Will Self - Grey Area

But if I feel genuine venom to any particular individual over the way this scenario plays itself out, it’s towards Lechmere. Lechmere, who should know better. Lechmere, who should be capable of being more steadfast. Lechmere, who has pretensions towards a higher kind of refinement. What with his collection of old silverware and his hunting prints. Lechmere, leaning against his invitation-encrusted mantelpiece, hands plunged deep into his grey-flannel bags, so he can jingle with his small change of maiden aunts and titled second cousins. Lechmere, who has the faint — but for all that distinct — whiff of new money about him.

This was dumped on him by a stepfather, of all people. A stepfather who made his money in construction, of all things. Con-struc-tion! Well, my dear, the word itself has a put-together feel about it. So you see, I cannot cede anything to Lechmere in the way of handicapping, even though on the face of it he’s closer to Lady Bob and the Recorder (I believe many, many of their respective people are on Christian-name terms) than I am. For the truth of the matter is that he has secrets of his own to protect.

If only Lechmere’s stepdaddy could have seen the uses his money has been put to. Lechmere gave up his job at the Treasury tout de suite. Now he fritters his time away between the bookanistes on the Farringdon Road and those chi-chi little antique joints in Camden Passage.

Can you squeeze in a little closer towards me? That’s it, lean forward, because this really is intended for your ears alone. I would only dream of vouchsafing this to someone like yourself, someone with whom I have struck up an immediate rapport, someone who’s a good listener. Further, you can take it as read that for me to divulge an intimate suspicion of this order is tantamount to my assuming that a corresponding intimacy exists between the two of us. .

Anyway, the nub of it is this: I suspect Lechmere of being a practising homosexual. You don’t seem shocked. Well, of course I suppose you know nothing of all this. But let me tell you that among the eight of us it’s common knowledge that more of Lechmere’s people are homosexual than anyone else’s. 15,394, to be precise.

What’s more, I know that he has a fair few voyeurs on his books. No, dammit. That’s the core of my suspicion — Lechmere’s voyeurs. When I mull it over I don’t think Lechmere’s homosexuals are either here or there. After all, we all have our homosexuals (I have over half a million practising and getting on for a quarter of a million latent), and bloody useful they are at times. I wouldn’t want to be without mine. They give more parties than the straights, and they’re excellent for close, subtle work: the spreading of malicious gossip, the Chinese whispering of slurs, and the making of just the right kind of insinuations. Spend a great deal more of their time on office politics to boot.

So you see, I’ve nothing against a toad in the hole — even if he’s one of Lechmere’s. No, no, the thing is the voyeurs. Why has Lechmere acquired so many voyeurs, so many people who like to watch? The only answer I can come up with is that at some deep and magical level of thought he feels that if he can watch us more than we watch him we won’t be able to find out what he’s doing with his pork sword.

Personally, I’m rather stunned that he still has the energy for it. What’s more, I’m sure that it corrupts his vision as far as dictating the more subtle movements of his people are concerned. If he’s bumping and boring around like that, leaning over some bloody rent boy, how can he conceivably be alive to the nuances of 2,947 unreturned phone calls? Or 45,709 bad birthday presents? Let alone 17,578,582 gestures of dismissal.

The work demands attention. Being one of the only eight people in London is like some massive game of go. No, go isn’t the right analogy at all, because people — whether controlled or not — are no mere counters. Each one, after all, has his or her own potentiality. It would be worse than pointless to deploy 4, 732 throat-cutting gestures, where what was required were a mere 219 diplomatic overtures by the Right People.

No, perhaps a better way of understanding it is chess. But then, chess isn’t played by eight players using thirteen million pieces between them. Who could possibly quantify the permutations that such a game represents; the googolplex available moves. I’ve heard it said that the brains of grand masters are uncoupled from time as ordinary people understand it. That the many many thousands of calculations they make, gambits they follow through, could only take place in parallel to one another, like many little rivulets of thought running down some hillside of cogitation.

Pah! I make more such calculations in an hour than Kasparov does in a year. I stretch, then relax — and 35,665 white-collar workers leave their houses a teensy bit early for work. This means that 6,014 of them will feel dyspeptic during the journey because they’ve missed their second piece of toast, or bowl of Fruit ‘n’ Fibre. From which it follows that 2,982 of them will be testy throughout the morning; and therefore 312 of them will say the wrong thing, leading to dismissal; hence one of these 312 will lose the balance of his reason and commit an apparently random and motiveless murder on the way home.

Now, to compute this, together with all the side issues, is unbelievably difficult. For this is not merely aimed at producing the effect of one homicide, oh no. There are many different outcomes that follow on from such a scenario. It isn’t so much a decision tree as a decision forest, with branches parting, and parting and parting into twigs that divide and divide and divide again, some of them only then coming to fruition.

It takes more than mere brainpower, though, to undertake such infinitely subtle and ramified calculations. It takes a kind of flair. An ability to think laterally — and then zoom around a corner; an innate tendency to perceive the tactical move that one of the other seven hasn’t grasped.

A good example of this is the massive double, triple, quadruple — all the way up to nonuple — bluffs that we all engage in, particularly on bank holidays. Naturally one would always like at least some of one’s people to be able to get out of town on a bank holiday, see a little green grass, frolic with a few sheep, even splash off the shingle at Brighton or Shoreham. But at the same time one knows that a bank holiday with more than an hour spent in heavy traffic is worse than no bank holiday at all, especially if we’re talking of people who have children. If this is to be the case it’s far better that one direct the greater part of one’s people to stay at home, if only so that a minority can gain greater utility.

You can see how it all shapes up. Like poker players the eight of us assess how many the others are likely to direct out of town, and how many by car, how many by bus or train. Sometimes one of the eight of us will go so far as to keep all of his or her people at home. The entire bunch! It can have only happened once or twice. I did it about five years ago, and the glee, let me tell you, the intense thrill of schadenfreude when I saw everyone else’s: the Bollam sisters, Dooley, Colin Purves, Lechmere. . damn it all, even a hell of a lot of Lady Bob and the Recorder’s people. . the whole lemming-load of them trapped sweating and bored in mile after mile of tailback after tailback.

But of course mostly it isn’t so straightforward. I sit there, caressing my volumes and papers and discs, trying to sense the messages in the ether, the subtle modulations of intent that might indicate how many are on the move — and where to. I think about Lady Bob. Will she send her people out of town — and if so, how many? Or will she, like the Bollam sisters who are incorrigibly nervous and stay-at-home, respond to the numerous notices of roadworks on major routes that have been coming in all week, and leave the tarmac shimmering and empty, so most of my lot can make a dash.