Grey Area (Will Self)

by Will Self

  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?

  Lizard

  Epilogue. Many years later . . .

  If you want to walk round the Lizard Peninsula, you have to be reasonably well equipped. Which is not to say that this part of Cornwall is either particularly remote (the M5 now goes all the way to Land’s End) or that rugged. It’s just that the exposure to so much wind and sky, and so many pasties, after a winter spent huddled on the urban periphery (somewhere like Beaconsfield, for example), can have an unsettling effect. I always advise people to take an antacid preparation, and also some kaolin and morphine. There’s no need any more to carry an entire bottle, for Sterling Health have thoughtfully created a tablet form of this basic but indispensable remedy.

  One other word of warning before you set out. Don’t be deceived by the map into thinking that distances of, say, eight to ten miles represent a comfortable afternoon’s stroll. The Lizard is so called because of the many rocky inlets that are gouged out of its scaly sides, giving the entire landmass the aspect of some giant creature, bound for the Atlantic vivarium. The coastal path is constantly either ascending or descending around these inlets. Therefore, to gain a mile you may have to go up and down as much as six hundred feet.

  I myself haven’t been to the Lizard for many years, in fact not since I was a young man. Even if I felt strong enough to make the journey now, I wouldn’t go. For those younger than I, who cannot remember a time before the current Nationalist Trust Government took power, the prospect may still seem inviting. But personally, I find that the thought of encountering the Government’s Brown Shirts, with their oak-leaf epaulettes, sticks in my craw. I would bitterly resent being compelled by these paramilitary nature wardens to admire the scenery, register the presence (or even absence) of ancient monuments, and propitiate the wayside waste shrines with crumpled offerings.

  Of course, we aren’t altogether immune from the depredations of the Trust here in Beaconsfield. Last month, after a bitterly fought local election, they gained power in almost all of the wards, including the one that contains the model village itself. There have been rumours, discreet mutterings, that they intend to introduce their ubiquitous signs to the village. These will designate parts of it areas of (albeit minute) ‘outstanding natural beauty’.

  But I am old now, and have not the stomach for political infighting. Since the publication of the last volume of my magnum opus, A History of the English Motorway Service Centre, I have gained a modest eminence. People tell me that I am referred to as ‘the Macaulay of the M40’, a sobriquet that, I must confess, gives me no little pleasure. I feel vindicated by the verdict of posterity. (I say posterity, for I am now so old that hardly anyone realises I am still alive.)

  I spend most my the days out on the sun porch. Here I lie naked, for all the world like some moribund reptile, sopping up the rays. My skin has turned mahogany with age and melanoma. It’s difficult for me to distinguish now between the daub of cancerous sarcoma and the toughened wattle of my flesh. Be that as it may, I am not frightened of death. I feel no pain, despite having long since reduced the indulgence of my pernicious habituation to kaolin and morphine to a mere teaspoonful every hour.

  With age have come stoicism and repose. When I was younger I could not focus on anything, or even apprehend a single thought, without feeling driven to incorporate it into some architectonic, some Great Design. I was also plagued by lusts, both fleshly and demonic, which sent me into such dizzying spirals of self-negation that I was compelled to narcosis.

  But now, even the contemplation of the most trivial things can provide enough sensual fodder to last me an entire morning. Today, for example, I became transfixed, staring into the kettle, by the three separate levels of scale therein. First the tangible scale, capping the inverted cradle of the water’s meniscus. Secondly, the crystalline accretions of scale that wreathed the element. And thirdly, of course, the very abstract notion of ‘scale’ itself, implied by my unreasoned observation. It’s as if I were possessed of some kind of Escher-vision, allowing me constantly to perceive the dimensional conundrum that perception presents.

  I am also comforted in my solitude by my pets. One beneficial side-effect of the change in climate has been the introduction of more exotic species to this isle. But whereas the nouveaux riches opt for the Pantagruelian spectacle of giraffes cropping their laburnums, and hippopotamuses wallowing in their sun-saturated swimming pools, I have chosen to domesticate the more elegant frill-necked lizard.

