Success (11 page)

‘How’s life?’ I said.

‘Busy busy busy. How’s yours shaping up?’

‘It isn’t. Everyone’s paralysed at work still. And no one’s fucked me recently, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Didn’t you try that little one with big ears again?’

‘Gita? Yes, I did. And she didn’t want to again.’

‘Bitch. Why on earth not? Who does she think she is?’

‘Actually, I think I know why she won’t now. She’s so thick that she’s forgotten she ever fucked me in the first place.’

‘They are hell, aren’t they. What do they think is the point of them if they won’t do that?’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Torka the town,’ he said.

‘Have a good time. Perhaps I ought to go queer like you.’

‘Thanks. Are you staying in?’

‘Yeah, I — ’ But he picked up his cape and waved. ‘Good night,’ I said.

I stayed in. I drank whisky until ten, dined on packet ham and cold baked beans, had a long swampy bath, and went to bed. Hot, exhilarating dreams of striving and crisis, a short wakeful period between five and six, more dreams, and something else in the bed while I smoked an early-morning cigarette, as if my neglected body were at last coming alive again.

That day, too, I asked her to the pub, and she came.

Another really cute ploy I’ve hit upon is this: through a tissue of hints, mild playacting, duplicity, reticence, subterfuge and lies, I have managed to give Jan the impression that I’m fucking, or used to be fucking, or at any rate have at some point definitely fucked, Ursula! Such precepts are arguable, I know, but I’ve always gone along with the view that, first, the surest guarantee of sexual success is sexual success (you can’t have one without the other and you can’t have the other without the one), and, second, that the trappings of sexual success are only fleetingly distinguishable from sexual success itself. (Third, I’m all fucked up anyway, and this can’t do me any harm. I am not a sexual success with women. I just
am not
. Gregory isn’t either, particularly. He’s just a success with sex.) So: the fecklessly beautiful Jan is swivelling on her swivel chair in the focal office area: leaning easily on the table by her side, his blue eyes bright, his strong arms folded, his ginger hair falling out, is the Trainee Seller, Terence Service, talking with vim and without a trace of condescension to the flower of the
clerical staff — when, at exactly 12.45, in walks this other girl of mine, this chick, this broad called Ursula, whose curious, up-market good looks I allow Jan time to register as I blurt
Uh-oh
out of the corner of my mouth and spring up guiltily to introduce them (first names only), in confused apology, before sailing out with Urs — to buy her a large and nourishing meal. (And that’s more, by the way, than Gregory does these days. The other week, apparently, they had a very depressing half-hour together in some sandwich bar near the gallery — he wasn’t meant to stay out any longer, he said, and he even had to borrow 60p off Ursula to help pay for the lunch. Most heartening. Ought to find out the truth about that job of his.)

I suspect, anyway, that this Ursula ploy is telling soundly on young Jan, who has not once but twice questioned me about her (unjealously, alas, but with respectful interest) and has several times remarked on how ‘really pretty’ she was. (Girls always like the way Ursula looks, doubtless because she’s got no tits.) I go hurt and wistful whenever she’s mentioned. ‘Yes,’ I said yesterday, chewing on a large creased lip, ‘it’s sad that things aren’t quite … clicking between us the way they once used to.’ Jan said, ‘Oh dear.’ I gazed out of the drizzly window. ‘Yeah. But, hell, at least we’re still friends.’ (I feel tremendous when I say things like that; I feel like a mountain. It’s far and away the sexiest I’ve been all year.)

And surely Jan’s fast-escalating alcoholism must continue to hold me in good stead, must continue to be a source of true security and encouragement.
Christ
can that girl drink. She makes me feel virtually teetotal, and I’m fighting drunk, falling-down drunk, drunk out of my mind all the time these days. I now grant the full potency of the cliché,
as if it were water
. I’ve seen her drink three pints and four glasses of wine at lunchtime — and she’s efficient and ethereal throughout the afternoon. She can drink seven or eight whisky-and-lemonades after work without blinking — then race out of the pub like a schoolgirl
to catch her train. (She lives in Barnet, with her parents, thank God. ‘Jan’ is short not for Janice or Janet, as I’d assumed, but for Jane — she’s posher than she lets on. A certain little fuck called Dave is mentioned more often than I’d like, but always in the perfect or pluperfect tense, and never except in retrospective subordinate clauses.) I’m entirely adamant about paying for every single drink she has in my company, of course — in order to nurse her guilt about not sleeping with me — and I’ve computed that I could take her to the pub
twice a day
for three-and-a-half months before going bankrupt. (I’m very scared about going broke, incidentally. ‘Broke don’t scare me,’ I sometimes say. But broke does. Broke scares me shitless.) It won’t be that long, though, will it? One way or the other, it can’t be that long.

