by Martin Amis
On the evening our lives sorted themselves out for good, on the evening when all came clear, I happened to pass Gregory in the passage. He was returning from that ridiculous ‘gallery’ of his, whereas I was preparing to stroll off with my book for an expensive meal in Queensway. ‘Hi,’ we both said. He looked bedevilled and morose as he took off his overcoat. He is going downhill, I thought: his clothes aren’t nearly as queer as they used to be.
‘How are you?’ I asked aggressively as I put on my new gloves. Despite my firm stance and brazen proximity, Gregory declined to meet my eye.
‘I’m okay,’ he said.
‘Good. And how’s the gallery?’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Good. Still doing well there, are you?’
‘Perhaps I won’t take off my overcoat,’ he said uncertainly. He slung the coat over his thin sloping shoulders and began to move up the stairs.
‘Ursula’s in her room,’ I said loudly, ‘moping about something or other as usual. Go and cheer her up, why don’t you?’
— And with that I slammed the door on him and sauntered towards the lift with a chuckle. Outside, through the bendy window, I could see people scurrying like leaves across the street.
I dined well. I now have so much of this curious thing that men call money — I seem to be able to do more or less as I please. Good evening! Hello again there! Yes, I don’t know but what I won’t have that vodka-and-tonic before my meal. The potted shrimps, if I may, and then I think the usual sirloin, if possible. That sounds splendid. And a carafe of — what? — red? Thank you. No, I won’t see the menu again — I know it backwards now anyway! — just the coffee, please, and also let me see, why, I think perhaps a large brandy too??? I feel posh here. I am posh here, now I come to mention it. The restaurant — a traditional, familial, up-market Italian place — is full of men with puffed, unintelligent faces and muscular potbellies, full of women with hard mean mouths and untidy teeth, women who look as though they don’t much like going to bed with the men but are bloody good at it once they do. True, the men are often fantastically hideous — yobs can be: no one minds — and seem to be all-thumbs with the platefuls of exotica they grumblingly request from the maternal waitresses (‘Nah, you put lemon on it, you cunt,’ I heard one gourmet tell his rather less sophisticated friend). True, also, the women glance at me quite a bit; perhaps they have me fingered for a coming yob; or perhaps they think I look rather grand and enigmatic, with my paperback, my cigarettes and my wine, my relative composure, sitting here alone in this crowded place.
Having settled the bill, and handsomely, I walked out into the street. The pubs had just closed and there was an agreeable whiff of Yahooism in the air. Over by the supermarket, I noticed, a promising scuffle was already well underway. I crossed the road, joining a small but appreciative audience, and watched two fat middle-aged men hurl a drunk about among some dustbins. The two men did this tirelessly, long after the drunk had surrendered consciousness. There seemed no reason for them to stop — but then they pantingly dusted their palms, and we all crackled away on the broken teeth and glass. We are getting nastier. We don’t put up with things. We do as we want now. I wouldn’t go out too late too often, if I were you. There are plenty of people here who would be quite happy to do you harm. You shouldn’t take anything for granted: you ought to be very careful. It suits me, all this, with no one being safe any more. I think I’m beginning to like the way the world is changing.
I recrossed the road to my local late-night pornographer’s. I prefer it when a decent amount of perverts are already in there, and also when the Jamaican girl isn’t at the tobacco counter: she has a bad habit of veering up without warning from her chair and shooing all the perverts into the street. Tonight, luckily, the Greek owner sat in her stead, disconsolately picking his teeth with a nail-file, and there were at least six or seven perverts spaced out along the pornography shelves, like dreamers at a urinal. I joined them. I flicked through six or seven magazines, all of which were evidently still in the business of showing men what the insides of women’s vaginas and anuses look like. There are hundreds of these girls in every magazine, and there are hundreds of these magazines in every shop, and there are hundreds and hundreds of shops. Where do these girls come from and how do they get hold of them and make them show us what the insides of their vaginas and anuses look like? They must have asked nearly every girl in the world to do it by now. Have they asked Jan yet, or Ursula, or Phyllis at Dino’s? Pretty soon they’ll run out of girls who will do it. Then they’ll have to find ways of making the girls who won’t do it do it. Then we’ll know what the insides of every girl’s vagina and anus look like. That’ll be good too.
