Ambition

by Julie Burchill

  Susan saw the tall, dark American shouldering his way to the stage, casually shaking off the two bespectacled bar girls who clung to him as if they were flies. Italian or not, he looked enough like David Weiss to make her throat contract and her mouth water. The other men were disgusting – she wouldn’t touch them with Ingrid Irving’s. But with him . . .

  She and Oon were by far the most beautiful girls in the bar, she decided; this fact, and the Thai stick, and Oon’s friendship, and the presence of the tall American combined to make her feel good. She began to move a little less dreamily; she began to grind her hips, shaking her long, dark hair back from her breasts. A Marine whooped appreciatively and flicked beer at her. Oon flashed her a grin of approval. She threw back her head, looked up at the ceiling and smiled wryly for the eyes of Tobias Pope. He’d done it again. Or had she?

  The music changed – ‘Shaft’ by Isaac Hayes. Oon was pulling off her bikini bottom and lying down on the stage. The crowd strained forward, or rather the thirty or so men in the crowd did. The girls remained immobile; Susan saw one of them yawn openly and raise her eyebrows at a friend. Obviously they had seen whatever Oon was going to do a thousand times before.

  Oon parted her legs, and pulled out a string of razor blades. The men cheered. The razor blades were followed by five ping-pong balls, spat into the crowd as if from a machine. More cheering. Susan danced on, amazed.

  Someone placed an unopened Coke bottle on the stage. Oon stood up, put it between her legs and then triumphantly brandished it in the air, fizzing and foaming. Incredibly she had removed the top without using her hands.

  What does she do for an encore? thought Susan, dazedly – pull out the Empire State Building? But no. Oon was scrabbling in her discarded bikini briefs for cigarette and matches. She got on her hands and knees, lit a cigarette, stuck it into her anus – sticking boldly in the audience’s faces – and smoked it down to the butt, in both senses. The crowd went wild and she jumped to her feet, grinning and bowing quickly two ways.

  The music changed – ‘Love Hangover’ by Diana Ross. Oon beckoned to Susan, who walked as if in a dream down the catwalk to her. They faced each other and embraced. Oon fell to her knees and removed the shiny black monokini. The Marines had gone dead quiet. Susan stood there in her stilettos as Oon parted her vaginal lips and began to suck her clitoris.

  I’m getting a blowjob, Susan thought surreally. I thought Thai girls didn’t do that. She stroked Oon’s head, winding the long heavy hair around her hands. If they were alone, she knew she could get into it. As it was, the presence of the paying public was something of an inhibitant. Thoughts of the orgy in Rio, the twins in Sun City and the dykes in Manhattan flitted through her mind; it wasn’t group sex she objected to, it was lack of audience participation.

  Oon was whispering, ‘Am I pleasing you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered back. But it was only half true. Oon was beautiful and good, but far too gentle for her. Guiltily she fell to her knees and took Oon in her arms, kissing her as she pushed her backwards on to the floor. She slid down between her legs and found her clean, silky and sweet to the tongue. Oon’s narrow hips thrust up and she began to wail loudly. Someone’s having a good time, thought Susan, sarcastically but without rancour.

  Oon shrieked and then was still. As Susan lay between her legs, panting for breath, the crowd cheered and threw their hats in the air. When the noise subsided, Oon sat up and stared down challengingly from the stage.

  ‘Who wants to fuck my friend and me?’

  You’d have thought, as Susan said later to Zero, that she’d been offering the last place in her nuclear shelter just as the three-minute warning was going off. There was a roar as the men pressed forward, waving their hands and hats in the air. Susan thought they looked like a bunch of little boys waiting for the teacher to give them permission to go to the lavatory. Which, in a sense, they were.

  Only the tall, dark American didn’t move. He stood there, leaning silently on the stage, and as she looked at him he smiled slowly. Fear that Oon might forget her request made her brave, and she sat up quickly, pointed at him and squeaked in what she hoped was a Thai voice, ‘You.’

  He vaulted up on to the stage, knelt down, grabbed her and kissed her. His haste reminded her of a TV film she’d seen of American housewives with just two minutes to get around a hypermarket and pile as much loot as they could into their trolleys. Maybe he had to get back to his ship; but anyway, he wasn’t one to mess about. He was hustling her on to all fours, unbuttoning himself, pulling on a condom and mounting her.

