Success (22 page)

I tried again that evening. The same. A nightmare succession of slow, smelly, packed, jerking buses ferried me home by seven-thirty. Ursula and Terence were
having one of their sickly little evenings together downstairs, and I couldn’t face them anyway. I lay on my bed until about eleven, then braved the bathroom. Terence, looking sly and reptilian in an absurd new shirt, sat crouched at his desk over a fathom of whisky. We never know how to greet each other these days. Good night. Hello. See you tomorrow. Ursula was in bed, knitting, and I paused for a rare chat — yes, she was fine, and had no trouble filling the days. Alone among the steel and glass of the bathroom, I found myself toying once more with the idea of instructing Ursula to visit me later in my bed. But no — that would be just as frightening in its way. I went upstairs again and took a strong pill, and another, and let them all fight it out like blind tribes inside my head. Somewhere in a room near by, in one of the forsaken tenements along the street, a demented foreigner bawled on hysterically into the night. What was it he kept screaming? … 
Shut the doors — shut the doors — shut the doors
 … At one point I sleepwalked to the open window and looked out. The doors of the black ambulance that had come for him were certainly open; but even when someone closed the doors after him he went on shrieking mechanically,
Shut the doors — shut the doors
 … Which doors could he have meant, I wondered as I returned to my bed. It might as well have been morning by the time I wound down into sleep, the pillow grey and wet, the dawn grey and soiled behind my curtains.

I tried again this morning. The same. As soon as the brutal lift doors cracked shut I knew that there was absolutely no chance, not the puniest most blighted hair of hope. I walked quite solemnly up the great steel staircase. I took a cab this morning. But I can’t afford it. I must adapt my life.

Who is there to talk to? I rang Torka from the gallery — rude Keith answered and was impossibly offensive when I asked him to make Torka call me back. I rang Mama from a telephone-box at lunchtime — but she was preoccupied and vague and too far away. Skimmer and
Kane — they’re idiots really, just upper-class yobs (you never did meet them, did you?); they wouldn’t understand anything like this. God, sometimes you turn round to test the rope-holds of your life and realize how tenuous they are. Now I’ve got this new thing in my life called panic. It was only a word to me until yesterday. What do I want with panic? Why can’t panic go and pick on somebody else?

After a confused talk with Ursula, I returned home by surface mail, edged along the queueing city with all the others in the sluggish reshuffle of evening. Ursula — and Terence, if you please — were waiting up in my room, both looking pathetically dependent on me to transform their day, to relieve their series of tired little compacts below-stairs. I had intended to take Ursula out to dinner, and now felt too drained to prevent Terence from joining us; when I decided on the French place in Dawn Street and Ursula ran off to get ready, I made no real effort to stop him tagging along. We walked there zestlessly. The restaurant was crowded and far too dark (practically requiring usherettes to guide the diners to their tables). Once I had secured an aperitif and decided on my meal I abstractedly relinquished the job of ordering it to Terence; this he stutteringly did, with much gauche deference to the waiters (and how badly he pronounced the names of the French wines). I let them both chatter through dinner, and then, after two large Benedictines, forced Terence to pay, by way of recompense for giving him an evening out. But it afforded me no genuine pleasure, even when I saw that huge tab whisked away, smothered with Service’s fivers. We walked home three-abreast (T. on the outside, one foot in the gutter, dodging trees); it was suggested we have some ‘coffee’ together, a scheme I briskly quashed. They scuttled off to their beds downstairs, to the calm cycles of their calm lives, while I, with the help of some pills and that liquor, searched for the letter A in the random alphabet of sleep.

What happened to me down there?

Everything has changed. That was all it took. A whole layer of protective casing has been ripped off my life. Nothing looks the way it used to look. Familiar objects now writhe with their own furtive being (I think they do things behind my back). When my eyes pass over the trogs, the yobs, the animals in the street — people who were hardly there at all before — I get sucked in by them helplessly and see the hell
they
are too. I take nothing for granted any more: the tiniest action or thought is broken down into a million contingencies. I have come out. I am one of you now. Where did I catch all this?

