PART II
CHAPTER SIX
1. The Decembrist
Wearing a black tracksuit as refulgent as perfect shoeshine, he stepped out into the afternoon. His storefresh white trainers, his dark glasses, his bronzed countenance, his backswept silver hair: in the pharmacy, from which he was now absenting himself, they called him the Professor or the Englishman. But he was the Decembrist: well advanced into the final month of his year. It was a distinguished face, its lines apparently connected to something ancient or the study of something ancient — Etruscan Pottery, Linear B.
But here he was, in a modern setting: video rental, liquor locker, radio shack. The Decembrist was of medium height (and was heading, by now, towards less than medium); he was not conspicuous in a country — America — where old men dressed like children. Watch an aeroplane climbing a blue sky for long enough and a globule of sunshine will eventually kiss it and coat it and drip from it. So, too, with the glossy garb of the Decembrist, which blackly glittered. Above the suit, his handsome, martyred face. Below it, the white dots of his gyms. Out in the lot the cars were waiting, all in line but all dissimilar, like a conscript army of machines.
There was caution in his stride but nothing frail or halt, which was just as well: a recreational vehicle weighing several tons jerked backwards out of its trap, and the Decembrist’s hands flew from his pockets as he himself jerked clear, seeming to levitate, with an avian lightness. But the sound he made was equine — whinnying, rearing, longtoothed.
The driver drew level, a cellphone nestling in the cup of his jaw (and what beautiful golden hair he had, also busy in the light, with its bullion, its specie), and said, in answer to the Decembrist’s disbelieving stare:
‘Fuck you.’
Having manoeuvred itself into the clear, the great bus surged forward, and now the film rewound — with the Decembrist moving suddenly into its speed and the wheels yelping to a halt six inches from his knees. After some exasperated honking the driver reversed, swerved, and sped on his way, the word asshole included in the passing gulp of his rhythm and blues.
The Decembrist paused, his lips working, and then pushed on to his German saloon.
He sat, days later, on an upright chair by the swimming-pool — the swimming-pool and its motion jigsaw. The pool moved, always and helplessly, but the man was still, his head thrown back as if in agonised exhaustion. Around him the acres of grass, the couch grass, the bent grass, the cheat grass; and the squirt of the ceaseless sprinklers, hissing like a monstrous cicada … In one movement he stirred and stood. Cruise-wear, now: the swing top, the blue pantaloons, the white canvas deck-shoes. He also sported a dude-ranch cowboy belt, which he now straightened. The cartridge sockets were empty, but the holsters had been modified to contain two slender spraycans. One spraycan specialised in mosquitoes and other insects of the air; the other spraycan specialised in ants.
First, an hour with his accountant. Then an hour with his gardener. He was served lunch on the canopied deck. He wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The wasp came weaving towards him the way they do, like a punchy old southpaw, with its halfremembered moves, its ponderous fakes and feints. He drew with his left and caught it full in the face. And the wasp rose up, bristling in grief and femininity and youth. They meandered towards you so middle-aged, but they too had youth, and delicacy and clarity of colour. He didn’t stay to watch its bouncings and wormings and coilings.
He moved on to the stables, and had words with a well-built young man called Rodney Vee.
‘Rodney.’ With a remind-me intonation and a lordly frown he asked, ‘How long …?’
‘Since Monday, sir.’
‘And where are we now?’
‘Friday, sir.’
He nodded and made a further indication with a sideways movement of his head.
They went past the back of the imported barn and down some steps and into the anteroom of the disused garage. He again wagged his head before Rodney opened the inner door.
At first it sounded like a large animal trying to breathe, and then it sounded like a small animal trying to cry.
‘That’ll be all, Rodney,’ he said.
He stepped forward. In the far corner a young man was strapped naked to a baronial dining-chair with a sack over his head. The young man’s chest was shaking, lamenting, and his breath was fierce and nasal — eddy upon eddy.
The Decembrist pulled up a footstool. Grumblingly he sorted through the tray of implements at his feet: skewers, chisels.
Half an hour passed.
He stood up. He lifted the cowl of sacking. After a flustered glance round the room his head dropped and he reached for his spraycans, one in the left, one in the right.
The young man’s golden hair was gone.
‘Open your eyes! Behold. Fuck … ME?’ said Joseph Andrews.
‘You can take this fucking little bumboy, and stuff him in a fucking mailbag, and go and … and go and …’ Andrews caught his breath. ‘And go and sling him over the fucking top at Quaker Quarry!’
‘It will be done, sir. It will be done,’ said Rodney Vee, who then closed the inner door and added, ‘Are you serious, Boss?’
‘Well … Give him a few hours to compose his thoughts. Nah. Where’s he live?’
‘Vermilion Hills, Boss.’
‘Yeah. You tell him it’s the Quarry. But you take him to fucking Vermilion Hills and sling him out the fucking van. On the road. And not lightly. One … two … three. Boof. Eh up. Ruthie rings Queenie, right?’
Rodney nodded. They were coming up the steps and into the sun.
‘She says, “Mum? You won’t like it, but I’m marrying Ahmed.” And Queenie’s gone, “What? You marry that Ahmed and you never darken me door again.” “But I love him!” All this. Six months go by. The phone rings and it’s Ruthie. “Mum! Come and take me away! Aw, what he’s been doing to me!” “So,” says Queenie, “your sins’ve found you out.” “Come on, Mum, don’t fuck about.” “Now calm down, love. I’ll be over in a minicab. Where are you?”
‘It’s a fucking great mosque of a place on The Bishop’s Avenue. Queenie’s come through the gates and up the drive. She’ve rung the bell and the butler’s led her through five reception rooms. Picassos. Rembrandts. Cézannes. Ruthie’s on the couch, crying its little heart out. Queenie’s give her a hug and gone, “Ruthie, what is it? Tell your mother. I’m sure you and Ahmed can sort this out.”
‘Ruthie’s gone, “Mum? Aw, what he’s been doing to me! When I come here, me arsehole was the size of a five-pee piece.” “Yes, dear?” “Well now it’s the size of a fifty-pee piece. Take me home.” Queenie looks round the room and says, “Let’s get it straight. You’re giving up all this for forty-five pee?”
‘Ah, here she comes. Here come them famous lils.’
2. Cora Susan
Here she comes: Cora Susan.
She had a hundred yards of lawn to cross. Seen from that distance, she looked like the platonic ideal of a young mother. But where were the children? Peering through the prisms of the sprinkler spray, you expected to make them out, the children, circling her, tumbling at her feet. That must be why she walked so slowly, with an air of dreamy purpose (always one step behind, one step beyond) — to keep pace with the children. But there were no children … As usual, she wore a dress of white cotton, and a broad straw hat. The straps of a straw bag depended from her left shoulder (is that where she kept the wipes and diapers, the rolled-up sock with spit on it — for emergency cleansings of childish mouths? No: there were no children). A slight arrhythmia in the clack of her sandals: time delay, diminishing as she neared. Cora Susan’s hair was long and straight and fine, and a lucent grey, reminding you that grey was a colour — a colour like any other colour. She was thirty-six and five foot one.
‘Have a chair, dear. Paquita’s fetching you a nice glass of wine. I have unfortunate news.’
She took off her hat but remained standing on the lined deck. Unanswerably womanly, but not a mother. The spheres of her grey eyes were too shallow, and without the faults and nicks that they give you — that children give you. Her mouth contained something ungenerous, something resolutely unindulgent; it did not extend outwards into the world — it stayed within. And the secondary sexual characteristics, the breasts, the famous breasts. They were above all binocular: they were the eyes of a different creature, a different type of being, with qualities not necessarily shared by Cora Susan — candour, innocence, even purity. No child would maul them. There were reasons for all this.
Wine for Cora, one glass served by Paquita, and the bottle kept in an ice-bucket on the tray. For Joseph Andrews — Lucozade (couriered out from England by the gross). Every few seconds he slowly reached forward and touched her, rested a light palm on her, almost doctorly — on the elbow, the hand, the wrist.
‘It’s your father, dear. What can I say? He’s gone. He’s passed away … No great shock but he was your father, Cora. Now. You was — you was never told the truth, dear. Your gran’s version, dear. How’d it go?’
‘As it was handed down to me,’ she said in her accentless and warmly civilised voice, ‘Dad crippled himself falling off some mountain, and Mum converted and went to Israel. And I went to Canada with Old Ma Susan. That bit’s true.’
‘… Mick Meo did him, Cora. Your own grandfather did your dad.’
Audibly she breathed in, breathed out.
‘Relations between the Susans and the Meos was never of the smoothest. And I don’t just mean your mum and dad’s marriage. I know what Mick Meo done to Damon Susan. He drew a nine for it: attempted murder. How much do you uh …?’
‘Oh, Jo, please. Tell me everything.’
‘That’s the spirit, Cora. That’s my girl … Your mum and dad was chucking things at each other even before they was engaged. It was that kind of uh, relationship — a right old scrap. Then, as ill chance would have it, come the day when your mum calls Mick and tells him Damon’s took a liberty with her. A right liberty.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Not to put uh, too fine a point on it, dear, he give her one up the khyber.’
With no change in her tone and modulation Cora said, ‘He give me one up the khyber and all.’
‘I know he did, dear.’ Again, the hand on her wrist. ‘And if Mick had known that then there’s no chance Damon’d’ve lived. There’d have been none of this fucky nattempted. That I can assure you.
‘There was no mobile phones in them days. Leda’s left a message at the workshed. Mick’s out nicking high-voltage cables — dangerous work, skilled work — but he was a very good thief was Mick. He calls back: “He what?” But Mick’s out in Stoke and it’s the fucking miners’ strike and he … Anyway. He’s gone in there at dawn.’
‘Floral Grove. Stoke Newington.’
‘He’s gone in there at dawn. Your mum and dad’s fast asleep. In the same bed. So, I don’t know: must have patched it up. For the time being. Your granddad’s gone and drawn the curtains back. You know: rise and shine. Now unfortunately Mick’s still in his work clothes. Heavy boots with the shallow spikes. And the reinforced gauntlets — for them cables. Oh and his helmet. So he’s on Damon now, straddling him like, and nutting him and that, and the roundarms with the big gloves. Then Leda’s on Mick: seems she’s had a change of heart if you please. So Mick’s gone and locked her in the bathroom, and he give her a tap and all, unfortunately — but she was his own daughter, Cora …
‘Damon’s lying there weltering in his own blood. “Ah fuck. Ah Jesus.” All this. Mick’s gone, “How’s your nose?” “How’s me nose? I’m blind, mate!” Then he ‘ve started trying to uh, you know, “reason” with him. You know: “Uh, Mick mate. Look uh, no complaints. Fair’s fair. I stepped out of line. You taught me a lesson. That’s it. End of.” And Mick’s gone, “It’s a crime of passion we got here, boy.” Course he’s been puzzling for a means of doing Damon for years. “This is nothing, son. This is nothing.”
‘Mick’s dragged Damon on to the floor and got on the bed hisself. Then he’s broke both his legs. Jumping like. Then, when you could do what you liked with them, Damon’s pins is wedged sideways and your granddad’s taking running kicks at his cods and his chopper. With the workboots, more’s the pity. Damon’s not making much noise any more but now Leda’s come round and she’s yelling her head off next door. But Mick didn’t pay her no mind.
‘When he’s broke his arms and all his fingers, he picks him up by his hair and what’s left of his bollocks and slings him out the window, sad to say.’
‘And was the window open at the time?’
‘Unfortunately not.’
‘I’m trying to remember the house. They were on the second floor, weren’t they?’
‘Alas no. They was on the third.’
‘There was a lawn there. It was just lawn in the back.’
‘If only. That really was unfortunate. Just the previous week Damon’s had a rockery put in. So he come down on that. And it was that what done for him, landing on his bonce as he did. He was in Intensive Care for nearly a year. And of course Mick went away for his nine. Course, he could have pleaded uh, mitigating circumstances. “Your Honour, I did him because he’s give me daughter one up the khyber.” But he didn’t want to tar her with it, so he never. Then Old Ma Susan spirits you away to Vancouver. And you was lost to the Meos for ever.’
‘And Mum?’
‘You’re not touching your wine, dear. As for your mum, she done the rounds a bit and then settled down with Tony Odgers. Then he’s gone and got a seven for demanding with menaces. Teddy Ambrose come out at last and she’s took up with him. Then Teddy’s got cut to pieces in a ruck outside the World Upside Down. Your mum’s played the field a bit, then she’s pulled herself together and for a time she’s made a go of it with Ian Thorogood. Then he gets himself choked in a headlock whilst in police custody. Things was going not bad between your mum and Frank Purdom. Then Nick Odgers come out, for about a week, but long enough to do Frank Purdom, and your mum’s back to her old tricks. Keith Room was very good with her till he pulled a twelve, and then she’ve raised eyebrows by shacking up with Thelonius Curtly. And when he gets hisself topped she’s let herself down, many thought, by throwing in her lot with Lon Chang You. But she was on the drink and worse by then. To be perfectly frank with you, Cora, her reputation was beginning to suffer. They was calling her Khyber Kath by the end. Funny kind of name, that. I never did learn how she come by the “Kath” bit of it. How you feeling, dear?’
‘Oh, tolerably well.’
‘You’re a hard girl, Cora. You’ve had to be. You frighten even me sometimes — what I seen in you. Now okay, your dad weren’t the best of fathers, but he was your father. Your natural father, dear. Damon done what he done. Damon was Damon. He messed with you, and there ain’t no excuse for that. But you was still a family. And Mick Meo, by his overly hasty behaviour … Now if I know my Cora Susan she’s not going to bend over for that. She’s going to want to hurt somebody. And there’s only one of them left. Uncle Xan.’
‘Uncle Xan.’
‘I give him a smack meself the other day. About something nothing whatsoever to do with the Susans.’
‘Oh?’
‘He fucking grassed me up. Then he’s gone to the papers saying he never! And he called me a mad prick …’ Joseph Andrews shook his head and gave a smile of yokellish incredulity. On the table before them lay a green folder. He reached for it. ‘Here: “… whoever did me in October or had me done … they think I’ve been telling tales to the Old Bill. And that is something I would never do … They can stick red-hot pokers up my arse … whoever did me I tell him, you come down and …” Now that’s game, that is,’ he added with unqualified admiration. ‘No less than he should have said, of course. But these days that’s game. There’s Mick in him, Cora. And there’s Mick in you and all.’
‘And the money.’
‘And the money. Hebe’s money. Skinned you out of it. You’re going back for the funeral, of course? … Have a read of that. And the other matter?’
‘Beyond all expectation.’
‘Gaw, I got to pinch meself with the price we’re getting on this one. Talk about a thrust.’ He brought his clawed hands together. ‘The double play. I tell you, darling, if it all goes through all right you can have my end of it. I give it to you, dear. Jesus, the satisfaction. It’s beautiful. Cora? We done them sweet.’
The green file went in the straw bag and Cora Susan kissed Joseph Andrews and walked away across the coarse sward. Moving with an air of dreamy purpose — always one step behind, one step beyond.
3. Denizen
About twenty miles to the north-east Clint Smoker was settling into his half of a cabana in the grounds of a Moorish mansion known locally as the Ponderosa. In Clint’s quarters, as in everybody else’s, there was a large and lavish reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation’ on the wall facing the picture window. Clint typed:
Chief: Got here all right. The hotel’s gorgeous. My companion, Kate, is particularly taken with the oiled dwarves who line the driveway day and night. Shop. You’ve got your gagging order and I hope you’re happy.
Yeah, thought Clint. According to Jeff Strite, Heaf was summoned, not to Downing Street, but to a sweltering basement at the FPA — along with every other e-zine and nude-mag chancer in the British Isles. A man from the Palace with a double-barrelled name came on and told them that the material on the Princess was a fake and a fiction, and would they please shut up about it. Heaf returned to the Lark shedding tears of pride.
I think you’re experiencing an accounting problem in the marble department, but that’s me: cynical. Still, we can pursue related and parallel themes on little Vicky. I have an idea or two. Here as promised is the revisionist editorial on the Walthamstow Wanker:
Over the past month, a tragedy has unfolded in the heart of Essex.
For two days and two nights, an innocent and injured man — and we’re proud to call him a Lark reader — languished without treatment in a Rotherhithe nick before being released on bail.
He now faces charges of public indecency.
And for what?
Health boffins have long agreed that a regular visit to Thumb Street is crucial to masculine well-being.
Every man-jack of us knows that a decent toss reduces tension, setting you up for the rest of the day.
And there’s nothing better for a good night’s sleep.
Imagine.
In the seclusion of an unoccupied area of a public baths, this stainless individual was seeking relief over his daily edition of the paper you now hold in your hand.
But who should burst in on him but some old boiler with a bucket and mop.
Congratulations, darling!
You f**ked that one up!
In his confusion, and sadly impeded by his clothing, he slipped on the damp stone steps, incurring serious injury.
Little did he know that his tribulation — yes, his martyrdom — was yet to begin.
We say to this man that he has not been forgotten.
We say to this man that we are with him and will stay by his side.
We say: fist your mister for the Walthamstow One.
Clint had briefly admired his bathroom but had not yet used it. Now he lifted the ox-collar; he bestrid the bowl. After a few seconds, he found he was undergoing a sense of gradual depersonalisation, as if about to receive the introductory chords and colours of a lifechanging illness. His stare moved to the left. The basin: how small it was. His stare moved to the right. The bogroll-holder, the actual gauge of the tissue: scaled down. And the can he straddled: like a potty. When you wiped yourself it looked … Yes, there was definitely a gain in contrast. And every little helped.
Strollingly he returned to his studio. Shower and change in a minute: off with the aeroplane-wear (the radiant trainers, the aerodynamic shell suit) and on with something smart. An inaugural drinks party was scheduled for half past five. Meet your fellow — clients? inmates? guests? What did the brochure call them: residents? No, denizens. Denizens of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission … The reproduction on the wall facing the picture window. Whew, the state of that Adam. Come on, you’ve got to fit him up a bit better than that. You can’t send him out there with that cashew between his legs.
Was Michelangelo taking the piss — taking the michael? Was God?
4. At Ewelme
‘Qi? Q, i? No no no. You can’t have a q without a u. Now if you let that stand I shall most certainly challenge … Challenge! … Where are we. Q, i, indeed. What does it mean? Ah, do you see, all the q’s have u’s after them. Hello, that’s very odd. “An individual person’s life-force, the free flow of which within the body is believed to ensure physical and spiritual health.” … Well God help us. What happens now? I get docked the points. Bother. And you’ve done it twice: two qis and an if. On the triple word.’
‘Sixty-nine.’
‘Sixty-nine? I’m now minus thirteen. And I’m changing my letters. Where’s the bag?’
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but please may I be excused?’
‘Oh don’t go up now, darling. We’ve barely started. Stay and have a lovely warm hot chocolate at least …’
A minute later Henry said, ‘What would you, Bugger? I’m trying to keep her spirits up and it’s exhausting her. And me. And when I try to draw her out …’
‘Write to her, sir,’ said Brendan. ‘Write.’
The King stayed up late, listening to the Irish Sea. Ewelme stood on the north-western tip of the Welsh peninsula, at the end of a mile-long single-lane causeway. Its situation, together with the infallibly dreadful weather, deterred all intruders — and indeed all visitors: no one who had stayed at Ewelme ever willingly returned. Henry, at his desk, in his overcoat, felt his ears vibrate as the tower bell sounded the quarter-hour. The wind was committing murders in the night, sudden abductions, terrible smotherings …
My dearest sweetheart,
My soul hurts for you, it truly does. I have never seen you so deeply low. Even after Mummy’s accident, the energy of your youth somehow seemed to carry you onward. Now you sleep sixteen hours a day and hardly eat anything. (And when you are awake you’re curled up with the Koran, or the Upanishads or the Targum or God knows what.) I do wish you’d agree to have a chat with Sir Edward, if nothing more.
My darling, I don’t know exactly what is troubling you. I know roughly what is troubling you. While you are in all things the chief sufferer, this ignorance is very heavy for your father. Rather than agonising about something in particular, I find I’m agonising about everything. I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see. I implore you to tell me what actually happened in the Yellow House, my dearest (who surprised you there?). And I earnestly do believe that you will feel the benefit. And if you had some sort of a romp with one of those pretty Arab boys, what of it?
The vultures. Our official position is that the material is faked. You and I are aware that the material, at least in part, is not faked. I was less confident than Brendan. None the less, there has been no rebuttal, let alone refutation, which is presumably in the enemies’ power. This is very much to the good (it has quietened things down a bit). Brendan says their silence reflects a certain incapacity on their part. And there is another fairly encouraging likelihood, which I will tell you about if you will only talk to me.
I have just read this through, and it’s such a curate’s egg! ‘Good in parts’ — albeit thoroughly rotten. I yearn to express the unconditional love and sympathy I feel, but I just sound selfish and pompous. It’s my poor character!
Sweetheart, my one, my only jewel, I beseech you: let us be in this together. I want to reach out and physically take some of the weight from your shoulders. Remember. It’s we two now.
5. February 14 (1.10 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: How’s our Flight Engineer?
First Officer Nick Chopko: Out cold.
Macmanaman: He can coax the computer along, I’ll give him that. I’d have killed it and gone to direct law … You know the rooftiles they have in England? Sheets of grey slate?
Chopko: Like machetes.
Macmanaman: This one, you could see it coming. Rennie thought it was a dead bird. It just twirled into him. Here.
Chopko: Jesus.
Macmanaman: … Royce Traynor was only ever going to fly CigAir when he was in the condition he’s in today.
Chopko: Dead.
Macmanaman: Dead. For him it was like a mission. Rennie said there was nothing — repeat, nothing — he liked more than telling someone to put a cigarette out. He’d get up in the middle of the night and call a cab if there was a good chance of telling someone to put a cigarette out. And get this. Rennie smoked a pack a day for forty-three years without him knowing. He would have killed her. Killed her. I think she did it to have something on him, to stick it to him. Why don’t people leave, Nick? Why don’t they just leave?
Chopko: I don’t know either.
Macmanaman: Addictive personality … I don’t like it up here. It’s too thin up here. I don’t like the physics of it up here. The difference between max and stall is just a couple of knots. It’s like a slide on black ice. Ask for three seven oh. Wait. The windshear: feel it’s moving around in back of us. It’s like … Uh, put everybody down, Nick. And the girls when they’ve secured the carts. This is my third time and I can feel it coming. There’s clear air [clear air turbulence] out there. I can feel it this time.
Four minutes later Flight 101 dropped a thousand yards at the speed of gravity: thirty-two feet per second per second. The coffin of Royce Traynor leapt from the floor of Pallet 3 and smashed into its ceiling. After a beat it smashed back down again. It landed corner-first on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. There was an atrocious sneeze of thick pink liquid, then a steadier, seeping flow. After twenty-five minutes the dominant pool of thick pink liquid would begin to fume.
* * *
6. Apologia—1
Joseph Andrews was in his office, upstairs. Two sloping sheets of glass formed an isosceles triangle with the floor. You could see every freckle, every nostril hair … He held a microphone in his hand: buxom, corded, the mike of a bygone crooner. The pause button gave a little click whenever he freed it or engaged it.
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story. Man to man. Let you be the judge. Let you be the judge … [Click.] … Gaw, where do I …? Go on then. Go on. [Click.]
‘I had such a reputation for enduring pain that when the prison dentist offered me an injection I felt pretty much duty-bound to chin him.
‘So he’ve gone off to see his dentist. And then of course the screws done me in the Strong Cell. Par for the course. Me cheek was out here. When the dentist come back [click] with his fucking jaw in a sling [click] … Well. They took a right liberty. I was in a straitjacket with me head in a clamp and me mouth wedged open with a sawblade. Ooh and that dentist, he’s give me abscess a right going over. Dear oh dear. They was watching to see if I’d flinch but I never. [Click.]
‘[Click.] There ain’t a form of punishment meted out in His Majesty’s Prisons that I’ve not took. Bread and water, deprivation of mattress, Refractory Block, PCFO. In the hospital wing they’ve give me the Blinder and the Crapper. They slip it in your coffee. The Blinder ain’t so bad — you just go all legless like. But the Crapper … you can kill a man in a week in that manner. I’ve had the Cat and the Birch. It’s a fallacy that I used to whistle while they was giving me the corporal. But on the thirteenth stroke I used to do a lovely yawn, and he’d come in with a will on the final five. Trying to make you cry out. No chance. The Birch is worst. It’s more uh, detrimental to a man’s dignity, being as how it’s on your arse. I mean you got some man on your shoulders, for the Cat. But it’s just a baby, your arse is.
‘Them’s only the official punishments. They’ve pissed in me tea and flobbed on me grub. For five weeks they’ve kept me in the Box on the Strap Plank: another right liberty. But what it is is: the niggles. Like me mum come up to see me in Durham — a two-day journey in them days — and an hour before she’s due they’ve gone and transferred me to Strangeways! That’s how low they’ll stoop. These are men who live to see other men confined. Like they take away your Association on a technicality — and there’s that little smirk. You see that look on they face, and you know you’ll have to do them. Just a question of when. And then of course they do you. Fact of life. [Click.]
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story, man to man. Right or wrong, let you be the judge.
‘Like many a face I was, in me youth, an avid boxer. I won four of me first eleven fights at Bermondsey Baths. Which don’t sound too clever. But I never lost one! In fact they was all knockouts. See, I had an unfortunate tendency to get meself disqualified. Instead of standing there with me hand held high, as victor, while the other bloke got stretchered off, I’d still be kneeling on the canvas and giving him what for. It was a struggle to uh, channel me aggression. In the eleventh fight I’ve left the ref for dead and all. So they banned me. [Click.] And Mr Shackleton, the Director of the YBPA, never knew what hit him — I come up on him that nice. [Click.] After that decision I had no choice but to turn to a life of crime.
‘Me first trouble with the Law was for possession of an offensive weapon. Not defensive, oh no. Offensive. The Old Bill gives you a spin and it’s one of them uh, circular conversations. “Oi. What’s this?” “What’s it look like?” “Why you carrying a knife?” “I always do.” “What for?” “I always carry a knife.” “Yeah but why?” “Because I always do.” Blah blah blah. I was eight. So then the social’s upped and packed me off to Approved School. And then of course I did me Borstal. And even in me boxing days I’ve had a spell or two in Pentonville for Smash and Grab. Smash and Grab: definition of a glass brassière, if you like. This’d be the late Thirties. Then the war come … Now don’t get me wrong. We was patriotic and that. In their struggle against the spectre of Nazism, we wished the armed forces all the luck in the world. But you wasn’t going to be donning togs for the powers-that-be. No chance. [Click.] And if a Tommy come your way on a dark night, the slag’d live to regret it. [Click.] So in the war years you was either inside or on your toes from the Conscription. In 1944, when I was finishing me three in Wormwood Scrubs, Sir Oswald Mosley, of Blackshirt fame, and his wife, Lady Diana, was interned there. There was a plan on to do him during Exercise, but he come over as a perfectly reasonable sort of bloke and we’ve left him be.
‘Things opened up beautiful after the war, with all the austerity. We was forging ration-books and otherwise like billy-o. Then in the year of your birth I get me first decent thrust — and me first serious bird. Swings and roundabouts. [Click. Click.] Funny word that: bird. Comes from birdlime, rhyming with time. Birdlime was the sticky stuff they put on the branches of trees to kill the birds. Sticky fingers, see: thieving. But it’s the birds that cop it, not the branches, so it don’t quite work out. Bird also means “girl”. A richard is a sort, Richard the Third rhyming with bird. [Click.] Rhyming-slang: load of bollocks. [Click.] But I’m told the word bird comes from bride, originally. Anyway.
‘It was the Airport Job. Heath Row — two words — it was in them days. Also known as the Protective Assurance Robbery. An overnight cargo of diamonds plus £160,000 in hard cash — millions in today’s money. The guards was supposed to be drugged: barbitone in they coffee. But when I give one a nudge [click] with me fucking iron bar [click] the others have jumped up and steamed in. They was Ghost Squad! Well, I don’t know, they must have expected schoolboys. They hadn’t reckoned on me, Ginger, Dodger, Gimlet, Whippo, Chick and Yocker, and we did them something gruesome. When we come out the coppers is there mob-handed and we’ve had another almighty mill. I reckoned I was well away. I’ve slipped under a police van and clung on to the exhaust. You know: first traffic-light and I’d be away. But they’ve only put the sirens on and roared off to Battersea nick — fifteen mile away. By then me chest and forearms was welded to the pipe. They had to cut me free before they banged me up, and I still bear them scars. One of the Ghost Squad boys was on the critical list, and offing a copper was a topping offence in them days. I even got me mum to send him a bunch of grapes — to a copper. But that’s one of them uh [click] them uh [click] them strange paradoxes you’ve stuck youself with when you gone and played the game I’ve played.
‘I served every hour of me fourteen. In them days, if you was flogged, you never lost no remission for subsequent misdemeanours. So me first week in Winson Green I thought: let’s do the Governor, and get the Cat. I done the Governor: spun the legs out from under him in the vegetable garden and come down on his face with me shovel. The screws’ve give me a right sticking — win some, lose some — but when me flogging come up, there’s questions from the Home Secretary in the House of Commons! And God stone me if they don’t go chucko. I’ve had some black hours on the in, but nothing compares to that morning when they’ve gone and cancelled me Cat. I had so many run-ins, thereafter, they was always trying to have me declared mental!
‘When I come out after me fourteen — that was 1949, so this’d be 1963—I find meself in an awkward situation. That’s what so often happens after you come out: like as not, you’re straight back in. Me sister Polly was at that period the common-law wife of Pongo Droy. A while ago Pongo’ve cut Noel Shortly — who’s nicked him! That’s to say: Noel’s reported Pongo to the Law. Which, for me … Well Pongo’s not having that, is he? He’s pulled three months, which is a bit stiff, because in them days you could go berserk with a blade and expect no more than a ten-bob fine. While Pongo’s away his brother Hughie’s done Duncan Shortly, Noel’s dad. So Duncan’s nephew, Cecil O’Rourke, puts Hughie’s lights out in the World Upside Down. Pongo’s fucking come out, he’s [click] fuck … Ah, fuck it [click] he’s glassed Cecil, and now he’s gone looking for Noel. Who was waiting for him, with a sawn-off. Pongo’s lost both legs from the knee down and Polly’s come running to me. I’ve only been out a week. I wasn’t interested till she told me Noel’d nicked Pongo for the stabbing. That got me off me arse. The result was I drew an eight for Aggravated Manslaughter.
‘It was 1975 when I come out — I served an extra three for me part in the so-called “mangle riot” at Winson Green. And by now I’m going: enough’s enough. As you yourself know, a man has to adapt and change with the times. A further two-year term for Grievous give me more leisure to think. I hadn’t been out for long when I was fancied for a murder [click] which I fucking done [click], the case being dismissed in the absence of any evidence whatsoever. And Life was eighteen years in them days. No, son, I said to meself. Time to turn over a new leaf. Strike out on a different path. I’ve gone and emigrated to the Costa del Sol. And thus began me long and, in the end, tragic association with Keith the Snake. [Click.]
‘Get this in here. [Click.] You don’t know of me personally, but me name might ring a bell. I don’t know — are you a reading man? Me, I never was a reader. Didn’t seem to have the time. Nah: wasn’t that. See, in prison, it’s just another way they can hurt you. “Where’s your book gone, Jo? Bookworms must have eaten it.” And then the little smirk. And then of course you’d do them and they’d do you. Goes with the territory. I never held with reading in the nick. Don’t believe in it. You hear about blokes getting degrees from fucking Oxford while they’re banged up. I never held with that because as soon as they start the reading they get religious and all. Nutters who’ve sliced up families of six going round with they hands clasped behind they back. Praying and that. Don’t hold with it. If I see a con with a Bible they was due a bash. I know what loss of freedom is, what confinement is, but me thoughts are me own. It’s like the Kray Twins, from their book: “Flowers are God smiling at us.” And if that don’t send you to the bog then I don’t know what will.
‘But one day the book trolley come round. As it’s gone past I see the spines and one of them’s only called Joseph Andrews! Me first thought was: someone’s gone and taken a right raging liberty. Someone’s gone and done me uh, me life story with no permission whatsoever. I give the screw a shout — and the slag’s name is Henry Fielding. But of course after a while I’ve calmed meself down. Joseph Andrews was one of the first English novels, published as early as 1742. I got me TV glasses for a read of it and I’ve not made head or tail of the language they use in them days. But there’s something very near the beginning, about a good man being more … influential than a bad. And them’s wise words …
‘Years later I’ve come across another book, in three volumes, entitled Tom Jones. Must be the life story of the singer, I’ve thought, him of “It’s Not Unusual” fame. But no: it was only by the same fella — Henry Fielding. I always was an avid Tom Jones fan, and to this day I’ll get on a plane to attend one of his concerts. “It’s Not Unusual” was his greatest hit, but me own favourite’s got to be “The Green, Green Grass of Home”.
‘I want you to think about that. If you would: the green, green grass of home.’
Click. Joseph Andrews now summoned his amanuensis, Manfred Curbishley: braces, a horseshoe of hair going round the back of his head, mouth and eyes as moist as oysters. He looked as though he’d never left London — never left the bookies’ office in the Mile End Road. And a drinker’s face, with its pattern of heat: its oxbow of oxblood.
With a wag of the head: ‘There’s more, but you can start turning this into English. And take out all the language … Where’s Rodney?’
‘Accompanying Miss Susan to the airport, Boss.’
‘Course he is, course he is.’
The frowning gaze of Joseph Andrews (every mote of age visible in the carbonated air) settled on the green file, which lay open on his desk. Cora, he now saw, had underlined a name in one of the clippings. He adjusted his glasses: Pearl O’Daniel. With an inner murmur he pictured her father: Ossie O’Daniel. A good man, a sound man, a man of principle: never took any fucking rubbish from the screws. Remember once he came into Association in the middle of the day with his privates hanging out. This was at Strangeways. There’d just been an off — someone kicking up. No one said anything about Ossie and his privates, not even the screws. He’d just had twenty-four of the Birch that morning, so you made allowances, and tactfully turned the other way.
7. We two
Brendan Urquhart-Gordon lay in bed with his laptop. The imagery being fed through to him was from Oughtred; it attempted to duplicate, by the use of ‘isosurfaces and volumetric rendering’, the material on the Princess. Emboldeningly, the counterfeits of the first stills could not be distinguished from the originals — or at least not by the unassisted eye; and the four-second loop, where the Princess swivelled in the bath, was an apparently perfect simulacrum, down to the very eddies of the water. But the attempt to morph the enemy’s latest offering, the attempt to carve it out of light and magic, was a clear failure. Here the technology came up against its structural limits. Brendan could feel his body temperature climb: the inner casuist was acknowledging the first great wound in his defence. He thought (again): if the enemy so much as gave the time and place — the Château, the Yellow House … A chimerical mischief would at once become something actual, something to be investigated, and the media …
The new image, anonymously remailed on to the Net that morning, showed the Princess in three-quarter profile. It was an enlargement, and the quality — the definition — seemed relatively weak. Yet this much became clear: she was not alone. It wasn’t a shadow, louring above her. It was an implicit presence, demanded by the demeanour of the Princess. Her crossed hands resting on her shoulders, the angle of her torso minutely averted from the hypothetical entity, her expression … This was what the technology couldn’t capture: it couldn’t capture the complexity of the Princess’s expression. She looked surprised, and shocked too, but not quite startled or fearful; she looked intensely anxious; she looked slightly sick. But it was the eyes and their pitiful attempt at comity, at courtesy, at good manners: this could not be duplicated.
Retaining his pyjamas, and adding all his sweaters, Brendan got dressed and went to the King. He found him in his dressing-room, sitting before the empty grate with his face in his hands. Without looking up Henry pointed at something on the low table. Was it a golf ball? No, it was a crumpled sheet of paper. Brendan didn’t find it pleasant to watch the King flatten and straighten this out, his lower lip pendulous with reluctant concentration, and then pass it on with a sigh that closed his eyes. Brendan asked for and was given permission to activate the one-bar electric fire. Don’t like that colon, he thought, as he settled down to it:
Dear Daddy:
So it’s ‘we two’ now, is it? Mummy will be delighted when she hears. But she won’t hear. Perhaps I could have told Mummy what happened in the Yellow House, even though she would have been much more horrified than you. But I can’t do that, can I? Because it’s just ‘we two’.
I’m so sad to learn that you’re suffering. On the other hand I am absolutely fine. It’s nice to know that everyone on earth is leering at you. I don’t dare look at any of it, but I’ve talked to my friends, until I stopped daring to do that too. The very air seems full of me; even the wind seems to say my name. But the air and the wind are polluted. When I’m not sleeping, or sitting there with you, not eating, I’m bathing. And even bathing, now, deeply reinfects me. Even the clear water feels like sewage.
I want to get farther and farther away from the thing which is called World.
May I close with a few quotations from your letter? ‘Thoroughly rotten … It’s my poor character … Sweetheart … let us be in this together.’
Uh-huh?
‘I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see.’
Oh go on and close them. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.
I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be—
V.
‘I am blind, like a kitten,’ said Henry in a slurred voice. ‘I see nothing. Do you think it possible, Bugger, to do something truly dreadful in your sleep and not remember it?’
Brendan moved closer. He hoped to dredge up words of comfort for his liege lord. Henry had settled on a certain eventuality: ‘What of it, if she had some sort of romp with one of those pretty Arab boys?’ There would be a better time to tell him that the visitor to the Yellow House was an adult, and not just another child.
8. Use Your Head
Chief: Tonight I’ll e you the pilot piece for the column. I suggest the byline ‘Yellow Dog’ (photo of snarling pariah). Then, if anyone asks, we can say it’s satire and comes from Jonathan Swift (the cases I’ll use will be all generic, so nobody can sue). You know like the Modest Proposal where he told the starving Irish to eat their own nippers. Look, there’s a big Vicky story brewing in LA which we can develop without stepping out of line. A flesh video called ‘Princess Lolita’. Humungous hit — what with the timing. Can’t buy that kind of publicity. More later. Weather here still superb high pressure. Saw that three people fucking drowned in the rain in SE England. That’s what I like to hear. Clint.
‘Hey asshole. What’s five times eight?’
Rich said, ‘… Fifty.’
‘Oh yeah? And what’s five times ten?’
Rich said, ‘… Forty-seven.’
There was laughter, in which Clint joined. He was attending class at the Academy, along with nine other denizens. Rich stood naked on a dais at the far end of the room. He was ridiculously endowed, endowed beyond all utility (his head and torso seemed mere afterthoughts: a howdah and canopy tacked on to the trunk), and he was supposed to be a genuine retard. In fact he was a would-be porno star acting under instructions. The Director of the Academy, John Working, had used genuine retards in earlier days, but it was hard to get hold of the right kind, and they were always injuring themselves or molesting the help. At the nightly poolside cookouts, Working also employed a nonorchid headmaster from Central LA who, strolling naked from table to table, knowledgeably answered questions on everything under the sun; the would-be porno star had to stand there too, stupidly eating hamburger after hot dog, while the Academy denizens sat back with their smoked trout and their ewe-cheese salads.
‘Hey shithead. In the Bible. Adam and …?’
Rich said, ‘… Ivy.’
‘Hey dorkbrain. How many Commandments are there?’
Rich said, ‘… Nine.’