  He wasn’t exactly built to Davie Weiss dimensions and there was no pretending he was, but he was strong, clean and thick and he felt good. She smiled and threw back her head, moving with him.

  ‘Feels good, huh, sexy girl?’ he whispered.

  She nodded quickly, not trusting her accent. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Oon, kneeling before a short, light-haired man who was obviously the less-favoured Vinnie, every boy’s mandatory Ugly Best Friend.

  Behind her, the Marine was making noises which sounded ominously like the ones men make when they’re about to come. She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate on the matter in hand – or somewhere – and ride in on his coat-tails. But it was too late; he groaned and they collapsed on to the floor. The crowd cheered.

  After a minute she felt a small soft hand pulling at her. ‘Get up,’ Oon was whispering. ‘Show not over yet. Stand up, stand up. You too, Johnny.’

  They got to their feet; he was still hard.

  ‘Go back in,’ hissed Oon. ‘From behind, standing.’ Johnny slid back into her vagina; Oon resumed her position in front of Susan, and Vinnie, kneeling behind Oon, entered her. As he fucked her, and she sucked Susan, and Susan thrust against Johnny, the music changed. Call it coincidence, or call it a DJ with a sick sense of humour, but as Susan Street reached her first orgasm in front of a paying public, the record they were playing was ‘She Works Hard For The Money’.

  In the part of her mind that wasn’t obliterated by sensation, she recognized once again the mischievous hand of Tobias Pope.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘You SLUT!’ shrieked Zero Blondell, jumping up from the armchair and on to Susan’s sofa and beginning to beat at her with bony little fists. ‘You SLAG! How come every time you’re in the mood for muff I’m on the other side of the world?’

  ‘Ah, Zero – maybe that’s why!’

  ‘You PIG!’ The blonde lunged at her, but half-heartedly this time; Susan caught her wrists and they lounged there in companionable enmity, exhausted from an evening of true confessions and martini cocktails.

  ‘So how many to go?’ asked Zero after a while. ‘Lessee – Rio, Sun City, New York, Bangkok – two?’

  ‘One. You forgot the tattoo.’

  ‘So I did. What’ll you do with the tattoo when you’ve got your stilettos under the editor’s desk, bach?’

  ‘By then I won’t care and it won’t matter.’ Susan threw her head back and closed her eyes, smiling dreamily and drunkenly. ‘I’m going to be such a great editor that they wouldn’t sack me if I had ‘BUBONIC PLAGUE – INFECTIOUS’ printed on my forehead. I think, I dream in headlines; I was born to edit this paper. All I need is a chance to prove myself and I can do the rest.’

  ‘That’s what they call bootstrap feminism.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you know what the alternative is – sackcloth and ashes feminism. Sit in a squat licking your wounds and raising your consciousness at a womb workshop while men go out and get all the fun, love and money the world has to give. Wouldn’t they just love that, having no competition? No, cringing in the ghetto is never a good idea.’

  ‘OK, bach, you don’t have to convince me. I’m hardly the belle of the Radical-Feminist-Lesbian-Separatist ball, with my satin and tat and my wicked ways.’ Zero stretched. ‘Know what I think of you as? A smash-and-grab feminist. You’ve got to have it now. You know what Madonna said when some man asked her what she thought of fem
inism, expecting her to put it down? She said, “Oh, I believe in everything they do. But I was too impatient to wait.” That’s what you’re like.’

  ‘That’s right, Zere – I can’t hang about waiting for men to change, or trying to change them myself, like they say we’re meant to. It seems that if we agree to that, we’re letting them off the hook of being responsible for their own behaviour all over again. I’m not a nurse or a nanny; they can change themselves, they’re big enough and ugly enough. I’ve got too much to do, I just want to get on with my life.’

  ‘I’m with you, bach, believe me.’ Zero sniggered. ‘Though I dread to think what the sisters would say if they knew about your bargain with the ugly American.’

