Jake's Thing Read online

  Jake's Thing

  Kingsley Amis

  Jake's Thing

  Kingsley Amis

  First published in 1978

  To Pat Kavanagh

  1—This Is It

  "When did you first notice something was wrong?"

  "Well, notice, it must be five or six weeks, I could give you the date if I had to. But then as soon as I did notice I realised something had been wrong much further back than that."

  "How much further back?"

  "Oh..... A year? Year and a half?"

  "About the time your other trouble started to become acute, in fact."

  "Yes. There must be a link."

  By way of answer the doctor gave a quiet sigh. His patient, a round-faced bespectacled man called Jake Richardson, was left to wonder whether this meant that the link was all too grimly real, that only a fool would suppose one existed or that the task of explanation seemed altogether daunting. Jake didn't wonder for long. To have gone on doing so would have been to concede the doctor (Curnow by name) too much importance. When asked why he persistently went to a man he had so little time for, Jake would say that disliking your GP was a good insurance against getting dependent on him.

  Now Dr Curnow shook his head a few times and swallowed. In the end he said, "There's nothing I can do for you."

  "Oh, but surely you must have a—"

  "No. The only way is for me to send you to someone."

  "That was rather what I—"

  "Excuse me a second, would you, please?"

  Funny how it's got ruder to say please than not, Jake thought to himself as the doctor began to turn slowly through a small leather-bound book on his desk. He seemed to find its contents of unusual interest, even novelty. One page in particular absorbed his attention for longer than would have been necessary if he had been doing no more than reading the whole of it with care. After this interval he lifted his head abruptly and looked Jake straight in the eye for a quarter of a minute or so. Then he returned his gaze to the book before him, keeping it fixed there while he reached for his telephone. It had buttons instead of a dial.

  "Dr Rosenberg? Dr Curnow here." This information was enough to provoke a considerable speech from the other end, though Jake couldn't make out anything of what was said. "I have a patient you might be able to do something for," said Curnow at last. "I have him here in the room with me. Name of Richardson, J. C. Richardson..... Well, you'll remember the Mr Pickering I sent to you last autumn..... Oh did he, I'm sorry to hear that..... Yes, I'm afraid so...." What Curnow heard next made him stare at Jake again but more consideringly, look him over rather than look at him. "Certainly not. No question of anything like that...." Curnow's face changed, except for the direction and quality of his stare, and he started nodding emphatically. "Oh yes, very much so..... Yes, the perfect description..... Oh really? You will? .... I'll ask him." Curnow arranged an appointment for the following week, listened with a grave, responsible expression to a final passage of words from far (from not all that far, actually, just a couple of hundred yards up Harley Street) and rang off.

  "A very able man, Dr Rosenberg. Very able."

  "Good," said Jake. "Rosenberg. Presumably he's some sort of—"

  "Would you excuse me a second, please?" Curnow lifted a switch on what he no doubt called his intercom, which had started to hum hoarsely. "Yes, what is it?"

  "Sheikh Qarmat bin Ezzat el Sha'ket is here," said a version of a girl's voice.

  "Bring him in in thirty seconds precisely and cash as he leaves of course," said Curnow, getting up. "Well, Mr Richardson, you'll be letting me know how things go. Insides behaving themselves?"

  "Oh, mustn't complain."

  "That's right. No pain in the abdomen?"

  "Just a twinge or so, nothing out of the way."

  "Urine satisfactorily pale?"

  "Yes thank you."

  "Faeces satisfactorily dark?"

  "Yes."

  "What about the haemorrhoids?"

  "You mean piles. I haven't got piles," said Jake truthfully. "I don't have them."

  The doctor chuckled and shrugged his shoulders, tolerant of his patient's nervous or whimsical avoidance of the topic. "Getting plenty of exercise?"

  "I thought I was supposed to take it easy."

  "Mild exercise. Walking. Gardening. Didn't you say you gardened?"

  "Yes I did. I do."

  "Keep on with it. It can't fail to do you good. Whatever's wrong with you."

  "Thank you, Dr Curnow."

