‘Oh yes. Very piggy indeed.’
Brendan thought: I’m always behind – not a year behind, but always half a season. He said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve interrupted you.’
‘My daughter was discoursing on Islam, if you please,’ said Henry. Of course, the King was religious, in his way: strictly non-ecumenical Prayer Book Church of England. ‘It’s like talking to a bally mullah.’
‘Oh poo. I was making Daddy cross by saying that Muslims seem to have much more feeling for each other than Christians. There’s a real bond, and I think that’s very attractive.’
‘Is the Princess’, asked Brendan lightly, ‘feeling herself “drawn” to Mecca?’
‘God no. I don’t think I’ve got any faith in me. I just find it all very riveting.’
Henry was no longer dreaming of Alabaman prisons. He had hit upon a more aristocratic excoriation: the smoking poker administered to Richard II (for crimes of ‘effeminacy’). And then the usurper Bolingbroke journeyed to the Holy Land to purge his guilt with fire and sword … Henry had at some point been informed by the Duchess of Ormonde that fifteen-year-olds were fifteen-year-olds, and that he should be pleased it was religion she was keen on, and not anorexia. Recalling this, he bafflingly volunteered,
‘You’d be better off having another round of sticky buns, my darling – and never mind about Mecca …’
Brendan turned his frown on the Princess, who wagged her head with a look of contented inanity. Then the smile she gave him: how it decanted itself upwards, from the mouth and through the frame of the nose and into the eyes, where it lingered in the folds of the orbits … Brendan was devoted to Henry; and yet Henry sometimes made him feel as if he had kissed his life away for some evanescent frippery – for a monogrammed butter-pat, in a deadly dining-room full of the ghosts of sweating placemen. But with the Princess it was love. What kind of love he didn’t know, but it was plainly love.
‘The sands of time, sir,’ he said, tapping his watch with a fingertip.
‘Yes yes, Bugger. Sorry: Brendan. What about the women then, eh, sweetheart? I expect you’d go a bit blank, my precious, if I told you to wear a uh, a black tepee for the rest of your days.’
Victoria sat forward, rubbing her hands together as if in ablution, and said, ‘But think of the agonies that Western women go through because of their looks. The constant worries and comparisons. It’s forced on you too. This stupid vanity is forced on you. What bliss it would be not to have to think about it ever again. Oh, the privacy of it!’
‘Well we can talk about that another time. My dearest, I have some rather unsettling news.’
Within a minute Brendan believed that the whole of terrestrial existence was just a breath away from cardiovascular collapse. He stared at the King, and thought: can you not feel it, man? Can you not hear it?
Though never as hurtfully as in the present case, Victoria’s integrity had of course been pierced and breached many times before; and, since childhood, she had always reacted with the same robust indignation. There was nothing regal in it – on the contrary, there was something severely republican and every-woman in her steep frown, her straight neck. It was for a version of this that Brendan had more or less unthinkingly prepared himself. And now? While her father, gazing resolutely ceiling-ward as he writhed around on his cushion, delivered the agreed preamble (‘it appears that the vultures are up to their old tricks’), Victoria did no more than sigh and stiffen. But as soon as Henry meandered in on the particular (‘the Château’, ‘the Yellow House’), she bared the teeth that were still too broad for her face, and her head dropped, by degrees, like the resilient jolts of a second-hand. Now Brendan could feel the heartbeat of the Princess, pressing in on his exterior ear. And soon the sound of her pulse – the slow, gonging throb – was entirely subsumed by his own.
‘Well it’ll soon blow over, my dear,’ said Henry, writhing around in earnest now, like a man playing footsie with a moving target. He was practically flat on his back.
‘We’ll just have to get on with it,’ he managed to add. ‘Storm in a teacup, all hands on deck.’
Brendan thought: she wants to disappear. She wouldn’t want the nails and the bolts and the shrapnel. But that’s what she wants to do. She wants to disappear.
‘Perfectly decent little place,’ said the King as he strode through the mountain tunnel of the Abbey archway – saying it as if Brendan, and Victoria, and everyone else, kept maintaining otherwise, in tireless error. ‘I don’t know about you, Bugger, but I thought she took that fairly well.’
