Amazing Disgrace (23 page)

I have the feeling I’ve already been stripped naked even before I climb onto the trolley and numbly unzip. I’m not wearing corduroy today, having discovered some small
spatters
of cooked vegetation adhering here and there. The awful Debra was right and the suit will have to be cleaned. Instead, I have chosen a lyrical pair of slacks by His Majesty in fawn mohair-and-denim mixture. We’re talking a serious sum of money here, which may or may not be the right impression to convey in a private surgery in the Harley Street area. It could cut both ways. I watch as Benjy Birnbaum goes to a
sinister-looking
dispenser on the wall and sticks a hand into its
brightly
lit aperture. There is the gulping noise of a vacuum being released and then he repeats the operation with the other hand. Only when he returns to the trolley can I see that his hands are now covered by a nearly invisible film of latex, quite
possibly of an ethical bent. Only a faint ring the colour of a rubber band around each wrist gives the game away.  

‘I suppose one could use that gadget to fit a condom,’ I say.  

‘Just relax.’  

It’s strange how one can’t watch a doctor examining one’s own body. Or I can’t, at any rate. Just as I did last night while Steffi Toms was giving my veal the once-over, I stare off sideways at yet another row of books as though my body no longer has anything to do with me.
Handbook of Vascular Anastomosis; The Dysfunctional Penis
by Murray G. Intrilogator;
The Beyondness of Healing
, published by an
outfit
called The Mystical Rose Center For Sexual Unfolding;
Dicktionary
. Dicktionary?? A fat, coffee table-sized volume with a …

‘Cough, please.’

… peculiar colophon on its spine.  

‘Again. Good.’ He gives my veal a valedictory pat. ‘I think we can be pretty sure there’s no permanent damage to the
perioticular
ostracon. And your melinges are sound, at any rate.’  

‘In layman’s terms, that will be five hundred guineas?’  

‘Ah, guineas. The dear, dead days. I’d like to do a blood test to be certain, however. I suspect these pills may temporarily have screwed up your hormonal system. Yes, yes, you can get up now. Mm, guineas.’ He returns to his desk. ‘How old are you?’  

‘Just about to turn forty.’  

‘Are you sure?’  

‘I mean fifty. Did I say forty? Truth to tell, I’ve been a bit thrown by last night. I was quite worried for a while as you can imagine.’ It has taken a rotund Jewish surgeon in my pay to expose an entirely harmless deception that goes back at least, well, ten years. This is cruel and humiliating. It is something I was hoping to keep from my readers and myself alike, let alone from Adrian, who now seems to recede on the far side of a gulf of years. Suddenly everything looks bleaker, even slightly pathetic. Brace up, Samper. Get a grip. Beaumont Street’s
Hippocratic
answer to the Pillsbury Doughboy is breaking out syringes and vials from sterile packaging. ‘I notice you have a book over there called
Dicktionary
. That big volume.’  

‘Oh, that. I need hardly say it comes from California, like the spiritual twaddle next to it. Yes, the Mapplethorpe Press. There’s not a word of text in it. Just clench your fist? That’s it. No, entirely pictures. Thousands of photographs. And do you know, no, hold still, it’s a good vein and we’ll take another twenty while we’re at it, I’ve found it quite as valuable as most medical textbooks. Just press that hard for a minute or two and I’ll stick a bit of plaster over it. We don’t want to get our nice shirt all messed up. We’ll have some results – what time is it now, two-thirty? – by this time tomorrow. And then we’ll know how to proceed. But for now I think you haven’t too much to worry about. I would recommend some form of
erotic
eventuality in the next twenty-four hours, preferably leading to climax. That way we’ll know if you’re draining normally. If not, call me immediately and find a flight of stairs to climb. Virginia in the office will give you my various numbers and deal with the paperwork. I’ll see you again tomorrow.’  

