Success Read online

  All day at work the anxiety had been quite frightful. Home to another evening à la Miranda — why do we put up with it? — another evening of my epic coldness and her clumsy awe, of my nauseous small talk and her snatched panicky kisses, another night of sculptured sleep, her large lips hot with tears at my side. Why do we let them put us through these ordeals? Why are we so tender with them? Why? Well — that’s your lot, bitch: you get no more of me.

  In fact, of course, there hadn’t been much difficulty. That fool Terence was in the kitchen when I got home from work. He isn’t really allowed in this part of my flat — hence his furtive air, his look of hunted gratitude when I asked him to stay upstairs and talk.

  ‘Gita won’t fuck me any more,’ he explained.

  I asked, with real interest, why he thought this to be the case.

  ‘I don’t know. Gita doesn’t know either.’

  I straightened a finger at him. ‘Which one is Gita?’

  ‘The small one who wears those ear-rings.’

  ‘Ah.’ All Terence’s girls are, perforce, tiny, and their ears are among the things I try very hard not to think about. ‘Didn’t she spend Tuesday night here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I tried to fuck her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She didn’t want me to.’

  I thought this extremely odd, Gita being the sort of girl — surely — that you can do whatever the hell you like to. What would be the point of her otherwise? But I said, out of politeness, ‘Curious — in my experience it’s usually the other way round.’

  A fatuous digression ensued, during which Terence made great play with his sexual insecurities at the imagined expense of my own. Gauche stuff — this dread he has of his own homosexuality can get quite alarming when so candidly displayed. ‘Nothing in that line, as it happens,’ I said coolly: ‘It’s this Miranda.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said with attention.

  ‘Miranda, and her demands.’

  Miranda’s robust physical appetites, my own sloth and lassitude, Terence’s more stolid gifts in this department, the ease with which the delegation could be made …

  The work of a moment. And now, tonight, while Terence gamely grunts, while Miranda cracks him in her dappled thighs: I’ll be up here chuckling about the things I didn’t tell him, about her raw-liver kisses and her sweet-sherry tongue, about the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents, about the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets.

  What’s happening to you girls these days?

  After spending the night with a neurotic girl — and so many of them are neurotic now — I feel more than my natural repugnance at the prospect of examining the bedclothes once I’ve shooed them from the flat. There will of course be the usual grim femininia — a dollop of make-up on the pillowslips, the school of pubic hairs on the sheets, that patch of hell somewhere further down: so much one expects. But these days I twitch back the blankets with a premonition of wonder, of dread; they’re all in pieces, these girls — they could have left almost anything behind … I can see it now: Gregory stands in the middle of the floor, the room still shimmering with the girl’s demented exit; gingerly he approaches, face halfaverted, gathers the heavy quilt in a muscular fist, breathes deeply, throws back the blankets — and finds an entire leg marooned on the sheets! I wouldn’t put it past them.

  Did you know, for instance, that girls now go to the lavatory? Shaking news, I agree, but they do. Oh yes. And not just to pee, either. I once nursed a fond dream — silly really — that they left all that sort of thing to the menfolk — except when they’re in hospitals or other suitably equipped establishments. Indeed, whenever I heard an ambulance siren, or saw one of the white vats whizz past, I was always cheered to imagine that it contained a few fortunate females being rushed to the wards for just this purpose. What a romantic I was … They do it all the time these days. They even talk about it. They even try to do it in front of you! But they’re like chaps, these days, like fellas, like blokes.

  It’s their nerves which really drive me mad. When did they start thinking they had to be nervous all the time? Who told them? Why, fidgety fingers I find hardly less repulsive than warty knuckles and rank nails. Agitated gestures seem to me a negligible improvement on misshapen or ill-assorted limbs. I see little to choose between subsultory mastication (or twitchy mealtime banter) and rotten teeth (or scum-lined lips). Post-coital tears disgust me as thoroughly as do pre-menstrual pimples. And the dreadful things they say. They keep trying to understand you; they keep wanting to talk about proper things; they keep trying to be people. We take it, we talk to them back. We’re not supposed to let on that, for all their many charms, they just aren’t very interesting.

