Vac (8 page)

I
SWUNG SEATED THROUGH
canals of velocity. I thought: our world is veined with causality. An impulse of love could retrieve our culture. The universe is more like a poem than an equation.

Mettlesome cars, ruled by wisps of complex flesh, charged through the night. The trees glowed white with erotic promise. The wreck of a mongrel dragged its shattered hind legs to the curb.

I entered the Vesuvius Club.

A massive brute, swathed in red fuzz, snored against the wall. A girl vibrated on a bar-stool. I fed disks of stamped silver into a costive iron paymaster.

Could she be alone?

The night, wearing flashy clothes, strolled past the door. The red brute slobbered in his sleep. But no husband or
boy-friend
lunged in to rape my carnal ambition.

She turned with an instant smile. We were not total strangers. For the past few minutes the mirrors had bounced our eyes about the room and several times they had met. She wailed:

As it toppled towards me I caught the frail web of her
personality.
Brilliant smiles and tiny starts tapped out a message of extremes. She was slim, dark and febrile. Her short dress was white with brown stripes and she promised.

Will you, Sonya? I had an idea you were one of the wild ones. I’m not opposed to getting you drunk. We’ve been to
four pubs already, cunningly selected by me to minimize the chances of bumping into troops of your eager friends. What? Everyone knows you in Chelsea? Ah but I doubt if you’ll be recognized in this little backwater pub. It’s understandable, Sonya, that girls who’ll do anything are popular.

She tore off sheets of her life for my perusal. She had children. She had a husband who still visited her:

She had a steady lover whose name was Fury. I’ve met girls like you before, Sonya. Spend the night, or a week of nights, with a chap and send your steady round with a blade if the chap falls for you. Honest, Sonya, I’d hate to get fond of you. I think you’re very attractive and gentle as a whip.

Are you approaching that desirable state? We are mounting the hill of dreams and death. A car went mad and hunted a dog to death. Actually I haven’t got a place. But I’m staying in a friend’s den. He’s gone away for a week.

Sonya, you—see how I drive, only one hand on the wheel? I know you didn’t come with me for love-making but leave my hand nesting there. It’s barely half-way up your leg. You see, Sonya—not drunk enough yet? Right, we’ll stop for
another,
a double. We’ll feast on whisky. Don’t look too closely, Sonya. You’ll see how ugly I am.
She
never did. There may be a thousand million inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone. Jim says we will never reach the stars. A little crest of mind on each planet waiting for the end of matter. Sonya—you will open your legs?

The saloon of The Tamberlaine was packed. Blond heads bobbed in the amber light. The whisky gleamed in gleaming glasses. There’s Ruth and Ian. Hope they don’t see us. Mean more delay.

The last lap. The faint nausea of anticipation tightening
my stomach, I kicked my vulgar convertible down the hill. Swing left, pull up.

I preceded her down the short, steep flight of stone steps. We reached the reek of dustbins. I opened a scarlet door and turned on the light. I preceded her down the short corridor of peeling paper and frayed carpet. I opened the room door and switched on the light. The palace of convulsive joy: a small square chamber deep in soiled garments and crumpled papers. Beneath a vortex of grimy bedding sagged a bed with a broken back.

A broad jet of warm air began to gush from the electric box. I stood up and turned to her. She was furled in the
armchair,
gazing at me intently. I stumbled forward but as I dropped to my knees in front of her, she snapped upright and breathed:

Then the room became rich with flesh and fabric.

Now she was standing near the bed, the brown stripes of her dress gaping to reveal a cusp of flesh and lace. The room began to sing. Her dress leaped to a chair. Her stockings sloughed from her legs and a frail garment slithered down her thighs. I reached for a loop of air and dragged myself towards her. The assumption of her slip began but I gave a
blasphemous
growl and pinned it to her body again. Then I tapped
peremptorily
the column of silk-lined flesh. It fell back on the tousled bed, nesting itself in stained blankets. I battled for a moment with cavalry twill and linen and then, warm air coursing about my loins and legs, dipped voluptuously towards her. As her legs swung majestically apart and my lips sank swiftly to kiss her lower lips, in a faint, strained tone, but one still softened by a Donegal lilt, she invited:

Soon her loins were jumping like a rodent and I could no longer keep my exciting tongue in place. So I surged up her body and slid my tool deep into her. Her motion barely
changed and I found, in spite of the trail of numbing whisky behind us, sensation gathering at once. A half dozen, a dozen strokes and, as I registered the mounting squeals in my ear, I plunged down in ejaculation.

A little later she said:

She said:

She said:

But the wild ways claimed her again. The next night, in the Vesuvius Club, this time awash with the sons of booze, the eddies plucked her repeatedly from my side. I watched her drift further and further with the shouting tide until she came to rest against a great black mooring-post of a gipsy. And when I paddled up to her and suggested we leave she said:

And that was the last I saw of Sonya.

M
OTHER COMFORTS EVERY
way but sexually. Whore only sexually.

A man is basically passive in relation to mother, active in relation to whore.

The transaction with whore is momentary, providing release from the burden of manifesting personality.

Whore has thus no duration.