On my way out I pass the open door of the waiting room where the fish are still frozen in their dimensionless limbo forty feet above a London street and the diver is for ever about to be shafted even as he revels in doubloons. Erotic
eventuality
? What kind of grotesque urban world have you strayed into, Samper, so far from the sanities of Le Roccie and its bucolic pleasures? You must hurry home and write whatever you want to write and stop waiting on other people’s
vagueness
and indecisiveness, a bending lackey to their promises of loot to come. Either Millie and Lew make a straightforward proposal in the next two days or I’ll sign up with Nanty. Not that he’s so much better, pop stars being about as reliable as Hollywood film-makers where airy promises are concerned. But cap-in-hand must now give way to cheque-in-hand.
Samper
has spoken.

This feeling of having taken a decision lifts my spirits, already somewhat buoyed by not having been despatched urgently by Benjy Birnbaum to the Wimpole Clinic for shaving and
prepping
prior to surgery. Still, he has left me some tricky
homework
to accomplish by tomorrow. Erotic eventuality? No matter how heartening an encounter with a cock doctor, the experience leaves behind it no quickening of the libidinal pulse. Rather the reverse, I’m afraid, and I don’t quite see how I’m to fulfil this task in the allotted time. Sharing Derek’s Allure-scented flat is often comic, sometimes sordid, but
seldom
stimulating since our amatory tastes in no way coincide. People cavil about having to follow their doctor’s tiresome orders but right now I would be happy to forswear alcohol, sugar or salt if it also let me off having to experience orgasm before two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I suppose that’s what comes of being fifty rather than forty. Quite infuriating to have been found out, by the way. I’m still smarting as I walk down Beaumont Street towards Derek’s rancid lair, but to take my mind off it I have already begun to sing Captain Thorogood’s doleful aria from Gilbert and Sullivan’s unfinished operetta,
Durance Vile
:

If you have any familiarity with this scarcely performable but noble torso (which I rather doubt), you will remember that the Captain, unjustly imprisoned for cheating at cards, is now in
the Tower of London awaiting execution for having throttled a succession of his gaolers, each of whom offered to cheer his spirits by playing games of chance with him and lost. Tonight it is the turn of kindly young Jack Lively, an apprentice gaoler barely out of his teens who has fallen in love with Pansy Thorogood, the Captain’s comely daughter who visits him daily. The Captain and Jack are about to play halma.

Young Jack survives, but barely. With extraordinary skill
Sullivan
manages to be simultaneously jaunty and sombre; and although we know there will be a happy ending (Jack will
himself
strangle Pansy in Act II when he visits her in Lowndes Square on his day off) a certain darkness tingles in the
background
. Impertinent burghers stare at me as I pass among them down Marylebone High Street, much as their
counterparts
did in Southampton the other day. There seems not much to be done about Britain’s essential unmusicality –
Das Land
ohne Musik,
as the Germans used to call us, and that was long before the Sex Pistols. Ours is today a riffraff culture of
hooli-scruffs
and yobbigans with little original to say and scarcely any technique for saying it. It was not ever thus; and there are some who would blame our culture’s demise on that of the Luton Girls’ Choir in 1976. I myself would place the date a decade or two earlier, after which everything was swamped by the enduring deluge of social realism and conceptual art. But who cares? I shall be off just as soon as I’ve signed a contract and sorted out my woefully abused member.

Today I’m too lazy to clean up Derek’s kitchen and prepare an inventive snack before his return from work. Instead I add to his phone bill by calling up last night’s fellow diner, Joan Nugent. I’ve been thinking that on balance she could be more
an ally than not. Anyway, I’m prepared to take a risk. I really do need to talk to someone about the Cleat problem, knowing the great yachtswoman is safely sitting in Hatchards or
Borders
or Waterstones laboriously signing copies of my book with her left hand. One of the minor inconveniences of losing your writing hand, Millie once told me, is that you also lose your scriptorial identity. All of a sudden bank managers,
passport
officers, the DVLC and supermarket checkouts refuse to believe you’re you. But that, of course, was in the bad old days of being Mrs Clifford Cleat. Once the nation recognizes you as just plain Millie it scarcely matters what hieroglyphs you scrawl.  

‘Hello?’ rasps Joan’s nicotine-pickled voice from the phone. ‘Get away, blast you, I’m feeding Sandy.’ A storm of yapping on the other end. ‘Go on, get away, Bo’sun. You’ve had yours. Greedy bugger. Who is this? Oh, Gerry. Sorry about that. Just feeding the dogs here. Bedlam as usual. Glad you’ve called, actually. We never did finish our conversation last night. I want to know what you know about those ruddy
transponders
, among other things.’  

