Your name here, p.21
Your Name Here, page 21
He punched out.
He says: OK. OK. He’s on our side. He likes the story. We can come back to the Boat Race at the time of the alleged event.
He says: Don’t look now, but there is a reptile in the corner. I can ask for another room if it will make you self-conscious. Are you afraid of snakes?
I say: No.
He says: Excellent news.
He says: They follow me. There is disconcertment. There is gêne.
He says: Are you going to take off your clothes?
I say: Are you going to pay?
He says: Oh sure. Sure.
He takes a wallet out of his hip pocket. He says: Do you accept Deutschmarks?
I say: If that helps.
He says: What have we here?
He throws notes on the bed. He pulls notes from his jacket pockets and throws them on the bed. He opens his laptop case and throws more notes on the bed.
He says: What’s 1 million yen in sterling?
I say: I haven’t been following the yen.
He says: Who has?
He says: There’s a number I can call on this baby.
He says: Uh huh. Uh huh.
He says: Did you see something move under the bed?
I say: No.
He says: We have balboas. We have bahts. We have drachmas. The slack-jawed hermaphroditic spawn of Bretton Woods.
He says: It’s good to be back. I was given this at the airport as a friendly gesture.
A duty-free bag hits the bed. A cardboard label attached to the handle says: Klaus Seifert.
He pulls apart the handles and turns out on the bed: a black and gold cardboard box that says Bushmills; a red and gold box that says Glenfiddich 25 years; a 2 kg box of Mozart chocolates.
He says: What was the exchange rate for the yen, again?
I say: You were going to check on your phone.
He says: How does 500 Dmarks and a million yen sound?
I say: Are we drinking that whisky?
His hands are dry, with brown spots on the backs. They shake as he tears at the box of Bushmills. He unscrews the cap and throws liquid into two glasses. He throws his at the back of his throat, pours.
He takes a bottle of pills from his jacket pocket.
He says: Are you going to take your clothes off?
I say: Let me check the exchange rate of the yen.
He raises his right arm to Sieg Heil, executes a swift flurry of shrugs with the left shoulder, exits the jacket with a martial arts medley of suave rapid tributes to Bruce Lee. Eyes narrowed he masters the beast in the corner by will alone. The slightest slip means death. He exits the string tie. He exits the shirt.
There seems to be quite a lot of paper currency on the bed.
The sentence Let’s get this over with before he pulls a gun crosses the mind, accompanied by the removal of skirt, jumper, bra, pants. He is now wearing only a white T-shirt and black socks. An object like a blunt red stick juts up from a bed of grizzled black hair.
I think there is a line in Portnoy’s Complaint: JEW SMOTHERS DEB WITH COCK. This is not the time to give the client a choice of orifice.
I crack a condom.
—I want you inside me.
I enrobe the truncheon. I squirt lubricant.
—Enter me, I say. I want you deep inside me. Enter me, enter me, yes, now.
I lie on the bed with my knees open. He says: Put your head at the foot of the bed so I can keep an eye on the corner.
I swivel. He kneels between my legs. He fumbles with the meths-grown monster.
—I want you inside me Ow.
He retracts slightly. —Easy does it, big boy. Yeah, yeah, OK, OK, vamonos muchacho, cuidado con mi Pit Bull, eso es …
He slides in further. The cunt clenches.
—Man that’s tight. Unh. Unh. Unh.
—I want you hard inside me, deeper, harder, yes, now.
He hoists my legs up over his shoulders. This is a better angle. His cock achieves decent penetration with only relatively minor discomfort.
—Enter me, enter me, yes, yes, deeper, harder, now.
He fucks: Huh huh huh huh, huh huh huh huh. Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!
His face has gone the colour of borscht.
Could I get money for the story if he dies? Is there a way of reaching Eduardo?
—Fuck me, fuck me, I want you deep inside me, yes, yes, now.
—HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUHHHHHHH!
[8 Tunisian dinars, 50 Mexican pesos, 675 Thai bahts, 90 Panamanian balboas, 350 Russian roubles, 9,880 Indian rupees, 100,200 Greek drachmas, DM 500, ¥1,000,000, 2 kg box of Mozart chocolates.]
1.1.1.1.2.1 = ١.١.١.١.٢.١
So what do you want to know? Just what was the exchange rate of the yen, you say. How much was all this paper worth, anyway?
I bought a copy of the Financial Times at the Magdalen Street Borders. I then crossed Beaumont Street and entered the Taylorian. One mounts a flight of stairs from street level to reach the library (devoted to modern languages, linguistics and literary theory). One is then in a very high room with a, is mezzanine the word? (The head is not clever.) One can mount to this mezzanine by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, and on that narrow, what’s the word? are placed a couple of small desks overlooking St Giles. A door leads to another flight of stairs leading to a stuffy little room of books on philology (Jesperson, that gang), but you would not want to sit there. I sat at a small desk and began to sort through my notes.
