Gainful Employment
Nick’s mother says, ‘I hope you have been thinking about getting a job.’
‘Yes, of course, I’ve been working at it –’
‘I can’t have you under my feet all day. You are no longer a schoolboy. You must help out. You must have a job.’
‘Yes, of course, I was thinking of –’
‘I have arranged for you to see Gareth and Judy. At their flat, next Tuesday, six-thirty. They may be able to help get you a job.’
‘Yes. I see. Next Tuesday. Fine.’
A job . . . !
No, wait, please, he protests, things are going too fast!
You wanted to be free, didn’t you? You wanted to be on your own, liberated from school, independent.
But a job! You’re too young for a job. What can you do? Nothing. Who wants you? Nobody.
Why can’t the world just leave a man alone?
Nevertheless, on Tuesday Nick takes the tube to another London suburb (his mother had to give him the fare) and rings the bell of Gareth and Judy’s flat. He takes the modern lift with modern strip lighting and modern buttons to press. It is all very unlike home.
Standing outside the door of No. 11, he hears the clitter-clatter of two typewriters. As usual, Judy and Gareth are hard at work. The sound both excites and frightens Nick. It is exciting because these are real grown-ups, real writers working for money. It is frightening because he wants to be like them. But will he ever be?
He rings the bell. Judy opens the door. ‘Oh, Nick, of course, is it six-thirty already? Come in, we’re both in a mess, I’ve got to finish a thing for tomorrow and Gareth’s got a broadcast, but lovely to see you, come in!’
She is short, plump and not pretty but something better than pretty. She moves quickly, like a bird. Gareth, also short and plump, takes his time about everything, deliberately and amusingly. They set each other off to perfection. Judy works on a portable Corona, Gareth on a portable Underwood. Both machines are surrounded by typing, his neatly stacked and hers in a mess all over the big table. Professionals.
‘Your ma, how is she? Says you’ve got to get a job, she’s quite right of course, be a love and put the kettle on, you just flick the switch, oh bum, we’re out of tea, can you make coffee? Now, about your job –’
Gareth stops prodding at the keys, looks at Nick and says, ‘A woman called Jean Lang. A theatrical agent. She might give you a job If she does, take it, my boy. Go down on your benders and take it.’
Nick tries to make coffee in their modern electric percolator. He gets it wrong and Judy does it at lightning speed, splash, tinkle, jingle, clatter.
Gareth has prepared a letter of introduction for Nick to hand to Jean Lang. It is very short and completely convincing, a masterpiece. Lucky Jean Lang, you’d think, getting such a brilliant young man to work for her!
Nick wants to stay and enjoy the energy fizzing around Gareth and Judy. But he knows he must leave because he is an intruder, six feet of gangling young wet blanket. He goes.
He has one and eight pence in his pockets. He does not want to go home, so he takes a bus ride that ends up in Soho.
Wardour Street, Frith Street, bookshops, music shops, restaurants, yellow electric lights, grimy old buildings. It feels like home yet he knows himself to be a stranger. But there is the doorway leading down to the club where he met the drummer. And there’s music. Might as well try . . .
Members Only
Once again, Nick goes down the narrow stairway and turns the sharp corner at the bottom where the bass drum nearly got stuck. This time, however, something has changed: he is cut off from the bump-bump-bump and blare of the music by a blank, grey, solid door with a square porthole at eye-level. He doesn’t know what to do. He ponders.
At last he knocks on the door. No reply. He knocks again. A slide behind the porthole whips aside and an amazing eye fills the space. The eye is black surrounded by veined yellow, surrounded in turn with glistening black flesh. It is a really nasty eye.
‘What you want?’ says the eye. It keeps blinking. Why? Because of the stale smoke leaking out around it. Cigarette smoke from inside the club.
‘Who are you?’ says the eye. Nick mumbles his name.
‘No one that name here,’ says the eye. The porthole slams shut.
A miracle happens: footsteps coming down the stairs – voices – and there he is! The drummer! Chance in a million.
‘Wouldn’t let you in, eh!’ he says. ‘Guitar, wasn’t it? Nice little chords.’ He gives the door a kick. The eye reappears.
‘Come on, then,’ the drummer says, ‘open up them pearly gates.’
‘Who that with you?’
‘Friend of mine. Guitarist. He’s all right.’
‘No member, only members.’
‘Bugger that. I’ll sign him in. Open up.’
And they’re in.
