by Will Self
her wide hips – every time she paused for breath her supportive
father heard the grating after-tone … send in the clooownssshhrrghhh.
The intervention had been, perhaps, her finest ever performance:
standing there, for once with an audience at least close to double
figures, and proving how much more mature she could be than
her spaced-out mother and senile father. Poor Lottie! The least
objection – the slightest check to one of her outbursts – was, Zack
knew only too well, the way to really enrage her … such a temper –
such anger. Yet on this occasion … I threw caution to the winds. Why?
There was the reopened wound of his split from Athena … it’s the
last, not the bloody first, that’s the deepest, and so he’d shouted her
down: That’s enough! You’ve no right to browbeat me in this way –
not you, Lottie, or any of you other ungrateful whelps … or words
to that effect. Oscar, who has his mother’s neat, dark features … and
permanently shaded top lip, had looked up from his phone-fiddling
and guffawed: You’re seventy-eight years old, Zack Busner – you’re
seventy-eight years old! Who was he, this pseudo-intellectual,
pseudo-biker in all his pretentiousness, to berate the father who …
wiped his fucking bum! It’d been Daniel, one of life’s conciliators,
who’d eventually calmed them all down. Busner felt a great affinity
with his second son, who … like me, has always had a … mutating
mental thunderhead between him and the sunlight: a profoundly
disturbed elder brother. It’d made of him a coper as well as a conciliator
– a coper and a tosher and a mender and a marrier of one
two-by-four to the next. Daniel had been the first of Zack’s children
to move back into the Redington Road house with the stated intention
of … keeping a bit of an eye on Dad – the Fortess Road flat had
gone the way of all rental properties, and, although he’d been saying
for a while that when the lease ended he’d … take to the open road,
winter was coming – so he’d scuttled back up to Hampstead … my
shitty-little tail between my bemerded legs. Zack couldn’t help feeling
a little cynical about Daniel and Pat’s eye-keeping: the doctoring
wasn’t … that lucrative, while his partner, the earthy and mostly
indolent Patricia … hadn’t stopped pushing ’em out until she was
nigh-on perimenopausal. They’d had a house of their own, once …
Palmers Green, wasn’t it? But, as the years passed, so the shortfall
between their earnings and the mortgage payments grew. Unlike
the thrifty Oscar, who’d scrimped and saved and bought-to-let,
they’d been compelled to sell-to-borrow … moving further and
further out, sending their vast brood of kids to wilder and wilder
schools, until they were marooned out in the Essex flatlands. There
were rooms aplenty at Redington Road for these whelps’ whelps –
of whom there were so many their grandfather couldn’t remember
their names … if I even knew them to begin with. He’d encounter
one or other of them on the stairs, or emerging from a bathroom,
and reel back, shocked by this particular expression … of my
own phenotype: faces of a greater or less … frogginess, but all with
standard, Busner-issue receding chins, wide mouths and prominent
yet flat-bridged noses – all of them with mild blue eyes, mostly
goggling behind thick lenses. And their grandfather would gaze
at them dumbstruck, thinking … Who are they, my descendants?
Who indeed. – Nonetheless, on the afternoon of the Big Interventio,
it was Daniel who’d … mended fences, just as he’d mended
the guttering, put the wildly overgrown garden in order and installed
the inset ceiling spotlights … possibly with a view to this
interrogation. Dad, he’d said, we’re quite simply worried about you
… or words to that effect, and we wonder whether you might be
more, um, comfortable somewhere where people can keep an eye
on you consistently … It was sort of okay when it was just Pat,
me and the kids here – but now so many of the others have pitched
up as well … and I’ve taken this Southwark job … Well … we
rather sort of … feel … you’re getting sort of … lost between
the … cracks. Surely … some sort of … assisted … living … ?
He had tailed off as his courage sort of deserted him – it was left to
his half-sister to do the … soothsaying: You’re getting forgetful,
Dad – you don’t take your medication … You have, um … these
accidents – what if you fall? And left it to her younger sister in
turn to deliver the … coup de grâce: It’s Simon, really, Dad, he’s a
complete fucking loony and none of us can stand him … There’d
been, Busner thinks now, still standing before the groovy wooden
door, waiting for admission to this … chamber of secrets – what’re
they gonna do to me? What possible sanction can there be for putting
your meat-and-two-veg’ on a buffet counter? a spring-loaded catch
in the collective throat of the family … and Frankie released It …
Clever Frankie – direct Frankie. Smart and efficient Frankie –
fully-medically-qualified Frankie, who works as a locum only because
she wants her time free to pursue … other projects. Smart,
neat, almost … reet-petite Frankie, who’s got all her sister’s share
of their mother’s ethereal good looks, yet … makes very little
of them … The expressions on the other Busneresque faces had
shifted – they all became animated, sat up, stopped mucking
about with their mobile phones, and so had begun … a clamour
of complaint: Simon had burned the carpet and the sheets in the
attic bedroom, he’d blocked the downstairs toilet with excessive
amounts of toilet paper, he’d woken the entire house at three in the
morning playing Carmina Burana … vita de-tes-ta-bi-lis … nunc
obdurat … et tunc curat … ludo men-tis ac-i-em … Sors sa-lu-tis!! Et
vir-tu-tis!! Michi nunc con-traaaria!! Est affectusss! Et de-fectussss!
