Absolute Beginners (8 page)

The Dean came over and sat down with me. I should explain I haven’t seen the Dean for several weeks, although he’s my favourite and most successful model. The Dean’s speciality’s an unusual one, which is posing always fully dressed, and yet, somehow, managing to look pornographic. Don’t ask me how! In the studio, exactly when he shouted out, ‘Now!’ I throw the switch, though he looks quite ordinary to me, and then, behold!
when he’s developed, there he is – indecent. Snaps of the Dean sell like hot ice-cream among vintage women with too many bosoms and time on their hands, and even my Ma, when she saw some photos of him was impressed – he looks so damn available, the Dean does. She actually asked to meet him, but Dean Swift is not interested in this, the chief reason being that he’s a junkie.

If you have a friend who’s a junkie, like I have the Dean, you soon discover there’s no point whatever discussing his addiction. It’s as senseless as discussing love, or religion, or things you only feel if you feel them, because the Dean, and I suppose all his fellow junkies, is convinced that this is ‘a mystic way of life’ (the Dean’s own words), and you and I, who don’t jab hot needles in our arms, are just going through life missing absolutely everything worthwhile in it. The Dean always says, life’s just kicks. Well, I agree with him, so it is, but personally, it seems to me the big kick you should try to get by how you live it sober. But tell that to the Dean!

Why I’d not recently seen him, is that he’d until then been away inside. This has fairly often happened to the Dean, owing to his breaking into chemists’ shops, and as he suffers a lot when he’s cut off from the world and all it gives in there, he doesn’t like you to refer to it when he emerges. At the same time, he
does
like you to say you’re glad to see him once again, so it’s all a trifle dicey.

‘Hail, squire,’ I said. ‘Long time no see. How is you are we? Won’t you say tell?’

The Dean smiled in his world-weary way. ‘Doesn’t this place stink?’ he said to me.

‘Well certainly, Dean Swift, it does, but do you mean its air, or just its atmosphere?’

‘The both. The only civilised thing about it,’ the Dean continued, ‘is that they let you
sit
here, when you’re skint.’

The Dean gazed round at the teenage products like a concentration camp exterminator. I should explain the Dean, though only just himself an ex-teenager, has sad valleys down his cheeks, and wears a pair of steel-rimmed glasses (which he takes off for our posing sessions), so that his Dean-look is habitually sour and solemn. (The Swift part of the thing comes from his rapid disappearance at the approach of any cowboys. You’re talking to him and then, tick-tock! he’s vanished.) I could see that now the Dean, as usual when skinned and vicious, was going to engage in his favourite theme, i.e. the horror of teenagers. ‘Look at the beardless microbes!’ he exclaimed, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Look at the pram products at their plotting and their planning!’

And, as a matter of fact, you could see what he meant, because to see the kids hunched over the tables it
did
look as if some conspiracy was afoot to slay the elder brethren and majorities. And when I’d paid, and we went out in the roads, even here in this Soho, the headquarters of the adult mafia, you could everywhere see the signs of the un-silent teenage revolution. The disc shops with those lovely sleeves set in their windows, the most original thing to come out in our lifetime, and the kids inside them purchasing guitars, or spending fortunes on the songs of the Top Twenty. The shirt-stores and
bra-stores with ciné-star photos in the window, selling all the exclusive teenage drag I’ve been describing. The hairstyle saloons where they inflict the blow-wave torture on the kids for hours on end. The cosmetic shops – to make girls of seventeen, fifteen, even thirteen, look like pale rinsed-out sophisticates. Scooters and
bubble-cars
driven madly down the roads by kids who, a few years ago, were pushing toy ones on the pavement. And everywhere you go the narrow coffee bars and darkened cellars with the kids packed tight, just whispering, like bees inside the hive waiting for a glorious queen bee to appear.

‘See what I mean,’ the Dean said.

And the chicks, round the alleys, on that summer afternoon! Heavens, each year the teenage dream-girl has grown younger, and now, there they were, like children that’ve dressed up in their fashionable aunties’ sharpest clothes – and suddenly you realise that it’s not a game, and that these chicks mean business, and that it’s not so much you, one of the boys, they aim their persons at, as their sheer, sweet, energetic legs walk down the pavement three by three, but no, at quite adult numbers, quite mature things, at whose eyes they shoot confident, proud looks there’s no mistaking.

‘Little madams,’ said the Dean.

