The Lowlife Read online

  Debbie, bless her heart, I love with an ache. We never talked together. We never had what they call a relationship. Strangers, always. But I look at her, and I know all about Debbie, and I think dumb Debbie, with her cow eyes, knows all about me. I think she cries sometimes for her no-good brother. We pity each other and say nothing.

  I went round there that night, and not a bad word was said till after supper. This is a big point for Gus. I told you, he is a good man. Life Governor of hospitals. A name for generosity. He grunts something that sounds like a greeting, goes behind the bar (this is a semi-circular bar, all glass in front, lit from beneath, with richly coloured Venetian glasses on shelves. Very pretty. Behind the barman are the shelves of bottles, and behind the bottles is a big mirror) and pours me a whisky that would knock down a carthorse. He gives it to me, picks up his own and says, ‘Cheers.’ That’s all. He must have been bursting, but he kept his anger in.

  Debbie, dear Debbie, just comes out into the hall. The servant opens the door, and Debbie always comes out and hovers timidly behind her. I know how frightened she must be of those servants, even after all these years. She gives me her big sad smile and says straight away, ‘I’ve got lutkas on, Harryboy.’

  Gus grunts, ‘What you like, she cooks. When you come, I eat well.’

  ‘Other times you starve?’ I say. ‘Where did you get that belly?’

  ‘I’m down to my right weight,’ he says. ‘Ten years’ time you should be as fat as me here.’ He smacks his belly.

  Debbie says, ‘He plays squash two nights a week. It kills him.’ She has a Benedictine. She always goes for sweet liqueurs.

  So for supper we have potato lutkas, soup with meat balls and thin vermicelli, a half a chicken each with roast potatoes, sweet corn and cream spinach (the old folk, rest their souls, used to be Orthodox, but Gus and Debbie keep a modem home), and in case I’m hungry afterwards, Debbie brings out a big apple tart, with fruit salad and cream to finish. I ought to mention that we had a good white wine, at the right temperature. You think a bookmaker has to be a fat ignoramus? Gus knows all about wines, even if he hasn’t got a butler. All the time, not a bad word.

  After supper we are back in the lounge, and puffing our Havanas, and the storm breaks.

  Gus looks at the ash on his cigar and starts quietly, as if he is delivering a stage soliloquy. ‘A schlemiel I’ve got for a brother-in-law. A half-wit. A lunatic. A good wife I marry, and she has to have the village idiot for a brother. Can good ever come to a man without trouble?’

  I keep dumb, breathe cigar smoke round myself. Now he addresses himself to me. ‘Couldn’t you do what I told you? Couldn’t you leave well alone? For thirty years you been going to the tracks, don’t you know when to call it a day? You were so greedy all of a sudden? You thought you were a genius? The prophet Elijah? You were getting your tips from the Almighty?’

  Now he starts to lose his temper. He bangs his fist on his chest. ‘From me you got the tip. Not the Almighty. Why should the Almighty care about you? A lowlife like you? Did you ever pay a subscription to a synagogue? At least I’ve got a seat, you should know what I pay for it. You? An atheist, I suppose. Go on, tell me you’re an atheist.’

  ‘I’m not an atheist.’

  ‘A discussion now we’re having about religion. Thank you. The intellectual. Thank you very much. Who’s talking about religion? I’m talking about a tip. I tipped you a dog. It wasn’t a gamble. What do I have to teach you at your time of life? It was a fix. The race was fixed. All you had to do was collect the money and go home. Go home, do you hear me? With the money in your pocket. My family, I do it for you because you’re my family, my wife’s brother, a tip like that I would never give to anyone, a fix you don’t talk about. If they pulled my nails out...’

  Does it matter what he said next? When the words are unwelcome, I can shut my ears up, curl up inside myself where it’s nice and cosy, and dream. I dreamed.

