Success (10 page)

It’s all done with the eyes. At nine or so the pockets of conversation begin their languid dying fall — glasses remain unfilled, cocaine nostril-spoons are put away, the air gets heady with resinous smoke — and people have started to send their gazes wandering round the room. They are conjectural, uncommitted gazes which offer, spurn, flaunt, sustain, advance until they are met by gazes they like and say hello to, and talk about certain
other gazes in a critical way and agree about them or fall out about them or realign in new conjunctions. Then we slip away.

It was with three of the newcomers — panthery blond, leather bike-girl, athletic redhead — that I eventually repaired to the grandest of Torka’s five bedrooms. (I believe, too, that the veteran Mary-Jane tagged along or at least put in an appearance, on the off-chance that an unattended orifice might at some point hove into view.) Inevitably, one imagines, I soon became the cynosure of their eyes, lips and hands. I was kissed by the redhead throughout as the leather girl unbuttoned my shirt and the panther helped peel away my clinging satin trousers. Much ungainly jostling when my brash virilia are displayed; an assortment of lips close and pop. Trickly unzipping noises from the leather girl and a sudden bouquet of healthy flesh as the redhead bursts from her white romper-suit and softly straddles my chest with her warm and freckly thighs, arching backwards as the panther boy cups her (perhaps rather too heavy) breasts from behind, thus admitting between them the busy mouth of the now-naked bikie, which bobs contentedly over my loins, and for a few seconds every cell in my body shakes with ravenous applause. That is the part I love most (though of course the whole thing goes on for ages). From then on, too often, it seems to be just skin and hair, membranes, worthless and familiar stuff, mere leftovers, junk.

One night towards the end of this wet and uncompanionable March I made an early exit from Torka’s — causing a tedious furore — and betook myself home at a smart pace along the midnight streets. My hand-made car, always something of a prima donna in winter, had once again been summoned to the Garage of Thieves, and I relished not at all a late safari down the Bayswater Road and Queensway, that unpoliced, forsaken strip of cruising Mediterraneans, sick vagrants, wheeling drunks
and rare taxis. Only the previous week I had witnessed a squalid and vicious scene in the overlit forecourts of the Three Square Garage on Smith Avenue corner. A stooped, intent figure was steadily clubbing another to the ground, while beside them a fat Alsatian padded nervously to and fro. Torka’s had in any case been well below par that evening. I was simply smuggled into a bedroom by a reasonably attractive, and reasonably resourceful, new couple (that was all there was, actually), emerging ninety minutes later too wearied and replete to have much patience with Adrian’s querulous reproaches. Torka himself was conducting a heated debate with some interior decorator or ballet critic in the kitchen, so I merely slipped away. (I should have gone with Kane and Skimmer on that Brighton jaunt of theirs.) I felt tired and numb, and it was cold outside in the streets. As I turned off the main road and started threading round the squares, a sour rain began to fall.

Then I saw him. The stairwell of my block has a glass wall fronting the street, thin bendy glass — it shudders when the wind is up. On the top floor, outside my penthouse, his body pressing on the rainy window, stood the squat martyred figure of my foster-brother. I halted. Slowly Terence spread his arms. He looked like an eager child, his face pushed flat against the shopfronts of night. What does he see out there? How is his life taking shape? I closed my eyes for a moment and saw him fall through the glass, spinning end over end through the dark air. I opened my eyes and he was gone. I shivered. Is there enough to keep him here? Careful, Terry, careful: please be careful you don’t break anything.

(i) Dirty boy, they’re coming to
seek you out —
TERRY

Guess what? I fucked a beautiful girl the other day. (Guess what? I didn’t really. April fool.)

But listen. Don’t get any ideas — I mean, I haven’t a clue how it’s going to turn out — only I think things might be looking up.

Of late, I’ve fallen into the habit of telling myself that the reason I don’t seem to pull any girls these days is that I don’t seem to meet any girls these days. How could I, even indirectly? (I don’t happen to know any human beings. Suck on that.) There are women I’m allowed to talk to like café waitresses and bus conductresses, but that’s about it. No. I’ve never had any friends really, just as I’ve never had anything I could use against people who might hate me. I’m on my own here.

What else is there supposed to be?

