The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  Though partially true, the remark was designed to give pleasure. One hand resting on my shoulder, the other massaging her foot, Mary said, ‘It’ll do that. It’s a city at the end of cities.’

  ‘It’s sixty miles across!’ I agreed.

  ‘It’s a thousand miles deep!’ cried Mary wildly and threw her brown arms about my neck. She seemed to have found what she had hoped for.

  But she was not inclined to explanations. Later on we ate out in a Mexican restaurant and I waited for her to mention her weekend in chains and when, finally, I began to ask her she interrupted with a question. ‘Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?’

  I said yes and spoke at length without believing what I was saying. The only experience I had of total collapse was a friend who killed himself. At first he only wanted to punish himself. He ate a little ground glass washed down with grapefruit juice. Then when the pains began he ran to the tube station, bought the cheapest ticket and threw himself under a train. The brand new Victoria line. What would that be like on a national scale? We walked back from the restaurant arm in arm without speaking. The air hot and damp around us, we kissed and clung to each other on the pavement beside her car.

  ‘Same again next Friday?’ I said wryly as she climbed in, but the words were cut by the slam of her door. Through the window she waved at me with her fingers and smiled. I didn’t see her for quite a while.

  I was staying in Santa Monica in a large, borrowed apartment over a hire shop which specialized in renting out items for party givers and, strangely, equipment for ‘sickrooms’. One side of the shop was given over to wineglasses, cocktail shakers, spare easy chairs, a banqueting table and a portable discotheque, the other to wheelchairs, tilting beds, tweezers and bedpans, bright tubular steel and coloured rubber hoses. During my stay I noticed a number of these stores throughout the city. The manager was immaculately dressed and initially intimidating in his friendliness. On our first meeting he told me he was ‘only twenty-nine’. He was heavily built and wore one of those thick drooping moustaches grown throughout America and England by the ambitious young. On my first day he came up the stairs and introduced himself as George Malone and paid me a pleasant compliment. ‘The British,’ he said, ‘make damn good invalid chairs. The very best.’

  ‘That must be Rolls-Royce,’ I said. Malone gripped my arm.

  ‘Are you shitting me? Rolls-Royce make…’

  ‘No, no,’ I said nervously. ‘A… a joke.’ For a moment his face was immobilized, the mouth open and black, and I thought, He’s going to hit me. But he laughed.

  ‘Rolls-Royce! That’s neat!’ And the next time I saw him he indicated the sickroom side of his shop and called out after me, ‘Wanna buy a Rolls?’ Occasionally we drank together at lunchtime in a red-lit bar off Colorado Avenue where George had introduced me to the barman as ‘a specialist in bizarre remarks’.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ said the barman to me.

  ‘Pig oil with a cherry,’ I said, cordially hoping to live up to my reputation. But the barman scowled and turning to George spoke through a sigh.

  ‘What’ll it be?’

  It was exhilarating, at least at first, to live in a city of narcissists. On my second or third day I followed George’s directions and walked to the beach. It was noon. A million stark, primitive figurines lay scattered on the fine, pale, yellow sand till they were swallowed up, north and south, in a haze of heat and pollution. Nothing moved but the sluggish giant waves in the distance, and the silence was awesome. Near where I stood on the very edge of the beach were different kinds of parallel bars, empty and stark, their crude geometry marked by silence. Not even the sound of the waves reached me, no voices, the whole city lay dreaming. As I began walking towards the ocean there were soft murmurs nearby, and it was as if I overheard a sleep-talker. I saw a man move his hand, spreading his fingers more firmly against the sand to catch the sun. An icebox without its lid stood like a gravestone at the head of a prostrate woman. I peeped inside as I passed and saw empty beercans and a packet of orange cheese floating in water. Now that I was moving among them I noticed how far apart each solitary sunbather was. It seemed to take minutes to walk from one to another. A trick of perspective had made me think they were jammed together. I noticed too how beautiful the women were, their brown limbs spread like starfish; and how many healthy old men there were with gnarled muscular bodies. The spectacle of this common intent exhilarated me and for the first time in my life I too urgently wished to be brown-skinned, brown-faced, so that when I smiled my teeth would flash white. I took off my trousers and shirt, spread my towel and lay down on my back thinking, I shall be free, I shall change beyond all recognition. But within minutes I was hot and restless, I longed to open my eyes. I ran into the ocean and swam out to where a few people were treading water and waiting for an especially huge wave to dash them to the shore.

