Grey Area (Will Self)

by Will Self

  What to do with the car batteries and Eskis that were delivered today? A sculpture is out of the question. I may just leave them as they are, boxed up and so splendidly replete.

  10th March

  A tedious encounter with Bohm today. I told him what I knew and he had the temerity to look shocked, like a little boy who’s been caught cheating. I know that he himself has taken Inclusion, so why was he nonplussed by my gift of some tin cans, a pair of slipper socks, and a transcript of a lecture delivered by I.A. Braithwaite to the British Ephemeral Society on ‘In-Flight Magazines for People in Temporarily Grounded Aircraft’?

  The fool tried to persuade me to come off Inclusion. I told him I would blow the whole incident wide open if he didn’t arrange for me to meet Busner. I spoke to him later in the afternoon and Busner has acceded to my demand. I would feel some trepidation about going to Worminghall tomorrow evening, but I don’t find it nearly as interesting as trying to divine how many fondue forks I can shove into a VCR before it stops working.

  This is the final entry in Simon Dykes’s increasingly spikey and manic scrawl. You turn a few pages on and there is nothing. You turn a few pages more and you find two final entries, dated 11th March and 19th March. They aren’t in Dykes’s hand, but Busner’s:

  11th March

  I have been included within the psyche of Simon Dykes in a most perverse fashion. I would be horrified by this eruption in the very skin of reality, were it not so very interesting.

  He and Bohm arrived at the Facility some hours ago. It may have been foolish of me to take some Inclusion shortly before they turned up, but I did it in a spirit of scientific enquiry.

  Under the influence of the Inclusion, Dykes appeared to me as an ever-mutating thing. The very composition of his head and body was of found objects, and constantly transmogrifying.

  The Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks that fill my office and laboratory were snaffled up by this protean being. When our eyes met there was a great humming and crackling in the atmosphere. Bohm, and MacLachlan, who had come with him, turned tail and fled. Paper clips and drawing pins bulged from the surface of his eyeballs. Biros and match books ruckled beneath his skin.

  The cyclotron in the corner began to hum and pulse, even though I knew it wasn’t activated. Then there was an appalling explosion, but instead of feeling myself blown apart, expanded, I had the sensation of being sucked in: a plume of genie being drawn into a bottle. Fragments of glass and fragments of mica, bigger than boulders, plummeted past the screen of my vision like some cheap special effect.

  19th March

  I am still in here. Dykes’s mind is a cluttered place, as you have no doubt gathered. He leaves me pretty much to myself. During one of his rare lapses in physical activity, he allows me the indulgence of employing his motor abilities to jot down notes such as these. For the rest of the time I am free to roam the museum of grotesque ideas, images and objects that the drug has driven him to acquire willy-nilly. I am pure intention, a secondary and immaterial will operating inside the Dykes psyche.

  Dykes naturally thinks he is psychotic – and in a way I suppose he is. But it’s comfortable enough here in the Warneford: a choice of meals, and at least one chat a day with a jejune shrink.

  It has occurred to me that the only way to understand the Inclusion incident is to view it at a metaphoric level. The drug was originally made from the corpses of the bee mites that infested the hives, much in the way that I now infest Dykes’s mind. I have become – as it were – Inclusion.

  Mind you – it’s just a thought.

  And that is that. Or at least it would be if the Inclusion folder wasn’t bulging and flexing in a sinister way between your hands. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to read things that don’t belong to you, not to interfere with private correspondence? The thoughts are scampering across your shoulders now; now, as the first of the leaflets on Blaenau Ffestiniog Slate Quarry falls out of the Inclusion brochure, followed by the. 1984-5 Eastbourne and District Phone Directory, followed by the Atlas of Cancer Incidence in England and Wales 1968-1985.

  There’s more to this Inclusion brochure than first met your eye. You should stay interested in it and not allow your thoughts to stray to unanswered letters, unreturned phone calls, unpaid bills, unfulfilled ambitions, wasted opportunities and people unloved and unmissed.

  * Selective Seratonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors, i.e. Prozac®, and other brand-name anti-depressants such as Sustral®, Faverin® and Sebcocat®. Author’s note.

  The End of the Relationship

  ‘Why the hell don’t you leave him if he’s such a monster?’ said Grace. We were sitting in the Café Delancey in Camden Town, eating croques m’sieurs and slurping down cappuccino. I was dabbing the sore skin under my eyes with a scratchy piece of toilet paper – trying to stop the persistent leaking. When I’d finished dabbing I deposited the wad of salty stuff in my bag, took another slurp and looked across at Grace.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I don’t leave him.’

  ‘You can’t go back there – not after this morning. I don’t know why you didn’t leave him immediately after it happened . . .’

  That morning I’d woken to find him already up. He was standing at the window, naked. One hand held the struts of the venetian blind apart, while he squinted down on to the Pentonville Road. Lying in bed I could feel the judder and hear the squeal of the traffic as it built up to the rush hour.

  In the half-light of dawn his body seemed monolithic: his limbs columnar and white, his head and shoulders solid capitals. I stirred in the bed and he sensed that I was awake. He came back to the side of the bed and stood looking down at me. ‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow.’

