There was Hollywood, and he entered.
* * *
He said to the kid (a different kid), ‘Uh, I’ll have a … What happened to the Dickheads?’
‘New menu.’
‘Okay. I’ll have a Shithead. No: two Shitheads. What’s the difference between a Dickhead and a Shithead anyway?’
‘Benedictine. In the Dickhead.’
‘Well sling some Benedictine in the Shithead. Because what I really want is a Dickhead. Or two Dickheads.’
‘Or you could have a Dickhead and a Shithead.’
‘Well. Now we’ve come this far with the Dickheads …’
The paved terrace was once again deserted; more than deserted — disused. No dead duck upended in the turbid canal, no firefighting sunset. And where was his bird (‘Is that your “bird”?’), his cockney sparrow? … Six weeks had passed, and, according to the books, he was supposed to be emerging from a period of false consciousness — though Incredulity, he thought, was a better word for it than Denial. He was currently scheduled to experience a deepening of melancholy as he grasped the true dimensions of his impoverishment. But Xan had considered himself pauperised right from the start; and he feared further demotion. What was stopping his family from abandoning him? Didn’t they now see, as he now saw, the unsuspected weakness of all prohibitions? And why was he bullying Russia, why was he torturing her with the sex weapon? To bind her to him, so she had to stay — or just to get another one in, before she left? Or to punish himself, himself, and bring about his own ejection? The groan he suddenly uttered rose steadily in pitch, and a passerby, pausing to listen, might have thought that Xan Meo was about to throw up.
Minutes passed. His present condition, he realised, physiologically reminded him of his sister’s death — and its attack on his own life-force. At the time (for about a year) he had thought: We’ll never be immortal. Because it’s the deaths of others that kill us … Suddenly he felt a vibration of troubled air on the back of his neck. There followed a moment of craven brittleness, then he turned … It was she, it was she (he was now sure it was she): the paparazza sparrow, with her chattering shutters. And as the bird bobbed and fussed about him, he said out loud,
‘What happened, darling? You saw it. What happened?’
Unlike the grimly assimilated pigeons (for whom flight was simply a last resort), the paparazza remained a creature of the air, she remained haughtily other. Before she twittered off she fixed him for an instant with the neutral madness of her eyes. Xan felt a flow, or a change of temperature, in his mind. And he remembered: ‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy. You went and named him. In black and white.’ In black and white …
‘Bless you,’ he said.
This was fresh information. It meant that he had named his enemy in something he had written. And so, with fluttering fingers, he wrote that down too, in the notebook they’d told him to keep about the details of his day: visits to the bathroom, food eaten, words exchanged with Billie, the whereabouts of his keys.
The significant name was in Lucozade.
He now switched to Shitheads, and for a little while he felt very happy and proud.
With its moodswings, its motor-failures (its slurrings and staggerings), its weepiness, its vaulting lechery, its encouragement of words and actions that sowed the seeds of regret, Xan’s posttraumatic condition reminded him of something: drunkenness. So after a few more drinks in Hollywood it occurred to him, rather drunkenly perhaps, that drunkenness, in his new world, might give him a clear head. Intending to explore the hypothesis, he lit out for the savage pubs of Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road.
‘Now in London it’s the congestion, the congestion,’ said the slender young Irishman crushed up against the bar in the Turk’s Head. ‘Everywhere. Now back home: go a mile out of Dublin and you won’t see a sinner all day.’
Wedging his whole forearm across his breast, Xan bent his head, and lowered his underjaw, to gain access to his third quart of London Pride. We all sin. What else do we all do? There were many sinners in the Turk’s Head, many breathers, thinkers, dreamers. Not everyone can walk or talk or hear or see, but we are all of us drinkers, micturaters. Eaters, excreters, everywhere. Xan got another quart of Pride off the feeder behind the wooden slab.
He fell in with a group of fuckers round the pool-table. And it was good. The female gobblers didn’t stir him, and the male platers didn’t scare him. There was fellow feeling: they were all in this together. Some shitters left — but new pissers took their place. Every farter bought a drink. This went on for a long time. Then he bade farewell to the assembled wankers, and moved on.
Later, as he stood in the throbbing toilet of a jazz bar in Camden Road, Xan looked at his watch and was most surprised to see that it was two o’clock in the morning. But this did not undermine the spirit of squinting concentration he had entered into as he reloosened his trousers. His immediate objective? Having just consumed a very great deal of dun-coloured tapwater, Xan’s immediate objective was to find out whether he was man enough to piss his own shit off the back of the porcelain bowl. He wasn’t quite man enough to do that, but then this was very butch shit, this shit: mutton vindaloo, pork kebab, cajun pizza, jalapeñas relleñas. Coming out of his stall, and thinking with some focus about getting home — his luck turned. There was a machine on the wall which, on the insertion of a pound coin, dispensed a generous handful of rudimentary cologne: the very thing to kill the smell of pub. He had lots of pound coins and, why, he fairly soused himself in the sugary fragrance. His cigarettes had run out long ago but that didn’t matter because he’d bought lots of cheap cigars.
After a long search he found the exit and the fresh air. Pausing only to leave a stack of sick in the gutter (and chewing all the more heartily on the soaked butt of his last perfecto), Xan went home with a clear plan (he’d just fling on the light and spin round): the detailed exaction of his connubial rights.
And all this wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing had to do with Billie.
2. Storm in a teacup
‘Oh, before I go, sir. I was talking earlier today to some friends in Madrid. Do you remember a scandal of uh, five years ago or so, sir, involving King Bartolomé?’
‘Would you very kindly remind me, Bugger.’
‘Certainly, sir. There was in existence a video-recording, widely circulated at the time, of the King having some kind of session with the wife of the local polo pro.’
‘The local what? … Oh. Oh. I thought you were talking in Spanish. Well?’
‘There was a gagging order which the press pretty much obeyed, and the whole thing was forgotten in a year.’
‘A year? Is this meant to cheer me up, Bugger? Besides, Tolo’s not a real … He keeps up no kind of style at all. That business was just another … another suburban scandal.’