The Sweet Smell of Psychosis Read Free Page A

the silvered tongue, trajected like bolas to wrap around their lower limbs, pull them down to the plushly carpeted pampa. There were many of these, for – damn it all! – even the denizens of the West End have somepride, some integrity, some other relationship they don't wish to lose.
    These Bell particularly favoured with his attentions. It seemed a perfect tonic to the man to seek out some long-established relationship – marriage, cohabitation, or a clandestine affair, even – and interpose his dissolutive bulk between the pair-bonding, unsticking the accretions of years, experiences, children . . . even love.
    Innumerable weeping spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, partners and lovers had raged impotently up and down the stretch of unforgiving pavement outside Bell's mansion-house block in Bloomsbury. Bell never made any attempt to hide his peccadilloes. In fact, that his corporeal column should have as much salience as his printed one seemed to be at the core of his philandering. And he always got his man, or his woman. So much so that once the denizens of the Sealink were aware even that he had drawn a bead on a given target, they knew that it was only a matter of time before there would be tears in the toilets, sobbing on the lobby phone, altercations in the vestibule. Laclos would have had a field day with Bell.
    It was one such annihilation of affect that the clique were discussing as Richard tuned in, adjusting his earsto the whine of perfidy. Ursula Bentley was saying, ‘Really, I think she'll have to go somewhere, a clinic . . . whatever, cool off y'know what I mean – ‘
    ‘But I don't think it's exactly drugs that're the problem.’ This was from a man called Slatter, who ran a clippings service much patronised by Bell.
    ‘Hng'f’ – ‘ Ursula snorted, her lovely mouth distorted with contempt, ‘if it's not drugs, it bloody well ought to be. Bell says she was banging on the main door of his block at five in the morning, twitching, white-faced, the whole bit. Isn't that right, Bell?’ She turned her radiant eyes to her mentor, who inclined his massive head ever so slightly to indicate that this was indeed the case.
    Slatter had been shaping a rejoinder, some of his words even ran under the end of Ursula's explanation, but seeing Bell's acquiescence he immediately shut up and fell to examining his nails. He was a beatifically repugnant man, Slatter. Thin and yet sallowly saggy, he always wore off-the-peg suits that appeared cut from fabric with the texture of vinyl (in summer), or carpet underlay (in winter). There were mounds of’ druff on his shoulders, and scurf clearly visible on his scalp. The nails he was examining were so neatly encrusted – eachwith a dear little dark crescent – that the crud essence was almost decorative. But in spite – or, perhaps, more sinisterly, because – of this, Slatter was Bell's right-hand man, his factotum, his chore whore. It was he who ran errands, took messages, bought cocaine, sold weepy girls down the river to abortionists in Edgware.
    His dirty hands guaranteed Bell's clean ones. And as befits a parasite and host who have achieved a perfect modus vivendi, they were in symbiosis, oblivious of who occupied which role.
    Bell was still silent; the filaments of unease and control connecting him to the other clique members hummed and pulsed. Who, Richard wondered, would seize this opportunity to advance himself, to take on the responsibility of providing input, material, potential copy?
    It was Todd Reiser. ‘You'll never guess,’ he began, ‘what young Richard and I saw just now . . .’ Reiser's collar-length, glossy hair bounced on the collar of his hacking jacket as he leant forward, claiming the web site.
    ‘You're right,’ whined Adam Kelburn, the Deputy Editor of Cojones, a men's style magazine Richard wrote features for, and a distal – if enthusiastic – cliquer, ‘we won't. Why not tell us, Todd?’
    Reiser hunched himself up still further, to