by Will Self
Simon-Arthur kept his mouth clamped shut, but sniffed the fog judiciously with a connoisseur’s nose. Lots of sulphur tonight, he thought, and perhaps even a hint of something more tangy . . . sodium, maybe? He turned on the ignition. His headlights barely penetrated the thick fog. As he pulled out and drove off down the road Simon-Arthur avoided looking at the fog too closely. He knew from experience that if he peered into it for too long, actually concentrated on its twistings, its eddies, its endless assumptions of insubstantial form, that it could all too easily draw him down a darkling corridor, into more durable, more horribly solid visions.
But halfway home he had to stop. A heavy mizzle was saturating the air. The A418 was a tunnel of spray. Heavy lorry after heavy lorry churned up the fog and water. Simon-Arthur was jammed between two of these grunting beasts as he gained the crest of the hill at Tiddington. The vacuum punched in the air by the one ahead was sucking his flimsy 2cv forward, whilst the boil of turbulence pushed up by the one behind propelled him on. The wheels of the car were barely in contact with the tarmac. He dabbed the brakes and managed to slide off the road into a lay-by.
Sort of safe, Simon-Arthur slumped over the Citröen’s steering wheel. He felt more than usually depleted; and the thought of facing his family produced a hard, angular sensation in his gorge. Without quite knowing why he opened the door of the car and got out. If he had felt unsafe in the car – he was now totally exposed. Lorry after lorry went on slamming by, throwing up clouds of compounded gas and liquid.
Simon-Arthur lurched round to the other side of the car and stood transfixed by the hard filthiness of the verge. The bank of grass and weeds was so stained with pollutants that it appeared petrified. It was as if the entire lay-by had been buried in a peat bog for some thousands of years and only this moment disinterred.
Simon-Arthur stood, lost in time, ahistoric. He looked along the A418 towards his house. The road manifested itself as a serpent of yellow and orange, winding its way over the dark country. Each ploughing vehicle was another muscular motion, another bunching and uncoiling in its anguiform body. But if he turned away from the road he was enclosed in his lay-by burial ship. A Sutton Hoo of the psyche. The armour of mashed milk cartons and crushed cans, the beadwork of fag butts, the weaponry of buckled hub caps and discarded lengths of chromium trim. They were, Simon-Arthur reflected, entirely useless – and therefore entirely apt – funerary gifts, for his sustenance in this current afterlife.
He would have stayed longer, savouring this mordant feeling, but the fog was seeping into his chest, producing acute sensations of rasp and tickle that grew and grew until he began to cough. When he was underway again he had to drive with the Citröen’s flap window open so that he could spit out of it. And by the time he turned off the main road, up the track to the Brown House, he was as blue as any Saxon – chieftain or otherwise.
The house stood about twenty yards back from the track, in an orchard of diseased apple trees; their branches were wreathed in some type of fungus that resembled Spanish moss. The impression the Brown House gave was of being absolutely four-square, like a child’s drawing of a house. It had four twelve-paned windows on each side. As its name suggested, it was built from brown brick; atop the sloping brown-tiled roof was a brown brick chimney.
As Simon-Arthur got out of the car, he looked up at this and noted with approval that it was gushing thick smoke. The fog was so dense now that he could barely make out the point at which this smoke entered the atmosphere; it looked, rather, as if the Brown House were sucking in the murk that wreathed it.
He took a tightly sealed cardboard box from the back of the Citröen, and tucking this under one arm and his Guardian under the other he struggled over the buckled wire fence. There was a gate, but it was awkward to open and as Simon-Arthur was the only member of the family who now left the immediate purlieus of the Brown House, he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The fence and the gate had been Simon-Arthur’s stab at being a countryman. It was summer when he built it and Simon-Arthur, stripped to the waist, spent a sweaty afternoon hammering in the stakes and attaching the netting. He imagined himself like Levin, or Pierre, communing through labour with the spirit of Man. It was a vain delusion.
Even then the fog had been in evidence – albeit as a shadow of what it later became. That afternoon it gave the air a bilious tint. It made everything seem disturbingly post-nuclear, irradiated. When Simon-Arthur had finally finished and stood back to admire his work he saw an aching disjunction between what he had imagined he had achieved – and what was actually there.
