Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘I’ve lived in the apartment over Karla White’s garage for five years. And yesterday was our first time. Not our first attempt. Our first time. You know what she does when she gets aroused? She weeps.’

‘She weeps?’

‘Hot tears. Then everything stops. She stops. Then you stop.’

She wore her usual white dress, her usual shallow sandals. The trouble was that he thought he loved her.

On the upper balcony she poured him another glass of the skull-chilling wine and said, ‘Don’t you think we’re all being incredibly cool about the comet?’

‘Cool?’

‘All women hate space. I hate space. I suppose you’ve taken an interest in it, the comet.’

He shrugged, in the affirmative. Before them lay the great beast of the Pacific Ocean.

‘Then the first thing you’ll have learnt is that comets aren’t like asteroids, and you can’t chart them. Because they’re subject to non-gravitational forces like explosions and sublimations. They say it’s going to miss.’

‘Or shear.’

‘Or shear. It’s the size of Los Angeles. And it’s going five times faster than a bullet. And the latest is that it’s going to miss by fifty miles. Fifty miles.’

‘It won’t hit. They wouldn’t have told us anything about it if they thought it was going to hit. They’ve done studies. Telling us about it would just add to the social cost. It won’t hit.’

‘If it does, the sky would ignite and then turn pitch black.’

‘… And you’d be pleased.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ she said in a wronged voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh you mean the void and nothing mattering and everything being allowed. I don’t think nothing matters.’

Did he? Did the comet matter? Watching her shape move around from room to room made him think that it had already happened: the end of the thing which is called world. Every few seconds he thought about reaching for her, but his arms, his hands felt loth and cold.

‘Nobody cares about the comet because it’s not our fault.’ After a while she said, ‘I wish I hadn’t been quite so rough on that sap Dork Bogarde. Are you hungry? Nor am I. Say if you are.’

The trouble was that he thought he loved her. And love had not guided him well in recent weeks and months, with his wife, his daughter. What kind of love was it? It seemed to have its life somewhere between what he felt for Russia and what he felt for Billie. The thing that further distinguished his love for Karla was that it persistently presented him with the cathartic emotions, those of pity and terror. In her presence, he was afraid and he was sorry. He wanted to protect her from all things — including things like himself. And his senses ached … The waves were for now holding good order, each one bristling up for sudden and ruthless and thrillingly opportune assault, and then pouncing, coming down hard, gnashing and frothing and enveloping with its teeth. And how bloodymindedly they came steaming into the boulders: the orgasmic impact, and then they shouldered their way into rockpool after rockpool, making waves that then had to be made again, after regrapplings, reslitherings.

Something was happening to him. It felt like a flow in the brain: rearrangements of currents and temperatures … Suddenly the sky went an olive colour, and the sea turned white.

‘ Tormenta ,’ she said.

‘I want to lie down. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I’ll be all right if I lie down.’

She took him to her bedroom and left him alone to shed some clothes. He was already half asleep when she returned.

‘I’ll put this on you. The principle of lullabies — it’s not the song. It’s not that the song soothes and dopes you. The point is that you know the singer’s still there. I can’t sing, but I’ll go on patting this shawl so you know I’m still there.’

While he slept and turned he kept remembering the final minutes of the sex-act he had witnessed on Dolorosa Drive.

Karla was on her knees. She was about to complete a presumably ancient human activity. But it didn’t look ancient. It looked as though it had been invented earlier that day — or was now, in fact, in the process of coming into being. For the forward thrust the arms were clasped about Burl Rhody’s waist; his phallus, ideally black, seemed to constitute an obstacle: she couldn’t go past it, she couldn’t go round it. No, she had to go through it, as if her real goal lay somewhere within his loins. On the reverse thrust, her hands were placed flatpalmed on his hipbones, to achieve greater traction, and each withdrawal ended with a tremendous smack of the lips before Rhody was as vociferously reengulfed. Then all was speed; and after a while he found himself thinking of a child with a party-whistle. And then she was Billie, or even Sophie, with yoghurt or vanilla icecream all over her face.

Consciousness was upon him. Before he opened his eyes he heard the sound of breathing. More than this, he heard sleep — the economical downdraughts which were the sound that sleep made … He found he was some way down the bed, under the sheet and the shawl; and the thing between his legs was a harsh concentration of gristle. He turned over: there was Karla’s apparently headless body, and the sleepless and incorruptible interrogation of her breasts. He moved towards them.

Soon he heard her somnolent sigh of approval and felt her hands on his neck and hair as he squeezed and kissed. Time passed.

‘I love you, I love you,’ she said.

And when she started to weep, he paused, expecting her to stop (then he’d stop). But she didn’t stop. Like Billie when she wept (faintly incredulous, naïvely eloquent), he thought. Her thighs were apart, and now his hand loomed. But then he reached out to her face and found that her cheeks were dry. Their eyes met. All was subtracted from him; and he turned away.

After several beats of his heart Xan said, ‘See? … Love doesn’t like fear. Size zero.’

‘Oh, I suppose you mean it should be tucked in nicely while you sprint for your life down the beach … That’s what they never say in the books or anywhere else. With a little girl you’re big, even when you’re little. You ought to go ahead with Billie. We get over it.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘No we don’t,’ she said. ‘ Ob viously.’ And with a whip of the sheet she was gone.

When he was woken again, this time by the storm, he got out of bed and reached for his clothes as if they were items of body-armour. The thunder was escalatory: fusillade, cannonade, heavy artillery, the fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike. He opened the bedroom door. There was a figure on the balcony, smoking.

She said, ‘God has got the movers in. There will be breakages. No, we don’t. We don’t get over it. Ob viously. In bed we don’t know our rights.’

And he thought: obviously. Because that is what you do, Daddy, when you do that, when you play that game, when you go down that road. You place them in another dimension where they’re always one step behind, one step beyond.

‘Do you want to see Jo now?’ she asked. ‘You still want that?’

He said yes, but with a reluctance, and a sadness, that he took to be a failure of courage. ‘Are you my enemy?’

‘I used to be your enemy.’ And she told him who she was.

‘… Jesus Christ, Cora.’

Beyond, arthritic feelers of lightning were lancing out, sideways, upwards, forming coastlines with many fjords. There was a repeated jumpcut effect, and shifting blocks of nightscape.

Cora Susan waited with the keys.

‘Come in, dear. Come in out of the wet. Xan … They’re waiting for you, dear, through there. Paquita’ll get you anything you need. Bit of business.’