‘The punishment never fit the crime. It hasn’t sat well with me, that. The punishment never fit the crime. Ah, lovely,’ said Mal, accepting the mug of tea he’d apologetically asked for. The two of them were in the kitchen at the flat, round the table, Mal with his coat still on and a cigarette in his fist. ‘He’s told me: “Smash his fucking jawbone for him. See how he likes that. I want him eating through a straw for a spell. See then if he ‘ll say my fucking name.” The way he was going on, I thought you’d shopped him – I thought you’d tried a citizen’s arrest. And all you did was put his name in a – in a story. Are you all right, mate?’
‘Yeah, mate …’
Xan stood over the table. He could feel the violence hormones still squirrelling around in him: voluptuous killers of pain and reality. He had seen the stranger approach his house; and then he had recognised him. Xan came up the steps and into the street, ready for absolutely anything … Mal had a way, as he talked, of compressing his lips and raising his eyebrows and tipping his head, now to the left, now to the right: on the one hand this, on the one hand that. Xan now watched him with clogged calm, almost lovelike, and a sense of getting nearer to something. He said,
‘I didn’t even do that.’
‘No. Come on. There it is in black and white.’ He held up the magazine he’d brought with him. ‘In Punch. And in the book and all. Joseph Andrews.’
Xan Meo was not a literary writer, but he had, in ‘Lucozade’, allowed himself an unwonted flourish. The story told of a middle-aged bodyguard who, at some earlier period in his career, had plied his trade on the American entertainment circuit. ‘He had spent a year in Las Vegas, working for Joseph Andrews,’ it said. And ‘Lucozade’ later mentioned that Joseph Andrews had retired to Los Angeles. And that was all.
‘I didn’t really mean Joseph Andrews,’ said Xan, trying to explain. ‘I meant Tom Jones.’
‘Tom Jones?’
‘The singer. You know: “It’s Not Unusual”. I meant Tom Jones.’
‘… Well that’s fucking unusual. Why didn’t you say Tom Jones?’
‘It’s just uh, it’s just a kind of joke. Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: they’re both novels by Henry Fielding … You can’t say Tom Jones.’
‘… Well you can’t fucking say Joseph Andrews neither! Either. Jesus.’ Mal, evidently appalled by such frivolity, took a moment to collect himself. Then he frowned and murmured, ‘“It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.” ‘Mal frowned deeper, adding: ‘“Each day I touch the green, green grass of home” … I see the film Tom Jones when I was fourteen. It was me first X. I thought: here we go. Non-stop orgies and swearing. But it was just a load of pubs, and birds with their – with it all pushed up up here.’
Xan waited. It had been made clear at the outset that there were things Mal could tell him and things Mal couldn’t.
‘He’s not called that now, Joseph Andrews. And he’s sensitive about it. As well he might be.’ Mal was now looking round about himself. ‘You’ve paid, haven’t you mate? You’ve paid. And the punishment never fit the crime. Tell you what. How about this: doing Snort.’
‘Doing snort?’
‘Doing Snort. The bloke who gave you two on the back of the head. I’ll do him.’
Wait, thought Xan: I may need the practice. You weren’t supposed to ask questions, but he said, ‘I’ve got a feeling he isn’t finished with me. Andrews.’
‘A feeling? Well I hope you’re wrong. But you have given him the right flaming hump, my friend. A very unpleasant man, Joseph Andrews. My father worked for him for thirty years till he got himself crippled by the oppo – the Plutarco Brothers. Me dad’s a pitiful sight when he goes to Jo. Dragging one leg, his arm still twisted over, and his neck all bent to one side. And Jo’s gone, “All right, the Plutarcos took a bit of a liberty with you. We’ll have a whip.” Give him sixty quid – and a kick in the arse as he limped from the room.’ Again, the sway of the head, the arch of the eyebrow. ‘All I can think of is it might go back to Mick Meo. I heard they was never on the best of terms. How’s your health?’
‘I’m all right physically. But not what I was.’
