The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  ‘Mmm … s’pose so, work, y’know –’

  ‘Yes! Your work.’ Serena stirs her languor into an animated whirl. ‘What’s it like being a shrink? Have you got any really weird, disturbed patients? D’jew think I’m crazy?’

  Bill tilts the car up on to Fitzjohn’s Avenue before replying, ‘Which of those questions do you want me to answer first?’

  ‘Oh, the last, I suppose …’

  Christ! The woman knows how to toy – she’s a world-class toyer. ‘Why on earth do you imagine that you’re crazy?’

  Serena takes her time answering. She chafes her thighs together so slowly that Bill cannot forbear from imagining the minute accommodations of flesh, hair and membrane that are going on behind the three-buttoned curtain covering her lap. Eventually, when they are level with Lindy’s Pâtisserie on Heath Street, she comes back with, ‘Bluntly, I find I have to have a really good orgasm every day,’ and gives him an amazing smile, her teeth so white and vulpine, her gums so pink.

  Bill feels the sweat burst from his armpits like spray from a shower fitment. He grips the wheel so tightly that as the Volvo bucks across the junction with Hampstead High Street, he feels he might wrench it clear off and twist the O of metal, foam and plastic into an involved pretzel shape. Kerrist! He’s thinking about adultery in Hampstead – it’s gone this far, he keens inside; my life has plunged into a prosaic – prolix even – vanishing point.

  At Whitestone Pond they stop in order to allow a man with black-and-white striped trousers to traverse the zebra crossing. Serena doesn’t appear to notice this – but Bill does. Bill finds he is noticing everything: the golden micro-fleece on the nape of Serena’s neck; a model yacht on the pond, tacking neatly around a floating Coke can; to the right of the road the Heath, and beyond it, collapsing waves of concrete and glass and brick and steel – maritime London. ‘When you say “a really good orgasm”’ – Bill chooses her words carefully – ‘do you mean good in a moral sense?’

  Serena breaks into trills and even frills of laughter – if that’s possible. ‘Tee-hee-hee, oh no – not at all! I mean a ripping, snorting, tooth-clashing, thoroughly cathartic orgasm, one that makes me feel as if every individual nerve ending has climaxed. That kind of good orgasm.’

  ‘Oh, that kind.’ Bill feels certain he’s damaged the turbo unit. He habitually does everything to the Volvo’s engine that – according to the manual – he shouldn’t. He races it immediately after starting, before the cold oil has had a chance to reach all the lubricating points. Worse than that, the engine has also been turned off when the turbocharger was at high speed – with the risk of seizing or heat damage – although, admittedly it wasn’t Bill who’d done it.

  It was Vanessa. She managed to lean right across Bill, tear the keys out of the ignition and throw them out the window of the car and clear over the parapet of the Westway, as the Volvo was ploughing along it at seventy. When they had coasted to a halt, Vanessa threw herself out as well. No one likes to be made a fool of.

  Bill parks the car in the small car-park off Hampstead Lane, diagonally opposite to Compton Avenue. They walk out on to the Heath. A light breeze is blowing up here and within seconds it’s dried their sweaty brows, cooled their sweaty bodies. They embrace and Bill feels Serena’s hair being blown about his chops. It’s the closest he’s ever been, he realises, to a shampoo commercial.

  They walk on, stopping every few yards for more snogging and groping. Bill is certain he has never had a more turgid erection in his life. If he flung himself forward on to the macadamised path, his resilient member would simply bounce him back up again. If he took his trousers off and scampered across the grass he would, to all intents and purposes, be indistinguishable from the famous statuette of Priapus, his penis as large and curved as a bow. Good orgasm, ha! Great orgasm, more like.

  On top of Parliament Hill they take their bodies to a bench that faces out over the city, and sit them there to listen to its peculiar silence. From the direction of Gospel Oak a man comes running up the hill. Even from three hundred yards away Bill can see that he’s wearing an England football shirt. The man is clearly in some distress; as he nears Bill becomes aware of labouring breath and pumping arms. He comes up to them like someone about to deliver news of a bad naval defeat by the Persians. But instead of collapsing he props himself against their bench saying, ‘Iss gone to penalty shoot-outs – I couldn’t cope any more.’

