by Will Self
‘Blud claat, Ras claat!’ exclaimed Beetle Billy. They stopped and gave each other five.
‘Now, what you want, boys?’ Just like that Leroy switched back from patois to Cockney. They were walking through a small estate of four-storey, red-brick blocks. Leroy drew them into a recess where huge rubbish canisters crouched on three-wheeled bases.
‘We just want a bag thanks, Leroy,’ Richard replied.
‘Hey, I like you, man. You remember my name, man, that shows some respect, y'know, you ain't dissin’ me an’ that.’ While he was talking a little white bead or polyp of plastic appeared between two of the gold rings on his hand. He proffered it to them. ‘There you go,’ said Leroy. ‘Thass why I like to get a ways off. So my punters can see what they're gettin’ an’ that, yerknowhatImean?’
‘I can't look at this, Leroy,’ said Richard. ‘It'll take me half an hour to get the packaging off. Why can't you guys ever put your stuff in a good old-fashioned paper bindle?’
‘Hey! You know why that is, man. Anyways you ain't buying the stuff on account of its packaging, now are you?’
‘No, that's true but every product has some kind of packaging and you could say that that effects its saleability – it may even represent added-value to the customer.’
The dealer paused for a moment, obviously taken by Richard's observation on the mechanics of his marketing. There was silence in the garbage recess, except for the faint ‘chk-chk’ noise made by Leroy's rings rubbing together and the distant grating of the traffic.
‘I hear you, bro’, said Leroy at length, ‘but a bit of gear ain't really a product as such. I mean it's not like a Custard Cream or a Painstyler, it's not an original created product. It's just – like – well – “gear”, innit?’
‘Yeah,’ Beetle Billy joined in. ‘Iss like a whatsit, a generik, innit.’
‘A generic?’ queried Richard.
‘Yeah, like an ‘oover. An ‘oover was just a product to begin wiv’. But now everyone calls any thingy thass like an ‘oover, an ’oover.’
‘I see, I see what you mean,’ mused Richard. Leroy shifted uneasily in his penny loafers, his expensively suited shoulders rubbed ‘shk-shk’ against the brickwork. ‘But, Billy, the Hoover was created as an individual product and then through its very ubiquity it became a generic term. Now this stuff’ – he pointed at the bead of heroin between Leroy's knuckles – ‘has a proper name but there are numerous slang terms that refer to it, neither as a product nor as a generic – ’
‘Of course it's a product,’ Leroy broke in. ‘Sheee! Someone grow it, right? Someone pro-cess it, right? Someone even im-port it, right? I know, sure as fuck that someone whole-sale it, right? Now I'm tellin’ you people,’ and here he paused and ran a fluttering hand around the space between the three of them, ‘that I am re-tailin’ this ‘ticular pro-duct. So if you want it – pay for it, an’ if you don't – say so, man, ‘cause I've got to get back out to the front of the store.’
Richard and Beetle Billy scrunged in their jeans’ pockets and pulled out bank notes like used handkerchiefs, together with some pound coins and other change. Leroy stood and withered at them while they accumulated the score for the score. They gave him the money – he gave them the scag. Then he disappeared, evaporating into the thick fructifying air as suddenly as he had materialised in the first place. Further up the courtyard a four-year-old child was ejected from a flat and started to howl.
Some time later Richard was back on his dead bed, staring out over the Heath where schoolchildren screechily played. He set down the 2 ml syringe on the cardboard box that served him as a bedside table and fell back, his mind nuzzling in on itself. He was stoned enough to be blissfully unaware of his role as pacemaker, psychic vanguard, racing ahead of Ian Wharton, back to the Land of Children's Jokes.
CHAPTER NINE
THE MONEY CRITIC
Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardises situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialised type of ritual.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
Dreamless sleep. No sensation even of having slept. Sleep simply as a gap, an absence. Sleep so blank and black that it shatters the cycle of the eight thousand moments that make up the waking mind. Hume spoke of consciousness as analogous to inertia, transmitted from moment to moment as force is transferred from one billiard ball to the next. In this instance a white-gloved hand of more than average size had come down to seize the pink.
