PART III
CHAPTER NINE
1. The syrups of the sky
Xan Meo hit Fucktown at four p.m. on February 2, when the Fucktown Shuttle landed at Fucktown’s Felixio International Skyport … All the signs, of course, said Lovetown, as in Welcome to Lovetown. But people very often accidentally called Lovetown Fucktown. It was clearly something Lovetown had had to get used to.
First, at LAX, he was required to pick up his suitcase and clear it through Immigration. This wait at the luggage carousel, he realised, was an interlude of enforced, of mandated ennui. It wasn’t like standing at a bus-stop with nothing to read: the bus, when it came, would announce itself; and there were other things to look at. No, you had to go on watching, staring; you had to go on performing humble mental tasks involving the differentiation of shape; you had to go on dully imagining dull complication, dull delay. A lanky Englishman was talking fearfully to his mobile phone: ‘It’s going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s stopped going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it …’ And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been bored, and this was what it was like. It was like civilisation. Because you’re never bored, are you, when you’re always raring to fuck or fight.
A courtesy car transferred him to the second airfield. Here the little toytown terminal contained a busy, frisky, jittery throng: multicoloured lovebirds massing ecstatically for the long flight south. Xan felt further depersonalised by the open and unsmiling use, hereabouts, of the byname Fucktown — as in ‘LA — San Diego with a stopover in Fucktown’, ‘What takes you to Fucktown?’ and (from a man in uniform) ‘And is Fucktown your final destination?’ For an instant, as he stood beneath the blatting, clacking information-board, he saw, or thought he saw, the directive ‘14:05: FUCKTOWN 5D LAST CALL.’ The twirling cubes quickly corrected themselves, with a paparazzo flutter. Lovetown’s other cognomen seemed to be used only in reference to the Sextown Sniper …
In the plane his consciousness of anomaly, of regrettable innovation, persisted and ramified. It took him several minutes to identify an important absence — that of children. All planes have children on them. But not the shuttle to Lovetown: no babies, bassinets, no hefted bundles. Well Lovetown was a babyless place, he supposed. It was Adult. There were teenage passengers on board, male and female, who couldn’t possibly be destined for erotic employment; but Lovetown needed its hatcheck girls, its busboys and carboys, just like anywhere else. And some of the older people maintained a patina of childishness — the cartoon, the picture book. As he returned from the toilet he noticed that some men and women got younger, or older, fast, as you walked towards them: about five years for every row of seats.
Surrounded by tans of butterscotch and eggyolk, by sculpted puppyfat in tanktop T-shirts, with noses too small or hair too big or mouths too wide, too full, and engaged in ceaseless laughter, as if the passengers were the unified audience of a coruscating comedy … The stewardesses in their blue suits looked more normal, less stylised in mien and gesture, than the intransigent titterers they tended. The Captain put them down in Lovetown, and the tube of canned sex emptied itself in relays of tits and pits and zits.
Again by courtesy car he was driven to the U Hotel, past suburban gardens of brown grass and haggard cacti. Xan read about it in the complimentary Lovetown Journal, fished from the pouch of the seat in front: the U Hotel belonged to a chain whose owner had earned 78 billion dollars for realising that w was the only non-monosyllable in the English alphabet. Scrapping the supposed abbreviation, which had human beings gabbling out nine syllables, and replacing it with three other syllables chosen at random (or, indeed, with the unabbreviated phrase ‘world wide web’) would save global businesstime half a decade per day …
As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire and mudslide, of stripmall, freeway and gridlock, of hatefuck, cockout and boxback, of blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue.
‘Hatefuck evolved very naturally in a way,’ said the voice of Karla White, ‘because there had never been … any love lost between the actors and the actresses. The girls earn five or six times more than the men, and the gap goes on widening. As you can imagine, the scenarios for Hatefuck are extremely monotonous. “So this is the big guy, huh?” “You’d better believe it, bitch.” “Have you taken your pill like a good little boy?” And so on. And she’ll ask him about the car he drives, if any, and the square-footage of his shitbox in Fulgencio Falls. Then came Cockout.’
‘Cockout,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Cockout,’ said Karla White.
Xan went on to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Down at the desk they had told him about the English journalist who was recently arrested and jailed for smoking a cigarette in his room. They had also given him Karla’s package: the script of Crown Sugar, the audiotape (‘Background’), and his docket for the courtesy car which, the following morning, would take him to Dolorosa Drive …
‘Cockout is a sub-genre, or an anti-genre, within Hatefuck. Much prized for its rarity, Cockout occurs when the man actually succeeds in arousing the woman — to such a point where she stops calling him a piece of shit and starts offering encouragement or even praise. The father of Cockout, Lover, Trash My Ass, was an uncontrollable hit. Nothing like Princess Lolita, but very considerable business.
‘Very soon, “I cocked her out” became the pet boast of the porno male, “He cocked me out” the pet peeve of the porno female. But its rarity created pressure, giving rise to a further sub-genre, Bullshit Cockout. Bullshit Cockout is when the — usually very minor — porno female pretends, after grim resistance, to get herself cocked out. And a lot of ten-year-old porno started being recycled as, in effect, Bullshit Cockout, suggesting that that was what porno was, all along: Bullshit Cockout.’
Below, Xan abruptly noticed, in about half of the thirty or forty plotlike gardens he could see, pornography was being made: little brown bodies around little blue pools.
‘True Cockout seemed to throw a lifeline to the porno male — to begin with, anyway. Every morning, as he thumbed his way to work, there was always the sustaining dream of getting hold of a headlining actress and cocking her out. The grunts, the poor stiffs, started rating each other by their cockouts. You know, stats and averages — like baseball. There was even an actor called Cockout. Kirk Cockout. He sure didn’t last long … Because Cockout was another poisoned chalice for the porno male. After a while no girl would even consider working with a guy who had cocked her out — or cocked out any of her friends. Porno men with any kind of rep for cockout stopped getting phonecalls. Then they started fearing cockout. A further humiliation was on its way in the form of Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
The sun was dropping down over the shoulder of the building. He leafed through the twelve-page script of Crown Sugar. In his only scene, Xan was supposed to exchange some words with Charisma Trixxx and then watch her perform with Sir Dork Bogarde (as follows: ‘Blow. Doggy. Cowgirl. Reverse Cowgirl. Facial’). His lines were not difficult or numerous but he was surprised by the ease with which he got them by heart. He paused … Something is happening to me, he thought. He paused, he listened; there was inside him a great hope that he didn’t dare reach for; with it, or instead of it, might come pain and grief of the same size. The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beautysleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. He went through his lines again, in his head. They were there.
‘Which brings us to the heart of it. This is just my view, of course, but I hold it for reasons less obvious than they may appear. Boxback. Ill-named, I think. And containing a serious structural flaw … Classic Boxback is simply premature ejaculation — inflicted by the woman. The more premature the better. Now it’s certainly very humiliating for the man, because he has to go again, much diminished. So: the shower, the pill, the wait, the headache, the hatefuck. But this new footage will precede the earlier ejaculation. Unlike Cockout, Boxback leaves no filmed evidence of its own achievement. And then there’s the question of the Facial.’
‘The Facial.’
‘The Facial. Even the most rigorous Hatefuck demands the Facial. Market force number one demands the Facial. And Boxback never even tried to do without it. So what kind of victory is that? Sending the grunt on his way with a sneer and a taunt when you’ve got his come all over your chin? The Facial is there, always, because the customer wants it to be there. What do men want? They want the Facial. And it’s the one sexual act that barely exists outside porno. A prostitute might do it, but a free woman, on her knees? That’s another good reason for calling the Facial what they call it: the Money Shot.
‘You know … They sometimes call it the Popshot. They don’t call it the Momshot. Because, at one remove or other, you get the feeling: it’s how Daddy would have liked it. Beauty and the Beast, innocence and its opposite. And the woman looks up, from her knees, at someone far more powerful than any lover …’
He drank half a bottle of wine, out on the balcony, with his early dinner. His equanimity now tired and wavered, and the evening clouds looked like wigs — toupees, perukes, the tawdry syrups of the sky. But then came Venus, with a pale aura, like a set of silver eyelashes, and simpering down at him. And then came the quarter-moon, seen at an unfamiliar angle, as if from somewhere behind, like a platonically perfect breast.
At nine o’clock there was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’
It was the hoary bellboy, who offered him a bouquet of the most hideous flowers he had ever seen: redface and yellowtongue. Who is it? Joseph Andrews.
Xan checked: yes: it was still what he wanted.
2. Sickout at Dolorosa Drive
During thirty months of activity the Sextown Sniper seemed to have evolved a set of rules, or restraints: no high-velocity bullets, no headshots or heartshots, no freeway hits causing extra traffic backups, no incursions into Tuxedo Terrace or Dolorosa Drive where core property values might be undermined, no sarcastic notes beginning ‘Grieve, blind worm’ or ‘I am God’ for the mayor and the SSVPD, no targeting of Meso-Americans, no targeting of help of any kind, no targeting of the very young, the very old. And if a pointy-bearded Director of Photography got grazed across the ankle, if a towel-boy or a makeup-girl lost a finger or two, if Charity Divine had her hairstyle scorched or Schlong Gielgud stopped one in the rump — who cared? Porno people cared, but no one cared about porno people and what porno people cared about.
Facing the U Hotel, at ten-fifteen the next morning, the sights of the sniper, moving, ranging, from face to face: this one, that one. The circular frame holding a rounded simulacrum, like a miniature kept in a locket — the faces of those that are loved and lost. In its crosshairs the face of a porter, the face of an arriving porno star, the face of Xan Meo, the face of the delivery-man with the potplant over his shoulder.
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything.’
But before all that he needed to be delivered to Dolorosa Drive, and he needed to climb out of the courtesy car, and enter the mansion (there was a different porno crew, from some earlier shift, coming the other way), and kiss Karla White, which proved difficult to do, with the telephonic mouthpiece round her neck like a chinguard … She wore a two-piece black business suit, which faintly sparkled as if with motes of coaldust, and black heels.
‘You’re fine,’ she said, in her warm, deep, accentless voice. ‘You don’t have to change. You’re fine. I was hoping you’d have lunch with me tomorrow at my house on the beach. I’ll send a car.’
‘So I don’t have to wear a crown or anything.’
‘You’re Rameses the Great,’ she said, ‘but you’re on a time-travel vacation from BC to LA. With some of your entourage. You’re fine … I apologise. Charisma Trixxx is keeping us waiting.’
‘They all do that,’ said the man in the white dressing-gown. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent out of a hundred of them do that. How come I don’t have one single line?’
‘Xan, say hello to Dork Bogarde. You don’t have any lines, Dork, because you’re a mute.’
‘Ah. Hence why …’
To Xan she went on, ‘In narrative terms this is what’s known as a side-fuck. It gives the seventeen-year-old a breather.’ Karla’s head registered a slight jolt and she walked away with a hand raised to her earphone, saying, ‘Charisma? Charisma … Am I? … Now why’s that? …’
Xan walked around the room. Such a scene was not unfamiliar to him: the half-dozen technicians and handymen and general noisemakers, the girl with the clipboard, the coffee-urn, the pretzel-bowl. On a white sofa beneath a window sat a young black man of impressive, even heroic appearance: representatively heroic. He stood up and introduced himself as Burl Rhody: Karla’s bodyguard.
‘Charisma’s a noshow,’ she now said.
‘A first-timer noshows?’ said Dork. ‘What nextly? They noshow their fuck-tests?’
‘The girls are calling it a herpes sickout,’ said Karla, ‘but what it amounts to is a three-day strike.’
‘Charisma! Hello?’ said Dork loudly into the air. ‘There are other people on the planet, Charisma! Hello? Hello?’
‘Who can we get?’ asked the girl with the clipboard.
Karla said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it.’
For a moment Dork’s face was a mask of dental work. Then he assumed a solemn, almost liturgical expression, and rose to his feet, saying,
‘In all my many years I have served in the industry … never has it been bestowed upon me such an honour like this. A legend such as Karla White. I can assure you, dear lady, that I will master you with uh, with true sincerithy … and respecth.’
He shrugged off his robe and stood there … It wasn’t a bodybuilder’s pose, not quite. But the face was now nobly half averted; the right knee was bent inwards; the toes were flexed; the thumb and forefinger of each hand were joined in tight circles.
Matter-of-factly unbuttoning her jacket, Karla said, ‘I’m sorry, Dork. You’ll get your two-fifty or whatever it is and there’s a car outside.’ She turned on her heel. As she climbed the stairs she said, ‘Burl. Would you mind taking a quick shower?’
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything. But know that I could have you blinded for addressing me with your eyes, trinket, because I am as the Sun.’
‘True, O King … This youth who stands before you is not as other men are. He cannot speak and though his manly parts, as you see, are right and comely, he cannot spend. Do you understand me, Sire?’
‘Perfectly, fraction.’
‘So he must to the eunuchs. The milk of propagation is denied him.’
‘To the eunuchs he goes then, instrument. Him, pawn, no dynasty awaits.’
‘As the most skilled of all the whores in the slave harem, as the most schooled in all the nauseous arts, haply I can yet bring him to blossom.’
‘Do so, toy.’
‘Yet I have a further design, great sire.’
‘Speak it, bauble.’
‘As I serve this youth, so I would fain serve thee.’
‘Puppet, begin.’
Karla swung down not to her knees but her haunches, in a catsuit made of coins.
3. The principle of lullabies
The next morning it was all over the Journal, pushed down the front page only by a further strike from the Sextown Sniper (a middle-aged porno star called Hick Johnsonson had been shot in the foot while reclining poolside at his home in Fulgencio Falls): ‘Reports Of Major Cockout On Dolorosa Drive’.
Xan sat in the hotel restaurant with the Journal propped up against his coffee-pot. Two tables away a young couple, damply agleam under a coating of man-tan, were acrimoniously negotiating a full-scale dinner (with two kinds of wine), watched by a camera and a klieg light. He read on:
It was at first believed that the surprise Cockout was the handiwork of Sir Dork Bogarde, who has claimed several Cockouts in recent years, and that the Cockout was sustained by Charisma Trixxx, a first-timer, and so theoretically vulnerable to Cockout.
But sources have revealed that the attractive newcomer was not present yesterday on Dolorosa Drive. ‘I think I got my wires crossed,’ explains Trixxx. ‘I was expecting the work but my agent said the shoot had been postponed.’ Trixxx denies all knowledge of the herpes sickout called by Comptroller Dimity Qwest of the LUWA (see page 2). Dork Bogarde was unavailable for comment.
It appears, however, that the artists involved were Burl Rhody, an industry jouneyman who quit the business some years ago, and legend Karla White, now of Karla White Productions. ‘I swear on my mother,’ said a crewmember who prefers not to be named, ‘it was classic Cockout. Beyond hot. He totally cocked her out.’
page 5: Dolorosa Drive: A Community Comes To Terms With Cockout
Editorial: Suspicion Of Bullshit In Karla White Cockout
He had the chauffeur drop him off a short distance from the house. As he turned into the drive he saw that Burl Rhody (non-coincidentally, Xan would later decide) was halfway down it, at the wheel of a blue convertible. Burl pulled up.
‘She’s given me the day off. And the night.’
These words were spoken with apparently effortless neutrality. Xan noticed a copy of the Lovetown Journal on Burl’s passenger-seat.
Burl said, ‘It was Bullshit.’ He sank back for a moment.
Whether Burl was happier than usual Xan couldn’t tell. But now he smiled with torpid nonchalance and said,
‘You know what I was thinking, at the end? I thought, God I’m old. Porno … it’s not for lazy people. Dork Bogarde is a celebrated asshole, but in general they aren’t such a bad crowd. They look out for each other. Karla,’ he said, ‘Karla spends half her life on the girls’ rights and the health shit. That’s how fucked-up she is.’
Xan said, ‘He’s not here, is he? Andrews — Joseph Andrews.’
Burl didn’t answer, but his frown told Xan no. His rather too affronted frown — no, not here, not now, not yet. He slowly engaged first gear, an almost hectic act, it seemed, and said,
‘I’ve lived in the apartment over Karla White’s garage for five years. And yesterday was our first time. Not our first attempt. Our first time. You know what she does when she gets aroused? She weeps.’
‘She weeps?’
‘Hot tears. Then everything stops. She stops. Then you stop.’
She wore her usual white dress, her usual shallow sandals. The trouble was that he thought he loved her.
On the upper balcony she poured him another glass of the skull-chilling wine and said, ‘Don’t you think we’re all being incredibly cool about the comet?’
‘Cool?’
‘All women hate space. I hate space. I suppose you’ve taken an interest in it, the comet.’
He shrugged, in the affirmative. Before them lay the great beast of the Pacific Ocean.
‘Then the first thing you’ll have learnt is that comets aren’t like asteroids, and you can’t chart them. Because they’re subject to non-gravitational forces like explosions and sublimations. They say it’s going to miss.’
‘Or shear.’
‘Or shear. It’s the size of Los Angeles. And it’s going five times faster than a bullet. And the latest is that it’s going to miss by fifty miles. Fifty miles.’
‘It won’t hit. They wouldn’t have told us anything about it if they thought it was going to hit. They’ve done studies. Telling us about it would just add to the social cost. It won’t hit.’
‘If it does, the sky would ignite and then turn pitch black.’
‘… And you’d be pleased.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she said in a wronged voice.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh you mean the void and nothing mattering and everything being allowed. I don’t think nothing matters.’
Did he? Did the comet matter? Watching her shape move around from room to room made him think that it had already happened: the end of the thing which is called world. Every few seconds he thought about reaching for her, but his arms, his hands felt loth and cold.
‘Nobody cares about the comet because it’s not our fault.’ After a while she said, ‘I wish I hadn’t been quite so rough on that sap Dork Bogarde. Are you hungry? Nor am I. Say if you are.’
The trouble was that he thought he loved her. And love had not guided him well in recent weeks and months, with his wife, his daughter. What kind of love was it? It seemed to have its life somewhere between what he felt for Russia and what he felt for Billie. The thing that further distinguished his love for Karla was that it persistently presented him with the cathartic emotions, those of pity and terror. In her presence, he was afraid and he was sorry. He wanted to protect her from all things — including things like himself. And his senses ached … The waves were for now holding good order, each one bristling up for sudden and ruthless and thrillingly opportune assault, and then pouncing, coming down hard, gnashing and frothing and enveloping with its teeth. And how bloodymindedly they came steaming into the boulders: the orgasmic impact, and then they shouldered their way into rockpool after rockpool, making waves that then had to be made again, after regrapplings, reslitherings.
Something was happening to him. It felt like a flow in the brain: rearrangements of currents and temperatures … Suddenly the sky went an olive colour, and the sea turned white.
‘Tormenta,’ she said.
‘I want to lie down. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I’ll be all right if I lie down.’
She took him to her bedroom and left him alone to shed some clothes. He was already half asleep when she returned.
‘I’ll put this on you. The principle of lullabies — it’s not the song. It’s not that the song soothes and dopes you. The point is that you know the singer’s still there. I can’t sing, but I’ll go on patting this shawl so you know I’m still there.’
While he slept and turned he kept remembering the final minutes of the sex-act he had witnessed on Dolorosa Drive.
Karla was on her knees. She was about to complete a presumably ancient human activity. But it didn’t look ancient. It looked as though it had been invented earlier that day — or was now, in fact, in the process of coming into being. For the forward thrust the arms were clasped about Burl Rhody’s waist; his phallus, ideally black, seemed to constitute an obstacle: she couldn’t go past it, she couldn’t go round it. No, she had to go through it, as if her real goal lay somewhere within his loins. On the reverse thrust, her hands were placed flatpalmed on his hipbones, to achieve greater traction, and each withdrawal ended with a tremendous smack of the lips before Rhody was as vociferously reengulfed. Then all was speed; and after a while he found himself thinking of a child with a party-whistle. And then she was Billie, or even Sophie, with yoghurt or vanilla icecream all over her face.
