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

by Will Self

  Darkness was welling up from the road; to the west it flowed from the valleys. Bill switched the lights back on to full beam. I'll be cosy in my little light tunnel, he joked. He had stopped at Mrs McRae's because he was sick with drink. He had more or less gone up to Orkney this time because he was sick with drink. He didn't like doing locums – he couldn't hold any other kind of job down. Not any more. He knew what genuinely affronted him – Bill did. What genuinely affronted him was the vigour of his fingernails. They kept on growing despite everything. Even now, the pallid fingers wrapped around the steering wheel each had their own dear little crescent of new life – and new dirt. Only something as dumb as a fingernail could go on growing in this hellish environment. Take skin, for example. Take the skin on Bill's ankles – Bill had. Bill had picked and plucked and even strummed the ulcerating skin on his ankles, and it had rewarded him by generously suppurating. That was skin for you – very intelligent stuff. Didn't go on growing after death, like hair or nails.

  The hitchhiker had had this information encoded in his own lousy, drink-raddled body. In that they were alike – in that and perhaps a lot else as well. Bill thought of how workable, how trustworthy, his denial of his own drink problem usually was. It was like a handy, movable bulwark that he could position in front of anyone of the dark corridors leading away from his self-awareness. The hitchhiker – Bill shouldn't have picked him up. He'd broken the rhythm of the journey; he'd made Bill late. He'd fucked with the bulwarks. Hal Late for his own funeral. No – his own cremation. In Hoop Lane, opposite the Express Dairy. When Bill was young he thought that everyone had died here, that everyone was burnt here – at Golders Green Crematorium – their essence disappearing in the form of charcoal smoke issuing from a red-brick tower, into a grey sky. Now Bill knew he had been right.

  And now, in the gathering gloom, Bill felt all pushed out of shape. His method of dealing with himself depended on carefully negotiated transitions from being alone to being among others. Hence Mrs McRae – who didn't, of course, count. Hence also Anthony Bohm, who was no threat to anyone; least of all – with his swollen liver more or less propped on the bar – to Bill, or any other physic-fond physician for that matter.

  The encounter with the hitchhiker had turned Bill about. He had mentally castigated the hitchhiker for his abusive relationships – but what constituted such an abuse? He knew what constituted such an abuse. The 3 a.m. rows that cranked up and then cranked down and then cranked up again; the siren song of emotional fracture. He knew all about them, just as he had full cognisance of the serial, parallel monogamist's lifestyle. No, no socialese, call a fucking spade a spade. He fucked around – like a spade. Grasped his haft and planted it where he would. At the Felliniesque conversion of Dunrobin Castle it wouldn't simply be a case of wassailing whores causing trouble – the whole emotional Utopia, the whole fantasy of inclusion was just that – a fantasy.

  Bill's life was now – and he realised this groping in the dark for the car bottle, as the big saloon whipped through the roundabout and on to the A74 – based, established on exclusion. Every hysterical evasion, every late-night session rubbing up the whisky bottle, until Mr Blubby, the drunken genie, emerged – it was all coming back to him. He took a slug, and in his hurry to get the bottle up and down without leaving go of the wheel, managed to slop several measures on to his chest. He was tired – and yes, perhaps it would be worth admitting it to himself – just a little drunk.

  No time to consider that now. Heads down, no nonsense, mindless boogie. Hone in on the music – ignore the background screech of the Furies, who pursued him: ‘Bill! Bill! Why did you do it/say it/go there/lie/come back/treat me like this!’ He pumped up the CD. He bit down on another caffeine lozenge, hoping the bitterness alone might make him alert. It wasn't working. The road was doubly blurred. He rubbed one ulcerated shin against the other. He chomped the inside of his cheek. He pinched the fat on the inside of his thighs with his unabashed fingernails. Eventually he took to slapping himself. Big, open-handed clouts. First one with the left, then one with the right. Left to left and right to right. Each blow gave him a few seconds of clarity, another hundred metres of onrushing progress.