  He’s a small plump man, with a bald pate fringed by a neat horseshoe of grey hair. Clearly football is his life. ‘I got meself this fucking big Havana – to celebrate wiv.’ He displays the stogie to them, clamped in his humid paw. ‘But now I dunno, I dunno, I can’t cope –’

  ‘We came here to get away from the football,’ says Serena.

  ‘Me too, me too,’ the man puffs back.

  ‘Actually’ – Bill takes a certain delight in this savage betrayal – ‘I bet we’ll be able to hear the result from up here.’ On cue there’s an enormous roar from the city below. ‘There we go, that was one goal.’

  The three of them wait for two minutes, then there’s a second eruption of roaring from the metropolis. They wait another two minutes and … nothing. Worse than nothing – a negative roar, a sonic vacuum in which a roar should have been. ‘They’ve missed one … the fuckers … they’ve missed one …’ The little man is destroyed, ripped asunder. He grinds the Havana into the grass with his training shoe, then he heads off back down the hill.

  Five minutes later Bill and Serena are rutting in a copse.

  4. Wheel and Tyres

  It is four days later and Bill Bywater sits at the desk which occupies most of the half-landing in his Putney house. Vanessa likes to be by the river; Bill rather wishes she was in it. Bill thinks it suitable that his study should occupy this in-between place, neither up nor down, because he has an in-between kind of psyche – especially at the moment. This is now the terrifyingly tiny house of the urban adulterer and Bill moves about it with incredible subtlety, acutely aware that every movement – from now on and for the rest of his natural life – will constitute a potential, further violation.

  Bill sits at the desk and contemplates the Volvo 760 Owner’s Manual for the year 1988 – perversely enough the year of his marriage. He has reached the section entitled ‘Wheels and Tyres’. Bill smiles manically – he’s lost his grip – and reaches for the Tipp-Ex. On the opposing page there’s a neat pen-and-wash drawing of a 1957 Volvo Amazon, captioned accordingly. With great deliberation Bill applies the little brush with its clot of liquid paper to the word ‘Volvo’ and smiles, satisfied by its deletion. It is approximately the hundredth instance of the word that he has dealt with, and soon the manual will become an opaque text, the arcanum of a vanished religion.

  As he leafs back through the pages, Bill is deeply satisfied by the small white lozenges of Tipp-Ex smattering them. They look like the results of pin-point accurate ejaculations. Bill, like Freud, has never repudiated or abandoned the importance of sexuality and infantilism, and with this unusual action he is attempting to reorient his sexuality through infantile handiwork. Bill is working hard to convince himself that by eradicating the word ‘Volvo’ from the manual, he will also annul his obsession with Serena’s vulva, which has got quite out of hand.

  In the copse she made Bill take off all of his clothes – and all of her own. At last his hands got to go on stage and open her curtain skirt. He shivered despite the summer heat and the close, dusty rot of desiccated shrubbery. ‘What’s the problem?’ she laughed at him, cupping her own breasts, stimulating her own nipples. ‘No point in worrying about the cops – we’re in it already.’ Their clothing made an inadequate stage for the performance that ensued. Bill could never have guessed that such a sexual Socrates would prove so satisfied a pig; she snorted and truffled in the musty compost. They had fucked five times since – top ’n’ tailing each other at the top ’n’ tail of each day.

  Again and again Bill scans the preamble to the section, wh
ich admonishes him to ‘Read the following pages carefully’, but his eyes keep sliding down to the subheading ‘Special Rims’, what can it mean? On page 67 there are directions for changing wheels, and a photograph of a young woman doing just that. The caption reads: ‘Stand next to body.’ Bill finds this distracting, but not as much as he does the boldface line further down the page which reads: ‘Make sure that the arm is lodged well in the attachment.’

  Bill sighs and throws down the Tipp-Ex brush. It’s no good, it’s not working. Instead of the deletion of the word ‘Volvo’ cancelling out thoughts of Serena’s vulva, it’s enhancing them. The firm, warm, lubricious embrace of living leather; the smell of saliva and cigarette smoke; the twitter and peep of the CD – a soundtrack for orgasm. Perhaps, Bill thinks, perhaps if I get to the very root of this I’ll do better. Perhaps if I delete the word ‘Volvo’ from the car itself it will do the trick?

  Serena has mastered a trick. She can apply ever so slight pressure to Bill’s indicator levers and she can effortlessly flick his shift into drive. Serena has undoubtedly read and absorbed the manual. Bill wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she knew exactly how to grease the nipple on the retractable-type towing bracket. That’s the sort of woman she is, as at home in a family car like the Volvo 760, as she would be in a sportier model.

  Bill crouches by the radiator grille. The tarmac is so warm on this summer evening that his feet subside a little into the roadway. In his right hand Bill holds a pot of Humbrol metal paint, in his left a brush. He is carefully painting out the word ‘Volvo’ on the maker’s badge of the car. He hears a riffle of rubber wheels and the fluting of a toddler, and turns to see that Vanessa has come up beside him, pushing their son in his buggy.

  ‘Bill’ – how can a voice be so cram-packed with wry irony (or ‘wiferonry’ as Bill awkwardly compounds it – to himself) – ‘what on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Whaddya’ think?’ he snaps.

  ‘I don’t know – that’s why I asked.’ The toddler’s eyes are round with anxiety; his life is already characterised by these tonal conflicts between giants, Gog and Magog smiting his Fischer-Price bell.

  ‘I’m getting rid of all the instances of the word “Volvo” on this fucking car – that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Dada said the F word.’ The toddler doesn’t lisp – his voice is high and precise.

  ‘Dada wants to rid himself of the F word,’ Vanessa pronounces sententiously.

  ‘How true, how true …’ Bill mutters.

  When the buggy and its cargo have disappeared inside the house Bill straightens up; he has arranged to meet Serena in the pub in St John’s Wood, and more importantly – he’s covered. He holds a seminar at the Middlesex Hospital every Wednesday evening at this time, so Vanessa won’t be curious about his absence. Bill stashes the paint and brush in the cardboard box of car impedimenta that he keeps in the boot of the ex-Volvo. He strolls up the path and opening the front door with his key shouts into the crack, ‘I’m off!’ and at the same time snatches up the CD face-off, his mobile and a sheaf of lecture notes he has to drop off for Sunil Rahman – who is giving the seminar. To Vanessa, who is feeding the toddler in the kitchen, this irruption of sound is just that – an odd kind of effect, as of a train window being opened while passing through a tunnel at speed.

  In the ex-Volvo, waiting at the lights by Putney Bridge, Bill dickers with the servos that alter the angle and rake of the driver’s seat. One of the servos is on the blink, and if he presses the button too much the seat tilts forward and to the left, threatening to deposit him face down, dangling over the steering wheel, in a posture all too reminiscent of how Bill imagines a suicide would end up after making with a section of hose and watering the interior of the ex-Volvo with exhaust fumes. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaims out loud as the lights change. ‘I’ve got to stop this!’

  Proceeding up Fulham Palace Road Bill faffs around with nodulous buttons until he manages to get Serena’s number. He clutches the purring instrument to his ear and hears her recorded pout. When the time comes he leaves a plaint in place of himself: can’t make it, lecture, car trouble … later. This isn’t, of course, the first time that Bill’s bailed out of this kind of situation, nor, he suspects, will it be the last.

  The lecture notes dropped in reception at the hospital, Bill wheels the big car up on to the Westway and heads out of town. There’s only one place for him now, Thame, and only one person he can speak to, Dave Adler, proprietor of the Thame Motor Centre – Repairs and Bodywork Our Speciality. Dave has worked on Bill’s Volvo for many years now – ever since he gave up psychiatry. Dave sees no intrinsic design faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo itself, rather he is inclined to locate them in the driver.

  Conversations between the two men usually go something like this:

  Dr Bill Bywater: Dave? It’s Bill.

  Dr Dave Adler: Yeah.

  Dr BB: There seems to be something wrong with the transmission …

  Dr DA: Yeah.

  Dr BB: The car isn’t changing up smoothly, it sort of over-revs and then – well, surges.

  Dr DA: Have you checked the automatic transmission fluid?

  Invariably Bill hasn’t checked it, or the windscreen reservoir, or the oil, or the brake fluid, or indeed any of the seething, bubbling liquids that course through the car’s blocky body. This will provide Dave Adler with an entrée for a sneer about how ridiculously cavalier Bill is about his car, and how if he would only pay attention to maintenance he wouldn’t run into this trouble.

  While Bill smiles to himself at the thought of the unscheduled lecture he will receive this evening when he turns up in Thame, the ex-Volvo rumbles down off the flyover and heads west into the soft heart of Britain.

