by Martin Amis
Well what would you have done?
There I am. It’s the end of an exhausting week, and after all I’ve been bloody ill, and I haven’t been to my friend Torka’s for yonks, and there’s this perfectly acceptable girl absolutely hurling herself at me, and —
Listen. Terence had just made some fatuous joke or other when the telephone rang. It was past midnight and the three of us turned to the telephone — T.’s panting giggles subsiding — and stared in minor surprise. I held Joan’s gaze, violet in the quarterlight, as Terence lurched drunkenly across the room and picked up the receiver, his back to our busy eyes (‘Hullo? Pardon?’), eyes which were already seeking each other out along slick cool parallels (‘Yes. Who?’), parallels which already seemed full of secret liquids (‘She what? When?’), liquids which were already glistening like dew on duck feathers in the cusps of our bodies (‘Where? Yes, yes. Well Christ of course’), bodies which already —
Terence reeled wildly round. He babbled something about Ursula and hospitals. ‘I’ll have to go,’ he said incredulously, and stumbled towards the stairs. But were June and I really listening?
The door slammed.
I lifted a forefinger and slowly beckoned her to my bed. She obeyed, raptly swaying across the room, hypnotized, dazed, battered. She hovered above me, as on that first night, a sleepy voluptuous sneer on her half-open lips. Very well then.
‘Sit.’
Now first — placing my hand among the sharp curls at the nape of her neck — I began to lower her face swooningly towards mine. Ah, but then, with a quick and contemptuous jerk on her head, I adroitly diverted her lips to the — what have we here? — superbly twanging erection which had long craned free from the folds of my kaftan (my kaftan is maroon, by the way, and it’s got buttons all the way down the front and a curiously effective white ruffled pageboy collar). I don’t know who was the more mesmerized as, with abstract stealth, her puckered mouth neared my palatinate dome: the face hovered, irreducibly close, kept in check by my rod-like hand, while, using natural heft only — I didn’t even need to tense my buttocks — I scoured the perimeter of her lips. Poor Joan’s goldfish mouth was flaccid with yearning by the time I let it have its slurpy, syrupy little way (strictly controlled throughout, of course, by this warm scribe my hand), and I let it sup full before I wrenched her face back, pointed it at mine, and told it,
‘I want you naked. Now.’
I do believe the girl had some trouble finding her feet. Meanwhile, I propped my head on an elbow to enjoy the view. She was wearing a downy patterned T-shirt and spray-on dungarees. She kicked off her golden shoes. I straightened a finger at her.
‘The breasts last,’ I specified.
Off, first, came Joan’s jeans — taking the pink and quite hygienic panties along with them in rather inelegant fashion (I always like a good peer at the pristine puff before confrontation with the jungly reality). But she still looked very fine standing there, legs defiantly apart, her fingers curling under the T-shirt’s hem, inches above the disappointingly sparse quiff of glistening henna. Now the breasts. They did not, I’m afraid, produce in me that tender, existential ache that occasionally comes with the slow unbuttoning of a shirt, the sudden unloosening of a gown strap, the sighing exhalation of a recalcitrant ‘bra’, that sense of glazed despair of the world’s staying alive long enough to touch the skin naked. What June did was to take hold of the hem with both hands and immediately cat’s cradle her arms, so that the material catapulted up into the complex of her neck and elbows, hiding the face and revealing with bizarre abruptness the two great swinging eminences, which lapped confidently on the summit of her ribcage. (We ought to remember that she was drunk.) Once she had got the bally thing off, though, and was peeling its sleeves from her arms, she shut her eyes and laughed, and for a moment she looked touching, pretty and extremely capable.
