by Martin Amis
‘I shall put out the OPEN sign,’ I suggest.
The day starts with a vexing personal fracas. Corinthia Pope, an absurd girl whom I recently scorned after some vague fling we had — and who’s been pestering me for weeks on the telephone — takes the unprecedented step of bursting in on me here at the gallery! I whisked the fool outside again and smartly sent her on her way with a definitive rebuke. Returning to my desk, I felt quite ill with rage, and had to shrug my helpless apologies at the two sets of eyes watching me from the glass slit of their office.
Talking of rejects, by the way, Terence is now claiming that he didn’t enjoy that Miranda after all. Amusing, you think. Well, I thought it was funny myself at first. But now he’s sticking to the story: he tried to, he says, and she wouldn’t let him. Curious business, because little Terry does enjoy a fair degree of success with the bashful shopgirls and aromatic students he used to bring back to my flat; if I returned late at night, and the kitchen tasted of smoke and human sweat, I’d almost bank on seeing some frizzy mat on the pillow next to his as I popped through his room to wash. Perhaps Miranda really wasn’t within his range. Perhaps, like so much else, it’s all a question of class. Has he said anything to you about it?
The incident with the Pope girl is enough to trigger the usual morbid badinage. There’s no one in the gallery anyway, of course, save for the odd taciturn alien moving from frame to frame like an inspector at an ID parade.
‘I must say, Gregory,’ Mrs Styles is compelled to remark as I emerge from the downstairs lavatory, the hearty ballcock flushing resplendently in my wake, ‘I can see why all the girls are chasing you. You are a very elegant young man.’
‘And I must say too,’ I am obliged to reply, ‘that you are a very elegant Older Woman.’ In the nature of things there must be some who would think her handsome — sleek black hair, barmaid face, embarrassingly swelly breasts and behind (I don’t know where to look — they’re everywhere), decent though unacceptably flossy legs, tall.
‘Come on … have you ever known an Older Woman?’ She moves closer — it is impossible for me to duck past. Breasts teem inside her manly shirt.
‘No, I don’t believe I have, funnily enough — not in that special sense.’
‘They have so much to show one,’ she goes ahead and says — the trite horror.
‘Oh? For example?’
She moves closer; so do seven veils of old make-up. A gargoyle jeers behind my slow diamond smile.
‘It would be simplest to show you,’ she says with a brazen nod towards the bathroom door. ‘There’s one thing I’m really rather expert at.’
‘Well?’
But the old trout is gone — my, how tantalizing — to service the stray scaffolding of her stays. Tubes rustle and gasp as I sprint upstairs.
Recuperating at my desk, I sense the compact Jason’s diagonal approach. I look up.
‘Of course, I don’t go in for that much any more,’ he says, looping his right arm in a bowler’s swivel.
‘In for what much?’
‘Played tennis this weekend. Terrible mistake. I feel like I’ve been beaten up. Very rash. Never again.’
He plants his pert derrière on the edge of my desk ‘Did you go in for all that, Greg? Games and so on?’
‘I rowed and played squash for the school and was captain of the First Eleven,’ I tell him, averting my gaze from the coarse lustre of his shantung suit.
He leans forward frowning to sample the muscularity of my thigh. ‘Wouldn’t have thought soccer was your game. Stronger than you look, though.’
‘Not “soccer” — cricket. Football was forbidden at Peerforth.’
‘Quite right too.’
His hand is still idling on my kneecap when busybody Odette shoots up the basement stairs.
‘We’ve got work to do!’ they say to each other in startled harmony, veering off like evasive aircraft to the shared shadows of their room.
Where, at about a quarter-past eleven, I am expected to join them as the three of us assemble for a morning drink variously described to me as ‘coffee’, ‘tea’ and ‘chocolate’ (the last one is, I think, rather sweeter than the first two, but that may be pure fancy). Now the mood changes — rivalries are forgotten, jealousies set at naught. We are warm in there, and after a few minutes I can even start breathing through my nose without undue discomfort. I let them gossip for a bit; I let them tell each other wistful lies about the viability of the gallery; I let them discuss important fixtures in their diary. Then, with hardly any direct prompting from me, it starts:
‘In what terms, Greg, in what — how do you see your future here?’
