Yellow Dog

by Martin Amis

  101 Heavy was twenty degrees from the horizontal (it felt more like twenty degrees from the vertical), and at maximum power, when it hit the torn air of the slipstream.

  At this point the locks securing the coffin of Royce Traynor snapped free from their bracket. Falling end over end for thirty-five feet, Royce powerdived into a mosaic of wall-bolted mountain bikes. Wedged at an acute angle against the cargo door, he remained more or less upright when the plane steadied and continued a shallow climb to its cruising altitude.

  ‘Isn’t it great to be above the weather?’ said the man in 2A. ‘I’d like to live above the weather.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Reynolds. ‘But not today.’

  ‘Not today.’

  He was staring at her legs, very critically, or so it seemed to Reynolds, who liked her legs. Now he was staring at her feet.

  ‘You shouldn’t have worn heels,’ he said. ‘You could puncture the inflatable emergency-slide. Which might also serve as a liferaft. You’re wearing tights.’

  ‘… That’s true.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have. They’re partly synthetic, you know,’ he said. ‘They melt and cling when they burn.’

  In the hold the corpse of Royce Traynor seemed to square itself.

  It was ready.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. The publicity of knowledge

  For her next encounter with the Intensivist, Russia Meo wore the most expensive clothes in her possession. A customised Italian suit of black cashmere, matching gloves and bag, court shoes. She wanted to send a clear message to Dr Gandhi: if anything went wrong, she would most certainly sue. It was also one of those days when she instinctively decided to let her figure have its head. A waisted white blouse, therefore, and her most dynamic white brassière. These luxurious expanses of silk were not aimed at Dr Gandhi (they were aimed at someone else); but perhaps the components of the olive cleavage would be making a core assertion – the assertion of life, life …

  Dr Gandhi had taken due note of Russia’s appearance, and derived some doctorly stimulation from it (the relative size of the nipples was what chiefly intrigued him); but he wasn’t enjoying this second interview as much as he had enjoyed the first. The correlation of forces had already changed, as was now pretty well invariably the case. How much better it had been, how much more appreciated he had felt, when nobody knew anything – in the time before the publicity of knowledge. Now, instead of the sweating mutes of yesterday, you faced erratically wised-up mountebanks with half-assimilated case-histories, prognoses, quackeries. Dr Gandhi believed that it would be fractionally harder, henceforward, to get doctors to be doctors, such was the drain on the job-satisfaction. Russia Meo was of course an educated, indeed a distinguished woman, and he had never expected to be able to radiate downwards at her, like a Saturn. But nowadays (he reflected) every flop and waster in London had some four-eyed cousin or nephew prepared to scour the Web for all it knew … So Russia pressed from question to question; and, head injuries being head injuries, with their labyrinthine sequelae, Dr Gandhi was soon reduced to a drone of equivocation. He felt a familiar frowsiness come over him, alleviated, for a moment, when Russia turned to the white sheet of the window: the tautening of her bust allowed him to conclude that the nipples would be correspondingly large. This prompted a sexual thought, one unmoderated by the simultaneous reminder that large nipples would facilitate the business – if not the actual process – of lactation.

  Russia, for her part, had not at all enjoyed her many hours in front of the computer, boning up on the head-injured. After reading one particular sentence (‘Approach your spouse as you would a completely new relationship’), she had even burst from the house and stridden to the Jeremy Bentham for cigarettes. She smoked seven of them while making herself mistress of subsections with titles like ‘Your New Domestic Life’ and ‘Your New Social Life’, and so on. What do they mean, new? she kept thinking. (And what do they mean, your?) It is better, we always assume, to be prepared than not to be prepared – but not much better; with some eventualities, being prepared isn’t any good either … Among other recent gains and accomplishments, women have naturally made considerable advances in the largely male preserve of self-centredness. And alongside the conviction that she would try her very best, there ran another – specifically, that there were some (no, many) possible outcomes, amply described on her screen, that she couldn’t and wouldn’t endure. She was not being ruthless, merely modern: come on. But then Russia confronted another sentence, one that made her hate herself, and weep, and valorously insufflate. The sentence went, ‘There is only one “miracle cure”, and that is love.’ And so now she said it a different way: come on. Come on …

