The Suburbs of Hell Read Free Page A

The village was Boxford. In mid-Victorian times one family of Pricks started spelling their name “Pryke”, and by the end of the century they’d all done the same. Now, if you look in the telephone book, you’ll find a lot of Prykes, but the Pricks don’t dare raise their heads.’
    ‘I don’t think,’ Harry said, ‘that your interests make you a very suitable person to have charge of the minds of our children.’
    Paul looked surprised. ‘You haven’t any children—have you, Harry?’
    ‘That was just a way of speakin,’ Harry said. ‘But I think I have. I might have. One. From before I was married, thass why I int sure.’
    ‘You were married?’
    ‘Well—not for long. The divorce went on for years, the marriage dint. But before that there was a gal what had a son I think was mine. I like to think he’s mine. There’s his name,’ Harry said, pushing up his sleeve. Tattooed on his forearm was a red rose with a label across the stem saying PAUL. ‘Thass why I like that name,’ Harry confided.
    Paul stared at the tattoo. ‘You’re full of surprises, Harry,’ he said. ‘What if it’s me? Perhaps I was left on the doorstep of the bourgeois Ramseys.’
    ‘Could be, for all I know,’ Harry said. ‘I never sin him. She wouldn’t let me. He’d be about twenty-five now.’
    ‘Not me, then. I’m thirty-one.’
    ‘Are you? Blokes with beards, you just can’t tell.’
    He looked at the beard with such candid affection that the younger man sheepishly smiled at him.
    ‘Do you know what I think about your face?’ Harry asked. ‘I think if I met you in the middle of the Go-By Desert, I should say: “Scoose me, boy, int you a Morris-dancer?”’
    Paul spluttered into his beer. ‘If that had come from any other man,’ he said, ‘I’d call him a bitch.’
    Harry merely beamed at him, and shook his head. After a pull at his pint he asked, grave now: ‘Are you comfortable in that old house of yours?’
    ‘All right, thanks,’ Paul said, sounding cagey.
    ‘Thass something big. Draughty, I should think. Draughty as arseholes.’
    ‘It’s not too bad. Of course, it’s not—we were going to take years to get it civilized. That’s rather come to a stop.’
    ‘Thass sad. Still, that happen.’
    ‘I get the impression,’ Paul said, ‘that it’s happened a lot in Old Tornwich. I’ve never seen so many deserted husbands and lifelong bachelors. I ask myself whether all these little pubs are cause or effect.’
    ‘I think thass the sea,’ Harry said. ‘Seamen’s marriages are often a bit dodgy, like.’
    ‘I put so much into that old wreck of a house,’ Paul said, and frowned down at a beermat which he was twisting between his fingers. ‘I thought about it all the time. I suppose I thought that we both thought that was the most important thing about us: that one day we’d sit in our Georgian house that I’d bought for a song and entertain our slightly Bohemian, mostly schoolteaching friends. When she was in the process of being swept off her feet by a real Bohemian, I didn’t even notice.’
    ‘She might come back, mightn’t she?’
    ‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t think that affair is likely to last, but she won’t move backwards now.’
    ‘Well, listen, Paul—’
    Paul’s eyes, looking up at him, were grey-blue and rather blank, or guarded. ‘What?’
    ‘Well, I mean to say, don’t be lonely, you know—’
    ‘No, I’m not going to be. I think Greg is probably coming to live here for a while.’
    ‘Greg? Oh, the little brother. The stoodent.’
    ‘Not a student now. Another unemployable Ph.D.’
    ‘Whass that—Ph.D?’
    ‘Doctor of Philosophy.’
    ‘Ah, you’re pullin my pisser,’ Harry exclaimed. ‘That skinny scruff with the guitar, you call him doctor?’
    ‘I call him Skinny Scruff,’ Paul said. ‘So can you.’
    ‘Well, they’re rum places, these universities,’ said Harry. ‘But thass nice for you. I don’t see that much of my own brothers, but