‘There you go!’ I answered.

Here Dean Swift stopped us in his tracks.

‘I tell you,’ he said, pulling his US-striped and
rear-buckled
cap down over his eyes, ‘I tell you something. These teenagers are ceasing to be rational, thinking,
human beings, and turning into mindless butterflies. And they’re turning into butterflies all of the same size and colour, that have to flutter round exactly the same flowers, on exactly the same gardens. Yes!’ he exclaimed at a group of kiddos coming clicking, cracking, prattling by. ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of butterflies!’

But the kidettes took no notice of the Dean whatever, because just at that moment … there! in his hand-styled car with his initials in its number, there sped by the newest of the teenage singing raves, with beside him his brother, and his composer, and his chicklet, and his Personal Manager, so that all that was missing was his Mum. And the kids waved, and the young Pied Piper waved his free hand back, and everyone for a few seconds was latched on to the glory.

‘Singer!’ cried the Dean out after him. ‘Har, Har!’

He was standing out there in the road, gesticulating at the departing vehicle. Abruptly, though, he sheered off at an angle, and I had to catch him up across the way. He looked back over his neck, gripped my arm, and hurried on. ‘Cowboys,’ he explained.

I looked back too. ‘They didn’t seem to me like cowboys,’ I told the Dean.

But to tell him this, was like telling some expert in Hatton Garden that you don’t think that stone there is a diamond.

‘I tell you this,’ the Dean said fiercely. ‘I can smell a copper in the dark, a hundred feet away, blindfolded. And anyway,’ he continued pityingly, ‘didn’t you see
those two were dressed in casual clothes, but with their
shoes mended
?’

That clinched the matter for the Dean.

‘You don’t like coppers, do you,’ I said to him.

The Dean paused on his tracks. ‘The only good thing about the bastards,’ he said gently, ‘is that they’ve all got themselves together into the same cowboy force. Just imagine what the world would be if monsters like them were out among the rest of us, without a label!’

The poor old Dean! He really hates the law although, unlike most that do, he doesn’t fear it, really doesn’t, though he’s been given the matchbox treatment on more than one night occasion. Of course, all the jobs he’s ever done have brought him into conflict with the cowboys – e.g. faith-healer, dance-hall instructor, club escort, property consultant and old-lady sitter.

We’d now reached a street down near ‘the Front’, as the girls on the game call the thoroughfare, and here the Dean whispered, ‘I must have a fix very shortly, and I need a new whosit for my whatsit.’ So we went into a chemist’s shop nearby.

Behind the counter was a female case who didn’t like the appearance of the Dean, and went into that routine that shopkeepers have perfected in the kingdom, that is, to get on the busy thing and bustle about with very necessary tasks, and when you cough or something, look up as if you’d broken into their private bedroom. And when they speak, they use a new kind of ‘politeness’ that’s very common in our city, i.e. to say kind and courteous words, with a bitchy edge of nastiness, so they disarm
you as they beat you down. To open the thing, of course, she asked us, ‘Can I help you?’

Ah! but in the Dean she’d met her equal, because he has perfected, and almost patented, a style of being terribly polite in a way that doesn’t mean a thing, and is in fact a mockery of the person he’s polite to, though not easy for them to pin down, because the Dean acts so serious and earnest they couldn’t quite make up their minds if it was sarcasm.

‘Yes, Mad-ahm!’ he answered, ‘you certainly
can
help me, if you please, and if I’m not taking up too much of your time.’

And then they began their duel of politeness, their eyes blazing hatred at each other, and there you are, I thought, that’s what happens when people grow to think that politeness, which is so lovely, is a form of weakness. And when the Dean had succeeded in luring the old slut to get out all sorts of products he didn’t really need at all, he suddenly said, ‘Thank you, Mad-ahm, so much,’ and dipped his cap at her and went out in the sun saying, ‘One of the fellow sufferers at the Dubious will lend me what I need.’

The Dubious, I should explain, is of all the drinking clubs that fester in Soho, the one that’s in fashion just at present with the sharper characters, and there, sure enough, when I came in with the Dean, I saw, among others, Mr Call-me-Cobber, and his friend the ex-
Deb-of
-Last-Year: he being a telly personality from the outer colonies, and she one who slipped effortlessly off the pages of the weekly social glossies on to those of the
monthly fashion ones. As a matter of fact, the ex-Deb’s rather nice in a hunt ball way, but the same cannot be said of Call-me-Cobber, who really flogs that dinkum Aussie thing too hard, though on the telly screen it looks terrific, so sincere.