  And as the big car bisected the night, drumming past Lockerbie, ignoring the blue signs that blazoned: Carlyle's Birthplace, and eventually gaining the M6 – which was lit for its first few miles, a tarmac chute – Bill gutted the carcass of his own life. He pulled out the entrails of neglect, and the gall bladder of resentment; he removed the engorged liver of indulgence, and excised the kidneys of cynicism. He fumbled in the cavities of his body for his heart – but couldn't find it.

  The big car plunged on. No longer a chimera, a meld between man and machine, but merely a machine, with a ghost loose in it somewhere. Desperately Bill shuffled his pack of shiny memories, of al fresco lovemaking, of dramatic hill scenery, of . . . his son. Who would be what – around five now. Not very clever that. Not clever at all – to have not seen your own child for two years. Three years. It had been three years.

  That had been the shabbiest of the accusations he had laid against the hitchhiker – the one of neglect. Bill knew all about neglect. He knew all about unanswered phone calls, crumpled-up letters, torn postcards. People said they didn't want children because they didn't want the responsibility. But if you didn't take responsibility for them – how could you have it for yourself?

  About forty minutes later, at Shap in the Lake District, at the point where the M6 really did begin to feel as if it were plunging inexorably downhill, down to the south, down to London, the ghost that was piloting the machine took a long final look in the rearview mirror, before lazily circling the steering wheel to the left and turning into an inexistent layby.

  DESIGN FAULTS IN THE VOLVO 760 TURBO: A MANUAL

  ‘. . . bearing in mind the fact that everyone hides the truth in matters of sex . . .’

  – Sigmund Freud,

  ‘My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses’

  1. Instruments and Controls

  Welcome to the terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer. Bill Bywater has been snogging with a woman called Serena. Giving and receiving as much tongue as possible – exactly at the point where Sussex Gardens terminate, and the streams of traffic whip around the dusty triangular enclosure of trees and grass, before peeling away in the direction of Hyde Park, or Paddington, or the M40.

  Bill has been snogging – and the adolescent term is quite appropriate here – in a way he remembers from youth. Not that the palpings of lip-on-lip, tongue-on-lip, and tongue-on-tongue have been any less accomplished, or plosively erotic, than we have come to expect from the man. It's just that Serena has recently had an operation on a benign cyst in her cheek. Bit of Lidocaine. Slit and suck – two stitches. Bosh-bosh. ‘Perhaps it would be wise’ – the surgeon had said, admiring the creamy skin of her cleavage, the standing into being of her ever-so-slightly large breasts – ‘if you were to avoid using your mouth for anything much besides eating over the next week or so?’

  He was right to make this statement interrogative – almost verging on the rhetorical, because Serena hardly uses her mouth for eating at all, preferring dietary supplements and cocaine to get by on. Serena used to be an ‘it’ girl – but now she's ‘that’ woman. A socialite – she went to a finishing school in Switzerland where they taught her to fellate. She'd set her cap at Bill months ago. Not that he wasn't ripe for it.

  Serena says, ‘I've had a small operation on my cheek . . .’ The eyelashes perturb the polluted air, monoxide and burnt rubber. ‘Try and be gentle with this side –’ She caresses her own elastoplasted cheek. Their bodies marry. Her thighs part slightly to receive the buttressing of his thigh. Her lips begin to worry at his mouth – so adept Bill wonders if they might be prehensile. He allows his hands to link in the region of her coccyx. A thumb lazily traces the rivulets and curves between her arse and the small of her back. She moans into his mouth. The traffic groan
s into his ear. He concentrates on stimulating the side of her which isn't numb.

  As he is snogging, Bill is acutely aware of the time: 6.30 p.m.; the place: Sussex Gardens, W2; and the implied logistics: his wife, Vanessa, cycles home every evening along Sussex Gardens, at more or less this time. It is not unlikely that Vanessa will see Bill snogging with Serena, because Bill is – he acknowledges with a spurt of dread – at least sixty feet high. He bestrides the two lanes of bumpy tarmac, his crotch forming a blue denim underpass for the rumbling traffic. Vanessa will be able to see him – this Colossus of Roads – the very instant she jolts across the intersection of the Edgware Road, and commences pedalling down Sussex Gardens.

