Will selfs collected fic.., p.78
Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1 (2014), page 78
part #1 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
And then there’s me. Acting, I would say, with absolute probity. Attempting to make sure that there is a kind of organic unity in London, that people have their right position and estate. It’s entirely appropriate that it should be me who fulfils this role; occupying, as I do, a sort of middle-to-upper-middle niche. I can look in both directions, up and down the social scale, and check that to the best of my abilities everybody is in his correct place.
If 212 ethnic minority local councillors throughout the capital are getting a tad stroppy, then I make it my business to ensure that they’re knocked down a peg or two. What exactly? We-ell, I might have their children arrested for drugs, something like that. And if there are 709 little Sloaney women who fancy they are about to get their name in some glossy magazine, then I’m on hand to make sure the proof readers make the correct error.
It can be still more subtle than this. In one blissful twenty-four-hour period, a month or so ago, I engineered it so that 45,902 of my people found themselves dropping the wrong name. Good, eh? I am good, good at the task in hand.
It’s not snobbery! I thought I told you that at the outset. I deplore snobbery and it constitutes no part of my motivation. I simply believe that there is a natural order of people just as there is of things. A kind of periodic table on to which every element within every person can be fitted.
Anyway, it’s not a responsibility that most people would be prepared to shoulder. It can be gruelling work and of course there is no reward to speak of.
Yes, sometimes I do get depressed, very low. When I’m really down it amuses me to toy with this notion: that one of the little people might discover the truth. Discover not only that their freedom is a delusion; but that, furthermore, instead of being the hapless tool of some great deity, shoved up on a towering Titian-type cloud, they are instead jerked this way and that by a pervert in Bloomsbury, or a dullard in the Shell Centre, or an old incontinent in Clapton. Ye-es, it would be droll.
I’m sorry? Yes, yes, that’s right, that’s what I was leading up to. When it gets too claustrophobic at home, when Mother’s rasping snore gets to me, and the old-woman smell of flannel, medicaments and cabbage is making me retch, I come here and engage someone like yourself in conversation. Someone bright, enquiring and interested. And then I do tell them – tell them everything.
What’s that? Yes, of course, you are perceptive; naturally I can do this with impunity, because you’ll never remember anything I’ve told you. It will depart from your tiny mind when we part. For as I told you at the outset: there are really only eight people in London. And whereas I am fortunately one of them – you are emphatically not.
The Indian Mutiny
I killed a man when I was at school. I’m not just saying that, I really did. And you know the fact of it has eaten away at me for years. Even now, sitting in my office at the station, in the dead centre of a dead ordinary day, I get chilly and sweaty thinking about it.
It was a shit thing to do, a truly bad thing. When I was growing up – after it had happened – I didn’t dwell on it that much. It wasn’t as if I had beaten the back of his head in with a spade and watched his brains run out like grey giblets, or poisoned him so that he died kicking and thrashing, or stabbed him, shot him, or hung him ejaculating and shitting from a spindly tree.
Don’t get me wrong – these aren’t my imaginings. I don’t visualise things like this. Like I say, when I was in my teens, my early twenties, I didn’t think of it as actually murdering someone. I read my behaviour differently, innocently.
He was my history teacher, I was his pupil. He had a mental breakdown one day, actually in the class, while he was taking a lesson. He was hospitalised, but we heard that he killed himself a couple of weeks later. Killed himself by suffocation.
Years later I heard that what he had done was to shut himself in a tiny broom cupboard. He caulked up the cracks in the door. That’s how he died, sitting in the close, antiseptic darkness. That’s what triggered it, I suppose. Before that I might have suspected that I had more to do with his death than the other boys in 4b, but I didn’t know. When I heard how he died I knew that I had killed him.
Soon after that the dreams came. The dreams where I’m looking at the blade of the spade, or fastening the elasticated belt around his thick, red neck. It’s astonishing how many different ways I’ve murdered Mr Vello in my dreams. Murdered him and murdered him and murdered him again. I’d say that while I’ve slept I’ve probably killed Mr Vello at least two thousand times. And you wanna know the really queer thing about it? Every time I do him, I do him in a fresh way – an original way.