Clint was not to be left out: ‘Hey. Who shall inherit the earth, cunt?’
dear clint: so! u have been sent to cali4nia 2 cover the princess lolita phenomenon 4 the lark! it’s just come out here 2, but u can only get it in the 6 shops, and they’re so c-d: i’ll have 2 get my brother (well, 1/2-brother) 2 get 1 4 me. every1’s talking about it: they say the actress is the absolute twin of our vicky (she’s barely 17) & per4ms the usual r&y stunts with stableboys & diplom@s, not 2 mention some 69 with a lady-in-w8ing! that’s what i am, clint: a lady in w8ing … so! k pasa? i’ve never been stateside, but i’ve read some boox. indian
reservations with t-p’s & heap big totem poles? or all very spanish with k-n pepper & “iladas? e me all, dear 1. i can’t tell u how much happier i am without orl&o. i o u 1 4 th@. 2nite i’m @ home with my father. so deliciously sed8! hurry back 2 engl&. i think it’s time, don’t u? k8.
Most birds you meet in the chat-rooms, thought Clint, as he relaxed in his cabana: they’re virtual. They ain’t there, not really: a bootstrap botchjob of mannerisms and affectations. But this one? A real character, a bubbly personality with a smashing sense of humour. And a good family girl, too, who knew her place, unlike some …
Cracking his knuckles, Clint moved to the table and the waiting laptop. He inhaled richly. He felt an unfamiliar afflatus: what was the phrase — taking dictation from heaven?
Yellow Dog’s Diary
• So some nun took a knock from a stolen car and was left bleeding on a zebra crossing.
Now, before we put our boxer pants into the tumble drier, let’s have a look at the other side of it.
The coppers openly admitted that the lad had had a few.
In actual fact he was four times over the limit.
It would have been a miracle if he’d noticed giving her a tap.
So much for ‘hit and run’.
As for her?
Thirty years old and she’s ‘a bride of Christ’.
In other words she’s crossed her legs forever to concentrate on her ‘good works’.
Pass the sickbag someone.
Word from the hospital is on the grim side, so at least she’ll be off the streets for a year or two.
But what about the others?
We ‘re the ones that have got to look at you, darlings.
Never had the strength of a man in you and it shows.
So when you go out in public, get your hair done and put some powder on that ugly old boat, for f**k’s sake.
• So a so-called ‘referee’s assistant’ (‘linesman’ was good enough in my day) got kicked to death by players, management and crowd after a disputed decision at the North-East derby at the Stadium of Light, where they really care about their football.
Yes, care.
That’s C-A-R-E, alright?
True, video replays leave little doubt that a red card was in order, and that, given the career-ending injury that resulted, a yellow would not have sufficed.
But they don’t f**k about up Tyneside way.
If you so much as
Clint worked on. Then, having filed, he sat down on the sofa and empowered the TV and the VCR. He was looking forward to seeing Princess Lolita. But normal porno was forbidden at the Academy: you had to watch the stuff they provided as part of your kit. Academy porno, true, had much in common with normal porno: the acting, for example, was free of all conviction. So you had to wonder, when the bloke stripped down, at the bird’s gasp of gratitude and awe. There she was now: swooning at the sight of another no-see-um — another inverted exclamation-mark (in, what, fourteen-point?). And the next bit, there, look. What was she doing — picking her teeth? Clint was supposed to pay special attention to the thirty-minute cunnilingus sequence that followed, but he found himself reaching for the remote. And you had to suspend the old disbelief entirely when at last he plunged into her: the way she twists and judders and starts singing Wagner. To be fair, the women in Academy porno were among the smallest he had ever seen. Not kids or midgets — just incredibly small. Real throwabouts …
‘Use Your Head’ was the Academy motto. Much of the class activity was overseen by a retired porno star called Dimity Qwest, now a respected activist and therapist, who showed you how to work the fake quim they doled out to you on arrival. In time, they all became slobberingly proficient at the art of oral love. Clint had found it a low moment, to be sure, when Dimity told him to regard his organ as a middle finger without the nail; but then she cheered him up by touting the likelihood of anal bliss, increased access to the tradesmen’s entrance being something the smaller bloke could legitimately expect. You were meant to practise in your cabana. The thing had a ‘pleasure meter’ on it, about halfway to the hypothetical navel, which showed you when you were getting warm.
If asked, Clint would have said that he was responding to the treatment. Definitely. After all, nobody’s perfect and everything’s relative. And the lads at the pool, during the nude brunch: a good few of them put a spring in his stride. Several denizens, moreover, during workshop, tearfully lamented the shaming meagreness of their ejaculations. Clint chipped in, saying that this was a department in which he happened to shine, and going on to describe his heroics with Rehab.
Now he cleaned his teeth in the scaled-down bathroom: the basin was no bigger than an ashtray. His artificial smile briefly quickened with sincerity as he thought about the porno interviews he’d lined up in Lovetown. Looking forward to Princess Lolita: see some decent todgers for once in his life. The absolute twin of our Vicky. Looking forward to Kate: lady in waiting.
9. Epithalamium
By now there were torn creases in the sheet of paper which winked at him whenever he picked the thing up. Through them you could see the other world — or so it seemed. The letter was now a week old; and there had since been the incident with the fox.
* * *
My dear Xan,
It would not be true to say that you raped me last night, but it would be true to say that you tried. I know this is a question you must in general be tired of hearing. Still, I must ask it. What do you remember?
It was about 2.20 when you put on the light. Then you crashed down on me and forced your tongue into my mouth and your hand between my legs. As well as being an amazing stinkbomb of cigars, beer, curry, vomit, and shit, you ‘reeked of cheap ponce’, to use your own phrase (you had just helped me out of a minicab — this was, or seems, years ago). I hit you on the head with closed fists about eight or nine times as hard as I could. I’m sorry. Your poor, poor head. Then I got out and ran upstairs and locked myself in with Baba. You followed, and battered on the door. Baba, incredibly, slept through it, but Billie woke up and sat down crying outside Imaculada’s door, and she woke up too. She said that if she’d had a phone in her room she would certainly have called the police.
You were shouting your head off about your ‘conjugal rights’. I think it’s a rule, don’t you, that whenever the ‘rights’ of marriage are invoked, by either one, then that’s the end of that marriage. I don’t know, this may only be true of the bedroom. In the last five years we have done a million things for each other that perhaps felt like duties or obligations or sacraments, but I never felt that either of us was asserting a right.
Our marriage is not over. But Xan, my dearest — you are scaring the shit out of me. And to think that there are supposed to be women who love to live in fear; no woman worth anything would put up with it for an instant. Shall I tell you what it’s like? It’s the desire, more intense than any you’ve ever felt, for something to be away from you. It’s the tearing desire for something to be over.
Our marriage is not over. It is not over. Last night was an utter disaster for us, and it will take an incredible effort to recover from it. I know — who wants an incredible effort, in matters of the heart or anywhere else. But that’s what lies ahead of you, beginning with hours and hours of Tilda Quant.
This is what I think has happened. Your past is your past, and you escaped it or evolved out of it. Over the years you wore down your prejudices and developed a set of rational contemporary attitudes — remember my saying that you were more feminist than I was? You were a little bit pious, if anything. Then, after you were hit, I thought at first you’d slipped back a generation or two. I now think it’s more basic, more atavistic than that. Your attitudes and opinions aren’t attitudes and opinions any more. They’re beliefs, and primitive beliefs at that. If, today, you were to show me around your past, as you once did five years ago, you wouldn’t be showing me Kropotkin’s clubhouse on Worship Street, or Mother Woolf’s spieler, or the pub called the World Upside Down. You’d be showing me your cave — or your treetop.
Two more things. You have started being different with Billie. And I don’t mean all the incomprehensible rules and regimens you tried to impose on her (no one could work out what she was supposed to do with that apple every day: give it to her teacher? give it to you? eat it?). No, it’s more serious than that. Remember, before, when she used to do her ‘exercises’, or when she did them for too long or too often, you’d get embarrassed or irritated and say ‘Oh stop that, Billie’ or ‘Go and do that in your room’. Now you’re transfixed by it. You practically pull up a chair. This is a qualitative change in you. What can I say? You give me the creeps, man. You give me the fucking creeps. See it from my side. If I started giving you the creeps they would be woman creeps, not man creeps. Women (I read) very rarely show a sexual interest in their children (and very rarely try to rape their husbands). You are a man and you always have that at your disposal — male heaviness.
Change back. Please change back. Oh please, please. Please become again the big, calm, slow-moving, encouraging, approving, protective, affectionate man you were before. Until you do that, and it is what you’re going to do, you and I can have only one kind of intimacy. Remember that word we loved: epithalamium. (I’ve just looked it up and burst into tears.) I was faithful to you and you were faithful to me. Fidelity is all we’ve got. Take that away, now, and there’s nothing. Fidelity is epithalamium. Epithalamium.
The last paragraph concerned itself with such matters as his packed case, the keys to the flat across the road, the fact that Imaculada had prepared the bed and lightly stocked the fridge, and so on. When he first read the letter (it was half past one the day after) Xan’s first impulse was to do about fifty thousand pounds’ worth of damage to the house. Fifty thousand pounds would be about right. The presence, in the kitchen, of Billie, Sophie and Imaculada was just enough to restrain him. Instead, he asked Imaculada, ‘How can a man rape his wife? She’s his wife. And you were going to nick me. Where is Russia? Where, where, where?’ And he stood there with his fists raised and tensed …
He made an effort to reconstruct the night before, and achieved some tinkertoy success with a credit-card receipt from a nearby Indian restaurant, a temporary tattoo on his forearm (presumably allowing his reentry into some joint or dive), a beermat from the Turk’s Head, and a coupon for an inexpensive cologne. Also, in his notebook, he had written: ‘In black and white!! (a little bird told me).’ Apart from a four-day hangover, this was all the evidence he had, and it meant nothing to him … The head-injured person cannot remember the moments leading up to the head injury; and this is perhaps a strategy of the mind, sparing you the pain of reliving it. Xan wondered whether the amnesia of inebriation was also self-protective: if strong and pure enough, the memory of how you were last night would kill you instantly. Why remember the time you lost everything you had?
The flat he now occupied was a garden flat — a basement flat. Even in summer it was sepulchral. And it wasn’t summer. Xan stood up, now, and went into the kitchen, where it was brighter (and also colder). For a moment he thought he saw a human figure stir on the stone steps leading up to the neglected, the unloved back garden. It was not a human figure. It was a black rubbish-bag, in the process of shifting its weight: a very low thing, really, in the scale of existence — and keeling over further now like a tramp in his oilskins to be quietly sick after the usual incorrigible reverse.
Xan was obliging himself to reread Russia’s letter at least twice a day. Its penultimate paragraph (oh please, please) he reread almost hourly. He was in treacherous psychological territory, but this he fully assented to. It was intimate, it was exclusively intimate: the thought that Russia, whatever else she was doing, was being faithful to him. Denied Russia, he himself wanted infidelity — he craved infidelity more ecstatically than ever. But he did accept that what she said was true. Fidelity was his lifeline, and without it he would be a man in water, without connection.
She called on the eighth day.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well I’m here,’ said a comfortable voice — educated, accentless. ‘And I’ve kept my promise. I’m lying on the sofa in a rather grand and rather warm hotel room, and I’m all dressed up as a little girl. What that means is that everything I’m wearing is much too small. These panties, in particular, are ridiculous. So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan.
1. The Decembrist
Wearing a black tracksuit as refulgent as perfect shoeshine, he stepped out into the afternoon. His storefresh white trainers, his dark glasses, his bronzed countenance, his backswept silver hair: in the pharmacy, from which he was now absenting himself, they called him the Professor or the Englishman. But he was the Decembrist: well advanced into the final month of his year. It was a distinguished face, its lines apparently connected to something ancient or the study of something ancient — Etruscan Pottery, Linear B.
But here he was, in a modern setting: video rental, liquor locker, radio shack. The Decembrist was of medium height (and was heading, by now, towards less than medium); he was not conspicuous in a country — America — where old men dressed like children. Watch an aeroplane climbing a blue sky for long enough and a globule of sunshine will eventually kiss it and coat it and drip from it. So, too, with the glossy garb of the Decembrist, which blackly glittered. Above the suit, his handsome, martyred face. Below it, the white dots of his gyms. Out in the lot the cars were waiting, all in line but all dissimilar, like a conscript army of machines.
There was caution in his stride but nothing frail or halt, which was just as well: a recreational vehicle weighing several tons jerked backwards out of its trap, and the Decembrist’s hands flew from his pockets as he himself jerked clear, seeming to levitate, with an avian lightness. But the sound he made was equine — whinnying, rearing, longtoothed.
The driver drew level, a cellphone nestling in the cup of his jaw (and what beautiful golden hair he had, also busy in the light, with its bullion, its specie), and said, in answer to the Decembrist’s disbelieving stare:
‘Fuck you.’
Having manoeuvred itself into the clear, the great bus surged forward, and now the film rewound — with the Decembrist moving suddenly into its speed and the wheels yelping to a halt six inches from his knees. After some exasperated honking the driver reversed, swerved, and sped on his way, the word asshole included in the passing gulp of his rhythm and blues.
The Decembrist paused, his lips working, and then pushed on to his German saloon.
He sat, days later, on an upright chair by the swimming-pool — the swimming-pool and its motion jigsaw. The pool moved, always and helplessly, but the man was still, his head thrown back as if in agonised exhaustion. Around him the acres of grass, the couch grass, the bent grass, the cheat grass; and the squirt of the ceaseless sprinklers, hissing like a monstrous cicada … In one movement he stirred and stood. Cruise-wear, now: the swing top, the blue pantaloons, the white canvas deck-shoes. He also sported a dude-ranch cowboy belt, which he now straightened. The cartridge sockets were empty, but the holsters had been modified to contain two slender spraycans. One spraycan specialised in mosquitoes and other insects of the air; the other spraycan specialised in ants.
First, an hour with his accountant. Then an hour with his gardener. He was served lunch on the canopied deck. He wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The wasp came weaving towards him the way they do, like a punchy old southpaw, with its halfremembered moves, its ponderous fakes and feints. He drew with his left and caught it full in the face. And the wasp rose up, bristling in grief and femininity and youth. They meandered towards you so middle-aged, but they too had youth, and delicacy and clarity of colour. He didn’t stay to watch its bouncings and wormings and coilings.
He moved on to the stables, and had words with a well-built young man called Rodney Vee.
‘Rodney.’ With a remind-me intonation and a lordly frown he asked, ‘How long …?’
‘Since Monday, sir.’
‘And where are we now?’
‘Friday, sir.’
He nodded and made a further indication with a sideways movement of his head.
They went past the back of the imported barn and down some steps and into the anteroom of the disused garage. He again wagged his head before Rodney opened the inner door.
At first it sounded like a large animal trying to breathe, and then it sounded like a small animal trying to cry.
‘That’ll be all, Rodney,’ he said.
He stepped forward. In the far corner a young man was strapped naked to a baronial dining-chair with a sack over his head. The young man’s chest was shaking, lamenting, and his breath was fierce and nasal — eddy upon eddy.
The Decembrist pulled up a footstool. Grumblingly he sorted through the tray of implements at his feet: skewers, chisels.
Half an hour passed.
He stood up. He lifted the cowl of sacking. After a flustered glance round the room his head dropped and he reached for his spraycans, one in the left, one in the right.
The young man’s golden hair was gone.
‘Open your eyes! Behold. Fuck … ME?’ said Joseph Andrews.
‘You can take this fucking little bumboy, and stuff him in a fucking mailbag, and go and … and go and …’ Andrews caught his breath. ‘And go and sling him over the fucking top at Quaker Quarry!’
‘It will be done, sir. It will be done,’ said Rodney Vee, who then closed the inner door and added, ‘Are you serious, Boss?’
‘Well … Give him a few hours to compose his thoughts. Nah. Where’s he live?’
‘Vermilion Hills, Boss.’
‘Yeah. You tell him it’s the Quarry. But you take him to fucking Vermilion Hills and sling him out the fucking van. On the road. And not lightly. One … two … three. Boof. Eh up. Ruthie rings Queenie, right?’
Rodney nodded. They were coming up the steps and into the sun.
‘She says, “Mum? You won’t like it, but I’m marrying Ahmed.” And Queenie’s gone, “What? You marry that Ahmed and you never darken me door again.” “But I love him!” All this. Six months go by. The phone rings and it’s Ruthie. “Mum! Come and take me away! Aw, what he’s been doing to me!” “So,” says Queenie, “your sins’ve found you out.” “Come on, Mum, don’t fuck about.” “Now calm down, love. I’ll be over in a minicab. Where are you?”
‘It’s a fucking great mosque of a place on The Bishop’s Avenue. Queenie’s come through the gates and up the drive. She’ve rung the bell and the butler’s led her through five reception rooms. Picassos. Rembrandts. Cézannes. Ruthie’s on the couch, crying its little heart out. Queenie’s give her a hug and gone, “Ruthie, what is it? Tell your mother. I’m sure you and Ahmed can sort this out.”
‘Ruthie’s gone, “Mum? Aw, what he’s been doing to me! When I come here, me arsehole was the size of a five-pee piece.” “Yes, dear?” “Well now it’s the size of a fifty-pee piece. Take me home.” Queenie looks round the room and says, “Let’s get it straight. You’re giving up all this for forty-five pee?”
‘Ah, here she comes. Here come them famous lils.’
2. Cora Susan
Here she comes: Cora Susan.
She had a hundred yards of lawn to cross. Seen from that distance, she looked like the platonic ideal of a young mother. But where were the children? Peering through the prisms of the sprinkler spray, you expected to make them out, the children, circling her, tumbling at her feet. That must be why she walked so slowly, with an air of dreamy purpose (always one step behind, one step beyond) — to keep pace with the children. But there were no children … As usual, she wore a dress of white cotton, and a broad straw hat. The straps of a straw bag depended from her left shoulder (is that where she kept the wipes and diapers, the rolled-up sock with spit on it — for emergency cleansings of childish mouths? No: there were no children). A slight arrhythmia in the clack of her sandals: time delay, diminishing as she neared. Cora Susan’s hair was long and straight and fine, and a lucent grey, reminding you that grey was a colour — a colour like any other colour. She was thirty-six and five foot one.
‘Have a chair, dear. Paquita’s fetching you a nice glass of wine. I have unfortunate news.’
She took off her hat but remained standing on the lined deck. Unanswerably womanly, but not a mother. The spheres of her grey eyes were too shallow, and without the faults and nicks that they give you — that children give you. Her mouth contained something ungenerous, something resolutely unindulgent; it did not extend outwards into the world — it stayed within. And the secondary sexual characteristics, the breasts, the famous breasts. They were above all binocular: they were the eyes of a different creature, a different type of being, with qualities not necessarily shared by Cora Susan — candour, innocence, even purity. No child would maul them. There were reasons for all this.
Wine for Cora, one glass served by Paquita, and the bottle kept in an ice-bucket on the tray. For Joseph Andrews — Lucozade (couriered out from England by the gross). Every few seconds he slowly reached forward and touched her, rested a light palm on her, almost doctorly — on the elbow, the hand, the wrist.
‘It’s your father, dear. What can I say? He’s gone. He’s passed away … No great shock but he was your father, Cora. Now. You was — you was never told the truth, dear. Your gran’s version, dear. How’d it go?’
‘As it was handed down to me,’ she said in her accentless and warmly civilised voice, ‘Dad crippled himself falling off some mountain, and Mum converted and went to Israel. And I went to Canada with Old Ma Susan. That bit’s true.’
‘… Mick Meo did him, Cora. Your own grandfather did your dad.’
Audibly she breathed in, breathed out.
‘Relations between the Susans and the Meos was never of the smoothest. And I don’t just mean your mum and dad’s marriage. I know what Mick Meo done to Damon Susan. He drew a nine for it: attempted murder. How much do you uh …?’
‘Oh, Jo, please. Tell me everything.’
‘That’s the spirit, Cora. That’s my girl … Your mum and dad was chucking things at each other even before they was engaged. It was that kind of uh, relationship — a right old scrap. Then, as ill chance would have it, come the day when your mum calls Mick and tells him Damon’s took a liberty with her. A right liberty.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Not to put uh, too fine a point on it, dear, he give her one up the khyber.’
With no change in her tone and modulation Cora said, ‘He give me one up the khyber and all.’
‘I know he did, dear.’ Again, the hand on her wrist. ‘And if Mick had known that then there’s no chance Damon’d’ve lived. There’d have been none of this fucky nattempted. That I can assure you.
‘There was no mobile phones in them days. Leda’s left a message at the workshed. Mick’s out nicking high-voltage cables — dangerous work, skilled work — but he was a very good thief was Mick. He calls back: “He what?” But Mick’s out in Stoke and it’s the fucking miners’ strike and he … Anyway. He’s gone in there at dawn.’
‘Floral Grove. Stoke Newington.’
‘He’s gone in there at dawn. Your mum and dad’s fast asleep. In the same bed. So, I don’t know: must have patched it up. For the time being. Your granddad’s gone and drawn the curtains back. You know: rise and shine. Now unfortunately Mick’s still in his work clothes. Heavy boots with the shallow spikes. And the reinforced gauntlets — for them cables. Oh and his helmet. So he’s on Damon now, straddling him like, and nutting him and that, and the roundarms with the big gloves. Then Leda’s on Mick: seems she’s had a change of heart if you please. So Mick’s gone and locked her in the bathroom, and he give her a tap and all, unfortunately — but she was his own daughter, Cora …
‘Damon’s lying there weltering in his own blood. “Ah fuck. Ah Jesus.” All this. Mick’s gone, “How’s your nose?” “How’s me nose? I’m blind, mate!” Then he ‘ve started trying to uh, you know, “reason” with him. You know: “Uh, Mick mate. Look uh, no complaints. Fair’s fair. I stepped out of line. You taught me a lesson. That’s it. End of.” And Mick’s gone, “It’s a crime of passion we got here, boy.” Course he’s been puzzling for a means of doing Damon for years. “This is nothing, son. This is nothing.”
‘Mick’s dragged Damon on to the floor and got on the bed hisself. Then he’s broke both his legs. Jumping like. Then, when you could do what you liked with them, Damon’s pins is wedged sideways and your granddad’s taking running kicks at his cods and his chopper. With the workboots, more’s the pity. Damon’s not making much noise any more but now Leda’s come round and she’s yelling her head off next door. But Mick didn’t pay her no mind.
‘When he’s broke his arms and all his fingers, he picks him up by his hair and what’s left of his bollocks and slings him out the window, sad to say.’
‘And was the window open at the time?’
‘Unfortunately not.’
‘I’m trying to remember the house. They were on the second floor, weren’t they?’
‘Alas no. They was on the third.’
‘There was a lawn there. It was just lawn in the back.’
‘If only. That really was unfortunate. Just the previous week Damon’s had a rockery put in. So he come down on that. And it was that what done for him, landing on his bonce as he did. He was in Intensive Care for nearly a year. And of course Mick went away for his nine. Course, he could have pleaded uh, mitigating circumstances. “Your Honour, I did him because he’s give me daughter one up the khyber.” But he didn’t want to tar her with it, so he never. Then Old Ma Susan spirits you away to Vancouver. And you was lost to the Meos for ever.’
‘And Mum?’
‘You’re not touching your wine, dear. As for your mum, she done the rounds a bit and then settled down with Tony Odgers. Then he’s gone and got a seven for demanding with menaces. Teddy Ambrose come out at last and she’s took up with him. Then Teddy’s got cut to pieces in a ruck outside the World Upside Down. Your mum’s played the field a bit, then she’s pulled herself together and for a time she’s made a go of it with Ian Thorogood. Then he gets himself choked in a headlock whilst in police custody. Things was going not bad between your mum and Frank Purdom. Then Nick Odgers come out, for about a week, but long enough to do Frank Purdom, and your mum’s back to her old tricks. Keith Room was very good with her till he pulled a twelve, and then she’ve raised eyebrows by shacking up with Thelonius Curtly. And when he gets hisself topped she’s let herself down, many thought, by throwing in her lot with Lon Chang You. But she was on the drink and worse by then. To be perfectly frank with you, Cora, her reputation was beginning to suffer. They was calling her Khyber Kath by the end. Funny kind of name, that. I never did learn how she come by the “Kath” bit of it. How you feeling, dear?’
‘Oh, tolerably well.’
‘You’re a hard girl, Cora. You’ve had to be. You frighten even me sometimes — what I seen in you. Now okay, your dad weren’t the best of fathers, but he was your father. Your natural father, dear. Damon done what he done. Damon was Damon. He messed with you, and there ain’t no excuse for that. But you was still a family. And Mick Meo, by his overly hasty behaviour … Now if I know my Cora Susan she’s not going to bend over for that. She’s going to want to hurt somebody. And there’s only one of them left. Uncle Xan.’
‘Uncle Xan.’
‘I give him a smack meself the other day. About something nothing whatsoever to do with the Susans.’
‘Oh?’
‘He fucking grassed me up. Then he’s gone to the papers saying he never! And he called me a mad prick …’ Joseph Andrews shook his head and gave a smile of yokellish incredulity. On the table before them lay a green folder. He reached for it. ‘Here: “… whoever did me in October or had me done … they think I’ve been telling tales to the Old Bill. And that is something I would never do … They can stick red-hot pokers up my arse … whoever did me I tell him, you come down and …” Now that’s game, that is,’ he added with unqualified admiration. ‘No less than he should have said, of course. But these days that’s game. There’s Mick in him, Cora. And there’s Mick in you and all.’
‘And the money.’
‘And the money. Hebe’s money. Skinned you out of it. You’re going back for the funeral, of course? … Have a read of that. And the other matter?’
‘Beyond all expectation.’
‘Gaw, I got to pinch meself with the price we’re getting on this one. Talk about a thrust.’ He brought his clawed hands together. ‘The double play. I tell you, darling, if it all goes through all right you can have my end of it. I give it to you, dear. Jesus, the satisfaction. It’s beautiful. Cora? We done them sweet.’
The green file went in the straw bag and Cora Susan kissed Joseph Andrews and walked away across the coarse sward. Moving with an air of dreamy purpose — always one step behind, one step beyond.
3. Denizen
About twenty miles to the north-east Clint Smoker was settling into his half of a cabana in the grounds of a Moorish mansion known locally as the Ponderosa. In Clint’s quarters, as in everybody else’s, there was a large and lavish reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation’ on the wall facing the picture window. Clint typed:
Chief: Got here all right. The hotel’s gorgeous. My companion, Kate, is particularly taken with the oiled dwarves who line the driveway day and night. Shop. You’ve got your gagging order and I hope you’re happy.
Yeah, thought Clint. According to Jeff Strite, Heaf was summoned, not to Downing Street, but to a sweltering basement at the FPA — along with every other e-zine and nude-mag chancer in the British Isles. A man from the Palace with a double-barrelled name came on and told them that the material on the Princess was a fake and a fiction, and would they please shut up about it. Heaf returned to the Lark shedding tears of pride.
I think you’re experiencing an accounting problem in the marble department, but that’s me: cynical. Still, we can pursue related and parallel themes on little Vicky. I have an idea or two. Here as promised is the revisionist editorial on the Walthamstow Wanker:
Over the past month, a tragedy has unfolded in the heart of Essex.
For two days and two nights, an innocent and injured man — and we’re proud to call him a Lark reader — languished without treatment in a Rotherhithe nick before being released on bail.
He now faces charges of public indecency.
And for what?
Health boffins have long agreed that a regular visit to Thumb Street is crucial to masculine well-being.
Every man-jack of us knows that a decent toss reduces tension, setting you up for the rest of the day.
And there’s nothing better for a good night’s sleep.
Imagine.
In the seclusion of an unoccupied area of a public baths, this stainless individual was seeking relief over his daily edition of the paper you now hold in your hand.
But who should burst in on him but some old boiler with a bucket and mop.
Congratulations, darling!
You f**ked that one up!
In his confusion, and sadly impeded by his clothing, he slipped on the damp stone steps, incurring serious injury.
Little did he know that his tribulation — yes, his martyrdom — was yet to begin.
We say to this man that he has not been forgotten.
We say to this man that we are with him and will stay by his side.
We say: fist your mister for the Walthamstow One.
Clint had briefly admired his bathroom but had not yet used it. Now he lifted the ox-collar; he bestrid the bowl. After a few seconds, he found he was undergoing a sense of gradual depersonalisation, as if about to receive the introductory chords and colours of a lifechanging illness. His stare moved to the left. The basin: how small it was. His stare moved to the right. The bogroll-holder, the actual gauge of the tissue: scaled down. And the can he straddled: like a potty. When you wiped yourself it looked … Yes, there was definitely a gain in contrast. And every little helped.
Strollingly he returned to his studio. Shower and change in a minute: off with the aeroplane-wear (the radiant trainers, the aerodynamic shell suit) and on with something smart. An inaugural drinks party was scheduled for half past five. Meet your fellow — clients? inmates? guests? What did the brochure call them: residents? No, denizens. Denizens of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission … The reproduction on the wall facing the picture window. Whew, the state of that Adam. Come on, you’ve got to fit him up a bit better than that. You can’t send him out there with that cashew between his legs.
Was Michelangelo taking the piss — taking the michael? Was God?
4. At Ewelme
‘Qi? Q, i? No no no. You can’t have a q without a u. Now if you let that stand I shall most certainly challenge … Challenge! … Where are we. Q, i, indeed. What does it mean? Ah, do you see, all the q’s have u’s after them. Hello, that’s very odd. “An individual person’s life-force, the free flow of which within the body is believed to ensure physical and spiritual health.” … Well God help us. What happens now? I get docked the points. Bother. And you’ve done it twice: two qis and an if. On the triple word.’
‘Sixty-nine.’
‘Sixty-nine? I’m now minus thirteen. And I’m changing my letters. Where’s the bag?’
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but please may I be excused?’
‘Oh don’t go up now, darling. We’ve barely started. Stay and have a lovely warm hot chocolate at least …’
A minute later Henry said, ‘What would you, Bugger? I’m trying to keep her spirits up and it’s exhausting her. And me. And when I try to draw her out …’
‘Write to her, sir,’ said Brendan. ‘Write.’
The King stayed up late, listening to the Irish Sea. Ewelme stood on the north-western tip of the Welsh peninsula, at the end of a mile-long single-lane causeway. Its situation, together with the infallibly dreadful weather, deterred all intruders — and indeed all visitors: no one who had stayed at Ewelme ever willingly returned. Henry, at his desk, in his overcoat, felt his ears vibrate as the tower bell sounded the quarter-hour. The wind was committing murders in the night, sudden abductions, terrible smotherings …
My dearest sweetheart,
My soul hurts for you, it truly does. I have never seen you so deeply low. Even after Mummy’s accident, the energy of your youth somehow seemed to carry you onward. Now you sleep sixteen hours a day and hardly eat anything. (And when you are awake you’re curled up with the Koran, or the Upanishads or the Targum or God knows what.) I do wish you’d agree to have a chat with Sir Edward, if nothing more.
My darling, I don’t know exactly what is troubling you. I know roughly what is troubling you. While you are in all things the chief sufferer, this ignorance is very heavy for your father. Rather than agonising about something in particular, I find I’m agonising about everything. I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see. I implore you to tell me what actually happened in the Yellow House, my dearest (who surprised you there?). And I earnestly do believe that you will feel the benefit. And if you had some sort of a romp with one of those pretty Arab boys, what of it?
The vultures. Our official position is that the material is faked. You and I are aware that the material, at least in part, is not faked. I was less confident than Brendan. None the less, there has been no rebuttal, let alone refutation, which is presumably in the enemies’ power. This is very much to the good (it has quietened things down a bit). Brendan says their silence reflects a certain incapacity on their part. And there is another fairly encouraging likelihood, which I will tell you about if you will only talk to me.
I have just read this through, and it’s such a curate’s egg! ‘Good in parts’ — albeit thoroughly rotten. I yearn to express the unconditional love and sympathy I feel, but I just sound selfish and pompous. It’s my poor character!
Sweetheart, my one, my only jewel, I beseech you: let us be in this together. I want to reach out and physically take some of the weight from your shoulders. Remember. It’s we two now.
5. February 14 (1.10 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: How’s our Flight Engineer?
First Officer Nick Chopko: Out cold.
Macmanaman: He can coax the computer along, I’ll give him that. I’d have killed it and gone to direct law … You know the rooftiles they have in England? Sheets of grey slate?
Chopko: Like machetes.
Macmanaman: This one, you could see it coming. Rennie thought it was a dead bird. It just twirled into him. Here.
Chopko: Jesus.
Macmanaman: … Royce Traynor was only ever going to fly CigAir when he was in the condition he’s in today.
Chopko: Dead.
Macmanaman: Dead. For him it was like a mission. Rennie said there was nothing — repeat, nothing — he liked more than telling someone to put a cigarette out. He’d get up in the middle of the night and call a cab if there was a good chance of telling someone to put a cigarette out. And get this. Rennie smoked a pack a day for forty-three years without him knowing. He would have killed her. Killed her. I think she did it to have something on him, to stick it to him. Why don’t people leave, Nick? Why don’t they just leave?
Chopko: I don’t know either.
Macmanaman: Addictive personality … I don’t like it up here. It’s too thin up here. I don’t like the physics of it up here. The difference between max and stall is just a couple of knots. It’s like a slide on black ice. Ask for three seven oh. Wait. The windshear: feel it’s moving around in back of us. It’s like … Uh, put everybody down, Nick. And the girls when they’ve secured the carts. This is my third time and I can feel it coming. There’s clear air [clear air turbulence] out there. I can feel it this time.
Four minutes later Flight 101 dropped a thousand yards at the speed of gravity: thirty-two feet per second per second. The coffin of Royce Traynor leapt from the floor of Pallet 3 and smashed into its ceiling. After a beat it smashed back down again. It landed corner-first on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. There was an atrocious sneeze of thick pink liquid, then a steadier, seeping flow. After twenty-five minutes the dominant pool of thick pink liquid would begin to fume.
* * *
6. Apologia—1
Joseph Andrews was in his office, upstairs. Two sloping sheets of glass formed an isosceles triangle with the floor. You could see every freckle, every nostril hair … He held a microphone in his hand: buxom, corded, the mike of a bygone crooner. The pause button gave a little click whenever he freed it or engaged it.
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story. Man to man. Let you be the judge. Let you be the judge … [Click.] … Gaw, where do I …? Go on then. Go on. [Click.]
‘I had such a reputation for enduring pain that when the prison dentist offered me an injection I felt pretty much duty-bound to chin him.
‘So he’ve gone off to see his dentist. And then of course the screws done me in the Strong Cell. Par for the course. Me cheek was out here. When the dentist come back [click] with his fucking jaw in a sling [click] … Well. They took a right liberty. I was in a straitjacket with me head in a clamp and me mouth wedged open with a sawblade. Ooh and that dentist, he’s give me abscess a right going over. Dear oh dear. They was watching to see if I’d flinch but I never. [Click.]
‘[Click.] There ain’t a form of punishment meted out in His Majesty’s Prisons that I’ve not took. Bread and water, deprivation of mattress, Refractory Block, PCFO. In the hospital wing they’ve give me the Blinder and the Crapper. They slip it in your coffee. The Blinder ain’t so bad — you just go all legless like. But the Crapper … you can kill a man in a week in that manner. I’ve had the Cat and the Birch. It’s a fallacy that I used to whistle while they was giving me the corporal. But on the thirteenth stroke I used to do a lovely yawn, and he’d come in with a will on the final five. Trying to make you cry out. No chance. The Birch is worst. It’s more uh, detrimental to a man’s dignity, being as how it’s on your arse. I mean you got some man on your shoulders, for the Cat. But it’s just a baby, your arse is.
‘Them’s only the official punishments. They’ve pissed in me tea and flobbed on me grub. For five weeks they’ve kept me in the Box on the Strap Plank: another right liberty. But what it is is: the niggles. Like me mum come up to see me in Durham — a two-day journey in them days — and an hour before she’s due they’ve gone and transferred me to Strangeways! That’s how low they’ll stoop. These are men who live to see other men confined. Like they take away your Association on a technicality — and there’s that little smirk. You see that look on they face, and you know you’ll have to do them. Just a question of when. And then of course they do you. Fact of life. [Click.]
‘[Click.] I want to tell you me story, man to man. Right or wrong, let you be the judge.
‘Like many a face I was, in me youth, an avid boxer. I won four of me first eleven fights at Bermondsey Baths. Which don’t sound too clever. But I never lost one! In fact they was all knockouts. See, I had an unfortunate tendency to get meself disqualified. Instead of standing there with me hand held high, as victor, while the other bloke got stretchered off, I’d still be kneeling on the canvas and giving him what for. It was a struggle to uh, channel me aggression. In the eleventh fight I’ve left the ref for dead and all. So they banned me. [Click.] And Mr Shackleton, the Director of the YBPA, never knew what hit him — I come up on him that nice. [Click.] After that decision I had no choice but to turn to a life of crime.
‘Me first trouble with the Law was for possession of an offensive weapon. Not defensive, oh no. Offensive. The Old Bill gives you a spin and it’s one of them uh, circular conversations. “Oi. What’s this?” “What’s it look like?” “Why you carrying a knife?” “I always do.” “What for?” “I always carry a knife.” “Yeah but why?” “Because I always do.” Blah blah blah. I was eight. So then the social’s upped and packed me off to Approved School. And then of course I did me Borstal. And even in me boxing days I’ve had a spell or two in Pentonville for Smash and Grab. Smash and Grab: definition of a glass brassière, if you like. This’d be the late Thirties. Then the war come … Now don’t get me wrong. We was patriotic and that. In their struggle against the spectre of Nazism, we wished the armed forces all the luck in the world. But you wasn’t going to be donning togs for the powers-that-be. No chance. [Click.] And if a Tommy come your way on a dark night, the slag’d live to regret it. [Click.] So in the war years you was either inside or on your toes from the Conscription. In 1944, when I was finishing me three in Wormwood Scrubs, Sir Oswald Mosley, of Blackshirt fame, and his wife, Lady Diana, was interned there. There was a plan on to do him during Exercise, but he come over as a perfectly reasonable sort of bloke and we’ve left him be.
‘Things opened up beautiful after the war, with all the austerity. We was forging ration-books and otherwise like billy-o. Then in the year of your birth I get me first decent thrust — and me first serious bird. Swings and roundabouts. [Click. Click.] Funny word that: bird. Comes from birdlime, rhyming with time. Birdlime was the sticky stuff they put on the branches of trees to kill the birds. Sticky fingers, see: thieving. But it’s the birds that cop it, not the branches, so it don’t quite work out. Bird also means “girl”. A richard is a sort, Richard the Third rhyming with bird. [Click.] Rhyming-slang: load of bollocks. [Click.] But I’m told the word bird comes from bride, originally. Anyway.
