by Will Self
Such a punctuated companionship did have its advantages: being with Sherman for more than an hour or two at a time was de trop. The constant phone calls, the bluster, the charging into fields with bulls in them – it all grew wearing; besides, I also needed time alone to process (the therapese is warranted here) certain psychological symptoms that had been latent in me for many years, and were now coming disturbingly to the fore.
Were those the shreds of black plastic bags caught on the legs of the pylons that strode over the hills? Or were they the clothes of plane-crash victims who in death had transgressed the first commandment of globalism: keep your belongings with you at all times? Was there any more distressing sight to behold than television news images of rayon blouses, frumpy brown skirts and smalls unlaundered for the entire fortnight, now caught in the bushes at the airport’s perimeter? To say nothing of the holdalls and suitcases that lay ruptured like sickeningly burst boils. Enfin, the corpses, neatly packed away in body bags, all they once possessed having already been decanted.
In eleven days’ time I was due to leave for a fortnight’s book tour, heading first to Toronto and then on to several cities in the USA. Due to, but I was questioning whether I could go at all, since my as yet unpacked bag dragged on me like an anchor. Of course, I had long since dispensed with anything but carry-on and was taking only a small rucksack – and not one of those pantechnicons you see being hauled up the aisle, a shotgun marriage between human and trunk. The lapwing pee-witting up above me, the ladybird millimetring along the buttercup at my feet, the red kite swooping between me and Fulking, or the rabbit hopping across the chalky path – were they so encumbered? I yearned in my own life to re-create Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise by stylizing my impedimenta over and over again, each time reducing the scale of books, clothing and toiletries, until all I took with me was a sheaf of sketches slipped inside my wallet. Nowadays, the thought of carrying anything more seemed grotesque, making of my world an nth-class cabin into which – my greasepaint moustache shining – I manoeuvred the steamer trunk packed with the other Capitalist Brothers.
At the Devil’s Dyke, Sherman and I sat on a bench. I wanted to tell him the folk tale associated with this great V-shape gouged out of the chalk escarpment. How the Devil, bent on flooding the Sussex Weald so as to drown all its sleeping cotters, one night set to with his mighty spade, aiming to dig a ditch through the Downs. But an old woman living alone in a farmhouse awoke in the small hours and lit her lamp. Satan, fearing the dawn, cast his tool aside and with a howl leapt all the way across the Weald to the North Downs, where he landed, thus creating the enormous depression now known as the Devil’s Punchbowl.
Wanted to – but couldn’t, because Sherman, while chewing a pizzle of biltong I’d handed him, was on the phone to a powerful arts Gauleiter half a world away, etching with incisive verbalizations his plan to implant the crater of Rano Kau, the volcano at the south-west corner of Easter Island, with scores – if not hundreds – of carved basalt Shermans, latter-day moai that, like those celebrated statues, would awe visitors by the sheer implausibility of their being in that place at all.
‘Make it happen!’ Sherman cried, then turning to me said, ‘So, what were you saying?’ But then he was interrupted once more by the fo-fiddle-i-o of contemporaneity, so that while he exchanged yelps with some willowy curator in a Berlin bunker I was left to tell myself that the destination for this trip was Lancing College, which stood on its knoll on the far side of the River Adur. My father and uncle had been educated there, and the neo-Gothic pile loomed large in the family mythology, having been founded by my great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Woodard.
His photograph – an original daguerreotype – had hung in the gloomy stairwell between the second and third storeys of my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace in Brighton, throughout the interminable Sunday afternoons of my childhood. It now hung in exactly the same position in my own terraced house in South London. The High Anglican churchman, and apostle of public school education to the rising middle classes, sat, life sized, behind thick glass, edged in gilt and framed with black mahogany, his expression at once stern and soppy, his cheeks furry.
At Lancing we would find something pleasingly out of joint – another oddity to add to our collection. Together, Sherman and I had visited the Tradescants’ monument at St Mary at Lambeth, and, rubbing away the lichen from the tomb, read the inscription: ‘Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) / A world of wonders in one closet shut’ – a reference to the gardening family’s celebrated ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the Ark, which in the seventeenth century occupied a site close to my house. In place of the long-departed Ark there was now a takeaway called Chicken World, which seemed painfully apt: a world of chickens in one box shut ...
Another time Baltie had driven Sherman and me down the M3 to Painshill. Here we had wandered Charles Hamilton’s landscaped park, surveying its grottoes, its ruined abbey, cascade and temple. Standing by the lake while Sherman bellowed at a banker in Shanghai, I was entranced as a flotilla of model dreadnoughts came cruising by, line abreast; then appalled, when one of these six-foot Edwardian warships was opened from within, the entire deck and superstructure flipping up to reveal the pasty face of the middle-aged boy who was lying inside.
I thought often of Claude Lévi-Strauss, still alive and buzzing at a hundred, an anthropological bee deep in the honeyed hive of the Sorbonne. It was his contention – made with reference to Clouet’s portrait of Elizabeth of Austria – that all miniatures have an intrinsic aesthetic quality derivable from their very dimensions. So it was that Sherman and I set out for Godshill, a model village on the Isle of Wight, where we discovered a model of the model village inside of it, and inside this model, model village a third.
Not that we neglected the sublime; after all, Sherman’s own works were themselves Burke’s ‘great objects and terrible’, willed concretizations that forced us into submission – albeit democratically. So we visited Northern Ireland for the weekend, and Baltie drove us in a rental Range Rover back and forth along the lanes to the south-west of Belfast, until we were able to establish the exact location from which Swift had seen the Divis and the Black Mountain massif as a recumbent giant, the easternmost tumulus of Cave Hill being its nose.
I had also proposed a longer trip to the remote Shetland island of Foula, although, given the lack of network coverage, I very much doubted Sherman would agree to go. On Foula we could see thousand-foot sea cliffs, vaulting stone arches, plunging rocky gullies – and all of this natural giganticism crammed into nine square miles. It was the ultimate fantasia on the sublime themes of the very big and the very little.
Not that either of us mentioned the B or the L word. It may have been all right for Sherman to say in public that he was a very small man who made very big things, but that was a deflection that effectively stymied any more penetrating questioning. I didn’t want to talk about it either – I enjoyed Sherman’s company, his curious grace, his hunger for life, his all-devouring eye, but I knew that sooner or later we would have to confront what was going on, then there it would be, winched upright like one of his own body forms, my vast and artfully oxidized shame.
Sherman finished his call and after we’d settled on our next rendezvous he joined Baltie in the Range Rover and they bumped away. I went on alone along the ridge, past fields where cattle lay as brown and glossy as the pools of their own shit. Six hundred feet below lay the amiable farmland of the Weald, while up here I simply revolved in my cloudy ball. But between Perching and Edburton hills my moodiness fused into a certainty: I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by intercontinental air travel. It was over: no more would I dutifully respond to those parental injunctions go here, go there, empty my pockets and take off my shoes. Never again would I take my underpants to see the world, which meant in turn that never would the world witness them espaliered on a hedge.
I say fused, but disintegrated would be closer to the truth. Of course,
I had always performed certain ... rituals, but doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone count the cracks and divide them by the number of paving stones? Doesn’t everyone ascribe numerical values to each action and every thing, then compute their way through the day? Doesn’t everyone listen to the fridge intently so as to be certain that its vibration calibrates with their pulse and heartbeat? Doesn’t everyone wash their hands because they touched the soap? Doesn’t everyone know that each digit has its own personality – feckless 2, arrogant 1, incurably romantic 9? Doesn’t everyone fear the world and their own subjectivity getting out of sync? It’s true that no one I knew personally wielded a Polaroid camera as I did, taking one snap of the knobs on the front of the gas cooker, a second of the fridge door shut, a third of my hand holding the front-door knob, a fourth of the blur as I pulled it to, a fifth of my hand pushing it to confirm that the latch had sprung. Nor did I see anyone stopping, as I did, halfway to the tube and shuffling through these shiny squares of recency – but that doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it, does it?
All the walls of my writing room were tessellated with Polaroids, and the shiny tide was creeping up on to the ceiling when I bought my first digital camera. What a relief! Now I need only pause in front of the urinal, in the empty youth hostel on top of the Downs, to confirm that the world and I were continuing to coincide. It helped – a bit.
Coming down off the ridge over stiles and between fizzing pylons, the Adur appeared, flowing sluggishly between curving banks. A derelict cement works stood on the floodplain, its dirty chimney giving the finger to the overcast sky. And in the hazy mid-ground loomed the spiritual aircraft hangar I was bound for: the massive chapel of Lancing College. Its rose window was the biggest in England, its nave higher than that of Notre-Dame. Had the chapel’s tower ever been built it would, at 350 feet, have rivalled those of Chartres.
My ancestor had insisted that, despite the scarcity of funding, one end of the chapel be raised to its full height at the very start, lest he or his successors ever waver in their ambition to build this very big thing. And now his bronze effigy lay in a tomb lodged in one side of the soaring nave, like a fishbone caught in the deity’s gullet – although a very High Anglican he had been a smallish man.
I crossed the river by a footbridge and walked past a fishery where miserable men sat on hired jetties, their rods dangling in a bilious pond. After a flurry of phone calls, I met up with Sherman and Baltie in a chalky hollow. The Range Rover lumped away, its thick tyres white-walled with clods, leaving the two of us to snap and crackle through the autumnal undergrowth towards the hypertrophied house of God.
We emerged from the woodland into the teensy paddocks and chicken-wire enclosures of the College’s farm. But if 350 feet high why not 35, or 3,500? There were recently shorn alpacas that looked like Dr Seuss’s therianthropes. There were also a couple of motos in a fenced-off wallow. As ever I found the motos’ nuzzling baby-faced muzzles repulsive, but Sherman lisped away happily with them; then, while he took a call from a Milanese brassière manufacturer who was sitting beside the drained infinity pool of his Ibizan villa, he caressed their jonckheeres.
We were expected, and an amiable youth met us at the headmaster’s office then guided us around the flint-knapped quads. He was possessed of sufficient sangfroid not to react to our oddness as a couple, while I found myself unbearably affected by the large spot on his neck to which a concealer had been uselessly applied, and also by the Windsor knot of his school tie. By the time the lad had itemized the crests and memorials and was leading us back through swags of drizzle towards the chapel I was openly weeping.
‘Buck up!’ Sherman snapped.
Inside the chapel the organ pipes were wrapped in translucent plastic – it was more than a century since Canon Woodard’s death and still the biggering continued. I found his tomb and pressed my ear to his bronze breast, beside where his married hands rose, the keel of this capsized prayer boat. Sherman took a photo with his iPhone, and said, ‘Very good.’
Afterwards Baltie drove us into Brighton and dropped us on the edge of the Lanes. Sherman and I walked through the quaint zone to English’s, the fish restaurant. We ate on the second floor, sitting side by side with our backs to the window, and observing the sole other table of diners as if they were a repertory play – which in a way I suppose they were. Sherman didn’t help my digestion by whispering improvised dialogue for these two couples, most of which was obscene. He also professed himself to be delighted with our outing as he snidely dissected his own Dover sole.
I had my doubts – I was beginning to suspect that Sherman was toying with me, just as he toyed with the Californian ephebe who phoned during dinner, and whom Sherman had assured would be in receipt of a body form that was 633.333 recurring feet high within the month. But why not 6,333, or 63.3? ‘Believe it!’ He belched as the other diners looked at us for a change. ‘This mother is so big it’ll be able to lean its elbow on the roadway of the Golden Gate as if it were a bar.’
Baltie drove us back to London and when they dropped me off I said goodbye to Sherman casually, without making any arrangement for the future. But I felt certain we would meet again soon – a reckoning of some kind was long overdue.
