by Will Self
‘What d’you think of the balloon?’ Keith said, one day in late summer when we were on our way to another MI6 cook-out. The balloon had been up for some weeks, tethered four hundred feet above Vauxhall Cross. But although it was on our beat we’d yet to visit its moorings. From where we currently were, crossing Battersea Park in a south-easterly direction, we could see its stripy awning of a belly nudging against the defunct cooling towers of the Power Station. Foreshortened London.
‘Pssht! Dunno. It’s a balloon, I s’pose. Can you go up in it?’
‘Course you can; what would be the fucking point in tethering a balloon four hundred feet over London if you couldn’t go up in it?’
‘Dunno. Observation of some kind – I mean it’s right next to MI6.’
‘You have distinctly primitive ideas about the secret state,’ said Keith in Ord’s camp, fruity and yet severe voice. ‘Neither cloaks nor daggers are necessary at all when there are many many men – and women – who regard proximity, loyalty and even fealty as the mere small change of historic arbitrage. When I was suppressing the anarcho-narco warlords of Grand Cayman in ’31, my death squads were penetrated to the very apex of their command structure. If I executed one of my traitorous officers another one immediately took his place and fed vital intelligence to the other side. Eventually I realised that the swine had penetrated us so deeply that I myself must logically fall under suspicion.’
‘B-but what,’ Flambard stammered obsequiously, ‘d-did you do?’
‘Simple, I too swapped sides. Taking control of the anarcho-narco forces I attacked the government and seized control of the State. With my hand thus massively enhanced’ – Ord clenched his meaty fist and hit out towards the balloon – ‘I could turn on the terrorist scum and finally eliminate them. Victory as usual!’
Still, whatever Ord said, the idea that the balloon was an observation platform didn’t seem such an absurd notion to me. After all, if the not-so secret service could flaunt itself in a ludicrous postmodern wedding cake of an office building immediately abutting Vauxhall Bridge, then why shouldn’t they have a hot-air-powered eye in the sky? Besides, I liked the MI6 building, its beige concrete façade and cypresses for finials suggested a kindlier apparatus than Ord’s brutal vision, and there was also the tiny roomlet of riparian beach next to it, a notch of the way we were. The oddest driftwood and trash got snagged by the notch, then, at low tide, Keith and I would build little fires out of it. As dusk fell we’d sit toasting marshmallows and staring moodily across the ruched brown river to the Tate Gallery on the opposite shore, while Dinah frolicked leadenly on the compacted silt.
Sometimes, when night had all but closed in, the Frog Tours amphibian would come pitching and yawing upriver from Westminster. Going half-about in the ebb tide, its way-off-road tyres would skitter and then gain purchase on the concrete ramp which angled down from our beach. With a throaty roar of its diesel engine the bizarre vehicle mounted towards us, until with a splutter and a gasp it freed itself from the heavier element. Keith grabbed Dinah, and the three of us flattened against the vertical dunes of our refuge. Bemused tourists stared down at us from the cabin of the amphibian as it headed for the Albert Embankment. A terrified Dinah would howl, and once or twice Keith lost his cool, chucking shingle against the garish landing craft as it established its commercial beachhead. Then I had to assume the role of Ord and restrain him.
But on this particular day it wasn’t the Frog Tour that concerned him. ‘Nah,’ said Keith as we circled the ornamental lake, ‘the balloon’s a tourist thing. It’s a tenner to go up – maybe we should do it. We could leave Dinah with that nice Australian lad in Majestic Wine –’
‘But why – why would we want to go up in it?’
‘To see the city, you pillock. To orientate ourselves. Jesus, we spend most of our waking hours trudging round this bit of London – why not see it from the air?’
‘No thanks, I feel hideously orientated already …’ I felt a surge of anger and when I continued it was as Ord. ‘About the only thing I could think of doing in that balloon is holding a debate –’
‘A debate? Whaddya mean?’
For the first time in weeks I’d both grabbed the role of Ord and caught all of Keith’s attention. I could tell this because it was his habit, when his massive Difference Engine fell properly into gear, to call Dinah over, put her on the lead, then walk with her closely to heel, as if he were a blind man entering his seeing-eye dog for Cruft’s. Some baggy-clad adolescents stared at us as we worked our way over the Queenstown Road roundabout: big, little and spotty, side by side by side, was that what they were thinking?