Consciousness was upon him. Before he opened his eyes he heard the sound of breathing. More than this, he heard sleep — the economical downdraughts which were the sound that sleep made … He found he was some way down the bed, under the sheet and the shawl; and the thing between his legs was a harsh concentration of gristle. He turned over: there was Karla’s apparently headless body, and the sleepless and incorruptible interrogation of her breasts. He moved towards them.
Soon he heard her somnolent sigh of approval and felt her hands on his neck and hair as he squeezed and kissed. Time passed.
‘I love you, I love you,’ she said.
And when she started to weep, he paused, expecting her to stop (then he’d stop). But she didn’t stop. Like Billie when she wept (faintly incredulous, naïvely eloquent), he thought. Her thighs were apart, and now his hand loomed. But then he reached out to her face and found that her cheeks were dry. Their eyes met. All was subtracted from him; and he turned away.
After several beats of his heart Xan said, ‘See? … Love doesn’t like fear. Size zero.’
‘Oh, I suppose you mean it should be tucked in nicely while you sprint for your life down the beach … That’s what they never say in the books or anywhere else. With a little girl you’re big, even when you’re little. You ought to go ahead with Billie. We get over it.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘No we don’t,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’ And with a whip of the sheet she was gone.
When he was woken again, this time by the storm, he got out of bed and reached for his clothes as if they were items of body-armour. The thunder was escalatory: fusillade, cannonade, heavy artillery, the fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike. He opened the bedroom door. There was a figure on the balcony, smoking.
She said, ‘God has got the movers in. There will be breakages. No, we don’t. We don’t get over it. Obviously. In bed we don’t know our rights.’
And he thought: obviously. Because that is what you do, Daddy, when you do that, when you play that game, when you go down that road. You place them in another dimension where they’re always one step behind, one step beyond.
‘Do you want to see Jo now?’ she asked. ‘You still want that?’
He said yes, but with a reluctance, and a sadness, that he took to be a failure of courage. ‘Are you my enemy?’
‘I used to be your enemy.’ And she told him who she was.
‘… Jesus Christ, Cora.’
Beyond, arthritic feelers of lightning were lancing out, sideways, upwards, forming coastlines with many fjords. There was a repeated jumpcut effect, and shifting blocks of nightscape.
Cora Susan waited with the keys.
4. Anger of the just
‘Come in, dear. Come in out of the wet. Xan … They’re waiting for you, dear, through there. Paquita’ll get you anything you need. Bit of business.’
Joseph Andrews pushed open a red-leather swing door with a porthole in its brow. Around a cardtable you could see a fat hot man in braces, a small natty figure in a borsalino and a chalk-striped suit, a Chinese woman with a pair of sunglasses lodged in her quiff, and the set of a pair of unknowable shoulders. Cora went inside and the door swung shut behind her.
‘You’ve got some arsehole coming here, haven’t you mate? Are you daft or what? This way: follow me. Follow me.’
Xan was led into a long low room: its recreation of an English pub was not entirely literal, but there were damp beermats and glistening black plastic ashtrays on the round tables, as well as a dartboard, and horsebrass and horsehair and prints of racing scenes. A log fire drew noisily in the hearth, like emphysema, with additional sputters and spatters.
‘First, the past,’ he said, and lengthily exhaled. ‘I’ll say this for Mick Meo: you’d have to hurt him. I’ll say this: you knew you was in a row when you was in a row with Mick Meo. You’d have to hurt him. A wall. A drop. We had it out the once back in them days, before he come on board. And it went on a bit but I done him. Six months later, when he’s up and about again, he come on board and there was no hard feelings whatsoever. Him and me, we’d have a drink. On several occasions he invited me to his home. Consistently. I’d have little Leda on me knee. This was before your time, son.
‘Then come the liberty. We was both in Strangeways. He’d pulled a three for grand larceny, whilst I was serving me six for uh … for malicious wounding. Now. Our mate Tony Odgers has lost remission for doing the two screws who’ve burnt a letter from his wife — in his face. I’ve said to Mick, “I’m not having that. I’ll do the Governor.” And Mick’s gone, “I’ll do him.” And I’ve gone, “No I’ll do him.” And Mick’s gone, “I’m not having that. No I’ll do him.” Deadlock.’
Said with a lingering stress on the last consonant, like the beginning of a cough, and joining all the other coughs in the log fire.
‘So we’ve had a word with the Chaplain. It’s arranged. A straightener, with gloves, in the main quad. It sometimes happened in them days. You sort it out, with the uh, permission of the Governor. The Governor didn’t know what it’s about, of course …’
Xan said, ‘What was it about?’
‘… About who’d do the Governor.’
‘Yeah but who’d do the Governor? The winner or the loser?’
‘Are you all right mate? … Well in the end they’ve had to drag us off ourselves. We was in the same ward in the hospital, but I’ve had it the worst because I’ve done one of the screws who’ve truncheoned us apart. Mick come out in the morning — and then come back that afternoon. In an appalling condition. I could tell by the state of him what he’s done: he’s done the Governor! Well I’m not having that. In the middle of the night I’ve slid out of me bed and crawled across the floor on me hands and knees and started giving him a whacking. Then they’ve shipped me off to Gartree. And after that, it’s a funny thing: Mick and me was never on the out at the same time. And never in the same prison. And for them twenty years the liberty’s festered …
‘Then I’m over to London from Dublin: bit of business. I’ve heard he’s come home and I’ve gone to the yard and I’ve called him out. He’s said, “What’s all this?” “What’s all this? You done the Governor, you cunt.” Then he reckons that he’s worked that one off: “Me in me hospital bed and you clawing me fucking stitches apart.” So I’ve gone, “All right. You want a liberty. Here’s a liberty. Are you married to a fucking elephant?”’
Andrews paused. The log fire gobbed and hawked and retched. It, too, was like England: bus shelters, station waiting-rooms, the pub Gents on a Friday night.
‘When’s your birthday, cock?’
Xan told him.
‘No it ain’t. “Your wife a fucky nelephant needs thirteen months to have a fucking baby?” And I’ve took the piece of paper from me pocket,’ said Andrews, taking the piece of paper from his pocket — the zippered pouch of his oilblack tracksuit. ‘Registration of birth. And I’ve wiggled it in his face. “Where was you, nine months back from this? You was in fucking Winson Green, that’s where. I’ve stuffed your wife and I’ve knocked her up and all. Your boy, he ain’t your boy. He’s fucking mine.”
‘Now that was me mistake … I overplayed me hand, you might say. Because he’s like grim fucking death then he is, so that nothing … nothing … So he’s giving me what for on the bare boards of the shed. And as he’s putting me lights out I’m thinking, Well it’s not your day, mate. Should have stayed in bed. But, you know, fair’s fair. See, stuffing other villains’ wives, it’s like a statement. The right of señor you could call it. It says to the bloke: let’s have you. And if he does you he does you. And Mick must have still had the hump because five days later he crippled Damon Susan and went away for his nine, out of me reach.
‘… So I’m lying there, taking me medicine, as you got to do, and who should enter upon the scene, sticking his fucking oar in, but you, you cunt. Now I know Mick give you punishment. But that was my punishment, not yourn. And I’m not having that. Me own son, and all. Me own boy. Did that to his own father … You’re very quiet over there.’
‘Yeah that’s right.’
‘Ooh. May I enquire why?’
It had not been a failure of courage. It had been a failure of inclination — or of appetite. Xan said,
‘Why? Because I’m trying not to corpse, mate. You’re a fucking old joke, you are, boy. Look at you, you fucking old joke.’
‘… Last time your mum come to see him in the nick she was eight months gone. She’s bound herself up. And broke four ribs. “I’ve had him,” she said. He’s said, “Then where is he?” “They’re doing his jaundice at Princess Beatrice.” Ten weeks later she’ve took you to the Green, and Mick said you was a bit little but of course she’s blamed it on the doctors … Dead dirty, your mum. Like your sister. Loved me muck on her face. Still in your chair are you?’
Joseph Andrews got to his feet — and the terrible moonbright dots of the trainers began to dance their dance, barely skimming off the stone floor. ‘I still love a row,’ he said. ‘Ah I still love a good mill. Don’t worry, mate. The hospital’s nice and near.’
‘I don’t see why you uh—’
‘Yeah well I’m turning nasty in me old age … Look at you. All I’ve took from you.’
‘How old are you, Jo? Yeah, and look at the state of him. Gaw, that’s a liberty, eh? That’s a right kick in the arse, what anno domini’s gone and done to you. And there’s no vengeance for it. Why aren’t you not having that? But no. He just bends over and waits for more of the same.’
Joseph Andrews took up position by the door. He seemed to be weighing something in his hands as he intoned, ‘A man fights … with his arsehole. Power comes … in the form of anger, up through the arsehole,’ he said heavily, breathing out. ‘The righteous anger of the just. Up … it comes … up though the arsehole … and into the lining of a man. Come on. Where is it. Let’s see it. Let’s have it.’
Xan observed that Andrews was the sort of man who, in preparation, exhibits not the upper teeth but the lower. He got to his feet and walked towards him, saying,
‘I’m not fighting that. I’m not touching that. You got … you got fucking drool all over your chin. Out of the road, you old joke. You old poof.’
And there seemed to be no question of the upshot till he felt a piercing, a timestopping stab to his forehead. But even if the blow had taken his head clean off there could be no question about the dynamics of the immediate future: the rules governing the motion of bodies under the action of forces. He clattered on and over, and Joseph Andrews buckled beneath him. There came a crack as his coccyx hit the stone, and then a faint whinnying sound, not human, not even organic, like a squawk of stressed metal. The logs and their maggots expectorated and regurgitated, hoiked and phthooked.
‘Me ip,’ he said consideringly. ‘Me replacement’s slid out. And me back and all. Yeah. Here it is.’ And he let out a soft low roar, like a man come in from the cold and at last feeling the warmth of the fire … ‘No, Simon. Rodney, let the man pass. Let him pass. It’s not over, boy. It’s not over.’
Within half an hour Xan was inspecting himself in his brutalist bathroom mirror: the one with the light inside it. There were two curved lesions, like bloodcoloured brackets, half an inch north-west of his eyes.
5. The Sextown Sniper
‘Cora, is this wise? Aren’t we throwing down a challenge to the Sextown Sniper?’
‘The Sextown Sniper never works at night. And never takes headshots. I don’t understand why some people go around in crash-helmets like they do … No one close to me has ever been hit — it’s more like at one remove. Hick Johnsonson, the guy who lost all those toes? He shares a shitbox with Dork Bogarde. I’ll put the roof up now for the freeway. Look at this. We should have taken the surface roads.’
Up ahead, the slowmoving river of crimson. And, to their left, the slowmoving river of yellow, flowing into Lovetown.
‘How gay is Dork? How gay is Jo, in your view? How gay is porno, in your view?’
‘Uh, porno‘s quite gay. And we mean unacknowledged-gay, don’t we. Not straight gay. Cryptogay. For instance, you’d have to be a bit gay to do a double anal, don’t you think? Two men with a girl? Seriously. And triple anal. And a lot of them do gay porno anyway. They get more money because in gay the boys are the girls. No. In gay everyone’s a girl. They call it “gay for pay”. And once something rhymes in America, or alliterates, then it’s a social norm. Jo …’
‘He wants to have them so he does them. And has their wives.’
‘Mm. Hence the love of pain: he’s correcting himself for it. He had plenty of pain this morning. His op. They plugged his hip back in. He’s in raging agony now and he won’t touch his morphine. Hey. Your forehead.’
‘Tried to blind me. His own son.’
‘So you’re not upset?’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes. In the newspaper I described Jo as “another mad prick”. Another — like Mick Meo. I don’t see what difference it makes.’
‘It makes a difference to me. It more or less cancels my reason for going after you in the first place.’
‘That’s true. It also dilutes the incest — if we had. We still share Hebe Meo. Christ: my mum. Oh well. You’ve got to let it be. You can’t go to your death-bed still … still obsessed by your kiddie cot. Easy for me to say. You’re all right I hope?’
‘Yeah. You know, you’ve undermined my magical thinking. The universal seductress — she won’t fly any more. Maybe it’ll be a relief. I’m quitting the vengeance business. And I’m considering quitting the industry. Now that I’m so rich. You know what’s really wrong with porno? Getting older, two of you, sexually, that’s the hardest thing, right? And the best thing, maybe. And porno’s the sworn enemy of that.’
‘… Cora, is Jo done with me?’
‘Well he’s the type, isn’t he. They come back at you. Unless they’re dead they come back at you.’
‘Last night … I called him a poof.’
‘What? Then he’ll come back at you. Listen, I’ll speak to him. He owes me.’
‘Don’t get out. You know, I loved your mother. She was wild, but she was a great sis to me. It killed me for a year when she died. And I love you. But in the right way.’
‘Thanks. And me too. Here’s a secret about the Sextown Sniper. It hasn’t been made public because it’s too sensitive politically. All the chicks would go on strike. The Sextown Sniper’s a woman.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Oh, it’s just the things she leaves in her hides. Eyeline pencils. Knitting-patterns. Recipes. And why else would she never kill anyone?’
So he left Lovetown, home of the gentle, the tender, the loving Sextown Sniper. The commuter flight took him up over Fucktown, which stayed there like a circuit diagram, and towards Los Angeles, arrayed like the stagecape of some old crooner the size of a comet.
6. Men in power
He wrote it over Greenland:
Dear Russia,
I hesitate to set this down, because I am greatly afraid of recurrence — I am very greatly afraid of the misery of recurrence. But I feel like a man who wearily consults an old wound or grievance, and finds it isn’t there.
Over the last few days I think I’ve worked out what my accident did to me. I used to suspect that it had shorn me of certain values — the values of civilisation, more or less. Well it did do that. But it did something else too: it fucked up my talent for love. It fucked it up. Love was still there, but it was love of the wrong kind. There was a terrible agitation in it. An impotent agitation. And now that agitation seems to have gone, retreated, lifted.
General thoughts are not my strength, but here’s a general thought. Men were in power for five million years. Now (where we live) they share it with women. That past has a weight, though we behave as if it doesn’t. We behave as if the transition has been seamlessly achieved. Of course there’s no going back. I went back. As if through a trapdoor I dropped into the past, and we shared that disaster. Still, we should acknowledge the weight of it, the past. Unconsciously, and not for long at a time, men miss women being tractable, and women miss men being decisive; but we can’t say that. All I’m suggesting, perhaps, is that there’s a deficiency of candour (and that’s the thing that’s wrong with what I write — or with what I wrote). It would be surprising if women weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren’t a little crazed by their losses. We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I won’t mind. No, strike that out. You will win, and I will mind, but I’ll probably pretend not to. What I’m saying is that it will take a century to work off those five billennia and consolidate the change. We pretend it is, but the change isn’t yet intact and entire.
My memory is filling out — I can remember Billie saying ‘here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school’ (she rose on her toes as she said it). And that’s the kind of daddy I am going to go back to being, if you give me the chance. I wasn’t quite right, in the head or the heart. Not right, not right. Memory. The only major gap now seems to be Sophie’s birth; it’s still gone, but I’m hoping it will reappear one day. I don’t know why this absence oppresses me so much. Of course I can remember very clearly declining to watch Billie’s caesarian. But I’ve forgotten Sophie’s birth — and I don’t want to be a man who has never watched a woman being born. Naturally I wish I could forget the creature I became, but I can’t and I won’t.
I may have done too much damage. I may have frightened and disgusted you too deeply and lastingly. And there’s one other thing you’re going to have to forgive me for — a strange kind of family entanglement. You’d think it premature (and alarming) if I were to write here about love. So I’ll just say that my profound hope has to do with your generosity. You are too generous not to try to forgive me.
Much has happened. I will tell you everything. I can’t understand why I want to tell you this now, but I do. In the past, when I thought about my father, I used to fantasise that he was allowed occasional glimpses of my life. Now of course he died when I was still married to Pearl. But I used to think: he would work it out, he would put two and two together, and see that I had married you now, and that we had these two girls, Billie and Sophie. I don’t believe he can do that. But it would be good and right if he was allowed to, every now and then — the privilege expiring after a couple of generations, the story discreetly fading from view when the children are about sixty-five. And when we’re dead, I should be allowed to watch the boys, and you and I should be allowed to watch the girls.
Epithalamium.
1. The syrups of the sky
Xan Meo hit Fucktown at four p.m. on February 2, when the Fucktown Shuttle landed at Fucktown’s Felixio International Skyport … All the signs, of course, said Lovetown, as in Welcome to Lovetown. But people very often accidentally called Lovetown Fucktown. It was clearly something Lovetown had had to get used to.
First, at LAX, he was required to pick up his suitcase and clear it through Immigration. This wait at the luggage carousel, he realised, was an interlude of enforced, of mandated ennui. It wasn’t like standing at a bus-stop with nothing to read: the bus, when it came, would announce itself; and there were other things to look at. No, you had to go on watching, staring; you had to go on performing humble mental tasks involving the differentiation of shape; you had to go on dully imagining dull complication, dull delay. A lanky Englishman was talking fearfully to his mobile phone: ‘It’s going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s stopped going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it …’ And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been bored, and this was what it was like. It was like civilisation. Because you’re never bored, are you, when you’re always raring to fuck or fight.
A courtesy car transferred him to the second airfield. Here the little toytown terminal contained a busy, frisky, jittery throng: multicoloured lovebirds massing ecstatically for the long flight south. Xan felt further depersonalised by the open and unsmiling use, hereabouts, of the byname Fucktown — as in ‘LA — San Diego with a stopover in Fucktown’, ‘What takes you to Fucktown?’ and (from a man in uniform) ‘And is Fucktown your final destination?’ For an instant, as he stood beneath the blatting, clacking information-board, he saw, or thought he saw, the directive ‘14:05: FUCKTOWN 5D LAST CALL.’ The twirling cubes quickly corrected themselves, with a paparazzo flutter. Lovetown’s other cognomen seemed to be used only in reference to the Sextown Sniper …
In the plane his consciousness of anomaly, of regrettable innovation, persisted and ramified. It took him several minutes to identify an important absence — that of children. All planes have children on them. But not the shuttle to Lovetown: no babies, bassinets, no hefted bundles. Well Lovetown was a babyless place, he supposed. It was Adult. There were teenage passengers on board, male and female, who couldn’t possibly be destined for erotic employment; but Lovetown needed its hatcheck girls, its busboys and carboys, just like anywhere else. And some of the older people maintained a patina of childishness — the cartoon, the picture book. As he returned from the toilet he noticed that some men and women got younger, or older, fast, as you walked towards them: about five years for every row of seats.
Surrounded by tans of butterscotch and eggyolk, by sculpted puppyfat in tanktop T-shirts, with noses too small or hair too big or mouths too wide, too full, and engaged in ceaseless laughter, as if the passengers were the unified audience of a coruscating comedy … The stewardesses in their blue suits looked more normal, less stylised in mien and gesture, than the intransigent titterers they tended. The Captain put them down in Lovetown, and the tube of canned sex emptied itself in relays of tits and pits and zits.
Again by courtesy car he was driven to the U Hotel, past suburban gardens of brown grass and haggard cacti. Xan read about it in the complimentary Lovetown Journal, fished from the pouch of the seat in front: the U Hotel belonged to a chain whose owner had earned 78 billion dollars for realising that w was the only non-monosyllable in the English alphabet. Scrapping the supposed abbreviation, which had human beings gabbling out nine syllables, and replacing it with three other syllables chosen at random (or, indeed, with the unabbreviated phrase ‘world wide web’) would save global businesstime half a decade per day …
As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire and mudslide, of stripmall, freeway and gridlock, of hatefuck, cockout and boxback, of blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue.
‘Hatefuck evolved very naturally in a way,’ said the voice of Karla White, ‘because there had never been … any love lost between the actors and the actresses. The girls earn five or six times more than the men, and the gap goes on widening. As you can imagine, the scenarios for Hatefuck are extremely monotonous. “So this is the big guy, huh?” “You’d better believe it, bitch.” “Have you taken your pill like a good little boy?” And so on. And she’ll ask him about the car he drives, if any, and the square-footage of his shitbox in Fulgencio Falls. Then came Cockout.’
‘Cockout,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Cockout,’ said Karla White.
