by Will Self
All morning the insects proved as good as their command of words. Whenever Jonathan needed something, a pencil or a computer disk, he had only to point to it for an insect formation to arrange itself in the air, lift the required object, and port it to where he sat, labouring at the Macintosh. Once their task was completed, the flies quit the room, leaving him with blissful quiet. No noise of miniature timpani, as tiny heads butted giant panes.
The sight of a clump of blue-black flies, holding within their midst such quotidian human artefacts, was also, in and of itself, a kind of displacement activity. Jonathan found that with these little breaks in the work to entertain him progress on the index was effortless. He was on to ‘rood’ before the end of the morning.
At lunch he had a protracted dialogue with the draining-board. ‘OK,’ he told the silverfish, ‘I accept that so far you have acted in good faith. I will throw the Vaponas away!’
HOORAY! wrote the silverfish.
‘I will also remove the spiders’ webs I have allowed to be established around the cornices and the architrave.’
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! WE WILL CONTINUE TO SERVE YOU.
Jonathan was using the broom to knock out the last of the webs in the spare bedroom when Joy rang. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.
‘Fine, fine.’ For some reason he found the very sound of her voice, vibrating in the receiver, intensely irritating, as if she were somehow trapped there, her nails rap-rap-rapping against the Bakelite.
‘Insect life not getting to you then, is it?’ She laughed, another tinkly, irritating noise.
‘No, no, why should it?’
‘Well, it’s been bothering you all summer. And frankly I can’t tell you what a relief it is to be in London, away from all of that bloody nature …’ She paused, and Jonathan bit his lip, restraining himself from pointing out that ‘bloody nature’ could just as well do without her. ‘… Still, I’m sure I’ll be longing for it by Friday. I’ll be on the three-forty train, would you get a cab to pick me up from Sax?’
Jonathan filed this request away, but as soon as he hung up, Joy vanished from his mind. He was finding Flytopia an exhilarating place to live in. They left him well alone in the study, but whenever he emerged he found orderly teams of insects going about their business of assisting him elsewhere in the house. Neat phalanxes of beetles trundled across the carpets, their mandibles seeking out whatever detritus there was. Similar teams of earwigs were at work in the bathroom, and in the kitchen all signs of his breakfast, right down to the ring of coffee powder he had left by the jar, were eradicated by the industrious ants.
At lunch he took down the remaining fly-papers, and had a more protracted dialogue with the silverfish on the draining-board. AS YOU ARE NO DOUBT AWARE … they began, to which Jonathan expostulated: ‘I’ll thank you not to adopt that high-handed tone with me!’ The insects immediately reformed into a demurral:
SORRY! WHAT WE WANTED TO SAY WAS THAT WE DON’T LIVE IN YOUR COTTAGE OUT OF CHOICE. WE COME INSIDE BECAUSE IN THE NORMAL COURSE OF THINGS THERE IS USUALLY SOME CARRION WITHIN WHICH WE CAN DEPOSIT OUR EGGS, SO THAT OUR LARVAE MAY GROW AND BECOME FULLY FUNCTIONING AND WELL-ADJUSTED MEMBERS OF FLYTOPIA.
‘I see.’
HOWEVER, IF WE ARE CLEANING EVERYTHING UP FOR YOU, WE’RE RATHER DOING OURSELVES OUT OF A KEY COMPONENT IN OUR OWN ECOSYSTEM.
‘I understand that, of course.’
WHAT WE WONDERED WAS WHETHER YOU MIGHT CONSIDER TURNING THE SPARE BEDROOM OVER TO US EXCLUSIVELY. IN WHICH CASE WE WOULD BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO ABANDON THE REST OF THE HOUSE TO YOU –
‘– But I’m rather pleased by the way you’ve been helping me –’
– APART THAT IS FOR THE WORK WE NEED TO DO TO HELP YOU.
‘I see. Well, I’ll give it some thought.’
And he did, but really Jonathan’s mind was already made up. The insects were proving such capable little friends. He no longer found them revolting at all, and when he saw them at work on the carpet he would bend down so as to catch whatever expressions might be contained in their alien faces. He also found their assistance in his toilet not simply helpful, but peculiarly sensual.
