Untold Stories (73 page)

In retrospect I see, as I run and re-run the scene in my head, that these two had come and stood too close, but there is no obvious threat or rancour, only a kind of feverishness to them which, retrospectively again (the debate never stopping), I put down to drink or drugs, or glue possibly (though too old for glue, surely?), like two boys seen once by the lake in
Regent's Park, pulling at their bags, then shouting hoarsely as if assailed, though no one was going near.

Suddenly the talking stops. The one blocking my way is smallish, with fair, curly hair, but his face now is a blank. Has he asked a question? ‘We're English,' I say in Italian. ‘We don't understand,' the nationality almost an excuse in itself, and I take a step back, meaning to go round and go on. Turning, I feel a blow across the side of my neck (I run my hand over it as I write, trying to decide if it is the neck I mean, or the throat), but not painful, a punch that has missed perhaps. Even so, it is surprise I register as much as alarm. But Rupert has become anxious at the same moment because the other youth is holding a cigarette far too close to his face. Rupert shouts and at the same moment we start to run back the way we have come.

Even at this point I feel surprise rather than alarm, but the scene plays and replays itself in my head, ragged, inexplicable and without sequence, and so unlike a film, though one searches every frame for a clue as to why it happened and how it might have been avoided.

There is no attempt to rob us, which would have been quite easy to do. Except now I wonder whether that was what they were saying when I said I didn't understand. Still, ‘Hand over your wallet' isn't hard to convey, and I would have understood that. Or were they a gang and this bit of random promenade some special territory? Had there been a football match? Were we being punished for the skills of Gary Lineker?

As we run, I feel a heavy blow on the top of my head, the blow struck with a short length of steel scaffolding which Rupert sees the fair-haired youth pick up from the ground. Fortunately, the scaffolding doesn't come instantly to hand, and he has to spend a vital second or so disengaging it, which, since I am already on the move, probably saves me from a more direct blow on my skull. Had it landed squarely, I must certainly have been stunned and fallen, and so probably received more, the usual procedure nowadays when someone falls to kick them in the head. As it is, I stagger with the blow but run on, and we are now so close to safety and the lights of the café that the two give up the chase.

Looked back on, the few seconds of the assault seem intensely private and solitary. I do not see the blow, feel no pain, just sheer bewilderment as to why this is being done to me. It is as if I am a little boy again, which is the last time I was in a fight, an element of recollection there, or reacquaintance: ah yes, now I remember! But I am not stunned in the least and retain enough sense of drama, as Rupert helps me towards the café, to note my blood falling in the dust around my feet, and to look forward to the looks of horror on the faces of the café clientele that must shortly greet the arrival in their midst of this bloodstained apparition as the pizza turns to ashes in their mouths.

Actually they seem rather less horrified than I'd expected, some of them just looking away in a very English fashion, so I have time to wonder if maybe this isn't such an outlandish occurrence after all, and whether this establishment regularly welcomes blood-drenched casualties, staggering in from the promenade.

The proprietor of the café sits me down, while the cashier tries to staunch the blood, patting my head with paper napkins. There is so much blood that it seems to me (wrongly) that the wound must therefore be quite deep though I still feel nothing, and am not even dizzy. I am conscious of the blood, though, and apologetic about it; it splashes onto the café table and the café floor, the mosaic now littered with gory serviettes. I am conscious of it because this is 1992 and these days blood is no longer just blood, but can have dangerous overtones, hazardous propensities. So, sitting there, steadily, voluminously bleeding, though I am a victim I can see I also constitute a threat.

I wait in the café for a while, looking, I see in the counter mirror, quite dreadful. My head is now a little tender but I'm not otherwise in pain.

A taxi arrives, the driver concerned and helpful and not at all fussed about the blood on his upholstery; he drives us to the Posto di Primo Intervento, the Pronto Soccorso, which is not a hospital but some sort of emergency clinic, staffed by a doctor and two nurses.

The nurse lies me down on the table and starts to cut away some of my hair, as the doctor enquires about the circumstances of the injury. He has
no English, Rupert has no Italian, so, despite being prone on the table, and being shaved and swabbed by the nurse, I struggle to answer with what little Italian I have. The doctor meanwhile is filling in a form, and it is now that I say ruefully that tomorrow will be my birthday. There is no smile, no interest even, and he glumly makes preparations to stitch my head.

I am expecting some kind of anaesthetic but none is forthcoming. Perhaps one cannot anaesthetise the surface of the skull, or perhaps, I think, as he takes a grip of my head, the surface of the skull feels no pain. I am soon disabused of this and, as he puts in his first stitch and draws the flesh together, my feet drum helplessly on the table with the pain of it, so that the nurse lies across my legs as he prepares the second stitch.

I watch him, trying to think who he reminds me of, and as he puts in the second stitch, and my feet start to bang, I realise that he is the young sheikh in John Huston's
Beat the Devil
. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh's soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita' (the script was by Truman Capote).

If this equally humourless young doctor cherishes such showbiz longings I am not to know, as throughout this grisly embroidery he utters no word.

‘Nearly done' or ‘just one stitch more!' would have helped, even in Italian. But nothing is said: there is just this cold-blooded, cold bloodied, morose medic, plying his impassive needle, remorselessly hemming my head.

Between the twelve stitches it eventually takes, I have time to wonder about his life.

I wonder if he has a young wife, a baby perhaps, and if he was already in bed when the telephone rang, though his impassive demeanour and neat collar and tie betray no sign of him having been summarily rooted out. It will be one of those cheerless Continental apartments where
Formica-topped tables stand on rugless tiled floors, the sofa is protected by sheets of plastic and, in the unfrequented sitting room, the green metal blinds are never raised.

