A Personal History of Thirst Read online

She held my wrists. “Oh, James! This isn’t right. Not tonight.”

  “You want me to stop?”

  For a moment her body froze, then she relaxed backward into my arms.

  “Your neighbors will see.”

  I said: “So draw the curtains.”

  She did so, then turned, her shirt gaping where I had opened it. She put her arms around my neck.

  “I’ll stop if you tell me to,” I whispered.

  “Stop.”

  “I can’t.”

  She smiled, closed her eyes, leaned her head back. “Your hands are shaking.”

  “It’s been so long. Touching you there makes me tremble.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Do you really want me to stop?”

  She groaned. “Not now.”

  —

  Afterward, as I played with her ear, I said, “You know, I did the strangest thing when they were here—I confessed.”

  Her body tautened, as if she was thinking fast.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told them I murdered him.”

  She raised her head until the cords in her neck strained. “You what?”

  “I couldn’t resist. I was sure they weren’t serious about suspecting me, but I wanted to provoke them.”

  “They didn’t take you seriously?”

  “No. I turned it into a joke—said I’d murdered him in my imagination every day for the past eleven years. They seemed relieved. But they were wired, I’m sure. When George Holmes drove up, he was careful to leave a space for an unmarked radio van, which means a couple of operators recording my interview. I don’t really know what they were up to.”

  “But why on earth did you say that? Why?”

  I licked a nipple casually. “I really don’t know. Bravado. It doesn’t matter; they’re not about to charge me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh yes, quite sure.”

  “How are you sure?”

  “I know George Holmes. He’s not going to charge me.”

  She let her head fall back to the pillow. She lay thinking for a moment, then turned to lay her cheek on my chest.

  “When I was coming here I did think about—you know—if we would be lovers again.”

  “And?”

  She sniggered. “I decided I wouldn’t let you. Unless you could make me want you as intensely as before.”

  She fell asleep in my arms, and I must have dozed off soon afterward. Hours later I was awakened by a shuddering, it seemed, in the middle of the night. Her hands were over my eyes, and I thought she was trying to blind me until I realized she was trying to wake me in some desperate way. She clung to me and gave huge, loud, inelegant sobs on my chest. As if the nightmare had jolted her back to some earlier personality, her accent was suddenly Connecticut again, with a dash of New York.

  “Oh Jesus, James. Oh fuck. He’s dead. He can’t do any of this—he can’t breathe, drink wine, screw. He’s a fucking dead man.”

  I wrestled with her until she was quiet. She looked at me with a kind of cowed resentment.

  “You don’t give a shit. Do you?”

  4

  It was class rage that propelled me to meet him the next time.

  I had lost my first jury trial because Benjamin Franklin, my client, was black and the judge was a bigot. I was furious and frightened that in 1976 there were still men in positions of power in England whose humanity did not extend beyond the magic circle of white male public school Oxbridge graduates—my credentials would only get me past the first two hurdles. My political views had stuck somewhere in radical chic, and I professed a kind of sex-appeal socialism. I had also boasted to Daisy that I expected to get my client off.

  He was all dreadlocks and marijuana, a compulsive burglar of limited skill who studied the Bible when he was not coveting other people’s stereo systems. The only reason he accepted me as his counsel was the Rastafarian significance he found in my name: I was, he said, his White Knight. When Daisy heard that he was black, she thought of the black activist writers imprisoned in San Quentin and packed me off to work with a black power salute. Explaining my failure to her would entail a degree of outraged posturing, which I rehearsed to myself in a cab on the way back to chambers from court. For half an hour I was a world leader of indeterminate race, hailed by millions, tubercular with righteous indignation, adored by Daisy.

  From this late-twentieth-century fantasy I emerged into the equally fantastic time warp that was headquarters for London’s trial lawyers, or barristers. A few unique acres of seventeenth-century Thameside tenements, it was called the Temple for having once been the meeting place of the Knights Templar, a mysterious chivalric order of crusaders of which modern barristers are attenuated descendants, though it suited our style to retain the mystery, even to the point of being arcane. We called our offices “chambers,” our office managers (who were mostly male) “clerks,” our colleagues “members of chambers,” and all members of chambers were “tenants,” because we paid rent to the “Head of Chambers,” who was usually a “silk” or Queen’s Counsel, so called for his right to wear silk robes with elaborate cutaway sleeves about a yard long. When we worked in teams, the most senior was a “leader” and the other team members were “juniors.” Work (which came to us only through solicitors) we called “instructions,” and the formal request to appear in court was called a “brief.” Quaint upon quaint, we maintained the gentlemanly fiction that we were not in it for the money. “Solicitors” were originally named by barristers for their contemptible trade of procuring clients on our behalf and arranging fees; not a task we would have contemplated undertaking for ourselves, our duty being to argue before the court for the fun of it, all the time wearing horsehair wigs that went out of vogue with Charles II.

  Disdain for the criminal client was still de rigueur in 1976, and our self-imposed rules required that we never met with him unless his solicitor was also present, to prevent contamination. There was even a kind of ethics pornography: stories wherein the barrister hero escaped by the skin of his teeth from overfamiliar overtures from his gangster clients.

  In the clerks’ room I found a meeting of eighteenth-century gentlemen whose plump backsides had, so to speak, privilege branded all over them. They fell silent in the middle of a discussion as I entered, because I was not one of them. Roland Denson, a music hall aristocrat, lounged against the marble mantelpiece, fingering a gold chain that looped across the belly of his black cutaway waistcoat. A scene in the prefects room from Tom Brown’s School-days. I glared at Denson, who glared back while resuming the debate in the teeth of my presence.

  “But look here, when all’s said and done, do we really want another outsider as a tenant—another of those chaps with a massive complex about having clawed his way up from the gutter?”

  Denson had continued loudly while I edged into the room. In the silence that followed, most of my colleagues had the decency to avoid my eyes. The room waited for me to say something, but I was paralyzed with rage. The ability to deal with calculated rudeness was one of the many social skills I had never acquired.

  “An outsider like me…” I could not finish the sentence. The telephone rang, and our quick-witted clerk called out that it was for me. Normally he would have checked to make sure it was not a client telephoning a barrister directly.

  “It is, sir, it is for you,” the clerk said as I crossed the room to take the call. For a moment I thought the caller was speaking in a foreign language. Someone in the room said, “You pompous prick, Denson,” and these words, delivered in an upper-middle-class accent, split my attention. Only a second later did I realize that the voice in my ear was speaking in cockney.

  “Yes, Oliver, yes, of course I’ll meet you,” I said, as much to the room as to the telephone.

  Half an hour later I left chambers with intent to commit a far graver sin against professionalism than having a drink with a client after a case. I had allowed a known criminal to tele
phone me at my chambers and agreed to meet him close by the hallowed precincts of the Temple, with no solicitor in sight.

  I carried over my shoulder a purple bag containing my wig and gown, on which my initials had been embroidered in gold. I walked down Middle Temple Lane, past names of barristers that sprang from a tribe grown powerful, so the story ran, by colonizing my own—Pearson-Rhys, Sir Cecil Maffeking-Gray, Lord Cranthorpe, Mr. & Mrs. Oliver Coldstream-Hill—through cloistered walks and tended gardens, fountains and dahlias. Why, I wondered, had I chosen for myself a path down which unhappiness was guaranteed? However much I succeeded, I would never belong. The bar was still a club for the protection of aging public school boys fixed at the emotional age of thirteen and a half.

  I turned right out of the Temple into Temple Place, where a dozen or so homeless men and women were waiting for the afternoon soup vans. In the summer heat the stench from their bodies was overpowering. It permeated the whole park, at the other end of which Thirst was sitting on a bench. My anger over the scene in chambers had abated during my short walk, and now that I had escaped from that room I no longer had any motive for meeting him.

