by Will Self
‘Fucked up, I s’pose, right enough.’
‘What’s that?’
‘With the kiddies like. Fucked up. Y’know, I was young – didn’t know what I wanted. Still don’t, I s’pose.’ He gifted Bill another smile that had once – no doubt – been charming.
Bill had been waiting for this; this descent into the cellar of Mark’s mind. The kids – his relationship with his kids – would have to be the trapdoor, the way down. Bill had pegged Mark as a bolter almost immediately. There was an aspect of bruised dejection about the young man which suggested someone who was willing to wound but afraid to strike. Someone who would say the unsayable and then attempt retraction. Someone whose capacity for self-love would only ever be manifested through attitudinising and narcissism.
Bill thought that he quite hated Mark already. He hated the young man’s willingness to be drawn out. His self-absorption. His tiresome lack of cool – he had told Bill four times while they smoked the joint how good the dope was in Poole, and how adept he and his pals were at obtaining it. Bill resolved to pump Mark for all he was worth. To gut the man’s past, quarter his present, and draw a bead on his future. It was a game Bill had often played before – trying to find out as much as he could about someone he encountered by chance. Find out as much as he could, and – this was crucial – not give away anything about himself. Once the mark began asking questions themselves the game was over.
‘It’s difficult bringing up kids –’
‘Specially with no dosh. Specially with no space, y’know. Space to think. I always thought there was more to me than just a driver. My father was a brilliant man. I couldn’t find myself. Couldn’t in Thurso – nothing there. And my wife … she didn’t, sort of, get it …’
‘Understand?’
‘Right.’
‘And it’s better down in Poole? Did you go there directly?’
‘Well, no. I bummed around the country, sort of, for a while. I mean, I set off aiming for Glastonbury that year – and then just sort of kept on. Got, well, ended up in Poole because of the Social –’
‘Easier to claim?’
‘Aye.’
They were well into the mountains and the clouds had come down. To the right the Monadhliaths, to the left the Grampians. The valley was a mile or so wide. Beyond the rough summer pasture the mountains did what they did best: mounting. Either the furred flanks of forestry, or the abrasive architecture of scree. Up and Up, until the indefinite, thrusting peaks made contact with the cloudy massifs lowered from above. Bill noted that the car was almost out of petrol. They would have to run into Aviemore.
‘I’m going to run into Aviemore,’ he said to Mark, who was humming along with the music, ‘but we won’t be stopping, we’ll just grab some sandwiches and head on – have you eaten?’ The young man was hitching. It was plain that he’d spent all of his money on booze the night before. This was Bill’s opportunity to do him a real turn. Feed him up.
‘Nah, really … nah … I’m all right.’ The suitable case for charity suitably hung his face. Bill said nothing – he was looking for signs. Eventually one ran along the road towards them – it was a mile to the turn. The sign – as did most in this part of the Highlands – showed a turnoff diverting from the main road, lancing a boil destination, and then rejoining it. Bill mused on how like life this was; the temporary diversions that you attempted to make, which were always cut off, subsumed once more to the ruthlessly linear, the deathly progression. Bill thought of sharing this observation with Mark, but then thought better of it. Then he did anyway.
Mark pondered for a while, then factored himself in: ‘Yeah, I feel that my whole life’s been like that up till now. I haven’t been doing what I should – I’ve been marking time.’
‘Neat.’
‘What?’
‘Neat.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ They sat silent as Bill piloted the car through the outskirts of Aviemore. The place was still tatty despite the money that had recently been poured in. Most of the buildings were chalet-style, with steeply pitched roofs running almost to the ground. But the materials were synthetic; concrete and aluminium; asbestos and perspex. Every surface seemed to be buckling; every edge rucking up. ‘Shit hole,’ Bill said.
Seeing a biggish Texaco station, set back off the road, Bill lazily circled the steering wheel to the left and the car oozed on to the forecourt. He pulled up to the pumps, was out of the door with the petrol-cap key in one hand and a tenner in the other, before Mark had a chance to plan his arrival. The air here was a sharp embrace. Bill still vibrated with the road. The outside world was warped. It felt like leaving a cinema after a matinée, and coming out into the inappropriately bright afternoon.
