The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (6 page)

BOOK: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
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The first anecdote featured an aristocratic girl, crazed by cocaine, whom Trellet had forced to lick kitchen tiling, lick herself, lick him – in order to get the merest lick of cocaine. The second was more in the manner of a revelation. Trellet – it was unfolded with nauseating aplomb – kept a Down's Syndrome adolescent mistress (this was
dignifying
it – obviously sex slave would have been nearer the truth), in a flat on the far side of Battersea Bridge. Trellet, jowls bunching, contorting with delight, gave details of domestic arrangements, and then more forced accommodations.

Ursula Bentley leant against the banisters, a Venus in spangles, trails of her long, dark brown hair twining around her upper body, forming a growing bodice. The good thing about opium is that when you're on it only the things that matter, matter. Or so thought Richard as he gathered himself together, and made the supreme effort of not registering the fact that Trellet was extending visiting privileges – ‘You wouldn't believe it mate, her mouth's that sloppy, that
gooey
.’ Richard got upright. He walked around the table-football table to where Ursula stood, put a firm hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I'm going to get a cab now – perhaps you should let me get one for you as well?’

He was as surprised as he would have been had she at that point brokered an IRA ceasefire when Ursula smiled and said, ‘Yes.’

On the night of Mearns's greenmail party Richard ended up taking the cab all the way back to Ursula's flat in Kensington with her. She rumpled his curls once more, said he was ‘sweet’, pecked him near the cheek, and didn't demur when he suggested that they have lunch together at some unspecified time in the future. It wasn't until the cab pulled away that Richard realised he had only a tenner plus some change in his pocket.
Ursula, typically, hadn't ventured a contribution, and he had no plastic or chequebook. The cabbie took him as far as Notting Hill before turfing him out, and Richard walked on from there.

Walked on through a distempered ground mist, across the Portobello Road, and up past the Front Line, where even at this hour the crack-heads were gathered in knots of desperation on the corner by the bookie's, their eyes tracking the passing cars like the targeting laser beams of ground-to-crack missiles. Richard knew what they were, what they wanted. He identified with them more than they could ever possibly know.

He reached Hornsey well after dawn, his body swathed in clashing, contrasting colours of narcosis: blue, red, purple; up, down, zigzag; but despite it all he still had the groin-borne horn, was still thinking about Ursula, imagining her in any number of poses and postures, naked, clothed, her limbs bent back, or even amputated – like the piss-head in the East End doorway – so as to aid more effective penetration. Yet when bed got to Richard, he found that he was spent with lust, that he could no longer either summon her up or contain himself After three strokes, he came like a beer belly spluttering in a pub toilet – great gouts of
spunk that drenched his doll's-house duvet. Needless to say, he didn't make it in to
Rendezvous
later that morning.

Autumn quit London, a transient, seasonal tourist clad in leaves of tan Burberry, and left the city behind to endure its own chill, its own immemorial, hibernatory dolour.

Every dog has his day, and Richard Hermes succeeded the glove fetishist as the Preview Editor of
Rendezvous.
His new job accorded him some perks, including the speedy advancement of his candidature for election to the Sealink Club. It now took him only five, instead of fifteen, minutes to get a drink from Julius. He also moved further towards the eye, the howling vacuity, at the epicentre of Bell's clique. He was included as a matter of course in the phone rounds that preceded clique meetings. He was patronised and humiliated as much as the others – but no longer more so.

On nights when he couldn't find the wherewithal, the energy, to meet them at this or that restaurant, or bar, or club, he would get calls from crackly mobiles: ‘Richard . . . Yah, it's me, Bell. We were just thinking that there's one thing really missing from the evening.
Ursula's here and she's feeling a bit . . . I dunno . . . a bit overcome. She says she really just wants to see you – ‘

‘Really! Where are you?’

‘We're in this place . . . Slatter, what's this place?’ The sound of tittering, guffawing, no exchange of information that Richard's straining ear could detect, and then: ‘Yeah, it's a Greek j oint on the Finch – ‘ Then invariably the line would go dead, leaving Richard in hellish limbo, not knowing whether to go through the
Yellow Pages
looking for every correlation of ‘Greek restaurant’ and the single first syllable ‘Finch’, or simply to butt his head against the wall until unconsciousness, unconscious-of-Ursulaness, set in.

