Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 68
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
After Michiko left Elmley convinced himself that he’d make a tolerable life for himself as a bachelor. He’d have his work and his flat, his cultural pursuits and his hobbies. He would travel. Far from being one of those single men who couldn’t relate to children, he’d maintain close and loving relationships with his friends’ offspring. How the put-upon parents would envy him. And when the kids grew older they’d find in Uncle David precisely the kind of trusted – and never condescending – friend, who can make all the difference when it comes to negotiating the choppy hormonal passage between child-and adulthood.
Unfortunately there weren’t the friends needed to breed the children required for Elmley’s ideal. He could’ve hung on to them – he thought – but the getting of friends was a trial. Forming a new relationship required spontaneity, a quality that Elmley possessed only in those flights of fancy when he proclaimed himself on the verge of taking up this, doing that, or buying the other.
Instead he remained stuck with Shiva Mukti. Shiva Mukti with whom he’d wandered the delapidated shopping parades and steel-cluttered playgrounds of Kenton. Shiva Mukti, who’d allowed him the leftovers – the odd grope or tooth-clashing snog – that fell from his own groaning board. Shiva Mukti, who he’d never really liked, but was stranded with on a makeshift raft of uneasy amity, the two of them sitting across from one another in the staff canteen at St Mungo’s, both chewing over the increasingly institutional character of their relationship.
Godfather wasn’t a polytheistic position, but Elmley tried to build up something special with Mohan. To begin with he’d zealously remembered birthdays, but Mohan was absorbed into the Mukti household and hardly acknowledged them. Then, as the years of married life had passed, Shiva seemed less and less inclined to break down the partitions between work, family, and what little social life he had. Elmley was confined to the work canteen and seldom invited back to the domestic one.
He would’ve loved it if the Muktis had come to see him in Tooting. He’d often thought of how he’d entertain them and the pride with which he’d display all the ordered intimacy of his happily solitary life. Elmley knew there was something not quite right about this, that it was the impulse of a grown-up boy needing to show off his toys. It didn’t matter though, because even Shiva hardly ever bothered to make the long southerly voyage, and when he did it was only so he could sit eyeballing the floor in the living room and complaining about his lot. Recently Shiva had been accompanied on these late-night journeys by Rocky’s hash. As they both puffed and Shiva fulminated, roasting in the hot coals of his fervid imagination every slight directed at him by Zack Busner, so his friend’s brain fried in its bone pan. For want of anything better to think about, David Elmley found himself considering the feud as if it were personal to him, and with which – no matter how he tried to avoid it – he was closely involved. He discovered that it now made sense to him. His life had been a succession of failed connections; only in his profession did he find 180 degrees of predictability. Plainly it was up to him to solder together these sundered men, or else twist them apart irrevocably.
In this moment of hash-leavened perception it also struck David Elmley – with all the force of a religious conversion – that although he understood he must play an active role in the war between truth and falsehood, sanity and madness, good and evil, he didn’t know which psychiatrist was which of these, or even whose side he was on.
There could only be one way forward, he concluded as he climbed back into his Elmley suit of jeans and checked shirt, and assumed the required expression of attentiveness. He would go and see Busner, he would wittingly become one of the man’s assassins, then he would know what to do. Either carry his mission through to a grisly and near-fratricidal conclusion, or else once and for all rid the world of the inventor of The Riddle.
Charlotte returned from Venice looking as pleased with herself as a rapacious doge. Busner went back to work. At least his colleagues were pleased to see him. They tried to persuade him to take things easy, confine himself to less taxing teaching duties and preparing his forthcoming lecture at the Royal Society of Ephemera. But Busner felt that he must remount the bucking bronco of doctoring. With a peaceful old age out of the question, and his elixir of life being glugged down by Massimo, it was best that he get on with what he knew best. He sensed that if he faltered now it could be the end.