The night was electric — the night was in italics. When a sharp rain began to dot the air I thought the pavement was going to sizzle. What is everyone doing up so late? Are they too hot to sleep? The moisture brought out the sweet smell of dead fruit from a forgotten barrow. I stopped and stared upwards. I was seeing stars.
Who needs the bathroom, I thought, as I came into the flat. Once in my room, I poured myself a potent nightcap — whisky: better than any toothbrush — removed my clothes in favour of some old pyjamas, and got quickly into bed. A cigarette, the day, the office, next month, the future, ah life, ah death. I gargled and extinguished my cigarette. I turned the light off and stared at the ceiling. But the ceiling wouldn’t go to sleep. My mind was busy busy busy.
Then I heard it. A sound too close for human grief, too deep to separate itself from the humming and dripping of the night. I sat up straight. A mauve baby that has reached the end of breath, a madwoman in a vacuum, murder beneath many pillows.
‘Ursula?’ I said.
Everything was over in a moment. I just lowered my trousers. I only remember the smell — sweat, tears, fluid. Her thighs were cold and goose-pimpled but inside she was seething. She wanted to be joined up, plugged, glued together again. I thought she might snap before I could do anything. She was shaking insanely. She was breathing so hard that I clamped my hand over her mouth — to keep her there, to keep her in, to put her back. ‘Quiet!’ I said in terror. She lay on the bed and I lay on top of her. Everything was over in a moment. I hoped I didn’t break anything.
‘He hates me,’ she said afterwards.
I moved away a few inches. ‘Him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because of me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you …?’
‘Yes. Someone’s got to look after me.’
‘Have they?’
‘It was him or you.’
‘Why?’
‘But none of that matters now, does it?’
I turned over. I could hear fresh rain rolling across the skylights. I wondered how long it would take before she went back to her room.
(ii) You’re not at the bottom yet. There
is a lot further you can fall — GREGORY
What happened?
What happened? I think I must have been outside for at least an hour before I realized I was outside, before I realized I was anywhere, before the fog of hot distress had a chance to clear from my eyes. I had ‘stormed out’ into the night. Suddenly I was in the streets, and suddenly the streets were black and empty and cold. There was no sound, no sound whatever, except for the dry sheen of cars in the distance and the blanket murmur of the air, like a gramophone record between tracks. And where was this? I stood at the top of a slope beyond a low dark railway bridge. Weak light came from the entrance to a dead Underground station across the street; next door was a little driving-instructor’s shop which ambitiously kept a pink neon L fluttering feebly in its window. Over the prefab wall banking the pavement I could see a vast razed area like a cordoned-off bombsite, with deep scars in the earth, mounds of sand, steaming ditches. Great head-in-air cranes loomed above me. What happened?
Further down the road lay rows of houses clumped in shadow (they seemed to have sprung up out of their own front gardens). I
could tell from the fake-brick plastering and absurdly garish window frames that I was in nigger country, the mau-mau hell between Ladbroke Grove and Kilburn. The cars irregularly spaced along the street were boogie cars, so impossibly lurid that only boogies could bear to drive about in them. But the boogies slept. I experienced no fear — of what, anyway? I’m on my own now, I thought, feeling saner than I had felt for weeks — saner than up there in that room, lying on that nailbed of nerves. Which way home? I started down the hill towards the dark bridge.
Then I saw them, two men, just beyond the viaduct. I hesitated for an instant (cross the road? No), and walked on. A third figure clambered over the buildingsite fence. The yellow streetlamps flickered. Is this it? Seen through the deeper shadows of the tunnel, they looked strangely becalmed in the glow. Two of them leaned against the corrugated prefab wall; the other, a young man in an old man’s overcoat, faced me squarely. I entered the tunnel (never stop now), using the darkness to slow my pace. I halted. A wire tugged in my throat as the two leaning figures steadied themselves and took up position by their friend. I could outrun them, perhaps, but I could not outflank them — those mad little legs of theirs … and run back where? Into that? And start again? I went to the edge of the shadows, ten yards from the three men. I halted. I heard water, a sudden rustic trickle. The men were lean, dirty, long-haired; they gave the sense of being outside everything, their nerves flexed tight for the streets. No one moved. There wasn’t any noise anywhere now.
