Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

I went and stood beside the London Road up near the old stone cross they’ve got there, where Queen Eleanor was set down on her funeral procession back to London, and it wasn’t long before I’d thumbed a lorry down, on its way to that very place. I spun a yarn about a lift I’d missed from some well-off old chum who drove a Bentley, and the lorry driver was soon taken in. He drove me to Tally Ho Corner on the Barnet Road and we arrived there about six as it was getting light.

I told a fellow at the Transport Office there that my own car had been pinched from outside a coffee stall because to tell the truth by then I was quite dozy and forgot that rot I’d said about the Bentley. Still, I’ve got a way with people, there’s a lot of folk have said it, and this bloke was no exception. Put me on a coach, the nine-fifteen for Cardiff, so that I arrived there in the afternoon and caught another bus to Penybryn. I could walk from there to Ivy’s house at Gellygaer and got in about eight that night.

Well, as I say, there’s always fuss with Ivy. Not that it’s her fault, it’s just there always is, and that night was no different. First of all I had her father, old man Jenkins, buttonhole me in the passageway and ask why it had taken me so long to get there with his Ivy at death’s door with illness and my baby on the way. You know how Taffy Welshman likes his bit of melodrama now and then, and he had Ivy sounding more like Little Nell than anything before he’d done with me. I told him how I’d had my car pinched in Northampton which I dare say I believed myself by then, I’d had to reel it out that often. It’s a funny thing, but on my oath, stood in his passage at that moment I’d forgotten everything about that other poor chap and the fire.

After I’d gotten past the dad I had the daughter to contend with. Ivy was propped up on pillows in her room and she looked very bad. The baby was due almost any time. No sooner had I sat down on the bed than she was asking when we should move into our new house in Surrey. To be frank, it caught me off-guard and I looked at her gone out. I’d quite forgotten all the business about Kingston-on-Thames that I’d told her and her dad when I was tipsy at our wedding do. Before I could come up with something good she was in floods of tears and telling me I didn’t love her, and how she was sure that I was seeing someone else. Why was I spending all these nights away and so on. You can guess the greater part of it.

They don’t consider what you might have gone through, do they? Buy me this and buy me that and let’s live somewhere else. Five hundred pounds a year I’m earning now from Leicester Brace & Garter and you might think I’d be well-to-do, but not a bit of it. All of it’s gone on kids or women long before I see a penny of it. It’s the same old story.

As it stood, although I hadn’t mentioned it to Lillian, I’d planned to sell the house and furniture we had at Buxted Road in Finchley so that I could use the cash to get set up with Ivy and the nipper when it came. Now, you can call me what you like, but I’ve always been softer than I should be when it comes to kids. I’d make a settlement to Lily and young Arthur, naturally.

Of course, I couldn’t say all this to Ivy without having her fall wise to Lily and my Finchley set-up, so I acted all offended and made quite a fuss about having my car pinched from outside the coffee shop so that it took me eighteen hours to get to Gellygaer. I find it often works if someone gets upset to act as if you’re more upset than they are in return. When you’re a smart chap like myself it never fails, and Ivy was soon telling me that she was sorry that she’d had a go at me, and it was just her nerves, what with the baby due and her so poorly. I said, ‘There now, Climbing Ivy, you can cling to me,’ and when she did I put my hand inside her nighty-top and had a feel. Her tit was hard and heavy with the end part stood out like a football stud. I slept in their spare room that night and I was on the bone just thinking of it, even after all the upset I had during supper, with that neighbour and her bloody paper.

If I’m truthful it’s my biggest fault, the sex. I’ll tell you, half the time I think of nothing else, and when you’re on your own a lot like me, driving from place to place, it makes it worse. You spend a lot of time with daydreams when you’re up and down the road. Sometimes I’ll have to pull in at a lay-by for a fiddle just so I can think of something else but fanny for an hour or two. I’ve got a catalogue I carry with me in the car with photographs of models in the company range. They’re only little pictures with four of them to a page, and you can only see the women from their tummies to the top part of their legs. You’ll think I’m crackers but to me they’ve all got different characters, and things about the way they stand so you can tell what sort of girls they are. Some of them, they’re the type you know that you’d get on with, and that they’d have decent personalities.

There’s one that I call