‘So, General, this balloon debate,’ Flambard enquired as we marched under the railway bridge which spans the appendix of Prince of Wales Drive, ‘would it be like a parachute debate?’
How I loathed Flambard’s mock humility. He was like all biographers of the living, a ghoul standing by the road his subject was due to drive along, waiting for the inevitable crash so he could gawp and then write it down.
‘Quite so,’ Ord snapped.
‘The loser would … what? Be thrown out?’
‘I’d rather hoped they would have the decency to jump, but yes, if necessary they would be thrown. I well remember the balloon debate I had in ’42 with Dickie Heppenstall and the Maharaja of Rawlpindi. That was during our pole-over-pole circumnavigation of the globe, and we had very little to do for weeks on end as our capsule was batted about the stratosphere by the trade winds. Madness to attempt such a journey, but then madness was always my forte …’
Ord paused, Dinah was straining at her leash, responding to the chorus of anguished barks from the canine rejects banged up in the Dogs’ Home. Flambard got her under control, and then as we went on he remained respectfully silent.
‘We were up there for so long that I was able to interest both men in certain practices, but inevitably that led to pettishness, jealousy and eventually a terrible falling out as they vied for my affections. A fight of some kind was looking increasingly likely, so in order to appeal to both men’s intellectual vanity I proposed we debate the motion: “This capsule believes that the man of action has more to contribute to the world than the man of learning.” We all spoke …’
We turned the corner into Kirtling Street, and the dun peaks of sand and aggregate in the yards of the Tideway Works loomed into view, arid urban alps.
‘And our contributions were judged from the ground by the then Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford, and Stig Öbernerdle, the powerboat-racing wunderkind of the interwar years.
‘To give the Maharaja credit, when he realised he’d lost he went as quietly as a lamb. We dropped the balloon down to five thousand metres and he climbed out of the porthole. It was a dramatic scene, the sun rising over the Weddell Sea, the towering bergs throwing long shadows, and if I craned up I could see the tiny figure of the Maharaja crawling up the massive curve of the balloon above me, like a fly on a wine glass. Over it all scudded the cloud cover – awesome.’
‘But tell me, General, what about this rather more lowly balloon debate. Had you a motion in mind?’
‘Mmm.’ Damn! Keith had wrong-footed me. Getting Ord back from the future was always tricky, and I felt my Ord mask slipping.
‘And what about the participants?’ Keith wheedled.
‘Err, you – me, obviously; and … and … Sharon Crowd.’
‘Ha-ha! I see, back to that, are we, Sharon-bloody-Crowd.’
‘There’s no need for you to get narked –’ The Ord mask came right off; my face felt nude without it.
‘Oh-no,’ Keith snorted, ‘not when you have so conspicuously already.’
There it was, out in the open, the nub of our friendship, and perhaps also the root of our dreary common isolation. Keith had an affair with Sharon Crowd. They broke it off, and, without knowing the whys and wherefores, I then had an affair with Sharon Crowd. In due course this ended and she went back to Keith. Hence the bloody between Sharon and
Crowd. Tmesis, it’s called, one word shoved between the legs of another. Months later, at about the last party I ever attended, a louring bear of a man came up and prodded me in the back while I was plopping guacamole on a paper plate, then he bellowed loud enough for the other guests to hear, ‘Why don’t you just put your prick up my arse and cut out the middle-fucking-woman!’
This was Keith, who was, by now, once more without Sharon Crowd. I never discovered whether he felt genuinely aggrieved about the loss of Sharon Crowd. If, like some true romantic, his flesh crawled from the wanting of her, his belly gurgled at the thought of her belly, and his eyes watered when he glimpsed the future stretching out ahead of him without her. I didn’t want to believe that Keith was so sentimental – not about Sharon Crowd at any rate. It hardly fitted in with his background in violent crime, or his formidable reasoning powers, especially given the way she’d unceremoniously shafted him.
Bax, an ageing, hairy, dwarfish, and onetime very successful novelist, also knew Sharon Crowd, carnally and otherwise. Bax said of Sharon Crowd, ‘You’ve got to admire her style. In the 1960s when you’d see girls weeping on the stairs outside parties, because they’d had some man do them wrong, you’d also see the odd smattering of doleful, lachrymose boys – they were Sharon’s.’
‘But Bax,’ I’d objected, ‘you can’t champion a woman solely on the basis that she’s a cruel deceiver.’
‘Can, and do. Also she’s clever and still remarkably handsome, which counts for something.’
At this juncture he’d leant forward to apply himself to rolling up a little turd of a cigarette, and dislodged the perilous quiff of hair that perched atop his head, so that it fell like a curtain over his puckish face. This was Bax’s way of showing that a subject was closed.
But Bax had never been one of Sharon Crowd’s lachrymose boys. Bax didn’t do lachrymose, except – as he once confided in me – when he finished one of his novels, although whether this was because he felt keenly the loss of his intellectual companion, or he was already anticipating the indifference of the reading public, he never vouchsafed. Keith too had once had a promising little career – albeit his second – as an academic. But then Sharon Crowd had exposed the delicate embroidering of some of his research and Keith lost his job. What was it with Sharon Crowd? Professional jealousy didn’t seem likely, even though she was a chalk-pusher herself. Why was it that she had so little respect for pillow talk? Because for me, well, there was the small matter of ten years’ marriage down the tubes. I lost sleep with Sharon Crowd three times – we have no need of euphemisms here – and it felt worth it at the time. Hell, it still seems worth it now I’m accelerating at 32 feet per second per second. Her lovemaking was a peculiar combination of the tender and the athletic; frequently, having engendered a bruise, she’d lay her thin lips on it.
At a Christmas party in Clapham, given by friends with a mortgage the same size as our own, Sharon Crowd sidled up to Maeve, my then wife. The interval between our third bout and what I fervently hoped would be our fourth was already far longer than that separating the second from the third. At a punch-in-the-gut level I knew time out had already been called between us.
‘Your husband’s penis really is most astonishing,’ was her opening. And when Maeve failed to respond to this sally, unable to recognise any connection between said organ and this stringy, washed-out, fiftyish blonde, Sharon Crowd continued: ‘I mean the way that when erect it bends so exaggeratedly to the left, then tips up at the end. In a nose you’d call this aspect retroussé.’
Comprehension soaked into Maeve’s face like spilt milk into kitchen towelling. ‘You mean to say you’ve been fucking my husband?’ Maeve made a fisheye lens of her wine glass through which to exaggerate the truth.
The conversation I’d been having near by with the host about free-range chickens was decapitated. It ran around for a few seconds then died.
‘Yup. I’ve stopped now though … he isn’t … he isn’t very versatile, is he?’
That hurt. I’d fed it to her in every conceivable position. We’d copulate with her on top, with me on top, side-by-side, standing up, sitting down, leaning to and falling over. I thought I’d been leading this, but it turned out to be Sharon Crowd’s merry dance.
‘Face it,’ she said to me months later when the lawyers’ letters had stopped coming, ‘if the marriage had been any good it would’ve survived my intervention – so you’d have to say what I did was for the best. After all it’s not as if there were children involved.’
Even at the time this struck me as the most Stalinist application of logic, allowing for the possibility of such alarming moral propositions as: If I hadn’t killed you, you would’ve died anyway. Keith took an even more robust view. He was extremely fond of Maeve, admiring both her capability and her sociability. As far as he was concerned there was a child in the marriage, me, and this was my way of showing that it was time I left home and let my mummy get on with her life. In Keith’s eyes Sharon Crowd remained mysteriously pure, apart from this little matter of destroying his career.
Two days after Ord had proposed the balloon debate, Keith and I went for one of our regular lunches with Sharon Crowd. Despite – or perhaps because of – her betrayals, the three of us remained close. One argument for this was that her flat was a convenient staging post on our walks. The other was that Sharon made us delicious meals. Pasta with ginger and tomato, fresh sardines swimming in lemon juice, artichoke hearts in melted butter, peppers stuffed with peppery stuff, and so on. White bourgeois woman tapas. She prepared the food in Le Creuset dishes, in her tiny galley of a kitchen, and brought it to Keith and me, where we sat, looking down the Wandsworth Road towards Nine Elms.