Xan went on to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Down at the desk they had told him about the English journalist who was recently arrested and jailed for smoking a cigarette in his room. They had also given him Karla’s package: the script of Crown Sugar, the audiotape (‘Background’), and his docket for the courtesy car which, the following morning, would take him to Dolorosa Drive …
‘Cockout is a sub-genre, or an anti-genre, within Hatefuck. Much prized for its rarity, Cockout occurs when the man actually succeeds in arousing the woman — to such a point where she stops calling him a piece of shit and starts offering encouragement or even praise. The father of Cockout, Lover, Trash My Ass, was an uncontrollable hit. Nothing like Princess Lolita, but very considerable business.
‘Very soon, “I cocked her out” became the pet boast of the porno male, “He cocked me out” the pet peeve of the porno female. But its rarity created pressure, giving rise to a further sub-genre, Bullshit Cockout. Bullshit Cockout is when the — usually very minor — porno female pretends, after grim resistance, to get herself cocked out. And a lot of ten-year-old porno started being recycled as, in effect, Bullshit Cockout, suggesting that that was what porno was, all along: Bullshit Cockout.’
Below, Xan abruptly noticed, in about half of the thirty or forty plotlike gardens he could see, pornography was being made: little brown bodies around little blue pools.
‘True Cockout seemed to throw a lifeline to the porno male — to begin with, anyway. Every morning, as he thumbed his way to work, there was always the sustaining dream of getting hold of a headlining actress and cocking her out. The grunts, the poor stiffs, started rating each other by their cockouts. You know, stats and averages — like baseball. There was even an actor called Cockout. Kirk Cockout. He sure didn’t last long … Because Cockout was another poisoned chalice for the porno male. After a while no girl would even consider working with a guy who had cocked her out — or cocked out any of her friends. Porno men with any kind of rep for cockout stopped getting phonecalls. Then they started fearing cockout. A further humiliation was on its way in the form of Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
The sun was dropping down over the shoulder of the building. He leafed through the twelve-page script of Crown Sugar. In his only scene, Xan was supposed to exchange some words with Charisma Trixxx and then watch her perform with Sir Dork Bogarde (as follows: ‘Blow. Doggy. Cowgirl. Reverse Cowgirl. Facial’). His lines were not difficult or numerous but he was surprised by the ease with which he got them by heart. He paused … Something is happening to me, he thought. He paused, he listened; there was inside him a great hope that he didn’t dare reach for; with it, or instead of it, might come pain and grief of the same size. The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beautysleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. He went through his lines again, in his head. They were there.
‘Which brings us to the heart of it. This is just my view, of course, but I hold it for reasons less obvious than they may appear. Boxback. Ill-named, I think. And containing a serious structural flaw … Classic Boxback is simply premature ejaculation — inflicted by the woman. The more premature the better. Now it’s certainly very humiliating for the man, because he has to go again, much diminished. So: the shower, the pill, the wait, the headache, the hatefuck. But this new footage will precede the earlier ejaculation. Unlike Cockout, Boxback leaves no filmed evidence of its own achievement. And then there’s the question of the Facial.’
‘The Facial.’
‘The Facial. Even the most rigorous Hatefuck demands the Facial. Market force number one demands the Facial. And Boxback never even tried to do without it. So what kind of victory is that? Sending the grunt on his way with a sneer and a taunt when you’ve got his come all over your chin? The Facial is there, always, because the customer wants it to be there. What do men want? They want the Facial. And it’s the one sexual act that barely exists outside porno. A prostitute might do it, but a free woman, on her knees? That’s another good reason for calling the Facial what they call it: the Money Shot.
‘You know … They sometimes call it the Popshot. They don’t call it the Momshot. Because, at one remove or other, you get the feeling: it’s how Daddy would have liked it. Beauty and the Beast, innocence and its opposite. And the woman looks up, from her knees, at someone far more powerful than any lover …’
He drank half a bottle of wine, out on the balcony, with his early dinner. His equanimity now tired and wavered, and the evening clouds looked like wigs — toupees, perukes, the tawdry syrups of the sky. But then came Venus, with a pale aura, like a set of silver eyelashes, and simpering down at him. And then came the quarter-moon, seen at an unfamiliar angle, as if from somewhere behind, like a platonically perfect breast.
At nine o’clock there was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’
It was the hoary bellboy, who offered him a bouquet of the most hideous flowers he had ever seen: redface and yellowtongue. Who is it? Joseph Andrews.
Xan checked: yes: it was still what he wanted.
2. Sickout at Dolorosa Drive
During thirty months of activity the Sextown Sniper seemed to have evolved a set of rules, or restraints: no high-velocity bullets, no headshots or heartshots, no freeway hits causing extra traffic backups, no incursions into Tuxedo Terrace or Dolorosa Drive where core property values might be undermined, no sarcastic notes beginning ‘Grieve, blind worm’ or ‘I am God’ for the mayor and the SSVPD, no targeting of Meso-Americans, no targeting of help of any kind, no targeting of the very young, the very old. And if a pointy-bearded Director of Photography got grazed across the ankle, if a towel-boy or a makeup-girl lost a finger or two, if Charity Divine had her hairstyle scorched or Schlong Gielgud stopped one in the rump — who cared? Porno people cared, but no one cared about porno people and what porno people cared about.
Facing the U Hotel, at ten-fifteen the next morning, the sights of the sniper, moving, ranging, from face to face: this one, that one. The circular frame holding a rounded simulacrum, like a miniature kept in a locket — the faces of those that are loved and lost. In its crosshairs the face of a porter, the face of an arriving porno star, the face of Xan Meo, the face of the delivery-man with the potplant over his shoulder.
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything.’
But before all that he needed to be delivered to Dolorosa Drive, and he needed to climb out of the courtesy car, and enter the mansion (there was a different porno crew, from some earlier shift, coming the other way), and kiss Karla White, which proved difficult to do, with the telephonic mouthpiece round her neck like a chinguard … She wore a two-piece black business suit, which faintly sparkled as if with motes of coaldust, and black heels.
‘You’re fine,’ she said, in her warm, deep, accentless voice. ‘You don’t have to change. You’re fine. I was hoping you’d have lunch with me tomorrow at my house on the beach. I’ll send a car.’
‘So I don’t have to wear a crown or anything.’
‘You’re Rameses the Great,’ she said, ‘but you’re on a time-travel vacation from BC to LA. With some of your entourage. You’re fine … I apologise. Charisma Trixxx is keeping us waiting.’
‘They all do that,’ said the man in the white dressing-gown. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent out of a hundred of them do that. How come I don’t have one single line?’
‘Xan, say hello to Dork Bogarde. You don’t have any lines, Dork, because you’re a mute.’
‘Ah. Hence why …’
To Xan she went on, ‘In narrative terms this is what’s known as a side-fuck. It gives the seventeen-year-old a breather.’ Karla’s head registered a slight jolt and she walked away with a hand raised to her earphone, saying, ‘Charisma? Charisma … Am I? … Now why’s that? …’
Xan walked around the room. Such a scene was not unfamiliar to him: the half-dozen technicians and handymen and general noisemakers, the girl with the clipboard, the coffee-urn, the pretzel-bowl. On a white sofa beneath a window sat a young black man of impressive, even heroic appearance: representatively heroic. He stood up and introduced himself as Burl Rhody: Karla’s bodyguard.
‘Charisma’s a noshow,’ she now said.
‘A first-timer noshows?’ said Dork. ‘What nextly? They noshow their fuck-tests?’
‘The girls are calling it a herpes sickout,’ said Karla, ‘but what it amounts to is a three-day strike.’
‘Charisma! Hello?’ said Dork loudly into the air. ‘There are other people on the planet, Charisma! Hello? Hello?’
‘Who can we get?’ asked the girl with the clipboard.
Karla said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it.’
For a moment Dork’s face was a mask of dental work. Then he assumed a solemn, almost liturgical expression, and rose to his feet, saying,
‘In all my many years I have served in the industry … never has it been bestowed upon me such an honour like this. A legend such as Karla White. I can assure you, dear lady, that I will master you with uh, with true sincerithy … and respecth.’
He shrugged off his robe and stood there … It wasn’t a bodybuilder’s pose, not quite. But the face was now nobly half averted; the right knee was bent inwards; the toes were flexed; the thumb and forefinger of each hand were joined in tight circles.
Matter-of-factly unbuttoning her jacket, Karla said, ‘I’m sorry, Dork. You’ll get your two-fifty or whatever it is and there’s a car outside.’ She turned on her heel. As she climbed the stairs she said, ‘Burl. Would you mind taking a quick shower?’
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything. But know that I could have you blinded for addressing me with your eyes, trinket, because I am as the Sun.’
‘True, O King … This youth who stands before you is not as other men are. He cannot speak and though his manly parts, as you see, are right and comely, he cannot spend. Do you understand me, Sire?’
‘Perfectly, fraction.’
‘So he must to the eunuchs. The milk of propagation is denied him.’
‘To the eunuchs he goes then, instrument. Him, pawn, no dynasty awaits.’
‘As the most skilled of all the whores in the slave harem, as the most schooled in all the nauseous arts, haply I can yet bring him to blossom.’
‘Do so, toy.’
‘Yet I have a further design, great sire.’
‘Speak it, bauble.’
‘As I serve this youth, so I would fain serve thee.’
‘Puppet, begin.’
Karla swung down not to her knees but her haunches, in a catsuit made of coins.
3. The principle of lullabies
The next morning it was all over the Journal, pushed down the front page only by a further strike from the Sextown Sniper (a middle-aged porno star called Hick Johnsonson had been shot in the foot while reclining poolside at his home in Fulgencio Falls): ‘Reports Of Major Cockout On Dolorosa Drive’.
Xan sat in the hotel restaurant with the Journal propped up against his coffee-pot. Two tables away a young couple, damply agleam under a coating of man-tan, were acrimoniously negotiating a full-scale dinner (with two kinds of wine), watched by a camera and a klieg light. He read on:
It was at first believed that the surprise Cockout was the handiwork of Sir Dork Bogarde, who has claimed several Cockouts in recent years, and that the Cockout was sustained by Charisma Trixxx, a first-timer, and so theoretically vulnerable to Cockout.
But sources have revealed that the attractive newcomer was not present yesterday on Dolorosa Drive. ‘I think I got my wires crossed,’ explains Trixxx. ‘I was expecting the work but my agent said the shoot had been postponed.’ Trixxx denies all knowledge of the herpes sickout called by Comptroller Dimity Qwest of the LUWA (see page 2). Dork Bogarde was unavailable for comment.
It appears, however, that the artists involved were Burl Rhody, an industry jouneyman who quit the business some years ago, and legend Karla White, now of Karla White Productions. ‘I swear on my mother,’ said a crewmember who prefers not to be named, ‘it was classic Cockout. Beyond hot. He totally cocked her out.’
page 5: Dolorosa Drive: A Community Comes To Terms With Cockout
Editorial: Suspicion Of Bullshit In Karla White Cockout
He had the chauffeur drop him off a short distance from the house. As he turned into the drive he saw that Burl Rhody (non-coincidentally, Xan would later decide) was halfway down it, at the wheel of a blue convertible. Burl pulled up.
‘She’s given me the day off. And the night.’
These words were spoken with apparently effortless neutrality. Xan noticed a copy of the Lovetown Journal on Burl’s passenger-seat.
Burl said, ‘It was Bullshit.’ He sank back for a moment.
Whether Burl was happier than usual Xan couldn’t tell. But now he smiled with torpid nonchalance and said,
‘You know what I was thinking, at the end? I thought, God I’m old. Porno … it’s not for lazy people. Dork Bogarde is a celebrated asshole, but in general they aren’t such a bad crowd. They look out for each other. Karla,’ he said, ‘Karla spends half her life on the girls’ rights and the health shit. That’s how fucked-up she is.’
Xan said, ‘He’s not here, is he? Andrews — Joseph Andrews.’
Burl didn’t answer, but his frown told Xan no. His rather too affronted frown — no, not here, not now, not yet. He slowly engaged first gear, an almost hectic act, it seemed, and said,
‘I’ve lived in the apartment over Karla White’s garage for five years. And yesterday was our first time. Not our first attempt. Our first time. You know what she does when she gets aroused? She weeps.’
‘She weeps?’
‘Hot tears. Then everything stops. She stops. Then you stop.’
She wore her usual white dress, her usual shallow sandals. The trouble was that he thought he loved her.
On the upper balcony she poured him another glass of the skull-chilling wine and said, ‘Don’t you think we’re all being incredibly cool about the comet?’
‘Cool?’
‘All women hate space. I hate space. I suppose you’ve taken an interest in it, the comet.’
He shrugged, in the affirmative. Before them lay the great beast of the Pacific Ocean.
‘Then the first thing you’ll have learnt is that comets aren’t like asteroids, and you can’t chart them. Because they’re subject to non-gravitational forces like explosions and sublimations. They say it’s going to miss.’
‘Or shear.’
‘Or shear. It’s the size of Los Angeles. And it’s going five times faster than a bullet. And the latest is that it’s going to miss by fifty miles. Fifty miles.’
‘It won’t hit. They wouldn’t have told us anything about it if they thought it was going to hit. They’ve done studies. Telling us about it would just add to the social cost. It won’t hit.’
‘If it does, the sky would ignite and then turn pitch black.’
‘… And you’d be pleased.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she said in a wronged voice.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh you mean the void and nothing mattering and everything being allowed. I don’t think nothing matters.’
Did he? Did the comet matter? Watching her shape move around from room to room made him think that it had already happened: the end of the thing which is called world. Every few seconds he thought about reaching for her, but his arms, his hands felt loth and cold.
‘Nobody cares about the comet because it’s not our fault.’ After a while she said, ‘I wish I hadn’t been quite so rough on that sap Dork Bogarde. Are you hungry? Nor am I. Say if you are.’
The trouble was that he thought he loved her. And love had not guided him well in recent weeks and months, with his wife, his daughter. What kind of love was it? It seemed to have its life somewhere between what he felt for Russia and what he felt for Billie. The thing that further distinguished his love for Karla was that it persistently presented him with the cathartic emotions, those of pity and terror. In her presence, he was afraid and he was sorry. He wanted to protect her from all things — including things like himself. And his senses ached … The waves were for now holding good order, each one bristling up for sudden and ruthless and thrillingly opportune assault, and then pouncing, coming down hard, gnashing and frothing and enveloping with its teeth. And how bloodymindedly they came steaming into the boulders: the orgasmic impact, and then they shouldered their way into rockpool after rockpool, making waves that then had to be made again, after regrapplings, reslitherings.
Something was happening to him. It felt like a flow in the brain: rearrangements of currents and temperatures … Suddenly the sky went an olive colour, and the sea turned white.
‘Tormenta,’ she said.
‘I want to lie down. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I’ll be all right if I lie down.’
She took him to her bedroom and left him alone to shed some clothes. He was already half asleep when she returned.
‘I’ll put this on you. The principle of lullabies — it’s not the song. It’s not that the song soothes and dopes you. The point is that you know the singer’s still there. I can’t sing, but I’ll go on patting this shawl so you know I’m still there.’
While he slept and turned he kept remembering the final minutes of the sex-act he had witnessed on Dolorosa Drive.
Karla was on her knees. She was about to complete a presumably ancient human activity. But it didn’t look ancient. It looked as though it had been invented earlier that day — or was now, in fact, in the process of coming into being. For the forward thrust the arms were clasped about Burl Rhody’s waist; his phallus, ideally black, seemed to constitute an obstacle: she couldn’t go past it, she couldn’t go round it. No, she had to go through it, as if her real goal lay somewhere within his loins. On the reverse thrust, her hands were placed flatpalmed on his hipbones, to achieve greater traction, and each withdrawal ended with a tremendous smack of the lips before Rhody was as vociferously reengulfed. Then all was speed; and after a while he found himself thinking of a child with a party-whistle. And then she was Billie, or even Sophie, with yoghurt or vanilla icecream all over her face.
Consciousness was upon him. Before he opened his eyes he heard the sound of breathing. More than this, he heard sleep — the economical downdraughts which were the sound that sleep made … He found he was some way down the bed, under the sheet and the shawl; and the thing between his legs was a harsh concentration of gristle. He turned over: there was Karla’s apparently headless body, and the sleepless and incorruptible interrogation of her breasts. He moved towards them.
Soon he heard her somnolent sigh of approval and felt her hands on his neck and hair as he squeezed and kissed. Time passed.
‘I love you, I love you,’ she said.
And when she started to weep, he paused, expecting her to stop (then he’d stop). But she didn’t stop. Like Billie when she wept (faintly incredulous, naïvely eloquent), he thought. Her thighs were apart, and now his hand loomed. But then he reached out to her face and found that her cheeks were dry. Their eyes met. All was subtracted from him; and he turned away.
After several beats of his heart Xan said, ‘See? … Love doesn’t like fear. Size zero.’
‘Oh, I suppose you mean it should be tucked in nicely while you sprint for your life down the beach … That’s what they never say in the books or anywhere else. With a little girl you’re big, even when you’re little. You ought to go ahead with Billie. We get over it.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘No we don’t,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’ And with a whip of the sheet she was gone.
When he was woken again, this time by the storm, he got out of bed and reached for his clothes as if they were items of body-armour. The thunder was escalatory: fusillade, cannonade, heavy artillery, the fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike. He opened the bedroom door. There was a figure on the balcony, smoking.
She said, ‘God has got the movers in. There will be breakages. No, we don’t. We don’t get over it. Obviously. In bed we don’t know our rights.’
And he thought: obviously. Because that is what you do, Daddy, when you do that, when you play that game, when you go down that road. You place them in another dimension where they’re always one step behind, one step beyond.
‘Do you want to see Jo now?’ she asked. ‘You still want that?’
He said yes, but with a reluctance, and a sadness, that he took to be a failure of courage. ‘Are you my enemy?’
‘I used to be your enemy.’ And she told him who she was.
‘… Jesus Christ, Cora.’
Beyond, arthritic feelers of lightning were lancing out, sideways, upwards, forming coastlines with many fjords. There was a repeated jumpcut effect, and shifting blocks of nightscape.
Cora Susan waited with the keys.
4. Anger of the just
‘Come in, dear. Come in out of the wet. Xan … They’re waiting for you, dear, through there. Paquita’ll get you anything you need. Bit of business.’
Joseph Andrews pushed open a red-leather swing door with a porthole in its brow. Around a cardtable you could see a fat hot man in braces, a small natty figure in a borsalino and a chalk-striped suit, a Chinese woman with a pair of sunglasses lodged in her quiff, and the set of a pair of unknowable shoulders. Cora went inside and the door swung shut behind her.
‘You’ve got some arsehole coming here, haven’t you mate? Are you daft or what? This way: follow me. Follow me.’
Xan was led into a long low room: its recreation of an English pub was not entirely literal, but there were damp beermats and glistening black plastic ashtrays on the round tables, as well as a dartboard, and horsebrass and horsehair and prints of racing scenes. A log fire drew noisily in the hearth, like emphysema, with additional sputters and spatters.
‘First, the past,’ he said, and lengthily exhaled. ‘I’ll say this for Mick Meo: you’d have to hurt him. I’ll say this: you knew you was in a row when you was in a row with Mick Meo. You’d have to hurt him. A wall. A drop. We had it out the once back in them days, before he come on board. And it went on a bit but I done him. Six months later, when he’s up and about again, he come on board and there was no hard feelings whatsoever. Him and me, we’d have a drink. On several occasions he invited me to his home. Consistently. I’d have little Leda on me knee. This was before your time, son.
‘Then come the liberty. We was both in Strangeways. He’d pulled a three for grand larceny, whilst I was serving me six for uh … for malicious wounding. Now. Our mate Tony Odgers has lost remission for doing the two screws who’ve burnt a letter from his wife — in his face. I’ve said to Mick, “I’m not having that. I’ll do the Governor.” And Mick’s gone, “I’ll do him.” And I’ve gone, “No I’ll do him.” And Mick’s gone, “I’m not having that. No I’ll do him.” Deadlock.’
