by Martin Amis
So Keith stood behind Scheherazade, whom he had never reached out and touched—the babyish fist of her coccyx, the long range of her spine, the wing-cases of her shoulder blades. And for a moment he thought he might honestly be capable of reaching in and around with his warm young hands; but then she drew aside the main body of her hair, between finger and thumb, revealing the long, downy, aromatic nape (exactly level with his nose). And all he wanted to do was rest his brow against her shoulder, rest it, cool it, ease it.
“What do I do—I just …?”
He slid the zip northward; he joined the plush little buttons; he fixed the clasp. The clasp of her gown, no bigger than a fairy’s paperclip, presiding over that empire of green and all it contained.
Keith said, “I suppose this is the last time. You forgetting.”
“I suppose.” She turned. “But if Jorq comes I’ll be moving back. So you never know.”
After two or three seconds she turned again, and walked. He locked the door after her—Scheherazade, in Sherwood green, and rustling like a tree. Green giantess of the frightening forest. Maid Marian. Who takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
He offered a sigh—a sigh directed, perhaps, as far as the Moho: the discontinuity between the lower mantle and the oceanic crust … Instead of helping her out of her clothes, he was helping her into them. It will happen, he thought. It won’t go on being the wrong way round.
Keith stood there among hooks and racks. The tub, he saw, contained two inches of barely tepid water, very slightly clouded yet almost mirror-like with its slick of oil. He thought about climbing into it; he thought about drinking it; but he just pulled the plug and watched the little maelstrom writhe into being.
Now the real heat began. The shadows, rich, sharp, and (he thought) distinctly furtive, yes, with a distinctly paranoid look about them—the shadows could no longer hold their ranks, and cowered inward, while the sun bulged and dropped and repositioned itself directly overhead as if to stare and listen. In the afternoons the gustatory and intestinal odours of the village rose up in layers of salt and gravy. A metal chair, down by the pool, would clasp you in its fire like an instrument of torture; coffee spoons could bite or sting. The nights were still damp but the air was thick and motionless. The dogs no longer barked (they whimpered) and the sheep’s blares of rage and boredom quailed and dried in their throats.
“He’s normal,” said Lily in the dark.
“… No he isn’t. What’s normal about Adriano?”
“His arrangements. Down there.”
“You mean she’s seen it?” He swallowed as silently as he could. “I thought he was still outside her top.”
“He is, or outside her bra. He’s in between her top and her bra. Which is coming off any night now. But she saw the shape in his white trousers. And it’s normal. It’s not like it seems in his swimsuits. She thinks his swimsuits are made out of baseball mitts. Don’t be alarmed by his driving.”
“What? Why should I be?”
“He’s one of those people who think they have to look at you when they talk to you. So he memorises the road ahead and turns around and has a chat. He hardly took his eyes off Scheherazade all the way to Rome. I was in the back. And he drove all the way in profile. Did you know she’s never gone down on anyone? Even on Timmy?”
“No, Lily, I didn’t know. How could I tell?”
“That’s part of it, you see. She just got three letters from college friends, and they’re all busy acting like boys. She wants to try new things. Which for her means anything that isn’t the missionary position.”
“… Why’s it called the missionary position?”
“Because the missionaries,” said Lily, “told the natives to stop doing it like dogs and start doing it like missionaries.”
“Christ, the nerve of it. No, really. The nerve of it. Still. Fascinating. You mean in all this time she’s never once gone down on Timmy?”
“That’s sort of why she’s feeling left out. She’s kissed it. She says she’s kissed it, whatever that means.”
“Yeah. What’s that mean?”
“Just a peck, I suppose. Or maybe she French-kissed it—on the tip.”
“Lily …”
“She’s kissed it but she’s never sucked it. She’s never put it in her mouth and really sucked it. She said, Is that how you do it? You put it in your mouth and you suck it as hard as you possibly can? … What’ll happen if Kenrik and Rita aren’t still just good friends?”
“If they’re lovers? Simple. They’ll be hating each other.”