‘I’ll fill the tank – could you go and get us three or four of those crappy plastic sandwiches they do – tuna, chicken, whatever … And some drinks, Coke, Irn Bru – yeah? And some fags. Regal blue. OK?’
Mark slouched off to the shop. If I give him enough things, Bill thought, he’ll have to ask me about myself. He’ll have to evince some curiosity about his benefactor. Bill wanted this. He didn’t like his dislike of the young man, didn’t like the way it was curdling in his gut – curdling it with still more bilious, watery gripes. If Mark would only ask him about himself the inquisition could be called off. They could chat normally, instead of this ceaseless interrogative chatter. Eventually silence would fall – not companionable, but not alienated either. In due course he would drop the young man off, on a slip road, about ten miles outside Glasgow. They would part and forget.
Spasmodically, Bill clutched the handle of the pump, until the attendant hit the flashing button on his console and the petrol began to glug. Perhaps Mark had done a flit, a new bolt, Bill couldn’t make him out in the shop. It wouldn’t be a bad score for the lad; a bit of whisky, some dope, a tenner, a ride, why not duck out now while he was ahead? Then Mark appeared from the back of the shop, where the customer toilets were, and Bill allowed himself the luxury of feeling a little guilty, imagining that he had misjudged human character.
Back in the car Mark struggled with his seatbelt while they rolled back out on to the road. ‘They’d no tuna, but I got a bacon one, and chicken with corn … and … smoked ham.’ He displayed the plastic-packed chocks of sandwich to Bill, as if he were about to be asked to perform some visio-spatial test with them.
‘Have you got a Coke?’
‘Aye.’ Mark passed it to Bill, but not before thoughtfully opening it.
Bill drank the Coke and drummed the wheel. They puttered between more, mutant chalet-style blocks of tourist flats, then past a shopping parade, then out into the country again. Bill didn’t say anything until they were heading south on the A9 once again. Then he sighed, cranked the big car up to eighty-five, overtook a convoy of Finnish campervans which were struggling up a long gradient, and said, ‘So, did you see much of the kids when you were up this time?’
‘It was …’ Mark was struggling with a recalcitrant piece of ham; gristle in a tug-of-war between bread lips and flesh lips. ‘It was …’ Bill decided to ignore the appetitive recovery. ‘Difficult, y’know. I’ve nowhere to take them, and I’m not happy hanging around her place – not that’s she’s keen or anything. I took them to the park a couple of times … and for tea.’
Either the clouds were descending, or the road was still rising, because turbulent clumps of vapour were falling down from the dark passes, and scudding a couple of hundred feet above the road. Bill put on the headlights, full beam. ‘Was it a long time since you were up before then?’
‘I hadn’t been back before.’ Mark let this fall from between chomping jaws, then grimaced. ‘Ach! It’s not like me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘To be saying so much.’
‘Really?’
‘Ach ye-es, well, I dunno … I was always a bit of a tearaway, y’know –’
‘I gathered.’
‘Nothing grievous, but this a
nd that, y’know, telling a few tall ones to the Social, doing a few chequebook and card jobs. So I was always good at … y’know …’
Y’know, y’know, y’know? What could this young man imagine about Bill? That he knew everything? That such a nonce word had become Mark’s asinine catch phrase, begged the very question the answer to which it assumed. The more ‘y’know’s filled the car, the more Bill felt certain that he did know – and bridled from the truth: ‘Lying?’
‘Yeah, I s’pose. There’s a way of doing it –’ He grinned. ‘A technique almost. It’s like job interviews –’
‘Job interviews?’
