Russia stood up. He followed her to the counter, saying,
‘I should keep my mouth shut, shouldn’t I. Because if a woman isn’t liking you, she isn’t going to like anything you say. It could be fit for Hamlet and she isn’t going to like it.’
‘You know what I’m thinking? It’s not that you’ve become a brute. I’m thinking you were a brute all along.’
‘Oh, nice, that is. I get smashed over the fucking head, and now nobody loves me any more. The girls don’t. You don’t.’
‘You’re doing it again. You’re standing too close to me.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Jesus, you are really freaking me out. Get away. And guess what.’
‘What?’
‘Your zipper’s undone.’
Yes, that’s right, that’s right. The worst things of all were happening upstairs: in the master bedroom.
2. His Voluminousness
The first sentence almost made him roll over backwards:
dear clint: r u as other men r?
But he was lying down at the time: on his humid sack in the Foulness semi.
(i ask because u ask: about size
[email protected]) well if u’re not as other men r: don’t worry. my current ‘other’, orl&o, wields a big 1, of which he is inordin8ely proud. but take my word 4 it, clint, u don’t want a bloody great 21.
A bloody great … twenty-one? he thought. Oh: the l’s an l.
they’re overr8ed! 1 h8 them! & what an un4tun8 effect it has on the ego: he thinks he’s the b’s knees. it’s not size
[email protected] [email protected], clint. it’s love
[email protected] [email protected] u ask also 4 my name. i don’t no y i’m feeling quite so shy about it. it suddenly seems so intim8. the 1st act of commitment, if u will. u want 2 no my name. well it’s … k8. there. i’ve said it. ‘k8.’ ‘“k8 …” ‘& u ask about my loox. 1st, my figure. 1 swain was consider8 enough 2 tell me
[email protected] my ‘tits were crap’. another ventured the opinion
[email protected] i had ‘a crap arse’.
So she’s taken her nox – fuck, her knocks – too, Clint noted. Poor little thing.
(no young gentleman has yet proved sufficiently gallant 2 aver
[email protected] i have ‘a crap cunt’.) in fact i am inordin8ly proud of my body as it has developed over the years. i’m not a
[email protected] cutout, nor a mega-boobed 6-queen: just an honest middle-w8. & @ 25, i’m bloomin’!
Age-difference: perfect, thought Clint.
as 4 my face. my i’s r green (tho not with n v!). my hair is s&y & ‘flyaway’. men have a habit of saying
[email protected] i am blessed with a submissive & yielding manner, in an old-fashioned way: quintessentially femi9. i’m 5′7″, and i no u r a taller man, clint. which is as it should b. height
[email protected]:
[email protected]’s an
[email protected] rule of @traction.
And you’re right. You’re not wrong. You’re right, thought Clint. Know why? Birds want tall nippers: Darwin and that.
a while ago i did some
[email protected] modelling work. i was also a bingo-caller & prize-presenter @ the Mirage in King’s X, and u have 2 b pretty pretty be4 they let u do
[email protected] i even appeared in the pp. of your aug. journal. not what u think! (tell u 18er. just u w8 & c.) must -. 2dle-oo! k8.
Not in Readers’ Richards, surely to God, thought Clint. And then his doorbell rang.
This event, in most households no great matter, invariably represented the direst of emergencies at 24, The Grove, Foulness. There was a time when he would have simply sprinted upstairs, positioned a hand-mirror between the outer wall and the drainpipe, and eyed the front step from the porthole, treating each case on its merits. But such free and easy dealings with the outside world belonged to a happier time. Now Clint crawled across the floor and locked himself in the bathroom, where he assumed the fetal position on the damp tiles. The doorbell’s morse: how he writhed like a lab-rat to its jabs. Next came silence, increasingly gorgeous, until the silence was itself silenced – by a sound that would have taken him over the top at Passchendaele: the car alarm of the Avenger.
In his untethered bathrobe and Y-fronts tinged grey as if with the smear of newsprint, Smoker pitched himself out into the morning.
‘Oi, my car …’
It was one of those days when the ocean medium had leaked into the lower air, bodying forth a sopping mist and mast-high cloudlets that looked solid to the touch. There was the Avenger at the bottom of the dead front garden, longsufferingly honking; and there was the broad shape on the seaward side of it, leaning on it, waiting there.
