Success (3 page)

I was putty in her hands. I always am. ‘I don’t want to hurt their feelings.’ Why don’t I? What feelings? I don’t mind if they hurt
my
feelings. They’ve got no more feelings than I have. Miranda is just a bloke, anyway, like me, the mad bitch.

The physical aspect of what happened next — and went on happening practically every night for the following two weeks — has already been adequately delineated by me. I think that one is entitled — no? — to a reasonable helping of startled indignation when an eighteen-year-old girl has a dented backside, tropical armpits
and stringy white lines on the undercurves of her breasts
. That first morning she sprang out of bed — having had her noisome way with me — and knelt naked before the bookcase, rummaging in her bag for some item that her genes loved. I watched, dressing her with my eyes. Her bottom is quite out of control, I thought; and I can’t take the smell she has down there. It’s not her fault, I know. It’s her nerves’ fault.

An even stronger threat to my ease, however, was what one might call the girl’s character. Not yet twenty, and each turn in her conversation opened up a chapter of wretchedness and squalor in her past — an infatuation
unrequited, a pass snubbed, a pocket of pleasureless promiscuities (fifty men in two years,
and
she admitted it). Small wonder that I’ve seriously hated her ever since that first impact. I hate it when she comes near. When she touches me I close my eyes and pray for patience. When we make love my face lives on another planet. She doesn’t mind. She wants lots more where that came from. Such people will take your money, take your body and take your time, but will they take your hint? Not them,
oh
no. I’m too tender-hearted. I just weather these hormonal storms. No wonder I get exploited.

I dialled seven digits. I spoke in whispers to Adrian — sulking, as usual — and established that whereas the wealthy Torka would not be home that evening, the redoubtable Susannah, a new discovery of ours, most assuredly would be. ‘Perfect,’ I murmured, dropping the receiver into place as I heard Terence clump up the stairs.

‘What time’s she coming?’ he asked.

‘Any minute. She just rang.’

‘How did she sound?’

‘As if she were having a nervous breakdown, naturally.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Uh, “Terry” …’ I paused, frowning. ‘Are you actually ready?’

I unconditionally promise you that Terence was wearing Sherwood-green velvet trousers, a flounced orange shirt, and a red corduroy jacket. He
was
. But then Terence’s taste in clothes, as in most other things, has always been quite beyond the pale. He possesses, for instance, a leatherene belt with a silver buckle on it the size of a hearth-grate; because of his want of inches he is moreover obliged to wear stilt-like yob’s boots — you can do that if, like me, you’re already very tall, but not if, like him, you’re actually very small (Terence, in fact, is, oh, 5′ 7″; I of course am six-foot-one-and-a-half); also he favours paint-by-numbers colour schemes — an absurd motley of nigger primaries and charwoman pastels — and
is fond, too, of cute appurtenances (braces, scarves, lockets) which he tends to sport all at once, like a tinker. He is quite prepared, you know, to wear dark boots with light summer trousers. He’ll put on V-neck jerseys over T-shirts and think nothing of it. He’s perfectly capable of doing up the middle buttons of his —

‘How do we swing it then, Greg?’

‘Simple,’ said I. ‘A row will be precipitated. Miranda shall be rendered hysterical. I then stalk out. At this point you, “Terry”, sweep in with tequila and sympathy. What could be more agreeable?’

‘What, get her drunk, you think?’

‘You might as well — it would put the matter beyond serious doubt. You’ve got masses, I expect?’

‘You bet. Drink is one thing I’ve got plenty of. Drink I’ve got.’

‘I recommend white wine. She’ll drink herself sick on that purely out of natural greed. Also I’ve got some smoked salmon you can give her. She likes that too, because you can have bread with it.’

‘Mm?’

The bell rang.

‘Let’s go,’ said Terence.

‘Ah. Come in,’ I called.

I heard Miranda thank the lingering Terence in the hall below as she started to make her heavy way up the stairs. Me? I stood rocking on my heels by the window, the black cape already thrown over my broad shoulders, the keys of my custom-built car jinking in my hand, the pewter-tipped cane leaning ominously against my desk.

‘Hello,’ she said — obviously in particularly dazzling form.

‘Well? And what do you imagine we’re going to do now?’

