Grey Area (Will Self)

by Will Self

  In fact it grew more convincingly mid-grey the more I checked it, until at lunchtime it was no comparison at all; it was rather that the tiny rectangle on the chart was a miniature window, looking out on to another quadrant of the grey heavens. All it needed was its own vertical textured fabric louvres, to complete the marriage between sample and sky.

  I went down to the café and bought my sandwiches, a can of Diet Coke and one of those giant, crumbly cookies.

  In the park I sat with other office workers in a circle of benches that surrounds a sagging rotunda. This feature is built from red London bricks. It’s damp and destitute, long since re-pointed. The pillars resemble a demented loggia, which instead of moving forward has turned in on itself, forming a defensive corral. The pools of rusty water at the base of each pillar seem evidence of incontinence, a suitable indignity for wayward park furniture.

  The office workers sat canted sideways on the benches. An occasional pigeon hopped up to one of these sandwich eaters, clearly shamed by its capacity to fly and doing its best to hide tattered wings. These exchanges between people and birds were embarrassing to watch. That’s the truth. We have now advanced so far into a zone of the genetically furtive, that office workers, contemplating these flying vermin, feel their own humanity compromised in some way. So they roll up bread pills, and averting their eyes, proffer them to the un-stuck craws.

  All afternoon I sat in my office and worked. The straining in my belly grew, swelled, became even more pregnant. I was certain that I was on the verge of getting my period. My nipples were so sensitive that I could feel every bump and nodule on their aureoles, snagging against the cotton of my bra. The afternoon was also punctuated by a series of quite sharp abdominal pains. After every one of them I was convinced I would feel the familiar ultimate lancing. I was poised, ready to head for the toilet – the venue for my imagined impregnation by the VPL man – but no blood came.

  Instead I occupied myself with the collation and binding of a series of management briefings that the Department was publishing for the greater edification of the Company as a whole.

  Five o’clock found me bending the flexible prongs back on the clean sheets, to house them securely in their plastic covers. My boss hung his face around the doorjamb and grunted approval. I couldn’t see his ear – and this troubled me. I wanted to ask him to take a step into the room, so that I could check on his ear, check that it was still there and still his. But the idea of it was silly, a nitrous oxide thought that giggled in my head. To stop myself from smirking I concentrated on the odd, phallic intervention, made at waist-height, by the black-taped handle of his squash racket.

  Then he left. I ordered my desk, and soon afterwards went home.

  At home I ate and then had a bath, hoping that it would ease the pre-menstrual tension. It didn’t. I put on a dressing gown and wandered about my flat. Never before had it seemed so claustrophobic. The neat, space-saving arrangement of double-seater sofa and twin armchairs was a cell within a cell. The coffee table, with its stack of magazines and dish of pot-pourri, was part of a set for a chat show that never made it past the development stage. The images on the walls were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest.

  I turned on the television, but couldn’t concentrate. I must have slept, squelched down amongst the foam-filled, polyester-covered cushions. Slid into sleep, the surfaces of my eyes grounding quickly on the salty, silty bottom of unconsciousness. There I floated, twisting slowly in the deceptive currents.

  Assembled backwards. Quickly. Scherlupppp! The elements of my dream: I arrive for work and see that the organisational chart has been rearranged overnight. The strips, dots and squares have been manipulated so as to form a new configuration, which places a dot I haven’t seen before at the very apex of the Department’s hierarchy. I consult the legend, a small ring binder dangling from the rail at the bottom of the board by a length of twine, only to discover that the dot is me.

  I realise that I will have to move across the corridor into my ex-boss’s office. I am relieved to see him coming through my door; cradled in his arms is his desk blotter and giant mouse mat. On top of these surfaces is a miscellany of objects he has culled from his desk: a Rotadex, a date-a-day diary, a dictaphone, and a collection of plastic beakers, joined at the root, brimming with pens, pencils and paper clips.

  He finds it difficult to meet my eye, but I’m wholly unembarrassed. I gesture to the collation and binding exercise that I was undertaking the previous evening, and which is still spread out on my desk. I say, ‘Finish this off, will you?’ He nods, dumbly.

