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

side of breast, whisper of pudenda. Gone was the coke fakeover, the lips red as ketchup, the eyes sparkling like crystals on a mirror. Gone too was that scent, that sweet, ineffable, seductive perfume. The one that Richard associated with her, as surely as he associated gravity with the earth. And with the scent gone she was more approachable, more girl-next-door than was altogether credible.
    She was skittish, coltish, vouchsafing little gobbets of her past, a past that was wholly charming to Richard, matching as it did his own in most respects: a father she loved, but felt distanced from by divorce; a mother whose influence she was still attempting to shake off; siblings who would come up to the city to enjoy her giddy round, and then berate her for her lack of conviction, application, seriousness. She and Richard would commiserate with each other, mull over each other's petty miseries and dissatisfactions. Richard would even discuss her latest column, without in any way averring – even to himself – that what she wrote had all the mondial impact of a used cotton bud falling on to a damp towel.
    But on these occasions Bell and the clique would never be mentioned, and when they met up again, that evening or the next in the bar of the Sealink, it would be neglect as usual. The same old brackish badinage, the same cruel jokes. And Ursula would behave as if the lunches never took place, as if there was no link between the two worlds they now inhabited.
    There was also a further, more unsettling downside. As cold infiltrated the city, taking possession first of the foundations of the buildings, and then of successivestoreys, working its way up until chill of earth and chill of sky effected union, so the press beanos, the book launches, the première parties reached new heights of purposeless frenzy. The members of the clique weren't simply having dinner with Pablo now, they were also having tea most days, lunch on some, and even the occasional, high-powered, breakfast meeting.
    This was because in early November the clique had acquired a new cocaine dealer, courtesy of Slatter. This individual was a Slatteralike, so dusted with ‘druff that it was hard not to imagine that some of his product had escaped its packagingto form an unorthodox mini-piste. But on the plus side, his tackle was always of the best – creamy white, rocky, unstepped on – and he turned up whenever and wherever, at the touch of a few rubberised buttons. So frequently, indeed, did Richard call upon the dealer's services (usually at Ursula's behest) that he soon ascended the ranking of frequent callers programmed into the dealer's mobile, until he was well up in the top ten of the snort parade.
    Richard was doing so much cocaine now that the numbers that should have been intaglioed into the back of his credit card were embossed, raised up like the word ‘POLO’ on the eponymous mint – only back to front.Richard was doing so much cocaine now that some mornings the rigid mucilage in his nostrils couldn't be shifted, even with a sharp nail and generous sluicings of salted warm water. He seriously considered going down to the mews garage at the end of his road and asking the surly mechanic there to rebore his nose to a higher calibre.
    Richard was doing so much cocaine now that he never worried about getting involuntary erections; instead he worried about ever getting another erection at all.
    But most disturbingly of all, the increased cocaine consumption brought with it more of what Richard termed – in order to take some of the sinister sting out of them – belles époques. These were those veridical occurrences – like the one he had had at the Sealink on the evening of Mearns's greenmail party – when he thought he saw Bell's familiar features, but then looked again to discover that it was some other cliquer who was withering at him.
    Walking up Old Compton Street one grey, hungover morning, he saw Bell's broad back bent low over the public phone