At night the moths tapped at the panes of the bathroom window until he allowed them access, and then they would blanket him with their softly pulsing wings. They tenderly licked away the encrusted sweat and dirt of the day, before drying him off with teasing flutterings of their wings. He didn’t bridle when the silverfish on the draining-board suggested that he might like some of the beetles and earwigs to seek out the more intimate portions of his body and give them a thorough scouring as well.
Jonathan wondered if he had ever felt in more harmony with his environment. Not only that, but wondered if the grosser manipulations of human intercourse weren’t becoming altogether more alien to his nature than these subtlest of digitations. In the morning he walked into Inwardleigh and bought ten pounds of pork sausages at Khan’s. ‘Barbecue?’ asked Mr Khan, quadra-chinned today. ‘Not exactly,’ Jonathan replied.
He laid them out in the spare bedroom on the white plastic trays he had taken from the fridge. He left the door open for most of the day, but when evening came the silverfish told him that there was no need for this. So he shut the door and fell asleep in his voluntarily insect-free cottage.
The next morning, when Jonathan peeked inside the spare bedroom he felt a rush of paternal pride to see the bulging, bluing aspect of the rotting sausages, each one stippled with the white nodules that indicated the presence of maggots. Maggots chewing, maggots growing, maggots that he had gifted life to. A group of female flies who had been methodically working their way across the last five pounds or so of sausages, injecting their eggs into the putrefying meat, rose as he entered the room, and executed what looked to Jonathan like a gay curtsey, acknowledging his assistance and his suzerainty.
He worked steadily all morning. One particularly faithful fly proved the most adept of wordfinders, shuffling over the open spread of the OED until it found the correct entry, and then squatting there, gently agitating its wings, so as to act as a living cursor.
MORE MEAT? queried the silverfish on the draining-board, when he went in to make a sandwich at lunch. ‘I’ll think about it,’ Jonathan replied, tossing them a sliver of ham to be getting on with. Then he retreated to the study, to phone for a cab to pick Joy up from the station.
Jonathan was so engrossed in the index that he didn’t hear the squeal of brakes as Joy’s cab pulled up outside the cottage. ‘I’m home!’ she trilled from the front door, and Jonathan experienced the same revulsion at the sound of her voice as he’d had on the phone. Why must she sound so high-pitched, so mindlessly insistent? She came into the study and they embraced. ‘Have you got a fiver for the cab, darling?’
‘Um … um … hold on a sec.’ He plumped his pockets abstractedly. ‘Sorry, not on me. I think there’s a pile of loose change up in the spare bedroom …’
Jonathan listened to her feet going up the stairs. He listened to the door of the spare bedroom open, he heard the oppressive, giant, fluttering hum, as she was engulfed, then he rose and went out to pay the cab.
Caring, Sharing
When Travis came out of the side door of the Gramercy Park Hotel – avoiding the guy who ran the concession stall, because earlier on he’d been embarrassed by his failure deftly to marshal the correct change – he felt pretty hollow. Brion was right behind him, and although Travis thought he really shouldn’t need to, he couldn’t help reaching back and clutching the emoto’s forty-inch thigh.
Brion’s response was immediate; he stooped down and grasping Travis by the generous scruff of his tweed suit, lifted him right up, drew him into his arms, and planted a series of wet kisses on Travis’s face, while all the time patting his back and muttering soothing endearments.
Travis felt all the knotted tension in his neck and shoulders begin to ebb away. It was a palpable sensation, just as if the emoto had been rubbing some balm into his exposed skin. Travis sighed
deeply and snuggled further into the warm-smelling gap between the brushed cotton collar of Brion’s shirt and the prickly tweed of his suit collar. Travis always dressed his emoto the same as himself. He knew that some people found it intolerably gauche, like putting twins in matching sailor suits, but he loved Brion so much – the emoto wasn’t just an emoto, more an aspect of Travis himself.
And Brion smelt good. He smelt of Imperial Leather soap and Ralph Lauren aftershave. He smelt of sweat and cocktail fish. He smelt of flannel and cigarette smoke. He smelt – in short – very much like Travis himself. Even Brion’s kisses smelt good; Travis could feel a slick patch of the emoto’s saliva on his upper lip, but he had no urge – as he might with any other individual’s secretions – to wipe it off. Instead, he gently scented the enzymic odours, while idly considering whether or not emotos had the same chemicals in their bodies as other humans. They couldn’t be exactly the same, because emotos couldn’t drink alcohol – or smoke for that matter; and that implied some different oils, boiling in the pullulating refineries of their massive bodies.
