Kiss the Blood Off My Hands Page 3

  I short-jabbed him in the face, and then clamped my hand quickly over his mouth, because he looked like the kind that might yelp when you hit him. But he was easy.

  He was such a soft mug that it was almost like robbing a blind baby.

  'Turn out your pockets!' I told him.

  He gaped as if I didn't make sense.

  'Your money,' I said, and slapped him again just to wake him up a bit. He looked such a frightened mug I could have spewed on him.

  He shook like a jelly and pulled out his note-case. I grabbed it and moved back across the seat to give myself room. Then I brought my right fist over in a real lovely jab. He sagged on the seat like a lump of nothing. I shoved the note-case in my pocket, and rapped on the front window. As the cab slowed down, I opened the door and put my head out to catch the cabby's attention before he looked into the cab.

  'Drop me here—the other fellow's going on to where he said,' I told him.

  Before the taxi had quite stopped I hopped on the curb and slammed the door.

  'Cheerio, old man!' I shouted. 'See you later!'

  The cab drove on and I strolled along the pavement until it was out of sight. Then I dropped into the first bar I came to and ordered a drink. I pulled the mug's note-case out of my pocket to get some money to pay. There was five pounds ten shillings in it. I changed the ten-shilling note and shoved the five one-pound notes into my trouser pocket. Then I swallowed the drink and went out into the street again.

  I walked along until I came to a bin for litter, and tossed the empty note-case into it.

  Carefully checking up the names of the streets, I marked

  with a pencil on my guide-map a black circle round the spot where I had got out of the taxi. That was the beginning of the evening's danger-zone. That was where the taxi-driver would say I had hopped out, and any time now special snoopers would be hanging around that area. I had to be careful not to start or finish another ride in that circle.

  Walking briskly for ten minutes, I picked on another taxi-rank and took up my position again in a doorway. I had to wait quite a time before a suitable fare came along, but when it did come it was even easier than the first. That was always the best of a big town. The bigger the town, the softer the mugs. After a couple of hours' work, there was close on twenty pounds in my pocket. But the map had a good many circles pencilled on it, and I reckoned it was time to pack up for the evening.

  It wasn't at all a bad start for a new town, and I wandered off to have some food and a drink to celebrate. It was a lovely night and there were a lot of people on the streets. I walked along idly, looking for a restaurant, turning away from the bright streets into the quieter ones. A tart grinned at me and I scowled back. I went into a bar and had a drink or two. There were snacks laid out temptingly on the counter, and I sat on a stool and ate there.

  When I came out, I found the same tart was walking along just in front of me. Her skirt was drawn tight around her, and she waggled her bottom deliberately. As I came up to her she bumped against me lightly, and said something to me.

  'Well, what?' I asked her.

  'Have you got any money to spend on a naughty girl?' she asked.

  I was certainly looking the part all right.

  'What would you say?' I asked her.

  Td say you'd got plenty,' she said.

  I grinned.

  'You got a place V I asked her.

  'Just round the corner, dear,' she said.

  'Shut up talking!' I said. 'I've got half an hour to waste.'

  'How much have you got? Three pounds?'

  'I might spare one,' I said.

  'One? What do you take me for?'

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  'Take it or leave it,' I told her.

  As we moved off she put her hand through my arm, but I rapped on her knuckles and she drew it away quick.

  'All right,' I said. 'I didn't mean to hurt you.'

  She laughed. 'Of course you didn't, dear,' she said.

  'How long have you been at it?' I asked.

  'Long enough to know how to show you a good time all right, dear,' she said.

  'It's a funny thing,' I said. 'Does every woman take a turn at being a tart some time or other?'

  'Don't call me a tart,' she said.

  'Why?'

  'We don't like being called names, that's why.'

  'Who's we?'

  'None of us girls don't like it.'

  I laughed.

  'Don't you like doing it?' I asked her.

  'It's nice when I get a nice gentleman like you,' she smirked.

  I stifled a belch and said, 'Shut up talking.'

  She stopped at a doorway and took out a key and unlocked it.

  'This way,' she said. 'I've got a nice flat up here.'

  We went in and she shut the door and switched on the light in the hall. It was nice enough in the hall. Then she started to lead the way upstairs. It's a funny thing, but with a tart there are always a lot of stairs.

  We climbed right up to the top of the building. She took out another key and unlocked a door on the top landing. We went in, and she locked the door behind her.

  'May I have the money, please?' she said.

  I gave her one of the first mug's pound-notes. She took it and put it in her handbag, and shut it up and put it on the mantelpiece. Then she took off her clothes so quickly you'd have thought she was racing someone.

  'You don't look so good now,' I told her.

  'Come on, dear,' she said. 'Don't waste time talking. Let's see what a big, strong man you are.'

  We sprawled across the bed and it was soon over, and then she was off like a flash putting on her things again.

  I lit a cigarette, and put on my jacket and did myself up, and watched her dress. It's a funny thing how there's nothing to it with tarts. It's simply like something that beer does to you, or else it's the way they waggle their tight-skirted bottoms in front of your eyes.

  She was doing up her suspenders as I walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up her handbag.

  'Excuse me, lady,' I said.

