Will Self - Grey Area

Dykes looked at the paper as if he couldn’t remember what it was. His rather protruberant grey eyes were darting about, unable to alight on anything. His thick brown hair was standing up in a crazy bouffant on top of his high, strained forehead.

He took the manager by the arm again, and drew him back into the shop a couple of paces. Then he leant towards him conspiratorially saying, ‘It’s Dave Hutchinson, that’s your name, isn’t it?’

‘Ye-es,’ the manager replied uneasily.

‘And your patronymic?’

‘Dave as well.’

‘Well, Dave-Dave, I want you to call me Simon-Arthur. I feel this little episode has brought us together, and I stand in debt on your account.’

‘Really, Mr Dykes — ‘

‘Simon-Arthur.’

‘Simon-Arthur, I don’t think it’s at all — ‘

‘No, I do. Listen, I’ve just picked up a brand-new nebuliser in Risborough. I’ve got it in the car. Why don’t you come around this evening, and give it a try — bring your wife if you like.’

This invitation, so obviously felt and meant, softened the manager’s resistance, broke down his barriers of social deference and retail professionalism. ‘I’d like that, Simon-Arthur,’ he said, grasping the artist’s right hand firmly in both of his, ‘really I would. But I’m afraid my wife is bed-bound, so it would only be me.’

‘I am sorry — but that’s OK, just come yourself.’

‘I’ve got a few mils of codeine linctus left over from the monthly ration — shall I bring it with me?’

‘Why not. . we can have a little party, as best we can.’

The two men finished, smiling broadly, in unison. Simon-Arthur took Dave-Dave Hutchinson’s hand warmly in his and gave it several pumps. Then they parted; and whilst Dave-Dave Hutchinson turned back into the interior of the shop, Simon-Arthur Dykes crossed the road to where his car was parked in the middle of the town square.

As he gained the herringbone of white lines that designated the parking area, Simon-Arthur felt a whooshing sensation behind him. He turned to see the 320 bus bearing down on the stop outside Marten’s. Observing the way the rows of yellow windows shone through the murky air, he jolted into greater haste. Darkness was coming; and with it the great bank of fog, that had hung two hundred feet above the ground all day, was beginning to descend, falling around the shoulders of the grey stone houses like some malodorous muffler.

Simon-Arthur kept his mouth clamped shut, but sniffed the fog judiciously with a connoisseur’s nose. Lots of sulphur tonight, he thought, and perhaps even a hint of something more tangy. . sodium, maybe? He turned on the ignition. His headlights barely penetrated the thick fog. As he pulled out and drove off down the road Simon-Arthur avoided looking at the fog too closely. He knew from experience that if he peered into it for too long, actually concentrated on its twistings, its eddies, its endless assumptions of insubstantial form, that it could all too easily draw him down a darkling corridor, into more durable, more horribly solid visions.

But halfway home he had to stop. A heavy mizzle was saturating the air. The A418 was a tunnel of spray. Heavy lorry after heavy lorry churned up the fog and water. Simon-Arthur was jammed between two of these grunting beasts as he gained the crest of the hill at Tiddington. The vacuum punched in the air by the one ahead was sucking his flimsy 2cv forward, whilst the boil of turbulence pushed up by the one behind propelled him on. The wheels of the car were barely in contact with the tarmac. He dabbed the brakes and managed to slide off the road into a lay-by.

Sort of safe, Simon-Arthur slumped over the Citröen’s steering wheel. He felt more than usually depleted; and the thought of facing his family produced a hard, angular sensation in his gorge. Without quite knowing why he opened the door of the car and got out. If he had felt unsafe in the car — he was now totally exposed. Lorry after lorry went on slamming by, throwing up clouds of compounded gas and liquid.

Simon-Arthur lurched round to the other side of the car and stood transfixed by the hard filthiness of the verge. The bank of grass and weeds was so stained with pollutants that it appeared petrified. It was as if the entire lay-by had been buried in a peat bog for some thousands of years and only this moment disinterred.

Simon-Arthur stood, lost in time, ahistoric. He looked along the A418 towards his house. The road manifested itself as a serpent of yellow and orange, winding its way over the dark country. Each ploughing vehicle was another muscular motion, another bunching and uncoiling in its anguiform body. But if he turned away from the road he was enclosed in his lay-by burial ship. A Sutton Hoo of the psyche. The armour of mashed milk cartons and crushed cans, the beadwork of fag butts, the weaponry of buckled hub caps and discarded lengths of chromium trim. They were, Simon-Arthur reflected, entirely useless — and therefore entirely apt — funerary gifts, for his sustenance in this current afterlife.

He would have stayed longer, savouring this mordant feeling, but the fog was seeping into his chest, producing acute sensations of rasp and tickle that grew and grew until he began to cough. When he was underway again he had to drive with the Citröen’s flap window open so that he could spit out of it. And by the time he turned off the main road, up the track to the Brown House, he was as blue as any Saxon — chieftain or otherwise.

The house stood about twenty yards back from the track, in an orchard of diseased apple trees; their branches were wreathed in some type of fungus that resembled Spanish moss. The impression the Brown House gave was of being absolutely four-square, like a child’s drawing of a house. It had four twelve-paned windows on each side. As its name suggested, it was built from brown brick; atop the sloping brown-tiled roof was a brown brick chimney.

As Simon-Arthur got out of the car, he looked up at this and noted with approval that it was gushing thick smoke. The fog was so dense now that he could barely make out the point at which this smoke entered the atmosphere; it looked, rather, as if the Brown House were sucking in the murk that wreathed it.

He took a tightly sealed cardboard box from the back of the Citröen, and tucking this under one arm and his Guardian under the other he struggled over the buckled wire fence. There was a gate, but it was awkward to open and as Simon-Arthur was the only member of the family who now left the immediate purlieus of the Brown House, he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The fence and the gate had been Simon-Arthur’s stab at being a countryman. It was summer when he built it and Simon-Arthur, stripped to the waist, spent a sweaty afternoon hammering in the stakes and attaching the netting. He imagined himself like Levin, or Pierre, communing through labour with the spirit of Man. It was a vain delusion.

Even then the fog had been in evidence — albeit as a shadow of what it later became. That afternoon it gave the air a bilious tint. It made everything seem disturbingly post-nuclear, irradiated. When Simon-Arthur had finally finished and stood back to admire his work he saw an aching disjunction between what he had imagined he had achieved — and what was actually there.

The fence zigged and zagged and sagged its way along the track’s tattered verge. It looked like a stretch of wire looming up across the shell-holed sludge of no man’s land in an old photograph of the Somme.

For as long as the children had played in the garden the fence had acted more as a psychic barrier than a physical one. While it prevented them from getting on to the farm track, it also turned them in on themselves, in on the sepia interior of the Brown House. The fog came. Now it had been over two years since any of them had even ventured out of the house for more than a few minutes. Every time Simon-Arthur contemplated the fence he thought of pulling it down, but to do so was to counsel defeat on too many different levels.