Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 70
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Three months later, two stone lighter and a quarter of a world away, Shiva lay on an examination couch in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, just another dysentery case back from the subcontinent who couldn’t believe how crude a colonoscopy was. The doctor – an irritable man with an impressive overbite – had Shiva assume a bicycling posture on his side, then inserted a steel tube into his anus. Then he put his eye to the other end.
‘What can you see?’ Shiva asked, since the doctor seemed disinclined to offer any opinion beyond effortful grunts and annoyed clucks.
‘Nothing much,’ he replied. ‘Only some rather rabbity-looking faeces.’
‘Well, whaddya expect if you look down a tube you’ve shoved up my arse?’ Shiva retorted, but this was lost on the tropical-disease specialist, who merely withdrew the tube with an audible ‘plop’ and told him to get dressed.
Shiva’s dreams possessed a realism long since absent from his waking life. They terrified him. As he thrashed and moaned, a slim and elegant physician observed him. For years Shiva had used all the diagnostic tools at his disposal on his wife, shoe-horning her into this or that dysfunctional slipper, but there was nothing wrong with Swati at all. Her refusal to couple with sufficient enthusiasm, her lackadaisical absorption into the boarding household, her efficient piety – none of these were symptoms of a neurosis or a behavioural disorder. No, Swati Mukti became aware of her husband’s instability soon after marrying him. She waited before risking a pregnancy, contraception needn’t be that sneaky, because Shiva was so profoundly self-absorbed. Once she was pregnant with Mohan she was already regretting it. Shiva’s rages, his mood swings, his odd beliefs – all of it drove her to read his professional manuals. Swati Mukti had concluded that, if not actually schizophrenic, then Shiva did at least have a borderline personality type.
There could be no question of any more children. Watching Mohan grow up and trying to outguess the emergence of whatever psychological problems he might develop would be labour enough. There was this task and there was waiting for her husband to fall, hovering behind him with a chair as if he were a slapstick drunk. Shiva thought Swati didn’t love him, but the truth was that hers was love of complexity and depth that he was quite unequipped to perceive. Swati was there to stop him falling, not because he was a loving husband and a dutiful father – he was neither – but as part repayment of the debt owed to him by the mentally ill he himself had tried to help. So, Swati Mukti, erect in her quilted bed jacket, with its peacock motif embroidered on the left breast, oversaw her tormented husband and waited for morning. There could be no question of him continuing to see Grunbein on such an informal basis: hospitalisation would be the next step.
Whimpering and grinding his teeth, Shiva swung open the gate and entered another of the fields on his funny farm. He herded the cow into the hoof-cratered corner by the water trough, then slipped his trousers off so he could mount her. His first wife Sandra bucked and mooed beneath him. Despite the tumult of upheaving flesh Shiva still noticed – with lofty, Brahminical pity – the sprinkling of livid spots on the inside of her anal cleft. Sandra’s conical fingers, which resembled jeweller’s ring trees, dug into an earthen bolster, and her high-pitched bellows rent the rapidly compressing atmosphere.
‘What’s all this about, Shiva?’ cried Zack Busner, pushing open the door with one of his hands, while the second snapped on the light, the third adjusted his spectacles and the fourth rolled and unrolled the hairy tongue of his mohair tie. ‘I can’t see that indulging in erotic reveries about your former wife is going to take you anywhere much – not in career terms at any rate.’ Sandra had seen Busner’s bloodstained teeth, and mewling, pulled herself out from under Shiva, then shuffled into the far corner of the dingy little student bedsit. The sand of total inhibition trickled into Shiva’s mouth. Busner came over to the squashy single bed and sat down on its disarranged sheets. He put one arm around Shiva’s shoulders and continued. ‘Untrammelled female passion, its destructive and consuming aspects …’ Another pair of hands fiddled with the folds of his white coat, which parted to reveal a burgeoning bulge in his corduroy trousers. ‘But surely, Shiva, this characterisation of the Jew is a bit of a cliché?’
‘C-can you be a Jew and a g-god?’
