Lurid & Cute (18 page)

— That's nice, I said.

— She protects me, she said.

— OK, I said.

— You believe in horoscopes? she said.

— So-so, I said.

— She protects me, she said.

— Can I look? I said.

The woman in the carving had a halo that was multicoloured and her clothes were multicoloured too. It was carved on a piece of wood that looked like some chess piece or intricate element of a fantastical building, by which I mean it had these arabesques and curlicues.

— Can I keep it? I said.

— You're asking? she said.

And I think it was at that moment that I really did understand that what we were doing was so much more violent than the usual world that she was absolutely correct to find this frightening. Because however much this crime might have seemed just very fun to us its perpetrators, totally I could see that to other people, I mean the people forced to act as bystanders or spectators or unwilling participants, like they are in the most upsetting piece of performance art and also against their will, it was something frightening and unusual. In movies there is so much violence that maybe it then doesn't occur to people how violent just the smallest alteration to reality really is, in fact it's very fearful just to see another person raise their voice, like if some holy man outside a pub is shouting at you and then decides to follow you as you walk towards a bus, it's hard not to feel just very threatened and alone. So that to introduce a gun, even if it was only fake or invented, was to introduce a much more unstable element than I had ever considered. This heist was swarming with sad particulars that I found difficult to react to in the appropriately violent way, or anticipate when they occurred at all. Instead I did just feel very gentle and bemused, so that softly I put the saint or holy person back.

— I'm sorry, I said.

— It's OK, she said.

with doubts of the inner life

I wonder if maybe in the end this is all about the whole pop concept of
nice
. The nice thing is the major problem. Because I totally do look nice. I wear teeshirts and jeans and sneakers like everyone else in the history of the multiverse. My hair is gently spiky. That's what I look like on the street or in the canteen. Also my eyes are manga large and my voice is soft. I pay attention to the way I speak which I hope is audible. And yet also for example I get way up high watching very bright pornography, where a girl's choking on a penis and her saliva's hanging down in strands like spaghetti or maybe more precisely spaghettini. I suppose eventually it does make me sad or ashamed or disgusted so I look away, but for at least a few hours, totally not. So
looks
, I'm just saying, are no guide to the inner life:
it's no joke
, to use a favoured phrase of my mother, as if only my mother understands the full seriousness of the world. Everyone I have ever met, their looks were nice – that's all I mean. If the looks were everything, then no evil could ever happen. But it obviously definitely does.

and large financial results

For slowly the girl at the counter was offering me all the soft notes from the cash register. And it was very light, the way this felt – like I had maybe imagined that money in such quantities was going to weigh me down like the swag sacks of the illustrated burglars in my children's stories, but no, it was about as heavy as a very light handbag, or not even. I marvel now at this ability the world has to sometimes arrange itself into scenes, to just pause there and coalesce the way a sorbet might, or crystal. That's the difference between things happening and not happening, and since so much of our time is spent arguing that nothing happens, that an
event
is basically impossible, I still think it's possible to see some lives as like the lives of the saints, where everything that happens, all the missed appointments and back problems and small mood swings, are really all fine details that form a wider pattern. For instance, just the weight of some old banknotes in your hand – that can mark a giant moment. Although at the time I did not think so. At the time I was not so sure that anything had really happened, as we ran outside, and I don't think this reluctance to believe in events is indefensible or even unusual at all – for in general people do tend to believe that life is just this overall foliage, like as dense and thickly populated as the tree canopy out in the Amazon, or one of those collages with a crazy sense of offness, where everything is just minutely unrelated. That's the general matte surface people think they live inside, like how the parties of this world keep on going, on and on they go, the fiestas, and it's the same people with the same drinks or with minute variations, Campari one day, Aperol the next, and you just think that this horizontal vibe will continue for ever – with no dramatics or splits or fissurings, yes you think that the whole concept of the dramatic
scene
, I guess I mean, is overplayed. I definitely tended to think so. I more believed that what was happening always was just the ongoing process of my thinking, and its difficult moods. But then something vertical does happen, after all. I can't deny it. We ran out into the quiet rain – back down into the noise of the normal life, and it was difficult, like the way it must be difficult for an astronaut when suddenly he's no longer in zero gravity, and oh the tortures it must be just to keep your neck supporting your head, or lifting your fork when you eat your longed-for messy plate of carbonara.

 

5. LONG FIESTA (THE HOROSCOPE)

 

LONG FIESTA (THE HOROSCOPE)

which improves his unstable mood

It was a time of many fiestas. They happened at picnics or other locations, in the parks where the trees hid statues of generals and renowned pharmacologists, or busts of the great explorers, with pink filtered light and daisies everywhere, and then at night in disused factories or small houses. We were at them all – because however much in reality you only want to be in bed and delirious with another person, still, you will leave the apartment and go to every party to which you're invited, it's one of those strange mysteries, why constraints are so constraining. Even the fact that I worried for our dog did not stop me, although definitely it made me sad to leave our dog behind, since unfortunately you cannot take dogs everywhere, they are not tolerated in society. Presumably he would have liked to live in a pack, with other dogs, but he was forced to live alone, dependent on us and without the language that we used among ourselves, at these swarays, where we talked gossip and the daily topics. But fiestas do have many moods. For me, I was upbeat absolutely but also I tended to have this haunted gaze. At unappointed moments my hands would suddenly start shaking, and I think it had a lot to do with the trauma of my recent escapades. This transformation into macho and crime-scene expert, I did not totally take it with aplomb. And yet, I did want to believe that I could be equal to this career, with its possible revenges and temptations. I tried to think that although the life ahead of me certainly was frightening, still, since every career made me fearful, this new fear felt like a test I needed to surmount … It's very difficult, after all, to make yourself proud of your own achievements. To pass exams is not enough. And so meanwhile I would interrupt these reflections with stand-up conversations.

