Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 76
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
When at last silence said the old man was no longer in motion, Carl emerged. The vulnerable head was teed up again on the seat back, the newspapers were stacked beside it, the kitchenette was tortured into uncomfortable tidiness. The new items in the flat – fruit, books, bread and butter – had an odd radiance to them, as if they’d been brought back from an alien planet.
Carl stood for a long time looking at the head on the edge of the chair and willing the old man – O’Leary the home help had called him – to turn round, but he didn’t. Eventually Carl padded out to the kitchen and buttered himself a piece of bread, taking care to leave everything as near to how he found it. He stood at the bedroom window eating. A mist had blown in off the sea, and together with it came a scattered flock of seagulls. The birds soared up the face of the block. Carl thought their rigid wings gave them a mechanical look, like feathered model aircraft. He preferred the pigeons.
Over to the west, beside the new container port, Carl could make out the three-bladed wind turbines revolving in the wind. He let the world turn itself upside down and the turbines become the propellers of a city-sized freighter, pushing it out into the ocean of sky. Queasily he felt for the old man’s keys in his pocket. They were there.
Dusk took a long time seeping into the sky, and with it mizzle slowly percolated. The close down below became sharply delineated, clean and wet. Carl was fixated by four semis that stood on a garden island surrounded by a moat of glistening tarmac. An umbrella came out of the school and, feet paddling at its rim, it swam around the corners until it washed up on the island. Four men stood looking into the open bonnet of a car, as if it were a dead dog and they were deciding where to bury it. Other men arrived in a van and opened up a hole in the road, they put a waist-high, yellow-plastic barrier around it to protect the city’s modesty, and then began performing a gynaecological examination.
When at last the orange pin-pricks had pierced the thickening night, and O’Leary had had his final two cuppas, taken his stuttering leak, then settled himself for the night, Carl made his move. Standing with his hand on the latch he felt poised between everything and nothing, but confused as to which side of the door was which.
One foot across the threshold Carl halted, half-expecting O’Leary to rise up from his sofa bed and implore him not to go. But there was no sound at all save for the clunk and moan of an approaching lift: the block, gulping up its human fodder. Stepping out on to the mat Carl braced himself for the shout of recognition, the slap of their trainers as they came for him. But still there was nothing. When the lift fell silent Carl bolted across the corridor, heaved the door open and scampered down the stairs. Three flights down he entered the seventeenth floor and took the lift to the ground floor. Its doors parted to reveal an empty chequerboard of linoleum tiles reeking of disinfectant. Through an open doorway Carl could see the nicotine-coloured residents’ lounge. Pot plants loitered on low tables, informative leaflets rustled on wall-mounted racks, their leaves caught in an artificial sirocco gritty with the dust of peace. Jaunty pop music leapt from speakers bolted to the ceiling, but there was no one to listen to it, let alone dance. For long seconds Carl was transfixed, the whole weight of the block squatting on his head and shoulders, but then he wrenched himself free and scampered out the door, into the night.
In the long afternoon he’d plotted his route along the backs of the houses, down the trashy alleys and across the patches of waste ground. He moved from one area of darkness to the next one of obscurity, avoiding the pubs, each with its gaggle of door-hanging kids. He bypassed the street lamps and turned his face away from the bus-stop loungers. He reached the border of Twisted Gut’s territory and began to breathe more easily. He loosened the hood he’d drawn tight around his head and allowed the night air to play cool on his sweaty face. It felt good. Walking down the long streets lined with thin houses he began to notice things, this faked stone façade, that carriage-lamp-flanked portico. In an upstairs window a girl was having her long mousy hair brushed by her mother. The girl was thirteen or so but her head was tiny, almost deformed. Each stroke of the brush beamed a lustre down at Carl through the gap in the nets. The woman turned to the window as if sensing his presence and Carl moved on. He turned into the next street. Here the houses were three storeys high and every fifth one was boarded up or burnt out. He looked at the decay with fresh eyes. The rotten window-frames, the doors sealed with corrugated iron, the shattered panes, the drains choked with weed.
