by Will Self
He was right. When they emerged they were standing at the side of a swimming pool, an old-fashioned thirties’ pool with magnolia tiling everywhere, a couple of tiers of wooden seats for spectators and green water lapping at its sides. Doug said, ‘I have to go on a bit and check that everything has been prepared. If you don't mind I'd be obliged if you'd wait here for a while.’ Before Ian could object, or remonstrate with him in any way he was gone, back through the footbath.
Ian sat down in one of the seats. This, he thought to himself, is no dream. It's too cold, for a start, never mind its terrible lucidity. There was a splash and an explosion of breath from the pool – there was something, or someone in it. Ian rushed down to the edge and peered in. Nothing. The greenish surface of the water lapped towards him and then away from him again. But then he saw something move, right down towards the deep end where the gently sloping bottom suddenly took a dive. It looked like a piece of statuary, a bust or torso of some kind, although not quite the right shape; and anyway, Ian observed, a trail of tiny air-bubbles linked it to the surface.
It lurched, then shot up from the bottom of the pool in a shroud of air and water – whoosh! Ian recoiled, it was bobbing in the open air, the torso of a man, quite a small man with collar-length dark hair. The armless and legless man wriggled his torso feverishly to remain upright in the water, his breath came out in hard ‘paffs’.
Ian was a little blasé by now. ‘You must be Bob,’ he said.
‘Aye – that's me,’ replied the quadra-amputee, still jerking spasmodically. He had a pronounced Strathclyde accent. His limbs had been chopped off right at the joins, shoulder and groin. Ian could see distinct ovals of recently grafted skin framed by the empty legs of his blue swimming trunks. For some reason the most revolting thing about Bob was this, that he had troubled to clothe his bottom half; the empty legs of his trunks stretched down from his groin, under his perineum and up his arse cleft at the back, framing the scar tissue with shocking clarity in spite of the ultramarine wavering.
Bob had managed to stabilise himself. He was sufficiently buoyant to prevent the water from coming above his nipples and he was now keeping himself upright with nice twitches of his hips and buttocks. Ian examined him more closely. He had the sharp features of a Gorbals hard man and the razor scars to go with them – thin blue capillaries radiated across his face from his nose. His narrow hairless chest – and indeed the rest of his body from what Ian could see of it – was packed with taut muscle under a pale freckled skin.
‘Did yer mother never teach you that it's rude to stare like that at the disabled?’ Bob snapped.
‘Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm a bit disoriented, you see. I've no idea either how I got here or what the hell it's all about.’
‘You can be forgiven for that,’ said Bob, mellowing. ‘I dinna’ ken anyone who rightly knows how he came here.’ He moved his head around to indicate the place they found themselves in. It was an amazingly expressive gesture, as if his neck were an arm and his face a hand he could talk with. ‘Ahm from Scotty Land – originally like.’
‘Oh,’ said Ian.
‘D'ye ken it?’
‘Well, I went when I was a child, to Edinburgh on a school trip.’
‘Edinburgh! Pshaw! Edinburgh! Thass no more Scotty Land than the bloody Tyne, man.’
‘Where are you from?’ asked Ian, sort of knowing that this was the right thing to do.
‘Glasgie, man, Glasgie, not that that's necessarily yer real Scotty land, ahm not claiming that because anyone from north of the Gramps always says that they're the real Scotties and I can see their point.’ Bob finished this speech by arching his pale body right out of the water like some hideous Rainbow trout, then he plunged his head down into the pool, so that his foreshortened rear end shot up in the air. The arch was followed by another and then another. Ian watched dumbfounded as the amputee propelled himself the length of the pool by exercising this limbless butterfly stroke.
Bob reached the shallows and regained his equilibrium in the far corner of the pool, his narrow shoulders jammed up against the rails of the ladder. There was a splashing from the footbath – Ian turned and saw Doug emerging spade-first.
‘About bloody time!’ hooted Bob.
‘I'm sorry?’ said Doug, urbane as ever.
‘You leave the bloody man in my pool without so much as by your leave – what kind of manners are those then?’
