Will Self - Shark

drag the whole filthy business up : a corpse pulled from dank waters, with mucus-smeared eels jostling for precedence as they exited through its eye sockets. . three into two doesn’t go . . Lesley says, The point is, yeah, that we’re all heading through the Spectrum Door — me, Rodge, the Kid here, Claude and Podge too. ’Course, it’d be super-cool if everyone else’d come along with us, but Podge can be the chicks’ sorta spokeswoman. . or delegate — that sorta thing. Zack looks down on the Multimedia Coordinator and reflects that, yes, there is a sorta truth in his job title, because that’s what Lesley does: channel sounds and visions deep inside vulnerable psyches. Then he turns to Roger Gourevitch and says, What about me? Roger props the Kid’s guitar carefully against the amplifier and turns to him. You? he says, you’re it, Zack — you’re the berries. We don’t go nowhere without you, man — you’re the Howdy-Doody man, we’re only puppets. Lesley has fiddled from filmy folds a tiny postage stamp of blotting paper that he now holds out to Zack on the palm of his hand. . the black spot! Zack recoils: Oh, no, I really don’t think so! I’d better be the, um, guide for this one, chaps, keep things under control, make sure the setting is safe — no visitors, that sort of thing. Besides, if this stuff is as potent as you say, John, you may well need me to go down to Brody’s. . again. — Why it’s necessary to remind them of this incident Busner cannot imagine — unless it’s that they think. . I was so shocked or drunk I don’t remember the model psychosis the pair of them had induced in Irene — which was how Gourevitch had justified giving her LSD. A ridiculous, foolhardy idea! because whether you labelled this condition mental illness or not, Irene was permanently in a model psychosis, racketing around the Concept House, her velour scarves and gypsy shawls flying in the slipstream of her eurhythmic lunacy: I am the wind, darlings! I am the sky and the clouds too! I am the birds, darlings — see me swoop and dive! And see her nest , which is what Irene did at the very zenith of the trip’s parabola, after sneaking away from Gourevitch and Lesley to remove all the light bulbs from the bedrooms. — When he got back from the pub, Zack found her naked and brooding in the airing cupboard, her buttocks and thighs covered in blood. It was patently useless getting Gourevitch and Lesley to deal with the situation — they were squirming around on the living-room floor of 117. . caterpillars who’d eaten their own toadstool . So once he’d been to the chemist — where the pharmacist was young, compliant. . and female to boot — Zack injected all three of them with Chlorpromazine. As soon as the astral pilots were back on the ground, he’d suggested to them. . in no uncertain terms . . that they stay there. — Well, yes, Gourevitch says, we’re not about to forget that friggin’ Nazi-jackboot bring-down, now are we. . But if things get a bit screwy again, you can fill us out another little RX —. What! Busner cries, you must be bonkers, Roger — you expect me to walk into a suburban chemist completely intoxicated by an illegal drug and hand them a prescription that’s at best professionally dubious? Caroline-bloody-Coon won’t save my bacon: it’s a recipe for getting oneself struck off! The Nabob sobs on . . Anyway, it’s completely academic, Roger, because I’m not taking one of these bloody things — no matter how gone the spade who sold it to Lesley was. — He senatorially hitches his towel higher on his hips and turns to leave — only then recalling why he came in to begin with: Any of you chaps know anything about this? He gives the censored letter to Lesley, who glances at it cursorily, then passes it to Radio Gourevitch. Roger takes his time, holding the notepaper under the green light, his lips pursed, humming — clearly he’s going to come up with some claptrap about Claude’s discourse of negation . . Then the Kid taps on the letter from below and says, Um, Lincoln. . I recognise that handwriting, that’s Michael Lincoln. . Oh, Busner says, and who’s he when he’s at home? The Kid looks at his bare feet shamefacedly, muttering, He’s, um. . he’s my guardian y’see, and I think he might be coming to visit me. Busner looks at the Kid, who’s already sweaty in his cheesecloth shirt. Why, he thinks meanly, would anyone want to visit that face full of pimples and bum fluff? But he says, Well, let’s hope he doesn’t pitch up today, shall we? I don’t imagine anyone’s guar—. And breaks off because Irene has. . batted into the room . She leans, panting, in the doorway, although Busner has the nauseating sensation that. . she’s flown straight into my face! Chris, Chris, she pants, there’s a phone call for you. . Only then do they