by Will Self
SORRY! WHAT WE WANTED TO SAY WAS THAT WE DON'T LIVE IN YOUR COTTAGE OUT OF CHOICE. WE COME INSIDE BECAUSE IN THE NORMAL COURSE OF THINGS THERE IS USUALLY SOME CARRION WITHIN WHICH WE CAN DEPOSIT OUR EGGS, SO THAT OUR LARVAE MAY GROW AND BECOME FULLY FUNCTIONING AND WELL-ADJUSTED MEMBERS OF FLYTOPIA.
‘I see.’
HOWEVER, IF WE ARE CLEANING EVERYTHING UP FOR YOU, WE'RE RATHER DOING OURSELVES OUT OF A KEY COMPONENT IN OUR OWN ECOSYSTEM.
‘I understand that, of course.’
WHAT WE WONDERED WAS WHETHER YOU MIGHT CONSIDER TURNING THE SPARE BEDROOM OVER TO US EXCLUSIVELY. IN WHICH CASE WE WOULD BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO ABANDON THE REST OF THE HOUSE TO YOU –
‘– But I'm rather pleased by the way you've been helping me –’
– APART THAT IS FOR THE WORK WE NEED TO DO TO HELP YOU.
‘I see. Well, I'll give it some thought.’
And he did, but really Jonathan's mind was already made up. The insects were proving such capable little friends. He no longer found them revolting at all, and when he saw them at work on the carpet he would bend down so as to catch whatever expressions might be contained in their alien faces. He also found their assistance in his toilet not simply helpful, but peculiarly sensual.
At night the moths tapped at the panes of the bathroom window until he allowed them access, and then they would blanket him with their softly pulsing wings. They tenderly licked away the encrusted sweat and dirt of the day, before drying him off with teasing flutterings of their wings. He didn't bridle when the silverfish on the draining-board suggested that he might like some of the beetles and earwigs to seek out the more intimate portions of his body and give them a thorough scouring as well.
Jonathan wondered if he had ever felt in more harmony with his environment. Not only that, but wondered if the grosser manipulations of human intercourse weren't becoming altogether more alien to his nature than these subtlest of digitations. In the morning he walked into Inwardleigh and bought ten pounds of pork sausages at Khan's. ‘Barbecue?’ asked Mr Khan, quadra-chinned today. ‘Not exactly,’ Jonathan replied.
He laid them out in the spare bedroom on the white plastic trays he had taken from the fridge. He left the door open for most of the day, but when evening came the silverfish told him that there was no need for this. So he shut the door and fell asleep in his voluntarily insect-free cottage.
The next morning, when Jonathan peeked inside the spare bedroom he felt a rush of paternal pride to see the bulging, bluing aspect of the rotting sausages, each one stippled with the white nodules that indicated the presence of maggots. Maggots chewing, maggots growing, maggots that he had gifted life to. A group of female flies who had been methodically working their way across the last five pounds or so of sausages, injecting their eggs into the putrefying meat, rose as he entered the room, and executed what looked to Jonathan like a gay curtsey, acknowledging his assistance and his suzerainty.
He worked steadily all morning. One particularly faithful fly proved the most adept of wordfinders, shuffling over the open spread of the OED until it found the correct entry, and then squatting there, gently agitating its wings, so as to act as a living cursor.
MORE MEAT? queried the silverfish on the draining-board, when he went in to make a sandwich at lunch. ‘I'll think about it,’ Jonathan replied, tossing them a sliver of ham to be getting on with. Then he retreated to the study, to phone for a cab to pick Joy up from the station.
Jonathan was so engrossed in the index that he didn't hear the squeal of brakes as Joy's cab pulled up outside the cottage. ‘I'm home!’ she trilled from the front door, and Jonathan experienced the same revulsion at the sound of her voice as he'd had on the phone. Why must she sound so high-pitched, so mindlessly insistent? She came into the study and they embraced. ‘Have you got a fiver for the cab, darling?’
‘Um . . . um . . . hold on a sec.’ He plumped his pockets abstractedly. ‘Sorry, not on me. I think there's a pile of loose change up in the spare bedroom . . .’
Jonathan listened to her feet going up the stairs. He listened to the door of the spare bedroom open, he heard the oppressive, giant, fluttering hum, as she was engulfed, then he rose and went out to pay the cab.
