O’Byrne turned and followed her, obscurely cheated.
He leaned in the doorway, she righted the chair. With a movement of his head O’Byrne indicated that he wanted none of the food Pauline was setting out on plates. She poured him a beer and knelt to gather a few black pastry droppings from the floor. They sat in the sitting room. O’Byrne drank, Pauline ate slowly, neither spoke. O’Byrne finished all the beer and placed his hand on Pauline’s knee. She did not turn. He said cheerily, “What’s wrong with you?” and she said, “Nothing.” Alive with irritation O’Byrne moved closer and placed his arm protectively across her shoulders. “Tell you what,” he half whispered. “Let’s go to bed.” Suddenly Pauline rose and went into the bedroom. O’Byrne sat with his hands clasped behind his head. He listened to Pauline undress, and he heard the creak of the bed. He got to his feet and, still without desire, entered the bedroom.
Pauline lay on her back and O’Byrne, having undressed quickly, lay beside her. She did not acknowledge him in her usual way, she did not move. O’Byrne raised his arm to stroke her shoulder, but instead let his hand fall back heavily against the sheet. They both lay on their backs in mounting silence, until O’Byrne decided to give her one last chance and with naked grunts hauled himself onto his elbow and arranged his face over hers. Her eyes, thick with tears, stared past him. “What’s the matter?” he said in resignatory sing-song. The eyes budged a fraction and fixed into his own. “You,” she said simply. O’Byrne returned to his side of the bed, and after a moment said threateningly, “I see.” Then he was up, and on top of her, and then past her and on the far side of the room. “All right then…” he said. He wrenched his laces into a knot, and searched for his shirt. Pauline’s back was to him. But as he crossed the sitting room her rising, accelerating wail of denial made him stop and turn. All white, in a cotton nightdress, she was there in the bedroom doorway and in the air, simultaneously at every point of arc in the intervening space, like the trick photographer’s diver, she was on the far side of the room and she was at his lapels, knuckles in her mouth and shaking her head. O’Byrne smiled and put his arms around her shoulders. Forgiveness swept through him. Clinging to each other they returned to the bedroom. O’Byrne undressed and they lay down again, O’Byrne on his back, Pauline with her head pillowed on his shoulder.
O’Byrne said, “I never know what’s going on in your mind,” and deeply comforted by this thought, he fell asleep. Half an hour later he woke. Pauline, exhausted by a week of twelve-hour shifts, slept deeply on his arm. He shook her gently. “Hey,” he said. He shook her firmly, and as the rhythm of her breathing broke and she began to stir, he said in a laconic parody of some unremembered film, “Hey, there’s something we ain’t done yet…”
Harold was excited. When O’Byrne walked into the shop towards noon the following day Harold took hold of his arm and waved in the air a sheet of paper. He was almost shouting. “I’ve worked it all out. I know what I want to do with the shop.” “Oh, yeah,” said O’Byrne dully, and put his fingers in his eyes and scratched till the intolerable itch there became a bearable pain. Harold rubbed his small pink hands together and explained rapidly. “I’m going All American. I spoke to their rep on the phone this morning and he’ll be here in half an hour. I’m getting rid of all the quid a time piss-in-her-cunt letters. I’m gonna carry the whole of the House of Florence range at ?4.50 a time.”
O’Byrne walked across the shop to where Harold’s jacket was spread across a chair. He tried it on. It was of course too small. “And I’m going to call it Transatlantic Books,” Harold was saying. O’Byrne tossed the jacket onto the chair. It slid to the floor and deflated there like some reptilian air sac. Harold picked it up, and did not cease talking. “If I carry Florence exclusive I get a special discount
O’Byrne sat down and interrupted his brother. “How many of those soddin’ inflatable women did you unload? There’s still twenty-five of the fuckers in the cellar.” But Harold was pouring out scotch into two glasses. “He’ll be here in half an hour,” he repeated, and offered one glass to O’Byrne. “Big deal,” said O’Byrne, and sipped. “I want you to take the van over to Norbury and collect the order this afternoon. I want to get into this straight away.”
O’Byrne sat moodily with his drink while his brother whistled and was busy about the shop. A man came in and bought a magazine. “See,” said O’Byrne sourly while the customer was still lingering over the tentacled condoms, “he bought English, didn’t he?” The man turned guiltily and left. Harold came and crouched by O’Byrne’s chair and spoke as one who explains copulation to an infant. “And what do I make? Forty per cent of 75p. Thirty p. Thirty fucking p. On House of Florence I’ll make fifty percent of ?4.50. And that”—he rested his hand briefly on O’Byrne’s knee—“is what I call business.”
O’Byrne wriggled his empty glass in front of Harold’s face, and waited patiently for his brother to fill it… Little Runt.
The House of Florence warehouse was a disused church in a narrow terraced street on the Brixton side of Norbury. O’Byrne entered by the main porch. A crude plasterboard office and waiting room had been set up in the west end. The font was a large ashtray in the waiting room. An elderly woman with a blue rinse sat alone in the office typing. When O’Byrne tapped on the sliding window she ignored him, then she rose and slid aside the glass panel. She took the order form he pushed towards her, glancing at him with unconcealed distaste. She spoke primly. “You better wait there.” O’Byrne tap-danced abstractedly about the font, and combed his hair, and whistled the tune that went in a circle. Suddenly a shriveled man with a brown coat and clipboard was at his side. “Transatlantic Books?” he said. O’Byrne shrugged and followed him. They moved together slowly down long aisles of bolted steel shelves, the old man pushing a large trolley and O’Byrne walking a little in front with his hands clasped behind his back. Every few yards the warehouseman stopped, and with bad-tempered gasps lifted a thick pile of magazines from the shelves. The load on the trolley grew. The old man’s breath echoed hoarsely around the church. At the end of the first aisle he sat down on the trolley, between his neat piles, and coughed and hawked for a minute or so into a paper handkerchief. Then, carefully folding the tissue and its ponderous green contents back into his pocket, he said to O’Byrne, “Here, you’re young. You push this thing.” And O’Byrne said, “Push the fucker yourself. It’s your job,” and offered the man a cigarette and lit it for him.
O’Byrne nodded at the shelves. “You get some reading done here.” The old man exhaled irritably. “It’s all rubbish. It ought to be banned.” They moved on. At the end, as he was signing the invoice, O’Byrne said, “Who you got lined up for tonight? Madam in the office there?” The warehouseman was pleased. His cackles rang out like bells, then tailed into another coughing fit. He leaned feebly against the wall, and when he had recovered sufficiently he raised his head and meaningfully winked his watery eye. But O’Byrne had turned and was wheeling the magazines out to the van.
Lucy was ten years older than Pauline, and a little plump. But her flat was large and comfortable. She was a sister and Pauline no more than a trainee nurse. They knew nothing of each other. At the underground station O’Byrne bought flowers for Lucy, and when she opened the door to him he presented them with a mock bow and the clicking of heels. “A peace offering?” she said contemptuously and took the daffodils away. She had led him into the bedroom. They sat down side by side on the bed. O’Byrne ran his hand up her leg in a perfunctory kind of way. She pushed away his arm and said, “Come on, then. Where have you been the past three days?” O’Byrne could barely remember. Two nights with Pauline, one night in the pub with friends of his brother.
He stretched back luxuriously on the pink candlewick. “You know… working late for Harold. Changing the shop around. That kind of thing.”
“Those dirty books,” said Lucy with a little high-pitched laugh.
O’Byrne stood up and kicked off his shoes. “Don’t start that,” he said, glad to be off the defensive. Lucy leaned forwards and gathered up his shoes. “You’re going to ruin the backs of these,” she said busily, “kicking them off like that.”
They both undressed. Lucy hung her clothes neatly in the wardrobe. When O’Byrne stood almost naked before her she wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Is that you smelling?” O’Byrne was hurt. “I’ll have a bath,” he offered curtly.
Lucy stirred the bathwater with her hand, and spoke loudly over the thunder of the taps. “You should have brought me some clothes to wash.” She hooked her fingers into the elastic of his shorts. “Give me these now and they’ll be dry by the morning.” O’Byrne laced his fingers into hers in a decoy of affection. “No, no,” he shouted rapidly. “They were clean on this morning, they were.” Playfully Lucy tried to get them off. They wrestled across the bathroom floor, Lucy shrieking with laughter, O’Byrne excited but determined.
Finally Lucy put on her dressing gown and went away. O’Byrne heard her in the kitchen. He sat in the bath and washed away the bright green stains. When Lucy returned his shorts were drying on the radiator. “Women’s Lib, innit?” said O’Byrne from the bath. Lucy said, “I’m getting in too,” and took off her dressing gown. O’Byrne
