by
Martin Amis
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As she spoke Nicola was looking, not at Keith, but at her bikini and what it framed. She rightly imagined that he was doing likewise. The interproximate breasts, concavities of throat and belly, white pyramid, the racing legs. Keith did not know, could not have guessed, would never have believed, that half an hour ago this body had stood naked before the bathroom mirror while its mistress wept - drenching the feet of the god of gravity. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Which is fun for the beholder; but what about the owner, the tenant? Nicola wondered whether she'd ever had a minute's pleasure from it. Even at sixteen, when you're excitedly realizing what you've got (and imagining it will last for ever), you're still noticing what you haven't got, and will never get. Beauty's hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu. Yes, but bidding adieu in the mirror.
The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert on infant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and had also paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised, Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutely impossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbelievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreed that the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship. Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-related personal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageous terms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.
There wasn't any. And hard to explain that one away, hard to justify it - to the young (Guy meant), to those who would come after. How would you begin? Well, we suspected that sacrifices might have to be made, later, for all the wonderful times we had with our spray cans and junk-food packaging. We knew there'd be a price. Admittedly, to you, the destruction of the ozone layer looks a bit steep. But don't forget how good it was for us: our tangy armpits, our piping hamburgers. Though maybe we could have got by with just roll-ons and styrofoam .. .
Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.
Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.
[...] He'd been out until three doing car stereos. Dispiriting work: when you stove in the window bearing the inevitable sticker STEREO ALREADY GONE — on a windy night, with glass everywhere — to find the stereo already gone. [...]
so good
Financially, this was not a good time for Keith. Few times were, financially. Even during his best periods, his purple patches of epiphanic swiping and stiffing, of fiddling and gypping and duping and diddling, when money was coming in hard from all directions, Keith never had a good time, financially. Always, at some point in the day, a bitter destiny lay in wait for him: pennilessness, at Mecca. Always he lost everything, without fail. Well, sometimes he won; but he always persevered until he had lost everything. Kath, who didn't know the tenth of it, used to ask where all the money went: where did they actually go, those tenner-crammed brown envelopes, those toilet-rolls of twenties? For the day usually began and ended with Keith upending her handbag over the kitchen table or banging at the electricity meter with his fists. Where did it all go? Kath had asked this question gently, patiently, and not recently. For it made Keith mad. How could he get anywhere, how could he progress, tied down to a wife with such limited horizons — who thought so small? 'Christ. Investments like,' he told her. 'Currency speculation. Futures.' In fact, Keith did not understand that money could be accumulated, except, perhaps, on an Accumulator, at the betting-shop. On the other hand, to give him credit, Keith didn't like it in the betting-shop. It was not a human option to like it in the betting-shop. Keith didn't mind the banked TV screens, the earache voiceover, the food scraps and dog-ends: it was more the atmosphere of longshot desperation, as guys in dead shoes and fifty-pence suits stood around trying to predict the future, with nothing to help them but the Evening News.
Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, with the spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicola depilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections of simmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (and knowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, in the windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. The thing is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is more or less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); but you start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, had thrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts the beanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play on Keith and Guy were good tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fully clothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons with impeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't going to be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchen floor.
Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.
Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - the shop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.
the iconic burglary passage
The other thing the house used up was order. Each day the doublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, the pasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtling towards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older, iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropy elsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, and the desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairs again, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way to exchange a few words with Melba, whose strength for years he had bought and sapped . . .