Marco slipped off his lap. and Richard tossed the kiddie book over his shoulder. For a moment his eye fell on the latest biography they'd sent at him: it was the size of a Harlem boombox. Richard rubbed his brow. The night before he had dreamed about some clubhouse in the Arctic, where women were eaten as if in a cafeteria, and where old Nazis hobnobbed with drugged monsters . . .
Heavily and dutifully, Richard moved up the stairs, to shower and dress—to put clothes on, to stand bent in the little cubicle while water fell. One glance in the mirror here, upon rising—the bruised scars beneath his eyes, his hair standing on end in terror—had caused him to scrap, or at least shelve, his immediate plan: seducing a lightly sun-kissed Demeter Barry. Had also caused him to think, to whisper: Where have I come from? Where have I been? Not in the land of sleep, not sleep as it used to be, but some other testing ground, some other forest. The forests of Comus and The Faerie Queened No. More like the forests that the wild boy must have known: the clearing, the picnic facility no sooner erected than rotten and ruined, the contemporary leavings and peelings, the rain, and all around the trees patiently dripping, in chemical lamentation. The bedcovers had as usual been pulled back, by Gina. Richard stood there naked, looking at the bared sheet, its crenellations, its damp glow. Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its own humorless arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.
Richard shaved. A fly, a London fly, was bumping and weakly buzzing around in the small and steamy cubicle; London flies are a definite type—they are fat, and slow, and, come October, they are the living dead. Richard shaved. He noticed that his bristles were getting bristlier, more ornery. But wait a minute, he thought: I am young. I still get spots, blackheads, whiteheads, and, yes, even the mirror-splatting bigboys of yore (often his face felt like one big bigboy). I still think about sex all the time, and beat off whenever I get the chance. I still stare at my own reflection. This is the journey we all make, from Narcissus to Philoctetes—Philoctetes, whose wound smelled so bad. Richard flinched, as if he'd cut himself. With Gina, he realized, he was now in the condition of sexual hiding. He couldn't even hug her anymore, because hugs led to kisses, and kisses led—kisses led to the little death. The poets were wrong when they said that sex was like dying. What he had, and kept on having, was the little death. How did Gina spend her Fridays? He had stopped snooping on her. He had lost the right to inquire. Christ, and there was that fat fuck of a fly, buzzing and weakly bumping around between his legs. Bristly and obese and hopeless, having outlived its season. When Gina watched frightening films she put her hands over her ears. Not over her eyes—over her ears. Richard didn't want to think about it. Where could he put his hands?
For the moment he fingered the lump on the back of his neck. Just a cyst, no doubt: he was a pretty cysty kind of guy. Telling himself not to worry about it, Richard decided that he had made tangible progress with
his hypochondria. He no longer suffered from the periodic panics of
early middle age, where a twinge here or a sting there made you suspect, for a while, that you had this or that fatal disease. Coping with his daily aches and pains, he no longer suspected that he had cancer or muscular
dystrophy or Ebola or Lassa Fever or rat-borne hantavirus or toxic-shock syndrome or antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus. Or gangrene or leprosy. Nowadays he was sure he had them all.
That morning there had been some idle prattle between Mr. and Mrs. Tull—would they never learn?—about the possibility of Marco taking a day off home and paying a visit to that fabled location, school. After all his temperature was barely into the low hundreds; he had woken just twice during the night, and then for no more than an hour each time. Only one of his ears was aching. Only one of his eyes was actually gummed shut with conjunctivitis (the other wasn't nearly so bad and even had the odd patch of white in it). At around eight-thirty, though, in an interval between coughing fits, Marco succeeded in throwing up his breakfast and could be heard crying for help from the bathroom as Gina went off with Marius (perfectly yet insouciantly uniformed, with up-to-date homework pouch, junior tennis racket and football kit bag festooned with rosettes). Richard would have Marco until four-thirty. Then Lizzete came, when her own schoolday was done. They paid her extra if she played hooky, and money was tight.
He wondered about Marius. That morning the senior twin had approached him and said, "Daddy? You're taking too much quack."Marius often neglected to sound his rs. So he must have meant crack.
Feral: that's what the wild boy was. That was what Steve Cousins was. And Richard could defend feral: it had to put up with a lot of dismissive talk (which it didn't like—which it didn't like one bit) from those who claimed that it was just a fashionable synonym for wild or untamed. Ooh, it hated it when anybody said that. Because feral derived not only from ferus (wild) but also from ferox (fierce). Now, something wild need not be fierce, may even be gentle. And the lion can lie down with the lamb. The lion can and must lie down with the lamb.
People who look at dictionaries all day keep seeing words at the top of the page—words they don't like seeing. Syzygy, crapulent, posterity, smegma, toiletry, dystopia, dentrifrice, bastinado, ferae naturae.
