Chapter 1

Emma Weedarse, ugly, dense, Celtic and indigent, with an uncomfortable hovel, a miserable disposition and a doctorate in Comparative Poujadism, seemed in her tweed suit and shotgun to unite some of the worst aspects of existence due to her being in underwater theatre (and currently resting); and had lived nearly eighty years in the world with only a serious criminal record and a history of psychopathology to distress or vex her.
She was the oldest of the two one-eyed daughters of a right bastard of a father who had fake Rolex watches and eyeglasses made by blind paraplegic child labour in Cambodia to enrich the globalising English economy, and had, hardly in consequence of her sister’s divorce due to being found out as intersexed, been the Madam of a lesbian brothel from a very early period. Her mother had died under suspicious circumstances before the last Ice Age (there were rumours that she’d faked her death, more honest than some celebs — eg Michael Hutchence — who fake their lives), and her place had been supplied by a dubious hard-drinking transvestite as governess — formerly she’d been at Holloway — who had fallen somewhat short of a piranha in affection.
Sixteen centuries had Miss Elizabeth Tailingsdamme and her woolly mammoth been in Mr Weedarse’s family (by now she was carrying her head under one arm), less a governess than a pterodactyl, committed to bestiality, child-molesting and ‘individualism’ — the whole is always less than the sum of its parts — and very nauseated by both daughters, particularly by Emma whose sagging boobs she would regularly grab. Between them (ie the sisters) it was more the intimacy of Tutsis and Hutus. Even before Miss Tailingsdamme had ceased to hold the nominal office of President of the United States, the extent of her mental condition (she had attained a Master of Lunacy*), her irrational hatred of the public sector and her poor acting credits (by comparison to Emma) had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, she used restraints with gusto (leg-spreaders, ankle-fetters, horse outfits, NIDA scholarships etc). Whenever she saw a baby cry she threatened to ‘pull its fucking eyes out’, whenever she saw a starving urchin pinching an orange she’d ‘cut its fucking hands off’, and had as a consequence been offered a job as a judge in Saudi Arabia. She believed democracy to be a foolish ideal, having a natural lean toward firm, authoritarian government, whereas Emma was a right-wing anarchist. They had been living together as mortal enemies very mutually hating each other, and Red Emma doing just what she liked with a Heckler and Koch (Miss Tailingsdamme favoured the Uzi); highly ridiculing Miss Tailingsdamme’s judgment of machine-guns* and flirtations with the Army of Southern Lebanon via the internet, but directed chiefly by her own delirium tremens, her links to Australia’s POWERFUL Maritime Union, and Michael Jackson and his little friends.
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way (and a bucket of gin every morning), and a disposition to think of herself as the reincarnation of Anne of Cleves; these were the disadvantages which, on a global basis, threatened alloy [zut allor?] to her many obsessive-compulsive behaviours and sinister modus operandi that outdid Jiang Zemin’s. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as squirrels with her.
(Nuts to you, John Locke, in estuary English. Progress (to date) is Yank parasitism. Look at the Davey Lamp. Look at Alexander Graham Bell.) Misery came — a gentle misery — or if you prefer a rip-roaring misery starring Arnold Schwarzenegger — but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable Mormon knocking at the door or the second Great Depression — Miss Tailingsdamme married a magician called The Great Buttox, sorry Botox. (The evils of Emma’s situation remained unperceived.) It was Miss Tailingsdamme’s loss which first brought grief — initially in the shape of un-PC Wilma Snoute of Sunhill. It was on the un-wedding-day of this hated fiend (ie, Miss Tailingsdamme, not Lewis Carroll or Michael Jackson) that Emma first sat in mournful doubt of any continuance of her ammunition allowance from her father (she considered lobbying Westminster). They sat with a bison in a smoke-filled room and Miss Tailingsdamme looked resplendent in a chrome wedding dress and flamethrower while performing ‘Wee Jinny McGregor’ on the bagpipes. The wedding over and the bride-people and vampires gone, her father, the bison and herself were left to dine together on a scorched gnu, with no prospect of a third (upper or lower) to cheer a long evening. As usual, with fond memories of his upbringing in a borstal, her father composed himself (along with the Ride of the Valkyries) to sleep after dinner, the mints being low, below the salt in fact, and she had then only to sit, wank and think what she had lost — three hundred nicker on the Grand National. She grabbed his rum bottle and sculled it, then got onto the pianola and played ‘Castle Walk’ and ‘The Maple Leaf Rag’ (well it was the 18th century).