He couldn’t answer … During the last half-hour, in the Oak Gallery, the ambient air had made steady gains in clarity, as if a succession of blankets were being removed from an exalted skylight; and now the actors had stepped out into a blue thaw of dripping glitter. At the foot of the cliffside lay the town, waiting, palpating like a dog that has just shaken itself dry. There was an invitation to the spirit – rise up; and all this, he knew, all this was only mist and rain to the Princess …
She was standing with her back turned, and slightly apart, to one side of her own entourage (the forecourt was now a millpond of Security), on a strip of lawn between the path and a bed of pink flowers. Looking at her hunched shape, he knew again what it was like to be fifteen: when you suffered, your every cell suffered. She was wearing black jeans and a short leather jacket, and he wondered why, with the young and indivisibly wretched, it was the tensed buttocks that best expressed all this strength and pain.
Brendan marched forward. As he came round in front of her he was prepared to see tears but her eyes were their normal blue. Yet clogged with chemicals, as was her mouth, chemicals of distress, and giving off a sour breath.
So he did something for which there was no precedent. He embraced her, saying,
‘He will forgive you anything and everything, you may be sure. Without a second thought. And so will I. He will always protect you. And so will I.’
‘Forgive me?’ she said. With the words evenly stressed, he thought, as he dropped her hand and backed away.
In the Royal Rolls the King, with a showily dexterous flick of the wrist, activated the television and sat back with a contented grunt to watch the snooker for the rest of the drive. ‘Oh, perfect weight … They make it look so … Now. Has he got the angle on the yellow?’
After about an hour Brendan started to think logically, or at least consecutively. If one used one’s imagination (he told himself), Victoria’s reaction could probably be readily explained. What do we do in bathrooms? Nothing we’re very proud of. A bodily function, perhaps. The use of a tampon, conceivably. Or something rather more intimate. Which woman friend had informed him that young girls referred to the hand-held shower as ‘Rain Man’? And she was fifteen. Remember that: the outlandish disproportion of being fifteen, when you were waiting to find out who you were.
‘Shot. Now he’ll come down for the blue … Oh no, he’s gone too far … Foul stroke!’
That embrace: a startling impropriety, never to be repeated, but none the less an unalterable fact. He recalled the tragic sourness of her breath. And the rigidity of her body – and the answering rigidity of his own ancillary heart. All the blood within him: all of it.
‘Here we are. Well I’m pleased to have got that out of the way, Bugger. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been playing on my mind. In a week or two I expect this’ll all be a thing of the past.’
Brendan spoke with only an instant’s forethought. You fool, you fool, he said to himself. Didn’t you see that her fear was waiting for it – for this day, for this hour? He said,
‘I disagree, sir. In fact I suggest that I turn this car round and go straight back to St Bathsheba’s. The Princess must be taken out of school at once and then secluded – I suggest Ewelme. If the illicit material is indeed made public on the thirty-first, then I suggest also that we take the advice of uh, our mole and insist from the outset that the material is faked. It’s a ghastly gamble, I know, but the chance won’t c
ome again. Meanwhile we must work out a strategy of damage-limitation with Downing Street. Sir, this isn’t going to be a storm in a teacup.’
‘Steady on, Bugger. Do you know something I don’t?’
‘It’s only a deduction, sir, but I think it’s sound. The Princess was not alone in the bathroom of the Yellow House.’
This is going to be a storm in all the oceans of the thing which is called world.
And the thought: God how she needs her mother.
3. Car-sweat
The two-storeyed Avenger lay in wait under the Esso sign. Welcome Break. Stop and Shop. Smoker consistently drove out here and just sat in the car or did his e’s on the laptop. You have 124 new messages. People coming and going: it’s more cheerful. You fill her up, grab a bay by the cash machine. And stroll inside if you want, for a pizza or whatever. At the Esso you often also get carpools. And women on mobile phones, women waiting alone under the lights in the forecourt with that waiting posture – doing nothing but waiting; they stand like that in the parks and recs with a leather lead in their hand: waiting for the dog to do its business. You could lower your window, saying, ‘Lost your lift then, love? Hop in.’ But the age of the random ride was over. Mobile phones: increased backup. You can have a brief exchange, there on the kerbside. Pass the time. Feel the confinement lift a little bit. It’s funny. They must think: I climb into that car, I pass through that glass, then I’m in his mirrorworld – he’ll have power, with its warp and distortion. He can turn. Every man sits on an anti-man. And the weathered saloon, ticking over in the suburban sidestreet, has its oil and coolant, its dark engine, beneath the windshield’s reflection of the leaves and the branches.
