by Will Self
Since I’d started to see Sherman again I’d had a revulsion from any ‘humour’ associated with dwarfism. Unfortunately, I’d been at it for so long that people still brought me anecdotes they thought would amuse me. Only the day before I left, a friend told me of a rash of audacious thefts from Scandinavian luxury tourist coaches. The authorities were confounded: the tourists’ suitcases had been in the locked luggage compartment of the coaches all day, yet when they reached their hotel and went to unpack they found all their valuables had been spirited away.
The police could find no leads, until at last an informer of restricted height came forward. He had been, he told them, a member of a gang of dwarfs who had enlisted larger accomplices to go on the tours, while they hid in their suitcases. Once the coaches were under way the dwarfs unzipped themselves and went to work. The inversion of drug smugglers’ modus operandi had a certain symmetry – here was the package that ingested the mule – but I didn’t believe a word of it.
I took off the Barbour and dropped it in the corner of the toilet stall where I squatted shortly before boarding. It was so stiff with stuff and waxing that it leant there – about the height of a small child, or a dwarf. I strained, fixating on the creases in its collar, pursed black lips. After only a few days’ ownership the jacket seemed to be taking on a life of its own, what might it do to me while I sleep? Then, when I rose to wipe myself and jumped as the toilet automatically flushed, it smirked at me from behind its cuff.
But in club class, with the hateful thing stashed in the overhead locker, I was free of all burdens, free to smirk at the frummer who was making his way awkwardly up the aisle dragging an enormous wheeled case, which bumped against one seat back and then the next. He was overweight and sweat wormed from beneath his hot homburg, his silk-faced frock coat falling open to reveal a black cummerbund and untuckings of white shirt. He seemed oblivious to the little anguishes he was causing – pre-flight champagne spilled, a laptop jogged – his eyes, in the shadows between his heron’s nest beard and his hat brim, unaffected, or so it seemed to me, by proximate concerns, yet brimming with the awe and anxiety provoked by Yahweh.
Consulting his ticket, he threw himself down beside me, ignoring the bag, which was left for a brace of cabin crew, straining like navvies, to lever into a locker. Then, nothing: we sat eyes front, with nought to meditate on but a spray of plastic flowers in a vase bolted to a bulkhead. The fabric of the aircraft whiningly tensed, groaningly relaxed. The copilot came on the PA: we had, he said, been slow getting away from the gate and now we’d lost our one o’clock slot; as soon as he had any more information he would let us know. But he didn’t. We sat in that rebreathed time, inhaling seconds, then minutes, then half hours. The frummer grew restless and began making a flurry of phone calls, slooshing Yiddish into the only clamshell he was allowed. Finally the stewardess came to tell him to stop phoning because the plane was taxiing, but this too he ignored.
I found the frummer heartening; his contradictory behaviour – at once mystical and insufferably worldly – seemed wholly in keeping with the paradox of modern air travel, whereby millions of pounds of thrust, a galaxy of halogen lights and leagues of concrete encapsulate a mundane environment dominated by the most trivial concerns. And it was while I was reflecting on this that the four merciless deities bolted to the wings began to howl and the jet trundled along the runway with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley, then rattled into the clouds.
When a while after takeoff the stewardess came by I ordered herb salad, followed by Vincent Bhatia’s prawn bhuna masala with coconut and curry leaf rice. Oh, and Eton mess to follow. The frummer laid tefillin. Of course, I knew a bit about phylacteries – they were bound to appeal to me – and if I’d ever inclined to observance tying little boxes to my head would’ve been a big part of the draw.
I chewed salad – he lashed the shel yad to his arm and the shel rosh to his head. I ate curry – he prayed: And it shall be for a sign for you upon your head, and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth, for with a strong hand has the LORD brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year.