It is a long, low basement, filled with a surging ocean of swaying figures, dimly seen. Beyond them is the brighter focal point: the band. A black face behind a golden trumpet; a slithering silvery trombone powered by a coffee-coloured head and hands; a mop of hair, all that’s visible of a bass player: a hunched, tousled boy pianist hardly older than Nick; a swarthy, villainous guitarist with a hooked nose; and a squat, thickset drummer, black, with puffy, drugged, half-closed eyes.
The din is amazing and delightful.
‘Dreamer!’ Nick’s friend the drummer shouts in Nick’s ear.
‘What?’
‘That drummer. We call him the Dreamer. Always looks dozy.’
‘He’s great!’ The drums go a-chizz, chizz, a-rickety-tick, a-boom-chic-a-BOOM.
‘He’s bloody useless. Accelerates. Can’t you hear? Always accelerating. Can’t hold a tempo.’
‘Those eyes . . . he looks as if he’s on drugs.’ Nick knows nothing about drugs, but still . . .
‘That’s not drugs, that’s cos he’s bloody dim. Useless. Keeps accelerating.’
‘Will you be playing?’
‘About nine, maybe ten. Have a beer.’
The bar is small but as big as the bandstand. ‘Who he?’ says the woman behind the bar. She is a large, beige-skinned lady with a huge cleavage and big, dark suspicious eyes.
‘Friend of mine, wossisname,’ says the drummer. ‘Great guitarist.’ Aside, he says, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Nick.’
‘I’m Freddie, right? Freddie.’
To the woman, he says, ‘Nick, meet Mrs Jack. Mrs Jack, meet Nick.’
‘You a member?’ says Mrs Jack, glaring at Nick. ‘You not a member, you get out of here.’ She glares sideways, spits into a small glass, polishes it on her skirt and pours gin into it. She lifts the glass to her great red mouth, brings it down empty. ‘You musicians,’ she says. ‘All lying pigs. Little pig men!’ And suddenly she blazes into peals of laughter that jig her earrings and bounce her creamy bosom. She pours two glasses of beer and turns away to answer the telephone. ‘No, no,’ she shouts above the noise of the band. ‘Not unless he’s a member. Ten shillings.’
‘Mrs Jack,’ Freddie says, shaking his head. ‘She’s all right, you know? Bloody barmy but all right. Killed Jack, her old man, knifed him, straight up. Cheers.’
Once the place must have seated people. There is still a line of linked, tattered cinema seats against one wall. Nick sits down, glad to be out of sight but able to see.
Couples dance. Black and coffee-coloured men; too-white white girls in shiny dresses, black stockings, greasy scarlet lipstick, bleachy hair. They dance badly. The men move as easily as cats; when they are not dancing, two might face each other and talk, both at once, not listening, just smiling and talking, with the palms of their hands lazily facing forward. Everything they do looks easy, meaning- less but amiable.
There’s a half-size billiard table. The cover has a tear in it. Three men play, talking all the time, not minding when someone’s backside gets in the cue’s way. One man wears a
fawn curly-brimmed Derby hat and smokes a cigar in a holder. He is like a character actor in a Hollywood movie. He even has two gold teeth. ‘That’s Chappie da Silva,’ the drummer says. ‘Plays trumpet. Owns the Nic Nac Club.’
‘Is he good on trumpet?’ Nick asks.
‘Bloody useless. Second-hand Louis Armstrong.’
‘And the guitarist?’
‘Oh, him. He’d be all right if you could hear him. Back in the States,’ he says, his voice turning American, ‘they got amps, you know? Amplifiers. Real snazzy, man, know what I mean?’
At about nine-thirty, Freddie is on drums. He is fast, neat and a showman. He takes a solo – becomes, for thirty-two bars, the star. He spins a stick up and catches it. He winks at the girls. He throws his head back, closes his eyes, does the showbiz. He’s good. The other musicians take no notice; the trumpeter shakes spit out of his trumpet, the guitarist lights a cigarette, the bass player chats to the trombonist.
Nick realizes that it must take a lot to become accepted by jazz musicians as a jazz musician.
*
An hour later, a fight starts. Two slim, dark-suited young Jamaicans scream falsetto obscenities. They face each other crouching low, eye-whites showing, beautiful teeth whiter than white, long-fingered left hands clawing in front of them.
Then something glints and a girl screams ‘A-owww!’ and blood squirts on to the dingy paintwork of the wall and Mrs Jack sails in with a parrot screech and a flailing dishcloth.
