Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 34
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Mindjew, this wasn’t an act of betrayal that would’ve truly bothered him. (’Bothered’ – another great Yaws word, used as noun, as verb and even – Oh! corny hallelujah! – as an exclamation.) Yaws was tight-fisted with his things, his piddling private income and his pathetic mementos of the Yaws family. When tipping girls (whether servants or his own children – both were liabilities to this neo-Victorian), he’d often be unable to let go of his end of a ten-shilling note. If they snatched, father, daughter and bill were divided.
Tight with things but free with his body. He stalked the unlovely environs of Crooked Usage in his yellow flannel underwear, one thick sock in his hand, plainting, ‘Bother! Lily, have you seen my other sock?’ Which I’d hear, natch, as ‘have you seen my other cock?’. ‘Think back to which frumpy cunt you last saw it in!’ I’d snap – and he’d look bemused, or else rise to ire: ‘Now look here, Lily!’ Jesus, he was an asshole. Christ, he had a skinny Shylock for a heart, enfolded in his fat form. He was that emotionally tight-fisted a man – with his smile which was like a ‘Keep Out’ sign.
If the late sixties proved anything to me it was that not all phobias are irrational. There was I – who’d spent the first half of the decade prostrate beneath the bed covers, as if they’d shelter me and my babies from the fallout – striding out into chilly arena of Grosvenor Square in order to hurl my hoarse barbs at the American Embassy. So dumb to be protesting – when I was always happier to be alone in bed, reading recipes and cracking up with Jacob’s Cream Crackers. But I knew I wasn’t a little girl running down a mud road with a napalm cloak flaring from my shoulders; and I knew I wasn’t a Viet Cong suspect, dying in a short-sleeved, tartan-patterned shirt, from one of General Loan’s bullets. Strangely, the very intimacy of these extinctions – now brought to us near instantaneously – made them quite inapplicable to my sad sack. I was safe while all the baddies were off on a peasant shoot in Indo-China. Safe enough for idealism to blossom anew in the neglected, North London borders of my mind. Safe enough to lust after Gus.
Gus, who strode athletically off the plane, and came to us from London Airport wearing the American student uniform of the time – blue jeans, college sweatshirt, sneakers and duffel coat. Within ten years this gear had been fully adopted as an off-the-peg, pre-unwashed, counter-cultural, dressing-up costume, but then it was preppily pressed. Decadences are just that. I remember the crowds at Grosvenor Square only too well, the young men with parted hair and heavy-framed spectacles, the young women in thrifty knitwear, some even sporting twinsets. My girls now ask me what the sixties were like – and the answer’s simple enough: the fifties. Yup, just like the fifties; the great mass of youth merely aped the styles and modes of their elders who’d advanced half a generation further into the future fray. Naturally, the fifties themselves were not unlike the late forties, which in turn were umbilically linked to before the war. And to me England was a retard society anyway, empty of fridges, devoid of drive-ins. If I squinted at the Aldermaston crowds of plump-faced CND demonstrators only a little, they became hollow-cheeked Jarrow marchers.
Anyway, Gus was the son of one the Eight Couples Who once Mattered, and – far more pertinently – one of Dave Junior’s friends, the mud-streaked skinny-dippers who’d been playing the nigger game on the day my love died. Gus, who’d mysteriously fallen through all the bafflers of influence and gratings of exemption designed to prevent good middle-class boys from going down the Vietnam pan. Gus, who’d actually been drafted; and who then took to his heels, hiking his way out along the Long Trail into Canada, where he waited for a money order to arrive from his parents before jetting on to Europe.
There was no room in the house – so Gus moved into the garage. He bivouacked in among the discarded luggage of the previous two decades. In order to dodge the VC he had to hunker down in the dark jungle of my peripatetic life. I’d never been anywhere for long – he was not to be long in the leavings of it. Nights we’d watch the nine o’clock news together, our asses rammed to the back of the vomit-coloured, oatmeal-textured divan. Yaws took a similar line on Vietnam to the one he’d taken on the Cuban missile crisis: this too would pass, leaving the Warden intact, a crumpet en route to his lips. Yaws didn’t suspect anything sexual between me and the kid. It wasn’t so much that he’d rationally dismissed the idea, rather, it couldn’t even register on his smutty radar. Gross. I can’t have slept with Gus more than four times – five at most. All that stuff about teaching young men the ways of love is so much horse shit. All you have to do is feed ‘em into the groove and they’ll do the hammering. Every time we did it I was amazed that he wasn’t discommoded by my sour smells and puckering cellulite. But I guess there was plenty of vagina, heaps of bosom.
