by Will Self
The club was underground – in site only. The reception lobby was accessed down two flights of stairs. Wide, plush treads, ochre walls with the uplights set behind horrid metal basketry – keeping the illumination down, taking the members down. You could imagine a judge saying ‘Take her down!’ and the cold shock of realising you’ve been sentenced to a lifetime’s networking.
Through the swing doors from the lobby was the club’s main room. This was dominated by a bulging belly of a bar, buckled into its leatherette décor by belts of chrome, a corset of mirroring and scintillating steel suspenders. The Sealink’s clientele – or members, this place was, after all, as private as any utterly public place can be – hung off the bar, or housed themselves in the conchate seats in the conchate seating areas; they flipped their leather fins and floated up to the restaurant on the gallery level, or upended and dived down to the toilets and table-football room on the level below the bar. But mostly they just sat there, cemented in place by their secretions of chatter.
For, if a net were to be cast into the Sealink Club and trawled through its corridors and vestibules – even a seine net, monofilamented, micro-meshed, gill-slicing – all it would come up with would be a few spluttering servitors, or gasping groupers who had ligged their way in.
No, to catch one moiety of the members you’d need a pot or cage, baited with publicity, or gossip, or innuendo, or money, or all four; or combinations thereof: gossip about money, public innuendo, lucrative publicity, and so on. Because this lot were bottom feeders, pure and simple, who came to the club in the unadulterated spirit of undersea exploration, to check out how low they could go.
As for the other moiety, well, you’d have to say that they were even easier to catch, if no better to eat. All that would be required to land them was a low tide – which came twice in the twenty-four, at noon and three in the morning, when the barroom was little more than a muddy flat of wrack – a dinghy which could be manoeuvred around the downlights – which were set behind horrid metal basketry – and a long knife-arm, with which to reach down and prise them from the carpeting.
For this box-load were bivalves – to an hermaphrodite. Eyeless in the gloom, de-tentacled by devolution, possessing at most one febrile limb with which to lift a glass or tote a cigarette, they reposed as the currents of conversation flowed through them, extracting sufficient nutriment simply by the act of being. Some argued – and Simon was on occasion among them, there had to be some defence – that if a grain of insight, a granule of originality, were inserted into their cloistered, sharp-edged minds, placed on the mantel where the invitations sat, it might well be cultured, swaddled in a carbonate of some kind until it formed, if not wisdom, at any rate something resembling culture. But Simon only ever said this when he was drunk and full of the world. Drunk, and so full of the world that the world must be good – or at any rate capable of inclusion – for him to be so full of it.
Sarah saw Simon from the stool where she still sat. Saw him pause in the doorway while two sumo suits squeezed by him, saw him crane his neck to scan the room, while at the same time dipping his eyes down, keen to avoid the taint of seeming to scan the room. The very sight of him lanced across the room to Sarah, every entrance he made was a penetration of her; and every time that he left, it was a slithery, warm withdrawal.
She unglued her thighs in anticipation, signalled to Julius that he was required, twirled on the stool to summon the shiny happy people, then finally turned right round to face Simon, thighs now parted, and guided him into her.
Simon and Julius arrived at the back and front of Sarah simultaneously. Simon bent down and kissed her at one side and then the other of her lips. She placed a hand on the nape of his neck, feeling the scalp beneath the hair and held him against her face until his lips nuzzled sideways to her mouth. Then their tongues slithered over and under, pink shrews blindly questing. Her small knees pincered his thick thighs. She wouldn’t let him go, wouldn’t let him order a drink, until she had the firm reassurance of him, that crosstown coil of erectile tissue with which she had drawn him in, and now landed him. And Simon felt relieved too. Relieved in her attraction to him – a different kind of visceral update.
His gusset unstuck from his perineum, his clothes dried on his sticky flesh as if a blast of cool, dry air had been blown up his sleeves and trouser legs. The stubble on his cheek softened to fur, the gunk on his eyes and mouth turned from sour to sweet. She sensed through his nape all the embarrassment of the kiss, and yet she still held him, challenged him to withdraw, to reject her in any way. This, naturally, he did.
