Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self)

by Will Self

  Zweijärig sighed deeply. A dapper man, of medium height, with a dark, sensual face, he was as ever dressed in a formal, sober, three-piece suit. This was one Frau Doktor Zweijärig had bought at the English shop, Barries, on Goethestrasse. Zweijärig liked the cut of English business suits, and also their conservatism. Perhaps it was because he wasn't a native Frankurter, but rather a displaced Sudetenlander, that Zweijärig felt the brashness of his adoptive city so keenly. He sighed again, and pushed his spectacles up on his forehead, so that steel rims became enmeshed in wire-wool hair. With thumb and forefinger he massaged his eyes.

  He felt airy today, insubstantial. Normally the detail of his work was so readily graspable that it provided his mind with more than enough traction, adhesion to the world. But for the past few days he had felt his will skittering about like a puck on an ice rink. He couldn't seem to hold on to any given thought for more than a few seconds.

  Maybe it was a bug of some kind? His daughter, Astrid, had called the previous evening from Stuttgart and said that she definitely had a viral infection. She'd stayed with them at the weekend – perhaps that was it? Zweijärig couldn't remember feeling quite so unenthusiastic about work on a Tuesday morning. Or was it that Kleist's appointment had irked him more than he realised. Right now he would have rather been in the Kleinmarkthalle, buying sausage or pig's ears from Schreiber's; or else at home with Gertrud, pruning the roses on the lower terrace. He conjured up a vision of their house, its wooden walls and wide glass windows merging with the surrounding woodland. It was only twenty kilometres outside Frankfurt, on the north bank of the river, but a world away.

  Zweijärig fondled the heavy fob of his car keys in the pocket of his trousers. He pushed the little nipple that opened the central locking on the Mercedes, imagining the car springing into life, rear lights flashing. He pictured it, under autopilot, backing, filling, then driving up from the underground car-park to sit by the kerb in front of the building, waiting to take him home.

  ‘Childish,’ he muttered aloud, ‘bloody childish.’

  ‘Herr Doktor?’ said Frau Schelling, Zweijärig's secretary, who he hadn't realised had entered the room. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘Nothing – it's nothing, Frau Schelling.’ He summoned himself, turned from the window to confront her. ‘Are those the files on Unterweig?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Doktor. Would you like to go over them with me now?’ Zweijärig thought he detected a note of exaggerated concern in her voice, caught up in the bucolic folds of her Swabian accent.

  ‘No, no, that's all right. As long as the details of the parent company are there as well –’

  ‘Herr Doktor, I'm sorry to interrupt, but Unterweig has no parent company, if you recall. It was only properly incorporated in May of last year.’

  ‘Incorporated? Oh yes, of course, how foolish of me. Please, Frau Schelling, I'm feeling a little faint. You wouldn't mind terribly getting me a glass of water from the cooler?’

  ‘Of course not, Herr Doktor, of course not.’

  She put the folder down on the desk and hustled out of the room. Really, thought Zweijärig, I must pull myself together – such weakness in front of Frau Schelling. He pulled out the heavy leather chair, the one he had inhabited for the past sixteen years, brought with him from the posting in Munich. He allowed the smell and feel of the thing to absorb him. He picked up the folders and tamped them into a neat oblong, then laid them down again, opened the cover of the first and began to read:

  Unterweig is a metal-working shop specialising in the manufacture of basic steel structures for children's playground equipment. The main plant is situated on the outskirts of Potsdam, and there is an office complex in the north-central district. As ever in these cases it is difficult to reach an effective calculation of capitalisation or turnover. Since May 1992, the shop has managed to achieve incorporation despite a 78 per cent fall in orders . . .

  The words swam in front of Zweijärig’s eyes. Why bother, he thought. I've read so many reports like this, considered so many investment opportunities, what can this one possibly have to offer that any of the others didn't? And why is it that we persist in this way with the Easterners? He grimaced, remembering that he himself had once been like the Easterners – no, not like them, worse off than them. There had been no one-to-one conversion rate for the little that the Russians had allowed him to take.

  A thirteen-year-old boy carrying a canvas bag with some bread in it, a pair of socks and two books. One, the poems of Hölderlin, the other a textbook on calculus, with most of the pages loose in the binding. He could barely remember the long walk into exile any more. It seemed to belong to someone else's past, it was too lurid, too nasty, too brutal, too sad for the man he'd become. Flies gathering on a dead woman's tongue.

