Will Self - Grey Area

Will the similarities in construction between my tomb and the great chamber tombs of Ireland and the Orkneys lead them to posit a continuous motorway culture, lasting some 7,000 years? I hope so. It has always been my contention that phenomena such as Silbury Hill and the Avebury stone circle can best be understood as, respectively, an embankment and a roundabout.

And so it seems that it is only by taking this very, very, long-term view that the answer to that pernicious riddle ‘Why are there no services on the M40?’ will find an answer.

In conclusion, then. It may be said of me that I have lost my sense of scale, but never that I have lost my sense of proportion.

* British Journal of Ephemera, Spring 1986

Repeat this exercise daily, or until you are thoroughly proficient.

The pavement outside Marten’s the newsagent was streaked with sputum. In the outrageously dull light of a mid-afternoon, in midwinter, in middle England, the loops and lumps of mucus and phlegm appeared strangely bright, lurid even, as if some Jackson Pollock of the pneumo-thorax had been practising Action Hawking.

There was an incident — of sorts — going on in the entrance to the shop. A man in the middle of his middle years, dressed not so much warmly as tightly in a thick, hip-length jacket, corduroy trousers, brogues, and anaconda of woollen scarf, was upbraiding the shop manager. His voice — which was in the middle of middle-class accents — would start off at quite a reasonable pitch, but as he spoke it would creep up the scale until it was a melodramatic whine. The shop manager, blue-suited, nylon-shirted, with thinning hair and earnest expression, kept trying — albeit with appropriate deference — to break in, but without success.

‘I can’t put up with this any more, Hutchinson,’ said the man, whose name was Simon-Arthur Dykes. ‘I’ve two sick children and an invalid wife, as well as other dependants. God knows how many times I’ve told your boy to bring the paper to the door and knock, but he still won’t do it. The paper is vital for my work — it’s useless to me if it’s damp and soggy, but every single day it’s the same, he just chucks it over the fence. What the hell does he think it’s going to do, grow legs and scamper up to the house?’

‘But Mr Dykes — ‘

‘Don’t “but” me, Hutchinson, I’m paying you for a service that I don’t receive. I’m a sensitive man, you know, a man who needs some caring and consideration. My nerves, you see, they’re so very. . so very. . stretched, I feel that they might snap. Snap! D’you appreciate that? The nerves of the artist — ‘

‘I’m not un — ‘

‘You’re not what? Unaware? Unsympathetic? Unaffected? All of the above? Oh, I don’t know — I don’t know — it’s all too much for me. Perhaps my wife is right and we need a redeemer of some kind, Hutchinson, a reawakening. .’ And with this, Simon-Arthur Dykes’s voice, instead of climbing up towards hysteria, fell down, down into his chest where it translated itself into a full-bodied coughing. A liquid coughing, that implied the sloshing about of some fluid ounces of gunk in his lungs.

The shop manager was left free to talk, which he did, fulsomely. ‘No, Mr Dykes,’ he began, sounding placatory, ‘I’m not unsympathetic, I do feel for you, really I do. I can imagine what it must be like only too well. Out there at the Brown House, isolated, with the wet, exposed fields all around you, damp and encompassing.’ His fingers made combing motions, ploughing dismal little furrows in the air. ‘I can see what a torment it must be to receive a wet newspaper every morning’ — now the manager’s own voice had begun to quaver — ‘knowing that it may be the only contact that you will have with the world all day, the only thing to touch your sense of isolation. I don’t know. Oh Christ! I don’t know.’

And with that the manager’s voice cracked, and he began to weep openly. But the weeping didn’t last for long, for having given way to the flow in one form, the manager’s will to resist the ever present tickling in his own chest was eliminated. Soon, both of the men were hacking away, producing great caribou-cry honks, followed by the rasping eructation of tablespoon-loads of sputum, which they dumped, along with the rest of the infective matter, on the pavement fronting the newsagent’s.

A group of adolescents was hanging about outside Marten’s, for this was where the buses stopped, picking up passengers for Oxford, High Wycombe and Princes Risborough. They wore padded nylon anoraks, decorated with oblongs of fluorescent material and the occasional, apparently random, selection of letters and figures: ‘zx — POWER NINE’, was written on one boy’s jacket; and ‘ARIZONA STATE 4001’ on his girl companion’s. With their squashy vinyl bags at their rubber-ridged feet and their general air of round-shouldered indifference, the adolescents gave the impression of being a unit of some new kind of army — in transit. Part of a pan-European formation of Jugend Sportif.

None of them paid any attention to the two men, who were now reaching the rattling end of their joint coughing fit. They were all focused on one of the older boys, who held a small red cylinder attached to a valved mouthpiece. Mostly he kept the mouthpiece clamped in his teeth and breathed through the double-action valve with a mechanical ‘whoosh’, but every so often he would pass it to one of the others, and they would take a hit.

Straightening up the manager said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Kevin-Andrew?’

‘It’s oxygen, Mr Hutchinson,’ said the lad, removing the mouthpiece.

‘Well, give us both a go, Kevin, for the love of God. Can’t you see the state poor Mr Dykes and I are in?’

‘I don’t know if I can, Mr Hutchinson. .’ The lad paused, looking shamefaced. ‘You see, it’s the family cylinder. I just got it recharged at the health centre and it’s got to last us till the weekend.’

‘If that’s the case, why are you giving it out to your pals like a tube of bloody Smarties!’ This was from Simon-Arthur Dykes. He too had straightened up, but was still gasping and visibly blue in the face. He shouldn’t really have expostulated with such vigour, for it got him wheezing again, and he began to double over once more, one hand clutching at the doorjamb, the other flopping around in the air.

‘Come on, Kevin-Andrew,’ said the manager, ‘give him the mouthpiece, for heaven’s sake. Tell you what, you can all have a belt off of my Ventalin inhaler, if Mr Dykes and I can just get ourselves straight.’

Grudgingly, and with much shoulder-shrugging and foot-shuffling, the youth handed over the small red cylinder. In return Hutchinson passed him the angled plastic tube of the Ventalin inhaler.

For a while there was a sort of calm on the wan stage of the pavement. The two men helped one another to take several much needed pulls from the oxygen cylinder, while the group of adolescents formed a circle around which they passed the inhaler. There was silence, except for the whirring whizz of the inhaler and the kerchooof! of the oxygen cylinder.

All the parties began to look slightly better than formerly. Their pale cheeks acquired an ulterior glow, their eyes brightened, their countenances took on the aspect of febrile health that only comes to those who have temporarily relieved a condition of chronic invalidism.

Simon-Arthur Dykes drew himself up in the doorway, passing the oxygen cylinder back to Kevin-Andrew. ‘Thank you, Mr Hutchinson, really I thank you most sincerely. You are a man of some honour, sir, some Christian virtue in a world of ugliness and misery.’ Dykes clutched the manager’s upper arm. ‘Please, please, Mr Dykes, don’t upset yourself again — think of your poor chest.’ The manager gave Dykes his copy of the Guardian, which he had dropped during the coughing fit.