Money: A Suicide Note (22 page)

It works well. It is an excellent system. Selina and I get on like a house on fire. The thing about Selina is, she understands. She knows the twentieth century. She has hung out in cities ... When we go to bed together, sometimes the conversation turns to... While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk.

No sleep. No, no chance. I couldn't sleep but Selina could. She's good at that too, an accomplished sleeper, with childish face.

I went next door in my shorty dressing-gown. I poured myself a drink. I glanced round about myself, on the lookout for clues. When I got in from the airport—yesterday, give or take a week—the flat felt lightly dishevelled, hurriedly lived-in, as if the cleaning-lady's efforts had been briskly cancelled or mussed. There were flowers on the table but no pants in the laundry basket. There was fresh milk in the fridge but old tea in the jar—and Selina likes her tea. She is particular about her tea, and often carries a pack round with her in her handbag ... She was expecting me. I could tell by the quality of her alarm, which was actressy and overdone. Where have you been? I asked her. 'Here!' she insisted, with a chirpy wag of the head. How did you know I was coming back? 'I didn't! she maintained. And I had told nobody, not Ella Llewellyn, nobody. Oh who cares, I thought, and tried to bundle her into the bag right away. I had a strong desire to repossess. She lets me furl her around for a while, and makes those shammy gasps she knows I like, and gives detailed promise of all that cocked and candid talent — before she calls a halt, slithers off the bed, corrects her clothing, brushes her hair, changes her shoes, powders her nose, slides my Johnson out of her mouth and insists on lunch.

We go to Kreutzer's. I eat and drink like there's no tomorrow. We don't have much to say. Nobody asks sticky questions as they are led on all fours up the stairs. I'm not about to spook her, not me. I'm too worried about earthquakes or nuclear warfare or extraterrestrial invasion or Judgment Day coming between me and my reward. AH you'll get from John Self is Smalltalk, flattery and squealed demands for more drink. After toothache liqueurs I thunder home and abandon the Fiasco in the middle of the street. By now I am a crackling sorcerer of grub and booze, of philtres and sex-spells. Selina walks into the bedroom with her head held low. I give a great hot grunt as I untether my belt.

... I picked up the stack of mail from the coffee-table and dealt myself one off the bottom: the envelope that contains my monthly bank statement, with its familiar brown matt and the wax seal like a blob of blood. It's not my bank account any more, of course. It's a joint bank account. Selina has half of it now — to shore up her dignity and self-respect, remember? I broke the seal with my blunt thumb. And the statement, I swear, was three pages long. Among the usual laconic entries on the debit side — US Approach, Liquor Locker, Dr Martha McGilchrist, Gas Board, Kreutzer's, the Mahatma, Trans-American, Liquor Locker—there now thronged a host of Selina's new playmates from the days of yore. Christ, what is this crew? It seems that the chick hangs out in Troy or Carthage when she's got a bit of cash to burn: Chez Zeus, Goliath's, Amaryllis, Aphrodite, Romeo & Juliet, Romulus & Remus, Eloise & Abelard ... I always suspected that Selina spent all her money on massages, rug-rethinks and underwear — but that was when she hardly had any. The telltale entry was the lone item on the credit side: £2,000, from deposit account. I can't complain, I suppose. Such is our deal. Such is our gentleman's agreement. But that's the whole trouble with dignity and self-respect: they cost you so much fucking money.

——————

And now I am one of the unemployed. What do we do all day? We sit on stoops and pause in loose knots on the stained pavements. The pavements are like threadless carpets after some atrocious route of flesh-frazzled food and emetic drink: last night the weather gods all drowned their sorrows, and then threw up from thirty thousand feet. We sit flummoxed in the parks, among low-caste flowers. Whew (we think), this life is slow. I came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances, when it was all there waiting. Now they seep out of school —to what? To nothing, to fuck-all. The young (you can see it in their faces), the stegosaurus-rugged no-hopers, the parrot-crested blankies — they've come up with an appropriate response to this, which is: nothing. Which is nothing, which is fuck-all. The dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground. Riots are their rumpus-room, sombre London their jungle-gym. Life is hoarded elsewhere by others. Money is so near you can almost touch it, but it is all on the other side — you can only press your face up against the glass. In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out. You can't drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There's nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money. You just cannot hide out from money any more. And so sometimes, when the nights are hot, they smash and grab.

