In the early weeks—they were still all shy and green, finding their way—they explored the theme of tiredness; and then they reexplored it. As in "Just tired, I suppose" and "I suppose it's just tiredness" and "You're just tired" and "It must be tiredness" and "I suppose I'm very tired" and "You must be very tired" and "So tired." There they lay together, yawning and rubbing their eyes, night after night, working their way through the thesaurus of fatigue: bushed, whacked, shattered, knackered, zonked, zapped, pooped ... As excuses went, tiredness was clearly a goer, amazingly versatile and athletic; but tiredness couldn't be expected to soldier on indefinitely. Before very long, tiredness made a natural transition to the sister theme of overwork, and then struck out for the light and space of pressure, stress and anxiety.
Of course they could now afford to look back on all this with a certain wry amusement. At their timorousness, their inhibition. That was in the past. These days, how boldly Richard reached, how broadly he roamed, for his excuses! Poor circulation, unhappy childhood, midlife crisis, ozone depletion, unpaid bills, overpopulation; how eloquent he was as he frowned his way through Marco's learning disability or the new damp patch on the sitting room ceiling. (Sometimes she liked it purely physical: upset stomach, bruised knee, tennis elbow, bad back.) There were disappointments, naturally. Book reviewing, for instance, never got off the ground, despite the clear appeal of stuff like deadlines and sub-editorial deletions and late payment. Richard didn't know why, but he couldn't quite bring himself to blame his plight on Fanny Burney or Thomas Chatter-ton or Leigh Hunt. On the other hand, artistic frustration, and more par- need a bag of in his kit, the pubic triangle, Richard judged, was quite tastefully rendered: an economic delta of dark brushstrokes. She was definitely younger than him. He was a modernist. She was the thing that came next.
"What favorite?"
"My favorite."
"Your favorite what?"
"You know. Like you were saying that time. The thing that tells you so much about someone. The thing that everyone has. A favorite."
She turned to him: a cartoon of nudity. There was no indignation in her voice—only puzzlement. "A favorite what?"
"Like you said. Do a little dance and—"
"I don't do that any more."
"Ah. What do you do?"
"I only do my favorite."
"Which is?"
"Everything."
"Everything?"
Belladonna stared into space and said zestlessly, "You do me and then I do you. Then straight, then cowgirl, then doggy. Then there's all the other stuff. How long have you got?"
Richard didn't look at his watch. And he didn't ask himself how old he was: because the answer was ninety-five. These rhythms, these rhythms of thought—he just didn't know these rhythms, and that was that. His voice cracked straight into near-senility as he said, "I ought to be home in half an hour."
"That's no good. I'd need that long just to get started." She reached down for her handbag. Another cigarette? No. She handed him a sheet of paper (a printout, a coded damage report: curlicues of computer graphics, marked here and there with a yellow highlighting pen), and said, "My blood test. You said you were going to take me round to Gwyn's."
All in good time, my dear. "And so I shall. And so I shall." He stood up. Richard used to think that young girls, these days, might like old men for reasons of hygiene. They could look at the old man's wife and think: Well, she's still walking. Well, he was still walking. But only just. He said, "I have to insist, I think, that you ..." He swayed, and steadied himself on the sofa's arm. "I'll have to insist that you tell me all about it. And that you'll ask him about his favorite."
"Okay, Richard. I guarantee it."
He stood on the corner of Wroxhall Parade. Across the way in the Ocularly the strains associated with Untitled, proved to be almost embarrassingly fruitful. Gina really bought that shit—or could sound as if she did. Best of all, unquestionably (no contest), was the death of the novel, not as a cause of general concern (Gina wouldn't mind if the novel died) but as it related to Richard personally. The End of Fiction, the foreclosure of Richard's art, the casting of his staff into the cold waters: because they couldn't afford it. That worked. Not for the first time, and not insincerely, Richard pitied life's straightmen, its civilians, its one-dimensioners, all non-artists everywhere, who couldn't use art as an excuse. In any event, all that was behind him now. He didn't need to make excuses anymore. Because he didn't go near her. And she didn't go near him.
