by Will Self
‘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 in-disci-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 autodidact, 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.
‘What are you doing, Fein?’ I couldn’t help giggling.
‘This is it, sir,’ I said. ‘What we’ve been waiting for. It’s the Indian mutiny.’
Mr Vello looked at my horrible, freckly little face. His eyes swung around the room to take in the rebellious sepoys. He sat down heavily and began to sob.
He sobbed and sobbed. His heavy shoulders heaved and shook. His wails filled the room. When Simmo opened the door to the corridor they filled the corridor as well. Eventually the Headmaster came with Mr Doherty, the gym teacher, and they led Mr Vello away, for ever.
So now you know how it was that I killed Mr Vello. Murdered him. You don’t think that’s enough? You think I’m being hard on myself? Children can be nasty after all – without meaning to be. But I meant to be, I really meant to be.
Last night I had one of my worst Mr Vello dreams yet. I was in Calcutta, it was 1857 – the Indian Mutiny was in full swing. Screaming fourteen-year-old sepoys broke into my villa and dragged me away. Their faces were distorted with blood lust and triumph. Dhiran Vaz hauled me along by the collar of my tunic. He and Rhamon took me and threw me in a cell, a tiny close cell, no more than twenty-feet square. And then they threw in the others, the other victims of the Mutiny: all my guests. All the guests I’ve ever had on Fein Time Tonight, one after another they came pressing into the cell, and each time one entered there was new roar of approval from the crowd of sepoy classmates massed on the dusty parade ground outside. I was pressed into the wall, tighter and tighter. My eyes filled with sweat but my throat was parched. I got a pain as sharp as a stuck bone when I tried to swallow. My thirst was oppressive, I longed for something, anything to drink.
And then Mr Vello arrived. He was in his Yorkshire County Cricket Club blazer, as ever. The chat-show guests passed him over their heads and then wedged him down beside me. He was still crying. ‘Why did you do it, Fein?’ he whimpered. ‘Why did you do it?’ And he was still whimpering when I buried my teeth into the leathery dewlap of his throat; still whimpering when I began to suck the life out of him.
A Short History of the
English Novel
‘All crap,’ said Gerard through a mouthful of hamburger, ‘utter shite – and the worst thing is that we’re aware of it, we know what’s going on. Really, I think, it’s the cultural complement to the decline of the economy, in the seventies, coming lolloping along behind.’
We were sitting in Joe Allen and Gerard was holding forth on the sad state of the English novel. This was the only price I had to pay for our monthly lunch together: listening to Gerard sound off.
I came back at him. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on this one, Gerard. Isn’t that a perennial gripe, something that comes up time and again? Surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’
‘You’re bound to say that, being a woman.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, insomuch as the novel was very much a feminine form in the first place, and now that our literary culture has begun to fragment, the partisan concerns of minorities are again taking precedence. There isn’t really an “English novel” now, there are just women’s novels, black novels, gay novels.’
I tuned him out. He was too annoying to listen to. Round about us the lunchtime crowd was thinning. A few advertising and city types sipped their wine and Perrier, nodding over each other’s shoulders at the autographed photos that studded the restaurant’s walls, as if they were saluting dear old friends.
Gerard and I had been doing these monthly lunches at Joe Allen for about a year. Ours was an odd friendship. For a while he’d been married to a friend of mine but it had been a duff exercise in emotional surgery, both hearts rejecting the other. They hadn’t had any children. Some of our mutual acquaintances suspected that they were gay, and that the marriage was one of convenience, a coming together to avoid coming out.
Gerard was also a plump, good-looking man; who despite his stress-filled urban existence still retained the burnish of a country childhood in the pink glow of his cheeks and the chestnut hanks of his thick fringe.
Gerard did something in publishing. That was what accounted for his willingness to pronounce on the current state of English fiction. It wasn’t anything editorial or high profile. Rather, when he talked to me of his work – which he did only infrequently – it was of books as so many units, trafficked hither and thither as if they were boxes of washing powder. And when he spoke of authors, he managed somehow to reduce them to the status of assembly line workers, trampish little automata who were merely bolting the next lump of text on to an endlessly unrolling narrative product.
‘. . . spry old women’s sex novels, Welsh novels, the Glasgow Hard Man School, the ex-colonial guilt novel – both perpetrator and victim version . . .’ He was still droning on.
