No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (16 page)

‘Give me another ten and I’ll suck you off with a rubber,’ the Ethiopian suggests.

Frank has a better idea. ‘Call the girl back in,’ he says.

They settle on a price. What does it matter? Another ten, another twenty, another hundred. The Ethiopian fiddles ill-temperedly with her clothing and brings out a long empty
rubbery tit, more blue than black. Such a sight never did much for Frank in the pages of the
National Geographic
and it does even less for him now. But he’s not doing it for him. He’s doing it for his pancreas.

On the back seat the girl with the sellotaped stilettos opens her legs and shows him what she has between them. It is not quite as criminal an act as he’d feared. At least there’s hair there. ‘Spread yourself wider,’ he says. She wriggles in the seat and with her small bitten fingers pulls herself apart. Not
as
criminal, but a crime none the less. Fifteen years I could get for this, Frank thinks. Fifteen years minimum. With no remission. I’ll be an old man when I come out. Except I won’t be coming out. There’ll be no exposes on the box on my behalf. No
Panorama
or
Rough Justice.
Who’d campaign for the release of a television critic? I’ll be locked in a cell with Franklin for the rest of my life.

He re-arranges himself into a lying position at a three-quarters twist, so that he can put his mouth to the Ethiopian’s tit while still being able to see the little furry pink-nosed gerbil the girl keeps between her legs. He has his dick in his hand. And on his dick he has spittle which the Ethiopian has sold him for a fiver. Thus positioned, he finally comes.

But only after imagining that he is on his back on the stage of the London Palladium and that D the fat comedian is pissing in his mouth.

H
E ISN’T WELL.

Mel kept him well. Maybe Mel made him well.

She found him, originally, wearing a three-piece Mafia suit, looking yellow and eating all the wrong foods at a conference on the televisual arts in Birmingham. He was doing television previews as opposed to reviews then, along with general media reporting, so he was there snaffling up tidbits and hearsay, and she was on a panel discussing, as you could tell from what
she
was wearing, the portrayal of women on television. They took an instant dislike to each other. That’s to say she tried to have him ejected from her discussion group for hectoring, and he tried to fuck her.

‘Why would I want to fuck you?’ she asked him at the conference farewell party where he was re-doubling his efforts to make her aware of him. ‘You’re shorter than I am. You dress like a secondary-school hit-man. And you eat like a pig.’

‘I could buy Cuban heels,’ he told her.

‘You’re already wearing Cuban heels.’

‘No, these are Sicilian heels. Cuban heels slope, and they’re higher, and they’re generally made of cow leather, unlike these which are part crocodile, part snake, part 9 carat
gold. You can tell Cubans from Sicilians because they’re altogether less subtle. I’ll show you.’

And he did. First thing the very next morning he purchased a pair of tooled cowboy boots with three-and-a-half-inch sloping heels from a shop that looked like a wild-west saloon – not difficult to find in Birmingham, where a five-foot man is considered tall – and towered over her in the sandwich queue on the train back to London. Make ‘em laugh. That’s always the way to do it.

In return for which she made him well. She got him out of his Brioni two-tone suits. She threw away his Stefano Ricci shirts with their mobster collars. She cut him down from seven curries a night to one curry a fortnight. She reduced his wine intake. She told him that what he was previewing for a living was crap but if he was going to do it he should do it in style. She pulled his hair out of his eyes and tied it in a pigtail. She taught him how to do stubble. She bought him a decent watch. And she refused to be mechanically fucked by him.

Every morning, before either of them was properly awake, he prodded her with his dick. His dick, at least, didn’t need to be built up. On mornings when she pretended not to notice what was doing the poking he insisted on showing it to her. ‘Look, Mel.’

‘Why do I have to see your dick, why do I have to acknowledge your dick, why do I have to have your dick inside me every morning?’ she wanted to know.

‘Because it’s there,’ he told her.

She punished him by making him fuck her day and night. On the stairs. In the kitchen. On the bathroom floor. In the garden. In the back of a taxi. In the washrooms of a Chinese restaurant. Bang in the middle of Blackheath, with Sunday traffic hooting at them. ‘OK, big boy, give it me now.’ She wore him out. She had him begging for mercy. She reduced
his manhood to a bleeding stump. And still she went at him. ‘That’s it, you hot fucker, ram it up!’ Until he had to hide. Lock himself into the toilet for hours at an end, while she stood outside on the landing with her skirt up, describing what she was doing to herself and what she would be expecting him to do to her the minute he came out.

