Success

by Martin Amis

  I expect, too, that you think my sexual life is as gleaming and ripe as Terence’s is joyless and jejune. I expect you think I’m an absolute corker when it comes to the cot. Well, I used to be, I admit (everything I’ve said about my extraordinary good looks, for example, is fact, spot on, to the letter, gospel. I am indeed wonderfully handsome). There was a time when I was widely thought to be the cutest catch in London: queers came to Torka’s from miles around, just to have a glimpse of me, to find out if all everyone said was true (and it was true, it was); any girl, any girl whatever, was mine at a nod, at a smile, at a hardly perceptible twitch of my artistic fingers. Both graceful and athletic, at once supple and firm, now submissive and obedient, now menacing and strict, I was what they called ‘a miracle’, with a marvellous talent for sex and play. But then all that’s gone bad on me too, bad and sad, bad and sad and mad. And they treat me like shit at Torka’s these days.

  Why? Is it part of the same thing? (Suddenly I keep needing to ask all these questions. Why? Tell me, someone, why won’t someone tell me?) I know there are other bits of my life just waiting to go next; they have no other function but to snuff out when it will do me most harm. I wander into the kitchen first thing, and it looks intensely familiar and yet intensely irritating, as if all night I had wearily dreamt of forks and spoons; and the lies of the past are already queueing up to point their fingers.

  And Terry. What is this with him now? No, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me he’s becoming a success. No, don’t tell me that.

  Although I may have been inclined to draw my foster-brother in a playfully disadvantageous light, his ineptitude, stupidity and charmlessness must surely come warmly across, with or without any elaboration from me. Again, veracity has been the keynote of even my briefest descriptions of his person. He really does look like that! His nasty hair thins by the hour; his polychromatic teeth (all of which bear the variegations of cheap dental work, surfacing like invisible ink as the fillings live and the bones die) now taper darkly off into the metallic hecatomb of his jaws — the bent, self-pitying mouth, the appallingly malarial eyes. They’re all there. He has got the word YOB scribbled across his mean forehead. Both gutless and aggressive, as craven and sentimental as he is sour and crude, lacking any genetic tradition, any pact with good behaviour, Terence is simply the representative of the values that have got to him first.

  But the yobs are winning. And Terry, of course, is ‘doing well’. He is doing well. Of course. He has shown that he will perform what is necessary to succeed. He has shown that he is prepared to trade his days. He is doing well.

  I am going to try to tell the truth from now on. It has all become too serious for lying, and I must protect myself as best I can. I’ll try. But will you listen? No, I suppose you’ll trust Terence’s voice now, with its dour fidelity to the actual, rather than mine, which liked to play upon the surface of things.

  And Ursula.

  ‘Ursula,’ I said in the passage (I’ve been hiding from her too long), ‘why won’t you come to my room at night?’

  She turned towards me but did not meet my eye. I could see the wonky parting on her lowered head, and she smelled of the old smell, of the outdoors.

  ‘Can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Can,’ I said — ‘can. You won’t wake him. You won’t wake him.’

  ‘I just don’t think it’s a very good idea, that’s all.’

  ‘What? What do you mean? Do you mean you think it’s only a fairly good idea?’

  ‘It just doesn’t make me feel any better, doing that.’

  ‘Now what the hell do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, Gregory, please’ — and her head begins to swirl with confusion, in the way that used to make me ache with tenderness, in the way that now makes me throb with hate — ‘I don’t feel well ever now, I don’t ever feel well. Nearly everything makes me feel worse. I don’t — ’

  ‘Why? Why, why, why?’