‘And uh, at home?’
‘I’m on probation.’
‘Well you … you stick with it. Because that’s the most important thing. You don’t need me to tell you. At our age, boy, you’re a joke without your wife. Your kids and that.’
Xan sat up and said suddenly, ‘I’ve got to meet this girl in this hotel.’
‘Ah. Right.’
Mal was a while getting to his feet. Face to face, with a strictly pragmatic air, he said, ‘Then you know the possible consequences.’
6. Size zero—1
Come and see me, she’d told him (inter alia), in my fat hotel. And Xan was now feeling the pull of a very heavy planet. The crystal moons, the mirrorballs, the space-squandering distances, the golden dome above the circling staircase – a brochure vivante for Atlantes. And down below, the marble streets of hairdressers, masseurs, of manicure and pedicure, of perfume and jewellery and haute couture. None of this was aimed at the mind, now was it? You felt it – the high pressure to live deliciously. And that was before you got to the food and the wine, the soft towels, the fresh white sheets.
He asked at the desk and was directed to a rank of telephones – telephones that might have been used by the courtiers of Louis Quatorze. ‘Karla?’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
‘I have a suite with a wet bar,’ she said. ‘Ride up.’
‘No – as we said. Ride down, if you would.’
‘What, wearing this? … only kidding. I’ll be one minute.’
She was longer than that. As he took up position by the fountain, some distance from the bronze traps of the elevators, and as he survived each new half-carload of assorted maquillage, Xan had time to imagine her, upstairs, slipping or stepping out of one thing and slipping or stepping into another. Of course, he had been perfunctorily ‘hoping’ that she would be unattractive. But by now he couldn’t be certain whether the way she looked, let alone the way she dressed, would make any difference. Tilda Quant was not attractive (she must have stood back in simple dismay when all the gifts were being handed out); and Xan found her very attractive indeed. And earlier still that morning he had found himself gazing entranced at the underslept Aztec obstinacy of Imaculada …
Down came another car (he was watching the crimson glints of the shaft diagrams), and another squaredance surged out of it, losing shape quickly in an atmosphere of hurry that had to do with the time of day and the coming of evening. She did not share in this hurry. The other passengers dispersed and she moved slowly through their fading speedlines. She walked as if impeded by the presence of small children – and you looked beyond her, beneath her, for these children; but they weren’t there … Xan did what he had seen Billie do: he tipped back so fractionally that he could steady himself by the weakest elevation of his toes. She did not share in the hurry, nor in the confectionery, of the hotel. The sandals, the straw bag, the plain white dress. There was of course her figure to be assimilated; and only the most vicious corset, he thought at first, could so constrain the isthmus of her waist; but her body moved forward with the regular beat of that which is unsupported. When she was still some yards away he saw that she wearing no makeup, and this felt like an intimacy you could do nothing about. He couldn’t place her. But the thing was that his body knew he had seen her before.
He inclined his head. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the corner of the mouth.
Xan had rehearsed the line uneasily, and now he delivered it uneasily: ‘This is my first blind date for thirty years.’
‘Blind? Well in one eye only. I know you. Do you know me?’
And he said, ‘You, I don’t know, you’re … already-seen.’
She said, ‘There’s a surprisingly good cave of a bar back here.’ And she took him by the arm.
He was, again, ‘hoping’ that the bar would be well lit and reasonably populous: that wo
uld be ‘better’, because she would then have less chance to do anything he might not ‘like’. The way it went, he ducked into the Rose Room as if from an equatorial strand; and it took him a full minute to establish that there were no other customers. A blind date, and a deaf date too: the cottony darkness seemed to be pressing its paws against his eardrums as he followed the little white ghost to a distant booth: an opulent brothel of red velvet. Their faceless waiter appeared at once and lit the candle with a flourish before disappearing again. Now their faces were unsteadily illumined – but nothing else was. In these surroundings, he felt, languid and methodical fornication would not seem particularly daring. And a dumb date: a dumb date. She said,
‘Now. Déjè vu in the proper sense, or in the vulgar? In the vulgar sense, already-seen just means already-seen. “It is with a distinct sense of déjè vu that we watch the Saints bear off the trophy for the second year running.” In the proper sense it would mean that you haven’t seen me before. You just get the feeling you have. Which is it?’
