by Will Self
I knew that the woman he had slept with lived here in Camden Town. As I walked down the High Street I began – at first almost unconsciously, then with growing intensity – to examine the faces of any youngish women that passed me. They came in all shapes and sizes, these suspect lovers. There were tall women in floor, length linen coats; plump women in stretchy slacks; petite women in neat, two-piece suits; raddled women in unravelling pullovers; and painfully smart women, Sindy dolls: press a pleasure-button in the small of their backs and their hair would grow.
The trouble was that they all looked perfectly plausible candidates for the job as the metal worker’s anvil. Outside Woolworth’s I was gripped by a sharp attack of nausea. An old swallow of milky coffee reentered my mouth as I thought of him, on top of this woman, on top of that woman, hammering himself into them, bash after bash after bash, flattening their bodies, making them ductile with pleasure.
I went into Marks & Sparks to buy some clean underwear and paused to look at myself in a full-length mirror. My skirt was bunched up around my hips, my hair was lank and flecked with dandruff, my tights bagged at the knees, my sleeve-ends bulged with snot-clogged Kleenex. I looked like shit. It was no wonder that he didn’t fancy me any more, that he’d gone looking for some retouched vision.
‘Come on,’ said Grace, ‘let’s go. The longer we stay here, the more weight we put on.’ On our way out of the café I took a mint from the cut-glass bowl by the cash register and recklessly crunched it between my molars. The sweet pain of sugar-in-cavity spread through my mouth as I fumbled in my bag for my purse. ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ It was only three-thirty in the afternoon but already the sky over London was turning the shocking bilious colour it only ever aspires to when winter is fast encroaching.
‘Can I come back with you, Grace?’
‘Of course you can, silly, why do you think I asked the question?’ She put her arm about my shoulder and twirled me round until we were facing in the direction of the tube. Then she marched me off, like the young emotional offender that I was. Feeling her warm body against mine I almost choked, about to cry again at this display of caring from Grace. But I needed her too much, so I restrained myself.
‘You come back with me, love,’ she clucked. ‘We can watch telly, or eat, or you can do some work. I’ve got some pattern cutting I’ve got to finish by tomorrow. John won’t be back for ages yet . . . or I tell you what, if you like we can go and meet him in Soho after he’s finished work and have something to eat there – would you like that?’ She turned to me, flicking back the ledge of her thick blonde fringe with her index finger – a characteristic gesture.
‘Well, yes,’ I murmured, ‘whatever.’
‘OK.’ Her eyes, turned towards mine, were blue, frank. ‘I can see you want to take it easy.’
When we left the tube at Chalk Farm and started up the hill towards where Grace lived, she started up again, wittering on about her and John and me; about what we might do and what fun it would be to have me stay for a couple of nights; and about what a pity it was that I couldn’t live with them for a while, because what I really needed was a good sense of security. There was something edgy and brittle about her enthusiasm. I began to feel that she was overstating her case.
I stopped listening to the words she was saying and began to hear them merely as sounds, as some ambient tape of reassurance. Her arm was linked in mine, but from this slight contact I could gain a whole sense of her small body. The precise slope and jut of her full breasts, the soft brush of her round stomach against the drape of her dress, the infinitesimal gratings of knee against nylon, against nylon against knee.
And as I built up this sense of Grace-as-body, I began also to consider how her bush would look as you went down on her. Would the lips gape wetly, or would they tidily recede? Would the cellulite on her hips crinkle as she parted her legs? How would she smell to you, of sex or cinnamon? But, of course, it wasn’t any impersonal ‘you’ I was thinking of – it was a highly personal him. I joined their bodies together in my mind and tormented myself with the hideous tableau of betrayal. After all, if he was prepared to screw some nameless bitch, what would have prevented him from shirting where I ate? I shuddered. Grace sensed this, and disengaging her arm from mine returned it to my shoulders, which she gave a squeeze.
John and Grace lived in a thirties council block halfway up Haverstock Hill. Their flat was just like all the others. You stepped through the front door and directly into a long corridor, off which were a number of small rooms. They may have been small, but Grace had done everything possible to make them seem spacious. Furniture and pictures were kept to an artful minimum, and the wooden blocks on the floor had been sanded and polished until they shone.
Grace snapped on floor lamps and put a Mozart concerto on the CD. I tried to write my neglected journal, timing my flourishes of supposed insight to the ascending and descending scales. Grace set up the ironing board and began to do something complicated, involving sheets of paper, pins, and round, worn fragments of chalk.
When the music finished, neither of us made any move to put something else on, or to draw the curtains. Instead we sat in the off-white noise of the speakers, under the opaque stare of the dark windows. To me there was something intensely evocative about the scene: two young women sitting in a pool of yellow light on a winter’s afternoon. Images of my childhood came to me; for the first time in days I felt secure.
When John got back from work, Grace put food-in-a-foil-tray in the oven, and tossed some varieties of leaves. John plonked himself down on one of the low chairs in the sitting room and propped the Standard on his knees. Occasionally he would give a snide laugh and read out an item, his intent being always to emphasise the utter consistency of its editorial stupidity.
