Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 1
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The Collected Will Self
Will Self
Contents
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
How the Dead Live
Dr Mukti and other Tales of Woe
The Butt
Walking to Hollywood
Umbrella
A Note on the Author
Also by Will Self
For Farrah Anwar, my best man
– and with thanks – as ever – to
D.J.O.
‘Life is a dream that keeps me from sleeping’
– Oscar Wilde
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz
Flytopia
A Story for Europe
Dave Too
Caring, Sharing
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual
The Nonce Prize
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Also by Will Self
The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz
A building, solid and imposing. Along its thick base are tall arches, forming a colonnade let into its hard hide. At the centre are high, transparent doors flanked by columns. There’s a pediment halfway up the facade, and ranged along it at twenty-foot intervals are the impassive faces of ancient gods and goddesses. Rising up above this is row upon row of windows, each one a luxuriant eye. The whole edifice is dense, boxy, four-square and white, that milky, translucent white.
Over the central doors is a sign, the lettering picked out in individual white bulbs. The sign reads: THE RITZ. Tembe looks at the luxury hotel, looks at it and then crosses Piccadilly, dodging the traffic, squealing cabs, hooting vans, honking buses. He goes up to the entrance. A doorman stands motionless by his slowly revolving charge. He too is white, milky, translucent white. His face, white; his hands, white; his heavy coat falls almost to his feet in petrified folds of milky, translucent white.
Tembe stretches out a black hand. He places its palm against the column flanking the door. He admires the colour contrast: the black fading into the yellow finger flanges and then into the white, the milky, translucent white. He picks at the column, picks at it the way that a schoolboy distresses a plaster surface. He picks away a crumb of the wall. The doorman looks past him with sightless, milky, translucent eyes.
Tembe takes a glass crack pipe from the pocket of his windcheater and fumbles the crumb into the broken end of Pyrex piping that serves as a bowl. Setting the pipe down on the pavement, at the base of the white wall, from his other pocket he removes a blowtorch. He lights the blowtorch with a nonsafety match, which he strikes on the leg of his jeans. The blowtorch flares yellow; Tembe tames it to a hissing blue tongue. He picks up the crack pipe and, placing the stem between his dry lips, begins to stroke the bowl with the blue tongue of flame.
The fragments of crack in the pipe deliquesce into a miniature Angel Falls of fluid smoke that drops down into the globular body of the pipe, where it roils and boils. Tembe draws and draws and draws, feeling the rush rise up in him, rise up outside of him, cancelling the distinction. He draws and draws until he is just the drawing, just the action: a windsock with a gale of crack smoke blowing through it.
‘I’m smoking it,’ he thinks, or perhaps only feels. ‘I’m smoking a rock of crack as big as the Ritz.’
When Danny got out of the army after Desert Storm he went back to Harlesden in north-west London. It wasn’t so much that he liked the area – who could? – but that his posse was there, the lads he’d grown up with. And also there was his uncle, Darcus; the old man had no one to care for him now Hattie had died.
Danny didn’t like to think of himself as being overly responsible for Darcus. He didn’t even know if the old man was his uncle, his great-uncle, or even his great-great-uncle. Hattie had never been big on the formal properties of family – precisely what relation adults and children stood in to one another – so much as the practical side, who fed who, who slept with who, who made sure who didn’t play truant. For all Danny knew, Darcus might have been his father or no blood relation at all.
Danny’s mother, Coral, who he’d never really known, had given him another name, Bantu. Danny was Bantu and his little brother was called Tembe. Coral had told Aunt Hattie that the boys’ father was an African, hence the names, but it wasn’t something he’d believed for a minute.
‘Woss inna name anyways?’ said the newly dubbed Danny to Tembe, as they sat on the bench outside Harlesden tube station, drinking Dunn’s River and watching the Job Seekers tussle and ponce money for VP or cooking sherry. ‘Our ‘riginal names are stupid to begin wiv. Bantu! Tembe! Our mother thought they was kind of cool and African, but she knew nothing, man, bugger all. The Bantu were a fucking tribe, man, and as for Tembe, thass jus’ a style of fucking music.’