Two old ladies who lived in Calchalk Street did strange things for money. Old ladies, who wore the ovine uniform of the good.
One of these old ladies was called Agnes Trounce. She didn't just look old: she looked middle class and reliable and comfortably off. She had that benignly pleading expression of the diplomatically elderly in a youthful Culture. Normally you could meet an old lady on a dark night— with equanimity. But you wouldn't want to meet this old lady, any time, when she was doing her strange thing for money.
The target is driving along. Without a care in the world, as they say. Although of course no one old enough to drive is without a care in the world. No one old enough to drive a trike is without a care in the world. Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit. That was one of the reasons why it was so easy to hurt people: they were never ready. More pain? Nobody needed that. Nobody thought they could possibly have room for any more, until it came.
Anyway, the target is driving along, feeling relatively happy, immeasurably happier, certainly, than he is going to feel in about ninety seconds. These moments will in retrospect appear golden-age, prelapsarian. So that's right: he doesn't have a care in the world. Intense and lasting cares are arriving, brought to him by Agnes Trounce. For many years, also, he will look back on this interval as the last time that his powers of concentration were any good.
So that's right: the target is driving along without a care in the world. He may be whistling. Perhaps he is listening to music; and because he is driving some of his mind is just plugged into the city . . . He reaches the end of the side street and slows as he approaches the traffic lights that guard a main road. It is evening and the bloodbath of sunset is daubed over the rooftops. No, it is darker, and on its way to being a dark night. In front of him before the red light is a wood-framed Morris Minor, gentlest of cars. The red light spells arterial warning; then red-amber; then green. And the Morris Minor backs into him—and stalls.
Mrs. Agnes Trounce, a widow, sixty-eight years of age in a little-old-lady hat and a gray-white shawl (nice touch), climbs flusteredly from her car and turns the target with her eyes benign and pleading. He climbs out too. Well, these things happen. But you'd be surprised how impatient, how non-understanding, people can be in such circumstances. None of this "Dear oh dear—well, not to worry!" It's "What are you doing on the road anyway, you fucking old cow?" And this makes things easier for Agnes Trounce. Because then the two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street. Then it's "You rammed my mum!" Or, if you were using black talent, "You rammed my gran!" And so on. "That's my mum you're fucking swearing at!" Or "That's my gran
you're calling a fucking old cow!" Agnes Trounce gets back into her woody Morris and drives away. And in the other car the target's head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and the doorframe. It was just a motoring dispute that got out of hand and you know how people are about their cars.
The other old lady who lived on Calchalk Street was seventy-two and weighed three hundred pounds and provided sexual relief over the telephone. She was called Margaret Limb. Her voice was hoarse and weathered but also high-pitched and musical, even maidenly, what with all that weight pressing down on it. The siren song of Margaret Limb could lure leaden businessmen out of humid hotel rooms on dark nights. An endless narrative of fat, she lay on a sofa doing the concise crossword and talking dirty. On the other end of the line, men arched and shivered to her tune.
Which old lady would you rather meet, on a dark night?
Now here is something very sad to think about.
The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty-three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller . . .
Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun "beyond all description bright"), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. For example, one solar week ago, man came stumbling out of the African rainforests. Herbiverous, bipedal—erect but by no means sapient. Four solar months ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth. One solar minute ago, we enjoyed the Renaissance. Having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, the sun will be with us for many solar years to come.
But it won't make old bones. Predictably, somehow (don't we see this every day?), the great decline will be presaged by increasingly hyper-manic activity (look out of the window, at the twanging joggers), by a frantic reassertion of once-infinite but now-vanishing powers. The doomed despot wants to leave nothing behind: its policy, then, is scorched Earth.
First will come the solar winds. It is not given to human beings to imagine the power of the solar winds. But we can make a start by trying to think of an ultimate hurricane consisting of heavy objects—things like trucks and houses and battleships.
During its life on the main sequence, the sun was never accused of being small or cold. Everyone knows that the sun is big and hot. Being big and hot is what it's always been so good at. Now, therefore, it gets even bigger and even hotter. It leaves the main sequence. The yellow dwarf becomes a red giant.
At this stage we give the sun about eighteen (solar) months—two years, at the most. In necrotic rage Chronos consumed its young. Now it retreats and shrinks and curls up and dies, a white dwarf, like all dead things, crystalline and embittered and entombed.
It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life.