  When I come out of my trance, he is still going strong. ‘A gambler. Too lazy to earn a living. My brother-in-law is a gambler. No, I’m sorry. A man of learning. I do you an injustice. I’m only a bookie. Illiterate. Race-cards I can read, that’s all. All right, I can read a good novel as well as anyone. Go in the den, see my books. You should have the money I spend on books. They give it a big review on Sunday, I’ve got it on Monday. Every book they’re talking about, you can see it when you go to Gus Van Bien’s. Oh, I beg your pardon.’ (He turns to poor Debbie, who has come in from the kitchen with the coffee trolley.) ‘I do your brother an injustice. Your brother, the great reader. Did it do him any good, his reading? Did he learn a profession? On his back he lays all day, reading. At night he gambles. This is his profession.

  ‘A man of forty-five. Have you got a wife? A home have you got? In Hackney he lives. In one stinking room. Hackney, he still lives there. Genius. A fine upstanding Jewish boy. My brother-in-law. A credit to me. Thank you.’

  Then he starts to tell me how much he has done for me. Has he done his best or not? Fifty things he’s tried for me. Fifty times he’s had a straight talk with me. How many times has he given me money? All this is true. He is a good fellow, Gus, and I am a burden to him.

  I had gone to ask for a loan, just a small one. You must understand from the start, although I am a cadger when necessary, you will never find me with the unshaven face, the dirty collar or frayed cuffs of a schnorrer. One thing about me, I always dress smartly. A good suit, midnight blue mohair, this year’s cut. Dazzling white shirt, quiet tie of silk, rust-colour. Buy your clothes good if you have to starve afterwards.

  I have to keep this front up. One evening I was walking through the West End with sixteen pounds in my pocket, my capital, all I had in the world. I met a couple I knew. ‘How’s things?’ ‘Fine, fine.’ I heard myself— could I stop the words coming out?—telling them of a new deal I was in on. Property. Marvellous site. So what could I do next? I had them in a taxi, next thing we were sitting round a table at the White Tower. Come on, let’s make an evening of it, my guests... Once I’ve started I have to go on. I urged them to try the smoked salmon. Would they like me to find out if there was any Beluga caviar? I was sick with fright. Sixteen pounds is only sixteen pounds. And to follow? Roast duck? Chicken barbecue? Steak Othello? And a good claret. And to follow? I was lucky. The bill only came to a little over twelve pounds. I threw three fives on the table and told the waiter to keep the change. I wasn’t sick any more then. My guests had seen the bill. They had seen the tip. They saw how the waiters bowed me out. In the street I got a scare. What would they suggest next? More drinks? A night club? I tell you, I barely had taxi money. I gave them a big pitch about a showgirl I had to meet at eleven. Chuckles from male guest, ‘Lucky fellow, you bachelors are the wise ones.’ Big goodnights all round. Never seen them again. I tell you, I felt good. The next day I worried.

  So now my pride swells up. I am a man at ease, with a cigar. ‘Gus,’ I say with quiet dignity, ‘who is asking? Am I asking you for money? I come to my sister for dinner. Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘Money,’ says Gus. ‘Who said you were asking for money? I gave you a tip—’

  ‘Forget it, Gus. What’s past is past. Never hold inquests on the past. A man in your position should know. Debbie has given us a wonderful dinner, God bless her. Can’t we enjoy it? Can’t you let me appreciate your cigar?’

  ‘They cost seven-and-six each,’ he says, ‘wholesale. You want brandy with your coffee?’

  In his rough way, Gus is a gentleman.

  I got back to Hackney after midnight. I let myself into the house, trying to open the door quietly. Usually at this hour the whole house is dark. But tonight, from the back room on the ground floor I saw a light shining under the door. I heard voices and footsteps, which echoed the way they do in an empty room.

  The downstairs flat had been vacant, but I knew from the old couple in the basement that a family was moving in soon. The old couple own the house. Their life savings are in it. They are always scrubbing stairs and landings as if they were polishing their jewels. For all their scrubbing, the house has the smell of all these tenement houses, a smell of cold decay that comes from the bare, aged lino that covers the floorboards in the hall and on the stairs.

  I was warm with brandy. I wanted my bed and my dreams. I had no curiosity about the new tenants. In that back room were the people who were going to change my life, the new tenants sweeping their room out. But we never know what is coming to us.

