by Will Self
thwack! as Kins unwinds and drives the ball right at the screen.
Then a brief yet disconcerting hiatus, before the ball-playing-the-ball
appears, hippety-hopping along the perfect fairway, towards
the perfect pin. Y’know, your grandfather wouldn’t so much as talk
to me or your Uncle Mike until we could handle a golf club properly,
is the sort of thing Kins probably said – given he said similar
things thousands of times throughout the De’Ath boys’ childhoods:
a maxim, intended to what? Convince them of the contrasting
warmth of his own hands-on parenting? There were homiletic tales
as well: any request from the Baker or the Candlestick-maker for
this or that item of crafty kit would be answered by Kins recounting
for the umpteenth time how he and Uncle Mike had amused
themselves for entire long vacs with bat, ball and bails: out on
Blackheath, in the everlasting interwar gloaming – one boy standing
in at the crease for eleven men in succession, while the other ran
towards him, arms windmilling. Or else it’d be how he and Uncle
Mike would be given a shilling by Sirbert to go to the flicks – A
shilling, mind, twelve whole pennies. With which the two fanatics
could gorge themselves on half a day’s entertainment: the Perils of
Pauline, a magic turn, a refulgent organ rising up from the bowels
of the Roxy tootling – followed by not one but two features. The
boys wouldn’t return to the Paragon until tea time – which they
hadn’t really the appetite for, having had enough change from their
shilling to get stuffed with sugar buns from the Aerated Bread
Company … Christ! He was full of shit. So full, he’d had to type it
all out of him, laboriously on an Imperial Good Companion. Copies
of the De’Ath Watch, the homemade magazine these two thrifty
boys published in their reclusion, were still extant during the
Butcher’s childhood, neatly deposited in a tea chest in the old
nursery, along with their lead soldiers, their spinning tops and skipping
ropes. During interminable Sunday lunches, while Kins and
Sirbert were downstairs in the dim dining room, sitting opposite
one another at the heavy mahogany table, masticating their way
doggedly through one of Missus Haines’s parched and stringy
roasts, the Butcher would be upstairs, flicking through smudged old
pages. The De’Ath Watch mostly consisted of his father and uncle’s
test match scores, and Kins’s reviews of such gems as Topaze, with
John Barrymore and Reginald Mason, in which the part of Coco –
a loose and fradulent woman – was played by Myrna Loy, an actress
for whom Kins, aged fifteen, reserved his warmest approbation:
“sporty”. It’d been the great weight and solidity of this life that
had borne down on the teenage Butcher … Oh, won’t you roll away
the stone! so the Redeemer can emerge, clad in grey flannel Oxford
bags, a thick hand-knitted pullover, a thicker hand-knitted tie, a
dense and hairy tweed jacket, and shod in brogues carved from
a single, solid block of toughened cow-skin. For hour upon hour,
father and son mortified themselves with the stodge dished up by
Sirbert’s cook, their basal behinds and solid flanks cleaving to the
worn leather seats of their hefty chairs … I masticate every mouthful
forty times before swallowing, the Butcher’s grandfather was wont to
say. The Butcher couldn’t’ve said he knew him well – but, unlike his
brothers, he wasn’t in the least intimidated by the old mandarin,
with his ivory dome, upon which – in his later years – there’d often
be poised several different pairs of spectacles. C’mere, little Johnny,
the old man would say, beckoning him towards the velvet-lined teak
box which lay open on his tartan-swaddled knees. The Butcher
goggled at the rows of gleaming lenses, each upright in its padded
groove. Sirbert would take one out, clip it in a frame and have
the boy peer through while he explained about dioptres and astigmatisms.
Sirbert also had a stereoscope – not a modern toy one, in
the plastic confines of which you could see Tracy Island, or imagine
you were on a trip to Marineville, but a serious bit of old Edwardian
kit made of wood and brass: C’mon, put your physog’ here … Now,
shut your right eye, and, if I adjust these knobs, what can you see?
The Butcher saw a Beatrix Potter rabbit sporting a green muffler –
but when he looked with his left eye, the rabbit had mysteriously
hippety-hoppeted inside a wire cage. Y’see, boy, Sirbert explained,
his tone, as ever, even, his accent, as ever, colourless: our shared
affliction means we lack the attributes of binocular vision – most
notably stereopsis, whereby the angle of inclination between the
two eyes allows for accurate depth-perception. You might say, little
Johnny, that you and I live in a flat and two-dimensional world …
Yes, a flat world in which information acquired by one eye was then
vetted by the other. Sirbert liked showing off his lightning-quick
calculating skills for his grandson by factoring the United Kingdom
population by the latest farming statistics in order to supply individual
dietary data … in seconds. The old savant saw the makings
of a superior mnemonist in little Johnny, noting the boy’s ability to
achieve a comprehensive visual take at a glance. Sirbert had hypothesised:
It may well be our ocular peculiarities that make us capable of
such retentive feats … He believed he’d found a way to compensate
for the affliction by wearing six pairs of differently lensed spectacles
at once, so when Maeve told him little Johnny was going to have
an operation at Great Ormond Street to correct his lazy eye, her
father-in-law had a rare apoplexy: For God’s sake, woman! This
boy of yours is a prodigy – do you want to take it away from
him? Of course she did. On awaking from the anaesthetic, the world
had been a blur, out of which swam this disturbing vision: Sirbert,
lying massive and naked, his turtle head propped up against the
mahogany headboard of his high, hard bed, while with both hands
he masticated forty times … The Butcher’s prodigious memory was
unaffected by the operation – but this was something he kept to
himself, along with the rest of the skills he was acquiring at around
this time … in Doctor No’s reactor room. The tube rolls downhill
towards Belsize Park – the carriage is full of American tourists, who
look – judging by their short pants and transparent-orange sun
visors – to’ve been for a walk on the Heath. The Butcher, slumped
on worn moquette, looks past the careworn face of the woman
opposite, to where his own curves across the window: a fleshy
blodge that, as he squints, elongates, darkening, until it approximates
to Kins’s scraggy saggy unshaven red face. His father had been,
the Butcher now understands, utterly intimidated by the old man –
and his compulsive, hand-me-down anecdotage was the evidence
of this, as was his hard work maintaining the cult of Sirbert’s personality.
Driv
ing the Rover back up Green Lanes past the grotty
shopping parades of Wood Green, Kins would substitute a younger,
slimmer and more dashing Sirbert for the frigid patriarch they’d
left behind in Blackheath. Young Sirbert had been a Fulham
cockney on the make, his big hands firmly wrapped round the
greasy pole of … his exploder. D’you remember, Kins would say, the
story about Sirbert royally besting two higher-ups at his Ministry
on the links? Ye-es, Dad, we know! The Butcher, the Baker and the
Candlestick-maker would chorus from the back seat – although
they also knew it was impossible to switch off this Home Service,
with its multiple repeats: He didn’t have a full set of his own
clubs, only –. A mashie niblick and an exploder! the boys chorused,
while, not in the least put off, their father would go on anon …
Above the tourist’s head are the laughing eyes of a Sally-alike being
sensitively dealt with by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.
A voice from the crypt intones: This is a southbound train via
Charing Cross terminating at Kennington … then continues …
Sirbert strode to the first tee, armed only with his two humble
clubs – the bigwigs waddled along behind, and behind them came
their caddies, bent double under the weight of opulent bags. As
Kins would have it, Sirbert had taken fifteen strokes off the complacent
permanent secretaries – just as he’d taken thirty off the
Welsh Wizard and his entire war cabinet, before going on to win
the war by advancing single-handedly into the Huns’ lines, hurling
his mashie niblick and his exploder before him … please do not
leave packages unattended. The Butcher and his brothers had heard
many variations of this tale, but he knew he was the only one who
grasped its theme. Kins had never made any secret of the fact
he’d been a conscientious objector – how could he, when there was
always someMaeveone there to remind him? Hers was a leftover
revenge – a congealed and fatty beef she had with him: Your father
in the war? Let him off scot-free, didn’t they – I expect your grandfather
pulled some strings … Anyway, your father heard about this
commune-thingy in Lincolnshire, so he went up there to till the
land. Maeve De’Ath, a cheerful soul, would beam with disloyalty as
she undermined her husband: Turned out Kins wasn’t quite as good
with a hoe as he was with a golf club, so after a few weeks he just
leant it against a barn and buggered off back to London. While all
his pals – his brother, too – were saving the world from Hitler, your
father mooched about the West End poncing drinks and living off
an allowance … She’d say these terrible things not in his absence
but while Kins was mooching about the house – or actually in the
kitchen, standing beside the fulminating Potterton, a teaspoon
in hand, an uneasy smile seaming his sad scraggy saggy unshaven
red face. And on the day they visited the driving range in Sunbury,
that seam had grown wider … deeper, becoming a canyon into
which … I fell. They’d begun sniping as Kins parked the Rover, got
out his golf bag, and the two of them entered the low cinder-block
structure, with its pancake-coloured and pancake-thin carpeting.
(What on earth possessed you?) I couldn’t go on, Squilly – I couldn’t
go on … The Butcher had already tried to broach the issue with his
mother by alluding to Freddie Mercury … or Frederick the Great.
But that morning he’d finally been explicit. Sat at the kitchen table,
his weekly reading material propped against the willow-patterned
milk jug, he’d told his own drab little tale: I’ve been going back to
Mister Deane’s house after revision tutorials, Mum. He gives me
almond slices and tawny port and then he … he does things to me.
