by Will Self
‘Fuck it, Masud,’ the girl said, conversationally, ‘why have you got Tembe over if you're just gonna grovel on the floor?’
‘Oh, yeah, right . . .’ He slid his thin arse back up on to the divan. In one hand he held a lighter, in the other some carpet fluff. He sat and looked at the ball of fluff in his hand, as if it were really quite difficult to decide whether or not it might be a bit of crack, and he would have to employ his lighter to make absolutely certain.
Tembe looked at the blue hollows under the Iranian's almond eyes. He looked at the misnamed whites of those eyes as well. Masud looked up at Tembe and saw the same colour scheme. They both saw yellow for some seconds. ‘What . . . ? What you . . . ?’ Masud's fingers, quick curling back from exploded nails, bunched the towelling at his knee. He couldn't remember anything – clearly. Tembe helped him. ‘I got the eightf anna brown.’ He took his hand from the pocket of his jacket, deftly spat into it the two marbles of clingfilm concealed in his cheek and then flipped them on to the table. One rolled to a halt at the foot of the portrait photograph of the handsome woman, the other fetched up against the video remote.
This little act worked an effect on Masud. If Tembe was a cool black dealer, then he, Masud, was a cool brown customer. He roused himself, reached into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulled out a loose sheaf of purple twenties. He nonchalantly chucked the currency on to the glass pool of the table top, where it floated.
Masud summoned himself further and resumed the business of having his own personality with some verve, as if called upon by some cutting-edge auteur to improvise it for the camera. ‘Excuse me,’ he stood, wavering a little, but firm of purpose. He smiled graciously down at the girl, who was sitting on the floor, and gestured to Tembe, indicating that he should take a seat on the divan. ‘I'll just throw some clothes on and then we must all have a big pipe?’ He cocked an interrogative eyebrow at the girl, pulled the sides of the bathrobe around his bony body and quit the room.
Tembe looked at the girl and remained, rocking gently from the soles to the heels of his boots. She got up, standing in the way young girls have of gathering their feet beneath them and then vertically surging. Tembe revised his estimate of her age downwards. She sat on the divan and began to sort out the pipe. She took the larger of the two clingfilm marbles and laborious unpicked it, removing layer after layer after layer of tacky nothingness, until the milky-white lode was exposed and tumbled on to the mirror.
She touched a hand to her throat, hooked a strand of hair behind a lobeless ear, looked up and said, ‘Why don't you sit here, Tembe? Have a pipe.’ He grunted, shuffled, joined her, manoeuvring awkwardly in the gap between the divan and the coffee-table.
Masud came back into the room. He was wearing a shirt patterned with vertical stripes of iridescent green and mustard-yellow, sky-blue slacks in raw silk flapped around his legs, black loafers squeaked on his sockless feet, the froth of a paisley cravat foamed in the pit of his neck. What a dude. ‘Right!’ Masud clapped his hands, another ham's gesture. Upright and clothed, he might have been some motivator or negotiator freeing up the wheels of commerce, or so he liked to think.
The girl took a pinch of crack and crumbled it into the bowl of the pipe. ‘I'm sure,’ said the Iranian, his tone hedged and clipped by annoyance, ‘that it would be better if you did that over the mirror, so as to be certain not to lose any–’
‘I know.’ She ignored him. Tembe was right inside the bowl of the pipe now, his boots cushioned by the steely resilience of the gauze. The lumps of crack were raining down on him, like boulders on Indiana Jones.
Tembe mused on what might be coming. Masud had paid for this lot, but could he be angling for credit? It was the only explanation Tembe could hit on for the welcome in, the girl's smiles, the offer of a pipe. He decided that he would give Masud two hundred pounds’ credit – if he asked for it. But if he was late, or asked for any more, Tembe would have to refer it to Danny, who would have the last word. Danny always had the last word.
The girl lit the blowtorch with the lighter. It flared yellow and roared. She tamed it to a hissing blue tongue. She passed Tembe the pipe. He took the glass ball of it in the palm of his left hand. She passed him the blowtorch by the handle. ‘Careful there . . .’ said Masud, needlessly. Tembe took the blowtorch and looked at his host and hostess. They were both staring at him fixedly. Staring at him as if they wouldn't have minded diving down his throat, then swivelling round so they could suck on the pipe with him, suck on it from inside his lips.
