I chose the whisky, but that liquor pleasantly numbed my fear as I walked down on to the King’s Road and along it to Sloane Square. Illuminated by bright shop windows, packs of Continental youths stood talking in loud voices, either among themselves or to heartbreakingly beautiful girls. They didn’t mind me. Things got slightly sweatier when I changed trains at Notting Hill, a small riot being in progress on the eastbound Central Line platform. But I stuck close to a pair of fat old women, actually nipping into the seat between them on the train itself.
When I returned I got drunker with Norman. We talked for an hour and a half about girls. He didn’t mention Jenny and I didn’t mention Rachel.
Later, instead of going to sleep, I stared at the ceiling all night and got a lot of coughing done.
‘If ever you think your prick smells bad,’ mused Geoffrey, weighing a tube of glue in his hand, ‘just get a load of this.’ He held it up to my nose. ‘And you needn’t worry.’
I sniffed. A swimming-pool of cock-camembert. I wondered.
‘When you say “bad” —’
‘I mean bad,’ he said, nodding.
Geoffrey was trying to stick a poster of a naked girl on to the south wall of his Belsize Park sitting-room. He continued:
‘No, man, don’t get too wanky with her. And cut out all this intellectual shit. Chicks don’t want to be over-awed … Thanks,’ he said to his (new) witch-like girlfriend as she handed him a joint so ill-made that it resembled a baby’s winkle. ‘Just be yourself. If you make it, cool, if you don’t, then no sweat because it wouldn’t of worked anyway. Be yourself … what’s … wrong with that?’ He strained to adhere the top of the poster to the wall, and stood back, hands on hips.
‘Crap,’ I said (deducing that if he didn’t care what he said in front of Sheila, I needn’t). ‘Who ever acts naturally with a girl? Do you think you do? How much of the time isn’t it lovable vague Mandied Geoffrey, or big-cock groover Geoffrey, or just plain old honest-to-goodness Geoffrey, who doesn’t put on any acts or play any games?”
He yawned. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about/ he said, and collapsed on to a pile of cushions, returning the joint to Sheila. As she puffed on it he kissed her neck and ears.
‘Relax,’ he murmured, to me rather than to Sheila. ‘Flow with it, never try to change … the course … You can’t alter…’
‘Geoffrey,’ 1 said. ‘Have you been reading all that Chink crap again, that J-Shaing or—’
Geoffrey stuck out an amphetamine-verdured tongue and made covert gestures with his free hand. Sheila stood up, brushed herself down, and brought the joint over to me. I gently refused it.
‘How’re you feeling?’ she asked. ‘Bit better?’
‘Yes, a bit better.’
‘Like some more coffee?’
‘Love some.’
Sunday, one o’clock. Two hours before I was to meet Rachel.
That morning, I awoke, bolt upright, at nine fifteen, with a bit of a hangover. I woke because Norman was ‘doing the dustbins’, a thing he did two mornings a week. This duty was, I imagined, also a pleasure; at the end of it Norman got to throw the two empty bins down the ten-foot drop outside my room. It made quite a lot of noise.
I waited for the second crash. It came, even louder than the first. Out of bed, across the room, I toppled into the armchair by the fire, which, naked, I lit, fourth match. With quivering fingertips I kneaded my forehead and scalp. When I had got them working again, I moved to the window and gingerly parted the curtains. Norman was standing above me, the two dustbin lids in outstretched arms. Cymbal-like, he clapped them together, and released them. I veered back into the room.
*
‘… change the way you feel, but you can change the way you think.’
There was enough of a pause for me to say: ‘Well, I’d better pull out.’
‘Here,’ Sheila said. She handed me a paperback. The Well-Tempered Spiral: An Ascent, by Professor Hamilton Macreadie. ‘Read it,’ she said. ‘It’s a very beautiful book.’