The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  They turned the corner into Tennyson Avenue and passed by the Hicks’ house (elderly bedridden mother, son on drugs), the Fakenhams’ house (he a closet paedophile, she a pillar of the local church), the Gartrees’ house (no human children but many cat babies). How could it be that he, Stephen, was exiled from this poisonous Eden, while so many serpents retained their tenancies? It occurred to him – not for the first time, not for the thousandth – that he should fake his own suicide, utilise the handy wreckage of a train he’d never caught, or the immolation of an office building he’d failed to enter, or simply leave his clothes, for once neatly folded, on a rock, and walk away from the CSA, from the children, from the pain.

  Bending down to unlatch the front gate he caught the tang of urine emanating from the toddler. Best not to leave it – it would lead to a rash, and then he’d have to face its mother’s wrath. Inside the gate he unbuckled the child and laid it down on the patch of grass behind the bins. He glanced up at the blank windows of the house, each with its cataract of net curtain, but saw nothing twitching.

  ‘Anurk’a,’ the toddler protested, as he ripped open the front of its all-in-one, yanked out its chubby legs, then held them open, spatchcocked, as he removed the absorbent wad.

  While Stephen was groping for a clean nappy in the compartment underneath the buggy he heard the front door swing open, and looked up to see his ex-wife standing, radiating contempt. Behind her slim shoulders the hallway receded, lined on either side with hummocks of school bags, rows of shoes, stooks of sports equipment and piles of books.

  ‘Huh!’ she exclaimed, arms crossed, and Stephen, observing her quick-bitten fingers clutching at her elbows, and the anger that semaphored from her lantern eyes, could not forbear from remembering the exact quality of her rage.

  ‘I’ve got fucking head lice!’ Those same hands in frenzied agitation, as she sits on the side of the bed. ‘Fucking nits! Fucking nits!’

  He leaps from his side of the marital bed, in that instant grasping that he’ll never lie down there again. His eyes search across the carpet for any certain object that they might anchor on in this suddenly fluid, frightening world. But he sees only a nude Barbie doll, pushed overboard by a passing child, its feet up beside its head, its pink plastic pubis a disturbing juncture. How can this thing be – he’s floundering in stormy irrelevance – a toy?

  ‘Kids!’ Stephen’s ex bellowed back into the house, and then again, still louder. ‘Kids!’

  Stephen finished parcelling up the toddler and placed it back on its side of the double buggy.

  Now he has so few things he tries to treat them with the respect others deserve. In the small flat on the other side of town he washes up the toddler’s plastic bowl with care, then dries it and puts it away in the cupboard. He no longer has the detached villa, with its innumerable corners, all of them slowly silting up with the materiality of years of family life.

  The six-year-old and the eight-year-old came down the stairs to the hallway like surprised conspirators, reluctant to admit their involvement with each other. Taking their anoraks from the pegs in the hall they put them on with an orderliness and efficiency that struck Stephen as overwhelmingly pathetic. Then they winkled their feet into wellingtons, and he wanted to go forward and help them but knew he really shouldn’t. They came out of the house and shuffled down the path to where he stood.

  ‘’lo, Dad,’ said the older one, the girl, while the boy said simply ‘’lo.’ They both nodded to their half-sibling in the buggy, as if this were a working situation, and they were all being formally introduced for the first time. ‘’lo,’ they said again.

  ‘Lorol,’ said the toddler.

  Stephen hunkered down and shuffled forward to encompass all three children with his outstretched arms. He smelt Ribena on their breath, conditioner in their hair. Looking at their pale faces he saw yet again the way his ex’s incisive features cut out his weak ones.

  Stephen’s ex-wife reappeared in the hallway, dragging a protesting two-year-old by its arm.

  ‘I’m not wanted it!’ the two-year-old was complaining. ‘I’m gonna’ stayere, I’m gonna –’

  ‘Doesn’t he want to come?’ Stephen called, half hoping.

