Umbrella

by Will Self

  Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking-glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past. The debris includes the row of houses along Novello Street towards Eel Brook Common, their top two storeys weatherboarded and bowing over the roadway under widows’ peaks of rumpled tiling. There’s the fat-bellied kiln of the pottery in the crook of the King’s Road and the ragged patterning of the yews in the misty grounds of Carnwath House. Old Father Thames sucking on weedy-greasy piles stuck in the mud all along the riverside from the bridge to the station. Her own father sucking on a hazel twig he’s cut and whittled with his pocket knife to slide in and out of his muddy mouth, in between his remaining weedy-greasy teeth. — Audrey’s father, Sam Death: not De’Ath, not lar-de-dar, not like some uz thinks they’re better than they should be. Namely, Sam’s brother Henry, who styles himself like that and resides in a new villa somewhere called Muswell Hill. They have their own general, the De’Aths. Audrey has heard this said so many times that even now, a big girl of ten, she cannot forestall this vision: a rotund man in a scarlet jacket hung all over with gold braid, and sitting on a kitchen chair in a scullery. His white mutton chops creamy on the rim of his high collar, his red cheek pressed against the limewashed wall. Not that Audrey’s mother speaks of the De’Aths’ general enviously – there has always been a niceness to this understanding: while the Deaths are not the sort to have servants, neither are they those what serve. And while the Deaths are no better than they should be, neither are they worse than they might. Whispering in the parlour before the new bracket was put in, before the cottage piano arrived – whisperings when Mary Jane put a solar lamp on the table at dusk and it rounded off the corners of the room with its golden globe of light. Guttersnipes, they hissed, urchins, street arabs – different ones came on several occasions to say, If it please you, sir, ma’am, I bin by the line-up fer the Lambeth spike, anna bloke wot wuz innit said if’n I wuz to cummover west an’ tell iz people there’d be a tanner innit. But Sam Death is not the whispering sort: A tanner! A tanner for a windy nag stuffed with skilly! You’ll count yerself bloody lucky t’cummaway frummeer wiv a thru’pence – now fuck off, or I’ll call fer the blue boys! The arabs aren’t down – thru’pence is a good dip, so they skip from the avenue into the Fulham Road, tossing their caps up as Audrey’s father buttons the long skirts of his rabbit-skin coat, saying, There’s one as won’t be dining wiv Duke ’Umphrey t’night. Audrey never sees ve windy nag, knows only of her father’s other brother from these evening sallies – Sam heading off to head him off, muttering that: It’s a crying shame Honest John Phelps the ferryman is no more, so cannot take him across to the Surrey side. So, James Death the pauper uncle becomes all paupers for Audrey – when she’s sent to fetch her father from the Rose & Crown for his tea Jim’s is the shadow that capers beside the trapdoor dancers. In the flare of a naptha lamp, she sees him, grovelling beneath one of the coster’s stalls in Monmouth Street market – cowering there, picking up orange peel and pressin’ its smile to ’is ol’ man’s mouf . . . Then there’s the screever kneeling on the pavement outside the ironmonger’s on King Street, where Audrey waits while her mother goes in to buy a tin of Zebra grate polish. This rat-man scratches a gibbet on the granite with charcoal, not chalk – a fraying hank of marks from which hangs Uncle Jim, who sings: Je-sus’ blood ne-ver failed me ye-et . . . his cap in hand.

  Stanley, his blazer hung from the privy’s latch, feeds the chalky inner tubing into the steel groove – Gilbert, Gilbert Cook . . . does something similar so that Audrey bites my lip –. But not yet – before then, when Albert sits at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves cinched by fascinating bands, their parents are already styling themselves Deeth, to rhyme with teeth Sam picks, his face swellin’ beet-red. You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor, says Albert, dipping his nib and filling in Olive’s line of the census form with quick, clever, cursive, clerkish writing. Don’t guv’nor me, you jack-gentleman, Sam growls, what matter if we change an a to an e? Whose business but our own? Albert has his father’s hand-me-down face, which would be handsome enough onna a fat man, although it appears queer on their tapered heads – the smooth flesh bunching up at their brows and along their jawlines. It’d be the Ministry’s business, I’d say, t’would be better if you left off – and as he speaks Albert continues to write, Death, Violet May, daughter, —, — — — —, — —, Secondary, his pen morsing from box to box, the dashes indicating further shared characteristics – ’til at least I’ve gone into rooms, I’ve no wish to speak for the others . . . who, despite having grown up with Albert always before them, are still agog when he does two things at once, both perfectly: piano playing and reading the evening paper, timing an egg while totting up the household accounts – no alternation between hand and foot, or coordination between eye and hand faults him, no variability of scales confounds him. ’E’s twins inna single skin, said a local wag, seeing Bert unerringly volley a football even as he was marking possibles for the guv’nor in the Pink ’Un with a stub of pencil – this when father and son were still close, down at Craven Cottage, the playing field all round kicked and stamped into a happily tortured morass. Audrey thought: if we’re Death, then Uncle James must be dearth – this a word gleaned from Bible and Bunyan at school, for the Deaths are not regular attendees, let alone communicants.

