The Rachel Papers (1973) by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis
Format: epub
Published: 1973-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

It was light enough to risk the walk to Kilburn. Thirty-ones were capricious buses; even so, I wasn’t due at Rachel’s until seven forty-five. There might be some time to kill. Underneath a still bright sky, Maida Vale was reassuringly well-lit against the incipient dusk.

I had been to Kilburn once before, when Geoffrey made me come with him to investigate a second-hand guitar shop. Again, it looked like a small town in wartime: beleaguered, shuttered-up, people on the streets, camaraderie after a blackout. I went into a ramshackle Victorian pub, and came out of it, very quickly. Chock-a-block with teds, micks, skinnies, and other violent minority groups. Any other day, to consolidate Bellamy’s gins, I would have chanced it. But I was wearing a three–piece charcoal suit—from school, admittedly, yet quite flash all the same. A lemonade, instead, then, with the students and au pair girls in a shadowy coffee-bar next to the cinema. There, and on the bus twenty minutes later, I leafed through my present from Bellamy, and thought about the weekend.

What, for a start, was my father’s game? When I got back from the cinema on Wednesday, Jenny and Norman were watching television in the breakfast-room. Simultaneously, Jenny asked me if I’d like some coffee and Norman asked me if I’d like some whisky, so I had had to say that I didn’t want anything.

‘Why’, I wondered, ‘did old shitface come round? What was he after?’

‘Old shitface’s tart’, said Norman, ‘has got a ten-year-old daughter with nowhere to go this weekend because her mother’s going off with old shitface.’

‘And he wants you to baby-sit?’

Norman nodded.

‘Are you going to?’

‘Of course,’ said Jenny.

‘What for?’

‘The poor little thing’s got nowhere else to stay.’

‘So?’

The television crackled. Jenny let out a short, sharp scream.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Norman.

‘Oh, nothing. I was just wondering what the dickens was going on.’

‘Thass funny. I was wondering what the fuck was going on, myself.’

I sat at my desk for an hour, shaking my head, working on the Letter to My Father. At midnight I crossed out ‘Letter’ and put in, above, ‘Speech’.

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