Yellow Dog

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.

  He washed and dried his hands … Her subtle eyes pleadingly appraised him, then widened; then freshened and refreshened in what he took to be an accession of trust. And so his daubed fingertip sought the intima.

  Billie gave a gasp of relief: it was a thing of the past. But she was staring beyond him now, and when he looked round he saw that Russia, her hair swept up in a turban and her dressing-gowned figure inanimately still, was watching from the stairs.

  9. To Otherville

  Rory McShane had quite enjoyed his dealings with Xan Meo, in the past. He had had him over to the house a few times, first with Pearl, then with Russia. But now that Xan’s career was evidently shot, Rory had transferred him to a different part of his mind: he belonged with all those who had to be humoured. Presumably there would be no good news to give him, ever again.

  ‘How’s Russia.’

  Xan stopped scowling and said, as if to himself, ‘I go round there and she calls the uh, the authorities. Can you credit it. You go round to your own house, and your own wife calls the fucking filth. Can you credit it.’ And he started scowling again.

  Rory wondered whether Xan was drunk: there was a kind of cruising hostility in him, and the promise of untoward personality change. But he decided that these emanations, plus the unvarying gaze and the embittered slur, were probably what you ended up with when you were smashed on the head. Still, Rory was being uncharacteristically careful not to give offence.

  ‘There are funds coming in,’ said Rory. ‘I’m checking, and there’s a few bob coming in.’

  ‘I’ve got a few bob. That’s not the point. I got a few bob, mate.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. If you don’t mind my asking – and do tell me to fuck off if you like – where did it come from, your few bob?’

  Xan stopped scowling and said, ‘Me mum. My mother. She died in a single room in a terraced house in Effley Road, E4. She was the sort of old woman who used the same teabag five times. But we knew she had a fair bit in the bank. When she died’ – and here he frowned, recalling Pearl’s third audit—‘it turned out she didn’t just own the house. She owned the street. Nineteen houses, full of nineteen hundred Patels, which is what the police call them. Bangladeshis. Slum landlady. But when we’d made it right, and we was … we were slinging money about in uh, reparations and that, there was still a tidy whack left over. She was a monster, my mum, but I adored her.’ He closed his eyes as he said it: ‘Fantastic businesswoman. It’s not the money, mate. It’s the employment. I can’t write and I can’t … perform. Act. I’m gone. But I’ll hump scenery, I don’t care. Give me employment.’

  And he started scowling again.

  ‘You look uh, buffed up.’

  ‘I do the gym. Up down, up down. In out, in out. Go on then: Karla White.’

  ‘Oh yes. Karla White. I hesitated to impugn you with it. But yes. Karla White.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You’ve had a so-called offer from Fucktown … From Lovetown. Sextown.’

  ‘… Didn’t they have a sniper there?’

  ‘They still do. The Sextown Sniper. And she’s still at large.’

  ‘She?’ Then Xan remembered that this was one of Rory’s party-turns. To Rory (fiftyish, long-haired, much-divorced) all malefactors were playfully assumed to be female. Somebody’d say: We had a burglar last night. And he’d say: How did she get in? Somebody’d say: I was mugged on my way here. And he’d say: Was she armed?

  ‘And they’ll never catch her either. They can’t. You know about Lovetown? The porno people … When the Washington believers started cracking down on them, the porno people found a zoning loophole and moved the whole shebang to the San Sebastiano Valley, Little Hollywood, Southern California. It’s a state within a state. So the uh, SSPD, which consists of about one guy, can’t get federal help. And who cares if it’s just porno people who’re getting shot at? Who cares if – I don’t know – Casey Cunt gets winged in the arm? It’s God’s way.’

  ‘All porno.

  ‘All porno. Pornotown. Othertown. Now your so-called offer … They’ve been madly Anglophile for some time – long before the Princess business. A lot of the girls are English. English Rose, Brit Isles. Greta Britain, Unity Kingdom. And the men give themselves English stage-names. And knighthoods. Sir Phallic Guinness. Sir Bony Hopkins. Sir Dork Bogarde. What they like to do now is hire mainstream British actors to play so-called character parts. Some of my younger clients have done it.’

