Success (7 page)

As the village princeling and household cosset, the toast of the family, the
mignon
of the minions, the darling of the staff, my feelings about the proposed adoption would not be hard to divine. I stared at the small visage splashed on the paper’s dirty front page (caption:
Terry Service — Friday’s Child
) until the grain of the print seemed to stir with a writhing furtive life: this, just this, was soon to push me to one side of my cloudless childhood days, an alien and frightened boy, a scurrying cur, no more corporeal to me, really, than a smudge of sooty newsprint, its uneven edges spanning away into another world, a world of degradation and hate, of panic and the smell of roused animals. I thought of the sparkling astronomy that
my
life had up until that moment formed: the scrubbed angularities of nursery and bedroom, the busy friendship I enjoyed with the garden’s vast precincts, my fairy-tale sister, the congruent rake and perspective of every doorway and stair-well — only three places a certain toy might be if abducted from its rightful nook, the time the leather ball needed to jump back from the
ribbed garage door, the creak of joists a hidden code of distance and identity: the thousand certainties on which childhood leans to catch its breath were all reshuffled in blurred travesty, as blurred as the picture of Terence’s face on that smudged news-sheet now slipping from my father’s thigh.

Terence arrived one brilliant autumn morning, while the Ridings were having one of their halcyon breakfasts in the raised East Wing conservatory. Imagine a circular white table on a checker-board stone floor, deep troughs of fabulous greenery, a receding backdrop of pink and purple blooms, and four decorative seated figures glimpsed through the echoic, yellowy light: Henry Riding, a tall, shaggy, ‘artistic’ patriarch in white jacket and collarless shirt; his handsome wife Marigold, silver-haired, grey-suited; the delicious, vague, sleepy-eyed Ursula — still in her nightie, the minx: and Gregory, who, having recently celebrated his tenth birthday, is already a tall and athletic figure, with driven-back raven hair, a thin, perhaps rather brutal mouth, and a vivid, evaluating stare … I remember I had just dispatched Cook with some rather sharp words about the consistency of my soft-boiled egg and, while waiting the required 285 seconds for its successor to be prepared, I leaned back on my chair, teasing my palate with a sliver of toast and Gentlemen’s Relish. Then I heard a sudden flurry from the maids in the hall — and there was our housekeeper, good Mrs Daltrey, bustling into the light and guiding on an invisible leash a small wondering boy in grey shirt and khaki shorts, Terence, my foster-brother, who turned and gazed at me with stolen eyes.)

You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.

Mouth-fuck, bum-fuck, fist-fuck, prick-fuck. Ear-fuck, hair-fuck, nose-fuck, toe-fuck. It’s all I think about when I’m in my room. Bed-fuck, floor-fuck, desk-fuck, sill-fuck, rug-fuck.

And in the streets. Tarmac-fuck, lamppost-fuck, shop-front-fuck. Bike-fuck, car-fuck, bus-fuck. Rampart-fuck, railing-fuck, rubbish-fuck.

Pen-fuck, clip-fuck, paper-fuck. (I’m at the office now.) Char-fuck, sec-fuck, temp-fuck. Salessheet-fuck, invoice-fuck, phone-fuck.

And everywhere else. Land-fuck, sea-fuck, air-fuck, cloud-fuck, sky-fuck. In all kinds of moods. Hate-fuck, rage-fuck, fun-fuck, sick-fuck, sad-fuck. In all kinds of contexts. Friend-fuck, kid-fuck, niece-fuck, aunt-fuck, gran-fuck, sis-fuck. Fuck-fuck. I want to
scream
, much of the time, or quiver like a damaged animal. I sit about the place here fizzing with rabies.

No, they still don’t want to. I’m not at all certain
I
want to any more. I mean, what happens when they … you know. I’m clear on the mechanical side of it (I hear about that in books, and I’m also buying quite a lot of those magazines, the ones in which girls show the insides of their vaginas and anuses to the world for money. Do the
police know about those magazines, incidentally, the ones you can get anywhere? I don’t think they can do), but it all must seem rather awkward and embarrassing. Do you do it much? How often? Less often than you want or more often than you want? I used to do it as much as I possibly could, and I liked it a lot. Then I stopped. No one would do it with me (and doing it with people is half the fun). Soon I’m going to stop trying — I can tell. I’m getting cordoned off. Barriers are slamming down all about me. Soon it will be too late ever to get out again.

