by Martin Amis
'Science', said Slizard, in his epigrammatic style (his good colour, his busy eyes, his accountant's beard), 'is getting very good at explaining how it killed you. How it killed things. But we still don't understand dead clouds.'
Luckily I've known Slizard all my life. How else could I afford him? I always enjoyed his company, until I got sick. My father taught Slizard at NYU before he switched subjects. He used to come to the house one or two nights a week. He had long hair then. Now he has no hair at all. Only the talking beard.
Marius Appleby lives for the ritual of those morning swims, and so do I. Cornelia's breasts, apparently, are magnificent, splendid, awesome, majestic - and all the other words that mean 'big'. And we're only on page fifty-nine.
Cornelia has Afghani blood. She rides a horse like a crazed ghazi. She shaves her legs with a Bowie knife. Marius has yet to win a smile from her, a civil word. Old Kwango (bent, pocked, muttering), himself deeply roused by her, for all his years, suggests the time-honoured and locally popular strategy of rape, where a man must roughly take what he claims to be his. Marius demurs. He's watched her with her bullwhip. But he also sees the need for something butch — some act of manly valour. Oh, it's tough, with Cornelia striding about so proudly and nobly the entire time. And she seldom has a stitch on.
The weight of her head and the plumpness of her cheeks cause Kim to pout while she sleeps. Her arms are arranged in one of her Spanish-dancer positions. If you could take twenty snaps of the sleeping child and flick them in a booklet, she would perform the movements of the castanet artist, one hand aloft and curved, one hand lowered and curved also, and always symmetrical.
She stirred. Every time, now, I'm frightened she won't recognize me. People don't. People I haven't seen for three days look right through me. I myself keep going to the mirror for an update . . . Her breath was deeply charged with sleep; and she looked momentarily disgraceful, as babies can look, her face puffed, and latticed with the ephemeral scars of sleep. She focused on me, and pounded her legs -but almost at once her face formed an appeal, as if straining to tell me something, something like you wouldn't guess what's been done while you've been gone. Of course, as babies inch toward speech, and their expressions so intelligently silent, you expect the first words to penetrate, to tell you something you never knew. And what you get is stuff like floor or cat or bus. But then with a bent finger Kim pointed at a lesion on my arm and said, with clarity and conviction:
'Ouch.'
I was astounded. 'Ouch? Kim. My God. So you can talk now, can you?'
The baby had no more to add. Not for the time being. I carried her into the kitchen. Kath was elsewhere (in the bedroom). I made the formula and put a slow teat on the bottle. She cried when she saw it. She cried because she wanted it and crying was all she had. I fed her with frequent burp-stops and burp-outs. She wiggled a leg as she drank. For of course if a leg is dangling attractively, then a baby must wiggle it, must never miss the chance to wiggle it. Toward the end of the bottle I felt the warm seep-swell of her diaper. So I put the mat on the table and got ready to change her.
Then Kath intervened, appearing suddenly. 'Ah there,' she said. She took the child from my arms and the Huggy from my hand. Some mick rule here — a chill of priestcraft?
She went with the child into the living-room. I watched the baby's rolling face as it bobbed on Kath's shoulder. The astonished eyes.
'Ouch,' the baby said to me, before Kath shut the door. 'Ouch.'
' "For Galen knew that from that day forth he would always dream of she who had come to him that night in Toledo, and tousled him awake with a lover's impatience." There.' Nicola said nothing. 'Come on. It's so obviously terrible. It's not even literate. "Of she who." Of her who, for Christ's sake.' Nicola said nothing. 'The sentiment is repulsive enough. But I guess he didn't bother you with sentiment. Too busy climbing into his Beelzebub outfit.' Nicola said nothing. 'It's funny he's so bad at women. All powder-puffed and air-brushed. Without physical functions. He places them in that golden age, now alas long past. You know the one: before women went to the toilet.'
