That didn’t sound too good either.
Which left us with possibility number three.
Now why would a woman like Sarah Woolf want to get together with a man like Russell P Barnes? Why would she walk with him, laugh with him, make the beast with four buttocks with him? If that’s actually what she was doing, and there wasn’t much doubt in my mind about it.
All right, he was handsome. He was fit. He was intelligent, in a stupid sort of a way. He had power. He dressed well. But apart from all that, what was in it for her? I mean, for Christ’s sake, he was old enough to be a corrupt representative of her government.
I deliberated on the sexual charms of Russell P Barnes as I trudged back to the hotel. Dawn was definitely pulling into the station by now, and the snow had begun to throb with an electric, new-fallen whiteness. It climbed the inside of my trousers, and clung, squeakily, to the soles of my boots, and the bit just in front seemed to say ‘don’t walk on me, please don’t walk… oh.’
Russell arsing Barnes.
I got back to the hotel and made for my room as quietly as I could. I unlocked the door, slipped inside and then, immediately, stopped: froze, with my windcheater half off. After the journey through the snow, with nothing but alpine air moving around my system, I was tuned to pick up all the nuances of indoor smells - the stale beer from the bar, the shampoo in the carpet, the chlorine from the basement swimming pool, the beachy sun-cream smell from just about everywhere - and now this new smell. A smell of something that really shouldn’t have been in the room.
It shouldn’t have been there because I was only paying for a single, and Swiss hotels are notoriously strict about this kind of thing.
Latifawas stretched out on my bed, asleep, the top sheet coiled around her naked body like a Rubens pastiche. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’
She was sitting up now, the sheet tight round her chin, while I sat on the end of the bed and pulled off my boots. ‘For a walk,’ I said.
‘For a walk where?’ snapped Latifa, still crumpled with sleep, and angry with me for seeing her that way. ‘It’s fucking snow. Where do you walk in fucking snow? What have you been doing?’
I yanked off the last boot and slowly turned to look at her. ‘I shot a man today, Latifa.’ Except I was Ricky to her, so I pronounced it Laddifa. ‘I pulled the trigger and shot a man down.’ I turned away and stared at the floor, the soldier-poet, sickened by the ugliness of battle.
I felt the sheet relax under me. Slightly. She watched me for a while.
‘You walked all night?’
I sighed. ‘I walked. I sat. I thought. You know, a human life…’
Ricky, as I’d painted him, was a man not wholly at ease with the business of talking, so this answer took some time to get out. We let a human life hang in the air for a while.
‘A lot of people die, Rick,’ said Latifa. ‘There is death everywhere. Murder everywhere.’ The sheet relaxed a little more, and I saw her hand move gently to the side of the bed, next to mine.
Why was it that I kept on hearing this argument wherever I went? Everybody’s doing it, so you’d be a square not to join in and help the whole business along. I suddenly wanted to slap her, and tell her who I was, and what I really thought; that killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco’s fucking ego, which was already large enough to house the world’s poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.
Fortunately, I am the consummate professional, so I just nodded and hung my head, and sighed some more, and watched her hand creep nearer and nearer to mine.
‘It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there was no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.’
We’re not a great deal with it, I thought, and started to pull off my shirt.
Things were changing, you see. In my head.
It was the photographs that had finally done it - had made me realise that I had been bouncing around inside other people’s arguments for so long that I’d reached the point of not caring. I didn’t care about Murdah and his helicopters; I didn’t care about Sarah Woolf and Barnes; I didn’t care about O’Neal and Solomon, or Francisco and The Sword Of fucking Justice. I didn’t care who won the argument, or who won the war.
I particularly didn’t care about myself.
Latifa’sfingers brushed against the back of my hand. When it comes to sex, it seems to me, men really are caught between a rock and a soft, limp, apologetic place.
The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. One is a runabout, suitable for shopping, quick journeys about town, and extremely easy parking; the other is an estate, designed for long distances, with heavy loads - altogether larger, more complex, and more difficult to maintain. You wouldn’t buy a Fiat Panda to move antiques fromBristol toNorwich, and you wouldn’t buy a Volvo for any other reason. It’s not that one is better than the other. They’re just different, that’s all.
This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said.
He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.
If a man gives himself up to the sexual moment, then, well, that’s all it is. A moment. A spasm. An event without duration. If, on the other hand, he holds back, by trying to remember as many names as he can from the Dulux colour chart, or whatever happens to be his chosen method of deferment, then he’s accused of being coldly technical. Either way, if you’re a heterosexual man, emerging from a modern sexual encounter with any kind of credit is a fiendishly difficult thing to do.
Yes, of course, credit is not the point of the exercise. But then again, it’s easy to say that when you’ve got some. Credit,
I mean. And men just don’t get any these days. In the sexual arena, men are judged by female standards. You may hiss and tut and draw in your breath as sharply as you like, but it’s true. (Yes, obviously, men judge women in other spheres - patronise them, tyrannise them, exclude them, oppress them, make them utterly miserable - but in matters of a writhing nature, the mark on the bench was put down by women. It is for the Fiat Panda to try and be like the Volvo, not the other way round.) You just don’t hear men criticising women for taking fifteen minutes to reach a climax; and if you do, it’s not with any implied accusation of weakness, or arrogance, or self-centredness. Men, generally, just hang their heads and say yes, that’s the way her body is, that’s what she needed from me, and I couldn’t deliver it. I’m crap and I’ll leave at once, as soon as I can find my other sock.
Which, to be honest, is unfair, bordering on the ridiculous. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to call a Fiat Panda a crap car, just because you can’t fit a wardrobe in the back. It might be crap for all sorts of other reasons - it breaks down, or it uses a lot of oil, or it’s lime-green with the word ‘turbo’ written pathetically across the back window - but it’s not crap because of the one characteristic that it was specifically designed to have: smallness. Neither is a Volvo a crap car, simply because it won’t squeeze past the barrier in the Safeways car-park and allow you to get out without paying.