Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [107]
How can you grow up, with a boil on your ass? Who would take you seriously? A joke is being played, at my expense.
It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.
'Actually I quite enjoyed it. What next? Rupert the Bear? Come on, give me a break. How about a real book next time? Porker and Squeaky and the rest of the guys. I'm too old for animal stories. I mean, we don't have to start that far back, do we?'
For all its offhand delivery, this speech had been pretty shrewdly rehearsed. I expected Martina to shrug and apologize and put me on to something harder. She would be impressed, a little stung and chastened perhaps, by the restless brainpower she had started to awaken. I met her gaze. Her bruised, active eyes were flooding with consternation, with delight. Fuck, I thought. Animal Farm was a joke all along.
'You know it's an allegory,' she said.
'What?'
'It's an allegory. It's about the Russian Revolution.'
'What is?'
She explained.
Now this was a shaker, no two ways about it. The Russian Revolution wasn't exactly news to me — well, I gathered that they'd had a major rumble and rethink over there, early on in the century sometime. But this allegory deal had certainly caught me napping. I listened as Martina talked on. That big horse Boxer — he was the peasantry, if you please. Little Squealer—he wasn't just a pig, he was the propagandist Molotov. Did I know that Molotov was a pre-Revolutionary editor of Pravda? I did not. To hide my panic (and it is panic, panic in the face of the unknown), I threw in my criticism, the one about the pigs.
For some reason Martina had a good laugh about this too. Like most people she has two laughs, the polite reflexive laugh, and the real laugh. Martina's real laugh is the least ladylike I have ever heard — savage, childish, but symphonic, with competing levels and strains. Yes, she likes a good laugh, this Martina.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Actually pigs are cleverer than dogs. They have bigger brains relative to body size. That's what counts. Pigs are nearly as clever as monkeys.'
'You don't say,' I said. 'Well I don't know about you but it seems a hell of a way to live. I mean, if they're meant to be so smart... I mean, you have seen pigs, haven't you.'
'I like pigs,' she said.
She brought me a glass of white wine and parked me on the terrace as she went upstairs to change. It was my first drink of the day. I wasn't hungover. I was in withdrawal — but there were shards of despairing hilarity among all the sourness and static. Martina's terrace had a lot of flowers on it, in pots and tubs and wall-brackets, big ones, small ones, red ones, blue ones, supervised by corpulent bees, their shields as rich and shiny as dark pebbles in running water. Metallic, superdynamated, these creatures of the lower air moved about me like complicit demons, so heavy that when they hovered they seemed to be idling from invisible threads. I welcomed their company. They wouldn't waste their suicide stings on me. Below lay the checkered decks of half-paved back gardens — fishponds and weak fountains, curlicued furniture, an overalled woman with ticking scissors. The birds of New York shivered and croaked among the bent branches. The birds of New York have more or less given up the ghost, and who can blame them? They have been processed by Manhattan and the twentieth century. A standard-issue British pigeon would look like a cockatoo among them — a robin redbreast would look like a bird of paradise.