‘It was only for a couple of minutes – ’
‘Dinne give me that crap, many mickles make a muckle; and you can tell his fucking nibs from me, that ahm no afraid of him neither. There's little else he can do to hurt me, now is there?’
‘I'm sorry if I offended you,’ said Ian. He couldn't say why but he rather liked Bob. There was something truly admirable about the way the spunky Scot had overcome his terrifying disability.
‘Oh dinna you worry, lad, I was jus’ letting off some blather. You run along now; and as the medieval knights used to say to one another on parting, “Be-sieging you!” Ahahaha! Hahah'ha!’
And it was this cackling laughter that followed Ian as he splashed his way back through the footbath behind Doug.
But either it wasn't the same footbath, or else someone had been indulging in scene shifting on a prodigious scale, for this time, after tramping through some changing rooms, they emerged into what was clearly the reception area which properly belonged to the swimming pool. A long low space, a checkerboard of blue-and-brown carpet tiles spread out towards a row of glass doors at the far end. There were cork boards all the way along the breeze-blocked walls and attached to them the usual notices advertising the times for the Junior Ducklings Club, aerobics classes and the water polo heats.
It was as if the swimming pool had been some kind of air-lock in between the Land of Children's Jokes and a less problematic reality, the reception area was so mundanely institutional. And for Ian, underscoring this paradigm shift was the sight of two familiar figures, sitting on a couple of tiny chairs that were set beside the information desk near the glass doors. One of the figures was Dr Gyggle and the other was The Fat Controller.
‘What's your name?’ called The Fat Controller, turning to face them.
‘Doug,’ Doug replied.
‘Of course – ha, ha! – “Doug”, that's rich. All right, Doug, bring him over here and then lose yourself, exit, scram, got the ticket? Good, good, in fact, capital!’
Ian took his time strolling down to meet his two mentors. He knew now that he had all the time in the world.
‘Come on, Ian, don't dither,’ said The Fat Controller. ‘We haven't got all the time in the world, you know. What's that you say?’ Poor Doug had banged the haft of his spade against a fire bell; it was this tinging noise that The Fat Controller was responding to.
‘Sorry,’ said Doug, ‘I didn't say anything, it was just my spade . . .’ He trailed off and gestured up to the ceiling in a rather helpless fashion.
‘I thought I told you to go away, Dougie – so do it – and on your way back give that coon-boy a shake, got that?’ barked The Fat Controller, who had a charmingly off-hand sort of way of voicing racist sentiments.
‘So here we all are,’ said Ian once Doug had departed. ‘All together at last.’ He pulled up a tiny chair for himself and sitting down went on, ‘I'd like to take this opportunity, Dr Gyggle – if indeed that is your real name – to thank you for all the wonderful help you've given me over the years. I don't know what I would have done without you.’ Gyggle shifted uneasily on his dwarfish seat – it was so low that his bony knees were stuck right up inside the billowing end of the beard.
‘Don't get chippy, Ian, there isn't any call for it. Hieronymus Gyggle is a trusted confrère of mine and I was hardly likely to leave you unsupervised while I was away, now was I?’
‘S'pose not.’
‘“S'pose not” isn't good enough, it never is. It wasn't good enough when you were a spotty little twerp and it isn't any better now that you're a grown man. I do wis
h that you'd buck up a bit, Ian, and face your responsibilities. You aren't the only person in the world that matters, you know, and anyway, we aren't here to maunder on about your distinctly minor problems, we're here to talk product.’
‘Why? Why bother?’
‘Because your agency D.F. & L. Associates has been contracted to handle the marketing for my new financial product, which as you know is beset with numerous problems, not least among them this naming business. Have you managed to do anything on that yet?’
‘I've set up a naming group.’
‘Oh good, well that's all right then, you've set up a naming group, how perspicacious of you. Cretin! Fool! Booby! When did a naming group ever settle a problem like this, I ask you, you're no better than your father the Essene.’
‘Well, we came up with the name for the Painstyler in one of these groups and I've managed to get the same people along again.’