The bison slipped out once she too was comatose and went on to become Sovereign (a surprise to the beast since it was only 200, 000th in the order of succession to the Throne, but there’d been a bit of a mega-air disaster in the meantime).*
The event (ie the marriage) had every promise of happiness for her pro-capitalist and rather arch enemy. Mr Weston (as The Great Buttox was known professionally) was a man of unexceptionable BO, a string of oil-wells in the North Sea, complete decrepitude and the manners of a wild boar; and there was some dissatisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous treachery she had always wished and promoted the match (the bourgeois Football Association had let her down badly); but it was a black morning’s work for her and she couldn’t even play the banjo. The want of Miss Tailingsdamme and a watermelon or briar patch yo mah homies would be felt every hour of every day — she lowered the ticking grandfather clock cautiously into the horse trough and, chanting ‘give us back our eleven days’, turned the calendar to face the wall — till Emma got so sick of her incessant spamming for a resumption of hostilities a lá Sanford Wallace that she cancelled her internet subscription. She, now on the outernet, recalled her past unkindness — the unkindness, the detestation of sixteen centuries — how she had taught and how she had interfered with her from five years old — how she had devoted all her weaknesses to attach and tie her up in health — and how she nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood, such as puerperal fever, leprosy and Housemaid’s Knee. A large debt of gratitude was owing here since she like Alan Bond was a convinced believer in deficit financing; but the intercourse of the last seven years (performed with an ivory dildo called the Seven Gates of Hell), the unequal footing (Miss Tailingsdamme had three feet like the Isle of Man and a face like Portugal) and perfect secrecy which had soon followed Isabella’s [her fucking morph sister!] divorce on their being left to each other (Emma abhorred the Right), was yet a dearer indeed astronomical recollection that her father later exchanged for a mansion in Nassau. It had been a fiend and companion such as few possessed (which is why she referred to it as ‘it’, though who she’s referring to is anybody’s guess), intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, useful, a great scapegoat, knowing all the ways of the family and blackmailing them for years, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of her’s [sic]; — one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, particularly her conversion to Marxism-Leninism, and who had such an affectation for her as could never find fault even in Kobe earthquake ah so.
How was she to bear the change (around $3.50)? The menarche (of the glen) had been bad enough. — It was true that her fiend [sic] was going only half a mile from them; but Emma — totally ignorant of the evils of her situation and no herm, merm or ferm — was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs Weston only half a mile from them, and a Miss Tailingsdamme in the house, a difference greater than that of a snowflake on the very tip of Mt Everest and that of a manganese nodule or fallen eyepatch on the floor of Challenger Deep, but more like that between a bird in the hand and two in the bush and hardly a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records; and with all her advantages, natural, domestic, and financial, she was now in great danger of suffering from one hundred years of intellectual solitude. She dearly hated her father, but he was no companion for her as he couldn’t play bezique, though he was a marvel on the tuba. He couldn’t meet her in conversation, rational or playful (he thought Spinoza was a spinal disease).
As Spina Bifida, the great Latin philosopher, asserts, the evils of her situation and of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr Weedarse had not married early being addicted to snowdropping) was much increased by his constitution (based on the Soviet one) and habits (worse than Dr Johnson’s doorknob-touching); for having been a valetudinarian all his life (he eschewed the Masons as a bunch of drunks), without activity of mind and body — he had been dead since he was 26 — he was a much older man in ways than in years and had sold his ark second-hand to Noah; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart, the fact that he owned more than Bill Gates and his amiable temper (Emma knew better, Fred West sprang to mind), his talents could not have recommended him at any time, his impressions of Al Jolson being pitiful. Warner Bros never got back to them as Bugs Bunny had come in for an audition.
And of course he was older than her, while her mother was considerably younger than her. She remained unaware of the evils of her situation.

Her sister (her shiftless cousin Bertha doesn’t come into this tale), though comparatively little moved by matrimony, being settled in a needle-strewn squat in London, only sixteen centuries off, was much beyond her daily reach (now the Web was down); and many a long October and November evening must be struggled through at Fartfield, before Christmas brought the next visit from Isabella and her Druid ex-husband and their little midget children to [whoops] fill the house and give her pleasant society again. She considered converting to the Jewish calendar.
