Grey Area (Will Self)

by Will Self

  Simon-Arthur didn’t say anything, but left the room immediately. Dave-Dave Hutchinson could hear heavy feet thudding up the stairs and then voices raised in the room above, one deep, the other reedy.

  ‘Christabel-Sharon,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes when her husband had gone, ‘this is Mr Hutchinson who manages the newsagent’s in Thame. Mr Hutchinson, this is my cousin Christabel-Sharon Lannière.’

  ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Ms Lannière, , said Dave Hutchinson, and waited for her to put the child down somewhere so that he might kiss her hand. She dumped the little girl quite unceremoniously on a chaise-longue, and advanced towards him smiling broadly, hand outstretched, the tears already drying on her cheeks, like snail trails in the morning sun.

  And as he took the hand, and noticed how small and fine it was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson decided that she was unquestionably the most beautiful woman he had seen in a very long time. He was, after all, so conditioned to accepting emaciation as a body-type, that he could dwell on the hollow beneath a woman’s clavicle, even if it threatened to bore through her thorax. Christabel-Sharon must have sensed this silent homage on his part, for, as she curtsied, she gave an extra little bob, as if acknowledging this new allegiance to her attractions.

  They stood like that for a while, looking at one another, whilst Jean-Drusilla Dykes tended to the little girl, propping her up on some cushions, finding a coverlet for her, and eventually placing the nebuliser mask over her whispering mouth and turning the machine on.

  ‘Oh, is that the nebuliser?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked. ‘It looks absolutely fantastic.’

  ‘Isn’t it,’ said Christabel-Sharon, with equal enthusiasm. ‘We’ve been on the waiting list for one now for months, but somehow Simon-Arthur managed to get priority – ‘

  ‘We don’t talk about that, Christabel-Sharon,’ Jean-Drusilla Dykes cut in. ‘It isn’t seemly.’

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to seem intrusive.’

  ‘No, no, Mr Hutchinson, it’s not your fault, but the truth of the matter” is that Simon-Arthur did use connections to get hold of the nebuliser; and even though I’m delighted to have it I can’t help feeling that the way in which it was obtained will tell against us eventually. Oh Mr Hutchinson, what a shoddy, cheap world we live in when a fine man like my husband, a moral man, a just man, has to resort to such expedients merely in order to aid his suffering family – ‘ Her voice broke, quite abruptly, and she began to sob, screwing the handkerchief soaked with Friar’s Balsam into her eye.

  Then the large, velvet-robed woman started to cough. It was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson noted – being now as adept at judging the nature of a cough as any doctor – a particularly hoarse and rattling cough, with an oil-drum resonance about it, admixed with something like the sound of fine shingle being pulled this way and that by breakers on a beach.

  ‘Now there – there, Mrs Dykes, please don’t upset yourself, please . . .’ He pulled the little brown bottle of codeine linctus from his pocket and showed it to her. ‘I have some linctus here – that’ll help us all to stop coughing for a while.’

  ‘Ach-cach-cach-cach-Oh Mr ach-cach-Hutchinson, you are too kind, too kind. Christabel-Sharon, kindly fetch the linctus glasses.’ Christabel-Sharon exited. The two of them were left regarding one another over the chaise-longue; on which the child lay, her laboured breath wheezing contrapuntally to the choof-choof of the nebuliser.

  ‘Did you say,’ asked Dave-Dave Hutchinson, by way of making polite conversation, ‘that you had an oxygen tent?’

  ‘It’s nothing really,’ she replied, ‘hardly a tent at all, more of an oxygen fly-sheet.’ They both laughed at this, and it was a laughter that Dave-Dave Hutchinson was profoundly grateful for. It ruptured the rather fraught atmosphere of the room, earthing the static sheets and flashes of his hostess’s spiritual intensity. But his gratitude didn’t sustain for long, because even this trifling response to her witticism, this strained guffaw, was enough to give him a coughing fit – this time a bad one.

  He sat back down on the armchair, both hands clasped against his mouth. Dave-Dave’s lungs heaved so, they threatened to turn themselves inside out. He laboured to retain some element of composure, or at any rate not to void himself on the Dykes’ Persian carpet. The edges of his visual field turned first pink, then red, and eventually purple. He felt himself losing control, when a cool, white hand was placed on his arm and he heard a voice say, ‘Here, Mr Hutchinson, pray take one of these, it looks as if you could do with one.’ It was Christabel-Sharon. She had materialised back inside the room and was proffering him a neat pad of gauze. ‘You’ll doubtless need it for the – ‘

  ‘Buh, buh –’ he laboured through his hands to express his shame and embarrassment.

  ‘Now, now, Mr Hutchinson, you musn’t worry about a bit of sputum with us,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes firmly. ‘We know how it is, we understand that the normal proprieties have had to be somewhat relaxed during the current situation.’ He gratefully seized the pad and as discreetly as he was able deposited several mouthfuls of infective matter into its fluffy interior. When he had finished Christabel-Sharon passed him a bucket lined with a plastic bag.

  Simon-Arthur Dykes came back into the room. ‘Did you sort the children out, Simon-Arthur?’ asked his wife.

  ‘Ye-es.’ he sighed wearily. ‘Henry and Magnus are back in the small room, so Storm can go up to the oxygen tent whenever she’s ready; and then Dave-Dave can take a turn with the nebuliser. He obviously has need of it – and I’m not surprised, coming out on this vile night.’

  ‘Is the humidifier on in the boys’ room?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And the ioniser in ours?’

  ‘Yes, yes, dear Jean-Drusilla, please don’t trouble yourself.’ He crossed the room to where his wife stood, and taking her arm, bade her sit beside him on a divan covered with brocade cushions. Their two heads leaned together and the four feverish spots on their cheeks reached an uneasy alignment.

  ‘Look, Simon-Arthur,’ said Christabel-Sharon, gesturing towards the round silver tray she had brought in from the kitchen, ‘doesn’t the linctus look pretty?’

  It did look pretty. She had poured the thick green liquid out into tiny, cut-glass linctus glasses. In the yellow-and-blue light from the fire the whole array sparkled the spectrum. She offered the tray to Dave-Dave Hutchinson. ‘Mr Hutchinson, will you have some?’

  ‘Thank you, Ms Lannière.’

  ‘Please, do use my matronymic – and may I use your patronymic?’

  ‘Certainly . . . Christabel –’

  ‘Christabel-Sharon,’ she said with her ever-so-slightly affected voice, ‘and you are Dave-Dave, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He blushed.

  Taking one of the tiny glasses, Dave-Dave sipped judiciously, savouring the thickness and sweetness of the stuff, whilst assaying the weight of the crystal it came in. At home he and Mrs Hutchinson drank their linctus from Tupperware. Christabel-Sharon handed two glasses of linctus to the Dykeses and took one herself. Then they all sat together in silence for a while, contentedly tippling.

  It was a good little party. One of the best evenings that any of the inhabitants of the Brown House could remember having in a long time. After Storm-Christabel had gone up to the oxygen tent and Dave-Dave had had a good long go on the anaboliser, Simon-Arthur set up a small card table and they played whist for a couple of hours. Christabel-Sharon paired off with Dave-Dave, and there was an agreeably flirtatious character to the way they bid together, often taking tricks through shared high spirits rather than any skill at the game.

  There was no discussion of weighty matters or what really preoccupied them all. The mere presence of Dave-Dave at the Brown House was a sufficient reminder. The codeine linctus helped to free up the constrictions in their four pairs of lungs, which did necessitate frequent recourse by all parties to Christabel-Sharon’s supply of gauze pads and the attend
ant bucket. But such was the bonhomie that the linctus engendered that none of them felt much embarrassment, or awkwardness.

  Only when Jean-Drusilla went out to the kitchen to ask the maid to make them some ham sandwiches, and her husband followed her to get a bottle of port from the cellar, was there any exchange that alluded to the wider issue. ‘It is strange, is it not, my dear,’ said Simon-Arthur, leaning his head against the wall and fighting the dreadful torpor that threatened to encase him, ‘to have a newsagent for company of an evening.’