  ‘Oh no, he’s going with you,’ she replied, expertly stuffing the little boy into his anorak, then tripping him backwards over her foot, so that he sat on the floor. While she inserted his feet into wellingtons, she kept up an incantation of irritation: ‘If you think I’m going to miss out on the only two bloody hours of the week when I have the house to myself … the only time I have to make a call, or even wash my bloody hair … You’ve no idea, have you? No bloody idea at all …’

  While the boy, for his part, kept on dissenting. ‘I gotta having this to show Daddy, ’cause … An’ Daniel says I wasn’t gonna ’cause … He tooken it, he-he –’

  ‘Josh wants to bring his driving thingy,’ Daniel explained.

  ‘I told him it would be in the way,’ his older sister, Melissa, explained.

  ‘But I has to!’ Josh cried out from the doorway.

  ‘Then take the bloody thing! Take-the-bloody-thing!’

  On ‘take’ she picked up the toy dashboard with steering wheel and gear stick attached; on ‘the’ she shoved it in Josh’s arms; on ‘bloody’ she picked him up and placed him outside the door; and on ‘thing’ she slammed it.

  In the frozen moment before Josh began to bawl in earnest, Stephen turned and looked away. On the opposite side of the road two nuns were passing by. They were both bespectacled, both wearing blue wimples and blue raincoats. From beneath their hemlines extended a foot or so of white nylon. The whole outfit, thought Stephen, gave them a look at once ecclesiastical and medical, as if they were on their way to nurse their Saviour in a specially equipped crucifixion unit. They flashed their lenses in his direction, and Stephen wanted to cry out, ‘Suffer these little children to come unto you! You won’t find a group of people more in need of help than us …’ But instead he turned back to Josh who was keening, ‘Erherrr-erherrr-erherrr,’ his way into hysteria, ‘waaaa!’

  ‘ComeonowJosh, noneedt’cry, here we go, here we go …’

  Stephen kept up a prayerful murmur as he lifted the roaring boy and his toy up, carried him down the path to where the others were clustered around the buggy, strapped him into his side, balanced the driving toy on his knees, got the buggy out through the gate, got the older ones positioned on either side, small hands on handles, and with his shocked progeny four abreast, started off back up the road. Misfortune took up its position to the rear.

  ‘It’s OK, Josh, it’s OK. We’ll have a good time – you’ll see …’

  Melissa had taken over from him and although he was grateful to her, Stephen couldn’t forbear from feeling sick with inadequacy, his own paternal dereliction melting into his shoulders like an irreversible jacket of napalm.

  ‘So, kids,’ he said cheerily. ‘What’re we going to do this afternoon? Museum? Zoo? Film? What’s it going to be – you decide.’

  ‘We wented to a film –’

  ‘Went,’ Stephen corrected Daniel – the six-year-old’s grammar was always the first casualty of these emotional firefights.

  ‘We went to a film yesterday.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘’s’ OK.’

  ‘How about the zoo or a museum then?’

  ‘Nah, boring,’ the older children chorused.

  ‘What then? It’s a bit gloomy for the park, isn’t it?’

  Their silence said they didn’t agree.

  ‘D’you want to go on the four-swing walk then?’

  ‘Yes, and you’ll push us up an’ up an’ up –’

  ‘So high, so high we’ll go over the bar –’

  ‘Or fly into space pasted the moon an’ Mars an’ everything –’

  ‘To another galaxy –’

  ‘Another universe, you mean.’

  ‘OK, the four-swing walk it is then, but I can’t promise you space exploration.
’

  Another universe – that was a good idea. Stephen didn’t doubt that Daniel and Melissa wanted to go on the four-swing walk because they connected it with the time before he’d left. The older children had come into consciousness on these four sets of swings: two in the local playing field, then one in an adjoining patch of overgrown park, and the last, tucked away in a playground on a council estate. Perhaps they hoped that if they swung high enough they could describe a perfect parabola into the past.

  ‘Swush,’ said the toddler on the left-hand side of the buggy, and it was only then that Stephen realised it was autumn, for the child was mimicking the sound of feet and wheels sweeping leaves along the pavement.

  Autumn, which explained this damp, oppressive sky, like a dirty grey clout waiting to be squeezed. Autumn, which located this sense of irretrievable loss in its appropriate context. Autumn, hence Stephen’s aching weariness. He would’ve given anything to be able to lie down underneath that scarified hedge until spring. Autumn, which made sense of the silage beneath his feet, a mulch of lolly sticks, ring pulls and macerated paper cups, laid down during the long harvest of the school holidays. Autumn, when it had all happened.