We ate with our plates balanced on our knees, and when we had finished, turned on the television to watch a play. I noticed that John didn’t move over to the sofa to sit with Grace. Instead, he remained slumped in his chair. As the drama unfolded I began to find these seating positions quite wrong and disquieting. John really should have sat with Grace.
The play was about a family riven by domestic violence. It was well acted and the jerky camerawork made it grittily real, almost like documentary. But still I felt that the basic premise was overstated. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe a family with such horrors boiling within it could maintain a closed face to the outside world, it was just that these horrors were so relentless.
The husband beat up the wife, beat up the kids, got drunk, sexually abused the kids, raped the wife, assaulted social workers, assaulted police, assaulted probation officers, and all within the space of a week or so. It should have been laughable – this chronically dysfunctional family – but it wasn’t. How could it be remotely entertaining while we all sat in our separate padded places? Each fresh on-screen outrage increased the distance between the three of us, pushing us still further apart. I hunched down in my chair and felt the waistband of my skirt burn across my bloated stomach. I shouldn’t have eaten all that salad – and the underdone garlic bread smelt flat and sour on my own tongue. So flat and sour that the idea even of kissing myself was repulsive, let alone allowing him to taste me.
The on – screen husband, his shirt open, the knot of his tie dragged halfway down his chest, was beating his adolescent daughter with short, powerful clouts around the head. They were standing in her bedroom doorway, and the camera stared fixedly over her shoulder, up the stairs and into the bedroom, where it picked up the corner of a pop poster, pinned to the flowered wallpaper. Each clout was audible as a loud ‘crack!’ in the room where we sat. I felt so remote, from Grace, from John, from the play . . . from him.
I stood up and walked unsteadily to the toilet at the end of the corridor. Inside I slid the flimsy bolt into its loop and pushed the loosely stacked pile of magazines away from the toilet bowl. My stomach felt as if it were swelling by the second. My fingers when I put them in my mouth were large and alien. M
y nails scraped against the sides of my throat. As I leant forward I was aware of myself as a vessel, my curdled contents ready to pour. I looked down into the toilet world and there – as my oatmeal stream splashed down – saw that someone had already done the same. Cut out the nutritional middlewoman, that is.
After I’d finished I wiped around the rim of the toilet with hard scraps of paper. I flushed and then splashed my cheeks with cold water. Walking back down the corridor towards the sitting room, I was conscious only of the ultra-sonic whine of the television; until, that is, I reached the door:
‘Don’t bother.’ (A sob.)
‘Mr Evans . . . are you in there?’
‘You don’t want me to touch you?’
‘Go away. Just go away . . .’
‘It’s just that I feel a bit wound up. I get all stressed out during the day – you know that. I need a long time to wind down.’
‘Mr Evans, we have a court order that empowers us to take these children away.’
‘It’s not that – I know it’s not just that. You don’t fancy me any more, you don’t want to have sex any more. You’ve been like this for weeks.’
‘I don’t care if you’ve got the bloody Home Secretary out there. If you come in that door, I swear she gets it!’
‘How do you expect me to feel like sex? Everything around here is so bloody claustrophobic. I can’t stand these little fireside evenings. You sit there all hunched up and fidgety. You bite your nails and smoke away with little puffs. Puff, puff, puff. It’s a total turn-off.’
(Smash!) ‘Oh my God. For Christ’s sake! Oh Jesus . . . ‘
‘I bite my nails and smoke because I don’t feel loved, because I feel all alone. I can’t trust you, John, not when you’re like this – you don’t seem to have any feeling for me.’
‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t. I’m certainly fed up with all of this shit . . . ‘
I left my bag in the room. I could come back for it tomorrow when John had gone to work. I couldn’t stand to listen – and I didn’t want to go back into the room and sit down with them again, crouch with them, like another vulture in the mouldering carcass of their relationship. I couldn’t bear to see them reassemble the uncommunicative blocks of that static silence. And I didn’t want to sleep in the narrow spare bed, under the child-sized duvet.
I wanted to be back with him. Wanted it the way a junky wants a hit. I yearned to be in that tippy, creaky boat of a bed, full of crumbs and sex and fag ash. I wanted to be framed by the basketry of angular shadows the naked bulb threw on the walls, and contained by the soft basketry of his limbs. At least we felt something for each other. He got right inside me – he really did. All my other relationships were as superficial as a salutation – this evening proved it. It was only with him that I became a real person.
Outside in the street the proportions were all wrong. The block of flats should have been taller than it was long – but it wasn’t. Damp leaves blew against, and clung to my ankles. I’d been sitting in front of the gas fire in the flat and my right-hand side had become numb with the heat. Now this wore off – like a pain – leaving my clammy clothes sticking to my clammy flesh.
I walked for a couple of hundred yards down the hill, then a stitch stabbed into me and I felt little pockets of gas beading my stomach. I was level with a tiny parade of shops which included a cab company. Suddenly I couldn’t face the walk to the tube, the tube itself, the walk back from the tube to his house. If I was going to go back to him I had to be there right away. If I went by tube it would take too long and this marvellous reconciliatory feeling might have soured by the time I arrived. And more to the point there might not be a relationship there for me to go back to. He was a feckless and promiscuous man, insecure and given to the grossest and most evil abuses of trust.
