Frankie Styne & the Silver Man Read Free Page B

tidy it up and make it blend . . . ‘Only trying to make things easy for you, old chap,’ he said when Frank asked him why didn’t he dispense with authors altogether. ‘Just so long as you get it in, I don’t care how, that’s all.’
    As a result of this discussion Frank had roughed out The Procreators. The Barratt-house husband’s desperate and humiliating attempts to produce viable sperm—spurred on by his belief that his beautiful wife Sandra was already unfaithful and staying with him only for material reasons—had culminated in a visit to a Dr Villarossa. From her he had learned that his infertility was the result of hiding his true nature. For too long he’d suppressed the virile part, the beast in himself, walking on soft carpets, bringing his wife flowers, busying himself with home improvements and gardening. Dr Villarossa had given him a series of injections to change all this. He would, she said, become what he truly was, and then a child would be conceived.
    As a result of the injections, Mr Barratt-Homes began to change physically. His shoulders broadened, his skin became greasy and then flaky. He perspired constantly; his sweat had a terrible odour like cat’s breath and left dark, ineradicable stains on his clothes. Sandra—at first concerned—had grown utterly repelled and rejected him. He had suffered terrible physical pain and grown even more miserable than before but Dr Villarossa had reassured him that everything was as it should be.
    Eventually he had taken to one of the spare bedrooms and locked the door. Finally, he emerged, creeping up on his wife in the sitting room while she watched TV and drank Martinis.
    Frank had already described this: his Barratt-Homes husband was man-shaped for the most part, but had grown unevenly, his buttocks, shoulders and feet huge, his arms long, his legs short. His jaw had grown larger, his forehead receded. Where a human skin would be soft—the lips and fingertips, the palms of the hands, the insides of the thighs—so his was scaled and hard, and elsewhere covered in a terrible eczema, a crust of flakes concealing the soft putrescence underneath, like pastry on a pie. They would have sex on the rug. Pete Magee was pleased.
    This is what I do, Frank thought. Pulp. Junk. I do it well. It’s not daring or experimental but I want to go on doing it in peace. No publicity. No people coming around and wanting to find out about the real me or what it all means deep down . . . But it was there, in his hand, typed: the future, the shortlist, the result in early May . . . Publicity, which meant, of course, television. It was as if a skewer had slipped through his flesh.
    â€˜Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, John,’ his mother had said, returning with custard creams and gold-top milk. The next day she had bought him the snow-storm paperweight. She found a wooden box so that he could stand next to her in the kitchen as she worked. But glass truth was truer than mother truth. The mirror had nothing to gain and nothing to lose. ‘Being bad is far worse than being ugly,’ she also said. But when school came—playtime—they had all run away.
    Liz possessed neither watch nor alarm clock. And there was no point, she believed, in getting up as soon as she woke; a waste of warmth—also, and more importantly, a waste of the special freedom that lingered after sleep, when she couldn’t quite remember what it felt like to be who she was, where she was, how she got there, nor how long it was that she must stay. A square of buttery light fell in ripples over the crumpled bedclothes and she moved her hand into its warmth.
    She set herself to imagine that she was a visitor from another planet, waking to her first dawn in the body of a human. She looked out through the borrowed eyes and asked: What kind of place is this? If she didn’t like it, she could