by Will Self
Carol’s hand travelled down, through her furze, doctored to a socially acceptable flying vee. Her pinkies scampered ahead to truffle in the gashed loam. But here, where Carol had tactilely surveyed every pore, set the theodolite of her hand on every mound, she found something new. Her fingertips just skated over her clitoris, tucked as it was under the hood formed by her inner labia, like a tree growing in a gulley.
But en route to her vagina, in that place where there should have been nothing but slippery anticipation, the tipping deck before the sea, she found instead a tiny nodule, a little gristly frond of flesh.
Of course, had Carol troubled to wield her hand mirror as she had been instructed, had she placed it where Dan’s mouth had so seldom been, she would have been in a position to establish the truth. She would have clocked immediately that the frond was an outgrowth of the spongiosum material surrounding her urethra—that somehow her vestibular bulb was being grossly flexed from within, pushing forth a miniature volcanic column of tissue, sinew, blood and vessel.
Now the body is an old peasant, it retains a vivid memory for felt (and imagined) injustice. Even more peasant-like is the body’s tendency to retail little proverbs or sayings to its accompanying mind. A good example of this practice, so ubiquitous that it is scarcely ever remarked on, was prompted by Carol’s discovery. Her finger probed. There was definitely something there, something that seemed quite large and embedded. Something that neither felt full of fluid, like a cyst; nor insensate like a wart or a callus. ‘But,’ said Carol’s body to her mind, ‘objects in the genitals, like those in the mouth, do appear to be so much larger than they really are.’ And with this folksy assurance Carol let the gristly frond rest. One finger headed south to her vagina, another north to her clitoris. In due course, A Whiter Shade of Pale took on form and substance and became a Rider on the Storm; and when the rider had passed by Carol was left behind, naked and gooey, spent on the slip-on cover.
But that was not the last of the frond, oh no, far from it. For although the peasant body dismissed it in the short term as an accident, a filament of meat stuck between the teeth and swollen against the gum, it also retained a memory like an embarrassing polaroid taken at a hen party. And when Carol was relaxed and unsuspecting the following afternoon, her vile body thrust the photograph in front of her mind and threatened blackmail.
She was in Safeway at the time. She had asked a Muslim shelf-stacker where the bacon was kept. The shelf-stacker, whose uncle was a haj, and who believed that Allah struck down those who ate the flesh of the pig with cancer, did his best to give Carol the most obscure and misleading directions. As she turned away from where he knelt, pricing up tins of puréed tomato, the frond swelled up in her mind with such alacrity, that she became petrified, fearing that the awful little promontory might come bursting out of the tight armature of her jeans and elasticised underwear.
As soon as she found herself in a deserted aisle, Carol popped her fly buttons and her hand sought out the damp interior. Jesus! There it was, larger than ever! Was it just the sensitivity of her fingertips, or had the frond actually grown? Was it just her imagination, or could she, with her probing digit, actually feel some kind of structure to the frond; some internal viscosities of its own that suggested that it was not simply a raggle-taggle end of gristle, but something sensate?
The curious head of the Muslim shelf-stacker ap-peared around the end of the gondola. Carol withdrew her hand from her jeans and broke out in a sweat, just as if she had been discovered wanking next to the bouillon cubes.
Now, say you. You find a gristly frond growing in your vagina masturbating of an evening. What could be simpler than to make an appointment at the local health centre and in due course visit your doctor?
‘What seems to be the problem?’ says the doctor, a kindly middle-aged woman, the Friends of the Earth badge on her lapel winking at you in philanthropic conspiracy. You tell her. She asks you to take off your clothes and hop up on the examining table. Once there, she examines you with a care and dexterity that is in itself instantly reassuring. The examination completed, she provides you with a completely satisfying explanation of the frond: its origins, its form, its likely extent and duration. You leave the surgery with a prescription for various salves and unguents; there is no problem.