Ian woke up and knew this before he opened his eyes. Then he opened them and found himself back in the Land of Children's Jokes. Pinky stood like some mutant Bonnard in the wash of lilac and lemon light that fell from the tall unshuttered sash windows. He was eating a Barratt's sherbert dip, using the stick of liquorice that plugged the cylindrical paper packet to dig out the yellow powder. He sucked the stick then plunged it back in and each time he drew it out more of the dusty stuff adhered. Pinky was eating the sherbert dip with great concentration and attention to detail but quite clearly he wasn't enjoying it. It was a task for him, to be carried out with diligence and application; nonetheless he had noticed Ian waking up.
‘Are you with us, dearie?’ said the gloriously nude man, and turned to confront Ian with his stubby cock and Tartar's-hat muff of white pubic hair.
Ian kept silent. The last time he visited the Land of Children's Jokes he had an awful time. The key to refusing entry into the delusion – or so he imagined – was not to manifest any kind of lucidity. That had been his downfall before, so he resolved to stay silent.
But then something moved in the corner of the room. It was too dark there to make out colour, or even shape, but something moved and abruptly.
‘What's that!’ cried Ian involuntarily, lifting himself up on his elbows. It was too late. Although the whatever-it-was had stopped moving he still found himself embodied, centre stage in the awful land.
‘I see you are with us again, dearie, now that the cat has left off your tongue.’ Pinky was welcoming enough, if guarded. He turned back to face the window and went on with his thrusting of liquorice stick into sherbert pond. Ian took a look around the room.
It had changed. It was recognisably the room in which Pinky and the thin man had entertained him before – there were the same high sash windows and there was the same fungal smell. The bed was also the same – huge with curling prows for the foot and headboards. It was even set in the same position, at right-angles to the window. But everything else was different.
The fungus was all gone. The button mushrooms that had clustered in fairy rings on the damp carpets had been dusted up. The giant toadstools and fly agarics that served as tables and chairs had been uprooted and removed. The enormous puff balls, which Ian remembered as being fully six feet across, had been rolled out from the corners of the room and disposed of. Indeed, now that Ian looked more closely, he could see that the room hardly had corners any more to speak of. He had the impression that the room's space had been translated into a vacancy within a far larger structure, some kind of barn, perhaps, or giant warehousing unit. The prevailing colours of the land were now slurry-greys and dried dirt-browns. The air had a sharp tang of high octane and there were lumps of formless detritus scattered around on the carpet.
‘What is this place?’ asked Ian aloud. ‘And why am I here?’
Pinky turned from the window and came and sat on the bed beside him. He went on eating the sherbert dip. On his face brown liquorice stains and plashes of yellow powder had combined, making it look like he'd been subjected to an attack with some new and vile kind of chemical weapon. He regarded Ian with an open but searching expression, not unlike that of a provincial bank manager. ‘I cannot say why you are here.’ He spoke softly. �
�This is not something that can be said. That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’
‘Wittgenstein,’ said Ian – it was one of the few quotations he knew.
Pinky flew into a rage. ‘It wasn't! It wasn't! The frigging little pansified bitch!’ He shook with anger, his ample bosoms swinging from side to side. ‘He stole everything, absolutely everything. All my best lines, all my best gags!’ He was like a child having a tantrum, a tantrum that departed as suddenly as it had arrived.
‘I'm sorry,’ said Ian, ‘I had no idea it was your line.’
‘No, no, it's my fault, I overreacted. I'm sorry, things haven't been going too well with the worm recently and you know how little sympathy I get from him.’
Ian glanced around quickly, Pinky had given such emphasis to the ‘him’ that he assumed the thin man was about to burst forth, twirling his cane and chanting his mantric ‘Cha, cha, cha!‘ but there was no sign of him. ‘What's the problem with the worm?’ Ian asked. By way of answering Pinky opened his mouth wide and indicated that Ian should look inside. He bent forward. In the red-ribbed recesses of Pinky's gullet he caught a glimpse of something with an alien's head. It was white and diffidently questing. ‘Is that it – is that the worm?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pinky. ‘He won't have anything to do with chocolate now and he won't deign to come out of my bum any more either. It has to be my mouth and sherbert fountains are his preferred tipple. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the things, they make me feel quite quite nauseous.’
