by Martin Amis
One night towards the end of this wet and uncompanionable March I made an early exit from Torka’s — causing a tedious furore — and betook myself home at a smart pace along the midnight streets. My hand-made car, always something of a prima donna in winter, had once again been summoned to the Garage of Thieves, and I relished not at all a late safari down the Bayswater Road and Queensway, that unpoliced, forsaken strip of cruising Mediterraneans, sick vagrants, wheeling drunks and rare taxis. Only the previous week I had witnessed a squalid and vicious scene in the overlit forecourts of the Three Square Garage on Smith Avenue corner. A stooped, intent figure was steadily clubbing another to the ground, while beside them a fat Alsatian padded nervously to and fro. Torka’s had in any case been well below par that evening. I was simply smuggled into a bedroom by a reasonably attractive, and reasonably resourceful, new couple (that was all there was, actually), emerging ninety minutes later too wearied and replete to have much patience with Adrian’s querulous reproaches. Torka himself was conducting a heated debate with some interior decorator or ballet critic in the kitchen, so I merely slipped away. (I should have gone with Kane and Skimmer on that Brighton jaunt of theirs.) I felt tired and numb, and it was cold outside in the streets. As I turned off the main road and started threading round the squares, a sour rain began to fall.
Then I saw him. The stairwell of my block has a glass wall fronting the street, thin bendy glass — it shudders when the wind is up. On the top floor, outside my penthouse, his body pressing on the rainy window, stood the squat martyred figure of my foster-brother. I halted. Slowly Terence spread his arms. He looked like an eager child, his face pushed flat against the shopfronts of night. What does he see out there? How is his life taking shape? I closed my eyes for a moment and saw him fall through the glass, spinning end over end through the dark air. I opened my eyes and he was gone. I shivered. Is there enough to keep him here? Careful, Terry, careful: please be careful you don’t break anything.
4: April
(i) Dirty boy, they’re coming to
seek you out — TERRY
Guess what? I fucked a beautiful girl the other day. (Guess what? I didn’t really. April fool.)
But listen. Don’t get any ideas — I mean, I haven’t a clue how it’s going to turn out — only I think things might be looking up.
Of late, I’ve fallen into the habit of telling myself that the reason I don’t seem to pull any girls these days is that I don’t seem to meet any girls these days. How could I, even indirectly? (I don’t happen to know any human beings. Suck on that.) There are women I’m allowed to talk to like café waitresses and bus conductresses, but that’s about it. No. I’ve never had any friends really, just as I’ve never had anything I could use against people who might hate me. I’m on my own here.
What else is there supposed to be?
Ex-girlfriends? They’ve all outgrown or forgotten me now, and I’ve simply destroyed any vestigial affection in the few hearts that once found a place for me, what with my clumsy needs and my shimmering hands. Girls in the street, randomly approached? Promising at first, though testing for the bottle — one phone number taken (came to nothing) and one invitation to the pub accepted (came to nothing) — but it obviously isn’t done much any more, (a) because most people seem to be able to fuck whoever the hell they like without resorting to it, and (b) because it’s so incredibly humiliating when you fail (three snubs running takes the spunk out of your stride; and a passer-by protectively intervened once, which was also very horrible). Girls brought back to the flat by Gregory? Well, pace whatever he may tell you, Gregory hasn’t got many friends either — except for that talentless old poof Torka, the various bumboys, cocksuckers and muffdivers who comprise his entourage, and those two upper-class cunts Kane and ‘Skimmer’: if Greg brings a girl home it’s for a brisk and fastidious coupling, and if he brings back a party I feel strictly below-stairs and don’t dare go up.
But listen. An amazing new temp has suddenly started working at the office. And I mean amazing by any standards, not just mine. The most striking thing about her, or at least one of the most striking things about her, is that she’s got, for a start, these huge tits. But they aren’t huge in any vulgar sense; they aren’t ‘high’ or ‘proud’ or anything pushy like that. In fact they’re entirely incongruous and endearing, merged as they are on to this disproportionately puny thorax, small hollow-looking waist, almost embarrassingly pert bottom, and reindeer legs. She often walks with her arms folded demurely over them, as if they oughtn’t to be there, as if she didn’t want them (I’ll have them). I think she’s got a really beautiful face. It looks at first like a hard, fashionable, affectless face, with its wide halo of tangly hennaed hair, stick-on nose, dark-daubed eyes, dimpled chin and wide but ungenerous-seeming mouth. If you go on studying her, though, which of course I go on doing all the time, you come to see many kinds of softened and soulful shapes beneath that sharp telegenic sheen. Her eyes, in particular, genuinely are violet — playful and tender-natured eyes too.
