• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 659 0

Selina, once more going cheap in the sales. How I love it. How I love it all. Like Selina, this area is going up in the world. There used to be a third-generation Italian restaurant across the road: it had linen tablecloths and rumpy, strict, black-clad waitresses. It's now a Burger Den. There is already a Burger Hutch on the street. There is a Burger Shack, too, and a Burger Bower. Fast food equals fast money. I know: I helped. Perhaps there is money-room for several more. Every other window reveals a striplit boutique. How many striplit boutiques does a street need — thirty, forty? There used to be a bookshop here, with the merchandise ranked in alphabetical order and subject sections. No longer. The place didn't have what it took: market forces. It is now a striplit boutique, and three tough tanned chicks run it with their needly smiles. There used to be a music shop (flutes, guitars, scores). This has become a souvenir hypermarket. There used to be an auction room: now a video club. A kosher delicatessen — a massage parlour. You get the idea? My way is coming up in the world. I'm pleased. No, I am. A shame about the restaurant — I was a regular patron, and Selina liked it there—but the other stuff was never much use to me and I'm glad it's all gone.

Slipping off the demographic shuttle, I moved into the calmer latticework of dusty squares and sodden hotels. Some of the residential allotments are going up in the world too: they are getting gentrified, humidified, marbleized. Ad-execs, moneymen, sharp-faced young marrieds, they're all moving in and staking out their patch. You even cop the odd sub-celebrity round my way now. An old actor, singing arias of bitterness in the backstreetpubs. There's a chick newsreader whom I sometimes see cramming her kids into the battered Boomerang. Every day a failed chat-show host and an alcoholic ex-quizmaster grimly lunch at the Kebab House in Zilchester Gardens. Oh yeah, and a writer lives round my way too. A guy in a pub pointed him out to me, and I've since seen him hanging out in Family Fun, the space-game parlour, and toting his blue laundry bag to the Whirlomat. I don't think they can pay writers that much, do you ?... He stops and stares at me. His face is cramped and incredulous — also knowing, with a smirk of collusion in his bent smile. He gives me the creeps. 'Know me again would you?' I once shouted across the street, and gave him a V-sign and a warning fist. He stood his ground, and stared. This writer's name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all?

. . . With a flinch I looked up: still no weather. Sometimes, when the sky is as grey as this — impeccably grey, a denial, really, of the very concept of colour— and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more than the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.

——————

All set. I'm back at my flat now. The sheets have been changed, the socks coralled, the mags stashed. I myself am scrubbed and primped. Soon the bell will ring and Selina will be here with Persian eyes, overnight bag, hot throat, omniscient underwear, scarred wrists, boudoir odours and, quite possibly, the odours of other men. Under the auspices of pornography, however, this is all right, this is okay. This'll do. I ought to wait until I know you a bit better before I reveal what I get up to with Selina in the sack. But I'll probably tell you anyway. Who cares? I don't. Is she an infidel? Does she go to bed with men for money? No, not my Selina. She simply makes blue films while I'm out of town, for private screening in this old head of mine. Tonight I get the lot. I can't say I'm too much bothered now that pornography is on its way in a cab.

While the champagne cooled in my small but powerful refrigerator, I uncapped a tube of beer and swallowed ten capsules of Vitamin E. I am a vitamin addict,