by Martin Amis
As I walked back from the Underground that night — briefcase, umbrella (you’d carry one if you had my hair) — I saw the fucked-up hippie again. I saw him by the backdoor dump of The Intrepid Fox, slumped like a rubbish-bag himself among the shiny black sacks and ripped cardboard boxes. I crossed the road and stood near him. He wore an overcoat, strapped on with various belts. Obviously he dressed for the cold of night and just sweated helplessly through the day. His hair was in thick sloping handfuls here and there about his head. He was muttering; his hands flapped idly on the tarmac. I went over.
‘Do you want a cigarette?’
‘I don’t beg from no cunt.’
‘Who’s begging?’ I asked, impressed. ‘I’m offering to give you one.’
‘I don’t take charity from no cunt.’
‘How do you know I’m a cunt? We’ve only just met.’
‘Cunt.’
‘… How the hell did you get fucked up like this? How the hell did you get so fucked up so soon?’
‘Cos I hate all that shit there.’
‘Oh come on. All what shit where?’
‘All you shit. All you cunt.’
‘Me? I’m practically as wrecked as you are. I’m practically a tramp myself.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘What am I then?’
‘You’re just a shit.’ He laughed. ‘The biggest shit of all.’
‘Listen, do you want some booze, or some turps or some after-shave or whatever the hell it is you drink? I’ll give you a couple of quid if you want.’
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
‘Well fuck you too.’
Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps I am a shit — a big one too. I must say, it’s all rather flattering.
Ursula moved in at the end of last week.
I helped. We got all her stuff out of the hostel and brought it round here in a taxi. It was a cool bright sabbath, clean after a night of rain, and it seemed to be one of those days when fresh cycles loom ambivalently in the air. We passed garden squares, in which lone couples played tennis under the shadows and men wearing whiter whites, standing out in the sun, wondered about a cricket match. Even Queensway appeared to have itself under control, as the taxi made its stertorous way down the strip, and the aeroplanes looked completely relaxed and at home in the featureless sky. Ursula paid, the young cabbie admiring her still-bandaged wrists.
Ursula attempted to give me a hand with her things, tripping and staggering under ridiculously tiny loads, but it was left to the beefy Terence to make three solo journeys in the lift. The ‘dressing-room’, which hardly gives you time to blink between me and the bathroom, merely a bit of passage, hardly a room at all, seemed about right for Ursula, with its scaled-down cot, narrow window-sill, and twenty-four square feet of carpet.
‘I’ve always quite liked this room,’ she said, unpacking one of her chaotic suitcases.
I gazed on laconically from my desk next door, hardly wondering at all how often I’d get to see her in the nude, or what bits of her in the nude I’d get to see.
‘Where’s Gregory?’ she asked, but with very little emphasis.
‘Off at that old bumboy’s, Torka’s.’
‘Mm. Why does he go there so much?’
‘Because he’s a queer.’
She took me to lunch at the three-time-losers’ wine bar off Westbourne Grove, a long low dark place full of Sunday desperadoes. I used to go there myself quite a bit, and I was pleased to note the looks of surprised — even slightly betrayed — resentment on the faces of the cravated sportscar-drivers and big-bummed hearties who precariously teamed up there for their weekly lunch. I held Ursula’s arm, making some show of this courtesy, and felt fairly flash and shitty throughout the meal of soft quiche, dry salad, thin meat and old cheese. I insisted on paying for the wine, of which we had two bottles, of which she had two glasses.
Afterwards, under the leering sun, we walked up into Queensway, in search of something easy to take back for dinner. We successfully bought a couple of plastic pies, but I could feel Ursula growing troubled and skittish with all the heat and the filth and the boogies, so we went back to the flat and spent the leavings of the afternoon in Gregory’s room (it’s all right to, I reason, with a blood-relation there. For a while I tried to make him paranoid of me. I don’t think it worked. Anyway, it was too tiring for the bottle, and I’m paranoid of him again now), flapping through the newspapers and watching his TV. At seven or so, Gregory returned. He looked more fatigued and disaffected than I had ever seen him look before (and very nice it was too), making no special response to Ursula’s presence. He was suddenly quite unintimidating — and when he said a few words about wanting a nap, it seemed the most natural and unanxious thing in the world for Ursula and me to return together to our rooms below. I calmly relate that we there played records and talked until bedtime (we even forgot the pies). I used the bathroom first: when I came out she was sitting on her bed, inches away, her legs crossed like a squaw, wearing a light-grey nightdress, whose folds shone wispily in the overhead light. She reached up, I leaned down, she kissed me on the cheek.
