by Will Self
When they had got their emotos settled next door, Travis and Karin entered the Brasserie and were shown to their table. Travis ordered a bottle of Montrachet and asked Karin, ‘D’you mind being apart from your emoto? Because personally I’d rather eat with Brion all the time.’
He was delighted when she replied, ‘I feel pretty much the same way,’ and then amazed as she told him why.
Karin had made the commitment to tell Travis about what had happened with Emil, when she made the final decision not to stand him up at the Royalton. What was the point, she reasoned, in even going on a date if she wasn’t – at least in principle – prepared to consider the possibility of a sleepover? And if Travis couldn’t handle it? Well, Jane made the point that he couldn’t be worth a great deal.
Travis sat rapt while she told the awful story, nodding and muttering the occasional ‘Omigod’ in the right places. When she had finished he said very simply, ‘Karin, that is hellish, you’re a very brave woman,’ then went on to amaze her still more than she had amazed him, by fully identifying. Moreover, it wasn’t only that the same thing had happened to Travis, but that it had been far far worse. The woman who invited him home for an innocuous sleepover actually touched Travis, and intimately, before Brion had managed to come to his rescue. Travis played it down, but Karin could tell that he was massively relieved to get the whole thing off his chest, for he had, naturally, told no one about it.
Which explained his diffidence, and also the very close relationship with his emoto. It also helped to explain his dilettantism; for Travis revealed, en passant, that at that time he was assaulted he had been a vastly successful antique dealer, and the abuser one of his clients. Karin understood perfectly that after such an experience he had had to retire.
But while the confessions had been risky on both sides, and the chasms of intimacy they had opened up would’ve appeared impossible to traverse with the slender bridge of conversation alone, Travis and Karin were after all grownups, and so they passed on to other subjects. By the time the entrée had been and gone, the date had swum its way into becoming a veritable whale of a time.
There was no awareness on either side as to who had suggested the idea of coffee and brandy at Travis’s house, but both understood what would happen when Karin agreed. Travis said, ‘To be frank I’m really gasping for a Havana; and things being still as they are …’ He shrugged. ‘But anyway,’ he continued, paradoxically in a breezier fashion, ‘if we need either Jane or Brion we can always page them!’ and with a flourish he showed her his miniature emotopager, which was concealed beneath the boss of his signet. In return Karin mutely displayed her purpose-built necklace emotopager. They both understood that this was a profound event.
It was a pleasant night, on the cusp of being balmy, so the foursome walked uptown from the Bowery. The grown-ups took the lead, while the emotos followed on behind in their shambling fashion. Glancing back at them Karin remarked, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, Travis, how when it comes to giving a grown-up a cuddle, or carrying us, or kissing us, emotos are so graceful and deft, but any activity outside of that seems to give them such difficulty.’
‘That’s why they’re emotos,’ he replied with finality.
Karin knew plenty of wealthy people, but had never had a friend who actually owned an entire brownstone; let alone one in Gramercy Park. The house was beautiful from the outside, the delicate wrought-iron balconies just beginning to froth with the wisteria that would enmesh them as the summer progressed. Inside the house was furnished in such a way as to suggest both opulence and austerity. Travis hadn’t cluttered the rooms, but in each there were a couple of extremely good pieces culled from his antique-dealing days. He showed Karin around the place from top to bottom. ‘It’s amazing how big these houses are … Oh! Gee! Is that what I think it is?’
‘Hepplewhite, yeah; and that’s a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, Chicago 1907.’
He showed her the master bedroom, which had its own emoto room en suite. ‘That’s neat,’ said Karin, who was now so relaxed she was content to mouth banalities.
Travis smiled gently. ‘I’ll show you what’s neater.’ They continued on up the switchback staircase. On the next floor there was another grown-up-emoto suite, and there was the same on the storey above. ‘I guess it’s something I thought of after the … y’know … I thought really I’d rather Brion were on hand during the night, should I need a bit of reassurance, a cuddle, whatever. I know a lot of people prefer to have their emotos closeted up on the roof for the night, but … well …’
‘I understand,’ Karin said – and she really did.
