“I’ll tell you. I can date it precisely from a trip I made to Darlington six years ago. There’s a new university there, you know, one of those plateglass and poured-concrete affairs on the edge of the town. They wanted to give me an honorary degree. Not the most prestigious university in the world, but nobody else had offered to give me a degree. The idea was, Darlington’s a working-class, industrial town, so they’d honour a writer who wrote about working-class, industrial life. I bought that. I was sort of flattered, to tell you the truth. So I went up there to receive this degree. The usual flummery of robes and bowing and lifting your cap to the vice-chancellor and so on. Bloody awful lunch. But it was all right, I didn’t mind. But then, when the official part was over, I was nobbled by a man in the English Department. Name of Dempsey.”
“Robin Dempsey,” said Persse.
“Oh, you know him? Not a friend of yours, I hope?”
“Definitely not.”
“Good. Well, as you probably know, this Dempsey character is gaga about computers. I gathered this over lunch, because he was sitting opposite me. ‘I’d like to take you over to our Computer Centre this afternoon,’ he said. ‘We’ve got something set up for you that I think you’ll find interesting.’ He was sort of twitching in his seat with excitement as he said it, like a kid who can’t wait to unwrap his Christmas presents. So when the degree business was finished, I went with him to this Computer Centre. Rather grand name, actually, it was just a prefabricated hut, with a couple of sheep cropping the grass outside. There was another chap there, sort of running the place, called Josh. But Dempsey did all the talking. ‘You’ve probably heard,’ he said, ‘of our Centre for Computational Stylistics. “No,’ I said, ‘Where is it?’ `Where? Well, it’s here, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m it, so it’s wherever I am. That is, wherever I am when I’m doing computational stylistics, which is only one of my research interests. It’s not so much a place,’ he said, ‘as a headed notepaper. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘when we heard that the University was going to give you an honorary degree, we decided to make yours the first complete corpus in our tape archive.’ `What does that mean?’ I said. `It means,’ he said, holding up a flat metal canister rather like the sort you keep film spools in, ‘It means that every word you’ve ever published is in here.’ His eyes gleamed with a kind of manic glee, like he was Frankenstein, or some kind of wizard, as if he had me locked up in that flat metal box. Which, in a way, he had. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked. ‘What’s the use of it?’ he said, laughing hysterically. `What’s the use? Let’s show him, Josh.’ And he passed the canister to the other guy, who takes out a spool of tape and fits it on to one of the machines. ‘Come over here,’ says Dempsey, and sits me down in front of a kind of typewriter with a TV screen attached. ‘With that tape,’ he said, ‘we can request the computer to supply us with any information we like about your ideolect. “Come again?’ I said. ‘Your own special, distinctive, unique way of using the English language. What’s your favourite word?’ `My favourite word? I don’t have one.’ `Oh yes you do!’ he said. ‘The word you use most frequently.’ `That’s probably the or a or and,’ I said. He shook his head impatiently. ‘We instruct the computer to ignore what we call grammatical words—articles, prepositions, pronouns, modal verbs, which have a high frequency rating in all discourse. Then we get to the real nitty-gritty, what we call the lexical words, the words that carry a distinctive semantic content. Words like love or dark or heart or God. Let’s see.’ So he taps away on the keyboard and instantly my favourite word appears on the screen. What do you think it was?”
“Beer?” Persse ventured.
Frobisher looked at him a shade suspiciously through his owlish spectacles, and shook his head. “Try again.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Persse.
Frobisher paused to drink and swallow, then looked solemnly at Persse. “Grease,” he said, at length.
“Grease?” Persse repeated blankly.
