by Glen Duncan
I rushed across the room, knelt before her and put my hands on her knees. The knees were the size of babies’ skulls.
‘You need to get one hand up to my chin, darling, if this is a Classically inspired entreaty,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’
I pushed my face into her lap and held it there for a moment. Delicious aroma: laundered wool, Opium, the noon tuna-salad, Laphroaig single malt, fagsmoke and ah, yes, surely a trace of Betsy’s sly and seasoned vadge. I leaped to my feet, crossed the Persian rug and threw myself into the leather couch so lately and ingloriously vacated by Tony Lamb. Betsy – with more amdram suppression of girlish collusion – took a Dunhills from her silver case and lit up from a hideous malachite and gold desk lighter. I followed suit with a Silk Cut and a Swan Vesta.
‘It’s very simple, Betsy,’ I said. ‘It’s really unbelievably simple. I wanted to see you, so here I am.’
Dunhill smoke exhaled nasally in twin plumes. Slowblinking heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Ah,’ she said – gravelly monosyllable – ‘A newly discovered allergy to the telephone?’
‘A newly discovered knack for spontaneity.’
‘And violence, apparently.’
I gave her a lickerish grin. ‘A talentless cunt with a head like a dead lightbulb, and you know it.’
‘Of course I know it, Declan. That doesn’t give you the right to assault the poor chap. Besides, Villiers are going to cough up a quarter of a million for his next book if I’ve got anything to do with it.’
‘Who said anything about rights,’ I said. ‘I want to come back over there and put my hand up your skirt.’
‘Oh I shouldn’t if I were you.’ Deeply blushing throat despite the aplomb. ‘Why don’t you tell me what all this is in aid of, umm?’
I smoked for a couple of drags in silence. It felt remarkably pleasant to be sprawled in Betsy’s couch, one leg hooked over the back, one arm trailing on the floor. The late afternoon light was fading and I knew that any moment Betsy would turn her desk lamp on (a charming art nouveau doodle in pewter with a green glass shade) creating a weird grotto of light around her heavy face. Our cigarette smoke hung in skeins above us. A Covent Garden audience stuttered into applause outside. Children cheered, tinnily. Betsy’s dark wall clock clucked, softly, and I thought: I’ll be sorry to leave all this behind.
‘Betsy,’ I said, then blew a succession of fat and shivering smoke rings. ‘Betsy, I’ve got a book for you. It’s not finished yet, but it very nearly is. I have absolutely no idea whether you’ll like it, nor do I care. All I want you to do is get the fucking thing published.’
‘I wrote it because it just seemed really clear to me that this whole debate between men and women . . . the sex war, the politics of gender . . . that entire dialectic was starting to stagnate.’
Thus Gunn on Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. I was there. (Yes, I was there. I’m everywhere, I am. Not quite omnipresent – but busy. Really busy.) ‘There’ was a flyblown and nicotine-coloured studio at Cult Radio. Gunn and Barry Rimmington, a moth-eaten and perennially soused jock so thin it looked as though he could barely support the weight of the headphones, who chain-smoked Rothmans and sat in the Joycean manner with legs not crossed but plaited, as if any looser posture would let his entire body unravel and fall apart.
‘You know, it just struck me that for a lot of guys in my – well, not my generation . . . but my . . . demographic . . . that we’re walking around with the sort of behavioural costumery of reconstructed men.’ He was pleased with that phrase, having devised it on the train up from London. He left a pause after its delivery, in which he expected Barry to say something like, ‘How d’you mean, exactly?’ Unfortunately, Barry, lighting one Rothmans off another with all the alacrity of a doped slow loris, wasn’t listening. (He’d had quite a few foul-ups on the air, had Barry, invariably as a result of letting his mind wander, having left the interview in the radically incapable hands of his professional autopilot. ‘Margaret, you say you’ve always had this ambition. Tell me, have you always had this ambition?’) So Gunn just went on: ‘By which I mean that, I suppose, there’s a number of men who’ve learned to speak feminist – we’ve read our Andrea Dworkin and our Germaine Greer and what have you, and we’ve got a handle on what’s cool and what’s not – but the question remains to what extent has the inner psychological mechanism actually changed? In other words, are we genuine? I wanted to write a novel that asked that question – of myself, naturally – I think it was Trollope who said that every writer is his own first reader – but also of men and women generally. That, at any rate was the starting point . . .’
Penelope stands with her arms elbow deep in Fairy Liquid bubbles. She’s staring out of the window (grotty ground floor one-bedroom flat in Kilburn, but it’s been the arena of their young love and therefore radiates an untranslatable beauty) into the haggard back garden with its rusted milk crate and neurotic tree. She had stopped to listen with a smile on her wide lips. Now she’s just still. The bubbles proceed with their quiet, continuous bursting around her arms.
‘So,’ Declan says that night on the phone. ‘Did you hear it?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And?’
‘You sounded nervous.’
‘I was nervous. You should’ve seen the fucking DJ. Looked like an imperfectly reanimated zombie.’
‘Umm.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What? Yeah, yeah. I’ve had bad guts all day, that’s all. You all right?’