Semper in an-garia … !! Because he’d been enslaved by the same
bloody thing that forever enslaves all of us: having gone out to some
dreadful-bloody-dive in Kilburn, where he succeeded in picking
up someone at least biologically female – as Pat-the-Prude put it.
Someone who – it transpired the following morning when she
refused to leave the house – was even crazier than Simon! Zack
gagged trying to drink in all this poisonous resentment – he’d
spluttered, I-I d-don’t rightly know where to begin when it comes
to rebutting this dreadful calumny … Whereupon his third son …
dangerous to know piped up again: You are seventy-eight years
old! You are seventy-eight years old! His leathery, bearded face
creasing, his hands shining his leathery knees, You are seventy-eight
years old! You are seventy-eight years old! Basking in Oscar’s
fury, his father had considered … yet again the stereotypic character
of younger siblings’ resentments: He thinks Simon crazy …
therefore Simon is Mark, so he’s pl
unged into insecurity … And
it might’ve been at that precise point … or possibly sometime later,
that the malefactor had himself appeared, slinking into the big
Busner-filled room and squatting down beside the mirrored cocktail
cabinet – another relic of the Maurice Years … You’ll have a cocktail,
won’t you, Zachary-dear? Gin-and-it? Kill a few brain cells while we
tune in to the Brains Trust? This – this! Then – now! This much he
knew – I know: he has reached the final Ashrama, the life-stage of
renunciation, so then – as now – he’d sat tight-lipped behind his
mask of akrodha … the state attainable by sustained practice wherein
the Sannyasin maintains his equanimity despite being roundly abused
by his own sickeningly ungrateful grown-up children, venturing only
this feeble riposte: He’s more sinned against than sinning … Right
away Oscar was up on his hind-legs … like his wet-nosed namesake
… long dead – Miriam took him to the vet, should’ve liked to say
goodbye … and the venom had spurted out: You may be seventy-eight
years old – you may even be a bit confused – but that doesn’t
disqualify you from hearing hard truths … hard stuff – yeah. Yeah!
All of our childhoods, yeah – all of ’em buggered up by you with
this bullshit: your great healing empathy – your magical healing
touch, which you insisted on bestowing on all-and-fucking-sundry
all the fucking time! All-and-fucking-sundry! To’ve conceived a
child at all was miraculous – to’ve watched him weaned and grown
to manhood a series of amazing revelations … thousands each day –
if you troubled to look, yet there he’d been, a Pecksniff pointing the
way towards responsibilities … he’ll never ever experience – all-and-fucking-sundry,
indeed! Zack had remained implanted in the shoddy
upholstery beside Pat-the-Prude – and last night, in Room Five-Twenty,
he’d stared balefully down at his parenthetic toes … they
say toenails grow when you’re dead – therefore I must be … And right
now, still standing in front of the groovy wooden door in the
Hilton’s lobby, his son’s execrations return … to soil me again.
Y’know, to be honest, Dad – because honesty is what you value
above all else, isn’t it … Well, to be fucking honest, Dad, I think
I’d’ve been better off without a father at all, instead of one who
picks saddo charity cases up off the streets and drags them into
the bosom of his own bloody family ’cause he’s got some fucking
messiah-complex! Such hateful words … he took his mother to the
hospice – I should’ve liked to say goodbye … poor Miriam! Her
beautiful, youthful curves planed flat by age … her lovely smooth
skin foxed by liver spots and melanomas … then varnished by the
chemo’ … Her limbs stiffened by rigor mortis – then assembled
into a coffin so she could be burned in the blown-out shell of her
younger self … How horrible! Best not touch her … might be
nailed to her – thrust atop the same flaming grill … And Simon?
Poor, benighted, homeless and helpless Simon – Simon whose
mind is a bloody battlefield all day, every day, what did he do?
He laughed! He roared with laughter! He rocked and rolled with
merriment so much the cocktail cabinet he was leaning against
rocked and rolled as well – Lottie had simply roared: He swore at
me! Told me to fuck right off out of it in my own bloody home!