  “You must never again telephone me at chambers; it’s against the rules,” I said. “Nor can you ever again be my client—is that clear?”

  He wore an ill-fitting suit of thick gray woolen material, a woolen tie badly knotted. The top button of his shirt was left undone, but he had combed his hair.

  He stood up, and I saw that his right hand was bandaged.

  “Had a bit of a knuckle,” he said. “Some bloke in a pub accused me of being a grass, so I had to wallop him.”

  “Bit of a knuckle,” “grass,” “wallop”—it was a foreign language spoken by a different race who lived south of the river. If he’d simply said that he’d had a fight because someone had accused him of being a police informant, he would have disappointed me. With crime, as with so many things, the charm is in the packaging.

  The bandage looked fresh. I could see the scene, a group of desperadoes in a pub, sour with alcohol, spitting insults. Thirst deciding, for the hell of it, to take umbrage. How hard had he hit him? Hospital?

  “Did you? Grass?”

  The bloody and oddly poetic world in which he lived, or perhaps the bad fit he seemed to make in it, intrigued me. I had read his probation officer’s report and a short note from a psychiatrist:

  Exceptional intelligence. IQ of 140. Disturbed childhood. Makes intermittent efforts at adjustment. The next few years will be crucial. Criminal psychosis likely if no creative channel is found for his energy and talent.

  The report from the probation officer was equally divided between awe at my ex-client’s potential and fear of the consequences if he failed to adjust.

  Thirst answered my question with a sidelong glance as I led him past the bag people, whom he called “dossers,” and along the Victoria Embankment to Waterloo Bridge.

  “I suppose you’ve been seeing your latest lawyer in the Temple?”

  He grunted. “Just a silly little thing. I’m pleading guilty. Need someone to say I’m a good boy really—what d’you call it?”

  “A plea in mitigation.”

  “Yeah. Mickey Mouse stuff. Not big enough for you.”

  “I wasn’t touting for work, for God’s sake, I was simply wondering how you came to be around the Temple and why you telephoned.”

  I scanned the street ahead. Why was I doing this? Someone from my chambers might see me at any minute; many barristers commuted from Waterloo Station and walked across the bridge. Nobody would say anything to me, but the beginning of a question mark would form—a small piece of dirt, seeding more. How to get rid of him?

  Midway across the bridge, I paused automatically at the spot I usually chose. It may be that you can tell something about a Londoner depending on which way he looks when he crosses the Thames. I always looked east, where the open sea waited fifty miles downstream, the traditional route for generations of Englishmen seeking ways of escape. Thirst leaned against the balustrade, facing me and looking inland. I’m shortsighted, and it was only at that moment that I was again close enough to observe the perpetual flow of energy across his facial muscles, the discriminating alertness in those bright brown eyes. My irritation diminished a degree. Was there not a right under the law to freedom of association? How dehumanizing did upward mobility have to be?

  “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Just wanted a bit of advice, that’s all. You being from the same neighborhood, like, maybe you could help.”

  “With what?”

  “See, I never had your chances—”

  “Please, not that sob story; save it for your social worker. We come from the same neighborhood. I’m four years older than you, in other words the same generation. You had my chances. Exactly the same ones.”

  “So how come you’re up there and I’m in shit? Because you’re better than me?”

  “The difference is that I never allowed myself the luxury of self-pity, and you do.”

  I had not intended to say so much. I looked down at the flow of water around the pier beneath us and at the antics of some debris caught in a whirlpool. When I looked up again he was staring at me. I sensed that in a way he could never articulate, he was shrewder and longer-suffering than I. From what depths had he already climbed? He blinked, twitched, his face changed again.