Miranda’s porcine good looks were minimally in evidence tonight: yellow scarf of hair, those fat lips of hers, scared eyes. She sat down with a grunt on the edge
of my bed, her ridiculous denim knapsack tumbling to the floor.

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Whatever you want to do.’

‘My God,’ I began, ‘that’s just what I can’t bear about you. Why must you be so hopelessly null?’

‘I’m sorry. Why don’t we have dinner somewhere? Or that film you wanted to see is on at the ABC. Or we could do something different — we could go bowling.’

I averted my appalled gaze. ‘Oh, we could do that, could we?’

‘Sorry. Or we could stay in. If you’re tired, I’ll just cook you something.’

‘That sounds absolutely riveting, I must say. Just what I feel like after a — ’

‘Why don’t we go to the little place round the corner? It’s — ’

‘Don’t you
dare
interrupt me like that again. It’s bloody rude.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Bloody
rude.’

— And with that of course I swept out of the room and clattered down the stairs. As I suavely paused to put on my gloves in the hall, Terence emerged from the shadows, breathing audibly.

‘Success?’ he said.

I pondered for a moment, then said, ‘You’d better get in there, “Terry”. I don’t know what she might do to herself. She’s quite distraught.’ (Let’s have a laugh at Terence’s expense, I thought. That’s what we’re here for, after all — to have some fun with him.)

Rain had warmed the air. I stopped a passing taxi — my sleek car is sick again — and was incompetently driven in it to Howarth Gardens. I depressed the marble bell-push. Torka’s houseboy giggled shyly as he took my cape.

It was two o’clock when I came out of Torka’s house and stood impatiently fastening my cape on the steps. I had
left with some precipitateness, certainly far too dramatically to telephone for a cab on my way out, and the chances of hailing one at this hour were dangerously slim. (There have been several incidents in the area recently. Not that this worries me in the slightest. Things simply don’t happen to proper people, people of my height, bearing, etc.) I had no choice, then, but to walk, to walk back through the liquid sounds and quicksilver gloss of the night.

Adrian and Susannah had behaved intolerably. No sooner had we removed our clothes before Adrian went into a ridiculous huff about Susannah’s scent; he complained that his back hurt — and actually accused me of not washing before I came out! We had to go through the most impossible contortions to distance these fancied danger-spots from his hideous, wide-pored nose, including some repellent new combinations he had learnt in New York. It was bloody uncomfortable and my elbow still hurts when I flex my arm. Oh, but that was nothing to the way
she
carried on. The very instant that Adrian turned his attention to me — which is all he’s really interested in, Susannah, though of course you’re too vain to see it — she claimed a headache and said she just wanted to watch. She isn’t nearly as expert as people keep claiming, anyway, and her breasts are far too large.

Funnily enough, it gets quite boring being chased and squabbled over the entire time. Idiots, with their possessive feuds. Can’t they see that I am there to be tasted, to be mulled over, to be adored, not to be fought over like a piece of meat?

I returned without incident — a bit puffed in fact, having elected to jog the final half-mile. The flat was dark: dust and silence in the air. I walked on down the passage, alert, springy. As a rule the location of the bathroom — through the hippie nightmare of Terence’s quarters — is the theme of much annoyance to me when I get home late, but
tonight I welcomed a chance to pass by his bed. Would Miranda be in it? I knocked on the door.

‘ “Terry”?’ I whispered.

I turned the cold doorknob noiselessly and switched on the light.

I assume in retrospect that what surprised me was not Miranda’s presence at the far side of Terence’s large and unfastidious double bed so much as my own obscure irritation that this should be the case. Any token regret, any reflexive pity I might have felt for her was instantly chased away by the sight of that bulked behind swelling the blankets. To think that she would even go to
these
lengths to make me jealous, the hysterical bitch.

Confident that I would not rouse Terence — who surrenders consciousness with truly plebeian ease and snores like a motorbike the moment his crimson eyes are closed — I picked up a hairbrush from the table with my gloved hand and skilfully lobbed it at the tent-like convexity of Miranda’s nethers; she twitched, half-turned, and looked up blinking; I offered her a classic, Parnassian sneer and cruised into the bathroom. (On the way back I looked straight ahead, pausing only to catch her muffled sobs as I threw off the light.)