There are many more secrets I must tell you. But go easy on me. It’s my birthday. Let’s take things one at a time. (I know. I caught it from him.)

There is now something leprous and inexorable about my nights. Things have progressed with steady certainty, with the slow cohering logic of a genre novel, or a chess combination, or a family game. Already I know how it will end — things will suddenly get much worse for two of us and never get better again — but I cannot break out. I don’t want to break out. I will go on until it happens. That seems to be the only thing I can do.

I went out with a blind girl for a while, you know — that’s right, totally, congenitally blind: she even sported dark
glasses and a white stick, which used to look like a floating chalk mark or a trail of smoke in the streets at night, an irrelevant thing when we were all blind too. Plenty of attractions, then, for the concerned, duffle-coated student, with his plastic bag of books and his experimental ginger beard (I soon aimed
that
). She was small, Jewish and slender; she had dazzling black hair, a large tragic nose, damp-sand complexion and wide lips almost as brown as her skin; she was regretfully agreed by all to be pretty. Think, also, of the poignancy of that brave but hesitant figure, strolling relaxed and cheerful with her friends between lectures, yet an uncertain sleepwalker when you glimpsed her alone in the town, her tread trying to be firm, her expression changing with scary rapidity as she moved down unknown paths. Consider, in addition, the fact that (a) she was a girl, and (b) she couldn’t see what I looked like, and you begin to appreciate the full potency of her spell.

She was tremendously easy to negotiate. I merely helped her across the road one day in town, asked her where she was going, and announced my intention to accompany her. There’s nothing they can do about it, you see: that’s the point of them. I was as nice as I possibly could be to her for a very long time. In due course she started almost going to bed with me (yes, she was one of the girls I wrote to when nobody would go anywhere near going to bed with me. She is a married woman now, or dead, or
tonto
in a home. Can’t quite remember if she ever replied). I knew it was going to turn nasty the moment her blindness became something I could use: and, sure enough, one evening, in her room, when she removed the freckly hand that was shimmering flat-palmed up her thigh and placed it primly back on my lap, I raised my hand again and waggled two fat splayed fingers underneath her nose. Suddenly the door was open. I took to hovering behind the sofa on which she sat, peering without relish into the slanting triangle of her shirt; I used to return on all fours from putting on a record, staring the while up her
skirt (they don’t know how to sit right, these blind girls); I would make faces at her constantly, finding particular enjoyment in belying my words with my facial expression, so that, say, everyday cordialities would be synchronized with gazes of rapt ardour, tender endearments chaperoned by contortions of sneering hate, etc. Finally, as we lay naked in her bed one evening (that was okay. But she was into non-penetration), I produced, with some effort, the sound-effects of a crying-jag, piteously honing that she could not really love me, that I would die if I did not possess her, and suchlike mendacities. In the end she complied, shedding more tears than I ever shed that night. We didn’t see each other again. The point was, you understand, that she
knew
I was faking, but couldn’t say she knew. Because that would have been much too frightening, wouldn’t it?

This is one of the ways you get them at your mercy.

Shudder shudder.

‘What else did you do?’ I ask, arresting with a twitch of my haunches the downward trend of Ursula’s hand.

‘Mm?’

She has just slid into bed with me for the eighteenth night running and seems by now quite blasée about the routine, showing a tendency, indeed, to get down to her task with what I take to be insulting dispatch (not that my cock gives a shit one way or the other. It does just like I tell it these days).

‘You and him. What else did you do?’ Stiffly I place an arm round her shoulders, raising the timbre of my voice to make things sound friendly.

‘Well, yes,’ she muses to my armpit (I don’t know how she can bear me during these revolting interludes), ‘as a matter of fact there were other things we did.’

‘… Oh yes? Like what?’

She wriggles slightly. ‘Can’t
say
them.’

