by Will Self
over and over again annagain … It’s dusty throughout the flat – and
greasy in the food-preparation areas. In the bathroom the war-without-end
between sepsis and antisepsis has long since been
fought to a standstill in trenches of congealed soap topped off by
the barbed wire of our shed hair. Yet for me it’s still being fought.
I once heard a woman on the radio – a theoretical physicist, I
assume – explain how we might perceive Einstein’s relativistic universe
by analogy with the way a picture plane of only two dimensions
can nonetheless represent three. I’ve no idea whether this is a good
analogy, having been able to see four dimensions in two, three or
however many – or few – others, for … well, predictably for as long
as I can recall … I love Camilla aged twenty-two, holding the little
ball of balling Benness to her heavy, milk-filled breasts – I can still
taste the brassiness of the buttons on her bib-and-braces, which I
suck upon frenziedly as she struggles to unbutton. I love Camilla
aged twenty-six, clasping a bigger ball of threshing Benness in her
aching arms – and I love Camilla aged thirty-four, driving our
clapped-out old Vauxhall along Kilburn High Road, while I hunker
down in the back seat, counting up the raindrops speckling the
car windows and multiplying the total by the number of times
the bald old tyres revolve between the junction with Cricklewood
Road and the turn-off for home – because that’s what the flat is:
home. Profoundly so. I mention the prodigious calculating only in
passing – I’ve no wish to contribute to egregious stereotyping. Not
that it matters much, but … well, I can admit it: I’ve allocated a
name to every prime number up to and beyond the largest currently
identified by human computing – which, if you’re not exactly au
courant with such matters, I can tell you has seventeen million, four
hundred and twenty-five thousand, one hundred and seventy digits.
I call it Meat Blanket. I can factor this prime as easily as a teenage
girl does French knitting. I see them in the afternoon – I’m seeing
them in the afternoon, standing at Camilla’s window … Oh, whatever
you fancy – I had a pizza earlier … the curtains bunched in one
of my hands. See them coming down the road on their way home
from Saint Augustine’s Church-of-England High School. Funny
a craze like that should come back again: weaving plastic thongs
into multicoloured plaits … Camilla says they did it when she
was a girl – I’d like to’ve done it with her, but, while the capacity
of humans to slide along their own timelines is far greater than
they realise, it’s not possible to slide along just anyone else’s. For
that to be possible you need the forensics: the notes on torn scraps
of spiral-bound pads, and the letters beautifully calligraphed on
Smythson’s bordered writing paper – the emails composed on the
tedious certainty of the Outlook Express grid, then cut and pasted
into standard word-processing files and saved on compact floppy
disks. I’m seeing the French knitters on the brilliant winter afternoon,
standing at Camilla’s window – seeing them float along the
road in a succession of billowy after-images – their beautiful youth
frozen in space and time, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs …
Everything was tightly and chronologically packed into Secret
Sam’s attaché case when I picked it up at the stall on Brixton Station
Road. Jesus! That’s heavy, mate … I know, young man – couldn’t get
the bleedin’ thing open – you’d think those old combination locks’d be
easy-peasy to crack … We-ell, some of ’em are, but these are proper
Manifoils – same kind as spooks use … You seem to know your stuff –
anyway, there it is: a locked-up-tight attaché case – sorta lucky dip, really.
Yours for twenty shitters … I’ll give you a tenner – if I break the
locks opening it, it’ll be worthless … Oh, for fuck’s sake! I can’t make
enough at the moment to buy a fucking bog roll – now you’re gouging me!
