by Self, Will
‘What?’
‘For us to love? D’jew think I should set the house on fire now? We could let the calendar look after itself, huh?’
She peered between her Mumu’s feet at the impacted leaves in Berkeley Square and felt the weight of inconceivable, middle-aged fatigue. She peered down the grooves of plebeian pine, as her poor old Mumu clawed the comestibles out and, cradling them like nutritious babies in her woolly arms, clumsily negotiated the five-barred gate. Natasha saw the trickle of blood lazily snake from beneath Mumu’s slacks, down her shin, into her sock. Like something they might both pick over later. From realm to realm, from sloth, to lust, to pride, to anger, to greed – and back again. In this, a humble outer stand of Phar Lap’s wood, a small plantation of the worlds available.
Dawn peeled back overhead and the gulf of the western sky drew a hard surface over the pools of the wood between the worlds. Natasha’s face emerged like a Polaroid from the limpid water, at first blurred – then overly exact. Hyper-real. Within minutes the burners on rocket earth had been cranked up to full thrust. She rose to her coltish height and her scratched, bloodied calves bent this way and that as she took up the strain of planetary revolution. She stared about her at the shrubbery. It was like all the rest, a stand of eucalyptus and mulga on a rough underlay of grass. In the gums overhead, kookaburras laughed snidely. To the east was a low escarpment, the shadow already retreating in its lee. Around her in the ticking undergrowth the mounds of magnetic termites, like miniature Mies van der Rohes, or the tomb-stones of alien warlords, provided savage orientation.
Natasha found her way back. She was fortunate to have come to her senses when she did, when the sun was low enough, the shadows long enough, the water still plentiful enough. She made it to Gary’s mudicar and woke him. The two of them drove back, east towards Stearns, all the baking day. It goes without saying that Gary was in it. Deep shit.
Natasha stopped long enough in Stearns to collect her little tote bag of pants and paints, her leather jacket and her R. M. Williams boots, her jeans and a trivia quiz book. She also took one of Gary’s black boomerangs – as a sinister souvenir. Up on the track she flagged down a passing Mormon-carrier, and they drove her to Tennant Creek. From Tennant she took the bus to Alice. From Alice she flew to Sydney. At Sydney she didn’t even quit the airport, but hung on in the terminal for thirty-six hours until a flight with a seat cheap and narrow enough became available. She boarded, and flew back around the world to the day before. From Heathrow she took the tube in to King’s Cross, feeling utterly spaced out by the confinement of this ancient muddy city on the banks of its mini-Euphrates. This uh-Ur. This mistake.
In Stearns, Gary pined away. The kid split. Gary ignored the fat young black men who came to play electric guitars, and after a while they ignored him. He pined – and he drank. He staggered across the track to the stores and bought carton after carton of Emu Export and NT Draught and Victoria Bitter and even Castlemaine – which the locals referred to, contemptuously, as ‘barbed wire’. Gary drank and the beer felt barbed in his rough throat. He switched to Bundaberg rum – but fared no better. He neglected everything. In front of the crappy little guvvie house, the once proud mudicar settled into the mud, which became dust, then became mud again. On the long-since rotted carpets lay greasy burger-wrappers and a mulch of mango pips, stalks and skin. In time a large mob of cockroaches moved in. Unlike Gary’s mind, the mudicar had become a full, rich environment. The people understood.
The local quack understood as well. Gary would have to go south for treatment. He left the mudicar for the skinny old men, but the fat young ones took it, and ripped the shit out of the shocks in two days of ‘roo-hunting. Gary went south and the treatment didn’t work. The medics were at a loss to understand why a man as young as this had developed cirrhosis with such scary alacrity, his liver flayed with scars, engorged with sarcomas.
From King’s Cross, Natasha took a cab up the Balls Pond Road, and at an indistinct point – not quite at Dalston Junction, nor exactly past it – she had the driver drop her off. From here on she’d only ever walked. There was a confusing character to this district, a delusive mounding and bunching of the streets, parklets and estates, that made it hard to direct a driver. Especially one who navigated the city using an internal map of Maputo, or Conakry.
In Adelaide, Gary’s liver swelled and swelled – and then ruptured. Bythe time this news made it back to Stearns – and how soon is Now? – it was understood by all and sundry that his liver had ‘just kinduv exploded – fuckin’ blew up’.
It was summer in London, an intensely sticky summer, when the childish gods the citizenry worshipped seemed to have drenched the very fabric of the city in Coca-Cola, dripped it with melting ice lollies, gummed it up with old Wrigley’s. With each long denim stride Natasha took, the city clamped its greedy, sweaty paw tighter round the seasoned stick of her, licking at her cool beauty with its tasteless, polluted tongue. She recognised the petrol station on the corner, turned down Corinth Way and continued until she recalled the phone box at the mouth of Sparta Terrace, She walked along the terrace, past the narrow house-fronts, where from the open sashes gauzy waves lapped at the paintwork. She crossed Syracuse Park, noting that while the one o’ clock club had its share of plastic earthmovers and wooden trucks, the workmen and drivers were absent. She turned the corner of Athens Road and, hurrying now, failed to notice the one individual she’d encountered since turning off the Balls Pond Road. On a wall, outside the corner shop, sat a small, immaculately dressed Asian boy, playing with a toy metal car, a toy plastic cow and a toy plastic harmonica.
Natasha turned into Argos Road and strode along to number 27. She called up, ‘Bernie, chuck down the key.’ And after a junky’s eternity – and how soon is Now? – it came sailing down, tied to some green sisal, like a tiny metal kite in the lifeless air. Was it Natty’s imagination – which admittedly had been rather too fertile of late – or could she hear whispering from the basement flat?
Christmas 2001
I used to hate napping in the afternoon; I’d always awake feeling infinitely sad, or crankily wound up, or even just fucking miserable. It felt like the day had been broken in two – into two, short, unbearable days, instead of a single,
long, barely tolerable one. ‘Ooh,’ they’d say, ‘she’s all cross because she’s fallen asleep. Because she’s napped.’ Yeah, caught napping by the world, and whoever I thought I was turned inside out like a sock. So I’d wail and I’d thrash, and I’d arch my back like a seal – like a fucking seal – diving beneath the polar ice, until they’d say, ‘All right, Miss Tantrum, we’re gonna leave you until you recover yourself!’ But I never did recover myself. I never fucking did.
The Ice Princess climbed under this cold giant nappy wearing her last trendy threads, her velveteen combat trousers. They have six empty pockets and are camouflage-patterned with malformed kidneys of black, yellow and khaki. I wish I could send every shmegegge I’ve seen in the last couple of years sashaying around wearing combat trousers straight into combat. I wonder how they’d react when tank-loads of huzzaing towel-heads appeared in the narrowed lenses of their fashion eyewear, and they had to put their militaristic gear to the test? The nineties ended with these pinheads observing a wide plain of destruction through such cramped apertures. Who the fuck did they think they were kidding? I’ve seen glasses come and go. In the seventies the dernier cri in frames were shaped like the rims of TVsets, or lavatory seats, and they goggled through these bulbous panes at the bulbous decade. Now everything’s narrowed right down. Yup, I wish I could send them into combat. And I wish I could send all the kids I see sporting full-length puffa coats the kind that look like sleeping bags with arms attached somewhere truly icy, to sleep off their identities. And I wish I could dispatch to a township all the creeps who flop along Greek Street in designer shoes modelled on third-world fucking sabots cut from car tyre. There they could drink puddles and get righteously screwed up the ass. Then they�
�d be copacetic. Truly, is there anything the world hath to show more asinine than a footwear fetish? Shake-spear kick in the rear. The Ice Princess used to dress me up like a little accessory when she was in funds, natch. All that time I spent longing to be the kind of female who cared more about these things, who took the time to groom and dress and preen and prink. I got it – brother I got it. Then she’d say, to whichever shnook happened to be in train at the time, whichever ugly was burnishing her by association, ‘Oob, she hates getting dressed. Hates it. Come on, Delilah. Come on!’ But I had – I have – a whim of iron.
Come on and let me buckle you into little combat trousers and track suits and even fucking dresses! All the while I’d buck and kick and yank at her hair, whirling my pudgy arms in wild haymakers, that would – bar-de-bar – every so often connect. Oh yes, I’m a past master of the voluntary involuntary action all right. Always have been. Yup, she’d dress me up in a velveteen dress, spangly tights, a miniature parka and tiny deck shoes. Then she’d let me clamp my plastic tiara on my head and she’d take this little JAP out with her when she went to make calls.
