Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 72
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Dave Elmley saw the Jews on the tops of the buildings skipping from ventilation shaft to water tank, their long black coats flapping. More frummers drove slowly past in their Volvos, their skull locks swinging in the warm breeze. To head north like this, into the very heart of their territory, taking the fight to them. It was hardly what they’d expect – they might even feel a tremor of fear.
By the time Shiva reached the junction of Grafton Way and turned right into Tottenham Court Road, Digger had already crossed the Euston Road and was heading up Hampstead Road at speed. While Elmley was in the middle of the intersection, caught up in a mêlée of ongoing roadworks, and apparently in conversation with a huddle of yet-to-be-installed traffic lights.
Shiva could see an ambulance pulled up outside the entrance to the University College Hospital’s A & E department. It was a garish vehicle, its red-and-orange chevrons go-sicker stripes. The green-and-white checks on its rear doors were inset with a stylised caduceus in a blue asterisk. Shiva thought, you’d have to be mad to willingly enter such a jazzy van, in which case – he snickered knowingly – you might not be mad at all.
Up Hampstead Road and then over on to Stanhope Street where Rocky had lived. Who, Shiva wondered, inherited the Rock? Up Park Village East and then over the railway line. Along Mornington Terrace then across the junction with Parkway and on to Oval Road. Shiva had read once that when Regent’s Park Terrace was built it stood alone in open country, a row of houses like a giant piece of Lego, waiting for a new piece of city to be attached. In the stinking heat of the summer afternoon the houses looked cool and inviting. From what he could see of their dark hallways hung with old prints, Shiva theorised that each one was occupied by a different family of upper-middle-class bien pensants. No doubt at this precise moment they were discussing elegant – yet workable – solutions to the very problems that plagued him. The tea they drank was fragrant and refreshing. China not Indian. Milk? I don’t think so. In the mid-distance the hunched figure of Digger passed the Old Piano Factory and turned the corner into Jamestown Road. Shiva began to skip.
Twenty minutes later Shiva was standing in the doorway of a launderette on the corner of Queen’s Crescent and Grafton Road. The smells of broiling fabric flapped in his face, and the chinking, thrumming sound of the machines filled his ears. Two doors along Elmley loitered by an off-licence. He’d got hold of a quarter-bottle of Scotch which he was swigging quite openly. With his dishevelled air and pale, worried face, the hinge-maker was playing his part of afternoon layabout with considerable brio. Looking across the junction, Shiva saw Digger use a succession of large keys to unlock a steel door that had been put up – presumably by the Council – to prevent the likes of him entering this large four-storey house.
Digger disappeared inside the house and Shiva let his attention fly between the blocks of flats on Mansfield Road, vault over the swelling green belly of Parliament Hill and then rise up into the sky. Digger resurfaced in the dark rectangular pool of the door and motioned to them, his hand grabbing at the air. First Elmley and then Shiva stepped out across the pavement and into the road. He was so awash with adrenalin that every step Shiva took felt like an anatomy lesson. His muscles lengthened and contracted with fluid ease, his cartilage absorbed the impact of his leather soles with the tarmac, his nerves up-loaded every twinge and glitch of his being-in-the-world. At the same time, irrelevant memories came to him with complete clarity: a schoolboy from a quarter-century ago, squatting down to sweep up a strew of fallen potato crisps from the playground, laughing when he finds them mixed up with autumn leaves, and then putting them all indiscriminately back into the packet.
When Shiva got inside the door he found Digger and Elmley standing very close together. They made room for him grudgingly, and then Digger went through the laborious operation of shutting the steel door, locking it, then closing the front door and locking it as well. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve been under surveillance for weeks.’
‘By the police?’ Elmley whispered back.
‘No,’ Digger hissed, ‘by the other lot.’ But instead of elaborating on this he indicated that they should follow him and they embarked on a peculiar tour of the derelict house.