  * * *

  As he stirred for the third or fourth time that morning, Xan Meo saw his wife, sitting, waiting, on the bedside chair. She said immediately,

  ‘I was just reading about you. Well, not you, but people in your condition. Now, Xan, I want to say this: don’t fall for the “two-year” myth. It’s an old wives’ tale that’s caused a lot of unnecessary pain. They say that “after two years” you’re not going to recover any further. It’s not true, Xan. You can go on recovering for much longer than that. It can take five years! It can take ten! Ask around in your support group and you’ll see that it’s so!’

  Xan needed more time than he would have liked to realise that all this was in itself an old wives’ tale – or a first wife’s tale, to put it another way. This wasn’t Russia. This was Pearl. She went on:

  ‘You know, something like this, it can make you grateful for what you already have. I know I’m grateful for what I already have: a lump sum, and not alimony. Because you do know, don’t you, that only twenty-five per cent of head-injured patients are in full employment three months after their accidents?’

  He straightened himself up and with both hands smoothed back his scattered hair; he supposed – and it was a supposition prompted or at least borne out by Pearl’s smile – that he had never looked balder. Rather more generally, his cheeks and forehead seemed to be dotted with excrescences, asperities – as if, while he’d slept, someone had sliced and daubed a loaf of bread above his face, leaving it covered with crumbs and seeds held in place by coagulating butter. He was glad that Pearl couldn’t see his knees: on the inner side of either patella, visible fluid waves, like fat worms.

  ‘Where are the boys?’ he said. ‘They’re here?’

  ‘They’re in the caff. They’ll be along … One of the things you’ll have to steel yourself for, my darling, is a net drop in your IQ. Studies show. Shouldn’t affect the acting but it won’t be too clever for the writing, will it? I don’t know about the rhythm guitar. You know what really worries me?’

  Xan waited.

  ‘What really worries me is how it’ll affect your relationship with Russia. Sitting there at dinner, you won’t know what she’s on about. Because that was always very important to you, in the past – her mind. You used to say so. It wouldn’t matter that much if you were still with me. Not that I’d look at you now, in your state. We could just hang around staring at the wall. But with her …’

  Over in the nook by the door several head-injured young men were sitting in front of the television, watching the only human pursuit dedicated to the infliction of head injuries: the two guys in the square ring, with the shiny shorts and the gumshields.

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet, Xan. I expect it’s a bit of a strain, putting a few simple words together.’

  ‘Oh I can talk all right.’

  ‘So you can. And don’t worry about the longer ones – you know, the ones with two or more syllables: they’ll come.’

  In fairness to Pearl (and Xan, silently, within himself, had already made such a concession), it should be recorded that after reading about the attack she telephoned the hospital and screamed at various people, demanding, as the mother of Xan’s sons, a full and detailed diagnosis, which she got; and this she had passed on to her boys with the gentlest and most
hopeful construction. Pearl was a good mother. She was not, perhaps, everybody’s automatic choice as an ex-wife. But she was a good mother.

  ‘The worst thing, they say – they say … The worst thing, they say, is what it does to your sex life.’

  A woman, it has been observed (by a woman, two hundred years ago), is fine only for herself. Man is indifferent to nuance; and the only things another woman will respond gratefully to are obvious signs of poverty or bad taste. Pearl didn’t dress only for herself. She dressed for everyone – herself included. Today she wore a black leather jacket that squeaked and glistened, a snow-white cashmere sweater, and a pink flowered skirt of startling brevity (plus witchy ankle-high boots, also black, and flouncy little socks, also white). There was one more thing: one more thing she was wearing.