With just that negligent hint of brutality which all girls adore, I tugged her down on to the bed. You know what it’s like, of course, to be desired utterly by someone? The gluttonous all-over kisses, the swirling fluttery hands, the deep-secret shudders, the gasps of imploring volition? Perhaps not. Lying back, my arms folded behind my head, I let her initial frenzy run its course before taking decisive command. Then: I flattened her on her back and, straddling her waist with my thighs, placed her arms behind her head. Both stimulated and amused by her look of B-movie prostration, I began to slide peelingly up her midriff, and went on to make delightful play with the tumescent trio beneath me, digging, gliding and bending long after her nipples had started to throb for mercy. Inching up further, seated comfortably on the bench of her breasts and supporting my diagonal torso against the head-rest with my hands, I dipped at my own slow leisure into that ravenous O.
A quarter of an hour of that and, with another display of skilful athleticism, I had executed a 180-degree pivot, offering my face up to her hooked-over thighs (I had already reckied the area, naturally, paddling a finger and covertly sniffing it — it was warm, wet and sweet), while she continued to shower my dock with her saliva and her tears. Now mind you I wasn’t down there just for the hell of it: after a few messy moments — adequately beguiled by her tonguey doings — I did another expert turnabout, swivelling my legs under my chest like a gymnast and concurrently upending the girl’s body, so that in a flash she was on her tummy — haunches aloft — and I was tensed mightily behind her. She tensed too. She tensed too late.
After a perfectly civil, and in fact somewhat tedious, phased entry, I buggered her quite pitilessly for — oh — a good twenty-five minutes, wrenching at her hair whenever she made some coquettish attempt to wriggle free. Roots, roots. Why, the bottom sheet was looking like a butcher’s apron by the time I flipped her on to her back, surged forward into the hot crush, and gouged myself empty to her screams.
It was two o’clock before I managed to boot the sobbing husk out into the night. I had to walk through Terence’s empty room to the airing-cupboard, then exhaustedly set about changing the linen.
Well even I felt a bit sheepish the next morning.
Asnooze on my storm-washed cot, having slept with the well-won fatigue of a returned warrior, I opened an eye to see the tremblingly self-righteous figure of Terence, who stood like some windy assassin at the foot of my bed. Oh Lor, I thought, I might as well hear him out. For once those fat little puds of his, the fingers gnawed down till they resembled ground-out cigarette butts, held all the ‘moral’ cards, and I decided to let him have the scene with good grace.
‘Ursula is in hospital. St Mark’s.’
‘Well?’
‘She’s all right now, more or less.’
‘Good. Stupid girl.’
‘She slit her wrists, for Christ’s sake … She wants you to go and see her.’
‘Where?’
‘In hospital.’
‘I dislike hospitals, she knows that. They depress me,’ I said softly, examining my rings.
‘Christ, did you realize what was happening last night?’
I made no reply.
‘I said did you realize what was happening last night?’
‘Look, I’ve been frightfully ill for some weeks now. I can’t be …’
Terence turned his back on me unsteadily. One hand clutched the table. Oh God (I thought), he’s going to blub.
‘When … what time did she leave?’
‘Who? June? Oh, about — ’
‘It’s Joan, not June — you fucked her and you don’t even know her fucking name.’
‘Joan then,’ I murmured.
‘… What time?’
‘About two, two-thirty,’ I said crisply, resolving to clear the air.
‘… What was it like then?’
‘Rather fun,’ I said in my manly way. ‘You should try her yourself sometime.’
‘Well thanks a fucking heap’ was Terence’s cryptic rejoinder as he clattered down the stairs.
That was a fortnight ago. And has his distress been healed by the sof
t massage of time? Not a bit of it. Indeed, I think he is getting angrier about it every day. Ho-hum. I’m afraid I simply had no idea of the (apparently) vast emotional investment he had placed on Joan’s shapely but fickle shoulders. And, as one who is used to having, at a snap of his muscular fingers, any girl he looks on, it takes some effort on my part to squint through the undergrowth of others’ needs and desires. Besides, I’ve been terribly ill. (I feel marvellous now; that work-out was just what I needed.)
Naturally I’m worried about Ursula. Naturally it was unfortunate that this aberration of hers struck so inconveniently. But there was nothing extra I could have contributed, after all, and between ourselves I happen to know that Ursula preferred me to be off having my fun. (We’ve already had a good hoot about the whole evening. She says, anyway, that Terence was impossibly drunk and tiresome at the hospital. All the nurses stared.) There is confident talk hereabouts that Ursula will soon be coming to stay with Terence and me, here in my fiat. I have even offered her my dressing-room — a serviceable nook between Terence and the bathroom — which I now seldom use. Of course, she gets depressed. Of course she gets disorientated. Eighteen, nineteen — they’re hell. It’s not success we crave for then but youth, youth.
She will get better quickly. We’re a highly-strung house, the Ridings, and many a princely caprice and noble foible has been let out to play in the large, tolerant rooms, lawns and walks of Rivers Court, Cambridgeshire. My father’s grandfather, Coventry Riding, insisted that he be carried everywhere from the age of twenty-one on, though he was as hale as is all our stock; my great-uncle Ivan played the fiddle and kept a vicious white mouse. Ursula will get better quickly, here with her tall and successful brother in his attractive flat. And, if she is as like me as I think she is, the example of Terence Service should prove a sobering commentary — and a very funny one, let me add — on the perils of seedy self-absorption: all that solicitude to one’s neuroses, all that unsmiling concern with one’s emotional ozone. I see her again as she once was, in that other world; the delicate piece of petit point slipping from her frocked lap to the foot of the velvet sofa as she half-rises, seemingly petrified with delight when the golden Gregory (just back from school, his poor suitcases abulge with trophies, rosettes, panegyrics) bursts away from the harassed housemaids and fussing footmen to throw open the drawing-room doors: my princess dashes down the length of the room — some fifty-five feet — and I catch the sinewy bullet of adoration in my arms, warm lips, warm tears, my heart everywhere at once.
7: July
(i) My calculations about how to
stay alive and sane on this particular
planet have clearly been at fault — TERRY
Thanks. Thanks for that, Jan. Thanks for that, Greg, my brother. That’s it. Yes, you’ve really fucked me up now. You too, Ursula, you poor bitch.
‘Did you fuck her, you bastard?’
Gregory continued to feign picturesque sleep. I kicked the bed (it hurt). He opened a narrow, quizzical eye.
‘I said: did you fuck her, you bastard?’
He sat up. His face looked completely clear now.
‘Did you fuck her, you bastard?’
‘Not exactly … I, we …’
‘What do you mean, not exactly? Did you fuck her or didn’t you fuck her?’
‘We played bodies of a rather unconventional kind, young Joan and I.’
‘You fucked her and you don’t even know her fucking name.’
‘… Sorry.’
‘Ursula,’ I managed to say, ‘cut her wrists last night.’
‘My God! She didn’t. Where is she?’
‘You didn’t even know what was going on, did you. She’s … at …’ And, in a dribble, all the shame was mine again, as I stood there, in the right but small, poor, bald.
‘You know what you’ve done,’ I told him. ‘You cut my cock off.’
All the shame is mine. Why? Somehow everything about the incident — in which, if you remember, my girlfriend and foster-brother copulated perfidiously while I went off without hesitation to do my (and his) fraternal duty — diminishes me. Why? If I should ever run into Jan again, in a pub, in a street, which of us will falter, mumble, turn away, and release a silent gasp of ignominy? When I said that pathetic thing to Gregory and stumbled down the stairs, whose face burnt the hotter with embarrassment and remorse? Mine, mine. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I have no pride, and they merely have no shame.
What does Ursula have?
At six o’clock, her classes for the day completed, Ursula Riding left her hostel and walked the quarter-mile to the King’s Road, a laundry bag in her hand. She installed her cleaning at the Washeteria and strolled up and down the strip before entering a café, where she ordered and drank a lemon tea. She returned to the laundry, then started back to her hostel, stopping at the all-night drugstore in Royal Avenue to buy a packet of Wilkinson razor-blades. She went straight in to supper with the rest of the girls; afterwards she sat in her room chatting to friends until lights out at 10.30. She slipped away then. The night-monitor found her an hour later, deep in a cold red bath.