It all happened one morning last week. I was at my desk, tricked out with an unusually desperate hangover (I had even bought a tomato-takeaway as opposed to a coffee-no from Dino’s, always a bad sign) and conducting a jangled, queasy hate-talk with Wark, the mad Stalinist. His floppy bum parked on my low filing-cabinet, and with a more than averagely plastic-and-offal lilt in his mealy new voice, Wark was deploring at length the proven inability of the urbane Lloyd-Jackson to make any stand against John Hain over the coming rationalization. I was just about to agree with him when the pooh-poohing ex-copywriter himself pushed open my cubicle door and, a shapely half-smile on his neat little lips, announced,
‘Ah. Two birds with one stone — or “rationalization”, as it’s now called. We have a new temp. Now this is Geoffrey Wark … and this is Terence Service.’
And this is she: in tight jeans and loose T-shirt, slouching (her arms folded, a habit of hers, as I said), a shy scowl on her face and a short-sighted ripple between her indigo eyes.
‘And this,’ he said, ‘is Jan.’
How like Gregory he sometimes is, I thought, straightening in my chair. Wark nodded with emphasis in the direction of the doorway, then turned to gaze unflappably out of the window. What could I say that would adequately indicate my disaffection from the values here personified by Wark and the intelligent Lloyd-Jackson, my shrewd sympathy (and it wasn’t a hypocritical one, either) with the casual, more strictly functional nature of her position here, the fact that I was nice, extremely friendly, and would make a fine husband? Leaning forward with arrested gusto, I said,
‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she said, and smiled.
‘How long,’ I asked her, ‘how long do you expect to stay here?’
Jan flared her oval nostrils. ‘Weeell. A month or two.’
‘That ought to do the trick. Come along, two more to meet,’ said Lloyd-Jackson indulgently, preceding Jan through my door.
‘See you,’ I said to her.
‘Right you are,’ she said back.
‘I’ll take you through the motions in a few minutes,’ Wark damply added.
Which is how it all began. Later that same morning I strolled from my hot tube into the main office, pretending to be in search of the back-invoices to check off against the sales-sheets I had nonchalantly brought along with me — ‘Ooh, I don’t know where those are yet,’ Jan pleaded — ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ I said — and together we stood over the cardboard concertina for perhaps ninety seconds, the air about us full of zestless currents, sudden shadows and pinpoints of bright humming dust … Oh boy.
Do I dare? There’s nothing for it.
A donnish, twinkly ‘Let me take you to a place where cash can be exchanged for alcohol’? A frank yet slightly literary ‘Why not let me take you to the pub’? A casually speculative ‘Coming over The Crown’? An abruptly plebeian ‘Fancy a drink?’?
It was 5.25 precisely. Wearing a smartly cut Forties suit and purpl
e stockings (the first time we’d got a proper look at her legs), Jan was ransacking her nosebag-like reticule in the unsystematic, indeed purposeless fashion which habitually preceded her exit from the office; any moment now she would stand up, stretch and yawn, and march round the central table hooting goodbyes. Jan got on famously with the lame young permanent secretary and the old fucked-up permanent secretary, and she tended to hobnob with them briefly before flouncing off. This was her eighth day here: it was also, therefore, the eighth evening I had spent gazing at her in gingery longing from behind my half-shut door. On the previous seven occasions she had been firmly engaged in chat with her two friends, which had of course rendered any kind of direct approach utterly inconceivable (you’re not in the Underground now, you know, or in the streets. ‘You can’t have a drink? You don’t want to have a drink? Fine, fine. Well, see you all in the morning!’). On this occasion, though, Jan lingered vexedly over a seized-up powder case while Anne and Muriel backed out of the office door. They were gone. All clear. Oh no.
Any gentleman would have got up from his chair and sauntered out to Jan’s table. You yourself would have leant over and offered to attempt the recalcitrant pink cask at which Jan’s long fingers pried. The next guy would surely have taken it from her hand, clenched his jaw and turned to the girl with diffident surprise when the aromatic clam split open. No one human wouldn’t have slumped with emotion when she looked up, smiled, and cried, ‘Tarzan!’
‘Fancy a drink?’ I said.