Ex-girlfriends? They’ve all outgrown or forgotten me now, and I’ve simply destroyed any vestigial affection in the few hearts that once found a place for me, what with my clumsy needs and my shimmering hands. Girls in the street, randomly approached? Promising at first, though testing for the bottle — one phone number taken (came to nothing) and one invitation to the pub accepted (came to nothing) — but it obviously isn’t done much any more, (a) because most people seem to be able to fuck whoever the hell they like without resorting to it, and (b) because it’s so incredibly humiliating when you fail (three
snubs running takes the spunk out of your stride; and a passer-by protectively intervened once, which was also very horrible). Girls brought back to the flat by Gregory? Well,
pace
whatever he may tell you, Gregory hasn’t got many friends either — except for that talentless old poof Torka, the various bumboys, cocksuckers and muffdivers who comprise his entourage, and those two upper-class cunts Kane and ‘Skimmer’: if Greg brings a girl home it’s for a brisk and fastidious coupling, and if he brings back a party I feel strictly below-stairs and don’t dare go up.

But listen. An amazing new temp has suddenly started working at the office. And I mean amazing by any standards, not just mine. The most striking thing about her, or at least one of the most striking things about her, is that she’s got, for a start, these huge tits. But they aren’t huge in any vulgar sense; they aren’t ‘high’ or ‘proud’ or anything pushy like that. In fact they’re entirely incongruous and endearing, merged as they are on to this disproportionately puny thorax, small hollow-looking waist, almost embarrassingly pert bottom, and reindeer legs. She often walks with her arms folded demurely over them, as if they oughtn’t to be there, as if she didn’t want them (I’ll have them). I think she’s got a really beautiful face. It looks at first like a hard, fashionable, affectless face, with its wide halo of tangly hennaed hair, stick-on nose, dark-daubed eyes, dimpled chin and wide but ungenerous-seeming mouth. If you go on studying her, though, which of course I go on doing all the time, you come to see many kinds of softened and soulful shapes beneath that sharp telegenic sheen. Her eyes, in particular, genuinely are violet — playful and tender-natured eyes too.

It all happened one morning last week. I was at my desk, tricked out with an unusually desperate hangover (I had even bought a tomato-takeaway as opposed to a coffee-no from Dino’s, always a bad sign) and conducting
a jangled, queasy hate-talk with Wark, the mad Stalinist. His floppy bum parked on my low filing-cabinet, and with a more than averagely plastic-and-offal lilt in his mealy new voice, Wark was deploring at length the proven inability of the urbane Lloyd-Jackson to make any stand against John Hain over the coming rationalization. I was just about to agree with him when the pooh-poohing ex-copywriter himself pushed open my cubicle door and, a shapely half-smile on his neat little lips, announced,

‘Ah. Two birds with one stone — or “rationalization”, as it’s now called. We have a new temp. Now this is Geoffrey Wark … and this is Terence Service.’

And this is she: in tight jeans and loose T-shirt, slouching (her arms folded, a habit of hers, as I said), a shy scowl on her face and a short-sighted ripple between her indigo eyes.

‘And this,’ he said, ‘is
Jan
.’

How like Gregory he sometimes is, I thought, straightening in my chair. Wark nodded with emphasis in the direction of the doorway, then turned to gaze unflappably out of the window. What could I say that would adequately indicate my disaffection from the values here personified by Wark and the intelligent Lloyd-Jackson, my shrewd sympathy (and it wasn’t a hypocritical one, either) with the casual, more strictly functional nature of her position here, the fact that I was nice, extremely friendly, and would make a fine husband? Leaning forward with arrested gusto, I said,

‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ she said, and smiled.

‘How long,’ I asked her, ‘how long do you expect to stay here?’

Jan flared her oval nostrils. ‘Weeell. A month or two.’

‘That ought to do the trick. Come along, two more to meet,’ said Lloyd-Jackson indulgently, preceding Jan through my door.

‘See you,’ I said to her.

‘Right you are,’ she said back.

‘I’ll take you through the motions in a few minutes,’ Wark damply added.

Which is how it all began. Later that same morning I strolled from my hot tube into the main office, pretending to be in search of the back-invoices to check off against the sales-sheets I had nonchalantly brought along with me — ‘Ooh, I don’t know where those are yet,’ Jan pleaded — ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ I said — and together we stood over the cardboard concertina for perhaps ninety seconds, the air about us full of zestless currents, sudden shadows and pinpoints of bright humming dust … Oh boy.

