Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

There was also inside him somewhere a baby of pristine misery; every day he felt for it and held it and fed it, and every night he put it to bed. But things were clearer now, as he squirmed and twisted. All the signs pointed the same way.

He had been to hospital. He was going to go to Hollywood.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Nick Chopko: ‘what we just experienced is known as CAT, or Clear Air Turbulence. It was quite a drop but uh, I’m pleased to report that we’re in okay shape, thanks to the … the skill and foresight of our Captain, whose last flight this is, now that all four girls are through college, one of whom I’m proud to call my fiancée: Amy Macmanaman. Give it up for the Captain … We encountered a very powerful following wind resulting in pressure-differential loss on the wings, otherwise known as a stall. It seems that everyone was belted down except for Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez in Business, who remained attached to her secured cart but suffered a jarred shoulder. We suspect she’ll pull through. Fortunately all the overhead lockers held but three. These did not contain the dumbbells and bowling-balls some of you like to stow up there. Just some pillows and blankets and a bunch of cartons of cigarettes. CAT is a potential emergency and a very rare event. It was my first time. It was almost certainly your first time. It wasn’t the Captain’s first time. We expect no further problems, but as a precaution we do ask that you keep your seatbelts securely fastened. Thank you.’

‘Do you know’, asked the man in 2A, ‘the proportion of passengers, on average, that survive a plane crash?’

‘No I don’t,’ said Reynolds. ‘Three per cent?’

‘Actually it’s more like forty. There can be one survivor, and there can be one fatality. And everything in between.’

‘Is that a fact.’

‘… I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I don’t even smoke. This seat. This cabin. Right in the crumple zone. I always sit right at the back. In among the toilets. Then the rest of the plane’s your buffer. I was booked on IA but they did my miles in Frankfurt and offered me the upgrade. It’s crazy. I don’t even smoke. The secondary inhalation’s killing me.’

‘Remember that nice breakfast you had. And think about your slippers. Concentrate on them.’

Not inordinately, not egregiously loud so much as very clear, very pure: the explosive failure, the rending crack, of the starboard engine; the grisly physics of its catapulting fan blades and rotor spokes; the clacking strafe of metal-piercing shrapnel.

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Shit Christ Jesus.

First Officer Nick Chopko : Which is the which is the?

Ward : What the hell these guys have done.

Chopko : Pull back the power back.

Captain John Macmanaman : Come on now. Let’s get ahold of the airplane. Come on now. Let’s fly the airplane.

CigAir 101 started to pitch; and then, to the inestimable advantage of Royce Traynor, it started to yaw.

The slightly longer and (by all accounts) very much dirtier version of Princess Lolita arrived at Ewelme by courier. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was committing a crime by taking delivery of it; but Oughtred had told him that the UK was already awash with the American original together with every variety of piratical counterfeit (and a marginally abbreviated edition, with all the non-sexual material excised, could be found by means of a dark and costly visit to the Net). In any case Brendan’s sense of transgression could hardly have been livelier as he signed for the package and hurried to his room to hide it. That night they retired at ten. And Brendan’s anticipation of the small-hour screening was quick to satisfy the greed of his insomnia. He rose at a quarter to three. Captain Mate had been spoken to; and, remarkably, all three doors to the library were equipped with functioning locks and keys … At Ewelme, the rudimentary heating-system wound down long before midnight. In pyjamas, then, in dressing-gown and greatcoat, and socks and hiking-boots, Brendan activated the paraffin stove, slipped the cartridge into the machine and sat there with his breath smoking. He turned the light off. He turned the light on. He turned the light off. He reached for the remote control.

No man on earth, Brendan considered, would watch Princess Lolita with the curiosity that he himself would bring to it. For example, who else had a sane claim to being in love with Princess Victoria, the real princess, as he did? More generally the experience would give him essential information. As he put it to himself, a little frantically: was he a ‘joseph’, one of nature’s neuters, bowing his head as God put the horns on him? Alas, poor Joseph. Hard to keep your chin up, and to go on looking so wise and true. And, yes: nice try with the beard … Brendan consulted the worn memory of his embrace with the Princess, how all the blood within him …

Princess Lolita began with a still of Tori Fate’s birth certificate, followed by a datelined clapperboard introducing footage from the first day of principal photography. Brendan made the calculation: the actress had been barely a week past her seventeenth birthday when filming began. An establishing-shot of a castle tower; then Tori Fate under a sheet in a four-poster. Yes, like, like, very like. Yet without complexity, as if the actress herself had been morphed. And even the surface resemblance proved specious, or cosmetic, the moment she opened her mouth, turning to her attendant and asking her (not in an accent from Brooklyn or Mississippi, but in English, dubbed, clipped, elocuted English — the voice, Brendan felt sure, of a woman of the King’s vintage) about the arts of love … Lolita’s lady-in-waiting, a glistening Amazon with occult tattoos on her muscular breasts, then undertook a demonstration. The enjoyment of such a spectacle, Brendan soon decided, was a test of male heterosexuality that he just didn’t pass. Outer tongue against inner tongue, upper against under — but now came a jolt. When the strap-on phallus was conspiratorially produced, and handed to Tori Fate, who buckled it about herself and stood there with a hand on its base, Brendan felt an abject stirring, a sick twitch, between his legs.

He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out — my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat — and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller …

By this stage Brendan expected to be twitching and twisting for the full ninety minutes. Yet only one more revelation awaited him, and this was insidious or cumulative, like the reluctant awareness of footsteps behind you, at night, on a lonesome road. Quite soon, exposure to Lolita’s sentimental education was reminding him of his only bullfight, in Barcelona: after the third kill, fascination and disquiet remained, but these feelings were quietly joined by boredom. As the heroine sedulously dallied — now with a jodhpured Spanish grandee, now with a rude young groom, now with a spangled diplomat, now with a rugged derelict plucked off the street — it seemed to Brendan that the performers, with more haste than lust, were working their way through a checklist or duty-roster: some of this, then some of that, and then this and then that, including some of this, not forgetting that, and then maybe this, and then always that. Always that — at the end. Grinning, and grinning gratefully, on her knees, Princess Lolita, awaiting anointment.