street. Someone had fallen at the foot of them. I ran over. ‘Can I help you? Are you hurt?’ I cried out.
By the light from the inner door, I could see this man was bleeding. He tilted his face, and I saw Jimmy Cannibal. He gave me a look of intense dislike, crawled to his feet, and lurched slowly up the stair. A voice from behind me said, ‘Who’s you?’
I turned, and saw a very fat man in a fur-lined jerkin.
‘That boy’s been wounded. What should we do?’
He said nothing, and struck a match under the stair. I saw him pick up a knife. He looked at me, still holding it. ‘Who’s you?’ he said again.
‘A friend of Johnny Fortune’s.’
‘I think I hear about you. What did you see out here?’
‘You know what I saw. A fight.’
‘Is best you saw nothing.’ He picked up a piece of newspaper, and wrapped the knife in it. ‘Who did attack him? You saw that?’
‘No. It was too quick.’
‘Is best you saw nothing, then. You come inside now?’
‘I don’t think I will.’
‘Best you come in till they scatter up there in the street. Give them the time to scatter.’
He propelled me in, and shut the outer door. We stood in the dim corridor.
‘How’s Johnny? That boy got some loot again just now?’
‘Not much.’
‘He ought to get some, then. A boy like him could make some easy, and then lose it all to me.’ He let out a laugh as big as his body. ‘And you, are you loaded?’
‘I have some money, yes.’
‘Come inside, then. I give you some good excitement before you say goodbye to it.’
‘Are you Mr Obo-King?’
‘That’s what they call me. They should so, is my name.’
He led the way into a large room with little chairs and tables where chicken and rice and foo-foo were being served. Some boys were playing a juke-box, and Mr Obo-King called to one of them, ‘Take a bucket out there, man. There’s some mess to wash away.’ He turned again to me. ‘The gambling’s through here. In this next door.’
‘I’ll come in later. I want to eat.’
Mr Obo-King looked at me. ‘Then come later. I give you some good excitement before I skin you.’
I sat down, asked for foo-foo, and looked around. Some of the men and women were dressed like birds of paradise, so that you’d turn and look at them in the street; though down here they seemed right enough, in spite of the resolute squalor of the place, and even though other customers were in the last degrees of destitution. A few seemed to have camped there for the night, for they’d kipped down on window-shelves and tables, snoring, or dreaming, possibly, of ‘back home’. A short boy with a pale blue-green pasty face and enormous eyes came up and said, ‘Buy me a meal, man.’ As I called for it, he suddenly lifted his sweater and showed me, on his naked stomach underneath, an enormous lump. ‘Hospital can do nothing – what is the future?’ he said, and carried his plate away. From time to time customers emerged, always disconsolate, from the gambling room, and started long public post-mortems on their disasters. Soon the West Indian Tamberlaine came out, and said to the company in general, ‘Well, I not had much, see, so I not lose much.’ He spotted me, and accepted an offer of coffee. ‘So voodoo is not for you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you like this place better.’
‘Who comes here mostly, Mr Tamberlaine?’
‘If white like yourself, they’s wreckage of jazz musicians, chiefly, a lot on the needle and full of despair; if coloured, well, ponces and other hustlers like myself.’
‘You’re a hustler, then?’
‘You might say I pimp around the town, picking the pounds up where I can. I don’t often gamble, though, because the winner is the table, and like all these boys I never know when to stop if fortune does the bitch on me like she do. But coloureds like gambling, don’t you see – it’s part of our carefree nature.’
He gave me a sarcastic grin. ‘Who gambles mostly?’ I said. ‘Africans or West Indians?’
‘What! You recognise some difference? Ain’t we all just coal-black coloured skins to you?’
‘Don’t be offensive, Mr Tamberlaine. Like so many West Indians I’ve met, you seem to have, if I may say so, a large chip sitting on your shoulder.’
‘Not like your African friends? They have less chip, you say?’
‘Much less. Africans seem much more self-assured, more self-sufficient. They don’t seem to