by Martin Amis
Lone male figures seated in movie theaters have about them, Richard thought, a madman or mongoloid intensity of privacy. I mean what are they? Frowning cineasts? Tramps? Movie theaters were surely much too expensive, now, for tramps to come and stink up. Richard knew that when he was a tramp there would be a lot of things he needed a lot more than stinking up a movie theater. In a full house the identity of the audience would have undergone gravitational collapse, and become oneIt was Sunday and the boys boldly roamed the flat. Marius happened to be passing. He entered the room and came up close and carefully peered at his father's face.
"Ouch," he said.
"Yeah yeah."
Richard went next door and sat at the kitchen table with a half-thawed porkchop pressed to his right eye. By crossing this small distance he passed from the monitorship of Marius to that of Marco. Through two doorways and over the width of the thin passage Marco watched his father sitting there, in shirtsleeves and plum bow tie, but still wearing his fuzzy checked slippers. As so often Marco wanted to ask, in pleading wonderment, why Richard's slippers, unlike his own, spurned the opportunity of sporting an attractive likeness of some kiddie-book character or TV superhero-or just an animal. Nor was Daddy taking the obvious and rewarding course of reading the back of the cereal packet .. . Ember-lidded, his hair sparsely stirring and twitching in the cold breeze from the open window, Richard sat there in full realism: healing himself. But to Marco (gazing now, if you remember, with his one good eye) Richard seemed to resemble a figure in a cartoon: he had about him the faint deep buzz of electricity. If he walked off a ledge or a cliff he could get back again so long as he turned promptly and whirled his legs; if someone hit him on the head with a hammer he would grow a pointy red bump but it would soon go down again. Marco was of course wrong about all this: in both of his scenarios Daddy would have died instantly of shock. He was right, though, about the electricity. The time Richard struck Marco across the head with the flat of his hand, the time when it all started to happen-when Gwyn's book danced on the best-seller list (his career-speed reaching escape velocity), and Richard danced, and jolted-it was as if an electric cable ran from Holland Park to Calchalk Street, bringing electric pain from one man to the other.
Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and a consciousness that just by being who he was he caused anxiety and exasperation-and desperate fatigue-in his parents (he understood, even when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the things inside that made him cough and smolder and effloresce, and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he -was inconsolable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year-old would normally have need or reason to be. Adults
were not other to him. Not remote and massively autonomous and alive only insofar as they maintained his domes of pain and pleasure. He knew that adults, too, were small, and pushed and tugged by many forces.
towels on the walls, double striplights above) so symmetrical that intuition demanded that a mirror stood at its center. But there was no mirror: only two of everything, opposed to a counterpart. Richard squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. No mirror, so no reflection; and he was a vampire, momentarily, denied its natural simulacrum, and fearing death by running water. Palpably, the Coronet toilet was the scene of a very recent gastric catastrophe: but it was the scene of nothing else. He moved sideways and quickly bent to look under the saloon doors of the cubicles: no quivering flounce of brown corduroy, no tortured dove-gray brogues. Richard was disappointed and Richard was relieved. He moved toward the urinal and was bending forward and breathing in (searching for purchase on his zipper toggle) when a voice said, "Nice smell in here."
And Richard's mind, which was always looking for pain, had time to feel hurt at this, had time to take this personally, as a sarcastic reference to himself. To himself, and not to the incredible smell of shit everywhere. He turned.
"Wait," he said. "This isn't me."
"I just wandered out. Get some fresh air. I told Demi. Didn't you notice I was carrying my hat? Between you and I I went back to the Slug for a quiet pint."
"Between you and me. Not a quiet Campari and soda?"
"I had a pint."
"What was the matter with the film?"
"It was getting on my wick, all that stuff about the barn. And the cows. The way they all kept on banging on."
"You're supposed to like all that. Fields. No sex. Civic-minded discussion. Nothing happening."
