Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

And the mad hair, the silver tresses, streamed on above their heads, following the comet to Jupiter.

It was six o’clock in London, and Xan was alone in the house with his younger daughter Sophie.

Earlier, as he ate his lunch standing by the fridge in the flat across the road, Russia had called and said (he was going to dinner there anyway), ‘Can you come early and have Sophie for an hour?’

‘I’d love to. But will she wear it?’

‘I think so. Let’s try it and see.’

‘She’s so flash now, Baba. And if she’s not having it … What came up? Tell me, tell me.’

She talked about Billie’s sleepover, Imaculada’s night off. Then she said, ‘A small man with a sort of Foreign Office accent approached me after my lecture on Tuesday. He told me he had some stuff on the Gaddafi boys and offered to bring it over. I’m meeting him in the Close at half past six. Disgusting name. Semen Something. Disgusting eyes: frothy blue. I’ll be back around seven, seven-fifteen. Thanks for this.’

He went over to the house at five o’clock. Sophie looked upon him leniently. At six he poured himself a glass of beer, reminded himself to watch for the comet, and went back to reading the kind of books that featured one word per page.

Relations with the girls were pretty well renormalised. Sophie, now, was occasionally bashful or demure. He was not yet free to pick her up and hold her — she squirmed and simpered, and wouldn’t quite collude. But with Billie he was fully reinstated. Once, to dramatise a point brought up by her bedside literature, he made a supposedly frightening face, and, having briefly faltered, Billie said, ‘ You can’t scare me. You’re just my silly old daddy.’ He had also done himself a power of good the other day, when Billie, using the arm of a chair, had embarked on what were known, hereabouts, as her exercises, and he had said, with mild vexation, ‘Oh Billie’ — and turned away (what was it that mildly vexed him: the sense of thwarted energy?). Then he met the eyes of his wife, and their frown of hope.

Xan, too, had hope. He even believed that he would be spending the night with Russia on this day: the day of the martyr Valentine. His wife, with her aerodynamic bone-structure: she used to put her tongue to the side and push, when she wanted a kiss — to draw attention to the cheek but also to make it nearer . And she had started doing that again, about twenty-four hours ago. If she asked him to stay, and to stay in her bed, he still wouldn’t press his case. And what he was thinking about now, as he said things like ‘car’ and ‘pig’ and ‘fork’, were the nights when your wife sits near you after dinner, reading, motionless, like an artefact, like an Old Master, and all you’re aware of is the texture of the paint.

He watched his daughter, crawling, and often getting to her feet and moving from handhold to handhold … On a certain level, Xan was aware, he entertained ridiculous expectations of Sophie Meo. She was his fourth child, and his second girl. I’ve got the idea by now, he sometimes found himself thinking. Why hasn’t she? Is she really going to cough and shriek and shit everywhere, just like the other three, and fall over all the time, and spend a year saying you when she meant me (‘help you! help you!’), and half a decade asking why, why, why ? Well, he was ready for why , this time around. Instead of ‘because …’ he’d say ‘guess’. Epiphenomenally, he wished that the laws of motion could be redrafted more indulgently with infants in mind, so that the smack of the face on the floor, when the arms failed, would be softer and quieter, and the weeping softer and quieter and also briefer, and the bump shallower-sided and a quieter red. Sophie moved from handhold to handhold.

Xan continued to wonder how much he was going to tell Russia about Cora Susan. In his letter he had promised her some sort of confession, and so he couldn’t altogether avoid it. He knew one thing: he’d tell her about it after . And not soon after, either. But this confidence, this intimacy, would eventually be expected of him. He felt entitled to blur it slightly. Could you actually say, ‘I kissed my niece’s breasts’? Shouldn’t you contain it — what was essentially a family embarrassment? And conceivably Russia might find out about it anyway, via Pearl. He could say: You have the right to retaliate. But with proportionality. You’ll have to get your Uncle Mordecai to …

In Russia’s eyes, naturally enough, Cora wore the taint of pornography (and Xan himself had not escaped it, for all his careful editing of the footage from Dolorosa Drive). Russia’s objections were mainly aesthetic objections — though not for that reason superficial; and the moral objections she saved for the end: ‘She’s both pimp and prostitute.’ ‘True,’ he said, ‘but there are reasons for that. Think.’ ‘Okay,’ she said—‘but when I think about pornography, all I see is a man with a remote control in one hand and his cock in the other.’ Well, yes; and, yes, the obscenification of everyday life was hesitantly entrained. He went on considering it. It could be that women wouldn’t mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy. Nobody bothered to object to the gay end of it, supposedly because of the absence of the other: the exploited. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe women just couldn’t bear to see it travestied, the act of love that peopled the world.

He intended to phone Cora — though maybe he should wait a while, he thought, before delivering the avuncular advice he had in mind. This advice was not particularly tasteful, but it was advice he could give her, because consanguinity had rendered him chaste. His erotic thoughts about Cora were now barely a memory. Which showed that the taboo was strong, was efficacious; it worked. He’d say: ‘It sounds soft, and trite — but have a baby. When I look at you I always look for your children. That’s what your breasts are looking for too: they’re looking for your children. So get Burl Rhody to knock you up, and then spend all your money on help.’ Or something like that. Xan now wondered, warily, whether Russia would go back to wanting another. He could take another child, he reckoned; and he wouldn’t refuse if she insisted. But could he take another pregnancy? Pearl and Russia had not much differed here: pretty wonderful, the first time round; and then, the second time round, the self-righteous sumo wrestler, with her doomy naps behind curtained noons, her looming trudge, and every other breath a sigh from the depths. And mad with power.

His hopes, he realised, his ambitions, were gaining in strength and complacency and even … Yes, he was back — back in his life. And what did it look like now, through these quietly different eyes? Good. But he was also back in the thing which is called world. Two days earlier he had gone to collect Billie from school. The playground, as he approached it, was making the sound that playgrounds make: that of unserious panic. And he thought — what if that panic were not unserious? How precious it all is and how fragile it all is. The bare trees above his head were furred with snow. Their claws had become paws. But the snow would soon melt.

But I go to Hollywood but you go to …

Sophie passed by. She steadied herself with a hand on his knee. The dimples at the base of each finger looked like pluses and minuses. The plus and minus signs of babies. She would soon be walking — the faulty wiring and the hairtrigger readjustments, the involuntary three-yard sprints, the upward-shooting arms.

He made a call on the house line, and reached Pearl, who treated him gently (persisting in some obscure cycle of penitence), and gave him a boy. As he hung up, his mobile phone sounded in his jacket.