Success

by Martin Amis

  Perhaps you think they aimed me because I wouldn’t fuck them? Well, I don’t think it can be that, because I have fucked them, more or less. Remember that afternoon, when she dropped the coffee on my trousers and then tried to fuck me? Well, I dropped the coffee and I tried to fuck her — tried very hard and without much success (she did let me feel her horrible tits and so forth, but she wasn’t keen. She said she never wanted to do anything like that with me again. Why? Who’s changed?). Jason has blown me. Once. I’ve blown him. Twice. I did it because I thought they might aim me if I didn’t. I did, and they aimed me anyway. Oh God. I suppose I can’t blame them, really, what with me so silent and tonto the whole time.

  It happened at mid-morning. I walked home with £80 in my pocket (it was lucky no one knew). I sat downstairs in Terry’s room, next to Ursula’s. I worry about Ursula all the time, far more than I ever did when she was alive. Something could always be done then. How close to nausea grief is. I want to be sick all the time. I would be sick all the time, if I felt up to it.

  It was no one’s fault. It was inevitable, just as what’s happening to me is inevitable. I only wish I hadn’t spoken to her like that. God damn me for speaking to her like that. How did I dare. I’d never been mean to her before. Does Terry know I did? I hope he doesn’t tell anyone.

  We talked when he came in. It was all right — he is much more relaxed now. We talked about home. Mama and Papa are believers. They don’t believe in worrying about the dead. I hope they still believe that. We’ll see. We’re going home early for Christmas.

  I feel incredibly strange out of doors now. I’m not working (no point in looking for new jobs yet, so near the holidays). I feel like an impostor, a ghost, just putting in the odd appearance as I do. Everyone is so compact and energetic. They breathe heavily and sweat in the cold. The meanest of them watch me with curious and unfriendly eyes. (They don’t like me. Who does, I wonder? Even the random babblings of the foreigners — and they speak in languages I’ve never heard of — come to my ears in cadences of obscenity, imprecation and threat.) I used to like their stares. I don’t any longer. I wish I looked a bit more like Terry. Unpleasant though his appearance certainly is, he does, in some important sense in which I do not, look like a person, one put together with this life in view. I don’t — I know it. I used to like the way I looked, and I liked the way they looked at me. But now it’s all wrong and I wish I looked like everybody else.

  What went on? What became of the people who would protect me? Kane and Skimmer never telephone or come round any more. Why should they? I never had anything to give them and couldn’t afford to go out. (I never cared for them anyway. They were cocksuckers, blind cocksuckers.) Torka cared for me at first, but now he and his yobs think I’m ridiculous. (I kept feeling sure that if I went there one more time they would beat me up, for sex or just for fun.) Odette and Jason might have looked after me for a while, perhaps. They were fond of me, I know. (But not that fond.) I see the tramps, standing in resentful knots behind the pubs. They don’t look like tramps used to look. They are not old and small and well wrapped-up. Some of them look quite young. (Some of them look quite rich.) Perhaps they aren’t all tramps. If they are, there must be an awful lot of tramps about.

  I don’t like staying in the streets too long (that’s natural. It’s a very cold November). I like to get back inside quickly. I like to doze on Ursula’s bed in the afternoons (it’s a small room. You can make it warm just by being in it). Her suspended future and my dead past get mixed up now in my mind. The trials that await her in death are probably no different from those she faced while she lived — new schools, the hatred of your peers, the voices in your head. The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms. I don’t like it when I fall asleep down there. I have dreams. I don’t see what you’re supposed to do about dreams. You’re always asleep when they happen. Perhaps sleep is to blame, pulling the wool over your eyes in that deceitful way it has. Dreams wouldn’t dare do what they do to me when I’m awake. That’s why they wait until I’m asleep before they do it.

  I lie on her bed until Terry comes home. We talk, and quite often he gives me some of his whisky to drink. Quite often, too, I drink some of his whisky before he comes home. He looks at the bottle and he looks at me. I feel ashamed. I wonder what he can think of me these days.