Outside the study window the clematis was tinged with yellow and gold-autumn, and Richard's cigarettes. He often smoked with his head on the block of the windowsill, facing skyward, to spare Marco's lungs. Out there, birds still fluttered and agitated, and they sang. The uncoil-ings, the slipping twists of sound. Say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through the trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting "Bullshit!" Now the singing thrushes and sparrows outside the window sounded like machines. Cold out there. Now that he was forty, he feared the cold. Now he was forty, something animal in him feared the winter.
righteousness. Today, it wouldn't have surprised Steve to learn that Gwyn-or, as it turned out, Richard-now faced major cranial surgery and would be eating through a straw for the next nine months. You give one smack: then you begin to think that you have been chiefed out. The blow that came before was there to justify the blow that will come after. The blow that comes after is there to justify the blow that came before. What held him back, Clasford, wasn't his strict instructions-but the city. Be quick: the lights, the footsteps. Suddenly Steve thought about the nun he had seen, out Wimbledon way. Nuns wore witchy booties and no cosmetic except the no-sex cosmetic.
Now Steve Cousins walked past security camera, past doorman, past security camera and security-camera monitor; he entered the lift and went up, high up, with the building's girders and cement blocks thrumming past him; then out past the security camera and down the tubular passageway. Excluding the two penthouses and the six maisonettes and the fourteen studios (and there were other hierarchical distinctions to do with elevation and vantage), Steve's flat was just like all the other flats in the complex. A squad of architects had been told to dream the dreams of the contemporary businessman, and to give that dream the weight of concrete and steel: economy of line, public space/private space, dynamism melding into hard-won repose. Then let the individual imprint his personality upon it-if he had one. But we all have one. Don't we? Scozzy's double reception room, the main living area where the expression of his personality was supposed to occur, had four corners: a fitness corner (weights, flexers, StairMaster), a computer corner (the usual information processors), a reading corner (cushions, a low glass table stacked with various nihilistic classics), and a video corner (a depthless window-sized TV, the numb sleek blackness of the VCRs, the heap of remotes, plus a Canaveral of decoders and unscramblers). Was there a truth to this room? In a sense it was all for show, like a stage set- despite the fact that nobody ever came here. Steve removed his clothes. At home, he went naked. At home, he sniffed his food before putting it in his mouth (his mouth: he knew that his jawbones, typically, projected at the dental arcades). At home, he stood and swayed with the wind, monotonously, unbearably, for hour after hour. At home, he often thought of renouncing all speech. Did he use to do these things when he was a wild boy? Or did he just do them now: now that he had read about wild boys? All he seemed to remember, from his wild-boy period, was lying under some fucking hedge. In the fucking rain.
Naked, he proceeded to the video corner. Then came a series of activations. He sank into the cold leather of the great swivel chair. On screenMarco knew grownups. Very often he hung out with them all day and all night long … Now Marco conceived the idea of giving his father pleasure, or comfort. A kiss, perhaps, on the temple? A few restorative pats on the shoul
der? As he got to his feet he decided instead to regale Richard with a joke.
Sensing his approach, Richard looked up from The Proverbial Husbandman: A Life of Thomas Tusser. The child's uplifted face, one eye wide, the lips compressed, brewing amusement.
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"I dunnop."
"I dunnop who?"
"Ooh you smelly phing!"
"… I don't happen to find that very funny, Marco."
"I phought it weren't him. He came on like he expected it. That was the phing."
"No, mate. You don't say it like that. Not with thing. You say ting."
"Yeah. That was the ting."
"What you give him?"
"Give him a smack. First I had to catch him."
"He scurried around, did he. Jesus. You say anything? Make it look…"
"Yeah. I said, 'You called me chief.' "
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You know. 'You fucking chiefed me out.' "
"Anything else?"
"Yeah. After I give him the smack I said, 'Don't chief me out.' "
'"Don't chief me out.'"