‘It was the Airport Job. Heath Row — two words — it was in them days. Also known as the Protective Assurance Robbery. An overnight cargo of diamonds plus £160,000 in hard cash — millions in today’s money. The guards was supposed to be drugged: barbitone in they coffee. But when I give one a nudge [click] with me fucking iron bar [click] the others have jumped up and steamed in. They was Ghost Squad! Well, I don’t know, they must have expected schoolboys. They hadn’t reckoned on me, Ginger, Dodger, Gimlet, Whippo, Chick and Yocker, and we did them something gruesome. When we come out the coppers is there mob-handed and we’ve had another almighty mill. I reckoned I was well away. I’ve slipped under a police van and clung on to the exhaust. You know: first traffic-light and I’d be away. But they’ve only put the sirens on and roared off to Battersea nick — fifteen mile away. By then me chest and forearms was welded to the pipe. They had to cut me free before they banged me up, and I still bear them scars. One of the Ghost Squad boys was on the critical list, and offing a copper was a topping offence in them days. I even got me mum to send him a bunch of grapes — to a copper. But that’s one of them uh [click] them uh [click] them strange paradoxes you’ve stuck youself with when you gone and played the game I’ve played.
‘I served every hour of me fourteen. In them days, if you was flogged, you never lost no remission for subsequent misdemeanours. So me first week in Winson Green I thought: let’s do the Governor, and get the Cat. I done the Governor: spun the legs out from under him in the vegetable garden and come down on his face with me shovel. The screws’ve give me a right sticking — win some, lose some — but when me flogging come up, there’s questions from the Home Secretary in the House of Commons! And God stone me if they don’t go chucko. I’ve had some black hours on the in, but nothing compares to that morning when they’ve gone and cancelled me Cat. I had so many run-ins, thereafter, they was always trying to have me declared mental!
‘When I come out after me fourteen — that was 1949, so this’d be 1963—I find meself in an awkward situation. That’s what so often happens after you come out: like as not, you’re straight back in. Me sister Polly was at that period the common-law wife of Pongo Droy. A while ago Pongo’ve cut Noel Shortly — who’s nicked him! That’s to say: Noel’s reported Pongo to the Law. Which, for me … Well Pongo’s not having that, is he? He’s pulled three months, which is a bit stiff, because in them days you could go berserk with a blade and expect no more than a ten-bob fine. While Pongo’s away his brother Hughie’s done Duncan Shortly, Noel’s dad. So Duncan’s nephew, Cecil O’Rourke, puts Hughie’s lights out in the World Upside Down. Pongo’s fucking come out, he’s [click] fuck … Ah, fuck it [click] he’s glassed Cecil, and now he’s gone looking for Noel. Who was waiting for him, with a sawn-off. Pongo’s lost both legs from the knee down and Polly’s come running to me. I’ve only been out a week. I wasn’t interested till she told me Noel’d nicked Pongo for the stabbing. That got me off me arse. The result was I drew an eight for Aggravated Manslaughter.
‘It was 1975 when I come out — I served an extra three for me part in the so-called “mangle riot” at Winson Green. And by now I’m going: enough’s enough. As you yourself know, a man has to adapt and change with the times. A further two-year term for Grievous give me more leisure to think. I hadn’t been out for long when I was fancied for a murder [click] which I fucking done [click], the case being dismissed in the absence of any evidence whatsoever. And Life was eighteen years in them days. No, son, I said to meself. Time to turn over a new leaf. Strike out on a different path. I’ve gone and emigrated to the Costa del Sol. And thus began me long and, in the end, tragic association with Keith the Snake. [Click.]
‘Get this in here. [Click.] You don’t know of me personally, but me name might ring a bell. I don’t know — are you a reading man? Me, I never was a reader. Didn’t seem to have the time. Nah: wasn’t that. See, in prison, it’s just another way they can hurt you. “Where’s your book gone, Jo? Bookworms must have eaten it.” And then the little smirk. And then of course you’d do them and they’d do you. Goes with the territory. I never held with reading in the nick. Don’t believe in it. You hear about blokes getting degrees from fucking Oxford while they’re banged up. I never held with that because as soon as they start the reading they get religious and all. Nutters who’ve sliced up families of six going round with they hands clasped behind they back. Praying and that. Don’t hold with it. If I see a con with a Bible they was due a bash. I know what loss of freedom is, what confinement is, but me thoughts are me own. It’s like the Kray Twins, from their book: “Flowers are God smiling at us.” And if that don’t send you to the bog then I don’t know what will.
‘But one day the book trolley come round. As it’s gone past I see the spines and one of them’s only called Joseph Andrews! Me first thought was: someone’s gone and taken a right raging liberty. Someone’s gone and done me uh, me life story with no permission whatsoever. I give the screw a shout — and the slag’s name is Henry Fielding. But of course after a while I’ve calmed meself down. Joseph Andrews was one of the first English novels, published as early as 1742. I got me TV glasses for a read of it and I’ve not made head or tail of the language they use in them days. But there’s something very near the beginning, about a good man being more … influential than a bad. And them’s wise words …
‘Years later I’ve come across another book, in three volumes, entitled Tom Jones. Must be the life story of the singer, I’ve thought, him of “It’s Not Unusual” fame. But no: it was only by the same fella — Henry Fielding. I always was an avid Tom Jones fan, and to this day I’ll get on a plane to attend one of his concerts. “It’s Not Unusual” was his greatest hit, but me own favourite’s got to be “The Green, Green Grass of Home”.
‘I want you to think about that. If you would: the green, green grass of home.’
Click. Joseph Andrews now summoned his amanuensis, Manfred Curbishley: braces, a horseshoe of hair going round the back of his head, mouth and eyes as moist as oysters. He looked as though he’d never left London — never left the bookies’ office in the Mile End Road. And a drinker’s face, with its pattern of heat: its oxbow of oxblood.
With a wag of the head: ‘There’s more, but you can start turning this into English. And take out all the language … Where’s Rodney?’
‘Accompanying Miss Susan to the airport, Boss.’
‘Course he is, course he is.’
The frowning gaze of Joseph Andrews (every mote of age visible in the carbonated air) settled on the green file, which lay open on his desk. Cora, he now saw, had underlined a name in one of the clippings. He adjusted his glasses: Pearl O’Daniel. With an inner murmur he pictured her father: Ossie O’Daniel. A good man, a sound man, a man of principle: never took any fucking rubbish from the screws. Remember once he came into Association in the middle of the day with his privates hanging out. This was at Strangeways. There’d just been an off — someone kicking up. No one said anything about Ossie and his privates, not even the screws. He’d just had twenty-four of the Birch that morning, so you made allowances, and tactfully turned the other way.
7. We two
Brendan Urquhart-Gordon lay in bed with his laptop. The imagery being fed through to him was from Oughtred; it attempted to duplicate, by the use of ‘isosurfaces and volumetric rendering’, the material on the Princess. Emboldeningly, the counterfeits of the first stills could not be distinguished from the originals — or at least not by the unassisted eye; and the four-second loop, where the Princess swivelled in the bath, was an apparently perfect simulacrum, down to the very eddies of the water. But the attempt to morph the enemy’s latest offering, the attempt to carve it out of light and magic, was a clear failure. Here the technology came up against its structural limits. Brendan could feel his body temperature climb: the inner casuist was acknowledging the first great wound in his defence. He thought (again): if the enemy so much as gave the time and place — the Château, the Yellow House … A chimerical mischief would at once become something actual, something to be investigated, and the media …
The new image, anonymously remailed on to the Net that morning, showed the Princess in three-quarter profile. It was an enlargement, and the quality — the definition — seemed relatively weak. Yet this much became clear: she was not alone. It wasn’t a shadow, louring above her. It was an implicit presence, demanded by the demeanour of the Princess. Her crossed hands resting on her shoulders, the angle of her torso minutely averted from the hypothetical entity, her expression … This was what the technology couldn’t capture: it couldn’t capture the complexity of the Princess’s expression. She looked surprised, and shocked too, but not quite startled or fearful; she looked intensely anxious; she looked slightly sick. But it was the eyes and their pitiful attempt at comity, at courtesy, at good manners: this could not be duplicated.
Retaining his pyjamas, and adding all his sweaters, Brendan got dressed and went to the King. He found him in his dressing-room, sitting before the empty grate with his face in his hands. Without looking up Henry pointed at something on the low table. Was it a golf ball? No, it was a crumpled sheet of paper. Brendan didn’t find it pleasant to watch the King flatten and straighten this out, his lower lip pendulous with reluctant concentration, and then pass it on with a sigh that closed his eyes. Brendan asked for and was given permission to activate the one-bar electric fire. Don’t like that colon, he thought, as he settled down to it:
Dear Daddy:
So it’s ‘we two’ now, is it? Mummy will be delighted when she hears. But she won’t hear. Perhaps I could have told Mummy what happened in the Yellow House, even though she would have been much more horrified than you. But I can’t do that, can I? Because it’s just ‘we two’.
I’m so sad to learn that you’re suffering. On the other hand I am absolutely fine. It’s nice to know that everyone on earth is leering at you. I don’t dare look at any of it, but I’ve talked to my friends, until I stopped daring to do that too. The very air seems full of me; even the wind seems to say my name. But the air and the wind are polluted. When I’m not sleeping, or sitting there with you, not eating, I’m bathing. And even bathing, now, deeply reinfects me. Even the clear water feels like sewage.
I want to get farther and farther away from the thing which is called World.
May I close with a few quotations from your letter? ‘Thoroughly rotten … It’s my poor character … Sweetheart … let us be in this together.’
Uh-huh?
‘I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see.’
Oh go on and close them. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.
I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be—
V.
‘I am blind, like a kitten,’ said Henry in a slurred voice. ‘I see nothing. Do you think it possible, Bugger, to do something truly dreadful in your sleep and not remember it?’
Brendan moved closer. He hoped to dredge up words of comfort for his liege lord. Henry had settled on a certain eventuality: ‘What of it, if she had some sort of romp with one of those pretty Arab boys?’ There would be a better time to tell him that the visitor to the Yellow House was an adult, and not just another child.
8. Use Your Head
Chief: Tonight I’ll e you the pilot piece for the column. I suggest the byline ‘Yellow Dog’ (photo of snarling pariah). Then, if anyone asks, we can say it’s satire and comes from Jonathan Swift (the cases I’ll use will be all generic, so nobody can sue). You know like the Modest Proposal where he told the starving Irish to eat their own nippers. Look, there’s a big Vicky story brewing in LA which we can develop without stepping out of line. A flesh video called ‘Princess Lolita’. Humungous hit — what with the timing. Can’t buy that kind of publicity. More later. Weather here still superb high pressure. Saw that three people fucking drowned in the rain in SE England. That’s what I like to hear. Clint.
‘Hey asshole. What’s five times eight?’
Rich said, ‘… Fifty.’
‘Oh yeah? And what’s five times ten?’
Rich said, ‘… Forty-seven.’
There was laughter, in which Clint joined. He was attending class at the Academy, along with nine other denizens. Rich stood naked on a dais at the far end of the room. He was ridiculously endowed, endowed beyond all utility (his head and torso seemed mere afterthoughts: a howdah and canopy tacked on to the trunk), and he was supposed to be a genuine retard. In fact he was a would-be porno star acting under instructions. The Director of the Academy, John Working, had used genuine retards in earlier days, but it was hard to get hold of the right kind, and they were always injuring themselves or molesting the help. At the nightly poolside cookouts, Working also employed a nonorchid headmaster from Central LA who, strolling naked from table to table, knowledgeably answered questions on everything under the sun; the would-be porno star had to stand there too, stupidly eating hamburger after hot dog, while the Academy denizens sat back with their smoked trout and their ewe-cheese salads.
‘Hey shithead. In the Bible. Adam and …?’
Rich said, ‘… Ivy.’
‘Hey dorkbrain. How many Commandments are there?’
Rich said, ‘… Nine.’
Clint was not to be left out: ‘Hey. Who shall inherit the earth, cunt?’
dear clint: so! u have been sent to cali4nia 2 cover the princess lolita phenomenon 4 the lark! it’s just come out here 2, but u can only get it in the 6 shops, and they’re so c-d: i’ll have 2 get my brother (well, 1/2-brother) 2 get 1 4 me. every1’s talking about it: they say the actress is the absolute twin of our vicky (she’s barely 17) & per4ms the usual r&y stunts with stableboys & diplom@s, not 2 mention some 69 with a lady-in-w8ing! that’s what i am, clint: a lady in w8ing … so! k pasa? i’ve never been stateside, but i’ve read some boox. indian
reservations with t-p’s & heap big totem poles? or all very spanish with k-n pepper & “iladas? e me all, dear 1. i can’t tell u how much happier i am without orl&o. i o u 1 4 th@. 2nite i’m @ home with my father. so deliciously sed8! hurry back 2 engl&. i think it’s time, don’t u? k8.
Most birds you meet in the chat-rooms, thought Clint, as he relaxed in his cabana: they’re virtual. They ain’t there, not really: a bootstrap botchjob of mannerisms and affectations. But this one? A real character, a bubbly personality with a smashing sense of humour. And a good family girl, too, who knew her place, unlike some …
Cracking his knuckles, Clint moved to the table and the waiting laptop. He inhaled richly. He felt an unfamiliar afflatus: what was the phrase — taking dictation from heaven?
Yellow Dog’s Diary
• So some nun took a knock from a stolen car and was left bleeding on a zebra crossing.
Now, before we put our boxer pants into the tumble drier, let’s have a look at the other side of it.
The coppers openly admitted that the lad had had a few.
In actual fact he was four times over the limit.
It would have been a miracle if he’d noticed giving her a tap.
So much for ‘hit and run’.
As for her?
Thirty years old and she’s ‘a bride of Christ’.
In other words she’s crossed her legs forever to concentrate on her ‘good works’.
Pass the sickbag someone.
Word from the hospital is on the grim side, so at least she’ll be off the streets for a year or two.
But what about the others?
We ‘re the ones that have got to look at you, darlings.
Never had the strength of a man in you and it shows.
So when you go out in public, get your hair done and put some powder on that ugly old boat, for f**k’s sake.
• So a so-called ‘referee’s assistant’ (‘linesman’ was good enough in my day) got kicked to death by players, management and crowd after a disputed decision at the North-East derby at the Stadium of Light, where they really care about their football.
Yes, care.
That’s C-A-R-E, alright?
True, video replays leave little doubt that a red card was in order, and that, given the career-ending injury that resulted, a yellow would not have sufficed.
But they don’t f**k about up Tyneside way.
If you so much as
Clint worked on. Then, having filed, he sat down on the sofa and empowered the TV and the VCR. He was looking forward to seeing Princess Lolita. But normal porno was forbidden at the Academy: you had to watch the stuff they provided as part of your kit. Academy porno, true, had much in common with normal porno: the acting, for example, was free of all conviction. So you had to wonder, when the bloke stripped down, at the bird’s gasp of gratitude and awe. There she was now: swooning at the sight of another no-see-um — another inverted exclamation-mark (in, what, fourteen-point?). And the next bit, there, look. What was she doing — picking her teeth? Clint was supposed to pay special attention to the thirty-minute cunnilingus sequence that followed, but he found himself reaching for the remote. And you had to suspend the old disbelief entirely when at last he plunged into her: the way she twists and judders and starts singing Wagner. To be fair, the women in Academy porno were among the smallest he had ever seen. Not kids or midgets — just incredibly small. Real throwabouts …
‘Use Your Head’ was the Academy motto. Much of the class activity was overseen by a retired porno star called Dimity Qwest, now a respected activist and therapist, who showed you how to work the fake quim they doled out to you on arrival. In time, they all became slobberingly proficient at the art of oral love. Clint had found it a low moment, to be sure, when Dimity told him to regard his organ as a middle finger without the nail; but then she cheered him up by touting the likelihood of anal bliss, increased access to the tradesmen’s entrance being something the smaller bloke could legitimately expect. You were meant to practise in your cabana. The thing had a ‘pleasure meter’ on it, about halfway to the hypothetical navel, which showed you when you were getting warm.
If asked, Clint would have said that he was responding to the treatment. Definitely. After all, nobody’s perfect and everything’s relative. And the lads at the pool, during the nude brunch: a good few of them put a spring in his stride. Several denizens, moreover, during workshop, tearfully lamented the shaming meagreness of their ejaculations. Clint chipped in, saying that this was a department in which he happened to shine, and going on to describe his heroics with Rehab.
Now he cleaned his teeth in the scaled-down bathroom: the basin was no bigger than an ashtray. His artificial smile briefly quickened with sincerity as he thought about the porno interviews he’d lined up in Lovetown. Looking forward to Princess Lolita: see some decent todgers for once in his life. The absolute twin of our Vicky. Looking forward to Kate: lady in waiting.
9. Epithalamium
By now there were torn creases in the sheet of paper which winked at him whenever he picked the thing up. Through them you could see the other world — or so it seemed. The letter was now a week old; and there had since been the incident with the fox.
* * *
My dear Xan,
It would not be true to say that you raped me last night, but it would be true to say that you tried. I know this is a question you must in general be tired of hearing. Still, I must ask it. What do you remember?
It was about 2.20 when you put on the light. Then you crashed down on me and forced your tongue into my mouth and your hand between my legs. As well as being an amazing stinkbomb of cigars, beer, curry, vomit, and shit, you ‘reeked of cheap ponce’, to use your own phrase (you had just helped me out of a minicab — this was, or seems, years ago). I hit you on the head with closed fists about eight or nine times as hard as I could. I’m sorry. Your poor, poor head. Then I got out and ran upstairs and locked myself in with Baba. You followed, and battered on the door. Baba, incredibly, slept through it, but Billie woke up and sat down crying outside Imaculada’s door, and she woke up too. She said that if she’d had a phone in her room she would certainly have called the police.
You were shouting your head off about your ‘conjugal rights’. I think it’s a rule, don’t you, that whenever the ‘rights’ of marriage are invoked, by either one, then that’s the end of that marriage. I don’t know, this may only be true of the bedroom. In the last five years we have done a million things for each other that perhaps felt like duties or obligations or sacraments, but I never felt that either of us was asserting a right.
Our marriage is not over. But Xan, my dearest — you are scaring the shit out of me. And to think that there are supposed to be women who love to live in fear; no woman worth anything would put up with it for an instant. Shall I tell you what it’s like? It’s the desire, more intense than any you’ve ever felt, for something to be away from you. It’s the tearing desire for something to be over.
Our marriage is not over. It is not over. Last night was an utter disaster for us, and it will take an incredible effort to recover from it. I know — who wants an incredible effort, in matters of the heart or anywhere else. But that’s what lies ahead of you, beginning with hours and hours of Tilda Quant.
This is what I think has happened. Your past is your past, and you escaped it or evolved out of it. Over the years you wore down your prejudices and developed a set of rational contemporary attitudes — remember my saying that you were more feminist than I was? You were a little bit pious, if anything. Then, after you were hit, I thought at first you’d slipped back a generation or two. I now think it’s more basic, more atavistic than that. Your attitudes and opinions aren’t attitudes and opinions any more. They’re beliefs, and primitive beliefs at that. If, today, you were to show me around your past, as you once did five years ago, you wouldn’t be showing me Kropotkin’s clubhouse on Worship Street, or Mother Woolf’s spieler, or the pub called the World Upside Down. You’d be showing me your cave — or your treetop.
Two more things. You have started being different with Billie. And I don’t mean all the incomprehensible rules and regimens you tried to impose on her (no one could work out what she was supposed to do with that apple every day: give it to her teacher? give it to you? eat it?). No, it’s more serious than that. Remember, before, when she used to do her ‘exercises’, or when she did them for too long or too often, you’d get embarrassed or irritated and say ‘Oh stop that, Billie’ or ‘Go and do that in your room’. Now you’re transfixed by it. You practically pull up a chair. This is a qualitative change in you. What can I say? You give me the creeps, man. You give me the fucking creeps. See it from my side. If I started giving you the creeps they would be woman creeps, not man creeps. Women (I read) very rarely show a sexual interest in their children (and very rarely try to rape their husbands). You are a man and you always have that at your disposal — male heaviness.
Change back. Please change back. Oh please, please. Please become again the big, calm, slow-moving, encouraging, approving, protective, affectionate man you were before. Until you do that, and it is what you’re going to do, you and I can have only one kind of intimacy. Remember that word we loved: epithalamium. (I’ve just looked it up and burst into tears.) I was faithful to you and you were faithful to me. Fidelity is all we’ve got. Take that away, now, and there’s nothing. Fidelity is epithalamium. Epithalamium.
The last paragraph concerned itself with such matters as his packed case, the keys to the flat across the road, the fact that Imaculada had prepared the bed and lightly stocked the fridge, and so on. When he first read the letter (it was half past one the day after) Xan’s first impulse was to do about fifty thousand pounds’ worth of damage to the house. Fifty thousand pounds would be about right. The presence, in the kitchen, of Billie, Sophie and Imaculada was just enough to restrain him. Instead, he asked Imaculada, ‘How can a man rape his wife? She’s his wife. And you were going to nick me. Where is Russia? Where, where, where?’ And he stood there with his fists raised and tensed …
He made an effort to reconstruct the night before, and achieved some tinkertoy success with a credit-card receipt from a nearby Indian restaurant, a temporary tattoo on his forearm (presumably allowing his reentry into some joint or dive), a beermat from the Turk’s Head, and a coupon for an inexpensive cologne. Also, in his notebook, he had written: ‘In black and white!! (a little bird told me).’ Apart from a four-day hangover, this was all the evidence he had, and it meant nothing to him … The head-injured person cannot remember the moments leading up to the head injury; and this is perhaps a strategy of the mind, sparing you the pain of reliving it. Xan wondered whether the amnesia of inebriation was also self-protective: if strong and pure enough, the memory of how you were last night would kill you instantly. Why remember the time you lost everything you had?
The flat he now occupied was a garden flat — a basement flat. Even in summer it was sepulchral. And it wasn’t summer. Xan stood up, now, and went into the kitchen, where it was brighter (and also colder). For a moment he thought he saw a human figure stir on the stone steps leading up to the neglected, the unloved back garden. It was not a human figure. It was a black rubbish-bag, in the process of shifting its weight: a very low thing, really, in the scale of existence — and keeling over further now like a tramp in his oilskins to be quietly sick after the usual incorrigible reverse.
Xan was obliging himself to reread Russia’s letter at least twice a day. Its penultimate paragraph (oh please, please) he reread almost hourly. He was in treacherous psychological territory, but this he fully assented to. It was intimate, it was exclusively intimate: the thought that Russia, whatever else she was doing, was being faithful to him. Denied Russia, he himself wanted infidelity — he craved infidelity more ecstatically than ever. But he did accept that what she said was true. Fidelity was his lifeline, and without it he would be a man in water, without connection.
She called on the eighth day.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well I’m here,’ said a comfortable voice — educated, accentless. ‘And I’ve kept my promise. I’m lying on the sofa in a rather grand and rather warm hotel room, and I’m all dressed up as a little girl. What that means is that everything I’m wearing is much too small. These panties, in particular, are ridiculous. So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. We will go quietly
After a couple of days on his own, batching it in the basement down the road, Xan Meo slowly realised something. Before, he had lived in a house full of girls: two that were women, two that would be women thereafter. And now? Now he was living with a man — himself: he felt denuded, and hideously revealed. Xan didn’t know the lines (and, in his present disposition, would have rejected them as unmanly), but he was sharing Adam’s agony, after the Fall: ‘… cover me, ye pines, Ye cedars with innumerable boughs, Hide me …’ He had fallen. He was a Septembrist, not a Decembrist, but he found it very ageing, his exclusion from the house with its women a hundred yards away — a minute’s walk; yet Russia had sent him on a much longer journey through time.
Standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, Xan clipped his toenails — so kippered and curled. The nail of the big toe cleaved with a crackle; its immediate juniors each gave a defiant tick as he lopped them. But the nail of the little toe made no sound at all. How tactful, how very discreet. The nail of the little toe came quietly.
Reading the instructions on the packet of a store-bought meat pie, he noticed that an ampersand of eye-dreck jumped from word to word — like the bouncing ball above the nursery rhyme on the television, there to help the children sing along.
Passing the mirror, naked, he seemed to see a Rubens in the glass. That thickened, tightened feeling around the gut and saddle, making him feel that he was, to say the least of it, a couple of hundred bowel-movements behind the game. There was nothing wrong with Xan that a year in the lavatory wouldn’t cure. But where would he find that year? Did he have that year?
Waking, and rubbing his face, he felt a pillow-crease like a duelling-scar on his cheek. He had just shoved himself out of a dream of kitchen chaos — buckets and coffee-grounds and upended rubbish-bags. No need to tidy up, not after dreams, he thought; no need to leave dreams as you’d expect to find them. But this was a dream about a man alone. So don’t allow that room to let itself go: you’ll be back. The duelling-scar was still on his cheek as he stood by the fridge and ate lunch. He caught himself in the glass of the garden door. Like a Junker: brainwashed, paranoid, talentless.
Climbing from the straightbacked chair, he gave voice to a groan. Sitting back down again, he gave voice to another. Anything and everything made him groan: bending, turning, wiping his brow. And the very old—they didn’t groan all the time. They trained themselves not to; and so would he. We will come quietly, like the little toenail. We will go quietly. We won’t make a sound.
On the fourth day he was allowed home for a probationary half-hour with the girls. Russia greeted him with a cousinly hug and then withdrew, but only tactically: she would look in, pass by, she would clump about on the stairs and on the floor above. This was meant to fortify Imaculada, whose sickened glances suggested (to Xan at least) that domestic disharmony was quite unknown in the slums of São Paulo … Billie was the kindest to him, consenting, after a while, to be lifted on to his lap for a book; then Russia appeared and loudly and brightly suggested that they sit on the sofa (side by side). Although Sophie burst into tears the instant she saw him, she recovered surprisingly well. Thereafter she cried only when he coughed. And Xan’s cough had come on a bit in recent days. He coughed not in helpless reflex but with purpose and method, hacking the ragged edges off the soggy presence in his throat.
With Russia he tried to look the very picture of contrition, which was the best he could hope for, because contrition was not what he felt. He was perhaps open to intellectual persuasion about the solecism, the regrettable typo, of raping your wife. But a persuasion is not a conviction; and it would in the end be countered by the argument, or the unadorned encyclical, that your wife is your wife. Besides: everyone knew that a special indulgence should always be extended to men who, through no real fault of their own, happened to be unusually drunk. Yet Xan was making the effort. He was making the effort to be or at least seem reasonable, to bow to reason, as hereabouts interpreted. For instance, with Russia, he never succumbed to the ever-present temptation to ask (or order) her into the bedroom. The work of controlling or dissimulating these urges and grievances caused him to tremble, sometimes for a minute on end. During one of those minutes Russia looked at him and fleetingly imagined that he was trying not to laugh.
But nothing openly terrible happened, and his visits became longer, looser, laxer. Russia’s patrols further receded; Imaculada would sometimes leave him briefly alone with Billie; and he was soon permitted to look in on them as they bathed … Observing the girls was now part of Xan’s schedule, like his morning hour with Tilda Quant, and his first cautious sessions at Parkway Gym; but there was nothing routine about it — about observing the girls. Indeed, the experience was hallucinogenic, uncannily vivid and unstable: he never knew what it was going to do next. Why was it such a savage pleasure to watch them eat? Why was it of desperate importance to him — the volume of water they displaced in the bath? And why did they so often remind him of pornography: the lewd contortions, the self-fingerings, the slurping ingestions with chin and cheek dripping with milk or vanilla icecream? Why did he always expect them to die, every day, every night?
There was one time when Sophie fell apart early on, having been deprived of her afternoon nap, and was asleep in her room by a quarter to six. On his way out, Xan asked Russia if he might take a last look at her, and in he went. The blanketed figure seemed quite inert as he reached down and placed the flat of his hand on her spine. There elapsed an evanescent eternity before he felt the soft push of her breathing; and then he heard his own quiet retch of deliverance.
‘She’s down,’ he said. He stood in his overcoat at the door of the small half-landing sitting-room, where Russia was watching the news. ‘Dead to the world,’ he added.
‘Oh well. She’ll wake at five.’
Russia continued to look up at him from her chair. The aerodynamics of her face: its angled gauntness, in the present light, made him think of hunger, of famine.
‘Answer me something,’ she said. ‘Why do you think Billie has stopped “exercising” when you’re in the room? She masturbates in front of Imaculada and me — still. Why not you?’
‘Maybe because I’m a man.’
‘She didn’t mind before. You’ve made her self-conscious about it. And then the fox.’
‘I told you about the fox. The vixen. It was nothing. I just hugged her too hard.’
Xan was in the shed, stowing the garden hose, when Billie joined him. They heard the scrape on the skylight — and there above them was the weight of the fox, its underside, its crusty rump, its coat with its spines and quills. Billie cried out (‘Look!’), and Xan snatched her into his arms as the animal tensely swivelled and stared. He had expected a moment of feral severity — a snarl, a show of teeth — and not the entreating frown with its depths of anxiety. An anxiety that no human could have borne for an instant. Then it fled, its nails scratching the glass, and Billie was struggling and cuffing his hands.
‘I just hugged her too hard. I hurt my knee too.’
‘Yes, she said. “Daddy hurt his knee too.”’
He swayed backwards a couple of inches and said, ‘With the girls, I don’t know, I’m just generally het up about them. As though they’ve just come in from being lost. After dark. It’s part of it. I’m trying. I’m trying.’
‘This last week. It’s gone okay.’
‘Has it? I’m glad you think that. I know I’ve got a long way to go. My guidance systems … Anyway. Goodnight.’
Her eyes had flicked back to the television screen. His eyes followed. He was subliminally prepared for some footage of the modern world: the scorched chassis of a bus or truck, a bandaged shape being wheeled at speed down a hospital corridor, a woman wailing, with subtitles … What he saw seemed simpler: a phalanx of American soldiers — grunts, jarheads — crunching across a sandswept airstrip, each of them fantastically overequipped, like a one-man band. He thought: the jihads of the jarheads. He said, sounding surprised,
‘Semper ft. Yes. Semper fidelis.’
‘You know,’ she began, staring full ahead, ‘you’re a lot more uh, gamesome than you used to be. In your speech. You used to be much more step-by-step. I liked it.’ She looked up at him. ‘I miss it. Still, yes: semper fidelis. At all times faithful.’
‘Epithalamium.’
‘… Epithalamium.’
But it was when he was alone in the flat at night that he really did his work with the little girls. He lay there twisting, arching, squirming, seeing them hurt, harmed, taken, their flesh pierced, their bones snapped, the shells of their skulls meeting concrete or steel. What he saw when he closed his eyes had the power to lift him off the sheet and flip him over, to double him up, to flip him back again. He thought: something’s coming for them and I can’t protect them, I can’t protect them. And there were their faces showing fear, then terror, then horror, forcing more convulsions on him, causing him to writhe and thrash and seethe … He had read about a woman who said she felt ‘a profound calm’ as her daughter was attacked and knifed before her eyes. Similarly, sleep appeared only when the thing had already happened in his mind, and their ruined bodies lay before him; he was afloat on a glazed lake of detachment, drenched with the chemicals that come at such a time — that come to take you to the other side. I can’t protect them. They’re mine, and I can’t protect them. So why not rend them? Why not rape them?
You can live as an animal lives, and he thought he knew, now, why an animal would eat its young. To protect them — to put them back inside.
That little girl I see, walking past the window. Is that her, or is it just the ghost of my child?
2. Weird sister
It was on the eighth day that she called.
‘So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan. ‘Wait. There’s someone at the door. It’s open! … Just put it there, please … Thank you. Thank you … Champagne. To celebrate my arrival. There’s a half-bottle in the fridge but I don’t like the brand and it’s never quite enough, don’t you find? Now look. I was under the impression that we had an understanding.’
‘I’m sorry. “Karla”?’
‘Yes, Karla. Christ. With a k.’
‘Uh, wait. The thing is I had an accident about a month ago. And I—’
‘An accident? What kind of accident?’
‘A head injury. My memory’s not what it was.’
‘You have no memory of a woman called Karla? This is a grave disappointment. You seemed perfect for me. Poor you and all that, but you’re probably no longer suitable.’
‘Suitable for what?’
She sighed and said, ‘I’ll start at the beginning then. I’m a wonderfully rich, young, sane and pretty businesswoman who adores loveless sex. All right, I’m petite, but I have a superb body and I’m marvellously fit and brown. I pass through London twice a year. You were supposed to come to my hotel one afternoon and do whatever you liked to me. Then I get on a plane and put five thousand miles between us. Till next time. Now I suppose I’ll have to keep an eye out for someone else. I’ve just seen the bill for the champagne. I love spending money but this is madness.’
‘I uh, I really don’t think I was ever on for that.’
‘Oh? You seemed awfully pleased with the idea at the time.’
‘When was that time?’
‘In the summer at Pearl’s … Well you can come and say hello at least. And Xan: hadn’t you better defuse a very awkward situation? What if I get hysterical and call the house?’
‘Where are you?’
She told him. He said,
‘I think we’d better meet on neutral ground.’
‘All right. We can meet in the lobby if you like. I’m busy till Friday so you’ll have time to mull it over.’
‘Friday’s … Yes. Tomorrow I’m taking my boys away for the night.’
‘Fascinating. Do you really not remember? Don’t you remember what you said about my breasts? … Don’t you remember them? That is alarming. You know, Xan, this may do you a lot of good. I’m sure that the moment you set eyes on me it’ll all come flooding back.’
* * *
Cora wore black, tights, skirt, blouse, but she had not yet put on the black shoes, the black suit-top, the black hat with its pendant black veil. Now she faced the irksome task of achieving a French twist: the hair swept up and over to the side, secured by an armoury of pins. She began work in the bathroom but soon moved the whole operation next door. The hectic profusion of mirrors, at odd angles and elevations, made her feel watched — that mirror especially, with its inner eye.
She knew the literature. Victims of incest grow up thinking they have magical powers. For they do. All infants, all babies, believe they wield magic: one-year-olds, if you have particularly displeased them, can look up from their cots in astonishment that you have physically survived their anathemas, their callingsdown. They grow out of it. But victims of incest, these girls, these weird sisters, never lose that faith. Because power is theirs: they can say a sentence, and make a family disappear.
Women whom Cora had earlier come across in support-groups and recovery programmes persisted with another notion: that they could seduce any male. And it was true, in their case, so long as the male was violent or inadequate; so long as the male was a rapist or an addict or a pimp or a bum … Cora believed she could seduce any male too, and she had not yet been proved wrong. But she had more in mind for Xan Meo than mere seduction — and the graphic disabusing of his wife. She didn’t yet know what. It would come to her.
Five minutes before her car was due she picked up the phone and dialled and said, ‘Hello, may I speak to Pearl, please? … Pearl! You don’t know me but I’m an old flame of your ex-husband’s … About eight years ago. Yes that’s right: when you two were still married.’ Cora held the phone at arm’s length. ‘Wait, wait. He was ghastly to me too, if that’s any comfort … So — so I thought we might bury the hatchet and have a good natter,’ she went on, ‘over a few grams of cocaine.’
Soon afterwards Cora was in her overcoat. She instructed her gorge to stay where it was when she encountered the traditional flower-arrangements for the antinomian dead.
3. King Bastard
‘So how’s it go again?’ he asked his sons.
‘Your middle name plus the name of your street is your filmstar name,’ said Michael.
‘And your pet’s name plus the name of your street is your porn-star name,’ said David.
Xan said, ‘I haven’t got a pet.’
‘What was the last pet you had?’
‘A dog. Called Softy.’
‘Well then. Softy St George.’
Xan went on, ‘Softy wasn’t soft. Far from it. Salt-and-pepper Alsatian, and a real hardnut. When I was growing up I thought that was why Softy was in a rage all the time. Because of his name.’
They returned to what they were reading. Michael and David were reading the sports pages of the mainstream yellowtops. And Xan was reading himself: Lucozade … The three of them sat in a fast-food joint on Paradise Pier, among nursery colours. And the colours of the clientele? The colours of the English, their pinks and greys, would eventually be subsumed by the colours of the ultramundane. And how they needed these new colours, he thought. At the next table, a baby-bottle full of Pepsi was being offered by a white man to a brown child; his pallid hand, with its bruised tattoo, seemed to make great gains from the transaction. The smile of his black wife — this also greatly distinguished him.
‘“Of his Kestrel Juniors Chivalric Medallion”,’ said David, ‘“shamed love-rat Ainsley Car has been sensationally stripped …” They reckon here he’s going to Charlton. After prison.’
‘Charlton? They’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. So’s Charlton. He’s crap and they’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. But Charlton aren’t that crap.’
‘Bullshit. They’re less crap than he is but they’re still crap.’
‘Boys, boys: you’ve got to learn some new swearwords. Take crap, say. I mean, bullshit actually means something. Something fairly complicated. Something like: rubbish intended to deceive. But crap? Crap just means crap. As a word, crap is so crap.’
‘That’s the whole point of it. Crap’s wicked.’
‘Yeah. Crap’s cool.’
‘I’ll tell you what is crap,’ he said, flicking his book on to the table, ‘and it’s this shit.’
‘… How d’you mean, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you when you’re older.’
They came out into the last of England. The rock, the winkles; the pigeon with a petrol prism on its neck, the dry-heaving gulls; and the sea, in its storm aftermath, all confused and distraught, not knowing its proper place. Everything on the pier, the slot arcades, the caffs and bars with their short change and short measure, the dodgems, the ghost train: the whole narrative painting was organised by a vast — and, in secret, vastly prosperous — slum family. This was all that was left of his childhood culture.
Thursday morning was bright and blue. He gave the boys about a hundred quid each and then sat alone on the rocks between the two piers, the Opera and the Paradise. Mariners talk about a twice-daily occurrence — when the waves ‘reconsider’. Something of the kind appeared to be happening in front of him, though the sea was more orderly now; morale, esprit de corps, had been returned to it. The waves crashed and dragged; they flopped and trawled.
Xan wondered about the reasons for the sense of alleviation he was feeling. His memories of the place were piquant and pellucid and above all plentiful; and his engagement with Lucozade (he was about halfway through) seemed sure to be enlightening, whatever else it might cost him. But, no, it must be the boys, the boys. Was it merely their maleness, the laxity of their talk, the companionable squalor they had instantly brought to the set of rooms at the Crown? No, it was their unexamined acceptance of his altered state — and the fact that they couldn’t possibly judge him. They too were in the process of abandoning a self and acceding to another. Like their father, they couldn’t fully remember what they had been, and couldn’t predict what they would become. They didn’t know who they were either.
Michael and David spotted him from the corniche. The distant clouds were like continents; there goes Africa, there goes America. The sea was equal to the task (all in a day’s work) of turning the rock he sat on into shingle. The waves flopped and dragged, and crashed and trawled. The foamline wore a sneer, then a grin, then a sneer, then a grin: phantoms of the opera, phantoms of the paradise.
‘Is uh, Vicky back at school yet?’ Xan asked.
They were in a taxi, on the way to the station; and as the car turned off the Parade they were given a clear view of St Bathsheba’s on its crumbling clifftop — apparently no more than a year or two from the sea.
Michael said, ‘No, they’ve got her salted away in the country somewhere. And why? The bloke who did it — he knocked her up.’
David said, ‘She’s four months gone. She’s out here.’
‘And there’s worse to come,’ said the elderly driver. ‘The bloke who did it: one of our coloured brethren. And he give her a disease.’
Michael said, ‘… If it’s a boy it’ll be one of those bastard pretenders.’
‘Bastard the First.’
‘King Bastard.’