  “Yeah—maybe. But see, I’m in trouble. I don’t mean with the Old Bill—I mean with my own head. When I was a teenager I thought I could take anything, but I can’t, James. I’ve got to get out or I’ll go nuts. Sometimes I think I’ll kill someone, I get so tense. And I don’t know why, that’s the weird thing. Everything I done, I was in control, I knew what I was up to. Until recently. I don’t do drugs, I’m not a boozer, I keep fit, see? Ever been out of control, James?”

  “No, never.” Was that true? True enough for him.

  “I’m scared. Last time I was inside, there was an old bloke about sixty—been in and out all his life—what do you call them?”

  “Recidivists.”

  “Yeah. One of them. Loved the nick. Safest place, he said, boasted about all the convicts he’d sucked off—no teeth, see. Gums Gillespie his nickname. I don’t want to end up like that.”

  He was still young enough to hold an echo of the girlish good looks he must have possessed as a teenager. Large eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones, a mouth that must have been fine before crime set it hard.

  “How much form have you got?” I asked.

  “Previous convictions? Quite a lot.”

  “Anything coming up?”

  “One or two little things. I can handle them, find a good barrister like you to get me off. It’s afterward I’m talking about.”

  “Afterward?”

  “Yeah, the future. I never thought about it before; the future was always, you know, half an hour’s time. I don’t regret nothing. But you change, don’t you?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Dunno. Maybe music, a rock band. Maybe travel. I’ve never been out of England. Never been out of London hardly—except, you know, in a prison van. I could do something, I could be up there. I’d be good. There’s nothing I can’t do. Anyway, I got to get out.”

  I had no need to ask what it was he had to get out of. It was everything: the grime, the crime, the favors, the vendettas, the police, the pressure. But his plea was for an instant solution, a magic carpet. If I had made it, why not him? How hard could it be, compared to the path that led to Gums Gillespie?

  “I can’t tell you if it’s worth it or not,” I said quietly, “but money and education are the only ways out of the swamp, and you haven’t got any money. You’re smart, everyone says so. But you can’t talk. Why not go to a college? A polytech.”

  “Back to school? Who would take me—with my record?”

  “They won’t ask about your record, and it’s not the same as school. My girlfriend is training in a poly—they’re for blokes li
ke you trying to better themselves.”

  He sighed, then turned and spat into the water.

  “Got the address?”

  I scribbled down on a card the name and address of the educational institute where Daisy was doing a term of hands-on teaching practice.

  “Yeah, ta.”

  He turned and walked away. I watched him go with the comfortable certainty that he would neither use the card nor contact me again.

  I heard a short time later that he had been sentenced to twelve months in Wormwood Scrubs for the offense of causing grievous bodily harm.

  —

  I cannot say that I thought about him very much as the glorious summer of ’76 continued, incredibly, into September and October and finally dwindled in fires of gold and russet throughout London’s parklands. His name came up from time to time because his solicitors, who had been pleased with the way I had won his case at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court, were sending more and more work. From them I learned that he did, indeed, suffer from that most ancient human need: the need to betray.

  He was known among his predator peers as a grass, and for that reason could not expect a comfortable sojourn in the Scrubs. Perhaps they would let him out early, before his statutory parole date. The solicitors had heard that he was having a particularly rough ride.

  The thoughts I spared him were few. The sunless misery of his summer inside could hardly cast a shadow over the brilliance of mine outside. At the time, I “put my hand up,” as crooks say on the rare occasions when they make a confession, to two ferocious passions. One was ambition, the other was Daisy, and in flagrant violation of all the laws of life, I seemed to be allowed to indulge them equally and in parallel.

  5

  The Monday after his death I awoke with Daisy still hanging on to me in her sleep in a fetal position. He had died on a cold windy night at the end of March, but now it was early April, with all the agonizing promise of spring. Light flooded my bedroom, trapping her discarded clothes and underwear in a golden pool on the floor. Her blond hair spilled chaotically over my pillow and chest, leaving uncovered an elegant shoulder and the dimple her collarbone made where it joined her neck.