The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity has reached its first great epistemological watershed. Like theoretical physics it must now account for the very phenomenon it has helped to identify. It must reconstruct the proof of its own ground on the fact of its own enactment. Clearly, by concentrating so many aberrant and near-aberrant people in one place or series of places, the very fact of Quantity Theory has been impacting on the sanity quotient itself.

  The task now is to derive an equation which would make it possible to establish whether what I suspect is true. Namely that as more and more insanity is concentrated around educational institutions, so levels of mental illness in the rest of society …

  Select Bibliography

  Ford, Hurst, Harley, Busner & Sikorski, ‘Some Aspects of Sanity Quotient Mechanisms in a Witless Shetland Commune’, British Journal of Ephemera, September, 1974.

  Ford, H., ‘Teaching Stockbrokers Ring Dancing’, Practical Mental Health, January, 1975.

  Ford, H., The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Publish Yourself Books, London 1976 (limited edition).

  Ford, H., ‘Repressing People Who Laugh Alone: Towards Effective Public Transport’, The Bus, October, 1995.

  Harley, T., ‘Shamanism and Soya Futures’, World Bank Research Briefs, September, 1979.

  Hurst, P., ‘Nailbiting in Bournemouth versus Bed-Wetting in Poole: Action and Amelioration’, Journal of Psychology, March, 1976.

  Hurst, P., ‘General Census of Sanity Quotients in the UK’, HMSO, January, 1980.

  Sikorski, A., ‘Daddy, Mummy’s Mad.’ ‘Good.’, Shefcott and Willer, London 1976.

  * British Journal of Ephemera

  Birdy Num Num

  What’s my name? My name is legion, for I – we – are many. Many and colourless. I’m in him – and her, and them; I’m in some of those over there, the ones shopping for travel adaptors in Dixons. The pair of semi-whores – squeaking on high stools in leather skirts, eating caviar with their sour daddy at the granite lip of the seafood bar – I’m far deeper in them than he’ll ever be. As for that one, I’m most definitely in him, I’m loaded into him, the windy horse of a cleaner who, emaciated in his worn blue-denim fatigues, is invisible to these fervent believers in universal healthcare: the African, pulling his cartload of bleach and plastic bags from one village-sized toilet to the next.

  I am not death, for death has no persona; death is only an absence – not even a mask. True, for some I am death’s helpmeet, but I’m not a psychopath, only a cytopath. I, too, am alive. I, too, have feelings – ethics as well. If I am known at all, it’s by my effects rather than my causes; in this I am antithetical to humans’ gods. Be that as it may, I am powerful, I am ancient, I am constantly changing, and I – we – are, if not omniscient, privy to a lot.

  Y’know, some bio-theologians think I’m the First Cause, a primitive form of all the life on this dirt ball – that every animal evolved from an organism like me; others take the contrary view, that I – we – are fallen angels, cast out from the heaven of advancement, deselected and so become parasitic and unsexed.

  I say, surely it’s a question of scale? Looked down on from a mile up in the sky – the holding pattern of a god – this air terminal is a body, the living tissue of which is bored into by bacterium planes, subterranean trains and hissing buses. Humans swarm through its concourses, virions with credit cards.

  Soon, I – some of us – will be thrust into that steep vantage, the sky, then propelled over land and sea to another city; Helsinki, as it happens. Before I go, let me – us – tell you how this has come to pass; let me tell you about this generic Tuesday afternoon – because, let’s face it, it’s always Tuesday afternoon. Allow me to assemble a cast of characters, as well or as woodenly drawn as any in a whodunnit. They were all my accomplices; your task is to identify the victim.

  November 1998, a Tuesday – the day teetering on noon’s fulcrum. Georgie Maxwell was walking along the first stretch of Kensington Road; she passed the gates at the end of Kensington Palace Gardens and then the driveway of the Royal Garden Hotel. In the fluffy onset of a fine drizzle, the hotel doormen moved smartly to marshal brass luggage carts and beckon taxis beneath the jutting portico with its inset lights haloed in the damp gloom. Over the shoulder of the hotel – a 1960s thing, granite-faced and angular – stretched the late autumn brownery of Kensington Gardens, and beyond them, Hyde Park, its black tree spars rigged with dead and dying leaves. In the middle east a dark mauve sky, its fundament coiled with ashen clouds, squatted over Bayswater.