  ‘Yes, dear, I suppose it is,’ she replied distractedly – she was helping the maid to de-crust some slices of bread, ‘but he is a very nice man, a very Christian man. I don’t imagine for a second that simply because we receive him in this fashion that he imagines we think him quality for an instant.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’

  ‘Christabel-Sharon seems to have taken quite a shine to him – is he married?’

  ‘Oh yes, but I fear the poor man’s wife is in extremis. He told me this afternoon that she was getting Brompton’s – hence his oversufficiency of linctus.’

  ‘I see. Well, while in the normal course of things such a flirtation might not be seemly, I think that in these times we live in, almost anything – within the bounds of propriety, of course – that serves to inculcate good feeling can be accepted.’

  ‘You are entirely right, my dear,’ replied Simon-Arthur, who had, like so many men of his age and class, long since abandoned the matter of making these practical moral judgements to his wife.

  But late that night when Simon-Arthur was in his dressing room, readying himself for bed, the fog and all the awful misery that hung about it began to impose itself on him once more. He slumped down in a broken rattan chair that he kept in the little room – which was barely more than a vestibule. The codeine linctus was wearing off and he could feel the tightness in his chest, the laval accumulation of mucus, flowing down his bronchi and into each little sponge bag of an alveolus. Felt this fearfully, as his nervous system reintroduced him to the soft internality of his diseased body, its crushable vulnerability.

  He remembered reading somewhere – God knows how many years ago – that if the human lungs were unfolded in their entirety, each little ruche and complicated pleat of veined tissue, then the resulting membrane would cover two football pitches. ‘Or two damp, exposed fields,’ Simon-Arthur murmured to himself, remembering Dave-Dave’s eloquent description of the Brown House and its environs earlier that day. He pulled off his socks by the toe, wheezing with the effort.

  In the bedroom next door he could hear his wife breathing stertorously. She was going through a cycle in her sleep that was familiar to him. First she would inhale, the twists and loops of mucus in her throat soughing like electricity cables in a high wind. Then she would exhale through her nose. This sounded peculiarly like a waste-disposal unit being started up.

  The noises would get closer and closer together until they were continuous: ‘Soouuugh-grnngchngsoouuugh-grnnchng.’ Eventually she would seize up altogether and begin coughing, coughing raucously, coughing and even spluttering like some beery fellow in a bar, who’s taken a mouthful of lager and then been poked in the ribs by a drinking buddy: ‘Kerschpooo-kerschpooo-kerschpooo!’ Over and over again. He couldn’t believe that this colossal perturbation of her body didn’t wake her – but it never seemed to. Whereas he was invariably yanked into consciousness by his own coughing in the night, or by that of the children, or Christabel-Sharon.

  He could, he realised, hear all of them coughing and snoring and breathing in the different rooms of the Brown House. To his left there was the sharp rasp of Christabel-Sharon, to the right there were the childishly high and clattery coughs of his two sons, and in the small room immediately opposite the door to his dressing room he could even detect the more reposeful sighs of Storm-Christabel. He even thought – but couldn’t be certain – that he could just about hear the maid, hacking away in the distant attic room. But on consideration he decided this was unlikely.

  Yes, it wasn’t the maid he could hear, but the furthest reaches of his lungs, playing their own peculiar, pathological fugue. Clearly each of the innumerable little pipes and passages had its own viscous reed, and as the air passed around them they produced many hundreds – thousands even – of individual sounds. Simon-Arthur concentrated hard on this and found himself able to differentiate quite subtle tones. He could screen the background noise out, so as to be able to pick up the individual notes being blown in the pipes of his internal organ. Or else he could relax, and taking in breaths as deep as he could manage, produce swelling chords.

  This discovery of the hidden musicality of his own lungs transfixed Simon-Arthur. He sat breathing in and out, attempting to contort his thorax in various ways, so as to bring off various effects. He even fancied that a particular sort of scrunching up in the rattan chair, combined with a two-stage inhalation, and long, soft exhalation, could, if pulled off properly, make his lungs play the magisterial, opening chords of Mozart’s Mass in C major.

