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Authors: Martin Amis
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was something like, But we used to get on so well, the believers and the infidels … It wasn’t really a fight between different religions, or between different countries. It was a fight between different centuries. What would future historians call it? The Time War, perhaps, or the War of the Clocks.
The secret police of the regime that had just been deposed went by the name of Jihaz al-Haneen. This included the torture corps—whose operatives were scholars of pain. Yet Jihaz al-Haneen translated as
the instrument of yearning
. The only way the phrase made any sense to him was as a description of the human body.
• • •
He had his wound coming, a different kind of wound, in the castle in Italy. It was the sensory opposite of torture: her pincers of bliss, her lips, her fingertips. And what remained in the aftermath? Her manacles, her branding irons.
It was here and all around them. What were they to do, the young ones? The response to the sea change, the realignment of power: this was the thing they were beginning to feel their way through, along with hundreds of millions of others. It was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution.
You see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes.
Book Two
Dreamball
1
WHERE WERE THE POLICE?
Under the burning axle of the parent star, he sat topless, poolside, his face inclined over the pages of
Peregrine Pickle
. Peregrine had just attempted (and failed) to drug (and ravish) Emily Gauntlet, his wealthy fiancée … Keith kept looking at his watch.
“You keep looking at your watch,” said Lily.
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. And you’ve been down here since seven.”
“Eight thirty, Lily. Beautiful morning. And I wanted to say goodbye to Conchita. You know, I have a bond with Conchita. And it’s more than us both being adopted … Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the time. I was thinking about drugging girls. They’re
all
at it.”
Lily said, “What’s the time got to do with drugging girls? I suppose drugging girls was your only hope—back then. That was how you did it.”
“Yeah.” He thought, now, of another ex-girlfriend: Doris. “Yeah. Instead of going on at them about the sexual revolution. Bending their ear about the sexual revolution … Have you decided yet? Whether to get your top brown?”
“Yes. And the answer’s no. Put yourself in my position. How would you like to sit here naked with Tarzan?”
He stood up and strolled to the water’s edge. Oona and Amen had independently come and gone—their morning lengths; and Keith was wondering about the unreliable optics of the swimming pool. Its walls and floor were a metallic grey. When the water was still, its surface shone solidly and impenetrably, like a mirror; when the water rippled, or when the light changed (from shadow to dazzle, but also from dazzle to shadow), it became translucent, and you could see the fat plug at thebottom of the deep end, and even the odd coin or hairclip. He wondered at it, this grey new world of glass and opacity, and not the wobbly, slippery, ribbony blue of the pools of his youth.
“Here she comes.”
Scheherazade was decanting herself downward through the three tiers of the terraced gradient, and now moved through a bower-and-hothouse setting as she neared the water, barefoot but in tennis wear—a quilted skirt of pale green, and a yellow Fred Perry. She twirled off the lower half of it (he thought of an apple being pared) and tugged herself out of the upper; and then she made wings of her long arms and unclipped the upper half of her bikini (and it was gone—with the merest shrug it was gone), saying,
“Here’s another boring thing.”
Of course, this wasn’t boring either. On the other hand, it would have been disgracefully callow and bourgeois (and uncool) to take the slightest notice of what was now on view; so Keith had the difficult task of looking at Lily (in housecoat and flip-flops and still in the shade) while
The secret police of the regime that had just been deposed went by the name of Jihaz al-Haneen. This included the torture corps—whose operatives were scholars of pain. Yet Jihaz al-Haneen translated as
the instrument of yearning
. The only way the phrase made any sense to him was as a description of the human body.
• • •
He had his wound coming, a different kind of wound, in the castle in Italy. It was the sensory opposite of torture: her pincers of bliss, her lips, her fingertips. And what remained in the aftermath? Her manacles, her branding irons.
It was here and all around them. What were they to do, the young ones? The response to the sea change, the realignment of power: this was the thing they were beginning to feel their way through, along with hundreds of millions of others. It was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution.
You see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes.
Book Two
Dreamball
1
WHERE WERE THE POLICE?
Under the burning axle of the parent star, he sat topless, poolside, his face inclined over the pages of
Peregrine Pickle
. Peregrine had just attempted (and failed) to drug (and ravish) Emily Gauntlet, his wealthy fiancée … Keith kept looking at his watch.
“You keep looking at your watch,” said Lily.
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. And you’ve been down here since seven.”
“Eight thirty, Lily. Beautiful morning. And I wanted to say goodbye to Conchita. You know, I have a bond with Conchita. And it’s more than us both being adopted … Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the time. I was thinking about drugging girls. They’re
all
at it.”
Lily said, “What’s the time got to do with drugging girls? I suppose drugging girls was your only hope—back then. That was how you did it.”
“Yeah.” He thought, now, of another ex-girlfriend: Doris. “Yeah. Instead of going on at them about the sexual revolution. Bending their ear about the sexual revolution … Have you decided yet? Whether to get your top brown?”
“Yes. And the answer’s no. Put yourself in my position. How would you like to sit here naked with Tarzan?”
He stood up and strolled to the water’s edge. Oona and Amen had independently come and gone—their morning lengths; and Keith was wondering about the unreliable optics of the swimming pool. Its walls and floor were a metallic grey. When the water was still, its surface shone solidly and impenetrably, like a mirror; when the water rippled, or when the light changed (from shadow to dazzle, but also from dazzle to shadow), it became translucent, and you could see the fat plug at thebottom of the deep end, and even the odd coin or hairclip. He wondered at it, this grey new world of glass and opacity, and not the wobbly, slippery, ribbony blue of the pools of his youth.
“Here she comes.”
Scheherazade was decanting herself downward through the three tiers of the terraced gradient, and now moved through a bower-and-hothouse setting as she neared the water, barefoot but in tennis wear—a quilted skirt of pale green, and a yellow Fred Perry. She twirled off the lower half of it (he thought of an apple being pared) and tugged herself out of the upper; and then she made wings of her long arms and unclipped the upper half of her bikini (and it was gone—with the merest shrug it was gone), saying,
“Here’s another boring thing.”
Of course, this wasn’t boring either. On the other hand, it would have been disgracefully callow and bourgeois (and uncool) to take the slightest notice of what was now on view; so Keith had the difficult task of looking at Lily (in housecoat and flip-flops and still in the shade) while
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