Therefore wife cannot be whore.

Each woman is whore the first time.

In enduring marriages, wife regularly modulates through a brief whore phase, the honeymoon, into ‘old dear’, ‘old love’, etc., i.e. into mother.

The higher primates are, to varying degree, polygamous or herd animals.

The purpose of male promiscuity is in part the
accumulation
of a mental herd.

The governing drive of the male is the widest possible
dissemination
of seed, that of the female the reception and
elevation
to maturity of one single seed.

Cultural evolutionary factors having crystallized in the West into the ideal of the durable association between one man and one woman, maturity is equated with successful adaptation to monogamy.

Whore has no duration.

The essence of mother is reliable presence.

The original of whore is the breast. The original of mother is the provider of the breast.

The concept of the obscene is essentially an expression of
resentment towards mother for having it in her power to dispense or withhold whore.

By turning woman into an abstract display of breasts and genitals, i.e. into something obscene, one asserts one’s
independence
from mother.

But the obscene is the domain of whore who has no
duration.

One must return to mother to live.

R
AM WAS ONE
of the trail of bottle-bearing layabouts who followed us up the hill one Saturday night after the pubs closed.

When the last drop of cheap wine had been gulped and our random guests had ambled away we were both surprised to find a slight, dapper Indian in a red velvet jacket still entrenched in the living room. He spoke:

A gratuitously sceptical and thus irritating smile on his brown, baby face, Ram plucked at his thin moustache.
Maintaining
his superior air he questioned me. The questions were about literature, genius, style—the conventional conversational currency of bohemian districts. Yet I found myself getting more and more annoyed. The knowing smirk on his face seemed to imply that, in some mysterious but absolute sense, I was a fraud. Finally, while his sceptical stance remained
unshaken
I became quite heated and more or less ordered him to leave.

We marvelled over an alka-seltzer and went to bed.

When was it? Oh yes bouncing down French roads in my ancient Ford, we discussed attractive qualities in people. Jim, you and I enthusiastically agreed—I daresay convinced that to some extent anyway we three possessed it—that the one irresistible quality a person can have is vitality.

Ram had vitality all right.

Even through my anger that first evening I reluctantly registered it. He looked like a pocket maharajah, gleaming eye,
taut, trimmed moustache, face mingling a schoolboy and the devil. When he stood in his underpants in the erotic squalor of his basement flat, probing my views cautiously with
sidelong
glances, there was an unmistakable air of coquetry about him. But on the few alcohol-relaxed occasions when I hugged his warm body to mine, tenderness was the nearest thing to desire I consciously felt.

Consciousness, we know, is addicted to an ostentatious
display
of what opposes subconscious urges. Still I doubt if the enviable parade of girls which Ram, in those days when my sick fidelity restrained me from more than a surreptitious caress or embrace masked as gaiety, led through the saloon bar of The Hart testified to the classical flight from
homosexuality.
But perhaps it did.

There were certainly elements of homosexuality in our
relationship.

We were forever probing each other’s sex lives.

Twice we shared a girl.

We seemed to mobilize strong emotional responses in each other.

Our relationship proved incapable of finding a stable state.

At times I adored him.

And at others I could have throttled the little bastard!

But he would, sure enough, produce evidence of evasion or partiality. Or even, alas, of fabrication of evidence.
Cock-sure
of my general thesis and indignant with memory or
learning
for not supplying the datum I required to substantiate it, I was capable of:

He was the most untrusting damned
shishya
a nimble
guru
ever had!

Ram enjoyed the use of one of the firm’s cars and hurled it about London with cavalier and often drunken abandon. On one occasion I turned, after he had dropped me, because I heard a clangour as of armies locked in conflict. What I beheld was Ram trying to turn his car round in the narrow street. Rabid at the wheel, he clanged back and forth off the rows of parked vehicles. I watched fascinated for some time as he punished steel but hastened through my front door as the first incredulous owner rushed gibbering out of his house. After that I refused to be chauffeured by him. Still, the frugality of his actual harvest of disaster—a few mangled animals and buckled panels—enabled him to maintain the haughty hypothesis that he was a magnificent driver, dogged by petty misfortune.

He was also a mighty poet whose universal recognition was impeded only by the fact that he had somehow never actually written any mighty poetry.

He was also:

He was also the sole principle of efficiency in the industrial equipment firm for which he worked. This seemed relatively plausible. They flew him about England and sometimes Europe to lecture salesmen. They gave him a car and a lavish expense account. They refrained from sacking him. Yet his week’s work, judging from the frequency with which a call at his sordid little flat, dripping with sperm and menstrual blood, found him at home, represented a few visits to the office when he succeeded in easing his hangover out of bed at a reasonable
hour. However, in spite of his contribution towards its
decadence,
no one was more critical of British industry than Ram:

He was the scourge of his fellow countrymen.

His tirade would only be halted by our arriving, in my car, at an Indian restaurant for curry.

But I am making fun of Ram. He wrote a novel,
unpublished
so far, that contained an infamous caricature of me. I had intended to maintain the lofty impartiality of this work even when retaliat—er—describing him, but possibly some slight bias has crept in. Affectionate bias, of course! There’s not a drop of venom in my nature!

