Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 67
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Ah, the inebriation, that little detail which Shiva had forgotten to mention in his letter. He hesitated to label Wadja an alcoholic, both for reasons of cultural prejudice – Shiva assumed that all Poles were subject to heavy drinking – and also because, despite the fact that he glugged slivovitz and gargled overproof vodka, it could be explained as an understandable act of self-medication.
Down the pub with his cronies, Mr Double’s cut-and-pasted reiteration passed for ordinary intercourse. He felt – as he explained to his therapist – ‘liber-liber-ated-ated’. The odd condition that caused him to repeat fragments of speech – the ‘uhs’, ‘ers’, ‘whats’ and ‘yuhs’; nonce words ‘really’, ‘actually’, ‘terribly’; and even phrases ‘d’youknowhatImean’, ‘at the end of the day’ – marked him out as simply another of the chaps down in his cups so deep that the walls of the vessel bounced back his cries. But Shiva also knew full well that Wadja was violent when drunk, and that when he lost control it happened suddenly and completely.
Forgotten? Was it altogether credible that Mukti had omitted to mention such an important aspect of his patient’s malaise? Wasn’t it more likely that he hoped Wadja would be drunk when he turned up at Heath Hospital (a journey taken on Shiva’s initiative rather than his own), so drunk that if Busner displayed any irritation – or worse, weakness – Wadja would attack?
David Elmley had taken to probing Shiva Mukti with unsettling regularity about his interactions with Busner, but Shiva confessed nothing to his friend, any more than he admitted it to himself. Instead he waited and he brooded, snapping at his colleagues, yet continuing to prove so exemplary in his dealings with his patients that none of them thought anything of his behaviour save that he was overworked. When the inevitable news came – in the form of a note from Busner’s senior registrar, Kevin Whatley – Shiva found himself strangely relieved. So, he thought, as he scanned the sparse communication of Busner’s injuries at the hands of the maddened alcho-echolalic – it has truly begun. Busner cannot now deny that this is a duel to the death – any more than I can. I’ve drawn the first blood, now I must expect the most extreme retaliation.
Shiva armed himself with a hypodermic syringe loaded with enough chlorpromazine to stop a berserker on phencyclidine. He got Maintenance to install an angled mirror on the wall outside the niche, so that he could see who was waiting in the vestibule by glancing up through the transom. As he stalked the warped and gloomy corridors of the old hospital Shiva would periodically revolve on his heel, so as to catch any assailants in the act of launching their attack. He was sure that matters were now so serious that to expect Busner to behave chivalrously and stick to their agreed choice of weapons would be folly. No, the next time the wily Jew struck, he might be wielding a nurse, an auxiliary, or even another psychiatrist. To have a chance of survival Shiva must expect trouble from any quarter at all.
Only days later, when he’d absorbed the full import of Whatley’s note, did Shiva stop to consider if things had gone too far. Whatley’s description of Busner, spreadeagled on the floor of the ward, while a baying Mr Double tried to stuff pieces of The Riddle into his mouth, was pitiful as well as painful. Two of Busner’s ribs were cracked, and the jaw that had uttered a thousand self-satisfied pronouncements had been dislocated. He’d taken indefinite sick leave, but his colleagues assumed it would be permanent.
But what pulled Shiva back from the soft brink of sympathising with the old man were the very feelings that had driven him to this extreme course of action in the first place – now hideously reinforced. What influence could mere sympathy exert in the face of these howling and atavistic imperatives? Shiva, his moustache twirled to savage points, his war elephants in full array, confronted his enemy on the ancient battleground of honour, ambition and hatred. The more he reflected on the way the situation was developing, the more he appreciated its justness. His father had been profoundly wrong to reject his own heritage. What possible sway could the febrile, girlish theories of the nineteenth century exert over Brahmins from a virile tradition that had lasted for five thousand years or more? Theories that were – Shiva could not forbear from noting – the intellectual needlework of those supremely effete casuists, the Jews.
