'Me too. I mean the bus. Yesterday. I just climbed off the bus.'
'Where from, Dawn?'
'New Jersey.'
'No kidding? Where in New Jersey? You know, I grew up —'
'You want another scotch?'
I felt my shoulders give. I turned slowly. I said, 'How much does it cost to keep you away from me for ten minutes? Tell me something,' I asked her. But I said a good deal more. She stood her ground, this old dame. She was experienced. I gave her all my face, and it's a face that can usually face them down, wide and grey, full of adolescent archaeology and cheap food and junk money, the face of a fat snake, bearing all the signs of its sins. For several seconds she just gave me her face too, full on, a stark presentation of the eyes, which were harder than mine, oh much harder. With her small fists on the bar she leaned towards me and said:
'Leroy!'
Instantly the music gulped out. Various speckled profiles turned my way. Hands on hips, older in the silence, her breasts standing easy now, the dark dancer stared down at me with weathered contempt.
'I'm looking for things.' This was Dawn. 'I'm really interested in pornography.'
'No you're not,' I said. And pornography isn't interested either. 'It's okay, Leroy! Relax, Leroy. Pal, there's no problem. I'm going. Here's money. Dawn, just you take care now.'
I slid to my feet and found no balance. The stool wobbled roundly on its base, like a coin. I waved to the watching women — get your staring done with — and made my diagonal for the door.
——————
Everything was on offer outside. Boylesk, assisted showers, live sex, a we-never-close porn emporium bristling in its static. They even had the real thing out there, in prostitute form. But I wasn't buying, not tonight. I walked back to the hotel without incident. Nothing happened. It never does, but it will. The revolving door shoved me into the lobby, and the desk clerk bobbed about in his stockade.
'Hi there,' he said. 'While you were out tonight, sir, Mr Lorne Guyland called.'
Daintily he offered me my key.
'Would that be the real Lorne Guyland, sir?'
'Oh, I wouldn't go that far,' I said, or maybe I just thought it. The elevator sucked me skyward. My face was still hurting a lot all the time. In my room I picked up the bottle and sank back on the bed. While I waited for the noises to come I thought about travel through air and time, and about Selina... Yes, I can fill you in on that now. Perhaps I'll even feel a little better, when I've told you, when it's out.
Earlier today — today? Christ, it feels like childhood — Alec Llewellyn drove me to Heathrow Airport at the wheel of my powerful Fiasco. He's borrowing the car while I'm away, that liar. I was smudged with drink and Serafim, for the plane. I'm scared of flying. I'm scared of landing too. We didn't talk much. He owes me money ... We joined the long queue for standby. Something in me hoped that the flight would be full. It wasn't. The ticking computer gim-micked my seat. 'But you'd better hurry,' said the girl. Alec jogged at my side to passport control. He tousled my rug and shooed me through.
'Hey, John,' he called from the other side of the fence. 'Hey, addict!' Beside him an old man stood waving at no one that I could see.
'What?'
'Come here.'
He beckoned. I came panting up to him.
'What?'
'Selina. She's fucking someone else — a lot, all the time.'
'Oh you liar.'' And I think I even took a weary swipe at his face. Alec is always doing things like this.
'I thought you ought to know,' he said offendedly. He smiled. 'Round from the back, one leg up, her on top. Every which way.'
'Oh yeah? Who? You liar. Why are you — who, who, who?'
But he wouldn't tell me. He just said that it had been going on for a long time, and that it was someone I knew pretty well.
'You,' I said, and turned, and ran ...
There. I don't feel better. I don't feel better at all. I'm rolling over now, to try and get some sleep. London is waking up. So is Selina. The distant fizz or whistle or hiss in the back of my head is starting again, modulating slowly, searching for its scale.
——————
Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.
Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.
The disease I host called tinnitus — more reliable and above all cheaper than any alarm call — woke me promptly at nine. Tinnitus woke me on a note of high exasperation, as if it had been trying to wake me for hours. I let my sapless tongue creak up to check out the swelling on my upper west side. About the same, yet tenderer. My throat informed me that I had a snout hangover on, too. The first cigarette would light a trail of gunpowder to the holster, the arsenal inside my chest. I patted my pockets and lit it anyway.
