by Martin Amis
“Stop,” groaned Lily. “You’re making that wheedling sound.”
“Wait,” he said, with care, as Scheherazade returned. “Whittaker’s going to London on Tuesday. Aren’t you, Whittaker? Would you mind dropping an envelope in a letterbox?” He turned to Lily for a sentence. “I’ll speed-read it tomorrow and write the piece on Monday. I’m sorry, everyone, but it just means that I won’t be able to come to the ruins.”
“On your birthday,” said Lily. “On your twenty-first birthday.”
“I’m sorry, Lily. I’m sorry, everyone.”
Keith regrouped. All seemed calm and clear. It was already eight twenty. Now Whittaker sloped off to join Amen in the studio. More lights came on. One by one they went to the kitchen and filled their plates and returned. The world was all before them, and they ate like students in a JCR, but it was normal, it was social realism, it was kitchen-sink. Lifes, Times. Good salad, said a voice. Could you pass the pepper? said another …
Very suddenly indeed they were eating their fruit: it was ten to ten. Lily’s head dropped another inch, and her mouth was forming its tragic mask. Gloria got to her feet and started stacking plates and magazines. With some nonchalance, Keith put aside Antinomianism in D. H. Lawrence (it didn’t look that difficult and there was quite a lot about Frieda fucking everyone), and said,
“I was just thinking about sex in the afterlife.”
What made him break the second rule? He had broken the first (don’t do anything); now he was breaking the second (and don’t say anything). What made him? Power, partly. The eastern side of every instant was aglitter with it, with class power and beauty power, infinitesimally added to (let’s not leave this out) by the power of inaugurating a vocation, of expressing himself in chosen words (while at the same time settling the immediate career prospects of Marvin M. Meadowbrook). But he couldn’t help it anyway. Because every breath he drew was now pure helium, and far, far lighter than air. It is over, and this is the climax of my youth, he thought, saying,
“With reincarnation I suppose it depends what you’re reborn as, a tiger, or a hyena, and in Israel they just sit tight, don’t they, till Judgement Day, and in Amen and Ruaa’s paradise they have girls but no boys, plus a nice kind of prosecco, Lily, Whittaker said, and as for us it’s not all over, because Gabriel told Adam that even in heaven the angels interpenetrate, and they …”
He stopped, he subsided, softly whinnying to himself, and looked round the company from under his brow. No one had listened. No one had noticed. Coolly Keith picked up an Encounter and opened it and frowned at it.
“I’ll leave you,” said Lily slowly, “to your cards. Oh, look. Oh no … Let It Be.”
“Yes, isn’t that sad. The Beatles’ last LP,” said Scheherazade. “Let It Be.”
With her hand resting flat on the side of her jaw, Gloria was saying, “The New English Bible. Bad idea, that … Tsuh, is that the time? Oh well. Jorquil has reached Monaco. And Beautyman must get her beautysleep. Lily, come on, we’ll go arm in arm … Trying to make it all chatty and modern. It’s sure to be a mistake, that. The New English Bible.”
“Gloria, I agree,” said Keith. “Bibles, bibles. I’m reading about bibles.”
“Oh? And?”
“Listen to this. It’s really quite funny. Listen to this. Some busybody, prick, and creep called the Reverend John Johnson got caught smuggling five thousand bibles into Russia through Czechoslovakia. And he’d already smuggled a quarter of a million bibles into Bulgaria and the Ukraine. What for? … Anyway, the stupid sod’s in a prison in Moscow. The very worst prison in Moscow.”
Keith felt the fumbling dig of Lily’s shoe on his shin. He looked up. And Gloria warmly began,
“Oh, that’s priceless, that is. Truly priceless. A little squirt like you saying that about an ordained missionary. And I’ll thank you to keep a decent tongue in your head when you talk about such things. To risk prison for your convictions. Excuse me, but I’m a Roman Catholic. And I’m in the country of my faith. Yes that’s right, I happen to believe in God. And I think that man’s incredibly brave.”
Keith said, “Tell me, Gloria, do you happen to believe in Father Christmas? No. Of course you don’t. You grew out of it. Of course you did. You know, it’s a pity Father Christmas isn’t featured in your holy book. Because you could’ve grown out of scripture too. Yes, a great shame Santa wasn’t at least foretold in the New Testament.” He went on reedily, “You know—There will come a man, at every Nativity, he will wear a red suit, fringed in white, he will ride through the air on a sleigh drawn by flying reindeers … It might have helped all you stupid sods to put these things in their true—”
Lily kicked him again. A movement of her head now directed his eyes, not to Gloria, but to the colourless face of Scheherazade. She had changed, altered. Do you know what she looked like? She looked like the photograph of the girl who distinguished herself on the harpsichord, or clocked up five thousand miles for Meals on Wheels, or rescued a cat from the great oak behind the guildhall.
When Keith came to the dark tower, around twelve, after two hours of solitaire in the gunroom, a jagged light was rocking its way downward, and on the steep steps he was met by the lady with the lamp.
“I was coming to look for you,” said Lily.
“What for?”
“I don’t know. I had a funny feeling.”
She turned and climbed. He followed.
“You’re early.” She was watching him over her shoulder. “… And you’re drunk.”
“Mm. Well.” Starting at around eleven twenty, Keith had three huge glasses of something called Parfait Amour—pink, sticky, and insultingly sweet. Followed by most of a bottle of Benedictine. He followed her into the room, saying, “Yeah. Well. By my standards.”
“I suppose you’re relieved,” said Lily as she climbed into bed.
“Relieved? Relieved? Why would I be relieved?”
“That you’re not out on your ear. After that display. It wasn’t just what you said, it was how you said it. Sadistic. You’re lucky.”
“Oh I’m lucky all right. How the fuck was I supposed to know she’s religious?”
“You mean Scheherazade.”
“Yeah I mean Scheherazade.” He was unbuttoning his shirt, unbuckling his belt. He fell over and said, “She doesn’t look religious.”
“And neither do you … It’s Timmy, you idiot.”
“Timmy? Is Timmy that religious?”
“Religious? He’s a practising maniac. Don’t you ever listen? Smuggling bibles is exactly the kind of thing Timmy does all the time. That’s why he was in Jerusalem. They go there to convert the Jews.”
He switched off the light and lowered himself downward.
“You offended Junglebum too.”
“Oh fuck Junglebum.”
There was a short silence. Then she said, “Did you see the difference? Gloria was all roused for the fight. But Scheherazade. Her eyes were ice.”
“Pathetic,” he said.
“You know, I think there’s something wrong with Scheherazade. Don’t you think? You saw how pale she was.”
“Pale?”
“You mean you didn’t notice? Gloria said she looked like Casper the Ghost. How could you not have noticed?”
He said, “Well I didn’t. And she doesn’t look religious. Her tits don’t look religious. And anyway, why aren’t you asleep?”
There was a long silence. Then her torso stiffly and frighteningly rose all at once and Keith was clenching his eyelids in the electric light.
“Why aren’t I asleep?” she said. “Why aren’t I asleep? You mean after being drugged?”
I’m not here, he thought. I’m not here, and, besides, this isn’t me anyway.
“Christ. It was like drinking a glass of barium. I thought I must be ovulating. I only realised what it was when I got back here and burped.”
And burped? You see, Lily, I’m actually rather disappointed about how things seem to have turned o
ut tonight. Well I am. I had other ideas—I had other plans and hopes.
She said, “Azium gives you smelly burps.”
Smelly burps? Do you perhaps sense, Lily, that there’s been a slight falling-short? From my point of view, admittedly. Let me explain. Around now, I should be in the shape of a reef knot with your friend Scheherazade, in the bedroom beyond the apartment; I should be wiping my mouth, around now, on a silken thigh before getting down to my second pint of her bodily fluid. And instead? Instead I find myself in a world of arraignment—of accurate arraignment, of ovulation, and smelly burps. He said,
“Wait.” His eyes gradually opened. “I mixed the glasses up—that’s all. Yours was meant for me.”
