Will Self - Grey Area

Giselle had had more wine that she should. She was almost drunk. When she turned her head, from the bookcase to the men’s mulberry faces, from these faces to those of the animated women, her eyes followed on lazily, lurching against the insides of their sockets as if intoxicated in their own right.

The voices burred and lowed. Giselle tried to imagine her hosts as cattle. They fitted the role well, set down on the field of carpet by the pools of wavering light, grazing on conversation.

‘You look ready to drop, Giselle.’ It was June, her voice maternal, gently concerned.

‘I’m, I’m sorry. .?’

‘You’d better go up to bed, my dear, you’ll need a good night if you’re going to cope with Peter and his hangover in the morning.’

‘Oh, yeah, urn, s’pose so.’ Giselle struggled to her feet, the distance from the bottom of the low armchair to being upright was an Everest ascent.

She said her good-nights. Peter and Henry barely interrupted their conversation, they just waved their glasses at her and made valedictory noises. The women were more polite.

‘I do hope you’ll be all right in the Rood Room,’ said June. ‘It can be a bit draughty.’

‘Oh I’m sure I will; please don’t worry.’

As she tunnelled her way up through the house Giselle felt nothing but relief — relief to have escaped the adults. Even though she was going to bed, she might have been on her way to join the twins, who she could hear chattering and playing records in some mid-distanced room. But what Giselle really wanted was sleep. Sleep and dreams.

In the Rood Room she felt her way gingerly around the shoulder-high screen and across the warped floorboards to the bed. She snapped on the bedside lamp and in that instant the whole space was defined with startling clarity, the Grunters jumbled together in jangling copulation on the screen, its penile coping writhing in the shadows, the plaster reliefs giving a serried leer.

Giselle sat down heavily on the bed and absorbed the charge gathered in the room, the accumulated gasps of time. They bounced off the walls and came into her, nuzzling down into the warm pit off her lower belly. Giselle was shocked by the feeling — the immediacy of her lust. The Rood Room seemed to hold her like a lover, cupping her body within its own warm confines.

Giselle had never had any real difficulties with sex. She had moved from riding ponies and horses to riding men and boys easefully, just going up on her sensual stirrups to absorb the shift from a merely physical trot to a psychic canter. But while she could will herself to climax, power herself up on to some kind of free-floating plateau, she knew that the constrictions of her upbringing still remained. Some way inside her, like a twist in a party balloon, they strangled abandon, choked off the flow of desire.

If only someone like Peter Geddes — not Geddes himself, of course — but someone like him, someone who plaited the psychic with the physical into a rigid rope, could pull himself into her. Here, in the Rood Room, her orange candle lit and pulsing soft light over the curved ceiling, Giselle could dare to imagine such a possibility — it coming and lancing into her, a naked libertine will, imploding from the noumenal realm into the phenomenal body of her world.

Outside the night insects scratched their legs, as Giselle caressed her own. She ran her palms up from her knees, snagging and then furling back the material of her skirt, conscious of it as a curtain being raised on a living puppet show; her hands — the players — descended from the boards of her belly to the pit of lust.

Her fingernails snagged at the rubber-band waist of her tights. She peeled them off, together with her pants. The warm coil was dropped by the side of the bed. It was the same with her blouse and her bra. She removed them with the hands of another person. It was the hands that made love to her, the hands that grasped her buttocks and pitched Giselle’s body back against the headboard. They whooshed around her breasts, pulling the nipples out to precise points of sensation. They moulded her body with worshipful art, as if it were a wet gobbet of clay being shaped into a votary statue of a fertility goddess.

From the other time of the twins’ room, Giselle could faintly hear and dimly recognise the chanting of a current hit: ‘Doo-wa yi, yi, yi, dooo-waaa. Yeah-yeah, mm-m-, yeah-yeah.’ The painted Grunters flexed their Hanna-Barbera bodies in time to the music, while the foreign fingers — wet now with a gastronome’s delight — picked at tit-bits of Giselle.

When she came it was with a hot flush. So much so, that as she lay on the disordered bed Giselle could almost imagine that she saw steam rising from the juncture of her thighs.

Downstairs Peter Geddes was pissed. The Beckwoods had long gone, and with them the necessity for the propriety performance that masks unhappiness for the well-bred English family.

June and Peter had reverted to their intimate selves, their rude selves, their hateful and hating selves. The fresh start they had made that morning, the honest attempt to use happy memories as scaffolding for a brave new marital building, had subsided into the churned-up mud of the present.

June was in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher when Peter’s pencilled doodles on the table caught her eye. She went over and peered down at them. This is what she saw:

p(M) ∀m(F)j →p(F)j T T F F T F T F F

She wiped it out with a sweep of her damp J-cloth, and called into the next room, ‘You’re not free any more, Peter!’

‘Whassat?’ His burning brow poked round the doorjamb.

‘You’re not free any more.’

‘Whyssat?’ he slurred.

‘Because I’ve obliterated your stupid truth table. You’re always saying that the truth about the world is a revealed thing. Well now it’s unrevealed. In fact, it’s gone altogether.’ She was at the sink. Scraping filaments of veal from the dinner plates with horrid knife squeals.

‘Oh no, June, you shouldn’t have done that, really you shouldn’t. .’ Peter was genuinely distressed. He staggered across to the table. In the overhead lighting of the kitchen his drunkenness was even more apparent. ‘June, June. . That was the matrix, the functional cradle that contains us both. Now it’s gone. . Well, I don’t know, I just don’t know. .’ and in concerto with his voice trailing away, his pudgy finger trailed across the damp surface. He raised it up to his brimming eyes and contemplated the greyish stain on its pad — all that was left of his freedom.

June slammed the door of the dishwasher. She was, Peter reflected with the hackneyed heaviness of the drunk, even more beautiful when she was angry. ‘Right! That’s it. I’m not going to listen to this maudlin drivel all night, I’m going to bed. I would suggest you do the same instead of sitting downstairs until 5 a. m., the way you did when Henry and Caitlin last came over. Honestly, chucking back brandy and listening over and over to the Siegfried Idyll.

‘Half of your waking life you seem to think that you’re wearing a horned helmet and sitting with the gods in Valhalla, not sporting a greasy mop of thinning hair and drunkenly slumped in your family-fucking-home in Notting-bloody-hamshire.’ With that she departed, stamping up the stairs.

For a couple of minutes after she had left the kitchen Peter did nothing. He just swayed back and forth, listening to the gurgling of alcohol in his brain, heavy oil slopping in a rusty sump. Then he summoned himself and dabbing at the light switch with his numb hand managed to kill the lights. He went next door to the sitting room and with great deliberation turned on the record player, selected an album from the old-fashioned free-standing rack that stood by it, and put it on.