by Martin Amis
"No. He's doing something with Sebby."
"Demi-this is good."
Gina, these days, no longer looked at Richard as if he was mad. These days Gina looked at Richard as if he was ill. And how did he look at her, these days? He watched Gina now, as she stood at the cooker, turning his chop beneath the grill. Her small shape, the curve of her bared neck … Someone who didn't know Gina well might assume that the tinge of burnt blood in her hair was enhanced by, if not actually derived from, the shoots and leaves of the tropical shrub we call henna. But Gina frowned on henna, and never used it. Richard could back her up: she didn't need to. How he used to sink his face into the evidence, into the information, and stare up like the sun-helmeted author of the most suicidal travel books (the slow waterfall, the dark and arching vines) and sight genuine auburn in the slobber of his jungle love. But that didn't happen anymore. And sex, to him, was everywhere and nowhere.
He told her about Demi's suggestion. She said,
"That's all right. I might go to my mother's. What will you say in your piece? How much you hate him?"
Richard looked up. No one was supposed to know about that. "I don't hate him."
"/ do. You just think his stuff is shit. Are you going to say that?"
"I don't see how I can, really. Everyone'll think it's just envy."
"Have you heard from Gal?"
"Nothing new."
"… We ought to talk."
"I know."
"Soon." Gina's elliptical face stayed low-over the bowl of bucolic cereal. From the country, where everything was good: the sack of wheat, the rubicund apple-rack. "How are we going to get through Christmas? I hope Lizzete can help out. Should be cheaper, because she won't be skipping school. A weekend in the country'll be nice for you. You need a rest."
"Not quite a rest. I'll be working."
"It's a break," said Gina. "And a break is as good as a rest."
You hear about a guy who buys a sports car on his forty-first birthday and comes roaring out of his midlife crisis behind the wheel of an MG Midget.
One whose mother died took to the cultivation of roses.
their heads. They're ready. It's the end of the story. They've felt it coming. They're ready. They just hang their heads."
"This is magical. This is poetry."
"Well then."
Suddenly Richard found himself distracted and oppressed: by matters of timing. If they went ahead now, then Gwyn, one trusted, would be in no kind of shape to tour America. Which was okay: it meant, at least, that Richard could go on saying he had never been there. But would the Sunday broadsheet still want the profile? Yes. The pressures facing the successful novelist? Absolutely. He could write about the pressures exerted by that hundred-pound pulley at the end of the hospital bed, the pressures exerted by this or that cumbrous prosthesis.
"Put it on hold for now. I'm going away for the weekend with his wife," said Richard, examining his fingernails and experiencing real surprise at how much dirt they stored.
"They had a break-in."
"So I heard."
"You know what he did, the bloke? Tore all his books up. His books. So-called Amelior."
"So. A disgruntled reader."
"Yeah, or a …"
Now came a moment of shared disquiet. It was clear that the young man was about to say, a "literary critic." He was sharp with words, in a way, as he was sharp with everything else; but his coin-slot mouth was not designed to say it. "A literary critic": his mouth was not designed to say it.
"A good critic," said Richard.
"I was talking to Mrs. Shields?"
"I know. Your brother's mum."
"She's not working there anymore, but she's a pal of that Colombian they got. And guess what. They sleep in separate rooms."
"Who do?"
"Gwyn. And Demeter. I got something for you." He took it from his pocket and passed it across the table under the shell of his palm. A section of glossy paper, tightly and elaborately folded, like origami. "That's in exchange," he said, "for the smack."
The possibility of additional or parallel universes, of which there may well be an infinity, presents the writer with something new to worry about. Shakespeare is the universal. That is to say, he plays well enough in this universe, with its sodium and cesium and helium. But how would he go down in all the others?much of it was on paper, written words, memos to the self, scrawled on the corners of envelopes and on the backs of credit-card slips franked by Pizza Express), seemed so hard to worsen; and yet a single blow from a muscular fist had shown it to be capable of dramatic and qualitative decline. The non-black-eye world that he was now reentering, for all its penury and hopelessness, felt like a banquet of immortality and joy. His cheekbone, this night, bore only an arid smear of yellow (not the cheerful, nursery yellow of days past but a different yellow, a dead yellow). The eye itself was no longer a tropical anemone. It had become an eye again. It had become Richard Tull again.