The fence zigged and zagged and sagged its way along the track’s tattered verge. It looked like a stretch of wire looming up across the shell-holed sludge of no man’s land in an old photograph of the Somme.
For as long as the children had played in the garden the fence had acted more as a psychic barrier than a physical one. While it prevented them from getting on to the farm track, it also turned them in on themselves, in on the sepia interior of the Brown House. The fog came. Now it had been over two years since any of them had even ventured out of the house for more than a few minutes. Every time Simon-Arthur contemplated the fence he thought of pulling it down, but to do so was to counsel defeat on too many different levels.
Simon-Arthur opened the front door and stepped into the small vestibule. The first sound that met his ears was of some child plainting in the sitting room. He ignored it and kicking off his muddy boots went into the parlour and set the nebuliser box down on the table. He was unpacking it when his wife’s cousin, Christabel-Sharon, came wafting in.
‘Is that the nebuliser?’ she said, without preamble. He grunted assent. ‘Well, as soon as you’ve got it up and running we’d better put Henrykins on it for a while – the poor child is panting like a steam engine.’
‘What about Stormikins?’
‘Stormikins is fine, she can have second go. It’s Henrykins who’s really acting up.’ Christabel-Sharon pulled one of the cane-backed chairs out from the table and slumped down on it with a sigh. A sigh that turned into a choke, a splutter and then a full-blown rasping cough. A bronchitic cough that, was of such sub-sonic, juddering intensity that Simon-Arthur, as always, could hardly believe her narrow chest capable of producing – or containing – it.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye, whilst continuing to ready the nebuliser. Christabel-Sharon was very thin – almost anorectic. Her ginger-blonde hair was done up in a chignon, revealing what once must have been a graceful swoop of pale, freckled neck, but what was now a scrawny shank of a thing with greaseproof skin stretched over a marbling of vein. She had once been very pretty, in a sylphlike way. Her grey eyes were deep-set, like Simon-Arthur’s own, although he could no longer remember whether they had always been so. They glittered under her brows, sending out a coruscating beam with each heave of her chest. Her breasts, fuller than the rest of her, moved under the stretchy fabric of her pullover; the nipples were erect and to Simon-Arthur they betokened nothing more than an autonomous and involuntary sexuality, parasitic on its hacking host.
He had the nebuliser assembled now and he plugged it in to the mains and switched it on. The rubber suction pads moved up and down in the glass chambers of Salbutimol and steroid. He turned on the stopcock of the oxygen cylinder and pressed the mask to his mouth. The sense of relief was overpowering. He could feel the electric engine adjusting itself to the motion of his ribcage, so that with each of his trembling and ineffectual inhalations it pushed more drug-laden oxygen into him.
It was bliss – like breathing normally again. The sensation marched at the head of a procession of memories: windows flung open and deep gouts of ozone-flavoured air drawn in unimpeded; running up hills and gasping with joy not pain; burying his head in the bosom of the earth and drawing its warm fungal odour in through flaring nostrils. These pneumo-recollections were so clear that Simon-Arthur could visualise each molecule of scent and gas burying itself in the pinkness of his membranes.
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sp; Christabel-Sharon’s woollen bosoms came into the corner of his eye. ‘Come on, Simon-Arthur, don’t you think you’re being a little selfish with that thing?’
‘Selfish! What the hell do you mean?’ As suddenly as the gift had been bestowed it was snatched away. Simon-Arthur’s anger rose up in him unbidden. ‘Listen, Christabel-Sharon, I’m the person in this house who has to go out, to engage with the brutal commerce of the world. I come back after a gruelling trip, blue in the face, on the verge of expiring, and just because I dare to take a few breaths – a few trifling puffs – on this nebuliser, this nebuliser which I abased myself to get . . . you call me selfish. Selfish! I won’t stand for it!’
Christabel-Sharon had recoiled from him and was pressing herself up against the side of the tiled Dutch stove that stood in the corner of the parlour. Simon-Arthur noted through stinging tears of self-pity and frustration that she was doing something he found particularly disgusting: jettisoning sputum from her full lips into a pad of gauze that she had pressed against her mouth. She had quantities of these fabricated pads hidden about her person, and after use, deposited them – together with their glaucous contents – in a bucket lined with a plastic bag that she kept in her room. The dabbing practice further erased her beauty. For Simon-Arthur could never look at her without seeing little parcels of infective matter studding her body.
