A Handful of Summers Page 16

  Woody walked up to the pram, looked down at the sleeping baby and beamed at us.

  ‘Hasn’t woken up yet, I see,’ he said.

  Abie turned to look at me, very slowly.

  ‘Forbsey,’ he said, ‘say something to Woody.’

  ‘It has been awake,’ I said, brilliantly.

  ‘You’re sure it’s actually been awake?’ asked Woody.

  Abie looked at me.

  ‘He wants to know if we’re sure the baby has been awake,’ he said.

  ‘It wet Abie,’ I said.

  ‘Dagne,’ said Woodcock, turning to his wife. ‘Did you hear that? Forbsey says that the baby wet Abie.’

  ‘You mean wet him?’ said Dagne.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Abie. ‘Wet me.’

  ‘It drinks anything you give it and converts it into widdle,’ I explained. Abie had a wild look about him, which reminded me of an unexploded bomb.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ he said to me, still in a most genial way. ‘I’m dreamin’. I’ve got to be. Forbsey, listen. Phone down to room service an’ order breakfast. That way I’ll wake up and know I’m dreamin’.’

  ‘It’s the afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘Where in the hell have you been?’ Abie asked Woodcock.

  ‘Having lunch with Dagne,’ said Woody.

  Spontaneous combustion is a rare phenomenon, taking place only when selected ingredients are present simultaneously in exactly the right proportions. For Abie, conditions were near-perfect. His particular explosion, when it occurred, reminded me of one of those fireworks which can’t quite decide when to go off – fizzling, crackling, hopping about and emitting odd blasts of varying intensity. Phrases like ‘driven moggy’; ‘chokin’ to death’; ‘ran clean out a milk’; ‘bloody bottles don’t work’ and ‘changin’ nappies full of crap’ kept popping out of his mouth, while he walked up and down swinging his racket.

  ‘You can’t be well,’ he said to Woodcock, several times. ‘You are a sick man. We gotta call a doctor. A specialist, maybe . . .’

  His explosion lasted all of ten minutes before, with a final blast of ‘Fuck you, Woody’, he turned and made for the clubhouse. I followed. We had a men’s doubles at four. As I walked away I heard Woody say to Dagne:

  ‘That’s very surprising. Heather assured me that Abie loves children!’

  After Germany came our Davis Cup tie against Romania – an event which, whenever I considered it, caused a certain hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Although Ilie Nastase was not yet on the scene, Ion Tiriac was mean and hungry and hardly ever missed a ball. To make matters worse, we had no idea at all about the strength of the rest of the Romanian team. For all we knew, they may have cooked up some diabolical plot to overthrow us.

  Abie viewed the whole expedition with immense scepticism. He’d read up bits about the tyranny of communism, the Russian secret police, Siberia, the Salt Mines, the NKVD and the Iron Curtain in some of his magazines, and scowled darkly whenever the trip was discussed.

  ‘That guy Marx,’ he said to me while we were changing, ‘couldn’t have been for real. They should have locked him up. I tell you, Forbsey, we’re gonna have to keep our heads screwed bloody well on. It’s not impossible that the whole lot of us disappear for good. What’s one tennis team, specially South Africans, to that bunch of fanatics? Nothin’. Absolutely nothin’!’

  And he did up his tennis shoes with a jerk that half lifted him off his seat.

  We embarked at Zurich on a grey Russian jet with droopy wings that immediately set Abie off again.

  ‘Bloody thing’s unstable, Forbsey,’ he said as we climbed the steps. ‘They don’t care too much about safety, these commies – they make these things real tough to fly, then they sell them to the Chinese.’

  I asked Abie where he got his information from, to which he replied cryptically: ‘You don’t read the right books, buddy!’

  At Bucharest airport they took our passports away and told us that they would be returned on our departure. This actually did make me uneasy. Abie muttered something to Claude Lister, our captain and trainer, about ‘disappearing without trace’.

  From the moment we landed in Bucharest, Abie changed completely. He turned up the collar of his raincoat and kept a cigarette, mostly unlit, in the corner of his mouth, which made his sentences even more curt.

