The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (2 page)

BOOK: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
3.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

But the girls in the Sealink! AAAAOOOOOOH! How he lusted after them! Their glossy hair and cigarette skin! Their whining voices and wasted eyes!
Their air of thoroughgoing contempt – expensively studied disregard. They glided about the place, and Richard followed the cruxes of their bodies, his eyes flickering, precisely registering each tilt and cant they made, while he visualised the subtle accommodations of their clothing, their hair, their skin . . .

Foremost among these glibmaidens, calling from the trivial rocks, was Ursula Bentley. Ursula wrote a diary for a glossy monthly detailing her amorous adventures. It was the most embarrassingly awful column Richard had ever read, but he made enormous allowances for her, allowances the size of Third World debts. He wanted her. She was not simply beautiful, but beautiful in a way that was so vastly improbable – like a diamond found in a gutter behind a Chinese takeaway – that to Richard, silly fool, she redeemed him, her, all of the sordidity and sopor, the tragic bathos that he felt sloshing about the Sealink.

That was how Bell snagged him in, made Richard part of his little group.

Richard took his allotted seat and signed for one of the waiters, knowing full well that given his lowly status he might wait some tens of minutes for a drink. Bell was –as usual–silent. He was sitting in the bosom of his clique
like a big-bodied spider in the middle of its web; invisible filaments wreathed him, garbed him, filaments of gossip and speculation, of opinion and dissent. And Bell sat there, listening to it all, registering it all, masticating it all for future regurgitation.

For if the Sealink Club had a kingpin, a grand panjandrum, a veritable Vautrin guiding the ship of scandal from the lower depths, then it was Bell. Bell was a hack, true enough, but he was also much more than that. His daily syndicated column ran in both the
Standard
and the
Mail,
reaching some ten million ideologically hobbled readers. His weekly television programme – a chat show called
Campanology –
was broadcast at peak viewing time on Friday night, live to some fifteen million viewers. His dead-zone phone-in show on Talk Radio may have gone out between two and four a.m. on a Sunday morning (although recorded six hours previously), but it none the less managed to buzz in the ears of some four hundred thousand lost souls.

Given the Venn intersections implied by this saturation coverage, one of Bell's most sycophantic acolytes had established – through certain arcane statistical computations – that there must, logically, be at least
two hundred thousand people in Britain who did
nothing else
but listen to Bell's voice, watch Bell's face, or read his words, for every waking hour of their lives. The same sycophant had once earned a week of his mentor's approval by seriously floating the idea that Bell should act now to broadcast to the subconscious and thus colonise the dreamscape.

Bell was a heavily-built man in his late thirties. He was thick both straight through and transversely. This would have made him curiously blocky and four-square, had it not been for the fact that his façade was so flat, so two-dimensional, as to cheat the eye. Hardly anyone ever looked at Bell and thought in terms of his mass, his solidity; rather, it was the front that bewitched the eye. Given his reputation, no one could have expected it when seeing him
in the flesh,
but Bell was good-looking, neat, nicely clean in appearance. His torso was one rectangle, his arms two thinner ones. His legs were congruent with his arms. He wore plain, well-cut suits that emphasised these planes.

This was just as well. More perspicacious, trained observers who managed to stay athwart Bell – in, as it were, a potential boarding position – for long enough
could gain some sense of his true heft. Beneath the finely woven wool was a body of awesome strength. A minotaur body, half-bull, half-man, thick of bone and intractable of muscle. Bell even held himself as the Minotaur might have done: bent forward from the waist, legs braced against the deck of the Sealink, arms pushed out and forward, so as to occupy the most propitious pyramid of space, so as to make good any lack of
gravitas
with a perfect centre of gravity.

Then there was the head. Once more, all the angles were well exploited by the man. Hardly anyone really knew that Bell was more or less neckless, that a lithic tier of fat ‘n’ muscle made a pagoda of his upper storey. Hardly anyone – not even those who had slept with Bell, who had had those jutting jaws clamped on their remote (or proximate) sensors – had noticed the prognathous, not to say primitive, cast of that face. Rather, encountering it from the public, the front-of-house angle, they often found him . . . surprisingly pretty.