Real and yet the projections of a dream. Irony stands in the centre of the ring and suddenly darts a mocking finger at—me, you, that sage, this reformer. Thought whirls in the grip of the magnets of necessity. Intent on ripping loose and ploughing through light-years of reality it achieves only—higher velocity. We ripple into different shapes like fish beneath water and imagine we legislate for a stable system. The brain is
composed
of circuits and the idea that seems to be winging into
mystery orbits back into cliché. Horrible, the life dedicated to a noble ideal which reveals itself, too late for redemption, to have been a neurotic need.

Ideal figures drifting in thought, we affirm our inescapably parochial values. A paragraph by a probing intelligence
obliterates
the meaning of a million heroic lives. The ones who will tell us what and why we were are not seeded yet in seeds and may not walk and think for a thousand years. And yet we must have myths in order to move.

A coil of parties.

The stocky Italian gazed through thick lenses at the
thrashing
boys and girls. He wanted an orgy. He wanted to film it for public consumption and also, I felt, for his own
delectation
. I had asked him if Italian youth held parties like this.

Beneath the glamour of the idea—under the parasol held by the publicist to ward off the complex and dire rays of reality—the struggle incessantly continues. There are no orgies. There are no parties. There are no film stars. There are no wise dons who understand. The confrontation is perpetual and perpetually challenging, the confrontation with the new.

As our glance meets, stark alien, we construct each other’s face.

Irony, a small, demonic Indian, lounges in the centre of the ring. As we come round, borne round on the grave fury of events, into contradiction of what we have long professed, his mocking finger lifts and a peal of Vedantic laughter shudders through the arena.

See them separate out. Here in the lab of history,
precipitating
out of the modest girls and pious youths of our ideal
grandparents,
the throbbing cats at the party.

That chick half-stoned on hash and Spanish red, squeezing
her fellow’s buttocks as they writhe, strolled eighty years ago demurely on the lawn, blushing at the respectful bow of the subaltern on leave next door. Dad’s still a bank manager. Small manic Indian with glowing eyes appropriates her and she sinks into his practised arms. The other shrugs faintly and looks about for another dolly and a murmur of vedantic laughter drifts round the room.

As we danced, I was implacably conscious of the press of bodies around us.

I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs.

I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs. And the haunches of the girls. My hand cradled a stubby tumbler of wine.

As we danced I pressed Eleanour against me. You came up behind and kicked me on the leg. I turned to confront the glittering smile of challenge on your face.

Stavros had made twelve Greek salads. One room was full of toys.

We couldn’t move in the passage. The crowd immobilized us. As we waited for the slow current to carry us into one of the rooms I allowed the back of my hand to press gently against Eleanour’s tender mound. She gazed at me
thoughtfully.

The salads were excellent. Cheerful, free-loading
bohemians
congregated in the tiny kitchen spooning up black-eyed beans. I ate some of the chick peas, which tasted really
excellent
the way Stavros had prepared them.

Milo made fourteen Iberian salads for his party. These were excellent. I sat on a publisher’s knee.

As I danced with Emmeline Crabbe, I caressed her breast with my left hand and her buttocks with my right. You came up behind her and jammed your cigarette into my hand. Sullen, I removed you from the party. We quarrelled for a week.

I sat glumly on the divan in the field of the weaving
buttocks
of the girls. Milo said:

When they refused to admit her, Rita burst into tears and punched her fist through the glass panel in the door. She
received
numerous cuts, several of them deep, and I was secretly glad to be spared the grim erotic quest that evening by the self-imposed task of stanching Rita’s wounds.

As we danced, I was implacably conscious of the press of bodies around us.

Water gushed into the sink and sprayed the girls clustered around the man who was ineffectually trying to mend the tap.

Rita lay down the floor, tugged her skirt up to her waist and screamed:

I stood by the slops on the table and watched the writhing bodies. I took a paper cup from the table and furtively trickled whisky into it from my reserve supply.

I went into the bathroom and found a girl changing her skirt for thick, winter trousers. I grabbed her at once. As we kissed I watched the door anxiously lest you appear on my trail.

I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs.

There was a camp-fire in the garden. There was a balcony round the studio. There was a spiral staircase leading to
split-level
bedrooms. There was a huge kitchen with a bath in the
middle. There was only one lavatory and nearly two hundred guests.

They’re smoking pot in the small kitchen upstairs. There’s a blue film running in the front room. They’re charging half a crown to see it. I’ve stashed two bottles of special Dutch gin at the back of the fridge. There’s a girl having hysterics in that bedroom. There are three blokes with her. They claim they’re looking after her but they’ve got her half-undressed. There are seven policemen at the door. There’s a girl standing on the balcony holding her skirt over her head. There’s a bloke vomiting in the lavatory. He’s been at it for two hours. There’s an ambulance in the street.

Large-eyed, with the transparent evasiveness of a child, you received the electrifying news. I asked flatly:

You shrugged with bogus indifference.

Cliché situations that mobilized petrified attitudes. We were not exploring each other’s views. We were rehearsing tacit pleas. I was silently imploring you to say: