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[...] Every now and then, immediately east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct my viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of good-nights. W hen that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake-a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees-degenerated into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.
lmao
[...] She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land -- Starasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you're wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn't." If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop -- we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. If some café sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. And she attempted -- unsuccessfully -- to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.
lol
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate-dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed-an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dol y Schil er.
It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniac worry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. There were hardly any Arrivals, apart from me. The business of the airport was all Departures. As I stood in some stalled passage and listened to the canned instructions I looked down on the lots and runways through the layered insult of dawn rain: all the sharks with their fins erect, thrashers, baskers, great whites — killers. Killers every one.
mmm
Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming - his one tragic flaw. When the moment arrived, in the office by the loading bay at the plant off the M4 near Bristol, with his great face crammed into the prickling nylon, and the proud woman shaking her trembling head at him, and Chick Purchase and Dean Pleat both screaming Do it. Do it (he still remembered their meshed mouths writhing), Keith had definitely failed to realize his full potential. He had proved incapable of clubbing the Asian woman to her knees, and of going on clubbing until the man in the uniform opened the safe. Why had he failed? Why, Keith, why? In truth he had felt far from well: half the night up some lane in a car full of the feet-heat of burping criminals; no breakfast, no bowel movement; and now, to top it all off, everywhere he looked he saw green grass, fresh trees, rolling hills. Chick Purchase, furthermore, had already crippled the second guard, and Dean Pleat soon vaulted back over the counter and self-righteously laid into the woman with his rifle butt. So Keith's qualms had changed nothing — except his career prospects in armed robbery. (It's tough at the top, and it's tough at the bottom, too; Keith's name was muck thereafter.) If he could have done it, he would have done it, joyfully. He just didn't have ... he just didn't have the talent.
lol
I told him. Keith looked sceptical. This just wasn 't right. 'Mostly for theatre and television,' I said. Now all was clear. 'TV?' he said coolly. For some reason I added, 'I'm in TV too.'
Keith nodded, much enlightened. Somewhat chastened also; and I have to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he was thinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the great cities and borrow each other's flats. Common sense. Yes, behind all the surface activity of Keith's eyes there formed the vision of a heavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV -above it, above it all.
lmao
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.
In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bitterness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.
god he's so funny
Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but not difficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension through which some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, was sewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silent modulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. He worked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijou flatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke: what would it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in and just walked the streets instead.
So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alone together in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him, stressing my links with various literary magazines and completely inventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. I can invent: I can lie. So how come I can't invent? Guy said, 'Really? How interesting.' I sent a sort of pressure wave at him; in fact I was rubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when he said, 'I've written a couple of things . . .' 'No kidding.' 'A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.' 'I'd certainly be happy to take a look at them, Guy.' 'They aren't any good or anything.' 'Let me be the judge.' They're rather autobiographical, I'm afraid.' 'Oh,' I said. 'That's okay. Don't worry about that.