The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

by Will Self

  Richard thought it queer, but Ursula and Mearns seemed not to have noticed. He was telling her about the last time he'd smoked opium, with triplet thirteen-year-old prostitutes in Patpong. Richard could feel Ursula's ribs move against his when she sniggered. The fulsome aroma of Jicki was thick in the enclosed atmosphere. If there had been a Magic Tree car air-freshener that distilled the odour of Ursula, it would have been called ‘Fuck Fragrance’. Richard's cock was like an iron girder some pile-driver had rammed into his crotch. He tried to concentrate on what the driver was saying. It was a tale of courage, warmth and fortitude in the face of craven, cold brutality. The cabbie had been an air-force general. He had been befriended by Assad's brother. There had been high-living times in Switzerland. Tarts and Krug. The general had become disgusted by the decadence. He had fomented a coup. He'd ended up in jail for twelve years. Beaten on the feet. Beaten on the balls. Screwed up by his thumbs.

  The juxtaposition of this and the squealing, coked-up atmosphere that had prevailed among the clique since they left the Sealink was grotesque. Richard felt sickened. Bell went on nodding sympathetically. The cab oozed across town. As they stopped by the lights at the junction with Kingsland Road, Richard looked to his left to see, framed between the concrete stanchion of a bus stop and the quivering bum of a double-decker, a lingerie advert that featured a young woman of such astonishing, bursting pulchritude (her mons, her nipples straining, yet demure) that Richard feared for his trousers.

  But beyond the bus stop, in a door adrift with litter, sat a double amputee drinking a can of Enigma lager. Richard looked deep into the stumps levelled in his direction, capped off with leather stump-protectors. Or, as Richard thought to himself footless boots. He tried to imagine his cock amputated, a leather stump-protector grinding into his groin. He sensed his twanging erection subside a little. The cab oozed on.

  The two vehicles carrying Bell's clique arrived at Milligan Street, behind the Limehouse Causeway, at exactly the same time, and their occupants debouched into the windy road, Things had got drizzly in London – as they often do; a chilly, wet tongue of leaf blew against Richard's cheek. He looked up to see no tree, but the Legoland edifice of Canary Wharf looming overhead, its aircraft-warning beacon making a dim, provincial disco of the metropolitan night. Bell gave his account number to the cabbie, signed the clipboard where the formerly-screwed thumb indicated. Once Assad's failed assassin had driven off Richard said to Bell, ‘What did you think of that? Pretty amazing story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘About Assad, about Syria – what the cabbie was saying.’

  ‘Oh that – to be frank I wasn't paying much attention; I wanted to listen to tonight's show.

  There could be comeback over what I said about wassername.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That soap star.’

  Bell broke away from Richard and mounted the short flight of stairs to the door of the house in front of them. Richard turned to Ursula, who was coming up behind. ‘Did you hear what the cabbie was saying? Any of it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Assad, about torture?’ Richard couldn't believe that he was getting carried away like this, that he was attempting to pierce the superficial skin of the evening.

  ‘Yeah, some. Grisly, huh?’ Ursula groped in her bag for a cigarette. Her jaw worked, chewing the cocaine cud of nothing.

  ‘I should say so. It's awful to think of things like that happening in the world, and we just go on talking about nothing, doing nothing, just writing on the wallpaper. Doesn't it make you feel sick sometimes?’

  Ursula's jaw stopped working for a moment. She gave Richard a level stare. He looked into her eyes and saw there what he was always looking for: that she understood. That she really understood. That she knew this wasted go-round was just that; and that she – like Richard – had higher aspirations. Aspirations to a life that might appear dull, conventional, to Bell and his clique, but which was in fact full of love, security, trust – the important values. Ursula reached out a hand and gently rumpled Richard's blond curls. ‘You know what?’ she said.

  ‘W-what?’

  ‘You're sweet.’