  Has Terence said anything about my sexual dispositions? No doubt he has. Well, I won’t deny it. If it’s a ‘sexual equal’ I want — i.e. a boy, and a boy’s unyielding musculature — then it’s a sexual equal I go ahead and have, rather than a thing with breasts that happens to urinate sitting down. (Terence will stick up for them, of course. The pungent witches whom he tends to squire are, expectably, among the heroines of this unhappy genre.) What I like are moneyed chasubles of silence, soft topography of flesh, the trickle of retreating satin and the white avenues of underwear, the mute secrets of dew and down.

  Imagine, then, my incredulous horror on discovering the true colours of this Miranda, this jumpy little idiot whose immediate transfer I have gulled Terence into accepting (a tedious mode of dismissal, you may think, but a relatively painless one. I detest scenes). It was at a noisy after-dinner party in the flat of my fashionable friend Torka that I incautiously made her acquaintance. Tired, stifled, and almost completely exasperated by Adrian’s vulgar rot, I was at first perfectly willing to give some of my time to a young, deferential and — I concede — reasonably pretty girl who seemed to be prepared to refill my glass and to take an intelligent interest in my work and opinions. She stood there; she listened; her teeth were clean. Only when I offered to drive her home in my powerful green car did the nightmare truly begin. She stuck with a kind of dumb immobility to my side throughout the entire course of the party — even when the famous Torka tried to pry me loose for a chat — kissed me with repulsive candour on the stairs, and then blandly announced, as my handsome sports car roared into life, that she had missed the last train back to the provinces and had nowhere in London to stay! I’m never, ever, going to fall for that one again.

  I was putty in her hands. I always am. ‘I don’t want to hurt their feelings.’ Why don’t I? What feelings? I don’t mind if they hurt my feelings. They’ve got no more feelings than I have. Miranda is just a bloke, anyway, like me, the mad bitch.

  The physical aspect of what happened next — and went on happening practically every night for the following two weeks — has already been adequately delineated by me. I think that one is entitled — no? — to a reasonable helping of startled indignation when an eighteen-year-old girl has a dented backside, tropical armpits and stringy white lines on the undercurves of her breasts. That first morning she sprang out of bed — having had her noisome way with me — and knelt naked before the bookcase, rummaging in her bag for some item that her genes loved. I watched, dressing her with my eyes. Her bottom is quite out of control, I thought; and I can’t take the smell she has down there. It’s not her fault, I know. It’s her nerves’ fault.

  An even stronger threat to my ease, however, was what one might call the girl’s character. Not yet twenty, and each turn in her conversation opened up a chapter of wretchedness and squalor in her past — an infatuation unrequited, a pass snubbed, a pocket of pleasureless promiscuities (fifty men in two years, and she admitted it). Small wonder that I’ve seriously hated her ever since that first impact. I hate it when she comes near. When she touches me I close my eyes and pray for patience. When we make love my face lives on another planet. She doesn’t mind. She wants lots more where that came from. Such people wil
l take your money, take your body and take your time, but will they take your hint? Not them, oh no. I’m too tender-hearted. I just weather these hormonal storms. No wonder I get exploited.

  I dialled seven digits. I spoke in whispers to Adrian — sulking, as usual — and established that whereas the wealthy Torka would not be home that evening, the redoubtable Susannah, a new discovery of ours, most assuredly would be. ‘Perfect,’ I murmured, dropping the receiver into place as I heard Terence clump up the stairs.

  ‘What time’s she coming?’ he asked.

  ‘Any minute. She just rang.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘As if she were having a nervous breakdown, naturally.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Uh, “Terry” …’ I paused, frowning. ‘Are you actually ready?’

