by Martin Amis
Tristan and Benedict when they weren't called Burt or Mel or Harrison,
and then some rather older guys with names like Clint and Yul and Marlon, and then some guys about Richard's age with names like Dave and Steve and Chris, and yet older guys (blemished, sidelined) with namesnosing it, getting wind of it. And the other half (this was copromode) he thought it all made perfect sense: that if you looked like shit, and felt like shit and behaved like shit, then pretty soon you were going to smell like shit. For Richard knew he was going to hell: it was just a question of which circle. Christ, he knew that. Just as he knew that smoking was bad for his health. Even the packet said that it killed you … Having gone nuts in the nose, he wondered what to do about it, but not for long. His doctor had died five years ago and Richard hadn't looked for a new one. He couldn't see himself sitting in Casualty with the Friday-night crowd, where, anyway, to gain admission, you needed an axe in your head. Nor did he expect to pay a visit to some suburban superclinic the size of a dormitory town or a major airport where you had to get into lane at least a mile or two back up the road: Richard, in the Maestro, flinching as the signs sliced by him, looking for the one that said NUTS IN THE NOSE. In the kitchen he sidled experimentally up to Gina, waiting for her to pull back with a "Yuck" or a "Phwaw." And nothing happened. The point was that he didn 't smell of shit. So who cared?
This Saturday morning, easing himself deeper into a bath almost Mediterranean in its oil-mantle and unguent prisms (and shit smells: would it soon aspire to the plastic 7-Up bottles, the belly-up jellyfish?), Richard thought briskly but proudly of all the bits of him that weren't nuts-or not nuts yet. People were nuts in the eyes and the ears. And Richard wasn't. People were nuts in the guts and the glands. Not Richard. The complacent roll call of organs that he was not yet nuts in might have continued-but then Marius knocked.
"Daddy. Quick."
"Jesus. Go upstairs."
"I'm desperate."
He rose, and turned the difficult doorknob. On the wall the mirror held him in its steam. After the usual pause Marius wandered inward. He lowered his track-suit bottoms and underpants a few inches but made no move for the bowl. As Richard dried himself his chest was suddenly remoistened by the thought that he was-and had long been-nuts in the Johnson. If going nuts was an internal treachery (all counter-suggestibility and finesse), then he had long been nuts in the Johnson. Oh yeah. And nuts in the brain.
Marius was now seated.
Just what I need, thought Richard: more shit.
The child's gaze was leveled at him. Marius said, declaratively, "You've got a big willy, Daddy."
"Well it's very nice of you to say so, Marius.?
this was how it went. This was what you did. What you did was: you took an individual and seized upon some obvious and invariably unfortunate characteristic-and talked about it the whole time, at every opportunity, all the hours there were, day in, day out. Whatever it might be: Bal was bald, Mai maladroit, Del delinquent, Gel gelatinous; Pel was plump; Hal sported an ill-advised and much-regretted tattoo on his throat (CUT HERE along the dotted line); Lol had had his right ear ripped off in an argument about zonal marking. With Richard, they really didn't know where to start or where to stop, so they called him Red Eye and Jethro and Scarecrow and Walking Dictionary and Mr. Pastry and Lord Byron . . . Often, in such quandaries, a TV tie-in can grant clarity; and usually, nowadays, they called him Cedric-after the affected old slob who presented an afternoon quiz show about words. Richard felt that he had a lot in common with the working classes (he understood hourly disaster), but he liked them better twenty years ago, when they looked worse. There was another nickname they had for him. He didn't know about it yet.
"All the way, Cedric. All the way."
And Richard was off. On the Knowledge, the questions recurred, so you needed memory. Richard had memory, a real memory, many magnitudes greater than what the million hobble by with, calling it their memory. It was open to doubt, at the Warlock, whether knowledge-the mind-counted for anything at all. But on the Knowledge, knowledge really seemed to matter, punctually rewarded by hot coins and an electric jingle. Sometimes, as now, the guys fell silent as Richard worked the machine, his face proud and nervous and aslant, giving glosses and derivations, sneering at the screen's bad grammar (for this oracle was only semi-literate, prone to danglers and pause-for-breath commas, confounded by all apostrophes) and smacking out the answers before anyone had time to read the questions. What is the collective noun given to crows? Set. Covey. Murder. "Yes, murder. They're weird, collective nouns. Always go-" What would an orologist study? Birds. Mountains. Metals. "Oros. Mountain. Always go for the really fanciful one. The precious one. An unkindness of ravens. A business of ferrets. "How many years ago was the last Ice Age? 10,000. 100,000. 1,000,000. "Not as long ago as you'd think. An exaltation of larks. They must have given collective nouns to some chick poet to do. Trecbeor: a cheat. Christ, look at that it's. 1968. Red shift.
One t, two /s. Don't ask me to spell. You can't spell. Randir. to gallop. Sk.
Mars. Jesus." And on he would go, 10p, 20p, 50p-until he was tripped up by some dead comic's catchphrase or rock star's cock size, and by thenlike Albert, Roger, and Bob. They turned, and greeted Gwyn, and Richard felt their humorous censure.
Pel said, "Quick. Here he is."
"Here he is," said Del. "Here's Cedric."
The Knowledge posed questions, offering multiple-choice answers (buttons A, B, and C), for modest cash prizes, depending on how far you traveled along learning's trail. To do well, to advance, you needed a good-sized crew round the Knowledge, all the smatterings you could get of history, geography, etymology, mythology, astronomy, chemistry, politics, popular music-and TV. Most crucially TV: TV down through the ages. It was in TV form that the other stuff was meant to be propagated anyway; and the newer knowledge machines, Richard had noticed, in the pubs he hung out in, actually were TVs: they fled the written, and embraced the audiovisual. The machine at the Warlock was trade-named Wise Money, and Richard, in his head, sometimes referred to it as the Profundity Requital, or the Aleph; but everyone else called it the Knowledge.
"Here, Cedric. What's . . . 'infra dig'?"
Richard squeezed up to the screen, which said:
Q. If a task was "infra dig," you would perform it
A. Quickly
B. Slowly
C. Unwillingly
"Complete non sequitur," brayed Richard, slapping the C. "You'd be just as likely to do it quickly or slowly. Beneath one's dignity. Infra dignitatem."
"That's Cedric," said Bal.
Now the screen said:
Q: D. H. Lawrence was a well-known writer. What does "D. H." stand for?
A. Donald Henley
B. David Herbert
C. Darren Henry
"Darren's good," said Richard. "Or what about Duane? Duane Lawrence."
"Do it, Cedric," said Lol. "Go for it, Cedric."
Cedric? When it came to interpersonal humor, here at the Warlock,true. He might have tried to laugh in your face. In any event he wouldn't have managed it. Out on court he felt he had forgotten how to play, but his body, with its sick nose, its damaged eye, seemed to remember the way it went. His body remembered. The low sun, the sun of winter, squinted into his face. When he threw the ball up to serve, an image scored itself onto the dark shutter of his eyelids; the ball burned in the bright orbit of his rackethead, like Saturn.
He had been a slave in his own life. Now he was a ghost in his own life.
How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn't nuts, when his eye wasn't black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.
The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noticed his black eye. This was because everyone else had a black eye. Even the men.
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
At the Tantalus Press he continued to look kindly on the wor
k of Keith Horridge. With poets, he realized, he was generally lenient. When in the year before he married her Gina started sleeping with writers, Richard found his jealousy reasonably easy to manage when she slept with poets- easier, much easier, than when she slept with novelists and (especially) dramatists. He liked poets because they had no power and no money. He wrote to Horridge, giving him advice on the stanza:
Spume retractile, the detritus of time. Stasis is epitaph- the syzygy of sand.
And Horridge reworked the stanza to make it more obscure. Maybe he should fuck up Keith Horridge. Maybe Keith Horridge was more his speed. But Richard wrote back, telling Horridge to justify the obscurity-telling Horridge that obscurity must be earned.
