Free Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

back. It didn't hurt that much, funnily enough, and I waved away the appalled footman who tried to help me to my feet. I then had a few pretty stern words with the old prong at the desk. He made sure I got there this time all right, personally escorting me to the door of the Pluto Room and saying with a bow, 'This okay now, sir?'
    'Fabulous,' I said. 'Look, take this.'
    'No thank you, sir.'
    'Come on. What's a five?'
    'We have a no-tips policy here, sir.'
    'Just this once won't harm anyone. No one's looking — come on ... Okay then — fuck off!'
    Well that sorted him out. I chugged into the Pluto Room loosening my tie and craning my neck. Boy, was it dark and hot in here. The bent backs of women and the attentive angles of their men stretched down the bar away from me. I took a bit of a toss on a stool-leg and sprinted face-first into a pillar, but stumbled on until I made out my friend Fielding down at the far end. Dressed in a white tux, he was whispering into the nimbus cast by a miraculously glamorous girl. She wore a low-cut silk dress in a razzy grey — it rippled like television. Her ferociously tanned hair hung in solid curves over the vulnerable valves of her throat and its buzzing body-tone. Giving Fielding no time to intercept me, I swanned straight up to the girl and kissed her lightly on the neck.
    'Hi, Butch,' I said. 'How you doing?'
    'Well hi. John Self. An honour,' said Butch Beausoleil.
    'How goes it, old sport,' said Fielding. 'Hey, Slick, you look really lit. Now before I forget, here's a present for you.'
    He handed me an envelope. It contained an air ticket, New York-London, first class.
    The flight's at nine,' said Fielding, 'but you'll catch your plane—I guarantee it. Now, John, you look like you could use a drink.' The kids were on champagne and I soon hollered for another bottle. I spilt a lot of that and hollered for another. Butch was a million laughs — and an obvious goer: you should have seen the way she helped me dab her lap with the napkin, and the way she playfully retrieved the ice-cubes I kept dropping down her front. Whew, the stuff that hot fox was giving out, all miming so fluently with the pornography still fresh in my head. Heat, money, sex and fever — this is it, this is New York, this is first class, this is the sharp end. I was one happy yob up there in the Pluto Room, and then another bottle appeared, and my nose was fizzing with the stuff, and there was another room and terrible confusion, and someone turned me by the shoulder and I felt wetness and could see Fielding's face saying ...
    ——————
    The yellow cab shouldered its way through the streets of New York, a caged van taking this mad dog home. The driver with his flexed brown arm gouged the car through the lights on amber and gunned us out on to the straight. Never do anything, never do anything. I watched his brown arm, the skin puckered and punctured by its lancing black hairs. I watched unfamiliar city acres surge past in their squares. Eventually the flat signs and white lights of the airport began to swish by my face.
    'Wha you fly,' said the driver, and I told him.
    I was lying. So far as I could tell — from my watch, and from the red streamers of the ticket-books — both my flights had flown. But a squad of surprises awaited me in the expo aviary of the terminal. The departure of the nine o'clock flight had been delayed, thanks to a timely bomb hoax. They had just started reloading the baggage, and expected to be in the air by eleven. I strolled to the first-class check-in bay. First class, they treat you right. 'How many bags, sir?' asked the chick. 'Just the one,'I said, and turned with an obliging flourish. 'Oh, you poor fucking moron.' 'Sir?' 'No, no bags. Just me,' I said with a dreadful smile ... I rang Felix at the Ashbery. He would store my stuff with no sweat. I'd be back ... Under the hot dental lights I traversed the building in search of a bar, having developed the idea of toasting my