Will Self - Shark

but not any more : thick slices of fat are piled on his plate, and he can’t see for the slaw in his eyes — or else he’d notice the Quonsets that’ve grown up among the Park’s stately elms and flowering dogwoods, he’d spot the kinking lizards, and he’d react to the naked men who’re lounging about offering up their jungle-rotted crotches to the healing rays of the sun. Moreover, if he were paying any attention, surely Pop, with his pawshaw for a drop of the ol’ aquavit . . would spy the group gathered round a drum of aviation fuel who’re taking turns at holding an air-compressor hose under its slubbling surface. Good logistics man that Claude is, he’s estimated the cost of this cooling method to be seventy-five bucks a can — on the steep side, certainly, but cheaper than persuading a transport pilot to take a case up to twenty thousand feet in his C47, then back down again, fast, which is what Colonel Midgely’s staff on Guam do —. Woe to the fugitive! Martin Evenrude breaks in, and his son obediently translates: Wehe dem Fliehenden . . Who sets out into the world. . Welt hinaus ziehenden! Who roams foreign parts. . But are these foreign parts? Claude wonders, looking over to where the grand mansions and apartment houses should face out from Fifth on to the Park, and seeing instead the shaggy grey-green shrubbery covering Mount Lasso, which undulates in the late-afternoon onshore breeze. — Since Claude flew in to Tinian from Guam a week ago, he’s been troubled by these slippages: the past overlaying the present, so that the grid-pattern of roadways laid out by the Seabees suddenly slips down over the familiar shapes of Midtown and Uptown. — It’s no help that some smartass also had the neat idea of giving these baking roads — which are steadily being pulverised by the jeeps, trucks and fuel tankers that pound the length and breadth of the island — Manhattan names: Wall Street, Canal Street, 42nd Street, Broadway and. . Riverside Drive. Claude would also be forced to concede — were he belayed on it — that the torpedo juice hasn’t been helping. Since he’d scored a couple of pints off some swabs who’d a gilly-still hidden behind the 212th’s tech’ area. . I can scarcely fuckin’ see any more . . although they’d sworn to him that they’d double-filtered the hooch. — Who roams foreign parts, his father chants. Fremde durchmessenden . . Claude dutifully recites. Who forgets his fatherland, his father needles, and Claude can’t take any more so pulls up short. — Their afternoon stroll has brought them looping over a spur of Mount Lasso, past the Army Hospital on 109th Street, up a perimeter road that runs beside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Central Bomb Dump. Now they’re almost home — home at the six-storey building on Riverside Drive where the Evenrude Family have been the tenants of a cavernous top-floor apartment since they took advantage of the Crash — and Pop’s silver-plated trust fund — to move back from Norwalk. Excepting this: there’s no apartment block here, its tiled mansard roof nipped by copper-tipped finials, its grey stone façade staring down on to the scary Hooverville on the far side of the streetcar tracks — there’re only still more Quonsets that’ve been pitched so hard into the heavy earth that their footings are buried, more raggedy palms — and a curved signboard mounted on two thick posts. . a scythe — or a samurai sword . Claude shades his eyes from the vicious sun and reads aloud: HEADQUARTERS 509TH COMPOSITE GROUP. Behind the sign there’s a barred gate with two MPs lazing guard, beyond them the fence bellies out around a large compound. . which is itself within Tinian’s compound, sailing on through Pacific waves . . Heimat vergessenden . . Mutterhaus hassenden . . Claude laughs — and Martin says, You may’ve enlisted but you don’t give a damn about your country any more than you do about the home Mother and I made for you. No! Claude protests. It’s not that — it’s this sign: this is the outfit I’ve been palletising cargo for — scads of it, Pop. They’ve got a big armaments squadron, a troop-carrier squadron and a whole goddamn slew of MPs too. Only yesterday I was down at the harbour offloading this super-heavy bomb hoist we found for ’em over on Midway and had shipped here. This is the hush-hush outfit they’re razzing with this poem — he recites: Don’t ask about results or such, Unless you wanna