  Returning from the beach one day I found pinned to my door a note from my friend Terence Latterly. ‘Waiting for you,’ it said, ‘in the Doggie Diner across the street.’ I had met Latterly years ago in England when he was researching a still uncompleted thesis on George Orwell, and it was not till I came to America that I realized how rare an American he was. Slender, extraordinarily pallid, fine black hair that curled, doe eyes like a Renaissance princess, long straight nose with narrow black slits for nostrils, Terence was unwholesomely beautiful. He was frequently approached by gays, and once, in Polk Street San Francisco, literally mobbed. He had a stammer, slight enough to be endearing to those endeared by such things, and he was intense in his friendships to the point of occasionally lapsing into impenetrable sulks about them. It took me some time to admit to myself I actually disliked Terence and by that time he was in my life and I accepted the fact. Like all compulsive monologuists he lacked curiosity about other people’s minds, but his stories were good and he never told the same one twice. He regularly became infatuated with women whom he drove away with his labyrinthine awkwardness and consumptive zeal, and who provided fresh material for his monologues. Two or three times now quiet, lonely, protective girls had fallen hopelessly for Terence and his ways, but, tellingly, he was not interested. Terence cared for long-legged, tough-minded, independent women who were rapidly bored by Terence. He once told me he masturbated every day.

  He was the Doggie Diner’s only customer, bent morosely over an empty coffee cup, his chin propped in his palms.

  ‘In England,’ I told him, ‘a dog’s dinner means some kind of unpalatable mess.’

  ‘Sit down then,’ said Terence. ‘We’re in the right place. I’ve been so humiliated.’

  ‘Sylvie?’ I asked obligingly.

  ‘Yes yes. Grotesquely humiliated.’ This was nothing new. Terence dined out frequently on morbid accounts of blows dealt him by indifferent women. He had been in love with Sylvie for months now and had followed her here from San Francisco, which was where he first told me about her. She made a living setting up health food restaurants and then selling them, and as far as I knew, she was hardly aware of the existence of Terence.

  ‘I should never’ve come to Los Angeles,’ Terence was saying as the Doggie Diner waitress refilled his cup. ‘It’s OK for the British. You see everything here as a bizarre comedy of extremes, but that’s because you’re out of it. The truth is it’s psychotic, totally psychotic.’ Terence ran his fingers through his hair which looked lacquered and stiff, and stared out into the street. Wrapped in a constant, faint blue cloud, cars drifted by at twenty miles an hour, their drivers propped their tanned forearms on the window ledges, their car radios and stereos were on, they were all going home or to bars for happy hours.

  After a suitable silence I said, ‘Well… ?’

  From the day he arrives in Los Angeles Terence pleads with Sylvie over the phone to have a meal with him in a restaurant, and finally, wearily, she consents. Terence buys a new shirt, visits the hairdresser and spends an hour in the later afternoon in front of the mirror, staring at his
face. He meets Sylvie in a bar, they drink bourbon. She is relaxed and friendly, and they talk easily of Californian politics, of which Terence knows next to nothing. Since Sylvie knows Los Angeles she chooses the restaurant. As they are leaving the bar she says, ‘Shall we go in your car or mine?’

  Terence, who has no car and cannot drive, says, ‘Why not yours?’

  By the end of the hors d’oeuvres they are starting in on their second bottle of wine and talking of books, and then of money, and then of books again. Lovely Sylvie leads Terence by the hand through half a dozen topics; she smiles and Terence flushes with love and love’s wildest ambitions. He loves so hard he knows he will not be able to resist declaring himself. He can feel it coming on, a mad confession. The words tumble out, a declaration of love worthy of the pages of Walter Scott, its main burden being that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the world Terence would not do for Sylvie. In fact, drunk, he challenges her now to test his devotion. Touched by the bourbon and wine, intrigued by this wan, fin de siècle lunatic, Sylvie gazes warmly across the table and returns his little squeeze to the hand. In the rarefied air between them runs a charge of goodwill and daredevilry. Propelled by mere silence Terence repeats himself. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the etc. Sylvie’s gaze shifts momentarily from Terence’s face to the door of the restaurant through which a well-to-do middle-aged couple are now eating. She frowns, then smiles.

