by Martin Amis
An exultant newspaper reporter found me (he found me out: he knocked on the door and heard me running up the stairs; he quickly knelt and peered through the letter-box: he found me out). The reporter seemed delighted by everything to do with me. So did the journal for which he worked (they took me and they splashed me). It was their gloating feature on my plight which first captured the imagination of the Riding household — or at least that of its patriarch; I later gathered that Mr Riding would read out the daily reports, with morbid insistence, over the spanking family breakfast table, much to the boredom and exasperation of everyone else present. As I myself was soon to learn at first hand, Riding Sr was an insatiably compassionate man (i.e. off his chump in a posh kind of way. He still is, basically) and in a very real sense he could not allow himself to rest until I was taken care of to his satisfaction. Which, again, in his sleepy world of whimsical cause and effect, meant being taken care of by him. Evidently, too, he was intrigued in a quirky way by certain parallels between our families, parallels at once so fortuitous and insistent that for a while I longingly suspected that some Fieldingesque parentage mystery would one day resolve our destinies: Mr Riding and my father were the same age, and Greg’s and my birthdays were only twenty-four hours apart; Ursula, Greg’s sister, and mine were both seven at the time, and were alike the survivors of abbreviated twins — and so on … As the scandal about my displacement grew, so did Mr Riding’s wayward but intense anxiety. He let it obsess him, for all the irritated now-nowing of his wife and the confusion and unease of his children.
I was in some sort of custody by this stage. Leading a posse of plain-clothes detectives, a fat social worker came round to take me to a place from which I could more decorously be taken away again. Look at the state of me. For a fortnight I was regularly bathed and fed, and deposited nightly between rayon sheets which by morning had always formed a burning garrotte about my neck. I had no affection for the place, with its self-sufficient hysteria, nor gratitude for the people who worked there; I was at their mercy, or thought I was, so they all got to hate me a bit. On the last morning a special matron looked in to comb my hair and to piss on me mildly for my good fortune. ‘Be polite, keep quiet, and think yourself lucky,’ she counselled.
Well aware of the full corniness of my status (orphan of underprivilege, changeling of panic and disgust), my feelings about the proposed adoption could be fairly painlessly guessed. I stared at the formal family study displayed on the front page of the local paper (caption: The Ridings — ‘We Must Act’) until — it’s hard to describe my sense of it then … I stared until the photograph’s four edges unravelled diagonally away from me into an overlit, unknowable world of correctness and symmetry. A very old man called Henry Riding, chin up in a dark suit, beside his younger, formidably hatted wife: in the turret between their faces you saw the smart portal of Rivers Hall — the bent metal knocker, the two urns, the retreating steps. In front of them, on either side of the tall parents, are positioned, well, my new brother and sister (no, surely not. They can’t want me to be that. I wouldn’t want me): the daughter, a girl with a sharp, knowing face like someone in a half-sinister fairy-tale, and the boy, the son, Gregory, a serious Fauntleroy defined by his frill shirt and pageboy collar, with that same taut look of angled distaste; and beyond them, past their neat shoulders (on each of which nestles a protective palm), the long black windows, the vine-matted walls, the grand perpendiculars of the house. Something’s coming. What would it be?
So the small black car edged up the pebbled drive, and through its rear-side window Rivers Hall was framed for me once again. A nylon drizzle hung from warlike clouds: the place looked all full up with autumn. We disembarked; I was led into a hall — everything bright and various suddenly — then guided into the kitchen by the housekeeper, Mrs Daltrey (these days referred to as ‘the staff’ by Gregory), who made some tea while Mr and Mrs Riding signed what was presumably a receipt and listened to the valedictions of the special matron and the fat social worker before seeing them out. They followed into the kitchen and introduced themselves anew as my foster-parents. I was in tears by this time, of course (tears of apology and remorse), and willingly agreed to Mrs Riding’s suggestion that I felt tired and wanted to go straight to bed. Mrs Daltrey preceded me to a high damp room on the first floor, where she remained until I said I was all right. (I wasn’t all right. I was all fucked up.)
