Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [17]
“Look at this one,” said Bern. “Twenty-eight. You know something? She’s me first Nip. Ain’t you, Tosh! Where they been all my life?” Without lowering his voice or changing his tone, he said, “You know, I always thought they’re built sideways. Down there. But they ain’t. Same as all the others the world over. God bless ‘em.”
“She don’t speak English, do you, Tosh?” continued Bern, putting Mal’s mind at rest.
Toshiko quacked something back at him.
“Can speak French.”
Mal lowered his gaze. The thing was … The big thing with Mal was that his sexuality, like his sociality, was essentially somber. As if everything had gone wrong forty years ago, some rainy Saturday, when he stared in through department-store windows at fawn, dun, taut, waxy, plastic women, their arms raised in postures of gift-bearing or patient explication … In bed together, he and Linzi—Big Mal and Shinsala—watched Asian Babes. By now their whole sex life was based on it. Asian Babes, the magazine, the video, the laser CD, or whatever: Asian Babes, Mal had a hunch, represented a milestone in race relations on this island. White men and dark women were coming together in electronic miscegenation. Every video wanker in England had now had his Fatima, his Fetnab. When Asian Babes was taking a rest, or when they were button-punching their way through it, and Linzi’s set was in neutral, the channel of choice was Zee TV—Indian musicals. And such a chaste culture! When a couple went to kiss, the camera would whip away to twirling, twittering lovebirds or great seas attacking a cliff face. Women of darkly heavenly beauty, laughing, singing, dancing, pouting, but above all weeping, weeping, weeping: milked of huge, glutinous, opalescent tears, on mountaintops, on street corners, under stage moons. Then Linzi would press the “Play” button and you’d be back with some Arab bint, smiling, chortling, and taking her clothes off to slinky music in some Arab flat at once modern and mosquelike and contorting herself on a polythene-covered settee or an ankle-deep white carpet … The other video they kept watching was the one Linzi had procured from Kosmetique. Breast enhancement: Before and After. You could tell that plastic surgery sought to reverse natural prescript, because After was always better than Before, instead of a poor second, as in life. Although Mal liked Linzi as she was, he was nonetheless dead keen on Kosmetique, and this troubled him. But he too wanted to switch his skin. One time, at Speakers’ Corner, where men on milk crates had one-way conversations with no visible audience, he had stood with a hand on Linzi’s shoulder, staring at the fantastic shoeshine of her hair, and he had felt wonderfully evolved, like a racial rainbow, ready to encompass a new world. He wanted a change. This thing, he thought, this whole thing happened because he wanted a change. He wanted a change, and England wasn’t going to give him one.
“Who you with now then?” Bern asked him.
“Linzi. Nuts about her.”
“Ah. Sweet. How old?”
He thought of saying, “Fortyish.” Yeah: forty-nine. Or why not just say, “Sixteen”? Mal was feeling particularly grateful to Bern—for not saying anything about the state of his face. Well, that was Bern for you: a man of the world. Still, Mal felt unable to answer, and Bern soon started talking about the mysterious disappearance of the man who fucked the Queen (or so they reckoned). Toshiko stood there, smiling, her teeth strangely stacked. Mal had been in her company for half an hour and she still looked wholly terrifying to him, like something out of an old war comic. The extra cladding of the facial flesh, as if she was wearing a mask made out of skin; the brow, and then those orbits, those sockets, those faceted lids … He had gained the vague impression, over the years, that Nip skirt ran itself ragged