Will Self - Shark

one flying duck on the wall, two dead on the floor . . Adam’s black fingernails on her white buttons, his brown fingertips on my browner nips , as he lilts, The little beauties, the little beauties . . while her heart hammers fit to bust , because at some point in that wild and beautiful night I’d done some dexies he give me . She sucks in her tummy as he unbuttons her Trevia skirt. . insies go outsie . . Where’s the boy looks after the sheep, he’s under the haystack with Little Bo Peep, Ai-yai-yaaaa! Kins pushes all that’s left of the shattered door — and it swings, admitting him to. . the last-fucking-chance saloon . He’s every inch the chap, in his tweed cap and sheepskin car coat. . coz he’s the boy who looks after Little Bo Peep, an’ he’s shaking an’ he looks like he’s gonna puke, his fat face all white and veiny . . — Out on the churned-up handkerchief of lawn the white Rover’s radiator nuzzled at one of the bikes. . ready to take a bite . In the car, still shaking, Kins had said, Button your blouse — which made her laugh, then choke — as she chokes now, smelling the sickly acridity of her own burning skin — she flaps her hand and the sparks of her fly. . and die — I musta nodded out . . She struggles to stay in it — the Rover rumbling along the lane, Kins praying to the wheel, and her teenage self laughing as she pulls apart her Ben Sherman and thrusts her goose-pimpled breasts against his suede arm. You want ’em, don’tcha? that’s what I said. . You want ’em, don’tcha? Kins’s arm jerked away, the car skidded, rose up the bank, stalled. In the sudden stillness the Rover’s engine ticked, its radiator hissed. . We shoulda fucked and kissed . . maybe . . Instead he groped his own woolly cleavage, pulled out his wallet and from this withdrew a Happy Families card . . Saying nothing, he passed it to her. Before taking it, she buttoned herself up primly — then she looked at smiling Kins in check sports jacket and brown trousers, standing with a boy a couple of years younger than Genie balanced on his big feet, and a boy a year or two younger than him balancing on those smaller feet, and a third, still smaller boy. . stacked on top . The boys wore the same school-uniform-grey Aertex shirts, maroon-striped ties and grey shorts. Big hands on smaller shoulders, smaller hands on littler shoulders. . littler hands on littlest shoulders . The squashed Moroccan leather pouf, the framed watercolour, the piled-up photo-cubes on the sideboard in the background — all these unfamiliar things confirmed for Genie the closeness that hair, eyes and noses all. . screamed . What was it Mumsie had said about Kins? A brilliant man — the biggest waste of brain power I’ve ever seen . What was it Kins did for money? Something that gave him enough free time to fritter his days away chasing round after her. A sociology lecturer , Mumsie had said. . together with some private means . And the wife? A castrating bitch and a harridan — like all wives, always . . He took a small block of wood covered with chammy leather out of the glove box and, beginning with a small circular portion, methodically wiped the whole windscreen. They saw a hawthorn hedge in the mist — there were still some berries on it but these were dead and shrivelled up, while streamers of cassette tape caught in the thorns glittered and gleamed . Kins said in a high, hysterical voice, This. . this is all I have, and Michael says, What the devil d’you mean by that? They’re in Wardour Street, standing staring up at St Anne’s: its charred campanile has been plopped atop a tower so generally beaten about and done in the most plausible explanation is that it was built but lately from the rubble . Kins looks malevolently at a pair of red caps who’ve detained a soldier by the Queen’s stage door and are asking for his pay book. He resumes: I mean all I have now is London — specifically Soho. Michael exclaims, What rot, Ape! You’re beginning to give me the absolute bloody pip. — From the Lyons’ they’d gone to a fleapit on Haymarket, where Goodbye, Mister Chips was showing. His belly full, Kins fell asleep halfway through the first reel, his snores — his brother thought — making a mockery of the flick’s sentiments: for here was the star pupil bored into unconsciousness by Robert Donat’s tear-jerking performance. The cinema was surprisingly full for a matinee, and Kins’s snoring buzzed above canoodling couples’ smacking lips and shuddery breathing. They shushed and tutted — but Michael couldn’t rouse him, and when he dug him in the ribs Kins inexplicably muttered, I killed the count. . Blinking in Piccadilly. . and looking like one . . Kins insisted on a corpse reviver at the Café Royal — so Michael saw more of Sirbert’s sub’ poured out: two parts cognac to one of calvados and another of vermouth. Standing at the bar in his egregious civvies, Kins twined the ticker-tape from the chittering machine through his clumsy fingers and boomed, It’s all balls — war balls and peace balls, love balls and bloody hateful balls. . Michael couldn’t understand why the serving officers — and there were many present — didn’t loft him on top of the bar, hitch a brocade drapery cord round his sunburnt neck. . and bring down the curtain on his performance . . Time was I’d’ve ticked anyone off for such specious reasoning — a diallelus, don’tcha know, that allows ’em to claim that since A caused B, and B led to C, it follows that C must’ve produced A. But y’know, now I see these wallahs’ point: love — love is indeed a product of hate — not a by-product, Ape, but a direct one. We love in order to hate — and so it follows, ceteris paribus, we hate in order to love. Kins. . Michael chided, but he wouldn’t be deflected: I say that the current hostilities are evidence of the same circularity. . Michael looked away from his brother’s flushed face — through the bottom of his raised beer glass he spied out cream-and-gilt cherubs preening in patinated mirrors, and an obvious nancy-boy wearing a cream silk shirt, peach-coloured tie and white corduroy trousers, who he. . raked with fire from nose to stern — always attack on the beam if you can . Kins persevered: We declare war in order to make peace, and no doubt — in the fullness of Mister Roosevelt’s time — we will make war again. . The corpse that’s been revived is not the Kins he’d known — no, idolised — had a pash on quite as bad as Monk minimus did on me . This Kins is pie-eyed, certainly, but beneath his ebullient crust something ugly is fulminating . — Michael says again: The absolute bloody pip! and Kins, sighing, takes him by the arm and leads him around the corner away from the bombed-out church. Has it ever occurred to you, Ape, Kins says, that when you kiss a girl — and I mean a truly ripping girl, one you’ve deep feelings for — that everything, by which I mean every single thing — not just your hopes and your feelings and all that rot, but every thing: your people and their place, your books and your sports togs, your prayer book and your pipe — every thing is inside that girl’s mouth being minutely sensed by hundreds upon thousands of nerve-endings. Your tongue and hers, your lips and hers —. He stops, seeing the consternation on Michael’s face. Does it bother you, Ape, Kins says, my talking like this? — No, not exactly, Ape — Michael lets go of his gas-mask bag, which at all times he finds he’s petting nervously — it’s only that I’m wondering. . what the hell’s come over you! . . where’re we heading to now? — Simmy, whom Michael had teamed up with to swot for their pilot’s exams, got his posting first: a Spitfire squadron in Scotland. This station’s remoteness from the big show was at least compensated for: he’d be flying single-engine fighters, which was what everyone at the OTU yearned to do — the honourable form of combat, knightly and mano-a-mano. There was this, and Michael supposed there’d also be good links courses — and possibly some grouse shooting. Stopping by Hullavington on his way north, Simmy confessed he hadn’t spent his five-day leave with his people on the Sussex coast. .Читать дальше