‘Ye-es,’ Busner drawled. ‘I am – as you observe – Zakibusna, your consort, but that doesn’t stop you from projecting the most outrageous imaginings on to me, hmm?’
Shiva struggled to answer this accusation, but all that emerged from his mouth were parched burbles. It didn’t matter anyway, because Zakibusna wasn’t listening, she’d expertly flipped her spectacles cord over Shiva’s head and was now tightening it around his neck. Shiva felt the blood vessels burst in his face, as if it were fleshy bubble-wrap being popped by an evil child. Eventually all was subsumed by a red darkness.
Swati left Shiva to sleep in, but when she returned from the school run she found him already up and dressed in suit and tie. ‘You’re due to see Dr Grunbein this morning,’ she said. ‘Why are you all dressed up like that?’
‘I’m not bothering with that fraud again,’ he replied. ‘I’m far better qualified than he is and I’ve decided that I’m going back to work. I’ve recovered.’
‘Don’t be idiotic, Shiva.’ She laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You were delirious in your sleep last night – you can’t go into the hospital.’
‘Can’ – he shrugged off her hand – ‘and will, and don’t try …’ He picked up his briefcase and waltzed towards the front door. ‘Stopping me!’
Part Five
He set off at a good pace around the placid curve of Kenton Park Crescent and then down Kenton Park Road to the Kenton Road. From the junction it was half a mile’s stroll to Kenton tube station. Kenton, Kenton, Kenton – for the balance of Shiva’s life these two syllables had meant home, routine, the tight mental brace of the mundane. Ken-ton. Ken, ton. Divided from each other what did they imply? A ton of Kens, or – in the Scots vernacular – a knowledge of weight? Or were they only sounds, ‘ken’ and ‘ton’, as full of import – for Shiva – as Mandarin words, the meaning of which might veer wildly if pitch or tone were slightly altered. ‘Ken-ton’ in Mandarin, Shiva thought, might mean something complex and poetic, such as: That feeling you have walking to the tube station having decided that very morning not to succumb to a mental breakdown, but instead to vanquish your enemies.
I need a cuddle, Shiva realised. Why can’t I go into that scrappy front garden and knock on the peeling paint of that front door, and fall into the arms of the overweight and overwhelmed woman who answers it? At once, the thought of the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus, then the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road, became frighteningly alien. The journey would be interminable, the brute power of the metropolis would be scored into every electric-blue check of the tube carriage’s seats. Swati was right – he wasn’t up to it. He was ill, he should turn back, see Grunbein later in the day, try and get some clarity. What was it that Gunnar had asked him to do for his psychotherapeutic homework? Think about a question – but what was it? Yes, that was it, why had Shiva wanted to be a psychiatrist in the first place?
To please his father, he thought. During Shiva’s early adolescence, when they’d been closest, Dilip Mukti took his son into his own intellectual confidence, and took him as well on the long, meandering public-transport journeys which became the outward expression of their intimacy. Father and son fleeing in order to get near to one another. Sleepy off-peak overground trains muttering over the rails to Berkhamsted, Chertsey and Amersham; Green Line buses tunnelling through the deep-cut lanes of the Kentish Weald; and always the tube and the London buses, royal roads, open to his father whenever he waved his staff pass. On these vague voyages Dilip Mukti would talk and Shiva would listen. Staring out over the backs of trackside houses – each one a strip of garden, a blob of shed, a wink of greenhouse, a child caught in the instant of catching a ball – Dilip would tell his son of his own childhood in the hissing and deadly snake pit of high-caste Indian religious politics. The names – Vivekananda, Ramakrishna – meant little to the boy, and the sects his father described – the Aryo and Bramo Samaj – seemed to have no conceivable relevance to Shiva’s own world of cliques and cricket teams, canoeing on the Welsh Harp Reservoir and canoodling at school discos.