“… What do you need tranquillising for? Dilkash? No,” she said. “You liar. You had some sort of sex date with Scheherazade, didn’t you. And you fucked it all up by shitting on God.”
This went on until half past three. Keith’s story was not actually falsifiable (or so he then supposed), and he stuck to it. This went on until half past three. Then Lily switched off the light and left him to his thoughts.
Keith Nearing awoke from troubled dreams and found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. His room, a regular human room, lay quiet between the four familiar walls; and he had his human eyes. But that was what he was—an enormous insect with human eyes.
4
TORQUERE “TO TWIST”
Go on, get your staring done with. The air shuddered and juddered around him in phonebox-sized volumes, it gonged and twanged around him, but he had to enter the kitchen. He had to enter the kitchen because he had to have coffee. And he had to have coffee to fuel the nicotine sobbed for by his foul mouth …
The three girls, as he approached, didn’t actually scream out loud, or climb up on their chairs, or fight their way, like little Miss Samsa, to the wide window for a lungful of breathable air. They stayed in their seats and stared. Get it done with. Lily looked at him with a kind of infinite weariness, Gloria with the contempt due to a crushed enemy, and Scheherazade’s flat glance made Keith feel invisible—morally invisible, in the way that poverty and sordor are said to be invisible to Hindus of the higher castes. Go on, get it done.
… He sat sweating and swearing and trembling and weeping, and smoking, in the loveseat on the west terrace, with Professor Meadowbrook, and Antinomianism, and Nottingham and Sardinia and Guadalajara, and D. H. Lawrence, and Frieda von Richthofen. If the terrible theory was true, and looks were shaped by happiness (if surface was determined by essence), then Keith did indeed have the six wavery limbs, the toothlessly drooling jaws, the vaulted brown belly, the metallic carapace, and the hurled apple rotting and reeking in his back. A storm was on its way, and too late. Not the sky but the air itself was a gangrenous green. The air itself was about to throw up. And he could hear the yellow birds in their tree—pissing themselves laughing.
So there was self-pity: in the mirror that morning he was foetal with it, his face a foetus of crapulent self-pity. And with regard to the other business, the business with Lily, he could smell about himself the effluent of ingratitude. And he felt his bastardy too. “Why bastard? wherefore base?” he kept whispering. “Why brand they us With base? bastardy? base, base?” Here, in Italy, Keith was Salò, in 1944—the republic of dissolution and defeat, of impotence and emptiness …
But men are shifty. Shiftier than they know. Shifty even within their own shifty beings. Life had pronounced him dead, but somewhere within, in his groin, perhaps, was a pulse of hope. And he felt the lucidity that comes with doom.
Keith had a stratagem for Lily. The back pocket of his jeans now contained Nicholas’s letter about their sister, Violet—still unread. Tactical prudence demanded that he acquaint himself with its contents; once or twice he unfolded the envelope and considered it. But his resolve could not survive the sadistic interdiction of his gut, his craw, and he simply took what courage he could from the firm curves of his brother’s hand.
So Keith had a stratagem for Lily. And he had a stratagem for Scheherazade.
It came again: from the far distance, the supposedly cleansing rumours of thunder.
A round noon he raised his head and saw that Lily was staring at him through the French windows. Her face wore a much more distilled version of the forensic look he had seen often enough the night before; and Keith could tell by the sharpness of her movements, as she opened the glass doors, that she came to him with a case much fortified by research. He felt reasonably frightened; but he somehow hugged it to himself, the airy clarity of doom.
“You—look—terrible,” she said. “Listen. I’m missing two. I count my pills, and I’m missing two. Now why’s that?”
He didn’t answer.
“You don’t answer. Two. You tried one out, didn’t you. And you thought it didn’t taste of anything. Because you smoke a carton of French cigarettes every day, you thought it didn’t taste of anything. You tried it out. And then you drugged me so you could sleep with Scheherazade.”
Keith lit a Disque Bleu. He had a tight balloon of gas—laughing gas and tear gas—in his solar plexus; this gas was sweetish and colourless and made him want to sob and cackle. For even he could see the quiet artistry, the hushed equipoise of his fate: here he sat, squaring up to the consequences of sleeping with Scheherazade—without sleeping with Scheherazade. And (he thought exhaustedly) is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some: some credit, some moral recompense on this earth, for not sleeping with Scheherazade?