  Walking is perhaps an overstatement. Georgie’s progress was halting, despite her being encumbered with no more than a tabloid newspaper, a pint carton of semiskimmed milk and a packet of milk chocolate HobNobs, all in a plastic bag. She clunked from stiff leg to stiff leg, swinging them from her hips as if they were stilts. The hem of her skirt rose first above one thickly bandaged shin, then the other. The skirt, eh? Well, it had a Minoan motif worked into it – geometric designs embroidered with gold thread; once pale green, it was now stained and blotchy. People walking in the other direction, from Kensington Gore, didn’t take in the skirt, or the rusty raincoat, or the espadrilles unravelling from both swollen feet. They merely checked her against their internal list of street people – alcoholics, junkies, schizos and dossers – made a positive identification, then dismissed her from view.

  Up close, and personally, Georgie smelt of sepsis. There were open sores under the chicken skin of her crêpe bandages; craters, really, in which bacteria, numerous as Third World miners, hacked at the exposed tissue-face. Thankfully, the day was fresh, and neither the hurrying working girls nor the strolling young ladies out shopping could smell this. However, besides looking crazy Georgie talked to herself: a twittering commentary in real time – ‘She’s crossing the road, pelican crossing, not a game bird, crossing the road’ – that kept her company as she did, indeed, cross the road at Palace Gate, stump back along the far side, then traverse the junction of Gloucester Road and turn left into De Vere Gardens.

  Why did this street – no different to scores of others in the area – feel quite so bare, so baldly threatening? On either side magnolia-painted six-storey Victorian terraces loomed in the thickening drizzle; the pavements were anthracite glossy, void of any rubbish, or even the occasional bracelet – or tiara – of costly dog shit. The kerb sides were cluttered with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of cars – cetacean Porsches and squashed Maseratis with Dubai plates – and, as she peg-legged by these, Georgie kept up her rap, a well-spoken psychosis, ‘Maybe he’ll be there – maybe he’ll come soon. Maybe-baby, if I don’t TREAD ON THE CRACKS!’ She shied away from the spear tips of the railings, then, halfway along the street, lurched towards them and, pushing open a gate, awkwardly descended an iron staircase into a savage little area full of bullying bins.

  I – we went along for the ride – although we were also waiting inside.

  Inside Billy Chobham, who, in turn, was inside the bath; which was inside the bathroom; which, in turn, was inside Tony Riley’s basement flat. The cell-like bathroom had no windows, and only a single lightbulb that dangled, unshaded, from a furred flex. The harsh light beat the limpid surface of the bath water, below which Billy’s pubic hair bloomed, silky as pond algae. The bath water had long since cooled – Billy was colder. He’d been in there for over an hour, his fair skin going blue, the ends of his fingers puckering up into corrugated pads. However, Billy was experiencing no discomfort, because, unlike the chaotic Georgie, he had had a get-up hit. Billy always had a get-up; this was part of his professionalism. ‘I’m a junky,’ he’d tell anyone unable to escape. ‘I don’t make any bloody bones about it. I don’t try an’ stop, an’ I ain’t sayin’ it’s not my fault neevah – I wanna be a junky. I like being a junky – I’m good at it.’

  It’s debatable whether it’s possible to be good at being bad, and it’s a discussion I – we – would be happy to join in. This being noted, let’s not trouble with the theory for now, and i
nstead present the actuality. Billy had jeans that stood up straighter without him in them, and a red mohair pullover given to him by a girl in East Sheen. If he was shod it was in prison-issue trainers. He had no fixed abode, but throughout London – and still further afield, in Reading, Maidstone and Bristol – there were small caches of his belongings: a T-shirt here, a paperback there, an exercise book full of mad ballpoint drawings of invented weaponry way over there. Billy never asked the occupants of the flats and houses where he crashed if he could leave these things; he just shoved them down the back of shelves or into cupboards, so that he could return days or months later and clamour to be readmitted, on the basis that ‘I’ve gotta get me fings.’