  Caught bang to rights, caught snagging with this slapper . . . His only defence, the fact that she's a little dolly of a thing compared to him. He's holding her aloft in one hand, clutching her wiggling torso to his huge, bristly cheek. He's having to be so damn gentle, tasting with his forty-inch tongue the sweetness of her two-inch bud. Her white satin shift dress has ridden up over her hips. She isn't wearing any tights – her pants are white, with an embroidered panel over her pubis.

  ‘Bill!’ Vanessa shouts up from below – she's ramming her front tyre against his foot, the knobble of uncomfortable bone protruding above the edge of his moccasins. ‘Bill – what are you doing!?’

  ‘Doing?’ He squints down at her, as if she's caught him in an inconsequential reverie – stagnantly considering the cost-effectiveness of double glazing, or fully comprehensive insurance. ‘Doing?’ He looks at the writhing, half-stripped woman in his hand, and then sets her down, gingerly, on the far side of the road from his wife. ‘Oh her, or rather – this. It's just a doll, my love – you can't possibly be jealous of a doll.’

  Couldn't be jealous of a doll, but might well be jealous of Serena who is not only a doll, but who has also, predictably, been a model. Bill, feeling the laser beams of his wife's gaze burning through buildings, fences, filing cabinets, people, had broken the embrace – which was getting nowhere. Or rather, it was getting somewhere only too fast. What could he do with Serena, short of hiring a room in the Lancaster Hotel for half an hour? No, that would show up on his credit card statement. They were too old for Hyde Park bushes, and the Volvo 760 Turbo was out of the question on account of various design faults.

  Serena had been having a session with her therapist, who had his consulting rooms on Sussex Gardens. Bill had arranged to meet her by her car. A metal rendezvous. Serena had a Westminster permit – Bill didn't. He couldn't find a meter for aeons – he imagined her growing old, her face wizening, an old apple on a draining board. When he did eventually find a space – by the needle exchange Portakabin on South Wharf Road – he had neither pound coins nor twenty-pence pieces. He wanted to ejaculate and die – simultaneously. He stopped one, two, three passers-by – got enough to pay for twenty minutes’ snagging. Park up the Volvo – and grab a vulva. Pay for space – space to live.

  The minutes tick away in her wounded mouth. Until – confident that at any minute he'll get a ticket – Bill breaks from Serena. ‘Call!’ they call to each other as he staggers back across the road and disappears in the direction of Paddington Station.

  Not that he's out of danger yet. Bill starts up the Volvo and savours its clicking, ticking and peeping into life. But when he pulls away he realises – given that he has absolutely no justification for being in this part of London, on this day, at this time – that the car is grotesquely elongated. When he turns right out of London Street and on to Sussex Gardens, the back end of the vehicle is still in Praed Street. When he reaches the lights on the corner of Westbourne Street, his tail end is still blocking the last set of lights, causing traffic in all four directions to back up, and engendering a healthy tirade of horn-accompanied imprecations: ‘Youuuu fuuuucking waaaanker!’

  Deciding that the only way he can escape detection – given that he's driving an eighty-foot-long vehicle – is to head for the Westway flyover, Bill turns right. As he circles the triangular enclosure where he snogged with Serena, he is appalled to see that the back end of the Volvo is passing by on the other side. He looks through the rear windows of his own car and can see sweet wrappers and medical journals scattered around on the back seat. Jesus! Astonishing how ductile these Volvo chassis are – they know what they're about over there at the Kalmar Plant. Know what they're about when it comes to building an eighty-foot extrudomobile like this, that can be seen clearly from a mile away . . .

  Bill Bywater, feeling the Volvo concertina back to its normal length, as he gains the anonymity of the motorway flyover, scrabbles in the breast pocket of his shirt for a cigarette. He lights it with a disposable gas lighter. The dash lighter has long since gone. Bill airily lit a fag with it a year or so ago, waved it gently in the air, and then threw it out the car window. One of the design faults – although hardly limited to the Volvo 760 Turbo – was this lack of a tether.

