Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 151
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Right beside her now, bent down like her so that he can peer round her palsied shoulder and into her face, which is . . . profoundly masked: rough-bark skin within which frighteningly mobile eyes have been bored. – Shocked, he withdraws, and the old woman is at once far away again, shaking and ticcing, her fingers scrabbling, her arms flexing I’m an ape man I’m an ape-ape . . . Perceptible flames of movement ignite on her left-hand side, in the middle of the densest thickets of akinesia, a paralysis not only of the muscles . . . but of the will itself – abulia? then flare up one arm, across the shoulders, before exploding into ticcy sparks and so dying away . . . Torticollis comes to Busner uselessly – and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair aerated cream in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them – . . . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she’ll ’preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman . . . See, ’e cummup ’ere mos days . . . – before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. — Electric woman waits for you and me . . . with Nescafé and a marijuana cigarette burning rubber after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm . . . Busner had taken the wrinkled fang trailing venom, his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase . . . nauseating. Her boyfriend’s hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. She was in velvet – the boyfriend in a sort of hessian sack. Was it Busner who had been time-travelled here from a past as jarringly austere as his test-card-patterned sports jacket and drip-dry tie, or, to the contrary, they who had been op-art-spiralled from a pre-industrial opium dream of foppery and squalor? Later . . . she frigidly anointed him with tiger balm and then they coupled on a floor cushion covered with an Indian fabric that had tiny mirrors sewn into its brocade. The boyfriend hadn’t minded gotta split, man and Busner was split . . . a forked thing digging its way inside her robe. She fiddled with bone buttons at her velvety throat. His skin and hairs snagged on the mirrors, his fingers did their best with her nipples. She looked down on me from below . . . one of his calves lay cold on the floorboards. There was the faint applause of pigeons from outside the window. — His strong inclination is to touch the old woman, his touch, he thinks, might free her from this entrancement – but first: Are you all right? Can I help you? Nothing. The upside-down face faces me down, the eyes slide back and away again, but their focal point is either behind or in front of his face, never upon it. – Can you tell me which your ward . . . is? He grasps her arm – more firmly than he had intended acute hypertonia wasted old muscles yet taut, the bones beneath acrylic sleeve, nylon sleeve, canvas skin . . . thin metal struts. The fancy new quartz watch on his own plump wrist turns its shiny black face to his as her malaise resonates through him . . . Along comes Zachary . . . he wonders: Am I blurring? Ashwushushwa, she slurs. What’s that? Ashuwa-ashuwa. One of her bright eyes leers at the floor. He says: Is it my shoes – my Hush Puppies? Her eye films with disappointment – then clears and leers pointedly at the floor again. She is drooling, spit pools at the point of her cheekbone and stretches unbroken to where it doodles on the tile with a snail’s silvering. At long last . . . slow, stupid Zachary bends down and presses down the lip of the tile so that the toe of the kicking slipper scoots over it. Then . . . she’s off! Not doddering but pacing with smoothness and fluidity, her shoulders unhunching, her neck unbending and pivoting aloft her head as her arms swing free of all rigidity. – It took so long for Busner to reach her, so long for him to decide to touch her, that he’s agog: she should be right in front of him not twenty yards off and falling down the long shaft of the corridor. Except . . . already her gait is becoming hurried then too fast . . . festination, another uncalled for Latinism, pops into his mind as the old woman is swept away from me on the brown tide . . . Is this, he wonders, a contradictory side-effect of