by Martin Amis
'And is your husband at home at the moment', he heard the voice ask, 'or is it you who's smoking all these cigarettes?'
At that Keith let out a savage and protracted belch, a belch that said to all that he would never yield.
Clive barked. Kath said, 'He is, yes. He's not been well.'
'So it would appear. The child . . . You're aware, no doubt, of the harm caused by passive smoking?'
'I smoked passively every day of my life and it never did me any harm.'
'Didn't it?'
Keith was now burping in varied and horrid volleys.
'I'm afraid I might have to see about a hygiene order.'
'Hygiene? Listen. 1 mean we haven't got what some have. We're just trying, you know?'
'You tell her, Kath,' shouted Keith.
'I mean you come in here . . .'
'Speak your mind, girl,' shouted Keith.
Kath said, 'I'm starting to wonder about what you're doing and how you're feeling. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my baby. Nothing.'
'Except you haven't got any money, have you. You just haven't got enough money. My God, the smoke. And I can't say I like the look of that dog. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'
'Oi!'
Keith could stand for this no longer. His protective instincts were stirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that way about Keith's dog - or about his cigarettes, which were superking-sized and had international standing. He was out of that bed by now and struggling with the mangled length of his ginger dressing-gown. Heavily he appeared in the doorway - browngowned Keith, fag in mouth, one arm working at the flapping sleeve, in variegated whiteness of pants and vest and flesh - and looked into the eyes of Nicola Six.
What was she doing?
What was she doing?
If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves and skylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where people thought they were alone — what on earth would it see?
Nicola backing towards her bed with a glass of champagne in one hand and the other raised and beckoning, in black elbow-length gloves and a cocktail dress the colour of jealousy, and on her face an unrecognizable smile. Now she sat, and placed the glass on the bedside table, with a languid stretch of her wings, and remained for a moment in perfect profile, facing the window: pensively. Then her black gloves began to take rapt interest in the presumably exquisite texture of her dress — that bit that housed her breasts. Oh, the look of young wonder! She shook back her hair and started to unclasp.
Who was watching? Who saw her stand and lower the dress to her feet and step out of the lillybed in her high heels? And turn, and look up sleepily, and blow a little kiss, and wiggle a black finger. Nobody. Or nobody now. Just the single eye of the pistol-grip camera, placed on the chest by the door.
This would undoubtedly be for Keith.
'Jesus,' I asked her, 'what are you doing?'
'Oh, it's nice to get out and about. Look who's talking. What about you and your crazed excursion?'
I held up an open palm at her.
'Your love-quest. . . I'm sorry. Are you very sad?'
'I'll live,' I said. Not the happiest choice of words. 'It wasn't meant to be.'
Nicola nodded and smiled. She was sitting opposite me, the lower half of her body strongly curled into the lap of the wicker chair. It was about two a.m. When she spoke you could see deep darkness in her mouth. 'Your nerve went,' she said.
'Listen. We're not all puppetmasters like you. And even you need the run of the play. You need accidents, coincidences. I happen to know there's a nice little accident that'll help speed things up with Guy.'
'I do need real life. It's true. For instance, I need the class system. I need nuclear weapons. I need the eclipse.'
'You need the Crisis.'
Blinking steadily, she sipped red wine and lit another black cigarette. A strand of tobacco stuck to her upper lip until her tongue removed it. With gusto she scratched her hair, and then frowned at her fingernails, each of which seemed to contain about a quid deal of hashish. Yes, she certainly looked off-duty tonight. I'm the only one who ever sees her like this. She lets me. She likes me. I'm a hit with all the wrong chicks: Lizzyboo, Kim, Incarnacion.
'Nicola, I'm worried about you, as usual. And in a peculiar way, as usual. I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.'
'I am a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It really takes it out of a girl.'
'But they don't know that.'
'I'm sorry, I just am. You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.'
'Nicola.'
'So they'll think you're just a sick dreamer. Who cares? You won't be around for that.'
'You neither. I was thinking. You're hard to categorize, even in the male fantasy area. Maybe you're a mixture of genres. A mutant,' I went on (I love these typologies). 'You're not a Sexpot. Not dizzy enough. You're not a Hot Lay either, not quite. Too calculating. You're definitely something of a Sack Artist. And a Mata Hari too. And a Vamp. And a Ballbreaker. In the end, though, I'm fingering you for a Femme Fatale. I like it. Nice play on words. Semi-exotic. No, I like it. It's cute.'
'A Femme Fatale? I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: Femmes Fatales are ten a penny compared to what I am.'
'What are you then?'
'Christ, you still don't get it, do you.'
I waited.
'I'm a Murderee.'
We went out walking. We can do this. Oh — what you see in London streets at three o'clock in the morning, with it trickling out to the eaves and flues, tousled water, ragged waste. Violence is near and inexhaustible. Even death is near. But none of it can touch Nicola and me. It knows better, and stays right out of our way. It can't touch us. It knows this. We're the dead.
My love-quest did something to me. Heathrow did something to me. I can still feel the burning vinyl on my cheek. What happens, when love-thoughts go out — and just meet vinyl?
Now I've had some bad airport experiences. I've been everywhere and long ago stopped getting much pleasure from the planet. In fact I am that lousy thing: a citizen of the world. I've faced utter impossibilities, outright no-can-dos, at Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing. But you wait, and the globe turns, and suddenly there is a crevice that fits your shape. Heathrow provided no such fuel for optimism, or even for stoicism. Zeno himself would have despaired instantly. The queues, the queues, cross hatched by the extra-frantic, the extra-needing. Too many belongings. Too many people all wanting to do the same thing . . .
And now the dreams have come. Something happened to me. I fell, down, down, tumbling end over end.
The dreams have come, right on schedule, as Dr Slizard warned. And if the dreams have come, then can the pain be far behind?
I always thought I was up to anything that dreams could throw at me: I'd just sleep right through them, and get some much-needed rest. But these dreams are different, as Slizard said they would be. After Incarnacion has been here the bed is plump and impeccably uniformed, and I repose trust in its square-shouldered pride, its bursting chest! On most nights, though, it looks about ready for me, intricately coiled, waiting for the stripped creature on his hands and knees.
As Slizard foretold, the dreams are not recuperable by memory, or not yet anyway, and this suits me right down to the ground. I have the impression that they deal with the very large and the very small — the unbearably large, the unbearably small. But I can't remember them, and I'm glad. Bad news for me, these dreams turn out to be bad news for Lizzyboo, too. I always used to think how heavenly it would be — at least in the abstract — to wake up to her, to wake up to all that honeytone and health (the sun lights this scene gently: her back bears warm creases from the press of her fanned hair; and then she turns). No longer. I'm not going to wake up to anybody ever again. I couldn't let Lizzyboo wake up to me, a gaunt zero, zilched by death. I can feel the unslept hours and the unr
emembered dreams queuing in waves above my head.
Quaintly, Slizard advises me not to eat cheese. This from his office in the Pan Am building in New York, the envy of the universe. I heed his words. Cheese? No thank you. I stay right off that shit. Don't grate no cheese on my pasta. Not a single Dairylea split with Kim. At the Black Cross, I take a pass on the cheese-and-onion crisps. Offered cocktails at the Clinches', I don't touch so much as a cheese football. And yet when 1 sleep what reeking Stiltons, what slobbering camemberts and farting gorgonzolas come and ooze across my sleep.
Lizzyboo says she eats too much when she is unhappy. She tells me this, between mouthfuls, in the Clinch kitchen. She tells me more over her shoulder from the icebox or the cooker. It's a terrible thing with her. Always the kiddie stuff: fish fingers, milkshakes, baked beans, sticky buns. Her weight shoots up. Lizzyboo and her weight! I didn't know? Yes, the slightest sidestep from her starvation diet -and grotesque obesity is at the door with its bags. I wonder if it can be the force of suggestion, but over the past few days a quarter-moon seems to have formed beneath her chin, and an extra belt of flesh around her midriff. She takes her head out of the bread-bin to tell me that she doesn't know what she's going to do about it.