Nicola spoke. She looked at me mistily and said, 'You're wrong. His work speaks very directly to women because he idealized them so passionately. Isn't this a great theme - the struggle of the man, the warlike creature, to accommodate gentleness? Asprey is surely Lawrentian here.'
'. . . This shatters me, Nicola.' This shatters me. Because it discredits, it explodes her artistic sense. And her artistic sense is all I have to go on. 'Oh well. You must be a theatre-lover. More perversity. There's nothing there, in English anyway. Just Shakespeare, and that's that. Which is some kind of cosmic joke. As if Titian was a scene painter, or Mozart wrote movie scores. As if God just directed rep.'
I was now being a little too glib — or a little too something — for the enigmatic Miss Six. (These last sentences were in fact direct quotes from a long letter I was writing to Mark Asprey.) She left her chair and went to the table. She poured out and drank eight swallows of brandy. She looked at the black window. 'I go out walking,' she sang, 'after midnight, in the moonlight, just like we used to do. I'm always walking, after midnight. Searching for you.’
'. . . Your voice is pretty nice. I guess you sang when you did pantomime. But it's kind of a cold voice. Holds something back.'
When she sank down on the sofa beside me her legs went up about three feet in the air. Her gaze also had the caloricity of liquor. I felt I was fending it off.
'To work,' I said, and took out my notepad. 'Let me have some more on these nature rambles you take Guy on. These little love parodies — they're among the worst things you do.'
'You only have to write them up. I have to go on them. I hate walking. 1 mean, where to? It's like being in an ad. An ad for menthol cigarettes - remember? In the days of threepenny bits?" She thought for a moment and said, 'No, it's like being in an ad for love. An ad for love.'
'I still don't get it. The Guy-torture. But I'm expecting some cool twist. Oh yeah. It's about time I saw one of these videos. One of these ads for sex.'
'There aren't any. I don't keep them. I hate them.'
'How very disappointing. I take it Asprey's snaps are a little out of date. How disappointing. How am I meant to describe the delights of your body?'
She reached for her top button and said, 'I'll take all my clothes off.' She paused. She leaned closer. 'Don't you feel we could be like terrible little cousins and show each other everything. All the sticky smelly bits. Look at you. You don't fancy it, do you, in flesh and blood. Listen. I have a confession to make. I have this shameful habit. Every day I go to a bad place and do a bad thing. Well, some days I manage not to — but then the next day I might do it twice. I go to the toilet. Come on, Sam. Help me beat this thing. You be my bathroom buddy. Every day, just after breakfast, when I feel the temptation — I can call you up and you can talk me down.'
'Nicola,' I said. I got to my feet. 'At least tell me this terrible thing you did. To Asprey. It might cheer me up.'
'I put a brick through his windscreen. A big un, too.'
'Oh, sure. Come on. That would be no more than routine.'
'I'm not saying.'
'Why?'
'Why? Why? Why do you think? Because it's too painful.'
She's right in a way. There is no language for pain. Except bad language. Except swearing. There's no language for it. Ouch, ow, oof, gah. Jesus. Pain is its own language.
The pain-kit arrived in good time. It came by courier, mid-afternoon, so I was able to call Slizard immediately. 'It's beautiful,' I croaked. 'Like a box of liqueurs. Or a chemistry set.'He knew I'd like all the labels: when it comes to pain-classification, he said, we're back in the middle ages, or the nursery. Suddenly I asked him, 'Hugo, what's happening? Worldwide I mean. I called some contacts in Washington. It's all leak and spin. Where's the information? How are you seeing it?'
'. . . It's serious.'
'How so?'
'It's like this. The pressure is
coming from two directions. Do you go in now, and take the chance, or let the system degrade further. The Pentagon is for going in; State would prefer to ride it out; the NSC is torn. There is hypertension, also dyspnoea. There may be embolisms. Me, I'm for ride-out. They must get past the millennium. They can't risk it now.'
'Hugo, what are we talking about here?'
He sounded surprised. 'Faith,' he said.
'Excuse me?'
The President's wife.'