  He had known Pearl, on and off, since infancy; and the lost world of their marriage (he had come to feel) was regressive or animalistic or even prehistoric – a land of lizards. There were things that, even today, he would never dare tell Russia. For instance, the fact that after twelve years together (years qualified by month-long silences, trial separations, separate holidays, frequent fistfights, and ceaseless adultery) their erotic life continued to improve – if improve is quite the word we want. Everything else was bottomlessly horrible, by the end: they had reached a state (as one of their counsellors put it) of ‘conjugal paranoia’. The two boys were long past going down on their knees and begging their parents to separate. It was not until Michael and David were well into their second and more serious hunger strike (eighty-four hours) that Xan and Pearl snapped out of it and called the lawyers. But throughout this period their erotic life continued to improve – or, to put it another way, continued to take up more and more of their time.

  ‘It can go either way,’ she said: ‘your sex life. Either you’re not interested – that’s what usually happens. Or else you’re interested in nothing else. Which d’you think it’s going to be?’

  Xan waited.

  ‘Let’s do a little test. Ready?’

  He knew what was coming, and he knew where he’d look. To fix it: Pearl O’Daniel was tall and lean (and wore her auburn hair short and spiky); her hips were narrow, but her thighs were widely set, splaying upwards and outwards from the knee; and it was in the space between her legs, in this triangular absence (the shape of a capital y), that her gravity-centre lay … Now one of the predicates of Pearl’s character was that she always went too far. Her greatest admirers would instantly admit it: she always went too far. Even in the company of those who themselves always went too far, she always went too far. And now, in St Mary’s, Pearl went too far. Uncrossing her thighs and crossing her ankles, she revealed this space, and Xan, still defeatedly low in the bed, contemplated it. His ex-wife, of course, had not committed the sexual illiteracy of wearing nothing, underneath: she was wearing something, and not just anything. He was familiar with it – pearly white, and studded with stars. On the morning of the day the decree nisi came through, Xan had had the whole thing in his mouth, while Pearl looked approvingly on.

  ‘Which is it?’ she asked. ‘All or nothing.’

  ‘Of the two, I don’t know, I’d have to say nothing.’

  ‘Well done, Xan. A long word: nothing. Ah. Here are the boys.’ She stood up and waved. Then from her fathomless tote-bag she removed a newspaper and stretched the page out at him: three photographs – Xan, Pearl, Russia. ‘She’s going to give you grief about this,’ she said.

  As his sons approached, Xan made another effort to straighten himself against the rails behind his back. Again, with trembling hands, he rearranged the trembling wefts of his hair. The bed, the whole stall here, felt like a display-case of age and ruin, in ashtray colours … Michael and David took up position on either side of him. They regarded their father, not with solemnity, alarm or disappointment, but with acceptance; and immediately he took comfort from it.

  David, the younger, kissed his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’

  Michael, the elder, kissed his cheek and said, ‘Dad? Who were the fucking bastards who did this to you?’

  ‘Michael,’ said Pearl.

  ‘Well that’s it,’ said Xan, who remembered, pretty much. ‘You don’t remember.’

  But he couldn’t remember the impact, nor the moments leading up to it. Tilda Quant had told him that there was a fear-centre in the brain, a dense knot of neurons deep inside either hemisphere and normally associated with the sense of smell. Here was the control tower of your horrors and hauntings. Sometimes the brain could suppress the most painful memories (and military scientists, she said, were trying to duplicate the effect with a devil-pill that would quell all qualms). So now his brain was protecting him from his memory. But he wanted the memory and constantly sought it out. He wanted the smell of the memory.

  ‘Never fear, boys. Soon I’m going to go out there’, he said (in a voice, in an accent, that even Pearl found hard to recognise), ‘and get them fucking dogs.’

  Like somebody moving from one life to another, Russia walked along a tube of glass – one hundred feet above the road that separated the two sections of the hospital. She was leaving theory, now, and entering practice.

