Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [50]
'Yeah, well what do you do?' I was saying. 'Use the blow-dry after the towels, or what?'
I was talking to this chick about her hair and the trouble she had with it. She was asking for trouble, mind you. Flattened by its own weight, its prisms as lively as oil stains or car blood, her solid black rug coursed down the length of her back. When she stood and turned to refreshen my drink, the bristly hem almost covered her double-fisted backside. Man, I wish I had an American rug, instead of this old dishtowel I live my life under... The lady had cordially assured me at the outset that I was free 'to party with anybody I liked the look of (this, except for the half-ounce bikini she wore, being her only hint that what we were sitting in wasn't a beauty parlour or seminar room but actually a brothel. I didn't let on either). I wondered then and I wondered now whether anybody included her. She'd sat on my lap in a friendly way, true, but that was just so I could get a better fix on her rug. Maybe she was simply a bargirl, a cashier, an all-purpose heft-dispenser . . . and maybe I had already got to know her a little too well. By my side nestled a water-proof, see-through plastic bag, containing my wallet: the money, the necessary. I had been obliged to take a blistering shower in a back room jovially serviced by two fat negroes in Hawaii shirts and frazzled straw hats. So I sat there, deloused, in the Happy Isles. Spurred by all this travel and transfer, the disease I have called tinnitus tunnelled deep and desperate into the corners of my head. Both ears were doing their jet imitation, with whistle and whine and the hungry rumble of underfloor fire. I held my new drink up to my forehead, as if to soothe my pulsing, my needing brow — plastic glass, plastic ice, an airplane drink. Yeah, I call this living good.
'The second wash,' I persisted, 'can be a big mistake. It expands the follicles and then the cleaning agents dry and harden.'
'Really?' said the girl. 'Is that a fact.'
'Yup,' I said. Hair is one of the things I do know something about. I may not know much about anatomy, but I am rug-smart. It's all those stylists, wardrobe girls and make-up technicians I've hung out with, plus my own pricey psychodramas on the topic. I nodded and drank my drink. I looked around. Where were the other candidates? Anyway, I assumed that this unit here in the white bikini was relishing the banter and the rug-wisdom. Chatting with me was presumably a lot more fun than going to bed with me for money — though less profitable, it had to be said. I too was pretty pleased by the way things were going. I was pleased to be sitting here with a strong drink, pleased that I wasn't staked out on the basement floor, playing the romantic lead in a snuff movie. No, it was all very civilized, very civilized indeed.
Now her head dipped as she pried at the fissure of a half-split nail. With that backdrop of hair the small round shoulders gained in defencelessness and pallor— but come on, the Isles was no place for local contrasts. The girl, the lean teenager with W-shaped folds in the vent of her shut armpits, she would suit me right down to the ground. Being the being I am, though, and no other (not yet anyway), I wanted full brothel privileges, the old male deal of dough and careless choice.
'Where are your friends?' I said.
She shrugged, and surveyed the empty bower. Where were mine? Then she raised her face to me and said with sad seriousness, 'Hey. What's your name.'
'I'm Martin,' I said at once... I hate my name. I mean, you have a kid, a little baby boy, and the best you can do with it is to name it John? I'm called John Self. But who isn't?
'And what's yours?'
'They call me Moby. You married?'
'No. I guess I'm not the