‘Can you see okay, or do you want to sit on my face? Tell me something. What’s her motivation? What’s theirs? Listen. I got the Fiasco outside. Let’s have some lunch at your hotel. Then I’ll take you upstairs and give you a really long lesson in motivation.’
She looked at me assessingly. She nodded and smiled and walked out through the drapes, speeded by a loud flathander on her rock-hard rump. I followed, muttering, my eyes on the busy stage. Beautiful, isn’t it, the way they’re all the same, God bless them? You just need a big body — a big body, and a little nerve.
With her jacket hooked over one shoulder Doris was hurriedly gathering her things. Whoah, baby, I thought. An eager one, eh? Maybe we skip lunch and bunk out right away. Then I saw the tears flying from her face like sweat.
‘Thanks,’ she said as I approached. ‘This is one of the worst times I’ve had for years.’
‘Come on, darling, you know you love it.’
She steadied herself. She spoke with effort, but she managed to get it all out in the end. ‘You asshole,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know they were still cranking them out. You think that despite ourselves women like me are attracted to men like you. But I don’t want to go to bed with men like you. I don’t want men like you to exist.’
She swivelled. I lurched forward to intercept her. I failed. I fell over the table instead. This manoeuvre, together with the dozen empty beer beakers and whisky glasses I floundered among, began to persuade me of something. I thought my hangover was lifting. In fact my hangover had sunk without trace beneath another ton of booze. As I climbed upright and started brushing the wet shards from my suit I saw that my father was watching me through the vent of the red curtains. I looked at him confusedly, expectantly. But he gave a weak leer of dismissal and backed off into the shadows with his drink.
Ten minutes later I was still soothing my brow against the cool glossy stone of the Shakespeare urinal. I raised my head, frowning gradually, and mouthed out the graffiti on the limegreen tiles. kill all nigs. rape is shit. fuck koff.
‘Who’s Koff?’ I mumbled to myself. ‘Yeah, well, fuck him, whoever he is.’
——————
After my siesta I felt a little better, and clambered quite gamely from the back seat to the front, only pausing to disentangle my ripped trouser-leg from the handbrake. Then I drove myself home — from Pimlico to Portobello in my purple Fiasco. Now my Fiasco, it’s a beautiful machine, a vintage-style coupe with oodles of dash and heft and twang. The Fiasco, it’s my pride and joy. Acting like a pal, I lend the motor to Alec Llewellyn while I’m in New York. And what do I return to? An igloo of parking-tickets and birdcrap, with a ripped spare, a bad new grinding noise, and every single gauge resignedly flashing. What’s the guy been doing to my great, my incomparable Fiasco? It feels as though he’s been living in it, subletting it. Some people, they’ve got no class. You should see the way the boys at the garage simply cover their faces with envy and admiration when the Fiasco is driven — or pushed or towed or, on one occasion, practically coptered — into their trash-strewn mews. It is temperamental, my Fiasco, like all the best racehorses, poets and chefs. You can’t expect it to behave like any old Mistral or Alibi. I bought it last year for an enormous amount of money. There are some — Alec is among them, probably — who believe that the Fiasco errs on the side of ostentation, that the Fiasco is in questionable taste. But what do they know.
The car and I crawled cursing up the street to my flat. You just cannot park round here any more. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here any more. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving. Houses divide, into two, into four, into sixteen. If a landlord or developer comes across a decent-sized room he turns it into a labyrinth, a Chinese puzzle. The bell-button grills in the flakey porches look like the dashboards of ancient spaceships. Rooms divide, rooms multiply. Houses split — houses are tripleparked. People are doubling also, dividing, splitting. In double trouble we split our losses. No wonder we’re bouncing off the walls.