her medication? The lizardish scuttle that counterpoints Largactil’s leaden tread? Because, of course, it is unthinkable that she shouldn’t be dosed with some form of chlorpromazine – everyone is. The drug saturates the hospital in the same way that paraldehyde formerly soaked the asylum, although a few isolated voices – Busner’s muted one among them – have, while not doubting its efficacy, its . . . humanity . . . questioned its necessity. For all the good this does, because there’s no damning its sepia-sweet flow, a single wave that nonetheless drowns out many, many voices. Not having seen quite so many chronic mental patients in one place for some years, Busner has been struck, since arriving at Friern, by the chloreography, the slow-shoe-shuffle of the chorus from which an occasional principal choric breaks free into a high-kicking and windmilling of legs and arms. Noticed this tranquillising – but also become aware of a steady background pulse of involuntary movement: tardive dyskinesia that deforms the inmates’ bodies, flapping hands, twitching facial muscles, jerking heads . . . They are possessed, he thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building-blocks of the psyche . . . She is gone – or, at least, too far down the corridor to be seen any more a human particle. Busner, who is interested in most things, has read about linear accelerators, and so he takes a green-capped Biro from the row ranged across his breast pocket – green for his more imagistic aperçus, red for clinical observations, blue for memories, black for ideas – then writes in the notebook he has taken out and flipped open: What will she smash into? What will happen then? All the subhuman parts of her – can they be observed? in the long dark corridor where they play all sorts: skippin’ and boats and hoopla-for-chokkolits. Mary Jane comes to smackem, Lookit the skirtin’! she cries. In the passage it’s allus dark – so dark inna coalhole. Illumination comes only from a fanlight above the door, comes on sunny days in a single oblique beam a Jacob’s ladder that picks out a burnin’ bush on the floorboards that Stan and Audrey jump into and out of – Yer put yer leff hand in, yer put yer leff arm out, Shake it a little, a little, then turn yersel about, the little ones, they are, going Loobeloo, loobeloo, but Bert just laughs at them: You’re rag-arses, you aynt got no proper cloves, juss smocks, and he swings open the front door and goes out on the step to play with his marbles . . . his wunner . . . his fiver an’ sixer inall. He has them all neatly wrapped up in one of their father’s noserags, wrapped up and tied in a little bindle. He sits on the front step and gets them out and places them in a row. Audrey peeks from behind the door and sees claybrown, marblewhirl, glasstripe with sunrays shining through it so pretty she cannot resist it when he goes down the four steps to sit at the kerb and twist fallen straw – but grabs it and darts back inside. Stan’s eyes are wide, Yul catchit, he says, yul catchit. They stand in the burnin’ bush looking at the striped marble glowing in Audrey’s palm and neither of them can move – Yer put yer leff leg in, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out . . . but it won’t go no ferver, it is stuck there kicking and kicking against an invisible barrier, while, terrorised by the imagining of what Bert will do to me, Audrey’s head shakes, Yer put yer noddle in, yer put yer noddle out . . . The door crashes back on its hinges and there he is: Where’s me stripey! He howls, then charges for her, Yer put yer whole self in, yer put yer whole self out . . . He grabs her wrist so hard she feels the bones grating together inside it, then twists it so that the fist opens helplessly. A’wah-wa-wa! A’wah-wa-wa! she blubs. Audrey’s big brother’s starting eyes are fixed on his beloved marble – but hers, hers, are equally held by the peculiar bracelet he wears, its golden segments fiery in the burnin’ bush, and on the back of it a huge black jewel Mother’s jet beads. Audrey staggers, almost falls, bends double to escape the hurt and is caught there feeling the long Vulcanised strip of tension that loops round her middle and stretches in either direction the length of the passage an inner tube pulled tight round the rim of a bicycle wheel.
Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking-glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past. The debris includes the row of houses along Novello Street towards Eel Brook Common, their top two storeys weatherboarded and bowing over the roadway under widows’ peaks of rumpled tiling. There’s the fat-bellied kiln of the pottery in the crook of the King’s Road and the ragged patterning of the yews in the misty grounds of Carnwath House. Old Father Thames sucking on weedy-greasy piles stuck in the mud all along the riverside from the bridge to the station. Her own father sucking on a hazel twig he’s cut and whittled with his pocket knife to slide in and out of his muddy mouth, in between his remaining weedy-greasy teeth. — Audrey’s father, Sam Death: not De’Ath, not lar-de-dar, not like some uz thinks they’re better than they should be. Namely, Sam’s brother Henry, who styles himself like that and resides in a new villa somewhere called Muswell Hill. They have their own general, the De’Aths. Audrey has heard this said so many times that even now, a big girl of ten, she cannot forestall this vision: a rotund man in a scarlet jacket hung all over with gold braid, and sitting on a kitchen chair in a scullery. His white mutton chops creamy on the rim of his high collar, his red cheek pressed against the limewashed wall. Not that Audrey’s mother speaks of the De’Aths’ general enviously – there has always been a niceness to this understanding: while the Deaths are not the sort to have servants, neither are they those what serve. And while the Deaths are no better than they should be, neither are they worse than they might. Whispering in the parlour before the new bracket was put in, before the cottage piano arrived – whisperings when Mary Jane put a solar lamp on the table at dusk and it rounded off the corners of the room with its golden globe of light. Guttersnipes, they hissed, urchins, street arabs – different ones came on several occasions to say, If it please you, sir, ma’am, I bin by the line-up fer the Lambeth spike, anna bloke wot wuz innit said if’n I wuz to cummover west an’ tell iz people there’d be a tanner innit. But Sam Death is not the whispering sort: A tanner! A tanner for a windy nag stuffed with skilly! You’ll count yerself bloody lucky t’cummaway frummeer wiv a thru’pence – now fuck off, or I’ll call fer the blue boys! The arabs aren’t down – thru’pence is a good dip, so they skip from the avenue into the Fulham Road, tossing their caps up as Audrey’s father buttons the long skirts of his rabbit-skin coat, saying, There’s one as won’t be dining wiv Duke ’Umphrey t’night. Audrey never sees ve windy nag, knows only of her father’s other brother from these evening sallies – Sam heading off to head him off, muttering that: It’s a crying shame Honest John Phelps the ferryman is no more, so cannot take him across to the Surrey side. So, James Death the pauper uncle becomes all paupers for Audrey – when she’s sent to fetch her father from the Rose & Crown for his tea Jim’s is the shadow that capers beside the trapdoor dancers. In the flare of a naptha lamp, she sees him, grovelling beneath one of the coster’s stalls in Monmouth Street market – cowering there, picking up orange peel and pressin’ its smile to ’is ol’ man’s mouf . . . Then there’s the screever kneeling on the pavement outside the ironmonger’s on King Street, where Audrey waits while her mother goes in to buy a tin of Zebra grate polish. This rat-man scratches a gibbet on the granite with charcoal, not chalk – a fraying hank of marks from which hangs Uncle Jim, who sings: Je-sus’ blood ne-ver failed me ye-et . . . his cap in hand.
Stanley, his blazer hung from the privy’s latch, feeds the chalky inner tubing into the steel groove – Gilbert, Gilbert Cook . . . does something similar so that Audrey bites my lip –. But not yet – before then, when Albert sits at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves cinched by fascinating bands, their parents are already styling themselves Deeth, to rhyme with teeth Sam picks, his face swellin’ beet-red. You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor, says Albert, dipping his nib and filling in Olive’s line of the census form with quick, clever, cursive, clerkish writing. Don’t guv’nor me, you jack-gentleman, Sam growls, what matter if we change an a to an e? Whose business but our own? Albert has his father’s hand-me-down face, which would be handsome enough onna a fat man, although it appears queer on their tapered heads – the smooth flesh bunching up at their brows and along their jawlines. It’d be the Ministry’s business, I’d say, t’would be better if you left off – and as he speaks Albert continues to write, Death, Violet May, daughter, —, — — — —, — —, Secondary, his pen morsing from box to box, the dashes indicating further shared characteristics – ’til at least I’ve gone into rooms, I’ve no wish to speak for the others . . . who, despite having grown up with Albert always before them, are still agog when he does two things at once, both perfectly: piano playing and reading the evening paper, timing an egg while totting up the household accounts – no alternation between hand and foot, or coordination between eye and hand faults him, no variability of scales confounds him. ’E’s twins inna single skin, said a local wag, seeing Bert unerringly volley a football even as he was marking possibles for the guv’nor in the Pink ’Un with a stub of pencil – this when father and son were still close, down at Craven Cottage, the playing field all round kicked and stamped into a happily tortured morass. Audrey thought: if we’re Death, then Uncle James must be dearth – this a word gleaned from Bible and Bunyan at school, for the Deaths are not regular attendees, let alone communicants.
