Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 78
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
In the street Stephen married child and conveyance in a union of plastic clips and nylon webbing, then he sat on a low wall bounding a hedge and, feeling the sharp twigs scratch him through his thin clothing, he wept for a few minutes. It was here that Misfortune – that ugly, misshapen creature – saw fit to join him. And, when he rose and pushed the buggy off up the pavement, Misfortune went along for the ride.
‘Inquitty,’ said the toddler, registering the tinkle-thud of a falling putlock on a building site they passed by, and Stephen pondered how it was that, while everything had gone perfectly well with the child’s development, now it was beginning to speak he found that it was he who was becoming autistic.
There was a bad thing waiting in the wings. There was an awful event struggling to happen. It was maddened already, battering against the windowpane of reality with its dark wings, like a bird caught in a room. I should never, Stephen thought as he pushed the buggy, have driven my wife insane by slowly increasing the duration of the car journeys we took together. I knew she had no sense of orientation, and yet I tormented her. If we had to go to friends’ houses, or even to the supermarket, each time I’d take a different route, each time slightly longer. Naturally she’d protest: ‘Stephen, I’m sure we didn’t go this way last time.’ And to derange her still more, I’d say, ‘It’s a short cut.’ Now there was no car and no wife. Or rather, there was an ex-wife, and instead of circling each other like boxers in the confinement of their own home, the ring had expanded to fill the city, while they were still stuck in the same bloody clinch, mauling each other with short jabs to the belly.
At the bus stop Stephen waited with an old woman drinking a can of Special Brew and a dapper old man who leant against his cane at a jaunty angle. The old man sported a feather in his porkpie hat, his tweed suit was immaculately pressed. He looked as if he were watching for a field of runners and riders to round the corner and come galloping up the high street in a breaking wave of pounding sinew and frothing silk. He looked happy. Stephen sank down on one of the narrow, tip-tilting rubber seats; his misery stung him like heartburn. Misfortune, seizing the opportunity, played with the child.
Misfortune tickled its feet and the toddler chuckled, ‘Chichi-chi.’ Misfortune stroked a cheek and accepted the nuzzle of the frizzy head. Misfortune sympathised entirely with the child and took on its hallucinogenic impression of a sharp-smelling trough, full of toy cars, and bounded by neat piles of building blocks. Behind these were grey walls too high to touch, and over it all unfurled haunting skirls. The toddler, too young to know Misfortune, felt it to be an outgrowth of the parental absence slumped at its side, and accepted its distorted presence willingly.
‘Fulub,’ it said.
But the old woman, who knew Misfortune for what it was – who felt it congealed in her hair, smeared on her neck – cried out, hands shaking to ward it off, ‘Gerariyer-gera –’
Lager beaded the little brow, Stephen jerked the handle of the buggy to roll it back a couple of feet and reached in his pocket for a tissue. The bus came.
In the time it took for the obtuse old man to pay for his ticket and climb up the bus to his seat, Stephen was able to load the human cargo, fold the buggy and stack it in the luggage rack. Misfortune, under the cover of the hiss of compressed air and the slap of the automatic door, slid on board too, and took up the seat behind the driver, the one allocated for elderly people or those accompanied by children. The old woman – if you can call fifty-three old – stayed on the bench, and watched, awestruck, as the bus stop slid away down the road, leaving the bus behind.
On the other side of town Stephen’s ex-wife kept up a large detached Edwardian villa on maintenance. Stephen didn’t know whether she had lovers – she hadn’t vouchsafed – but if she did there was plenty of space for them in the generous rooms. The walk-in cupboards alone could’ve housed five or six closet Lotharios and, when Stephen wanted to make himself feel particularly bad, he imagined them in there, sitting comfortably in the close darkness, her dresses rustling around their shoulders, as they waited for her to select one of their number. Stephen’s ex was beautiful. She was trim, raven-haired and sharp-profiled. She despised sexual incontinence in specific men – this he knew to his cost – but mysteriously, admired it in the generality of mankind. And so it was easier to imagine her with lovers than with a boyfriend.
