Success (16 page)

‘E, m, b …’ I plead.

— most intimate hopes and dreams. Reeling through the gallery towards the Styleses’ fetid grotto, I saw that the Creator, the First Author himself, was present, hunched worriedly over the catalogue draft; Old Ma Styles stood in hirsute attendance while Jason fumbled with the coffee cups behind them. Apparently the fraudulent
little oik was very anxious about the catalogue, partly because he couldn’t dream up any ‘titles’ for the oblongs of homogeneous drivel which now smothered the gallery walls. ‘Less think,’ he says. ‘What about “Sensuality” for this one. Or for that one. Or for that one.’ I crept away to my desk, suffering Madame Styles to give me a bellow if —

‘Gregory! How do you spell “Schizophrenia”?’

‘Oh, you’ll have to look that one up,’ I said wearily.

The show is a flop, of course. Throughout the following week the gallery remains deserted, save for the odd mad-eyed Nipponese, in whom the canvasses seem to awaken a momentary, tribal pang. Odette and Jason are depressed. They are losing more money than they usually lose. They stay in their pit all day, and I can hear their morbid whispers. The interior decorator comes in less often now; nobody tries to look cheerful when he does.

But the week is slow. I have nothing to do. I sit at my glass desk here as the afternoons stretch and yawn, and by the time I get home I feel tired and wretched and don’t go out. The dreams have not gone. Once I awoke with a jolt to find that I was in the gallery, which seemed shrill and hollow, like another kind of dream. So I just sit here with the feverish taste of rust in my mouth, sickening again, fading and fading, until the week stops.

Twenty-four hours to go. Now let me see.

Gregory doesn’t want to talk about Ursula. I don’t blame him. If she were my sister I wouldn’t want to talk about her either. It looks as though she has started to go mad, I’m afraid. And she knows, too, just as my sister always knew.

Of course, in
his
family there’s a lot of it about. (There must be some in mine as well, I suppose, but I feel so unimplicated by that part of it: my stuff all comes from without.) Greg’s father, for instance, is, by almost anybody’s standards, off his head — though in an entirely benign and comic way (he is, I should say, a manic depressive who never gets depressed. Everything about him is light-hearted — even his occasional heart-attacks. I like him: he has always tried hard to make things okay for me). Greg’s mother is, in my view, quite mad also — though try telling
her
that (she is, I should say, slightly paranoid, tending to delusions of pride rather than of persecution. I don’t like her much: she has always been dutiful and correct with me, but no more). And now Greg’s sister Ursula is going mad too: she is ‘getting’ schizophrenia, rather in the way that other people get hay fever, or get rich quick, or get fucked up. I love her (and she loves me, I think, which is some claim to
uniqueness), but I have no idea what to do about her.

Gregory himself has always been very cavalier on the subject, playfully tending to rattle the skeletons in the family cupboard rather than board them up. He has always enjoyed chronicling the
tonto
exploits of his ancestors, particularly those of his great-grandfather, who, among other idiosyncracies, used to like sleeping in the stables and once tore down two rooms of the house and dug up large parts of the garden in search of a mislaid marble, which was later discovered in his shoe. Brilliant. I further suspect that Gregory finds madness posh, like gout or incest. If you’re sufficiently protected by family and cash (the argument runs) you
might as well
be mad, since nothing you do is ever going to matter a bugger anyway. Well, things aren’t like that any longer, bub. The world is changing. You are not protected, your father is not rich any more, and what you do suddenly counts. Madness doesn’t mean maybe these days.

Now that’s passed some time. Twenty-three hours to go. I expect I’ll give madness a try myself, if things don’t work out tomorrow. It all seems to be fixed still. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

My foster-brother is up and about again, if rather groggily so. A week ago today, when I saw him before going off to work, he looked as complacently poorly as ever, crying out when I started to draw his curtains and fluttering a wristless hand at the mug of Cona coffee I had laboriously prepared. But what happens when I get home that evening? There he is, pallid and overdressed, feebly pacing his room. I expressed surprise, which annoyed him, and then lamely asked if he felt better. Greg said that he wasn’t better so much as too bored with illness to go on countenancing it. He added something to the effect that the gallery ‘couldn’t do without’ him any longer, and made it clear that he planned to attend work the next day. In fact he seemed so incredibly fucked up that I assumed Mr and Mrs Styles (both of
whose mothers, so far as I can gather and guess, suck cocks in hell — I mean, they don’t sound terribly nice) had been nagging him to return. This evening I went upstairs and, after a bit of nervous fawning, asked him if our plan was still intact. What plan? he asked. I rehearsed my dream that he might stay out until at least twelve o’clock the following night. Oh, and don’t come into my room when you get back. He agreed again, shaking his head in friendly bemusement. Christ he looked rocky, but we’re almost there now and I’m pretty sure he will keep his promise to me.

