Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Women whom Cora had earlier come across in support-groups and recovery programmes persisted with another notion: that they could seduce any male. And it was true, in their case, so long as the male was violent or inadequate; so long as the male was a rapist or an addict or a pimp or a bum … Cora believed she could seduce any male too, and she had not yet been proved wrong. But she had more in mind for Xan Meo than mere seduction — and the graphic disabusing of his wife. She didn’t yet know what. It would come to her.

Five minutes before her car was due she picked up the phone and dialled and said, ‘Hello, may I speak to Pearl, please? … Pearl! You don’t know me but I’m an old flame of your ex-husband’s … About eight years ago. Yes that’s right: when you two were still married.’ Cora held the phone at arm’s length. ‘Wait, wait. He was ghastly to me too, if that’s any comfort … So — so I thought we might bury the hatchet and have a good natter,’ she went on, ‘over a few grams of cocaine.’

Soon afterwards Cora was in her overcoat. She instructed her gorge to stay where it was when she encountered the traditional flower-arrangements for the antinomian dead.

‘So how’s it go again?’ he asked his sons.

‘Your middle name plus the name of your street is your filmstar name,’ said Michael.

‘And your pet’s name plus the name of your street is your porn-star name,’ said David.

Xan said, ‘I haven’t got a pet.’

‘What was the last pet you had?’

‘A dog. Called Softy.’

‘Well then. Softy St George.’

Xan went on, ‘Softy wasn’t soft. Far from it. Salt-and-pepper Alsatian, and a real hardnut. When I was growing up I thought that was why Softy was in a rage all the time. Because of his name.’

They returned to what they were reading. Michael and David were reading the sports pages of the mainstream yellowtops. And Xan was reading himself: Lucozade … The three of them sat in a fast-food joint on Paradise Pier, among nursery colours. And the colours of the clientele? The colours of the English, their pinks and greys, would eventually be subsumed by the colours of the ultramundane. And how they needed these new colours, he thought. At the next table, a baby-bottle full of Pepsi was being offered by a white man to a brown child; his pallid hand, with its bruised tattoo, seemed to make great gains from the transaction. The smile of his black wife — this also greatly distinguished him.

‘“Of his Kestrel Juniors Chivalric Medallion”,’ said David, ‘“shamed love-rat Ainsley Car has been sensationally stripped …” They reckon here he’s going to Charlton. After prison.’

‘Charlton? They’re crap.’

‘Car’s crap. So’s Charlton. He’s crap and they’re crap.’

‘ Car’s crap. But Charlton aren’t that crap.’

‘Bullshit. They’re less crap than he is but they’re still crap.’

‘Boys, boys: you’ve got to learn some new swearwords. Take crap, say. I mean, bullshit actually means something. Something fairly complicated. Something like: rubbish intended to deceive. But crap? Crap just means crap. As a word, crap is so crap.’

‘That’s the whole point of it. Crap’s wicked.’

‘Yeah. Crap’s cool.’

‘I’ll tell you what is crap,’ he said, flicking his book on to the table, ‘and it’s this shit.’

‘… How d’you mean, Dad?’

‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you when you’re older.’

They came out into the last of England. The rock, the winkles; the pigeon with a petrol prism on its neck, the dry-heaving gulls; and the sea, in its storm aftermath, all confused and distraught, not knowing its proper place. Everything on the pier, the slot arcades, the caffs and bars with their short change and short measure, the dodgems, the ghost train: the whole narrative painting was organised by a vast — and, in secret, vastly prosperous — slum family. This was all that was left of his childhood culture.

Thursday morning was bright and blue. He gave the boys about a hundred quid each and then sat alone on the rocks between the two piers, the Opera and the Paradise. Mariners talk about a twice-daily occurrence — when the waves ‘reconsider’. Something of the kind appeared to be happening in front of him, though the sea was more orderly now; morale, esprit de corps , had been returned to it. The waves crashed and dragged; they flopped and trawled.

Xan wondered about the reasons for the sense of alleviation he was feeling. His memories of the place were piquant and pellucid and above all plentiful; and his engagement with Lucozade (he was about halfway through) seemed sure to be enlightening, whatever else it might cost him. But, no, it must be the boys, the boys. Was it merely their maleness, the laxity of their talk, the companionable squalor they had instantly brought to the set of rooms at the Crown? No, it was their unexamined acceptance of his altered state — and the fact that they couldn’t possibly judge him. They too were in the process of abandoning a self and acceding to another. Like their father, they couldn’t fully remember what they had been, and couldn’t predict what they would become. They didn’t know who they were either.

Michael and David spotted him from the corniche. The distant clouds were like continents; there goes Africa, there goes America. The sea was equal to the task (all in a day’s work) of turning the rock he sat on into shingle. The waves flopped and dragged, and crashed and trawled. The foamline wore a sneer, then a grin, then a sneer, then a grin: phantoms of the opera, phantoms of the paradise.

‘Is uh, Vicky back at school yet?’ Xan asked.

They were in a taxi, on the way to the station; and as the car turned off the Parade they were given a clear view of St Bathsheba’s on its crumbling clifftop — apparently no more than a year or two from the sea.

Michael said, ‘No, they’ve got her salted away in the country somewhere. And why? The bloke who did it — he knocked her up.’

David said, ‘She’s four months gone. She’s out here.’

‘And there’s worse to come,’ said the elderly driver. ‘The bloke who did it: one of our coloured brethren. And he give her a disease.’

Michael said, ‘… If it’s a boy it’ll be one of those bastard pretenders.’

‘Bastard the First.’

‘King Bastard.’

On the train Xan dozed, and his heart and mind loosened into shapeless candour. What he wanted, what he had to have, apart from revenge, was familial reinstatement with honour. It would be done. It would be made so. And he considered he’d performed pretty well with Russia, playing the man he used to be. On the other hand, as his head snapped up from sleep and then dipped back down into it, like the shifting height of the parallel wires on the telegraph poles beyond, on the other hand … His nodding thoughts kept going back, kept going forward, to the woman in the hotel room. The joys of fame: the cyclostyled circular from the teenage autograph-hound; the plea for funds from the Bulgarian theatre group; and, every now and then (and not for a long time now), a woman, coming at you from out of the ether. They were far from being forces for good, for stability, these women, he knew. But they were women. And it was nice to feel wanted, even by a wrecking-ball … Much would depend, of course, on her looks. He was determined to be faithful — at all times faithful; he wouldn’t touch. Still, he might have to go up there for a little while and watch her swan around in her pants. And then slip quietly away.