Will selfs collected fic.., p.29
Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1 (2014), page 29
part #1 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Now Dan had friends, supportive friends. Dave 2 was so supportive that he would come home with Dan after the meeting to preach to him further. They would find Carol already at the flat – the Al Anon meeting started and finished a half hour in advance of the AA meeting – and the kettle on the boil. The three of them would then sit down around the breakfast counter to share the articles of Dave 2’s faith. These he would pronounce with the kind of affectedly natural sincerity that is most typical of an Anglican priest at his worst.
The rubric of Dave 2’s sermons was that of a kind of spiritual ‘n’ tell. He had a great number of quasi-devotional postcards and stickers that he liked to distribute to his new acolytes. An example of what was depicted on one of these would be: cuddly puppies in a wicker basket, the cutest dangling from the handle. Underneath there was a slogan in curly cursive script. It read, ‘Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re hanging on to.’ Another showed kittens in a rumble-tumble bundle. The slogan read, ‘What we need are lots of hugs!’ Dave 2 also had A5-sized tablets of card laminated with plastic that carried the AA commandments (the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions), or very important AA prayers: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change … etc … etc …’ You know the type of thing. These he would slap down on the formica, as if they were the flesh that justified his burring, bleating homilies …
The don’s voice trailed off again quite suddenly. The light in the little circular shade above his head had come on, and the nutty wings of hair that smoothed to his scalp were burnished and refulgent in the downlight. He stood, and in the tiny roomlet of the enclosed compartment, turned and paced from one door to the other. He stopped and looked at me, slope-shouldered, ectomorphic. He was like a peardrop someone had dressed at Turnbull & Asser. His pate was framed by the gaudy surround of a retouched Highland photo, the proud stag poking its head from behind his ear.
The don looked at me and for the first time I saw something else in his eyes besides the usual facetiousness. A glimmer of hate? Or at any rate flat anger at felt or imagined hurt and insult. His clipped voice spat again: ‘You’re typing me, boy, aren’t you? You’re turning me into something that I’m not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!’
Still facing me, he half crouched, half knelt in the space between the seats. He looked intently at my profile, as if trying to make up his mind about something, and then, apparently satisfied, he straightened up. He sat down opposite me again and recommenced his narrative in the same rapid, even tones. This more than anything else shocked me. There was something so utterly pat and performative about everything that he did. It gave me the chilling feeling that I was not the first unwitting listener to be pinioned by the don. Nor was I the first audience for this tawdry cast. There was that and there was the compartment itself. I couldn’t place my finger on it but somehow the decor was changing, as surely as if ghostly but efficient stagehands were playing their part. The scene was shifting more exactly to accommodate the don … But as if to forestall my examining this impression more clearly, he went on.
Suffice to say that Dave 2 became a fixture in the flat, an adept of the idiosyncratic toilet-roll holder, a hunter after Marvel and condensed milk for late-night brews.
5
It
There are those people in the world whose lives really are as flat as those of characters in a slight fiction. You know the kind of thing: bound in light blue cloth and picked up for 25p from a cardboard box outside a charity shop. When you get on the bus and start to read a few pages you are struck immediately by the leaden feel of the characterisations. You chuck it to one side and with it go Dan and Carol – and Dave 2 for that matter.
Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 had never supplied any depth to Dan’s life; no interconnectedness, no grout with which to edge the smooth, square featurelessness of Dan’s identity. His mother dominated him in the manner of a Roman emperor. She might send a legion to pacify him from time to time but mostly she preferred to rule him through a provincial governor, a psychological satrap she had established in his very sense of self. And Carol? Well, we know about her. Dave 2’s cards started to appear on the corkboard, next to joky parodic postcards from Camden Lock.
Carol and Dan’s life was thus exactly like a work of literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuo, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.
Each evening at their respective meetings Carol and Dave blossomed and then they raced home to receive a little Potterton-side sermon from Dave 2, who would depart punctually at 11.10 pm to get the last 114 bus heading north into the fastness of Friern Barnet, where he had a little quasi-serviced flatlet.
