Will Self - Shark

Rose-moles all in stipple . . the Deacon recites when he’s pissed — does ’e mean this? this lumpy, blotchy leg with the shadows from the shimmering leaves shimmying over it? Jeanie fiddles an evil splinter from the side of the hut that’s Mumsie’s club. An express train explodes into the cutting at the top of the field, and, although deep down inside London, she sees this: the shock wave bellying out in front of the engine, shattering the haze drowsing above the hot rails. — A ring of taunting teeth and tongues surrounded her at school: Stupid Jeanie’s got no brai-ns, Soon she didn’t ’ave no vei-ns! — She longed to shout at them, Juss coz I’m a bit deaf it don’t mean I’m a spazz! She longed to tell them that sometimes she could see sounds: bass browns and trumpeting purples, screeching pinks and the high-pitched fluting the sunlight made right before Mumsie’s fist exploded in her head. Jeanie sets one of the feed buckets upside down on the ground — a featherless chick lies there, its dead body smeared with yolk. Through the dusky pane Big Chief I-Spy sees an old gate-leg table, a rotten canvas deckchair, a small bookcase cluttered with jars and tobacco tins — but no sign of Herman. . or ’is ’ermits . Losing her footing on the bucket, Jeanie’s shoulder strikes the windowframe and it cracks! open. . ’ Ave no vei-ns, ’ave no vei-ns , the crows carp in the sky above London. The rough planks fetch her a graze, the latch ssscrapes her tummy — but she’s in, tumbling head over heels on to a steamer trunk that, once opened, blows mouldy old doughhhh . . up her nose. It’s full of magazines: Club and Playboy and Mayfair (incorporating King). The girl on the cover of Mayfair kneels on a sandy beach wearing only blue gingham check bikini bottoms, her straggly blonde hair whips her honey-skinned shoulders — her face is turned away from what her hands are doing: her metallic-green-varnished nails. . grip ’er tits . Jeanie’s nails, each with its dark crescent of dried blood, work their way gingerly over her scabby calf, then begin to pick, Aaaah . . — Shoved in between the magazines there’s a thick paperback — with her free hand Jeanie eases it out: 42 Inches Plus is written on the cover. She riffles the pages — tits balloon and shrink, balloon and shrink again. The glamour models’ expressions are squiffy masks of lippy an’ mascara . . the riffling stops, and she picks out dirty bunk-ups . . from the uneven type: wet-pussy, stiff-cock, firm-arse . . On the opposite page Mumsie stares at her with furious intent — she’s nakeder than all the rest, her boobs saggy balloons left over from the party . Jeanie examines Mumsie’s skin inch by inch — she knows it as well as she does the immediate vicinity of the cottage: the overgrown garden with its dense and woody hedges, the hamlet of Dudswell, the canal and its towpath, the scraggy fields between this and the main road — the more kempt ones spreading up the hill to the woodland that stretches all the way to Little Gaddesden. She thinks of the bracken-choked hollows up on the common — and she looks at Mumsie’s parted thighs, and she says aloud, I done all right, though. . — She had to begin with at least: she got a saucer and poured the silvermilky lotion into it — she took up the paintbrush Mumsie used for Hughie. Jeanie’s model stood on the stool in the bay window and Jeanie began to paint her into lifelikeness with broad strokes across her squishy tummy. There, Mumsie said, and Jeanie twirled the brush into her armpits. Go on, girl, she commanded, slap it on! and Jeanie did, painting greaves on to her mother’s shins like the ones the Addressograph workers had when they dressed up as knights for Hemel Carnival. You have an eye, Jeanie Gruber, is what Miss Philbeach at school says — but that was. . my undoing . Because her faithful eye coaxed her steady hand on into fashioning straps and buckles out of the Melathion lotion. The camphor-and-creosote fumes sucked the tears out of that eye, while Mumsie, temporarily soothed, hummed: If I were a rich cow, z-zz-za’, zuzza-zzuzza-zzer. . so