The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  About forty minutes later, at Shap in the Lake District, at the point where the M6 really did begin to feel as if it were plunging inexorably downhill, down to the south, down to London, the ghost that was piloting the machine took a long final look in the rearview mirror, before lazily circling the steering wheel to the left and turning into an inexistent layby.

  Design Faults in the Volvo

  760 Turbo: A Manual

  ‘… bearing in mind the fact that everyone hides the truth in matters of sex …’

  –SIGMUND FREUD,

  ‘My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality

  in the Aetiology of the Neuroses’

  1. Instruments and Controls

  Welcome to the terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer. Bill Bywater has been snogging with a woman called Serena. Giving and receiving as much tongue as possible – exactly at the point where Sussex Gardens terminate, and the streams of traffic whip around the dusty triangular enclosure of trees and grass, before peeling away in the direction of Hyde Park, or Paddington, or the M40.

  Bill has been snogging – and the adolescent term is quite appropriate here – in a way he remembers from youth. Not that the palpings of lip-on-lip, tongue-on-lip, and tongue-on-tongue have been any less accomplished, or plosively erotic, than we have come to expect from the man. It’s just that Serena has recently had an operation on a benign cyst in her cheek. Bit of Lidocaine. Slit and suck – two stitches. Bosh-bosh. ‘Perhaps it would be wise’ – the surgeon had said, admiring the creamy skin of her cleavage, the standing into being of her ever-so-slightly large breasts – ‘if you were to avoid using your mouth for anything much besides eating over the next week or so?’

  He was right to make this statement interrogative – almost verging on the rhetorical, because Serena hardly uses her mouth for eating at all, preferring dietary supplements and cocaine to get by on. Serena used to be an ‘it’ girl – but now she’s ‘that’ woman. A socialite – she went to a finishing school in Switzerland where they taught her to fellate. She’d set her cap at Bill months ago. Not that he wasn’t ripe for it.

  Serena says, ‘I’ve had a small operation on my cheek …’ The eyelashes perturb the polluted air, monoxide and burnt rubber. ‘Try and be gentle with this side –’ She caresses her own elastoplasted cheek. Their bodies marry. Her thighs part slightly to receive the buttressing of his thigh. Her lips begin to worry at his mouth – so adept Bill wonders if they might be prehensile. He allows his hands to link in the region of her coccyx. A thumb lazily traces the rivulets and curves between her arse and the small of her back. She moans into his mouth. The traffic groans into his ear. He concentrates on stimulating the side of her which isn’t numb.

  As he is snogging, Bill is acutely aware of the time: 6.30 p.m.; the place: Sussex Gardens, W2; and the implied logistics: his wife, Vanessa, cycles home every evening along Sussex Gardens, at more or less this time. It is not unlikely that Vanessa will see Bill snogging with Serena, because Bill is – he acknowledges with a spurt of dread – at least sixty feet high. He bestrides the two lanes of bumpy tarmac, his crotch forming a blue denim underpass for the rumbling traffic. Vanessa will be able to see him – this Colossus of Roads – the very instant she jolts across the intersection of the Edgware Road, and commences pedalling down Sussex Gardens.

  Caught bang to rights, caught snogging with this slapper … His only defence, the fact that she’s a little dolly of a thing compared to him. He’s holding her aloft in one hand, clutching her wiggling torso to his huge, bristly cheek. He’s having to be so damn gentle, tasting with his forty-inch tongue the sweetness of her two-inch bud. Her white satin shift dress has ridden up over her hips. She isn’t wearing any tights – her pants are white, with an embroidered panel over her pubis.

  ‘Bill!’ Vanessa shouts up from below – she’s ramming her front tyre against his foot, the knobble of uncomfortable bone protruding above the edge of his moccasins. ‘Bill – what are you doing!?’

  ‘Doing?’ He squints down at her, as if she’s caught him in an inconsequential reverie – stagnantly considering the cost-effectiveness of double glazing, or fully comprehensive insurance. ‘Doing?’ He looks at the writhing, half-stripped woman in his hand, and then sets her down, gingerly, on the far side of the road from his wife. ‘Oh her, or rather – this. It’s just a doll, my love – you can’t possibly be jealous of a doll.’

