‘Oh don’t be too hard on handjobs.’ She spread her arms at shoulder height on the black velvet. ‘It’s not flattering, to be forgotten. It makes you feel forgettable.’
‘That’s not how it works. Three weeks before I got hit on the head it was Billie’s fourth birthday.’ He checked himself; then he pressed on. ‘When I picked her up at lunchtime, which I don’t usually do, she was very happy and excited. She said to the teacher, “And here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school.” You know: as if to cap it all. I said at the time that I’d remember that for the rest of my life, but I had to be reminded of it. Like my younger daughter’s birth. Sophie’s birth. I’d forgotten it. I’ve forgotten it. It’s not there. I’d say you were pretty unforgettable. But I still might have forgotten you.’
‘Then I’ll have to remind you properly. Will you excuse me for a moment? You’ll find me in a rather different mood when I return … All you do is – you wear things that are many many sizes too small. Many many sizes too small. Size zero. Don’t watch me walk away. I’ll feel self-conscious if you watch me walk away.’
So he watched her walk away and then sat there with his face in his hands.
7. Size zero—2
Bent over marble in the Ladies, and watched by mirrors, Cora Susan applied light makeup.
Recently, in the industry, there was an actor, Randy Rivers, who kept faking his HIV-clearance – in industry terms his work permit; and he infected five actresses. As this unfolded, various violent people went looking for Randy. They all found him and they all let him be. The explanation she heard was that Randy’s condition and circumstances could in no way be worsened: there was nothing to fuck up.
Cora hadn’t quite put Xan in this category, but she had thought of Randy Rivers, over at Pearl’s. Over at Pearl’s: that was a good name for her. Pearl would have revealed everything – without the good alcohol, without the good cocaine. Similarly, Xan sounded like an ignoble candidate for the rhino horn and the Spanish fly: Xan, the shambling flasher and dirty-raincoat merchant of Pearl’s adumbration. But it wasn’t turning out that way. She knew about such things, and the resistance she felt from him was unexpectedly dogged: erratic and confused, but dogged. Seducing him, therefore, was now a matter of her self-respect and even her self-belief; it was vital to her private culture – to her inner suns and moons. And the other, more terrible punishment, if it had to come, could come later.
She approached from behind and placed her hands on his shoulders, saying, ‘I’m going to have the same again. And I’ll briefly hate you if you do likewise.’
‘Then I’ll have what you’re having … You’ve put on makeup.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘You look a bit younger. No, older. No, more artificial. Like this place. And less familiar. I don’t remember you at all now.’
‘That’s all right. You know, two cocktails is about my limit. It’s funny that men are so starchy about drunk women – except in the bedroom. They don’t want them sloppy. Except in the bedroom. Men do love a legless woman. I suppose it’s the diminished responsibility. But you’ve got to time it right.’
Their drinks came, and she started to touch him. A hand on the arm, a hand on the hand: hand touching hand.
‘You’re a bit starchy, about the industry, aren’t you? When I started out it seemed to me that I was made for the industry. Made.’
‘Because of you and your father.’
‘Well yes, but I meant physically made.’ She took her hand from his and started counting off the fingers. ‘One. Okay: father. Two. I can be candid with you, can’t I? Two. My uh, netherhair is naturally minimalist, as they all are now. As everyone is now. Is that evolution too? Like men stopping having beards? Three. I wasn’t born with a kiss-tattoo on my coccyx, but I do have a birthmark on my hip that’s shaped like a valentine greeting. All I needed, for the complete look, was some great rock bolted into my navel. Or my tongue. Four. The bust. They seem fake. They seem fake because there’s no asymmetry. They don’t move fake but they feel fake. Feel.’
Up till now he hadn’t stared at her breasts. On the contrary: they had been staring at him. But now he stared at them, and they stared back. ‘Feel.’ What could he say – that he’d ‘prefer’ not to? Instead, to postpone it a second or two, he said, ‘I don’t know what fake breasts feel like.’