This, just one of the injunctions for the faithful to write down on parchment that a box was to be tied to their head, which was then put in a box that was tied to their head – a reduction ad absurdum that made me dizzy with joy. That within the tefillin was a scroll upon which no fewer than 3,188 Hebrew characters were written in kosher ink confirmed the magical intent. After all, it took fifteen hours with a limner’s abject concentration to write them, and if one was wrong, or two were out of order, the juju wouldn’t work: no mitzvah! This little black box was the flight recorder for a Haredi jet-propelled through life by the halacha, a set of rules so comprehensive – if open to labyrinthine interpretation – that they told him what he should be doing every moment of the day, and exactly how he should be doing it.
What was my own life beside such finicky precision? Cack-handed! Anomic! Eton-messy! True, the parchment scrolls of Torah verses were by no means the smallest books in existence,* but they had the virtue of being fragments of a single work that was all you ever needed to read – if, that is, you believed the universe had been created by a omnipotent games-playing deity with attention-deficit disorder as a real-time moral-philosophic experiment. I had my doubts.
Mm, house truffle, Earl Grey pearl and liquid salted caramel – popping one of the dusty balls into my mouth I preferred to think of Him as a cosmic artisan du chocolat. The plane had reached its cruising height of 35,000 feet over Ireland, but why not 350,000 so we could orbit the earth with fiery Apollo, or 3,500 so we could see the zephyrs comb the heathery chest of the Black Mountain? Ach! The vicious constraint of worshipping the infinite through the contemplation of the vanishingly small was getting to me – that and the multiplying and then dividing of truffles, clods, bald-headed men and book pages ... I must have slept, exhausted – or at least assumed I was dreaming, otherwise it would’ve been madness to pop the catch of the overhead locker with the frummer’s great crate in it.
The plane hit an air pocket and the case slammed down on top of me. The zip was already open and Sherman tumbled out, dressed in a black rollneck and black jeans, equipped with a head torch and wire cutters. ‘What the fuck!’ he exclaimed. ‘I assumed the frummer would check me in as hold baggage.’
I looked up the aisle, but the cabin crew were all goofing off in their curtained booth; as for the passengers, not a single one seemed to have noticed – they were all lost in the light caves hollowed out of the back of each other’s heads. Sherman disentangled himself from old-fashioned flannel underpants, long black socks and a prayer shawl. I watched him, thinking of the first six-inch TV I’d had back in the early 1980s.
While the miners had fought the Battle of Orgreave, I lay on a slagheap of mattresses watching James Robertson Justice play Vashtar, the leader of an enslaved people (I don’t recall the J-word) compelled to build a mighty pyramid for the Pharaoh. The wide open desert, the massed teams of extras pulling stone blocks on rollers, the whole CinemaScope sweep of the epic compressed into that tiny screen – I squinted at it, awed.
‘C’mon,’ hissed Sherman, leading me aft.
As we prowled up the aisle the plane banked slightly and my eyes were flung sideways down through a window to where, 17,000 feet below, the emulsive cloud had congealed into a vast simulacrum of the paths, box hedges and yew avenues of a formal eighteenth-century garden. As I watched, humbled, a monstrous baby staggered upright from the horizon 300 miles away, its chubby arms formed by vortices of cumulo-stratus. As the plane drew closer I saw that this apparition was one of my own children; it seemed that Gaia had been busy uploading the essence of my sentimentality and fashioning it into this towering love object – which we flew straight through.
‘Will you come on!’ Sherman pulled my sleeve, and reluctantly I joined him between the stainless-steel galley and the flimsy toile
t doors, where he went unerringly to a section of carpet and lifted it to expose a D-ring. He opened the hatch and we let ourselves down into the cold booming hold, the beam of his head torch picking out the Samsonite blocks on pallets.
‘Y’know Faulkner had a screen credit on Land of the Pharaohs,’ I remarked, apropos of everything, but Sherman only hissed:
‘Will you shut the fuck up,’ and went about his task with a will, snapping combination locks with his clippers, then unzipping the bags so that their contents spilled on to the aluminium deck.
‘Look at this drek,’ he said, snatching up a handful of stuff. I recognized the seat covers we had had in my childhood home, the print of a historic map of Worcestershire that had hung above the phone table, a paperback edition of C. E. M. Joad’s Guide to Modern Wickedness and my mother’s dentures.