A lad Carl knew had gone down south and said on his return that the city centres there were like they saw them on TV, shiny, scrubbed, all the buildings properly maintained. Carl knew the lad was stringing him along. All cities were like this one, shattered, battered and burnt out. The cities on TV were cleverly constructed sets, and at the end of the day when the actors who worked on them took off their costumes and put on their shell suits, they went home to streets like these.
Lost in his reverie Carl turned into a main road and looking up saw someone he knew advancing towards him – almost in his face. It was one of Twisted Gut’s former lieutenants. Frank, a lad so nasty that when he’d been expelled from the gang he’d escaped with the mildest of drubbings, a bloodied kidney and a blackened face. Luckily Frank had his shaven head lowered. He was hefting a rucksack, a blue-and-white nylon one which matched his tracksuit. Carl flattened his body against some railings and put his hot head behind an arson-melted bin. But if Frank had seen him he made no sign.
Further along the road Carl ducked into an alley beside a bus stop. A grey bus pulled up and he dodged on board as the doors were hissing shut. He sat at the back beneath a lurid orange advert. The advert was for low-cost flights to cheap destinations. For the price of a gram of smack you could be hotly wafted to a sunburnt shore. But then what would Carl do? Only wait a couple of weeks before surrendering himself to the warders at the airport for reincarceration. Under the floodlights of the bus the other prisoners sat shackled to their seats; and the bus like a fat oblong snake hissed its way across the city.
Dawn’s family lived in a low-rise block of only three storeys. But there could be no question of Carl buzzing for admission, or even trying her mobile phone. He had to arrive unannounced or there was no guarantee he’d get away again. Carl had feelings for Dawn – but trust wasn’t one of them.
He circled the squat building looking for a way in, and eventually, climbing a wooden fence, he dropped down into long grass, nettles and damp cardboard. He knew which was her window, up on the second floor. He went up a drainpipe feeling the plastic rigid and brittle beneath his damp palms. Incey-wincey Spiderman. Holding tight to a bracket he got the toe of one trainer on to the outside sill, and a hand inside the flap window so he could grab the metal frame. He shifted his weight and all at once was looking down into Dawn’s room from a twisted, giddy perspective. There she was, in knickers and a T-shirt, lying on the carpet, her plaits more savagely plaited than ever – the hair looked like gloss paint on her round head. She was lying on her stomach, her legs raised with the ankles lazily crossed. A tiny explosion of cotton wool between each furled toe signalled recent nail painting. Dawn was simultaneously leafing through a magazine, chewing gum, smoking, talking on her mobile phone and listening to a CD playing on the boom box positioned close to her free ear. Unseen, Carl was free to observe her plump pink limbs, her cotton-bagged buttocks, her many-studded earlobes – all the feminine otherness of her. This might’ve been enough for him, and if Carl could’ve gone back down the way he came up he probably would have. There were also other people to consider: the hard father sprayed with tattoos like a building with graffiti, and the mother, as beaky and sharp as a secretary bird strutting after its prey.
Carl inclined his ear towards the gap in the window and funnelled in the sounds that welled from the bedroom – the girly yammer, the pop piping, the paper slapping. So alive – all of it – after the old man’s terminal ward. Carl hungrily sucked on her smoke and scent. She finished her call, put the mobile on the carpet, stubbed out her cigarette. Her buttocks clenched as she stretched to kill the music; in the sudden silence he spoke, Dawn. What – Jesus fuck! She flipped on to her back, one arm went to protect her belly, the other her face. Her eyes groped the darkness without. It’s me, Carl, he said, insinuating his stubbly muzzle between metal and glass. What the fuck! What – Let me in, he pleaded. Let me in, Dawnie, I can’t hang on out here for ever.
She came to the window, freed the catch and he dropped into the room. It wasn’t until he was standing right in front of her, looking into her pale-blue eyes, that he saw the stitched gash on her cheek, the smear of yellow and black bruising above it. Jesus fuck, Dawnie, Carl said. What’s this about? He took her sharp little chin in his finger and thumb as if it were a hand mirror within which he could see his own fate, and he queried again, Jesus fuck, Dawnie, what’s this about? Nothing, she replied, and then, What d’you care anyways? Where’ve you been, lover-bloody-boy, the whole fucking town’s been looking for you, I dunno how you’ve got the nerve to show yourself on the street, where’ve you been?
