Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  Sammy Samuels knew her, knew them all: their bodies, at any rate, moles and dimples and tattoos. He could put a name to them as well, but only so that when he rang the club he would know who was performing on any particular night. Here she was, then, Amanda, his favourite, the only one whose eyes did not betray her as she thrust and pivoted above an erection reined in by trousers and a libido growing colder each year. He could see the other girls’ production-line glaze or contempt, but Amanda was different, Amanda saw herself as a kind of sanctuary, where men adrift in the world could seek brief refuge, and if their only gratitude was shown by ten-pound notes tucked as far down her knickers as their fingers could reach, or the pained expression as they came in their pants, then she felt vindicated by a job well done. All those wives and girlfriends, in fact all of womankind, were freed from the pent-up frustrations of their menfolk who, if Amanda did not perform her act of discharge, might subsume their tension into violence. Hers was a preventative dose, and Sammy needed to taste its sweetness.

  “Tits are too small,” remarked the man sitting on the other side of the table. Each of the fingers wrapped around his beer bottle carried a large gold ring. His nose was large and bulbous, with broken capillaries running down either side like the tributaries of a forgotten delta. “What d’yer reckon, mate? Bit flat-chested or what?”

  Samuels, still cocooned in the temperate waters of Amanda’s body, glared at his distractor. “I like her.”

  “Yer no a tits man, then.”

  Sammy looked more closely at his unwanted companion. He had the generic look of his theatre audience, enlivening a life in the doldrums with alcohol, fantasy and a brittle camaraderie with others of their creed. He was wearing a pinstriped jacket over the virulent green of a Celtic shirt, and even in the semi-darkness Sammy could see the dark brown nicotine stains on his fingers.

  “You’d prefer Kara,” he replied, puzzled by his own forbearance. “A tit man’s dream.”

  “Aye? She on tonight?”

  “No.”

  Amanda wrapped herself around the pole and the music slowed, took up a languid rhythm which Amanda replicated with a thrusting of her hips, an arching of her back, a tilting of her head. With little apparent effort she lifted herself up the pole, then, thighs locked around its burnished shaft, she let herself sink backwards until her hair brushed the stage. Only the tremors in her leg muscles betrayed the effort required to make this move prolonged and elegant. A silver crucifix slid onto her chin and Jesus sparkled.

  Her inverted beauty smiled at Sammy, but the crescent of her mouth appeared to turn down in sadness. He stared at the glistening collagen-plump lips, imagining what it would be like to kiss them, or watch them open as they neared the end of his cock. For a moment he was back at his flat, the yellow glow from his bedside lamp reflected in her lip gloss. It was so wonderfully shiny, like varnish, glistening as her mouth opened wider and wider until, like the maw of a whale, she engulfed him and swallowed him whole: the ultimate blow-job. Because this was all Sammy had ever allowed the ladies to perform on him; now he had a perfect excuse in HIV and AIDS, but even back in the 70s, when the comedian first made use of call-girls and the occasional groupie, he had balked at penetrative sex. He regarded it as demeaning, awkward, undignified. There was something about being inside another human which made him feel uneasy. He could not help thinking of all those organs and processes, pumping and squirting and functioning only inches away from his penis. To Sammy sex was as unacceptable as dropping his trousers in an operating theatre, climbing onto the patient and thrusting himself into their open wound. Even the look of a woman’s sexual organ reminded him of an injury. Their mouths were so much more appealing: warm and soft and inviting, just like Amanda’s.