On the train Xan dozed, and his heart and mind loosened into shapeless candour. What he wanted, what he had to have, apart from revenge, was familial reinstatement with honour. It would be done. It would be made so. And he considered he’d performed pretty well with Russia, playing the man he used to be. On the other hand, as his head snapped up from sleep and then dipped back down into it, like the shifting height of the parallel wires on the telegraph poles beyond, on the other hand … His nodding thoughts kept going back, kept going forward, to the woman in the hotel room. The joys of fame: the cyclostyled circular from the teenage autograph-hound; the plea for funds from the Bulgarian theatre group; and, every now and then (and not for a long time now), a woman, coming at you from out of the ether. They were far from being forces for good, for stability, these women, he knew. But they were women. And it was nice to feel wanted, even by a wrecking-ball … Much would depend, of course, on her looks. He was determined to be faithful — at all times faithful; he wouldn’t touch. Still, he might have to go up there for a little while and watch her swan around in her pants. And then slip quietly away.
4. Cora’s call on Pearl
‘Well I’ll say this much for Xan Meo: he could pull. Enter and welcome. It was the television. His standard went soaring the minute he was on the television. Oh, just put it anywhere. Lovely tits, darling. And I bet they’re yours, too. And the waist. And the arse … Jesus wept, he must have thought all his birthdays had come at once. Even your stomach‘s a turn-on. And when was it? You’d have been even more of a little miracle then, at — what? — twenty-nine, thirty? No. I bet you’re better now. Sorry about the mess. You should see the boys’ rooms. They come home from school and try on all their clothes. That’s very kind of you. I could fancy some of that.
Cora made room on the large kitchen table for the ritzy shopping-bag with the magnum of champagne in it, and then produced the snuffbox with its packed white powder.
‘Ooh, go on then.’
A glance at the sitting-room, with its shawls and scarves showered over the furniture, and the multilayered clutter deposited as if by flashflood, told Cora that Pearl was no keeper of secrets. The house-presents she had brought were de trop—not unwelcome, but almost certainly otiose. Pearl’s appearance was similarly informative: the livid cheeks and forehead, the irregular auburn spikes of her hair, the costume jewellery, the ashsmudged jacket, the short skirt. It was on the short skirt that Cora concentrated. She saw that this was Pearl’s gravitational centre — the bandy thighs, the framed void. With a thrill of mortality Cora decided that the day Pearl finally stopped wearing short skirts would be the worst of her life. On the way to this rendezvous Cora’s cab had encountered an old lady in the street (and Cora wasn’t used to seeing old ladies in the street) bent almost triple in her search for purchase. The old lady was waiting at the zebra-crossing; the driver slowed and stopped; and, before starting off like a sick crab, she stared at him with a sneer of suspicion for at least twenty seconds, as if London taxis were well known to like ploughing into old ladies on zebra-crossings. Cora thought: try doing all that in a short skirt.
Pearl had both feet on the table, and had just rocked back from her seventh line of cocaine, when Cora introduced the subject of male sexuality, with particular reference to Xan Meo.
‘It’s too fizzy, isn’t it,’ said Pearl. ‘Wiggle your finger in it. Like this. It makes the bubbles go away and you can drink it faster. Whew. I haven’t scarfed up as much … Uh, he uh, wasn’t a fetishist. Like some. I knew a bloke who ricked his neck every time he heard a toilet flush. Another bloke could only do it wearing a mask and I had to pretend to be someone else — you know, a different person each time. I said, Ah come on for once. He said, It’s like being gay — I can’t do it otherwise. Xan. Xan liked frilly knickers and the rest of the bollocks but name me one that doesn’t. With him it was a power thing. He’d want to master you. So, you know, you’d resist that and pretend it isn’t doing anything for you. You’re not in the mood and you’re just letting him get on with it. Until you … That’s what he liked. Well. What can you do with them? Either they’re lording it or they’ve locked themselves in the bathroom. For a weep or a wank. Wiggle your finger in it.’
Cora now raised the question of Xan’s current circumstances, and was pleased to see Pearl’s shiver of flustered highmindedness: still greater indiscretion was on its way.
‘Of course it’s all off now, since he copped that smack on the head.’ Her voice had a faint buzz to it, imparted by the furled tenner in her nose. ‘He was always pretty keen, actually, but now he’s all screwed up and can’t think about anything else. Russia — I’ve got quite pally with Russia, on the phone at least. Russia had to kick him out after he came in and leapt on her in the middle of the night. She was that close to having him nicked. Said he’d become like a retarded child when they turn fourteen. They don’t know what to do with it all. And here’s something worse.’
Cora leant forward. With a look of righteous panic Pearl went on,
‘Russia asked me whether … When I was divorcing him I told my lawyer Xan was messing with the boys. Total rubbish, but any port in a storm. And Russia asked me whether it was true. Because she thinks he might have been messing with Billie — that’s their four-year-old and a sexy little minx according to the boys. Nothing definite, mind. It’s the way he eyes her. Whoop. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that, but you know what it’s like with this stuff. Out it pops.’
‘Oh it’s safe with me,’ said Cora. ‘Mm, your garden looks awfully nice. Would you give me a tour before I go?’
Pearl stood swaying at the front door. She said,
‘Oof: that fresh air’s really done me in. And look at her. Like a daisy. We never did talk about you and your time with Xan … Yeah, what time, right? Aren’t you clever … Ooh, you’re going to start stirring it now, aren’t you. Going to start mixing it. I’d say he’s going to be a very lucky boy. For about half an hour. His head’s on the block with her — one slip and it’s all over. Let me know how you get on. I’ll call Russia and feed her the dirt. Or do you do that bit too?’
5. It’s Not Unusual
On Friday Xan rose at seven. He breakfasted with the girls, and with Imaculada, to compensate or atone for his absence later on — if, for some reason, he got held up at the hotel. And he did his hour with Tilda Quant. Next, at the gym, he worked much harder and longer than usual; his class-leader, Dominic, commended the extra rasping and straining with the benchpress. Back at the flat, as he was about to unpeel his stinking singlet, he said to himself: Don’t wash. Go like this. That’ll keep you honest … As a compromise (and this was by no means habitual) he stood under a cold shower for fifteen minutes. Tilda Quant might have said that the mechanism at play here was self-flagellatory: purgation in advance. Hell isn’t just hot; it’s cold, too.
No doubt it was in the same spirit that he surrendered to a much-postponed ordeal: he tried to write something. Just a couple of paragraphs (he told himself), a couple of hundred words describing the confusions that had beset him since his accident. He stopped after forty-five minutes and read what he’d put down. As he feared, it did not evoke so much as leadenly dramatise his condition. Indeed, it was just another symptom: expressive dysphasia. His concentration, he realised, was additionally impaired by the fact that he kept thinking about sex: sex in the afternoon. By now his imagination had long exhausted all known acts, stunts, positions, variations. By now it was unalloyed nostalgie—pure love of the mud. Xan sat there sinking, in his brown study.
With a smile of pain he picked up Lucozade, intending to finish it — or to finish ‘Lucozade’, the last and longest story.
Twelve pages in he got to his feet and said, ‘Joseph Andrews?’
At that moment Mal Bale was two hundred yards away and heading straight for him. Well, not quite: he had a bit of business to get done en route. Only take a minute. Mal, this day, was on a dual mission. He didn’t like the first thing he was going to do and he didn’t like the second thing he was going to do. But he was going to do them. In his worn leather overcoat (the broad belt was like the metal strap on a barrel), Mal approached a hotdog stand on the west pavement of Prince Albert Road.
‘Go on then. How much? … Jesus, you don’t take no prisoners, do you mate. Onions? Nah. Just the uh, the doings …’
The hot-dog man, a middle-aged rasta with every other tooth missing and a face wreathed and sallowed by half a century of keef, said coaxingly, ‘You got to eat you onions, man. Put lead in you pencil.’
‘I’ve got lead in me pencil, mate. Look at the state of that sausage: that’s bioterror, that is. Do you know who I am? Do you know why I’m here?’ Why am I here? he thought. At my time of life, and I’m frightening hot-dog stands. It’s not even a stand. It’s a fucking trolley … ‘The cousins aren’t having it.’
‘But they’s ice cream!’
‘Ice cream, hot dogs: same difference.’
The hot-dog man stood fixed, with his dishcloth, his spatula.
‘Look, you don’t want your face on that grill, do you, you don’t want this trolley down on you and them onions in your hair. And a squirt of ketchup up one ear. And a squirt of mustard up the fucking other.’
‘I got youths, man.’
‘Yeah well we’ve all got them. Sorry and that. But I’ll be back in a bit and if you’re still here it’ll happen.’
Mal strode on, past St Mark’s Church, to St George’s Avenue.
He rang the bell and waited. Just as the door opened he heard a fierce shout from the street: ‘Oi!’ He looked round, looked back again; then he shifted his feet, raised his outturned hands to shoulder height, and bowed his head. A passerby might have thought that Mal was hoping to settle an argument — hoping to find common ground — between husband and wife. Either that, or he was just trying to keep them apart.
‘The punishment never fit the crime. It hasn’t sat well with me, that. The punishment never fit the crime. Ah, lovely,’ said Mal, accepting the mug of tea he’d apologetically asked for. The two of them were in the kitchen at the flat, round the table, Mal with his coat still on and a cigarette in his fist. ‘He’s told me: “Smash his fucking jawbone for him. See how he likes that. I want him eating through a straw for a spell. See then if he ‘ll say my fucking name.” The way he was going on, I thought you’d shopped him — I thought you’d tried a citizen’s arrest. And all you did was put his name in a — in a story. Are you all right, mate?’
‘Yeah, mate …’
Xan stood over the table. He could feel the violence hormones still squirrelling around in him: voluptuous killers of pain and reality. He had seen the stranger approach his house; and then he had recognised him. Xan came up the steps and into the street, ready for absolutely anything … Mal had a way, as he talked, of compressing his lips and raising his eyebrows and tipping his head, now to the left, now to the right: on the one hand this, on the one hand that. Xan now watched him with clogged calm, almost lovelike, and a sense of getting nearer to something. He said,
‘I didn’t even do that.’
‘No. Come on. There it is in black and white.’ He held up the magazine he’d brought with him. ‘In Punch. And in the book and all. Joseph Andrews.’
Xan Meo was not a literary writer, but he had, in ‘Lucozade’, allowed himself an unwonted flourish. The story told of a middle-aged bodyguard who, at some earlier period in his career, had plied his trade on the American entertainment circuit. ‘He had spent a year in Las Vegas, working for Joseph Andrews,’ it said. And ‘Lucozade’ later mentioned that Joseph Andrews had retired to Los Angeles. And that was all.
‘I didn’t really mean Joseph Andrews,’ said Xan, trying to explain. ‘I meant Tom Jones.’
‘Tom Jones?’
‘The singer. You know: “It’s Not Unusual”. I meant Tom Jones.’
‘… Well that’s fucking unusual. Why didn’t you say Tom Jones?’
‘It’s just uh, it’s just a kind of joke. Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: they’re both novels by Henry Fielding … You can’t say Tom Jones.’
‘… Well you can’t fucking say Joseph Andrews neither! Either. Jesus.’ Mal, evidently appalled by such frivolity, took a moment to collect himself. Then he frowned and murmured, ‘“It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.” ‘Mal frowned deeper, adding: ‘“Each day I touch the green, green grass of home” … I see the film Tom Jones when I was fourteen. It was me first X. I thought: here we go. Non-stop orgies and swearing. But it was just a load of pubs, and birds with their — with it all pushed up up here.’
Xan waited. It had been made clear at the outset that there were things Mal could tell him and things Mal couldn’t.
‘He’s not called that now, Joseph Andrews. And he’s sensitive about it. As well he might be.’ Mal was now looking round about himself. ‘You’ve paid, haven’t you mate? You’ve paid. And the punishment never fit the crime. Tell you what. How about this: doing Snort.’
‘Doing snort?’
‘Doing Snort. The bloke who gave you two on the back of the head. I’ll do him.’
Wait, thought Xan: I may need the practice. You weren’t supposed to ask questions, but he said, ‘I’ve got a feeling he isn’t finished with me. Andrews.’
‘A feeling? Well I hope you’re wrong. But you have given him the right flaming hump, my friend. A very unpleasant man, Joseph Andrews. My father worked for him for thirty years till he got himself crippled by the oppo — the Plutarco Brothers. Me dad’s a pitiful sight when he goes to Jo. Dragging one leg, his arm still twisted over, and his neck all bent to one side. And Jo’s gone, “All right, the Plutarcos took a bit of a liberty with you. We’ll have a whip.” Give him sixty quid — and a kick in the arse as he limped from the room.’ Again, the sway of the head, the arch of the eyebrow. ‘All I can think of is it might go back to Mick Meo. I heard they was never on the best of terms. How’s your health?’
‘I’m all right physically. But not what I was.’
‘And uh, at home?’
‘I’m on probation.’
‘Well you … you stick with it. Because that’s the most important thing. You don’t need me to tell you. At our age, boy, you’re a joke without your wife. Your kids and that.’
Xan sat up and said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to meet this girl in this hotel.’
‘Ah. Right.’
Mal was a while getting to his feet. Face to face, with a strictly pragmatic air, he said, ‘Then you know the possible consequences.’
6. Size zero—1
Come and see me, she’d told him (inter alia), in my fat hotel. And Xan was now feeling the pull of a very heavy planet. The crystal moons, the mirrorballs, the space-squandering distances, the golden dome above the circling staircase — a brochure vivante for Atlantes. And down below, the marble streets of hairdressers, masseurs, of manicure and pedicure, of perfume and jewellery and haute couture. None of this was aimed at the mind, now was it? You felt it — the high pressure to live deliciously. And that was before you got to the food and the wine, the soft towels, the fresh white sheets.
He asked at the desk and was directed to a rank of telephones — telephones that might have been used by the courtiers of Louis Quatorze. ‘Karla?’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
‘I have a suite with a wet bar,’ she said. ‘Ride up.’
‘No — as we said. Ride down, if you would.’
‘What, wearing this? … only kidding. I’ll be one minute.’
She was longer than that. As he took up position by the fountain, some distance from the bronze traps of the elevators, and as he survived each new half-carload of assorted maquillage, Xan had time to imagine her, upstairs, slipping or stepping out of one thing and slipping or stepping into another. Of course, he had been perfunctorily ‘hoping’ that she would be unattractive. But by now he couldn’t be certain whether the way she looked, let alone the way she dressed, would make any difference. Tilda Quant was not attractive (she must have stood back in simple dismay when all the gifts were being handed out); and Xan found her very attractive indeed. And earlier still that morning he had found himself gazing entranced at the underslept Aztec obstinacy of Imaculada …
Down came another car (he was watching the crimson glints of the shaft diagrams), and another squaredance surged out of it, losing shape quickly in an atmosphere of hurry that had to do with the time of day and the coming of evening. She did not share in this hurry. The other passengers dispersed and she moved slowly through their fading speedlines. She walked as if impeded by the presence of small children — and you looked beyond her, beneath her, for these children; but they weren’t there … Xan did what he had seen Billie do: he tipped back so fractionally that he could steady himself by the weakest elevation of his toes. She did not share in the hurry, nor in the confectionery, of the hotel. The sandals, the straw bag, the plain white dress. There was of course her figure to be assimilated; and only the most vicious corset, he thought at first, could so constrain the isthmus of her waist; but her body moved forward with the regular beat of that which is unsupported. When she was still some yards away he saw that she wearing no makeup, and this felt like an intimacy you could do nothing about. He couldn’t place her. But the thing was that his body knew he had seen her before.
He inclined his head. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the corner of the mouth.
Xan had rehearsed the line uneasily, and now he delivered it uneasily: ‘This is my first blind date for thirty years.’
‘Blind? Well in one eye only. I know you. Do you know me?’
And he said, ‘You, I don’t know, you’re … already-seen.’
She said, ‘There’s a surprisingly good cave of a bar back here.’ And she took him by the arm.
He was, again, ‘hoping’ that the bar would be well lit and reasonably populous: that would be ‘better’, because she would then have less chance to do anything he might not ‘like’. The way it went, he ducked into the Rose Room as if from an equatorial strand; and it took him a full minute to establish that there were no other customers. A blind date, and a deaf date too: the cottony darkness seemed to be pressing its paws against his eardrums as he followed the little white ghost to a distant booth: an opulent brothel of red velvet. Their faceless waiter appeared at once and lit the candle with a flourish before disappearing again. Now their faces were unsteadily illumined — but nothing else was. In these surroundings, he felt, languid and methodical fornication would not seem particularly daring. And a dumb date: a dumb date. She said,
‘Now. Déjè vu in the proper sense, or in the vulgar? In the vulgar sense, already-seen just means already-seen. “It is with a distinct sense of déjè vu that we watch the Saints bear off the trophy for the second year running.” In the proper sense it would mean that you haven’t seen me before. You just get the feeling you have. Which is it?’
‘The latter. I think. As I said, there are things wrong with my memory.’
‘Of course it could be already-seen in a really vulgar sense. Supervulgar, in fact. We’ll come to that. Ah.’
To Xan’s dark-adapting eye the faceless waiter now looked implausibly young: he seemed about to recommend a glass of milk.
‘I’ll have what you have,’ she said.
All the more reason, then, to order an ocean of blue ruin. To tell the truth, he would have given anything for a drink. He would have given anything — but not everything. For the time being he could see the line in the sand: on one side of it, all he had; on the other, all he’d lose. Milk, yes, or water, still water — liquid parched of all life. He asked if they served fresh orange juice, and was told that they did.
‘Orange juice?’ she said. ‘I’m not having that. A large gin Martini, please, with a twist. Oh don’t have orange juice. Have an espresso at least.’
‘Okay, I’ll have an espresso.’
‘A double … I read your book. It’s …’
He was gratified — but it was all too urgent in his mind and he could think of no other way of putting it. He said, ‘It’s up-your-arse, isn’t it? Sorry. That sounds terrible. But you know what I mean.’
‘You mean you toady to the reader. Well, there is a feeling of ingratiation. A kind of pan-inoffensiveness. And you seem to subscribe to various polite fictions about men and women. In my view. As if all enmity is over and we both now drink the milk of concord. And there’s another thing. What’s the one where the title is a girl’s name? “Evie”. Yes. After a thirty-page chase the narrator finally gets Evie into bed, and then, in my view, rather congratulates himself for not describing it. “No, I’m not going to tell you who put what where”, and so on. What’s that? Gallant? Evolved? Is that what the writer should do — shirk the task and strike an attitude? I’m being rather unfair here, because it’s not just you. Good sex seems to be something that writing can’t manage. Maybe the only thing. No: there’s dreams. But why should that be? Mm. Excuse me while I get stuck into this lovely drink.’
‘They say,’ said Xan, ‘they say that the writer stops speaking for anyone but himself. The quirks come out. It’s no longer uh, universal.’
‘Can’t the quirks be universal? Aren’t there things we all like?’
‘It’s funny. I don’t often describe sex, but it’s the first question I ask myself about a character: what they’re like in bed.’
‘Do you? Sorry: “what they’re like” or “what they like”?’
‘I suppose both. Or is it the same thing?’
‘So if you were going to fictionalise me, which I don’t recommend, you’d start how?’
‘Why wouldn’t you recommend it?’
‘Because nobody believes in women like me. Or no woman does. Unless she was a victim too. Victims believe.’
‘Victims of what?’
‘Wait. I see you’ve evaded the question. Anyway. Good sex, as a subject, has to have a place to go. So a whole other form, a whole other industry, devotes itself to nothing else.’
‘Pornography.’
‘Pornography … Porn is a disgusting little word, isn’t it? It’s the most disgusting single thing in the whole phenomenon. Porno‘s nothing like so bad. In the industry, we call it the industry. That’s what you call it when you’re in it. I’m in it … I said before that you may have already-seen me, in the supervulgar sense. It’s been a while now, and there were reasons for it at the time, but I uh, “starred” in over a hundred movies. Blue movies. Karla White. For three years the only sex I had was the sex I had on camera. Porno-people aren’t like non-porno-people. When we watch porno, we fast-forward through the sex to get to the acting. Now that’s true perversity.’
‘… What were the reasons?’
‘I told you. Do you really not remember?’
‘When? Where?’
‘It was at Pearl’s summer party: August thirty-first. Pretty chaotic, as usual. And, of course, no Russia. Remember? We talked for two hours and then went into the garden and did what we did.’
‘What did we do?’
‘We’ll come to that. And I told you the reason. It was once a cliché, and is now a fallacy — but why do girls make blue movies? Because they were raped by their fathers. Between the age of six and nine, inclusive, my father raped me once a day … Now that’s strange. That’s very strange. Then you do remember.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘When I told you the first time you were hugely indignant on my behalf. Now look at you. You just blinked once. Slowly.’
‘It’s not that I remember you telling me. It’s …’
‘You don’t think it’s so shocking any more? Boy, you really did get a knock on the head, didn’t you. Well all right. Let’s consider. Is it so shocking? Some fathers, and not just mass-murdering yokels but stockbrokers and politicians — some fathers really do believe that incest is “natural”. I made you so I can touch you, your first child should be your dad’s: all that. It’s an atavism. Because getting rid of incest, outgrowing incest, was part of the evolutionary advance, like outgrowing oestrus.’
‘What?’
‘Oestrus. Heat in women. There has never been a human society that doesn’t observe incest taboos. But the one to do with fathers and daughters has always been the weakest. In the Bible there’s every kind of prohibition. “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s sister; she is thine aunt; it is wickedness.” But there’s nothing specific about fathers and daughters.’
‘Patriarchy.’
‘Well yes. No. Masculinity. Mother-son incest barely exists. There are about twenty cases in the entire literature. And all the biblical restrictions are addressed to men. Men do it, and it’s the same with the higher animals. Size. Masculine bulk. Men do it because men are big … If you were trying to dream up a justification, then don’t look at the past.’
She leant forward and sipped, parting her bright grey hair with her hands. Clearly these were strange words he was hearing. Then why didn’t he find them strange?
‘Look at the future. Us, us victims, we’re not so frightened and repelled by the way the world is now: the end of normalcy. We always knew there was no moral order. So sleep with Billie, and introduce her to the void.’
‘That’s what it is, is it. It’s a void.’
‘It’s very simplifying.’ She smiled — the bright teeth shallow, feline — and said, ‘Where I live there are all these treatment centres for vices and inadequacies and addictions. Incestuous fathers are taught how to sublimate. They make their poor wives dress up as little girls.’
He thought of Billie, of Sophie. ‘School uniforms. Rompers and nappies.’
‘Not quite that literal. It’s something a lot of men like. Believe me. All you do is you wear things that are many many sizes too small. When I rang you and said I was dressed up as a little girl: I said it because that’s a, that’s a non-deuniversaliser. I don’t know, it takes the stress out of it. Consider the notion of the baby-doll look. It’s not only sublimation, it’s comic relief. How serious can anything be when your dress hardly covers your waist?’
‘You find? Uh, Karla, let me concentrate for a moment and … Yeah. I have seen you before. And it wouldn’t have been on film.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t watch pornography.’
‘You mean you say you don’t watch pornography. Ooh. Then you’re not the good modern person who wrote Lucozade … Unfair. You’re just a generation out — you’re still obliged to disapprove of it. It’ll take a while, but pornography is heading for the mainstream. The industry, now, is always saying how respectable it is. Every time Dimity Qwest or Tori Fate opens a supermarket, the industry says how respectable it is. To say that, you have to say that masturbation has become respectable. And that’s what they’re saying. “Wanking’s cool,” I read the other day. “Handjobs are brilliant.”’
‘Handjobs are bullshit. But wait.’
He did watch pornography, now, in the status quo after. Previously he quite liked it when he saw it but also disapproved of it; now, he liked it a lot and approved of it, assented to it, blessed it. And yet it was no help to him, in his altered state. Because even pornography needed your memory; and there were things wrong with his memory. The streams and currents, the different pressures and temperatures: if these do not flow as they used to, if the memory cannot ride them … The physiological reaction occurred, but nothing was eased by it. As if his erotic past was lost, and his desires, undiluted and unballasted, were all pushed out in front of him, into the present and the actual.
‘Oh don’t be too hard on handjobs.’ She spread her arms at shoulder height on the black velvet. ‘It’s not flattering, to be forgotten. It makes you feel forgettable.’
‘That’s not how it works. Three weeks before I got hit on the head it was Billie’s fourth birthday.’ He checked himself; then he pressed on. ‘When I picked her up at lunchtime, which I don’t usually do, she was very happy and excited. She said to the teacher, “And here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school.” You know: as if to cap it all. I said at the time that I’d remember that for the rest of my life, but I had to be reminded of it. Like my younger daughter’s birth. Sophie’s birth. I’d forgotten it. I’ve forgotten it. It’s not there. I’d say you were pretty unforgettable. But I still might have forgotten you.’
‘Then I’ll have to remind you properly. Will you excuse me for a moment? You’ll find me in a rather different mood when I return … All you do is — you wear things that are many many sizes too small. Many many sizes too small. Size zero. Don’t watch me walk away. I’ll feel self-conscious if you watch me walk away.’
So he watched her walk away and then sat there with his face in his hands.
7. Size zero—2
Bent over marble in the Ladies, and watched by mirrors, Cora Susan applied light makeup.
Recently, in the industry, there was an actor, Randy Rivers, who kept faking his HIV-clearance — in industry terms his work permit; and he infected five actresses. As this unfolded, various violent people went looking for Randy. They all found him and they all let him be. The explanation she heard was that Randy’s condition and circumstances could in no way be worsened: there was nothing to fuck up.
Cora hadn’t quite put Xan in this category, but she had thought of Randy Rivers, over at Pearl’s. Over at Pearl’s: that was a good name for her. Pearl would have revealed everything — without the good alcohol, without the good cocaine. Similarly, Xan sounded like an ignoble candidate for the rhino horn and the Spanish fly: Xan, the shambling flasher and dirty-raincoat merchant of Pearl’s adumbration. But it wasn’t turning out that way. She knew about such things, and the resistance she felt from him was unexpectedly dogged: erratic and confused, but dogged. Seducing him, therefore, was now a matter of her self-respect and even her self-belief; it was vital to her private culture — to her inner suns and moons. And the other, more terrible punishment, if it had to come, could come later.
She approached from behind and placed her hands on his shoulders, saying, ‘I’m going to have the same again. And I’ll briefly hate you if you do likewise.’
‘Then I’ll have what you’re having … You’ve put on makeup.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘You look a bit younger. No, older. No, more artificial. Like this place. And less familiar. I don’t remember you at all now.’
‘That’s all right. You know, two cocktails is about my limit. It’s funny that men are so starchy about drunk women — except in the bedroom. They don’t want them sloppy. Except in the bedroom. Men do love a legless woman. I suppose it’s the diminished responsibility. But you’ve got to time it right.’
Their drinks came, and she started to touch him. A hand on the arm, a hand on the hand: hand touching hand.
‘You’re a bit starchy, about the industry, aren’t you? When I started out it seemed to me that I was made for the industry. Made.’
‘Because of you and your father.’
‘Well yes, but I meant physically made.’ She took her hand from his and started counting off the fingers. ‘One. Okay: father. Two. I can be candid with you, can’t I? Two. My uh, netherhair is naturally minimalist, as they all are now. As everyone is now. Is that evolution too? Like men stopping having beards? Three. I wasn’t born with a kiss-tattoo on my coccyx, but I do have a birthmark on my hip that’s shaped like a valentine greeting. All I needed, for the complete look, was some great rock bolted into my navel. Or my tongue. Four. The bust. They seem fake. They seem fake because there’s no asymmetry. They don’t move fake but they feel fake. Feel.’
Up till now he hadn’t stared at her breasts. On the contrary: they had been staring at him. But now he stared at them, and they stared back. ‘Feel.’ What could he say — that he’d ‘prefer’ not to? Instead, to postpone it a second or two, he said, ‘I don’t know what fake breasts feel like.’
‘Yes you do. You’ve felt mine.’
‘Have I? But yours aren’t fake.’
‘But they feel fake. Feel.’
He felt. She held his hand in place with her wrist and powerfully inhaled.
‘If you put your cupped palm out of a car window and feel the air going past … Some breasts are thirty miles an hour. Some are fifty. I’d say mine are about seventy. Speed-limit breasts,’ she said, and let his hand drop. ‘Where was I? Yes. Five. I’m little.’
‘What?’
‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I measure five foot and a credit card. I weigh eight stone sopping wet. I magnify the man. I’m a cock-puppet … Now that last point has a bearing on what happened at Pearl’s. I’m going to describe it to you, and then perhaps we’ll know where we are. And I think I will have that third Martini. You may have to help me to my suite.’
On screen, actors blink only when they mean to; and when Xan decided he wanted to be an actor he had spent a lot of time practising not blinking. ‘Stotaring!’ his mother used to say. ‘I’m not staring. I’m practising not blinking!’ Now, in the fat hotel, Xan was trying not to blink. Because whenever he did, he saw the two of them naked on the carwash of her bed … Yes, the world was going, was seeping away. He could feel bits of it closing down; they made a sound like a computer’s final sigh — a faint ricochet, a distant miaow …
‘It was about one o’clock in the morning. There was a hard core still at it in the sitting-room, but it was thinning out, and everyone was pretty far gone — except you, funnily enough. You weren’t drinking, but there was other stuff going around and maybe you’d had a puff or a toot, I don’t know. We agreed to meet in the garden. You know at the far end, through the arched trellis, there’s a hut or Wendy house that’s not actually on the property but you can get to it through the gap in the hedge?’
‘We called it the Monkey House,’ he said thickly. ‘It belonged to the little girls next door. But they grew up.’
‘Well, in we sneaked. It felt childish, and we were laughing quite a bit at first. You know: playing Doctors in the parkie’s shed. Then it happened. Oh, nothing very serious. This came down, and this came up, and you caressed me fairly thoroughly. Listen, at one point … I was getting rather tired, standing on tiptoe, and I said it wasn’t fair, your being so much bigger than me. And you lifted me up with one hand, so I was on your level. You used your other hand to steady me. But you lifted me up with one hand.’
‘How?’
‘How? It was the hand that was between my legs.’
There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They went to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the bed … Xan tensed himself, below. It was still there: like a section of solid cartilage.
‘A reconstruction, a reenactment of that moment,’ she was saying, ‘up in my suite, might bring it all back … Xan, I feel I may have alarmed you slightly, with all this talk of incest and pornography. Unstable things. Alien things. But as you see I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I’m little. I know that after accidents people feel very fragile. But I won’t hurt you. How could this’ — she shrugged — ‘hurt anyone? And you deserve it, Xan. You’ve had a very hard time and you deserve it. You don’t have to touch if you don’t want to. You can just watch me glide around in my underwear for a while. Size zero. And then slip quietly away.’
His memory had got him into this; and now maybe his memory was going to get him out. The first instant, in the lobby, had been for Xan a sexual coup de foudre; yet he still believed that he could muster some kind of counterforce to it — could avoid the occasion of sin. Thereafter a reptilian ponderousness had slowly spread itself over his body, coagulating into one purpose, one meaning. He was the slow-eyed crocodile who has watched and waited, who has watched and waited long enough. Simultaneously, for minutes on end, he felt like a heavenly body in space, urged towards another heavenly body of far greater gravity; he felt celestial attraction. Others, other things, the world: all of it was about to disappear … Then a memory came. A memory came, like a flare, bringing with it a series of forced deductions.
He remembered that on the evening of his injury, when he was on his way out of the house, on his way to Hollywood, to hospital, he had said to his wife: I have no secrets from you. And he remembered that he had meant it: he remembered the undesigning light of his own veracity. Every man has secrets from his wife, those letters, that photograph, the guest-appearances and thought-experiments that come as ghosts to the master bedroom. But Karla, with her dress around her waist: that qualified as a secret. In the last few minutes Xan had been hoping that what she said was true: that he had indeed lifted her off her feet. Because it was something well worth doing, and if you’d done it once, what was the point in not doing it again?
‘And, in the morning, I get on a plane and fly five thousand miles.’
He said abruptly, ‘If you’re not a friend, what are you? Do you know the name of Joseph Andrews?’
She seemed to take it like a tiny blow from a tiny enemy. But her voice was firm and cool: ‘Yes. It’s in your book. I assumed it was just a joke about Henry Fielding. “Lucozade”. Easily the best.’
‘Thank you. I think so too. And you’re not my enemy?’
‘Oh I’m your enemy all right. Come on. What do you think? That I’ve got … that I’ve got a motion-sensitive camera up there? And tomorrow morning, a liveried courier delivers the cassette to your wife? It would start in the lift: we’d wait for an empty one. Look at this place. You can feel it on top of you, tons and tons of it saying that the body should have it good. I’m offering you a modern temptation: one with no consequences. Come on up. It’s no more than what you deserve.’
The temptation, he considered, was implausibly extreme, and it would be ridiculous not to succumb to it. She was right. The fat hotel wanted it to happen. Before him, on the table, the two cocktail glasses were a pair of female thighs, and the two shots of unfinished booze, the slowly seething gin, were their hosiery … Against this luxury he could array only the luxury of uxoriousness — a luxury of the mind, merely. And Russia was far, very far, perhaps unrecapturably distant; and Karla was near.
Xan shook his head and at once she called for the bill.
‘In the dictionary,’ she said evenly, removing her key from her bag, ‘the third meaning of tempt is to risk provoking a deity or abstract force. That’s what you’ve just done. As a sexual temptation this was nothing. And now you’re going to have to watch me walk away.’
‘Wait. How do I — ’
‘Do what I did and call your agent. Now you’re going to have to watch me walk away. And it’s already too late to change your mind: this time. I’m going to leave you with a visual paradox. My mother was very feminine, but so was my father. And I’m a doublegirl. How does it go? Haunch touching haunch, breast touching breast, each touching each. Look at me walk away in my doubleskin. And you’re going to think: that’s my cock, walking away.’
She was on her feet in front of him: the sheer white dress with its pools and hollows. Now she swivelled, with the straw strap on her shoulder. She laughed harmonically and said, ‘It’s so sweet. Fathers have the ridiculous idea that …’
Over her shoulder she looked at him. He expected to find dislike in it, but her face seemed about to crumble and collapse, as Billie’s might.
‘You know, if you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter — she’d go along with it. What else can she do? She can’t do otherwise. When it comes to Daddy, little girls are certainties. Fathers have the idea that if they made a move their daughters would rear back and slap them across the face. And say: I’m not that kind of little girl. What kind of little girl do you take me for?’
And then she walked away.
That’s what a good caveman is meant to do, isn’t it? When he hears the snap of a twig, the breath of an animal or enemy, then he disappears — even if oestrus is spreadeagled before him. The desire to reproduce meets its counterforce, which is the desire to go on being alive.
Something very ancient but much less primitive also constrained him. She was familiar, intimately familiar; in both senses she was already-seen. He didn’t know it, of course, but the face behind her face was that of his mother. And his sister, and himself. He had seen her in the past all right: when he was twenty and she was ten, when he was sixteen and she was six, when he was twelve and she was two, when he was ten and she was a baby.
Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy sister’s daughter; she is thy niece; it is wickedness.
8. Not knowing again
‘Will you get me a drink?’
‘Yeah, sure. What would you like?’
‘Chocolate Mix.’
‘Coming up.’
‘I read this book but I fell asleep before I could finish the end. Now I started the beginning and I don’t know it again.’
She often said that: ‘don’t know again’ instead of ‘don’t remember’. He understood what she meant.
‘Well let’s sit down and read it properly.’
He was alone with Billie in the kitchen. Sophie was being aired by Imaculada on Primrose Hill. And Russia was a presence, somewhere above. Billie, now, was treating him not like a father, quite, but like a reasonably reliable uncle … Xan was doing what his father had done, many times: he was being genially, even cloyingly considerate to a child while also entertaining murderous thoughts about a fellow male.
‘Will you die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so, darling.’
‘Will Mummy die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Will Sophie die before me?’
‘I hope not.’
‘Will I die before her?’
‘I don’t know, darling. Now let’s read the book.’
Xan had spent the morning on the trail of his enemy. The search — equally unreal and prosaic — began in the True Crime section of the High Street bookshop. A surprising number of the gangland exposés and ghosted memoirs (of various blaggers and bruisers) ended with an index; and a suprising number of these indexes contained references to Andrews, Joseph: the Airport Job, the two long sentences, the suspected murder, and, some time later, a massive tax fraud. It disconcerted Xan, and also disappointed him, to learn that Andrews went back at least half a generation beyond his father: he would now be over eighty. When he returned to the flat Xan typed the forbidden name into a searchengine. After a while he had before him a loose and jangling biography, and even a press photograph. It showed a headmasterly figure, with his wet grey hair combed back and a glass of champagne defiantly raised, poolside, on a plastic chair; a teenage creole sat perched on his lap, wearing a bikini bottom and a wet T-shirt. This was Brazil, twenty years ago; and nothing else followed.
‘Can we do the horses?’
‘Come on then. Up you get. This is the way the children ride … They walk … they walk … they walk. This is the way the ladies ride. To trot, to trot, to trot, to trot. This is the way the—’
‘I need to do a pooh-pooch.’
‘Do you? Come on then.’
‘Quick. I’m desperate.’
Unthinkingly at first, he followed the old protocol. He helped her with the metal buttons of her jeans, and placed her on the toilet seat; then he withdrew, to await her call when she was ready to be wiped. In earlier days Xan had not exactly relished this routine: after four and a half decades, wiping his own backside had lost much of its magic, and wiping Billie’s just seemed like more of the same. But now he admitted to himself that he would rather do it than not. The admission entrained another thought: he knew, he understood, why some animals licked their young clean.
‘Daddy?’ he heard her say. ‘When people move, they don’t move they houses. They move everything else. They move they carpets … they beds … they tables … they toys … they blankets …’
He stood in the passage, by the stairs, in front of the forwardleaning gilt mirror. To this mirror he idly directed the remains of his tortured vanity: the thickening excrescences beneath the eyes; the looming lagoons of his hairline (the shampoo was getting colder every year, every month). Yes, he was thinking, it was a pity, it was a tragedy, that Joseph Andrews was eighty-five years old. There was so little of his life left to ruin; on the other hand, how much more easily, and how much more loudly, might he snap.
‘… they pencils … they fridge … they books … they television … Ready, Daddy.’
He entered. The pleasure the smell gave him — the smell of shit lite … Not dizziness but a sense of general physical insecurity retarded him as he leant over her, and wiped, and activated the flush.
‘My ploompah’s sore.’
‘I’m not surprised. The treatment you give it. Stand on here.’ He placed her on the basin shelf. In recent months Billie had gained weight uniformly, like a coating. He could now see the preliminary form of her breasts through her shirt; then the stomach still infantilely outthrust; and then the vulva, like a longhand w, but all abraded and enflamed — written in pink and red. Xan registered an impulse to weep, but it wasn’t straightforward, this impulse; some of it had to do with his futile twistings and writhings in the night; and some of it felt coarsely and unworthily tender, like crinkling your nose over a Christmas card.
‘You want some cream on that,’ he said.
He went into the passage and called Russia’s name. He went halfway up the flight of stairs and called a second time. ‘Russia! We need you!’ Then he made out the heavy clatter of the shower a floor and a half above; she would be in there under the thick jet, naked behind the panel of glass.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.
He washed and dried his hands … Her subtle eyes pleadingly appraised him, then widened; then freshened and refreshened in what he took to be an accession of trust. And so his daubed fingertip sought the intima.
Billie gave a gasp of relief: it was a thing of the past. But she was staring beyond him now, and when he looked round he saw that Russia, her hair swept up in a turban and her dressing-gowned figure inanimately still, was watching from the stairs.