Said with a lingering stress on the last consonant, like the beginning of a cough, and joining all the other coughs in the log fire.
‘So we’ve had a word with the Chaplain. It’s arranged. A straightener, with gloves, in the main quad. It sometimes happened in them days. You sort it out, with the uh, permission of the Governor. The Governor didn’t know what it’s about, of course …’
Xan said, ‘What was it about?’
‘… About who’d do the Governor.’
‘Yeah but who’d do the Governor? The winner or the loser?’
‘Are you all right mate? … Well in the end they’ve had to drag us off ourselves. We was in the same ward in the hospital, but I’ve had it the worst because I’ve done one of the screws who’ve truncheoned us apart. Mick come out in the morning — and then come back that afternoon. In an appalling condition. I could tell by the state of him what he’s done: he’s done the Governor! Well I’m not having that. In the middle of the night I’ve slid out of me bed and crawled across the floor on me hands and knees and started giving him a whacking. Then they’ve shipped me off to Gartree. And after that, it’s a funny thing: Mick and me was never on the out at the same time. And never in the same prison. And for them twenty years the liberty’s festered …
‘Then I’m over to London from Dublin: bit of business. I’ve heard he’s come home and I’ve gone to the yard and I’ve called him out. He’s said, “What’s all this?” “What’s all this? You done the Governor, you cunt.” Then he reckons that he’s worked that one off: “Me in me hospital bed and you clawing me fucking stitches apart.” So I’ve gone, “All right. You want a liberty. Here’s a liberty. Are you married to a fucking elephant?”’
Andrews paused. The log fire gobbed and hawked and retched. It, too, was like England: bus shelters, station waiting-rooms, the pub Gents on a Friday night.
‘When’s your birthday, cock?’
Xan told him.
‘No it ain’t. “Your wife a fucky nelephant needs thirteen months to have a fucking baby?” And I’ve took the piece of paper from me pocket,’ said Andrews, taking the piece of paper from his pocket — the zippered pouch of his oilblack tracksuit. ‘Registration of birth. And I’ve wiggled it in his face. “Where was you, nine months back from this? You was in fucking Winson Green, that’s where. I’ve stuffed your wife and I’ve knocked her up and all. Your boy, he ain’t your boy. He’s fucking mine.”
‘Now that was me mistake … I overplayed me hand, you might say. Because he’s like grim fucking death then he is, so that nothing … nothing … So he’s giving me what for on the bare boards of the shed. And as he’s putting me lights out I’m thinking, Well it’s not your day, mate. Should have stayed in bed. But, you know, fair’s fair. See, stuffing other villains’ wives, it’s like a statement. The right of señor you could call it. It says to the bloke: let’s have you. And if he does you he does you. And Mick must have still had the hump because five days later he crippled Damon Susan and went away for his nine, out of me reach.
‘… So I’m lying there, taking me medicine, as you got to do, and who should enter upon the scene, sticking his fucking oar in, but you, you cunt. Now I know Mick give you punishment. But that was my punishment, not yourn. And I’m not having that. Me own son, and all. Me own boy. Did that to his own father … You’re very quiet over there.’
‘Yeah that’s right.’
‘Ooh. May I enquire why?’
It had not been a failure of courage. It had been a failure of inclination — or of appetite. Xan said,
‘Why? Because I’m trying not to corpse, mate. You’re a fucking old joke, you are, boy. Look at you, you fucking old joke.’
‘… Last time your mum come to see him in the nick she was eight months gone. She’s bound herself up. And broke four ribs. “I’ve had him,” she said. He’s said, “Then where is he?” “They’re doing his jaundice at Princess Beatrice.” Ten weeks later she’ve took you to the Green, and Mick said you was a bit little but of course she’s blamed it on the doctors … Dead dirty, your mum. Like your sister. Loved me muck on her face. Still in your chair are you?’
Joseph Andrews got to his feet — and the terrible moonbright dots of the trainers began to dance their dance, barely skimming off the stone floor. ‘I still love a row,’ he said. ‘Ah I still love a good mill. Don’t worry, mate. The hospital’s nice and near.’
‘I don’t see why you uh—’
‘Yeah well I’m turning nasty in me old age … Look at you. All I’ve took from you.’
‘How old are you, Jo? Yeah, and look at the state of him. Gaw, that’s a liberty, eh? That’s a right kick in the arse, what anno domini’s gone and done to you. And there’s no vengeance for it. Why aren’t you not having that? But no. He just bends over and waits for more of the same.’
Joseph Andrews took up position by the door. He seemed to be weighing something in his hands as he intoned, ‘A man fights … with his arsehole. Power comes … in the form of anger, up through the arsehole,’ he said heavily, breathing out. ‘The righteous anger of the just. Up … it comes … up though the arsehole … and into the lining of a man. Come on. Where is it. Let’s see it. Let’s have it.’
Xan observed that Andrews was the sort of man who, in preparation, exhibits not the upper teeth but the lower. He got to his feet and walked towards him, saying,
‘I’m not fighting that. I’m not touching that. You got … you got fucking drool all over your chin. Out of the road, you old joke. You old poof.’
And there seemed to be no question of the upshot till he felt a piercing, a timestopping stab to his forehead. But even if the blow had taken his head clean off there could be no question about the dynamics of the immediate future: the rules governing the motion of bodies under the action of forces. He clattered on and over, and Joseph Andrews buckled beneath him. There came a crack as his coccyx hit the stone, and then a faint whinnying sound, not human, not even organic, like a squawk of stressed metal. The logs and their maggots expectorated and regurgitated, hoiked and phthooked.
‘Me ip,’ he said consideringly. ‘Me replacement’s slid out. And me back and all. Yeah. Here it is.’ And he let out a soft low roar, like a man come in from the cold and at last feeling the warmth of the fire … ‘No, Simon. Rodney, let the man pass. Let him pass. It’s not over, boy. It’s not over.’
Within half an hour Xan was inspecting himself in his brutalist bathroom mirror: the one with the light inside it. There were two curved lesions, like bloodcoloured brackets, half an inch north-west of his eyes.
5. The Sextown Sniper
‘Cora, is this wise? Aren’t we throwing down a challenge to the Sextown Sniper?’
‘The Sextown Sniper never works at night. And never takes headshots. I don’t understand why some people go around in crash-helmets like they do … No one close to me has ever been hit — it’s more like at one remove. Hick Johnsonson, the guy who lost all those toes? He shares a shitbox with Dork Bogarde. I’ll put the roof up now for the freeway. Look at this. We should have taken the surface roads.’
Up ahead, the slowmoving river of crimson. And, to their left, the slowmoving river of yellow, flowing into Lovetown.
‘How gay is Dork? How gay is Jo, in your view? How gay is porno, in your view?’
‘Uh, porno‘s quite gay. And we mean unacknowledged-gay, don’t we. Not straight gay. Cryptogay. For instance, you’d have to be a bit gay to do a double anal, don’t you think? Two men with a girl? Seriously. And triple anal. And a lot of them do gay porno anyway. They get more money because in gay the boys are the girls. No. In gay everyone’s a girl. They call it “gay for pay”. And once something rhymes in America, or alliterates, then it’s a social norm. Jo …’
‘He wants to have them so he does them. And has their wives.’
‘Mm. Hence the love of pain: he’s correcting himself for it. He had plenty of pain this morning. His op. They plugged his hip back in. He’s in raging agony now and he won’t touch his morphine. Hey. Your forehead.’
‘Tried to blind me. His own son.’
‘So you’re not upset?’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes. In the newspaper I described Jo as “another mad prick”. Another — like Mick Meo. I don’t see what difference it makes.’
‘It makes a difference to me. It more or less cancels my reason for going after you in the first place.’
‘That’s true. It also dilutes the incest — if we had. We still share Hebe Meo. Christ: my mum. Oh well. You’ve got to let it be. You can’t go to your death-bed still … still obsessed by your kiddie cot. Easy for me to say. You’re all right I hope?’
‘Yeah. You know, you’ve undermined my magical thinking. The universal seductress — she won’t fly any more. Maybe it’ll be a relief. I’m quitting the vengeance business. And I’m considering quitting the industry. Now that I’m so rich. You know what’s really wrong with porno? Getting older, two of you, sexually, that’s the hardest thing, right? And the best thing, maybe. And porno’s the sworn enemy of that.’
‘… Cora, is Jo done with me?’
‘Well he’s the type, isn’t he. They come back at you. Unless they’re dead they come back at you.’
‘Last night … I called him a poof.’
‘What? Then he’ll come back at you. Listen, I’ll speak to him. He owes me.’
‘Don’t get out. You know, I loved your mother. She was wild, but she was a great sis to me. It killed me for a year when she died. And I love you. But in the right way.’
‘Thanks. And me too. Here’s a secret about the Sextown Sniper. It hasn’t been made public because it’s too sensitive politically. All the chicks would go on strike. The Sextown Sniper’s a woman.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Oh, it’s just the things she leaves in her hides. Eyeline pencils. Knitting-patterns. Recipes. And why else would she never kill anyone?’
So he left Lovetown, home of the gentle, the tender, the loving Sextown Sniper. The commuter flight took him up over Fucktown, which stayed there like a circuit diagram, and towards Los Angeles, arrayed like the stagecape of some old crooner the size of a comet.
6. Men in power
He wrote it over Greenland:
Dear Russia,
I hesitate to set this down, because I am greatly afraid of recurrence — I am very greatly afraid of the misery of recurrence. But I feel like a man who wearily consults an old wound or grievance, and finds it isn’t there.
Over the last few days I think I’ve worked out what my accident did to me. I used to suspect that it had shorn me of certain values — the values of civilisation, more or less. Well it did do that. But it did something else too: it fucked up my talent for love. It fucked it up. Love was still there, but it was love of the wrong kind. There was a terrible agitation in it. An impotent agitation. And now that agitation seems to have gone, retreated, lifted.
General thoughts are not my strength, but here’s a general thought. Men were in power for five million years. Now (where we live) they share it with women. That past has a weight, though we behave as if it doesn’t. We behave as if the transition has been seamlessly achieved. Of course there’s no going back. I went back. As if through a trapdoor I dropped into the past, and we shared that disaster. Still, we should acknowledge the weight of it, the past. Unconsciously, and not for long at a time, men miss women being tractable, and women miss men being decisive; but we can’t say that. All I’m suggesting, perhaps, is that there’s a deficiency of candour (and that’s the thing that’s wrong with what I write — or with what I wrote). It would be surprising if women weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren’t a little crazed by their losses. We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I won’t mind. No, strike that out. You will win, and I will mind, but I’ll probably pretend not to. What I’m saying is that it will take a century to work off those five billennia and consolidate the change. We pretend it is, but the change isn’t yet intact and entire.
My memory is filling out — I can remember Billie saying ‘here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school’ (she rose on her toes as she said it). And that’s the kind of daddy I am going to go back to being, if you give me the chance. I wasn’t quite right, in the head or the heart. Not right, not right. Memory. The only major gap now seems to be Sophie’s birth; it’s still gone, but I’m hoping it will reappear one day. I don’t know why this absence oppresses me so much. Of course I can remember very clearly declining to watch Billie’s caesarian. But I’ve forgotten Sophie’s birth — and I don’t want to be a man who has never watched a woman being born. Naturally I wish I could forget the creature I became, but I can’t and I won’t.
I may have done too much damage. I may have frightened and disgusted you too deeply and lastingly. And there’s one other thing you’re going to have to forgive me for — a strange kind of family entanglement. You’d think it premature (and alarming) if I were to write here about love. So I’ll just say that my profound hope has to do with your generosity. You are too generous not to try to forgive me.
Much has happened. I will tell you everything. I can’t understand why I want to tell you this now, but I do. In the past, when I thought about my father, I used to fantasise that he was allowed occasional glimpses of my life. Now of course he died when I was still married to Pearl. But I used to think: he would work it out, he would put two and two together, and see that I had married you now, and that we had these two girls, Billie and Sophie. I don’t believe he can do that. But it would be good and right if he was allowed to, every now and then — the privilege expiring after a couple of generations, the story discreetly fading from view when the children are about sixty-five. And when we’re dead, I should be allowed to watch the boys, and you and I should be allowed to watch the girls.
Epithalamium.
CHAPTER TEN
1. February 14 (2.19 p.m.): 101 Heavy
With furious precision the maddened corpse of Royce Traynor delivered its final, smashing blow, and he was gone, away, spinning end over end through the plane-shaking clouds …
The pressurised air in 101 Heavy now fled it too: a squall of dust and grit. The mid-section of the cabin floor instantly collapsed, severing all remaining hydraulic lines.
Reynolds felt the bang, the howl like a ricochet, the stinging wind, the harsh vibration. In ragged unison the oxygen-masks dropped and hovered. After a few seconds all the cigarette smoke was replaced by a thin white mist.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Feel it, Nick.
First Officer Nick Chopko: No …
Macmanaman: No quantity. None.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: … You know the ‘feel’ they put into it’s bullshit. It’s just the computer. The yoke’s bullshit.
Macmanaman: Engineer, we’re flying by direct law.
Chopko: And if we reengage?
Macmanaman: We’d get fictitious feel, if anything. Gentlemen, we have no hydraulic control over this aircraft. She’s banking. She’s banking. The throttle, Nick. If you … She’s coming back. She’s coming back … We’re just blundering around up here. We have no flaps and no spoilers. If we can get her down we ‘re going to land at 300 knots with no reverse thrust and no brakes. We don’t need an airport. We need an interstate. Three miles of good road. And one on our present setting. Nick. Brief SAM [System Aircraft Maintenance]. Hal? I’m going to be asking you to line up every kind of rescue and emergency we can get. She’s banking. Come on back …
System Aircraft Maintenance: Copy your situation, one oh one heavy.
Macmanaman: We’re just making grand clockwise circles up here …
SAM: I don’t want to add to your cares, sir. But we’d better start thinking about the NEO window.
Macmanaman: Hey. Come on back. Come on back. Come on back to me.
2. Clint prepares
‘So some so-called 14-year-old’, he typed, ‘has been crying “rape” after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad.’
Have you seen this bird (see photo)?
She looks 16 if she’s a day.
And how was he supposed to tell?
The bloke’d had a few, as he freely admits.
He’s getting on a bit and his eyes aren’t as sharp as they were.
And they say in that part of the woods it was so dark you couldn’t even—
Clint paused. He thought: got to be careful with the medication. Overdo it with the Narcopam and what happens? You’re checking into the hotel with the bird slung over your shoulder.
And who does the judge think he’s kidding?
He’s got the gall to tell us there was ‘no provocation’.
When the bird was wearing a school uniform.
What are we, c**ts?
He was sixty-six hours away from the date with Kate: Valentine’s Day (nice touch). He could see himself parking the Av enger and crossing the road. In a kind of saunter. Hands in hip pockets. Just … looning over the road to her door. Well he was like the boyscouts, wasn’t he: always prepared. The Potentium, the His Voluminousness (supplemented by a booster called Volume Control), the Valium, the Hellcat (Legally Not To Be Used Without Partner’s Permission), the Narcopam (ditto), the Diploma from the Academy. The guy was oozing confidence.
3. Waking in the cold
Joseph Andrews sat before the tape recorder. He looked as if he had just climbed out of the swimming-pool; but his clothes were dry.
‘Come on, Boss. Have half a Nurofen.’
In a strained and trembling voice he said, ‘Fuck off out of it.’
‘You had the local.’
‘Against me will. Ready? And Manfred. You transcribe this now, all right?
‘[Click.] Is it a crime to want to die in me own country? [Click.] Apart from a personal family matter and four or five blokes who know fucking well who they are [click] I pose no threat to society whatsoever. And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, mate.
‘Uh. Take out the “mate” and put in uh …’
He intended to add an evocation of his love of England. But the essence of what he really missed about it was waking in the cold, and feeling the rust in his hipbones, all wired up and saddled to a faint need to shit.
‘Where’s Simon? I need me Simon.’
4. Leather on willow
Brendan was reading it out loud and had come to the last page.
‘“And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, Your Majesty. I’m a confirmed royalist, and of course we all worshipped your mother and father. And it would break my heart if I was obliged to make the enclosed material public. I’m just an old man who wants to lay down his bones in the land of his fathers. I want to hear the chimes of Big Ben, I want to hear the sound of leather on willow at the village green, I want to walk down Worship Street and in through the doors of the World Upside Down. I’m coming into Heathrow on the afternoon of February 13, under my own name, and will take to my farmhouse in rural Essex. And that’s the last you’ll hear of me. But if I’m nicked on my way in, then you know the consequences. Respectfully, Joseph Andrews, Esquire. PS. If you don’t mind me saying, you had some front, didn’t you, claiming it was all a fake? I had half a mind to go public then and there, to get some respect. But wiser voices prevailed. Now you can stick to your guns and hopefully it’ll all pass over quickly for the Princess. What with her mum and all. PPS. I see your cousin offed poor old Jimmy O’Nione down Cold Blow way. I knew Jimmy at Knavesmire, where we did an Inspector together. Jimmy O’Nione was one of the best.”’
Brendan dropped his hands to his lap.
Henry uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
He said, ‘And what is that, Bugger, may I ask?’
‘A DVD, sir … A digital videodisc’
‘Well I suppose we’d better …’
The two men were in Brendan’s rooms in St James’s — not otherwise would such a viewing be possible. Not in any of the wintry palaces, the lashed castles … Brendan said,
‘I’m wondering whether you have to expose yourself to this, sir. I could simply tell you what you needed to know.’
‘Stop babying me, Bugger. Call Love and then lock the door.’
5. February 14 (3.44 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back to me. Come on back to me. No no no no. Wait. Now … Got to stay ahead of her, got to stay ahead of her. Got to lead her. Can’t get behind her.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Captain, say souls on board and fuel remaining.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Three nine nine. Thirty-six seven, and dumping.
SAM: Only differential power. You’re manoeuvring with the throttles … Slats are out?
Macmanaman: Slats? We don’t have any slats. If we can get ourselves down while we’re still horizontal, we’re going to ditch. We’re descending. Ah, now the nose is coming up. Easy. Easy.
Columbia [South Carolina] Approach: Copy your setting, one oh one heavy. The runway is ten thousand feet long.
Macmanaman: Can’t use it. And we’re not going to make Columbia. Find me a place to ditch on that setting. Nick, put the [landing] gear down.
Chopko: What?
Macmanaman: Throw it down.
Reynolds turned to the man in 2A, and she screamed. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘What? … I can’t hear! Take it off!’
‘A smoke-hood. Cost me two-thirty.’
‘Ladies and gentleman,’ said the exalted voice of Robynne Davis. ‘As in all emergency landings we will be evacuating as soon as the aircraft is at rest. Passengers close to the exit doors, those in seats …’
A uniformed man came out of the cockpit. He leant over 2B and whispered something.
‘Ma’am,’ said Hal Ward, in the galley, ‘would you please go to the bathroom and then quietly return to 22D. Business. Captain’s orders.’
The inter-cabin curtains were open, and by straining his neck the man in 2A saw that Mrs Traynor’s new seat was unlike his own. It was slightly narrower, and it faced the other way.
Chopko: Look at our speed.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: The heavies aren’t designed for this. We could just come apart up here.
SAM: Captain, on your present setting you’re going to be coming in right under it.
Macmanaman: What are they saying? Thirty-three, thirty-four?
SAM: Their latest and best is an NEO altitude of twenty-one point four. Repeat, at 17.43. If you’re not yet on the ground you’re going to feel it. Heat and blast.
Macmanaman: And another thing. Watch the nose, Nick. No no no. Pull back, pull back, pull back.
6. What do princesses want?
On screen, the bathroom of the Yellow House: the passageway, the circular concavity of the tub, the mirrors, the towels on their pegs. Brendan flinched as a subtitle gave date and place. He turned. On the sofa the King stared levelly.
The Princess entered, in her tennis whites. She approached, smiling with amusement or satisfaction, and then vanished to the right. The sound of a sigh, the brisk drilling of micturation, the soft percussion of the toilet paper as it ripped. She reappeared with her shirt half-up and her skirt half-down, and limping as she kicked off her shoes. She threw on the taps. She paused for a full minute, examining a blemish on her forearm. Then she undressed carelessly, and in she climbed.
