‘… So I’m lying there, taking me medicine, as you got to do, and who should enter upon the scene, sticking his fucking oar in, but you, you cunt. Now I know Mick give you punishment. But that was my punishment, not yourn. And I’m not having that. Me own son, and all. Me own boy. Did that to his own father … You’re very quiet over there.’
‘Yeah that’s right.’
‘Ooh. May I enquire why?’
It had not been a failure of courage. It had been a failure of inclination – or of appetite. Xan said,
‘Why? Because I’m trying not to corpse, mate. You’re a fucking old joke, you are, boy. Look at you, you fucking old joke.’
‘… Last time your mum come to see him in the nick she was eight months gone. She’s bound herself up. And broke four ribs. “I’ve had him,” she said. He’s said, “Then where is he?” “They’re doing his jaundice at Princess Beatrice.” Ten weeks later she’ve took you to the Green, and Mick said you was a bit little but of course she’s blamed it on the doctors … Dead dirty, your mum. Like your sister. Loved me muck on her face. Still in your chair are you?’
Joseph Andrews got to his feet – and the terrible moonbright dots of the trainers began to dance their dance, barely skimming off the stone floor. ‘I still love a row,’ he said. ‘Ah I still love a good mill. Don’t worry, mate. The hospital’s nice and near.’
‘I don’t see why you uh—’
‘Yeah well I’m turning nasty in me old age … Look at you. All I’ve took from you.’
‘How old are you, Jo? Yeah, and look at the state of him. Gaw, that’s a liberty, eh? That’s a right kick in the arse, what anno domini’s gone and done to you. And there’s no vengeance for it. Why aren’t you not having that? But no. He just bends over and waits for more of the same.’
Joseph Andrews took up position by the door. He seemed to be weighing something in his hands as he intoned, ‘A man fights … with his arsehole. Power comes … in the form of anger, up through the arsehole,’ he said heavily, breathing out. ‘The righteous anger of the just. Up … it comes … up though the arsehole … and into the lining of a man. Come on. Where is it. Let’s see it. Let’s have it.’
Xan observed that Andrews was the sort of man who, in preparation, exhibits not the upper teeth but the lower. He got to his feet and walked towards him, saying,
‘I’m not fighting that. I’m not touching that. You got … you got fucking drool all over your chin. Out of the road, you old joke. You old poof.’
And there seemed to be no question of the upshot till he felt a piercing, a timestopping stab to his forehead. But even if the blow had taken his head clean off there could be no question about the dynamics of the immediate future: the rules governing the motion of bodies under the action of forces. He clattered on and over, and Joseph Andrews buckled beneath him. There came a crack as his coccyx hit the stone, and then a faint whinnying sound, not human, not even organic, like a squawk of stressed metal. The logs and their maggots expectorated and regurgitated, hoiked and phthooked.
‘Me ip,’ he said consideringly. ‘Me replacement’s slid out. And me back and all. Yeah. Here it is.’ And he let out a soft low roar, like a man come in from the cold and at last feeling the warmth of the fire … ‘No, Simon. Rodney, let the man pass. Let him pass. It’s not over, boy. It’s not over.’
Within half an hour Xan was inspecting himself in his brutalist bathroom mirror: the one with the light inside it. There were two curved lesions, like bloodcoloured brackets, half an inch north-west of his eyes.
5. The Sextown Sniper
‘Cora, is this wise? Aren’t we throwing down a challenge to the Sextown Sniper?’
‘The Sextown Sniper never works at night. And never takes headshots. I don’t understand why some people go around in crash-helmets like they do … No one close to me has ever been hit – it’s more like at one remove. Hick Johnsonson, the guy who lost all those toes? He shares a shitbox with Dork Bogarde. I’ll put the roof up now for the freeway. Look at this. We should have taken the surface roads.’
Up ahead, the slowmoving river of crimson. And, to their left, the slowmoving river of yellow, flowing into Lovetown.
‘How gay is Dork? How gay is Jo, in your view? How gay is porno, in your view?’
‘Uh, porno‘s quite gay. And we mean unacknowledged-gay, don’t we. Not straight gay. Cryptogay. For instance, you’d have to be a bit gay to do a double anal, don’t you think? Two men with a girl? Seriously. And triple anal. And a lot of them do gay porno anyway. They get more money because in gay the boys are the girls. No. In gay everyone’s a girl. They call it “gay for pay”. And once something rhymes in America, or alliterates, then it’s a social norm. Jo …’
‘He wants to have them so he does them. And has their wives.’
‘Mm. Hence the love of pain: he’s correcting himself for it. He had plenty of pain this morning. His op. They plugged his hip back in. He’s in raging agony now and he won’t touch his morphine. Hey. Your forehead.’
‘Tried to blind me. His own son.’
‘So you’re not upset?’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes. In the newspaper I described Jo as “another mad prick”. Another – like Mick Meo. I don’t see what difference it makes.’
‘It makes a difference to me. It more or less cancels my reason for going after you in the first place.’
‘That’s true. It also dilutes the incest – if we had. We still share Hebe Meo. Christ: my mum. Oh well. You’ve got to let it be. You can’t go to your death-bed still … still obsessed by your kiddie cot. Easy for me to say. You’re all right I hope?’
‘Yeah. You know, you’ve undermined my magical thinking. The universal seductress – she won’t fly any more. Maybe it’ll be a relief. I’m quitting the vengeance business. And I’m considering quitting the industry. Now that I’m so rich. You know what’s really wrong with porno? Getting older, two of you, sexually, that’s the hardest thing, right? And the best thing, maybe. And porno’s the sworn enemy of that.’
‘… Cora, is Jo done with me?’
‘Well he’s the type, isn’t he. They come back at you. Unless they’re dead they come back at you.’
‘Last night … I called him a poof.’
‘What? Then he’ll come back at you. Listen, I’ll speak to him. He owes me.’
‘Don’t get out. You know, I loved your mother. She was wild, but she was a great sis to me. It killed me for a year when she died. And I love you. But in the right way.’
‘Thanks. And me too. Here’s a secret about the Sextown Sniper. It hasn’t been made public because it’s too sensitive politically. All the chicks would go on strike. The Sextown Sniper’s a woman.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Oh, it’s just the things she leaves in her hides. Eyeline pencils. Knitting-patterns. Recipes. And why else would she never kill anyone?’
So he left Lovetown, home of the gentle, the tender, the loving Sextown Sniper. The commuter flight took him up over Fucktown, which stayed there like a circuit diagram, and towards Los Angeles, arrayed like the stagecape of some old crooner the size of a comet.
6. Men in power
He wrote it over Greenland:
Dear Russia,
I hesitate to set this down, because I am greatly afraid of recurrence – I am very greatly afraid of the misery of recurrence. But I feel like a man who wearily consults an old wound or grievance, and finds it isn’t there.
Over the last few days I think I’ve worked out what my accident did to me. I used to suspect that it had shorn me of certain values – the values of civilisation, more or less. Well it did do that. But it did something else too: it fucked up my talent for love. It fucked it up. Love was still there, but it was love of the wrong kind. There was a terrible agitation in it. An impotent agitation. And now that agitation seems to have gone, retreated, lifted.
General thoughts are not my strength, but here’s a general thought. Men we
re in power for five million years. Now (where we live) they share it with women. That past has a weight, though we behave as if it doesn’t. We behave as if the transition has been seamlessly achieved. Of course there’s no going back. I went back. As if through a trapdoor I dropped into the past, and we shared that disaster. Still, we should acknowledge the weight of it, the past. Unconsciously, and not for long at a time, men miss women being tractable, and women miss men being decisive; but we can’t say that. All I’m suggesting, perhaps, is that there’s a deficiency of candour (and that’s the thing that’s wrong with what I write – or with what I wrote). It would be surprising if women weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren’t a little crazed by their losses. We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I won’t mind. No, strike that out. You will win, and I will mind, but I’ll probably pretend not to. What I’m saying is that it will take a century to work off those five billennia and consolidate the change. We pretend it is, but the change isn’t yet intact and entire.
My memory is filling out – I can remember Billie saying ‘here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school’ (she rose on her toes as she said it). And that’s the kind of daddy I am going to go back to being, if you give me the chance. I wasn’t quite right, in the head or the heart. Not right, not right. Memory. The only major gap now seems to be Sophie’s birth; it’s still gone, but I’m hoping it will reappear one day. I don’t know why this absence oppresses me so much. Of course I can remember very clearly declining to watch Billie’s caesarian. But I’ve forgotten Sophie’s birth – and I don’t want to be a man who has never watched a woman being born. Naturally I wish I could forget the creature I became, but I can’t and I won’t.
I may have done too much damage. I may have frightened and disgusted you too deeply and lastingly. And there’s one other thing you’re going to have to forgive me for – a strange kind of family entanglement. You’d think it premature (and alarming) if I were to write here about love. So I’ll just say that my profound hope has to do with your generosity. You are too generous not to try to forgive me.
Much has happened. I will tell you everything. I can’t understand why I want to tell you this now, but I do. In the past, when I thought about my father, I used to fantasise that he was allowed occasional glimpses of my life. Now of course he died when I was still married to Pearl. But I used to think: he would work it out, he would put two and two together, and see that I had married you now, and that we had these two girls, Billie and Sophie. I don’t believe he can do that. But it would be good and right if he was allowed to, every now and then – the privilege expiring after a couple of generations, the story discreetly fading from view when the children are about sixty-five. And when we’re dead, I should be allowed to watch the boys, and you and I should be allowed to watch the girls.
Epithalamium.
CHAPTER TEN
1. February 14 (2.19 p.m.): 101 Heavy
With furious precision the maddened corpse of Royce Traynor delivered its final, smashing blow, and he was gone, away, spinning end over end through the plane-shaking clouds …
The pressurised air in 101 Heavy now fled it too: a squall of dust and grit. The mid-section of the cabin floor instantly collapsed, severing all remaining hydraulic lines.
Reynolds felt the bang, the howl like a ricochet, the stinging wind, the harsh vibration. In ragged unison the oxygen-masks dropped and hovered. After a few seconds all the cigarette smoke was replaced by a thin white mist.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Feel it, Nick.
First Officer Nick Chopko: No …
Macmanaman: No quantity. None.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: … You know the ‘feel’ they put into it’s bullshit. It’s just the computer. The yoke’s bullshit.
Macmanaman: Engineer, we’re flying by direct law.
Chopko: And if we reengage?
Macmanaman: We’d get fictitious feel, if anything. Gentlemen, we have no hydraulic control over this aircraft. She’s banking. She’s banking. The throttle, Nick. If you … She’s coming back. She’s coming back … We’re just blundering around up here. We have no flaps and no spoilers. If we can get her down we ‘re going to land at 300 knots with no reverse thrust and no brakes. We don’t need an airport. We need an interstate. Three miles of good road. And one on our present setting. Nick. Brief SAM [System Aircraft Maintenance]. Hal? I’m going to be asking you to line up every kind of rescue and emergency we can get. She’s banking. Come on back …
System Aircraft Maintenance: Copy your situation, one oh one heavy.
Macmanaman: We’re just making grand clockwise circles up here …
SAM: I don’t want to add to your cares, sir. But we’d better start thinking about the NEO window.
Macmanaman: Hey. Come on back. Come on back. Come on back to me.
2. Clint prepares
‘So some so-called 14-year-old’, he typed, ‘has been crying “rape” after a bit of fun in a ditch with an older lad.’