Misfortune dogged his footsteps as he clunked the buggy over paving stones ridged with virulent moss. From the bus stop they went up the hill between flat-faced semis, then around the playing field at the top, with its stark goalposts like gallows. Then past the gasometer, down the short street walled with poky terraced houses, and finally along the parade of shitty little shops, each one apparently devised for public inconvenience. A grocer with only two kinds of fruit and three of vegetables; a butcher selling just sausages and mince, who counted on three boxes of dried stuffing as a tempting window display; an ironmonger’s that never had anything you wanted. Stephen recalled asking for thirteen-amp fuses in it, for eggshell paint, for clothesline, for grout, but all of these were unavailable. Preposterously, the ironmonger’s had been refitted in the last year, yet still sold nothing that anyone needed. Perhaps, Stephen thought, the ironmonger’s existed solely to refit itself – not so much a retail concern as an evolved play on the whole notion of doing-it-for-yourself.
They turned the corner into Tennyson Avenue and passed by the Hicks’ house (elderly bedridden mother, son on drugs), the Fakenhams’ house (he a closet paedophile, she a pillar of the local church), the Gartrees’ house (no human children but many cat babies). How could it be that he, Stephen, was exiled from this poisonous Eden, while so many serpents retained their tenancies? It occurred to him – not for the first time, not for the thousandth – that he should fake his own suicide, utilise the handy wreckage of a train he’d never caught, or the immolation of an office building he’d failed to enter, or simply leave his clothes, for once neatly folded, on a rock, and walk away from the CSA, from the children, from the pain.
Bending down to unlatch the front gate he caught the tang of urine emanating from the toddler. Best not to leave it – it would lead to a rash, and then he’d have to face its mother’s wrath. Inside the gate he unbuckled the child and laid it down on the patch of grass behind the bins. He glanced up at the blank windows of the house, each with its cataract of net curtain, but saw nothing twitching.
‘Anurk’a,’ the toddler protested, as he ripped open the front of its all-in-one, yanked out its chubby legs, then held them open, spatchcocked, as he removed the absorbent wad.
While Stephen was groping for a clean nappy in the compartment underneath the buggy he heard the front door swing open, and looked up to see his ex-wife standing, radiating contempt. Behind her slim shoulders the hallway receded, lined on either side with hummocks of school bags, rows of shoes, stooks of sports equipment and piles of books.
‘Huh!’ she exclaimed, arms crossed, and Stephen, observing her quick-bitten fingers clutching at her elbows, and the anger that semaphored from her lantern eyes, could not forbear from remembering the exact quality of her rage.
‘I’ve got fucking head lice!’ Those same hands in frenzied agitation, as she sits on the side of the bed. ‘Fucking nits! Fucking nits!’
He leaps from his side of the marital bed, in that instant grasping that he’ll never lie down there again. His eyes search across the carpet for any certain object that they might anchor on in this suddenly fluid, frightening world. But he sees only a nude Barbie doll, pushed overboard by a passing child, its feet up beside its head, its pink plastic pubis a disturbingjuncture. How can this thing be – he’s floundering in stormy irrelevance – a toy?
‘Kids!’ Stephen’s ex bellowed back into the house, and then again, still louder. ‘Kids!’
Stephen finished parcelling up the toddler and placed it back on its side of the double buggy.
Now he has so few things he tries to treat them with the respect others deserve. In the small flat on the other side of town he washes up the toddler’s plastic bowl with care, then dries it and puts it away in the cupboard. He no longer has the detached villa, with its innumerable corners, all of them slowly silting up with the materiality of years of family life.
The six-year-old and the eight-year-old came down the stairs to the hallway like surprised conspirators, reluctant to admit their involvement with each other. Taking their anoraks from the pegs in the hall they put them on with an orderliness and efficiency that struck Stephen as overwhelmingly pathetic. Then they winkled their feet into wellingtons, and he wanted to go forward and help them but knew he really shouldn’t. They came out of the house and shuffled down the path to where he stood.
‘ ’lo, Dad,’ said the older one, the girl, while the boy said simply ‘ ’lo.’ They both nodded to their half-sibling in the buggy, as if this were a working situation, and they were all being formally introduced for the first time. ‘ ’lo,’ they said again.
