Cora made room on the large kitchen table for the ritzy shopping-bag with the magnum of champagne in it, and then produced the snuffbox with its packed white powder.
‘Ooh, go on then.’
A glance at the sitting-room, with its shawls and scarves showered over the furniture, and the multilayered clutter deposited as if by flashflood, told Cora that Pearl was no keeper of secrets. The house-presents she had brought were de trop—not unwelcome, but almost certainly otiose. Pearl’s appearance was similarly informative: the livid cheeks and forehead, the irregular auburn spikes of her hair, the costume jewellery, the ashsmudged jacket, the short skirt. It was on the short skirt that Cora concentrated. She saw that this was Pearl’s gravitational centre — the bandy thighs, the framed void. With a thrill of mortality Cora decided that the day Pearl finally stopped wearing short skirts would be the worst of her life. On the way to this rendezvous Cora’s cab had encountered an old lady in the street (and Cora wasn’t used to seeing old ladies in the street) bent almost triple in her search for purchase. The old lady was waiting at the zebra-crossing; the driver slowed and stopped; and, before starting off like a sick crab, she stared at him with a sneer of suspicion for at least twenty seconds, as if London taxis were well known to like ploughing into old ladies on zebra-crossings. Cora thought: try doing all that in a short skirt.
Pearl had both feet on the table, and had just rocked back from her seventh line of cocaine, when Cora introduced the subject of male sexuality, with particular reference to Xan Meo.
‘It’s too fizzy, isn’t it,’ said Pearl. ‘Wiggle your finger in it. Like this. It makes the bubbles go away and you can drink it faster. Whew. I haven’t scarfed up as much … Uh, he uh, wasn’t a fetishist. Like some. I knew a bloke who ricked his neck every time he heard a toilet flush. Another bloke could only do it wearing a mask and I had to pretend to be someone else — you know, a different person each time. I said, Ah come on for once. He said, It’s like being gay — I can’t do it otherwise. Xan. Xan liked frilly knickers and the rest of the bollocks but name me one that doesn’t. With him it was a power thing. He’d want to master you. So, you know, you’d resist that and pretend it isn’t doing anything for you. You’re not in the mood and you’re just letting him get on with it. Until you … That’s what he liked. Well. What can you do with them? Either they’re lording it or they’ve locked themselves in the bathroom. For a weep or a wank. Wiggle your finger in it.’
Cora now raised the question of Xan’s current circumstances, and was pleased to see Pearl’s shiver of flustered highmindedness: still greater indiscretion was on its way.
‘Of course it’s all off now, since he copped that smack on the head.’ Her voice had a faint buzz to it, imparted by the furled tenner in her nose. ‘He was always pretty keen, actually, but now he’s all screwed up and can’t think about anything else. Russia — I’ve got quite pally with Russia, on the phone at least. Russia had to kick him out after he came in and leapt on her in the middle of the night. She was that close to having him nicked. Said he’d become like a retarded child when they turn fourteen. They don’t know what to do with it all. And here’s something worse.’
Cora leant forward. With a look of righteous panic Pearl went on,
‘Russia asked me whether … When I was divorcing him I told my lawyer Xan was messing with the boys. Total rubbish, but any port in a storm. And Russia asked me whether it was true. Because she thinks he might have been messing with Billie — that’s their four-year-old and a sexy little minx according to the boys. Nothing definite, mind. It’s the way he eyes her. Whoop. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that, but you know what it’s like with this stuff. Out it pops.’
‘Oh it’s safe with me,’ said Cora. ‘Mm, your garden looks awfully nice. Would you give me a tour before I go?’
Pearl stood swaying at the front door. She said,
‘Oof: that fresh air’s really done me in. And look at her. Like a daisy. We never did talk about you and your time with Xan … Yeah, what time, right? Aren’t you clever … Ooh, you’re going to start stirring it now, aren’t you. Going to start mixing it. I’d say he’s going to be a very lucky boy. For about half an hour. His head’s on the block with her — one slip and it’s all over. Let me know how you get on. I’ll call Russia and feed her the dirt. Or do you do that bit too?’
5. It’s Not Unusual
On Friday Xan rose at seven. He breakfasted with the girls, and with Imaculada, to compensate or atone for his absence later on — if, for some reason, he got held up at the hotel. And he did his hour with Tilda Quant. Next, at the gym, he worked much harder and longer than usual; his class-leader, Dominic, commended the extra rasping and straining with the benchpress. Back at the flat, as he was about to unpeel his stinking singlet, he said to himself: Don’t wash. Go like this. That’ll keep you honest … As a compromise (and this was by no means habitual) he stood under a cold shower for fifteen minutes. Tilda Quant might have said that the mechanism at play here was self-flagellatory: purgation in advance. Hell isn’t just hot; it’s cold, too.
No doubt it was in the same spirit that he surrendered to a much-postponed ordeaclass="underline" he tried to write something. Just a couple of paragraphs (he told himself), a couple of hundred words describing the confusions that had beset him since his accident. He stopped after forty-five minutes and read what he’d put down. As he feared, it did not evoke so much as leadenly dramatise his condition. Indeed, it was just another symptom: expressive dysphasia. His concentration, he realised, was additionally impaired by the fact that he kept thinking about sex: sex in the afternoon. By now his imagination had long exhausted all known acts, stunts, positions, variations. By now it was unalloyed nostalgie—pure love of the mud. Xan sat there sinking, in his brown study.
With a smile of pain he picked up Lucozade, intending to finish it — or to finish ‘Lucozade’, the last and longest story.
Twelve pages in he got to his feet and said, ‘Joseph Andrews?’
At that moment Mal Bale was two hundred yards away and heading straight for him. Well, not quite: he had a bit of business to get done en route. Only take a minute. Mal, this day, was on a dual mission. He didn’t like the first thing he was going to do and he didn’t like the second thing he was going to do. But he was going to do them. In his worn leather overcoat (the broad belt was like the metal strap on a barrel), Mal approached a hotdog stand on the west pavement of Prince Albert Road.
‘Go on then. How much? … Jesus, you don’t take no prisoners, do you mate. Onions? Nah. Just the uh, the doings …’
The hot-dog man, a middle-aged rasta with every other tooth missing and a face wreathed and sallowed by half a century of keef, said coaxingly, ‘You got to eat you onions, man. Put lead in you pencil.’
‘I’ve got lead in me pencil, mate. Look at the state of that sausage: that’s bioterror, that is. Do you know who I am? Do you know why I’m here?’ Why am I here? he thought. At my time of life, and I’m frightening hot-dog stands. It’s not even a stand. It’s a fucking trolley … ‘The cousins aren’t having it.’