While the Dean went rambling off into dark corners, I snapped this drunken loving couple, propping my Rolleiflex upon the bar.

‘Oh, hullo, reptile,’ said the ex-Deb, ‘perhaps you can help my paramour with his new series.’

‘It’s called,’ the Cobber said, ‘
Lorn Lovers
, and we’re looking for persons deeply in love who fate has sundered.’

‘You’re too young for tears, I suppose,’ the ex-Deb said to me, ‘but maybe among your somewhat older companions …?’

I nominated the Hoplite as Lorn Lover of the year.

‘And who’s he in love with?’ Call-me-Cobber asked. ‘We want to confront the frantic pair in front of the cameras, without either knowing beforehand what’s going to hit them.’

‘He’s in love with an American,’ I said.

‘A good angle, though we’ll have to pay the fee in dollars … Yes, confront the pair of them, and get them in a clinch.’

‘It’ll be sensational,’ I said.

‘
His
trouble,’ said the ex-Deb, pointing a princess-size cigarette-holder at her lover, ‘is his success. Ever since that fabulous series on the Angries, when the thing first broke, they expect the highest from him.’

‘And they’ll get it!’ Call-me-Cobber cried. ‘It’s my aim, my mission, and my achievement to bring quality culture material to the pop culture masses.’

‘He’s the culture courtier of all time,’ his lady said, as they both gulped the firewater down, then tried to kiss each other.

Call-me-Cobber looked around the basement room, where parties crouched on plastic covered seats with dim rose lights shining reflected up at them from the parquet floor. ‘Today,’ he announced, ‘each woman, man and child in the United Kingdom can be made into a personality, a star. Whoever you are – and I repeat, whoever – we can put you in front of cameras and make you live for millions.’

But no one seemed interested in this idea down there in the Dubious, so Call-me-Cobber slipped off his stool and went searching for the toilet. And the ex-Deb turned all her attention to myself, and started suddenly to get ‘maternal’. Because a woman, if she’s high and a bit frustrated, and you’re young, is very apt, I’ve found, to want to show she ‘understands’ – though what, you never quite discover, and it’s most embarrassing.

‘Tell me about your camera,’ the ex-Deb said, leaning across and fondling the thing and breathing spirits on me though, I must say, looking smashing.

‘What you want to know about it?’ I enquired.

‘How did you learn to use it?’ she said mysteriously.

‘By trial and error.’

‘Ah!’

I didn’t get that ‘Ah!’

‘When you were young?’ she said. ‘A boy?’

‘That’s it.’

She gazed at me as if I was straight out of Dr Barnardo’s. ‘You’ve had a hard life, I can see,’ she said ‘sympathetically’.

‘No, I wouldn’t say so’ – and I wouldn’t, really.

‘Ah, but I can see you have!’ she nattered on.

I gave up. ‘Well – you win,’ I told her.

‘Your mother must have been a bitch,’ she said.

Now, though I quite agreed with this, it made me furious! Who the hell did she think she was, this fashion model – Mrs Freud?

‘I’ll tell you something,’ I said, ‘about my mother. She may have her defects – who hasn’t? – but she’s got a lot of courage, and she’s kept her looks, which are terrific.’

‘You’re loyal, kid,’ said the ex-Deb, her swish-skirt nearly sliding her off the stool in her emotion.

‘You bet,’ I said, heaving her on to it again.

She held my arm, and said, ‘Tell me a secret about you teenagers. Do you have a very active sex existence?’

They can’t keep off it. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘we don’t.’

And, as a matter of fact, what I said was true, because although you often seen teenagers boxed up together in a free-and-easy, intimate sort of way, it doesn’t very often reach the point of no return. But in this kingdom we reside in, the firm belief of the venerables seems to be that, if you see kids out and about enjoying themselves, then fleshy vices must be at the bottom of it all, somewhere, not just as it often is – frisking and frolicking, and having a carefree ball.

So as this wasn’t the ex-Deb’s business, anyway, I changed the subject round and said to her, ‘Where will you take your holiday this year, Miss Sheba?’

‘Who, me? Oh, I dunno … I always get taken some place or other where there’s sand, and quarrels, and a quick flight home … And you, child? I hear all you brats are hitch-hiking across the Continent these days.’