  ‘You know why,’ she said in sudden outrage, in defiant, goaded outrage. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’

  ‘Look at me! Now you’re not getting silly, now, are you, Ursula? Remember how angry it makes me when you start getting silly …’

  Remember (I want to say), remember, my princess, when it happened? Listen. Your first day at the big girls’ school. Mama and Papa had driven you in (to while away the time at shops and aunts’, and to drive you back). You wore a dark smock, two thin straps over your white-shirted shoulders, and a smart beret. I myself stood in the drive, with good Mrs Daltrey, and waved as the car sped confidently through the gates. You waved back, without fear. You were nearly fourteen (God forgive me). All morning, as I sat perched up in my tree-house, sculpting aimlessly with my penknife at some twig, or practising my tennis against the prickly garage wall, or thinking of my own school — its welcome back, the beds laid out in rows, the Captain of Swimming, whom I had found tearfully fondling my rugger boot one day when I returned unexpectedly to the dorm — I thought of your day too, the oblongs of claret stone, this is the new girl, the self-sufficient hysteric standing like a flag at the head of the classroom (ah, the fatal corporeality of schoolteachers). Once lunch was finished, and once I could hear Mrs Daltrey’s complacent snores from her parlour dog-basket, I took to the webby attics (the trunks, the bedposts and winded mattresses, the single sunlit pine plank leaning against a wall), as beneath me the house lay suspended and still, a great brick ship basking in the afternoon. I was by the window, scanning the cricket scores of a yellowing newspaper — Graveney, Barrington, Dexter — when I glanced outside at the front lawn and blinked through the sun and leopard-shade. What I saw made my blood jolt. (I so wanted that day to be a success.) You were running up the drive, a tiny blur of pain — I couldn’t see your face but everything about you looked like distress, stiff and creased and weak, a machine’s last attempt to work, as if all that kept you from collapse was the desperate rhythm of your stride. We met head-on in the first-floor passage; you were in my arms: Quiet, I said in terror. You were breathing so hard that I clamped my hand over your mouth, to keep you there, to keep you in, to put you back. You talked in tears (only the young do that): They hate me — They said they hate me! I thought you might snap, explode, zoom through the air. Make it stop — make it, make it! We went into the nearest room. It was my room. You lay on the stripped bed. I lay on top of you. You were shaking insanely. You wanted to be smothered, joined up, plugged, to stop the bits of you from flying apart for ever. You wanted me as close as I could get. Who would have borne it? I couldn’t. Your pants were navy-blue and slightly furry. The insides of your thighs were goose-pimpled with dread but inside you were boiling. I only remember the smell, the smell of young sweat and salt-and-pepper tears, and the other smell of fluid and blood. I just lowered my trousers. Everything was over in a moment. I hoped I didn’t break anything.

  ‘Oh, Gregory, don’t do this to me, don’t do it.’

  ‘Then tell me why, tell me why?’

  ‘You know. So just stop it.’

  And I stop it — quickly. She can see I’m as frightened as she is.

  (There might have been a moment when we could have helped each other. That moment has passed. We’re on our own now.)

  It was the last night of the month. It was midnight. The secret agents of sleep no longer glanced at me with interest or suspicion. I sat up straight in bed and clasped my hands together. My eyes were streaming (how ridiculous) — why won’t my body behave? And why is sleep so hard to find, and why do dreams spring in to translate your fears in measures of forgetfulness and failure? I sit here upright in my bed, sobbing into my hands. I am six-feet-one-and-a-half. I’ve been an adult for some time now. Surely I’m too big to go on like this … I crawled from the bed. I put on my dressing-gown and moved towards the stairs. Ursula (I don’t care. I need someone to go mad with). I used to love the man I would become. I don’t any longer. Look at him, look at him.

  The flat was full of a neutral headache grey. I paused at the botto
m of the stairs. The grey was boiling up, climbing, as if it wanted to spill into harsh laughter. Through the narrow hall window I saw squares of life on the backs of the houses opposite. A dirty bulb came on near by. An exhausted man in a vest, with a stubbled neck, hunched over a sink. Would he turn towards his window, and find me out?

  I stumbled on. The grey thickened in the passage, its dust wired to the dust in my throat. I stumbled on past the cupboards. I hurried — never stop now. I threw on the light as the door swung open. And I focused.

  On what?

  I turned and ran back up to my room. I put on clothes. I chased my heartbeat out of the flat, down the stairwell, through the doors into the black air.

