Now on this Sunday afternoon I walk from the kitchen to the bedroom. I open the white slats of the fitted wardrobe and take out the suit I wore on that last night in New York. Not for the first time, I tug the trousers out and flatten them on the bed. On the lateral creases of the crotch there is a large splattered stain, dark tan against the fawn, ending in tapered trickles down either leg. The soiled contours of the material crackle faintly to the touch. What is it? Tapsplash? No. It is champagne, or urine. I think I know the truth. The memory is there somewhere, it has its being— but it is loathsome to the touch. Ay! don’t let it touch me! Keep it away,. So I lock the suit in again, back in the slammer with its partners in crime, shut up safe for the night, far from my touch.
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Something is missing from the present too. Wouldn’t you say? Mobile, spangled and glamorous, my life looks good — on paper, anyhow— but I think we’re all agreed that I have a problem. Not so? Then what is it? Brother, sister, do the right thing here and let me in on it. Help me out. You’ll tell me it’s the booze … the booze isn’t brill, I warrant, but the booze is nothing new. Something else is new. I feel invaded, duped, fucked around. I hear strange voices and speak in strange tongues. I get thoughts that are way over my head. I feel violated … The other morning I opened my tabloid to find that, during my brief absence, the whole of England has been scalded by tumult and mutiny, by social crack-up in the torched slums. Unemployment, I learned, was what had got everyone so mad. I know how you feel, I said to myself. I feel how you feel. I haven’t got that much to do all day myself. I sit here defencelessly, my mind full of earache and riot. Why? Tell. Inner-cities crackle with the money chaos — but I’ve got money, plenty of it, I’m due to make lots more. What’s missing? What the hell else is there?
Randomly prompted (and that’s how I’m always prompted these days: it is all I have in the way of motivation), I went next door and ran an eye over my book collection: Home Tax Guide, Treasure Island, The Usurers, Timon of Athens, Consortium, Our Mutual Friend, Buy Buy Buy, Silas Marner, Success!, The Pardoner’s Tale, Confessions of a Bailiff, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Amethyst Inheritance — and that’s about it. (Most of the serious books are the accumulations of Selina’s predecessors, except for The Usurers, which I remember buying myself.) I stared at my space-age sound system. Many years ago I outgrew rock music, and I have failed to grow into any other kind since. I waited, I hung about, but it just didn’t happen. Breakfast television is as yet only a dream, a whisper. I’m going to hang around for that too, maybe. Maybe not. Watching television is one of my main interests, one of my chief skills. Video films are another accomplishment of mine: diabolism, carnage, soft core. I realize, when I can bear to think about it, that all my hobbies are pornographic in tendency. The element of lone gratification is bluntly stressed. Fast food, sex shows, space games, slot machines, video nasties, nude mags, drink, pubs, fighting, television, handjobs. I’ve got a hunch about these handjobs, or about their exhausting frequency. I need that human touch. There’s no human here so I do it myself. At least handjobs are free, complimentary, with no cash attaching.
On the quartz coffee-table serving the spudjacket sofa a deck of unopened mail is carelessly fanned. For how long now in my life has mail confined itself to one topic? When I look at the cards in this pack, when I eventually rip and snarl my way through these trap-faced offers and demands, these begging letters, I want to say, Look, can’t we change the subject? Just once, after all these years? Isn’t there anything else you can talk about?… When did I last get a love letter, for Christ’s sake? When did I last write one?