Grey Area

by Will Self

  Giselle had had more wine that she should. She was almost drunk. When she turned her head, from the bookcase to the men’s mulberry faces, from these faces to those of the animated women, her eyes followed on lazily, lurching against the insides of their sockets as if intoxicated in their own right.

  The voices burred and lowed. Giselle tried to imagine her hosts as cattle. They fitted the role well, set down on the field of carpet by the pools of wavering light, grazing on conversation.

  ‘You look ready to drop, Giselle.’ It was June, her voice maternal, gently concerned.

  ‘I’m, I’m sorry . . .?’

  ‘You’d better go up to bed, my dear, you’ll need a good night if you’re going to cope with Peter and his hangover in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, urn, s’pose so.’ Giselle struggled to her feet, the distance from the bottom of the low armchair to being upright was an Everest ascent.

  She said her good-nights. Peter and Henry barely interrupted their conversation, they just waved their glasses at her and made valedictory noises. The women were more polite.

  ‘I do hope you’ll be all right in the Rood Room,’ said June. ‘It can be a bit draughty.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure I will; please don’t worry.’

  As she tunnelled her way up through the house Giselle felt nothing but relief – relief to have escaped the adults. Even though she was going to bed, she might have been on her way to join the twins, who she could hear chattering and playing records in some mid-distanced room. But what Giselle really wanted was sleep. Sleep and dreams.

  In the Rood Room she felt her way gingerly around the shoulder-high screen and across the warped floorboards to the bed. She snapped on the bedside lamp and in that instant the whole space was defined with startling clarity, the Grunters jumbled together in jangling copulation on the screen, its penile coping writhing in the shadows, the plaster reliefs giving a serried leer.

  Giselle sat down heavily on the bed and absorbed the charge gathered in the room, the accumulated gasps of time. They bounced off the walls and came into her, nuzzling down into the warm pit off her lower belly. Giselle was shocked by the feeling – the immediacy of her lust. The Rood Room seemed to hold her like a lover, cupping her body within its own warm confines.

  Giselle had never had any real difficulties with sex. She had moved from riding ponies and horses to riding men and boys easefully, just going up on her sensual stirrups to absorb the shift from a merely physical trot to a psychic canter. But while she could will herself to climax, power herself up on to some kind of free-floating plateau, she knew that the constrictions of her upbringing still remained. Some way inside her, like a twist in a party balloon, they strangled abandon, choked off the flow of desire.

  If only someone like Peter Geddes – not Geddes himself, of course – but someone like him, someone who plaited the psychic with the physical into a rigid rope, could pull himself into her. Here, in the Rood Room, her orange candle lit and pulsing soft light over the curved ceiling, Giselle could dare to imagine such a possibility – it coming and lancing into her, a naked libertine will, imploding from the noumenal realm into the phenomenal body of her world.

  Outside the night insects scratched their legs, as Giselle caressed her own. She ran her palms up from her knees, snagging and then furling back the material of her skirt, conscious of it as a curtain being raised on a living puppet show; her hands – the players – descended from the boards of her belly to the pit of lust.

  Her fingernails snagged at the rubber-band waist of her tights. She peeled them off, together with her pants. The warm coil was dropped by the side of the bed. It was the same with her blouse and her bra. She removed them with the hands of another person. It was the hands that made love to her, the hands that grasped her buttocks and pitched Giselle’s body back against the headboard. They whooshed around her breasts, pulling the nipples out to precise points of sensation. They moulded her body with worshipful art, as if it were a wet gobbet of clay being shaped into a votary statue of a fertility goddess.

  From the other time of the twins’ room, Giselle could faintly hear and dimly recognise the chanting of a current hit: ‘Doo-wa yi, yi, yi, dooo-waaa. Yeah-yeah, mm-m-, yeah-yeah.’ The painted Grunters flexed their Hanna-Barbera bodies in time to the music, while the foreign fingers – wet now with a gastronome’s delight – picked at tit-bits of Giselle.

  When she came it was with a hot flush. So much so, that as she lay on the disordered bed Giselle could almost imagine that she saw steam rising from the juncture of her thighs.

  Downstairs Peter Geddes was pissed. The Beckwoods had long gone, and with them the necessity for the propriety performance that masks unhappiness for the well-bred English family.

  June and Peter had reverted to their intimate selves, their rude selves, their hateful and hating selves. The fresh start they had made that morning, the honest attempt to use happy memories as scaffolding for a brave new marital building, had subsided into the churned-up mud of the present.

  June was in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher when Peter’s pencilled doodles on the table caught her eye. She went over and peered down at them. This is what she saw:

  p(M) ∀m(F)j →p(F)j

  T T F

  F T F

  T F F

  She wiped it out with a sweep of her damp J-cloth, and called into the next room, ‘You’re not free any more, Peter!’

  ‘Whassat?’ His burning brow poked round the doorjamb.

  ‘You’re not free any more.’

  ‘Whyssat?’ he slurred.

  ‘Because I’ve obliterated your stupid truth table. You’re always saying that the truth about the world is a revealed thing. Well now it’s unrevealed. In fact, it’s gone altogether.’ She was at the sink. Scraping filaments of veal from the dinner plates with horrid knife squeals.

  ‘Oh no, June, you shouldn’t have done that, really you shouldn’t . . .’ Peter was genuinely distressed. He staggered across to the table. In the overhead lighting of the kitchen his drunkenness was even more apparent. ‘June, June . . . That was the matrix, the functional cradle that contains us both. Now it’s gone . . . Well, I don’t know, I just don’t know . . .’ and in concerto with his voice trailing away, his pudgy finger trailed across the damp surface. He raised it up to his brimming eyes and contemplated the greyish stain on its pad – all that was left of his freedom.

  June slammed the door of the dishwasher. She was, Peter reflected with the hackneyed heaviness of the drunk, even more beautiful when she was angry. ‘Right! That’s it. I’m not going to listen to this maudlin drivel all night, I’m going to bed. I would suggest you do the same instead of sitting downstairs until 5 a. m., the way you did when Henry and Caitlin last came over. Honestly, chucking back brandy and listening over and over to the Siegfried Idyll.

  ‘Half of your waking life you seem to think that you’re wearing a horned helmet and sitting with the gods in Valhalla, not sporting a greasy mop of thinning hair and drunkenly slumped in your family-fucking-home in Notting-bloody-hamshire.’ With that she departed, stamping up the stairs.

  For a couple of minutes after she had left the kitchen Peter did nothing. He just swayed back and forth, listening to the gurgling of alcohol in his brain, heavy oil slopping in a rusty sump. Then he summoned himself and dabbing at the light switch with his numb hand managed to kill the lights. He went next door to the sitting room and with great deliberation turned on the record player, selected an album from the old-fashioned free-standing rack that stood by it, and put it on.

  As Wagner’s billowing orchestration filled the room, Peter subsided into an armchair. He spilt a few measures of brandy on to his trousers, but three more managed to hit the tumbler. These he chucked down. The music swelled to fill the space, lowering like a heliotrope grizzly bear. Peter poured himself another brandy, then another and then a fourth.

  Some time later he was truly drunk, orbiting his own consciousness in a tiny capsule of awareness t
hat was shooting backwards at speed. He watched, awed, as the dawn of his own sentience sped away from him towards the great slashed crescent of the horizon. Then the toxic confusional darkness came upon him, swallowing him entirely.

  The synaptic gimbals had been unslung and Peter’s splendidly meticulous gyroscope of ratiocination fell to the jungly floor of his id. He rose and did not know that he did so. He went to the record player and snapped it off – not knowing that he did so. He quit the room. Standing in the misshapen vestibule, the oddly angled point of entry to this disordered household, the philosopher stared into an old mirror – not knowing that he did so.

  From out of the mirror there loomed the face of a Grunter. It was dead white, shaped by the utter foreignness of the distant past. The Civil War recusant looked at Peter for a while and then slid away into the mirror’s bevelled edge. Peter’s head shook itself – hard. His body felt the painful anticipation of the morning and took its mind upstairs.