  I cross the corridor to my new office. I go behind the broad, black slab of desk and sit down. My former boss has left one object behind on his desk top, an executive toy of some kind, saved from the era when these mini constructions of stainless steel and black plastic had a vogue.

  This one takes the form of a Newton’s cradle. But in the place of ball bearings, there are tiny, humanoid figures hanging from the threads by their shiny aluminium hands. The figures are naked, and when I set the cradle in motion, they engage in dangerously athletic congress. There is silence, except for the sound of miniature, metal, intercrural activity.

  Piled under the vertical textured-fabric louvres; tucked up against the vents under the storage heaters; squidged sideways to lie along the top of the cable-tracking conduit, which circles the office at knee height; stacked in loose bundles on every flat surface, bar the desk itself, are many many panty liners, tampons and sanitary towels. Staunchers, stemmers, cotton-wool barriers. There is so much plastic-backed absorbent material in my new office that, taken together with the fabric-covered walls and carpet-tiled floor, the effect is of a recording studio. The clicking of the Newton’s cradle has amazing clarity. The shadows of the figurines banging into one another are thrown into sharp relief against the whiteboard on the far wall. A cord of pain, running like a zipper up through the flesh from my vagina to my throat, threatens to undo me, to spill out my interior, like so much offal, or rhino shit, on the carpet tiles.

  * * *

  When I awake Newsnight is on the television. Peter Snow is running the world from his modular grey bunker of a studio. He’s sitting in front of oversized venetian-blind slat panels, and ignoring the micro-computer that has sunk at an oblique angle into the vinyl-veined console he’s sitting behind.

  He is speaking with undue emphasis. It’s this undue emphasis that impinges on me first – but it occurs to me immediately afterwards that perhaps everything I have ever heard anyone say has been subjected to undue emphasis.

  Snow is talking to two pop academics. I can tell this with some certainty, because one of them is too well dressed for a politician, and the other too badly. Like a dentist with mass appeal, Snow is getting down to extracting the truth from this duo. He cants himself towards the badly dressed, froggy-looking one.

  ‘Now, Dr Busner, haven’t we been hearing for years now – from you and others – about the possible effects of such a bottoming-out?’

  ‘Quite so,’ says the man called Busner, ‘although I’m not sure that “bottoming-out” is the right expression. What we have here is a condition of stasis. I’m not prepared to hazard any long-term predictions about its duration on the basis of the sanity quotient figures we currently have; but what I can say is that the Government’s response has been woefully inadequate – a case of too little, too late.’

  He falls to rolling and unrolling the ragged strip of mohair tie that flows down over the soft folds of his belly. He does this extremely well, with one hand, the way a card sharp runs a coin through his fingers. Snow now cants himself towards the other man, a virile sixty year old, with intact and ungreying hair, wearing a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. ‘Professor Stein, a case of too little, too late?’

  ‘I think not.’ Stein steeples his fingers on top of the console. ‘Like Dr Busner, I would reserve the right to comme
nt at some later date. The evidence we have at the moment is sketchy, incomplete. But that being noted, even if the conditions today’s report draws our attention to are fully realised, it only points towards the non-event I am certain will not occur.’

  ‘So, contrary to what you have said in the past, you now think something may well happen?’ Snow is delighted that he has caught Stein’s double-negative.

  ‘That’s not what I said,’ Stein fires right back at the lanky television presenter. ‘I appreciate the implications of this data. It is bizarre – to say the least – to have so many people apparently experiencing a lengthy period of climatic and seasonal stasis; but we must bear in mind that, as yet, this is a localised phenomenon, confined to a discrete area. It has only been this way for some six weeks – ‘

  ‘More like two months!’ Busner cuts in.

  This gives Peter Snow the opportunity to try and knock the discussion down, so he can drag it somewhere else. ‘How-can-you-Doc-tor-Busner’ – he is in profile, Struwwelpeter-like, fingers splayed, elongated, nose sharp, rapping out the words in a dot-dash fashion, letting his pentameters beat up on each other – ‘be-so-o-certain-about-the-ex-act-time-the-stasis-began?’

