Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

First, an hour with his accountant. Then an hour with his gardener. He was served lunch on the canopied deck. He wiped his mouth and got to his feet. The wasp came weaving towards him the way they do, like a punchy old southpaw, with its halfremembered moves, its ponderous fakes and feints. He drew with his left and caught it full in the face. And the wasp rose up , bristling in grief and femininity and youth. They meandered towards you so middle-aged, but they too had youth, and delicacy and clarity of colour. He didn’t stay to watch its bouncings and wormings and coilings.

He moved on to the stables, and had words with a well-built young man called Rodney Vee.

‘Rodney.’ With a remind-me intonation and a lordly frown he asked, ‘How long …?’

‘Since Monday, sir.’

‘And where are we now?’

‘Friday, sir.’

He nodded and made a further indication with a sideways movement of his head.

They went past the back of the imported barn and down some steps and into the anteroom of the disused garage. He again wagged his head before Rodney opened the inner door.

At first it sounded like a large animal trying to breathe, and then it sounded like a small animal trying to cry.

‘That’ll be all, Rodney,’ he said.

He stepped forward. In the far corner a young man was strapped naked to a baronial dining-chair with a sack over his head. The young man’s chest was shaking, lamenting, and his breath was fierce and nasal — eddy upon eddy.

The Decembrist pulled up a footstool. Grumblingly he sorted through the tray of implements at his feet: skewers, chisels.

Half an hour passed.

He stood up. He lifted the cowl of sacking. After a flustered glance round the room his head dropped and he reached for his spraycans, one in the left, one in the right.

The young man’s golden hair was gone.

‘Open your eyes! Behold. Fuck … ME ?’ said Joseph Andrews.

‘You can take this fucking little bumboy , and stuff him in a fucking mailbag , and go and … and go and …’ Andrews caught his breath. ‘And go and sling him over the fucking top at Quaker Quarry!’

‘It will be done, sir. It will be done,’ said Rodney Vee, who then closed the inner door and added, ‘Are you serious, Boss?’

‘Well … Give him a few hours to compose his thoughts. Nah. Where’s he live?’

‘Vermilion Hills, Boss.’

‘Yeah. You tell him it’s the Quarry. But you take him to fucking Vermilion Hills and sling him out the fucking van. On the road. And not lightly. One … two … three. Boof. Eh up. Ruthie rings Queenie, right?’

Rodney nodded. They were coming up the steps and into the sun.

‘She says, “Mum? You won’t like it, but I’m marrying Ahmed.” And Queenie’s gone, “What? You marry that Ahmed and you never darken me door again.” “But I love him!” All this. Six months go by. The phone rings and it’s Ruthie. “Mum! Come and take me away! Aw, what he’s been doing to me!” “So,” says Queenie, “your sins’ve found you out.” “Come on, Mum, don’t fuck about.” “Now calm down, love. I’ll be over in a minicab. Where are you?”

‘It’s a fucking great mosque of a place on The Bishop’s Avenue. Queenie’s come through the gates and up the drive. She’ve rung the bell and the butler’s led her through five reception rooms. Picassos. Rembrandts. Cézannes. Ruthie’s on the couch, crying its little heart out. Queenie’s give her a hug and gone, “Ruthie, what is it? Tell your mother. I’m sure you and Ahmed can sort this out.”

‘Ruthie’s gone, “Mum? Aw, what he’s been doing to me! When I come here, me arsehole was the size of a five-pee piece.” “Yes, dear?” “Well now it’s the size of a fifty -pee piece. Take me home.” Queenie looks round the room and says, “Let’s get it straight. You’re giving up all this for forty-five pee?”

‘Ah, here she comes. Here come them famous lils.’

Here she comes: Cora Susan.

She had a hundred yards of lawn to cross. Seen from that distance, she looked like the platonic ideal of a young mother. But where were the children? Peering through the prisms of the sprinkler spray, you expected to make them out, the children, circling her, tumbling at her feet. That must be why she walked so slowly, with an air of dreamy purpose (always one step behind, one step beyond) — to keep pace with the children. But there were no children … As usual, she wore a dress of white cotton, and a broad straw hat. The straps of a straw bag depended from her left shoulder (is that where she kept the wipes and diapers, the rolled-up sock with spit on it — for emergency cleansings of childish mouths? No: there were no children). A slight arrhythmia in the clack of her sandals: time delay, diminishing as she neared. Cora Susan’s hair was long and straight and fine, and a lucent grey, reminding you that grey was a colour — a colour like any other colour. She was thirty-six and five foot one.

‘Have a chair, dear. Paquita’s fetching you a nice glass of wine. I have unfortunate news.’

She took off her hat but remained standing on the lined deck. Unanswerably womanly, but not a mother. The spheres of her grey eyes were too shallow, and without the faults and nicks that they give you — that children give you. Her mouth contained something ungenerous, something resolutely unindulgent; it did not extend outwards into the world — it stayed within. And the secondary sexual characteristics, the breasts, the famous breasts. They were above all binocular: they were the eyes of a different creature, a different type of being, with qualities not necessarily shared by Cora Susan — candour, innocence, even purity. No child would maul them. There were reasons for all this.

Wine for Cora, one glass served by Paquita, and the bottle kept in an ice-bucket on the tray. For Joseph Andrews — Lucozade (couriered out from England by the gross). Every few seconds he slowly reached forward and touched her, rested a light palm on her, almost doctorly — on the elbow, the hand, the wrist.

‘It’s your father, dear. What can I say? He’s gone. He’s passed away … No great shock but he was your father , Cora. Now. You was — you was never told the truth, dear. Your gran’s version, dear. How’d it go?’

‘As it was handed down to me,’ she said in her accentless and warmly civilised voice, ‘Dad crippled himself falling off some mountain, and Mum converted and went to Israel. And I went to Canada with Old Ma Susan. That bit’s true.’

‘… Mick Meo did him, Cora. Your own grandfather did your dad.’

Audibly she breathed in, breathed out.

‘Relations between the Susans and the Meos was never of the smoothest. And I don’t just mean your mum and dad’s marriage. I know what Mick Meo done to Damon Susan. He drew a nine for it: attempted murder. How much do you uh …?’

‘Oh, Jo, please. Tell me everything.’

‘That’s the spirit, Cora. That’s my girl … Your mum and dad was chucking things at each other even before they was engaged. It was that kind of uh, relationship — a right old scrap. Then, as ill chance would have it, come the day when your mum calls Mick and tells him Damon’s took a liberty with her. A right liberty.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Not to put uh, too fine a point on it, dear, he give her one up the khyber.’

With no change in her tone and modulation Cora said, ‘He give me one up the khyber and all.’

‘I know he did, dear.’ Again, the hand on her wrist. ‘And if Mick had known that then there’s no chance Damon’d’ve lived. There’d have been none of this fucky nattempted. That I can assure you.