Zack Busner lay on the chaise longue in the small dressing room adjoining the master bedroom of his house on Redington Road, Hampstead. But really, considering his bulk and length, chaise courte would’ve been a better name for it. And as for master bedroom – Busner bitterly ruminated – why not mistress? He was bloody uncomfortable, his hairless white shanks stuck out over the end, their calves hung with bunches of untreated varicose veins. His fingers – crackling with arthritis – clutched at the wad of blankets and tried to position it more comfortably about his shivering form. I’m running a bloody fever, he realised miserably, although whether it was a function of the beating he’d received from Mukti’s patient or an unrelated malady he was unable to say.
In the next room he could hear the reason for his exile, the thudding of cases and suit bags being pulled out from cupboards and wardrobes, the sharp swishes of silk dresses being overlaid by silk blouses, and the rattle of face paints being loaded into a make-up bag. Charlotte – the second Mrs Busner – was going on one of her ‘little trips’. It had – Busner worried the emotional sore – been a profound mistake remarrying. He couldn’t unwish the children he’d had with Charlie, but if he could by some paradigm shift have managed to delete her from his life, he rather feared he might’ve done so. With what he now, too late, saw as yet more evidence of his unresolved Oedipal issues, he’d been foolish enough to imagine that by coupling with a woman twenty years his junior he’d acquire another lease of life. Charlie had been so bright and vivacious when Zack met her at that conference in Finland (entitled ‘Endless Wastes and Limited Affect’ if he remembered it rightly). Vivacious as well as seemingly caring. Busner had been nearing sixty and was worn out with work, marital wrangling and the interminable end-game of rearing adolescents. Charlie had offered her torso to him – complete with capacious shoulders.
How could he have foreseen that it would all end up like this? With him – now knocking on seventy! – sick and ill and condemned to thrash about on a dwarf couch because his unfaithful wife was off to see her Italian lover? Oh yes, she still had sufficient shame to dress it up as a work trip, and to style Massimo as just a fellow shrink with whom she was collaborating on a research project. But what kind of research could possibly require this ever expanding wardrobe? Only perhaps a comparative study aimed at assessing the impact of La Perla underwear – when worn by a statuesque forty-year-old English blonde – on two male psychiatrists, one half the age of the other.
Busner tossed and turned some more. No wonder it’s impossible to get comfortable, he silently groaned, what with these great horns I’m sporting. And the consideration of this led him back once more to the arrogance and folly that had landed him on his back. To play at being a psychotherapeutic espontáneo, at my age and with my experience! Daring to examine a new patient without having adequately absorbed the notes – or even read them at all! No, Zack couldn’t blame the debacle on anyone but himself.
Charlie swept into the room, her Junoesque form sheathed in costly tailoring and giving off the heady aroma of rapidly dispersing ambergris. She’s covered in whales’ intestines, Zack chuckled inwardly, and this thought did a little to dispel the pain of her blithe betrayal. ‘Here’s the schedule, Zack.’ She rattled a piece of paper. ‘Anna will get the children up and make sure they get off to school. All you have to do is cover for two hours in the afternoon when they’re dropped back. You can manage that at least, can’t you?’
‘Well … ye-yes, b-but …’ he spluttered.
‘Come on now, Zack, they are your kids.’
‘I know that, but can’t you see the state I’m in, Charlie, I can barely speak because of this bloody jaw.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ she snapped. ‘You shouldn’t even be practising at your age, let alone trying to treat severely ill patients with no preparation.’
‘But it’s my métier, Charlie – it’s what I do!’
‘What you do now, Zack, is look after the children while I’m gone. Two hours a day and the nights – not too much to ask, I think.’ She bestowed a kiss on his sweating brow so cursory that it felt only as if a fly had alighted there for a split-second, then she barrelled out of the door.
He could hear her yomping down the staircase, clacking across the hall and opening the heavy front door. A waiting cabbie was called to and in due course he manifested himself in the dressing room, Charlie’s luggage arranged around his thick trunk like unseasonal leather fruit. ‘Orlright, old feller,’ said the cabbie, as he dragged a macho swathe of cigarette smoke and old-car smell through the residue of Charlie’s perfume. But Zack Busner didn’t reply: he turned his face to the wall, sighed, and shut his large and furry ears to the clamour of his abandonment.
