Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘It’s not a “past”. It’s a providence. I mean a provenance.’

‘“Meo’s marriage to O’Daniel was dissolved five years ago on grounds, among others, of physical abuse. Within months he married again. His second wife is dah dah dah …”’

‘No, go on. Who’s my second wife? Remind me.’

‘“Dr Russia Tannenbaum, who teaches at King’s College, London, and is the author of a university-press bestseller about the children of tyrants.” Remarkable.’

‘Remarkable how?’

‘No errors of fact.’

Russia pushed the bulky, frazzled tabloid across the sofa towards him. Xan saw that the piece was illustrated to shore up its theme. The photograph of Pearl belonged to a set she had circulated during one of the more regrettable spasms of their divorce: her left cheekbone was bruised and the eye above it was swollen shut (and Xan, in the same desperate struggle, had received a broken nose). As for Russia, she’d been taken by surprise in the street somewhere, and looked as though she was about to be mugged. Xan was represented by a still from a TV movie called 99 Stitches , in which he had played the part of ‘Striper’ McTavish: he had a broken bottle in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other.

‘Well you can’t say you wasn’t …’ said Xan. ‘You can’t say you weren’t warned.’

She contemplated him. His face now seemed to wear a coating, a cladding — the hospitalic subtraction of vigour and light. It was also, again, oddly leonine: something top-of-the-food-chain in the contented wreath of the mouth. This face feared no predator.

‘I’ll come back at them. In the press. I’ll get on to Rory,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell my side.’

Billie entered, without escort. In the last couple of months she had established her right to glide unaccompanied round the house — much to the profit of her inner life. Increasingly often you saw the eyes give a freshened bulge: new acquisitions, new annexations, in the forming brain.

‘Get a book, darling,’ said Russia, ‘and Daddy will read.’

‘Look at the size of this lousy rag,’ said Xan as he let it slip from his lap to the floor. ‘I’m on page eighty-six. That’s one good thing about being in the papers these days. If you’re on the news pages up front then they’ve got you. If not, you’re okay. Because you can’t fucking find it.’

Russia was certain: he had never done that before — sworn in front of Billie.

‘Want it this one,’ said the child.

And Xan turned his attention to a family of well-dressed elephants awaiting sustenance in a palatial dining-room.

‘I’m that one,’ said Billie. ‘And Mummy’s that one. And Baba’s that one. And Lada’s that one.’

Xan pointed to the head of the table, where the father sat. ‘Who’s that one?’

‘… No one.’

That one wasn’t anyone. It was just an elephant in a blue suit.

Deficit-denial, energy-debt, fatigue-management: they knew the kind of things to expect. And they went about it like sensible people.

Russia’s maternity sabbatical was coming to an end (and there was that conference in Germany), and Imaculada’s trip to Brazil was imminent and unpostponable; but Xan, in his condition, wasn’t going anywhere: so it seemed obvious. He would spend his days lolling and idling with the girls, and would make himself useful, as lackadaisically as he liked, about the house.

Both projects proved beyond him.

Very soon it became clear that he could be trusted with nothing. The spacious kitchen, where Xan spent most of his suddenly limitless free time (he was keen to reassert his culinary skills), became a psycho’s laboratory of molten frying-pans, blackened pots and blazing skillets; the waste-disposer would be chewing its way through one of his dropped tablespoons while the microwave juddered and seethed. Things slid through his fingers — spillages, sickening breakages. The toaster scorched him, the coffee-grinder finesprayed him. Even the fridge stood revealed as his foe.

Elsewhere he left traces of himself around the house, like messages sent from one animal to another. A sock, a vest, a pair of underpants, on the stairs, in the sitting-room — but also his wastes, his emanations. Whenever she went near it the bathtub always seemed to contain two feet of cold swill bearing a greenish mantle; there were flannels, scraps of tissue paper, wadded with mucus and earwax, and little middens of scurf and nail-clippings, leavings, peelings. Most signally, of course, no amount of asking could persuade him to flush the toilet: as you opened the front door you felt you were entering some coop in rustic Dorset, or the Zoo, or a men’s room from the Third World. Now, at night, his armpits gave off a smell of meat.

They were at the table, with the teamugs and the newspapers. If asked to describe the atmosphere, Russia would have called it pseudo-normal. Then he said,

‘Chicks like salad.’

‘What?’

‘Chicks like salad. That’s a real difference between the sexes. Chicks like salad.’

‘You eat salad.’

‘Yeah but I don’t like salad. No man likes salad. Chicks like salad. And I can prove it.’

She waited. ‘How?’

‘Chicks eat salad when they’re stoned. A bloke would want his chocolate bar or his sugar sandwich. Not some bullshit tomato. A chick’ll eat salad in the morning. From the fridge. Only a chick would do that. That’s how sick chicks are. Christ, is that the phone?’

‘It’s the fridge.’

‘The fridge?’

‘It’s new. Haven’t you noticed? It makes a noise if you leave the door open. You left the door open.’

‘Fuck off!’ he called out to it. ‘I wonder. Am I the first man on earth to tell his fridge to fuck off?’

It came again: a vicious chirrup.

‘Oi you. Fuck off out of it!’

‘Instead of telling it to fuck off, why don’t you go and shut it?’

‘ You shut it. And I mean your mouth and all.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that.’

‘Why not? Are you getting your period or something. Okay, I’ll make allowances. Red Rag is running in the two-thirty. You’ve got the painters in.’

The words came out this way: ‘Please try and remember yourself,’ said Russia.

After a moment his head and his shoulders dropped and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do … I am trying. You can’t imagine how hard I’m trying. You don’t know this thing. I can tell you. It’s a real cunt. ’

The doorbell buzzed. Russia swung the fridge door shut on her way to the stairs.

My room, Xan thought … Outside is cold, but my room is warm, but my fridge is cold …

When Russia came back she saw that her husband was doing two things at once. Such multitasking was now rare. Doing one thing at once was difficult enough. Still, there he sat on the sofa, where he slept and wept.

Meanwhile, the little girls handed down their judgements.

Both had at first seemed astonished but on the whole delighted to see him. Billie, in the front hall on the first day, had smiled so wide that he feared her face might break: the corners of her mouth almost disappeared into her hair. He didn’t encounter Sophie until first thing the next morning: she was what he saw when he opened his eyes. Whereas Billie, in the same situation, would have inserted herself between her parents like the crossbar of a capital h (H for home , perhaps — but with the further suggestion of a thwarting wedge), Sophie kept to the side of her mother (with whom, again resonantly, she was making the beast with no backs). Sophie too smiled. And when he opened his eyes twenty minutes later she was still smiling, and he knew it was the same smile, held good as he slept. Sophie’s smile lacked the unsustainable emphasis of Billie’s. It was faithful, grateful, and above all proprietorial; she had written him off, and now he was home. He reached out and felt her arm. The warmth this event had created, his return, came back at him through her blue-veined wrist.