‘Lorol,’ said the toddler.
Stephen hunkered down and shuffled forward to encompass all three children with his outstretched arms. He smelt Ribena on their breath, conditioner in their hair. Looking at their pale faces he saw yet again the way his ex’s incisive features cut out his weak ones.
Stephen’s ex-wife reappeared in the hallway, dragging a protesting two-year-old by its arm.
‘I’m not wanted it!’ the two-year-old was complaining. ‘I’m gonna’ stayere, I’m gonna –’
‘Doesn’t he want to come?’ Stephen called, half hoping.
‘Oh no, he’s going with you,’ she replied, expertly stuffing the little boy into his anorak, then tripping him backwards over her foot, so that he sat on the floor. While she inserted his feet into wellingtons, she kept up an incantation of irritation: ‘If you think I’m going to miss out on the only two bloody hours of the week when I have the house to myself … the only time I have to make a call, or even wash my bloody hair … You’ve no idea, have you? No bloody idea at all …’
While the boy, for his part, kept on dissenting. ‘I gotta having this to show Daddy, ’cause … An’ Daniel says I wasn’t gonna ’cause … He tooken it, he-he –’
‘Josh wants to bring his driving thingy,’ Daniel explained.
‘I told him it would be in the way,’ his older sister, Melissa, explained.
‘But I has to!’ Josh cried out from the doorway.
‘Then take the bloody thing! Take-the-bloody-thing!’
On ‘take’ she picked up the toy dashboard with steering wheel and gear stick attached; on ‘the’ she shoved it in Josh’s arms; on ‘bloody’ she picked him up and placed him outside the door; and on ‘thing’ she slammed it.
In the frozen moment before Josh began to bawl in earnest, Stephen turned and looked away. On the opposite side of the road two nuns were passing by. They were both bespectacled, both wearing blue wimples and blue raincoats. From beneath their hemlines extended a foot or so of white nylon. The whole outfit, thought Stephen, gave them a look at once ecclesiastical and medical, as if they were on their way to nurse their Saviour in a specially equipped crucifixion unit. They flashed their lenses in his direction, and Stephen wanted to cry out, ‘Suffer these little children to come unto you! You won’t find a group of people more in need of help than us …’ But instead he turned back to Josh who was keening, ‘Erherrr-erherrr-erherrr,’ his way into hysteria, ‘waaaa!’
‘ComeonowJosh, noneedt’cry, here we go, here we go …’
Stephen kept up a prayerful murmur as he lifted the roaring boy and his toy up, carried him down the path to where the others were clustered around the buggy, strapped him into his side, balanced the driving toy on his knees, got the buggy out through the gate, got the older ones positioned on either side, small hands on handles, and with his shocked progeny four abreast, started off back up the road. Misfortune took up its position to the rear.
‘It’s OK, Josh, it’s OK. We’ll have a good time – you’ll see …’
Melissa had taken over from him and although he was grateful to her, Stephen couldn’t forbear from feeling sick with inadequacy, his own paternal dereliction melting into his shoulders like an irreversible jacket of napalm.
‘So, kids,’ he said cheerily. ‘What’re we going to do this afternoon? Museum? Zoo? Film? What’s it going to be – you decide.’
‘We wented to a film –’
‘Went,’ Stephen corrected Daniel – the six-year-old’s grammar was always the first casualty of these emotional firefights.
‘We went to a film yesterday.’
‘Good?’
‘ ’s’ OK.’
‘How about the zoo or a museum then?’
‘Nah, boring,’ the older children chorused.
‘What then? It’s a bit gloomy for the park, isn’t it?’
Their silence said they didn’t agree.
‘D’you want to go on the four-swing walk then?’
‘Yes, and you’ll push us up an’ up an’ up –’
‘So high, so high we’ll go over the bar –’
‘Or fly into space pasted the moon an’ Mars an’ everything –’
‘To another galaxy –’
‘Another universe, you mean.’
‘OK, the four-swing walk it is then, but I can’t promise you space exploration.’