They hardly had time to nauseate one another. Padding passers-by in the alcove by the bathroom, bathrobed like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, their lips were sealed. I could almost say that Carol didn’t have time to examine the gristly frond. I could almost say that, and I know that in a way, despite your enquiring fucking mind, you’d rather like me to do that, n’est ce pas? But you would also know I was lying, wooden d’jew? Of course Carol had time, no, took time to check out that little priser. Because that’s what it was, a little priser. At odd moments she could feel it prising her apart below; sitting in the group listening to someone share, or else standing at the library counter, crotch bumping against the veneer slab, which, peeling away from its restraining rivet, clacked mournfully.
And how could we forget pissing and shitting? We mustn’t forget those. Sometimes I feel that my body is nothing but one enormous, snaking bowel, stuffed full of ordure and but thinly covered with skin. Nietzsche, you know, suffered agonies on the toilet. In Ecce Homo he damns the Germans for their beer and sausage, bum-concretising cuisine. Like Gogol, another neuro-neuter, he roamed the cities of Northern Italy, seeking digestive relief in huge antacid bowls of pasta.
I digress. On the toilet then, Carol’s usual sense of micturation was muted, she felt the stream somehow tramelled – funnelled externally. Looking down she would catch sight of a bead of flesh and set into it a bead of urine. Then Carol’s fingers would brush and freeze as if skewered, on confirming the testimony of her eyes: it was still there. And now poking forward, out from the lips. She could hardly bear to encompass it with shaking thumb and forefinger. She could see herself, outlined in avocado, framed in the half-length mirror over the sink. Legs akimbo, underclothes like twisted fan belts between her splayed shanks, she sweated and twisted on her plastic horseshoe of a torture throne.
But grasp it she did. And feeling the, by now, wormlet of flesh and gristle between her fingers did something to her. On the one hand it hardened an awful bone of knowledge, a hard white femur or tibia torn from a pirate flag and shoved through her life, cutting her out from the herd, along with her secret. (Although it can be said with certainty that, as yet, Carol did not view this secret as having any greater import or connotation of the bizarre than an adulterous liaison or a dumped foetus.) But on the other hand, or in the other hand, the wormlet was there. It was, as it were, accomplished. And when, clothes still half off herself, she shiveringly, retchingly pulled it out and held it hard against the edge of a perspex six-inch ruler, the memory of capturing her brother Steven doing the same with his willy, some fifteen years before, came to her involuntarily. It wasn’t an inference that she could slap aside. The wormlet was clearly not that strange after all, it was something that she had had an acquaintance with before, albeit in quite a different context.
‘Monday, 9.45 am. Length: 7mm. Appearance: that of an extended clitoris, sac-like but containing an interior twistle of nerve-ending-packed gristle. Remarks: sort of a second fun button really.
‘Tuesday, 11.45 am. Length: 8.5mm. Appearance: as yesterday but more distended still, clearly poking out from the labia minora now. The wormlet seems to quest for the light, just as the clitoris above retreats under its fleshy hood. Remarks: the increment in length of 1.5mm is not altogether credible. With such small increments we doubt the accuracy of the Oxford Geometry Kit six-inch perspex ruler.
‘Wednesday, 3.30 pm. (In the library toilet, hence the brevity of this entry) Length: 10mm. Appearance: repulsive, it has a little eye. Remarks: I feel sick, very sick.’
Such might have been the entries if Carol had troubled to keep a written log detailing all the steps of its development. Of course she did no such thing. But strange to relate, within the context of her relationship with it, it was as if she had kept a matter-of-fact account. Moreover this strand of Carol’s character, the matter-of-fact, pragmatic, practical qualities – qualities one primary-school teacher had once reported that she possessed, but which, to my knowledge at least, she had never before exhibited – began to come to the fore in other ways as well.
