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By Root 596 0

off Sutton Place. Half way through my synopsis the cork of nausea abruptly popped in my throat. I only just made it to the adjacent can, which was large and acoustical: my imitation of an exploding hippopatamus through the closed door in full quadraphonic (as Fielding later explained). I got one or two funny glances on my return, but I just butched it out and I don't think it did me any harm. If I were them, I'd enjoy the spectacle. It does my poor old ticker good to see someone really totalled — by his own hand, mind you. Not blasted by outside nature or misfortune, which only frightens me. But they're a bit more puritanical in the States, hence the looks of incredulous solicitude, that morning over juice and scrambled eggs and coffee gurgling in heavy silverware, as I attempted to talk on. I started making an extraordinary noise — I heard that noise again the other day, while trying to force the last drops of ketchup from a plastic tomato. It was no big deal. I simply coughed myself into a crying-jag and had to be helped downstairs and into the Autocrat. All good knockabout stuff. I don't like seeing women in this state. You don't see it so much in women, and I'm glad. You see it round my way sometimes, the dead blondes in the scarred pubs ... What happened that night, that night in the Berkeley? What happened? Something did... I've solved one minor mystery. I now know how I managed to make my flight from New York. Fielding rang JFK and informed Trans-American that there was a bomb on board my flight. 'It's no big thing, Slick,' Fielding told me on the phone. 'I always do it when I'm running late. They grill the latecomers but not if you're first-class. It's not economical'... And then there is the second mystery, the mystery that lingers.

Now on this Sunday afternoon I walk from the kitchen to the bedroom. I open the white slats of the fitted wardrobe and take out the suit I wore on that last night in New York. Not for the first time, I tug the trousers out and flatten them on the bed. On the lateral creases of the crotch there is a large splattered stain, dark tan against the fawn, ending in tapered trickles down either leg. The soiled contours of the material crackle faintly to the touch. What is it? Tapsplash? No. It is champagne, or urine. I think I know the truth. The memory is there somewhere, it has its being— but it is loathsome to the touch. Ay! don't let it touch me! Keep it away,. So I lock the suit in again, back in the slammer with its partners in crime, shut up safe for the night, far from my touch.

——————

Something is missing from the present too. Wouldn't you say? Mobile, spangled and glamorous, my life looks good — on paper, anyhow— but I think we're all agreed that I have a problem. Not so? Then what is it? Brother, sister, do the right thing here and let me in on it. Help me out. You'll tell me it's the booze ... the booze isn't brill, I warrant, but the booze is nothing new. Something else is new. I feel invaded, duped, fucked around. I hear strange voices and speak in strange tongues. I get thoughts that are way over my head. I feel violated ... The other morning I opened my tabloid to find that, during my brief absence, the whole of England has been scalded by tumult and mutiny, by social crack-up in the torched slums. Unemployment, I learned, was what had got everyone so mad. I know how you feel, I said to myself. I feel how you feel. I haven't got that much to do all day myself. I sit here defencelessly, my mind full of earache and riot. Why? Tell. Inner-cities crackle with the money chaos — but I've got money, plenty of it, I'm due to make lots more. What's missing? What the hell else is there?

Randomly prompted (and that's how I'm always prompted these days: it is all I have in the way of motivation), I went next door and ran an eye over my book collection: Home Tax Guide, Treasure Island, The Usurers, Timon of Athens, Consortium, Our Mutual Friend, Buy Buy Buy, Silas Marner, Success!, The Pardoner's Tale, Confessions of a Bailiff, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Amethyst Inheritance