I knew this bloke Adam.
Back when I was training to be a journalist, so that would have been when I was 17. Adam was a fellow trainee and his dad was Foreign Correspondent for one of the big Fleet Street papers, so the family was based in Paris.
To us other aspiring scribes, none of whom had ever been closer to France than a pub or two in Dover at that time, Adam was a touch exotic in that he spoke fluent French and had film star looks. He was also very funny indeed. Sadly he was a terrible trainee and he just couldn’t get anything right. When it was getting obvious they were going to boot him off the course he took a weekend off and went and visited his dad in France to seek his advice.
Adam had a close relationship with his father. For example, Adam had been going out with this French girl. Isabel was an animal in bed (Adam never specified what type of animal but when he told me the whole story I imagined that she was a member of the cat family, and I was soon proved to be correct...).
So, while he was living in France at home with his mum and dad he was going out with sexy Isabel. He was only 16 at the time and I think she was about 26, which must have seemed so old to him then, I know it did to me. Of course he was big for his age - in height I mean - and so he told her he was 25. Apparently she ummed and arred over going out with him because he was younger than her. Phew, what a shock she’d have got had she known the awful truth - that he was really just a schoolboy! A big one, but still a schoolboy.
Anyway, sometimes he’d stay over at Isabel’s. I mean he had to. He could hardly tell her he had to go home because his mum and dad were waiting up for him, what with him supposedly being 25 and all that.
Thankfully for him his mum and dad were pretty liberal, which was a bit weird because his dad wrote for just about the most right-wing newspaper in Britain (it truly is a strange world we live in). Adam told his parents that he was house-sitting with a friend of his who needed him to keep her company during the dark Parisian nights. For some reason I think they thought this was innocent enough - what with Adam being 16.
Now, on this particular occasion Adam comes back from Isabel’s in time for breakfast and him, his mum and his dad are sitting there and his dad is reading the newspaper so all Adam can see of him are the morning’s headlines.
His mum brings her son some milk and she says, “Adam, your shirt is all torn at the back and it looks like there’s blood on it too. Whatever can you have been doing?”
Adam’s mind went into overdrive as he poured the milk on his cornflakes. And then it came to him. “Yes. Last night I was playing with Isabel’s pussy.” His father’s newspaper came down slowly and he looked at his son over his half glasses, pursed his lips and gave him a couple of slow nods before hoisting the paper once again.
“That must be some fierce pussy,” said his mother noisily buttering a piece of toast. “Oh yes,” said Adam, “if you weren’t careful it would actually gobble you all up.”
Anyway, the point is this. Adam went to Paris for the weekend and asked his dad what he should do about the journalism course. They talked about it for a long time and Adam told his father everything. About all the mistakes he was making, about how it just wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go, about the tutors who just wouldn’t give him a chance and his dad thought about it for a long time and if he’d had a pipe, indeed if he’d been a pipe smoker, he would have puffed and puffed aromatic smoke into the air, and eventually he did say to Adam, “Have you ever considered turning to crime?”
I was thinking about Isabel’s pussy - well, to be more accurate, I was thinking about the story about Isabel’s pussy. Anyway, I was seriously wondering if crime might not be the answer to my predicament. It really had got down to that. I just couldn’t see my way out of this at all. So there I was sitting on my bed at Henry and Clarissa’s, the Lotus ticking cool in the garage below, thinking about this, and the house was all quiet and I put my hand in my jacket pocket and brought out The General’s gun, a Ruger Speed Six, and I looked at it all heavy and loaded and shiny and cool in my hand. And I wondered...