Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Over her shoulder she looked at him. He expected to find dislike in it, but her face seemed about to crumble and collapse, as Billie’s might.

‘You know, if you wanted to sexualise your relationship with your daughter — she’d go along with it. What else can she do? She can’t do otherwise. When it comes to Daddy, little girls are certainties. Fathers have the idea that if they made a move their daughters would rear back and slap them across the face. And say: I’m not that kind of little girl. What kind of little girl do you take me for?’

And then she walked away.

That’s what a good caveman is meant to do, isn’t it? When he hears the snap of a twig, the breath of an animal or enemy, then he disappears — even if oestrus is spreadeagled before him. The desire to reproduce meets its counterforce, which is the desire to go on being alive.

Something very ancient but much less primitive also constrained him. She was familiar, intimately familiar; in both senses she was already-seen. He didn’t know it, of course, but the face behind her face was that of his mother. And his sister, and himself. He had seen her in the past all right: when he was twenty and she was ten, when he was sixteen and she was six, when he was twelve and she was two, when he was ten and she was a baby.

Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy sister’s daughter; she is thy niece; it is wickedness.

‘Will you get me a drink?’

‘Yeah, sure. What would you like?’

‘Chocolate Mix.’

‘Coming up.’

‘I read this book but I fell asleep before I could finish the end. Now I started the beginning and I don’t know it again.’

She often said that: ‘don’t know again’ instead of ‘don’t remember’. He understood what she meant.

‘Well let’s sit down and read it properly.’

He was alone with Billie in the kitchen. Sophie was being aired by Imaculada on Primrose Hill. And Russia was a presence, somewhere above. Billie, now, was treating him not like a father, quite, but like a reasonably reliable uncle … Xan was doing what his father had done, many times: he was being genially, even cloyingly considerate to a child while also entertaining murderous thoughts about a fellow male.

‘Will you die before me?’

‘I’m afraid so, darling.’

‘Will Mummy die before me?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Will Sophie die before me?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Will I die before her?’

‘I don’t know, darling. Now let’s read the book.’

Xan had spent the morning on the trail of his enemy. The search — equally unreal and prosaic — began in the True Crime section of the High Street bookshop. A surprising number of the gangland exposés and ghosted memoirs (of various blaggers and bruisers) ended with an index; and a suprising number of these indexes contained references to Andrews, Joseph: the Airport Job, the two long sentences, the suspected murder, and, some time later, a massive tax fraud. It disconcerted Xan, and also disappointed him, to learn that Andrews went back at least half a generation beyond his father: he would now be over eighty. When he returned to the flat Xan typed the forbidden name into a searchengine. After a while he had before him a loose and jangling biography, and even a press photograph. It showed a headmasterly figure, with his wet grey hair combed back and a glass of champagne defiantly raised, poolside, on a plastic chair; a teenage creole sat perched on his lap, wearing a bikini bottom and a wet T-shirt. This was Brazil, twenty years ago; and nothing else followed.

‘Can we do the horses?’

‘Come on then. Up you get. This is the way the children ride … They walk … they walk … they walk. This is the way the ladies ride. To trot, to trot, to trot, to trot. This is the way the—’

‘I need to do a pooh-pooch.’

‘Do you? Come on then.’

‘Quick. I’m desperate.’

Unthinkingly at first, he followed the old protocol. He helped her with the metal buttons of her jeans, and placed her on the toilet seat; then he withdrew, to await her call when she was ready to be wiped. In earlier days Xan had not exactly relished this routine: after four and a half decades, wiping his own backside had lost much of its magic, and wiping Billie’s just seemed like more of the same. But now he admitted to himself that he would rather do it than not. The admission entrained another thought: he knew, he understood, why some animals licked their young clean.

‘Daddy?’ he heard her say. ‘When people move, they don’t move they houses. They move everything else. They move they carpets … they beds … they tables … they toys … they blankets …’

He stood in the passage, by the stairs, in front of the forwardleaning gilt mirror. To this mirror he idly directed the remains of his tortured vanity: the thickening excrescences beneath the eyes; the looming lagoons of his hairline (the shampoo was getting colder every year, every month). Yes, he was thinking, it was a pity, it was a tragedy, that Joseph Andrews was eighty-five years old. There was so little of his life left to ruin; on the other hand, how much more easily, and how much more loudly, might he snap.

‘… they pencils … they fridge … they books … they television … Ready, Daddy.’

He entered. The pleasure the smell gave him — the smell of shit lite … Not dizziness but a sense of general physical insecurity retarded him as he leant over her, and wiped, and activated the flush.

‘My ploompah’s sore.’

‘I’m not surprised. The treatment you give it. Stand on here.’ He placed her on the basin shelf. In recent months Billie had gained weight uniformly, like a coating. He could now see the preliminary form of her breasts through her shirt; then the stomach still infantilely outthrust; and then the vulva, like a longhand w , but all abraded and enflamed — written in pink and red. Xan registered an impulse to weep, but it wasn’t straightforward, this impulse; some of it had to do with his futile twistings and writhings in the night; and some of it felt coarsely and unworthily tender, like crinkling your nose over a Christmas card.

‘You want some cream on that,’ he said.

He went into the passage and called Russia’s name. He went halfway up the flight of stairs and called a second time. ‘Russia! We need you!’ Then he made out the heavy clatter of the shower a floor and a half above; she would be in there under the thick jet, naked behind the panel of glass.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said.

He washed and dried his hands … Her subtle eyes pleadingly appraised him, then widened; then freshened and refreshened in what he took to be an accession of trust. And so his daubed fingertip sought the intima.

Billie gave a gasp of relief: it was a thing of the past. But she was staring beyond him now, and when he looked round he saw that Russia, her hair swept up in a turban and her dressing-gowned figure inanimately still, was watching from the stairs.

Rory McShane had quite enjoyed his dealings with Xan Meo, in the past. He had had him over to the house a few times, first with Pearl, then with Russia. But now that Xan’s career was evidently shot, Rory had transferred him to a different part of his mind: he belonged with all those who had to be humoured. Presumably there would be no good news to give him, ever again.

‘How’s Russia.’

Xan stopped scowling and said, as if to himself, ‘I go round there and she calls the uh, the authorities. Can you credit it. You go round to your own house, and your own wife calls the fucking filth. Can you credit it.’ And he started scowling again.