‘The boy we had before, you know, he wasn’t very happy. He had too many interests, really.’
Boy? Boy? The pathos of it — these people wear their needs on their sleeves!
‘In the end he left for a more … a job that appealed to him more.’
‘As you know, Greg, we’re childless, but we’ve always thought of the gallery as a family affair. Silly really.’
‘We’ve grown very fond of you, as you know, and we’d feel a lot easier if we could feel that you were, well, sort of a permanent fixture here. Wouldn’t we?’
‘Because — let’s face it — we’ve no one else we can leave it to. Have we?’
And so on. And so on.
God, the horror of being ordinary.
When I see them, other people — a woman who looks like a remedial art-therapist releases a soft gurgle of satisfaction as she and her colleague find seats at the wine-bar, a stroke of luck which considerably lightens her day; in the underground carriage a big man in a cheap grey mackintosh, breathing that bit too hard, is wrestling with a newspaper so explosively that he misses his stop, a reverse which causes him to rise and pace, and to stare suddenly at his watch as if it were a syphilitic boil; the porter at my flat stands becalmed on the stairs all day wondering how old he can be, as if the very air were full of strange equations that would somehow make his life add up — I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won’t see any reason not to do you harm. Your life will divide up between the fear of madness and the panic of self-preservation. That’s it: feed up for going mad. I’m afraid that’s all we have to offer you.
Well, well (I bet someone is asking), and what would happen to me if …
If I weren’t beautiful, talented, rich and well-born? I would beg, fight, travel, succeed, die.
Terence thinks — he doesn’t actually dare say it — that my life is in some sense a gloating parody of the huff-and-puff of his own quotidian dreads, slumped where he is now in his days and days. All my gifts — social, monetary, physiognomic — take on monstrous shape, loom large like muscle-clouds, in his sallow mind. He sees me as somehow the active champion of the privilege which I merely passively embody. That sad bastard, he didn’t do anything to end up like he is. Only he let what happened to him happen to him, and that’s enough these days. The world is changing; the past has gone, and from now on it is all future tense. The yobs may be winning, but they’ve left no room for him inside.
Do I mind — do I mind the guaranteed dazzle of my days, the way I surge from one proud eminence to another, the way my life has always pounded through the unequal landscape about us on arrow-straight, slick silvery rails? I hold my eye in the glass — funny feeling: it’s always nice; we have a good time together (it’s like catching nature rhyming). I suppose it’s a gift, like any other, and the inordinately gifted have always had a certain dread of their own genius. There’s a pang in it somewhere … lonely are the beautiful, like the brilliant, like the brave.
(Terence Service is my foster-brother, by the way. I know, but there it is. My parents went and adopted him when he was a lad of nine. The first chapter of his life was spent in some hired box in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, the meandering slum that lies between t
he railway station and the cattle-market. His mother, a freelance charwoman, died when Terry was six or seven, and for a few years he and his little sister lived under the sole care of their father, a perfectly able carpenter by the name of Ronald. It was conjectured that Service Sr had an intimate say in the death of his wife, and, in due course, the view received pointed corroboration when the brute savagely murdered his own daughter. Terence was, as I say, nine years old, and there at the time, so you should indulge his going on about it. The melodrama won a fair amount of attention in Cambridge — not least because Terence lived on for a week in the deserted hovel before anyone realized he was there — and it was only through the local rag’s shameless mawk-campaign that little Terry’s tragedy came to the benign notice of my family, the Ridings. I remember my father, over the breakfast table, reading out the daily bulletins in that soppy old voice of his, while Mama and I exchanged wary yawns. He was going through one of his gluttonously humane phases — or, more accurately, he had recently read something somewhere about humanity, or had read something somewhere about someone being gluttonously humane — and ‘literally’ could not rest until Terence had been satisfactorily housed. What took my father’s fancy, you see, was not the corny squalor of Terry’s plight so much as certain imagined affinities between his family and our own (too boring to rehearse — get them from Terence). His concern for the waif grew; he longed for him to be taken into care. Mama and I did our best to reason with him — ‘But the boy, the boy,’ he would say, slowly shaking that big crazy head. Father’s considerable influence was brought to bear: the plans were formed, the authorities notified …