  In the Rood Room Giselle lay in a deep swoon. After climaxing she had relapsed thus, and gone to sleep with the twins’ pop records still sounding in her ears. But the twins were now asleep as well, and her fine body was still banked up on top of the disordered covers, forming cumulus piles of sweet flesh. A beam of starlight fell across her upper thighs, then extended itself towards the rood screen, where it illuminated the central panel, which depicted five Grunters in a loose bundle of copulation, a fasces of fornication.

  Giselle was gorgeous, the fullness of her refulgent in the silvery light. Her auburn pubic hair glowing as if lit from within. Her breath disturbed her breast, only just sufficiently to reinforce the impression that she was an artist’s model trapped since the Regency in suspended inanimation.

  There was a creaking from the corridor, a groaning of larynx and wood. The door squealed on its hinges and Peter Geddes’s brandy golem entered the Rood Room.

  Giselle awoke at once and sat up. The diamond light from the window was scattered across his brow – outsize spangles. The incubus rubbed at them carelessly. She didn’t need to ask who it was, she could see that immediately. She shifted herself back under the covers, adroitly, as if inserting a sliver of ham into a half-eaten sandwich.

  ‘D-Doctor Geddes, is that you?’

  ‘Please,’ said the incubus, his voice clear now, unslurred, ‘call me Peter.’ And then he went on, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I must have taken the wrong turning at the top of the stairs. Quite easy to do, y’know – even after many lifetimes’ residence.’

  ‘Th-that’s OK – are you all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks – and you?’ He had turned away from her now and was confronting the rood screen. ‘Not finding it too hard to sleep in this strange old place?’ His voice came to her now as it had done in tutorials, focused, crisply edged by intellect. His outstretched hand traced the line of a Grunter back, in the same way she remembered it tracing the sinuous connectives of his scrawled logical formulae.

  As if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the incubus then moved away from the rood screen and towards where Giselle lay.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down for a moment?’ he said, looking down at her.

  ‘No, not at all.’ The words pooted from her kissable lips, inappropriate little farts of desire. The incubus sat, inhabiting the warm vacant V between the ranges of Giselle’s calves and thighs. He canted round, his unfocused eyes squeezing their watery gaze into the dilation of her pupils.

  ‘If it wasn’t such a trite remark,’ the incubus quipped, ‘I would tell you how vitally lovely you are at this precise moment – right now.’ He bent to kiss her, her urge to resist was as insubstantial as the air that escaped from between their marrying bodies.

  His hands unwrapped the covers, her hands unfurled his woolly bunting, until they lay, two tubby people, damp with desire, in the heat of an English summer night.

  He kissed her clavicle – the pit of it neatly fitted the trembling ball of his tongue. He tasted the salt of her skin as he ice-cream-licked the whole of her upper body, lapping her up. His face went down on her trembling belly and his hands cupped first her round face, then her round shoulders and lastly her rounded breasts. Cupped and kneaded, cupped and kneaded.

  To her, the incubus and his touch were more than a release. She couldn’t have said why – for she had no reason left now – but he was beautiful. His pendulous belly, his bow legs, the scurf on his high forehead, the stubble on his jowls, all of it moved her. She grasped the flesh on his back, feeling moles like seeds beneath her palms; she worked at them to cultivate still more of his lust.

  The mouth of the incubus was presently in her pubic hair, the tip of his tongue describing ancient arabesques and obscure theurgical symbols on her mons, the deep runnels of her groin, the babyflesh of her inner thighs. The incubus drew in a gout of the urine and mucous smell of her, and savoured it noisily, as if it were the nose of some particularly rambuncious Burgundy.

  Then his horizontal lips were firmly bracketing her vertical ones, his hands were under her, holding her by the apex of her buttocks, and he ate into her, worried at the very core of her, as if she were some giant watermelon that he must devour to assuage an unquenchable thirst.

  Later still the incubus addressed her with the incontrovertible fact of his penis. Entered into her with the logical extension of himself. She was curled up like a copula, a connective, her kneecaps almost in her eye sockets, as he placed himself on top of her. And Giselle went into him, went out of herself, travelled over the curved roof. The incubus was lancing into her from out of that other realm – he was pure, ineffable will, freeing her up with each stroke, dissolving her corporeal self.