"Go on," he said, and sank back, and called with languor for another Zombie .. . This was the world where the body was money: the world of pornography and vassalage. Here were Gwyn Barry's organs and appendages, laid out on trays and studded with price pegs as on a butcher's shelf-or reeling and calibrating, items on the circular slide rule that an American doctor might carry in his top pocket, for instant estimates. Steve Cousins's terms, Richard thought, were staggeringly reasonable: by pledging half his fee for the Gwyn Barry profile, he could get its subject safely bedded down, in old age. Disillusionment with the literary world-that was what had brought Richard here. If Leavis had been right, if the whimpers of provincial neglect had had just cause, if the literary world was a Hong Kong of arbitrage, of graft and drink and sex: in such a world, with a ton of money and a cooling-tower of vitamin E, Richard could have attained his goal by conventional means. But the literary world wasn't like that. When it came to fucking people up, the literary world never got started. Sadness at this, and disillusionment, had brought Richard here, to the Canal Creperie, and to Steve Cousins, his familiar and his fan.
Who was telling him that he could get Gwyn killed for a thousand- for eight book reviews! Some trog from up north would do it. He comes down here with all the others, for a football match, completes his business, then digs his scarves and bobble hat out of his duffel bag and takes the train back to Worksop.
"Enchanting," said Richard. "This is pure witchcraft. But please. You were saying."
"What you do is-what you do is you turn their lives into fear. Everything they do. Everywhere they go. It's like the world has-"
"Turned against them."
"Like the world hates them."
"Go on," said Richard limply.
"So that by the time it happens, by then, they just-they just hangIt was not the black woman that stopped him, though: it was the white man. For 13 had long sensed, very accurately, that you didn't want to be around Scozzy with anything sexual. While to the white man the thought of the black man was some kind of antic aphrodisiac, the presence of Scozzy, with his sallow stare, in 13 's head definitely went the other way. You wouldn't ever want to present the man with it. Simple as.
"Tell you what," said 13. "What say we do 68."
"68?"
"68."
"What's 68?"
"You do me and I owe you 1."
"13!"
"Take it or leave it or whatever."
Lizette left it. She left altogether, after a while. Just as well, thought 13. With an unhappy expression he fussed and sighed and softly flinched over the paper tissues. Don't want to fuck that one off. Good business relationship. Adolf emerged at twelve-forty-five, with his book, silent, satisfied. Run the man home and go out looking for a laugh.
"Oi. What's this?"
Chewing gum on the speedo! 13 scraped it off and popped it between his lips. In his haste he immediately swallowed its cold gray hardness.
Maybe they all had what Richard didn't have.
13 had it. Walk down the stree
t with him and you wouldn't be seeing any of the things he saw. He saw earners and turners and leavers and levers, he saw locks and catches, what was unguarded and what protruded, what was detachable, what was transferable. In any shop his eyes glittered with compound calculation.
Scozzy had it, though he had it the wrong way round. Animal ther-movision, in the city; the night-sight of the wild boy.
Belladonna had it. In the business of reinvention, the first act is that of renaming. The novelist does this all the time, on the page. On the street, the only thing you can rename is yourself, and everyone else you know, if you like, so that everyone has two names, just as everyone on television has two names.
Even Darko had it. When he came to London, with his bag of tools, the very air over Oxford Circus was rank with pornography, the shop windows were stills in duty-free brochures, and the cars bulged and shimmied like women, the clios, the starlets, the princesses of the street.
In truth (and we must face this), Lady Demeter Barry poses difficulties of representation. She poses difficulties of representation not justSuch questions were far from 13's thoughts. He was in the orange van with Lizzete. Engine on: for the warmth.
13 exhaled plangently. He was, as usual, nursing a sense of strictly local injustice. He'd had a call from the halfway house: the leader of his Probation Program, informing 13 that the Harrow Road police were going to charge him with 43 burglaries. 43! Harrow Road! The worst. They stitch you up. 43 burglaries. And he'd only done 29 of them.