‘The latter. I think. As I said, there are things wrong with my memory.’
‘Of course it could be already-seen in a really vulgar sense. Supervulgar, in fact. We’ll come to that. Ah.’
To Xan’s dark-adapting eye the faceless waiter now looked implausibly young: he seemed about to recommend a glass of milk.
‘I’ll have what you have,’ she said.
All the more reason, then, to order an ocean of blue ruin. To tell the truth, he would have given anything for a drink. He would have given anything – but not everything. For the time being he could see the line in the sand: on one side of it, all he had; on the other, all he’d lose. Milk, yes, or water, still water – liquid parched of all life. He asked if they served fresh orange juice, and was told that they did.
‘Orange juice?’ she said. ‘I’m not having that. A large gin Martini, please, with a twist. Oh don’t have orange juice. Have an espresso at least.’
‘Okay, I’ll have an espresso.’
‘A double … I read your book. It’s …’
He was gratified – but it was all too urgent in his mind and he could think of no other way of putting it. He said, ‘It’s up-your-arse, isn’t it? Sorry. That sounds terrible. But you know what I mean.’
‘You mean you toady to the reader. Well, there is a feeling of ingratiation. A kind of pan-inoffensiveness. And you seem to subscribe to various polite fictions about men and women. In my view. As if all enmity is over and we both now drink the milk of concord. And there’s another thing. What’s the one where the title is a girl’s name? “Evie”. Yes. After a thirty-page chase the narrator finally gets Evie into bed, and then, in my view, rather congratulates himself for not describing it. “No, I’m not going to tell you who put what where”, and so on. What’s that? Gallant? Evolved? Is that what the writer should do – shirk the task and strike an attitude? I’m being rather unfair here, because it’s not just you. Good sex seems to be something that writing can’t manage. Maybe the only thing. No: there’s dreams. But why should that be? Mm. Excuse me while I get stuck into this lovely drink.’
‘They say,’ said Xan, ‘they say that the writer stops speaking for anyone but himself. The quirks come out. It’s no longer uh, universal.’
‘Can’t the quirks be universal? Aren’t there things we all like?’
‘It’s funny. I don’t often describe sex, but it’s the first question I ask myself about a character: what they’re like in bed.’
‘Do you? Sorry: “what they’re like” or “what they like”?’
‘I suppose both. Or is it the same thing?’
‘So if you were going to fictionalise me, which I don’t recommend, you’d start how?’
‘Why wouldn’t you recommend it?’
‘Because nobody believes in women like me. Or no woman does. Unless she was a victim too. Victims believe.’
‘Victims of what?’
‘Wait. I see you’ve evaded the question. Anyway. Good sex, as a subject, has to have a place to go. So a whole other form, a whole other industry, devotes itself to nothing else.’
‘Pornography.’
‘Pornography … Porn is a disgusting little word, isn’t it? It’s the most disgusting single thing in the whole phenomenon. Porno‘s nothing like so bad. In the industry, we call it the industry. That’s what you call it when you’re in it. I’m in it … I said before that you may have already-seen me, in the supervulgar sense. It’s been a while now, and there were reasons for it at the time, but I uh, “starred” in over a hundred movies. Blue movies. Karla White. For three years the only sex I had was the sex I had on camera. Porno-people aren’t like non-porno-people. When we watch porno, we fast-forward through the sex to get to the acting. Now that’s true perversity.’
‘… What were the reasons?’
‘I told you. Do you really not remember?’
‘When? Where?’
‘It was at Pearl’s summer party: August thirty-first. Pretty chaotic, as usual. And, of course, no Russia. Remember? We talked for two hours and then went into the garden and did what we did.’