Dan was set to work to build a cabinet for the CD/video module. Carol went off on the Thursday morning after her first Al Anon meeting and purchased the required rivet gun and composite wood slabbing from a DIY superstore in Wood Green. Work was scheduled to commence on Saturday morning. On the same trip to Wood Green Carol did something else she had been meaning to do for a while. She signed up for a course of driving lessons.
But Saturday came and as Dan outlined the shape of the cabinet on a sheet of tracing paper with a special pencil, Carol gibbered and cowered upstairs on her bed. A TV interview with Julio Iglesias’s father, a prominent Spanish gynaecologist, was the trigger point that set her off. She inadvertently opened her fly buttons and took it out. ‘Jesus Christ! I did that. I took it out!’ Awareness screamed. She retched and up came All Bran, an irregular and unscheduled appearance for this most regulatory of breakfast cereals. Carol staggered off the bed to find the security of the carpet. It was rasped against the thick denim of her jeans by the move, and imperceptibly – thank God, because personally I don’t think she could have taken much more at this stage – hardened.
Despite her so recent distress, Carol was nonetheless totally unresponsive to yet another nuzzling interception from Dan, as she crossed the living room en route for the kitchen. And she continued to keep his nose to the grindstone for the rest of the day. For, the separate compartments of Carol’s mind, which had always been strung out along a lurching, ill-lit corridor, had now begun to detach themselves from one another altogether. They were much like this compartment we are sitting in now. It is part of the train, yes, but we cannot access any other part of the train from it. And in that sense I suppose it isn’t part of the train at all …
The don interleaved his plump little fingers and basketed a flannel knee as if well pleased with this piece of sophistry. Somehow I had failed to notice the pre-war rolling stock when I boarded the train. But what he said was true. The compartment was self-contained, with no access to the rest of the train. It belonged to an earlier age. An age when sexual assault was collectively believed to be something undertaken solely by those without the wherewithal to buy a train ticket. I wanted to discuss this oddity, this example of British Rail underfunding with the don, but he was off again.
… Carol had always been subject to a time delay between emotional event and emotional response. And therein, of course, lay the essence of her neurosis. But however attenuated, the connection did always exist, and, if you like, her failure adequately to explain why such and such an event might make her cry, while another might make her angry, was a guarantee of her real stability.
The proof of this assertion is in what began to happen to her next. With increased detachment came increased awareness. Carol flitted in the darkness along the gravelly grading, peeking into the lighted compartments of her mind. In one she saw herself at an Al Anon meeting, sharing; in another she was retching over it; in a third she listened attentively to Dave 2 and in a fourth she was turning away from Dan. The Carol in the darkness, the ghost, as it were, ex machina, smiled and passed on.
Carol was also getting more aggressive. When a plasterer set aside his hawk and praised her svelte figure – in demotic terms – as she passed along Fortune Green Road, she turned back and spat at him, ‘Shove it up your fucking arsehole,’ and walked on happy. Dan didn’t notice the change, in part simply because he was used to her. Habit is such a great canceller-out of any reflective thought and Dan was nothing if not a creature of habit – and anyway it had never really been Carol that he was married to, but a simulacrum of her, spun from his own fantastic mental projections and the accident of his mother’s indifference. (‘She’s just a little chit of a girl but frankly I don’t think he could do much better.’ This had been the Empress’s response to the news of Dan and Carol’s engagement.)
Anyway, Dan found himself sober in the clean, cold light of day, and remembered that once upon a time, before Barry, Gary, Derry, Gerry, Dave 1 and he had taken to regularly seeking out the lager of Lamot, they had gained much pleasure from squash, and all the mateyish towel-flicking, play-fighting and Lucozade-swigging that had accompanied it.
The first four days of sobriety had been sheer hell for Dan. He was so naive and ignorant that he had never known that you could have physical withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. The sweating, retching, and puking, together with the unsettling peripheral hallucinations, took him entirely by surprise. Carol reacted by exiling the sweating grub of his body to the futon divan. There he lay, storms of electrons coursing behind his narrow forehead. And as he tossed, he was subject to waking dreams in which odd sexual chimeras – women with testicles instead of eyes and men with vaginal ears – stood about, unconcerned, in a delusional lounge bar.
