We were roaring past a filthy lorry on a filthy day when she said, "You don't talk like an airman." I've thought here about pretending that I answered, "Oh, and how does an airman speak?" (in a controlled, superior voice) but I think I said, oh.
"You don't talk like an airman," she said. "I think you talk like a poet, or a playwright, definitely someone artistic." Oh, Mrs Jordan if only you knew. "Do you think you could be an artist? Do you have dreams?"
I did have dreams. I wanted to own a sports car one day. Once I asked a salesman with a gold tooth how much a Mercedes Benz 230 SL would cost me (about two thousand pounds, almost twenty year's of my then trainee airman's salary), but it's right a boy should have dreams.
I said, "I write poems and I don't really like being in the Air Force."
"A poet!" she said. "I just knew it. Would you like to come to a party?"
Until I turned fifteen, parties had been jelly. Then they moved up a level and meant Woodpecker cider and Elvis on someone's Dansette. I thought maybe this party was different, so I said yes. Louise Jordan squealed with joy. When she stopped to let me out, back into the rain, she gave me a telephone number and said, "Green Dragon, Saturday, seven-thirty, OK? Bring a toothbrush. We'll look after you from there."
I can see you thinking now, the sixties, party = weird, pot, free love, funny ties and flares - here goes our hero about to get his first shag. Well, pardon me but Her Majesty's Royal Air Force didn't go in much for flower power and Ban the Bomb, and when your hairline starts above ears that stick out like satellite dishes, when all your ties are knitted, you don't have much chance of an inaugural shag to applause. Of course I didn't know that before our seven-thirty meeting in an Olde Englishe Pubbe.
"Glen," I said, "Can you lend me five quid?"
"Five bloody quid?" It was almost two week's wages.
"Yes," I said. "I'm borrowing another five off Batty. I've been invited out with these posh people from telly and I want to take a ten pound note."
"Ten Quid?" Glen shouted - we were in the NAAFI and people looked. "Where d'you think yer going, Paris?"
Again, I would quite like to retrospectively pretend some cool here and tell you I said, "That's next week," but in fact I said, "Pl-eeease, Glen…" and then I said I'd pay him back two quid a week for three weeks. That was when Glen grinned and coughed up. I had thought about buying a new pair of socks but didn't and even though I try, I can't remember what I was wearing, (I think this may be protective amnesia), but I do remember getting there (a 59 bus) and I remember getting off one stop early and walking to the pub trying to look suave. Inside they were there already, Louise, Hans, some very tall thin people, and Anastasia.
Anastasia was my blind-date, at least, looking back, that's the nearest word I can give for the set up. She was, to my untutored eyes, a shining goddess wearing a ball-gown. When you've never had even one shag, beauty and a Marks and Spencer's see-through top is everything. Anastasia knew, I knew, we were the two spares the moment we saw each other. But she knew too that I had no hair, a very small, untested brain and sticky-out ears. She was mortified, even I could see that. Remember, I wore brown knitted ties. But reflecting in my mature middle-age, I still think she could have tried harder. In later years I've found picturing my entrance into the Green Dragon as an excellent way of delaying orgasm.
I walked in and said brightly "Ah Louise!" (I had been practising) and the way Anastsia's jaw dropped in horror is etched on my soul. If it hadn't been for the fact that later that night she set herself on fire, (I mean I set her on fire, to be more precise) I would keep all this secret, but life does have its ways of balancing the ups and downs. I swear when I was introduced to her, "Recently down from Oxford, working in publishing," I thought she was Anna, surname Stacia, but in the confusion of introductions no-one heard me say anything that foolish. But I remember the pain and terror as I was slotted next to her by Louise, and how she, Anastasia, immediately tried to move away but couldn't in the crush and how she raised her gin and tonic up to hide her face and the look in her eyes.
