The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  It was the only down time in the twenty-four when the big merc. bearing the big dread pulled up in front of the old house on Milligan Street, in back of the Limehouse Causeway. ‘Wa’ de fuck’s that?’ enquired Skank, seeing the Canary Wharf Tower for the first time in his life as he got out of the car.

  ‘Offices,’ Blutie replied. ‘I’ll park the motor.’

  Skank was ushered into the mouldering gaff by a child, who might have been the Chinaman’s granddaughter, or even his great-granddaughter. They picked their way through the warren of interconnected rooms and found the old man in what could have been a kitchen, had it not been for the presence of a large steel desk and two filing cabinets, in addition to sink, fridge and vomit swirl-patterned lino tiles. ‘Please!’ he exclaimed, getting up from behind the desk. ‘Please to be welcome to my office, Mistah Skank!’

  ‘Please,’ Skank countered, ‘jus’ Skank is suff-ic-ient. So iss all offices roun’ hereabout now?’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes, plenty change, big new dewelopment. Plenty offices. Plenty office workers. Plenty office workers who need help –’

  ‘So, busyness is good then?’

  ‘Busyness is excellent! This is an enterpwise zone –’

  ‘Issatso.’ Skank couldn’t help feeling that the Chinaman’s efficiency and zeal was undercut by his working apparel, a dirty terry-towelling bathrobe, but he hadn’t come to talk about that. ‘I’ve got de two hundred – have you got my man?’

  ‘No problem, no problem –’ He broke off and called into the next room, ‘Mistah Gerald, would you come through, the Jamaican gentleman has arrived.’

  Certainly the Chinaman liked to think that Gerald was a run-of-the-mill enforcer. But the Chinaman’s mind was not unlike his place of business, a bewildering agglomeration of different spaces housing deeply incompatible contents. And as in each of the rooms of the Chinaman’s bizarre den – one set aside for opium smoking, the next for crack, a third for ecstatic gibbering – each of the compartments of his mind featured a different belief system, an incompatible truth, another story.

  Even Skank felt a chill run down the back of his neck when Gerald walked into the room. He was a small man with hardly any shoulders; his face wasn’t so much warped as entirely twisted to one side, as if the wind had changed at the precise moment Gerald had been hit with a hard right cross. He had on a blue nylon anorak of the kind children wore in the sixties; set on his head was an obvious toupee. Set beneath the toupee, and shining forth despite the violent moue was a visage of absolutely uncompromising vapidity and bloodlessness; a face like the belly of a toad. This was not a man with ordinary feelings – or perhaps any feelings at all. Accompanying Gerald was a boy of about fifteen, the same height as his master – for clearly, that’s who Gerald was – pipe-cleaner thin, ginger-haired, freckled, and wearing an identical blue anorak. They both had flesh-coloured rubber gloves on.

  Skank cleared his throat, ‘Errm … Gerald.’

  ‘Yes.’ The voice was blank as well.

  ‘Dis man ’ere say you can deal with my prob-lem.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where de fellow lives?’

  ‘Not necessawy,’ the Chinaman interjected. ‘The man who told me about him – he’ll bring him here tonight. He’s had a little twouble with the police – it wasn’t hard to persuade him.’

  ‘Good. Den what?’ Skank had folded his arms and was regarding Gerald critically. The blank man unzipped his anorak without speaking and flipped it open. A shotgun, cut down so that there were only three inches of the barrel and half the stock left was dangling from a hook inside it. Skank said nothing. Gerald zipped the anorak up again.

  Blutie came into the room and handed Skank an envelope, which the big dread handed to the Chinaman. The Chinaman handed it to Gerald. Skank shook hands with the Chinaman, nodded to Gerald and he and Blutie left the room. Skank didn’t take a full breath until they were back in the street.

  2.

  Bruno and Danny sat on the stairs of the old house in Milligan Street husbanding the last crumbs of Bruno’s crack. It was around midnight. Bruno had sworn to Danny that he’d be generous with the shit – even though he was buying. But inevitably, now that they were down to the penultimate hit they were beginning to squabble. ‘Sheeit!’ Bruno exclaimed. ‘Thass loads more than my last – take a bit of it off, man!’