  In the hall the man of the East, clad quite as if he had just arrived from there, without even time to freshen up after the journey, was approaching across a carpet that looked as if it had once taken a similar course: no doubt the gift of some grateful emir or caliph. The receptionist, a girl of twenty or twenty-five, was in attendance. Jake noticed that her breasts were either remarkably large or got up to seem so by a professional. He tried to reckon the chances of Curnow's knowing which and felt downcast for a moment, because any chance at all was too much. But almost at once he cheered up again: between the front door and that of the waiting-room there moved a fellow-patient he had seen at least once before under this roof, moved with new and extreme labour, one leg straight and stiff, the other bent and stiff. Teach him, thought Jake. Not me yet, he also thought.

  As one who did what doctors said while still rather looking down on them, he decided to walk to Warren Street and catch a 127 bus instead of taking a taxi. That in any case wouldn't have been as easy as winking in this area. No sooner had one black, brown or yellow person, or group of such, been set down on the pavement than Americans, Germans, Spaniards were taken up and vice versa. It was just after four o'clock on a fine afternoon early in April. Jake lengthened his stride and crossed the road in front of a double-parked car, large, black and with CD plates. An unmistakable witch doctor, in equally manifest need of outside help, was doing his best to alight from it.

  Portland Place turned out to be easily as full of north-bound vehicles, most of them cars, as might have been expected at this hour on Wednesday in Holy Week, no less so than it would doubtless turn out to be on 23rd December or, this year, more likely 22nd. Despite their intermittent and slow progress, Jake waited for the lights to change before he left the kerb. He had made this a rule ever since a momentously near miss by a motorbike the previous year. The traffic going the other way was much lighter but no faster, thanks to some extensive road works with nobody working on them.

  By contrast, though not altogether by contrast, Euston Road resembled a motor-racing track, or a network of such. Jake felt some relief at reaching the northern side undamaged. He waved and smiled cheerily at an old friend he couldn't have named for the moment and the old friend, who had just come out of Thames Television House, waved and smiled cheerily back a couple of seconds before Jake realised he wasn't an old friend but the chap who played the superintendent in that police series. Oh Christ, thought Jake; still, the bugger must get a lot of that.

  Half an hour later, having been carried up through Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Hampstead, Jake got off the 127 at the stop outside the Orris Park National Westminster Bank. He was about to start the five-minute walk to his house when his eye fell on the window of Winesteals Ltd and an ill-written notice that nevertheless clearly proclaimed Crazy Cuts: 10p in the £ off everything this week only. He hesitated only a moment. He had brought himself to go and see his doctor, he had responsibly taken a bit of exercise, he had saved something like £1.20 by not taking a taxi home, and he was fed up with Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry) every night of his life. Into the shop he darted and over to the French corner. Côtes de Nuits Villages 1971 at £2.05 less presumably 20-1/2p? Beaune Clos de la Mousse 1972 at..... To hell with it: Château Talbot
1967 at £4.09 less whatever the fuck. On his way to what people probably meant by the check-out he noticed a pile of boxes of liqueur chocolates and hesitated again, longer this time. £2.17, but that wasn't what was at stake. In the end he took a box.

  Ahead of him at the till stood a customer in very dirty whitish overalls smoking a cigar and chatting to the senior of the two shopmen present while the junior cast up what he was buying.

  "Is it worth it?" he asked a couple of times. "This is it. If it isn't, I don't want to know. If it isn't, I'm not interested. If it is, then this is it. I mean, this is it. Right?"

  "Right."

  "And it is. It bloody is. Like everything else." As he talked the overalled man took a roll of £20 notes from his side pocket and counted some out; Jake thought five but wasn't sure. "It bloody is. Twelve-year-olds better than eight-year-old and '61's going to be better than '62. I mean, you know, this is it. Ever tried Jack Daniel's Green Label?"

  "No."

  "Worth trying." Change was handed over, not much. "Ta. Yeah, worth trying. Shows you the Black's worth it. Green's good, though. Well, cheers."

  "Cheers."