Jesus, I’m mad about her. Sometimes, when she smiles at me or calls my name without looking up, I just want to burst into hot tears of gratitude. I can feel the husky saline need trying to well up out of me, trying to get away. Sometimes, when I hear her muttering to herself as she sorts through her handbag, or letting out a little grunt of effort as she shifts her heavy typewriter, I sit tight in here, my teeth bared, actually wringing my hands. Apart from anything else she’s incredibly funny, as well as inexhaustibly good-natured: for instance, she can mimic the ulcerous, monosyllabic Damon to a T, yet she’s far and away the least nasty to him of anyone in the office and even makes me hesitate before twitting him in front of the girls or obliging him to run some pointless and humiliating errand. (Everybody here loves her too, naturally. Burns hides his fish and vinegar in a desk drawer; Herbert is always bending her ear with his bullshit — fat chance
he’s
got; mad Wark tenderly forgives her most egregious clerical errors; and John Hain himself takes a few seconds out from sly self-advancement to admire her as she swanks this way and that.) And, oh God, her face, her eyes, that silly hair. What if I reached for her hand and she took it in hers, what if I put my arms round her
shoulders and she stayed still, what if she let me kiss her … with tongues. Meet me, O Jesus, meet me — and what can her breasts possibly be like?
Damn
, I have to know this thing; I’d give all I own sooner than not know it. And what if, say, she let me, you know, touch them (you can see her thimble nipples when it’s cold and she’s especially prone to folding her arms in modest diagonals across her chest), touch them, just like that, then perhaps move on to — why not? — her tight stomach and dinky little weapon of a bum and
oh no
her (can’t bring myself to say that word any more) … would it be singed auburn like her hair or just plain black or what, and how much of it would there be, a prim wisp or a great swirling mother of a bush that teemed right over her midriff or what? — and would I get to stroke it and … yes, that’s what I’d do all right, I’d go down on her, for as long as she bloody well liked, for months, for good, I’d really set up camp down there and make bloody sure she had a great time so it wouldn’t matter that much when I didn’t get a bonk, unless of course she was particularly skilled at dealing with this sort of problem or had mastered some foreign technique or just treated me with unusual gentleness and sympathy or if she were very excited herself and … Good God, it’s never actually occurred to me before: do you think she actually
wants
to?

Take it easy. That really
is
a bit fanciful. And what do you give a shit, at this stage, whether she
wants
to or not? How often, really, do girls go to bed with people because they
want
to? (You won’t get anywhere that way, fat boy. You never have.) Just do it, do it. Wheedle, intimidate, bully, bribe; beg, sob, goad, nag; curse, threaten, cheat, lie: but do it.

We were, for example (though I say it myself), in the pub together only last night.

It was an emotional dusk, so gradual and welcome that no one had thought to put on the lights and chase it away. We’d already had three each, in our corner, and a tearfully
numinous haze had begun to form between ourselves and everything else. Moistly I peered at Jan as she talked on, thinking that perhaps the last thing in the world I should do was make a pass at her — because what if there were no more evenings like this one, warm and drunk at nightfall, surrounded by the talk of friends and, outside, by the sound of slow rain and confident cars. I began to speak. I looked at her again, the small clear nostrils, the curved-down mouth, the tangy trace of half-moles and freckles along the outlines of her lips.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Come back and have a drink at the flat tomorrow. You’ll meet my brother, my foster-brother. I was adopted by his parents when I was nine. I had parents of my own but they got fucked up. I share the flat with him. He’s called Gregory. You’ll probably like him’ (and probably fancy him too. Do you imagine I haven’t thought about that? I have. I’ll talk to him. I’ll fix it. He wouldn’t do that to me if he knew how much it meant). ‘He’s odd. He’s also a total faggot, by the way. We don’t get on now — I can’t remember what getting on with him was like — but there was a time, there certainly was a time when I loved him …’

I hardly ever see him any more. I miss him. He’s the only friend I’ve ever had.