Ten minutes later I came out of that can on all fours, a pale and very penitent crocodile, really sorry about all that stagnant gook and offal I went and quaffed last night. I'd just rolled on my back and was loosening my tie and unbuttoning my shirt when the telephone rang.
'John? Lorne Guyland.'
'Lorne!' I said. Christ, what a croak it was. 'How are you?'
'Good,' he said. 'I'm good, John. How are you?'
'I'm fine, fine.'
That's good, John. John?'
'Lorne?'
'There are things that worry me, John.'
'Tell me about them, Lorne.'
'I don't happen to be an old man, John.'
'I know that, Lorne.'
'I'm in great shape. Never better.'
'I'm glad, Lorne.'
'That's why I don't like it that you say I'm an old man, John.'
'But I don't say that, Lorne.'
'Well okay. You imply it, John, and that's, it's, that's about the same thing. In my book. You also imply that I'm not very sexually active and can't satisfy my women. That's just not true, John.'
'I'm sure it's not true, Lorne.'
'Then why imply it? John, I think we should meet and talk about these things. I hate to talk on the telephone.'
'Absolutely. When?'
'I'm a very busy man, John.'
'I respect that, Lorne.'
'You can't expect me to just drop everything, just to, just to meet with you, John.'
'Of course not, Lorne.'
'I lead a full life, John. Full and active. Superactive, John. Six o'clock I'm at the health club. When my programme's done I hit the mat with my judo instructor. Afternoons I work out with the weights. When I'm at the house, it's golf, tennis, water-skiing, scuba-diving, racquet-ball and polo. You know, John, sometimes I just get out on that beach and run like a kid. The girls, these chicks I have at the house, when I run in late they scold me, John, like I was a little boy. Then I'm up half the night screwing. Take yesterday ...'
It went on like this, I swear to God, for an hour and a half. After a while I fell silent. This had no effect on anything. So in the end I just sat through it, smoking cigarettes and having a really bad time.
When it was over, I took a pull of scotch, dabbed the tears away with a paper tissue, and rang down to room service. I asked for coffee. I mean, you have to take it easy on yourself sometimes.
'Coffee how?' came the suspicious reply.
I told him: with milk and sugar. 'How big are the pots?'
'Serve two,' he said.
'Four pots.'
'You got it.'
I lay back on the cot with my frayed, fanlike address book. Using the complimentary pad and pencil, I started making a list of all the places where I might expect to find the nomadic Selina. That Selina, she gets around. I wondered, out of interest, how much these calls were going to cost me.
I undressed and ran a tub. Then the impeccable black bellhop arrived with my tray. I came over, initialled the check and slipped the kid a buck. He was in good shape, this kid: he had a pleasant agitation in his
step and in his smile. He frowned innocently and sniffed the air.
He could take one look at me — at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel — he could take one look at me and be pretty sure I ran on heavy fuel.
There is a dog tethered in the steep airwell beneath my room. A talented barker, he barks boomingly well. I listened to him a lot while I sat there being talked to by Lorne. His half-hourly barking jags reverberate in monstrous warning up the length of the canyon walls. He needs that nether fury. He has big responsibilities — he sounds as though he guards the gates of hell. His lungs are fathomless, his hellhound rage is huge. He needs those lungs — what for? To keep them in, to keep them out.
——————
I'd better give you the lowdown on Selina — and quick. That hot bitch, what am I letting her do to me?
Like many girls (I reckon), and especially those of the small, supple, swervy, bendy, bed-smart variety, Selina lives her life in hardened fear of assault, molestation and rape. The world has ravished her often enough in the past, and she thinks the world wants to ravish her again. Lying between the sheets, or propped at my side during long and anxious journeys in the Fiasco, or seated across the table in the deep lees of high-tab dinners, Selina has frequently refreshed me with tales of insult and violation from her childhood and teenage years — a musk-breathing, toffee-offering sicko on the common, the toolshed interrogations of sweat-soaked parkies, some lumbering retard in the alley or the lane, right up to the narcissist photographers and priapic prop-boys who used to cruise her at work, and now the scowling punks, soccer trogs and bus-stop boogies malevolently lining the streets and more or less constantly pinching her ass or flicking her tits and generally making no bones about the things they need to do... It must be tiring knowledge, the realization that half the members of the planet, one on one, can do what the hell they like with you.
And it must be extra tough on a girl like Selina, whose appearance, after many hours at the mirror, is a fifty—fifty compromise between the primly juvenile and the grossly provocative. Her tastes are strictly High Street too, with frank promise of brothelly knowhow and top-dollar underwear. I've followed Selina down the strip, when we're shopping, say, and she strolls on ahead, wearing sawn-off jeans and a wash-withered T-shirt, or a frilly frock measuring the brink of her russety thighs, or a transparent coating of gossamer, like a condom, or an abbreviated school uniform. .. The men wince and watch, wince and watch. They buckle and half turn away. They shut their eyes and clutch their nuts. And sometimes, when they see me cruise up behind my little friend and slip an arm around her trim and muscular waist, they look at me as if to say — Do something about it, will you ? Don't let her go about the place looking like that. Come on, it's your responsibility.
I have talked to Selina about the way she looks. I have brought to her notice the intimate connections between rape and her summer wardrobe. She laughs about it. She seems flushed, pleased. I keep on having to fight for her honour in pubs and at parties. She gets groped or goosed or propositioned — and there I am once again, wearily raising my scarred dukes. I tell her it's because she goes around the place looking like a nude magazine. She finds this funny too. I don't understand. I sometimes think that Selina would stand stock still in front of an advancing juggernaut, so long as the driver never once took his eyes off her tits.
In addition to rape, Selina is frightened of mice, spiders, dogs, toadstools, cancer, mastectomy, chipped mugs, ghost stories, visions, portents, fortune tellers, astrology columns, deep water, fires, floods, thrush, poverty, lightning, ectopic pregnancy, rust, hospitals, driving, swimming, flying and ageing. Like her fat pale lover, she never reads a book. She has no job any more: she has no money. She is either twenty-nine or thirty-one or just possibly thirty-three. She is leaving it all very late, and she knows it. She will have to make her move, and she will have to make it soon.
I don't believe Alec, necessarily, but I won't believe Selina, that's for sure. In my experience, the thing about girls is—you never know. No, you never do. Even if you actually catch them, redhanded—bent triple upside down in mid-air over the headboard, say, and brushing their teeth with your best friend's dick—you never know. She'll deny it, indignantly. She'll believe it, too. She'll hold the dick there, like a mike, and tell you that it isn't so, I have been faithful to Selina Street for over a year, God damn it. Yes I have. I keep trying not to be, but it never works out. I can't find anyone to be unfaithful to her with. They don't want what I have to offer. They want commitment and candour and sympathy and trust and all the other things I seem to be really short of. They are past the point where they'll go to bed with somebody just for the hell of it. Selina is past that point also, long past. She used to be a well-known goer, true, but now she has her future security to think about. She has money to think about. Ah, Selina, come on. Tell me it isn't so.
——————
I worked up a major sweat over the console that morning — yeah, and a major tab, too. Deafened with caffeine, I was just a hot robot, a ticking grid of jet-lag, time-jump and hangover. The telephone happened to be an antique: a dialler. And my fingers were already so sore and chewed that each shirtbutton had felt like a drop of molten solder . .. Half way through the session I was dialling with my left pinkie. 'Room number please,' said the telephonist in her honeying drone, every time, every time. 'Me again,' I said and said. 'Room 101. Me. It's me.'
I tried my own number first and repeatedly thereafter. Selina has her keys. She is always in and out... I spoke to Mandy and Debby, Selina's shadowy flatmates. I rang her old office. I rang her dancing class. 1 even rang her gynaecologist. No one knew where she was. On a parallel track 1 combed the airwaves for Alec Llewellyn. I talked to his wife. I talked to three of his girlfriends. I talked to his probation officer. No luck. Boy, these are pretty thoughts for me to entertain, three thousand miles from home.