‘I don’ care,’ Tembe replied. ‘I like my name. Now I’m big –’ he pushed his chest forward, trying to fill the body of his windcheater ‘– I tell everyone to call me Tembe, so leastways they ain’t dissin’ me nor nuffin’.’ Tembe was nineteen, a tall, gangly youth, with yellow-black skin and flattish features.
‘Tcheu!’ Danny sucked the inside of his cheek contemptuously. ‘You’re a fucking dead-head, Tembe, an’ ain’t that the fucking troof. Lucky I’m back from doing the man stuff to sort you, innit?’
And the two brothers sat passing the Dunn’s River between them. Danny was twenty-five, and Tembe had to confess he looked good. Tough, certainly, no one would doubt that. He’d always been tough, and lairy to boot, running up his mouth whenever, to whoever.
Danny, many years above him, had been something of a hero to Tembe at school. He was hard, but he also did well in class. Trouble was, he wouldn’t concentrate or, as the teachers said, apply himself. ‘Woss the point?’ he used to say to Tembe. ‘Get the fucking “O” levels, then the “A” levels, whadjergonna do then, eh? Go down the Job Centre like every other fucking nigger? You know the joke: what d’jew say to a black man wiv a job? “I’ll have a Big Mac an’ fries ...” Well, I’m not going to take that guff. Remember what the man Mutabaruka say, it no good to stay inna white man’s country too long. And ain’t that the troof.’
So Bantu, as he was then, somehow got it together to go back to Jamaica. He claimed it was ‘back’, but he didn’t exactly know, Aunt Hattie being kind of vague about origins, just as she was about blood ties. But he persuaded Stan, who ran the Montego Bay chippie in Manor Park Road, to get him a job with a cousin in Kingston. Rootswise the whole thing was a shot in the dark, but in terms of getting a career Bantu was on course.
In Kingston Stan’s cousin turned out to be dead, or missing, or never to have existed. Bantu got all versions before he gave up looking. Some time in the next six months he dropped the ‘Bantu’ and became ‘London’, on account of what – as far as the Jamaicans were concerned – was his true provenance. And at about the same time this happened he fetched up in the regular employ of a man called Skank, whose interests included buying powder off the boat and cooking it down for crack to be sold on the streets of Trenchtown.
Skank gave London regular pep talks, work-incentive lectures: ‘You tek a man an’ he all hardened, y’know. He have no flex-i-bil-ity so he have no poss-i-bil-ity. But you tek de youth, an’ dem can learn, dem can ‘pre-ci-ate wa’ you tell for dem … You hearing me, boy?’ London thought most of what Skank said was a load of bullshit, but he didn’t think the well-oiled M16s under the floorboards of Skank’s house were bullshit, and clearly the mean little Glock the big dread kept stuck under his arm was as far from being bullshit as it was possible to be.
London did well in Skank’s employ. He cut corners on some things, but by and large he followed his boss’s orders to the letter. And in one particular regard he proved himself to be a very serious young man indeed: he never touched the product. Sure, a spliff now and then just to wind down. But no rock, no stones, no crack – and not even any powder.
London saw the punters, he also saw his fellow runners and dealers. Saw them all getting wired out of their boxes. Wired so they saw things that weren’t there: the filaments of wire protruding from their flesh which proved that the aliens had put transmitters in their brains. And hearing things as well, like non-existent DEA surveillance helicopters buzzing around their bedrooms. So London didn’t fuck with the stuff – he didn’t even want to fuck with it.
A year muscling rock in Trenchtown was about as full an apprenticeship as anyone could serve. This was a business where you moved straight from work experience to retirement, with not much of a career in between. London was getting known, so Skank sent him to Philadelphia, PA, where opportunities were burgeoning, this being the back end of a decade that was big on enterprise.
London just couldn’t believe Philly. He couldn’t believe what he and his Yardie crew could get away with. Once you were out of the downtown and the white districts you could more or less fire at will. London used to get his crew to wind down the windows on their work wagon and then they would just blast away, peppering the old brown buildings with 9-mm rounds.
