by Will Self
Eventually I said to The Fat Controller, ‘I've got it, I know what they're doing, all these products are generics, aren't they?’
‘Quite so. This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying, in order that they should not return, in order that their immortal souls should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and erased utterly beyond recall. You see, my dear boy, as you have always suspected, I am the very Lama of Lost Souls, I reduce the human to the material, utterly and completely. And now, if I'm not much mistaken, we're ready for the off.’
The junkies had stopped chanting. John was feeling for Billy's pulse again. He straightened up saying, ‘He's had it, popped his clogs, karked it, he's run down the flag, he's retired to the pavilion, he's collected his watch, he's kicked the proverbial bucket and marked his mortal card, in short, he's elsewhere.’
‘Shall we join him?’ asked my guru.
And then we were back in the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller was saying to Doug, ‘Give that coon-boy a shake, will you, I can't stand people dropping off in my naming groups.’
‘Hold up,’ I cried, ‘we've been here before, I've heard you say that before.’
’Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose – what goes round comes around, my dear boy, must you be so obdurate?’ The new scene seemed to have perked him up a bit, he'd even managed to find an old Voltiger somewhere in the pockets of the decrepid check suit, which at least had the virtue of being to scale with his hand even if it was rather tatty and coated with lint. He lit it with the feeble flare of a cheap disposable lighter.
We were in the reception area to the Land of Children's Jokes, the swimming pool off the Roman Road that The Fat Controller had obtained the use of by corrupt means, for even more corrupt purposes. The same advertisements for children's swimming classes and work-out sessions were stuck up on the noticeboards, we were sitting on the same tiny chairs, eight of them had been pulled out to form a ragged circle.
Doug got up from where he sat opposite me and the poor man banged his spade on the fire bell again: ‘Ting!’. ‘Oh for Christ's sake,’ snapped The Fat Controller, ‘can't you mind out for that bloody thing? I would have thought you'd managed to get the hang of it by now – surely it's like judging the width of a car.’
‘Well no,’ Doug replied, ‘not exactly.’ The impact had shifted the spade in his head and he was clearly in pain; nevertheless he got up and walked round to where Beetle Billy sat dead to the world.
To the world maybe, but not to the Land of Children's Jokes. Doug shook him by the shoulder and he stirred, groaned, blinked a few times and then sat upright rubbing his eyes. ‘That's better,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘Now, are we all here, can we begin?’
I looked around the circle, they were all there. Besides Beetle Billy and Doug, there was Pinky, the thin man, the baby chewing razor blades and another baby I hadn't seen when I was there last. This baby was about the same age as the red one and was sitting in the corner over by the entrance to the changing rooms. I couldn't see its face because it had a plastic bag on its head, filmed with condensation and tightly fastened under its chin. Despite the suffocating hood the baby was still breathing vigorously. With each of its inhalations and exhalations the bag expanded and contracted. ‘Sweet, isn't it,’ said The Fat Controller indicating the poor mite with the wet end of his stogie.
‘S'pose so, but what's all this about anyway?’
‘We need to think up a name for you, Ian, that's what it's all about.’
‘Yes,’ chimed in Pinky. ‘Now you're coming here to stay, to be with us permanently, you need to have a proper designation like the rest of us – ’
‘After all,’ the thin man broke in his sharp tones, ‘you can't be called plain Ian, that won't do at all, oh no, my precious.’
‘Come on, come on, there's a proper way to do these things, I don't want you all blithering away like this to no effect,’ said the Lama of Lost Souls. ‘Moreover, it isn't only a name that we need for him, we need the right Sisyphean pose to lock him into, don't we?’
‘Call me the Prometheus of the Painstyler,’ I quipped. ‘After all, you've been scraping away at my liver now for years – ‘ I was going to say some even more trenchant things but at that moment the progress of my naming group was interrupted by a commotion at the far end of the reception area.
A group of young men wearing the loose cotton garb of hospital porters were trying to manhandle something out of the door to the changing rooms. The thing could have been a cricket bag, except that it was far larger. ‘Get a move on,’ shouted The Fat Controller to them. ‘We've started already, so bring it over here right away.’ They ignored him but his order did coincide with them all giving an almighty heave that dragged the heavy load out into the reception area.
It was rather like a cricket bag in shape, coated with PVC or some other slick substance and leaking water from its gaping lips. Along the side I could see the word ‘PortoDolph’ emblazoned inside a fish symbol and then I realised what it was, a container for transporting large fish, small cetaceans or any other animals that needed to be kept permanently moist.
There were four young men carrying the PortoDolph, one at each corner; they staggered the length of the room spilling water with every lurching step that they took. ‘Dump the thing there, Mandingo.’ He wasn't even looking at the lead young man – who happened to be black – when he said this, he just threw it out cursorily.
The four young men walked into the centre of the circle and dumped the PortoDolph so that the sides of the bag flopped open – inside was Bob the quadra-amputee, lying in a bedding of coolant bags. ‘Less of the thing, will'ya, laddie,’ he cried, addressing The Fat Controller. At the same time he was struggling to get some kind of purchase on his slippery container; the double pits of his shoulders were a bright violet in the artificial light. Amazingly he managed it and wedged himself upright in the sharp prow of the bag. ‘Allreet,’ he said once he was stable, ‘ahm ready now, let's get on with it.’
Now there was another diversion to cope with. The lead porter, the black one The Fat Controller had called Mandingo, after setting down his corner of the PortoDolph, had extracted a switchblade from his cotton blouson. This he now opened with a loud ‘click’, which echoed off the walls.
‘No one gives me that kind of dissin’,’ he said to The Fat Controller. ‘I'm gonna have to fucking cut you, old man.’ He went over to where the bully was sitting, plucked the Voltiger out of his hand and threw it away. The Fat Controller sat motionless, saying nothing. The porter stuck his knee in The Fat Controller's chest and placed the point of the switchblade at his bullfrog throat. The rest of us sat stock still as well; even the thin man had left off surreptitiously waggling his cane and muttering under his breath, ‘Cha, cha, cha!‘ I waited for the outrage I felt sure was about to happen. What would he do?
Well, in his situation I would have deprived the young man of his blade and used it to slit its owner from sternum to pelvic bone. Then I might have cut the throat of one of his companions and stuffed his dead head inside the knifeman's dying stomach. I would have left them standing like that as a sort of bio-mechanical sculpture, a tableau, intended to drive home the message of what you get if you diss’ The Fat Controller.
But he didn't do this at all. I looked at his face and it was white, not with rage, with something I had never seen in him before, a sense of fear? No, it couldn't be, it couldn't.
‘I'm very sorry if I offended you,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘It was crass and insensitive.’
‘It wasn't fucking crass and insensitive, it was very stupid, old man, an’ I don't care if you ‘pologise, if you grovel, I'm still gonna have to cut you.’
‘Ian . . .’ The big man's voice quavered. ‘C-could you lend me a hand here?’
I got up from my tiny chair and crossed the circle. The man with the knife moved round behind The Fat Controller, keeping the digging point of h
is weapon dead against where the obese old man's jugular might have been. ‘Don't get any closer,’ he cried, ‘or he gets it.’
‘Oh don't worry,’ I replied, ‘I'm not going to do anything. I got up to leave.’ I turned to face the children's jokes. ‘Doug,’ I said, ‘Pinky, thin man, babies, I'll see you around.’ I turned back to the Great White Spirit, the Manitou of Maleficence. ‘And Mr Broadhurst, although it may not have been that nice knowing you, it's certainly been interesting.’
As I gained the glass doors that opened on to the Roman Road he called out, ‘Ian?’ I turned back once more. ‘My dear boy, I'm so sorry you have to rush off, I thought all of this might amuse you.’ There was a pathetic, abandoned sort of note in his voice, a wheedling that undercut its normal basso.
‘It's getting on,’ I said. ‘We're going out to dinner tonight and I'll have to check back at the office before I go home.’
‘Oh very well, very well, don't forget to pay my respects to your lady wife.’
‘I won't.’
‘Oh – and Ian?’
‘Yes.’
‘It has been fun, old boy, hasn't it?’
‘Oh yes,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘it's been lot's of fun – just not my idea of it.’
And then I was on the Roman Road, walking quickly towards Bethnal Green through the late-afternoon shoppers. The fruit and veg market was still going, the stall holders barking their wares: ‘Toms at 50p on the two poun’, come an’ load up, you luvverly ladies.’ ‘Orlrighty, what am I gonna’ get for this?’ This was a stuffed dog, covered in virulent synthetic fur.
You can see why I was tired this evening, why I couldn't concentrate at dinner, I'd had quite a day. I sat there drinking red wine and listening to them pass the wonky baton of conversation between themselves, like an ill-trained relay team. I ran over everything in my mind and concluded that perhaps the city itself had played some part in all of this.
London, or so its inhabitants like to claim, is a collection of villages. I don't see it like that at all. I see the city as mighty ergot fungus, erupting from the very crust of the earth; a growing, mutating thing, capable of taking on the most fantastic profusion of shapes. The people who live in this hallucinogenic development partake of its tryptamines, and so it bends itself to the secret dreams of its beholders. I was – I realised – tired of it. It was time to go.
As I was on the verge of leaving work this afternoon, Hal Gainsby came into my office and told me that there was an opportunity to go to New York. Someone is needed to work on the marketing for yet another financial product to be launched by the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon. I think I might take this offer up.
Oh, and before I go, I suppose you're wondering about Jane upstairs, curled up under the duvet, her full belly pressed into the mattress? I was a little inconsistent there at the outset, wasn't I? But then no one ever said I couldn't be.
Time for bed now, isn't it? Time to climb the angled stair and settle my accounts with my destiny. What's the line – ‘ripped untimely from its mother's womb'? That's it. In this case, however, we're talking about another kind of abortion, perhaps ‘sucked untimely with the mechanical insensitivity of a domestic appliance’ would be a better way of putting it. I believe that's the method they use in those private clinics up in Edgware. You sit in the waiting room with weepy girls from Spain and Ireland and every couple of minutes there's a whirring noise from the room above, like the sound of some enormous vacuum cleaner. It's eternity's housework.
I also happen to know that it's a particular private anxiety of my wife. Neat, eh?
You what? Oh yes, your opportunity to participate, silly me, I was forgetting . . . Well, of course you may, if that's what you want but give it plenty of thought, don't rush into anything. Remember I may have killed, I may have tortured, I may have done all sorts of terrible things but it hurt me too, I do have feelings, as you know.
EPILOGUE
AT THE OYSTER BAR IN
GRAND CENTRAL STATION
The shoeshine boys and the cops were hamming it up for the tourists outside of the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central Station. The shoeshine boys were sticking their legs out on the sidewalk, tipping themselves back and forth on their boxes and generally goofing. They were all loose-limbed and slap-happy guys, as supple as the chamois cloths they flicked in the faces of their potential customers.
The cops were just being cops, standing in that ass-out way that cops have, so that their cuffs and revolvers are thrown into as much prominence as possible. They were all elbows and shirt epaulettes, these cops, dead casual.
It was a muggy afternoon in late May and the cops wanted the citizenry to know that about the best thing they could be doing for them in this city of cracked-up serial psychokillers was to maintain a strong goofing-with-the-shoeshine-boys presence. That was their routine.
Yellow cabs kept on driving down the slip road from the elevated section of Lexington Avenue and dumping more travellers on the sidewalk outside the station. Down they came, nosing their way off the steep ramp with that sloppy undulant motion that New York cabs have, then they shouldered their way to the kerb.
Inside the terminus the vast booking hall was cool, a twenty-two-piece gamelan orchestra from Indonesia was playing over by the subway entrance and the liquid notes flowed up and away into the airy marbled recesses of the hall's cranial dome.
At the far side of the hall from the 42nd Street entrance, wide tunnels lined with dressed stone blocks led down to the station's subterranean tracks. The tunnels were big enough to accommodate a hundred Hittites dragging a tranche of clay bricks intended for some ancient ziggurat, and this served to point up still further the impression that the station belonged to a forgotten culture, to an age when monumentalism went along with king-worship and collective consciousness.
Outside it had begun to rain. The cops and the shoeshine boy wrapped up their act, the tourists, the travellers and the city people rushed for cover. It was heavy rain that seemed to fall from a great height. It's like that in New York, the skyscrapers give the lie to nature's majesty, pushing the puny clouds up higher and higher so that the drops plummet down from twenty storeys, fifty storeys, a hundred storeys. It's not like London, in London the rain is two storeys high, at best.
Down on the second level of the station, the Oyster Bar was open for business. Even in the mid-afternoon there were still plenty of people who wanted a platter of Coney Island blue points and a glass of Bud.
The maître d’ had taken a booking that morning for a kids’ party. He suggested to the caller – a secretary from some bank or other – that they might like to have a table in the main dining room, or even the Saloon Room. She opted for the main dining room and he had supervised the table-laying himself, making sure that there were a few decorations on the red checkered tablecloth.
He had been expecting a group of five or six, but when the party turned up there was only this one guy with a funny-looking kid. The man was tall, English and plump. He apologised profusely to the maître d’ and explained that his secretary had misunderstood. He gave the maître d’ ten bucks and asked whether, if it wasn't too much trouble, he and his son could sit at the long nickel-plated oyster bar itself? The maître d’ said wouldn't it be a bit difficult for the kid getting on and off the high stools? But the man – without consulting the kid – said he wouldn't mind.
Carlton, who cooked on one of three raised tiers set behind the oyster bar, thought them an odd couple as well. He stood, stirring a mussel chowder in the stainless-steel basin set on its fixed tripod and watched while the kid finished off his second dozen oysters. Christ! The kid was only about two or three. Carlton had never seen a child that age do anything other than take a bite of seafood from a parent's plate but this tubby little thing was wielding his fork like a connoisseur, dipping mollusc after mollusc into the sauces provided. And such a strange kid to look at, almost entirely bald save for a moustache of fine blond hairs that shaded the creases at the back of h
is thick little neck, no eyebrows to speak of and those bulging eyes.
Carlton didn't want to be saying anything to anyone. He wasn't that kind of a guy. Since he had arrived in New York he'd done his best to cultivate a steady demeanour – Jamaicans had a bad reputation in this town. Despite the fact that he had been a commis chef back in Kingston and knew just about everything there was to know about cooking seafood, it hadn't been easy to get a job at all. He didn't want to do anything that would call attention to himself. He wanted to work quietly, save enough money to bring his wife and child over.
But whether or not it would get him into trouble Carlton knew he'd have to say something to the maître d’, because once or twice he was certain that he'd seen the tall Englishman surreptitiously give his son a sip from his glass of rye, and now that the kid had finished his second dozen, he turned to his father and Carlton heard him say, ‘I suppose I shall have to adjourn to the water closet for my post-prandial cigar.’
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title
By The Same Author
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Book One: The First Person
Prologue
Chapter One: What You See is What You Get
Chapter Two: Crossing The Abyss
Chapter Three: The Fat Controller
Chapter Four: My Universities
Chapter Five: Rehabilitation
Intermission
Book Two: The Third Person
Chapter Six: The Land of Children's Jokes
