Will Self - Grey Area

This is the final entry in Simon Dykes’s increasingly spikey and manic scrawl. You turn a few pages on and there is nothing. You turn a few pages more and you find two final entries, dated 11th March and 19th March. They aren’t in Dykes’s hand, but Busner’s:11th MarchI have been included within the psyche of Simon Dykes in a most perverse fashion. I would be horrified by this eruption in the very skin of reality, were it not so very interesting.He and Bohm arrived at the Facility some hours ago. It may have been foolish of me to take some Inclusion shortly before they turned up, but I did it in a spirit of scientific enquiry.Under the influence of the Inclusion, Dykes appeared to me as an ever-mutating thing. The very composition of his head and body was of found objects, and constantly transmogrifying.The Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks that fill my office and laboratory were snaffled up by this protean being. When our eyes met there was a great humming and crackling in the atmosphere. Bohm, and MacLachlan, who had come with him, turned tail and fled. Paper clips and drawing pins bulged from the surface of his eyeballs. Biros and match books ruckled beneath his skin.The cyclotron in the corner began to hum and pulse, even though I knew it wasn’t activated. Then there was an appalling explosion, but instead of feeling myself blown apart, expanded, I had the sensation of being sucked in: a plume of genie being drawn into a bottle. Fragments of glass and fragments of mica, bigger than boulders, plummeted past the screen of my vision like some cheap special effect.19th MarchI am still in here. Dykes’s mind is a cluttered place, as you have no doubt gathered. He leaves me pretty much to myself. During one of his rare lapses in physical activity, he allows me the indulgence of employing his motor abilities to jot down notes such as these. For the rest of the time I am free to roam the museum of grotesque ideas, images and objects that the drug has driven him to acquire willy-nilly. I am pure intention, a secondary and immaterial will operating inside the Dykes psyche.Dykes naturally thinks he is psychotic — and in a way I suppose he is. But it’s comfortable enough here in the Warneford: a choice of meals, and at least one chat a day with a jejune shrink.It has occurred to me that the only way to understand the Inclusion incident is to view it at a metaphoric level. The drug was originally made from the corpses of the bee mites that infested the hives, much in the way that I now infest Dykes’s mind. I have become — as it were — Inclusion.Mind you — it’s just a thought.

And that is that. Or at least it would be if the Inclusion folder wasn’t bulging and flexing in a sinister way between your hands. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to read things that don’t belong to you, not to interfere with private correspondence? The thoughts are scampering across your shoulders now; now, as the first of the leaflets on Blaenau Ffestiniog Slate Quarry falls out of the Inclusion brochure, followed by the. 1984-5 Eastbourne and District Phone Directory, followed by the Atlas of Cancer Incidence in England and Wales 1968–1985.

There’s more to this Inclusion brochure than first met your eye. You should stay interested in it and not allow your thoughts to stray to unanswered letters, unreturned phone calls, unpaid bills, unfulfilled ambitions, wasted opportunities and people unloved and unmissed.

* Selective Seratonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors, i.e. Prozac ®, and other brand-name anti-depressants such as Sustral ®, Faverin ®and Sebcocat ®. Author’s note.

‘Why the hell don’t you leave him if he’s such a monster?’ said Grace. We were sitting in the Café Delancey in Camden Town, eating croques m’sieurs and slurping down cappuccino. I was dabbing the sore skin under my eyes with a scratchy piece of toilet paper — trying to stop the persistent leaking. When I’d finished dabbing I deposited the wad of salty stuff in my bag, took another slurp and looked across at Grace.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I don’t leave him.’

‘You can’t go back there — not after this morning. I don’t know why you didn’t leave him immediately after it happened. .’

That morning I’d woken to find him already up. He was standing at the window, naked. One hand held the struts of the venetian blind apart, while he squinted down on to the Pentonville Road. Lying in bed I could feel the judder and hear the squeal of the traffic as it built up to the rush hour.

In the half-light of dawn his body seemed monolithic: his limbs columnar and white, his head and shoulders solid capitals. I stirred in the bed and he sensed that I was awake. He came back to the side of the bed and stood looking down at me. ‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow.’

I squirmed down further into the duvet and looked up at him, puckering my lip so that I had goofy, rabbity teeth. He got back into bed and curled himself around me. He tucked his legs under mine. He lay on his side — I on my back. The front of his thighs pressed against my haunch and buttock. I felt his penis stiffen against me as his fingers made slight, brushing passes over my breasts, up to my throat and face and then slowly down. His mouth nuzzled against my neck, his tongue licked my flesh, his fingers poised over my nipples, twirling them into erection. My body teetered, a heavy rock on the edge of a precipice.

The rasp of his cheek against mine; the too peremptory prodding of his cock against my mons; the sense of something casual and offhand about the way he was caressing me. Whatever — it was all wrong. There was no true feeling in the way he was touching me; he was manipulating me like some giant dolly. I tensed up — which he sensed; he persisted for a short while, for two more rotations of palm on breast, and then he rolled over on his back with a heavy sigh.

‘I’m sorry — ‘

‘It’s OK.’

‘It’s just that sometimes I feel that — ‘

It’s OK, really, please don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t talk about it.’

‘But if we don’t talk about it we’re never going to deal with it. We’re never going to sort it all out.’

‘Look, I’ve got feelings too. Right now I feel like shit. If you don’t want to, don’t start. That’s what I can’t stand, starting and then stopping — it makes me sick to the stomach.’

‘Well, if that’s what you want.’ I reached down to touch his penis; the chill from his voice hadn’t reached it yet. I gripped it as tightly as I could and began to pull up and down, feeling the skin un- and re-peel over the shaft. Suddenly he recoiled.

‘Not like that, ferchrissakes!’ He slapped my hand away. ‘Anyway I don’t want that. I don’t want. . I don’t want. . I don’t want some bloody hand relief!’

I could feel the tears pricking at my eyes. ‘I thought you said — ‘

‘What does it matter what I said? What does it matter what I do. . I can’t convince you, now can I?’

‘I want to, I really do. It’s just that I don’t feel I can trust you any more. . not at the moment. You have to give me more time.’

‘Trust! Trust! I’m not a fucking building society, you know. You’re not setting an account up with me. Oh fuck it! Fuck the whole fucking thing!’

He rolled away from me and pivoted himself upright. Pulling a pair of trousers from the chair where he’d chucked them the night before, he dragged his legs into them. I dug deeper into the bed and looked out at him through eyes fringed by hair and tears.