get in Dutch, But take it from one who is sure of the score, The 509th is winning the war! Claude, his father says quietly. Yes, Pop? You know I’m dead, don’t you, son? Well. . yeah, I guess so, Pop, I guess so. . Martin Evenrude takes his time relighting his cigar — he totters on one leg, striking the match on the sole of his two-tone, and Claude is sickened by his father’s scrawny shank, its bald shine cinched by a flesh-coloured sock-suspender. He thinks of the garter belt some joker had tied round the toilet bowl in the can of the Liberator he hitched a ride on from Hickam Field to Guam. Lying on a lumped-up cargo of mail sacks and flamethrowers, as the ship gained altitude and the scent of frangipani blossom was replaced by the stench of greasy hessian and aviation fuel, he’d marvelled: So this is what we’ve become, a fighting force of underwear thieves commanded by panty-waists and policed by snitches. . Freunde verlassenden, Folget kein Segen, ach! his father — the lightest, sweetest, least heroic of tenors — gently lullabies. — A wave slaps Claude in the face, and sobbing the ocean he says, Yeah, I know, Pop: Who forsakes their friends no blessing follows on their way. . But Martin Evenrude can’t hear him — he’s already ten feet down and sinking fast. His worsted coat-tails have drifted up to cover his head — while his snappy hat floats up-ended on the surface and his final words are fast dying away in the velvety canyons of his hopped-up son’s head: You’re . . dead . . toooo . . — Close it up, man! Close it up! the Chaplain shouts right in Claude’s face. He has a sparse blond moustache, through the salt-encrusted strands of which Claude can admire. . the resolution of his lip . Is. That. An. Extra. Vest? the Chaplain wheezes. He himself has none, and has swum to and fro across the sea’s buckled deck plates tying the dying boys’ life-vests back together so that. . the cir-cle will be un-bro-ken, by and by, Lord, by and by . . — Give it here, man, give it here! His lustful hands paw at Claude’s waist, struggling with. . my garter belt — what’s a girl to do? Claude retaliates: shrugging out of his own now useless vest, he tears away from Gorecki’s embrace — then, propelling the murdered kid’s one before him, he kicks out for the wave crest beyond the wave crest beyond this one. . — A wave crest beyond which he can see the familiar flying-V pediment of the Fairfield State Hospital Administration Building, supported by its austerely slim white columns, as it slices through the ocean’s heaving skin. . leaving no wake . It’s crazy to think he’ll be able to catch up with the hospital — a delusion that’s laid its febrile hands on plenty of the others: Claude’s seen it help them out of their uncomfy vests and into the waves’ embrace. He’s heard their crazy babbling as they’ve swum off — foolishness concerning the creamily streamlined shapes they could see cruising along the horizon: Luxy hotels with shady patios staffed by smiling waiters serving ice-cold cocktails in glasses choked with fruit. Others of the damned — who Claude considered more inventive — waved their arms vigorously in greeting, then struck out for a passing desert island, shouting to the boys left behind that they could see Esther Williams, naked as the day she was born, frolicking in the crystalline waters of its lagoon. Yet more — the ones Claude reserved his most fulsome contempt for — broke the circle only to dive beneath the surface, because, they cried, they were twice-saved! — For what should they see rising up from the deep but the resurrecting ship, which, as she came, sucked up, through the jagged gashes the torpedoes had torn in her hull, all the dreck — the dud life-rafts, the unused ammo boxes, the matchwood furniture, the pissed-upon mattresses, the three-thousand-times triplicated telexes of never-to-be-fulfilled orders, the tar babies and the skin-fucking-angels — she’d spewed out when she went down. — This may’ve been the snafu at the end of the world, Claude thinks as he dips and rises, his legs scissoring. . but how could I know ’til it happened to me exactly how convincing it would be? — There, without question, is the Admin. Building, its white-painted clock tower a lurching crow’s nest, its wings wide open to receive him in their warm, red-brick embrace. If he were only Plastic Man he could stretch out an arm, flip his hand round a column. .Читать дальше