Simon-Arthur’s wife, Jean-Drusilla, came hurrying into the kitchen. In her arms she carried Henry-Simon, their son, a child of about eight.
‘Simon, thank God, thank God! The nebuliser. Praise be to the Father and to the Son. Praise be to the Mother of God especially, for granting us this deliverance.’ She set the child down on a chair and attached the mask, which was still giving out little ‘poots’ of oxygen, to his pallid face. Then she fell to her knees on the cold stone flags. ‘Simon-Arthur, Christabel-Sharon . . . You will join me.’ It was a command, not a request.
Looking sheepishly at one another Simon-Arthur and Christabel-Sharon knelt on the flags. The three adults joined hands. ‘Oh merciful Mother,’ Jean-Drusilla chanted, ‘giver of all bounty, repository of all grace, we thank you for this gift of a nebuliser. Be sure, oh Blessed One, that we will employ it solely in furtherance of your Divine Will. So that our children and ourselves might breathe freely, and so that my dear husband might create beautiful art, the greater to glorify your name.’
Simon-Arthur had knelt grudgingly, and cynically observed the way that this spiritual intensity shaped his wife’s rather homely features. Her thick black hair was cut so as to frame her broad brow and firm chin, but the flesh hung slackly on her and there was a yellowish tinge to the whites of her eyes when she rolled them up to stare beatifically at the fire-resistant tiles. Even so, the effect of her measured chanting, which adapted itself to the background chuffing of Henry-Simon and the nebuliser, was mesmeric.
Perhaps there is a Redeemer, Simon thought. Perhaps He will come in a cloud of eucalyptus, freeing up all our passages, gusting through us with the great wind of the Spirit. And before he knew it tears were coursing down his cheeks. Jean-Drusilla, seeing this, leant forward and, taking his head, cradled it against her breast. Christabel-Sharon leant forward as well and stretched her thin arms around the both of them, and for quite a while they stayed like that, gently rocking.
When Dave-Dave Hutchinson, the manager of Marten’s the newsagent, arrived at the Brown House about three hours later, the ecstasis had somewhat subsided. He knocked, and waited on the metal bootscraper, treading gingerly from one foot to the other. After a few minutes Simon-Arthur himself came to the door. ‘My God, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it over tonight, the fog’s ridiculously thick.’
‘I’ve got the new radar in the car. It’s a bit tricky but once you’ve got the hang of it you can drive well enough.’
‘Come in, come in.’ Simon-Arthur almost yanked Dave-Dave in off the doorstep. ‘The children aren’t quite in bed yet and I don’t want them getting a lungful of this.’ He grabbed at the air outside the door and brought a clutch of the fog inside, which stayed intact, foaming like a little cloud on the palm of his hand for some seconds.
‘I brought this along with me.’ Dave-Dave pulled a small brown bottle from the side pocket of his sheepskin jacket.
‘Is that the codeine?’
‘Yeah, I’m afraid I’ve only about sixty mils left, but I pick up tomorrow.’
‘Sixty mils!’ Simon’s face lit up. ‘That’s splendid, that’ll bring us some warm cheer, but’ – and here his face fell – ‘what about your poor wife?’
The newsagent’s face adopted a serious expression. ‘I’m afraid she gets Brompton’s now.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, that’s too bad. Anyway, come in now, come in here to the drawing room, where it’s warm.’
Simon-Arthur ushered Dave-Dave into a long room that took up half of the Brown House’s ground floor. Dave-Dave could see at once that this was where the family spent the bulk of their time. There were two separate groupings of over-stuffed armchairs and sofas, one at either end of the room. Mahogany bookcases went clear along one of the walls, interrupted only by two windows in the centre and a door which presumably led to the garden.
