by Martin Amis
"Bloody hell," said Gina. "Have you seen this?"
Richard looked up long enough to make sure that this wasn't a ten-page letter from Anstice and then looked down again at Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. Gina was reading an extensive account, in her tabloid, of a series of murders, somewhere in America. Nearby on the passage floor the twins were playing quietly and even tenderly with their violent toys. Saturday morning, at the Tulls'.
The trouble with getting Gwyn beaten up … Richard strove to be more specific. The trouble with getting Gwyn catapulted into his seventies was this: Gwyn would never know that it was Richard who had catapulted him there. Only a moron, true, would have failed to suspect (uneasily) that it was Richard who was responsible for the Los Angeles Times. But Gwyn was a moron: according to Richard. And you couldn't expect a moron-particularly a moron who was upside down in a dustbin or groping for consciousness in Intensive Care-to suspect that Richard was responsible for Steve Cousins. No, the whole thing lacked justice: artistic justice. Richard found himself increasingly drawn to another quest or project, something more classical, something simpler, something nobler. He was going to seduce Gwyn's wife.
"Why?" said Gina. "I just can't… Ooh."
His head, today, was full of women, as it always was, but not just the opposite sex. Genuine individuals-there was Gina, there was Anstice, there was Demeter. There was also Gal Aplanalp: lying on her bed and clad in her ankle bracelet, curled up with Untitled, and lightly frowning with amused admiration. There was also Gilda: Gilda Paul . .. When Gwyn took up with Demi, he ended it with Gilda, his teenhood sweetheart, and with some dispatch: he ended it the next morning. One moment Gilda was living with a little Welsh scrivener with two dud novels under his belt, plus a stack of A-Level Guides; the next, she was being helped on to a train by the cult author of a surprise best-seller, at Euston, with her cracked plastic suitcase and her podgy green overcoat, heading for Swansea and a full nervous breakdown. At that stage Richard was already in need of a good-looking reason for hating his oldest friend, and Gilda's collapse, at first, seemed like a breath of fresh air. To strengthen his case, morally, he even traveled, with the flat smile of thedeeply inconvenienced, to the cliffside hospital in Mumbles and sat for an hour with Gilda's dank white hand in his, while one TV spoke English and another TV spoke Welsh, in a room whose light seemed to come from the brick-red tea and the orange-brown biscuits, and peopled by women, none of them old, whose favorite food (how did this notion come to him, over the fumes of the bloody tea?)-whose favorite food was brains. Richard still wrote to Gilda. His letters tended to coincide with some fresh coup of Gwyn's, or with some new gobbet of praise that made mention of his humanity or-better-his compassion. Rather regrettably, perhaps, Richard sent her a print interview in which Gwyn mentioned Gilda and characterized their parting as "amicable." Only occasionally did he suggest that the true story was something that the public-or Rory Plantagenet-deserved to learn. Richard was pleased that Gwyn had never been to see Gilda. Richard hoped he never would. Richard didn't really care about Gilda, of course. Richard really cared about Demi. "I mean … why'?" said Gina. "Ooh, if I had my way." He looked up. Gina's hand was at her throat. An hour ago, his lips had been where that hand was now. And it hadn't worked out. .. Richard's stare returned to the index of Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. The Maid's Revenge, The Traitor, Love's Cruelty, The Lady of Pleasure, The Imposture, Love in a Maze. While contemplating the seduction of Lady Demeter, Richard had no mustache he could twirl, no barrelly chortles he could summon: the Jacobean boudoir creeper had a big advantage over Richard. You couldn't imagine, say, Lovelace holding his shoes by their buckles as he limped from the bedroom in tears. You couldn't imagine Heathcliff propped up in the four-poster, with a forearm resting limply on his brow, telling Catherine how anxious and overworked he must be. Things seemed to start loosening up after 1850. Bounderby, in Hard Times: an obvious no-show merchant. And as for Casaubon, in Middlemarch, as for Casaubon and poor Dorothea: it must have been like trying to get a raw oyster into a parking meter. Acute and chronic impotence, Richard knew, was no kind of springboard for a seduction operation. But he had information on her now, which always meant the vulnerable, the hidden, the intimate, the shame-steeped. It panned out. And he couldn't be accused of trying to deceive Gwyn. Because there wasn't any point in it unless he got caught.
"Words," said Gina, "-words fail me. Why? Won't someone tell me."
Slowly sliding from his chair, Richard took up position behind her. The
center pages of Gina's tabloid described the trial, and conviction, of a child-murderer in Washington State. There was a photograph. You could see him. He stood there in his prison fatigues, his eyes introspectivelyrecessed, his upper lip exaggeratedly cupid's bow, the shape of a gull coming right at you. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" shouted one of his victims, according to witnesses: a little boy, stabbed to death by an adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't say anything. There was also a third and much younger child whom the murderer kept for several days, beforehand.
Gina said, "Look at the face on that horrible queer."
Marius entered the kitchen and, without ceremony, presented his parents with the contention that he "looked like shit" in his school photograph. The school photograph was produced and exhibited. Marius didn't look like shit.