Some of the ways that I’ve dreamt I killed Mr Vello are positively baroque. Like shredding his buttocks to a pulpy mass, my weapon a common cheese grater. Or like pulling his head off. Just pulling it right off and sort of decoring his body. Really icky stuff. I’m glad I can’t express this too well in words because it’s worse than any special effect you’ve ever seen. I don’t know where the dreams come from because I don’t see the world that way. I’ve never watched an operation, or been in an abattoir. I don’t go to horror movies. I’ve never even seen a dead person. So I just don’t know where I get all these vivid anatomical details.
Of course it’s the guilt. I know that. I’m not stupid – far from it. I’ve got the real gift of the gab. I can talk and talk. That’s what I do for a living: talk and talk. That’s what the kids at school said about me, ‘You can talk like a chat show host, Wayne,’ that’s what they said. And it was prophetic, because now I am a chat show host. I went straight from being a lairy kid to being a lairy adult. That’s how I really killed Mr Vello, of course, I killed him with my big mouth. I killed him by winding him up. Winding him up so tight that he shattered. He just shattered.
Yeah, I did him all right. But I can tell you I didn’t do it all by myself. I couldn’t have managed it without the Indian Army. Mr Vello came to us as a supply teacher. He wasn’t like the other teachers at the school. He didn’t wear PVC car coats, or ratty corduroy jackets. He didn’t speak with a cockney accent, or try and speak with one. He didn’t read the Guardian, or the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Mr Vello dressed like a retired Indian Army officer. I think that’s how he saw himself.
He was a solidly plump Yorkshireman in his mid-fifties. He always wore a blue blazer with brass buttons – the Yorkshire County Cricket Club badge was on the breast pocket. Mr Vello combed his hair back tight over his scalp. He had been using Brylcreem for so many years that the thin slick of his hair had become Brylcreem-coloured. Mr Vello’s face was moley rather than vulpine, but when he got angry, which he did with increasing frequency, his apparently friendly, diffident wrinkles seemed to get smarmed back with his greasy hair.
With the benefit of culpable hindsight I can place myself behind Mr Vello’s metal-framed spectacles and picture class 4b as it must have appeared to him when he first swung back the big wooden door and walked in on us.
Simmo was doing his drawing-pin trick. This was a bogus bit of fakirism whereby he placed three drawing pins on top of a desk and put his fat white hand over them. He then asked another boy to stamp on the back of his hand. On this occasion Simmo got it wrong – just as Mr Vello walked into the room he screamed and held up his hand. The three drawing pins were deeply embedded.
‘What’s all this?’ said Mr Vello, setting a pile of textbooks down on the teacher’s desk.
‘Please, sir,’ gurgled Simmo (blood was beginning to flow), ‘please, sir, I’ve hurt my hand.’
‘Nonsense, boy,’ said Mr Vello, ‘now sit down and shut up … all of you: sit down, shut up and pay attention.’
But we didn’t. We never did. We just went on: flicking rubber bands; chasing one another around the desks; bashing and shouting. The majority, that is. But really there were three distinct minorities in class 4b: the Jews, the Gentiles and the Asians. 4b was a bipartisan culture, however, and power derived solely from the antagonism between the Jews and the Gentiles. We formed two gangs and called ourselves respectively The Yids and The Yocks.
The Asian boys were different. They were all first-generation immigrants, mostly East African Asians, expelled from Uganda and Kenya, but some Punjabis and Pakistanis as well. It could have been this factor alone, or perhaps it was because Asian families have a more pronounced tradition of respect for pedagogues, but none of the Asian boys was indisciplined or cheeky. On the other hand they didn’t exactly stick together. They certainly didn’t all sit together in the classroom. It was as if they had conspired to be unobtrusively unobtrusive. I reckon Mr Vello picked up on this immediately. Because it was the Asian boys who stopped buggering about first. They all sat down at their desks and got their books out.
Mr Vello saw the rest of us, immediately, for what we were: time-servers; time-wankers; ignorantly urbane boys – full of nasty decadences. The doomed scurf on the last polluted wave of our culture. He said as much, or rather shouted it.