They drank a brandy that had been distilled in the year of the Wall Street crash. Travis puffed a Patargas Perfecto. On an antique Victrola Chaliapin creaked and groaned his way through ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’. They sat facing one another in matching art-deco armchairs, which had semicircular backs inlaid with tortoiseshell. In the shadowy periphery of the room the emotos slouched on a scaled-up divan, drinking Slush Puppies and exchanging the shy glances of overgrown youngsters.
Karin wished the evening could go on for ever. As it was she drank three brandies – and that on top of the two bottles of wine they had shared at the restaurant, and the paddling pool of vodkatini she’d supped at the Royalton. Yet she didn’t feel drunk – if anything the reverse. It was as if, having cracked the whole hideous problem of dating again, she was liberated, set free into a new kind of intimacy. Karin thought that, as long as she always had Jane with her, always there to care for her, she could cope even with the intimacy of a sleepover.
‘You look tired,’ said Travis after Chaliapin had creaked and groaned up and down the Volga several times, and Ma Rainey had ululated ‘Titantic Man Blues’ at least three. ‘Would you like Brion to show you and Jane up?’
Karin gathered herself together, Jane came over louring – after all she couldn’t help it. Their combined bags were dangling from the emoto’s – proportionately – slim wrist. ‘No, it’s OK, I think we can find our own way.’ Karin stood and looked down levelly at Travis, noticing for the first time what a very sky shade of blue his twinkling eyes were. ‘Travis.’ Her voice dipped into sincerity. ‘I just want to thank you for everything, the drinks, the meal, your lovely house … It really has been … peachy!’ They all laughed at this – the fruit gag was well on its way to being iconic.
For a long time after Karin and Jane had left the room Travis sat, silently sipping his brandy and drawing on his Perfecto. Eventually he cleared his throat to summon Brion, and when the big Celtic emoto was beside him, he reached up his arms and uttered the command that ended all of their days: ‘Carry!’
Brion gently lifted Travis up, one massive arm behind his back and the other tucked neatly under the grown-up’s legs; and porting him thus like some giant baby, he smoothly exited the room, climbed the angled stair and entered the master suite. Setting Travis down, upright, next to the Second Empire bed, with its curved footboard, and extravagant, overarching pediment, Brion started to undress him, efficiently stripping off the lineaments of Travis’s anachronism to reveal first Calvin Klein underwear, and then latterly the robust, healthy body of a fit man in his middle thirties. ‘Pjs?’ the emoto queried, and his grown-up nodded acquiescence.
At last Brion had Travis settled in bed. The grown-up lay, arms outside the covers, pyjama top neatly buttoned, looking like some old-fashioned illustration; to complete the engraving the pocket Gargantua sat by him, one atlas hand ever so softly smoothing Travis’s sand-blond hair. Travis sighed, ‘Night-night, Brion.’
‘Night-night, Travis,’ the emoto sighed back at him. And in due course the grown-up was asleep.
As was Karin in the suite of rooms upstairs. Jane looked down into her already flickering eyelids with an expression that changed, as she realised her grown-up was definitively unconscious, from cloying compassion to decided relief. She rose from the bedside and shook herself down, as some great mastiff or indeed any other fine, healthy, u
nneurotic creature might shake itself down after a dousing.
Jane strode to the window, her six feet-long legs divinely scissoring apart the hip-length slash in her dully scintillating silk dress, and picked up her bag. She drew out a five-litre catering bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, sheathed in a coolant sleeve, and holding it to the light from the window, sighed appreciatively to see that the bottle was still frosted. The emoto reached into the bag again and drew out a pack of twenty regular Marlboro and a disposable plastic lighter. These items might have appeared queer in such large hands had they been actual size – but they weren’t; they too were scaled up for the use of the emoto, the Marlboro pack the size of a paperback, the lighter as long as a pencil. Holding the long lighter aloft, like a cheap beacon, Jane made her way with ginger grace to the door, opened it, ducked down and withdrew her mighty trunk and endless limbs from the room.
