Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 82
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
‘OK, OK, keep your fucking hair on, you don’t have to, just let me be Ord and I promise I’ll amuse you.’
So we passed on along Lambeth Walk and Ord regaled me with his tales of how he suppressed the Dog-Headed Jockstraps of Minnesota, the most feared motorcycle gang of the 2030s.
I met Bax in the Beer Engine, a pub in Stockwell. It was an awful dive, yet Bax frequented it so much that they kept his tankard hanging behind the bar. This was a ghastly miniature stein, with a witch’s face bulging from the green glaze. Bax drank light and bitter from it, he was a one-man preservation league. I was having a particularly arrogant day. My arrogance was so palpable that my belly bulged uncomfortably, inflated by my superiority. Bax noticed the odd way I was canted on the leatherette bench.
‘Whass the matter?’ he slurred through smoke and beer.
‘Arrogance.’
‘Flatulence?’
‘Arrogance. I’ve an inflated opinion of myself.’
‘Whichever it is they’re both calculated to drive people away.’
‘I know that.’
Bax fell to building another roll-up behind his safety hair curtain and I fell to examining the wristlets he always wore. These protruded from the cuffs of his denim shirt and extended as far as his knuckles. They looked as if they were made of either very pale leather, or some peculiar rubber. It was impossible to tell whether they were a fashion accessory or an orthopaedic brace. A bit like Bax’s novels really.
‘Whassat?’ He was sharp – horribly so.
‘I didn’t say anything.’ I brazened it out.
‘Sharon says’ – he pooted the words out, together with irritating little dribbles of smoke – ‘that she’ll go up in the balloon with us on Sunday, this Sunday.’
‘Really? And she’ll take part in the debate?’
‘Of course, that’s why she’s going. We’ll debate the motion “This balloon considers Sharon Crowd to be thoroughly immoral”. I assume you’ll be proposing and Keith seconding?’
‘S’pose so.’
‘Sharon will reject the motion – obviously – and I’ll support her. If you win, one of us takes the dive. If we win, the reverse will be the case.’
‘I see …’ This was a turn-up. I wasn’t at all sure about Keith’s reaction if his life was weighed in the balance with mine. ‘And who did you have in mind to deliberate?’
‘Why, whoever’s operating the balloon, I s’pose, and whoever else is taking the trip with us, tourists and suchlike.’
I found Keith at the Vauxhall city farm. Dinah was tied up outside, but her master was down at the far end from the animal enclosures, past the new straw-brick pigsty, crouching in the small allotment section. I’d like to be able to say that with his beard and his weathered features Keith had a peaceful appearance in this bucolic – if diminutive – setting, but he didn’t. Not even the three small children, who frolicked about him throwing handfuls of straw in the air, could lighten his mood.
‘Bax says that whoever’s operating the balloon, together with any others who’re there at the time, should deliberate. On the matter of Sharon, that is –’
‘Or you.’
‘Or me, or you, or Bax.’
‘Ah, but it isn’t necessarily Bax or you, or Sharon or me, now is it?’ His big boot rolled a small pellet of sheep shit around on the earth with surprising delicacy. ‘It’s me or you in the final analysis.’
I thought of big tie knots, droopy moustaches, the Rubettes, the Winter of Discontent and the death of Blair Peach. It was a lot for someone to have missed out on, and while I was thinking this Keith was gathering himself together and moving off.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he flung over his shoulder, ‘well, that’s that then.’
‘They’ll never cooperate,’ I called after him, ‘the people in the balloon. They’ll freak out.’
‘I’ll handle it.’
‘Really?’
I caught up with him by the exit as he was untying Dinah. The Dalmatian had managed to wriggle inside and was straining at the leash so hard that her collar disappeared in the folds of her neck. Keith and I took a look at the doggy porn as well, a glass tank of ferrets scrabbling and flowing through sections of plastic piping.
‘I’ll handle it.’ Keith rounded on me – I was reminded of Ord.
‘Are you in character …? As Ord, I mean.’
‘No, of course not, you prat.’
Off he went, Dinah’s nails clicking behind him, as he traversed the cracked lozenge of paving beside the Vauxhall Tavern. Even at this early hour there was a scrum of bare-chested, bald-headed clones outside the grotty old rotunda. They goosed one another, snapping braces, nipping necks, while the techno broke over them in waves and the traffic roared past. The balloon was coming down for the night; from where I stood, it appeared to be settling in a giant egg cup of masonry. Foreshortened London – there was never any escaping it. Respectfully, I asked Ord if he had any comment to make on the clones, but for once he was silent.
The week before the balloon debate they began demolishing the Nine Elms Cold Store. This huge concrete box – which closely resembled a beehive of the cubic kind – had dominated the messy confluence of Nine Elms Lane and the Wandsworth Road for the last twenty years, shouting solidity and radiating chill. Presumably advances in refrigeration had done for it, the encroaching entropy. They bashed a big hole in its side and the wound festered as epidermal layers of asbestos swelled and the steel maggots squirmed out.
It was easy enough to get on to the demolition site, which, of course, Keith, Dinah and I did. We’d always got on to the Battersea Power Station site as well, dodging hard hats in order to wander, like post-apocalyptic communicants, into the towering chancel of red brick. Now the two massive structures were both being flung down, like the victims of summary war-time executions. At least the Cold Store was being dealt with with some dispatch, but the city had decided to make an example of the Power Station. The nave of the building, open to the dank sky, was profaned by abandon. Where once erg upon erg had been burnt into being, there were only pigeon droppings, and the strange cries of bungee jumpers, falling from a crane erected over the Thames, and shitting themselves as they plunged.
Ord had penetrating observations to make about London, its future and its fabric. During that last week he dismissed Flambard and gave me the full benefit of his long-term view.
‘Let me say’ – his voice was as clipped and peremptory as ever, radiating discipline and ferocity – ‘that from the perspective of 2073 all your concerns about the removal of this building, or the implanting of that structure, seem trifling in the extreme. Take this stretch of the Thames littoral,’ and he did just that, cupping the shimmering oxbow of the river in his callused hand. ‘Apartment blocks with gull-wing roofs will rise up on the site of the Cold Store, then soar down again, a mighty Ferris wheel will dominate the Central London skyline for decades and then roll away. Some commentators may see the city as a peculiar entity, with its hillside suburbs and inner-city marshes as phrenological bumps and depressions, each revealing an enduring aspect of the metropolitan personality, but frankly this is bolderarckshifucklenoo.’ Ord lapsed into the profane slang of the mid-future. ‘London hasn’t had any personality to speak of since the tube system, like some mighty course of electroconvulsive therapy, linked node to neighbouring node and shorted them out with hundreds of thousands of volts.
‘That being the case –’ He stopped to observe a queue of Somalians – golf-ball heads, golf-club bodies – waiting to send money orders from a small chemist’s. ‘You can’t imagine what the Central Spike erected in 2035 will be like. Over a thousand storeys high, shaped like an immense termites’ nest, its interior hollowed out into thousands of offices and apartments, hundreds of atria and gardens, and the whole mighty structure a permanent home and workplace for half the city’s population, its many different streams of power, air and information both generated and regulated by newly developed bio-force.’
‘No I can’t.’ I tried not to sound bitter. ‘I can’t imagine.’
In between walks I did my best to put my affairs in order. My will was a thin document: to Mrs Benson my pile of old mattresses, an envelope stuffed with foreign currency for a brother I’d neglected, boxes of old paperbacks and worn-out clothes to charity stores. Any money I’d once had had long since been frittered away. In an office crackling with static electricity and insulated with the papery record of the lives of others, I frittered away the rest.
‘It’s hardly worth your while to make out this will,’ the solicitor said. ‘It costs to have me write it, it costs to deposit it. To be frank – this stuff is near worthless.’ Sweat plastered her white blouse to her white bra.
‘I don’t like the idea of the State getting hold of anything, anything at all.’
A desk fan creaked back and forth, ruffling the fates of men and women.
‘I see.’
The water-cooler bubbled, perhaps it was boiling?
‘I would scream in eternity if I thought a single battered paperback or mismatched sock was contributing in its material essence to the power of the State.’
