Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (7 page)

He'd expected the shop's interior to be something like the public bar of the Three Compasses or the Blue Boar, but it was in fact brightly lit and arranged systematically with racks of goods, in just the same way as other supermarkets. An ioniser winked in the corner. There were special offers marked on fluorescent cards. Some throbbing kind of rock music, which he detested, played in the background, providing, he supposed, the sort of cover that dim lighting might have done. There was a sweetish smell somewhere between popcorn and musk.

The assistant, seated close to the door in front of an enormous image of two buttocks and a closed-circuit screen, glanced up and then ignored him. Frank paused again, trapped by his own image on the screen. They were often rather flattering, the way they broadened the shoulders, dwindled the rest of the body to a pair of point-like feet and painted the complexion a stark but even white. Only his overcoat and paisley scarf were recognisable.

Afterwards the camera would cut in closer, and the commentator would joke, ‘There's no end to the unlikely places a writer's vocation may lead him . . .'

The sooner this is over, Frank told himself, the sooner I can go home and cook the trout. He stuffed his gloves in his pockets and went to the nearest stand—a display of penises and breasts, ceramic, plastic, metal, functional and ornamental. There was a woman's body, legs doubled back, with a pencil sharpener between them. He examined it. He took a pencil from his breast pocket and tried it surreptitiously, sweeping the shavings carefully from the shelf. Rather childish, he thought. He went to the underwear, and then a rack of plastic chains and handcuffs, and a stand of inflatable women with usable orifices, under a handwritten sign saying,

‘She never has a headache and she doesn't talk!'

Behind him a group of young people in padded jackets came in together. They were shepherded to the middle of the shop by an older man in a flowing coat and oversized glasses. He cleared his throat and said in a booming voice, ‘Now, take your time and don't forget to keep noting your reactions. Don't censor . . .'

The group stood unmoving and the leader pushed one young man gently forward. Frank stared over his shoulder but no one else in the shop paid any attention.

‘This is a perfectly commonplace thing to do,' the leader continued. ‘If there's something that disgusts or upsets you, make a note of it so that we can discuss it in the group later on. If there's something that turns you on, make a note of that too! Or buy it,' he added, glancing in the direction of the till.

Supposing there just isn't, Frank thought, anything that turns you on; suppose there's nothing at all? I'd better just find what I want and clear out.

Magazines dominated the back of the shop; good, he thought, to see that paper is still holding its own. He slipped between two other men. The magazines were sealed in plastic, sometimes taped together in threes. The cover of the first he selected showed a woman with wet hair and skin, her hands over her crotch, her breasts exposed. The background was a bathroom. Her eyes were wide and startled, but she was smiling, as if she had been caught midway between the two emotions. He could see that she was attractive, young. But also that it was a lie: in reality, he was quite—leadenly—sure, she wouldn't want him in her bathroom, and he felt nothing except his own strangeness.

The next he selected showed a woman chained at her ankles and wrists to some kind of concrete wall. The lighting picked out her breasts and her head, which was tilted back and to one side so that she looked at the viewer through hooded eyes with an expression of fierce concentration. Her lips were picked out in a deep crimson and smudged. What am I supposed to do? Frank, exasperated, wanted to ask.

He ran his fingernail quickly down the side of the next bundle and flicked through the pages, which still smelled strongly of printing ink. Flesh, salmon pink and blue black, greeted him from every page, a good deal of it bruised or bloody. He studied it for several minutes. This kind of thing, chaining, whipping, bruising, throttling and so forth, was obviously a particular genre, and more expensive. There seemed to be—though he was obviously the worst person to judge—a complete poverty of imagination, perhaps because of it being photographic. And nowhere were the parts he wanted, just the place where they could be imagined, if, that was, you'd seen them before. For a few seconds a childish kind of despair enveloped Frank, causing an odd tightness in his throat and behind his eyes.

‘Many men would envy him this part of his job!' his imaginary commentator joked.

‘You'll have to pay for those,' the assistant called from the till. Frank noticed that a large ginger-haired man was standing by the door, his arms folded across his chest.

‘They're not exactly what I was looking for.' His voice, he thought, sounded petulant.

‘Shouldn't have opened them then. What is it you want?'

‘Close ups of women's vaginas,' Frank said. The camera would be cutting delightedly between the two of them now, back and forth.

‘Round there, at the side,' the assistant called, adding, ‘but you're paying for what you've opened.'

The shop had filled considerably since he arrived. People called in on their way home from work. Men and women, old and young, pale under the fluorescent light, but unremarkable. A woman, examining a penis Biro, looked up, caught him staring at her, and glowered until he looked away.