That’s what you would will Carol to do, isn’t it? But Carol’s medical experiences hadn’t been like that. Carol’s mother was too inhibited ever to even say words like ‘sanitary’ and ‘towel’. This left Carol to discover her own biology in the fullness of time. The fullness was reached in the showers at school, where Carol had the misfortune to start with a bang rather than a whimper; a thick and bloody discharge splashing over her wet shanks. Some of the other girls screamed, Carol was mortified. Her mother, fidgeting like a rat, fixed her up with ‘STs’ that evening.
At Llanstephan Beverley had been astonished by Carol’s ignorance of her own biology. ‘The female body is incredible,’ she breathed at Carol, using her enthusiasm for it as a rope with which to pull herself closer. ‘It is an ever-changing, self-regulating mechanism. A kind of chemical factory really. Totally unlike a man’s body, which never changes, which is static and lifeless.’
That night in her blond-wood study bedroom, half wired still on instant coffee, Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the esturine sand; her great buttocks were shoved up against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming.
Subsequently she was persuaded by Beverley to attend a well woman group, which met in the house of an active and sympathetic faculty member.
Here female undergraduates were encouraged to probe their breasts, their genitals, and even to worm their fingers upwards, towards their gonads. It was all designed to help them to appreciate the wonder of their own biology. Carol learned to palp for cancerous lumps, and to utilise a hand mirror in the search for cell dysplasia; so as to obviate the need for some man to perform the ritual humiliation of dilation and curettage.
Carol stuck it out for three sessions, but baulked after a demonstration of the application of a poultice of comfrey and live yoghurt to a large, inflamed pudenda. It wasn’t that Carol felt that the poor girl was being hurt, exposed or humiliated (although she was all three). It was rather that some atavistic impulse led Carol to feel, suddenly but with absolute conviction, that such things were better left in the dark, where they belonged.
So, Carol had no sympathetic woman GP, friendly, and determined to adopt a holistic approach. Instead she had Dr Flaherty, the local doctor, with whom both she and Dan had registered as a matter of course within a month of moving to Muswell Hill.
Carol had been to see him once, on account of a dry heave of a cough. She judged that he was just the doctor for Dan as soon as she clapped eyes on him; poking his cropped and buffeted head around the door of the waiting room, ushering her through to his inner sanctum. For Flaherty was stinking. Stinking at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. Stinking as if his whole body had been dipped in a mixture of cooking sherry and Rémy Martin. Flaherty was stinking, arsing, fucking drunk. Drunk, drunk.
He made a half-hearted attempt to persuade Carol that she needed a chest examination, but it was a feeble effort. As she left the surgery, clutching her prescription for linctus simplex, the ancient receptionist, clad in white like a nun, but with the withered face and beady eyes of a Neapolitan procuress, looked at Carol as if she were personally to blame for the distempered premises with their foetid odour.
Needless to say, Carol had not been back. But she did send Dan. It was after the occasion when he had gone missing for a full thirty-six hours. And Derry, by dint of working backwards from
fuddled supposition to more lucid fact, had eventually discovered him, cuddling a bottle of Night Train, underneath Charing Cross railway bridge.
Dan returned from his consultation with Flaherty with two bits of information. Firstly Flaherty told him that what he had experienced was an alcoholic blackout, otherwise known as an instance of Korsakov’s Syndrome. And secondly, Flaherty urged Dan not to worry. ‘My dear boy,’ wheezed the patchy and varicoloured old medic, ‘you don’t have a drink problem. No man has a drink problem until he drinks more than his doctor!’ And then he filled the surgery with great gusts of evil, shit-smelling laughter.
Now medicine is the modern religion and doctors are our shamen, possessed of arcane knowledge and imbued with the necessary wisdom, and commensurate powers, to decoct the auguries and then to cast out the evil spirits that plague us, whether they be spirits that infest the body, or worse, spirits that infest the mind. But once one has abandoned the idea of seeking assistance from a doctor, one has instantly entered a twilight zone, a crepuscular territory, where the anatomy and its corruption through disease becomes fantastical and phantasmagoric.