‘Even as we speak they’re trying to retrieve them from the seabed.’  

‘Ha! I was right. You do know more.’  

I tell her the story of the container that was swept overboard but lie when I say I have no idea how the recording of the transponders’ electronic Babel came into Millie’s hands.  

‘Huh, it’ll be one of those marine boffins,’ says Joan
astutely
. ‘For some reason they’ve got it in for her. I don’t yet know why but I’m going to find out.’  

Now tread carefully here, Gerry. There must be no mention of the EAGIS affair otherwise this old crony will warn Millie of the plot against her. ‘Don’t quote me on this because I don’t know anything for certain, but I suspect at least some of the scientists at BOIS will have taken against her over this
Neptune
business. It’s all too flaky and New Age. I’d guess they feel it’s squandering the opportunity of having a celebrity who
might otherwise raise awareness in a serious and intelligent way. Possibly they think she’s more interested in grabbing a new constituency of admirers for herself.’ ‘Suspect’, ‘guess’, ‘possibly’. I hope I’m covering my tracks well enough but this butch old girl at the other end is nobody’s fool. ‘It might be a kindly act if you warn Millie about the transponders, at any rate. You obviously know far more about marine salvage than I do, but whether or not they retrieve this gear I’m afraid the story’s going to break sooner or later. I’m sure Millie will want to distance herself from alleged recordings of the Spirit of the Ocean addressing the human race from the seabed. In short, if I were her I’d throw those nutty scholars – what’s their names, Tammeri and Brilov – to the wolves.’

There is a silence at the other end, unless one counts what sounds like a pack of the very wolves in question. Joan’s
terriers
would surely make equally short work of the misguided linguists if thrown them at dinner time.  

‘Right,’ she says at length. ‘Yes, I don’t see she has any
alternative
. Not that she ever had. I’m afraid there’s this streak in Millie that imagines she can get away with anything.’  

‘You noticed.’  

‘It’s as if reality’s never going to catch up with her.’  

‘That shark did.’  

‘Yes, but she’s never spotted its more metaphorical aspects. She only thinks of it as having been an agent of change for the better in her life. I’ll tell her, Gerry. That’s loyal of you. While we’re about it, do you know of anything else that might steal up and bite her when she’s not looking?’  

‘Well … Not really, no.’ Why is it that conspiracies are so tempting to divulge? Why do we find it so flattering to hold some titbit of knowledge over somebody’s head?  

‘May I ask how you come to have contacts in the marine
sciences
, Gerry?’  

‘Oh, sheer chance,’ I tell her. ‘Friends of friends. It came in handy while writing the book when I had to check some details about navigation. You can imagine – being a
landlubber
I needed to bone up on winds and tides and currents and compass bearings even if I didn’t actually use the information.’ It’s just like talking to Benjy Birnbaum. I’m
so
plausible when I ad-lib. We Sampers can think on our feet. I really believe there must be oratory in our genes. ‘You wouldn’t credit the weird contacts and knowledge I’ve needed to acquire over the years while writing these stupid books. Skiing, competitive eating, motor racing, sailing – you name it.’  

‘Competitive
eating
?’  

‘I’m afraid so. That was a few years ago. They were trying to have it accepted as an Olympic sport with strict rules, accredited trainers and regular testing for drugs such as
regurgitation
suppressants. As a matter of fact I believe they still are.’  

‘You’re having me on.’  

‘By no means. Look it up on the internet. It’s still mainly
US-led
but the world champion hot-dog eater for the past five years has been a Japanese boy, and if you’re thinking sumo wrestler you’d be wrong. He’s quite small and hasn’t an ounce of fat on him. Apparently it’s all about training the stomach to expand. I had to learn a lot about the human digestive system, the vagus nerve, the physiology of the stomach lining, all that.’  

‘What was your book called?’  