Had his ambitions once aimed higher than a casualty clinic in a rundown seaside town? Is he already sinking into a routine of frustration and inanition, like a doctor out of Chekhov, a drink in the same dull bar every night, a walk with the pram on Sundays and a coarsening wife to whom he finds less and less to say? Was the nightly quota of split heads and unexciting contusions diminishing what he had once thought of as a noble or at least profitable vocation? Does he hanker after a larger arena in which to vent his unwinking disdain?

A serious boy, thought promising at school, does he regret not hanging about with his racier classmates, now dashing about on their Lambrettas, and playing pool in the café? As he threads his needle for what I pray will be the final stitch, it occurs to me that he has missed his time, this expressionless, never altogether young man. Fifty years ago in a similar room and under the same unshaded lights, he could have been found lifting the eyelid of some near-insensible partisan; the heart checked, he gives a professional nod and watches while the victim's head is thrust back into the bucket.

He puts in the last stitch, my legs thrash for the last time as he neatly knots his thread; the nurse gets off my legs and the torture appears to be over.

Enter at this point a plump, middle-aged carabiniere, who is unshocked by the assault to the point of indifference, but with a touch of satisfaction that one more ingenuous member of the public now realises what the real world is like and the shit-heap it is that the police are toiling to clean up.

‘Who were these people? What did you do to them?'

‘Nothing,' I say.

‘Well, they can't have been Italians. Were they black?' And to make sure I do not mistake his meaning, he draws a face on a pad and scribbles over it.

‘No.'

‘Were they Moroccans?'

‘I don't know.'

The nurse cleans me up while medicine and the law confer.

‘I would not go to a country where I did not speak the language,' says the doctor, confirming that Wilfred Thesiger he isn't.

Now Rupert and the nurse help me up from the table and suddenly, seeing us side by side, a solution to the crime presents itself to the policeman, a solution (the police being the same the world over) which hardly makes it a crime at all.

‘This one,' he says, indicating me, ‘is much older than the other one.'

The opinion of the law is given medical endorsement when Doctor Death nods thoughtfully. They consult our passports and I am revealed as old enough to be Rupert's father; perhaps they had hitherto thought I was his father – but not any more.

Now there is no longer any mystery about this crime in either of their minds: strolling down to the seafront at eleven at night, this oddly matched couple have been up to no good; what this sorry-looking, middle-aged Englishman is not saying is that on that seedy promenade some advance had been made, a gesture even, and the honour of the Italian male impugned. The wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted, an entirely proper response to an insult to Italian manhood for which a blow on the skull is perfectly appropriate. We had been cruising; it was our own fault.

That there was no truth in this assumption I hesitate to say again, as laying stress on one's innocence seems to presuppose the opposite. This happened is the most that one can say; to get into why it happened, why it should not have happened, or how one did nothing to make it happen, implies that there is an alternative story that could be sketched out, the denial in itself conferring some authenticity on the alternative. I see now how women who have been attacked find themselves incriminated when they are asked to explain it, and how, in classic fashion, by simply recounting the circumstances of an assault, the victim becomes the culprit. In Kafka (about whom I had written) it is almost a commonplace, the lesson (and this is in Kafka too) now written on my own flesh.

Just by telling the story one loses the facts, shakes them out and makes them available for interpretation and rearrangement. Instinctively, in telling the story one guards against misinterpretation, but to lay stress on the innocence of one's conduct is to imply that there have been other occasions, similar situations, dark nights with boys on seafronts where one's behaviour might be more blameworthy. But this too was false in my case, so far from the truth it was almost comical.

I have never been able to cruise and have never had much inclination to do so, though seeing it as a definite shortcoming, one of several masculine accomplishments I have never been able to master – throwing a ball, for instance, catching the barman's eye, pissing in public. It was partly that, never feeling I would be much of a catch, I saw no point in trawling the streets for someone who might feel differently. And then, too, I was quite hard to please.

Homosexual friends, I had noticed, never seemed all that choosy when they caught someone giving them the eye. Quick as a fish they were off on the trail of their quarry, a ritual of flight and pursuit that involved glances over the shoulder, looking in shop windows and hesitation at street corners, until when eventually one or other of the parties decided to close the gap and actually speak, it came as no surprise and was almost a joke.

It was a knack I did not have as well as a disinclination, and was reinforced by a fastidiousness that was disabling too. Friends invariably dramatised and romanticised such encounters, some of which must surely have been commonplace and many, though spiced up by the unexpected, downright dull. But what never ceased to astonish me (and fill me with a kind of wonder) was the persistent readiness for such casual flings and the rapidity with which, regardless of previous plans or engagements, they would, the opportunity unexpectedly presenting itself, dart away after some unknown man in response to a glance which, as often as not, I had not even spotted.

Some of these considerations I dramatised in the screen adaptation of Joe Orton's biography
Prick Up Your Ears
.

Halliwell's wail of complaint is truly mine: my first consideration would always be Sir Malcolm Sargent, or whoever, until, that is, the moment passed, when I would be left wretched at my own timidity. ‘One walks about the streets with one's desires,' wrote T. S. Eliot, ‘and one's refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches.' Still, living life in Orton's bold, head-on sort of way, which I was never able to do, seemed to me to have a morality of a sort. That all other fancies and preoccupations – the ties and tugs of social life, for instance, the need to keep appointments and the overriding obligations of work – should, at the prospect of sex, be straight away rendered provisional and be instantly dispensed with might be thought, if not admirable, at least praiseworthy; between keeping a promise and turning a trick no contest: it was a question of priorities.