Her eyes became blurred and the scene dissolved:
The crowds watching round the hill of Golgotha hewed into their bacon sandwiches, cringed at the smell of the Sea of Galilee, three centimetres away, tried not to think about the Palestinians starving in Sabra and Chatila and berated their children for demanding too many loaves and fishes. It was so wonderful to be part of a piece of history in the making. Oh, and there’s Jesus!, Mrs Finkleberger cried, having only just got over the death of Diana. But who are those two other guys? Is that George Soros? Or Dr Mahathir?The kids didn’t seem to care until the Roman governor came on — and when he did they yelled Avanti! and other words they didn’t understand but which sounded cool. Though annoyed by the way they seemed to be picking up Roman accents, she consulted her program, while little Chaim polished off the lox, he would make such a good loxsmith despite his dressing up.
The scene resolved again. It was awful to be in such a filmic story, especially one with Biblical pretensions. Charlton Heston’s rifle collection sprang to mind. Rifol, rifol, follididdlay!
Hate-Ashbury, the large, folklorical and bibulous village almost amounting to a cloaca maxima, to which Fartfield, in spite of its separate lawn cemetery and shrubberies and gasworks, did really belong (she had the title deed salted away in the attic yet remained completely blind to the evils of her situation), afforded her no equals as she was an egotistical cow who performed regularly though in disguise at their annual folk festival. The Weedarses, big in the folk music scene (‘balls to the NSW Folk Federation’, as the old Childe ballad has it), were first in consequence and tin whistles there. All looked up to them. She was six foot seven. (Well, that was predictable enough, but remember that she was also over eighty and having smoked like a chimney since the age of seven she should have been a dwarf by now.) She had many folksy acquaintances in the place (having walked the streets there for many years bashing a mandolin), for her father — a serial bigamist and dulcimer player — was universally civil (he had been to university), but not one of them who could be accepted in lieu of Miss Tailingsdamme, PhD, for even half a day, deedeediddlydiddlydiddlydiddly. (Bored with the plot which was written by Jane Austen, she made a cup of tea by sending the water up in a weather balloon to the stratosphere where due to the lack of atmospheric pressure it boiled; she also made toast by jabbing a fork into a slice of Tip-Top and holding it up to the sun, her meanness knew no bounds and she hadn’t paid a cent of tax in her life.) It was a melancholy change, the hot flushes being hell at eighty; and Emma could not but sigh over it and wish for impossible things, such as a working wicker model of the Polish economy, till her father awoke from his stupor, and made it necessary to be cheerful. Hip, hip, hooray, she went. Yippee aye oh kay ay! Yahooey! One day as I was walking down the street, a pretty young fair maid I chanced to meet … His spirits required support. They were all quadriplegics and carried bags of urine on their wheelchairs while reciting from the Grundrisse. It was like an episode of the Addams Family, bubeleh. He was a nervous man, easily depressed, as proved by that time he fell into the car-crushing machine with Jimmy Hoffa; fond of every body he was used to, especially hers, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind, being a conservative fuckwit. Matrimony, as the origin of change, a surprise to Karl Marx, was always disagreeable; and he was by no means yet reconciled to his own daughter’s marrying, nor could ever speak of her but with callousness, though it had entirely been a match of affectation, when he was now obliged to part with Miss Tailingsdamme too; and as this fucking sentence will never end I can only add that from his dirty habits, including smoking after sex (he’d never looked) and of being never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself, the self-centred old fart, he was very much disposed to think Miss Tailingsdamme had done as sad a thing for herself as for them, and would have been a great deal happier if she had spent all the rest of her life at Fartfield. Emma smiled and chatted as cheerfully as she could, blowing a raspberry (she enjoyed having oral sex with fruits) and giving a Bronx cheer and whistling with two fingers between her lips, to keep him from such impure thoughts (he was a member of Opus Dei); but when tea came — it just sort of wafted in from every side — it was impossible for him not to say exactly as he had said at dinner,
‘Poor Miss Tailingsdamme! — Only the poor will help the poor. I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr Weston ever thought of her! What a fag-hag she is! Where are the snows …?’
‘I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot, despite my seretonin deficiency and vast blind spot concerning what Miss Austen terms ‘the evils of my situation’. Mr Weston is such a good-humoured, pleasant, excellent man that he thoroughly deserves a good wife despite being a homosexual and a Trobriand Islander; — and you would not have had Miss Tailingsdamme live with us for ever and bear all my odd humours, my children, my chemistry experiments, my urban guerilla exercises and my attempts to revive the trade union movement, when she might have a house of her own?’
‘A house of her own! — Her husband owns it; and where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large. It is taller than the World Trade Centre (this was the eighteenth century). — And you have never had any odd humours, my dear, not like that horrible Virginia Woolf who visited last week.’
Emma knew better. Averting her face, she did some private stand-up which the malignant old fossil would never get in a millennium. Her one-liners made Dorothy Parker’s look pathetic. Verlaine is always chasing Rimbauds indeed.
‘How often will we be going to see them and them coming to see us!’
‘Is that a question?’
‘Papa! We shall be always meeting! We must begin, we must go and pay our wedding visit very soon. And the gas bill. Wait till I learn how to forge Bernie Fraser’s signature.’
‘My dear, this is Emma and you hardly ever get out of the house, I fear you must have agoraphobia like that dreadful colonial lesbian Emily Dickinson and you’ll never get a job. And how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance, almost as far as the Crab Nebula. I could not walk half so far.’
‘No, papa, nobody thought of you walking. We must go in the carriage to be sure, the Lear Jet being in the service station having a tune-up. ’ It was of course air-conditioned and they had to keep the windows up all the time, a sad fact due to her father’s flatulence and proprietorship of a broad bean farm in Senegal. (Whereas with the cars of the peasantry opening the windows was the air-conditioning.)
‘The carriage! But James will not like to put the draft horses to for such a little way, let alone the published ones; — and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?’
Emma cursed the absurd Thatcherite lack of public transport in Fartfield and her father’s awful puns.
‘They are to be put into Mr Weston’s stable, papa, just like the landless poor and any Messiah who happens by. You know, we have settled all that already even*. Oy, we talked it all over with Mr Weston last night as the reader will remember.’ (A star went by outside with a Wise Man following it — downsizing had been savage, all the Prophets had been replaced by machines and the Christ Child was due for the boot — but she ignored that along with the evils of her situation.) ‘And as for James, ach du lieber! — you may be very sure he will always like going to Randalls, because of his daughter’s being housemaid and knee there. I doubt whether he will ever take us anywhere else, eh? Sut on the cheer and comb your heer. Say what? A la Recherche du Temps Perdu! Cojones! Ah, the tyranny of the British Class System! Hasta la Vista! (A hostel with a great view.) The pursuing paparazzi, by Dad!’ (She was doing a roaring trade in selling photos of herself in all sorts of candid situations that she didn’t know the evils of.) ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Ah so, the rentier class and their resemblance to the long-term unemployed in all but wealth and social status! The spiritual void left by the collapse of the Soviet Union! How green was my valley! That, was your doing, papa. Ooo la la! You, got Hannah, that good place with the proceeds of ‘Candle in the Wind’ and your very public pubic hair-transplant after wearing a cowboy hat for years. Donner und blitzen! Nobody, thought of Hannah Arendt till you mentioned her — James is so obliged to you as even he hadn’t thought of her! Eeee by goom! Wopboppaloolawopbamboom (you should see how that translates into Japanese)! Global sponging by the stupidly rich! How! Ugh! Hitler — has only got one ball … Ecky thoomp! Vips! Jesus Tweezers! By the beard of the Prophet! Fucka me dead, perhaps you should bite him for a few hundred quid. Credit, and, the scrapping of social security and human freedom, is the soul of the life-denying disease of patriarchal, parasitic capitalism. Oh, arrr.’ She lit a joint and almost set her hair on fire in the process. A fire extinguisher appeared and she thanked the Goddess for her narrow escape.
‘Careful with the commas, my dear, you will desecrate the House Style. (And even more careful with your use of characteristic ethnic dialect expressions.) I am very glad I did think of her. It was very lucky (cough), for I would not have (cough) had poor James think himself slighted upon any account even though he is a horny-handed son of toil and so enjoyed being crowned Queen of the May last year (cough cough); and I am sure she will make a very good servant; she is a civil, pretty-spoken girl (perhaps she should be a civil servant); I have a (cough) great opinion of her. Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it, indeed she is almost human.’ He gasped with an involuntary orgasm and choked on Emma’s smoke. ‘I am — gasp — sure she will be an excellent servant, having a damn fine pair of thighs (cough); and it will be a great comfort to poor Miss Tailingsdamme to have somebody about her that she is used to see and use. Whenever James goes over to see his daughter you know, she will be hearing of us. He will be able to tell her how we all are, misogynistic exploitative bourgeois pigs to be precise.’
He hacked his lungs out.
Emma, who’d once been a Brownie, spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas (she sang on, Goering has two but very small, Himmler has something similar …), and hoped, by the help of backgammon and stud poker, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own and Miss Otis’s. The backgammon-table was placed (apparently by magic); but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary, along with Hoyle’s Rules of Games and the World Chess Championships.
Mr Newtly, a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty, and an idiot at three o’clock in the morning, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it as the elder brother of Isabella’s husband and a son of a bitch (James’s daughter’s second cousin who kept a bordello in Vientiane). He lived about a mile from Hate-Ashbury, was a frequent visitor and always welcome, and at this time more welcome than usual, as coming directly from their mutual connections with Napoleonic War profiteers in London. He had returned to a late dinner after some days absence, and now walked up to Fartfield to say that all, even the urchins, were well in Brunswick-square. It was a happy circumstance and animated Mr Weedarse for some time. Mr Newtly had a cheerful manner, danced the Watusi (it was the late 18th century) in a miniskirt and white fishnet stockings whenever the local Gridiron team had a match on, which always did him good; and his many inquiries after ‘poor Isabella’ (who was not as poor as Emma) and her fourteen disabled Carribean children were answered most satisfactorily. When this tiresome show of upper middle class etiquette was over, Mr Weedarse gratefully observed,
‘It is very kind of you, Mr Newtly,’ (he had known him twenty years and still hadn’t caught his first name), ‘to come out at this late hour to call upon us. I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk.’
‘Not at all, sir. I have the Porsche outside. Nor was I struck by lightning. It is a beautiful, moonlight night, braw bricht in fact; and so mild that I must draw back from your great fire, hoots.’ He deposited the bag of gold in Mr Weedarse’s lap.
‘Unggggh! Er — spare me the flattery about my fire. But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold.’
‘Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them. I have kept them out of the fire, which may be dirty though hardly damp. And no chance of catching cold here, it’s hot as a nun’s cunt.’
‘Well! Don’t carry on so about the fire, sir. It distracts the reader. And I think ‘tight’ is the adjective you seek. But that is quite surprising as we have a vast deal of rain here.’ Twenty years in the gold speculation game, and they were still talking about the weather. ‘It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour, while we were at breakfast and the local peasantry with their poor noses pressed against the glass and all. I wanted them to put off the wedding.’
‘Do they marry, like we do? I thought they just lay down in the hay and rutted like beasts, the lazy beggars. Bye the bye — I have not wished you joy or strength. Being pretty well aware of what joy you must be feeling, I have been in no hurry with my ejaculations. But I hope it all went off tolerably well. How did you all behave? Who cried most?’
‘Ah! poor Miss Tailingsdamme! ’tis a sad business. Her family in Sicily were all wiped out by the Mafia.’
‘Poor Mr and Miss Weedarse, if you please; but I cannot possibly say “poor Miss Tailingsdamme.” (Well, I just did, heh heh.) — Yes, I have a great regard for you and Emma and ground tiger penis; but when it comes to the question of dependence or independence, I don’t approve of granting it to the Welsh! Dusky beggars don’t want it anyway, they call themselves Taffs. — At any rate, it must be better to have only one to fuck, rather than two.’
‘Arrr, especially when one of those two is such a fanciful, troublesome creature!’ said Emma playfully, having just completed a season of Godot. ‘That, is what you have in your head, I know — and what you would certainly say if my father were not by. But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!’
‘Not at all, I would say Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt.’ averred Mr Newtly in a crude Bavarian accent, raising his right arm. The stench was dreadful. It was a terrible thing, living in the 18th century. (But perhaps not quite as bad as the 20th.)
‘I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed to goodness.’ said Mr Weedarse with a sigh, reflecting on the ferocious nature of the Celtic Race and their screeching females and the all-important fact, essential to the story, that the string telephone was invented in 1667 thus assuring British Technical Progress unlike that of the Australians who had only kangaroos to pull their stump-jump ploughs. ‘I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome.’