It hadn’t wavered, the watching eye, stupidly imperturbable, like a security monitor. After a while you understood that it had now begun a painfully gradual zoom.
Here came the change of the Princess’s expression — a listening face. The sound of a door opening and closing, and the audible rumour of advent. Then the white shape, still halved by shadow.
The quality of the sound, throughout, had been ticklishly distinct. And now the sudden surge of a human voice.
‘I come from your father’s bed. He sent me here to help you bathe.’ It was He, it was He … He removed her robe, and held out a hand in such a way that the Princess must rise to receive it. He stepped in … The kissed neck and throat, the sponged breasts. The two bodies, one brown and full of gravity, one pale and light. And the two faces: one with its young astonishment and horror, the other with its ancient inclemency.
Brendan turned again. Henry had his arms up on the sofa’s shoulders and his head was bent to one side. Moisture had had time to sink in around his closed eyes.
Some minutes later Brendan said, ‘Sir? I think you …’
Henry sat up and stared. A different scene, now, gloom, luxury, a half-dressed He Zizhen attending to his own naked body, which looked utterly helpless, like a baby waiting to be changed.
‘If it’s any comfort to you, sir, I think we can say this of Miss Zizhen. She was our Enemy’s Enemy.’
‘It is some comfort, surprisingly enough, Bugger. This is over now. Oughtred at one end and the PM at the other. What remains is for us, or for me, to divine what the Princess wants. What do princesses want?’
7. Simon Finger
His crutch was of the sort that went all the way up the arm. Joseph Andrews leant it against the side of his desk and, after some bitter tottering, crashed down into his swivel chair.
‘Sime,’ he said when he was able.
He addressed a small middle-aged man in a chalkstriped suit and with foul eyes, pale round the poster-blue pupil: Simon Finger.
‘Sime, mate. It’s all bollocks, that: me threat. I’m a monarchist, mate. Always have been. And what I got on that lot’d make the royal family disappear. And I couldn’t live with meself with that on me conscience. Knowing I’d done that, I couldn’t rest easy in me grave. They nick me tomorrow, then I’ll take me secret with me. Though Cora always have it, lest need be.’
In his ripe drawl — posher than the King — Simon Finger said, ‘I couldn’t agree more, Jo. It’s a fine institution.’
‘Where are we? Yeah, we’ll be obliging Tony Tobin, Yocker Fitzmaurice, Kev Had and Nolberto Drago. You can do what you want with them other slags, but I want to be there for Nobby Drago.’
For a while Joseph Andrews unsystematically sifted through the papers on his desk. He held up a clipping.
‘Calls me a mad prick. In print. Names me. Places me. As for what he said here the other night: no respect whatsoever. And he would’ve walked away if I’d’ve let him! Wouldn’t stand. He wouldn’t stand. Called me a … Me own son. Well I’m not having that. Her,’ he said.
‘Her? Isn’t that rather …?’
‘Yeah. See. Cora’ve made me promise I won’t hurt him. So I want you to hurt her, Simon. The wife. Because it’s not gone away. And I’m owed. I want you to mark her, Simon. I want you to cut her face.’
‘No. That’s uh, incommensurate. I think that would undoubtedly be un peu trop.’
‘… I don’t understand you, Simon Finger. You got arsehole to spare. If a raging bull come at you, you’d stand. You’d stick your head in a fucking cement-mixer, you would. If you considered it the correct thing to do. I’ve just asked you to top four villains and you’ve barely shrugged. And you won’t even … Uh all right. All right. Will you knock her about — will you do that at least?’
‘What are we talking about here, Jo? A bloody nose and a black eye? … A handful of hair or two and a couple of teeth?’
He leant forward and spread his hands all-solvingly. ‘Exactly. Just like any normal husband’d give her.’
Then Simon Finger helped Joseph Andrews down the stairs to join their friends for the little going-away party, Manfred, Rodney and Dominic, Cora Susan and Burl Rhody, Tori Fate, Captain Mate, and He Zizhen.
8. The vestal follow
They were all there for the midday meeting: Clint, Supermaniam, Strite, Mackelyne, Woyno, Donna Strange. Clint had just had a conversation with Donna Strange about Dork Bogarde. It was remarkably similar to the conversation he had had with Dork Bogarde about Donna Strange: she couldn’t remember him either. Chemistry not quite right, thought Clint. Nevertheless he took this sophisticated exchange as a good omen for his rendezvous with Kate, now only hours away. He could see himself parking the Avenger and strolling across the road. Having a quiet wander across the road …
Supermaniam said, ‘Ainsley Car reckons Durham’s the best dryout centre he’s ever been to. Course he’s treated like a god in there. And Ainsley and Beryl are going to get married for the third time in the prison chapel. Could do a piece on that.’
Crinkling his nose, Desmond Heaf said, ‘So you see some things turn out for the best.’
‘Yeah. You know,’ said Clint: ‘“The faded and disgraced football legend gave a wry smile as he added his own slops to the bucket of filth outside his cell. His wedding day had begun.”’
‘Oh I imagined something a bit softer in tone. Though point taken: football is the religion of our … Now,’ said Heaf with a glance at his watch. ‘It doesn’t happen often — oh no — but every now and then, every now and then, in a publishing lifetime, you encounter an instance of the journalist’s craft that simply takes your breath away … Yesterday morning I said to Clint here, “Clint? I’ve had a personal communication from the Palace via the FPA.” ‘Heaf briefly waved a flyer-like sheet of paper in the air. ‘It says that the tacit embargo on the Princess is now officially lapsed, but that they do respectfully ask that we maintain a certain tact and distance at this very sensitive time, following the demise of Queen Pamela. Explaining this, I said, “Clint? How about a little piece on Vicky? Something for the op-ed page. And not Yellow Dog, mind! More like your earlier light-hearted style. Now that all the scandal’s blown over, and with her sixteenth birthday not that far off. To go with this nice new photograph. Lovely to see her laughing again, isn’t it? … A turning of the page — the start of a fresh chapter.” This morning I happened to open my Lark at the breakfast table, in the company of my wife and six daughters. Would you all now turn to page thirty-three. “Vicky With Nobs On”.
‘“Hi, men!”’ Heaf recited. ‘“With these words Princess Vicky kissed goodbye to her catflap — and nun too soon says the Lark. Gore blimey, it was virgin on the ridiculous. These days British minge is spreading the butcher’s apron aged 12 or 13. So high time Vicky had herself deflowered (what in carnation did you expect?) and jumped aboard the cherrygoround. We’ve had a Virgin Queen — Liz I. So loosen your belts for the Goer Princess.
‘“Who’s the (p)lucky boy then? Porking the Heir Suggestive is still a topping offence so this must have come from on high. Did she do a Blessed Mary and let the Lord God giveth her one? Or was it an inside job in at least two senses? We all knew that Vick’s first pash would have to be posh. And it’s well known that her Pop hasn’t popped for more than two year. Maybe she said, ‘Dad? I need a nob. Let’s keep it in the (royal) family.’ And he said, ‘What the Hal?’
‘“So out with the crown jewels, lads, and start dreaming. Now that one bloke’s got his leg over, the vestal surely follow. After all those years of Queen Pam, known to every motorist as the Buckingham Turnoff (RIP), here’s a royal to tauten the todge. Look across the page, lads, and raise your rifles. Ready, aim — and let Britannia drool the waves!”
‘… I never thought I’d ever hear myself say this, Clint. But you’re fired.’
Mattock Estate, NW2. Homeless John and And New were sitting on the pavement.
‘It ain’t a bad patch, this,’ said Homeless John. ‘You can help people with their cars. Say, “Eh up, mate. You got a ticket. Tried to stop her but the cow give you one.”’
‘How’s that help?’ asked And.
‘Well, prepare them. Warn them. Where you been then?’
‘On an oil-rig. In the fucking North Sea.’
‘Eh. Mega money.’
‘If you’re a driller, yeah. Not if you’re licking out the fucking pie-warmer it ain’t.’
The black Avenger crept up, with Clint’s head in it like the hump of a camel.
Still seated, Homeless John made a series of unreadable gestures till Clint lowered the passenger window.
‘Not there, mate. It’s Residents’ up to ten-thirty. Back up a bit and it’s Pay and Display. Just beyond the yellow line. Beyond the yellow.’
Clint backed up, then climbed down, holding the two bottles of champagne by their necks in his left hand and the pigskin hamper in his right. ‘Yeah cheers lads,’ he said.
‘Eh up then,’ said Homeless John. ‘I’m off home.’
And Clint started across the road. Nice to get going early: love in the afternoon. Roaming across the road, ambling, sort of happy-go-lucky. A loon, a wander. Pressure? There was no pressure, not with Kate. And he was prepared for every contingency: when shaken, his pockets sounded like a pair of maracas. Conversation? Okay: the new royal sensation, breaking as we speak. (Well out of that. Let them other mugs do it.) Or amuse her with the story of the two nights he had served in a Lovetown jail for smoking in his room. Every sprinkler in the whole hotel …
He admitted to himself that she had her little mannerisms. Like her paltry ingenuities on the keyboard. Some of her abbreviations saved her but one touch, and none at all when they included the use of the tab. And punctuation as visual pun: ‘i must—’; ‘orl&o’s, of red hair’; and, of course, ‘a 2nd 9-hour operation on his:’. And 6 for sex kept making him think she came from bleeding New Zealand. Unconsciously, too, of course, Clint was suffering from a proliferation of doubts in new areas: innovatory uncertainties. He had the sense that he was missing something — and not a detail. And he had already suspected, many times, and not just unconsciously, that she wasn’t quite right in the head.
He pushed the button marked k8. Time passed. I bet that lamb felt it, he thought insensately, when I come up on it. The house opened out with a soft laugh and the smell of hot greens, and closed again.
9. February 14 (4.37 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: I’ve got a little more feel here. I don’t know. Maybe the gear is giving us just a little bit of rudder, or maybe the air — it’s lower, it’s thicker.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: What you got you got.
Macmanaman: How are you doing there, Nick?
First Officer Nick Chopko: … The numbers say drop the nose.
Reynolds knew why the Captain wanted her in a seat facing aft. You quickly intuited that you had a large piece of fixed furniture to cushion you, rather than the slender section of strapping enjoyed, for example, by the man in 2A. On the other hand there were unfamiliar sensations to be accommodated. When the plane met with resistance, in the shuddering clouds, it felt to her spine like acceleration. And the obverse: when the nose went down and they started to dive, it felt to her spine like reverse thrust.
But they didn’t have reverse thrust.
Four hundred people gulped, as the plane jerked wildly to the left. So sudden, so sharp. She thought of the scrap of tissue paper in the steel toilet bowl, an hour or more ago, sucked sideways with the sound of a sneeze. As sharp as that.
People were no longer wailing, even at the most terrible drops and lurches. Except for some of the couples, people were no longer touching or talking but staring straight ahead. People had stopped saying that word, which they nearly all said and which was fuck. People travelling alone were no longer saying goodbye to their loved ones on their mobile phones. People were no longer saying goodbye to their loved ones, in their heads. People were saying goodbye to themselves.
1. February 14 (2.19 p.m.): 101 Heavy
With furious precision the maddened corpse of Royce Traynor delivered its final, smashing blow, and he was gone, away, spinning end over end through the plane-shaking clouds …
The pressurised air in 101 Heavy now fled it too: a squall of dust and grit. The mid-section of the cabin floor instantly collapsed, severing all remaining hydraulic lines.
Reynolds felt the bang, the howl like a ricochet, the stinging wind, the harsh vibration. In ragged unison the oxygen-masks dropped and hovered. After a few seconds all the cigarette smoke was replaced by a thin white mist.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Feel it, Nick.
First Officer Nick Chopko: No …
Macmanaman: No quantity. None.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: … You know the ‘feel’ they put into it’s bullshit. It’s just the computer. The yoke’s bullshit.
Macmanaman: Engineer, we’re flying by direct law.
Chopko: And if we reengage?
Macmanaman: We’d get fictitious feel, if anything. Gentlemen, we have no hydraulic control over this aircraft. She’s banking. She’s banking. The throttle, Nick. If you … She’s coming back. She’s coming back … We’re just blundering around up here. We have no flaps and no spoilers. If we can get her down we ‘re going to land at 300 knots with no reverse thrust and no brakes. We don’t need an airport. We need an interstate. Three miles of good road. And one on our present setting. Nick. Brief SAM [System Aircraft Maintenance]. Hal? I’m going to be asking you to line up every kind of rescue and emergency we can get. She’s banking. Come on back …
System Aircraft Maintenance: Copy your situation, one oh one heavy.
Macmanaman: We’re just making grand clockwise circles up here …
SAM: I don’t want to add to your cares, sir. But we’d better start thinking about the NEO window.
Macmanaman: Hey. Come on back. Come on back. Come on back to me.
2. Clint prepares
‘So some so-called 14-year-old’, he typed, ‘has been crying “rape” after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad.’
Have you seen this bird (see photo)?
She looks 16 if she’s a day.
And how was he supposed to tell?
The bloke’d had a few, as he freely admits.
He’s getting on a bit and his eyes aren’t as sharp as they were.
And they say in that part of the woods it was so dark you couldn’t even—
Clint paused. He thought: got to be careful with the medication. Overdo it with the Narcopam and what happens? You’re checking into the hotel with the bird slung over your shoulder.
And who does the judge think he’s kidding?
He’s got the gall to tell us there was ‘no provocation’.
When the bird was wearing a school uniform.
What are we, c**ts?
He was sixty-six hours away from the date with Kate: Valentine’s Day (nice touch). He could see himself parking the Av enger and crossing the road. In a kind of saunter. Hands in hip pockets. Just … looning over the road to her door. Well he was like the boyscouts, wasn’t he: always prepared. The Potentium, the His Voluminousness (supplemented by a booster called Volume Control), the Valium, the Hellcat (Legally Not To Be Used Without Partner’s Permission), the Narcopam (ditto), the Diploma from the Academy. The guy was oozing confidence.
3. Waking in the cold
Joseph Andrews sat before the tape recorder. He looked as if he had just climbed out of the swimming-pool; but his clothes were dry.
‘Come on, Boss. Have half a Nurofen.’
In a strained and trembling voice he said, ‘Fuck off out of it.’
‘You had the local.’
‘Against me will. Ready? And Manfred. You transcribe this now, all right?
‘[Click.] Is it a crime to want to die in me own country? [Click.] Apart from a personal family matter and four or five blokes who know fucking well who they are [click] I pose no threat to society whatsoever. And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, mate.
‘Uh. Take out the “mate” and put in uh …’
He intended to add an evocation of his love of England. But the essence of what he really missed about it was waking in the cold, and feeling the rust in his hipbones, all wired up and saddled to a faint need to shit.
‘Where’s Simon? I need me Simon.’
4. Leather on willow
Brendan was reading it out loud and had come to the last page.
‘“And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, Your Majesty. I’m a confirmed royalist, and of course we all worshipped your mother and father. And it would break my heart if I was obliged to make the enclosed material public. I’m just an old man who wants to lay down his bones in the land of his fathers. I want to hear the chimes of Big Ben, I want to hear the sound of leather on willow at the village green, I want to walk down Worship Street and in through the doors of the World Upside Down. I’m coming into Heathrow on the afternoon of February 13, under my own name, and will take to my farmhouse in rural Essex. And that’s the last you’ll hear of me. But if I’m nicked on my way in, then you know the consequences. Respectfully, Joseph Andrews, Esquire. PS. If you don’t mind me saying, you had some front, didn’t you, claiming it was all a fake? I had half a mind to go public then and there, to get some respect. But wiser voices prevailed. Now you can stick to your guns and hopefully it’ll all pass over quickly for the Princess. What with her mum and all. PPS. I see your cousin offed poor old Jimmy O’Nione down Cold Blow way. I knew Jimmy at Knavesmire, where we did an Inspector together. Jimmy O’Nione was one of the best.”’
Brendan dropped his hands to his lap.
Henry uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
He said, ‘And what is that, Bugger, may I ask?’
‘A DVD, sir … A digital videodisc’
‘Well I suppose we’d better …’
The two men were in Brendan’s rooms in St James’s — not otherwise would such a viewing be possible. Not in any of the wintry palaces, the lashed castles … Brendan said,
‘I’m wondering whether you have to expose yourself to this, sir. I could simply tell you what you needed to know.’
‘Stop babying me, Bugger. Call Love and then lock the door.’
5. February 14 (3.44 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back to me. Come on back to me. No no no no. Wait. Now … Got to stay ahead of her, got to stay ahead of her. Got to lead her. Can’t get behind her.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Captain, say souls on board and fuel remaining.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Three nine nine. Thirty-six seven, and dumping.
SAM: Only differential power. You’re manoeuvring with the throttles … Slats are out?
Macmanaman: Slats? We don’t have any slats. If we can get ourselves down while we’re still horizontal, we’re going to ditch. We’re descending. Ah, now the nose is coming up. Easy. Easy.
Columbia [South Carolina] Approach: Copy your setting, one oh one heavy. The runway is ten thousand feet long.
Macmanaman: Can’t use it. And we’re not going to make Columbia. Find me a place to ditch on that setting. Nick, put the [landing] gear down.
Chopko: What?
Macmanaman: Throw it down.
Reynolds turned to the man in 2A, and she screamed. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘What? … I can’t hear! Take it off!’
‘A smoke-hood. Cost me two-thirty.’
‘Ladies and gentleman,’ said the exalted voice of Robynne Davis. ‘As in all emergency landings we will be evacuating as soon as the aircraft is at rest. Passengers close to the exit doors, those in seats …’
A uniformed man came out of the cockpit. He leant over 2B and whispered something.
‘Ma’am,’ said Hal Ward, in the galley, ‘would you please go to the bathroom and then quietly return to 22D. Business. Captain’s orders.’
The inter-cabin curtains were open, and by straining his neck the man in 2A saw that Mrs Traynor’s new seat was unlike his own. It was slightly narrower, and it faced the other way.
Chopko: Look at our speed.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: The heavies aren’t designed for this. We could just come apart up here.
SAM: Captain, on your present setting you’re going to be coming in right under it.
Macmanaman: What are they saying? Thirty-three, thirty-four?
SAM: Their latest and best is an NEO altitude of twenty-one point four. Repeat, at 17.43. If you’re not yet on the ground you’re going to feel it. Heat and blast.
Macmanaman: And another thing. Watch the nose, Nick. No no no. Pull back, pull back, pull back.
6. What do princesses want?
On screen, the bathroom of the Yellow House: the passageway, the circular concavity of the tub, the mirrors, the towels on their pegs. Brendan flinched as a subtitle gave date and place. He turned. On the sofa the King stared levelly.
The Princess entered, in her tennis whites. She approached, smiling with amusement or satisfaction, and then vanished to the right. The sound of a sigh, the brisk drilling of micturation, the soft percussion of the toilet paper as it ripped. She reappeared with her shirt half-up and her skirt half-down, and limping as she kicked off her shoes. She threw on the taps. She paused for a full minute, examining a blemish on her forearm. Then she undressed carelessly, and in she climbed.
It hadn’t wavered, the watching eye, stupidly imperturbable, like a security monitor. After a while you understood that it had now begun a painfully gradual zoom.
Here came the change of the Princess’s expression — a listening face. The sound of a door opening and closing, and the audible rumour of advent. Then the white shape, still halved by shadow.
The quality of the sound, throughout, had been ticklishly distinct. And now the sudden surge of a human voice.
‘I come from your father’s bed. He sent me here to help you bathe.’ It was He, it was He … He removed her robe, and held out a hand in such a way that the Princess must rise to receive it. He stepped in … The kissed neck and throat, the sponged breasts. The two bodies, one brown and full of gravity, one pale and light. And the two faces: one with its young astonishment and horror, the other with its ancient inclemency.
Brendan turned again. Henry had his arms up on the sofa’s shoulders and his head was bent to one side. Moisture had had time to sink in around his closed eyes.
