Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [43]
'Who's Tony Devonshire?'
'The manager!'
'Yeah, well ...'
'Go on! Ring him up!'
'By the way, I thought I asked you to take the rubbish bag down. Will you do it now please. Why can't we have lunch in town tomorrow and then go to your bank and get it all sorted out. That money's all got to go on rent and I still owe my gynaecologist sixty. It would be a lot more sensible if I moved in here. Come on, you're rolling. Look at that. They've shrunk. I can hardly get them on. Whoops. Ooh. I don't think they go with this garter belt anyway, do you?'
I sat down on the crushed money. 'Dah,' I said. 'Come here.'
—————— The Fiasco needs a major overhaul. Selina Street wants a joint bank account. Alec Llewellyn owes me money. Barry Self owes me money. I've got to head back to America, pretty soon, and earn lots more.
I had lunch with Doris Arthur. She was very nice about me making a pass at her. In fact, she was so nice about me making a pass at her that I made a pass at her. It wasn't the drink this time. It was the woman. After the meal we discussed the outline in her hotel room. Basically I have six big scenes in my head that I know how to shoot: Doris's job is to get from one to the other as smoothly as possible. 'You know something?' she said, as she slid out from beneath me and wryly detached my hands from her thighs. 'You've given me a lot of new heart for the struggle. I thought we were winning, but there's clearly a long way to go.' Thanks to Selina, the second pass wasn't nearly as bad as the first pass. But it was still quite bad, thanks to Selina. Selina, she ... Oh yeah, and I had a few drinks with my lighting man, Kevin Skuse, and Des Blackadder, my grip. Fielding says I should put these guys on retainer immediately, ready for shooting in the autumn. But there's no work around. They seem hungry enough to me and I figure they can wait another month.
Can I? Where has the weather gone, where? Where? You get April, blossom blizzards and sudden sunshafts and swift bruised clouds. You get May and its chilly light, the sky still writhing with change. Then June, summer, rain as thin and sour as motorway wheel-squirt, and no sky at all, just no sky at all. In summer, London is an old man with bad breath. If you listen, you can hear the sob of weariness catching in his lungs. Unlovely London. Even the name holds heavy stress.
Sometimes when I walk the streets — I fight the weather. I take on those weather gods. I beat them up. I kick and punch and snarl. People stare and occasionally they laugh, but I don't mind. Tubbily I execute karate leaps, forearm smashes, aiming for the sky. I do a lot of shouting too. People think I'm mad, but I don't care. I will not take it. Here is someone who will not take the weather lying down.
For some time now Selina Street has been on at me to open a joint bank account. She hasn't got a bank account and she wants one. She hasn't got any money and she wants some. She used to have a bank account: it broke my heart to see her dreaded statements and note the pitiable sums she dealt in—£2.43, £1.71, £5. But they took her bank account away. She never had any money in it. Selina maintains that a joint bank account is essential to her dignity and self-respect. I have been disputing this, arguing that her dignity and self-respect can get on perfectly well under the present system, with its merit awards and incentive schemes. Now, the way I see it, girls with no money have two ways of asserting themselves: they can either start fights all the time, or they can simply be unhappy at you until you surrender. (They can't leave: they haven't got the dough.) Selina is not a fighter, maybe because I'm a hitter — or used to be (she doesn't know I've reformed, and I hope she never finds out). And she hasn't the patience to be unhappy at me. That would be a long-term project. So Selina has found a third way ... For a week she used no make-up, wore dumpling tights and porridgy knickers, and went to bed in face-cream, curlers and a dramatically drab nightdress. I didn't find out whether sex was actually