During that first chapter of my time at Rivers Hall my face must have been perpetually florid with either embarrassment or shame, but I now tend to see my long-ago self there as a wan and wary child, subject to a smaller spatial scale than everything about me, a downy white cheek fronting the gloss of an opulent Brobdingnag. When I awoke on the first morning, a shrivelled grub in the corner of someone else’s bed, I remember thrilling as if for the first time to all the dazzled self-pity of childhood; I felt that the reduced outlines of my body (the poor thighs, the poor arms, the poor shoulders) expressed an almost abrasive pathos — much too much to bear (I could bear it, just about; I had some bottle then. I can’t bear it now). My eyes stayed shut. I didn’t dare move — and sensed also that this was an intelligible procedure. The contours of the blankets I lay in: that was all there was of my space.
Mrs Daltrey entered the room with Dickensian bustle, carrying the whole world in her wake, threw back the curtains to a rush of sun, and told me to get dressed. As I obeyed she limped round the room singing forcefully and arranging my clothes in a vacated drawer. Groomed to her satisfaction, I was taken out of the door, along a passage, down a staircase much smaller than the one we had come up by, through the kitchen, into a vivid conservatory where four people sat round a crowded tabletop.
‘Now this is your sister, Miss Ursula,’ said Mrs Daltrey, gesturing towards the girl, soft and sleepier in white, who smiled, ‘and this is Mister Gregory’ — that dark, thin-faced boy who turned and gazed at me with stolen eyes.
So this is how the days start.
My big cheap alarm clock, invariably set for 7.55, is placed on the window-sill at the far end of my room. When I sleep at all — as opposed to simply lying in bed all night, gagging and flashing with booze and nerves — I do so with a cloying, musty, vascular heaviness (I die a little), and if the clock is positioned within my reach I’ll just lean over, slap off the alarm and burrow back into unconsciousness. This used to happen so often, and used to make me feel so incredibly insecure at work, that I took to placing the tinny round bomb under the cocked lid of my record-player (for extra resonance) with nastily worded notes by it saying things like FUCKING GET UP or GET UP, YOU FUCK, necessitating a hot-eyed stumble across the room; usually, though, I would merely stumble back to bed again, to rise clogged and guilty at 10. For an experimental period I fell into the habit of placing various obstacles in my path, obstacles intended to jolt and scare me awake with sudden noise and stubbed pain, only to weave obliviously through the tripwires, angled chairs and upended wastepaper-baskets, press the clock’s quivering nipple, and weavingly return to the moist warmth of the sheets. I hate sleep, anyway (and wish to Christ I didn’t dream so much). I don’t know why I still bother with the stuff. Anything can happen when you’re asleep. Sleep just pulls the wool over your eyes.
Now I get out of bed as if someone were trying to keep me there, and stand all shocked and tonto before the gingerly opened window. It takes cold air, will and time. It takes, for instance, at least a minute of gentle panting and gasped obscenities before I am able to storm the bathroom (via the little dressing-room in between, where Gregory’s clothes hang on the walls like mosaics) and get to work on reclaiming my face. Before they are prepared to open, my eyes demand ninety seconds with a wet sponge, and a further gook-rinse with plain water until such time as they regain their rather suspect cheer (I get lots of sleepy, even when I don’t sleep. To look at the basin, you’d think I had spent a day at the seaside). Then, too, my mouth will put up with no less than three minutes of brush and gargle if its dry paving of dust is ev
er to retreat, my nose a furlong of lavatory paper if the airways are ever to open. The corralling of my face lifts the seven veils of the daily hangover (why do I drink so much now? I never used to. I want to be drunk all the hours there are. I expect I drink so much simply because I’m losing my bottle. I used to smoke hash, too. I don’t any more. It makes me feel tonto. Unless of course I’m drunk. I do then): in a heat haze of peeled and gonging crapulence I go back to my room and insert my body among items of bristly clothing.
On account of the perverse design of the flat we live in (it’s meant for someone flash living alone, or someone flash plus his girl), the trip to the kitchen takes me through Gregory’s room, within a couple of feet of his bed. Quite often, he brings it about that there is someone else in there with him (never a boy, though. Why not? I’m glad. I don’t like queers. I don’t like them, which I suppose means I’m queer). This morning, at the far side of Gregory’s slender torso, there is a lot of brown hair and a light, intermittent truffling sound; and, as usual, maximum de-proximity between their bodies has been established, with Greg’s narrow face bent to one side in that familiar expression, askance, unfriendly, replete and disgusted in sleep. I want to shout with pain and pull the world apart, but I just vaguely peek in the direction of the girl’s breasts (I’ve seen a couple every now and then: it’s the most sex I’ve had for months), then carefully turn the squeaky kitchen doorknob. I am sincerely terrified of waking Gregory, despite my intense envy and disapproval of his freedom to rise as late as 9 or 9.30. (He might chuck me out. Could he? Would they let him?) So I creep downstairs with a big mug of instant coffee and sit at my desk drinking it and smoking lots of cigarettes. I pour the dead ashtrays into the wastepaper basket. (The wastepaper basket is one of the Bad Things about my life at the moment. I haven’t emptied it for several weeks. I daren’t. I just compress the rubbish even further. One of these days it’s going to get up and walk out of here all by itself.) I make a last visit to the bathroom to pee and adjust my hair, then it’s the streets.
We live in Bayswater — district of the transients. Nearly everywhere is a hotel now; their porches teem like Foreign Legion garrisons; a fucked-up Arab comes here and is an automatic success. (The local boys are taking over, too. They work the streets, roping off the bits they want. They’re winning. I feel that I could join them if I could just wire my nerves up tight.) But I can’t. I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside. I hate this daily ten-minute walk, along the outlines of the cold squares, past dark shopfronts where cats claw at the window panes, then into the tingling strip of Queensway, through shuddering traffic and the sweet smell of yesterday’s trash. I look at girls, of course, watch aeroplanes (take me to America), buy a paper and lots more cigarettes on the way, but I don’t think I’m convincing anyone by all this. No one senses my presence; they walk on by (you might pass me one of these days; you wouldn’t know it. Why should you?). At kiosks and stalls of which I am an abjectly faithful patron I attract not the slightest notice — never mind my identical good mornings and wellenunciated demands for goods. The huge, exhausted newspaperman who sells me my Guardian (and who has a smile and a hello for virtually everyone else, I see) never returns my greeting when I give him the exact money and will stare at me with sick hatred should I offer him a trembling one-pound note. Underground officials throw me a knowing glance as they dispense a ticket or check it over at the entrance gate, but it isn’t standard, all this. Sometimes I will turn, halfway along the stone corridor, to see that I am being followed by curious and unfriendly eyes. And once I’m down there, down in the streets of the earth, and the train bursts angrily out of its hole, and I try to join the people stacked inside — I keep expecting them to make some spontaneous gesture of protest, hardening their van to keep me out. (This can’t be alienation, can it? I want to belong. I’m dying to belong.)
At the other end of my journey a relatively small-time ordeal awaits: I have to call in to buy my sealed carton of tea at Dino’s, a little Italian-run café in the bowels of Holborn Viaduct. Dino himself, a foul-tempered ted with a great glistening quiff, is far too grand these days to prepare any dish less specialized than a Bovril-toast or a tomato-takeaway, so the quotidian hot-drink commerce falls to the old (British) dog and incompetent, Phyllis. Phyl, who is incredibly slow and bad at her job, goes on as if she’s fucking most of the people she sells things to. ‘Tea, Frank?’ and ‘That’s Ron’s orange’ and ‘Your coffee-no, Eddie’ — even girls get a smile and a fruity good-morning, and complete strangers, people who have come into the café not to buy things, not to give her and Dino money in exchange for goods, but just to ask the bloody way, will frequently be blessed by a ‘dear,’ a ‘love’ or a ‘darling’. She has never spoken to me in my life — and once, when the old cow was dithering with the plastic cups and I tentatively called her ‘Phyl’ (everyone else does), she gave me a look of such startling dislike that for a week I had to go all the way to the taxi-drivers’ sandwich bar in King Street. (I say the words ‘thank you’ five times a morning in places like these. Thank you for letting me in, thank you for acknowledging my presence, thank you for taking my order, thank you for taking my money, thank you for giving me change. The other day, in London’s Paddington station, I said the words ‘thank you’ to a hot-drinks machine. To a hot-drinks machine: it gave me a hot drink and I said, why ‘thank you’. This constitutes another Bad Thing that has happened to me recently. I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going tonto.) Approximately the same treatment is accorded me by the whiskered doorman of Masters House, by its normally talkative and vivacious liftman, and by the tarty chars who tense on all fours in the carbolic vestibules.
