by Martin Amis
Heaf said, ‘Bill. You made up these pages. How did you physically bring yourself to do it?’
‘When the first lot came in,’ said Bill Woyno, ‘I assumed they were taking the piss. When the next lot came in I must have thought, Well, this is … this is what it’s like.’
‘Let’s face it, lads,’ said Clint, ‘we’ve gone and strafed ourselves in the metatarsus on this one. But there’s a way out of it, Chief. May I essay a marxist analysis?’
‘By all means, Clint,’ said Heaf with a frown of intense respect.
‘Right. The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The upmarket tabloids are aimed at the bourgeoisie. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat. At the Lark our target wanker is unemployed.’
‘Come to the point, Clint.’
‘Well: who can you pull when you’re on the dole? We’ve delivered an insult to all our wankers – a deserved insult, but an insult. We’re saying, we’re proving, that our readers’ richards, if any, are straight out of the Black Lagoon.’
Four days earlier the Morning Lark, with considerable pomp, had launched its new feature, Readers’ Richards. And the death threats had started coming in that morning.
‘“Your ankles will be nice and warm” ‘, Heaf incredulously quoted, ‘“as you feast your todger on another array of top-grade totty, submitted by our red-blooded …” ‘He sat back. ‘Sweet mother of Christ, will you look at that – that troll in the top left-hand corner.’
‘I’m getting e’s from blokes who’re stapling the pages together in case they see it by accident.’
‘You should have a look at what we’re not using. Every last one of them takes years off your life.’
‘You got to brace yourself, and even then …’
‘There’s not that many to choose from. And we’re already running out.’
‘Three point seven million wankers,’ said Heaf weightily. ‘And this is the best they can do. Well then. What’s our course of action?’
‘Simple,’ said Jeff Strite. ‘Scrap it. Without comment.’
‘No. See,’ said Clint, ‘that’s another insult. And it’s not what they’re after.’ He pointed at the four heaped stacks of printed protests. ‘They can’t believe it either. They’re not telling us to scrap it. They’re telling us to say it isn’t so.’
‘And there’s a road out of this, Clint?’
‘Yeah, Chief. We can turn it around. Over a period of a few days we weed out the Wives and start replacing them with models.’
‘What, our own girls? Bit obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Well, not the Donna Stranges of this world, obviously. Use more like the also-rans. And if a famous face does get in there now and then … See, it’s not overly rational, is it, their response? We’ve kicked them in the arse. We’ve insulted them. Now let’s flatter them.’
In the fight for the Lark‘s ideological soul, Clint Smoker was always alertingly radical. He alone, it sometimes seemed, had a true estimation of their typical reader. He now went on to add,
‘It’ll go down okay. You could fill that spread with filmstars and have a strap saying dream on, you stupid sods and it would still go down okay. The other thing we need to do is improve the decor. Not these bleeding … coalholes. Look at the one on the middle right.’
Heaf rotated his head ninety degrees to the left, and then realigned it very slowly before jerking back from the page.
Clint said, ‘That could illustrate a piece about white slavery or slum housing. The whole spread could. No. We want reasonable birds on three-piece suites. Or better. And if you had them in the driveways of stately homes, I assure you, our wankers would be none the wiser.’
There was a silence of about half a minute.
‘Thank you for those words, Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘Make it so. Additional points … Now. All the other papers are going on about the NEO, the asteroid or whatever it is, and I’m sure our instinct was sound when we decided we’d completely ignore it. But with all these earth-shaking events going on – aren’t we short-changing the wanker on current affairs? I think we should at least mention the main wars and plagues and famines and what have you. Now I know our emphasis is essentially domestic, but with the world situation as it is I can’t help thinking we’re slacking off a bit on our foreign news.’
‘I agree, Chief,’ said Strite. ‘I could do with another month in Bangkok.’
Everyone laughed tensely.
What’s funny? thought Clint. Gentle reader. Reader, I married him. T.S. Eliot: A Reader’s Guide. Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frere!
dear clint: your remarx about your childhood struck a chord. i 2 never felt th@ i was ‘1 of the “gang” ‘. some of us seem 2 have been singled out. We r, in some sense, ‘special’. & i no th@ if i ever find some1 2 spend the rest of my days with, then he would have 2 b ‘special’ 2.
