Success

by Martin Amis

  How has he made me hate him like this? Do you know? How has he landed me with this concerted, headache hate which makes me frown as if in pain when I pass him on the stairs or hear the fat-thighed swish of his cheap denim trousers, when we jockey head-on within the bathroom doorway and I go on into the land of his smells, when we sit up here together and the room slowly fills with the sound of his breath. Why do I let him roost on my life? Why don’t I swat him from my brain like the flea he is? Why do I care?

  You know why.

  There was a time when I felt very differently about Terence. Yes, I loved him — and who wouldn’t have? Trite though the sufferings of his early life seemed, they had reality enough; when he first came to our house they still clung to him like sad heavy clothes, and he never quite shook them off. Poor Terence, poor Terence, my dear old friend. I see you running from the school bus in tears, clutching your satchel to your side as if it were some worthless extension of your body to which you had by now grown miserably used. I see you being led back to your room by servants at midnight, your face exhausted by the staying-power of your dreams. I see you kneeling on the curved lawn, your body bent over with the strain of the past and your own colossal efforts to expunge it, the grass rippling scarily all about you, the trees wringing their hands behind your back, the clouds scudding away above your head, scudding away from you and all the terrors of childhood and hell. Here is my pity, duly wettened with your brother’s tears — take it, take it.

  I naturally expected to be teaming up with a compact, urban, taut-nerved little tike: not a bit of it (one reaches for one’s Penguin Freud). Although he later turned out to be a frightful thief and sneak, Terry was from the start an abject, pant-wetting supplicant of the most token forms of authority. All the spirit, all the licence of childhood, seemed to have been confiscated from his imagination before he knew what childhood was, before he saw it couldn’t last. There I would be — up on a glass-spiked wall stealing apples, out on the Green baiting the village yobs, off on my ten-gear racing-bike pursued by scandalized schoolgirls — and there would be Terence, uncertain, retreating, distressed that sudden possibilities had opened up in the world of harm about him. While I tossed hissing cherry-bombs in the air, flicked them through the letterboxes of the disadvantaged and distraught, or buried them in soft dog-messes beside scrubbed and splendid cars, Terence would be off behind some wall or tree, his wrinkled eyes clenched shut, his hands held flat over his ears as if to keep his whole head from flying apart. While I, standing tall on private property, rained splintery death on neighbouring greenhouses and conservatories, he would look on in the posture of one cocked for flight; and while I laughingly lingered in the lane to relish the fury of gardener or housewife, away Terence would scramble to the fields, and one would then have the tedious job of coaxing him out of some ditch where he cowered and blinked. Curious, inconsequential things spooked him: parkies, too-tall buildings, dressing up, boarded shopfronts, any sudden noise or movement. Curious, inconsequential things steadied him and made him feel at peace: small rooms, buses, very old people, policemen …

  Whereas I stole with care, precision and superbly classy daring — from shops, from institutions, from enemies — the young Terence’s thefts were grubby, doomed and exclusively domestic. With him, plainly, it was all part of some bungling anal compulsion, quite at odds with the expressive chutzpah of my own romantic capers (in several ways I think I’m still a victim of Terry’s potty-training). I remember one particularly uproarious bit of banditry involving a rather fine Cellini salt-cellar which Terence the Menace scooped into his hot pocket soon after I had returned from Repworth, my expensive prep school, for the Christmas holidays. Instantly the disappearance of the piece was established, the culprit wearily agreed upon to be Terence, and a servant sent to get the boy and bring him forthwith to the Ridings, sternly arrayed in the library, wondering about some vague form of punishment — and all trying like mad to keep straight faces. But wait: the larval Moriarty had gone into hiding! We undertook a search of the house and quickly cornered Public Enemy Number One in the north attics, where he had crawled beneath the chassis of a warped bed. I was the first to discover him and raise the cry. His explosive confession and bawled apologies soon had us all in stitches.

  Of the many singular and disconcerting things about my foster-brother — his graphic sense of his own inadequacies, his dreary obsession with psychological weather, his resentful craving for approval and affection, the way his nature seems to vulgarize even the very real horrors that shaped it — I immediately settled on one trait as being absolutely fundamental to his make-up. His humour was, from the start, always ironic. Ironic — never gay, fantastic, mirthful, relieved, outrageous: but ironic. (Not that he was ever actually funny, mind you.) ‘My shoes, they’re too tight — they hurt more every day,’ I said one morning. ‘Growing pains,’ Terence murmured. Once he and I managed to shirk some Sunday School outing and Mama self-righteously made us go and visit a retired nanny of mine in the village. ‘Well, what do you expect?’ he said as I grizzled all the way there: ‘This isn’t a Sunday School outing, you know.’ Allied to that, I assume, was his instinctive and unthinking fidelity to truth, as if to lie were to guarantee one’s personal cubicle in hell. Whereas I made no secret of my love of fabrication, my unquenchable thirst for falsehood, the truth would come blurting out of his mouth, no matter the circumstances, no matter the cost. On the few occasions when veracity would have been actually suicidal as well as morbidly perverse, adrenalin-heavy fibs crept from him like persecuted nomads, and his eyes became woebegone and doomed. He never could lie. No one believed him. This was yet another sickly precocity in the denatured world that took the place of his boyhood.

  Who stole it from him? Somebody did. Or he gave it away. While you and I, the children, pushed off into the sea, into the thunder and the sunshine, he remained a melancholy, beckoning figure on the shore, lost in the abrasive hiss of shingles. There you are, Terence — I assimilate your past, its pathos and its fears. But now your past is of no use to you or to anyone, a hindrance, second-hand, trash; your pathos is an unmanly and demeaning thing, mawkish, banal and sour. It is why you have no friends or anyone who would protect you; it is why you will never be good at your job or anything else you try to do; it is why you’re so neurotic, so very nearly mad; it is why your hair falls out and your teeth die; it is compounded of self-pity, self-disgust and self-love, and it is why nobody likes you.

  Moreover: 1. His messiness. A common enough sight, the sedentary Terry poking a cigarette out into a quite untarnished ashtray. Where can all the ash-droppings be? On the floor, on the chair, in his lap, hair, ears? 2. What you might call the flexibility of his personal hygiene. He scums up the bath no more than two or three times a week — though always, hilariously, on Fridays. I’m pretty certain he smells. Witness, if you please, the shattering pong from his room. 3. His climbing alcoholism. The drinks I don’t mind having about the place include champagne, Tio Pepe, the lighter liqueurs and certain costly wines. And what is my flat cluttered up with? Beer, disgustingly cheap plonk, ‘barley wines’, domestic sherry, cut-price spirits — and Terence himself, boring, burping, blundering, baying. 4. His insolent sloth. He’s the one who’s forever preparing those plastic snacks — I always eat out — but does he ever clear up his mired tins and splayed cutlery? He’s the one with rotting clothes, caked boots, and dandruff, but does he ever wield the hoover? (And imagine, too, my startled revulsion when an item of his chaotic laundry invades the pristine galaxy of my own.) 5. His vile drugs. As an aficionado of hashish — which he (wouldn’t you know?) calls ‘shit’ — rank and incriminating odours are in perpetual flux from his room, which is itself a Hades of resin-scrapings, twisted cigarette-papers and nicotine-moist tubelets of cardboard. (The drugs I like are cocaine and mandrax — both far too expensive for Terry.) 6. His presence, the fact of it, the continuing fact of it.

  Why doesn’t he just get out. Get out. Get out, Terry. Get out of my
room, get out of my flat, get out of my town, get out of my world, get out of my life and never come back again.

  5: May

  (i) Perhaps there is a solid bottom to

  my life beneath which I will never

  be allowed to fall — TERRY

  Summer is well and truly on its way, which means I’ve been an adult for almost two years now. And for the first time it’s all starting to look faintly possible. Waking early in my northbound bed, I smoke cigarettes and watch the morning shadows rearrange themselves across the rooftops. In the evenings I sit and read and drink at my desk until the dregs of the day have been tapped from the room. Then, sometimes, I go out for a walk, last thing, to watch the foreigners. Yes, I think, I can cope with a certain amount more of this — not much more, maybe, but more. Even the rush-hour streets look purposeful nowadays; everyone willingly connives at this seasonal trick the world has of seeming to start all over again.

