‘I uh, I really don’t think I was ever on for that.’
‘Oh? You seemed awfully pleased with the idea at the time.’
‘When was that time?’
‘In the summer at Pearl’s … Well you can come and say hello at least. And Xan: hadn’t you better defuse a very awkward situation? What if I get hysterical and call the house?’
‘Where are you?’
She told him. He said,
‘I think we’d better meet on neutral ground.’
‘All right. We can meet in the lobby if you like. I’m busy till Friday so you’ll have time to mull it over.’
‘Friday’s … Yes. Tomorrow I’m taking my boys away for the night.’
‘Fascinating. Do you really not remember? Don’t you remember what you said about my breasts? … Don’t you remember them? That is alarming. You know, Xan, this may do you a lot of good. I’m sure that the moment you set eyes on me it’ll all come flooding back.’
* * *
Cora wore black, tights, skirt, blouse, but she had not yet put on the black shoes, the black suit-top, the black hat with its pendant black veil. Now she faced the irksome task of achieving a French twist: the hair swept up and over to the side, secured by an armoury of pins. She began work in the bathroom but soon moved the whole operation next door. The hectic profusion of mirrors, at odd angles and elevations, made her feel watched – that mirror especially, with its inner eye.
She knew the literature. Victims of incest grow up thinking they have magical powers. For they do. All infants, all babies, believe they wield magic: one-year-olds, if you have particularly displeased them, can look up from their cots in astonishment that you have physically survived their anathemas, their callingsdown. They grow out of it. But victims of incest, these girls, these weird sisters, never lose that faith. Because power is theirs: they can say a sentence, and make a family disappear.
Women whom Cora had earlier come across in support-groups and recovery programmes persisted with another notion: that they could seduce any male. And it was true, in their case, so long as the male was violent or inadequate; so long as the male was a rapist or an addict or a pimp or a bum … Cora believed she could seduce any male too, and she had not yet been proved wrong. But she had more in mind for Xan Meo than mere seduction – and the graphic disabusing of his wife. She didn’t yet know what. It would come to her.
Five minutes before her car was due she picked up the phone and dialled and said, ‘Hello, may I speak to Pearl, please? … Pearl! You don’t know me but I’m an old flame of your ex-husband’s … About eight years ago. Yes that’s right: when you two were still married.’ Cora held the phone at arm’s length. ‘Wait, wait. He was ghastly to me too, if that’s any comfort … So – so I thought we might bury the hatchet and have a good natter,’ she went on, ‘over a few grams of cocaine.’
Soon afterwards Cora was in her overcoat. She instructed her gorge to stay where it was when she encountered the traditional flower-arrangements for the antinomian dead.
3. King Bastard
‘So how’s it go again?’ he asked his sons.
‘Your middle name plus the name of your street is your filmstar name,’ said Michael.
‘And your pet’s name plus the name of your street is your porn-star name,’ said David.
Xan said, ‘I haven’t got a pet.’
‘What was the last pet you had?’
‘A dog. Called Softy.’
‘Well then. Softy St George.’
Xan went on, ‘Softy wasn’t soft. Far from it. Salt-and-pepper Alsatian, and a real hardnut. When I was growing up I thought that was why Softy was in a rage all the time. Because of his name.’
They returned to what they were reading. Michael and David were reading the sports pages of the mainstream yellowtops. And Xan was reading himself: Lucozade … The three of them sat in a fast-food joint on Paradise Pier, among nursery colours. And the colours of the clientele? The colours of the English, their pinks and greys, would eventually be subsumed by the colours of the ultramundane. And how they needed these new colours, he thought. At the next table, a baby-bottle full of Pepsi was being offered by a white man to a brown child; his pallid hand, with its bruised tattoo, seemed to make great gains from the transaction. The smile of his black wife – this also greatly distinguished him.
‘“Of his Kestrel Juniors Chivalric Medallion”,’ said David, ‘“shamed love-rat Ainsley Car has been sensationally stripped …” They reckon here he’s going to Charlton. After prison.’
‘Charlton? They’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. So’s Charlton. He’s crap and they’re crap.’
