* * *
When Brendan returned, at seven, he heard voices in the dining-room. He knocked and entered. And it seemed to him that they were unusually slow to acknowledge his presence: well, a game – or another game – of Scrabble was about to begin. An empty bottle of champagne stood between them on the table, and there was a cocktail-shaker suspiciously close to the King’s brimming glass.
‘Aha, the X,’ she was saying. ‘Which I fully intend to keep.’
‘And I’ve got a Y. Rats. I don’t even go first. You’ll adore this, Bugger. I mean Brendan.’
‘Oh call him Bugger for God’s sake.’
‘You’ll adore this, Bugger.’
‘Sir?’
‘I can see you going all rosy. Procure for me the Instrument of Abdication, if you will! No. Make that two such instruments. One for her and one for me. Yes, Bugger, we’re packing it in. A bit feeble, you could say, but there it is. I sent Boy to the Press Centre and Chippy to Number Ten. It’s accomplished fact. What this princess wants is to stop being a princess.’
‘You needn’t absolutely do it, Daddy, if it’s too horrible for you.’
‘No no. All or nothing. All for love and the world well lost. Look. Look! He’s all rosy … But no, when you stop to think for a minute, it’s about time we all grew up, wouldn’t you say? The people will have to grow up. I’ll have to grow up. And if I can grow up, they can grow up. And then she can grow up. Uh! And the boredom. Uh! Nightmare … And you know what’s absolutely impossible about the monarchy, Bugger? It’s such a … Darling, go and find Love and ask him for another one of these. The impossible thing is that it’s such a …’ He held up a hand until his daughter was perhaps a kilometre distant, and said in a fading whisper, ‘It’s such a …’
‘Such a what, sir?’
‘Such a …’
‘I’m sorry, sir, such a …?’
‘Such a …’
Brendan said desperately, ‘Such a belly wink, sir?’
‘No, Bugger! Such a bally wenk!’
Then her musical laugh in the doorway, and Henry coughing and turning aside.
‘And did you reach Gelding’s Mere, Brendan?’ she asked.
‘I did not, Victoria. The mind was willing …’
He contemplated Victoria England and formed a rough plan for the rest of his life. She would actually need him more now – and Henry would need him less. He would love, and she would never know. So then: twenty or thirty winters without a kiss, a touch, a considering glance. And this love of his would be a hundred, no, a thousand times more than he deserved.
2. k8
‘well, clint, how’s trix?’ asked k8. ‘it’s so nice 2 actually c u in the flesh. now u just relax & make yourself completely @ home …’
‘Little house-present,’ said Clint coolly. ‘Moisten the piccolo so to speak.’
‘how giving u r, clint. & this ruddy gr8 cr8 of goodies! now. u get the top off
[email protected] & i’ll b mother.’
His first thought was: Shelley. The undulant frizz of hair, the daunted orbits of the eyes, the sharp lips. She wore a black tanktop T-shirt and a Union Jack miniskirt – but then of course she had already mirthfully warned him about the girth of her thighs.
‘How’s your father, love?’
‘decim8ed. all the way from caecum 2 rectum.’
‘It never rains … Precipitation, then lovely weather for ducks.’
‘bottoms up! here’s mud in your i.’
It was around now that Clint started to feel really tragically ill. As they moved from the sink to the armchairs, and as she smoothed down her skirt with her sizable feelers, another gangrenous lunge passed slowly through him.
‘1st, the $64,000?, clint: 6. u needn’t worry. it’ll b a relief 4 u 2 no this: i’ve never had a., clint.’
‘A what? … Period?’
‘i’ve never had a., clint. that’s y i was so tickled
[email protected] u seemed 2 want 2 initi8 a deb8 about children. as if i want a
[email protected]!’
‘And I’m relieved, am I?’
‘4 you’re not
[email protected] way inclined, r u, clint.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘y? in scribendo veritas, yellow dog. it’s all in h&, clint. i’ve been under the nife. but not 2 destroy—2 cre8! i’ve got tits & a 21, clint. they do an operation where they w.’
‘What did I hear you say to me?’
‘They w, clint … clint, what r u thinking?’ said k8. ‘i kill it now? i kill it now?’
When he came out into the street (he hadn’t touched her: just edged by with his arms shieldingly raised) he found that a grimy white van was doubleparked on the Avenger. ‘How Am I Driving?’ said its sticker. ‘Like A Cunt,’ someone had written in the dust. After a lot of parping and yelling and twisting about, Clint mounted the gutter, taking a left from a lamppost and a right from a railing, and ploughed through a hill of black rubbish-bags and on to the street. With his leg stretched straight over the pedal, in a yowl of revs, he shot through Mattock Estate and skidded into Britannia Junction, where he joined the ten-mile traffic jam that would, eventually, deliver him to the Bends and the open road he craved. He kept tearing off up sidestreets, kept buzzing round culs-de-sac like a hornet in a jamjar – like a particle in a cyclotron; then back to the bumper-to-bumper, where he hogged and jockeyed and lane-hopped. Down came the window for many a white-lipped slagging – the evil eye, the crackling fist; at one point, in hopeless gridlock, he jumped down and briefly chased a young couple on an old scooter – and was of course easily outstripped, the man turning to give the tosser sign with a gauntleted hand. Weeping, twisting, brutally honking, he flanked and tacked through Thamesmead, Hornchurch, Noak Hill.
Then the open road. At this time Clint Smoker weighed four and a half tons. He had a top speed of a hundred and sixty miles per hour. The great blare of his voice (audible for miles), the great blaze of his eyes, tunnelling through the late afternoon. Even his backside carbuncles were now eight inches square.
3. The edge of the earth
There was a little reception committee for him, of course, and Joseph Andrews hadn’t travelled alone. His people were unloading the Range Rover that Manfred had hired, and there were two other cars, blocking the road for now, outside the villa in rural Essex, near Gravesend, just where you come off the Bends.
‘A fine fucking welcome this is,’ he said. ‘A fine fucking homecoming.’
Joseph Andrews stood at the gate, half slumped over his Zimmer frame. His eyes were clenched shut and his lower teeth bared, after the long journey.
‘I come back to me own country,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘after twenty-five year. And what’s the first thing I see in me Evening Standard? Plans for the uh, the fucking renounciation of the monarchy. I reckon they done it to spite me. Got half a mind to …’ His closed eyes saw a swimming-pool: a motion jigsaw of crimson blood.
‘That’s down to you, that is, Boss,’ said a passing figure. ‘Pressures on the Princess.’
‘… You’re due a chinning for that, you are, Manfred Curbishley. And when you least expect it and all. No Scotch for you tonight. Face like a fucking chicken tandoori as it is. Where’s Simon? Simon! Hadn’t you better be getting along, son? … Gaw, now who’s this doing his fucking nut.’
He thought it was an insect at first, and even reached feebly for his holster – which of course he would not be needing, in England, in February: a buzzing whine, with hysteria in it. Joseph Andrews raised his trembling head; but the eyes wouldn’t open.
‘Someone – someone go and …’
Brisk footsteps clicked past him. He heard the car change gear, down from third to second, then, with insane protest, from second to first; then a sterling cry of ‘Halt!’; then a boost, then an atrocious concussion, then a faint miaow in the air, then a sound that opened the eyes of Joseph Andrews. It was a sound he had heard once before, in Strangeways, when a prison guard threw himself naked from the tower into the courtyard. An explosion, then something like a flurry of rain.
/>
He threw aside his Zimmer frame and stepped forward. And he thought he had never seen anyone walking towards him as fast as this – walking to the edge of the earth, and intending to get there.
Mal Bale was within (he had been there half the day: turn on the heat and otherwise), coming out of a light nap on the chair in the hall. He heard it. He looked into the kitchen and told Manfred and Rodney to stay inside.
You couldn’t see anything from the front path: just the lights of the cars and the garage lantern. Mal kept moving forward. And now other sounds, the squelch, the sob, the squelch, the sob.
There was a pink mist. And his own car, the elderly BM, was lavishly besplattered with flesh and plasma; on the bonnet was a brown brogue shoe with an ankle in it.
To the left, where the noises were coming from, you were blinded by the brights of the black jeep. Mal ducked out of the beam and edged round the garage doors.