Nor did the central dilemma of his father’s life – whether he should continue in the family tradition or break decisively with it – find any answering echo in his son’s sensibility. Dilip Mukti would have Shiva believe that at his age all that had preoccupied him was whether the truth could be reconciled with archaic religious practices, or better served by embracing modern realities. But all Shiva was fixated upon was the ugliness of the hard-core porn passed around in the boys’ toilets at school. Could it be that the girls he viewed through the pastel-hued lenses of romance had the same gaping wounds underneath their Bandaid-sized skirts?
Dilip Mukti had a way of talking about himself that omitted the personal pronoun. ‘What to do? Where to go? It was one thing to rebel, understand, quite another to know what that rebellion was for. To go to England? Many had gone before for economic reasons, but to go for the philosophy? Why?’ Years later Shiva understood that this was simply a function of speaking in a second language, but at the time his father’s recollections had an oracular quality, as if they were on a par with the Ramayana.
Dilip Mukti may have tried to strike off the chains of caste, class, culture and nation, but he couldn’t abandon the search for jnana, the way of knowledge. In the shaggy-faced thinkers of the European Enlightenment, Shiva’s father had discovered another form of smirti – what is remembered – and so he laboured to remember it, and to create his own oral tradition by passing it down to his son.
Those interminable journeys! Traversing and re-traversing the conurbation, while his dad spoke of Darwin, Mill, Marx and even Freud, an Everyman Library volume of the relevant thinker like a sandwich on his lap, opened out to reveal its filling of knowledge. Why had Shiva become a doctor? Why, to please his father, and why a psychiatrist? To please his father still more. Surely this was what Dilip Mukti had been calling upon him to do for all those miles of tarmac and steel? To use the highest faculties of reason to map out the irrational, segregate and then annihilate it? The monkeys would be caged, the elephants put to work, the tigers shot and the snakes handled. The entire, ever-inchoate, shape-shifting bestiary of Hindu belief would be fit meat for his heir’s career as a psychological vivisectionist.
But by the time Shiva came to train his father had reverted almost entirely to type. His trousers had been slit up the seams and rearranged into a lungi. He’d even abandoned his gardening, claiming that the soil was infertile and used up. But Shiva knew that his father feared its defilement now that he was approaching the end of his lifetime. Feared that all of his contact with John Innes potting soil might prejudice his chance of reaching enlightenment of a different order. So, like Oedipus, despite his very best intentions, Shiva found himself committing an act of parricide. With Dilip putting back on the pious garb of their forefathers, Shiva’s white coat became an arrogant and offensive bit of character armour.
In the final years of his life – despite Shiva’s marriage to Swati – Dilip often alluded to the shame of his son’s first forlorn liaison with ‘the English girl’. Dilip seemed to believe that it was this impulsive act that had decisively altered the status of the whole Mukti clan, and not his own, heavily ruminated decision to leave India and seek his truth in the West. When the old man’s will was read, it transpired that the task of taking his ashes back to Varanasi, so that they might be scattered in the waters of Mother Ganga, had been allocated to his brother-in-law Jayesh. Shiva was left behind in Kenton, having been mysteriously reincarnated in his father’s discarded self-image.
‘Why, Dad?’ Shiva asked aloud outside the florist’s next to the station. ‘Why couldn’t you love me like a father should love a son? After all, I was your only child.’ But Dilip’s shade, for so long present at the periphery of Shiva’s darkening vision, was now nowhere to be seen. Shiva bought his ticket, got on the train, and dry-heaved the whole way into town.
Whatever worry they may have felt at the hospital to see Dr Mukti back so soon was cancelled out by the need there was for his services. It hardly mattered to his hard-pressed colleagues if Shiva Mukti was sane or not, all that concerned them was that he shoulder his share of an overwhelming case load. Cases like Darlene Davis, a young woman who’d been discovered that very morning by one of the porters, collapsed in a dead faint by the hopper full of clinical waste which was next to the entrance of A & E. ‘She’s got a haemoglobin level of six – six!’ mouthed Shiva’s secretary as he took Davis’s notes from her and ducked back inside his niche.