Over the next forty-eight hours, Carol agonised over whether or not to see Flaherty; or to call Beverley and ask for advice; or to do nothing at all, in the hope that whatever the gristly frond was, it would just shrivel up, wither, collapse in on itself. In a word: just plain disappear. Leaving her genitals pristine, smooth, a delight to find and find again, just as she had been doing in the few short weeks since she had discovered the joy of wanking.
Carol would be ironing, or tucking in a bedcover, or making free with the Shake ’n’ Vac, when the gristly frond would come teasing its way back into her mind. Her agitated claw, seemingly against its mistress’s will, would once again make its exploratory journey. The frond would still be there. It could be her imagination, inflamed by anxiety, but each time her fingers prised her labia apart, the frond seemed a little larger, a little more gristly.
After forty-eight hours Carol, despite her insipid nature, was really quite upset. She resolved that in the morning she would either call Beverley, or make an appointment with Flaherty; one or the other—if not both. What swayed her and buried the issue for the foreseeable future (what a trite expression! How can a future be ‘foreseeable’, especially when you’re growing some ghastly frond between your soft thighs), was a great life change that swept over both Carol and Dan. The herald of this life change was Dave 2, and its harbinger was Dan’s mother.
Morning came, and a grey wash of light found Dan, his cheek thrust hard in the carpeted right-angle of the bottom stair. The vomit had got into his hair and down the round collar of his fashionable leather blouson. He cried over his Alpen. Those folded corners were turned into raw gutters, the better to funnel the salty stream into the Swiss cereal. Carol was not unsympathetic but she wasn’t sympathetic either. She pulled the sides of her terrytowelling robe tighter around her slim shoulders, and idly noted that the TV-AM weatherman, an effete creature missing from the screen for these past two months, had now reappeared on BBC Breakfast Time, wearing a suit.
Dan blubbed as he dialled his mother. And then he blubbed to Carol that this would be the last time—the last time he would ask her to phone work on his behalf— and the last time that his behaviour would make it necessary.
‘I’m stopping boozing, Carol,’ he blubbed, and his deft fingers scouted and shaped the edge of the breakfast counter, as if it were some benchmark of sobriety, soon to be attained. ‘I’ve asked Mum for help. I knew that she would know what to do. She’s sending someone to see me this evening, someone called Dave. He’s going to take me to a kind of meeting.’
All day Dan lurked around the house, propping his pounding head against door jambs and patterned cushion covers. God, how his hangdog look infuriated Carol! Never before, not even in his cups, had Dan disgusted her as he disgusted her now. He was such a turn-off. And now he was giving in to his mother, accepting her estimation of him and seeking her help. This was weakness run rampant.
That afternoon Carol went to the pet-shop at the Quadrant. They had had a fresh delivery of cuttlefish. Carol brought back two pieces, one for the mynah and one for the cockateel. The cuttlefish was white, dry and light in her hand, like a bleached bone. She pushed it through the wire bars. The birds looked at her with their solo-eyed, insectoid stares. Dan came up behind her, she could feel his forelocked head nuzzling between her shoulderblades. She shrugged him off. In the kitchen, while she waited for the kettle to boil, she could hear Dan in the living-room, still blubbing.
4
Dave 2
DAVE 2’s REAL SURNAME was Hobbes, and his parents still lived in Shepton Mallet. Had Dave 2 not had the great good fortune to be an alcoholic, one feels that he might well have struggled for some time to find his true vocation, that of religious whipper-in; spiritual barker; moral double-glazing salesman. For that was Dave 2. He was the man on the door with a ready grin and a quip for the wavering punter. He was a universal type. One could imagine him in all times and at all places: wearing a toga and explaining the fish symbol, or resplendent in a round-collared tunic, Marxist catechism in hand, drumming home the simplified fallacies of Dialectical Materialism.
But given the particular historical moment within which he found himself, Dave 2’s chronic alcoholism had provided him with a passport to Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA dogma was loosely based on Christian principles, but there was a residual zeal for low church liturgy and ritual that, in the hands of types like Dave 2, all too quickly fanned up into a witch-burning Salemite passion. For, as William James so justly remarked, the only known cure for dipsomania is religiomania.