Glossy black hair hung in loose bangs around a high, white forehead. The eyes were black – but warmly so. The flawless complexion was pointed up by a small, bell-shaped birthmark on the edge of his jaw.
The lips were red – but not wet. The nose, though broad-bridged, had fine nostrils. And there was more than enough bone in cheek and chin to supply the suffix. No wonder that Bell scored – and scored often. Scored, more or less, whenever and with whomever he wanted.

Even in a rout of rutting like the Sealink, Bell's penchant for cunt and cock stood out. He liked them both. Some bar dross said the former more, others the latter. Whatever the case, Bell had no difficulties in obtaining supplies. Of course, in his line of work there were the facile, the futile, and the febrile seductions: those loose enough, insubstantial enough, and weak enough for their heels to round under the man's hooded gaze, to find themselves tipping over backwards, knees and thighs arranged automatically into the correct position for effective penetration.

But Bell didn't simply forage on the herbage within reach of his big mouth, oh no. He was also capable of seducing those who attempted to evade him, to outrun the silvered tongue, trajected like bolas to wrap around their lower limbs, pull them down to the plushly carpeted pampa. There were many of these, for – damn it all! – even the denizens of the West End have some
pride, some integrity, some other relationship they don't wish to lose.

These Bell particularly favoured with his attentions. It seemed a perfect tonic to the man to seek out some long-established relationship – marriage, cohabitation, or a clandestine affair, even – and interpose his dissolutive bulk between the pair-bonding, unsticking the accretions of years, experiences, children . . . even love.

Innumerable weeping spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, partners and lovers had raged impotently up and down the stretch of unforgiving pavement outside Bell's mansion-house block in Bloomsbury. Bell never made any attempt to hide his peccadilloes. In fact, that his corporeal column should have as much salience as his printed one seemed to be at the core of his philandering. And he always got his man, or his woman. So much so that once the denizens of the Sealink were aware even that he had drawn a bead on a given target, they knew that it was only a matter of time before there would be tears in the toilets, sobbing on the lobby phone, altercations in the vestibule. Laclos would have had a field day with Bell.

It was one such annihilation of affect that the clique were discussing as Richard tuned in, adjusting his ears
to the whine of perfidy. Ursula Bentley was saying, ‘Really, I think she'll have to go somewhere, a clinic . . . whatever, cool off y'know what I mean – ‘

‘But I don't think it's exactly drugs that're the problem.’ This was from a man called Slatter, who ran a clippings service much patronised by Bell.

‘Hng'f’ – ‘ Ursula snorted, her lovely mouth distorted with contempt, ‘if it's not drugs, it bloody well
ought
to be. Bell says she was banging on the main door of his block at five in the morning, twitching, white-faced, the whole bit. Isn't that right, Bell?’ She turned her radiant eyes to her mentor, who inclined his massive head ever so slightly to indicate that this was indeed the case.

Slatter had been shaping a rejoinder, some of his words even ran under the end of Ursula's explanation, but seeing Bell's acquiescence he immediately shut up and fell to examining his nails. He was a beatifically repugnant man, Slatter. Thin and yet sallowly saggy, he always wore off-the-peg suits that appeared cut from fabric with the texture of vinyl (in summer), or carpet underlay (in winter). There were mounds of’ druff on his shoulders, and scurf clearly visible on his scalp. The nails he was examining were so neatly encrusted – each
with a dear little dark crescent – that the crud essence was almost decorative. But in spite – or, perhaps, more sinisterly,
because –
of this, Slatter was Bell's right-hand man, his factotum, his chore whore. It was he who ran errands, took messages, bought cocaine, sold weepy girls down the river to abortionists in Edgware.

His dirty hands guaranteed Bell's clean ones. And as befits a parasite and host who have achieved a perfect
modus vivendi,
they were in symbiosis, oblivious of who occupied which role.

Bell was still silent; the filaments of unease and control connecting him to the other clique members hummed and pulsed. Who, Richard wondered, would seize this opportunity to advance himself, to take on the responsibility of providing input, material, potential copy?