While her sensible sister quietly added: He can be a lot more
abusive than that if you get in his way – there’re ample grounds for
a section … And Simon had roared some more, his spotty-and-stubbly
Adam’s apple bouncy-bouncy as he … volleyed their selfishness
back in their faces: Fair enough … fair enough – you’re Fair-enough-Frankie,
innit … bin it … S’me – s’him … Sick as a pig-in-shit,
me – true enough, but where’s all your money and your edyucashun
and your sickotherapy got you lot? What I see – what I see’s
Guardian-reading fucking ingrates squatting in the strictly-I’m-a-celebrity-Big-Busner-house
… That’s what I see – and the lot of
you got the squabbly-wobblies over money-can’t-buy-you – that’s
what I hear … Zack, attuned as ever to the ultrasonic whine
of psychosis, heard the extreme neediness lurking behind Simon’s
words – heard it, and registered also the impossibility of anyone …
or ones’ ever being able to fulfil it and make good the neglect of
parents, teachers, officers and, of course, psychiatrists. It’s this
incommensurability – between his own capacity to care for Simon
… for Henry, Mark and all the others as well, and the caring such
distress so plainly demands – that Busner experiences as … love –
I confess it: I love Simon, just as I loved Henry, love Mark … all the
others as well … At any event, he’d always been more partial to
psychotics than these … neotenous neurotics, and, while conceding
his behaviour could be pretty … primal at times – I’m an ape-man,
I’m an ape-ape-man, theirs was simply … brutish. He’d encountered
the woman Simon had picked up one morning at the breakfast
table – Zack had been huffing and puffing into his porridge, while
Simon, proud of his conquest, introduced them thus: Ann, this
is Doctor Zebadius Obadius Anthraxobadus. He is a great healer,
scientist and alchemical worker – he can see the future … all of
our futures … This is his castle on the hill, dearie, and we’re his
guests … Ann, who looked to be in her early thirties, had an
electro-shock of ginger hair on her narrow head, peeling lips …
rubber cement and the warily defiant, yet terrified eyes of the
psychotic. All she’d said was, And? Which Zack accepted as … the
mot juste – not only in that context, but in all others as well. For
did not And? perfectly convey that nothing … nichts, nada, rien du
tout is discrete – everything is conjoined: one moment to the next,
space to time, cause to effect … at least in our own minds. And
so Simon had … carried on conjoining: explaining to Ann how
Doctor Zebadius Obadius Anthraxobadus had met him when he
was lying on a flattened cardboard box next to the steps descending
into Tottenham Court Road tube station – lying there pinioned by
the eyes of Freddie Mercury’s giant effigy, which stared down from
on top of the Dominion’s portico. I want to break free, Simon had
croaked – but there was scant chance of that: Zack, hurrying to
Foyle’s, in search of a book on Ch’an, had heard this – and at the
same time been struck by the beggar’s Buddhistic posture: cross-legged
in a child’s flower-patterned sleeping bag, his black hair
hacked into a disturbing divot, his face a bashed-about conker:
wind-browned and gaunt, his mien innocently guilty. In his mitty
hands he’d been holding a flap torn off a cardboard box on which
he’d lettered: EX-ARMY SOLDIER ON THE RD WAS 25138694
i HAVE PTSD CAN YOU HELP ME TO FIND A BED FOOD SHELTER
THANK YOU’S so MU
CH COMPLEX SIMON. It’d been the complex
that really hooked Zack – and, after giving him a pound, he’d
asked the ex-squaddie if he’d mind being photographed. It’d been
the very first snap he’d bagged with the smartphone given him by
his grandson, and in the weeks which followed, whenever Simon
grew distressed … They’re taking me into the dark chamber – don’t let
’em PUT THAT THING ON ME! Zack faffed about until this
pitiful vision was once more before them, and he’d say, Look at
this and tell me things haven’t got better … He’d installed Simon
at Redington Road – while he went to Camilla’s in Kilburn to sleep
– saying to Daniel and the others when they bridled: C’mon, don’t
be a sickening bunch of Missus Jellybys – this man is as worthy
of your compassion – all of your compassion – as anyone else …
Don’t bother with covenanting Oxfam, or filling out a tax-payer
declaration for Amnesty – that’s not charity, it’s accessorising
your own bleeding hearts … Go to any high street in any of our
marvellous towns and cities and you can find men and women
simply lying on the ground suffering – all of them are as deserving
of this house as you lot – as deserving of your cars, your clothes,
your Sardinian cultural tours and your mobile-bloody-phones as
well – you all know this. You MUST know this – I’ve been teaching
it to you your entire-bloody-lives. At least, that’s what I remember,
not the catalogue of crimes you accuse me of … Toenails grow when
you’re dead – therefore I must be … rolling home — Last night, in
Room Five-Twenty, Zack had arisen from the bed and stared into
the sallow and labial petals of the sub-Georgia O’Keeffe daub
planted in the alcove behind. What was it Ann had added to
Simon’s description of their beneficent host? Ah, yes – she’d said
that besides being a wise and charitable man Doctor Anthraxobadus
was the Great White Spirit who lived in the fifth dimension –
an unreal estate, from which he nonetheless managed to control
everything that happened in the world … with wires – WIRES! So
charmingly recherché, this, in an era when psychotics – modish, as
they always are – were incorporating the new digital technologies