  Couldn’t be jealous of a doll, but might well be jealous of Serena who is not only a doll, but who has also, predictably, been a model. Bill, feeling the laser beams of his wife’s gaze burning through buildings, fences, filing cabinets, people, had broken the embrace – which was getting nowhere. Or rather, it was getting somewhere only too fast. What could he do with Serena, short of hiring a room in the Lancaster Hotel for half an hour? No, that would show up on his credit card statement. They were too old for Hyde Park bushes, and the Volvo 760 Turbo was out of the question on account of various design faults.

  Serena had been having a session with her therapist, who had his consulting rooms on Sussex Gardens. Bill had arranged to meet her by her car. A metal rendezvous. Serena had a Westminster permit – Bill didn’t. He couldn’t find a meter for aeons – he imagined her growing old, her face wizening, an old apple on a draining board. When he did eventually find a space – by the needle exchange Portakabin on South Wharf Road – he had neither pound coins nor twenty-pence pieces. He wanted to ejaculate and die – simultaneously. He stopped one, two, three passers-by – got enough to pay for twenty minutes’ snogging. Park up the Volvo – and grab a vulva. Pay for space – space to live.

  The minutes tick away in her wounded mouth. Until – confident that at any minute he’ll get a ticket – Bill breaks from Serena. ‘Call!’ they call to each other as he staggers back across the road and disappears in the direction of Paddington Station.

  Not that he’s out of danger yet. Bill starts up the Volvo and savours its clicking, ticking and peeping into life. But when he pulls away he realises – given that he has absolutely no justification for being in this part of London, on this day, at this time – that the car is grotesquely elongated. When he turns right out of London Street and on to Sussex Gardens, the back end of the vehicle is still in Praed Street. When he reaches the lights on the corner of Westbourne Street, his tail end is still blocking the last set of lights, causing traffic in all four directions to back up, and engendering a healthy tirade of horn-accompanied imprecations: ‘Youuuu fuuuucking waaaanker!’

  Deciding that the only way he can escape detection – given that he’s driving an eighty-foot-long vehicle – is to head for the Westway flyover, Bill turns right. As he circles the triangular enclosure where he snogged with Serena, he is appalled to see that the back end of the Volvo is passing by on the other side. He looks through the rear windows of his own car and can see sweet wrappers and medical journals scattered around on the back seat. Jesus! Astonishing how ductile these Volvo chassis are – they know what they’re about over there at the Kalmar Plant. Know what they’re about when it comes to building an eighty-foot extrudomobile like this, that can be seen clearly from a mile away …

  Bill Bywater, feeling the Volvo concertina back to its normal length, as he gains the anonymity of the motorway flyover, scrabbles in the breast pocket of his shirt for a cigarette. He lights it with a disposable gas lighter. The dash lighter has long since gone. Bill airily lit a fag with it a year or so ago, waved it gently in the air, and then threw it out the car window. One of the design faults – although hardly limited to the Volvo 760 Turbo – was this lack of a tether.

  Another was the ashtray itself. This was accommodated neatly enough, in the central housing of the dash, but it was impossible to pull the tray out at all unless the shift was in drive; and fully out only if it was in first gear. The implications of this stagger Bill anew as he struggles to insinuate his ash-tipped fag into the small gap. Could it be that the car cognoscenti at Kalmar intended this as an anti-smoking
measure? It hardly made sense. For the ashtray couldn’t be opened at all when the shift was in park – implying that you should only smoke, and even empty the ashtray, when the car was in motion.

  The Volvo is passing Ladbroke Grove tube station, doing around seventy. Bill can see commuters tramping the platform. And anyway – even if the operation was technically difficult – he did at least know how to empty the ashtray. The manual expressed it quite succinctly: ‘Empty ashtrays by pulling out to the limit and pressing down the tongue.’

  Bill was masterful at this – he could even avoid the cyst.

  2. Body and Interior

  Bill has arranged to meet Serena at a pub in Maida Vale. It’s a barn of a gaff on Cunningham Place – so prosaic it might even be called The Cunningham. It’s the night of a vital World Cup qualifier for England, and the city soup is being insistently thickened by cars, as the spectators head for their home terraces. The driving is stop-start – and so is the parking. Eventually, he finds a tight space on Hamilton Terrace. He cuts in well enough the first time, but the space is so confined that he has to turn the steering wheel in the other direction, then back, then reverse again, each time gaining just a few inches more of the precious, temporary possession.