Masud hunched forward on the divan. His lips and jaws worked, smacking noises fell from his mouth. Tembe exhaled to one side and placed his pursed lips around the pipe stem. He began to draw on it, while stroking the bowl of the pipe with the tongue of blue flame. Almost instantly the fragments of crack in the pipe deliquesced into a miniature Angel Falls of fluid smoke that dropped down into the globular body of the pipe, where it roiled and boiled.
Tembe continued stroking the pipe bowl with the flame and occasionally flipped a tonguelet of it over the rim, so that it seared down on to the gauzes. But he was doing it unconsciously, with application rather than technique. For the crack was on to him now, surging into his brain like a great crashing breaker of pure want. This is the hit, Tembe realised, concretely, irrefutably, for the first time. The whole hit of rock is to want more rock. The buzz of rock is itself the wanting of more rock.
The Iranian and the girl were looking at him, devouring him with their eyes, as if it was Tembe that was the crack, their gazes the blowtorch, the whole room the pipe. The hit was a big one, and the rock clean and sweet, there was never any trace of bicarb in the stuff Danny gave Tembe, it was jus’ sweet, sweet, sweet. Like a young girl's gash smell sweet, sweet, sweet, when you dive down on it, and she murmurs, ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet . . .’
It was the strongest hit off a pipe Tembe could ever remember taking. He felt this as the crack lifted him up and up. The drug seemed to be completing some open circuit in his brain, turning it into a humming, pulsing lattice-work of neurones. And the awareness of this fact, the giant nature of the hit, became part of the hit itself – in just the same way that the realisation that crack was the desire for crack had become part of the hit as well.
Up and up. Inside and outside. Tembe felt his bowels gurgle and loosen, the sweat break out on his forehead and begin to course down his chest, drip from his armpits. And still the rocky high mounted ahead of him. Now he could sense the red-black thrumming thud of his heart, accelerating through its gearbox. The edges of his vision were fuzzing black with deathly, velvet pleasure.
Tembe set the pipe down gently on the surface of the table. He was all-powerful. Richer than the Iranian could ever be, more handsome, cooler. He exhaled, blowing out a great tumbling blast of smoke. The girl looked on admiringly.
After a few seconds Masud said, ‘Good hit?’ and Tembe replied, ‘Massive. Fucking massive. Biggest hit I ever had. It was like smoking a rock as big as . . . as big as . . .’ His eyes roved around the room, he laboured to complete the metaphor. ‘As big as this hotel!’ The Iranian cackled with laughter and fell back on the divan, slapping his bony knees.
‘Oh, I like that! I like that! That's the funniest thing I've heard in days! Weeks even!’ The girl looked on uncomprehendingly. ‘Yeah, Tembe, my man, that has a real ring to it: the Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz! You could make money with an idea like that!’ He reached out for the pipe, still guffawing, and Tembe tried hard not to flatten his fucking face.
At home, in Harlesden, in the basement of the house on Leopold Road, Danny kept on chipping, chipping, chipping away. And he never ever touched the product.
FLYTOPIA
’Ending up as I am with animals and alcohol, one of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a great deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to
take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it, much to the annoyance of Aunt Bunny, who had to clear up after her.‘
J. R. ACKERLEY
My Father and Myself
In Inwardleigh, a small, Suffolk town which had been marooned by the vagaries of human geography, left washed up in an oxbow of demography, run aground on the shingle of a failing economy, and land-locked by the shifting dunes of social trends, the landlords in the three desultory pubs on the main street (the Flare Path, the Volunteer and the Bombardier) drew pints for themselves in the cool, brown, afternoon interiors of their establishments. The landlords stretched across the bars, from where they sat – feigning custom – tipped the handles of the pumps down with the heels of their hands, and then brought the glasses to their lips before the yellow foaming had subsided, before head had been separated from heart.
In the Volunteer a lone young lad, who was skiving off from the harvest, played pool against himself. He made risky shots, banging the balls off the cushion, hazarding tight angles. He felt certain he could win.
