by Martin Amis
Take it easy. That really is a bit fanciful. And what do you give a shit, at this stage, whether she wants to or not? How often, really, do girls go to bed with people because they want to? (You won’t get anywhere that way, fat boy. You never have.) Just do it, do it. Wheedle, intimidate, bully, bribe; beg, sob, goad, nag; curse, threaten, cheat, lie: but do it.
We were, for example (though I say it myself), in the pub together only last night.
It was an emotional dusk, so gradual and welcome that no one had thought to put on the lights and chase it away. We’d already had three each, in our corner, and a tearfully numinous haze had begun to form between ourselves and everything else. Moistly I peered at Jan as she talked on, thinking that perhaps the last thing in the world I should do was make a pass at her — because what if there were no more evenings like this one, warm and drunk at nightfall, surrounded by the talk of friends and, outside, by the sound of slow rain and confident cars. I began to speak. I looked at her again, the small clear nostrils, the curved-down mouth, the tangy trace of half-moles and freckles along the outlines of her lips.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Come back and have a drink at the flat tomorrow. You’ll meet my brother, my foster-brother. I was adopted by his parents when I was nine. I had parents of my own but they got fucked up. I share the flat with him. He’s called Gregory. You’ll probably like him’ (and probably fancy him too. Do you imagine I haven’t thought about that? I have. I’ll talk to him. I’ll fix it. He wouldn’t do that to me if he knew how much it meant). ‘He’s odd. He’s also a total faggot, by the way. We don’t get on now — I can’t remember what getting on with him was like — but there was a time, there certainly was a time when I loved him …’
I hardly ever see him any more. I miss him. He’s the only friend I’ve ever had.
There was a time when I loved Gregory. I did. I loved him in my own way — but then anyone would have. What a boy. You didn’t have to be what I was to be able to see what he was. The one who could accomplish all things: with him it wasn’t even a question of daring — his transgressions were merely the accoutrements of his unthinking self, the phraseology of his charm and luck. As if daring could exist, anyway, in that soft-tempered land of airy white rooms, afternoon toast, and fat housekeepers.
He stole with ambition, with casual acumen — and without getting caught. He would loiter in the exit-gates of supermarkets, his duffle-bag groaning with chocolate and pop. He once stole a football from Macmillan’s in Church Street — simply cruised out of the place patting it up and down on the ground. There was another time when, just for kicks (he doesn’t smoke), Greg was leaning over the counter to steal some cigarettes at the dumplike sweetshop near my school and was caught in mid-theft by the huge owner, who barred the door and stonily informed us that he was going to call the police, get them round, dial 999. Naturally we both lapsed into tears — me with a throaty, regular, doomed sobbing (I knew they’d get me in the end), Gregory with pitiful high-pitched wails as he wretchedly surrendered the ten-packet of cheap filters in hysterical remorse, begging and begging the man to let us go. As soon as he’d shouted and sworn at us to his satisfaction, the tobacconist did just that, unbolting the door and shoving us disgustedly into the street. I was still deep in tears when, a hundred yards down the road, Gregory turned to me with delighted, cloudless eyes, a packet of twenty Pall Mall Kings gleaming in his palm.
Where did he get those nerves? Where did I get mine? I stole too, of course, rarely, amateurishly, compulsively, and from home. I would rifle through wallets and handbags in the pure, unadorned hope of not finding anything, but usually appropriating it if I did. Past the crowded sitting-room tables, each a glossy Lilliput of silver and quartz — and there I’d be, trotting in panic up the stairs with something valuable and heavy weighing my pocket down as monstrous as a billiard ball. If I saw my foster-mother’s purse fanned open on the kitchen dresser, a sac of adult richesse — then suddenly my fingers would be burrowing in the leathery lips. I never hid the baubles with conviction, never spent the money I stole. Why did I do it? — there must be a textbookful of reasons why. Once I provoked an unprecedented furore by making off with some pricey cruet from the dining-room mantelpiece. Almost immediately — to my sweaty horror — the alarm was loudly raised. I put the burning insect on a first-floor passage table and fled to the attic, where I crawled under a collapsed bedstead and listened for the staccato threshes and sterling trebles of the advancing posse. Dirty boy, they’re coming to seek you out. I wanted to die, to die … Gregory was alone when he found me. I waited for him to rally the others with a whoop, but instead he paused, crouched at the side of the bedstead, and slowly edged beneath it towards me. His face was as wet with tears as my own. ‘Come down, Terry,’ he said. ‘We’re not cross any more. It’s all over now.’
And he had tenderness then, and real radiance, an extraordinary flair for boyhood and youth, as if he had cleverly worked out that these were the licensed days of his life when there was nothing he couldn’t do — and get away with it, and be liked, and that this could never last. Gregory, Gregory, my opulent and legendary brother. I feel sentimental about your childhood because I can’t feel it about mine. I see you streaking down the village road on your drop-handlebar bike as the girls come out from school, no hands; I see you at your birthday party, in your first long trousers too, joy flooding your eyes when all twelve candleflames turned into threads of leaning smoke, as if the four horizons were converging for your delight; I see you being driven off to your school in autumn, not waving, your head held up high, going without fear into that world of harm beyond the garden gates. It was wonderful, and I loved it as much as anyone.