‘Yes you do. You’ve felt mine.’
‘Have I? But yours aren’t fake.’
‘But they feel fake. Feel.’
He felt. She held his hand in place with her wrist and powerfully inhaled.
‘If you put your cupped palm out of a car window and feel the air going past … Some breasts are thirty miles an hour. Some are fifty. I’d say mine are about seventy. Speed-limit breasts,’ she said, and let his hand drop. ‘Where was I? Yes. Five. I’m little.’
‘What?’
‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I measure five foot and a credit card. I weigh eight stone sopping wet. I magnify the man. I’m a cock-puppet … Now that last point has a bearing on what happened at Pearl’s. I’m going to describe it to you, and then perhaps we’ll know where we are. And I think I will have that third Martini. You may have to help me to my suite.’
On screen, actors blink only when they mean to; and when Xan decided he wanted to be an actor he had spent a lot of time practising not blinking. ‘Stotaring!’ his mother used to say. ‘I’m not staring. I’m practising not blinking!’ Now, in the fat hotel, Xan was trying not to blink. Because whenever he did, he saw the two of them naked on the carwash of her bed … Yes, the world was going, was seeping away. He could feel bits of it closing down; they made a sound like a computer’s final sigh – a faint ricochet, a distant miaow …
‘It was about one o’clock in the morning. There was a hard core still at it in the sitting-room, but it was thinning out, and everyone was pretty far gone – except you, funnily enough. You weren’t drinking, but there was other stuff going around and maybe you’d had a puff or a toot, I don’t know. We agreed to meet in the garden. You know at the far end, through the arched trellis, there’s a hut or Wendy house that’s not actually on the property but you can get to it through the gap in the hedge?’
‘We called it the Monkey House,’ he said thickly. ‘It belonged to the little girls next door. But they grew up.’
‘Well, in we sneaked. It felt childish, and we were laughing quite a bit at first. You know: playing Doctors in the parkie’s shed. Then it happened. Oh, nothing very serious. This came down, and this came up, and you caressed me fairly thoroughly. Listen, at one point … I was getting rather tired, standing on tiptoe, and I said it wasn’t fair, your being so much bigger than me. And you lifted me up with one hand, so I was on your level. You used your other hand to steady me. But you lifted me up with one hand.’
‘How?’
‘How? It was the hand that was between my legs.’
There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They went to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the bed … Xan tensed himself, below. It was still there: like a section of solid cartilage.
‘A reconstruction, a reenactment of that moment,’ she was saying, ‘up in my suite, might bring it all back … Xan, I feel I may have alarmed you slightly, with all this talk of incest and pornography. Unstable things. Alien things. But as you see I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I’m little. I know that after accidents people feel very fragile. But I won’t hurt you. How could this’ – she shrugged – ‘hurt anyone? And you deserve it, Xan. You’ve had a very hard time and you deserve it. You don’t have to touch if you don’t want to. You can just watch me glide around in my underwear for a while. Size zero. And then slip quietly away.’
His memory had got him into this; and now maybe his memory was going to get him out. The first instant, in the lobby, had been for Xan a sexual coup de foudre; yet he still believed that he could muster some kind of counterf
orce to it – could avoid the occasion of sin. Thereafter a reptilian ponderousness had slowly spread itself over his body, coagulating into one purpose, one meaning. He was the slow-eyed crocodile who has watched and waited, who has watched and waited long enough. Simultaneously, for minutes on end, he felt like a heavenly body in space, urged towards another heavenly body of far greater gravity; he felt celestial attraction. Others, other things, the world: all of it was about to disappear … Then a memory came. A memory came, like a flare, bringing with it a series of forced deductions.
He remembered that on the evening of his injury, when he was on his way out of the house, on his way to Hollywood, to hospital, he had said to his wife: I have no secrets from you. And he remembered that he had meant it: he remembered the undesigning light of his own veracity. Every man has secrets from his wife, those letters, that photograph, the guest-appearances and thought-experiments that come as ghosts to the master bedroom. But Karla, with her dress around her waist: that qualified as a secret. In the last few minutes Xan had been hoping that what she said was true: that he had indeed lifted her off her feet. Because it was something well worth doing, and if you’d done it once, what was the point in not doing it again?