  I crept upstairs, as quietly as I could on the bare lino and the creaking floorboards, and I went to bed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Gus was doing his nut about was this. The day before he rang me in the afternoon, and gave me a cert for the third at Harringay.

  Gus did this out of the goodness of his heart, because as he suggested to me after dinner, if you hear of such news and talk about it in his line of business, it is no good for trade. But Gus is always trying to put me on my feet.

  The way he reckons is that if only I can get a little capital behind me, my normal human instincts will unfreeze, i.e., I will feel the need to start a nice secure little business. Then I will feel better, my sister Debbie will stop crying, Gus will mark a good deed up in heaven and incidentally will be shot of a parasite. Maybe a little shop, he suggests occasionally, a tobacconist and sweets. Or if I don’t like work, I could buy an old house or two and let the rooms. Fine. To tell you the truth, this last proposition appeals to me a good deal. If the luck holds, I might live to old age. Did anyone ever hear of an old gambler?—a professional, I mean. Before then I must make some arrangement. So I dream of that thousand or two of capital, to buy a few houses for letting. And inside that dream, I snuggle up to the other dream, of going away to an island
.

  You may ask, why doesn’t Gus put up the capital to start me in a business? He has. Several times. Every time I gambled it away. So now he’s learned sense. Thank goodness for that. I wouldn’t like my sister to be married to a fool. All the same, he tries to help.

  In the evening I went to the track. I had some money with me, but as I was going in through the ten-shilling gate one of Gus’s tuchas-lickers gave me an envelope. It had twenty pounds in it. Gus was even giving me the stake, bless him. I got five to one on my dog. Gus’s twenty plus ten of my own brought me a hundred and fifty winnings.

  So there it was, seventy minutes after I left home, my night’s working profit, a hundred and fifty nicker. Now a professional, in gambling, is not greedy. Unless he has another sure thing, which is unlikely, he walks away from it. So I went up to the restaurant and had some supper.

  But down there in front of me, through the high glass windows, the floodlights were on, the grass a bright unreal green, the dogs on parade; and I realised I was snapping my fingers for the best runner. I could have bet ten, twenty, put the rest away, but I was backing the favourite, and at eight to five where is the benefit if you are just going to bet with pocket-money? A hundred I put on, and when the dog strolled home, a hundred and sixty came back to me. So there it was, two hundred and ten nicker.

  I let the fifth race go, did a combination on the sixth and won seventy. Two hundred and eighty nicker.

  Now what happened next may be beyond my power to explain. It had happened before, and I suppose it will happen again. Sitting at my table on the terrace, I leaned back against the wooden wall that rose to form the front of the table above and behind me. I shut my eyes. A throbbing started in the middle of my chest. I opened my eyes and studied the card. The way my eyes bored into it you would have thought there was a computer clicking inside my head to give me the winner. But all I could hear inside my head was a buzz, a scrape on my nerves that keyed me up, wound me up to do the mad thing like a clockwork train. My eyes went up and down the names, but they only saw one name, the Number Five dog. I could give no reason. Simply, this was my dog.

  I cannot tell what is in me at such times. There is something like death. Go on, go on, squeeze the trigger. Cold water pours into my lungs when I breathe. The muscles in my arms cramp. I am full of knots that are going to get tighter and tighter unless I put the money on. But there is also the exulting certainty that this is victory, this is the last skyline and Big Rock Candy Mountain is in front of me. Go on, Harryboy. Take a thousand pounds, two thousand pounds home with you. They’ll be talking about you at the barber’s shop tomorrow. All the schnorrers will be round you and you will hand out loans like an emperor. Harryboy Boas. Harryboy Boas, he walked away from Harringay with fifteen hundred nicker in his pocket.

  But I know, I know what is going to happen. I pay in my money, all of it. There is no magic unless I pay in all of it. Keep back one pound and—but I can’t. Who is making my fingers move? Not me. I lean back. I breathe deliberately. I become calm. The preparations, the race, the loudspeakers and the hubbub mean nothing to me. I know what is going to happen.

  There he is, my dog, in orange. Loping down the track when the first, second and third have all shot home. I am calm, so calm, empty, drained empty. There is no regret in me, nothing, nothing. Only peace. I feel far away from it all. Now I can lay me down to sleep.