  ‘Anything?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, yes, anything.’ Terence is solemn now, sensing the real challenge in her question. Sylvie leans forward and grips his forearm.

  ‘You won’t back out?’

  ‘No, if it’s humanly possible I’ll do it.’ Again Sylvie is looking over at the couple who wait by the door to be seated by the hostess, an energetic lady in a red soldier-like uniform. Terence watches too. Sylvie tightens her grip on his arm.

  ‘I want you to urinate in your pants, now. Go on now! Quick! Do it now before you have time to think about it.’

  Terence is about to protest, but his own promises still hang in the air, an accusing cloud. With drunken sway, and with the sound of an electric bell ringing in his ears, he urinates copiously, soaking his thighs, legs and backside and sending a small, steady trickle to the floor.

  ‘Have you done it?’ says Sylvie.

  ‘Yes,’ says Terence. ‘But why… ?’ Sylvia half-rises from her seat and waves prettily across the restaurant at the couple standing by the door.

  ‘I want you to meet my parents,’ she says. ‘I’ve just seen them come in.’ Terence remains seated for the introductions. He wonders if he can be smelled. There is nothing he will not say to dissuade this affable, greying couple from sitting down at their daughter’s table. He talks desperately and without a break (‘as if I was some kinda bore’), referring to Los Angeles as a ‘shithole’ and its inhabitants as ‘greedy devourers of each other’s privacy’. Terence hints at a recent prolonged mental illness from which he had hardly recovered, and he tells Sylvie’s mother that all doctors, especially women doctors, are ‘assholes’ (arseholes). Sylvie says nothing. The father cocks an eyebrow at his wife and the couple wander off without farewell to their table on the far side of the room.

  Terence appeared to have forgotten he was telling his story. He was cleaning his nails with the tooth of a comb. I said, ‘Well, you can’t stop there. What happened? What’s the explanation for all this?’ Around us the diner was filling up, but no one else was talking.

  Terence said, ‘I sat on a newspaper to keep her car seat from getting wet. We didn’t speak much and she wouldn’t come in when we got to my place. She told me earlier she didn’t like her parents much. I guess she was just fooling around.’ I wondered if Terence’s story was invented or dreamed for it was the paradigm of all his rejections, the perfect formulation of his fears or, perhaps, of his profoundest desires.

  ‘People here,’ Terence said as we left the Doggie Diner, ‘live so far from each other. Your neighbour is someone forty minutes’ car ride away, and when you finally get together you’re out to wreck each other with the frenzy of having been alone.’

  Something about that remark appealed to me and I invited Terence up to my place to smoke a joint with me. We stood about on the pavement a few minutes while he tried to decide whether he wanted to or not. We looked across the street through the passing traffic and into the stores where George was demonstrating the disco equipment to a black woman. Finally Terence shook his head and said that while he was in this part of town he would go and visit a girl he knew in Venice.

  ‘Take some spare underwear,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah,’ he called over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘See you!’

  There were long pointless days when I thought, Everywhere on earth is the same. Los Angeles, California, the whole of the United States seemed to me then a very fine and frail crust on the limitless, subterranean world of my own boredom. I could be anywhere, I could have saved myself the effort and the fare. I wished in fact I was nowhere, beyond the responsibility of place. I woke in the morning stultified by oversleep. Although I was neither hungry nor thirsty, I ate breakfast because I dared not be without the activity. I spent ten minutes cleaning my teeth knowing that when I finished I would have to choose to do something else. I returned to the kitchen, made more coffee and very carefully washed the dishes. Caffeine aided my growing panic. There were books in the living room that needed to be studied, there was writing that needed completion but the thought of it all made me flush hot with weariness and disgust. For that reason I tried not to think about it, I did not tempt myself. It hardly occurred to me to set foot inside the living room.

