Will Self - Shark

. . and they’re gone. — Already ten feet down, sinking fast, the kid’s long-sleeved denim shirt twirls about him, his bell-bottomed dungarees whirr, and his pillbox hat oscillates — a white dot hopping from word to word across the sea’s screen, Talk about the moon floatin’ in the sky, Lookin’ at a lily on a lake . . The kid is twenty feet down now, his arms up and circling, his feet down and revolving the other way, his hips swing as he hula-hulas into the deep — that doesn’t seem so very deep due to the amazing clarity of the water. Claude experiments, turning his whole head because his eye sockets are filled with gritty sand — he sees the sea turn from green to aquamarine to cobalt-blue to silver-blue to silvery to silver-white then vanish completely as. . I push my head up her skirt . . Mm — mm, finest ear-protectors a fellow can get — flesh-filled nylons fitted snug to the head and dried with talc . . The kid’s maybe forty feet down now, yet his dancing plummeting body can still be clearly seen. . Happy talk, keep talkin’ happy talk . — At Wright-Patterson combat veterans had told Claude that when their chutes collapsed falling men spun — even as the ship they’d bailed out of flipped up on its wing and spun away from them, while the Kraut fighter that’d scored the hit wheeled away too, so everywhere in the sky could be seen spinning things. Talk about the moon . . Claude supposes if the sinking kid could only tip his head back he’d see my face floatin’ in the sky . . but really it’s too late for that — the kid must be nearing. . full-fathom-friggin’-five , and the sunrays — which Claude sees flicker-fingering boots, tin cans and other slowly descending debris — can no longer touch him. The kid has almost reached the Emerald City’s limits — Claude wonders what sort of how-d’you-do he’ll get from the welcoming committee that circles him, their long grey bodies zigging, zagging and circling evasively. — What’re their names? Ah, yes: Ivan Shark, Fury Shark, Admiral Himakito, that Chink shit-bird, Fang, and the sinister Barracuda. . There’s obviously no possibility of Claude warning the kid — let alone saving him — but for his own satisfaction at least he wishes he’d had the patience to decipher that day’s Code-O-Graph, a useless mishmash of letters and numerals that, as he watches the first inquisitive shark nuzzle the kid’s belly, only spools through his own soggy head AM859R45HJ88 . . At least, Claude thinks, I’ve taken my vitamins, and he feels for the morphine syrettes he took from the emergency packs in the rafts lashed to the bulkhead by the radio room. Reassuringly, they’re still in the button-down pocket of his shirt, but how long can it be before the seawater happy talks its way up the hypos and ruins all those healthy vie-tay-mines? All mine . . this food . . Those other lunkheads — the green hands running round like they were after cooze . . and the sad-sack sailors trying to corral all those farm boys, prairie boys and banjo-pickin’ freaks so’s to herd them over the side — none of them had the smarts to pick up any supplies before they took the dive . . Yes, Claude snickers to himself, they’re all lesser men — men who didn’t volunteer for the Secret Squadron, which is why they mostly. . flipped their wigs when the torpedoes hit. — Those who didn’t, flipped ’em when they saw their ship-mates flying towards them across the tilting deck, the fleshy streamers flayed from their arms and legs flapping in the hot air blasting from the burning fuel. . Flipped ’em at the grotesque sight: the skin angels in flight, behind them flames flaring from the smokestack. . Flipped ’em as the skin angels flocked to the fantail, where, too crazed by pain to recall the layout of their own ship if they’d known it to begin with , they slithered about in its dying blood — bilge water, piss and turds from the heads, melted ice cream and still-fizzing soda from the dumb gedunk stand — before launching themselves, screaming, over the taffrail. — Claude had seen them when he was on board, their fledgling wings spread in the hellish light — he’d seen still more of them once he was struggling in the water, as the mass of the sinking ship dragged him back. Although shocked by his searing slide down the hull and the cold impact of the waves, Claude realised: Either his abandonment of the ship had taken a fraction of the time it seemed, or there must be a great host of the skin angels — for there they’d been, high above him, each one silhouetted against the low, scudding clouds for a couple of seconds, then launching into the air, managing maybe two or three futile wing-beats before being swatted by the Indy’s slowly revolving screws. . Quick, Henry! The Flit! and crumpling among all the other black flies into the sticky pool of fuel oil that lay. . molasses on the heaving waves. . — Waves that now cradle Claude. . so tenderly . . Embrace me, You irreplaceable you , raising him up, then easing him gently down. . Best not, Claude thinks, get too far down, ’cause then I’ll find myself with. . roister-doister li’l oyster, Down in the slimy sea, You ain’t so diff ’rent lyin’ on your shell bed, To the likes of l’il ol’ me . . Excepting that: Roister-doister you’re somewhat moister, Than I would like to —. What the fuck didja do that for!? The dumb Polack — whose name is Go-recce or something like that — pulls Claude’s head from the water, tearing the sweetly salty sheets from his shell bed. Neptune’s muffled subaquatic realm is conquered by this: the hurting disc of the noonday sun, the long hard swell of the open ocean, and, on the slope of that swell, the disintegrating chain of men Claude has deprived of a link by untying the kid’s life-vest and letting him sink. — Again: What the fuck didja do that for!? Gorecki’s two-day stubble rasps against Claude’s, his Chili Williams life-vest presses into Claude’s burnt back, his paddling feet kick at Claude’s calves, tearing the saturated skin. I did that — Claude is thucthinct through cracked lips — becauth he wath dead. — He-weren’t-dead. Gripping Claude’s scruff, Gorecki shakes out his own words: I-heared-him-talkin’-when-you-was-untyin’-him! Aww, Claude croaks, giveth a fuckin’ retht willya, Gorecki. The kid wath praying — thaying hith latht prayerth. He wath a Catholic thame ath you, and he thought I wath the Chaplain — the Chaplain been by a while back, the kid begun to give up, and the Chaplain went way over there, the kid thaid he couldn’t hold out and he wanted to go out praying. What am I gonna do, Gorecki, refuthe a man hith dying whith? It’s the most Claude has said to Gorecki in the long hours they’ve been spooning . . In your arms I find love so de-lec-ta-ble, dear, I’m afraid it isn’t quite re-spec-ta-ble . . dear . . and he thinks it may be this talkativeness as much as his explanation that pacifies the Polack, who lets go of his hair. Claude’s gaze sweeps over the beaver heads of their companions as his hands smuggle the tapes of the kid’s vest behind his back, fumbling them into a knot that’ll do for now . . — Whatever his other little foibles . . Claude comprehends this crucial fact perfectly well: survival is all about everything having to do for now . Survival is a jerry-rigged little raft of flotsam on the ocean wave — and if Gorecki had ridden him harder, Claude could’ve euchred him any number of other ways. He might’ve pulled rank — although he doubts this would’ve worked, given their current communistic situation: officers and enlisted men, swabs and marines,Читать дальше