9. To Otherville
Rory McShane had quite enjoyed his dealings with Xan Meo, in the past. He had had him over to the house a few times, first with Pearl, then with Russia. But now that Xan’s career was evidently shot, Rory had transferred him to a different part of his mind: he belonged with all those who had to be humoured. Presumably there would be no good news to give him, ever again.
‘How’s Russia.’
Xan stopped scowling and said, as if to himself, ‘I go round there and she calls the uh, the authorities. Can you credit it. You go round to your own house, and your own wife calls the fucking filth. Can you credit it.’ And he started scowling again.
Rory wondered whether Xan was drunk: there was a kind of cruising hostility in him, and the promise of untoward personality change. But he decided that these emanations, plus the unvarying gaze and the embittered slur, were probably what you ended up with when you were smashed on the head. Still, Rory was being uncharacteristically careful not to give offence.
‘There are funds coming in,’ said Rory. ‘I’m checking, and there’s a few bob coming in.’
‘I’ve got a few bob. That’s not the point. I got a few bob, mate.’
‘Yes. That’s right. If you don’t mind my asking — and do tell me to fuck off if you like — where did it come from, your few bob?’
Xan stopped scowling and said, ‘Me mum. My mother. She died in a single room in a terraced house in Effley Road, E4. She was the sort of old woman who used the same teabag five times. But we knew she had a fair bit in the bank. When she died’ — and here he frowned, recalling Pearl’s third audit—‘it turned out she didn’t just own the house. She owned the street. Nineteen houses, full of nineteen hundred Patels, which is what the police call them. Bangladeshis. Slum landlady. But when we’d made it right, and we was … we were slinging money about in uh, reparations and that, there was still a tidy whack left over. She was a monster, my mum, but I adored her.’ He closed his eyes as he said it: ‘Fantastic businesswoman. It’s not the money, mate. It’s the employment. I can’t write and I can’t … perform. Act. I’m gone. But I’ll hump scenery, I don’t care. Give me employment.’
And he started scowling again.
‘You look uh, buffed up.’
‘I do the gym. Up down, up down. In out, in out. Go on then: Karla White.’
‘Oh yes. Karla White. I hesitated to impugn you with it. But yes. Karla White.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’ve had a so-called offer from Fucktown … From Lovetown. Sextown.’
‘… Didn’t they have a sniper there?’
‘They still do. The Sextown Sniper. And she’s still at large.’
‘She?’ Then Xan remembered that this was one of Rory’s party-turns. To Rory (fiftyish, long-haired, much-divorced) all malefactors were playfully assumed to be female. Somebody’d say: We had a burglar last night. And he’d say: How did she get in? Somebody’d say: I was mugged on my way here. And he’d say: Was she armed?
‘And they’ll never catch her either. They can’t. You know about Lovetown? The porno people … When the Washington believers started cracking down on them, the porno people found a zoning loophole and moved the whole shebang to the San Sebastiano Valley, Little Hollywood, Southern California. It’s a state within a state. So the uh, SSPD, which consists of about one guy, can’t get federal help. And who cares if it’s just porno people who’re getting shot at? Who cares if — I don’t know — Casey Cunt gets winged in the arm? It’s God’s way.’
‘All porno.
‘All porno. Pornotown. Othertown. Now your so-called offer … They’ve been madly Anglophile for some time — long before the Princess business. A lot of the girls are English. English Rose, Brit Isles. Greta Britain, Unity Kingdom. And the men give themselves English stage-names. And knighthoods. Sir Phallic Guinness. Sir Bony Hopkins. Sir Dork Bogarde. What they like to do now is hire mainstream British actors to play so-called character parts. Some of my younger clients have done it.’
And here he named a few actors whom Xan was more or less aware of.
‘It has a kind of grunge cachet. Like with minor rockstars. It’s considered a blinding coup for a rockstar to have a porno girlfriend.’
‘What would be the work?’
‘Well you won’t be doing any fucking, and you certainly won’t be doing any acting. You’ll have to do a bit of watching, I suppose. You know: you learn your so-called lines in the cab to some Moorish villa consisting entirely of dens. They’ll have worked it into the so-called storyline that you happen to be present while uh, Brit and Bony have sex.’ He leant into his computer screen. ‘Mm. Usually it’s like a parody of a Hollywood offer: Prestige Economy, BudgetBower, three-figure fee. But this looks pretty reasonable. More than reasonable for one day’s work. Well it is Karla White. She owns Princess Lolita … It’s called Crown Sugar and you’re Rameses the Great. Know what I think you should do?’ said Rory dutifully. ‘Sit in on some workshops. Do some classes. Go easy. Get back to where you were before.’
Like the dark-clad others, those drawn into the city and then released from it at seven p.m., he returned to his flat with a plastic shopping-bag: provisions for one. He warmed and ate some savoury mess or other; and he drank the red wine — but not all of it. For nearly a week his afternoons, his evenings, had been journeys to non-consciousness; he woke up in a flat where (it seemed) thirteen or fourteen people had caroused the night before. Then, one morning, while he roiled in his own gases and acids on the benchpress, he thought: being drunk was a way of saying that, in your opinion, the universe was bullshit. No, more: it was a way of saying that you thought the universe was crap. And he didn’t think he did think that. So tonight he was sober as he sat there staring at the wall. He was sober when he went into the bedroom and looked out of the window at the house across the street: that was the status quo ante; that was where he was before.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan? Mal Bale. How are you, boy?’
‘Oh, you know. Mustn’t weaken.’
‘Uh, listen. About doing Snort. We can’t now. He’s just gone away for twelve years.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Still, that’ll learn him. What was it?’
‘Malicious wounding. Though by the sound of it Snort got as good as he give. We can have him done inside of course, but where’s the satisfaction?’
‘Yeah. No. So I’m still owed.’
‘You’re still owed.’
‘I’ve been going over something you said about — about our friend. You said I placed him. You said I “put him there”. Put him where? Put him on the page? Or put him in Los Angeles.’
‘No comment.’
‘Is he in Los Angeles?’
‘Uh — no comment. If you get my meaning. Uh, you fancy it, do you mate?’
‘Well it’s not up to me, is it? If I don’t do something, I’ll feel like shit for the rest of my life. Who’s Karla White?’
‘Karla White? … Nah, mate. So how’s your probation? You survived that, did you: the bird in the hotel?’
‘Well I did and I didn’t.’
He finished the bottle of wine, that night. He needed a bottle of wine to get him through it: that is to say, he needed a bottle of wine to get him through an evening with only a bottle of wine to get him through it.
In the silent argument he was always having in his head with Russia, and in his far noisier exchanges with her surrogate, Tilda Quant, Xan maintained that he had acted as any father would — but he knew that his heart had not been quite right, there in the bathroom, with Billie. ‘If you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter — she’d go along with it. What else can she do?’ This had proved to be a terrible transmission: deenlightenment. He wished he could forget this; he wished, in Billie’s phrase, that he didn’t know again. Her power, her rights (which depended on what? Civilisation?) had seemed to disappear; and his power, his rights — they had corrosively burgeoned. To be alone with somebody who had no choice: it was the extent of her helplessness that had made him want to weep. Because all this was tied up with his fear of her being hurt, cut, pierced, split, stuck. And over and above it, and under and beneath it, was his sense of his own entitlements and deserts, his privileges, warrants, beliefs, all of them apparently non-negotiable: his sense of what he was due.
There was also inside him somewhere a baby of pristine misery; every day he felt for it and held it and fed it, and every night he put it to bed. But things were clearer now, as he squirmed and twisted. All the signs pointed the same way.
He had been to hospital. He was going to go to Hollywood.
1. We will go quietly
After a couple of days on his own, batching it in the basement down the road, Xan Meo slowly realised something. Before, he had lived in a house full of girls: two that were women, two that would be women thereafter. And now? Now he was living with a man — himself: he felt denuded, and hideously revealed. Xan didn’t know the lines (and, in his present disposition, would have rejected them as unmanly), but he was sharing Adam’s agony, after the Fall: ‘… cover me, ye pines, Ye cedars with innumerable boughs, Hide me …’ He had fallen. He was a Septembrist, not a Decembrist, but he found it very ageing, his exclusion from the house with its women a hundred yards away — a minute’s walk; yet Russia had sent him on a much longer journey through time.
Standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, Xan clipped his toenails — so kippered and curled. The nail of the big toe cleaved with a crackle; its immediate juniors each gave a defiant tick as he lopped them. But the nail of the little toe made no sound at all. How tactful, how very discreet. The nail of the little toe came quietly.
Reading the instructions on the packet of a store-bought meat pie, he noticed that an ampersand of eye-dreck jumped from word to word — like the bouncing ball above the nursery rhyme on the television, there to help the children sing along.
Passing the mirror, naked, he seemed to see a Rubens in the glass. That thickened, tightened feeling around the gut and saddle, making him feel that he was, to say the least of it, a couple of hundred bowel-movements behind the game. There was nothing wrong with Xan that a year in the lavatory wouldn’t cure. But where would he find that year? Did he have that year?
Waking, and rubbing his face, he felt a pillow-crease like a duelling-scar on his cheek. He had just shoved himself out of a dream of kitchen chaos — buckets and coffee-grounds and upended rubbish-bags. No need to tidy up, not after dreams, he thought; no need to leave dreams as you’d expect to find them. But this was a dream about a man alone. So don’t allow that room to let itself go: you’ll be back. The duelling-scar was still on his cheek as he stood by the fridge and ate lunch. He caught himself in the glass of the garden door. Like a Junker: brainwashed, paranoid, talentless.
Climbing from the straightbacked chair, he gave voice to a groan. Sitting back down again, he gave voice to another. Anything and everything made him groan: bending, turning, wiping his brow. And the very old—they didn’t groan all the time. They trained themselves not to; and so would he. We will come quietly, like the little toenail. We will go quietly. We won’t make a sound.
On the fourth day he was allowed home for a probationary half-hour with the girls. Russia greeted him with a cousinly hug and then withdrew, but only tactically: she would look in, pass by, she would clump about on the stairs and on the floor above. This was meant to fortify Imaculada, whose sickened glances suggested (to Xan at least) that domestic disharmony was quite unknown in the slums of São Paulo … Billie was the kindest to him, consenting, after a while, to be lifted on to his lap for a book; then Russia appeared and loudly and brightly suggested that they sit on the sofa (side by side). Although Sophie burst into tears the instant she saw him, she recovered surprisingly well. Thereafter she cried only when he coughed. And Xan’s cough had come on a bit in recent days. He coughed not in helpless reflex but with purpose and method, hacking the ragged edges off the soggy presence in his throat.
With Russia he tried to look the very picture of contrition, which was the best he could hope for, because contrition was not what he felt. He was perhaps open to intellectual persuasion about the solecism, the regrettable typo, of raping your wife. But a persuasion is not a conviction; and it would in the end be countered by the argument, or the unadorned encyclical, that your wife is your wife. Besides: everyone knew that a special indulgence should always be extended to men who, through no real fault of their own, happened to be unusually drunk. Yet Xan was making the effort. He was making the effort to be or at least seem reasonable, to bow to reason, as hereabouts interpreted. For instance, with Russia, he never succumbed to the ever-present temptation to ask (or order) her into the bedroom. The work of controlling or dissimulating these urges and grievances caused him to tremble, sometimes for a minute on end. During one of those minutes Russia looked at him and fleetingly imagined that he was trying not to laugh.
But nothing openly terrible happened, and his visits became longer, looser, laxer. Russia’s patrols further receded; Imaculada would sometimes leave him briefly alone with Billie; and he was soon permitted to look in on them as they bathed … Observing the girls was now part of Xan’s schedule, like his morning hour with Tilda Quant, and his first cautious sessions at Parkway Gym; but there was nothing routine about it — about observing the girls. Indeed, the experience was hallucinogenic, uncannily vivid and unstable: he never knew what it was going to do next. Why was it such a savage pleasure to watch them eat? Why was it of desperate importance to him — the volume of water they displaced in the bath? And why did they so often remind him of pornography: the lewd contortions, the self-fingerings, the slurping ingestions with chin and cheek dripping with milk or vanilla icecream? Why did he always expect them to die, every day, every night?
There was one time when Sophie fell apart early on, having been deprived of her afternoon nap, and was asleep in her room by a quarter to six. On his way out, Xan asked Russia if he might take a last look at her, and in he went. The blanketed figure seemed quite inert as he reached down and placed the flat of his hand on her spine. There elapsed an evanescent eternity before he felt the soft push of her breathing; and then he heard his own quiet retch of deliverance.
‘She’s down,’ he said. He stood in his overcoat at the door of the small half-landing sitting-room, where Russia was watching the news. ‘Dead to the world,’ he added.
‘Oh well. She’ll wake at five.’
Russia continued to look up at him from her chair. The aerodynamics of her face: its angled gauntness, in the present light, made him think of hunger, of famine.
‘Answer me something,’ she said. ‘Why do you think Billie has stopped “exercising” when you’re in the room? She masturbates in front of Imaculada and me — still. Why not you?’
‘Maybe because I’m a man.’
‘She didn’t mind before. You’ve made her self-conscious about it. And then the fox.’
‘I told you about the fox. The vixen. It was nothing. I just hugged her too hard.’
Xan was in the shed, stowing the garden hose, when Billie joined him. They heard the scrape on the skylight — and there above them was the weight of the fox, its underside, its crusty rump, its coat with its spines and quills. Billie cried out (‘Look!’), and Xan snatched her into his arms as the animal tensely swivelled and stared. He had expected a moment of feral severity — a snarl, a show of teeth — and not the entreating frown with its depths of anxiety. An anxiety that no human could have borne for an instant. Then it fled, its nails scratching the glass, and Billie was struggling and cuffing his hands.
‘I just hugged her too hard. I hurt my knee too.’
‘Yes, she said. “Daddy hurt his knee too.”’
He swayed backwards a couple of inches and said, ‘With the girls, I don’t know, I’m just generally het up about them. As though they’ve just come in from being lost. After dark. It’s part of it. I’m trying. I’m trying.’
‘This last week. It’s gone okay.’
‘Has it? I’m glad you think that. I know I’ve got a long way to go. My guidance systems … Anyway. Goodnight.’
Her eyes had flicked back to the television screen. His eyes followed. He was subliminally prepared for some footage of the modern world: the scorched chassis of a bus or truck, a bandaged shape being wheeled at speed down a hospital corridor, a woman wailing, with subtitles … What he saw seemed simpler: a phalanx of American soldiers — grunts, jarheads — crunching across a sandswept airstrip, each of them fantastically overequipped, like a one-man band. He thought: the jihads of the jarheads. He said, sounding surprised,
‘Semper ft. Yes. Semper fidelis.’
‘You know,’ she began, staring full ahead, ‘you’re a lot more uh, gamesome than you used to be. In your speech. You used to be much more step-by-step. I liked it.’ She looked up at him. ‘I miss it. Still, yes: semper fidelis. At all times faithful.’
‘Epithalamium.’
‘… Epithalamium.’
But it was when he was alone in the flat at night that he really did his work with the little girls. He lay there twisting, arching, squirming, seeing them hurt, harmed, taken, their flesh pierced, their bones snapped, the shells of their skulls meeting concrete or steel. What he saw when he closed his eyes had the power to lift him off the sheet and flip him over, to double him up, to flip him back again. He thought: something’s coming for them and I can’t protect them, I can’t protect them. And there were their faces showing fear, then terror, then horror, forcing more convulsions on him, causing him to writhe and thrash and seethe … He had read about a woman who said she felt ‘a profound calm’ as her daughter was attacked and knifed before her eyes. Similarly, sleep appeared only when the thing had already happened in his mind, and their ruined bodies lay before him; he was afloat on a glazed lake of detachment, drenched with the chemicals that come at such a time — that come to take you to the other side. I can’t protect them. They’re mine, and I can’t protect them. So why not rend them? Why not rape them?
You can live as an animal lives, and he thought he knew, now, why an animal would eat its young. To protect them — to put them back inside.
That little girl I see, walking past the window. Is that her, or is it just the ghost of my child?
2. Weird sister
It was on the eighth day that she called.
‘So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan. ‘Wait. There’s someone at the door. It’s open! … Just put it there, please … Thank you. Thank you … Champagne. To celebrate my arrival. There’s a half-bottle in the fridge but I don’t like the brand and it’s never quite enough, don’t you find? Now look. I was under the impression that we had an understanding.’
‘I’m sorry. “Karla”?’
‘Yes, Karla. Christ. With a k.’
‘Uh, wait. The thing is I had an accident about a month ago. And I—’
‘An accident? What kind of accident?’
‘A head injury. My memory’s not what it was.’
‘You have no memory of a woman called Karla? This is a grave disappointment. You seemed perfect for me. Poor you and all that, but you’re probably no longer suitable.’
‘Suitable for what?’
She sighed and said, ‘I’ll start at the beginning then. I’m a wonderfully rich, young, sane and pretty businesswoman who adores loveless sex. All right, I’m petite, but I have a superb body and I’m marvellously fit and brown. I pass through London twice a year. You were supposed to come to my hotel one afternoon and do whatever you liked to me. Then I get on a plane and put five thousand miles between us. Till next time. Now I suppose I’ll have to keep an eye out for someone else. I’ve just seen the bill for the champagne. I love spending money but this is madness.’
‘I uh, I really don’t think I was ever on for that.’
‘Oh? You seemed awfully pleased with the idea at the time.’
‘When was that time?’
‘In the summer at Pearl’s … Well you can come and say hello at least. And Xan: hadn’t you better defuse a very awkward situation? What if I get hysterical and call the house?’
‘Where are you?’
She told him. He said,
‘I think we’d better meet on neutral ground.’
‘All right. We can meet in the lobby if you like. I’m busy till Friday so you’ll have time to mull it over.’
‘Friday’s … Yes. Tomorrow I’m taking my boys away for the night.’
‘Fascinating. Do you really not remember? Don’t you remember what you said about my breasts? … Don’t you remember them? That is alarming. You know, Xan, this may do you a lot of good. I’m sure that the moment you set eyes on me it’ll all come flooding back.’
* * *
Cora wore black, tights, skirt, blouse, but she had not yet put on the black shoes, the black suit-top, the black hat with its pendant black veil. Now she faced the irksome task of achieving a French twist: the hair swept up and over to the side, secured by an armoury of pins. She began work in the bathroom but soon moved the whole operation next door. The hectic profusion of mirrors, at odd angles and elevations, made her feel watched — that mirror especially, with its inner eye.
She knew the literature. Victims of incest grow up thinking they have magical powers. For they do. All infants, all babies, believe they wield magic: one-year-olds, if you have particularly displeased them, can look up from their cots in astonishment that you have physically survived their anathemas, their callingsdown. They grow out of it. But victims of incest, these girls, these weird sisters, never lose that faith. Because power is theirs: they can say a sentence, and make a family disappear.
Women whom Cora had earlier come across in support-groups and recovery programmes persisted with another notion: that they could seduce any male. And it was true, in their case, so long as the male was violent or inadequate; so long as the male was a rapist or an addict or a pimp or a bum … Cora believed she could seduce any male too, and she had not yet been proved wrong. But she had more in mind for Xan Meo than mere seduction — and the graphic disabusing of his wife. She didn’t yet know what. It would come to her.
Five minutes before her car was due she picked up the phone and dialled and said, ‘Hello, may I speak to Pearl, please? … Pearl! You don’t know me but I’m an old flame of your ex-husband’s … About eight years ago. Yes that’s right: when you two were still married.’ Cora held the phone at arm’s length. ‘Wait, wait. He was ghastly to me too, if that’s any comfort … So — so I thought we might bury the hatchet and have a good natter,’ she went on, ‘over a few grams of cocaine.’
Soon afterwards Cora was in her overcoat. She instructed her gorge to stay where it was when she encountered the traditional flower-arrangements for the antinomian dead.
3. King Bastard
‘So how’s it go again?’ he asked his sons.
‘Your middle name plus the name of your street is your filmstar name,’ said Michael.
‘And your pet’s name plus the name of your street is your porn-star name,’ said David.
Xan said, ‘I haven’t got a pet.’
‘What was the last pet you had?’
‘A dog. Called Softy.’
‘Well then. Softy St George.’
Xan went on, ‘Softy wasn’t soft. Far from it. Salt-and-pepper Alsatian, and a real hardnut. When I was growing up I thought that was why Softy was in a rage all the time. Because of his name.’
They returned to what they were reading. Michael and David were reading the sports pages of the mainstream yellowtops. And Xan was reading himself: Lucozade … The three of them sat in a fast-food joint on Paradise Pier, among nursery colours. And the colours of the clientele? The colours of the English, their pinks and greys, would eventually be subsumed by the colours of the ultramundane. And how they needed these new colours, he thought. At the next table, a baby-bottle full of Pepsi was being offered by a white man to a brown child; his pallid hand, with its bruised tattoo, seemed to make great gains from the transaction. The smile of his black wife — this also greatly distinguished him.
‘“Of his Kestrel Juniors Chivalric Medallion”,’ said David, ‘“shamed love-rat Ainsley Car has been sensationally stripped …” They reckon here he’s going to Charlton. After prison.’
‘Charlton? They’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. So’s Charlton. He’s crap and they’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. But Charlton aren’t that crap.’
‘Bullshit. They’re less crap than he is but they’re still crap.’
‘Boys, boys: you’ve got to learn some new swearwords. Take crap, say. I mean, bullshit actually means something. Something fairly complicated. Something like: rubbish intended to deceive. But crap? Crap just means crap. As a word, crap is so crap.’
‘That’s the whole point of it. Crap’s wicked.’
‘Yeah. Crap’s cool.’
‘I’ll tell you what is crap,’ he said, flicking his book on to the table, ‘and it’s this shit.’
‘… How d’you mean, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you when you’re older.’
They came out into the last of England. The rock, the winkles; the pigeon with a petrol prism on its neck, the dry-heaving gulls; and the sea, in its storm aftermath, all confused and distraught, not knowing its proper place. Everything on the pier, the slot arcades, the caffs and bars with their short change and short measure, the dodgems, the ghost train: the whole narrative painting was organised by a vast — and, in secret, vastly prosperous — slum family. This was all that was left of his childhood culture.
Thursday morning was bright and blue. He gave the boys about a hundred quid each and then sat alone on the rocks between the two piers, the Opera and the Paradise. Mariners talk about a twice-daily occurrence — when the waves ‘reconsider’. Something of the kind appeared to be happening in front of him, though the sea was more orderly now; morale, esprit de corps, had been returned to it. The waves crashed and dragged; they flopped and trawled.
Xan wondered about the reasons for the sense of alleviation he was feeling. His memories of the place were piquant and pellucid and above all plentiful; and his engagement with Lucozade (he was about halfway through) seemed sure to be enlightening, whatever else it might cost him. But, no, it must be the boys, the boys. Was it merely their maleness, the laxity of their talk, the companionable squalor they had instantly brought to the set of rooms at the Crown? No, it was their unexamined acceptance of his altered state — and the fact that they couldn’t possibly judge him. They too were in the process of abandoning a self and acceding to another. Like their father, they couldn’t fully remember what they had been, and couldn’t predict what they would become. They didn’t know who they were either.
Michael and David spotted him from the corniche. The distant clouds were like continents; there goes Africa, there goes America. The sea was equal to the task (all in a day’s work) of turning the rock he sat on into shingle. The waves flopped and dragged, and crashed and trawled. The foamline wore a sneer, then a grin, then a sneer, then a grin: phantoms of the opera, phantoms of the paradise.
‘Is uh, Vicky back at school yet?’ Xan asked.
They were in a taxi, on the way to the station; and as the car turned off the Parade they were given a clear view of St Bathsheba’s on its crumbling clifftop — apparently no more than a year or two from the sea.
Michael said, ‘No, they’ve got her salted away in the country somewhere. And why? The bloke who did it — he knocked her up.’
David said, ‘She’s four months gone. She’s out here.’
‘And there’s worse to come,’ said the elderly driver. ‘The bloke who did it: one of our coloured brethren. And he give her a disease.’
Michael said, ‘… If it’s a boy it’ll be one of those bastard pretenders.’
‘Bastard the First.’
‘King Bastard.’
On the train Xan dozed, and his heart and mind loosened into shapeless candour. What he wanted, what he had to have, apart from revenge, was familial reinstatement with honour. It would be done. It would be made so. And he considered he’d performed pretty well with Russia, playing the man he used to be. On the other hand, as his head snapped up from sleep and then dipped back down into it, like the shifting height of the parallel wires on the telegraph poles beyond, on the other hand … His nodding thoughts kept going back, kept going forward, to the woman in the hotel room. The joys of fame: the cyclostyled circular from the teenage autograph-hound; the plea for funds from the Bulgarian theatre group; and, every now and then (and not for a long time now), a woman, coming at you from out of the ether. They were far from being forces for good, for stability, these women, he knew. But they were women. And it was nice to feel wanted, even by a wrecking-ball … Much would depend, of course, on her looks. He was determined to be faithful — at all times faithful; he wouldn’t touch. Still, he might have to go up there for a little while and watch her swan around in her pants. And then slip quietly away.
4. Cora’s call on Pearl
‘Well I’ll say this much for Xan Meo: he could pull. Enter and welcome. It was the television. His standard went soaring the minute he was on the television. Oh, just put it anywhere. Lovely tits, darling. And I bet they’re yours, too. And the waist. And the arse … Jesus wept, he must have thought all his birthdays had come at once. Even your stomach‘s a turn-on. And when was it? You’d have been even more of a little miracle then, at — what? — twenty-nine, thirty? No. I bet you’re better now. Sorry about the mess. You should see the boys’ rooms. They come home from school and try on all their clothes. That’s very kind of you. I could fancy some of that.
Cora made room on the large kitchen table for the ritzy shopping-bag with the magnum of champagne in it, and then produced the snuffbox with its packed white powder.
‘Ooh, go on then.’
A glance at the sitting-room, with its shawls and scarves showered over the furniture, and the multilayered clutter deposited as if by flashflood, told Cora that Pearl was no keeper of secrets. The house-presents she had brought were de trop—not unwelcome, but almost certainly otiose. Pearl’s appearance was similarly informative: the livid cheeks and forehead, the irregular auburn spikes of her hair, the costume jewellery, the ashsmudged jacket, the short skirt. It was on the short skirt that Cora concentrated. She saw that this was Pearl’s gravitational centre — the bandy thighs, the framed void. With a thrill of mortality Cora decided that the day Pearl finally stopped wearing short skirts would be the worst of her life. On the way to this rendezvous Cora’s cab had encountered an old lady in the street (and Cora wasn’t used to seeing old ladies in the street) bent almost triple in her search for purchase. The old lady was waiting at the zebra-crossing; the driver slowed and stopped; and, before starting off like a sick crab, she stared at him with a sneer of suspicion for at least twenty seconds, as if London taxis were well known to like ploughing into old ladies on zebra-crossings. Cora thought: try doing all that in a short skirt.
Pearl had both feet on the table, and had just rocked back from her seventh line of cocaine, when Cora introduced the subject of male sexuality, with particular reference to Xan Meo.
‘It’s too fizzy, isn’t it,’ said Pearl. ‘Wiggle your finger in it. Like this. It makes the bubbles go away and you can drink it faster. Whew. I haven’t scarfed up as much … Uh, he uh, wasn’t a fetishist. Like some. I knew a bloke who ricked his neck every time he heard a toilet flush. Another bloke could only do it wearing a mask and I had to pretend to be someone else — you know, a different person each time. I said, Ah come on for once. He said, It’s like being gay — I can’t do it otherwise. Xan. Xan liked frilly knickers and the rest of the bollocks but name me one that doesn’t. With him it was a power thing. He’d want to master you. So, you know, you’d resist that and pretend it isn’t doing anything for you. You’re not in the mood and you’re just letting him get on with it. Until you … That’s what he liked. Well. What can you do with them? Either they’re lording it or they’ve locked themselves in the bathroom. For a weep or a wank. Wiggle your finger in it.’
Cora now raised the question of Xan’s current circumstances, and was pleased to see Pearl’s shiver of flustered highmindedness: still greater indiscretion was on its way.
‘Of course it’s all off now, since he copped that smack on the head.’ Her voice had a faint buzz to it, imparted by the furled tenner in her nose. ‘He was always pretty keen, actually, but now he’s all screwed up and can’t think about anything else. Russia — I’ve got quite pally with Russia, on the phone at least. Russia had to kick him out after he came in and leapt on her in the middle of the night. She was that close to having him nicked. Said he’d become like a retarded child when they turn fourteen. They don’t know what to do with it all. And here’s something worse.’
Cora leant forward. With a look of righteous panic Pearl went on,
‘Russia asked me whether … When I was divorcing him I told my lawyer Xan was messing with the boys. Total rubbish, but any port in a storm. And Russia asked me whether it was true. Because she thinks he might have been messing with Billie — that’s their four-year-old and a sexy little minx according to the boys. Nothing definite, mind. It’s the way he eyes her. Whoop. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that, but you know what it’s like with this stuff. Out it pops.’
‘Oh it’s safe with me,’ said Cora. ‘Mm, your garden looks awfully nice. Would you give me a tour before I go?’
Pearl stood swaying at the front door. She said,
‘Oof: that fresh air’s really done me in. And look at her. Like a daisy. We never did talk about you and your time with Xan … Yeah, what time, right? Aren’t you clever … Ooh, you’re going to start stirring it now, aren’t you. Going to start mixing it. I’d say he’s going to be a very lucky boy. For about half an hour. His head’s on the block with her — one slip and it’s all over. Let me know how you get on. I’ll call Russia and feed her the dirt. Or do you do that bit too?’
5. It’s Not Unusual
On Friday Xan rose at seven. He breakfasted with the girls, and with Imaculada, to compensate or atone for his absence later on — if, for some reason, he got held up at the hotel. And he did his hour with Tilda Quant. Next, at the gym, he worked much harder and longer than usual; his class-leader, Dominic, commended the extra rasping and straining with the benchpress. Back at the flat, as he was about to unpeel his stinking singlet, he said to himself: Don’t wash. Go like this. That’ll keep you honest … As a compromise (and this was by no means habitual) he stood under a cold shower for fifteen minutes. Tilda Quant might have said that the mechanism at play here was self-flagellatory: purgation in advance. Hell isn’t just hot; it’s cold, too.
No doubt it was in the same spirit that he surrendered to a much-postponed ordeal: he tried to write something. Just a couple of paragraphs (he told himself), a couple of hundred words describing the confusions that had beset him since his accident. He stopped after forty-five minutes and read what he’d put down. As he feared, it did not evoke so much as leadenly dramatise his condition. Indeed, it was just another symptom: expressive dysphasia. His concentration, he realised, was additionally impaired by the fact that he kept thinking about sex: sex in the afternoon. By now his imagination had long exhausted all known acts, stunts, positions, variations. By now it was unalloyed nostalgie—pure love of the mud. Xan sat there sinking, in his brown study.
With a smile of pain he picked up Lucozade, intending to finish it — or to finish ‘Lucozade’, the last and longest story.
Twelve pages in he got to his feet and said, ‘Joseph Andrews?’
At that moment Mal Bale was two hundred yards away and heading straight for him. Well, not quite: he had a bit of business to get done en route. Only take a minute. Mal, this day, was on a dual mission. He didn’t like the first thing he was going to do and he didn’t like the second thing he was going to do. But he was going to do them. In his worn leather overcoat (the broad belt was like the metal strap on a barrel), Mal approached a hotdog stand on the west pavement of Prince Albert Road.
‘Go on then. How much? … Jesus, you don’t take no prisoners, do you mate. Onions? Nah. Just the uh, the doings …’
The hot-dog man, a middle-aged rasta with every other tooth missing and a face wreathed and sallowed by half a century of keef, said coaxingly, ‘You got to eat you onions, man. Put lead in you pencil.’
‘I’ve got lead in me pencil, mate. Look at the state of that sausage: that’s bioterror, that is. Do you know who I am? Do you know why I’m here?’ Why am I here? he thought. At my time of life, and I’m frightening hot-dog stands. It’s not even a stand. It’s a fucking trolley … ‘The cousins aren’t having it.’
‘But they’s ice cream!’
‘Ice cream, hot dogs: same difference.’
The hot-dog man stood fixed, with his dishcloth, his spatula.
‘Look, you don’t want your face on that grill, do you, you don’t want this trolley down on you and them onions in your hair. And a squirt of ketchup up one ear. And a squirt of mustard up the fucking other.’
‘I got youths, man.’
‘Yeah well we’ve all got them. Sorry and that. But I’ll be back in a bit and if you’re still here it’ll happen.’
Mal strode on, past St Mark’s Church, to St George’s Avenue.
He rang the bell and waited. Just as the door opened he heard a fierce shout from the street: ‘Oi!’ He looked round, looked back again; then he shifted his feet, raised his outturned hands to shoulder height, and bowed his head. A passerby might have thought that Mal was hoping to settle an argument — hoping to find common ground — between husband and wife. Either that, or he was just trying to keep them apart.
‘The punishment never fit the crime. It hasn’t sat well with me, that. The punishment never fit the crime. Ah, lovely,’ said Mal, accepting the mug of tea he’d apologetically asked for. The two of them were in the kitchen at the flat, round the table, Mal with his coat still on and a cigarette in his fist. ‘He’s told me: “Smash his fucking jawbone for him. See how he likes that. I want him eating through a straw for a spell. See then if he ‘ll say my fucking name.” The way he was going on, I thought you’d shopped him — I thought you’d tried a citizen’s arrest. And all you did was put his name in a — in a story. Are you all right, mate?’
‘Yeah, mate …’
Xan stood over the table. He could feel the violence hormones still squirrelling around in him: voluptuous killers of pain and reality. He had seen the stranger approach his house; and then he had recognised him. Xan came up the steps and into the street, ready for absolutely anything … Mal had a way, as he talked, of compressing his lips and raising his eyebrows and tipping his head, now to the left, now to the right: on the one hand this, on the one hand that. Xan now watched him with clogged calm, almost lovelike, and a sense of getting nearer to something. He said,
‘I didn’t even do that.’
‘No. Come on. There it is in black and white.’ He held up the magazine he’d brought with him. ‘In Punch. And in the book and all. Joseph Andrews.’
Xan Meo was not a literary writer, but he had, in ‘Lucozade’, allowed himself an unwonted flourish. The story told of a middle-aged bodyguard who, at some earlier period in his career, had plied his trade on the American entertainment circuit. ‘He had spent a year in Las Vegas, working for Joseph Andrews,’ it said. And ‘Lucozade’ later mentioned that Joseph Andrews had retired to Los Angeles. And that was all.
‘I didn’t really mean Joseph Andrews,’ said Xan, trying to explain. ‘I meant Tom Jones.’
‘Tom Jones?’
‘The singer. You know: “It’s Not Unusual”. I meant Tom Jones.’
‘… Well that’s fucking unusual. Why didn’t you say Tom Jones?’
‘It’s just uh, it’s just a kind of joke. Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: they’re both novels by Henry Fielding … You can’t say Tom Jones.’
‘… Well you can’t fucking say Joseph Andrews neither! Either. Jesus.’ Mal, evidently appalled by such frivolity, took a moment to collect himself. Then he frowned and murmured, ‘“It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.” ‘Mal frowned deeper, adding: ‘“Each day I touch the green, green grass of home” … I see the film Tom Jones when I was fourteen. It was me first X. I thought: here we go. Non-stop orgies and swearing. But it was just a load of pubs, and birds with their — with it all pushed up up here.’
Xan waited. It had been made clear at the outset that there were things Mal could tell him and things Mal couldn’t.
‘He’s not called that now, Joseph Andrews. And he’s sensitive about it. As well he might be.’ Mal was now looking round about himself. ‘You’ve paid, haven’t you mate? You’ve paid. And the punishment never fit the crime. Tell you what. How about this: doing Snort.’
‘Doing snort?’
‘Doing Snort. The bloke who gave you two on the back of the head. I’ll do him.’
Wait, thought Xan: I may need the practice. You weren’t supposed to ask questions, but he said, ‘I’ve got a feeling he isn’t finished with me. Andrews.’
‘A feeling? Well I hope you’re wrong. But you have given him the right flaming hump, my friend. A very unpleasant man, Joseph Andrews. My father worked for him for thirty years till he got himself crippled by the oppo — the Plutarco Brothers. Me dad’s a pitiful sight when he goes to Jo. Dragging one leg, his arm still twisted over, and his neck all bent to one side. And Jo’s gone, “All right, the Plutarcos took a bit of a liberty with you. We’ll have a whip.” Give him sixty quid — and a kick in the arse as he limped from the room.’ Again, the sway of the head, the arch of the eyebrow. ‘All I can think of is it might go back to Mick Meo. I heard they was never on the best of terms. How’s your health?’
‘I’m all right physically. But not what I was.’
‘And uh, at home?’
‘I’m on probation.’
‘Well you … you stick with it. Because that’s the most important thing. You don’t need me to tell you. At our age, boy, you’re a joke without your wife. Your kids and that.’
Xan sat up and said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to meet this girl in this hotel.’
‘Ah. Right.’
Mal was a while getting to his feet. Face to face, with a strictly pragmatic air, he said, ‘Then you know the possible consequences.’
6. Size zero—1
Come and see me, she’d told him (inter alia), in my fat hotel. And Xan was now feeling the pull of a very heavy planet. The crystal moons, the mirrorballs, the space-squandering distances, the golden dome above the circling staircase — a brochure vivante for Atlantes. And down below, the marble streets of hairdressers, masseurs, of manicure and pedicure, of perfume and jewellery and haute couture. None of this was aimed at the mind, now was it? You felt it — the high pressure to live deliciously. And that was before you got to the food and the wine, the soft towels, the fresh white sheets.
He asked at the desk and was directed to a rank of telephones — telephones that might have been used by the courtiers of Louis Quatorze. ‘Karla?’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
‘I have a suite with a wet bar,’ she said. ‘Ride up.’
‘No — as we said. Ride down, if you would.’
‘What, wearing this? … only kidding. I’ll be one minute.’
She was longer than that. As he took up position by the fountain, some distance from the bronze traps of the elevators, and as he survived each new half-carload of assorted maquillage, Xan had time to imagine her, upstairs, slipping or stepping out of one thing and slipping or stepping into another. Of course, he had been perfunctorily ‘hoping’ that she would be unattractive. But by now he couldn’t be certain whether the way she looked, let alone the way she dressed, would make any difference. Tilda Quant was not attractive (she must have stood back in simple dismay when all the gifts were being handed out); and Xan found her very attractive indeed. And earlier still that morning he had found himself gazing entranced at the underslept Aztec obstinacy of Imaculada …
Down came another car (he was watching the crimson glints of the shaft diagrams), and another squaredance surged out of it, losing shape quickly in an atmosphere of hurry that had to do with the time of day and the coming of evening. She did not share in this hurry. The other passengers dispersed and she moved slowly through their fading speedlines. She walked as if impeded by the presence of small children — and you looked beyond her, beneath her, for these children; but they weren’t there … Xan did what he had seen Billie do: he tipped back so fractionally that he could steady himself by the weakest elevation of his toes. She did not share in the hurry, nor in the confectionery, of the hotel. The sandals, the straw bag, the plain white dress. There was of course her figure to be assimilated; and only the most vicious corset, he thought at first, could so constrain the isthmus of her waist; but her body moved forward with the regular beat of that which is unsupported. When she was still some yards away he saw that she wearing no makeup, and this felt like an intimacy you could do nothing about. He couldn’t place her. But the thing was that his body knew he had seen her before.