‘Oh mein papa! My cheapest papa! My only papa, as far as I know. You do not think I could mean you , or suppose Mr Newtly to mean you. What a horrible idea! What an annus horribilis! Oh no!’ She touched her brow melodramatically with the back of her hand, being a thespian. ‘I meant only myself. I think of little else, and never about the evils of my situation. Oh, arrrr. Mr Newtly likes to find fault with me you know — in a joke — it is all a joke.’ She looked a bit unsure, since no one was laughing. ‘We always say what we like to one another, you hideous fascist bastard.’
Mr Newtly, in fact, was one of the few (har har fucking har) people who could see faults in Emma Weedarse, and the only one who ever told her of them: and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would have been so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by every body such as by stooping to double negatives.
‘Emma knows I never flatter her,’ said Mr Newtly, abusing her and the fire; ‘but I meant no reflection on any body, let alone hers. I am hardly the glass of fashion myself. Miss Tailingsdamme has been used to have two persons to please; she will now probably open a molly-house or a bawdy-shop. The chances are that she must be a gainer, if not an old boiler.’
‘Well,’, said Emma, willing to let it pass with a loud report (fart suppression was not one of her talents) — ‘you want to hear about the wedding and the bar-mitzveh, and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly, papa got so legless he fell in the cake and Miss Tailingsdamme upbraided Mr Weston for being a collectivist toad. Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks, some of them poncing around in drag. Not a tear, and hardly a long face or an underarm hair to be seen. Oh! no, we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and then they moved to Decatur, Illinois.’
‘Dear Emma bears every thing so well,’ said her father, hiding his consternation at the last remark, though Emma was grinning impishly. ‘But, Mr Newtly, she is really very sorry to lose poor Miss Tailingsdamme,’ (he sneaked a look at the dwindling figures in his bank book) ‘and I am sure she will miss her more than she thinks for.’
Emma turned away her head, divided between tears and smiles and a sanitary napkin that was migrating down her left leg — her stand-up routine had its underlying pathos — and resolved to intensify her target practice with the Heckler and Kock.
‘It is impossible that Emma should not miss such a companion,’ said Mr Newtly. ‘We should not like her so well as we do, sir, if we could suppose it — it would like thinking that parliamentarians represent money (old or new) rather than people! But she knows how much the marriage is to Miss Tailingsdamme’s advantage; she knows how very acceptable it must be at Miss Tailingsdamme’s time of life (ie past the Change) to be settled in a home of her own (tell Virginia I’m writing this in the fucking kitchen added Jane), and how important to her to be secure of a relaxed and comfortable provision, and therefore cannot allow herself to feel so much pain as pleasure (or maybe a mixture of both since she’s so into interesting piercings). Every friend of Miss Tailingsdamme must be glad to have her so happily married, even though Mr Weston is a witchdoctor.’
‘Arrr, I thought he was a wop.’ opined Emma.
“No, a nig-nog, dear.’ corrected her father.
‘Oh, of course. He does rub off on the furniture.’ She wiped her hands on her lurex pinny and the marks were dreadful. ‘And have you forgotten one matter of joy to me,’ said Emma, ‘and a very considerable one — that I made the match myself. I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said Mr Weston would never marry again after that awful accident with the vacuum dilator, may comfort me for any time.’
Mr Newtly shook his head at her then did himself up. Her father fondly replied, ‘Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretel things, for whatever you say always comes to pass — look at the French Revolution. Surely there will be no ‘Potato Famine’ in Ireland, let alone a ‘McDonald’s feedlot’! Pray do not make any more matches.’
