Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and a consciousness that just by being who he was he caused anxiety and exasperation-and desperate fatigue-in his parents (he understood, even when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the things inside that made him cough and smolder and effloresce, and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he -was inconsolable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year-old would normally have need or reason to be. Adults
were not other to him. Not remote and massively autonomous and alive only insofar as they maintained his domes of pain and pleasure. He knew that adults, too, were small, and pushed and tugged by many forces.
towels on the walls, double striplights above) so symmetrical that intuition demanded that a mirror stood at its center. But there was no mirror: only two of everything, opposed to a counterpart. Richard squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. No mirror, so no reflection; and he was a vampire, momentarily, denied its natural simulacrum, and fearing death by running water. Palpably, the Coronet toilet was the scene of a very recent gastric catastrophe: but it was the scene of nothing else. He moved sideways and quickly bent to look under the saloon doors of the cubicles: no quivering flounce of brown corduroy, no tortured dove-gray brogues. Richard was disappointed and Richard was relieved. He moved toward the urinal and was bending forward and breathing in (searching for purchase on his zipper toggle) when a voice said, "Nice smell in here."
And Richard's mind, which was always looking for pain, had time to feel hurt at this, had time to take this personally, as a sarcastic reference to himself. To himself, and not to the incredible smell of shit everywhere. He turned.
"Wait," he said. "This isn't me."
"I just wandered out. Get some fresh air. I told Demi. Didn't you notice I was carrying my hat? Between you and I I went back to the Slug for a quiet pint."
"Between you and me. Not a quiet Campari and soda?"
"I had a pint."
"What was the matter with the film?"
"It was getting on my wick, all that stuff about the barn. And the cows. The way they all kept on banging on."
"You're supposed to like all that. Fields. No sex. Civic-minded discussion. Nothing happening."
Outside the study window the clematis was tinged with yellow and gold-autumn, and Richard's cigarettes. He often smoked with his head on the block of the windowsill, facing skyward, to spare Marco's lungs. Out there, birds still fluttered and agitated, and they sang. The uncoil-ings, the slipping twists of sound. Say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through the trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting "Bullshit!" Now the singing thrushes and sparrows outside the window sounded like machines. Cold out there. Now that he was forty, he feared the cold. Now he was forty, something animal in him feared the winter.
righteousness. Today, it wouldn't have surprised Steve to learn that Gwyn-or, as it turned out, Richard-now faced major cranial surgery and would be eating through a straw for the next nine months. You give one smack: then you begin to think that you have been chiefed out. The blow that came before was there to justify the blow that will come after. The blow that comes after is there to justify the blow that came before. What held him back, Clasford, wasn't his strict instructions-but the city. Be quick: the lights, the footsteps. Suddenly Steve thought about the nun he had seen, out Wimbledon way. Nuns wore witchy booties and no cosmetic except the no-sex cosmetic.
Now Steve Cousins walked past security camera, past doorman, past security camera and security-camera monitor; he entered the lift and went up, high up, with the building's girders and cement blocks thrumming past him; then out past the security camera and down the tubular passageway. Excluding the two penthouses and the six maisonettes and the fourteen studios (and there were other hierarchical distinctions to do with elevation and vantage), Steve's flat was just like all the other flats in the complex. A squad of architects had been told to dream the dreams of the contemporary businessman, and to give that dream the weight of concrete and steeclass="underline" economy of line, public space/private space, dynamism melding into hard-won repose. Then let the individual imprint his personality upon it-if he had one. But we all have one. Don't we? Scozzy's double reception room, the main living area where the expression of his personality was supposed to occur, had four corners: a fitness corner (weights, flexers, StairMaster), a computer corner (the usual information processors), a reading corner (cushions, a low glass table stacked with various nihilistic classics), and a video corner (a depthless window-sized TV, the numb sleek blackness of the VCRs, the heap of remotes, plus a Canaveral of decoders and unscramblers). Was there a truth to this room? In a sense it was all for show, like a stage set- despite the fact that nobody ever came here. Steve removed his clothes. At home, he went naked. At home, he sniffed his food before putting it in his mouth (his mouth: he knew that his jawbones, typically, projected at the dental arcades). At home, he stood and swayed with the wind, monotonously, unbearably, for hour after hour. At home, he often thought of renouncing all speech. Did he use to do these things when he was a wild boy? Or did he just do them now: now that he had read about wild boys? All he seemed to remember, from his wild-boy period, was lying under some fucking hedge. In the fucking rain.
Naked, he proceeded to the video corner. Then came a series of activations. He sank into the cold leather of the great swivel chair. On screenMarco knew grownups. Very often he hung out with them all day and all night long … Now Marco conceived the idea of giving his father pleasure, or comfort. A kiss, perhaps, on the temple? A few restorative pats on the shoulder? As he got to his feet he decided instead to regale Richard with a joke.
Sensing his approach, Richard looked up from The Proverbial Husbandman: A Life of Thomas Tusser. The child's uplifted face, one eye wide, the lips compressed, brewing amusement.
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"I dunnop."
"I dunnop who?"
"Ooh you smelly phing!"
"… I don't happen to find that very funny, Marco."
"I phought it weren't him. He came on like he expected it. That was the phing."
"No, mate. You don't say it like that. Not with thing. You say ting."
"Yeah. That was the ting."