Free Success by Martin Amis Page A

tears in the neighbour room. Two or three times a month, in the kitchen at supper time, seven o’clock, a slight, tickling, migraine haze would envelop and gradually retard our evening meal. Uh-oh, the air was saying. My father, a tall, lumpy, sober-looking man with flat red smalltown hair, a bent little slot of a mouth and stark protuberant eyes, sits to my right, saying nothing, eating his eggs, chips, beans and tomatoes with fastidious dispatch, paying shrewd justice to every foodstuff on each forkful, so that he will be left with, say, a sliver of yolk, a stub of chip, two baked beans and the pipped crimson gook of the tomato for the final prim swallow. My mother, a lean, nervous and intelligent woman with nutcrackerish features (she lost her teeth; she never did find them again), sits tight on my left, saying nothing, mashing her skiddy eggs, beans and tomatoes into thin brothy spoonfuls. Sitting between them — and looking, I should think, about the same as I look now — is me, Terry at six, the long-ago boy. I work at my fishfingers; no one speaks, though you feel everyone is trying to, everyone would if they could, and the airgets itchier and itchier until the sound of our irons on the plates is like the alarum of advancing kettle-drums which swells up to fill the room, then dies down again, then gathers once more.
    And it’s a completely normal evening — we all think it’s a completely normal evening — except for this curious, unpleasant headache haze and this strange false clarity of sound. But perhaps, too, we can all sense something else, an extra thing, activity starting to occur somewhere in my father’s brain, and maybe in my mother’s mind also a perverse, insidious reciprocity has begun.
    Time for you to go to bed, Terry, says my father to the air. Don’t forget to clean your teeth, my mother adds, stacking the plates, her head bowed. I walk to the door and turn. For a moment I feel I am on the edge of their exhausted, frightening, migraine world, and feel that I could deliver them from it, tell them something quickly about the other side. But I say,
    Good night.
    Good night.
    Good night.
    And I walk softly upstairs, use the bathroom in watery porcelain silence, undress shivering and slide between the heavy blankets, crush the pillow to my head — and hear the house start to come alive like a big machine: the walls shudder and sweat, the ceiling splits, the floor bounces my bed high in the air, the cold sheets hug me in their fire.
    When I was a bit older — taller, stronger, more aware that my parents were up to no good — I used to think that by simply appearing, by simply showing them I was there, that they would have to stop, and stop straight away and never do it again. (I had an absurd faith in the sacramental power of my own presence. What happened to that?) See! I’m here while you’re doing this. Can’t you tell what it must be like for
me
?
    I stood waiting in my room. I wanted to hide, hide, but I made no move to get undressed. There had been thatdizzying tingle again, and that sharp low threshold of sound, and I knew it would have to happen soon. Then the stirrings began, random and intermittent at first, like the collapse of distant breakers, harsh music over choppy water. Out on the shaken landing, the walls veering about me, down the stairs which creak by on a slowing treadle, part of the old machine the house becomes as I head for its heart, the back room, a place of dangling black pans, sooty cisterns and something I’ve never seen before. In the downstairs passage the noise is almost unbearable — and not the discrete, inanimate noise of battle and wreckage, but warm, sweaty, human sounds, as of pain and distress, of something far too intense to be seen. I enter the kitchen; I cross the room and push the half-glass scullery door; it swings open and I stare. At what? At my father’s eyes as they focus incuriously on my face. Eyes without a trace of hatred or anger or