‘I promise you to make none for myself, papa, especially after throwing myself under that police horse during the Bryant & May strike; but I must, indeed, for other people. Arrr! It is the greatest amusement in the world! And after such success you know! — Every body said that Mr Weston would never marry again, especially with the bone through his nose and safety-pins stuck in his eyebrows, and a face that would make the Elephant Man look like Nicholas Cage. Oh dear no! Mr Weston, who had been a widower so long (about 400 centimetres), and seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife due to his rubber fetishism, so constantly occupied either in his dental practice in town or among his non-unionised victims here, always unacceptable wherever he went, always cheerful — hurrah! — Mr Weston need not spend a single evening in the year alone if he did not like it in spite of his halitosis which has been known to render the New Forest leafless. Oh no! Nyet! Non! Não! Nein! Nej! Nie! Nem! Ei! Hayir! Tidak! O’chi! La! Lo! Nit! Iya! Hapana! Mr Weston certainly would never marry again with his attraction to little boys and the priesthood. Some people even talked of a promise to his wife on her death-bed (ie to strangle her if she didn’t pop off soon for the sake of the insurance money and even to take away the bed and force her to die standing up), and others of the son and the uncle not letting him — marry!, papa — on account of his share in their Catholic Religious Supplies company. All manner of solemn nonsense was talked on the subject (sûjet), but I believed none of it. Ever since the day (about sixteen centuries ago) that Miss Elizabeth ‘Orlando’ Tailingsdamme and I met with him in Broadway-lane, when, because it began to mizzle and pizzle and then piss down with rain till we all got soaked, he bounced away with so much gallantry upon his single cork leg, and borrowed two umbrellas for us from Farmer Ceutical’s (and Farmer Ceutical lives on Rockall), I made up my mind on the subject. I planned the match, to win the FA Cup, from that hour; and when such success has blessed me in this instance, dear papa, you cannot think that I shall leave off match-making, channel-swimming or the production of mechanical elephants.
‘I do not understand what you mean by “success;”’ said Mr Newtly. ‘Success supposes endeavour, as Captain Cook knew, the uppity scouse git. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last sixteen centuries to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind — rather than reading Mary Wollstonecraft and reassembling machine-guns in the dark! But if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, ‘I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Tailingsdamme if Mr Weston were to marry her due to his being a bigwig in the Presbyterian Church and a whizz at bezique,’ and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards, — why do you talk of success? where is your merit? — what are you proud of? — who the fuck do you think you are, you meddling old hag — bleating about social justice — consumed with nostalgia for the revolution — communist fellow-traveller — hairy-legged radical feminist — still waiting for the earthly paradise — you made a lucky guess, and that is all that can be said.’
Emma averted her face again and imagined him giving the Devil’s Kiss to the Pope, along with the hated Prince Regent on the toilet (George II had died on it). What did he know about building a just world, with his loathsome commitment to some sort of meaningless theory of historical accidence and inevitable ‘globalisation’? Agent of foreign capital (he had an agency in High Street). Then she raised herself up to her full height (no, Jane wouldn’t stoop so low), and riposted,
‘And have you ever known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? — I pity you, you degenerate sexist slimeball. — This ewe has teeth. — I thought you cleverer — for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck.’ She donned a gypsy scarf and tossed a few tarot cards around. ‘There is always some talent in it.’ She took up the scarred violin she’d kept since Auschwitz. It was now worth some £300 000 and with the merchandising contracts would make her an attractive catch for any single man, but Mr Newtly showed no sign of twigging (even as she failed yet again to see the evils of her situation). ‘And as to my poor word “success,” which you quarrel with, I do not know that I am so entirely without claim to it. You have made two pretty pictures, my dear Leni Riefensthal — but I think there may be a third, a third way, a stakeholder society — a something between the do-nothing and the do-all (which the representatives of foreign capital in parliament might bear in mind). If I had not promoted Mr Weston’s visits here (in conjunction with Harry M. Miller), and given many little encouragements and bribes, and smoothed many little matters and dying pillows, it might not have come to anything after all and I might have had to get a job as a management consultant and escaped papa’s sclerotic influence at last. I think you must know Fartfield well enough to comprehend that.’
He was surprized at her prescience and could hardly believe that she did not know the evils of her situation.
‘And as for Captain Cook,’ she added unexpectedly, ‘all I can say is “Send the r’yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye — foretopmastuns’l! Avast ye lubbers! Ahoy there!” And as for Captain Cook, all I can say is “Send the r’yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye — foretopmastuns’l! Avast ye lubbers! Ahoy there!”And as for Captain Cook, all I can say is “Send the r’yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye — foretopmastuns’l! Avast ye lubbers! Ahoy there!” And —’
Mr Newtly drew back at this apparent sticking of the needle (there were no CDs in the 18th century) and retorted,
‘A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, a guinea-pig for modern surgery and a thorough-going economic rationalist, and am equally rational unaffected woman, like Miss Tailingsdamme, with a face like the back of a bus and a Master of Business Administration, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. Let the managers manage! Going back to protection and financial rigidity will lead to disaster such as paying people a living wage! In the modern world, as Smith observed to me at a dinner-party the other night, no one makes decisions, all is utopian, even the administration of things! You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interfering in the meat market.’
