by Will Self
Richard was doing so much cocaine now that he never worried about getting involuntary erections; instead he worried about ever getting another erection at all.
But most disturbingly of all, the increased cocaine consumption brought with it more of what Richard termed – in order to take some of the sinister sting out of them – belles époques. These were those veridical occurrences – like the one he had had at the Sealink on the evening of Mearns's greenmail party – when he thought he saw Bell's familiar features, but then looked again to discover that it was some other cliquer who was withering at him.
Walking up Old Compton Street one grey, hungover morning, he saw Bell's broad back bent low over the public phone in the gay café on the corner of Frith Street. Richard was surprised to see the big man out this early, and as he approached the back – fashionably suited by Barries in the finest of hound's-tooth checks – he checked and rechecked, to be sure. He even worked his way around the horizon of dark brow very slowly, very carefully, as a space probe might make its way over the curvature of an alien planet, in order to be certain that he wasn't committing some awful solecism.
But it was definitely Bell. The flesh had that exact Bell shade, like the inside lip of an old Wedgwood teacup, and the black bangs arched over in exactly the right way. The hand that grasped receiver against ear even had Bell's signet ring on its fourth finger. Richard said ‘Hiyah!’ brightly, but somewhere between the ‘Hi’ and the ‘yah’ the figure on the phone turned, and as the face came into view there was an instant when two sets of features were revealed to Richard simultaneously: those of Bell, and those of someone else. Then the Bell features dissolved and he was looking straight into Trellet's face. The venal thespian expostulated, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Grabbing hold of me like that – get off!’
Richard reeled away, back into the street. His head pounded. He wasn't so much humiliated as painfully disoriented, perplexed. There was that – and there was the oppressive smell of Jicki in the air. Why was Trellet wearing the fragrance Richard associated solely with Ursula? There was no particular reason why he shouldn't, but it did seem a bizarre coincidence.
Then there was the occasion when Richard had arranged to meet Todd Reiser for some sushi in the little café in the basement of the Japanese Centre on Brewer Street. Richard was late. That morning had been one of the worst – hangover-wise – he could remember. His nose had bled when he blew it over the soapdish-sized sink in his Hornsey flat; and then he'd fainted, banging his head hard on the radiator as he went down. Richard hadn't even bothered to go into Rendezvous; he'd simply sent a ‘sick’ fax from the bureau on the corner of his road. His co-workers weren't that taken aback – they already had a slew of the things, which they'd pinned to a photograph of Richard up on the office bulletin board. Pinned to his nose, to be precise.
Cramped and bent, he had come down the narrow flight of stairs to the sushi bar. Hunched over one of the lacquered boxes of fish niblets was – Bell! But as Richard descended, and Bell's chopsticks ascended to his sculpted lips, the big man seemed to shimmer, to dissolve, like a reflection in agitated water, the transmogrification was effected that quickly. In Bell's place sat Todd Reiser, grinning facetiously.
Richard gulped, heaved. The lingering scent of Jicki was in the air, with its faintly sticky mélange of fruits and flowers. Richard said nothing, moved past Reiser and went straight to the toilet, where he had an hots d'œuvre with Pablo.
But most of the belles époques occurred at the Sealink – and occurred with a mounting rhythm. Whenever Richard ran into any of the clique members off guard, in the brasserie, the restaurant, the table-football room or either of the bars, he would see them first as Bell and only latterly as themselves. And always there was the smell of Jicki, the smell of Ursula.
Richard would have been more disturbed by all of this had it not been for the fact that he knew he was getting closer to Ursula, closer to making her his. She now allowed him to kiss her full on both cheeks when they met, and near the perfect bow of her lips when they parted. Day by day, party by party, line of coke by line of coke, Richard's mouth drew closer to Ursula's. He knew that she liked him; she made it abundantly clear. She had stopped talking of her sexual affairs in his presence – something he was grateful for. In the past she had referred to them deliberately, coldly, as if assaying the exact quantities of bile and envy she could engender in him. But now she would often back out when the clique's prattling became prurient, take Richard by the arm and draw him away.