The jealous agony came over me again, covering my flesh like some awful hive. I leant up against a shopfront. The sick image of him entering some other. I could feel it so vividly that it was as if I was him: my penis snagging frustratingly against something . . . my blood beating in my temples . . . my sweat dripping on to her upturned face . . . and then the release of entry . . .
I pushed open the door of the minicab office and lurched in. Two squat men stood like bookends on either side of the counter. They were both reading the racing form. The man nearest to me was encased in a tube of caramel leather. He twisted his neckless head as far round as he could. Was it my imagination, or did his eyes probe and pluck at me, run up my thighs and attempt an imaginative penetration, rapid, rigid and metallic. The creak of his leather and the cold fug of damp, dead filter tips, assaulted me together.
‘D’jew want a cab, love?’ The other bookend, the one behind the counter, looked at me with dim-sum eyes, morsels of pupil packaged in fat.
‘Err . . . yes, I want to go up to Islington, Barnsbury.’
‘George’ll take yer – woncha, George?’ George was still eyeing me around the midriff. I noticed – quite inconsequentially – that he was wearing very clean, blue trousers, with razor-sharp creases. Also that he had no buttocks – the legs of the trousers zoomed straight up into his jacket.
‘Yerallright. C’mon, love.’ George rattled shut his paper and scooped a packet of Dunhill International and a big bunch of keys off the counter. He opened the door for me and as I passed through I could sense his fat black heart, encased in leather, beating behind me.
He was at the back door of the car before me and ushered me inside. I squidged halfway across the seat before collapsing in a nerveless torpor. But I knew that I wouldn’t make it back to him unless I held myself in a state of no expectancy, no hope. If I dared to picture the two of us together again, then when I arrived at the house he would be out. Out fucking.
We woozed away from the kerb and jounced around the corner. An air freshener shaped like a fir tree dingled and dangled as we took the bends down to Chalk Farm Road. The car was, I noticed, scrupulously clean and poisonous with smoke. George lit another Dunhill and offered me one, which I accepted. In the moulded divider between the two front seats there sat a tin of travel sweets. I could hear them schussing round on their caster-sugar slope as we cornered and cornered and cornered again.
I sucked on the fag and thought determinedly of other things: figure skating; Christmas sales; the way small children have their mittens threaded through the arms of their winter coats on lengths of elastic; Grace . . . which was a mistake, because this train of thought was bad magic. Grace’s relationship with John was clearly at an end. It was perverse to realise this, particularly after her display in the café, when she was so secure and self-possessed in the face of my tears and distress. But I could imagine the truth: that the huge crevices in their understanding of each other had been only temporarily papered over by the thrill of having someone in the flat who was in more emotional distress than they. No, there was no doubt about it now, Grace belonged to the league of the self-deceived.
George had put on a tape. The Crusaders – or at any rate some kind of jazz funk, music for glove compartments. I looked at the tightly bunched flesh at the back of his neck. It was malevolent flesh. I was alone in the world really. People tried to understand me, but they completely missed the mark. It was as if they were always looking at me from entirely the wrong angle and mistaking a knee for a bald pate, or an elbow for a breast.
And then I knew that I’d been a fool to get into the cab, the rapistmobile. I looked at George’s hands, where they had pounced on the steering wheel. They were flexing more than they should have been, flexing in anticipation. When he looked at me in the office he had taken me for jailbait, thought I was younger than I am. He just looked at my skirt – not at my sweater; and anyway, my sweater hides my breasts, which are small. He could do it, right enough, because he knew exactly where to go and the other man, the man in the office, would laughingly concoct an alibi for him. And who would believe me anyway? He’d be careful not to leave anything inside me . . . and no marks.
Then the sequence of events went awry. I subsided sideways, sobbing, choking. The seat was wide enough for me to curl up on it, which is what I did. The car slid to a halt. ‘Whassermatter, love?’ Oh Jesus, I thought, don’t let him touch me, please don’t let him touch me, he can’t be human. But I knew that he was. ‘C’mon, love, whassermatter?’ My back in its suede jacket was like a carapace. When he penetrated me I’d rather he did it from behind, anything not to have him touch and pry at the soft parts of my front.
The car pulls away once more. Perhaps this place isn’t right for his purposes, he needs somewhere more remote. I’m already under the earth, under the soft earth . . . The wet earth will cling to my putrid face when the police find me . . . when they put up the loops of yellow tape around my uncovered grave . . . and the WPC used to play me when they reconstruct the crime will look nothing like me . . . She’ll have coarser features, but bigger breasts and hips . . . something not lost on the grieving boyfriend. . . Later he’ll take her back to the flat, and fuck her standing up, pushing her ample, smooth bum into the third shelf of books in his main room (some Penguin classics, a couple of old economics text books, my copy of The House of Mirth), with each turgid stroke . . .
