Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 115
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
. . . And popped back up to be dashed with song spray:
This golden realm of unutterable promise . . .
We give it to you, O Lord, our country,
We give . . . it . . . to . . . you-ooo . . . !
The lamps had long since been lit and now burned down low. The paraffin fumes were choking, the tobacco smoke was stale, and the meat was already putrefying between the gaping teeth from which these words spewed. They were all standing to attention behind their chairs. Prentice even had his hand on his heart. His angular Adam’s apple bobbed as he sang, stretching the smooth healthy skin of his neck.
They finished the anthem. There were tears in Gloria’s eyes, and Von Sasser’s, the latter said: ‘There she blows! Poor bugger’s had a skinful of grog, you better get him to his swag, Brian, yeah.’
Tom had no real awareness of the walk back to the derelict College; nor of Prentice, once again, readying him for bed. He switched off the lights and shut the door, but, as soon as Tom shut his eyes, he found himself back out in the dusty corridor, together with Tommy Junior, who mooched up and down puffing a cigarette. What was the slob of a teenager doing? Cutting class was one thing – but smoking in the school; that wasn’t merely delinquent, it was insane. Tom would’ve berated his adoptive son – as he had so many times before – with his lack of concern for anyone’s feelings other than his own, were it not for the uncomfortable fact that what the boy was smoking was Tom himself.
Tommy Junior stuck Tom’s feet in his mouth and slobbered on them: a suck of incestuous satisfaction. His father’s head burned with shame. Then the boy pinched Tom’s legs, hard, and flipped him. Tom flew, end over end over end, yet never reached the end of the dusty corridor; while up ahead the woman that was Martha, that was Atalaya, that was Gloria – that was all of them – turned and turned and turned the corner, avoiding him for an eternity, her words floating back, over and over, to her rejected spouse: ‘I’m scared, honey. I’m scared . . .’
It was still early when Prentice came to wake him. When they got outside the Technical College, the first dull light of the pre-dawn showed up the sloppy grin on Prentice’s face. He had changed his clothes as well as his complexion; the slogan on his too-tight, white T-shirt read NEXT PUB 859 KMS. He must’ve scored last night and the T-shirt is his sick trophy . . . Prentice took Tom’s hand and led him into the eucalyptus grove.
As they walked towards the dispensary, he prattled away: ‘Have you ever noticed, old chap, how the water here goes down the plughole the other way? Y’know, anti-clockwise. I’m not good at expressing myself at all, but it did occur to me that this was a sort of meta-thingy.’
‘Metaphor.’
‘That’s it, metaphor – for what’s happened to me. I mean, a good deal of pressure was applied, don’t get me wrong. Jethro told me I’d be seeing the inside of the old prison walls. Then there’s the racialism thing. Well, I’d be the first to admit that my, um, standpoint – rumpy-pumpy aside – was pretty old-fashioned, but, well . . .’ He laughed. ‘Seeing your behaviour – how crass you were – and then meeting my own children for the first time . . . Well, it turned me completely round, twisted me anti-clockwise. Now I believe in what I’ve done, Tom. It’s like Erich says: it doesn’t matter what my intentions were, I was a good tool.’
There was barely enough current in Tom’s brain for the connections to be made – but then they were. At high speed the entire narrative spooled through the viewfinder of his awareness, and the depth and complexity of the set-up, and the shallowness and simplicity of his own responses, stunned him with blow after blow.
Adams – who’d known so very much about Tom without even having to ask, right down to the fact that he drank Seven and Sevens – had been omniscient in the breakfast room at the Mimosa – and then there was Swai-Phillips, who had already known that Tom had met with the Consul. The indifference and then hostility of the junior embassy attaché – who had been got to long before Tom called.
Then, once things were up and running, they had a legman keeping an eye on Tom’s every move. First there were tails from behind – Squolly’s men – and then they were replaced by a better tail, one who worked from the front and was able to anticipate which way he’d go before Tom knew himself.
