Will Self - Shark

tread in the runny shit of lurid reflections. Better in . . with the butter biscuits spilling from tartan tins to scatter across tartan blankets, better in . . with wax fruit and mince pies frosted with icing sugar, better in . . with an extravagantly embroidered stocking hung from a fireplace with a fire eff ect, better in . . among elaborately wrapped boxes full of fuck-all , but still: better in . . with side plates and matching cutlery, and electric candles with a dummy child poised waiting to blow them out — in! to a life she’s not only never known, but can scarcely imagine. Genie wonders if she could eat the giant baubles, eat the shoppers, eat the fancy department stores and all their stock. — The hunger she’s kept at bay with smack and coke and methadone and speed and booze is gnawing away at her. . from inside , its snout tucked under her ribcage, its sickle-shaped jaws wide open, its many rows of angular teeth sawing away at her broken heart, her filthy lungs, her stupid slow-witted brain . . When she’s staggered through the mazy streets, limped down Wardour Street, turned into Blore Court, climbed the stairs, pushed the tatty baize-covered door, and is finally. . in , Val says: Look what the cunt’s dragged in — and not in a nice way . Genie stands there, swaying, looking at the stinking hypocrite — and remembering the evening she and Mumsie had got back from Greenham Common and Val guffawed, Ban the bomb! What you two need is a cruise missile apiece up your fucking jacksies! In . . Val’s guzzling neck his Adam’s apple rose and fell. . a dirty works pushing in his vodka fix — yet he’d the brass neck to whinily croak: I don’t want no junkies in ’ere, this is a respectable-fucking-house — you’re barred! — Barred, because she served no purpose — although the day after Boxing Day she did: propped up in a straight-backed padded chair, hosed down and made up with a full coat of slap , her skinniness hidden in a red silk Chinese dress with white and yellow chrysanths embroidered on it. . and long sleeves, obviously . Her hair up, with a real chrysanth. . stuck in it , while on the other side of the table the punter sat, his belly pushing apart the vertical stripes of his shirt, the four pockets in his tan suede safari jacket stuff ed with Dunhill fags, Dunhill lighter, wallet. . and extra rubber johnnies in case I’d forgot . Ignoring the waiter — who, although obviously repelled by this very odd couple, was angling towards the ice bucket — the punter took out the bottle of ’poo and topped up Genie’s glass. I don’t know why I do that, he said, straight into the waiter’s furious face, but I always do. — All around them in the restaurant the other diners. . mindless fucking sterotypes , who’d driven their Cavaliers in from Hendon for supper and a show, looked on, secretly delighted by this little shop of horrors , because it gave them a dirty thrill to see the fat old lecher and his painted whore, right after Christmas as well. . ’ aving it in So-ho-ho! Sitting there, waiting woozily to poke giggles into the punter’s pauses, Genie thought back to the Plantation and Mumsie’s pinched and avid face. She wondered what might’ve happened if she’d the bottle to say: No! — That single-syllable shot straight into Mumsie’s mouth, piercing the steel cylinders in which were compressed all the carbon dioxide from all the scotch and sodas and vodka and tonics she’d ever drunk. . and, BOOM! a righteous explosion: Mumsie’s brains dripping from the leaves of the money plant Val gloats over, Mumsie’s false teeth pinging into the bottles of Merrydown and Harp on the shelves behind the bar, Mumsie’s blood staining the Christmas cards, colouring in the cartoon one showing Santa, trousers round his ankles, dumping a steaming plum pudding. No! — She hadn’t got that bottle, only the champagne one, and another — then the crappy hotel in Bayswater, where he’d taken a room not much bigger than the double bed, a bed ’ollowed out by the pneumatic hammering of. . soft cocks into dry cunts . A hot room, where she’d spent the next three hours, at first with her dress raised up round her waist, as — watching himself intently in the mirror — the punter ever so gently stroked the most sensitive parts of her: the soft flesh-swell where her buttocks flowed into her thighs. A-ha, the punter said judiciously, and, No-ho, when she tried to move his hand somewhere more obvious, or get her own on his cock so she could finish ’im off . Take your panties off and sit there, the punter said, and because he had the face of a nasty tomcat — all stringy whiskers and snaggly teeth — she did as he instructed, sitting on the cane-bottomed chair until he told her, Enough. She passed the remainder of her sentence with him purring as he traced the raised pattern of welts — breaking off occasionally to take another pawful of salted peanuts from the big bag he’d bought in Soho. Black pussy, white pussy, pink pussy, blue, The name of the game is Little Boy Blue . . Nyum-nyum, he nibbled, his salted breath stinging her. Now I’d like, he said, to put my mouth where my money is. . Genie held the dress tightly bunched. Her belly was full of potatoes dauphinoise and steak. . well done — she’d managed to button her Trevia skirt over her puppy fat, but it was so tight it’s given me a second insie . — Genie’s in the poxy back bedroom of the poxy little two-up, two-down they’d moved into in town. Skinhead Moonstomp jitters from the Dansette Debbie abandoned when she fled to teacher-training college, and Genie fluffs up her feather-cut in the mirror, her tummy. . sucked in . No need for all those extra rooms now that Miss Hoity-Toity’s buggered off, Mumsie had said. The Chesterfield wing armchair had come with them to Berkhamsted. While the removal men in their parcel-paper coats were loading up the van, it stood on the verge outside the cottage — its legs looked scrawny , its old-gold upholstery — the backdrop for so many brightly painted visions — filthy, it shoulda scuttled sideways into the canal for shame . . Mumsie’ll be sitting on it right now . . downstairs in the front room. . what’s ’ad nuffink done to it since they arrived. There’s a flamenco dancer bunching up her skirts on the Artex wall, a pair of castanets dangling from a nail hammered into the one opposite. Hughie, Genie knows, will be lying on the floor, his hooky nose and tumbling brown curls cameoed by the double loops of his Matchbox Superfast track, around which shoots a metallic-purple toy car. Shot by the Superbeschleuniger, it loop-the-loops, click-clacks through the Superfast Doppel-Rundenzähler, leaps over the Sprung durch den Feuerreifen, then skitters across the raspberry-ripple lino before crashing into the bare tootsies of she , who, as she’d helped him to slot it together on Christmas Day, taught Hughie these German words purely in order to show off that she really can speak the lingo . Heil Hitler! Genie cries, standing on the third step up — she’s one hand raised and two fingers of the other on her top lip. She smells of acetone and Bacardi. Mumsie lifts her sleek head from her magazine and examines her through rings of bright water . You look like a tart, she says approvingly. — At Ashlyns, where Genie’s sunk deep in the U-stream with the cockney kids from the Percy Bilton Estate, she sits cramped up . . as Mister Watts draws his snake on the board. In less than a year, he says, you’ll be leaving this school — and you ignoramuses remain utterly incapable of reciting your times tables. Genie knows he’s saying this because she reads the shapes his lips make — but she can’t hear him, only the dull hubbub of chair-scrape and the snot bubbling in seventy nostrils. She’d had the operations when she was little, and endured for years theirЧитать дальше