  I unconditionally promise you that Terence was wearing Sherwood-green velvet trousers, a flounced orange shirt, and a red corduroy jacket. He was. But then Terence’s taste in clothes, as in most other things, has always been quite beyond the pale. He possesses, for instance, a leatherene belt with a silver buckle on it the size of a hearth-grate; because of his want of inches he is moreover obliged to wear stilt-like yob’s boots — you can do that if, like me, you’re already very tall, but not if, like him, you’re actually very small (Terence, in fact, is, oh, 5′ 7″; I of course am six-foot-one-and-a-half); also he favours paint-by-numbers colour schemes — an absurd motley of nigger primaries and charwoman pastels — and is fond, too, of cute appurtenances (braces, scarves, lockets) which he tends to sport all at once, like a tinker. He is quite prepared, you know, to wear dark boots with light summer trousers. He’ll put on V-neck jerseys over T-shirts and think nothing of it. He’s perfectly capable of doing up the middle buttons of his —

  ‘How do we swing it then, Greg?’

  ‘Simple,’ said I. ‘A row will be precipitated. Miranda shall be rendered hysterical. I then stalk out. At this point you, “Terry”, sweep in with tequila and sympathy. What could be more agreeable?’

  ‘What, get her drunk, you think?’

  ‘You might as well — it would put the matter beyond serious doubt. You’ve got masses, I expect?’

  ‘You bet. Drink is one thing I’ve got plenty of. Drink I’ve got.’

  ‘I recommend white wine. She’ll drink herself sick on that purely out of natural greed. Also I’ve got some smoked salmon you can give her. She likes that too, because you can have bread with it.’

  ‘Mm?’

  The bell rang.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Terence.

  ‘Ah. Come in,’ I called.

  I heard Miranda thank the lingering Terence in the hall below as she started to make her heavy way up the stairs. Me? I stood rocking on my heels by the window, the black cape already thrown over my broad shoulders, the keys of my custom-built car jinking in my hand, the pewter-tipped cane leaning ominously against my desk.

  ‘Hello,’ she said — obviously in particularly dazzling form.

  ‘Well? And what do you imagine we’re going to do now?’

  Miranda’s porcine good looks were minimally in evidence tonight: yellow scarf of hair, those fat lips of hers, scared eyes. She sat down with a grunt on the edge of my bed, her ridiculous denim knapsack tumbling to the floor.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Whatever you want to do.’

  ‘My God,’ I began, ‘that’s just what I can’t bear about you. Why must you be so hopelessly null?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Why don’t we have dinner somewhere? Or that film you wanted to see is on at the ABC. Or we could do something different — we could go bowling.’

  I averted my appalled gaze. ‘Oh, we could do that, could we?’

  ‘Sorry. Or we could stay in. If you’re tired, I’ll just cook you something.’

  ‘That sounds absolutely riveting, I must say. Just what I feel like after a — ’

  ‘Why don’t we go to the little place round the corner? It’s — ’

  ‘Don’t you dare interrupt me like that again. It’s bloody rude.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bloody rude.’

  — And with that of course I swept out of the room and clattered down the stairs. As I suavely paused to put on my gloves in the hall, Terence emerged from the shadows, breathing audibly.

  ‘Success?’ he said.

  I pondered for a moment, then said, ‘You’d better get in there, “Terry”. I don’t know what she might do to herself. She’s quite distraught.’ (Let’s have a laugh at Terence’s expense, I thought. That’s what we’re here for, after all — to have some fun with him.)

  Rain had warmed the air. I stopped a passing taxi — my sleek car is sick again — and was incompetently driven in it to Howarth Gardens. I depressed the marble bell-push. Torka’s houseboy giggled shyly as he took my cape.

  It was two o’clock when I came out of Torka’s house and stood impatiently fastening my cape on the steps. I had left with some precipitateness, certainly far too dramatically to telephone for a cab on my way out, and the chances of hailing one at this hour were dangerously slim. (There have been several incidents in the area recently. Not that this worries me in the slightest. Things simply don’t happen to proper people, people of my height, bearing, etc.) I had no choice, then, but to walk, to walk back through the liquid sounds and quicksilver gloss of the night.

  Adrian and Susannah had behaved intolerably. No sooner had we removed our clothes before Adrian went into a ridiculous huff about Susannah’s scent; he complained that his back hurt — and actually accused me of not washing before I came out! We had to go through the most impossible contortions to distance these fancied danger-spots from his hideous, wide-pored nose, including some repellent new combinations he had learnt in New York. It was bloody uncomfortable and my elbow still hurts when I flex my arm. Oh, but that was nothing to the way she carried on. The very instant that Adrian turned his attention to me — which is all he’s really interested in, Susannah, though of course you’re too vain to see it — she claimed a headache and said she just wanted to watch. She isn’t nearly as expert as people keep claiming, anyway, and her breasts are far too large.