  Christmas at Rivers Court. A cartoon, Dickensian scene — the mansion lapped in snow, the windows golden with great crackling fires, everything set for the miracle: cottagers and farmworkers humming carols in the courtyard (did they ever come? If they did, someone took them hot drinks), the heavy village bell obsessively counting its notes in the distance, robust caterwauling from the servants’ parlour (if there was one. Did we ever have any?), the beaming silence of the East drawing-room as we all converge on the teeming tenements of cadeaux grouped round the crystal Christmas tree. The family feels strong again. I can almost see my face, here and there in the whirl of merriment and memory. There he is! Did you see him? Twenty Christmases put me together and make me up: my height jerks in the time machine, my clothes change like a prismatic cockatoo, arms reach out towards me like, like …

  Oh come on — were we ever that happy and grand (and it’s Hall, not Court, you lying fuck)? My parents were probably old and tonto long before we actually noticed they were, and my sister and I were always heading that way too … I live more in the past these days. Christ knows why. I used to think I’d never had a good time since I was twenty. Now I wonder if I ever had a good time since I was ten.

  The telephone rang suddenly, as if in fright or warning. I picked it up and said,

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There you are. Terry, now listen. It’s getting worse quicker. No one seems to know how soon. You must get Gregory up here. How soon can you?’

  I sat up in bed. This was my mother’s voice. And I am not Terry. I leaned forward. I wanted to hurl the telephone against the wall or crack it to pieces on the floor.

  ‘Mother, this is me,’ I said. ‘This is Gregory.’

  ‘… Oh, Gregory.’

  There was a pause — the silence quite undistraught — before I heard the receiver being gently replaced.

  I got up and put on clothes. I started off.

  It took a hundred bad minutes to find him.

  I walked all the way to the bus-stop (a helicopter thudded low overhead and a cat in an empty restaurant stood on a table to scratch the glass) before it occurred to me that I had no idea where Terry worked. I thrashed through the books of a urine-steeped telephone kiosk. What was I looking for? I ran back to the flat. I found a printed address on one of his staggering pay-slips. But where on earth was Holborn Viaduct? I ran back to the bus-stop. I consulted the meaningless yellow timetables on the billboard. I went through my pockets, watching for taxis. I had no money. I had no money at all. (What happened to that £80? Something did: coffees, boxes of matches, bus-fares.) I ran back to the flat. I looted my drawers and pockets. Eighteen pence. I ran down to Terry’s room. In his money drawer were several £5 notes. I took one. I took two. I ran outside. There were no taxis (it was raining. There never are then). I ran back to the bus-stop. On the 88 I rode. I asked the coons. I changed buses twice. I found myself standing on a street that became a bridge. I asked the newspaper vendors (I bought three Standards and a News). Holborn Viaduct was ‘down there’. I descended steep steps. I stumbled through the gloom. The oyster light was full of drizzle, and when I asked men where to go they replied too quickly or too slowly or not at all and then hurried away or lingered strangely, making me walk fast and forgetful in any direction and praying that they would not call out to correct me. It got a shade darker suddenly. I began to run.

  Masters House loomed up at me through a silk of rain and tears. It was a big efficient building; a uniformed man guarded its portals. I hung back. There was some sort of café in the alley where I lurked. I put my head round its door momentarily — a teddy-boy with a great gl
istening quiff, a frizzy-haired old tart, unfriendly eyes. I fastened my coat. Beneath some rusty scaffolding I saw a pool of frozen vomit. I walked forward.

  ‘The third floor,’ said the whiskered doorman.

  I stood in a carbolic vestibule. Three big women with faces like cruel pigs stood watching me critically from their office or parlour or rest-room (cheap newspapers on a green chair, a leaning mop-handle). The doors of the lift were open. The liftman hovered. Shut the doors, shut the doors. As we moaned upwards I felt someone was watching me, watching me with sneering, lethal hate. The lift had a mirror. I didn’t look.