‘We never got that far, it all came to nothing. The cash wasn’t there. Believe me, Joan, the money needs to be reasonable enough to supply incentive, at least. When I was still doing the preliminary interviews I once had to spend the night in the same small room as the reigning world champion baked beans eater.’ I thought back to those awful hours in a caravan behind a fairground outside Dewsbury. Never again; not least because the forty-stone Yorkshireman expired a month later,
deafeningly
, after losing his title in Oslo. He was only twenty-seven. It’s a complete no-no, trying to write about people who are likely to up and die on you. I’d always thought motor racing risky enough when it came to writing a champion’s biography; it’s a wealthy sport so the risk is probably worth taking. But
competitive eating still inhabits the roustabout world of
country
fairs. Try as it might for Olympic status there’s always the ghost of a barker with a megaphone in the background
shouting
‘Roll up! Roll up! Fifteen poundsa sausages in ten minutes, gennlemen ’n ladies! Fifteen
pounds!
’ There’s another aspect, too, from the would-be writer’s point of view. Most sports are pretty sickening at close range but competitive eating can be literally so. Try watching somebody stuff himself with a huge chunk of naked butter against the clock and without ‘
regurgitating
’, as they euphemistically call throwing up. After
witnessing
a professional butter eater put away a kilo in five minutes, trying with his spare hand to stop it coming back down his nose, I ate nothing for a week and spent much of the time in a darkened room with cologne compresses reading Proust. We writers
suffer
for our art.  

‘So,’ I conclude, ‘my knowing the odd oceanographer falls well within the boundaries of normality for me. I can tell you honestly, Joan, that my boundaries are set pretty wide these days but they definitely do not include the likes of Brilov, Tammeri and my other neighbour last night with the big, er, jacket.’  

‘And eyes.’  

‘And eyes, yes. Debra Leather, that’s it. She’s another of these mystical scholars. As I say, to the wolves with them.’  

‘Definitely. I’ll let Millie finish her book signing and then I shall get on to her and make that very point. Ciderpresses, my arse. Balls to Neptune! Me and the girls have been thinking it for a long time, mind you, but we couldn’t find the right lever to move Millie. Really, she’s been beyond reason in some ways, for Pete’s sake don’t quote me, but this time I shall talk her around. It will take two minutes, the way I’m going to do it. We’ll simply put the blame on those blasted groupies for misleading her with all that mystic garbage. We Navy girls are about to reassert ourselves. You’re a star, Gerry.’  

So there you are, Samper. Congratulations. For all the right reasons you have probably just talked yourself out of a plum contract, one that would have enabled you to step off the
treadmill for a good long time. I have no doubt tough old Joan with her nautical tattoos will pound some sense into Millie and Lew. My bet is that Millie will pretty soon announce she’s standing down from her short-lived leadership of the loony Neptunies for reasons of ill health. When her awful lapse in taste and intelligence has receded in the public’s mind – in about a week, given that organ’s attention span – she can maybe start lending her name to some serious marine
enterprises
and political initiatives. But the salient thing is she is no longer going to want me to write her a book about her
awareness
of divine presences twenty thousand leagues under the sea. I suppose I should keep ahead of the game by contriving a different book for her, an altogether more sensible book, a sort of David Attenborough-ish book about the ocean and its threatened future, as told by world-renowned yachtsmoll
Millie
Cleat. But I’m weary of the woman. And besides, the sea’s future is in no way threatened. It will still be there long after Millie and the rest of our race have vanished, washing its hands of us over and over on its thousand shores.  

Wise in the ways of the world, the next day I put off calling Nanty until after midday. In my limited experience, boy-band leaders are seldom up before noon and often not much before 4 p.m., depending on the toll taken by last night’s gig. Slightly to my surprise I catch him sounding frisky and compos mentis.  

‘Doin’ me exercises, mate,’ he tells me. ‘Physio for the old gluteus maximus. Bet you don’t know what that is.’  

‘I do, too. It’s what you sit on.’ Minimus in poor Derek’s case, of course.  

‘I gotta hand it to you, Gerry, you know a lotta stuff. So what did you think of that dinner the other night?’  

‘Inedible, mostly.’

‘Yeah. What about that neighbour of yours, though, eh? Not the dyke – the one with the boobs? Tasty, or what? Giving you the old eye, I thought. “Wonder if old Gerry’s up for it?”
I said to myself. “She’s making it a bit obvious.”’