"Yeah. 'Never chief me out.' You know. 'You don't never fucking chief me out.' "
Steve was trying to imagine Richard chiefing Clasford out. "Clasford. When was the last time somebody chiefed you out?"
"I don't know. When I was about phree."
"Yeah well take care, chief."
He pocketed the mobile and parked the Cosworth. It all proved that the town was safer than the country. The trees were more dangerous than the streets. The city was like world opinion-it held you back. The fields held no one back. Why do you think people get stabbed fifty-seven times? Why do you think people die from thirty-nine blows to the head? Given the leisure (the privacy, the seclusion), you don't stop. It's the … reversecard at the bottom of the deck; and then slid in the second and third, saying, "One jack goes in the first floor. And one on the next floor." He paused, thinking. "And the fourth jack goes on the roof to look out for police." Reasonably skillfully he placed the four jacks, held tightly, as one card, on the top of the pack. Marco watched with drugged interest. "Then the police came! Me-mao me-mao me-mao me-mao! So the jack on the roof called to the other jacks: 'Police are here!' And they all came running up. One jack, two jacks, three jacks, four jacks."
Marius's shoulders subsided; tension absented itself from him. "Brilliant," said Gina. Marius gave a modest smile and lifted his eyes toward Marco-and Marco's imploring stare.
Marco said: "Then what?"
Richard shifted his weight. He too was thinking about a story: "The Aleph," by Jorge Luis Borges. About a magical device, the aleph, that knew everything: like the Knowledge. About a terrible poet, who wins a big prize, a big requital, for his terrible poem. "Astonishingly," the narrator writes, "my own book, The Cards of the Cardsharp, received not a single vote." Richard listened to the tuneless blues that was playing in his head. None of this ever left him and everything always reminded him of it.
"Then what?" said Marius.
"Then what?" said Marco.
"… Nothing!"
"Did the police get them? What did they steal? Where did they go?"
"Marco."
Yes. Because Marco was always like this. Marco. So unlike Marius, who was so firmly placed in the world, who constantly sought and identified distinctions (that was a hem, that was a fringe; that was an eave, that was a ledge; that was a scratch, that was a scrape), who had already joined in the great human venture of classification. Richard, too, knew all about classification. That afternoon, hoping to begin a single-paragraph review of a seven hundred-page biography, L. H. Myers: The Forgotten, he had spent an hour with his ragged thesaurus, in search of a fancy word for big. Halfway through this search, Gal Aplanalp telephoned. "You're not going to believe this," she began . . . Whereas Marco would believe anything. He longed to believe everything. He never wanted any story to end. It had been tentatively suggested, by a young neurologist, that this was why Marco cried in the night; the broken narrative of dreams, or simply the fact that dreams ended.
"Marco," said Richard. "I want to see you in my study. Now."
The child got straight to his feet. This had never happened before butthere slowly formed the freeze-framed torso of a woman. Scozzy stared, with consent, with recognition: you could see the bruised scars on the undersides of her breasts, from the surgeon's work: seals of approval. The woman, like the man who watched her, was all alone. But he was the virgin. The wild boy had never done the wild thing (and had his theories about the jizm and the ism). When he watched pornography, he sometimes thought, he was trying to find out whom he wanted to hurt. Scozzy touched the Play. She wrenched off the remains of her muscle shirt and then reached down with inch-long fingernails and savagely juxtaposed her fixed tits.
Three days later, by which time Richard's eye had ceased its experiments with the visible spectrum, had stopped trying to be a yellow eye or a violet eye and became, unarguably, a black eye, something else resolved itself in his head: he got up from the kitchen table and crossed the passage. On the sitting room floor Marius was showing Marco a card trick, in the autumn dusk of Calchalk Street, with the furniture acquiring ghosts of poor definition and the sound of footsteps miraculously surviving their ascent from the street below . .. The card trick, Richard knew, had involved Marius in much preparation. With the deck in his hand he had disappeared into the bathroom for about fifteen minutes. But now he was ready. His aim was to tell a story. On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others, there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew's lover's guardian's brother's youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean. Marius's card trick was old and crude and self-defeatingly famous. Marco didn't know it. It was called "The Four Jacks" and it told a simple tale of urban striving.