‘Car’s crap. But Charlton aren’t that crap.’
‘Bullshit. They’re less crap than he is but they’re still crap.’
‘Boys, boys: you’ve got to learn some new swearwords. Take crap, say. I mean, bullshit actually means something. Something fairly complicated. Something like: rubbish intended to deceive. But crap? Crap just means crap. As a word, crap is so crap.’
‘That’s the whole point of it. Crap’s wicked.’
‘Yeah. Crap’s cool.’
‘I’ll tell you what is crap,’ he said, flicking his book on to the table, ‘and it’s this shit.’
‘… How d’you mean, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you when you’re older.’
They came out into the last of England. The rock, the winkles; the pigeon with a petrol prism on its neck, the dry-heaving gulls; and the sea, in its storm aftermath, all confused and distraught, not knowing its proper place. Everything on the pier, the slot arcades, the caffs and bars with their short change and short measure, the dodgems, the ghost train: the whole narrative painting was organised by a vast – and, in secret, vastly prosperous – slum family. This was all that was left of his childhood culture.
Thursday morning was bright and blue. He gave the boys about a hundred quid each and then sat alone on the rocks between the two piers, the Opera and the Paradise. Mariners talk about a twice-daily occurrence – when the waves ‘reconsider’. Something of the kind appeared to be happening in front of him, though the sea was more orderly now; morale, esprit de corps, had been returned to it. The waves crashed and dragged; they flopped and trawled.
Xan wondered about the reasons for the sense of alleviation he was feeling. His memories of the place were piquant and pellucid and above all plentiful; and his engagement with Lucozade (he was about halfway through) seemed sure to be enlightening, whatever else it might cost him. But, no, it must be the boys, the boys. Was it merely their maleness, the laxity of their talk, the companionable squalor they had instantly brought to the set of rooms at the Crown? No, it was their unexamined acceptance of his altered state – and the fact that they couldn’t possibly judge him. They too were in the process of abandoning a self and acceding to another. Like their father, they couldn’t fully remember what they had been, and couldn’t predict what they would become. They didn’t know who they were either.
Michael and David spotted him from the corniche. The distant clouds were like continents; there goes Africa, there goes America. The sea was equal to the task (all in a day’s work) of turning the rock he sat on into shingle. The waves flopped and dragged, and crashed and trawled. The foamline wore a sneer, then a grin, then a sneer, then a grin: phantoms of the opera, phantoms of the paradise.
‘Is uh, Vicky back at school yet?’ Xan asked.
They were in a taxi, on the way to the station; and as the car turned off the Parade they were given a clear view of St Bathsheba’s on its crumbling clifftop – apparently no more than a year or two from the sea.
Michael said, ‘No, they’ve got her salted away in the country somewhere. And why? The bloke who did it – he knocked her up.’
David said, ‘She’s four months gone. She’s out here.’
‘And there’s worse to come,’ said the elderly driver. ‘The bloke who did it: one of our coloured brethr
en. And he give her a disease.’
Michael said, ‘… If it’s a boy it’ll be one of those bastard pretenders.’
‘Bastard the First.’
‘King Bastard.’
On the train Xan dozed, and his heart and mind loosened into shapeless candour. What he wanted, what he had to have, apart from revenge, was familial reinstatement with honour. It would be done. It would be made so. And he considered he’d performed pretty well with Russia, playing the man he used to be. On the other hand, as his head snapped up from sleep and then dipped back down into it, like the shifting height of the parallel wires on the telegraph poles beyond, on the other hand … His nodding thoughts kept going back, kept going forward, to the woman in the hotel room. The joys of fame: the cyclostyled circular from the teenage autograph-hound; the plea for funds from the Bulgarian theatre group; and, every now and then (and not for a long time now), a woman, coming at you from out of the ether. They were far from being forces for good, for stability, these women, he knew. But they were women. And it was nice to feel wanted, even by a wrecking-ball … Much would depend, of course, on her looks. He was determined to be faithful – at all times faithful; he wouldn’t touch. Still, he might have to go up there for a little while and watch her swan around in her pants. And then slip quietly away.
