Will Self - Shark

Catching up on the week’s news . . she calls what she does every Saturday morning, and. . Seeing what’s what in my field, ’cause I’d be lost in this cultural-fucking-desert without my New Society . . Jeanie pictures Mumsie wandering across her field leaving ssscabies lotion prints on the soft greyish newsprint. Between her fingers her Embassy has mutated into a giant, ember-tipped pencil with which she scorches select phrases or traces classified advertisements with fiery rings. Jeanie doesn’t understand how a field can also be a desert. I’m cut off from the world, Mumsie often moans, yet all she ever talks about with the Deacon and Jeffers, Silly Sybil and especially Kins, is the world beyond the canal: Em-i-ess-ess-i-ess-ess-i-pee-pee-i — They get Jeanie to stand on a chair and spell eye-tee while they fall about laughing — then they get serious, yakkety-yakking about bombs falling on Hanoi, and how disgusting this is, how Mister Wilson oughta do something more about it besides talk, but Jeanie doesn’t see how he could. . the silly old white-haired man . She pictures him sitting on the back of a water buffalo splashing about in a paddy field, trying to knock the falling bombs for six with his giant pipe while slitty-eyed kiddies in silky jim-jams and fruit-basket hats bow and bow again. . We are Si-am-ese, if you ple-ease . After a while the grown-ups put another smoochy old record on and all shuffle about in their socks and stockings. . Fly me to the moon! — which gets them talking about the Yanks again — the terrible Yanks this, the bloody awful Yanks that. The Yanks are dropping the bombs on Hanoi, and the Yanks are shooting nig-nogs in Detroit. — The Yanks, Jeanie thinks, must be the grown-ups’ grown-ups, coz when they’re slagging them off they sound like kids being naughty behind their mumsie’s back. — Jeanie presses her ear against the back door’s warm green paint and grasps the eight-sided doorknob. She knows every rasp the latch makes and her X-ray specs mean she can also see it. . rise an’ fall . In the scullery she touches every third VAT 69 bottle, which makes nine . . This means she should take nine crawl-paces to get to the telephone table, where Mumsie’s fat black leather purse will be lolling on the lip of her open handbag. There’ll be florins and half-crowns and perhaps a ten-shilling note in it, but Jeanie’ll only take ninepence — coz that way Mumsie’ll never notice. . a stitch in time saves nine, a nine in time . . snips that time out — OUT! The ages an’ ages an’ ages . . of ssscabies itch and dusty tickle are gone — never happened: Jeanie is back outside up on me ’ind legs and levering herself over the garden wall. She drops down into the musty-dusty tunnel that runs beneath next door’s shrubbery — next she’s on the towpath, eyes smarting inside the flash cube of the noonday sunshine — there’s not a soul about , and the village slumbers as a great downie of cloud is pulled over it. Heads up, girls! Jeanie marches over the humpback bridge and up the lane, past the playing field, where the Batteram boys are playing French cricket, to the nooky shop. Weatherboard walls and a tarpaper roof — whorled old windows covered up inside by cardboard boxes full of mouse traps and fly-papers, Brillo pads and sponges. The nooky shop’s warped shelves are tightly packed with boxes of Vim and Daz, loaves of Nimble and Sunblest — none of this interests Jeanie: it’s behind the counter that the real stuff lives, not on proper shop shelves but in two old Welsh dressers that’re nailed together. The right-hand one houses fags: Guards, Numbers 6 and 10, cool water-falling Consulates and Mumsie’s red-striped Embassies — all stacked in any old how, together with tobacco in neat foil-wrapped bricks. The Deacon smokes Old Holborn — and when he’s got a new half-ounce, he teases open the triangular flaps taking the greatest care, humming. . spit on the mouthy bits of his water-rat beard . Easing the little brick of sweet-smelling baccy into his tin, he abandons the foiled paper with its picture of a big half-timbered building. . like the pub in Waddesdon . Jeanie knows the Deacon’s nickname is a piss-take , but, still, there is a holiness about him — he sing-song-sips his VAT 69, and with a vicarish hush intones local indiscretions: bunk-ups, deaded babies, the pikeys’ purple hearts, and what “Uncle George” — who answers letters in the Berko Gazette — gets up to in his “Children’s Corner”. Jeanie keeps the old Old Holborn wrappers in her special hiding place, under the floorboards in the room the girls share — they lie down there, another version of far-off. . London . — The nooky shop’s other dresser is lined with large glass jars of lemon bonbons, blackjacks, toffees and the fruit salads which are Jeanie’s favourites. On the shelves above are boxes of Bazooka Joe bubble gums and Wrigley’s, slabs of Cadbury’s chocolate and Fry’s Turkish Delight, Mars Bars and the turdy dollops of Walnut Whips. On the topmost shelf there’s a long ammo belt of Barratt’s Sherbet Fountains, each yellow-paper-wrapped cartridge of fizziness nipped and plugged with a liquorice fuse. Red-and-black liquorice bootlaces loop from the dresser’s hooks, tangled up with elastic necklaces of sweetie beads. — The dressers whisper to Jeanie of the world to come, one of unfettered indulgence: a satchel full of bank notes, an E-Type Jag with its top down an’ filled to the brim wiv wine gums . . — She places her thru’pence and her sixpence on a pile of the Tring and District News, and Missus Pile puts her own copy — RAF PIPE BAND’S FLOODLIT CONCERT ENDS HEMEL CARNIVAL — to one side and, looking up, cries, Oh, my! The state of you, Jeanie, you’ve bled all down yer shirt an’ yer face is all swole. . You’re one to talk! — Missus Pile’s face is all swole : apple cheeks and a Superball nose chalky with lavender-smelling powder. Quarter of flyin’ saucers, please, Missus Pile, Jeanie says, an’ same again of blackjacks an’ fruit salads. This’ll leave her with a penny in hand — she’ll get two liquorice laces, nibbling them will stop her gobbling up the other stuff too quickly. I fell over, she adds lamely, and Missus Pile tut-tuts. — Come in back, Jeanie, I’ll clean you up and put some tee-cee-pee on that cut, it’ll go septic y’know. — What Missus Pile knows is what’s what . Missus Pile opens up very early some mornings for Jeanie and Hughie, and knows fine well their coppers have been pinched — Missus Pile sees the pink marks of pinches on Jeanie and watches her traffic-light bruises changing from red to orange to yellow. They’re stuck gummily together, the neglected girl and the old widow-woman. No, s’all right fanks, Missus Pile, Jeanie says, as the jar is tilted and flying saucers shuffle into the scoop. Me mum’ll sort it out when I get ’ome. That mumsie of yours —. Missus Pile begins emphatically, then equally emphatically stops, because, after all’s said and done, you gotta get along with folk . — If she could muster the self-control Jeanie would limp back to London before gently unfurling her three tightly twirled paper bags — but she can’t. She glances up and down the main road, back down the lane, then scampers behind the bus shelter. So long as she can get in unseen, Jeanie feels safer here than almost anywhere. If people arrive to wait for the bus and sit on the benches with their backs inches from her own, this only pushes her deeper into the jungle of shrubbery, where she fetches up on a rotten old log with the pottery shards of ancient ginger-beer bottles pressed into the dried mud between her plimsolls.Читать дальше