Will Self - Shark

as a tramp makes his bed . It might well be that at the Concept House residents received no encouragement to play the parts of either patients or psychiatrists, yet. . there’s still no end to the bloody histrionics! The living room is at last fully focused and properly configured: there’s a mid-ground now, occupied by a three-seater couch covered in fabric the shade and texture of dried porridge, beside it lies a grey-and-white ticking mattress, upon which are scattered several sweat-stained pillows without their cases. The ticklishness of escaping feathers, the fine filigree of sweat stains — Zack is chilled by the grimness of it all, and as he turns to flee his scrotum tightens up . . — The Creep has disappeared from the hall, instead there’s Oscar the dog: a black mass of fur and paws squirming and skittering. Inasmuch as he loves anything, Zack believes he may love Oscar — which is why the sight of the dog’s muzzle is so angering: one night a month or so ago, Roger Gourevitch, high on some brain-seasoning bouquet garni, decided to operate on Oscar’s muzzle — specifically on the warty excrescence above the right side of the Labrador’s worming lip. Zack returned from a meeting of the PA to find the dog supine on the kitchen table, with Gourevitch and Lesley bending over him, both wearing bloodied washing-up gloves. The scalpel in Gourevitch’s shaking hand. . flicked red peas . Zack slapped Roger. . hard , then sutured the wound. With antibiotics from the slightly suspicious vet — it was too early in the year for the claimed lawnmower accident — Oscar was making a full recovery, but he whined if the Nazi doctor tried to pet him, and Zack believes Roger’s behaviour may’ve been. . the last straw . Bending to stroke Oscar, he thinks: The RSPCA will come down on us, along with the Meehans’ furies. . Good boy, he says, there’s a good fellow! and: Walkies soon, w-w-w-walkies! The. . alarm bell of frying pan clashing with stove makes both man and dog salivate. Others of the residents are up, soon bacon will be frying. Since conditions have started to deteriorate, Zack has taken to rising earlier than the rest, heading downstairs and champing on a couple of rounds of toast while he chokes down that morning’s Guardian. Only in these periods of relative calm can he abstract himself from the psychic strangeness of the Concept House and project himself out into the still-stranger and more turbulent world: the world of Operation Prometheus, where nineteen-year-old marines cuddle puppies they’ve rescued from villages they’ve burnt to the ground. He can read all about it, then go back upstairs to bathe and shave, before being. . shackled to the rock once more . . put down his ancient jenny in the field behind Crofut an’ Knapp’s hat factory, he did, the barnstormer. Five bucks for a spin, he said — an’ I’d hoarded all these dimes I got from chores in a mason jar. I was waiting, I guess — waiting for someone to show me the Godly integral and Satan’s differential, show ’em to me from the skies. . Five bucks! Five bucks! An’ there’s no twiddly-diddlydee on a ’lastic for this feller, no, siree — up, up an’ away we go, an’ soon enough I see the roof of the hat factory, I see the railroad bridge over the river, I see the cupola on top of the house where I like to lounge readin’ Nick Carter, hand down my pants, apple in my mouth. . — All this gnaws away at Zack in the time it takes him to swing open the translucent glass door to the kitchen and enter. — The Creep, as he monologues, is twiddly-diddly-deeing a screwdriver to mend the broken plate-dryer above the cooker. It’s a saving grace of the Creep, this: his indefatigable handiness — no job is too large or too small for him, he twiddles, he fiddles and he tweaks, he bolts, bangs and glues — and on several occasions Zack has found him poised precariously on the eaves, replacing a broken tile or mending the wonky guttering. On Tuesdays, when the other residents collect their National Assistance from the post office, he canvases them: Got any chores, my friend, small chores, five-and-dime jobs? For the next hour or three, while he re-hems skirts or solders the straying wires of portable record players, he’s quieter — although never entirely silent, his face at once beatific and fearfully strained. It is, Zack often thinks, as if his very survival depended on changing fuses or grouting tiles. — The Creep has lost his red pullover and gained a rag of flowery cravat that’s confused with his necklace, so that, as he twiddles, scallop shell, tin opener and amulets tink-tonk against the cooker, while the bacon. . frieshhhhh and the trannie Strines: One little chap, had a mishap, broke off —. An Aberfan . . of dirty dishes has slumped from the draining board into the sink: cereal bowls, saucepans, plates and mugs, all jumbled up with cutlery and other utensils, so that when a train passes the whole mass shifts and vibrates. . Galloped away to where Joe lay. . — The four women residents of the Concept House are seated around the kitchen table, all with cigarettes lit: Eileen has her back to the door, Maggie’s opposite her, Irene’s to the left and Podge to the right. As Busner pauses in the doorway, Podge is saying, I can make collages and paint murals and my name is Fi-o-na, using her teeny fey voice that Radio Gourevitch says is. . the china doll persona her repressive mother’s white-hot anger has fired inside her . Zack isn’t so sure, although Podge’s willed immaturity is. . impressive : She reads the Bunty — which arrives every Wednesday, piggy-backing on Busner’s Guardian — and carefully snips out the paper outfits, folds the tabs and glues them to the cardboard outlines of. . other even teenier girls . — Irene takes a handful of Podge’s thick blonde hair and gushes, Ooh, that’s that new Space Age toning you’ve done, isn’t it, luvvie — is it the lunar type or the honeysuckle? Irene’s sharp features stab aggressively at Podge — what’s left of her own hacked-off hair is hidden by a purple velour scarf bound round her Nefertiti head, the ends of which dangle down her arched and bony back. She wears a long tight stretchy black dress — and her chitchat bleeds malice: You’re got such super hair, Podge — it’s so thick. . and fat. — Podge preens beneath her withering, while Maggie, face down, knits stolidly on, clickety-click , the ends of the needles wiggling either side of her sensible perm, and Eileen — her own hair a slovenly brownish mess — rocks and keens, her nightdress unbuttoned, the injection-moulded-shut mouth of her Barbie Jesus pressed against her parched nipple. — No one in the kitchen pays this any attention, any more than they do the near-naked Busner, who sways, assailed again by the same hallucinatory effect: the SOFT BROWN DEMERARA SUGAR packet on the table, the empty milk bottle, the Sunfresh bottle — all of it surging towards him, as the background of twiddling Creep, tangled net curtain and damp wall expands, so the entirety of Zack’s visual field is perversely. . impossibly! . . in focus: he sees through the window above the sink the overgrown garden, its spindly weeds ignited by sunflash as yet another tube train batters the back of the house. Tracers hiss in from the corners of the steamy, smoky kitchen — he shuts his eyes and the after-image of the garden shines in maroon velvet. He feels a predatory yet impersonal memory hammering at his consciousness againannagainannagain . . a vision he never actually saw — but will never escape from. . We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when! But Zack does know when: Now, we’ll meet again nowЧитать дальше