‘I see.’ The solicitor was looking at me with mounting suspicion. ‘Tell me, is there any particular reason why you should be making a will now?’
‘No, no reason. Mortality bears down on us all though – doesn’t it?’
It was clear but gusty for late summer on the Sunday morning appointed for the balloon debate. A pebble pinged against my attic skylight. Standing unsteadily on my princess’s bed, I poked my head through and looked down to see Keith and Sharon Crowd standing on the pavement.
Keith called up to me through cupped hands: ‘Get a move on!’
They reminded me of schoolkids come to fetch one of their mates for a morning’s skiving. I hurried down, grabbing the parcel I’d spent the previous night preparing. This I slung over my shoulder as I came out of Mrs Benson’s front door, but neither Sharon Crowd, nor Keith, appeared to notice. One of the Benson kids shouted after us, but his words were caught up and mangled by the passage of an early lorry. We walked across Albert Square and down the Clapham Road towards the Oval. At the mouth of Fentiman Road, Bax fell in beside us and we walked on, in silence, line abreast across the pavement, like band members in a pop video, or urban Samurai. There was silence between us, a malevolent, brooding silence.
As we marched around the curve of the Oval, then down the grimy stretch of Harleyford Road to Vauxhall Cross, the tension began to mount.
‘Where’re you gonna leave Dinah?’ I asked Keith, who I could hear inside my head, grinding his dentures.
‘With the Australian lad in Majestic – obviously.’
‘Oh yeah, yeah, sorry.’
‘Why don’t you leave him with the doorman of the Hoist,’ said Bax – they were his first words of the day – ‘it’s still open.’
It was. A metre or so of satiny fabric was attached to a hot-air blower in the doorway of the club. Its simulation of fire led me to picture a hell in which the torments were quite as ersatz. But Keith didn’t deign to answer Bax, and the four of us trudged on as doggedly as Dinah.
The wind was smearing sheets of paper, strips of packing tape and dead leaves in broad brushstrokes across the stretched and primed sky, but the ulterior element remained daubed with its own plenitude. As ever, full of itself. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to leave this behind, this thick brick viaduct, these ancient pubs, these silent showrooms full of cacophonous motorcycles, these leprous squeegee merchants, and those Sunday saloons, stacked with life-size Playmobil figures, on their way to shop in Croydon. The whole pasta mash of Vauxhall Cross, with its myriad transport conduits noodling through the city.
While Keith and Dinah nuzzled one another under the kindly eye of the wine warehouse assistant, Sharon Crowd, Bax and I waited on the false hillock that runs along Goding Street. This was a barrow of scurvy grass, speared by sticks planted in wire baskets, and garnished with sweet shit. The balloon was being unlimbered for the day, its securing cables untethered by New Zealander travellers and Canadian postgraduate students. They worked efficiently.
‘It seems fairly windy,’ I said to Bax. ‘Maybe they won’t go up.’
‘That would be a shame,’ he replied distractedly, his yellow nails scrabbling at one of his wristlets. Sharon Crowd was looking magnificent. She’d elected to wear a brown Nehru jacket and matching brown trousers. The ensemble did her every compliment available. Her hair was scraped back severely, her lips were barely there at all. She and Bax went on ignoring my parcel.
When Keith returned we advanced down the hillock and crossed the park to the balloon enclosure. A Portakabin stood at a gap in the wire fence. Inside they were selling tickets and souvenirs to a clutch of tourists. I couldn’t really take them in. I was getting very antsy. We all paid for our tickets separately, then filed out of the hut and along a plank walkway to the balloon’s giant basket. It was not a basket as such, but an open square of walkway, the sides made of metal posts linked by five double strands of cable from waist to shoulder height, and below waist-level there were metal panels. It was Wright Brothers rather than Mongolfier, and when I saw it I realised I’d been hoping for a gondola with silk-embroidered panels, and in it a few show goats and a vicuña for company on our experimental ascent. But there was little time for quibbling, because one Kiwi took my ticket and tore it, another ushered me on board, then a third cast off.
The ascent was phenomenally fast, as quick as a lift.
