What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  After this, anyway, came the most important part of the ritual. We would get back to the house, make two cups of instant coffee, lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits and then, for half an hour, settle down in front of the television to watch a quiz show: a show of awesome frivolity and tameness which we none the less followed with idolatrous concentration, as though to miss even a few seconds of it were to render the whole experience meaningless.

  There were two simple elements to this programme: a game involving numbers, where the contestants had to perform some basic mental arithmetic (I was quite good at this one, whereas my mother invariably got into a muddle and found herself beaten by the clock); and a lexical game, in which they vied with each other to see who could make the longer word out of nine randomly selected letters of the alphabet. My mother took it more seriously than I did, always making sure that she had pencil and paper to hand before sitting down to watch, and every so often she would actually beat the contestants: I can well remember her flush of triumph at making an eight-letter word, ‘wardrobe’, out of the letters R,E,B,G,A,R,W,O,D, when the best that the winner could manage was ‘badger’, for six points. She was euphoric for hours afterwards: it was the only time during those weeks that I saw the lines of care wiped smooth from her face. And I can only think it was for this reason that we used to make such strenuous efforts to get back to the television every day at four-thirty, even sometimes, when our shopping expedition had taken longer than expected, driving at fifty or sixty miles an hour through the suburban streets, fearful of missing the early stages of the game or the host’s foolish introduction, peppered with terrible puns and delivered with the beseeching smiles of an overgrown puppy. There was another reason, though, why my mother watched every afternoon, her eyes aglow with the faith of the true believer, and this was that she clung to the possibility that one day she might be granted a vision, a revelation of the Holy Grail after which all of the programme’s followers quested: a perfect nine-letter word to be formed out of those randomly selected letters. It would have made her the happiest woman in the world, I think, if only for a few instants; and the ironic thing is that it did happen once and she never knew it. The letters were O,Y,R,L,T,T,I,M and A, and I could see it straight away, but neither of the contestants got it and my mother was struggling, too – all that she found, in the end, was a feeble five-letter word, ‘trail’. At least, that’s what she said at the time, and it’s only now that I wonder if she saw it as well, the word ‘mortality’ spelled out by those nine random letters, but couldn’t bring herself to write down the truth of it on the back of her scribbled afternoon shopping list.

  In any case, Fiona and I had more serious matters to occupy us, because the dramatic change which her illness wrought on our viewing habits happened to coincide with a period of political upheaval in both the domestic and the international spheres. Late in November, just a few days after she had been to see her doctor for the second time, the Tory party leadership crisis came to a head and Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. It was a week of intense, if transient, media excitement, and we were able to gorge ourselves on a diet of end-to-end news programmes, special late-night panel discussions and extended bulletins. And then on the day she went for her outpatients’ appointment, we heard that Saddam Hussein had rejected Security Council Resolution 678, an ultimatum authorizing the use of ‘all necessary means’ if Iraq had failed to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15th, and soon he was on French television saying that he thought there was a 50–50 chance of armed conflict; and even though he now started releasing the hostages, so that they were all home a week or so before Christmas, it still felt as if the politicians and the army leaders were hell bent on dragging us into war. But the strange thing is that Fiona, who Was a peace-loving person and not very interested in politics, took a kind of comfort from all of this, and I began to suspect that, like my mother with her quiz show, she had chosen to use it as a way of shielding herself from the fear which was otherwise liable to swamp her.

  This time the doctor had listened more carefully. He examined her neck when she told him about the growth, which was bigger than it used to be, she said, almost two inches across, and he wrote down everything she told him about it but still said there was probably nothing to worry about, that the fevers and night sweats might well derive from something else entirely, some aggressive but treatable infection. But there was no point in taking unnecessary risks, and she was booked in for this outpatients’ appointment in the last week of November. They took some blood tests and X-rays, apparently, and she was supposed to go back in three weeks’ time to get the results. Meanwhile she had a temperature chart to fill in, and so our evenings together would always conclude with me fetching the thermometer, and faithfully entering the relevant figure before putting out the light and returning to my flat with the tray and the dirty plates or soup bowls.

  As I mentioned, there was a good deal of silence between us: on Fiona’s part because talking made her throat burn, on mine because I could never think of anything to say. But I do remember one conversation which took place in the dead half hour between the Nine O’Clock News and the News at Ten, and which began with her making an unexpected remark.