Some minutes later Brendan said, ‘Sir? I think you …’
Henry sat up and stared. A different scene, now, gloom, luxury, a half-dressed He Zizhen attending to his own naked body, which looked utterly helpless, like a baby waiting to be changed.
‘If it’s any comfort to you, sir, I think we can say this of Miss Zizhen. She was our Enemy’s Enemy.’
‘It is some comfort, surprisingly enough, Bugger. This is over now. Oughtred at one end and the PM at the other. What remains is for us, or for me, to divine what the Princess wants. What do princesses want?’
7. Simon Finger
His crutch was of the sort that went all the way up the arm. Joseph Andrews leant it against the side of his desk and, after some bitter tottering, crashed down into his swivel chair.
‘Sime,’ he said when he was able.
He addressed a small middle-aged man in a chalkstriped suit and with foul eyes, pale round the poster-blue pupil: Simon Finger.
‘Sime, mate. It’s all bollocks, that: me threat. I’m a monarchist, mate. Always have been. And what I got on that lot’d make the royal family disappear. And I couldn’t live with meself with that on me conscience. Knowing I’d done that, I couldn’t rest easy in me grave. They nick me tomorrow, then I’ll take me secret with me. Though Cora always have it, lest need be.’
In his ripe drawl — posher than the King — Simon Finger said, ‘I couldn’t agree more, Jo. It’s a fine institution.’
‘Where are we? Yeah, we’ll be obliging Tony Tobin, Yocker Fitzmaurice, Kev Had and Nolberto Drago. You can do what you want with them other slags, but I want to be there for Nobby Drago.’
For a while Joseph Andrews unsystematically sifted through the papers on his desk. He held up a clipping.
‘Calls me a mad prick. In print. Names me. Places me. As for what he said here the other night: no respect whatsoever. And he would’ve walked away if I’d’ve let him! Wouldn’t stand. He wouldn’t stand. Called me a … Me own son. Well I’m not having that. Her,’ he said.
‘Her? Isn’t that rather …?’
‘Yeah. See. Cora’ve made me promise I won’t hurt him. So I want you to hurt her, Simon. The wife. Because it’s not gone away. And I’m owed. I want you to mark her, Simon. I want you to cut her face.’
‘No. That’s uh, incommensurate. I think that would undoubtedly be un peu trop.’
‘… I don’t understand you, Simon Finger. You got arsehole to spare. If a raging bull come at you, you’d stand. You’d stick your head in a fucking cement-mixer, you would. If you considered it the correct thing to do. I’ve just asked you to top four villains and you’ve barely shrugged. And you won’t even … Uh all right. All right. Will you knock her about — will you do that at least?’
‘What are we talking about here, Jo? A bloody nose and a black eye? … A handful of hair or two and a couple of teeth?’
He leant forward and spread his hands all-solvingly. ‘Exactly. Just like any normal husband’d give her.’
Then Simon Finger helped Joseph Andrews down the stairs to join their friends for the little going-away party, Manfred, Rodney and Dominic, Cora Susan and Burl Rhody, Tori Fate, Captain Mate, and He Zizhen.
8. The vestal follow
They were all there for the midday meeting: Clint, Supermaniam, Strite, Mackelyne, Woyno, Donna Strange. Clint had just had a conversation with Donna Strange about Dork Bogarde. It was remarkably similar to the conversation he had had with Dork Bogarde about Donna Strange: she couldn’t remember him either. Chemistry not quite right, thought Clint. Nevertheless he took this sophisticated exchange as a good omen for his rendezvous with Kate, now only hours away. He could see himself parking the Avenger and strolling across the road. Having a quiet wander across the road …
Supermaniam said, ‘Ainsley Car reckons Durham’s the best dryout centre he’s ever been to. Course he’s treated like a god in there. And Ainsley and Beryl are going to get married for the third time in the prison chapel. Could do a piece on that.’
Crinkling his nose, Desmond Heaf said, ‘So you see some things turn out for the best.’
‘Yeah. You know,’ said Clint: ‘“The faded and disgraced football legend gave a wry smile as he added his own slops to the bucket of filth outside his cell. His wedding day had begun.”’
‘Oh I imagined something a bit softer in tone. Though point taken: football is the religion of our … Now,’ said Heaf with a glance at his watch. ‘It doesn’t happen often — oh no — but every now and then, every now and then, in a publishing lifetime, you encounter an instance of the journalist’s craft that simply takes your breath away … Yesterday morning I said to Clint here, “Clint? I’ve had a personal communication from the Palace via the FPA.” ‘Heaf briefly waved a flyer-like sheet of paper in the air. ‘It says that the tacit embargo on the Princess is now officially lapsed, but that they do respectfully ask that we maintain a certain tact and distance at this very sensitive time, following the demise of Queen Pamela. Explaining this, I said, “Clint? How about a little piece on Vicky? Something for the op-ed page. And not Yellow Dog, mind! More like your earlier light-hearted style. Now that all the scandal’s blown over, and with her sixteenth birthday not that far off. To go with this nice new photograph. Lovely to see her laughing again, isn’t it? … A turning of the page — the start of a fresh chapter.” This morning I happened to open my Lark at the breakfast table, in the company of my wife and six daughters. Would you all now turn to page thirty-three. “Vicky With Nobs On”.
‘“Hi, men!”’ Heaf recited. ‘“With these words Princess Vicky kissed goodbye to her catflap — and nun too soon says the Lark. Gore blimey, it was virgin on the ridiculous. These days British minge is spreading the butcher’s apron aged 12 or 13. So high time Vicky had herself deflowered (what in carnation did you expect?) and jumped aboard the cherrygoround. We’ve had a Virgin Queen — Liz I. So loosen your belts for the Goer Princess.
‘“Who’s the (p)lucky boy then? Porking the Heir Suggestive is still a topping offence so this must have come from on high. Did she do a Blessed Mary and let the Lord God giveth her one? Or was it an inside job in at least two senses? We all knew that Vick’s first pash would have to be posh. And it’s well known that her Pop hasn’t popped for more than two year. Maybe she said, ‘Dad? I need a nob. Let’s keep it in the (royal) family.’ And he said, ‘What the Hal?’
‘“So out with the crown jewels, lads, and start dreaming. Now that one bloke’s got his leg over, the vestal surely follow. After all those years of Queen Pam, known to every motorist as the Buckingham Turnoff (RIP), here’s a royal to tauten the todge. Look across the page, lads, and raise your rifles. Ready, aim — and let Britannia drool the waves!”
‘… I never thought I’d ever hear myself say this, Clint. But you’re fired.’
Mattock Estate, NW2. Homeless John and And New were sitting on the pavement.
‘It ain’t a bad patch, this,’ said Homeless John. ‘You can help people with their cars. Say, “Eh up, mate. You got a ticket. Tried to stop her but the cow give you one.”’
‘How’s that help?’ asked And.
‘Well, prepare them. Warn them. Where you been then?’
‘On an oil-rig. In the fucking North Sea.’
‘Eh. Mega money.’
‘If you’re a driller, yeah. Not if you’re licking out the fucking pie-warmer it ain’t.’
The black Avenger crept up, with Clint’s head in it like the hump of a camel.
Still seated, Homeless John made a series of unreadable gestures till Clint lowered the passenger window.
‘Not there, mate. It’s Residents’ up to ten-thirty. Back up a bit and it’s Pay and Display. Just beyond the yellow line. Beyond the yellow.’
Clint backed up, then climbed down, holding the two bottles of champagne by their necks in his left hand and the pigskin hamper in his right. ‘Yeah cheers lads,’ he said.
‘Eh up then,’ said Homeless John. ‘I’m off home.’
And Clint started across the road. Nice to get going early: love in the afternoon. Roaming across the road, ambling, sort of happy-go-lucky. A loon, a wander. Pressure? There was no pressure, not with Kate. And he was prepared for every contingency: when shaken, his pockets sounded like a pair of maracas. Conversation? Okay: the new royal sensation, breaking as we speak. (Well out of that. Let them other mugs do it.) Or amuse her with the story of the two nights he had served in a Lovetown jail for smoking in his room. Every sprinkler in the whole hotel …
He admitted to himself that she had her little mannerisms. Like her paltry ingenuities on the keyboard. Some of her abbreviations saved her but one touch, and none at all when they included the use of the tab. And punctuation as visual pun: ‘i must—’; ‘orl&o’s, of red hair’; and, of course, ‘a 2nd 9-hour operation on his:’. And 6 for sex kept making him think she came from bleeding New Zealand. Unconsciously, too, of course, Clint was suffering from a proliferation of doubts in new areas: innovatory uncertainties. He had the sense that he was missing something — and not a detail. And he had already suspected, many times, and not just unconsciously, that she wasn’t quite right in the head.
He pushed the button marked k8. Time passed. I bet that lamb felt it, he thought insensately, when I come up on it. The house opened out with a soft laugh and the smell of hot greens, and closed again.
9. February 14 (4.37 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: I’ve got a little more feel here. I don’t know. Maybe the gear is giving us just a little bit of rudder, or maybe the air — it’s lower, it’s thicker.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: What you got you got.
Macmanaman: How are you doing there, Nick?
First Officer Nick Chopko: … The numbers say drop the nose.
Reynolds knew why the Captain wanted her in a seat facing aft. You quickly intuited that you had a large piece of fixed furniture to cushion you, rather than the slender section of strapping enjoyed, for example, by the man in 2A. On the other hand there were unfamiliar sensations to be accommodated. When the plane met with resistance, in the shuddering clouds, it felt to her spine like acceleration. And the obverse: when the nose went down and they started to dive, it felt to her spine like reverse thrust.
But they didn’t have reverse thrust.
Four hundred people gulped, as the plane jerked wildly to the left. So sudden, so sharp. She thought of the scrap of tissue paper in the steel toilet bowl, an hour or more ago, sucked sideways with the sound of a sneeze. As sharp as that.
People were no longer wailing, even at the most terrible drops and lurches. Except for some of the couples, people were no longer touching or talking but staring straight ahead. People had stopped saying that word, which they nearly all said and which was fuck. People travelling alone were no longer saying goodbye to their loved ones on their mobile phones. People were no longer saying goodbye to their loved ones, in their heads. People were saying goodbye to themselves.
LAST CHAPTER
1. Courtly love
Earlier in the morning of Valentine’s Day, Brendan had breakfasted with the Princess, and they had had words.
‘What do you want, ma’am?’
‘… I want to be a part of the umma.’
‘The umma, ma’am?’
‘The body of Islam. That’s why they pray five times a day. Shorooq, sunrise, zhur, noon, asr, mid-afternoon, maghreb, sunset, and isha, night. To recommit themselves to the body of Islam. For the act of prostration, the knees first, and then the hands. Brow, nose, both hands, both knees, and the underside of all your toes must touch the ground, and the fingers and toes must point towards Mecca. The conformity is an expression of the oneness of Islam. The umma.’
‘… If you’ll excuse me, ma’am.’
‘You’re off on your hike. Daddy doesn’t have hikes. Or even walks.’
Her tone, he noted, was softer than it had been. More fond — or at least more proprietorial.
‘Daddy takes strolls. No. Daddy takes turns.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, clutching his gloves, ‘I hope to reach Gelding’s Mere.’
Brendan headed north from the Greater House. He was surprised, in a way, by the devoutness of his secularism. Because he feared that his love could not survive it — a truly pious Princess. He could imagine his increasingly formal and detached response. He could imagine falling out of it: falling out of love. Love isn’t blind, then, he thought. Or mine isn’t. And what next, when love was gone? … Brendan sought to calm himself by looking at it practically. He didn’t care which faith it was she turned to; but the immediate task, for political puposes, would be to steer her off towards (say) Buddhism.
The unbroken cloud was thick and grey and low, like under-felt. And he felt beneath, below, under — under the underfelt.
Hal Nine — he found out what this princess wanted.
They were taking a turn, arm in arm, along the trout stream (Henry was a great subliminal believer in the curative power of flowing water). Victoria was in any case much improved — after his epic abjections concerning He Zizhen.
‘If I found out what you wanted and gave it to you, how would you change?’
‘Well I’d stop all this religious stuff for a start.’
He looked at her eagerly, not because the possible outcome was attractive but because this voice, with its forthright calculation, was the voice he knew.
‘Then I must find it out.’
‘You won’t. And even if you do, you won’t do it. Knowing you.’
‘Oh, if I find it out I will most certainly do it. Because then you’ll have to come back to me.’
In the lull before lunch they took to the low table in the library for a couple of rubbers of Vanishing Whist.
‘This is another thing you’ll have to give up,’ he said. ‘No more piggy for breakfast either … Oof. Three. No, four. At least.’ And he fanned them out, the court cards, the kings and the queens.
‘None,’ she said.
And abruptly he folded his hand, and slipped from the stool to his knees, and came round to her saying, ‘Yes of course. Yes of course, yes of course, my dearest.’
* * *
When Brendan returned, at seven, he heard voices in the dining-room. He knocked and entered. And it seemed to him that they were unusually slow to acknowledge his presence: well, a game — or another game — of Scrabble was about to begin. An empty bottle of champagne stood between them on the table, and there was a cocktail-shaker suspiciously close to the King’s brimming glass.
‘Aha, the X,’ she was saying. ‘Which I fully intend to keep.’
‘And I’ve got a Y. Rats. I don’t even go first. You’ll adore this, Bugger. I mean Brendan.’
‘Oh call him Bugger for God’s sake.’
‘You’ll adore this, Bugger.’
‘Sir?’
‘I can see you going all rosy. Procure for me the Instrument of Abdication, if you will! No. Make that two such instruments. One for her and one for me. Yes, Bugger, we’re packing it in. A bit feeble, you could say, but there it is. I sent Boy to the Press Centre and Chippy to Number Ten. It’s accomplished fact. What this princess wants is to stop being a princess.’
‘You needn’t absolutely do it, Daddy, if it’s too horrible for you.’
‘No no. All or nothing. All for love and the world well lost. Look. Look! He’s all rosy … But no, when you stop to think for a minute, it’s about time we all grew up, wouldn’t you say? The people will have to grow up. I’ll have to grow up. And if I can grow up, they can grow up. And then she can grow up. Uh! And the boredom. Uh! Nightmare … And you know what’s absolutely impossible about the monarchy, Bugger? It’s such a … Darling, go and find Love and ask him for another one of these. The impossible thing is that it’s such a …’ He held up a hand until his daughter was perhaps a kilometre distant, and said in a fading whisper, ‘It’s such a …’
‘Such a what, sir?’
‘Such a …’
‘I’m sorry, sir, such a …?’
‘Such a …’
Brendan said desperately, ‘Such a belly wink, sir?’
‘No, Bugger! Such a bally wenk!’
Then her musical laugh in the doorway, and Henry coughing and turning aside.
‘And did you reach Gelding’s Mere, Brendan?’ she asked.
‘I did not, Victoria. The mind was willing …’
He contemplated Victoria England and formed a rough plan for the rest of his life. She would actually need him more now — and Henry would need him less. He would love, and she would never know. So then: twenty or thirty winters without a kiss, a touch, a considering glance. And this love of his would be a hundred, no, a thousand times more than he deserved.
2. k8
‘well, clint, how’s trix?’ asked k8. ‘it’s so nice 2 actually c u in the flesh. now u just relax & make yourself completely @ home …’
‘Little house-present,’ said Clint coolly. ‘Moisten the piccolo so to speak.’
‘how giving u r, clint. & this ruddy gr8 cr8 of goodies! now. u get the top off th@. & i’ll b mother.’
His first thought was: Shelley. The undulant frizz of hair, the daunted orbits of the eyes, the sharp lips. She wore a black tanktop T-shirt and a Union Jack miniskirt — but then of course she had already mirthfully warned him about the girth of her thighs.
‘How’s your father, love?’
‘decim8ed. all the way from caecum 2 rectum.’
‘It never rains … Precipitation, then lovely weather for ducks.’
‘bottoms up! here’s mud in your i.’
It was around now that Clint started to feel really tragically ill. As they moved from the sink to the armchairs, and as she smoothed down her skirt with her sizable feelers, another gangrenous lunge passed slowly through him.
‘1st, the $64,000? clint: 6. u needn’t worry. it’ll b a relief 4 u 2 no this: i’ve never had a., clint.’
‘A what? … Period?’
‘i’ve never had a., clint. that’s y i was so tickled th@ u seemed 2 want 2 initi8 a deb8 about children. as if i want a br@!’
‘And I’m relieved, am I?’
‘4 you’re not th@ way inclined, r u, clint.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘y? in scribendo veritas, yellow dog. it’s all in h&, clint. i’ve been under the nife. but not 2 destroy—2 cre8! i’ve got tits & a 21, clint. they do an operation where they w.’
‘What did I hear you say to me?’
‘They w, clint … clint, what r u thinking?’ said k8. ‘i kill it now? i kill it now?’
When he came out into the street (he hadn’t touched her: just edged by with his arms shieldingly raised) he found that a grimy white van was doubleparked on the Avenger. ‘How Am I Driving?’ said its sticker. ‘Like A Cunt,’ someone had written in the dust. After a lot of parping and yelling and twisting about, Clint mounted the gutter, taking a left from a lamppost and a right from a railing, and ploughed through a hill of black rubbish-bags and on to the street. With his leg stretched straight over the pedal, in a yowl of revs, he shot through Mattock Estate and skidded into Britannia Junction, where he joined the ten-mile traffic jam that would, eventually, deliver him to the Bends and the open road he craved. He kept tearing off up sidestreets, kept buzzing round culs-de-sac like a hornet in a jamjar — like a particle in a cyclotron; then back to the bumper-to-bumper, where he hogged and jockeyed and lane-hopped. Down came the window for many a white-lipped slagging — the evil eye, the crackling fist; at one point, in hopeless gridlock, he jumped down and briefly chased a young couple on an old scooter — and was of course easily outstripped, the man turning to give the tosser sign with a gauntleted hand. Weeping, twisting, brutally honking, he flanked and tacked through Thamesmead, Hornchurch, Noak Hill.
Then the open road. At this time Clint Smoker weighed four and a half tons. He had a top speed of a hundred and sixty miles per hour. The great blare of his voice (audible for miles), the great blaze of his eyes, tunnelling through the late afternoon. Even his backside carbuncles were now eight inches square.
3. The edge of the earth
There was a little reception committee for him, of course, and Joseph Andrews hadn’t travelled alone. His people were unloading the Range Rover that Manfred had hired, and there were two other cars, blocking the road for now, outside the villa in rural Essex, near Gravesend, just where you come off the Bends.
‘A fine fucking welcome this is,’ he said. ‘A fine fucking homecoming.’
Joseph Andrews stood at the gate, half slumped over his Zimmer frame. His eyes were clenched shut and his lower teeth bared, after the long journey.
‘I come back to me own country,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘after twenty-five year. And what’s the first thing I see in me Evening Standard? Plans for the uh, the fucking renounciation of the monarchy. I reckon they done it to spite me. Got half a mind to …’ His closed eyes saw a swimming-pool: a motion jigsaw of crimson blood.
‘That’s down to you, that is, Boss,’ said a passing figure. ‘Pressures on the Princess.’
‘… You’re due a chinning for that, you are, Manfred Curbishley. And when you least expect it and all. No Scotch for you tonight. Face like a fucking chicken tandoori as it is. Where’s Simon? Simon! Hadn’t you better be getting along, son? … Gaw, now who’s this doing his fucking nut.’
He thought it was an insect at first, and even reached feebly for his holster — which of course he would not be needing, in England, in February: a buzzing whine, with hysteria in it. Joseph Andrews raised his trembling head; but the eyes wouldn’t open.
‘Someone — someone go and …’
Brisk footsteps clicked past him. He heard the car change gear, down from third to second, then, with insane protest, from second to first; then a sterling cry of ‘Halt!’; then a boost, then an atrocious concussion, then a faint miaow in the air, then a sound that opened the eyes of Joseph Andrews. It was a sound he had heard once before, in Strangeways, when a prison guard threw himself naked from the tower into the courtyard. An explosion, then something like a flurry of rain.
