by
Martin Amis
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Throughout, I stabilized myself with lots of examsmanship, in order to depress my fellow-candidates. I would laugh out loud on my first glance at the questions, trot up happily for more paper with only half an hour gone, drift through the crowd afterwards murmuring phrases like '... a breeze ... candy from a baby ... I romped home ... bloody pushover...'
Ur? What can she mean? She talks as if she's filling in a form. 'What about me ?' I want to yodel. How do you think my body feels, wearing that sliver of bathroom? (It's unpractically pricey, too. A week after The Pull I had to lone up to Soho and buy a gross-pack of 'Sharpshooters' - economy dunkers - three of which I daily transfer to one of those plush Penex three-slots. Knowing, you see, how hurt she'd be if she thought I was fucking her on the cheap. Are there any limits to my sensitivity ?)
i gasped
Eight twenty-five. After some neck-ricking soixante-neuf and a short period inside her unsheathed, I clawed at the little pink holder and took its final trojan. — Not to worry, because this is my equivalent of a flash cigarette-case; the real supply is elsewhere.
The condom case was empty, of course, so I looked out the box of Sharpshooters. Who needs it, I thought. You'll be coming blood, if anything.
It, too, was empty.
'Damn. None left.'
'No,' said Rachel. There was one. I saw it this afternoon. There were two there.'
In a voice that could have been my younger brother's, I asked: 'Are you sure ?'
'Positive.'
I turned my back and pretended to fumble in the drawer. 'Ah yes. Here we are. - Whoops! Dropped it in the waste-paper basket! ... damn ...' My fingers curled round the Gloria-moistened trojan, flicked it aside, and burrowed deeper into the pool of tissue, banana skin and cigarette ash, until it found the one used that afternoon on Rachel herself. I have my standards, thank you. Excuse me, but I do have my principles. True, Gloria's would have been nicer, because Rachel's was much dirtier and danker and colder than hers. All the same, that would have been, well, vulgar - and an insult to a fine girl.
crying
So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?
'Have you, have you ever fucked a tart who's had a kid?'
'No.' He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.
'Well I—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway - 'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know you're there.'
Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.
'Like waving a flag in space.'
More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen'll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but - tarts like having babies! Their cunts', he flicked off the heater, 'turn to mush. Tits' - we pulled away - 'smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.'
christ
'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later - hopefully. You'll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?'
This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.
She hadn’t noticed his arm on the back of her chair, how his hair brushed her shoulder when he filled her glass. Without any self-consciousness, without any consciousness at all, she had eased into the man’s presence. In the vestibules between cars he took her arm to steady her, drew her in to him when a mozo passed with luggage. She didn’t react to such intimacies, as she would have with any other man. She was simply enveloped.
This would never happen to her again. When she grew older she would always be in control, even when being submissive. This would be the first and last time anyone took over herself.
fun prolepsis
I freshened up the onion dips and chips and guacamole and went out on the steps. No one else was outside, and I was too depressed to call anybody to come see the unbelievable sunset. Is there a word opposite of déjà vu? Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. Well, of course I didn’t know all that, but I saw how things would be hard. And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.