  The third-floor landing led nowhere. I walked up a half-flight of stairs. I walked down a passage. I turned a corner. Something crackled beneath my feet. I stared down and saw with a rush of horror that I was treading on human teeth. I heard a wet sob. In a gloomy nook to my left sat a young boy with a blood-stained handkerchief pressed to his mouth. A woman was with him.

  ‘Oh you poor young boy,’ I said.

  His shoulders shook.

  ‘The boys from downstairs,’ said the woman. ‘They just flicked them out.’ She made a flicking gesture with forefinger and thumb. She winced. ‘Just flicked them out.’

  ‘You poor boy. Why? Couldn’t you stop them?’

  ‘No. You can’t stop them,’ she said.

  ‘Oh God. Where’s Terry? Is he here?’

  ‘Mr Service? Through there.’

  I walked on, round a curved corner. A tableful of secretaries looked up at me.

  ‘Is Mr Service here?’ I said. Mr Service. Who the hell is he?

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Service?’

  ‘Terry? Through there.’

  I turned a second corner. A large open-plan area edged by cubicles disclosed itself. Heavy young men with close-cut beards moved confidently about in the middle-distance. They stopped what they were doing and turned towards me. Through where? Through where, where, where?

  Then a cubicle door wafted open — and there was Terry, hunched over a telephone, his back to me, the smoke of a cigarette curling up above his head.

  ‘Yes,’ he was saying. ‘Well, no, it wouldn’t be me, would it? I mean, I go to work in the mornings. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve tried already — no answer. They must have some idea how soon. Yeah, I’ll get him there, I’ll get him there. It’s just that I do a job, you know? I can’t just — ’

  He swung round in his chair and saw me.

  ‘Later,’ he said, and hung up.

  We stared. He seemed brisk, dressed-up, adult, like somebody I’d never met.

  ‘Have you seen the boy out there?’ I said.

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘The boy out there.’

  ‘Damon?’

  ‘They broke his teeth.’

  ‘I knew they would,’ said Terry, ‘one of these days.’

  ‘… I spoke to Mama.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She …’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything.’

  He straightened his jacket. ‘Things are not good,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know. Do I?’

  ‘Things are not good,’ he said. ‘We’re going home early for Christmas.’

  12: December

  (i) I’m going to be all right — TERRY

  One cloud shadows the life of the British Passenger-Railman: in the ointment of his daily labour there is but this single fly. The passenger. The passenger is forever causing him trouble. The passenger is forever getting in his hair. The passenger is forever interfering with his job. The passenger just seems to fuck him up all the way along the line.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told Gregory and the porter, my tone sharpened by the latter’s show of insolence when I tried to enlist an unattended trolley. I joined the long queue which was slowly offering itself up to the one operative ticket-counter. In due course I bawled our destination through the plastic grill. ‘How much?’ I asked. After a relatively brief period of mutinous incomprehension, the brute told me — a startling sum. ‘Why do you advertise?’ I said. ‘No one uses you unless they have to.

  ‘Come on,’ I told the porter and Gregory. Light music flitted among the high stone stanchions. Tramps were selling bales of newspapers. It was Saturday and the station was empty and unswept, bearing the litter of last night’s delinquencies like the remains of a prehistoric rout. It was eight in the morning: the air had started to defrost; the trains lay stretched out exhausted, slumped panting on their buffers, wheezing steam.

  ‘Here you are,’ I told the porter when he had installed us in our carriage. ‘Sit there,’ I told Gregory. Gregory hesitated, while the porter fixed his stunned gaze on the mere twenty pence in his palm: ‘Is that okay?’ I asked them both.

  I turned to Gregory as the train pulled out. ‘Now do you want to eat? There’s a restaurant car, where you can get a plate of shit for five quid, or do you just want coffee? Do you want to eat something? You can if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  I looked up from my work as the train back-pedalled into some suburban whistle-stop. Greg was staring boyishly out of the window. I noticed with a sigh that his cheeks were fretted by dried-up tears.