  10: October

  (i) I think I’m beginning to like the

  way the world is changing — TERRY

  Of course, you know, it was all his fault in most respects. The whole thing was his fault really. None of it would ever have happened if it hadn’t been for him. We can look back on these events now, and see that that’s the way it was.

  I wouldn’t, naturally, have planned it quite the way it turned out (I didn’t get laid yet, is a powerful for-instance). And I completely lost my bottle during those first shrill seconds. Had it occurred to him to do so, Gregory could have struck me to the floor and given me a sound thrashing there and then. I would have given no resistance: you can fuck with the upper classes only so far, as every true yob knows. I just put on my dressing-gown and lit a fag and stared at the wall. As soon as we heard the flat door being wrenched shut — Greg off for his Byronic storm out into the night (marvellous stuff) — Ursula slipped from the bed and strode past me, with no expression whatever on her face. Well, that’s that, fat boy, I thought to myself, watching her anorexic ass disappear through the door, which shut unemphatically behind it. Your control over that girl has gone for good. You’ll see no more of her.

  They should have come for me then. They should have got me then. If I had been in their shoes, I’d have got me then. They couldn’t have known how vulnerable I felt. Otherwise they would surely have taken the chance to give me payment for all that I’ve done to them.

  Ursula avoided me for several days. I avoided her. Gregory avoided me. I avoided him. He avoided her, too, and she avoided him (I’m pretty certain), which was some comfort. We kept nearly bumping into each other, unavoidably. I wished we could stop avoiding each other long enough to agree to avoid each other properly.

  All this avoiding that was going on posed certain logistic difficulties. I was so keen on avoiding Ursula that I didn’t even dare use the bathroom in the mornings. I staggered out of the flat with moustachioed teeth and a bladder like a molten cannonball, and hit a local café for breakfast and a hairtrigger bowel-movement in the cardboard cubicle; I shaved at work, in the nasty lavatories, which are still loud with exploding old men.

  So is the office now. The rationalization has begun in earnest. Wark left last week. He went tonto opportunely; he had been looking secretly but hard for other jobs — he never found any, he never got a glimpse of a single one; he stalked out of here without opening the ominously stamped brown envelope he saw one morning among his mail, which means he won’t even get the derisory non-Union compensation, that idiot. Fish-eating Burns will leave next week; he is not the kind to give trouble. Ex-beatnik Herbert clings grimly to his desk: he hasn’t been fingered yet, but he is already talking about squatters’ rights, protests and letters to the press (he shouldn’t do anything like that — the Union hates anything like that, according to my friend Veale). John Hain is calm, or thinks he is. So am I. My advice to the professionally inviolable Damon, however, is to resign instanter, while he’s still alive: the boys from downstairs beat him up with growing brio; Damon doesn’t need this. A heavy-set, trendily dressed, unsmiling man in his late twenties has moved into Wark’s room. He is a Union man, and so keeps himself pretty much to himself.

  After work I have time for — let’s say — three big whiskies before going off to my evening classes in the derelict caverns behind Farringdon Street. You sit in a dirty lecture-room while some old deadbeat tells you about positive thinking and how to evade certain sorts of questions. There’s a bit of speedwriting too. We are all very lonely and friendly there, and some of us tend to go on to the pub, including two unremarkable girls, whom I shall approach in turn the minute I get my bottle back.

  I’m glad I get home late. I’m glad Gregory is dangling up in his room and never comes down any more and never goes out. I’m glad Ursula lies curled up with her face to the wall, playing possum, playing dead, when I sneak through to wash and pee (and vomit briskly, if I feel up to it). I think: we’re all on an equal footing at last, more or less. We’re quits. We’re even.

  And then — guess who I ran into the other day?

  I was lunching in the pub for once — normally I go to an agreeable little Greek place round the corner — when I noticed a familiar figure in a familiar stance up against the bar. The long legs restlessly sharing the burden of that tiny waist, the energetic slouch of the disproportionate thorax, the corkscrew hair. Jan.