‘Yeah. It’s absurd, you know, you spend your entire life trying to get people to listen to you, then when it finally happens and someone shoves a microphone in front of you –’
‘Gunn – ?’
‘– you just end up speaking in platitudes – eh?’
‘I’ve got something on the stove.’
‘Oh. Okay. Are you sure you’re all right, love?’
‘Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Just. I should go and get this thing.’
‘Okay. Go on then, I’ll wait.’
‘No I’ll call you later. Is that all right? I’m just –’
‘What?’
‘I think I might need to go and have an enormous poo.’
‘Oh, okay’
‘I’ll call you later then. About eleven?’
‘Okay. All right. I love you.’
‘I love you, too, Deckalino.’
And she is dumb to tell the crooked rose (for there is one, pathetic and miraculous, crept through from next door’s bush) how at her heart (oh you humans and your hearts) goes the sense, the certainty, that it’s changed between them, been forked and twisted by the dishonesty of his radio voice. It’s upon her, our Penelope, like the horror in the dream she’s had now more than once that Gunn’s asleep and snoring next to her, but when she shakes his shoulder and he turns towards her it’s not him at all, but someone completely different – not a monster, nothing in itself terrifying – just . . . horribly . . . not him . . .
‘Declan?’
‘Umm?’
‘Why did you say that on the radio?’
‘Say what on the radio?’
A week later Penelope’s got a horrible feeling of emptiness about this conversation. That all conclusions here are foregone.
‘All that stuff about having a thematic agenda – wanting to ask yourself how much men in general had really changed?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean?’
They’re had in bed, of course, these conversations, under cover of darkness. That way you’re spared seeing each other lying – as Declan is (can’t quite recall who was working with him at that time . . . Asbeel, possibly . . .) in the matter of not knowing what she’s talking about.
Penelope knows he’s lying and she knows why he’s lying. She jams her jaws together for a few moments, riding the wave of desperation, butching out the need to scream at him that he’s changing and betraying her.
‘Well, I was wondering, you
see, because I remember that conversation we had about how much you thought it was bogus, all that talk about starting with a theme and then grafting a story onto it. You said it was pretentious revisionism, and that any writer being honest would admit that you start with a character, or a situation, or a place, or an event, or – I remember you said this, you see – even a snatch of overheard talk.’
‘Hang on a –’
‘You said it was all bullshit, and that if there really was a something there then it would be “about” something. But you said that to start with the “about” and try’n’ get to the story was an invention of academic criticism.’
‘Penelope, what on earth is all this about?’
‘Whereas on the radio, you see, you said quite clearly that you started with a theme and then devised the story.’
‘I didn’t say that. Did I say that?’
‘And I remember the conversation we had about this because you were so animated. We were sitting at a fucking plastic table with a lopsided sun-shade outside the cafeteria.’
‘Penny, wait. Just –’
‘And I remember, you were so excited, talking about it all. It was absolutely nothing to do with trying to impress me. I remember because it was then that I realised I was in –’
‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’
‘And how could you – how could you say that thing about Trollope?’
‘What?’
“‘I think it was Trollope who said that every writer is his own first reader.’”
‘Well, it was Trollope, wasn’t it?’
‘You were trying to sound like a fucking writer.’
Well. The magnitude of this utterance and the closefitting silence it engenders surprises both of them. Doesn’t sound like much of an accusation, does it? None the less, Gunn lies absolutely still, filled with either fire or ice, he can’t tell which. Penelope lies on her back with all her limbs gone cold and dead.
This, though he doesn’t know it, is the time for Gunn to turn to her and say: ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It was false, the product of ego and vanity and disgusting selfflattery and phoniness. I’m weak, that’s all. I’ll try to grow beyond it. Forgive me.’ But he’s so embarrassed and enraged that she’s seen him, shown him himself from an angle he would always have ignored, he’s so unmanned by this that he too lies prone and inert. Though he’s lying next to her, he has the strangest feeling of the bed’s sudden pitch and roll, an LSD-esque distortion of proximity which shows him Penelope receding over an infinitely expanding vastness of mattress to a point beyond reach or vision . . . He’s thinking that there was, after all, a chance for him to have owned up, that even now, even as he falls away from her, from the possibility of love, thinking (without any desire to sound like a writer) that this is the way this is the way this is the way the fucking cunting bastard world ends . . .
‘Shouldn’t you be out murdering people?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you’re the Devil, I mean. Shouldn’t you be a bit, you know, busier?’
‘I am busy,’ I said. It was three in the morning and I was with Harriet in the Rolls on our way from a very private party in Russell Square to a very private party in Mayfair. We passed a cinema hoarding that said Little Voice. I lit another Silk Cut. ‘I am busy, for Heaven’s sake. Have you any idea how much of the script I’ve already got down? That Pilate scene is going to have them dancing in the aisles.’
‘What I mean is,’ Harriet said, sipping, ‘shouldn’t you be a bit more hands-on in the criminal department? “A murderer from the first”, or whatever, isn’t it? I’d’ve thought New Scotland Yard’s finest would’ve been picking their way through a litter of corpses by now.’
