Moggerhanger by Alan Sillitoe

Author:Alan Sillitoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-04-21T19:22:16+00:00

Chapter Sixteen.

Hatchbacks scooted like blackclocks around my brain. It’s only a dream, I told myself in the dream. Didn’t someone say life itself was a dream? My grandfather’s big wooden mallet squashed the beetles flat. I heard them crack under every blow but it made no difference because they turned into boats and floated here and there to find a landing. Someone pulled the plug, and daylight flooded in.

I woke up wondering where I was. Dreams only meant that you had been down deep, which had to be good. I was safely back in Moggerhanger’s flat above the garage, but how safe was safe after his warning on my vulnerability from the Green Toe Gang? I couldn’t know that whatever he’d said about spreading the word among them that I was not to be touched was worth the breath it was blurted on. No one could live forever in a state of alertness, yet I had to be ready for any onset of peril, while confidently assuming that my instinct for self-preservation would look after me.

If Moggerhanger was playing cat and mouse to see whether someone of my expertise would enter into negotiations with the Green Toe Gang, as a test of loyalty to him (he had a liking for such machinations) he could get stuffed, since I was the one who could well be playing the same game with him, and should I come to believe he was pressing me too close on that front I would send a stamped and self-addressed envelope in a letter to Oscar Cross offering my services.

Walking down to the Mall to put my money in the bank I noticed two old people kissing at a bus stop. Such public billing and cooing at their age was rare, and I supposed that at seventy-odd they went at it at home like rabbits in a thunderstorm. If they were man and wife there was no life on vinegar hill for them, who had no doubt been making love since fourteen, in which time he had pumped sufficient in to fill a swimming pool, and she had come enough for her cries to reach heaven. They looked fit to be banging away with mutually adoring exertion at ninety, to be found dead by one of their twelve children in each other’s arms.

Leaving them to their snogging I wondered whether, being a marked man, I would reach that age and still be going at it. I certainly would be if I did, which merry notion took me into the bank, and then out knowing that at least the cheque was safe enough to pay for a few more weeks of life.

I thought of calling on Frances, but she wouldn’t be home from the surgery till six, so to get my legs in shape after so much motoring I headed for Notting Hill Gate, where I’d take the Tube into Soho. I was alone, but the sky was mine, and if any of Oscar Cross’s Green Toe Gang

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