by Will Self
Jonathan was compiling the index for a scholarly work on ecclesiastical architecture – or meant to be. Normally the whirrings and clickings of the Macintosh soothed him, as he moved from application to application, working in symbiosis with the mechanism. But now he found himself listening the whole time, listening for the other whirrs and clicks of his fellow residents. It occurred to him that perhaps they were learning to imitate the noises of the computer; that through some quantum, phylogenetic leap, the insects were becoming computer-like. An outrageous act of Batesian mimicry, akin to that with which the undistinguished wasp beetle jerkily pretends to the status of its more dangerous namesake.
The heat. The fucking heat. He was broiled in vexation.
Mr Khan manifested himself by Jonathan’s elbow. A dun pyramid of a man who multiplied his chins to acquiesce with his customers, and divided them to dissent. ‘Was there anything else?’ he said. Jonathan flailed, he had been lost in the fugue, staring sightlessly at the frozen vegetables. ‘Garden peas, French beans?’
‘No, no, silly of me … I don’t – all I can think of that I really need is some of those Vapona thingies. I’m convinced the ones I’ve got at the moment must be losing their effectiveness.’
‘They’re meant to last at least a month.’ Mr Khan regarded Jonathan quizzically, from out of an eye with a bruised ball.
‘That’s as may be, but the house is still full of flies.’
‘We-ell, that’s the summer we’ve been having, isn’t it? And with the harvest on now, you’ll be lucky if you don’t get a lot of mice and rats coming into your place as well. So how many will it be?’
‘Give me another five, Mr Khan, and I’ll take a box of fly-papers as well please.’
Inwardleigh was stretching and yawning as Jonathan came back up the main street. A knot of teenagers was gathered outside the public toilets, opposite the defunct Job Centre. They were smoking, hands cupped around fags, bodies cupped around hands. A couple of cars stood by them, doors open so that the techno which blared from their stereos was clearly audible from well down the road. It was, Jonathan reflected, not exactly music at all; more like a sound effect devised by a radiophonic composer to accompany a film featuring giant, mechanical cockroaches.
The teenagers ignored him. He walked on by, conscious of the weight of the rucksack, parasitic on the small of his back, and the damp partings and clammier marriages of his nether limbs. Reaching the end of the estate, Jonathan dropped back into Hogg Lane. Two gossamer lines wavered some three feet above the track, each one following the line of the rut below. They were comprised of many many thousands of tiny midges, which hovered, tumbling over and over and over. Why would the midges gather in this way? Jonathan thought as he pushed on into the tunnel of greenery, his waist cresting the wave of life-forms. Could it be an attraction to the moisture latent in the rut? Or animal droppings? Or was it some new behaviour? Certainly the summer had been doing things to the insects, gingering them up, pushing the hot air faster through their spiracles, so that they were able to fly faster, feed faster, and reproduce in even greater numbers.
The haunch slathered with infective matter. Bulging from within, the fact of decay possessing and altering it, changing it from organism to environment. Delicately, methodically Mustica Domestica goes about her business of insertion.
Almost every week there were irruptions of silverfish or ants into the kitchen. Usually Joy was first up in the morning, so it would be her cry that awoke Jonathan: ‘Ayeee!’ she would bellow, and the sound would yank him from sweat-impacted sheets, pull him down to where she stood, her nightdress clutched up in folds around her belly by one hand, while the other flapped in the air. Did she imagine they were intent on accessing the pit of her body? ‘What! What!’ he would cry, angry with her and hating the little kitchen as well, despising its linoleum confines, the ruched, muslin, pseudo-curtain in the tiny window over the sink. She would gesture to one or other of the wooden, Melamine, or stainless steel surfaces, where the invaders were boiling up from crack or join.
Were silverfish insects? Jonathan bent down low to examine them. They flowed as much as crawled, each wriggling driblet of a creature adopting a piscine undulation. Were they recently hatched, or fully mature? On these occasions he sent Joy back up to bed, boiled the kettle, located the break-out point and poured down libations of exterminatory water into the navel of the silverfish world.
Ants didn’t bother him as much. It was like a racial prejudice. The ants carried things. Teams of them would move crumbs with an orderly sideways shuffle; or one would roll a nugget of sugar on to another’s back. They were like the Japanese: small, efficient, manifesting an unknowable, collective mind.