A STORY FOR EUROPE
‘Wir-wir,’ gurgled Humpy, pushing his little fingers into the bowl of spaghetti Miriam had just cooked for him. He lifted his hands up to his face and stared hard at the colloidal web of pasta and cheese. ’Wir müssen expandieren!’ he pronounced solemnly.
‘Yes, darling, they are like worms, aren't they,’ said the toddler's mother.
Humpy pursed his little lips and looked at her with his discomfiting bright blue eyes. Miriam held the gaze for a moment, willing herself to suffuse her own eyes with tenderness and affection. Blobs of melted cheese fell from Humpy's hands, but he seemed unconcerned. ’Masse!’ he crowed after some seconds.
’Very messy,’ Miriam replied, hating the testiness that infected her tone. She began dabbing at the plastic tray of his high chair, smearing the blobs of cheese and coiling the strayed strands of spaghetti into edible casts.
Humpy continued staring at the toy he'd made out of his tea.
’Masse,’ he said again.
‘Put it down, Humpy. Put it in the dish – in the dish!’ Miriam felt the clutch on her control slipping.
Humpy's eyes widened still more – a typical prelude to tears. But he didn't cry, he threw the whole mess on the just-cleaned floor, and as he did so shouted, ‘Massenfertigung!’ or some such gibberish.
Miriam burst into tears. Humpy calmly licked his fingers and appeared obscurely satisfied.
When Daniel got back from work an hour later, mother and son were still not reconciled. Humpy had struggled and fought and bitten his way through the rituals of pre-bedtime. Every item of clothing that needed to be removed had had to be pulled off his resisting form; he made Miriam drag him protesting every inch of the ascent to the bathroom; and once in the bath he splashed and kicked so much that her blouse and bra were soaked through. Bathtime ended with both of them naked and steaming.
But Daniel saw none of this. He saw only his blue-eyed handsome boy, with his angelic brown curls framing his adorable, chubby face. He put his bag down by the hall table and gathered Humpy up in his arms. ‘Have you been a good boy while Daddy was at the office –’
‘You don't have an office!’ snapped Miriam, who like Humpy was in terry-towelling, but assumed in her case for reasons of necessity rather than comfort.
‘Darling, darling . . . what's the matter?’ Carrying the giggling Humpy, whose hands were entwined in his hair, Daniel advanced towards his wife.
’Darlehen, hartes Darlehen,’ gurgled Humpy, seemingly mimicking his father.
‘If you knew what a merry dance he's led me today, you wouldn't be quite so affectionate to the little bugger.’ Miriam shrank away from Daniel's kiss. She was worried that, if she softened, let down her Humpy-guard at all, she might start to cry again.
Daniel sighed. ‘It's just his age. All children go through a difficult phase at around two and a half; Humpy's no exception –’
‘That may be so. But not all children are so aggressive. Honestly, Daniel, I swear you don't get to see the half of it. It's not as if I don't give him every ounce of love that I have to give; and he flings it back in my face, along with a lot of gibberish!’ And with this Miriam did begin to cry, racking sobs which wrenched her narrow shoulders.
Daniel pulled Miriam to him and stroked her hair. Even Humpy seemed distressed by this turn of events. ’Mutter,’ he said wonderingly, ’Mutter,’ and squirmed around in his father's arms, so as to share in the family embrace.
‘See,’ said Daniel, ‘of course he loves his mother. Now you open a bottle of that nice Chablis, and I'll put young Master Humpy down for the night.’
Miriam blinked back her tears. ‘I suppose you're right. You take him up then.’ She bestowed a glancing kiss on the top of Humpy's head. Father and son disappeared up the stairs.
The last thing Miriam heard before they rounded the half-landing was more of Humpy's peculiar baby talk. ’Mutter–Mutter–Muttergesellschaft’ was what it sounded like. Miriam tried hard to hear this as some expression of love towards herself. Tried hard – but couldn't manage it.
Daniel laid Humpy down in his cot. ‘Who's a very sleepy boy then?’ he asked.
Humpy looked up at him; his blue eyes were still bright, untainted with fatigue. ’Wende!’ said Humpy cheerily. ’Wende-Wende-Wende!’ He drew his knees up to his chest and kicked them out.
