by Martin Amis
‘Me?’ he had once told Russia. ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ This had perhaps been true, for a while. It was certainly true no longer. Now he spent at least an hour a day, with swat and spraycan, trying to hurt them, trying to kill them: flies. Wasps he left alone if the children were elsewhere; bees he respectfully spared; and spiders – fly-eaters – were his familiars, his enemies’ enemies. Flies he hunted down: the fatter and hairier they were, the worse he needed to see them dead. Some seemed armoured: they looked like the attack aircraft of the twenty-second century. And when they rubbed their wrists together the way they did: was it in anticipation of it, or was it in satisfaction with the vengeance they had already exacted, the vengeance of ugliness? The ugliness spoke to him. When they rubbed their wrists together, they seemed to be sharpening their knives.
Such substantial creatures could not be dispatched with the brute physics of the swat; the disgust of it would travel up through your hand and along your arm and into your gorge. ‘So Potent You’ll Watch Them Drop’, said the blurb on his spraycan. And he did watch. For a few seconds they buzzed about their business, as if the fatal blast was something they would at once shrug off. Then it was all over them, like age: every possible affliction. The wings sharply shrivelled; the taut rods of their legs became as crinkly as pubic hair. They were little old men – but not dying as we do. In the hospitals, even in the execution chambers, in the last rooms, human beings didn’t hammer themselves against the windowpanes or the mirrors and then plop to the floor, enragedly buzzing, and spinning on their spines.
What were they doing here anyway, so late in the year? What atmospheric betrayal sustained them? They were living carrion – dead already, already dead.
At St George’s Avenue there had been few visitors since the night of the accident. Three or four broad-shouldered, blue-chinned men in shiny suits came to sit with Xan for an hour or so; he kept asking them if he had ‘upset’ someone, if someone had a ‘problem’ with him that he didn’t know about; the broad shoulders shrugged, the blue chins gravely shook. They stopped coming. He had actor friends, director friends, producer friends; such people (and Xan partly understood this, because he was partly one of them) cannot bring themselves to contemplate failure or distress or humiliation. His writer friends might have taken a different attitude, but he didn’t have any; so the writers stayed away too. The crowd he used to play guitar with: they came, and kept coming, for a while. And the boys kept coming.
On the Tuesday of the third week Russia conducted an experiment. With not yet entirely humourless resignation she had read, in the books, that ‘head-injured people often find it easier to relate to the elderly, who also cannot keep up the fast pace that the peers of a head-injured person expect.’ All right, she thought: but what’s in it for the elderly? Then, seated at her desk, with her head held still in her hands, Russia took her lower lip between her teeth, and alighted on the Richardsons: late seventies, and good old sports. She had a long chat with Margot on the telephone; and Margot was amenable, stressing her immunity to all extremes of boredom, embarrassment and alarm. It went ahead.
The four of them were in the upstairs sitting-room, the Meos, the Richardsons. Earlier, in nighties, their hair thickly coiled from the bath, Billie and Sophie had been presented, to considerable acclaim. Russia attended, now and then, to the drinks tray (a lone bottle of Chardonnay, plus all Xan’s near-beers, his sodas, his juices and squashes and quashes), while the man himself sat facing their guests, his expression especially leonine that evening, his mouth curved downwards at the edges, grand, sleepy, all-tolerant. Margot Richardson, better known as Margot Drexler, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at UCL, was talking about the world situation with particular reference to Kashmir.
‘It is incumbent upon the West’, she said in her seminar style, ‘to establish a cold-war culture in the subcontinent. Starting with the hotline. Plus arms-limitation talks, test-ban treaties, crisis-management channels, and the rest of the wherewithal. We waged such a war for forty years. We know how you do it. They don’t. But then there’s religion. In Gujarat some peanut-wallah refuses to say “Hail Ram” and the next thing you know there’s two thousand dead. On one side of the border there’s Hindu Nationalism, and on the other there’s Islam. Think of it: nuclear jihad.’
‘Pakistan’, said Xan Meo, ‘is bullshit.’
‘… The clinical term for it is perseveration,’ explained Russia, after a pause. ‘You don’t mind my saying this, do you, honey? When you have an accident like Xan’s you can get hooked on certain words or ideas. We seem to have drawn “bullshit”.’ Yes, she thought: ‘bullshit’, and its not very numerous synonyms. ‘There’s also a touch of Witzelsucht, or inappropriate humour. My, how they love that word “inappropriate”. It’ll pass.’
‘But Pakistan is bullshit. India is India but Pakistan is plain bullshit. They just cobbled it together on the map. “Pakistan” is a uh, an abbreviation. It could be Kapistan. Or Akpistan. Total bullshit.’
Margot said quickly, ‘Xan’s right in a way. “Pakistan” is an acronym. And if they lost Kashmir, they’d lose the k. It would have to be … Apistan.’
‘Anyway it’s Krapistan as it is. What I don’t get about Partition is this. What I don’t get about Pakistan is this. You take one country and turn it into two countries that are bound to go to war. And this was … two years after Hiroshima. Which is just round the corner. Geographically. Now you don’t have to be … what’s he called? Cosanostra …’
‘Nostradamus.’