It was Todd Reiser. ‘You'll never guess,’ he began, ‘what young Richard and I saw just now . . .’ Reiser's collar-length, glossy hair bounced on the collar of his hacking jacket as he leant forward, claiming the web site.

‘You're right,’ whined Adam Kelburn, the Deputy Editor of
Cojones,
a men's style magazine Richard wrote features for, and a distal – if enthusiastic – cliquer, ‘we won't. Why not tell us, Todd?’

Reiser hunched himself up still further, to form a veritable basis of denim and whipcord, all supporting a Martini glass. ‘We were up in the top room, herherh, and young Richard spotted this character hanging around outside the knocking shop opposite, h'herherher . . .’ Reiser was a once-and-future film director who – naturally enough – made adverts. With everyone he was brusque to the point of rank rudeness – everyone but Bell, that was. ‘. . . So, we thought we'd get a little bet on, as to whether he'd actually go in and poke one of the brasses, herherh'her . . .’ He paused to take a slurp of his drink, and Bell's inky tones stained the atmosphere.

‘How much was the bet?’ As ever, Richard was shocked by the measured evenness of the man
,
s voice.

‘The bet!’ Reiser started. ‘The bet, well, er . . . a fiver, wasn't it Richard?’

‘That's right.’

‘Anyways, this prannet goes in, trudges all the way up three flights of pokertunity. So I'm thinking I'm quids in – because that's the way I'd figured it – when he turns tail and comes barrelling all the way back down again, h'herherher . . .’

Even Reiser's sniggering exploited women, Richard thought – but then, irresistibly, the opportunity to exploit them himself began to hold sway. ‘Actually,’ Richard dropped into the short-term maw that had opened up to receive this anecdote, ‘he didn't head for home.’

‘Oh no?’ Reiser crammed as much snot as he could into the two nasal vowels.

‘No, he came into the club.’

‘In here? Into the Sealink?’ This was from Ursula. She was talking to Richard – sort of His heart sang.

‘Yeah, in fact, he's standing right over there, gabbing to Julius.’

Six pairs of calculating eyes dipped, panned, and unobtrusively zoomed, so as to get a view of this John, this consummate mark. ‘H'herherh'her,’ Reiser tittered, ‘well I'll be buggered, young Richard's right!’

Everyone ignored him, because by certain subtle, even obscure, movements, Bell was indicating that he wished to speak. ‘OK,’ he pronounced, ‘let's have a little fun. Slatter, go to the front desk and find out bald boy's name. Reiser, you go with him. Once you've got hold of the handle, you go across the road. You say he went up to the top floor, well, it's obviously the whore
up there who he either wanted to see, or couldn't bear the sight of Give her some dosh, and get her to come back across here, sign herself in as baldy's guest, come into the bar and
faire un petit rendezvous.
That should stop us all from expiring with boredom, huh?’

Richard was stunned with a vibrating, cacophonous silence. He felt as if someone had clubbed him round the head with a two-pound fillet of wet fish.

He was still stunned three hours later, sitting on a stool in the farthest corner of The Hole, an illegal drinking club in a sub-sub-basement beneath a porn ‘n’ poppers shop on Old Compton Street. Richard was stunned by the sheer, wilful malice of it. He could still remember the expression on the poor man's face when the whore had come into the bar, sidled up to him, put her bruised arm through the epaulette of his trench coat, nuzzled her peroxide brow into his shoulder. Richard remembered the man's face, myopic, hurting, as the red had suffused from his neck, up through the sparse roots of his sparse hair. And Richard felt the shame he had provoked.

Now, he sat morosely, hanging on to a small plank of sobriety, while all around was a choppy sea of inebriation. Bell was there as well. He was standing

BOOK: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
3.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Core by Viola Grace
Charged - Book One by L.M. Moore
Turquoise Girl by Thurlo, David
Just Shy of Harmony by Philip Gulley
Disclaimer by Renée Knight
Ecce homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
MustLoveMusic by Jennifer Dunne
Seasons in the Sun by Strassel, Kristen