Years later, when I'd learned to change my socks, if somehow it was me who ended up with the ugly one, I would remember that night, and if I get into heaven it may well be because I'm marked down in the golden book as "kind to dogs". I'm not really, I'm as pissed off as the next guy if the shake-out doesn't favour me, but thinking karma, I simply couldn't do what Anastasia Burnside did that night to a meek little sprog with small dreams. But Louise didn't notice, and later we all moved on. It was time to have a party. Party the verb hadn't been invented then. I remember the trip to Louise Jordan's house, in a deux-chevaux, a sit-up-and-beg Citroen 2CV. This was Hans the poet's. Anastasia had managed to escape into another car. All I can remember about the trip was Hans smoking a cigar and the car so full of fumes I figured he couldn't possibly see out. He farted too, almost like punctuation.
"So you too am a poet as I am," Prrrtt! "This is good."
Please don't ask me to remember any more.
Their house was nice (to my eyes) in a half-way decent area of Hull, a large terrace with pink woodwork and in the hall, about ten thousand copies of Reader's Digest. Maybe the Jordans were "artistes" but it didn't stop them moving condensed shit for commission.
"Oh, no, dear." Louise told me dismissively, "We don't read them, but people will insist."
Later, Anastasia got very drunk, pulled me into an alcove, lifted her skirt, (she wasn't wearing pants), climbed on to me and let me ravish her as if the four-minute warning had just been sounded. Doesn't ring true? Nah, I guess not, but we used to pray for the four minute warning in those days and I always hoped that if it happened I'd be with two girls. (No point in wasting the last two minutes being love-dovey.
OK, she didn't speak to me, always seemed to be moving when we caught each other's eye and always seemed to find something to put in front of her face when I smiled pathetically across the room. So I set her on fire.
Looking back, I don't think I was so unreasonable. All Anastasia had to say was, "Look, John, I don't go in for blind dates, this is all Louise's fault. I'm sorry and all that, thanks but no thanks." But she didn't. She didn't.
Every now and then I'd hear her laughter across the crowded room. I'd think, her laughter across a crowded room, that's a really good line. I should have written it down, I know, but I didn't. And best part of thirty-five years later it comes back to me. I coulda been a contender. I'd hear her laughter across the crowded room and look over, and there she'd be, laughing. And so would be one of the tall skinny bastards, a Nigel or a Jeremy, whatever, but always another chinless twat. They were all chin-less except Hans, and he had flatulence. I'd look up, see her, the object of my immediate desire and ache, and I mean ache. It wasn't so much unrequited lust as realisation, the realisation that I was a wing-nut, a pink-faced shiny thing with sticky-out bits, and uneducated. It hurt. I don't remember much else about the party except they had stuff on biscuits which was gone in a mouthful and they were playing some rock thing, something about the signs of the zodiac. Who gives a shit, I'm OK now… but that night I set Anastasia on fire and paid the chinless crowd one back for the ordinary man.
It was her fault. Some time around ten-thirty I was on my third or fourth cider, and feeling a little braver, I went over. I stood in a shadow and pulled in my chin, then sort of sidled her way. She was laughing a goodbye kind of laugh and she turned, sensing a presence and was ready to haw-haw at me next, chinless-streak-of-piss #13, but when she turned, eyes alight, pupils wide, she saw it was the funny little RAF man and froze.
This was my moment. It was obvious Anastasia was about to extricate herself, but she was middle-class and I was just drunk enough not to care any more. A girl from where I came from would have just looked at me and said "Fuck off, Quasimodo!" but, as I said, Anastasia was middle pause class and I don't know why but I knew it was pay-back time, time for the proletariat to have their final fling.
I leaned in quickly and cut of her avenue of escape. "Hi!" she said but the way you say "Hi," to a labourer delivering manure.
"Oh, Hi," said I, really trying, but sniffing at an odd, sweet, smoky smell.
Behind Anastasia one of the chinless wonders was smoking a spliff, and, for whatever reason, after each drag he was putting his hand behind his back, like he was hiding it. The glowing end of the cigarette was perilously close to Anastasia's dress, and I thought, "Well, all I'm doing is trying to make conversation. If she decides to back away and that's on to a naked flame, it's not my fault, surely?"
I moved in. If I remember rightly I said something about algebra. (I was reading Teach Yourself Algebra at the time).
"Oh, yes," Anastasia said and shifted the weight on her feet, then stepped back a touch.
