B.S. Johnson:

THE Ivy Leaf is sitting in the high chair, and Alfred is combing in the peroxide as he has done every morning since the Leaf really hit the top spots about two years ago. I am lolling about the f and fs generally, watching and thinking. I can think best at about eleven in the mornings, don't know why, always have done. Then in bursts Brastle with news that starts me thinking about a thousand times faster.

"Ivy," he says to the Leaf, "we've 'ad it. Duke says 'e can't find a place for you on 'is bookings any more. Not even round the bloody picture 'ouses!"

Brastle was a teenager about two hundred years ago, and is given to using these ancient expressions. We chose him as our manager, the Ivy Leaf and me, because he is forty percent honest, which is about thirty percent more than most of them.

But I do not have time on this morning to think about Brastle's quaintness, because I am totally demolished by what he says. No less is the Ivy himself, for he leaps to his feet and snatches the sheet from round his neck. Alfred looks pained, which is the second and last of his looks. The Leaf is starkers under the sheet.

"Johnno," he says to me, the Leaf, my old mate, "Johnno, what was the fix on the Duke?" Just as though he doesn't know.

He seems frantic, so I calm him down and say:

"Iv, I'll have to look it up, but Johnno'll fix it, don't worry."

But myself I am no end worried, because I know very well how we fixed the Duke, and have since been given the word that teenage poppers have lost eightyfive places to the latest number one, which is twelve-year old little girls, and the Duke is a man always right straight in there on fashion. So is Johnno worried, because he is very fond of the meal ticket he has drawn in the last three years, and while he has a little stashed away he wants to keep it for his old age, his late twenties, when he will have to pay for it or get married, which comes to the same thing really. For don't get confused, although the Leaf got his break that way, Johnno wasn't part of the bargain, and likes his women female. Not that the Leaf isn't really normal as well, because he is, very, but, well, the chance paid off. As the Leaf says, in his coarse way, you may think, who wants a foreskin full anyway, he can't understand it. But that was his first chance that was, not the Duke, he came later.

So I throw off my gold shot-nylon back in my bedroom with the quilted headboard, and fix my clothes on. Then I go out the other door smartly down to the hallporter's phone, for what I have to say to the Duke is strictly not for the lugs of Alfred, Brastle, or even the Ivy Leaf himself.

"Duke," I say, nicely, into the little holes, "Duke, what's this unmatelike deciding about my boy I hear falsely attributed to you?"

Now the Duke is usually very impressed by long words, but this time he won't anything like bite.

"Just don't want to know, Johnno," he says, in his old frog's voice, "nothing personal, Johnno, you know that."

And even when I plead with him (me! plead! me!) he still says he don't want to know. Now whatever my worst enemy says about me (and there are plenty of worst enemies) he still has to admit that I am fastest on the sizing up of a fix. And I now realize superquick that it's all up with the Leaf's career, so I take this splendid opportunity of telling the Duke a thing or two.

"Duke, I hope they drop off in action," I tell him, "as it is the knife should have slipped when they were circumnavigating your world."

The Duke laughs his asthma laugh, and drops the blower. He always enjoys a joke, the Duke, as long as it's filthy.

You can imagine how my ticker is whanging up the blood pressure as I belt up the stairs. How to break the news? Rough, tough, I decide, shock 'em.

"Russian roulette," I say, bursting in on the beauty session. "Bullet, bullet, who's got the bullet? You 'ave Alfred, for one, for just a start. What you going to do?"

"Oh, there's lots of other young shentlemen," says Alfred, with his first expression, taking out the Leaf's curlers with just a little bit of malice, "lots of young shentlemen besides Mr. Livid."

Ferry Livid is the pro name that Brastle and me dredged up for the Ivy Leaf at the beginning of his career. About the time of the angries, it was.

The Leaf, I must say, takes the news of his blow very well indeed.

"We always knew it would come, Johnno," he says, "but I never thought the Duke would be the one to push me face in the fertilizer."

"Blame Lolita," I say, to cheer him up.