Jane encountered Brion on the half-landing a floor below. The male emoto was backing out of his grownup’s bedroom in much the same way as Jane had: retracting his body in a series of phased movements as he squeezed under the dwarfish lintel. He straightened up to his full, magnificent height. Even in the wan light of the stairwell – provided by two unusual baroque electroliers Travis had snapped up in Venice – Jane could see the shadows of intelligence and amusement pass across Brion’s handsome countenance. Jane held the long lighter to one side of her face and the frozen Stoli to the other. ‘Party?’ she mouthed. Brion grinned hugely and indicated with a series of significant head jerks that they should go downstairs.
Back in the main sitting room of the house, the antique Victrola was curled on the floor, casting its analogous, auricular shadow. The light – orange street stuff – cast itself in splashes on the rich patterning of the Persian rug, working up a beautiful palette. Jane went to the window, while Brion carefully shut the double doors leading to the stairs. She undid the cap of the bottle of vodka and took a long, shuddering pull on it. The great female’s throat pulsed and in four large gulps she had managed to decimate the contents. She set the bottle down on the windowsill, and taking out one of the mutant Marlboros, lit it with a flourish of the long lighter. Jane expelled the smoke in a series of hisses and pops: the Morse code of satiation.
Brion had finished securing the door. He hit the lights and the golden oldie tones of the room sprang back up. ‘So,’ Brion said, ‘despite her terrible experiences, and her terrible nerves, she managed to fall asleep in someone else’s house for the first time in years?’ His voice wasn’t just freighted with irony – it was sinking under the weight of it.
‘Yup, that’s about it – of course that Tylenol/Nytol/Valium combo helps no end.’ The babyish lilt was excised from Jane’s voice; and in its place were the definite tones of a woman of the world.
‘Poor old Travis.’ Brion shook his big, Roman senatorial head. ‘He adds Prozac to that downbeat cocktail, sad fucker. I don’t think he knows whether he can sleep naturally or not any more, he’s been necking them for such a long time.’
‘So there’s no chance of him waking?’
‘None at all – and Karin?’
‘Nix. The only thing that could wake the beauty up would be what? A kiss? She’d die!’
‘Which leaves us.’
‘Indeed. Us. Drink?’
Brion accepted the vodka tank and drained a further tenth of it. He then took a pituitary-case Marlboro from the proffered pack and lit it by pressing its dead end against her live tip. For a few moments the two emotos experienced ignition, then he broke. ‘My God!’ he guffawed. ‘What a nerd – “I do hope you wouldn’t mind joining me … If it’s not too much … That would be lovely …” Never saying what he fucking means – never meaning what he fucking said.’ The male emoto’s voice was below basso; it had ultrasonic undertones which caused the glass of the window they were standing by to vibrate. But now there was no irony in that voice, nor sarcasm, but a genuine – if hideously patronising – concern.
Jane took another hefty draught of vodka before answering – between them they’d now dealt with a quarter of the five litres; then she drawled through a hedge of blue curlicues, ‘Fucking would hardly be the operative word, now would it?’
He snorted, ‘No, I guess not, the poor little etiolated mice –’
‘Which leaves you – and me.’
‘Indeed.’ Jane studied Brion a bit more, he really was the most astonishingly handsome male, and freed of the soppy expression he adopted to deal with his grown-up’s puling anxiety, he had a countenance of nobility and gravity, tempered by a wild humorousness. Jane found herself saying – rather than said, ‘Brion, would you show me your body – please?’
He stripped the foulard tie from his neck with one swipe; he shrugged his shoulders and his suit jacket fell like a theatre curtain; the shirt ballooned away from him; the trousers unsheathed; the underpants were kicked; and finally the socks – and attendant garters – were shot by Brion into the corners of the room, like kids fire off elastic bands. They were both laughing, but she was marvelling, marvelling at the great slab-sided length of him; marvelling at the marbled skin with its endearing rash of brown moles; marvelling at the flames of hair that burned in his crotch; marvelling at his beautiful, two-foot cock. It was curved up prominently; symbol and reality priapically nailed together.
