Will Self - Shark

not battlefield . . The pious and unworldly young man they saw before them, his tie inexpertly knotted. . was me , and if he seemed too clumsy to handle anything with more materiality than a conscience this was. . no contrivance — because Lord knows I want to move my hands but cannot! They hunger after Annette’s breasts and sides, her hips and thighs. — Suddenly they break to stand, eyeing each other warily, breathing heavily and hearing the snuffling in the stalls. Annette, her face monochrome in the moonlight. . throws me a lifeline by asking, Were you awfully afraid? and Kins. . deflating . . going soft . . hauls himself back to the land. Jack Clarke and another trainee remain in custody — Bill Smedley was packed straight off to join the Nancy Elsies. A blanket of shame has covered Collow Abbey Farm, and. . the baseless fabric remains unrent by full and frank discussion . — Two nights before, tiring of their confabs, bored by their limited selection of gramophone records, the trainees and their mentors had set out on a moth hunt. Kins couldn’t remember who’d proposed it — or why they’d all hared heedlessly about the farmhouse and its outbuildings, pulling sheets off beds and gathering together electric torches. Of course we were a bit tiddly — but even so . . Then they marched out together through the recently harvested home field, its stiff hackles scratching their ankles as grasshoppers and mites flew up their trouser legs. It should’ve occurred to someone the row of currant bushes beside the dried-out pond known as Despond was an ill-starred spot — the Graveneys, unsympathisers . . lived a quarter-mile beyond, hunched in their Maginot Line manor house beside the Wragby Road, and armed with one of the few telephones in the district. The torches were implanted in the cracking earth by the bushes’ roots and the sheets were flung on top of them, and the. . great globe was drawn down into these cloudy chambers , over the eerily glowing billows of which inched. . the bamboozled muons and positrons , their antennae twitching, their tattered wings fluttering. They were all there, the CLTA crowd: Brockleby, Cornwallis and Procter — their wives, their older children and their disciples. All fell silent at the eerie sight, and quietly moved to form their own orbit around the pulsing, illuminated bushes — a circle that. . too late! realised it too had been encircled by the. . bloody warmongers! Whose powerful electric lamps. . smashed on! The cosmological model was annihilated , to be replaced by a scrawny boy , his carbuncular neck loose in his battledress, his teeth bared, who stared furiously at Kins over the quivering point of his fixed bayonet. All the Tommies had been racked by nerves — the one confronting Cornwallis actually pricked him. When the enraged ex-docker — temporarily abandoning his own principles — made to give his assailant a clip round the ear, he was immediately surrounded by three more, whose bellicosity was rather compromised by their having to struggle with their rifle bolts. Cornwallis held his hands up, clawed at the air and gave a howl, Kins supplying the line from his archive: He’s remembering the time when he was a wolf and other people and other places never existed. Kins’s Tommy chattered, Wh-What the ’ell ’re you on about, m-mate? And, as with the tribunal, Kins gave him chapter and verse: The Call of the Wild, 1935, starring Clark Gable, Loretta Young and Jack Oakie —. He would’ve continued — since there was laughter on all sides and the tension was draining away — but an officer strode forward at that point and tore the sheets from the bushes. For eternity . . the torch beams pierced the darkness, light tunnels along which the moths whirred as they struggled to reorientate themselves. Then they were smouldering in the stubble and the officer was shouting, What the bloody hell is going on here?! Who the bloody hell are you people? — Later, Kins concluded it was puzzlement rather than the rifles that had made the CLTA party so compliant. How had the Army detachment managed to creep up on them so stealthily. . seems as if I’ve lived out here in this wilderness forever . When they were jolting along in the back of the lorry, it did occur to him that the conchies, having learnt to ignore the airplanes roaring aloft at all hours from RAF Goltho, had probably, quite unconsciously, placed the Army lorries in the same ignorable category. — At Despond, Brockleby took his time coming forward, and when he did he was nonchalantly screwing a Craven “A” into the end of his amber holder. The singing farmer softly serenaded the officer — who looked old enough to be a regular and probably hadn’t much to do in this rural backwater but cultivate his own zeal. That’s all very well, Mister Brockleby, he said. For my own part I don’t doubt you are who you say, but the Station Commander is another matter, he’ll want to know what manner of fools he has on the doorstep of his airfield. . The officer’s voice began to creep up the scale, the anticipation of his superior’s grievance stimulating his own. . a malicious meddling fool, or merely one who thinks it a bit of a lark to show the enemy precisely where we are on the brink of a bloody invasion! — After that Brockleby’s Lincoln-green treacling couldn’t smooth things over: the officer all but frogmarched him to the road, his men chivvying the others along in their wake. The women and children were allowed to return to the farm on foot. When they arrived, they discovered the Tommies had already up-ended the stripped beds and emptied out all the cupboards. Out in the barns — Kins found this comical because it was something they’d seen done in the flicks — they were pitch-forking the loose fodder with their bayonets. A pair of binoculars, two Box Brownies and two shotguns were confiscated. The officer was still in high dudgeon, and when Jack Clarke couldn’t produce any papers he acted. . precisely as any jumped-up little fascist would and held them collectively responsible. As they were being loaded back on to the lorry, Jack kept on at him: For heaven’s sake, Captain Smyth, I’d have to’ve been here since W. G. batted for the MCC in order to acquire my accent — and I’d’ve had to mug up like a bastard to’ve gained my mastery of Wisden. Go on, man, try me out, I can give you any Test match result for the last twenty years, every innings, if that’s what you want. . But Smyth was not to be drawn, so off they went, the lorry with its slitted headlamps purring throatily along the dark lanes. . a big cat, its belly stuffed after happy hunting . In the back, pacifists and warmongers sat jolting. . un-der-neath the ar-ches! but, rather than being allowed to dream his life away, Kins was. . viciously ragged . Seated opposite him was one of the older Tommies, whose chubby cheeks and lumpy nose forced Syd Walker . . from Kins’s deck of cigarette cards. . a hundred stars of British cinema . The Tommy confirmed his own knowledge of this resemblance by removing his bayonet from its scabbard, catching its point in the floppy skirts of Kins’s cricketing pullover and pulling the hem so as to oblige its wearer to lean in to his leering face. I killed the cunt! he spat — and his mates guffawed. It was the first time Kins had ever heard the epithet spoken aloud, and such was his feverish shame he wondered whether it might abracadabra that part of Annette. . a grin without its pussy . . into the thickening atmosphere. Blushing heavily, Kins spluttered, Wh-What the d-devil d’you mean by that? And Syd Walker smashed Kins’s cut-glass with his mockery: W-Wot ve devil do I mean by vat? Well-well, wot ’ave we ’ere, lads — you must fink you’re some sorta dis-cunt vi-cunt swannin’ abaht safe in your cunt-tree funk-hole while us lot bash the square ’til it’s time to get our fucking bollocks shot off! — The pronounced indifference of the other Tommies — who were more taken up with whether they’d get a weekend pass and, if so, which local pubs would be most congenial for a prolonged soaking — stopped Syd Walker from getting any uglier. .Читать дальше