But mostly the hardware was just for show. The Yardies had such a bad reputation in Philly that they really didn’t have to do anyone much. So, it was like running any retail concern anywhere: stock control, margins, management problems. London got bored and then started to do things he shouldn’t. He still didn’t touch t
When the third key went missing, Skank grew suspicious and sent an enforcer over to speak to his errant boy. But London had headed out already: BIWI to Trinidad, and then BA on to London, to cover his tracks.
Back in London, London dropped the name, which no longer made any sense. For a while he was no-name and no-job. Floating round Harlesden, playing pool with Tembe and the other out-of-work youth. He lived on the proceeds from ripping off Skank and kept his head down way low. There were plenty of work opportunities for a fast boy who could handle a shooter, but he’d seen what happened in Trenchtown and Philly, he knew he wouldn’t last. Besides, the Met had a way with black boys who went equipped. They shot them dead. He couldn’t have anything to do with the Yardies either. It would get back to Skank, who had a shoot-to-kill policy of his own.
Without quite knowing why, he found himself in the recruitment office on Tottenham Court Road. ‘O’ levels? Sure – a couple. Experience? Cadet corps and that. He thought this would explain his familiarity with the tools, although when he got to training his RSM knew damn well it wasn’t so. Regiment? Something with a reputation, fighting reputation. Infantry and that. Royal Green Jackets? Why not?
‘Bantu’ looked dead stupid on the form. He grinned at the sergeant: ‘Ought to be “Zulu”, really.’
‘We don’t care what you call yourself, my son. You’ve got a new family now, give yourself a new name if you like.’ So that’s how he became Danny. This was 1991 and Danny signed on for a two-year tour.
At least he had a home to go to when he got out of the army. He’d been prudent enough to put most of Skank’s money into a gaff on Leopold Road. An Edwardian villa that was somewhere for Aunt Hattie, and Darcus, and Tembe, and all the other putative relatives who kept on coming around. Danny was a reluctant paterfamilias, he left all the running of the place to Aunt Hattie. But when he came home things were different: Hattie dead, Darcus almost senile, nodding out over his racing form, needing visits from home helps, meals on wheels. It offended Danny to see his uncle so neglected.
The house was decaying as well. If you trod too hard on the floor in the downstairs hall, or stomped on the stairs, little plumes of plaster puffed from the corners of the ceiling. The drains kept backing up and there were damp patches below all the upstairs windows. In the kitchen, lino peeled back from the base of the cooker to reveal more ancient layers of lino below, like diseased skin impacted with fat and filth.
Danny had been changed by the army. He went in a fucked-up, angry, potentially violent, coloured youth; and he came out a frustrated, efficient, angry black man. He looked different too. Gone were the fashion accessories, the chunky gold rings (finger and ear) and the bracelets. Gone too was the extravagant barnet. Instead there were a neat, sculpted flat-top and casual clothes that suggested ‘military’. Danny had always been slight, but he had filled out in the army. Darker than Tembe, his features were also sharper, leaner. He now looked altogether squared-off and compact, as if someone had planed away all the excess of him.
‘Whadjergonna do then?’ asked Tembe, as the two brothers sat spliffing and beering in front of Saturday afternoon racing. Darcus nodded in the corner. On screen a man with mutton-chop whiskers made sheepish forecasts.
‘Dunno. Nuffin’ criminal tha’s for sure. I’m legit from here on in. I seen enough killing now to last me, man.’
‘Yeah. Killing.’ Tembe pulled himself up by the vinyl arms of the chair, animated. ‘Tell me ‘bout it, Bantu. Tell me ‘bout the killing an’ stuff. Woss combat really like?’
‘Danny. The name’s Danny. Don’ forget it, dipstick. Bantu is dead. And another fing, stop axin’ me about combat. You wouldn’t want to know. If I told you the half, you would shit your whack. So leave it out.’
‘But … But ... If you aren’t gonna deal, whadjergonna do?’
‘Fucking do-it-yourself. That’s what I’m gonna do, little brother. Look at the state of this place. If you want to stay here much longer with that fat bint of yours, you better do some yersel’ as well. Help me get the place sorted.’