  ‘Well, I admit’ – Busner, far from being cowed, is invigorated by Snow’s tongue-tapping – ‘it can be difficult to ascertain when nothing begins to happen.’ His plump lips twitch, he is sucking on the boiled irony, ‘But not, I think, impossible.

  ‘Take events – for example. How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that is a very interesting question.’ This from Stein. The three of them are now all canted towards one another, forming a boyish huddle. ‘I myself am intrigued by small events, matters of the merest degree. Perhaps I might give an example?’

  ‘Please do.’ Peter Snow’s tone has softened, it’s clear that the idea interests him.

  ‘Can we have the camera in very tight on the surface of the console, please?’

  ‘Pull right in, please, camera 2.’ Snow makes a come-on-down gesture.

  The camera zooms right down until the veins in the grey vinyl of the console are rift valleys. What must be the very tip of Stein’s fingernail comes into view. I can see the grain of it. It pokes a little at the vinyl, dislodging a speck of something. It could be dust or a fragment of skin, or mica. But the speck is both very small – less than a tenth of the width of Stein’s fingernail – and very grey; as grey as the console itself.

  The camera zooms back out in. The three middle-aged men are beaming. ‘So there we have,’ says Peter Snow, addressing a portion of the nation, ‘a very small event. Thank you, Professor Stein, and you, Dr Busner.’ The two pop academics incline their heads, slightly.

  The camera moves back in until Snow fills the screen. There are some fresh newspapers, interleaved by his elbow. ‘Well-that’s-about-it-for-tonight-except-for-a-quick-look-at-tomorrow’s-papers.’ His hands pull them out, one at a time, while he recites the headlines, ‘The-Times: “No-New-Developments-in-Stasis-Situation”, The Guardian: “Government-Ministers-Knew-that-Nothing-Had-Happened”. And-Today-with-the-rather-racier: “We’re-in-a-Grey-Area!”.

  ‘Jeremy-Paxman-will-be-here-tomorrow-night. But-for-now, this-is-Peter-Snow-wishing-you-good-night.’ The grey man on the screen smiles, picks up the pile of papers from the grey console in front of him, and shuffles them together, while the camera pulls up and away.

  I pull up and away, and go next door to the bedroom. I take off my dressing gown and hang it on a hook behind the door. I take my nightie from beneath my pillow and put it on. I get a fresh pair of underpants from the chest of drawers and wriggle into them. I set the alarm clock for seven-fifteen. And I get a new sanitary towel and place it in the gusset of my underpants.

  My period might start during the night.

  Inclusion®

  You are holding in your hands a folder. The hands cannot be described by me, because they are yours, but the folder can. A shiny, white thing, the standard A4 size, it has sparse, expensively embossed, blue lettering on the cover, together with a corporate logo. The first line of the lettering reads: ‘Cryborg Pharmaceutical Industries’ and underneath it says: ‘Inclusion, a Revolutionary Approach to Anti-Depressant Medication’. Beneath that there is the corporate logo, an odd thing that looks somewhat like a pineapple with wavy lines radiating all around it. Whether or not it expresses some attribute of Cryborg Pharmaceutical Industries is moot, or merely obscure, depending on how interested you are. Depending on how far you are prepared to include the marketing brochures of pharmaceutical companies in your life. Give them head-room.

  If you open the Inclusion folder you’ll find what you expect to find. Namely, that the marketing budget didn’t quite reach to laminating overleaf, and further, that the two sides of the folder are equipped with diagonal pockets – pockets that house on the right the Inclusion marketing brochure and on the left a miscellany of order forms, sheets covered with corporate information, information on other Cryborg products etc., etc.

  So, you ease out the marketing brochure from its pocket and start to flip through. The paper is creamy and textured, the type is artful and elegant, the photographs and illustrations are composed, if a little arid. Of course, initially, it’s amusing to see that anti-depressant drugs are marketed in exactly the same way as lingerie, or cars. But it’s an amusement that soon fades to a faint wryness and then winks out altogether.