He inclined his head. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the corner of the mouth.
Xan had rehearsed the line uneasily, and now he delivered it uneasily: ‘This is my first blind date for thirty years.’
‘Blind? Well in one eye only. I know you. Do you know me?’
And he said, ‘You, I don’t know, you’re … already-seen.’
She said, ‘There’s a surprisingly good cave of a bar back here.’ And she took him by the arm.
He was, again, ‘hoping’ that the bar would be well lit and reasonably populous: that would be ‘better’, because she would then have less chance to do anything he might not ‘like’. The way it went, he ducked into the Rose Room as if from an equatorial strand; and it took him a full minute to establish that there were no other customers. A blind date, and a deaf date too: the cottony darkness seemed to be pressing its paws against his eardrums as he followed the little white ghost to a distant booth: an opulent brothel of red velvet. Their faceless waiter appeared at once and lit the candle with a flourish before disappearing again. Now their faces were unsteadily illumined — but nothing else was. In these surroundings, he felt, languid and methodical fornication would not seem particularly daring. And a dumb date: a dumb date. She said,
‘Now. Déjè vu in the proper sense, or in the vulgar? In the vulgar sense, already-seen just means already-seen. “It is with a distinct sense of déjè vu that we watch the Saints bear off the trophy for the second year running.” In the proper sense it would mean that you haven’t seen me before. You just get the feeling you have. Which is it?’
‘The latter. I think. As I said, there are things wrong with my memory.’
‘Of course it could be already-seen in a really vulgar sense. Supervulgar, in fact. We’ll come to that. Ah.’
To Xan’s dark-adapting eye the faceless waiter now looked implausibly young: he seemed about to recommend a glass of milk.
‘I’ll have what you have,’ she said.
All the more reason, then, to order an ocean of blue ruin. To tell the truth, he would have given anything for a drink. He would have given anything — but not everything. For the time being he could see the line in the sand: on one side of it, all he had; on the other, all he’d lose. Milk, yes, or water, still water — liquid parched of all life. He asked if they served fresh orange juice, and was told that they did.
‘Orange juice?’ she said. ‘I’m not having that. A large gin Martini, please, with a twist. Oh don’t have orange juice. Have an espresso at least.’
‘Okay, I’ll have an espresso.’
‘A double … I read your book. It’s …’
He was gratified — but it was all too urgent in his mind and he could think of no other way of putting it. He said, ‘It’s up-your-arse, isn’t it? Sorry. That sounds terrible. But you know what I mean.’
‘You mean you toady to the reader. Well, there is a feeling of ingratiation. A kind of pan-inoffensiveness. And you seem to subscribe to various polite fictions about men and women. In my view. As if all enmity is over and we both now drink the milk of concord. And there’s another thing. What’s the one where the title is a girl’s name? “Evie”. Yes. After a thirty-page chase the narrator finally gets Evie into bed, and then, in my view, rather congratulates himself for not describing it. “No, I’m not going to tell you who put what where”, and so on. What’s that? Gallant? Evolved? Is that what the writer should do — shirk the task and strike an attitude? I’m being rather unfair here, because it’s not just you. Good sex seems to be something that writing can’t manage. Maybe the only thing. No: there’s dreams. But why should that be? Mm. Excuse me while I get stuck into this lovely drink.’
‘They say,’ said Xan, ‘they say that the writer stops speaking for anyone but himself. The quirks come out. It’s no longer uh, universal.’
‘Can’t the quirks be universal? Aren’t there things we all like?’
‘It’s funny. I don’t often describe sex, but it’s the first question I ask myself about a character: what they’re like in bed.’
‘Do you? Sorry: “what they’re like” or “what they like”?’
‘I suppose both. Or is it the same thing?’
‘So if you were going to fictionalise me, which I don’t recommend, you’d start how?’
‘Why wouldn’t you recommend it?’
‘Because nobody believes in women like me. Or no woman does. Unless she was a victim too. Victims believe.’
‘Victims of what?’
‘Wait. I see you’ve evaded the question. Anyway. Good sex, as a subject, has to have a place to go. So a whole other form, a whole other industry, devotes itself to nothing else.’
‘Pornography.’
‘Pornography … Porn is a disgusting little word, isn’t it? It’s the most disgusting single thing in the whole phenomenon. Porno‘s nothing like so bad. In the industry, we call it the industry. That’s what you call it when you’re in it. I’m in it … I said before that you may have already-seen me, in the supervulgar sense. It’s been a while now, and there were reasons for it at the time, but I uh, “starred” in over a hundred movies. Blue movies. Karla White. For three years the only sex I had was the sex I had on camera. Porno-people aren’t like non-porno-people. When we watch porno, we fast-forward through the sex to get to the acting. Now that’s true perversity.’
‘… What were the reasons?’
‘I told you. Do you really not remember?’
‘When? Where?’
‘It was at Pearl’s summer party: August thirty-first. Pretty chaotic, as usual. And, of course, no Russia. Remember? We talked for two hours and then went into the garden and did what we did.’
‘What did we do?’
‘We’ll come to that. And I told you the reason. It was once a cliché, and is now a fallacy — but why do girls make blue movies? Because they were raped by their fathers. Between the age of six and nine, inclusive, my father raped me once a day … Now that’s strange. That’s very strange. Then you do remember.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘When I told you the first time you were hugely indignant on my behalf. Now look at you. You just blinked once. Slowly.’
‘It’s not that I remember you telling me. It’s …’
‘You don’t think it’s so shocking any more? Boy, you really did get a knock on the head, didn’t you. Well all right. Let’s consider. Is it so shocking? Some fathers, and not just mass-murdering yokels but stockbrokers and politicians — some fathers really do believe that incest is “natural”. I made you so I can touch you, your first child should be your dad’s: all that. It’s an atavism. Because getting rid of incest, outgrowing incest, was part of the evolutionary advance, like outgrowing oestrus.’
‘What?’
‘Oestrus. Heat in women. There has never been a human society that doesn’t observe incest taboos. But the one to do with fathers and daughters has always been the weakest. In the Bible there’s every kind of prohibition. “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s sister; she is thine aunt; it is wickedness.” But there’s nothing specific about fathers and daughters.’
‘Patriarchy.’
‘Well yes. No. Masculinity. Mother-son incest barely exists. There are about twenty cases in the entire literature. And all the biblical restrictions are addressed to men. Men do it, and it’s the same with the higher animals. Size. Masculine bulk. Men do it because men are big … If you were trying to dream up a justification, then don’t look at the past.’
She leant forward and sipped, parting her bright grey hair with her hands. Clearly these were strange words he was hearing. Then why didn’t he find them strange?
‘Look at the future. Us, us victims, we’re not so frightened and repelled by the way the world is now: the end of normalcy. We always knew there was no moral order. So sleep with Billie, and introduce her to the void.’
‘That’s what it is, is it. It’s a void.’
‘It’s very simplifying.’ She smiled — the bright teeth shallow, feline — and said, ‘Where I live there are all these treatment centres for vices and inadequacies and addictions. Incestuous fathers are taught how to sublimate. They make their poor wives dress up as little girls.’
He thought of Billie, of Sophie. ‘School uniforms. Rompers and nappies.’
‘Not quite that literal. It’s something a lot of men like. Believe me. All you do is you wear things that are many many sizes too small. When I rang you and said I was dressed up as a little girl: I said it because that’s a, that’s a non-deuniversaliser. I don’t know, it takes the stress out of it. Consider the notion of the baby-doll look. It’s not only sublimation, it’s comic relief. How serious can anything be when your dress hardly covers your waist?’
‘You find? Uh, Karla, let me concentrate for a moment and … Yeah. I have seen you before. And it wouldn’t have been on film.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t watch pornography.’
‘You mean you say you don’t watch pornography. Ooh. Then you’re not the good modern person who wrote Lucozade … Unfair. You’re just a generation out — you’re still obliged to disapprove of it. It’ll take a while, but pornography is heading for the mainstream. The industry, now, is always saying how respectable it is. Every time Dimity Qwest or Tori Fate opens a supermarket, the industry says how respectable it is. To say that, you have to say that masturbation has become respectable. And that’s what they’re saying. “Wanking’s cool,” I read the other day. “Handjobs are brilliant.”’
‘Handjobs are bullshit. But wait.’
He did watch pornography, now, in the status quo after. Previously he quite liked it when he saw it but also disapproved of it; now, he liked it a lot and approved of it, assented to it, blessed it. And yet it was no help to him, in his altered state. Because even pornography needed your memory; and there were things wrong with his memory. The streams and currents, the different pressures and temperatures: if these do not flow as they used to, if the memory cannot ride them … The physiological reaction occurred, but nothing was eased by it. As if his erotic past was lost, and his desires, undiluted and unballasted, were all pushed out in front of him, into the present and the actual.
‘Oh don’t be too hard on handjobs.’ She spread her arms at shoulder height on the black velvet. ‘It’s not flattering, to be forgotten. It makes you feel forgettable.’
‘That’s not how it works. Three weeks before I got hit on the head it was Billie’s fourth birthday.’ He checked himself; then he pressed on. ‘When I picked her up at lunchtime, which I don’t usually do, she was very happy and excited. She said to the teacher, “And here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school.” You know: as if to cap it all. I said at the time that I’d remember that for the rest of my life, but I had to be reminded of it. Like my younger daughter’s birth. Sophie’s birth. I’d forgotten it. I’ve forgotten it. It’s not there. I’d say you were pretty unforgettable. But I still might have forgotten you.’
‘Then I’ll have to remind you properly. Will you excuse me for a moment? You’ll find me in a rather different mood when I return … All you do is — you wear things that are many many sizes too small. Many many sizes too small. Size zero. Don’t watch me walk away. I’ll feel self-conscious if you watch me walk away.’
So he watched her walk away and then sat there with his face in his hands.
7. Size zero—2
Bent over marble in the Ladies, and watched by mirrors, Cora Susan applied light makeup.
Recently, in the industry, there was an actor, Randy Rivers, who kept faking his HIV-clearance — in industry terms his work permit; and he infected five actresses. As this unfolded, various violent people went looking for Randy. They all found him and they all let him be. The explanation she heard was that Randy’s condition and circumstances could in no way be worsened: there was nothing to fuck up.
Cora hadn’t quite put Xan in this category, but she had thought of Randy Rivers, over at Pearl’s. Over at Pearl’s: that was a good name for her. Pearl would have revealed everything — without the good alcohol, without the good cocaine. Similarly, Xan sounded like an ignoble candidate for the rhino horn and the Spanish fly: Xan, the shambling flasher and dirty-raincoat merchant of Pearl’s adumbration. But it wasn’t turning out that way. She knew about such things, and the resistance she felt from him was unexpectedly dogged: erratic and confused, but dogged. Seducing him, therefore, was now a matter of her self-respect and even her self-belief; it was vital to her private culture — to her inner suns and moons. And the other, more terrible punishment, if it had to come, could come later.
She approached from behind and placed her hands on his shoulders, saying, ‘I’m going to have the same again. And I’ll briefly hate you if you do likewise.’
‘Then I’ll have what you’re having … You’ve put on makeup.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘You look a bit younger. No, older. No, more artificial. Like this place. And less familiar. I don’t remember you at all now.’
‘That’s all right. You know, two cocktails is about my limit. It’s funny that men are so starchy about drunk women — except in the bedroom. They don’t want them sloppy. Except in the bedroom. Men do love a legless woman. I suppose it’s the diminished responsibility. But you’ve got to time it right.’
Their drinks came, and she started to touch him. A hand on the arm, a hand on the hand: hand touching hand.
‘You’re a bit starchy, about the industry, aren’t you? When I started out it seemed to me that I was made for the industry. Made.’
‘Because of you and your father.’
‘Well yes, but I meant physically made.’ She took her hand from his and started counting off the fingers. ‘One. Okay: father. Two. I can be candid with you, can’t I? Two. My uh, netherhair is naturally minimalist, as they all are now. As everyone is now. Is that evolution too? Like men stopping having beards? Three. I wasn’t born with a kiss-tattoo on my coccyx, but I do have a birthmark on my hip that’s shaped like a valentine greeting. All I needed, for the complete look, was some great rock bolted into my navel. Or my tongue. Four. The bust. They seem fake. They seem fake because there’s no asymmetry. They don’t move fake but they feel fake. Feel.’
Up till now he hadn’t stared at her breasts. On the contrary: they had been staring at him. But now he stared at them, and they stared back. ‘Feel.’ What could he say — that he’d ‘prefer’ not to? Instead, to postpone it a second or two, he said, ‘I don’t know what fake breasts feel like.’
‘Yes you do. You’ve felt mine.’
‘Have I? But yours aren’t fake.’
‘But they feel fake. Feel.’
He felt. She held his hand in place with her wrist and powerfully inhaled.
‘If you put your cupped palm out of a car window and feel the air going past … Some breasts are thirty miles an hour. Some are fifty. I’d say mine are about seventy. Speed-limit breasts,’ she said, and let his hand drop. ‘Where was I? Yes. Five. I’m little.’
‘What?’
‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I measure five foot and a credit card. I weigh eight stone sopping wet. I magnify the man. I’m a cock-puppet … Now that last point has a bearing on what happened at Pearl’s. I’m going to describe it to you, and then perhaps we’ll know where we are. And I think I will have that third Martini. You may have to help me to my suite.’
On screen, actors blink only when they mean to; and when Xan decided he wanted to be an actor he had spent a lot of time practising not blinking. ‘Stotaring!’ his mother used to say. ‘I’m not staring. I’m practising not blinking!’ Now, in the fat hotel, Xan was trying not to blink. Because whenever he did, he saw the two of them naked on the carwash of her bed … Yes, the world was going, was seeping away. He could feel bits of it closing down; they made a sound like a computer’s final sigh — a faint ricochet, a distant miaow …
‘It was about one o’clock in the morning. There was a hard core still at it in the sitting-room, but it was thinning out, and everyone was pretty far gone — except you, funnily enough. You weren’t drinking, but there was other stuff going around and maybe you’d had a puff or a toot, I don’t know. We agreed to meet in the garden. You know at the far end, through the arched trellis, there’s a hut or Wendy house that’s not actually on the property but you can get to it through the gap in the hedge?’
‘We called it the Monkey House,’ he said thickly. ‘It belonged to the little girls next door. But they grew up.’
‘Well, in we sneaked. It felt childish, and we were laughing quite a bit at first. You know: playing Doctors in the parkie’s shed. Then it happened. Oh, nothing very serious. This came down, and this came up, and you caressed me fairly thoroughly. Listen, at one point … I was getting rather tired, standing on tiptoe, and I said it wasn’t fair, your being so much bigger than me. And you lifted me up with one hand, so I was on your level. You used your other hand to steady me. But you lifted me up with one hand.’
‘How?’
‘How? It was the hand that was between my legs.’
There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They went to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the bed … Xan tensed himself, below. It was still there: like a section of solid cartilage.
‘A reconstruction, a reenactment of that moment,’ she was saying, ‘up in my suite, might bring it all back … Xan, I feel I may have alarmed you slightly, with all this talk of incest and pornography. Unstable things. Alien things. But as you see I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I’m little. I know that after accidents people feel very fragile. But I won’t hurt you. How could this’ — she shrugged — ‘hurt anyone? And you deserve it, Xan. You’ve had a very hard time and you deserve it. You don’t have to touch if you don’t want to. You can just watch me glide around in my underwear for a while. Size zero. And then slip quietly away.’
His memory had got him into this; and now maybe his memory was going to get him out. The first instant, in the lobby, had been for Xan a sexual coup de foudre; yet he still believed that he could muster some kind of counterforce to it — could avoid the occasion of sin. Thereafter a reptilian ponderousness had slowly spread itself over his body, coagulating into one purpose, one meaning. He was the slow-eyed crocodile who has watched and waited, who has watched and waited long enough. Simultaneously, for minutes on end, he felt like a heavenly body in space, urged towards another heavenly body of far greater gravity; he felt celestial attraction. Others, other things, the world: all of it was about to disappear … Then a memory came. A memory came, like a flare, bringing with it a series of forced deductions.
He remembered that on the evening of his injury, when he was on his way out of the house, on his way to Hollywood, to hospital, he had said to his wife: I have no secrets from you. And he remembered that he had meant it: he remembered the undesigning light of his own veracity. Every man has secrets from his wife, those letters, that photograph, the guest-appearances and thought-experiments that come as ghosts to the master bedroom. But Karla, with her dress around her waist: that qualified as a secret. In the last few minutes Xan had been hoping that what she said was true: that he had indeed lifted her off her feet. Because it was something well worth doing, and if you’d done it once, what was the point in not doing it again?
‘And, in the morning, I get on a plane and fly five thousand miles.’
He said abruptly, ‘If you’re not a friend, what are you? Do you know the name of Joseph Andrews?’
She seemed to take it like a tiny blow from a tiny enemy. But her voice was firm and cool: ‘Yes. It’s in your book. I assumed it was just a joke about Henry Fielding. “Lucozade”. Easily the best.’
‘Thank you. I think so too. And you’re not my enemy?’
‘Oh I’m your enemy all right. Come on. What do you think? That I’ve got … that I’ve got a motion-sensitive camera up there? And tomorrow morning, a liveried courier delivers the cassette to your wife? It would start in the lift: we’d wait for an empty one. Look at this place. You can feel it on top of you, tons and tons of it saying that the body should have it good. I’m offering you a modern temptation: one with no consequences. Come on up. It’s no more than what you deserve.’
The temptation, he considered, was implausibly extreme, and it would be ridiculous not to succumb to it. She was right. The fat hotel wanted it to happen. Before him, on the table, the two cocktail glasses were a pair of female thighs, and the two shots of unfinished booze, the slowly seething gin, were their hosiery … Against this luxury he could array only the luxury of uxoriousness — a luxury of the mind, merely. And Russia was far, very far, perhaps unrecapturably distant; and Karla was near.
Xan shook his head and at once she called for the bill.
‘In the dictionary,’ she said evenly, removing her key from her bag, ‘the third meaning of tempt is to risk provoking a deity or abstract force. That’s what you’ve just done. As a sexual temptation this was nothing. And now you’re going to have to watch me walk away.’
‘Wait. How do I — ’
‘Do what I did and call your agent. Now you’re going to have to watch me walk away. And it’s already too late to change your mind: this time. I’m going to leave you with a visual paradox. My mother was very feminine, but so was my father. And I’m a doublegirl. How does it go? Haunch touching haunch, breast touching breast, each touching each. Look at me walk away in my doubleskin. And you’re going to think: that’s my cock, walking away.’
She was on her feet in front of him: the sheer white dress with its pools and hollows. Now she swivelled, with the straw strap on her shoulder. She laughed harmonically and said, ‘It’s so sweet. Fathers have the ridiculous idea that …’
Over her shoulder she looked at him. He expected to find dislike in it, but her face seemed about to crumble and collapse, as Billie’s might.
‘You know, if you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter — she’d go along with it. What else can she do? She can’t do otherwise. When it comes to Daddy, little girls are certainties. Fathers have the idea that if they made a move their daughters would rear back and slap them across the face. And say: I’m not that kind of little girl. What kind of little girl do you take me for?’
And then she walked away.
That’s what a good caveman is meant to do, isn’t it? When he hears the snap of a twig, the breath of an animal or enemy, then he disappears — even if oestrus is spreadeagled before him. The desire to reproduce meets its counterforce, which is the desire to go on being alive.
Something very ancient but much less primitive also constrained him. She was familiar, intimately familiar; in both senses she was already-seen. He didn’t know it, of course, but the face behind her face was that of his mother. And his sister, and himself. He had seen her in the past all right: when he was twenty and she was ten, when he was sixteen and she was six, when he was twelve and she was two, when he was ten and she was a baby.
Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy sister’s daughter; she is thy niece; it is wickedness.
8. Not knowing again
‘Will you get me a drink?’
‘Yeah, sure. What would you like?’
‘Chocolate Mix.’
‘Coming up.’
‘I read this book but I fell asleep before I could finish the end. Now I started the beginning and I don’t know it again.’
She often said that: ‘don’t know again’ instead of ‘don’t remember’. He understood what she meant.
‘Well let’s sit down and read it properly.’
He was alone with Billie in the kitchen. Sophie was being aired by Imaculada on Primrose Hill. And Russia was a presence, somewhere above. Billie, now, was treating him not like a father, quite, but like a reasonably reliable uncle … Xan was doing what his father had done, many times: he was being genially, even cloyingly considerate to a child while also entertaining murderous thoughts about a fellow male.
‘Will you die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so, darling.’
‘Will Mummy die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Will Sophie die before me?’
‘I hope not.’
‘Will I die before her?’
‘I don’t know, darling. Now let’s read the book.’
Xan had spent the morning on the trail of his enemy. The search — equally unreal and prosaic — began in the True Crime section of the High Street bookshop. A surprising number of the gangland exposés and ghosted memoirs (of various blaggers and bruisers) ended with an index; and a suprising number of these indexes contained references to Andrews, Joseph: the Airport Job, the two long sentences, the suspected murder, and, some time later, a massive tax fraud. It disconcerted Xan, and also disappointed him, to learn that Andrews went back at least half a generation beyond his father: he would now be over eighty. When he returned to the flat Xan typed the forbidden name into a searchengine. After a while he had before him a loose and jangling biography, and even a press photograph. It showed a headmasterly figure, with his wet grey hair combed back and a glass of champagne defiantly raised, poolside, on a plastic chair; a teenage creole sat perched on his lap, wearing a bikini bottom and a wet T-shirt. This was Brazil, twenty years ago; and nothing else followed.
‘Can we do the horses?’
‘Come on then. Up you get. This is the way the children ride … They walk … they walk … they walk. This is the way the ladies ride. To trot, to trot, to trot, to trot. This is the way the—’
‘I need to do a pooh-pooch.’
‘Do you? Come on then.’
‘Quick. I’m desperate.’
Unthinkingly at first, he followed the old protocol. He helped her with the metal buttons of her jeans, and placed her on the toilet seat; then he withdrew, to await her call when she was ready to be wiped. In earlier days Xan had not exactly relished this routine: after four and a half decades, wiping his own backside had lost much of its magic, and wiping Billie’s just seemed like more of the same. But now he admitted to himself that he would rather do it than not. The admission entrained another thought: he knew, he understood, why some animals licked their young clean.
‘Daddy?’ he heard her say. ‘When people move, they don’t move they houses. They move everything else. They move they carpets … they beds … they tables … they toys … they blankets …’
He stood in the passage, by the stairs, in front of the forwardleaning gilt mirror. To this mirror he idly directed the remains of his tortured vanity: the thickening excrescences beneath the eyes; the looming lagoons of his hairline (the shampoo was getting colder every year, every month). Yes, he was thinking, it was a pity, it was a tragedy, that Joseph Andrews was eighty-five years old. There was so little of his life left to ruin; on the other hand, how much more easily, and how much more loudly, might he snap.
‘… they pencils … they fridge … they books … they television … Ready, Daddy.’
He entered. The pleasure the smell gave him — the smell of shit lite … Not dizziness but a sense of general physical insecurity retarded him as he leant over her, and wiped, and activated the flush.
‘My ploompah’s sore.’
‘I’m not surprised. The treatment you give it. Stand on here.’ He placed her on the basin shelf. In recent months Billie had gained weight uniformly, like a coating. He could now see the preliminary form of her breasts through her shirt; then the stomach still infantilely outthrust; and then the vulva, like a longhand w, but all abraded and enflamed — written in pink and red. Xan registered an impulse to weep, but it wasn’t straightforward, this impulse; some of it had to do with his futile twistings and writhings in the night; and some of it felt coarsely and unworthily tender, like crinkling your nose over a Christmas card.
‘You want some cream on that,’ he said.
He went into the passage and called Russia’s name. He went halfway up the flight of stairs and called a second time. ‘Russia! We need you!’ Then he made out the heavy clatter of the shower a floor and a half above; she would be in there under the thick jet, naked behind the panel of glass.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.
He washed and dried his hands … Her subtle eyes pleadingly appraised him, then widened; then freshened and refreshened in what he took to be an accession of trust. And so his daubed fingertip sought the intima.
Billie gave a gasp of relief: it was a thing of the past. But she was staring beyond him now, and when he looked round he saw that Russia, her hair swept up in a turban and her dressing-gowned figure inanimately still, was watching from the stairs.
9. To Otherville
Rory McShane had quite enjoyed his dealings with Xan Meo, in the past. He had had him over to the house a few times, first with Pearl, then with Russia. But now that Xan’s career was evidently shot, Rory had transferred him to a different part of his mind: he belonged with all those who had to be humoured. Presumably there would be no good news to give him, ever again.
‘How’s Russia.’
Xan stopped scowling and said, as if to himself, ‘I go round there and she calls the uh, the authorities. Can you credit it. You go round to your own house, and your own wife calls the fucking filth. Can you credit it.’ And he started scowling again.
Rory wondered whether Xan was drunk: there was a kind of cruising hostility in him, and the promise of untoward personality change. But he decided that these emanations, plus the unvarying gaze and the embittered slur, were probably what you ended up with when you were smashed on the head. Still, Rory was being uncharacteristically careful not to give offence.
‘There are funds coming in,’ said Rory. ‘I’m checking, and there’s a few bob coming in.’
‘I’ve got a few bob. That’s not the point. I got a few bob, mate.’
‘Yes. That’s right. If you don’t mind my asking — and do tell me to fuck off if you like — where did it come from, your few bob?’
Xan stopped scowling and said, ‘Me mum. My mother. She died in a single room in a terraced house in Effley Road, E4. She was the sort of old woman who used the same teabag five times. But we knew she had a fair bit in the bank. When she died’ — and here he frowned, recalling Pearl’s third audit—‘it turned out she didn’t just own the house. She owned the street. Nineteen houses, full of nineteen hundred Patels, which is what the police call them. Bangladeshis. Slum landlady. But when we’d made it right, and we was … we were slinging money about in uh, reparations and that, there was still a tidy whack left over. She was a monster, my mum, but I adored her.’ He closed his eyes as he said it: ‘Fantastic businesswoman. It’s not the money, mate. It’s the employment. I can’t write and I can’t … perform. Act. I’m gone. But I’ll hump scenery, I don’t care. Give me employment.’
And he started scowling again.
‘You look uh, buffed up.’
‘I do the gym. Up down, up down. In out, in out. Go on then: Karla White.’
‘Oh yes. Karla White. I hesitated to impugn you with it. But yes. Karla White.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’ve had a so-called offer from Fucktown … From Lovetown. Sextown.’
‘… Didn’t they have a sniper there?’
‘They still do. The Sextown Sniper. And she’s still at large.’
‘She?’ Then Xan remembered that this was one of Rory’s party-turns. To Rory (fiftyish, long-haired, much-divorced) all malefactors were playfully assumed to be female. Somebody’d say: We had a burglar last night. And he’d say: How did she get in? Somebody’d say: I was mugged on my way here. And he’d say: Was she armed?
‘And they’ll never catch her either. They can’t. You know about Lovetown? The porno people … When the Washington believers started cracking down on them, the porno people found a zoning loophole and moved the whole shebang to the San Sebastiano Valley, Little Hollywood, Southern California. It’s a state within a state. So the uh, SSPD, which consists of about one guy, can’t get federal help. And who cares if it’s just porno people who’re getting shot at? Who cares if — I don’t know — Casey Cunt gets winged in the arm? It’s God’s way.’
‘All porno.
‘All porno. Pornotown. Othertown. Now your so-called offer … They’ve been madly Anglophile for some time — long before the Princess business. A lot of the girls are English. English Rose, Brit Isles. Greta Britain, Unity Kingdom. And the men give themselves English stage-names. And knighthoods. Sir Phallic Guinness. Sir Bony Hopkins. Sir Dork Bogarde. What they like to do now is hire mainstream British actors to play so-called character parts. Some of my younger clients have done it.’
And here he named a few actors whom Xan was more or less aware of.
‘It has a kind of grunge cachet. Like with minor rockstars. It’s considered a blinding coup for a rockstar to have a porno girlfriend.’
‘What would be the work?’
‘Well you won’t be doing any fucking, and you certainly won’t be doing any acting. You’ll have to do a bit of watching, I suppose. You know: you learn your so-called lines in the cab to some Moorish villa consisting entirely of dens. They’ll have worked it into the so-called storyline that you happen to be present while uh, Brit and Bony have sex.’ He leant into his computer screen. ‘Mm. Usually it’s like a parody of a Hollywood offer: Prestige Economy, BudgetBower, three-figure fee. But this looks pretty reasonable. More than reasonable for one day’s work. Well it is Karla White. She owns Princess Lolita … It’s called Crown Sugar and you’re Rameses the Great. Know what I think you should do?’ said Rory dutifully. ‘Sit in on some workshops. Do some classes. Go easy. Get back to where you were before.’
Like the dark-clad others, those drawn into the city and then released from it at seven p.m., he returned to his flat with a plastic shopping-bag: provisions for one. He warmed and ate some savoury mess or other; and he drank the red wine — but not all of it. For nearly a week his afternoons, his evenings, had been journeys to non-consciousness; he woke up in a flat where (it seemed) thirteen or fourteen people had caroused the night before. Then, one morning, while he roiled in his own gases and acids on the benchpress, he thought: being drunk was a way of saying that, in your opinion, the universe was bullshit. No, more: it was a way of saying that you thought the universe was crap. And he didn’t think he did think that. So tonight he was sober as he sat there staring at the wall. He was sober when he went into the bedroom and looked out of the window at the house across the street: that was the status quo ante; that was where he was before.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan? Mal Bale. How are you, boy?’
‘Oh, you know. Mustn’t weaken.’
‘Uh, listen. About doing Snort. We can’t now. He’s just gone away for twelve years.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Still, that’ll learn him. What was it?’
‘Malicious wounding. Though by the sound of it Snort got as good as he give. We can have him done inside of course, but where’s the satisfaction?’
‘Yeah. No. So I’m still owed.’
‘You’re still owed.’
‘I’ve been going over something you said about — about our friend. You said I placed him. You said I “put him there”. Put him where? Put him on the page? Or put him in Los Angeles.’
‘No comment.’
‘Is he in Los Angeles?’
‘Uh — no comment. If you get my meaning. Uh, you fancy it, do you mate?’
‘Well it’s not up to me, is it? If I don’t do something, I’ll feel like shit for the rest of my life. Who’s Karla White?’
‘Karla White? … Nah, mate. So how’s your probation? You survived that, did you: the bird in the hotel?’
‘Well I did and I didn’t.’
He finished the bottle of wine, that night. He needed a bottle of wine to get him through it: that is to say, he needed a bottle of wine to get him through an evening with only a bottle of wine to get him through it.
In the silent argument he was always having in his head with Russia, and in his far noisier exchanges with her surrogate, Tilda Quant, Xan maintained that he had acted as any father would — but he knew that his heart had not been quite right, there in the bathroom, with Billie. ‘If you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter — she’d go along with it. What else can she do?’ This had proved to be a terrible transmission: deenlightenment. He wished he could forget this; he wished, in Billie’s phrase, that he didn’t know again. Her power, her rights (which depended on what? Civilisation?) had seemed to disappear; and his power, his rights — they had corrosively burgeoned. To be alone with somebody who had no choice: it was the extent of her helplessness that had made him want to weep. Because all this was tied up with his fear of her being hurt, cut, pierced, split, stuck. And over and above it, and under and beneath it, was his sense of his own entitlements and deserts, his privileges, warrants, beliefs, all of them apparently non-negotiable: his sense of what he was due.
There was also inside him somewhere a baby of pristine misery; every day he felt for it and held it and fed it, and every night he put it to bed. But things were clearer now, as he squirmed and twisted. All the signs pointed the same way.
He had been to hospital. He was going to go to Hollywood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. February 14 (1.15 p.m.): 101 Heavy
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Nick Chopko: ‘what we just experienced is known as CAT, or Clear Air Turbulence. It was quite a drop but uh, I’m pleased to report that we’re in okay shape, thanks to the … the skill and foresight of our Captain, whose last flight this is, now that all four girls are through college, one of whom I’m proud to call my fiancée: Amy Macmanaman. Give it up for the Captain … We encountered a very powerful following wind resulting in pressure-differential loss on the wings, otherwise known as a stall. It seems that everyone was belted down except for Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez in Business, who remained attached to her secured cart but suffered a jarred shoulder. We suspect she’ll pull through. Fortunately all the overhead lockers held but three. These did not contain the dumbbells and bowling-balls some of you like to stow up there. Just some pillows and blankets and a bunch of cartons of cigarettes. CAT is a potential emergency and a very rare event. It was my first time. It was almost certainly your first time. It wasn’t the Captain’s first time. We expect no further problems, but as a precaution we do ask that you keep your seatbelts securely fastened. Thank you.’
‘Do you know’, asked the man in 2A, ‘the proportion of passengers, on average, that survive a plane crash?’
‘No I don’t,’ said Reynolds. ‘Three per cent?’
‘Actually it’s more like forty. There can be one survivor, and there can be one fatality. And everything in between.’
‘Is that a fact.’
‘… I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I don’t even smoke. This seat. This cabin. Right in the crumple zone. I always sit right at the back. In among the toilets. Then the rest of the plane’s your buffer. I was booked on IA but they did my miles in Frankfurt and offered me the upgrade. It’s crazy. I don’t even smoke. The secondary inhalation’s killing me.’
‘Remember that nice breakfast you had. And think about your slippers. Concentrate on them.’
Not inordinately, not egregiously loud so much as very clear, very pure: the explosive failure, the rending crack, of the starboard engine; the grisly physics of its catapulting fan blades and rotor spokes; the clacking strafe of metal-piercing shrapnel.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Shit Christ Jesus.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Which is the which is the?
Ward: What the hell these guys have done.
Chopko: Pull back the power back.
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on now. Let’s get ahold of the airplane. Come on now. Let’s fly the airplane.
CigAir 101 started to pitch; and then, to the inestimable advantage of Royce Traynor, it started to yaw.
2. The face has holes in it
The slightly longer and (by all accounts) very much dirtier version of Princess Lolita arrived at Ewelme by courier. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was committing a crime by taking delivery of it; but Oughtred had told him that the UK was already awash with the American original together with every variety of piratical counterfeit (and a marginally abbreviated edition, with all the non-sexual material excised, could be found by means of a dark and costly visit to the Net). In any case Brendan’s sense of transgression could hardly have been livelier as he signed for the package and hurried to his room to hide it. That night they retired at ten. And Brendan’s anticipation of the small-hour screening was quick to satisfy the greed of his insomnia. He rose at a quarter to three. Captain Mate had been spoken to; and, remarkably, all three doors to the library were equipped with functioning locks and keys … At Ewelme, the rudimentary heating-system wound down long before midnight. In pyjamas, then, in dressing-gown and greatcoat, and socks and hiking-boots, Brendan activated the paraffin stove, slipped the cartridge into the machine and sat there with his breath smoking. He turned the light off. He turned the light on. He turned the light off. He reached for the remote control.
No man on earth, Brendan considered, would watch Princess Lolita with the curiosity that he himself would bring to it. For example, who else had a sane claim to being in love with Princess Victoria, the real princess, as he did? More generally the experience would give him essential information. As he put it to himself, a little frantically: was he a ‘joseph’, one of nature’s neuters, bowing his head as God put the horns on him? Alas, poor Joseph. Hard to keep your chin up, and to go on looking so wise and true. And, yes: nice try with the beard … Brendan consulted the worn memory of his embrace with the Princess, how all the blood within him …
Princess Lolita began with a still of Tori Fate’s birth certificate, followed by a datelined clapperboard introducing footage from the first day of principal photography. Brendan made the calculation: the actress had been barely a week past her seventeenth birthday when filming began. An establishing-shot of a castle tower; then Tori Fate under a sheet in a four-poster. Yes, like, like, very like. Yet without complexity, as if the actress herself had been morphed. And even the surface resemblance proved specious, or cosmetic, the moment she opened her mouth, turning to her attendant and asking her (not in an accent from Brooklyn or Mississippi, but in English, dubbed, clipped, elocuted English — the voice, Brendan felt sure, of a woman of the King’s vintage) about the arts of love … Lolita’s lady-in-waiting, a glistening Amazon with occult tattoos on her muscular breasts, then undertook a demonstration. The enjoyment of such a spectacle, Brendan soon decided, was a test of male heterosexuality that he just didn’t pass. Outer tongue against inner tongue, upper against under — but now came a jolt. When the strap-on phallus was conspiratorially produced, and handed to Tori Fate, who buckled it about herself and stood there with a hand on its base, Brendan felt an abject stirring, a sick twitch, between his legs.
He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out — my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat — and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller …
By this stage Brendan expected to be twitching and twisting for the full ninety minutes. Yet only one more revelation awaited him, and this was insidious or cumulative, like the reluctant awareness of footsteps behind you, at night, on a lonesome road. Quite soon, exposure to Lolita’s sentimental education was reminding him of his only bullfight, in Barcelona: after the third kill, fascination and disquiet remained, but these feelings were quietly joined by boredom. As the heroine sedulously dallied — now with a jodhpured Spanish grandee, now with a rude young groom, now with a spangled diplomat, now with a rugged derelict plucked off the street — it seemed to Brendan that the performers, with more haste than lust, were working their way through a checklist or duty-roster: some of this, then some of that, and then this and then that, including some of this, not forgetting that, and then maybe this, and then always that. Always that — at the end. Grinning, and grinning gratefully, on her knees, Princess Lolita, awaiting anointment.
When it was over he went through it again, availing himself of the remote control. Watching pornography, watching the sex of others (this was already clear to him), you were constantly saying, No don’t do that — do this, stop, don’t stop, proceed, desist. The viewer was helpless before the spatial dimensions, but the remote control gave him power over time. Deploying this power, Brendan concentrated on freeze-framed close-ups of the actress’s face. From certain angles, yes, remarkably like, remarkably like. But older. And not just a year older … If Princess Lolita had shape or form, then power was its pattern. The exertion of that power remained symbolic, and counterintuitive: it was the handsome derelict who pinioned the Princess with a pair of paper handcuffs; it was the sleek grandee who followed her about on all fours, led by a gossamer leash. Yet always this moment at the end, when power was no longer held in balance. The face, smiling, with male seed dripping from it, hanging from it. Brendan didn’t like this spectacle. But his blood did.
It was with a sense of himself revised dramatically downward that he stood, and pressed the eject. For a moment he entertained the informed certainty that the machine would now seize (trapping its contents for later delectation — Henry’s, Victoria’s), and he would have to wrench it apart with his teeth and fingernails. But here it came, disgustedly expectorated on to the tiled floor … On the way to his room he came round a corner and almost fell over her: the Princess. He flung out both hands in her direction, to catch or steady her, and so released what was lodged beneath his armpit: and in clear contravention of all life’s laws (which demand that every dropped object lands the wrong way up), Princess Lolita came to rest face-down, and in near silence, on the tussocky pelt of the carpet. Even so he had time to think that his greatcoat and dressing-gown would now fly open, to reveal not the full complement of his pyamas but a pair diligently savaged by scissors, with the trousers, secured by elastic bands, ending just above the knee.
‘I’m so sorry, ma’am. I do apologise.’
