BOOK EXCERPT
FROM “THE PREGNANT WIDOW” BY MARTIN AMIS
{[(EDITOR’S NOTE: SINCE MARK ZUCKERBERG’S FACEBOOK IS
DEFICIENT IN ITALICS AND DOES NOT ALLOW IRONY OF ANY KIND, WHEN MY DEAR FRIEND
MARTIN AMIS USES ITALICS, WE HAVE (MARTY AND I) AGREED TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS
TO DENOTE ITALICS – MR. AMIS DOES NOT HAVE TO “SHOUT” WHEN HE WRITES, AS HIS
PALABRA ARE SHOTS HEARD ROUND THE WORLD. --JFM)]}
“When he was young, people who were stupid or crazy, were
called STUPID or CRAZY. But now (now he was old) the stupid and the crazy were
given special names for what ailed them. And John wanted one. He was stupid and
crazy too, and he wanted one – a special name for what ailed him.
He noticed that
even the kids’ stuff got special names. And he read about their supposed
neuroses and phantom handicaps with the leer of an experienced and by now
pretty cynical parent. I recognise that one, he would say to himself: otherwise
known as Little Shit Syndrome. And I also recognize that one: otherwise knows
as Lazy Bastard Disorder. These disorders and syndromes, he was pretty sure,
were just excuses for mothers and fathers to dope their children. In America,
which was the future, broadly speaking, most household pets (about sixty
percent) were on mood drugs.
Thinking back,
John supposed that it would have been nice, ten or twelve years ago, to drug
Nat and Gus – as a way of imposing ceasefires in their fratricidal war. And it
would be nice, now to drug Isabel and Chloe – whenever they weaponised their
voices with shrieks and screeches (trying to find the limits of the universe),
or whenever, with all the freshness of discovery, they said quite unbelievably
hurtful things about his appearance. YOU’D LOOK A LOT BETTER, DADDY, IF YOU
GREW SOME MORE HAIR. Oh really. DADDY, WHEN YOU LAUGH, YOU LOOK LIKE A MAD OLD
TRAMP. Is that a fact … John could imagine it easily enough: the mood-pill
option. COME HERE, GIRLS. COME AND TRY OUT THIS LOVELY NEW SWEET. Yeah, but
then you’d have to consult the doctor, and trump up a case against them, and go
and queue in the striplit pharmacy in Lead Road …
What was wrong
with him? he wondered. Then one day (in October 2006), when it had stopped
snowing and was merely raining, he went out into it, into the criss-cross, into
the A to Z – the sodden roadworks, the great DIG of London Town. And there were
the people. As always, now, he looked from face to face, thinking, HIM – 1937.
HER – 1954. THEM – 1949 … Rule number one; the most important thing about you
is your date of birth. Which puts you inside history. Rule number two: sooner
or later, each human life is a tragedy, sometimes sooner, always later. There
will be other rules.
John settled in
the usual café with his Americano, his unlit French cigarette (a mere prop,
now) his British broadsheet. And here it was, the news, the latest installment
of the thriller and tingler, the great page-turner called the planet Earth. The
world is a book we can’t put down … And he started reading about a new mental
disease, one that spoke to him in a haunting whisper. It affected children, the
new disease; but it worked best on grown-ups – on those who had reached the
years of discretion.
The new disease
was called Body Dismorphic Sydrome or Perceived Ugly Disorder. Sufferers of
BDS, or PUD, gazed at their own reflections and saw something even worse than
reality. At his time of life (he was fifty-six), you resigned yourself to a
simple truth: each successive visit
to the mirror will, by
definition, confront you with
something unprecedentedly awful.
But nowadays, as he impended over the basin in the bathroom, he felt he was
under the influence of a hellish hallucinogen. Every trip to the mirror was
giving him a dose of lysergic acid; very occasionally it was a good-trip trip,
and nearly always it was a bad-trip trip; but it was always a trip.
Now John called
for another coffee. He felt much cheered.
Maybe I don’t
actually look like that, he thought. I’m just insane – that’s all. So perhaps
there’s nothing to worry about. Body Dysmorphic Syndrome, or Perceived Ugly
Disorder, was what he HOPED he’d got.
When you
become old … When you
become old, you
find yourself auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then after interminable
rehearsals, you’re finally starring in a horror film – a talentless,
irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way
with horror films) they’re saving the worst for last.
Everything that
follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are all true, and
the boys are all true (Lisa is true, Adriano, incredibly, is true). Not even
the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no
innocent. Or else all of them were innocent – but cannot be protected.
This is the way it
goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (DEATH WILL
NOT IGNORE ME); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (MY BODY
WHISPERS THAT DEATH IS ALREADY INTRIGUED BY ME). But something very interesting
happens to you in between.
As the fiftieth
birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will
continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you
sometimes say to
yourself: That went a
bit quick. That went
a bit quick. In certain moods,
you may want
to put it rather more
forcefully. As in: OY! THAT
went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!! …
Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out
again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence
within your being,
like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.
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