And when I found her an hour later — as I came lurching and burping into Ward B4, Casualty, St Mark’s Hospital, past a boy with a fork in his knee, a screaming woman whose back had been split in a car crash, a fat tramp with a huge plastic hold-all in his hand and half a Guinness bottle in his crown, several evidently whole refugees who just liked the look of the place, a polite but unhelpful porter, a black nurse, a black matron, an orderly, a young skinhead doctor, and many white squares of light, sheets, flooring — there she lay, lost among cloudy pillows on her eerily high bed, an expression of scared, fully-conscious self-reproach on her half-hidden face, my first reaction was: I wanted to hit her, hit her hard, give her something to slash her wrists about, make her see what it was really like, make her cry. And I felt like crying too, I wasn’t Gregory and she wanted him, everyone wanted him and what was he doing now, and me drunk and Ursula mad.
‘Oh, Ginger, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You won’t tell Mummy or Papa.’
‘Jesus Christ, Ursula, what the hell did you do?’
‘My wrists,’ she said, holding out her bandages.
‘What the hell did you do it for? What could have gone wrong with you yet? Look at all this here. It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Ginger, you’re drunk.’
‘You bloody bet I am. So would you be. And don’t call me Ginger.’
I stayed an hour, as agreed with the skinhead doctor. She was all right in the end.
‘We’re going to have to change the way you are,’ I said, leaning over to kiss her quickly good night. ‘We’re going to have to do something about it.’
‘Why? Why not let it go?’
‘You don’t want that and the whole thing there,’ I said.
And I can see, too, that I’m going to have to change the way I am. My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity — the sentimentality, in a word — that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude. I have never been nice, but from now on, boy, am I going to be nasty. I’ll show you.
I’m standing by the tall bendy window outside our flat, the one that hates stormy weather. Greg is asleep. Jan has gone (I won’t see her again). It is raining outside and the glass is full of tears, tears for the wrecked Rosie, but let that go, yes let that go and never come back again.
‘Hello, may I speak to Mr Veale, please?’
‘Veale speaking,’ said Veale, in his calm and sinister voice.
‘Oh, hello. Mr Veale, it’s Terence Service here, from the — ’
‘Morning, Terry. What can you do for me?’
I hesitated (he’s a sharp fuck, this one). ‘… Anything you tell me to do,’ I said, and laughed.
‘Pardon? Can’t hear you. Talk louder.’
‘Sorry, it’s this line.’
‘I know it’s the line, brilliant. That’s why I told you to talk louder. I mean, you don’t have to be … Marconi to tell it’s the line.’
‘I said I’d do whatever you tell me to do. Is that better?’
‘Lots.’
He told me some things to do. They sounded innocuous enough, though I wasn’t sure I’d like people to know I was doing them.
‘Well, I could do that now,’ I said. ‘Wark, for a start. He’s all — ’
‘Did I tell you to do it now? Did I?’
‘No.’
‘Well don’t do it now then. Do it when I tell you, like I tell you.’
‘What do I do now?’
‘Wait.’
‘Okay.’
‘Take care of yourself, Terry-boy.’
I put the telephone down and yelled for Damon. ‘Go and get me a coffe-no,’ I said (I’m practising being nasty on Damon. This is extra tough for Damon. Damon doesn’t need this. He looks as though he might drop dead any day now as it is). I gave him 12p. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ I said. Silently Damon took a colourful paperback from his coat pocket. ‘You’re reading these days, are you?’ I glanced at the cover, which showed two pantied girls in a sneering embrace. ‘Dikes. You’re into dikes?’
Damon shook his sickly head.
‘You’re not into them. You don’t like dikes.’
Damon nodded his sickly head.
‘Why not?’
‘It disgusts me,’ he said.
‘Well why the hell do you read about it?’
Damon shrugged.
Christ, he looked ill. ‘You don’t half look rough, you know, Dame.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said.
‘Go and get my coffee, go on.’
The office seems empty without her. Everyone keeps saying they miss her — except me. I wish they wouldn’t talk about her in the way they all go on doing. I have to pretend I have fond memories of her. And they are fond. But I must change that too.