Jonathan Priestley, an indexer by profession, came bouncing on balled feet, out from the mouth of Hogg Lane and into the small council estate flanking the village. He savoured the anonymous character of the place, the semis’ blank, concrete-beamed facades; the pebble-dashed lamp standards; the warmed gobs of blue-black tarmac in the dusty, spore-filled gutters. Savoured it, and thought to himself how it was that while in turning in on themselves some places achieve character, Inwardleigh had been visited only with anonymity.
In the windows of Bella's Unisex, Jonathan observed a young woman. She wore a blue, nylon coverall, elaborately yet randomly brocaded with the abandoned hairs of a sector of the population. She was sitting in one of the battered chairs, head tilted back against the red vinyl headrest, and as Jonathan passed by he saw her reach up to pluck, pull and then deftly snip at a lock of her own. He sighed, shifted the strap of the small rucksack he carried from one arm to the other, tried whistling a few notes through gummy lips, abandoned the attempt, proceeded.
Jonathan tripped on down the main street. His socks had peristalsized themselves down into the ungy, sweaty interior of his boots. He passed flint-knapped houses kneeling behind low walls, with peeling paint on their lintels, window frames and doors. The shutters on the windows of the small parade of shops were mostly rolled down. It was Wednesday, early closing in Inwardleigh. Have to buy everything in Khan's, thought Jonathan.
He passed by the window of Ancient Estates. The photographs which depicted properties for sale or rent were curling up like the eaves of pagodas. Jonathan sighed. Some of the asking prices were ridiculously low, Mars Bar money really. But then no one much wanted to live in Inwardleigh and its environs, where self-abuse was rife and the vet shot up his own horse tranquilliser.
Some way to the north and east of Inwardleigh a vast nuclear power station crouched on a lip of shingle and dune abutting the North Sea. The station hummed both sub- and ultrasonically. Its very size made it paradoxically invisible, as if its presence were quite simply too monumental to be apprehended.
Almost daily Jonathan would drive up there and walk out along the beach below the power station. The thing was so vast as to defy human scale, or even purpose. The reactor hall, a great dome coated in some ceramic material, was scored into so many panels, or cells, like the compound eye of Moloch. It sat on a murkily iridescent plinth. The whole was frequently wreathed in tissuey steam, sea mist, even low-hung cloud. At night the place was orange floodlit, and at all hours it echoed and crackled with amplified announcements. Announcements for whom? And by whom? He never saw any of the workers. Perhaps there weren't any; and the place was talking to itself, soliloquising while the brown waves slapped the shingle, the violet butterflies tumbled on the tips of the dune grasses and the geese honked overhead.
Inwardleigh was outflanked by the two mighty pylon lines which leapt from the power station, marched over the gorse and scrub and passed either side of the town, giving it a wide berth as if anxious to avoid being netted in for a quiz night at the Flare Path, or a cake-bake at the Methodist Hall.
These behemoth lyres, strung with lethal strings, sang the life out of the town and its environs, made them feel scorched, irradiated, scarious and desiccated. And so the working-class trippers and the middle-class weekenders steered clear of Inwardleigh, heading for the twee villages further up the coast.
Yet for Jonathan the pylon lines were part of the district's appeal. They provided what little relief the countryside possessed, for this was an area of low, rolling farm land, studded with dense copses and gouged with gravel pits dug from the sandy soil. It was a landscape of ingress and of repose: a tired body lying down on an old, horsehair mattress.
In Khan's Jonathan moved up and down the aisles putting bits of stuff in his wire basket. Joy had been gone two days and there were two more before she would return. Could he be bothered to cook something proper for himself, or would he go to the pub for fish and chips again that evening? He stood, hand hovering over a small freezer full of eugenic vegetables and macerated, frozen beef, lost in thoughts of the kitchen at the cottage.
If he cooked and didn't vigorously clean afterwards he could be guaranteed an invasion of insect life. Should he bother therefore? But to not cook was to counsel defeat, to acknowledge the unsustainability of life at the cottage. That, or maybe only its unsustainability without Joy.
