Downriver Read Free Page B

view all the private papers. I’ll give you another man altogether, a sick soul. A much better yarn. What can the “truth” matter now – when you set it against an advance from an honourable publisher? Your fame is assured.Take your time, go down to the country. It will be marked in the right places, I promise you. Drop in, any Thursday, at the Albany. My day, you know.” I had to lift his hand from my knee. When I walked out, he was still talking to the empty chair. The waiter was taking a brandy glass to his lips, then patting him dry with the folded edge of an Irish-linen napkin.’
    Bobby, the publican and sinner, the gold-maned ‘television personality’, posed for a moment in the doorway, then tottered to the bar and shot a very large gin into a dirty glass. ‘Cunts,’ he whispered, superstitiously. And pressed his glass against the tiny shoulders of the dispenser.
    A Romanesque docker, head slicked with sump oil, sleeves rolled threateningly above the elbow, kept his back to the fireside cabal of Crime Connoisseurs, while he indulged in some serious drinking. He was being talked to, whined at, flattered, flirted with, and altogether patronized by Conlin, the notorious Lowlife photographer. An evil-smelling dwarf who had lost his christian name, thirty years before, in a strict discipline Naval Training Establishment for delinquent boys. His Leica was on the stool beside him. The great Conlin! The man who had shot, and later destroyed, the definitive portrait of John Minton. Beads of salt-sweat rolled down the contours of his coarse-grained skin. Smirking, then sniffing, he began to excavate the docker’s ear with his tongue. Without hurrying, or spilling a drop, the docker finished his drink. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and clamped his vast hands around the back of Conlin’s neck. He looked for a long moment into the photographer’s eyes: then he nutted him. And watched him drop, screaming, on to the floor.
    Gamely, Bobby rushed forward to hook Conlin’s elbows back on to the bar. Blood was dripping from the photographer’s broken nose into his vodka. Bobby teased a cigarette between Conlin’s trembling lips, and lit it with his own.
    The board behind the line of inverted spirit bottles was decorated with exotic postcards from Bobby’s collection: jungles, ivory poachers, whips, balconies. Bobby tried to take his mind offthings by constructing a fiction that would animate these static images.
    Recklessly inspired, he groped for Conlin’s camera. He propped the wilting photographer between the docker and his mate; then fidgeted the group, until the sign, BUOYS , could be clearly read on the left of the composition. He carefully framed out the corresponding door, marked GULLS .
    The dockers were rigid, severe; breathless. One of them mimed danger, by fingering a kiss curl; while the other excited a detumescent bicep.
    Bobby, the artist, was not quite satisfied. After prolonged meditation, and a final check through the viewfinder of his fingers, he darted forward to unzip Conlin, fumble him, shake him out. The earwig! Now satisfied, he snapped the shutter on another fragment of his one-day-to-be-published tribute to a lost generation: the Tilbury Group. He might give his agent a tinkle.
    VI
    Iddo Okoli, savage in Middle Temple mufti – pin-striped, wing-collared, with soup-stained tie – progressed benevolently through the collapsed markets, smiling on chaos. His wife, broad, dignified, sheet-wrapped, followed in his slipstream. His children, in a file, struggled with suitcases of outdated textbooks. How his optimism survived, nobody knew. He bellowed at back-counters. He shook the plaster from damp ceilings. He beat on tables. There had been good days when he almost covered his bus fare.
    His prospects changed with a small piece of theatre that became apocryphal in the trade. A literary graveyard, lurking between the Royal Academy and