Three Score & Ten

Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing Chinese-burn – a last attempt to tempt a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol?

I experienced thrilling self-pity. ‘What will that mind of yours get up to next?’ I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.

Steady on. What’s so great about going mad?

But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

‘I didn’t mean to sound like a martyr. You’re right, of course, I do have a good time and I’ve been very lucky in all sorts of ways. But, you know, I do find some things awfully difficult. I don’t really know my way around, you know.’

Dixon wanted to laugh. He couldn’t imagine a woman of her age less in need of such law. He said as much.

‘No, it’s perfectly true,’ she insisted. ‘I haven’t had a chance to find out yet.’

‘You mustn’t mind me saying this, but I should have thought there’d be plenty of people only too willing to show you.’

‘I know, I see what you mean exactly, but they don’t try to. They assume I know already, you see.’ She was talking animatedly now.

‘Oh, they do, do they? How’s that, would you say?’

‘I think it must be because I look as if I’m full of poise and that sort of thing. I look as if I know all about how to behave, and all that. Two or three people have told me that, so it must be right. But it’s only the way I look.’

‘Well, it is true you look fairly sophisticated, if that’s the right word. Even a bit upstage sometimes. But it…’

‘How old would you say I am?’

Dixon thought an honest answer would, for once, be appropriate. ‘About twenty-four, I should say.’

‘There you are then,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Just what I thought. I’m twenty next month. The eighteenth.’

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim