Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city. In Brasilia they’re coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they’re having their first whisky sours — that’s what’s happening elsewhere in the world when our hero wakes up. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. He has had the good education and, until recently, the good job. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning was not parked heavily on our hero’s lawn.

But then the lurid overtakes him — and whether this lurid tone is caused by our hero’s new unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it’s hard to say. What’s definite is that a chain of events begins that feels to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent — complete with lies, deceit, and chicanery; one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes.

Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape ; a novella, Kapow! ; and a project including an essay-book — which won a Somerset Maugham Award — and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s . His work is translated into thirty languages. He has twice been selected as one of Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists.

in which our hero wakes up

When I woke I was looking upside down at a line of velvet paintings on the wall above the bed. Jesus was standing on his halo beside a very bright Madonna — I mean the religious kind, not the disco version. In between the two of them was a tropicana beach — it was a palm tree, a palm tree, a palm tree, some blue sand. I thought perhaps I liked them, these velvet paintings. I liked the very bright vibe. But also I knew that although I liked the vibe it was not the vibe of my usual bedroom, just as the girl who was sleeping beside me in what seemed to be a hotel room was not my happy wife. It was that kind of problem situation, and while I acknowledge that some people would not feel that this is after all so bad — and that waking beside a person who is not ethically your own is just the usual way most humans enter the moral realm and therefore, kiddo, live with it — still, I could not be so suave. For a long time now there had been problems in the atmosphere — small cracks and fissures, like butterflies emerging in autumn, a light tropicália everywhere and it made me a little afraid. Just as now I felt like my head was somewhere else and I also felt very sick. I knew my phone must be beside me and I knew that I should look at it but I really also didn’t. If at this point you had placed me on a chat-show sofa and asked me how I was feeling, I’d have told you that I basically was feeling very sad. Because I really am no big shot, or hoodlum. I am no player . Always girls have made me shy. In this role of high-speed macho I was about as authentic as the white chicks doing gang signs for photos. It really wasn’t normal for me to wake up and not know how I got there. For me a normal pastime was to be intent on mathematical problems, or models of voting systems — my pastimes, I just mean, were always sweet and meditative. Nevertheless, this new thing went on happening and I was powerless to stop it. My head was definitely very bad. In Brasilia they were coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they were having a first whisky sour. Four thousand miles away there were drones just very noisily hovering in formation above the mountain passes and valley gorges, and down here on the quiet earth a girl who was not my wife was lying there beside me. Her name was Romy, and she was one of my favourite friends. She was blonde and when you saw her in a bar her hair was this gorgeous listless mass to one side of her neck but now I had this inner knowledge that she wasn’t a natural blonde. She almost had no hair between her legs but it turned out that the hair that was there, a tuft, was definitely dark. That’s what I tried to concentrate on while the light began to fry the nylon curtains and Romy continued to sleep. Because even if you’re bewildered or sad you have to carry on. I remember one bodhisattva phrase — keep cool but care — and that phrase is never wrong. It’s most certainly a rule to live by and such rules should always be treasured. I hope that if I prove one thing in the writing of this account it’s the importance of rules for living, which is perhaps why in this story of my moral life I have decided to begin with this episode of blood. It was I think the place where my usual categories disappeared. I got up and dressed and stood there just considering how I was going to go back home — I mean in what state and with what explanations. But it was also very early. It was both way too late and also very early so I thought for now I would start with getting myself some breakfast, because sometimes the only correct way to act is to take care of the ordinary things. You have to think things through in stages. So I walked out into the car park and along to the hotel restaurant where I sat myself down. From the booth in which I sat I had a very bright view. It was nothing special. Insects rotated slowly in the green dawn, they just kept developing from nowhere, from the bright and granular air. My car was in the parking lot outside our door, and beside it there was what looked like a Caddy Hearse but I ignored it. And maybe this was a mistake — to ignore what other people might consider a definite sign. If you’re used to the unfranked letters arriving at your house, or phone calls where a man asks if he’s got through to the chapel of rest, I mean if you’re alive to the mafia ways of telling a man he’s marked or savaged or doomed, then maybe it could be said that I made a mistake. Had I known then what I know now, had I been able to understand the full ranges of terror I would come to know, the gore and ballistics, had I been able to perform the kind of loop-the-loop this manner of talking now allows me, I might well have argued in this way. But I always missed the obvious. I don’t know why. Other people appreciated the ordinary things like shopping-centre car parks and cafe parasols, or whatever — the coffee-machine coffee. But me, no. I was much better at my own ruminations. It was very bright and very sad inside this restaurant. The radio was talking to itself but I had nobody to talk to, so I sat there in my booth with a view of the empty signscape and read through the laminate menu. I waited. I looked out the window. I kept looking at my watch and then the landscape for ten minutes: my watch and then the landscape, my watch and then the landscape. I really don’t like waiting. Finally a waitress emerged from the kitchen. Her name was on her breast pocket. This name was Quincy. In another font, another badge was wishing me a nice day. And it was a nice day, no question. It was CGI nice, if you had not woken up in a state of oozing anxiety.

— I was waiting ten minutes, I said.

— You said what? said Quincy.

— I’m not making a formal complaint, I said. — I just think you should know that I came in I think ten minutes ago. It’s really nothing.

— Uh-huh, said Quincy.