The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  His knuckles were white, his arms bent back to brace him, his purple windcheater snapped in the stiff breeze. I was shocked by how precipitate the balloon trip was turning out to be – the platform bucked and heaved in the wind as if it were a crow’s nest surmounting a flexible mast.

  ‘Or perhaps you’d like a game of Go-Chess to distract you – how like a Go board London is, from this elevation.’

  Keith turned to survey the city falling away beneath us, and I turned as well. The Antipodean chatting, the gas burner roaring, the Middle Eastern couple hand-holding, the child whimpering, all were as nothing when set beside its warty enormity. Already I could make out the burst boil of the Millennium Dome to the east and the greenery of Teddington Lock to the west. As we rose still higher, the streets of the city eerily unknotted themselves, straightening out to form a grid of many many poignant intersections, places where I’d laid the wrong stone.

  ‘It is peculiarly like a Go board!’ I shouted over to Keith, who was faint against the sharp sky. ‘So we’ll have to begin with –’

  ‘Go!’ shouted Ord, and I took this to be an order, as I’m sure it was intended. We understood our secret mnemonics – Ord and I.

  I unslung the linen parcel from my shoulders. The Middle Eastern couple backed away from me muttering. The man tried to look me in the eyes, attempting the command of me with his own inner Ord. I evaded his control beams just as I ignored the woman’s suitable beak and her black flapping chador. I unpopped the poppers of the duvet cover and took out the fitted-sheet parachute. The Antipodean called to the couple to move back towards me, they were unbalancing the platform. Ord gave a single bark of cruel laughter. How like the man. I got one foot up on the taut cable and swung myself over. The horizon tipped like a giant grey swell and I fell, screaming, towards the periphery of my own acquaintance.

  The Five-Swing Walk

  ‘It is through children that the soul is cured.’

  – FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  Stephen awoke to find himself lying in a cold damp roadway. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his cramped hands implored the tarmac. His cheek and chin were jammed in a gutter full of sodden, unclean leaves, which had been tossed into a salad with a few handfuls of polystyrene S’s, the kind used for-bulk packaging. Near by lay the dead body of his six-year-old, Daniel. Stephen levered himself up on one elbow; the driver of the black cab that had struck and killed his son was standing over the child’s corpse. Stephen noticed that they were both wearing shorts, Daniel’s were denim, the cabbie’s khaki. The cabbie was scratching his head in a perplexed way.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, ’e’s dead.’ The cabbie was friendly, if a little solemn. ‘’e didn’t stand a chance, the bonnet hit his bonce like a fucking ’ammer.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right,’ Stephen spluttered on the sweet saliva of grief, ‘a little boy dying in this filthy place.’

  He rose and floated over to where the cabbie stood. He gestured about at the junction, at the freshly cladded council blocks, the tubular garages and workshops slotted into the railway arches, at the traffic lights and the twisted safety railings. Just how twisted could a railing be, Stephen pondered, before it ceased to be one at all?

  ‘No, it doesn’t seem right.’ The cabbie stroked his mono-jowl. ‘You’d far prefer ’im to be all tucked up in a nice fresh bed, yeah, wiv nurses an’ doctors an’ his mum to look after ’im, yeah?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  ‘Tell you what –’ The cabbie was clearly the kind of man for whom a good turn is a good deal. ‘St Mary’s isn’t too far from ’ere. What d’you say to giving the lad a jolt with the jump leads, and seeing if we can get ’im up and running for twenty minutes? That’ll be long enough to take ’im down there an get ’im admitted before ’e snuffs it again.’

  They weren’t exactly jump leads, they were long thick cables coated with yellow rubber. The plugs were the kind used to link up a portable generator. Stephen was surprised to see – when the cabbie smoothed back his fringe – that Daniel had the requisite three-pin arrangement on his forehead. The cabbie made the connection and walked back to his cab, which stood, engine still stuttering, like a big black hesitation.

  ‘Right,’ he called over, ‘tell ’im you love ’im.’

  ‘I love you, Daniel,’ Stephen said, crouching by his son, taking in for the first time the unnatural angle of the boy’s neck, the blood and brain matter puddling beneath his head.

  The cabbie gunned the engine, the cables pulsed, Daniel’s eyes opened: ‘Dad?’ he queried.

  ‘It’s OK, Daniel,’ said Stephen, feeling the vast inexplicability of loss. ‘We’re going to take you down to the hospital.’

  ‘But I’ll still be dead, won’t I, Dad.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ll still be dead.’

  The cabbie came back and handed Stephen what was either a large pellet or a small canister. It was the same yellow as his jump leads.

  ‘This thing is pretty amazing, mate,’ he said. ‘If it has any contact wiv water it expands to ten thousand times its own size.’

  ‘Like a seed?’

  Stephen looked at the plastic cylinder and felt the all kinds of everything packed up inside it, amazing, bio-mechanical energy. He could feel a tear struggling to detach itself from the well of his eyelid, fighting the tension of this greater surface with its own need to become a moment. Then it was. It rolled down his cheek, dripped on to the cylinder. All hell broke loose.

  And resolved itself into an idiotic collage of tissues gummed up with snot, a clock radio, a lamp, a book, the moon face of a toddler confronting him from a few inches away.

  ‘Bissa – bussa,’ said the toddler, and then, ‘Gweemy.’

  Stephen levered himself up on forklift arms. The dream was still exploding in his head, smattering everything he saw with its associations, simultaneously lurid and tedious. Were dreams always this prosaic? he wondered, or had they become so through over-analysis? The collective unconscious now seemed to be expertly arrayed for merchandising, like a vast supermarket, with aisle after aisle of ready-made psychic fare. Still, his kid … dead … it didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Currle,’ the toddler broke in, butting his arm with a mop of black ringlets.

  Stephen snaked an arm around small shoulders and pulled the child up on top of him.

  ‘Hiyah,’ he said, pressing his lips into the thicket.

  The toddler squirmed in his grasp, butted the underside of his chin, which nipped his tongue between his teeth.

  ‘OK!’ Stephen snapped. ‘Getting up time!’ And he deposited the child back on the floor, followed by his own feet.

  A broad little base of squished nappy and brushed-nylon pyjama bottom supported the eighteen-month-old, an expression of stolidity was painted on to the smooth face. Stephen stood, teetering, a pained grimace pasted across his own rough one. Casually yet deliberately, he knocked the small torso sideways with his flaky foot, and it toppled over, curly head clonking on the mat. Too surprised to protest, the child lay there mewling softly. Stephen scrutinised bubbles of saliva forming on perfect pink lips, each one reflecting in its fish eye the bright grids of the bedroom windows. He couldn’t say its name, its absurd name. After all, a name was an acknowledgement – and he’d had no part in its naming.

  ‘This bedroom looks like a fucking bathroom!’ he cursed, then added, ‘while the bathroom looks like a fucking bedroom!’

  And they did. She’d put bathroom mats either side of the bed, a festoon of netting by the window had dried starfish and sea horses caught up in its ratty folds, the walls were papered in vertical stripes of blue and white. But there was never any rowing at this regatta, only vigorous rowing.

  Stephen stomped into the adjoining bathroom, and here white, lace-fringed pillows were plumped up on small carpeted surfaces; there was a stripped-pine shelf of swollen paperbacks over the bath itself, and the mirror above the sink had a gilt picture frame. Stephen gras
ped the cool sides of the sink and thought about wrenching it out of the floor. He stared at his face in the mirror. ‘No oil painting!’ he spat. And it was true, with two days of greying grizzle and the sad anachronism of pimples and wrinkles on the same cheeks, he looked like an ageing slave rather than an old master.

  A turd floating in the toilet caught his eye – one of hers. Smooth, and brown, and lissom – like her. He hitched up an invisible robe and hunkered down over it.

  ‘I shit on your shit!’ he angrily proclaimed, while at the same time, in a feat of bizarre moral tendentiousness, he felt satisfied to be saving two gallons of water.

  In his mind’s eye a video clip of emaciated Third World women was reversed, and they walked jerkily backwards from a distant dusty well to an encampment of battered huts. The toddler came crawling into view.

  ‘I shit on your mother’s shit,’ Stephen addressed it conversationally, but then, as he strained, he thought, I can’t go on behaving like this, these casual kicks, these slipshod remarks. None of it is harmless. But why had she left the kid with him on this of all days?