  His tongue was in her mouth, marauding around the back of her throat. His penis was in her vagina, knocking forcefully at the mouth of her cervix. The shadows of the phalluses on top of the rood screen fell across both their bodies, tiger-striping them in the luminous darkness. The Grunters stared down at the wreckless, wrecking bodies with gnostic inappetency.

  She came; and the incubus yanked her up in her orgasm, hooking her higher by the pubic bone, until she span in giddy baroque loops and twirls – pain for pleasure and pleasure for pain. Her cries, her groans, her molar-grinds, all were grace notes, useless embroideries on the fact of her abandonment. ‘S-s-s-sorry!’ It was almost a scream; this remembering, even at the point of no return, the refinements of her upbringing.

  They lay in each other’s arms for a while, but only a short one. Then the incubus, kissing her to stay silent, departed. Some while afterwards Giselle heard the sound of a shower pattering in a distant bathroom.

  The following morning Giselle went downstairs knowing that this could be the hardest entrance of her life. She had no idea how Peter Geddes was going to play it. His lovemaking the night before had been so demonic, so intense. It had beached her on the nightmare coast of the dreamland. Would he acknowledge what had passed between them in some way? Would he already have confessed to his wife? Would she find herself back at Grantham station within the hour, her vacation job over and her academic career seriously compromised?

  Peter and June were altercating in the kitchen of their ugly house as Giselle appeared at the bottom of the stairway.

  ‘Honestly, Peter.’ The gardener was even more beautiful this morning, her long blonde hair loose in a sheaf around her shoulders. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, getting pissed like that on a weekday. What’s Giselle’ – she gestured towards the guilty research assistant – ‘going to think of this household?’

  Peter dropped the upper edge of his Guardian and looked straight into those guilty eyes. Looked forthrightly and yet distantly. Looked at her, Giselle realised with a shock, as if she were a member of some other species. He said – and there was no trace of duplicity or guile in his voice, ‘Sleep well, Giselle? Hope Richard and I didn’t disturb you during the night?’

  ‘R-Richard?’

  ‘He means Wagner,’ said June, placing a large willow-patterned
plate of eggs and bacon on the table. ‘He always plays Wagner when he gets pissed – thinks it’s romantic or something. Silly old fool.’ She rumpled Peter’s already rumpled hair with what passed for affection, then went on, ‘Here’s your breakfast, Giselle, better eat it while it’s hot.’

  ‘Oh, er . . . sorry, thanks.’ Giselle sat down.

  Peter rattled his paper to the next page. He was feeling pretty ghastly this morning. I really oughtn’t, he mused internally, get quite that drunk. I’m not as young as I used to be, not as resilient. Still, lucky the old autopilot’s so efficient, can’t remember a thing after putting on the Idyll . . . He glanced up from the paper and felt the eyes of his research assistant on him, full of warm love. Silly girl, thought Peter wryly.

  Difficult to imagine why but she must fancy me or something. His eyes went to the straining spinnakers of her contented bosoms. Still, she is a handsome beast . . . pity that I’m not free – in a way.

  Appendix

  Peter Geddes’s Truth Table

  p(M) ∀m(F)j p(F)j

  T T F

  F T F

  T F F

  or:

  Peter is a man. All men want to fuck June. Therefore Peter wants to fuck June.

  T = the truth of a component or concluding proposition.

  F = the falsity of a component or concluding proposition.

  Scale

  Prologue

  (to be spoken in conversational tones)

  The philosopher Freddie Ayer was once asked which single thing he found most evocative of Paris. The venerable logical positivist thought for a while, and then answered, ‘A road sign with “Paris” written on it.’

  Kettle

  Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale. Arriving home from London late last night, I found myself unable to judge the distance from the last exit sign for Junction 4 to the slip road itself. Granted it was foggy and the bright headlights of oncoming vehicles burned expanding aureoles into my view, but there are three white-bordered, oblong signs, arranged sequentially to aid people like me.