Success (25 page)

‘Well, well, well.’

‘Aha.’

‘So.’

‘Well then.’

‘And how are you?’ Jan asked.

‘Oh, you know. And you?’

‘Why didn’t you ever ring me?’

Because you cut my cock off, you bitch, is all. That was the only reason. ‘Ring you? When?’

‘After that mad night at your flat. Is your sister okay?’

‘Yes, she’s okay.’ Couldn’t quite believe all this was going on. ‘Yes, it was rather a mad night, wasn’t it.’

‘You’re telling me. That flatmate of yours — cor.’

An unrealistically tasteless remark, I thought, but I said, mildly enough: ‘How do you mean, “cor”?’

‘Boy, has he got problems.’

‘Oh he’s got problems, has he?’

‘I’ll say.’ She sipped contentedly on her whisky and orange. Her extraordinary irises, with their violet webbing, held no activity, ironic or otherwise.

‘What kind of problems?’

She laughed, lifting a hand self-reprovingly to cover her mouth. ‘Well, the minute you left he started talking to me in this funny way. He is queer, isn’t he?’ She laughed again.

‘What kind of funny way?’

She imitated him, with her customary exactitude. ‘You know, sort of: “Ah now, and if this delightful sky-urchin would merely reveal her mysteries, then mayhap the — ” Oh, you know. I can’t remember. God it was funny. I kept laughing.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then …’ And for the first time some commiseration entered her face. She looked down quickly, but only for a moment. ‘Oh God. Then he asked me to do this strip. Still in that funny voice, “unveil your several treasures, my sweet”, and stuff like that. Well I — I was anybody’s that night — I sort of did a dance for him.’

‘What, a strip?’

‘Kind of.’

‘How do you mean, “kind of”? Did you take your clothes off or didn’t you take your clothes off?’

‘Well I kind of took off my T-shirt. And my jeans.’

‘Then what’s all this about him having problems? It doesn’t sound to me as if he had any problems at all.’

‘No, but then he didn’t — he couldn’t get a hard-on.’

‘Neither can I, sometimes.’

‘No, but it didn’t get that far. It was
awful
. It really was. It was
awful
.’

‘In what way?’ This was interesting all right, and reasonably consoling. But I felt oddly remote, even protective, too. It was a family affair.

‘He started crying,’ said Jan. ‘Really loud. It was awful. Him crying.
Him
crying like that.’

‘What about — not getting hard-ons?’

‘A bit, I suppose. And about being queer and broke. And about his sister going mad. He said that if she went mad he knew he would too. And about — oh everything. He sounded really fucked up.’

I lit another cigarette. I felt, again, that sense of invigorating coldness that has strengthened me so much recently. And I said — but it was only an afterthought by now — ‘So you’d have gone to bed with him anyway? If of course he could have got a proper hard-on.’

She held my eye. ‘Yup. And I would have with you too. If
you
could have got one.’

‘Why didn’t you
stay
, damn it? Why didn’t you stay?’

‘I was going to! But he said I’d better leave. He said you wouldn’t come back, or you might bring your sister back with you. Or something.’

‘So that was that.’

‘I told him to tell you to ring me. You never did.’

‘He never did either.’

‘You never got the message?’

‘No. But I’ve got it now.’

So at last we know. So at last we know a lot of things we
didn’t know before. (Or I didn’t — did you?) Christ. It’s all faintly alarming, isn’t it? I meant him harm — I meant to give him imagination, to make him see the difference between himself and everything else — but I assumed there was more to avenge. It’s easy enough now to see what it was that fucked him up. Her too.

I won’t be scared of them
any more
. I won’t ever let them make me feel I’ve done wrong. They are the strange ones these days, to be pitied, allowed for and put aside. They don’t belong any more. What they belonged to has already disappeared; it is used up, leftovers, junk.

On the evening our lives sorted themselves out for good, on the evening when all came clear, I happened to pass Gregory in the passage. He was returning from that ridiculous ‘gallery’ of his, whereas I was preparing to stroll off with my book for an expensive meal in Queensway. ‘Hi,’ we both said. He looked bedevilled and morose as he took off his overcoat. He
is
going downhill, I thought: his clothes aren’t nearly as queer as they used to be.