Supplementary Bad Things continue to happen. Last week I bought a chalk-stripe suit from a second-hand shop in Notting Hill Gate. It was a ridiculous suit in all kinds of ways — obviously an incredibly old and fucked-up man had used it before me — but I knew of a good place that would taper and restyle it cheaply (that was the idea). They tapered and restyled it cheaply, I took it home and put it on, it fitted and it looked all right. Then I realized that it smelled, very very strongly, of the sweat of the dead man who had worn it all his life. Fair enough, I thought, as I soaked it in ammonia overnight, hung it out of my window ditto, buried it in the square double ditto, sprinkled it with ashtrays, steeped it with aftershave and whisky, and put it back on again. It smelled, very very strongly, of the sweat of the dead man who had worn it all his life. I threw the thing away in a dustbin. It wouldn’t go in my wastepaper-basket, which still glowers rankly at me from the corner of my room, still looking for trouble, still wanting a fight.

Nothing happens at work. The rationalization hasn’t taken place yet (we still think it’s Wark, however. Even Wark thinks it’s Wark by now). John Hain isn’t letting on (the cunning fuck was just sounding me out that time); he will not be rushed; no one can make him do anything he isn’t already very keen on doing. Work has dried up. We no longer get our sales-sheets and telephone lists in the mornings. We’re not given anything to sell (though we still
get paid for it. I hate getting my wages now. When the old woman runs her fingers over the envelopes under ‘S’, I
know
mine won’t be there). I sit at my desk all day as if I were Damon (God that boy’s teeth are a mess — he admits they’re all jangling in his head, like a pocketful of loose change), a split match in one hand, a paper-clip in the other, chewing chewing-gum and smoking fags. I can’t even read right any more. That’ll be the next thing to go. We wait and sigh and watch the rain (rain on windows always takes me back, or it tries. I’m not going back). We don’t dare talk to each other much; we’re frightened we might know something we don’t. Yesterday, a man called Veale with an immensely calm and sinister voice rang me from the Union. He’s coming to see me, he says. His voice held neither menace nor encouragement; it was just calm and sinister. I asked around a bit: he isn’t coming to see anyone else, or so everyone says. Just me. I hope he doesn’t think I’m posh.

I did ring Ursula eventually, in response to that card of hers. I’m not sure why I waited so long (she’s a girl, isn’t she?), but I did wait. I’m grateful to her, I hope, for her kindness in the past — or rather her complete lack of cruelty, which was better still under the circumstances — and I’ll do what I can to make things all right for her. I love her. Yes, I do love her — thank God for that. It’s hard to give you any sense of Ursula without making her sound a bit of a pain in the ass (which she is half the time anyway — and for Christ’s sake don’t listen to a word Greg says about her: he’s totally unreliable on this point). She is nineteen and looks about half that. I have never in my life seen anyone so unvoluptuous — pencil legs, no bum, two backs. In repose her face has an odd neutral beauty, like an idealized court portrait of someone plain. As soon as her face becomes animated it loses that beauty, but at the same time it becomes, well, more animated. (You’d fancy her, I reckon. I’d fall in love with her instantly if she weren’t my sister. But that’s not saying
much.) See what you think. For the record, she is in my view a pure, kind, touching, innocent, quite funny, very posh, erratically perceptive and (between ourselves) slightly
tonto
girl.

I spoke to the matron at her secretarial lodgings and was serenely told by her that Ursula would ring me back at the number I left the moment her class was finished. I sat at my desk with some coffee that Damon had limped out to fetch, unable to do anything until she returned my call.

‘Hello, Ginger. Are you happy?’

‘Of course not. Have you gone out of your mind? How are you?’

‘I think I’m all right. This place is jolly mad, though. How nervy are you?’

‘Very, I think. I hope I am. I don’t want to be any more nervous than I am now. How nervy are you?’

‘Lots.’

‘It’s a thing, isn’t it.’

‘We’d better meet soon, don’t you think?’

Yes, I do think. But I’ve got no advice for you. All I’ve got to tell you is: don’t grow up, if you can possibly avoid it. Stay down there, because it’s no fun up here.