Maybe – maybe not, like you say: it’s a lucky dip … C’mon, young
feller – be reasonable. I can see you’re innerested – giss fifteen … At the
bottom were passwords for anonymous email and cloud accounts,
all written out in a mock-crocodile-skin-covered notebook, also
from Smythson’s. The upper middle classes are as restricted in
their shopping for luxury brands as the underclass are in our lucky
dip of discounted stock at Lidl: Oh, no, Mum – not Black Forest-fucking
gateau again! Sorry, Ben – but that’s what was on offer …
again. It would, of course, be ridiculous to imagine I’d been searching
for something of this sort ever since I began collecting stuff in
earnest – because, of course, I already knew it was there, lying
beside a pair of red, polka-dotted Doc Martens and … a pink
oboe. The human distinction between events which are determined
and those adjudged contingent evaporates from this perspective –
while the minute variation between the official Pikachu figurine
and a knock-off one manufactured in Hong Kong remains as acute
as it was, is and always will be. I admit it: I am a little bit of a
chameleon – what does Gawain’s Uncle Rodney say? There’s a
soupçon of the peacock in all army officers à mon avis – while
Jonathan would concede there’s a soupçon of the sociopath in all
good intelligence officers. Carefully rearchiving his large data-set,
I’ve come, if not exactly to admire him, at any rate to feel at home
with him – his waspishness, his snobbery and his exaggerated sense
of his own pantomimic … Milla – you’ve a bit of cottage cheese on your
chin … here … let me – I have a hanky … derring-do. Inevitably,
I’ve found myself incorporating elements of his persona into mine,
since, having no social existence of my own beyond interactions
with eBay vendors and flea-marketers, I tend to use whichever mask
is lying to hand. In this respect, the rise in autism diagnoses during
my lifetime has played to my advantage, providing me with an off-the-peg
set of characteristics – the stimming, the food-pickiness,
the eye-avoidance, the palilalia – with which to play, in turn, to
the gallery of my family. Not to Milla, though – oh, Milla! From
this angle your dear face looms: a Mount Rushmore of a woman
you are to me, in all your maternal splendour. I grab for your
breast – you grab for my hand … Oh, Ben! C’mon – Be-en … and
place your own behind my head, cupping it, drawing it closer …
and closer … Oh … until my mouth suckers on … Ben! to your
nipple … chupp-chupp-chupp-chupp … a steady, rhythmic siphoning
off of these: a casein homologous to bovine beta-casein,
alpha-lactalbumin, lactoferrin, immunoglobulin, lysozyme and
serum albumin – the essential amino-acid pattern which is optimal
for human infants … chupp-chupp-chupp-chupp … She manages
somehow – bless her – to read a few lines of the newspaper folded
on the table next to the ashtray in which my father’s hand-rolled
cigarette smoulders, and, saint though Milla undoubtedly is, she
cannot help experiencing relief – bordering on Schadenfreude – that
we’re in Camberwell rather than Khorramabad, where dead children,
plastic-wrapped, are the subjects of the grainy black-and-white
photograph which accompanies the article. They’re being laid out
in an improvised mortuary, bodged up from breeze-blocks. The
Zagora Mountains have always been an earthquake zone – always
will be, but Missus Thatcher will only resign as PeeEmm once, and
Milla, who has a little badge on her bib ‘n’ braces with the familiar
tight-bouffant hairdo silhouetted on it, and the slogan, DITCH THE
BITCH, is happy enough today, only to be mildly revolted when …
chupp-chupp-chupp-chupp-mmmm-hn’! I let her nipple flubber from
my sharp-edged little gums, rise bow-legged – the way toddlers
do – and, looking back down into the plastic arena, call her attention
to … that great big poo what I done, Mummy … Oh, Ben, darling …
Oh, where’re the Wet Ones … One thing you can say for the realm of
the senses is that there’s no irony in them whatsoever – no saying
what is not in order to call others’ attention to what manifestly is:
which is that we’re not in on the cosmic joke forever being whispered
behind humanity’s back concerning the terms of our own existence.
We know each other for who we really are – Milla and I. We were
raped in a rape field – has she told you? And a traumatic experience
like that will force some together – while others fly apart. Gramps,
bless him, has never been able to remove his pathologising spectacles
and see me for who I truly am – and at least that, I can
concede, is truly ironic – given he’s spent his entire career critiquing
the validity of just these diagnostic criteria, together with the
aetiologies and outcomes they wilfully predict. Anosognosia is the
sort of word old Zack likes to drop into conversations – he understands
his colleagues have it, just not he himself … there’s still half
that pizza in the fridge, Milla – I’ll have that … He certainly doesn’t
get that almost all of humanity is afflicted with a chronic form of
anosognosia – he, Milla, my many and variously fucked-up uncles
and aunts and cousins are all labouring under the same overarching
delusion. Not Mark, though … think I’ll go and see Dad tomorrow,
Mum … I’ll give you a tenner to get him some tobacco … A patient
diagnosed as schizophrenic by the celebrated psychoanalyst
Winnicott once said to him – or so he reports: We schizophrenics
say and do a lot of stuff that’s unimportant and then we mix
important things in with it to see if the doctor cares enough to see
and feel them … Extraordinary to think Mark’s been mixing all
this important stuff into what he says for decades now, but his own
father – his own father! – an eminent psychiatrist with thousands of
hours of exposure – hasn’t understood a word of it. We should be
charitable to dear old Gramps, though – especially now he’s sundowning.
It won’t be long before the neurofibrillary tangles and the
amyloid plaques completely choke his cerebrum. The French idiom
is revenons à nos moutons – and we can see Zack trying desperately
to revenir to his, but the one he most needs to pen is out there
on the hillside, baaing pitifully, caught up in a neurofibrillary
tangle – caught the way a poor little lambkin might be in the tangle
of barbed wire atop a tumbledown drystone wall somewhere in
the Ettrick Forest. Click-click … Baa-baaa … click-click … the
stonechat dips its head, flicks its wings, clicks out its nominative
destiny and flies away, but Zack’s little lambkin of a thought remains
hopelessly trapped – will I be able to free him in time? It’s late
January and I phone Jonathan again: I’d like to add you to my professional
network… – Either you’re insane, Ben, or you’re a very misguided
young man … – I’m twenty-seven, Jonathan – as you presumably
already know – because you’ve contacted your former colleagues, and with
their assistance put a trace on this line … – You’re asking me? – No,
Jonathan – it’s a statement of fact… – Aren’t you at all worried, Ben?