4. Cora’s call on Pearl
‘Well I’ll say this much for Xan Meo: he could pull. Enter and welcome. It was the television. His standard went soaring the minute he was on the television. Oh, just put it anywhere. Lovely tits, darling. And I bet they’re yours, too. And the waist. And the arse … Jesus wept, he must have thought all his birthdays had come at once. Even your stomach‘s a turn-on. And when was it? You’d have been even more of a little miracle then, at – what? –twenty-nine, thirty? No. I bet you’re better now. Sorry about the mess. You should see the boys’ rooms. They come home from school and try on all their clothes. That’s very kind of you. I could fancy some of that.
Cora made room on the large kitchen table for the ritzy shopping-bag with the magnum of champagne in it, and then produced the snuffbox with its packed white powder.
‘Ooh, go on then.’
A glance at the sitting-room, with its shawls and scarves showered over the furniture, and the multilayered clutter deposited as if by flashflood, told Cora that Pearl was no keeper of secrets. The house-presents she had brought were de trop—not unwelcome, but almost certainly otiose. Pearl’s appearance was similarly informative: the livid cheeks and forehead, the irregular auburn spikes of her hair, the costume jewellery, the ashsmudged jacket, the short skirt. It was on the short skirt that Cora concentrated. She saw that this was Pearl’s gravitational centre – the bandy thighs, the framed void. With a thrill of mortality Cora decided that the day Pearl finally stopped wearing short skirts would be the worst of her life. On the way to this rendezvous Cora’s cab had encountered an old lady in the street (and Cora wasn’t used to seeing old ladies in the street) bent almost triple in her search for purchase. The old lady was waiting at the zebra-crossing; the driver slowed and stopped; and, before starting off like a sick crab, she stared at him with a sneer of suspicion for at least twenty seconds, as if London taxis were well known to like ploughing into old ladies on zebra-crossings. Cora thought: try doing all that in a short skirt.
Pearl had both feet on the table, and had just rocked back from her seventh line of cocaine, when Cora introduced the subject of male sexuality, with particular reference to Xan Meo.
‘It’s too fizzy, isn’t it,’ said Pearl. ‘Wiggle your finger in it. Like this. It makes the bubbles go away and you can drink it faster. Whew. I haven’t scarfed up as much … Uh, he uh, wasn’t a fetishist. Like some. I knew a bloke who ricked his neck every time he heard a toilet flush. Another bloke could only do it wearing a mask and I had to pretend to be someone else – you know, a different person each time. I said, Ah come on for once. He said, It’s like being gay – I can’t do it otherwise. Xan. Xan liked frilly knickers and the rest of the bollocks but name me one that doesn’t. With him it was a power thing. He’d want to master you. So, you know, you’d resist that and pretend it isn’t doing anything for you. You’re not in the mood and you’re just letting him get on with it. Until you … That’s what he liked. Well. What can you do with them? Either they’re lording it or they’ve locked themselves in the bathroom. For a weep or a wank. Wiggle your finger in it.’
Cora now raised the question of Xan’s current circumstances, and was pleased to see Pearl’s shiver of flustered highmindedness: still greater indiscretion was on its way.
‘Of course it’s all off now, since he copped that smack on the head.’ Her voice had a faint buzz to it, imparted by the furled tenner in her nose. ‘He was always pretty keen, actually, but now he’s all screwed up and can’t think about anything else. Russia – I’ve got quite pally with Russia, on the phone at least. Russia had to kick him out after he came in and leapt on her in the middle of the night. She was that close to having him nicked. Said he’d become like a retarded child when they turn fourteen. They don’t know what to do with it all. And here’s something worse.’
Cora leant forward. With a look of righteous panic Pearl went on,
‘Russia asked me whether … When I was divorcing him I told my lawyer Xan was messing with the boys. Total rubbish, but any port in a storm. And Russia asked me whether it was true. Because she thinks he might have been messing with Billie – that’s their four-year-old and a sexy little minx according to the boys. Nothing definite, mind. It’s the way he eyes her. Whoop. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that, but you know what it’s like with this stuff. Out it pops.’