Jane bent down so that her long hair swept the floor. She grasped the hem of her dress with crossed hands and, with a movement not unlike a nursery-school pupil impersonating the growth of a tree, she shed her silken foliage. Then she too was resplendent in the night light and it was Brion’s turn to marvel. But before long they were locked in passionate, needful, delirious and athletic congress. The emotos were so large that they could simultaneously brace themselves against either wall, so as to achieve exciting contortions. It would have been fearful – this orgiastic clash of the Titans – were it not for the fact that they were both so beautiful, and so clearly in love with the moment.
When at last they were spent, and lay wrapped demurely in the Persian rug which had been yanked from the floor by their thrashings, Brion lit a Meta-Marlboro with the lanky lighter and turning to Jane, cupped her big face in his big hand. ‘Just remember,’ he winked at her, ‘don’t say a word to the grown-ups.’
Tough, Tough Toys for
Tough, Tough Boys
Bill saw him about five miles after he had powered past the Dornoch turning. The hitchhiker was walking with one foot in the newly minted road, and one on the just-born verge. He was wearing some kind of cheap plastic poncho, which didn’t really cover the confused pack on his back. There were no road markings, as yet, on this fresh stretch. Two hundred metres before he saw the hitchhiker, Bill had passed one of the road workers holding a lollipop sign with GO written on it in white-out-of-green capitals. The traffic was thick – solid files moving at twenty miles an hour in both directions. The cars were kicking up spray, and from out of the sharp blue sky, big, widely spaced drops of rain descended.
The hitchhiker was trying simultaneously to turn and give the car drivers a come-hither grin, keep his footing on the uneven surface, and shelter himself under his plastic poncho. It was, Bill thought, a pathetic sight. There was that, and also an indefinable something about the hitchhiker’s bearing – Bill thought later, and then thought that he had thought so at the time, in the precise moment foot slipped from accelerator to brake – which he recognised as being not that of a tourist, but someone going somewhere with a purpose, not unlike Bill himself.
Bill had spent the night at Mrs McRae’s bed and breakfast, at Bighouse on the northern coast of Caithness. In the blustery evening, after a poorly microwaved pie – there was a chilly nugget in its doughy heart – he had stumped to the public phone, the half-bottle of Grouse in his jacket pocket banging against his hip, and called Betty. Once his fingertips had been digitised and resolved into connection the line sounded dead in Bill’s ear. He could recognise the tone of Betty’s phone – he knew it that well; but the phone was
at the bottom of a galvanised metal dustbin. Then Betty was in the dustbin as well, and he was calling down to her: ‘Betty? It’s me, Bill.’
‘Bill, where are you?’ She sounded interested.
‘Bighouse, I’m at Mrs McRae’s –’
‘Bill – why are you there, why did you backtrack?’
‘I could only get the four o’clock ferry from Stromness, and I wanted to stay between Wick and Tongue …’ This was an old joke, and Betty didn’t laugh. Anyway he was lying – and she knew it.
‘What’s it like then between Tongue and Wick?’ She owed it to the history of the old joke to sustain the repartee – a little.
‘Oh, you know, furry, an odd bit of lint here and there, some sweat, a smear of soap, perhaps later some semen –’ He broke off – preposterously there was banging on the door of the phone box.
A white face bloomed out of wind and darkness: ‘Will you be all night? The wind’s bitter.’
‘I’ve only just got through.’ He held the receiver out towards the old woman’s scarf-wrapped face. She looked at it. Bill thought of Betty on the other end of the line, listening to the gale, participating in this non-conference call.
‘The wind’s bitter,’ the old woman reiterated – she would say nothing more.
Bill jammed himself back inside the phone box, but didn’t allow the heavy door to close completely. Pinioned thus, he called down into the dustbin, ‘Betty, there’s an elderly lady here who needs the phone – I’ll call back later.’ He heard her faint valediction and hung up. He hadn’t called back later.
In the morning the storm that had hung over Caithness and Orkney for the past week had cleared. The sun was chucking its rays down so hard that they exploded off all glass and metal. Looking out from the window of the kitchen, where he sat at Formica dabbling rind in yoke, Bill saw that the aluminium trim around the windows of his car was incandescent. He paid Mrs McRae with wadded Bank of Scotland pound notes – eleven of them. ‘Will you be back soon, Dr Bywater?’ she asked.