She did something with her face then, a simultaneous smile-snort that lasted a third of a second. Then she put her head on one side like a perplexed kitten. ‘Let me just check something with you,’ she said. ‘Are you actually aware that you’re six hours late?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry.
‘Well perhaps, since you’re six hours late, and are dreadfully sorry, you wouldn’t mind fucking off?’ she said.
For a moment I held my tongue – which was difficult, given that I’d only seconds ago discovered the fascinating imprecisions entailed in letting it loose. (So quaint, too, that humble servitude paid by the organs of speech to the organ of cognition, all those cerebral constrictions eased by labials and glides, palatals and stops, the concerted efforts of wet little bits and pieces.) Then I very slowly and with excessive expansiveness installed myself in her one battered red leather armchair. ‘Chimera Films have commissioned me to adapt my novel, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, for the screen,’ I said, quietly. (To be fair to Gunn, he’s thought of this himself, some bogus incentive to keep her boudoir friendly. What he’s never come up with, what’s stopped him going through with the yarn, is the explanation necessary for the day of reckoning when Violet – money-shot, fisted, assbanged, lezzed-up, whatever carnal prices he would have tagged on to the starring role – discovered that there was no starring role, no supporting role, no bit part, no walk-on, no fucking movie.)
Violet stared. Then switched her weight from her left leg to her right. Then said, ‘What?’
‘Martin Mailer at Chimera Films has optioned Bodies for the screen and has asked me to write the screenplay.’ I fished out a Silk Cut and ignited it with a languidly struck Swan Vesta. The scent of sulphur reminded me of . . . ahhh.
‘You’re . . . Declan you’re having me on. Tell me you’re having me on.’
‘Chimera Films is a UK unit owned by Nexus,’ I said. ‘They trawl novels here looking for stuff. You know, seventy per cent of all films made are adapted from novels or short stories. Nexus, as you know, isn’t a UK unit.’
‘Nexus as in . . . Nexus?’ Violet asked.
‘As in Hollywood Nexus,’ I said.
‘Oh my God, Declan. Oh my fucking God.’
I didn’t bother trying to conceal my grin. Violet thought I was grinning with glee – and so I was – but only at my own chutzpah. At the last, the very last moment, I’d resisted christening my phantom optioner Julian Amis. ‘Martin Mailer was the guy behind Top Lolly, Bottom Dollar.’
‘Oh my fucking God,’ Violet said.
‘I’m having casting consultation written into the contract.’
‘You are not.’
‘I am.’
‘You are not.’
‘I am. Oh yes. I am.’
Violet thinks of herself as stunning. She is stunning, too, in her self-absorption verging on autism. She’s got a retroussé nose and expressive eyes and breasts like fresh little apples. There are freckles she’d be better off without, an arse on the low side, reddish heels and elbows, but on the whole you’d definitely say she was attractive. Not that it doesn’t come at a price. To say she’s high-maintenance would be to murder her with understatement. She gets headaches, back aches, leg aches, eye aches, indigestion, colic, near-perpetual cystitis and PMT that doesn’t hold with all that old-fashioned nonsense about only showing up just before menstruation. If you’re her boyfriend, really quite a lot of things get on her nerves. Chiefly, it seems, if you’re her boyfriend, being with you gets on her nerves. Being Violet’s boyfriend means spending quite a lot of your time listening to Violet itemizing (while you rub her shoulders, massage her feet, run her a Radox bath or prepare her a hot water bottle) the many ways in which you get on her nerves.
Like all women who think they’re actresses, Violet’s ferociously untidy. The West Hampstead studio flat looks like the Nazgul have just thundered through it – an appearance I had considerable time to note, waiting firstly for Violet to finish her pre-coital bathroom routine, and secondly, fruitlessly (tossing and turning in the bed’s swamp) for the arrival of an erection.
‘Fucking hell,’ Violet said, tactfully, backing away from me as if at the discovery of a noxious smell. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Oh well go on, get your chuckles over with now if you must. Yes. Hilarious, isn’t it. Let’s all have a jolly good wheeze.
‘Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can’t . . . I mean what is it?’
‘Perhaps I don’t fancy you any more,’ I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a foetal curl.
‘Oh come here,’ I said, like a successfully soft-soaped uncle – and she did, too (rifling through her memory files, wishing she hadn’t lied to Gunn about having read his novel, wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers, hers!) – but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell you. Gunn’s penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best work to date.
‘Never mind, honey,’ she said, huskily. ‘It’s no big deal. It happens. You’re probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot last night?’
I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a slight American accent.
Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn’t substantially. I’ve noticed blips, the odd blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide. On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but increasingly frequent intervals. You’re not an actress. You don’t have any talent. You’ve knobbled your own auditions because you know you’re not up to it in the end. You’re a vain and talentless fraud.
It’s not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even my own Little Voice – did I mention that? – even my own Little Voice comes from a place I’m not sure I own. I have of late, it generally begins . . . I don’t quite ignore it.
Declan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one I can’t resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse toothache.
I don’t much like the look of him, if you want the truth. If I was considering staying – staying for good, I mean – I’d be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus meum. Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin’s beige, greasy and porous. The hairline’s not exactly struggling to conceal its upcoming recession, and the pot belly (too much booze, too much fat, zero exercise – the corporeal side of the basic adult human story) doesn’t help at all. The flesh on the nose is thickening and the slightest dropping of the head reveals a putative double chin. He looks, all in all, like an under-the-weather chimp. I doubt very much he’s washed his ears since childhood. At seventeen, eighteen, he might have taken you in with his Navajo granddad story (supported by the usual nonsense: long hair, silver and turquoise jewellery, beads); you see him at thirty-five and look for a much less glamorous explanation: spic-mix, wog-cocktail, decaf wop. Truth is: Irish Roman Catholic mum boozily knocked up in a moment of weakness (I thank you) by a saucy Sikh from Sacramento at a friend’s birthday party in Manchester. Ships in the night, bun in the oven, he’s gone, she’s Catholic: enter beige Gunn, fatherless and feeble at five pounds, six ounces. She brings him up on her own. He loves her and hates himself for blighting her young life. Grows up with bog-standard Virgin-Whore dichotomy as far as women go (with which I’m now lumbered, thank you very much); rabid Oedipus complex replaced during teen years by terrifying phase of homoerotic fantasies (I’ll find a use for them before I’m done, you watch), before sexual imagination stabilizes around mild heterosexual sado-masochism in early twenties, concomitant with discovery of some effeminacy of body, a loathing for manual labour, a penchant for the arts and a much mauled but still virulent belief in the Old Fellah and yours truly.