  The old Chinaman who let them into the mouldering house seemed to be well known to Bell. He asked after the man's grandchildren, made reference to certain mutual business acquaintances. While this went on the rest of the clique remained backed up in the vestibule. Eventually they all shuffied on in. It was a warped, early-nineteenth-century house. At one time it would have been part of the old Limehouse rookery, a teeming, tri-dimensional dying space of interconnected alleys, courtyards and tenements; but now it stood alone, carved out from the past, teetering on the edge of the Docklands Enterprise Zone.

  The Chinaman led them through rooms that had not so much been decorated, as arrived naturally at a bewildering number of styles. Some were hung with Persian carpets, others had pop posters tacked on the walls, still more were strip-lit and tiled, like toilets or Moroccan cafes. Everywhere the atmosphere was dank, dilapidated; and everywhere there were people taking drugs. Two Iranians sat on phallic bolsters, moodily chasing the dragon; on a velveteen-covered divan a gaggle of giggling upper-class girls – as out of their element as gorillas in Regent's Park – were high on E, stroking each other's hair; and as the clique climbed the stairs, they passed two black guys smoking crack in a pipe made from a Volvic bottle. ‘I prefer Evian myself,’ Mearns sneered as they tromped by.

  ‘Whassit t'you, cunt?’ came back at him; but the speaker's companion muttered, ‘Safe, Danny,’ and they let it lie.

  Later, Richard could barely recall the actual opium-smoking. It had taken place in an attic room, the sloping ceiling forcing the cliquers into a series of staggered postures, from upright to crouched to supine. The Chinaman spawned a daughter – or granddaughter, or great-granddaughter – who looked about eleven, and who did the business of priming the pipe, passing it round, cleaning out the dross, repeating the operation.

  Richard glared at Ursula, who was allowing Bell to cup the back of her head and guide the pipe's thick stem into her mouth. The image had an awful implication. Richard concentrated on the cracked paint of the skirting board, the furring of dust on the lampshade. Outside in the street a dog was shouting at a barking drunk. The thick, sweet, organic smoke filled the room. Like agitated children being given a narcotic bedtime narrative, the cliquers were calmed as it did the rounds.

  Then, the black guy from the stairs crashed in, smacked Mearns in the mouth and ran out. There was less pandemonium than might have been expected. Bell exited the room and found the Chinaman, who in turn got hold of his minder, a big Maltese guy called Vince whose nose had been cut in half and badly sewn together again.

  The Chinaman ushered them all back down through the warren of rooms, with much solicitous cooing. Bell was saying ‘No matter . . . No matter . . .’ in such a way, Richard understood, as to make the Chinaman feel that it mattered a great deal, and that something had to be done.

  More cabs were waiting outside – someone must have used their mobile. The clique encabbed. As they pulled away from the house Richard saw the black guy. He was halfway down the area steps, and Vince appeared to be throttling him. Or perhaps – and the thought came to Richard as painfully as a sick bubble of gaseous indigestion squeezes between waist and band – Vince was making love to him, and cutting off his carotid artery as a means of inducing shattering orgasm.

  Then the Sealink again – the table-football room, to be precise. The club had bought an outsize table-football table from a paedophile member – of parliament. Now, the wannabe macho and the never gonnabe macho flexed their tethered cocks, yanked, biffed and slammed the balls. Taking up an unobtrusive position against one wall of the room, Richard got trapped behind two seats of agitated suit trousers, whose owners were – to all intents and purposes – psychically merged with the battered eight-inch figurines of cockless men that they manipulated.

  Bell was over by the bar, talking t
o Trellet, an influential, older-generation member of the clique. Trellet was a comic actor who had made quite dumb amounts of money by impersonating a bumbling, lovable paterfamilias in an endless sitcom. In fact,

  as soon as there was a wrap, Trellet's face collapsed from the expansively benign to the pettily vicious. In appearance not unlike a pocket-sized Robert Morley (circa Beat the Devil), Trellet was possessed of appetites as sluttish as Bell's, but with an added full twist of genuine perversion.

  Right now, Richard couldn't forbear from listening to them. As he did so his delicate ears, networked with the finest of bluest of veins, changed from the white-pink of shame to the deep, angry pink of impotence and anger. Trellet was telling two anecdotes with intersecting themes, which converged on his drive to humiliate anyone who crossed his path.