  I squirmed down further into the duvet and looked up at him, puckering my lip so that I had goofy, rabbity teeth. He got back into bed and curled himself around me. He tucked his legs under mine. He lay on his side – I on my back. The front of his thighs pressed against my haunch and buttock. I felt his penis stiffen against me as his fingers made slight, brushing passes over my breasts, up to my throat and face and then slowly down. His mouth nuzzled against my neck, his tongue licked my flesh, his fingers poised over my nipples, twirling them into erection. My body teetered, a heavy rock on the edge of a precipice.

  The rasp of his cheek against mine; the too peremptory prodding of his cock against my mons; the sense of something casual and offhand about the way he was caressing me. Whatever – it was all wrong. There was no true feeling in the way he was touching me; he was manipulating me like some giant dolly. I tensed up – which he sensed; he persisted for a short while, for two more rotations of palm on breast, and then he rolled over on his back with a heavy sigh.

  ‘I’m sorry – ‘

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s just that sometimes I feel that – ‘

  It’s OK, really, please don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t talk about it.’

  ‘But if we don’t talk about it we’re never going to deal with it. We’re never going to sort it all out.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got feelings too. Right now I feel like shit. If you don’t want to, don’t start. That’s what I can’t stand, starting and then stopping – it makes me sick to the stomach.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what you want.’ I reached down to touch his penis; the chill from his voice hadn’t reached it yet. I gripped it as tightly as I could and began to pull up and down, feeling the skin un- and re-peel over the shaft. Suddenly he recoiled.

  ‘Not like that, ferchrissakes!’ He slapped my hand away. ‘Anyway I don’t want that. I don’t want . . . I don’t want . . . I don’t want some bloody hand relief!’

  I could feel the tears pricking at my eyes. ‘I thought you said – ‘

  ‘What does it matter what I said? What does it matter what I do . . . I can’t co
nvince you, now can I?’

  ‘I want to, I really do. It’s just that I don’t feel I can trust you any more . . . not at the moment. You have to give me more time.’

  ‘Trust! Trust! I’m not a fucking building society, you know. You’re not setting an account up with me. Oh fuck it! Fuck the whole fucking thing!’

  He rolled away from me and pivoted himself upright. Pulling a pair of trousers from the chair where he’d chucked them the night before, he dragged his legs into them. I dug deeper into the bed and looked out at him through eyes fringed by hair and tears.

  ‘Coffee?’ His voice was icily polite.

  ‘Yes please.’ He left the room. I could hear him moving around downstairs. Pained love made me picture his actions: unscrewing the percolator, sluicing it out with cold water, tamping the coffee grains down in the metal basket, screwing it back together again and setting it on the lighted stove.

  When he reappeared ten minutes later, with two cups of coffee, I was still dug into the bed. He sat down sideways and waited while I struggled upwards and crammed a pillow behind my head. I pulled a limp corner of the duvet cover over my breasts. I took the cup from him and sipped. He’d gone to the trouble of heating milk for my coffee. He always took his black.

  ‘I’m going out now. I’ve got to get down to Kensington and see Steve about those castings.’ He’d mooched a cigarette from somewhere and the smoking of it, and the cocking of his elbow, went with his tone: officer speaking to other ranks. I hated him for it.

  But hated myself more for asking, ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Later . . . not for quite a while.’ The studied ambiguity was another put-down. ‘What’re you doing today?’

  ‘N-nothing . . . meeting Grace, I s’pose.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, the two of you can have a really trusting talk – that’s obviously what you need.’ His chocolate drop of sarcasm was thinly candy-coated with sincerity.

  ‘Maybe it is . . . look . . . ‘

  ‘Don’t say anything, don’t get started again. We’ve talked and talked about this. There’s nothing I can do, is there? There’s no way I can convince you – and I think I’m about ready to give up trying.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I fucking know that?! Look, do you think I enjoyed it? Do you think that? ‘Cause if you do, you are fucking mad. More mad than I thought you were.’

  ‘You can’t love me . . .’ A wail was starting up in me; the saucer chattered against the base of my cup. ‘You can’t, whatever you say.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. All I do know is that this is torturing me. I hate myself – that’s true enough. Look at this. Look at how much I hate myself!’

  He set his coffee cup down on the varnished floorboards and began to give himself enormous open-handed clouts around the head. ‘You think I love myself? Look at this!’ (clout) ‘All you think about is your-own-fucking-self, your own fucking feelings.’ (clout) ‘Don’t come back here tonight!’ (clout) ‘Just don’t come back, because I don’t think I can take much more.’

  As he was saying the last of this he was pirouetting around the room, scooping up small change and keys from the table, pulling on his shirt and shoes. It wasn’t until he got to the door that I became convinced that he actually was going to walk out on me. Sometimes these scenes could run to several entrances and exits. I leapt from the bed, snatched up a towel, and caught him at the head of the stairs.