‘Yeah. If you don’t want the job, you tend to do well in the interview. It’s the same with lying. People always make the mistake of trying to make someone believe what they’re saying – but that’s not the way. You’ve got to not care whether they believe – and they will. I’m pretty good at it, if I say so myself. Not that I lie now though.’ He was gabbling. ‘I don’t have to any more – don’t need to …’
But he had lost Bill, who was no longer listening to the content of what Mark said – only its form. Bill was listening to the emotional shapes that Mark was making. In the rising and falling of tone, the bunching and stretching of rhythm, he was able to discern the architecture of Mark’s past history: the outhouses of unfeeling and evasion; the vestibules of need and recrimination; the garages of wounding and abuse. All of it comprehensively planned together, so as to form a compound of institutionalisation and neglect. Bill honed his ears, concentrating on this shading in of a sad blueprint. The young man’s actual pride in his mendacity – that would have to be one part bravado, one part a lie and one part the truth. Nasty little cocktail. Nasty little dilemma for the two of us, imprisoned in a car, speeding through a mountain pass. Bill hunkered down more against the comfortable padded extrusion of the door, letting his weight rest on the inside handle. He scanned Mark out of the corners of his eyes; a series of quick penetrating glances, as ever interleaved with shards of scenery, fragments of road. He really was rough. The fingers nicked and burnt: pus-ridden here – browned there, the knuckles fulsomely scabbed. He might not be altogether compos mentis – this hitchhiker, awarded to Bill by the journey, like an idiotic prize – but that made him all the more potentially dangerous.
‘Potential for people, like me, to do all sorts of things …’ Mark had veered on to the subject of the Internet. It appeared to verge most of his discourse. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Oh definitely,’ Bill replied, surfacing, and used the hiatus to ask for the chicken sandwich, before getting back down to the drive, getting back down to the questioning.
Past the turning for Kingussie, past the A86, forking away to the west coast and Fort William, the big car bucketed on along the darkening road, as the autumn afternoon curled about the mountains. Bill kept the speed up – because he had no speed. The last of the Dexedrine had been used for the drive north. It was unwise for him to blag any more for a while. More than unwise – fucking foolhardy. So, on this mammoth drive Bill would have to depend on caffeine and ephedrine pills. Hideous shit he hadn’t scoffed since revising for school exams. Feeling himself flag and sopor welling up from the road, Bill scrabbled in the pocket of his jacket, located a couple of the bitter little things, washed them down with a mouthful of flat Coke. Mark was talking about what served him as a love life.
‘If you’ve had bad experiences it affects you. I dunno – maybe I’m not so good on the trust end of things …’ Bill realised he was referring, preposterously, to his capacity for trust – not his trustworthiness. ‘So I keep my distance. Jennifer’ (that was the new girlfriend) ‘did move in for a bit, but I felt crowded. We couldn’t see eye to eye. The place was too small. She wouldn’t give me my space – like my wife. Always crowding me, getting on my case about … stuff. We’re still seeing each other though … though it’s not quite so full-on …’
Bill thought he could probably decipher this completely now. Mark was abusive – like many of the abused. Back in Thurso was a wife who had cowered when one of those barked hand-battens was raised; and in Poole it had been the same. Bill heard hysterical flutings of heterosexual discord in his inner ear: Mark and the nameless women, pleadings and beratings like vile duets. The hitchhiker harped on about the harpies.
By now they were coming down off the mountains. The land turned a greener, tawnier hue by the mile. The isolated shuttered lodges were being replaced by scattered habitations, farms carved out from the heathery hillsides. But as if to taunt the occupants of the car, who were, after all, coming in from a kind of cold, the rain now recommenced. Bill flicked the stalk, the wipers did their thing intermittently, then steadily, then rapidly. And by the time they were passing the turning for Pitlochry the land, the road and the sky had been boiled up into a vaporous stock. Turner, Bill thought, would have painted this greying haze, had he been alive to suck the butt-end of the twentieth century.
Mark was talking about the Internet again. About how a friend of his – an acquaintance really, had set up a small service provider and software technical-support company. The friend was letting Mark spend time on his equipment, learn his way around it. The friendship, Bill surmised, was actually just as virtual as a Windows window. Mark was there under sufferance – if there at all. But Bill wasn’t really thinking about this, he was remembering a woman he’d bedded in Pitlochry. A wannabe thesp, up for the summer theatre festival. Bill had motored through and caught her in an execrable production of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Funny that – a bad production of Wilde. Funny how bad direction, bad acting, bad sets and costumes were the dramatic equivalent of monkeying with the controls on a television, so that the picture became over-contrasted, or too dark. In this case the effect of the monkeying was to produce leaden vulgarity, rather than frothy and sophisticated farce.