  Had the fields really been that beautiful in Bohemia? He seemed to remember them that way. Smaller fields than those in the West, softer, and fringed by cherry trees always in bloom. It can't have been so. The cherry trees could only have blossomed for a couple of weeks each year, and yet that's what had stayed with him: the clutches of petals pushed and then burst by the wind, creating a warm, fragrant snowfall. He couldn't face meeting with Bocklin and Schiele at the Frankfurter Hof. He'd rather have a few glasses of stuff somewhere, loosen this damn tie . . . Zweijärig’s hand went to his neck without him noticing, and shaking fingers tugged at the knot.

  On her way back from the water-cooler Frau Schelling saw her boss's face half-framed by one of the glass panels siding his office. He looked, she thought, old, very old for a man of sixty-one. And in the past few days he seemed unable to concentrate on anything much. Herr Doktor Zweijärig, who was always the very epitome of correctness, of efficiency. She wondered whether he might have suffered a minor stroke. She had heard of such things happening – and the person concerned not even noticing, not even being able to notice; the part of the brain that should be doing such noticing suffused with blood. It would be uncomfortable for Frau Schelling to call Frau Doktor Zweijärig and voice her anxieties – but worse if she did nothing. She entered the office quietly and placed the glass of water by his elbow, then silently footed out.

  Miriam placed the feeding cup by Humpy's cot and paused for a moment looking down at him. It was such a cliché to say that children looked angelic when they slept, and in Humpy's case it was metaphoric understatement. Humpy appeared angelic when awake; asleep he was like a cherry blossom lodged in the empyrean, a fragment of the divinity. Miriam sighed heavily and clawed a hank of her dark corkscrew curls back from her brow. She'd brought the feeding cup full of apple juice in to forestall Humpy calling for her immediately on awaking. He could get out of his cot easily enough by himself, but she knew he wouldn't until he'd finished the juice.

  Miriam silently footed out of Humpy's room. She just needed five more minutes to herself, to summon herself. It had been an agonised night on Humpy's account. Not that he'd kept Miriam and Daniel up personally – he never did that – but it had been a night of reckoning, of debating and of finally deciding that they should keep the appointment with the child psychologist that Dr Peppard had made for them for the following day.

  Daniel had gone off to work just after dawn, giving the half-asleep Miriam a snuffly kiss on the back of her neck. ‘I'll meet you at the clinic,’ he said.

  ‘You be there,’ Miriam grunted in reply.

  Dr Peppard had shared their misgivings about consulting the child psychologist, their worries that, even at two and a half, Humpy might apprehend the institutional atmosphere of the clinic and feel stigmatised, pathologised, mysteriously different to other toddlers. But more than that, she worried that the Greens were losing their grip on reality; she had seldom seen a happier, better-adjusted child than Humpy. Dr Peppard had great confidence in Philip Weston – he was as good at divining adult malaises as he was those of children. If anyone could help the Greens to deal with their overweening affection for their child – which Dr Peppard thought privately was the beginning of
an extreme, hot-housing tendency – then it would be Philip Weston.

  Miriam now lay, face crushed into pillow, one ear registering the Today Programme – John Humphreys withering at some junior commissioner in Brussels – the other cocked for Humpy's awakening, his juice-slurping, his agglutinative wake-Miriam-up call.

  This came soon enough. ’Bemess-bemess-bemess – !’ he cried, shaking the side of his cot so that it squeaked and creaked. ‘Bemessungsgrundlage,‘ he garbled.

  ‘All right, Humpy,’ Miriam called out to him. ‘All right, Humpy love, I'm coming!’ then buried her head still further in the pillow. But she couldn't shut it out: ‘Bemess-bemess-bemessungsgrundlage!‘ Better to get up and deal with him.

  An hour or so later Miriam was sitting at her dressing table, which was set in the bay window of the master bedroom, with Humpy on her lap. It was a beautiful morning in late spring and the Greens’ garden – which Daniel lavished all of his professional skills on – was an artfully disordered riot of verdancy. Miriam sighed, pulling the squirming Humpy to her breast. Life could be so sweet, so good; perhaps Dr Peppard was right and she was needlessly anxious about Humpy. ‘I do love you so much, Humpy – you're my favourite boy.’ She kissed the soft bunch of curls atop his sweet head.

