Will Self - Grey Area

‘He’s anally labile.’

‘Whadjewsay?’

‘He’s anally labile.’

Labile, labile. Labby lips. Libby-labby lips. This is the kind of drivel I’ve been reduced to. Imaginary dialogues between myself and a non-existent interlocutor. But is it any surprise? I mean to say, if you have a colon as spastic as mine it’s bound to insinuate itself into every aspect of your thinking. My trouble is I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t. If I don’t drink vast quantities of kaolin and morphine I’m afflicted with the most terrifying bouts of diarrhoea. And if I do — drink a couple of bottles a day, that is — I’m subject to the most appalling undulations, seismic colonic ructions. It doesn’t really stop the shits either. I still get them, I just don’t get caught short. Caught short on the hard shoulder, that’s the killer.

Say you’re driving up to High Wycombe, for example. Just out on a commonplace enough errand. Like going to buy a couple of bottles of K&M. And you’re swooping down towards Junction 3, the six lanes of blacktop twisting away from you like some colossal wastepipe, through which the automotive crap of the metropolis is being voided into the rural septic tank, when all of a sudden you’re overcome. You pull over on to the hard shoulder, get out of the car, and squat down. Hardly dignified. And not only that, destructive of the motorway itself. Destructive of the purity of one’s recollection.

That’s why I prefer to stay home in my kaolin-lined bungalow. I prefer to summon up my memories of the motorway in the days before I was so afflicted. In the days when my vast roman-fleuve was barely a trickle, and my sense of scale was intact. Then, distance was defined by regular increments, rather than by the haphazard lurch from movement to movement.

This morning I was sitting, not really writing, just dabbling. I was hunkered down inside myself, my ears unconsciously registering the whisper, whistle and whicker of the traffic on the M40, when I got that sinking feeling. I hied me to the bathroom, just in time to see a lanky youth disappearing out of the window, with my bathroom scales tucked under his arm.

I grabbed a handful of his hip-length jacket and pulled him back into the room. He was a mangy specimen. His head was badly shaven, with spirals of ringworm on the pitted surface. The youth had had these embellished with crude tattoos, as if to dignify his repulsive skin condition. His attire was a loose amalgam of counter-cultural styles, the ragged chic of a redundant generation. His pupils were so dilated that the black was getting on to his face. I instantly realised that I had nothing to fear from him. He didn’t cry out, or even attempt to struggle.

I had seen others like him. There’s quite a posse of them, these ‘model heads’. That’s what they call themselves. They congregate around the model village, venerating it as a symbol of their anomie. It’s as if, by becoming absorbed in the detail of this tiny world, they hope to diminish the scale of society’s problems. In the winter they go abroad, settling near Legoland in Belgium.

‘Right, you,’ I said, in householder tones. ‘You might have thought that you’d get away with nicking something as trivial as those bathroom scales, but it just so happens that they have a sentimental value for me.’

‘Whadjergonna do then?’ He was bemused — not belligerent.

‘I’m going to put you on trial, that’s what I’m going to do.’

‘You’re not gonna call the filth, are you?’

‘No, no. No need. In Beaconsfield we have extended the whole principle of Neighbourhood Watch to include the idea of neighbourhood justice. I will sit in judgment on you myself. If you wish, my court will appoint a lawyer who will organise your defence.’

‘Err — ‘ He had slumped down on top of the wicker laundry basket, which made him look even more like one of Ali Baba’s anorectic confreres. ‘Yeah, OK, whatever you say.’

‘Good. I will represent you myself. Allow me, if you will, to assume my position on the bench.’ We shuffled around each other in the confinement of tiles. I put the seat down, sat down, and said, ‘The court may be seated.’

For a while after that nothing happened. The two of us sat in silence, listening to the rising and falling flute of the Vent-Axia. I thought about the day the court-appointed officer had come to deliver my decree nisi. He must have been reading the documents in the car as he drove up the motorway, because when I encountered him on the doorstep he was trying hard — but failing — to suppress a smirk of amusement.

I knew why. My wife had sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The co-respondent was known to her, and the place where the adultery had taken place was none other than on these selfsame scales. The ones the model head had just attempted to steal. At that time they were still located in the bathroom of our London house. After the decree absolute, my ex-wife sent them to me in Beaconsfield, together with a caustic note.

It was a hot summer afternoon in the bathroom. I was with a lithe young foreign woman, who was full of capricious lust. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s do it on the scales. It’ll be fun, we’ll look like some weird astrological symbol, or a diagram from the Kama Sutra. ’ She twisted out of her dress and pulled off her underwear. I stood on the scales. Even translated from metric to imperial measure, my bodyweight still looked unimpressive. She hooked her hands around my neck and jumped. The flanges of flesh on the inside of her thighs neatly fitted the notches above my bony hips. I grasped the fruit of her buttocks in my sweating palms. She braced herself, feet against the wall, toenails snagging on the Artex. Her panting smoked the mirror on the medicine cabinet. I moved inside her. The coiled spring inside the scales squeaked and groaned. Eventually it broke altogether.

That’s how my wife twigged. When she next went to weigh herself she found the scales jammed, the pointer registering 322 lb. Exactly the combined weight of me and the family au pair. .

Oh, mene, mene, tekel, upharsin ! What a fool I was! Now fiery hands retributively mangle my innards! The demons play upon my sackbut and I am cast into the fiery furnace of evacuation. I am hooked there, a toilet duck, condemned for ever to lick under the rim of life!

The model head snapped me out of my fugue. ‘You’re a Libra,’ he said, ‘aren’t you?’

‘Whassat?’

‘Your sign. It’s Libra, innit?’ He was regarding me with the preternatural stare of a madman or a seer.

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

‘I’m good at that. Guessing people’s astrological signs. Libra’s are, like, er. . creative an’ that.’

‘I s’pose so.’

‘But they also find it hard to come to decisions — ‘

‘Are you challenging the authority of this court?’ I tried to sound magisterial, but realised that the figure I cut was ridiculous.

‘Nah, nah. I wouldn’t do that, mate. It’s just. . like. . I mean to say, whass the point, an’ that?’

I couldn’t help but agree with him, so I let him go. I even insisted that he take the bathroom scales with him. After all, what good are they to me now?

If you want to walk round the Lizard Peninsula, you have to be reasonably well equipped. Which is not to say that this part of Cornwall is either particularly remote (the M5 now goes all the way to Land’s End) or that rugged. It’s just that the exposure to so much wind and sky, and so many pasties, after a winter spent huddled on the urban periphery (somewhere like Beaconsfield, for example), can have an unsettling effect. I always advise people to take an antacid preparation, and also some kaolin and morphine. There’s no need any more to carry an entire bottle, for Sterling Health have thoughtfully created a tablet form of this basic but indispensable remedy.