‘Charming.’
‘It’s coming, man. The hour is at hand. “And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of the heaven fell unto the earth …”’
‘Oh. That. The comet. Your lot were a bit quick off the mark with the last one. Didn’t they all top themselves in advance, your lot, over in California?’
‘Not my lot. My lot won’t even be here, man. It’s all yours.’ For a moment Darius laughed quietly. ‘You think America’s powerful. Taste the wrath of the big guy, bro. Coming to getcha …’
‘Where’s the meaning in it? Just blind natural forces.’
‘No blind. The comet is like me, man. Muscle. Muscle of God.’
The room – the hotel – was postmodern, but darkly, unplay-fully so. It seemed that the gunmetal furniture was trying to look like the refrigerator, the television, the safe. Among the gaunt gadgets on Clint’s worksurface was an anomalously ovoid Babicom (supplied by the Lark‘s lone parent, Desmond Heaf). He reached for the dial. You could hear Ainsley’s slurred and labouring baritone, Donna’s bold alto.
… for the both of them. The uh, the mongrel’s Bena. The Alsatian’s Mick. Know why I love dogs?
Tell me, love.
Dogs don’t kick you when you’re down.
That’s true.
Dogs don’t nag at you. Dogs don’t rip you fucking off. Dogs don’t give you bullshit.
They give you dogshit.
Yeah but … yeah but … Dogs don’t—
‘Jesus. Well at least they’re in bed by the sound of it.’
‘How long’s he got?’ asked Darius. ‘You’d think he’d be making a pig of himself. Donna Strange?’
‘“I always enjoy the Lark’s annual Top Titcrack Competition (pages 19–26),” ‘typed Clint. ‘“It’s a chance to have a few drinks and a laugh and generally relax. After the lunch and the playoff, we sat around with the proud winner, Donna Strange, and had a few drinks. Spirits were high. And it was hard to take your eyes off Donna’s cleavage. Talk about Silicone Valley! A bit later someone suggested that we move on to the bar for a few drinks. At this stage, the thought of any monkey business was the last thing on my mind. I’m a happily married man. And after all, little Beryl was due to join me at seven.
‘“After a few drinks Donna suggested we move on to the restaurant for a snack and a few drinks. Call me naïve, but I thought little of it when Donna complained of hoarseness in the foyer and asked for a glass of water. We went up to my room on the twentieth floor. I don’t know if she was having me on about the tickle in her pipe. But this was for certain. Five seconds after that door closed behind us, Donna Strange had a frog in her –”‘
—I’ve nutmegged their number two and come haring into the box. The goalie’s come out to close me down but I’ve gone and chipped him. Two-all. The crowd’s going spare. In the eighty-sevemf minute, Gibbsy’s played a long ball out to the left …
‘The time is nigh.’
‘Yeah, well. Donna knows what time it is.’
Clint now typed very fast for fifteen minutes. ‘“At last,” ‘he went on, ‘“she smiled up from beneath my sopping knackers. I needed no second invitation when she offered to start taking her clothes off. In all the excitement I clean forgot that …”’
‘Five to,’ said Darius.
… with a power header just before half-time. Shortly after the resumption I—
Where are we now, Dodge? Kestrel Juniors?
Kestrel Juniors? No, love, this is the Under Nines. Shortly after the—
Here, darling, we’d better get started.
… I’m uh, I’m not bothered.
Pardon?
I’m not bothered. With Beryl due. Bit embarrassing for a bloke, his wife seeing him with his arse in the air. No offence.
I don’t mind, sweetheart, but it’s not up to us, is it? Look … Undo your … If I … Just get your …
‘He’s not even got his clobber off!’ cried Darius.
‘She’ll have him. Donna Strange? She’ll jack him up. She’ll be there.’
And now they could hear her, through the Babicom (its red light straining), through the matt wall: Donna, gathering it up from the depths.