It’s all fixed.

Ever since the epoch-making, Rosie-induced crying-jag, there had been a lot of breezy, offhand banter between Jan and me in the office about our ‘big night out’, our ‘night on the razzle’, our ‘spree’. There would be expensive drinks, a posh dinner — ‘hell, we might even take in a show’, the Trainee had cracked in response to Jan’s ironic cooing. Then, once, in the pub, I plucked up the bottle to say, ‘And I’ll make sure Gregory is out of the way so we can have the place to ourselves …’ And
then
, instead of walking out of the pub, instead of slapping the sick grin off my face, instead of shouting, ‘You’ve made sure of
what
? Why do you think I’m coming
back
there, fat boy?’, instead, she leaned forward and whispered, ‘And I’ll fix with my folks to stay with a mate in Chelsea, so there’ll be none of that last-train bit.’ I was shocked, I don’t mind telling you. Perhaps Gregory was right, perhaps she does fuck everyone. Perhaps all you’ve got to do is ask her and she will. (‘Will you?’ ‘Yup.’) Or perhaps she really likes me. Do you think that’s at all possible?

Twenty-two hours to go. For the time being cleanliness preoccupies me. I shall need to have a marathon soak, obviously — and I even toy with the idea of actually sleeping in the bath. Jan and I are swanning straight out after work (we happen to be having cocktails at the Bar
Royale — a wallet-thinner, true, but it’s a tremendously sexy place, I’m told), so there will be no time for pedantic, nitpicking ablutions immediately beforehand. Maybe I’ll take some sort of kit with me to work and have some sort of session with it in the nasty lavatories there (and they’re
very
nasty lavatories. The two cubicles are separated by partitions no bigger than cowboy-saloon swing doors, so not only do you hear the awful farting, plopping and grunting of your co-crapper, and he yours, with especially high fidelity, but also, on preparing to leave, it’s quite possible to pull up
his
trousers instead of your own. It is even more horrible if you know who’s next door. Wark always has a particularly bad time in there). The morale of my cock, incidentally, which was suavely sporting an erection this morning, albeit of a piss-proud, bladder-bolstered variety, is surprisingly good considering it’s been lying very low these days and, well, we haven’t been on what G. would call ‘speakers’ for some weeks now. I have given it, in all kinds of senses, a free hand, as a gesture, hoping that the trust I am so plainly reposing in it will spur it on to greater efforts on the night. No more henpecking: all right, you say you can handle the job, young fella — go ahead and handle it. I
think
my cock has fallen for the ruse. (I’m keeping my voice down here, so to speak — it might get wise. But the response so far has been encouraging. After all, it has a lot of prestige riding on tomorrow night.) My room is in superb shape since I aimed my wastepaper-basket. I even own a double-bed I see.

I had a soul-session between eight-thirty and nine — a fairly grateful one, which left my cheeks with a post-sneeze tingle — and then slipped out (all was quiet up there), to walk, perhaps to eat, perhaps to find someone else to fall in love with for when things went wrong. The sodium-illumined arcades of Queensway buzzed with the random, yapping faces of aliens enjoying their stay or actually living here now in the dirty and fire-prone tenements whose sparsely lit top storeys form a queasy mezzanine above the shop fronts (this was a street once, with
houses). A coloured woman in a green-ribbed T-shirt with the biggest breasts I’ve ever seriously seen on anybody walks alongside her waiflike but massively pregnant girlfriend. Across the road a couple dance indolently to the weak strumming of a pavement guitarist. As I go by my nearest pornographer’s — run by a greedy Greek who keeps the shop open practically round the clock — I see a very old woman stand becalmed between the pavement displays: for a moment she is weirdly framed by a montage of whopping breasts and proffered backsides. Busy busy busy. I don’t know why I make all this fuss, I’m sure.

Deciding, after mature consideration, against the hamburger, ditto the pasty, the pasta, the pizza or the pastry — against any take-home variant of these — I found myself entering The Intrepid Fox, the semi-sinister pub in Moscow Road which sells everyone Particular Brews. Particular Brew, a potent domestic beer much favoured by my ubiquitously near-alcoholic contemporaries, tastes of soap and makes you totally pissed and
tonto
the instant it touches your lips (I’m sure that when the truth about these Brews breaks, when we all find out what they’ve really been doing to us, such things as the Thalidomide tragedy are going to look pretty trifling in comparison). By ten o’clock, everyone is either fighting or dancing or crying or all three in The Intrepid Fox, such is the pathetic paradigm of drunkenness that this beer sets in train. ‘Never any trouble in my pub,’ I’ve overheard the ketchup-cheeked landlord saying, and then adding, with a smug downward glissade, ‘ — except of course-with-the-Particular-Brews.’

