Will Self - Shark

City-gents-put-aside-their-toppers-and-brollies-to-help-passengers-to-safety! Michael also finds it significant that: The interpretation I place on it to this day is that the baby elephant bus had blundered into a pit the clever Nazi cavemen had dug during the night, and covered up with a tarmac-coloured tarpaulin. . He forces himself upright — the kipper that slithered across his tongue on the Brighton Belle is yet with him. . sickening, smoky and oily . For routine assurance he pats down the pockets of the pinstripe suit he wears for going up to town: wallet, keys, pipe, tobacco pouch, matches . . just as before each sortie he’d pat down the pockets of his Sidcot and check the rest of his kit: rations, oxygen tube, Webley side-arm, harness, parachute, gloves, pear drops? No pear drops! Such had been the clouds of superstition they all barrelled blindly through that no one item or action could be accorded greater importance than any other — pear drops mattered as much as parachute, because where would you be in the icy turbulence of wind and death without those sweet strings of saliva to hang on to . . The smirched station pigeons wheel about Michael’s head, and the still-filthier station wheels about them. He staggers, and would fall if it weren’t for one of the cabbies, who’s been standing chatting and smoking with his mates, coming up to take the old man’s arm . . You all right, guv? he says, a grinning leprechaun, more freckle than face, with a shock of ginger hair. You all right, guv? he says again. You look like you’re ’aving a bit of a turn. Michael wants to scream, I’M NOT EVEN FIFTY! but recovers himself by taking out his wallet, and from this unfolds a sheet of paper. I’m quite all right, he says, but thank you, honestly — and, actually, I need a cab if you’re for hire. Do you know this address? The cabby looks at the paper, Dick-van-Dykily scratching his head. Chapter Road NW2, he says, that’s up Willesden way, guv. I should fink we’ll make it so long as there ain’t too many Mick bombers about. — In the back of the cab Michael fills the sunlit conservatory with a convolvulus of pipe smoke, and thinks, How strange we met at Victoria that day, but of course, it’d been because that’s where we took the train to school. . And where they returned to at the end of each term, fleeing Jencks the malevolent mathematics master, who, hypoxic in his brainstarver collar, hacked at our shins with a hockey stick. It makes sense, Michael feels, to think of himself as being on a sortie. . of sorts : rumbling up Park Lane past the new American skyscraper, on his way to liberate this lad . . the son of one of his Shoreham residents who’s a decent enough chap, although quite unable to cope . But then why should he be able to, what with his leg left behind on a Normandy beach, marriage to a difficult woman who he says drinks — and, of course, his own morphine addiction. The boy has bolted from school several times before — but never for this long. And now he’s got himself mixed up with some self-styled revolutionary psychiatrist who has a hippy commune. . in Willesden of all places . Michael wonders how easy it’ll be to detach Christopher — if the garbled letter he sent to his father is anything to go by, he’s powerfully in thrall to this bloody man Busner. Still, there are some young men, Michael knows, who can be very easily swayed. . from their deepest and most sincere convictions . He grips the bowl of his pipe so tightly his hand shakes, burning tobacco shreds. . whip me — more mortification . He remembers praying all night on the cold stone of the altar at Winchester Cathedral. . there was no revelation — only an openly contemptuous sexton who shooed him out into the cloisters, lest his deranged expression frighten the arriving choristers. And yet . . And yet . . if only he could’ve seen what Kins saw that September morning — seen himself through his brother’s eyes — then perhaps Tufty, Claus, Jimmy, Jimp, Jacko, Hobbles, the Scamp, Smalls, Dotty, Tommo, Taffy and the Barrel. . would all still be alive . And not only them, there were all those omas and fartis, onkels and tantes, who, shaking the fine dust from their overcoats and their furs, would draw back into their lungs the air the blast had sucked out. . when I did my bit for the Morgenthau Plan . As for the flayed angels, maybe they’d zip up their skin Sidcots and, patting down their pockets, discover heart, liver, lungs and lights. . all once more safely housed — so they were full of life’s CONCENTRATED FOOD , whereas he feels parched and his furred tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth — there’s the young squirt, bold as bloody brass, clad in a blue-grey uniform, a soppy, eager expression on his pink face, and a forage cap floating on his blond kiss curls. Kins thinks, I’m too bloody bilious to choke down a bloody bile bean, and calls out to Michael, What the bloody hell have you got that on for? his tone gently joshing, then he makes his way across the concourse, swinging his stick when there’s enough room to do so — which there mostly is because on this Thursday morning the crowds are keeping away, terrified, no doubt, by That Man’s threat to raze their city. . by night, by day, whensoever it pleaseth him . Kins isn’t afraid of Hitler — or of tuppeny-ha’penny patriots taking exception to his civvies. He’s amused by Michael’s appalled expression — clearly he expects everything to stop: the porters lined up for the chase to round on Kins, clerks and secretary girls too, and for him to become. . Actaeon, run down then torn apart by the dogs of war . So, purely to twit him, Kins sings out again, What the bloody hell have you got that on for? — Kins believes himself to be inured — no longer afraid of man or beast. Since arriving back in town a fortnight before, he’s discovered an appetite — and an unexpected aptitude — for this live-wire stuff . An Anderson has been delivered direct from the Ministry to Blackheath. . there have to be some benefits to being a big bug in Whitehall , but Daggett, the odd-job man, has enlisted in the Engineers, while Kins lacks the aptitude — and Sirbert the time — to erect the thing. So it lies stacked in the front garden next to Sirbert’s old handmade Indian clubs, and when the sirens by the station start up, sending their wails surging up the hill to echo over the heath, Sirbert, Bumbly and Kins retreat beneath the dining-room table. There they await the airborne flotilla’s low rubba-rubbarubba, a noise that penetrates the heavy black mahogany and throbs into them where they lie, propped up on bolsters, playing a. . rubber-rubber-rubber or three of bridge by candlelight, and sipping cocktails of an asperity to gladden Lord Woolton’s heart — six parts Nicholson’s Gin. . It’s clear, it’s good! to one of Vermouth — cocktails Bumbly has dubbed Bombshells. — Sirbert says . . is a little tease that Bumbly and her sons share behind his monolithic back, never to his face. Since the raids began, coincident with Kins’s return from the country, Sirbert says the chances of any one Londoner being either injured or killed on any given night remain reassuringly constant: in the region of one in fifteen thousand, with the possible exception of those unfortunate enough to be in the slum areas around the docks. When the wind was from the north they could all smell the vile stench of burning chemicals. . stronger and more astringent than gin , but Sirbert says . . based on his own readily available data — stressing that he relies on nothing not in the public domain — he calculates there’s a greater chance of one being killed during a raid by spent anti-aircraft ordinance, a gravity-stricken night fighter, or fire engines and ambulances rushing to the scene. In other words, Sirbert says, we’ve more likelihood of kicking the bucket due to what’s called blue-on-blue actions than because of anything Herr Goering has chucked at us. — There’s no justification,Читать дальше