  ‘No way!’ Danny replied. ‘You said I could have a big one to finish on – then there’s that for you.’ He pointed at the crumb of white stuff that remained lying on a piece of plastic on the dusty stair. ‘Iss no help that we’ve only got this poxy fuckin’ bottle.’ Danny gestured with the pipe they were using, which had been crudely fashioned out of a miniature Volvic mineral-water bottle.

  ‘You should’ve brought your fuckin’ stem, man,’ Bruno retorted.

  ‘You should’ve brought your fuckin’ stem ’n all.’ And to put an end to the pathetic quarrel, Danny sparked his lighter, applied it to the heap of fag ash and crack set in the tin-foil bowl, and commenced drawing on the biro stem.

  At that moment a large party of people – perhaps six in all, entered the hallway at the foot of the stairs. The Chinaman met them himself, ushering in their leader – a large, heavy-set man wearing an expensive ’crombie – with much bowing and scraping. The four other men who shuffled in behind were clad in various degrees of fashionable suiting, and together with them was a quite beautiful young woman in a very short skirt. Danny wasn’t paying any attention, but Bruno pegged them as West End media types, out for a night’s drug slumming.

  The party, led by the Chinaman, commenced tramping up the stairs past the crack smokers. They all ostentatiously averted their eyes from the spectacle of Danny, drawing for all he was worth on his final pipe of the day, except for the last man to pass, a fat type with oval glasses smoking a cigar, who squinted down at the pipe in Danny’s hand and sneered, ‘I prefer Evian myself.’

  Danny stopped drawing on the pipe, and together with a plume of crack smoke spat at the man, ‘Whassit t’you, cunt!’ but Bruno laid a hand on his arm and muttered, ‘Safe, Danny.’ And he let it lie.

  Not for long though. After ten minutes had elapsed and together with them the last vestiges of Danny’s hit of crack, he began to appreciate the full awfulness of his position. He was hideously strung out. He’d done three rocks more than he should have during his morning’s sodden tramp around the financial institutions. He managed to deliver twenty rocks to the bitches at the Learmont and the ones in Sixth Avenue, but it hadn’t been quite enough to mollify Mr Tembe, who had cut his evening hit of brown to a mere smear. So Danny now had the rumbling beginnings of heroin withdrawal to contend with, as well as the hideous trough of a crack comedown. He hated sitting on this filthy staircase, waiting to summon the energy to stagger down, stagger to the tube, clank all the way back to Harlesden, face the derision of his squeaky-clean little brother: ‘Thass whappen when you smoke the shit, man, give it a rest …’ And all the way the Fates walking with him, whispering and cachinnating, ordering him to tread there, breathe here, spit there, unless he wanted to be eviscerated by destiny. But what Danny hated most of all, right here and now, was the dissing the fat white cunt had given him.

  Danny leapt to his feet, ran up the stairs, barged through the door of the room the party had disappeared into. He didn’t take any time to register the occupants – who were smoking opium, contorted by the sloping ceiling of the attic room into various cramped postures – he merely picked out the fat ponce and gave him a smack in the mouth. Then it was back down the stairs and straight out the front door, to where Vince, the Chinaman’s Maltese minder, who had witnessed Danny’s sudden departure, was waiting.

  Vince delivered a deft karate chop to the back of Danny’s neck which felled him instantly. Crack had winnowed away the muscle that Danny had put on in the army – the huge Maltese could lift him by the scruff of his jacket using only one hand. Vince carried Danny as if he were a kitten, down the area steps. At
the bottom he pressed him up against the wall, and when Danny began to come round – his flickering eyes providing him a view of Vince’s repugnant nose, which had been sliced in two during a knife fight and crudely sewn back together again – Vince began, almost tenderly, to press down on his cartoid artery.

  Two minicabs pulled up to the kerb and the West End slummers emerged from the house. The party got into the cars and they drove off. Shortly afterwards a vomit-coloured Austin Maxi pulled up and Gerald and his boy got out. Gerald was about to go up the short flight of steps to the front door when he saw Vince and his unconscious kitten in the basement area. Gerald jerked his head significantly in Danny’s direction, and Vince, enjoying the conspiratorial silence of the very ugly, wordlessly did his bidding. By the time he’d carried Danny back up to the street, the rear door of the Maxi was open Vince slid the body on to the seat and without even giving Gerald so much as a backward glance, reentered the house.