‘You boys are ignorant,’ he shouted, ‘ignorant of discipline.’ He walked up and down the classroom batting the backs of heads with practised swipes of his wooden ruler. We yowled and yammered like the Yahoos we were. ‘But it isn’t your fault, you live in an undisciplined society and you are subjected to a banal cultural babble. You would do well to observe these Indian boys. They at least have been subjected in the more recent past to the rigours and responsibilities of imperial rule. Isn’t that right, boy?’ Mr Vello stopped by Jayesh Rabindirath, a thick oaf who was heavily moustachioed at fourteen.
‘Err … yes, sir. I suppose so.’
Mr Vello tried to teach us. He tried for weeks. But he just couldn’t hack it. Adolescent boys sense weakness in a teacher and go for it like piranhas sporting in offal. I think that in a quieter school, some nice prep where the kids were better behaved, Mr Vello would have been OK. But at Creighton Comprehensive he didn’t have a chance.
I think he was overwhelmed by the militancy of our philistinism, the utter failure of our didactic urge. Naturally we played up to this – me in particular. It took only four maladministered lessons for the situation to deteriorate to such an extent that the poor man couldn’t even talk for sixty seconds without being importuned by a battery of grubby paws, stuck out straining from the shoulder, at angles of forty-five degrees. ‘Please, sir! Please, sir! Ple-ease, sir!’ we all chorused, but as soon as he paid us any mind we would come up with some absurd request (‘Please, sir, may I breathe?’), our subservience a grotesque parody of his assumed authority. Or if, in the course of attempting to instruct us, he managed to shout out a question, we would vie with one another to produce the most facile, the most patently weak, the most irrelevant answer.
I think I managed the worst example of this fairly early on. Mr Vello was attempting to discourse on the Crimean War; back to the class, he mapped out the battlefield at Balaclava with a series of mauve chalk strokes. We had all fallen silent, the better to stand on our desks and wigglingly shimmy our contempt for him. Without bothering to turn he flung over his shoulder, ‘Why were the Russian batteries positioned here?’
I came back triumphantly (God, have I ever been funnier?), ‘Because that’s where the little diagram said they should be positioned.’
We all fell about. I got eighteen consecutive detentions. God, how we (and me in particular) loved it when he got worked up. It was so comic, there was something cartoony about the colour contrast between his blue, blue blazer and his red, bursting, humiliated face. Rebellion was in the air.
It was during the lesson after that that Mr Vello first announced the establishment of the Indian Army. ‘Now then, boy-yz!’ He thwacked his desk with his ever-handy ruler to give his words emphasis.
‘Now then, boy-yz!’ we all chorused back, thwacking our desks with our rulers. Things really had got that bad. Worse still we all managed a pretty fair imitation of Mr Vello’s idiosyncratic accent and enunciation. This was marked by a weird alternation in pitch between the swooping vowels of Yorkshire and the clipped consonants of received pronunciation. We were all pretty good at doing Mr Vello, but I was the best.
‘Now then, boy-yz!’ he came at us again. ‘I have no patience any more with your indisci-pline. None at all. I have noticed that your Indian colleagues maintain a healthier respect for authority than the rest of you, so I am going to adopt my own Martial Races policy.’
He got all the Indian boys to stand up and then he lined them up in the aisle in order of height. Jayesh Rabindirath at the front, behind him Dhiran Vaz, behind him Krishna Patel and so on, all the way down to the minuscule Surrinyalingam (no one ever knew his first name), a tiny blackened block of a boy, who wasn’t an Indian at all but a Tamil; however, Mr Vello chose to ignore this fine distinction.
‘I commission all you Indian boyz into my Indian Army.’ He paced the next aisle, ruler on one shoulder like an officer’s swagger stick. ‘It is no longer my task, but yours, to maintain ab-so-lute order amongst this miserable, unlettered rabble – ’
As he spoke my attention sideswiped out the window. A bus had pulled up and shook in mechanical ague by the concrete bus shelter. I could see fat old women coming out of the library across the road from the school and donning plastic rain hats. Life seemed to be proffering a teasing and perhaps crucial juxtaposition. I raised my arm. Mr Vello whirled on me. ‘Yes, Fein?’
‘Please, sir – ’
‘Yes, boy?’