Up in the kitchen were two half-finished glasses of hock, the remains of my expensive smoked salmon and a wedge of clawed-at French bread. I clicked my tongue, tasting this scene of snatched food and hurried lust. Oh well. I decanted the wine into a clean glass, drank it, folded the salmon into a section of crust, and then lay on my bed for a few minutes in thought, munching it all up with my superb teeth.

Gregory Riding is my foster-brother. He is. I was adopted by his parents when I was nine. That first bit of my life, which was full of crappy things, took place at Dawkin Street in the Scovill Road area of Cambridge, not quite a slum but going that way (I haven’t been back. It probably is one by now), clutches of post-war semi-detacheds flanking thin yellow streets, sections of grass that they considered you ought to have, old scooters in back gardens. My mother died when I was six and for three years my sister and I lived under the sole care of my father, Ronald Service. Then my sister died on me too. I don’t know whether my father killed my mother; but I bloody know he killed my sister, because I was there at the time and watched him as he did so. (Suck on that. It’s easy enough to see what it was that fucked me up. I go on about all this a lot. I make no apologies. It’s just too bad. I’m allowed to go on about it, on account of it fucking me up.) Rosie Service was seven when Ronnie Service killed her; she had fat freckly cheeks, pencil legs and impossibly narrow shoulders that cause me to ache with tenderness for her even now — even now, as I sit here slumped in the middle of what appears to be my life, with its days and days. That mad fuck (my language, like everything else about me these days, gets worse and worse), he probably didn’t mean to do that to her. But did he mean to do this to me?

Anyway, the murder claimed a fair amount of local attention at the time. Indeed if it hadn’t been for a whopping lapse on the part of the authorities my case might never have come under the twinkly, philanthropic gaze of Greg’s family. I stayed on alone at the scene, at 11 Dawkin Street, for over a week: people came to take my father away, people came to take my sister away (she went quietly — he didn’t), but no one came to take me away (someone goofed. Someone fucked up. Take me where, anyhow?). And for a week I picked my terrified way through the dead rooms, through the rank scullery-world of thickened milk and glaring butter, through the nights on that nail-bed of nerves, and through the slow time of the pendulous afternoons. Can you imagine? I didn’t go out and I stayed away from the windows. I was hiding. I was very, very ashamed of what those two had done.

An exultant newspaper reporter found me (he found me out: he knocked on the door and heard me running up the stairs; he quickly knelt and peered through the letter-box: he found me out). The reporter seemed delighted by everything to do with me. So did the journal for which he worked (they took me and they splashed me). It was their gloating feature on my plight which first captured the imagination of the Riding household — or at least that of its patriarch; I later gathered that Mr Riding would read out the daily reports, with morbid insistence, over the spanking family breakfast table, much to the boredom and exasperation of everyone else present. As I myself was soon to learn at first hand, Riding Sr was an insatiably compassionate man (i.e. off his chump in a posh kind of way. He still is, basically) and in a very real sense he could not allow himself to rest until I was taken care of to his satisfaction. Which, again, in his sleepy world of whimsical cause and effect, meant being taken care of by him. Evidently, too, he was intrigued in a quirky way by certain parallels between our families, parallels at once so fortuitous and insistent that for a
while I longingly suspected that some Fieldingesque parentage mystery would one day resolve our destinies: Mr Riding and my father were the same age, and Greg’s and my birthdays were only twenty-four hours apart; Ursula, Greg’s sister, and mine were both seven at the time, and were alike the survivors of abbreviated twins — and so on … As the scandal about my displacement grew, so did Mr Riding’s wayward but intense anxiety. He let it obsess him, for all the irritated now-nowing of his wife and the confusion and unease of his children.

I was in some sort of custody by this stage. Leading a posse of plain-clothes detectives, a fat social worker came round to take me to a place from which I could more decorously be taken away again. Look at the state of me. For a fortnight I was regularly bathed and fed, and deposited nightly between rayon sheets which by morning had always formed a burning garrotte about my neck. I had no affection for the place, with its self-sufficient hysteria, nor gratitude for the people who worked there; I was at their mercy, or thought I was, so they all got to hate me a bit. On the last morning a special matron looked in to comb my hair and to piss on me mildly for my good fortune. ‘Be polite, keep quiet, and think yourself lucky,’ she counselled.