‘That’s my car …’
Now the broad shape moved clear.
‘Ah. Eh up,’ said Clint, showing his palms. ‘Now, mate. No. You ain’t … you ain’t about to dispense the proverbial I hope. I’ve been a good boy, mate. Utterly oyster. I never—’
Mal Bale raised a stocky index finger to his upper lip. His manner, Clint was pleased to see, was not concertedly threatening: not all hot and righteous, like it had been that time on the Thames, outside the Cocked Pinkie. Mal’s manner was merely disaffected, inconvenienced … Clint thought for a moment. He was a newspaperman. Newspapering was in his veins. One day, at the office, he had typed out the forbidden name on a search-engine, which he never launched. For a moment he had felt like the science-fiction physicist who fears that he may obliterate the universe at the touch of a key.
‘It ain’t that,’ said Mal.
‘Then why are you here, mate?’
‘I am here as a representative’, said Mal, ‘of Ebony Escorts.’
Jesus, not the escorts again. With some people you can never … Sheer spite on her part, thought Clint. Though – okay – maybe he’d overdone it a bit on the His Voluminousness.
The girl, Rehab, had humiliated him totally and, this being the case, had thoroughly deserved the lesson he’d taught her. She went and let him down at one of the Lark‘s Sovereign Suppers (monthly occasions, held in the private rooms of prestigious Soho restaurants). Heaf was there of course, with his sheep, Mrs Heaf, and Mackelyne was there with his, Mrs Mackelyne, and Strite was there with some dolly or poppet, and Supermaniam was there with one of his many-armed subcontinental divinities …
Told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend, Rehab explained to the assembled accompany that she was an escort girl told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend.
‘Ladies. Guys,’ Clint had said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to a certain someone who’s become very special to me. Ladies. Guys. Say hi to Rehab.’
‘Charmed,’ said Heaf. ‘Sit here, dear.’
‘Dear’ is right, thought Clint. You couldn’t call them darling or sweetheart, but you could definitely call them dear.
‘Now tell me, dear: how long have you and Clint known each other?’
Rehab looked at her watch and said, ‘An hour and fifteen minutes.’
And then it all came out.
Apart from anything else it was a flagrant breach of contract. They’d done the budgeting earlier on: this much for every fondly shared reminiscence, this much for every stroke of Clint’s hand, this much for every blown kiss and melting gaze, this much for every proffered spoonful of her crème brûlée.
Afterwards, on their optioned-for but uncosted return to the hotel, Clint, using all his charm and the promise, at least, of a significant fraction of his net worth, induced Rehab to take her clothes off and go and prepare herself in the bathroom. Which he then locked, and walked out with all her gear under his arm. And that was the extent of it. There had been no suggestion whatever of the hair-tugging and nipple-twisting that had so expensively marred his encounter with Scheherazade from Escorts De Luxe. All Rehab’d had to do was screech down the fifteen floors until a passerby told the doorman.
On top of leaving himself alone for a couple of nights, Clint had prepared for his date with Rehab by taking three Potentium and five His Voluminousness. His Voluminousness was another webdrug Clint had started using. It was meant to increase the bulk of your ejaculations ‘to porno proportions’, according to the literature. And it did. You might have your doubts about the quality (the colour, the texture, the
redolence, and so on), but you couldn’t argue with the quantity.
In this lay Clint’s error – and Rehab’s grievance. First, drinks in the bar, and Clint with his pen poised over the paper napkin, sketching out the manifest (and keeping his eye on all the sundries). Then the rush of the elevator beneath your feet, the heavy moment as the key entered the lock, the azure carpet, the floral curtains … Now at these prices a bloke’ll want fair dealing – and Rehab was gypping him left and right. So, when the moment came, Clint reckoned he’d do a Dork Bogarde to Rehab’s Donna Strange. He had been aiming for her chest (not her lower abdomen, as negotiated), and hadn’t meant to lash it all over her throat and neck and hair.