So Richard was now where he imagined he very much wanted to be: on the sofa of the big front room near the corner of Wroxhall Parade, in illicit evening light. Not only that: Belladonna was at his side, and she was also, in a certain sense, already more than in the nude. When he went to bed with Anstice that time Richard somehow persuaded himself that he was doing it "for Gina"—for his marriage, for his rattled virility. And that turned out real good, didn't it? With Belladonna, the internal argument was considerably more challenging (and harder to follow). If Richard succeeded in sleeping with her, then many benefits would of course be passed on to Gina, who would reap them in the marital bed, at her sated leisure. Besides, it wasn't his fault—it was death's fault. Every sensitive man was allowed a midlife crisis: when you found out for sure that you were going to die, then you ought to have one. If you don't have a midlife crisis, then that's a midlife crisis. Finally, Richard's presence in this room was just one more move in the great game of Gwyn's ruin. He was here for the information. He had it all worked out.
Belladonna was at his side. Neither of them had spoken for three or four minutes. Richard told himself that this shared silence, maintained over a period of three or four minutes (that deracinating eternity), was clear proof of how relaxed they must be. Her face was half-averted. Soft-skinned and luminous, she smoked, with concentration, with self-communing ardor.
"I've been thinking," said Richard, with a faint and fussy smile, "about my 'favorite.'"
That wasn't really true. Richard's favorite, by now, would have taken eight hours to summarize, let alone perform. He was glad the room was getting darker, because that meant he could look at her without unavoidable and intrinsic lechery. For Belladonna wore a printed body-stocking which bodied forth—the body: the naked female body. Unlike the nipples, which were pink and rubbery, the kind of nipples a plumber might "Piece of shit," said Steve Cousins (to himself, and to the old man who was taking ten minutes to cross the road: the zebra stretched before him like a track event). He turned off Floral Grove and entered Newland Crescent. When they get like that they're better off dead. Number sixty-eight: he pulled up. This was Terry's house—the Quack. Scozzy wasn't looking for Terry himself. Home, out Wimbledon way, was clearly the last place you'd look for Terry. He'd be in a club somewhere, or fucking up some deal in some Quacko go-down, or under a jukebox of black flips in that flat he had above the casino in Queensway. See those blokes doing dope: ropes of smoke coming out of their noses like their skulls were on fire.
Two children, two little girls wearing flower dresses and kinky up-pointing braids were playing in the garden of the detached pebbledash: swing, climbing frame, slide. Under thrashing trees. Such a scene struck no chord in Steve's past. Watch out, girls: here comes mum. Cooking in a track suit, with her face in the steam. Now she's calling out the kitchen window. Be there in a minute ... Steve was in his Cosworth with its low racing skirt. He swiveled his neck: 13, asleep on the back seat. What did he do last night? Stole a double-decker and went to Scotland and back. The triangles of Steve's face—the equilateral, the isosceles, the scalene— stirred and recomposed themselves.
"I deplore gratuitous violence," Steve used to say. Which was untrue, which was well known to be untrue. One of his nicknames was Gratuitous.
"Jesus," said 13.
Steve turned: gone back to sleep again ... Richard Tull intelligent? Steve knew wholesalers who were just down from Oxbridge or wherever. Twenty-two, twenty-three, and they had a chain of com
mand that covered five thousand miles, with Afghani army captains, Japanese diplomats, and British customs officers all on their payroll. That was intelligent. That was organized. With drugs, with supplying, you tended to go on and on until you exploded like a tick full of blood. And big time was just a big drag. Considering the business he was in, it was prudent to have your
midlife crisis at the age of twenty-nine. Now what? He had money. But
he couldn't see himself taking the usual route. Running a bar in Tenerife. Flogging San Migs and scotch eggs and screening FedExed videos of "Match of the Day." Probably that's all different now. They got Sky.
chained playground some large and muffled figure creaked alone and pleasurelessly on the pendulum of the swing; it stopped, and then started again, in a slower but no less desperate rhythm ... The night before Richard had dreamed that he was having an unhappy love affair with his own son Marius. "Let's not do it any more," Marius had said. And Richard had said, "Yes—let's not." And Marius had said, "Because Daddy, if you do, it means you're inadequant." Inadequant. Ah, innit sweet.