‘Emma never thinks of herself (how sickening indeed), if she can do good to others, and as you observe, she has a deplorable commitment to social justice in this Age of Reason.’ rejoined Mr Weedarse, understanding but in part as he suffered from paralysis of the left cerebral hemisphere and an undescended testicle. ‘But, my dear, pray do not make any more matches as I cannot construct any more models of the Eiffel Tower and I must stop reading Spike Milligan. They are silly things, and break up one’s family circle grievously. Since Miss Tailingsdamme went I have to wash my own underpants.’
‘Only one more, papa; only for Mr Ben Elton. Oy vey! Poor Mr Elton! Allah ou Akhbar!’
Her mother swanned in at that point, dressed in a tippet, red heels and fur miniskirt emblazoned with hammers and sickles. She was vibrating like a plucked string. ‘Oh, I thought you’d carked it.’ said Emma. Her mother winked and introduced them all to a long-haired guy in a striped sheet.
‘I had-d-d-d-d p-p-p-peg-g-g-g-ge-d-d-d-d out, but then-n-n-n-n I found the an-n-n-n-nswer in Jesus-s-s-s-s-s.’ she quivered at the tall, silent type, at which he gave a sardonic curl of the lip and a peace sign, having long seen the rule of ‘the market’ as the law of the jungle.
Tall, dark and handsome — he looks more like Elvis, decided Emma. Except for the whip … When he started munching on a cheeseburger she was sure. ‘What was the question?’ she said cheekily.
Her mother winked again, shuddering like a naked Eskimo, and the pair swept from the room, heading at full steam for the warmth of Mr Weston’s stable.
Every body remarked on how much she looked like a Quaker.
‘Er — we’re completely Aryan on the paternal side. Mama was born during an earth tremor. Her parents were good economic rationalists in the Congo. (She felt the shakes coming on herself, and cursed the fact that she couldn’t plausibly squeeze in a tale about congenital malaria. A glass of sherry fixed it.) Um — You like Mr Elton, papa, — I must look about for a wife for him. He must want a wife, he is a man (I think). It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, and any woman writer especially with kids, must be in want of a wife. There is nobody in Hate-Ashbury who deserves him, due to his terrible scrofula — and he has been here a whole year, and has fitted up his three-hundred storey yurt so comfortably that it would be a shame to have him single any longer — and I thought when he was joining their hands to-day, he looked so very much as if he would like to have the same kind of office done for him! Yes, he was sick of playing gooseberry all right and would have leapt into bed with them then and there if he hadn’t been a vicar and fond of handcuffs! Fuckwit. But I think very well of Mr Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service.’
You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone knew that was crap.
‘Mr Elton is a very pretty young man (yes, it’s me, said her Dad with some embarrassment), and a very good young man, and I have a great regard for him and his taut, firm thighs. But if you want to shew him any attention, my dear, ask him to come up and see me sometime. I will have my leather corset on. That will be a much better thing. I dare say Mr Newtly will be so kind as to meet him too.’
‘Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ quipped Mr Newtly, thereby wrecking the flow of the story.

[break while characters are chewed out by director]

‘Er — um — with a great deal of pleasure, sir — (giggle)

TAKE 2

‘Er — um — with a great deal of pleasure, sir — at any —

TAKE 3

‘Er, um —

…

TAKE 4 238 497

‘Er — um — with a great deal of pleasure, sir — any time.’ (Exhausted, he avoided tiresome gags about ‘labour market flexibility’.) ‘I’m a little nodding man, my head is made of wood … er, Julian, I can’t seem to remember my lines, darling.’ said Mr Newtly, in a fit of the giggles; ‘um, no, no! — they’re coming back … and I agree with you entirely that it will be a much better thing. Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken even if he is a vegan, but leave him to chuse his own wife and blunderbuss. (Are these the lines?) Depend upon it, a man of six or seven-and-twenty can take care of himself.’ (He’d obviously not known the parodist at that age.)