Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [77]
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And now I am one of the unemployed. What do we do all day? We sit on stoops and pause in loose knots on the stained pavements. The pavements are like threadless carpets after some atrocious route of flesh-frazzled food and emetic drink: last night the weather gods all drowned their sorrows, and then threw up from thirty thousand feet. We sit flummoxed in the parks, among low-caste flowers. Whew (we think), this life is slow. I came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances, when it was all there waiting. Now they seep out of school —to what? To nothing, to fuck-all. The young (you can see it in their faces), the stegosaurus-rugged no-hopers, the parrot-crested blankies — they've come up with an appropriate response to this, which is: nothing. Which is nothing, which is fuck-all. The dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground. Riots are their rumpus-room, sombre London their jungle-gym. Life is hoarded elsewhere by others. Money is so near you can almost touch it, but it is all on the other side — you can only press your face up against the glass. In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out. You can't drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There's nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money. You just cannot hide out from money any more. And so sometimes, when the nights are hot, they smash and grab.
Meanwhile, there are some pretty primitive creatures driving around with money in their Torpedoes and Boomerangs, or sitting down with money at the Mahatma or the Assisi, or just standing there with money, in the shops, in the pubs, in the streets. They are all shapes and colours, innocent beneficiaries of the global joke which money keeps cracking. They don't do anything: it's their currencies that do things. Last year the pubs were full of incredulously spendthrift Irishmen: they didn't have money in their pockets any longer— they had Euromoney, which is much more powerful stuff. There's some bundle in the Middle East, and a new squad of fiscal space invaders starts plundering the West. Every time the quid gets gang-banged on the international exchange, all the Arab chicks get a new fur coat. There are white moneymen, too, English, native. They must be criminals, with their wads, the crap they talk, their cruel, roasted faces. I am one. I am one of them, white or at least sky-grey, with pub rug, and ashen arm on the Fiasco doorjamb, unsmiling at the traffic light, fat-brained with abuse—but holding money. I have money but I can't control it: Fielding keeps supplying me with more. Money, I think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can't control it. Life gets poor-mouthed all the time, yet you seldom hear an unkind word about money. Money, now this has to be some good shit.
Ever since I gave up my job and started waiting for the film to happen, I too have felt like a gap in between things. So how can you expect someone like me to deal with the day? I have no ideas on this one. Tell me, please. Money doesn't tell me. I lie clueless in the cot until — until when? How is it that the experience will ever end? Up, get out, do it now — now, now. Now! I drift, dither, grope, fumble ... and there I am at last, half-dressed in the kitchen with cigarettes and coffee-filters. Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them. I look through the window—the streets, the sky the colour of wet sugar—and I am simply stumped by this, dumbfounded, nonplussed. The windows themselves, they make a little more sense. They are doubleglazed with dirt. The glass looks like the Fiasco windscreen after a thousand-mile drive, stained with the blackened blood of insects nine hundred miles ago, the dottings of soot, the fingerprints of filthy phantoms. Even dirt has its patterns and seeks its forms. .. When I quit my job it felt like the