Horridge was twenty-nine. This sounded like a good age for a poet to be.
At The Little Magazine he secured favorable reviews for the paperback of
Saddle Leather, a collection of short stories by the Boston-based poet
and novelist Elsa Oughton, and for the out-of-print Jurisprudential by Stanwyck Mills, Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.
Del and Pel and the others would be so lulled by his mastery, by his Knowledge know-how, that the clock would tick along its ratchet and hum warningly, and Richard would guess, furiously, and smack the wrong button, and the quest, the trail of gold, would evaporate and a new one would form. Because of course the quest for knowledge never really ended. Like the universe, it was a saga of augmentative abasement. Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge. Hazlitt. Gibbon. Coleridge: it was Coleridge. Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole.
"Let's go," said Gwyn. "We're on."
Richard was staring at the screen-at the resumed quest. What is coprolite? Rock. Oil deposit. Fossil dung. Turning to leave, he thoughtlessly smacked A (thoughtlessly, because the opening question of any quest allowed two attempts, as was meet, as was only right). Then with impatience he smacked B. Also wrong. "Shit," he said.
"Fossil dung!" said Pel, with humorous authority, as the quest dissolved.
"Yeah, of course. Kopros: shit. You know, like coprophile."
"Most untypical," said Gwyn.
Richard looked at him.
"I thought you knew everything about shit."
The guys laughed, uncertainly. TV meant that everything Gwyn said was revised upwards in terms of sparkle and pertinence; but shit, the reality, the stuff itself-this was not happy ground.
"Homer nods," said Bal. "Cedric nods. 'Anosmia' nods."
Anosmia: loss of sense of smell. Although Richard had a great memory, he didn't remember that "anosmia" had once featured on the Knowledge. And he didn't know that they called him Anosmia not because he suffered from it but because he was capable of defining it. He dropped his head and ducked away from the crowd, following Gwyn on to Court One.
"Won't be able to concentrate today." Gwyn was shaking his wrists and bobbing around like a million-quid footballer arising ominously from the dugout. "I'll keep thinking about that maniac in my bedroom."
"What did she actually … How do you-"
"Oh our visitor left a calling card all right," said Gwyn with disgust.
"Christ, you don't mean she-"
"Enough. Please."
If, at seven in the morning, you had told Richard he was going to play tennis that same afternoon, he would have laughed in your face. No: notOver the chessboard, the following Sunday, Richard asked Gwyn what had happened with Belladonna.
"Nothing," he said. "What did you expect? I wanted to talk about oral sex but she just wanted to talk about Amelior. That book is her bible. A lot of kids seem to have taken it up. It's the message of hope, I suppose."
"J'adoube," said Richard, sniffing his fingertips.
"You know it's on the syllabus. Not just in America, where you'd kind of expect it. But here in stuffy old England!"
"Mate in three," said Richard. "No. Mate in two."
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
Once a day that slobbering fuckpig of an Englishman hurled and bounced himself down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour in his German car. Like a low-flying aircraft-like a drug rush …
Richard couldn't believe this fucking guy. This fucking guy: what was his hurry? Who did he think could want him anywhere a second sooner than he was going to get there already?
Somehow it always happened that Richard was out on the street when the German car ripped past-frozen with loathing, his imprecations tousled and tossed aside by the barreling backdraft. The drooling brute in his capsule of humorlessness. White shirt, with loosened tie, and the navy suit-top on the hook behind him.
What is it with this fucking guy? he always said out loud-driving down my street at sixty miles an hour, coming to kill my kids.
He rang Demi. "Oh I'm okay," she said. "How are you?"
"Tolerably well," he said, for this was sometimes Richard's style. His black eye had stopped being a black eye. The lid was violet, the orbit a lively-even a cheerful-yellow. "Demi, you know I'm writing this big thing on Gwyn. This means we'll have to hang out together. Lunch, for instance. A brief sea cruise, perhaps."