  ‘How long will you stay?’ he asked in a normal voice.

  ‘Depends. I can’t just stay on indefinitely. I’ve got a job to do.’

  We rode on.

  ‘… And how long will you stay?’ I asked him.

  ‘Depends,’ he said.

  It was all over by the time we got there — I had known it would be. We arrived at the house by taxi. I pay because I’m the eldest now … this family is costing me a fortune. As I rewarded the driver I watched Gregory climb out of the car. He stood with his back to the house, buttoning up his coat, snarling gently at the wind.

  His mother received us at the door. Gregory dropped his eyes and nodded a few times when he was told the news, as if it were the least he could have expected. She asked whether we should like to see the body: Greg and I shrugged and said yes. We moved along the hall to the stairs. The past tried to flood back. How I hate this place, I thought, with its worn carpets, its oddly shaped corridors good for hiding in, and its dangerously antique round-pin plugs. I would tear it apart with my bare hands if I could. I always felt bad here. It wasn’t their fault, of course. They tried.

  He was staked out on the master-suite bed. Mrs Riding pulled back the sheet. Her husband’s face, I now saw, was caught in a rictus of angry surprise, gat-toothed — the posh keep their teeth, you know, however old or fucked up they get — eyes open, brow clenched, like a proud man being told he is the victim of a humbling joke. I looked at that starry, messianic face. What was he? I knew what he was. A good man — or a nice man, anyway; a fool; a fool who was kind to me when he didn’t have to be; someone who was allowed to do pretty well what he wanted pretty well all the time. Gregory cried a bit more here, but with restraint — introspective tears, almost.

  I was glad I managed to get three glasses of sherry before lunch, which was taken with frugal and teetotal haste in the kitchen. My foster-mother was brisk and laconic throughout — the next few days, at least, would be fairly well mapped out for her — and she repaired un-fussily to the study once the cheese was cleared away. I joined her for a few minutes, as agreed. No surprises: she would live with her cousin in Shropshire; there were debts; the house was rotting and near-worthless; the lease on the London flat had eight years to run — I told her what I could get her for it and she told me to go ahead and get it; she said she would manage; I said I would do what I could for them both.

  I rejoined Gregory and we wandered out into the drive. We stood shivering together for a few minutes. I offered him an expensive cigarette, which he shyly accepted.

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be lots to do here,’ he said.
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  ‘There’s nothing for me to do here, is there?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I might as well get back straightaway, before it gets dark. That’s okay, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Gregory gazed up the drive. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk too, while it’s light.’ He turned to me with a half-smile.

  ‘Goodbye then,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye, Terry.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’ I called as he started off.

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said.

  Nor am I, I thought, as an hour later I took my seat in the restaurant car of the 5.15. Life is finished there. It’s just a damp house where I grew up. Let them stay for as long as they can. I hope they’ll be all right.

  Now I’ve got the flat to myself for a bit — I’ll sell it in time — I think I’ll do some proper entertaining this winter. Have you heard? Terence Service is entertaining these days. He didn’t used to be, but he is now. There are people I can ask round. Friends from the Night School. All Veale’s boys at the office — some rationalization that was: there are twice as many Sellers as there ever were before; no one seems to mind, though, and we all get lots of money. There are even a couple of girls I can ring up now and take out and go to bed with. I fucked Jan, for instance. It was okay — with myself in sparkling form, both athletic and pitiless — but nothing special.

  The train bombed on, through fields wedged by advancing shadows. The countryside gives me the horrors these days: I long for the reassurance of underground stations, streets, tramps and pubs. I waved for a drink. I lit a cigarette. I uncrossed my legs to accommodate the great hydraulic erection which trains always give me whether I need them or not. I smiled.

  The machine pounds along on slick silvery rails. I squint down the unravelling track, on the look-out for London. I sip my drink. I’m going to be all right.