by Will Self
From where I sat I could watch the sun, which, in sinking, touched the edge of the Number Three cooling tower at Didcot Power Station. This rose up, over the rape, like some malevolent piece of statuary—an Easter Island god—in all its monumental bulk, evidence of some sterile and unproductive culture. The don sat in silence, his plump little arms folded.
I don’t know why; I have no explanation for what I did next. I certainly had no liking for the don’s story, but perhaps I felt like a disappointed cinemagoer— having paid for my ticket I’d be buggered if I was going to walk out of the film. If I couldn’t have less, I would make do with more. You can see therefore, how the copula naturally insinuated itself, so:
‘And…?’ I ventured after some time.
‘What!’ He started.
‘And—having cornered her suspect?’ What a fool! I wilfully goaded him. He thrashed at the cue, a small seal with a large fish.
‘Her suspect…? Oh yes, I’m sorry, I went into a kind of reverie just then, it comes upon me unexpectedly. Just as it did then—when I am in full flood…’ And he was off again, the train jerked into motion and the don and I were utterly alone, yellow-islanded by low wattage in the jolting darkness.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ he continued. His little hands held either side of his head, as if they were contacts between which the current of thought leapt and fizzed. ‘A lapse, a fugue, a thought jamming and sparking like a severed high-tension cable between the two lobes…’
Dan, then…Dan had always drunk and always got drunk. It was just another of those things that in the beginning had made him endearing to Carol. He lost himself charmingly and entirely, like a Dervish in a whirl or a swami in a trance, and then he would recover himself the next morning at breakfast, pulling on his identity like a woolly.
‘I really tied one on last night,’ he’d say, mockshamefaced, his deft fingers tucked away in the tops of his jeans pockets, his hair all tousled. ‘What! Doncha remember what happened?’ And whichever of Dan’s floating crowd of mates had happened to be along on this particular crawl would recount its dénouement. ‘You were standing by the rack, right on the bloody forecourt of the garage, man! And you’d grabbed one of those big two-litre cans of oil. You kept shouting…’
‘Come over here and get greased…yeah, I know.’ Dan would break in in tones of genuine remorse, the one acute phrase somehow surfacing out of the sewage morass that was his memory of the previous night.
To begin with, Carol not only tolerated, she even welcomed, the mates. ‘Mates’ who were elements of Dan’s Stourbridge boozing set, now transplanted to London. Mates, who for convenience’s sake we shall call: Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 (Dave 1 because Dave 2 comes later). On most evenings Carol counted them all out of the flat and, five or six hours later, counted them back in again. And in the morning, when Barry lay, his fat freckled forearms slapped down on the flower-patterned spare duvet, and raw, yellow callused feet sticking out over the end of the spare futon divan bed, Carol would wish him a cheerful ‘good morning’ and bring him a mug of tea. Then she would cook Barry (or Gary, Gerry, Derry, Dave 1—she was quite fair) an enormous fry-up. Bacon, eggs and sausages with all the trimmings, including black pudding, for which they had all gained a taste in the Midlands. Some way through the breakfast ritual Dan would make the kind of appearance I have described above.
But then, somehow, Carol lost patience. Either that, or the character of Dan’s boozing sessions with his mates changed. It was difficult to say which came first. Naturally, this very issue was the grist of the subsequent friction between them. Carol stopped Drinking (with a capital ‘D’) herself, and she stopped tolerating the Mates on the futon divan.
In the mornings she lay rigidly in bed while Dan, in the en suite bathroom, irrigated his head under the avocado faucet. The tepid water flowed over him and into the avocado bowl.
‘We never fuck any more,’ she said. And watched while Anne Diamond straightened her skirt on the television.
‘Whozzat?’
‘We never fuck any more. You’ve always got brewer’s droop.’ In moments of tight emotion Carol regressed to the tropes and figures of urban Poole, such as they were.
‘Don’t be vulgar,’ said Dan, and he involuntarily hawked, as if to illustrate what was prohibited.