  What the hell do they know?—the punters who come to the tracks or pop into the betting shops for a giggle? Or the professionals who keep it all on a debit and credit basis? None of them knows what a gambler is. The gambler is the one who goes on with no peace, no release, till he has annihilated himself. I am a gambler.

  I was going down the steps when Gus came hurrying across, dripping happiness like gravy.

  ‘Well, Harryboy? How you do?’

  ‘Lend me a dollar for a taxi.’

  After a few seconds, he says, ‘I’ve finished with you.’

  He is not a bad fellow. As you know, the next night he made me welcome for supper.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Deaners moved into the house a week later. I didn’t catch any glimpse of them before then. I am at the dog track most nights, and it fell out that our comings and goings didn’t coincide, though I heard from the old man that they were giving the place a terrific spring-clean.

  The day they moved in was a memorable one for me. Not because of them, for I couldn’t know what they were to bring into my life, but because of a dog.

  The night before, I had been to the track and brought off a hot forecast. This forecast was a funny business. I went to the tracks with two dogs tipped for the third race. When it came to the race, I saw a dog’s name on the card. Heliotrope. I liked it. It wasn’t one of the dogs they’d tipped, and the odds were diabolical. But I stood there, and I said the name to myself again and again, ‘Heliotrope, Heliotrope.’ It upset me. God knows what was buried in me, from childhood, for this name to upset me. I fancied the name. So I did it in the forecast. Now this is mad. It is stone bonkers meshuggah. This is the way women bet. So would you believe me, it came off? I walked away from the track with a hundred and ten quid in my pocket. I knew what might happen if I stayed for the last three races. None of that nonsense. I walked away from the track with a hundred and ten quid in my pocket and a light heart.

  The next morning I was in the West End, in a winner’s mood, panting to play the millionaire and buy myself something snazzy. Well, this time it wasn’t a suit or a half-a-dozen shirts. It was a set of the works of Emile Zola translated into English. I saw the books in Charing Cross Road—once I get to that row of bookshops you can say goodbye to me for half a day—and the next thing I knew I owned this stack of two dozen fat books and I was shouting for a taxi to get them home. This Zola is a terrific writer. He can be tougher than Mickey Spillane, and when he gets on to sex he’s red hot. But I am giving you the wrong idea about him. He is a serious writer. Profound. Terrific.

  I knew what my programme was going to be for the next few weeks. I can go off on a jag with books like some people do with liquor. Weeks at a time. When I get on to a good writer I have to go right through him. So now, for the next couple of months, I looked forward to doing nothing at all. Nothing, except laying on my bed (just like Gus said) and reading through this stack of books. I would stay with them as long as my money lasted.

  My room was at the top of the house, quiet. The street is half a slum, but in front of the house and in the garden behind it, are trees that no one has tended for years. This was in the winter. All I could see from my room was sky, and bare tree-tops. For weeks I could lie on my bed and read. A hundred and ten quid would see me through. What did I want except rent and meal money? I was always a great reader. When I was a boy I even dreamed of writing books.

  So I settled down—(You lovely dog, Heliotrope. What buried memory in me did you touch? What buried memory in the owner’s mind made him give you the name? Here was I, free for weeks, I could dream, I could weep, I could follow the long, long trail of my thoughts, because a dog was named Heliotrope. This is how our fortunes, life or death, are decided)—I settled down on my bed and read all the morning. All of a sudden I heard the factory whistle from the next street. Half-past twelve. Pavlov’s dog felt hungry. I went downstairs. When I opened the front door, a big furniture van blotted out the view. As far as I could see it was deserted. Naturally. The British working-man had heard the lunch whistle and bolted. Half a mile to the caff in five seconds flat. Oh, I could make some money racing them against greyhounds.

  There are two places I go to for meals. The Italian cafe near the corner, and the kosher restaurant down the road. Today I felt good. Reading is wonderful, but reading on a full belly is the peak of human happiness. I had roast breast of veal, a strudel and a glass of lemon tea, and walked around for a half-hour to clear my head before the afternoon session.