Travis didn’t like thinking about the inside of Brion’s body – it made him distinctly queasy. So he cancelled the observation and snuggled still deeper into the sheltering arms. The emoto’s vast hands smarmed over Travis’s back, over his shoulders, smoothed down his hair, so gentle, yet so firm. Travis heard Brion’s voice rumble in his chest before the words reached his muffled ears, ‘Are you worried about the date tonight, Travis?’
Travis stiffened. The word ‘date’ – how he hated it. It put him in mind of the fruit, not two adults enjoying each other’s company. ‘You don’t even like the word, do you?’ The comforting hand almost completely encapsulated Travis’s head, as if it were a helmet of flesh and tendon and bone. The voice was beautifully modulated, sonorous even. The emoto’s words seemed to come zinging straight to Travis’s heart, each one with a top spin of sympathy.
‘It makes me think of the fruit …’ he muttered. Brion chuckled in a rumbly sort of way and hugged him still harder. Hugged Travis and lifted him high up in the early evening air, twisting the grown-up’s body as he did so gifting Travis a few seconds of Gramercy Park upside-down. Travis noted an old douche bag, clanking with jewellery, walking her miniature Schnauzer on the roof of the world. Then Brion deftly lowered him, and bestowing one, final drooly kiss on Travis’s forehead, set him back neatly on his feet.
‘You shouldn’t worry so much,’ Brion admonished Travis. ‘I’m sure Karin is just as anxious about the whole thing as you are. She probably thinks of the fruit too. Now come on, we better get going if we’ve got to head uptown.’ Brion’s armchair hand descended once more and cupping Travis’s back, the emoto pushed his grown-up gently in the direction of Madison Avenue. As they walked under a canopy tethering a townhouse to the sidewalk, Brion had to duck down, but then he straightened up, and the two tweed-suited figures, one about six feet tall, the other closer to fourteen, ambled away and were presently engulfed by the croaking roar of Manhattan.
Three miles to the north, in the West Seventies, Travis’s date for the evening, Karin, was feeling just as uneasy. She was even on the verge of cancelling altogether. Karin had met Travis a couple of weeks ago at a wine tasting arranged by her friend Ariadne. The event was a pure snob thing – Ariadne wanted to show off her wine cellar and her new SoHo loft apartment-cum-studio; which was big enough – Karin had reflected – to enable Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore and Damien Hirst to work alongside one another, with little danger of them muddling up tools, or materials. Really, an exorbitant waste of space when you considered the further fact that Ariadne herself was a miniaturist.
Ariadne’s friends were mostly the usual faux bohos who congregated in the environs of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Tribeca; affecting the style of penniless, fifties, rive gauche students; while living on the income from vast tranches of AT&T stock. These types were always on the verge of exhibiting, publishing, constructing, filming or presenting something, but never actually managed it. At one of Ariadne’s soirées, a young man with pigtails had even deliriously informed Karin that he was about to present a presentation. ‘What do you mean?’ Karin politely queried. ‘Y’know, make a pitch for a pitch, I guess …’
‘And if you get the pitch?’
‘Aw, hell, I dunno … I dunno if I want to follow through that far.’
Karin wandered away from this absurd reductivism. Later, she was pleased to see that the pigtailed pitcher had had to be carried out by his emoto, dead drunk, more incoherency falling along with the drool from his slack mouth.
But on the night of the wine tasting nobody much got drunk – and Karin met Travis. Travis, who seemed initially a little creepy in his immaculately cut English-retro tweed suit. Travis, who smoked, which meant he had to stand out on the fire escape, engaging her in flirtatious conversation through the window. Karin couldn’t really approve of the smoking, but nor could she condemn it. In fact, she found something faintly racy and daring about Travis on that first encounter, certainly in comparison to the posing rentiers, who were swirling their wine glasses around in the studio as if to the château born.
