The Sweet Smell of Psychosis by Will Self Read Free Book Online

making love to him, and cutting off his carotid artery as a means of inducing shattering orgasm.
    Then the Sealink again – the table-football room, to be precise. The club had bought an outsize table-football table from a paedophile member – of parliament. Now, the wannabe macho and the never gonnabe macho flexed their tethered cocks, yanked, biffed and slammed the balls. Taking up an unobtrusive position against one wall of the room, Richard got trapped behind two seats of agitated suit trousers, whose owners were – to all intents and purposes – psychically merged with the battered eight-inch figurines of cockless men that they manipulated.
    Bell was over by the bar, talking to Trellet, an influential, older-generation member of the clique. Trellet was a comic actor who had made quite dumb amounts of money by impersonating a bumbling, lovable paterfamilias in an endless sitcom. In fact,

    as soon as there was a wrap, Trellet's face collapsed from the expansively benign to the pettily vicious. In appearance not unlike a pocket-sized Robert Morley ( circa Beat the Devil ) , Trellet was possessed of appetites as sluttish as Bell's, but with an added full twist of genuine perversion.
    Right now, Richard couldn't forbear from listening to them. As he did so his delicate ears, networked with the finest of bluest of veins, changed from the white-pink of shame to the deep, angry pink of impotence and anger. Trellet was telling two anecdotes with intersecting themes, which converged on his drive to humiliate anyone who crossed his path.
    The first anecdote featured an aristocratic girl, crazed by cocaine, whom Trellet had forced to lick kitchen tiling, lick herself, lick him – in order to get the merest lick of cocaine. The second was more in the manner of a revelation. Trellet – it was unfolded with nauseating aplomb – kept a Down's Syndrome adolescent mistress (this was dignifying it – obviously sex slave would have been nearer the truth), in a flat on the far side of Battersea Bridge. Trellet, jowls bunching, contorting with delight, gave details of domestic arrangements, and then more forced accommodations.
    Ursula Bentley leant against the banisters, a Venus in spangles, trails of her long, dark brown hair twining around her upper body, forming a growing bodice. The good thing about opium is that when you're on it only the things that matter, matter. Or so thought Richard as he gathered himself together, and made the supreme effort of not registering the fact that Trellet was extending visiting privileges – ‘You wouldn't believe it mate, her mouth's that sloppy, that gooey .’ Richard got upright. He walked around the table-football table to where Ursula stood, put a firm hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I'm going to get a cab now – perhaps you should let me get one for you as well?’
    He was as surprised as he would have been had she at that point brokered an IRA ceasefire when Ursula smiled and said, ‘Yes.’
    On the night of Mearns's greenmail party Richard ended up taking the cab all the way back to Ursula's flat in Kensington with her. She rumpled his curls once more, said he was ‘sweet’, pecked him near the cheek, and didn't demur when he suggested that they have lunch together at some unspecified time in the future. It wasn't until the cab pulled away that Richard realised he had only a tenner plus some change in his pocket.Ursula, typically, hadn't ventured a contribution, and he had no plastic or chequebook. The cabbie took him as far as Notting Hill before turfing him out, and Richard walked on from there.
    Walked on through a distempered ground mist, across the Portobello Road, and up past the Front Line, where even at this hour the crack-heads were gathered in knots of desperation on the corner by the bookie's, their eyes tracking the passing cars like the targeting laser beams of ground-to-crack missiles. Richard knew what they were, what they wanted. He identified with them more than