She came. We went to The Enterprise in Fox Street, a popular, cavernous, ramshackle pub with dark marble walls and sad windows. I completed my grotesque routine of standing on tiptoe several drinkers from the bar, pound-note cocked, failing to attract the attention of the fantastically slow-moving and resentful landlord, turning to Jan every few seconds to tell her things like ‘Just be a sec’ or ‘He didn’t see me’ or ‘Christ’, until, equipped with a pint of bitter, a whisky-and-lemonade for the lady, and no change, I followed Jan through the crowd of tall suited men, established her at an advantageous cornerseat, and raced down the stairs for a frenzied pee and bald-patch adjustment before rejoining her and our drinks at the table.
‘All set?’ she asked.
And I don’t care what anybody says — I think I hit bloody good form and made a really very favourable impression. I was, quite fortuitously, wearing my best (i.e. newest) clothes, and it happened also to be one of those days when I felt I could look my face in the eye: less blanched in texture, fewer munch-scars on the lips, my hair behaving itself. Nor were my hands shaking that much — why, I lit three cigarettes for her, panting in gentle appreciation as I marked the relative staticity of the flame — and my voice was without the spastic tremolo it opts for in times of stress, shame or yearning. (As for Jan, by the way — she was a wet dream throughout.) And conversation? Well, it came and went. It came and went, but it seemed to be there.
God, it was so nice. Absurd — I felt changed almost straightaway. On the way home that night (the bridge, the Underground, the streets) I no longer stared ravenously at every girl I passed, as if their very existence were a wounding fait accompli directed at myself and the remains of my dignity. The pretty black lady who does the exit gate at Queensway, normally the theme of some jungly fantasy or other, accepted my ticket with an exchange of thankyous: I might have been anybody else, I might have been you. Turning off the main strip, I saw a couple canoodling in a dusty hotel porch and veered away in automatic repugnance and anger — until I slowed my pace, and thought about it, and wished them well. The streets themselves, which felt last week like a dead newsreel reshown nightly in my path, seemed softer and full of more varied shadows. I paused in the square, friendly leaves hurrying across my feet, and watched the bedsitter lights start to come on. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘Of course she won’t. I know, I know. But still.’
I even met Gregory in the kitchen (this is real high-society); he was looking very spruced-up and places-to-go but showed willing to linger while I poured myself a drink.
‘How’s life?’ I said.
‘Busy busy busy. How’s yours shaping up?’
‘It isn’t. Everyone’s paralysed at work still. And no one’s fucked me recently, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Didn’t you try that little one with big ears again?’
‘Gita? Yes, I did. And she didn’t want to again.’
‘Bitch. Why on earth not? Who does she think she is?’
‘Actually, I think I know why she won’t now. She’s so thick that she’s forgotten she ever fucked me in the first place.’
‘They are hell, aren’t they. What do they think is the point of them if they won’t do that?’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘Torka the town,’ he said.
‘Have a good time. Perhaps I ought to go queer like you.’
‘Thanks. Are you staying in?’
‘Yeah, I — ’ But he picked up his cape and waved. ‘Good night,’ I said.
I stayed in. I drank whisky until ten, dined on packet ham and cold baked beans, had a long swampy bath, and went to bed. Hot, exhilarating dreams of striving and crisis, a short wakeful period between five and six, more dreams, and something else in the bed while I smoked an early-morning cigarette, as if my neglected body were at last coming alive again.
That day, too, I asked her to the pub, and she came.
Another really cute ploy I’ve hit upon is this: through a tissue of hints, mild playacting, duplicity, reticence, subterfuge and lies, I have managed to give Jan the impression that I’m fucking, or used to be fucking, or at any rate have at some point definitely fucked, Ursula! Such precepts are arguable, I know, but I’ve always gone along with the view that, first, the surest guarantee of sexual success is sexual success (you can’t have one without the other and you can’t have the other without the one), and, second, that the trappings of sexual success are only fleetingly distinguishable from sexual success itself. (Third, I’m all fucked up anyway, and this can’t do me any harm. I am not a sexual success with women. I just am not. Gregory isn’t either, particularly. He’s just a success with sex.) So: the fecklessly beautiful Jan is swivelling on her swivel chair in the focal office area: leaning easily on the table by her side, his blue eyes bright, his strong arms folded, his ginger hair falling out, is the Trainee Seller, Terence Service, talking with vim and without a trace of condescension to the flower of the clerical staff — when, at exactly 12.45, in walks this other girl of mine, this chick, this broad called Ursula, whose curious, up-market good looks I allow Jan time to register as I blurt Uh-oh out of the corner of my mouth and spring up guiltily to introduce them (first names only), in confused apology, before sailing out with Urs — to buy her a large and nourishing meal. (And that’s more, by the way, than Gregory does these days. The other week, apparently, they had a very depressing half-hour together in some sandwich bar near the gallery — he wasn’t meant to stay out any longer, he said, and he even had to borrow 60p off Ursula to help pay for the lunch. Most heartening. Ought to find out the truth about that job of his.)
