Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘“Your ankles will be nice and warm” ‘, Heaf incredulously quoted, ‘“as you feast your todger on another array of top-grade totty, submitted by our red-blooded …” ‘He sat back. ‘Sweet mother of Christ, will you look at that — that troll in the top left-hand corner.’

‘I’m getting e’s from blokes who’re stapling the pages together in case they see it by accident.’

‘You should have a look at what we’re not using. Every last one of them takes years off your life.’

‘You got to brace yourself, and even then …’

‘There’s not that many to choose from. And we’re already running out.’

‘Three point seven million wankers,’ said Heaf weightily. ‘And this is the best they can do. Well then. What’s our course of action?’

‘Simple,’ said Jeff Strite. ‘Scrap it. Without comment.’

‘No. See,’ said Clint, ‘that’s another insult. And it’s not what they’re after.’ He pointed at the four heaped stacks of printed protests. ‘ They can’t believe it either. They’re not telling us to scrap it. They’re telling us to say it isn’t so.’

‘And there’s a road out of this, Clint?’

‘Yeah, Chief. We can turn it around. Over a period of a few days we weed out the Wives and start replacing them with models.’

‘What, our own girls? Bit obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Well, not the Donna Stranges of this world, obviously. Use more like the also-rans. And if a famous face does get in there now and then … See, it’s not overly rational, is it, their response? We’ve kicked them in the arse. We’ve insulted them. Now let’s flatter them.’

In the fight for the Lark ‘s ideological soul, Clint Smoker was always alertingly radical. He alone, it sometimes seemed, had a true estimation of their typical reader. He now went on to add,

‘It’ll go down okay. You could fill that spread with filmstars and have a strap saying dream on, you stupid sods and it would still go down okay. The other thing we need to do is improve the decor. Not these bleeding … coalholes. Look at the one on the middle right.’

Heaf rotated his head ninety degrees to the left, and then realigned it very slowly before jerking back from the page.

Clint said, ‘That could illustrate a piece about white slavery or slum housing. The whole spread could. No. We want reasonable birds on three-piece suites. Or better. And if you had them in the driveways of stately homes, I assure you, our wankers would be none the wiser.’

There was a silence of about half a minute.

‘Thank you for those words, Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘Make it so. Additional points … Now. All the other papers are going on about the NEO, the asteroid or whatever it is, and I’m sure our instinct was sound when we decided we’d completely ignore it. But with all these earth-shaking events going on — aren’t we short-changing the wanker on current affairs? I think we should at least mention the main wars and plagues and famines and what have you. Now I know our emphasis is essentially domestic, but with the world situation as it is I can’t help thinking we’re slacking off a bit on our foreign news.’

‘I agree, Chief,’ said Strite. ‘I could do with another month in Bangkok.’

Everyone laughed tensely.

What’s funny? thought Clint. Gentle reader. Reader, I married him. T.S. Eliot: A Reader’s Guide. Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frere!

dear clint: your remarx about your childhood struck a chord. i 2 never felt th@ i was ‘1 of the “gang” ‘. some of us seem 2 have been singled out. We r, in some sense, ‘special’. & i no th@ if i ever find some1 2 spend the rest of my days with, then he would have 2 b ‘special’ 2.

Clint had recently read a piece in a magazine which posited the emergence of a new human type: the high-IQ moron. Wised-up, affectless, and non-empathetic, high-IQ morons, according to the writer (a woman novelist), were also supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change — an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling. So Clint was relieved, in a way, to find himself flinching and smiling, smiling and flinching, at the authorial style of his newfound penpal. In the text-messaging line, and so on, he had seen the King’s English far more miserably disfigured. But never quite like this. Never, quite, in the service of mutual exploration and courtship — and with such good grammar. Clint knew about grammar. Mr and Mrs Smoker: both schoolteachers. And old hippies. Old — now dead — hippies. Dead hippies. Jesus: what happened?

Still, Clint wasn’t about to be critical. Clint? Critical when it came to birds? Deprived for so long of female influence, he felt — well, these words of hers were like a lifeline to the guy. Like a lifeline.

He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography — with its infinities, its immortalities — Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them. And the distance was getting greater all the time.

What happened? What was emanating from him, what was he giving off? He was, he thought, no uglier (and by now much richer) than the bloke you saw all over the place with his trusting female companion who was always ready to kiss his earring or stroke the nap of his fuzz or gaze into his dark glasses with a smile of roguish forgiveness.

Must be nice, he thought. Ring it up when you’re walking down the street: so everybody knows. ‘Hello, love, it’s me. I’m walking down the street. What’s for dinner?’ Romantic evening. Table set for two. Slip it a Narcopam in its coffee: take the pressure off.

Must be nice. But it never had been nice. Even when things were bowling along all friendly, he always sensed the weight, the sinkage, the falling mercury inside his chest. Because he knew full well that they were just waiting — waiting for their chance. In bed, of course, the eternal battle was to make them feel it : to transform them with your strength. And that’s what the books said women were after too, at one remove: the metamorphosis of impregnation by the strongest available male. So they were always waiting, calculating, comparing — always ready to belittle … This, at any rate, was what Clint kept telling himself (wash your hands of them; they’re all the same; and so on). But his unconscious mind suspected otherwise. He heard from his unconscious mind, sometimes. On Sunday afternoons as he lay abed licking his nasal handcuffs in the hopeless pit of his Foulness semi, he would sometimes hear it say: ‘I don’t know, mate. There’s going to be grief. I don’t know, mate. It’s all going to end in tears.’

She was like a lifeline to the guy:

my man of the moment (& i do mean moment) is of the ‘macho’ type. u no: down the gym all Sat, football on Sun morning & 10nis in the afternoon. borlNG! i like a fella who drinx beer in front of the tele — with me on his lap! in bed, while we r having 6, he moans at me 2 scream. i tell him: i’m not the kind that will per4m @ your beck & call! don’t (me with TH@ sort! i suppose he thinx th@ screaming = abandon. but i don’t WANT abandon. y o y, clint, do people use 6 2 infl8 their own gr&iosity?

Although the piece of paper he had in his hand was merely a printout of an e-mail, Clint held it to his cuffed nostrils, as if hoping for an intimation of her scent. And he had read it, oh, three or four dozen times. I’m not going to mess this one up, he thought: no way.

the trouble is i’ve never been able 2 ‘sack’ a man. 2 anger a man. i wouldn’t dare. offend a MAN? so i have 2 go on mildly displeasing him (and th@’s bad enough) till he pax his bags & moves on. how? o u no, clint — little things. i 4get 2 praise him as of10 as i used 2. i refuse 2 wipe his p off the toilet seat. i speak up 4 myself. wh@ i’m really saying is: join the q, m8, 2 the back door! clint, i’m tired of it. let me b clear: i h8 the ‘new man’ 2, so ‘caring’ in the bedroom. ‘did u finish?’ ‘was it good 4 u 2?’ yes! 7th heaven! cloud 9! y can’t people just b themselves, clint? 2 much herd instinct, 2 much falsity, 2 much pre10ce.