"On me. What are you … What's your-"
"My angle? The usual, I should think. What made the princess fall for the grim little Taff."
"And what's the answer?"
"I don't know."
"So you want…?"
"Deep background."
Then she gave him a date in mid-January and said, "I'm going home that weekend. You could come down on the Friday or the Saturday. Spend the night. It'll be very informal. Just family."
He sat in the pub for three hours staring at the haywain of Anstke's dipped head while she explored what she considered to be her only alternative to suicide: moving into 49E Calchalk Street.
Early in December Richard had lunch with the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet which would be publishing his long profile of Gwyn Barry. "What we want to know," said the Features Editor, "is what every reader wants to know: what's he really like. You know him as well as anyone. You know: what's he really like."
They would run the piece after Gwyn's pub date: absorb the "impact." More generally, the Features Editor went on, Richard should examine the pressures facing the successful novelist in the late 1990s.
On the day before his trial for drunken driving Richard took a spin in the Maestro: to Wroxhall Parade. Belladonna answered the door in a black two-piece suit, a black hat and a black veil. The veil held dull gray sequins in its mesh; it resembled a spider's web complete with dead flies. In the Maestro they rode to Holland Park Avenue. He didn't feel like a pimp or a pander or an agent provocateur. He felt like a minicab driver.
Gwyn treated him as such. Unsmilingly he led Belladonna off to his study, and Richard poked around in the kitchen, failing to read a new biography but successfully drinking beer.
She was quiet, and maybe even quietly tearful behind her veil, when he drove her back to Wroxhall Parade. He asked her what had happened and she kept saying Nothing.
Richard went to court and was duly admonished and fined and banned- for a year.
Demi failed her driving test for the third time.
Crash couldn't understand it. "This is beyond my comprehension," he said, as he drove her woundedly back from Walthamstow. Not only did the driving instructor and the driving examiner originate from the West Indies. They originated from the same island.
As Crash approached central London he relented, and taught Demi something nice: the use of the hazard lights to express gratitude. Often, as you joined a queue of traffic from a side road, and a fellow motorist held back to admit you, there wasn't enough time to wave or flash your thanks. A brief application of the hazard lights, however, allowed you to salute the indulgence of the car behind.
One whose oldest son left home received instruction from Father Duryea at St. Ant
hony's.
One whose marriage ended traveled first to Israel, then to Africa.
They all suffered from pains. These pains were informers sent by death.
One who heard mechanical noises in his ears attached a mirror to his shoe and stood in crowds where women gathered.
One who wore his hair swiped upward from his right sideburn abjured the love of women and sought the love of men.
One who could still see the bus when the bus was nice and near started responding to the propositions written on cards and left in street-corner telephone booths.
They all kept comparing what had gone to what would come.
One abstained from meat and fish, and eggs, and fruit that failed to fall to the ground of its own accord.
One grew fat and had nightly dreams of lopping.
One bought an electric juicer and came to fear the force of electricity.
They all saw what lay behind. If they looked, they could see what lay ahead. They didn't choose to look. But at three in the morning something woke them with the fizzy rush of an old flash camera, and there they all were, staring down the sights of their lives and drawing a bead on the information.
"What does it mean anyway: 'chief me out'?"
"Like you called him chief. Your chiefed him out."
"What's wrong with chief? Cabbies call you chief. Chief doesn't sound too bad."
"I asked him. He couldn't remember. All he knew was if you get called chief then you've been chiefed out. And it can't get around that you stood there and got chiefed out."
" Why would I chief him out? Why would I chief him out? Why would I tell anyone I chiefed him out?"
"There you go. Such are the ways of our colored brethren."
"I'm assuming I got my black eye free."
"Yeah," said Steve Cousins, without any sign of amusement. "That one's definitely on the house."
"Now might be a good time to talk about money."
Richard had not been discouraged by his black-eye experience. Far from it. He felt he had traveled through the visible spectrum and had at last reached the end of the rainbow. His own life, on paper (and"And will Gwyn be there?"