by Will Self
‘No it’s not!’ Stephen snapped. He snagged him too hard and, picking him up, slammed him into his side of the double buggy. Josh began to cry, and the other three children turned their frightened faces towards him.
‘I’m sorry, Josh, I’m sorry.’ Stephen knelt down to bring comfort within Josh’s range. ‘Really I am. Look –’ He peered at the accusatory faces. ‘Look, you can all have drinks and sweets. How’s that?’
There was silence save for sniffles for three beats, and then Daniel said, echoing the performance of some fifth-rate American actor which had become lodged in his own repertoire, ‘OK, then, sure, whatever.’
They trundled on.
The four-swing walk wasn’t going well – Stephen knew that. He had to stop stumbling through his life, he had to take all these children in hand – but how? How could he practise emotional hygiene in this filthy city? The scooters lay like the corpses of animals, each in a tacky pool of its own oil. The petrol stench of decomposing machinery was overpowering. And by the walls of the abandoned shop premises they were skirting was a frozen wave of detritus, a fully evolved deco-system, where the squashed spine of an old vacuum cleaner was preyed on by the strut of an umbrella, which in turn was ensnared by a shred of gabardine, upon which suckered last night’s discarded condom, which for its part was being eaten away by the white acid of bird shit. Stephen checked his watch, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t. Misfortune bided its time.
Down on the main road men stood about in Saturday afternoon poses outside the bookie’s. One was throwing an empty lager bottle into the air and catching it again by the neck, another was savagely and methodically shredding betting slips, then letting the fake snowflakes flutter around his shaken-up world. Traffic coursed and thumped along the uneven surface of the road. After the stunned silence of the playing field, the way these vehicles honked and beeped seemed almost companionable. Stephen pushed the buggy right inside one of the shops, and the older children tagged along.
They were all the same – these shops – the same in their heterogeneity. They all sold small stocks of random supplies. Many shelves were empty – others bulged with useless plenitude. One shop would offer booze, fags, yams, ten-kilo bags of rice, cassava, sweets, fans and ex-rental videos; while right next door you could purchase seat covers, disposable barbecues, monkey nuts, sink plungers, aubergines, booze, dog chews, fags, sweets and sixteen-inch black-and-white TVs. One shop would be entirely sealed by an inner sleeve of steel mesh, so that customers had to transact their business in a sort of dog pen; while right next door it was all wide open, soda crystals and incense holders there for the taking.
In this one, a man with a V-necked cashmere pullover, blue stains beneath his brown eyes, sat behind a counter piled high with foreign-language newspapers, picking his teeth with a biro cap. Stephen let the children have what they wanted: Cokes and sweets. He even let the little toddler hold a big red can in its little brown paws. So much sugar – it wouldn’t do any of them any good. Sweet guilt. Gummy, granulated, one hundred per cent refined shame.
‘All right, boss,’ said the man when Stephen paid him.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Stephen countered.
Neither of them knew if the other was being ironic.
Swing three was behind this parade, in a little misshapen scrap of park, a dumb-bell shape of overgrown grass and shrubbery, even more littered than the street. Stephen hated swing three most of all. It felt diseased here, with the backs of the shops exhaling their awful humours over a loose rank of overflowing wheelie bins, and five or so distempered chestnuts moping up above. But the children didn’t mind, they were caught up in their sugar rush, rushing ahead, Josh hard on the heels of his older siblings, the toddler in the buggy screeching between slugs of Coke, ‘Weeee!’ Then they all pulled up short.
Sitting on the run-down swings that were their objective, kicking their feet and sharing a cigarette, were three teenagers. Two girls and a boy. They didn’t look remotely threatening, but set beside the swings – which were small anyway – they were completely out of scale. Three teenagers. One of the girls was pretty in an over-made-up way, her lips a brilliant pink, her hair oiled and smarmed down into a series of precise curlicues across her coffee brow. The other girl was much more heavy-set and darker, her big breasts a veritable shelf, her large arse cut into by the swing’s chains. She wore stretchy black clothing. The lad was in blue denim, a hip-length jacket buttoned to the neck, wide-legged trousers, the crotch of which was located in the region of his knees. A Los Angeles Raiders baseball cap was crushed down on his head, so hard that his hair formed frothy earphones. The pretty girl had a mobile phone in her lap, the hands-free set plugged into her delicate, gold-studded ear. She was toying with the keyboard of the phone, while the lad swung himself towards her and away, pretending to try and grab hold of it. The big girl ignored them, stared at her feet, smoked.
