Will Self - Shark

afterpuff of cotton-wool earmuffs, but her hearing never improved that much . . I’m in mono . . She could listen to one thing at a time: the Dansette, Mumsie’s voice, the jets wobble-boarding overhead — but when Adam had laid her down on his parents’ fitted carpet, with her head carefully positioned between their huge Grundig speakers, she still couldn’t hear Jimi’s wah-wah guitar shoot straight through my ’ead . . which is what he said she should. . experience . It simply buggered off . . then boomeranged back as Adam’s hand squirmed up her skirt and his fingers plucked. . at me knickers . — This she does hear: Thwack! Mister Watts’s steel ruler cracked down on the desk, and then the slaves’ lament, One times el-ev-en is el-ev-en. . This she does feel: his breath tickling her neck — followed by the poisonous Thwack! across the back of her calf — she touches the Superfast welt it made as Mumsie says again: You look like a tart — not that anyone’d want to have a crack at yer. Genie smiles — she know this isn’t true: black sixteen-hole DMs, white thighs, black pleated skirt, white Ben Sherman, black Harrington. . I look the biz . Down the shops on a Saturday afternoon — out round the pubs after dark, sipping from Coke tins and waiting for Billy the greaser to. . top ’em up wiv Bacardi . . At weekends Genie is a Berko boot girl out on the razz , and spazzes who’ve been taking the piss all week — Watch my lips, Jeanie Gruber, You-Are-Shit — shut up when she and her mates swagger by. Genie’s bullies have no real appetite. . for a bit of aggro , they’re wet-knickered bitches . . whose knees go all rubbery as they. . near piss themselves, coz they fink we might be tooled up . — That morning, in the Kardomah, flipping through Jackie, searching for the Marc Bolan pinup. .’ e looks like Hughie — it’d be incest . . Genie had stopped at a cartoon strip: You do not like the thought of war, earth girl, speech-bubbled a hunk called Gemal, his cloak was flung back over his shoulder, his muscly bicep clasped by a leather armlet, yet we delight in it. If you were to be my woman, you would be proud to be loved by such a great Warrior! And Genie thought: I ain’t ever gonna be your woman, you dirty hippy coon — ’sides, I love the thought of war an’ I could take you any time I want! Mumsie lowered her copy of Spare Rib, her expression serious, like it was whenever she’d been teaching. . or raising ’er consciousness . She covered up Gemal and the earth girl with her cup of cappuccino and, taking a spoonful of sugar, trickled it down on to the froth — the white granules hovered on the white foam, then sank through it, creating a brownish gash that instantly resealed. See that, girl, Mumsie said, see all those little pricks tearing themselves a new fanny. . Genie laughed, but Mumsie pursed her lips and said, That’s holy deadlock, that is Jeanie: some sweet-talking prick making a cunt out of you, night and day if they get the chance. That’s what we call sexism nowadays — and that’s what it was like with Gregor, he couldn’t stop pawing at me — this in spite of his mental health problems. . Always Gregor to me but Your Father to the others . Mumsie folded her Spare Rib and tapped the page: See this woman here, she followed a bunch of brasses round the West End, in and out of knocking shops, up and down the back stairs of the Regent Palace. What did she con-clude? I’ll read it you: Men’ll continue to need prostitutes so long as there’s an inhibition on sex, while women will continue to sell their bodies while they’re denied an equal right to financial independence. . So, take my advice, girl, give marriage a wide berth — whoring’s honester. I never took a penny offa Gregor once he’d left us, I got my own. .’ til I was old enough to get it for you . . — Collapsed back on the couch, Genie marvels at this: while so much of her life has. . gone up in smoke , Mumsie’s words exhale through the years, smarting her eyes — then dragging her back into a typical Jackie horoscope she once weepily read: You’ll find it hard to stick with one fella when you could have fun with so many, and you’re tempted to play the field while you’re getting away with it . . She remembers the pathetic pen pals who signed their letters David Cassidy Fan, S.W.A.L.K . . and the chain letters. . that mustn’t be broke , and the nice girls with poodle hair they styled with their Pifco Go-Girl hairdryers . . But Genie hadn’t been a nice girl at all: she didn’t fancy fellas from afar, or moon into the mirror. I so want this job, but I don’t stand a chance with skin like mine . . Because: I never wanted a fucking job . As for her skin, If I could’ve I’d’ve popped my plukes in their complacent faces! Stu-pid Genie’s got no brai-ns, Now she ain’t got no vei-ns . . But back then, in Berko , back then: I ’ad the brains, I was the ring leader of the tormentors . . While the nice girls were nerving themselves to sneak into the rerun of Up the Chastity Belt at the Rex, the Berko boot girls were pelting down the High Street with the landlord of the King’s Arms in fat pursuit, crying, You yobbos! They’d regroup by the phone boxes to drink Double Diamond. . which was all we’d addaway . . fall about laughing and make some calls so that shazzam! the greasers’d be there, revving their bikes, spurting forward, braking, spurting forward again, leather legs bending as they absorbed the shock. — One-Armed Mickey is long gone. . The nail of charred paper detaches from the long finger of ash . . Genie thinks of a picture in the Guinness Book of Records of the longest fingernails in the world spiralling from a mandarin’s hands. Such a world there’d once been! Full up with such super things! Now there were only the cats scratching in their litter tray. . they’ll eat my face if I go over . . and the twigs scratching against the windowpane in the wind, and her left hand. . a mind of its own . . that scratches the place the punter touched, scratches it hard and harder. . the longest fingernails in the world hungry for flesh and blood. She thinks: I pulled my skirt right up and I swung my leg right over, I wish I could’ve stayed on the back of Adam’s bike forever, a Norton Commando Moves like a cat an’ ’e knows how to ride her . . the petrol tank mirror-shiny and — flashing under the streetlamps, folding the road in on itself as he sticks his knee out, cries, Lean! and they heel into the roundabout at the top of the London Road, her bare knee almost touching the tarmac, his hair lashing her face, the pistons hammering up through the saddle, her heart hammering through her Harrington and his leather jacket to meet his hammering heart — the grass and the bushes and the road and the lights and the night. . a smear of fear that she can smell. . powerful as petrol , which she breathes more and more of as they lean more, the big bike thundering round the roundabout. . againannagain its tremendous torque dragging the earth round on its axis, ratcheting up the sun faster and faster . . Allll-rrright, get ready — here we go! Little Boy Blue come blow up your horn, The sheep’s in the meadow and the cows in the corn, Ai-yai-yaaaa! — Until cold, cold dawn comes drum-rolling over that meadow, driving before it the cool breeze that blows the singed curtains through the open window of the council semi at Potten End the greasers have squatted, then trashed. The pitiless day finds them out, kneeling on a mattress in the front room,Читать дальше