Will Self - Shark

— with the plaster dust trickling from the cracks in everything, the walls collapsing, the fragile psyches shattering, and the flesh that contains them shredding into. . trayf — all trayf . Although his Uncle Maurice has told him repeatedly this wasn’t so: Walter and Felicia Busner’s bodies had been quite intact when they were found. His father’s three pieces buttoned into one — his mother’s breasts buttoned into another one. It was the shockwave that killed them, and they were buried the very next day in decent plots in the decent Liberal Jewish Cemetery. . which is not far from here , as is Churchill’s wartime reserve HQ: an investigative journalist from Red Mole had told Busner how a coal shed between two inconspicuous semis was the entrance to a subterranean maze of offices, bunkrooms and storerooms — a place of greater safety where the Anti-Semite-in-Chief could wait out the apocalypse while. . the Untermenschen died in their shitty little shelters . . some su-unny daaay! — The train has passed and the day is indeed sunny. . the trayf fries and the Creep stops twiddling to turn it. Busner says, I’m afraid this didn’t make it past our house censor. He passes the letter to Irene, who barely glances at the blacked-out lines before handing it to Maggie, who sets down her knitting to examine it closely before shaking her head dismissively. Eileen won’t stop nursing Barbie Jesus to look — but Podge flaps the notepaper and squeaks, Ooh! This is funny! Didja do this, Claude — did you? Didja leave Lincoln ’cause it’s the same as the biccie or what? Busner thinks, It’s always food with Podge. . Her nickname is itself a pained self-ascription: Ooh, I’m so podgy! And if he weren’t done with such pathologising he’d diagnose her as. . a classic hysterical anorexic . The Creep, who’s still twiddling at the plate-dryer, responds to Podge by turning up his volume: The Shaeff er boys ate crullers for breakfast, and my how we let ’em have it — Mother said it was so dé-class-é. . Still, crullers is circular, and cookies is circular — pancakes too. Anyway you look at it, most sweet things are either circular or there’s a circular process to makin’ ’em. . Pop and me used to make the ice cream on the back porch, hand-crankin’ that old bucket freezer, round and round it went — my how it gobbled up big grains of. . gobbled up big. . big. . — Being lost for words is not, Busner thinks, something the Creep is used to: he ceases to screw the plate-dryer, drops the screwdriver and lunges for the canister of Saxa on the table. . a boy chasing a chicken! — W-W-What’s this?! W-What’s this?! he cries, brandishing it — his scrawny neck is corded, his crazy necklace spins. . hypnotising the women . Busner says, Salt, it’s called salt, Claude — and, retrieving the letter, he stalks out of the kitchen via a side door beside the stuttering fridge. — And enters what was probably once a scullery-cum-laundry room, but which Lesley and the Kid have converted into a crash pad, with coconut matting on the floor and Indian hangings pinned up on all four walls and the ceiling as well. Through a ragged rip a single low-watt green bulb hangs down, bathing the mildewed mattresses, a slew of superhero comics, the Kid’s amplifier, his guitar and the Kid himself in an aqueous brinelight that ripples on his troubled hair. The hair, Busner thinks, says it all: it’s thick, blond, and was once upon a time cut and styled with a sensible side-parting. However, the days of hitch-hiking and the months of squatting have seen turbulent new growth. Now the Kid’s haircut floats on these waves. . an empty life-jacket that no longer saves. . his parents’ respectability from drowning . Sitting either side of him on the edge of the mattress pile, very close, so all six knees touch, are Lesley and Radio Gourevitch. As Busner appears a polythene bag vanishes into the pocket of Lesley’s leather waistcoat. . Fort — Da! Busner elects to ignore this, as he does the obviously conspiratorial nature of their huddle and the smirks on the two older men’s faces. Hi, man, Lesley hails him, while Gourevitch only flutters the fingers flying a roll-up up to perch on his lips. The Kid guiltily squeaks, Hi! and Zack hears the Creep’s trannie in the kitchen: a vast work of pop-orchestral portentousness piddling out from its dinky box, accompanied by this tinny cry, That’s where I’m gonna go when I die! Zack thinks: Asinine as it is, anything’s easier listening than Radio Gourevitch. — The tension between the two men is far more savage than any of the other residents’ mutual antagonisms. More savage, and more corrosive of the community than the women’s revulsion towards the Creep — revulsion Zack feels should properly be directed at Roger, since Claude is his baby, his pet project, one he happened upon serendipitously when he was doing the work he’d believed would make his name. Without his association with Claude Evenrude, Zack doubted Roger would’ve got anywhere much in his career — he’d be another pill-pushing psychiatrist. . with a theoretical axe to grind . Instead, the fortuitous escalation of the Vietnam War reignited public interest in Claude’s story — and Roger was on hand to tell it. In the States, Roger Gourevitch went on air, at first simply to discuss the traumas of war, but soon enough he was the media’s favoured pundit for all opinion fringe-psychological, a position he retained — indeed, enhanced — when he crossed the pond. Zack imagines there to be a sort of Bat Phone beneath a glass dome at Broadcasting House for producers who need to reach. . the fearless fink-fighter : the monster of vanity Zack has dubbed. . Radio Gourevitch . Taxied in from Willesden, Radio Gourevitch obliges by pronouncing on the sanity of Rothko and Ojukwu, or the likely behaviour of newly sexually liberated eighteen-year-olds, or mop-tops but lately manumitted from their fab’ slavery. The kitchen-sink pop-opera climaxes, then fades out in a last trumping of tuba-kazoos and an angelic strumming of bass Jews’ harps. What’s eating you, Zack? Gourevitch asks. His tones are teak and well carpented, a sailor’s trunk with polished brass fittings . You look like Tarzan would if he’d been told Cheetah was, uh, cheating on him. Lesley sniggers, and Zack says, Yeah, Rodge, I am being cheated on — but not by Miriam, Miriam is. . — How, he wonders, did it come to this? When they’d first met — both barefoot doctors at Kingsley Hall — Zack had seen in Roger Gourevitch someone he believed complemented him perfectly: the twanging yang to my still-callow ying-tong-iddle-i-po . . Inseparable, they’d sparred together, thrown the I Ching together, and gone on three-day benders beginning at the Scotch of St James and ending at dawn on Mayfair rooftops where the dolly birds floating on gossamer wings chorused with cut-glass accents. All this time they. . chewed it over : together they gashed open the bloated belly of the West and yanked out its half-digested incorporations, munched their way through any remaining repressions and spat out its worthless projections. With his arm around Roger’s broad shoulders, feeling the heat of each other’s psychic energy as their faces almost touched, Zack had become convinced that they — and they alone — possessed the X-ray vision needed to see through the pseudo-events that surrounded them. . in the fibrillating heartland of sclerotic capitalism . Together they’d reached the exhilarating conclusion that, far from Ronnie being the best and most radical proponent of an existential and phenomenological approach to so-called mental illness, he hadn’t gone far enough! —. . cool. — Zack looks at his erstwhile blood brother, at his high and noble forehead with its aurora of red curls, at his prominent cheekbones with their fiery Victorian sideboards, and thinks: hot — Miriam had the hots for Roger, we all did — Maurice included. But was this surprising? He had charisma, Roger, and he was a force of nature, thrashing his way through the tepid lagoon of London’s psychoanalysts. — Roger and I, Zack had said to Miriam, are thinking of setting up a place of our own — a therapeutic community, that is. We rather feel Ronnie’s lost his way. . a bit. And Miriam said. .Читать дальше