A week of childcare in his condition! At his age! It didn’t warrant thinking about. Not that he didn’t love Alex and Cressida, but their bickering and bouncing, and their breaking of whatever norms he tried to establish utterly exhausted him. When he was force-feeding the twins their supper, or trying to stop them watching too much television, or removing one’s clenched fist from the other’s yanked hair, he tried to recall what it had been like with his first batch of children, how he’d coped with them. Of course attitudes had been a lot laxer then. When the two boys were very small, the whole family had lived alongside the patients at Zack’s Concept House in Willesden. Not that the residents were called ‘patients’ in those heady days, let alone ‘clients’, a euphemism Zack frankly despised. Nor were they treated as such, no matter how flamboyant or flagrant their behaviour. No, they all rubbed along together, patients, therapists, adults and children. There must’ve been ordinary domestic tasks, the milk-ordering, homework-supervising, bum-wiping basics, but Zack couldn’t for the life of him remember how it had all got done.
It wasn’t that he’d abrogated such responsibilities – far from it. He’d always prided himself on taking up his share of the burden, but somehow the atemporal nowness of domesticity – which was not unlike, he’d often had cause to remark, the freeform encounters of dynamic, interpersonal psychotherapy – wasn’t conducive to any firm chronology. Was it David, his eldest, who’d chipped his tooth falling down the garden stairs, or was it Bruno? Had Bruno also been the bed-wetter? And when was it exactly that the two of them had been allowed to wear long trousers? Why was it that he had a distinct memory of the two of them, their top lips already shadowed, and their bare legs not bare at all, but those of privately educated fauns?
Even now, as he laboriously concocted bowls of cereal and read aloud children’s books which had become classics during his own parenting lifetime, Busner tried to reactivate the wonder he’d felt as a young father, watching those two billion neurones self-assemble into sentience, and the semblance of this on porcine little countenances, their snouts flanked by two downwards-curving tusks of snot.
But that evening, lopsidedly revolving the open-plan kitchen, his dressing-gown cord snagging on the fashionable fittings as he struggled to prepare the twins’ supper with arthritic fingers, while his injured jaw ached and his fevered brow dripped, Zack Busner couldn’t achieve any contact with his children’s minds, let alone some exalted intimacy. In the current – and to his mind loathsome – idiom, he simply wasn’t there for them.
Instead he was with his young colleague Shiva Mukti. These Indian families – it bore down on him – were so closely entwined and mutually supportive. Far from finding himself isolated like this, he would doubtless – were he Mukti – be surrounded by sandalwood-scented, sari-clad womenfolk, all vying with each other to ease the weight of his responsibilities, to serve and generally mollycoddle him.
As he sat, hunched up in his study and listening to the sickeningly mushy sound of old gums dealing with dahl in the next room – how could something so soft be so grating? – Shiva Mukti was plagued by visions of the repose his nemesis was doubtless enjoying. Visions which were rendered hideously concrete since he’d taken to smoking a joint in the evening. Shiva had done his fair share of drug experimentation when he was a medical student, a dab of speed for revision purposes, the odd beta-blocker to ensure calm during oral exams. As a junior doctor he had even skin-popped the tail-end of a shot of diamorphine which he was giving to some poor, old, pain-addled soul. However, he’d never truly taken to intoxication of any kind – saving speed and sex – until now. He’d had the hashish for months – it was given to him by Rocky in a lucid moment of self-preservation. Rather than throwing it away, Shiva chucked the nugget in his desk drawer and forgot all about it.
For a week now, each night after supper, he’d take up his station by the bins in the back of the garage. Looking out over the fenced-off pens of the suburban gardens, each with its bare-branched tree and nude trellis, he performed his elegiac ceremony. The harsh smoke rasped his sensitive membranes, while he offered up his profoundest apologies to the soul of the departed schizophrenic and in return was granted long moments of peace.
But once back inside, the kitchen lino reared up at Shiva and the strip lights strobed down on him. The aunts and uncles chattered as if they were the sacred monkeys of his grandfather’s temple, mysteriously transported halfway around the world. So Shiva retreated to his study, and there shut up among the box files he tormented himself, night after night, with imaginings of his rival’s peaceful convalescence.