  Another was the ashtray itself. This was accommodated neatly enough, in the central housing of the dash, but it was impossible to pull the tray out at all unless the shift was in drive; and fully out only if it was in first gear. The implications of this stagger Bill anew as he struggles to insinuate his ash-tipped fag into the small gap. Could it be that the car cognoscenti at Kalmar intended this as an antismoking measure? It hardly made sense. For the ashtray couldn't be opened at all when the shift was in park – implying that you should only smoke, and even empty the ashtray, when the car was in motion.

  The Volvo is passing Ladbroke Grove tube station, doing around seventy. Bill can see commuters tramping the platform. And anyway – even if the operation was technically difficult – he did at least know how to empty the ashtray. The manual expressed it quite succinctly: ‘Empty ashtrays by pulling out to the limit and pressing down the tongue.’

  Bill was masterful at this – he could even avoid the cyst.

  2. Body and Interior

  Bill has arranged to meet Serena at a pub in Maida Vale. It's a barn of a gaff on Cunningham Place – so prosaic it might even be called The Cunningham. It's the night of a vital World Cup qualifier for England, and the city soup is being insistently thickened by cars, as the spectators head for their home terraces. The driving is stop-start – and so is the parking. Eventually, he finds a tight space on Hamilton Terrace. He cuts in well enough the first time, but the space is so confined that he has to turn the steering wheel in the other direction, then back, then reverse again, each time gaining just a few inches more of the precious, temporary possession.

  With each rotation the power steering ‘Eeeeeeyouuuus’ – a fluid, pleasurable kind of whine; and with each dab on brake, or plunge on accelerator, the rubber limbs buck, receiving pressure or its release. ‘In-Glands! In-Glands! In-Glands!’ his pulse chants in his temples. Bill feels exposed – in this act of taking the space; worries that he may be observed, censured. When he's finally got himself and the car properly berthed – no more than six inches to front and aft – he lunges out the door, giddy in the hot, sappy, fume-tangy evening air. But there's nothing; only an old woman with secateurs in a front garden; the roar of traffic from the Edgware Road; a Tourettic man – gnome-like with a spade of grey beard – who high-steps it over the domed camber of the road, legs smiting his chest, whilst he expels a series of sharp ‘Papp-papp-papp!’ sounds.

  Bill is reassured. In a London uncaring enough to ignore such blatancy – the Tourettic looking as if he were on a run-up to jumping clear of his own nervous system – Bill's own peccadilloes not even consummated, as yet, can hardly be of any interest at all. Still, it takes him five minutes of walking up the road, patting his pockets, retracing his steps to see if he has forgotten anything, or dropped anything, or illegally parked the car – only too easy to do in a city where the controls of adjoining zones are radically different – before he resigns himself to the concrete reality of the rendezvous. He is going to meet Serena – this time he might fuck her.

  Serena is sitting
on one of the four trestle-table-and-bench combinations that occupy the dirty oblong of paving in between The Cunningham itself, and the low brick wall that borders it. A very believable terrace – for London. There are metal ashtrays with beer spilt into them, there are crisp packets wedged in the tabletop cracks, there are sunshades poking through two of these tabletops. One advertises Martini – the other is in tatters. The compression of boozing bodies within the cavernous boozer is already considerable; the baying of the clientele and the baying of the Wembley crowd – relayed by a giant-screen television suspended from the ceiling – are echoing one another. The beery exhalations surge from the double doors of the pub; which are propped back, so as to allow the T -shirted multi-lung to draw in another great gulp of exhausted air.

  Bill considers that this rendezvous is taking place within a spatial gap – the Edgware Road/Maida Vale hinterland – and, more importantly, a temporal one. ‘I can't stand all this nationalist sporting triumphalism’ – he has been priming Vanessa the five days since he avoided Serena's cyst – ‘it's going to reach a hideous climax . . . And then what – when they lose there'll be a national depression for days. I can't stand it. I want to opt out.’

  Of course, what Bill really wants to opt out of is any situation of bonhomie, of excitation, that might embrace them – and tighten up the vice of fidelity. Bill has been working on his dissatisfactions with Vanessa for weeks now – building up a comprehensive dossier of her awfulness. Without this adulterers’ manifesto Bill knows he'll be incapable of being remotely serene – with Serena. It would only take one embrace, one shared apprehension, for him to have to abandon his plans. Therefore, why not excise this possibility and use the time available.