It was last time in my life that sex held any quality of conviction for me. In the cooling pretzel of tatty linen, still aromatic with Yaws, we’d thrash about. He did it hobbled by his jeans. I did it hobbled by Librium. It was a big period of mental freedom for me. I hauled myself up in the morning and cooked the kiddy-winkies breakfast in my nightie. Then I drove them to school in my nightie. Then I came back to Crooked Usage, took my nightie off, and climbed back into bed. I felt like I was on the night shift. Haig was the blended Scotch people drank in those days. It was advertised with the catch-line ‘Don’t be vague’, when that’s exactly what it did to you. To me.
On that particular cold March afternoon, shlepping from Marble Arch with all the other bleeding hearts and closed minds, I was tired. I was always fucking tired. Natasha’d kicked seven kinds of hell out of the insides of me; I still smoked forty a day; I was often vague – and there was the Librium. It didn’t lay you out like sodium amytal, but it still made me pretty laid back. Laid back on a cushion of Librium, my young lover by my side, I railed by the railings at the boob-helmeted policemen. Over the grey haunch of the American Embassy the tessellated greenery of Hyde Park tossed with wind and drizzle. The coppers linked arms and forced the beatniks and beatific old Quaker women back from the entrance. Lots of the duffel-coat-wearers – and Gus, to my shame – began to chant, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh!’ Absurd – what did they think an ageing, intellectual, highly ascetic, Vietnamese Communist Party cadre would have to do with these truants from the bourgeoisie?
That’s all gone now, social revolution as an aspect of the gap year. It’s all there was to left-wing radicalism in the West after the war anyway; doctoring the social fringes was as much a fashion statement as cutting your hair, or growing it, or shaving it off. I fell for these cheap nostrums as did many others. Protest marches were my weight-watching; and I used to see plenty of other women, nearing middle age, verging on being pear-shaped, who smiled ruefully at me as they toted their placards.
But I was tired – fucking exhausted. As the police moved in, blows were exchanged and they lost control – marvellous expression. They lost control, fists tried to fly but crashed into skulls and cheekbones. Fleet feet fled through flesh. I snuck away – leaving my young lover to the shlemozzle. But not before seeing more striking slow motions – heads going like the clappers, the impacts were so percussive. I saw one beefeater thug smack a Buddy Holly lookalike the way British actors playing Gestapo officers smacked their interrogation victims. Back and forth and back again. I never ever wanted to be that close to violence again. I’d never intended it, my life wasn’t meant to be like that. I’d understood that I was to be excluded from this section of the twentieth century, that I hadn’t been selected. I saw it as my role to skulk in history’s wings, observing the actors once they’d been bandaged, or otherwise made beautiful.
Even the noise of a riot soon fades if you tuck your head down and ignore it. While bottles, bricks and splintered placards punctured the drizzly sky, I made my way to Berkeley Square and sat down on a bench. Here, then, there were elms not yet diseased – I think. I sat and lost myself in the damp leaves pressed into the pavement, the old people fizzling out. Come in cigarette number 34, your time is up. I’d never felt, it occurred to me, more depleted. Or, to be correct, more indolent. The very effort needed to register my own fatigue was … too much. Seeing made me yawn. I was only forty-six, but I couldn’t conceive of how I’d make it through the remaining years – they’d have to spool them in front of my eyes. Pathé life reels.
Eyes which are now jammed open in the enclosing darkness. I wake from reveries of the late sixties to this nighttime paralysis. Waking takes long enough for me to realise that these memories – undoctored and unedited – are a crude gloss on the badly painted present. More precisely – that the tank of tiredness is itself now empty; and I feel fatigued by this fact alone. I’d thought that at least I could always depend on this numbing languor, this painful drowsiness. That it would be the layette of my lifetime; and that sleep – for so long dispensed in famine rations – would now, at long last, be in plentiful supply.