‘You’re always pissed.’ She pursued him. ‘We used to get tipsy and even pissed pissed for fun, to be sociable. We did it as a means…[and here perhaps were some of the meagre fruits of Llanstephan]…not as an end in itself.’
‘I still drink to have fun,’ was Dan’s pathetic rejoinder. ‘Why else would I drink?’
There, you have the measure of the man. And when she pressed him further, he said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ and left. Which, when Carol came to think about it, had always been his stock response when anything between them that smacked of emotion veered away from a treacly gooey-goo love sentimentality, or the good companionship of hail-fellow-well-met mates.
Not that Carol longed for the two of them to sit down opposite one another and dissect their relationship together—as if it were a fish dinner. Everything in her own upbringing—and nature for that matter—cried out against such a course. This was not the Poole way. The Poole way with ‘relationships’ was a turgid misunderstanding, leading perhaps to an evening in the allotment shed shouting, or an extra valium. So Carol let it ride.
She got another caged bird, a mynah this time. Beverley, who hadn’t been in touch for over two years, arrived in Muswell Hill unannounced. Dan was out drinking with Gary. After an edgy evening watching a repeat of Columbo, Beverley had her way with Carol on a pile of Dan’s work shirts, which were stacked on the half landing, freshly ironed and en route for storage.
This was quite different to Llanstephan nights. Beverley had brought a dildo with her, or a lingam, as she called it. She had been instructed in its use by a flat-faced Tamil woman who lived in Shrewsbury. It was a ghastly little knobkerry of ironwood. But despite that, with it inside her vagina Carol could feel a potential for pleasure in the internal contemplation of its ongoing rigidity; its failure to wilt, its determination to stay just as it was. If it wasn’t for Beverley’s horrible face, the schoolgirl myopia and cartoon curls (and that sour cream smell: was it sweat, or worse?), Carol could perhaps have unslipped the surly bonds of her meagre restraint and flown off into orgasmic orbit.
Carol’s head thudded against the skirting board. The lingam thudded into her. Beverley’s thumb thudded against Carol’s perineum. Dan thudded on the door to the maisonette. ‘Let us in, love,’ he called, ‘I’ve lost me key.’
He’d also lost Gary in the John Logie Baird on Fortune Green Road. However, in the Bald-Faced Stag in East Finchley, he had acquired Derek; a lapsed Methodist and fervent member of the British National Party. For good measure, by way of possessing a trinity of attributes, Derek was also a stinking piss artist.
As he came into the main room of the maisonette Derek took in the dangling strap of Beverley’s bib ’n’ braces with fanatic eyes, from under a dead straight fringe that must have framed a million commercial handjobs. He had them sussed. Later, when several more cans had been circulated he tangled with Beverley; calling her first a commie, then a Jew and only latterly a dikey cockteaser. Carol thought she might have to call the constabulary, and feared for their lease. Dan slept throughout —but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience.
3
Frond
THE MORNING AFTER the night when Dan tried to memorise STD codes by pressing his cheek hard against the booklet for eight hours, he woke up groaning. ‘Gor…’ he exclaimed to a sunfilled kitchen, ‘I really tied one on last night.’ There was no one to answer. Beverley and Derek had gone and Gary had never returned. Dan found Carol upstairs, watching TV-AM in bed. He cursed, seeing how the hands stood on the little clock in the corner of the screen, but he was interrupted in mid-curse. The lining of his stoma
ch had been saturated like a sponge with alcohol, and then compressed beneath the waistband of his jeans for eight hours. He just made it to the bathroom. Carol blocked out the sound of his retching by humming, and affected not to notice when he came nuzzling back to her and slid his thin head up under the bedcovers. ‘Jeez, I feel awful,’ he said, ‘just awful.’ And then he fell asleep. Carol waited half an hour and then she called his work.
So began the era of the sick calls. With monstrous regularity, once, twice and even three times a week, Dan would fail to make it to work. From what snippets of information Carol could glean, Dan was no longer the blue-eyed boy at the design agency. They were only snippets because Dan was as unforthcoming about his work as he was his feelings. Carol knew better than to risk a direct question; that would just precipitate a retucking of those hospital corners and a bob-bob out the door by that by now lank and tired forelock.