There was a time when I loved Gregory. I did. I loved him in my own way — but then anyone would have. What a boy. You didn’t have to be what I was to be able to see what he was. The one who could accomplish all things: with him it wasn’t even a question of daring — his transgressions were merely the accoutrements of his unthinking self, the phraseology of his charm and luck. As if daring could exist, anyway, in that soft-tempered land of airy white rooms, afternoon toast, and fat housekeepers.

He stole with ambition, with casual acumen — and
without getting caught
. He would loiter in the exit-gates of supermarkets, his duffle-bag groaning with chocolate and pop. He once stole a
football
from Macmillan’s in Church
Street — simply cruised out of the place patting it up and down on the ground. There was another time when, just for kicks (he doesn’t smoke), Greg was leaning over the counter to steal some cigarettes at the dumplike sweetshop near my school and was caught in mid-theft by the huge owner, who barred the door and stonily informed us that he was going to call the police, get them round, dial 999. Naturally we both lapsed into tears — me with a throaty, regular, doomed sobbing (I knew they’d get me in the end), Gregory with pitiful high-pitched wails as he wretchedly surrendered the ten-packet of cheap filters in hysterical remorse, begging and begging the man to let us go. As soon as he’d shouted and sworn at us to his satisfaction, the tobacconist did just that, unbolting the door and shoving us disgustedly into the street. I was still deep in tears when, a hundred yards down the road, Gregory turned to me with delighted, cloudless eyes, a packet of twenty Pall Mall Kings gleaming in his palm.

Where did he get those nerves? Where did I get mine? I stole too, of course, rarely, amateurishly, compulsively, and from home. I would rifle through wallets and handbags in the pure, unadorned hope of not finding anything, but usually appropriating it if I did. Past the crowded sitting-room tables, each a glossy Lilliput of silver and quartz — and there I’d be, trotting in panic up the stairs with something valuable and heavy weighing my pocket down as monstrous as a billiard ball. If I saw my foster-mother’s purse fanned open on the kitchen dresser, a sac of adult richesse — then suddenly my fingers would be burrowing in the leathery lips. I never hid the baubles with conviction, never spent the money I stole. Why did I do it? — there must be a textbookful of reasons why. Once I provoked an unprecedented furore by making off with some pricey cruet from the dining-room mantelpiece. Almost immediately — to my sweaty horror — the alarm was loudly raised. I put the burning insect on a first-floor passage table and fled to the attic, where I crawled under a collapsed bedstead and listened for the
staccato threshes and sterling trebles of the advancing posse. Dirty boy, they’re coming to seek you out. I wanted to
die
, to die … Gregory was alone when he found me. I waited for him to rally the others with a whoop, but instead he paused, crouched at the side of the bedstead, and slowly edged beneath it towards me. His face was as wet with tears as my own. ‘Come down, Terry,’ he said. ‘We’re not cross any more. It’s all over now.’

And he had tenderness then, and real radiance, an extraordinary flair for boyhood and youth, as if he had cleverly worked out that these were the licensed days of his life when there was nothing he couldn’t do — and get away with it, and be liked, and that this could never last. Gregory, Gregory, my opulent and legendary brother. I feel sentimental about your childhood because I can’t feel it about mine. I see you streaking down the village road on your drop-handlebar bike as the girls come out from school, no hands; I see you at your birthday party, in your first long trousers too, joy flooding your eyes when all twelve candleflames turned into threads of leaning smoke, as if the four horizons were converging for your delight; I see you being driven off to your school in autumn, not waving, your head held up high, going without fear into that world of harm beyond the garden gates. It was wonderful, and I loved it as much as anyone.

What fucked you up? What changed you? Something did. Something has robbed you of all soulfulness and feeling and heart and left you the thing you are now, the little bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response you pass yourself off as, all the stuff that simply got to you before anything else could.

Look at you,
cock
sucker,
scum
, with your bloody stupid twee old heap of a car, your laughingstock poof clothes, your worthless layabout job, your cretinous faggot friends, your sullen and ravening
money
worries, your pathetic outdated swank, your endless lies. Gregory is a liar. Don’t believe a word he says. He is the author of lies.