Not so. The devil is looking at me with malevolent red eyes shaped like twos. They blink with electronic implacability. Coiled around the bedroom the plumbing gurgles like a gassy gut. The pain comes galloping towards me, ravening white horses which chomp though everything in their path. Hurricane pain. Pain that leaves me clinging to the driftwood of my own consciousness; battered into not being me. Maybe now I die? I allow myself to be lifted up by this anguish like an oscillating mote. Higher and higher I rise in the fusty darkness, while below me the duvet’s pattern dissolves into the grid of Manhattan, as a clarinet intimately moans: ‘Ooooowaaaawa-waa-wa-waa-waaa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaa …’ then a string section cranks up the pace: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ until the clarinet gets eloquent on behalf of its own misery: ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’ and not to be outdone, the strings crank it up some more: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’
‘Wawawawaaaa!’ Christ alive – it’s fucking Rhapsody in Blue. Christ penetrated by the Lord. Christ jacking off the Holy Ghost – how I hate this tune. Three in one. It’s a tune – not a rhapsody. A tin-pan-crash-bang bit of Yid slickery, played out in the trash-choked alleys around Times Square and Broadway.
The city of my majority swims towards me out of the dusty deathly darkness of this suburban room an ocean away. At first I’m relieved to have this effortless ascendancy; rising in a smooth parabola from the coxcomb of Liberty into the clouds over the toe of Manhattan, so that the leggy length of the island rears below me, each neon street switched on by my own awareness. ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ A set of a certain unreal age, with no distinction between the fabricated and the constructed, between interior and exterior. A musical New York peopled by eternally young songsters clad in sky-blue Runyon shmutter. See them dance down the block, swing around the corner, leap into the subway, while Top Cat trades gags with Officer Dibble and the Jetsons head home in their flivvers to White Plains.
As if the streets were sore throats gargling the violence of their own dissolution, it’s a memento mori city in which a flayed cop rides a flayed horse, half of their skulls and half of their skeletons exposed. And these picked-clean knights are predisposed to shepherd a funeral which emerges from Harlem to march across 121st Street and downtown. A black funeral – what repulsive fun. How much black silk and black crêpe, how much bombazine has been draped over these black bodies? The tubas and cornets are pooting out the hated moans of Jew urbanity. This black has decided to belong to the Jewish Death Club – which is happy to accept him as a member. This Jew has declined to attend meetings of the Black Club – but she’s being forced into the procession for all that. Please don’t let Death touch me with its black hands; please don’t let Hitler kiss me with his greasepaint moustache.
‘Ooooowaaaawa-waa-wa-waa-waaa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wawaaaa …’ I managed to squeeze that one out, project it above the murmurous, murderous news of Kurt Waldheim’s rehabilitation.
— Ms Bloom?
I try to reply, to ask her to move me, feed me, drug me, comfort me, but all that emerges is more blueish rhapsodising. ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’
— Ms Bloom, are you all right? Is there something I can get for you?
And now the beat is doubled up: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ Deirdre has opened the double doors to the living room, letting in a big wedge of yellow light. She returns to my bedside.
— Ms Bloom, can you hear what I’m saying to you?
‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ Oh yes, and I can also see the greasy blackheads like Braille on your yellow vellum.
— Ms Bloom, could you blink, or close your eyes if you can understand what I’m saying?
No. No – that’s beyond me. It’s happened. I’ve been buried alive in the flesh-eating box of my own body. My eyelids, intermittently and unpredictably, sweep wet streaks across my view – like demented windshield-wipers. Time doubles up in their wake. ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ And my voice is compelled. ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’ This definitely gets things going. Deirdre recoils as if I’ve spat in her face. I have spat in her face – she’s wiping the spittle from her drippy nose. I can hear my clarion cry echo around the room, my hearing must have a delay now, a sound-lock. But in place of Gershwin’s bombastic klezmer, it’s become a hideous life-rattle, a gurgling, gasping, aspirated screech: ‘Hhhraarrghhhresheo’ Hyayyayrhg-h’- h’h’hergh’!’ This is a terrorist alert in the language centre itself; vowels and consonants evacuating at top speed from the Tower of Song. Christ! You would’ve thought such a bestial noise would get windows banging open all over Kentish Town.