It’s hard not to like Harriet. She’s so bored and so mad and so bad. She’s such a piece of work. It makes sense to like her, too: if you’re alive in the Western world at the moment, something you buy probably puts money into Harriet’s pocket, and there’s no sense in putting money into the pockets of those you dislike, is there? Multinational Parent Companies (one of which boasts Harriet Marsh among its senior executives) were my invention. (But do you see me clamouring for credit for the idea? Do you hear me boasting?) The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you’re putting money into evil and shit. And let’s be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave . . .
‘I’ll tell you something, Harriet,’ I said, pouring myself another, ‘I’ve always objected to that nonsense about me being a murderer. It’s nothing but a bare-faced lie.’
‘I think Jack’s right, you know. You should have a show. After the film. After the Oscars.’
Little Voice, apparently, was on everywhere. I suppose He thinks that’s funny. I suppose He thinks that’s droll.
‘“. . . [A] murderer from the beginning . . .” says Jesus in John 8:44,’ I said, topping up, as the National Gallery loomed up on our left. ‘Moreover, a murderer who “. . . abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Charming. And, I might add, a pack of lies. Who, exactly, am I supposed to have murdered?’
Harriet, averting her cadaverous face so that her breath fogged the Rolls’s tinted pane, undid my flies and groped, with a sigh of weariness, for my cock.
‘Find me a stiff,’ I said, ‘– ahem – just one, and you can have my hooves for paperweights. Talking someone into murder, obviously yes, absolutely, mea culpa, and so on – but it’s hardly the same thing. (Talk a writer into a successful novel and see how far you get trying to pick up the royalties.) And if we’re agreed I’m not a murderer, that makes Sonny a liar.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be working, darling,’ Harriet said, abandoning my member with an abruptness a more sensitive soul might have found . . . well, a bit hurtful.
‘The point here is that I’ve never murdered, nor manslaughtered, nor caused the death of by misadventure, anyone,’ I said. ‘Mind you. I’ve seen the state it puts humans into.’
Harriet pressed a stud in the door panel.
‘M’am?’
‘What?’
‘You pressed the com. button, M’am.’
‘Did I? Oh. Never mind. Switch it off permanently, will you.’
‘Switching off, M’am. Rap on the glass if you need me.’
‘Who is this guy?’ I asked. ‘Parker?’
‘You were saying?’
‘Was I?’
‘The state. It puts humans into.’
Do you think this was ringing any bells for Harriet? Are you beginning to get an inkling of the lengths to which boredom drives the rich?
‘I’ve seen the state it puts the murderer into often enough,’ I said. I have, too. The singing blood, the hypersensitive flesh. I’ve seen wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly faces transformed in the act; gone the dome-head and comb-over, the bi-focals and the overbite, the cowlick, the nose-hair, the sticking-out ears; here instead the rapt gargoyle, the beauty of ugliness, the ugliness of beauty, the breathtaking purity and singularity of the human being transported by crime. Dear old Cain, who really wouldn’t have set hearts a-flutter in his unmurderous state, was a different proposition when his blood was up: all cheekbones and smouldering eyes. Kneeling over whacked Abel, a wind ruffled his dark hair (much in the way that strategically placed cooling fans unfurl the locks of onstage rock stars) and his normally nondescript lips swelled to an engorged pout Sophia Loren would have envied. How like a god indeed. ‘Call me an old flatterer,’ I continued, ‘but murder definitely looks good on you. Murder’s got you written all over it. Humans, I mean. It really is the ultimate makeover. Elton J
ohn would look wildly sexy if he could just pluck up the nerve to off some poor bugger.’
It’s all right, Harriet was thinking. He’s harmless. If he knew, he wouldn’t go on like such an idiot.
She kept her face averted, with no outward sign of anything but profound boredom. But then, I don’t need outward signs. That’s another of the perks of being me.
The Mayfair party (Rock Legend, formerly epicene guitar guru with whipcord body and waifish good looks, now resembling a troubled transsexual, with permanent mumps, Buddha gut, scorched hair and skin like congealed porridge) has turned out rather dull, and Harriet, myself, Jack, Lysette, Todd, Trent and a handful of other enervated revellers have retired with opium to one of the maestro’s mockCasablancan dens. The house is huge, naturally; a snip at eight-and-a-half, according to Harriet, who’s thinking of making him an offer for it herself, should she ever encounter him in a state of sustained clear-headedness. Rooms and rooms and rooms, with, here and there, these windowless smoke-nests, kitted out with all the trappings of Moorish indulgence. Everyone wants in on the film. Everyone wants to give us money. Even the multi-mill muso upstairs struggled out of his bulimia fever or coke-doze to offer us a stupid wedge. Harriet, among her many other talents (most of which were nurtured in her tender years by yours truly) certainly knows how to send hot gossip down wealth’s healthy grapevine.
‘I’ve racked my brains, but I don’t know from what passing zephyr I plucked the Eight Out of Ten idea. As with all my previous inspired ideas, I knew it was a cracker.’