  And here he named a few actors whom Xan was more or less aware of.

  ‘It has a kind of grunge cachet. Like with minor rockstars. It’s considered a blinding coup for a rockstar to have a porno girlfriend.’

  ‘What would be the work?’

  ‘Well you won’t be doing any fucking, and you certainly won’t be doing any acting. You’ll have to do a bit of watching, I suppose. You know: you learn your so-called lines in the cab to some Moorish villa consisting entirely of dens. They’ll have worked it into the so-called storyline that you happen to be present while uh, Brit and Bony have sex.’ He leant into his computer screen. ‘Mm. Usually it’s like a parody of a Hollywood offer: Prestige Economy, BudgetBower, three-figure fee. But this looks pretty reasonable. More than reasonable for one day’s work. Well it is Karla White. She owns Princess Lolita … It’s called Crown Sugar and you’re Rameses the Great. Know what I think you should do?’ said Rory dutifully. ‘Sit in on some workshops. Do some classes. Go easy. Get back to where you were before.’

  Like the dark-clad others, those drawn into the city and then released from it at seven p.m., he returned to his flat with a plastic shopping-bag: provisions for one. He warmed and ate some savoury mess or other; and he drank the red wine – but not all of it. For nearly a week his afternoons, his evenings, had been journeys to non-consciousness; he woke up in a flat where (it seemed) thirteen or fourteen people had caroused the night before. Then, one morning, while he roiled in his own gases and acids on the benchpress, he thought: being drunk was a way of saying that, in your opinion, the universe was bullshit. No, more: it was a way of saying that you thought the universe was crap. And he didn’t think he did think that. So tonight he was sober as he sat there staring at the wall. He was sober when he went into the bedroom and looked out of the window at the house across the street: that was the status quo ante; that was where he was before.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Xan? Mal Bale. How are you, boy?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Mustn’t weaken.’

  ‘Uh, listen. About doing Snort. We can’t now. He’s just gone away for twelve years.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Still, that’ll learn him. What was it?’

  ‘Malicious wounding. Though by the sound of it Snort got as good as he give. We can have him done inside of course, but where’s the satisfaction?’

  ‘Yeah. No. So I’m still owed.’

  ‘You’re still owed.’

  ‘I’ve been going over something you said about – about our friend. You said I placed him. You said I “put him there”. Put him where? Put him on the page? Or put him in Los Angeles.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Is he in Los Angeles?’

  ‘Uh – no comment. If you get my meaning. Uh, you fancy it, do you mate?’

  ‘Well it’s not up to me, is it? If I don’t do something, I’ll feel like shit for the rest of my life. Who’s Karla White?’

  ‘Karla White? … Nah, mate. So how’s your probation? You survived that, did you: the bird in the hotel?’

  ‘Well I did and I didn’t.’

  He finished the bottle of wine, that night. He needed a bottle of wine to get him through it: that is to say, he needed a bottle of wine to get him through an evening with only a bottle of wine to get him through it.

  In the silent argument he was always having in his head with Russia, and in his far noisier exchanges with her surrogate, Tilda Quant, Xan maintained that he had acte
d as any father would – but he knew that his heart had not been quite right, there in the bathroom, with Billie. ‘If you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter – she’d go along with it. What else can she do?’ This had proved to be a terrible transmission: deenlightenment. He wished he could forget this; he wished, in Billie’s phrase, that he didn’t know again. Her power, her rights (which depended on what? Civilisation?) had seemed to disappear; and his power, his rights – they had corrosively burgeoned. To be alone with somebody who had no choice: it was the extent of her helplessness that had made him want to weep. Because all this was tied up with his fear of her being hurt, cut, pierced, split, stuck. And over and above it, and under and beneath it, was his sense of his own entitlements and deserts, his privileges, warrants, beliefs, all of them apparently non-negotiable: his sense of what he was due.

