The Sweet Smell of Psychosis Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fabia, the glove woman. Don't tell me she hasn't tried it on with you. She got me in the coat room at some party once. I was a bit pissed, so we sort of started snogging, whatever. Then she pulled some ski gloves out of her pocket, the thick, quilted kind. Tried to get me to give her a right good frigging with them. Since then I've heard all sorts about her – but always with the glove angle. What was it with you? Leather driving numbers with holes? Mittens?’
    ‘Oven gloves, actually.’
    ‘Ha-ha! Very good, Richard. “ Touché, "one might even say. ,
    By God! He'd said something right! A thousand thousand pink flamingos lifted off from the volcanic lake of Richard's stomach.
    ‘Well, I'm afraid I had nothing much to get up for this morning, so I went on with the boys.’
    ‘W-where?’ The flamingos were machine-gunned by Nazi vivisectionists.
    ‘To that gay place by Charing Cross, then back toThe Hole again – Bell wanted to pick something up – then back to Bloomsbury.’
    ‘T-to Bell's?’
    ‘Yah. Then we had a gas. Bell had some of this shit called bliss. Sort of cross between smack, E and ice. You've gotta smoke it in a little pipe. Makes you feel . . . I dunno . . . Well! Like you'd imagine.
    ‘Anyway,’ Ursula went on, ‘Reiser had skulked off by this time, do Bell calls him up – he knows Reiser can't resist drugs – and says, “Hey Todd, wanna come back to my place and do some bliss? The whole gang's here, plus some babes who've blown in from out of town, and want to meet people in film . . .” Todd is salivating so much I can hear it, going “Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah” like fucking Muttley. So Bell just says, “Well you can't!” and slams the phone down. Ha-ha-ha-ha!’
    ‘Hee-hee, hee-hee,’ Richard joined in, although he couldn't for the life of him have said what was funny about it.
    ‘The poor sap even came over and leant on the entryphone for half an hour before Bell got round to disconnecting it – ‘
    ‘When did you get home?’ Richard almost snapped this; like most courage, it was reflex.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I mean – back?’
    ‘Dunno. Whatever. Six-thirty, seven. Whatever. Tweety time, at any rate – I'm fucked. Anyway, Richard, it's Mearns's greenmail party this evening, and I'm doing the APB. See you at the Club at seven – I'll be early . . .’
    ‘O – ‘
    Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .
    Richard listened to the dialling tone for some time, hearing it as the Little Bear's purring, lustful breath. That's what his lovey-dovey nickname for her would be: ‘Little Bear’.
    Then he shook himself out of it and turned to the computer. The screen showed the corporate screensaver, a cartoon representation of an average Rendezvous reader (back view), ringing with a felt tip his/her cultural-event selections for the week. Richard slapped the mouse; the screen squeaked and cleared to reveal about two hundred words of copy. With a myriad flocks of pink flamingos spiralling like galaxies in his universal heart, Richard Hermes bent to the task of correcting the copy. He had been called by Ursula Bentley! They had made . . . a rendezvous! (What elsecould that ‘early’ have meant?) On such a day, even annotating pre-puff for Razza Rob's new stand-up show Gynae-Gynae, Hey-Hey! was a rare treat.
    Richard hovered about on a metaphorical decision-making corner all day, much like the John on his actual corner the night before. At five he started for Hornsey, only to abandon the journey halfway there, leaving the tube at Archway on the grounds that he wasn't going to have enough time to get home, shower, masturbate himself into a genderless nullity (this was an evening when Richard didn't even wish for the race memory of an involuntary erection), then address the question of his toilet and attire with a rigour not seen since pubescent, preening pre-disco nightmares.
    To have insufficient time at the Wendy flat would be worse than having none at all. Better to turn up at the Sealink with