‘Do it then,’ I hear myself tell her, in the impervious monotone I have developed for such requests: ‘Do it.’

Again with a non-committal grunt, as of some dead-end toiler asked to switch from one equally meaningless chore to another, my foster-sister shinnied down the bed. There was no contact between her skin and mine until I felt the firm, distinct clamp of her lips.

‘Was that all right?’ I asked in awed disbelief when she resurfaced.

‘I think I’ll get used to it,’ said Ursula, crinkling her her nose in distaste.

Hardly perfect, is it?

After each one of these nightly acts — after Ursula’s self-satisfied ‘There’, uttered in the tone of the truly experienced virgin — my immediate and prevailing instinct has been one of grateful, yearning reciprocation. On the first night I slithered down the bed like a fool, and only after a humiliating struggle — Ursula half-slithering down the bed with me — did I blinkingly re-emerge. Clearly, that wasn’t the idea. For the next few nights I reached out for the body in the bed beside me with a kind of ecstatic circumspection, as if it were a friend’s baby or a critical nuclear pile, only for my fingers to find it dead, dead, a frozen log on a gusty night. Once she jerked away with crude abruptness, and I snarled silently in the darkness. For a moment there, I was back where I was before. I haven’t tried since. But I’m going to try again soon. I’ve been thinking what’s best to do.

Is Gregory on to us? (Has he said anything?) I would guess not. I would guess he has other things on his mind. Natural conceit protects him, of course, but now there are other things, and I’m pretty sure I know what they are. He looks scared (look at him!
He
looks
scared
). He looks as if the very air might turn on him in fury … When we were young, I was always the scared one, always getting fucked up and peed on at school, always getting stomped and creamed by the townies, always getting belted and hollered at by the parkies, always in tears over some trifling slight, always scared. Gregory hardly ever cried as a child — only at the distress of others (yes, that’s true).
Now he goes about with the ripe, tremulous smile of someone with too much emotion in his nostrils. He is really scared.

I don’t think I need do anything about him after all. Something else is doing it for me. I think things are being taken care of very nicely.

‘Ah, hullo. Come in, Terry.’

‘… Which way?’

I stood in the sweeping drive of Mr Stanley Veale’s Fulham home, an auburn three-storey Victorian residence against whose broad husk various gleaming superstructures leaned and crouched. Veale addressed me through the slide-up window of one of these dinky little afterthoughts, what looked like an oval breakfast-room full of pink chairs and motley scatter-cushions. His great white face remained expressionless.

‘Through the car-ports.’

Oh, you have more than one car-port, do you, I thought, having already noticed the three cars lying in their ruts of gravel — the heavy Ford Granada, the van, the Mini.

‘Which car-port?’ I asked.

‘There’s only one car-ports,’ said Veale gravely. ‘I keep the Granada down the road. It’s for the runabouts. Round the side.’

Oh, you have more than one runabout, do — ‘Oh, right,’ I said, tardily realizing that Veale’s lust for the plural was a shrill result only of his posh emphasis on the terminal
t
(a decade ago, no doubt, he would have said
car-por
’ and
runabar
’. But then again he wouldn’t have needed to say those words a decade ago). Hence also, presumably, his fondness for the husky initial
h
. Veale said
hello
like a resolute halitotic sounding out a friendship.

I set off round the side — Veale’s head gingerly withdrawing — between the fireman’s poles of the car-port, and into an open-air vestibule where a large selection of cloaks, capes and bike-ponchos stood hooked to the wall,
shrivelled prisoners in a northern camp. A heap of lopped feet, in the form of discarded wellingtons, lay on the tiled floor. A glass wall slid back: Veale turned away down a wide passage that immediately spanned out into a doublelevel sitting-room — fluffy white rugs like snow on moss, facing sofas as long as cinema rows, a fireplace the size of a back-entrance to Versailles, a kidney-shaped bar against the shelved walls of bottles.