  With each rotation the power steering ‘Eeeeeeyouuuus’ – a fluid, pleasurable kind of whine; and with each dab on brake, or plunge on accelerator, the rubber limbs buck, receiving pressure or its release. ‘In-Glands! In-Glands! In-Glands!’ his pulse chants in his temples. Bill feels exposed – in this act of taking the space; worries that he may be observed, censured. When he’s finally got himself and the car properly berthed – no more than six inches to front and aft – he lunges out the door, giddy in the hot, sappy, fume-tangy evening air. But there’s nothing; only an old woman with secateurs in a front garden; the roar of traffic from the Edgware Road; a Tourettic man – gnome-like with a spade of grey beard – who high-steps it over the domed camber of the road, legs smiting his chest, whilst he expels a series of sharp ‘Papp-papp-papp!’ sounds.

  Bill is reassured. In a London uncaring enough to ignore such blatancy – the Tourettic looking as if he were on a run-up to jumping clear of his own nervous system – Bill’s own peccadilloes not even consummated, as yet, can hardly be of any interest at all. Still, it takes him five minutes of walking up the road, patting his pockets, retracing his steps to see if he has forgotten anything, or dropped anything, or illegally parked the car – only too easy to do in a city where the controls of adjoining zones are radically different – before he resigns himself to the concrete reality of the rendezvous. He is going to meet Serena – this time he might fuck her.

  Serena is sitting on one of the four trestle-table-and-bench combinations that occupy the dirty oblong of paving in between The Cunningham itself, and the low brick wall that borders it. A very believable terrace – for London. There are metal ashtrays with beer spilt into them, there are crisp packets wedged in the tabletop cracks, there are sunshades poking through two of these tabletops. One advertises Martini – the other is in tatters. The compression of boozing bodies within the cavernous boozer is already considerable; the baying of the clientele and the baying of the Wembley crowd – relayed by a giant-screen television suspended from the ceiling – are echoing one another. The beery exhalations surge from the double doors of the pub; which are propped back, so as to allow the T-shirted multi-lung to draw in another great gulp of exhausted air.

  Bill considers that this rendezvous is taking place within a spatial gap – the Edgware Road/Maida Vale hinterland – and, more importantly, a temporal one. ‘I can’t stand all this nationalist sporting triumphalism’ – he has been priming Vanessa the five days since he avoided Serena’s cyst – ‘it’s going to reach a hideous climax … And then what – when they lose there’ll be a national depression for days. I can’t stand it. I want to opt out.’

  Of course, what Bill really wants to opt out of is any situation of bonhomie, of excitation, that might embrace them – and tighten up the vice of fidelity. Bill has been working on his dissatisfactions with Vanessa for weeks now – building up a comprehensive dossier of her awfulness. Without this adulterers’ manifesto Bill knows he’ll be incapable of being remotely serene – with Serena. It would only take one embrace, one shared apprehension, for him to have to abandon his plans. Therefore, why not excise this possibility and use the time available.

  ‘Shit! It’s all shit!’ he had cried an hour or so before. ‘I can’t stand it – I’m off out. I’ve got to find somewhere – anywhere where nobody’s concerned about this fucking football match!’ He then grabbed his car keys from the hall table, performed an uninteresting arabesque in the process of snatching up the CD face-off and his mobile phone, before slamming the door and sprinting off up the garden path. Vanessa, who was sat marking spelling tests, wondered what the hell her husband was on about – she wasn’t remotely interested in the football international; and their two-year-old son was, somewhat proleptically, already at his grandmother’s.

  ‘Hi!’ says Serena – who cares nothing for Bill’s predicament, who indeed positively savours it. ‘I thought you wouldn’t make it.’

  ‘Traffic – parking.’ He fobs her off with his key fob. ‘Have you got a drink?’ She downs the rest of her sea breeze and downs the glass.

  ‘No.’