‘No detail is lost,' the imaginary commentator said. ‘He always makes meticulous notes on the bus home.' Astounded at the clumsy style and the number of typographical errors, Frank scanned the beginning of a short story in which a woman was stripped and tied up with a washing line. The sheer repetition was stunning. He felt irritated. What to make of it, the tying up, the hitting, the way they looked like they liked it? Did they? All the pictures, he thought, looked real, but it was simply impossible to imagine. To connect, to conceive of how it came about. And they smiled . . . Even the ordinary stuff . . . Let alone how the rest . . . Perhaps it only worked if you'd already seen and done it for real? The pictures would remind you, then, of the real thing. Something to key into. Perhaps you just had to at least have seen for yourself what a real woman's vagina looked like, and felt the effect, before the pictures would work, before you could understand it at all.

Cougar books were just fantasy, he thought. Inside people's heads the world is endlessly plastic. People who read my books don't expect them to happen in real life. They just liked believing things. Perhaps this is the same?

There was a queue at the till.

‘That lot from the polytechnic,' grumbled the assistant. ‘He brings them in every term and they and just crowd the place out. Never spend much . . .' The customer immediately in front of Frank was buying some vinyl underwear. Frank found himself feeling rather contemptuous. He was unlikely to get home on time and would be late eating and late starting work: all this because of Pete Magee.

Perhaps he could use the shop in a book? Things could turn real when people got them out of the shop. They'd wake up in the morning with a bruised woman lying on the floor, refusing to leave or to get dressed. Or they'd open the carrier bag and inside would be a bloody penis stump, or a pair of sawn-off breasts. They'd panic and try to dispose of them. Police would be baffled . . .

He counted out thirteen pounds and ninety-nine pence.

Silly

Frank was glad to be home, but even so he could shake off neither his feeling of exhausted irritation nor his imaginary commentator. ‘Styne loves to cook,' the voice gushed. ‘His kitchen would be the envy of many a chef.' There was a pause, while he unpacked his carrier bag, and the camera followed him, showing the leaf-wrapped cheese and out-of-season vegetables, the rack of knives, the herbs and spices in their special vacuum-sealed jars, the food processor, the two ovens, the water purifier. ‘For him, cooking is a time for meditation. Preparing and eating a meal is a way of settling himself prior to work . . .' The word ‘work' echoed with a terrible hollow reverence and Frank turned on his radio hoping to drown the commentator in a babble of real voices.

He cooked patiently, working precisely from the recipe. The pink and white trout fillets had to be cut into thin strips, braided; the tomatoes skinned, simmered with fresh basil and sieved. Meanwhile, the new potatoes were steaming, and when the timer went off he would begin the mushrooms—already, like the cherry tartlets for dessert, prepared. The recipe took longer to make than stated in the book and he made a note of that in the margin.

When his mother had taught him how to cook there had been only one kind of mushroom bought just four ounces at a time and they weren't in a position to use things like aubergines, or to cook beef in vintage wine. But he had made sure that she had had decent three-course meals right until the last. Consommé. Duck in orange. Trifle. Even though she couldn't taste or smell, she could see, and it was important.

‘Read me what you've written, Johnny,' she'd ask as he removed the tray. Frank never worried about it; he knew she'd hear perhaps two or three words before she fell asleep. He'd shuffle his papers, ask her if she was ready, clear his throat and read as much like the BBC as he could:

‘He looked down at where his foot used to be. The stump, cauterised, ached and throbbed. How much of him could he watch them take and still live . . .'

He smoothed a linen cloth over half the table, and savoured his trout in silence so as to fully appreciate it. No music, no wine. A habit. Habits, he sometimes thought, were what made the world go round. Or him stay on it while it did. One would be lost without them: when he washed up, he took trouble to render each pan as new—that was something she had taught him, an inherited habit; so, too, turning the bowl upside down when he had finished. These things were what stayed to remind him of her. She would not, he thought as he dried, have particularly liked the trout; on the whole she had preferred substantial meat dishes with thick, multi-flavoured sauces. He shook the tablecloth outside and took his manuscript from the cutlery drawer built into the table's central support.

He glanced at the clock—8:40—and read the description of his man-monster through to remind himself.