Ainsley Car had impressed it upon Clint that Beryl was a woman of pathological punctuality – especially in her dealings with things like Central London, and public spaces, and Ainsley Car when he was putting himself about … Clint approached the door and opened it narrowly. The hand-mirror he held gave him a flickering view of the empty passage. He stuck his head out – his head, like the shaved hump of a camel. The Bostonian had recently been dragged into the twenty-first century, but it remained an old, sprawling, fire-haunted hotel: the corridor unreeled itself like an opium vision, as if to infinity. Clint waited. At 7.58 the specklike pixel of Beryl Car began to detach itself from the distance. So small; and already so strafed by fears. Funny: she’s getting nearer – but no bigger. And shit nerself, he thought… Her want of inches was like an exertion of humility; and the stride, too, was just a series of starts and hesitations, buffeted by invisible fingerstabs of mockery or reproach.
Sternly Clint backed into Room 2011. ‘Wait for it,’ he whispered. ‘First the waterworks. Then boof.’
With their heads dipped and their mouths stretched in grins of suspense, the two men listened to what they had heard many times before. But only on their television sets: the shuddering, self-righteous birthsong of Donna Strange – so operatically brought to bed.
He gave it half a minute longer, then stepped up and opened the door. He looked left, he looked right.
‘You little bitch,’ he said.
Clint entered the conference room, the next day, to a standing ovation. There was nothing triumphal in it. Rather, the applause expressed a grave and considered solidarity – a sense that, though much had been achieved, much abided their care; a sense that, however uncertain the outcome, the attempt itself had spoken, and not in a quiet voice, for professional intrepidity and esprit.
‘Well thanks, lads, for the moral support. Thanks, Chief. Appreciated. It was never going to be easy out there last night, but I was … “Doing Beryl” was my baby, and I wasn’t about to mess this one up. No danger.’
It was Desmond Heaf’s practice, when the paper mounted one of its coups de théâtre, to retire to the sidelines for a day or two. He now had the air of a fuddled corporal emerging from a foxhole. ‘Would you care to take us through it, Clint?’
‘Okay. Beryl’s done a runner on us. Yup. Seems she approached the door, heard Donna belting it out – and she’s done a runner.’ Down the far end of the passage she was disappearing into the motes at the vista’s end. ‘So be it: plan B. I got Dodgem out from under Donna and hauled him next door. I said, “Dodge? You know what you got to do, boy? You got to go in there and do Donna.”’
‘I almost gave birth when I saw it,’ said Heaf. That morning’s edition rattled faintly in his grip: WHY I DID DONNA BY AINSLEY CAR * WORLD EXCLUSIVE * Dodgem Goes Apes**t After Hotel Sex Fest. ‘Why I did Donna?’
‘“Do Donna?” says Dodgem,’ said Clint. ‘“Why do I do Donna?” I said, “You don’t do Donna. What you do is you ‘do’ Donna: when I give the word, you make a racket and smash up the furniture, and we’ll do the rest.” He said, “But why, mate?” I said, “If it’s motivation you’re after, she’s just cost you your marriage.” Course I was rewriting it in my head: the piece. Like: “When I realised that those three hours of madness might mean the loss of little Beryl, my anger naturally turned on the rotten slag who’d led me astray.” Et cetera. Then I rang Marge Fitzmaurice.’
Clint’s colleagues were listening with unrelieved solemnity, their faces dry and grey. Even Supermaniam looked like Voltaire.
‘I told Marge to get her vanity case and her fat arse over to the Bostonian instanter … It was a pleasure to watch her work. If you turn the page, Chief – the bruises on the inner thigh? And o
n the bosom? Then we slung in the black eye and the split lip. I told Dodge to get started. Give him a minute and I’ll call Security. Well I heard a thud or two, nothing much, and I looked back in: Ainsley’s on the floor, and there’s Donna in her pants smashing his head in with a glass ashtray. Said he took a right swing at her, so she did him. After that it was just logistics.’
‘Had Ainsley been drinking?’
‘Drinking? He doesn’t remember anything from about noon on. And guess what. He didn’t do Donna – and he didn’t have her either. Rather talk about his dogs and Kestrel Juniors. Donna straddled him and that, for Beryl, but it was strictly soft-core.’
‘Well I never did,’ said Heaf. ‘Congratulations, Clint. You handled a difficult situation with considerable delicacy, and it all came out for the best. Jeff?’
‘Tomorrow’, said Strite, ‘it’s Donna’s Story.’
‘Angle?’
‘Uh … She deeply respects the strength of Ainsley’s feelings for Beryl. No way in this world will she press charges. Says the rough stuff shrinks to insignificance compared to the fivestar porking he gave her earlier. You know: have you seen the size of him?’