  The flecks of light drifting round the lap dancing club left streaks on his retinae. He closed his eyes, waiting for the after-images to fade, but instead they intensified, began to burn, and the music lost all treble, folded itself into the beat of the darkness. Amanda crouched, hands caressing her thighs, a purple spotlight making her look like a putrefying toad. Sammy’s mouth was dry, his top lip cold and sweaty, and the white streaks in his eyes still weren’t fading. Amanda flicked a huge tongue, caught a fly, munched it down and her eyes were filigree gold. The glitterball accelerated, its reflections elongating into bands of white light pulsing in time with the bassline, which was all Sammy could hear. What’s happening to me? he wondered, near to panic. He had snorted two small heaps of cocaine from the back of his hand in a graffiti-daubed cubicle less than an hour ago, but had never experienced anything like this reaction to the drug. Was it a contaminated batch? Or was this what a heart attack felt like? He tried to stand up, but the floor was whipped from under his feet, like jumping off a speeding roundabout and not running when you land. His head caught the edge of the platform. Amanda’s clear plastic stilettos clomped and twirled only inches from his face, and bizarrely he noticed that the left heel was worn down further than the right. High in the darkness the glitterball hummed, about to fly loose from its mountings such was its speed. Samuels gawped. It looks like Telstar, he thought. Then it was eclipsed by the Scotsman bending over him. Sammy read ‘Carling’ across the man’s shirt.

  “Y’alright, man? Come on, let’s have ye up before the bouncers see yer.”

  “Fuck off… I’m not drunk.”

  Amanda had sashayed off into the club to bring succour to those on its fringes. Sammy, still sprawled on the floor, watched her transparent shoes recede into an uncertain distance, refracting the dollops of light which were returning to a more sustainable speed around the room. He felt a tingling in his fingertips and toes, but his heart was still beating strongly, unequivocal and cold.

  Before he had a chance to clamber back into the protective darkness of the booth, however, Sammy felt someone take a firm hold of his jacket collar and haul him unceremoniously to his feet. An awareness of the strength required to do this instantly stifled the comic’s anger at such treatment, but not without it being followed by a silent caveat of deferral.

  “No touching, pal, you know the rules.”

  Sammy tried to shrug off the bouncer. “I wasn’t trying to touch her. I fell over.”

  “Yeah, right. Had a bit too much to drink, have we sir?”

  “I don’t drink, dickhead! Look, there’s my glass… ” The comedian gestured at the booth table. “Taste it if you don’t believe me.”

  “You’re leaving, pal. Right now.”

  The grip tightened on Samuels’ collar and the same inexorable force that had raised him from the floor now began to propel him through the club, away from the music and the glitterball and the resonance of his dizzy spell. A group of men cheered his ejection — ‘dirty bastard!’ — but they never saw the irony of their jeers. Sammy caught a last glimpse of Amanda’s arse, neatly bifurcated by her sparkly G-string, as she bent over a customer whose strained features were smoothing out, brought back onto the path of righteousness by virtue of her confessional skills, before the swing doors opened and he was expelled, banished from the womb of the lap dancing club, up the stairs and out into the night where a leaking downpipe spattered like vomit on the pavement.

  Deprived of the club’s warmth, Sammy turned up the collar of his jacket against the spring chill. Why is it always so fucking windy here? Wet and windy and dying on its arse. Normal people didn’t go to the seaside in England for their holidays any more, not when a fortnight in Spain cost less than a week wiping the kebab stains off the nylon sheets in a damp B&B where the fairy lights round the bar tried to dispel the ennui of the guests but in fact only emphasised the watered-down whisky in its wobbly optic and there was a smell of dog, and burnt toast, and cheap air freshener; where the landlady jacked up her apron to polish the strobe-lit fountain in the bay window of the dining room, the window which looked out onto the terrace of guest houses opposite who all had VACANCIES, still, it was early in the season, it might pick up, Easter was only round the corner, pity the show
on the pier won’t be anything to write home about this year, but it’ll never be the same as it was…

  No. Sammy interrupted his own reverie. That’s not true: it’s always been the same. It always was shite, and it always will be. Different kinds of shite, maybe, but shite nevertheless. Because people will always want shite, they’ve got an insatiable appetite for it. Appetite for shite. The comedian smiled to himself inside the tweedy confines of his lapels. It could be the title of his autobiography.

