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By Root 671 0

Now this I didn't need... Money, of course. The actor was out for seventy-five big ones. Cocaine debts, he said — though he'd kicked it long ago. A dear friend (oh so very dear) had run out on him. His mother needed an operation. He needed an operation. And on it went. I suppose, in theory, I've had worse times, but not many, and not much worse. Jesus, am I ever as bad as this? Do I ever show such concerted and repetitive frailty? He sank four cocktails. He instigated a meaningless rumble with the maître d'. A waiter bounced back by handing him a molten soup-plate. Meadowbrook upended the whole fiery mess into his lap and let out a scream of such inhuman power that the restaurant cat (a sleepy, sloth-flattened Persian) kamikazeed through a glass screen into the startled shards of the lobby. Then he went to the John for twenty minutes and squelched back clicking and ticking like a geiger-counter. At this point I noticed that he had only one nostril. Abuse has a habit of smacking you in the nose like that, for all to see. Back home there's a guy who works in my nearest off-licence: he's got a conk like a haemorrhaged strawberry. I avoid him. I go to the next off-licence along, where the guy's nose is still okay ... Now Meadowbrook started making with the Shakespeare. To be or not to be. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Never never never never never. In despair, and despite the zags and zigs, the lagjag, the alphabet chowder of my own alcothon, I hit the scotch. Fielding returned. Semaphoring his credit card, Meadowbrook made a big thing of catching the tab. 'And lose that soup!' he warned. The card was borne back on a silver tray. It was snipped into four pieces.

'I'm dying here,' said Meadowbrook.

'No rating,' grinned the waiter.

'Jesus, let's go.'

That was me. I stood up.

So did Fielding. 'You're out, Chris,' he said, and drew two fifties from his golden clip.

——————

There is a sense, as you sit in your cab and tunnel through the grooves and traps, there is a sharper sense (there must be) of the smallness of human concerns — in New York, where you always feel the height and weight of the tall agencies. Control, purpose, meaning, they're all up there. They're not down here. God has taken columned New York between the knuckles of his right hand — and tugged. That must make the ground feel lower. I am in the cab, going somewhere, directing things with money. I have more say than the people I look out on, nomads, tide-people. They have no say. Twenty-Third Street, and its running dogs.

I now know for certain that Selina Street isn't fucking Alec Llewellyn, or not for the time being anyway. The more I think about it, the more I persuade myself that I've misjudged little Selina. She's faithful to me, that Selina. True, she behaves like someone who is unfaithful to me all the time. She behaves like someone who is hyperunfaithful. But she behaves like that because she knows I like it. (Why do I like it? I do, clearly, don't I. Then why don't I like it?) Selina, she just does it to please me. If she were really being unfaithful, she wouldn't behave like that, now would she. She would behave like someone who wasn't being unfaithful, and nobody could accuse her of behaving like that. How very cheering.

Hell, it's all good news.

'Yeah?' I'd said warily, expecting Lorne or Meadowbrook or Frank the Phone.

'John? Ella Llewellyn here. I've rung you because there's something I think you ought to know. Bad news, I'm afraid.'

Oh, come on, Ella, no need to take that tone with me. I fucked you once — on the stairs, remember? — when Alec blacked out in the kitchen that time. 'Hi, Ella. Okay, tell me,' I said, and I stiffened myself for the worst.

'Alec's in prison. Brixton, on remand. He had it coming. He just wanted me to tell you.'

Bad news? Bad? No, these are excellent tidings in their own right. Well before Selina's sly face had a chance to invade my mind screen, I felt a gulp of innocent, bright-eyed pleasure that my best and oldest pal was in such serious trouble. Mm, it's so nice when one of your peers goes down. You know