“Mm. Which we could never do.”
On Sunday, under a percussive sky that seemed to hum like a cymbal, Adriano kept his promise and took the four of them out to lunch—Keith, Lily, Gloria, Scheherazade—at a starred restaurant in a place called Ofanto, which was twenty miles away.
They went there in the motorised drawing room of the Rolls Royce, eerily piloted by Adriano. Keith’s unease seemed to be more basic than Lily’s. Even on the return journey he failed to convince himself that Adriano could actually see over the dashboard, except perhaps through the upper segment of the steering wheel. And when he talked to Scheherazade in the back seat, screwing his head around the full half-circle without moving his shoulders (as Linda Blair was soon to do in The Exorcist), all you could make out was one arched eyebrow and the expanse of his silvery frown.
“The truffles,” he kept turning and saying. “You must have the truffles, Scheherazade. Mmm—as a taste of ambrosia.” The head creaked round again. “The truffles, Scheherazade. Quite divine.”
Ofanto drew near. Confirming his ability to see out of the side window at least, Adriano muttered wonderingly (and you could tell that this was most retrograde to his hopes and wishes),
“So many people! It used to be a market town. Just a sleepy market town. And now?”
And now there is industry, and clumps of workers, each with his singlet and his cigarette, and cuboid medium-rise flatblocks, and insect nests of aerials, and distantly swearing dogs aswivel on trapped balconies—and where there is all this, all that, there is also the presence of young men …
“Just a sleepy market town. And now—I don’t know. I don’t know.”
At this point we should jump ahead to six thirty that evening. There are sour drinks on the castle’s west terrace. Sour drinks in the sour dusk. Adriano, perfunctorily asked up, had perfunctorily declined, and drove on. So the four of them are arranged out there, their faces averted in the private trials of digestion. The usual sunset colours, with a shading or grading of turbulence, as Jupiter’s stomach rumbles, in some other valley, under some other mountain.
“Well,” said Scheherazade.
And Keith turned to her. Because something was the matter with the film she used to be starring in. Was it the light? Was it the continuity? Was it the dialogue—was the whole thing dubbed all along?
Well what?
“Well,” said Scheherazade.
For a moment, sitting there on the swing sofa, she seemed average—average in the eyes. There was a good reason for this. And Keith partly understood her need to go to the table and pour out that second helping of white wine; her glass, already half empty, rested at an angle on her print-flowered lap … Those average eyes of hers were fixed on Gloria Beautyman, who stood by the French windows, poking with her finger at the ice cubes in her Pellegrino. Scheherazade said,
“Well. Your backside gathered quite a following this afternoon.”
Gloria seemed to swallow something suddenly. She said, “Meaning?”
“Meaning? Meaning your rear end and the stir it caused.”
“And the same went for you,” said Gloria, swallowing again, “and your—your bust.”
“Well if you’re going to cram it into those cords …”
“You told me to. I was going to go in a smock but you said wear something else. So I wore cords. They’re just cords.”
“Cords. Skintight and bright red. With your arse lik
e a prize tomato.”
“Hark who’s talking. With that top on.”
And Keith was wondering. What were heroines allowed to do?
As Lily, Keith, Scheherazade, Adriano and Gloria walked across the dusty grey piazza, and down the length of the endless avenue, the young men of Ofanto staged their choreographic referendum on the attractions of the three girls. Here they came again. Drawn like iron filings in obedience to magnets of varying power, the young men squirmed and milled and then divided—with graphic candour—into two columns: one in front of Scheherazade, and one behind Gloria Beautyman. One group walking forward. One group walking backward. And Lily? … I can say that her figure, when it came, turned out to be impeccably symmetrical, not top-heavy, not bottom-heavy—classic, without fetish. But this of course would have pulled little weight with the young men of Campania, faithful to the sacrament of the twinned and rolling orbs. It was here that Adriano made his terrible mistake. It was such a little thing. All he did was reach out with his hand.