On the other wall there was a vast collection of icons set on a number of shelves that were unevenly spaced, giving the impression that the icons were somehow radiating from the smouldering fire in the grate. Everywhere in the room, set on little tables – occasional, coffee and otherwise – on the arms of the chairs, and even the floor itself, were votive objects: crucifixes, incense burners, hanks of rosary beads, statuettes of the Blessed Virgin. The long room vibrated with the hum of so many patterns flowing into one another: wallpaper into carpet; carpet into seat-cover; seat-cover into cushion; cushion into the gilded frame of an icon. It was like a peacock’s tail under the glass dome of a taxidermist’s collation.
The overwhelming clutteredness of the room so impressed itself upon Dave-Dave Hutchinson that it wasn’t until Simon-Arthur said, ‘Jean-Drusilla, I want to introduce Mr Hutchinson, he manages the newsagent’s in Thame,’ that he realised there was anyone in it besides the two of them. A rather gaunt woman with severely chopped black hair and a prominent, red-tipped nose rose from behind the moulting back of a horsehair armchair where she had been seated.
‘I am so pleased to meet you, Mr Hutchinson,’ she said, holding out her hand. Dave-Dave Hutchinson advanced towards her, picking his way between the outcroppings of religionalia. She was wearing a crushed velvet, floor-length dress. Both the lace at her throat and that of her handkerchief broadcast the caramel smell of Friar’s Balsam.
He kissed her hand, and releasing it looked up into her eyes, which were deep brown. There, he caught a glimpse of her graphic religiosity: circling the two diminutive Hutchinson heads, reflected in her pupils, hovered imps, satyrs, minor demons and hummingbird angels. ‘A-and I you, Mrs Dykes,’ he stammered.
‘Simon-Arthur told me about the help you gave him this afternoon – and the concern you showed him as well.’
‘Really, Mrs Dykes, it was nothing, nothing at all.’
‘No, not nothing, Mr Hutchinson, far from it. It was a truly Christian act, the behaviour of a man of true feeling. A Samaritan casting aside the partisan claims of place, people and estate, selflessly to aid another.’
She was still holding his hand and she used it to draw him round and pilot him into an armchair that faced her own. ‘I fear my husband was asthmatic even before the fog, and he will let his emotions run away with him. Like all artists he is so terribly sensitive. When he gets upset . . .’ She tailed off and shrugged expressively, both of her hands held palm-upwards. Dave-Dave Hutchinson stared at the many heavy gold rings, studded with amethysts and emeralds, that striped her fingers.
‘What exactly is it that you paint, Mr Dykes?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked, turning in his chair to face Simon-Arthur, who was still hovering by the door. Even as the newsagent said it, he felt that the question was
both too prosaic and too forward. He was painfully aware that his own social position was quite inferior to that of the Dykeses, and while it didn’t matter when he and Simon Dykes had formed that spontaneous bond of friendship at Marten’s – which was after all his own preserve – here at the Brown House he felt awkward and gauche, on guard lest he commit some appalling gaffe, or utter a solecism that would point up his humble origins.
‘Oh, I don’t paint much besides icons nowadays. These are some of mine around the fireplace.’
The newsagent rose from his chair and walked over to the wall. The icons were really very strange indeed. They featured all the correct elements of traditional icons, but the Trinity and the saints depicted were drawn not from life, nor imagination, but from the sort of photographs of public personages that are printed in the newspapers. These bland faces and reassuring eyes had been done in oils with total exactitude. The artist had even rendered the minute moiré patterning of coloured dots that constituted the printed image.
‘I can see why you’re so concerned to get your newspaper in good condition each day, Mr Dykes,’ he said – and immediately regretted it, it sounded so trite, so bourgeois a comment.
‘Ye-es,’ Simon-Arthur replied, ‘it’s very difficult to get that level of detail if you’re working from a soggy paper.’
‘Is there much of a demand for icons at the moment?’
‘A huge demand,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes, ‘a vast demand, but Simon-Arthur doesn’t sell his. He paints them for the greater glory of our Saviour, for no other client.’
Just then the door of the room swung open and Christabel-Sharon came in, carrying her three-year-old daughter Storm in her thin arms. The little girl was feverish. She was murmuring in a distracted way and had two bright, scarlet spots high up on her cheeks. Christabel-Sharon herself was in tears. ‘Henry has thrown Storm out of the oxygen tent again, Simon-Arthur; really, you must do something about it, look at the state she’s in.’