There’s a word for it. Don’t you worry. Oh yeah, there’s a word for it all right. Contempt.
The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy. Will gasp with envy.
You can take all the shrinks and minders and trickcyclists or whatever you want to call them … It’s down to you, mate. It’s down to you.
One told him he was crap in bed. One called him a crap fuck. At first he didn’t understand, and responded in kind. He invited them to come back and try him again when they’d lost a couple of tons and had their arses fixed. Then understanding began to dawn. ‘Oh. Is this as big as Clint gets?’ – and this, by now, was a Clint preempurpled with Potentium. Raillery, is it? Later that night: payback. ‘Gaw,’ he’d said, as she took off her bra: ‘when you have a baby, you’ll have to get it pissed, you will, before it’ll go near that little lot.’ ‘Oi. Take your ring off for God’s sake,’ she’d said, after a full minute of foreplay. ‘Ring? What ring? That’s me watch.’ But understanding was beginning to dawn. Go on, laugh, he was already muttering as he unbuckled his belt. Get your laughing done with. They didn’t laugh. They said: ‘I’m sorry, love, but I can’t feel you.’ They said: ‘I can’t feel you, Clint. I’m trying, but you’re not there.’ Not there! Those microscopic insects called no-see-ums: they bite. And Clint? No-see-um – and no-feel-um. He’s not there. Where is he if he’s not there?
The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy, gasp with envy. There’s a word for it: contempt.
You have 125 new messages: half of them offered riven virgins and pregnant grannies; the other half offered penis-enlargement strategies – and Clint had tried them all.
Meet the challenge of any woman … you will be in total command … remain your secret … discovered by Dr Trofim Frenkel, MD … why settle for … your maximum potential … herbs found in Polynesia … ‘I feel great about myself (PL, Germany) … natural scents that turn women into … 55 million satisfied customers … piston assembly … non-removable springloaded … pistol-trigger press pump … ‘I am already 12 inches but I’m going for 14′(RB, USA) …
Why stop there, mate? Why not 28? Why not 56? We’d be like the men on the Esso forecourt, with the steel nozzles, the flickering digits, the fat splats of car-sweat.
At home Clint had flexers and extenders, fancy philtres in tubs and tubes, pulleys, lozenges, unguents, humidors, all over the house, in trunks and suitcases and cardboard boxes and tengallon bags. No African scarifier had subjected himself to more thorough and various mortification; down there, Clint had undergone every possible metamorphosis – except growth. There had been temporary, and terrifying, enlargements. But nothing you’d want to keep …
Then of course there was the radical solution. And Clint (while on assignment) had once got as far as the surgery waitingroom of a Dr Christer Ekland in Stockholm; he filled in forms for ten minutes before he burst out through the door. And by now he had heard many sufficiently gruesome stories about Life after the Knife … How the shame – how the shame was predisposed to bring down more shame. Shame came from receiving, from sustaining, that other thing, contempt.
I don’t know, mate, but it’s down to you. They talk about the shrinks, the minders, the trickcyclists … And Clint had always feared such an investigation: he wondered what else they’d find … But you can’t go any further, not down this road. You’ve got to open your head, and let them in.
‘Absolutely glorious weather,’ said Heaf. ‘Today, London will be hotter than Dubai. What we’ll have here is a café society. Like on the Continent.’
Clint said, ‘The big news climatewise, they’re saying, is the Ice Age. Which is coming up. After uh, ten thousand years of decent weather, muck out the igloo, boys, and hunker down for ninety millennia of frostbite.’
‘… Then maybe global warming isn’t such a bad thing after all!’
‘Yeah, they’re saying – yeah: but if you wet your pants at the beginning of a blizzard, it won’t keep you warm for very long. You’re obviously in a brilliant mood, Chief?’
‘Well. Yes, well, it’s true. I can’t be unhappy today.’
Everyone turned to the masterscreen. This was showing the four-second loop of the Princess. Each man present had watched it a couple of hundred times; and the room fell silent as they watched it yet again. The first second: supine in the white bath, the Princess is rhythmically spooning water on to her throat with her left hand. The second second: she pauses, as if to listen; the splashing, the lapping of the water – this has ceased. The third second: she sits up suddenly. The fourth second: she turns her head to the right as her body rotates through ninety degrees, causing the water to slide and swirl across her cocked hip. Then black.
