Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

they’re overr8ed! 1 h8 them! & what an un4tun8 effect it has on the ego: he thinks he’s the b’s knees. it’s not size th@ m@ters, clint. it’s love th@ m@ters.

u ask also 4 my name. i don’t no y i’m feeling quite so shy about it. it suddenly seems so intim8. the 1st act of commitment, if u will. u want 2 no my name. well it’s … k8. there. i’ve said it. ‘k8.’ ‘“k8 …” ‘& u ask about my loox. 1st, my figure. 1 swain was consider8 enough 2 tell me th@ my ‘tits were crap’. another ventured the opinion th@ i had ‘a crap arse’.

So she’s taken her nox — fuck, her knocks — too, Clint noted. Poor little thing.

(no young gentleman has yet proved sufficiently gallant 2 aver th@ i have ‘a crap cunt’.) in fact i am inordin8ly proud of my body as it has developed over the years. i’m not a c@walk cutout, nor a mega-boobed 6-queen: just an honest middle-w8. & @ 25, i’m bloomin’!

Age-difference: perfect, thought Clint.

as 4 my face. my i’s r green (tho not with n v!). my hair is s&y & ‘flyaway’. men have a habit of saying th@ i am blessed with a submissive & yielding manner, in an old-fashioned way: quintessentially femi9. i’m 5′7″, and i no u r a taller man, clint. which is as it should b. height m@ters: th@’s an axiom@ic rule of @traction.

And you’re right. You’re not wrong. You’re right, thought Clint. Know why? Birds want tall nippers: Darwin and that.

a while ago i did some c@alogue modelling work. i was also a bingo-caller & prize-presenter @ the Mirage in King’s X, and u have 2 b pretty pretty be4 they let u do th@. i even appeared in the pp. of your aug. journal. not what u think! (tell u 18er. just u w8 & c.) must — . 2dle-oo! k8.

Not in Readers’ Richards, surely to God, thought Clint. And then his doorbell rang.

This event, in most households no great matter, invariably represented the direst of emergencies at 24, The Grove, Foulness. There was a time when he would have simply sprinted upstairs, positioned a hand-mirror between the outer wall and the drainpipe, and eyed the front step from the porthole, treating each case on its merits. But such free and easy dealings with the outside world belonged to a happier time. Now Clint crawled across the floor and locked himself in the bathroom, where he assumed the fetal position on the damp tiles. The doorbell’s morse: how he writhed like a lab-rat to its jabs. Next came silence, increasingly gorgeous, until the silence was itself silenced — by a sound that would have taken him over the top at Passchendaele: the car alarm of the Avenger.

In his untethered bathrobe and Y-fronts tinged grey as if with the smear of newsprint, Smoker pitched himself out into the morning.

‘Oi, my car …’

It was one of those days when the ocean medium had leaked into the lower air, bodying forth a sopping mist and mast-high cloudlets that looked solid to the touch. There was the Avenger at the bottom of the dead front garden, longsufferingly honking; and there was the broad shape on the seaward side of it, leaning on it, waiting there.

‘That’s my car …’

Now the broad shape moved clear.

‘Ah. Eh up,’ said Clint, showing his palms. ‘Now, mate. No. You ain’t … you ain’t about to dispense the proverbial I hope. I’ve been a good boy, mate. Utterly oyster. I never—’

Mal Bale raised a stocky index finger to his upper lip. His manner, Clint was pleased to see, was not concertedly threatening: not all hot and righteous, like it had been that time on the Thames, outside the Cocked Pinkie. Mal’s manner was merely disaffected, inconvenienced … Clint thought for a moment. He was a newspaperman. Newspapering was in his veins. One day, at the office, he had typed out the forbidden name on a search-engine, which he never launched. For a moment he had felt like the science-fiction physicist who fears that he may obliterate the universe at the touch of a key.

‘It ain’t that,’ said Mal.

‘Then why are you here, mate?’

‘I am here as a representative’, said Mal, ‘of Ebony Escorts.’

Jesus, not the escorts again. With some people you can never … Sheer spite on her part, thought Clint. Though — okay — maybe he’d overdone it a bit on the His Voluminousness.

The girl, Rehab, had humiliated him totally and, this being the case, had thoroughly deserved the lesson he’d taught her. She went and let him down at one of the Lark ‘s Sovereign Suppers (monthly occasions, held in the private rooms of prestigious Soho restaurants). Heaf was there of course, with his sheep, Mrs Heaf, and Mackelyne was there with his, Mrs Mackelyne, and Strite was there with some dolly or poppet, and Supermaniam was there with one of his many-armed subcontinental divinities …

Told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend, Rehab explained to the assembled accompany that she was an escort girl told, and paid, to pretend that she was Clint’s girlfriend.

‘Ladies. Guys,’ Clint had said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to a certain someone who’s become very special to me. Ladies. Guys. Say hi to Rehab.’

‘Charmed,’ said Heaf. ‘Sit here, dear.’

‘Dear’ is right, thought Clint. You couldn’t call them darling or sweetheart, but you could definitely call them dear.

‘Now tell me, dear: how long have you and Clint known each other?’

Rehab looked at her watch and said, ‘An hour and fifteen minutes.’

And then it all came out.

Apart from anything else it was a flagrant breach of contract. They’d done the budgeting earlier on: this much for every fondly shared reminiscence, this much for every stroke of Clint’s hand, this much for every blown kiss and melting gaze, this much for every proffered spoonful of her crème brûlée.

Afterwards, on their optioned-for but uncosted return to the hotel, Clint, using all his charm and the promise, at least, of a significant fraction of his net worth, induced Rehab to take her clothes off and go and prepare herself in the bathroom. Which he then locked, and walked out with all her gear under his arm. And that was the extent of it. There had been no suggestion whatever of the hair-tugging and nipple-twisting that had so expensively marred his encounter with Scheherazade from Escorts De Luxe. All Rehab’d had to do was screech down the fifteen floors until a passerby told the doorman.

On top of leaving himself alone for a couple of nights, Clint had prepared for his date with Rehab by taking three Potentium and five His Voluminousness. His Voluminousness was another webdrug Clint had started using. It was meant to increase the bulk of your ejaculations ‘to porno proportions’, according to the literature. And it did. You might have your doubts about the quality (the colour, the texture, the redolence, and so on), but you couldn’t argue with the quantity.

In this lay Clint’s error — and Rehab’s grievance. First, drinks in the bar, and Clint with his pen poised over the paper napkin, sketching out the manifest (and keeping his eye on all the sundries). Then the rush of the elevator beneath your feet, the heavy moment as the key entered the lock, the azure carpet, the floral curtains … Now at these prices a bloke’ll want fair dealing — and Rehab was gypping him left and right. So, when the moment came, Clint reckoned he’d do a Dork Bogarde to Rehab’s Donna Strange. He had been aiming for her chest (not her lower abdomen, as negotiated), and hadn’t meant to lash it all over her throat and neck and hair.

Then Rehab’s hubbub, yelling down the phone for the drier and the extra shampoo. They were half an hour late for dinner, and he gave her a piece of his mind in the cab. She was a professional, wasn’t she? Where was her pride? A girl like her, used to dealing with nutters and perverts and inadequates, and she raises Cain over a lad who happens to have a bit of man in him? He said it again and again: Where was her pride? And this too perhaps explained why a recently goosed Rehab, on arrival at the table, was so thoroughly out of sorts …