‘Can you believe people cross the Atlantic with such tat,’ he spat, ‘and pay for it too!’
‘Dentures are pretty much essential,’ I said, ‘if you don’t have any teeth.’
Sherman slid down the baffler of bags until he was sitting. The cyclopean eye of his torch dazzled me, and his voice – nasal, insistent – soared above the jeremiad of the jets. ‘You and your dumb books!’ he prated. ‘Micro-satire, dirty doodlings in the margins of history!’
‘I say, that’s a bit harsh.’
‘Is it? When Gutenberg invented the printing press there were at most a hundred titles produced annually; by 1950 this had swollen to a quarter of a million; now a book is published somewhere in this dumb world every twenty seconds, and you have the nerve – no, the gall, to contribute to this flood of verbiage that is inexorably inundating the land with ill-contrived metaphors!’
‘I – I ...’ I wanted to rebut him forcefully; instead I only spread my hands and said, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else.’
Add a dream, lose a reader – isn’t that Uncle Vladimir’s line? Well, the lover of little girls has aught to teach me. I awoke as the British Airways flight settled down over Toronto and shat its undercarriage, sending said reader end over end, down to where the survivors had retreated, a network of tunnels deep under Chaillot. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats. In the half-light before full consciousness I took in the drear panorama of the razed city, the stalk of the CN Tower wilting among the charred stumps of the skyscrapers, the grid pattern of blackened rubble – all of it irradiated by the sickly green glow from Lake Ontario.
I remembered my first visit to Canada in 1977, with my father. We stayed out in Dundas with his friend, the philosopher George Grant. While they debated Red Toryism, I lay upstairs on an iron bedstead smoking. I loved the Players pack, the way one side read ‘Players Filter’ and the other ‘Players Filtre’ – all of Canadian happenstance seemed bound up in the reversal of e and r.
I took a bus into town and wandered the Hagia Sophia of the Eaton Center in a consumerist ecstasy – it was big enough to swallow whole five of London’s poxy malls. I bought a disposable lighter for a few bucks – the first I’d ever seen – and when I got back to Dundas I lay back down on the iron bedstead, then held the translucent green canister to my eye so as to look through the liquid gas.
I left the frummer behind where we had been sitting. He appeared stricken, making none of the phone calls that other passengers had begun the instant the plane had landed; nor did he rise to retrieve his flight bag from the overhead locker. But I couldn’t concern myself with that – the flight had arrived almost two hours late – and so I strode off through the dun corridors, hopping on to travelators with whistling insouciance. The two men crammed into dun uniforms at Immigration only glanced at my passport. I was kicking about in the dun arrivals hall, pondering my transport options, when I became aware of snuffling behind me and turning discovered the frummer looking very down-in-the-beard and accompanied by a member of the airline’s ground staff, who was pushing a wheelchair in which sat the obese flight bag, its front zip creased in a complacent smile.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked brightly.
‘It’s dusk ... so, it’s Shabbat,’ he muttered. ‘You must’ve noticed me, on the flight ... as soon as I realized we were gonna be delayed I began trying to get through to someone by phone.’
‘And?’
‘Yes’ – he stared shamefaced at his black dress shoes – ‘I guess you’re right – it wouldn’t’ve made any difference, I can’t go in any car on Shabbat.’
I was merciless. ‘Or bus, or train.’
‘Or bus, or train.’
‘You’ll have to stay out here at the airport.’
‘No, no, I can’t do that, it’s a really important Shabbat, the last before my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, I must get home.’
‘Well, you should’ve thought about that before you booked a flight with an insufficient margin of safety.’
‘I know, I know,’ he moaned.
‘Of course’ – I looked towards the main doors where gentile-mobiles were pulling away from the kerb with unholy despatch – ‘you could always walk.’
‘Walk ...’ He savoured the word in a prayerful way.
‘Yup’ – plunged my hands into the pockets of the Barbour – ‘walk – I think I’ll walk into town, the weather’s OK and I could do with stretching my legs. You’re welcome to come with, but I’d advise you to check that into left luggage – it’s a good seventeen miles.’