Sharon Crowd’s flat was in a block next to her place of work, South Bank University. Ever since the balloon had arrived, and was winched into the municipal heavens, Sharon Crowd’s dining area was the place to be if you wanted a spanking view.
‘Have you been up in it?’ Keith queried, poking a fork laden with bruschetta at the balloon, which from this vantage was well clear of the surrounding city, and motionless in the typically pewter sky.
‘No, why should I?’ Sharon poured me another glass of Côte Rotie – there was no faulting her as a hostess.
‘He and I are holding a balloon debate.’ The bruschetta wavered round to me.
‘What’s that – like a parachute debate?’
‘Sort of, but instead of the winner getting the parachute the loser jumps from the balloon.’
‘And what’s the subject?’
At this Keith clammed up. It was one thing to disrespect Sharon Crowd in the privacy of our mournful promenades – quite another to do so to her face. I, however, felt a rush of delirious irresponsibility, a carefree loss of all self-protective instincts, and said, ‘You.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Sharon Crowd’s bone-china brow cracked.
‘We’re going to debate your conduct towards us – Keith and me, that is.’
‘Conduct?’ Her incredulity curdled the atmosphere. ‘Let me get this straight, you troglodytes –’
‘That isn’t, “nyum-nyum”, fair …’ said Keith. The long years of imprisonment meant he was able to do indignation and tomato salad simultaneously.
‘Nomads then. Yes, you two nomads are going to debate – to the death – my conduct towards you?’
‘If Bax is to be believed’ – having taken on the challenge I was determined to push this as far as it would go – ‘many many hundreds of similar offences should be taken into consideration.’
Shaping words suddenly seemed too hard for our mouths and they regressed to munching, squidging, cracking and lunching. From where I sat Sharon Crowd’s sharp profile was etched against the painful concrete portico of South Bank University, which jutted out with brutal certitude. The two façades were not dissimilar, and Sharon Crowd’s chin, although small, was impressively cleft, like facial buttocks.
‘You never had any academic prospects to speak of, Ke
ith.’ Sharon Crowd’s tone was brusque. ‘Your research capabilities were negligible, and your ability to teach was severely compromised by the fact that the majority of your students were born in a decade of which you have no direct knowledge. I was doing you a fav –’
‘What!?’ Keith couldn’t suppress this yelp.
‘A favour. You don’t know your own mind, you would’ve been humiliated. Publicly humiliated. You’d have found yourself worse off than you were already’ – again the Crowd counterfactual – ‘and certainly worse off than you are now.’
Keith hung his big head, bruised with the bumpy passage of the years. He had no ability to resist her. It was the same tactic she’d applied to me; by proposing an alternative – and still more negative – future, Sharon Crowd completely extirpated Keith’s free will. He’d told me that on occasion she still came to his place and ‘did things’. His imprecision matched my own unwillingness to imagine what such things could be, and I hoped my refusal to comment was interpreted by Keith as evidence that she still did things with me as well.
Now Sharon Crowd was the convenor of the business studies department at SBU, she undertook many lucrative consultancies and even appeared on late-night current affairs programmes, debating matters of public import. Her burnish, once merely institutional, was now digital and televescent. Her suits had always been severe but now they were mannish. Her tits were non-existent. When we’d lost sleep together her nipples had been astonishing, smooth pink cones of erectile tissue rising straight from the grille of her ribcage, but perhaps they were gone now? I certainly couldn’t visualise them any more – all I saw beneath her tailored breastplate was smooth, nippleless skin.
‘And you, you’re the originator of this motion?’ She looked at me as if I were very small, a long way away and falling fast.
‘You’re a tyrant, Sharon,’ I pronounced. ‘You may even be corrupt.’
Her eyes zeroed in on the level of wine in my glass. ‘You’re probably drunk, and therefore not worth talking to – but let’s say you are, you think I mistreated you, do you?’