Читать книгу Whoring Around - John Bryson - Страница 5

Humphrey stood on the footpath outside the bar, pressed against the cardinal and gold panels by the troubled volumes of Chinese, and leaning away from them as if he were falling off some tireless production line of human figures. An overhead neon sign flashed between English and Chinese to the rhythm of a quick heartbeat and shadowed his jawline as though he were clenching his teeth.

The entrance became a stairwell. Humphrey brushed the front of his suit with his hands. The bottom stairs darkened and the passageway opened into a larger room before he noticed the change.

He could see one bar only. It was circular and Humphrey could make out six, perhaps eight drinkers around it. He could not see a bar-girl until he was close enough to slide onto a stool.

She was naked, but for a scarf printed with a red hibiscus bloom in her lap, and she lay on a couch. Her body lit the drinkers’ faces like a flame; it was the only source of light. She lifted an arm and the faces flared and flickered. The bar held her in a crucible and from its edges a canopy of cigarette smoke drifted to a lamp set into the ceiling.

Her head rolled to face him, the flat cheeks glittering like gilded gift paper, the cut-out eyes wide and empty. She smelled of camphorwood incense. She swung her legs to the floor and sat upright, as light as a marionette. But tall, Humphrey thought, for a Chinese. She was oiled. Humphrey pulled his hands from the bar as if he had been irreverent. The girl leaned forward; her breasts were barely fuller than a boy’s. But she was not so young, maybe, you can’t tell with Asians. The virgins, especially, all look young. He took the printed drink list from her. Thank you, he began, but she had dropped from his sight and he could hear the changing of cassettes in a console under the bar. He could not read the list easily. Poor light rather than too much wine at dinner, I haven’t had that much.

He heard laughter and smoke wavered like a veil. Humphrey looked at the other drinkers. None was Chinese. An American, chunky as an amateur wrestler and wearing a university T-shirt, held the hand of one Englishwoman and talked to another. A merchant seaman chanted a Glasgow football dirge in a slow rumble, chin hard against his chest as if fighting wind, so drunk he could not lift his full glass from the bar. A Japanese sat opposite in business shirt and tie but without a suit-coat, sharpening his cigarette on the ashtray like the tip of a pencil. Humphrey picked up a match folder and opened it. A pair of cardboard breasts flopped out, Boob’s Bar Kowloon. He put them back.

Thank you, he said, I’ll have a scotch, and again when she had poured, thank you, and as she slid the glass toward him on a coaster shaped like a pair of heavy watermelons, thank you very much, he said. She gave not the slightest sign of interest.

Humphrey felt the effects of the whisky quickly. Its vapours filled his chest with a heated perfume and his eyes moistened. He was not a heavy drinker by the standards he knew, not practised, not by his father’s measure. Nor by his wife’s. Mimi said it often: some men drink, she put it, easily. He preferred to drink at home, or at the tennis club where he was then known as a good fourth, and he feared the house parties given by Mimi’s friends largely because he could not break into the circular conversations of the husbands, through their bumping guffaws, Mimi, I can’t burrow down between their legs and heave up into the topic like a half-blind mole, it’s not me. He sat with the women, do you mind, until their smiles drifted away in the diffident swirls of his interjections and she had to take him home.

Every night he worked in the study. You won’t get the job, Mim told him. Humphrey did not answer her. He kept working. She told him again when she got home from the theatre. She was not surprised to find him still working. The paper work made five neat piles on the desk. Before they were married, she now told even her lunchtime friends, she had mistaken his diligence for ambition. Not a chance, she told him.

But he did. Humphrey set up the structure of the Fossil Extracts Conference in less than two months. He was appointed to do it, you were wrong Mimi, he said without bile for his stomach had been scoured by twenty years of their resentments, I have been assigned until further notice. His employer was one of ten member companies to the agreement, to the Conference, as they called it. Each of those companies converted fossil deposits into a convenient form for processing into plastics or fuels or packaging materials and sold the product to their own subsidiaries or to each other. The plants and animals that had laid down their lives to bubble into gastric slime had lived three hundred million years before, dying mindlessly in geomantic layers for heat and pressure to harden for the benefit of posterity. Those companies saw themselves as that posterity and benefited. But the companies multiplied, Mimi, listen to me and you will understand it, multiplied according to laws of available sustenance older than the vulcanised moors they dug. The answer was a cartel.