Her own wardrobe she was less fanciful about. This was dressing to undress, that much she understood. Gone were the days when she wore slinky fabrics for falling downstairs in. Oh no, her activities now demanded ligatures of slick material that cut to the quick of her, dividing her sex and ass like the core of a pear. Over this cord – pull it and she’d speak pretaped phrases: ‘My aren’t you . . .’; ‘Oooh, don’t you . . .’; ‘Mmm . . . can’t you . . .’ – went heavy, yet sheer, sixty-denier tights, which could be torn off easily without being laddered. She wore skirts like belts, and tops like sporting bras for this most unsporting activity. She put on zip-up knee-high boots and, to complete the dissemble, a heavy coat which could be wrapped round her then whipped open to reveal the goods.
Hey presto! And there was also the jewellery, the elongated rings – thumb, finger and pinkie – the angled bangles, the toe rings, all of them like the bits of a robotic exoskeleton. I suppose it pressed home the point that this was purely mechanical – what she was doing.
Yeah, she took me out with her, this mundane magician turning the oldest tricks in the world. She was that fucking mad and desperate. She’d leave me for ten, twenty, thirty minutes – however long it took – locked in some fucking vestibule at the Hilton, or the Royal Garden, or the Holiday-fucking-Inn. Playing with a dolly, while she was being one within feet. My presence kept them docile – the really mad ones – or so she liked to think. She’d even leave me outside in the minicab, brushing up on my Swahili. She had, like they all do, her cabbie accomplices.
Then we’d go and meet the Estate Agent in a restaurant or a bar in the West End, and he’d expatiate on his latest earth-shatteringly bad deal. Swapping this deed for that deed, indeed! The Estate Agent, with his mobile phone the size of a suppository and his handsome face all constipated with the rank, stinking jealousy which kept them both at it. Full-on.
They’d order up silly plates of food, expensive snacks for smack-heads – sun-dried this, wind-blown that, flambéed whatever – and cut off corners to poke in my little mouth. ‘Try some of this,’ they’d say, and, ‘Ooh – doncha think she might like that,’ my own burgeoning appetites putting to shame their diminishing ones – this fucking cuckoo in their nest.
Or nests, rather. We moved constantly, one step ahead of whichever Iranian, or Brazilian, or alumna of St Trinian’s the Estate Agent had last done a number on. That’s what they called it – ‘doing a number’. ‘Why don’t we do a number on so-and-so,’ they’d chortle indulgently to each other, and plan
who next to fuck up or fuck over. Was there ever a duo for more indulgences than these two – they could’ve filled the medieval fucking Vatican’s order book. They were mad and beautiful, for a while. You’ll have seen their like, chucking chips on the wheel at Charlie Chester’s, or stoking up with Bellinis at the American Bar, and wondered how the hell they have the gall to exercise their timeless gangster chutzpah. How they can get away with it, while outside whichever joint it is they’re infesting crouch others of their ilk, the dirty panhandling ones, with stoles of giveaway blanket draped over their puny shoulders. The city’s neglected children, trying to get home from the shoddy, alfresco sleep-overs that have become their entire life.
The Ice Princess and her consort only got away with it for a while. After all, neither of them was as young as they used to be. And there was the kiddy – such a drain. And the drugs. It’s amazing they could take so many drugs, for so long, and still do any numbers greater than one. But then they’d both managed to get a few liver-enhancing years under their belt, and they both eschewed the needle, until this, their final tailspin down to the ground.
I suppose the question I ask myself now, as I hear the waking-up noises of newborn, Coborn House (trousers with writing on them being donned, dogs yanked, doors slammed, so that the scratch cards of no chance whatsoever can be bought from the meshed-in store below), the question now is – is this a good day to die?
It seems to me that it would be a sensible course if I decided this myself, rather than leaving it until, in a weakened condition, I fall down the fucking stairs and pulp my head on the fender of skirting board by the door. Or succumb to the wild, exquisite pain of being more hungry than even I can believe and, staggering, dazed, inject myself with tetanus from one of the bent nails the Estate Agent left poking out of the window frames downstairs, when, in a crack-induced fit of late-adopted DIY enthusiasm (you couldn’t call it paranoia – his fears were entirely justified), he attempted to board up this, his final, squatted castle, from within. What a mensh. Not.
