Will Self - Grey Area

As Wagner’s billowing orchestration filled the room, Peter subsided into an armchair. He spilt a few measures of brandy on to his trousers, but three more managed to hit the tumbler. These he chucked down. The music swelled to fill the space, lowering like a heliotrope grizzly bear. Peter poured himself another brandy, then another and then a fourth.

Some time later he was truly drunk, orbiting his own consciousness in a tiny capsule of awareness that was shooting backwards at speed. He watched, awed, as the dawn of his own sentience sped away from him towards the great slashed crescent of the horizon. Then the toxic confusional darkness came upon him, swallowing him entirely.

The synaptic gimbals had been unslung and Peter’s splendidly meticulous gyroscope of ratiocination fell to the jungly floor of his id. He rose and did not know that he did so. He went to the record player and snapped it off — not knowing that he did so. He quit the room. Standing in the misshapen vestibule, the oddly angled point of entry to this disordered household, the philosopher stared into an old mirror — not knowing that he did so.

From out of the mirror there loomed the face of a Grunter. It was dead white, shaped by the utter foreignness of the distant past. The Civil War recusant looked at Peter for a while and then slid away into the mirror’s bevelled edge. Peter’s head shook itself — hard. His body felt the painful anticipation of the morning and took its mind upstairs.

In the Rood Room Giselle lay in a deep swoon. After climaxing she had relapsed thus, and gone to sleep with the twins’ pop records still sounding in her ears. But the twins were now asleep as well, and her fine body was still banked up on top of the disordered covers, forming cumulus piles of sweet flesh. A beam of starlight fell across her upper thighs, then extended itself towards the rood screen, where it illuminated the central panel, which depicted five Grunters in a loose bundle of copulation, a fasces of fornication.

Giselle was gorgeous, the fullness of her refulgent in the silvery light. Her auburn pubic hair glowing as if lit from within. Her breath disturbed her breast, only just sufficiently to reinforce the impression that she was an artist’s model trapped since the Regency in suspended inanimation.

There was a creaking from the corridor, a groaning of larynx and wood. The door squealed on its hinges and Peter Geddes’s brandy golem entered the Rood Room.

Giselle awoke at once and sat up. The diamond light from the window was scattered across his brow — outsize spangles. The incubus rubbed at them carelessly. She didn’t need to ask who it was, she could see that immediately. She shifted herself back under the covers, adroitly, as if inserting a sliver of ham into a half-eaten sandwich.

‘D-Doctor Geddes, is that you?’

‘Please,’ said the incubus, his voice clear now, unslurred, ‘call me Peter.’ And then he went on, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I must have taken the wrong turning at the top of the stairs. Quite easy to do, y’know — even after many lifetimes’ residence.’

‘Th-that’s OK — are you all right?’

‘Fine, thanks — and you?’ He had turned away from her now and was confronting the rood screen. ‘Not finding it too hard to sleep in this strange old place?’ His voice came to her now as it had done in tutorials, focused, crisply edged by intellect. His outstretched hand traced the line of a Grunter back, in the same way she remembered it tracing the sinuous connectives of his scrawled logical formulae.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the incubus then moved away from the rood screen and towards where Giselle lay.

‘Do you mind if I sit down for a moment?’ he said, looking down at her.

‘No, not at all.’ The words pooted from her kissable lips, inappropriate little farts of desire. The incubus sat, inhabiting the warm vacant V between the ranges of Giselle’s calves and thighs. He canted round, his unfocused eyes squeezing their watery gaze into the dilation of her pupils.

‘If it wasn’t such a trite remark,’ the incubus quipped, ‘I would tell you how vitally lovely you are at this precise moment — right now.’ He bent to kiss her, her urge to resist was as insubstantial as the air that escaped from between their marrying bodies.

His hands unwrapped the covers, her hands unfurled his woolly bunting, until they lay, two tubby people, damp with desire, in the heat of an English summer night.

He kissed her clavicle — the pit of it neatly fitted the trembling ball of his tongue. He tasted the salt of her skin as he ice-cream-licked the whole of her upper body, lapping her up. His face went down on her trembling belly and his hands cupped first her round face, then her round shoulders and lastly her rounded breasts. Cupped and kneaded, cupped and kneaded.

To her, the incubus and his touch were more than a release. She couldn’t have said why — for she had no reason left now — but he was beautiful. His pendulous belly, his bow legs, the scurf on his high forehead, the stubble on his jowls, all of it moved her. She grasped the flesh on his back, feeling moles like seeds beneath her palms; she worked at them to cultivate still more of his lust.

The mouth of the incubus was presently in her pubic hair, the tip of his tongue describing ancient arabesques and obscure theurgical symbols on her mons, the deep runnels of her groin, the babyflesh of her inner thighs. The incubus drew in a gout of the urine and mucous smell of her, and savoured it noisily, as if it were the nose of some particularly rambuncious Burgundy.

Then his horizontal lips were firmly bracketing her vertical ones, his hands were under her, holding her by the apex of her buttocks, and he ate into her, worried at the very core of her, as if she were some giant watermelon that he must devour to assuage an unquenchable thirst.

Later still the incubus addressed her with the incontrovertible fact of his penis. Entered into her with the logical extension of himself. She was curled up like a copula, a connective, her kneecaps almost in her eye sockets, as he placed himself on top of her. And Giselle went into him, went out of herself, travelled over the curved roof. The incubus was lancing into her from out of that other realm — he was pure, ineffable will, freeing her up with each stroke, dissolving her corporeal self.

His tongue was in her mouth, marauding around the back of her throat. His penis was in her vagina, knocking forcefully at the mouth of her cervix. The shadows of the phalluses on top of the rood screen fell across both their bodies, tiger-striping them in the luminous darkness. The Grunters stared down at the wreckless, wrecking bodies with gnostic inappetency.

She came; and the incubus yanked her up in her orgasm, hooking her higher by the pubic bone, until she span in giddy baroque loops and twirls — pain for pleasure and pleasure for pain. Her cries, her groans, her molar-grinds, all were grace notes, useless embroideries on the fact of her abandonment. ‘S-s-s-sorry!’ It was almost a scream; this remembering, even at the point of no return, the refinements of her upbringing.

They lay in each other’s arms for a while, but only a short one. Then the incubus, kissing her to stay silent, departed. Some while afterwards Giselle heard the sound of a shower pattering in a distant bathroom.

The following morning Giselle went downstairs knowing that this could be the hardest entrance of her life. She had no idea how Peter Geddes was going to play it. His lovemaking the night before had been so demonic, so intense. It had beached her on the nightmare coast of the dreamland. Would he acknowledge what had passed between them in some way? Would he already have confessed to his wife? Would she find herself back at Grantham station within the hour, her vacation job over and her academic career seriously compromised?