by Will Self
Audrey had seen her father with horses – and she had seen him with men, a stallion among them, his commerce easy enough – yet fraught with sufficient danger to give him authority, Gentlemen, I have dived into Romano’s, and now . . . his sausage seegar sizzles innis face . . . my tissues are refreshed! He’s a study, Rothschild, a quick turn, who hooks his thick neck in the crook of his bamboo cane and hoiks himself offstage. He had so they said once thrashed a navvy to wivvinaninch, not that you would divine these fistic manoeuvres from the way he plotted his course home down the Fulham Palace Road, his flame-haired slippuv a dorter clipping along in front of him, lighting the way through the particular to anuvver meat tea . . .
Albert and Stanley sit, both with books held open by the lips of their plates, both with collars unbuttoned, their tea cups cradled in their hands for warmth as much as refreshment. Vi and Olive gawp, pasty faces pinched by pointed shoulders, each with a slice of bread and dripping in their hand as they behold this virile spectacle: the man and the boys taking turns to hack at the leg of mutton, then put meat in their too-similar faces. Albert’s glassy paperweight eyes, Welsh-slate blue, scan up and then down the narrow columns of Rous’s Trigonometric Tables – not consigning cosines, sines and tangents to memory, only confirming the tight joins of the granite setts already laid out along the rule-straight roadways of his metropolitan mind. And Stanley – his complexion cooler, his brows finer than those of his older brother – he sighs, ahuh, shuffling fingertips from one page to the next of a Free Library book. His eyelids flicker and his fringe bobs, the whirring mechanism of Bakelite and crystal rods, propelled by scores of flywheels, squeezes his very atoms into the kinetomic beam in a number of abrupt spasms that, while they bend him back so far his just-stropped neck touches his rear, are not in the slightest discomforting – and all the essence of Stanley is then discharged from the elevated muzzle of the contraption, shooting a streak of light between the spokes of the Great Wheel at Earls Court. Up and up above the city it goes – dolorous hoots from the steamers anchored at Tilbury, gas-mantle-ssssh! in the upper atmosphere – and higher still, the clouds flickering far below. In one aperture pickelhaube-helmeted Junkers slash each other’s cheeks to ribbons, in another the Tsarina kisses an egg set with rubies and garnets. The beam is so high now that Stanley’s atoms sweep into orbit, girdling the earth once, twice, thrice! Before tending down and down into the viridian heart of Africa, where, in a jungle clearing, awaits Fortescue, my mechanic, cranking the handle of an apparatus that sucks the beam into its celluloid funnel. Stanley is an apparition that swiftly solidifies, panting in a patented woollen Jaeger bicycling suit. He and Fortescue shake hands vigorously. Capital shot, old bean! the mechanic says, as a nigger chief steps forward from the trees, his honour guard of naked warriors dropping their tribute of tusks at the feet of the scientific adventurer . . .
. . . Olive, Olive! Oh, I dunno, there’s summat wrong wiv you, girlie, carncher see yer father’s wantin’ izale? Olive turns back to the scullery, limping on the toes of her too-tight boots – she almost lays a hand on the ruddy range to steady herself. Audrey agrees there’s summat wrong wiv that girlie, and moreover: They’re in cahoots, they want her to be like this, lost, confused, a top spinnin’ round ’em. Sam plucks the beaded cloth from the jug and pours a draught into his moustache cup, and there are beads of sweat on Mary Jane Death’s forehead. Above her in the cabbage-steam-fug hangs a sampler Audrey sewed at school. — One, two, three, four, girrrls. One: needle in the right hand. Two: thread in the left. Three: Through the eye. Then four: loop and knot. Now, thimble drill . . . Audrey’s hands, not suited to this fine work, twitched and shook in an ague that she felt incapable of mastering, or even to be a part of her at all, but something that snowed down poisonously from the arsenical-green ceiling . . . Thimbles on yer thumbs, one-two, thim-thumbs, thimthums, tee-to-tum . . . — Out of the eater, she says, came forth meat and out of the strong came forth – Burrrurp! Really, Samuel, Mary Jane says, laughing, mussyer? They’re in cahoots, together they’ve made five now an’ loss none. Stanley laughs at his father’s eructation and says, Judges, Chapter 14, Verse 14 – thass evens, guv’nor. Albert, without looking up, grimaces and Audrey can hear what he hears: the echo of one brother inside the other’s bony cave. I’m inbertween ’em – I’m a prism or a lens. Beams of Stanley, beams of Albert, playing, each on the other brother’s blank face . . .