  Last Saturday morning I was at the street market in the Portobello Road, in search of a cheap electric kettle for my room (Gregory bitches when I use the kitchen early. He says he needs his sleep. Big deal. Who doesn’t? I even need mine). That fucked-up hippie I’ve seen about the place was there too. He stood by my side at the tinker’s stall with two roped suitcases in his hands. Did they buy tools? he asked the scarved gyppo behind the barrow. No, they never bought tools. Never. Some sort of dehydrated protest tottered from the fucked-up hippie; his chapped lips were stained with flecks of vomit and undigested food (and I thought my hangovers were bad). He wandered off in his damp overcoat down the crowded streets, my age, another whole shelf of his life just given away. I thought: I am not like that, that will never happen to me. Who knows? Perhaps there is a solid bottom to my life beneath which I will never be allowed to fall. And so for the time being I no longer wonder who will protect me when I am poor and bald and mad.

  ‘Here, I’ll tell you what you want to do,’ said Mr Stanley Veale, the Union Regional Secretary, in his immensely calm and sinister voice.

  ‘What do I want to do?’ I asked.

  Veale looked cursorily at Mr Godfrey Bray, the Union Regional Under-Secretary, and continued, ‘You want to become Clerk of the Chapel here.’

  ‘Why do I want to do that?’

  ‘Because you want to not get fuckin’ sacked, is one thing you want.’

  This is making me nervous. As it is I’m sitting here in my cubicle with a mouthful of chewing-gum, a fag in either nostril, a paperclip on every finger-nail (and a ruler up my bum). ‘Won’t I?’

  ‘No way. Not for three years you won’t be, until reelection, and you’ll be in line for Father then if you don’t fuck it up. That’s a long time for us here, the redundancies we got here already.’

  ‘Twenty per cent in this Region,’ said Mr Bray.

  ‘This is right, Mr Veale, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘that if we get Unionized a couple of us are going to get aimed?’

  ‘Course. At least two of your five Sellers will be aimed. Definitely. They’ve got to be aimed so the rest of you can get Union rates. If they were already in the Union they couldn’t be aimed. That’s why you want to do things for us now. Do things for us now and there’s no way you’ll get aimed when you go Union.’

  ‘Really? Does John Hain know about all this?’

  Veale laughed. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘John Hain. The Controller.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  At this point Mr Bray, who was clearly so thick that he could hardly breathe, produced a notebook from his lumpy patch-pocket and said, ‘What about training?’

  ‘… What about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Have you had any?’ said Veale.

  ‘Well, I’m sort of a trainee here.’

  ‘We know that. It says it on your form. Look: “Trainee”. Gor, he’s really brilliant, this one. I mean you don’t have to be … Keir Hardie to work that one out.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Have you received a training course in Selling?’ continued Mr Bray.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shorthand and typing, anything of that kind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Apprentice work in the provinces?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No.’ But I’ve got ginger hair and my dad killed my sis.

  ‘That’s bad,’ said Mr Bray. ‘Stanley?’

  ‘Of course it’s bad,’ said Mr Veale. He closed his wet lustrous eyes. ‘They’re all bad here — no offence, Terry. None of you here should be fuckin’ Selling. You know that. You’re keeping real Sellers out of work. You, this lot couldn’t sell a pass without having a conference about it. People you got here, makes me sick, you know? Tumblebum can pick up the phone without his ear aching, so what does he become. He becomes a Seller. That’s his profession. That’s what he does.’

  ‘Why me?’ I said.

  Mr Veale stood up. He gazed out into the alley, his albinoid but coarse features puffed by the yellowy light. ‘I come here, I got to see everybody here. I got to see the Dep. Controller, Mr Lloyd-Jackson. He sits back in his chair, you know? — he can deal with people like me, dealt with people like me all his life. Sarcastic, having a little laugh on us. He thinks we’re thinking: “Mr Lloyd-Jackson, difficult gentleman to deal with, always was.” But we’re not any more. We’re thinking: “Ooh, saucy little fucker, eh? Hullo, we got a saucy little fucker here, have we?” ’ He held his hand up to his cheek and squinted down an erect forefinger, which twitched. ‘Bang bang,’ he said. ‘Think about it. I’ll phone you.’

