‘Tell me – truthfully – why you did it. Why on earth did you have to fuck her?’
There was nothing and then, in one breath, with lightning speed, his father half-shouted, half-said, ‘I knew that if I didn’t I’d kick myself afterwards!’
All at once his father looked very old and frail. Bloch’s face didn’t betray any emotion.
‘I suppose you’ll want me to leave now,’ his father mumbled, his eyes turned away.
Speaking very slowly, Bloch whispered, ‘No, I don’t want you to go.’
Samuel managed the weakest of smiles. Inside him pain and pleasure were bleeding into each other, fusing until they were one. Each moment contained whole worlds of kaleidoscopic feelings.
‘I’ve no more words...,’ he said, his big head hanging.
Bloch also turned his eyes away.
‘It’s funny isn’t it,’ Bloch sighed, ‘after all the noise...there comes a point when a conversation turns real, all the smokescreens clear and all that’s left...is this...two voices in the wilderness.... Do you know what I mean?’
His father’s giant frame seemed to have been hammered into the ground. In a tiny voice he mumbled, ‘Danny, I really need you to forgive me for what I did to you.’
He was crying now.
Bloch’s face, pulled by conflicting forces, was opaque and clear at the same time.
He was suddenly aware of the artificiality of his indignation, a residual sense of contrivance. Had he been acting out the role of someone who was wounded, full of accusing anger? He realized that he was more pleased than he cared to admit that his father had made contact with him. The strange thing was – he now saw – that those spars and verbal parries had been enjoyable; despite the enormity of his father’s violation Bloch still found him amusing. Something was stopping Bloch from really giving vent. But was that something the product of a transcending magnanimity? Or did it suggest that he had finally severed his links with life and didn’t really care about anything at all?
After Bloch had gestured for a scrap of paper and written down I forgive you on it, a great weight lifted from Samuel’s shoulders, some color returned to his cheeks, and he felt a strong desire for food.
11
Ryan Rees carried three cellular phones with him at all times. He gave the number of the first phone out to people he didn’t want to speak to and so this phone was always switched off; those trying to get through could only leave messages on it. People Ryan Rees didn’t want to speak to included lawyers out to sue him, two ex-wives, and those who wanted Rees to generate publicity for them: aspiring musicians and actors, people with ‘remarkable’ life stories, and other hopefuls. Rees had given them all this number so that they didn’t feel he wasn’t co-operating with him or that he was avoiding them, but at the same time he used the screen of voice-mail to have nothing to do with them. Their many e-mails would receive replies, but they would never be written by Rees himself. For some in this unfortunate camp Ryan Rees was a duplicitous snake who hid behind technology; for those who were less worldly-wise, he was simply a very difficult man to get hold of.
He gave the number of the second phone out to all the clients that he represented. The second number was also in the possession of certain journalists. For example, Lee Crackstone of the Daily Mail. Crackstone had once been described by his former editor as “the vilest, most spineless, toxic, evil-smelling piece of scum to have ever crawled from under a rock where he takes his place with all manner of writhing and greasy worms. Whenever he opens his mouth the entire surrounding area should be fumigated and geiger counters installed to test for levels of radiation.” Crackstone had – in the interests of the pursuit of the unalloyed truth – come up with the idea of having the homes of high-profile celebrities installed with minuscule cameras (which were accordingly secreted into lamps and lightbulbs by the celebrities’ maids, the latter having been drilled and bought off by the Daily Mail). Crackstone had also hacked into the mobile phones of victims of crime, hoping to listen in on some glaring inconsistency which would reveal what he thought had actually happened. Interestingly, when Crackstone’s own phone was subsequently hacked by Rebecca Murdeck, a rival journalist at the Daily Express, he went instantly to the police in a state of righteous indignation, and asked Ryan Rees to dig up or make up any dirt he could find on Murdeck, as he planned to sue and ruin her.