‘Why did you do it, by the way? Just for the record.’
‘It was those voices.’
‘Which voices?’
‘Oh, the ones in my head.’
‘What, they sort of told you to?’
‘No, they never say anything. They just wouldn’t go away.’
‘Do you still hear them?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Well don’t do it again, for Christ’s sake. And if the voices start going on at you, just come and tell me about it.’
‘And what will you do?’
‘I’ll tell them to shut the fuck up.’
‘They won’t listen.’
‘Oh yes they will.’
‘Good night, Ginger. Oh, I’m not supposed to call you Ginger any more, am I?’
‘No, you’re not. Good night. Not any more.’
Ursula moving in here with us has proved to be a bonus in all kinds of ways. One particularly heartening thing, of course, is that she is fucked up, clearly very fucked up indeed, much much more fucked up than I am for instance, possibly (who knows?) totally fucked up for ever, decisively fucked up for good; no matter how fucked up I get, she will always be that little bit more fucked up than I am: it is a virtual certainty that I will never be able to get quite as fucked up as she is fucked up already. This is good. Ursula is, in addition, fucked up in a way radically at odds with the way in which I am fucked up. Everything observable about me is fucked up — my face is fucked up, my body is fucked up, my hair is fucked up, my cock is fucked up, my family is all fucked up. Nothing observable about Ursula, on the other hand, is in the slightest bit fucked up: looks, ability, background, advantages — all this is, on the contrary, notably un-fucked up. And yet Ursula, Ursula Riding, my foster-sister, is fucked up. She is fucked up. This is also good.
Why is it good? Remember that day at school when you were found out, caught doing whatever it was they caught you doing … caught stealing the dinner-money after the boys had hung their jackets up for handicraft, caught flobbing on the classroom door-handle (so that the incoming master would, ideally, arrive with his soiled hand aloft in ecstatic disgust), caught scrawling cloacal obscenities in the Fat Boy’s Letts Pupils’ Diary (April 21st: Got spunk up tonight; April 22nd: Fucked my sister again today; April 23rd: Stole another £5 from Mum), when you got found out, remember how you longed for only one thing, not for release, not even for innocence, as you stood there solitary and foul at the head of the room while behind you your classmates, enjoying the disruption as you too would enjoy it, were lined up in rows, seeming to nod unanimous mocking assent to all the horrors of schooldays and death? Remember how you longed just for a guilty friend, someone like yourself, a partner in grime, a sharer of your shame? Remember that.
We have a rule now, Ursula and I, that whenever she starts to suffer from anxiety without an object, or whene
ver she says something that has nothing to do with anything anyone else has said recently, or whenever she suggests doing something impossible or incoherent or generally crappy, or whenever she locks herself in the bathroom and mumbles fanciful excuses through the door, or whenever she bursts into tears for no good reason that I can see — then one or other of us enunciates that word tonto. I say, warningly, ‘Tonto’, or she says, humbly, ‘Tonto’, or we both chant ‘Tonto!’, and this seems to negotiate the delicate leap over the distance between how she sees things and how things actually are. To me that distance is a rut which any frog could straddle: I see things the way they are, and they are horrible. I live with this. She doesn’t see things the way they are, and they are still horrible. But — ‘Tonto’, I whisper warningly, and at once they are horrible no longer.
Can I help? Do I care? I don’t really care if I help, do I, obviously? And how can I help if I don’t really care? (I can’t help not caring, but that’s another matter.) I unfurtively admit that most of the time it fills me only with gloating irritation to see such fuddled, helpless solipsism (yes, act like an idiot. That’s my girl, I think). My sister was neither rich nor pretty and she behaved with perfect normality right up to and including the moment she died — reacted, indeed, with exemplary sanity to the surely very tonto experience of getting murdered: it didn’t seem to alienate her. Whereas it doesn’t take shit to alienate Ursula. Any bugger can alienate Ursula. Ivied cemeteries are stacked with people you can blame. I just think she’s mad.
I saw her mad tits the other night. They are mad but nice, like her and unlike me. Come on, I’m going under too. Remember. Forgive, forgive.
(ii) The world is going bad on
us. I’m having nothing to do
with it — GREGORY
July too hot, smelly and boring to merit much comment from me.
The world is heating up. I’ve seen three oldsters drop down dead already this month — just flicking over flat in the street for ever. It used to be the winter they were afraid of: now it’s the summer that finds them out. The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.
Notes in an artist’s yearbook …
Tuesday the 7th. Getting bored with the gallery. Unacceptably fraught and humid-breathed scene with Mrs Styles, she of the fat freckly arms, copiously fringed upper lip and embarrassing bald patch. Trim Jason had come over all nauseous after lunch (with my clever little flu, I trust), and had gone home, burping greenly, in his hilarious new Homburg. I lay back, as nubile as ever, on the sofa in their hot office, my sleeves rolled up after some strenuous picture-packing, being fed tea and expensive Chocolate Viennas by the matronly Odette. Was wearing my deceptive new jeans, the ones that look like incredibly smart and well-pressed cords (with sewn-on crease. I know, but these really work. Trust me). Gallery completely deserted, it being the final trickling lees of the interior decorator’s unsaleable lino designs. Abruptly, and with a loud shimmy of her stockinged colossi, stale Styles leaves her chair, returning half a minute later to announce that she’s just shut up shop! ‘But look here [you fat fool],’ I cried, ‘I haven’t finished my tea and biscuits yet.’ Don’t worry, says she, making a grab for my cup, you shall have all the tea you — and with a harsh bark of self-reproach she had upended the whole scalding mess over my brand-new jeans! (Oh, I see it now, I see it all now, you bungling hag.) In crisp, act-now terms, she instructed me to ‘slip out’ of my wrecked trousers, and, through concern for the fragile material, I hastily concurred. — Cut to the jockey-panted Gregory, reclining on the sofa in appalled petrification, as Mrs Odette Styles (36 yrs) kneels before him, caressing in murmurs the roots of his spread legs, and staring — with what she no doubt thought of as an hypnotic tug — at his sprawled manhood! Well, I simply had to smack her hand away, cross my arms and my legs in one deft wriggle, and talk wildly on as if nothing had happened. The huffy hen stalked off home, without a goodnight and, moreover, without doing anything about my £25 jeans. Had a tiresome fifteen minutes with soap and nail-brush downstairs and felt like some lunatic or incontinent drunk on the underground train home. Went to the Garage of Thieves. A swarthy yob looked up from cleaning his fingernails with a spanner to say that it would take six days and sixty pounds before he could cure my delicate green car. Asked the brute to Torka’s, as a good mean joke.
Sunday the 19th. Getting bored with Torka’s. Spent last night there, always a mistake. It’s just that he’s going in for ruffian-trade these days, which isn’t my cup of tequila at all. Adrian has been given the push at last (serve him right, I agree), but has been grimly replaced by a cuboid, power-packed little hoodlum called ‘Keith’! With girlish bell-bottoms swathing his ridiculously truncated legs, a purple T-shirt painted on to his brutal, slab-titted chest, coarse complexion and coarse bouffanted blond hair, tiny vicious eyes and a fur-lined stripe of a mouth, why, I find Keith about as attractive as I find Terence Service (and a lot less manipulable). Perhaps he’s frightfully good at beating Torka up, or something. And as for Keith’s crew, which looms and glowers all over the apartment: loutish, sidling Norman, the poolsharp with the ‘quick’ Zodiac and even quicker temper; Dilly-boy Derek, the near-toothless Scot who claims to have the mightiest member in the metrop (it is enormous, if shockingly scarred); petulant, ever-naked Yvette, who has the failed eyes of all dead blondes, plus an — I concede — extraordinary tongue; huge Hugo (pronounced you-go), who paces the floor in his eighteen-inch platforms recounting unbelievably evil tales of sexual humiliation and GBH; tiny Tessa, a would-be nymphet of at least fifteen to whom you can, admittedly, do whatever the hell you like (you can kill her if you like — it wouldn’t bother her); wondering, hippyish, soft-faced Jerry, an Aries, a prose-poet, a dreamer … And there are more where they came from … All right — on a Saturday evening, wheedled by the right wines, coaxed by the correct stimulants, I too can take some pleasure in the honest heaving stink of these crude, troglodytic people (though the threat of disease is a pervasive nightmare), with their mean and dangerous bodies, their rather touching views on personal hygiene, the callow lasciviousness of their caresses and, above all, their immense talent for self-preservation. But the next morning! Ah for the olden days — a sleepy, bemused yet still-gorgeous confluence of half-naked bodies in the warm pined kitchen, toast and crispy bacon and a great cauldron of real coffee, all three baths thundering to their marble brims; while Torka fondly prepares the Bullshots and Bloody Ivans he knows I like, we skim the better Sundays, cackling at the clowns in the review sections, and talk