‘And, in the morning, I get on a plane and fly five thousand miles.’
He said abruptly, ‘If you’re not a friend, what are you? Do you know the name of Joseph Andrews?’
She seemed to take it like a tiny blow from a tiny enemy. But her voice was firm and cool: ‘Yes. It’s in your book. I assumed it was just a joke about Henry Fielding. “Lucozade”. Easily the best.’
‘Thank you. I think so too. And you’re not my enemy?’
‘Oh I’m your enemy all right. Come on. What do you think? That I’ve got … that I’ve got a motion-sensitive camera up there? And tomorrow morning, a liveried courier delivers the cassette to your wife? It would start in the lift: we’d wait for an empty one. Look at this place. You can feel it on top of you, tons and tons of it saying that the body should have it good. I’m offering you a modern temptation: one with no consequences. Come on up. It’s no more than what you deserve.’
The temptation, he considered, was implausibly extreme, and it would be ridiculous not to succumb to it. She was right. The fat hotel wanted it to happen. Before him, on the table, the two cocktail glasses were a pair of female thighs, and the two shots of unfinished booze, the slowly seething gin, were their hosiery … Against this luxury he could array only the luxury of uxoriousness – a luxury of the mind, merely. And Russia was far, very far, perhaps unrecapturably distant; and Karla was near.
Xan shook his head and at once she called for the bill.
‘In the dictionary,’ she said evenly, removing her key from her bag, ‘the third meaning of tempt is to risk provoking a deity or abstract force. That’s what you’ve just done. As a sexual temptation this was nothing. And now you’re going to have to watch me walk away.’
‘Wait. How do I -’
‘Do what I did and call your agent. Now you’re going to have to watch me walk away. And it’s already too late to change your mind: this time. I’m going to leave you with a visual paradox. My mother was very feminine, but so was my father. And I’m a doublegirl. How does it go? Haunch touching haunch, breast touching breast, each touching each. Look at me walk away in my doubleskin. And you’re going to think: that’s my cock, walking away.’
She was on her feet in front of him: the sheer white dress with its pools and hollows. Now she swivelled, with the straw strap on her shoulder. She laughed harmonically and said, ‘It’s so sweet. Fathers have the ridiculous idea that …’
Over her shoulder she looked at him. He expected to find dislike in it, but her face seemed about to crumble and collapse, as Billie’s might.
‘You know, if you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter – she’d go along with it. What else can she do? She can’t do otherwise. When it comes to Daddy, little girls are certainties. Fathers have the idea that if they made a move their daughters would rear back and slap them across the face. And say: I’m not that kind of little girl. What kind of little girl do you take me for?’
And then she walked away.
That’s what a good caveman is meant to do, isn’t it? When he hears the snap of a twig, the breath of an animal or enemy, then he disappears – even if oestrus is spreadeagled before him. The desire to reproduce meets its counterforce, which is the desire to go on being alive.
Something very ancient but much less primitive also constrained him. She was familiar, intimately familiar; in both senses she was already-seen. He didn’t know it, of course, but the face behind her face was that of his mother. And his sister, and himself. He had seen her in the past all right: when he was twenty and she was ten, when he was sixteen and she was six, when he was twelve and she was two, when he was ten and she was a baby.
Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy sister’s daughter; she is thy niece; it is wickedness.
8. Not knowing again
‘Will you get me a drink?’
‘Yeah, sure. What would you like?’
‘Chocolate Mix.’
‘Coming up.’
‘I read this book but I fell asleep before I could finish the end. Now I started the beginning and I don’t know it again.’
She often said that: ‘don’t know again’ instead of ‘don’t remember’. He understood what she meant.
‘Well let’s sit down and read it properly.’
