Will Self - Shark

out of kilter with the times . As for Sirbert’s line, there’s so very much of him in Kins — the Baroque dome of his forehead, the spear-point of his nose, the heavy cheeks with their insidious veining — it’s no wonder there was. . nothing left over . Michael has entertained the idea. . I may be some throwback , although he can muster no evidence, his grandfather being long departed, and his grandmother encountered only once, when, on a tour of the links courses along the Dorsetshire coast, Sirbert having unexpectedly kept the driver on, they motored into Devon for a day and paid a call on a peculiar bundle of black silks in a tiny whitewashed cottage. Ignoring Kins and Sirbert, the old woman had stroked Michael’s hair, chucked his chin and clucked, Ain’t ’e the spit, ain’t ’e the bloomin’ spit. . while an indeterminately younger boss-eyed woman sat on a stool by the low window, the drool from her open mouth tangling in the thread she pulled as she sewed the simplest of samplers: a single word, misspelt by blue cross-stitching, JEBUS. — That these were Sirbert’s mother and sister Michael realised much later and purely circumstantially — for his father said nothing. It had been the first summer. . when I was eleven that his father had begun to engage Michael in conversation at all, Sirbert viewing intercourse with men as only really appropriate on the golf course or at the bridge table, and with women solely the latter. By the age of ten, Kins. . my Irish twin could play every convention there was, and so received paternal favour. . doubled and then redoubled . Albeit this mostly consisted of Sirbert saying, Are you completely certain you can make four diamonds? while the boy stared furiously into the fan of his cards. — There’d been little sociability beyond this at the family home, and there was less still during the vacs when the boys returned first from prep school, and thereafter from Lancing College. Sirbert had a loathing for that sort of carry-on. He had raised his voice to Bumbly on just one occasion that Michael could recall, when she’d accepted a dinner invitation on their behalf without consulting him, imagining since it came from such a powerful personage. . the Beaver himself, I think , her husband would forgo his usual cocktail, one mixed — Michael had assumed for a long time — from two parts rectitude to one of outright disdain. You silly woman! he’d cried — and Missus Haines scuttled away to hide in the cupboard beneath the stairs. Don’t you realise, he boomed on, his face engorged, that if we go there they may very well form the expectation they should come here! — The brothers stand beside the. . Sirberts-upon-Sirberts . . of sandbags piled up by the entrance to St James’s Park tube station. Michael’s eye strokes their prickly sacking, then slides up the smooth sooty sandstone laid down aeons before Ussher’s world began . . to rove the rigid folds of the skirted figure sitting on the pediment. . a bearded lady Jesus who I daresay wears no blackouts! He turns to Kins: So, what’s it to be — I see the Karloff ’s still on at the Paramount. . His brother sneers: I see you’ve secured yourself a cushy commission. Michael softly admonishes him, Ape, I don’t think I’ll stand it if. . Ape, please. . ZZZZZZZZUM! Kins swipes his stick across the façade. This rotten pile, he says, would be just the ticket for you and your United Airmen, eh? Unfortunately you’ve come from your HQ in Basra a little precipitately, eh? After all — he pulls his younger brother on — the wandering sickness is still very much abroad. What was the timing Wells proposed for civilisation’s collapse and resurrection? Ah, yes, I remember it now: social vitality begins to return in 1967 and the pestilence finally ceases in May 1970. Very factual when it comes to his fantasy, is Master Herbert, however, like all systematisers he prefers the bigger picture, doesn’t want to bother himself with fiddly little details such as how the BLOODY HELL DO WE WEATHER THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS! Breathing heavily, Kins pulls up short and tugs a pack of Tenners from his jacket pocket. Gasper lit, he puffs away with both hands on his hips while declaiming: War can be a stimulating thing — and you can always do with stimulus! — Not having his brother’s perfect recall for words, any more than he does Sirbert’s for figures, Michael doesn’t remember the line. In place of their flat certitude he has only these swelling sensations: sweet Aero bubbles suddenly sickly . . as the Hawker Hart banks hard right, drops into an air pocket, then is lifted, so it soars up and around in a thermal carrying him and PO Murgatroyd out over the downs in a widening circle. Far below there’s the soft seethe of beeches and the azure-and-brown roundel of the dew pond at Chanctonbury Ring. — It’s the flying, Kins, Michael says as they shamble on up the lane that debouches into St Anne’s Gate, not the dying. Dying! Kins snorts. I should’ve thought it was the killing that’d bother you more, Ape — the Ape I knew was a vegetarian beast, not at all happy with killing in the main. . They stroll on along Birdcage Walk and turn into the park. — At the Lyons’ in Trafalgar Square, Michael watches moodily as Sirbert’s sub’ starts to disappear by the forkful into Kins’s ever-moist mouth. There is something, he thinks, rather sickening about the concentration his brother brings to bear on making little bite-sized sandwiches of egg white, bacon and fried bread, then mopping up the yolky grease in. . widening circles . Charles the First’s dainty horse is mounted on a thick cloud of steam and fag smoke — beyond this Michael can make out the Whitehall Theatre, while to the right a barrage balloon bumbles obscenely against the opening of Admiralty Arch as some AA types cack-handedly winch it aloft. Sirbert . . Bumbly . . Kins . . Everyone except me, Michael reflects, gets a nickname. . which was why, when one was bestowed on him at the OTU, he felt his conscience. . crumble a bit more . Links, the chaps call him, or Creamy, by reason of the biscuit that shares his nom de guerre. — The De’Ath Watch, a weekly round-up of cinema visits and sports fixtures, appeared during the Easter and summer vacs. To begin with it was a single typewritten page, but soon enough it was four, then eight, and multiple copies were cranked out on the Gestetner in Sirbert’s study. Kins had written the review of Things to Come, and Michael had typed the stencil. Kins’s dismissal of the flick had been trenchant: Like the work of speculative fiction on which it is based, this film demonstrates the shallowness of a socialistic ethic when it is divorced from any Christian morality. Raymond Massey’s performance seeks to establish as incontestable the patently threadbare idea that the only foundation necessary for civilisation is a stiff enough lip. . or words to that eff ect . This was when Kins was seventeen. Three years later he’d be the only person Michael knew — besides Sirbert — who wasn’t surprised when Commissar Molotov and Herr von Ribbentrop declared their respective nations. . desirous of strengthening the cause of peace . Kins had been Publisher, Editor and Chief Correspondent of the De’Ath Watch — Michael was compositor and ginger-beer boy. As the sun set and the shadow of the All Saints’ steeple stretched across the heath, Kins would still be hitting Michael’s perfectly adequate deliveries. . all over the shop . It’d been more humiliating on the golf course — by the time they were fourteen and fifteen Kins was awarding his younger brother six strokes. . and still thrashing me . At Lancing, Michael should by all that’s sacred have been more popular: he was a good average chap in the classroom, and a solid player at rugger. Kins by contrast was. .Читать дальше