8 Tunisian dinars
× .5425 =
£4.34
50 Mexican pesos
× .0702 =
£3.51
675 Thai bahts
× .015 =
£10.18
90 Panamanian balboas
× .5978 =
£53.80
350 Russian roubles
× .098 =
£34.35
I was beginning to feel duped.
9,880 Indian rupees
× .0514 =
£507.53
That’s more like it.
100,200 Greek drachmas
× .0018 =
£185.97
500 Dmark
× .3365 =
£168.25
1,000,000 Japanese yen
× .0045 =
£4475.47
The 6 digits glow on the LCD. It is very quiet.
Total:
£5443.40
It goes on being very quiet. This is what the pieces of paper buy.
This was the thought: that it would not be necessary to make phone calls for a very long time.
I stacked up the notes again. There was bewilderment and joy. Dust floated in a beam of light. I had tried so many sentences on the kinship system, and received so many sentences in return—if there were sentences that would extract cheques or even duly completed forms from the system, I had failed to find them. But here was a transaction I had managed. I had replied to each sentence with a sentence, and the sentences had brought us to a hotel room, connected bodies, transferred a duty-free bag of notes.
Years later I saw a film called X-Men based on a series of comic books I had not read. Ian McKellen plays Magneto. It is about a group of superheroes, each with a special power, persecuted by an uncomprehending society. I did not break down in tears in the auditorium because it is not my way to break down in tears—in fact, a failure to break opportunely into tears is one of the problems. Still, that world looked familiar.
I met Mr Clever in 2000, three years before the release of the film. When I saw the film, though, I realised this was what I had expected—that Mr Clever would be Patrick Stewart, protecting his freaks. I explained to Mr Clever that the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation looks like a human to make interaction easier for humans, but that constructing a machine with a plausible personality takes energy. I think Mr Clever did not know the series (but of course I had watched it in the first place with the idea of making myself more plausible to people who, maybe, had not read that classic of French prose, Le Suicide by Pierre Moron).
The point, anyway, is that Oxford was once a place for freaks. (As, of course, was Cambridge.) A freak could sit an examination and win a scholarship for freakish powers—money, that is, buying time to develop the freakish powers. So you can do a set of graphs, and what the graphs show is the evaporation of funding for superheroes. (Graphs to come.) The habitat disappeared. It had once been possible for a mathematician to win a scholarship covering all expenses by sitting a series of examinations in mathematics and demonstrating excellence in mathematics. It was now necessary to combine excellence in mathematics with skill at fundraising from a kinship system.4 Failing that, some other extra-mathematical skill. Failing that, luck in the Lottery.
And there’s always the novel, ha ha ha ha ha, there’s always the novel, ha ha.
Duty Free had showered me with more liquidity than I had ever seen in my life.
A week went by. There were 153 messages on the phone but I did not answer them. What to do, what to do, what to do? When in doubt, walk on the Wilde side. The Holy Scriptures were composed in primitive times when YHWH wrote on stone tablets and that invention of the devil, the telephone, was unknown to Homo sogenannte sapiens sogenannte sapiens. Good News for Modern Man (aka The Importance of Being Earnest) reminds us that revelation adapts itself to the intelligence of the revelatee:
Algernon. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
Jack. That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing.
Algernon. Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist.
You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
Jack. What on earth do you mean?
Algernon. You have invented a very useful younger brother called Earnest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.
Thank you, St Oscar, thank you thank you thank you thank you. I wrote a group e-mail to all members of the kinship system explaining that I would be spending Christmas with my dear friend Lily Marlowe, who had been diagnosed with MS and was confined to a wheelchair. There’s always the novel, ha ha ha ha ha, and I had had a brilliant idea, ha ha, Jesus loves me, he loves me, he really really loves me, ha ha ha ha ha.
13. ON THE OTHER HAND
SUNDAY 15 APRIL 2001 0917
DISCOURAGEMENT.
Too bad! Better luck next time!
I did not need the lottomonitor to tell me I had drawn Physically Repulsive: the mirror told its own tale. I shaved, more through force of Perseverance than any genuine hope of improving the spectacle, and had soon transformed Physically Repulsive (unshaven) to Physically Repulsive with bloody tufts of toilet paper.
I thought: I shall overcome.
I was about to flesh out my material on monomonitors with further episodes from my early life, my hopes, my dreams and how it all went so wrong, when I suddenly thought of something. That’s so sad, Gab had said. I had no idea, she’d said. What she had not said was I think you’re really on to something. She had not said I had only to write more in the same vein and she would send it off to this bloke Giles.
If you’re discouraged it’s important not to read too much into the fact that something like this is discouraging. All the same, I was discouraged. It was never going to be easy making shelf-filling and violin practice a gripping read. If I was doomed from the start, why start?
I breakfasted on half a chocolate cake.
