Will Self - Shark

here or there — pretty much anywhere that took her fancy, ’cause she was pissed — and, ’though he must’ve been as well, you could never tell with him, ’e ’ad a head for it . He’d pull on his soft leather driving gloves — his knuckles showed white through the holes. . crotchless panties . He drove his sharkish Rover 2000, which smelt of Trebor mints and Windo-fucking-lene , with fanatic care, his traffic-cone nose close to the windscreen, his rounded shoulders. . more rounder , his ape arms. . bent . It’d been. . a flappy-wappy day — which was what they called them. You had to give Mumsie this much: when the mood took her she was a dedicated laundress. Sheets, blouses, pillowcases, knickers. . all spotless . The cottage might be a tip you had to. . Twister through , placing your feet in the small patches left between dirty dishes and drink spillages, but there in the middle of it all would be a hanky pressed, folded and. . crying out for snotty panky . — Kins drove them through the outskirts of Hemel to St Christopher’s, a new comp’ of glass and concrete H-blocks with a bleak playing field across which blew. . the wind from nowhere . In the corner of this, set well apart, was a crap-looking prefab’: the special unit for difficult pupils Mumsie had set up, and which was the first of its kind in the country — a piece of information she took immense pride in shoving at. . all comers . The grown-ups clustered by a chain-link fence with a banner tied to it, and chattered loudly over its. . flappy-wappy . Jeanie and Hughie had been around the unit enough to get over any repulsion — now they found the mongs’ and spazzers’ groans and gurns, their gargoyle faces, fucking hilarious . They liked to be chased. . and we liked chasing ’em — around the ragged goal nets. . the ragged rascals ran . I was jealous, Genie thinks, she loved them kids more than she’s ever loved me. . Mumsie and Kins hung on to sausage rolls while they talked to a tall blonde woman wearing an ethnic dress of many colours. . her astounding clothing took the bis-cuit, Quite the smoothest person in the dis-trict . . ’cause the other parents all looked like their spazzy kids, and this was. . disturbing . Round and around they chased the mongs, zeroing in on the witch’s hat roundabout, which they jumped on and off, making it rock and squeal. . Help! Not just anybod-y! — Someone would’ve rigged up a record player to a crappy tannoy. . they always did that . . and there would’ve been crappy-flappy bunting as well. Woozy and knock-kneed, their heads spinning, Jeanie and Hughie staggered away to skulk by the table where the tombola prizes were set out: Emva Cream Sherry, Quality Streets, a tin of Saxon Car Wax, each on its own little wooden plinth. . like they were a big-fucking-deal . Eventually, bored outta our tiny minds , they took the half-bottle of Gordon’s gin. . an’ did fer at least half of it in the school bogs . The juniper fumes were. . disinfectant cubes plucked from the dribbling urinals and. . rammed up our noses . Hughie began puking right away. . he was only five . Jeanie left him to it and reeled back to the playground equipment — the shand pit, the shee-shaw sheahorsh . . and the climbing frame. . it took some bottle to haul herself up, bar after bar, before she stood right at the top, legs spread. . Olga-fucking Korbut while the mongs gathered below, their eyes wide, their upside-down mouths open. — I should, she thinks, have shouted, Mind yer Ps an’ Qs! because the puke — when it came in rhythmic surges — had been watery except for these carroty bits — What did I ’ave for breakfast? or brekker, as Kins called it. — Sometimes he stayed at the cottage — not in Mumsie’s bedroom, but tucked up in blankets on the sofa — or, if he didn’t make it that far, stretched out in the Chesterfield armchair with a bedspread chucked over his long legs. When the kids were getting ready for school, there he’d be: a canary in candlewick , who’d wake up and be chirpy enough . . as he ducked under the low beams in the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers, stewing tea and burning toast. Once he made Nesquik for her. . wiv five spoonfuls! She sat stirring the sludge and watched, repelled, as he ate toast: buttering a small corner, coating it with Golden Shred, then bringing the little bite-sized sandwich up to ’is rabbity teeth . Of all. . ’ er casual fucks , Kins repelled Jeanie the most: his nervous tic of rubbing his thumbs on his fingers, his voice a flem plum lodged in his throat, his ever-wet lips and always moist eyes, the way he cleared his throat with a Harrumph! The way his shoulders were permanently hunched from talking down to Munchkins , so his head stuck out from this shell . . while he. . munched ’is dandelions — fucking tortoise . As she grew older, and especially after she’d come on , Jeanie’s revulsion only increased. She could see that to others he might be good-looking enough. . for an old man : his nose was straight, his chin firm, his eyes clear-sky-blue — but she saw through to the inside: she knew who Kins really was. . Desperate Dan, desperate for cuddles from Mumsie-wumsie . . and this made him ugly. Over time, her repulsion settled down sootily on. . his skin , its snowy pallor scattered with freckles and reddish moles that, as he slumped despondently in the kitchen, she fixated on through the mesh of his dingy string vests. Genie hated Kins’s skin most of all because it was a puckered carrier bag full of Kins’s wanting flesh — and she hated this wanting flesh because it coddled Kins’s. . yearning ’eart . — Years later, when she’d get back from weeks away — crashing on the floors of squats, or travelling with the Convoy — her own skin browned by dirt and sun, her hair thick with grease, her eyes shattered mirrors and her head all over the shop — in trees an’ flowers an’ both ’alves of a worm , she’d be appalled to find him palely loitering — still there. . still lapping up whatever she dished out . On his wounded face the same soppy expression — the one Jeanie saw as her puke spurted into the mongs’ faces, the one she saw — her bare leg outstretched, her Converse basketball boot arched — just before she tumbled, her head boinging off the bars once, twice, fuck knows how many times . . only that it was a miracle she was still alive when she reached the ground and he came shambling up at a run to disentangle her from the climbing frame’s steel embrace. — Someone is yanking the string that rattles the tin against the window. It’ll be One-Armed Mickey, Genie thinks, because ’e’s more regular than any clockwork . She ought to haul herself up from the old couch, drag herself down the stairs, shoot the bolts, turn the keys and serve ’im up ’is poxy little dollop . She doesn’t move: the memories are within and without now: tapeworms . . curling in one eye and out the other, in one whistling adenoidal ear an’ out the uvver . — It was Kins who took her to the carnival in his sharkish car. That was the summer Mumsie stopped sending her with Gregor and the others to visit Omi Maria in Vienna. She remembers. . traction engines, and some bint got up as Lady Godiva inna flesh-coloured body-stocking . Kins held her hand as the parade passed by: there were floats with people wearing giant papier-mâché animal heads on them, others with dolly birds doing the twist in their swimming costumes. She sees them. .Читать дальше