‘Nostradamus …’
While Xan continued, Russia’s eyes settled on Lewis Richardson. As was the case with many husbands of distinguished women, his project was the radiation of quietly relentless approval. The creases of his face, when Margot spoke, gave tiny flinches of encouragement and affection and pride. Russia was reminded that Xan had had something of that in him, once upon a time: silent but expressive approbation, directed at her. Silent respect – and it was gone.
‘On the uh, woman question,’ he was saying, ‘they’ve gone backwards. In the north, guess what the punishment is if you get raped. You get raped. You know, kid,’ he said to Russia, ‘the books are wrong. It’s not old people that make me relaxed. It’s young people. Like the boys. Because they don’t know who they are either.’
Russia blew her bangs off her brow and said, ‘What a day I’ve had – beginning at five, when Sophie woke up for good. Then Billie went to school for around five minutes, and then I had both of them till two. Then three hours of teaching. And I still haven’t touched my Munich lecture. I guess I’ll work on it tonight until Sophie wakes up again.’
‘Ah,’ said Xan authoritatively. ‘There goes my fuck.’
Into the silence that followed he said, ‘So when’s the comet due then?’
‘I hate space,’ said Russia evenly.
Xan said, ‘The comet is the come of heaven.’
But maybe come here to unmake us.
Meanwhile, in the master bedroom … On the night of Xan’s return from hospital Russia had been more or less pleasantly surprised when, with the dull glow of the linoleum still on him, he had clambered up on top of her. Afterwards, she praised him and calmed him, and there were avowals. She thought: what could be more – natural? The next night it happened again, and the next. And the next morning, and the next. Having subsided, he lay there trembling like an engine. Russia thought about this engine. It would be that of a large vehicle, stationary but locked in a high gear, and the stick would be flailing and juddering in its attempt not to stall.
‘What do they say?’ said Billie, in the kitchen, during a play-date. Her friend had just produced a pair of badges; and the badges said Just Say No.
‘They say Just Say No.’
‘Just Say No to what?’
‘They don’t say. They just say Just Say No.’
Russia had started just saying no. It worked – but only for half an hour. He had started following her around the house.
‘Can’t we go to a hotel this afternoon’, he kept asking, ‘– just for a couple of hours?’
She laughingly declined: work, children. When this response had at last proved itself incapable of changing the subject, Russia tried saying something weird. It was a thought she had had; Xan’s return had proved to be far from rejuvenating. She said,
‘Hotel bedrooms are all right. But I don’t like hotel bathrooms. I don’t like the mirrors in the bathrooms.’
Before changing the subject Xan said, ‘… But we needn’t go in the bathroom.’
She had of course talked to Tilda Quant, among others. There was a name for it: Post-Traumatic Satyriasis. It had to do with the hypothalamus and the release of testosterone. Tilda said there was a drug you could give him (or put in his coffee): cyproterone acetate. The trademark was Androcur.
One afternoon he was breathing over her shoulder while she sat at her desk.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘E-mails.’
‘But what’s this? And this?’
‘Pornography,’ she said.
Without another word he sloped off to his basement flat across the road – and sloped back again, two hours later, smelling of public swimming-pools and shorted electricity … But he still loomed up on her, later, five seconds after lights-out.
And the worst thing was that all this wasn’t the worst thing. Not any more.
Xan wanted to go to bed with his wife all the time for two good reasons: she was his ideal, and she was there. But he wanted to go to bed with all other women all the time too. If he could persuade Russia to stop working and farm out the children and spend her spare time coating herself in unguents and underwear: this would have contained it. But Russia wasn’t going to do that … When, fumblingly, feeling like it in a game of blindman’s-bluff, he groped his way into the thick detail of the city and reached the casbah – the souk, the chowk – of Britannia Junction, he seldom saw a woman of any age whose bathwater he would have declined to drink. And they wanted him too, he realised. With subtle salacity they sent signals to him, with their mouths, their eyelashes, their tongues. They dressed for him, they even mortified their flesh for him – those nuts and bolts in their heads were cuneiform, telling him what to expect, when the time came. But the time wouldn’t come, because he couldn’t be sure (and this was a massive consideration) that these women, many of them young and strong, wouldn’t hurt him. And he could be sure that Russia wouldn’t hurt him.
Sometimes an itch (say in the septum of the upper lip) announces itself as far more baldly intolerable than any pain – perhaps because there is the power to quell it, in an instant, with the swipe of a finger. But Xan couldn’t do that. His heart itched, his soul itched. It felt connected to the need for vengeance. Vengeance was the relief of unbearable humiliation. And so at night, when he invaded Russia, that’s what he was doing: seeking relief from it. More distantly, he felt that some historic wrong had at last found redress, as if his god, so inexplicably crippled, was once again more powerful than the god of his enemies.
Climax.