Back upstairs Jonathan would reassure Joy. Roll her on to her carapace and investigate the damp portions of her thorax and abdomen. Then the two humans adopted peculiar, mating postures, their limbs outlined against the pink, vernal riot of the flower-patterned wallpaper. Jonathan nuzzled her and struggled not to think of the insects nuzzling all about them, the pillowy dust mites labouring below the pillows as they laboured above them, carrying away the dead epidermal portions of Jonathan and Joy.
And in the primal, physical contortions of sex, Jonathan laboured as well not to think of the earwigs. The earwigs bothered him the most of all the insects. These prehistoric beasts, with their excremental bodies both shiny and somehow unclean, made it their business, their métier even, to seek out the dampest and most intimate portions of the cottage. Were they parodying Jonathan and Joy’s efforts to keep the cottage clean, keep it as a viable, human-supporting environment? Whenever he picked up a dishcloth, a mug, a cake of soap even, one of the earwigs would emerge, moving unsteadily, antennae and forceps waggling, and mooch off across the allegedly clean surface. It was the insouciance that did it. Jonathan would take the offender between thumb and forefinger, crush the life out of it.
Don’t think of the earwigs as she lifts my balls. Don’t think of them as her pink triangle of a tongue traces the brown crinkles of my perineum. Don’t think of them as I palp the gristle between her legs; gristle beneath hairs as insubstantial as frass. Don’t think of earwigs emerging from beneath labia or foreskin. Don’t think of earwigs, don’t think of her. Gone.
So the insects whirled in front of and behind Jonathan’s grey eyes; and he walked on unseeing. Beyond the thick hedging bordering the lane, the pylons kept pace with him, their cables thrumming in the late-afternoon heat.
The cottage reposed at the bottom of what passed for a combe in this relaxed landscape. A stream-cum-drainage ditch ran alongside the garden hedge. When there was any rain it burst its confines, flooding lane and field. On all sides of the cottage the fields swept up at a modest angle for some hundreds of yards, on two sides meeting the pylon lines, on the third a liner-shaped copse, and on the fourth the paddock of tumbledown jumps and dried-out pits where his landlord’s tinkly-voiced daughters rode their ponies.
Jonathan’s cottage pinioned this awning of fieldscape, weighed it down at its centre. He debouched from the lane and walked the hundred yards of his landlord’s drive to the cottage gate. Arbuthnot – the landlord – was away. Jonathan could tell this from the pile of black plastic bags set at the end of the drive. As he passed by them, the black bucklers the bags formed palpably radiated heat, and then a cloudlet of scintillating flies, gold and blue, arose from them to dance on the tiny thermals.
Jonathan entered his cottage, went through the breakfast room to the kitchen and unloaded his rucksack on the work surface by the fridge. The fly-paper dangling by the window was full. So full that the gooey corpses of its victims entirely covered it, like an advanced chancre on a tongue. As he watched a fly homed in on the thing, circling, dipping and finally alighting on the back of one of its conspecifies. Jonathan watched, only slightly sickened, as the fly applied its nozzled proboscis to the chink betwixt the head and thorax of the corpse and began to feed.
Then the repulsion did come, and Jonathan found
himself moving from room to room, fetching chairs so that he could rear upwards, prise out the drawing-pins in the ceiling and take down the tacky mausoleums. Such was his hurry over this loathsome work that on two occasions the fly-papers came down on top of him, gifting him a head-dress repellent in the extreme. He ran from the house, hunched over, head and arm angled as if he were a Pompeian, about to receive a lava bath; and then ran back in again, mewling; there was no succour abroad. He had to wash his hair before he could resume work on the index.
In the study a gold beam lanced down from a chink in the curtain, to spotlight a patch of wear on the carpet. On the screen of the Macintosh, small pellets ricocheted about like insects in a killing jar. Jonathan sat down in his swivel chair and clicked on the Anglepoise. He flicked the mouse and the screensaver dissolved into a body of text.
Jonathan had reached the term ‘nef’ before going out to do the shopping. It was an obscure term meaning the nave of a church. He plugged the three letters into the word-search and hit the control key. The computer went about its work, chomping through the text, looking for instances. He felt himself relax into the machine’s labour. It made its clicks and whirrs companionably, this clean thing, this ergonomic thing. Jonathan honed his appreciation, concentrated, tried to ignore the deeper zzzing undercutting them … the deeper, more organic, more moribund zzzing.
