Fullalove (15 page)

To this rancid pile, add the little dog whose fate should have been to end up in a farmer’s field outside Keighley in West Yorkshire, and then maybe as a mascot wired to the radiator grille of the refuse truck given the task, after a respectable interval, of clearing the memorial away.

For two years the little dog lay ignored in a corner, slowly disappearing behind the layers of dust and the yellowing cellophane. He became a fixture. I didn’t see him. I soon forgot he was there. For the story of how he was finally sprung from this limbo-life to become my
gris-gris
or
nkisi,
my spirit-catcher, my boon companion and talisman, we have to go back more than a year.

I had been to a leaving-party – the latest in a long line of leaving-parties for men my age and younger who had out-stayed their welcome and were scrapheap-bound. The party started in the upper room of an old haunt in Fetter Lane called The Tickle Pink, and moved on in due course to the Press Club. Around four in the morning, the die-hards (Myc Doohan, briefly off the wagon, myself and three or four others similarly placed) were heading for some dump in the Mile End/Stratford area run by the son-in-law or father-in-law or brother of somebody (we were
all too crocked to remember who) travelling in the cab in front.

We had stopped at a set of traffic lights in Queen Victoria Street in the City when the front of the taxi was lifted clear of the ground by the deep whump! of what, even where we were orbiting, we all knew straightaway was a bomb. The taxi windows, and the windows of the shadowed, institutional buildings closest to us, remained intact. But after a dangling moment of anticipation and terror, a blind hover in time, the cupric and opal and mercurichrome skins of the high-rises above and beyond us tightened and then bellied and ruptured to gorgeous and catastrophic effect: out of the vapours and dusts emerged stacks of brilliantly variegated tatters, like a finale at the autumn catwalk shows; like flesh hanging off a kipper bone. Before we had a chance to get our fists up to our faces to unpop our ears, the driver had locked into a U-ie, and was flooring the cab away from the danger zone.

Whoa! Hey! Where-the! What-the! Whooooa! Stop! We fell over each other trying to get at the sliding glass panel behind his colour-drained head. We were sitting on top of a story. Here was a chance to delay our own evenings of mutilated Stiltons and sad vol-au-vents and sozzled speeches and dusty boards (and the shed-sitting, wood-whittling, golf-playing, post office-queuing years ahead). We skipped like five-year-olds towards the already paling pall of smoke, beautiful against a murky orange dawn, the declarative sentences and stubby paras forming by force of habit in our pounding thick heads.

The body-count wasn’t high (only one fatality, several lacerations, one serious). But there were important political implications and I was able to phone through some not-half-bad colour copy (paling pall, tragic tequila dawn), along with some eyewitness quotes, which made it into the late London editions.

By then the adrenalin and the need to get a grip had burned off some of the alcoholic haze. I was at that dangerous stage where the edge put on the night before was beginning to give way to the thud of blood at the base of the skull, and the shakes; birds were singing, and reality was beginning to intrude. With Myc
Doohan, I took a taxi to Smithfield market, where the pubs were serving breakfast and you could get a drink.

The hours that followed are something of a blank. I remember the first port and brandy, and maybe the one that followed that. I don’t remember falling backwards off the stool while putting over a brief up-date on the scene at the devastation area as we had left it (Doohan apparently got to me in time to stop me cracking open my skull like a pumpkin, and finished dictating the remainder of what I was going to say without missing a beat). I have no recollection of the taxi ride to Seven Dials, or of being deposited in the room where I eventually, briefly, came to.

I do remember working out, with the utmost difficulty, what time of day and where I must be: it was just beginning to get dark, coming up to the Happy Hour, with lights from the traffic filtering through the mealy calico blind and slipping over the cockerel-green painted walls, the plasterboard filling the space where a door had recently been, the pasted-on dado line, and the poster of a smoke-wreathed, curly-headed man I recognised as Lenny Bruce.

I was lying under a rigid, padded counterpane, so far as I was able to tell fully-dressed, watching the spokes of light become harder-edged, deeper golden, better-defined; listening to the haloed, picking up, quickening sounds of London at six o’clock.

I was at The Quoag, better known as Bobby’s, the (very) short-stay hotel popular for generations with people meeting for ‘funch’ – lunchtime fucking, with blank receipts from the fishing-net-and-raffia-nested-chianti-bottle restaurant on the ground floor – ‘moodies’ – provided
tout
compris,
so that the knobbing was eventually reimbursable as a justifiable business expense.

There was a hot wire piercing my thalamus, hypothalamus, parietal cortex and limbic system, so that I didn’t dare raise my head above the horizontal. But lying flat made me feel something life-threatening was about to take place in the ribs region: there were fluids sluicing around my upper body, swamping my heart (what I judged to be my heart), which itself felt inflated, spongily engorged, when I was lying down. Something that I remember
thinking seemed like orange juice seemed to be trickling out of my nose.

The next time I woke, the lines of light were ticking across the ceiling with more purpose, indicating that the traffic had thinned. It was probably about 2 a.m. and I had wiped out almost a whole twenty-four hours. I risked sliding a few inches up the head-board and, with my left hand, groped inside the bedside cabinet. This happened, conveniently, to be a minibar, and I came up with some foil-wrapped peanut brittle and some International Party Mix in a five-ounce ring-pull can. When I had taken care of these (leaving aside the seaweed-glazed Japanese crackers, which I have never liked), it seemed to make some of the sense of panic paralysis recede.

