Will Self - Shark

a nightjar in a Norfolk jacket slithering over the damp grass . . if he could. This is no super-abundance — no revolutionary bread basket. Kins has read The General Theory — he knows much of it by heart. Havering in the dark corridor, a thoughtful moth drawn to neither flame, he sees Cornwallis’s views on employment and Procter’s on interest for what they are: hopelessly naive, and ignorant of the third and prime factor, which is money . . — Kins’s and Annette’s tongues thrash. . round annaround in their coralline cave, scraping against teethy reefs . . He cannot restrain that mutinous part of himself, he’s bemused, his muzzle is. . foam-flecked . After so much in the way of vegetables her meat is strong in his hands. . aitch bone, rump . . As he wrestles with her, Kins pedantically notes. . for the umpteenth time! that were Cornwallis not a pacifist, he’d be delighted to have Bevin’s ukase, since it’d give him all the control over persons and their property. . any revolutionary may desire! — Is it sheer wantonness or bracing for an escape attempt . . Annette has parted her thighs. Fighting for control, Kins thinks of the dismal week he spent in Oxford after receiving his call-up papers. . round annaround I went . — Never at ease on a bike, as he wobbled off each morning over the cobbles in the Broad, he’d to concentrate on every push of the pedals — then wavering down Holywell Street, then teetering along beside Magdalen, then turning on to the High Street, then huffing his way up it to the Turl, along which he wobbled back towards Balliol. — But once he’d completed one circuit he found he couldn’t stop, for the concentration he’d mustered at least muffled the symposium in his head, the rhetorical flights of which were, in essence. . balderdash , for when it came right down to it there was only the one stark question: Should I, or shouldn’t I? So long as Kins kept pedalling, kept going round and round the town. . the arrow remained in flight . The prosperous-looking matrons rolling across his path towards the Cornmarket, the blazered hearties aiming for the river, the dons. . their black wings flapping — if he stopped pedalling and made a decision then, all at once, the vividness, the colour and the motion would be drained from this scene, leaving pen strokes sketchily describing their dropping jaws and widening eyes, their outstretched arms and horrified hands, for before them would be standing, astride his bone-shaker, the preposterous figure of THE MAN WHO SAID HE WOULDN’T FIGHT . So, even as ARP volunteers were painting thick white lines along the kerbstones and up the walls of these ancient halls, Kins kept on pedalling, round annaround . . he kept on cycling. . round annaround . — The tribunal was held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, an oddity for which no explanation was forthcoming, although Kins intuited this was only the beginning. Wartime — for him, at least — would be characterised by such improvised billets: a trestle table covered with moth-eaten baize, on it, propped against a stack of books, a coat of arms borrowed from some council office that. . kept sliding down and rucking up the cloth. . Honi soit qui billiards y pense . As the chairman harrumphed his way through his opening remarks: No definition in the Act of conscientious objector per se. . Convened here rather to assess gradations of sincerity. . A tricky notion, indeed. . — He wafted away into slight mystifications of G. E. Moore, the Naturalistic Fallacy, the reductio implicit in any concept of a belief sincerely held. Kins, standing to attention at an odd little lectern, thought, I can win this trick at least. He’d heard tell of the chairman — a blinking little moley-man who wore a queer moustacheless beard — as a fairly typical supernumerary, loosely attached to Teddy Hall, who’d published a single book on Thomas à Kempis so long ago the saint. . had checked the proofs himself! or so Kins’s informant quipped. The other panellists he wasn’t so sure about. — In the background, display cabinets hulked, their dusty glass obscuring savage clutter: tomahawks and necklaces of cowries, teak masks and bongo-bongo drums fringed with coconut fibre. Closest to Kins sat a lady JP who wore a high-crowned puritanical hat garlanded with a crazy bunch of artificial fruit. Her long powdered chin bathed in its shadow — the glass eyes of the mink tucked up around her bony neck drew the winter day down from the skylight into their cold dead orbs. To concentrate on the chairman’s interminable circumlocutions was an athletic feat: his sentences were so long they curled up and up, then curled still more, arching over in the waxed gloom, until their object was finally united with their subject. . and eaten by it — in its end is its beginning . Moreover, try as he might, Kins couldn’t subdue a strange trompe-l’œil tic: if he looked away for an instant, then back at the lady JP, her head had shrivelled up and been displaced to one of the display cabinets, shelved there beside those of the two remaining tribunal members, a saturnine reservist colonel and a wisp of a parson whose gonflé . . lower lip suggested to Kins acts of unspeakable. . Stiff keyness . He kept his own eyes averted from this horror: the three of them, enraged by being bagged as trophies , so determined to. . enact their own coup . — D’you not think Christ himself would appreciate the justness of this war? It took a while for Kins to realise the lady JP had addressed him, for her tone was surprisingly warm. . Bumbly even . . while her long skinny fingers — fidgeting from dusty beaker to smeared carafe, to the coat of arms which she re-propped — seemed to be acting out an inner conflict. The unbending colonel and the end-of-the-pier parson regarded Kins with expressions indicating they too believed this to be the very crux of the matter, and so: Off I went . . giving chapters — Psalms 29, 32, 34 and 37 — and verses therein — 11, 17, 14 and 37. Quoting: The LORD will give strength unto his people, the LORD will bless his people with peace . . Alternating between the Hebrew prophets — LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us, for thou also hast wrought all our works in us — and the Gospels — Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto to you . . At which juncture Kins swept his eyes over the quorum and tugged the end of an invisible mantiple, as he impressed on his judges the unsaid — but for all that SHOUTED — message: See! See what all these so-called statesmen and their backroom deals have brought down upon our innocent heads! How they cheered Musso and stood by applauding while he poisoned Abyssinia! How they urged on Chamberlain as he beat Beneš to death with his good old um-ber-ella! — The lady JP was looking rather down in the mouth . . still Kins persisted with Romans, Chapter 14, Verses 17 to 19: For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of by men. Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another . . — Not meat and drink . . but tongues and spit, as the fighting continues . . Each seeking the other’s tip so they may. . suck each other, an ouroboros the subject of which eats its own object . . — There’d been a few more questions. It was established that Kins was a regular communicant, and that, while he’d signed the Reverend Dick’s pledge in ’37, he saw this: Very much as a logical adjunct to my faith, not a political statement per se. — Kins could guess at the figure he presented: ruddy-cheeked, his dark hair flattened with water and hair oil, his rather beefy upper body draped in studious and unflashy tweed, its thick material hiding the fine balance and magnificent control he could deploy on court and course. .Читать дальше