of Proust, of Cavafy, of Antonio Machado — before streaking off in our cars to Thor’s and its slow, slow Sunday lunch. And now? I awoke this morning to the damp smell of cabbage (what’s this? a gravy brunch?), a smell akin to the tang of poverty and failure sometimes discernible in Terence’s undersea quarters, a smell of cheap sad clothes and given-up-on bodies. I find I have slept in the smallest bedroom — the one formerly reserved for the most scorched and peed-on catamite — find also, to my horror, that I am sleeping with dreamy Jerry, one-up one-down, and that his fat dreamy feet are quivering gently on the pillow beside my head (what mangled cauchemars might they have witnessed?). Stumbling into a bathroom, I surprise the vested, spotty-backed Hugo, complacently shaving before the wide swing of the looking-glass with Torka’s drum razor. ‘Cheers,’ he tells me. Radio One is having hysterics in the kitchen, and in the drawing-room blonde Yvette is clothed only by The People, with Derek the Denture still asleep in his underpants on the chesterfield beside her. Then unsmiling Keith appeared, wearing the spare kaftan I once used to wear, followed by the hunched Torka, devoted and bruised. — Luckily Susannah turns up and I whisk her off for a stirringly pessimistic lunch at Paupers’. Time of changes. Either Keith and his kind go, or Gregory does.
Friday the 24th. Getting bored, too, in a way, you know, with how things seem to be turning out in my flat, now that Ursula is here, and what with Terence still slightly fizzy (i.e., in a state of helpless, purple-gummed paranoia) about that absurd tart of his, June. My flat is an eldest son’s flat: it is designed for one person: it is designed for me. The spacious drawing-room, with its high knobbly cornice, serried bookcases, and white blaze of window, was, in days of yore, an ample stage upon which the young Mr Ridings could muse and wander, wander and muse … These days my civilized eyrie appears to have gone the way of the rest of the neighbourhood — a teeming subcontinent of alien voices, alien clothes, alien needs. Ursula will leave everything all over the place, and Terence, who is virtually a tramp these days anyhow, clearly feels that if a Riding can be untidy, you just watch a Service. Scenes of Rabelaisian squalor are commonplace now on the ground floor, and it takes a clear head and a strong stomach to forge one’s way through that jangling rag-and-bone shop to the blighted bathroom. Ursula, mind you, is herself quite prettily installed in the little dressing-room: normally I shouldn’t mind in the least her powdery pandemonium of discarded dresses and unrecycled laundry, her rockpools of jewels and bombsite necropoli of make-up. There’s just something promiscuous and infra dig. about my sister’s girlish, patrician (i.e., essentially maid-less) disarray mingling with Terence’s apathetic slobbery: her used stockings are sandwiched in the wastepaper-basket by Terence’s beer-bottles and pin-ups; his splayed, pyorrhoeac toothbrush and ginge-fleeced comb flank her lipstick tubes and hair clips. They have, moreover, got a definite little community going on down there, often pooling resources for take-home snacks from Queensway and brewing up hot drinks on that electric kettle I forced Terence to buy. I sometimes feel — coming in late to deposit my coat in the large cupboard I still use in Ursula’s room — that I am the interloper; they’ll be sitting on the bed chatting, or listening to Terence’s absurd gramophone, or just pottering about, content in one another’s proximity, and I seem out of place, too glamorous, too in-demand, too far ahead of them. (Extra disorientating, this, when you reflect that from puberty onwards the young Ridings’ life had been a constant quest to evade their foster-brother, the weepy new-boy whose wrinkled socks never would stay up.) Why doesn’t she go out more? How does she fill her days? Where is her life? I’ve completed the circuit, have myself adorned the endless soirées, outings and cocktail parties of her near-coevals. She should be off to Ascot and Wimbledon and Henley, or just having those teas with her friends (where are everyone’s friends? A pity that no one’s daughters ‘come out’ any more, or rather that only yids’ daughters ‘come out’ any more). I don’t think it’s really on — is it? — that my sister should be permitted to slum in Terence’s world of cheap eateries and drab bedsitterdom, that world of contingency and failure. Shall (a) make an effort to take her out more myself, (b) get her to sneak up here sometimes at night — fun for me and symbolic rescue from below-stairs, (c) forbid Terence to have her in his room. (T. is, by the way, pretty well his docile, winded old self again. I think he has now accepted the status that was always so clearly his true one. Don’t you?)
