Grey Area

by Will Self

  The Ascent

  ‘Affected as well as asinine’ TLS

  Some of my innovations regarding the new genre of ‘Motorway Verse’ have been poorly received, both by the critics and by the reading public. My claim, that what my motorway verse is trying to do represents a return to the very roots of poetas, an inspired attempt to link modish hermeneutics to the original function of oral literature, has been dismissed sans phrase.

  I myself cannot even understand the thrust of this criticism. It seems to me self-evident that the subconscious apprehension of signs by motorway drivers is exactly analogous to that act whereby the poets of primitive cultures give life, actually breathe reality into the land.

  Taking the M40 as an example of this:

  Jnctn 1. Uxbridge. Jnctn 1A. (M25) M4.

  Jnctn 2. Slough A365. No Services.

  On M40 . . .

  would be a very believable sample of such a ‘signing up’ of the country. Naturally, in order to understand the somewhat unusual scansion, it is necessary that readers imaginatively place themselves in a figurative car that is actually driving up the aforementioned motorway. Metrical feet are, therefore, to be determined as much by feeling through the pedals the shift from macadamised to concrete surfaces, and by hearing the susurration produced by alterations in the height and material construction of the crash barrier, as by the rhythm of the words themselves.

  Furthermore, a motorway verse that attempts to describe the ascent of the Chiltern scarp from the Oxfordshire side will, of course, be profoundly different to one that chronicles the descent from Junction 5 (Stokenchurch) to Junction 6 (Watlington). For example:

  Crawling, crawling, crawling. Crawler Lane

  Slow-slow O’Lorry-o. Lewknor. 50 mph max.

  11T! Narrow lanes, narrowing, narr-o-wing, na-rro-wing.

  as opposed to:

  F’tum. F’tum. F’tum.

  Kerchunk, kerchunk (Wat-ling-ton) . . .

  Well, I’m certain no one reading this had any difficulty in divining which was which!

  On the Continent they are not afflicted by the resistance to the modern that so entirely characterises English cultural life. In France, ‘Vers Péage’ is a well-respected genre, already making its way on to university syllabuses. Indeed I understand that a critical work is soon to be published that concerns itself solely with the semantic incongruities presented by the term ‘soft vierge’.

  It has occurred to me that it could be my introduction of motorway symbology itself, as if it were an extension of the conventional alphabet, that has hardened the hearts of these penny-ante time-servers, possessors of tenure (but no grip), and the like. But it seems to me that the white arrow pointing down, obliquely, to the right; the ubiquitous ‘11T’ lane-closing ideogram; the emotive, omega-like, overhead ‘[X]’; and many many others all have an equal right to be considered capable of meaningful combination with orthodox characters.

  On bad days, days when the tedium and obscurity of my life here at Beaconsfield seem almost justified, I am embarrassed to say that I console myself with the thought that there may be some grand conspiracy, taking in critics, publishers, editors and the executives in charge of giant type-founders such as Monotype, to stop my verse from gaining any success. For, were it to do so, they would have to alter radically the range of typefaces that they provide.

  Is it any wonder that I look for consolation – partly in draughts of sickly morphine syrup (drunk straight off the top of bottles of kaolin and morphine), and partly in hard, dedicated work on my motorway saga, entitled From Birmingham to London and Back Again Delivering Office Equipment, with Nary a Service Centre to Break the Monotony?

  There’s that, and there’s also the carving of netsuke, at which I am becoming something of an expert. I have chosen to concentrate on rendering in ivory the monumental works of modern sculptors. Thus, I have now completed a set of early Caros and Henry Moores, all of which could be comfortably housed in a pup tent.

  The ebb and flow of my opiate addiction is something that I have come to prize as a source of literary inspiration. When I am beginning a new habit, my hypnagogic visions are intricate processions of images that I can both summon and manipulate at will. But when I am withdrawing, I am frequently plunged into startling nightmares. Nightmares that seem to last for eons and yet of which I am conscious – at one and the same time – as taking place within a single REM.