“Grease. Greasy. Greased. Various forms and applications of the root, literal and metaphorical. I didn’t believe him at first, I laughed in his face. Then he pressed a button and the machine began listing all the phrases in my works in which the word grease appears in one form or another. There they were, streaming across the screen in front of me, faster than I could read them, with page references and line numbers. The greasy floor, the roads greasy with rain, the grease-stained cuff, the greasy jam butty, his greasy smile, the grease-smeared table, the greasy small change of their conversation, even, would you believe it, his body moved in hers like a well-greased piston. I was flabbergasted, I can tell you. My entire oeuvre seemed to be saturated in grease. I’d never realized I was so obsessed with the stuff. Dempsey was chortling with glee, pressing buttons to show what my other favourite words were. Grey and grime were high on the list, I seem to remember. I seemed to have a penchant for depressing words beginning with a hard ‘g’. Also sink, smoke, feel, struggle, run and sensual. ‘Then he started to refine the categories. The parts of the body I mentioned most often were hand and breast, usually one on the other. The direct speech of male characters was invariably introduced by the simple tag he said, but the speech of women by a variety of expressive verbal groups, she gasped, she sighed, she whispered urgently, she cried passionately. All my heroes have brown eyes, like me. Their favourite expletive is bugger.
The women they fall in love with tend to have Biblical names, especially ones beginning with ‘R’—_Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca_, and so on. I like to end chapters with a short moodless sentence.”
“You remember all this from six years ago?” Persse marvelled.
“Just in case I might forget, Robin Dempsey gave me a printout of the whole thing, popped it into a folder and gave it to me to take home. `A little souvenir of the day,’ he was pleased to call it. Well, I took it home, read it on the train, and the next morning, when I sat down at my desk and tried to get on with my novel, I found I couldn’t. Every time I wanted an adjective, greasy would spring into my mind. Every time I wrote he said, I would scratch it out and write he groaned or he laughed, but it didn’t seem right—but when I went back to he said, that didn’t seem right either, it seemed predictable and mechanical. Robin and Josh had really fucked me up between them. I’m never been able to write fiction since.”
He ended, and emptied his tankard in a single draught. “That’s the saddest story I ever heard,” said Persse.
The lights in the pub dimmed and brightened. “Time, ladies and gents!” called the barman.
“Come on,” said Frobisher. “I know a place where we can get a drink. In Soho.”
At Darlington’s Computer Centre, the strip-lighting burns late. The student users of the facility have gone home long ago, back to their digs and halls of residence, back to the distractions of the Union bar and the Union disco, leaving behind them the paper excreta of the day’s labours: punched data cards in various colours, swathes of printout, dogends, and crumpled paper cups. The air has a stale, slightly singed odour, as if the electronic machinery has burned up all its natural sweetness. There are only two men left in the building. One, sitting in a glass-partitioned booth, peels the polyfilm wrapping from a cheese sandwich and eats it, thoughtfully observing the other man, who is hunched over a console in a corner of the main room.
“NOBODY SEEMS TO LIKE ME,” Robin Dempsey types.
“WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?” replies ELIZA.
“IN THE STAFF CANTEEN I WATCH MY COLLEAGUES COMING TOWARDS MY TABLE WITH THEIR TRAYS AND THEN VEERING AWAY WHEN THEY RECOGNIZE ME.”
“WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DO THAT?”
“BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ME.”
“WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU?”
“BECAUSE THEY’RE AFRAID I WILL TALK TO THEM ABOUT MY RESEARCH AND THEY CAN’T STAND THAT BECAUSE I DO MORE RESEARCH THAN THE REST OF THEM PUT TOGETHER.”
“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH.”
Robin Dempsey ty
pes for an hour without stopping.
Persse had never been in Soho before. He was shocked, but also excited, by the blatant attempts to arouse lust made from every quarter, appealing to every sense. Striptease, peepshows, massage parlours, pornographic films, videos, books and magazines. The rhythmic beat of jungle rock throbbing from the bottom of cellar stairs. Odours of fish and garlic steaming from ventilators. Tarts and touts lounging in doorways. The word Sex blazoned everywhere—on shopfronts, bookcovers, tee-shirts, in capitals and lower case, in print, in neon, in bulbs, red, yellow, blue, vertically, horizontally, diagonally.
“Soho’s been ruined,” Ronald Frobisher was complaining. “Just one big pornographic wasteland, it is now. All the nice little Italian groceries and wine shops are getting pushed out.” He stopped on the corner of an intersection, hesitating. “You can get lost, it changes so fast. This used to be a shop selling coffee beans, I seem to remember.” Now it was a shop selling pornographic literature. Persse peered inside. Men stood facing the wall-racks, silent and thoughtful, as if they were urinating, or at prayer. “They don’t seem to be having much fun in there,” he remarked, as they moved on.
