Will Self - Shark

all in it together . . and me the only fly-boy . Or, Claude could’ve fanned out for Gorecki some of the choicer cards he’d picked up censoring the dumb Polack’s mail. — It’d been a strange realisation, this, that seeped into him during the darkest hours of their first night together, when, in fear and trembling, Gorecki spilt the beans on his activities as a cocksman back home in his jerkwater Pennsylvania steel town: double-and triple-timings he felt the need to unburden himself of now, hoping, Claude presumed, that a buoyant conscience might help him stay afloat. Claude didn’t let on he knew all about these peccadilloes already — to say sins would be to. . dignify them — because he’d read Gorecki’s letters to these broads, and, purely for the hell of it, he’d blanked out all the ham-fisted endearments, while scrawling on the one destined for Missus Gorecki, You’re not the only one, you know, before sealing and stamping it kerrr-chunk! you asshole lunk! PASSED BY NAVAL CENSOR . Claude knew that for many another man — in particular a mackerel-snapper such as Gorecki — this crazy coincidence would be further confirmation of God’s existence — the selfsame God who’d perpetrated this ALMIGHTY FUCK-UP on them all. Not Claude — not me . To Claude, Gorecki’s secrets were only more of the flotsam folks left lying round for anybody to make use of who was good with his hands — flotsam such as the Very pistol tucked in Claude’s belt, the malted-milk tablets and the morphine syrettes in his shirt pockets, and the drowned kid’s life-vest he keeps stuck between his thighs — waiting for when Gorecki isn’t looking to make the swap. What Claude can do is sneak out the fourth of the syrettes, nip off the cap with his teeth and stab it into his thigh through his pants leg — not because he’s in pain — how could he be, when he’d only had the third an hour or so ago — but because I can . . and because he can lie painlessly back on Gorecki’s bazoom while. . pain is all around . — A superfluity of pain, seared in the skin, burnt in the flesh and charred in the bones of these sailor-boys. Pain is in the saltwater eating into these wounds, and the sun hammering down on them — most of all, pain is in the vitals of those boys foolish enough to slake their terrible thirst with seawater, who soon enough begin crazily ranting, then puke their guts out, some so violently they turn full somersaults. Pain is in the fists that fly when one of the boys dies and ten others gather round to fight over who should get his life-vest — not that these crummy pieces of shit are worth having once the penetrating seawater has been sopped up by their kapok stuffing. — You might ath well tie a goddamn thponge on. . Gorecki’s arms tighten round his chest, and the Polack grunts, Wozzat? And it’s only then that Claude realises he’s croaked aloud, because pain is in those arms around his chest as well — pain is in the legs that grip his hips too. Pain, Claude concludes, is in all human touch, no matter how gently murmurous, Wiege das Liebchen, In Schlummer ein . . — A lover’s sleepy breath in the hollow of your neck is a raging flamethrower, a mother’s tender caress is the flail of tank tracks, a brother’s helping hand is a bayonet twisted in your guts . . With pain so all-encompassing, surely it’s better to feel this: the warm numbness spreading out from his leg, and repelling not simply current pain but pain. . as yet unborn . . In tiefer Ruh liegt um mich her, Der Waff enbrüder Kreis . The Chaplain, who’d bullied, slapped and punched the shipwrecked men into tying their vests together, had indeed been hearing the kid’s mumbled confession when a sailor on the far side of the circle flipped his wig, firing a service revolver he’d miraculously managed to keep dry. The padre paddled off to deal with this — and Claude let the boy die. It might be kinda funny to tell Gorecki that, yeah, if he wanted to get a fix on it — to read the bottom line — then he might as well know: Claude had killed the dying boy with courtesy. Death had been a sales clerk at Brooks Brothers who helped him out of his life-vest and handed him down into the deep. — Claude had once read an article in the Scientific American about the psychopathic personality. It said the psychopathic killer depersonalises his victim by turning a he or a she into an expendable it about which it’s unnecessary to have any human feeling. Yet Claude knew all there was to about the kid: his name and his mom’s and pop’s names, and his sisters’ and brothers’ names, and where he went to high school, and the names of the boys he’d snuck into vacant houses with to poke