'Ah suppose you're gettin randy again?' Betty looked at me disapprovingly. I was surprised.
'How did you guess?'
'Two fags.' Betty put the saucer/ashtray down on the bare wooden floor and lay down, turning to me. 'You alwiz want it again aftir two fags.'
I laughed, but uncertainly. Am I really so predictable? Betty put out one hand to me, rolled on her back.
'Men,' she said, through a sigh. I kissed her.
Her mouth tasted of smoke, her hair smelled of cheap perfume. A curiously comforting combination.
'There's still a funny smell in here,' she said, unrolling a Durex down my dick.
'You get to like it eventually,' I told her.
She wrinkled her nose up, lay back again. 'You're weird,' she said. Then: 'Whit's so funny?'
EIGHT
There is no such thing as too much money. Anybody who has more money than they know what to do with has no imagination. You can always find new things to spend money on; houses, estates, cars, aircraft, boats, clothes, expensive paintings...
Most really rich people usually find thoroughly appropriate ways of getting rid of some of their funds; they take up ocean-going yacht racing, they collect a string of racehorses, they buy newspapers and television stations or car companies, they fund prizes and scholarships or give their money and their names to hospital wings or new bits of art galleries. Purchasing a chain of hotels is a popular option; gives you places to stay all over the world, and you don't lose any time buying the hotel when you want to sack the manager.
God almighty, offer me any sum of money from one pound to total control of the entire world economy and I could tell you just what I'd do with it, without even having to think very much.
But only in an advisory capacity. Only theoretically. Don't expect me actually to do the things I'd say I'd do. I know now that, regardless of how much money I have, I'll stay much as I am. I had my fill of trying to be somebody else, of fulfilling my own fantasies and making them up for other people; tried that, been there.
Mine turned bad on me, mine turned lethal, eventually.
But I did my bit. I played my part in the great commercial dance; I accepted all that money and I spent it on all sorts of daft, stupid, useless, wasteful things, and quite a lot of drugs too. I had my flash car (even if I couldn't drive it) and I had my big house and my estate in the Highlands.
The house was made up of equal parts of draughts and damp, and the estate was ten thousand acres of bog and scrappy heather. The only things I left planted there were wellington boots, sucked off by the clinging peat. There were deer on those there hills and fish in them there burns, but I didn't want to kill any of them, which made the whole enterprise a bit of a waste of time. I sold it eventually, to people who drained the ground and planted trees. I made on the deal, of course. I bought my ma a house in Kilbarchan, and I put up half the money for the Community Rehearsal and Recording Suite we donated to Paisley Council.
I even owned an island for a while; an inner Hebridean island I picked up ridiculously cheap at an auction in London. I had all sorts of wonderful plans for it, but the crofters resented me even though I meant well, and when I thought about it I guessed I'd have felt the same way if I'd been one of them; who did this lowlander, this Glesga Keelie, this youth of a 'pop' star think he was? Why, I didn't even have the Gaelic (I was going to learn the goddamn language, but I never got... oh never mind).
They'd seen too many grand schemes come to nothing, too many promises disappear into the mists, and too many owners spend all their time somewhere else more comfortable and sunny. They were a surly and unfriendly bunch, but they had a point; I sold the island to them as soon as my accountants had worked out a way of writing it off against tax. Lost a bit on that one, but you can't win them all.
So I've done all that, and I got fed up with it. My dreams came true, and I discovered that once they did, they were no longer dreams, just new ways of living, with their own problems and difficulties. Maybe if I'd been working on new dreams while the old ones were coming true I could have kept going, heading for even greener hillsides, even newer pastures, but I guess I just ran out of material, or I used it all up in the songs.
That might be it. Maybe I used up all my dreams in my songs so that I had none left for myself. That would be ironic, almost tragic, because at the time I thought I had perfect control; I thought I was being clever, using my songs, using my dreams, to find out more about myself... a shame, really, that what I found out just wasn't worth the finding.
I think I hoped to find myself in my fantasies, to see the shape of who I really was in the pattern of my realised dreams, and when it all happened, and I did, I just wasn't very impressed with what I found there. It wasn't that I actively disliked myself, just that I wasn't as interesting and fine and noble a person as I'd thought I was. I used to think that all I needed was the opportunity, and I'd blossom, I'd flower, I'd spread my wings and fly... but discovered in the end that I was a weed, and that some buds just never open, and that some caterpillars were only ever worms with an identity crisis.
So I became a hermit crab instead, and look at the big shell I found! Well, I'm no shortarse. I need the headroom.
St Jute's and I are suited.
'Wes, you're not serious.'
'Hey, of course I'm serious.'
'No, I... no, not even you. You c-can't be serious. You can't mean it. Come on; it's a joke.'
'It's not a joke, man. One day everybody'll live like that. This is the future and you'd better get used to it.'
'Jesus, you are serious.'
'I already told you that.'
'You're mad.' I turned to Inez. 'Tell him he's mad.'
Inez looked up from her magazine. 'You're mad.'
'See?' I said to him. 'Even Inez agrees.'
Wes just shook his head and looked out of the car window at the passing Cornish scenery. 'It's the future, man. Might as well get used to it now.'
The Panther de Ville swept down the high-banked Cornish lanes, between the rainswept golden fields of summer. Clouds moved like bright ships, alternately battleship grey and the colour of the sun. The air was warm and a little humid outside and we had the air conditioning on. I refilled Inez' tumbler with champagne. She, Wes and I were on our way down from London to Wes' house, for that weekend's party.
The big car braked suddenly as we came round a bend and found a tractor backing a trailer into a field from the road. I tutted, shook my hand and reached for a napkin. 'Hey, Jas,' I said, 'we're not in a hurry.' Jasmine stopped the car to wait for the tractor to unblock the road. She looked round from the driver's seat and pushed her cap back, showing the shaved sides of her head. She'd rather taken to the punk look over the last month. I'd preferred it when she had long blonde hair, but I wasn't going to say anything.
'Spill your champers, did I?'
'Yeah.' I filled Wes' glass too, then my own.
'Never mind, love; carpet's champagne coloured, innit?'
'Jas, the bodywork is champagne coloured, but that doesn't mean I'm going to wash it with Moët.'
Jas looked at my full tumbler. (Flutes are impractical when you're travelling. Especially when Jas is driving.) 'Give us a glass, Dan,' she said.
'Wait till we get to the house,' I told her. She looked peeved.
'Give us some coke, then,' she suggested.
'What?' I shoured. 'Are you kidding? Last time I gave you that stuff we ended up doing a hundred and forty down the M6! Never again!'