"You don't look like shit," said Richard authoritatively. He felt he knew all there was to know about looking like shit. "You look good."
"I think that's so awful," said Gina, "the little boy saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' like that."
The young swear more now, and the old swear more now. This is perhaps the only area in which your parents can shock you as much as your children. The middle-aged swear more too, of course, in reflexive protest against their failing powers.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy to the adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't shout, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He was older and maybe he knew something that his little brother didn't know.
Among its many recent demotions, motive has lost its place in the old law enforcement triumvirate: means, motive, opportunity. Means, motive, opportunity has been replaced by witnesses, confession, physical evidence. A contemporary investigator will tell you that he hardly ever thinks about motive. It's no help. He's sorry, but it's no help. Fuck the why, he'll say. Look at the how, which will give you the who. But fuck the why.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy. He thought he had offended and angered his murderer in some way, without meaning to. He thought that that was the why. The little boy was searching for motivation, in the contemporary playground. Don't look. You won't find it, because it's gone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
A square of city rather than a city square, it branched out like an inbred shim family whose common name was Wroxhall, Wroxhall Road, then
Wroxhall Street. Wroxhall Terrace, then Wroxhall Gardens. Then Court, Lane, Close, Place, Row, Way. Drive, then Park, then Walk. Richard locked the Maestro, whose days were numbered, and turned toconfront a landscape out of one of his own novels-if you could speak of landscape, or of locus, or of anywhere at all, in a prose so diagonal and mood-warped. Actually this is as good a time as any to do what Gal Aplanalp is doing and take a quick look at Richard's stuff-while the author stumbles, swearing, from Avenue to Crescent to Mews, in search of Darko, and of Belladonna.
Essentially Richard was a marooned modernist. If prompted, Gwyn Barry would probably agree with Herman Melville: that the art lay in pleasing the readers. Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty. He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged. Aforethought was first person, Dreams Don't Mean Anything strictly localized third; both nameless, the I and the he were author surrogates and the novels comprised their more or less uninterrupted and indistingui
shable monologues interieurs. Untitled, with its octuple time scheme and its rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators, sounded like a departure, but it wasn't. As before, all you had was a voice. This was the basket that contained all the eggs. And the voice was urban, erotic and erudite … Although his prose was talented, he wasn't trying to write talent novels. He was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time. If you had to settle on a one-word description of his stuff then you would almost certainly make do with unreadable. Unfitted, for now, remained unread, but no one had ever willingly finished its predecessors. Richard was too proud and too lazy and--in a way-too clever and too nuts to write talent novels. For instance, the thought of getting a character out of the house and across town to somewhere else made him go vague with exhaustion …
He reached a corner. Wroxhall Parade? Across the road was a wired children's playground populated not by children (note the silence) but by menacingly sober old drunks, behind seesaw, behind jungle-gym, between swings and roundabouts. Would New York be like this? On his way here Richard had noticed all the speed bumps. Sleeping policemen were the only kind of policemen you would find in such a land, a land of stay-away and no-go. Richard walked past yet another scorched mattress. Revelation would come, hereabouts, in the form of the mattress-fire . . . Richard continued to write about this world but he hadn't
actually walked around in it for six or seven years. All he did, nowadays, with this world, was drive through it, in the vermilion Maestro.
As he made towards the given address, and identified it, he paused and turned and gave his surroundings one last dutiful sweep of the eyes. Thepale wire, the brutalist hairdos of the lopped trees. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences. The sentences spoken by what confronted him here would be short sentences, rich in nothing but solecism and profanity. Now how did this tie in with the mangled syllogism, arrived at ten hours earlier over a cup of tea and a stupefied cigarette, following the usual failure with Gina. Going something like:
A. Gwyn's trex was loved by the world; his trex was universal.
B. The world loved trex; the world was trex.
C. Better use the world, in that case; better have Gwyn picked on by
something his own size . ..
No need for Richard to knock himself out, humping the Los Angeles Times all over town. Or seeking the hospitality of the pages of The Little Magazine for that gory "middle" he was forever rehearsing in his mind. Literature couldn't do it. The world could fucking do it… As Richard climbed the steps, the supposedly superseded notion of paying money to get Gwyn beaten up returned to him with all the freshness of discovery.
As promised, the front door was unlatched ("I guarantee it," Darko had said). Steadying himself in the hall Richard heard the sound of a sander or a plane-saw: a plane-saw whining for its plane-saw mummy. It was the noise of dental pain: it was the noise of pain. The weak link is you, Steve Cousins had said, in the Canal Creperie. If we do this, he had said, the weak link is you. If someone leaned on you-you'd break. People don't know pain and fear, he had said, I know pain and fear. Pain and fear are my friends. I'm watertight. The weak link is you . . . Richard had always thought that he knew pain and fear; but he didn't-not yet. Pain and fear were waiting for him, as they waited for everyone. A whole hospice of pain and fear, patiently waiting.