Brastle just sits in a corner and throws up.

"'op it, Alfred," says the Leaf. "I'm real sorry."

And he shows the hairmonger to the door, wearing just the sheet, still. Alfred takes one look, his last, at the Ivy Leaf in all his glory, and says:

"It's been a real pleasure, Mr. Livid, it really has, but one must earn one's living, mustn't one?"

So off slides Queen Alfred, only losing today's pay, since he insisted on cash every day, the cunning cat.

"How much d'you owe us, Brastle?" I ask him.

He fetches up again, and then says:

"I don't know. Call at me office for it, Ivy."

Then he speeds through the door and leaves his hat rolling in the corner. He calls my boy `Ivy' mainly to get something of his own back on the lad for gétting eighty percent to his own ten. He knows from me it's a school nickname which the Ivy got when he was about seven in this crummy nuns' school we went to, for saying the creed `Ivy leaf on the lord their god' or something, and I said they're always figleaves in the pictures I seen. And the name stuck, like these things will.

So the Leaf and me sit there looking hard at one another. The Leaf still has not gone to the bother of dressing.

"How old are we, Johnno?" he says, "I feel like I was ninety-four."

"Well," I say, "we threw up school three years or so ago, and we were fourteen then, so that makes us seventeen each."

The Ivy Leaf got his first break, in several ways, at fourteen, and, being as I was always the one who could think smartly in our class, not that it ever did me any good at school, he asked me to dispense with the last year at school as he had already done and come and see him right. Which I did, getting him out of a fair mess right from the word go since he'd gone and got himself an agent who was taking forty percent and had the Leaf nailed to the floor by one foot, as well. So I got a mate of mine who passed the eleven plus and works in a lawyer's office to pinch me some legal paper, and I wrote this agent a letter. (I could always write a good letter—at our Sec Mod we sometimes used to get these college cats along to teach us, or rather make cracks at our expense; they all used to bugger off again after a week or two of us, but one of them did teach me how to write a good letter.) So I send this letter to the Leaf's crooked agent, and it scared the arse right off him, so that he unnailed the Leaf right prompt and didn't want to know a thing after that. Then I found Brastle and shared twenty percent of the Leaf between him and me.

The Leaf sits there looking very troubled.

"What we going to do now, Johnno?" he says.

This is the tragic thing for the Leaf: at twelve he could play guitar like he was born to it, and even though we came from Mortlake the Hammersmith boys used to let us in; anyone from south of the river was a Wog to the Hammersmith boys, but the Leaf they sort of naturalized, on account of his great playing. And me with him. Leaf gigged with trad outfits that used to do the boozers just off the Broadway; do the boozers, that is, not in any sense of playing for the drunks, but that the rooms we used to hire were made such a mess of that they never used to last more than two-three weeks in any one. But, boy, was the Leaf a great guitarist! Then some queer goes and `discovers' him at fourteen and we lost sight of him for a few months until he calls me in to get him out of this peabrained contract he's gone and signed, that I told you about before. So what I'm getting at is that the Ivy Leaf sold his soul for a handful of sharp loot, and jumped on the rock wagon, electrifying his guitar and shocking all the boys who knew him round Hammersmith.

"Well, Leaf," I say to him this morning when the blow falls, "This looks like it: we're in for some thinking. What you mustn't do, boy, is give up the playing."

"Couldn't play another note," says the Leaf, and I know that he is a very worrying man. "Do you think any of the trad boys would have me back?"

"Doubt it very much, Leaf. Once you stray from the straight and narrow into the pop field you might as well be buried as far as the figs are concerned. You might form your own group, of course, but whose label would you stick on your arse?"

"What about these folksong cats?" says the Leaf. "That's the next thing, ain't it, Johnno?"

"Really, Leaf!" I say, and I sometimes wonder at how really young the Leaf can get, "Really, Leaf, what those boys are selling is sincerity, and that's what we've not got a lot of."

"No," says the Leaf quietly, "I think I left mine back in Hammersmith."

Which is quite an intelligent remark for the Ivy Leaf.