Have you seen this bird (see photo)?
She looks 16 if she’s a day.
And how was he supposed to tell?
The bloke’d had a few, as he freely admits.
He’s getting on a bit and his eyes aren’t as sharp as they were.
And they say in that part of the woods it was so dark you couldn’t even—
Clint paused. He thought: got to be careful with the medication. Overdo it with the Narcopam and what happens? You’re checking into the hotel with the bird slung over your shoulder.
And who does the judge think he’s kidding?
He’s got the gall to tell us there was ‘no provocation’.
When the bird was wearing a school uniform.
What are we, c**ts?
He was sixty-six hours away from the date with Kate: Valentine’s Day (nice touch). He could see himself parking the Av enger and crossing the road. In a kind of saunter. Hands in hip pockets. Just … looning over the road to her door. Well he was like the boyscouts, wasn’t he: always prepared. The Potentium, the His Voluminousness (supplemented by a booster called Volume Control), the Valium, the Hellcat (Legally Not To Be Used Without Partner’s Permission), the Narcopam (ditto), the Diploma from the Academy. The guy was oozing confidence.
3. Waking in the cold
Joseph Andrews sat before the tape recorder. He looked as if he had just climbed out of the swimming-pool; but his clothes were dry.
‘Come on, Boss. Have half a Nurofen.’
In a strained and trembling voice he said, ‘Fuck off out of it.’
‘You had the local.’
‘Against me will. Ready? And Manfred. You transcribe this now, all right?
‘[Click.] Is it a crime to want to die in me own country? [Click.] Apart from a personal family matter and four or five blokes who know fucking well who they are [click] I pose no threat to society whatsoever. And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, mate.
‘Uh. Take out the “mate” and put in uh …’
He intended to add an evocation of his love of England. But the essence of what he really missed about it was waking in the cold, and feeling the rust in his hipbones, all wired up and saddled to a faint need to shit.
‘Where’s Simon? I need me Simon.’
4. Leather on willow
Brendan was reading it out loud and had come to the last page.
‘“And the fact is, I’ve got you over a barrel, Your Majesty. I’m a confirmed royalist, and of course we all worshipped your mother and father. And it would break my heart if I was obliged to make the enclosed material public. I’m just an old man who wants to lay down his bones in the land of his fathers. I want to hear the chimes of Big Ben, I want to hear the sound of leather on willow at the village green, I want to walk down Worship Street and in through the doors of the World Upside Down. I’m coming into Heathrow on the afternoon of February 13, under my own name, and will take to my farmhouse in rural Essex. And that’s th
e last you’ll hear of me. But if I’m nicked on my way in, then you know the consequences. Respectfully, Joseph Andrews, Esquire. PS. If you don’t mind me saying, you had some front, didn’t you, claiming it was all a fake? I had half a mind to go public then and there, to get some respect. But wiser voices prevailed. Now you can stick to your guns and hopefully it’ll all pass over quickly for the Princess. What with her mum and all. PPS. I see your cousin offed poor old Jimmy O’Nione down Cold Blow way. I knew Jimmy at Knavesmire, where we did an Inspector together. Jimmy O’Nione was one of the best.”’
Brendan dropped his hands to his lap.
Henry uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
He said, ‘And what is that, Bugger, may I ask?’
‘A DVD, sir … A digital videodisc’
‘Well I suppose we’d better …’
The two men were in Brendan’s rooms in St James’s – not otherwise would such a viewing be possible. Not in any of the wintry palaces, the lashed castles … Brendan said,
‘I’m wondering whether you have to expose yourself to this, sir. I could simply tell you what you needed to know.’
‘Stop babying me, Bugger. Call Love and then lock the door.’
5. February 14 (3.44 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back to me. Come on back to me. No no no no. Wait. Now … Got to stay ahead of her, got to stay ahead of her. Got to lead her. Can’t get behind her.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Captain, say souls on board and fuel remaining.