It was cold despite the radiator. Liz could see her breath. She ran the hot water and tested it with her elbow, the way they'd shown her. The bathroom was small, with door, bath, sink and toilet each taking up one of its sides, then bulging out to fill the tiny rectangle the walls contained. The floor Liz knelt on was covered with lino patterned like oil and milk mixed together. Jim's small plastic bath was set inside the big one, the sides of which reared up like smooth cliffs marked by a strata of stains, sandy brown and copper green. Steam filled the tiny room and the handfuls of water she tipped onto Jim shrivelled to momentary lace on his skin, then vanished. He seemed to like water: he slapped at it and made noises that sounded eager and excited—sounded so like pure pleasure that Liz found herself smiling, even though it was probably just some accident, a facial coincidence—though, really, that all went back again to what exactly the doctor had meant by capacity for language. She rubbed some water over her own face and leaned back a little on her feet.

‘Suppose you are from the Silent Zone I was talking about,' she began, ‘sent to teach me how to get there. Main problem, as I've discovered today, is other people. Not on the same wavelength.' She rubbed a minute quantity of shampoo onto Jim's head, working the lather gently but intently as she continued. ‘It's not just, like I said this morning, a matter of not getting through. Lies, too, people making things up, forgetting that what happens is what counts, not what people say.' She held a flannel over Jim's eyes, tipped a cup of water over his head to rinse off the shampoo.

‘You—you really should thank your lucky stars . . .

‘Talking spreads like measles. Because other people have got it, they want to pass it on, like tag. If everyone else catches it too they won't stand out. I saw a film like that once. You caught it by kissing and it made you lose your identity. It spread like wildfire and that made the whole fabric of society break down. There was a research doctor who fell in love . . .'

Frank made the monster's penis huge, barbed like a tomcat's and covered in tiny interlocking scales. The monster's wife, Sandra, was slender and small, her skin unblemished, the colour of cream, her breasts large, their nipples prominent and pink, her belly a smooth curve, her pubic hair as soft as that on her head . . . He chose his words slowly, testing them in his head before writing them in tiny longhand. He was working hard to blot out the commentary, not to see himself from odd angles as he sat there bent in a pool of anglepoise light; to stay in the present, and not to think for more than a second or two of that letter from Katie Rumbold, which said,
The shortlist (rumour has it that you are on it) will emerge this week. I'm sure you'll be as
delighted as I am . . .

He was successful, as authors go. His books had been translated: he made a reasonable living. The letters he received were always appreciative.
‘I read page 123 four times,'
they'd say.
‘My favourite part was the scene when his head splits open. I was almost sick 
. . .' When readers bought one of his books he liked to think they could be confident that somewhere in it would be at least one passage like the one that he was just beginning: the mating of the monster and his impossibly beautiful bride. Really, a rape.
Daring and experimental work at the cutting edge of contemporary fiction 
. . .

Dwelling for a full page in almost microscopic detail on the monster's penis, which he called ‘organ' so as not to be too medical on the one hand, nor break his style on the other, Frank wrote steadily in fine-tip felt pen on plain white paper, rising from his chair only to switch on the extractor fan to eliminate the lingering fishy smell of his meal.

The monster was strong and cruel. He held Sandra around the neck and squeezed if she struggled. He squatted over her, his terrible penis weeping unpleasantly all the while. Her face was red and screwed tight in an agony of revulsion. With his free hand the monster parted her labia and began to rub her clitoris with his thumb. It was the only way Frank could think of getting her eventually to smile, despite herself and the situation. He had to keep referring to the magazine.

The photographs were disturbing. They were all different: flaps and folds every which way, hair all over the place. He had expected something neater, like the visible bits of women. Secondly, he couldn't begin to imagine what it would feel like, going inside, there, between the
labia minora:
but fortunately, he reminded himself, the point was not to describe that so much as the spectacle of Sandra's fear and distaste, which he felt he could do with some confidence . . . Bile rose in her throat. Her breath came in gasps—it was, he knew, procrastination. The imaginary commentator knew it too:

‘Because of chronic impotence and a lack of female acquaintance,' he explained earnestly, ‘Styne has not before written a scene requiring precise description of a woman's genitals . . . Here we see him struggling to convey . . .' Shut up, Frank thought at it, at himself. Shut up! He could feel his lips yearning to say it aloud: shut up, you ugly son of a bitch!

He made Sandra dribble. Her face was torn between weeping and laughter. Her genitals were crimson, plump . . . They were real things, like the living room in the Barratt estate, and so had to be correct. At least, he'd thought as he made his way from the sex shop to the public library, carrying the violent threepack plus the one he'd been looking for—which was called
Explicit!—
it's something I'll have to do only once. He'd passed half an hour correlating the pictures with diagrams in a medical textbook, labelling them and taking notes from the section on sexual arousal. I have all the information, he told himself. It is simply a question of accurate attention to detail.