Darlene Davis suited St Mungo’s only too well. With her skin-tight black clothes and dusty-black, Struwwelpeter hair, she fused all Gothic revivals together in one gloomy incarnation. Her skin was so white, her eyes so sunken, and her mouth so lipstick-livid that had he a coffin to hand Shiva would’ve tucked her up in it without hesitating. She sat, rocking on her pelvis, tied up in the bondage of her own limbs, while he roamed about posing questions. How had she come to lose so much blood? Had she any idea what was wrong with her? Who was her GP? To begin with she behaved like many prisoners of the mental-health wars, refusing anything but her name and sexual rank. It was only when Shiva began a conversation with himself – ‘I’ve always lived with my family or with friends, but I wonder what it would be like to live alone’ – that Davis joined in.
‘I don’t live by myself.’ She sounded proud of this. ‘I live with a group of … err … I s’pose you’d call them creative like people.’
‘And what do you call them?’
‘Artists.’
‘I see, and where is this artistic community situated?’
‘In London.’
‘I realised that.’
‘And Paris.’
‘Paris, well, that’s nice.’
‘I dunno about nice, but it’s fucking cool. Most of the time we hang out here, but when we feel like it we up and fuck off like, get on the ferry or whatever, take the vans and go over. We got another squat opposite this weird park, the Butte Chaumont, d’you know it?’
‘Not as such.’
‘Didn’t think so.’ Davis hugged herself tighter with self-satisfaction. ‘It’s this big like limestone bowl that’s been carved out of a hill. All that’s left of the rock is this big like pinnacle thing in the middle, with a bridge going over to it. Digger says the Surrealists called it the Bridge of Suicides and this poet bloke, Aragorn –’
‘Aragon.’
‘Whatever. This poet bloke said that people who’d only gone out to do some like shopping found themselves driven like … to like … throw themselves off it.’
‘Who’s Digger?’
‘He’s a bloke.’
‘An artist?’
‘A bloke.’
It went on like this, with her evasions and nonce words forming the dots and dashes of a telegram, that conveyed to Shiva the news that important command centres in Darlene’s mind had been overrun by delusional thinking. When he brought her back to the matter of her physical condition she became surly. ‘I dunno.’
‘But you must know – you must’ve lost at least a litre of blood to have a haemoglobin level this low …’ Shiva walked behind her and looked hard at her scrawny neck. ‘Tell me, Darlene – you needn’t feel ashamed about this, it’s a not uncommon thing – but have you been cutting yourself?’
‘No.’
‘Have you had an accident in the last week?’
‘No.’
‘A miscarriage?’
‘No – don’t be fucking stupid! Look, I know what I need, blood, so why don’t you give it to me?’
‘It’s not that simple, Darlene – you’ll have to have a physical examination first.’
‘Well go on then.’ She uncoiled herself and began pulling off the stretchy black clothes, revealing tuberous white limbs as speedily as if they’d been yanked from the earth.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ Shiva blurted. ‘I’ll get a female colleague.’
Shiva left the niche. In the waiting area a thirtyish man sat reading a glossy magazine. Even as he swept past, Shiva noted the contrast between the shiny faces on its cover and his pasty one. The man’s big nose was pitted with old acne scars and a sideburn of pus joined his spiky, part-bleached hair to his unshaven cheek. He glared at Shiva, who at once intuited that there was a connection between him and Darlene.
Shiva leant over the receptionist’s desk and whispered to her, ‘Call Security and have them station someone in the corridor. I have a potentially dangerous patient in my office and I don’t want her leaving the hospital under any circumstances. Also’ – his voice dropped – ‘call Sharon, would you. I need her to do a physical for me.’
When the staff nurse arrived five minutes later she found Darlene shivering in a hospital gown, while Shiva Mukti sat at his desk noting down numbers from the phone directory. ‘Could you give Ms Davis here a complete physical examination, please Sharon? Look for any traumas or breaks in the skin, no matter how small – this young woman has mislaid a large amount of her own blood.’ He smiled facetiously. ‘I’ve got to do some telephoning.’ He left them to it.