— What’s the matter?!
Sweat damp in her knickers and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Natty appears in the yellow wedge.
— Your mother is declining very rapidly, Ms Bloom –
— Mum! Mumu! Can you hear me?
— I’m afraid she’s no longer lucid –
‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …
— What’s that dreadful noise she’s making?
From the terror in my youngest’s porcelain eyes I can assess the mess I must be. If I try hard I can re-establish contact with this steadily departing vessel of cellular mush. I can feel its dismasted no-progress – limbs flapping like collapsed sails, as it no-heads round into the afflatus of extinction.
— I’m afraid the cancer must have entered her brain –
— Her brain?
‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa …’
— That’s awful, she … she doesn’t sound –
Human. I don’t sound human. I sound like a fucking animal. A gurgling cow. My brain’s been vaccinated – with cancer.
— Please – Natasha. It isn’t her, these noises are involuntary. It’s breakthrough pain.
Oh, it’s a breakthrough allrighty. Brand-new pain for a brand-new era – coming soon to a nerve ending near you.
— What can we do?
— I’ll have to phone the hospital, see if they’ll admit her.
— Admit her, why?
— I haven’t been able to give her medication for eight hours now – it’s likely she’s in a lot of pain. I can’t tell. She’ll have to –
Make sure you know quite how far things have got by my skilled employment of the voluntary involuntary action; in this instance an arm swung wide in the shadows, swiped in a spastic butterfly stroke, then whipped back again. Whack-whack-smack! I catch Deirdre in the lower belly, Natty on the thigh, paperbacks and the little radio fly from the bedside table.
— go on a drip.
Drip-drip. In fairness to Natty she’s exactly the same as everyone else. It’s only that unlike the others she can’t prevent the naked self-interest from showing. Especially not now, not near naked, in frayed M&S bikini briefs, sweat on her thighs, sweat on her neck and sporting a sweaty tiara. It’s a sweat T-shirt competition – the sweat plastering Che Guevara’s noble brow between Natty’s once proud tits. So, she stayed here last night. Evidently Russell wasn’t available; absent, I daresay, at some junkies’ soirée – pass the Vicar, tea-head. Miles would’ve been small comfort – and miles away if he’s any sense. So, best for her to hang out here in the hope of a few crumbs of pleasurable relief. You would’ve imagined that this – the live burial, the uncoupling of mind from body – would plunge me into final despair. Not so. Can you hear me? Not so. All those injunctions to let go; to accept and let go; to walk into the garden and see spring invest the saplings and let-fucking-go – when there was no need. I can kick and punch and scream as much as I like, I can hold on for dear life if I want, because it makes no odds. Dear Life is rearing up above me, rearing over me as my fingers scrabble on mortality’s cliff edge; and Dear Life’s boot is coming down on the back of my hand. Hard.
Life has left me in a plastic-curtained cubicle. Life has left me in the family way. I’m fully gravid with Death; Death is engaged now – his bony head nuzzling my cervix. Perhaps that’s why I’m so detached, and able to witness impassively my spasmodic movements, my stuck-pig cries. My sick and sickened daughter.
Deirdre hits the overhead light and banishes one kind of darkness. Natasha sinks down on the chair and stares at the animal who used to be her mother. I can’t focus on her – I can’t focus on anything. I have no more control over my eyes than I do over the rest of my body. Perhaps that’s why I’m achieving such glorious indifference? After all, it’s foolish to take any responsibility for involuntary actions, to weep for sneezes, cry for hiccups, mourn for yawns.
— I think the best course would be admission. Is it possible to send an ambulance? 256 Bartholomew Road, ground-floor flat. The name on the bell is Bloom.
Efficient Deirdre comes back to deal with dreck girl:
— Now, Ms Bloom – Natasha – I know you’re not feeling well yourself –
— Can you help?
What a chancer. Deirdre glares at her with a what-kind-of-an-inhumanly-selfish-bitch-are-you expression. Natasha isn’t chastened.