She made him well.

‘Enough?’ she asked him at last.

‘Enough,’ he conceded.

‘Well that’s tough because it’s not enough for me. Here, suck on my tit.’

This was another of their disagreements. He thought she had perfect breasts and that the only way he could adequately attest to their perfection was to put them in his mouth. For her part she found the sight of a grown man suckling her grotesque.

‘Go on,’ she ordered him. ‘Guzzle me. Get those lips around. Go on, suck. Suck like a baby.’ She made him do it in front of a mirror so that he could see what he looked like. He agreed with her. The spectacle was unedifying. It made him look like a retard. He didn’t say that that was the whole point, that you did it in order to
feel
like a retard. He was going along with the treatment. He was taking the medicine.

She drove him out into the country, blindfolded like O, a mystery tour, down a lane, up a lane, off the beaten, on to corrugations, along a logger’s track (was it?) deep into a forest (was it?) the light dappling and dying through his blindfold, the trees at one another’s throats, his heart swinging like the shafts of sun – was she bringing him here to kill him? ‘Out,’ she said, when the track finally came to an end. She led him along warm gravel, foliage nudging at him, lime the only smell, the only sound leaves breathing. She took off his blindfold. ‘Strip,’ she said. She produced a camera. His camera. The old Brownie box camera with which he’d won
the school junior photography prize, for a series of studies of the Manchester Ship Canal in winter. The same Brownie box camera he thought she’d confiscated after he’d tried to snap her climbing out of the bath. ‘But don’t take everything off,’ she told him. ‘Nudity is always heightened, wouldn’t you agree, if something is left to the imagination. Keep your socks on.’ She draped him around a tree. She sat him on a stump and got him to put a finger in his mouth. ‘Not your thumb, your forefinger.’ She arranged him on the forest floor like a stricken nymph, with everything akimbo. ‘Lovely,’ she said, ‘now moisten your lips.’ He knew he had to take it like a man. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. She’d found his photograph collection. She’d seen what he could do, compositionally, with a camera. She got him to crouch on all fours and then pout at her, upside down between his knees. ‘One for the mantelpiece, that,’ she said. He heard the clop of a tennis ball, saw through the trees a pair of lovers on a tandem. Suddenly he knew where he was. ‘Jesus Christ, Mel, this is Dulwich Park! We live here!’

‘So don’t draw attention to yourself,’ she said. ‘Now reach for your member. Make as if you’re picking a flower. You’re a creature of the woods, don’t forget. Wild and untameable, yet curiously innocent.’

He couldn’t.

‘Enough?’

‘Enough.’

But it wasn’t enough for her. ‘Just a couple with your legs up around your ears then, and we’ll call it a day. And try to look as if you’re at home in nature more.’

She made him well. She showed him that he was suffering from a common compulsive order known as man – M.A.N. – and that contrary to popular belief there was a cure.

‘And how will I know when I’m better?’ he asked her.

‘You’ll know that you’re
getting
better when you wake up
in the morning and your first thought isn’t a fuck or a photo.’

Now he knows that there’s another cure. They could have just waited till he was fifty.

But of course his hard-on was only the tip of the polluted iceberg that was his nature. ‘I wouldn’t mind if your appetites were cheerful,’ she told him. ‘But you don’t fuck to feel good, you fuck to feel bad. You drink to feel bad, too. You watch crap all day on the television to feel bad. You even eat to feel bad. That’s why you want a curry every night, so that you can punish your stomach and feel like shit in the morning.’

He took this hard. When all else was said and done, he considered himself to be a Rabelaisian man. He drank, he fornicated, he pigged out, he belched, he farted, he slept, he rose on the arched dolphin back of his dick, ready to breast the wild waves of existence all over again. He was a force of nature, wasn’t he. He was the functions disporting themselves. ‘According to the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin,’ he told her, ‘no meal can be sad.’

‘Well it can in your case,’ she said. ‘In your case no meal is ever anything but sad.’

He couldn’t deny it. If he feasted at midnight he woke with a broken heart. Whatever he did upset him, and whatever upset him, he did.