All things considered, the day might be better spent revising for the Unemployment Opportunity.
I had sent in my official application to sit the prizeclaim, so in theory I could be called on any time. In practice it took a minimum of six weeks to get a date, usually at least two months, sometimes as many as six. If my number came up in six weeks I was doomed, but if it took much more than two months I was doomed anyway, so it had seemed safest to get the application off ASAP. If it took much more than two months I was going to need a true heartfelt tale sincerely told to fall back on, but if it took the standard two months I had a lot of ground to cover in the time.
I started thinking about Gaby.
It occurred to me that at that very moment my grandmother was probably running a luck check on my chances of marrying a nice Jewish girl. At that very moment my grandmother was probably registering a sinister downturn in the odds. And a sinister upturn in the odds of seeing her first great-grandchild. One with a sinister similarity to the level of reliability of a condom as a method of contraception. Or if she wasn’t there was something seriously wrong with my grandmother.
What this meant, surely, was that I could find out how my grandmother was doing by running a luck check. I could set it up for a draw relating to GRANDMOTHER CHECKING ODDS OF MARRIAGE TO NICE JEWISH GIRL.
I sat down at the lottomonitor, pondering. This was going to be quite a complicated draw to set up.
I went into the Family menu and pondered again.
1537 GRANDMOTHER CHECKING ODDS OF MARRIAGE TO NICE JEWISH GIRL
Congratulations! Only 15,789 out of 17,247,866 won Grandmother Checking Odds of Marriage to Nice Jewish Girl in the latest draw!
I slumped back in my chair, exhausted yet oddly exhilarated. In the first place it was good to know that my grandmother was all right. In the second place I felt a real sense of achievement in having elicited the information. It had been a fantastically involved draw to set up. The statistical reporter had slightly missed the point, as it so often did—it had obviously calculated the odds using all single males, or possibly all single males with living grandmother—but it would be easy enough to introduce a religious parameter. It was brilliant having a lottomonitor all to myself, at home a complex draw was out of the question and at college I had never had the time.
I noticed suddenly that it was 1537.
I thought: Fuck.
I had a quick afternoon snack of half a chocolate cake washed down with grape juice. On balance, it might be better to get on with the story of my life.
After all, I was going to have to do something. Gaby was probably already consumed with regrets at having thrown herself away on the type of guy who can’t even claim a free trip to Florida. She had given in to a momentary weakness. Now she would be even keener to see me take charge of my luck.
Probably the only reason Gab had not said she would like to see more was that she got carried away. I would write more along the same lines and even if she did not offer to send it off there was always a chance she would get carried away again.
1538 RESOLUTION.
Congratulations!
1539 FREE BOOKKEEPING COURSE
Congratulations! You have won a free bookkeeping course which will train you in the valuable skill of bookkeeping! The course can be pursued at your own pace in the privacy of your own home! Save thousands of pounds in bookkeeping fees! Earn thousands of pounds as a freelance bookkeeper! Be sure to claim your free bookkeeping course today!
1540 FREE TIME MANAGEMENT COURSE
Congratulations! You have won a free time management course which will train you in the valuable skill of time management! The course can be pursued at your own pace in the privacy of your own home! Save thousands of pounds by learning to manage your time more effectively! Earn thousands of pounds showing others how to manage their time more effectively! Be sure to claim your free time management course today!
I hit DRAW a few more times and got a long string of junk prizes.
I said: Fuck.
Something in my enquiries about my grandmother must have destablised the settings.
Resisting the temptation to kick the lottomonitor I sat down and went through the all-too-familiar routine of prize elimination.
An hour later I was ready to go back to work.
Now that it came to the point I realised that I would much rather have gone back to writing about Richard the croupier. I reminded myself that writing about Richard the croupier was not an option. The options were sitting the UEO, sending in five hundred applications for a free trip to Florida and writing a heartwarming story about the ecstasy of victory the agony of defeat.
I thought: Just do it.
1954
AUNT CHECKING HOROSCOPE
Congratulations! Only 500,000 out of 30,000,000 won Aunt Checking Horoscope in the latest draw! 300,000 in your age group!
1955
Fuck.
1956
MARKED INABILITY TO CONCENTRATE
I thought: If I write down the lyrics of the Impossible Dream, which as a Platinum Perseverer I often find myself unconsciously singing, I’ll have to pay somebody some money and I don’t even know if I am going to win a Paper Ticket.
I thought: Would I have to pay if I just put: This is my something, to something that something? I thought or would the odds be better if I put:
**** ** ** *****, ** ****** **** ****, ** ****** *** ********, ** ****** *** ***?
Hello!
You know, you’re a very lucky person.
Nobody else is quite like you.
I beat a hasty retreat to the fire escape.
4. Readers familiar with Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines will understand that the assets and income available to a kinship system do not translate directly into funding for a mathematician who is a member of the kinship system.