  ‘Come here! You come here! You come here and sit down by me. Sit here!’ Her belly rounded and plumped up amidst the squashed pillows, her nightdress rucked up in angry folds.

  ‘Melissa hasn’t had them for months – for months! I comb her every day – every day! You sit here, you let me look in your hair. In your fucking hair!’

  And so, like half-naked apes, they engage in a savage grooming that destroys all social cohesion. She scrabbles and yanks at his hair.

  ‘There! There! You’ve got them too! And eggs – and fucking eggs! What is this, Stephen? You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?! Someone with fucking head lice. Who is she, Stephen? A schoolgirl?’

  No, not a schoolgirl. At the time, still fixated on the disturbing juncture of Barbie’s thighs, Stephen had considered that perhaps, had she been a schoolgirl, the truth would’ve been easier to acknowledge, because it would’ve been so grotesque, so singular. But of course it’s lies that are singular; the truth – that she was Melissa’s teacher – was merely prosaic.

  At the shopping parade Stephen’s engine, with its double-buggy cow catcher, clattered over invisible points and turned to the left, back up the hill towards the playing field. Misfortune was in the guard’s van.

  ‘Whoo-whoo!’ said the toddler, and Josh, who sat beside it yanking on the orange plastic steering wheel, beeped his horn.

  ‘So, how’s school?’ Stephen asked Melissa, because he thought he ought to.

  ‘’s’ OK,’ she replied.

  ‘Good OK or bad OK?’ he probed.

  ‘OK. OK.’

  And that was that, that was the full extent of his input into her education.

  As soon as they reached the playing field the two older children broke from the sides of the buggy like swing-seeking missiles and headed off across the scummy grass. Seagulls lifted off in advance of them, crying unpleasantly. Stephen pushed the buggy along the path, past a zone of crappy benches where two adolescents were nuzzling. He felt an intense physical sympathy for the little goatee of pus and scab on the boy’s chin. He wanted to touch it, but cancelled the feeling by staring at his feet as they negotiated the blobs and dollops of dog shit, some brown, some black, some desiccated white, some livid yellow. It was interesting the way that the two toddlers managed to ignore each other. Maybe in a few months’ time Josh would turn to the other one and say, out of the blue, ‘Are you capable of holding a conversation yet?’

  At the playground Melissa and Daniel were already on two of the big swings. Daniel was kicking his feet out and leaning back, he’d gained quite a bit of height, but Melissa couldn’t manage it, and merely dangled, twisting from side to side. Stephen got Josh out of the buggy and put him in one of the small swings, tucking his feet through the holes. Then he did the same with the other toddler and got them both swinging.

  ‘Hold on to the front!’ he ordered them.

  ‘Come and swing me, Dad!’ Melissa called over. ‘I can’t get going.’

  ‘She can’t swing!’ Daniel cried out, delighted. ‘She doesn’t know how to, doesn’t know how to!’

  ‘Shut up, Daniel! Shut up!’ Immediately Melissa was close to tears.

  ‘She’s eight and she can’t swing!’ he crowed as he swooped above her.

  ‘Shut up – I mean it!’

  ‘Now then,’ said Stephen, leaving the two toddlers swinging. ‘I’ll swing you both.’

  He got Melissa swinging using both hands, then shifted to shove the boy with one hand and the girl with the other. He pushed the seat one time and their backs the next. He felt their backs, the curvature of their spines, the warmth of their small buttocks. At the apex of the swings’ curve he felt their bodies hover in his hands. And yet he felt no physical sympathy for these children – his children. Melissa and Daniel left themselves behind as they swung, left behind their preternaturally aged selves, they travelled in time – if not space – to a place of fun, that was simply and physically now. Stephen tickled them under the arms on the upswing and they giggled. He ran in front and like a crazy matador just avoided their feet-for-horns on the downswing and they screeched. He ran over to the toddlers on their little swing and got them going again, then ran back to the big kids and pushed them still higher. Back and forth Stephen shoved, round and round he ran. Now all four were laughing – even the stolid little toddler. Misfortune picked up a lost mitten someone had stuck on top of a railing and tried it on for size.