An hour, perhaps two hours later, it occurred to me to slip the trousers I had been sleeping in under the mattress, in an effort to get them to look at least half-decent when it was time to leave. I succeeded in kicking them off and folding them and arranging them more or less flat without glimpsing any evidence of the lowering brown oceans and exotic archipelagos of human stains. In the course of this (in the circumstances) tricky manoeuvre, though, my eye was drawn into the dark crevice of the bucking tongue, the throat where mattress peeled away from base and where I spied the dim, dog-eared, delaminated surface of what could only be porn. I plucked it from its hiding place, catching a confirming drift as I did so of the lewd inks, and fell back in the bed with all the dry-mouthed excitement of a secret debauche.

Every page showed a pie-faced woman in congress with a German Shepherd or a Borzoi, frequently both. She wore a short brown wig in some pictures, engineer boots and a zippered leather mask in others; only from the dusting of acne on her pale adipose buttocks – acne like a map of the cosmos; galaxies and galaxy clusters, conurbations of stars – was it possible to confirm that it was the same person.

I fell into a fitful sleep in which I dreamed of babies, dolls, disease, the corruption of the body – the things that go bad in the world of time, and decay. I woke with my face an inch or so
from the wall, where, written in a tiny Rapidographic hand just below the lower edge of the paper dado (laurel garlands, prancing elegant-necked gazelles), I read the following: ‘Lipstick on a penis/a kiss on a running sore/sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair’.

I remember my father describing to me once how the men of his regiment, himself included, had looted the homes of innocent Dutch families during the liberation of Holland. This was in ’44 or ’45, just before the end of the war, when the ordinary squaddie hadn’t experienced home, and the comforts of home, for many months, in some cases years.

It wasn’t valuables they looted, but the simple
heimelig
objects that they associated with peace and stability and physical and spiritual ease: sideboards, armchairs, those fringed chenille table coverings with depictions of windmills and dumpling-cheeked little dyke-pluggers in turned-up-toed clogs that you still find in some older Dutch bars today; they even took hearth-rugs and cheap mantel ornaments. The brass went hairless when they found the dug-outs converted into room-sets of cosy front parlours in Sunderland and Birmingham and Stepney. But they did nothing, because they could see the men were in the mood to kill rather than surrender the right to enjoy these potent reminders of a normal human existence.

Everybody can always use a little Christmas, as Frank Sinatra once said, explaining why he keeps Christmas-tree lights burning in his house all the year round. Even Ronnie Duncan – big, don’t-piss-on-my-back-and-tell-me-it’s-raining, rooted-in-the-world Ronnie Duncan, forcibly uprooted from the mess of his desk and the fortress of his office and the consolations of nicotine, now the building is a smoke-free, open-plan, virtually paper-free zone – Ronnie Duncan has lately taken to towing a small module behind him as he moves about the office making his executive pronouncements. Officially, this cabinet-on-wheels is supposed to contain all the bumf the new clean-desking mandates prohibit him from leaving lying around the place. Unofficially, it is no accident that he now looks like a small child pulling a favourite choo-choo or tottering cube of alphabet blocks on a trolley, or that he appears indifferent to this childhood regression. (Many people have remarked on how unhyper, how eerily unlike himself he has been seeming lately.)

I couldn’t have foretold that a fluffy toy given to me more than two years earlier by the wife of a serial child killer would be what I would reach for – something cuddly and sterile and acquainted with death – when life once again belly-upped and went weird on me. But this is what I asked Myc Doohan to go to my flat and get, when I eventually tracked him down. (He had spent the morning covering the opening by the Duke of Edinburgh of one of the new upgraded Poly-Universities – somebody back at the ranch’s idea of a joke.) Mrs N would give him the keys; he’d find the little dog in question by a stack of mouldering newsprint between the Exercycle (broken) and the window, abandoned but unresentful, an expression of absolute, insatiable neediness on its come-all, forgive-all machine-made face.

Doohan was the one person I could trust to do this who wouldn’t make unhelpful suggestions. (Like: Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have me call a doctor? Or: Wouldn’t you prefer to be oiled and stroked to orgasm by a topless lady of your choice?) A man who spends his mornings strapping himself into a whalebone corset (couturièred by the London woman who
post-operatively resculpted Andy Warhol and President Reagan among others) and his nights wanly communing with the oily city river is a man chasing his own demons. I also knew that Doohan was somebody who wouldn’t risk even a trip to the new University of the Outer Circle without taking his own charms and amulets with him: a brass pixie, a four-leaf clover, two silver dollars, a dashboard Jesus, and two St Christophers in case one was more effective than the other. (‘Oh world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin?’)

It was around one, I was vegging into day two of my occupancy of that twilit, garlic-reeking knocking shop, when I heard a key slip into the lock and opened my eyes to see an apprehensive – a frankly spooked – Doohan making his entrance. Hoisted on the heels of his tan cowboy boots, the kneed and bunched trousers of his suit dragging, thin hair slapped against his scalp, glasses steamed, the buckled belt of his leather coat trailing the floor, Doohan looked as if he had been bin-diving with the aristocracy of the gutter in Leicester Square. The paper sack in which he carried his belongings was sodden and collapsing; the newspapers clamped under his arm were flopping grey pulp; the little dog looked like a consolation prize from budget bingo in its patchily opaque, dingy shroud. ‘I’ll just do a piss,’ Doohan said, disappearing into the bathroom, and re-emerged gulping on a joint.

He paced the floor at the foot of the bed, lugubriously filling me in on the trade gossip I’d missed over the previous twenty-four hours: who was up, who was down, who was stuffing who. He had had a telephone conversation earlier that morning with a young photographer he had never met who he was meant to be working with for the first time. ‘I’m five-foot-eight, clean-shaven, ponytail, that kind of genre,’ the smudger had told him. ‘I’ll be with an assistant, blonde, of the female persuasion. You’ll be carrying a pineapple, I presume.’ ‘“My assistant,”’ Doohan said. ‘What happened to aiming it, holding the bleedin’ thing steady and pressing the tit? Probably still crapping his nappies this time last year. The wank in the bath.’