Gal Aplanalp called.
She said at the outset that she had an unfortunate coincidence to report.
Richard sat there, waiting. He felt far from resilient. His right ear still throbbed from its recent hour with Anstice. And then Gwyn, newly returned, had phoned in a knuckle-whitening celebration of Italian warmth, generosity, erudition and discernment—and Italian willingness to buy a novel called Amelior in record numbers.
"Tell me about it," said Richard.
On Tuesday, Gal explained, her assistant, Cressida, had stayed at home to apply herself to Untitled. So Cressida didn't go to work on Tuesday. And Cressida didn't go to work on Wednesday either, or on Thursday. Why was this? Because halfway through Tuesday morning, and halfway through the anomalously brief first chapter of Untitled, Cressida had suffered an attack of diplopia or double vision—of sufficient severity for her GP to suspect a case of (you'll like this) "vascular embarrassment" or even, quite possibly, an organic lesion of the central nervous system. Cressida? Cressida was fine. On light duties, and taking plenty of rest.
"What I'm going to do now is fire off a copy to Toby Middlebrook at Quadrant. He has the right kind of taste and the right kind of list. Both Cressida and I—we agree that Untitled is obviously a challenging and highly ambitious novel."
"How far did she get? Cressida."
Gal always tried to be as straight as possible with her clients. She told him: page nine.
He said good-bye. He hung up. He cleared a space for his elbows and sat there for a while with his head in his hands.
Richard now knew just how violent that disagreement was. Demi was the exception in another way too, because Richard and Gwyn and Gina had spent at least a year, all told, in the Slug and Cabbage, with speechless Gilda making up the four. Nowadays the Tulls and the Banys were seldom to be seen as a foursome. Richard had had to promise to be good.
"What's happening with your novel?" asked Gwyn. "Are you all right, love?"
Demi looked all right. It seemed to Richard that she even managed to exude the pub placidity that pubs like to see in their women. Gina, of course, knew all about pubs—their comfort and their boredom. The doors were open to the evening traffic of Notting Hill Gate. Along with the seams of cigarette smoke, the pub vapors and pub humors, the pie waft and the yeasty burp of beer, there was also the breath of cars like a gray mesh at table height. Out on the pavement, only feebly stirred by the little cyclones of rubbish, the twisters of trex, lay several cartons of half-eaten food—meals abandoned in haste or disgust or outright vomi-tus. Above, the creases of the sky glimmered like cellulite. Richard sat out a wave of nausea and then said,
"It's with Toby Middlebrook, at Quadrant. Gal said she found it very ambitious. Rather discouragingly."
"But it is ambitious, isn't it?"
"Is it? I don't know."
"But it's what you intended, isn't it?"
"I don't—what you write shouldn't be exactly what you want to write. You should feel pressed. In some way."
"The whole process feels completely natural to me. As natural ... as childbirth."
In any metaphor that linked writing with parturition, no, Richard wouldn't come out well. What were they, his novels? Not stillborn. More like those babies whom it was thought best to spirit away: a black bag in the loading dock. But this particular maternity hospital was primitive and remote, and superstitiously spurned its dead; and you yourself carried the dead thing home, swaddled in old newspapers. Richard sat out a second wave of nausea. The first had felt fragile, and tinselly; the second felt projectile in its tacit force. Was this excitement? Was this grief? He thought not—neither. It was simple proximity to violence.
"Have you plans?" said Gina. "Is there something you're not telling
us about?"
Richard (who had been staring at Gwyn's shoes) thought that Gina was talking to him. She wasn't. She was talking to Demi, who now shook her head with a flat brief smile.
Disobedient daughters, not obeying their mother. The little girl was showing the littler one a stunt on the slide. Jump off the top and land on your bum halfway down. Hasn't got the confidence. In Steve's head: concentration-loss followed by subject-change. He stopped thinking about hurting Terry and started thinking about hurting Gwyn.