  Humpy struggled in her embrace and reached out to one of the bottles on the dressing table. Miriam picked it up and pressed it into his fat little palm. ‘This is kohl, Humpy – can you say that, “kohl"? Try to.’

  Humpy looked at the vial of make-up intently; his small frame felt tense in Miriam's arms. ’Kohl,’ he said. ’Kohl!’ he reiterated with more emphasis.

  Miriam broke into peals of laughter. ‘That's a clever Humpy!’ She stood up, feeling the curious coiled heft of the child as she pulled him up with her. She waltzed Humpy a few steps around the room.

  ’Kohl!’ he cried out merrily, and mother and son giggled and whirled; and would have gone on giggling and whirling were it not for the sound of the front door bell.

  ‘Bugger!’ said Miriam, stopping the dance. ‘That'll be the postman, we'd better go and see what he wants.’

  The change in Humpy was instantaneous – almost frighteningly so. ’Pohl!’ he squealed. ’Pohl-Pohl-Pohl!’ and then all his limbs flew out, his foot catching Miriam in her lower abdomen.

  She nearly dropped him. The moment before, the moment of apparently mutual comprehension was gone, and in its place was a grizzling gulf. ‘Oh Humpy – please, Humpy!’ Miriam struggled to control his flailing arms. ‘It's OK, it's OK,’ she soothed him, but really it was she who needed the soothing.

  Philip Weston entered the waiting room of the Gruton Child Guidance Clinic moving silently on the balls of his feet. He was a large, adipose man, who wore baggy corduroy trousers to disguise his thick legs and bulky arse. Like many very big men he had an air of stillness and poise about him. His moon face was cratered with jolly dimples, and his bright-orange hair stood up in a cartoon flammable ruff. He was an extremely competent clinician, with an ability to build a rapport with even the most disturbed children.

  The scene that met his forensically attuned eyes was pacific. The Green family were relaxed in the bright sunny waiting room. Miriam sat leafing through a magazine, Daniel sat by her, working away at the occupational dirt beneath his nails, using the marlinespike on his clasp knife. At their feet was Humpy. Humpy had, with Daniel's assistance, in the fifteen minutes since they'd arrived at the clinic, managed to build a fairly extensive network of Brio toy-train tracks, incorporating a swing bridge and a level crossing. Of his own accord he had also connected up a train, some fifteen cars long, and this he was pushing along with great finesse, making the appropriate ‘Woo-woo’ noises.

  ‘I'm Philip Weston,’ said the child psychologist. ‘You must be Miriam and Daniel, and this is –?’

  ‘Humpy – I mean Humphrey.’ Miriam Green lurched to her feet, edgy at once.

  ‘Please.’ Philip damped her down, and knelt down himself by the little boy. ‘Hello, Humpy, how are you today?’

  Humpy left off mass-transportation activities and looked quizzically at the clownish man, his sharp blue eyes meeting Philip's waterier gaze. ’Besser,’ he said at length.

  ‘Better?’ queried Philip, mystified.

  ’Besser,’ Humpy said again, with solemn emphasis. ’Besserwessi!’ and as if this gobbledygook settled the matter, he turned back to the Brio.

  Philip Weston regained the foundation of his big legs. ‘Shall we go in,’ he said to the Greens, and indicated the open door of his consulting room.

  Neither Miriam nor Daniel had had any idea of what to expect from this encounter, but in the event they were utterly charmed by Philip Weston. His consulting room was more in the manner of a bright, jolly nursery, a logical extension of the waiting room outside. While Humpy toddled about, picking up toys from plastic crates, or pulling down picture books from the shelves, the child psychologist chatted with his parents. So engaging and informal was his manner that neither Miriam nor Daniel felt they were being interviewed or assessed in any way – although that was, in fact, what was happening.

  Philip Weston chatted their worries out of them. His manner was so relaxed, his demeanour so unjudgmental, that they both felt able to voice their most chilling fears. Was Humpy perhaps autistic? Or brain-damaged? Was Miriam's age in some way responsible for his learning difficulty? To all of these Philip Weston was able to provide instant and total refutation. ‘You can certainly set yourselves at rest as far as any autism is concerned,’ he told them. ‘Humpy engages emotionally and sympathetically with the external world; as you can see now, he's using that stuffed toy to effect a personation. No autistic child ever engages in such role-playing activity.’