  Last night’s dream was a classic case of this clucking phenomenon. In it, I found myself leaving the bungalow and entering the precincts of the model village. I wandered around the forty-foot-long village green, admiring the precision and attention to detail that the model makers have lavished on their creation. I peeked first into the model butcher’s shop. Lilliputian rashers of bacon were laid out on plastic trays, together with sausages, perfect in every respect, but the size of mouse droppings. Then I sauntered over to the post office. On the eight-inch-high counter sat an envelope the size of a postage stamp. Wonder of wonders, I could even read the address on the envelope. It was a poll-tax demand, destined for me.

  Straightening up abruptly I caught sight of two model buildings that I was unfamiliar with. The first of these was a small, but perfectly formed, art gallery. Looking through the tall windows I could see, inside, on the polished wooden floor, a selection of my netsuke. The Caros rather than the Moores. Preposterous, I thought to myself, with one of those leaps of dream logic; a real village of this size would never have an art gallery. Let alone one exhibiting the works of an internationally renowned sculptor.

  The second building was my own bungalow. I couldn’t be certain of this – it is after all not that remarkable an edifice – until I had looked in through the kitchen window. There, under the dirty cream melamine work surface surrounding the aluminium sink, I could see hundreds of little kaolin and morphine bottles, serried in dusty ranks. That settled it.

  As soon as I had clapped eyes on them, I found myself miraculously reduced in size and able to enter the model bungalow. I wandered from room to room, more than a little discomfited at my phantasmagoric absorption into Beaconsfield’s premier visitor attraction. Stepping on to the sun porch I found another model – as it were, a model model. Also of the bungalow. Once again I was diminished and able to enter.

  I must have gone through at least four more of these vertiginous descents in scale before I was able to stop, and think, and prevent myself from examining another model bungalow. As it was I knew that I must be standing in a sun porch for which a double-glazing estimate would have to be calculated in angstroms. From the position I found myself in, to be 002 scale would have been, to me, gargantuan. How to get back? That was the problem.

  It is fortunate indeed that in my youth I spent many hours tackling the more difficult climbs around Wastdale Head. These rocky scrambles, although close to the tourist tramps up the peaks of Scafell Pike and Helvellyn, are nevertheless amongst the most demanding rock climbs in Europe.

  It took me three months to ascend, back up the six separate stages of scale, and reach home once more. Some of the pitches, especially those involving climbing down off the various tables the model bungalows were placed on, I would wager were easily the most extreme ever attempted by a solo climber. On many occasions, I found myself dangling from the rope I had plaited out of strands of carpet underlay, with no apparent way of regaining the slick varnished face of the table leg, and the checkerboard of lino – relative to my actual size – some six hundred feet below.

  Oh, the stories I could tell! The sights I saw! It would need an epic to contain them. As it is I have restrained myself – although, on awakening, I did write a letter to the Alpine Club on the ethics of climbers, finding themselves in such situations, using paper clips as fixed crampons.

  The final march across the ‘true’ model village to my bungalow was, of course, the most frightening. When contained within the Russian-doll series of ever diminishing bungalows, I had been aware that the ordinary laws of nature were, to some ext
ent, in abeyance. However, out in the village I knew that I was exposed to all the familiar terrors of small-scale adventuring: wasps the size of zeppelins, fluff-falls the weight of an avalanche, mortar-bomb explosions of plant spore, and so on and so forth.

  My most acute anxiety, as I traversed the model village, was that I would be sighted by a human. I was aware that I could not be much larger than a sub-atomic particle, and as such I would be subject to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Were I to be in any way observed, not only might I find the direction of my journey irremediably altered, I could even cease to exist altogether!

  It happened as I picked my way over the first of the steps leading up from the village to my bungalow. The very grain of the concrete formed a lunar landscape which I knew would take me days to journey across. I wiped the sweat that dripped from my sunburnt brow. Something vast, inconceivably huge, was moving up ahead of me. It was a man! To scale! He turned, and his turning was like some geological event, the erosion of a mountain range or the undulation of the Mohorovicic Discontinuity itself!