  Her anxiety, her suspense, was currently devoted to a fit of slanderous detestation aimed at Natwar Gandhi – and at all doctors everywhere. As a student of twentieth-century history, she knew about the ‘chemistry’, as opposed to the ‘physics’, of the USSR’s interrogation teams, the vivisectionists of Japan; when, in 1941, the German doctors were given a free hand in their treatment of the infirm and the supposedly insane, the following phase became known as ‘wild euthanasia’. Doctoring talent – healing – danced closely with its opposite. Given the chance (it seemed), these pulse-taking, brow-fondling trundlers would be wrapping up children’s heads in old newspapers, and strolling about, in a collegiate spirit, with the packages under their arms.

  All of which they did do. But Russia, now, was hating Dr Gandhi (her chest swelled, her nostrils broadened) for his refusal to protect her from any of her fears. The prognosis was good; still, he would rule nothing out. And the glint that came into his face when he described negative outcomes: the glint of relished life-power. Yes, he must get a lot of that, in Intensive Care. While he talked, Russia found herself imagining what his senses had been trained to tolerate – unspeakable textures, fantastic stenches. Nor, as she took her leave, could she spurn the consolation that this doctor, like most other doctors, would drop down dead within a week of his retirement. It was to do with power, and when that went, they went.

  She pressed the button. Something dropped in her. She sighed as the lift sighed.

  ‘No, boys,’ Pearl was saying, ‘Dad’ll be back on his feet before we know it. And up to his old tricks again. Won’t you Xan.’

  ‘… Course I will.’

  ‘Of course he will. Whoo-pa. Here she comes. Christ she’s fat. Russia! I’ve been admiring your picture in the newspaper!’

  Explosive Anger and Irritability, Family Abuse, Grief and Depression, Lack of Insight and Awareness, Bladder and Bowel Incontinence, Anxiety and Panic, Sexual Problems, Loss of Love, Coping with Loss of Love, Letting Go … Russia walked on, making herself taller. The waisted blouse, the dynamic brassière, the olive cleavage: all this – just in case – had been for Pearl.

  2. The high-IQ moron

  What used to be funny? wondered Clint Smoker. What’s funny now? And is it still funny?

  A hushed conference room in the sick building. On the other side of the sealed window a tubercular pigeon silently flapped and thrashed. The Chief Publisher sat at his desk with his face in his palms.

  For the Morning Lark was in crisis. Desmond Heaf (who made a habit of disappearing, of fading in and out of things) had returned, on a thirty-hour flight from the South Pacific, to rally his men.

  He eventually said, ‘I simply don’t see how something as extreme as this could have actually … What were you thinking of?’ Gingerly and evasively he lo
oked down at the double-page spread flattened out in front of him. ‘Sacred heart of Jesus. I mean, it’s not in nature …’

  ‘When I saw the first one,’ said Clint, ‘I thought it was an exposé on Battersea Dogs’ Home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jeff Strite, ‘or a “shock issue” about Romanian mental homes.’

  ‘And the actual damage, so far?’

  ‘This whole thing is being taken very personally,’ said Mackelyne. ‘There’s a lot of anger out there.’

  ‘Are we losing them, Supermaniam?’

  ‘Judging by my e’s, they’re all dying of heart attacks.’

  ‘That’s good, that is,’ said Heaf. ‘We’re killing our own wankers.’

  Supermaniam said, ‘It’s like Black Thursday.’

  On the Wednesday before Black Thursday, the Lark had put together a playful piece about the Guinness Book of Records and the new category saluting the biggest ever, or longest ever, male member. On the same page (with more than a little twinkle in its eye) the Lark had reproduced a twelve-inch ruler and (tongue still firmly in cheek) challenged its readers to make an invidious comparison. As an obvious tease – or so the Lark believed – the twelve-inch ruler had been renumbered to make it look like a six-inch ruler. Soon after dawn it started coming in: word of the Black Thursday suicides.