Free Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe

him, stunts he had not previously imagined and certainly not wanted. Maybe she thinks I’ll turn queer, he thought, so that we’ll be a devoted couple into old age. ‘Fat chance, mamma,’ he snarled, in their last bout of cat and dog fury.
    Assuming that almost every woman was drawn to the lesbian condition as they became older, he took Norman Bakewell’s advice and found a young one before she’d had time to think it worth a try. Nineteen-year-old Debbie worked as a waitress. Wearing a caramel coloured shirt and a tie, she had a shapely bottom but not much bosom, hands lightly clasped behind her back, waist nearly reached by her rope of dark hair. Pale-faced and with a somewhat pinched and distant expression, she brought Tom’s soup to the table as if it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, or to be seen doing, then stood by the wall to stare contemptuously in turn at everyone else who was eating. When she came with his steak au poivre he asked if she liked working here.
    ‘I don’t like working anywhere.’
    He laughed. ‘Then why do it?’
    ‘My father just died, and my mother threw me out.’
    He was fascinated by the inch of white ankle between the top of her boots and the bottom of her brown trousers. ‘We ought to talk about it sometime.’
    ‘You can if you like.’
    He ate there the following week, surprised she still had her job. ‘Thanks for that tip,’ she smiled. ‘Nobody’s dropped me a tenner before.’
    As a device for being remembered it was worth every penny. ‘What part of the world do you come from?’
    ‘A little semi in South East Ninety Eight. Shitville.’
    At least it wasn’t Yorkshire. Or Sevenoaks. ‘That’s not far away.’
    ‘It’s too close for me, though. I might as well still be there, having to work in this pig-dump, and living in a squat.’
    ‘It sounds all right,’ he said, wanting to hear more of her fairly basic lingo, which he assumed covered a profundity of unexplored emotion – and love.
    The head waiter, or maybe he was the boss, came close. ‘Haven’t I told you not to talk so much to the customers?’
    She stood so high Tom thought she would break her toes. Nobody was going to show her up in front of a man who’d left a ten pound tip. ‘Well, you know what you can do, don’t you?’
    ‘And what’s that?’
    ‘You can fuck off.’
    Nor was anybody going to humiliate him on such a busy night. ‘I rather think that’s what you’re going to do, my dear, and this minute – if you don’t mind.’
    Tom, ready to get up should the man give her that smack in the chops which she certainly merited, enjoyed being in a real life situation. She let a napkin drop to the floor as if it was a dead rat, and stepped on it. ‘You don’t need to tell me twice.’
    ‘Oh, I shan’t. Out, out, out,’ he said, walking away with Tom’s plate.
    She lit a cigarette, and made sure the smoke clouded over the next table until a woman waved it irritably away. ‘He thinks he’s the fucking cat’s whiskers because he can’t fancy me.’
    Tom had fallen in love with her by succumbing to a so-called general truth from Norman Bakewell, a fatal way to behave, but what way was not? ‘Let’s meet outside,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’
    He took her to the best pubs and clubs, feeling in the prime of youth when older men saw them as so apparently happy. He installed her in the house which, for a while, she kept scrupulously ordered and clean, scrubbing and polishing (in stiff checked aprons Tom lasciviously provided) as if it was a big new toy unwrapped for her birthday.
    Even before marrying her he ought to have guessed that such a sloppy proletarian underlip dripping tea into the saucer, or onto herself if the cup was at too much of a slope, meant trouble. What he had assumed to be an endearing pout was the shape of her mouth that had not evolved since birth. It was even more emphasized now that she was transmogrified into a grown-up married woman.
    After