  Gerald and the boy got into the Maxi. The boy was driving. They drove off to the north, heading for Clapton.

  Sixteen hours later, at around three in the afternoon, Danny regained consciousness. He was lying on dirty linoleum. The first sensations he had on awakening were the smell of the stuff, and the thrumming weight of his head, mashing his cold cheek into the floor. Danny groaned, coughed, spat and sat up. The room he was in might once have been an office – there were a couple of cheap wooden kneehole desks set against one wall, a battered filing cabinet against the other. The office must have also been a shop of some kind, because there was a large front window. However, this had been completely boarded up on the inside and the only light in the place came from the chinks between the planks.

  Following one of these wavering beams to its destination on the back wall, Danny saw that this was entirely covered with a papering of posters. He squinted at them through the gloom. They all featured photographs of children. The photos were obviously family snaps that had been blown up and reproduced in black-and-white – Danny could see the individual dots composing the images. Then he read the lettering and realised, with an access of dread, what they were. They were posters appealing for help in the search for missing children.

  Danny scrambled to his feet. He felt an awful thickening and distortion in the already unpleasant atmosphere of the room. He could smell something sickly, yet faecal. A dollop of vomit came into the back of his mouth. He could see a tartan blanket thrown over something in the dark corner, only three paces away. Danny knew what the thing was before he lifted the blanket – and then he knew for sure.

  It was the mutilated corpse of a six-year-old white boy. Danny registered blond hair, pulped features, cut throat. There was a lot of blood. The child’s hands and feet had been severed and left beside the corpse, which was naked from the waist down. The last thing Danny took in before he began, simultaneously, to puke and scream, was that the little boy was wearing a bright sweatshirt, featuring a decal of the character Buzz Lightyear from the film Toy Story.

  Yes, Gerald, who by this time was heading west, to Bristol, was no ordinary enforcer, as the Chinaman well knew. Just as his accompanying boy – whose name was Shaun Withers – was not really a boy at all, but a twenty-year-old violent retard. Gerald and Shaun had met each other on the treatment course for sexual offenders at HMP Grenville. Day after day they had sat together in group-therapy sessions where sincere psychiatrists urged them to give voice to their most keenly desired fantasies of rape, abuse, torture and murder, in the hope that this would enable them to gain the merest sliver of objectivity about their conditions.

  Gerald and Shaun managed to achieve very considerable objectivity about their favourite shared fantasy – the abduction, buggering, torture, mutilation and eventual murder of a young boy, the younger the better. They resolved to join forces and make it a reality as soon as they were released. Gerald got out first – he had been serving a two-year stretch for indecent assault – and went back to his home town of Bournemouth. But the local paper there had already published a picture of him the day before, and printed the address of his house. Gerald found that the constant posses of vigilantes screaming abuse outside, and the flaming, petrol-soaked rags shoved through his letterbox, rather cramped his style.

  Gerald left Bournemouth and headed for London where he lost himself in the immemorial city’s stygian underworld. He worked sporadically for the Sparks family in Finsbury Park, collecting debts for them and when necessary inflicting a beating. But generally he kept quiet, moved his digs every month, and bided his time. Six months passed before Shaun was released after completing his three-year stretch for rape. In London he joined Gerald, who already had the elements of a plan in place.

  Shaun had spent the last year of his sentence, at Gerald’s behest, cheerfully allowing himself to be buggered by the ex-cop who was the boss of the nonce wing. The ex-cop had gone down for corruption and was desperate not to be sussed as a queer. Shaun guaranteed to keep this information to himself in return for a little assistance with getting back on his feet once he got out. The assistance he most required was a reasonably roomy set of premises where he and his good buddy Gerald could resume their activities. The ex-cop had to oblige. It transpired that he had the lease on the offices of a defunct minicab firm on the Lower Clapton Road. The place was boarded up and had no electricity or water, but it had several rooms, and most importantly a back entrance that wasn’t overlooked. Gerald and Shaun took the keys while making sincere expressions of gratitude.