When four out of the five Death children had left the house on Waldemar Avenue, Death, Samuel A. Theodore, 51, married, 31 years, Night Garage Inspector, Omnibus Coy, Worker, was still known, familiarly, as Rothschild Death, on account of the flutters and the rabbit-skin coat, and the arf and arfs he downed in pubs and penny gaffs from King Street to Parsons Green and Mortlake beyond, ales that imparted a jovial gloss to his coating of bombast. Familiarly, yes, for those sort won’t be told, but formally it was Deeth, and when the three Deeths transplanted themselves from the London clay to the red Devon loam, with Albert’s assistance taking up residence in a cottage at Cheriton Bishop – where Mary Jane had been raised – they became known locally as the Deers. — Sam Deer totters around the small garden, Olive Deer watches him. She has seen pictures in the illustrated weekly and read the accompanying text. The pictures are obscure – the words surpassing allusive. Olive, who knows nothing of adult bodies besides her own, still wonders how it is that they get food into the women in Holloway Prison who won’t eat . . . who keep their jaws clamped shut. She wonders what it might be like to tell someone that a twisting rivulet of ants has leaked into the cottage from the rain-washed garden. Got in, flowed up the stairs, sopped up the grooves of the candlewick and, not unpleasantly, are infesting me merry bit . . .
Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the kinked eel sends a piddle of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its gills with the chalk. Caught in the kink, the corridor stretching away in front of her . . . longer than time, Audrey burns with covetousness for that safety bicycle, convinced she can ride it better than him – fix it quicker. Neat as a pin in the tailor-made she’s bought with her first week’s wages from Ince’s, she covets it – and resents him. It was one thing to be still soaping Bert’s collars – from when they were nippers his primacy was taken so much for granted that there was no more need to speak of it than what you got upter in the privy. But Stanley – her baby, her bumps-a-daisy, that he should have this and not her, well, she was reft, the suspicion creeping into her that he’s never given a fig for her. Playing out, playing Queenie – and I was Queenie, and the Wiggins boys all mocking me . . . and that lousy boy, who come up from Sands End – the one Mother said az the stink of gas onnis togs – picks up the ball and dips it inna puddle, then rolls it in some horse shit, and when I turn round he throws it at me so ’ard the string busts and all the soggy, shitty paper wraps round my face and spatters my pinny, an’ Stan leaps on ’im, thumpinim proper, defendin’ his big sis, and the Sands End kid ad vese big obnail boots, no stockings, juss vese boots . . . coming down on Stan’s face . . . a yelp! The Wiggins boys screamin’, turnin’ tail. There mustabin a nail come loose – there was that much blood. When Bert come out of the house and dragimoff, the Sands End kid was spittin’, Garn! Piss up yer leg an play wiv ve steam! Still . . . maybe . . . maybe even then it was all a bloody show . . .
Cold meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . November in Foulham, the streets greasily damp – the colour of rotten logs. Bad air from the river, bad air from the Works, rotten malt gusting from the Lamb brewery over Chiswick way. In the back bedroom Audrey rubs the soot-stained muslin curtain against her cheek and peers down in the near-darkness at the backyards of their terrace and those of the terraces behind, fret-worked by walls and fences into separate territories, each with its own upright hut . . . a command post – Ladysmith relieved. Come inter the ga-arden, Maude! And see the raspberry canes scattered spilikins, the humpback of an abandoned cask, a pile of bricks, a birdcage shaped like the Crystal Palace that them two doors down adfer a myna, which had croaked back at the cat’s-meat-man: Ca-a-at’s me-eat! Until p’raps a cat gotit. Audrey! Or-dree! Cummun get yer tea! Cat meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . She should have been down there with her sisters, fetching yesterday’s leg of mutton down from the meat safe, peeling and boiling potatoes, scraping dripping from the pale blue enamel basin. Or-dree! She can’t be doin’ wivvit. Time enough for tasks later – her soda-scraped hands bloaters floating in the scummy water. Besides, she cannot abide her mother just now – Mary Jane who stinks of chlorodyne, and slumps narcotised on the horsehair chaise her sons dragged in from the parlour when it split. Her Ladysmith, a bell tent of grey woollen shawl and black bombazine, her tired auburn hair down rusting on her big shoulders. I can’t be bovvered wiv me stays, she says, not when me mulleygrubs comes upon me. Audrey is repelled by her – disgusted that her mother vouchsafes her women’s ailment to her alone – the sly thing, Or-dree! – where they jumble together in the sewn-in pockets of time swung apart from the general shindy of Death family life.