As the village princeling and household cosset, the toast of the family, the mignon of the minions, the darling of the staff, my feelings about the proposed adoption would not be hard to divine. I stared at the small visage splashed on the paper’s dirty front page (caption: Terry Service — Friday’s Child) until the grain of the print seemed to stir with a writhing furtive life: this, just this, was soon to push me to one side of my cloudless childhood days, an alien and frightened boy, a scurrying cur, no more corporeal to me, really, than a smudge of sooty newsprint, its uneven edges spanning away into another world, a world of degradation and hate, of panic and the smell of roused animals. I thought of the sparkling astronomy that my life had up until that moment formed: the scrubbed angularities of nursery and bedroom, the busy friendship I enjoyed with the garden’s vast precincts, my fairy-tale sister, the congruent rake and perspective of every doorway and stair-well — only three places a certain toy might be if abducted from its rightful nook, the time the leather ball needed to jump back from the ribbed garage door, the creak of joists a hidden code of distance and identity: the thousand certainties on which childhood leans to catch its breath were all reshuffled in blurred travesty, as blurred as the picture of Terence’s face on that smudged news-sheet now slipping from my father’s thigh.
Terence arrived one brilliant autumn morning, while the Ridings were having one of their halcyon breakfasts in the raised East Wing conservatory. Imagine a circular white table on a checker-board stone floor, deep troughs of fabulous greenery, a receding backdrop of pink and purple blooms, and four decorative seated figures glimpsed through the echoic, yellowy light: Henry Riding, a tall, shaggy, ‘artistic’ patriarch in white jacket and collarless shirt; his handsome wife Marigold, silver-haired, grey-suited; the delicious, vague, sleepy-eyed Ursula — still in her nightie, the minx: and Gregory, who, having recently celebrated his tenth birthday, is already a tall and athletic figure, with driven-back raven hair, a thin, perhaps rather brutal mouth, and a vivid, evaluating stare … I remember I had just dispatched Cook with some rather sharp words about the consistency of my soft-boiled egg and, while waiting the required 285 seconds for its successor to be prepared, I leaned back on my chair, teasing my palate with a sliver of toast and Gentlemen’s Relish. Then I heard a sudden flurry from the maids in the hall — and there was our housekeeper, good Mrs Daltrey, bustling into the light and guiding on an invisible leash a small wondering boy in grey shirt and khaki shorts, Terence, my foster-brother, who turned and gazed at me with stolen eyes.)
3: March
(i) I’m no good at all this any more. I’ve
got to lock myself away until I’m
fit to live — TERRY
You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.
Mouth-fuck, bum-fuck, fist-fuck, prick-fuck. Ear-fuck, hair-fuck, nose-fuck, toe-fuck. It’s all I think about when I’m in my room. Bed-fuck, floor-fuck, desk-fuck, sill-fuck, rug-fuck.
And in the streets. Tarmac-fuck, lamppost-fuck, shop-front-fuck. Bike-fuck, car-fuck, bus-fuck. Rampart-fuck, railing-fuck, rubbish-fuck.
Pen-fuck, clip-fuck, paper-fuck. (I’m at the office now.) Char-fuck, sec-fuck, temp-fuck. Salessheet-fuck, invoice-fuck, phone-fuck.
And everywhere else. Land-fuck, sea-fuck, air-fuck, cloud-fuck, sky-fuck. In all kinds of moods. Hate-fuck, rage-fuck, fun-fuck, sick-fuck, sad-fuck. In all kinds of contexts. Friend-fuck, kid-fuck, niece-fuck, aunt-fuck, gran-fuck, sis-fuck. Fuck-fuck. I want to scream, much of the time, or quiver like a damaged animal. I sit about the place here fizzing with rabies.
