Will Self - Shark

wobbling in mid-air. Anointed she is, my Sheba . . her perfume mingles headily with the sweet reek of dung. The great heat of the day is subsiding, the earth giving it off in shuddery gasps . . Annette wears a sensible-enough frock, over the knee, with a collar and some sort of embroidery down the front . . it’s her breasts he’s overpoweringly aware of as he gestures at the moon, saying, They should put a big bit of blackout over that if they really want to stop the Luftwaff e finding their targets. His legs go all dithery as he awaits her response. Honestly, she says, that man Feydeau is a complete ass. . Her shoulders are high and mighty , her thick auburn hair, unset, lies loose and tousled on her neck. She has an ironstone stuck in her throat, and every time she speaks it resonates with an adenoidal whine that for Kins lends everything she has to say an irresistible authority . . told us a faintly indecent anecdote. Said he’d met some chap on a London bus, chap says to Feydeau: No civilisation can be secure that wastes its sewage as ours does. Feydeau says to chap: Pray give me an example. Chap continues: The Chinese were a civilisation thousands of years before we were, and they’ll remain one when we’ve blown ourselves to pieces because they return all their. . excrement to the land! — As Annette’s great heat . . subsides, she gives off. . shuddery gasps . Kins starts muttering how Brockleby says there are increased yields to be gained from concerted manuring. . then takes two steps forward, grasps the back of her head and spreads his mouth over hers. — The meals at the farm are simple, although ample and served with plenty of ale and cider. The girls have no interest in camouflaging dishes with suet or pastry, instead bowls piled with steaming swede, potatoes and mangel-wurzels are set before them, gilded with their pooled butter ration. When he looks from mouth to mouth around the long refectory table, Kins thinks, Yes, this is a re-creation of a village community such as there was in the middle ages. . He misses the heavy chocolate cake of his parents’ cook, Doris, and her beetling beef, roasted into a carapace of its own juice — but his bowels move easily. . and with terrific regularity . Her belly seethes against his and in the alarming tumult of lips, teeth and tongue, for a second or so it seems to Kins. . she yields! — South, towards Bardney and Woodall Spa, the soil is richer and the land. . rolls — not on the surface. . deep below . The fields open out and out. In some places they’re half a mile wide and interspersed by dense copses of lime, beech and elm. . stately Queen Marys, each a world entire . Walking here, distractedly fleeing the earnestness of the farm, Kins stumbled upon the bones of a Cistercian abbey, the vertebrae of its pillars scattered across a pasture snarled by vetch and cow parsley, spattered with dung. Flies and midges revolved giddily above the dolloped cowpats, the waywardness of one only emphasising the tight conformity of the rest. He happened there upon a bull in the act of mounting a cow, its earnestness was. . comical and tragic . Kins looked once upon the preposterous extent of its penis — then turned away from its bemused and foam-flecked muzzle. — There was no wireless at the farm, no electricity or water from the main either. The buildings were dilapidated, which was why Brockleby and Feydeau had been able to buy the property for a few thou’. When a refugee from the wider world arrived, fresh from the ordeal of his tribunal, he might talk nervily for a day or two about the capitulation of the Netherlands, or the encirclement of the BEF, but soon enough he’d be caught up in workaday farm life, succumb to its Lilliputian captivity, and so fall silent. Kins was responsible for the wall newspaper, which he put up conscientiously every other day. Modelled on the De’Ath Watch, Collow Laffs featured reports of eggceptional layers, with whimsical pen-portraits of individual hens. There were testy editorials on the wilfulness of Lincolnshire shorthorns — more emollient ones celebrated the epochal progress of the first farm-bred heifers into Brockleby’s precious Friesian herd. Kins tried to give his paper plenty of pep — also intellectual depth: he glossed Mandeville when reporting the bee hives’ harvesting, and quoted Ovid in his analysis of silage-making. He commissioned Valerie to illustrate this article, and she produced a vigorous gouache on a bit of old Lincrusta depicting Work Group No. 1 loading up the great galleon of a haywain, with Kins himself — somewhat implausibly — directing their labour from the high poop of its thatching. Collow Laff s was popular with the Community Land Association trainees, whose numbers had swelled to near twenty by midsummer. Brockleby offered them all the same terms: bed, board and thirteen shillings a week. There will be sweat and tears, he told them, but no blood unless you’re daft enough to fall into the threshing machine. — There weren’t meant to be any bosses as such, yet he still divided them into two working groups: one under Ted Cornwallis, a pugnacious communist and former docker from South Shields, the other answerable to Tiny Procter, a giant and seraphic Quaker. Procter had lost all the toes on his left foot when he was wounded at Passchendaele while serving with the ambulance service. This gave him a precipitate gait: always lurching forwards, saved from falling flat on his rubicund face, Kins hypothesised, only by his irrepressible good humour. The socialistic gravitated to Cornwallis, who stirred them up. War, he sing-songed, is the in-ev-i-table condition of capitalistic pro-duction, laddies. We moost de-velop new modes of mech-a-nis-ation. The Brockhouse trac-tor is only the beginning — the old Imperial master’s belly woon’t continue t’be swollen by cheap food imports after this war has ended, and it’s co-mu-no-ties such as these that’ll take up and radicalise the great armies of the unemployed! — A rivalry quickly developed between the two groups — at first good-humoured, then predictably earnest, and eventually verging on hostile. — Each day the trainees toiled in their work groups, and each evening, after their vegetable supper, they separated again to form their own colloquies, each one gathered in the halo of an oil lamp. Kins hung back, looking from face to face, from lips pursed at the ends of hand-rolled cigarettes to teeth clenched on pipe stems. He sidled away from the refectory table into the dark passage, where he stood, muscles stretching and twanging, fingers twining in the soft hush of spider webs, nostrils prickling as he inhaled the old must-makings of beetles and mice. In the back parlour, under a photogravure of Sanssouci. . how could it’ve ended up here? . . Tiny Procter’s Mennonites in Morris chairs recited their own catechism. For the Quaker, as much as for the communist, agricultural self-sufficiency was merely a means — for him the end was emancipation from interest: Usssury, Procter’s boiling face gently hissed, is an unparalleled evil, one that you, my children, will live to see torn up from the land, root and branch. . He spoke as if they were. . seed already sown : the printer, the glazier, the boiler-house-keeper and the four wayward students — Kins pictured them planted waist-deep in what was at best marginal land, the soil claggy and richest in . . stones . . 250 acres of arable, sixty more of grassland. Kins understood the practicalities, knew from the accounts the farm was only. . a touch on the right side : 105 tons of potatoes, 150 of sugar beastly , 2½ of dried peas, 12 of wheat, 9 of oats, 6 of barley, 300-odd lambs — and of course Brockleby’s beloved Friesians, whose lush udders the singing farmer — as he was known throughout the north of the county — would suck upon. .Читать дальше