by Will Self
Big Mama Rosie began to truffle and muffled champings fell from her mouth. She moved over Richard like a planetoid blob, pumping at the syringe with one hand, until his red blood joined the orange fluid in the barrel. He made the effort and lifted his free arm up into the air; it floated away from him, ethereal and unconnected. He pawed weakly at Rosie's T-shirt, pulling the damp fabric away from. her chest. Rosie's breasts were like two sweating blancmanges. They lay on her rib cage, depressed and puddingy – the nipples were recessed. Richard tried to pull these fly-speck currants out of their soft surround, the virulent pink slab of yesteryear's dessert.
There was a ‘lumpa-lumpa’ noise in the air, a deafening heartbeat. Richard looked down at the crook of his arm and saw that a massive thrombus had blown up in the vein; it bulged beatingly, uncontrollably: ‘lumpa-lumpa, lumpa-lumpa’. Richard tried to call out to Rosie, to tell her to cease with her injecting of him into her and her into him. It was no use, her eyes were glazed and rolled back in their sockets, she stared sightlessly up at the ceiling where Spiderman hung from his plastic web. The ‘Iumpa-lumpa’ grew, filling the cold closeness of the room. Outside the streetlamps came on, each one an island. ‘Lumpa-lumpa, Iumpa-lumpa.’ And still the lump grew and grew in the crook of his arm, grew until it eclipsed the arm itself. And still Rosie pumped up and down. Richard tore with his nails at Rosie's breast, feeling the skin pucker and give, like the wrinkled rubber of an old party balloon.
The breast exploded. The thrombus exploded. Suddenly the air was full with a spray of orange droplets; gouts of pussy fluid spurted out from arm and chest. The tattered skin of Rosie's breast fell slack against the exposed radiator of her rib cage. Richard stared down at his arm. Corners of flesh and skin curled away from the ragged hole in the crook of his elbow. Exposed to view, in the very core of his arm, were the crude struts and wonky rivets of his Meccano anatomy, lain bare for all to see.
A huge bald man came in from where he had been loitering in the passage and stood over Richard. He was wearing an immaculately tailored pin-stripe suit. The bald man mopped the orange gunk from his lapels and brow with a silk paisley handkerchief. Then he reached his hand down towards Richard's face, middle fingers and thumb bent in, index and little fingers extended, warding off the evil eye. With the two outstretched fingers he teased down Richard's eyelids and pressed him back once more, down into the orange darkness.
('He's right under now,’ said Gyggle.
‘An’ I suppose you want me to change his bloody pee bag an’ that.’
‘Well, yes. I do think that constitutes part of your duty as a nurse.
‘Usually there's a good reason for why a patient is unconscious for the whole damn weekend.’
‘Ours not to reason why – ‘ Gyggle shot over his shoulder, and was gone, off to interview his volunteer.)
Ian was in the Land of Children's Jokes. His gummy eyes prised themselves open to see a garish room full of clashing primary colours, post-box reds, viridian greens and cerulean blues. It was a large room and the furniture was all fungal. There were giant toadstools instead of chairs and grossly distended puffballs in place of sofas. Tall mushrooms gathered together, their slick flat caps grouping to form the surfaces of what might have been tables. The close air in the room was meaty, yeasty, damp and beefy.
There were two men in the room with Ian. One, who was plump and pink, squatted naked in the corner. The other wore a purple suit of satin covered with large black spots and moved about, stepping between the unusual soft furnishings. Every third step he twirled on his heels and as he did so struck an attitude, the cane in his right hand held aloft at an angle. Ian could hear him muttering to himself, ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ the emphasis always on the last ‘cha’.
‘Are you awake, dearie?’ said the pink man in the corner. He spoke without moving, but it was clear to Ian from the way that his flabby thighs quivered that the man was finding it difficult to hold his position. As if to confirm this every few seconds a little clenched hand would shoot out from his lap and drop to the carpet, steadying his wavering bulk. ‘Doh err!’ exclaimed the pink man. ‘I'm not: sure I can hold out like this for much longer. ‘
‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The character in the polka-dot suit shot between them, pirouetting. As well as the cane he sported a top hat made from the same shiny material, and in the same pattern – this he now began to raise and waggle, keeping time with his Terpsichorean promenade.