He knocked on the first inner door he came to. Darko opened it. A Transylvanian confrontation, just for a second: Darko's eyes were redder than his red hair, redder than the Maestro. He looked Richard up and down, and said, as if identifying him by name, "Charisma bypass." Very soon they were standing in a room roughly the size of a tennis court and filled with furniture that might have come from anywhere or even everywhere: from the SCRs of provincial sociology departments, from business hotels, from schoolrooms, from barracks.
Turning, Richard said boldly, "Where are you from, Darko? Originally."
"From the place I still call Yugoslavia.?
Darko was standing in the middle of the room's kitchen district and staring down at some kind of foodstuff splayed on a plate. Now he looked up, and smiled. Long upper lip with a feathery mustache on it; long upper gum, also gingery in hue.
"Are you Serb or Croat? Out of interest."
"I don't accept that distinction."
"Yes. Well. There isn't any ethnic distinction, is there. Just religion. Nothing visible." On the mantelpiece Richard thought he saw a devotional knickknack or icon, lit from within by a bulb the shape of a closed tulip; it was the Virgin Mary (he sensed), but travestied, with joke breasts outthrust like the figure of a redoubtable maiden on a ship's prow. "Isn't there some big deal about the sequence of making the sign of the cross? In the war, in the world war, Croat soldiers rounded up children and got them to make the sign of the cross. To see which way they did it. To see if they lived or died."
This was obviously news to Darko: fresh information. Richard tried to relax himself with the following thought: that nowadays, in a sense, you could know more about a stranger than the stranger knew about himself. Recently he had involved himself in an argument on his doorstep with a proselytizing Mormon (soon to be sent on his way with a taunt) who had never heard of Moroni: Moroni, the nineteenth-century American angel, the Messiah of the wild-goose chase in whose name the bearded ranter trudged from house to house. Big clue, that: Moroni. Moron with an i on the end of it. Moronic without the c.
Darko said, "I believe that everyone is a human being."
"I buy that too. Belladonna, I take it, is a human being. I mean I assume she exists. Where is she?"
"Getting dressed. Getting undressed. What's the diff? Now what do I do with this cholesterol bomb?"
He gestured at the dish and what it contained. The dish glowed back up at him like the palette of a busy artist: some modern primitive who worked in pastels.
"Bung it in the fucking MW," Darko decided.
MW equaled microwave. That was good. The word had fewer syllables than its abbreviation. Especially good, especially self-defeating, because the microwave was a device intended to cheat time. Anyway Darko had already heated it, and was already eating it-his mango pizza or pomegranate rissole-with both hands… On a video he'd hired and admired, Richard remembered the motorist hero referring to his FWD, or four-wheel drive. One might add that there are certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to "the WYSIWYG universe," or "What You See Is What YouGet." To be fair, this isn't an abbreviation but an acronym. They don't actually stand there and say Double-U-Why-Ess-Eye-Double-U-Why-Gee. They stand there and say Wysiwig. Those assholes. Whom we ask to do the job of wondering how we're here. The wysiwyg universe is the one in which dark matter, the overarching shadow comprising perhaps 97 percent of universal mass, remains unexotic, the usual proton-neutron-electron arrangement, just planets, possibly, bigger than Jupiter but not big enough to shine, "massive compact halo objects," known (what is it with these guys?) as MACHOS. What is it with these guys? The "free lunch" universe. The "designer" universe. The "charisma bypass" universe? Sending their minds back eighteen billion years, they reach for catchphrases that were getting old eighteen months ago.
"Will Belladonna be joining us? And tell me more," said Richard, making sure there was plenty of amusement in his tone, "about her thing with Gwyn Barry."
Darko held up a ringer while he finished a demanding mouthful, one that involved much tongue work on all four sets of molars. At last he said, "Who?"
"Belladonna."
"You mean Diva. She's called Diva now. Now I don't know Diva mega-well."
"Is that right."
"With men, everywhere you look there's Divagate."
No, not divagate: Divagate. Like Watergate, etcetera.
"A lot going on," Richard suggested. "More than meets the eye."
"She gives good girlrock, I reckon. Yep."
Richard w
ent on standing there.
"Oh yeh," said Darko with resignation. "Diva's wild for the wild thing."
"Have you known her mega-long? Where is she, for instance?"
Darko excused himself and left the room through a door beyond the kitchen. When he came back he looked at Richard suddenly and said, "Who are you?"
"Richard. Who are you?"
"Ranko."
"You mean Darko."
"Darko is my twin brother. He's Croat. I'm Serb. We look the same but we've got nothing in common."
"Well you both eat pizza. You've still got a bit of it hanging from your mustache."
The man stood there neutrally, continuing to clean his teeth with his tongue. "She's getting up," he said. "Me I'm off out.?
Richard was alone in the room he should never have entered for only five or six turbulent seconds, while one door closed and another opened. If you could have micro-monitored this time frame you would have found: fear of injury, disease and murder, fear of the dark that was now descending, fear of poverty, of poor rooms, fear of Gina and her swelling irises; despair for the stranded self and its timidly humming blood; and, among all these fears and hates, the sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house. He took one smeared glance at Diva as she came slanting into the room and thought: hopeless. He's safe. I'm safe. Not deadly nightshade. Just poison ivy. We're all safe.
"Hi."