In Clint’s evening paper there was an ‘artist’s impression’ of the Princess in her bath. You know: like in a court case. The artist was not a very good artist; the impression was not a very good impression. Idealised (and, as it were, self-bowdlerised by the placement of her limbs), the image of the Princess might have graced the greetings cards sent by a suburban madam to selected members of her clientele. Reduced to an artist’s impression, on account of the shielding order. Bit late now, thought Clint: a case of bolting the stable door after the graniverous quadruped has gone AWOL. Everyone on earth was gawping at the stills, on the Net, in the foreign press – and, of course, in the Morning Lark, which, that morning, had consisted of nothing else. The official line, from above, was that the material was all faked anyway: software, pseudofilm, ‘without ontology’. Either that, or some snapper hides in the toilet for a month … What Clint couldn’t work out was who benefited. Cui bono? – apart from the Lark, with its triple print-run … Clint: never gone that big on the younger bird. But virgins had their points. Bet they felt you more. And they couldn’t tell you were crap at it, having nothing to compare.
You have 125 new messages. About 120 of them would be from commercial concerns: invitations to Clint to shower money on his genitalia – by various means and for various purposes. Three or four would be chat-room flirtations with indistinguishable career-girls, all of them apparently chasing the next leg-up or leg-over. Clint visualised a succession of fierce little hussies, with lips crimped in ceaseless calculation. But of course they could be anyone: these were rigged-up identities, summoned out of the ether. It was said of the Web that its contents were (on average) about 60 per cent true. And you, mate, he said to himself: can you swear any better? … And then it came, the voice that seemed to penetrate his solitude:
clint: how r u, dear man? i detected a note of melancholy in your most recent e, so i thought i’d cheer u up with some verbal 4play. u have asked 4 my views on anal 6 & related ?s. well, i’m all 4 it if it gets the job done quicker. i said be4 th@ the best prix r small & soft, & i’m aware th@ anal 6 demands gr8er 10sion. so it’s 6 of 1 & 1/2 a dozen of the other! i’m very happy to per4m oral 6 @ any time. what’s my style? i no th@ some girls r merely rather affection8 2 the man’s 2l. i consider this ‘cock-i’d’! u should go @ it 40ssimo. rule: never kiss your man after fell8io – by god, u’d be calling him a bumb&it! as 4 cunnilingus, th@’s strictly verbo10.
Blimey: she’s ideal. Talk about taking the pressure off. With this bird, expectation’s reduced to nil … But that’s all very well, that is. That’s all very fine and large. Because the wound’s in you, my son. There ain’t anyone else who can sort this out: it’s down to you, mate. You yourself.
Before driving back to his Foulness semi, Clint topped up the Avenger at the pumps. They talked their heads off about sex and cars, but look at this: look at the mechanised brothel of the forecourt. In every bay, in every trap, there was a man with a hulking nozzle in his mitt; you lifted the cover, and there was the sliding aperture; then you poured in the power while the digits flickered.
Fat splats of water fell unevenly from the ribbed roof. Not rain: just drops of car-sweat.
‘So what was in this “dirty bomb”?’
‘Radioactive medical waste, Chief, plus ringworm, West Nile virus, liquid gangrene, and a cladding of mad cow.’
‘And what do this lot call themselves?’
‘Uh, the Legion of the Pure.’
Clint thought: what’s funny? Is it still funny? Was it ever funny?
‘And they blew themselves up on purpose.’
‘No, Chief. By accident. It went off in the airport carpark.’
‘And who were they followers of?’
‘Uh, you know: the bloke with no tackle.’