‘What's your name?’ Ian broke in, keen to change the subject.
‘Pinky,’ said Pinky.
‘I knew that,’ said Ian and then, ‘What is this place, Pinky?’
‘This,’ said Pinky, getting up and turning a full circle with his flabby arms outstretched, ‘is the Land of Children's Jokes.’ His Hottentot buttocks hung behind him like a sack. ‘And your host for this evening is – ’ The thing in the corner that had stirred before moved again. ‘The one and only man in the Land of Children's Jokes with a spade in his head. Yes, Ian, with a spade actually in his head. Will you put your hands together, please, and give a big welcome to – Doug!’
Without quite knowing why Ian found himself applauding. His cold hands banged flatly against one another and the split-second echo bounced off the metal walls with a tuning fork's whine. The thing in the corner shifted again, resolving itself into a shape that then took on extension and colour, until it finally became the figure of a man. The man stepped forward – he was in the middle of his middle years and conventionally dressed in a worn but still serviceable single-breasted pin-stripe suit. He was taller than average and slim with sandy hair cut en brosse, his features were symmetrical and fine, his countenance pleasing. Ian found him instantly reassuring.
‘I'm Doug,’ said the man, still standing in the shadows. ‘I've come to give you a look-see around the Land of Children's Jokes, if that's all right with you?’
‘Um, well, err – absolutely.’ Ian struggled to find the words.
‘Good, good, but before we set out I need to – how can I put it, let me think – ’ There was a long and considered pause, clearly Doug wasn't the sort of man to rush into anything. Ian felt relaxed just being in his presence, it was such a contrast to Pinky. So much so that he wasn't surprised when he looked round and saw that Pinky had gone, taking his sherbert fountain with him.
‘I need to familiarise you with my condition,’ Doug said at last.
‘What exactly do you mean?’ Ian was bemused. Doug stepped back further into the shadows and Ian could make out one arm going up to fidget in the sandy hair.
‘You heard what my colleague said?’
‘Oh, you mean about the spade in your head.’
‘Exactly. It's not pretty but there it is and we have to get on with things. It's just that one's first sight of it can be a little disturbing.’ With this he stepped right forward into the wash of light from the high sash windows.
He really did have a spade in his head, a large garden spade. It was the kind with a blond-wood varnished shaft, a two-tone metal blade and a galvanised rubber handle. This was the part of the spade that was furthest from the ground, for the thing had obviously been plunged into the top of Doug's head vertically, as if some sadistic gardener had stood on his shoulders and started digging. The spade's blade ran perpendicular to Doug's forehead like a surreal coxcomb or hair-parting device. Surrounding the point of entry there was about an inch of corrupted flesh, a ditch and dyke of purpled pus, garnished with matted hair and what might have been brain.
Ian gagged and then, sprawling over the side of the great bed, vomited on to the carpet.
‘I am sorry,’ said Doug, who had by now moved right up to the foot of the bed, where he stood playing with his watch chain, ‘but there's very little that I can do to lessen the impact of the thing. It's useless trying to warn people or explain to them what they're about to see.’
Ian couldn't look at him, he looked at the carpet instead and said, ‘Impact would have to be the operative word.’
‘Quite so,’ said Doug. And suddenly Ian found that he could look at the man with the spade in his head, that it hardly bothered him at all.
‘Are you feeling a little better now?’ Doug was solicitous. He had the old-world charm Ian associated with British civil servants of the pre-war period. His mien was compounded of concern, probity and duty, more or less in equal parts. There was also something peculiarly affecting about the waxy patina of his sticky-out ears. ‘You're so right to remark on my use of the word “impact”. You know, I hope I may speak frankly to you, Mr Wharton, for without a certain frankness what is the point of conversation? You see I find this image – ’ he gestured towards the implement buried in his cranium – ‘to be almost integral to any understanding of the modern world. Metal into flesh – the impact of metal on flesh. Isn't that the whole of progress in a nutshell – a spade in the head? I only have to contemplate the world to feel it entering into me as steelily and as surely as this spade bisects my skull. Do you follow me?’