Travis, it transpired, knew a great deal about wine; or ‘fine wine’ as he invariably referred to it. He could tell a Chareau-Carré Muscadet from a white Bordeaux by bouquet alone. He knew the names of all the varieties of phylloxera, their life cycles and their effects. He had once rafted down the Rhône, stopping for a bottle of wine in every vineyard he passed. But there was nothing overbearing or self-satisfied in the way he retailed all of this knowledge and experience. Rather, it seemed to be an essential mannerism of the man to be tirelessly self-effacing, albeit with such an ironic inflection to his voice, that it was clear he had a perfectly healthy opinion of his own wit and talents.
‘I’m basically a wealthy dilettante –’ He paused, his long upper lip twitching with self-deprecation. ‘And not a very good one at that.’
‘How d’you figure that?’ Karin thought she sounded like some whiny co-ed – his diction was so studied.
‘Because I can’t really settle to anything, the way you have. I just flit from one hobby to the next. But I enjoy my enthusiasms – if that isn’t something of a contradiction in terms.’
Karin had told Travis all about the small dress-making business she ran. How she had turned her two-room apartment in the twenties into a miniature atelier, staffed by six deft Filipino seamstresses. How she had made a considerable name for herself selling near-couture to wealthy Manhattanites. And how she had now been offered, by an enormous fashion business, a prêt-à-porter range of her own.
Travis listened to all of this intently, nodding and gifting polite noises of encouragement in the correct places. When Karin finally faltered he asked exactly the right question: ‘D’you also make clothes for emotos?’
‘Oh sure, actually I’m really best known for my fashion wear for emotos. Some people, y’know, some people find it easier to do a bias cut using a bigger expanse of cloth –’
‘I guess that’s to do with the weight and tensility of the fabric,’ Travis replied, in his rather tense, weighty fashion. Karin couldn’t believe it – a presentable, youngish man in Manhattan who knew what a bias cut was.
‘Is your emoto here?’ Travis asked after a short while.
‘Yeah, Jane, she’s the one with the long blonde hair over there.’ She pointed to the section of the loft that had been set aside for the emotos. Suitably enough this was in the highest section, where a trapezoid skylight formed a twenty-foot-high roof space. A table had been set up for the emotos – a table that was to their scale, about six feet high – and on it were five litre jugs full of Kool-Aid and root beer and cherry cola, the kind of sweet, sickly drinks that emotos preferred. The emotos were supping these and engaging in the slightly infantile banter that passed for conversation among them.
There were about ten emotos, and they were of all types: black, white, old, young. But Travis’s and Karin’s were easy to
spot, for, naturally, they were both dressed identically to their grown-ups. Travis laughed. He turned first to Karin and then to Jane. He compared the trim, thirtyish blonde in front of him to the lissom, twelve-foot emoto at the far end of the loft. Both wore the same well-cut jackets that flared from the hip; and the same velveteen leggings tucked into snakeskin ankle boots. Both had their straight blonde hair cut into bangs, and Travis was even more amused to note that Karin had equipped her emoto with a heavy, scalloped silver choker necklace, the same as her own. This must have cost a great deal of money.
‘And that’s …?’ Karin pointed at the chunky, fourteen-foot emoto in the immaculately cut, English-retro tweed suit.
‘Brion – yeah, that’s my emoto. We’ve been together a long, long time. In fact, he’s the same emoto that I had when I left group home –’
‘Snap!’ Karin cried. ‘I’ve been with Jane since I was sixteen too.’
At this point the emotos concerned came over to give their grown-ups a much needed cuddle. Jane, coming up behind Karin, leant down and draped her flawless white hands over the grown-up’s shoulders. Then she pulled Karin backwards, so as to nuzzle the grown-up’s entire body against her crotch and lower belly. Brion did pretty much the same thing to Travis; so that the two grown-ups continued their conversation from within the grottoes of these massive embraces.
Perhaps it was the security of Jane’s arms around her, or that Travis was – in his own eccentric fashion – almost alluring, which made the idea of them meeting again, perhaps enjoying a meal, a movie or a gallery visit together, seem a good one. Jane took Karin’s organiser out of her shoulder bag – which for reasons of convenience also held her grown-up’s shoulder bag – and Karin exchanged numbers with Travis. Brion had an outsize, Smythe’s of Bond Street, leather-bound address book, in which he noted down Karin’s numbers with an outsize, gold propelling pencil. ‘Wow!’ Karin exclaimed. ‘Can your emoto write?’
