Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel by James Hynes

Author:James Hynes [Hynes, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2005-02-28T20:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

THAT NIGHT, after a dinner Charlotte couldn’t ruin—no-brand hot dogs on no-brand buns, with no-brand chips and cola—Paul unfolded his creaking sofa bed and turned on his little black-and-white TV. As the air-conditioning unit rattled under the window, Paul sat on the end of the lumpy mattress in his t-shirt and shorts and clicked round the dial in the jittery light from the screen. After fifteen minutes of fidgeting with the rabbit ears, the local PBS station came in the clearest, showing an aggressively vulgar old Britcom from the seventies called ’Ow’s Yer Knickers? about three women in a lingerie shop. The youngest was a scrawny, hawk-nosed punk with piercings and jagged hair; the next oldest was a sour, middle-aged divorcée; and the oldest was a zaftig, sixty-something widow with blue hair like a helmet, named Mrs. Prestoil. Their antagonists were assorted customers—usually stammering, red-faced, clueless men—and Mr. Lancet, who owned the butcher’s shop next door, and his shop assistant Stig, a buck-toothed, pasty-faced lad with a yen for the young punk. Mrs. Prestoil’s shtick was lead-footed double entendre, accompanied by raucous laughter from a studio audience of lubricious Londoners.

“I couldn’t find my pussy last night,” trilled Mrs. Prestoil. Big laughs.

“She couldn’t find her pussy with both ‘ands,” said the punk, in a snarling sotto voce. Bigger laughs.

“What’s happened, dearie?” drawled the divorcée, examining her nails.

“I’m afraid someone’s snatched her,” wailed Mrs. Prestoil.

“Someone say ‘snatch’?” said Stig, sticking his head in from next door.

“Crikey,” said Paul as he sprawled across his rumpled sheets. He concentrated harder on the program than it probably deserved because he was trying not to brood about recent events. Who was Boy G, and what did he want with Paul? And who were the men with him? Surely their saw-blade dentition was the product of Paul’s imagination. And why, thought Paul, shifting restlessly on his groaning bed, why were the Colonel and his dopey little lunch group showing so much interest in him all of a sudden? Had the Colonel really given the three men on the bridge a thumbs-up, or had he imagined that, too? And how on earth did the Colonel know about Paul’s “lil’ Oklahoma gal”?

On the television, smirking Stig slouched into the lingerie shop.

“Someone’s snatched her pussy,” explained the divorcée on the television.

“Is that even possible?” said Stig, goggle-eyed.

Where was Callie? Paul wondered. What was she doing? And who was she doing it with? Even the Britcom wasn’t loud and vulgar enough to divert his inflamed imagination from constructing a detailed picture of Mr. X. In Paul’s head the singer/songwriter from Tulsa was tall and lanky, with sleepy eyes and a sensual mouth and a ponytail, and he looked good in faded jeans and a denim shirt open to the third button, and he stretched out on Callie’s narrow mattress while Callie’s fingers popped buttons four, five, and six, on her way to Mr. X’s big silver belt buckle in the shape of the state of Texas. . . .

Charlotte interrupted his

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