Although I could point a finger at the world situation, I'm clearly meant to take the blame for this. For this disaster also I am obliged to pocket the tab. 'Come on, honey,' I say to her. 'There are plenty of fish in the sea.' Again, a poor choice of words, perhaps. Because there aren't plenty of fish in the sea, not any more. Lizzyboo shakes her head. She looks at the floor. She gets up and heads for the grill and sadly makes herself a cheese dream.
When entering America these days it is advisable to look your best. Wear a tuxedo, for instance, or a vicar outfit. Penguin suit, dog collar: take your pick. Me? I looked like a bum, in bum suit, under bum hair, on bum shoes, when I crept into a cab, twenty miles from Missy Harter. My eyes felt as red as cayenne pepper - as red as the digital dollars on the cabby's moneyclock. It was night. But I could see the cabby's signs as clear as day. Passengers were asked to stow their own bags (driver handicapped) and, of course, to refrain from smoking (driver allergic). please talk loud was a third notification of the cabby's many disabilities and cares. Even with three of the four lanes down we made good speed into the city. Just enough moon to see the clouds by, clouds shaped like the tread of a gumboot, or a tyre, or a tank. Over the sky's sandflats the gibbous moon seemed tipped slightly sideways and smiling like a tragic mask. Beneath, half-cleared rustbelt. sherato. texac. Even the big concerns losing their letters. Then the city: life literalized, made concrete, concretized, massively concretized. Here it comes. And as we passed the Pentagon, the biggest building on earth, visible from space, I saw that every last window was burning bright.
That was my American dream. America? All I did was dream her. I woke up and I was still in Heathrow Airport, with my cheek on the hot vinyl. For fifteen minutes I watched a middle-aged man chewing gum, the activity all between the teeth and the upper lip, like a rabbit. And then I just thought: Enough.
It was hard getting back into London: I nearly flunked even that. Even getting back into London took my very best shot (No danger. You won't get a cab here, pal. No way). Before, I never thought I'd be able to live with myself if I failed to get to Missy and America. But maybe I can. After all, it won't be for terribly long.
That dream ... So dogged, so detailed - so literal. One of those dreams where things happen at the same speed as they do in real life. It included a convincing four-hour wait in Reimmigration. Missy Harter used to dream like that, always; she used to lie by my side, and spend half the night in the Library of Congress or shopping at Valducci's. Something tells me that I won't dream like that ever again. From now on, each night, it'll be special relativity — Einsteinian excruciation. So maybe the American dream was a farewell to dreams. And to much else.
What was I doing? The whole thing, the whole love-quest, the whole idea: it was from another world. Forget it. Turn back. Back to try the art and dice with death and hate, and not fight for love in some unreal war .
Chapter 14: The Pinching Game
i
f we could pass through her force field (and we can't quite do this, force fields being strongest round the beautiful and the mad), we would know that her stomach wall hurt and weighed heavily, that she felt occasional drags and brakings of nausea, that all sorts of salmon were bouncing upwards against the stream. But here she comes, the character, Nicola Six on the street, on the Golborne Road, bringing a packet of light through all the random hesitation. Not that the street was without colour and definition on this day: it looked shorn in the low sun, plucked and smarting, with a bristle of golden dust. But Nicola brought light through it, human light, even dressed as she was, for simple authority: black cord skirt and tight black cashmere cardigan, white shirt with blue ribbon serving as bowtie, hair back (before the mirror, earlier, a daunting emphasis of eyebrow). She was getting all the right kinds of look. Women straightened their necks at her; men glanced, and dipped their heads. Only one discordant cry, from the back of a truck, and fading: 'Miss World! Miss World!' Everyone else seemed to be shifting sideways or diagonally but Nicola was travelling dead ahead.