‘What are you driving at, Gerard?’
‘Oh come on, you’re not going to play devil’s advocate on this one, are you? You don’t believe in the centrality of the literary tradition in this country any more than I do, now do you?’
‘S’pose not.’
‘You probably buy two or three of the big prize-winning novels every year and then possibly, just possibly, get round to reading one of them a year or so later. As for anything else, you might skim some thrillers that have been made into TV dramas – or vice versa – or scan something issue-based, or nibble at a plot that hinges on an unusual sexual position, the blurb for which happens to have caught your eye – ‘
‘But, Gerard’ – despite myself I was rising to it – ‘just because we don’t read that much, aren’t absorbed in it, it doesn’t mean that important literary production isn’t going on – ‘
‘Not that old chestnut!’ he snorted. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that there may be thousands of unbelievably good manuscripts rotting away in attic rooms, only missing out on publication because of the diffidence of their authors or the formulaic, sales-driven narrow-mindedness of publishers, eh?’
‘No, Gerard, I wasn’t going to argue that – ‘
‘It’s like the old joke about LA, that there aren’t any waiters in the whole town, just movie stars “resting”. I suppose all these bus boys and girls’ – he flicked a hand towards the epicene character who had been ministering to our meal – ‘are great novelists hanging out to get more material.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant.’
‘Excuse me?’ It was the waiter, a lanky blond who had been dangling in the mid-distance. ‘Did you want anything else?’
‘No, no.’ Gerard started shaking his head – but then broke off. ‘Actually, now that you’re here, would you mind if I asked you a question?’
‘Oh Gerard,’ I groaned, ‘leave the poor boy alone.’
‘No, not at all, anything to be of service.’ He was bending down towards us, service inscribed all over his soft-skinned face.
‘Tell me then, are you happy working here or do you harbour any other ambition?’ Gerard put the question as straightforwardly as he could but his plump mouth was twisted with irony.
The waiter thought for a while. I observed his flat fingers, nails bitten to the quick, and his thin nose coped with blue veins at the nostrils’ flare. His hair was tied back in a pony-tail and fastened with a thick rubber band.
‘Do you mind?’ he said at length, pulling half-out one of the free chairs.
‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘of course not.’ He sat down and instantly we all became intimates, our three brows forming a tight triangle over the cruets. The waiter put up his hands vertically, holding them like parentheses into which he would insert qualifying words.
‘Well,’ a self-depr
ecatory cough, ‘it’s not that I mind working here – because I don’t, but I write a little and I suppose I would like to be published some day.’
I wanted to hoot, to crow, to snort derision, but contented myself with a ‘Ha!’.
‘Now come on, wait a minute.’ Gerard was adding his bracketing hands to the manual quorum. ‘OK, this guy is a writer but who’s to say what he’s doing is good, or original?’
‘Gerard! You’re being rude – ‘
‘No, really, it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind. He’s got a point.’ His secret out, the waiter was more self-possessed. ‘I write – that’s true. I think the ideas are good. I think the prose is good. But I can’t tell if it hangs together.’
‘Well, tell us a bit about it. If you can, quote some from memory.’ I lit a cigarette and tilted back in my chair.
‘It’s complex. We know that Eric Gill was something more than an ordinary sexual experimenter. According to his own journal he even had sex with his dog. I’m writing a narrative from the point of view of Gill’s dog. The book is called Fanny Gill or I was Eric Gill’s Canine Lover.’ Gerard and I were giggling before he’d finished; and the waiter smiled with us.
‘That’s very funny,’ I said, ‘I especially like the play on – ‘
‘Fanny Hill, yeah. Well, I’ve tried to style it like an eighteenth-century picaresque narrative. You know, with the dog growing up in the country, being introduced to the Gill household by a canine pander. Her loss of virginity and so on.’
‘Can you give us a little gobbet then?’ asked Gerard. He was still smiling but no longer ironically. The waiter sat back and struck a pose. With his scraped-back hair and long face, he reminded me of some Regency actor-manager.
‘Then one night, as I turned and tossed in my basket, the yeasty smell of biscuit and the matted ordure in my coat blanketing my prone form, I became aware of a draught of turpentine, mixed with the lavender of the night air.