  When four out of the five Death children had left the house on Waldemar Avenue, Death, Samuel A. Theodore, 51, married, 31 years, Night Garage Inspector, Omnibus Coy, Worker, was still known, familiarly, as Rothschild Death, on account of the flutters and the rabbit-skin coat, and the arf and arfs he downed in pubs and penny gaffs from King Street to Parsons Green and Mortlake beyond, ales that imparted a jovial gloss to his coating of bombast. Familiarly, yes, for those sort won’t be told, but formally it was Deeth, and when the three Deeths transplanted themselves from the London clay to the red Devon loam, with Albert’s assistance taking up residence in a cottage at Cheriton Bishop – where Mary Jane had been raised – they became known locally as the Deers. — Sam Deer totters around the small garden, Olive Deer watches him. She has seen pictures in the illustrated weekly and read the accompanying text. The pictures are obscure – the words surpassing allusive. Olive, who knows nothing of adult bodies besides her own, still wonders how it is that they get food into the women in Holloway Prison who won’t eat . . . who keep their jaws clamped shut. She wonders what it might be like to tell someone that a twisting rivulet of ants has leaked into the cottage from the rain-washed garden. Got in, flowed up the stairs, sopped up the grooves of the candlewick and, not unpleasantly, are infesting me merry bit . . .

  Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the kinked eel sends a piddle of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its gills with the chalk. Caught in the kink, the corridor stretching away in front of her . . . longer than time, Audrey burns with covetousness for that safety bicycle, convinced she can ride it better than him – fix it quicker. Neat as a pin in the tailor-made she’s bought with her first week’s wages from Ince’s, she covets it – and resents him. It was one thing to be still soaping Bert’s collars – from when they were nippers his primacy was taken so much for granted that there was no more need to speak of it than what you got upter in the privy. But Stanley – her baby, her bumps-a-daisy, that he should have this and not her, well, she was reft, the suspicion creeping into her that he’s never given a fig for her. Playing out, playing Queenie – and I was Queenie, and the Wiggins boys all mocking me . . . and that lousy boy, who come up from Sands End – the one Mother said az the stink of gas onnis togs – picks up the ball and dips it inna puddle, then rolls it in some horse shit, and when I turn round he throws it at me so ’ard the string busts and all the soggy, shitty paper wraps round my face and spatters my pinny, an’ Stan leaps on ’im, thumpinim proper, defendin’ his big sis, and the Sands End kid ad vese big obnail boots, no stockings, juss vese boots . . .
coming down on Stan’s face . . . a yelp! The Wiggins boys screamin’, turnin’ tail. There mustabin a nail come loose – there was that much blood. When Bert come out of the house and dragimoff, the Sands End kid was spittin’, Garn! Piss up yer leg an play wiv ve steam! Still . . . maybe . . . maybe even then it was all a bloody show . . .