Do I dare? There’s nothing for it.

A donnish, twinkly ‘Let me take you to a place where cash can be exchanged for alcohol’? A frank yet slightly literary ‘Why not let me take you to the pub’? A casually speculative ‘Coming over The Crown’? An abruptly plebeian ‘Fancy a drink?’?

It was 5.25 precisely. Wearing a smartly cut Forties suit and purple stockings (the first time we’d got a proper look at her legs), Jan was ransacking her nosebag-like reticule in the unsystematic, indeed purposeless fashion which habitually preceded her exit from the office; any moment now she would stand up, stretch and yawn, and march round the central table hooting goodbyes. Jan got on famously with the lame young permanent secretary and the old fucked-up permanent secretary, and she tended to hobnob with them briefly before flouncing off. This was her eighth day here: it was also, therefore, the eighth evening I had spent gazing at her in gingery longing from behind my half-shut door. On the previous seven occasions she had been firmly engaged in chat with her two friends, which had of course rendered any kind of direct approach utterly inconceivable (you’re not in the Underground now, you know, or in the streets. ‘You can’t have a drink? You don’t
want
to have a drink? Fine, fine. Well, see you all in the morning!’). On this
occasion, though, Jan lingered vexedly over a seized-up powder case while Anne and Muriel backed out of the office door. They were gone. All clear. Oh no.

Any gentleman would have got up from his chair and sauntered out to Jan’s table. You yourself would have leant over and offered to attempt the recalcitrant pink cask at which Jan’s long fingers pried. The next guy would surely have taken it from her hand, clenched his jaw and turned to the girl with diffident surprise when the aromatic clam split open. No one human wouldn’t have slumped with emotion when she looked up, smiled, and cried, ‘Tarzan!’

‘Fancy a drink?’ I said.

She came. We went to The Enterprise in Fox Street, a popular, cavernous, ramshackle pub with dark marble walls and sad windows. I completed my grotesque routine of standing on tiptoe several drinkers from the bar, pound-note cocked, failing to attract the attention of the fantastically slow-moving and resentful landlord, turning to Jan every few seconds to tell her things like ‘Just be a sec’ or ‘He didn’t see me’ or ‘Christ’, until, equipped with a pint of bitter, a whisky-and-lemonade for the lady, and no change, I followed Jan through the crowd of tall suited men, established her at an advantageous cornerseat, and raced down the stairs for a frenzied pee and bald-patch adjustment before rejoining her and our drinks at the table.

‘All set?’ she asked.

And I don’t care what anybody says — I think I hit bloody good form and made a really very favourable impression. I was, quite fortuitously, wearing my best (i.e. newest) clothes, and it happened also to be one of those days when I felt I could look my face in the eye: less blanched in texture, fewer munch-scars on the lips, my hair behaving itself. Nor were my hands shaking that much — why, I lit three cigarettes for her, panting in gentle appreciation as I marked the relative staticity of the flame — and my voice was without the spastic
tremolo it opts for in times of stress, shame or yearning. (As for Jan, by the way — she was a wet dream throughout.) And conversation? Well, it came and went. It came and went, but it seemed to be there.

God, it was so
nice
. Absurd — I felt changed almost straightaway. On the way home that night (the bridge, the Underground, the streets) I no longer stared ravenously at every girl I passed, as if their very existence were a wounding
fait accompli
directed at myself and the remains of my dignity. The pretty black lady who does the exit gate at Queensway, normally the theme of some jungly fantasy or other, accepted my ticket with an exchange of thankyous: I might have been anybody else, I might have been you. Turning off the main strip, I saw a couple canoodling in a dusty hotel porch and veered away in automatic repugnance and anger — until I slowed my pace, and thought about it, and wished them well. The streets themselves, which felt last week like a dead newsreel reshown nightly in my path, seemed softer and full of more varied shadows. I paused in the square, friendly leaves hurrying across my feet, and watched the bedsitter lights start to come on. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘Of course she won’t. I know, I know. But still.’

I even met Gregory in the kitchen (this is real high-society); he was looking very spruced-up and places-to-go but showed willing to linger while I poured myself a drink.