  She said: ‘You don’t have to do this every evening, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, if there are other places you want to be, other people you want to be seeing …’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘It can’t be much fun for you, being stuck here with me all the time. It’s not as if –’

  ‘You’re good company. Really. I’ve told you that before.’ (And it was true.)

  ‘I know, but – When I’m better, when I’ve got this thing licked, I’ll be … a lot more fun. And then – you know, then we’ll really start something, will we? Really try to make a go of it.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘I’m impressed, in a way,’ she continued hesitantly. ‘I mean, it’s not every man – There aren’t many men I’d feel comfortable with, having them around here all the time and seeing me in bed and everything. I suppose I’m impressed that … you haven’t tried anything on.’

  ‘Well I’m not going to take advantage of you, am I? Not while you’re feeling like this.’

  ‘No, but we’ve known each other a couple of months now, and most people, in that time, would have … I mean circumstances don’t permit, in our case, but – you know. You must have given it some thought.’

  And of course I had given it thought, sitting night after night on Fiona’s bed, sometimes with her wearing a jumper, sometimes just her nightgown; touching her bare arms, brushing crumbs from her body, feeling her neck for signs of swelling, taking the thermometer in and out of her mouth, giving her consoling hugs and good-night kisses on the cheek. How could all of that attention be innocent, how could it not contain its quota of furtive glances and suppressed excitement? Of course I had given it thought. There was, and we both knew this, a strong undercurrent of feeling between us which it was both difficult to ignore and folly not to acknowledge.

  But I merely smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, making for the kitchen to get two cups of cocoa. ‘Sex has never been further from my mind.’

  ∗

  suspenders black bullwhip

  stockings bra unhook

  orgy grope panties

  erect handcuffs stretch

  unzip fishnet tights

  protruding take off suck

  cleavage juices rubber

  striptease Mazola smooth

  nipple stroking pink

  mount lick moist

  leather thighs parted

  probing tongue tender

  back arching moaning

  softly Oh God Yes

  please don’t stop Yes

  ∗

  I left the contents of the tray unwashed in the kitchen, then went back to my desk and read through this list again. It filled me with apprehension. Ever since my conversation with Patri
ck, I had been determined to show him that I could write about sex as well as anybody, that it wasn’t a subject I would shy away from in my book about the Winshaws. And the situation I’d chosen to describe had presented itself without much difficulty. When meeting Findlay at the Narcissus Gallery, I’d happened to overhear some gossip about how Roddy Winshaw had once seduced a young painter he’d invited up to Yorkshire for the weekend, and since I knew nothing of the circumstances, and had decided that, for the purposes of this book, the boundary between fiction and reality was no longer one which I was interested in observing, the incident seemed to form an ideal starting point. But I’d been working on it, now, for more than four nights, and it was perfectly obvious that I was getting nowhere.

  To be honest, I had little experience in this area. My knowledge of sexually explicit books and films was small. Despite all those years of relying on the television for sexual stimuli, I retained, amazingly enough, a fundamental aversion to pornography (an aversion probably based on principle, if you cared to look back into the distant past). In even the tackiest of the films which I bought, rented or taped from the television, there was usually a vestige of artistic justification for the couplings and disrobings which would rapidly become my main focus of interest. And in fact I had only once been to the cinema to see a pornographic film. It was in the mid 1970s, during the final grisly stages of my marriage to Verity. For several months our sex life had been dying a slow, lingering death, and in our mutual panic we decided that a visit to a nearby cinema specializing in blue movies might provide something in the way of resuscitation. Sadly, we were out of luck. The film we’d chosen had attracted a certain amount of attention in our evening newspaper because, although made by a London production company, it had been shot entirely on location in Birmingham itself. As a result it was enormously popular with the locals, and the rest of the audience consisted mainly of middle-aged couples – some of whom had obviously seen it several times before – who would have an annoying tendency to interrupt, for example, a scene of back-seat oral sex with remarks like, ‘This is the bit where you can see our Tracy’s Morris Minor going past outside’, or ‘Doesn’t the chiropodist’s look better now they’ve given it a lick of paint?’ Verity and I left the cinema without feeling noticeably aroused and spent the rest of the evening, I seem to remember, rearranging the holiday snaps from our recent trip to the Scilly Isles.