"There are four jacks. See?" said Marius, showing Marco the four jacks in a vertical strip-behind which the three decoy cards (a nine, a five, a three-mere commoners) despicably lurked. "And they decide to rob a house."
"Our house?"
The upper periphery of Marco's riveted vision told him that his father was in the room, standing near the door. Reassuringly and eternally, Gina sat knitting on the window seat, her legs crossed sharply in answer to the angles of the needles.
"No. This house," said Marius, indicating the remaining forty-five cards. "One jack goes in the basement." Marius placed the first decoy"It was a joke, Daddy." "What do I smell of?" "Nothing. You. It was a joke, Daddy."
"I'm sorry. Don't tell Mummy. Just say you wouldn't do your homework or something. Come and give me a kiss. Forgive me." And Marco did so.
At about eleven-fifteen that night the twins, in their twin beds, were winding up a long, whispered and untendentious discussion (tangerines, a new supervillain, water pistols) and had started to think about calling it a day. At any rate their silences were more extended, their yawns more musical and vacant. Marius, in particular (always the more likely to close things out), lay on his side with both hands thrust down the front of his pajama bottoms. He was indulging in his nightly fantasies of rescue. His father, at that age, taking what he needed from any genre available, was shepherding adult showgirls onto gondolas from the black gurgling rock-sides of island fortresses. Marius braved lasers and particle beams, interposing himself between their fire and a succession of alien maidens wearing catsuits and pastel tunics in video-puppet dreamscapes that rushed past or through him, as the lit runway is assimilated by the cockpit monitors of the landing plane. He rolled on to his back and said,
"Why did Daddy call you?"
Marco thought for a moment. He saw Richard's face and all the troubled calculation in it. He saw him on another day, head bent, sniffing his fingertips. And on another day (by general consensus a very ba
d day: the rooms were hushed), with him sitting at the kitchen table over an opened letter and smoking a concussed cigarette. Marco said, "He thinks he smells of shit."
Struck but broadly satisfied, Marius turned on to his side.
Time passed.
"He cried," said Marco, and nodded suddenly in the dark.
Marius was asleep. The words stayed in the air. Marco listened to them.
That morning with Anstice-oh, man-that morning when he woke up in Anstice's arms, or at her side, or in her bed, which was a small bed, he lay on his back and stared at the world of adultery. The ceiling was a
good enough figure for it, the way the stains massed and groped around
its edges (the pale orange of trapped water, of rot), moving stealthily in on the center, where the cropped lightcord hung. Plasterwork saturated in solitude enclosed him, on every side. He felt fear, and grief; he longedMarco seemed to know how you did it. Only as he left the room did he turn his head to look at his mother, his brother. His bare legs seemed to move rather faster than usual, too, not with purpose but as if he was being steadily pushed, or urged on, from behind.
I was once lying on a low bed in a room to which a child had been summoned-in which a small boy would be denounced and arraigned. So, I was on the same level as he was, down there, three feet from the ground. I have denounced children myself and seen the head of hair, both thick and fine, inclined in contrition. But when you're on their level you see that really they're staring sadly straight ahead, lifting their eyes only in dutiful reflex to confront the cathartic fire of the parent's wrath. The accusation is stated, the confession secured, the sentence imposed. Looking straight ahead, the child's teeth-milk teeth, perhaps, or hig-gledypiggledy, newfangled, as the big supplants the small-are bared in an undesigning sneer of misery. Children have usually done something. What had Marco done?
"Two days ago," Richard began, "the day before yesterday you said- you said something very hurtful to me. Marco?"