Lizzete said, "We could go in the back."
He said, "Can't. Giro there. He's wrecked. Up all night driving."
She did something.
He said, "Leave it out is it."
Lizzete was 14, 13 knew. 14 at the oldest. As always when he was with her 1-on-l, 13 was struggling to keep his relationship with Lizzete on a professional footing. He still had his shirt and his sateen wind-cheater on-but his trousers were down there. Lizzete had taken her pants off. She had even taken her chewing gum out. And stuck it on the speedo . .. Professional footing. Pleasure doing business with her. For example, he set Lizzete to knock on doors. Anyone home at that number: "You have a girl called Mina living here? … Sorry to bother!" Worked well. Don't want to be going in there blind. Don't want to be doing a creeper. Tiptoe is it. Anything comes down and you have to give someone a tap: Aggravated. Statutory: you're 4-walling it for 3 years. End of story. 3 years: 24-7, 24-7. Jesus: 60-60, 24-7, 52, 52, 52. Time I come out, Lizzete be 17. No worries. Take her down the Paradox.
"Here you are," said Lizzete, though it sounded like "eeh-ah" or "E-R."
"Yat," said 13. "Ooh intense."
He had a white man in his head. At this sexual moment, his head had a white man in it: Scozzy. Who'd said he'd be out straightaway or might be some time. Covertly 13 peered over Lizzete's shoulder: Giro's body was gathered steeply in sleep, like an ancient hassock. (His other mode was all floppy and invertebrate, like a vast dog omelette or even a huntsman's rug made from his own coat.) So, yeah, they could slide in there easy, between the dog and the gardening tools, which 13 was selling on. Ten minutes. If Minder came out he could hide her behind Giro. Bung a blanket on her. Still, you didn't want to be taking it too far with a 14-year-old that wanted to get pregnant. 13 knew that Lizzete was jealous of her 15-year-old sister Patrice, who was pregnant and no mistake. Who was out here. They thought it got them council flats, having a youth, but it didn't, not anymore. They wouldn't listen. Tories or whatever. Her mum'd kill him.
ist, subliminally trained to reveal character through action, duly contorts his narrative to provide cute walk-ons for the next spoonerism, mala-propism, pleonasm. Better, in my view, just to make a list.
So Demi said "vicious snowball" and "quicksand wit" and "up gum street"; she said "worried stiff' and "beyond contempt" (though not "beneath belief); she said "on its death legs" and "hubbub of activity" and "what's with it with her?" and "tell him no flat out"; she said "none of my luck" and "when it comes down to the crunch"; she said "grease-boat" (as opposed, presumably, to "dreamball"); she said "he lost his top" and "she blew her rag"; she said "he coughed up" (he confessed) and "she fluffed it" (she killed herself). Once, just once, she murmured, "Sorry. I was talking aloud." Demi also pronounced her rs as ids, but I don't think I'm even going to begin to attempt that.
I said at the outset that Demeter, like Gina, had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners. This isn't quite true. This is never quite true. We all have our connections with literature, wittingly or not so wittingly. How else do we explain the intensity of Richard's interest? Everybody knew that he was going down to Byland Court to spend the weekend with Lady Demeter. His wife knew; her husband knew; the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet knew. But nobody knew how Demi filled his mind, sometimes-how he burned across town at her.
If you could gather together all a man's past lovers (the lovers of a modern midlifer, averagely promiscuous) and line them up in chronological order, as in a catalogue raisonne, as in the long passage of a gallery or museum: for the retrospective . . . You would begin with shocking diversity, with the wide-sweep eclectic. Moving along the line the viewer's eye would jump up, down, start back, all heights, all weights, all colorings. Then after a while a pattern would establish itself; the repetition of certain themes would eventually situate you in one genre or another, until you came to the last woman in the show, the crystallized: and that's your wife. So things had gone, more or less, with Richard. The arrow of obsession pointed to Gina. All the girls, all the women, got bendier and coilier and craftier-until you came to Gina. Her eyes, her mouth, the turn of her waist: these were his Collected Poems. Whereas members of the subgenre that Demi roamed, the big round baby-powder blondes, were never numerous and petered out a long way back down the line. Though he had been awfully pleased to see them at the time. Richard was forty. He paid many visits to this passage. His life was this passage. The world was this passage.