  ‘Our rooms’ll be bugged for sure,’ he said, ‘so don’t shoot your mouth off.’

  ‘I don’t actually know anything secret,’ I said.

  I was, in fact, surprised and subdued by the dreary greyness of the place as we drove from the airport through the city. It was like a film in black-and-white. The people hurried up and down the streets, hunched into their coats against the fine drizzle, featureless, anonymous. I was depressed and worried about the pending match, as I always was about pending Davis Cup ties. We stayed at one of the best hotels; a tall building which towered above most others. Abie and I were shown to a room on one of the upper floors – comfortable enough, with a bathroom attached.

  ‘Hey, Abie,’ I called out, relieved, ‘this place is a –’

  ‘Ssssh,’ he hissed, with a finger to his lips. I froze in my tracks watching him. He was frantically busy setting up the portable record player he always carried, opening it up and arranging the electrical connection. Miraculously, it began to work. A record was installed and suddenly the room was full of Sinatra with London By Night. Abie turned up the volume.

  ‘What’s that you were saying, Forbsey?’ he asked.

  ‘I was going to say that this is not a bad hotel,’ I said lamely, but by then Abie was moving around the walls peering behind the pictures, pressing an ear to the panelling, tugging and tapping. In the centre of the room he stopped and stood gazing at the light pendant.

  ‘You know how you can tell when a light is bugged, Forbsey?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘It flickers,’ said Abie. ‘Something to do with the volts.’ He moved to the door, turned on the switch and we both eyed the burning light.

  ‘Seems OK,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Could be,’ said Abie. He moved into the bathroom.

  Now Abie has a fixation about bathrooms. The time he spends inside them is very important to him and if, by some chance, he has a room without one, he gets demented and broods about it, sitting upon the edge of his bed, picking his toenails and scowling like the devil.

  Certain things are ritual. Each morning he wakes at about seven with two immediate objectives always in mind. The first, a bath. The second, a session on the toilet with the newspaper. He runs the bath while he sits on the throne, and the session is under way. Now Abie has the most unbelievably regular and explosive lavatorial habits I’ve ever known. Against a background noise of rushing water would come a series of blasts and rumblings which sometimes shook the room, and often used to remind me of the soundtrack of a war film on TV. The variety of his sound effects was unbelievable. Sometimes he produced a series of evenly spaced, heavy raps. At others a sharp, tremendous bang tapered off in a series of grumbling noises, while sometimes the grumbling noises led up to the bang. After a can or two of prunes, followed by doses of salts that he sometimes took, savage sounds ensued, like sheets being ripped. Once, in Paris, I remember a particularly enthusiastic assault had raised a cloud of pigeons from the eaves of our hotel. Severe gas attacks usually accompanied his performances, adding to the realism, and assuring him of privacy during his bath. It was Abie’s opinion that if he flushed the toilet before rising, the gas would diminish. It wasn’t valid. When this measure failed he would sometimes stand in the doorway and violently swing the door back and forth, creating draughts of dubious odours to eddy about the place. With a brimming bath at hand, he would then do his press-ups and sit-ups, swing his racket a few times, run on the spot and generally tone up before collapsing into the bat
h. Thus his mornings.

  His other bathroom habits involved bathing immediately upon arriving at his hotel after his journey. Thus in Bucharest that afternoon, when he finally made for the bathroom, I knew what to expect. I, meanwhile, busied myself unpacking and selecting the bed best suited to cope with whatever nocturnal excursions my subconscious might drum up.

  (‘You gonna be so nervous, Forbsey,’ said Abie darkly, ‘that I hate to think what’s gonna happen at night. We may have to chain you to the bed!’)

  After five minutes of puzzling silence, Abie’s voice reached me from the bathroom. ‘Hey, Forbsey. Come and take a look at this.’

  I found him standing with a towel around his waist, contemplating the most extraordinary plumbing arrangement I’d ever seen. A maze of pipes, U-bends and elbows connected the various taps, shower, toilet and bidet, and valves and faucets sprouted at intervals for no apparent reason. The bath was a shortish affair with a tremendous inlet, served by two valves that appeared to belong on some Jules Verne submarine.

