Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘I mean, look at her. Clint: nice to see you, son. I mean, look at her. That’s deformity, that is. Or obsessive surgery: Munchausen’s. They’re very unhappy people and they look it. See her eyes . If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times. Keep the bosoms within reasonable bounds: forty-four triple-F would do as a benchmark. I say it and I say it. They go down for a while but then they always creep back up again. And then we get this .’

‘More centrally, Chief,’ said Clint, ‘it makes the paper too embarrassing to buy. I bet we’re losing wankers.’

Even before the first issue had hit the streets, it was universal practice, at the Morning Lark , to refer to readers as wankers. This applied not only to specific features (Wankers’ Letters, Our Wankers Ask the Questions, and so on), but also in phrases common to any newspapering concern, such as ‘the wanker comes first’ and ‘the wanker’s what it’s all about’ and ‘is this of genuine interest to our wankers?’ The staff had long stopped smiling when anybody said it.

‘Well said, Clint,’ said Heaf.

‘We wouldn’t be losing wankers,’ said Supermaniam. ‘You might find a blip on the rate of increase but we’re not actually losing wankers.’

‘Red herring,’ boomed Clint. ‘We’re losing potential wankers.’

‘I’ll have Mackelyne track the figures,’ said Heaf. ‘Who keeps putting these bleeding great … dugongs in the paper anyway?’

No one spoke. For the Lark was run along cooperative lines. The selection of the scores of near-naked women who appeared daily in its pages was a matter of cheerfully generalised improvisation. Naturally the editorial staff was all-male. The only women to be found in the Lark ‘s offices were its tutelary glamour girls and the retirees who impersonated them on the hotlines.

‘I don’t know, Boss,’ said Jeff Strite — Clint Smoker’s only serious rival as the paper’s star reporter. ‘You get in a sort of daze after a bit. You go, you know, “Sling her in” without really thinking about it.’

Clint said judiciously (and loudly), ‘Some blokes do think you can’t have too much of a good thing, so there’s an argument for the occasional bigger bird. We’ve got to attract the more specialised wanker without grossing out the rank and file. It’s this simple: keep the dugongs off the front page.’

‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Anyway, who are we to complain?’ said Heaf. Normally the Publisher had the air of a small-town headmaster — and one harassed by logistical cares to the point of personal neglect (so frayed, so meagre). But now he freshened, and said in a gurgling voice, ‘Gregory, be a good lad and make a start on the beverages, would you?’

Mackelyne had entered and taken his seat. They listened as he talked about the latest sales figures, the multimillion hits on the hardcore websites, the fact that the new sexlines had caused the collapse of the local telephone network, and the inevitability of the 192-page daily format. Then came the money numbers … At the Lark , all profits were shared, with certain steep differentials. But even young Gregory, who was little more than an office boy, had plans to buy a racehorse.

‘Now,’ said Heaf, a while later. ‘What have we got for tomorrow? Clint.’

There always came this moment (and by now the empty bottles of champagne were ranked on the Publisher’s desk, and the dusty air looked gaseous in the low sun, as if everyone had joined in one cooperative sneeze), this moment when the men of the Morning Lark tried to feel like journalists. There was of course hardly any news in the Lark , and no global cataclysm had yet had the power to push the pinup off the front page. Even the vast sports section did little more than print the main results; the rest consisted of girls climbing in and out of the kit of famous football clubs, girls chronicling their one-night stands with famous footballers, early and reckless photographs of models who were married to or living with famous footballers, and so on, plus a few odds and ends about adulterous golfers, satyromaniac jockeys, and rapist boxers. But current events of a certain kind were covered, usually on the lower half of pages two and four.

It was Jeff Strite who spoke. ‘The Case of the Walthamstow Wanker,’ he intoned. ‘And I don’t mean the Walthamstow Reader. It’s an interesting story. And it ties in with our Death to Paedophiles campaign. There’s this public swimming-pool, right? With a gallery? He’s up there alone watching a school party of nine-year-olds. Then this old dear, you know, Mrs Mop appears. The geezer does a runner, falls down the stairs and smashes his head in. For why? His trousers are down around his ankles. ’

‘Because he was having a …?’

‘Exactly. Good headline too: Pervs Him Right.’

‘Excellent. And I see we’ve decided to go ahead,’ said Desmond Heaf, ‘with Wankers’ Wives.’

Back at his laptop Clint resumed work on the heiress with a passion for visiting shoeshops in short skirts. This contribution posed as a letter to the paper’s agony aunt, or ‘Ecstasy Aunt’, whose daily double-page spread was pretty well entirely composed by staff writers. Long narratives of an exclusively and graphically sexual nature were followed by three or four words of encouragement or ridicule, supposedly from the pen of Donna Strange. Readers did write in; and once in a blue moon their letters received the hospitality of the Lark ‘s correspondence columns. These letters dramatised the eternal predicament of erotic prose. It wasn’t that they were insufficiently salacious; rather, they were insufficiently universal — were, in fact, impenetrably solitary. And they were never from women … Then, with a heavy heart, Smoker flagged the new photo-section alluded to by Desmond Heaf. It was to be called Readers’ Richards, ‘Richard’ being rhyming-slang (via Richard the Third) for bird, just as ‘Bristols’ (via Bristol City) was rhyming-slang for—

‘Why’d you want those bloody handcuffs in your conk?’ asked Margery, who was packing up. She was sixty; he was thirty: these facts had suddenly to be acknowledged.

‘Reminds me I’ve got a nose.’

‘Congratulations. Why’d you want reminding you’ve got a nose?’ Especially that nose, she felt moved to add (Clint’s nose was a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage). ‘And what’s that rope in aid of?’

‘I’ll swing for you, Marge,’ said Clint in a softer voice than usual. ‘It’s my identity . Now shut it.’

He was still muttering viciously to himself when five minutes later his mobile sounded: the knock of a truncheon on a cell door.

‘Clint? And.’

And was Andrew New, one of the sempiternal figures in the Smoker universe, someone with whom he had formed the stoutest of bonds. And was Clint’s pusher. And this call was out of the ordinary. And hardly ever rang Clint. Clint rang And.

‘ And , boy. Jesus, what’s that racket? She having another go then?’

‘Gaw, hark at this. “ Harrison! Will you get your fuck ing arse into that bath!” Terrible it’s been. “ And! And! Come and it im!” You fucking it im! I hit im the last time. Sorry, mate. It’s calming down a bit now. It’s not as bad as what it sounds … Uh, Clint mate. I think I’ve got a news story.’

‘Well you’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘Yeah, but you must have contacts.’

‘I’m tolerably well connected,’ said Clint untruthfully (and loudly. People placed near him in restaurants used to ask for relocation. That was when he still went to restaurants with other people). ‘Come on then. What is it?’