Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Down came another car (he was watching the crimson glints of the shaft diagrams), and another squaredance surged out of it, losing shape quickly in an atmosphere of hurry that had to do with the time of day and the coming of evening. She did not share in this hurry. The other passengers dispersed and she moved slowly through their fading speedlines. She walked as if impeded by the presence of small children — and you looked beyond her, beneath her, for these children; but they weren’t there … Xan did what he had seen Billie do: he tipped back so fractionally that he could steady himself by the weakest elevation of his toes. She did not share in the hurry, nor in the confectionery, of the hotel. The sandals, the straw bag, the plain white dress. There was of course her figure to be assimilated; and only the most vicious corset, he thought at first, could so constrain the isthmus of her waist; but her body moved forward with the regular beat of that which is unsupported. When she was still some yards away he saw that she wearing no makeup, and this felt like an intimacy you could do nothing about. He couldn’t place her. But the thing was that his body knew he had seen her before.

He inclined his head. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the corner of the mouth.

Xan had rehearsed the line uneasily, and now he delivered it uneasily: ‘This is my first blind date for thirty years.’

‘Blind? Well in one eye only. I know you. Do you know me?’

And he said, ‘You, I don’t know, you’re … already-seen.’

She said, ‘There’s a surprisingly good cave of a bar back here.’ And she took him by the arm.

He was, again, ‘hoping’ that the bar would be well lit and reasonably populous: that would be ‘better’, because she would then have less chance to do anything he might not ‘like’. The way it went, he ducked into the Rose Room as if from an equatorial strand; and it took him a full minute to establish that there were no other customers. A blind date, and a deaf date too: the cottony darkness seemed to be pressing its paws against his eardrums as he followed the little white ghost to a distant booth: an opulent brothel of red velvet. Their faceless waiter appeared at once and lit the candle with a flourish before disappearing again. Now their faces were unsteadily illumined — but nothing else was. In these surroundings, he felt, languid and methodical fornication would not seem particularly daring. And a dumb date: a dumb date. She said,

‘Now. Déjè vu in the proper sense, or in the vulgar? In the vulgar sense, already-seen just means already-seen. “It is with a distinct sense of déjè vu that we watch the Saints bear off the trophy for the second year running.” In the proper sense it would mean that you haven’t seen me before. You just get the feeling you have. Which is it?’

‘The latter. I think. As I said, there are things wrong with my memory.’

‘Of course it could be already-seen in a really vulgar sense. Supervulgar, in fact. We’ll come to that. Ah.’

To Xan’s dark-adapting eye the faceless waiter now looked implausibly young: he seemed about to recommend a glass of milk.

‘I’ll have what you have,’ she said.

All the more reason, then, to order an ocean of blue ruin. To tell the truth, he would have given anything for a drink. He would have given anything — but not everything. For the time being he could see the line in the sand: on one side of it, all he had; on the other, all he’d lose. Milk, yes, or water, still water — liquid parched of all life. He asked if they served fresh orange juice, and was told that they did.

‘Orange juice?’ she said. ‘I’m not having that. A large gin Martini, please, with a twist. Oh don’t have orange juice. Have an espresso at least.’

‘Okay, I’ll have an espresso.’

‘A double … I read your book. It’s …’

He was gratified — but it was all too urgent in his mind and he could think of no other way of putting it. He said, ‘It’s up-your-arse, isn’t it? Sorry. That sounds terrible. But you know what I mean.’

‘You mean you toady to the reader. Well, there is a feeling of ingratiation. A kind of pan-inoffensiveness. And you seem to subscribe to various polite fictions about men and women. In my view. As if all enmity is over and we both now drink the milk of concord. And there’s another thing. What’s the one where the title is a girl’s name? “Evie”. Yes. After a thirty-page chase the narrator finally gets Evie into bed, and then, in my view, rather congratulates himself for not describing it. “No, I’m not going to tell you who put what where”, and so on. What’s that? Gallant? Evolved? Is that what the writer should do — shirk the task and strike an attitude? I’m being rather unfair here, because it’s not just you. Good sex seems to be something that writing can’t manage. Maybe the only thing. No: there’s dreams. But why should that be? Mm. Excuse me while I get stuck into this lovely drink.’

‘They say,’ said Xan, ‘they say that the writer stops speaking for anyone but himself. The quirks come out. It’s no longer uh, universal.’

‘Can’t the quirks be universal? Aren’t there things we all like?’

‘It’s funny. I don’t often describe sex, but it’s the first question I ask myself about a character: what they’re like in bed.’

‘Do you? Sorry: “what they’re like” or “what they like”?’

‘I suppose both. Or is it the same thing?’

‘So if you were going to fictionalise me, which I don’t recommend, you’d start how?’

‘Why wouldn’t you recommend it?’

‘Because nobody believes in women like me. Or no woman does. Unless she was a victim too. Victims believe.’

‘Victims of what?’

‘Wait. I see you’ve evaded the question. Anyway. Good sex, as a subject, has to have a place to go. So a whole other form, a whole other industry, devotes itself to nothing else.’

‘Pornography.’

‘Pornography … Porn is a disgusting little word, isn’t it? It’s the most disgusting single thing in the whole phenomenon. Porno ‘s nothing like so bad. In the industry, we call it the industry. That’s what you call it when you’re in it. I’m in it … I said before that you may have already-seen me, in the supervulgar sense. It’s been a while now, and there were reasons for it at the time, but I uh, “starred” in over a hundred movies. Blue movies. Karla White. For three years the only sex I had was the sex I had on camera. Porno-people aren’t like non-porno-people. When we watch porno, we fast-forward through the sex to get to the acting. Now that’s true perversity.’

‘… What were the reasons?’

‘I told you. Do you really not remember?’

‘When? Where?’

‘It was at Pearl’s summer party: August thirty-first. Pretty chaotic, as usual. And, of course, no Russia. Remember? We talked for two hours and then went into the garden and did what we did.’

‘What did we do?’

‘We’ll come to that. And I told you the reason. It was once a cliché, and is now a fallacy — but why do girls make blue movies? Because they were raped by their fathers. Between the age of six and nine, inclusive, my father raped me once a day … Now that’s strange. That’s very strange. Then you do remember.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘When I told you the first time you were hugely indignant on my behalf. Now look at you. You just blinked once. Slowly.’

‘It’s not that I remember you telling me. It’s …’

‘You don’t think it’s so shocking any more? Boy, you really did get a knock on the head, didn’t you. Well all right. Let’s consider. Is it so shocking? Some fathers, and not just mass-murdering yokels but stockbrokers and politicians — some fathers really do believe that incest is “natural”. I made you so I can touch you, your first child should be your dad’s: all that. It’s an atavism. Because getting rid of incest, outgrowing incest, was part of the evolutionary advance, like outgrowing oestrus.’