Richard also knew he was on a slippery slope. Things at work were getting sticky. The Editor had told him flatly to buck up his attendance, and get both himself and his pages to bed earlier, or else there would be some radical downsizing of Richard's career prospects in the new year. The Editor lectured Richard quite severely, made reference to sightings of him with Bell's clique in the Sealink. ’He may be able to run through life at that kind of pace,’ he said, squinting at Richard through his absurd, pentagonal, designer spectacles, ‘but he's pulling down two hundred grand a year and filing x thousand words a week . . .’ – the pause hung in the inefficiently filtered air; Richard thought, I'm a sick, sick man, in a sick, sick building – ‘. . . and what are you for?’
Richard was, he decided, ‘for’ being tormented by Bell. Although he had come to despise Bell and everything he stood for, he couldn't stop himself sticking to the tacky man. It was getting to the point where Richard's revulsion from Bell was becoming physical as well. He no longer contemplated that massive, dense body with anything like awe or curiosity; instead it frankly disturbed him. The thought of the texture of Bell stubble, the heft of Bellflesh, the odour of Bellfluents and Bellsecretions was foul. The idea of touching the fingers that had typed all those bigoted opinions, those tendentious assertions, those unwarranted insinuations! Of pressing to one's own lips the waspish lips that had uttered such slanders, and feeling the tongue loaded with venom press against your own!
Richard dreamed this – and woke up screaming in the cold, clammy, winter predawn.
As if both to engender and to bank up this malaise, Bell's media ubiquity had never been so evident to Richard. There seemed to be more and more of the billboards advertising the phone-in show. There was one on Charing Cross Road, one in the Strand. After the one on the Euston Road – which Richard invariably passed on his undulant cab rides home at three, four and five in the morning – there was a chain of the damn things, like beacons of reminder taunting him back to Hornsey.
If Richard chanced to pick up an old copy of the Standard while on the tube, it was always folded so as to display Bell's column. This was set out in a series of snide little paragraphs such as: ‘No need to ask why the fragrant Jasmine Phillips is taking such an interest in the resident combo at Grindley's Upstairs. After all, it's a jazz band – and our Jasmine can't go for long without blowing someone's trumpet . . .’ In between each of these casual calumnies, acting as a running subhead, was the single piece of onomatopoeia ‘BONG!’. No one was ever saved by this Bell – only sacrificed to the alienation and indifference of five million commuters.
Bell's chat show was put on an extended pre-Christmas run. Every night the Minotaur sat in his plastic labyrinth of a studio and drew his ‘guests’ into querulous quadrilles. A repeat of each show was also screened the following morning, so that inattentive viewers, addicted to the remote, would find themselves breathing the Bellosphere, and jump-cutting the very fabric of space-time itself along with their thaumaturge.
Richard thought of home and going there. His father, a retired solicitor, would enjoy seeing him. They would play chess, and walk across the sodden fields to the local pub for a pint, while his stepmother put on the dinner. His father's retriever would scamper ahead, rooting in the hedgerows. His father's pipe smoke would bunch and coil in the night air. They would discuss what had happened in London fully and frankly. His father would turn out to have hidden reserves of wisdom concerning people like Bell and the things that they
did. As the first draught of real ale gushed into Richard's mouth, he would feel it bringing with it a more real, more tangible world than the febrile machinations of Bell and the clique. There would be turkey for Christmas dinner, and plenty of stuffing.
This vision came to him in the urinals beneath Notting Hill Gate, and when it cleared Richard found that he had toppled forward so that the side of his face and his shoulder were pressed against the slick jaundice of the splashback. The toilet attendant was shaking him. ‘Don't leave yer cock dangling out of yer flies ‘ere, mate,’ he advised. ‘Some cunt ‘ll have it off you an’ it'll be on sale in the Porterbeller before you can say Errol Flynn!’
Richard resolved to quit London the day after the Rendezvous office party. But before he did so he would make one last assault on Mount Ursula. If he failed
he would accept it, move on, break with Bell, turn his attention to higher things, dust off his ideals and reignite his ambition.
He phoned her in the dead hour after what would have been his lunch break, had he made it into the office that morning. ‘Ursula?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It's Richard.’
‘Richard – how nice to hear from you. Are you coming out to Kelbum's country place at the weekend? Apparently he's got some MDMA fresh from Sandoz in Switzerland, we're all going to go bacchanalian.’
‘I dunno. I thought I might go to my dad's place on Friday. Christmas you know.’
‘Yeah, yeah, you're right, I ought to think about that – ‘
‘And frankly, Ursula, I think I've had enough of Kelburn.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Ursula.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I'd like to see you before I go.’
‘I'll be in the club this evening, I'm meeting – ‘
‘Alone, Ursula, I want to see you alone.’ He could hear her breathing on the other end of the phone. He imagined the warm curvature of her breast rising and falling, pressing into its fabric mould.
Then she replied, ‘I'd like to see you alone as well, Richard.’
‘Shall we have dinner, then? On Thursday, just the two of us?’
‘Yeah, OK, pick me up from here and we'll avoid the Sealink altogether. I was meant to be having dinner with Bell and some TV producer in from LA, but they can just do without me.’
After hanging up Richard went to the gents’ toilet, locked himself into a cubicle, confronted the commode, voided himself, then sprinkled three-quarters of a gram of cocaine on top of the excreta. He prayed over this powdery, maculate offering, prayed for success with Ursula, and wagered his soul as the stake.
Three days later it was a very different Richard Hermes who rang the entryphone outside Ursula Bentley's flat. The cocaine had fallen away from him like a conning tower blown off the side of a Saturn Five. Without Pablo extending dining privileges, Richard's psyche soared. He had put on a spurt of work, tidied up his flat, renegotiated his overdraft, and telephoned both of his parents. He felt as virtuous as a nonagenarian nun, nodding away her virginal life in some closed order. He felt – somewhat paradoxically – ready for love.
They ate at the Brasserie St Quentin, opposite the Brompton Oratory. Ursula was demure to begin with, in her lunching mode. There was no talk of Bell, of the clique. Richard was nervous but steady. He acquitted himself well with the waiters and the wine list. By the time they got on to the main course (or at any rate he did – Ursula had confined herself to an entrée of Parmesan shavings atop rocket leaves, and was going for more of the same), he felt he was hitting his stride. She was laughing at his jokes, making her own conversational sallies; once or twice her knee brushed against his beneath the table.
Ursula was more beautiful than ever this evening. She was wearing a velvet variation on the little black dress, black suede high heels, and sepia-toned stockings. Richard knew they were stockings because of the seams he had followed into the Brasserie, seams he wanted to follow to their ultimate end. Her breasts rose and fell in the soft vice of the velvet bodice. Her brown locks were piled on top of her head in tawny cumulation. Her brown eyes, with their flecks of gold, contemplated him in a way he hadn't seen before; an amused, frankly sensual way.
But despite all this, it came as a profound shock to Richard when, after he had ordered their coffee, she leant forward, exposing her breasts to him, cupped her slim hand over his, and said, ‘Let's not have a digestif here – I've got some brandy Bell gave me back at the flat. . .’ The odour of Jicki came off her like musk off a lioness.
Richard's hand shot up to re-summon the only recently departed waiter. ‘C-could we have the bill, please?’ he stuttered like Oliver in the workhouse.
How could he have imagined that she was rich? The flat Ursula admitted Richard to was no bigger than his own, just a large room with a kitchenette at one end and a bathroom at the other. A tall, dirty-paned window bleared out on to that cosmically awful, incarnated oxymoron: a lightwell.
There were a few obvious sticks of furniture: a collapsing sofabed, an armchair, a chest of drawers. Spilling from cupboards, tented over the arms of chairs, lying in huddles on the floor were elements of the fantastic costume she assumed in her Sealink persona: the microskirts, the scintillating body stockings, the slinky boob-tubes. A pair of tights was flung over the shade of a table lamp, although whether to mute the lighting or not, Richard could not have said.