through the lumber in their attics. . Picking up an ancient ukulele. . plink-a-plunking a few sad notes. . Hullabaloo-loo, Don’t . . bring . . Lulu! — Or was this all a lie — had it been Claude himself who hung the garbage on Old Man Olsen’s gate, caught frogs in the brook at the back of the overgrown yard, and cried hot tears when he found out that one of the kids he’d played pick-up baseball with. . since we were knee-high had finger-fucked Betty Spiegelman in the back of her brother Ted’s rattletrap Ford. . The winds blowing . . the savage old bitch incessantly crying . . And the strange tears down the cheeks coursing — some drowned fuckin’ secret hissing . . Anyhoo, the point being that if he’d had his druthers he would’ve killed the kid hours before, when it became obvious what a righteous pain in the ass he was . . — Close it up there, man! Willya close it up! The Chaplain’s cry comes to Claude from a long way off, stirring the thick sludge of painlessness he’s lying in. Close it up, man! the Chaplain yells again, and Claude lifts his head from Chili Williams’s chest to see the blackened faces of the shipwrecked sailors polka dots . . on the. . bazoom of a wave. Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de muff-tash on he face . . They’d all been dunked in the thousands of gallons of fuel oil spewed from the ship’s ruptured tanks — then, yesterday, when the sun came up, as if they weren’t turpentine niggers already , they’d deliberately rubbed more on their faces to protect themselves from the tropical sun. Some had tied strips torn from their clothing around their eyes so that blindfolded they faced the fusillade of radiation. Now all that could be done was to. . throw de tar babies in de coal hole, throw de massa in dere too . . Did Claude really want to embrace the blackened thing that labours towards him, trailing behind it so many more the same, all of them. . turned uppity by disaster? Not. He thinks, I would prefer not to — I’d rather stay away from work for the next few days. . or years. — Fat chance of that! The Old Man does a trick with his hands — taking Claude’s arm in a friendly Bing ’n’ Bob kinduva way, then pinching puppy fat in his pianist’s fingers. . He gets me every time . And every time Martin Evenrude says the same thing: Feel that, kiddo, a span of a twelfth — so sing out, kiddo, sing out after me, Wie sich die Welle, An Welle reiht. . that means, As wave follows wave, so c’mon, sing it! So Claude does sing out — and, as the Old Man had prophesied on all those walks back uptown from Carnegie Hall, he’s never forgotten them: Fließen die Tränen, Mir ewig erneut . . which is also prophetic, because on and on Claude’s tears. . do flow . — In the Recital Hall Pop seethed at the bohunk philistines who destroyed his listening pleasure with their papery rattles and moist coughs. He never seemed to see any connection between his own often quite outrageous public behaviour and anyone else’s, nor did he ever see the need to mute his vulgarities — the drooly ten-cent cigar, his snap-brim hat with the Aztec band — or to harmonise them with his otherwise studious aestheticism. — As they prowl into the Park, Martin Evenrude stabs at the skyline with his cigar, snarling, Tin-can architecture, Claude, for a tin-pot town. . The horses rise and fall on the merry-go-round, curvetting waves of cream and scarlet paint frothing with gilt. Tipping his hat back on his big head, and seemingly choosing to ignore the wild incongruity of the coconut palms springing up along the terrace behind the boating pond, Martin says, We’ll take the long way back, son. We’ve sat in the great man’s hall, so let’s go by his mansion at 91st and Fifth — that way we can stretch our legs, put some of de ol’ jelly-roll in ’em. . — Claude wants to say, I can’t, Pop, I’m only here to echelon in this cargo from Midway — I gotta take these down to Tinian Town and get them mimeoed at 20th Air Force Forward HQ —. But when he reaches in his coat pocket for the way-bills, they aren’t there. Besides, his father is insistent, pinch-pulling him on at a steady clip as he complains about the sheeny swish Lozenge — which is the joke name he’s given the singer of the Schwanengesang: That Lozenge, Claude, why he’s a heldentenor — the Met brung him over to sing Tristan, he’s got the wrong voice entirely for Lieder! — Pop’s two-tones kick up white dust puffs from the crushed coral and quahog roadway, his cigar smoulders in his mottled baloney face. His father, Claude imagines, must’ve once been a handsome fellow, with a strong jaw, a neat dimpled chin, a sharp-shooting nose and clear blue eyes. .Читать дальше