A patient called David Elmley was referred to him by a GP in Fitzrovia ‘… shows signs of near-acute depression, somatic disorders etc, also suicidal ideation. I would’ve sent him to St Mungo’s but he says there could be conflicts with the staff there of a personal nature. He may need a course of psychotherapy or even short-term inpatient treatment.’ Lantern-jawed, jug-eared, sparse-haired, Elmley had a thigh-slapping manner that was almost offensively inappropriate.
‘I’m an architectural ironmonger,’ he told Busner. ‘I run a small business with my partner, I’m responsible for the hinges … and now … heh-heh, now I’m afraid it’s me who’s become unhinged …’ He paused so that Busner could regurgitate a morsel of chuckling, but far from obliging the fleshy-faced psychiatrist only sat behind his oddly adorned desk, skinny ankles exposed by the inaction of his crossed legs, and apparently completely absorbed in contemplating the bright-purple socks he was wearing.
They sat like this for a full five minutes, the unhinged hinge designer and the mental locksmith. To begin with Elmley was profoundly uneasy, but gradually the force of Busner’s impassivity began to impose itself on him. He became calm and began to consider all the forlorn by-ways and desultory cul-de-sacs that had brought him to this suburban breakdown.
Eventually, remembering that he had a powerful ulterior motive for being in this particular consulting room, he spoke. ‘I suppose, Dr Busner, that before you can help me you’ll need to know a little bit about my history.’
There was another long and profound silence; like an ankle-high relic, the sock received further devoted scrutiny. Then Busner cleared his throat with a loud ‘Erumph!’ and replied, ‘Not necessarily.’
That had been a week ago. Now Elmley sat and stared through the window at precise slices of Tooting and sky while fingering the plastic canister of pills in his pocket. All the way back from North London, as he pedalled his midget-wheeled bike past the parade of shops that linked Vauxhall Cross, Stockwell, Clapham, Balham and finally Tooting itself, peace had descended upon him. As kebab-joint sign after kebab-joint sign loomed up out of the gloom to take on the appearance of a severed human thigh with bone protruding, so David Elmley had grasped more securely that he had freely chosen to do that to which he was compelled.
A couple of days after that Elmley was back in the canteen at St Mungo’s sitting in his usual position. Was the tightness he felt in his belly caused by the antidepressants Busner had prescribed for him or their side effects? Or was it the anxious anticipation – no matter how misguided – of betrayal? It was hard to tell – ever since he’d gone in search of help Elmley felt as if he’d entered a hall of mirrors, but when he looked into them he saw not his own face but the crazy masks of people at once familiar and strange to him. Had it been Busner who, like a spymaster, had ‘turned’ Elmley, or was it he himself who’d volunteered his services as a double agent? Whichever was the case, he now sat cutting his Cornish pasty into a series of cross-sections – as if preparing it for an anatomy class in which the function of diced potato in the life of the organism was to be explained – and stealing the occasional glance at his friend-cum-enemy across the table.
There didn’t seem anything untoward about Shiva: he was eating his cheese sandwich with characteristic nibbles of his front teeth, while one blocky hand toyed nervously with a cruet, spinning it round and round on its base by its knurled sides. But if Elmley looked away and then looked back quickly, Shiva’s lips curled into murderous, distended red flaps, bared to reveal fangs. He sprouted two additional pairs of arms, and in each of his four free hands he held a severed head. The cruet became a skull which he brought to his mouth brimming with blood. Elmley had to shake his head to dispel the terrifying vision and Shiva said, ‘Everything all right?’, to which he grunted non-committally and made a dismissive gesture.
Part Four
In the impressively large but slightly shabby lecture room of the Royal Society of Ephemera the atmosphere was subdued yet engaged. A medium-sized gathering of like-minded professionals and well-informed lay people sat here and there on the leather-covered seats. Through the tall narrow windows, from which velvet drapes had been pulled back, there was a view of the Mall and beyond it St James’s Park. It was a clear evening and a very cold one. Frost dusted the tarmac, the trees and the grass like icing sugar, so that when a car crunched past it couldn’t help but look shiny, tiny and decorative. Under these conditions Central London appeared about as magical as it ever did, save for when companies of centaurs trotted down Constitution Hill, or winged serpents thronged the sky above Trafalgar Square.
