Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘… They’ll gag you. They’ll gag you, Chief.’

‘Maybe they will, maybe they will. Uh, what did we have in mind for tomorrow?’

Supermaniam unfurled the mockup. It said: ‘Souvenir Issue *The Little Princess Frame By Frame *FUTURE Q. OF E. GANGF **KED ON CAMERA??’

‘Mm. Await my call. That may need some toning down.’

‘If you feel strongly about it, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘we’ll add another question mark.’

It came through when he was back at his workstation and talking to the travel people, Virtually There. It said:

fl@ e, 49 m@tock est8, n7

dear clint: @ last — the dex r clearing! he’s not a gr8 hint-taker, orl&o, & he hasn’t noticed i’ve stopped talking 2 him. but he has noticed i’ve stopped making his t. ‘y don’t u make my t any more?’ & i say, ‘you can make your own bloody t!’ but he’s as obstin8 as a mule. th@’s the word 4 him: asi9. he still wants 6 every nite, but i’ve got a new str@agem: not washing. let’s c how long he can st& the s10ch! … a whole new future is opening up 4 me now. a new 2morrow, clint. my thoughts & hopes r turning 2wards some1 else — some1 not a 1,000 miles from where u st&, my v dear friend. on our first d8, whenever th@ may b, if we feel like a cuddle, y the 1 not! but th@ doesn’t have 2 lead 2 anything but sleep, & in the morning i’ll make the t! still, i think it’s a good thing 4 u 2 take a journey 2 distant 1&s — 2 reflect, 2 ponder, 2 rumin8. i shall be w8ing here 4 u — like a nun, a noviti8, ready 2 become a bride of X! well, dear 1, i kiss your h&s. fare 4th, & find the lite! k8.

So on his last Sunday before jetting off, Clint drove to N7: just to reconnoitre, and maybe catch a glimpse. Trapped in traffic on Parkway, and gazing out, he noticed a smart-looking woman whom he thought you’d call fanciable, despite the doublepram she wielded. As he watched, she pulled up short, came round in front of the two nippers — and crouched, in earnest interchange. Shit: if he’d been in a normal car, instead of the Avenger, he’d have been able to see right up her skirt. Clint moved on.

‘Start again. He what?’ said Russia Meo.

‘He hugged me too hard,’ said Billie.

‘Start again. Where was Imaculada?’

‘In the kitchen with Baba. I went out to the shed where Daddy was and we saw the fox on the roof.’

‘You saw the fox through the skylight? Through the glass? And then?’

‘I couldn’t breathe. Daddy hugged me too hard.’

* * *

The man in 2A returned to his seat. The woman in 2B, Reynolds Traynor, said,

‘Why do you keep doing that? Don’t look so stricken. You’re making me nervous.’

‘It’s just a precaution.’

‘Relax. Have a drink. Flying’s safe. It’s safer than walking.’

‘Depends how you figure it. Per passenger-mile — right. But if you figure it per journey, it’s about the same as motorcycling.’

‘… When you grope your way up and down the cabin — why do you keep doing that?’

‘It’s so I can get to the emergency doors with my eyes shut. In case of smoke. Only I’d be doing it on my knees. More oxygen. Avoid the flashover. Twenty-two per cent of aviation fatalities are caused by fire.’

‘Really.’

‘Second only to blunt trauma.’

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Ah, that’s better. I am a whole new hombre … If, as they say, you can judge the health of a carrier by the age of the flight attendants, then you’re in okay shape.

First Officer Nick Chopko : That’s because they’re all dead by the time they’re thirty-five. This is CigAir, pal.

Ward : Flew Air K last week and the broads could hardly walk … That one in Business, what is it, Conchita? Awesome bod. Oh, mercy, I could do her some harm.

Captain John Macmanaman : The hell with that kind of talk, Flight Engineer. Not in my cockpit, son.

Ward : Sorry, Cap.

Macmanaman : Forget it. Hey, Nick. Look at the power. Look at the speed. Oh sure. We’re going to stall at maximum up here … Nick? Hal? See what I see? Thrust-reversers are engaged.

Chopko : Jesus Christ. It’s fictitious, right?

Macmanaman : Damn right it’s fictitious. Or we’d be in cartwheel. If it’s fictitious — what else is fictitious?

In Pallet No. 3 the corpse of Royce Traynor minutely rearranged itself. Its chin now rested on one of the canisters marked HAZMAT. Extreme turbulence would be needed before Royce could make his next move.

His mahogany coffin was hard and heavy. Like the past, he was dead and gone. But Royce was still hard and heavy with it: hard and heavy with the past.

Wearing a black tracksuit as refulgent as perfect shoeshine, he stepped out into the afternoon. His storefresh white trainers, his dark glasses, his bronzed countenance, his backswept silver hair: in the pharmacy, from which he was now absenting himself, they called him the Professor or the Englishman. But he was the Decembrist: well advanced into the final month of his year. It was a distinguished face, its lines apparently connected to something ancient or the study of something ancient — Etruscan Pottery, Linear B.

But here he was, in a modern setting: video rental, liquor locker, radio shack. The Decembrist was of medium height (and was heading, by now, towards less than medium); he was not conspicuous in a country — America — where old men dressed like children. Watch an aeroplane climbing a blue sky for long enough and a globule of sunshine will eventually kiss it and coat it and drip from it. So, too, with the glossy garb of the Decembrist, which blackly glittered. Above the suit, his handsome, martyred face. Below it, the white dots of his gyms. Out in the lot the cars were waiting, all in line but all dissimilar, like a conscript army of machines.

There was caution in his stride but nothing frail or halt, which was just as well: a recreational vehicle weighing several tons jerked backwards out of its trap, and the Decembrist’s hands flew from his pockets as he himself jerked clear, seeming to levitate, with an avian lightness. But the sound he made was equine — whinnying, rearing, longtoothed.

The driver drew level, a cellphone nestling in the cup of his jaw (and what beautiful golden hair he had, also busy in the light, with its bullion, its specie), and said, in answer to the Decembrist’s disbelieving stare:

‘Fuck you. ’

Having manoeuvred itself into the clear, the great bus surged forward, and now the film rewound — with the Decembrist moving suddenly into its speed and the wheels yelping to a halt six inches from his knees. After some exasperated honking the driver reversed, swerved, and sped on his way, the word asshole included in the passing gulp of his rhythm and blues.

The Decembrist paused, his lips working, and then pushed on to his German saloon.

He sat, days later, on an upright chair by the swimming-pool — the swimming-pool and its motion jigsaw. The pool moved, always and helplessly, but the man was still, his head thrown back as if in agonised exhaustion. Around him the acres of grass, the couch grass, the bent grass, the cheat grass; and the squirt of the ceaseless sprinklers, hissing like a monstrous cicada … In one movement he stirred and stood. Cruise-wear, now: the swing top, the blue pantaloons, the white canvas deck-shoes. He also sported a dude-ranch cowboy belt, which he now straightened. The cartridge sockets were empty, but the holsters had been modified to contain two slender spraycans. One spraycan specialised in mosquitoes and other insects of the air; the other spraycan specialised in ants.