  There was also inside him somewhere a baby of pristine misery; every day he felt for it and held it and fed it, and every night he put it to bed. But things were clearer now, as he squirmed and twisted. All the signs pointed the same way.

  He had been to hospital. He was going to go to Hollywood.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1. February 14 (1.15 p.m.): 101 Heavy

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Nick Chopko: ‘what we just experienced is known as CAT, or Clear Air Turbulence. It was quite a drop but uh, I’m pleased to report that we’re in okay shape, thanks to the … the skill and foresight of our Captain, whose last flight this is, now that all four girls are through college, one of whom I’m proud to call my fiancée: Amy Macmanaman. Give it up for the Captain … We encountered a very powerful following wind resulting in pressure-differential loss on the wings, otherwise known as a stall. It seems that everyone was belted down except for Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez in Business, who remained attached to her secured cart but suffered a jarred shoulder. We suspect she’ll pull through. Fortunately all the overhead lockers held but three. These did not contain the dumbbells and bowling-balls some of you like to stow up there. Just some pillows and blankets and a bunch of cartons of cigarettes. CAT is a potential emergency and a very rare event. It was my first time. It was almost certainly your first time. It wasn’t the Captain’s first time. We expect no further problems, but as a precaution we do ask that you keep your seatbelts securely fastened. Thank you.’

  ‘Do you know’, asked the man in 2A, ‘the proportion of passengers, on average, that survive a plane crash?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Reynolds. ‘Three per cent?’

  ‘Actually it’s more like forty. There can be one survivor, and there can be one fatality. And everything in between.’

  ‘Is that a fact.’

  ‘… I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I don’t even smoke. This seat. This cabin. Right in the crumple zone. I always sit right at the back. In among the toilets. Then the rest of the plane’s your buffer. I was booked on IA but they did my miles in Frankfurt and offered me the upgrade. It’s crazy. I don’t even smoke. The secondary inhalation’s killing me.’

  ‘Remember that nice breakfast you had. And think about your slippers. Concentrate on them.’

  Not inordinately, not egregiously loud so much as very clear, very pure: the explosive failure, the rending crack, of the starboard engine; the grisly physics of its catapulting fan blades and rotor spokes; the clacking strafe of metal-piercing shrapnel.

  Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Shit Christ Jesus.

  First Officer Nick Chopko: Which is the which is the?

  Ward: What the hell these guys have done.

  Chopko: Pull back the power back.

  Captain John Macmanaman: Come on now. Let’s get ahold of the airplane. Come on now. Let’s fly the airplane.

  CigAir 101 started to pitch; and then, to the inestimable advantage of Royce Traynor, it started to yaw.

  2. The face has holes in it

  The slightly longer and (by all accounts) very much dirtier version of Princess Lolita arrived at Ewelme by courier. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was committing a crime by taking delivery of it; but Oughtred had told him that the UK was already awash with the American original together with every variety of piratical counterfeit (and a marginally abbreviated edition, with all the non-sexual material excised, could be found by means of a dark and costly visit to the Net). In any case Brendan’s sense of transgression could hardly have been livelier as he signed for the package and hurried to his room to hide it. That night they retired at ten. And Brendan’s anticipation of the small-hour screening was quick to satisfy the greed of his insomnia. He rose at a quarter to three. Captain Mate had been spoken to; and, remarkably, all three doors to the library were equipped with functioning locks and keys … At Ewelme, the rudimentary heating-system wound down long before midnight. In pyjamas, then, in dressing-gown and greatcoat, and socks and hiking-boots, Brendan activated the paraffin stove, slipped the cartridge into the machine and sat there with his breath smoking. He turned the light off. He turned the light on. He turned the light off. He reached for the remote control.

  No man on earth, Brendan considered, would watch Princess Lolita with the curiosity that he himself would bring to it. For example, who else had a sane claim to being in love with Princess Victoria, the real princess, as he did? More generally the experience would give him essential information. As he put it to himself, a little frantically: was he a ‘joseph’, one of nature’s neuters, bowing his head as God put the horns on him? Alas, poor Joseph. Hard to keep your chin up, and to go on looking so wise and true. And, yes: nice try with the beard … Brendan consulted the worn memory of his embrace with the Princess, how all the blood within him …

  Princess Lolita began with a still of Tori Fate’s birth certificate, followed by a datelined clapperboard introducing footage from the first day of principal photography. Brendan made the calculation: the actress had been barely a week past her seventeenth birthday when filming began. An establishing-shot of a castle tower; then Tori Fate under a sheet in a four-poster. Yes, like, like, very like. Yet without complexity, as if the actress herself had been morphed. And even the surface resemblance proved specious, or cosmetic, the moment she opened her mouth, turning to her attendant and asking her (not in an accent from Brooklyn or Mississippi, but in English, dubbed, clipped, elocuted English —the voice, Brendan felt sure, of a woman of the King’s vintage) about the arts of love … Lolita’s lady-in-waiting, a glistening Amazon with occult tattoos on her muscular breasts, then undertook a demonstration. The enjoyment of such a spectacle, Brendan soon decided, was a test of male heterosexuality that he just didn’t pass. Outer tongue against inner tongue, upper against under – but now came a jolt. When the strap-on phallus was conspiratorially produced, and handed to Tori Fate, who buckled it about herself and stood there with a hand on its base, Brendan felt an abject stirring, a sick twitch, between his legs.

  He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out – my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat – and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller …

  By this stage Brendan expected to be twitching and twisting for the full ninety minutes. Yet only one more revelation awaited him, and this was insidious or cumulative, like the reluctant awareness of footsteps behind you, at night, on a lonesome road. Quite soon, exposure to Lolita’s sentimental education was reminding him of his only bullfight, in Barcelona: after the third kill, fascination and disquiet remained, but these feelings were quietly joined by boredom. As the heroine sedulously dallied – now with a jodhpured Spanish grandee, now with a rude young groom, now with a spangled diplomat, now with
a rugged derelict plucked off the street – it seemed to Brendan that the performers, with more haste than lust, were working their way through a checklist or duty-roster: some of this, then some of that, and then this and then that, including some of this, not forgetting that, and then maybe this, and then always that. Always that – at the end. Grinning, and grinning gratefully, on her knees, Princess Lolita, awaiting anointment.

  When it was over he went through it again, availing himself of the remote control. Watching pornography, watching the sex of others (this was already clear to him), you were constantly saying, No don’t do that – do this, stop, don’t stop, proceed, desist. The viewer was helpless before the spatial dimensions, but the remote control gave him power over time. Deploying this power, Brendan concentrated on freeze-framed close-ups of the actress’s face. From certain angles, yes, remarkably like, remarkably like. But older. And not just a year older … If Princess Lolita had shape or form, then power was its pattern. The exertion of that power remained symbolic, and counterintuitive: it was the handsome derelict who pinioned the Princess with a pair of paper handcuffs; it was the sleek grandee who followed her about on all fours, led by a gossamer leash. Yet always this moment at the end, when power was no longer held in balance. The face, smiling, with male seed dripping from it, hanging from it. Brendan didn’t like this spectacle. But his blood did.

  It was with a sense of himself revised dramatically downward that he stood, and pressed the eject. For a moment he entertained the informed certainty that the machine would now seize (trapping its contents for later delectation – Henry’s, Victoria’s), and he would have to wrench it apart with his teeth and fingernails. But here it came, disgustedly expectorated on to the tiled floor … On the way to his room he came round a corner and almost fell over her: the Princess. He flung out both hands in her direction, to catch or steady her, and so released what was lodged beneath his armpit: and in clear contravention of all life’s laws (which demand that every dropped object lands the wrong way up), Princess Lolita came to rest face-down, and in near silence, on the tussocky pelt of the carpet. Even so he had time to think that his greatcoat and dressing-gown would now fly open, to reveal not the full complement of his pyamas but a pair diligently savaged by scissors, with the trousers, secured by elastic bands, ending just above the knee.