Out of habit — and out of anxiety and shame and self-dislike — I asked my foster-sister to meet me at a bus-stop on the Fulham Road. I do this to girls (or to me) because if they fail to turn up you simply hop on a bus, as if that was what you were waiting for, as if that was all you had in mind, rather than standing on an exposed and lonely corner while the streets about you go soiled and ripped and dead. She came. She jumped off a 14 on the far pavement, and, her small body canted forward intently, like a well-trained child, ran across the road. We hugged awkwardly and separated to appraise each other in the streetlight. Half-fringe, large pale eyes, her incongruously strong nose reddened in the cold, a thin but open face, without much angularity; she looked pre-pubescent — non-pubescent; I felt that if I ever slept with her (these
thoughts wriggle up) it would cause some lingering and poignant hurt that would take me my whole life to nurse. (Does she fuck? I wonder suddenly, with a nauseous lurch. Nah. She probably doesn’t know about all that yet. And I hope no one ever tells her. Oh God I miss my sister. No one ever told her either. Well, that’s something. She may have got fucked up but at least she never got fucked. I’m
glad
.)

‘Come on, you look all right,’ said Ursula. ‘For a yob.’

We went to a noisy, conservatorial hamburger place I know some 200 yards further up the Fulham Road, a place where tall, handsome trend-setters go on as if they were your friends while they give you food and take your money. It’s popular there. We joined a short queue consisting entirely of couples, denimmed men and their far more flamboyant and varied-looking women. I don’t like couples, as you know (they’re like a personal affront), but Ursula and I pretended to be one, and within five minutes we were inside and within ten had secured two seats at an unoccupied table for four. Immediately a rangy young man with toothbrush eyebrows pulled up a chair opposite. I turned to him resentfully and he met my gaze. This guy wants a fight, I thought, until he said, ‘Hi. What would you like tonight?’ and produced a yellow pad from his top pocket.

‘Oh. Just some wine, while we think. Red. A bottle.’

‘I won’t be having any,’ said Ursula.

‘So what?’ I said.

The waiter nodded grimly and sloped off.

‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

‘What did he do?’

‘Sat down next to us like that. He’s a waiter, isn’t he? I don’t want waiters sitting down next to me.’

‘Come on, Ginger. He looked nice. He looked intelligent too.’

‘Oh yeah? Then why’s he dealing them off the arm in a dump like this?’

‘Chippy chippy chippy,’ said Ursula.

(Do you know what ‘chippy’ means, by the way? I think I do. It means minding being poor, ugly and common. That’s what
chippy
means.)

‘You bet,’ I said.

Ursula chose this moment to take off her duffle-coat; this was a thick, studently item and I knew that its removal would diminish her personal presence by about two-thirds. From her dark flower-patterned dress (clean, unironed, shapeless, not a dress for winter) now protruded thin stockingless legs and thin forearms whose shade of fluff caught the light. When she strained to hook her coat on the stand’s tall curlicue, the dress rode wispily up her Bambi thighs. See? She really is my sister and she really is about ten.

I opened my third packet of cigarettes that day and poured out the wine brought to us smartly enough by the uppity waiter. Round about us, sexy youngsters laughed and whispered.

‘Whew, Terry!’ said Ursula. ‘You
are
nervy tonight.’

‘I know. Look at my hands.’

Ursula had just returned from a weekend with her parents at home. We talked about it, that secure and companionable-seeming place (I used to go back there a lot. I don’t any more and neither does Gregory. I don’t like going away at all any more: I’m frightened something might happen behind my back. And home gives me the horrors, anyway). Apparently father’s ankle had healed after his celebrated fall from the barn roof; he now claimed to be fleeter of foot than at any period of his life. Recent stories about him included his heckling of — and subsequent scuffle with — the left-wing vicar of the village church, his new passion for indoor bowls, his continued refusal to eat vegetables, his second wave this year of horrendous spending sprees, his third early-morning pass at the septuagenarian cleaning-lady, and his decision to erect a wigwam in the main sitting-room.

‘Christ, everything’s falling apart these days,’ I said. ‘I suppose he really must be a bit mad, mustn’t he?’

Ursula’s expression — like mine, one of vestigial amusement — did not change. ‘Of course. He always has been. All of us lot always have been. You’re the lucky one, Ginger.’

‘Oh
that’s
what I am. I was wondering what I was. But you’re posh, you lot. It makes no odds if posh people go mad. They’re all mad anyway.’

‘That’s why you’re the lucky one — you’re not posh.’

‘Yes I am. I’m posh too now.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘What am I then?’