A fly was dying in the lea of his mouse mat. As Jonathan watched it span out from the thin, hard-edged shadow and into the full glare of the Anglepoise. The fly was on its back. Must be propelling itself with its wings, thought Jonathan, as it span to a halt like a minuscule merry-go-round, the wings, the hairs, the compound eyes, returning from blur.
Was the fly a victim of Vapona? Jonathan had erected the little venetian-blind slatted units, one to each room, but done it in the spirit of magic, not really believing that they worked. How could the poison affect the flies – and not me? Or the earwigs for that matter? It started up twirling again, buzzing again. The upside-down fly moved top-like across the desk, batted off the edge of a piece of paper and came to rest among some breadcrumbs. How long, Jonathan wondered, will it take to die?
And this query sent his febrile mind spinning into an orbit of twisted, insect supposition. Why? Why were flies’ bodies full of what appeared to be pus? From where Jonathan sat he could see the smear paths of two of his earlier executions. Was it perhaps an adaptive response to parasitising humans? Making sure that the act of killing was an unpleasant, if marginal activity? And why did killing flies need to be unpleasant at all? Why couldn’t it be made into some kind of pastime, or sport even. That’s it! A solution to the need for blood sports and the need to kill flies. Perhaps miniature needle-guns could be developed, able to achieve the pin-point accuracy necessary for targeting flies?
Jonathan tilted back in his chair, imagining the ramifications of his new idea. A fully functioning hunting field contained within the compass of a single Axminster carpet. Beaters – or rather beetles – moving through the pile, flushing out the grazing flies. The huntsmen sitting motionless at their workstations, needle-guns at the ready. The quarry has broken from behind its cover of lint and fluff. It’s in the air! And the guns lead the flies, their muzzles moving sharply up, down, obliquely, tracking the erratic paths. A slight pressure on the trigger and the needle flies fast and true, skewering the droning bluebottle precisely through one wing and its bulbous abdomen. Crunch! It falls to the twistpile, bounces, settles down into death, like a slo-mo film of a wildebeest dropping on the veldt. Small wicker cages are opened by the guns, and specially trained wasps fly out. They bank, right themselves, lose altitude to the carpet, move in to retrieve the quarry.
Outside the summer afternoon droned on. The sun drummed on the hard, cracked earth. The cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers chafed and stridulated, rubbing leg on leg, wing-case on wing-case, or else popping a rigid tegument of their bodies, so as to produce noises like a child’s toy. The land pulsed, as a woman’s vagina does in the aftershocks of orgasm: holding the hot air to itself, and releasing it; holding the hot air to itself, and releasing it.
Jonathan’s head fell back, jerked forward, rolled some, righted itself, fell back. His eyelids fluttered, then fell. He slept. In his dream Joy returned to the cottage. The taxi from Saxmundham station dropped her in the lane. She looked tremendous, her high, pointed shoulders enveloped in clear, veined wings. She had – he was amused and titillated to see – three, dear little pairs of hands. Her hands, so small, he found the thought of their childish grip on his thickening penis insistently erotic, even as he pitched and yawed in sleep, and the computer’s screensaver enveloped the recondite text.
‘Look,’ Joy said, gesturing with three hands towards her lower body, and twitching the drapery of wings to one side, ‘I bought it at Harvey Nick’s, it’s the very latest in abdominal sacking,’ ‘Darling!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s tremendous.’ And it was. Alternate filleted panels of silk and satin, in two shades of blue, ran from her thorax, down in smooth and sensual slickness, to where a simple tassel hinted at the delights within.
In the bedroom Jonathan stripped nervously, like an adolescent, hunching up to remove his trousers and pants, as if he could somehow hide his ravening erection. She stood by the window to disrobe, and as she removed epidermis after epidermis, the sun streamed through her wings, creating a jalousie pattern on the ceiling. Her six hands moved rapidly, speeded by her own, insistent appetite. Then they were one writhing thing on the sheet. She arched above him, her multifaceted eyes capturing and scattering the light. He groaned – in awe and pleasure. Out of the line of his sight, her modified ovipositor pushed smoothly from the tip of her abdomen, each one of its barbs dripping with Cacharel. She arched still more, bending herself back underneath him. The ovipositor nuzzled his anus; and then the sting oozed up, killing him at the moment of climax.
