‘What do they say?’ said Billie, in the kitchen, during a play-date. Her friend had just produced a pair of badges; and the badges said Just Say No.
‘They say Just Say No.’
‘Just Say No to what?’
‘They don’t say. They just say Just Say No.’
Russia had started just saying no. It worked — but only for half an hour. He had started following her around the house.
When she submitted, she often felt, as he shifted her body about, as he arranged it on the bottom sheet, that he had taken on the role of her personal trainer; at other times he was like a good trencherman settling down to the systematic completion of an enormous meal. And when, after an hour or so of that, he seemed quite certain to conclude, he would suddenly go as static and abstract as a stick insect; and then he’d resume, like someone doggedly trying to shoulder his way through a locked door. Russia remembered a phrase Xan had once used anecdotally: ‘he gave her a right seeing-to’. Yes: that was what she was being given. The only time she ever considered herself aroused was when he deployed maximum animal force and she could say she was being ravished and it wasn’t her fault. But this thought more or less instantly produced a counterthought, not quite political or even intellectual, but trained up: something like — did I take two degrees and study history so I could get raped in a cave? At first she had faked orgasms. Then she started faking migraines. And now the migraines were real.
‘Can’t we go to a hotel this afternoon’, he kept asking, ‘— just for a couple of hours?’
She laughingly declined: work, children. When this response had at last proved itself incapable of changing the subject, Russia tried saying something weird. It was a thought she had had; Xan’s return had proved to be far from rejuvenating. She said,
‘Hotel bedrooms are all right. But I don’t like hotel bathrooms. I don’t like the mirrors in the bathrooms.’
Before changing the subject Xan said, ‘… But we needn’t go in the bathroom.’
She had of course talked to Tilda Quant, among others. There was a name for it: Post-Traumatic Satyriasis. It had to do with the hypothalamus and the release of testosterone. Tilda said there was a drug you could give him (or put in his coffee): cyproterone acetate. The trademark was Androcur.
One afternoon he was breathing over her shoulder while she sat at her desk.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘E-mails.’
‘But what’s this? And this?’
‘Pornography,’ she said.
Without another word he sloped off to his basement flat across the road — and sloped back again, two hours later, smelling of public swimming-pools and shorted electricity … But he still loomed up on her, later, five seconds after lights-out.
And the worst thing was that all this wasn’t the worst thing. Not any more.
Xan wanted to go to bed with his wife all the time for two good reasons: she was his ideal, and she was there. But he wanted to go to bed with all other women all the time too. If he could persuade Russia to stop working and farm out the children and spend her spare time coating herself in unguents and underwear: this would have contained it. But Russia wasn’t going to do that … When, fumblingly, feeling like it in a game of blindman’s-bluff, he groped his way into the thick detail of the city and reached the casbah — the souk, the chowk — of Britannia Junction, he seldom saw a woman of any age whose bathwater he would have declined to drink. And they wanted him too, he realised. With subtle salacity they sent signals to him, with their mouths, their eyelashes, their tongues. They dressed for him, they even mortified their flesh for him — those nuts and bolts in their heads were cuneiform, telling him what to expect, when the time came. But the time wouldn’t come, because he couldn’t be sure (and this was a massive consideration) that these women, many of them young and strong, wouldn’t hurt him. And he could be sure that Russia wouldn’t hurt him.
Sometimes an itch (say in the septum of the upper lip) announces itself as far more baldly intolerable than any pain — perhaps because there is the power to quell it, in an instant, with the swipe of a finger. But Xan couldn’t do that. His heart itched, his soul itched. It felt connected to the need for vengeance. Vengeance was the relief of unbearable humiliation. And so at night, when he invaded Russia, that’s what he was doing: seeking relief from it. More distantly, he felt that some historic wrong had at last found redress, as if his god, so inexplicably crippled, was once again more powerful than the god of his enemies.
Climax.
Russia’s day was assuming certain proportions. Awake all night anyway with Sophie (this now brought its comforts: Xan stood on the stairs for hours, waiting), she rose at six-thirty and breakfasted with the girls, at which stage she noted the first rumours of her menstrual cramps. Next, she went into college, and finished, corrected and then delivered her lecture. At three in the afternoon she would fly from Gatwick to Munich where she would sight-translate the same lecture into German at a conference on ‘Geli Raubal and Eva Braun’. The only possible return flight got her into Manchester with a good chance of making the last express to London. She hoped to be home by about half past twelve.
Late in the afternoon of the same day her husband was struck by a thought. He realised that he owed himself two drinks: two drinks, four cigarettes (and half an hour of writhing reminiscence — if, that is, he could manage reminiscence). ‘I never did have those Dickheads,’ he said out loud. ‘I was going to toast the boys but then …’ And this was an important moment for him: a new memory, and one that took him close to the epicentre. It pushed him into attempting something he had long postponed: a reenactment of October 29 … He watched Imaculada bathe the girls. At six o’clock he put on his overcoat. ‘I’m off out, me,’ he said, and opened the front door. It was darker now, darker in the year, with the sun pitching a lower ball across the sky. The sky is falling, thought Xan Meo. Where’s the king? Where’s the fox?
He approached the main road: to his right, the garden (pramlike Primrose Hill), to his left — left field, and the city … So, the rink of Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the black gallows of the traffic lights. At this time of day you saw guys in suits heading home with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a plastic bag containing provisions for one. Will this be me, myself? he thought. It wasn’t only the women: he was looking at the men differently too, weighing them, grading them — fearing them. On the phone, with Pearl, he had felt as breakable as a lightbulb when she told him that her older brother, the enormous Angus, was thirsting for a rematch. And now when he saw them (and they’re always there), the male figures in the street who disclosed the preparedness for violence (for continuation by other means), he knew he could find no answer to it; and he would have to find an answer, if there was to be vengeance … He bought his cigarettes at BestCost. Even the striplights seemed to be trying to hurt his head.
Xan glanced round the door of the High Street bookshop, and ascertained that Lucozade was no longer on the table marked Our Staff Recommends. He turned up Delancey Street and passed the café where he no longer played rhythm guitar every second Wednesday night. Then left down Mornington Crescent, under the busy trees, and a sinus whistle from the points and wires above the railtracks. ‘Harrison! Move your …’ Sometimes an aeroplane can sound a note of warning. There were four of them in the sky, but far beyond earshot. Their contrails left chalkmarks on the firmament. They are chalking us up for something, measuring us up for something … A thick and shaggy brown cloud had spread itself over the streetlamps, resembling the pelt of a bear or an ape, but with a punk colour in it (perhaps the result of chemical confusion), like the khaki of an old Elastoplast.