‘What do you want?’ I called from the shadows.
They did not come forward but seemed ready to change their posture for attack. Thick fingers were itching at my heart.
‘Money,’ said one of them quietly.
I haven’t got any either! I’ve got an overdraft! ‘Listen!’ I said. ‘Three pounds and some change — you can have it. Please. It’s all I’ve got — I promise.’
‘Three pounds,’ said one to another. They stepped forward.
My legs disappeared. ‘I’ll get you more! I’ll — ’ Then two heavy hands seized me from behind.
I wheeled round, half toppling over. I felt my trousers go wet and hot. Inches from mine was a face with orange skin and no front teeth. It let out a shout of rank laughter.
‘Hey,’ it said — ‘he’s only shit himself. You can smell it. He’s only shit himself.’
The other three converged. ‘Don’t hit me, please,’ I said in tears. ‘I’ll give the money. Please don’t hit me.’
‘He’s crying now. Gor, you little shit. Hah! Shit himself! Poof fucking shit himself!’
And as I stood there scouring my pockets, even through the mist of alarm and humiliation, I realized that they were beggars only, and very sorry ones, young and sick, with no more strength in their bodies than I could summon in mine.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, holding out the money in cupped hands. ‘Believe me there is no more.’
The fanged one laughed again. ‘Keep it, shitty,’ he said. ‘You keep it, there’s a good little shit.’
I reeled away from them, stumbling into a run. They yelled until I could hear them no longer.
‘Go on, shitty. Go on, go on home and change your panties. Go on, shitty. Go on, you little shit.’
Two o’clock. I stood in my shirtsleeves at the kitchen table, the change and crumpled notes spread out before me. I had buried the trousers in the rubbish-bin. I had cleaned myself at the sink, with water, Squezy and the tissue roll. I turned to the blank window. There was my face, suspended among the rooftops and the beads of passage lights of the blocks higher up. It looked like me, I suppose, or like other people think I look. ‘You’re not at the bottom yet,’ I said. ‘There is a lot further you can fall.’
This month hides in unfamiliar places.
I avoided them for as long as I could — and with some success. (I couldn’t face them. The shame was mine too, somehow. Why?) In the early evenings and over the weekends I stayed away from the flat. I sat in coffee-bars with au pairs and transients, with self-possessed middle-aged women and trim, well-spoken middle-aged men, coffee-bars in which everyone knew all about everyone else’s failures, and nobody had anywhere they would rather be. I lingered in bookshops and antique-marts and junk shops among the ponderous hippies, the cruel-faced spivs and the trusting students with their valuable plastic bags. I sat through films in the afternoons, next to noisy kids and sleepy pensioners, beside faceless unemployables and gibbering tramps (how can they afford it? I can’t). I try not to stay out later than nine or eight-thirty. I stick to the crowded streets, where the foreigners are still busy looting the shops. I have been keeping my eyes open. I have been looking round about me.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that approximately one in three of this city’s indigenous population is quite mad — obviously, openly, candidly, brazenly mad. Their lives are entirely given over to a bitter commentary on the world, the light, the time of day it is. In every busload there will be six or seven people who just sit there growling about nothing with tears in their eyes. Every café contains, at all times, a working minimum of two gesticulating maniacs who have to be shown or chucked out into the street, where they will hover and shout and threaten until someone redoubles their efforts to make them go away again. On every street you walk along you find the same proportion of people who do nothing but fizz all the hours there are, fizz with hatred or disappointment or grief, or fizz simply because they are ugly and poor and mad. They ought to get together. They ought to organize (they would form a very powerful lobby). They ought to organize, and make everyone else fucked up and tonto too.
Am I like that? No, not yet. But I’m treading lightly wherever I go now, testing all the surfaces. At any moment I expect to hear them crack.
