When it was over, I took a pull of scotch, dabbed the tears away with a paper tissue, and rang down to room service. I asked for coffee. I mean, you have to take it easy on yourself sometimes.
‘Coffee how?’ came the suspicious reply.
I told him: with milk and sugar. ‘How big are the pots?’
‘Serve two,’ he said.
‘Four pots.’
‘You got it.’
I lay back on the cot with my frayed, fanlike address book. Using the complimentary pad and pencil, I started making a list of all the places where I might expect to find the nomadic Selina. That Selina, she gets around. I wondered, out of interest, how much these calls were going to cost me.
I undressed and ran a tub. Then the impeccable black bellhop arrived with my tray. I came over, initialled the check and slipped the kid a buck. He was in good shape, this kid: he had a pleasant agitation in his step and in his smile. He frowned innocently and sniffed the air.
He could take one look at me — at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel — he could take one look at me and be pretty sure I ran on heavy fuel.
There is a dog tethered in the steep airwell beneath my room. A talented barker, he barks boomingly well. I listened to him a lot while I sat there being talked to by Lorne. His half-hourly barking jags reverberate in monstrous warning up the length of the canyon walls. He needs that nether fury. He has big responsibilities — he sounds as though he guards the gates of hell. His lungs are fathomless, his hellhound rage is huge. He needs those lungs — what for? To keep them in, to keep them out.
——————
I’d better give you the lowdown on Selina — and quick. That hot bitch, what am I letting her do to me?
Like many girls (I reckon), and especially those of the small, supple, swervy, bendy, bed-smart variety, Selina lives her life in hardened fear of assault, molestation and rape. The world has ravished her often enough in the past, and she thinks the world wants to ravish her again. Lying between the sheets, or propped at my side during long and anxious journeys in the Fiasco, or seated across the table in the deep lees of high-tab dinners, Selina has frequently refreshed me with tales of insult and violation from her childhood and teenage years — a musk-breathing, toffee-offering sicko on the common, the toolshed interrogations of sweat-soaked parkies, some lumbering retard in the alley or the lane, right up to the narcissist photographers and priapic prop-boys who used to cruise her at work, and now the scowling punks, soccer trogs and bus-stop boogies malevolently lining the streets and more or less constantly pinching her ass or flicking her tits and generally making no bones about the things they need to do… It must be tiring knowledge, the realization that half the members of the planet, one on one, can do what the hell they like with you.
And it must be extra tough on a girl like Selina, whose appearance, after many hours at the mirror, is a fifty—fifty compromise between the primly juvenile and the grossly provocative. Her tastes are strictly High Street too, with frank promise of brothelly knowhow and top-dollar underwear. I’ve followed Selina down the strip, when we’re shopping, say, and she strolls on ahead, wearing sawn-off jeans and a wash-withered T-shirt, or a frilly frock measuring the brink of her russety thighs, or a transparent coating of gossamer, like a condom, or an abbreviated school uniform. .. The men wince and watch, wince and watch. They buckle and half turn away. They shut their eyes and clutch their nuts. And sometimes, when they see me cruise up behind my little friend and slip an arm around her trim and muscular waist, they look at me as if to say — Do something about it, will you ? Don’t let her go about the place looking like that. Come on, it’s your responsibility.