by Will Self
Her note. It smashed through the partitions – her note; and it crashed through the glass walls of the Editor's office (he'd had them installed after seeing All the President's Men). It ushered in a coconut-scented breeze, the sound of a Hawaiian guitar. The thick slick of alcohol began to be cleaned up with the detergent of desire. The dark pall of dope smoke wavered and dispersed. His eyes still clamped on the Post-it note, Richard saw the future opening up before him like some virgin land. It was a future in which Ursula Bentley called him at the office. It was nirvana.
Richard made it through the rest of the meeting by grinding the shaft of his erect penis against the underside edge of the conference table until a sharp pain ran down his inner thigh. Once or twice he thought that this extraordinary practice might actually cause him to ejaculate, but he had to do it, had to prevent himself from being carried away on a cloud of mucal imaginings. Richard didn't even rise when the glove fetishist – in a lull – flicked his golden calf of a Post-it note with a fake nail and insinuated, ‘Well, Richard, Ursula Bentley eh? Pretty thing, isn't she – although, to coin a phrase, she's had her bell rung a fair few times, hmm?’
As soon as the meeting ended, Richard sprinted through the maze of partitioning like an experimental rat hurrying to get an on-demand hit of cocaine. He crouched down in the cul-de-sac that served him as an office space, and dialled the number on the note. It was a Kensington exchange. As the mist of static was cleared by connection, Richard's imagination called up a vision of Ursula in her Kensington flat, with its high, high ceilings, its quarter-acre of Persian rug, its cabinets full of rare objets d'art. There she was, Ursula, a Maughamesque figure, reclining on a deco divan in a bay window. Her gown was long, falling in columns and scallops of ivory material. There was gold at her breast, worked into her girdle, and at hem and sleeve as well. Her telephone receiver was sculpted in the form of an epicene young man, an Adonis – like Ursula herself, formed of ivory and gold.
‘Yeah?’ Ursula's voice rasped.
‘Is – is that Ursula? Ursula B-Bentley?’ Richard didn't so much reply, as warble.
‘Yeah.’
‘It's Richard, Richard Hermes.’
‘Oh, yeah, young Richard. You scarpered a bit quick last night. What happened?’ Her voice was harsh – but not to his ear.
‘Um, well, work in the morning y'know – ‘ Fool! He didn't know that she knew anything of the sort. Apart from her column ('Peccadillo’, which some wags referred to as ‘Pick-a-Dildo'), Richard had no idea of what Ursula did. But judging by the way in which she waved aside everything that pertained to money – like her share of the bill – the world of work was something she orbited, rather than inhabited.
‘At Rendezvous, with what's her name, that glove woman.’
‘Sorry?’ He was sorry all right, sorry that anything should connect these two. He felt as if (and this was an overarching absurdity) he had betrayed Ursula already, committed proleptic adultery.
‘You know, Richard, your boss, Fabia, the glove woman. Don't tell me she hasn't tried it on with you. She got me in the coat room at some party once. I was a bit pissed, so we sort of started snogging, whatever. Then she pulled some ski gloves out of her pocket, the thick, quilted kind. Tried to get me to give her a right good frigging with them. Since then I've heard all sorts about her – but always with the glove angle. What was it with you? Leather driving numbers with holes? Mittens?’
‘Oven gloves, actually.’
‘Ha-ha! Very good, Richard. “Touché," one might even say.,
By God! He'd said something right! A thousand thousand pink flamingos lifted off from the volcanic lake of Richard's stomach.
‘Well, I'm afraid I had nothing much to get up for this morning, so I went on with the boys.’
‘W-where?’ The flamingos were machine-gunned by Nazi vivisectionists.
‘To that gay place by Charing Cross, then back to The Hole again – Bell wanted to pick something up – then back to Bloomsbury.’
‘T-to Bell's?’
‘Yah. Then we had a gas. Bell had some of this shit called bliss. Sort of cross between smack, E and ice. You've gotta smoke it in a little pipe. Makes you feel . . . I dunno . . . Well! Like you'd imagine.
‘Anyway,’ Ursula went on, ‘Reiser had skulked off by this time, do Bell calls him up – he knows Reiser can't resist drugs – and says, “Hey Todd, wanna come back to my place and do some bliss? The whole gang's here, plus some babes who've blown in from out of town, and want to meet people in film . . .” Todd is salivating so much I can hear it, going “Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah” like fucking Muttley. So Bell just says, “Well you can't!” and slams the phone down. Ha-ha-ha-ha!’