‘It's my balance, you see,’ the pink man went on. ‘It's by no means as good as it used to be, not at all as good, not at all.’ To underline the point, he then nearly fell right back on to his bum, only saving himself by grabbing the thick stem of a fierce three-foot-high fly agaric. ‘Oof! I wonder if it's worth it, it used to take a couple of days but now it can be a month or more.’
‘What?’ asked Ian.
Speaking had to have been a mistake. Before he spoke Ian could as much believe that the room and its occupants were a hazy figment as a real situation, but with speech came focus and precision: the sharp tang of a fresh crop of mustard and cress that spread across the rotting pile of the damp carpet; wan heaps of daylight that fell in from a tall triptych of sash windows at the far end of the room; Pinky's voice, which resolved itself into a soft-accented bucolic burr; and the ‘Cha, cha, chal’ that came rattling in between them defined itself as precipitate, intrusive, urban, American.
‘What only used to take a couple of days?’ asked Ian again. While it was quite true that he was riven by fear and wrapped around with the nauseous sensation of so much fungus in an enclosed place, his salvation still clearly lay in conversation.
‘To get the worms out, of course.’ Pinky essayed a gesture towards the puckered base of his body but his little arm could only reach half-way down the side of one haunch. There it rested, the index finger crooked inwards toward his hidden portal. ‘I'm sure it's not these, because they're just as good as they ever were. Why, they're even doing a special offer at the moment, you get twenty-five per cent extra – absolutely free!’ He was genuinely delighted by the bargain, his gently weathered features creased up with joy.
Ian propped himself up on his elbows as best he could. This motion set off waves of infective pollenation in the organic bed – spores the size of dragonflies lifted off in a puff of oxidised dust from around his neck and shoulders. The experience was truly appalling but there was some pay-off, for his semi-recumbent position allowed Ian to see beneath Pinky's bum. A Mars Bar lay on the carpet. It had been cut open and the chocolate coating prised apart to reveal the stratification of toffee, caramel and nougat within.
‘For the worms, you see,’ Pinky explained. ‘They love a Mars Bar more than anything else, although that being said, they'll usually take a Snickers or a Bounty as well.’
‘So what's the problem?’ Ian felt genuinely curious.
‘Oh! Do you really sympathise, do you really? Do you think you could really care? He never even asks what the situation is’ ('Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!') ’he's completely absorbed in his own problems. But if you're interested I'll tell you.
‘You see, the cycle normally lasts about a week. First there's a funny pain, in a sort of a band around my tummy, then come the cramps and the squits. But it's when I actually start to lose weight, that's when I know that the worm is back for certain, that's when I have to act.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘Well, here's how it is. I usually push a Mars Bar up my bum every day for three or four days. On the fourth day – and mark my words, this has never failed before- I just lay the Mars Bar on the carpet and sort of squat over it. When the worm peeks out of my arsehole to see what's happened to his elevenses, I grab him by his neck and drag him right out! But this time things aren't going so well – I've been at it for two weeks and there hasn't been any sign of him. ‘
‘How do you know he's still in there?’
‘Oh my dear – I can feel him, of course. I can feel
him right now, coiled up in me. His body fills me up, the end of his tail is jammed at the base of my gullet and his wet wormy head is questing in my colon even as we speak. Oh, I had so hoped that he would come today.’
While describing this acute parasitical predicament, Pinky fell to running his little hands over his tummy, seeking out and emphasising the shape of the worm within him by bunching up and pulling at his flesh. The exercise made the baby-soft man wobble and puff, so much so that at the end of his speech he finally tumbled back on to the carpet with an ‘Oof!’ and a stifled squeak.
Ian relapsed as well, thrusting himself down into the mulch of the big bed. He shut his eyes and struggled to escape the Land of Children's Jokes. He clenched himself, both mind and body, with the effort and dived down and down and down through internal layers, each one successively darker, until he was nothing, just a stray seed in warm soil, or a plastic bottle bobbing in the wake of a ship.
‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha! Not so fast, kiddo.’ An acute finger probed at the bottom of Ian's eyelid, then pushed it up, peeling back in the pale, early-morning light. ‘Don't even think of leaving us just yet, kiddo, not before the main event anyways – Cha, cha, chal!
The thin man span away from the bed and stopped a few feet off. Ian could not forbear from looking at him. ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man danced a little jig. He had a long skinny face dominated by a sharp nose marbled with broken blood vessels. His tiny avian eyes flashed and, as he waggled his head from side to side, first one and then the other ear, both of them thick slabs of knotted cartilage, poked into view, jammed down at a forty-five-degree angle by the shiny rim of his shiny topper.
‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ the thin man plain ted in nasal tones. He seemed to Ian to be mimicking the voice of a fiddling entertainer in an auld country bar. With each new phase of the jig he flourished his cane in the air and then brought its fob neatly to rest on the chin in question. ‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye – ‘ He broke off abruptly.
‘Well? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ He brought his frightening face down to Ian's and menaced him with it. ‘What d'ye think of it, my little love?’ The thin man wore satin gloves; he palped his chin with one slippery digit. On the very prong end of the chin there was a button of flesh, a soft whorl with a dimpled crater. ‘Come now!’ exclaimed the thin man. ‘D'ye like it or no? Say now!’ The barbed finger poked towards Ian's throat.
‘I-I like it very much,’ he stuttered. ‘It's it's terribly nice.’
‘Ahhh, but now, d'ye recognise it, lad? D'ye know what it is now? Say what it is now, come on, say!’
Ian stared at the chin. The thin man held himself trembling, angled over Ian like a gantry. He continued to agitate his queer chin with his slick finger, flipping the curlicue of skin first to one side and then to the other. Ian couldn't imagine what the thin man was getting at but he understood the importance of the question all right. The thin man was plainly dangerous, there was no telling what he might do if Ian failed to come up with the right answer. For some reason the phrase ‘hair matted with blood’ kept running through his mind.
‘Say now!’ Everything about the thin man was thin. Ian could make out every ridge in his tormentor's windpipe. In the deep gulf underneath his plastic jaw there was a pulse beating like the pedal attachment on a drum kit. The tendons of the thin man's neck were stretched so tight that they could have been twanged, or even strummed. They formed flying buttresses, supporting the gullet where it broke to accommodate the large irregular Adam's apple that was lodged in the thin man's craw.
His neck was long. There was as much of it below as above the Adam's apple. It descended and descended, until it disappeared into the celluloid of a cheap dicky-bow arrangement. Down there, pushing out against the knot of the thin man's spotted bow tie, something stirred. There was a living root amongst the scrawny hairs poking from the pit of his neck, a projection of flesh, which humped back on itself and dived beneath the white rim of the collar.
‘I know!’ Ian was startled by the squeakiness of his voice. ‘At least, I think I know. ‘
‘What d'ye know? Say it, say it now if ye know anything. Come now, have no more ado.’ The thin man span away from the bed and went back to his dance, weaving in and out, and round and around the leguminous furniture of the dank room. ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man wiggled his head and his hips in opposite directions, he wiggled and waggled like a novelty marathon runner. At a stroke and with complete certainty, Ian knew that the thin man wouldn't hurt him after all.
‘The thing on your chin – ‘
‘Yes, lad?’
‘It's your belly button, isn't it? Your navel, isn't it?’
The thin man didn't reply, he just kept right on cha, cha, cha-ing as if nothing had been said. Then, suddenly, ‘Ta-taa!’ he cried, striking a pose at the foot of the bed. He threw his arms right up and back and thrust his chin forward. The belly button dimple stood out, white and tuberous from its stretched bloody surround, but there was’ worse, far worse below. For, sprung free from the confining collar, a flaccid penis dangled down, flipping and flopping from lapel to lapel of the thin man's spotted satin suit. Its fluid animation contrasted outlandishly with the bow-string quiver of the thin man's pose.