“Hello, darling,” he said, and then to Julius, “My man.” They shook hands.
The barman stood behind his bar, all barman. White apron, white shirt, black tie tucked just-so. Behind him his reflected back was equally exact. The ranks of bottles proclaimed near-pharmaceutical alleviation of whatever ailed Simon; and Julius, the physician, prepared for the laying-on of hands. “Can I assist you, sir,” he intoned, “to a refreshing beverage?”
Simon regarded Julius as if he had never before encountered such a noble barman and this was his first visit to the Sealink. He straightened up, aware of the importance, the solemnity of ordering. He yanked the bottom hem of his nondescript black jacket and placed his blunt hands in the pockets of his nondescript black trousers. If there had been a nondescript black tie knot around the neck of his unremarkable white shirt, you could have been certain that he would have straightened it before replying, “A large Glenmorangie for myself, straight up. A Samuel Adams to chase it … and for you, my little monkey? The usual?” The toque tilted.
Tony Figes appeared next to Sarah, ostentatiously blowing his nose on a piece of thick paper towel. “Simon …” he drawled, and the two men awkwardly embraced, side on; Tony’s scar writhed. The drinks were placed gently in front of Sarah. Simon asked Tony if he would like something, and then widened the order to encompass the Braithwaites and Tabitha, who had sidled up and who also had the sniffles. The snotty children waited – like the good adults they were – for their drinks.
“Simon,” Tony redrawled, “how was the opening?”
“Open,” Simon countersigned, “partially, at any rate.”
One of the Braithwaites palmed him a wrap, hip bones touched, hands stroked. Simon was in possession and even the tenth part of the law was far away from him now. He raised his eyebrow ridges at Sarah and the two of them, without further preamble, sidled away from the group, sidled across the room, out of the doors, and took the stairs down to the car-deck room.
Down in the car-deck room Simon went to where the window should have been, and under a downlight that illuminated a duff political cartoon – axes labelled ‘cuts’ – opened the wrap. The cocaine was yellow and lumpy. It looked good. He raised his eyebrows again, and she tilted her toque once more. He was halfway through chopping out the lines on the rough pseudo-grain of a large television, which was camouflaged so as to resemble a sea locker, when he broke off, gestured with the corner of his credit card.
“Good day?”
“Mmm.”
“By which?”
“Crap. Boring too.”
“Talk about it?”
“Nah.”
He carried on chopping, scientifically, feeling the chemical crunch of plastic on granule.
When she took the rolled note and bent her head to snort the line, perspective was re-banished; she became an ochre swathe of face with pinkness in the exposed interior of the nostril. The swathe wound back into a bolt, which turned to him, becoming a face. “Simon?”
“Umph.” He took the note. The cocaine burned his nose and anaesthetised it at the same time. Alternative medicine. Like the sodden cloth of a ragamuffin at traffic lights the drug squeegeed its way over his fore-brain, both clouding and cleaning his mind. Then he was erect and erect, Kundalini currents running both ways. Perhaps I have two spines, he thought inconsequentially, backing his petite lover between the chunky furnishings. She ended up in th
e corner of the room, his mouth clamped over hers.
Downstairs in the bar, Tony Figes was putting the bite on a journalist.
“It’s like some neurological disorder,” he told the man, who wrote a column on columns. “A compulsion to say, write, do, the glibbest and most ephemeral thing possible; a kind of glibolalia –”
“Give me an example,” the man replied. He was fat, with licks of vanilla hair on a conical head, but despite this – or perhaps because of it – he wasn’t going to be intimidated by a faggot.
“Well.” Tony’s scar squirmed. “What you wrote about the raising of veal calves in your column yesterday.”
“What was wrong with that?” The fat man – whose name was Gareth – moderated his tone. Even if he was to be criticised, at least he had been read.
“You added nothing to the debate. All you said was that the mental state of the animal was an unknowable thing –”
“And isn’t it?”
“Possibly, but the only authority you quoted was another newspaper article.”
“Drink, Tone?” This was from Tabitha, who had interposed half her long body, half her long hair. Gareth stiffened to avoid contact, the leggy girl was that sexy; and where they were standing, hard against the bar, fast becoming a thicket of arms and legs, with burning tobacco foliage.
