Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘We … we weren’t all born with a talent like yours. You’re a god, you are.’

Ainsley now turned inexorably on Clint Smoker. ‘I stood, mate. I stood. The National Amfem! The fucking King’s there just above the dugout with tears in his eyes! With the grace of a pamfer I’ve put Hugalu on his arse, nutmegged Straganza, and laid it off for Martin Arris! The Twin Towers explode! With love, mate, with love!’

‘They can’t take that away from you, Ains,’ conceded Mal.

The dog looked up at the footballer with eyes of loving brown.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it, son. Go and get arseholed on Ainsley Car. Everyone stand back! That’s not a dog! It’s a rabies bomb! ALL PASSENGERS IN SEATS FIVE TO TEN PROCEED AT ONCE TO THE SECOND LEVEL OF THE SUBMARINE! IT’S GOING OFF, IT’S GOING OFF! ’

Then, like two athletes genuinely committed to winning the three-legged race, Ainsley launched his desperate hurdle into the night, Darius following, first at a jog, then at a run, then at a sprint.

Clint remained, as did Mal. Mal was wondering what kind of mood Shinsala would be in when he got back to her flat. As he swung the car door shut, as he listened to the chirrup of the lock, would he feel the excuse me of fear in his chest? Not physical fear, of course, but fear. Was fear a mood?

‘You could do it by maths,’ said Clint. ‘Divide his weekly wage by his IQ. Something like that.’

‘Clint mate,’ said Mal, winding up.

Smoker offered him a look of effusive contrition. In the last thirty minutes there had been a power-shift between the two men. Clint had tended, in his previous dealings with Mal, to regard him as an affable plonker obliged to earn a living with his fists. But male anger, male heat so easily translatable into male violence, had rearranged this view. Clint thought of himself as big and strong, and there were those ragged brawls of his that he always won. Still, Mal’s violence was efficient, professionalised and above all righteous: it was something that Clint could never counter. At this moment Clint’s fear felt to him like love — love for Mal Bale.

‘Clint mate. Are you a cunt?’

‘No, Mal. I’m not a cunt.’

‘Now. What happens if you let me down.’

‘Well, obviously the proverbial’ll hit the fan, won’t it. Obviously.’

‘If you want to know how hard, give your boy Andy a call at the end of the week. All right?’

‘Yeah mate. All the best then, Mal. Go easy. Take care, mate.’

Clint Smoker was laughing by the time he hoisted himself on to the flight deck of his black Avenger. Adrenalin: it’s very good stuff. As he put his foot down (within minutes, consecutive thought would be entirely sacrificed to motorly concerns) Clint began to compose an e-mail in his head, beginning, ‘What do you say to the hoary old chestnut, Does size matter?’

The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money — and the Queen was not in the parlour, eating bread and honey …

Henry was coming south on the Royal Train. This train of his had an ‘office’ car, a conference car, a drawing-room car, a bedroom car, a dining-room car, a kitchen car, a staff car, a security car, and an observation car. The potentate was in the ‘office’ car, writing his daily letter to the Princess. Like nearly all the interiors he had ever known, it was a chamber of restless lines: absolutely nothing had been left in peace. Every plane was harassed with ornament; the walls were tiled with paintings and framed photographs, the flat surfaces infested with curios and bibelots; each panel of the ceiling insisted on its cloudscape, its putto, its madonna, its nude. Denied the freedom of vast dimension, the train was like the condition of being royal: it was always on at you and it never let you be.

There were frequent and durable and much-resented delays, but the Royal Train was technically non-stop. At this stage only the King knew of the coming rendezvous, in a siding at Royston, near Cambridge, with Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, who claimed to bear both positive and negative news.

‘My darling daughter,’ the letter had begun … ‘The Lepers’, he now wrote, ‘were rather a pain. Then the nightmare of the flight back. The turbulence over the Channel was, as always, pretty good hell. On landing, straight off to the Head Injury lot, which was a fair form of medieval torture. You have to hang round listening to people who can barely talk and say how wonderfully they’re getting on. Then, in the afternoon, I went north, on the Train.’

He paused. Going north had been like a journey into organic depression, a journey into night and into winter. At first, merely the obese cauldrons of the power-stations adding their clouds to the huge grey. Then the sky turned fuzzily black, with bright seams. Every now and then the sun would appear, like a miner’s helmet coming down a chimney. They met the night at three-fifteen. And finally the Kyle of Tongue, strapped on to its crag in the North Sea.

‘There has, alas, been no change in Mummy’s condition,’ Henry wrote on, his elaborate calligraphy rendered even more tremulous by the careening wheels. ‘I must say I now thoroughly dread these visits. What’s so heartbreaking is that Mummy is quite unchanged, as serenely handsome as ever.’ He broke off, and shuddered. ‘The hairdresser still attends her once a day, they still do her nails once a week, and she is of course frequently “turned”. If it weren’t for the ghastly wheezing of the ventilator, one might expect her to open her eyes and say, with all the old joviality, “Oh Daddy, don’t just sit there! Where’s my pot of tea?” As I have often said, whilst there have been cases of people emerging from “PVS” after periods of several years, we must contine to steel ourselves for the worst. The “team”, my darling, may be reduced from three to two, but it’s still a team, you and I, my dearest one. You and I. We Two.

‘The presence of the media …’

He paused. And continued:

‘… simultaneously cheapens and confuses one’s sufferings. Of course I am moved, of course I am shaken. But must I display my wounds to the camera? And this is when they are at their most respectful! “Don’t be afraid to shed a tear, Your Majesty”! It makes one want to vom. More and more viscerally do I feel that the media are base violators who poison everything they touch.’

He paused. How had Bugger put it? ‘The Princess should be told’, Urquhart-Gordon had said, ‘that there may have been a breach of her privacy.’ No, thought Henry: too early for that. And continued: ‘It seems to me that we two ought to have a “peptalk” on this very subject, and on security in general; I will come on Saturday (5th), and we can have a lovely chat in that perfectly decent hotel.’

There followed a fantastic display of diminutives and endearments.

Henry then rang for Love.

At Royston they began to slow. Up ahead, in an almost invisibly fine mist, lay the siding where large-eyed Urquhart-Gordon now stood with a lone detective. And the black car, beyond, with its driver. The train was still moving when Brendan climbed aboard.

Henry IX said, ‘Give me the bad first, that good may come of it.’

‘The discouraging news, sir, is that the photograph is not, in fact, a photograph.’ Brendan composed the sleek lines of his eager, clever face. ‘It is a still.’

He had mentally set aside quite a few seconds for Henry to take this in. And the King’s head actually idled on its base for a full half-minute before he murmured,

‘From a film.’

‘Well, yes, sir. From a film.’

Brendan heard Henry’s sigh — long and searching, with a muted whimper at the end of it.