Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren

ride,” finished the Scotch while she read my farewell, and got the hell out of there. No, it just didn’t feel right.
    Yet here and there, beside a juke in an all-night restaurant, the honest British whore still survives.
    The barrage balloons are long down, but she still makes it here and there, forever on the dodge.
    Like the woman who called herself Chantelle—perhaps because the café had a French name. She came up in a first-person war and will do first-person time on a penal farm if caught peddling her goods on the streets.

    Little ferns, in rusty pots, were caught between the double-panes of the café. It was the only café on this street permitted to stay open all night.
    â€œWere you ever buried in the time of the V-l’s?” I asked.
    The small ferns are neither outside nor in; their life is lived out between panes and they don’t look at all well.
    â€œIt begins to seem so now,” was her answer.
    The press of the throng between the Regent Palace and the Hotel Piccadilly, the ceaseless hurry-hurry of MR. BRANDYWINE, and the urgent demands to resink the Bismarck later began to confuse me. I bought two bags of peanuts—I let the oranges go this time—from a huckster near the Regent and returned to Room 916.
    When I got inside, my telephone was ringing madly. Although I knew not a soul in that whole vast city, anticipation leaped in me like a sailfish in the sun—England had been expecting me! I was ready for dinner in Hampstead or Kent or to fly back to Dublin if the party were already starting.
    â€œ918?” a male voice asked.
    â€œ916.”
    â€œSo sorry. Would you mind jumping the small bell up and down there’s a good chap?”
    I jumped the small bell up and down like a good chap to recall the operator, but she paid me no heed. I could hear the other good chap breathing into the phone. He wasn’t as young as he used to be anymore either, the other good chap. Time and The Goat will get you breathing harder over the prospect of a light date than you once did in handling a heavy one.
    â€œHave you ever been buried alive?” I asked him.
    â€œWhat’s that, Old Chap?”
    â€œI say have you ever been buried alive? A lot of people have, you know.”
    He seemed to be thinking about something else.
    â€œWould you mind stepping down the hall and telling the lady in there John is on his way down?”
    At any rate I’d gotten him off the “Old Chap.”
    Down? On his way down? We were on the top floor as it was. But if Old John liked living on a hotel roof it was alright with me. I hurried down the hall, as I wanted to be back in time to see him scaling that wall. It was pretty wet out there.
    At the door of 918 I noticed I was still carrying one bag of peanuts. I smoothed out the wrinkles in it before knocking as I wished to make a
powerful first impression. The woman who opened the door wasn’t Simone Signoret.
    But she wasn’t a brute either. Just one of those five-foot-eleven Marylebone Road blondes with a pile of hair that made her look six-three.
    â€œJohn is on his way down,” I told her, feeling short.
    How I happened to know so much about her affairs she didn’t bother to get being astonished about. Lazy girl. Too lazy to ask me inside for a drink. I actually had to filter in, by explaining that I had been in London in 1944. This entitled me to a passkey to any room in the hotel.
    â€œYou’ll excuse me,” my new-found friend asked. This kid needed someone like me to restore her confidence.
    â€œI came over on the SS Meyer Davis.” I sprung the surprise I’d been holding out. She stayed unstartled. She had good control.
    Her apartment had a continental, I might almost say apartmental air, and was four times the size of the broom closet in which I had been cowering. A cheerful lived-in air. Taking off my tie, I started to live in it. A nice water color by somebody named Duffy hung