The entrance to Windsor House immediately extinguished all her light. Nicola slowed for an instant, then kept going; she used a mental trick she had of pretending not to be there. The steeped concrete shone in the low sun, and even fumed slightly with the fierce tang of urine. It would have been a humiliation to approach them, so clearly were the lifts defunct — slaughtered, gone, dead these twenty years. She peered up the vortex of the stone stairwell and felt-she was underneath a toilet weighing ten thousand tons.
'Want I mind your car?' said a passing four-year-old.
'I haven't got a car.'
'Die, bitch.'
She climbed up past scattered toilet-dwellers, non-schoolgoing schoolboys and schoolgirls, non-working men and women, past the numb stares of the youthful and the aged. She faced them all strongly; she knew she looked enough like the government. She felt no fear. Walking naked up these steps (she told herself), with her bare feet on the wet stone, Nicola would have felt no fear. That was part of it: no more fear. She paused on the tenth floor and smoked half a cigarette, watching an old toiletman tearfully trying to uncap a damaged can of Peculiar Brew.
Like everybody else, Nicola knew that council flats were small — controversially small. In a bold response to an earlier crisis, it was decided to double the number of council flats. They didn't build any new council flats. They just halved all the old council flats. As she walked along the ramp of the fifteenth storey, open to the search of the low sun, Nicola could hardly fail to notice that the front doors alternated in colour, elderly green interspliced by a more recent but even flakier dark orange. The front doors were also hilariously close together.
She halted. Faultily the bell sounded.
It was Nicola's view that she was performing very creditably, especially during the first two or three minutes, in that storm or panic of sense-impressions. To begin with there was the kaleidoscopic wheeling that her entry forced upon the kitchen, the chain of rearrangements made necessary by the admission of one more person into the room. Then vertigo relaxed into claustrophobia — armpit-torching, heat-death claustrophobia. Distractedly her parched eyes searched for a living thing. There was a plastic pot on the minif ridge. In it, some kind of maimed gherkin was apparently prospering; it rose from the soil at an unforgivable angle. Then she had to confront the pallor and distress of the mother, and the surprising child on the floor (the intelligent valves of its watchful face), and the flummoxed dog. Christ, even the dog looked declassed. Even the dog was meant for better things. Next door to the left a man and a woman were quarrelling with infinite weariness. The room was split-levelled with cigarette smoke. Nicola pressed her thighs together to feel the good silk between her legs. She hadn't been anywhere this small since she was five years old.
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br /> Still hidden from sight, Keith hardly went unnoticed. As the olfactory nerve-centre of this particular stall or cubicle, Keith hardly went unnoticed. Although he remained at the far end of the flat, he was none the less only a few feet away. Keith was very close. Nicola could hear a beercan pop, a lighter worked and sworn at, the severe intakes of air and smoke. Then the inhuman hostility of his eructations . . . Time to flush him out. Time, because the place could not be borne -was astonishingly unbearable, even for an expert, like her. Feeling you were in Nigeria was one thing. In Nigeria, and trapped in Nigeria, and not at the scene of a drought or a famine but of an industrial catastrophe caused by greed. And there for your own advancement, to make what you could of the suffering. The talk was two-way torture. She said,
'Except you haven't got any money, have you. You just haven't got enough money. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'
'Oi!'
They waited.
And Keith loomed, loomed large in the Keith-sized kitchen. He wasn't that big; but he was gigantic in here. When their eyes met he paused heavily. Up from the depths of the brown dressing-gown came a sallow blush of shame or rage or both.
'I'm sorry,' said Nicola, with some haughtiness, 'but it seems to me that self-hatred is more or less forced on one in conditions like these. There'd be no way round it. Without self-hatred you wouldn't last five minutes.'
'Hey,' said Keith. 'Hey. You. Fuck off out of it.'
Kath turned slowly to her husband, as if he were a wonderful doctor, as if he were a wonderful priest. She turned back to Nicola and said, 'Yes. Care? What kind of care do you get from an office? And from someone like you, doing your hobby or whatever it is you're doing. Get out.'