'What do you want to hear me on a record for?
Aren't you going to hear me every day?' He squeezed her arm. 'You're a good kid. I don't grudge you things. You can have anything you say.' He thought: She's got me where she wants... how long? 'You didn't mean those things now, did you?' he wheedled her. His face crinkled in the effort of amiability like an old man's.
'Something came over me,' she said, avoiding his eyes with an expression he couldn't read, obscure and despairing.
He felt relieved but reluctant. He didn't like the idea of putting anything on a record: it reminded him of finger prints. 'Do you really,' he said, 'want me to get one of those things? We haven't got a gramophone anyway. You won't be able to hear it. What's the good?'
'I don't want a gramophone,' she said. 'I just want to have it there. Perhaps one day you might be away somewhere and I could borrow a gramophone. And you'd speak,' she said with a sudden intensity that scared him.
'What do you want me to say?'
'Just anything,' she said. 'Say something to me.
Say Rose and something.'
He went into the box and closed the door. There was a slot for his sixpence, a mouthpiece, an instruction: 'Speak clearly and close to the instrument.' The scientific paraphernalia made him nervous; he looked over his shoulder and there outside she was watching him without a smile; he saw her as a stranger, a shabby child from Nelson Place, and he was shaken by an appalling resentment. He put in a sixpence and speaking in a low voice for fear it might carry beyond the box he gave his message up to be graven on vulcanite: 'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home for ever and let me be?'; he heard the needle scratch and the record whir, then a click and silence.
Carrying the black disk he came out to her. 'Here,' he said, 'take it. I put something on it loving.'
She took it from him carefully, carried it like something to be defended from the crowd. Even on the sunny side of the pier it was getting cold--and the cold fell between them like an unanswerable statement you'd better be getting home now. He had the sense of playing truant from his proper work he should be at school, but he hadn't learned his lesson. They passed through the turnstile, and he watched her out of the corner of an eye to see what she expected now; if she had shown any excitement he would have slapped her face. But she hugged the record as chilled as he.
'Well,' he said, 'we got to go somewhere.'
She pointed down the steps to the covered walk under the pier. 'Let's go there,' she said, 'it's sheltered there.'
The Boy looked sharply round at her; it was as if deliberately she had offered him an ordeal. For a moment he hesitated} then he grinned at her. 'All right,' he said, 'we'll go there.' He was moved by a kind of sensuality: the coupling of good and evil.
In the trees of the Old Steyne the fairy lights were switched on--it was too early, their pale colours didn't show in the last of the day. The long tunnel under the parade was the noisiest, lowest, cheapest section of Brighton's amusements: children rushed past them in paper sailor caps marked 'I'm No Angel'; a ghost train rattled by carrying courting couples into a squealing and shrieking darkness. All the way along the landward side of the tunnel were the amusements; on the other little shops: Magpie Ices, Photoweigh, Shellfish, Rock. The shelves rose to the ceiling; little doors let you into the obscurity behind, and on the sea side there were no doors at all, no windows, nothing but shelf after shelf from the pebbles to the roof, a breakwater of Brighton rock facing the sea. The lights were always on in the tunnel--the air was warm and thick and poisoned with human breath.
'Well,' the Boy said, 'what's it to be winkles or Brighton rock?' He watched her as if something important really depended on her answer.
'I'd like a stick of Brighton rock,' she said.
Again he grinned; only the devil, he thought, could have made her answer that. She was good, but he'd got her like you got God in the Eucharist in the guts.
God couldn't escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation. He padded across to a doorway and looked in. 'Miss,' he said. 'Miss. Two sticks of rock.' He looked around the little pink barred cell as if he owned it; his memory owned it, it was stamped with footmarks, a particular patch of floor had eternal importance; if the cash register had been moved he'd have noticed it. 'What's that?' he said and nodded at a box, the only unfamiliar object there.
'It's broken rock,' she said, 'going cheap.'
'From the maker's?'
'No. It got broken. Some clumsy fools ' she complained.
He took the sticks and turned; he knew what he would see nothing; the promenade was shut out behind the rows of Brighton rock. He had a momentary sense of his own immense cleverness. 'Good night,' he said, stooped in the little doorway, and went out.
If only one could boast of one's cleverness, relieve the enormous pressure of pride...
They stood side by side sucking their sticks of rock; a woman bustled them to one side. 'Out of the way, you children.' Their glances met: a married couple.
'Where now?' he said uneasily.
'Perhaps we ought to find somewhere,' she said.
'There's not all that hurry.' His voice caught a little with anxiety. 'It's early yet. Like a movie?' He wheedled her again. 'I've never took you to a movie.'
But the sense of power left him. Again her passionate assent 'You're good to me' repelled him.
Slumped grimly in the three-and-sixpenny seat, in the half-dark, he asked himself crudely and bitterly what she was hoping for; beside the screen an illuminated clock marked the hour. It was a romantic film: magnificent features, thighs shot with studied care, esoteric beds shaped like winged coracles. A man was killed, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the game. The two main characters made their stately progress towards the bed sheets: 'I loved you that first time in Santa Monica...' A song under a window, a girl in a nightdress, and the clock beside the screen moving on. He whispered suddenly, furiously, to Rose: 'Like cats.' It was the commonest game under the sun why be scared at what the dogs did in the streets? The music moaned: 'I know in my heart you're divine.' He whispered: 'Maybe we'd better go to Billy's after all,' thinking: we won't be alone there; something may happen; maybe the boys will have drinks; maybe they'll celebrate there won't be any bed for anyone tonight. The actor with a lick of black hair across a white waste of face said: 'You're mine.
All mine.' He sang again under the restless stars in a wash of incredible moonshine, and suddenly, inexplicably, the Boy began to weep. He shut his eyes to hold in his tears, but the music went on it was like a vision of release to an imprisoned man. He felt constriction and saw hopelessly out of reach a limitless freedom: no fear, no hatred, no envy. It was as if he were dead and were remembering the effect of a good confession, the words of absolution; but being dead it was a memory only he couldn't experience contrition the ribs of his body were like steel bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance. He said at last: 'Let's go. We'd better go.'
It was quite dark now; the coloured lights were on all down the Hove front. They walked slowly past Snow's, past the Cosmopolitan. An aeroplane flying low burred out to sea, a red light vanishing. In one of the glass shelters an old man struck a match to light his pipe and showed a man and girl cramped in the corner. A wail of music came off the sea. They turned up through Norfolk Square towards Montpellier Road; a blonde with Garbo cheeks paused to powder on the steps up to the Norfolk bar. A bell tolled somewhere for someone dead and a gramophone in a basement played a hymn. 'Maybe,' the Boy said, 'after tonight we'll find some place to go.'
He had his latchkey but he rang the bell. He wanted people, talk... but no one answered. He rang again.
It was one of those old bells you have to pull; it jangled on the end of its wire, the kind of bell that knows from long experience of dust and spiders and untenanted rooms how to convey that a house is empty. 'They can't 'ave all gone out,' he said, slipped in his latchkey.
A globe had been left burning in the hall--he saw at once the note stuck under the telephone: 'Two's company'--he recognised the drab and sprawling hand of Billy's wife. 'We gone out to celebrate the wedding. Lock your door. Have a good time.' He crumpled the paper up and dropped it on the linoleum.
'Come on,' he said, 'upstairs.' At the top he put his hand on the new bannister rail and said: 'You see.
We've got it mended.' A smell of cabbages and cooking and burnt cloth hung about the dark passage. He nodded. 'That was old Spicer's room. Do you believe in ghosts?'