“What are we supposed to do?” asked Gloria on the rosy terrace. “Swaddle ourselves like Ruaa?”
And Scheherazade laughed tinnily and said, “At least you had the sense to refuse that glass of champagne. Otherwise—well I shudder to think.”
Gloria glanced quickly from face to face. And two tears leapt from her eyes: you could see them whitely glitter as they leapt and fell …
Now Lily stood up into the silence.
“To be really popular in Italy,” she said with slow emphasis, “this is what you’d need. Your tits. And your arse.”
“You know,” said Keith wildly, “you know my tutor Garth, Lily—the poet? He says the female body has a design flaw. He says the tits and the arse should be on the same side.”
“… Which side?”
Keith thought for a moment. “I don’t think he’s fussy,” he said. “Though I suppose you’ll tell me he was fussy in the first place. The front. To get the face. It would have to be the front.”
“No, the back, surely,” said Scheherazade (as Gloria turned and went inside). “If it was the front, her legs would be pointing the wrong way.”
Lily said, “She’d walk backward. And the boys in the street—I’m trying to work it out. Which way would they walk?”
That night, dinner was dead, killed by the reeking fungi of Ofanto: no one attempted it. Lily and Scheherazade were closeted in the apartment, so Keith went stumbling down the slope to use up time with Whittaker—and with Amen, who silently produced a large sliver of the blackest and greasiest hashish.
“Jesus, it’s a bit strong, isn’t it?”
“C’est bien de tousser,” said Amen. “Et puis le courage. L’indifférence.”
“Whittaker, what’s all this?”
He meant the images in the paintings that were fanned out on the floor. Whittaker said,
“Cataloguing. My Picasso period.”
The figures in the canvases were all bassackward or inside out, and after a while Keith was asking whether it would be any good if men were sexually rearranged, with the cock and the arse on the same side, and maybe the head wrenched round, too, like Adriano’s in the Rolls …
“You know Tom Thumb called me Keef today?” he said, some time later. “He called me Kif. And it’s true. I just smoked a whole death-pipe of kif with Amen.”
Lily said, “You fool. You know you can’t cope with drugs.”
“I know. You look amazing.” And she did, too, in the candlelight. She looked like Boris Karloff. “Assassin comes from hashish. Or the other way round.”
“What are you going on about?”
“It’s just … It’s just impossible to believe that they smoked this stuff to make them brave. I was shitting myself on the way back. I still am. And guess who I bumped into in the dark. Literally. The Blob!”
“Come on, it’s one o’clock.”
“Christ, I thought it was about half past nine.”
“Because you’re a drugged fool,” said Lily. “That’s why.”
He did as he was told. Ruaa, like the feathery night made solid. Oof … And then as he drank a quart of water in the kitchen he heard a footfall—and felt a rush of fresh fear at the thought of Scheherazade. Fear? Scheherazade?
“Okay, I’m calmer now. I’m cool. So tell.”
“It was an absolute catastrophe for Tom Thumb.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” he said contentedly as he drew a sheet over the hive of his chest.
“When he took her hand.”
Because that’s what he did, Adriano. As soon as they got out of the car, and the riot, the revolution began, Adriano strode to Scheherazade’s side and took her hand. And looked out and up at the young men with that scowl Keith had glimpsed once or twice before. The scowl of practised defiance you always saw in the very small male, and the readiness to transact with cruelty, to absorb it, to transfer it. Adriano, Mr. Punch. Punchinello.
“She said it was like walking along,” said Lily, “with her own disturbed child.”
“Mm, like a young mum. That’s what she looked like from behind.”
“It was much worse from in front. She saw herself in a shop window and had a heart attack. Not a nice child. A disturbed child.”
“Jesus. And that crowd …”
“Jumping up and down in front of her with their tongues hanging out. All through lunch her pulse was raging. About whether he’d do it on the way back.”
Overseen, with severe connoisseurship, by Adriano, the meal went on for three hours. And as they gathered in the lobby he again reached towards Scheherazade with an opened palm. She turned away and gave a shivering laugh and said, Oh don’t worry about me. I’m a big girl now.
