No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

delivering an elegy. Everyone felt the same, as though they were in mourning; and each of them mourned for his favourite part.
    The knees. The glossy shins in which, once you were low enough, you could see your own sorrowing reflection. Theankles – oh the ankles, with their little continental tufts of winnowing amber down.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ burst in the Pakistani playboy Wasim, ‘I don’t know how you can go past the tits.’
    ‘Depends which end you start from, Was. Some of us haven’t
got
to the tits yet.’
    ‘Well when you do you’ll find me there.’ Was was the only one among them who boasted. It was a cultural thing. He couldn’t grasp the comedy of deprivation. He didn’t understand that offering to do without, even when you hadn’t actually done without, was a male-bonding device. ‘In fact I’m there most nights.’
    His voice was too deep, too heavy for him to carry. When he spoke he gave the impression of a man falling over himself.
    ‘Has anyone noticed,’ lamented Nick Heywood, bringing dolour back into the minibus, ‘that they move separately when she walks?’
    Everyone had. But everyone took time to review the heart-rending phenomenon again in their minds.
    ‘I maintain there should be a law,’ said Was, a lawyer himself, ‘against tits moving like that.’
    There should be a law against you, everybody thought. Was was social committee, not teaching staff. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t have been in their minibus at all, screwing up their funeral.
    What Frank liked best about the Swede was less specifically located. He liked what was between and around her: the space between her legs when she walked, her atmosphere and weather-sytem, her Arctic fuzz. You could say he was returning her to the abstract of beauty which, for three short weeks in August, she made flesh. So how could he ever have expected anything of the fuck? It was so much not the thingshe wanted to be doing that she turned her head away and wept all through it.
    It wasn’t him. Or it wasn’t
only
him. She’d wept all through the others as well.
    But oh, the tragic adoration she induced. Frank mopped her tears with the corner of his pillow case, wiped her symmetrical nose, and let his eyes wander like hungry lambkins over her grassless slopes. Smooth thighs, flat belly, perfect self-righteous little cunt, labia crossed like a nun’s wrists, thus far and no further, not a hair out of place. Refused the promised land, Moses would have gazed like this from Pisgah. Beautiful, beautiful, but never to be mine.
    The knocking on his bedroom door seemed to be an event on another planet. She made the connection before he did. ‘You have visitor,’ she said.
    ‘What?’ He was still lost; alone on the mountain. ‘What? Who?’
    ‘Friend maybe,’ she said. She was sitting up now. ‘Shall I leave?’ She couldn’t wait to leave.
    ‘There’s no way out. Only the window, and we’re three floors up.’
    He realised that this was a tactless thing to say. She was a Swede. She could easily decide to jump.
    He looked at his watch. A little after one in the morning. No one came calling at that time. But someone was definitely out there.
    ‘Just cover yourself,’ he said. It must have been the only time in her life she’d heard such a phrase. He threw on a dressing gown, put his ear to the door, then opened it fractionally. It was the Finn. He’d wriggled out of her tonight. Told her he had a headache and when she gave him aspirins told her he was washing his hair.
    She’d known something was wrong. Some lousy self-annihilative Finnish impulse drove her to find out who.
    ‘How’s your head?’ she asked.
    ‘Better, thank you.’
    She looked more than ever unfinished, raw, like an uncooked burger.
    ‘It doesn’t seem so clean.’
    He touched his hair and shrugged at her disconsolately. He wanted her to feel that he respected her too much to lie to her. To lie to her
again.
    She lit up a cigarette, sat down on the landing