  There were warrants out for Billy from Redbridge to Roehampton for crimes beneath petty: kiting ten-quid cheques, exchanging shoplifted underwear at Marks and Spencer, forging methadone prescriptions. There was nothing aggressive in Billy’s felonies; he took no part in the great metropolis’s seven and a half million fuck-offs, the abrasive grinding of psychic shingle on its terminal beach. Be that as it may, wherever Billy went, doors came off their hinges, baths overflowed and fat-filled frying pans burst into flame. His life was a free-pratfall, as, flailing, head over tail, he plunged through year after year, his fists and feet – entirely accidentally, you understand – striking mates, siblings, the odd – very odd – girlfriend, but mostly his old mum, who, while fighting depression, did the payroll for a chemical plant in St Neots and remained good – or bad – for a loan.

  Billy, the career junky, always had his get-up: the brown-to-beige powder in the pellet of plastic, which – after being tapped into a spoon, mixed with water and citric acid, heated, then drawn off through the cellulose strands of a bit of a cigarette filter – was thrust inside his veins, making it possible for the muzzy show to go on. Locked in bathrooms with taffeta mats, crouching in back of couches, planted in the bushy corners of conservatories – Billy stayed in these spaces for as long as it took, watching for the bloom in the hypodermic syringe, his gift of a houseplant.

  Georgie, who had forgotten her key, tapped on the glass panel of the kitchen door. Her face was a sharp, feline triangle, tabby with dirt and misapplied make-up; her taps were as diffident as the blows of velvet paws. No one heard her. In the cold bath, Billy gouched out, sunk in the hot Mojave desert of his habitual reverie, a corny old Blake Edwards vehicle for the comedian Peter Sellers called The Party.

  Billy had first seen the film on television when he was four or five years old; but even then – it was originally released in 1968 – its depiction of flowery fun was painfully dated: the beautiful people of Hollywood cavorting the night away. Besides, it was a crap film with a dumb script – no plot to speak of, only a series of farcical sight gags for Sellers, browned up to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, a useless Indian who haplessly destroys the house where the eponymous party is being held, a party he has been invited to in error, and that is being thrown by the producer of a movie he’s already sabotaged with his stupid mistakes and brainless antics.

  It was on the location for that movie-within-a-movie that Billy habitually began his drug-dreaming. So I – we – were inside Billy, who was inside the bath inside Tony Riley’s flat. In there with us was a ravine, somewhere out beyond Barstow, chosen for its superficial similarity to the Hindu Kush; and in the ravine were Hispanic extras playing Pathan tribesmen, together with more Hispanic extras playing sepoys. A detachment of Hispanics marched along the bottom of the ravine, accompanied by an Hispanic pipe band miming their instruments. The Hispanics playing the tribesmen – and a few light-skinned, Caucasian-featured blacks – reared up from the rocks above and made ready to fire. Frantic to frustrate the ambush, the half-Jewish Sellers – who, presumably, had been sent ahead as a scout – reared up as well, blasting a bugle. The Hispanic Pathans turned their rifles on him and he was struck by their volley. The bugle notes flattened into farts, Sellers collapsed, then reared up again, crazily tootling.

  This was where Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, made his entrance: a junky in a bath in a fantasy of a film. He had seen The Party next in his teens, again on television; this time he was banged up in a secure hostel on the Goldhawk Road. This second viewing confirmed for Billy that this was ‘his’ film: an acid-pastel ball, in which he could perceive his dull childhood transmuted to the plinkety-plunk beat of a Henry Mancini soundtrack. Eventually Billy had acquired his own videotape of The Party. It was wrapped in a pair of bloodstained combat trousers and pushed behind the hot-water tank in a bungalow near Pinner.

  Billy’s white body, fishily flattened by refraction, undulated in the cold water as he mimicked the flips and flops of the comedian; who died in 1980 of a heart attack – his third – brought on by the amyl nitrate he huffed on the sets of movies such as The Party. Billy’s wide mouth – which could be described as generous only if what you wanted was more plaque – stretched into a rictus. Outside, Georgie’s taps increased in volume as the drizzle percolating De Vere Gardens bubbled into rain.

  Along a gloomy corridor that ran the length of the basement flat, between Dexion shelving units stacked with papers and paperbacks waiting to be burnt, then between a thicket of cardboard tubes that sheathed old point-of-sale materials and posters, then in through an open door, the minute sound waves pulsed, to where Tony Riley, the Pluto of this underworld, sat on a sofa in his boxer shorts, his unshaven muzzle clamped by the transparent obscenity of an oxygen mask, while the cylinder lay on the cushion beside him, steely and fire-engine-red.

  I – we – were in Tony, too, not that this mattered; the catch, then gush, as his own febrile inhalation triggered the valve and yanked a gush of oxygen into his defeated lungs, drowned out everything: hearing, thought, intention, feeling. Tony was hanging on to life by his teeth, which were sunk in the plastic mouthpiece. Shitty disease, emphysema; shitty paradoxical condition. Tony sat in a stale closet, into which every small sip of air had to be dragged down a long corridor wadded with cellulose, while beneath his rack of ribcage his lungs were already abnormally distended.

  Tony Riley’s legs were kite struts in the flattened cloth of his boxers; his sweaty T-shirt hung on him like a scrap of polythene on a barbed-wire fence; his dirty-brown hair was painted down on to his canvas scalp; his grey eyes streamed behind once fashionable Cutler and Gross glasses. Up above him, on the purple and taupe striped wallpaper, hung a Mark Boxer cartoon of Tony in his heyday. It was a prophetic casting of inky sticks: the Roman profile and laurel wreath of hair simplified to a few thin and thick lines. Two decades on, the caricature was as good a likeness as any photograph – perhaps better. No photo could have captured the way Tony’s breathless need for heroin simplified the awesome clutter of the large, low, subterranean living room – its middle-aged armchairs and smoked-glass coffee tables, its Portobello Road floor cushions and swampy Turkish kelims, its portable commode and novelty coat tree – into two white dimensions of nothing.

  Beside Tony’s meagre thigh there lay a scrap of tin foil, on which trailed burnt heroin. Chasing the dragon? For Tony it was more akin to staggering after a snail: he huffed, he puffed, he struggled to exhale, so that he could carve a tiny pocket in the necrotic tissue of his lungs to fill with the narcotic fumes.

  Tony spat out the mouthpiece, snatched up the foil and, from the coffee table in front of his sofa, a gold Dupont lighter; then he grabbed a rolled-up tube of tin foil, poked it between his lips and hunched to his labour.

  ‘In the primitive environment,’ Lévi-Strauss wrote, ‘the relevant is the sensational.’ But really, in Tony Riley’s basement flat, it was too primitive even for that; here, sensations were muffled and numbed by mould and opiates; the rain falling on the roof five storeys above penetrated the slates, then joists, plaster, paint, carpet, floor boards and more joists, until it pattered on to the jungly floor between the chief’s bare feet. The parrot of addiction flapped across the dank clearing to perch on the edge of a serving hatch. Oh, that noble psittacine! Lo
nger lived than humans, perfectly intelligent, and well able to imitate the squawks of their most awful mental pathologies.

  Outside, Georgie’s tapping had finally risen to a determined rapping. It was only 12.20; nevertheless, the most dissolute of establishments still have their routines. There were chores to do, calculations to be made, the supplier to be contacted; then, soon enough, the customers would begin arriving. She rapped, the glass bruising her clenched knuckles. She had once had a body that, like any affluent woman’s, was a gestalt of smell, texture and colour – but now that had all flown apart: she was as dun as a cowpat, you wouldn’t want to touch her, her smell was in your face.

  ‘Whereis’e? Stupid Billy. Fucking Billy. Open up. Gotta do Tony’s meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s fucking meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s meds –’ This aloud, the narrative of her staggering thought replacing the saga of her limping walk along Kensington Road.

  Skin pancaked between bone and glass; the raps marched through the kitchen, along the sepia corridor, and into the room where Tony was trying to recapture the thrill of the chase. He left off, let fall his impedimenta, stood and lurched to the doorway. ‘Billy!’ he shouted in a crepitating whisper. ‘It’s her – get the fucking door!’ Then he crumpled up as thoroughly as any scrap of tin foil.

  ‘Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng!’ Billy had discovered that if he plugged his ears in a certain way and pressed his mouth against the side of the bath, his submarine ejaculations sounded – to him – like sitar chords. Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, sat cross-legged on the floor of his Los Angeles bungalow, wearing a long-sleeved, collarless linen shirt. The big bole of the instrument was cradled in his lap, his browned-up face concentrated in mystic reverie. ‘Brill-ll-llerowng!’ When the letter-box flap lifted, a letter fell on to the mat, and the flap clacked shut. Clacked shut. Clacked shut again. It wasn’t meant to do that – this was the invitation to the paradisical party, and he, Billy-as-Hrundi, was simply meant to pick it up, open and read it; but the fucking flap wouldn’t stop clacking!