Meanwhile, there are some pretty primitive creatures driving around with money in their Torpedoes and Boomerangs, or sitting down with money at the Mahatma or the Assisi, or just standing there with money, in the shops, in the pubs, in the streets. They are all shapes and colours, innocent beneficiaries of the global joke which money keeps cracking. They don't do anything: it's their currencies that do things. Last year the pubs were full of incredulously spendthrift Irishmen: they didn't have money in their pockets any longer— they had Euromoney, which is much more powerful stuff. There's some bundle in the Middle East, and a new squad of fiscal space invaders starts plundering the West. Every time the quid gets gang-banged on the international exchange, all the Arab chicks get a new fur coat. There are white moneymen, too, English, native. They must be criminals, with their wads, the crap they talk, their cruel, roasted faces. I am one. I am one of them, white or at least sky-grey, with pub rug, and ashen arm on the Fiasco doorjamb, unsmiling at the traffic light, fat-brained with abuse—but holding money. I have money but I can't control it: Fielding keeps supplying me with more. Money, I think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can't control it. Life gets poor-mouthed all the time, yet you seldom hear an unkind word about money. Money, now this has to be some good shit.

Ever since I gave up my job and started waiting for the film to happen, I too have felt like a gap in between things. So how can you expect someone like me to deal with the day? I have no ideas on this one. Tell me, please. Money doesn't tell me. I lie clueless in the cot until — until when? How is it that the experience will ever end? Up, get out, do it now — now, now. Now! I drift, dither, grope, fumble ... and there I am at last, half-dressed in the kitchen with cigarettes and coffee-filters. Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them. I look through the window—the streets, the sky the colour of wet sugar—and I am simply stumped by this, dumbfounded, nonplussed. The windows themselves, they make a little more sense. They are doubleglazed with dirt. The glass looks like the Fiasco windscreen after a thousand-mile drive, stained with the blackened blood of insects nine hundred miles ago, the dottings of soot, the fingerprints of filthy phantoms. Even dirt has its patterns and seeks its forms. .. When I quit my job it felt like the end of term, it felt like Saturday morning, it felt great, it felt illegal. But the end of something ought to be the start of something else, and I can't yet feel what's meant to be beginning. In my head it feels like nothing, like fuck-all. Selina is an early riser. Her High Street instincts (detectable in the sharpness of her face, even in the sharpness of her teeth) propel her into the world of money and exchange. She has an interest in a boutique run by that useful friend of hers, Helle, down Chelsea way, the World's End. Selina wants me to put money into it. I don't want to put money into it, but I probably will. If I do, I know I'll never get it out again.

So I play patience, and solitaire. Martina's book lies closed on my bedside table: I haven't got into it yet, and I still don't know what pop-holes are. I look to the TV, the video recorder. Once I had a pretty decent collection of films on tape, but I can't handle anything continuous any more. I've seen all the video nasties, and I don't need pornography, now that Selina's here. I fill the reels with nightly squirts of random TV traffic. Nature shorts, comedy shows. Football, snooker, bowls, darts. Darts! Dah! Oh man ... soon I'll look like those fat brutes with the beer mugs and the arrows. And then with shoulders bunched and my eyes on the messed pavement I shuffle off down the drinker, and sit with tankard and tabloid in the corner by the fire.

Russia is going to beat Poland up. If I were Russia, that's what I'd do, just to keep up appearances—I mean, you can't let the word start to get about. Seems that Prince Charles had a thing with one of Diana's sisters, way back, before he fingered Lady Di as the true goer of the family. Another pussy-whipped judge has given some broad a ten-bob fine for murdering the milkman — pre-menstrual tension, PMT. The Western Alliance is in poor shape, I'm told. Well what do you expect? They've got an actor, and we've got a chick. More riots in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, the inner cities left to rot or burn. Sorry, boys, but the PM has PMT. Here is a woman who gave her five-year-old child away to a stranger in a pub for two barley stouts. She's separated from her common-law husband, who is unemployed.

I do the quick crossword. I play the spacegames and the fruit-machines. I feel like a robot, playing a rival robot, for a price. We are both one-armed bandits. Hold, nudge, spin, kick, shuffle, double, win, lose. It's all done for you nowadays — Prizefinder, Holdamatic, Autonudge. The machines nauseate me whether I win or lose. But if they had a hole in the wall here I think I'd put money into it. I go somewhere else and eat junk food and drink junk wine, I hit the betting shop and lose dough perched on a stool. I wander through the newsagents and check out the chicks in the magazines. I go home and lie down and then it all starts again. What is there to help me make sense of things? Time has me dangling on its tenterhooks, I used to run on energy. These days, saying energy makes me black out with exhaustion. I can't do any storyboarding until Doris Arthur shows with the script. As for budgeting, my first assistant Micky Obbs is on a half-pay retainer until the first day of Principal Photography, along with Des Blackadder and Kevin Skuse. He can fucking do it.