  The first anecdote featured an aristocratic girl, crazed by cocaine, whom Trellet had forced to lick kitchen tiling, lick herself, lick him – in order to get the merest lick of cocaine. The second was more in the manner of a revelation. Trellet – it was unfolded with nauseating aplomb – kept a Down's Syndrome adolescent mistress (this was dignifying it – obviously sex slave would have been nearer the truth), in a flat on the far side of Battersea Bridge. Trellet, jowls bunching, contorting with delight, gave details of domestic arrangements, and then more forced accommodations.

  Ursula Bentley leant against the banisters, a Venus in spangles, trails of her long, dark brown hair twining around her upper body, forming a growing bodice. The good thing about opium is that when you're on it only the things that matter, matter. Or so thought Richard as he gathered himself together, and made the supreme effort of not registering the fact that Trellet was extending visiting privileges – ‘You wouldn't believe it mate, her mouth's that sloppy, that gooey.’ Richard got upright. He walked around the table-football table to where Ursula stood, put a firm hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I'm going to get a cab now – perhaps you should let me get one for you as well?’

  He was as surprised as he would have been had she at that point brokered an IRA ceasefire when Ursula smiled and said, ‘Yes.’

  On the night of Mearns's greenmail party Richard ended up taking the cab all the way back to Ursula's flat in Kensington with her. She rumpled his curls once more, said he was ‘sweet’, pecked him near the cheek, and didn't demur when he suggested that they have lunch together at some unspecified time in the future. It wasn't until the cab pulled away that Richard realised he had only a tenner plus some change in his pocket. Ursula, typically, hadn't ventured a contribution, and he had no plastic or chequebook. The cabbie took him as far as Notting Hill before turfing him out, and Richard walked on from there.

  Walked on through a distempered ground mist, across the Portobello Road, and up past the Front Line, where even at this hour the crack-heads were gathered in knots of desperation on the corner by the bookie's, their eyes tracking the passing cars like the targeting laser beams of ground-to-crack missiles. Richard knew what they were, what they wanted. He identified with them more than they could ever possibly know.

  He reached Hornsey well after dawn, his body swathed in clashing, contrasting colours of narcosis: blue, red, purple; up, down, zigzag; but despite it all he still had the groin-borne horn, was still thinking about Ursula, imagining her in any number of poses and postures, naked, clothed, her limbs bent back, or even amputated – like the piss-head in the East End doorway – so as to aid more effective penetration. Yet when bed got to Richard, he found that he was spent with lust, that he could no longer either summon her up or contain himself After three strokes, he came like a beer belly spluttering in a pub toilet – great gouts of spunk that drenched his doll's-house duvet. Needless to say, he didn't make it in to Rendezvous later that morning.

  Autumn quit London, a transient, seasonal tourist clad in leaves of tan Burberry, and left the city behind to endure its own chill, its own immemorial, hibernatory dolour.

  Every dog has his day, and Richard Hermes succeeded the glove fetishist as the Preview Editor of Rendezvous. His new job accorded him some perks, including the speedy advancement of his candidature for election to the Sealink Club. It now took him only five, instead of fifteen, minutes to get a drink from Julius. He also moved further towards the eye, the howling vacuity, at the epicentre of Bell's clique. He was included as a matter of course in the phone rounds that preceded clique meetings. He was patronised and humiliated as much as the others – but no longer more so.

  On nights when he couldn't find the wherewithal, the energy, to meet them at this or that restaurant, or bar, or club, he would get calls from crackly mobiles: ‘Richard . . . Yah, it's me, Bell. We were just thinking that there's one thing really missing from the evening. Ursula's here and she's feeling a bit . . . I dunno . . . a bit overcome. She says she really just wants to see you – ‘

  ‘Really! Where are you?’

  ‘We're in this place . . . Slatter, what's this place?’ The sound of tittering, guffawing, no exchange of information that Richard's straining ear could detect, and then: ‘Yeah, it's a Greek j oint on the Finch – ‘ Then invariably the line would go dead, leaving Richard in hellish limbo, not knowing whether to go through the Yellow Pages looking for every correlation of ‘Greek restaurant’ and the single first syllable ‘Finch’, or simply to butt his head against the wall until unconsciousness, unconscious-of-Ursulaness, set in.

  And sometimes calls would come really late at night, at three, four, or five, after Richard had left Ursula at home (which he was now permitted to do – and pay for), or still out with the clique. He would be dreaming, chasing her along some Mediterranean strand, when the insistent trill would pull him back to the sweaty confines of his bed, yank him up, yank the receiver up – ‘y-yeah – who'ssat?’ – only for his ear to be met with the evil purr of the dialling tone, and, when he tried 1471, with the chilling, robotic information ‘You were called today at four-forty-five hours; sorry, we do not have the number . . .’ It was the ‘sorry’ that was the killer; for, if the recorded voice were truly sorry, it was the most sympathy that Richard had ever received for his predicament.

  Things got worse in some ways and better in others. The activities of Bell and his clique were as vicious, sophomoric and cynical as ever, but at the same time Richard's suit of Ursula was progressing, albeit at the pace of a snail on Tuinal. They had lunch together most weeks in a sandwich bar equidistant from her flat and the offices of Rendezvous. On these occasions her entire manner was different, she was the Ursula he wanted . . . he wanted . . . he wanted to make his wife. She preferred tuna and mayonnaise on brown bread, while he invariably had salami on rye.

  Gone was the terminal merriment of her evening self the louche demeanour, flash of leg, side of breast, whisper of pudenda. Gone was the coke fakeover, the lips red as ketchup, the eyes sparkling like crystals on a mirror. Gone too was that scent, that sweet, ineffable, seductive perfume. The one that Richard associated with her, as surely as he associated gravity with the earth. And with the scent gone she was more approachable, more girl-next-door than was altogether credible.

  She was skittish, coltish, vouchsafing little gobbets of her past, a past that was wholly charming to Richard, matching as it did his own in most respects: a father she loved, but felt distanced from by divorce; a mother whose influence she was still attempting to shake off; siblings who would come up to the city to enjoy her giddy round, and then berate her for her lack of conviction, application, seriousness. She and Richard would commiserate with each other, mull over each other's petty miseries and dissatisfactions. Richard would even discuss her latest column, without in any way averring – even to himself – that what she wrote had all the mondial impact of a used cotton bud falling on to a damp towel.

  But on these occasions Bell and the clique would never be mentioned, and when they met up again, that evening or the next in the bar of the Sealink, it would be neglect as usual. The same old brackish badinage, the same cruel jokes. And Ursula would behave
as if the lunches never took place, as if there was no link between the two worlds they now inhabited.

  There was also a further, more unsettling downside. As cold infiltrated the city, taking possession first of the foundations of the buildings, and then of successive storeys, working its way up until chill of earth and chill of sky effected union, so the press beanos, the book launches, the première parties reached new heights of purposeless frenzy. The members of the clique weren't simply having dinner with Pablo now, they were also having tea most days, lunch on some, and even the occasional, high-powered, breakfast meeting.

  This was because in early November the clique had acquired a new cocaine dealer, courtesy of Slatter. This individual was a Slatteralike, so dusted with ‘druff that it was hard not to imagine that some of his product had escaped its packagingto form an unorthodox mini-piste. But on the plus side, his tackle was always of the best – creamy white, rocky, unstepped on – and he turned up whenever and wherever, at the touch of a few rubberised buttons. So frequently, indeed, did Richard call upon the dealer's services (usually at Ursula's behest) that he soon ascended the ranking of frequent callers programmed into the dealer's mobile, until he was well up in the top ten of the snort parade.

  Richard was doing so much cocaine now that the numbers that should have been intaglioed into the back of his credit card were embossed, raised up like the word ‘POLO’ on the eponymous mint – only back to front. Richard was doing so much cocaine now that some mornings the rigid mucilage in his nostrils couldn't be shifted, even with a sharp nail and generous sluicings of salted warm water. He seriously considered going down to the mews garage at the end of his road and asking the surly mechanic there to rebore his nose to a higher calibre.