Minority Report Part 1

A mindreader called K, who changed his name to Yak, came to a seaside town not intending to kill the ventriloquist. 

Window hit by rain, diffused screams from the promenade, Yak raised himself from the bed, iron frame like something in a barracks, and treading across threadbare patterned carpet, pressed an ear to the partition. Just a push, it was that flimsy, and he would be through, and what then? They would be there, starkers? P and the ventriloquist.

    He’d seen her on the stairs. In drink probably, a drunkard’s careful unsteady stagger, hair almost covering her eyes but the same thick lipstick. Crimson. Smudged. The landlady had scolded him for shitting in his pot. That’s just for number ones Mr Yak she had said. We’re a respectable house here. Tell that to them. He’d heard her, P, and the ventriloquist going at it all night. Squealing she was, as if she did have his whole hand up her like with his dummy, but it was her the noise was coming from and not his pursed vibrating lips. He’d make him squeal if ever they met man to man. She was my wife once, he’d say. You don’t know her like I do. The mother of our daughter.

    Turning now away from the partition K caught a shadow, cried out, who goes there? He took a single step closer, blast this stingy light. Limp arms and legs. Tapered breast. Silly fool! It was only his pinstripe airing on the back of the door. Dry-cleaned fresh it was and that wasn’t cheap. But you can’t penny-pinch a good impression. First impressions count, any artiste will tell you that.

    At the sound of a cry, this one from the promenade, K pushed the curtain aside, placed an eye to the crack. Spartans. Opposite. Doric columns affronting the façade giving it the impression of a temple and certainly worshiping went on there. A sauna for men of a certain kind. Healthy living! He’d seen them coming out that first day, eyeing him up, as he paced outside the B&B. It was their daughter who’d written him. Grubby postcard. Grubby writing.

Here on a dirty weekend with Keith I saw her. Mum! Tiptoeing on the arms of a much younger man. I knew his face. On posters all around the town. Peter Reach and Kenny the Tearaway. A double act like no other! She wasn’t even ashamed. Dad, you’re better off without her.

K lay first like a foetus, then flat on his back, forming shapes from birth to death but sleep wouldn’t come. Inside, nothing from behind the partition. Outside footsteps, the buzz of a door. The sauna doing a brisk trade he supposed. A cloud passed K’s feet, moved up his body, settled in, vaporous. It was always the same. On his National Service they’d mocked him in the showers, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, then one or the other of them would take him round the back of the canteen. You won’t tell. It’s rum here with no birds. He’d never told her, P, and she didn’t guess, not to begin with. He’d got used to dissembling. It was all part of the act. I can read your mind.

    Yak. For one week only. The Pier Playhouse. He’ll know your question even before you ask!

    There’d been talk of him going on the tele once. For two years things had been good. He and P snapped by the papers. In Soho. All the world going nuts for P. She’d been on the up. It was the fashion, birds from up North with a mouth on them. Dolled up she didn’t look half bad.

    She hadn’t been difficult to find in the end. Peter Reach and Kenny the Tearaway was on posters all around the town. Now Playing at The Algonquin Theatre. K’d bought himself a ticket and sat in the front row, sweated through two hours of Reach with his hand up Kenny, the ersatz teenager’s, arse.

    Afterwards K, or Yak rather, he must remember who he was, waited at the stage door. There were others there, autograph hunters clutching tatty books with ragged corners. Reach had been hot property since his turn on the Royal Variety Performance. Then Bennie Hill had him on. They’d been photographed by the tabloids, dolly birds on their arms, going through the doors of some swanky club. Here would you sign this for me, love? Susan. Write, To Susan, with all my love. Something like that. Reach, having appeared, hair combed, wafting pungent cologne, put the coffin down, that’s what ventriloquists called the carrying cases for their dummies, and greeted the waiting crowd with open arms.