Once inside, I begin to feel much, much better. Because nearly everyone here is as fucked up as I am.
I do a job. That’s what I do. (Most people do them. Do you do one? It’s what nearly everybody does.) For a while, after the school bit of my life was over, I bummed around (now where did I ever find the nerve to do that?), then I started to do this job. I was pleased when they gave it to me — I certainly didn’t ever want to give it back. I still am pleased, more or less. At least I won’t be a tramp, now that I’ve got it. I wonder why they let me take it away. (I think they think I’m posh.)
I don’t really know what I do here. Sometimes I want to say, ‘What do I do here — just in case people ask?’ I don’t know what I do here, but then no one really does. (This used to worry me, or surprise me anyway. No longer. When you’re young you assume everybody old knows what they’re doing. They don’t. Hardly anyone does. Hardly anyone seems at all clear on that point.) I sell things — so much is obvious. I think I buy things too. It’s all done by telephone; we talk about ‘items’. I am required to say things and to listen to things. Some of these things often strike me as possibly evasive or misleading or not quite 100 per cent true. But I shall say whatever I have to say to sell whatever it is I sell. What do I sell? Whatever it is, they pay me £50 a week for it.
We’re getting taken over — that’s for sure, also. Everyone is a bit sweaty at my work these days. We’re all having a bit of a bad time these days. It now looks as though we will be obliged (I expected this) to affiliate with the Union, regularizing staff rates of pay, holidays, office hours, luncheon vouchers, going to the lavatory, etc. In return, the office will enjoy considerable increases of salary and proportionate rationalizations of personnel.
It’s a nervous time for all of us here. This is not a bad office, but at the moment it has a bad feel. Disgruntlement hangs in the air; it hangs in the air like migraine. These are not bad men: on the contrary, they are in some ways the last of a certain type of good man. They are gentlemanly in their dealings, and have read something (whereas the people we have to talk to all day are cocksuckers, who have never read shit). They just don’t want to lose their jobs. The ones who aren’t queer or whatever invariably have kids (‘what for?’ I think again and again, seeing the extra they s
uffer). Three of us would be tramps within a week, not including me. There are no new jobs and nobody wants to go looking for them. Nobody wants to go. (And it seems that we can’t protect each other. If we were in the Union we would be able to, but you can’t get organized until you get organized.)
Who will it be? There are five people in the department and we all think it will be us. Burns, the moustachioed ex-schoolteacher, thinks it will be him. He could be right — he doesn’t seem to sell as much as I sell. I would quite like it to be Burns because he is going bald slightly slower than I am and because he eats fish at his desk during the afternoons (this can’t be good for business, I feel). Herbert, the fat ex-beatnik, who is nearly as young as I am, seems pretty well convinced it will be him. I hope it is Herbert, and am always slyly goading him to resign anyway, because he is ponderous and slow-talking (though fairly diligent), goes on about mental instability and collapse much too much, and is nearly as young as I am. Lloyd-Jackson, the urbane, pooh-poohing ex-copywriter, says he wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it were to be he. He is senior to the rest of us (deputy-Controller, in fact), but claims that a Unionized department would be unable to accommodate his urbane, pooh-poohing ways. I’m reasonably keen on it being Lloyd-Jackson, because I feel some affection for him and he is the only person here who might be cleverer than me. Wark, the mad ex-Stalinist, says he doesn’t give a shit whether it’s him or not. That’s all he’ll say about it. I crave for it to be Wark because he is a mad cunt who has recently had all his teeth pulled and I can’t bear his new mushy voice and the way his fag-ends sometimes go red and heavy in the slack corner of his mouth … No. The only people here who really don’t care about the coming rationalization are John Hain, the frightening new Controller (he came in after I was hired — not easy on the bottle either), who has fought brilliantly for Unionization all along, and Damon, the sickly office-boy, who already has a different Union to uphold his brooding, adenoidal needs.