Zack Busner stood at the lectern summing up what had been a most wide-ranging lecture. Indeed, so eclectic had it been that the majority of his listeners, despite their own credentials, would’ve been at a complete loss if called upon to summarise it. He had set out the arguments of others and provided his own rebuttals; he had told several amusing anecdotes and exhibited a prodigious display of theoretical impedimenta; he had illustrated the lecture with a number of odd artefacts laid out on a baize-covered table and his assistant had projected a selection of curious slides. So well-pitched was the overall tone of the presentation that at any given time a sufficient proportion of Busner’s audience was able to feel that pleasant state of intellectual arousal which passes for understanding. So it was that the lecture was judged an unqualified success.
There was, however, one member of the audience who didn’t share in this communion, one head that didn’t nod on cue, one mind that refused to accept the primacy – even for a few moments – of this psychological pargeting over the more durable – and believable – interior that it had constructed for itself. Shiva Mukti was hunkered down so low in his slope-backed armchair that from the lectern all that was visible of him was the perfectly centred crown of his lustrous dark hair. His lips moved, but his words were addressed to himself, introjecting a stream of remarks which were inaudible even to his immediate neighbours – glosses on Busner’s remarks, disparaging observations and bitter imprecations. Shiva marked off the fingers of his left hand with vowels, and the fingers of his right with consonants, then he twisted them into painful, fleshy acrostics. His brown eyes, from deep inside their purple tunnels of fatigue and anxiety, hunted the lecture room, tracking down the members of the conspiracy ranged against him, who had gathered here – in this most august of institutions – to receive the latest briefing from their overlord.
After Busner had concluded and there’d been a smattering of applause, the audience rose and moving awkwardly between the chairs they formed small groups around small groups of canapés and trays laden with glasses of sweet and sour wine. These men and women displayed all the skill they’d accumulated from hundreds of such gatherings. The way they deferred to one another, the way they adopted poses both critical and disinterested, the way they listed to afford the passage of waitresses bearing trays, all of it suggested an unforced intimacy born of long professional association.
To Shiva this was nothing but smoke, fiendishly concocted cover for their nefarious activities. He shrank behind a Doric column, the sausage roll in his hand throttled to within a tenth of an inch of its original girth. The dust from the long maroon drapes and the burgundy carpet tickled his sensitive nose, while the companionable hubbub assailed his lank-lobed ears with wave after wave of encryption that was indecipherable on the spot, but which he felt confident he’d be able to crack at his leisure, if only he could manage to take in as much as possible.
He noted that each of the little groups had at its centre a Jew. Levy from the Institute of Psychoanalysis over by the projection screen, Berners from the Maudsley under the bust of Robert Burton, Weissbraun, Director of the Gruton Clinic, behind a baize-covered table, and of course Busner himself, still positioned by the lectern and receiving the attention of a small crowd of acolytes. And, as Shiva observed this sinister master of the Kabbalah directing his golems to commit more outrages, the full character of the conspiracy impacted on him. This was no mere Semitic mutual advancement pact, oh no. Just as Busner was intent on annihilating Mukti using psychotics as assassins, so the Praesidium of the Elders of Psycho-Zion was bent on controlling all of society, employing not only hapless isolated drones, but whole clusters of neurotic bomblets, which would lie on the firm ground of sanity for months – years even – before going off in the face of someone who handled them by chance. No, theirs was a campaign of carpet bombing the culture with manufactured mental malaises. The whole modern obsession with the disorders of the psyche was of their engineering, and was deployed everywhere you cared to look – in the advice pages of women’s magazines, on daytime television, in the academic press and the self-help sections of high-street bookshops. The severely mentally ill – now released back into the community – were only these monsters’ fedayeen, suicidal bombers, each primed to detonate in a crowded mall, sending shock waves crashing through the happy shoppers.