Then Rehab’s hubbub, yelling down the phone for the drier and the extra shampoo. They were half an hour late for dinner, and he gave her a piece of his mind in the cab. She was a professional, wasn’t she? Where was her pride? A girl like her, used to dealing with nutters and perverts and inadequates, and she raises Cain over a lad who happens to have a bit of man in him? He said it again and again: Where was her pride? And this too perhaps explained why a recently goosed Rehab, on arrival at the table, was so thoroughly out of sorts …
What would a baby look like, made of that stuff? thought Clint (and it was the second time in recent days that he had found himself thinking about babies). He hadn’t even got it on her face – which, at the time, had been rigidly averted. For fifty-five minutes, with that one brief interruption, Clint thought about the farinaceous sports bra he had daubed on Rehab’s persian breasts (before the thing whipped out of control like a rogue powerhose) as the Avenger bombed back to Foulness.
It was in the Avenger that they now sat, the two of them, Clint and Mal. The engine was whirring (like a sewing-machine), for the warmth and the muted radio; and Clint, now contritely dressed in chinos and polo-neck, had produced a thermos of coffee. Both men were smoking with dedication, perhaps because the Avenger smelt so powerfully of human feet. Clint couldn’t understand why: the great tugs of his shoes, with their claws and cleats, featured moisture-wicking fleece lining and ozone-resistant sole-beds leavened for superior sweat-management; and the semi didn’t smell of human feet, so far as he could tell. When Mal asked why they didn’t go indoors Clint said that his live-in, Kate, who was insanely jealous, would murder him if she got wind of this one.
‘You’ve got a nice bird at home. Why d’you want to be out there paying for it?’
‘Yeah. Well.’
‘And this ain’t the first time there’s been trouble, is it, mate. I don’t understand people like you. Your live-in. You bat her about and all?’
Clint said, ‘No way. Never do that.’ But he was keeping his head down.
‘Well you got to make good.’
For the second time in eighteen hours Clint had before him an itemised bill of sale. But this invoice did not consist of fancy favours, of costly caresses … ‘A grand for the clothes?’ he said, leaning back. ‘I bunged them in a flowerpot in the passage. They be okay.’
‘Never mind the clothes. It’s the distress and the humiliation you’re paying for, boy. You should be glad you’re dealing with me and not with her two brothers. Izzat and Watban.’
‘Okay, mate. Deal. Look uh, no hard feelings, all right? And I want you to know, Mal mate, that on the other matter …’
Clint trailed off, and they were silent. Then Mal said, ‘Yeah – that. It don’t … It ain’t sitting well with me, that.’
The Avenger was so high off the ground that Mal chose to clamber down rear-forward. Clint, who had been within to fetch the cheque, wondered at the great natural sweep of Mal’s backside, which seemed to rise up from the middle of his thighs and then proceed to the third or fourth notch of his spine. This gluteus maximus: it was the base of all Mal’s operations; every decision would be referred to it. And Clint? Despite the man’s size, his heavy-boned mass, there was just a vacuum, and an apologetic fold or flap, in the rump of his chinos (and not having a backside didn’t mean that he didn’t have spots all over it). In the mirror, when he looked: it was as if his buttocks belonged to a much smaller man who kept them emphatically clenched.
‘What happened here, mate?’
‘Uh, at Basildon I come off the A13 and cut through the Bends. This sheepdog shot out at me. I swerved …’
‘A sheepdog? That ain’t a dog. It’s a sheep. Look.’
‘No it was a dog. With curly white hair.’
‘What, like a poodle. A poodle in the Bends?’
‘I don’t know. Not a sheep. Just a dog.’
‘… So you’d rather kill a dog than a sheep.’
‘Don’t know about rather.’ But, yeah, Clint found he had subliminally assumed that a dog was inferior to a sheep. Which didn’t make a lot of sense. Analogously (perhaps) he noticed that he wasn’t sure whether this or that woman was attractive or not-so-attractive. He could spot the difference between a centrefold and a Reader’s Richard, but he was none too clever, he thought, on the gradations in between.
‘Why, because a sheep is man’s best friend?’ pursued Mal. ‘They have sheepdogs. They don’t have dogsheep, do they. You got a sheep in there, have you, that fetches your slippers? Or guards the back door? Clint: you take care.’
Clint gestured farewell to the stern of Mal’s elderly German saloon. I don’t know, mate, he said to himself. I just don’t know …
The mist had lifted; out to sea a wildhaired wave collapsed, not all in one piece but laterally, from left to right, like a trail of gunpowder under the torch.