——————

Take yesterday.

Eleven forty-five, and I strolled into the Jack the Ripper, the roughest and least local of my many locals. The dump wasn't that crowded: the girl behind the bar just kept disappearing and failing to meet my eye. Two or three new arrivals were greeted, listened to, obeyed, given drinks and change — without any acknowledgement of my cocked fiver and strident excuse mes. Well, I'm not one to soldier on with this kind of treatment.

'How about it?' I said loudly. 'I mean, what are my chances, If I stick around for a couple more months?'

People turned, but the barmaid did not turn. She went to the till, which jounced and jingled at her bidding. She swivelled primly—she wasn't one of nature's barmaids — and held up the change just past my face, which was boiling now, as she saw.

'We're not serving you,' she announced. Her face wavered. Then she looked into my eyes. Her face, its small universe, was all present and correct. Along the bar people perked up their interest.

As it was, even when I stepped in here, I wanted a drink quite badly. And that was five minutes ago.

'You're WHAT?' I said. 'Why? Who says? Why?'

'Not after last night.'

'What do you mean, last night? I wasn't even in here last night.'

'You don't even remember, you were that drunk. Jerome!' she called. 'Jerome!'

Jerome, the blue-jeaned bumboy with earring and dyed blonde hair, cruised over from his toytown window-display of pie-warmers and bean-blasters.

'Yeah?'

This was Jerome's contribution. The girl had begun to busy herself elsewhere. Over her shoulder she now said, 'Tell him. He was the one last night.'

'What's all this last-night shit?' I said. 'I just told you, I wasn't even in here last night.'

'Hang about,' said Jerome. 'Here Flora, it was the night before last.'

'Sunday night.'

'What are we today then?'

'Monday,' said Flora. 'It was last night.'

'Well which was it?' I said. 'You work in a fucking pub all day, you can't remember either.'

'He smashed the machine,' Flora told Jerome, who crossed his arms unhappily. 'Then he had a go at Mr Beveridge. Then he made obscene suggestions to me.'

'Yeah, well,' said Jerome.

'Hey. Jerome. You. Fuck off,' I said. 'Flora. Come here. Come here.'

Flora also crossed her arms. 'I'm not going near that one,' she said.

I dropped my head. I drew in breath. Tears formed. Boy, did I need a drink. I wanted to tell them that I had great trouble with my eyes and rug and heart, and that I was friendly with Lorne Guyland and Butch Beausoleil. More attractively, though, a lumpy clutch of beer glasses stood on the bar before me. With two spread hands I shoved them over the side. They took quite a time to fall, and by then I was half way to the door. 'You stay out!' I heard Flora yell as I shouldered my way into the air.

There were two more pubs near by, the Butcher's Arms and the Jesus Christ. The annoying thing was that I was banned from these joints too. So I checked in to the Pizza Pit. I sat in this crepuscular caravan with a tub of red wine, and with a Big Sharp One sizzling unregarded on its platter. Sunday night... terrible to the touch. Or was it Saturday night? I killed another carafe, then crossed the road in search of some proper grub. With the aid of a long line of lagers, I consumed three Waistwatchers, two Seckburgers, an American Way and a double order of Tuckleberry Pie. But hang on a minute... Do you think I might have left anything out?

After lunch I recrossed the road to the newsagents, and took my place at the wailing wall of the pornography section. As in any library, the material is arranged to suit the specialist: there are magazines featuring chicks with big tits, there are magazines featuring chicks in silk and lace and garter-belts, there are magazines featuring chicks getting roughed up. Boy, are there a lot of magazines featuring chicks getting roughed up. You'd think the punters could get by with a mere half-dozen of these monthly publications, but no, they need more. Pornography has a smell, a special odour. I think it comes from the treated paper the barons use. The smell of pornography is arid, acrid, the smell of headaches and wax... I had just taken another look at Debonair—at Vron, my future stepmother. My future stepmother has a pair on her, no doubt about it. She could even cut the mustard in one of the magazines specifically featuring chicks with big tits. I replaced Debonair and picked up Lovedolls, Take it from me, they don't come much dirtier than Lovedolls, not in England, not legally. So there I was, muttering in a low grumble and torpidly flipping through the pages, shoulders up, head down — when to the sound of a loud handclap the splayed centre-spread was violently dashed from my grip.