Think of it, Mimi, a cartel, and Humphrey began from scratch, he told her, it’s never been done like this before, on this scale. The Heads of Agreement were slim by comparison, but the ancillary contracts, the documentation, would fill half a dark room, memoranda and articles drawn and submitted and drawn again, Whereas the Parties Desire, by ten firms of lawyers, their names alone take up a page and a half, working in teams around the clock in shirtsleeves like poker players on a streak, that’s why I’m late, and lobbying for government sanction, delicate but we can, he told us over lunch, look to favourable consideration, he is a source close to the Minister, what’s good for the nation, though the Party contribution is a hundred grand more than we budgeted, but we should hear by Tuesday, by Friday he thinks, when it’s all done, Mimi, we’ll spend a few days at the coast, don’t bother she said, and Humphrey designed a staff structure stronger than a family tree but without, the Board laughed with him, the dead wood, and the recommendations are in, working capital, and lines of credit established in Dollars and Yen and Deutschmark, en demande, a phonecall and it’s there.

There.

The effort had drained Humphrey of his reserve. He was too tired to cover the childishness of his anticipation. I’ll be going to Japan, Mimi, as head of the Conference. Hong Kong and Japan first, Europe later.

No chance, she said.

We want you to go to Japan, they told him. The sheets of his recommendations were strewn the length of the Boardroom table, a crazy-path, Mimi, from the bottom to the top, you were wrong.

To Japan, they paused, as assistant to Butcher. Butcher of Mincorp, they told me, he will lead you. I know him, Humphrey said, a good choice, and closed the panelled door quietly as he left.

How can you hold up your head, she said, you’re as timid as a bird. You’re being screwed as usual. Anger hardened in his throat like a growth. I can do that too, all expense account, screw my prick off.

Screwing it on is the problem, she turned toward her dressing-room, you’ve forgotten where you put it. Humphrey sat on the bed.

So the march to destroy the spectre of competition begins, he called after her, not to the hymns of uniting workers, but to the rattling chains of capital. Humphrey pulled off his shoes. Think of it, Mimi, and as he thought of it, Humphrey knew the lapping tide of his laughter had begun to turn after a thirty-year ebb.

Humphrey’s glass was again empty. He did not know how many he had drained. The girl reached from the couch to the console, and Humphrey pushed his glass forward but she turned the volume louder and lay back, tapping her slicked belly to the rubber-ball syncopations of its catchy beat as if her skin had been tensioned.

She was the most beautiful object he had ever seen, a perfection that struck him as intensely inhuman. It reached beyond mood or character, as vacantly exquisite as a rich sarcophagus. Reaching beyond morality and inhibition; yet without prerogative or authority. She was entirely servile, an item of male plunder.

It excited him and he quickly confused this with manhood. She would do anything I want, he thought, that is what she is for. Anything at all.

This is a demesne some men are born to and others assume or appropriate; the Brothers who had taught him and the priests who married and absolved him must have known it though it was never directly spoken, and merely hinted in the displays of Asian and Roman and Egyptian antiquity to which Mimi had dragged him with the impatience of a schoolmistress through the interminable makeshift labyrinths of exhibition galleries, past the eyes of regents and their sacrificed concubines scaled with the ancient mail of their imperishable currency, past tribunes and their maidens in terracotta held together only by the diminishing humidity of an age, past deathmasks carved in pairs by whittlers who were somehow longer dead than the ageless cry they continue to immortalise, you do not understand it Mimi, but she would not listen; even he had not seen what they were really showing him, that each was master by merely acts of will; he understood it only at this very instant and the power of it made him sit upright, though he knew his straightening back was a metaphor for the pitiless hardening of his virility.

I will talk to her. But as he thought of it, scraps of adolescent failure rustled in his memory like old photographs. He fingered his gold lighter, I might give it to her, a present to inflame your admirers. Mimi had given it to him on their wedding anniversary the year before. The case held a roughly grained texture and felt heavy in the hand. He had seen it previously in the richly draped centrecase of a boutique at the corner of their street and had rejected the idea of it as a gift for her. An excess of expenditure over imagination, Mimi.

Three men now drank together on the opposite side of the bar. He had not seen them enter. She will light their cigarettes with an insolent snap but otherwise ignore them. The merchantman from Glasgow still sat alone, his mallet chin slumped onto the knitted bulk of his navy chest. He seemed to focus on her but could not hold it. He pressed his glass to his chest with both hands. Humphrey waited for it to shatter. The sailor stood as the stool tumbled slowly to the floor. His jowls began to work but their slabs made the stiff articulations of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He thought he was singing. Humphrey’s fingers tightened on the edge of the bar but the sailor made for the door in his fitful waltz to a heaving sea, the glass dropped and his hands reached for a steel railing. That seaman had, she will tell me in her whisper of a sad confidant, sat at her bar for the last five nights, pouring whisky into his hard mouth as mechanically as filling a boiler, chanting the slow homesick songs of Scotland. His ship, she will say it pressing the tips of my fingers, his ship steamed for home at five this morning.