  Funnily enough, it gets quite boring being chased and squabbled over the entire time. Idiots, with their possessive feuds. Can’t they see that I am there to be tasted, to be mulled over, to be adored, not to be fought over like a piece of meat?

  I returned without incident — a bit puffed in fact, having elected to jog the final half-mile. The flat was dark: dust and silence in the air. I walked on down the passage, alert, springy. As a rule the location of the bathroom — through the hippie nightmare of Terence’s quarters — is the theme of much annoyance to me when I get home late, but tonight I welcomed a chance to pass by his bed. Would Miranda be in it? I knocked on the door.

  ‘ “Terry”?’ I whispered.

  I turned the cold doorknob noiselessly and switched on the light.

  I assume in retrospect that what surprised me was not Miranda’s presence at the far side of Terence’s large and unfastidious double bed so much as my own obscure irritation that this should be the case. Any token regret, any reflexive pity I might have felt for her was instantly chased away by the sight of that bulked behind swelling the blankets. To think that she would even go to these lengths to make me jealous, the hysterical bitch.

  Confident that I would not rouse Terence — who surrenders consciousness with truly plebeian ease and snores like a motorbike the moment his crimson eyes are closed — I picked up a hairbrush from the table with my gloved hand and skilfully lobbed it at the tent-like convexity of Miranda’s nethers; she twitched, half-turned, and looked up blinking; I offered her a classic, Parnassian sneer and cruised into the bathroom. (On the way back I looked straight ahead, pausing only to catch her muffled sobs as I threw off the light.)

  Up in the kitchen were two half-finished glasses of hock, the remains of my expensive smoked salmon and a wedge of clawed-at Fren
ch bread. I clicked my tongue, tasting this scene of snatched food and hurried lust. Oh well. I decanted the wine into a clean glass, drank it, folded the salmon into a section of crust, and then lay on my bed for a few minutes in thought, munching it all up with my superb teeth.

  2: February

  (i) It’s easy enough to see what it was

  that fucked me up — TERRY

  Gregory Riding is my foster-brother. He is. I was adopted by his parents when I was nine. That first bit of my life, which was full of crappy things, took place at Dawkin Street in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, not quite a slum but going that way (I haven’t been back. It probably is one by now), clutches of post-war semi-detacheds flanking thin yellow streets, sections of grass that they considered you ought to have, old scooters in back gardens. My mother died when I was six and for three years my sister and I lived under the sole care of my father, Ronald Service. Then my sister died on me too. I don’t know whether my father killed my mother; but I bloody know he killed my sister, because I was there at the time and watched him as he did so. (Suck on that. It’s easy enough to see what it was that fucked me up. I go on about all this a lot. I make no apologies. It’s just too bad. I’m allowed to go on about it, on account of it fucking me up.) Rosie Service was seven when Ronnie Service killed her; she had fat freckly cheeks, pencil legs and impossibly narrow shoulders that cause me to ache with tenderness for her even now — even now, as I sit here slumped in the middle of what appears to be my life, with its days and days. That mad fuck (my language, like everything else about me these days, gets worse and worse), he probably didn’t mean to do that to her. But did he mean to do this to me?

  Anyway, the murder claimed a fair amount of local attention at the time. Indeed if it hadn’t been for a whopping lapse on the part of the authorities my case might never have come under the twinkly, philanthropic gaze of Greg’s family. I stayed on alone at the scene, at 11 Dawkin Street, for over a week: people came to take my father away, people came to take my sister away (she went quietly — he didn’t), but no one came to take me away (someone goofed. Someone fucked up. Take me where, anyhow?). And for a week I picked my terrified way through the dead rooms, through the rank scullery-world of thickened milk and glaring butter, through the nights on that nail-bed of nerves, and through the slow time of the pendulous afternoons. Can you imagine? I didn’t go out and I stayed away from the windows. I was hiding. I was very, very ashamed of what those two had done.