After desultory applause he had cornered her in her cubbyhole dressing room. The smell of silk, satin, crinoline and powder was sharp, overpowering. She’d giggled as he pushed up her skirts …
‘We didn’t realise he had a stash in there. We just went in to get these tapes back, but we found it in his room, so we took it. It turned out it was his whole stash. He paid us upwards of two hundred to get it back – a decent score.’ Mark was, Bill realised, talking about another rip-off. He’d slid from contemplating that mundane world of electronic encoding, to the airily fascinating world of Poole bedsits.
‘So.’ Bill lit a Regal with the lighter he now held, permanently crushed, between palm and steering wheel. ‘Did you take any of the smack?’
‘God, no! I wouldn’t do that! Bit of puff, fine – bit of whizz when it’s about, but I don’t want to fuck up – I’ve seen what that shit can do to people.’
Bill inwardly grinned. What more could a heroin addiction have done to this young man? Make him leave another family? Make him lie more than he had already? Make him a more self-satisfied and still less reflective petty thief? Bill doubted it.
They were past Perth and heading down the long valley towards Gleneagles and Stirling. The country was still green here, with the stubbly residue of crops catching, with a shimmy of light, the occasional burst of sun from between cloud banks. The hills had pushed back still further from the road, and the farmhouses were trimmer, better kept, more on show. The changed landscape dampened the mood in the car; the evocations of domesticity, whipping by in the slipstream, reminded both Bill and Mark of the queer accommodations they had made with life. Bill felt like a drink.
He could visualise – quite clearly – the slopping level of whisky in the car bottle. He wanted to stop and have a piss and then a decent pull. Tramp down the memories that his cross-examination of Mark was dragging to the surface. But Bill didn’t trust Mark at all now. He wouldn’t feel safe leaving the car running while he splattered on the verge. He could all too clearly imagine the sound of the door slamming at his back, the car’s wheels crunching, spattering gravel. His own anguished cries as he turned, and r
an up the road, his cock still spluttering pee as he contemplated loss of car and everything else. And he wasn’t even insured for theft. Bill really hated Mark now. Hated him for being pathetic – and a threat; at one and the same time.
A layby came by. Bill dabbed the brakes, lazily circled the wheel. The car ground to a halt. Bill yanked up the bottle of Campbelltown from its sleeve of medical journals. He unscrewed it, took a deep pull and passed it to Mark, who looked at him warily, took a slug and passed the bottle back. ‘You’re not bothered by the pigs then?’ he asked.
‘Of course I am,’ Bill replied tartly, ‘who isn’t? But that’s the last before Glasgow – I’ll not risk going head-to-head with them.’ He checked the rearview and side mirrors, lazily circled the wheel to the right, then pushed home the accelerator, like the plunger of some 300cc hypodermic. The big car summoned its inertia and banged back up on to the crown of the road. Bill felt the bladder of mistrust push its toxic cargo back against his pelvis. He resigned himself to the sensation. Better score more distraction.
‘So, what’ll you be doing with this mate in Glasgow then?’
‘I dunno, not too much. We certainly won’t be drinking single fucking malts.’ He grinned at Bill in a way he hoped was rueful. ‘More like single fucking pints. He’s on the sick – my mate. But I’ve got a few quid, I promised him a bit of a night. It’ll be the same as our normal routine. Do a few cans at home. Down to the pub for a few. Then a carry-out; and then the racing –’
‘Racing?’
‘We-ell, not racing exactly. It’s just a thing we do – we’ve always done – when I’m in Glasgow. My mate – he’s got these old Tonka toys, y’know?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Not the little one – the jeeps and that. But the big ones, the ones kids can sit on and push along wi’ their feet. Y’know, the big earth movers and that?’