  Shaking this memory off, I returned to the blank sheets of paper in front of me and tried to bring my mind into focus. It was no easy task, for we were only five days away from Christmas, and tomorrow Fiona was supposed to be going back to the hospital for the results of her tests. I’d agreed to keep her company, and we were both apprehensive about it. On top of that, I’d had an alarming phone call earlier that day – from Mrs Tonks, of all people. It seemed there had been another break-in: not at the office, this time, but at Mr McGanny’s house in St John’s Wood. The burglar had managed to force entry into his safe and several private documents had been stolen. They included letters from Tabitha Winshaw and, for some reason, statements of the firm’s accounts for the tax year 1981/82. Even more bizarrely, a number of photographs had been removed from one of Mr McGanny’s family albums. She asked me if I could throw any light on this. Naturally I couldn’t, and so the only effects of our conversation were to leave the mystery more clouded than ever and to make it even harder for me to concentrate on my work.

  After a few minutes I put my list of key words to one side: it had proved inhibiting rather than helpful, and the only way to break the deadlock, I decided, was to go for complete spontaneity. I should write down whatever came into my head, and worry about the details later. So I fetched a bottle of white wine from the kitchen, poured myself a tumbler-full and wrote my first sentence.

  She followed him into the bedroom

  That was a good start. Nothing too complicated there. I took a sip of wine and rubbed my hands. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as difficult as I’d thought. Now maybe just a couple of sentences to describe the bedroom, and then we would be getting somewhere.

  It was a

  It was a what, though? I didn’t want to go for anything elaborate at this stage, bogging the reader down in prolix descriptions. A single carefully chosen epithet ought to do the trick. How about –

  It was a large room

  No: much too boring. It was a sumptuous room? Too cliched. A charming room? Too twee. It was a large, charming, sumptuous room. It was charmingly sumptuous. It was largely charming. To be honest, I didn’t give a shit what kind of room it was. Neither would my readers, in all probability. Best to skip all that stuff and keep things moving.

  He pulled her roughly towards the bed

  That wouldn’t do. I didn’t want to make it sound like rape.

  He pulled her gently towards the bed

  Too wimpish.

  He drew her towards the bed

  He sat down on the bed and drew her roughly towards him

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said, and pointed in the rough direction of the bed

  He looked in the rough direction of the bed, and raised a provocative eyebrow

  A suggestive eyebrow

  He raised one of his eyebrows

  He raised both of his eyebrows

  He raised his right eyebrow provocatively

  He raised his left eyebrow suggestively

  Raising both of his eyebrows, one provocatively, the other suggestively, he pulled her gently in the rough direction of the bed

  Perhaps this section was also best dispensed with. I could imagine exactly what Patrick’s criticism would be: I was dithering over these preliminary niceties so as to avoid getting down to the action.

  She was wearing a

  What was she wearing?

  She was wearing a blouse

  Yes?

  She was wearing a thin muslin blouse

  She was wearing a thin muslin blouse, through which her

  Go on, write it.

  through which her nipples stood out like

  Like?

  like two cherries

  like two maraschino cherries

  like two glace cherries

  like two Fox’s Glacier Mints

  like two peas in a pod

  like three coins in a fountain

  like Victoria plums

  like Victoria Falls

  like a sore thumb

  Anyway, she had these nipples. That was fairly obvious. What about him, though? I didn’t want to be accused of sexism: I was obliged, as far as I could see, to present the male as a sexual object too. And so, for instance:

  His tight black trousers could barely conceal

  Or better still –

  The bulge in his tight black trousers left her in no doubt as to

  his excitement

  his intentions

  bis endowment

  his policy

  the nature of his endowment

  the extent of his manhood

  the length of his extension

  the extent of his full, throbbing manhood

  the full extent of his hot, throbbing member

  I had to admit it, this wasn’t getting me anywhere. Besides, I could always come back later if I wanted to fine-tune these points of descriptive detail. If I didn’t get to the heart of the matter soon, the momentum would be gone.

  He tore off her blouse

  No, too aggressive.

  He unbuttoned her blouse and peeled it off like a

  like

  like the skin on an overripe banana

  I threw down my pen and sat back in disgust. What was the matter with me tonight? Maybe it was the wine, or just the fact that I was thoroughly out of practice at this sort of thing, but nothing seemed to be working. I was making all the wrong moves, falling at every fence, fumbling and groping and communicating nothing but my own inexperience.

  He laid a tentative, questioning hand on her

  soft, milky

  warm, silkyr />
  yielding, heaving

  rising, falling

  swelling, bulging

  big, bouncy

  fleshy, bumpy, heavy, chunky, strapping, whopping, vast, enormous, massive, monstrous, prodigious, colossal, gigantic, mountainous, Gargantuan, Titanic, Herculean