“No, well, it’s not surprising, is it? I believe they throw them out if they start wanking in the shop.” Frobisher turned down a narrow side street and stopped outside a doorway over which there was an illuminated sign: “Club Exotica.”
“Well I’m buggered,” said Frobisher. “What’s happened to the old `Lights Out’?”
“It seems to have been turned into a striptease place,” said Persse, looking at the photographs of the artistes displayed in a glass case on the wall outside: Lola, Charmaine, Mandy.
“Coming in, boys?” said a squat, swarthy man from just inside the door. “These girls will put some lead in your pencil.”
“Ribbon in my typewriter is more what I need,” said Frobisher. “What happened to the ‘Lights Out’ club which used to be here?”
“I dunno,” said the man with a shrug. “Come inside, see the show, you won’t regret it:”
“No thanks. Come on, Persse.”
“Just a minute.” Persse leaned against the wall with both hands, feeling faint. One of the pictures was unmistakably a photograph of Angelica. She was naked, swathed in chains, with her arms pinioned behind her back. Her hair streamed out behind her. Her expression was one of simulated distress and fear. A red paper disc over her pubis bore the legend, “Censored”, and a red strip across her breasts identified her as “Lily”. A. L. Pabst. Angelica Lily Pabst.
“What’s the matter, Persse?” said Frobisher. “Are you all right?”
“I want to go in here,” said Persse.
“What?”
“That’s right,” said the doorkeeper, “the young man has the right idea.”
“You don’t want to go in there, it’s just a rip-off,” said Frobisher.
“Don’t listen to him,” said the doorkeeper. “It’s only three pounds, and that includes your first drink.”
“Look, if you really want to see a strip show, let me take you somewhere with a bit of class,” said Frobisher. “I know a place in Brewer Street.”
“No,” said Persse. “It has to be this place.”
“You know something?” said the doorman. “You got good taste. Not like this old man here.”
“Who are you calling old?” Frobisher said truculently. Grumbling, he followed Persse down the steps just inside the doorway. Persse paid for them both with the change left from Frobisher’s ten pound note. “I resent paying for this sort of thing,” the writer said as they stumbled and groped their way to a vacant table. The Club Exotica was as dark as the sex cinema in Rummidge, except for a small stage where, bathed in pink light, and to the accompaniment of recorded disco music, a young woman, not Angelica, wearing only high boots with spurs, was vigorously riding a rocking horse. They sat down and ordered whisky. “I mean, if I want to see a bit of tit and bum, I only have to write it into a telly script,” said Frobisher. ” ‘With a tantalizing smile, she slowly unbuttons her blouse.’ `Her robe slides to the floor; she is wearing nothing underneath.’ That sort of thing. Then a few weeks later, I sit back in the comfort of my own home and enjoy it. This looks like the kind of corny strip show where the girls are always pretending to be doing something else.”
Ronald Frobisher’s judgment appeared to be correct. A succession of “turns” followed the rocking-horse rider, in which nudity was displayed in various incongruous contexts—a fire station, an airliner, an igloo. Sometimes there would be more than one artiste involved, and there was a young man, muscular but clearly homosexual, who occasionally combined with the girls to mime some trite story or situation, usually wielding a whip or instrument of torture. There was no sign of Angelica.
The tables were arranged in arcs facing the stage. When anyone rose to leave the front row, someone moved forward from behind to take his place.
“You want to move up?” Frobisher asked.
Persse shook his head.
“Had enough?” Frobisher enquired hopefully.
“I want to wait till the end.”
“The end? We’ll be here all night. They just keep the acts going in rotation till closing time, you know.”
“Well, we haven’t seen them all, yet,” said Persse.
The stage lights faded on the spectacle of a naked girl thrashing about like a fish in a net suspended from the flies. There was lukewarm applause from the audience. The curtains closed and from behind a faint clinking of chains carried to Persse’s ears. He sat up and leaned forward, hardly able to draw a breath.