Of course, Gwyn had off-street parking. It was hard to do much to a man in the bay of his own house, with all its windows standing above you and looking on. Off-street parking: vital in certain circumstances to the longevity of the urban male. Not to mention the ulcer or cancer you don't get, spending two hours a day looking for somewhere to put the fucking car. Get him at the exit to the Westway Health and Fitness Center. Send Wesley or D. Gwyn comes round the corner—and D runs right through him. That would be fifteen stone of bro coming at you at fifteen miles an hour. You're going to go down. All that coming at you, through you: you're going to go down. Then, well: whatever.
He picked up his mobile and called Clasford. He said, "Clasford? Tonight, mate." And then he added, after a pause, "No. You're going to the cinema."
"Yeah?" said Clasford cautiously.
"Starring Audra Christenberry. A touching tale about a group of children sent to the country during the Blitz. You do him in the toilet."
And Clasford just said, "Jesus."
The girls went inside for their tea. Behind him somewhere a police siren started up like a homosexual comedian: Ouuuu. Steve gave one of his agonized yawns. He started the engine and engaged first gear. Just then a nun stepped in front of the car and, while Scozzy sat there sighing and waiting, paused to examine some stain or discoloration on her shiny white bib. She looked up at him. For a moment the two virgins stared at one another, with virgin ferocity.
"Piece of shit," said Scozzy as he drove away.
"Audra Christenberry's in it. You like her, don't you?"
"Why's she in it? I thought it was set in England."
"She's an actress," said Richard. "They can put on voices. What do you want, the usual pint?"
Gwyn said, "I'll have a campari and soda."
"No. A pint of bitter for you. That's what they drink in Wales, isn't it?"
"Go on then. When's it start?"
They went with the drinks to their wives. A gin-and-tonic for Gina. A mineral water for Demi. She said that alcohol disagreed with her: being, like a mob. But the Coronet was quarter full, loosely dotted with heads on necks on shoulders, and the cinematography somber (bombed-out basements, moonless campsites), so that Richard kept thinking that everyone around him was black, or in negative; after a while he imagined that all the people in front were sitting facing him but with their heads turned half-circle like Caribbean demons; a little later it seemed to him that the backs of their heads were really their faces, hidden by hair.
Forty minutes in, and it happened. Richard experienced the complicated pleasure of standing up to allow Gwyn passage—famous Gwyn, uxorious Gw
yn, his torso bent over his famously weak bladder. Down the aisle he trudged, turning right beneath the stage and following his shadow across a screen of green: curving field, rank of trees, evening sky. He went through the door marked EXIT and GENTS. No one followed. An old man followed. Richard stopped watching. He watched the film. He watched a five-minute scene about hot-pot preparation (a crofter's wife showing Audra Christenberry how you did it) with no interest whatever. But his body swarmed with affect, as if he was watching something else: the climax of a deathless tingler—Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho.
Time passed. There was a transitory period during which, no doubt, the women subliminally and approvingly assumed that Gwyn had set himself the stark and universal challenge of defecation. Riding on with this assumption—as it were in tandem with Demi and Gina—Richard imagined Gwyn's quest for full voidance steadily growing in complication and dolor; after fifteen minutes its dimensions approached the Augean. Next came an interlude of localized travail: Richard, having heartily matched Gwyn pint for pint, was in need of a bathroom himself. The need was sharp, sour—as sharp and sour as his curiosity.
"Excuse me," he said, and got to his feet.
It was one of those cinema toilets whose promise and scent lead you up ramps and stairways which then double back and deepen like the chutes of an ancient airport, or a city of myth—the twisted construct of embittered immortals. Richard walked on into the bowels of the building, past chained fire exits and beneath seeping ceilings, until the penultimate door, with a soft flap, like an internal valve, seemed to admit him and exclude all else, and there was the marked entrance—GENTS—at the bottom of the bending steps . .. He paused, listening. Only the eternal
toilet trickle, sharp and sour, like the rumors of its odors. Slowly he
leaned on the door. The room let him in and then closed again.
His first thought was that he, Richard, had disappeared. He faced an arrangement of toilet furniture (double rows of basins, double roller- Gwyn said, "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?"