    I could nick his coffin, K thought, hot foot it down to the pier, empty Kenny the Tearaway into the surging sea. There would be no last words as he went under and tomorrow some kids would find his clip-on bow-tie washed up on the shore amidst the other debris, bottle tops, candy floss sticks, used rubber johnnies, hats adorned with Kiss Me Quick, half eaten sticks of rock. What would P make of Reach without his addendum? Source of income. Personality too probably. K knew what a fierce tongue she had, how insatiable she was once she got going. Poof. Poofter. Shirt-lifter. Faggot. We’ve got a fucking daughter. They’d wanted her to go on the stage. She had the legs for it but not the face. Six months she’d worked a revue in Vauxhall and that said it all. K had twice been to the show, in disguise, but P had been adamant she didn’t want to see her own daughter with her dollies out. Then she’d got pregnant anyway, to some gigolo or other and had to give it up. Didn’t know who the father was. There had been a lot apparently, a way of making a pound or two after the show. He and P knew all about making ends meet, they’d been living then in damp lodgings above a fish shop in a bleak Northern garrison town. They got dressed crab half-price from the fish shop, tenants’ bonus, and that was about the best of that sorry period. Along with the men’s toilets by the railway station. There was something thrilling about standing there with your todger out. In just six weeks K’d had more soldiers than he’d had in the army. More black eyes too. He’d tell P that it was punters who didn’t like his show and she believed him because she’d seen his show.

    Reach didn’t expect to be followed. Why would he? Down to the front. Tra-la-lar. A bunch of youths hanging out the door of an arcade. All arms, legs and shorn heads. Rattle and buzz of pinball machines. Chippie closing up for the night, proprietor standing outside, one arm on belly, other lifting a Pall Mall. Then the pier. Lit up like the end of rationing. A pair of young lovers cosied up at one end of a long bench as if it was all to do with gravity. Maybe when P saw him she’d take in his greying hair, the paunch, the shiny patches on his elbows, the threadbare socks and not see any of that, the decrepitude. No, she’d realise it was all a mistake. Not him but Reach. There was lust and there was love, they both knew that, and it was K she loved. 

The B&B Reach had finally washed up outside was called Dolly’s so K was expecting a dolly. You looking for a place to stay? she asked, left elbow cupped in right hand, fag between index and ring finger. Mr…? Mr…? Yak, he said. And is that a first or a last name? and he thought take your pick love, makes no odds to me, but he held out a hand and gave her some patter from his show, told her to think of a colour, any colour, it was always pink with this sort, and did she have something dead in her past, someone she’d cared for deeply, and when she looked spooked then pleased, people like to be the centre of your attention, he asked her if she had a room on the third floor, that’s where he’d seen the light flicker the night before, following Reach’s arrival, the shape of two bodies behind a thin curtain becoming one. I’m here for one week only. Yak. Mindreader. You don’t mind performers, do you? Talent as we like to say.

    But maybe he was losing it. He’d had a bit of a fright during his first show at The Pier Palace. Someone shouted, Get oorrrfff!, as soon as K, Yak, he was Yak, walked on the stage and there was a spattering of chuckles. It was the usual crowd. Young men with sleeves rucked up and sweaty top lips dropping in on their way back from the smokey barrooms of boozers, older men with rancid armpits, still wearing last week’s y-fronts, crunching on bags of pork scratchings. A few women, hair set in perms, faux-leather handbags on the folds of their plentiful laps, dour husbands in tow, regrets they had a few. And to begin, our National Pastime, no not that sir, steady on, this is a family show, SPORTS, I mean, ask me a question, any race, any team, any dog. He had a talent for it. Remembering things. Facts. Figures. He could still remember the first time he’d seen P. On the beach in Redcar. She’d had that dog with her, Winnie, named after Churchill, because it had the same dour face. She though, was a peach. The way she opened her lips, called out, Winnie, Winnie! He wanted her then, take her home, introduce her to his mum, to show her that Fred, the milkman, was water under the bridge. She still never left Fred a tip even at Christmas when all the neighbours’ empty bottles jangled with loose change and how many times had she told him she’d cancel if it wouldn’t set tongues wagging? He hadn’t even fancied him, not really. Now, we need a volunteer! It was always one of the young men, bravado in the pit but sheepish when faced with the sea of faces. And so it was here. K could see him in an oily boilersuit in a smokey factory somewhere, pub and a girl in an alleyway on a Friday night. Right slapper! It’ll be a meeting of minds, K, Yak, said reassuringly and he put his hands up to the lad’s forehead, flesh on flesh still fiercely intimate even in this public environment, the damp of sweat reminding of other bodies and other times, train station toilets, behind the bushes at Peasholm Park, outdoor manoeuvres in the army. It’s coming to me, Yak intoned, leaning in, increasing the pressure on the lad’s forehead. He raised his voice for those seated at the back. You, and on the ground, another, blood coming from him, head cradled between your thighs, a final breath. Death! The auditorium was silent, expecting a punchline, some final joke. But K, Yak, stunned, simply let his hands fall. This wasn’t from the young man’s head but his own, exactly the dream he’d been having since before arriving in this place. Him, a man with blood, sometimes also the dummy, half lying outside its coffin.