‘Hee-hee, hee-hee,’ Richard joined in, although he couldn't for the life of him have said what was funny about it.
‘The poor sap even came over and leant on the entryphone for half an hour before Bell got round to disconnecting it – ‘
‘When did you get home?’ Richard almost snapped this; like most courage, it was reflex.
‘What?’
‘I mean – back?’
‘Dunno. Whatever. Six-thirty, seven. Whatever. Tweety time, at any rate – I'm fucked. Anyway, Richard, it's Mearns's greenmail party this evening, and I'm doing the APB. See you at the Club at seven – I'll be early . . .’
‘O – ‘
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .
Richard listened to the dialling tone for some time, hearing it as the Little Bear's purring, lustful breath. That's what his lovey-dovey nickname for her would be: ‘Little Bear’.
Then he shook himself out of it and turned to the computer. The screen showed the corporate screensaver, a cartoon representation of an average Rendezvous reader (back view), ringing with a felt tip his/her cultural-event selections for the week. Richard slapped the mouse; the screen squeaked and cleared to reveal about two hundred words of copy. With a myriad flocks of pink flamingos spiralling like galaxies in his universal heart, Richard Hermes bent to the task of correcting the copy. He had been called by Ursula Bentley! They had made . . . a rendezvous! (What else could that ‘early’ have meant?) On such a day, even annotating pre-puff for Razza Rob's new stand-up show Gynae-Gynae, Hey-Hey! was a rare treat.
Richard hovered about on a metaphorical decision-making corner all day, much like the John on his actual corner the night before. At five he started for Hornsey, only to abandon the journey halfway there, leaving the tube at Archway on the grounds that he wasn't going to have enough time to get home, shower, masturbate himself into a genderless nullity (this was an evening when Richard didn't even wish for the race memory of an involuntary erection), then address the question of his toilet and attire with a rigour not seen since pubescent, preening pre-disco nightmares.
To have insufficient time at the Wendy flat would be worse than having none at all. Better to turn up at the Sealink with a devil-may-care, rumpled-from-the-night-before, funky-dirty-stopover, essentially rugged and masculine demeanour. In this macho attitude Richard would rub his stubble vigorously against Ursula's cheek upon meeting, challenging her with insolent eyes to imagine its abrasiveness applied elsewhere – sanding her into submission.
Richard's sagging, spotted trousers, bagging shirt and scuffed shoes would be taken by Ursula as telling evidence of a disconcertingly sexy and powerful lack of self-consciousness. He considered whether a nice further touch might be to give a mock-Yiddisher hunch of his shoulders and declaim to her, ‘Style, schmyle!’
All of this kaleidoscoped through Richard's mind as he paced up and down the tatty concourse outside Archway Tower, his eyes stinging from the grit that cold, dry puffs of wind were kicking up. At least his hangover was on the wane; all he felt now were a certain wateriness in the lower belly, and a feculence of mucus rammed up both nostrils, not unlike two small coral reefs.
As he paced he kept looking at his watch, feeling time course away from him, while he remained imprisoned in a permanent, embarrassed agony of the pres
ent. It was the window of Smith's that snapped him out of it, provided the visual salts. A rack of copies of the Radio Times was positioned so as to grab the attention of passers-by. It grabbed Richard all right, grabbed him like a street fighter grabbing a collar, thrusting a belligerent face into a cowering one. But it wasn't a face, it was faces. Bell's faces, serried ranks of Bells, a tintinnabulation of them resounding in Richard's head. Below each smiling visage was a version of his ever mutable slogan: ‘Can You Ring Me?’
Richard resolved compromise. He got back on the tube and headed into town. Getting out at Tottenham Court Road he walked along to a menswear store and bought a pair of black chinos, a black blazer, a black pullover shirt, clean underwear and socks. He couldn't afford all of it really, but also couldn't stand not to look presentable, Ursula-worthy.
