Will Self - Shark

an oddball , who wouldn’t play rugger or footer at all, and made letter-perfect translations from Cicero and Demosthenes. Worse still. . surely . . when they both joined the sixth, Kins cold-shouldered his peers — instead of gathering with them at the common-room settle on winter evenings to toast bread on twists of barbed wire, as Michael did, he hid himself away in his study — the Anchorite they called him — and palled up still more with Ape, who prepared him for confirmation, and with a history master called Venables, who was a terrific Bolshie . All this, yet still Kins. . got their vote . He was so very popular that when he set himself up as the College’s very own Steel-Maitland, the resolution was easily passed that none of them would fight for. . anything much . Michael had been the most energetic of canvassers: he’d do anything for his revered older brother and fears. . I still might . The pale-blue Oxford entrance paper had a single-word question on it: Why? Michael felt the compulsion to write an essay explaining he’d applied purely in order to be closer to Kins. — They’d gone up together the previous autumn, and at last the gap that had been widening between them since Highers was confirmed. Parting on Beaumont Street, Kins brayed in terribly accented French, C’est magnifique, mais n’est ce pas la gare. . then turned on his heel, heading towards Balliol. — At the beginning of the long vac Kins and Venables bought a banger from a grocer in Kemptown for a tenner and had it shipped to Dieppe on the Newhaven packet. Winched down into the white dust, they’d hammered along. . underneath the ar-ches of the planes, a Grande Armée of two, so rapidly mobilised that they soon reached the limits of Michael’s imagination. He pictured them sitting at Parisian café tables, drinking cloudy Pernods, while they watched ladies of high fashion and drooping garters promenade. . with their lapdogs and lobsters . The stiffly prosaic truths were cartes postales, the first showing the table decoration of the Place de la Bastille with model motor-cars revolving round it. Michael pored over this for evidence of loose morals and discovered only the long hoardings exposed on the rooftops — SAVON CADUM pour la Toilette — flanked by electrified cherubs. Kins had written: Smooth crossing, Bumbly. . the banger, christened in her honour. . running well. Fell in last night with two Germans who stood us a drink! One was Manager of Berlin Chemicals en route to do business with Imperial Airways. Address here, Hotel Burgundy, 8 rue Duphot. — Address there: The Paragon, Blackheath, where, having been passed over for the trip, Michael spent the whole summer — apart from a short walking tour of the Suffolk coast with some pals from the Corps. He chanced his arm at the tennis club, and in the evenings swayed away from Gwen Cudlip’s embrace at gramophone parties. . I can’t give you the ocean — or deep and tender devotion . . thankful his one decent pair of white flannels at least had. . substantial pleats . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins . . — Whozzat? Kins has finished his breakfast and pats his sluggish bottom lip with the triangle of a paper napkin. To be frank I don’t altogether fancy a flick, he says, screeching his chair back. Nor a show, got in the way of spending rather a lot of time in the great outdoors when I was with the CLTA wallahs, seems I lived out there in the wilderness forever —. Kins does a lousy Clark Gable and his brother thinks, I myself could do a better Loretta Young, then remembers the De’Ath Watch gave the flick two out of a possible four stars, then interrupts: Where did you spend last night? Kins grins apishly at the girl who’s plastered their scrap of a bill to the sticky tabletop. All in good time, Ape, he says. — Time, Kins thought, had been a by-product of the coal he’d found in the bunker in the mews off the Euston Road — a bunker that. . rather counter-intuitively was also full of damp clods, though it hadn’t rained for days. . with the exception of bombs . Kins supposed some Camden sparrow had dumped the clayey earth in there when he dug in a galvanised nest for his own brood — or possibly it was for the quality in the mansion blocks. Either way, it made a satisfactory settee for. . my struwwely self . For the last half-hour of the barrage it’d all felt curiously personal — each bomb with Der Kins painted on it. In the coal hole he regretted his behaviour — if he hadn’t overstepped the mark he might still be up in the top-floor flat of the Nash Terrace which Annette shared with her pal Doreen. When the raid began, he fed the girls Sirbert’s hard data, before extinguishing the electric and opening the curtains. He’d watched scarcely able to contain his excitement, as a stick of incendiaries falling somewhere to the north of the Mappin Terraces lit up the freshly dug allotments on Primrose Hill. Doreen had hurried off down to the basement — but Annette, Kins was persuaded, shared his exultation in these. . the trumpets of Jericho , and when she buried her face in his chest. . I pawed her breasts . — At Collow Abbey Farm, Feydeau, an old contemptible of the movement, arrives to speak to the trainees. Squinting at Kins through the lamp smoke, he says, De’Ath, eh — putting heavy emphasis on the second syllable. I knew a very fine young fellow by the name of Stanley Death, who was killed in the last war, any relation of yours? And Kins, repelled by the pubic protuberance of the old proselytiser’s wagging beard, bridles: No, not that I know of. . and hopes it’ll end there — but Feydeau’s not to be so easily subdued. Earlier he’d made some rather pointed comments about how community living appeals to a certain sort of person, usually comfortably reared, as an Elysium in which, without having to do anything in particular about it, he feels the burden of existence will be lifted from his shoulders. . and now he prates on : Death is a good old English peasant name that in my experience is frequently left behind — as if it were a smock, hung on a lowly peg — when the family begins its social ascent, very often under a new and Frenchified covering —. If you’re implying, Kins breaks in, that my old man has cut his cloth to suit his position, then, I’m afraid you nothing at all about him! — And on this peevish, rather than Napoleonic, note, Kins struggles up from the broken rattan chair with a good deal of squeaking, then endures the further humiliation of. . a Hardyesque interlude as he grapples with the two halves of the door, before eventually finding himself in the yard, breathing heavily and trying. . to take the long view between the barns and over the lime woods, to where in the distance the soft light of the new moon silvers the Wolds’ grassy haunches. Picking his way gingerly over the well-manured cobbles, Kins draws closer to a long low byre and its. . beautiful pong — By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house . Kins fights to maintain his footing in the present — had it been days or weeks before, when, by way of being more useful, he’d taken on the task of doing the farm’s accounts? And also begun acting as. . a rum sort of scribe , filling out forms and penning personal letters for the unlettered labourers in the neighbourhood. Time — at least of the readily divisible species — had. . dissolved . He wore no wristwatch, no calendar hung in the farm’s kitchen, and the clock on the mantel was only intermittently wound. There was no wireless, while his weekly bike expeditions into Market Rasen — where he took communion from the vicar of St Thomas’s, a man acquainted with the Reverend Dick, who evinced. .Читать дальше