‘Oh it’s safe with me,’ said Cora. ‘Mm, your garden looks awfully nice. Would you give me a tour before I go?’
Pearl stood swaying at the front door. She said,
‘Oof: that fresh air’s really done me in. And look at her. Like a daisy. We never did talk about you and your time with Xan … Yeah, what time, right? Aren’t you clever … Ooh, you’re going to start stirring it now, aren’t you. Going to start mixing it. I’d say he’s going to be a very lucky boy. For about half an hour. His head’s on the block with her – one slip and it’s all over. Let me know how you get on. I’ll call Russia and feed her the dirt. Or do you do that bit too?’
5. It’s Not Unusual
On Friday Xan rose at seven. He breakfasted with the girls, and with Imaculada, to compensate or atone for his absence later on – if, for some reason, he got held up at the hotel. And he did his hour with Tilda Quant. Next, at the gym, he worked much harder and longer than usual; his class-leader, Dominic, commended the extra rasping and straining with the benchpress. Back at the flat, as he was about to unpeel his stinking singlet, he said to himself: Don’t wash. Go like this. That’ll keep you honest … As a compromise (and this was by no means habitual) he stood under a cold shower for fifteen minutes. Tilda Quant might have said that the mechanism at play here was self-flagellatory: purgation in advance. Hell isn’t just hot; it’s cold, too.
No doubt it was in the same spirit that he surrendered to a much-postponed ordeal: he tried to write something. Just a couple of paragraphs (he told himself), a couple of hundred words describing the confusions that had beset him since his accident. He stopped after forty-five minutes and read what he’d put down. As he feared, it did not evoke so much as leadenly dramatise his condition. Indeed, it was just another symptom: expressive dysphasia. His concentration, he realised, was additionally impaired by the fact that he kept thinking about sex: sex in the afternoon. By now his imagination had long exhausted all known acts, stunts, positions, variations. By now it was unalloyed nostalgie—pure love of the mud. Xan sat there sinking, in his brown study.
With a smile of pain he picked up Lucozade, intending to finish it – or to finish ‘Lucozade’, the last and longest story.
Twelve pages in he got to his feet and said, ‘Joseph Andrews?’
At that moment Mal Bale was two
hundred yards away and heading straight for him. Well, not quite: he had a bit of business to get done en route. Only take a minute. Mal, this day, was on a dual mission. He didn’t like the first thing he was going to do and he didn’t like the second thing he was going to do. But he was going to do them. In his worn leather overcoat (the broad belt was like the metal strap on a barrel), Mal approached a hotdog stand on the west pavement of Prince Albert Road.
‘Go on then. How much? … Jesus, you don’t take no prisoners, do you mate. Onions? Nah. Just the uh, the doings …’
The hot-dog man, a middle-aged rasta with every other tooth missing and a face wreathed and sallowed by half a century of keef, said coaxingly, ‘You got to eat you onions, man. Put lead in you pencil.’
‘I’ve got lead in me pencil, mate. Look at the state of that sausage: that’s bioterror, that is. Do you know who I am? Do you know why I’m here?’ Why am I here? he thought. At my time of life, and I’m frightening hot-dog stands. It’s not even a stand. It’s a fucking trolley … ‘The cousins aren’t having it.’
‘But they’s ice cream!’
‘Ice cream, hot dogs: same difference.’
The hot-dog man stood fixed, with his dishcloth, his spatula.
‘Look, you don’t want your face on that grill, do you, you don’t want this trolley down on you and them onions in your hair. And a squirt of ketchup up one ear. And a squirt of mustard up the fucking other.’
‘I got youths, man.’
‘Yeah well we’ve all got them. Sorry and that. But I’ll be back in a bit and if you’re still here it’ll happen.’
Mal strode on, past St Mark’s Church, to St George’s Avenue.
He rang the bell and waited. Just as the door opened he heard a fierce shout from the street: ‘Oi!’ He looked round, looked back again; then he shifted his feet, raised his outturned hands to shoulder height, and bowed his head. A passerby might have thought that Mal was hoping to settle an argument – hoping to find common ground – between husband and wife. Either that, or he was just trying to keep them apart.