‘Please, sir, I want to join the Indian Army.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid, boy. Enlistment in the Indian Army is open only to boys of Indian descent. You, Fein, are of Semitic descent, you are a Levantine, not an Aryan, therefore you shall not be called to the Colours.’
‘Or the coloureds …’ Simmo sniggered in the corner.
‘But, sir, Mr Vello, sir,’ I kept on at him, ‘my dad says we’re Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardim. He says we aren’t really Semites at all.’
And this was true. My father had a touch of the Mr Vellos about him as well, a fondness for the Daily Telegraph (ironed) and village cricket. A relentless auto-didact, he had been much taken by Arthur Koestler’s theory that the Ashkenazi were in fact the descendants of the Scythian Khazars, Turkic tribesmen who had converted to Judaism in the seventh century. Dad discoursed on this in the garden of an evening, smoking a briar pipe (his plumed flag of utter assimilation).
‘Oh, and what are you if you’re not a Semite?’
‘I’m an Aryan, sir. My ancestors were Turkic tribesmen. My dad told me so, he’s really interested in Jewish history.’
Mr Vello was nonplussed, he left off drilling the Indian Army and took to his desk where he cradled his head in his hands. And here’s one of the sickest bits of this sick, sad tale, for Mr Vello really was a conscientious and unbigoted man – he was giving this matter of my lineage real thought, heavy consideration. The class was strangely silent. At length he stirred.
‘All right, Fein, I’ll make an exception as far as you are concerned, and in deference to your father’s scholarship. You may join the Indian Army.’
So it was that I became an Indian Army soldier. What a soldier I was: relentlessly enforcing the order I had so recently been determined to disrupt. With my fellow soldiers I patrolled the aisles of the classroom swiping hair-covered collars with my ruler, confiscating fags and sweets, strutting my skinny, flannel-legged stuff. I exulted in the power. My sharp tongue grew sharper still. And was discipline imposed? Did Mr Vello’s writ run class 4b? Did it hell. For in as much as I was an Indian Army soldier I was also its principal mutineer. I was the Fletcher Christian to Mr Vello’s Captain Bligh (‘Why did the mutineers throw away the bread fruit plants?’ ‘Please, sir, please, sir,’ ‘Yes, Fein?’ ‘Because they were stale, sir!’ Ha, ha, bloody ha).
Yes, it makes me sick now. Sick to think of it. Trim girlies come in and hand me things: write-ups and intelligence files on the guests I’m about to goose and humiliate, promote and patronise, fawn over and psychically fellate. That’s my job. But if only I could get Mr Vello back, get him on the show. I’d recant, I’d apologise, I’d vindicate myself, and in doing so I’d make him whole again, make him live again, abolish the ghastly Vello golem that parades through my unconscious.
He got worse and worse. In one lesson he insisted on giving us a graphic description of the way he prepared his vegetable patch in the spring. In another he showed how, while on hazardous service during the latter war, he was taught to signal using a windproof lighter and a pipe. The Indian Army grew restless. It wasn’t their idea, they just wanted to carry on being unobtrusively unobtrusive. After one particularly surreal lesson Dhiran Vaz and Suhail Rhamon got me in the corridor.
‘You’re a jerk, Fein,’ said Vaz; he gripped and twisted my collar, ‘the poor man’s having a breakdown, he’s really going nutty and you’re just goading him, making it happen. D’you like watching people suffer?’
‘Yeah,’ Rhamon concurred, ‘we’ve had enough of this, we’re going to talk to the Headmaster – ’
‘Now hang on a minute, guys – guys.’ I was emollient, placatory. ‘I agree with you. I don’t like it either, but I still think we should settle it ourselves. End the rule of the Indian Army in our own way.’
I won them round. I stopped them going to the Head. I implied that if they did the full weight of both the Yids and the Yocks would come down on them. They had no alternative.
The bubble burst the next Thursday. Mr Vello was ranting about the abandonment of the Gold Standard when I gave the signal. The soldiers of the Indian Army took up their prearranged positions: at the door, the windows, the light switches. While they flashed the lights on and off I strode to the front of the class and deprived Mr Vello of his ceremonial ruler. He blinked at me in amazement, his eyes huge and bulbous behind the concave lenses of his glasses.