Richard slid into the Sealink at five to seven, and ducked along the corridor to the gents’. Here he shaved with nose-hair-paring exactitude. He also crouched in one of the stalls, to swab the grooves of his body with wads of moistened toilet paper, before scrabbling at the cellophane packaging and wrapping himself in his new finery. Five more minutes in front of the mirror – ignoring the comments of Sealink regulars as they filed past him to snort, scratch and sniff – and Richard was as ready as he'd ever be. He advanced along the corridor, towards the bar, at a steady trot. A Norman knight at Agincourt.
The first arrow came barrelling down vertically on him from the barman, Julius. Richard entered the bar, sidled up to the bar, put his elbow on the bar, and undertook the subtle business of gaining the barman's attention. This took about fifteen minutes. Finally the orange divot was in front of Richard and he essayed the following casual enquiry: ‘Julius – seen Ursula?’
‘No,’ came the reply, the ‘N’ riving him from occiput to nape, the ‘o’ set alight and dropping neatly around his neck. Not here? It was now ten past seven – she had to be here. Was she toying with him?
‘I'll have – ‘ but the orange divot was gone, to the other end of the bar, to serve an actor whose most impressive credit to date was the voiceover for a Pepto-Bismol advert.
Richard ranged the Sealink Club with the loping, multijointed gait of a maddened polar bear. He charged upstairs, fell downstairs, looked in the brasserie-style cafeteria, the cafeteria-style brasserie, the table-football room; he even called her name several times outside the ladies’, softly, every bit of him agitated but pitching it low, in three quavering syllables, ‘Uuuur-suuuu-laaa . . .’, until two hack-harridans emerged, knock-kneed with merriment – charged on his account.
Then he was back in the bar for a while, clenching and unclenching his hands around fictive balls of hard, realistically rubber anxiety. Richard didn't want Kelburn, Reiser, Slatter and all the others to turn up before her – it was unthinkable. He'd be sucked straight back down that plughole of loathsomeness, which connected directly to the sewer of the previous night. He must at least speak with Ursula alone before this happened. He had to capitalise on the Post-it note.
Richard thought of the private room he and Reiser had been in the evening before. Could she be up there? One of the chambermaids who serviced the room had also been serviced by Bell. Richard found it hard to credit, but the experience indebted her to him. She made sure that a copy of the key was available for Bell, or any of his cronies, when they required sequestration from the rest of the club.
If Ursula was up there, what could she possibly be doing? The long day of speculation, insecurity and hair-trigger lust was beginning to tell on Richard. He contemplated lurid images of Ursula going down – on Reiser! On Slatter! On Kelburn! On still weasellier, greasier members of the clique. As the phantom figures mounted one another in his mind, Richard mounted the stairs. By the time he reached the fifth floor his heart was pounding, his visual field expanded and contracted, a squeezebox of perception. Without pausing to summon himself he straight-palmed the door open.
It crashed back on its hinges to reveal that a small gate-leg table had been set up in the very centre of the room; around this four figures were grouped playing cards. From their clothing and the set of their bodies, Richard recognised the clique members Reiser, Slatter, Kelburn and Mearns – the greenmailer. But when their faces turned to the source of the interruption, Richard saw four sets of near-identical features. Each of them had the same thick-set neck, the same jutting jaw, the same high, white forehead, the same red lips and broad-bridged nose. It was a group of Bells – a belfry. Four sets of black eyes examined Richard for a long, long fraction of a second. They bored into him, as if he were a diseased liver on which they were keen to do a biopsy.
The sight of the belfry was so incomprehensible, so weird, that Richard fell back against the wall of the corridor, mouthing – rather than saying – ‘What the fu – ‘. He rubbed his eyes; he felt dizzy, nauseous, as if about to faint. He sank to his knees.
Then a firm hand grasped Richard's shoulder, and a
firm – yet soft – voice clasped his ear: ‘What's the matter, Richard?’ Richard shook his head, his vision cleared, he looked up into the black eyes, began to recoil – but this time it was the real Bell, the authentic Bell. ‘Come on, come in here.’ Bell lifted Richard up under the arms. Lifted him as easily as another man might pick up a free newspaper, as a prelude to throwing it in a dustbin. It was the first time the big man had touched Richard, and he found it disconcertingly thrilling – Bell was so strong, so adamant.
