Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘Daddy’s different now.’

‘Count down from one hundred in units of seven.’

‘One hundred … Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Et cetera.’

‘Good. What do a bird and an aeroplane have in common?’

‘Wings. But birds don’t crash.’

‘Can you name the Prime Minister?’

Xan named him.

‘Can you name the Royal Princess?’

Xan named her.

‘I’m going to ask you to memorise three words for me. Will you do that? They are: dog, pink, reality … All right. What were they?’

‘Pink. Cat. Reality.’

His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from — snap out of. Now it was a dream within a dream. And both dreams were bad dreams.

That morning, with Russia present, Xan had been moved from the Intensive Care Unit to the Head Injury Ward. He had won (it seemed to him) insultingly excessive praise for slowly walking in a roughly straight line, for negotiating a flight of stairs depending only on the handrail, for ponderously combing his hair and cleaning his teeth, and for successfully getting into bed. The consumption of a fish finger, with full deployment of knife and fork, brought him further accolades. It was a dream and he couldn’t wake up. But he could go to sleep, and he did so, dreamlessly.

In the afternoon everything became a little clearer. There were fourteen patients in the ward, and they had all of them been split in time. Their minds had gone backwards, while their bodies had floundered on into age. The dullest chores of body-maintenance, those that normally made you numb with inanition, were hereabouts hailed as skills . For example: voidance. An unassisted visit to the toilet could win a round of applause from the staff and from all the patients who knew how to clap. (And even Sophie, at ten months, knew how to clap: a tinny, ticky sound, to be sure, but she seldom actually missed.) Then, too, there were accomplishments that were even more basic than going to the toilet — like not going to the toilet when you weren’t in the toilet. Aslant the next bed but one there lay a seventy-year-old who was being taught how to swallow. And there were others, at different points along different roads, trudging off in tracksuits to the woodshop or the physiotherapy pool. And there were two or three like himself, the uncrowned kings of Head Injury — virtuosos of toothbrush and hairbrush, crack urinators, adepts of the shoelace and the beltbuckle, silky eaters: Renaissance Men.

‘Do you know what the en ee oh is?’

‘Meo. Neo. No.’

‘Near Earth Object. Have you seen a newspaper? It rather drove you off the front page, I’m afraid. It’s coming on Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry. It’ll be close, but it’ll miss.’

Valentine’s Day, he thought. Not a good day for this particular woman. The full orange lips against the downy pallor, the massed orange hair. And yet there was something …

‘Could you write out a sentence for me? Any sentence.’

Xan was handed a pencil and pad. His interlocutor was a forty-year-old clinical psychologist called Tilda Quant. She was having a reasonably good time, partly because it made a change from cajoling an elderly into spelling the word the , but also because this patient was indeed in the newspapers, was in show business, was a mediated individual. Tilda wasn’t succumbing to the old-style reverence for fame. This was something more subliminal and interactive. Partaking of his publicity, his exposure to general observation, her own publicity was minutely enhanced. For his part, Xan thought it tremendously significant, for reasons as yet unclear to him, that Tilda Quant was a woman. She said,

‘“The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” Hm.’

‘It’s an exercise,’ he said. ‘Supposed to contain every letter in the alphabet.’

‘Yes, you’re a qwerty too. Qwerty? You know: qwerty uiop.’

‘Oh yeah. I think I got it wrong though. The sentence. Don’t see a vee in it. I could never remember that one. Even before.’

‘… You say you don’t remember it, the uh, violence.’

‘I do. I do. It wasn’t just the rough stuff in the last few months. The whole process was unbelievably violent. I’ll tell you how I felt. I thought: If I could find some very old people to sit near to, then maybe for ten seconds nothing that bad would happen. Then I wouldn’t feel so incredibly frail.’

She was looking at him with a new fascination. She said,

‘What are you talking about?’

‘My divorce.’

‘Hah,’ she said, taking notes. ‘I’d call that your first dabble in cognitive dysfunction. An inappropriate response to a question that was clearly related to the assault .’

‘The assault? No, I don’t remember the assault.’

‘Do you remember the three words I asked you to memorise?’

‘… Cat. A colour: yellow or blue. Oh, and reality.’

Outside the sun was an hour above the horizon, still showing one thing to another: showing the other thing to this thing, and this thing to the other thing. He watched shadows move. They moved, it seemed to him, at the same speed as the minute-hand of the clock on the wall of the sister’s office, behind her sheet of glass. This felt like a discovery: shadows moved at the speed of time … Xan kept thinking about his dead sister, Leda: he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and when he went to the hospital she never woke up.

His wife came, with Billie and the baby, and Imaculada.

When the girls had gone Russia called for the screens to be drawn around his bed, which she then climbed into, wearing only her slip. The way she did this made him think of the phrase petticoat government … He responded palpably to her warmth, her breadth. This was a distant reassurance, but it soon joined the pulse of his headache, and was then lost in his exhaustion and nausea and the ambient grief of his wound. He wanted to submit to a body of moving water. He wanted to let the waves do it.

Russia had put her clothes back on and was about to leave. Xan seemed to be sleeping, but as she tugged at the plastic curtain he sat up straight and eagerly pointed to the young man in the next bed along (who seemed far from grateful for the attention), saying,

‘This guy here — he’s a hell of a shitter. Aren’t you son. Not … uh, overly brill at the eating and the talking. So far. But you can’t argue with shitting of that quality. Boy can he shit.’

Xan felt that no one seriously expected him to remember the assault. When they asked him about it (the doctor, the clinical psychologist, the easily satisfied plainclothesman), he told them that he remembered nothing between going to Hollywood and going to hospital. This is what he told his wife. And it wasn’t true. He remembered it pretty well. And he remembered it as he had been promised he would remember it: in pain.

Whoever hurt me, he thought (all day long), I will hurt. Hurt more, hurt harder. Whoever hurt me, I will hurt, I will hurt.

Five foot eight in all directions (he was roughly the size of a toilet stall), Mal Bale carefully poked a number into his mobile (it was no bigger than a matchbox, and caused him to rely on the nail of his little finger). He said to his employer,

‘There should be two of me here. To body this fucking bloke? You come back from the Gents and he’s gangraping a waitress — all by hisself … No, mate. No, I only rang for a moan. Actually he’s not that bad tonight, with his injury: slows him down a bit. And the journalist’s here now and he’s gone a bit calmer … Yeah? Thanks, mate. Appreciate it.’

Mal referred, in the first instance, to Ainsley Car, the troubled Wales striker. One of the most talented footballers of his generation, Car was now up to his armpits in decline; and he was only twenty-five. It was three years since he had represented his country (and three months since he had represented his club). The journalist in question was the Morning Lark ‘s Clint Smoker.