  ‘Christ, I didn’t come this far so I could worry about what a bunch of bellowing, bullying dykes think of me.’ Susan slopped vermouth into her glass and then looked at Zero. ‘But what about you? Aren’t I colluding with the enemy?’

  Zero shrugged. ‘That’s pretty much par for the course in wartime.’

  ‘Wartime! Zero!’ Susan threw back her head and laughed.

  Zero nodded seriously. She didn’t seem drunk now. ‘No, it is a war. But it’s a guerrilla war, and that’s why life seems to be going on more or less as usual. But it’s all there: the rapes and the raiding parties and the goon squads and the losses. You’d have to be a pit-pony who believed in the power of positive thinking not to see it. It’s a dirty little war, and they’ve got the arms.’ She shook her short hair and smiled falsely at Susan, crossing her legs so that her short black micro slid all the way up to heaven. ‘We, however, have the legs. Not to mention the other parts. And like all armies of the night we must use them for all they’re worth. Of course I’m not going to condemn you for what you’re doing. It would be as futile as arguing with God.’

  ‘So you don’t think I’m – immoral?’ The word didn’t feel right on her tongue; she was back at school, speaking bad French.

  Zero shrugged impatiently. ‘War and murder and child molesting are immoral. That being so, I don’t see how the word can be used about consensual sex. Some words are sacred.’

  ‘I don’t know what it means when they use it about sex, either. It’s one of those words that’s lost its meaning – like sinister for left.’

  ‘Or left for progressive. No, when men use “immoral” about women, it means “Cleverer or richer or more successful than me”. Like “plastic” means “Better-looking than me”. These words, they’re the pop-guns of the powerless, and these days that’s starting to mean men.’ Zero drank dry vermouth from the bottle. ‘But I’ll tell you honestly what I think about your bargain, without recourse to portable pulpits.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘First you’ve got to level with me. You have slept with him—’

  ‘Cross my heart I haven’t. Wherever it is.’

  ‘Yeah, the smart money says it’s hanging around the lobby at Claridge’s. But you know what that means, of course? He’s impotent.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘’Course he is! You know my line about impotence?’ Zero began to bounce excitedly, as she always did when thinking back to her best lines.

  ‘“It’s Nature’s way of saying you’re a bad fuck,” ’ Susan recited dutifully. ‘I’ll say I know it, Zero. I cut it from your copy about twice a month.’

  ‘Ah, it’s a great line.’ Zero pouted. ‘You’re a bunch of old women up there.’

  ‘Go on. Tell me what you think.’ It struck her that Zero was the only person in the world whose opinion mattered to her, and she thought drunkenly how strange and beautiful modern life was, the way it took you from your family and tossed you up high in a blanket, so that you ended up with the weirdest and most wonderful creatures of the species as your spiritual next of kin.

  ‘Well, all right.’ Zero was making the most of it now she had her audience. ‘One, I think that if a women is as chaste as a Poor Clare and makes it to the top of her profession, then wherever men gather to spread their slime, be it private club or public bar, she will be talked about as though she sucked and fucked her way to the top; such sad specimens are their pathetic little egos that their worlds would collapse if they had to believe she got there on merit. So they’ll talk anyway – you may as well be hung for an editorship as for being a personal secretary plucked from the typing pool.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And two, which gets top billing: since I was sixteen, I’ve seen the way men crawl round the big boss man. I’ve seen it in Wales in insurance offices and I’ve seen it in London in newspaper offices, and only the accents are different. In every workplace in this country, the majority of men spend their time crawling, rimming and kissing ass to the boss; and the ones that don’t, they’re eventually singled out and sacked for supposedly making trouble. Well, I’ve seen these men crawl, and you can’t tell me that if they weren’t so ugly, and the boss wasn’t so straight, they wouldn’t bend, blow and bugger, too. They’d do anything to get ahead. And as white, well-fed, male people, they are hardly the wretched of the earth. They have no excuse, and yet they do it. It’s called capitalism.’ Zero touched Susan’s forehead, tracing the SOLD with her fingertip. ‘My child, you are absolved. Just say three Hail Marys, suck me off and we’ll say no more about it.’

  Susan laughed weakly, though she felt like crying. ‘Oh Zere, you understand. All I need is one shot. Then I can do it properly.’

  Zero looked at her nails with more attention than they merited; they were short and cracked, from typing and from other acidic activities best not gone into. ‘Actually, you might get your chance sooner than you think. Before your chores are over, so to speak.’

  The words were like ice-cold water in the face and Susan sat up straight, instantly sober. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I say nothing.’

  ‘ZERO!’ She grabbed the girl by the shoulders.

  ‘Mmm.’ Zero wriggled. ‘Why don’t you slap my face?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Slap it silly, till I beg for mercy—’

  ‘Be serious. Tell.’

  ‘Well.’ Zero looked at her flirtatiously from under her lashes; then, seeing the desperate ambition so alien to her, almost backed away with fright. Instead she stopped stalling and lowered her eyes, speaking softly.

  ‘A couple of days ago, Yasmin told me that Bryan wanted to see me. I thought it was for a scolding, look you, because I’d sent little Rachel up the ladder in the reference library for something – and then on impulse I’d gone up after her. I didn’t mean to, but she was wearing Chantilly by Houbigant, and it brought back some very pungent memories of cheap girls who wear even cheaper scent. Just a bit of fun, mind you, nothing dirty. But who should walk in but Bryan! And Rachel only married last month. He gave me such a look. So I thought Yas meant straight away, and I knocked and walked in. But I was wrong.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, there was your beloved and Bryan facing off over the desk – one step from coming to blows, I’d say. They looked round when I walked in and backed off. It was very novel for me, coming the Grace Kelly bit from High Noon, I can tell you. So I stood there trying to look sort of Quakerish – not easy in a sideless dress – and then your beloved left the room, snarling at Bryan that the way the paper was going, he wouldn’t wipe his behind – only he said “butt” – on it soon. And Bryan ran to the door and yelled after him that he hadn’t known that Pope Junior – that’s what he called him – did wipe his behind: he’d thought he wore nappies, and that his father changed them for him.’

  Susan winced, thinking of David Weiss’s sensitivity concerning his father. ‘What then?’

  ‘Well. Bryan told me to piss off and keep my cruising out of the office. So I burst into tears.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Oh, I cried. Being Welsh I cry very easily. And I’m very good at it. I can cry from either eye alone, and I can make the tears stop halfway down. Tears are a deadly weapon with a certain sor
t of man, and that big ox O’Brien’s one of them, bless him.’

  ‘But why did you cry?’

  ‘I wanted to find out what was going on, didn’t I. So I detonated myself, as it were. A bleached blonde dyke is Threatsville – but a weeping woman isn’t. Sure enough Bryan came over, threw his arms around me and began to sort of heave. The Aussies are very like the Welsh – I’d call it maudlin macho. He said he was sorry and he wasn’t himself these days. He went on about Wagga Wagga and how he knew how hard it was to feel Different. He said he was having a difficult relationship with a sheila – no, I’m being mean, he said woman. And he said he wasn’t happy on the Best any more. “As Weiss has got more confident, he’s got more opinionated,” he said, “and like all Americans he’s serious, and he wants a serious paper. I can’t do serious, Zero, because I’m aware of what a fucking tragedy the world is. Like all sensitive people – though I’ll cut your clit off, you little bleached twat-tickler, if you breathe a word of this to anyone – I can’t get serious, or I’ll break. I’m off as soon as I can find another foxhole. And you will be too, Zero, if you don’t want that po-faced Yank cutting your gags.” And I quote.’ Zero sat back, looking pleased and expectant of praise.

  ‘I see.’ Her mind flicked back through her memory, all thumbs in its impatience, and came up with a scene just before Candida Brown’s wedding; the contained but nasty skirmish over editorial direction in Bryan’s office when David had previously flounced off in a huff. ‘They don’t work well together, do they?’

  ‘Do men ever? All that stuff about women bosses is just a decoy. But it’s not just personal chemistry, bach; Bryan’s a great editor. He’s so good that Pope keeps him on tap, like Red Adair, always ready to fly off and sort out some new mess. But he’s sick of being an understudy; he wants a real job. And he knows now that he’s just keeping that seat warm for you: English, and young, and a girl. It hurts him.’