  Jake moved along, put his two items down on the stub of counter and set himself to see which buttons on his machine the junior shopman would prod. 3, then one he missed, so he gave up and waited for the receipt slip to be torn off and wordlessly handed to him. He screwed up his eyes. 003.69, 002.17, 006.86. He went on looking while the senior shopman drew in air through his nose.

  "Er, the..... You've charged the full price for the chocolates."

  "Right."

  "But your notice says 10p in the pound off everything."

  "Everything bar chocolates and smokes."

  "But it says everything."

  "It means everything bar chocolates and smokes."

  "But...."

  "You want them, do you, squire?

  ".... Yes."

  "Right."

  After a short pause, during which he took a blow on the kneecap from the corner of a wire basket in the hand of a man in a blue boiler-suit, Jake paid, picked up his goods and left, remembering he should have said Cheers just as the exit door swung shut after him. Out in the street he noticed that away from the sunlight the air was chilly: the spring had begun late and wet. There were still a few dead leaves half beaten into the triangular patch of bare earth bounded by concrete, probably due to become a communal flower-bed any day, at the corner of the High Street and Burgess Avenue. The near end of the latter consisted of two longish brick terraces put up a hundred years before to house the workers at some vanished local industry and these days much in demand among recently married couples, pairs of homosexuals and older persons whose children had left or never existed. Jake had bought no. 47 in 1969; he couldn't have afforded to now.

  2—The Farting Ploughboy

  The house stood out among its neighbours by not having had anything done to its outside: no stucco, no curious chimneys, no colourful shutters, no trailing ferns in wire baskets, front door and window-frames and drain-pipes not painted cinnabar or orpiment or minimum or light mushroom, and garden neither turned into a tiny thicket nor altogether removed to accommodate a car. Having no car had made it comparatively easy for Jake to prevent that last option but some of the others had taken toll of his powers of resistance. He opened and then shut the gate, which was not of wrought iron or imitation bronze, walked up the eight yards of gravel path and let himself in.

  A great deal had managed to get itself done to the inside of no. 47 because so much of it was in items small in themselves and capable of being introduced a bit at a time. He was also at the mercy of the view that whatever rights a man might have over the exterior of his dwelling lapse by definition once its threshold is crossed. The place was full of things. It had to be admitted that some of these weren't as small as all that, like the heavy-duty cheval glass near the front door and the giant's coffin-sized Dutch (or some such) clock in the alcove by the sitting room fireplace, but a lot were. No flat surface except the ceiling and parts of the floor was free of ashtrays bearing quotations from poem and song, serious souvenir mugs and antique paperweights, and screens supplemented the walls for the hanging of small pictures enclosed in large mounts and photographs of dead strangers. It was hard to find a square foot that hadn't been made nice.

  The person who had brought all this about was Jake's fat wife Brenda, who stood up, brushing cake-crumbs off her knee-length fisherman's-knit cardigan, to be kissed on the cheek by him. He went over and greeted similarly her old friend Alcestis

  Mabbott, who was fat too, not as fat as Brenda but short with it. And then Alcestis' hair stood away from her head in a stiff dun froth while Brenda's, though no more vivid, was smooth and abundant, so that almost anybody would have decided that Brenda had the better of things between the two of them.

  "Hallo, Allie dear," said Jake. "What a nice surprise."

  "I told you she was coming," said Brenda.

  "Did you, darling? I must have forgotten."

  One way or the other the presence of Alcestis was certainly a surprise to Jake. If it hadn't been he wouldn't have come carting his recent purchases into the sitting room like a boy back from the fair. It was on them, as he could have predicted without the least trouble, that Alcestis round-eyed gaze instantly fell.