‘For us, that’s a licence to print money,’ said Mackelyne. ‘If the gagging order holds. They can download it themselves but it’s not the same. Our wankers’ll want something to keep – to cherish. And that’s what we’ll give them.’
‘Hold your fire, Mack.’ Heaf joined his hands behind the back of his neck and said conversationally, ‘Donna Strange opened an abortion clinic in Belfast – today at noon … There were protestors, of course, and it was covered on local TV. Donna looked radiant.’
Supermaniam said, ‘What about the black eye and the split lip?’
‘No trace of either.’ Heaf added brightly, ‘We can always claim she put makeup on it.’
‘What, makeup on the makeup?’ said Clint. ‘I can see why you’re not bothered, Chief. After all, April Fool’s Day is only three and a half months off. We can say we jumped the gun.’
Heaf guffawed with his head thrown back. He reached across the table for a tasselled folder, saying, ‘From Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice, no less. It seems that we are now faced with the legal question of whether our photocaptions constitute a uh, “an incitement to masturbation”.’ He held up a clipping between finger and thumb. ‘“Does Steffi give you a stiffi? Roll your sleeve up, son, and get to work!” Or the following, from your Blinkie Bob Video Review, Clint. “You’ll be needing a box of tissues for this one (make that a mansize!). And I don’t mean it’s a weepie.”’
‘Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice,’ said Clint. ‘Don’t they represent the Walthamstow Wanker?’
‘They do. You see, the “erotic material” being consulted at the public baths on that fateful day was nothing other than the Morning Lark. So the Walthamstow Wanker …’
‘Is a wanker! You’re doing my bonce in here, Chief. Tell you what. Can I have a month’s holiday starting tomorrow?’
‘Course you can, dear boy. The thing is, none of this matters, journalistically, because everyone pretends we’re not a newspaper. Well all that is about to change.’
Heaf stood. They waited.
‘I’m late, I’m late,’ he sang, ‘for a very important date …’
‘W
here at, Chief?’
‘At Number Ten Downing Street. By order of the King.’
‘… They’ll gag you. They’ll gag you, Chief.’
‘Maybe they will, maybe they will. Uh, what did we have in mind for tomorrow?’
Supermaniam unfurled the mockup. It said: ‘Souvenir Issue * The Little Princess Frame By Frame * FUTURE Q. OF E. GANGF**KED ON CAMERA??’
‘Mm. Await my call. That may need some toning down.’
‘If you feel strongly about it, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘we’ll add another question mark.’
It came through when he was back at his workstation and talking to the travel people, Virtually There. It said:
fl@ e, 49 m@tock est8, n7
dear clint: @ last - the dex r clearing! he’s not a gr8 hint-taker, orl&o, & he hasn’t noticed i’ve stopped talking 2 him. but he has noticed i’ve stopped making his t. ‘y don’t u make my t any more?’ & i say, ‘you can make your own bloody t!’ but he’s as obstin8 as a mule. th@’s the word 4 him: asi9. he still wants 6 every nite, but i’ve got a new str@agem: not washing. let’s c how long he can st& the s10ch! … a whole new future is opening up 4 me now. a new 2morrow, clint. my thoughts & hopes r turning 2wards some1 else - some1 not a 1,000 miles from where u st&, my v dear friend. on our first d8, whenever th@ may b, if we feel like a cuddle, y the 1 not! but th@ doesn’t have 2 lead 2 anything but sleep, & in the morning i’ll make the t! still, i think it’s a good thing 4 u 2 take a journey 2 distant 1&s – 2 reflect, 2 ponder, 2 rumin8. i shall be w8ing here 4 u - like a nun, a noviti8, ready 2 become a bride of X! well, dear 1, i kiss your h&s. fare 4th, & find the lite! k8.
So on his last Sunday before jetting off, Clint drove to N7: just to reconnoitre, and maybe catch a glimpse. Trapped in traffic on Parkway, and gazing out, he noticed a smart-looking woman whom he thought you’d call fanciable, despite the doublepram she wielded. As he watched, she pulled up short, came round in front of the two nippers – and crouched, in earnest interchange. Shit: if he’d been in a normal car, instead of the Avenger, he’d have been able to see right up her skirt. Clint moved on.