‘Actually, Chief, he has got tackle,’ said Clint. ‘Records show. It’s funny, that. Like Hitler’s only got one ball.’
‘Was he the one that went to the stripclub?’
‘That wasn’t true either.’
Heaf seemed disappointed. ‘Well we certainly spent enough space on it. Did he go near the stripclub? … Anyway, we can only keep hammering on about racial profiling at airports. This is Clint in today’s: “And at the security checkpoints, what do we see? Some gimp of a granny being fisted in half, while the dunerat called Zui’zide al Bomba sails past with a J-cloth on his bonce and a flamethrower over his shoulder. And followed by his three best friends, Hijaq, Kydnap and Drugrun.” ‘Heaf slapped the page with his fingernails. ‘That’s what I call an editorial. Anyone who looks remotely Arab should have their lives made an absolute torment for the rest of the century.’
‘What happened to “Bints in Burkas”?’ said Donna Strange, who was sitting in. ‘I did one and you never ran it.’
‘Yes. Whatever happened to “Bints in Burkas”?’
‘“Bints in Burkas”? We backed off on that one, Chief.’
Mackelyne read from the minutes: ‘“… reached the decision not to go ahead, out of deference to the deepest personal convictions of our wankers.”’
‘And we thought they might dirty-bomb us.’
‘Mm. And what about the royal angle? The list of demands. It didn’t actually reach the King, did it?’
‘No. They found it floating around in the carpark.’
‘But the tone of it. Completely outrageous. How did it begin?’
‘“Greetings, Slave. God, who controls the clouds, who –”’
‘Yes yes. But “slave”! I mean, I find that quite unbelievable. Apart from the Vatican there’s not an institution on earth that’s older than the monarchy. And along comes some little snake-charmer, some casbah cutthroat …’
‘Well this is it, Chief. That’s what unbelievers are, in their eyes. According to them,’ said Clint with a shrug, ‘we’re shit.’
‘But to say the King’s shit,’ said Heaf, who seldom swore. ‘I mean, if he’s shit, if our king’s shit, then what are we? We ought to … Ah, but religion’s a very curious thing, you know, and that’s why we’ve always steered clear of it. I’m Catholic myself, of course, though partly lapsed. I don’t think we’ve ever pinned it down, have we, Mack? We know everything there is to know about our typical wanker, but what he believes remains a mystery.’
Clint said, ‘A mystery wrapped
in an enigma, Chief.’
‘The sampling varies as in no other sphere,’ Mackelyne went on. ‘There’s only one thing we know for sure.’
‘Which is?’
‘They all hate nuns.’
‘… Well I’m glad we’ve joined the fray. The smell of cordite at last,’ said Heaf. ‘Now. Can we at least have a filler on Russia-China?’
Smoker sat smoking in Room 2011 of the Bostonian Hotel on Meagure Street. Darius, the seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist, lay shoeless on the sofa, reading the Gideon Bible: Book of Revelation … In Room 2013 Ainsley Car was supposedly in the process of having Donna, prior to doing Beryl.
‘“Words”,’ keyed Clint, ‘“cannot convey the torment I am going through,” said a sickened “Dodgem” Car last night in an exclusive interview with the Morning Lark. “The pressures on the pro footballer of today are something you wouldn’t believe. And as the world knows, I’ve had a long and painful struggle with my ‘demons’. Football isn’t about winning. It isn’t about losing. It’s about glory. And yes, I’ve feasted on the recognition. Runner-up in the Premiership with Wanderers. A winner’s medal in the Ivatex Data Systems Cup with United. That ‘banana’ consolation goal for Wales in the quarter-final at the Bernabéu.
‘“And God knows I’ve had my share of grief. The endless months in hospital wards and prison yards. The tragic death of Sir Bobby Miles a scant ten days after my ‘challenge from hell’ and the crippling civil action that followed. Relegation with United. Tell me about it – the booze, the birds, the brawls. I’ve been there. And who’s stood at my side through thick and thin, through the good, the bad, and the bubbly? My childhood sweetheart and now my bride. Little Beryl.”’
‘“For the time is at hand,” ‘said Darius conversationally. ‘Her in there: that’s Jezebel. “And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.”’