Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Holding a glass in either hand Xan went out into the paved garden overlooking the canal where, in recent months, on a west-facing bench, usually with Russia at his side, he had consumed many a pensive Club Soda, many a philosophical Virgin Mary. And how much more solemn — how much more august and royal — his thoughts would be, pondering Pearl, alone with his cigarettes and his Dickheads … Meo’s first glance at the motionless green channel rather too studiously confronted him with a dead duck, head down with its feet sticking up like the arms of a pair of spectacles. Dead in the water, abjectly dead: he imagined he could smell it, over and above the elderly medicine of the canal. Like Lucky Ducky or Drakey Lakey, after Foxy Loxy was done.

Xan seemed to be alone in his garden. But then a dapper young man emerged from a Hollywood side-exit, with a mobile phone held to his ear; he seemed briskly bound for the street until he stopped dead and then seemed to grope his way sidewise and steady himself against the canal fencing a few feet away. He acknowledged Xan’s nod with a flicker of his brow and then said clearly, ‘So everything we said, all the vows we exchanged, now mean nothing. Because of Garth. And we both know that’s just an infatuation … You say you love me but I think we have different conceptions of what love really means. To me, love is something sacred, almost ineffable. And now you’re saying that all that, all that …’ He moved off, and his voice was soon lost in the hum of the city. Yes, and that was part of it, the obscenification: loss of pudeur.

Like the dead duck, the worldline of Xan’s first marriage, that attempted universe — dead also. His divorce had been so vicious that even the lawyers had panicked. It was as if the two of them had been trussed together with barbed wire, naked and face-to-face, and then thrown overboard. Your flailings down there, your kicking and clawing: there could be no morality. When Pearl had him arrested for the third time, and he stood at the door of his service flat listening to the charges, Xan knew that he had reached the end of a journey. He had reached the polar opposite of love — a condition far more intense than mere hatred. You want the loved one dead; you want her plane to come down, and never mind about the others on board — those four hundred saps and losers …

But they’d survived; they lived, didn’t they? Xan reckoned that he and Pearl came out pretty well even. And, fantastically, they came out richer than they went in. It was the boys, the two sons, who lost, and it was to them that Xan Meo now raised his glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said out loud. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ As if in recompense for the waterbird upended in the green canal, a sparrow, a feathered creature of the middle air, hopped on to the bench beside him and, with eerie docility, began to ventilate itself, allowing its wings to thrum and purr, six inches away.

The wind had departed — fled elsewhere. In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself. It resembled a titanic firefighting operation, with ethereal engines, cranes, ladders, the spray and foam of hose and standpipe, and the genies of the firemen about their massive work of hell-containment, hell-control.

‘Is that your “bird”?’ said a voice.

Meo acknowledged the passing of his solitude. He looked to his right: the sparrow was still agitating on the arm of the bench, testingly close to his second Dickhead. He looked up: his smiling questioner, a square-looking, almost cubic individual, stood about ten feet away in the weak dusk.

‘Yeah, well it’s all I can pull these days,’ he answered.

The man took a step forward, his thumbs erect on either side of his navel. Recognised, thought Meo. Made.

‘Are you the ?’

Expecting that he would soon have a hand to shake, Xan got to his feet. The sparrow did not yet absent itself.

‘Yes. I’m the. ’

‘Well I’m Mal.’

‘… Hello there,’ said Xan.

‘Why’d you do it, son?’

At this point it became clear that Mal, despite his air of humorous regret, was a violent man.

Far more surprisingly, it became clear that Xan was a violent man too. That is to say, he suffered from no great deficit of familiarity as the changed forcefield took hold. Violence, triumphally outlandish and unreal, is an ancient category-error — except to the violent. The error having been made, both men would know that from here on in it was endocrinological: a question of gland-management.

‘Why’d I do what ?’ said Meo, and took a step forward. He hoped still to avert it; but he would not be going second.

‘Ooh.’

He pronounced it où , as Russia Meo had, so long ago. He went on, ‘I heard you was a bit tasty.’

‘Then you know what to expect,’ he said as levelly as he could (there was an acidic presence in his mouth). ‘If you have it with me.’

‘You went and named him! And I mean that , to me, that is totally, to me —’

‘Named who?’

Mal breathed in and bulged his eyes and loudly whispered, ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. J-o-s-e-p-h A-n-d-r-e-w-s. ’

‘Joseph Andrews?’

‘Don’t say it. You don’t say it. You named him. You put him there — you placed him. In black and white. ’

For the first time Meo thought that something else was wrong. The calculations going on inside him might be given as follows: my five inches equals his two stone, and zero real difference in the other thing (time lived). So: it would be close. And the guy seemed too blithe and hammy for close. He couldn’t be that good: look at his suit, his shoes, his hair.

‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’

But there is another actor on our stage. But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital. A man (for it is he, it is he, it is always he), a sinner, shitter, eater, breather, coming up fast on him from behind. Mal is violent, and Xan is violent, but in this third player’s scowl and its nimbus you see an absence of everything that human beings have ever agreed about: all treaties, concordats, all understandings. He is palely and coarsely bald. His eyebrows and eyelashes seem to have been lasered or even blowtorched off his face. And the steam pouring from his mouth as if from a spraycan, on this not intemperate evening, reached out to arm’s length.

Xan heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe, of the hefted cosh. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn, and he didn’t turn — he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many noble and delicate powers are so trustingly encased.

He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat: his womanblood, his childblood, taken by his enemy. The physics of it sent his Dickhead twisting up and away. He heard the wet crack, the wet crack of his knees followed by the wet crack of the sliced glass. The world stopped turning, and started turning again — but the other way. Only now after a heartbeat did the sparrow rear up with the whirling of its wings: the little paparazzo of the sparrow.

The sky is falling!

Then the words ‘ Get down’ and a second, fervent blow.

The sky is falling, and I’m off to tell the …

Seemingly rigid now, like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.

The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money. He was in a drawing-room in the Place des Vosges, absorbing some very bad news. The equerry on the armchair opposite was called Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. Between them, lying on the low glass table, was a photograph, face-down, and a pair of tweezers. And the room was like a photograph: for several minutes now neither man had moved or spoken.