What was it that glinted? Good God! An open razor, a cut-throat! Mrs Jack has taken it away from the unwounded man. ‘Pig!’ she shouts at him. ‘You a member, heh? OK, not no more a member, you a pig and get out!’
The band goes into Moten Swing, C major. The cut man has the bloodied dishcloth knotted round his forearm. Shaking like a leaf, eyes jittering, mouth twitching, he dances with his girl.
Gods and Goddesses
Nick is on his way to his new job. He got it straight away. Jean Lang turned out to be an instantly delightful, larger than-life person with a loud clear voice, a plump, moon-like Face with mischievous corners to the mouth and a straight to-the-point way of dealing with anything at all.
‘You can type?’ she says. ‘Really? Show me.’ He shows her, on a big, upright black Underwood. ‘That’ll do. You can type. Boys can’t, they’re not taught, I can’t think why.’
The phone rings. ‘Let’s see you answer it,’ she says. Her amused brown eyes regard him, judging his performance.
‘Hello? Yes . . . yes . . . hang on. I’ll see if she is available.’ He puts his hand over the Receiver and says, ‘Someone called Polly Marklin. Are you here?’
‘No, definitely not. But be nice.’
‘I’m so sorry . . . You’ll ring again? Yes, please do, thank you.’
He puts down the phone.
‘Brilliant!’ she says. ‘You did that just right. You and me, we’ll get on like a house on fire. Never, never admit that I’m in – that’s rule number one. Always, always make a note of who called; make a list and give it to me every half hour. I’ll give you a list of my specials, the people you must put straight through. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now your hair. It looks ridiculous. Here’s ten shillings. I’ll phone – no, you phone – Michael’s in Charing Cross Road and get it cut. Ask for Mr Paul. Seven shillings plus one shilling tip, that makes eight. Keep the change to buy lunch, then come back and get started. Lovely. Oh, money: you’ll get two pounds a week, it’s no good arguing, they’re the world’s meanest here. And don’t try to fiddle the petty cash, Miss Hardcastle knows all the dodges. Oh, the phone, blast . . .’
Nick loves her: her confidence, her directness, her energy – and her power: for she is London’s top play agent, a force in the major literary/theatrical agency. He sees the power that first afternoon, when the most beautiful woman in the world enters like a scented whirlwind. ‘Where’s Jean, quick, darling – I’m frantic, furious – where is she?’
He tries to hold her back. It should be easy. The lady is tiny – five-foot-three? Size two lizard-skin shoes? She wears a little black hat with velvet dots spotting a black half-veil. But her eyes are enormous – brilliant green, apparently lit up from inside, rimmed with mascara outside. She is a household name, a great talent, a notable beauty, a star, a goddess.
‘I’m sorry, but –’ says Nick.
‘Oh, bugger, bugger, bugger!’ cries the goddess, flailing at Nick with little gloved hands. She picks up a telephone directory and throws it. It misses the frosted-glass panels separating him from his boss and merely knocks down Jean Lang’s latest pot plant. ‘You stupid urchin!’ screeches the goddess. ‘I WANT JEAN!’
Jean’s half-glass door is flung open and Jean is there, plump chin lifted. ‘Any more of that,’ she tells the goddess, ‘and you won’t get a free cup of tea.’
‘Oh, Jean . . . ! Jean, darling. . . ! Everyone’s being so awful, and Larry won’t lift a finger . . .’ The goddess is crying, quite beautifully, into a lacy handkerchief, without disturbing her mascara.
‘First, darling,’ Jean commands, ‘we will mind our manners and say hello nicely to my Mr Nicholas here. One day he may let you call him Nick.’
‘Oh, darling Jean, darling Nick . . . oh, isn’t he lovely, I know we’re going to be such friends, how do you do!’ He holds for half a second a tapered, weightless hand.
Then – ‘Oh, Jean, everyone’s being such a bitch! What am I to do?’
‘Nick, ring for tea. Come on, love, tell Mother all about it.’
The door closes for half an hour. The phone rings incessantly. A drunken Irish playwright, world-famous, comes in to borrow half a crown. An actor, world-famous, makes an agonized entrance in a camel-hair coat – ‘Oh God, I’ve got to see Jean.’ A dimpling, elderly comedienne-turned- successful-playwright flirts with Nick to get him to hold her nasty little dog.
Nick loves all of it.
Extract from Pig Ignorant
Nicholas Fisk © 1992
Click here to browse the podcast archive 
Leave a comment