  It was one of the maintenance men who works in the model village. I knew it because, emblazoned across the back of his blue boiler suit, picked out in white as on a motorway sign, was the single word ‘MAINTENANCE’. His giant eye loomed towards me, growing bigger and bigger, until the red-and-blue veins that snaked across the bilious ball were as the Orinoco or the Amazon, to my petrified gaze. He blinked – and I winked out of existence.

  I don’t need to tell you that when I awoke sweating profusely, the covers twisted around my quaking body like a strait-jacket, I had no difficulty at all in interpreting the dream.

  To the Bathroom

  ‘Like, we’re considering the historic present – ?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And David says, “I want to go to the bathroom.”’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, like we all accompany him there and stuff. Cos in his condition it wouldn’t like be a . . . be a –’

  ‘Good idea for him to be alone?’

  ‘Yeah, thassit. So we’re standing there, right. All four of us, in the bathroom, and David’s doing what he has to do. And we’re still talking about it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The historic present. Because Diane – you know Diane?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Well, she says the historic present is, like . . . er . . . like, more emotionally labile than other tenses. Yeah, thass what she says. Anyways, she’s saying this and David is, like, steaming, man . . . I mean to say he’s really plummeting. It’s like he’s being de-cored or something. This isn’t just Montezuma’s revenge, it’s everyone’s revenge. It’s the revenge of every deracinated group of indigenes ever to have had the misfortune to encounter the European. It’s a sort of collective curse of David’s colon. It’s like his colon is being crucified or something.’

  ‘He’s anally labile.’

  ‘Whadjewsay?’

  ‘He’s anally labile.’

  Labile, labile. Labby lips. Libby-labby lips. This is the kind of drivel I’ve been reduced to. Imaginary dialogues between myself and a non-existent interlocutor. But is it any surprise? I mean to say, if you have a colon as spastic as mine it’s bound to insinuate itself into every aspect of your thinking. My trouble is I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t. If I don’t drink vast quantities of kaolin and morphine I’m afflicted with the most terrifying bouts of diarrhoea. And if I do – drink a couple of bottles a day, that is – I’m subject to the most appalling undulations, seismic colonic ructions. It doesn’t really stop the shits either. I still get them, I just don’t get caught short. Caught short on the hard shoulder, that’s the killer.

  Say you’re driving up to High Wycombe, for example. Just out on a commonplace enough errand. Like going to buy a couple of bottles of K&M. And you’re swooping down towards Junction 3, the six lanes of blacktop twisting away from you like some colossal wastepipe, through which the automotive crap of the metropolis is being voided into the rural septic tank, when all of a sudden you’re overcome. You pull over on to the hard shoulder, get out of the car, and squat down. Hardly dignified. And not only that, destructive of the motorway itself. Destructive of the purity of one’s recollection.

  That’s why I prefer to stay home in my kaolin-lined bungalow. I prefer to summon up my memories of the motorway in the days before I was so afflicted. In the days when my vast roman-fleuve was barely a trickle, and my sense of scale was intact. Then, distance was defined by regular increments, rather than by the haphazard lurch from movement to movement.

  This morning I was sitting, not really writing, just dabbling. I was hunkered down inside myself, my ears unconsciously registering the whisper, whistle and whicker of the traffic on the M40, when I got that sinking feeling. I hied me to the bathroom, just in time to see a lanky youth disappearing out of the window, with my bathroom scales tucked under his arm.

  I grabbed a handful of his hip-length jacket and pulled him back into the room. He was a mangy specimen. His head was badly shaven, with spirals of ringworm on the pitted surface. The youth had had these embellished with crude tattoos, as if to dignify his repulsive skin condition. His attire was a loose amalgam of counter-cultural styles, the ragged chic of a redundant generation. His pupils were so dilated that the black was getting on to his face. I instantly realised that I had nothing to fear from him. He didn’t cry out, or even attempt to struggle.