Joseph Andrews lay dead on the road. Above him, his assailant, by now with painful weariness, delivered a few last blows with his tool – his spanner, his wrench. Then he threw it aside and seemed to be trying to weep. But he couldn’t weep; and Mal saw why.
‘Come on, son. You’ve done him now. It’s over. Easy. Easy … Christ: Clint mate … Up. Up you come. We’re going to help you now. We’re going to help you, help you.’
Mal Bale thought: So that was Jo’s last act on earth. With his prehensile right hand. The blinding of Clint Smoker.
4. February 14 (6.27 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Captain John Macmanaman: Come on back. Come on back! … Come on back to me. Level up the turn. No no no. Straighten out, straighten out.
System Aircraft Maintenance: Well I’m here, John, with my circular sliderule.
Macmanaman: Take me through it, Betty.
SAM: NEO will be twenty-one point three nine miles from you when it sheers. There’ll be fireworks and some heat and you’ll feel that instantly. We don’t think that’ll be important. But there’ll be downwinds, John.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Well that’s it.
SAM: I’m sorry. Now the heat’ll come at the speed of light. The wind will come at the speed of sound. So after the flash you’ll have one minute … nine seconds. Good luck. We’re all rooting for you. Really rooting for you.
Macmanaman: Thanks, honey.
First Officer Nick Chopko: And here we have our so-called runway, gentlemen. See it?
Macmanaman: Hal?
‘Three minutes,’ said the voice of Hal Ward, and nothing else. Reynolds knew that John Macmanaman had been in a crash before – as a young man, and as a passenger. He’d told her about it a couple of times. He said it was like a silent movie: no sound at all, and black-and-white. Even the gust of fire was silent and black-and-white. And the dying, those slipping away but also those actually in flames had the same expression. One of wonder.
She eased her neck, and searched for better thoughts … John said he suddenly became a hundred different mes. All around him were wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children. And then, later, the question of survival. It was like winning a squalid lottery, he said … Oh I get it, she said to herself. After nearly half a century Royce dies and then, three days later, I die too. Moral: don’t marry at seventeen.
The passengers facing the prow were in the brace position, bent forward with their hands clasped over their heads. Reynolds, facing aft, sat normally, just hugging her neck, hugging her neck: Captain’s orders.
And she knew – stone knew – that if they got through this alive she was going to make him marry her.
There was a yellow flash and she felt sweat form on her upper lip.
Ward: How long?
Macmanaman: Sixteen seconds. And God, right now, it’s so still.
SAM: This isn’t my field, but if the wind comes down, it’s got to come back up, right? If you can just stay out there …
Macmanaman: Here it comes. Ride it. Ride it.
Ward: … Fucking Christ, the wing’s coming down!
Macmanaman: Wait!
Ward: We’re coming down on the wing!
Chopko: I love you, Amy!
There were rescue-and-emergency teams, at a distance, all along the cleared six miles of Interstate 95—just south of the city of Florence, Florence County, South Carolina.
This is what the people saw and this is what they heard.
They saw the crucifix of Flight 101 coming out of the early afternoon above the red plateau. At first in perfect silence – until they heard the mournful chord of the stricken machine. Then its drunken slides and drifts, and its final circling, chest up, arms outflung: counterclockwise. As it steadied, as it bore down, there came the heavy flash from above, and, within a second, the comet’s hair was a silver river from horizon to horizon …
The plane was perhaps five hundred feet from the ground when the downwind took it. It seemed to give a roar of pain and rage as it rocked and plunged. The left wing dropped and hit: a streak of sparks along the hard shoulder. Then the updraught: and Flight 101 violently levelled. One scorching ricochet, one hurt, wounded rearing-up with slats and panels flying off it, then touchdown, the resilient gathering of its rigidity, and on it powered beyond the cauldron of its wake.
And the mad hair, the silver tresses, streamed on above their heads, following the comet to Jupiter.
5. Yellow dog
It was six o’clock in London, and Xan was alone in the house with his younger daughter Sophie.
Earlier, as he ate his lunch standing by the fridge in the flat across the road, Russia had called and said (he was going to dinner there anyway), ‘Can you come early and have Sophie for an hour?’
‘I’d love to. But will she wear it?’
‘I think so. Let’s try it and see.’
‘She’s so flash now, Baba. And if she’s not having it … What came up? Tell me, tell me.’
She talked about Billie’s sleepover, Imaculada’s night off. Then she said, ‘A small man with a sort of Foreign Office accent approached me after my lecture on Tuesday. He told me he had some stuff on the Gaddafi boys and offered to bring it over. I’m meeting him in the Close at half past six. Disgusting name. Semen Something. Disgusting eyes: frothy blue. I’ll be back around seven, seven-fifteen. Thanks for this.’
He went over to the house at five o’clock. Sophie looked upon him leniently. At six he poured himself a glass of beer, reminded himself to watch for the comet, and went back to reading the kind of books that featured one word per page.
Relations with the girls were pretty well renormalised. Sophie, now, was occasionally bashful or demure. He was not yet free to pick her up and hold her – she squirmed and simpered, and wouldn’t quite collude. But with Billie he was fully reinstated. Once, to dramatise a point brought up by her bedside literature, he made a supposedly frightening face, and, having briefly faltered, Billie said, ‘You can’t scare me. You’re just my silly old daddy.’ He had also done himself a power of good the other day, when Billie, using the arm of a chair, had embarked on what were known, hereabouts, as her exercises, and he had said, with mild vexation, ‘Oh Billie’ – and turned away (what was it that mildly vexed him: the sense of thwarted energy?). Then he met the eyes of his wife, and their frown of hope.
Xan, too, had hope. He even believed that he would be spending the night with Russia on this day: the day of the martyr Valentine. His wife, with her aerodynamic bone-structure: she used to put her tongue to the side and push, when she wanted a kiss – to draw attention to the cheek but also to make it nearer. And she had started doing that again, about twenty-four hours ago. If she asked him to stay, and to stay in her bed, he still wouldn’t press his case. And what he was thinking about now, as he said things like ‘car’ and ‘pig’ and ‘fork’, were the nights when your wife sits near you after dinner, reading, motionless, like an artefact, like an Old Master, and all you’re aware of is the texture of the paint.
He watched his daughter, crawling, and often getting t
o her feet and moving from handhold to handhold … On a certain level, Xan was aware, he entertained ridiculous expectations of Sophie Meo. She was his fourth child, and his second girl. I’ve got the idea by now, he sometimes found himself thinking. Why hasn’t she? Is she really going to cough and shriek and shit everywhere, just like the other three, and fall over all the time, and spend a year saying you when she meant me (‘help you! help you!’), and half a decade asking why, why, why? Well, he was ready for why, this time around. Instead of ‘because …’ he’d say ‘guess’. Epiphenomenally, he wished that the laws of motion could be redrafted more indulgently with infants in mind, so that the smack of the face on the floor, when the arms failed, would be softer and quieter, and the weeping softer and quieter and also briefer, and the bump shallower-sided and a quieter red. Sophie moved from handhold to handhold.
Xan continued to wonder how much he was going to tell Russia about Cora Susan. In his letter he had promised her some sort of confession, and so he couldn’t altogether avoid it. He knew one thing: he’d tell her about it after. And not soon after, either. But this confidence, this intimacy, would eventually be expected of him. He felt entitled to blur it slightly. Could you actually say, ‘I kissed my niece’s breasts’? Shouldn’t you contain it – what was essentially a family embarrassment? And conceivably Russia might find out about it anyway, via Pearl. He could say: You have the right to retaliate. But with proportionality. You’ll have to get your Uncle Mordecai to …
In Russia’s eyes, naturally enough, Cora wore the taint of pornography (and Xan himself had not escaped it, for all his careful editing of the footage from Dolorosa Drive). Russia’s objections were mainly aesthetic objections – though not for that reason superficial; and the moral objections she saved for the end: ‘She’s both pimp and prostitute.’ ‘True,’ he said, ‘but there are reasons for that. Think.’ ‘Okay,’ she said—‘but when I think about pornography, all I see is a man with a remote control in one hand and his cock in the other.’ Well, yes; and, yes, the obscenification of everyday life was hesitantly entrained. He went on considering it. It could be that women wouldn’t mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy. Nobody bothered to object to the gay end of it, supposedly because of the absence of the other: the exploited. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe women just couldn’t bear to see it travestied, the act of love that peopled the world.