I could kill myself with their drug shit, but that is revolting. I could hang myself with any number of cords, ligatures and strings the terminally neglectful parents have left lying around. I could even – if the taps aren’t frozen – drown myself in the fucking bath. All that guff about how ninety per cent of accidents happen in the fucking home, but hey, so do ninety per cent of fucking suicides. Statistically we’re fools ever to curl up in bed with a good book, lest the madness seize us.
But I know I won’t take any of these options. Won’t take them as the cold day extends its fingers across the crappy carpet tiling, feeling up the exposed blue feet of the Ice Princess. Won’t take them as it retreats again. What the fuck am I waiting for? And why do I find myself crying? Crying for Mummy.
Chapter Fifteen
Pride means never having to say you’re sorry. I mean to say, if I’m so right about everything, then what the hell do I have to be sorry for, exactly? Pride is the necessary, deep mother lode, from which daily truckloads of self-righteousness can be mined and brought to the superficial surface. Pride can be husbanded, nurtured and laid up for an uncertain future. Think of all those aristocratic fools dusting their Meissen, while the Red Army rapes their womenfolk next door. Hey, do stand on ceremony, guys. And another thing – pride is heritable. Indeed, there’s a prideful heritage industry. I mean to say, you don’t want to spend all those years accumulating pride only to throw it away in some mad spree. No, pass it down, brother, pass that pride down. You can only hope that the next generation to the manner born understand what to do with the stuff and don’t end up as deadbeat epigones, whiling their days away losing family pride at the humility racetrack.
Now, Richard Elvers had made a lot of pride of his own, and Charlotte Elvers had inherited a fair amount from her folks. And one final point needs to made about pride before I get on with the business of telling you how they spent theirs: there’s no counterfeiting at the pride mint. Absolutely not. I can assure you of this; Mother knows best. I don’t want to hear any of that crap about false pride, not now, not never. I don’t care if you’re Jonas Salk or a kid in a sulk – your pride is as good as any other cripple’s.
So, Charlotte Elvers, proud of her attainments in the show business of big business. Proud of her womanly figure. Proud of her houses and cars and all her other
chattels. Proud of her father, the late, eminent, ecclesiastical historian (and it’s worth mentioning at this point that David Yaws came from a long line of Trollope readers), and proud of her mother. Not. No, not proud of me. So not proud of me that she’ll avoid any mention of exactly who I was, who I am.
Charlotte, with her Yaws mask Scotch-taped to her broad brow, has no difficulty passing herself off as a goy, natch. No autobiography of a mongrel for her. Charlotte is subject to not mentioning the fact that she is – according to whomsoever you might fucking care to ask – a Jew. A Jewess, even. Mindjew, in our increasingly enlightened time there isn’t much need for her to adopt –like the good, English chameleon she is – her protective colourlessness. Her studied indifference. Nowadays there are few of those awkward convocations where someone makes an anti-Semitic remark and everyone else gives silent assent.
Oh no, not nowadays. Not when the fucking Israelis are doing such a fantastic job of drawing fire by bombing refugee camps, cracking skulls, taking bribes, and generally behaving like an honest-to-God gang of .99-calibre fascist assholes. Nope, no need to be anti-Semitic with these shlemiels on the scene. Hell, even Jewish anti-Semitism doesn’t seem that outrageous any more. To be a Jew-hating Jew used to mean something, you could take pride in it; it put you up there with some of the finest minds of the last two centuries – but nowadays any little cut-about prick with an attitude can get away with it.
So, let me set the scene for you, cue up the denouement. It’s the autumn of ‘94. Charlotte the shiksa, with her sad, comical, dead-man’s face, stands in her squash-court–sized kitchen at Cumberland Terrace. Over the last couple of years the Elverses have bought the leases to several more of these apartments, and they’re generous-sized to begin with. Knocked together they make a veritable fucking mansion, a country townhouse ready and waiting for the son and heir. Except that there isn’t one. Charlotte isn’t quite sick enough to trick out any of the bedrooms as a nursery for the Anointed One, the slow messianic train coming. But even if she was, where would she begin? There are far too many rumpus rooms where no one romps, studies where no one reads, bathrooms where not so much as a cuticle is trimmed, and conservatories full of freshly-cut fucking flowers – for her to get to grips with it. The Elverses’ joint is so large now they have a fucking switchboard. And that’s just the London branch of the chain.