“Thank you, Tabitha, a Stolli martini, please –”
“Straight up?” Julius fed Tony from behind the bar.
“Straight up, but then wiggle it a bit, please. Then pull it out again, but put it straight back up.” Tony gave his double smile to Gareth, who shivered with distaste.
“It wasn’t another newspaper article – I quoted Wittgenstein … Wittgenstein’s theory about private language.” Gareth took a pull on his glass of white wine and peered down at his interlocutor’s bald patch.
“Certainly you quoted what you thought was Wittgenstein, but actually you misquoted him, because you lifted the quote from an article on exactly the same subject that appeared on Sunday, I think you know which one I mean.” And Tony snorted, realising too late that a glob of cocaine and mucus was poised on the very lip of his nostril. This shot down in a near-vertical trajectory and lodged on the rim of Gareth’s shoe. Fortunately the journalist didn’t notice. Although Tabitha did, and dissolved in giggles.
“So what if I did? I don’t think that goes to prove anything much. Why don’t you address yourself to the real questions, instead of trying to score points.”
“Ho-hoo! The real issue. Is that it? The real issue.” The critic was becoming agitated now. Animals were Tony’s first – perhaps only – love. He lived in a council flat in Camberwell with his mother, who looked like an ancient Labrador; and an ancient Labrador. “So, if that’s the case, under what circumstances do you feel it’s acceptable to raise veal calves in crates where they can’t move, where they can’t do anything but slam their heads against the planks until they’re bruised and bleeding? Perhaps if we could be certain that the beasts weren’t in any real distress it would be acceptable, hmmm?’
Gareth was not to be humiliated. Or rather, he had been humiliated so long ago that everything which had followed was nothing but mint on the lamb of shame. He hated Figes and his little clique. The sexy girls, the two apparently mute blacks, the painter Dykes with his sniffy attitude. He looked down at his shoe and saw that a glob of whitish mucus was lodged on the rim of the toe. He discreetly smeared this off on the carpet – ten hours later this residuum was hoovered up by a Guatemalan cleaner, dressed in blue overalls – then came back at Tony: “That’s irrelevant. Whether I misquoted or not, the point I made still stands – we can’t know the animal’s state of mind.”
‘Well, shrinks now apparently have the humility to admit that they don’t know anything about depression. They just hand out the drugs and if the patient responds then they say that they have a depression that is responsive to such-and-such a drug. So perhaps we should do that with the veal calves, give them Prozac and if they seem to be happier take it as read that they are. I can see quite a brisk trade being done in the flesh of calves raised on Prozac, can’t you?”
“You’re being idiotic. Very silly.” And Gareth contrived to notice someone on the far side of the bar, someone he needed to talk to urgently, right away. “Excuse me.” He rotated his figure on its axis and abstracted it.
Tony called after him, “Or how about venison on Valium?”
And Tabitha chimed in, “or ham on haloperidol?”
The clique dissolved in forced laughter, which left them with the uneasy feeling of not-having-been-fair to the man.
“But seriously,” said Ken Braithwaite, the older of the brothers by three minutes, “if we eat the meat of animals who have been physically tortured, perhaps we should be more imaginative about it.”
“Whaddya mean?” Tony was dipping one of his mouths in his martini, the other one nuzzled at the side of the glass.
“Well, how about eating the flesh of animals who have been emotionally abused?”
“Hmmm, nice idea. You mean persistently sexually humiliate pheasants – and then shoot them?”
“Something like that.”
“Or,” Tabitha said, clutching the little ball of humour and running with it, “chickens that have been socially ostracised, maddened by the fact that they aren’t invited to parties.”
“Sort of free-rage chickens, you mean?” said Tony.
“Which reminds me,” said Tabitha, “if we’re going to rage, we’d better do some of these.” She already had the pills, dusty with lint, secreted in her hand and she palmed one each to Tony and the Braithwaites.
“Wozzthis?” queried Steve, the younger Braithwaite, but after popping it.
“E,” Tabitha slurred – she was chewing hers up for a quicker rush. “Good too. White dove.”