He threw aside his Zimmer frame and stepped forward. And he thought he had never seen anyone walking towards him as fast as this — walking to the edge of the earth, and intending to get there.
Mal Bale was within (he had been there half the day: turn on the heat and otherwise), coming out of a light nap on the chair in the hall. He heard it. He looked into the kitchen and told Manfred and Rodney to stay inside.
You couldn’t see anything from the front path: just the lights of the cars and the garage lantern. Mal kept moving forward. And now other sounds, the squelch, the sob, the squelch, the sob.
There was a pink mist. And his own car, the elderly BM, was lavishly besplattered with flesh and plasma; on the bonnet was a brown brogue shoe with an ankle in it.
To the left, where the noises were coming from, you were blinded by the brights of the black jeep. Mal ducked out of the beam and edged round the garage doors.
Joseph Andrews lay dead on the road. Above him, his assailant, by now with painful weariness, delivered a few last blows with his tool — his spanner, his wrench. Then he threw it aside and seemed to be trying to weep. But he couldn’t weep; and Mal saw why.
‘Come on, son. You’ve done him now. It’s over. Easy. Easy … Christ: Clint mate … Up. Up you come. We’re going to help you now. We’re going to help you, help you.’
Mal Bale thought: So that was Jo’s last act on earth. With his prehensile right hand. The blinding of Clint Smoker.
4. February 14 (6.27 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back. Come on back! … Come on back to me. Level up the turn. No no no. Straighten out, straighten out.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Well I’m here, John, with my circular sliderule.
Macmanaman: Take me through it, Betty.
SAM: NEO will be twenty-one point three nine miles from you when it sheers. There’ll be fireworks and some heat and you’ll feel that instantly. We don’t think that’ll be important. But there’ll be downwinds, John.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Well that’s it.
SAM: I’m sorry. Now the heat’ll come at the speed of light. The wind will come at the speed of sound. So after the flash you’ll have one minute … nine seconds. Good luck. We’re all rooting for you. Really rooting for you.
Macmanaman: Thanks, honey.
First Officer Nick Chopko: And here we have our so-called runway, gentlemen. See it?
Macmanaman: Hal?
‘Three minutes,’ said the voice of Hal Ward, and nothing else. Reynolds knew that John Macmanaman had been in a crash before — as a young man, and as a passenger. He’d told her about it a couple of times. He said it was like a silent movie: no sound at all, and black-and-white. Even the gust of fire was silent and black-and-white. And the dying, those slipping away but also those actually in flames had the same expression. One of wonder.
She eased her neck, and searched for better thoughts … John said he suddenly became a hundred different mes. All around him were wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children. And then, later, the question of survival. It was like winning a squalid lottery, he said … Oh I get it, she said to herself. After nearly half a century Royce dies and then, three days later, I die too. Moral: don’t marry at seventeen.
The passengers facing the prow were in the brace position, bent forward with their hands clasped over their heads. Reynolds, facing aft, sat normally, just hugging her neck, hugging her neck: Captain’s orders.
And she knew — stone knew — that if they got through this alive she was going to make him marry her.
There was a yellow flash and she felt sweat form on her upper lip.
Ward: How long?
Macmanaman: Sixteen seconds. And God, right now, it’s so still.
SAM: This isn’t my field, but if the wind comes down, it’s got to come back up, right? If you can just stay out there …
Macmanaman: Here it comes. Ride it. Ride it.
Ward: … Fucking Christ, the wing’s coming down!
Macmanaman: Wait!
Ward: We’re coming down on the wing!
Chopko: I love you, Amy!
There were rescue-and-emergency teams, at a distance, all along the cleared six miles of Interstate 95—just south of the city of Florence, Florence County, South Carolina.
This is what the people saw and this is what they heard.
They saw the crucifix of Flight 101 coming out of the early afternoon above the red plateau. At first in perfect silence — until they heard the mournful chord of the stricken machine. Then its drunken slides and drifts, and its final circling, chest up, arms outflung: counterclockwise. As it steadied, as it bore down, there came the heavy flash from above, and, within a second, the comet’s hair was a silver river from horizon to horizon …
The plane was perhaps five hundred feet from the ground when the downwind took it. It seemed to give a roar of pain and rage as it rocked and plunged. The left wing dropped and hit: a streak of sparks along the hard shoulder. Then the updraught: and Flight 101 violently levelled. One scorching ricochet, one hurt, wounded rearing-up with slats and panels flying off it, then touchdown, the resilient gathering of its rigidity, and on it powered beyond the cauldron of its wake.
And the mad hair, the silver tresses, streamed on above their heads, following the comet to Jupiter.
5. Yellow dog
It was six o’clock in London, and Xan was alone in the house with his younger daughter Sophie.
Earlier, as he ate his lunch standing by the fridge in the flat across the road, Russia had called and said (he was going to dinner there anyway), ‘Can you come early and have Sophie for an hour?’
‘I’d love to. But will she wear it?’
‘I think so. Let’s try it and see.’
‘She’s so flash now, Baba. And if she’s not having it … What came up? Tell me, tell me.’
She talked about Billie’s sleepover, Imaculada’s night off. Then she said, ‘A small man with a sort of Foreign Office accent approached me after my lecture on Tuesday. He told me he had some stuff on the Gaddafi boys and offered to bring it over. I’m meeting him in the Close at half past six. Disgusting name. Semen Something. Disgusting eyes: frothy blue. I’ll be back around seven, seven-fifteen. Thanks for this.’
He went over to the house at five o’clock. Sophie looked upon him leniently. At six he poured himself a glass of beer, reminded himself to watch for the comet, and went back to reading the kind of books that featured one word per page.
Relations with the girls were pretty well renormalised. Sophie, now, was occasionally bashful or demure. He was not yet free to pick her up and hold her — she squirmed and simpered, and wouldn’t quite collude. But with Billie he was fully reinstated. Once, to dramatise a point brought up by her bedside literature, he made a supposedly frightening face, and, having briefly faltered, Billie said, ‘You can’t scare me. You’re just my silly old daddy.’ He had also done himself a power of good the other day, when Billie, using the arm of a chair, had embarked on what were known, hereabouts, as her exercises, and he had said, with mild vexation, ‘Oh Billie’ — and turned away (what was it that mildly vexed him: the sense of thwarted energy?). Then he met the eyes of his wife, and their frown of hope.
Xan, too, had hope. He even believed that he would be spending the night with Russia on this day: the day of the martyr Valentine. His wife, with her aerodynamic bone-structure: she used to put her tongue to the side and push, when she wanted a kiss — to draw attention to the cheek but also to make it nearer. And she had started doing that again, about twenty-four hours ago. If she asked him to stay, and to stay in her bed, he still wouldn’t press his case. And what he was thinking about now, as he said things like ‘car’ and ‘pig’ and ‘fork’, were the nights when your wife sits near you after dinner, reading, motionless, like an artefact, like an Old Master, and all you’re aware of is the texture of the paint.
He watched his daughter, crawling, and often getting to her feet and moving from handhold to handhold … On a certain level, Xan was aware, he entertained ridiculous expectations of Sophie Meo. She was his fourth child, and his second girl. I’ve got the idea by now, he sometimes found himself thinking. Why hasn’t she? Is she really going to cough and shriek and shit everywhere, just like the other three, and fall over all the time, and spend a year saying you when she meant me (‘help you! help you!’), and half a decade asking why, why, why? Well, he was ready for why, this time around. Instead of ‘because …’ he’d say ‘guess’. Epiphenomenally, he wished that the laws of motion could be redrafted more indulgently with infants in mind, so that the smack of the face on the floor, when the arms failed, would be softer and quieter, and the weeping softer and quieter and also briefer, and the bump shallower-sided and a quieter red. Sophie moved from handhold to handhold.
Xan continued to wonder how much he was going to tell Russia about Cora Susan. In his letter he had promised her some sort of confession, and so he couldn’t altogether avoid it. He knew one thing: he’d tell her about it after. And not soon after, either. But this confidence, this intimacy, would eventually be expected of him. He felt entitled to blur it slightly. Could you actually say, ‘I kissed my niece’s breasts’? Shouldn’t you contain it — what was essentially a family embarrassment? And conceivably Russia might find out about it anyway, via Pearl. He could say: You have the right to retaliate. But with proportionality. You’ll have to get your Uncle Mordecai to …
In Russia’s eyes, naturally enough, Cora wore the taint of pornography (and Xan himself had not escaped it, for all his careful editing of the footage from Dolorosa Drive). Russia’s objections were mainly aesthetic objections — though not for that reason superficial; and the moral objections she saved for the end: ‘She’s both pimp and prostitute.’ ‘True,’ he said, ‘but there are reasons for that. Think.’ ‘Okay,’ she said—‘but when I think about pornography, all I see is a man with a remote control in one hand and his cock in the other.’ Well, yes; and, yes, the obscenification of everyday life was hesitantly entrained. He went on considering it. It could be that women wouldn’t mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy. Nobody bothered to object to the gay end of it, supposedly because of the absence of the other: the exploited. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe women just couldn’t bear to see it travestied, the act of love that peopled the world.
He intended to phone Cora — though maybe he should wait a while, he thought, before delivering the avuncular advice he had in mind. This advice was not particularly tasteful, but it was advice he could give her, because consanguinity had rendered him chaste. His erotic thoughts about Cora were now barely a memory. Which showed that the taboo was strong, was efficacious; it worked. He’d say: ‘It sounds soft, and trite — but have a baby. When I look at you I always look for your children. That’s what your breasts are looking for too: they’re looking for your children. So get Burl Rhody to knock you up, and then spend all your money on help.’ Or something like that. Xan now wondered, warily, whether Russia would go back to wanting another. He could take another child, he reckoned; and he wouldn’t refuse if she insisted. But could he take another pregnancy? Pearl and Russia had not much differed here: pretty wonderful, the first time round; and then, the second time round, the self-righteous sumo wrestler, with her doomy naps behind curtained noons, her looming trudge, and every other breath a sigh from the depths. And mad with power.
His hopes, he realised, his ambitions, were gaining in strength and complacency and even … Yes, he was back — back in his life. And what did it look like now, through these quietly different eyes? Good. But he was also back in the thing which is called world. Two days earlier he had gone to collect Billie from school. The playground, as he approached it, was making the sound that playgrounds make: that of unserious panic. And he thought — what if that panic were not unserious? How precious it all is and how fragile it all is. The bare trees above his head were furred with snow. Their claws had become paws. But the snow would soon melt.
But I go to Hollywood but you go to …
Sophie passed by. She steadied herself with a hand on his knee. The dimples at the base of each finger looked like pluses and minuses. The plus and minus signs of babies. She would soon be walking — the faulty wiring and the hairtrigger readjustments, the involuntary three-yard sprints, the upward-shooting arms.
He made a call on the house line, and reached Pearl, who treated him gently (persisting in some obscure cycle of penitence), and gave him a boy. As he hung up, his mobile phone sounded in his jacket.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan? Mal Bale. He’s dead.’
‘Who is?’
‘Joseph Andrews.’
‘How?’
‘Road accident. And another old bastard copped it and all. Simon Finger. Smashed to pieces he was. All over me BM. Thought you’d like to know. You all right?’
‘Yeah mate …’
He hung up and sat still for a moment and closed his eyes.
He closed his eyes and saw the yellow dog.
Into the yard Xan had come, and heard a sound seemingly designed for his unease. The sound had a rhythm, like a murderous act of love: a grunt, then a muffled, slushy impact or convergence, then an answering moan. And over and above it the crying, the choric wail of the yellow dog. He moved past the stake where the animal was chained.
The yard — with its stacks of planks, its sinks and toilet bowls, its black entanglement of tyres — was the place where his sentimental understanding had so far been formed. He had trailed his sister Leda when she took her boyfriends there on summer nights, and watched her on her knees behind the disused cement-mixer, or up against the wheelless van with her skirt round her waist. The sometimes pouting, sometimes snarling pinups and calendar-girls tacked or gummed to the workshop wall; the dogs (earlier dogs) stoically stuck together in coition and awaiting the deliverance of the bucket; and — even further back — the hectic hen coming running to the screeching cock.
He tipped open the shed door and saw his father seated on another man’s chest, straddling the flattened shoulders with his knees: Mick Meo over Joseph Andrews. How he kept raising his bleeding fist and letting it drop with a grunted oom, the wet slap of the blow, and the countering retch from beneath. And how weary it was, how sick and tired. For this, that. For that, this. ‘Hey Dad,’ he had said, coming forward to rush and quell. And how the man’s greased and distorted face had filled with fresh fury as he rose up to envelop his boy.
While it happened (and he didn’t remember much: at one point he was in mid-air, and taking an intense interest in the nature and texture of his destination) you could hear the yellow dog. Whining, weeping, and rolling its head as if to ease an aching neck, working its shoulders, trying to free itself of this thing — this thing on its back.
* * *
6. When they were small
Just after seven he opened the door to the garden and watched the comet with the child in his arms. ‘Yook!’ she said, pointing, but pointing as infants do: the bisection-point of thumb and forefinger was the direction intended. The comet bustled east across the sky — a white light — with futile industry, like a terrible old man on a terrible old errand. Mustn’t stop, mustn’t stop. And utterly committed, suicidally committed, to Jupiter and its gravity. He imagined for a moment that he could hear it: a weak hiss of execration. Then came the affronted honk of a car in the street, and another honk sounding in defiant response, and he shook his head and smiled, returning to the small and the local concerns.
He was fetching some water for Sophie when he saw his wife coming past the front of the house. She was slightly hunched over, with an air of conscious remissness — as if, having been out too long, she was now stealing back, but confident of exoneration, and of frictionless readmittance. He heard her enter upstairs; he heard her throw her keys on to the hall table, and give the indignantly aspirated hoot she gave when something or other, in the exterior world, just hadn’t worked out. ‘Down in a minute,’ she called. And he heard her running up the stairs; and, after a while, the clatter of the shower on the tub floor.
He turned. And there was someone else in the room: a new kind of person. Sophie was standing beside the heap of toys, not walking, just standing, unsupported — unconnected except by her feet to the floor. She was delighted, but she was delighted about something else (the scrap of paper in her hand), and didn’t yet see that she had changed.
Xan moved forwards, saying, ‘Baba, you’re—’
It came to her. She was up: now how to get down? Her arms sprang skyward, her legs dipped at the knee — and she flipped herself backwards into the rubble of the building-blocks and Sticklebricks … When he reached for her she took his whole arm in both of hers, and when he hoisted her up he felt her hot wet snorting in his ear — but it wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious at all.
As, nevertheless, he sat comforting her on the sofa, he looked at the lashes of her eyes, their tear-freshened zigzag — and he remembered her birth, and the zigzag, the frantic scribble of the heart-monitor as Sophie toiled within. He was already crying when she came (as he had cried when the boys came): not because of what they faced but because of what they had already suffered, all alone and at their very smallest. And minutes later, when Sophie came, for the first time in his life he was contemplating the human vulva with a sanity that knew no blindspots … She slipped away from him now and started moving round the room, from handhold to handhold. And he thought, with numb tautology: in this project of their protection, the hopelessly painful thing, when they were small, was their size, their small size, their very small size.
1. Courtly love
Earlier in the morning of Valentine’s Day, Brendan had breakfasted with the Princess, and they had had words.
‘What do you want, ma’am?’
‘… I want to be a part of the umma.’
‘The umma, ma’am?’
‘The body of Islam. That’s why they pray five times a day. Shorooq, sunrise, zhur, noon, asr, mid-afternoon, maghreb, sunset, and isha, night. To recommit themselves to the body of Islam. For the act of prostration, the knees first, and then the hands. Brow, nose, both hands, both knees, and the underside of all your toes must touch the ground, and the fingers and toes must point towards Mecca. The conformity is an expression of the oneness of Islam. The umma.’
‘… If you’ll excuse me, ma’am.’
‘You’re off on your hike. Daddy doesn’t have hikes. Or even walks.’
Her tone, he noted, was softer than it had been. More fond — or at least more proprietorial.
‘Daddy takes strolls. No. Daddy takes turns.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, clutching his gloves, ‘I hope to reach Gelding’s Mere.’
Brendan headed north from the Greater House. He was surprised, in a way, by the devoutness of his secularism. Because he feared that his love could not survive it — a truly pious Princess. He could imagine his increasingly formal and detached response. He could imagine falling out of it: falling out of love. Love isn’t blind, then, he thought. Or mine isn’t. And what next, when love was gone? … Brendan sought to calm himself by looking at it practically. He didn’t care which faith it was she turned to; but the immediate task, for political puposes, would be to steer her off towards (say) Buddhism.
The unbroken cloud was thick and grey and low, like under-felt. And he felt beneath, below, under — under the underfelt.
Hal Nine — he found out what this princess wanted.
They were taking a turn, arm in arm, along the trout stream (Henry was a great subliminal believer in the curative power of flowing water). Victoria was in any case much improved — after his epic abjections concerning He Zizhen.
‘If I found out what you wanted and gave it to you, how would you change?’
‘Well I’d stop all this religious stuff for a start.’
He looked at her eagerly, not because the possible outcome was attractive but because this voice, with its forthright calculation, was the voice he knew.
‘Then I must find it out.’
‘You won’t. And even if you do, you won’t do it. Knowing you.’
‘Oh, if I find it out I will most certainly do it. Because then you’ll have to come back to me.’
In the lull before lunch they took to the low table in the library for a couple of rubbers of Vanishing Whist.
‘This is another thing you’ll have to give up,’ he said. ‘No more piggy for breakfast either … Oof. Three. No, four. At least.’ And he fanned them out, the court cards, the kings and the queens.
‘None,’ she said.
And abruptly he folded his hand, and slipped from the stool to his knees, and came round to her saying, ‘Yes of course. Yes of course, yes of course, my dearest.’
* * *
When Brendan returned, at seven, he heard voices in the dining-room. He knocked and entered. And it seemed to him that they were unusually slow to acknowledge his presence: well, a game — or another game — of Scrabble was about to begin. An empty bottle of champagne stood between them on the table, and there was a cocktail-shaker suspiciously close to the King’s brimming glass.
‘Aha, the X,’ she was saying. ‘Which I fully intend to keep.’
‘And I’ve got a Y. Rats. I don’t even go first. You’ll adore this, Bugger. I mean Brendan.’
‘Oh call him Bugger for God’s sake.’
‘You’ll adore this, Bugger.’
‘Sir?’
‘I can see you going all rosy. Procure for me the Instrument of Abdication, if you will! No. Make that two such instruments. One for her and one for me. Yes, Bugger, we’re packing it in. A bit feeble, you could say, but there it is. I sent Boy to the Press Centre and Chippy to Number Ten. It’s accomplished fact. What this princess wants is to stop being a princess.’
‘You needn’t absolutely do it, Daddy, if it’s too horrible for you.’
‘No no. All or nothing. All for love and the world well lost. Look. Look! He’s all rosy … But no, when you stop to think for a minute, it’s about time we all grew up, wouldn’t you say? The people will have to grow up. I’ll have to grow up. And if I can grow up, they can grow up. And then she can grow up. Uh! And the boredom. Uh! Nightmare … And you know what’s absolutely impossible about the monarchy, Bugger? It’s such a … Darling, go and find Love and ask him for another one of these. The impossible thing is that it’s such a …’ He held up a hand until his daughter was perhaps a kilometre distant, and said in a fading whisper, ‘It’s such a …’
‘Such a what, sir?’
‘Such a …’
‘I’m sorry, sir, such a …?’
‘Such a …’
Brendan said desperately, ‘Such a belly wink, sir?’
‘No, Bugger! Such a bally wenk!’
Then her musical laugh in the doorway, and Henry coughing and turning aside.
‘And did you reach Gelding’s Mere, Brendan?’ she asked.
‘I did not, Victoria. The mind was willing …’
He contemplated Victoria England and formed a rough plan for the rest of his life. She would actually need him more now — and Henry would need him less. He would love, and she would never know. So then: twenty or thirty winters without a kiss, a touch, a considering glance. And this love of his would be a hundred, no, a thousand times more than he deserved.