  I said, ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. I feel the same way, you know? These people — ’ I gestured vaguely ‘ — what do I give a shit about them.’ They won’t protect me. ‘You want rights for people who don’t have any rights. I want that as well. I’ll do all I can for us.’

  I will, too. I don’t know what it is he wants me to do yet. But whatever it is I’ll do it.

  On top of all this, I’ve managed to kick wanking, which is a great relief for me and my cock both. Now I don’t say that I’m never going to wank again (I mean, who the hell knows?); it’s just that I’ve allowed my libido to lapse into the kind of unpicked-on quiescence that it seems to be demanding of me these days. ‘Okay,’ I’ve told my cock, ‘you win.’ For the time being anyway (until I really need you). I won’t bully you any more. I won’t wake you up nights and give you a bad time. I won’t beef and moan and nag when you don’t do like I say. You go your way — me, I’ll go mine. No hard feelings.

  (No feelings at all.) But it was getting ridiculous — the recriminations, the scenes. I remembered all those wanking contests I used to have with Gregory and others when I was young. Ready? Go! It was like squeezing a pee along a tube, nothing to do with desire at all, just a thing that your body was ever-willing to do for you. Later on, of course — after you’ve had real sex — wanking becomes largely a matter of substitution, but it still has its own role, its own autonomy. (Like I always maintain, a wank is bound to be slightly disappointing if what you really want is a fuck. But it’s unbeatable if what you really want is a wank.) ‘Honestly!’ I would shout at it, ‘I don’t want a fuck, I swear. I want a wank.’ ‘You’re just saying that,’ it would reply — and of course it was absolutely right. I tried to think (as I always used to do when I wanked) about those ten or eleven strange girls who had let me go to bed with them — had let me put this bit of tendon right up inside their bodies for no other reason than that they wanted me to. Where were they all now? What had they all become? It wasn’t sexy; it was extraordinary and heartbreaking that they had left me so far behind. I could remember their bodies — I could remember what each one’s face, tits and cunt had been like; but I couldn’t remember, couldn’t even lyingly imagine, why they had wanted me enough to let me do that to them. (They won’t any longer. I know. I checked.) And it was sad like sad sex is sad — all that as well. Naturally, I gave pornography a whirl, gave pornography a pretty thorough outing (in a consultative capacity, as i
t were). I spent practically half my wages on nude magazines. I went to bed in a great glistening sea of those law-breaking bestiaries. But who were all these people? I don’t know them, they don’t like me, we won’t meet, that won’t work. Plus I couldn’t get a bonk, which didn’t help.

  Do I sound at all steadier? Probably not, but I feel it. For the first time in months — for the first time since that day when all the women on the planet got together and made a rule never to fuck me, and all the men gathered somewhere else to see if they could make me a tramp — I feel that I’ve stopped sliding, found a toe-hold on the last rung, on the last patch of briars before fuck-up gulch.

  I think Jan is going to go to bed with me. Now I know that sounds rash, I know I’ll probably regret ever having said it, but I think Jan is going to go to bed with me.

  Until last week, progress was being made at more or less the usual rate (i.e., hardly at all, hardly any progress), with me as relentlessly considerate and generous as ever — and as awkward, and as ineffectual — and with Jan showing me no more, really, than a single facet of her sunny and straightforward nature. Obliquely but often did I attempt to gouge some past trauma or present misery out of her (some item that the Fear and Loathing Kid could plausibly be impressive about), yet it soon became clear that her life was disastrously free of neurotic content — got on with her parents, no particular worries about boys it seemed, the job would do for a while, she just wanted a bit of fun. Well, fun is hardly what I was brought here to give people. Fun I’m not — that much is certain. What am I then? What have I got going for myself? I don’t know, but such things must have been quietly intruding on my thoughts last Wednesday evening, when this extraordinary scene took place.