Will Self - Shark

debagged me! In the creaking bed she’d swung back and forth over him, gripping the headboard with both hands, her fringe flapping — and when the younger boy came tapping at the door, she’d leapt from the bed — a barbaric spectacle, turbaned by the lampshade, her breasts flying, her pubic hair beaded with mucus — snapped the key in the lock and viciously hissed, Go away, Danny, darling, Mummy and Daddy are talking! before remounting Zack, grasping his penis, and enveloping it in her vagina with an efficient dispatch that, even as they got going again, Zack continued to find. . rather shocking — although the true shock was this oft-repeated banal and biological insight: A man’s desire was an evanescent thing, whereas the depths of Miriam’s sexuality remained. . unplumbed — at least by me . — Now, standing in the hallway by the rock ’n’ rolling Creep, he concludes that Nachträglichkeit isn’t the right analytic concept to apply — but rather a sort of double-afterwardness . . because. . she hasn’t wanted me like this since before Mark was born . He turns from the Creep and makes for the living-room door, only to find that up comes stately Buck Mulligan . . and the towel retied about his hips is. . sustained by blood and ouns . . He leans against the door jamb until. . Percy points at the lino — lino the previous owners had laid in the hall, the kitchen and the toilet, and would doubtless have put down everywhere else had the manufacturer — Zack likes to facetiously hypothesise — not discontinued this particular line because the workers charged with making it had gone on strike, claiming to the tribunal that looking day after day at its maroon rhomboids and beige discs was making them. . sick to their stomachs . Which was how Zack felt after smoking Lesley’s strong hash and staring into the squeaky world beneath his feet. Modernity has been jerry-built at number 117: polystyrene ceiling tiles cover the old plaster mouldings, clumsily cemented indoor rockeries hide the redundant fireplaces, and the original doors have been replaced with bland slabs. Next door there’s at least. . a grotty authenticity . Advancing into the living room, Zack’s overwhelmed by a very contemporary messiness: the blue Sifta salt cylinder and the white plates potato-printed with dried tomato ketchup, the empty Worthington’s tins and the crumpled cigarette packets. Then there’s Clive, who sits cross-legged in the middle of this rubbish with an acoustic guitar in his lap, his balding scalp aimed up at Zack and censored with the greasy black strands he’s drawn over it. My ex-per-i-ence is my psy-che, My psy-che is my ex-per-i-ence, Clive nasals in Brummie, as his ticcing fingers summon discords from its untuned strings. Then there’s the far wall of the room, upon which the same geometric blizzard as in the hall. . ever falls , and an unknown hand has scrawled shakily in biro: GOD IS WITHIN ME AND THEREFORE I AM MY OWN MASTER. This rushes towards Zack, as his visual field expands to include the smoke-stained nets haunting the bay window, the dusty swags of Indian cloth hanging from the back wall and the still furrier television screen that lurks beside them. He staggers, retches and, wondering if he might be having. . some dreadful sort of flashback , presses his hands to his eyes and waits, panting, while phosphenes chase each other’s paisley tails and Clive rondels on: My ex-per-i-ence is my psy-che, My psy-che is my ex-per-i-ence. . until it all thankfully subsides. Whereupon he thrusts the notepaper at Clive and asks, You aren’t expecting a letter from anyone called Lincoln by any chance, are you, Clive? — Flaky notes dandruff to the floor . . Clive sets the guitar down among them. Panting, he rises and takes the notepaper, his bloodshot and exophthalmic eyes blink as they teletype along the blacked-out lines, he nasals the while: Hmm, hm, yes, yes — stayed on a farm between Lincoln and Market Rasen once. . Mister Treadagar, the farmer-chappie, he’d some faith in me — sent me out after the gappers’d been down the rows with their hoes, said I’d a nose for the one beet shoot uz grows. . — Clive wears a sleeveless Fair Isle sweater and nothing else on his worryingly puce upper body. The paunches of his bare arms waggle. Thankfully, his legs are clad in the blue cotton legs of a regulation Gas Board boiler suit. Secured by a single button, its top half hangs down over his wide arse. . flayed skin . Busner notes that Clive’s speech, as ever, scans better than his singing — but it’s always the same elegy for a life less lived than endured: a hoe’s progress from farms to police cells or cottage hospitals, then prison or the long-stay wards of asylums, then back to the fields again, where he committed some piffling crime — pissing openly or pilfering sneakily — and the whole cycle started all over again. . digging for defeat . When he came to Willesden, he was carrying a green canvas release bag — inside it there was nothing but a tube of Palmolive shaving cream. Clearly, Busner remarked to Gourevitch, the only rehabilitation they think he needs is to be clean-shaven. — Although Clive, in common with most of the Concept House’s residents, attends an outpatient clinic where he receives depot injections of Chlorpromazine that keep him docile for most of the month, Busner tells former colleagues — who visit Willesden either out of curiosity or to gloat with Schadenfreude aforethought — that Clive’s medication is entirely unnecessary, and he’d be perfectly content without it if he could only live in a pre-industrial society, one decoupled from the relentless assembly line of work and consumption. Not that Zack has actually calculated the life-expectancy of a severely myopic middle-aged man with galloping blood pressure in an era when the only medical specialisation was in horse. Zack does believe Clive, Eileen and Irene hear the voices. . they say they do . . it’s only that he and Roger think these are the internalisation of hectoring conflicts imposed on them by their mummies and daddies — and by the Big Daddy and Mummy of the state admonishing them to work and be productive , even as it uses the results of their labour to stockpile the means of their destruction . Zack had once sent a postcard to the German philosopher Adorno: a view of a Polaris submarine. On the back he’d sloganised: You say, No poetry after Auschwitz — I say, No love after Hiroshima. Irritatingly, Adorno hadn’t replied. — He sent me a postcard once, Mister Treadagar. That were when I were in All Saints at Winson Green, the corner of that card, it were hard. I poked it right in the eye of this bloke what gerron me wick, the prick, an’ he starts up blartin’ —. Zack takes the corner of the censored letter — which is stiff but not hard — and tugs it gently away from Clive. For his maroon jowls and sparse black hair, for his jumbled teeth and the burn scar on his snub nose, for his Homeric attempts to convey in alliterative fits and starts the oddity of his odyssey through life — for all this Busner had loved Clive, loved also all the other Clives he’d encountered banging their heads against padded walls, or counting the raindrops on. . windows without views . He knew it was these Clives — and the tragedy of his brother Henry’s mental collapse — that had radicalised him, made him determined to see every patient not as a function of their disease. . but as a human being . And it was this striving for humanity. . and fundamental decency . . that had brought him to this. . pretty pass , where he cordially and unthinkingly despised the. . human refuse he’d wadded about himself. .Читать дальше