He described the odour and prodigious lubrication, the glistening and the sucking noises. Despite herself Sandra arched her back and offered herself to the monster's touch. She begged for release. The monster's foul breath came in gasps . . .

Frank was glad when the figures on the digital clock in his kitchen flipped over to 10:00 pm. He went to the toilet, washed his hands, and turned on his electric blanket in preparation for sleep. The terrible and bloody conjunction, the monster's vile orgasm, could wait until tomorrow. He glanced again at the clock—10:06—and set himself to read through. At 10:25 he would swallow two sleeping pills. Quite possibly he would become addicted to them, but at present, he felt, it was the lesser of two evils.

He read his own words, absorbed by them yet unmoved, making minor corrections to grammar, crossing out repetitions and underlining parts that would need to be looked at again. It was good, and he felt relaxed for the first time all day. He knew there was an infinite supply of Cougar books inside him. If new things had to go in them, well, with effort he could do it. He would manage. The books welled up from a seemingly inexhaustible source, and people wanted to read them; it was—I am, he thought with some pride—a perfect machine.

‘Once people know you can talk they won't take no for an answer,' Liz told Jim as she added more warm water and mixed it in, her hair falling like two curtains on either side of her face as she reached down to scoop handfuls and slosh them over him. ‘That means, as if it isn't bad enough getting them through the walls every other night, you have to sit in the launderette for an hour listening to a woman who wants to get pregnant by means of hypnotism . . . Well, no one hypnotised me.

‘Should she leave him, murder him, have an affair back, kill herself or get a divorce? Or should she forget all about it and get on with life, perhaps train for a proper career? Should they try and adopt the other woman's child? If so, would she be able to love it? Or just stick with the hypnotism, and see how it goes? Mind you, it's expensive . . .'

When Liz stopped talking, the bathroom was quiet enough to hear both of them breathing. She was aware of an angry tightness in her chest.

‘It was like being buried alive, being told all that . . . Like I'm in a coffin, paralysed, but lucid, looking out through a crack in the lid at people standing around the grave, unaware. Thud, thud, thud go the shovels. Try to scream, but only a rasp comes out. The air grows thicker, the sound fainter. You can't move. Soon no one will be able to tell you were ever there; but you are, lying with tons of soil on top, a terrible heaviness and the air running out. That's what it felt like, sitting with her in the launderette . . . But this is different, different, for reasons I've explained. You understand, don't you?

‘I only asked because I knew you couldn't answer,' she said, quietly. ‘That's the beauty of it. You're lucky. I've got it, but you're immune. So I'm lucky too, in a way: no need to struggle with my conscience, like the doctor in
The Kissing Disease 
. . .' A drop of water fell from the ceiling above into the bath. She glanced up. Others hung ready to fall, brownish dimples, gelatinous, like sea anemones. Between them were circular stains, where others had formed then dried to death.

‘Ugh,' she said. ‘Still, it's better than the B & B. And that was better—in some ways—than before. Disadvantage of the carriages was water. Carrying it up along the path in gallons. And then heating it—I can't stand to wash in cold. I only bothered once a week or so . . .' Jim, her hand supporting his head and neck, appeared to be looking at the suds, gathered in drifts around the edge of the bath.

‘I got head lice,' she said.

‘It's a miracle you've got nothing worse,'
the staff nurse had said.

‘I was there two years.' Liz's hands fell still as she remembered.

‘Your baby's life expectancy is more or less normal,'
the doctor had said.

‘Two years isn't long, really.' One-handed, she spread a towel on her knees, then hooked Jim out of the bath. Blood rushed to her feet as she rose. ‘I really like the house. That's a Silver Lining and a half. And I wouldn't have got it without you, not in a million years. Purvis took a shine. Every cloud. Even a baby with something syndrome.'

‘Spinney's is very rare,'
the doctor had said,
‘it's associated with a silvery hair colour but there are no physical abnormalities, though at first we thought—
'

‘Jim—it's all going to turn out fine. And I'm going to give you another name,' Liz announced, holding him in the crook of one arm as she flipped down the toilet seat to sit on. ‘Silver, after the lining. Silly for short. So, thanks for the house, Silly.

‘I know a lot about her. Alice,' she resumed, searching out the moisture buried in creases and lurking between fingers and toes, the way she had been told to. Jim was a lean baby, and kept pretty still, which made it easier. ‘She's called Ally to her friends. She's got grey eyes and wears soft contact lenses. She has seven ‘O' levels and works four mornings in the building society. She's made chicken curry tonight and she bought white wine to go with it, though she doesn't drink, especially now, because it might damage her fertility . . .'