“Lily, I mixed the glasses up. That’s all.”
“Mixed them up? How could you mix them up? They weren’t the same … I asked Gloria and she said you had a beer before dinner.”
He had not been looking forward to this thrust, but he had anticipated it—this thrust into the very crotch of his defence. Gloria was right. Beer, and in a hefty beaker, and not a long-stemmed flute of tempered glass. “That was later,” he said. “I had a prosecco first. Like I did the night before.”
“I seem to remember you just went and got a beer.”
He said, “Seem to remember, Lily? How would you remember? You were drugged. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“Yes, drugged. For your sex date with Scheherazade.”
Keith exhaled and thought about male anger: male anger as a tactic. He had an opening phrase ready in his mind. Lily, how dare you even—and so on … The underexperienced but observant Nicholas once advised him that anger was still worth trying: when your position was truly dire, it was still worth trying male anger—because some women still instinctively feared it, even the best and the bravest of them. Even the most accomplished terrorists, Nicholas said, were still vulnerable to male anger—because it reminded them of their fathers. Keith, now, a bent shape on the loveseat, under the tundra of Lily’s stare—no, Keith was not about to reach for male anger. He had no talent for anger, anger, which is only in command of the power to postpone.
Lily said, “Not a date. Not a fuck. She isn’t like that. It’s not in her … No. You felt she’d been flirting with you, and you were planning to make your move. That’s why you were douching yourself in the bathroom for an hour and a half.”
Keith stirred. It was of course axiomatic, according to Nicholas, that you seized on it—the moment when the witch radar showed its first false reading. He said (having given a curlike sneeze that left his palm secretly coated in snot),
“Come on, Lily. You’re so proud of being rational. Think. I’ve had—what?—twenty evenings alone with Scheherazade. If I was that kind of … If I was that type, I’d have made my move long before now. Christ. I like her, she’s a lovely girl, but she’s not my type. You’re my type, Lily. You.”
She examined him. “And the pills?” She examined him further. “Mm. Your story’d sound better if you looked less suicidal.”
Now Keith chose to take the two necessary risks (did she inspect Jane Eyre last night? how often did she count her pills?). He said, he recited,
&n
bsp; “So you have noticed. Listen. I took the first pill after I read the first letter from Nicholas. I took the second pill—or I tried—to prepare myself to read the second. Okay?”
“You haven’t even glanced at it. It’s still in Jane Eyre.”
“No it isn’t.” He reached into his back pocket. “I had it with me last night. I read it last night. That’s why I got drunk. I’m speechless, Lily. Violet. It’s really very seriously terrible. Help me. I need you to help me think it through, Lily. Help me.”
She consented to be led by the hand to the swing sofa, where he flattened the letter out on her lap.
My dear Little Keith,
The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness Pains my sense. So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth.
“Yeats, Keats,” he murmured. “And Sir Walter Raleigh.” Keith was now in the curious position of hoping that the news about his sister would indeed be really very seriously terrible. “Those were Raleigh’s last words,” he said. “He was putting his neck on the block at the time.”
They began. And Violet, not always the most dependable of young women, didn’t let her brother down.
A little later Lily reappeared with a cup of coffee, meant for him, and he thanked her, and drank in silence, while she stood looking out, with her hands joined and a freshened sheen in her eyes.
“All right. Gloria said she wasn’t sure about the beer. Not at all sure. So I suppose I … Now what have we here? Well isn’t that a sight.”
In wasp-waisted charcoal suits, and arm in arm, Scheherazade and Gloria were making their way across the terrace, heading for the steps that led to the lane and the village.
“Church.”
“It’s pitiful, isn’t it,” said Keith. “Absolutely fucking pitiful. Gloria’s RC, right? Scheherazade isn’t. What’s Scheherazade?”
Lily told him that Timmy, at least, was Pentecostalist—and it should be admitted that this was something that Keith thought he still needed to know. He said,