Rees’ second phone number was also in the possession of the formidable Acquanetta Stilton, an editor at Shankly & Windup. Her tastes in fiction were quite esoteric; her greatest passion was reserved for novels about sado-masochistic practices among the Mormons. Another editor Ryan Rees was on friendly terms with was Miles Curfew of Nema. Their most heavily-promoted book that summer was Toothly Intuitions, which was about a dental hygienist whose secret, breathless dream is to be a health inspector. In addition, Rees chatted regularly on his second phone with the Director-General of the BBC, the Chairman of the RAC; the Head of the Inland Revenue, Daffyth Ratchet; the shipping nabob Adonis Contomichalos (Contomichalos and Ratchet were good friends and Ratchet had stretched out many a time on one of the Greek’s famed yachts); and the noted West-End actor, heartthrob and drug addict Rufus Cerventino. He also used the second phone to converse with his staff, which consisted of Johnson Manger, his copywriter; Arnold Bateman, his accountant; Donald Inn, his vulpine associate; and a fleet of secretaries. Rees would concoct and embellish stories with Manger, brainstorm ideas with Inn, and work out costs, budgets and hire fees with Bateman. He had no friends as such.
Rees made a point of never antagonizing newspaper editors. But when it came to the journalists he considered run of the mill it was usually his custom to show them two faces, softening them up when he wanted something from them and demonstrating almost pathological coldness when they wanted something from him. But he had an uncanny ability to charm his way back into the lives of those he had alienated in the past, striding through their misgivings, quashing their queries with great gusts of laughter, showering them with expensive gifts.
The third phone was reserved exclusively for calls with his private banker in Liechtenstein.
Ryan Rees liked to ride in black cabs. He was riding in a black cab at the moment. He was scanning Tom Beard’s review of last night’s television on his tablet.
Beard was a feature writer on The Guardian. He was an intelligent, erudite man, but he had problems. He had begun his journalistic career by espousing the highest of principles, always reviewing a book honestly, researching his stories scrupulously, taking editors to task for changing his copy. As the years rolled by he found the energy required to swim against the current, to oppose the will of those interested in maintaining the lowest common denominator, begin to wane. He developed a serious cocaine habit after his wife left him for a younger, less complicated man. At about that time he no longer bothered to check facts or read up on people he was interviewing; when reviewing a book he confined himself to its first thirty pages. He became soft, unsure of his opinions, and he accrued debts everywhere.
He had joined The Guardian after coming from The Times, having been sacked by the latter after his drug habit had come to light. At The Guardian Beard was paid a third of the salary he had enjoyed as a feature writer at The Times. Rees had approached him a few days ago, and treated him to lunch at the Café Royal. He told Beard that if he could review the forthcoming edition of “After Meditation” and mention Oscar Babel in a glowing, even ecstatic, light he might be able to secure him the lucrative position of restaurant critic on the Evening Standard since Martin Maclehose was going to the Bahamas for three months to get a really good sun tan in readiness for his new life as a talk show host in Los Angeles. Rees had propositioned Beard after a couple of bottles of claret and after slipping him a small tin marked ‘Strong Mints.’
The tin had in fact been stuffed with cocaine.
Beard agreed, after some hesitation, to write a favorable review.
Later on Rees gave Beard a contact number – that of
his first cellular phone.
As he finished scanning the review he rolled one of the windows down and popped his head out. They were stuck in some traffic on the Victoria Embankment. Behind them was the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, in front the slender line of Cleopatra’s Needle. Beside them, to the left, like a long, gelatinous blanket, lay the Thames. All along its length boats and ships were eerily still, as if embedded in the water. The grey faÇades of south bank edifices, office blocks and concert halls were lent a certain vigor by the bright morning sun. Rees watched commuters scurrying back and forth along the Hungerford bridge, the dilapidated trains behind them creaking into slumberous life.
Ryan Rees loved London, its messiness, the sense that it had been spliced together from so many different parts. He loved its color and dust, its history and pubs – rumbustious, dingy, warm, squalid. He loved the city and its cut and thrust, the giant mechanisms of business and banking. He loved Trafalgar Square and the figure of Nelson presiding over it. He loved Canary Wharf with its futuristic layout and Soho with its cluttered one, the serenity of Green Park, the clamor of Oxford Street. He loved the fact that telephone booths, buses and post boxes were red. He even loved the parking meters. In short Rees’ love of London was like everything else about him: the product of demented energy.
At last the cab began to move and as it did so Rees read the review of “After Meditation” with care. Released from a set of traffic lights, they turned into Westminster Bridge with a spasmodic burst of speed.
Last Night’s TV Tom Beard
Turning Pimples into Diamonds
Summer is of course the time of year when courtship thrives, as the inhibitions and clothes associated with the other seasons are shed. It is around now that people think about having flings, men expose their anaemic legs, and women wear skimpy dresses. So it’s timely to find a program dedicating itself to the thorny subject of sexual love. Sexual love has an uneasy ring to it; no one quite knows what it is, but everyone knows it’s highly desirable. Sexual love is wonderful, we are told, whereas sex without love is just empty; and love, well, that can be downright boring on its own.
On last night’s inaugural edition of BBC2’s highly trumpeted new discussion forum After Meditation some respected minds tried to define what sexual love is. The various luminaries included A. S. Meredith, the novelist, Stephen Rialto, critic and raconteur manqué, and Christopher Carey, professor of English at Cambridge University, in his streetwise leather jacket. During the course of an unexpectedly entertaining program these were the highlights. Meredith – tragically – confessed to never having said “I love you” to anyone because of the danger of misinterpretation. Carey, in an uncharacteristically acute line, remarked that society today was geared toward creating maximum sexual longing and minimum sexual satiation. Stephen Rialto noted that the byzantine contortions of Internet pornography had had a disastrous effect on our sense of what we desired in a partner. No one could really define the term sexual love with any real precision. It was left to the token member of the general public who was present, one Oscar Babel, to shed some light. Clearly the following had been painstakingly rehearsed, but what he had to say deserves to be quoted in full.
‘I think that if a person was really in love, reaching out, if that intimacy was blowing through your body, turning water into wine, turning the pimples into diamonds, giving the loved one’s reality the stamp of great art...the sexual act could be in this case a revelation, a manifesto of how to live your life.
‘But instead erotic love is usually sold as a promised land, or seen as a land mine. Love should be beyond judgment, though it hardly ever is. It should be unconditional, but who can truly love unconditionally?
‘These days the idea of love comes with the imperative of wealth. But sometimes, very rarely, it turns out like a fairytale. When it’s working, really working, it can even stop time, so that everything shimmers.’
Unfashionable stuff, I grant you, but I found it bold. Babel was obviously drawing on Tantric doctrines about sexuality, while giving them a slant that is all his own. Meredith told Babel his remarks were labored and vague, and then the others all put the boot in. Everyone was quick to dismiss Babel, to belittle his contribution. Perhaps we were witnessing an outbreak of the Bitching Virus. Who can say? I think we should watch out for Babel. He is clearly destined for something, though I don’t know what yet. My sources tell me that he used to life model, and spent many years studying Sanskrit while traveling widely in the East. Maybe that’s what greatness is made of. Who knows?
(Someone else who read the review with care was Najette, but her reaction to what she read was rather less positive than Rees’s. A day afterwards she had a dream about Oscar. He was perched – or stuck – at the top of a silver birch tree; he was calling down to her, ‘There’s an amazing view from up here. How do I get down?’)
The cab, having turned around via Westminster Bridge’s roundabout, was duly able to enter Parliament Square where tourists were busy snapping photographs of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Rees’s gaze drifted toward the bronze statue of Churchill in its corner, his left arm tucked inside a pocket, his right hand leaning on a cane, his gaze fixed and resolute. As they moved toward Victoria Street he turned around to catch a last glimpse of the austere, faintly hunchbacked form. Rees liked statues – they were emblems of solidity, of unwavering firmness, judging and absolving. They embodied something human beings lacked: magnificent detachment.