  Oh, Jesus (I thought), where can I hide? But she turned at once, saw me, gasped, smiled, waved, and gestured that she would be right with me. I did a quick mental check: hair in some sort of possession of my crown, not bad shirt, shaved this morning, haven’t farted for at least ten seconds. I drank deep and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘And how are you?’ Jan asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. And you?’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever ring me?’

  Because you cut my cock off, you bitch, is all. That was the only reason. ‘Ring you? When?’

  ‘After that mad night at your flat. Is your sister okay?’

  ‘Yes, she’s okay.’ Couldn’t quite believe all this was going on. ‘Yes, it was rather a mad night, wasn’t it.’

  ‘You’re telling me. That flatmate of yours — cor.’

  An unrealistically tasteless remark, I thought, but I said, mildly enough: ‘How do you mean, “cor”?’

  ‘Boy, has he got problems.’

  ‘Oh he’s got problems, has he?’

  ‘I’ll say.’ She sipped contentedly on her whisky and orange. Her extraordinary irises, with their violet webbing, held no activity, ironic or otherwise.

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  She laughed, lifting a hand self-reprovingly to cover her mouth. ‘Well, the minute you left he started talking to me in this funny way. He is queer, isn’t he?’ She laughed again.

  ‘What kind of funny way?’

  She imitated him, with her customary exactitude. ‘You know, sort of: “Ah now, and if this delightful sky-urchin would merely reveal her mysteries, then mayhap the — ” Oh, you know. I can’t remember. God it was funny. I kept laughing.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then …’ And for the first time some commiseration entered her face. She looked down quickly, but only for a moment. ‘Oh God. Then he asked me to do this strip. Still in that funny voice, “unveil your several treasures, my sweet”, and stuff like that. Well I — I was anybody’s that night — I sort of did a dance for him.’

  ‘What, a strip?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘How do you mean, “kind of”? Did you take your clothes off or didn’t you take your clothes off?’

  ‘Well I kind of took off my T-shirt. And my jeans.’

  ‘Then what’s all this about him having problems? It doesn’t sound to me as if he had any problems at all.’

  ‘No, but then he didn’t — he couldn’t get a hard-on.’

  ‘Neither can I, sometimes.’

  ‘No, but it didn’t get that far. It was awful. It really was. It was awful.’

  ‘In what way?’ This was interesting all right, and reasonably consoling. But I felt oddly remote, even protective, too. It was a family affair.
r />   ‘He started crying,’ said Jan. ‘Really loud. It was awful. Him crying. Him crying like that.’

  ‘What about — not getting hard-ons?’

  ‘A bit, I suppose. And about being queer and broke. And about his sister going mad. He said that if she went mad he knew he would too. And about — oh everything. He sounded really fucked up.’

  I lit another cigarette. I felt, again, that sense of invigorating coldness that has strengthened me so much recently. And I said — but it was only an afterthought by now — ‘So you’d have gone to bed with him anyway? If of course he could have got a proper hard-on.’

  She held my eye. ‘Yup. And I would have with you too. If you could have got one.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay, damn it? Why didn’t you stay?’

  ‘I was going to! But he said I’d better leave. He said you wouldn’t come back, or you might bring your sister back with you. Or something.’

  ‘So that was that.’

  ‘I told him to tell you to ring me. You never did.’

  ‘He never did either.’

  ‘You never got the message?’

  ‘No. But I’ve got it now.’

  So at last we know. So at last we know a lot of things we didn’t know before. (Or I didn’t — did you?) Christ. It’s all faintly alarming, isn’t it? I meant him harm — I meant to give him imagination, to make him see the difference between himself and everything else — but I assumed there was more to avenge. It’s easy enough now to see what it was that fucked him up. Her too.

  I won’t be scared of them any more. I won’t ever let them make me feel I’ve done wrong. They are the strange ones these days, to be pitied, allowed for and put aside. They don’t belong any more. What they belonged to has already disappeared; it is used up, leftovers, junk.