In each of the rooms they entered Digger gave a little spiel, as if he were an outlaw estate agent persuading them to take on the purloined space. ‘This is Pedro’s room.’ His gesture encompassed the boarded-up windows, torn-out light fittings, a ripped-out sink which lay on its side in the middle of the floor. ‘It’s fourteen by eighteen feet, roughly, and the ceiling is twelve feet high. The original mouldings are intact, but Pedro has taken a few pot shots at the ceiling rose with his air gun.’
Pencil beams of sunlight pierced the two-by-fours nailed across the bay window, and Shiva followed their tracer paths to where they impacted on the floor and walls. Indistinct pieces of trash wriggled in and out of view, a flute of copper tubing bent to charm some springs which were uncoiling from a slashed armchair. On the far wall there hung an extremely badly executed oil painting of an ugly middle-aged woman. The eyes had been crudely hacked out and replaced with bits of old orange peel.
The adrenalin surge was still propelling Shiva along. Time had slowed down to such a degree that he could spend long extruded moments listening to the wheeze of Elmley’s lungs, or the rasp of Digger’s fingernail as he scratched his jaw. ‘Where is Pedro?’ he asked, and his voice sounded amazingly deep and full-bodied.
‘At work,’ Digger snapped in reply, as if this was obvious.
On they went, Digger stepping into each room and intoning its dimensions, the name of its occupant, then drawing their attention to what he thought were notable features. In the second room there was a teetering pile of old mattresses covered with a lumpy-porridge: foam-rubber chaff mixed up with spilt wood glue. ‘Andy’s thing,’ Digger explained. ‘It’s in progress.’ The contrast between the sharp light from the chinks in the wooden cladding and the deep wells of darkness filled Shiva’s eyes with after-images, but even so, by the time they reached the first floor he began noticing the evidence.
On small sets of shelves, in defunct fridges, and propped on top of doorways were small earthenware bowls and crudely moulded clay statues. All of them were stained rust-red. The old iron smell of dried blood permeated the house, and mixed with the homelier odours of stale sweat, evaporated alcohol and blown-away dope smoke to create a heady aroma of once and future misrule. ‘The master bedroom,’ Digger said, ‘an impressive eighteen by twenty-two feet, twelve-foot ceiling, custom paint job. Melissa strings her rags up here, calls them her moon mice, yeah.’
His eyes adjusting to the light, Shiva saw that the pink room was criss-crossed by myriad clotheslines, and that these were hung with hundreds – thousands even – of old tampons. Obliquely lit, the dipping rows of dried-blood-encrusted cotton wool looked altogether unearthly, beautiful even. Shiva couldn’t prevent himself from saying something which sounded intolerably prosaic. ‘She must’ve been living here a long time in order to collect so many … moon mice?’
‘I didn’t say they were all hers personally.’ Digger’s brow was furrowed. Again, he seemed to think Shiva should not only appreciate the art work – if that’s what it was – but understand it as well. Elmley was leaning against the wall outside on the landing, from which ancient wallpaper peeled away in damp ribbons. The sweat stood out on his high brow, his own wet Anaglypta.
‘Are you OK?’ Shiva placed a hand on his friend’s arm. Elmley jerked away and his hand withdrew from his jacket pocket, the middle finger dripping with blood.
‘Cool,’ said Digger.
They mounted the tumbledown stairs – treads kicked in, banisters kicked out – and Digger called upon them to admire the giant collage on the wall of cartoon posters, drinks advertisements and old playbills. Objects had been glued on to the bumpy surface, including milk cartons, used tea bags, and a desiccated little bundle which, Shiva realised – as he made his way gingerly past – was the corpse of a mouse. There was a clatter of wings overhead and he looked up to see a tangle of gutter-rooted vegetation pushing through a broken window. Pigeon shit ill-starred the glassy peaks.
‘Eleven feet by seven, ten-foot ceiling. A hutch, yeah, for a cowed little hamster serf, yeah?’