The dog barked. My face felt small and clueless between its fat red ears. For a while I slumped back and stared hard at the phone. It held out for several seconds, then it rang. And so naturally I thought it's her and made a hurried grab for my girl.
'— Yes?'
'John Self? It's Caduta Massi.'
'At last,' I said. 'Caduta, it's an honour.'
'John, it's good to talk to you. But before we meet I want to sort some things out.'
'Like what, Caduta?'
'For instance, how many children do you think I should have?'
'Well I thought just the one.'
'No, John.'
'More?'
'Many more.'
I said, 'About how many?'
'I think I should have many children, John.'
'Well okay. Sure. Why not. What, say two or three more?'
'We'll see,' said Caduta Massi. 'I'm glad you're amenable to that, John. Thank you.'
'Forget it.'
'And another thing. I think I should have a mother, a white-haired lady in a black dress. But that's not so important.'
'You got it.'
'And another thing. Don't you think I should change my name?'
'What to, Caduta?'
'I don't know yet. But something a little more appropriate.'
'Whatever you say. Caduta — let's meet.'
After that I had them send me up a rack of cocktails and canapes. The same black bellhop walked skilfully into the room with the silver trays on his tense fingertips. I had nothing smaller, so I flicked him a five. He looked at the drinks and he looked at me.
'Have one,' I said, and picked up a glass.
He shook his head, resisting a smile, averting his mobile face.
'What's up?' I said coolly, and drank. 'Little early for you?'
'You party last night?' he asked. He couldn't straighten his face for more than a couple of seconds at a stretch.
'What's your name?'
'Felix.'
'No, Felix,' I said, 'I did it all by
myself.'
'. . . You gonna party now?'
'Yeah. But all by myself again. Damn it. I got problems you wouldn't believe. I'm on a different clock to you, Felix. My time, it's way after lunch.'
He lifted his round chin and nodded his head tightly. 'I take one look at you, man,' he said, 'and I know you ain't never gonna stop.'
I didn't attempt anything else that day. I drank the drink and ate the grub. I had a shave. I had a handjob, closely structured round my last night with Selina. Or I tried. I couldn't remember much about it, and then all these guys came walking in on the act... So me and my sore tooth throbbed our way through a few hours of television — I sat flummoxed and muttering like a superannuated ghost, all shagged out from its hauntings, through sports, soaps, ads, news, the other world. Best was a variety show hosted by a veteran entertainer, someone who was pretty well over the hill when I was a kid. Amazing to think that these guys are still around, still alive, let alone still earning. They don't make them like that any more. No, come on, let's be accurate: only now, in 1981, do they make them like that. They couldn't before — they didn't have the technology. Jesus Christ, this old prong has been sutured and stitched together in a state-of-the-art cosmetics lab. The scalloped blaze of his bridgework matches the macabre brilliance of his flounced dicky. His highlit contacts burn a tigerish green. Check out the tan on the guy — it's like a paintjob. He looks terrific, positively rosy. His Latin rug sweats with vitamins. His falsy ears are sharp and succulent. When I make all the money I'm due to make and go off to California for that well-earned body transplant I've promised myself, I'll mention the name of old green eyes here, and tell the medics, as I go under, There. That's how I want it. Give me one just like that. . . But now this aged android starts bringing on a string of even older guys, also spruce and dazzlingly metallic, a chorus line of tuxed fucks called things like Mr Music and Entertainment Himself. Wait a minute. Now I know that one has been dead for decades. Come to think of it, the whole show has the suspended air and sickly texture of treated film, that funeral-parlour glow — numb, tranced and shiny, like a corpse. I switched channels and sat there rubbing my face. The screen now showed a crater-field of dead cars, the frazzled heaps pummelled to the sound of tinnitus, a new necropolis of old American gods. I telephoned, and found no answer anywhere.