Will Self - Shark

I am the Anti-Fox, a man of sorrows in a time when the Lord has ceased His suffering on my behalf and left me to my own . . At dusk, when the sun threw a half-halo above the horizon that was simply ghastly in its perfection, he found himself passing by the Cistercian abbey’s broken masonry, and there were plump pigeons coming in to roost: streamlined gunmetal bodies rotating as their wings remained absolutely still . But Kins kept on, seeing the half-halo of Syd Walker’s tin hat rising up from behind every hedge, hearing him cry out, I’ll kill you — you cunt! — In the starless night, with the mothering moon bumbling ineff ectually along behind the clouds, Kins blundered into fences, barking his shins, and tore his flesh on rapacious brambles — then at dawn, filthy and bleeding, the familiar racket of some farm dogs — two barking low, one falsetto howling — told him he’d proceeded in a great and useless circle. He lay most of the day on a bed of wood sorrel, God’s broken green typography spreading between the lines of trees in a perfectly square plantation. He slept intermittently, waking often to the ignominy that. . I lack the spunk to throttle a hen pheasant on its nest . And he drank stump water and ate unripe berries, so that dusk found him out being. . spasmodically moved by my bowels . He went on, his soiled thighs chafing, until as night descended he came upon the Witham and was able to follow its manmade banks under a sky. . yellowing to black . He watched closely as the river’s algal bloom consumed everything — earth and sky alike absorbed into its snaking intestine . Before at last, the umpteen-thousandth footfall supplied the necessary pressure, the rude mechanicals did their capering business, and the byss and the abyss swopped places! — After that, he tells Michael, navigation became altogether easier, d’you see? What with the land stretched across the sky and the stars beneath my feet, I’d only to set my course at a consistent tangent to the rising and setting of the moon in order to head south. Kins takes a swig of his scotch and continues: Which I did at a fair old pace for several hours, before dawn spoilt it all by flipping everything right side up — slipping on runny dung he was flung into the drink . Swans closed on him, spitting suspiciously, and when he’d floundered away from their wing-beats he found the cold hard nostrils of a shotgun. . thrust into my nose . — Kins downs the last of his whisky and sets the glass down, clack! He grips Michael’s sleeve: Don’tcha see, Ape, this was my baptism of fire. . my Waterloo! After what’d happened at Louth, I’d been crawling about on my yellow belly for days — but climbing out of that drain, as it were under fire, I regained my self-possession. I said to the fellow, absolutely calmly — Kins comes to attention and takes off John Snagge — I’m in the mobile infantry, don’t you know your own? — But Michael has no knowledge of what happened in Louth. In the corner of the saloon bar a small pugnacious blonde is fending off an unsmiling man sporting a fire-watcher’s arm band. You said you’d take me for spag’ bol’ at Fava’s, she cries, but now I find you’ve not been straight at all! Michael thinks: Kins isn’t being straight with me at all. . Then his sozzled thoughts begin tripping over their own feet: How strange it is that Kins manages to veer in and out of drunkenness without spilling a drop of dialogue. . And how bally typical it is that he doesn’t bother to ask about my own tribul . . tribunalations . . — They leave the Highlander and crawl on past dunes of sandbags. . towards the next oasis of booze . Michael adjures himself severely: It’s less than honest to blame Kins, after all: he never expected me to observe such protocols. — Michael had registered with the local labour exchange in Blackheath. He didn’t want to queer Kins’s pitch, believing the coincidence of conscientious brothers might test the Oxford tribunal’s patience. The chairman of the South London Tribunal had the look of a vegetarian crossword compiler: faint toothbrush moustache, sparse mousy hair, non-existent shoulders and greenish buck teeth. The bronze cross and swords of the Croix de Guerre he wore on his jacket lapel seemed as preposterous to Michael as. . my own ability to identify it as such . The chairman’s small white hands scuttled among the papers he had in front of him. Be a man! he squeaked suddenly. You certainly seem to have the necessary capacity — an air cadet at your public school, and now at the varsity. How the devil d’you square this with such whole-hogging pacifism? Taken aback, Michael blustered, I simply like flying, sir, always have. . The whole business of being up in the air — getting things in the air. When I was younger it was kites and model airplanes, that sort of thing. . He’d tried to adopt an unmartial bearing — he wanted to avert his eyes from the chairman’s, but was worried this might seem. . sly . Standing there on the highly polished floor, he flinched as sunlight exploded against the high windows of the Council Chamber, then his eyes went from the handle of one window to the rods corkscrewing up into the complicated system of ratchets and levers used to open its. . top flaps . The chairman inveighed, D’you imagine His Majesty’s air force exists solely in order for you to go fly a kite at the expense of the British tax payer? — N-no, absolutely not, sir — it’s simply. . in the context of peacetime, I confess, I regarded it as on a par with any other sporting activity, such as. . such as. . golf. — Yaroo! On the town hall steps Michael gave himself an imaginary kick in the pants , then he drove the Fat Owl of the Remove through the teeming Greenwich streets and into the park with imaginary swipes of Quelch’s cane. He was stunned by his own passivity. He’d failed to raise the matter of the speech he’d delivered only months before at the British Peace Assembly — the text of which was actually in the chairman’s paws. Nor had he summoned any of the Bible quotations he’d carefully memorised to confirm his. . whole-hogging piety . He’d also neglected to call his living reference, Teddy Tippett from the CBCO, who, commiserating with him before taking the train back to London Bridge, said: They’re notorious for their carping and bullying, this lot — haven’t to our knowledge granted a single unconditional since their first sitting. Even so, a flat-out non-exemp’ in your case is a bit bloody thick — you’ll appeal, I s’pose? But Michael didn’t say anything — at that moment a ghostly aircraftman cried Contact! and his insides began turning over. — When the chairman had sneered at him: There are lads of your age who’re embarking from Folkestone right this moment to defend you, you blackguard — how does that make you feel? Michael wanted to say: It makes me feel pretty damn unlucky, given were I a couple of weeks younger I wouldn’t’ve received my call-up. . Instead he’d closely observed the sunlight touching the clerk’s whiskers. . dripping solder . — There were navvies smoking through their tea break at the building site on the corner of Roan Street — and further along dockers jostled into the pubs to sling pints down before the hooter went and they’d to scamper back through the foot tunnel to Millwall. The burnt-molasses breeze was blowing from Silvertown as Michael dived into the covered market and encountered a detachment of cadets taking a short cut back to the College. Making his own way up towards the Observatory, Michael chanced upon a. . tea bush terracing of freshly dug slit trenches, some planted with school kids being put through a practice drill. All of it made him think in a confused way of how the coming hostilities would fuse together thousands of perfectly arbitrary decisions — such as the one his tribunal had made — into a mighty ball of leaden bureaucraticЧитать дальше