Bet that sheep, thought Clint – bet that sheep … The sheep had been standing on the verge, like an old country personage wise (by now) to the ways of cars. On the verge in its drenched white woollie.
Bet that sheep felt it when I come up on it. Boof.
‘The Walthamstow Wanker’, said Desmond Heaf, ‘has alas emerged from his coma, and we’ve had a pretty stiff letter from Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice, no less. In your report, Jeff, you said he was ogling a party of little girls in the public pool. Well, according to this, you can’t even see the swimming-pool from the gallery in question. It’s over some squash courts which were not in use at the time. I don’t suppose you happened to check.’
‘Check?’ said Strite. ‘Course I didn’t check. I got it from my boy at the cop shop, Chief. Since when do we check?’
‘Tulkinghorn, Summerson and Nice have also taken exception to our tone.’ Heaf held up the clipping. ‘“So if you’re passing 19 Floral Crescent, and you’ve got a spare brick on you, or a bottleful of petrol, then you know where to fling it.” An incitement to violence against the family of an innocent man in Intensive Care.’
‘Innocent? He was having a wank in public,’ said Strite indignantly. ‘What’s innocent about that?’
‘Says here he was massaging his sore hip when Mrs Mop burst in on him. And she’s seventy-eight and half-blind.’
‘Then why’d he do a runner? With his trousers round his ankles. If you’ll excuse me Chief, I’ll get back to my boy.’
Clint looked on judiciously as Strite left the conference room. He also wanted to get out of there – and into Back Numbers. Arriving at his workstation, with his latte and his brioche, Clint had found a new message from Kate: ‘well, u r an importun8 1, & no mistake! i appeared in the pp of your estimable sheet on the following d8.’ Which she gave: well, month and year. ‘it was in the “casebook” feature opposite the “ecstasy aunt”. u’ll no which 1 is my 1: the 3 principals r called brett, ferdin& & sue. go & have a look c, & let me no if i’m “up 2 snuff”.’ Ah, yes: Casebook, thought Clint pitilessly. For there were few things that Clint relished more than a powerful Casebook. And now he would set eyes on the woman with whom, he increasingly felt, his destiny was somehow entwined. He said,
‘No disrespect to Jeff, Chief, but I always thought we were baying up the bum bonsai on Pervs Him Right.’
‘Please elaborate, Clint.’
Jeff Strite came back in. He
looked vindicated, redeemed.
Clint shrugged and said, ‘He’s a wanker.’
‘Who’s a wanker?’
‘The Walthamstow Wanker.’
‘You mean he’s a reader?’
‘No, Chief. I mean he’s a wanker.’
‘And he is a wanker and all,’ said Strite. ‘My boy said they’d taken some “erotic material” off him. Got it stored down in the basement somewhere and he’ll be looking it out.’
‘There you are,’ said Clint, folding his arms. ‘Unless it was Nonce Monthly he had on his knees …’
Heaf said, ‘I don’t quite follow you, Clint.’
‘He’s not a paedophile. He’s just a wanker. And wankers are the people the Lark‘s on the side of. Wankers are what we’re all about.’
The Chief had a cornered look. Most of Clint’s really radical brilliancies, he found, took several days to sink in. ‘So we should … support him? No, no, Clint, I think you do our … our real wankers a definite injustice here. There were certainly grounds for suspicion that he was a paedophile. You’re forgetting the enormous groundswell of wanker response to our Nuke the Nonces campaign.’
‘You keep saying that, Chief. But as Mackelyne has often pointed out, the response to Nuke the Nonces was virtually undetectable … It’s Mrs Mop we should have gone after.’
‘For putting him in a coma.’
‘And for ruining his wank. Fling a brick through her front window.’
For a moment a bad-dream glaze descended on Desmond Heaf, and his brow was suddenly and minutely sequinned with sweat. After about ten seconds of steady recuperation he said, ‘… Royal comment. I think this is building quite well. Rather touchingly, the King’s enforced chastity is awakening the most profound concerns of our – and uh, I’ll be interested to hear your view, Clint, on the line we should take on the tragedy in Cold Blow Lane. So what’s the King to do? By the way, Supermaniam, I thought you overstepped the bounds of good taste with your think-piece … “Quick Mate While She’s Warm”. I thought Clint’s editorial the next day was far more sensitive and appropriate. Where is it? “Time To Pull The Plug On Pam”.’