‘Ye-es, that's right.’ Daniel pulled the clutch of covers up over the bunched little boy. ‘Wendy will be here to look after you in the morning, because it's Mummy's day to go to work, isn't it?’ He leant down to kiss his son, marvelling – as ever – at the tight, intense feeling the flesh of his flesh provoked in him. ‘Goodnight, little love.’ He turned on the nightlight with its slow-moving carousel of leaping bunnies and clicked off the main light. As Daniel went back downstairs he could still hear Humpy gurgling to himself, ’Wende-Wende,’ contentedly.
But there was little content to be had at the Greens’ oval scrubbed-pine kitchen table that evening. Miriam Green had stopped crying, but an atmosphere of fraught weepiness prevailed. ‘Perhaps I'm too bloody old for this,’ she said to Daniel, thumping a steaming casserole down so that flecks of onion, flageolets and juice spilled on to the table.’ I nearly hit him today, Daniel, hit him!’
‘You musn't be so hard on yourself, Miriam. He is a handful – and you know that it's always the mother who gets the worst of it. Listen, as soon as this job is over I'll take some more time off –’
‘Daniel, it isn't that that's the problem.’
And it wasn't, for Miriam Green couldn't complain about Daniel. He did far more childcare than most fathers, and certainly more than any father who was trying to get a landscape-gardening business going in the teeth of a recession. Nor was Miriam cut off from the world of work by her motherhood, the way so many women were, isolated then demeaned by their loss of status. She had insisted on continuing with her career as a journalist after Humphrey was born, although she had accepted a jobshare in order to spend two and a half days a week at home. Wendy, the part-time nanny who covered for Miriam during the rest of the week, was, quite simply, a treasure. Intelligent, efficient and as devoted to Humpy as he was to her.
No, when Miriam Green let fly the remark about being ‘too old’, her husband knew what it was that was really ctroubling her. It was the same thing that had troubled her throughout her pregnancy. The first trimester may have been freighted with nausea, the second characterised by a kind of skittish sexiness, and the third swelling to something resembling bulgy beatitude, but throughout it all Miriam Green had felt deeply uneasy. She had emphatically declined the amniocentesis offered by her doctor, although at forty-one the hexagonal chips were not quite stacked in her favour.
‘I don't believe in tinkering with destiny,’ she had told Daniel, who, although he had not said so, thought the more likely reason was that Miriam felt she had tinkered with destiny too much already, and that this would, in a mysterious way, be weighed in the balance against her. Daniel was sensitive to her feelings, and although they talked around the subject, neither of them ever came right out with it and voiced the awful fear that the baby Miriam was carrying might turn out to be not quite right.
In the event the birth was a pure joy – and a revelation. Miriam and Daniel had lingered at home for the first five hours of the labour, mindful of all the premature hospital-dashes their friends had made. When they eventually got to the hospital Miriam's cervix was eight centimetres dilated. It was too late for an epidural, or even pethidine. Humphrey was born exactly fifty-one minutes later, as Miriam squatted, bellowing, on what looked to Daniel suspiciously like a school gym mat.
One moment he was watching the sweating, distending bulk of his wife, her face pushed about by pain; the next he was holding a blue-red ball of howling new vitality. Humphrey was perfect in every way. He scored ten out of ten on the first assessment. His features were no more oriental than those of any other new-born Caucasian baby. Daniel held him tight, and uttered muttered prayers to the idea of a god that might have arranged things so perfectly.
The comfortable Victorian house in Muswell Hill the Greens called home had long since been tricked out with enough baby equipment to cope with sextuplets. The room designated as the young master's had had a mural of a rainforest painted on its walls by an artist friend, complete with myriad examples of biodiversity. The cot was from Heal's, the buggy by Silver Cross. There were no less than three back-up Milton sterilisers.
Daniel had worried that Miriam was becoming obsessive in the weeks preceding the birth, and after they brought Humpy home from the hospital he watched her closely for any signs of creeping depression, but none came. Humphrey thrived, putting on weight like a diminutive boxer preparing for life's title fight. Sometimes Daniel and Miriam worried that they doted on him too much, but mostly they both felt glad that they had waited to become parents, and that their experience and maturity was part of the reason their child seemed so pacific. He hardly ever cried, or was colicky. He even cut his first two teeth without any fuss. He was, Daniel pronounced, tossing Humpy up in the air while they all giggled, ‘a mensch’.