His glass was again full. How many times might she have served it with such humility that no ripple of it reached him? Perhaps he had simply not drunk the last.

She sat facing the Japanese. Their conversation was solemn. She sat straight as a schoolgirl and the round of her buttocks gleamed the colour of waxed oranges. She would do anything I want, it is the way she lives, her vocation. How much will it cost? No matter, we can go to your hotel-room and relax, she will say. The money is little, enough to purchase the evening she would lose for her boss, she will tell me, to pay for another in her place. His gambling debts in Macao do not allow him to be more generous. I pull a lump of crushed notes from my pocket. The money is nothing. Her parents are two years dead. The rent of her high concrete room and its balcony flapping with gay laundry is a pittance. A top-coat she has on order for a month now, she tells me, is almost ready, the tailor is her uncle but he needs forty-two dollars for the material. A nice-girl’s coat, she says, I look respectful, I must be well dressed to keep my job.

Humphrey felt a sudden glare from her body on his cheek. She was turning toward him. Her face was as expressionless as beaten foil. She was her own reflected image. His breath caught in his chest as though he had been running and he could see her mouth move but he could hear nothing.

I will have her.

I will slip the first of my words lightly about her shoulder, almost to touch the swayed back of her doll-smooth neck, watching the eyelids wisp lower to hide her interest, lilting my vowels over the faintest tip of worldly conceit, hold the conversation momentarily still, a neutrality offering the opportunity of acquiescence by hesitation and then by default, hiding the impetus of a later excitement softly under the swelling puberty of her breast until she is held by the feather-lightness of its breath on her skin, fluttering down the tightening of her belly, an insistence pressed against the bowl of her childish buttock, knowing the slackening of her open lips is a lust of which she is not now ashamed, and we grasp at it, both, into a dancing, hip-jerking abandon, thrusting under the rose-tinctured moisture of it and she can not close her flooding eyes against the virgin terror of its ruthless meaning, gripped with an urgency that is no longer cruel, dashed against each other by an overwhelming truth deep-pouring from me with the sudden essence of a bursting sac, an explosion, concussive and blinding, tears running into my salty cry with the slow memory of pain, revolving to the sweeter crux of pity, from which I can no longer move.

Mother of God.

I’m drunker than I thought, he said aloud, and wiped his cheek.

Well, she said, you coming to life now, time enough. Buy me a drink this time?

No.

He could answer her only with difficulty and his voice was dead. No, I need some rest,, he said, and he knew his cheeks were grey and his eyes sagged. Your eyes dribble with fatigue like an exhausted spaniel, Mimi told him, no stamina at all. He slid off the stool and looked again at the girl’s face. The head was unnaturally round and had the vacant malevolence of a halloween mask. He stared at her breasts, they were mean and without promise of motherhood, and he felt disgust bubble in his throat like an acid.

His lump of crushed notes lay on the bar. He counted some of it out: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, forty-two. There, he said as she drew away from it, that’s for your coat.

He stumbled from the doorway into the pedestrian stream. The light was harsh. The current sucked him past the shopfronts. Some were still open. Cab-horns sounded from a roadway he couldn’t see; grey water ran the gutter and splashed the pavement although it had not been raining. His eyes closed out the strobed glare from display windows beaded with lightbulbs. The force of movement around him stopped at an intersection. He stood in a wide queue as police directed traffic on both sides of nine workers excavating a floodlit trench in the centre of the road. Most of the pick-workers were women. They wore the black work-singlets of men and chipped at the bitumen crust without glancing up at the traffic.

Humphrey joined the group waiting to cross. It bulged over the kerbline. He was pushed forward and across the road, closely behind three women in wide-bottomed trousers and short canvas jackets hurrying to early shift-work. They turned toward the wharf. The shortest of the women carried a baby in a sling across her back. The child was swaddled to the chin and fast asleep. A brown bottle swung from its mouth and the teat jerked flat with each short stride. All the way to the ferry Humphrey walked to one side in case the bottle dropped and splintered. He lost them in the crowd outside the terminal.

And from his hotel room Humphrey booked for the breakfast flight to Tokyo.