  ‘And what’s more,’ said Abie scornfully, ‘with all these pipes and things, there’s no water. Not one drop of water.’

  ‘Have you opened the right ones?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve opened them all,’ said Abie. ‘Even the big one under the bath.’

  I checked, as I wasn’t sure whether Abie knew which was open and which was shut, but sure enough, he’d opened every visible valve and faucet.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean, “That’s it”?’ he asked indignantly. ‘I’ve got to bathe. You know I can’t think straight ’til I’ve bathed.’

  We were standing there, nonplussed, contemplating our dilemma, when suddenly we heard a far-off rushing sound, like a tube train approaching at high speed. It appeared to be coming up from below us, and began to get louder and louder at an alarming rate.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Abie, as the pipes began to vibrate and one of the taps began to emit a resonant, threatening hum, like a church organ only half warmed up. With a mighty blast, the water arrived. In a flash everything came on at once – the shower gushed, the toilet flushed, the bidet began filling, the basin taps gave staccato coughs and snorts, mostly steam, and a gout of water leapt into the bath, filling it to the brim in an instant with ice-cold water. We made frantic adjustments, and finally, with the floor awash to the depth of an inch or so, everything stopped flowing with the exception of the toilet. Nothing we could do prevented it from flushing continuously and copiously. Abie eyed it warily.

  ‘And in Italy last week, would you believe it? I couldn’t get the toilet to flush at all. Had to buy a plastic bucket and pour bath water in. Jesus. Now we’ve got a built-in fountain. I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand it.’

  In spite of the expected terrors of Bucharest, my nocturnal activities were remarkably placid. Only one short, but oddish, little event sticks in my mind – and this, I still claim, was caused by the particularly severe gas attacks to which Abie subjected me that week. He, in turn, blamed these gas attacks on the Bucharest diet, saying that the masses of fresh strawberries and sweetish wine which accompanied every meal used to combine and effervesce, and build up inside him such abnormal pressures that even he himself became alarmed at the violence of his morning sessions. Door-swinging became essential and all windows and doors had to be flung open, to prevent the paintwork from peeling.

  In the dark hours of the night before our doubles match, it suddenly appeared to me that the room was full of noxious gas and that I was being suffocated. The shortage of air was so acute that immediate action had to be taken. There was no time at all for consideration. I leapt out of bed, seized a tennis racket and, darting to the nearest window, knocked out a glass pane with the racket handle and breathed for my life through the hole in the broken glass. After half a minute of this I began to realise that perhaps the situation wasn’t as critical as I had first imagined. I withdrew my nose cautiously, sniffed the air inside the room, realised that I’d been mistaken, then turned to look at Abie, hoping fervently that he had not awoken.

  He had.

  He was sitting up in bed and watching me with the odd sort of expression which he now adopted for use during the onset of my madness. A monologue apparently seemed called for.

  ‘Forbsey’s makin’ his own holes for breathin’ through,’ he said to himself. ‘I mean, some people are quite happy to open the windows. Not Forbsey. He’s got to make his own private holes.’ He looked up at me. ‘What’s the problem, buddy?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t realise we were that short of air!’

  It took me some time to explain to Abie why it had seemed necessary to ‘make my own private hole’, and even then he wasn’t fully convinced, and for a while seemed genuinely put out.

  ‘Imagine if they are actually buggin’ us,’ he said as we plugged the hole with a towel. ‘They wouldn’t know what the hell to think. Maybe accuse us of releasin’ a pigeon or something. Goddammit, Forbsey –’

  ‘Abie,’ I said firmly, ‘we are not being bugged. Besides, nobody in their right minds would knock out a window pane to release a pigeon.’

  ‘Who’s talkin’ about people in their right minds?’ he asked. ‘Just supposin’ the police arrived and asked you what you were doin’. “Puttin’ my nose through a hole in the window,” you’d tell them, and then they’d say: “And what’s so important out there you have to put your nose out?”’

  He had a point, I suppose. I felt deflated and sleepy and unhappy about the whole situation.

  On our first sortie into the city that evening, Abie had looked in vain for an English movie, or for any clubs that had music going. The shops were half-filled with thrifty items, and only a bar or two showed any signs of life. At last, in desperation, he bought a can of stewed pineapple, marked ‘Product of Cuba’, to loosen himself up after the flight. Not that he needed, in my opinion, any ‘loosening up’.

  ‘You get any looser, Abe,’ I said to him, ‘and they’ll get a reading tomorrow on the seismograph.’

  ‘What’s a seismograph?’ asked Abie.

  ‘A thing that measures earthquakes,’ I replied.

  He laughed at that. ‘Better than a pressure burst,’ he said, shortly, ‘which is what happens if I seize up!’

  We returned to the room, where he set to work with a pair of scissors. Putting the scissor point to the can, he gave them a welt with the palm of his hand, whereupon the can gave a prolonged hiss, sending out a jet of nectar which almost filled his shirt pocket. Comment at once poured forth, mixed with phrases like, ‘booby-trapped’ and ‘blowin’ up innocent people’.

  ‘Jesus, Forbsey,’ he said as a final word. ‘Those Cubans are bloody savages. Herbie (Flam) told me. That Castro’s something else altogether.’

  ‘Somebody else,’ I corrected him, but he ignored me.

  ‘I mean, when a country gets down to buggin’ stewed fruit, where can a man go?’ And he moved off moodily into the toilet to check out his system.

  That evening at dinner Abie finished his food, as usual, twice as fast as anyone else, pushed his plate away and regarded the assembled team.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said with the air of a long-suffering scientist who has suddenly verified a private obsession.

  ‘Knew what, Abie?’ asked Claude Lister, in his British way.

  ‘The light in the toilet’s bugged,’ announced Abie.

  ‘Oh, come on, Abie,’ said Cliff Drysdale, still the junior of the team. ‘Do you think the Romanians want a recording of your farts! They’d be smarter to install a gas detector! The toilet!’ and he gave a hoot of laughter.

  Abie turned to Claude Lister with a look of extreme exasperation.

  ‘He’s only been around for eighteen years,’ he explained, ‘and most of that time he’s been rattlin’ his brains together to make sure they’re still there!’ He turned to Cliff: ‘Idiot!�
� he said. ‘Don’t you understand that they’d bug the toilet just because idiots like you’d figure they’d never bug the toilet?’ He turned back to Lister and said triumphantly, ‘Right, Skip?’

  Claude Lister was the fairest man I’ve ever known, cautious in even the most mundane arguments where his players were concerned.

  ‘I doubt whether they would go as far as, er, bugging, as you call it, the, er, toilet,’ he said.

  ‘You guys are gangin’ up on me,’ was Abie’s only further comment, as at that moment his dessert arrived.

  We all forgot about the incident, but Abie, apparently, brooded about the scepticism of his friends. The next morning he awoke especially early, feeling the call, and entered the toilet, carrying Time magazine. Half asleep, I suddenly heard him give a grunt of satisfaction. In a flash he had emerged in his underpants and shot out of the room, returning in a minute or two leading, or rather dragging, a tousled and bewildered Claude Lister by the arm. I awoke immediately. He dragged Claude into the toilet, set him down on the seat, thrust the magazine into his hands and said:

  ‘Right! Now, Skip, what do you see?’

  ‘My dear chap, I can’t get my eyes open!’ said Claude plaintively.

  ‘Well, get them open,’ said Abie. Claude opened his eyes and found himself seated on our toilet, dressed in his pyjamas and staring at a copy of Time.

  ‘Light’s flickering like a bastard,’ said Abie. ‘You can’t even read the magazine.’

  ‘You mean we’re being bugged?’ asked Claude.

  ‘Sure we’re bein’ bugged,’ said Abie. ‘They’ve got everything we’ve said down on tape!’

  In spite of Abie’s forebodings, Bucharest was relatively uneventful. We won the match and were allowed to leave without being imprisoned. But Abie sank into his seat in the jetliner with a heavy sigh.