‘Harumph! Well, I admit that does sound a bit more promising – pass me that ashtray, will you, Gyggle.’ The lanky shrink handed him one of the tinfoil doilies that pass muster for ashtrays in such places and The Fat Controller stubbed out his Voltiger. The three of them sat in silence while he invented fire with his primitive lighter and then used it to light another.
‘Now, Ian,’ he resumed, thick smoke gushing from his rapacious mouth. ‘There are several tricky aspects to all of this and although I don't expect you to follow the many dizzy twists and scale the haunting crags of my reasoned plotting – genius is after all a lonely estate – I do expect you to apply yourself.
‘Firstly the matter of this young woman – what's her name, Gyggle?’
‘Jane,’ said the shrink. ‘Jane Carter.’
‘That's right. Now this Jane Carter, you can have her if that's what you want – you can even marry her for all I care. Of course, you'd be wise not to tell her about your little outrages, I don't think she'd take too kindly to them, it might put a bit of a crimp on your relationship, hmm?’
‘Little outrages? I'm not sure I follow you.’ Ian was non-plussed.
‘Well, the woman you killed with the poisoned umbrella at the Theatre Royal for a start; and then there was that other chit, what was her name? Ah yes, it's coming to me now, June. Jane and June, not very imaginative when it comes to your playmates’ nomenclature are you?’
‘I don't know what you're talking about. I never killed anybody, you killed the woman at the Theatre Royal and I never did anything to June – ’
‘You sexually assaulted her.’
‘No I didn't.’
‘Did.’
‘Didn't.’
‘Did!’
‘Gentlemen, perhaps I could assist?’ Gyggle had regained his professional composure and was speaking once again in the honeyed tones of his consulting room. ‘Ian, I do think Samuel is being a little unfair to you but I'm afraid that the substance of what he says is true. The only way I can explain this to you is to adopt a schema from somewhere else – the cinema or detective fiction, perhaps. You see, Ian, all your adult life you have been committing these little “outrages”. It has been Samuel's – and latterly my own – responsibility to cover things up, to clear up the mess. I don't mean literally, of course, although many of your activities have left quite a few stains, I mean clear up the mess in here.’ And then Gyggle made a gesture identical to the one The Fat Controller had, all those years ago. He tapped his temple with his bony finger, forcefully, as if requesting admission to his own consciousness. ‘We didn't want you to suffer the torment of your own behaviour, Ian, because you had no option. You are, I fear, chronically ill equipped in the self-control department but you do have a conscience – ’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘And that does mean that you would have found your own behaviour pretty upsetting.’
‘Wait a minute, you're saying that you two have brainwashed me in some way, is that it?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ The Fat Controller broke in, the beginnings of one of his mirth eruptions starting to rumble. ‘Ha, ha – ahahahahaha! Oh my word yes! We had to wash your brain, Ian, because it was dirty! Hahaha!’ He spewed laughter and smoke.
‘This is cheap,’ said Ian. ‘I would have expected better of you.’
This pulled the fat man up short. ‘Whassat!’ he barked. ‘You dare to impugn my behaviour in this way, as if I were some pettily corrupt bureaucrat and you an ethical ombudsman? Come, come, I have never made any secret to you of how I regard my position, I have always told you that I hold myself to be above mere human concerns. Why would you imagine that this didn't extend to enmesh you fully – even your very sense of self? Come, come, it's you who are being cheap. Anyway, all of this jawin’ is too, too fatiguin’ – we're not at a college debate. It would all be far better explained by a spot of retroscendence, eh?’
‘I don't want to retroscend,’ said Ian. ‘I don't want anything to do with your banal psychobabble and your hypnotic games. In fact, I don't want anything to do with you at all.’
The Fat Controller didn't respond in quite the way Ian expected to this monumental cheek. For the first time ever Ian saw the big man looking discomfited, a little ashamed even. ‘I don't think,’ he said softly, ‘that that's something you have an option about but perhaps it will be clear to you after the retro, hmm?’ He came over and placing Ian's neck in the iron maiden of his hand said, ‘Let us consider the history of this suit, for example, shall we? Fashionable item, isn't it, I especially admire the leather pocket-facings. I hear they're all the rage at the moment. From Barries’, isn't it, on the King's Road?’