‘What did we do?’
‘We’ll come to that. And I told you the reason. It was once a cliché, and is now a fallacy – but why do girls make blue movies? Because they were raped by their fathers. Between the age of six and nine, inclusive, my father raped me once a day … Now that’s strange. That’s very strange. Then you do remember.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘When I told you the first time you were hugely indignant on my behalf. Now look at you. You just blinked once. Slowly.’
‘It’s not that I remember you telling me. It’s …’
‘You don’t think it’s so shocking any more? Boy, you really did get a knock on the head, didn’t you. Well all right. Let’s consider. Is it so shocking? Some fathers, and not just mass-murdering yokels but stockbrokers and politicians – some fathers really do believe that incest is “natural”. I made you so I can touch you, your first child should be your dad’s: all that. It’s an atavism. Because getting rid of incest, outgrowing incest, was part of the evolutionary advance, like outgrowing oestrus.’
‘What?’
‘Oestrus. Heat in women. There has never been a human society that doesn’t observe incest taboos. But the one to do with fathers and daughters has always been the weakest. In the Bible there’s every kind of prohibition. “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s sister; she is thine aunt; it is wickedness.” But there’s nothing specific about fathers and daughters.’
‘Patriarchy.’
‘Well yes. No. Masculinity. Mother-son incest barely exists. There are about twenty cases in the entire literature. And all the biblical restrictions are addressed to men. Men do it, and it’s the same with the higher animals. Size. Masculine bulk. Men do it because men are big … If you were trying to dream up a justification, then don’t look at the past.’
She leant forward and sipped, parting her bright grey hair with her hands. Clearly these were strange words he was hearing. Then why didn’t he find them strange?
‘Look at the future. Us, us victims, we’re not so frightened and repelled by the way the world is now: the end of normalcy. We always knew there was no moral order. So sleep with Billie, and introduce her to the void.’
‘That’s what it is, is it. It’s a void.’
‘It’s very simplifying.’ She smiled – the bright teeth shallow, feline – and said, ‘Where I live there are all these treatment centres for vices and inadequacies and addictions. Incestuous fathers are taught how to sublimate. They make their poor wives dress up as little girls.’
He thought of Billie, of Sophie. ‘School uniforms. Rompers and nappies.’
‘Not quite that literal. It’s something a lot of men like. Believe me. All you do is you wear things that are many many sizes too small. When I rang you and said I was dressed up as a little girl: I said it because that’s a, that’s a
non-deuniversaliser. I don’t know, it takes the stress out of it. Consider the notion of the baby-doll look. It’s not only sublimation, it’s comic relief. How serious can anything be when your dress hardly covers your waist?’
‘You find? Uh, Karla, let me concentrate for a moment and … Yeah. I have seen you before. And it wouldn’t have been on film.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t watch pornography.’
‘You mean you say you don’t watch pornography. Ooh. Then you’re not the good modern person who wrote Lucozade … Unfair. You’re just a generation out – you’re still obliged to disapprove of it. It’ll take a while, but pornography is heading for the mainstream. The industry, now, is always saying how respectable it is. Every time Dimity Qwest or Tori Fate opens a supermarket, the industry says how respectable it is. To say that, you have to say that masturbation has become respectable. And that’s what they’re saying. “Wanking’s cool,” I read the other day. “Handjobs are brilliant.”’
‘Handjobs are bullshit. But wait.’
He did watch pornography, now, in the status quo after. Previously he quite liked it when he saw it but also disapproved of it; now, he liked it a lot and approved of it, assented to it, blessed it. And yet it was no help to him, in his altered state. Because even pornography needed your memory; and there were things wrong with his memory. The streams and currents, the different pressures and temperatures: if these do not flow as they used to, if the memory cannot ride them … The physiological reaction occurred, but nothing was eased by it. As if his erotic past was lost, and his desires, undiluted and unballasted, were all pushed out in front of him, into the present and the actual.