Will Self: Grey Area

It is a rare thing nowadays to be commissioned to write any short fiction at all, so my thanks go to Tony Peake who asked me to write ‘Incubus’, for the Serpent’s Tail anthology Seduction, and who arranged the commissioning of ‘The Indian Mutiny’ for the Constable anthology Winter’s Tales. Maria Lexton commissioned ‘A Short History of the English Novel’ for the Time Out Book of London Short Stories, and subsequently also published it in Time Out. Bill Buford ran a much abridged version of ‘Scale’ in Granta, although the piece was originally commissioned by Martin Jaques for a limited pictorial edition. All the other stories were written with this collection in mind.

Thanks are due to Sarah Milwidski who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript at a crucial juncture, to Liz Calder, Mary Tomlinson and all at Bloomsbury; and of course to Ed Victor and Morgan Entrekin for keeping the faith.

W.W.S., Suffolk 1994

There are only eight people in London and fortunately I am one of them.

Of course, when I make that statement I don’t mean to be taken literally — heaven forbid! And what would be worse still, I shouldn’t want you to think that I’m a snob of any kind. To discriminate between people on the basis of birth is inimical to me, always has been. I simply couldn’t engage in that sort of conceit.

I can declare with some authority that there simply isn’t a snobbish bone in my entire body. If there was I would feel quite confident that the good egalitarian tissue encasing it would tense up, like the lining of a chomping mouth, and spit the slimy thing out without more ado. There you have it in a nutshell: I should sooner be filleted than have it thought by you that I wish to elevate myself in some spurious, unmerited fashion.

But all of this being noted, the fact does remain that there are only eight people in London. Eight people who count, that is. Eight people who matter. I still find it strange to say this. It is so very strange to imagine, for example, that someone like Dooley — funny that his name should occur quite so readily — counts for anything at all. Even to some-long, lost great-niece, or old army mate, what could the likes of Dooley possibly represent, save for an embarrassment? Even his family — I know that he had one, at one time — must have felt that being closely related to Dooley was like being trapped next to someone on a long plane flight, and having them force a glancing acquaintance into intimacy.

Furthermore Dooley smells. Of that much I am certain. Not that I know exactly where he lives, but I have narrowed it down to a particular grid of Victorian artisans’ cottages in Lower Clapton, I can picture him in one of these ticky-tacky rabbit warrens readily enough. But I don’t so much see him as scent him, reclining on a broken-down day bed, with layer after layer of urine-damp underwear compressed between his jaundiced arse and the worn nap of an old army blanket. I can guess as well that, all around him, resting on tables and chairs, the tops of heaters, the mantelpiece and the floor, there will be pots of prescription drugs: sedatives, hypnotics, tranquillisers. For Dooley is a neurotic of the old school. He wouldn’t be able to survive without such gross nostrums.

Of course, the reason why I don’t know exactly where Dooley lives is because I don’t want to. I don’t want to know the precise location of any of them. Some might say that this is because I want to hold fast to my cherished illusion. But what does this illusion amount to really? That at such-and-such a time I might choose to see myself as a little more than an equal? A third amongst eight, rather than simply as one of eight? Well, why not? I’ve never ever attempted to elevate myself above Lady Bob or the Recorder, but, by the same token, I’ll never concede an iota of distinction to Lechmere, Colin Purves or the Bollam sisters. They could all rot in hell before I would give any one of them the satisfaction of believing that I think them quality.

And, of course, it’s the same for them. I know — it’s crazy. Crazy that the Bollam sisters — these virtually psychotic twins from St Nevis who sit all day, every day, in a Streatham bedsit knitting dolls of ‘the Redeemer’, and who share a bizarre kind of joint mind (speaking in unison, prescience and so forth) — should despite everything feel capable of being slighted socially! As if anyone would ever invite those two to any social function whatsoever. A turkey-pluckers’ whist drive is as elevated and rarefied, in respect of the Bollam sisters, as one of Lady Bob’s soirées would be for Dooley.

Yet, that being noted, it is an index of just how repugnant everything Dooley does is that even these two weirdo, humanoid knitting machines are still concerned to distance themselves from him.

So it goes on. We all tiptoe around one another, dancing our little dance, the two-step of arrogance and conceit. One of us will orchestrate a calculated snub, and then the rest of us will respond. There will be a rapprochement, an olive branch offered by one or perhaps two of us. A new clique will be constructed on the basis of mutually assured destruction.

We believe in it at the time. Believe that this collusion of interests is for ever, as thick as family blood that has coagulated over centuries. Yet invariably it will all be picked away at within days, weeks at the outside, creating a ragged, exposed patch, a new area of potential healing.

Just occasionally these manoeuvres will get something like serious. There’s a particular L-shaped axis of cliquishness that is dangerous. It begins with the Bollam sisters, snags in Lechmere — the insipid, compliant dunderhead — and then. . and then (and you really would have thought that this would immediately act as a limpet mine planted on the very hull of their social ambition). . the three of them start extending their feelers towards Dooley. Dooley! What a joke, what a sick bloody joke!

To think of it, the Bollam sisters’ people, many thousands of them — at least 150,000 individuals would be required — approaching Dooley’s people at cocktail parties, union meetings, in bars and restaurants. Then, figuratively speaking, offering up to Dooley’s lot the baboon’s arse of acknowledged inferiority, in some crude way that even Dooley’s people can understand. 147,000 invitations here, 270,000 confidences there, a myriad fatuous compliments in the middle. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand of Lechmere’s people will be deployed as well, to write grovel letters or open doors.

It should be funny, because they haven’t a hope in hell of achieving anything. The minute they start deploying their people like this they drag them down to Dooley’s level, rather than yanking his sots, moochers and social-security claimants up to theirs. But what I don’t find funny at all is the way that this appears to place Colin Purves and me in some sort of clubbable relation to one another. Not that I dislike Colin Purves: in his own way he has a certain — albeit narrow — sympathy. It’s just that his more rentier character-traits make him utterly and incontrovertibly unsuitable company for someone of Lady Bob’s breeding.

What little progress I have made with Lady Bob over the years would be shot to pieces if she were to suspect that Colin Purves and I were anything more than acquaintances. Not that she would do anything crass — like have her people actively cut my people. It’s just that I can imagine — visualise even — the tiny individual crystals of hoar frost that would begin to coalesce around her sense of froideur towards me. She is that subtle and refined a person.