And, at this juncture, the poofy old don paused again. He got out from his inside pocket one of those Mahawat cigarillos that were popular in the mid-seventies. He put it in his pink little mouth and lit it with a rolled-gold Dunhill lighter.
The props and the deft blocking that made up the whole performance were so in keeping with his soft countenance and the faggy invective that laced his tale that I became slightly uneasy …This sardonic, effete don with his amusing if mordant story …Damn it all, he had to be too good to be true.
The lights had gone out in the carriage, and we had ground to a halt again, while an Inter-City 125 whooshed past on the main line. The tip of the cigarillo glowed and dimmed in the close darkness. He cleared his throat with a click of firm sputum on palate, and continued.
Dave 2 was of that opinion himself. ‘I’m fortunate to be what I call—and I hope you’ll pardon my French, ladies —a pisshead. Yeah, I’m fortunate to be a pisshead. You want’er know why? Because it’s brought me to a spiritual life: a life of the spirit. Oh, and why pisshead? Because sometimes I would get so drunk that I would piss all over myself. I was completely incontinent, totally, completely. So that’s what I was—literally a pisshead.’
But being a pisshead had really been the least of it. Indeed, given Dave 2’s accounts of some of his more extreme intoxicated behaviour one might almost have said that had he confined himself to pissing on his own head, he would have been almost socially acceptable.
For, compared to Dave 2’s lapses in memory and consequent losses of identity, Dan’s escapades were mere awaydays. With Dave 2 we can see the compass of the whole Grand Tour.
Dave 2 had once had an alcoholic blackout that was so long that during it he had joined the army, gone through basic training and been dishonourably discharged, for, guess what, drunkenness.
And if you don’t believe that this is possible, then spend an evening with Dave 2 and his cronies, because they know more about alcoholism in all its manifestations than an institute full of experts, and they are very keen to impart. So keen that a session with them is more tedious and introverted than being stuck on a desert island with a tour-load of constipated, bourgeois, middle-aged French women.
But of all this Dan and Carol were unaware. Instead, from the moment Dave 2 arrived at the maisonette in Melrose Mansions, both
of them were captivated by his vitality, his immediacy; the way he seemed to smash into shards the very quiddity of a continuum in their lives that they had always assumed to be of the consistency of the toughest Tupperware.
‘Bing-bong’ went the door chimes at seven o’clock. Dave 2 stood in the vestibule, arms akimbo, jaw lanterned, a thatch of thick sandy hair tilted sideways on his head, so that one edge touched the collar of his army surplus fatigue jacket. This garment was Dave 2’s trademark. He called it ‘my uniform’. It was re-equipped for the campaign each and every day. One hip-dangling pocket was stuffed to overflowing with mock-gold flip-top boxes of Benson and Hedges Special Filter, and the other was usually stretched to its seams with some work or works of an improving or a spiritual nature. Books with titles like Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I am? or Why Are You Afraid to Tell Me Who You Are? and even the blunter and more comprehensive Why Are We Afraid?
Dave 2 then, lowering in the vestibule, under the neat certainty of the sconce, says to Carol, ‘Dave, Dave Hobbes. I’ve come to pick up…Dan?’ He said the name as if not quite sure, and an appealing glance seemed to come up at Carol from his yellow eyes. Seemed to, because it was a trick, an illusion. Dave 2 stood at least a foot taller than Carol, but constant abasements and attempts to achieve perfect humility had given him the ability to alter his height at will.
And Dave 2 saw a thinnish, blondish young woman, her flat hair trained behind lobeless ears. She had flawless skin, but it did have some kind of a waxy patina; and there was also an oddly collapsing aspect to her midriff, as if Carol were a card table in the process of being vertically folded for storage purposes. Dave 2 said later of this encounter and the first impressions he associated with it, ‘It was obvious that she was ready for help, that she had reached her own personal Waterloo… She was all sort of faded and wrung out, weren’t you?’ And at this point he would turn to Carol, sitting next to him in the circle of chairs, radiant in white chemise, and she would radiantly smile her assent.