Clint had recently read a piece in a magazine which posited the emergence of a new human type: the high-IQ moron. Wised-up, affectless, and non-empathetic, high-IQ morons, according to the writer (a woman novelist), were also supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change – an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling. So Clint was relieved, in a way, to find himself flinching and smiling, smiling and flinching, at the authorial style of his newfound penpal. In the text-messaging line, and so on, he had seen the King’s English far more miserably disfigured. But never quite like this. Never, quite, in the service of mutual exploration and courtship – and with such good grammar. Clint knew about grammar. Mr and Mrs Smoker: both schoolteachers. And old hippies. Old – now dead – hippies. Dead hippies. Jesus: what happened?
Still, Clint wasn’t about to be critical. Clint? Critical when it came to birds? Deprived for so long of female influence, he felt – well, these words of hers were like a lifeline to the guy. Like a lifeline.
He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography – with its infinities, its immortalities – Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them. And the distance was getting greater all the time.
What happened? What was emanating from him, what was he giving off? He was, he thought, no uglier (and by now much richer) than the bloke you saw all over the place with his trusting female companion who was always ready to kiss his earring or stroke the nap of his fuzz or gaze into his dark glasses with a smile of roguish forgiveness.
Must be nice, he thought. Ring it up when you’re walking down the street: so everybody knows. ‘Hello, love, it’s me. I’m walking down the street. What’s for dinner?’ Romantic evening. Table set for two. Slip it a Narcopam in its coffee: take the pressure off.
Must be nice. But it never had been nice. Even when things were bowling along all friendly, he always sensed the weight, the sinkage, the falling mercury inside his chest. Because he knew full well that they were just waiting – waiting for their chance. In bed, of course, the eternal battle was to make them feel it: to transform them with your strength. And that’s what the books said women were after too, at one remove: the metamorphosis of impregnation by the strongest available male. So they were always waiting, calculating, comparing – always ready to belittle … This, at any rate, was what Clint kept telling himself (wash your hands of them; they’re all the same; and so on). But his unconscious mind suspected otherwise. He heard from his unconscious mind, sometimes. On Sunday afternoons as he lay abed licking his nasal handcuffs in the hopeless pit of his Foulness semi, he would sometimes hear it say: ‘I don’t know, mate. There’s going to be grief. I don’t know, mate. It’s all going to end in tears.’
She was like a lifeline to the guy:
my man of the moment (& i do mean moment) is of the ‘macho’ type. u no: down the gym all Sat, football on Sun morning & 10nis in the afternoon. borlNG! i like a fella who drinx beer in front of the tele - w
ith me on his lap! in bed, while we r having 6, he moans at me 2 scream. i tell him: i’m not the kind that will per4m @ your beck & call! don’t (me with TH@ sort! i suppose he thinx th@ screaming = abandon. but i don’t WANT abandon. y o y, clint, do people use 6 2 infl8 their own gr&iosity?
Although the piece of paper he had in his hand was merely a printout of an e-mail, Clint held it to his cuffed nostrils, as if hoping for an intimation of her scent. And he had read it, oh, three or four dozen times. I’m not going to mess this one up, he thought: no way.
the trouble is i’ve never been able 2 ‘sack’ a man. 2 anger a man. i wouldn’t dare. offend a MAN? so i have 2 go on mildly displeasing him (and th@’s bad enough) till he pax his bags & moves on. how? o u no, clint - little things. i 4get 2 praise him as of10 as i used 2. i refuse 2 wipe his p off the toilet seat. i speak up 4 myself. wh@ i’m really saying is: join the q, m8, 2 the back door! clint, i’m tired of it. let me b clear: i h8 the ‘new man’ 2, so ‘caring’ in the bedroom. ‘did u finish?’ ‘was it good 4 u 2?’ yes! 7th heaven! cloud 9! y can’t people just b themselves, clint? 2 much herd instinct, 2 much falsity, 2 much pre10ce.
ps: 3 cheers 4 ‘readers’ richards’. a real tonic 4 the gentler 6: gr8 scott, there’s hope 4 us all!
‘Your messages are like a breath of fresh air,’ mused Clint as he precomposed his reply. ‘Now you’ve seen my ugly mug often enough in the Lark. I’m no looks snob – can’t afford to be! But it would be nice to put a face to your words of wisdom. And maybe a name …’ And she still hadn’t said whether she thought size mattered.
Only one thing troubled him. Market research had shown, time and time again, that the Morning Lark had no women readers. So the question remained: what sort of bird read the Lark?
He paused there, at his desk. Clint was about to begin a piece. But he paused at his desk there.
‘… Uh, is uh, is And around?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Uh, Pete.’
‘No he ain’t,’ said a much smaller voice than the one he was used to. ‘Harrison, careful, darling. They’ve got him down as missing. No, don’t do that, sweetheart – there’s a good boy. They’ve got him down as a missing person.’
Clint said he was sorry to bother. He thought: Jesus – don’t say Joseph Andrews. Then: pop round and cheer her up. Then: no. Leave all that out. Or: the proverbial’ll—
‘– Ah Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘It’s not as serious, but something else has just blown up in our faces.’
‘And what’s that, Chief?’
‘Pervs Him Right.’
‘Ah. The Walthamstow Wanker.’
‘The same. But one crisis per day, eh? A couple of things, Clint. There’s a word in your Video Review column that gave me a bit of a turn. Where are we.’
He flattened the page out on Clint’s worksurface. The strapline said Blinkie Bob’s Video Review. In the corner was a mugshot. Not Clint, but some portmanteau imaging creation: a face grotesquely wall-eyed, and bent at an angle, tongue lolling, with two hair-matted palms loosely raised.
Heaf said, ‘Now where …? Here we are. Uh, “and have your bogroll handy for when gueststar Dork Bogarde pumps his lovepiss over the heaving norks of our very own Donna Strange”. What, may I ask, is lovepiss?’
‘Semen, Chief.’
‘Oh. Oh. I thought our house style was “manjuice”. Oh. Well that’s all right then. You know, it disgusts me, sometimes, what we do here. It does. How are things progressing with Ainsley Car?’
‘Well the ice-boot’s come off. Have to wait till he’s playing again, for the visibility. But it’s looking good, isn’t it, with the new charges.’
Clint remembered that Heaf didn’t follow football. He went on, ‘They’re nicking him for match-fixing now. Said he took half a mil from a Malaysian businessman to throw it for Rangers last season. Our wankers’ll hate him for that: sacrilege, Chief. Maybe we can get Beryl done during the trial.’
‘Proceed as you think fit, Clint. And you said you were following through with our royal coverage.’
‘I’m on it, Chief.’
‘It warms your heart, doesn’t it, Clint. We always assumed that the royals were felt to be an irrelevance – an anachronism. And old Queen Pam, of course, was a rather forbidding figure. But now she’s been gone for two years, and what with the Princess flowering into maturity, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of affectionate interest – reflected in Mackelyne’s figures – across the entire spectrum of our wankership.’
‘Yeah well what it is is, now that Vicky needs a bra, it’s reminded them that Henry’s still on bread and water. They think it’s time he started getting stuck in again.’
‘You think?
‘Read Smoker on Saturday. Long think-piece.’
‘Title?’
‘“Is The King Normal?”’
3. Excalibur
He was in a ridiculous situation.
On the day of his birth the guns of the Royal Fleet all over the world boomed forth their joy. ‘Our thoughts go out’, said Churchill in the House of Commons (the Second World War was in memory yet green), ‘to the mother and father and, in a special way, to the little Prince, now born into this world of strife and storm.’ He was only a few hours old when he made headlines in every language and every alphabet. At school he discovered that his father’s face was on the coins he presented at the tuckshop, and on the stamps he used to send his letters home. Before his visit, as a twelve-year-old, to Papua New Guinea, the island tomtoms sounded all night long. He was still a teenager when he represented his country at the funeral of Charles de Gaulle: he stood between Mrs Gandhi and Richard Nixon. Then came majority, marriage, murder – and the crown: the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, the enthronement, the homage.
All his personal dramas were national dramas. He was in a ridiculous situation. He was the King of England.