Bell dropped Richard in an armchair inside the room. The others had left off their card game. They were still twisted round in their seats, but they no longer had the appearance of Bell clones. They had their own faces back, their own, leering faces. Todd Reiser stood up, brushing the outsize ash-fragments of a joint from his little lap, and said, ‘All right now, young Richard? You were out for the count there for a moment . . .’
‘I'm – I'm fine, really. Fine. Just took the stairs too fast.’
‘Not feeling the pace, are we young Richard? Too many late nights, too much fun?’ This was sneered. Reiser couldn't do concern.
‘N-no, really. It was the stairs, and then seeing you all . . . You all looked like . . .’
‘What?’ This was from Slatter, who was openly worrying a cuticle with yellow teeth. ‘What did we look like?’
‘Y-you all looked like . . .’ – Richard indicated the big man, who was now standing over by the window – ‘. . . like Bell.’
The room exploded in laughter, different varieties of sarcastic cackling, all the way from Slatter's wheezing, nominal ‘Hugh-hugh-hugh-’ to Reiser's exploitative, pronominal ‘Her-her-her-her-'; even Bell heaved a little. Richard was still too dazed to be shamed by this; he was running over the past minute or so in his mind, again and again. Had there really been four Bells in the room? Or had it just appeared that way? After all, Bell's ubiquity was undeniable; and if Richard was going to have a hallucination, it was fairly likely to incorporate the man whose actions, whose thoughts, obsessed him. If it hadn't been Bell, who else but –
‘Ursula!’ cried Mearns, the greenmailer. ‘How lovely to see you; you look quite, quite marvellous.’ He rose and went to meet her. Richard unstuck his head from his hands and blinked. She was standing in the doorway, bracing herself with both hands held above her head. She had one thigh raised up and half-crossed over the top of the other. She was wearing some sort of golden, spangled top, the spangles scattered over a fine mesh that exposed as much as it concealed her magnificent embonpoint. And Ursula wasn't just wearing a short skirt, she was wearing a pelmet – a little flange of thick, green, brocaded material that hung down, barely covering her lower abdomen. To either side of this lappet, flaring curtains of material descended. If Ursula had been straight-legged, ordinarily disposed, this would have presented a decorous enough picture. However, given the attitude she had struck, the longer drapes of cloth fell away, making an arch that framed the very juncture of her thighs. Richard let fly with a deep, glottal groan.
This was ignored by the o
thers, who all rose and went over to Ursula. One by one they all kissed the air some inches in front of her cheek, as exemplary an acknowledgement as possible of the fact that they would rather be some inches inside her body.
Richard looked on from where he was slumped. Would she give some indication that she was sorry to have missed their rendezvous, that this was an unwanted and hateful turn of events? She did, in the form of lifting up the fingers of one hand, pushing them in his direction, and chafing the two middle ones together.
Much, much later that evening, the clique were encabbed and heading east. There had been some calls for a trip to a restaurant, but Mearns – whose party, after all, it was – had already had dinner with Pablo (the clique's preferred euphemism – this month – for doing cocaine), and couldn't be bothered, as he put it, with ‘paying x quid cover charge, x quid service charge, and twenty-bloody-x for food to play patty-cake with – rather than eat’. Once the other cliquers had snacked with Mr Escobar as well, they didn't argue.
Mearns's greenmail party had begun the same way as any other cliquey evening at the Sealink, continued the same way as any cliquey evening at the Sealink, and was now speedily moving towards a dénouement of crushing obviousness: they were going to Limehouse to smoke opium.
Bell was up front, speaking to the cab driver. Richard and Mearns sat in the back, either side of Ursula, while the others were following in another cab. It had taken masterly powers of anticipation, of jockeying, for Richard to get this close to Ursula. Not that she was ignoring Richard any more than usual – she was simply ignoring him.
The cabbie – who was a middle-aged Syrian man with a Colonel Blimpish moustache, beach-ball paunch and shattered air – was telling Bell a long and involved story, haltingly and with real feeling, about his imprisonment and torture for an attempt on the life of President Assad. Bell appeared to be concentrating deeply on the story. He studied the cabbie's pained face intently, nodding, uttering tiny, encouraging grunts. But it was difficult for Richard to hear everything, because the radio was on and tuned to Bell's own phone-in show. This, as usual, was being dominated by Bell, berating callers, inciting callers, ignoring callers. The broadcast Bell and the in-car Bell stood proxy for each other.