  They found the boy in a playground a mile away in Stoke Newington; his name was Gary. It took only minutes for the two men to persuade the six year old to accompany them to their house for some sweets and videos. He got into the Maxi almost gaily and chattered away as they drove carefully back to the cab office. For Gary was not simply neglected and unwanted – he was also being abused already. Shaun and Gerald found this out when they got him inside and took his clothes off – his little arse was cratered with cigarette burns. The burns were the work of his mother’s sadistic boyfriend. The same boyfriend who had bought him the Toy Story top.

  Still, despite this, Gary was blond and slim and almost pretty. Gerald and Shaun managed to have plenty of fun with him over the next ten days or so, but then he became a bit of a drag. He was incontinent, he wouldn’t eat, he’d lost his freshness, and the two men began to argue about who should have the task of washing him in between sessions. And Gary didn’t even struggle satisfactorily any more, he just whimpered. Worse than that, Gerald had already clocked the profusion of missing-child posters that had gone up in the area, and he’d read in the local paper that the police were conducting exhaustive house-to-house questioning. It could only be a matter of time before the knock on the door came.

  Gerald decided that what they needed was another body, someone to take the rap. Then, through the Sparks, he heard about a Chinaman in Limehouse who had a contract that needed enforcing. ‘Just the ticket,’ Gerald said to Shaun. Gerald never spoke much, but when he did he invariably retailed such hackneyed turns of phrase. When the two men came to heaving Danny’s unconscious body into the office, and stuffing the downers down his throat, and removing the semen from his seminal vesicles with a long hypodermic, Gerald referred insistently to him as the ‘thingummyjig’.

  And that’s how the thingummyjig came to be in the boarded-up cab office in Lower Clapton Road, screaming and puking on a cold November afternoon. But he didn’t have to suffer his terror and revulsion alone for long. Gerald and Shaun had thoughtfully phoned the local constabulary, shortly after quitting the premises.

  Three months later, and ensconced on the nonce wing of Wandsworth Prison, Danny had plenty of leisure with which to reflect on the awesome apathy that had gripped him during those few minutes in which he waited with dead Gary for the door to the cab office to be kicked in by the police. Granted, he still had enough downers in his system to make a polar bear sluggish; and granted he had the smack withdrawal and the crack come-down underlying this fateful to
rpor, but even so there was a genuine acceptance of his fate – or rather his Fates.

  They thronged the corners of the dark room, their gloomy robes brushing against the missing-children posters, their grimy turbans scratching the polystyrene ceiling tiles. The Fates muttered and chuckled over the child’s corpse, and for the first time since they emerged from the cracks in the corners of the world to keep him company, Danny could clearly understand what they were saying. The words ‘low profile’ and ‘Maltese’ and ‘set-up’ and ‘Skank’ were there; along with ‘fool’ and ‘crack-head’. And in the dark room, perfumed by psychopathy, Danny acknowledged that his nemesis had come back to haunt him.

  It was just too smooth – and too inexplicable otherwise. Bruno offering to front him an evening’s rocking in the East End. The big, ugly Maltese who had given him a careful twice-over when they arrived at Milligan Street, and then the same fucker, choking the sense out of him after Danny had given that lairy git a smack. Now he was here, obviously many hours later, and there was blood on his hands. Danny, unlike anything else graphic in the room, had been neatly framed.

  For, there was not only blood on his hands, it was under his nails and in his hair as well. Some of it was his own – some was Gary’s. This, when it was also neatly catalogued at the trial, was damning enough; as were Danny’s dabs on assorted implements: knives, hacksaw blades, screwdrivers etc., revolting etc.… But worse, far worse, was Danny’s semen in the little boy’s anus, Danny’s semen in the little boy’s throat. These were facts that thankfully weren’t published in the newspapers, although they remained in Danny’s deposition papers, when the corridor was frozen and he was hurried down it on his way to the nonce wing.

  The police were amazed by Danny’s quietism when they arrested him. Since he put up hardly any resistance, they administered a minimal beating. It was the same as he was shuffled from one nick to the next over the next nine weeks. It didn’t matter what they screamed at him, or how they slapped him – he wouldn’t rise to it. Eventually they gave up – it was no fun punching a bag.