Will Self - Shark

rather ineff ectual . He pushes them bodily down the road, and Michael breaks into a trot, his gas mask banging on at his hip. . put-me-on, put-me-on, put-me-on . . the sharp smack of footsteps on paving goes hollow and the Guinness Clock disappears overhead into a flickering sky. On the long trudge down the stopped escalator, he gradually identifies the young woman in front who’s sinking by the dim fizzle of declining bulbs, her high hips rising, her reddy-auburn hair swishing between her shoulder blades. . Seven we were, and five are gone: five! What are those remaining? Ghosts of the past, with cloud o’ercast, Cloud that is always raining! Put-me-on, put-me-on, put-me-on . At the bottom people are milling about trying to decide. . if Herman has it in for the Northern or the Central Line . Spotting him, Annette elbows her way through and, rather unexpected, this , takes Michael by the hand and leads him down a second stalled escalator. . We’re all for QUAKER CORN FLAKES — they’re MALTED and we find they need less sugar . . She flings back, I know a spot behind the platform guard’s box. . then laughs gaily: I left two old blankets there last week on my way to work, I’ve high hopes they’ll still be there! — They are, and together they spread them out. . Sleeping when it’s raining, And sleeping when it’s fine . . Pavement is my pillow . . and one or two trains do indeed come. . rattling by . Annette, seeing a few bona fide passengers who look frightfully put out as they pick their way between the supine bodies, says, There’s really no point — if it’s a big raid they’ll stop the train at Mornington Crescent, which isn’t nearly so deep down. Then she lies straight out in their private nook, her head against the curve of the tiles, her hair fanned out on the yellow blanket, her stockinged feet aligned with its satin hem. She smoothes her skirt with both palms and laces her fingers beneath her breasts. You may as well settle down, she says, we could well be here all night. . But Michael can’t — he keeps craning round the guard’s box to see what his fellow tramps are up to. At first they’re strung out along the platform in a disordered mass, though soon enough they begin organising themselves into. . a community . Pitches are speedily demarcated with rolled-up macs and beer bottles — pipes are lit and evening papers spread wide to catch the ebb and flow of the electrical current. . A nucleus of enlightened, sane and intelligent men and women who shall keep events in their right perspective . . and Michael muses, Perhaps these are they? A wholly arbitrary group who’ll stump up the stairs at dawn, smelling of soiled linen and soured beer, to find a smoking shattered plain where London once stood, and who’ll have to pick through the rubble, not for survivors — there’ll be no survivors — but solely for the wherewithal to rebuild socie—. They’re almost all Jews, y’know, Annette pipes up, propping herself up on her big elbow. — I’m sorry? — The trogs — that’s what we call them — they’re almost all Jews. They get down at Liverpool Street and find the platforms already full up, so they head west. It’s a sort of exodus, I s’pose. Michael looks at her mouth — it has the precise corners and sharp red flanges of a posting box . He wonders if she’s trying to be witty. But on the contrary. . she’s being pi , and is also rather thrilled by her own proximity to these aliens. — Sirbert says the Jews —. He stops short, not wishing to explain who Sirbert is or what he says. Instead he considers whether she may be expecting him to make love to her. She’s N.B.G. — that’s plain, yet in his experience it’s often the N.B.G. ones who expect you to try, rubbing up against their own tightly belted chastity. . excites them . She doesn’t excite him — however, smoothing his eyes over her sensible fawn skirt, he’s aroused by the idea of. . betrayal — it would jolly well serve Kins right . EDGWARE, HIGH BARNET, MILL HILL EAST — the indicator creaks and the wind from the tunnel-shaped nowhere pushes smut and an excremental smell into the nostrils pressed against the platform. Michael wads his gas-mask bag behind his head and pulls his cap down low on his brow. It seems to him that it’s deep below the detonations rumble on — of no more account than the underground trains he heard rumbling beneath the cinema when Chips’s boys were sobbing their goodbyes. Good idea, Annette says, I’m ’fraid I hardly ever wear a hat. . Michael blanks her — lying prone he’s become a fuselage . . and the tunnel his. . long hollow wing . He pulls back on the stick rather abruptly and forces him, her, the trogs — all of them — to loop-the-loops fastening her brassiere. Give over! Moira cries. You’ll bend ’em. Kins lets his heavy head fall back against the day-bed’s hard padding. His liquefied brains slosh against his eyes, before which her bare back curves. . mailed by the light from yonder window — her breast-plate slides into her lap, and she turns to show him. . her perfections! Careful now, she chides him, don’t paw at me — you’ll rip me knicks, an’ they’re crêpe-de-Chine — not likely to see any more this side of Christmas, not at eight-and-six the yard. Then with holy grace . . she wriggles her bottom from side to side, bends to remove the undergarments from her toes and, sitting upright, carefully folds, then puts them on a portion of empty shelf inside a bookcase, the shattered glass of which lies all about them on the Persian rug. . mingling promiscuously with common window glass. — The few sticks dropped on Bloomsbury were, Kins thinks, only incontinence on the Luftwaffe’s part, hurrying comme d’habitude to relieve themselves in their favourite pissoir : the docks. When he and Moira found themselves separated from the others and clattering along the austere terrace as the bombers grumbled away south, she’d stopped, pulled at her garments, squatted in the gutter. The babbling of her brook was more shocking to him than any explosion. Whassermatter, she’d said, ain’tcher seen no one takin’ a whizz before? Now she rears before him, smelling of boracic, cold cream and Guinness — and subsides to snuggle beside him. The net curtains flick up in the breeze, fingering the underside of the sash. — Exhilarated to a frightening pitch. . we’ll be caught! . . he’d followed her in through the crippled door, along the dirtied passage and into this study, where, by intermittent flashes, he snatched quotes from the blasted books: Sir Peverel from the castle rode out, his puissant steed . . functions in inverse association to the anima or tribal sex-instinct . . heard, yet declined to give any further account of these monstrous occurrences . . I say, Kins says, sitting up, don’tcha think the people’ll be up from the shelter pretty soon? He presses his lips together, mangling out the booze from phrases he hopes sound. . calm and sober . She’s so very close — he daren’t touch her. . lest I explode! Give over, Moira says, there weren’t any lights in the square — an’ that ain’t because they’re so bloomin’ careful, it’s ’cause they’ve all sodded off for the duration — packed their kiddies off to Canada, while they’re all down in the country noshing on snob’s duck. . She folds her arms wantonly behind her head and says, looking at him appraisingly, Arn’tcha gonna do nothing, then? You want I should give your thingummy a rub or sumfing? I’m getting bloody parky — there’s a hell of a draft in ’ere. He shrugs off his sports jacket and enfolds her in it. She giggles: Ooh! that tickles, and he stifles her giggles with his lips, seekingЧитать дальше