Another universe – that was a good idea. Stephen didn’t doubt that Daniel and Melissa wanted to go on the four-swing walk because they connected it with the time before he’d left. The older children had come into consciousness on these four sets of swings: two in the local playing field, then one in an adjoining patch of overgrown park, and the last, tucked away in a playground on a council estate. Perhaps they hoped that if they swung high enough they could describe a perfect parabola into the past.
‘Swush,’ said the toddler on the left-hand side of the buggy, and it was only then that Stephen realised it was autumn, for the child was mimicking the sound of feet and wheels sweeping leaves along the pavement.
Autumn, which explained this damp, oppressive sky, like a dirty grey clout waiting to be squeezed. Autumn, which located this sense of irretrievable loss in its appropriate context. Autumn, hence Stephen’s aching weariness. He would’ve given anything to be able to lie down underneath that scarified hedge until spring. Autumn, which made sense of the silage beneath his feet, a mulch of lolly sticks, ring pulls and macerated paper cups, laid down during the long harvest of the school holidays. Autumn, when it had all happened.
‘Come here! You come here! You come here and sit down by me. Sit here!’ Her belly rounded and plumped up amidst the squashed pillows, her nightdress rucked up in angry folds.
‘Melissa hasn’t had them for months – for months! I comb her every day – every day! You sit here, you let me look in your hair. In your fucking hair!’
And so, like half-naked apes, they engage in a savage grooming that destroys all social cohesion. She scrabbles and yanks at his hair.
‘There! There! You’ve got them too! And eggs – and fucking eggs! What is this, Stephen? You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?! Someone with fucking head lice. Who is she, Stephen? A schoolgirl?’
No, not a schoolgirl. At the time, still fixated on the disturbing juncture of Barbie’s thighs, Stephen had considered that perhaps, had she been a schoolgirl, the truth would’ve been easier to acknowledge, because it would’ve been so grotesque, so singular. But of course it’s lies that are singular; the truth – that she was Melissa’s teacher – was merely prosaic.
At the shopping parade Stephen’s engine, with its double-buggy cow catcher, clattered over invisible points and turned to the left, back up the hill towards the playing field. Misfortune was in the guard’s van.
‘Whoo-whoo!’ said the toddler, and Josh, who sat beside it yanking on the orange plastic steering wheel, beeped his horn.
‘So, how’s school?’ Stephen asked Melissa, because he thought he ought to.
‘ ’s’ OK,’ she replied.
‘Good OK or bad OK?’ he probed.
‘OK. OK.’
And that was that, that was the full extent of his input into her education.
As soon as they reached the playing field the two older children broke from the sides of the buggy like swing-seeking missiles and headed off across the scummy grass. Seagulls lifted off in advance of them, crying unpleasantly. Stephen pushed the buggy along the path, past a zone of crappy benches where two adolescents were nuzzling. He felt an intense physical sympathy for the little goatee of pus and scab on the boy’s chin. He wanted to touch it, but cancelled the feeling by staring at his feet as they negotiated the blobs and dollops of dog shit, some brown, some black, some desiccated white, some livid yellow. It was interesting the way that the two toddlers managed to ignore each other. Maybe in a few months’ time Josh would turn to the other one and say, out of the blue, ‘Are you capable of holding a conversation yet?’
At the playground Melissa and Daniel were already on two of the big swings. Daniel was kicking his feet out and leaning back, he’d gained quite a bit of height, but Melissa couldn’t manage it, and merely dangled, twisting from side to side. Stephen got Josh out of the buggy and put him in one of the small swings, tucking his feet through the holes. Then he did the same with the other toddler and got them both swinging.
‘Hold on to the front!’ he ordered them.
‘Come and swing me, Dad!’ Melissa called over. ‘I can’t get going.’
‘She can’t swing!’ Daniel cried out, delighted. ‘She doesn’t know how to, doesn’t know how to!’
‘Shut up, Daniel! Shut up!’ Immediately Melissa was close to tears.
‘She’s eight and she can’t swing!’ he crowed as he swooped above her.
‘Shut up – I mean it!’