"Yes," I said. "I thought simultaneous equations were difficult, but they're not really. For that matter quadratics aren't all that tough."
We might have drifted into talking calculus (my next book) but we didn't. This was because the spliff Nigel was holding was now touching the back of Anastasia's dress, a kind of ballroomy thing but obviously some flammable nylon. No-one noticed it happening and there was very little smell (Hans had just passed anyway) but then Anastasia gave a little cry and said, "Oh, but!" put her hand behind her, into the voile and black plastic morass that
had been her dress, and almost fainted.
And that was it, the only time I ever went out with a student from Oxford.
Anastasia went out in tears, Louise followed, they were upstairs for maybe ten minutes, then they both came back. Anastasia was wearing pink bottoms, some thick brushed nylon. She went straight to the bar and never moved from there. We never spoke again. I stopped over that night, some rickety bed in a garret somewhere, and no, there were no nocturnal trysts, not even fantasies or wet dreams. Just the smell of burning plastic.
A poet? A poet I never was. Writing poems does not a poet make. But it seems Louise Jordan was right, I wasn't an airman, I wasn't cut out for the life, for the dirty fingernails, the scream of jets. A year later I decided I'd had enough, got myself court-martialled and after twenty-eight days inside with nothing to read but women's novels, I was a civilian.
Then I was lots of things, most that don't matter now, but then one day I woke up and somehow I'd become a writer, one they paid, the sort they might offer to make a Reader's Digest condensed book for. But somehow I'd also become rich, rich enough to pour scorn on the very idea of tampering with my art. Condensed book, indeed!
It was my fiftieth birthday, three years after my second divorce and the bash was a big one, a few hundred yards down from the publisher's offices. Hank, my agent had promised me a pretty hot date for the night, a rising star, a thirty-just brunette from New Zealand who'd written a pseudo-lit thing which was grabbing headlines. "Cracker if her book cover is real!" he said.
It wasn't. Paulette Proulx-Petter was an anorexic chain-smoker as jumpy as an off-territory cat and when I'd extricated myself from her and gone and sat down I ended up with a sad, slightly overweight fifties-something who looked like a reader for Bloomsbury or worse. I was in danger of feigning sleep which would turn embarrassingly real when Hank came up and said, "I see you two have met already!" slapped me on the shoulder and went off laughing.
Well I'd already abandoned ship once and I couldn't do it again, so I started to talk to this woman who turned out had once had a small hit with an erotic cookbook but was actually an academic of sorts and now reviewed travel books. Talk about Venice and die. We started getting drunk together and somewhere into the second bottle of a really good red she told me she hated parties. Once, she said, when she was twenty-one, she said, and just about to come down from Oxford, some smelly-footed military oik had set fire to her dress.
"I've never liked parties, since," she said, a real low ache in her voice. "I sometimes wonder if that's why I never married, parties."
I tried to be sympathetic, such a terrible story. Where was this?
"A friend's, in Hull. She was something or other in local television and she had a mad Austrian lover who turned out to be an illegal immigrant."
"Oh," I said slowly. "And the friend?"
"She jacked it in, built up her business selling for Reader's Digest."
I don't know what made me ask, but as I poured us both some more red wine I smiled as if a little unsure of myself and said, "Stacey, have you ever been hurt? I men really hurt?"
She looked at me in a look that I guess could be called sad amazement and she said, "John, I'm a single, middle-aged woman."
"You're hardly middle-aged," I said.
"Oh sure," she said.
But she wasn't. She was neither old nor ugly, just worn thin. Take away the sadness, massage a few scars, and she was a pretty young graduate who had learned stuff the hard way.
"Do you fancy sneaking out of here?" I said. "I know a nice restaurant less than two minutes away."
She looked at me. I smiled. She stared, I smiled again, and then when she realised I was real, she picked up her handbag.
"Great!" I said. "We'll walk through London, take in the night, and see the lights sparkle on the river."
"My," she said. "You should have been a poet."
I laughed and told her that once someone thought I might be, I took her arm. "Anyway," I said, enough of me, "Tell me about this oik, the one who set fire to you. I wonder what ever happened to him?"