The recorded music this time was less bland, more symphonic rock than disco, with a lot of distorted electric guitar. The curtain rose to reveal a naked girl in exactly the posture of “Lily” in the photograph outside: naked, chained to a pasteboard rock, writhing and twisting in her bonds, mouth and eyes wide with fear, long hair streaming in a current of air blowing from a wind machine in the wings. But it was not Angelica. It was the girl on the rocking horse. Persse slumped back in his seat, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Well, we might as well wait till this act is finished,” said Frobisher. “As a matter of fact, it’s the first one that has come within a mile of turning me on. Something to do with the way those chains dig into the flesh, I think.”
Persse had to admit that the spectacle had an impact that the previous entertainment had lacked. The nudity, for once, was thematically appropriate. The lighting and sound were expressive: wave effects were projected on to the backcloth, and the sound of surf had been mixed with the guitar chords. Whoever had produced this item knew something about the Andromeda archetype, though in the end it was travestied. The young homosexual, dressed up as Perseus, or possibly St George, arrived to rescue the sacrificial virgin, but was chased off the stage by another naked girl in a dragon mask, who proved to have amorous rather than violent designs upon the captive. The lights faded on a scene of lesbian lovemaking.
“Rather neat, that,” said Frobisner, as they climbed the stairs to street level.
“Enjoy the show, boys?” said the doorkeeper.
“What happened to Lily?” Persse demanded.
“Who?”
Persse pointed at the photograph.
“Oh, you mean Lily Papps.”
Frobisher guffawed. “Good name for a stripper.”
“Is that what she calls herself?” Persse asked.
“Yeah, Lily Papps, with two pees. She left a few weeks back. We haven’t got round to doing a photo of the new girl.”
“What happened to Lily? Where can I find her?” said Persse.
The man shrugged. “Don’t ask me. These girls—they come, they go. Mind you, Lily was special. Not just a nice body—she had a brain too. You know that dragon number? Good, eh? That was her own idea.”
“Someone you know?” Frobisher enquired, as they walked away from the Club Exotica.
&n
bsp; “It’s the girl I told you about. The one I’m looking for.” Frobisher raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me she was a stripper.”
“She’s not really. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Money, I suppose. She’s an educated girl. She’s doing a PhD. She shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing at all.”
“Ah,” said Frobisher. “I understand. You’re going to track down this damsel and rescue her from the sordid life to which poverty has condemned her?”
“I’d like to do that,” said Persse, “for her own sake.”
“Not for your own?”
Persse hesitated. “Well, yes, I suppose so… Only it was a shock, seeing her picture in that place back there. I didn’t know, you see.” It was still hard for him to imagine the girl he remembered from the Rummidge conference, eagerly discussing structuralism, romance, the poetry of Keats, performing in a nude cabaret in some sordid Soho cellar. His soul recoiled from the idea, but after all it was not an irredeemable degradation. No doubt for Angelica, as for Bernadette, it was simply a job, a way of earning money—though why she should have to choose that way was a mystery. One day he would discover the answer. Meanwhile, he must trust Angelica, and his first impressions of her. “Yes,” he said, lengthening his stride, “I want to find her for my own sake.”
Philip Swallow woke suddenly in his hotel room in Ankara with all the symptoms of incipient diarrhoea. It was pitch dark. He groped for the lightswitch on the wall above his head and pressed it, with no result. Bulb gone, or power cut? Sweating, feverish, he tried to recall the geography of the room. His briefcase was on a dressing-table facing the end of the bed. About three yards to the right of that was the door to the bathroom. Carefully he got out of bed and, tightening his sphincter muscle, felt his way along the edge of the bed until he reached the foot of it. With his arms extended in front of him like a blind man, he searched for the dressing-table, but it was his big toe that located this piece of furniture first. Whimpering with pain, he delved in his briefcase for his makeshift toilet paper, and shuffled along the wall like a rock-climber until he came to the bathroom door. He tried the lightswitch inside without effect. A power cut, then. Sink to the left, toilet beyond it. Ah, there, thank God. He lowered himself on to the toilet seat and voided his liquefied bowels. A foul smell filled the darkness. It must have been the kebab, or, more likely, the salad that accompanied it. Still, at least he had managed to get to the loo in time, in spite of the power cut.
David Lodge - Small World Page 23