"The History of Increasing Humiliation, dear sirs, proceeds apace." "Please don't fret. I have got dear Den ton out of Repton and into the Goldsmith. He didn't live very long anyway, so completion is more or less in sight." "Gentlemen: Worry not! The ice and cobalt blue of Siberia loom ever nearer." In the haystack of Richard's desktop (he couldn't find the needle), among its schemes and dreams and stonewallings, its ashtrays, coffee cups, dead felt-tipped pens and empty staplers, were traces and deposits of other books: books he hadn't told Gal Aplanalp about; books commissioned yet unfinished, or unbegun. These included a critical biography of Lascelles Abercrombie, a book about literary salons, a book about homosexuality in early twentieth-century English literature with special reference to Wilfred Owen, a study of table manners in fiction, his half of a picture book about landscaping (his half was meant to be a 25,000-word meditation on Andrew Marvell's "The Garden"), and a critical biography of Shackerley Marmion . . . Richard definitely wasn't going to Siberia. But then again, all the other books felt like Siberia: they felt laughably inimical. There were leper colonies, in Siberia. Richard had read about them for a week. To think of the Siberian lepers made him feel cold—it wasn't the weather but the isolation. The Siberian lepers, with all their pathos and disgrace; and lost in time, too, because nobody went near their world and so nobody changed it, and there it was, preserved in ice. What drew him to the Siberian lepers? Why did he feel like one? Siberia wasn't all like that; it wasn't all quarantine and gulag, wasn't all bitter ends. Siberia had bears, and even tigers.
He reread the impatient and quietly menacing letter from the publishers—about Siberia and Richard's wanderings there.
"They're kidding. Fuck it, I'm just not going."
"You said a swear": this was Marco, who now half-entered the study, supporting himself against the doorway in a leaning embrace.
"I'm not going, Marco. They can't make Daddy go."
"Who?"
"Birthstone Books."
"Where?"
"Siberia.”
Marco took this in. After all it was, for him, a perfectly average conversation. His face framed itself to say something nice—something, perhaps, about not wanting Daddy to go anywhere; but he just ducked shyly. That's where I'll end up, he thought. After Gina goes, and after Anstice has wearied of me. Among the Siberia lepers will I dwell. He imagined he would cut quite a dash, there in the colony, and would be entitled and even expected to go around sneering at those less fortunate than himself, at least to start with, until he too succumbed.
Kirk was out of hospital and Steve went around to see him: as you do.
They sat together, watching a video, Steve in his mack, Kirk on the couch, with a blanket. His face still looking like a pizza: heavy on the pepperoni. Kirk: his lieutenant. Organized the muscle.
It was a normal video they sat staring at. Cops and robbers. Or FBI and serial murderers. Steve had watched so much pornography, and so little else, that he had some mental trouble, watching normal videos. Whenever you got a man and a woman alone in a room, or an elevator, or a police car—Steve couldn't understand why they didn't start ripping each other's clothes off. What was the matter with them? Steve's glazed eyes strayed. Up on the book nook, above the TV console, was Kirk's modest collection of erotica: megaboobs from the boondocks. Steve knew all about Kirk's visions of eros: 200 pounds of nude blonde—on a trampoline.
"This it?" said Steve, meaning Kirk's general condition and immediate career plans.
Kirk droopily waved a hand at him.
"Beef?" said Steve.
"Beef," said Kirk, dropping his quilted face—with its onion rings, its anchovies.
See? Still pining. Beef had been put down by Kirk's brother Lee— after its third attack on Lee's daughter. Next came Kirk's retaliatory attack on Lee. And Kirk's brief rehospitalization.
"Kirk mate. You ain't going anywhere, are you?" said Steve, getting to his feet. "Give my love to your mum."
No one had as yet written a novel called Quacko. And for good reason. This novel would have no beginning, no middle and no end—and no punctuation. This novel would be all over the fucking gaff.
There wasn't going to be a novel called Quacko and there wasn't going to be any drugs war—or drags whah (rhymes with ma), as Terryterry called it. Drugs war? Get real. "Get real," Steve Cousins would sometimes murmur, when he saw women, in pornography, who hadn't had their breasts surgically enhanced. "Get real. Get a life," he would mur- mur, seeing the unfixed tits, scarless on the underhang. "Jesus. Get a life." And now that was what he had to do. He had to get a life. Taking a life: he knew how you did that. Some old guy in some old hut somewhere, in the fucking rain . . . The planet definitely lacked a person, down to Scozz. Taking a life and getting one were very different activities. But they weren't opposites, Steve Cousins felt.
Like a musician who can jam all night the love-life with legs is constantly improvising on anything that comes its wa
y. So the Tulls, Richard and Gina (those veterans of sexual make-do and catch-can), as they faced this new challenge, looked to their powers of extemporization. After each display, after each proof of his impotence, it was into his excuses that Richard poured his creative powers. Nor did Gina's talent for the humane go untested by all these let-outs and loopholes, because, after all, she had to lie there and listen to them, nudging him here, prompting him there (yes, there ... Ouuu, yes there!).