  When he rose to wipe himself, and involuntarily looked back, he saw that his turd had been married with hers, that they were entwined, with a lappet of his shit curled around hers like a comforting arm. Intimacy, it occurred to Stephen, is highly overrated. In the middle of the night she had kicked out at him hard, her heels drumming on his sleep-softened thighs. Kicked him and cursed him, and at the time he’d been inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt – doubting that he was awake at all. Now she was gone.

  Over a soft pap of cereal that the toddler made free with, Stephen thought about how he had come to be here, in a tatty kitchenette way across town. Still, two years after the move, he awoke with this sense of disorientation, wanting to go back to the home that was no longer a home, from this, which was no kind of home at all. He looked at the kitchenette, at the sharp flaps of melamine detaching themselves from the surfaces, at the Mesopotamian outline of the electric jug, at the nodular malevolence of a mug tree, and he grasped how all the lines of his life had unruled themselves. He wouldn’t – he couldn’t – take responsibility for this … He wouldn’t own these other, bonded lives, this bewildering emotional dovetailing. He felt only a monumental sense of self-pity for his own self-piteousness.

  ‘Zyghar,’ said the toddler.

  On the radio a weathered voice spoke of cloudiness. Stephen had heard how they held up a grid to the sky and counted the cloud cover in each square. There was such a crude calculation – he understood – as average cloudiness. Squinting up through the tiny flap window, Stephen saw, between tapering walls of London brick, a sky of more than average cloudiness, grey on grey on greyer, shapeless shoals of grey slipping over and under each other. It was always gloomy on these, his days off. Off from what? He remembered yesterday morning, and the ugliness that occurred beside the Sasco year planner when he reminded his boss that he wouldn’t be coming in tomorrow. ‘But what about –’ and ‘Didn’t you realise – ?’ and ‘Couldn’t you have – ?’ When it was all there already on the board, his days off, meted out in felt-tip strokes. And anyway, Stephen’s job, what did it consist of? Save for saying on the phone the valediction ‘See you’ to people who, in fact, he had never seen.

  ‘H’hooloo,’ toodle-ooed his breakfast companion.

  Stephen tried to wrench it out of the high chair too fast; chubby legs were caught under the rung and he swung the entire edifice – a tower of metal and plastic, a penthouse of flesh – aloft. Then set everything down, disentangled the feet, tried again. He did a nappy change, wiping the grooves around its genitals with careful uncaring. He taped up the little parcel of excrement with its Velcro tabs. In due course, he mentally carped, this would be added to tens of thousands of others, and deposited in a landfill in the East Midlands, where it would wait for ten thousand years, to confront the perplexed archaeologists of the future with yet more evidence of their shit-worshipping ancestors.

  Stephen dressed his charge, his fingers feeling like bloated sausages, as they grappled flaccidly with the fiddly straps and clasps. In its nylon all-in-one, the toddler looked to Stephen like some dwarfish employee of a nuclear inspectorate, ready to assess the toxicity of the Chernobyl that lay in wait outside. Backing and filling in the awkward confines of the flat – where bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette and living room all opened on to a hall the size of a mouse mat – Stephen manoeuvred the buggy with one hand while grasping glabrous scruff with the other. The borrowed buggy – what a risible, lopsided contraption. The buggy, with its collapsible aluminium struts, like a tragicomic boxing glove on an extendable arm, made to smack him in the face again and again and again. He could fold it up, but never put it away. Now it half-opened and jammed a door, and while he closed it up the prisoner escaped. But at the moment of recapture the double buggy fell open once more.

  In the street Stephen married child and conveyance in a union of plastic clips and nylon webbing, then he sat on a low wall bounding a hedge and, feeling the sharp twigs scratch him through his thin clothing, he wept for a few minutes. It was here that Misfortune – that ugly, misshapen creature – saw fit to join him. And, when he rose and pushed the buggy off up the pavement, Misfortune went along for the ride.

  ‘Inquitty,’ said the toddler, registering the tinkle-thud of a falling putlock on a building site they passed by, and Stephen pondered how it was that, while everything had gone perfectly well with the child’s development, now it was beginning to speak he found that it was he who was becoming autistic.