  "Been shopping, have we?" she asked gruffly. It wasn't a tone or vocal quality adopted for the occasion. On their first meeting, round about ten years earlier at a dinner-party in some cultural crapper south of the river, Jake had come really close to congratulating her on a marvellous imitation, unasked for though it was, of the way retired colonels were supposed to talk. All that had deterred him was puzzlement about why she thought it went well with the detailed account she was giving him of how she had made the unpleasant dress she had on. Then, soon after she had switched the focus of attention to the new wallpaper she was going to have in her dining room and kept her voice the same, he had got it. Whenever he considered he had done something particularly foolish, which wasn't often, he would cheer himself up by remembering that at least he'd never made a pass at Alcestis ("Smudger" to him in his thoughts).

  He answered her question, or anyhow spoke while looking at her. "Just one or two odd things."

  "One of them looks to me like a very odd thing indeed." She meant the bottle which, though wrapped in brown paper, was obviously either a bottle or an object shaped just like a bottle.

  Forewarned of he knew not quite what, Jake put it down on a tiled coffee-table slightly to his rear and said to his wife, "Got you a little something."

  "Ooh...." Brenda moved her spectacles from the top of her head to the region of her nose and uncovered the liqueur chocolates. "Oh, darling, you really shouldn't."

  "Nonsense, everybody deserves a bit of a—"

  "I mean you shouldn't, darling," said Brenda. Her eyes, unlike her friend's, were long from corner to corner and also bright, both in the intensity of their greenish colour and in the shining of their surfaces even through glass. Jake had never forgotten the first time they had been turned full on him: not where or when, just how they had looked. "You know, this is exactly what I'm not supposed to have because they're sugar and booze and I can't resist them. It's very sweet of you but honestly."

  "You haven't got to dispose of the whole—"

  "I'm sure good old Janelle give you a hand if you're well and truly stuck. Always ready to help out, our Jake, eh, what?" Alcestis didn't actually utter the last two words but they were there in the way she rocked her long head to and fro and pushed her lips up afterwards.

  "I should jolly well hope so, I can tell you," said Jake, and saw Brenda give him a sharp glance over the top of her glasses. He added hastily, "I mean that's right, I can always—"

  "What absolutely fills me with the most burning curiosity is the question of what's inside the other parcel, the chappie over there."

  "Well, it's a .... a 'bottle' actually of all things, Allie. With drink corked up in
side it."

  "Absolutely agog."

  The two women waited. Jake reached out and snatched up the bottle and tore the paper off it as fast as he could. In wine-waiter style he displayed the label to Alcestis, who nodded several times and gave a grunt or so of approval. There was another pause.

  "I wonder...." said Alcestis. "Of course it is a bit on the early side."

  "Would you like a glass?" asked Brenda.

  "Well, I must say, I don't normally, I—"

  "Come on, do you good, why not, fill your boots, great stuff, that's the spirit." It wasn't (Jake saw) that Alcestis had guessed he had been going to give himself a treat which she had maliciously decided to impair, nor that she had simply fancied a glass of wine: she had sensed, without realising that she had sensed, that he hoped she wouldn't ask him for one and so naturally had asked him for one, or better still had got herself asked to have one. "Shan't be a jiffy."

  Along in the kitchen he got going fast. Off with the vile plastic foil they put round the necks of bottles these days and out with the cork; same treatment for a bottle of Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry). Now a jug, or rather pair of jugs.

  "I remember as if it were yesterday," he said as he worked. "Jerry had given our lads a fearful pasting round St Quentin and Compiègne and most of us thought that when the big push came in the spring we'd be done for. Not a word of a lie. Literally. I said done for and I meant done for." He raised his voice. "Where's the bloody corkscrew? Oh, here it is—all right—got it."

  By this time he had the two wines in jugs of their own and was pouring the Château Talbot into the Tunisian bottle. A jet aircraft came into earshot.

  "There were men in my battalion who'd gawn six months without sleep and the average life of a subaltern in the front line was thirty seconds. Absolute gospel. Literally. Then one day in the shithouse at Division I ran into old Bugger Cockface who I'd known at Eton and Sandhurst and in the Crimea and at Spion Kop." The jet was almost overhead. "And I said to him, I said, "Are we done for, Bugger?" and he said, "By George not yet, Smudger," and I thought, damn fine soldier, damn fine Englishman, damn fine feller, what? What? 'What?'"