Everyone laughed tensely.
What’s funny? thought Clint. Gentle reader. Reader, I married him. T.S. Eliot: A Reader’s Guide. Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frere!
dear clint: your remarx about your childhood struck a chord. i 2 never felt th@ i was ‘1 of the “gang” ‘. some of us seem 2 have been singled out. We r, in some sense, ‘special’. & i no th@ if i ever find some1 2 spend the rest of my days with, then he would have 2 b ‘special’ 2.
Clint had recently read a piece in a magazine which posited the emergence of a new human type: the high-IQ moron. Wised-up, affectless, and non-empathetic, high-IQ morons, according to the writer (a woman novelist), were also supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change — an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling. So Clint was relieved, in a way, to find himself flinching and smiling, smiling and flinching, at the authorial style of his newfound penpal. In the text-messaging line, and so on, he had seen the King’s English far more miserably disfigured. But never quite like this. Never, quite, in the service of mutual exploration and courtship — and with such good grammar. Clint knew about grammar. Mr and Mrs Smoker: both schoolteachers. And old hippies. Old — now dead — hippies. Dead hippies. Jesus: what happened?
Still, Clint wasn’t about to be critical. Clint? Critical when it came to birds? Deprived for so long of female influence, he felt — well, these words of hers were like a lifeline to the guy. Like a lifeline.
He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography — with its infinities, its immortalities — Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them. And the distance was getting greater all the time.
What happened? What was emanating from him, what was he giving off? He was, he thought, no uglier (and by now much richer) than the bloke you saw all over the place with his trusting female companion who was always ready to kiss his earring or stroke the nap of his fuzz or gaze into his dark glasses with a smile of roguish forgiveness.
Must be nice, he thought. Ring it up when you’re walking down the street: so everybody knows. ‘Hello, love, it’s me. I’m walking down the street. What’s for dinner?’ Romantic evening. Table set for two. Slip it a Narcopam in its coffee: take the pressure off.
Must be nice. But it never had been nice. Even when things were bowling along all friendly, he always sensed the weight, the sinkage, the falling mercury inside his chest. Because he knew full well that they were just waiting — waiting for their chance. In bed, of course, the eternal battle was to make them feel it: to transform them with your strength. And that’s what the books said women were after too, at one remove: the metamorphosis of impregnation by the strongest available male. So they were always waiting, calculating, comparing — always ready to belittle … This, at any rate, was what Clint kept telling himself (wash your hands of them; they’re all the same; and so on). But his unconscious mind suspected otherwise. He heard from his unconscious mind, sometimes. On Sunday afternoons as he lay abed licking his nasal handcuffs in the hopeless pit of his Foulness semi, he would sometimes hear it say: ‘I don’t know, mate. There’s going to be grief. I don’t know, mate. It’s all going to end in tears.’
She was like a lifeline to the guy:
my man of the moment (& i do mean moment) is of the ‘macho’ type. u no: down the gym all Sat, football on Sun morning & 10nis in the afternoon. borlNG! i like a fella who drinx beer in front of the tele — with me on his lap! in bed, while we r having 6, he moans at me 2 scream. i tell him: i’m not the kind that will per4m @ your beck & call! don’t (me with TH@ sort! i suppose he thinx th@ screaming = abandon. but i don’t WANT abandon. y o y, clint, do people use 6 2 infl8 their own gr&iosity?
Although the piece of paper he had in his hand was merely a printout of an e-mail, Clint held it to his cuffed nostrils, as if hoping for an intimation of her scent. And he had read it, oh, three or four dozen times. I’m not going to mess this one up, he thought: no way.
the trouble is i’ve never been able 2 ‘sack’ a man. 2 anger a man. i wouldn’t dare. offend a MAN? so i have 2 go on mildly displeasing him (and th@’s bad enough) till he pax his bags & moves on. how? o u no, clint — little things. i 4get 2 praise him as of10 as i used 2. i refuse 2 wipe his p off the toilet seat. i speak up 4 myself. wh@ i’m really saying is: join the q, m8, 2 the back door! clint, i’m tired of it. let me b clear: i h8 the ‘new man’ 2, so ‘caring’ in the bedroom. ‘did u finish?’ ‘was it good 4 u 2?’ yes! 7th heaven! cloud 9! y can’t people just b themselves, clint? 2 much herd instinct, 2 much falsity, 2 much pre10ce.
ps: 3 cheers 4 ‘readers’ richards’. a real tonic 4 the gentler 6: gr8 scott, there’s hope 4 us all!
‘Your messages are like a breath of fresh air,’ mused Clint as he precomposed his reply. ‘Now you’ve seen my ugly mug often enough in the Lark. I’m no looks snob — can’t afford to be! But it would be nice to put a face to your words of wisdom. And maybe a name …’ And she still hadn’t said whether she thought size mattered.
Only one thing troubled him. Market research had shown, time and time again, that the Morning Lark had no women readers. So the question remained: what sort of bird read the Lark?
He paused there, at his desk. Clint was about to begin a piece. But he paused at his desk there.
‘… Uh, is uh, is And around?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Uh, Pete.’
‘No he ain’t,’ said a much smaller voice than the one he was used to. ‘Harrison, careful, darling. They’ve got him down as missing. No, don’t do that, sweetheart — there’s a good boy. They’ve got him down as a missing person.’
Clint said he was sorry to bother. He thought: Jesus — don’t say Joseph Andrews. Then: pop round and cheer her up. Then: no. Leave all that out. Or: the proverbial’ll—
‘— Ah Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘It’s not as serious, but something else has just blown up in our faces.’
‘And what’s that, Chief?’
‘Pervs Him Right.’
‘Ah. The Walthamstow Wanker.’
‘The same. But one crisis per day, eh? A couple of things, Clint. There’s a word in your Video Review column that gave me a bit of a turn. Where are we.’
He flattened the page out on Clint’s worksurface. The strapline said Blinkie Bob’s Video Review. In the corner was a mugshot. Not Clint, but some portmanteau imaging creation: a face grotesquely wall-eyed, and bent at an angle, tongue lolling, with two hair-matted palms loosely raised.
Heaf said, ‘Now where …? Here we are. Uh, “and have your bogroll handy for when gueststar Dork Bogarde pumps his lovepiss over the heaving norks of our very own Donna Strange”. What, may I ask, is lovepiss?’
‘Semen, Chief.’
‘Oh. Oh. I thought our house style was “manjuice”. Oh. Well that’s all right then. You know, it disgusts me, sometimes, what we do here. It does. How are things progressing with Ainsley Car?’
‘Well the ice-boot’s come off. Have to wait till he’s playing again, for the visibility. But it’s looking good, isn’t it, with the new charges.’
Clint remembered that Heaf didn’t follow football. He went on, ‘They’re nicking him for match-fixing now. Said he took half a mil from a Malaysian businessman to throw it for Rangers last season. Our wankers’ll hate him for that: sacrilege, Chief. Maybe we can get Beryl done during the trial.’