He drew her to the single bed, which was tucked into a hard bower formed by the flower-patterned wall. In a compartment of the bed’s modular headboard clustered contraceptive pills, cigarettes, a drug wrap, keys, a knife, all the rebellious accessories. They sat knees-v-knees and Carl said, Tell me, Dawnie, was it to do with me? But she wouldn’t answer, she only drew his scared mouth to her sullen one with her bitten fingertips.
There was a gnawing quality to this kiss – it was like a rat at a food container. Carl jerked away. Dawn’s pretty features – the nose slim and arched, the forehead clear – were shadowed by cloudy emotions. What is it? she said. Oh nothing. He cast his eyes down on to the floor. If you don’t want me, I know one who does. She turned away and her T-shirt rode up, exposing coffee-orange skin across which lay the purple-and-yellow welt left by the blow of a heavy belt.
Jesus fuck, Dawnie, Carl said again. Did he do this? Did he?! Say he did … say he did and I’ll … I’ll … What? She rose, stooped for cigarettes and lighter, strolled insouciantly to the darkened window and stood there looking out, as if she were on the promenade deck of a cruise liner. What will you do, Carl, run away again? Besides, s’pose I like it, s’pose I like what he did? S’pose I like him?
But Carl wouldn’t be drawn down this crooked path. He went to her, spun her round by the shoulder. Tell me – jus’ tell me, him, was it? She laughed shortly, pushed past him, walked to the door and slid a tiny silvery bolt. Then she went to the bed and extracted the drug wrap. She chopped out two lines of yellowish powder on the headboard. Whizz? She conducted him over to her, using a cored biro for a baton.
They sat side-by-side on the bed rubbing their stinging noses and snuffling, two city rats poisoned with tasty warfarin. Dawn stuck two cigarettes in her mouth and lit the white fangs. She passed one to Carl. Won’t your parents come in? Nah, all they’re bothered with is that I’m in at all. Besides they’ve got a few cans going in front of the telly, soon be bye-byes.
She dropped a small hand into the slick folds that gathered in his groin, and squinting through the smoke Carl saw her bruised flesh as an opportunity, not just a threat. When he held her upper arms she forced him on top of her with a neat hormonal throw, and their sex was like judo. They grabbed each other’s pyjama clothing and tugged it apart. Their mat was the pancaked duvet. Carl found he could do things to Dawn, but not the ones she wanted. The amphetamine, the tension, the evidence of Twisted Gut – all of it unmanned him. After a while she curled up into a ball, the tough little field mouse in her floral nest. She seemed to sleep.
Maybe, Carl thought, she’s doing so much bloody whizz it isn’t getting to her … But it was getting to him. He sat, he stood, he paced, he leant. He pissed a dribble into the tiny sink mounted in the corner of the bedroom, his dry mouth crinkled about his freeze-dried tongue. Or maybe she isn’t asleep at all – she’s faking it and waiting for him and this is a set-up?
Carl was frightened to go and frightened to stay. He spent an hour crouched inside the wall closet, her insubstantial dresses and flared jeans dangling over his head and shoulders like a pharaonic headdress. He spent another two hours vibrating in front of the oblong window, his mind scurrying this way and that in its bone cage. When at last the rising sun silvered the roof tiles of the block opposite, he made his move.
Poised on the sill, he turned to face back into the room so he could lower himself by his outstretched arms. Dawn was sitting up in the bed. With her nakedness, her exposed wounds and her expression of beatific hatred, the girl spoke to Carl from outside of this time, this predicament. A cord of betrayal stretched with Carl as he dropped the two storeys into the dewy grass. He hit, rolled, and cursing wished that it might yank him back up again, in through the oblong window, returning him to her perfidious arms. Anything had to be better than this.
This limping, dragging, peg-leg progress along light-shattered streets. This skulking, fearful retreat towards his refuge, the block, which stood proud of the city as if taunting the municipal authorities with the very fact that it was still standing.