The ‘fat bint’ was Brenda, a girlfriend Tembe had moved in a week after his brother went overseas. Together they slept in a disordered pile upstairs, usually sweating off the effects of drink, or rock, or both.
Danny started in the cellar. ‘Damp-coursing, is it?’ said Darcus, surfacing from his haze and remembering building work from four decades ago: tote that bale, nigger; Irish laughter; mixing porridge cement; wrist ache. ‘Yeah. Thass right, Uncle. I’ll rip out that rotten back wall and repoint it.’
‘Party wall isn’t it?’
‘No, no, thass the other side.’
He hired the Kango. Bought gloves, goggles, overall and mask. He sent Tembe down to the builders’ merchants to order 2,000 stock bricks, 50 kilo bags of ballast, sand and cement. While he was gone Danny headed down the eroding stairs, snapped on the yellow bulb and made a start.
The drill head bit into the mortar. Danny worked it up and around, so that he could prise out a section of the retaining wall. The dust was fierce, and the noise. Danny kept at it, imagining that the wall was someone he wanted done with, some towel-head in the desert or Skank, his persecutor. He shot the heavy drill head from the hip, like an action man in a boys’ comic, and felt the mortar judder, then disintegrate.
A chunk of the wall fell out. Even in the murky light of the cellar Danny could see that there wasn’t earth – which he had expected – lying behind it. Instead some kind of milky-white substance. There were fragments of this stuff on the bit of the drill, and twists like coconut swarf on the uneven floor.
Danny pushed up his goggles and pulled down his mask. He squatted and brought a gloveful of the matter up to his face. It was yellowy-white, with a consistency somewhere between wax and chalk. Danny took off his glove and scrunged some of it between his nails. It flaked and crumbled. He dabbed a little bit on his bottom lip and tasted it. It tasted chemical. He looked wonderingly at the four-foot-square patch that he had exposed. The swinging bulb sent streaks of odd luminescence glissading across its uneven surface. It was crack cocaine. Danny had struck crack.
Tembe was put out when he got back and found that Danny had no use for the stock bricks. No use for the ballast, the cement and the sand either. But he did have a use for Tembe.
‘You like this shit, that right?’ Danny was sitting at the kitchen table. He held up a rock of crack the size of a pigeon’s egg between thumb and forefinger.
‘Shee-it!’ Tembe sat down heavily. ‘Thass a lotta griff, man. Where you get that?’
‘You don’ need to know. You don’ need to know. You leave that to me. I found us a connection. We going into business.’ He gestured at the table where a stub of pencil lay on top of a bit of paper covered with calculations. ‘I’ll handle the gettin’, you can do the outin’. Here –’ he tossed the crack egg to Tembe ‘– this is almost an eightf. Do it out in twenties – I want a oncer back. You should clear forty – and maybe a smoke for you.’
Tembe was looking bemusedly at the egg that nestled in his palm. ‘Is it OK, this? OK, is it?’
‘Top-hole! Live an’ direct. Jus’ cooked up. It the biz. Go give the bint a pipe, see how she like it. Then go out an’ sell some.’
Tembe quit the kitchen. He didn’t even clock the brand-new padlock that clamped shut the door to the cellar. He was intent on a pipe. Danny went back to totting up columns of figures.
Danny resumed his career in the crack trade with great circumspection. To begin with he tried to assess the size of his stock. He borrowed a set of plumber’s rods and shoved them hard into the exposed crack-face down in the cellar. But however many rods he added and shoved in, he couldn’t find an end to the crack in any direction. He hacked away more of the brickwork and even dug up the floor. Every place he excavated there was more crack. Danny concluded that the entire house must be underpinned by an enormous rock of crack.
‘This house is built on a rock,’ he mused aloud, ‘but it ain’t no hard place, that the troof.’
Even if the giant rock was only fractionally larger than the rods indicated, it was still big enough to flood the market for crack in London, perhaps even the whole of Europe. Danny was no fool. Release too much of the rock on to the streets and he would soon receive the attentions of Skank or Skankalikes. And those Yardies had no respect. They were like monkeys just down from the fucking trees – so Danny admonished Tembe – they didn’t care about any law, white or black, criminal or straight.