  ‘Don’t walk out on me! Don’t walk out, don’t do that, not that. ‘ I was hiccupping, mucus and tears were mixing on my lips and chin. He twisted away from me and clattered down a few stairs, then he paused and turning said, ‘You talk to me about trust, but I think the reality of it is that you don’t really care about me at all, or else none of this would have happened in the first place.’ He was doing his best to sound furious, but I could tell that the real anger was dying down. I sniffed up my tears and snot and descended towards him.

  ‘Don’t run off, I do care, come back to bed – it’s still early.’ I touched his forearm with my hand. He looked so anguished, his face all twisted and reddened with anger and pain.

  ‘Oh, fuck it. Fuck it. Just fuck it.’ He swore flatly. The flap of towel that I was holding against my breast fell away, and I pushed the nipple, which dumbly re-erected itself, against his hand. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead stared fixedly over my shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom. I pushed against him a little more firmly. Then he took my nipple between the knuckles of his index and forefinger and pinched it, quite hard, muttering, ‘Fuck it, just fucking fuck it.’

  He turned on his heels and left. I doubled over on the stairs. The sobs that racked me had a sickening component. I staggered to the bathroom and as I clutched the toilet bowl the mixture of coffee and mucus streamed from my mouth and nose. Then I heard the front door slam.

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Then leave. You can stay at your own place – ‘

  ‘You know I hate it there. I can’t stand the people I have to share with – ‘

  ‘Be that as it may, the point is that you don’t need him, you just think you do. It’s like you’re caught in some trap. You think you love him, but it’s just your insecurity talking. Remember,’ and here Grace’s voice took on an extra depth, a special sonority of caring, ‘your insecurity is like a clever actor, it can mimic any emotion it chooses to and still be utterly convincing. But whether it pretends to be love or hate, the truth is that at bottom it’s just the fear of being alone.’

  ‘Well why should I be alone? You’re not alone, are you?’

  ‘No, that’s true, but it’s not easy for me either. Any relationship is an enormous sacrifice . . . I don’t know . . . Anyway, you know that I was alone for two years before I met John, perhaps you should give it a try?’

  ‘I spend most of my time alone anyway. I’m perfectly capable of being by myself. But I also need to see him . . .’

  As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the café at couple after couple, each confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.

  Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn’t down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there . . . It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.

  After he had left that morning I went back to his bed and lay there, gagged and bound by the smell of him in the duvet. I didn’t get up until eleven. I listened to Radio Four, imagining that the deep-timbred, wholesome voices of each successive presenter were those of ideal parents. There was a discussion programme, a gardening panel discussion, a discussion about books, a short story about an elderly woman and her relationship with her son, followed by a discussion about it. It all sounded so cultured, so eminently reasonable. I tried to construct a new view of myself on the basis of being the kind of young woman who would consume such hearty radiophonic fare, but it didn’t work. Instead I felt quite weightless and blown out, a husk of a person.

  The light quality in the attic bedroom didn’t change all morning. The only way I could measure the passage of time was by the radio, and the position of the watery shadows that his metal sculptures made on the magnolia paint.

  Eventually I managed to rouse myself. I dressed and washed my face. I pulled my hair back tightly and fixed it in place with a loop of elastic. I sat down at his work table. It was blanket
ed with loose sheets of paper, all of which were covered with the meticulous plans he did for his sculptures. Elevations and perspectives, all neatly shaded and the dimensions written in using the lightest of pencils. There was a mess of other stuff on the table as well: sticks of flux, a broken soldering iron, bits of acrylic and angled steel brackets. I cleared a space amidst the evidence of his industry and taking out my notebook and biro, added my own patch of emotion to the collage:

  I do understand how you feel. I know the pressure that you’re under at the moment, but you must realise that it’s pressure that you put on yourself. It’s not me that’s doing it to you. I do love you and I want to be with you, but it takes time to forgive. And what you did to me was almost unforgivable. I’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to be hurt again. If you can’t understand that, if you can’t understand how I feel about it, then it’s probably best if we don’t see one another again. I’ll be at the flat this evening, perhaps you’ll call?

  Out in the street the sky was spitting at the pavement. There was no wind to speak of, but despite that each gob seemed to have an added impetus. With every corner that I rounded on my way to King’s Cross I encountered another little cyclone of rain and grit. I walked past shops full of mouldering stock that were boarded up, and empty, derelict ones that were still open.

  On the corner of the Caledonian Road I almost collided with a dosser wearing a long, dirty overcoat. He was clutching a bottle of VP in a hand that was blue with impacted filth, filth that seemed to have been worked deliberately into the open sores on his knuckles. He turned his face to me and I recoiled instinctively. It was the face of a myxomatosic rabbit (‘You’re like a little animal in there. A little rabbit, snuggled down in its burrow’), the eyes swollen up and exploding in a series of burst ramparts and lesions of diseased flesh. His nose was no longer nose-shaped.

  But on the tube the people were comforting and workaday enough. I paid at the barrier when I reached Camden Town and walked off quickly down the High Street. Perhaps it was the encounter with the dying drunk that had cleansed me, jerked me out of my self-pity, because for a short while I felt more lucid, better able to look honestly at my relationship. While it was true that he did have problems, emotional problems, and was prepared to admit to them, it was still the case that nothing could forgive his conduct while I was away visiting my parents.