  He walked the mile or so to his flat in an agreeable daze, still able to glimpse the white blurs from the glitterball dancing in his peripheral vision and welcome their portent. Certain details of the town were all Sammy recalled from his journey: two doormen, like overstuffed undertakers in their long black coats, joking with a group of girls shivering in skimpy summer dresses; the red LED on a CCTV camera glimmering in a shadowed doorway like the only witness to the bad in the world; litter whirling in a patch of neon-lit pavement. The resort felt enervated, in need of a transformation as drastic as it would be invigorating. Maybe, Sammy wondered, he could be the catalyst, like a comic book hero letting loose a shockwave of cleansing destruction while he emerged, awesome, triumphant, a top billing the likes of which had never been seen before.

  Carlton Apartments was once an address to be proud of, a social yardstick that could be quoted with confidence in any context. Four storeys high, with wide steps up to a porticoed entrance and stucco detailing, it was all there, no expense spared. These were no ordinary flats, catering as they did for professionals who were looking for either a weekend retreat or retirement home, and perfectly positioned to supply a constant flow of rejuvenating seaside ozone to fill ageing lungs, a little bit of Riviera class to take the edge off postwar austerity Britain. Fifty years down the line, however, the optimism that had built the place was long gone, along with the social strata counted on to fill it, who had been lured away by the glittering come-on of the Mediterranean. In order to survive Carlton Apartments had had to lower its sights somewhat. Its residents were still decent enough folk; no DSS, no students, but they weren’t chic, or exotic, they didn’t trot up to that grand entrance with an aspirational spring in their step and a warm feeling of pride at the success in life which had enabled them to buy into the Dream. No, these people were tenants in the literal sense of the word, fully aware of the temporary nature of their possession, knowing their livelihood depended on a declining tourist trade. When Carlton Apartments were built the crowds were thick enough to obscure the sand; now the small groups of donkeys and sunbathers scattered over the beach looked more like lonely outposts on a desert frontier, preparing for a last stand from behind the flimsy protection of their windbreaks.

  Sammy trudged up the steps, turned the key and pressed his foot against the bottom of the door frame as he pushed it open because the door had warped, years ago, yet despite repeated requests to the landlord nothing had been done and now Samuels was so used to this extra manoeuvre that when other doors opened normally it unsettled him. He reached for the large white button that would give him twenty seconds of light in which to unlock the door to flat two, winced at the bare bulb’s harsh light, then frowned at the dried blood on the knuckles of his left hand that it revealed. When had that happened? It must have been his fall in the lap dancing club, but the comedian could not recall any pain at the time. Amanda’s body must have anaesthetised him, like the drug that she was.

  He turned the key, and as the door to his flat opened a new wave of fatigue and dizziness washed over him. Sammy staggered into the hallway, scattering unopened junk mail with his scuffing feet, and let the spring-loading slam shut the door behind him.

  “Fuck me,” the comedian muttered. He leaned on the bathroom door jamb one-handed and with the other gripped his face as though to let go would see it fall from the front of his skull to the floor. Bright spots of light flitted over the darkness of the hallway, swirling together before separating and vanishing with a blink. Sammy heard the entrance timer switch off the light, and like the click of a hypnotist’s fingers its sound restored a delicate equilibrium to his mind, but his trust in this stability had been greatly diminished.

  Samuels groped for the lounge light switch and flicked it down. For a split second the room looked utterly foreign to him, but then its jumbled elements resolved themselves into the spartan setting that he openly acknowledged said more about his life than any amount of psycho-analysis. Three of his Hawaiian shirts were drying on hangers hooked over the dado rail; an overflowing ashtray, two mugs and an empty takeaway foil tub lay on the coffee table; a rack of porn and science fiction DVDs stood next to the television; three weeks’ worth of newspapers were jammed into a wicker basket, and on the walls were photos, mostly black-and-white, of Sammy with various stars of TV and theatre, together with a framed front cover of the TV Times depicting Samuels dressed as a cowboy tilting back his stetson using the barrel of a revolver, a promotional picture for some long-forgotten game show which he had always loathed but which his agent had insisted would ‘widen his appeal’. So you’re saying hardly anybody likes me at the moment? Sammy remembered replying. Isn’t that your fucking job? They had parted company not long after that.