So finally all we can think of is the moment, and the Leaf dresses and looks in his bedroom for ready, and all he can find is about twelve, and I go and do the same, and all I can find is about twenty. So we say, let's go and see Brastle and collect what loot there is from him, and then get shot of the creep.

Now Brastle is quite bright in that he keeps this office in half a room in Old Compton Street, the other half being occupied by a more steady sort of business. Which tides him over the depressions in the pop field, so to speak, and he thinks it great that art should be supported like this. So it is O.C. Street that the Ivy Leaf and me go to from our flat in this huge concrete orangebox near St. John's Wood, my wood, as the Leaf used to call it when he was trying to get something out of me, like loot. And who do we meet there first of all but some of les girls, who don't see the Leaf much, or me for that matter, but who know him very well by reputation, and who really go on his rock rubbish.

"Ooooooooooooooooooooh," they say, les girls, "It's Ferry Livid himself, in the flesh, ooooooooooooooooooh!"

"And how about a bit then," says the Ivy Leaf, "for free to the famous, eh, girls?"

"Oooooh, no," say les girls, turning all businesslike, "Mr. Brastle wouldn't like it."

"Mr. Brastle ain't going to get the offer of it." says the Ivy Leaf, very quick.

"After all, Ferry," says Josie, who has one wooden leg and caters for the curious, "you don't give us nothing for free, like some of your records, now do you?"

Which the Leaf has to admit is very true.

So he decreases his dozen to a tenner while I drift into Brastle's other half office.

"Let's get this straight, boyo," Brastle says, a very different man altogether from the puking hatless punk who beat it a couple of hours earlier, "I never want to see your backsides again, the both of them."

"Just like we was thinking," I say to him, all cold now, "just cough up the gelt you owe us."

And I know how much it is; he only owes us for the last tour the Leaf did in the sticks, which amounts to about two hundred.

"Hundred and ten," says Brastle, and before he knows it his scraggy throat is stopping my fingers getting at his neckbone.

"Two hundred," he is glad to squawk through what passage he's got left, and I gratefully accept.

"Hope we don't meet again," I say to Brastle, "it's been worse than crummy knowing you. I'll take my boys elsewhere in future."

This is just as a bluff to the Brastle, who knows very well that I am now worse ofl' than when I left school, and that it is very unlikely that he will ever hear of me again, while he will go on much the same once he has sicked back his loss.

So I pile out of one half office into the other half, where I find the Ivy Leaf having delirium tremens on the communal couch with Josie, and, pausing only to let him do up his flies, I drag him out into the cold world of O.C. Street.

"Hundred and eighty for you, twenty for me," I tell him, and hand over his gelt.

"Thanks," he says, "I need it, mate."

And he dives down some queer club into which I do not care to follow him. Very versatile is the Leaf.

So then I go back to my wood to pick up some clothes in the flat, not forgetting Alfred's sheet, and I am thinking that my old mum will be glad to see me back, so I give the neighbour who has a phone a tinkle to tell her. Then I set about making as many fixtures into movables as I can in this flat a shark lets to the Leaf and me last year for fifty quid a month, and then, just as I am unscrewing the last light bracket, in walks the Ivy Leaf looking just about done up. Down he sits in the high chair he has graced so often, Alfred or no Alfred, starkers or not, and he looks at me. He tells me he is broke: it is only an hour since I hand him a hundred and eighty nicker. He will not tell me where the loot has gone.

"What we going to do, Johnno?" he says, and the poor sod looks nearly dead, "Johnno, Johnno, what we going to do, what we going to do?"

"We're going to get the jobs we should have got when we were fifteen, Leaf, my old ínate, my old Ivy Leaf, and it's all over for us, with us, all over, all over, all over!"

And that's about all I can tell you, mate. I suppose you'll bloody well alter it for your paper. Leave out the dirty bits, like. Nothing I ever said to you boys was ever printed just like I said it. Still, this is my last. Any chance of it coming out this Sunday? I need the loot, mate. Bad.