The cab was moving quickly now and as they chundled along he put the newspaper aside for a moment and extracted a digital music player from his case. He placed the earphones into his ears and fiddled with the keys. A second later an ear-splitting medley of animal cries and bird calls assaulted him. He was listening to a recording that a travel journalist had edited for him, assembled while traveling in Kenya. Here was the plaintive trilled whistle of the Green-Winged Pytilia and the diurnal song of the Common Drongo. The latter sounded like a banjo as it rasped and twanged. The White-Bellied Go-Away Bird called in a nasal whine, not unlike the bleating of a sheep. There was also the pig-like cry of the Maribou stork, spasmodic, stopping abruptly. Rees carried the recording with him wherever he went. It allowed him to be transported, to leave his immediate surroundings behind. He also listened to it whenever he felt particularly excited, as he did now.
He closed his eyes, his lips drawn back in a crooked smile. Nature was pure, amoral, uncluttered, he reflected. Nature and statues: These are the ideals. That review was good, really good. He lit a cigar. What a stroke of genius, what a minor miracle it would be to turn Oscar into a modern myth; to take this nobody and make him into a somebody, give him status and worth for no good reason other than because it would be good fun to fool everyone.
Rees – though attracted by the thought of ultimate financial gain – wanted to mold Oscar into an icon. He would be there, by his side, the ring master proudly introducing his lion. Deep down he aimed to produce a hybrid of freak and god. In his experience there was an exquisite pleasure to be had in fooling the population at large, in milking their gullibility and juggling with their perceptions.
They had just turned into Grosvenor Place. Rees had an appointment with Jura Proskovira, a Russian millionaire, at The Morgue, a fashionable restaurant on Brompton Road. Here, in a discreet corner, guests were encouraged to pluck off wads of sushi carefully laden onto naked, exotic-looking women stretched out on slender tables. Rees was helping to publicize Proskovira’s new nightclub – Baby Go-Go. What this promotion amounted to was dropping the name during radio interviews and mentioning it to journalists whenever he felt inclined to do so. For this Proskovira was paying Rees £15,000 a month. Rees thought Proskovira harmless enough, though he knew his club didn’t have any chance of gaining the cachet of the most wellknown establishments, despite his assurances to the contrary and impassioned guarantees that in three months from now the name Baby Go-Go would be on everyone’s rouged-up lips.
He puffed on his ciga
r, the thick smoke enveloping him, obscuring his face. He removed his earphones carefully, pulled out one of his phones and dialed a number, all the while studying Beard’s television review, his eye searching for usable phrases.
Speaking into his phone at breakneck speed, he said, ‘Donny, we need to sort out some posters. Then get them up in every library, coffee house, public place you can think of. But mainly I want a few billion on the underground. You’ll need to get in touch with the Transportation Display for permission. Tell them we’ll need it for four weeks minimum. You can sort it out with whoever’s the account manager for W1. To target, shall we say, an adult, central London audience? I don’t know how long they usually take to come up with a design, but my guess is weeks so sort something out with Jurgen. I’ll dictate what they should say. Ready?...What do you mean Jurgen might be tricky? For fuck’s sake, don’t piss-arse around. Ready? “Is love inseparable from wealth? Is love a fairytale or the wailing of the damned? The cure will follow.” Got that? Now, read it back to me.’
The cab came to a shuddering halt halfway down Brompton Road. Outside Harrods’ elegant-looking women were studying their even more elegant counterparts locked in stasis within the windows, disquieting prototypes of perfection. The summer afternoon crowds moved along, driven by a mad compulsion to spend, to burn money, as if to do so would be to breathe more easily.
The Fabrications Page 16