And over all of this scene, like gunsmoke over no man's land, wafted the pungency of Jicki, so strong that Richard could almost see molecules of bergamot and lavender fizzing and boiling in the room's close atmosphere.
She got the bottle of brandy from the kitchenette. She swilled some water round in two dusty tumblers and then poured each of them four of her slim fingers. She stepped off the platform of her heels and moved across the room. She footled with some buttons on a console, and the voice of Tricky's Martine welled from a hidden speaker: ‘You sure you wanna be with me – I've nothing to give / When there's trust there'll be treats, when we funk we'll hear beats . . .’ The trip-hop tripped and hopped. Ursula put her statuesque body down on the plinth of the sofabed and patted the faded nap by her smooth haunch. Richard joined her.
To begin with he felt awkward; the jacket of his best suit nipped him under his arms; but after he took her in those arms they felt nothing but her, the massed voluptuousness of her. Then his mouth was over hers, pressuring the infinitely sweet tackiness of marinaded lips. This occurred so naturally that it seemed a wholly mutual seduction. Her tongue came into his mouth and he introduced his to hers. Grass snake twined with viper.
There was no fumbling, no awkwardness as his hands roamed over her, cupping her breast, cupping her hip, stroking the slick surfaces of her thighs.
They were lying half across the sofabed now. Her hands tugged at his waist, pushing up his shirt. They were cool – her palms – cool wavelets on the baking salt pan of his stomach. He moaned into her mouth. She moaned into his. Martine moaned to both of them. His fingers worried up the hem of her dress. He felt the brocade at the top of her stockings, and then he was home free. He couldn't believe the softness of her flesh. He couldn't believe the sensation of silk over pubic hair, over parted lips.
They divested themselves. She simply sat upright, crossed her arms in front of her, and pulled the dress over her head. Her bra and pants were ivory satin. She was a lucid wet dream sitting there right in front of him. It was as if by wanking for night after night after night, her image before him, Richard had made a spare rib – of his spare prick.
He got his trousers off his shirt off He smiled at her, but she wasn't in the mood for it, she just pulled his head back down to hers. His fingers went to her nipples, teased them, pinched them. She gasped. His hands then ranged south, pulled down the ligature of her pants. He grasped her vulva as if it was a scruff ‘Fuck me,’ she said, ‘please fuck me.’ She freed his cock. Her hands were dry ice. He groaned throatily, half rose, stripped the last leaves from her sapling body. She lay bac
k bucking and writhing. She grasped him again, guided him into her.
As soon as Richard felt himself engulfed by her, he realised that he would be able to manage at best three strokes without coming. He could feel his spunk already surging in his cock, like the effervescing fluid in some test-tube. He had to do something, to think of something to prevent the worst, most humiliating fiasco of his life. He had to damp it down, push it back down. What would serve as an instant bromide, a circuit-breaker for this electric spasm? Not his old girlfriend's homey, suety body – that was an erotic image, if not as erotic as what now lay beneath him panting, urging him on. Not his father's face creased with sincerity – although that helped some. No, it had to be something definitively unerotic, something that would transcendentally turn him off . . .
‘Fuck me!’ Ursula exhorted him. Her heels were against his buttocks, she was urging him on. ‘Fuck me!’ she squealed into the nape of his neck. Her nails tore at his exposed shoulders. Then the solution came to him, and with it the correct, crucial damper. Bell! He would think of Bell. Bell's white, domed forehead; Bell's damp, lubricious mouth; Bell's black, black hair. He would use Bell to turn himself off: to avert disaster.
And with this settled, Richard was able once more to rear upward over the prone form of Ursula, to plunge into her with renewed vigour, adamantine confidence.
Her mouth lolled open. Her eyes rolled back in ecstasis. Her hair lay in a fan about her head. Her features were transfigured . . . No, not transfigured, transforming! They were changing, being replaced by other, stronger, more brutish features. Ursula's forehead was bulging, growing whiter, she was being instantly encephalicised. And the arms that held Richard, they