Dr Zack Busner was staying at an exclusive sanitarium high in the Austrian Tyrol. While he lay in state on a divan swollen with satin-tasselled cushions, dimpled frauleins deftly decrusted his cucumber sandwiches and fawning doctoral students played court. Wadja’s attack – far from being a painful and disturbing violation – was a fresh opportunity for Busner to spin out his flimsy thread of theoretical speculation. ‘Who fully grasps the interrelation between malaises?’ Shiva could hear Busner address his adoring audience in his trademark oracular style. ‘Was my assailant’s peculiar echolalia an attempt to confront his alcoholism? Perhaps by repeating himself verbatim Wadja was enacting his obsessive-compulsive disorder? Or was the reverse the case, and Wadja, far from being a violent alcoholic, is rather drinking to medicate his own unipolar depression? It would follow that the repetition was an alarm being constantly sounded to wake him from incipient catatonia …’
Under the elastic influence of Rocky’s rubbery old dope, Shiva’s Busner scenarios expanded and their content became so plausible to him that he began to find credence in the false Busner’s theorising. Shiva even jotted down his ideas with half a mind to examining them further at some point in the future.
Then, inevitably, the hash started mashing up his mind and Rocky’s shade came hammering for admission to the house. The big dread shinned up the drainpipe and poked his head in through the tiny flap window of the bathroom. Sensing his presence as he took an uncomfortable late-night piss, Shiva looked up to be confronted by the grey-black face. Rocky’s sad, slack mouth opened and the boring beseeching began. ‘Got any jobs you want doing an’ that, Doc? Small jobs, tiny jobs, there’s no job too small for me. I’ll clean your nails for ten pence, yes I will, clean ’em till they shine like new half-moons, yes I can …’ And Shiva had to stare into the sad dead eyes then shut the window with great deliberation, rearrange his clothing and flush away the wasted life.
David Elmley sat in his flat in Tooting. It was on the ground floor of a 1930s block called Mimosa Court that stood twenty metres back from the High Road. Its foundation was fringed with broken glass and dirty grass, while four storeys up its flat roof supported the monochrome sky. Spiralling about Mimosa Court were the two strands of South London’s genetic code, the endlessly recombined sequence of halal butcher’s, international call centre and convenience store. While behind the horizontally leaded windows its inhabitants led their oblique lives.
To begin with Elmley had rented a room in the flat from a fellow student who had the tenancy. There were four of them in those days, each creating his or her little world in one of the cubic rooms which opened off the narrow hall. The cramped kitchen was in a continual ferment of experimental cooking, with pots of pulses bubbling on the grease-painted cooker and strange fruit drinks being concocted in the huge blender. Elmley could remember the carefully drawn-up rota – complete with coloured Dynotape strips for each flatmate – that was the focus of many an emotional confrontation. At the time these harsh accusations of wilful neglect and frozen postures of martyrdom felt like a descent into barbarism, but looking back Elmley recognised them as only the necessary flexing of young characters seizing up into the atrophy of adulthood.
Gone were the dusty pot plants and uncomfortable futon-and-pallet beds, gone were the battered and beloved collections of LPs, gone were the posters advertising art exhibitions in European capitals, and gone as well were the be-jeaned students who used to kneel on the worn carpet to roll their joints, stick their tongues in each other’s pimple-fringed mouths, or play Go. One by one they’d moved on to be replaced by older versions of themselves. The tenancy devolved to Elmley, and when his business was doing well enough he stopped sharing. In the early 1990s he exercised his right to buy the flat from the Council.
It was the failure of his marriage to Michiko that pushed Elmley into this permanence. That he should’ve mistaken a business arrangement for a loving relationship was no surprise to Shiva Mukti, who understood that Elmley’s effervescent and groundless enthusiasm made him see the basis of every union as fungible. Convenience or conviction, either one could be taken in lieu of the other.
Over the years Elmley did the place up tastefully but austerely. The walls were white, the original parquet flooring was stained black. Furniture and fittings were kept to the bare minimum and were mostly pieces contemporary with the building. While he was creating this environment Elmley took pleasure in it, but now it felt chilly and empty, its echt Modernism self-parodic.