I thought I’d have one, just to keep the cold out. I did, and most refreshing it was too.

As the landlord cheerfully poured out my second, I thought: success. It will be a success. My cock may not be in colossal form these days, but — Christ — we
like each other
, Jan and I. We have feelings to share, thank you. Excuse us, but we don’t happen to be that interested in
brisk, press-up, Seventies sex. Not us, my friend,
oh
no. Even if I goof, even if my cock retracts beyond recall into my loins, the evening will one way or another be a
success
.

As the landlord solicitously poured out my third, I thought: … I thought about the extraordinary amounts of tenderness contained within the world, about all the scruffy pockets of everyday goodwill and desire to be nice, about the nobility and pain of growing up and never being young again. I thought of the frightening beauty of clouds, the fluffiness of kittens, little girls with big eyes.

As the landlord facelessly poured out my fourth (and the first tear of the evening plopped fatly on to the bar beside my drink), I thought: oh God, why is it this hard. Why does it have to be this hard. That poor fucked-up hippie never had a chance to become anything else. It can happen when you’re young, or it can happen now, or it can happen at any point in the future. Who fucks us up? Who is it who makes our bottles crack?

As the landlord, using his old and violent hands with deliberation, uncapped my fifth, I thought: shiteaters like you, mack, with your horrible unsmiling ways. Look at these cocksuckers, I thought, swinging round from the bar and disgustedly surveying the people grouped about me in circles and rows, drinking, smoking, talking. What have
you
ever felt, what do
you
do, what has
your
life ever been but some sort of appetite. Look at that mindless asshole over there with the two girls — yes, you, you scumbag — what the hell are … who the … what do …

As the landlord, after an interlude of noisy argument, finally agreed to sell me my sixth, I thought: I’m going to be sick. Very sick, very soon. Slumped over my high-octane washing-up liquid, I became the theme of derogatory remarks from both sides of the bar. Dirty boy. I couldn’t finish my drink. Off with you, said someone, and good riddance, as I stumbled out into the eventful night, Terry the Tramp once more.

It must have been, oh, 11.30 by the time I came lurching and burping back to the flat. I shut the door
brashly and executed a menacing wheel in the direction of the stairs. I’ll go beat him up, I’ll go cry on his shoulder, I’ll go fuck him (the faggot), that’d be good, all that would be good.

I lurched and burped along the corridor to my room, swigged candidly from the whisky bottle, undressed, and, with a bale of nude-magazines stacked in front of my arched form — the fist of lav-paper beside me, the two pillows in the tell-tale L (one as prop, one as lectern) — had a bitter catfight with my cock, which hadn’t the slightest intention of tumescing in the first place and was very bored and imperturbable about the whole thing. Well fuck
you
, I thought as the ceiling swung down on me, unwashed, whisky souring my teeth, drunk, battered, unloved, all fucked up.

Delightful behaviour, I think you’ll agree? Tremendously sexy stuff, and the perfect prelude to the epiphany of the next day.

So this is what a hangover is, I said out loud when I woke up. All the others — they weren’t hangovers. This is, though.

I overslept (or, rather, was unable to climb from the cot) until 9.45, and had to run, coffeeless and with someone else’s head, an old monster’s head, on my shoulders, to the dry cleaners’, in whose canned heat I gaggingly queued for fifteen minutes before the information reached me that my suit had been mislaid in the van. Thence to the launderette (I’ve been a joke-figure there ever since I asked them to launder my rubbish — Pakkis look up and smile), thence home and into clean creased shirt, fresh pants and socks, and second-best clothes, thence the streets. Pausing for a spectacular hawk in the gutter (strata of ancient poisons lay in wait in my lungs), I dashed into the fumy hole of the Underground. For twenty surreal, nauseous minutes, no train arrived. When one did, it was naturally very crowded — I had to ooze my way into the wall of limbs and was practically
frenching an elderly Chinaman all the way to Chancery Lane (I don’t know how he bore it). Stopping for a panicky coffee-no at Dino’s, I found I had only a £10 note, which, on top of winning me the unanimous venom of staff and clientele alike, delayed me a further eight minutes. It was
11.30
when I crept, more or less on all fours, into the office — undetected, I thought (except by Jan, who seemed to smile my way) — and found a note on my desk from the Controller saying, ‘See me, when you get in.’ Hated that comma.