‘How are you?’ I asked aggressively as I put on my new gloves. Despite my firm stance and brazen proximity, Gregory declined to meet my eye.

‘I’m okay,’ he said.

‘Good. And how’s the gallery?’

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Good. Still doing well there, are you?’

‘Perhaps I won’t take off my overcoat,’ he said uncertainly. He slung the coat over his thin sloping shoulders and began to move up the stairs.

‘Ursula’s in her room,’ I said loudly, ‘moping about something or other as usual. Go and cheer her up, why don’t you?’

— And with that I slammed the door on him and sauntered towards the lift with a chuckle. Outside, through the bendy window, I could see people scurrying like leaves across the street.

I dined well. I now have so much of this curious thing that men call money — I seem to be able to do more or less as I please. Good evening! Hello again there! Yes, I don’t know but what I
won’t
have that vodka-and-tonic before my meal. The potted shrimps, if I may, and then I think the usual sirloin, if possible. That sounds splendid. And a carafe of — what? — red? Thank you. No, I won’t see the menu again — I know it backwards now anyway! — just the coffee, please, and also let me see, why, I think perhaps a large
brandy
too??? I feel posh here. I
am
posh here, now I come to mention it. The restaurant — a traditional, familial, up-market Italian place — is full of men with puffed, unintelligent faces and muscular potbellies, full of women with hard mean mouths and untidy teeth, women who look as though they don’t much like going to bed with the men but are bloody good at it once they do. True, the men are often fantastically hideous — yobs can be: no one minds — and seem to be all-thumbs with the platefuls of exotica they grumblingly request from the maternal waitresses (‘Nah, you put lemon on it, you cunt,’ I heard one gourmet tell his rather less sophisticated friend). True, also, the women glance at me quite a bit; perhaps they have me fingered for a coming yob; or perhaps they think I look rather grand and enigmatic, with my paperback, my cigarettes and my wine, my relative composure, sitting here alone in this crowded place.

Having settled the bill, and handsomely, I walked out into the street. The pubs had just closed and there was an agreeable whiff of Yahooism in the air. Over by the supermarket, I noticed, a promising scuffle was already well underway. I crossed the road, joining a small but appreciative audience, and watched two fat middle-aged men hurl a drunk about among some dustbins. The two men did this tirelessly, long after the drunk had surrendered consciousness. There seemed no reason for them to stop — but then they pantingly dusted their palms, and we all crackled away on the broken teeth and glass. We
are
getting nastier. We don’t put up with things. We do as we want now. I wouldn’t go out too late too often, if I were you. There are plenty of people here who would be quite happy to do you harm. You shouldn’t take anything for granted: you ought to be very careful. It suits me, all this, with no one being safe any more. I think I’m beginning to like the way the world is changing.

I recrossed the road to my local late-night pornographer’s. I prefer it when a decent amount of perverts are already in there, and also when the Jamaican girl isn’t at the tobacco counter: she has a bad habit of veering up without warning from her chair and shooing all the perverts into the street. Tonight, luckily, the Greek owner sat in her stead, disconsolately picking his teeth with a nail-file, and there were at least six or seven perverts spaced out along the pornography shelves, like dreamers at a urinal. I joined them. I flicked through six or seven magazines, all of which were evidently still in the business of showing men what the insides of women’s vaginas and anuses look like. There are hundreds of these girls in every magazine, and there are hundreds of these magazines in every shop, and there are hundreds and hundreds of shops. Where do these girls come from and how do they get hold of them and make them show us what the insides of their vaginas and anuses look like? They must have asked nearly every girl in the world to do it by now. Have they asked Jan yet, or Ursula, or Phyllis at Dino’s? Pretty soon they’ll run out of girls who will do it. Then they’ll have to find ways of making the girls who won’t do it do it. Then we’ll know what the insides of every girl’s vagina and anus look like. That’ll be good too.

The night was electric — the night was in italics. When a sharp rain began to dot the air I thought the pavement was going to sizzle. What is everyone doing up so late? Are they too hot to sleep? The moisture brought out the sweet smell of dead fruit from a forgotten barrow. I stopped and stared upwards. I was seeing stars.