‘I bet you can't guess what happened, though? Now can you? I bet you can't tell me why it should be this way, now can you?’ The thin man was menacing Ian again. As speedily as his sense of safety had arrived it departed again. The thin man dropped his knife-edged knees on to the bed, one either side of Ian's feet, and then his sharp hands came forward and rested on either side of Ian's thighs. The thin man began to edge up the bed on all fours, plunging first one and then another of his implement limbs into the doughy mattress, like spades biting into loam. The action rocked Ian from side to side. The thin man began to mutter, but his words were clearly addressed to himself rather than Ian.
‘He guessed my precious . . . Guessed . . . How could he now? Rumpelstiltskin is my name, gold thread is my game . . . How could he have guessed my little secret, my sorry tale – precious?’
With each lunge forward that the thin man made, the penis at his throat flipped and flopped again. It was quite a small penis, a rather delicate young penis even, and where the foreskin curled back at the tip, the helmet beneath was a deeper pink. A drop of semen glistened in its eye, stretched to a tear and then dropped on to Ian's chest with a warm plash. He wasn't afraid any more as the thin man's thin lips came down to touch his forehead.
Meanwhile, back in the waking world, the no-nonsense world, the nylon-sheet world that snags the hangnails of cogitation; that hated, empty-swimming-pool world; the one that is mere infill, a dusty rubble of time sandwiched between eternities, Gyggle's volunteer is still sitting, still waiting.
Waiting. That is the point of her. She's always waiting for men, this woman, this Jane Carter. And on this summer afternoon at the DDU she cannot complain, because she is now so ingrained, so conditioned, that she's actually volunteered – to wait, that is.
Sitting there, staring out through those murky windows, cataracted with dirt, Jane felt within herself the line of least resistance tethering her to her past. It stretched back into her memory, drawing with it the peculiar torsion of her being. Necessity or contingency, contingency or necessity, which of these had provided the half-twist of fate that had brought her to this strangest of places?
For all her long childhood Jane Carter played on a broad lawn dappled with sunlight. Jane and her brother in matching outfits, she in a plaid pinafore dress, he in plaid trousers, both of them shod in patent leather. Jane chucked the garish rubber ball to Simon and Simon hurled it back, boy-hard.
In tan jodhpurs and red pullovers, they sat in the back seat of the estate car as Mummy drove them to the stables. Later still there was tea, biscuits on a plate, orange squash in a glass, the frosted aluminium struts of garden furniture coo
l to the touch.
It had a new-world flavour, this childhood of Jane's, an Eisenhower quality. Her parents lived in a detached house, set on the low hills that ranged from London's southern underbelly.
It was a house detached both from other houses, and detached even from time and from place. It was here that the moneyed people had patented their place. They had spread themselves beneath the oaks and chestnuts and planted the green banks with tussocks of crocuses; it was more like some exercise in trichology than horticulture.
The brown tarmac of the suburban roads held oven heat in summer and they seemed, to Jane, to be infinitely slow-moving lava flows, pouring out from some resurfacing volcano. You never forget the kerbstones of early childhood, do you? The under-fives nose their way along the moss-edged paving; they sell lemonade on warped card tables and set out toys in the lost world of grass.
Jane loved Simon, loved him to distraction. In return he tortured her. He sat on her chest, twisted her nose, applied Chinese burns to her thin wrists. He kicked and pummelled, punched and spat. Older and stronger than Jane, he extended his domain into the world of imagination. Even aged six, he was already remorselessly didactic, a cruel version of the kind school teacher he later became.
‘Who's that?’ He examined her engine knowledge.
‘Gor-on,’ she lisped.
‘And that?’
‘Henwy.’
‘And that?’
‘Redward.’
‘S'not “Redward”, you stupid little girl. Try not to be a stupid little girl. Now who is it?’
‘I – I – I dunno – ‘
‘It's James. Now remember that. James is red and has a brass thingy on top. Edward is blue. Get it right or I'll have the Fat Controller brick you up in a tunnel.’
A bit of sibling bullying never really hurt a child. Not a child as well-loved as Jane. And she was -loved, that is. Her parents were solid people, protective of Jane and Simon. They kept the world of pissy alleyways and shitry behaviour at bay. Jane went to quiet private schools where discipline was unquestioned and the results invariably more of the same. Friends came to play on the great dappled lawn, they peed in the pampas grass as the clouds were peeled away from the sky, rolling back the years.