On the far side of the platform from me, across a fifteen-foot gap, a child squirmed and protested in her mother’s arms: ‘Mummy, I’m scared aoooh! Mummy – I don’t want to go up! Mu-uuummy!’
Fucking abuser, I thought to myself. ‘Sadist,’ I said aloud.
Then I noticed that Sharon Crowd and Bax weren’t on board. I checked the other passengers: together with the abusing mother and abused child there were a couple of teenagers in white anoraks, while to my right there was a young Middle Eastern couple, and next to them was Keith. The Antipodean balloonist was isolated by the gate; he held a length of chain attached to the burner which he yanked from time to time, sending a great tongue of flame licking and roaring into the ever-tautening belly of the canopy. I looked down: framed in the square of the walkway was a rapid, reverse-zoom shot of the patch of Vauxhall Cross Park. It grew to encompass the Portakabin, the barrow, the Hoist, some boys having a kick-around, then the stand of vetch growing on top of the Vauxhall Tavern, and eventually the figures of Sharon Crowd and Bax, both equally tiny now, who arm in arm were striding towards the tube.
I was down to one friend, Keith, a former bank robber, although we’d never talked about his bank-robbing days. He was wedged into the corner of the platform, and as I looked on, awed, Brockwell Park disappeared below his shoulder, only to reappear beneath his feet. We were two hundred feet up and still rising.
‘So,’ Keith called over, ‘no debate. Didn’t think they’d go through with it. We may as well just enjoy the ascent.’
His knuckles were white, his arms bent back to brace him, his purple windcheater snapped in the stiff breeze. I was shocked by how precipitate the balloon trip was turning out to be – the platform bucked and heaved in the wind as if it were a crow’s nest surmounting a flexible mast.
‘Or perhaps you’d like a game of Go-Chess to distract you – how like a Go board London is, from this elevation.’
Keith turned to survey the city falling away beneath us, and I turned as well. The Antipodean chatting, the gas burner roaring, the Middle Eastern couple hand-holding, the child whimpering, all were as nothing when set beside its warty enormity. Already I could make out the burst boil of the Millennium Dome to the east and the greenery of Teddington Lock to the west. As we rose still higher, the streets of the city eerily unknotted themselves, straightening out to form a grid of many many poignant intersections, places where I’d laid the wrong stone.
‘It is peculiarly like a Go board!’ I shouted over to Keith, who was faint against the sharp sky. ‘So we’ll have to begin with –’
‘Go!’ shouted Ord, and I took this to be an order, as I’m sure it was intended. We understood our secret mnemonics – Ord and I.
I unslung the linen parcel from my shoulders. The Middle Eastern couple backed away from me muttering. The man tried to look me in the eyes, attempting the command of me with his own inner Ord. I evaded his control beams just as I ignored the woman’s suitable beak and her black flapping chador. I unpopped the poppers of the duvet cover and took out the fitted-sheet parachute. The Antipodean called to the couple to move back towards me, they were unbalancing the platform. Ord gave a single bark of cruel laughter. How like the man. I got one foot up on the taut cable and swung myself over. The horizon tipped like a giant grey swell and I fell, screaming, towards the periphery of my own acquaintance.
Return to the Planet of the Humans
Then he was back, suddenly and savagely. Not that he knew he was back, he simply found himself in a room full of monsters, lanky, pasty giants clad in disgusting nether garments, who, rather than beat him compassionately into stability, kept their distance and moaned. Their vocalisations were so low and febrile, so ghostly. They made no signs that he could comprehend and when he could bear it no longer he attacked.
They sedated him – that much he knew. When he came to again he was in a padded cell on the psychiatric ward of a hospital. While he had no clear memory of what lay either side of this nasty null space, he grasped that he’d been in a similar one before, for it felt familiar to him.
The monsters came and pressed their sharp muzzles against the tiny panel of toughened glass in the door. Periodically they entered the cell so as to inject him with drugs and he sprayed them. Once he was docile they wiped away the shit and piss. They told him that he had a history of this kind of thing, so they weren’t inclined to pay any attention to his panicky vocalisations or frantic signing.
