Absolute Beginners Read Online Free PDF Page A

and finally my half-brother Vern, who Mum had by a mystery man seven years before she tied up with my poppa, and who’s the number-one weirdie, layabout and monster of the Westminster city area. As for the numerous additions, these are Mum’s lodgers, because she keeps a boarding house, and some of them, as you’d expect if you knew Ma, are lodged in very firmly, though there’s nothing my Dad can do about it, apparently, as his spirits are squashed by a combination of my Mum and the 1930s, and that’s one of the several reasons for which I left the dear old ancestral home.
    Mum won’t let me have a key and, as a matter of fact, is even tough about giving one to her paid-up boarders, as she likes to see them come and go, even late at night, so though as a matter of fact I’ve had a key made of my own, in case of accidents, I go through the form of ringing the front doorbell, just out of politeness, and also to show her I regard myself strictly as a visitor anddon’t live there. As usual, although she gets mad if you go down the area steps and knock on the basement door, where she almost always is, Mum came out from there into the area and looked up to see who it was, before she’d come up the stairs inside and open the front door for me which she might have done, if she’d been civilised, in the first place.
    There she stood, her face lighting up at the sight of a pair of slacks, even her own son’s, with that sloppy sexy expression that always drove me mad, because, after all, tucked away behind all those mounds of highly desirable flesh, my Mum has got real brains. But she’s only used them to make herself more appealing, like pepper and salt and garlic on an overdone pork chop.
    ‘Hello, Blitz Baby,’ she said.
    Which is what she calls me, because she had me in one, in a tube shelter with an air raid warden acting as midwife, as she never tires of telling me or, worse still, other people in my presence.
    ‘Hullo, Ma,’ I said to her.
    She still stood there, pink hands with detergent suds on them on her Toulouse-Lautrec hips, giving me that come-hither look she gave her lodgers, I suppose.
    ‘Are you going to open up?’ I asked her, ‘or should I climb in through your front parlour window?’
    ‘I’ll send you down your father,’ she answered me. ‘I expect he’ll be able to let you in.’
    This is the trick my Mum has, to speak to me of Dad as if he’s only my relation, only mine, that she never hadanything whatever to do with (apart, of course, from having had sex with him and even marrying the poor old man). I suppose this is because, number one, Dad’s what’s known as a failure, though I don’t regard him as one exactly, as anyone could have seen he’d never have succeeded at anything anyway, and number two, to show that her first husband, whoever he was, the one who goosed her into producing that Category A morbid, my elder half-brother Vernon, was the real man in her life, not my own poor old ancestor. Well, that’s her little bit of feminine psychology: you certainly learn a lot about women from your Mum.
    I was kept there waiting a considerable time, so that if it wasn’t for the need of my darkroom they’d have never seen me, when Dad appeared with that dead-duck look not merely on his face, but hanging on his whole poor old scruffy body, which makes me demented, because really he’s got a lot of character, and though he’s no mind to speak of, he’s read a lot like I do – I mean, tried to make the best of what he’s got in a way my Mum hasn’t tried to do at all, or even thought of trying. As usual, he opened the door without a word except ‘Hullo,’ and started off up the stairs again towards his room in the attic portion of the building, which is just an act because he knows, of course, I’ll follow him up there for a little chatter, if only for politeness’ sake, and to show him I’m his son.
    But today I didn’t, partly because I was suddenly tired of his