K awoke to noises coming from the other side of the partition, rhythmic, a staccato susurration. He pulled the thin pillow from under his head, placed it over his head but then the wailing piped up louder. They’d had complaints themselves, Rosey from the flat next door accosting him outside Ritzy’s, telling him it wasn’t decent, that carry-on, but she was only jealous because her fella was away in the merchant navy, the Bering Sea, and there were rumours. K had seen him, Ken, coming from under the pier and there was only one reason men went there, K knew that only too well.

    The heavy fingertips of wind against window and another cry. Outside this time. Kneeling on the divan K parted the curtains a crack. Two lads astride mopeds, the ends of their cigarettes going back and forth, specks of flying light. One of the lads made his mouth into a rapid O, GO!, and the other dismounted at speed, set off at a dash towards the entrance of Spartans. Behind the partition came a long groan, guttural, a single unintelligible noise, and it was, this final insult, that sent K clambering off the bed. Assailed from without and within he made the decision to flee.

    K’d seen the sign for The Duck on his first foray down the street and had been in after every show since, for a quick one, but there had never been any acknowledgment from the landlord that he was recognised as a regular. Big old duffer he was, a round gut like a beach ball under his strained shirt. A pint, K said, the usual, and he retreated with it, feet sticky on the carpet, over to one of the empty tables, ancestral rings from former pints spelling out a litany of similar orders. Behind the bar a long mirror, speckled with dust, years of grime. Beside the dim passage to the gents a jukebox, chipped gold paint, a smattering of once grandiose bulbs blown. K eyed a youth sidle up, fiddle in pocket for coin, insert and slink away to All Day and All of the Night. Quite. After K retrieved a second pint a whoosh of the public door, a gust of fresh air, signalled a new customer. Now, there’s a surprise! Reach, the ventriloquist, waltzing in like a preening hen, trousers tight around firm buttocks, top three buttons of white shirt undone, medallion, gold, nestled in chest hair, coffin handle gripped in right hand. So, here was a man who liked some lubrication after the sowing of his oats. Hey, don’t I know you from Dolly’s? The dark roving eyes of the interloper had alighted on K, shifted to one side, shifted back. Mind if I? Even without the coffin-dweller on his knee Reach sat with legs spread. Fancy one? K leant forward to pull one of the proffered Pall Malls. Play the ukulele, do you? What’s that? K nodded to the long box. Ventriloquist, replied Reach. That’s my dummy packed tight in there. Never let him out of my sight. Precious you see. And you’re staying with a lady? Reach smirked, took a long slurp from his pint. Older, I know, but I like them old. More grateful. None of this, I’m not in the mood tonight. And always willing to nip out and fetch a bacon sarnie. This one’s got money too. A nice little inheritance. Mother or father died. I forget which. Hey, how rude of me. What’s your name? Yak, said K. In the business of show too. I’m a mindreader. He pointed to the wall where the landlord had let him place one of his fliers for a couple of shillings. Then tell me what I’m thinking. They always asked this. It was just a question of assembling the parts on view and here K saw it all. A mother and father who doted upon their only son, ignoring the trouble he got into at school until it was too late to get any decent grades. It was his father, through connections down at the golf club, who secured Reach a job in a local estate agents. But Reach was unhappy, possessing a character that simply wanted to indulge its passions. Booze, football and women. He was carrying on with three housewives, he preferred women who were connected so they couldn’t pull at his strings, when one cuckolded husband caught a whiff of something amiss and cornered Reach in the alley behind the Ring o’ Bells. A broken rib and a black eye followed and Reach decided finally to sling his hook. Brushing up the hilarious act he’d performed for his final year school show, a dummy on his knee and a litany of coarse jokes, Reach easily got a gig in nearly every Working Men’s Club he rocked up at. It was easy come, easy go, and he wasn’t doing too bad. Look, he’d been on the front page of The Sun with Benny Hill, was getting gigs in big venues. The world was his oyster. I’m not that kind of mindreader, said K. It’s mostly card tricks. A bit of memory skill. Go on, ask me who came third in the fifth race at Cheltenham June 5, 1956. I like a bit of bum too, said Reach leaning in. He was ogling the lad back at the jukebox, fiddling in his pocket for another coin. Look at the arse on him, said Reach. If you’ll excuse my French. I’d love to bend him over Aunt Fanny’s Grand Piano. Sorry am I shocking you? That’s just me. Say it like it is. And I’ve seen you loitering outside Spartans. Two peas in a pod me and you. Two peas in a buggering pod.

Read Part 2