ME

Did I ever tell you about this flight I once took?

ROMY

No, cookie, tell me.

ME

We were on the runway and it was taxiing and I totally knew that something was wrong, the plane's noises were completely unusual, and then I saw the stewardess in front of me mouth
What's wrong?
to the stewardess at the other end of the aisle, and so obviously I decided that I had to say something, I had to stop the plane from trying to take off, because it would only burst apart in flames, and so I called to the stewardess and explained, I advised her that the safest thing to do would be to return to the airport and have the plane thoroughly examined, to which she replied that of course she could do this, but first she would get me a glass of water and when she came back I could tell her if I still wanted her to inform all these people in the plane that I'd been so worried by what I considered to be the unusual buzzing noise of the air-conditioning nozzle that the plane would have to miss its take-off slot and be examined for what might be a period of four or five hours.

ROMY

So what did you do?

ME

I kept quiet.

ROMY

Is not so bad.

ME

But what I don't know, do you get this? – was if my silence was due to an inner knowledge that I was in fact being hysterical, and that there was nothing there to worry about, or whether I was so imbued with vanity and the wish not to make a scene that I preferred to risk my own death and the death of 453 other people rather than subject myself to the possible humiliation of the stewardess's announcement.

For, aware as I was that I wanted Romy to love me, and also aware that the reason why I was so in love with her was the fact that she had such cool, still I could not stop myself encouraging her to laugh at me. It was the only way I ever knew to charm, and so I could not help it. To live impossibly is no pleasure and yet it seemed to be the fate for which I was created. I knew of course that I needed to make decisions and renunciations. My life with Candy was impossible, but then, so was my life with Romy. Each option had no future. And yet in me was this extra wish to create some crisis, nevertheless, knowing there was no hope. Perhaps that's just an effect of my character because I do have a drive to the future. I am always searching for a better me. But in particular I think there was one specific cause for this sudden concern for acceleration. I think I blame the new-found thrill which is created by any scene of violence with a replica pistolet.

in its new-found machismo

Not that Hiro and I had come back with a sea chest spilling with doubloons but still, it was something. To have money of my own was very pleasant. Qat, I suppose, would have been one option now open to us, we could have sat outside the grocer's with those fronds protruding from our mouths like the red-eyed geeks who sat on garden chairs and looked into their inner space on the high street, counting cars. But my wildness was more different and more sweet. Now, for instance, it was possible for me to take Candy out for dinner, or buy her small treats at the African delicatessen, and to be able to do such things, which I had not been able to do for some time now, made me feel at least slightly if privately enlarged. Sure, naturally it's very sad when violence occurs, in no way does anyone
want
to be doing violence, but at the same time these things do end, finally, nothing continues always, and there you are on Geranium Avenue or some such boulevard, and really things couldn't be prettier. And then of course there are still restaurants in interesting parts of town, and little theatre openings that people tell you about. You can't let the memory of violence overshadow everything, or at least that was how I liked to think. And also, I had to admit that there was even something pleasant, in talking to someone when making them look down the barrel of a gun, just a fleeting delicious moment of knowing you have absolutely gone too far. And the memory of that sensation allowed me this lazy largesse in my general demeanour. We sat there in the pomegranate pubs and in the small-size newspapers read about the fascists taking over everything, their triumphal marches in the TV studios and the giant slums. Then in the bigger newspapers we read about our friends. Because what happens if you're hypereducated is that in the newspapers you recognise many people from your childhood or early youth, which is a problem if you want to preserve a sense of universal respect and public optimism because it does reduce your sense of gravitas a little – that
there
is the parliamentary secretary who once bored you over dinner,
there
is the cinema critic in the sadsack figure of Nelson. It tends to lower your estimation of the social world.

that may require more violence to continue

Even if very quickly the issue of the social world did start to impose itself, in the need for making more money. For largesse cannot continue, not indefinitely.

— Still, we do need more, said Hiro.

— I don't have any, I said.

— That's why we need to make more, he said.

— Oh, I said.

— How much money you got? said Hiro.

— I don't have money, I said.

— Doesn't Candy make money? said Hiro.

— That's not why I married her, I said.

— I never said that, said Hiro.

— I don't have any money, I said.

And while to make someone stare down the barrel of a gun has its definite temptations, my preference certainly would nevertheless have been for less violent schemes, if they could also be pursued without exertion. One method for getting rich quick in comfortable surroundings seemed to be online gambling, and especially the online poker competitions, but this was not, we soon discovered, where our particular gifts lay. We did not have the temperament. Then for a moment I considered if the general global vibe could be our friend, given how many products there are in the world and how many disparities in their pricing, and wondered about turning my parents' house into some Internet depot or warehouse where we would buy up special editions of chocolate or magazines, or rare forms of sneaker, then sell them to foreign buyers for enormous profit. But the obvious problems of capital and distribution, of market knowledge and know-how soon defeated this idle dream. It seemed that at this moment the considered small intrusion on legality might be our very best option, or this was how Hiro tried to argue. It had a neatness to it. And I always wanted to see the best in Hiro's reasoning. Always it seemed very impressive. This manner of entering the world that Hiro offered seemed valuable to me precisely because it was so piquant and unusual. I saw no need for any other classroom – just Hiro and his arguments. Perhaps in addition I think I did feel altruistic, like in the creation of this troupe that was always my ideal, I wanted very much to assist Hiro in his effort to live well. If he needed a student or laboratory assistant, I could fulfil that role with ease.