What fucked you up? What changed you? Something did. Something has robbed you of all soulfulness and feeling and heart and left you the thing you are now, the little bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response you pass yourself off as, all the stuff that simply got to you before anything else could.
Look at you, cocksucker, scum, with your bloody stupid twee old heap of a car, your laughingstock poof clothes, your worthless layabout job, your cretinous faggot friends, your sullen and ravening money worries, your pathetic outdated swank, your endless lies. Gregory is a liar. Don’t believe a word he says. He is the author of lies.
Listen, if he fucks Jan I shall just have to arrange for him to be dead. I’ll kill him, and her (I’ll leave the country and start over). Oh Christ, perhaps the safest thing is for me to pay him not to, make him an offer (he’d take it — he’s very broke). Or threaten him (I know I can beat him up. He’s bigger than I am, but I don’t care what damage is done to me. He does). Or agree to move out if he doesn’t. Or promise to kill myself if he does. Hear this: if he fucks Jan — a casual athleticism, one on his list, might as well — my hatred will find some way to injure his life, to do his body harm, or to make him mad.
(ii) April is the coolest month
for people like myself — GREGORY
I really must say a few words about this rather marvellously tarty girl that Terence has taken to bringing home with him from the office. Joan? Janice? Janet? — something ridiculous like that. A secretary, of course, or the discharger of untaxing clerical duties at his blacking-factory, dreadful ragdoll manner and wilfully barmaidenly voice, just the sort of slouching nobody one half-registers among you all in the clamorous streetscapes but hardly expects actually to meet. Interesting, I suppose, to see these city-ciphers in the flesh, and some minor refund for having a nonentity as a flatmate.
She’s got one of those corkscrew haircuts … Now it’s normally axiomatic that the slightest hint of ‘frizz’ is enough to have me reaching for my thickest dark glasses. But I playfully admit that with young Janice here the effect really is quite fun in a hackneyed, sentimental way, combining with her small stupid features and clogged goldfish mouth to provide that look of orb-like vacuity striven for by portraitists of the Woolworth school — you know, unbearably cute mites, all gaze and pout, whose l
ikenesses are hung, mostly, by representatives of the criminal classes on taffeta walls. (They’re enjoying a camp revival at the moment, sponsored by such slow-witted phonies as Du Pré at the Merton Gallery. Three weeks? Four weeks?) Yet Janet’s face has withal several symptoms of an interesting hardness — the tough creasing round the eyes, the occasional mean tightening of those lips — which, in my vast experience, argues for great daring and know-how in bed.
And then I expect Terence has told you about her absurd figure? Now normally, again, I like girls to have small breasts: the breasts I like are mild round concavities which unobtrusively swell to gossamer petallic teats. I can’t bear women who push out all over the shop, like one-man bands. Great plates of blancmange the size of knapsacks, topped by curlicued sausage stubs — oh, wonderful; thanks awfully. I will at once concede, however, that Joan’s breasts are frankly colossal (so big that she wears a brassière) and would be utterly sick-making on any other girl (Susannah, Mrs Styles, Miranda, etc., etc.). But there is an air of sweet disproportion about Joan’s body, as indeed there is about everything to do with her. Such breasts shouldn’t be where they are really, gawkily perched on a frail lattice of ribcage over that poor waist (thumbs up from the waist down, incidentally: long lean thighs, boyishly dinky derrière). She carries it all off with a certain style and, no, I admit it, I’m rather amused by her.
Take the first time Terence brought her back to my flat. It was a glorious mid-April evening and a burgundy dusk was slowly decanting itself through the high windows. I lay musingly on my bed, a goblet of Tio Pepe balanced on the muscular tabletop of my stomach, freshly showered, midway between taking off my day clothes and putting on my evening ones — i.e., naked, except for some fairly daring and extremely eventful white scants — and generally readying myself to whizz off to Torka’s in my aggressive green car, which had that day been returned from the Garage of Thieves with a staggering bill. I sensed the usual drunken scuffling at the front door and was about to put down my glass and feign handsomely profiled sleep — until I heard voices, and a light female cockney mingling with Terence’s didactic baritone. I sat up in wry anticipation as they climbed the stairs to my room: Terence, carrying a shiny bag full of cheap drink, and the Joan, a frizzy presence in his wake.
‘Oh, sorry, Greg,’ he said, tugging his eyes away from my barely clad form. ‘Thought you’d be out. Just wanted some ice.’
‘Come in, come in,’ I indulgently drawled.
‘Oh … thanks.’
‘Introduce, introduce.’
‘Oh — uh, this is Joan, Joan, this is Gregory.’ He turned to me helplessly. ‘She works at work,’ he said.
‘Yur, what a dump. Never temped anywhere so dead.’ And in she strode, past my bed right up to the penthouse window, on whose sill she coolly leaned, running her screwed-up eyes over my torso in candid appreciation. I in turn, meanwhile, allowed my stare to praise the contents of her billowing T-shirt, the stripe of brownishly exposed midriff between it and her bejeaned, sharp-boned pelvis (noted also, with distaste, the abnormally plump pubic hillock).