No, they still don’t want to. I’m not at all certain I want to any more. I mean, what happens when they … you know. I’m clear on the mechanical side of it (I hear about that in books, and I’m also buying quite a lot of those magazines, the ones in which girls show the insides of their vaginas and anuses to the world for money. Do the police know about those magazines, incidentally, the ones you can get anywhere? I don’t think they can do), but it all must seem rather awkward and embarrassing. Do you do it much? How often? Less often than you want or more often than you want? I used to do it as much as I possibly could, and I liked it a lot. Then I stopped. No one would do it with me (and doing it with people is half the fun). Soon I’m going to stop trying — I can tell. I’m getting cordoned off. Barriers are slamming down all about me. Soon it will be too late ever to get out again.
Supplementary Bad Things continue to happen. Last week I bought a chalk-stripe suit from a second-hand shop in Notting Hill Gate. It was a ridiculous suit in all kinds of ways — obviously an incredibly old and fucked-up man had used it before me — but I knew of a good place that would taper and restyle it cheaply (that was the idea). They tapered and restyled it cheaply, I took it home and put it on, it fitted and it looked all right. Then I realized that it smelled, very very strongly, of the sweat of the dead man who had worn it all his life. Fair enough, I thought, as I soaked it in ammonia overnight, hung it out of my window ditto, buried it in the square double ditto, sprinkled it with ashtrays, steeped it with aftershave and whisky, and put it back on again. It smelled, very very strongly, of the sweat of the dead man who had worn it all his life. I threw the thing away in a dustbin. It wouldn’t go in my wastepaper-basket, which still glowers rankly at me from the corner of my room, still looking for trouble, still wanting a fight.
Nothing happens at work. The rationalization hasn’t taken place yet (we still think it’s Wark, however. Even Wark thinks it’s Wark by now). John Hain isn’t letting on (the cunning fuck was just sounding me out that time); he will not be rushed; no one can make him do anything he isn’t already very keen on doing. Work has dried up. We no longer get our sales-sheets and telephone lists in the mornings. We’re not given anything to sell (though we still get paid for it. I hate getting my wages now. When the old woman runs her fingers over the envelopes under ‘S’, I know mine won’t be there). I sit at my desk all day as if I were Damon (God that boy’s teeth are a mess — he admits they’re all jangling in his head, like a pocketful of loose change), a split match in one hand, a paper-clip in the other, chewing chewing-gum and smoking fags. I can’t even read right any more. That’ll be the next thing to go. We wait and sigh and watch the rain (rain on windows always takes me back, or it tries. I’m not going back). We don’t dare talk to each other much; we’re frightened we might know somethin
g we don’t. Yesterday, a man called Veale with an immensely calm and sinister voice rang me from the Union. He’s coming to see me, he says. His voice held neither menace nor encouragement; it was just calm and sinister. I asked around a bit: he isn’t coming to see anyone else, or so everyone says. Just me. I hope he doesn’t think I’m posh.
I did ring Ursula eventually, in response to that card of hers. I’m not sure why I waited so long (she’s a girl, isn’t she?), but I did wait. I’m grateful to her, I hope, for her kindness in the past — or rather her complete lack of cruelty, which was better still under the circumstances — and I’ll do what I can to make things all right for her. I love her. Yes, I do love her — thank God for that. It’s hard to give you any sense of Ursula without making her sound a bit of a pain in the ass (which she is half the time anyway — and for Christ’s sake don’t listen to a word Greg says about her: he’s totally unreliable on this point). She is nineteen and looks about half that. I have never in my life seen anyone so unvoluptuous — pencil legs, no bum, two backs. In repose her face has an odd neutral beauty, like an idealized court portrait of someone plain. As soon as her face becomes animated it loses that beauty, but at the same time it becomes, well, more animated. (You’d fancy her, I reckon. I’d fall in love with her instantly if she weren’t my sister. But that’s not saying much.) See what you think. For the record, she is in my view a pure, kind, touching, innocent, quite funny, very posh, erratically perceptive and (between ourselves) slightly tonto girl.
I spoke to the matron at her secretarial lodgings and was serenely told by her that Ursula would ring me back at the number I left the moment her class was finished. I sat at my desk with some coffee that Damon had limped out to fetch, unable to do anything until she returned my call.
‘Hello, Ginger. Are you happy?’
‘Of course not. Have you gone out of your mind? How are you?’