soothing Jeanie, who used up the broad skin canvas of Mumsie’s back tracing the long and curving feathers of a pair of angelic wings, incorporating into them the scattering of rose-moles all in stipple . . between Mumsie’s shoulder blades. . All day long I’d mooey-mooey-moo, if I was a weal-thy cow —. She stopped, and her diabolical face loomed over her shoulder: What THE FUCK! — She kicked Jeanie and the stool away, strode to the mirror by the front door, turned her back to it, twisted round. — When she does the washing-up, Mumsie unscrews all the rings on the fingers of her right hand. Me knucks, she quips — and it was these that flattened Jeanie’s nose, ripped her cheek and slammed her head back so hard that hitting the wall a bloody mushroom cloud blew up me brain . . — Jeanie closes the paperback and shoves it down inside the trunk. There’s a bottle of linseed oil on the wonky gate-leg table and a tobacco tin brimming with the maggoty butts of Mister Jarvis’s roll-ups — tea mug rings hula-hoop across the parched veneer, and in the cluttery corners of the hut spades and mattocks conspire. Snap! a stick snaps right outside — I’m gonna die like Lesley Ann! She knows all about it — the graves and the tape recordings and the blondie with the perm. . coz the tipsy grown-ups whisper in shouts . — Jeanie sees herself tucked up in the steamer trunk with the big-boobied dolly birds — Mister Jarvis wheels it along Tring Station’s platform on a trolley, City gents ignore him, their newspapers held open in front of their folded faces. Mister Jarvis has always been friendly — taking Jeanie on his rounds when he fills the feed bins, tightening fences with a mole grip and setting traps for foxes. Mister Jarvis wears a bottle-green tweed suit in all weathers and a darker green porkpie hat — he saddle-soaps his leather gaiters, and, if Jeanie sees him first thing in the morning, his boots are freshly shined. If a man works on the land, he says, it don’t mean the land ’as t’be on ’im. When he sees Mumsie he raises his hat and says, Good day, Missus Gruber, like he means it — not like Eddie the milkman, who comes into the cottage with the gold and the red top, the orange juice concentrate and the dinners inna can , and sits there smoking, using his peaked cap as an ashtray while he sips his tea and his eyes give Mumsie a grope before ’aving a fiddle with Debbie, which is bonkers coz she ain’t got her periods yet an’ ’er tits’re like two gnat bites onna ironing board . One morning, when milk float and post van coincided on the bridge, Jeanie heard this exchange between Eddie and Mister Fitch, the postman — who looked like butter wouldn’t melt . . what with his Milky Bar Kid hair and his Harry Worth glasses : ’Ad a crack at ’er yet, the Gruber slag? Mister Fitch said. You oughta, she’s gagging for it — shagged ’er old man so hard ’e ended up in Broadmoor. . In Broadmoor . — Jeanie goes headfirst through the hut’s window, grazing her grazes — soon enough her tormented wails will spool from reel to reel of the Grundig, and Miss Philbeach, pushing the button to kill her off, will say, Now, children, that’s what happens to naughties like Jeanie Gruber who run away to London. . The blood-drenched streets of which she pelts along. . the brambles arching over Oxford Street tearing her hair. . the bracken in Tottenham Court Road slapping at her bare thighs with its pervy fronds . . She bashes through the rhododendron bush on the far side of Trafalgar Square and explodes into the wheat field. — Ssssh! she warns Hughie, who’s making mud bricks in the back garden with a flowerpot mould. Ssssh! she says again — but his pea-green eyes only widen a bit, as, naked in his silvery ssscabies lotion suit, he piddles water from the rosette of the watering can. Jeanie secretly squirrels under the windows, rising up once to I-Spy at Mumsie, who’s also naked, sitting in the Chesterfield, a bottle of Crabbie’s within reach and in front of her on the biggest nesting table a pile of newspapers together with this week’s copy of New Society:Читать дальше