The wallpaper was striped in here, the floorboards bare except for remote islands of lino left behind when the rest was torn up. A small wire rack, which Shiva recognised as the kind once used for storing 45 rpm records, stood on top of an old piece of plasterboard. Three matching women’s court shoes – two right and a left – were lined up along the skirting board. A picnic basket lay murdered, its head bashed in by the counterweight from a sash window. On the windowsill itself stood three toy soldiers, their rifles levelled at an ancient crust of toast. Nearby was the slim, naked torso of a much larger plastic doll, its nipple-less breasts shiny in the sunlight. The toys presented a disturbing disjunction in scale, suggesting the possibility – by analogy – that the squat might once have been tenanted by giants, or dwarfs, or both. Shiva became aware of the insistent ‘coo-coo-coo-coo’ of roosting pigeons, the stress falling again and again on the final ‘coo’.
‘Shall we move on?’ said Digger.
On the final flight of stairs leading to the attic the clay models and dishes began massing into disorderly platoons of misshapen men. The bloodstains on the walls connected up into a full paint job. The three men paused awkwardly, first Digger, then Shiva, then Elmley, as Digger fished out his keys and unlocked the door. Stepping inside he ushered them after him. ‘Zack’s room,’ he announced, then continued, ‘now –’
It was the sign he’d been waiting for. Elmley spun round and grabbed Shiva by the shoulders. Bloody hell, he’s strong, Shiva thought, as he was hurled in Digger’s direction. It must be all that cycling. Digger, having no option if he wished to avoid being knocked over, caught Shiva in his arms. Elmley’s Stanley knife was already out of his pocket. He darted forward and sliced one way and then back, deep and hard across Shiva’s windpipe.
Falling to the floor took five minutes. At first Shiva assumed that the pink droplets spraying over the sloping walls and splattering on the dormer window were part of another artistic effort, but then he understood that this was his own blood airbrushing the outlines of a disgraceful mural. Some 1970s rock-album cover, Shiva guessed, refracted through the stoned eye of a dreadful painter. The mural took up three of the irregular walls, great swathes of blue, purple and mauve banishing both planes and angles with the superimposition of a desert landscape. Three pyramids clustered like discarded cardboard boxes beside a thicket of wonky palms. A caravan of camels wended over the dunes with a refractory inability to conform with even elementary perspective, the lead camel being far larger than the one bringing up the rear.
David Elmley grappled with Digger, making the slow and leaden movements of someone putting a theoretical knowledge of violence into practice. So leisurely was their combat that Shiva thought Digger might not be there at all, and that his old friend was doing a jig with his own Stanley knife. Elmley passed the blade back and forth in front of his equine muzzle while uttering peculiar brays and snorts. But whatever the truth about this one-sided fight, it wasn’t long into Shiva’s second minute of falling that Digger fell too, and although he couldn’t forbear from hating Elmley, Shiva was still glad he’d managed to vanquish the cultist.
Shiva Mukti spent his third minute of falling reading the slogan scrawled over the desert sky. The meaning of the characters bore no apparent relation to the work, and its rusty colour, together with the way the ascenders and descenders trailed off into splashes and smears, suggested it had been applied some time after the desert scene. It read: ‘I caught a falling star and it cut my hands to pieces.’
I caught a falling star and it cut my hands to pieces. It had a certain naive Symbolist verve to it, Shiva thought, and in this context an almost piquant horror. Elmley had backed his lanky form into a far corner beneath the steeply sloping wall. He was folded up like a cowering house spider, and with shaking hands he fed pills into his moaning mouth. Fed and gobbled and crunched, so that a chalky froth gathered on his lips, then fell in globs on to his dimpled chin. Even from four-fifths of the way to the floor, Shiva could make out the slogan on the pill pot: ‘Do not exceed the stated dosage,’ and this too had a certain naive Symbolist verve.
In the last minute before he reached the floor, Dr Mukti had plenty of time to appreciate exactly what he was falling into. It was the very centre not of the blood-daubed pentagram he’d expected, but a carefully delineated Star of David. The two interlocking triangles were traced on the floorboards with thin lines of white chalk. ‘Coo-coo, coo-coo,’ commented the roosting pigeons. Through the skylight Dr Mukti saw a plane heading up into the cerulean aether, like a heavy car being driven up a crystal hill. Then he hit and lay slopping about in his own blood, a weak and overqualified seal.
