Will Self - Shark

she wanted sweeter-smelling and prettier children with less tormented dreams . . As for Michael, he could only abide with the bloody cripples, for, if he was their beneficent father, he was also their prodigal son, ever-returning with his pockets empty of all but hope. — His natal home he hardly ever visited: he’d no wish to expose himself to his own father’s naked absence of feeling, no longer covered up by his mother’s sentimental flounces. . because Bumbly’s not scoring any more — Bumbly’s headed back to the pavilion . . — He was forsaken on the London train, and, as the coaches chuntered across the Ouse Valley viaduct, the skin angels drew closer and closer, their flapping translucency blocking his view of rich green fields, dew-sparkly in the early-morning spring sunlight. He stumbled from the compartment, and, since this was a Pullman service, made his way to the restaurant, where an overweight waiter, his thick buttery paunch oozing from under his short stained white jacket, silver-served him kippers with forceps . . from. . a surgical salver . — The flak embedded in Michael’s shoulder at Wilhelmshaven had smarted — while the portly City brokers and civil servants who sat all around him maintained a steady and aggrieved mutteration. . always taxation , as they tucked sausage stubs into their prudent mouths. They’re the right age, Michael thought, to’ve been through the show, surely there’s one I might hold on to, one that can stop me from falling? But he knew: the plummet would never end. . I’ve got no home on high , while the only flyers who could stay in this dizzying formation were the skin angels. — Accelerating through Redhill, then Purley Oaks and Croydon — as all those years ago another train had clattered through the western suburbs, albeit much more slowly — Michael remembered de Gaulle’s inspiriting fatalism: We who go on fighting are all more or less sentenced to death anyway . . — In the first few years after the war he’d consulted eminent doctors, who’d referred him to compassionate psychiatrists. They hadn’t helped. He’d also made several visits to a modish psychoanalyst, who was long-haired and self-regardingly dishevelled in a brown corduroy suit. The analyst asked Michael againannagain . . whether Bumbly had breastfed him. . which was idiotic , and if she’d cuddled him often. . the very idea! However, the analyst had no sig’ int. when it came to the skin angels with their alien faces. Michael thought he might’ve been able to bear it if he’d recognised them — if it’d been Tufty, Claus, Jimmy, Jimp, Jacko, Hobbles, the Scamp, Smalls, Dotty, Tommo, Taffy, the Barrel — or indeed any or all of the spare bods he’d served with who’d gone for a Burton and remained in the celestial saloon, playing crib, throwing darts and, with cries of Here’s how!. . drunk themselves stony until they’d petrified into memorials of their own truncated lives. But it wasn’t their faces that haunted him — and it wasn’t their victims’ faces either. On that day — the day the skin angels alighted on him and commenced their vampiric feeding — there’d been a photo of Rita Hayworth torn from a movie magazine stuck to the bulkhead at the back of the cockpit. . breastfeeding , and he’d curled the sweet tongue of chewing gum he was offered into his dry mouth, and he’d taken a look through the Norden bombsight out of courtesy to the proud bombardier, but he hadn’t done anything at all himself — only watched. Perhaps the narcissistic shrink would’ve said this in itself was a form of doing — this voyeurism, and as culpably perverse as any sadism. But how could you desire to watch what you’d never seen before, never so much as entertained the existence of before: these others, these Windmill girls who cavorted for him in skimpy skin skirts. . torn from their own bellies and who, batting their lidless eyes in their baked faces, seduced him againannagain , while silently screamingly entreating him with their lipless mouths. . We are Jap-a-nese, if you ple-ease . . — The commuters who boarded the train at Ealing and Park Royal had stayed silent as the grave, although Michael knew, from speaking to evacuees in Chippenham and men who returned to Hullavington after leave, that in town the nattering about the air raids was incessant. The windows of the third-class compartment were heavily misted, and he employed his battledress cuff to rub a little bomb-damage sight into being. It was the same on cold mornings before the ground crew swung the propeller: he sat in the Tiger Moth trainer rubbing the Perspex windscreen with the fleecy cuff of his flight jacket, then they took off to do bumps and circuits over the pristine Wiltshire fields. — There were ugly heaps of clods at the backs of the railwaymen’s cottages along the track, and beside them the corrugated-iron sheds the householders were supposed to take shelter in — here and there a cottage had been pulled by the Luftwaff e quite painlessly . . leaving behind. . a gingivitis of rubble . Michael had been able to persuade himself his curiosity was. . really rather academic , or, more accurately, that it was an interest appropriate to a professional when examining his competitors’ handiwork . — Then, as the train skulked past the barges in Paddington Basin, the walls of blackened moss drew closer, and rising up behind them he saw the boarding houses alongside Queen Mary’s, their cliff faces grimy and guano-dashed. One, he thought, has been. . especially cleft for me — all seven storeys, from the garret to the cellar, while. . from thy wounded side flows . . water spattering over a staircase doubling back into nowhere. Worse than this was the po poised on a tilted scrap of remaining floor — worse still the wardrobe door flapping in the breeze, opening to reveal short-sleeved summer frocks still hanging inside, then shutting, then opening again. — It may’ve been this peek-a-boo . . or possibly the rosewater of the girls belted into gabardine beside him, but, as Michael gazed upon the bombed-out boarding house. . I was resurrected . His fingers had twitched — their nerve endings remembering the joyous slide from prickling nylon to smooth skin, then the glide inside the moist woollen leg. . of her blackouts . Michael, pressing his copy of John o’London’s Weekly down hard on his lap, revisited the incomparable feeling of holding all of her in the palm of his hand as she rocked back and forth, giving excited little yips. — Surrounding them in the dark orchard garden of the Three Feathers at Sherston were other agitated couples: WAAFs, local girls, Princess Marys — in the absence of any artificial sources they’d been attracted to the mooning light of the officer trainees’ faces and the whiteness. . of our unsullied hands , and so. . we fed on one another’s unrationed faces . . When apples are ripe and ready for plucking, Girls of sixteen are ready for —. It had, Michael thought, been incomparable with the Sherston girl, because such a thing had never happened to him before — how could it? The only females detained in the knapped-flint compound on the downs were Matron and the headmaster’s wife — neither of whom had any more allure than the school sow. Instead there’d been Monk minimus, who came to Michael’s study most evenings, where, in his faggish capacity, he made toast and. . never kissed me any other way than lovingly. — Brained by the bright light boring in from the Buckingham Palace Road, Michael gropes through the shining strips of his memories, memories that interfere with insight’s invisible beam. It isn’t until he’s leaning against Dumbo that he realises this is the small cinema that used to show newsreels, and where on the morning he’d met his brother he’d sat in the sixpenny seats watching footage taken in the aftermath of the raids on the City and the Docks. — It’s a testimony, Michael thinks as he sniffs the yawning station’s halitosis, to. . something. . that I remember an image from that film better than anything I personally witnessed in the Blitz. — A double-decker had driven into a shell crater in Lombard Street, nevertheless the commentary remained a breezyЧитать дальше