  'Put that down!' she flashed, and pounced across the room and grabbed the wrist of the hand I was holding the bag with. I twisted my wrist free and gave her a shove backwards.

  'Ease up, 5 I told her. 'You don't have to get excited. I won't take anything that doesn't belong to me. Not in somebody else's house,' I explained.

  'Give me that bag!' she said.

  'You can have it in a minute,' I told her. 'I am just going to take my pound out of it first, that's all.'

  She came at me in a fury now, and I jerked my head back just in time as her nails grazed down my cheek. Then I picked her up and chucked her right across the room on to the bed. She was so surprised she lay there and didn't know quite what to do. She couldn't yell; the landladies won't stand them if they yell.

  'Yours is a pretty one-sided racket,' I said. 'But you've got to lose sometimes. You say it's your pound. I say it's mine. When it comes to a simple argument like that, you've got to lose sometimes.'

  'You've had what you wanted, haven't you?' she said fiercely. 'Do you think you can come and mawl me about for nothing?'

  'That's your lookout,' I told her. 'I've never been out looking for a tart. I wasn't looking for you tonight. You started the whole thing up. You dangled yourself in front of me and started the whole thing up. I don't blame you, you've got to advertise. You've got to dangle the smell under somebody's nose, but if the nose helps itself just once in a while, you can't whine about it.'

  I took the pound-note out of the handbag and put the bag back on the mantelpiece. I thought she was going to fly at me again, but she didn't. Some of those landladies keep them pretty tame.

  She had left the key in the lock, and I opened the door.

  'You dirty sod!' she said in a low, spitty kind of voice. 4 You stinking bastard!'

  I pulled myself up with the door half shut, but I let it go. One of the best ways to keep women happy is to let
them call you things. She had been a nuisance anyhow. She had wasted good time that I might have spent in looking for somewhere to sleep. Women always were a nuisance. The kid hadn't been. That was funny; that kid could have been a hell of an extra lot of nuisance, but she'd known how to behave all right.

  I got to the bottom of the tart's stairs and came out into the street. I would have to start fixing myself up with a place somewhere. It was no good tramping around with no luggage to a different hotel each night, because the good ones wouldn't take you, and you had to put up with the cheap sheds like the one I had slept in last night. It was getting towards midnight now. It was a lovely night and I wandered off slowly in the direction of the park where I had been that afternoon. That would do me fine. That was always the best way to sleep if the weather was right. Apart from the risk of having your sleep interrupted by snoopers, it was a fine way to sleep.

  I came down to where the park was, but the gates were shut. They probably shut it at dark, soon after I left it. So I walked along the railings for a bit until I came to a place where some trees threw a shadow on the railings. I looked up and down, but there was no one much about and I hopped over.

  I walked across the grass to find the path, because the ground was none too dry, and one of the long seats would be better. When I came to the path there were about a dozen long seats by the side of it, but not one of them was

  empty. On some of them sprawled a man or a woman; on others there were a couple of people propped up, one in each corner. They all looked like down-and-out mugs.

  I went up to one of the seats where there was one mug lying right along it, and pulled his feet down and made room for myself.

  'Here, come off it!' he said.

  'Shut up! 5 I said.

  He was dressed in ragged clothes and he looked pretty sick around the face.

  'Is this place always cluttered up with mugs like these?' I asked him.

  'We're here when we can get here,' said the mug. 'Where else d'you suggest, the Ritz Hotel? I wouldn't 've thought a toff like you needed a seat in the park.'

  'I don't need anything,' I told him. 'You mugs who lie around starving and shivering make me want to spew. I've eaten a good meal tonight. I've had plenty of beer tonight. I've got a new suit on. But nobody's given me anything. Here are you mugs in the middle of a town that stinks with money, and you slop around waiting for some of it to drop on your heads. You make me sick!'

  'What do you mean, mister?' he asked.

  'Shut up,' I told him, 'or I'll take the whole seat to myself.'

  I propped myself up in the corner, but the iron dug into my back. So after I had shifted about and tried it every way, I got off the seat and lay down on the asphalt path and slept soundly till morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The man in the secondhand luggage shop was an obliging fellow. From a junk shop nearby he fetched a pile of old magazines, and into the big suitcase that I had bought he put just enough to give it the right weighty feeling, just as if it were full of clothes, padding the spare space out with bunched-up newspaper to stop the magazines from sliding about. I paid him, lugged the suitcase out into the street, and called a taxi.

  'Where's a good comfy hotel, middle price, not on a main street?' I asked him.

  He told me Fletcher's. I got into the cab and told him to take me there. I booked a room, and left my suitcase there while I went out to buy a razor and a few odds and ends. When I had taken these back to the hotel, and laid them about the room so that it didn't look so bare, I went out to have a look round and get more acquainted with the town. So far, apart from that mess-up in the pub, this town was looking like working out in a nice friendly way. You never know with a town until you actually get there. Some towns you never seem to fit into the place, and with others you find your feet almost straight away. I felt I was going to be pretty good at this one. The last town, I never seemed to get the hang of at all. I even had to leave it pretty quick in the end. It's funny how they vary. Some places you find yourself scrapping half the time, just because the town doesn't happen to take to strangers. In others, they've got every way of making money so damned

  organised that you can't cut into anything without a lot of sweat and argument. But this was looking like a pretty good place. And anyway, the flat-racing season was just starting, and that was always an easier time.