  He threw his jacket onto the back of the couch and slumped into its worn cushions. For perhaps ten minutes he sat motionless, wrapped in the gentle patter of rain on the window, staring vacantly at the blank television screen. He had always been able to do this, to clear his mind of all conscious thought and simply be. Sammy found this waking coma, what he termed his ‘lobotomy mode’, invaluable before a performance. It seemed to clear away the detritus of everyday life and leave his jokes and observations in sharp relief, categorised, cross-referenced, together with a selection of put-downs for hecklers and some specific comments on the town he was playing. He had no idea where this meditative skill had come from, nor did he want to. In his experience it was the performers who analysed their work too closely that ended up as politically correct castrati, bleating out tedious observations and petrified of losing market share by causing some offence.

  Sammy held up his right hand and studied it carefully, from the nicotine-yellow fingernails to the clumps of black hair on the first joint of each finger. He traced the course of the blue-green veins — like creepers slowly throttling the life out of a tree — to the white crescent scar on the side of his thumb left by a dog bite on his twelfth birthday, and the skin, translucent and shiny like paper wrapped round greasy food. What was happening beneath all this banality? He flexed his fingers, balled them into a fist. Sammy thought back to the signet ring he had once worn on his little finger, and the damage it had caused.

  “Fuck it,” he said out loud, baulking at his train of thought. Sammy switched on the television and flicked through the channels, anything to detract from the emotions clammering for admission. There was the usual crap, the endless exhortations to decorate improve buy buy buy which the comedian understood were all variations on his own profession. He plucked a DVD at random from the rack, placed it in the player’s tray and returned to the couch. First came titles outlined in fluorescent purple, then teasing five-second clips, and finally the film itself began, set in a hotel where all the guests appeared to be nymphomaniac teenage girls. Samuels unzipped his trousers and settled back. He needed to wank himself into the right frame of mind for tomorrow’s meeting, and if his cock was sore by the time he had achieved some degree of tolerance towards the halfwits who ran the pier’s parent company then that was a risk Sammy was prepared to take.

  The Karmic Imperative

  The doodle was a series of concentric isosceles triangles, immaculately drawn, with precise straight lines and equal spacing. Julian J Walker took great care with each triangle. Indeed, if anyone had asked him at that precise moment whether he was concentrating more on the telephone call or the doodle he would probably have been unable to say with any degree of certainty. He found the symmetry of the triangles soothing, which was as well, because the l
onger the phone call went on, the shorter his patience grew.

  “I can’t make a decision based on something you might have heard at a party,” he protested. “I’m not writing a bloody gossip column.”

  “C’mon, Mr Walker, you know me better than that.” The woman on the other end of the line possessed a strident Mid-Western American accent which, during its fibre-optic journey beneath the Atlantic, had acquired a sibilant quality that was setting the managing director’s teeth on edge.

  “Do I?” Julian countered. “You told me not long ago that Matt Damon was going to be filming here. I made sure all the local media got the story, then when nothing happened I had to sack one of my PR team so that I didn’t look like a complete idiot.”

  “His publicist,” she persisted heavily, “told me that Matt had seen a documentary about the town and he said to them that it looked like a cool place. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  Julian finished another triangle. “Why not? Why shouldn’t the messenger be shot if they keep bringing the wrong message? If I had a gun and you were standing in front of me now, Carmen, I’d shoot you. Bang. Right through the forehead. You wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “That isn’t funny, Mr Walker.”

  “Who says I’m joking?”

  Five thousand miles away Carmen took a deep breath of pine-scented San Fernando air. “Okay. It’s late, I should be in bed, but I rang you first because I figured you ought to know what I’d heard. If you don’t want to listen…hey, that’s up to you. You’re the boss.”

  Julian glanced at his watch. “What time is it there?”

  “Nearly three in the morning. Why?”

  “Just checking to see how dedicated you are.”

  “And have I passed your little test?”

  “Oh, without a doubt.”