In this moment of unmasking Shiva Mukti found himself unmasked. He saw Busner turn from the group he’d been holding spellbound – a smooth man in a furry suit, a cadaverous woman with hepatitic skin, another woman, grotesquely tall, with pendulous, dirigible breasts – and beckon Shiva to join them, a broad smile playing on his froggy lips, Busner’s manner was hammy, doubly contrived like an actor playing an actor. Shiva backed away several metres and collided with an ugly bronze of Alkan, the great founding father of the Implied Method of Psychoanalysis. He yelped, turned on his heel and rushed out of the room.
‘Shiva Mukti,’ Busner explained to his queer interlocutors, ‘as skittish as a foal. Of course, I’ve had my eye on him for quite some time now.’ And the four of them tittered knowingly.
Zack Busner was perplexed, no, genuinely flummoxed. He couldn’t see how this young woman who sat before him – paper-white where her skin was exposed and dusty-black where it was covered by dusty-black clothes – managed to remain upright. Outside the room, in the sunlit limbo of a Tuesday mid-morning on the psychiatric ward at Heath Hospital, a trio of old women patients – who had mysteriously ended up lodged in the crannies of the Department, like last autumn’s furled and desiccated leaves – mumbled and clucked to themselves as they threaded outsize wooden beads on to lengths of leather thong.
Busner had made more than a cursory examination of … he looked back at her notes on his desk … Liz Good, asking a female nurse to be present while he did so. You could never be too careful where hysterics were concerned, and he knew this to his cost. Lacan may have viewed the female hysteric as a cultural icon, but so far as Zack Busner was concerned they were a dangerous liability at worst, and at best a righteous pain in the arse.
Liz Good’s arse had looked like the plucked scut of a chicken once she’d peeled off her dusty-black, skin-tight clothing. Her goose-bump flesh was bisected by her ill-advised and profoundly unalluring black satin-look thong; a piece of apparel which – Busner felt – stood in the same relation to underwear as marginalia did to a text, and which he had neither the strength nor the inclination to ask her to remove. It was like an exoskeleton, this thong, a caricature pelvis drawn on to the outside of her emaciated body. She professed – artlessly and blithely – to have no idea what was the matter with her, only admitting to the extreme lethargy and faintness which had brought her into A & E.
Busner reacquainted her with the facts the duty doctor and various nurses had already made a lean meal of. ‘Your haemoglobin level is six, Ms Good, six! A healthy level would be between twelve and fourteen. I’m not surprised that you’ve been feeling very tired and that you fainted this morning – by all rights you should be dead! Do you understand me – dead!’
Feeding her white limbs back into her black, patchouli-scented clothing, like a snake reassuming its skin, Liz Good had paused to give him a wan smile, freighted with a curious mixture of contempt and self-deprecation. Busner was flummoxed.
He leafed through the notes again, but there was nothing there save for the test results and a few scribbled remarks. In answer to the standard questions Liz Good had given no information whatsoever. She denied having a fixed abode, a GP, or any next of kin. She had no occupation, history of illness, or religion. She had admitted to an age – twenty-eight – and a gender, but, judging by the dismissive manner she employed with Busner, these had been granted only under duress.
‘I repeat, Ms Good, there is only one conceivable way that you could’ve arrived here with such a low haemoglobin level, and that’s due to major blood loss within the past week or so. Now, Georgina and I have thoroughly examined you and we can find no evidence of any injury or trauma. If there’s nothing that you can tell us then it’s extremely difficult to know how we should proceed.’
‘I’m not mad,’ she said in a small resolute voice, as she picked at the split ends of her dusty black pelt.
‘I’m not suggesting that you are,’ he replied in his best public tones – but his internal address system squawked: YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY BLOODY INSANE! ‘Listen,’ he continued. ‘I’m not certain of a course of treatment but for now I’m going to give you a bed on the ward so that you can recuperate after the blood transfusions we need to give you. There’s also a young colleague of mine at St Mungo’s – you know the hospital?’ He probed her further, hoping to elicit responses that would indicate her grip on reality.