And sometimes calls would come really late at night, at three, four, or five, after Richard had left Ursula at home (which he was now permitted to do – and pay for), or still out with the clique. He would be dreaming, chasing her along some Mediterranean strand, when the insistent trill would pull him back to the sweaty confines of his bed, yank him up, yank the receiver up – ‘y-yeah – who'ssat?’ – only for his ear to be met with the evil purr of the dialling tone, and, when he tried 1471, with the chilling, robotic information ‘You were called today at four-forty-five hours; sorry, we do
not have the number . . .’ It was the ‘sorry’ that was the killer; for, if the recorded voice
were truly
sorry, it was the most sympathy that Richard had ever received for his predicament.

Things got worse in some ways and better in others. The activities of Bell and his clique were as vicious, sophomoric and cynical as ever, but at the same time Richard's suit of Ursula was progressing, albeit at the pace of a snail on Tuinal. They had lunch together most weeks in a sandwich bar equidistant from her flat and the offices of
Rendezvous.
On these occasions her entire manner was different, she was the Ursula he wanted . . . he wanted . . . he wanted to make his wife. She preferred tuna and mayonnaise on brown bread, while he invariably had salami on rye.

Gone was the terminal merriment of her evening self the louche demeanour, flash of leg, side of breast, whisper of pudenda. Gone was the coke fakeover, the lips red as ketchup, the eyes sparkling like crystals on a mirror. Gone too was that scent, that sweet, ineffable, seductive perfume. The one that Richard associated with her, as surely as he associated gravity with the earth. And with the scent gone she was more approachable, more girl-next-door than was altogether credible.

She was skittish, coltish, vouchsafing little gobbets of her past, a past that was wholly charming to Richard, matching as it did his own in most respects: a father she loved, but felt distanced from by divorce; a mother whose influence she was still attempting to shake off; siblings who would come up to the city to enjoy her giddy round, and then berate her for her lack of conviction, application, seriousness. She and Richard would commiserate with each other, mull over each other's petty miseries and dissatisfactions. Richard would even discuss her latest column, without in any way averring – even to himself – that what she wrote had all the mondial impact of a used cotton bud falling on to a damp towel.

But on these occasions Bell and the clique would never be mentioned, and when they met up again, that evening or the next in the bar of the Sealink, it would be neglect as usual. The same old brackish badinage, the same cruel jokes. And Ursula would behave as if the lunches never took place, as if there was no link between the two worlds they now inhabited.

There was also a further, more unsettling downside. As cold infiltrated the city, taking possession first of the foundations of the buildings, and then of successive
storeys, working its way up until chill of earth and chill of sky effected union, so the press beanos, the book launches, the première parties reached new heights of purposeless frenzy. The members of the clique weren't simply having dinner with Pablo now, they were also having tea most days, lunch on some, and even the occasional, high-powered, breakfast meeting.

This was because in early November the clique had acquired a new cocaine dealer, courtesy of Slatter. This individual was a Slatteralike, so dusted with ‘druff that it was hard not to imagine that some of his product had escaped its packagingto form an unorthodox mini-piste. But on the plus side, his tackle was always of the best – creamy white, rocky, unstepped on – and he turned up whenever and wherever, at the touch of a few rubberised buttons. So frequently, indeed, did Richard call upon the dealer's services (usually at Ursula's behest) that he soon ascended the ranking of frequent callers programmed into the dealer's mobile, until he was well up in the top ten of the snort parade.

Richard was doing so much cocaine now that the numbers that should have been intaglioed into the back of his credit card were embossed, raised up like the word
‘POLO’
on the eponymous mint – only back to front.
Richard was doing so much cocaine now that some mornings the rigid mucilage in his nostrils couldn't be shifted, even with a sharp nail and generous sluicings of salted warm water. He seriously considered going down to the mews garage at the end of his road and asking the surly mechanic there to rebore his nose to a higher calibre.