“That’s all I want to eat from now on in,” said Ken Braithwaite, skulling his with a swallow of beer. “The breasts of white doves raised on ecstasy.”
Beneath the basement they stood in were the kitchens, and beneath this was Bazalgette’s main sewer conduit for Soho, a Victorian creation originally tiled in green, but for so long unseen that the green was neither here – nor there, where brown rats squeaked horribly. Hosts of them, crawling up and over, through and under one another, as if dimension was of no account. They copulated in passing, their long tails twined in scaly knitting. And on their backs, in the filthy fur that covered their bodies – little sacs of organs – the lice trundled, excremental eggs plopping from their abdomens.
In Soho Square – where the hunt was centuries gone – two mutts mucked about with one another. The dog covered the bitch, entirely. For his legs were as long as the bitch’s body. He crouched to snag his corkscrew in, and then twisted it, twisted it. The two bodies shuddered, half on the grass – half off. On-side nails scratched the paving, off-side nails found purchase in the grass. The dog’s fore-paws flapped, then twitched, then spasmodically waved. He was too big for the job, his part-Alsatian body heeled over, like a shaggy yacht with too much sail on, and too late he felt his cock hook in hard under the bitch’s bone. Then they were arse to arse, horribly mated, awfully fucked. They yowled and yowled and yowled.
In the green deep, off the continental shelf, where the leviathans keep only each other’s company, a penis the size of a lifeboat was unlimbered, swung out on its davit of sinew, and then plunged gently into its oceanic counterpart. The two vastnesses nuzzled one another, moved closer together with ridiculously subtle movements of their tails, each the length of a suburban cul-de-sac. Their underslung mouths parted to reveal curtains of baleine, enough to stricture a school of women. Barnacles on belly grated against barnacles on back. Their theramin cries swooped and oscillated weirdly. Of such creatures it could never be said that they came, only that they had departed. Quit the earth first, now exited the sea.
In the car-deck room Simon groomed Sarah. His finger traced the soft line of her buttock, beneath the soft line of her pants,
beneath the soft fabric of her skirt. She grunted, leant into him, tucked the whole of herself beneath his barbellate chin. Her fingers scampered on his flocculent chest. The cleft of her was in the corner, in line with a cleft of cornice, a cleft of carpet, a cleft of plaster. He bit her lip. His finger explored – he was almost bent double to encompass her – hooked up the hem of her skirt, blotted itself on the inky top of her stocking, and then imprinted his touch on the white flesh above. Dab and dab and dab. Leaving dabs. He explored the lightly wrapped crotch of her, hair bunching in damp flawless flaw. Her sex was gaping. He visualised it swelling. He moaned. She moaned. “Touch me,” she whispered, muffled by his mouth. He did. The elastic rimmed his finger. He sunk the emissary inside, scouted the gaff, looked for a place to leave the genetic evidence. Her little paws moved down, swirling, over shirt to belt. Simon thought of an axe-shaped turd he had once extracted from where it was wedged in his son’s arse cleft. “Monkey, monkey,” he uttered in her mouth.
The door to the car-deck room banged open and Tabitha stood there guffawing, a drink slopping in her hand. “What have we here?” She turned up the fader switch by the door. “Love in a dim climate, or what?” Sarah and Simon broke. His hand went to his nose, he added musk to mucus, cunt to cocaine. Tabitha threw herself in a chair. She was wearing a very short skirt and her legs were hosed in something matt yet shiny, emphasising their great length, their insulting shapeliness. “There’s fuck-all happening down there,” she continued, grabbing handfuls of her tawny hair and pulling them upwards, a characteristic gesture “The shiny happy people and I have dropped an E, but it doesn’t look as if you two need one.”
Sarah still stood in the corner, she had hoicked her skirt up to rearrange her blouse and underwear. “Hoo, I dunno, Simon?”
“God, I really shouldn’t –”
“Shouldn’t, or don’t want to?” Tabitha’s tone mocked him, lassoed him with double meaning. She always fancied her sister’s men, wanted them. Although whether this was out of competitiveness, or genuine attraction, was impossible to say.