Henry IX was staying at the Greater House, his unheatable 300-room drum in Southern Hertfordshire. He had dined à deux with his little brother, Prince Alfred, Duke of Clarence, in the private room of a three-star restaurant on the Strand.
‘The barman here, Felix, is absolutely marvellous,’ he had said. ‘He makes a truly splendid drink called a Scorpion. Ah, there you are. Two Scorpions! No: make that four Scorpions … Now tell me, dear boy. Are you going to merry this “Lyn” of yours?’
‘You know, old thing, I don’t see how I can marry anyone.’
‘Why ever not, you ass?’
‘Because I’m such a disgusting lech. We all are. Except you. Old chap.’
‘… Now where are those Scorpions?’
The words stayed with him. And as he sat up, alone, at home (before the fire, under a heap of rugs and dogs), waiting for Bugger’s call, Henry thought: yes, true enough. And why? Prince Alfred, at forty-nine, was still the hyperactive satyromaniac he had been from the age of thirteen (when he raped his first housemaid). His father, Richard IV, had gratified epic appetites, before his late marriage; and his grandfather, John II, was a notorious debauchee. And Henry IX?
By the time he reached his twentieth year, the Prince of Wales, as he then was, showed no more interest in sexual intercourse than he showed in polo or parachuting. He had a hectic and quite drunken social life, and many women friends. What, then, made him decline or ignore the countless importunities, ranging from the near-undetectable to the melodramatic, that tended to come a prince’s way? It seemed to be nothing more complicated than fear of effort. A concerned Richard IV, abetted by the Queen Consort, arranged for the Prince to be visited by a lady-in-waiting – a young widow called Edith Beresford-Hale. Edith surprised Henry one night in the Kyle of Tongue. The Prince had retired after a damaging night with the forty or fifty ‘guns’ who had come up to scrag his wildlife. Of course, Henry himself never had anything to do with that. But he gamely went along with Edith Beresford-Hale. She bounced him around on top of her for a couple of minutes; then there was a smell of fire-tinged male chang
ing-rooms, and Edith made a joke.
Then the Prince did what the King and Queen had by no means intended. He fell in love with Edith – or, at any rate, he confined himself to Edith. Though press and public assumed that he was sleeping with at least one or two of the young beauties he frequently squired, Henry was faithful for the next five years. He looked in on Edith about three times a month. She was thirty-one, and of comfortable figure and temperament. Not unlike his mother: the tweed skirt, the hardwearing shoes.
So Henry was in his mid-twenties when he began to be disquieted by a younger friend: the Honourable Pamela North. He gave Edith a house, a world cruise, and a pension, and started paying court to Pamela. On the day after the Royal Wedding (and a princely marriage, said Bagehot, was the most brilliant edition of a universal fact) Henry wrote to his brother, Prince Alfred: ‘Everything was plain sailing, which was a relief. You saw when I kissed her on the balcony and the crowd went absolutely bonkers? Well, it was a bit like that in the bedroom. I felt the country’s expectations on my shoulders, albeit in a rather agreeable way. I felt them urging me on. And everything was plain sailing. You know what I mean: I was very good!’ And how could it have been otherwise, on that night, with his blood so thrilled and brimmed by the people’s love?
The Prince had just turned twenty-seven when Richard was blown apart on a fishing-boat off the west coast of Ireland. Also on board was the King’s cousin, who was the last Viceroy of India (and its first Governor-General); thus the murders had many claimants – Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and so on, as well as the more obvious and proximate suspects … Nevertheless, this period, with all its magnified emotion (emotion magnified by fifty million), saw Henry at his erotic apogee. England celebrated the Coronation in a mood of fierce defiance and euphoria; and the power-surge, for Henry IX, was carried over into the royal bed, with its gilt posts, its four boules bearing ducal crowns, its tester of purple satin embroidered with lilies, garters and portcullises, its valance of cloth of gold. During their second honeymoon, on the Royal Yacht, as the royal couple sat at table, serenaded by a romantic medley from a band of Royal Marines, Henry smiled sternly at Pamela when the hour of retirement drew near. Sexually, being king got him safely into his thirties (for a while, one of his many nicknames was Excalibur). But by now they were ‘trying’ for an heir…