Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

As he came muttering up over the bridge a voice hailed him from behind:

‘I say! Excuse me! Young man!’

Turning, And saw a compact gent of late-middle years, wearing a chalkstripe suit with its three jacket buttons fastened, dark glasses, and a black borsalino.

‘Thank you, thank you. Now. I wonder if you could very kindly direct me to …’

With some difficulty he detached an envelope from his inside pocket. He smiled. ‘How are you?’ he asked heartily.

‘All right. How are you?’

‘I’ve never felt better in my life, thank you, and I’m thoroughly enjoying this spell of fine weather we’re having.’

One of those accents: posher than the King.

‘I’m looking for Mornington Crescent , do you see. Not Mornington Terrace, Mornington Crescent …’

Andy soon set him right.

‘Ah. Thank you so much.’

At this point, with an elegant rotation of the wrist, the man in the suit removed his dark glasses — to reveal the strangest eyes And had ever seen. So bright yet so pale: Antarctic blue, with yellow haloes. For a moment Andy wondered where the bloke had left his guide dog.

‘Tell me. Would you be Andrew New?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name is Semen Figner …’

Pronouncing the name in a different voice: Slavic. And New saw that the blue eyes had foully darkened.

‘Your woman is shit,’ Semen Figner said normally. ‘Your kid is shit.’

First Officer Nick Chopko : Hey, that’s kind of cool …

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Excuse me?

Chopko : See it? Second to go, runway right.

Captain John Macmanaman : … Well well. The old De Hav Comet. What? Nineteen fifty-five? Where’s that going?

Ward : Croydon, maybe? The Aviation Museum?

Macmanaman : … This wait is going to eat into my retirement.

Chopko : Yeah. I would like to take off while I’m still quite young.

After the seventy-minute weather delay, CigAir 101 had pushed back from its stand and joined the queue on runway nine. Flight regulations insisted on a three-minute interval between ascents. But on this day, of course, all the transatlantic equipment had to be off the ground by eleven o’clock sharp. The tower decided on the Emergency Interval of 130 seconds. And the Captain coolly advised his passengers to prepare for some ‘slipstream turbulence’; with slipstream turbulence, he might have gone on to say, the passenger will feel more like a mariner than an aeronaut, shouldering through heavy seas at 200 miles per hour.

Tower : One oh one heavy, you are cleared.

Macmanaman : Acknowledge.

Tower : Up and dirty.

At 10.53, 101 Heavy put its head down and went looking for the escape velocity. Reynolds Traynor was bolt upright in seat 2B. She had a cigarette in her mouth and the trigger of a lighter waiting beneath the print of her bent left thumb.

Chopko : V1 … V2. Out of here.

The instant the tyres left the tarmac the Captain extinguished the no-smoking sign.

A climbing plane normally welcomes the surge of a stiff headwind; but the headwind facing 101 Heavy, while no longer describable as a storm , was still, at forty-six knots, a severe gale. The Captain thus faced two immediate dangers, one grave, one merely very serious, with or without the slipstream turbulence and its ‘funnelling’ effect. The first danger was that the aircraft would go ‘beneath the BUG’, or the minimum flying speed, and submit to its own gravity load (resulting in a black box which consisted of a brief squall of obscenities). The second danger was that of ‘nose-lift’: here, the windforce meets the plane on its rising breast and renders it vulnerable to ‘toppleback’. Nose-lift was what happened to 101 Heavy. Lighting a cigarette from its predecessor’s trembling ember, Reynolds leaned into the aisle and looked aft. The inter-compartment curtains had fluttered up to head height. She was staring into a lift-shaft — but one thickly peopled. The women she could see wore contorted faces: bared teeth, incredulous scowls. As for the others, their brows were marked by the childish, the calflike frowns of men expecting death.

101 Heavy was twenty degrees from the horizontal (it felt more like twenty degrees from the vertical), and at maximum power, when it hit the torn air of the slipstream.

At this point the locks securing the coffin of Royce Traynor snapped free from their bracket. Falling end over end for thirty-five feet, Royce powerdived into a mosaic of wall-bolted mountain bikes. Wedged at an acute angle against the cargo door, he remained more or less upright when the plane steadied and continued a shallow climb to its cruising altitude.

‘Isn’t it great to be above the weather?’ said the man in 2A. ‘I’d like to live above the weather.’

‘Yeah,’ said Reynolds. ‘But not today.’

‘Not today.’

He was staring at her legs, very critically, or so it seemed to Reynolds, who liked her legs. Now he was staring at her feet.

‘You shouldn’t have worn heels,’ he said. ‘You could puncture the inflatable emergency-slide. Which might also serve as a liferaft. You’re wearing tights.’

‘… That’s true.’

‘You shouldn’t have. They’re partly synthetic, you know,’ he said. ‘They melt and cling when they burn.’

In the hold the corpse of Royce Traynor seemed to square itself.

It was ready.

For her next encounter with the Intensivist, Russia Meo wore the most expensive clothes in her possession. A customised Italian suit of black cashmere, matching gloves and bag, court shoes. She wanted to send a clear message to Dr Gandhi: if anything went wrong, she would most certainly sue. It was also one of those days when she instinctively decided to let her figure have its head. A waisted white blouse, therefore, and her most dynamic white brassière. These luxurious expanses of silk were not aimed at Dr Gandhi (they were aimed at someone else); but perhaps the components of the olive cleavage would be making a core assertion — the assertion of life, life …

Dr Gandhi had taken due note of Russia’s appearance, and derived some doctorly stimulation from it (the relative size of the nipples was what chiefly intrigued him); but he wasn’t enjoying this second interview as much as he had enjoyed the first. The correlation of forces had already changed, as was now pretty well invariably the case. How much better it had been, how much more appreciated he had felt, when nobody knew anything — in the time before the publicity of knowledge. Now, instead of the sweating mutes of yesterday, you faced erratically wised-up mountebanks with half-assimilated case-histories, prognoses, quackeries. Dr Gandhi believed that it would be fractionally harder, henceforward, to get doctors to be doctors, such was the drain on the job-satisfaction. Russia Meo was of course an educated, indeed a distinguished woman, and he had never expected to be able to radiate downwards at her, like a Saturn. But nowadays (he reflected) every flop and waster in London had some four-eyed cousin or nephew prepared to scour the Web for all it knew … So Russia pressed from question to question; and, head injuries being head injuries, with their labyrinthine sequelae, Dr Gandhi was soon reduced to a drone of equivocation. He felt a familiar frowsiness come over him, alleviated, for a moment, when Russia turned to the white sheet of the window: the tautening of her bust allowed him to conclude that the nipples would be correspondingly large. This prompted a sexual thought, one unmoderated by the simultaneous reminder that large nipples would facilitate the business — if not the actual process — of lactation.