The man who knew what the inside of the courtroom was like – even knew that it had good airconditioning; the man the car-rental clerk knew the name of without having to be told; the man who’d slipped it to the clerk in the Goods Shed Store that the rifles weren’t for Tom; the man who was never marked by the makkata in Vance to begin with, and whose thigh was checked by other makkatas along the way, purely to confirm that he was the plant. Yes, the man whose case was being handled on a no-win-no-fee basis, and who performed brilliantly as an instrument to be played upon by the wills of others.
Lincoln, Tom kicked himself. The old man was the only damn one of them who had told the truth. He tried to warn me – the rest of them were all in on it. And to Prentice, he croaked: ‘That makkata.’
‘What’s that, old chap? Speak up.’
‘That makkata, back in Vance, he was a fucking fraud, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ Prentice laughed. ‘Pissed out of his brains, the ceremony was a total cock-up. You must’ve realized, Tom, you were inquivoo all along.’
They had reached the dispensary, and Prentice let go of Tom’s hand to withdraw an envelope from the back pocket of his jeans. It was identical to the one that Tom had left under his swag – the one that contained Tom’s copy of the tontine.
‘All tontines are, of course, fully reciprocal, Tom,’ Prentice said, waggling the envelope. ‘You may have thought you could convert it unilaterally, but I’m afraid you couldn’t. I’m surprised the man at Endeavour didn’t spell it out for you, but then insurance salesmen aren’t the most honest of chaps. The natives are easy to rook; however, it’s different with an Anglo – they couriered a copy round to me at the Hilton within an hour.’
Prentice smiled complicitly. ‘Our tontine covers – you’ll’ve noticed, if you’ve read the small print – severe mental impairment, as well as injury and death. In the absence of your having appointed someone to hold your power of attorney . . . Well, let’s just put it this way, since I can see you’re still a little groggy: it seems I’m on the verge of coming into a considerable sum of money.
‘But don’t think I’m going to be selfish,’ he continued, holding the dispensary door open for Tom. ‘By far the bulk of it will go to support my kids – and to help Erich’s work, naturally. So, best not to look on this, um, procedure as a punishment at all; rather it’s your way of giving a lot of people a much deserved reward.’
Erich von Sasser was waiting for them in the anteroom to the operating room, together with Vishtar Loman. The doctors were already in their gowns and masks, but a third shrouded figure – smaller, slimmer – was scrubbing up at a sink in the corner.
Prentice helped Tom on to the gurney, then went to take his turn at the sink. The other operating assistant was Atalaya Intwennyfortee, and it seemed she was playing the part of of anaesthetist, because she came over to where Tom lay bearing a kidney dish, and looked down at him. Her beautiful dark eyes were joined by Von Sasser’s hollow sockets.
‘I’m afraid, Tom,’ the neuro-anthropologist said breezily, ‘that a lack of funds means we aren’t able to give you a pre-med’, but Ms Intwennyfortee here has something that should help you relax.’
Atalaya took a quid of engwegge from the kidney dish and pushed it into Tom’s defenceless mouth. Biting down on it, feeling the nicotine immediately perfuse through his gums and into his bloodstream, Tom ruminated on what a pity it was that his last smells were so bitterly antiseptic.
In gown and mask, Prentice joined the other two standing over Tom, and Von Sasser put one rubber-gloved hand on his shoulder and the other on Atalaya’s. ‘Well, Tom,’ he said, ‘if you’re puzzled as to why Brian is helping out with your oppo, cast your mind back to Papa’s Songs. You’ll recall that there’s nothing a Tayswengo fears more than gettanka, or ritualized humiliation, and that he – or she – would rather see a man die – or at any rate, experience an ego-death – than suffer such a fate.’
However, Tom wasn’t casting his mind back anywhere; he was adrift in his engwegge trance, and faintly amused by the way things had turned out. After all, he was only doing what he had always done: passively conforming to an invented belief system.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the Scottish Book Trust and its partners, who facilitated the writing of some of what follows.