  On page two a photo shows a young couple with a toddler. The man is laughing and holding the child – who’s also laughing – up in the air. The woman is looking at him with milch cow eyes, slopping over with admiration – there will be no crying over this spillage. The photo caption reads: ‘Once a patient is being treated with Inclusion, he can be maintained indefinitely at a constant, regular dosage. A lifetime of positive engagement lies ahead.’

  Turning back a page we discover why it is that this should be the case. See here: the same couple, but now his brown model face is crammed with agony against a rain-speckled windowpane. And her lighter-brown model hand, sketching a gesture of tenderness across his knotted back, will soon – it’s absolutely clear – be shrugged off. He may even belt her one. The neglected toddler sits on the floor at their feet, looking up at them with tiny, dull eyes.

  This is a man who needs Inclusion, that’s the conclusion you have to draw. This man is crying out for Inclusion, or at any rate he would be if he knew what it was.

  A flip-through the rest of the brochure is all that’s needed for you to clock the pastel, shaded drawings of dissected brains. If you tilt the brochure this way and that you will see that the portion of the brain that contains the receptors to which these benign Inclusion molecules attach themselves has been coated with a lozenge of varnish, so that it shines.

  The accompanying text is, however, unilluminating – an unholy mish-mash of medicalese and promotional claptrap that combines together to produce repellent patois like the following:

  Inclusion has fewer contra-indications than the tri-cyclics and the SSRIs.* Better still, the attractive, easy-to-swallow spanules come in a variety of quality-enhanced patternings: paisley, Stuart tartan, heliotrope . . . etc., etc.

  If there is anything to be learnt from the Inclusion folder it isn’t contained in the brochure. The brochure is quite clearly not for the general reader. But what’s this? Poking out from among the order forms in the opposite pocket there is a thick wadge of typescript. Funny to think that it could be hiding there, in this folder which seemed so flimsy, so insubstantial, when first you hefted it. Pull it out now:

  What is it? We-ell, it looks like a report of some sort. It’s word-processed rather than printed, but it’s been done on a good machine with an attractive typeface, a Palatino or Bodoni. It isn’t bound – the comers of the fifteen or so pages are mashed together with a single paper clip, yet somehow the report is instantly alluring. Right at the top is written:

  Ref. Inc/957 [and underneath] Rep
ort from R.P.H. to Main Board [and beneath that] Strictly for Board Eyes Only. Confidential.

  God, how exciting! Not at all like the Inclusion brochure. You have a prickly little thrill, don’t you? You have the thrill of reading someone’s private correspondence in a silent house, on a Sunday afternoon. Somewhere in the mid-distance a dog barks. You read on:

  Report of the Incident at the Worminghall Research Facility

  From: R.P. Hawke

  To: All Main Board Directors

  Attached to this report are two relevant documents which I suggest are read and then destroyed. They are: Dr Zack Busner’s journal of the events surrounding the aborted Inclusion trial and a diary kept by one of his guinea-pigs (the painter Simon Dykes). I have appended them to my report because I feel they may be of some interest to Board members. However, little of what either Busner or Dykes has to say is of any significance when it comes to understanding, or even attempting to explain, the events at Worminghall over the past four months.

  That task is my responsibility. As the Company’s senior public relations manager I was asked to conduct the appropriate damage limitation exercise after the incident. The results of this are as follows:

  1. The Worminghall Facility itself has been cleared. All evidence of the cyclotron explosion has been disposed of. Our operatives have conducted an exhaustive cleansing operation using the most sophisticated reagents available. All stocks of Inclusion held at the Facility have been destroyed; and I am confident that any residual traces of Inclusion that may have permeated the facility following the explosion will be soon neutralised.

  2. As you are all no doubt aware, the explosion was reported by a local resident to the desk sergeant at Thame Police Station before anyone at Cryborg Head Office knew what had transpired. Fortunately, the fact of the explosion did not gain any wider currency. The police sergeant and the local resident (a Mrs Freeling) have been made extensive, ex gratia payments.