I have talked to Selina about the way she looks. I have brought to her notice the intimate connections between rape and her summer wardrobe. She laughs about it. She seems flushed, pleased. I keep on having to fight for her honour in pubs and at parties. She gets groped or goosed or propositioned — and there I am once again, wearily raising my scarred dukes. I tell her it’s because she goes around the place looking like a nude magazine. She finds this funny too. I don’t understand. I sometimes think that Selina would stand stock still in front of an advancing juggernaut, so long as the driver never once took his eyes off her tits.
In addition to rape, Selina is frightened of mice, spiders, dogs, toadstools, cancer, mastectomy, chipped mugs, ghost stories, visions, portents, fortune tellers, astrology columns, deep water, fires, floods, thrush, poverty, lightning, ectopic pregnancy, rust, hospitals, driving, swimming, flying and ageing. Like her fat pale lover, she never reads a book. She has no job any more: she has no money. She is either twenty-nine or thirty-one or just possibly thirty-three. She is leaving it all very late, and she knows it. She will have to make her move, and she will have to make it soon.
I don’t believe Alec, necessarily, but I won’t believe Selina, that’s for sure. In my experience, the thing about girls is—you never know. No, you never do. Even if you actually catch them, redhanded—bent triple upside down in mid-air over the headboard, say, and brushing their teeth with your best friend’s dick—you never know. She’ll deny it, indignantly. She’ll believe it, too. She’ll hold the dick there, like a mike, and tell you that it isn’t so, I have been faithful to Selina Street for over a year, God damn it. Yes I have. I keep trying not to be, but it never works out. I can’t find anyone to be unfaithful to her with. They don’t want what I have to offer. They want commitment and candour and sympathy and trust and all the other things I seem to be really short of. They are past the point where they’ll go to bed with somebody just for the hell of it. Selina is past that point also, long past. She used to be a well-known goer, true, but now she has her future security to think about. She has money to think about. Ah, Selina, come on. Tell me it isn’t so.
——————
I worked up a major sweat over the console that morning — yeah, and a major tab, too. Deafened with caffeine, I was just a hot robot, a ticking grid of jet-lag, time-jump and hangover. The telephone happened to be an antique: a dialler. And my fingers were already so sore and chewed that each shirtbutton had felt like a drop of molten solder . .. Half way through the session I was dialling with my left pinkie. ‘Room number please,’ said the telephonist in her honeying drone, every time, every time. ‘Me again,’ I said and said. ‘Room 101. Me. It’s me.’
I tried my own number first and repeatedly thereafter. Selina has her keys. She is always in and out… I spoke to Mandy and Debby, Selina’s shadowy flatmates. I rang her old office. I rang her dancing class. 1 even rang her gynaecologist. No one knew where she was. On a parallel track 1 combed the airwaves for Alec Llewellyn. I talked to his wife. I talked to three of his girlfriends. I talked to his probation officer. No luck. Boy, these are pretty thoughts for me to entertain, three thousand miles from home.
The dog barked. My face felt small and clueless between its fat red ears. For a while I slumped back and stared hard at the phone. It held out for several seconds, then it rang. And so naturally I thought it’s her and made a hurried grab for my girl.
‘— Yes?’
‘John Self? It’s Caduta Massi.’
‘At last,’ I said. ‘Caduta, it’s an honour.’
‘John, it’s good to talk to you. But before we meet I want to sort some things out.’
‘Like what, Caduta?’
‘For instance, how many children do you think I should have?’