because she is a pretty blonde (with a full bosom) who is related to the Queen, nor yet because she kept various ponies and was addicted to cocaine and heroin and slept with one or two black men. In the Queen's extended family, being a junkie, like keeping a pony, is standard stuff: the landscaped grounds of the higher-priced detox clinics are like lawn parties at Sandringham. Sleeping with black men, on the other hand, shows us Demi's more adventurous side. Girls of every other class do that, perhaps because, among other less elusive attractions, it's the only thing left that their mothers haven't done. But girls of the nobility, with exceptions, don't sleep with black men. I can't think why not, if it's half as much fun as everyone says it is. We noted earlier that the black man, very commonly, serves as a sexual thought-experiment for his white counterpart: he is your gifted surrogate; he is your supersub. I myself have a bro in my head-Yo!-who, after much ritual handslapping, takes over when I'm tired or can't come, or on those nights when I've got a headache or I'm washing my hair. (The polite phrase for this habit is imaginative delegation: whoever he is-masterfully glistening, in the fantasy, over your wife or girlfriend or pin-up or pick-up-he isn't you.) . . . Otherness is exciting. Miscegenation is exciting. So, with all this going for it, why don't the girls of the nobility do it more? Racial guilt, egalitarian guilt, is exciting: it excites compassion in the female breast. But maybe this guilt only works when it's vague-a presentment, an unease. With the nobility, maybe, the guilt is all too palpable and proximate. The De Rouge-mounts were famous alike for their piety and rapacity. Demi's great-granddad, with his "extensive interests" in the West Indies. Demi's granddad, with his South African diamond mines. And then the polluting, scorching, forest-razing, rubble-bouncing speculations of Demi's father, thirteenth Earl of Rieveaulx. The guilt is still real. The spell is still fast and good.
Representationally, though, this isn't the difficulty. The representational difficulty posed by Demi has to do with the way she speaks: the way she puts sentences together. For some reason
it is the destiny of Richard Tull to be surrounded by idioglots. Idioglots, with their idiolects.
Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like "Up you!" or "Ballshit!" For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase-Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context. But here's the difficulty. In fictional prose the idiolect spells trouble because the novel-They come at me. They come at me like information formed in the night. I don't make them. They're already there.
"Where you been then?"
"Party. Office party."
"Party? Time of year. Parties. It. You do."
"Yeah."
These minicab drivers who ferried Richard about, over Christmas, to and from the diaspora of old Fleet Street-these minicab drivers were every hue of Asian brown, but they all spoke the same language. Clearly they had learned their English from small-hour conversations with their customers, people like Richard or people in similar condition.
"Nice talking to you," slurred Richard, climbing out on Calchalk Street, under a slanting moonman and a city star or two. "What's that?"
"Uh, that's. Let's. It. Call it six-fifty," slurred the minicab driver.
"Take seven."
"… Phanks. Cunt.?
Still, aristocratic lineage, great wealth, comparative youth, an air of vulnerability, a full bosom: wouldn't that about cover it, universally? Did Demi need anything literary, to ignite Richard's passion?
Yes. First, the big parties she used to throw for writers. Deliriously, ravenously, Richard sent his mind back to the napkin-scarved bottles of old champagne tipped his way by tuxedoed athletes (even the help was hip, was hot) and bims in ra-ra skirts offering canapes made of dodo G-spots and hummingbird helmets, in the octagonal library, where he had mingled with the knowers and philosopher kings of the living word-while all the agents and editors and publishers cowered in their nimbus of pelf and preferment: men and women who shunned him; men and women whose secretaries hung up on him without blinking; men and women whose letters he opened like some Soviet janitor getting a personal summons from Stalin . . . Hoping to impress Gwyn Barry (or, more honestly, hoping to depress him), Richard had taken his friend to the salon of Lady Demeter de Rougemount. And look what happened.