Dr Mukti thought it would be appropriate at this point in the proceedings if all the dramatis personae had been able to join him and Elmley in the attic of the squat. Swati, obviously, as composed as ever in a beautiful, gold-trimmed sari; Mohan, perhaps, although he conceded the situation might have a negative impact on the child; his mother, the aunts and uncles, filing silently in through the door, then lining up to form a grave, Graeco-Indian chorus; his colleagues from St Mungo’s carrying Gunnar Grunbein in his leather office chair; and of course the patients that had shuttled back and forth between Heath Hospital and St Mungo’s, some of them perhaps walking past this very house. Those animate weapons, once used then discarded, which now, by rights, should be allowed to witness the coup de grâce. The English teacher with hypoglycaemia, Creosote Man, poor Rocky spouting his cereal-packet poetry, Mr Double, Mohammed Kabir – they should all be here. He desired the Kumla Devi of his own life, a mass gathering on the bank of this gushing river of his own blood. But of course, the only sadhu he was permitted was Dr Zack Busner.
He came in through the door looking altogether ordinary, playing the part of himself with affecting ease. He was dressed in his habitual grey-flannel trousers, his green mohair tie was askew and one tail of his Viyella shirt poked out below the hem of his tweed jacket, a particularly unthreatening little detail which Dr Mukti noticed when Dr Busner turned to shut the door and bolt it.
‘What,’ Shiva bubbled, his voice sounding like a toddler half-gargling with its drink, ‘no aspect of a frightening Hindu deity today, Dr Busner? No multiple arms, no necklace of skulls, no bloodstained teeth?’
‘I rather thought,’ Dr Busner said mildly, ‘that at this late stage we might as well dispense with all of that.’ He strolled over and placed his foot in the middle of Shiva’s chest. ‘To the victor,’ he said conversationally, ‘the spoils.’
‘There is one thing …’ Shiva gurgled. ‘… I’d like to know …’
‘Yes?’ The fat fingers rolled and unrolled the green tongue of tie, the prominent nose dipped.
‘Why? Or rather, why me?’
‘Well, you remember when we first met?’ Dr Busner removed his foot and bent down laboriously so as to bring his full and froggy features up close to Shiva’s face.
‘Yes …’ The darkness at the edges of the attic was massing and lumping. It had already swallowed up Elmley’s recumbent figure, and now it sent exploratory tentacles into the Star of David. ‘… it was at that conference on affective disorders.’
‘That’s the one. Well, I introduced myself as your neighbour up at Heath Hospital. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you looked at me rather disdainfully and said, “I know.” Do you remember that too?’ Dr Busner’s head was cowled now with a dark hood.
Busner said nothing more, only looked at Shiva, his expression at once pitying and devoid of pity.
It dawned on Shiva that that was it. ‘That …’ he managed to spit out, ‘was it? That was what all this was about? The whole business between us, all those ill people so cruelly used, the entire … fiendish plot … my life … Elmley’s … that was all because of that … that snub?’
Busner took his time answering, and the dark cowl tightened, eclipsing his moon face until only his slack old crater of a mouth, grey and uninviting, remained in the diminishing spotlight of Shiva’s consciousness. The mouth opened and closed, and as if from a long way off Shiva heard the final words of his nemesis: ‘Isn’t that enough?’
161
He slipped into the flat just as the old man stooped to lift the paper from the mat. The boy couldn’t believe his luck – here he was being chased by a vicious bastard, his lungs bursting, his heart hammering, his knees aching with the impact of flight up flights of stairs, and his pants damp with the acrid trickle of fear, when this door opened. The old man emerged and sanctuary was visible, a sunlit room dusty and composed. The boy waited for a few seconds. The old man having picked up the paper shuffled a few steps into the corridor and peered in the other direction towards the lift lobby. It was all the opportunity the boy needed – he nipped in through the flat door, skidded across the tiny vestibule, leapt into the bedroom and went to ground, quiveringly still like a rabbit.