He was alone with Billie in the kitchen. Sophie was being aired by Imaculada on Primrose Hill. And Russia was a presence, somewhere above. Billie, now, was treating him not like a father, quite, but like a reasonably reliable uncle … Xan was doing what his father had done, many times: he was being genially, even cloyingly considerate to a child while also entertaining murderous thoughts about a fellow male.
‘Will you die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so, darling.’
‘Will Mummy die before me?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Will Sophie die before me?’
‘I hope not.’
‘Will I die before her?’
‘I don’t know, darling. Now let’s read the book.’
Xan had spent the morning on the trail of his enemy. The search – equally unreal and prosaic – began in the True Crime section of the High Street bookshop. A surprising number of the gangland exposés and ghosted memoirs (of various blaggers and bruisers) ended with an index; and a suprising number of these indexes contained references to Andrews, Joseph: the Airport Job, the two long sentences, the suspected murder, and, some time later, a massive tax fraud. It disconcerted Xan, and also disappointed him, to learn that Andrews went back at least half a generation beyond his father: he would now be over eighty. When he returned to the flat Xan typed the forbidden name into a searchengine. After a while he had before him a loose and jangling biography, and even a press photograph. It showed a headmasterly figure, with his wet grey hair combed back and a glass of champagne defiantly raised, poolside, on a plastic chair; a teenage creole sat perched on his lap, wearing a bikini bottom and a wet T-shirt. This was Brazil, twenty years ago; and nothing else followed.
‘Can we do the horses?’
‘Come on then. Up you get. This is the way the children ride … They walk … they walk … they walk. This is the way the ladies ride. To trot, to trot, to trot, to trot. This is the way the—’
‘I need to do a pooh-pooch.’
‘Do you? Come on then.’
‘Quick. I’m desperate.’
Unthinkingly at first, he followed the old protocol. He helped her with the metal buttons of her jeans, and placed her on the toilet seat; then he withdrew, to await her call when she was ready to be wiped. In earlier days Xan had not exactly relished this routine: after four and a half decades, wiping his own backside had lost much of its magic, and wiping Billie’s just seemed like more of the same. But now he admitted to himself that he would r
ather do it than not. The admission entrained another thought: he knew, he understood, why some animals licked their young clean.
‘Daddy?’ he heard her say. ‘When people move, they don’t move they houses. They move everything else. They move they carpets … they beds … they tables … they toys … they blankets …’
He stood in the passage, by the stairs, in front of the forwardleaning gilt mirror. To this mirror he idly directed the remains of his tortured vanity: the thickening excrescences beneath the eyes; the looming lagoons of his hairline (the shampoo was getting colder every year, every month). Yes, he was thinking, it was a pity, it was a tragedy, that Joseph Andrews was eighty-five years old. There was so little of his life left to ruin; on the other hand, how much more easily, and how much more loudly, might he snap.
‘… they pencils … they fridge … they books … they television … Ready, Daddy.’
He entered. The pleasure the smell gave him – the smell of shit lite … Not dizziness but a sense of general physical insecurity retarded him as he leant over her, and wiped, and activated the flush.
‘My ploompah’s sore.’
‘I’m not surprised. The treatment you give it. Stand on here.’ He placed her on the basin shelf. In recent months Billie had gained weight uniformly, like a coating. He could now see the preliminary form of her breasts through her shirt; then the stomach still infantilely outthrust; and then the vulva, like a longhand w, but all abraded and enflamed – written in pink and red. Xan registered an impulse to weep, but it wasn’t straightforward, this impulse; some of it had to do with his futile twistings and writhings in the night; and some of it felt coarsely and unworthily tender, like crinkling your nose over a Christmas card.
‘You want some cream on that,’ he said.
He went into the passage and called Russia’s name. He went halfway up the flight of stairs and called a second time. ‘Russia! We need you!’ Then he made out the heavy clatter of the shower a floor and a half above; she would be in there under the thick jet, naked behind the panel of glass.