  Nor, according to Philip, was Humpy in any way retarded: ‘He's using two or more coloured pencils in that drawing, and he's already forming recognisable shapes. I think I can tell you with some authority that, if anything, this represents advanced, rather than retarded, ability for a child of his age. If there is a real problem here, Mr and Mrs Green, I suspect it may be to do with a gift rather than a deficiency.’

  After twenty minutes or so of chatting and quietly observing Humpy, who continued to make use of Philip Weston's superb collection of toys and diversions, the child psychologist turned his attention directly to him. He picked up a small tray full of outsized marbles from his desk and called to the toddler, ‘Humpy, come and look at these.’ Humpy came jogging across the room, smiling broadly. In his cute, Osh-Kosh bib ‘n’ braces, his brown curls framing his chubby face, he looked a picture of health and radiance.

  Philip Weston selected one of the marbles and gave it to Humpy. ‘Now, Humpy,’ he said, ‘if I give you two of these marbles’ – he rattled the tray – ‘will you give me that marble back?’ Without even needing to give this exchange any thought Humpy thrust the first marble in the child psychologist's face. Philip took it, put it in the tray, selected two other shiny marbles and gave them to him. Humpy grinned broadly. Philip turned to Miriam and Daniel saying, ‘This is really quite exceptional comprehension for a child Humpy's age – ‘ He turned back to Humpy.

  ‘Now, Humpy, if I give you two of these remaining marbles, will you give me those two marbles back?’

  Humpy stared at Philip for some seconds, while storm clouds gathered in his blue, blue eyes. The little boy's brow furrowed, and his fist closed tightly around his two marbles. ’Besserwessi!’ he spat at Philip, and then, ’Grundgesetz!‘

  It was to Philip's credit, and a fantastic exemplar of his clinical skills, that he didn't react at all adversely to these bits of high-pitched nonsense, but merely put the question again: ‘These two marbles, Humpy, for your two, what do you say?’

  Humpy opened his hand and looked at the two blue marbles he had in his possession. Philip selected two equally shiny blue marbles from the tray and proffered them. There was silence for some moments while the two parties eyed one another's merchandise. Then Humpy summoned himself. He put one marb
le very carefully in the side pocket of his overalls, and the other in the bib pocket. This accomplished, he said to Philip with great seriousness, ’Finanzausgleichgesetz,’ turned neatly on his heels, and went back to the scribbling he'd been doing before the child psychologist called him over.

  Daniel Green sighed heavily, and passed a hand through his hair. ‘Well, now you've seen it, Philip – that's the Humpy we deal with most of the time. He talks this . . . this . . . I know I shouldn't say it, but it's gibberish, isn't it?’

  ‘Hmmm . . .’ Philip was clearly giving the matter some thought before replying. ‘We-ell, I agree, it doesn't sound like anything recognisably meaningful, but there is definitely something going on here, Humpy is communicating something, something that he thinks we might comprehend. There's great deliberation in what he's saying . . . I don't know, I don't know . . .’ He shook his head.

  ‘What?’ Miriam was sitting forward on the edge of her chair; she was trying to remain calm, but her troubled expression betrayed her. ‘What do you think? Please, don't hold anything back from us.’

  ‘It could be pure speculation. It's something I've never seen before. I tell you, if I didn't know any better I'd be prepared to hazard the idea that young Humpy was originating some kind of idiolect, you know, a private language. His cognitive skills are, as I said, quite remarkably developed for his age. If you don't mind, I'd like to get a second opinion here.’

  ‘What would that entail?’ asked Miriam. She was clearly appalled by this turn of events, but Daniel, by contrast, was leaning forward, engaged, intrigued.

  ‘Well, it just so happens that we have a Dr Grauerholtz visiting us here at the Gruton at the moment. This is a marvellous opportunity. He's a former director of the clinic, now based at the Bettelheim Institute in Chicago, and he's without doubt the foremost expert on human-language acquisition in either Europe or the USA. If he's available I'd like him to pop in right away and have a chat with Humpy as well. See if we can get to the bottom of this young man's verbal antics. What do you say?’