The curious round-’ousing of a big man pulling himself together with his braces – his moustache is wet wiv beer and tobacco-stained above his hidden lip. Hard to imagine that there is a lip beneath it, because Samuel Death’s hair is so fleshy in tone, and, if it weren’t for the reddening of his cheeks, you would think the tache wuzziz lip, while there are waxy skin strands plastered at the back of his bare domed head: Bedlam engraved in the Illustrated London News. — A large worthy-looking body walking along the quayside of a Mediterranean port, a basket of laundry dumped on her head. Four sailors dice in front of a tangle of ropes and spars while gazing at her behind. None of the Deaths know where this racy print has come from – it simply cropped up on the wall, hiding the wallpaper with its criss-cross pattern of violets and pansies, wallpaper that is steam-slackened, torn into strips, and certainly antedates the Deaths, for, when Audrey was a littler girl, she was convinced her baby sister had been named after it. — Violet now clambers on to the chair her father has risen from, and, smuts on her cheeks, reaches up to fasten his collar stud. All of them have been dragooned into his toilet: Stanley sent to fetch the showy coat from the hook in the passage, Olive buckles his gaiters, Audrey and her mother mix tea and gin into his flask. Only Albert remains at table, his eyes triangulating a realm of purer forms, his fork negligently sccccrrrraping gravy shapes. Samuel cries, Get the Coniston’s! A hair tonic he madly applies to the front and back of his dome, as he places first one profile, then the other, before the oval of looking-glass chained up by the door – this, a motion that shows off to its fullest effect the sharp isosceles that, together with his love of swank, has earned him his moniker. Not, Audrey muses, that he’s like the landlord, Silver, who comes attired soberly in bowler, wing collar, impeccably shined and elastic-sided boots – but whose face is sallow, handsome, the features somehow exaggerated, outlined wiv charcoal. The Deaths are plaster mouldings, Romish swags and vine trails pressed into their whiteness. They are pink and blond, brown and blonder, all save Audrey, whose flaming glory and cake-crumb-scattered cheeks betoken . . . wot? Or-dree, Or-dree, Ordree’s mammy gorrersel knocked up by a navvy! Howsoever the taint was acquired, these are no distinguishing marks – leastways not up towards the Munster Road, where the houses are all knocked abaht and there’s a family of Irish – or two – in every room, and the ginger nuts are everywhere in the streets. Still, Comes the Jew-boy, Comes the Yid, Comes the Jew-boy for iz gelt . . . is sung with gusto on Thursday evening, with whichever of the two little girls is to hand, grabbed and bounced on his knee. Samuel breaks off only when he hears the sccccrrrreeeching of the front gate, then he goes to the door to watch, derisively, as Silver undoes his trouser clips, pulls off his gloves and courteously doffs his hat. From the Horeb heights of the doorstep Audrey’s father hands down a tosheroon, then a second, which is followed – after an insulting interval – by a sixpence. He places the coins in the dapper man’s palm, paying t’be fucking crucified, before, sucking on his own gall, he retreats to the Golgotha of the parlour so that Silver may trot upstairs and do the same to the other tenants.
The odd panting and heaving that accompanies a tall and corpulent man working his way into a full-length overcoat. Oof-oof. The rabbit fur lies slick and rough in the gaslight, the Coniston is sweating offuvim stink up the privyole. Over her father’s shoulder Audrey sees Stanley’s impish expression: a valet, preparing to cuttim dahn t’size, by saying, I say, Pater, that’s a wewwy extwavagant costume for an hexplorer-chappie who ain’t heggzackerly headin’ up the Wivver Congo, only dahn to the ’bus garage by Putney Br
idge – say it, that is, if ’e wuz mad. Samuel Death takes a further dekko around the room, then makes a final imposition of paternal discipline: Wozzat?! He snatches the flick-book Violet has just that moment snatched from dozy Olive – Audrey knows which one, it was given away with the Daily Mail on the occasion of the old Queen’s final birthday parade, stiff cards sewn so they could be riffled and By Jingo! The horsemen fresh back from bashin’ the Boer soundlessly jingle across Horse Guards Parade, their mounts breasting the staccato dust-puffs. Samuel peers at it, lets it fall to the painted floor, extwavagantly unbuttons the just-buttoned skirts of his coat. Parts them and reaches in his waistcoat pocket for his watch. Well, pshaw! – the skin curtain billows – You’re welcome to vese guttersnipes, Mary, me old Dutch – she simpers on the chaise – if’en I don’t look lively . . . All eyes are on his fumbling fingers, all except Albert’s. Samuel Death holds the timepiece up by its gold-plated bracelet, its face a lozenge of jet eclipsing the present that flows behind and in front of it. He pinches the tiny buttons either side of the casing and peers at the red illumined figures, 08.54, each digit composed with straight bars, bevelled at their ends. Gaol numbers . . . I’m in gaol . . . in the spike – the booby-hatch, ha-ha-hooo – help me, helpme, hellellellellpme, Stan, Bert’s torturin’ me! Ashuwa-ashuwa . . . — The long rubberised strip of tension loops round her middle and stretches in either direction along the corridor, pulling from the past to the future, lashing her to the moment – her belly bulges so bad, she feels queer, like I might . . . I dunno. Before she came down to tea she took the piece of calico she had folded into an ’Arrington Square and put it down the front of her bloomers, although not really grasping why every lady should know the greatest invention of the age for women’s comfort . . . Stanley releases the semi-inflated tube and it snaps into the bicycle wheel and off I go! Leaping like a pea onna griddle . . . the pink ’un in Holywell Street . . . stuckinim – stuckinerr . . . We only start the generator for the electric from time to time, Miss De’Ath, wouldn’t you agree that candlelight is more aesthetically pleasing? Cables swagging the length of the workshop sheeee-ung-chung-chung-chung! Her lathe-bed ratchets back and Audrey loosens the chuck, switches the bit – a fuse rattles down on top of the others. Then they are streaming out from No. 1 Gate, Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day, Wearing the roses off our cheeks, For precious little pay . . . red-and-green flags come from nowhere and are waving on the tops of ’buses thronging Beresford Square. Shoulders back! Necks straight! Arms swing! We are the munitionettes, the suffragettes, the wild revolutionary girls!
What can it mean, this sudden shift from paralysis to movement? Busner is left rooted, all the sour rot from the hospital’s miles of intestinal corridor blowing into his puzzled face. This must be, he intuits, something – some definable pathology . . . surely? The marked counterpoint between akinesia and festi-festi-na-shun, D-E-C-I-M-A-L-I-ZAYSHUN. DECIMALIZAYSHUN. Soon it’s gonna change the money round, Soon it’s gonna change the money rou-rou-round! Easier, Busner thinks, to conceive of the Friern corridor as an endless conveyor belt, running around and around, bringing towards him patient after patient pari passu, so that if he can maintain concentration he’ll have ample time to make the appropriate diagnosis of neurosis, dipsomania, dementia praecox, generalised paralysis of the insane, syphilis, addiction to socialism, schizophrenia, shell shock – the diseases historically synchronised and so entirely arbitrary, the moral ament becoming, on his next go-round, the mentally deficient, on his third, retarded, fourth, mentally handicapped. Rou-rou-round. Soon it’s gonna change the money round . . . The hospital’s fantasia on the theme of the Italianate belies, he thinks, its real purpose as a human museum within which have been preserved intact these specimens, crushed and mangled round-rou-round, I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape, ape – Enough! He must seize upon an action with which to fracture this reverie, exactly as the pressed-down tile allowed the elderly woman’s foot to scoot forward. He finds it in the automatism of consulting his watch, an involved process since his wife – overreacting to an interest in gadgets Busner once feigned – gave him a new quartz model, the first to be affordable, for his thirty-first birthday. So: he flips the heavy gold-plated bracelet from beneath his shirt and jacket cuffs, he brings the little black face up to his own, then pinches the small buttons either side of its casing so that the digits are illuminated redly, futuristically: 08.54 . . . late already for the ward rou-rou- he at once sees and feels himself to be a colossal white canister spinning slowly end over end and sharply illumined against the infinity of blackness . . . I am late . . . already, must pinch . . . harder, I can’t . . . see . . . the time!
He awakens to discover himself an old man who lies pinching the slack flesh on the back of his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand, fingers that prickle with arthritis. He awakens to the pity of it all, for I was up only . . . he struggles on to his other side so he can check the clock radio on the bedside table . . . three quarters of an hour ago, when he stood in the musty toilet, his sweaty forehead pressed against the mildewed wall, dropsical – late-onset hydrocephalus? and stared stupidly at the splutters unceasing, a plip here, a plash there . . . then at the ecclesiastical window with its opacity of wormy smears – out there breaks the blank day – then at a toilet roll once dampened, now dried, its lumpy multi-ply reminiscent of epidermal corruption not seen since student days – keratitis, rhagades, the stigmata of congenital syphilis – and then only as plates in textbooks. On the lino, by the El Greco of his old feet, there was a pile of old proceedings, peedewed, to be read at stool, and so the memory’s overlay peels back to reveal the exact same vignettes – wall, toilet roll, medical journals – and Busner realises that I have returned! A triumphalism he acknowledges to be inappropriate for a sleepy walk even as he looks to the window and vermiculated quoins comes from somewhere – but where? Then, as he turns, not bothering to flush, and shuffles back towards bed, it occurs to him that he troubled to ask someone he knew then, someone who had specialist knowledge, because they were so ugly, those worm-riddled blocks set into the gateposts of the hospital – but which hospital? There had been so many – Twenty? Thirty? – up until his retirement the year before, after hanging on at Heath far longer than I should’ve . . . and why? Almost certainly to postpone this present mode of life, one his children viewed as pathological, a senile depression – possibly the forerunner of dementia – that had been kept at bay by his pottering, his peculiar job-reductivism, consulted as he had been mostly by other consultants. Busner knows better: this is the re-emergence of an essential self, long since buried and worm-eaten . . . The passage from the toilet to his bedroom is narrow and angles around a portion of the adjoining and more modern office building, an insurance company which, in the process of construction, somehow managed to exact a few cubic feet from this end-terrace Victorian property of no distinction, a brick and masonry cell like all the rest — A burst of clickety-clack from the keyboards of the brokers who factor risk within inches of his sloped shoulder almost derails him. John! he hears one call, quite distinctly: John! Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims – one for John at Aviva? They’re all called John, while here am I, a prophet in the wilderness . . . There is no soft Persian runner beneath his feet, as there would be at Redington Road, only coarse and colourless carpet offcuts that he himself had pulled from a wheelie-bin in back of the discount furniture store in Cricklewood, Slumberland!, where he had picked up the few sticks needed to prop up this domestic scene, this granddad flat. Granddad! Granddad! You’re lov-ley, Granddad! Granddad! We lo-ove you! It’s a curse and a blessing, this, as he shuffles through the doorway and spies, clasped by April morning sunshine, the bars of his bedstead, with clumps of his damp straitjacket wadded between them. To incontinently recall these, the lyrical leftovers and junked jingles of seven decades, would be an affliction . . . timeitus, he smirks . . . had Busner not come to appreciate, since his retreat here to the first-floor flat on Fortess Road, tha