  This curious reptile, with its preposterous vermilion ruff, stands erect on its hind legs like a miniature dinosaur. When evening comes, and the day’s visitors have departed, I let it out so that it may roam the lanes and paths of the model village. The sight of this pocket Godzilla stalking the dwarfish environs, its head darting this way and that, as if on the look-out for a canapé-sized human, never fails to amuse me.

  However, not every aspect of my life is quite so easeful and reposed. The occasional dispute, relating to a lifetime of scholarly endeavour, still flares up occasionally. It is true that my work has a certain status here in England, but of course all this means in practice is that although many have heard of it, few have actually read any of it.

  In the ex-colonies the situation is different. A Professor Moi wrote to me last year, from the University of Uganda, to dispute the findings of my seminal paper ‘When is a Road Not a Road?’*, in which – if you can be bothered to recall – I established a theory that a motorway cannot be said to be a motorway unless it is longer than it is broad. I was inspired to this by my contemplation of the much maligned A41 (M), which at that time ran for barely a mile. Moi took issue with the theory, and after I had perused the relevant Ugandan gazetteer it became clear to me why.

  The ill-fated Lusaka Bypass was to have been the centre-piece of the Ugandan Government’s Motorway Construction Programme. However, resources ran out after only one junction and some eighty feet of road had been built. Faced with the options of either changing the nomenclature or admitting failure, the Ugandans had no alternative but to take issue with the theory itself.

  But such episodes are infrequent. Mostly I am left alone by the world. My children have grown up and disappointed me; my former friends and acquaintances have forgotten me. If I do receive any visitors nowadays, they are likely to be young professional couples, nascent ex-urbanites, come to enquire whether or not the bungalow is for sale.

  It is a delicious irony that although when I first moved to Beaconsfield the bungalow was regarded as tacky in the extreme, over the years it has become a period piece. The aluminium-framed picture windows, the pebbledash façade, the corrugated-perspex carport: all of these are now regarded as delightfully authentic and original features. Such is the queer humour of history.

  And what of the M40 itself, the fount of my life’s work? How stands it? Well, I must confess that since the universal introduction of electric cars with a maximum speed of 15 mph, the glamour of motorway driving seems entirely lost. Every so often I’ll take the golf buggy out and tootle up towards Junction 5 (Stokenchurch), but my motives are really rather morbid.

  Morbid, for it is here that I am to be buried. Here, where the motorway plunges through a gunsight cutting and the rolling plain of Oxfordshire spreads out into the blue distance. Just beyond the Chiltern scarp the M40 bisects the Ridgeway, that neolithic drovers’ path which was the motorway of Stone Age Britain. It is here that the Nationalist Trust has given gracious permission for me to construct my mausoleum.

  I have opted for something in the manner of an ancient chamber tomb. A long, regular heap of layered stones, with corbelled walls rising to a slab roof. At one end the burial mound will tastefully elide with the caisson of the bridge on which the M40 spans the Ridgeway.

  It is a fitting memorial, and what’s more, I am convinced that it will remain long after the motorway itself has become
little more than a grassed-over ruin, a monument to a dead culture. The idea that perhaps, in some distant future, disputatious archaeologists will find themselves flummoxed by the discovery of my tomb, together with its midden of discarded motorway signs, brings a twitch to my jowls.

  Will the similarities in construction between my tomb and the great chamber tombs of Ireland and the Orkneys lead them to posit a continuous motorway culture, lasting some 7,000 years? I hope so. It has always been my contention that phenomena such as Silbury Hill and the Avebury stone circle can best be understood as, respectively, an embankment and a roundabout.

  And so it seems that it is only by taking this very, very, long-term view that the answer to that pernicious riddle ‘Why are there no services on the M40?’ will find an answer.

  In conclusion, then. It may be said of me that I have lost my sense of scale, but never that I have lost my sense of proportion.

  * British Journal of Ephemera, Spring 1986

  Repeat this exercise daily, or until you are thoroughly proficient.

  Chest

  The pavement outside Marten’s the newsagent was streaked with sputum. In the outrageously dull light of a mid-afternoon, in midwinter, in middle England, the loops and lumps of mucus and phlegm appeared strangely bright, lurid even, as if some Jackson Pollock of the pneumo-thorax had been practising Action Hawking.