Victoria hugged her robe to her. Plainly she was heading for the cavernous bathroom which the three of them shared (along with the rabbits and the archery sets). He expected, as he focused, to find her poetically pale, as pale as the weak dawn that was now almost upon them. But she wore an uneven flush and a roseate brocade on her upper lip and septum — she had not been well, was not well, was of course not well, this Christmas, this long January …
‘Oh never mind,’ she said, and stepped round him. At the corner she bent and turned, saying, ‘Brendan — you know there’s only one thing he can do.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am?’
She flipped a hand in his direction, and was gone.
An hour later Brendan was still muttering into his pillow … How did it go again? Oh yes: work. That’s all you were doing. Making ‘headway’, was it? And rousing yourself from the enforced torpor of Ewelme … Working is what they’re doing and that’s why they look so old: old in the eyes. Is pornography just filmed prostitution or is it something more gladiatorial? Those hospitalic condoms: they don’t keep them on at the end. And the face has holes in it … Gladiators: were slaves. But could win their freedom. What exactly has happened to you? he asked himself. Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse. If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body … Tori Fate turned seventeen on January 3. Princess Lolita was begun on January 12 and released on January 19, the day after the Victoria story metastasised. So hard upon — it followed hard upon. And thus the phenomenon explained. At the back of the common mind, for reasons fair or foul, was a virgin princess. A fifteen-year-old girl — but the most brilliant edition.
* * *
3. Apologia—2: Keith the Snake
‘Did you dear? Did you dear? Ah. I trust me wreath was in its proper place? Ah. Did you dear? Did you dear? Ah. He’s coming is he? Handsome. Yes dear. God bless.’
Joseph Andrews put down one instrument and picked up another. Click.
‘Going through what I done so far, I think I could’ve give the wrong impression. You must think I’m a stubborn sort of so-and-so — a bit too stubborn, sometimes, for me own good! And it could be you ain’t that far wrong. On the last day of me eighteen months for [click] Jesus. Oh yeah [click] for uh, for Affray, some bloke come up to me and says, “Fancy a run at the wall, mate?” They had a uh, refectory table in the yard — must have been fifteen feet, we’ve reckoned, on its end. So I said I’d be absolutely delighted. I fancied it the more as they’d already give me me civvies. In a pillowslip. Lob it over — up and away. As it was we was only gone half an hour. And of course, when they’ve dragged you back in, they lay about you with a will. Course that: does the bear do its business in the woods? They’ve stuck me with the eighteen months again plus another six for the break, plus another year for what we done to the couple whose car we’ve took. Now I’ve said at the time that having a run at the wall was the right thing to do and I’d do it again. You got to keep on having a go at them. You got to keep — kicking up, we call it. But then it comes over you that … that prison is like the sea. You can be the strongest swimmer there ever was and you can keep kicking up, and kicking up, and kicking up, like grim death with all you got till your very last gasp. But the sea is the sea. It’ll stay where it is and it’ll never tire. [Click … Click.]
‘So when I come out from doing me eight I threw in me lot with Tony Eist and Keith the Snake. Import-export business on the Costa del Sol. Me and Tony’ve gone back a way, through Wormwood Scrubs, Borstal, Detention Centre and Approved School. But this Keith the Snake was a new one on me. And you know what? Don’t ask me why, but there was something about Keith the Snake that I didn’t quite … Call it a sixth sense, if you like. I couldn’t put me finger on it, but there was something about Keith the Snake that come over a bit offo. Lovely dresser, Keith the Snake. Not flash. Smart. Always beautifully turned out.
‘What we was doing was we was … Now I liked a drink, in them days, but I’ve personally never held with drugs. Offer me an aspirin and I dash it from your hand. And drugs — they pose a danger to the young. Then again, you got to adapt and move with the times, as you yourself know fully well, and you can’t keep clinging to the past. We had eighteen powerboats shifting two ton of heroin through Puerto Banus per month. What we was doing was we was making runs, twice a night, to Algiers, where the gear come in from the Pakis and the Afghans. We had it going up the coast and flooding into Europe through Marseille. It was a highly lucrative trade — but then there’s always the human element …
‘Now we was none of us model citizens, but Tony Eist … he just wasn’t normal. In the old days, he’d have himself committing crimes even in his alibis. He’d go: “I was never in on the Brink-Mats lark. I was busy flogging this condemned Argie beef.” Or: “How could I have been in on the Waterloo jewellers? I was up West, demanding with menaces.” A very dishonest man, Tony Eist. So one day Keith the Snake come up to see me in me villa. He’s said he’s done his sums — and Tony’s been hiving off millions for hisself! Well I wasn’t having that now was I.
‘I’ve gone over there and we’ve had it out. And I’ve done him. Then, not content with that, he’s got hisself mangled up in his lawnmower. Diesel. Two-seater. And his wife, she hasn’t done the sensible thing and said she’ve run him down by accident. She’s gone and shopped me to the Spaniards! [Click.] Go on then. [Click.] See, there was complicating factors. I’m not about to go banging on about the Other or the Urge or whatever you want to call it. For me, there’s too much of that kind of thing as it is. But we’re talking man to man, and, well, I’ve been giving Tony’s wife Angie one. If I did have a regrettable habit, back then, it was that: giving me mates’ wives one. [Click.] And they daughters and all, in them days. Little Debbie. And she’s gone and grassed me up to Angie! [Click.] So a bit of malice there, I’d reckon. Oh yes, a little bit of spite. The Spanish coppers was all bent as arseholes of course, but what could they do, with that bloody great swamp on the front lawn and no Tony? Me and Keith the Snake’ve grabbed what we could and roared round to Alicante, flogged the boat, and hopped on a tanker to Belfast.
‘[Click.] Go on then. He’s no different. Him? … Goo on. [Click.] Regarding the matter of uh, giving your mates’ wives one. Now in them days that’s considered not on. Something you don’t do. See, you can only do it if you … if you fear no man. Because all right, it’s naughty — but what’s the blokes going to do? Come round and have it with me about it? No. They gives their wife a biff and otherwise, and that’s it. End of story. Which they thoroughly deserve. That’s a female weakness, that is. Weakness for power. Weakness for strength … I never was married but I got engaged the twice. By an unfortunate coincidence, both of them’ve gone and took they own lives, for reasons best known to theirselves.
‘During our time in the uh, “Emerald Isle”, Keith the Snake and me’ve come to London the once. I had a bone to pick with a bloke who’d taken a liberty with me, years back, in Strangeways. Fella name of Mick. I should’ve just done him, shouldn’t I. [Click] Should’ve just taken a chopper to the cunt … [Click.] But no. Fancy a fair fight instead. I’ve gone over to his yard [click] with me lapels lined with razorblades [click] and called him out. Told him a home truth or two and all. What a ruck that was. I don’t know who’ve come off worst. Still, I’ve remained active even from me hospital bed. And that was the only crime I committed on British soil that I never paid me debt to society for. I mean the matter of the gold bullion and the VAT. Me and Keith the Snake was convinced we’ve found a genuine loophole, as there’s no VAT on the coins we melted down and sold back to the Bullion House. Customs and Excise begged to differ. That would be about seventeen million in today’s money. And to that I’ll come back to.
‘So Keith the Snake and me’ve transferred our endeavour to Dublin, and made a totally fresh start. I asserted meself and encountered no difficulty whatsoever. Them Irish in the south, I don’t know what they think they’re thinking of half the time. Too much of the Danny Boy, I don’t know. They couldn’t believe Keith the Snake and me, and the measures we was prepared to take. All in all we had seven very happy years in Eire. Then we come to this business with the IRA, and the extremely unfortunate parting of the ways with Keith the Snake.
‘Now me I never wanted no publicity. People prominent in the underworld, they’ve got this terrible weakness for it. I seen publicity do for face after face. You know, you got power, you want it noticed. We all want to be top dog, mister big, king bastard. But it can’t work like that down here, see, where everything moves the other way … What happened was, I was driving along in me Merc and lost me concentration. Next thing I know, I’ve gone and injured a young woman, who unfortunately soon died. Pregnant and all. Well there was no end of a song and dance about that — though it’s perfectly legal to give someone a spill if you’re sober, and me lawyer said there’s definitely something a bit iffy in me breathalyser report. And then it’s come out who I am and what I’m worth. And the IRA think: eye-eye.
‘I’m still on bail and I heard there’s a kidnapping planned. Which is a joke. As a Cat-A prisoner I’ve marged me bread with all their top boys, and there’s no way in this world they’d’ve fancied me for a nab. But by then Scotland Yard’s sticking its nose in, and I’ve reckoned it’s time to move on. I’ve said to Keith the Snake, “Keith mate? It’s time to move on.” And he’s gone, “I never ploughed into no pregnant sort. You move on.” Fair enough. “Fine by me, mate. You go your way, I’ll go mine.” [Click.] And that — and that’s his idea of loyalty … [Click.] So I’ve started making me arrangements to emigrate across the water.
‘Come the very sad conclusion of me friendship with Keith the Snake. It started off foolish really: just one of them things, I suppose. I’ve had a drink and I’ve gone and done him. I go in to visit and I’ve said, “Keith mate. I sincerely apologise. I bitterly regret what’s occurred, and can you find it in your heart to overlook it.” So we shake and that. I know it’s going to take time for the rift to heal. Then of course he’s barely out of hospital and I’ve gone and done him again. Carved up all his suits and all. Lovely materials. Only the best … That was me weakness in them days. I’d get uh, argumentative in me drink. And he kept getting on me nerves. Same stupid talk. I says, “Why you always off with them brasses? Why don’t you have a proper bird?” “What, so’s you can stuff her? Why d’you stuff your mates’ birds?” “Well I always do that.” “Yeah but why?” “I always stuff me mates’ birds.” “Yeah but why?” “Because I always do.” [Click.] “Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you’re me?” “Oi!” “Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you’re her?” … Well it was all off then. [Click.] One of them uh, circular arguments. Blah blah blah.
‘So now I’ve done him the twice. And here’s what we done. I’ve let him strap me to the paddock wall (this is in me farm near Balbriggan). First thing he’s done, he’s told me it was never Tony Eist who skanked me off in Spain. It was Keith the Snake all along! So I’ve gone, “That’s water under the bridge, that is. Now do your worst, mate. But no tools. Done?” And Keith the Snake’s gone, “Done.” And what’s he gone and done? He’s gone and done me with the fucking scythe. There he is in his underpants, screaming his head off. And left me wallowing in me own blood. I’ve had more than two hundred stitches in me chest alone. One stripe come down from me ear, across me cheek, under me nose, over me mouth, along me jaw and into me neck. [Click.] He’s had a go at me privates and all. That’s how low he’s stooped. Ah, Keith mate … What happened, boy? [Click.] Well, after a liberty like that, why he never finished the job I’ll never know. Was he barmy or what?
‘After a short uh, sojourn in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, I’ve pitched up in Southern California. And if me name rings a bell from the newspapers it’s because you’re thinking of an old geezer sitting round a swimming-pool in Rio with a glass of champagne and a halfcaste brass on his lap. That’s me brother Fred, and no icecream’s ever had it easier, with the pension I give him. Me record here in Southern California is absolutely stainless, and I’ve uh, amassed another fortune in the home-video industry. Totally legitimately. [Click.] And if you want to see a beauty-queen with her head up a giraffe’s arse, or otherwise, I’d be delighted to oblige. [Click.] I’ve done uh, extensive fundraising work for charity, and I hold the post of Treasurer at the local Citizens’ Community Association.
‘See, I’m not such a bad bloke really, when all is said and done. Me, I’m the nicest fella in the world — in the car like, you know, after you, darling. In the shops: “Morning all” and “God bless”. I’ve lived me life by me own rules — and, yes, and woe betide anyone that breaks them. I am who I am. Jo is Jo. It’s just the road I went down. It’s just the game I played. It’s just the game I played.
‘Now to business.’
A musclebound horsefly materialised on the spotted knuckle of his right hand. He reached slowly for the holster with his left.
‘You didn’t like that, did you mate …’
He leant forward to drink in the full fragrance of the propellant. Like a cut-price air-freshener — the negative essence of all the smells it was meant to conceal. His eyes moistened: takes you back.
It was like the choking sweetness of some new cell they’ve just flung you in. Scented detergent, fighting a lost battle against another man’s fluids, another man’s fear.
4. Yellow Tongue
Clint Smoker sat, for now, in a milk bar on Ignacio Boulevard. He typed: ‘So some so-called 15-year-old is crying “rape” after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad.’ He deleted this: got to pace yourself … Clint was expected, ninety minutes from now, at Karla White Productions on Innocencio Drive … No, it had to be admitted: he was having the time of his jounalistic life, was Clint Smoker. That morning he had interviewed a pimp named DeRoger Monroe in the Lovetown Greyhound Station, and filed an admiring profile. Emptying sachet after sachet of sugar into his Coca-Cola, DeRoger had told him how it worked: you tell them to go out there and be superstars, while, in the meantime, you do hard drugs with other pimps. Then when the birds are down to their last tooth, you ‘take them to Florida’: give them a final pasting and then boot them out the door … Soon, Clint would be meeting with Karla White. And, later, there was the mouthwatering prospect of an hour with Dork Bogarde.
Nor was it merely Clint’s reportage. What about the editorials, the think-pieces, the ‘virtual cult’ (as Strite had put it), back home, of Yellow Dog. He typed:
• So some grasping icequeen is seeking compensation for ‘sexual harassment’, having left her job after a bit of harmless horseplay round the water cooler.
She’s already had a few quid for her ripped clothes and the dental work.
And now it’s for ‘emotional distress’ that she’s taking those nine lads to court.
Well she’s not going to come clean, is she?
She’s not going to say: I f**king loved it!
All the girls Yellow Dog’s worked around go batty at the thought of a proper goose.
And don’t tell me there’s one of them, when you’re alone in the lift, that doesn’t like her nip being given a healthy twist.
Hallo, here comes old Marge, grunting and sighing with her mop and her pails.
She’s down on those shiny red knees, moaning and groaning, with her great fat arse in the air.
Look lively lads — where’s the office cattleprod?
Clint paused, and mused. Karla White: best norks in Lovetown. It’s well known. Dark glasses? Check. He mused, and paused, and worked on:
• So some old boiler in Hammersmith got smacked about a bit by a couple of lads while they were relieving her of her pension.
Now that’s well naughty, boys, and don’t do it again.
But spare us the violin, okay.
Spare us the clock-stopping photos of the biddy with the black eyes.
She’s only 77—a child in this day and age — and she can f**king well take her chances like anybody else.
Besides, she’s been stinking up the place for long enough, hasn’t she?
When they get like that they’re better off dead.
So get well soon Gran — if you must.
But leave out the f**king whinge this time. Alright?
A little light told Clint that he had an e in, which he now shared:
dear 1: o, it all went 1 derfully, 1 derfully — with dad. i was always his favourite, u c. when i was a child he worshipped the very ground i walked on; 4 him, the sun shone out of my* … he was as punctual as ever, & as gallant, with the bouquet of 4sythia and the creamy chocol8s. always the perfect gent 2 me, full of amusing stories about his girlfriends. i prepared his favourite dinner (tripe & brains), with 40fied wine, in the candlelite. Then the bombshell, the utter c@astrophe: my father has been diagnosed with: cancer. i am absolutely devast8ed. k8.
Poor little thing, thought Clint. Still, that can work to a man’s advantage. You get credit for not being dead.
For once in your life.
‘Fucktown,’ began Karla White, ‘in its current phase, which could be ending around now with the Princess Lolita phenomenon, might as well be called Hatefucktown. That’s the dominant form: Hatefuck. But let’s go back a bit.’
‘I’ll just see if this …’ said Clint, giving his tape recorder a malevolent stare.
‘… Porno was self-policing until the second term of the last administration, when, as you know, all of a sudden we had a porno president. Porno, under this porno presidency, stopped policing itself and entered its Salo period.’
‘Sorry, Karla. Salo?’
Karla considered her interlocutor, and wondered if there’d be any point in telling him about Mussolini and the Republic of Filth. She was enough of an American to grant interviews more or less automatically, but she had run a light check on Clint; she knew about his recent stay at John Working’s joint in the San Sebastiano Valley; she knew the circulation figures of the Morning Lark, and had some idea of its contents.
‘An embrace of dirt,’ she said. ‘Immediately there was an overwhelming emphasis on male-female sodomy. The rallying cry was Pussies Are Bullshit. They’d sign off with it on the phone: “Pussies Are Bullshit!” One director said, “With anal, the actress’s personality comes out.” Oh sure: her personality. They talked about female virility, female testosterone. Which is strange considering the next phase, post-Pussies Are Bullshit.’
Clint steadied his dark glasses and resumed his attempt to stare out Karla’s breasts. They stared back, irreproachably innocent and unblinking; and they awakened humility in him. He thought it was beautifully generous of her not to hide them, to allow them to be warmly present. It also occurred to him that at any moment they might count down from three and he’d do exactly as they said.
‘The essential self-policing had to do with two areas, male-female violence and paedophilia. Male-female violence was called Black Eye, and began with the notorious “line”, Male Dawn. They’d tell the girls: Don’t be too proud to cry while we do this. Basically they roughed them up, and roughed them up for real. The paedophiliac tendency was unofficially known as Short Eye, where the girls wore kiddie clothes and talked in squeaky voices and played with dolls while granddads peed in their mouths. And worse. I’m serious. The nymphets weren’t nymphets, of course. Along with your HIV-clearance, your birth certificate is your work permit. You have to produce it, even in geronto-porno, or White Hair. Even eighty-five-year-olds have always had to prove that they’re over seventeen. That’s porno.’
Clint thought: codger-todger. Good riff.
‘All this came to an end when the new administration started their holy war on porno. Black Eye and Short Eye disappeared right away. Pussies Are Bullshit staggered on for a while, because male-female sodomy is not illegal in every state. But then some busybody — some spoilsport or killjoy, Clint — would buy a sodomy tape in Arkansas, where it isn’t illegal, and take it to Alabama, where it is, and you’d be indicted in Montgomery. And so on. But porno people are believers too. It’s the contrarian nature of the form. And they wouldn’t give it up. Dozens of production companies were wiped out and some of the very top guys went to jail. And in an Alabaman correctional facility, I can assure you, they don’t need to be told that pussies are bullshit. Then the zoning loophole, and the founding of Lovetown. And the dominant genre, these days, is unquestionably Hatefuck.’
They talked on — about Hatefuck, about Cockout, about Boxback, about Red Face, about Yellow Tongue … After an hour with Karla, Clint was becoming vaguely aware of his surroundings — glass, mirrors, tubular furniture. It might have been any old ad-firm except for the posters: porno girls, in porno colours, with porno pouts … Throne Together, Royal Flesh, Pump and Circumstance, Anne of a Thousand Lays, Mary Queen of Sluts, Falstiff, King Rear, and Princess Lolita 2, Princess Lolita 3, Princess Lolita 4 …
Feeling something lift from her, Karla followed Clint’s gaze. She said,
‘They go together, don’t they — porno and puns? It couldn’t be otherwise. Because humourlessness is the lifeblood of porno. One genuine smile, and everything would disappear.’
‘It’s finished, though, this, isn’t it: video. Now it’s the Web.’
‘Rentals are dying. Despite Princess Lolita. See the girls. They have a flared-pants look. A beehive look. The future’s in interactive. What they call “self-tailoring”. And the viewer will direct.’
Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission. He said,
‘Do you miss it? Performing?’
‘No,’ said Karla, who had answered this question, and all others, many times before.
‘You were an abused child, weren’t you. Were they all that, the actresses?’
‘There’s something in it. It’s the … creation myth of porno. But porno’s just an industry now. Times change, Clint. I know a girl who goes to the Mature Video Awards with her parents. Her father came out brandishing her statuette for Best Anal.’
‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do? As an actress. Fisting and pissing and that?’
‘… I stopped before it went that way. I stopped before Pussies Are Bullshit.’
‘Uh, fancy a drink later?’
‘With a view to what?’
‘You tell me. You’re the pro. Another day, another cock. You tell me.’
He noticed that she was staring at him with unchecked fascination — with entirely undissimulated fascination. Clint started to feel twenty-seven thousand dollars poorer — and Karla hadn’t yet said what Karla said next.
‘That’s right. And the men I’m used to’, she said, and suddenly seized the tumbler of water on her desk, ‘are like this.’
Clint followed instructions: faced with noncompliance, construct the counterfactual. ‘Well. Wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Off to Hawaii in an hour or two.’
‘I thought you were seeing Dork Bogarde.’
‘He’s uh, he’s out of town himself.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Karla, standing. ‘I’m expecting him at Dolorosa Drive tomorrow morning. He’s doing a scene with Charisma Trixxx. Day one of Crown Sugar.’
‘Hold up. Got me days confused.’ Clint added ruefully, ‘Kate, she’s always going on at me about it. So maybe I uh, I’ll look in. Fly on the wall.’
With an illegible shudder she said, ‘This set will most definitely be closed.’
That evening, after three hours of Black Eye and Cockout in his hotel, Clint attained a sense of belonging: a sense of belonging, in Lovetown.
Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal, Hick Johnsonson, in Lovetown’s Fulgencio Falls. When Clint arrived, and was made welcome, they were out on the porno patio … In the small garden enchained porno parrots swore and shat around the porno pool. Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine. It seemed that Dork had only one thing he wanted to talk about, however: porno pay.
‘I mean there am I,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation, ‘naked as I am. I’m out there, with sweat pouring off my person, cocking out … some little rube who’s just climbed off the Dog — and I get three hundred dollars? Excuse me. Excuse me. While the guy watching, in an easy chair, some … asshole from Ye Olde England, gets ten grand? They do me that indignithy? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’
Sincerely puzzled, and yet with the rosiness of genuine admiration (indignithy: he made other slips like that — but you had to hand it to the guy, with his porno pectorals, his porno ponytail, his monstrous porno penis, familiar to all Dork’s fans), Clint said,
‘Yeah but you’re the one getting it wet, aren’t you mate.’
Sir Dork implored Clint to consider something: porno pressure.
‘Did it get here yet?’ Dork asked Hick. ‘It’, Dork had told Clint earlier, was ‘the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx’, to whom Dork was to be introduced the following day, on the set of Crown Sugar. ‘Clint? Could you perform with three breaks for coffee and one for lunch? The lights? The people?’
‘Yeah but there’s a way round that now, isn’t there.’ Clint thought resentfully of Karla White, and what she had told him about porno and Potentium: ‘They all use it and they all say they don’t.’
‘I never use it,’ said Dork.
Clint recalled her words. Potentium, said Karla, had turned out to be a Midas curse for the porno male. Pre-Potentium, a flop meant a skipped day and a net loss. Post-Potentium, it meant that the man was ready fifteen minutes late, and had splotchy cheeks (hence Red Face) and a porno headache. But there were fewer suicides and crackups, and they all started using it. ‘The change sparked controversy,’ as Clint would later write; and we must remember, along with Dork Bogarde, that ‘this was at the heighth of Pussies Are Bullshit’ … Some said that Potentium was bullshit too: it affronted the market forces having to do with the reality of arousal. People who argued that way turned out to be purists — because the customer didn’t care. ‘Being able, or likely, to perform in public’, Karla said, ‘was once a marketable skill. Now anyone can do it. The men — the grunts, the stiffs — never were a draw. And now they’re just life-support systems for a tab of Potentium.’ Karla said she was surprised. She said she had always thought that the customer was a lot gayer than that …
Dork now confronted Clint with a porno paradox. ‘See, Clint,’ he said, ‘we get pressure coming the other way: Cockout. How can a man fulfil his fanthasy when, hanging over him at all times, he faces the spectre of Cockout?’
After a while Dork returned to the subject of porno pay, and porno percentages, until Hick confirmed the arrival of the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx.
‘Look at that,’ said Dork, gesturing at the screen. ‘Suave ass. Sincere bush. I don’t just mean the mohawk. I mean the presentation. I’m talking the whole box.’
‘She chugs good,’ allowed Hick.
‘Good neck-work on the back-take.’
‘And I like the tongue-slide on the feed-draw.’
Fifteen minutes later Hick said, ‘Here we go. Gracious address for the facial.’
‘… Wow,’ said Dork. ‘See that? Right in the eye.’ Dork turned to Hick (it was established earlier that Hick had been known to do Gay). ‘Does that hurt? I mean, does it kind of burn?’
‘Burn? It’s like fucking fire. And she didn’t even flinch.’
‘I won’t have any kind of problem tomorrow. Flinch? She didn’t even blink. Clint, hadn’t you …?’
‘Yeah well thanks, lads,’ said Clint. ‘Dork mate. I happen to know one of your uh, conquests.’ And he felt luxury as he pronounced her name: ‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Uh — big English brunette with a silver streak in her hair and a crinkly mouth … She sucked you off underneath a pyramid and then you had her up the arse in a helium balloon. Then you landed on Everest and shot all over her tits.’
‘… I spent on her breatsts? That’s so—passé. You’d think I’d remember that.’
On his way back to the hotel Clint pulled in at another video store. And there it all was, yet again, laid out in categories, like a dramatisation of the words of Karla White. Not Hatefuck, because everything was Hatefuck unless labelled otherwise. But Cockout, and Bullshit Cockout, and Boxback, and Red Face, and White Hair, and Yellow Tongue (‘Yellow Tongue’, she said, ‘is for those who miss the motel room, the handheld video cam, the ghoulish lighting, and the plain cast ill on drugs’), and, of course, the category called Princess Lolita.
He worked into the small hours on his starry-eyed profile of Dork Bogarde. Then, to release tension, he pounded out some Yellow Dog. At about noon, London time, he received the following message:
my only 1: thank u so much 4 your e of consol8ion. i don’t no y, but things r clearer now. it feels as if a gr8 w8 has been lifted from me. Even as my father lies in st &rew’s, f8ally unwell … u no what i’m thinking? i think i’m 4lling in love with u, clint. yes u, and no 1 else. u, clint! u, u, u! r u o fait with the poetry of ezra £? as i transmitted this, i thought of the lines: ‘& now i bring the boy in, on his knees, & send this 1,000 miles, thinking.’ i’m mad 4 u, clint. come 2 me on your return. only when u & i r 1 will i feel truly @ peace. 10derly, k8.
ps: i vener8 yellow dog. i lite c&les to yellow dog. i make a god of yellow dog.
Yellow Dog wiped away his tears and settled down to an hour or two of Yellow Tongue.
5. Cur moment
The third (and final) message from their mole, their enemy’s enemy, took the form of a no-fingerprints communication directed at Brendan’s laptop. Earlier that day a similarly anondot service-provider released six new stills of the Princess, one of which, sensationally, showed her daunted face half-dimmed by the shadow of the intruder … The message Brendan received ran as follows: ‘Ultimatum will be presented on February 10. Strongly advise immediate compliance. Please to reemphasise: the material on the Princess is all light and magic. All light and magic.’ Feeling sick to his stomach, but also wonderfully lightheaded, Brendan issued a contemptuous press-release from Ewelme. Then he had his worst talk ever with the King.
‘Here’s a turn-up, sir,’ he began. ‘Captain Mate has resigned. Effective immediately.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it, Bugger.’
‘It’s a bit rum, though, sir. We can—’
‘I’ve been meaning to chuck him for years.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Bugger. On account of his physical appearance. But I could never be fagged. Now never mind him, and get on with it. You’ve got that glint in your eye, Bugger. Yes you have. You’re preparing me for something horrid, I can tell.’
Henry looked out of the window of the Royal Train; but there was nothing to see. To be heading north, north from Ewelme with its mists and brown spume, and at the very worst time of year … He thought: the cur moment. I shall have to revisit it, relive it. The cur moment.
‘That’ll be all, Love.’ Henry waited. He said, ‘Do you believe in life after death?’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘I’m not changing the subject. It’s practically the only subject there is. With you. These days, darling.’
‘Well yes I do. Do you?’
‘… No.’
‘See? What you have, it isn’t faith. It’s just habit.’
‘Faith … faith is a power. It gets weaker as you age. Like all powers.’
‘You have changed the subject. And the subject,’ said the Princess, ‘the subject is this. To distract attention from my uh, imbroglio in the Yellow House—’
‘Whatever that was.’
‘Whatever that was. To distract attention, and to win some sympathy from the media and the million,’ she said, ‘we’re going to Scotland to kill Mummy.’
‘Don’t. Be. Silly … Darling.’
After a while he said, ‘Bugger told me that you told him that there was something I could do. Uh, Brendan, rather. He took you to mean that there was something I could do — that would make it all right.’
‘One thing I will tell you is that this isn’t it. Murdering Mummy isn’t it. Oh I’m not going to spring to your rescue. You’ll have to get there on your own.’
Dusk was coming nearer. They rushed to meet it. He sat back, and looked for what comfort he could find in thoughts of He Zizhen.
In his bedroom at Tongue he was woken by the draughts at half past five. He kicked Love out of his army cot and then drank the tea with great gouts of brandy in it until his teeth stopped chattering. A bath of blood heat; a cold-water shave. He put on his black suit, and his hardiest overcoat — inherited from his father, Richard IV, and still a sober tribute to the protective power of cashmere and silk. He stepped out into the morning twilight and the cockcrow.
Unlike his numerical predecessor, who would habitually exhaust a dozen stallions in the space of an afternoon, Henry IX loathed anything that involved horses (with the single exception of Royal Ascot); but Pamela, of course, had been a lifelong equestrienne. Times beyond number he had shaken his head, from a seated position, and watched her trot off, seemingly about thirty feet from the ground … That September, at Tongue, the Queen Consort did not return from her second ride of the afternoon. Her mare, Godiva, returned; but Pamela did not return. The King seized a bicycle in the courtyard and, with much wobbling and wiggling … But now, on foot, in his overcoat, Henry moved from gravel to lawn, beginning to retrace these steps.
He remembered the way the colour of the day changed. At first he was merely very frightened, mostly for himself (the bicycle), and also rather bored (he could already hear the exasperating halloos of normality regained). On the cinder path he pedalled to the shoulder of the slope, and turned: Godiva, riderless in the stableyard. And then the colour of the day changed.
It was he who found her … Pamela had told him about the softened thump of the horse’s hooves as you approached the chalk quarry, and thither he rode — until, with a horrified lurch, he skidded to a halt and assessed the obscenity in his path. A fat snake, already dead, already putrescent: fat, moist, yellow, like the voided boil of some tutelary troll or Friar Rush … Yes, he thought: Godiva could be forgiven for rearing at such a sight. And there, down the brambly slope, Pamela lay, in her boots, her jodhpurs, her tweed jacket, her velvet helmet, arched backwards over a boulder with her eyes wide open. The bike fell with a clatter and a brief purr of spokes. He moved through the snow-scape, the moonscape, of the winter chalk.
‘Oh no, Pemmy.’ But he stressed it on the second and fourth syllables: he said it as he had said it many times before, when being reminded of some recurrent social chore, when interdicting a loud headscarf, or when she brought off a forceful roll at ludo or backgammon.
Then, rhythmically gathering air for his moment, his cur moment, Henry said, ‘At least, at least, at least — at least there won’t be any more bally …’; and it was then that his shoulders began to shudder: ‘… any more bally three-a-clockers.’ And the words enveloped him like an unrecognisable fart, saying: yes, oh yes, this is you, this is you.
Aboard the helicopter they found a faint pulse in her groin, and an hour later she was on the machine at the Royal Inverness.
That was two years ago. In his black suit, his black coat, Henry stood in the white land of the chalk field. It was time to awaken the Princess.
The patient looked like an enormous and ancient squaw, with the warpaint of death on her, but regally breathing.
Henry passed his hand down through the air.
‘Mummy’s …’ said Victoria.
‘But she breathes.’
Victoria pointed to the parallel lines on the screen.
‘But she breathes.’
And she breathed greedily, lustily. Could she still reach up and hold him and draw him in? And he smelt himself all over again — the smouldering smell of the male secret, like a fire doused in rivers of sweat.
‘That’s just the machine,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s the machine that’s breathing.’
‘Turn it off,’ he cried. ‘Turn it off. Turn it off.’
6. February 14 (1.25 p.m.): 101 Heavy
System Aircraft Maintenance: One oh one heavy, please repeat.
Captain John Macmanaman: Confirm engine number-two explosive failure. Number-two accessory drive system is blown. Secondary debris hit the horizontal stabiliser and severed number-one line and number-three line. These hydraulic systems are down. Copy?
SAM: Copy, one oh one heavy. You lost number two.
Macmanaman: No. We lost all three.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You lost number three?
Macmanaman: We lost all of them.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You still have number one, right?
Macmanaman: All three are gone. Repeat. All three are gone.
SAM: One oh one heavy. Copy, copy. You have emergency hydraulics.
Macmanaman: Affirmative. But the goddamned auto won’t disengage. It thinks one through three is fictitious. Extreme yaw. Extreme pitch.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Try it.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Yeah but …
Ward: Try it.
Chopko: … Auto disengaged!
Macmanaman: I feel it. I feel it. Auto disengaged. Hydraulic quantity returning. Now flying by direct law. Nose is coming up. Steadying. Steadying. Still yawing but no pitch. It won’t give us flaps.
SAM: One oh one heavy. I’ll clear frequency and give you Detroit.
Chopko: The backup hydraulics — where are they anyway?
Ward: Where they used to be, in the old days. Under the cabin floor.
Macmanaman: Come in!
Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Is it over? Are we okay?
Macmanaman: We’re coming out of it, Robynne. What’s it like back there?
Davis: Like a vomitorium in ancient Rome. They can take a yaw but they hate a pitch.
Chopko: We got the pitch. We’ll get the yaw. Now what?
Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez: Lucy says the floor’s hot. The passengers are saying the cabin floor’s hot. Left side. Between the wings.
Chopko: Christ. Any smoke?
Martinez: How could they tell?
Macmanaman: You know what we need? What we need is an airport.
No, you couldn’t tell — about the smoke. A lavish bonfire of wet leaves would have made little difference to the pall. In Economy, 314 people had cigarettes in their mouths (they weren’t giving up now), including the occupants of rows twenty-five to thirty, seats H and I and J, who, in addition, had their feet off the floor and tucked in underneath them.
There was smoke in the hold, too, under the port wing. But this was smoke of a different kind. With this kind of smoke (hot, thick, black), you wouldn’t be breathing it: you’d be eating it. And it would be eating you … Just discernible in the pallet facing the cargo door, Royce Traynor, mantled in ebony, stood upright, slowly steadying on his base as if to regather his strength. When the plane yawed to starboard, he sank back, waiting, against a column of stacked bags. Next, the port wing began its sharp drop, and Royce, after bristling for an instant like a wave before it breaks, dived forward to butt the diagonal handle of the cargo door … This door was not a plug door, opening inwards, and kept slammed shut by air-pressure. It opened outwards, to increase holdspace and revenue … He’s up again now, with the yaw to the right, and leaning back, in weary but determined contemplation. Then the tottering vertical and the piledrive into the handle of the cargo door, with all his weight. Which was the weight of what? Which was the weight of the past.
You could see why Royce had to do this. When the sprinklers came on, you could see why Royce had to do this. He couldn’t trust to fire. It was now his aim to go for the very throat of the aircraft. Decompression, explosive decompression, was what he wanted to bring about, and the collapse, the catastrophic strangulation, of the cabin floor, with all its tubes and veins and arteries. Most proximately, the blown door would mean his own escape (he would be the first to go), his martyrdom, after death.
With no blood in him any more, just wax and formaldehyde, Royce sways. The front teeth, perhaps, are bared: the teeth of a sunbelt golf pro. Royce sways, but not drunkenly. He rests, catching his breath, unappeasably preparing himself for fresh assault.
1. February 14 (1.15 p.m.): 101 Heavy
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Nick Chopko: ‘what we just experienced is known as CAT, or Clear Air Turbulence. It was quite a drop but uh, I’m pleased to report that we’re in okay shape, thanks to the … the skill and foresight of our Captain, whose last flight this is, now that all four girls are through college, one of whom I’m proud to call my fiancée: Amy Macmanaman. Give it up for the Captain … We encountered a very powerful following wind resulting in pressure-differential loss on the wings, otherwise known as a stall. It seems that everyone was belted down except for Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez in Business, who remained attached to her secured cart but suffered a jarred shoulder. We suspect she’ll pull through. Fortunately all the overhead lockers held but three. These did not contain the dumbbells and bowling-balls some of you like to stow up there. Just some pillows and blankets and a bunch of cartons of cigarettes. CAT is a potential emergency and a very rare event. It was my first time. It was almost certainly your first time. It wasn’t the Captain’s first time. We expect no further problems, but as a precaution we do ask that you keep your seatbelts securely fastened. Thank you.’
‘Do you know’, asked the man in 2A, ‘the proportion of passengers, on average, that survive a plane crash?’
‘No I don’t,’ said Reynolds. ‘Three per cent?’
‘Actually it’s more like forty. There can be one survivor, and there can be one fatality. And everything in between.’
‘Is that a fact.’
‘… I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I don’t even smoke. This seat. This cabin. Right in the crumple zone. I always sit right at the back. In among the toilets. Then the rest of the plane’s your buffer. I was booked on IA but they did my miles in Frankfurt and offered me the upgrade. It’s crazy. I don’t even smoke. The secondary inhalation’s killing me.’
‘Remember that nice breakfast you had. And think about your slippers. Concentrate on them.’
Not inordinately, not egregiously loud so much as very clear, very pure: the explosive failure, the rending crack, of the starboard engine; the grisly physics of its catapulting fan blades and rotor spokes; the clacking strafe of metal-piercing shrapnel.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Shit Christ Jesus.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Which is the which is the?
Ward: What the hell these guys have done.
Chopko: Pull back the power back.
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on now. Let’s get ahold of the airplane. Come on now. Let’s fly the airplane.
CigAir 101 started to pitch; and then, to the inestimable advantage of Royce Traynor, it started to yaw.
2. The face has holes in it
The slightly longer and (by all accounts) very much dirtier version of Princess Lolita arrived at Ewelme by courier. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was committing a crime by taking delivery of it; but Oughtred had told him that the UK was already awash with the American original together with every variety of piratical counterfeit (and a marginally abbreviated edition, with all the non-sexual material excised, could be found by means of a dark and costly visit to the Net). In any case Brendan’s sense of transgression could hardly have been livelier as he signed for the package and hurried to his room to hide it. That night they retired at ten. And Brendan’s anticipation of the small-hour screening was quick to satisfy the greed of his insomnia. He rose at a quarter to three. Captain Mate had been spoken to; and, remarkably, all three doors to the library were equipped with functioning locks and keys … At Ewelme, the rudimentary heating-system wound down long before midnight. In pyjamas, then, in dressing-gown and greatcoat, and socks and hiking-boots, Brendan activated the paraffin stove, slipped the cartridge into the machine and sat there with his breath smoking. He turned the light off. He turned the light on. He turned the light off. He reached for the remote control.
