Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘Use Your Head’ was the Academy motto. Much of the class activity was overseen by a retired porno star called Dimity Qwest, now a respected activist and therapist, who showed you how to work the fake quim they doled out to you on arrival. In time, they all became slobberingly proficient at the art of oral love. Clint had found it a low moment, to be sure, when Dimity told him to regard his organ as a middle finger without the nail; but then she cheered him up by touting the likelihood of anal bliss, increased access to the tradesmen’s entrance being something the smaller bloke could legitimately expect. You were meant to practise in your cabana. The thing had a ‘pleasure meter’ on it, about halfway to the hypothetical navel, which showed you when you were getting warm.

If asked, Clint would have said that he was responding to the treatment. Definitely. After all, nobody’s perfect and everything’s relative. And the lads at the pool, during the nude brunch: a good few of them put a spring in his stride. Several denizens, moreover, during workshop, tearfully lamented the shaming meagreness of their ejaculations. Clint chipped in, saying that this was a department in which he happened to shine, and going on to describe his heroics with Rehab.

Now he cleaned his teeth in the scaled-down bathroom: the basin was no bigger than an ashtray. His artificial smile briefly quickened with sincerity as he thought about the porno interviews he’d lined up in Lovetown. Looking forward to Princess Lolita : see some decent todgers for once in his life. The absolute twin of our Vicky. Looking forward to Kate: lady in waiting.

By now there were torn creases in the sheet of paper which winked at him whenever he picked the thing up. Through them you could see the other world — or so it seemed. The letter was now a week old; and there had since been the incident with the fox.

* * *

My dear Xan,

It would not be true to say that you raped me last night, but it would be true to say that you tried. I know this is a question you must in general be tired of hearing. Still, I must ask it. What do you remember?

It was about 2.20 when you put on the light. Then you crashed down on me and forced your tongue into my mouth and your hand between my legs. As well as being an amazing stinkbomb of cigars, beer, curry, vomit, and shit, you ‘reeked of cheap ponce’, to use your own phrase (you had just helped me out of a minicab — this was, or seems, years ago). I hit you on the head with closed fists about eight or nine times as hard as I could. I’m sorry. Your poor, poor head. Then I got out and ran upstairs and locked myself in with Baba. You followed, and battered on the door. Baba, incredibly, slept through it, but Billie woke up and sat down crying outside Imaculada’s door, and she woke up too. She said that if she’d had a phone in her room she would certainly have called the police.

You were shouting your head off about your ‘conjugal rights’. I think it’s a rule, don’t you, that whenever the ‘rights’ of marriage are invoked, by either one, then that’s the end of that marriage. I don’t know, this may only be true of the bedroom. In the last five years we have done a million things for each other that perhaps felt like duties or obligations or sacraments, but I never felt that either of us was asserting a right.

Our marriage is not over. But Xan, my dearest — you are scaring the shit out of me. And to think that there are supposed to be women who love to live in fear; no woman worth anything would put up with it for an instant. Shall I tell you what it’s like? It’s the desire, more intense than any you’ve ever felt, for something to be away from you. It’s the tearing desire for something to be over.

Our marriage is not over. It is not over. Last night was an utter disaster for us, and it will take an incredible effort to recover from it. I know — who wants an incredible effort, in matters of the heart or anywhere else. But that’s what lies ahead of you, beginning with hours and hours of Tilda Quant.

This is what I think has happened. Your past is your past, and you escaped it or evolved out of it. Over the years you wore down your prejudices and developed a set of rational contemporary attitudes — remember my saying that you were more feminist than I was? You were a little bit pious, if anything. Then, after you were hit, I thought at first you’d slipped back a generation or two. I now think it’s more basic, more atavistic than that. Your attitudes and opinions aren’t attitudes and opinions any more. They’re beliefs, and primitive beliefs at that. If, today, you were to show me around your past, as you once did five years ago, you wouldn’t be showing me Kropotkin’s clubhouse on Worship Street, or Mother Woolf’s spieler, or the pub called the World Upside Down. You’d be showing me your cave — or your treetop.

Two more things. You have started being different with Billie. And I don’t mean all the incomprehensible rules and regimens you tried to impose on her (no one could work out what she was supposed to do with that apple every day: give it to her teacher? give it to you? eat it?). No, it’s more serious than that. Remember, before, when she used to do her ‘exercises’, or when she did them for too long or too often, you’d get embarrassed or irritated and say ‘Oh stop that, Billie’ or ‘Go and do that in your room’. Now you’re transfixed by it. You practically pull up a chair. This is a qualitative change in you. What can I say? You give me the creeps, man. You give me the fucking creeps. See it from my side. If I started giving you the creeps they would be woman creeps, not man creeps. Women (I read) very rarely show a sexual interest in their children (and very rarely try to rape their husbands). You are a man and you always have that at your disposal — male heaviness.

Change back. Please change back. Oh please, please. Please become again the big, calm, slow-moving, encouraging, approving, protective, affectionate man you were before. Until you do that, and it is what you’re going to do, you and I can have only one kind of intimacy. Remember that word we loved: epithalamium. (I’ve just looked it up and burst into tears.) I was faithful to you and you were faithful to me. Fidelity is all we’ve got. Take that away, now, and there’s nothing. Fidelity is epithalamium. Epithalamium.

The last paragraph concerned itself with such matters as his packed case, the keys to the flat across the road, the fact that Imaculada had prepared the bed and lightly stocked the fridge, and so on. When he first read the letter (it was half past one the day after) Xan’s first impulse was to do about fifty thousand pounds’ worth of damage to the house. Fifty thousand pounds would be about right. The presence, in the kitchen, of Billie, Sophie and Imaculada was just enough to restrain him. Instead, he asked Imaculada, ‘How can a man rape his wife? She’s his wife. And you were going to nick me. Where is Russia? Where, where, where? ’ And he stood there with his fists raised and tensed …

He made an effort to reconstruct the night before, and achieved some tinkertoy success with a credit-card receipt from a nearby Indian restaurant, a temporary tattoo on his forearm (presumably allowing his reentry into some joint or dive), a beermat from the Turk’s Head, and a coupon for an inexpensive cologne. Also, in his notebook, he had written: ‘In black and white!! (a little bird told me).’ Apart from a four-day hangover, this was all the evidence he had, and it meant nothing to him … The head-injured person cannot remember the moments leading up to the head injury; and this is perhaps a strategy of the mind, sparing you the pain of reliving it. Xan wondered whether the amnesia of inebriation was also self-protective: if strong and pure enough, the memory of how you were last night would kill you instantly. Why remember the time you lost everything you had?