Will Self - Shark

don’t ’alf mouth some dumb clichés . You take my situation, he continues. You’re a crim’ so basically there’s no law to protect you — thass obvious. Then, in the course of doin’ a bit of work, you ’appens to waste a copper. Well, now the law wants to fucking crucify you. . He talks in clichés, Genie thinks. . an’ iss always about ’imself . Next up, to cap it all, you got the sheer-bloody-balls to leg it from the cells just before your case is up. Hey, sinner-man, where you gonna run to now? The chaps? I don’t-fucking-think-so — they’ll grass you up quicker than they can wipe their hairy arses. He carefully shrugs off his coat, which is shaggy. . some sorta synfetic fur . He must, Genie thinks, be mad if he thinks it’s a disguise. . ’ e’d stand out a mile from the Paddies along the ’igh Road . Under the coat David wears a lilac blouse with ruffles down the front. . but no fake boobs — an’ ’e’s whippet-thin . Give us the works, willya, he says, and Genie rouses herself to tong . . the syringe lying beside. . my setting with her thumb and forefinger. — She remembers a handful of shifts she did waiting at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. When Genie went into the storeroom to try on the itsy-bitsy black nylon dress with its white cotton cunt-rag . . of an apron, the dago maître d’ followed her. . and tonged my arse . She knew his bullshit about his invalid wife was exactly that . . and he knew hers about being silver service was. . same again . The onion sacks were rough and hard and knobbly. . I’m always at the parties in kitchens , she thinks aloud — and David says, You what? and Genie says, Nuffink, juss finkin about standing on me own two feet. David holds the syringe — a third, glossier one — between his Revlon lips as he unbuttons the blouse’s ruffled cuff. Genie says, You’re not really gonna hit that up, are you? I might have hep’ or all sorts. . inna paper bag from the nooky shop . . Pontefract cakes . . the free-decker biggie an’ the aniseedy one wiv the little sugar balls . . Genie may be stoned, but David’s strong resemblance to. . someone famous has been bothering her. Now he’s expertly twisted the handbag’s strap around his. . stained-glass arm, and probed with the needle in the pit of his elbow, she gets it: the blond page-boy wig, the floppy-brimmed felt hat, the pink-framed and bug-eye green shades. . it’s Brian Jones! Because David isn’t trying to look like a woman — ’ e’s trying to look like a man trying to look like a woman . . Genie puzzles over this confusion as David pushes in the plunger. . all that claret mysteriously robbing his face of its remaining colour. He’s pretty enough for a bird . . with his refined nose and flirty lashes. . He’s outrageous, he screams and he bawls . . let yerself go-o-wo! — She was Jeanie until 1972, then she began to write GENIE with diff erent-coloured felt-tips. Next she doodled her way round GENIE, turning it into a flower’s stamen. . with daggers for petals —. Oof! he says, withdrawing the needle, and immediately ducks to suck the thick black streamer of blood. Genie says to the dimpled crown of his hat: What about the other geezer, whassisface — Waldorf? Then curses herself You fucking mong! for such lairiness, because of all the heavy blokes who score off her, David is indisputably the heaviest — heavier than the ex-SAS nutter who came with them on the Lebanon run, heavier than the South African gingernut pimps who sold her in Cambridge. Heavier than the Dilly-boy thugs Trouget brings into Mumsie’s club — rough trade, Mumsie says, the painter pays to. . beat the shit out of him . David shows his heaviness by walking into Genie’s top room an’ pullin’ me paintings off the walls . Genie thinks this is a worse violation than anything he could do to her physically — anyway, David’s probably queer. . like Trouget . . and if he were to fuck her it’d probably only be. . for the hell of it , or else he’d go all soppy — queers did when they did it with a woman. She pictures David opening the passenger door of a metallic-blue beach buggy plastered with daisy decals for her. She pictures him driving her away along a Kilburn High Road. . gone tropical , with white sand banked up against the scuzzy shop windows and palm trees bursting through the flobbed-upon pavements. Genie’s wearing a travelling outfit from Sindy’s Bazaar: a pink party dress with a twist flare, white lace edgings, bow-tie loop belt and matching Alice band. . and underneath a blue nylon petticoat edged in more white lace with pink flowers. . and deeper down matching blue-and-white nylon lace bra and panties. . and deeper still David’s. . matching pearly-whites ready to bite ’em off . . Genie sees the hole smashed in the abandoned fishing boat’s hull, sees her own severed head wobble into view, its dead eyes staring stupidly back at her, its slag’s mouth open and the words felt-tip-doodling out: When Genie comes around and sings a happy song of summ-errr . . The money Barry gave her for the smuggling trip is long gone. . all twenty grand of it — mostly straight up me sleeve , and the two keys of hash she nicked are gone as well. All she’s left to show for it are the canvases stacked against the walls of the downstairs room she calls. . my stew-di-o , and the half-squeezed tubes of acrylic paint worming on the bare boards or nesting in balls of stained rags. — Sweat trickles from beneath David’s blond bangs, and Genie thinks, He must have a stash of cash somewhere — he could help me. She needs help, she owes. . every-fucking-body : Bantock, the big Jamaican geezer who lays ounces of gear on her — and Joe Levy who does the same with coke. She’s already borrowed to pay them off. . and the loan sharks are circling . For now they’re only curious — nosing out from the urban murk to see what manner of creature she is. There’s been a petrol bomb through the window — only a small one. . never mind . . and a dead squirrel nailed to the front door. . least it weren’t the moggy . Soon, however. . they’ll smell blood an’ zero in fer it . Genie looks at the gun lying on the table — it has a dull blue-shine barrel and a brown grip that looks like plastic . Life, Genie thinks, is stretched so thin — it doesn’t. . take Allsorts, it ain’t a biggie . . it’s stretched out right around the world, a triple-decker : thin sea, thinner land, thinnest of all. . the sky . It’s a shell, this life, and through the cracks in it the darkness is forever. . leaking . The paraffin heater’s stink catches in her throat — outside, where the pissed-up Paddies ’owl , it’s cold enough, but inside it’s hot, because she lit the heater at dusk when she got up. Between five and seven she served at least fifteen punters — when there was a lull she laid a fire of chair legs and splintered orange boxes in the grate and lit it. The thin dry pieces of wood caught and crackled — kneeling, watching, thinking not of her own childhood but of someone happier’s, she saw a spider leg wiggle through a crack, followed by another, a third, a fourth . . The wee beastie pulled its body laboriously after them, and inky-pinked into incandescence. David puts his hand to his face and sweeps it all off — shades, wig, hat — to reveal slicked-black back and sides, a foundation mask with Revlon lips and mascara eyelids scorched on to it. In an odd little-girly voice he says, I’ve only one life so I prefer to live it as a blonde. . Then in his normal one: What about that fucking slag, Waldorf? Sue says when the filth thought they done him — by which I mean they thought they done me — one of ’em still stuck his piece right between her eyes, like this — he picks up the gun and, with hands upside down and back to front, levels it at the bridge of his refined nose — and screamed, OK, COCKSUCKER! Which is a laugh, really — a complete fucking blast. — Genie’s fingers have sidled of their own accord over to the pack of Bensons and areЧитать дальше