I suspect, anyway, that this Ursula ploy is telling soundly on young Jan, who has not once but twice questioned me about her (unjealously, alas, but with respectful interest) and has several times remarked on how ‘really pretty’ she was. (Girls always like the way Ursula looks, doubtless because she’s got no tits.) I go hurt and wistful whenever she’s mentioned. ‘Yes,’ I said yesterday, chewing on a large creased lip, ‘it’s sad that things aren’t quite … clicking between us the way they once used to.’ Jan said, ‘Oh dear.’ I gazed out of the drizzly window. ‘Yeah. But, hell, at least we’re still friends.’ (I feel tremendous when I say things like that; I feel like a mountain. It’s far and away the sexiest I’ve been all year.)
And surely Jan’s fast-escalating alcoholism must continue to hold me in good stead, must continue to be a source of true security and encouragement. Christ can that girl drink. She makes me feel virt
ually teetotal, and I’m fighting drunk, falling-down drunk, drunk out of my mind all the time these days. I now grant the full potency of the cliché, as if it were water. I’ve seen her drink three pints and four glasses of wine at lunchtime — and she’s efficient and ethereal throughout the afternoon. She can drink seven or eight whisky-and-lemonades after work without blinking — then race out of the pub like a schoolgirl to catch her train. (She lives in Barnet, with her parents, thank God. ‘Jan’ is short not for Janice or Janet, as I’d assumed, but for Jane — she’s posher than she lets on. A certain little fuck called Dave is mentioned more often than I’d like, but always in the perfect or pluperfect tense, and never except in retrospective subordinate clauses.) I’m entirely adamant about paying for every single drink she has in my company, of course — in order to nurse her guilt about not sleeping with me — and I’ve computed that I could take her to the pub twice a day for three-and-a-half months before going bankrupt. (I’m very scared about going broke, incidentally. ‘Broke don’t scare me,’ I sometimes say. But broke does. Broke scares me shitless.) It won’t be that long, though, will it? One way or the other, it can’t be that long.
Jesus, I’m mad about her. Sometimes, when she smiles at me or calls my name without looking up, I just want to burst into hot tears of gratitude. I can feel the husky saline need trying to well up out of me, trying to get away. Sometimes, when I hear her muttering to herself as she sorts through her handbag, or letting out a little grunt of effort as she shifts her heavy typewriter, I sit tight in here, my teeth bared, actually wringing my hands. Apart from anything else she’s incredibly funny, as well as inexhaustibly good-natured: for instance, she can mimic the ulcerous, monosyllabic Damon to a T, yet she’s far and away the least nasty to him of anyone in the office and even makes me hesitate before twitting him in front of the girls or obliging him to run some pointless and humiliating errand. (Everybody here loves her too, naturally. Burns hides his fish and vinegar in a desk drawer; Herbert is always bending her ear with his bullshit — fat chance he’s got; mad Wark tenderly forgives her most egregious clerical errors; and John Hain himself takes a few seconds out from sly self-advancement to admire her as she swanks this way and that.) And, oh God, her face, her eyes, that silly hair. What if I reached for her hand and she took it in hers, what if I put my arms round her shoulders and she stayed still, what if she let me kiss her … with tongues. Meet me, O Jesus, meet me — and what can her breasts possibly be like? Damn, I have to know this thing; I’d give all I own sooner than not know it. And what if, say, she let me, you know, touch them (you can see her thimble nipples when it’s cold and she’s especially prone to folding her arms in modest diagonals across her chest), touch them, just like that, then perhaps move on to — why not? — her tight stomach and dinky little weapon of a bum and oh no her (can’t bring myself to say that word any more) … would it be singed auburn like her hair or just plain black or what, and how much of it would there be, a prim wisp or a great swirling mother of a bush that teemed right over her midriff or what? — and would I get to stroke it and … yes, that’s what I’d do all right, I’d go down on her, for as long as she bloody well liked, for months, for good, I’d really set up camp down there and make bloody sure she had a great time so it wouldn’t matter that much when I didn’t get a bonk, unless of course she was particularly skilled at dealing with this sort of problem or had mastered some foreign technique or just treated me with unusual gentleness and sympathy or if she were very excited herself and … Good God, it’s never actually occurred to me before: do you think she actually wants to?
