Absolute Beginners Read Online Free PDF

performance, and partly because I’d so much work to do immediately inside my darkroom. So out Iwent and, would you believe it, found that horrible old weirdie Vernon had built himself a cuckoo’s nest there, which was something new.
    ‘Hullo, Jules,’ I said to him. ‘And how’s my favourite yobbo?’
    ‘Don’t call me Jules,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you.’
    Which he has – perhaps 200,000 times or so, ever since I invented the name for him, on account of Vernon = Verne = Jules of Round the World in Eighty Days.
    ‘And what are you doing in my darkroom, Julie?’ I asked this oafo brother of mine.
    He’d got up off the camp bed in the corner – all blankets and no sheets, just like my Vernon – and came over and did an act he’s done with monotonous regularity ever since I can remember, namely, to stand up over me, close to me, breathing heavily and smelling of putrid perspiration.
    ‘What, again?’ I said to him. ‘Not another corny King Kong performance!’
    His fist whisked past my snout in playful panto.
    ‘Do grow up , Vernon,’ I said to him, very patiently. ‘You’re a big boy now, more than a quarter of a century old.’
    What would happen next would be either that he’d push me around in which case, of course, it would be just a massacre, except that he knew I’d get in at least one blow that would really cripple him, and perhaps even harm him for life – or else he’d suddenly feel the whole thing was beneath his dignity, and want to talk to me, talk to anyone, in fact, whatever, since the poorold ape was such an H-Certificate product he was really very lonely.
    So he plucked at my short-arse Italian jacket with his great big cucumber fingers and said, ‘What you wear this thing for?’
    ‘Excuse me, Vernon,’ I said, edging past him to unload my camera on my table. ‘I wear it,’ I said, taking the jacket off and hanging it up, ‘to keep warm in winter, and, in summer, to captivate the chicks by swinging my tail around.’
    ‘Hunh!’ he said, his mind racing fast, but nothing coming out except this noise like a polar bear with wind. He looked me up and down while his thoughts came into focus. ‘Those clothes you wear,’ he said at last, ‘disgust me.’
    And I hope they did! I had on precisely my full teenage drag that would enrage him – the grey pointed alligator casuals, the pink neon pair of ankle crêpe nylon-stretch, my Cambridge blue glove-fit jeans, a vertical-striped happy shirt revealing my lucky neck-charm on its chain, and the Roman-cut short-arse jacket just referred to … not to mention my wrist identity jewel, and my Spartan warrior hairdo, which everyone thinks costs me 17/6d in Gerrard Street, Soho, but which I, as a matter of fact, do myself with a pair of nail scissors and a three-sided mirror that Suzette’s got, when I visit her flatlet up in Bayswater, W2.
    ‘And you, I suppose,’ I said, deciding that attack was the best method of defence though oh! so wearisome, ‘you imagine you look alluring in that horrible men’swear suiting that you’ve bought in a marked-down summer sale at the local casbah.’
    ‘It’s manly,’ he said, ‘and it’s respectable.’
    I gazed at the floppy dung-coloured garments he had on. ‘Ha!’ was about all I said.
    ‘What’s more,’ he went on, ‘I’ve not wasted money on it. It’s my demobilisation suit.’
    My heaven, yes, it looked it – yes !
    ‘When you’ve done your military service,’ the poor old yokel said, his boot face breaking into a crafty grin, ‘you’ll be given one too, you’ll find. And a decent haircut just for once.’
    I gazed at the goon. ‘Vernon,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you. Somehow you missed the teenage rave, and you never seem to have had a youth. To try to tell you the simplest facts of life is just a waste of valuable breath, however, do try to dig this, if your microbe minibrain is capable. There’s no honour and glory in doing military service, once