Maeve, who’d been washing up, said nothing – but the Butcher saw
her fat back stiffen. It’d been sheer folly – yet he’d pressed on, after
all (An ickle boy always wants hith mummy to understand): He
says he wants to do other things to me, but I don’t want to, Mum
… I mean, I know you know I’m gay, Mum, but you never say anything
about it … is it that you … don’t … mind? The thermostat
clicked, the Potterton puttered to a halt, the temperature dropped
by five degrees – all Saint Albans had been … eclipsed. Maeve
De’Ath had turned from the sink, her hands dripping with bloody
suds: Have you finished? she’d said – followed by words to this
effect: So long as you never speak of this matter again, nor shall I.
So long as you make a pretence of being normal, I shan’t enquire
into how far you’ve deviated. But if you persist with this sickening
effeminacy, or ever speak to me directly of such perversions again,
you’ll be dead to me – you hear me: dead. The Butcher had sat
there at the kitchen table, his head seemingly thrust into Sirbert’s
stereoscope, where a pink-nosed bunny hopped inside a cage forever.
That afternoon Kins had locked it. To his father, who’d been preoccupied
by balancing his Penfold Number One on the little plastic
pyramid there was in lieu of a tee, the Butcher had tried being more
circumspect: You must’ve noticed, Dad, that I get Gay News every
Saturday … Kins had winched his big torso back upright, waggled
his driver, looked towards the faraway nearby of the screen, upon
which a sylvan scene had been projected: an avenue of lush trees
with a strip of emerald fairway running between them all the way
to the flag flickering on the two-tone green. The Butcher wondered
then – and wonders now, as the tube doors open at Camden Town –
how exactly the equipment had worked. The blasé attendant had
explained it in general terms: when the ball hit the screen, sensors
recorded velocity and trajectory, then transferred this information
to its filmic representation – the white scut which went bob-bobbobbing
along … There’d been a grunt, a swish, a crack! and, as
Kins’s championship ball metamorphosed into an image-of-itself,
the Butcher had experienced all-consuming vertigo: the pancake-thin
carpet split asunder, while between his scruffy trainers the
great yawning abyss of Kins’s non-acceptance opened up. Au fond,
the Butcher has always cordially detested his mother (We’d never
have guessed) – but Kins? At sweet sixteen the Butcher still clung
to this sickly illusion: his wayward father would understand my
own waywardness … Yet Kins had said nothing, only gone on
whacking balls into the green closet while his son looked on. Later
the two of them occupied a trestle table outside a riverside pub.
Kins – who’d been liberal in this regard at least – bought them
both pints, and had doubtless wiped the froth from his wet-red lips
with the back of his hand … ‘cause he always did, before finally
speaking: Have you read Orwell’s essay Such, Such Were the Joys?
Or Graves’s Goodbye to All That for that matter? Thing is … I was
at prep and public school during the same era, but I never witnessed
/> any such … behaviours. The boys I was at Lancing with were a
fairly normal lot – mostly civil servants’ and clergymen’s sons.
Some were really rather pious – not least me. D’you know, Johnny,
I think on the whole it’s very much exaggerated – the sex relation.
It’s the temper of the times – Messalina would be right at home.
Nowadays, everyone wants to make a big deal out of their sex relation
– brute it about. But you’ve only to consider Cousin Minnie
– or Cousin Elfreda for that matter. You can’t tell me old spinsters
like these were driven by some sort of repressed sex-drive. I don’t
believe either of them’s ever given the matter any thought at all …
No, no thought: the Butcher’s head separates into two whitish
blodges, connected by a smear of sentience: Squilly and me. He
looks to the right and sees the next carriage, rotating clockwise
on its coupling. He looks to the left and sees the carriage behind,
rotating anti-clockwise on its coupling, as, boring beneath London,
the train describes … this eternal figure-of-eight. A quarter-century
ago, at the futuristic golf range on the outskirts of Staines, beneath
the screaming flight path: the clocks all stopped, the phone line was
cut, and the mutt choked to death in the corner … on a juicy bone.
As he’d followed his father back across the car park, the Butcher
looked up to the sky and saw inscribed there by the disintegrating
contrails of jets lifting off from Heathrow love is dead. The three
of them had never spoken of any of this again – not even years
later, when accident rather than design brought them together on
a Sunday afternoon, a fine cast of British character actors, to watch a
similar ensemble at the Rex in Berkhamsted. Ra-ra skirts and horsy
accents cantering through a succession of country-house hotels,
breaking and bonding. Then at the funereal end, a Scots actor
with thick eyebrows had intoned, My noon, my midnight, my talk,
my song … and at this moment the Butcher supposes Kins must
have glanced along the row and seen his son’s cheeks, wet with
sentiment. When they were standing back in the sunlight, beneath
the cinema’s decaying Nouveau façade, Peter De’Ath had turned
to his wife and said, quite loudly, I’ve no idea why anyone would