‘Cor,’ said Joan in that mock-common voice of hers, ‘what a flash flat. How much’s it cost you?’
I waved a hand in the air. ‘Rien. An heirloom. I merely pay the rates.’
‘What do you pay then, Tel?’ she asked her colleague. Tel? Tel?
‘Half the rates,’ he mumbled. Terence really was looking something like his very worst that night. His unpleasant face, with its long upper lip and crushed nose-bridge, seemed drained of all colour and life, further highlighting the remains of his hair, which fell in fishy red tails down his brow. His clothes were the usual bellowing mardi gras. He appeared to be quite pleased with himself, however; he was smiling furtively, and a dirty glint played in one of his revoltingly bright eyes.
‘Well well well,’ said Janice, turning to me, ‘isn’t this posh.’
I held her gaze — and, as Terence lurched away into the kitchen, and as a defiant half-smile offcentred Janice’s round mouth, I felt a familiar tremor riding down the paths between our eyes: suddenly the room was full of burgundy light, and suddenly it would have seemed the most natural and decorous thing in the world if Joan, slipping her T-shirt over her head, had knelt unsmilingly on the bed to delve with her hard lips in the busy curvatures of my scants. Had it not been for Terence, slopping explosively about in the neighbour room, she would have done so without the slightest hesitation. Of that I entertained no serious doubt. And neither did she, the slut.
‘I’m so glad you like it,’ I murmured, whisking her pussy to the boil. ‘I do think it’s rather beautiful.’
‘Oh I do too. Beautiful,’ she said slowly (and we all know where her eyes were now), ‘beautiful, beautiful.’
‘What a charming friend you have found!’ I cried when Terence appeared in the doorway, holding the two glasses aloft like a waiter. ‘Do bring her back here as often as she is prepared to come.’
‘Sorry, Greg, can I get you a — ’
But at that I sprang to my full height and, with smooth indifference, started to dress. Terence squired poor Janet down the stairs in alarm — he won’t make it, I thought: no chance — and I shot off to Torka’s, found the great man asleep and his flat almost deserted, teased Adrian until he went off to his room for a sulk, and then imaginatively ground myself empty (compliments of young Janice) to the bland flicks of Susannah’s boring, amphetamine-verdured and in my view rather sandpapery tongue.
April is the coolest month for people like myself. Down comes the roof of my ritzy green car. Out burgeons my spring wardrobe. I have a £20 haircut. Champagne is more often than not to be found in my refrigerator. Flowers garland my room. I walk in the park. Dreams of legendary summers hang about me in the air.
I leave the gallery early when it’s fine — enfeebled protests notwithstanding — so that I can enjoy to the full these lengthening days before the burnt months take the town in their clammy hug. I motor out with Kane and Skimmer to country hostelries. We get rich girls to bring picnics along, or if it’s warm we all eat late on the pavements of Charlotte Street. At weekends there’s houseparty after houseparty — croquet, tennis, Pimms on aromatic lawns. Ursula and I keep meaning to drive up to Rivers Court for a few days while the weather holds (she loves the open car), but my diary is far too full, as hers must be by now: April is when the debs are making friends. Henry Brine wanted to take me to Paris for his opening and I couldn’t make room even for that. It’s right, I think, to crowd one’s youth like this. I hardly sleep at all once the season is underway, but everyone says I look as fresh as always. How do you do it? they say. There’s no answer.
I only wish I could entertain more here in my flat. You’ve guessed why I can’t, naturally … I’ve considered making a virtue of him, featuring him as a kind of court dwarf, a mascot, a curiosity; I wouldn’t need to dress him up, after all. Too embarrassing, though, and people would be sure to ask questions. Quite often, of course, I simply instruct him to get the hell out for the evening. But the ghastly thing is that he has absolutely nowhere to go, and I can’t bear to think of him in some coffee-bar all night staring at his watch. It’s far too depressing for me. God, what am I supposed to do with him? (I’d like to evict him. That’s what I’d like to do. Now how would I manage that?) Perhaps, at my next thrash, he could come with that nice Janice of his, as a sort of double-act; Skimmer would be wild for her, I know — he adores tarts. She’s even made the odd appearance in my own thoughts too, as a retrospective visual aid, during dull sessions at Torka’s …
Watch out, Terry, or I may have to have her!
Well, he never shall — so much is clear. Good Lord, has the boy any conception of what is happening to him these days? Has he no idea of the kind of impression he has started to make? And I don’t just mean the more effusively horrible aspects of his appearance, the aspects he can’t do much about. It’s not hard to read certain people’s lives in the way they look, and something dreadful and las
ting and deep is going wrong with Terence Service. I didn’t mind him last year, for some reason — he was like a big friendly dog to come home to. Now he’s like a reptile, a quiescent, loathsome thing. He’s drunk. He’s drunk all the time, and he thinks you can’t tell. He returns from the office at eight — he can hardly walk. His smile is sick and smug; his face is numb and slightly luminous — it seems dead (you can tell life is getting to him). You feel he must be hating something very much nearly all the time. Something is sizzling behind his eyes.