Will Self - Shark

at least some sympathy — became less frequent as the summer wore on, before ceasing entirely. Kins wrote no letters of his own — he’d given his address only to his people, and so received tersely loving postcards from Bumbly in response to his own tersely loving ones. There seemed to be an unstated agreement between all four De’Aths that, as their consciences took them in different directions, so it was better for all concerned if. . we became heirs of the righteousness that comes by faith . Saving that there is faith no more — not for Kins. Brockleby, whose beloved Friesians jostle and fart in the byre, has a faith that rises up strong from the furrows. Shortly after Kins’s arrival. . the singing-bloody-farmer , in old-fashioned high gaiters, corduroy breeches and a mismatched double-breasted jacket, took him out to the Glebe field, together with Jack Clarke and Bill Smedley, the latter having cycled all the way there from Coventry wearing his window cleaner’s overalls. That’s faith! Brockleby hosannaed when Bill turned up — and, as they all squatted down to goggle at the furrows, he intoned, This is white gold, my soulful boys. . The trio followed his fanatic eyes along the row of little plants groping into the grey May daylight. Looking from the farmer’s breeches to the corduroy field . . Kins had realised that the beets interested him. . not a bit . These clutches of tiny leaves on spiky stalks might as well’ve been. . docks, lettuces or ruddy opium so far as he was concerned. Our role, Brockleby preached on, as pacifists in a time of war such as this, is to plant the seed of a new civilisation within the barbarism of a world hell-bent on destruction. These. . these are the seedlings of that civilisation, my soulful boys — and when we take our hoes like this — he delved down as his cigarette holder stuck up, and Kins thought that for a pious man Brockleby relied rather a lot on. . these Craven “A” crutches — we remove the weeds choking the little saviours. The men who work the land hereabouts will tell you there’s na frim folk as can manage singling, it’s too arrud t’make it natty, but I tell you, my soulful boys, we’ll make proper clod-hoppers of you all, for, when you untangle these seedlings here. . gently does it. . and when you pluck out the weak ones and leave only the single strong shoot. . thus, you’re making it possible for the one true God to grow with vigour in your hearts, same as the one true beet grows in the earth. — Jack Clarke singled well enough, Bill Smedley better still, but Kins, who’d to coil himself down to the ground, found the work back-breaking. . and soul destroying . He wished the beastly beets would fly at him at a decent height, and he were equipped with a fives glove instead of this. . bally hoe! — May handed off to June, June held fast to July. Kins’s hands blistered and burst — his neck burnt and he walked with a permanent stoop, as. . With what rapture, With what rapture, With what bally rapture, Gaze we on those glorious scars . . The attic room he shared with Jack stank of his cheesy feet , and the thin mattress on the iron cot was stuffed with horsehair, so draught animal that I am, I sleep on others of my kind . He poured the tepid water from the earthenware ewer over his aching, crusty head and it dribbled down into the earthenware bowl. A corn dolly had been nailed high up on the wall, and when Kins touched it, it crumbled to. . chaff . — Had this been days or weeks before? Kins cannot decide — any more than he comprehends how they all manage to regard the aircraft roaring up from the aerodrome at Goltho with such studied indifference. . the thunderbolts of a Babylonian marduk we worship not . Instead, every evening the gramophone is wound for recitals, and there’s Evelyn Dall, or Flanagan and Allen, or Myra Hess playing Jesu, joy of man’s desiring to the conchies, together with one or two clod-hoppers who creep in to sit, transfixed as much by the oddity of their fellow listeners. . in our grass-stained cricketing pullovers and torn Oxford bags . . as by the music’s wistfulness. As he cranked the handle, then watched the shellac sheening go round annaround , Kins meditated on this: a small dog with its ear cocked tumbling over a horn. . the only Victor I’ll ever be . — Each interminable and hurting summer day was somehow succeeded by another, and, as the sun’s swords were beaten into ploughshares , so Kins’s faith — forged during the long walks up on to the downs, matins plainsinging back into evensong — melted away. In its place a white-hot lust boiled through his veins. He tried thinking of the altar boys wafting their censers — he tried to hear the choristers, their reedy calls and the school chaplain’s honked responses. To Kins, surrounded by Brockleby and his Fenland ilk, the College’s devotions appeared higher and higher . . and he tried to fix upon that higher purpose — but the smells assailing him emanated from Annette’s berry-brown skin, and the bells he heard were his ears ringing as he strained for the slightest note of approval in her monotone. — This, though she was a spirited enough girl, dismissed within weeks of the declaration for speaking openly of her objections to her class in Bromsgrove. Given Annette had been an ILP member since ’36 and was also an organiser for the Teachers’ Anti-War Movement, Kins assumed she’d take a shine to Jack — he certainly did to her. After all, he was closer to being a proper proletarian, and spoke without a smidgen of the ironical about the inevitable production of warfare by the capitalistic system . But they jawed so over doctrinal matters — Kins thought of shop stewards. . speechifying on the head of a Woolworth’s pin . Besides, while Jack was handsome enough — with his long, lean form and head of jet-black hair — Kins had his suspicions: for all her mucking in and talk of equality, Annette remained an alderman’s daughter. She’d told Kins — with a pride he’d have found. . laughable in anyone else — that her father was a stalwart Rotarian who owned the largest sanitary-ware manufactory in the Midlands. No doubt he also had. . all the wholesale prejudices this implied . — When the farmhouse door opens and she comes out, Kins assumes her aim is to finish off what the old fraud Feydeau has started . . and castigate him for being a public school and Oxford man, circumstances that. . are patently beyond my control . She pauses on the doorstep, straightening her shoulders, tugging down first the one then the other sleeve of her dress, taking time, Kins thinks, to gain her night sight — then she comes towards him calling softly, Kins? Kins? Before she arrives he smells her perfume — a real one she must’ve put on after her bath. He knows she’s bathed today, because this is a twice-weekly ritual the three young women at Collow Abbey Farm undertake together, in the smaller of the two milking parlours, with a great deal of public fetching and carrying of just-boiled water, the aim being to give the men ample warning, so they’ll retreat to the home field for footer, or to the millpond for a dip. Annette, Valerie and Ida do their laundry together as well, then carry their moist things to the very end of the orchard to be pegged out to dry. One day Kins came on Ida unexpectedly there, and they stared at each other with the shocked recognition. . of minds encountering bodies . She’s a small girl who wears thick spectacles and has a voluptuous figure. Between them were dresses, blouses and smalls hanging from a washing line — as she grabbed brassieres and bloomers, hugging them defensively to her chest, he was sure they both saw the same mirage: the bare breasts, exposed haunches and naked buttocks these scraps should clothe. .Читать дальше