all realise that for the past few minutes the telephone has been ringing, its Answer-me! Answer-me! echoing in the hall, each insistent peal. . eating into us and cranking up the tension between them still more. Busner sighs, Gourevitch too — Lesley gives a yelping laugh. Irene says, It’s someone called Lincoln, Chris, he says he’s in a phone box and he hasn’t got much change. . In the hall the Kid picks up the receiver and presses it to his ear, she can hear the long fetch of his sigh and pictures Maurice holding the instrument with one manicured hand, while the other wields a toothpick to spear a cube of Turkish delight. Maurice says, He isn’t going to arrange for Henry to stay in Willesden, is he, my dear? Miriam thinks, If I carry on pressing the phone this hard against my ear, it’ll knit with my skull. . But she only says: No, Uncle, I don’t believe he is. . — Miriam calls her husband’s uncle, Uncle, not because she hasn’t enough uncles and aunts of her own, but, on the contrary, because she has. . too bloody many of them! Uncles bald as eggs who wear open-toed sandals, drive Austin 7s and canvas for Jeremy Thorpe — others who import Meissen to premises beneath the arches of Broad Street Station, and who, when she was a little girl, took her deep in there, among the resinous packing cases, and pulled out pink-and-white shepherdesses for her to admire, lying on. . their afterbirth of frizzy straw . Miriam has yet more uncles, including apostates who have married out: there’s one who has a goatee, does something utterly unacceptable in the motor trade and is married to a bottle-blonde from Leicester. Then there are the aunts — some with crazy two-tone hair, their wigs are. . that bloody obvious , and others, less pious, who still Marcel and smoke like billy-o , cigarettes, cheroots as well — and there’s an especially scary pipe-smoking one: Tante Mitzi, whose corsetted bulk and deep, curved creases from lip to chin earned her the nickname the Boar from Miriam’s brother Felix. Ach! the Boar would exclaim each time she relit her trumpet-shaped meerschaum. Now I am burrrning ze Turk! Tante Mitzi’s exaggeratedly rolled r’s are, Miriam’s always feels, proof of her ineradicably. . schweinish nature . This despite her having been the first of Miriam’s mother’s siblings to have left, fleeing Berlin following her active participation in the Sparrrtakusaufstand . . a blooding which cost her her left leg — or so the Boar madly claims, each time she removes the tin of Presbyterian Mixture from the small cedar-wood box bolted to the steel spavins of the prosthetic leg Onkel Herschel made for her. Madly, because Miriam and the other children — including Boopsie, the youngest — all remember perfectly well when it was cut off. It was inevitable, given such a large family — many of whom were either doctors or other kinds of physiological technicians — that these squeamish matters were the subject of noisy debate. There was Onkel Hermann, the much teased osteopath, Tante Frieda, the openly derided naturopath, and of course Onkel Herschel, who, having providentially made a small fortune during the war from the manufacture and sale of prosthetic limbs — mostly to wingless airmen — was deferred to in person, then derided behind his hunched back. — At the Shabbat supper the children, tipsy from the dregs of the Kiddush cup, drowsy from the singing of prayers, their eyes widened by candlelight and smarting from the tobacco smoke, had listened in awe as their mother gleefully described how difficult it’d been to cut off her aunt’s leg. Meira Gross took the oiled braiding of the challah and, tearing it in half, illustrated how she’d squeezed plaque from Mitzi’s clamped arteries that was: So thick! Toothpaste from a tube wouldn’t be thicker. . And the tissue itself: riddled — I say riddled with necrosis. You pay attention kiddy-winkies, and every time you see Tante put her pipe in her mouth imagine it like this: the white meerschaum is her leg, the amber mouthpiece is the rotten tissue — pure rot! — I’d so hoped, Maurice continues, that he’d find space there for Henry, the hospital he’s in at the moment is so very grim and gloomy-seeming. . Miriam, gripping the phone still tighter, thinks, What should I tell him? That Zack’s so deluded now he thinks not just that it’s impossible for either of you to help his brother, but that you actually caused his schizophrenia to begin with? And she also wonders: What loyalty should I have to this silliness in Willesden? — To begin with she’d thought of it as a sort of compensation for her husband: an opportunity for him to have a wider family, as she did, with eccentric onkels and tantes of his own — she’d never taken the house’s concept seriously, hoping it would allЧитать дальше