Will Self - Grey Area

Simon-Arthur opened the front door and stepped into the small vestibule. The first sound that met his ears was of some child plainting in the sitting room. He ignored it and kicking off his muddy boots went into the parlour and set the nebuliser box down on the table. He was unpacking it when his wife’s cousin, Christabel-Sharon, came wafting in.

‘Is that the nebuliser?’ she said, without preamble. He grunted assent. ‘Well, as soon as you’ve got it up and running we’d better put Henrykins on it for a while — the poor child is panting like a steam engine.’

‘What about Stormikins?’

‘Stormikins is fine, she can have second go. It’s Henrykins who’s really acting up.’ Christabel-Sharon pulled one of the cane-backed chairs out from the table and slumped down on it with a sigh. A sigh that turned into a choke, a splutter and then a full-blown rasping cough. A bronchitic cough that, was of such sub-sonic, juddering intensity that Simon-Arthur, as always, could hardly believe her narrow chest capable of producing — or containing — it.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, whilst continuing to ready the nebuliser. Christabel-Sharon was very thin — almost anorectic. Her ginger-blonde hair was done up in a chignon, revealing what once must have been a graceful swoop of pale, freckled neck, but what was now a scrawny shank of a thing with greaseproof skin stretched over a marbling of vein. She had once been very pretty, in a sylphlike way. Her grey eyes were deep-set, like Simon-Arthur’s own, although he could no longer remember whether they had always been so. They glittered under her brows, sending out a coruscating beam with each heave of her chest. Her breasts, fuller than the rest of her, moved under the stretchy fabric of her pullover; the nipples were erect and to Simon-Arthur they betokened nothing more than an autonomous and involuntary sexuality, parasitic on its hacking host.

He had the nebuliser assembled now and he plugged it in to the mains and switched it on. The rubber suction pads moved up and down in the glass chambers of Salbutimol and steroid. He turned on the stopcock of the oxygen cylinder and pressed the mask to his mouth. The sense of relief was overpowering. He could feel the electric engine adjusting itself to the motion of his ribcage, so that with each of his trembling and ineffectual inhalations it pushed more drug-laden oxygen into him.

It was bliss — like breathing normally again. The sensation marched at the head of a procession of memories: windows flung open and deep gouts of ozone-flavoured air drawn in unimpeded; running up hills and gasping with joy not pain; burying his head in the bosom of the earth and drawing its warm fungal odour in through flaring nostrils. These pneumo-recollections were so clear that Simon-Arthur could visualise each molecule of scent and gas burying itself in the pinkness of his membranes.

Christabel-Sharon’s woollen bosoms came into the corner of his eye. ‘Come on, Simon-Arthur, don’t you think you’re being a little selfish with that thing?’

‘Selfish! What the hell do you mean?’ As suddenly as the gift had been bestowed it was snatched away. Simon-Arthur’s anger rose up in him unbidden. ‘Listen, Christabel-Sharon, I’m the person in this house who has to go out, to engage with the brutal commerce of the world. I come back after a gruelling trip, blue in the face, on the verge of expiring, and just because I dare to take a few breaths — a few trifling puffs — on this nebuliser, this nebuliser which I abased myself to get. . you call me selfish. Selfish! I won’t stand for it!’

Christabel-Sharon had recoiled from him and was pressing herself up against the side of the tiled Dutch stove that stood in the corner of the parlour. Simon-Arthur noted through stinging tears of self-pity and frustration that she was doing something he found particularly disgusting: jettisoning sputum from her full lips into a pad of gauze that she had pressed against her mouth. She had quantities of these fabricated pads hidden about her person, and after use, deposited them — together with their glaucous contents — in a bucket lined with a plastic bag that she kept in her room. The dabbing practice further erased her beauty. For Simon-Arthur could never look at her without seeing little parcels of infective matter studding her body.

Simon-Arthur’s wife, Jean-Drusilla, came hurrying into the kitchen. In her arms she carried Henry-Simon, their son, a child of about eight.

‘Simon, thank God, thank God! The nebuliser. Praise be to the Father and to the Son. Praise be to the Mother of God especially, for granting us this deliverance.’ She set the child down on a chair and attached the mask, which was still giving out little ‘poots’ of oxygen, to his pallid face. Then she fell to her knees on the cold stone flags. ‘Simon-Arthur, Christabel-Sharon. . You will join me.’ It was a command, not a request.

Looking sheepishly at one another Simon-Arthur and Christabel-Sharon knelt on the flags. The three adults joined hands. ‘Oh merciful Mother,’ Jean-Drusilla chanted, ‘giver of all bounty, repository of all grace, we thank you for this gift of a nebuliser. Be sure, oh Blessed One, that we will employ it solely in furtherance of your Divine Will. So that our children and ourselves might breathe freely, and so that my dear husband might create beautiful art, the greater to glorify your name.’

Simon-Arthur had knelt grudgingly, and cynically observed the way that this spiritual intensity shaped his wife’s rather homely features. Her thick black hair was cut so as to frame her broad brow and firm chin, but the flesh hung slackly on her and there was a yellowish tinge to the whites of her eyes when she rolled them up to stare beatifically at the fire-resistant tiles. Even so, the effect of her measured chanting, which adapted itself to the background chuffing of Henry-Simon and the nebuliser, was mesmeric.

Perhaps there is a Redeemer, Simon thought. Perhaps He will come in a cloud of eucalyptus, freeing up all our passages, gusting through us with the great wind of the Spirit. And before he knew it tears were coursing down his cheeks. Jean-Drusilla, seeing this, leant forward and, taking his head, cradled it against her breast. Christabel-Sharon leant forward as well and stretched her thin arms around the both of them, and for quite a while they stayed like that, gently rocking.

When Dave-Dave Hutchinson, the manager of Marten’s the newsagent, arrived at the Brown House about three hours later, the ecstasis had somewhat subsided. He knocked, and waited on the metal bootscraper, treading gingerly from one foot to the other. After a few minutes Simon-Arthur himself came to the door. ‘My God, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it over tonight, the fog’s ridiculously thick.’

‘I’ve got the new radar in the car. It’s a bit tricky but once you’ve got the hang of it you can drive well enough.’

‘Come in, come in.’ Simon-Arthur almost yanked Dave-Dave in off the doorstep. ‘The children aren’t quite in bed yet and I don’t want them getting a lungful of this.’ He grabbed at the air outside the door and brought a clutch of the fog inside, which stayed intact, foaming like a little cloud on the palm of his hand for some seconds.

‘I brought this along with me.’ Dave-Dave pulled a small brown bottle from the side pocket of his sheepskin jacket.

‘Is that the codeine?’

‘Yeah, I’m afraid I’ve only about sixty mils left, but I pick up tomorrow.’

‘Sixty mils!’ Simon’s face lit up. ‘That’s splendid, that’ll bring us some warm cheer, but’ — and here his face fell — ‘what about your poor wife?’

The newsagent’s face adopted a serious expression. ‘I’m afraid she gets Brompton’s now.’