  I strolled along and looked at the people, and looked at the shops, and looked at everything there was. I dropped into a shop and bought myself a hat, and when I looked in the glass I could see that I looked the part all right. Along the street was a big open place that was full of slot machines. I never could resist those things. Every time there's a new kind I have to go on playing it and playing it, until they bring out another. I spent a few shillings in coppers, trying to get the five cigarettes that they were offering to anyone who beat five thousand. After a time it struck me that they had bent the pins too close together, so that to get the five cigarettes was just about more than the ten balls could do. I tried lifting up the machine so as to coax the balls slowly into place. You could do it better that way, and after a couple of goes like that, I beat the five thousand.

  I flicked my fingers for the girl who was looking after the place. She came along, and I pointed to the score and grinned. She grinned back and pointed to a notice on the machine which said it had been tilted.

  'Sorry, mister,' she said.

  She was a nasty, cocky little bitch.

  'Give me those five cigarettes,' I told her.

  'Nothing doing,' she said. 'You tilted it, I saw you.'

  Her hand was resting on the machine, and I brought down my elbow hard on the back of it. She snatched it away and yelped a bit.

  'Get out!' she said. 'Get out or I'll have you thrown out!'

  I laughed.

  It was a time of day when a lot of people go to work, and there was no one else there except for a couple of pimply-faced, undersized mugs, who gave us a glance and started to edge away. There was no one else looking after the place, and I guessed that a part of her job was to keep the place nice and quiet and friendly. I looked along the row of machines, and then looked back at her and grinned.

  'Lot of glass around here, in these machines,' I pointed out.

  She hesitated, and then took the hint. She put her hand in her apron pocket and fished out the packet of five cigarettes.

  'Now get out!' she said. 'We don't want people like you here!'

  I took the cigarettes and went out into the street. I opened the packet and lit one of them, and it tasted fine. They had cost me several shillings, but they always taste much better when you've won them off a machine.

  There was a picture house just along the street, and I went in to waste a couple of hours. They were playing a film about a fellow who was always bottled, and who kicked his wife around all the time, and in the end she died, and he was so fed up about it that he shot himself. It didn't seem to make sense, because as far as he was concerned she had just been a bitch anyway, and he could have gone on drinking all the better without her clogging the place up. But a woman near me started snivelling away so loudly I had to move my seat, because the bitch in the film who died had a face that reminded me quite strongly of the kid, and it was annoying to have people snivelling at it, when they had probably never even seen her.

  Just why my mind kept dropping back to her I couldn't make out. She was certainly so much less of a nuisance than the usual female that she stuck out a mile. But I didn't know her name, and I doubted whether I could find that house again in a hurry, and anyway I didn't go in for seeing the same woman twice.

  When I came out of the picture house it was raining, so I ducked into a bar to get a drink. The barman was a nice friendly fellow, and the place wasn't busy yet. He started to talk, and I bought him a beer, because he was one of those fellows who talk and you don't seem to mind it much.

  T've heard of something for Saturday,' he said.

  'What's that?'

 
'There's a bloke comes in here,' he said, 'his brother-in-law's a jockey, and he says they've got it all set for this one.'

  I laughed and took a gulp of beer.

  'I'll buy it,' I said. 'But judging by the number of fellows whose brothers-in-law are jockeys, these jockeys' mothers must breed like rabbits!'

  The barman didn't seem to take to the joke, and he was a nice enough fellow, so I grinned and said:

  'Go on, cough it up!'

  'Well, it's like this,' he said. 'This one's a three-year-old. It only raced twice as a two-year-old, and then it was shy of the gate, and it never did nothing. But now it's got over that, and they're going to spring it out sudden at a good price, see? Now when the weights come out for this race, this bloke's brother-in-law said to this bloke, now if they give him anything less than seven stone six, we just loose him off quietly and everything is all wrapped up, see?'

  The barman paused.

  'Hasn't the bloody thing got a name ?' I asked him.

  'That's just what I was coming to,' he said. 'As soon as the weights come out, this bloke comes rushing in here with the list and shows me, and I look down it, and what do I see but Petulant has been let in for seven stone!'

  'I've never heard of the thing,' I said.

  'That's just it!' said the barman excitedly. 'Nor has no one else!'

  'Except every long-eared mug who comes in this pub,' I said.

  The barman looked very offended.

  'All right, don't use it,' he said. 'But remember to watch out on Saturdav, so as vou can kick vourself for missinsf a ten to one.'

  I grinned at him. And then, suddenly, it went across my mind that he might be trying to play me. Having a dud horse tipped you so as a fellow can take a cushy bet is any mug's game. I put my hand tight round my glass.

  'Can vou fret me a bet on it?' I asked.

  I kept the grin on my face, but I was watching him closely. My hand was tight round my glass, ready to crash it up straight into his face if he said yes. But he shook his head.

  'That's more than my licence here is worth, old man,' he said.