by
Martin Amis
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I saw Rachel only twice in the six days before she was due to come and stay. Just as well, really: there were still some texts I had to read for the exams, and a good deal of clerking was necessary to keep The Rachel Papers up to date, what with all these new emotions to be catalogued and filed away. First Love, you understand.
Apparently what happened was this. Sheila returned from work (she was a sec in an alternative weekly) to find Geoffrey supine on the bedroom floor, a gramophone speaker propped up against either ear, a joint gone out in one hand, an overturned glass quite near the other, tinted saliva oozing from the corners of his mouth. He had been on plonk since breakfast. He had been on plonk since breakfast since September. On rising, Geoffrey found an envelope under his chin. In it was a precis of this state of affairs and a five-pound note.
I'm afraid the next two-and-a-half weeks are rather a blur. The days soon cease to be distinguishable. In my diary several sheets are quite blank, and The Rachel Papers, at this point, are a sorry jumble of cold facts and free-associative prose. However, this prompts me to take a structural view of things - always the very best view of things to take, in my opinion. The dates are there, so are most of my significant thoughts and feelings. And we've only half an hour left. I sip my wine. I turn the page.
Kneeing impedimenta into the kitchen. Rachel and I were met by Norman and Jenny. They had taken up formal positions before the window; each held a bottle of champagne, and a third stood by on the coffee-table, surrounded by half a dozen Guinnesses for Norman to dilute his with. I was embarrassed to find how much this moved me. But what I felt even more strongly - looking at Rachel's smiles, her adult handbag and dinky suitcases - was a sense of her independence and separateness. Rachel had her own identity, you see - here saluted by Jenny and Norm - her own belongings and her own autonomy. She wasn't just a sum total of my obsessions; she simply chose to be with me.
Right then. You're okay, but you're callow and vain and you simper too much and your personality is little more than an aggregate of junior affectations, all charming, only without weight, without substance. For example: you wouldn't lie to DeForest about the Blake thing, yet you lied to your mother about the Nanny thing. Fair enough. But does this urge you to restructure your moral thinking ? I don't think I need answer that question. Life, dear Rachel, is more of an empirical or tactical business than you would perhaps concede.
Me? Me, I'm devious, calculating, self-obsessed - very nearly mad, in fact. I'm at the other extreme: I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self. You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these. Doubtless we have much to learn from one another. We're in love; we're good-natured types, you and I, not moody or spiteful. We'll get by.
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?