Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘Well it’ll soon blow over, my dear,’ said Henry, writhing around in earnest now, like a man playing footsie with a moving target. He was practically flat on his back.

‘We’ll just have to get on with it,’ he managed to add. ‘Storm in a teacup, all hands on deck.’

Brendan thought: she wants to disappear. She wouldn’t want the nails and the bolts and the shrapnel. But that’s what she wants to do. She wants to disappear.

‘Perfectly decent little place,’ said the King as he strode through the mountain tunnel of the Abbey archway — saying it as if Brendan, and Victoria, and everyone else, kept maintaining otherwise, in tireless error. ‘I don’t know about you, Bugger, but I thought she took that fairly well.’

He couldn’t answer … During the last half-hour, in the Oak Gallery, the ambient air had made steady gains in clarity, as if a succession of blankets were being removed from an exalted skylight; and now the actors had stepped out into a blue thaw of dripping glitter. At the foot of the cliffside lay the town, waiting, palpating like a dog that has just shaken itself dry. There was an invitation to the spirit — rise up; and all this, he knew, all this was only mist and rain to the Princess …

She was standing with her back turned, and slightly apart, to one side of her own entourage (the forecourt was now a millpond of Security), on a strip of lawn between the path and a bed of pink flowers. Looking at her hunched shape, he knew again what it was like to be fifteen: when you suffered, your every cell suffered. She was wearing black jeans and a short leather jacket, and he wondered why, with the young and indivisibly wretched, it was the tensed buttocks that best expressed all this strength and pain.

Brendan marched forward. As he came round in front of her he was prepared to see tears but her eyes were their normal blue. Yet clogged with chemicals, as was her mouth, chemicals of distress, and giving off a sour breath.

So he did something for which there was no precedent. He embraced her, saying,

‘He will forgive you anything and everything, you may be sure. Without a second thought. And so will I. He will always protect you. And so will I.’

‘Forgive me?’ she said. With the words evenly stressed, he thought, as he dropped her hand and backed away.

In the Royal Rolls the King, with a showily dexterous flick of the wrist, activated the television and sat back with a contented grunt to watch the snooker for the rest of the drive. ‘Oh, perfect weight … They make it look so … Now. Has he got the angle on the yellow?’

After about an hour Brendan started to think logically, or at least consecutively. If one used one’s imagination (he told himself), Victoria’s reaction could probably be readily explained. What do we do in bathrooms? Nothing we’re very proud of. A bodily function, perhaps. The use of a tampon, conceivably. Or something rather more intimate. Which woman friend had informed him that young girls referred to the hand-held shower as ‘Rain Man’? And she was fifteen. Remember that: the outlandish disproportion of being fifteen, when you were waiting to find out who you were.

‘Shot. Now he’ll come down for the blue … Oh no, he’s gone too far … Foul stroke!’

That embrace: a startling impropriety, never to be repeated, but none the less an unalterable fact. He recalled the tragic sourness of her breath. And the rigidity of her body — and the answering rigidity of his own ancillary heart. All the blood within him: all of it.

‘Here we are. Well I’m pleased to have got that out of the way, Bugger. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been playing on my mind. In a week or two I expect this’ll all be a thing of the past.’

Brendan spoke with only an instant’s forethought. You fool, you fool, he said to himself. Didn’t you see that her fear was waiting for it — for this day, for this hour? He said,

‘I disagree, sir. In fact I suggest that I turn this car round and go straight back to St Bathsheba’s. The Princess must be taken out of school at once and then secluded — I suggest Ewelme. If the illicit material is indeed made public on the thirty-first, then I suggest also that we take the advice of uh, our mole and insist from the outset that the material is faked. It’s a ghastly gamble, I know, but the chance won’t come again. Meanwhile we must work out a strategy of damage-limitation with Downing Street. Sir, this isn’t going to be a storm in a teacup.’

‘Steady on, Bugger. Do you know something I don’t?’

‘It’s only a deduction, sir, but I think it’s sound. The Princess was not alone in the bathroom of the Yellow House.’

This is going to be a storm in all the oceans of the thing which is called world.

And the thought: God how she needs her mother.

The two-storeyed Avenger lay in wait under the Esso sign. Welcome Break. Stop and Shop. Smoker consistently drove out here and just sat in the car or did his e’s on the laptop. You have 124 new messages. People coming and going: it’s more cheerful. You fill her up, grab a bay by the cash machine. And stroll inside if you want, for a pizza or whatever. At the Esso you often also get carpools. And women on mobile phones, women waiting alone under the lights in the forecourt with that waiting posture — doing nothing but waiting; they stand like that in the parks and recs with a leather lead in their hand: waiting for the dog to do its business. You could lower your window, saying, ‘Lost your lift then, love? Hop in.’ But the age of the random ride was over. Mobile phones: increased backup. You can have a brief exchange, there on the kerbside. Pass the time. Feel the confinement lift a little bit. It’s funny. They must think: I climb into that car, I pass through that glass, then I’m in his mirrorworld — he’ll have power, with its warp and distortion. He can turn. Every man sits on an anti-man. And the weathered saloon, ticking over in the suburban sidestreet, has its oil and coolant, its dark engine, beneath the windshield’s reflection of the leaves and the branches.

In Clint’s evening paper there was an ‘artist’s impression’ of the Princess in her bath. You know: like in a court case. The artist was not a very good artist; the impression was not a very good impression. Idealised (and, as it were, self-bowdlerised by the placement of her limbs), the image of the Princess might have graced the greetings cards sent by a suburban madam to selected members of her clientele. Reduced to an artist’s impression, on account of the shielding order. Bit late now, thought Clint: a case of bolting the stable door after the graniverous quadruped has gone AWOL. Everyone on earth was gawping at the stills, on the Net, in the foreign press — and, of course, in the Morning Lark , which, that morning, had consisted of nothing else. The official line, from above, was that the material was all faked anyway: software, pseudofilm, ‘without ontology’. Either that, or some snapper hides in the toilet for a month … What Clint couldn’t work out was who benefited. Cui bono ? — apart from the Lark , with its triple print-run … Clint: never gone that big on the younger bird. But virgins had their points. Bet they felt you more. And they couldn’t tell you were crap at it, having nothing to compare.

You have 125 new messages. About 120 of them would be from commercial concerns: invitations to Clint to shower money on his genitalia — by various means and for various purposes. Three or four would be chat-room flirtations with indistinguishable career-girls, all of them apparently chasing the next leg-up or leg-over. Clint visualised a succession of fierce little hussies, with lips crimped in ceaseless calculation. But of course they could be anyone: these were rigged-up identities, summoned out of the ether. It was said of the Web that its contents were (on average) about 60 per cent true. And you, mate, he said to himself: can you swear any better? … And then it came, the voice that seemed to penetrate his solitude: