I had time to slap my hand over the telephone, so she didn’t hear me cry. When I listened again Rachel was saying, ‘Charles, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
Twenty-five of eleven: the Low
Now I weigh the Longman’s Blake in my hand. On the inside cover, I notice, Rachel has written, in pencil: To Charles, with love from Rachel’. Between my finger and thumb I take a rubber and bounce it up and down on the desk.
Elaine, my elder brother’s girlfriend, sat on the sofa with a glass of iced whisky in her hand. She really did say to me:
‘Gerry, the cat I was balling before Mark, yeah?, sort of poet, free-lance lecturer, ICA, that scene, was way into this Selby-Miller-Purdy trip, like we’re all children, tender sometimes and beautiful maybe, but like we kill each other and fuck each other up all the time. So Gerry gets into these doomy oppositions, God and Satan, creativity and napalm, love and thalidomide, fucking and cruelty, birth and death, youth and shit.’
‘I dig,’ I bluffed.
‘And his pomes get doomier and doomier, and his acid experiences get more and more negative, he won’t lecture any more, can’t make the night-time, won’t go to the bathroom alone, gets freakier and less organic, won’t eat. I mean, I can dig where his head’s at but ‘Yeah, that’s nowhere. You get all upti—’
‘Right. And it was like kind of a drag too.’ She laughed. ‘Sometimes he’d be really into me, digging me, telling me I was beautiful’ (which she was), ‘and other times I could tell I was turning him right right off. He’d get the shudders in the sack.’ She laughed again. ‘We’d make it maybe once a week, yeah ? He could like get it together … but he couldn’t get it on.’
‘I know exactly what you mean.’
Half an hour earlier, out of the bathroom window, I watched my father seeing off Sir Herbert, Willie French and the ladies (to whom he gave identical kisses). As they drove away, mother, in cerise trouser-suit with green fringe and gold buttons, joined him. My father put his arm round mother, and she responded hurriedly, putting her arm round him. They said things I couldn’t hear. But I could tell from the angle of my father’s head that he was being nice.
They were still outside the porch when two cars appeared at the turn in the lane. Out of the first, Mark’s MG, came Mark, all arse and smiles, plus the Elaine. Out of the second, a DeFor-est Jaguar, surfaced three handsome gangsters and a second, taller girl; up her legs, encircled by a belt-sized skirt, I caught a gout of scarlet panties. On the strength of this I had a heartless and pleasureless wank before joining them downstairs, my face still flushed, but more ambiguously so. I hawked a lot, too, because you hawk more when you cry.
My father and my brother and the rest came into the sitting-room through the frog-windows. They talked about improvements to be made to the house. Mark outlined plans for landscaping the rear plot. Then he led his friends over to the drinks shelf and gave them more gin. They laughed and bantered and seemed really to like each other, as tall, healthy people will when things are going right for them. Elaine emphasized her detachment by continuing her experiments in stream-of-con-sciousness narration.
‘Hello, people,’ said my brother, sitting creakily on the coffee-table before us. ‘What’s the matter with you, Charlie? You look like shit. I mean it.’
‘I feel like shit, too,’ I said.
Elaine sucked on an ice-cube, so Mark took her glass and refilled it.
‘Elaine. I have to talk big-business with Dad. So Tracy and everyone’s staying for dinner, okay ? We’ll drive back —’
‘Look, I told you, I’ve gotta be —’
‘Yeah. You told me.’ He dropped a bunch of keys in her lap. As he withdrew his hand he playfully tousled my hair. ‘Keep at it, little-britches.’ He coasted off to join the others by the window.
‘Why do you go out with that fat shit?’ I wondered out loud.
‘You got me,’ said Elaine.