The Butt End
Some years later . . .
The Honorary Consul, Winthrop Adams, stood on the casino steps together with his two friends, Jethro Swai-Phillips and Brian Prentice.
Prentice, who had a good deal of ready cash, was known around Vance as something of a high-roller, and, although he only blew into town from time to time, he liked to cut loose and enjoy himself. Treating his mates to a few hundred bucks’ worth of chips, so they could fritter them away on blackjack or craps, gave him immense – and not altogether discreditable – pleasure.
The three men lingered, chatting on the white marble steps, under the white marble pyramid of the vulgarly grandiose building; then Prentice waved his arm, hoping to gain the attention of one of the cab drivers waiting in the shade of the ornamental palms on the far side of Dundas Boulevard.
‘Can’t I give you a ride, Brian?’ Swai-Phillips asked.
‘No, that’s all right, old chap,’ Prentice said. ‘I’ve got my Hummer to pick up from the garage, and I need to do a few errands in town before I head over–’ He stopped abruptly. Something – or, rather, someone – had caught his eye.
An old wino was shuffling along the arc of the sixteen-metre line, bending down to pick up cigarette butt after butt, then lifting each in turn up to the sky and scrutinizing it, before letting it fall. Every time he bent down he displayed the back of his cropped head to the three spectators, and the white trough of a scar that bisected it from nape to crown.
‘I say,’ Prentice exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that Tom Brodzinski?’
‘Yes,’ Adams said. ‘I believe it is.’
‘What’s he still doing here?’ Prentice demanded.
‘Well, Brian.’ The Consul couldn’t avoid sounding official, if not officious. ‘There have been numerous, ah, complications with his, ah, status. Seems his passport was, ah, mislaid and, given his record, it’s proving tricky to get him another one. He’s stuck in limbo, poor fellow.’
‘He looks like he’s getting a bellyful of grog in limbo,’ Swai-Phillips caustically observed.
‘Well,’ Adams said pedantically, ‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s a lot else he can do, given his, ah, mental-health problems.’
‘At least he’s doing now what he should’ve bloody done in the first place, yeah,’ the lawyer persisted.
‘Oh, and what’s that, old chap?’ Prentice was genuinely curious.
‘Picking up the bloody butts, of course!’
And, although this wasn’t a particularly adroit witticism – even by Swai-Phillips’s unexacting standards – his two friends still rewarded it with laughter: Prentice giving voice to manly guffaws, while the Consul emitted a dry ‘heh-heh-heh’.
Tom heard everything the three men were saying with perfect clarity, and he entirely understood its relevance to him. If he made no response, it was because Prentice and the others were so ridiculously tiny and insignificant: buzzing flies, settled for a split-second on the side of a termite heap, before some still smaller perturbation triggered them into flight.
Astande, who stood beside Tom, enormous and black and beautiful and proud, now pointed out another cigarette butt and said: ‘Pick it up, Tom, yeah.’ Tom did as he was told. ‘Now hold it up, mate.’ Tom held it up, turning the butt this way and that. ‘Yup,’ Astande boomed, ‘I reckon that’s the one, d’you see?’
Tom did see. The crumpled paper tube, with frayed tobacco at one end and its bung of synthetic cellulose acetate at the other, had been accidentally moulded by the sole that had ground it out. The butt was a mashed vee that, from the right angle, was exactly the same shape as the great island-continent itself.
Tom asked his spirit guide: ‘Can I smoke it?’ And Astande said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So Tom scurried into the thin passageway that had been left behind in the scar tissue lining his longitudinal fissure. He burrowed deep inside his own brain, to where Von Sasser’s scalpel had negligently created a small cavity while in the process of clumsily cutting through the tough cells of Tom’s corpus callosum.
Over the intervening years since this slight, Tom had worked away at the cavity with his bare hands and whatever tools he could find lying around, until he had managed to excavate a sizeable den.