  Instead I went to the bedroom and made the bed and took great care over the ‘hospital corners’. Was I sick? I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling without a thought in my head. Then I stood up and with my hands in my pockets stared at the wall. Perhaps I should paint it another colour, but of course I was only a temporary resident. I remembered I was in a foreign city and hurried to the balcony. Dull, white, box-shaped shops and houses, parked cars, two lawn sprinklers, festoons of telephone cable everywhere, one palm tree teetering against the sky, the whole lit by a cruel white glow of a sun blotted out by high cloud and pollution. It was as obvious and self-explanatory to me as a row of suburban English bungalows. What could I do about it? Go somewhere else? I almost laughed out loud at the thought.

  More to confirm my state of mind than change it, I returned to the bedroom and grimly picked up my flute. The piece I intended to play, dog-eared and stained, was already on the music stand, Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in A minor. The lovely opening Andante, a series of lilting arpeggios, requires a flawless breathing technique to make sense of the phrasing, yet from the beginning I am snatching furtively at breaths like a supermarket shoplifter, and the coherence of the piece becomes purely imaginary, remembered from gramophone recordings and super-imposed over the present. At bar fifteen, four and a half bars into the Presto, I fumble over the octave leaps but I press on, a dogged, failing athlete, to finish the first movement short of breath and unable to hold the last note its full length. Because I catch most of the right notes in the right order, I regard the Allegro as my showpiece. I play it with expressionless aggression. The Adagio, a sweet thoughtful melody, illustrates to me every time I play it how out of tune my notes are, some sharp, some flat, none sweet, and the semi-demi quavers are always mis-timed. And so to the two Minuets at the end which I play with dry, rigid persistence, like a mechanical organ turned by a monkey. This was my performance of Bach’s Sonata, unaltered now in its details for as long as I could remember.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and almost immediately stood up again. I went to the balcony to look once more at the foreign city. Out on one of the lawns a small girl picked up a smaller girl and staggered a few steps with her. More futility. I went inside and looked at the alarm clock in the bedroom. Eleven forty. Do something, quick! I stood by the clock listening to its tick. I
went from room to room without really intending to, sometimes surprised to find that I was back in the kitchen again fiddling with the cracked plastic handle of the wall can-opener. I went into the living room and spent twenty minutes drumming with my fingers on the back of a book. Towards the middle of the afternoon I dialled the time and set the clock exactly. I sat on the lavatory a long time and decided then not to move till I had planned what to do next. I remained there over two hours, staring at my knees till they lost their meaning as limbs. I thought of cutting my fingernails, that would be a start. But I had no scissors! I commenced to prowl from room to room once more, and then, towards the middle of the evening, I fell asleep in an armchair, exhausted with myself.

  George at least appeared to appreciate my playing. He came upstairs once, having heard me from the shop, and wanted to see my flute. He told me he had never actually held one in his hands before. He marvelled at the intricacy and precision of its levers and pads. He asked me to play a few notes so he could see how it was held, and then he wanted me to show him how he could make a note for himself. He peered at the music on the stand and said he thought it was ‘brilliant’ the way musicians could turn such a mess of lines and dots into sounds. The way composers could think up whole symphonies with dozens of different instruments going at once was totally beyond him. I said it was beyond me too.

  ‘Music,’ George said with a large gesture of his arm, ‘is a sacred art.’ Usually when I wasn’t playing my flute I left it lying about collecting dust, assembled and ready to play. Now I found myself pulling it into its three sections and drying them carefully and laying each section down like a favourite doll, in the felt-lined case.

  George lived out in Simi Valley on a recently reclaimed stretch of desert. He described his house as ‘empty and smelling of fresh paint still’. He was separated from his wife and two weekends a month had his children over to stay, two boys aged seven and eight. Imperceptibly George became my host in Los Angeles. He had arrived here penniless from New York city when he was twenty-two. Now he made almost forty thousand dollars a year and felt responsible for the city and my experience in it. Sometimes after work George drove me for miles along the freeway in his new Volvo.