She came home earlier than expected from a meeting with her publishers one afternoon and found him bending over the ironing-board, spitting on his shirt.

‘How can you do that?’ she cried.

He explained that his shirt was badly creased but that he couldn’t be bothered with the palaver of setting the iron to steam.

‘Why can’t you treat your things with some respect,’ she
asked. ‘Why can’t you take time over yourself? Why do you have to spit on your own life?’

She made him well. She taught him self-regard. She showed him how everything didn’t have to be a hurry or a hurt, how he could make a ceremony out of eating, ironing, sex. She even showed him how to take some small pleasures in the crap he watched all day on telly. OK, Oprah might not have been to his taste, but she addressed the feelings, didn’t she? And she was warm – that was called warmth, Frank. And sure, the conversation of those Cockneys who made all their important life-decisions in the pub wasn’t of the sort that Frank and Mel may have recognised as penetrating, but it gave pleasure to others, and where would the world be if it only contained the sort of people whose conversation Mel and Frank found penetrating? Besides, she explained, disliking everything he saw and did was making him ill. Bad heartedness was not just a figure of speech. Thinking and feeling badly actually made the heart bad. Weakened it. Predisposed it to disease. He would have a heart attack from attacking. When they cut him open they would see the scars made by all the intemperate attacks he’d launched on others and on himself. She calmed him; she soothed him; she talked to him as though he were an imbecile, she made him see that the universe was a plenteous place, roomy enough for diversity, and unlikely to run out of food and drink and girls, so Frank didn’t have to gobble it all up at once and make himself feel poorly afterwards. She couldn’t have succoured him better had she left him to guzzle on her tit.

It cost her in the end. Making someone else well always does. She expended so much energy on the reparation of his self-esteem that she had none left for the maintenance of her own. He was meant to do the same for her now. Massage her heart; talk to her as though she were an imbecile. But he
couldn’t ever make the sentences sound right. ‘Get your finger out of your fucking throat!’ he yelled at her. ‘Is that meant to help me?’ she asked. ‘Is that your way of being calming?’ But what was he supposed to do? He was a man; he suffered from M.A.N.; and men don’t have tits.

Even when she’d given up on him and closed her ears against the noise he made, she kept him well by virtue of her brute presence. The mere fact of her being there – even if he didn’t touch her, even if he didn’t see her – was enough to stop him going whoring whenever the fancy took him. Whoever invented the idea of the stable relationship understood the necessity for anchorage. A cold line extended from Frank’s keel to the icy ocean bed of habituation. Friend or foe, Mel was there, a mooring, a tether, an ever-present weight that prevented him floating out into the uncertain immensity of the night.

Then he became fifty and no longer felt the want of an anchor.

Was that why he consented to be booted out of his house? Did he know that he didn’t need Mel any more? Did he understand that he was finally old enough to be trusted with the captaincy of his own bark?

Well he got that wrong, didn’t he.

He isn’t well. Even allowing for bad hotel lights and unflattering hotel mirrors, he can see he doesn’t look well. There’s no life in his skin. He’s eating crap again. Watching it
and
swallowing it. His teeth feel loose. His heart’s bad. Mel was right. You get a bad heart from having bad feelings. And he’s been having bad feelings for a lifetime. And now he’s having bad dreams.

Disaster dreams. Two on the run, both involving Mel. In the first, he was standing on a verandah looking out into a garden where Mel was sitting reading under a tented
umbrella. Her legs were crossed and her hair was blowing. It was their garden in Dulwich, but the light was Italian. In the dream, Frank felt Italian himself. He was back in a mobster shirt, having Italian thoughts, sucking in the light as though he were an Italian vegetable, a melanzana or a zucchino, absorbing what was rightfully his. Suddenly the ground began to open in front of Mel, then behind her, great fiery cracking fissures in the lawn, as though the great boulders on which the earth was founded had finally split. Mel took no notice. Her book was far more interesting to her. Frank screamed and screamed to get her attention but she couldn’t be bothered listening. Merely Frank making noise again. He wanted to run to her but he couldn’t move. He was growing in a terracotta pot on the verandah. A melanzana can’t just leap out of the soil and scale a verandah wall when the fancy takes it. He woke as Mel was disappearing obliviously into the ground.