The pulsing, pinky-grey walls of the brain-cave sparked with neurones – an unearthly display; but the furniture that Tom had dragged in from his memory was rather prosaic: a couple of plastic-backed chairs taken from Squolly’s interview room, Tom’s crap bed from the Entreati Experience and a gateleg table that he had carried away from Adams’s bedroom. There were plenty of ashtrays.
Tom straightened out the butt and lit it with a match from a book advertising SWAI-PHILLIPS ATTORNEYS, NO WIN-NO FEE. CALL: 1–800-LAW. He took a deep drag and handed it to Astande, who sat opposite him on the other plastic chair. The Swift One took a companionable pull, then passed the butt back.
WALKING
TO HOLLYWOOD
Memories of Before the Fall
WILL SELF
For Marti
While the names of some real persons are used for characters in this text, these characters appear in fictionalized settings that are manifestly a product of the narrator’s delusions. There is no intention to suggest that the characters in the book bear any other than the most superficial similarity to actual people bearing these names, and any other resemblances to living people are accidental and wholly unintended.
Walking to Hollywood
Very Little
1 Sherman Oaks
2 Round the Horn
3 Fin du trottoir roulant
4 The LongPen
5 There is Hope – Make the Call
5.5: The Last Nurdle
5.25: It’s a Small World
5.125: Burke Shops at Wal-Mart
5.0625: Rat Poison
5.03125: Light Aircraft
5.015625: Paying Guests
5.0078125: The Confession
5.00390625: Top of the World, Ma
5.001953125: La Jetée
5.0009765625: Left Behind
5.00048828125: The Earth Summit
5.000244140625: Global Reach
Walking to Hollywood
1 The Consultation
2 KerPlunk!
3 My Name is Bond
4 Among the Chocodiles
5 The Atrium
6 Timber Just in Lake
7 My Dinner with Bret
8 The Happy Detective
9 The Pitch
10 The Virgil of Laurel Canyon
11 A Touch of Evil
12 Will Hay and the Fat Boy
Spurn Head
1 Daycare
2 Static Homes
3 The Seal Pup
4 The Sound Mirror
5 The Struldbrug
Footnotes
Afterword
A Note on the Author
Also by Will Self
Very Little
‘Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness’
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
1
Sherman Oaks
At three minutes past noon on 8 October 2007, I found myself standing listening to Sherman Oaks beside a dew pond on the crest of the South Downs in Sussex. A single cramped ash was reflected in the gunmetal disc of water, a disc that was ringed with pocked earth and cupped in a fold of cropped turf. Had an eavesdropper crept up on the pair of us, they might have thought Sherman’s magniloquence prompted by the very finitude of this watering hole, that the way he lectured not only me but the thrushes flitting overhead was an attempt to break free of this claustrophobic scene: the sky closely sealed by a lid of cloud, cut-outs of hedge and woodland stuck on the receding crests of the downs.
I knew this not to be the case.
Sherman had always been a big talker. I remember him aged seven or eight, rolling around in the boot of my mother’s car when it was her turn to do the school run, spouting a stream of wisecracks and making razor-sharp observations on the foibles of the world. A precocious anarchist, at thirteen Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski’s, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this – in a thick, mittel-European accent: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’
It’s barely worth remarking that the impact of this stunt would be hugely enhanced by the perpetrator’s stature: at eight Sherman had been less than three feet tall, at thirteen he was perhaps three-foot-two, thirty-five years later he had gained, at most, an inch.
Assuming Sherman did do it – and I have no reason to doubt him – his dwarfism was the reason he got away with it, for in the North London of the 1970s the uneasy ridicule that disability once provoked had mutated into a tolerance that already verged on de facto acceptance of collective responsibility: we were all to blame for Sherman Oaks’s restricted height. Not that our peers felt exclusively this way; after all, children are always in a state of nature – always nasty, brutish … and short. Sherman may not have been overtly persecuted, but he undoubtedly felt excluded – forever eddying while the life stream flowed forward all around him.