Our world of pain, as here arrayed and classified: how like life it is, how like childhood and love and war and art. Shooting, Stabbing, Burning, Splitting. Tugging, Throbbing, Flashing, Jumping. Dull, Heavy, Tiring, Sickening. Cruel, Vicious, Punishing, Killing.
'The single pill in the black bottle,' I said. 'With the modern skull-and-crossbones ..."
'That's for when the living will envy the dead. That's for the most painful condition of all. Life, my friend.'
On Aphrodite, Cornelia continues to disdain all congeniality. And all clothing. It's driving Marius and Kwango crazy.
It occurs to me that certain themes - the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty — are united in the person of Incarnacion. There is, I believe, something sadistic in her discourses, impeccably hackneyed though they remain. I wonder if Mark Asprey pays her extra to torment me.
She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolen ashtray and lighter. And I'm often too beat to get out of her way.
Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objects have face value. Other objects have sentimental value. Sometimes the face value is relatively small, but the sentimental value is high. In the case of the missing ashtray and lighter, the face value is relatively small (for one of Mark Asprey's means), but the sentimental value is high (the gifts of an obscure but definitely first-echelon playmate). Being of high sentimental value, these objects are irreplaceable, despite their relatively low face value. Because it's not just the money.
Do you hear her? Do you get the picture? It takes me half a day to recover from one of these drubbings. I am reminded of the bit in Don Quixote when Sancho has spent about fifteen pages saying nothing but look before you leap and waste not want not and a stitch in time saves nine, and Quixote bursts out (I paraphrase freely, but I really understand): Enough of thine adages! For an hour thou hast been coining them, and each one hath been like a dagger through my very soul.
Chapter 18: This Is Only a Test
keith frowned, and sipped on his cigarette, and read these words:
It is a definite historical fact that Boadicea played a form of darts. Quite a warrior for a woman, she was thought to have honed her skills, by playing darts. Little good it did the Queen of the Ancient Britons in the end, for she was defeated by the Romans and perished by her own hand in the year 'AD' 61.
' AD' 61! thought Keith.
Early dartboards have definitely been recovered from ancient locations. It is not known for definite what form of darts Boadicea played. Probably not 501, which shapes the modern game but some other form of darts.
Pensively Keith removed his darts from their purple pouch. Then, with the aid of this same pouch, he dabbed away his tears. A cigarette later, he sat with his pad, his darting diary, on his lap and a biro in his hand. The biroholding hand waved in the air for a while like a sketcher's. Then he wrote:
Eazy on the drink. A cigarette later, he added:
The trouble with darts they are no good when you are pist.
He resumed his practice session, his darting workout at the oché. The darts thunked into the board. He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threw again . . . Eight cigarettes later, he sat down and wrote:
Get the basics right. Lean on front foot, nice eazy follow thrugh. In doors you just get moaned-at. Sap's a mans ability to concentrate completely on his darts.
The darts were thrown, retrieved, thrown again (they thunked into the board), retrieved, and thrown again, and again. The six cigarettes were torched, consumed, ground out on the crackling floor. He threw 2.6 four times running. A wave of self-pity went through him. No one outside the sport realized just how tragically hard it was to throw a dart 5ft 9 1/4 ins, with clinicism. He paused, and sat, and wrote:
Keep throwing fucking '2,6'. Better Tomorrow. Don't reckon Nicks skeem scecm skeem.
'Good morning to you, Keith.'
Scheme, thought Keith. TV had not prepared him for anything like this. Or scam. 'Good morning ah ... Miss Six,' said Keith. Load of nonsense.
'Nicola, please! Now just sit in your normal place and I'll be with you in a minute. Coffee?'