3
Fin du trottoir roulant
Eleven days later, despite all my queer resistances and awkward premonitions, I left for Canada. I took no luggage with me, only a Barbour jacket* I had bought from their concession in Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods department store, the capacious pockets of which I intended to fill with a few essential things. But, despite this simple solution to my luggage phobia, I still lay awake night after night obsessing in nauseating detail how I would ‘pack’ the jacket.
It didn’t help that it was hot in the bed – an emperor-sized cherrywood lit bateau. None of our four children had ever quite managed to make it through the night in their own beds. No matter how many times I lifted them up, their sweaty thighs clamped about my hips, and laboured upstairs to put them down again, they still came creeping back and wormed their way in. Our eldest son was away at university; however, he not only walked but entrained in his sleep, and often in the small hours I would hear his key in the lock, followed by the heavy tramp of his feet, he would push the dog aside and insinuate his adult form so that the six of us lay tightly packed, like the victims of a civil disaster laid out on the varnished floorboards of a school gymnasium.
I visualized filling the pockets, then emptying them, filling them – then emptying them, over and over again. Should I put that in there, or this? I fretted until the predawn, when I heard the milkman wheedle open the gate and set down three bottles of half-fat, or was it a third of a bottle or thirty? In the half-light the methane off the entire family lay in a mustard haze atop the Flanders of the duvet, my sons’ bayonets digging into me from either side, my mind roved across the terrain of the past: The human race was doomed, the only link with survival passed through time.
My obsessions with bigness, with littleness, with all distortions in scale – surely this was only a spatial expression of my own arrested development? In my mid-twenties I had still been living in my mother’s flat and speaking a shared idiolect of mushy diminutives – ‘-kins’, ‘-ums’ and ‘noo-noo’ – with her that we referred to shamelessly as ‘baby talk’. Had her premature death not thrust me into the actual-sized world, we might’ve been there still, me with my collections of Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries, she with her hefty Henry James novels. While I remained in the spare bedroom – which, due to the botched conversion of the Victorian house, had the proportions of an upright cereal box – dreamily making little tableaux with trolls, pencil erasers and .002-scale plastic soldiers, she would sit in the front room, concentrating hard on the subtle velleities of James’s characters.
It was not to be. Instead, it was ‘Off with her head!’ as the cancer shot up through the meningeal fluids of her spine to her brain, and I was thrust through the little door and into the caucus race of adulthood,
which has no precise start or finish, and although everyone is promised a prize, only a select few ever receive them.
A minute envelope materializes, the flap of which opens and closes while arrows arc up and down, conveying the strong impression to the user – and the suggestion of physiological addiction is highly appropriate – that vital communications are being transmitted through the ether. She sits there, radiation pinging off the back of her retinas, unable to tear her eyes from this very little thing – the envelope icon – which is an insult to the illustrious history of the epistolary – I mean to say: who’s this email from, Laclos?
Of course, of course, all new technologies cannibalize their predecessors: the horses are put down and the carriage rolls on complete with postilions and oil lamps. If futurological imaginings establish anything at all, it’s woe betide anyone who dares to conceive of the un become in too great a detail – and yet here we are, with the entire Library of Babel inscribed on a pin, and a trillion web pages expressed by the digits 1 and 0.
A few days later I set off, leaving wife, children and dog, all laid out on this weekend morning like idols in their great bed of wear. The last vision of home I took with me was of the fat woman who lives in the block of flats opposite, and whose bedroom window is exactly level with that of my writing room. As I slid notebook, passport, etc. into the pockets of my waxy jacket she swished back her curtains then proceeded to plump up her duvet, punching the white slug with her yellowy-black fists.
At the end of the road I paused to check I had turned off the cooker, shut the fridge and closed the front door. At my feet a concrete bollard lay toppled on the pavement: the severed penis of a god at once Brutalist and kaloi. I looked for Lysippus among the bus drivers smoking outside their garage ... the lime trees in their raised beds were losing their foliage ... and then, quite suddenly, I was at Paddington – no, Heathrow, and wandering shoeless and un belted through security.