Will Self - Shark

didn’t she? . . That’s a good idea. — After Sunday lunch, at Uncle Maurice’s, once the boys had got down from the table and gone to lark about in the garden, Zack raised the tricky business: Roger Gourevitch and I would like to open a sort of clinic. . We feel we could offer distressed patients a more, um, humane environment than they get in ordinary mental hospitals —. Maurice interrupted, a forked sliver of beef perturbed by his gestures: I thought that’s what your Scottish chap was all about, absolute freedom, no drugs or other treatments, everyone pitching in? Yes, Zack explained patiently, that’s what he set out to do, but, to be frank, he’s become rather a victim of his own rhetoric and the whole thing has turned into something of a personality cult. Besides which, he can be terribly overbearing. — Miriam had laughed, That Ronnie! He’s awfully authoritarian about anarchy — utterly unyielding when it comes to a total lack of restraint. Maurice laughed as well, and dabbed with his napkin the neat moustache pinned on his handsome donkey’s face. Then he sat back in his chair while Missus Mac cleared the heavy gold-rimmed plates. In the past two or three years Zack had begun to notice this nimbus of anachronism forming around his uncle. Maurice had always seemed so with it, what with his fast cars and his brittle theatrical friends. But the gilded oval of the portrait hung behind him now framed a pre-war head: the hair Brilliantined, the collar starched, the spotted silk tie Eton-knotted. Maurice’s very dialogue was dated: Here’s how! was his toast, and gin his poison, while what he feared above all things was people. . banging on . Fidgeting with his rolled-up napkin, sliding it in and out of its silver ring, Zack had thought: He’s probably rumbled already that I’m going to touch him. . Yet Maurice was as elliptically discreet as always, only asking, D’you think you might be able to have Henry to stay there? And Zack, who hadn’t entertained this possibility for an instant, blustered, Well. . ye-es, I suppose so. . Maurice said, Good. — Then, after pudding, when Miriam had curled up on the settee to gain Insight from the Sunday Times, Zack joined his uncle in the bright study, with its glassy gaiety of playbills: There’s a Girl in My Soup! which, in Maurice’s case, was. . not remotely likely . There was no beating about the bush . . Maurice unscrewed the cap of his Parker, raised a querying eyebrow, then wrote out a cheque for 35, 000 to buy the two dilapidated properties on Chapter Road, cash down. Zack had sat there, stunned by his own temerity — the fat numerals hanging in the air, together with the soft rrrrip of the torn perforations, until Maurice fanned them away with the cheque. Taking it, Zack didn’t know which way to look — Danny La Rue, it appeared, had been at the Palace with Roy Hudd, and Missus Mac hadn’t emptied the smoking stand, which was full of his uncle’s Du Maurier butts. Maurice, ever tactful , had said, There’re strong rumours on the horizon of a merger between Forte’s and A. N. Other. Nothing in the bag yet — by no means a dead cert’ — but I do hold a fair number of shares. . He laughed: Anyway, it wouldn’t matter one jot if I’d to write it off entirely — suppose I’d to live down to a regular something every week, spin it out a bit, it’d still be a very generous something. . This didn’t assuage his nephew, who tried to hand back the cheque, but Maurice hee-hawed gently, twisted his moustache and shook his long face — all that was required to silence one already so heavily indebted. . — And this is how I’ve repaid him! There on the mattress pile sits Gourevitch and his leather-breeked henchman. In between them sits the Kid — Christopher ‘Kit’ Titmuss — guileless. . and stuffed full of their salacious plotting . The Kid, now a pyjama case . . but recently. . a basket one , whom Gourevitch had picked out from among all the raffia tat the hippies flogged in Gandalf ’s Garden. The Kid had gone on the run from Uppingham, and such was his momentum he’d travelled full-pelt from public school into the power circle of the Aetherians. Gourevitch — who collected the confected arcana of the age the way Jungians coined archetypes, and who now referred to himself as a yogibod with no irony at all! carried the Kid back to Willesden and listened to him intently as he raved: The Great Cosmic Master was due. . Satellite No. 3 would be brought into orbit, and those — such as the Kid — who’d evolved their cosmic consciousness would join together in a great spiritual push, lifting their bodies by psychic power alone up to the satellite, which would set course for Mars Sector 6, where they’d all dwell in peace and love with Master Aetherius and the Master Jesus. . You’re not bloody LISTENING! Busner shouted at Gourevitch when he enthused about the limitless possibilities of the liberated mind to discover new and viable syncretisms. Recalling the expression on Gourevitch’s face — a topological oxymoron, since Roger was simultaneously full of himself. . and hopelessly spaced out — Zack now realises this was the precise moment when they stopped talking meaningfully to one another at all. Their nights in white satin had been ripped to shreds. . trayf . . and Roger fully metamorphosed into Radio Gourevitch, a one-man pirate station, moored in this suburban backwater and continuing to broadcast at full strength whether or not anyone was listening. — There was also the problem of sex. Roger had always been. . libidinous, aren’t we all? . . but his powerful body began to writhe with the unearthly flexions of the Kundalini spirit, and after swallowing a couple of nigger minstrels Lesley had given him he spent most of one Friday morning house meeting sitting cross-legged, clutching his crotch and chanting, My dick is God, God is my dick. . over and over again, until Zack had thought he would stick my fingers in his eyes, my thumb in his third one and tear his bloody head off! — Skinning up and smoking a little shit — this Zack hadn’t minded, and with two or three of the residents, in the right surroundings and carefully guided, he believed LSD could have therapeutic benefits. He’d read Osmond and Smythies, and, while he thought the stuff about psychoses being caused by metabolic malfunction of the adrenal gland was. . balls , he did find the successes they reported treating chronic alcoholics credible. There was a point, Busner had found, in the psychedelic journey when the ego consumed itself. . an ouroboric process , whereby the tail of earthly desire was choked down by its own avaricious head. Safely shepherded through this dark and terrifying psychic defile, the day-tripper became aware his neuroses were a featherweight contingency rather than a heavyweight and unalterable given. True, within days — or weeks at most — the residents who’d undertaken the therapy tended to slide back into the mire of their maladies, but this was only to be expected: the social pressure to conform to the insane game was so very strong. However, they’d never discussed any rules for drug use in the house — any more than he and Gourevitch had had an espoused policy on sexual relations. . Why would we? Common sense should surely prevail . — But that was before John Lesley landed on them, a Jumbo jet overloaded with Pakki and Red Leb’, Rocky and Nepalese temple balls, its erratic pilot wired on dexies, yellow bellies, mandies, prellies and black bombers. Speed — Busner had deployed San Franciscan sententiousness — kills. And Radio Gourevitch had. . whined at my interference : Aw, shucks, ma-an, don’t tell me you didn’t pop a little pep when you were sweating the books in med’ school —. Besides, Lesley had chipped in, everything’s cut with speed nowadays, why’d you think these chappies look so bloody happy? And he shook the cereal box in time as he chanted, Snap! Crackle! and Pop! Then he squinted at the small print and said, What the hell’s riboflavin anyway? This was the previous autumn, when the three of them had been seated around the kitchen table on better terms. It was shortly after Lesley had joined the Concept House with the preposterous title of Multimedia Coordinator — Lesley, with his ank-on-a-thong and his lank hair weeping sebaceously on to his habitually bare and spotty shoulders,Читать дальше