Along with absenteeism came more drinking. Carol found suspect bottles of sticky liqueur and smoky aquavit in odd places: under the sink, in a hollow pouffe, behind a ventilation grille. But the novelty of unearthing Sambucca from the sock drawer, or Poire Guillaume from the pelmet, soon palled.
About this time, Dan’s mother came on a visit. She was a formidable woman in late middle age. Dan had been the child of her latter, inferior marriage. Before Dan’s father she had been married to a man who had made his fortune out of sherbet fountains. She was possessed of the pear-shaped figure that English women of a certain class and disposition inevitably acquire. And to go with it she had astonishing tubular legs, encased in nylon of a very particular caramel shade. The effect was one of kneelessness, tendonlessness—Dan’s mother’s legs, one felt, if cut into, would not bleed. They were somehow synthetic, plasticised.
She stayed for four nights. Night One: Carol cooked chilli con carne and they drank a bottle of Matéus Rosé. Night Two: Carol made shepherd’s pie with the leftover mince and they drank an odd six-pack of Mackesons that Dan ‘found’ at the back of the fridge. Night Three: Carol made lamb chops and they drank a bottle of Valpolicella. Actually, it was a two-litre bottle that Dan had brought home especially, and he did most of the drinking. His mother didn’t really seem to notice. On the fourth night Carol didn’t bother to cook. Dan, maddened, shouted at her right in front of his mother, as if it were her presence that gave him the licence to behave in this appalling fashion. He stormed out of the maisonette and came back banging, crashing and ultimately puking at four a.m.
In the morning, before she left, Dan’s mother took Carol to one side. She hadn’t addressed Carol directly more than ten times during her entire stay.
‘You remind me of myself as a young woman,’ said Dan’s mother. Carol looked into the uttermost denseness of her rigid coif. ‘You’re quiet, but you’re not stupid.’ Carol stared fixedly at a bad watercolour of Llanstephan that a be-scarfed admirer had once given her, willing Dan’s mother not to say anything too intimate. Embarrassment wasn’t an emotion that Carol was familiar with, but she did know when she should adopt a mien appropriate to someone receiving a back-handed compliment. Dan’s mother went on. ‘I see my son is becoming an alcoholic. It doesn’t surprise me—it’s in the family. My father died on a mental ward. He had been a celebrated high court judge. He had what they called a “wet brain”.
‘The day he died I went to visit him. He was terribly thin and his eyes glittered. He grabbed my wrist and said, “D’ye see them?” “What?” said I. “The peacocks,” he said. “They are beautiful with their radiant plumage, but why does matron let them run about the ward, it can’t be hygienic.” He died an hour later. My son is the same, although I cannot imagine that he is sufficiently grandiose to hallucinate peacocks. There’s no reason for it, you see—it’s hereditary. Try and hold out, my dear, if he asks for it I’ll arrange for some help. But if things get too bad, my advice would be to leave him.’
And with that she left herself. Heading back to Burford with all sorts of goodies she had tracked down in the West End. Goodies she hadn’t bothered to show Carol.
It was two nights after her departure that Carol masturbated for the first time. It is true that she had been thinking about masturbation, albeit in a rather woolly way, for some time. But she hadn’t concretely imagined what it would be like, or indeed what she would have to do.
Dan was out with Derry. They had heard about some pub on the Pentonville Road where a man had been killed the preceding weekend: this was their macabre excuse for an unseasonal Oktoberfest. ‘I shan’t expect you,’ said Carol, standing in her nightie and dressing-gown, unaware of cliché or irony. She retired to bed with a Jilly Cooper. In the book, a woman was wanked off with great expertise by a Venezuelan banker. Carol, who was no connoisseur, found the description exciting, and more importantly, technically illuminating. She put the book aside. Her hand crawled down under the covers to the crackling hem of her nightie, and lifted it. Her fingers flowed up the smooth runnel between her thighs. She cupped her vulva and then kneaded it a little. One finger slipped inside the puckered lips and sought out the damp pit of her vagina.
The access of power thrilled Carol to the tips of her carmined toenails. Of course she had been aware of the act, but the liberation from being climbed on board, or pummelled by Beverley’s exhausting manipulations, was ecstatic. Carol orgasmed within seconds, one finger on the slick dewlap of her clitoris, another inside herself. The News at Ten theme tune drummed a counterpoint to her subsiding sighs.
This, then, was the pattern that they established: Dan went out drinking, and Carol, as soon as he was out of the way, treated herself to a really big wank. Over a period of some eight or ten weeks, she staged productions of a number of masturbatory playlets, all of her own devising. Her imagination wasn’t that fertile, but we mustn’t laugh at her legions of buck niggers, priapic and grinning; nor at her Latino playboys, who bore down on her riding foam-flecked polo ponies, and dismounted only to remount…Carol.
How those fingers flew! And how Carol discovered herself; every millimetre of damp erogenous site was mapped out. How peculiar that Dan, with his deft hands, had never bothered to discover this spot, had never chanced to trail his fingers here, or there.
One night Dan, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 all took off for Ilford. Their goal was an enormous nightclub, famous for its ‘caged’ bar. This was mounted on concrete, enabling the young men and women who patronised it to reach fabulous levels of intoxication, and to indulge in commensurate behaviour without being able to trash, vandalise or bemerde. At dawn they were hosed down by thick-set men wearing dinner jackets.
In Barry’s car on the way there, Dan was clearly troubled and more than usually silent. The others asked him what the problem was, but he wouldn’t reply. So, in lieu of sympathy they offered him Jack Daniels.
At home meanwhile, behind drawn, patterned blinds, Carol was getting down to business. She undressed in the living room. She had discovered that the juxtaposition between her own nakedness and the room’s bland formality really excited her. And furthermore, by moving around the room she could catch sight of herself in numerous mirrors and glass surfaces that had been vigorously Mr Sheened.
She undid her blouse and ran her hands over her nylon cones, seeking out the gap between breast and cuirass. She undid the buttons of her slacks and let them swish to the floor. She kicked herself free of them. A Whiter Shade of Pale oozed from the CD player, Carol’s hand slid under the waistband of her pants…
* * *
‘Do you believe in horror?’ The direct question threw me out completely. I had been utterly absorbed, and, despite myself, a voyeuristic party to Carol’s onanism. Now the don had broken off, without warning or explanation.
The train lurched and clattered over points, I could see the modern lines of Reading station swimming towards us out of the dusk. The don repeated his question: ‘Do you believe in horror?’
I summoned myself: ‘Do you mean the occult? Beasts, demons, ghouls, table turning, that kind o
f thing?’
‘Oh no, not that at all.’ The train juddered to a halt. People in nylon windcheaters and off-the-peg suits dis- and embarked. But even this profoundly workaday sight somehow failed to rupture the thickening atmosphere in the compartment. ‘Oh no, not outlandish horror. That’s chickenfeed, mere persiflage. What I’m talking about here is real horror. The horror that shadows each and every aspect of the ordinary, just as surely as the darkness shadows that vending machine over there.’ He pointed at a vending machine that hung about in the shadows on the platform. A whistle rose and fell, the train jolted and moved off once more. The don shifted on his buttocks and leant forward, adopting a didactic, tutorial posture. ‘You know that poem of Roethke’s, how does it go? “All the nausea of brown envelopes and mucilage, Desolation in hygienic public places…”
‘No, no, that’s not quite it. But you know what I mean …’ His faced bulged at me, as synthetic as injection-moulded plastic. ‘That’s the horror that interests me, the horror that we all feel, left alone in a living-room, in the mid-afternoon, in the centre of a densely populated city… that horror.
‘There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the very core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.
‘So, while you wait for what is going to happen next, prepare yourself for these two kinds of horror and unite them in your mind. Then you will be able to calmly assure yourself, that the muffled “bong” of that ultimately distressed spring, as you subside alongside Carol on to one of the pieces of her suite, really is a reptilian alien tentacle, lunging through the soft upholstery.’
