’
He laughed, as if he couldn’t wait to see me do so. The fact that I failed to place him irritated me so much that I wanted to smash his mug to pulp. Then I twigged that beneath the old veneer he was ineradicably working class. He couldn’t fool me, who was neither ashamed nor proud of having come from the mob, though my father was said to be descended from a long line of impoverished landowning wankers.
A lid of dark cloud stretched across the sky, a luminous mixture of blue up top and white below, which could only mean that it would rain the whole day over London. Such a prospect made the present conversation unimportant, but I played up to his need for chit-chat. ‘I’ve no intention of not paying the extra, though it’s true that by the time the ticket collector returns, if he ever does get back from the sort of trip he’s gone on, we could be at Liverpool Street.’
I stubbed my cigar out too violently on the window, and had to brush ash and sparks from my newly cleaned suit. I looked at the half-hunter gold watch in my waistcoat pocket, as if anxious about a business appointment in town. He was interested in seeing how I would manoeuvre myself out of the predicament, and because I was in a good mood I decided to fall in with his expectations as a way of discovering something about him. Most of all, it was as if I was a candidate for a job and he was testing my suitability.
‘I intended paying up from the beginning, yet I needn’t if I don’t want to. As soon as I see him coming with the change for twenty quid I can nip smartly back into second class, and nobody will be any the wiser. It pays to hold off till the last minute, because you never know what’s going to turn up. It’s because it’s good exercise racking my brains for a way out, and probably as near to real life as I can get. In any case, suppose my briefcase above your head was full of explosives, and I thought somebody might be on the look-out for it. To divert suspicion, I’d cause a fuss about something insignificant, as a way of practising the theory of the indirect approach.’
He had turned pale, in the lurid light caused by the darkening sky. ‘But what are you practising for?’
Raindrops splashed the window. ‘Fun, as far as you are concerned. But you never know when the fun’s going to turn nasty, do you? Or serious, for that matter. And therein lies the danger for anybody else wh
‘Seems like we’re going to become friends.’ He brought out a silver cigar case of real Havanas. I smoked Jamaicans which were just as good. He passed one across. ‘What sort of work do you do?’
‘Work?’ I dropped the crushed tube to the floor, and scuffed it under the seat with my heel. ‘Work,’ I said, ‘is a habit which I gave up when I started living off my wife.’
He smiled, not knowing whether to believe me. The only blemish in his otherwise well-bred presentation was that his teeth were rotten, though not too much for a forty-year-old who hadn’t yet got false ones, or too good for a perspicacious German not to recognise him for an Englishman. ‘What sort of work do you do?’
‘I don’t think I could describe what I do as work,’ he said. ‘I’m a Royal Messenger, flitting not only between the Palace and the Foreign Office in my powder blue Mini-van, but occasionally using trains, and even planes, when engaged on overseas duties. I go from place to place as a courier.’
‘I thought you were in something important. My name’s Michael Cullen, by the way.’
He held out his manicured hand. ‘I was christened Eric Samuel Raymond, and my surname is Alport. Call me Eric. At the moment I’m just back from Sandringham.’
I could only suppose that he had fallen arse backwards into that kind of an occupation, and yet I was convinced that he lied, and that if so he was more of an artist at it than I was – or used to be. He lied, right from the back of his throat, for he was no kind of Royal Messenger. I knew he had been in jail because the first thing people learn inside is how to lie. Learning how to become better criminals is only secondary. The lies they tell each other inside are picturesque. The lies they tell everyone they meet after they get out are calamitous and wild. It gives them something to do, and is a way of feeling their way back towards self-respect. But when they come out they betray themselves to people like me by the way they lie with such wonderful confidence. And lying is the first step that leads them back to jail where lying at least is safe.