“It just popped out. Poor her, she’s so confused. Weeping in her room.”
“So that’s off now, is it? No more doing it for the troops.”
“Oh out of the question. It was primal. I mean, you can’t get involved with someone who makes you think of your own mad child.”
Keith agreed that it was hardly a promising sign.
“And then she went and said that thing about Junglebum’s arse.”
“Yeah, well, it was worse than that, wasn’t it,” he said. “The champagne.”
“The champagne. So now Junglebum knows we know about her pants getting sucked off by the jacuzzi.”
“Mm. I’ve never seen anyone cry like that. Like a popgun. Both barrels.”
“Mm. Poor Gloria. Poor Adriano. Poor Scheherazade.”
Well, said the shrill Scheherazade on the terrace—and Keith wanted to shout, Cut! But no: keep rolling. It occurred to him, now, that he was the director of the film in which she starred; and it was time for a change of genre. No more platonic pastoral. Time for the slatternly shepherdess, the venal wood-nymph, the doped contessa.
“I suppose you’re happy now.”
“Why would I be happy?”
“Why? Adriano gone. No sign of Timmy. And her getting more and more desperate.”
“… Crappy meal, didn’t you think? I thought truffles were meat.” Heroines were definitely allowed to do that. “Like pâté or something.” Heroines were definitely allowed to get more and more desperate. “Not a five-quid toadstool … I was proud of you today.”
Keith, and not Hansel, now performed the sexual act with Lily, and not Gretel. Its components, as he saw them: on the terrace, the way she pushed down with her hands on the armrests and rose up into it, and brought peace; and earlier, in Ofanto, the rinsed look in her pale blue eyes, the closed smile of disappointment, even disbelief … She must have felt as sore and roused as Adriano, when the young men rose from the stone benches (as if gathering for violence), when the young men came hurrying from under the shade of the palm trees.
3
TICKET OF ENTRY
“Any sign of Gloria yet?” said Scheherazade with a guarded look. “No, I suppose she’s still in her room.”
Keith settled himself near by, himself and Vanity Fair.
<
br /> “I can’t think—I can’t believe I was such an absolute witch last night.”
She lay there wearing her belted monokini, her olive oil, and the fleshy V of her frown. She leant back and said,
“I took her breakfast in bed, but of course she still hates me … I suppose everyone hates me. Especially a moralist like you. And this is just a question of common decency. So come on, let’s hear it.”
Keith produced a fresh packet of Cavallos (a local brand) … In Emma, it was as Mr. Knightley reproached her for publicly ridiculing a defenceless woman that Emma Woodhouse realised, in the novel’s key scene, that she was in love with him. Realised—for in the world of Emma you could be subconsciously in love. At the picnic on Box Hill, Emma was cruel to Miss Bates (the kindly old virgin), and Mr. Knightley told her so … Keith, then, might have paraphrased Mr. Knightley, and said, Were she your equal in situation—but, Scheherazade, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she lives to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! But Keith didn’t say that. He said,
“Hates you? Not at all.”
“Everyone hates me. And I deserve it.”
If Keith paraphrased Mr. Knightley, would Scheherazade realise, at last, that she was in love with him? No, because things were different now. And what had changed? Well, Emma’s colloquy with Miss Bates, on Box Hill, was not about busts and backsides and (by implication) a day of shame at a sex tycoon’s; and as she girded herself for censure, Emma did not face Mr. Knightley topless; and Gloria was not, or not yet, a spinster. All that, and this. In 1970, you could no longer love subliminally: the conscious mind worked full-time on love or what used to be love. Anyway, why would he censure Scheherazade? On the west terrace she had shown a vulgarity and a sexual vanity, and an ordinariness, that at this point he could only commend. He said,
“It was unlike you. But relax. We’ve all got to toughen up a bit. You’re too soft-hearted. You were upset. You had that business with Adriano. I—we felt for you.”