  Forty minutes later the car rolls to a halt in a dusty lane that snakes away from the market square of the small Oxfordshire town. The high wooden doors of Dave Adler’s garage are shut and chained. Dangling from the hasp of the lock is a peculiar sign which Dave uses in lieu of a more conventional one. The sign reads:

  ‘BEARING IN MIND THE FACT THAT EVERYONE HIDES THE

  TRUTH IN MATTERS OF SEX – WE’RE CLOSED.’

  Bill guffaws to himself, albeit a little wearily.

  Meanwhile, in Putney, Dave Adler lowers himself carefully into the inspection pit of the Bywaters’ marital bed. He has the necessary equipment and he’s intent on giving Vanessa Bywater’s chassis a really thorough servicing. As far as Dave Adler is concerned a car is a means of transport, nothing more and nothing less.

  The Nonce Prize

  1.

  Danny and Tembe were standing in the kitchen of their house on Leopold Road, Harlesden, northwest London. It was a cold morning in early November, and an old length of plastic clothesline was thwacking against the window as the wind whipped it about. The brothers were cooking up some crack cocaine; Danny worked the stove while Tembe handled the portions of bicarb and powder. On the kitchen table a deconstructed boom box – the CD unit, speakers and controls unhoused, connected only by a ganglion of cabling – was playing tinny-sounding drum ’n bass.

  Tembe had heard an item of gossip when he went to buy the powder off the Irishman in Shepherd’s Bush three hours before, gossip he was now hot to impart. ‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ he said, ‘sheeit! Those fuckers jus’ sat in the fuckin’ house an’ waited for the punters to come along –’

  ‘Issat the troof?’ Danny cut in, but not like he really cared.

  ‘I’m telling you so. The filth were smart, see, they come in an’ do the house at aroun’ eleven in the morning – like the only fuckin’ down time in the twenty-four. Bruno and Mags was washing up an oz in the kitchen – Sacks was crashed out with some bint in the front room. They got one of them jackhammer things, takes the fuckin’ door to pieces, man, an’ then they come in with flak jackets and fuckin’ guns, man, like they’ve got the fuckin’ tactical whatsit unit out for this one –’

  ‘Tactical firearms unit,’ Danny snapped, ‘thass what th
ey call it – but anyways, wasn’t Bruno tooled?’

  ‘Yeah – and some. The blud claat had a fuckin’ Saturday night special, .22 some motherfucker built from a fuckin’ starting pistol. You recall I tol’ you that Bruno shot that nigger Gance and the bullet bounced off his fuckin’ rib – that was this shooter. Anyways he didn’t have no time nor nuffin’ for that cos’ they was on ’im in seconds, gave him a good pasting, nicked his fuckin’ stash, nicked about a grand he had in cash, an’ then tol’ ’im he had to front it up while they nicked all the fuckin’ punters.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Yeah, man. Solid. He had no choice. He sat there by the fuckin’ door an’ greeted them all in. Jus’ imagine it, man, you fink you’re goin’ to score a nice rock, you’re all didgy about it, all worked up an’ that, pumping, right, an’ you get to the fuckin’ door, in a right state, only to get fuckin’ nicked! Silly motherfuckers! The filth got twenty of them – that’s that Bruno out of the fuckin’ crack business –’ and Tembe, no longer able to contain himself at the thought of this busted crack house, like a ship of fools grounded off the All Saints Road, burst into peals of unrestrained laughter; a laughter that to Danny’s over-sensitive ears sounded peculiarly harsh and insistent.

  To cut the flow Danny waved the bottle he’d been cooking the crack up in in front of Tembe’s face. ‘Lissen,’ Danny said, ‘now you’ve tol’ me hows about I get to have my fuckin’ get up an’ that – yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, all right, no fussin’, yeah. Keep it mellow like …’ Tembe fumbled around in the mound of crack that sat drying on a wad of kitchen towelling, his finger picked a peck and he passed it over. ‘There you go – thass at least three hits, bro’, get it down you an’ then fuck off an’ that.’ Danny wasn’t paying any attention to this, he’d already fumbled out his stem from where he kept it, tucked in the top of his right boot, and was crumbling a pinch of crack into its battered end. Once the stem was primed he lit the blow torch and commenced smoking.