Jonathan awoke, his mouth full of glutinous, mucal crud. It was ten thirty in the evening, and he was now living in Flytopia.
This he realised on entering the kitchen. Silverfish boiled up from the crack at the back of the sink and spread out over the draining-board. Their myriad bodies formed some comprehensible design. Jonathan leant down to see what it was. It was writing; the silverfish had formed themselves into a slogan: WELCOME TO FLYTOPIA … it said, the leader dots being, as it were, the fifty or so stragglers who couldn’t make it into the final leg of the ‘A’. Jonathan rubbed his eyes and exclaimed, ‘Well, this is a turn up. Tell me – if you can act in this fashion presumably you can understand my speech – what does being in Flytopia entail exactly?’
The swarm of silverfish fused into a single pullulating heap and then fissioned back into readable characters, spindlier this time, which ranged across the corrugations of the draining-board, as if they were lines on a sheet of paper:
IN FLYTOPIA HUMANS AND INSECTS LIVE TOGETHER COOPERATIVELY. WE HAVE UNDERSTOD YOUR ANXIETY AND REVULSION FROM US, BUT WISH NOW TO LIVE AT PEACE WITH YOU. YOU ASSIST US – WE WILL ASSIST YOU.
‘That should be “understood”,’ said Jonathan, ‘not “understod”.’ The silverfish rearranged themselves to correct the living typo. ‘Hmm,’ Jonathan continued to speak aloud as he got a beer from the fridge and opened it, ‘I suppose you want some kind of quid pro quo then?’
IT WOULD BE KIND IF YOU GOT RID OF THE VAPONAS AND THE FLY-PAPERS – INCIDENTALLY, SINCE YOU WERE WONDERING, THE VAPONAS EMIT A KIND OF NEUROTOXIN THAT PARALYSES US. IT’S NOT A NICE DEATH.
‘I’m sure … I’m sure … but you must appreciate, I don’t want to relax my campaign against you until I have more evidence of your goodwill.’
WE UNDERSTAND THAT. IF YOU CONTINUE ABOUT YOUR DAILY EXISTENCE, WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO ACCOMMODATE OURSELVES TO YOUR NEEDS. I THINK YOU WILL FIND THAT WE CAN BE SURPRISINGLY USEFUL. YOU ARE TIRED NOW, WHY NOT GO AND SEE WHAT WE’VE DONE IN THE BEDROOM?
Jonathan went upstairs and snapped on the overhead light in the bedroom. The bed, normally a slough of damp and disorder
ed sheets, was not only neatly made, but peculiarly clean in appearance, clean as if burnished from within. A four-inch-wide rivulet of mites was flowing off the plumped-up pillow, down to the floor, across the intervening strip of carpet, up to the window-sill, and out the window itself. ‘What’s going on here?’ Jonathan asked, taking a slug of his beer. The back end of the stream of tiny insects quivered, detached itself from the larger body of its kine and began to form characters on the pillow. Within seconds a slogan arranged itself:
WE ARE THE DUST MITES WHO HAVE BEEN LIVING IN YOUR BEDROOM. IN THE MATTRESS, THE PILLOWS, AND THE CARPET. AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL FROM OUR ORDER WE HAVE THOROUGHLY CLEANED YOUR BEDDING AND NOW WE ARE DEPARTING. SWEET DREMS.
‘That should be “dreams”,’ said Jonathan pedantically, but the dust mites, paying no attention, had already reformed their column and were completing their ordered withdrawal.
It was the first night of dreamless and undisturbed sleep that Jonathan could remember having in weeks. But when he awoke the following morning the bedroom was humming with insect life. As he opened his eyes he saw that the ceiling immediately above him was carpeted with flies. DO NOT BE ALARMED! The flies quickly and quiveringly arranged themselves into the words: WE WISH TO ASSIST YOU WITH YOUR TOILET.
‘Fair enough,’ said Jonathan, heaving himself blearily up on to his elbows.
A beautiful flight of cabbage white butterflies then came winging into the room, for all the world like a host of angels. Before Jonathan could react they had blanketed his face with soft, faintly damp wings. He felt their tiny mandibles pluck, and nibble at the crusted matter on his lips and eyelids. He lay back on the pillow and let the insects give him what amounted to an entire facial. When the butterflies lifted off, regrouped and flew out the open window, he arose, refreshed and ready for the day.