Work is impossible these days. (It always was really, as you know, but it’s even more impossible now.) They bawl me out. They bawl me out when I come back late from delivering their shitty pictures all over town (perhaps I should tell them about the Underground and me. Perhaps they would be kinder then). They bawl me out when I drop things, and I drop things quite a bit these days. Last week I dropped a teapot, and the fuckpigs made me buy them a new one. This week I dropped a picture frame; it was a hideous picture frame, naturally, but so valuable that not even they expected me to buy them a new one. They just bawled me out instead. Yesterday they bawled me out in front of some friendly students I was chatting to (apparently I had misaddressed most of the private-view invitations). ‘Get down to the stock-room,’ said Odette. The friendly students looked baffled. So did I. I cried for a while as I cleaned the frames.
You know what I had for lunch the other day? (Ah, thank you, good Emil, yes, the usual, please.) A Mars Bar. A fucking Mars Bar. Suck on that. Terry pays all the bills now. He doesn’t seem to mind. One day I returned from work to find that the powerful Grundig had disappeared from my room. I assumed the men had come for it (I couldn’t keep up the payments). I went downstairs and saw that it was in Terry’s room. I didn’t say anything about it.
I want to go home. I want to go back to that big warm house. I want to be among people who love me. I can’t find anything to use against people who hate me.
On the evening our lives sorted themselves out for good, on the evening when all came clear, I happened to pass Terry in the passage. I had just got back from work; he was putting on a new pair of gloves, getting ready to stroll out with a book for an expensive meal in Queensway.
‘How are you?’ he asked aggressively.
‘I’m okay,’ I said, without meeting his eye.
‘Good. And how’s the gallery?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good. Still doing well there, are you?’
‘Perhaps I won’t take off my overcoat,’ I said uncertainly as I began to move up the stairs.
‘Ursula’s in her room,’ he shouted, ‘moping about something or other as usual. Go and cheer her up, why don’t you?’
All that month I had expected to want Ursula to come to me, to
come to me and ask for forgiveness. I knew things could never be good again, but perhaps I could find a way to stop hating her, a way to throw off this frenzy of solitude which mantles me now. I didn’t want her to come, though. I really didn’t. I knew that I could not tolerate it, that it was intolerable. I’m on my own here. Let’s face that.
I was sitting by my window. I was still in my overcoat (I often am these days. It means that I’m not here to stay and can bolt any time I like and, besides, I’m paranoid about putting on the fire). I was sitting by my window, staring out at the aeroplanes that wafted through the grey clouds. Then I heard the intimate footfalls.
‘Gregory?’
I could not turn. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
‘I know.’
‘Won’t you talk to me?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Won’t you ever talk to me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘Won’t you look at me?’
‘I can’t.’
‘When we were young we said we’d never be mean to each other.’
‘I know.’
‘Then why are you being mean to me now?’
‘Because I hate you,’ I said.
‘You can’t do that. What will become of us?’
And why is it always clichés that make you cry? I leaned forward on my table and gave vent to the saltiest tears I had ever shed. So much water flooding out — where does it all come from? I felt her presence behind me. I turned, startled.
Her hand was raised, as if she would rest it on my shoulders. Her face was full of migraine. She moved nearer with her hand.
‘Don’t!’ I said. I was pleading. ‘Don’t. I’ll go mad if you touch me.’
Late that night the swirl of sirens came slantwise across my sleep. I turned over (shut the doors, shut the doors. Sirens are ten-a-penny round my way, where everyone is always getting fucked up or going tonto. Sirens always have to be waiting near by). I had dreamt I was walking down a bombed-out street; there were children playing, and the air was nostalgic with that forgotton concord — bat patting ball, the soft-shoe shuffle of hopscotch, the flick of a skiprope, the weak protesting trebles of their cries; I reached the house I had come to find; I knocked on the door and turned to enjoy the children; now all was silent, and I saw with a sob that they were not children after all, but mad old dwarves, every one, their faces boiling as they crossed the street towards me … The sirens yawled, screaming for blood. I opened my eyes. A blue light was shooting round my room like a spectral boomerang — whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I sat up with a shiver. The sirens cried warning as I moved down the stairs. I opened the flat door.