Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [41]
'Where d'you fancy, John? The Breadline? Assisi's? The Mahatma?'
Terry Linex and the boys want to take me out to lunch. Keith Carburton has just walked in, razzing his hands. There has been quite a bit of this sort of thing recently. It feels to me like a new way of superannuating people. But I'm keen. After my morning, I need the , . fuel, I'm almost out of gas. I go, of course I go — as I will go when the time is right, when I get my big break. I hope it doesn't break me, my big break.. . So we come bobbing out of cabs in our high-shouldered cashmere overcoats. The girl in dike suit and streaming salmon tie (I think I could go to bed with her, if I liked, but it might be just her professional style to put this idea about) shows us fondly to our table. But it is the wrong table! Before Terry Linex can sue the restaurant, Keith Carburton takes the girl aside. I can hear him dully reminding her how much money we all spend here. The chick is impressed. So am I. Very soon we have another table (an old man is backing away with a napkin still frilling his throat), a better table, circular, nearer the door, and bearing a bottle of free champagne.
'We're sorry about that, sir,' said the girl, and Keith slipped her his pained nod.
'Now this is a bit more bloody like it," said Terry to himself.
'Right,' said Keith. 'Right:
We drink the champagne. We call for another. One by one the girls finish in the bog or the powder parlour and are redirected to the improved table. Mitzi, Keith's assistant. Little Bella, the telephonist. And the predatory Trudi, an all-purpose vamp and PR strategist. (As for the hiring of girls, we have a looks-alone policy over at C. L. & S.) They will have to do a lot of laughing and listening. They can talk a bit, but only so long as we are the heroes of the tales they tell. The quenched light of this joke June, in the shape of a sail or a breast, swells its camber across the room. For a moment we all look terribly overlit in here: we look like monsters. For a moment, the whole restaurant is a pickle-jar of rug glue and dental work. But now the real fun starts. Terry is throwing bread at me, and Nigel is on the floor doing his dog imitation and snuffling at Trudi's stockings. I notice that the middle-aged pair at the next table retract slightly and lower their heads over their food. As they huddle up, I give Terry a squirt from the shaken champagne bottle and join Keith Carburton in a few choruses of 'We are the Champions'. No, the rest of the meal isn't going to be much fun for those two, I'm afraid. I suppose it must have been cool for people like them in places like this before people like us started coming here also. But we're here to stay. You try getting us out. . . Now the menus come, dispensed like examination scripts, and we hesitate and fall silent for a little while, frowning and murmuring over the strange print.
Four o'clock. In heavy, motionless, back-breaking light, Linex and Self stood swaying in front of the basement urinal. I heard the slow rasp of Terry's three-foot zip, then the drilling of his leak against the ivory stall. There goes the day again, like so many others, just pissed away.
'Whoar,' said Terry with a wince.
'How's your dick?'
He glanced downwards. 'Still green,' he said in his piping, disembodied, fatman's