Daniel and Miriam delighted in each stage of Humpy's development. Daniel took roll after roll of out-of-focus shots of his blue-eyed boy, and Miriam pasted them into scrapbooks, then drew elaborate decorative borders around them. Humpy's first backwards crawl, frontwards crawl, trembling step, unassisted bowel movement, all had their memento. But then, at around two, their son's smooth and steady path of development appeared to waver.
Humpy's giggles and gurgles had always been expressive. He was an infant ready to smile, and readier still to give voice. But at that time, when from many many readings of the relevant literature his parents knew he should be beginning to form recognisable words, starting to iterate correctly, Humpy changed. He still gave voice, but the ‘Da-das’ and ‘Ma-mas’ garbled in his little mouth; and were then augmented with more guttural gibberish.
Their friends didn't really seem to notice. As far as they were concerned it was just a toddler's rambunctious burbling, but both Daniel and Miriam grew worried. Miriam took Humpy to the family doctor, and then at her instigation to a specialist. Was there some hidden cleft in Humpy's palate? No, said the specialist, who examined Humpy thoroughly and soothingly. Everything was all right inside Humpy's mouth and larynx. Mrs Green really shouldn't be too anxious. Children develop in many diverse ways; if anything – and this wasn't the specialist's particular expertise, he was not a child psychologist – Humpy's scrambled take on the business of language acquisition was probably a sign of an exceptional growing intellect.
Still, relations between mother and son did deteriorate. Miriam told Daniel that she felt Humpy was becoming strange to her. She found his tantrums increasingly hard to deal with. She asked Daniel again and again, ‘Is it me? Is it that I'm not relating to him properly?’ And again and again Daniel reassured her that it was ‘just a stage’.
Sometimes, pushing Humpy around the Quadrant, on her way to the shops on Fortis Green Road, Miriam would pause and look out over the suburban sprawl of North London. In her alienation from her own child, the city of her birth was, she felt, becoming a foreign land. The barely buried anxieties about her age, and how this might be a factor in what was happening to Humpy, clawed their way through the sub-soil of her psyche.
Herr Doktor Martin Zweijärig, Deputy Director of the Venture Capital Research Department of Deutsche Bank, stood at the window of his office on the twentieth storey of the Bank's headquarters building looking out over the jumbled horizon of Frankfurt. All about him, the other concrete peaks of ‘Mainhattan’, the business and banking district, rose up to the lowering sky. Zweijärig’s office window flowed around a corner of the Bank's building, and this, together with his elevated perspective, afforded him a vi
ew of the city cut up into vertical slices by the surrounding office blocks.
To his left, he could view an oblong of the university, and beyond it the suburb of Bockenheim; to his right the gleaming steel trapezoid of the Citibank building bisected the roof of the main station, and beyond it the old district of Sachsenhausen. Zweijärig couldn't see the River Main – but he knew it was there. And straight in front of him the massive eminence of the Messeturm, the highest office building in Europe, blotted out most of the town centre, including, thankfully, the mangled modernism of the Zweil shopping centre. Zweijärig had once, idly, calculated that, if a straight line were projected from his office window, down past the right-hand flank of the Messeturm at the level of the fifteenth storey, it should meet the earth two thousand and fifty-seven metres further on, right in the middle of the Goethehaus on Hirschgrab Strasse; forming a twanging, invisible chord, connecting past and present, and perhaps future.
‘We must expand!’ The phrase with its crude message of commercial triumphalism kept running through Zweijärig's mind, exhorting his inner ear. Why did Kleist feel the need to state the obvious in quite so noisy a fashion? And so early in the morning? Zweijärig didn't resent Kleist's elevation above him in the hierarchy of the Venture Capital Division – it made sense. He was, after all, at fifty-five six years Zweijärig's junior; and even though they had both been with the Bank the same number of years, it was Kleist who had the urge, the drive, to push for expansion, to grapple with the elephantine bureaucracy the Treuhand had become and seek out new businesses in the East for the Bank to take an interest in.
But the rescheduling of the directors’ meeting for 7.30 a.m., and the trotting-out of such tawdry pabulums! Why, this morning Kleist had even had the temerity to talk of mass marketing as the logical goal of the Division. ‘The provision of seed capital, hard loans even, for what – on the surface – may appear to be ossified, redundant concerns, can be approached at a mass level. We need to get the information concerning the services we offer to the widest possible sector of the business community. If this entails a kind of mass marketing then so be it.’