‘Why yes,’ said Ian. ‘I suppose I do.’
‘I'm dreadfully sorry to bang on about it like this – you must think me a frightful bore but it's so rare that I get the opportunity to talk to anyone.’
‘What about Pinky?’ said Ian with a creeping sense of déjà entendu.
‘Oh my dear boy, he's far too tied up in his own problems to have any concern for mine. Somehow that's the way that things tend to be here. Come now, get up and I'll take you for a bit of a tour – you'd like that, wouldn't you?’
Doug gave Ian his smooth hand and assisted him to stand. Throwing off the covers, swinging his legs sideways and then standing up, these actions brought Ian still further into the reality of the Land of Children's Jokes. He found himself upright, fully dressed, next to the man with the spade in his head, within the bounds of the fan of light that spread out from the windows across the lumpy floor. Still holding him by the hand, Doug led him away into the dark.
Doug wouldn't let go of Ian's hand. He pulled him gently but firmly into the crepuscular hinterland of the giant shed, if that's what it was. From somewhere in the distance Ian could hear faint noises that might have been cries but they were too indistinct to make out.
‘I ought to warn you,’ Doug threw over his shoulder, ‘we're going to see some things that may disturb you.’ Ian grinned to himself, he was beginning to get the hang of the Land of Children's Jokes.
At that moment there was a squeal in a dark corner some twenty yards off to their right. Ian jumped. ‘What's that!’
‘The first of them, I suppose, come on, we'd better take a look.’ The man with the spade in his head pulled a torch from his pocket and, using its pencil beam tentatively, guided them through the maze of rubbish that littered the floor.
They rounded a low bank, which as far as Ian could make out was composed of tumbleweeds of swarf, dripping with oil and frosted with sawdust. Behin
d it there was a bloody baby. Doug's torch gave the baby's head a weak yellow halo. It was around nine months old, wearing a terry-towelling Babygro and sitting solidly on its broad-nappied base. Its chin, its hands, its Babygro, even the beaten floor beneath it, were all covered in blood. Something glinted in the baby's tender pink paw, something bright which travelled towards its budding mouth.
‘Jesus!’ cried Ian. ‘That baby's got a razor blade!’ But immediately he saw the stupidity of saying it, for scattered at the baby's feet were ten or fifteen more razor blades, all within easy reach. While they watched the baby raised the blade to its mouth, opened wide and inserted it vertically. The baby's blue eyes twinkled merrily at Ian as it bit down on the blade, which straight away sliced through lip and gum at top and bottom. Ian could see the layers of flesh and tissue all the way to the bone; he screamed weakly and Doug squeezed his hand as if to reassure. Thick plashes of blood gave the baby a red bib, but it continued to sit upright and was even happily burbling.
‘What's red,’ Doug asked, ‘and sits in the corner?’
Up above them some sort of dawn had begun to break. In the vaulting of the high ceiling Ian could descry rhubarb girders bursting from a piecrust of concrete. ‘Come on.’ Doug tugged at his hand. ‘There's someone else who wants to meet you.’
They walked for what seemed like hours through the echoing space, sometimes crossing wide expanses of concrete, other times crouching to make their way through twisting tunnels lined with chipboard, or Formica. Everywhere there was evidence of failed industry. Defunct machinery lay about, dusty and rusty. Bolts, brackets, angle irons and other unidentifiable hunks of metal were scattered on the floor; a floor that changed from concrete to beaten earth and in places disappeared altogether underneath a foot or more of water.
The Land of Children's Jokes was locked in the bony embrace of winter, the limitless building must have central unheating, Ian reflected miserably. It was also awkward walking hand-in-hand with Doug, who often had to proceed with extreme caution in order to avoid knocking the spade in his head. Eventually they came to a tunnel that was different to all the others. This one was tiled. It was, Ian realised as they splashed through a footbath, set in its slippery floor, the sort of tunnel you go through on your way from the changing rooms to a public swimming pool.
