Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘From a different source you say, Bugger.’

Henry and Urquhart-Gordon were briefly occupying a private apartment in a gentlemen’s club off Pall Mall (where the King was due to host a luncheon). In the neighbouring room Oughtred was accepting delivery of a tape recorder from the BBC; only the national broadcasting corporation, it seemed, could be depended on for a sufficiently ancient machine. The second communication: Henry knew its gist. He had twice excused himself and tiptoed to the bathroom.

‘Who can be sure, sir, but it may well be a positive development. Ah. Thank you, Oughtred. I’ll be in touch.’

The two men left one room for another similarly appointed: an ambience of silver and crystal and deep-brown panelling, with an elderly rictus to it, like a mask of empire. Watched warily by Henry, Brendan approached the fat contraption and started poking at its buttons. They listened to the pleading farewells of Love’s stricken relative, and then: ‘ For the attention of the King …’

Brendan addressed himself to Henry’s wondering frown: ‘If this isn’t a feint of some kind, sir, it may even be that we have a waverer, if not a friend, in the camp of the intruder.’

The tape spooled on. And they heard the metallic addendum: ‘ Prepare. Prepare the press. Prepare the Princess. ’

‘Oh, Christ, Bugger. This is really going to happen.’

Flight Attendant Robynne Davis : Anybody home?

Captain John Macmanaman : Oh, hi, Robynne.

Davis : Here you go. Robynne’s Fruitjuice Special.

First Officer Nick Chopko : Thank you.

Macmanaman : Mmm. What’s in it?

Davis : Secret recipe. Guess.

Macmanaman : Well … Orange juice.

Davis : You got that from the colour, right?

Chopko : And, uh, cranberry?

Davis : And?

Chopko : Lilt?

Davis : Close. Ting. Diet Ting.

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Be even better with some dark rum in it.

Davis : Yeah, right.

Ward : A little vodka.

Davis : Yeah, right.

Ward : Or a little gin, maybe.

Davis : Yeah, right.

Ward : Or some light rum in it …

Davis : Yeah right.

Ward : Excuse me.

Macmanaman : … Where’s he gone, our wrench [Flight Engineer]?

Davis : To make a nuisance of himself with Conchita in Business.

Chopko : You can’t blame the guy.

Macmanaman : You can blame the guy. The radar, Nick? See the weather coming? Get permission to climb. Uh, three nine zero. Robynne? Put them down back there. The girls too.

Davis : You got it.

Air Traffic Control : I hear you, one oh one heavy.

Chopko : Request permission to climb to three nine zero.

ATC : … That’s a confirm. Three niner zero, one oh one heavy.

* * *

The plane revealed her silver breast to the sun. As she rose, a cross-wind jolted her fiercely to starboard: a beast of the upper air had tried to seize her, and then let her slip from his grasp like a bar of soap. The lateral motion was enough to free the coffin of Royce Traynor from the pair of mountain bikes that had lightly braced it. Royce fell flat on his face and was then shudderingly drawn towards the opening to Pallet No. 3. As the climb steepened another sideways lurch flipped him over the low partition. He rolled on his side and pitched up against a rank of canisters marked HAZMAT (Hazardous Material): Class B and Class C-3 dynamite propellants and rocket motors for fighter-aircraft ejection seats.

‘Pearl? It’s me.’ There must come a point (he thought) when you couldn’t still say that — to your ex-wife: It’s me. There must come a point when me turned into somebody else. You had to abdicate. ‘Uh, is there a boy to hand?’

‘Xan. Xan, I was just chuckling over a misprint in a book I’m reading,’ she said warmly. ‘I was dying to share it with you because I knew it would appeal to your sense of humour. Have you still got one, by the way? I mean a sense of humour, because it says here you can lose that too. The book’s about crazy people and the misprint comes in the chapter called “Post-Traumatic Psychosis” under the subheading “Changes in Sexuality”. Ready?’

Both his sons owned mobile phones, of course. For a while mobile phones had seemed to make them safer. The boys were like electronically tagged criminals: you could trace them, monitor them, when they went out. But when they went out they were always being attacked — by criminals who wanted their mobile phones. When Xan went out, which he now obliged himself to do, most days, he was very regularly unnerved by mobile phones — by the disembodied voices, moving up behind you or off to one side of you, testifying, with such iterative force, to the need of the human being for connection — or for self-dilution; these voices were the voices of the lonesome crowd, needing to come together … Never eager to face Pearl, Xan always tried his sons on their mobile phones. What you got was a beep for a message (rarely responded to), preceded by forty-eight bars of hate-crammed music inciting you to act like somebody crazy. As for people who talked to themselves and really were crazy, you should issue them with mobile phones; and then they could go around talking to themselves and no one would think they were crazy.

‘“The sexuality of the head-injured male” ‘, said Pearl, ‘— and most head-injured people are male, Xan, because men are generally more physical and impulsive … Yes: “The sexuality of the head-injured male may be affected by importence.” Im-portence, with an r. Don’t you think that’s incredibly funny? It says it all really, doesn’t it. I just screamed. ’

‘Yeah, well …’

‘They’re both out. I’ll tell them you rang.’

He was the father of her boys, and Pearl was a good mother. She satirised his masculinity (he sometimes sensed) because she needed to know how much of it he had — and if he fell short, then so might her sons, which she wouldn’t want. More specifically Pearl hoped to enrich his desire for vengeance. On all questions of reprisal she was unreflectingly fundamentalist. And so was he, apparently; he thought he wasn’t, but he was. Pearl would understand — and Russia would not understand — that vengeance was something he had to have. All his senses wanted it, needed it. And even in his weakest moments, moments of flickering fragility, he was sure that vengeance would come. It could not be otherwise. And just by living, by lasting, by not dying, he was getting closer to it.

‘Me?’ he had once told Russia. ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ This had perhaps been true, for a while. It was certainly true no longer. Now he spent at least an hour a day, with swat and spraycan, trying to hurt them, trying to kill them: flies. Wasps he left alone if the children were elsewhere; bees he respectfully spared; and spiders — fly-eaters — were his familiars, his enemies’ enemies. Flies he hunted down: the fatter and hairier they were, the worse he needed to see them dead. Some seemed armoured: they looked like the attack aircraft of the twenty-second century. And when they rubbed their wrists together the way they did: was it in anticipation of it, or was it in satisfaction with the vengeance they had already exacted, the vengeance of ugliness? The ugliness spoke to him. When they rubbed their wrists together, they seemed to be sharpening their knives.