Basically, Michael, I'm just the sort of guy who just likes to meet up with his mates down the pisser. Down the drinker. Down the pub. Basically I just drink to relax. To relax? To relax? thought Keith, and saw himself (last night, 3 a.m.) on his knees in the garage with a bottle of porno in either hand. Gracelessly Keith sat himself down on the sofa (he was thoroughly out of sorts). Earlier instructed by Nicola not to look at the camera, he looked at it anyway, through his low lids: on the little bookcase there, its twin red lights unkindly glowing. Keith rocked with the pulse of a contained cough or burp or retch, then lit a cigarette. Here she comes. Nicola wore a checked grey suit, squarely cut, and flat black shoes; her hair was swept up from her lightly painted face, the bun rich and grained and gordian. Looks the part all right, you could say (there was even an apple on the table). Schoolmarm outfit innit.
'Why don't we begin', she said, 'with Keats's "Bright Star"?'
'Yeah cheers.'
'Page eighty-six. It is five lumps, isn't it, Keith.’
86, thought Keith. Treble 18, double 16. Or you could go bull, double 18. Darts.
'Now.' Nicola settled herself erectly at his side. Humming somewhere just beneath their hearing threshhold, the video camera was positioned to Nicola's rear, over her shoulder, catching Keith in profile as he turned towards her grimly. She didn't really look like a schoolmarm. At that moment Nicola crossed her legs with a lift of the skirt and briefly shivered her rump into the cushion. On TV more like a Mother Superior who gets up to things. Or the dog in the office in the touching romantic comedy: take her glasses off and she's a goer. The skirt had a slit in it, or a fold, like a kilt.
'Keith? Why don't you take us through it.'
'You what?'
'Read it out loud. Use mine. Come a little closer.'
'Bright,' said Keith, 'bright - star!' He jolted, apparently rather taken aback by the exclamation mark. 'Would ... I would I were -'
'Would I were steadfast,' whispered Nicola.
'As . ..'
Thou.'
'Art.' Keith wiped his toiling brow. 'Not in lone, not in lone splendour.' He coughed: a single bark from the dog within. 'Pardon. Splendour hung aloft the night — and watching, with, with eternal lids, apart, like —'
'You seem to be reading one word at a time. As if you're lassoing it with your tongue. When was it you learned to read?"
Keith's open mouth went square. 'Yonks,' he said.
'Go on.'
'Er, like nature's . . . patient, sleepless . . .'
'Eremite. Hermit. Recluse. And 'patient' has the sense of devout, Keith.'
'The moving. Jesus. At their . . .'
'At their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores,' said Nicola; and as she read on she opened up her skirt to the waist (and Keith could see the sheer of the stockings, the interesting brown flesh, the white silken prow):
'Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever - or else swoon to death.
.. . Well, Keith?'
'Yeah?'
'So what does it mean? Take your time.'
/> Keith read the poem again. Two vertical worms of concentration formed in the centre of his forehead. The letters on the page seemed as unanswerable, as crammed with silent quiddity, as the impurities in his own eyes. Keith moved through an awful dream of missed connexions, sudden disappearances, horrendous voids. He wondered if he had ever suffered so. Three or four minutes later, when he thought he might actually be about to lose consciousness, Keith felt words fighting their way to the surface and the air.
'There's this star,' Keith began.
'Yes?'
'And', Keith concluded, 'he's with this bird.'
'Well that's more or less the size of it. But what is the poet trying to say?'
And Keith might have put an end to everything, right then and there. But now Nicola turned the page: Keith's eyes were presented with an index card with writing on it — her corpulent, generous, feminine hand.
'Now I may not be an educated man,' read Keith, with only a little difficulty. It sounded halting, honest. It sounded good. 'But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is "trying to say". The poem isn't a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.'
'Bravo, Keith.'
'The lover looks to the star as an image of, of constancy. What Keith — what Keats is expressing here is a yearning to be outside time. Suspended with his fair love. But I think the uh, movement of the poem gives a little twist to that reading. The star is identified with purity. The clean waters. The newly fallen snow. Yet the lover must be bold. He must come down from the heavens, and enter time.'
'Exactly, Keith. The lover knows he cannot escape the human
sphere, with all its ecstasy and risk, "Swoon to death": for the
Romantics, Keith, death and orgasm are equivalent.’