2. k8
‘well, clint, how’s trix?’ asked k8. ‘it’s so nice 2 actually c u in the flesh. now u just relax & make yourself completely @ home …’
‘Little house-present,’ said Clint coolly. ‘Moisten the piccolo so to speak.’
‘how giving u r, clint. & this ruddy gr8 cr8 of goodies! now. u get the top off th@. & i’ll b mother.’
His first thought was: Shelley. The undulant frizz of hair, the daunted orbits of the eyes, the sharp lips. She wore a black tanktop T-shirt and a Union Jack miniskirt — but then of course she had already mirthfully warned him about the girth of her thighs.
‘How’s your father, love?’
‘decim8ed. all the way from caecum 2 rectum.’
‘It never rains … Precipitation, then lovely weather for ducks.’
‘bottoms up! here’s mud in your i.’
It was around now that Clint started to feel really tragically ill. As they moved from the sink to the armchairs, and as she smoothed down her skirt with her sizable feelers, another gangrenous lunge passed slowly through him.
‘1st, the $64,000? clint: 6. u needn’t worry. it’ll b a relief 4 u 2 no this: i’ve never had a., clint.’
‘A what? … Period?’
‘i’ve never had a., clint. that’s y i was so tickled th@ u seemed 2 want 2 initi8 a deb8 about children. as if i want a br@!’
‘And I’m relieved, am I?’
‘4 you’re not th@ way inclined, r u, clint.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘y? in scribendo veritas, yellow dog. it’s all in h&, clint. i’ve been under the nife. but not 2 destroy—2 cre8! i’ve got tits & a 21, clint. they do an operation where they w.’
‘What did I hear you say to me?’
‘They w, clint … clint, what r u thinking?’ said k8. ‘i kill it now? i kill it now?’
When he came out into the street (he hadn’t touched her: just edged by with his arms shieldingly raised) he found that a grimy white van was doubleparked on the Avenger. ‘How Am I Driving?’ said its sticker. ‘Like A Cunt,’ someone had written in the dust. After a lot of parping and yelling and twisting about, Clint mounted the gutter, taking a left from a lamppost and a right from a railing, and ploughed through a hill of black rubbish-bags and on to the street. With his leg stretched straight over the pedal, in a yowl of revs, he shot through Mattock Estate and skidded into Britannia Junction, where he joined the ten-mile traffic jam that would, eventually, deliver him to the Bends and the open road he craved. He kept tearing off up sidestreets, kept buzzing round culs-de-sac like a hornet in a jamjar — like a particle in a cyclotron; then back to the bumper-to-bumper, where he hogged and jockeyed and lane-hopped. Down came the window for many a white-lipped slagging — the evil eye, the crackling fist; at one point, in hopeless gridlock, he jumped down and briefly chased a young couple on an old scooter — and was of course easily outstripped, the man turning to give the tosser sign with a gauntleted hand. Weeping, twisting, brutally honking, he flanked and tacked through Thamesmead, Hornchurch, Noak Hill.
Then the open road. At this time Clint Smoker weighed four and a half tons. He had a top speed of a hundred and sixty miles per hour. The great blare of his voice (audible for miles), the great blaze of his eyes, tunnelling through the late afternoon. Even his backside carbuncles were now eight inches square.
3. The edge of the earth
There was a little reception committee for him, of course, and Joseph Andrews hadn’t travelled alone. His people were unloading the Range Rover that Manfred had hired, and there were two other cars, blocking the road for now, outside the villa in rural Essex, near Gravesend, just where you come off the Bends.
‘A fine fucking welcome this is,’ he said. ‘A fine fucking homecoming.’
Joseph Andrews stood at the gate, half slumped over his Zimmer frame. His eyes were clenched shut and his lower teeth bared, after the long journey.
‘I come back to me own country,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘after twenty-five year. And what’s the first thing I see in me Evening Standard? Plans for the uh, the fucking renounciation of the monarchy. I reckon they done it to spite me. Got half a mind to …’ His closed eyes saw a swimming-pool: a motion jigsaw of crimson blood.
‘That’s down to you, that is, Boss,’ said a passing figure. ‘Pressures on the Princess.’
‘… You’re due a chinning for that, you are, Manfred Curbishley. And when you least expect it and all. No Scotch for you tonight. Face like a fucking chicken tandoori as it is. Where’s Simon? Simon! Hadn’t you better be getting along, son? … Gaw, now who’s this doing his fucking nut.’
He thought it was an insect at first, and even reached feebly for his holster — which of course he would not be needing, in England, in February: a buzzing whine, with hysteria in it. Joseph Andrews raised his trembling head; but the eyes wouldn’t open.
‘Someone — someone go and …’
Brisk footsteps clicked past him. He heard the car change gear, down from third to second, then, with insane protest, from second to first; then a sterling cry of ‘Halt!’; then a boost, then an atrocious concussion, then a faint miaow in the air, then a sound that opened the eyes of Joseph Andrews. It was a sound he had heard once before, in Strangeways, when a prison guard threw himself naked from the tower into the courtyard. An explosion, then something like a flurry of rain.
He threw aside his Zimmer frame and stepped forward. And he thought he had never seen anyone walking towards him as fast as this — walking to the edge of the earth, and intending to get there.
Mal Bale was within (he had been there half the day: turn on the heat and otherwise), coming out of a light nap on the chair in the hall. He heard it. He looked into the kitchen and told Manfred and Rodney to stay inside.
You couldn’t see anything from the front path: just the lights of the cars and the garage lantern. Mal kept moving forward. And now other sounds, the squelch, the sob, the squelch, the sob.
There was a pink mist. And his own car, the elderly BM, was lavishly besplattered with flesh and plasma; on the bonnet was a brown brogue shoe with an ankle in it.
To the left, where the noises were coming from, you were blinded by the brights of the black jeep. Mal ducked out of the beam and edged round the garage doors.
Joseph Andrews lay dead on the road. Above him, his assailant, by now with painful weariness, delivered a few last blows with his tool — his spanner, his wrench. Then he threw it aside and seemed to be trying to weep. But he couldn’t weep; and Mal saw why.
‘Come on, son. You’ve done him now. It’s over. Easy. Easy … Christ: Clint mate … Up. Up you come. We’re going to help you now. We’re going to help you, help you.’
Mal Bale thought: So that was Jo’s last act on earth. With his prehensile right hand. The blinding of Clint Smoker.
4. February 14 (6.27 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back. Come on back! … Come on back to me. Level up the turn. No no no. Straighten out, straighten out.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Well I’m here, John, with my circular sliderule.
Macmanaman: Take me through it, Betty.
SAM: NEO will be twenty-one point three nine miles from you when it sheers. There’ll be fireworks and some heat and you’ll feel that instantly. We don’t think that’ll be important. But there’ll be downwinds, John.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Well that’s it.
SAM: I’m sorry. Now the heat’ll come at the speed of light. The wind will come at the speed of sound. So after the flash you’ll have one minute … nine seconds. Good luck. We’re all rooting for you. Really rooting for you.
Macmanaman: Thanks, honey.
First Officer Nick Chopko: And here we have our so-called runway, gentlemen. See it?
Macmanaman: Hal?
‘Three minutes,’ said the voice of Hal Ward, and nothing else. Reynolds knew that John Macmanaman had been in a crash before — as a young man, and as a passenger. He’d told her about it a couple of times. He said it was like a silent movie: no sound at all, and black-and-white. Even the gust of fire was silent and black-and-white. And the dying, those slipping away but also those actually in flames had the same expression. One of wonder.
She eased her neck, and searched for better thoughts … John said he suddenly became a hundred different mes. All around him were wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children. And then, later, the question of survival. It was like winning a squalid lottery, he said … Oh I get it, she said to herself. After nearly half a century Royce dies and then, three days later, I die too. Moral: don’t marry at seventeen.
The passengers facing the prow were in the brace position, bent forward with their hands clasped over their heads. Reynolds, facing aft, sat normally, just hugging her neck, hugging her neck: Captain’s orders.
And she knew — stone knew — that if they got through this alive she was going to make him marry her.
There was a yellow flash and she felt sweat form on her upper lip.
Ward: How long?
Macmanaman: Sixteen seconds. And God, right now, it’s so still.
SAM: This isn’t my field, but if the wind comes down, it’s got to come back up, right? If you can just stay out there …
Macmanaman: Here it comes. Ride it. Ride it.
Ward: … Fucking Christ, the wing’s coming down!
Macmanaman: Wait!
Ward: We’re coming down on the wing!
Chopko: I love you, Amy!
There were rescue-and-emergency teams, at a distance, all along the cleared six miles of Interstate 95—just south of the city of Florence, Florence County, South Carolina.
This is what the people saw and this is what they heard.
They saw the crucifix of Flight 101 coming out of the early afternoon above the red plateau. At first in perfect silence — until they heard the mournful chord of the stricken machine. Then its drunken slides and drifts, and its final circling, chest up, arms outflung: counterclockwise. As it steadied, as it bore down, there came the heavy flash from above, and, within a second, the comet’s hair was a silver river from horizon to horizon …
The plane was perhaps five hundred feet from the ground when the downwind took it. It seemed to give a roar of pain and rage as it rocked and plunged. The left wing dropped and hit: a streak of sparks along the hard shoulder. Then the updraught: and Flight 101 violently levelled. One scorching ricochet, one hurt, wounded rearing-up with slats and panels flying off it, then touchdown, the resilient gathering of its rigidity, and on it powered beyond the cauldron of its wake.
And the mad hair, the silver tresses, streamed on above their heads, following the comet to Jupiter.
5. Yellow dog
It was six o’clock in London, and Xan was alone in the house with his younger daughter Sophie.
Earlier, as he ate his lunch standing by the fridge in the flat across the road, Russia had called and said (he was going to dinner there anyway), ‘Can you come early and have Sophie for an hour?’
‘I’d love to. But will she wear it?’
‘I think so. Let’s try it and see.’
‘She’s so flash now, Baba. And if she’s not having it … What came up? Tell me, tell me.’
She talked about Billie’s sleepover, Imaculada’s night off. Then she said, ‘A small man with a sort of Foreign Office accent approached me after my lecture on Tuesday. He told me he had some stuff on the Gaddafi boys and offered to bring it over. I’m meeting him in the Close at half past six. Disgusting name. Semen Something. Disgusting eyes: frothy blue. I’ll be back around seven, seven-fifteen. Thanks for this.’
He went over to the house at five o’clock. Sophie looked upon him leniently. At six he poured himself a glass of beer, reminded himself to watch for the comet, and went back to reading the kind of books that featured one word per page.
Relations with the girls were pretty well renormalised. Sophie, now, was occasionally bashful or demure. He was not yet free to pick her up and hold her — she squirmed and simpered, and wouldn’t quite collude. But with Billie he was fully reinstated. Once, to dramatise a point brought up by her bedside literature, he made a supposedly frightening face, and, having briefly faltered, Billie said, ‘You can’t scare me. You’re just my silly old daddy.’ He had also done himself a power of good the other day, when Billie, using the arm of a chair, had embarked on what were known, hereabouts, as her exercises, and he had said, with mild vexation, ‘Oh Billie’ — and turned away (what was it that mildly vexed him: the sense of thwarted energy?). Then he met the eyes of his wife, and their frown of hope.
Xan, too, had hope. He even believed that he would be spending the night with Russia on this day: the day of the martyr Valentine. His wife, with her aerodynamic bone-structure: she used to put her tongue to the side and push, when she wanted a kiss — to draw attention to the cheek but also to make it nearer. And she had started doing that again, about twenty-four hours ago. If she asked him to stay, and to stay in her bed, he still wouldn’t press his case. And what he was thinking about now, as he said things like ‘car’ and ‘pig’ and ‘fork’, were the nights when your wife sits near you after dinner, reading, motionless, like an artefact, like an Old Master, and all you’re aware of is the texture of the paint.
He watched his daughter, crawling, and often getting to her feet and moving from handhold to handhold … On a certain level, Xan was aware, he entertained ridiculous expectations of Sophie Meo. She was his fourth child, and his second girl. I’ve got the idea by now, he sometimes found himself thinking. Why hasn’t she? Is she really going to cough and shriek and shit everywhere, just like the other three, and fall over all the time, and spend a year saying you when she meant me (‘help you! help you!’), and half a decade asking why, why, why? Well, he was ready for why, this time around. Instead of ‘because …’ he’d say ‘guess’. Epiphenomenally, he wished that the laws of motion could be redrafted more indulgently with infants in mind, so that the smack of the face on the floor, when the arms failed, would be softer and quieter, and the weeping softer and quieter and also briefer, and the bump shallower-sided and a quieter red. Sophie moved from handhold to handhold.
Xan continued to wonder how much he was going to tell Russia about Cora Susan. In his letter he had promised her some sort of confession, and so he couldn’t altogether avoid it. He knew one thing: he’d tell her about it after. And not soon after, either. But this confidence, this intimacy, would eventually be expected of him. He felt entitled to blur it slightly. Could you actually say, ‘I kissed my niece’s breasts’? Shouldn’t you contain it — what was essentially a family embarrassment? And conceivably Russia might find out about it anyway, via Pearl. He could say: You have the right to retaliate. But with proportionality. You’ll have to get your Uncle Mordecai to …
In Russia’s eyes, naturally enough, Cora wore the taint of pornography (and Xan himself had not escaped it, for all his careful editing of the footage from Dolorosa Drive). Russia’s objections were mainly aesthetic objections — though not for that reason superficial; and the moral objections she saved for the end: ‘She’s both pimp and prostitute.’ ‘True,’ he said, ‘but there are reasons for that. Think.’ ‘Okay,’ she said—‘but when I think about pornography, all I see is a man with a remote control in one hand and his cock in the other.’ Well, yes; and, yes, the obscenification of everyday life was hesitantly entrained. He went on considering it. It could be that women wouldn’t mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy. Nobody bothered to object to the gay end of it, supposedly because of the absence of the other: the exploited. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe women just couldn’t bear to see it travestied, the act of love that peopled the world.
He intended to phone Cora — though maybe he should wait a while, he thought, before delivering the avuncular advice he had in mind. This advice was not particularly tasteful, but it was advice he could give her, because consanguinity had rendered him chaste. His erotic thoughts about Cora were now barely a memory. Which showed that the taboo was strong, was efficacious; it worked. He’d say: ‘It sounds soft, and trite — but have a baby. When I look at you I always look for your children. That’s what your breasts are looking for too: they’re looking for your children. So get Burl Rhody to knock you up, and then spend all your money on help.’ Or something like that. Xan now wondered, warily, whether Russia would go back to wanting another. He could take another child, he reckoned; and he wouldn’t refuse if she insisted. But could he take another pregnancy? Pearl and Russia had not much differed here: pretty wonderful, the first time round; and then, the second time round, the self-righteous sumo wrestler, with her doomy naps behind curtained noons, her looming trudge, and every other breath a sigh from the depths. And mad with power.
His hopes, he realised, his ambitions, were gaining in strength and complacency and even … Yes, he was back — back in his life. And what did it look like now, through these quietly different eyes? Good. But he was also back in the thing which is called world. Two days earlier he had gone to collect Billie from school. The playground, as he approached it, was making the sound that playgrounds make: that of unserious panic. And he thought — what if that panic were not unserious? How precious it all is and how fragile it all is. The bare trees above his head were furred with snow. Their claws had become paws. But the snow would soon melt.
But I go to Hollywood but you go to …
Sophie passed by. She steadied herself with a hand on his knee. The dimples at the base of each finger looked like pluses and minuses. The plus and minus signs of babies. She would soon be walking — the faulty wiring and the hairtrigger readjustments, the involuntary three-yard sprints, the upward-shooting arms.
He made a call on the house line, and reached Pearl, who treated him gently (persisting in some obscure cycle of penitence), and gave him a boy. As he hung up, his mobile phone sounded in his jacket.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan? Mal Bale. He’s dead.’
‘Who is?’
‘Joseph Andrews.’
‘How?’
‘Road accident. And another old bastard copped it and all. Simon Finger. Smashed to pieces he was. All over me BM. Thought you’d like to know. You all right?’
‘Yeah mate …’
He hung up and sat still for a moment and closed his eyes.
He closed his eyes and saw the yellow dog.
Into the yard Xan had come, and heard a sound seemingly designed for his unease. The sound had a rhythm, like a murderous act of love: a grunt, then a muffled, slushy impact or convergence, then an answering moan. And over and above it the crying, the choric wail of the yellow dog. He moved past the stake where the animal was chained.
The yard — with its stacks of planks, its sinks and toilet bowls, its black entanglement of tyres — was the place where his sentimental understanding had so far been formed. He had trailed his sister Leda when she took her boyfriends there on summer nights, and watched her on her knees behind the disused cement-mixer, or up against the wheelless van with her skirt round her waist. The sometimes pouting, sometimes snarling pinups and calendar-girls tacked or gummed to the workshop wall; the dogs (earlier dogs) stoically stuck together in coition and awaiting the deliverance of the bucket; and — even further back — the hectic hen coming running to the screeching cock.
He tipped open the shed door and saw his father seated on another man’s chest, straddling the flattened shoulders with his knees: Mick Meo over Joseph Andrews. How he kept raising his bleeding fist and letting it drop with a grunted oom, the wet slap of the blow, and the countering retch from beneath. And how weary it was, how sick and tired. For this, that. For that, this. ‘Hey Dad,’ he had said, coming forward to rush and quell. And how the man’s greased and distorted face had filled with fresh fury as he rose up to envelop his boy.
While it happened (and he didn’t remember much: at one point he was in mid-air, and taking an intense interest in the nature and texture of his destination) you could hear the yellow dog. Whining, weeping, and rolling its head as if to ease an aching neck, working its shoulders, trying to free itself of this thing — this thing on its back.
* * *
6. When they were small
Just after seven he opened the door to the garden and watched the comet with the child in his arms. ‘Yook!’ she said, pointing, but pointing as infants do: the bisection-point of thumb and forefinger was the direction intended. The comet bustled east across the sky — a white light — with futile industry, like a terrible old man on a terrible old errand. Mustn’t stop, mustn’t stop. And utterly committed, suicidally committed, to Jupiter and its gravity. He imagined for a moment that he could hear it: a weak hiss of execration. Then came the affronted honk of a car in the street, and another honk sounding in defiant response, and he shook his head and smiled, returning to the small and the local concerns.
He was fetching some water for Sophie when he saw his wife coming past the front of the house. She was slightly hunched over, with an air of conscious remissness — as if, having been out too long, she was now stealing back, but confident of exoneration, and of frictionless readmittance. He heard her enter upstairs; he heard her throw her keys on to the hall table, and give the indignantly aspirated hoot she gave when something or other, in the exterior world, just hadn’t worked out. ‘Down in a minute,’ she called. And he heard her running up the stairs; and, after a while, the clatter of the shower on the tub floor.
He turned. And there was someone else in the room: a new kind of person. Sophie was standing beside the heap of toys, not walking, just standing, unsupported — unconnected except by her feet to the floor. She was delighted, but she was delighted about something else (the scrap of paper in her hand), and didn’t yet see that she had changed.
Xan moved forwards, saying, ‘Baba, you’re—’
It came to her. She was up: now how to get down? Her arms sprang skyward, her legs dipped at the knee — and she flipped herself backwards into the rubble of the building-blocks and Sticklebricks … When he reached for her she took his whole arm in both of hers, and when he hoisted her up he felt her hot wet snorting in his ear — but it wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious at all.
As, nevertheless, he sat comforting her on the sofa, he looked at the lashes of her eyes, their tear-freshened zigzag — and he remembered her birth, and the zigzag, the frantic scribble of the heart-monitor as Sophie toiled within. He was already crying when she came (as he had cried when the boys came): not because of what they faced but because of what they had already suffered, all alone and at their very smallest. And minutes later, when Sophie came, for the first time in his life he was contemplating the human vulva with a sanity that knew no blindspots … She slipped away from him now and started moving round the room, from handhold to handhold. And he thought, with numb tautology: in this project of their protection, the hopelessly painful thing, when they were small, was their size, their small size, their very small size.
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