  Then they stopped. Daniel squeaked himself to a halt, his rubber soles buffing the rubber tiling. He sprung off the swing before it came to a halt and walked over to the static roundabout. He knelt on the edge and leant his dark little head against one of the metal stanchions, as if praying. In that instant the whole desolation of the scene returned: the louring sky, the scuffed surface of the playground, rubber peeling away from bitumen, bitumen rubbing off concrete; the two-decade-old climbing frame like a garish steel pretzel for a metal-eating giant; the swings themselves, some of which had their chains twisted around the crossbar, evidence of adolescent mayhem, or maybe children genuinely catapulted into orbit. There was broken glass by the enclosing railings, there were lopsided crash barriers grouped around a depression in the concrete, which was filled with water and leaves, there was a bin all buckled in its bandolier of wooden struts. That such a rigid thing could have been vandalised at all was evidence, Stephen thought, of the most extreme population explosion.

  Melissa got off her swing as well. The two toddlers were hanging, barely moving in their little swings.

  ‘Come on, everyone!’ Stephen injected enthusiasm into his voice as if it were a stimulant drug. ‘Let’s go to swing two.’

  ‘Two!’ the toddler cried out, loudly, distinctly, with perfect enunciation. They all ignored it.

  Swing two was in the smaller, recently constructed playground next to the one o’clock dub. The little army marched there across the playing field, a direct route that took them sloshing between the gibbet goalposts, each set erected in mud. The older two ran on ahead, the younger toddler rode in the buggy, Josh trudged carrying his plastic dashboard. Stephen remembered how Melissa and Daniel had clung to him so ferociously, demanding to be carried until they were well past Josh’s age. But this two-year-old just plodded on, hunched up, clearly no keener to be touched by his father than his father was anxious to touch him.

  It was the weekend so the one o’clock club was closed, steel shutters pulled down to the ground, and each horizontal line filled in with sloppy graffiti. The small playground was yet to be vandalised, its black rubber tiling was inviolate. Each beautifully appointed piece of equipment stood on its own inset carpet of green-rubber tiling. The sandpit was covered and padlocked. The climbing frame-cum-slide had a neat gabled roof, and ramps leading up to it with firm wooden treads, each one edged with more black rubb
er. Clover-leaf-shaped platforms stood about on coils of giant spring. The whole assemblage was so new and neat and padded. It defied the outside with its evocation of a safe domestic interior.

  ‘It’s so fucking claustrophobic,’ Stephen muttered aloud, putting Josh and the toddler into another duo of swings. He felt this inside-out playground to be outside in the playing field, and the outside playing field in turn to be inside the city, and the city to be enclosed by the country, and the country to be jumbled together with other countries inside the world. A world like a vast and messy playroom, strewn with the broken and discarded toys of an immature humanity, who had been having an awful tantrum for decades. The terrible two millennia. Like the security camera atop its red pole in the corner of this playground, God observed it all from his own distant enclosure, a child-lover passively watching for paedophiles.

  Stephen got the two toddlers swinging again, and then went over to the bigger swings and got the bigger kids going. The two sets of swings were facing, so four pairs of wellingtons were aimed at Stephen as he scampered around the red safety bafflers, desperate to keep the swingers all up in the air.

  ‘I like this swing best,’ said Melissa.

  ‘I like swing three best,’ said Daniel.

  ‘This swing is faster,’ said Melissa.

  ‘Yeah.’ Daniel cultivated the conversation as if he were attending an aerial cocktail party. ‘But swing three is fastener – I can go fastener.’

  ‘Sinee!’ the toddler sang out.

  ‘I’m thursday,’ said Josh.

  ‘You mean you’re thirsty,’ Stephen puffed.

  ‘I’m very thursday,’ the child reiterated.

  They left the playing field through a short alley that became a cul-de-sac. Parked along the kerb were an abandoned car and two toppled motor scooters. The car had been both seared and eviscerated. All the windows were caramelised, the seats were cut into slices of burnt foam rubber. The dashboard had been cut out so that the electrical guts spilled all over the floor. All the wheels were gone, making it just the right height for Josh, who crunched towards it through the debris hefting his own dashboard. ‘My car,’ he said. ‘My car.’