Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, arrived in her hearse-like limousine. She wore a black suit and blouse and a black hat with pendant veil, which she lifted to kiss the King. They were standing apart, and Henry identified a sliver of moisture in the corner of his mouth; likewise her gloved fingers trailed meaningly across his palm. With a beseeching frown she told him how perfectly angelic he was being; and Henry felt the erotic component, the fractional overspill, in her gratitude. They had played doctors at the age of six; he had woken up thinking about her, for a while, during his years with Edith Beresford-Hale; and there had been an evening, not too long after the Queen’s accident, when something glazed and reptilian had settled on him between the second and the third course of their closeted dinner. Now he looked down at her muscular ankles, her chunky black shoes. She was so securely rooted to the earth, like Pammy. And Henry thought of the shoes of the greatgrandmother of He Zizhen. No, he didn’t want to see a woman wavering like a willow in the wind. But when they were so securely rooted … even in bed, with their feet off the ground: they just ‘got on with it’, in a mild kind of tizzy. They were never what He so often was; they were never lucid, never lost.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Best foot forward.’

‘Indeed. Prosequare. ’

Brendan Urquhart-Gordon and Chippy Edenderry joined the procession just as it turned into Cold Blow Lane. And so there it was: the crowd-flanked arroyo and, dead ahead, the curved wall of the prison like the stern of a ship — and the inmates all over the rigging. In the hope of increasing its impact, Henry IX’s participation, on this day, had not been scheduled or canvassed, and there was, at first, a sudden caution in the burbly ruffle of the crowd, and brief desistance from the cat-calls and ear-hurting wolf-whistles of the prisoners — many of whom, after all, were technically dependent, for their release, on His Majesty’s Pleasure. It didn’t last. Brendan, as he paced behind Henry England and Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, looked left and right and tried to individualise those gathered here: those whose hearts were hurting for Jimmy O’Nione. The dead man had had no family, no friends, and no known associates or even accomplices. It was the community itself that smouldered and smarted for him. Looking beyond the weary, gritty hatred of these faces, Brendan saw the terraced streets that curled and tapered off from Cold Blow: a corner shop, a barber’s writhing pole, an encaged headline at an angle on the pavement. Here, he thought, the dust-devils, the little twisters of rubbish, would spin the other way, answering to the prison and its gravity. The air smelt of cheap ghosts — those that had died cheaply: street accidents, bludgeonings, mattress fires.

They halted. The Duchess moved forward and steadied herself in front of a black-draped table which bore a microphone and a wreath. Thirty feet beyond, O’Nione’s stolen scooter, exceeding the speed limit when it was clipped by the swerving peoplecarrier, had slammed into the knee-high kerbstone at forty miles per hour; maintaining that velocity, its helmetless rider had torpedoed into the redbrick wall of Cold Blow Prison. It was here, at the plaque, that the Duchess would lay her wreath, in commemoration of the life of Jimmy O’Nione.

‘Good-day to you and bless you one and all,’ began Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, steering her way into the fragile hush. ‘We are gathered here to bid farewell to a much-loved member of the community: Jimmy O’Nione … “He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again … Mourn not for O’Nione … While burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of O’Nione, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.” Thank you. I shall now lay the wreath. There will then be a minute’s silence.’

Oh no there won’t, thought Henry. You see: noise is all they have. Everything detachable from the chapel roof had long ago been hurled down into the courtyard; noise was all they had left; and they would use it … Even before the monkey-grunts began, the prisoners had reminded him of primates, more specifically the Barbary apes — tailless macaques — he had leerily eyed on the Rock of Gibraltar in the course of a recent cruise: the hopping and capering, the squatting and teeth-baring, the picking, the scratching … And these monkey-grunts, poundingly concerted, reminded him in their turn of an international football match he had attended five years ago: one hundred thousand voices had raised his hair and his flesh with the fanatic unanimity of their ‘God Save the King’; but when play began, and the ball arrived at the feet of a black player on the other side? The noise made by the prisoners, now (like the vibration of a titanic double bass), was in connotation sexual merely, as the womanly Duchess bustled to the wall; her head was piously bowed anyway, of course, as she approached O’Nione’s shrine, but she seemed also to be shrinking under it, the carnal thump of it, beaten, beaten down. Reflexively Henry stepped forward in his cashmere overcoat and stood with his hands on his hips and his elbows outturned.

Brendan found that he had crushed his arms to his sides, antiakimbo, as he cringed for the King.

On the chapeltop there now followed a moment of hesitation, and of arrest. And in that moment Henry was confronted by the elementary fact that the prisoners were men, not chimps or baboons (no, nor the viciously jerked marionettes to which an alternative impulse had likened them). In their singlets and half-buttoned shirts, their scrawny flares of winded denim, they were men — men in power. It was a funny kind of power, but it was power: power enough to call forth the King. And have him stand to attention. Seeing their drunkenly childish delight in this, Henry smiled. Unreservedly and unforgettably he smiled — and was answered by a savage roar. But as soon as he composed himself and turned a priestly gaze on the Duchess, now curtseying before the cenotaph of Jimmy O’Nione, and the minute’s silence began …

Despite the unsettling discoveries in the vacated bedsitting-room (the stolen property, the forged passports and pension-books, the fantastic cache of female underwear, and the carcass of her missing budgerigar), Jimmy O’Nione’s landlady was among the crowd that had gathered that day at Cold Blow — largely, it was true, to see the Duchess (she had seen the King up close before, but what an unexpected bonus that was, him coming by …). And during the minute’s silence: such a torrent of filth you never heard in all your life. It was as if those men up there had rehearsed it. The Duchess shrank back as if she couldn’t believe her senses. Suck my. Lick my. Drink my. Eat my. And what did we get when the minute’s silence was over, and they stopped? A minute’s silence: we were all in pure shock. And then when she walked away, quaking on her heels:

Get your arse out , get your arse out , GET your arse out for the boys — oogh!

Well, I must say, that was a nice welcome they give her!

‘You see them elsewhere,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. ‘Alien moral systems.’

‘Yes, Bugger, but we did rather scrag one of their lot. As they’d see it. The chap who had the prang.’

‘… I thought the people were more for you than agin you today, sir. But the prisoners …’

‘Well, they’re prisoners, Bugger.’

It was a monarchical trait: the inability to disapprove of any of his subjects. The urge to correct them, and if necessary by hard means, yes; but not the urge to disapprove of them. It would be like disapproving of yourself. And yet the King had been confusedly thinking, as he ran low under the battering blades of Chopper F1, that sex was the opposite of torture (thinking, in particular, that the sounds He made were the opposite of torture). Both were exquisitely intimate; and both relied on carnal knowledge. And then the prisoners and their chant, which was also sex and also torture. The prisoners, who were the champions of the deed of Dean Bull, and of Dean Bull’s words …