No man on earth, Brendan considered, would watch Princess Lolita with the curiosity that he himself would bring to it. For example, who else had a sane claim to being in love with Princess Victoria, the real princess, as he did? More generally the experience would give him essential information. As he put it to himself, a little frantically: was he a ‘joseph’, one of nature’s neuters, bowing his head as God put the horns on him? Alas, poor Joseph. Hard to keep your chin up, and to go on looking so wise and true. And, yes: nice try with the beard … Brendan consulted the worn memory of his embrace with the Princess, how all the blood within him …
Princess Lolita began with a still of Tori Fate’s birth certificate, followed by a datelined clapperboard introducing footage from the first day of principal photography. Brendan made the calculation: the actress had been barely a week past her seventeenth birthday when filming began. An establishing-shot of a castle tower; then Tori Fate under a sheet in a four-poster. Yes, like, like, very like. Yet without complexity, as if the actress herself had been morphed. And even the surface resemblance proved specious, or cosmetic, the moment she opened her mouth, turning to her attendant and asking her (not in an accent from Brooklyn or Mississippi, but in English, dubbed, clipped, elocuted English — the voice, Brendan felt sure, of a woman of the King’s vintage) about the arts of love … Lolita’s lady-in-waiting, a glistening Amazon with occult tattoos on her muscular breasts, then undertook a demonstration. The enjoyment of such a spectacle, Brendan soon decided, was a test of male heterosexuality that he just didn’t pass. Outer tongue against inner tongue, upper against under — but now came a jolt. When the strap-on phallus was conspiratorially produced, and handed to Tori Fate, who buckled it about herself and stood there with a hand on its base, Brendan felt an abject stirring, a sick twitch, between his legs.
He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out — my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat — and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller …
By this stage Brendan expected to be twitching and twisting for the full ninety minutes. Yet only one more revelation awaited him, and this was insidious or cumulative, like the reluctant awareness of footsteps behind you, at night, on a lonesome road. Quite soon, exposure to Lolita’s sentimental education was reminding him of his only bullfight, in Barcelona: after the third kill, fascination and disquiet remained, but these feelings were quietly joined by boredom. As the heroine sedulously dallied — now with a jodhpured Spanish grandee, now with a rude young groom, now with a spangled diplomat, now with a rugged derelict plucked off the street — it seemed to Brendan that the performers, with more haste than lust, were working their way through a checklist or duty-roster: some of this, then some of that, and then this and then that, including some of this, not forgetting that, and then maybe this, and then always that. Always that — at the end. Grinning, and grinning gratefully, on her knees, Princess Lolita, awaiting anointment.
When it was over he went through it again, availing himself of the remote control. Watching pornography, watching the sex of others (this was already clear to him), you were constantly saying, No don’t do that — do this, stop, don’t stop, proceed, desist. The viewer was helpless before the spatial dimensions, but the remote control gave him power over time. Deploying this power, Brendan concentrated on freeze-framed close-ups of the actress’s face. From certain angles, yes, remarkably like, remarkably like. But older. And not just a year older … If Princess Lolita had shape or form, then power was its pattern. The exertion of that power remained symbolic, and counterintuitive: it was the handsome derelict who pinioned the Princess with a pair of paper handcuffs; it was the sleek grandee who followed her about on all fours, led by a gossamer leash. Yet always this moment at the end, when power was no longer held in balance. The face, smiling, with male seed dripping from it, hanging from it. Brendan didn’t like this spectacle. But his blood did.
It was with a sense of himself revised dramatically downward that he stood, and pressed the eject. For a moment he entertained the informed certainty that the machine would now seize (trapping its contents for later delectation — Henry’s, Victoria’s), and he would have to wrench it apart with his teeth and fingernails. But here it came, disgustedly expectorated on to the tiled floor … On the way to his room he came round a corner and almost fell over her: the Princess. He flung out both hands in her direction, to catch or steady her, and so released what was lodged beneath his armpit: and in clear contravention of all life’s laws (which demand that every dropped object lands the wrong way up), Princess Lolita came to rest face-down, and in near silence, on the tussocky pelt of the carpet. Even so he had time to think that his greatcoat and dressing-gown would now fly open, to reveal not the full complement of his pyamas but a pair diligently savaged by scissors, with the trousers, secured by elastic bands, ending just above the knee.
‘I’m so sorry, ma’am. I do apologise.’
Victoria hugged her robe to her. Plainly she was heading for the cavernous bathroom which the three of them shared (along with the rabbits and the archery sets). He expected, as he focused, to find her poetically pale, as pale as the weak dawn that was now almost upon them. But she wore an uneven flush and a roseate brocade on her upper lip and septum — she had not been well, was not well, was of course not well, this Christmas, this long January …
‘Oh never mind,’ she said, and stepped round him. At the corner she bent and turned, saying, ‘Brendan — you know there’s only one thing he can do.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am?’
She flipped a hand in his direction, and was gone.
An hour later Brendan was still muttering into his pillow … How did it go again? Oh yes: work. That’s all you were doing. Making ‘headway’, was it? And rousing yourself from the enforced torpor of Ewelme … Working is what they’re doing and that’s why they look so old: old in the eyes. Is pornography just filmed prostitution or is it something more gladiatorial? Those hospitalic condoms: they don’t keep them on at the end. And the face has holes in it … Gladiators: were slaves. But could win their freedom. What exactly has happened to you? he asked himself. Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse. If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body … Tori Fate turned seventeen on January 3. Princess Lolita was begun on January 12 and released on January 19, the day after the Victoria story metastasised. So hard upon — it followed hard upon. And thus the phenomenon explained. At the back of the common mind, for reasons fair or foul, was a virgin princess. A fifteen-year-old girl — but the most brilliant edition.
* * *
3. Apologia—2: Keith the Snake
‘Did you dear? Did you dear? Ah. I trust me wreath was in its proper place? Ah. Did you dear? Did you dear? Ah. He’s coming is he? Handsome. Yes dear. God bless.’
Joseph Andrews put down one instrument and picked up another. Click.
‘Going through what I done so far, I think I could’ve give the wrong impression. You must think I’m a stubborn sort of so-and-so — a bit too stubborn, sometimes, for me own good! And it could be you ain’t that far wrong. On the last day of me eighteen months for [click] Jesus. Oh yeah [click] for uh, for Affray, some bloke come up to me and says, “Fancy a run at the wall, mate?” They had a uh, refectory table in the yard — must have been fifteen feet, we’ve reckoned, on its end. So I said I’d be absolutely delighted. I fancied it the more as they’d already give me me civvies. In a pillowslip. Lob it over — up and away. As it was we was only gone half an hour. And of course, when they’ve dragged you back in, they lay about you with a will. Course that: does the bear do its business in the woods? They’ve stuck me with the eighteen months again plus another six for the break, plus another year for what we done to the couple whose car we’ve took. Now I’ve said at the time that having a run at the wall was the right thing to do and I’d do it again. You got to keep on having a go at them. You got to keep — kicking up, we call it. But then it comes over you that … that prison is like the sea. You can be the strongest swimmer there ever was and you can keep kicking up, and kicking up, and kicking up, like grim death with all you got till your very last gasp. But the sea is the sea. It’ll stay where it is and it’ll never tire. [Click … Click.]
‘So when I come out from doing me eight I threw in me lot with Tony Eist and Keith the Snake. Import-export business on the Costa del Sol. Me and Tony’ve gone back a way, through Wormwood Scrubs, Borstal, Detention Centre and Approved School. But this Keith the Snake was a new one on me. And you know what? Don’t ask me why, but there was something about Keith the Snake that I didn’t quite … Call it a sixth sense, if you like. I couldn’t put me finger on it, but there was something about Keith the Snake that come over a bit offo. Lovely dresser, Keith the Snake. Not flash. Smart. Always beautifully turned out.
‘What we was doing was we was … Now I liked a drink, in them days, but I’ve personally never held with drugs. Offer me an aspirin and I dash it from your hand. And drugs — they pose a danger to the young. Then again, you got to adapt and move with the times, as you yourself know fully well, and you can’t keep clinging to the past. We had eighteen powerboats shifting two ton of heroin through Puerto Banus per month. What we was doing was we was making runs, twice a night, to Algiers, where the gear come in from the Pakis and the Afghans. We had it going up the coast and flooding into Europe through Marseille. It was a highly lucrative trade — but then there’s always the human element …
‘Now we was none of us model citizens, but Tony Eist … he just wasn’t normal. In the old days, he’d have himself committing crimes even in his alibis. He’d go: “I was never in on the Brink-Mats lark. I was busy flogging this condemned Argie beef.” Or: “How could I have been in on the Waterloo jewellers? I was up West, demanding with menaces.” A very dishonest man, Tony Eist. So one day Keith the Snake come up to see me in me villa. He’s said he’s done his sums — and Tony’s been hiving off millions for hisself! Well I wasn’t having that now was I.
‘I’ve gone over there and we’ve had it out. And I’ve done him. Then, not content with that, he’s got hisself mangled up in his lawnmower. Diesel. Two-seater. And his wife, she hasn’t done the sensible thing and said she’ve run him down by accident. She’s gone and shopped me to the Spaniards! [Click.] Go on then. [Click.] See, there was complicating factors. I’m not about to go banging on about the Other or the Urge or whatever you want to call it. For me, there’s too much of that kind of thing as it is. But we’re talking man to man, and, well, I’ve been giving Tony’s wife Angie one. If I did have a regrettable habit, back then, it was that: giving me mates’ wives one. [Click.] And they daughters and all, in them days. Little Debbie. And she’s gone and grassed me up to Angie! [Click.] So a bit of malice there, I’d reckon. Oh yes, a little bit of spite. The Spanish coppers was all bent as arseholes of course, but what could they do, with that bloody great swamp on the front lawn and no Tony? Me and Keith the Snake’ve grabbed what we could and roared round to Alicante, flogged the boat, and hopped on a tanker to Belfast.
‘[Click.] Go on then. He’s no different. Him? … Goo on. [Click.] Regarding the matter of uh, giving your mates’ wives one. Now in them days that’s considered not on. Something you don’t do. See, you can only do it if you … if you fear no man. Because all right, it’s naughty — but what’s the blokes going to do? Come round and have it with me about it? No. They gives their wife a biff and otherwise, and that’s it. End of story. Which they thoroughly deserve. That’s a female weakness, that is. Weakness for power. Weakness for strength … I never was married but I got engaged the twice. By an unfortunate coincidence, both of them’ve gone and took they own lives, for reasons best known to theirselves.
‘During our time in the uh, “Emerald Isle”, Keith the Snake and me’ve come to London the once. I had a bone to pick with a bloke who’d taken a liberty with me, years back, in Strangeways. Fella name of Mick. I should’ve just done him, shouldn’t I. [Click] Should’ve just taken a chopper to the cunt … [Click.] But no. Fancy a fair fight instead. I’ve gone over to his yard [click] with me lapels lined with razorblades [click] and called him out. Told him a home truth or two and all. What a ruck that was. I don’t know who’ve come off worst. Still, I’ve remained active even from me hospital bed. And that was the only crime I committed on British soil that I never paid me debt to society for. I mean the matter of the gold bullion and the VAT. Me and Keith the Snake was convinced we’ve found a genuine loophole, as there’s no VAT on the coins we melted down and sold back to the Bullion House. Customs and Excise begged to differ. That would be about seventeen million in today’s money. And to that I’ll come back to.
‘So Keith the Snake and me’ve transferred our endeavour to Dublin, and made a totally fresh start. I asserted meself and encountered no difficulty whatsoever. Them Irish in the south, I don’t know what they think they’re thinking of half the time. Too much of the Danny Boy, I don’t know. They couldn’t believe Keith the Snake and me, and the measures we was prepared to take. All in all we had seven very happy years in Eire. Then we come to this business with the IRA, and the extremely unfortunate parting of the ways with Keith the Snake.
‘Now me I never wanted no publicity. People prominent in the underworld, they’ve got this terrible weakness for it. I seen publicity do for face after face. You know, you got power, you want it noticed. We all want to be top dog, mister big, king bastard. But it can’t work like that down here, see, where everything moves the other way … What happened was, I was driving along in me Merc and lost me concentration. Next thing I know, I’ve gone and injured a young woman, who unfortunately soon died. Pregnant and all. Well there was no end of a song and dance about that — though it’s perfectly legal to give someone a spill if you’re sober, and me lawyer said there’s definitely something a bit iffy in me breathalyser report. And then it’s come out who I am and what I’m worth. And the IRA think: eye-eye.
‘I’m still on bail and I heard there’s a kidnapping planned. Which is a joke. As a Cat-A prisoner I’ve marged me bread with all their top boys, and there’s no way in this world they’d’ve fancied me for a nab. But by then Scotland Yard’s sticking its nose in, and I’ve reckoned it’s time to move on. I’ve said to Keith the Snake, “Keith mate? It’s time to move on.” And he’s gone, “I never ploughed into no pregnant sort. You move on.” Fair enough. “Fine by me, mate. You go your way, I’ll go mine.” [Click.] And that — and that’s his idea of loyalty … [Click.] So I’ve started making me arrangements to emigrate across the water.
‘Come the very sad conclusion of me friendship with Keith the Snake. It started off foolish really: just one of them things, I suppose. I’ve had a drink and I’ve gone and done him. I go in to visit and I’ve said, “Keith mate. I sincerely apologise. I bitterly regret what’s occurred, and can you find it in your heart to overlook it.” So we shake and that. I know it’s going to take time for the rift to heal. Then of course he’s barely out of hospital and I’ve gone and done him again. Carved up all his suits and all. Lovely materials. Only the best … That was me weakness in them days. I’d get uh, argumentative in me drink. And he kept getting on me nerves. Same stupid talk. I says, “Why you always off with them brasses? Why don’t you have a proper bird?” “What, so’s you can stuff her? Why d’you stuff your mates’ birds?” “Well I always do that.” “Yeah but why?” “I always stuff me mates’ birds.” “Yeah but why?” “Because I always do.” [Click.] “Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you’re me?” “Oi!” “Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you’re her?” … Well it was all off then. [Click.] One of them uh, circular arguments. Blah blah blah.
‘So now I’ve done him the twice. And here’s what we done. I’ve let him strap me to the paddock wall (this is in me farm near Balbriggan). First thing he’s done, he’s told me it was never Tony Eist who skanked me off in Spain. It was Keith the Snake all along! So I’ve gone, “That’s water under the bridge, that is. Now do your worst, mate. But no tools. Done?” And Keith the Snake’s gone, “Done.” And what’s he gone and done? He’s gone and done me with the fucking scythe. There he is in his underpants, screaming his head off. And left me wallowing in me own blood. I’ve had more than two hundred stitches in me chest alone. One stripe come down from me ear, across me cheek, under me nose, over me mouth, along me jaw and into me neck. [Click.] He’s had a go at me privates and all. That’s how low he’s stooped. Ah, Keith mate … What happened, boy? [Click.] Well, after a liberty like that, why he never finished the job I’ll never know. Was he barmy or what?
‘After a short uh, sojourn in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, I’ve pitched up in Southern California. And if me name rings a bell from the newspapers it’s because you’re thinking of an old geezer sitting round a swimming-pool in Rio with a glass of champagne and a halfcaste brass on his lap. That’s me brother Fred, and no icecream’s ever had it easier, with the pension I give him. Me record here in Southern California is absolutely stainless, and I’ve uh, amassed another fortune in the home-video industry. Totally legitimately. [Click.] And if you want to see a beauty-queen with her head up a giraffe’s arse, or otherwise, I’d be delighted to oblige. [Click.] I’ve done uh, extensive fundraising work for charity, and I hold the post of Treasurer at the local Citizens’ Community Association.
‘See, I’m not such a bad bloke really, when all is said and done. Me, I’m the nicest fella in the world — in the car like, you know, after you, darling. In the shops: “Morning all” and “God bless”. I’ve lived me life by me own rules — and, yes, and woe betide anyone that breaks them. I am who I am. Jo is Jo. It’s just the road I went down. It’s just the game I played. It’s just the game I played.
‘Now to business.’
A musclebound horsefly materialised on the spotted knuckle of his right hand. He reached slowly for the holster with his left.
‘You didn’t like that, did you mate …’
He leant forward to drink in the full fragrance of the propellant. Like a cut-price air-freshener — the negative essence of all the smells it was meant to conceal. His eyes moistened: takes you back.
It was like the choking sweetness of some new cell they’ve just flung you in. Scented detergent, fighting a lost battle against another man’s fluids, another man’s fear.
4. Yellow Tongue
Clint Smoker sat, for now, in a milk bar on Ignacio Boulevard. He typed: ‘So some so-called 15-year-old is crying “rape” after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad.’ He deleted this: got to pace yourself … Clint was expected, ninety minutes from now, at Karla White Productions on Innocencio Drive … No, it had to be admitted: he was having the time of his jounalistic life, was Clint Smoker. That morning he had interviewed a pimp named DeRoger Monroe in the Lovetown Greyhound Station, and filed an admiring profile. Emptying sachet after sachet of sugar into his Coca-Cola, DeRoger had told him how it worked: you tell them to go out there and be superstars, while, in the meantime, you do hard drugs with other pimps. Then when the birds are down to their last tooth, you ‘take them to Florida’: give them a final pasting and then boot them out the door … Soon, Clint would be meeting with Karla White. And, later, there was the mouthwatering prospect of an hour with Dork Bogarde.
Nor was it merely Clint’s reportage. What about the editorials, the think-pieces, the ‘virtual cult’ (as Strite had put it), back home, of Yellow Dog. He typed:
• So some grasping icequeen is seeking compensation for ‘sexual harassment’, having left her job after a bit of harmless horseplay round the water cooler.
She’s already had a few quid for her ripped clothes and the dental work.
And now it’s for ‘emotional distress’ that she’s taking those nine lads to court.
Well she’s not going to come clean, is she?
She’s not going to say: I f**king loved it!
All the girls Yellow Dog’s worked around go batty at the thought of a proper goose.
And don’t tell me there’s one of them, when you’re alone in the lift, that doesn’t like her nip being given a healthy twist.
Hallo, here comes old Marge, grunting and sighing with her mop and her pails.
She’s down on those shiny red knees, moaning and groaning, with her great fat arse in the air.
Look lively lads — where’s the office cattleprod?
Clint paused, and mused. Karla White: best norks in Lovetown. It’s well known. Dark glasses? Check. He mused, and paused, and worked on:
• So some old boiler in Hammersmith got smacked about a bit by a couple of lads while they were relieving her of her pension.
Now that’s well naughty, boys, and don’t do it again.
But spare us the violin, okay.
Spare us the clock-stopping photos of the biddy with the black eyes.
She’s only 77—a child in this day and age — and she can f**king well take her chances like anybody else.
Besides, she’s been stinking up the place for long enough, hasn’t she?
When they get like that they’re better off dead.
So get well soon Gran — if you must.
But leave out the f**king whinge this time. Alright?
A little light told Clint that he had an e in, which he now shared:
dear 1: o, it all went 1 derfully, 1 derfully — with dad. i was always his favourite, u c. when i was a child he worshipped the very ground i walked on; 4 him, the sun shone out of my* … he was as punctual as ever, & as gallant, with the bouquet of 4sythia and the creamy chocol8s. always the perfect gent 2 me, full of amusing stories about his girlfriends. i prepared his favourite dinner (tripe & brains), with 40fied wine, in the candlelite. Then the bombshell, the utter c@astrophe: my father has been diagnosed with: cancer. i am absolutely devast8ed. k8.
Poor little thing, thought Clint. Still, that can work to a man’s advantage. You get credit for not being dead.
For once in your life.
‘Fucktown,’ began Karla White, ‘in its current phase, which could be ending around now with the Princess Lolita phenomenon, might as well be called Hatefucktown. That’s the dominant form: Hatefuck. But let’s go back a bit.’
‘I’ll just see if this …’ said Clint, giving his tape recorder a malevolent stare.
‘… Porno was self-policing until the second term of the last administration, when, as you know, all of a sudden we had a porno president. Porno, under this porno presidency, stopped policing itself and entered its Salo period.’
‘Sorry, Karla. Salo?’
Karla considered her interlocutor, and wondered if there’d be any point in telling him about Mussolini and the Republic of Filth. She was enough of an American to grant interviews more or less automatically, but she had run a light check on Clint; she knew about his recent stay at John Working’s joint in the San Sebastiano Valley; she knew the circulation figures of the Morning Lark, and had some idea of its contents.
‘An embrace of dirt,’ she said. ‘Immediately there was an overwhelming emphasis on male-female sodomy. The rallying cry was Pussies Are Bullshit. They’d sign off with it on the phone: “Pussies Are Bullshit!” One director said, “With anal, the actress’s personality comes out.” Oh sure: her personality. They talked about female virility, female testosterone. Which is strange considering the next phase, post-Pussies Are Bullshit.’
Clint steadied his dark glasses and resumed his attempt to stare out Karla’s breasts. They stared back, irreproachably innocent and unblinking; and they awakened humility in him. He thought it was beautifully generous of her not to hide them, to allow them to be warmly present. It also occurred to him that at any moment they might count down from three and he’d do exactly as they said.
‘The essential self-policing had to do with two areas, male-female violence and paedophilia. Male-female violence was called Black Eye, and began with the notorious “line”, Male Dawn. They’d tell the girls: Don’t be too proud to cry while we do this. Basically they roughed them up, and roughed them up for real. The paedophiliac tendency was unofficially known as Short Eye, where the girls wore kiddie clothes and talked in squeaky voices and played with dolls while granddads peed in their mouths. And worse. I’m serious. The nymphets weren’t nymphets, of course. Along with your HIV-clearance, your birth certificate is your work permit. You have to produce it, even in geronto-porno, or White Hair. Even eighty-five-year-olds have always had to prove that they’re over seventeen. That’s porno.’
Clint thought: codger-todger. Good riff.
‘All this came to an end when the new administration started their holy war on porno. Black Eye and Short Eye disappeared right away. Pussies Are Bullshit staggered on for a while, because male-female sodomy is not illegal in every state. But then some busybody — some spoilsport or killjoy, Clint — would buy a sodomy tape in Arkansas, where it isn’t illegal, and take it to Alabama, where it is, and you’d be indicted in Montgomery. And so on. But porno people are believers too. It’s the contrarian nature of the form. And they wouldn’t give it up. Dozens of production companies were wiped out and some of the very top guys went to jail. And in an Alabaman correctional facility, I can assure you, they don’t need to be told that pussies are bullshit. Then the zoning loophole, and the founding of Lovetown. And the dominant genre, these days, is unquestionably Hatefuck.’
They talked on — about Hatefuck, about Cockout, about Boxback, about Red Face, about Yellow Tongue … After an hour with Karla, Clint was becoming vaguely aware of his surroundings — glass, mirrors, tubular furniture. It might have been any old ad-firm except for the posters: porno girls, in porno colours, with porno pouts … Throne Together, Royal Flesh, Pump and Circumstance, Anne of a Thousand Lays, Mary Queen of Sluts, Falstiff, King Rear, and Princess Lolita 2, Princess Lolita 3, Princess Lolita 4 …
Feeling something lift from her, Karla followed Clint’s gaze. She said,
‘They go together, don’t they — porno and puns? It couldn’t be otherwise. Because humourlessness is the lifeblood of porno. One genuine smile, and everything would disappear.’
‘It’s finished, though, this, isn’t it: video. Now it’s the Web.’
‘Rentals are dying. Despite Princess Lolita. See the girls. They have a flared-pants look. A beehive look. The future’s in interactive. What they call “self-tailoring”. And the viewer will direct.’
Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission. He said,
‘Do you miss it? Performing?’
‘No,’ said Karla, who had answered this question, and all others, many times before.
‘You were an abused child, weren’t you. Were they all that, the actresses?’
‘There’s something in it. It’s the … creation myth of porno. But porno’s just an industry now. Times change, Clint. I know a girl who goes to the Mature Video Awards with her parents. Her father came out brandishing her statuette for Best Anal.’
‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do? As an actress. Fisting and pissing and that?’
‘… I stopped before it went that way. I stopped before Pussies Are Bullshit.’
‘Uh, fancy a drink later?’
‘With a view to what?’
‘You tell me. You’re the pro. Another day, another cock. You tell me.’
He noticed that she was staring at him with unchecked fascination — with entirely undissimulated fascination. Clint started to feel twenty-seven thousand dollars poorer — and Karla hadn’t yet said what Karla said next.
‘That’s right. And the men I’m used to’, she said, and suddenly seized the tumbler of water on her desk, ‘are like this.’
Clint followed instructions: faced with noncompliance, construct the counterfactual. ‘Well. Wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Off to Hawaii in an hour or two.’
‘I thought you were seeing Dork Bogarde.’
‘He’s uh, he’s out of town himself.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Karla, standing. ‘I’m expecting him at Dolorosa Drive tomorrow morning. He’s doing a scene with Charisma Trixxx. Day one of Crown Sugar.’
‘Hold up. Got me days confused.’ Clint added ruefully, ‘Kate, she’s always going on at me about it. So maybe I uh, I’ll look in. Fly on the wall.’
With an illegible shudder she said, ‘This set will most definitely be closed.’
That evening, after three hours of Black Eye and Cockout in his hotel, Clint attained a sense of belonging: a sense of belonging, in Lovetown.
Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal, Hick Johnsonson, in Lovetown’s Fulgencio Falls. When Clint arrived, and was made welcome, they were out on the porno patio … In the small garden enchained porno parrots swore and shat around the porno pool. Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine. It seemed that Dork had only one thing he wanted to talk about, however: porno pay.
‘I mean there am I,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation, ‘naked as I am. I’m out there, with sweat pouring off my person, cocking out … some little rube who’s just climbed off the Dog — and I get three hundred dollars? Excuse me. Excuse me. While the guy watching, in an easy chair, some … asshole from Ye Olde England, gets ten grand? They do me that indignithy? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’
Sincerely puzzled, and yet with the rosiness of genuine admiration (indignithy: he made other slips like that — but you had to hand it to the guy, with his porno pectorals, his porno ponytail, his monstrous porno penis, familiar to all Dork’s fans), Clint said,
‘Yeah but you’re the one getting it wet, aren’t you mate.’
Sir Dork implored Clint to consider something: porno pressure.
‘Did it get here yet?’ Dork asked Hick. ‘It’, Dork had told Clint earlier, was ‘the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx’, to whom Dork was to be introduced the following day, on the set of Crown Sugar. ‘Clint? Could you perform with three breaks for coffee and one for lunch? The lights? The people?’
‘Yeah but there’s a way round that now, isn’t there.’ Clint thought resentfully of Karla White, and what she had told him about porno and Potentium: ‘They all use it and they all say they don’t.’
‘I never use it,’ said Dork.
Clint recalled her words. Potentium, said Karla, had turned out to be a Midas curse for the porno male. Pre-Potentium, a flop meant a skipped day and a net loss. Post-Potentium, it meant that the man was ready fifteen minutes late, and had splotchy cheeks (hence Red Face) and a porno headache. But there were fewer suicides and crackups, and they all started using it. ‘The change sparked controversy,’ as Clint would later write; and we must remember, along with Dork Bogarde, that ‘this was at the heighth of Pussies Are Bullshit’ … Some said that Potentium was bullshit too: it affronted the market forces having to do with the reality of arousal. People who argued that way turned out to be purists — because the customer didn’t care. ‘Being able, or likely, to perform in public’, Karla said, ‘was once a marketable skill. Now anyone can do it. The men — the grunts, the stiffs — never were a draw. And now they’re just life-support systems for a tab of Potentium.’ Karla said she was surprised. She said she had always thought that the customer was a lot gayer than that …
Dork now confronted Clint with a porno paradox. ‘See, Clint,’ he said, ‘we get pressure coming the other way: Cockout. How can a man fulfil his fanthasy when, hanging over him at all times, he faces the spectre of Cockout?’
After a while Dork returned to the subject of porno pay, and porno percentages, until Hick confirmed the arrival of the tape of the test-fuck of Charisma Trixxx.
‘Look at that,’ said Dork, gesturing at the screen. ‘Suave ass. Sincere bush. I don’t just mean the mohawk. I mean the presentation. I’m talking the whole box.’
‘She chugs good,’ allowed Hick.
‘Good neck-work on the back-take.’
‘And I like the tongue-slide on the feed-draw.’
Fifteen minutes later Hick said, ‘Here we go. Gracious address for the facial.’
‘… Wow,’ said Dork. ‘See that? Right in the eye.’ Dork turned to Hick (it was established earlier that Hick had been known to do Gay). ‘Does that hurt? I mean, does it kind of burn?’
‘Burn? It’s like fucking fire. And she didn’t even flinch.’
‘I won’t have any kind of problem tomorrow. Flinch? She didn’t even blink. Clint, hadn’t you …?’
‘Yeah well thanks, lads,’ said Clint. ‘Dork mate. I happen to know one of your uh, conquests.’ And he felt luxury as he pronounced her name: ‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Donna Strange …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Uh — big English brunette with a silver streak in her hair and a crinkly mouth … She sucked you off underneath a pyramid and then you had her up the arse in a helium balloon. Then you landed on Everest and shot all over her tits.’
‘… I spent on her breatsts? That’s so—passé. You’d think I’d remember that.’
On his way back to the hotel Clint pulled in at another video store. And there it all was, yet again, laid out in categories, like a dramatisation of the words of Karla White. Not Hatefuck, because everything was Hatefuck unless labelled otherwise. But Cockout, and Bullshit Cockout, and Boxback, and Red Face, and White Hair, and Yellow Tongue (‘Yellow Tongue’, she said, ‘is for those who miss the motel room, the handheld video cam, the ghoulish lighting, and the plain cast ill on drugs’), and, of course, the category called Princess Lolita.
He worked into the small hours on his starry-eyed profile of Dork Bogarde. Then, to release tension, he pounded out some Yellow Dog. At about noon, London time, he received the following message:
my only 1: thank u so much 4 your e of consol8ion. i don’t no y, but things r clearer now. it feels as if a gr8 w8 has been lifted from me. Even as my father lies in st &rew’s, f8ally unwell … u no what i’m thinking? i think i’m 4lling in love with u, clint. yes u, and no 1 else. u, clint! u, u, u! r u o fait with the poetry of ezra £? as i transmitted this, i thought of the lines: ‘& now i bring the boy in, on his knees, & send this 1,000 miles, thinking.’ i’m mad 4 u, clint. come 2 me on your return. only when u & i r 1 will i feel truly @ peace. 10derly, k8.
ps: i vener8 yellow dog. i lite c&les to yellow dog. i make a god of yellow dog.
Yellow Dog wiped away his tears and settled down to an hour or two of Yellow Tongue.
5. Cur moment
The third (and final) message from their mole, their enemy’s enemy, took the form of a no-fingerprints communication directed at Brendan’s laptop. Earlier that day a similarly anondot service-provider released six new stills of the Princess, one of which, sensationally, showed her daunted face half-dimmed by the shadow of the intruder … The message Brendan received ran as follows: ‘Ultimatum will be presented on February 10. Strongly advise immediate compliance. Please to reemphasise: the material on the Princess is all light and magic. All light and magic.’ Feeling sick to his stomach, but also wonderfully lightheaded, Brendan issued a contemptuous press-release from Ewelme. Then he had his worst talk ever with the King.
‘Here’s a turn-up, sir,’ he began. ‘Captain Mate has resigned. Effective immediately.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it, Bugger.’
‘It’s a bit rum, though, sir. We can—’
‘I’ve been meaning to chuck him for years.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Bugger. On account of his physical appearance. But I could never be fagged. Now never mind him, and get on with it. You’ve got that glint in your eye, Bugger. Yes you have. You’re preparing me for something horrid, I can tell.’
Henry looked out of the window of the Royal Train; but there was nothing to see. To be heading north, north from Ewelme with its mists and brown spume, and at the very worst time of year … He thought: the cur moment. I shall have to revisit it, relive it. The cur moment.
‘That’ll be all, Love.’ Henry waited. He said, ‘Do you believe in life after death?’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘I’m not changing the subject. It’s practically the only subject there is. With you. These days, darling.’
‘Well yes I do. Do you?’
‘… No.’
‘See? What you have, it isn’t faith. It’s just habit.’
‘Faith … faith is a power. It gets weaker as you age. Like all powers.’
‘You have changed the subject. And the subject,’ said the Princess, ‘the subject is this. To distract attention from my uh, imbroglio in the Yellow House—’
‘Whatever that was.’
‘Whatever that was. To distract attention, and to win some sympathy from the media and the million,’ she said, ‘we’re going to Scotland to kill Mummy.’
‘Don’t. Be. Silly … Darling.’
After a while he said, ‘Bugger told me that you told him that there was something I could do. Uh, Brendan, rather. He took you to mean that there was something I could do — that would make it all right.’
‘One thing I will tell you is that this isn’t it. Murdering Mummy isn’t it. Oh I’m not going to spring to your rescue. You’ll have to get there on your own.’
Dusk was coming nearer. They rushed to meet it. He sat back, and looked for what comfort he could find in thoughts of He Zizhen.
In his bedroom at Tongue he was woken by the draughts at half past five. He kicked Love out of his army cot and then drank the tea with great gouts of brandy in it until his teeth stopped chattering. A bath of blood heat; a cold-water shave. He put on his black suit, and his hardiest overcoat — inherited from his father, Richard IV, and still a sober tribute to the protective power of cashmere and silk. He stepped out into the morning twilight and the cockcrow.
Unlike his numerical predecessor, who would habitually exhaust a dozen stallions in the space of an afternoon, Henry IX loathed anything that involved horses (with the single exception of Royal Ascot); but Pamela, of course, had been a lifelong equestrienne. Times beyond number he had shaken his head, from a seated position, and watched her trot off, seemingly about thirty feet from the ground … That September, at Tongue, the Queen Consort did not return from her second ride of the afternoon. Her mare, Godiva, returned; but Pamela did not return. The King seized a bicycle in the courtyard and, with much wobbling and wiggling … But now, on foot, in his overcoat, Henry moved from gravel to lawn, beginning to retrace these steps.
He remembered the way the colour of the day changed. At first he was merely very frightened, mostly for himself (the bicycle), and also rather bored (he could already hear the exasperating halloos of normality regained). On the cinder path he pedalled to the shoulder of the slope, and turned: Godiva, riderless in the stableyard. And then the colour of the day changed.
It was he who found her … Pamela had told him about the softened thump of the horse’s hooves as you approached the chalk quarry, and thither he rode — until, with a horrified lurch, he skidded to a halt and assessed the obscenity in his path. A fat snake, already dead, already putrescent: fat, moist, yellow, like the voided boil of some tutelary troll or Friar Rush … Yes, he thought: Godiva could be forgiven for rearing at such a sight. And there, down the brambly slope, Pamela lay, in her boots, her jodhpurs, her tweed jacket, her velvet helmet, arched backwards over a boulder with her eyes wide open. The bike fell with a clatter and a brief purr of spokes. He moved through the snow-scape, the moonscape, of the winter chalk.
‘Oh no, Pemmy.’ But he stressed it on the second and fourth syllables: he said it as he had said it many times before, when being reminded of some recurrent social chore, when interdicting a loud headscarf, or when she brought off a forceful roll at ludo or backgammon.
Then, rhythmically gathering air for his moment, his cur moment, Henry said, ‘At least, at least, at least — at least there won’t be any more bally …’; and it was then that his shoulders began to shudder: ‘… any more bally three-a-clockers.’ And the words enveloped him like an unrecognisable fart, saying: yes, oh yes, this is you, this is you.
Aboard the helicopter they found a faint pulse in her groin, and an hour later she was on the machine at the Royal Inverness.
That was two years ago. In his black suit, his black coat, Henry stood in the white land of the chalk field. It was time to awaken the Princess.
The patient looked like an enormous and ancient squaw, with the warpaint of death on her, but regally breathing.
Henry passed his hand down through the air.
‘Mummy’s …’ said Victoria.
‘But she breathes.’
Victoria pointed to the parallel lines on the screen.
‘But she breathes.’
And she breathed greedily, lustily. Could she still reach up and hold him and draw him in? And he smelt himself all over again — the smouldering smell of the male secret, like a fire doused in rivers of sweat.
‘That’s just the machine,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s the machine that’s breathing.’
‘Turn it off,’ he cried. ‘Turn it off. Turn it off.’
6. February 14 (1.25 p.m.): 101 Heavy
System Aircraft Maintenance: One oh one heavy, please repeat.
Captain John Macmanaman: Confirm engine number-two explosive failure. Number-two accessory drive system is blown. Secondary debris hit the horizontal stabiliser and severed number-one line and number-three line. These hydraulic systems are down. Copy?
SAM: Copy, one oh one heavy. You lost number two.
Macmanaman: No. We lost all three.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You lost number three?
Macmanaman: We lost all of them.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You still have number one, right?
Macmanaman: All three are gone. Repeat. All three are gone.
SAM: One oh one heavy. Copy, copy. You have emergency hydraulics.
Macmanaman: Affirmative. But the goddamned auto won’t disengage. It thinks one through three is fictitious. Extreme yaw. Extreme pitch.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Try it.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Yeah but …
Ward: Try it.
Chopko: … Auto disengaged!
Macmanaman: I feel it. I feel it. Auto disengaged. Hydraulic quantity returning. Now flying by direct law. Nose is coming up. Steadying. Steadying. Still yawing but no pitch. It won’t give us flaps.
SAM: One oh one heavy. I’ll clear frequency and give you Detroit.
Chopko: The backup hydraulics — where are they anyway?
Ward: Where they used to be, in the old days. Under the cabin floor.
Macmanaman: Come in!
Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Is it over? Are we okay?
Macmanaman: We’re coming out of it, Robynne. What’s it like back there?
Davis: Like a vomitorium in ancient Rome. They can take a yaw but they hate a pitch.
Chopko: We got the pitch. We’ll get the yaw. Now what?
Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez: Lucy says the floor’s hot. The passengers are saying the cabin floor’s hot. Left side. Between the wings.
Chopko: Christ. Any smoke?
Martinez: How could they tell?
Macmanaman: You know what we need? What we need is an airport.
No, you couldn’t tell — about the smoke. A lavish bonfire of wet leaves would have made little difference to the pall. In Economy, 314 people had cigarettes in their mouths (they weren’t giving up now), including the occupants of rows twenty-five to thirty, seats H and I and J, who, in addition, had their feet off the floor and tucked in underneath them.
There was smoke in the hold, too, under the port wing. But this was smoke of a different kind. With this kind of smoke (hot, thick, black), you wouldn’t be breathing it: you’d be eating it. And it would be eating you … Just discernible in the pallet facing the cargo door, Royce Traynor, mantled in ebony, stood upright, slowly steadying on his base as if to regather his strength. When the plane yawed to starboard, he sank back, waiting, against a column of stacked bags. Next, the port wing began its sharp drop, and Royce, after bristling for an instant like a wave before it breaks, dived forward to butt the diagonal handle of the cargo door … This door was not a plug door, opening inwards, and kept slammed shut by air-pressure. It opened outwards, to increase holdspace and revenue … He’s up again now, with the yaw to the right, and leaning back, in weary but determined contemplation. Then the tottering vertical and the piledrive into the handle of the cargo door, with all his weight. Which was the weight of what? Which was the weight of the past.
You could see why Royce had to do this. When the sprinklers came on, you could see why Royce had to do this. He couldn’t trust to fire. It was now his aim to go for the very throat of the aircraft. Decompression, explosive decompression, was what he wanted to bring about, and the collapse, the catastrophic strangulation, of the cabin floor, with all its tubes and veins and arteries. Most proximately, the blown door would mean his own escape (he would be the first to go), his martyrdom, after death.
With no blood in him any more, just wax and formaldehyde, Royce sways. The front teeth, perhaps, are bared: the teeth of a sunbelt golf pro. Royce sways, but not drunkenly. He rests, catching his breath, unappeasably preparing himself for fresh assault.
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