‘It's mine.’
‘It is now but it used to belong to a man called Bob Pinner. Let me explain – ’
And then they retroscended.
Ian Wharton was lying in among the dirty bushes that skirt the easterly edge of Wormwood Scrubs. It was only nine-thirty in the morning but the late-summer day was already prematurely aged and complaining with the heat. In the direction he faced, the cracked ground humped away in a sweeping undulation towards the prison, pushing up a single nodulous copse between the defunct goalposts.
Ian lifted himself up on his elbow and, turning his head, looked out from his enclave towards the corner of the Scrubs. Here, tucked into the elbow of the road where it chicaned under the railway bridge, was a derelict house. It was there that Ian had spent the previous night.
The house had been intended for one of the park-keepers who used to work on the Scrubs. It was a solid manse, three-bedroomed, pebbledashed, with diamond-patterned mullions in the windows and green coping over the doors. The house belonged with others of its own kind in some quiet suburb. It hardly deserved its expulsion to this ragged corner of the urban veldt.
Ian had come to the house at nightfall – leading Fucker Finch's pit bull by the scruff of its thick neck. He had prised away a slab of chipboard from the front door and gone into its warm mustiness. The house was empty save for the banked-up dust of insect and rodent activity. The walls had been worked over by the artistry of decay, wallpaper falling away from wallpaper falling away from wallpaper; flock, patterned in roses, patterned in stripes. Here and there delinquents had used Magic Markers and the ends of charred sticks to describe their zig-zag graffiti.
Ian went from room to room dragging the big black dog. Whenever it tried to bite him – which was often – he cowed it simply and efficiently with a stunning dead-fist thump to its iron skull.
All night long Ian had tortured the dog. He burnt it with matches, lighting them against its eyes. He cut it and scratched it with the old masonry nails he had found in the corners of the empty rooms. He shut it up in cupboards, leaving it to piss itself with terror; and then, when he released it and it ran at its tormentor again, slavering with the eager freshness of poor memory, Ian had beaten it into submission once more. Beaten it with great clouts to the head and shoulders, clouts of an unnatural strength.
The pit bull must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Its taut back and humpe
d shoulders were stuffed with giblet muscle; and when it cried out, yowled with brute incomprehension in the face of this pain, this outrage, its cries were piercing.
As the city put away its toy cars and settled down for the night, Ian had begun to worry that some late walker – or wanker of a policeman beating the cooling meat of the pavemen – might hear the dog. So he waited and listened, listened for the trains, the whisper of grating metal that heralded their coming slowly rising to a howl and then the deafening change in pitch as the coaches exploded on to the bridge next to the derelict house, before being fed, screaming, into the maw of Wilsden Junction.
Ian learnt to anticipate their arrival and he used it to mask the sound of his activities. And so he had worked at his persecution of the dog, as if it were some spy or agent that he had to break – giving it the time off between trains to consider whether or not it should tell him what he wanted to know; break its silence and grass on its species.
At dawn Ian had led the dog, which was by now blinded and shambolic with pain, out of the house and into the bushes. There they had lain together for three hours while the red ring of the rising sun reheated the left-over city. They reclined in each other's legs and paws and as the dog slowly died Ian savoured its meaty breath.
Ian let himself down off his elbows and settled his chest and abdomen deeper into the crushed dry grass. He was sucking on the pit bull's penis, a knotty sea slug of gristle which he eased in and out of his mouth with a combination of suction and jaw movement. The penis was detached from the dog.
It was a placid scene. The pink tip of the dog's penis pushed out from Ian's mouth at the same time as it emerged from its black foreskin, so that the whole motion had a secondary mechanical phase to it, as if the penis were a piston and Ian's jaw the engine. The pit bull itself lay on its back some twenty yards off, hidden deeper in the bushes. Ian had disembowelled it after it had died and its guts lay on the dry grass like coiled grey sausages. In death the dog's fleshy neck and heavy jowls had fallen away from its jaws, which were bared as if in exasperation at this undignified, unmartial end.