  So peculiar and absorbing was this new game that Simon-Arthur became enveloped in it, fancying that he was himself inside a giant lung. The coughing and breathing of the other inhabitants of the house were integrated into his bronchial orchestration. He could no longer tell which noises were inside him and which outside. Then senses merged in the painter’s disordered mind. Looking around him at the many tiny icons – icons he himself had painted – that studded the walls of the dressing room, Simon-Arthur no longer saw them for what they were. Everything, the pattern of the carpet, the texture of the walls, was transmogrifying into a gothic scape of pulsing red tubes and stretched, semi-transparent membranes.

  In the midst of this fantasy the despair clamped down on him. The black bear bumped under the bed of his mind. He saw that the walls were studded with carcinomas, the corridors lined with angry scars and lesions. Up and down the stairs of the lung-house ran rivulets of infective matter. The thoracic property was choking with disease. The alveolar bricks that made up its structure were embedded in nacreous mortar. And then the final horror: the carcinomas took on the faces of people Simon-Arthur had known, people he had not done right by.

  The contrast between his light-hearted silliness of a split-moment ago and the sickening despair of this image plunged Simon-Arthur into retching tears. He ground his fists into the sockets of eyes. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! The ugly realisations came winging in on him, each scything into his chest from a different trajectory. He buckled as the images of his loved ones choking on their own blood, drowning in it, impinged on him with dread force, awful certainty.

  The fog was never going to lift, just thicken and thicken and thicken, until the air curdled. Stopping up the mouths of babies as surely as if they were smothered in the marshmallow folds of a pillow. Simon-Arthur knew this. Knew it as his tears called forth the inevitable and irresistible coughing fit.

  After a turbulent, feverish night Simon-Arthur awoke for the sixth time with what passed for dawn long past. He could hear Christabel-Sharon, his wife and the children moving around downstairs, coughing their matitudinal coughs.

  Then there was another sharp spatter against the window, a repeat of the spattering sound that he now realised had awoken him. He sat up. It was shot, he thought, it has to have been shot. It’s too early in the autumn for hail.

  He got up, and dressing as hurriedly as he could, he went downstairs. In the dining room his eldest son, Henry, was eating Rice Crispies, taking time out after each mouthful for a few pulls from the mouthpiece of the nebuliser. The crunch-crunch–choof-choof noise was slightly eerie. Simon-Arthur found the rest of the family, and the maid, gathered in the vestibule. The two smaller children were still in their nightclothes.

  ‘Is that the shoot?’ asked Simon-Arthur, although he already knew that it was.

  ‘We can’t understand why it’s so early,’ said Jean-Drusilla. The children were looking apprehensive.

  ‘They’re sh
ooting d–ed near to the house as well. I’d better go out and have a word.’ He took his scarf from the rack by the front door and wound it around his throat.

  ‘Won’t you put on a mask, dear?’

  ‘No, no, don’t be silly, I’m only popping out for a minute.’

  As Simon-Arthur groped his way down the side of the Brown House he berated himself: Why worry about such stupid things? Why need it concern me if Peter-Donald and his cronies see that I can only afford a chemical mask? Such pride is worse than stupidity. But it was the truth – for he was a proud man. And he was right in assuming that the members of the shoot would be fully masked, because the fog was unusually thick this morning, the visibility down to fifteen yards or less.

  Once Simon-Arthur had begun to acclimatise he could see the line of huntsmen beyond the low scrub of bushes at the bottom of the garden. He also fancied he could make out a few beaters in among the tangle of sick trees to the rear of the house. He made for the tallest figure in the middle of the former group and was gratified to find, when he got closer, that it was his landlord, Peter-Donald.

  ‘Good morning, Peter-Donald,’ he said, on coming up to him. ‘You’re early today.’

  ‘Ah, Simon-Arthur.’ Peter-Donald Hanson rested his Purdey in the crook of his arm and extended his right hand. ‘How good to see you, old chap.’ The big man’s voice issued from a small speaker, just above the knot of his cravat; and was crackly, like a poorly tuned radio.

  Simon-Arthur had been right about the mask. Peter-Donald was wearing a full scuba arrangement. The rest of his cronies were all clad in the same, overdone shooting kit: Norfolk jackets and plus-fours, cravats and tweedy hats with grouse feathers in their bands. They looked like the usual mob of city types, members of Peter-Donald’s Lloyds syndicate, Simon-Arthur supposed.