Sternly Clint backed into Room 2011. ‘Wait for it,’ he whispered. ‘First the waterworks. Then boof.’
With their heads dipped and their mouths stretched in grins of suspense, the two men listened to what they had heard many times before. But only on their television sets: the shuddering, self-righteous birthsong of Donna Strange — so operatically brought to bed.
He gave it half a minute longer, then stepped up and opened the door. He looked left, he looked right.
‘You little bitch,’ he said.
Clint entered the conference room, the next day, to a standing ovation. There was nothing triumphal in it. Rather, the applause expressed a grave and considered solidarity — a sense that, though much had been achieved, much abided their care; a sense that, however uncertain the outcome, the attempt itself had spoken, and not in a quiet voice, for professional intrepidity and esprit.
‘Well thanks, lads, for the moral support. Thanks, Chief. Appreciated. It was never going to be easy out there last night, but I was … “Doing Beryl” was my baby, and I wasn’t about to mess this one up. No danger.’
It was Desmond Heaf’s practice, when the paper mounted one of its coups de théâtre, to retire to the sidelines for a day or two. He now had the air of a fuddled corporal emerging from a foxhole. ‘Would you care to take us through it, Clint?’
‘Okay. Beryl’s done a runner on us. Yup. Seems she approached the door, heard Donna belting it out — and she’s done a runner.’ Down the far end of the passage she was disappearing into the motes at the vista’s end. ‘So be it: plan B. I got Dodgem out from under Donna and hauled him next door. I said, “Dodge? You know what you got to do, boy? You got to go in there and do Donna.”’
‘I almost gave birth when I saw it,’ said Heaf. That morning’s edition rattled faintly in his grip: WHY I DID DONNA BY AINSLEY CAR * WORLD EXCLUSIVE * Dodgem Goes Apes**t After Hotel Sex Fest. ‘Why I did Donna?’
‘“Do Donna?” says Dodgem,’ said Clint. ‘“Why do I do Donna?” I said, “You don’t do Donna. What you do is you ‘do’ Donna: when I give the word, you make a racket and smash up the furniture, and we’ll do the rest.” He said, “But why, mate?” I said, “If it’s motivation you’re after, she’s just cost you your marriage.” Course I was rewriting it in my head: the piece. Like: “When I realised that those three hours of madness might mean the loss of little Beryl, my anger naturally turned on the rotten slag who’d led me astray.” Et cetera. Then I rang Marge Fitzmaurice.’
Clint’s colleagues were listening with unrelieved solemnity, their faces dry and grey. Even Supermaniam looked like Voltaire.
‘I told Marge to get her vanity case and her fat arse over to the Bostonian instanter … It was a pleasure to watch her work. If you turn the page, Chief — the bruises on the inner thigh? And on the bosom? Then we slung in the black eye and the split lip. I told Dodge to get started. Give him a minute and I’ll call Security. Well I heard a thud or two, nothing much, and I looked back in: Ainsley’s on the floor, and there’s Donna in her pants smashing his head in with a glass ashtray. Said he took a right swing at her, so she did him. After that it was just logistics.’
‘Had Ainsley been drinking?’
‘Drinking? He doesn’t remember anything from about noon on. And guess what. He didn’t do Donna — and he didn’t have her either. Rather talk about his dogs and Kestrel Juniors. Donna straddled him and that, for Beryl, but it was strictly soft-core.’
‘Well I never did,’ said Heaf. ‘Congratulations, Clint. You handled a difficult situation with considerable delicacy, and it all came out for the best. Jeff?’
‘Tomorrow’, said Strite, ‘it’s Donna’s Story.’
‘Angle?’
‘Uh … She deeply respects the strength of Ainsley’s feelings for Beryl. No way in this world will she press charges. Says the rough stuff shrinks to insignificance compared to the fivestar porking he gave her earlier. You know: have you seen the size of him?’
There’s a word for it. Don’t you worry. Oh yeah, there’s a word for it all right. Contempt.
The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy. Will gasp with envy.
You can take all the shrinks and minders and trickcyclists or whatever you want to call them … It’s down to you, mate. It’s down to you.
One told him he was crap in bed. One called him a crap fuck. At first he didn’t understand, and responded in kind. He invited them to come back and try him again when they’d lost a couple of tons and had their arses fixed. Then understanding began to dawn. ‘Oh. Is this as big as Clint gets?’ — and this, by now, was a Clint preempurpled with Potentium. Raillery, is it? Later that night: payback. ‘Gaw,’ he’d said, as she took off her bra: ‘when you have a baby, you’ll have to get it pissed, you will, before it’ll go near that little lot.’ ‘Oi. Take your ring off for God’s sake,’ she’d said, after a full minute of foreplay. ‘Ring? What ring? That’s me watch.’ But understanding was beginning to dawn. Go on, laugh, he was already muttering as he unbuckled his belt. Get your laughing done with. They didn’t laugh. They said: ‘I’m sorry, love, but I can’t feel you.’ They said: ‘I can’t feel you, Clint. I’m trying, but you’re not there.’ Not there! Those microscopic insects called no-see-ums: they bite. And Clint? No-see-um — and no-feel-um. He’s not there. Where is he if he’s not there?
The men in the locker-room will gasp with envy, gasp with envy. There’s a word for it: contempt.
You have 125 new messages: half of them offered riven virgins and pregnant grannies; the other half offered penis-enlargement strategies — and Clint had tried them all.
Meet the challenge of any woman … you will be in total command … remain your secret … discovered by Dr Trofim Frenkel, MD … why settle for … your maximum potential … herbs found in Polynesia … ‘I feel great about myself (PL, Germany) … natural scents that turn women into … 55 million satisfied customers … piston assembly … non-removable springloaded … pistol-trigger press pump … ‘I am already 12 inches but I’m going for 14′(RB, USA) …
Why stop there, mate? Why not 28? Why not 56? We’d be like the men on the Esso forecourt, with the steel nozzles, the flickering digits, the fat splats of car-sweat.
At home Clint had flexers and extenders, fancy philtres in tubs and tubes, pulleys, lozenges, unguents, humidors, all over the house, in trunks and suitcases and cardboard boxes and tengallon bags. No African scarifier had subjected himself to more thorough and various mortification; down there, Clint had undergone every possible metamorphosis — except growth. There had been temporary, and terrifying, enlargements. But nothing you’d want to keep …
Then of course there was the radical solution. And Clint (while on assignment) had once got as far as the surgery waitingroom of a Dr Christer Ekland in Stockholm; he filled in forms for ten minutes before he burst out through the door. And by now he had heard many sufficiently gruesome stories about Life after the Knife … How the shame — how the shame was predisposed to bring down more shame. Shame came from receiving, from sustaining, that other thing, contempt.