  There was a bad thing waiting in the wings. There was an awful event struggling to happen. It was maddened already, battering against the windowpane of reality with its dark wings, like a bird caught in a room. I should never, Stephen thought as he pushed the buggy, have driven my wife insane by slowly increasing the duration of the car journeys we took together. I knew she had no sense of orientation, and yet I tormented her. If we had to go to friends’ houses, or even to the supermarket, each time I’d take a different route, each time slightly longer. Naturally she’d protest: ‘Stephen, I’m sure we didn’t go this way last time.’ And to derange her still more, I’d say, ‘It’s a short cut.’ Now there was no car and no wife. Or rather, there was an ex-wife, and instead of circling each other like boxers in the confinement of their own home, the ring had expanded to fill the city, while they were still stuck in the same bloody clinch, mauling each other with short jabs to the belly.

  At the bus stop Stephen waited with an old woman drinking a can of Special Brew and a dapper old man who leant against his cane at a jaunty angle. The old man sported a feather in his porkpie hat, his tweed suit was immaculately pressed. He looked as if he were watching for a field of runners and riders to round the corner and come galloping up the high street in a breaking wave of pounding sinew and frothing silk. He looked happy. Stephen sank down on one of the narrow, tip-tilting rubber seats; his misery stung him like heartburn. Misfortune, seizing the opportunity, played with the child.

  Misfortune tickled its feet and the toddler chuckled, ‘Chi-chi-chi.’ Misfortune stroked a cheek and accepted the nuzzle of the frizzy head. Misfortune sympathised entirely with the child and took on its hallucinogenic impression of a sharp-smelling trough, full of toy cars, and bounded by neat piles of building blocks. Behind these were grey walls too high to touch, and over it all unfurled haunting skirls. The toddler, too young to know Misfortune, felt it to be an outgrowth of the parental absence slumped at its side, and accepted its distorted presence willingly.

  ‘Fulub,’ it said.

  But the old woman, who knew Misfortune for what it was – who felt it congealed in her hair, smeared on her neck – cried out, hands shaking to ward it off, ‘Gerariyer-gera –’

  Lager beaded the little brow, Stephen jerked the handle of the buggy to roll it back a couple of feet and reached in his pocket for a tissue. The bus came.

  In the time it took for the obtuse old man to pay f
or his ticket and climb up the bus to his seat, Stephen was able to load the human cargo, fold the buggy and stack it in the luggage rack. Misfortune, under the cover of the hiss of compressed air and the slap of the automatic door, slid on board too, and took up the seat behind the driver, the one allocated for elderly people or those accompanied by children. The old woman – if you can call fifty-three old – stayed on the bench, and watched, awestruck, as the bus stop slid away down the road, leaving the bus behind.

  On the other side of town Stephen’s ex-wife kept up a large detached Edwardian villa on maintenance. Stephen didn’t know whether she had lovers – she hadn’t vouchsafed – but if she did there was plenty of space for them in the generous rooms. The walk-in cupboards alone could’ve housed five or six closet Lotharios and, when Stephen wanted to make himself feel particularly bad, he imagined them in there, sitting comfortably in the close darkness, her dresses rustling around their shoulders, as they waited for her to select one of their number. Stephen’s ex was beautiful. She was trim, raven-haired and sharp-profiled. She despised sexual incontinence in specific men – this he knew to his cost – but mysteriously, admired it in the generality of mankind. And so it was easier to imagine her with lovers than with a boyfriend.

  Misfortune dogged his footsteps as he clunked the buggy over paving stones ridged with virulent moss. From the bus stop they went up the hill between flat-faced semis, then around the playing field at the top, with its stark goalposts like gallows. Then past the gasometer, down the short street walled with poky terraced houses, and finally along the parade of shitty little shops, each one apparently devised for public inconvenience. A grocer with only two kinds of fruit and three of vegetables; a butcher selling just sausages and mince, who counted on three boxes of dried stuffing as a tempting window display; an ironmonger’s that never had anything you wanted. Stephen recalled asking for thirteen-amp fuses in it, for eggshell paint, for clothesline, for grout, but all of these were unavailable. Preposterously, the ironmonger’s had been refitted in the last year, yet still sold nothing that anyone needed. Perhaps, Stephen thought, the ironmonger’s existed solely to refit itself – not so much a retail concern as an evolved play on the whole notion of doing-it-for-yourself.