Martin Amis. The Rachel Papers

I was being a bit roguish (for dramatic purposes) when I suggested to my friend Peter in the sixth-form coffee-bar that I hated all my family. I don’t really mind the women in it. This bias officially dawned on me towards the end of my second bedridden winter. I concluded that it was merely rather trustingly Godfrey Winn of me, nothing more sinister. My age? Fourteen.

However, one afternoon, in a doped half-state, I read a Chunky Paperback on Sigmund Freud.

I spent the night in a state of mild, run-of-the-mill delirium, sweating quietly as my mind wobbled and raced and swerved: and with morning, came the unshakable, indeed serene, conviction that I was a homosexual. It all added up: I had had, it was true, one queer experience (a smegmatic handful of queer experience in my primary-school cricket pavilion); I was a soprano, a first soprano, often taking descants, in the choir; I was as yet a virgin, and had to lie my unpimpled head off to my friends about how I wanked as often, and with as much piston-wristed savagery, as they said they did. Clearly, the minute I was off my arse I’d be getting it on the bus to Oxford and hawking it there to the friendly undergraduates at Magdalen. In puzzled preparation I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and (for what little it was worth) E. M. Forster.

Next, exploring my powerhouse elder brother’s desk I came across a body-building mag, called Tensio-Dynamism or something, one of the ones that explains to you how to kick the shit out of anyone who bugs you at the seaside. Resignedly I went back to my room, curled up in bed with it, started turning the pages, waiting equably for an erection. No way. Idiot faces glaring in pinhead conceit, ghastly all-out-of-control tenements of beef-cake. Never felt less sexy in my life: it beat me how females could fancy them. These gentlemen were, I realized, unrepresentative – but even so.

Luckily, I had, and still have, a mind like a bear-trap; as soon as one idea wriggles free I’m sprung and tensed for the next unwary paw. As with most people who pass for sensitive, obsessive types, I simply can’t get enough of things to get worked up about – an interest. Now I was keen to know why all woman weren’t dikes. Anyway, that summer I had a formative heterosexual experience. I’ll go into it later. Let me say only that as a direct result I got my first decent pimple, a fine double-yolker, and that that pimple flourished over the weeks, to become the object of much silent envy when I returned to school in September.

To be fair, there weren’t all that many maniacs in the Costa, and hardly more than a smattering of blinkies.

Sipping on my coffee I tackled the Mirror crossword. If I completed it I would fuck Rachel within … three weeks. Putting in a couple of clues I decided I would ring her when I got back. It would be intelligent to do it while I still felt tolerably spermy and Joycean after my night with Gloria. In my mind I saw young Charles leaning against Jenny’s passage wall and smiling into the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his eyes were bright and his face pleasantly animated. ‘Hi, Rachel ? This is Cha – … Great – thanks – how’re you ? Whoah, baby. Yeah, sure, tonight’s fine.’

I ordered another coffee. An old woman passed by surreptitiously dropping paper-wrapped sugar-lumps on to the chair opposite. ‘Hello. Good afternoon. I should like to speak to Rachel Noyes, if I may. I wonder whether this would possibly … ? Thank you. So kind. Hello, Rachel Noyes ? Rachel Francette Noyes? Good afternoon. You probably don’t remember me (why should you?) but in fact we met at the party in August ? August pth ? I was wearing…”

We met at the party in August. It was a wine and lights flashing and everyone jumping up and down party, as opposed, say, to a lie on the dank carpet cradling empty Pipkins wishing there was more than one girl there party, or, again, to a smoke hash and eat syphcakes while Charles Manson, Esq., pats the bongoes and recites scabrous prose poems party. It was the very best kind of party.

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