  There was an incident – of sorts – going on in the entrance to the shop. A man in the middle of his middle years, dressed not so much warmly as tightly in a thick, hip-length jacket, corduroy trousers, brogues, and anaconda of woollen scarf, was upbraiding the shop manager. His voice – which was in the middle of middle-class accents – would start off at quite a reasonable pitch, but as he spoke it would creep up the scale until it was a melodramatic whine. The shop manager, blue-suited, nylon-shirted, with thinning hair and earnest expression, kept trying – albeit with appropriate deference – to break in, but without success.

  ‘I can’t put up with this any more, Hutchinson,’ said the man, whose name was Simon-Arthur Dykes. ‘I’ve two sick children and an invalid wife, as well as other dependants. God knows how many times I’ve told your boy to bring the paper to the door and knock, but he still won’t do it. The paper is vital for my work – it’s useless to me if it’s damp and soggy, but every single day it’s the same, he just chucks it over the fence. What the hell does he think it’s going to do, grow legs and scamper up to the house?’

  ‘But Mr Dykes – ‘

  ‘Don’t “but” me, Hutchinson, I’m paying you for a service that I don’t receive. I’m a sensitive man, you know, a man who needs some caring and consideration. My nerves, you see, they’re so very . . . so very . . . stretched, I feel that they might snap. Snap! D’you appreciate that? The nerves of the artist – ‘

  ‘I’m not un – ‘

  ‘You’re not what? Unaware? Unsympathetic? Unaffected? All of the above? Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know – it’s all too much for me. Perhaps my wife is right and we need a redeemer of some kind, Hutchinson, a reawakening . . .’ And with this, Simon-Arthur Dykes’s voice, instead of climbing up towards hysteria, fell down, down into his chest where it translated itself into a full-bodied coughing. A liquid coughing, that implied the sloshing about of some fluid ounces of gunk in his lungs.

  The shop manager was left free to talk, which he did, fulsomely. ‘No, Mr Dykes,’ he began, sounding placatory, ‘I’m not unsympathetic, I do feel for you, really I do. I can imagine what it must be like only too well. Out there at the Brown House, isolated, with the wet, exposed fields all around you, damp and encompassing.’ His fingers made combing motions, ploughing dismal little furrows in the air. ‘I can see what a torment it must be to receive a wet newspaper every morning’ – now the manager’s own voice had begun to quaver – ‘knowing that it may be the only contact that you will have with the world all day, the only thing to touch your sense of isolation. I don’t know. Oh Christ! I don’t know.’

  And with that the manager’s voice cracked, and he began to weep openly. But the weeping didn’t last for long, for having given way to the flow in one form, the manager’s will to resist the ever present tickling in his own chest was eliminated. Soon, both of the men were hacking away, producing great caribou-cry honks, followed by the rasping eructation of tablespoon-loads of sputum, which they dumped, along with the rest of the infective matter, on the pavement fronting the newsagent’s.

  A group of adolescents was hanging about outside Marten’s, for this was where the buses stopped, picking up passengers for Oxford, High Wycombe and Princes Risborough. They wore padded nylon anoraks, decorated with oblongs of fluorescent material and the occasional, apparently random, selection of letters and figures: ‘zx – POWER NINE’, was written on one boy’s jacket; and ‘ARIZONA STATE 4001’ on his girl companion’s. With their squashy vinyl bags at their rubber-ridged feet and their general air of round-shouldered indifference, the adolescents gave the impression of being a unit of some new kind of army – in transit. Part of a pan-European formation of Jugend Sportif.

  None of them paid any attention to the two men, who were now reaching the rattling end of their joint coughing fit. They were all focused on one of the older boys, who held a small red cylinder attached to a valved mouthpiece. Mostly he kept the mouthpiece clamped in his teeth and breathed through the double-action valve with a mechanical ‘whoosh’, but every so often he would pass it to one of the others, and they would take a hit.

  Straightening up the manager said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Kevin-Andrew?’

  ‘It’s oxygen, Mr Hutchinson,’ said the lad, removing the mouthpiece.

  ‘Well, give us both a go, Kevin, for the love of God. Can’t you see the state poor Mr Dykes and I are in?’

