by
Martin Amis
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I had no desire whatever to enlarge on this cryptic reply. 'Christ, how should I know?' Christ? Was that wise, what with her being half Jewish and all ? I held up a hand, to silence her, to call a halt. 'Why don't we talk about something that interests you? Make-up ... clothes ... babies... ? Anything you like. Let me get you a drink.'
'How do you know they interest me?'
'You're a girl.'
'So?'
'They interest you. All girls like talking about those things, surely you must know that. It's all all girls ever talk about. Shops ... pillow-slips ... hairbrushes.'
'You can't generalize like —'
'Why no—'
' — because, there are so many exceptions.'
'Oh really?'
She sighed. 'I'm an exception.'
'Then you're the exception that makes the rule.'
Bloodcurdling, I quite agree; yet the bookish teenager will often find himself behaving in this way.
god so funny
Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things. No, don't tell me she's the very girl to show me what egotistical folly it is to compartmentalize people in this sad way; don't tell me she's going to sort me out, take me on, supply the cognitio and comic resolution. I couldn't bear it.
lol
With comb and fingertips I styled my pubic hairs. It was a good idea to spruce myself up for Rachel, the reason being that one honestly did never know. One night last July: at 10.5, in Belsize Park tube station, a girl was telling me to go away before she called the police; at 10.17 I was lying on the floor -between untouched cups of still quite hot tea - helping her off with her greasy panties. Admittedly the girl was quite hideous, had smelled unclothed of open wounds and graveyards, etc., but you still never knew. It was a theory of Geoffrey's that pretty girls liked sex more than rough ones. Take Gloria, whom I had seen only yesterday. What an excellent time I was having in London. Oxford seemed years away, like childhood.
I was in the Notting Hill Gate Smith's at the time, standing with my back to the front entrance and scratching my scalp -not in puzzlement, but because it itched. Badly shaken by my fell-off-a-lorry slip the other day, I had just put down a book on Cockney slang ('Cheers, Norm, where's the trouble and strife? Up the apples and pears having a pony and trap?'), and was just picking one up on 'Criticism and Linguistics'.
lmao
On our way to the door I had a brainwave.
I halted suddenly as we stepped on to the pavement. I was frightfully sorry - it had almost slipped my mind - but I'd promised Cecilia Nottingham that I would ride with her in Hyde Park that afternoon. Did she mind?
I went along to the Tate, I need hardly say, on the Saturday before, decked out like a walking stationery department, also with a pocket edition of the poet's work and the well-thumbed Thames and Hudson.
lol
'I feel vaguely ridiculous saying this, it may be quite out of line - I can't tell any more where I stand with people - but listen. I ... well, I just think about you all the time, that's all, and I thought I'd better find out how you feel so that we can see what's best to do.' I waited. 'And because I'd really like to know. I'm getting tired —'
The fruit-machine burped, gave a deep, guttural judder, and, while the milkmen whooped, started to cough out a string of clamorous tokens.
'It's difficult—' Rachel began.
'What ? I can't hear.'
She bit her lip, again, and shook her head.
The machine hawked. The milkmen shrieked.
I patted the hand on her lap. 'Well. Never mind,' I said, relaxing, sinking, drained and battered into my seat. I felt completely hollow, as if I were a child. She could have sneaked away then without me lifting a finger, without me noticing.
'Let's get out of here.'
Rachel said that.
Let it just try anything when I had a pee and Christ would I show it who was boss. I washed, got out, slipped a towel over my shoulder - had a pee. I couldn't tell whether it hurt or not. So I worked it over anyway, and good.
Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing chinese-burn - a last attempt to tempt out a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol?
I experienced thrilling self-pity. 'What will that mind of yours get up to next?' I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.
Steady on. What's so great about going mad?
But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.
oh my god
I was still soggy with retrospective alarm about the miraculous escape I had had eighty minutes earlier. When I followed Rachel into the room the first thing I saw was a huge notice on the mantelpiece. The notice had this to say:
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LET HIM TOUCH YOU HE HAS GOT AN UNUSUALLY REVOLTING DISEASE
The notice was written on a small bottle of pills (pressed into my shaking hand twenty-four hours before). The notice was in code form; it said :
Flagyll. One to be taken four times daily.
There was a warm, musty silence. The diagonal curls of smoke from her cigarette were spangled by a thousand grains of dust highlit by the shaft of autumn sun. The shaft of autumn sun struck through the recently dismembered tree in the front garden, squeezed between the railings, quartered itself against the window-frame, wormed its way into the room.