Who needs the bathroom, I thought, as I came into
the flat. Once in my room, I poured myself a potent nightcap — whisky: better than any toothbrush — removed my clothes in favour of some old pyjamas, and got quickly into bed. A cigarette, the day, the office, next month, the future, ah life, ah death. I gargled and extinguished my cigarette. I turned the light off and stared at the ceiling. But the ceiling wouldn’t go to sleep. My mind was busy busy busy.

Then I heard it. A sound too close for human grief, too deep to separate itself from the humming and dripping of the night. I sat up straight. A mauve baby that has reached the end of breath, a madwoman in a vacuum, murder beneath many pillows.

‘Ursula?’ I said.

Everything was over in a moment. I just lowered my trousers. I only remember the smell — sweat, tears, fluid. Her thighs were cold and goose-pimpled but inside she was seething. She wanted to be joined up, plugged, glued together again. I thought she might snap before I could do anything. She was shaking insanely. She was breathing so hard that I clamped my hand over her mouth — to keep her there, to keep her in, to put her back. ‘
Quiet!
’ I said in terror. She lay on the bed and I lay on top of her. Everything was over in a moment. I hoped I didn’t break anything.

‘He hates me,’ she said afterwards.

I moved away a few inches. ‘Him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that why you …?’

‘Yes. Someone’s got to look after me.’

‘Have they?’

‘It was him or you.’

‘Why?’

‘But none of that matters now, does it?’

I turned over. I could hear fresh rain rolling across the
skylights. I wondered how long it would take before she went back to her room.

What happened?

What happened? I think I must have been outside for at least an hour before I realized I was outside, before I realized I was anywhere, before the fog of hot distress had a chance to clear from my eyes. I had ‘stormed out’ into the night. Suddenly I was in the streets, and suddenly the streets were black and empty and cold. There was no sound, no sound whatever, except for the dry sheen of cars in the distance and the blanket murmur of the air, like a gramophone record between tracks. And where was this? I stood at the top of a slope beyond a low dark railway bridge. Weak light came from the entrance to a dead Underground station across the street; next door was a little driving-instructor’s shop which ambitiously kept a pink neon L fluttering feebly in its window. Over the prefab wall banking the pavement I could see a vast razed area like a cordoned-off bombsite, with deep scars in the earth, mounds of sand, steaming ditches. Great head-in-air cranes loomed above me. What happened?

Further down the road lay rows of houses clumped in shadow (they seemed to have sprung up out of their own front gardens). I could tell from the fake-brick plastering and absurdly garish window frames that I was in nigger country, the mau-mau hell between Ladbroke Grove and Kilburn. The cars irregularly spaced along the street were boogie cars, so impossibly lurid that only boogies could bear to drive about in them. But the boogies slept. I experienced no fear — of what, anyway? I’m on my own now, I thought, feeling saner than I had felt for weeks — saner than up there in that room, lying on that
nailbed of nerves. Which way home? I started down the hill towards the dark bridge.

Then I saw them, two men, just beyond the viaduct. I hesitated for an instant (cross the road? No), and walked on. A third figure clambered over the buildingsite fence. The yellow streetlamps flickered. Is this it? Seen through the deeper shadows of the tunnel, they looked strangely becalmed in the glow. Two of them leaned against the corrugated prefab wall; the other, a young man in an old man’s overcoat, faced me squarely. I entered the tunnel (never stop now), using the darkness to slow my pace. I halted. A wire tugged in my throat as the two leaning figures steadied themselves and took up position by their friend. I could outrun them, perhaps, but I could not outflank them — those mad little legs of theirs … and run back where? Into that? And start again? I went to the edge of the shadows, ten yards from the three men. I halted. I heard water, a sudden rustic trickle. The men were lean, dirty, long-haired; they gave the sense of being outside everything, their nerves flexed tight for the streets. No one moved. There wasn’t any noise anywhere now.

‘What do you want?’ I called from the shadows.

They did not come forward but seemed ready to change their posture for attack. Thick fingers were itching at my heart.

‘Money,’ said one of them quietly.

I haven’t got any either! I’ve got an overdraft! ‘Listen!’ I said. ‘Three pounds and some change — you can have it. Please. It’s all I’ve got — I promise.’