Russia’s day was assuming certain proportions. Awake all night anyway with Sophie (this now brought its comforts: Xan stood on the stairs for hours, waiting), she rose at six-thirty and breakfasted with the girls, at which stage she noted the first rumours of her menstrual cramps. Next, she went into college, and finished, corrected and then delivered her lecture. At three in the afternoon she would fly from Gatwick to Munich where she would sight-translate the same lecture into German at a conference on ‘Geli Raubal and Eva Braun’. The only possible return flight got her into Manchester with a good chance of making the last express to London. She hoped to be home by about half past twelve.
Late in the afternoon of the same day her husband was struck by a thought. He realised that he owed himself two drinks: two drinks, four cigarettes (and half an hour of writhing reminiscence – if, that is, he could manage reminiscence). ‘I never did have those Dickheads,’ he said out loud. ‘I was going to toast the boys but then …’ And this was an important moment for him: a new memory, and one that took him close to the epicentre. It pushed him into attempting something he had long postponed: a reenactment of October 29 … He watched Imaculada bathe the girls. At six o’clock he put on his overcoat. ‘I’m off out, me,’ he said, and opened the front door. It was darker now, darker in the year, with the sun pitching a lower ball across the sky. The sky is falling, thought Xan Meo. Where’s the king? Where’s the fox?
He approached the main road: to his right, the garden (pramlike Primrose Hill), to his left – left field, and the city … So, the rink of Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the black gallows of the traffic lights. At this time of day you saw guys in suits heading home with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a plastic bag containing provisions for one. Will this be me, myself? he thought. It wasn’t only the women: he was looking at the men differently too, weighing them, grading them – fearing them. On the phone, with Pearl, he had felt as breakable as a lightbulb when she told him that her older brother, the enormous Angus, was thirsting for a rematch. And now when he saw them (and they’re always there), the male figures in the street who disclosed the preparedness for violence (for continuation by other means), he knew he could find no answer to it; and he would have to find an answer, if there was to be vengeance … He bought his cigarettes at BestCost. Even the striplights seemed to be trying to hurt his head.
Xan glanced round the door of the High Street bookshop, and ascertained that Lucozade was no longer on the table marked Our Staff Recommends. He turned up Delancey Street and passed the café where he no longer played rhythm guitar every second Wednesday night. Then left down Mornington Crescent, under the busy trees, and a sinus whistle from the points and wires above the railtracks. ‘Harrison! Move your …’ Sometimes an aeroplane can sound a note of warning. There were four of them in the sky, but far beyond earshot. Their contrails left chalkmarks on the firmament. They are chalking us up for something, measuring us up for something … A thick and shaggy brown cloud had spread itself over the streetlamps, resembling the pelt of a bear or an ape, but with a punk colour in it (perhaps the result of chemical confusion), like the khaki of an old Elastoplast.
There was Hollywood, and he entered.
* * *
He said to the kid (a different kid), ‘Uh, I’ll have a … What happened to the Dickheads?’
‘New menu.’
‘Okay. I’ll have a Shithead. No: two Shitheads. What’s the difference between a Dickhead and a Shithead anyway?’
‘Benedictine. In the Dickhead.’
‘Well sling some Benedictine in the Shithead. Because what I really want is a Dickhead. Or two Dickheads.’
‘Or you could have a Dickhead and a Shithead.’
‘Well. Now we’ve come this far with the Dickheads …’
The paved terrace was once again deserted; more than deserted – disused. No dead duck upended i
n the turbid canal, no firefighting sunset. And where was his bird (‘Is that your “bird”?’), his cockney sparrow? … Six weeks had passed, and, according to the books, he was supposed to be emerging from a period of false consciousness – though Incredulity, he thought, was a better word for it than Denial. He was currently scheduled to experience a deepening of melancholy as he grasped the true dimensions of his impoverishment. But Xan had considered himself pauperised right from the start; and he feared further demotion. What was stopping his family from abandoning him? Didn’t they now see, as he now saw, the unsuspected weakness of all prohibitions? And why was he bullying Russia, why was he torturing her with the sex weapon? To bind her to him, so she had to stay – or just to get another one in, before she left? Or to punish himself, himself, and bring about his own ejection? The groan he suddenly uttered rose steadily in pitch, and a passerby, pausing to listen, might have thought that Xan Meo was about to throw up.
Minutes passed. His present condition, he realised, physiologically reminded him of his sister’s death – and its attack on his own life-force. At the time (for about a year) he had thought: We’ll never be immortal. Because it’s the deaths of others that kill us … Suddenly he felt a vibration of troubled air on the back of his neck. There followed a moment of craven brittleness, then he turned … It was she, it was she (he was now sure it was she): the paparazza sparrow, with her chattering shutters. And as the bird bobbed and fussed about him, he said out loud,
‘What happened, darling? You saw it. What happened?’
Unlike the grimly assimilated pigeons (for whom flight was simply a last resort), the paparazza remained a creature of the air, she remained haughtily other. Before she twittered off she fixed him for an instant with the neutral madness of her eyes. Xan felt a flow, or a change of temperature, in his mind. And he remembered: ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. You went and named him. In black and white.’ In black and white …
‘Bless you,’ he said.