  I had seen others like him. There’s quite a posse of them, these ‘model heads’. That’s what they call themselves. They congregate around the model village, venerating it as a symbol of their anomie. It’s as if, by becoming absorbed in the detail of this tiny world, they hope to diminish the scale of society’s problems. In the winter they go abroad, settling near Legoland in Belgium.

  ‘Right, you,’ I said, in householder tones. ‘You might have thought that you’d get away with nicking something as trivial as those bathroom scales, but it just so happens that they have a sentimental value for me.’

  ‘Whadjergonna do then?’ He was bemused – not belligerent.

  ‘I’m going to put you on trial, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘You’re not gonna call the filth, are you?’

  ‘No, no. No need. In Beaconsfield we have extended the whole principle of Neighbourhood Watch to include the idea of neighbourhood justice. I will sit in judgment on you myself. If you wish, my court will appoint a lawyer who will organise your defence.’

  ‘Err – ‘ He had slumped down on top of the wicker laundry basket, which made him look even more like one of Ali Baba’s anorectic confreres. ‘Yeah, OK, whatever you say.’

  ‘Good. I will represent you myself. Allow me, if you will, to assume my position on the bench.’ We shuffled around each other in the confinement of tiles. I put the seat down, sat down, and said, ‘The court may be seated.’

  For a while after that nothing happened. The two of us sat in silence, listening to the rising and falling flute of the Vent-Axia. I thought about the day the court-appointed officer had come to deliver my decree nisi. He must have been reading the documents in the car as he drove up the motorway, because when I encountered him on the doorstep he was trying hard – but failing – to suppress a smirk of amusement.

  I knew why. My wife had sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The co-respondent was known to her, and the place where the adultery had taken place was none other than on these selfsame scales. The ones the model head had just attempted to steal. At that time they were still located in the bathroom of our London house. After the decree absolute, my ex-wife sent them to me in Beaconsfield, together with a caustic note.

  It was a hot summer afternoon in the bathroom. I was with a lithe young foreign woman, who was full of capricious lust. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s do it on the scales. It’ll be fun, we’ll look like some weird astrological symbol, or a diagram from the Kama Sutra.’ She twisted out of her dress and pulled off her und
erwear. I stood on the scales. Even translated from metric to imperial measure, my bodyweight still looked unimpressive. She hooked her hands around my neck and jumped. The flanges of flesh on the inside of her thighs neatly fitted the notches above my bony hips. I grasped the fruit of her buttocks in my sweating palms. She braced herself, feet against the wall, toenails snagging on the Artex. Her panting smoked the mirror on the medicine cabinet. I moved inside her. The coiled spring inside the scales squeaked and groaned. Eventually it broke altogether.

  That’s how my wife twigged. When she next went to weigh herself she found the scales jammed, the pointer registering 322 lb. Exactly the combined weight of me and the family au pair . . .

  Oh, mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! What a fool I was! Now fiery hands retributively mangle my innards! The demons play upon my sackbut and I am cast into the fiery furnace of evacuation. I am hooked there, a toilet duck, condemned for ever to lick under the rim of life!

  The model head snapped me out of my fugue. ‘You’re a Libra,’ he said, ‘aren’t you?’

  ‘Whassat?’

  ‘Your sign. It’s Libra, innit?’ He was regarding me with the preternatural stare of a madman or a seer.

  ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

  ‘I’m good at that. Guessing people’s astrological signs. Libra’s are, like, er . . . creative an’ that.’

  ‘I s’pose so.’

  ‘But they also find it hard to come to decisions – ‘

  ‘Are you challenging the authority of this court?’ I tried to sound magisterial, but realised that the figure I cut was ridiculous.

  ‘Nah, nah. I wouldn’t do that, mate. It’s just . . . like . . . I mean to say, whass the point, an’ that?’

  I couldn’t help but agree with him, so I let him go. I even insisted that he take the bathroom scales with him. After all, what good are they to me now?