  ‘I don’t know if I can, Mr Hutchinson . . .’ The lad paused, looking shamefaced. ‘You see, it’s the family cylinder. I just got it recharged at the health centre and it’s got to last us till the weekend.’

  ‘If that’s the case, why are you giving it out to your pals like a tube of bloody Smarties!’ This was from Simon-Arthur Dykes. He too had straightened up, but was still gasping and visibly blue in the face. He shouldn’t really have expostulated with such vigour, for it got him wheezing again, and he began to double over once more, one hand clutching at the doorjamb, the other flopping around in the air.

  ‘Come on, Kevin-Andrew,’ said the manager, ‘give him the mouthpiece, for heaven’s sake. Tell you what, you can all have a belt off of my Ventalin inhaler, if Mr Dykes and I can just get ourselves straight.’

  Grudgingly, and with much shoulder-shrugging and foot-shuffling, the youth handed over the small red cylinder. In return Hutchinson passed him the angled plastic tube of the Ventalin inhaler.

  For a while there was a sort of calm on the wan stage of the pavement. The two men helped one another to take several much needed pulls from the oxygen cylinder, while the group of adolescents formed a circle around which they passed the inhaler. There was silence, except for the whirring whizz of the inhaler and the kerchooof! of the oxygen cylinder.

  All the parties began to look slightly better than formerly. Their pale cheeks acquired an ulterior glow, their eyes brightened, their countenances took on the aspect of febrile health that only comes to those who have temporarily relieved a condition of chronic invalidism.

  Simon-Arthur Dykes drew himself up in the doorway, passing the oxygen cylinder back to Kevin-Andrew. ‘Thank you, Mr Hutchinson, really I thank you most sincerely. You are a man of some honour, sir, some Christian virtue in a world of ugliness and misery.’ Dykes clutched the manager’s upper arm. ‘Please, please, Mr Dykes, don’t upset yourself again – think of your poor chest.’ The manager gave Dykes his copy of the Guardian, which he had dropped during the coughing fit.

  Dykes looked at the paper as if he couldn’t remember what it was. His rather protruberant grey eyes were darting about, unable to alight on anything. His thick brown hair was st
anding up in a crazy bouffant on top of his high, strained forehead.

  He took the manager by the arm again, and drew him back into the shop a couple of paces. Then he leant towards him conspiratorially saying, ‘It’s Dave Hutchinson, that’s your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ the manager replied uneasily.

  ‘And your patronymic?’

  ‘Dave as well.’

  ‘Well, Dave-Dave, I want you to call me Simon-Arthur. I feel this little episode has brought us together, and I stand in debt on your account.’

  ‘Really, Mr Dykes – ‘

  ‘Simon-Arthur.’

  ‘Simon-Arthur, I don’t think it’s at all – ‘

  ‘No, I do. Listen, I’ve just picked up a brand-new nebuliser in Risborough. I’ve got it in the car. Why don’t you come around this evening, and give it a try – bring your wife if you like.’

  This invitation, so obviously felt and meant, softened the manager’s resistance, broke down his barriers of social deference and retail professionalism. ‘I’d like that, Simon-Arthur,’ he said, grasping the artist’s right hand firmly in both of his, ‘really I would. But I’m afraid my wife is bed-bound, so it would only be me.’

  ‘I am sorry – but that’s OK, just come yourself.’

  ‘I’ve got a few mils of codeine linctus left over from the monthly ration – shall I bring it with me?’

  ‘Why not . . . we can have a little party, as best we can.’

  The two men finished, smiling broadly, in unison. Simon-Arthur took Dave-Dave Hutchinson’s hand warmly in his and gave it several pumps. Then they parted; and whilst Dave-Dave Hutchinson turned back into the interior of the shop, Simon-Arthur Dykes crossed the road to where his car was parked in the middle of the town square.

  As he gained the herringbone of white lines that designated the parking area, Simon-Arthur felt a whooshing sensation behind him. He turned to see the 320 bus bearing down on the stop outside Marten’s. Observing the way the rows of yellow windows shone through the murky air, he jolted into greater haste. Darkness was coming; and with it the great bank of fog, that had hung two hundred feet above the ground all day, was beginning to descend, falling around the shoulders of the grey stone houses like some malodorous muffler.