There were no buses this early. Carl’s route took him between the outhouses of the gods and then up the long straight hill past the hospital. Even at this hour there were still a few vulturine taxis croaking on the rank outside. Death and disease didn’t keep office hours.
Carl counted on no one from Twisted Gut’s gang having the staying power to wait all night for him. They couldn’t have seen him leave the block or they would’ve caught up with him in the street, or tracked him to Dawn’s place and done the business there. No, they were asleep in their mucky beds, licking their bloodied chops, of this much Carl was certain.
He slipped back into the empty lobby. The pop music was still blaring and the doors of all three lifts stood open to welcome him. Carl took Lift A to the seventeenth floor and got out. Sneaking through the door in the direction of the stairs, his hood up, his head down, he didn’t notice the mother and child until he was nearly on top of them. He reared back against the wall. She straightened up from the ploughshare of the pushchair and regarded him with the weariness of a peasant called to her labours by natural cycles beyond her control. In the chair sat a toddler who seemed too big to be pushed, or to have its mouth stoppered by a rubber plug. What would happen if the dummy was pulled out, he considered idly. Would the kid spout like a little whale?
Then he recognised the careworn mother, Harriet McCracken – she’d been in his year at school. Carl, she began, what the bloody hell are you doing in here? But he declined to answer, an entire network was connecting up in his mind, Harriet to Pearl, Pearl to Davey, Davey to Dan the Mango, one of the Gut’s closest lieutenants. Even if they hadn’t been watching the block, hadn’t sussed out he was still in here, they’d find out soon enough now. He dodged past her and into the stairwell, and, as he took the red-painted stairs four at a time, he dared to hope her visitation had been exactly that.
He let himself into 161 using the old man’s key. O’Leary’s head was where it always was, poised like a grizzled egg on the soft cup of the seat-back. Carl was so relieved to be back he almost called out, Mr O’Leary, I’m home. But what was the point of that? The old fellow couldn’t hear him anyway. Instead he limped through to the kitchen, purloined a small handful of sleeping pills, chucked them down with tepid water from the faucet, then limped through to his bedroom.
Like a creepy old film, Carl thought, as he lowered himself back into the wardrobe and let the door fall. Surely soon it’ll be over? The sun has risen and still the angry villagers haven’t come up to the Count’s castle brandishing their pitchforks and their scythes. Surely it’ll be over soon and I can stroll outside, with only that funny feeling you get when you come out of a cinema in the afternoon to remind me? Soon, in the darkness, Carl slept.
When the gaze was gone Dermot felt abandoned. But when the gaze returned – and he felt it as he woke to the unexpected brightness of a daybreak never more predictable – it had gained a genuine malevolence, a homicidal edge. The gaze was now a sharp point, a burning laser, a death ray.
Carl awoke with a start in the wardrobe and banged his head hard against the hooks. Hang ’em high, he thought, and then, I’m gonna have to kill the old man, I’m gonna have to do O’Leary. I can’t run now, not with this ankle. The inevitability of the murder thrummed in his ears, the hot blood rushing to fill a tank of intent. Carl thought Dawn might’ve waited for an hour after he left her place before she made the call, but he’d no doubt that she had. Then there was the McCracken girl. They’d put two such obvious facts together – even them. They’d come for him and, when the old man let them in, they’d do both of them. But if O’Leary was gone Carl could barricade the door and last out at least another week. They’d lose interest in that time, there were limits.
Yeah, it made sense, get rid of the old man. It was nothing personal really, just one of those things. He’d make it painless, crush some pills into the supplement, then when O’Leary was well and truly under push him down further with a pillow. You’d have to say – given what might go off if Twisted Gut got into the flat – that it’d be an act of mercy on Carl’s part. Youthnazia – wasn’t that what they called it?
Dermot’s sight was sharpest in the early morning. Especially one like this, the sun bright, the clouds gone save for a few greyish smears over the hills to the south. Besides, Dermot conceded, old age was all about the long view. You grew long-sighted, only able to focus accurately on objects a long way off, and you became the same about events in your own life. The four-decade-old indigestible meal sprang to mind with all the swollen, flatulent force that its consumption first entailed. No wonder it felt so right to sit here day in day out up on the twentieth floor. It was a long view.