Richard was doing so much cocaine now that he never worried about getting involuntary erections; instead he worried about ever getting another erection at all.

But most disturbingly of all, the increased cocaine consumption brought with it more of what Richard termed – in order to take some of the sinister sting out of them –
belles époques.
These were those veridical occurrences – like the one he had had at the Sealink on the evening of Mearns's greenmail party – when he thought he saw Bell's familiar features, but then looked again to discover that it was some other cliquer who was withering at him.

Walking up Old Compton Street one grey, hungover morning, he saw Bell's broad back bent low over the public phone in the gay café on the corner of Frith Street. Richard was surprised to see the big man out
this early, and as he approached the back – fashionably suited by Barries in the finest of hound's-tooth checks – he checked and rechecked, to be sure. He even worked his way around the horizon of dark brow very slowly, very carefully, as a space probe might make its way over the curvature of an alien planet, in order to be certain that he wasn't committing some awful solecism.

But it was definitely Bell. The flesh had that exact Bell shade, like the inside lip of an old Wedgwood teacup, and the black bangs arched over in exactly the right way. The hand that grasped receiver against ear even had Bell's signet ring on its fourth finger. Richard said ‘Hiyah!’ brightly, but somewhere between the ‘Hi’ and the ‘yah’ the figure on the phone turned, and as the face came into view there was an instant when two sets of features were revealed to Richard simultaneously: those of Bell, and those of someone else. Then the Bell features dissolved and he was looking straight into Trellet's face. The venal thespian expostulated, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Grabbing hold of me like that – get off!’

Richard reeled away, back into the street. His head pounded. He wasn't so much humiliated as painfully disoriented, perplexed. There was that – and there
was the oppressive smell of Jicki in the air. Why was Trellet wearing the fragrance Richard associated solely with Ursula? There was no particular reason why he shouldn't, but it did seem a bizarre coincidence.

Then there was the occasion when Richard had arranged to meet Todd Reiser for some sushi in the little café in the basement of the Japanese Centre on Brewer Street. Richard was late. That morning had been one of the worst – hangover-wise – he could remember. His nose had bled when he blew it over the soapdish-sized sink in his Hornsey flat; and then he'd fainted, banging his head hard on the radiator as he went down. Richard hadn't even bothered to go into
Rendezvous;
he'd simply sent a ‘sick’ fax from the bureau on the corner of his road. His co-workers weren't that taken aback – they already had a slew of the things, which they'd pinned to a photograph of Richard up on the office bulletin board. Pinned to his nose, to be precise.

Cramped and bent, he had come down the narrow flight of stairs to the sushi bar. Hunched over one of the lacquered boxes of fish niblets was – Bell! But as Richard descended, and Bell's chopsticks ascended to his sculpted lips, the big man seemed to shimmer, to dissolve, like a
reflection in agitated water, the transmogrification was effected that quickly. In Bell's place sat Todd Reiser, grinning facetiously.

Richard gulped, heaved. The lingering scent of Jicki was in the air, with its faintly sticky
mélange
of fruits and flowers. Richard said nothing, moved past Reiser and went straight to the toilet, where he had an
hots d'œuvre
with Pablo.

But most of the
belles époques
occurred at the Sealink – and occurred with a mounting rhythm. Whenever Richard ran into any of the clique members off guard, in the brasserie, the restaurant, the table-football room or either of the bars, he would see them first as Bell and only latterly as themselves. And always there was the smell of Jicki, the smell of Ursula.

Richard would have been more disturbed by all of this had it not been for the fact that he knew he was getting closer to Ursula, closer to making her his. She now allowed him to kiss her full on both cheeks when they met, and near the perfect bow of her lips when they parted. Day by day, party by party, line of coke by line of coke, Richard's mouth drew closer to Ursula's. He knew that she liked him; she made it abundantly clear. She had stopped talking of her sexual affairs in
his presence – something he was grateful for. In the past she had referred to them deliberately, coldly, as if assaying the exact quantities of bile and envy she could engender in him. But now she would often back out when the clique's prattling became prurient, take Richard by the arm and draw him away.

BOOK: The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
3.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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