  Cold meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . November in Foulham, the streets greasily damp – the colour of rotten logs. Bad air from the river, bad air from the Works, rotten malt gusting from the Lamb brewery over Chiswick way. In the back bedroom Audrey rubs the soot-stained muslin curtain against her cheek and peers down in the near-darkness at the backyards of their terrace and those of the terraces behind, fret-worked by walls and fences into separate territories, each with its own upright hut . . . a command post – Ladysmith relieved. Come inter the ga-arden, Maude! And see the raspberry canes scattered spilikins, the humpback of an abandoned cask, a pile of bricks, a birdcage shaped like the Crystal Palace that them two doors down adfer a myna, which had croaked back at the cat’s-meat-man: Ca-a-at’s me-eat! Until p’raps a cat gotit. Audrey! Or-dree! Cummun get yer tea! Cat meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . She should have been down there with her sisters, fetching yesterday’s leg of mutton down from the meat safe, peeling and boiling potatoes, scraping dripping from the pale blue enamel basin. Or-dree! She can’t be doin’ wivvit. Time enough for tasks later – her soda-scraped hands bloaters floating in the scummy water. Besides, she cannot abide her mother just now – Mary Jane who stinks of chlorodyne, and slumps narcotised on the horsehair chaise her sons dragged in from the parlour when it split. Her Ladysmith, a bell tent of grey woollen shawl and black bombazine, her tired auburn hair down rusting on her big shoulders. I can’t be bovvered wiv me stays, she says, not when me mulleygrubs comes upon me. Audrey is repelled by her – disgusted that her mother vouchsafes her women’s ailment to her alone – the sly thing, Or-dree! – where they jumble together in the sewn-in pockets of time swung apart from the general shindy of Death family life.

  She comes clattering down the bare stairs – the runner in the hall has yet to reach them, it trails behind the Death’s measured tread as they mount from floor to floor of No. 18 Waldemar Avenue. When they had arrived, the house – barely twenty years old – had just suffered its first demotion: sold on by the family who had bought it from its spec’ builder to one Emmanuel Silver, who had sliced it into three residences. The Deaths – Samuel, Mary Jane and the three older children, who were then very small – had the ground floor, a proper kitchen range and a spankin’ new geyser, although they and the other families still had to share the old bucket privy in the backyard. The Poultneys had the rooms on the first floor for a while, until Abraham Poultney was laid off from his job as a fitter with Ellis Tramways, a happenstance that coincided – or may have been caused by – the death of their younger daughter, Rose, from diphtheria. She wuz not the right sort, Mary Jane said of Missus Poultney. Not that she wuzzn respectable – but she ’ad no backbone, poor soul. I didn’t see little Rose for, ooh, on toppuv a week – you remarked onnit, Ordree – so I goes up there and finds they’d put her on toppuv the wardrobe in the back bedroom. The whiffuvit – terrible, it wuz. The merciful Deaths had paid for the funeral – including the toy casket, knocked up from deal, cheap but decent. At about the same time, Samuel had secured his own position as Deputy General Manager of the London General’s Fulham garage – this, after long service as a driver, and latterly a conductor. ’E was a blackleg in the strikes, said Stanley, years later, so they give iz nibs iz dibs. Audrey never thought this the whole story – she had seen how her father was with horses bussing and petting ’em . . . She had been with him one time when he stooped down in the road after another hearse had passed by and said, See ’ere, girl, ’ere’s shit an’ straw both. What they eats an’ what they lets fall at the far end. Straw’s ’ere to muffle it up when they carts us away. When they’ve planted us in the ground, we’ll turn inter ’urf – which is only by wayuv sayin’ another sorta droppin’. It was an uncharacteristically lengthy speech for her father to have made – at least, in the presence of a member of his own family. — Parked outside the Cock & Magpie with a jujube to suck – or not, Audrey heard not Father, Samuel or Sam, but Rothschild Death holding forth in the public bar: on the follies of the turf, the moonstruck fancies of the new women and the socialistic madness of the Progressives. An occasional late hansom or growler might bowl along King Street – straw bristles plaited in its horses’ tails, followed by a ’bus rattle-chinking towards her father’s garage. A swell got up in Ulster and homburg might elbow a tinker woman away from the pub door, bloody jade, giving a keyhole warbler the chance to slide in to the goldensmoky mirrored cacophony on his coat-tails. Once ensconced she might yowl out, Well if you fink my dress is a littulbit, juss a littulbit – not too muchuvit! While hiking up her petticoats, such as they were, until overwhelmed by cries of outrage: Flip ’er a tinker, Rothschild! Gerriduv ve drab! Her father’s face hanging mottled from the shiny platter of his topper’s brim, the hiss of the jets in the outsized glass lamp that hung above the double doors. Up there, in the elemental radiance, floated a softly moulded figure in a dainty print gown. Up there, where speechless Thought abides, Still her sweet spirit dwells, That knew no world besides . . .