On the fifth day he rose from the futon and went to work. Apart from an odd tingling around the tips of his fingers and toes – as if he were a quadra-amputee, afflicted with the ghost memory of limbs long gone – he felt nothing. Not even a bat’s squeak of a craving for alcohol beset Dan. He had handed over his will and his life to a power greater than himself. According to the AA credo the power did not have to be God, it could be any force greater than one’s self, provided that it was benign and transcendent rather than phenomenal and temporal. Unfortunately, although Dan did try awfully hard not to personify his higher power, occasionally, being a vengeful God, it would manifest itself; appearing in Dan’s mind’s eye in the form of a heavyset middle-aged woman eating Battenburg cake, a woman not unlike Dan’s mother.
Another week came and went at Melrose Mansions. It grew. Carol and Dan continued on their divergent courses, meeting up only in the short period before their respective meetings; and then afterwards in order to harken once more unto Brother Dave.
Dave 2, it needs to be said, was playing his own very particular game. For Dave 2 was a parasite of the emotions. Dave 2 could gain no direct pleasure from any intimate relationship, but rather, like some honey-sucking bird with an obscenely elongated bill, he gained an intense and even sweetly erotic pleasure from sucking out the juice from the private parts of other people’s entanglements. And so, to this end, he encouraged each half of any given couple to regard him as their supreme and absolute confidant. When this ideal situation was achieved, Dave 2 attained his own strange nirvana.
But with Carol and Dan, things were proving a little tough. Sure, both of them were willing to confide in Dave 2, but the nature of their confidences was entirely unsatisfying. Both of them were vague about their resentments, hurts and passions. And the precise detail, the who, where, why, what and when, was altogether missing. It was this hot intimacy that Dave 2 desired more than anything else, so, like a spymaster, Dave 2 determined to employ an agent, and to that end he waited behind at St Simon’s on the tenth day after Carol’s induction and introduced her to Geena.
Geena was a fellow recovering alcoholic, a stringy old hippy thing in black lycra that smelt of patchouli long past its sell-by date. Geena was an old-time accomplice of Dave 2’s, similarly sexually dormant, and addicted to the delights of what we may call – to coin a neologism – psycho-empathetic voyeurism, or PEV for short.
Geena came lurching up to Carol, rocking hard on her preposterous heels. Carol was helping to dispense handleless mugs of instant coffee to the Al Anon group members. Carol was struck immediately by the strange way that Geena’s belly bulged out at the sides, as if she had a circular cushion rammed up her stretchy top. Struck by this and struck also by Geena’s defiantly ethnic hairstyle. All of her thick black locks had been gathered up into a single plume on top of her head and garlanded there with skeins of fake amber beads. Geena’s face was unremarkable to begin with; her flywhisk hair-do made it wholly unmemorable.
‘Hi, I’m Geena,’ said Geena, before Dave 2 had even had an opportunity to introduce them. ‘The old pisshead here has told me about you. I insisted that he introduce us, I keep birds too.’
This was three arrows straight into the bull. Carol did like her birds and she could be flattered as much as the next. But Geena’s real stroke had been to ridicule Dave 2. Carol had begun to develop some profound doubts about Dave 2, after the first flush of her conversion had started to fade. And although the ridicule was clearly not intended to be pejorative in this context, Carol thought she could definitely sense some lurking malice.
Carol didn’t need much urging to accompany Geena back to her flat off the Harrow Road. It was a long way but Geena had a car. Carol was doubly pleased because riding in the car gave her a good pretext for discussing her favourite thing of the moment – driving. Ever since Carol had started her driving lessons she had developed an unreasonable interest in everything to do with the road. She had already had two lessons and they had gone off more than satisfactorily. The instructor was feeling so relaxed towards the end of the second lesson, that he lifted his feet aside from the dual-control pedals and let her go solo on Green Lanes. ‘You’re a natural,’ he told Carol. And only 80 per cent of the compliment sprang from his fuzzy desire to go where it was.