‘Walk ...’ I hadn’t noticed the flattened vowels of his Canadian accent before, the a cowering as if an umlaut had been fired over its head. ‘Yes, I guess I could walk, but I’ll have to bring my bag, it’s got valuable, uh, stuff in it.’
‘Stuff, or a valuable person?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
One of his fish-belly-white hands flipped towards me. ‘My name’s Reichman, Howard Reichman, and ... well, it’s an awfully big favour to ask but would you consider helping me with the bag – unless, that is, you keep Shabbat yourself?’
I shook my head.
‘And I could pay you—’
I shook it again. I felt guilty – but then I always do. In this instance it was guilt over my snide thoughts. However, it wasn’t this that motivated me, but the sheer challenge. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Reichman,’ I said. ‘Now let’s get going.’
As I took the flight bag’s handle and trundled away, I wondered: was this one of the Reichmann brothers who ran Olympia & York, at one time the largest property developer in the world? If so, it was a curious coincidence; after all, before they went bust in the recession of ’92 they had built the biggest skyscraper London had ever seen, Canary Wharf; not only the biggest – the most banal. I looked back; he was struggling along in my wake. His coat looked hot – his hat hotter; he was as ill-equipped for exodus as anyone I’d ever seen.
On we went along Airport Road, then Silver Dart, before crossing beneath the 427 expressway. To begin with I waited for Reichman to come puffing up in his woefully constricting cummerbund, but soon enough I was struggling with the dumb bag, which lurched from one tiny wheel to the other, yanking my arm in its socket as if it were a drunkenly dependent toddler. I had to lift it over the cobbled ravelins under freeway bridges and hump it up grassy embankments. He was tirelessly grateful. ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, most kind,’ he kept saying as we rumbled between the down-at-heel warehouses and unbusinesslike premises that lined International Boulevard. When I looked back, the sun was setting behind the airport and the jets coming into land incandesced in its last gleaming.
We reached the Royal Woodbine golf course and I yanked the bag along aggregate paths to a culvert containing Mimico Creek, a rivulet of tea-coloured water that a hundred yards further on disappeared into darkness under Highway 27. ‘Surely,’ Reichman said, ‘you don’t mean to ...’ But I did, and so manhandled the bag down to the flat bottom, then dragged it splashing through the shallows, while the observant corvid flapped blackly along behind me.
The Kufic script of aerosol g
raffiti rippled on the concrete walls; ducklings paddled serenely past. On the far side of Highway 401 I weight-lifted the bag up the embankment and clambered after it, to discover that, although we were now benighted, we were nonetheless entering a kind of Eden – vetch tangled with brambles, maple saplings and the occasional wild iris. We were both entranced: the mondial groan and turbofart of the Lester B. Pearson International Airport had been utterly abstracted by this profound localism. In place of multi-storey car parks there was only an ear of wild wheat bowed to listen to the breeze.
Despite the season and the hour we were both sweating now, and I envied Reichman, because he was able to remove his coat, hat and cummerbund, then, with his back obscuring my view, unzip his case and pack them away inside. I sat groggily on the ground. When Reichman straightened up, Sherman was lying there in the long grass, naked in the half-light save for a skullcap – a newborn, middle-aged savant, with his clever thumb in his intelligent mouth. Nothing is ever funny twice, but it was cheering to hear that immortal line once again: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’
But of course he wasn’t there – any more than my companion had disrobed outside on Shabbat; both visions were products of my fervid expectation, cooked up in waxed cotton. If I’d taken the Barbour off, I would have to have carried it over my shoulder like a child that had to be returned to its bed – and there was no bed to be found. Still, I went on half expecting Sherman, as all that long Saturday evening I continued hauling the frummer’s case through West Deane Park, Ravenscrest Park, Thomas Riley Park, until we eventually reached a jollily lit convenience store on Bloor Street, where I bought a bottle of Evian. He davened, I drank, then we went on again past apartment blocks and monstrous Tudorbethan houses further and further into the city.