Will Self - Grey Area

The play was about a family riven by domestic violence. It was well acted and the jerky camerawork made it grittily real, almost like documentary. But still I felt that the basic premise was overstated. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe a family with such horrors boiling within it could maintain a closed face to the outside world, it was just that these horrors were so relentless.

The husband beat up the wife, beat up the kids, got drunk, sexually abused the kids, raped the wife, assaulted social workers, assaulted police, assaulted probation officers, and all within the space of a week or so. It should have been laughable — this chronically dysfunctional family — but it wasn’t. How could it be remotely entertaining while we all sat in our separate padded places? Each fresh on-screen outrage increased the distance between the three of us, pushing us still further apart. I hunched down in my chair and felt the waistband of my skirt burn across my bloated stomach. I shouldn’t have eaten all that salad — and the underdone garlic bread smelt flat and sour on my own tongue. So flat and sour that the idea even of kissing myself was repulsive, let alone allowing him to taste me.

The on — screen husband, his shirt open, the knot of his tie dragged halfway down his chest, was beating his adolescent daughter with short, powerful clouts around the head. They were standing in her bedroom doorway, and the camera stared fixedly over her shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom, where it picked up the corner of a pop poster, pinned to the flowered wallpaper. Each clout was audible as a loud ‘crack!’ in the room where we sat. I felt so remote, from Grace, from John, from the play. . from him.

I stood up and walked unsteadily to the toilet at the end of the corridor. Inside I slid the flimsy bolt into its loop and pushed the loosely stacked pile of magazines away from the toilet bowl. My stomach felt as if it were swelling by the second. My fingers when I put them in my mouth were large and alien. My nails scraped against the sides of my throat. As I leant forward I was aware of myself as a vessel, my curdled contents ready to pour. I looked down into the toilet world and there — as my oatmeal stream splashed down — saw that someone had already done the same. Cut out the nutritional middlewoman, that is.

After I’d finished I wiped around the rim of the toilet with hard scraps of paper. I flushed and then splashed my cheeks with cold water. Walking back down the corridor towards the sitting room, I was conscious only of the ultra-sonic whine of the television; until, that is, I reached the door:

‘Don’t bother.’ (A sob.)

‘Mr Evans. . are you in there?’

‘You don’t want me to touch you?’

‘ Go away. Just go away. . ’

‘It’s just that I feel a bit wound up. I get all stressed out during the day — you know that. I need a long time to wind down.’

‘Mr Evans, we have a court order that empowers us to take these children away.’

‘It’s not that — I know it’s not just that. You don’t fancy me any more, you don’t want to have sex any more. You’ve been like this for weeks.’

‘I don’t care if you’ve got the bloody Home Secretary out there. If you come in that door, I swear she gets it! ’

‘How do you expect me to feel like sex? Everything around here is so bloody claustrophobic. I can’t stand these little fireside evenings. You sit there all hunched up and fidgety. You bite your nails and smoke away with little puffs. Puff, puff, puff. It’s a total turn-off.’

( Smash! ) ‘Oh my God. For Christ’s sake! Oh Jesus. . ‘

‘I bite my nails and smoke because I don’t feel loved, because I feel all alone. I can’t trust you, John, not when you’re like this — you don’t seem to have any feeling for me.’

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t. I’m certainly fed up with all of this shit. . ‘

I left my bag in the room. I could come back for it tomorrow when John had gone to work. I couldn’t stand to listen — and I didn’t want to go back into the room and sit down with them again, crouch with them, like another vulture in the mouldering carcass of their relationship. I couldn’t bear to see them reassemble the uncommunicative blocks of that static silence. And I didn’t want to sleep in the narrow spare bed, under the child-sized duvet.

I wanted to be back with him. Wanted it the way a junky wants a hit. I yearned to be in that tippy, creaky boat of a bed, full of crumbs and sex and fag ash. I wanted to be framed by the basketry of angular shadows the naked bulb threw on the walls, and contained by the soft basketry of his limbs. At least we felt something for each other. He got right inside me — he really did. All my other relationships were as superficial as a salutation — this evening proved it. It was only with him that I became a real person.

Outside in the street the proportions were all wrong. The block of flats should have been taller than it was long — but it wasn’t. Damp leaves blew against, and clung to my ankles. I’d been sitting in front of the gas fire in the flat and my right-hand side had become numb with the heat. Now this wore off — like a pain — leaving my clammy clothes sticking to my clammy flesh.

I walked for a couple of hundred yards down the hill, then a stitch stabbed into me and I felt little pockets of gas beading my stomach. I was level with a tiny parade of shops which included a cab company. Suddenly I couldn’t face the walk to the tube, the tube itself, the walk back from the tube to his house. If I was going to go back to him I had to be there right away. If I went by tube it would take too long and this marvellous reconciliatory feeling might have soured by the time I arrived. And more to the point there might not be a relationship there for me to go back to. He was a feckless and promiscuous man, insecure and given to the grossest and most evil abuses of trust.

The jealous agony came over me again, covering my flesh like some awful hive. I leant up against a shopfront. The sick image of him entering some other. I could feel it so vividly that it was as if I was him: my penis snagging frustratingly against something. . my blood beating in my temples. . my sweat dripping on to her upturned face. . and then the release of entry. .

I pushed open the door of the minicab office and lurched in. Two squat men stood like bookends on either side of the counter. They were both reading the racing form. The man nearest to me was encased in a tube of caramel leather. He twisted his neckless head as far round as he could. Was it my imagination, or did his eyes probe and pluck at me, run up my thighs and attempt an imaginative penetration, rapid, rigid and metallic. The creak of his leather and the cold fug of damp, dead filter tips, assaulted me together.

‘D’jew want a cab, love?’ The other bookend, the one behind the counter, looked at me with dim-sum eyes, morsels of pupil packaged in fat.

‘Err. . yes, I want to go up to Islington, Barnsbury.’

‘George’ll take yer — woncha, George?’ George was still eyeing me around the midriff. I noticed — quite inconsequentially — that he was wearing very clean, blue trousers, with razor-sharp creases. Also that he had no buttocks — the legs of the trousers zoomed straight up into his jacket.

‘Yerallright. C’mon, love.’ George rattled shut his paper and scooped a packet of Dunhill International and a big bunch of keys off the counter. He opened the door for me and as I passed through I could sense his fat black heart, encased in leather, beating behind me.

He was at the back door of the car before me and ushered me inside. I squidged halfway across the seat before collapsing in a nerveless torpor. But I knew that I wouldn’t make it back to him unless I held myself in a state of no expectancy, no hope. If I dared to picture the two of us together again, then when I arrived at the house he would be out. Out fucking.