t within the patterns made by their effervescing in the pool of his consciousness are encoded wider meanings – he balks at truths – ones not surveyed or even guessed at by the mental mapmakers with whom he has spent his working life, notwithstanding the elegance of their modelling – theoretical, neurological – or the crassness of their professionalism. The unyielding mattress calls forth only this: a tired acknowledgement of his own flabbiness. Walks have been resolved upon and not taken, meals are spooned from tins and forked from plastic containers, or else spread on bread – lots of it. This particular Busner kneads soft stuff into a pillow-shape and puts his swollen head on to it while cavorting with all the svelte fugitive selves that have spun away from him in this . . . dizzy dance, Granddad, Granddad, we love you! And he loves them too, but after he and Caroline parted it seemed superfluous to do it all again, acquire a fourth wife who would demand the application of yet another decorative scheme to the walls that had contained him, on and off, since he was . . . what, ten or eleven? He remembers his uncle, Maurice, leading him by the hand through the wintry chambers of the house on Redington Road, his tight-fitting overcoat so long and black that when he stooped he . . . was a drainpipe . . . stiffness . . . rigidity . . . hypertonia –. It would be superfluous and besides the point – if he wished to go that way . . . Well, he had considered getting back together with Miriam – whom he viewed with genuine affection when they met at grandchildren-centred events, and with whom, of course, he still had to deal when it came to Mark. If not with her – and, after all, he had no idea of how Miriam felt about him – there might be the possibility of tying up the loose ends of relationships still more unravelled . . . But no: the real point being that in some place or other one of me and one of them are already united in the bicker of minor ailments, cemented by the mucus of passion spent . . . So, whatever the anxieties of his children – two of whom are mental health professionals with all that this implies – Busner had thought it better to simply walk away, will the house to them while he was living and walk away, not quite a sannyasin . . . gingerly he rasps the underside of a jowl – although at long last committed, after decades of dependency, to once more caring for myself. 09.01. – When he had stopped wearing ties that was when I stopped fidgeting with them, obviously . . . the pill-rolling tremor we called it: tremor at rest, the patient’s gaze forced upwards, the hands held out in front, the index fingers rubbing the pads of the thumbs – and the shrink? He sat there watching them, rolling the end of his tie up and down: tremor at rest. Nothing, Busner thinks, comes of nothing – although, LCD digits come of pinching. He had been dreaming of a hospital and got up to pee, then gone back to bed and returned to another hospital – or was it the first again, only in a different era? The plaster strings around the cornices torn away, and the plaster laurels dressing the windows and doors pulverised, the gaps concreted in, then pebble-dashed. Was this the same hospital – or a smaller one? One equipped with a few acute wards, some offices, and a workshop for occupational therapy – which he had liked . . . Busner had visited them all as he careered through his professional life – Hanwell, Napsbury, Claybury, Shenfield, the ’Bec. Visited them all while organising trials or conducting studies or working as a clinician. He thought now, wistfully, of the long minutes spent watching the cutlass shadows slashed by a pot plant on geometrically patterned wallpaper during an interminable group therapy session . . . No! It had been a visit – it was a visit that he dreamed of. A visit – and the smell was on him . . . the smell of sweat, Largactil sweat. There were greeny linctus beads on his spotty forehead and a filthy mark on the inside of his lumberjack-shirt collar. He liked to look at the redwood, he said, which he could see from the window of his ward. Surely, Busner had thought, it isn’t beyond their ability simply to keep him clean – although he, far better than most, knew that it was. Surely, he had almost screamed into the mustiness of the day-room, they can stop his legs from kicking! For if this wasn’t pathetic enough, Henry Busner – my brother – had whimpered: I – I can’t con-con-control them, I can’t . . .