This is a matter of state security: you’re asking me to give you back-door
access to the entire EssEyeEss and GeeSeeAitchQueue internet – and
through that to the YouEss systems as well. By comparison, hacking into
the Pentagon would be a mere misdemeanour. I’ve only to put one call in
and there’d be a Swat team landing a bloody helicopter in Mowbray
Road in minutes … – I’m well aware of that, Jonathan – but what
we really have here is a Mexican stand-off, isn’t it? It’ll take time –
I realise that. I’ll need to talk him round – convince him of the
case intellectually, to a degree – but also establish an emotional
relationship with him. Despite the inversion of our ages, I need him
to feel that I’m a wiser, older brother. His father used to sing: Put
your head on my shoulder, you need someone who’s older … But he
was no Billy Eckstine – mine’s the shoulder Jonathan needs to put
his head on, so I can give him a little rub with my velvet glove.
Really, my evolving relationship with him is exactly the same as the
ones he used to cultivate with his various assets and field agents.
Jonathan’s no fool – he gets it. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in February
and Dad and I are in the chain coffee outlet at Heath Hospital.
Dad hasn’t been on a section for a while – but if he gets a
little wiggy they’ll let him come and stay on the acute ward at Heath
for a few days, really out of respect for Gramps, who, whatever his
other failings, was always a supportive colleague. Dad’s going
on … positional ataraxy – take it up, then drop it much harder so
it crackimup twice – once in the fons, once down the box part … about
the repositioning of the transuranic galvinator, which needs to be
brought into Mercury’s orbit so that its beam will connect to all
human consciousnesses simultaneously, drawing every single individual
on the planet into a vast neural net … interleaved with
plates of burlap and grease tied to the back of a milk floating on my
bread, Benny dearest … Winnicott’s patient was right – but it’d be a
profound mistake to think the important things Mark says are
metaphors of some kind: there’s nothing less analogic than the
world of the schizophrenic, in which everything is entirely and
absolutely like … itself. You try living with captious voices bickering
in your brain, which get louder and louder throughout the day, until
their very howls are the fact of your own dissolution streaming,
screaming through the cosmos. Oh, I’m forgetting – you already do:
for that’s the fundamental insight afforded by schizophrenese –
that’s the thing my father and all the other street soliloquisers are
&nb
sp; ever attempting to tell us anosognosics: we share their malaise – we,
too, labour under the compelling delusion there’s a voice being
piped into our brain which orders us to do this, go there, feel that
and think whatever it pleases us to think. You call it your self – the
hectoring voice which calls you. Wouldn’t you like to be rid of it –
to take a pill or recite a prayer, spin the wheel again and again, and
have the silence descend on you, fine as silica, silky as sand – or
Bonnie’s coat … Bonnie! Bo-nnie! Gramps used to think – when he
could still think clearly about such things – that Mark’s transuranic
galvinator bore some resemblance to James Tilly Matthews’s Air
Loom – the celebrated subject of the first known case study of a
paranoid schizophrenic. Confined to Bedlam in the first decades
of the nineteenth century, Matthews wrote painstaking technical
descriptions of this strange contrivance, which, when operated by
malevolent agents, skilled in the science of pneumatic chemistry,
emitted the rays that tangled up his mind: inducing the magnetic
fields which paralysed his circulatory system and concentrated
the blood in his brain. Matthews thought there were numerous
agents scattered throughout London, all of them equipped with
air looms – all under the control of a mysterious figure known as
Bill, or the King, who identified their targets. And, as I say: there’s
nothing in the least bit metaphoric about schizophrenese – unlike,
say, classical Persian … Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in
that grass, the world is too full to talk about … It’s perhaps difficult
for us to understand quite how central the poetry of Jelal al-Din
Mohammed Rumi was to Iranians of Amir Ali al-Jabbar’s generation
– he once told Jonathan he couldn’t remember ever visiting
the mosque as a child, whereas classical Persian was taught daily,
and mostly through the medium of the works of Shams Tabrizi.
Shams, the Sufi mystic, threw Rumi’s scholarly works into a pool of
water … Bonnie! Bon-nie! Oh, you ridiculous hound! but when the
poet retrieved them they were still dry. I bet you wish the same
would be true of your mobile phone, once you fished it out of the