  He shuttles in and out of the bar over the next half-hour. Serena has four more sea breezes – a nicely paradoxical drink for this landlocked Saragossa. Bill struggles to keep his alcohol intake down; tonight has undoubtedly seen the inception of a special Metropolitan Police Task Force to deal with adulterous drunk drivers. Every time he thinks she isn’t looking – he checks his watch. The seconds are ticking by towards half-time. In the meantime they edge closer as well.

  Serena is wearing a black suede miniskirt. It has six brass buttons to fasten it at the front – but the three bottom ones are undone. Serena is wearing a cream silk blouse and no bra. Serena never wears tights in summer – her legs are too good. Each time she leans forward Bill sucks her nipples; each time she leans back he runs his bent-back index finger up the front of her pants. Not.

  Bill dives into the public bar of The Cunningham and edges through the crowd of passive dribblers. ‘Awwwww!’ they cry – awed by some feat of failure. It takes several such ‘awws’ and accompanying pokes in the ribs for Bill to gain the far side of the public bar, and the stairs down to the toilets. In the toilet he releases the trap of his flies and the grey hound of penis comes out frothing. Painful – peeing with an erection – Bill has to force himself into alarming postures in order to lend his urine to the giant ceramic ear. While he’s doing this he reflects on the paradoxical sense of control offered by reckless driving.

  That’s what he needs – to get Serena away from the pub, get her in the Volvo, take her for a spin. There’s a vanity mirror set into the passenger-seat sunshade – she’ll like that. And there’ll be no chance of being observed by anyone who knows either of them – or Bill’s wife. Even if Bill’s wife were to suddenly manifest herself in the Volvo – Serena could hide in the glove compartment, as any other adulterer might hide in a cupboard. She really was a doll.

  3. Starting and Driving

  It takes the same brake shoe-shuffle to extract the Volvo (overall length four metres and seventy-nine centimetres) from the parking space. Bill, as he circles the steering wheel back and forth, wishes he were coming rather than going – because he could then make some crack to Serena, analogise the parking space and her space.

  They pop up on to the crown of Hamilton Terrace and Bill turns the big car to the north. He is conscious of Serena on the seat beside him, her thighs slightly parted, her trunk slightly tilted in his direction, a tip of pink tongue between her scarlet lips. ‘How’s the cyst?’ he forays – they have yet to snog.

  ‘Better!’ she laughs, a horrible, expensive, phone-your-divorce-lawyer kind of laugh. She is – Bill reflects – an awful, venal, unprincipled and deeply a
lluring woman.

  Bill turns right into Hall Road and then left into Abbey Road. He’s driving fast – the decision to leave the pub had been mutual. He had said, ‘It’s getting insane in there – looks like they’ll be going to a penalty shoot-out. Let’s get out of here, go somewhere where there’s neither sight nor sound of football, hmm?’ And she had said, ‘If you like.’

  The streets are emptied of traffic – the whole city is inside, watching the match. Bill banks to the right, to the left, he feels the weight of the car shift beneath him like a body. He concentrates on the whine of the transmission and the thrum of the engine. He pokes at the CD and a track with a suitably heavy bass line begins to underscore the tense atmosphere in the car. ‘Drive smoothly, avoid fast starts, hard cornering and heavy braking …’ What the hell do they think anyone wants a Volvo 760 Turbo for, if, as the manual suggests above, it’s inadvisable to drive the car with any alacrity?

  At Kalmar – where Bill knows from his careful reading of the manual, the Volvo 760 Turbo is built by dedicated teams of workers, rather than by an unconscious and alienated assembly line – they presumably have no need of the car’s maximal performance capability. In the sexually tolerant atmosphere of Sweden, the Volvo has evolved as a highly safe vehicle in which to transport the promiscuous. If you’re about to start an affair with a fellow worker at the Plant, you simply say to your wife, ‘Bibi, I’ve decided that I must make love to Liv. I shall take the estate today – and a clean duvet!’ Whereupon she replies, ‘Of course, Ingmar, but remember, “Protective bags should be used to avoid soiling the upholstery”…’

  ‘You seem preoccupied?’ Bill wouldn’t have believed that anyone could actually say this whilst toying with her silken décolletage – but Serena just has.