Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [112]
'You guessed, huh?'
'What?'
'She's a moron,' said Fielding. 'The big thing about Butch is her ass. Hi there, Celly. Now you just sit down and make yourself at home. John? Where are those drinks.'
Twenty minutes later, as Celly was getting dressed again (she looked like a pornographic cartoon, a comic strip, except for the eyes, which weren't even twenty yet and could hardly be expected to hide their fear or helplessness), I stood up and moved like a ghost to the white window. I held the cold steel of the cocktail-shaker, and, watching the way my shoulders worked, you might have thought that I was shaking it. But I wasn't. I was just wondering, I'm in hell somehow, and yet why is it hell? Covered by heaven, with its girls and deceptions and mad-acts, what is the meaning of this white tent? I keep looking at the sky and saying, Yeah, I'm like that, so blue, so deeply blue. How come? I've done it before and I'll do it again. There are no police to stop you doing it. I know that people are watching me, and you aren't exempt or innocent, I think, but now someone else is watching me too. Another woman. It's the damnedest thing. Martina Twain. She's in my head. How did she get in there? She's in my head, along with all the crackle and traffic. She is watching me. There is her face, right there, watching. The watcher watched, the watched watcher — and this second pathos, where I am watched by her and yet she watches me unknowingly. Does she like what she is seeing? Dah! Oh, I must fight that, I must resist it, whatever it is. I'm in no kind of shape for the love police. Money, I must put money round me, more money, soon. I must be safe.
'Fielding,' I said, 'what are you doing to me? What? It's been twelve days. God damn it, where is that script?'
'Tomorrow morning, John. I guarantee it.'
The telephone rang, and I swore brutally — but it was the call that Fielding had been waiting for. Spunk Davis. I returned to the window as Fielding soothed and coaxed.
'Just like I figured. Shnexnayder was straight on to him. You see, Spunk hates Nub with a passion. A long story.' Fielding shrugged limply. 'Yeah, he's in. And Herrick's out.'
That's good,' I said, and meant it.
'On one condition. Get this. He wants it to be a vegetarian restaurant.'
'In the film.'
'In the film. These guys ...'
I laughed, and Fielding laughed too, his lovable, his loving laugh. As he showed me his clean back teeth (plump, kiddish, uninjured), I thought numbly, Christ, what a goodlooking guy. When I wing out to Cal for my refit, when I stroll nude into the lab with my cheque, I think I know what I'll say. I'll say, 'Lose the blueprints. Scrap those mock-ups. I'll take a Fielding. Yeah, give me a Goodney. Do me one just like him.'
——————
As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.) In addition, there was the welcome sex-interest and all those rat tortures to look forward to. Stumbling into the Ashbery late at night I saw with a jolt that the room I had hired was Room 101. Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money. But I had no time for reading the next day. I was too busy reading.
At eleven o'clock Felix woke me with four smartly-bound volumes of Good Money, a screenplay by Doris Arthur based on an original idea by John Self. I ordered six pots of coffee and did my bathroom routines simultaneously, like a one-man band. I D-noticed all calls. I settled down, with the new anglepoise lamp staring interestedly over my shoulder. Reading—it's all I ever do these days. All I ever do is sit about the place reading. But this was different. This was work. This was money '1. INT. NIGHT,' I read, and pressed on, feeling dangerously excited.
An in-form reader, an old hand at reading, I flapped through Good Money in just under