The cottage was small. The summer heat percolated it entirely, forcing its way through the gaps in the dusty, velveteen curtains. Even if Jonathan kept them drawn throughout the day, it was still hot enough in his study for the sweat dripping from his fingers to gum up the keyboard of the Macintosh. And then there were the flies. Jonathan didn't think of himself as squeamish or phobic about insects, but this long, hot summer had brought the six-legged kine out in force.
Every room in the cottage had its own, buzzing pavane; which revolved ceaselessly, with unsettling inertia, usually beneath the light fitment. There were other species as well. Daddy-long-legs which fluttered and thirruped in the evenings, skipping up the Artex pinnacles in the bathroom, then abseiling down them, like spindly climbers. Wasps also frequently diverted into the cottage. As he worked, Jonathan would become teased into awareness of them by their doodle-bug droning, which undercut the higher whine of the houseflies. This noise was insistent and somehow predatory in its very essence. He would abandon work on the index, grab whatever magazine or journal was to hand and hunt out the hunters. He would not be satisfied until he had created another pus-like smear, another shattered tangle of broken legs and wings, of mashed thorax, head and abdomen.
When Joy was staying the insects barely bothered Jonathan. She did the annoyance and upset for him. But since she had gone they had begun to irritate him more and more. He tipped back in his chair and contemplated them from under furrowed brows. How to kill? Why to kill? What the killing meant? The insects – and in particular the flies – were becoming an object of study, a platform for obscure games in virtuality.
Jonathan was compiling the index for a scholarly work on ecclesiastical architecture – or meant to be. Normally the whirrings and clickings of the Macintosh soothed him, as he moved from application to application, working in symbiosis with the mechanism. But now he found himself listening the whole time, listening for the other whirrs and clicks of his fellow residents. It occurred to him that perhaps they were learning to imitate the noises of the computer; that through some quantum, phylogenetic leap, the insects were becoming computer-like. An outrageous act of Batesian mimicry, akin to that with which the undistinguished wasp beetle jerkily pretends to the status of its more dangerous namesake.
The heat. The fucking heat. He was broiled in vexation.
Mr Khan manifested himself by Jonathan's elbow. A dun pyramid of a man who multiplied his chins to acquiesce with his customers, and divided them to dissent. ‘Was there anything else?’ he said.
Jonathan flailed, he had been lost in the fugue, staring sightlessly at the frozen vegetables. ‘Garden peas, French beans?’
‘No, no, silly of me . . . I don't – all I can think of that I really need is some of those Vapona thingies. I'm convinced the ones I've got at the moment must be losing their effectiveness.’
‘They're meant to last at least a month.’ Mr Khan regarded Jonathan quizzically, from out of an eye with a bruised ball.
‘That's as may be, but the house is still full of flies.’
‘We-ell, that's the summer we've been having, isn't it? And with the harvest on now, you'll be lucky if you don't get a lot of mice and rats coming into your place as well. So how many will it be?’
‘Give me another five, Mr Khan, and I'll take a box of fly-papers as well please.’
Inwardleigh was stretching and yawning as Jonathan came back up the main street. A knot of teenagers was gathered outside the public toilets, opposite the defunct Job Centre. They were smoking, hands cupped around fags, bodies cupped around hands. A couple of cars stood by them, doors open so that the techno which blared from their stereos was clearly audible from well down the road. It was, Jonathan reflected, not exactly music at all; more like a sound effect devised by a radiophonic composer to accompany a film featuring giant, mechanical cockroaches.
The teenagers ignored him. He walked on by, conscious of the weight of the rucksack, parasitic on the small of his back, and the damp partings and clammier marriages of his nether limbs. Reaching the end of the estate, Jonathan dropped back into Hogg Lane. Two gossamer lines wavered some three feet above the track, each one following the line of the rut below. They were comprised of many many thousands of tiny midges, which hovered, tumbling over and over and over. Why would the midges gather in this way? Jonathan thought as he pushed on into the tunnel of greenery, his waist cresting the wave of life-forms. Could it be an attraction to the moisture latent in the rut? Or animal droppings? Or was it some new behaviour? Certainly the summer had been doing things to the insects, gingering them up, pushing the hot air faster through their spiracles, so that they were able to fly faster, feed faster, and reproduce in even greater numbers.
