Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find …

Xan Meo went to Hollywood. And, minutes later, with urgent speed, and accompanied by choric howls of electrified distress, Xan Meo went to hospital. Male violence did it.

‘I’m off out, me,’ he told his American wife Russia.

‘Ooh,’ she said, pronouncing it like the French for where.

‘Won’t be long. I’ll bath them. And I’ll read to them too. Then I’ll make dinner. Then I’ll load the dishwasher. Then I’ll give you a long backrub. Okay?’

‘Can I come?’ said Russia.

‘I sort of wanted to be alone.’

‘You mean you sort of wanted to be alone with your girlfriend.’

Xan knew that this was not a serious accusation. But he adopted an ill-used expression (a thickening of the forehead), and said, not for the first time, and truthfully so far as he knew, ‘I’ve got no secrets from you, kid.’

‘… Mm,’ she said, and offered him her cheek.

‘Don’t you know the date?’

‘Oh. Of course.’

The couple stood embracing in a high-ceilinged hallway. Now the husband with a movement of the arm caused his keys to sound in their pocket. His half-conscious intention was to signal an impatience to be out. Xan would not publicly agree, but women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting. Men shouldn’t mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power … Now Xan sighed softly as the stairs above him softly creaked. A complex figure was descending, normal up to the waist, but two-headed and four-armed: Meo’s baby daughter, Sophie, cleaving to the side of her Brazilian nanny, Imaculada. Behind them, at a distance both dreamy and self-sufficient, loomed the four-year-old: Billie.

Russia took the baby and said, ‘Would you like a lovely yoghurt for your tea?’

‘No!’ said the baby.

‘Would you like a bath with all your floaty toys?’

‘No!’ said the baby, and yawned: the first lower teeth like twin grains of rice.

‘Billie. Do the monkeys for Daddy.’

‘There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They took him to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the BED. ’

Xan Meo gave his elder daughter due praise.

‘Daddy’ll read to you when he comes back,’ said Russia.

‘I was reading to her earlier,’ he said. He had the front door open now. ‘She made me read the same book five times.’

‘Which book?’

‘Which book? Christ. The one about those stupid chickens who think the sky is falling. Cocky Locky. Goosey Lucy. And they all copped it from the fox, didn’t they, Billie.’

‘Like the frogs,’ said the girl, alluding to some other tale. ‘The whole family died. The mummy. The daddy. The nanny. And all the trildren.’

‘I’m off out.’ He kissed Sophie’s head (a faint circus smell); she responded by skidding a wet thumb across her cheek and into her mouth. And then he crouched to kiss Billie.

‘It’s Daddy’s anniversary,’ Russia explained. ‘Where are you going,’ she asked him finally, ‘for your lost weekend?’

‘That bar-type place on the canal. What’s its name. Hollywood.’

‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ Billie called.

Leaving the house, he turned briefly to assess it — a customary means of assessing himself, assessing where he was positioned, where he was placed. It wasn’t his style (we shall come to his style), but he might have put it this way:

If fine materials are what you like, then have a feel of that fleece there, on the extravagantly deep armchair (take as long as you like: don’t stint yourself). In fact, if you have an interest in real estate or fine living generally, you could do worse than take a tour of the whole house. If, alternatively, German technology is your thing, then get you to my garage, just around the side there. And so on. But it wasn’t the money. If you harbour an admiration for extreme womanly beauty, then feast your eyes on my wife — the mouth, the eyes, the aerodynamic cheekbones (and the light of high intelligence: he was very proud of her intelligence). Or, if your soul melts to the vivid ardour of unusually cute, healthy and well-behaved children, you would envy us our … And so on. And he might have continued : But then I am the dream husband: a fifty-fifty parent, a tender and punctual lover, a fine provider, an amusing companion, a versatile and unsqueamish handyman, a subtle and accurate cook, and a gifted masseur who, moreover (and despite opportunities best described as ‘ample’), never fools around … The truth was that he knew what it was like, being a bad husband, a nightmare husband; he had tried it the first time; and it was murder.

Xan Meo walked down St George’s Avenue and came to the main road (this was London, near the Zoo). In so doing he passed the garden flat, opposite, which he now seldom used. Were there any secrets there? he wondered. An old letter, maybe; an old photograph; vestiges of vanished women … Xan paused. If he turned right he would be heading for pram-torn Primrose Hill — itself pramlike, stately, Vicwardian, arching itself upwards in a posture of mild indignation. That route would have got him to Hollywood the long way round. If he turned left he would get there sooner and could stay there later. So he had a choice between the garden and the city. He chose the city. He turned left, and headed for Camden Town.

It was late afternoon, and late October. On this day, four years earlier, his decree nisi had been made absolute, and he had also given up smoking and drinking (and dope and coke. American pimps, he had recently learnt, called coke girl ; and heroin boy ). It had become Meo’s habit to celebrate this date with two cocktails and four cigarettes and half an hour of writhing reminiscence. He was happy now — a delicate state: you could feel the tingle of its stress-equations. And he was steadily recuperating from his first marriage. But he knew he would never be over his divorce.

The rink of Britannia Junction: Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the dozen black frames of the traffic lights, the slum of cars. Certain sights had to be got out of the way: that heap — no, that stack — of dogshit; that avalanche of vomit; that drunk on the pavement with a face like a baboon’s rear; that old chancer who had clearly been incredibly beaten up in the last five or six hours — and, just as incredibly, the eyes that lurked among those knucklestamps and bootprints harboured no grievance, sought no redress …

Xan Meo looked at the women, or more particularly the girls, the young girls. Typically she wore nine-inch bricks and wigwam flares; her midriff revealed a band of offwhite underpants and a navel traumatised by bijouterie ; she had her car-keys in one cheek and her door-keys in the other, a plough in her nose and an anchor in her chin; and her earwax was all over her hair, as if via some inner conduit. But aside from that — what? The secret purpose of fashion, on the street, the harlequinade, fashion in its anarcho-bohemian form, is to thwart the lust of your elders. Well, it’s worked, thought Meo. I don’t dig you. He thought too of the menpleasers of twenty-five years ago, their stockings, garterbelts, cleavages, perfumes. Girls were now breaking with all that. (And maybe it went further, and they were signalling the retirement of physical beauty in the interests of the egalitarian.) Meo would not say that he disapproved of what he saw, though he found it alien. And when he saw two teenagers vigorously kissing — an unimaginable mesh of lip-rings and tongue-studs — he felt himself assent to it. See the young kissing and run it by your heart; if your heart rejects it, retreats from it, then that’s age, that’s time — fucking with you.