They didn’t notice Stephen and the children for some moments. Moments during which he weighed up their timeless triangle, the priapic pipsqueak importuning the pretty one, while being silently warned off by this bulky black chaperone. The three of them, come here to the overgrown playground in an attempt to recapture an innocence that they’d probably never had. Then the pretty one saw Stephen and his kids. She stood, and trailing the lad by the flex – he’d snatched the mobile – she walked over to the seesaw. The big girl got up and followed them, goosing the lad with her hefty haunch. The pretty girl snatched back the mobile, the lad hitched up his mainsail trousers and sat on the middle of the seesaw, the big girl moved off to one side and stood, staring into a thicket.
Stephen’s kids took their places. He helped Josh up on to the swing and began pushing him, the older two kicked and leaned, kicked and leaned. The other toddler still sucked on its Coke, buckled into the buggy like a fitful pilot, the whites of its eyes sharp in the mounting twilight. The rusty eyelets of the chains grated in their corroded bolts, ‘ear-orr-ear-orr’.
Melissa gave up, and dropping to the ground walked towards the teenagers. She stopped a few feet away and examined them intently, then said, ‘Hello.’ They ignored her. ‘Hello,’ she said again, this time louder. The teenagers went on ignoring her, Stephen wanted to stop pushing Josh and go and pull her away, but he couldn’t. ‘Hello, my name’s Melissa.’
‘Y’ all right, M’lissa,’ said the lad.
‘Y’ all right,’ the pretty one echoed him, and the big girl snickered, an oddly high-pitched ‘tee-hee-hee’.
Melissa walked over to the buggy and stood there regarding the toddler for a while. She stooped, slid her hand inside the hood of its all-in-one and rubbed the curly mop of hair. The toddler, said, ‘Lissl.’
Then she came back to where Stephen was pushing Josh and, looking up at him with an expression minted by her mother, said, ‘Dad, why’s Setutsi black?’
The teenagers paid attention now, their six eyes sought out Stephen’s pale face, the pale faces of the three older children, then wavered over to take in the pretty black eighteen-month-old girl in the buggy.
‘Yeah, black right,’ the lad exclaimed to no one in particular. ‘Black like me innit.’
And as if responding to some hidden signal, or perhaps to express a mutual disapproval of this miscegenation, the three teenagers gathered themselves into a little posse and strolled off. The last that was heard of them was the ‘delaloodoo-delaloodoo-doo’ of the mobile ringing.
Stephen stopped pushing Josh. He went over to the buggy and began unstrapping Setutsi. For something to do he got the changing mat and spread it on the damp grass. He got the wipes and a clean nappy. He undid the poppers of Setutsi’s all-in-one, and pulled down the elasticated waist of her velveteen trousers. Her nappy was swollen with pee. He got it off, cleaned her with a wipe, then put a hand under her small, sweaty back and lifted her up so he could position the new nappy. As he fastened the Velcro tabs he looked up to see the three palefaces grouped around his shoulders.
‘Isn�
�t Setutsi toilet-trained, Dad?’ asked Melissa.
‘Well, she is really, but as we were out all day I put a nappy on her.’
‘Josh is toilet-trained.’
‘I know.’
‘Mum says people don’t toilet-train their kids ’cause they’re lazy.’
‘Well, maybe I am a bit lazy, but Setutsi’s very good at going to the toilet by herself when we’re at home.’
‘D’you and Miss Foster sleep in the same bed?’ Daniel asked, and before Stephen could reply he went on, ‘Miss Foster doesn’t teach at our school any more.’
‘Can we come to your flat, Dad?’ Melissa asked. ‘Can we have supper there?’
‘Have you got a video, Dad?’ Daniel added. ‘Can we watch TV while we have supper?’
Josh had knelt down by Setutsi and was half tickling her, half trying to do up the poppers of her all-in-one. Setutsi giggled obligingly. And even though his head was swarming with the ugliest of images – the bedroom like a bathroom where they spat and shouted and writhed – and his nostrils were full of her coconut conditioner – which had once aroused, but now nauseated him – he knew that this was a momentous breakthrough. That this rapid-fire inquisition was the beginning of an acceptance – for them, for him – of all that had happened. Of course Melissa and Daniel knew full well why Setutsi was black and exactly what that meant. But up until now Stephen had only offered instalments of this reality to them, randomly cut up, just as Setutsi herself had been a fleeting visitor, seen in blurred longshot through car-window screens. Now the older children had taken it upon themselves to construct a proper narrative, a story that involved them.
The questions kept on coming as he helped Josh to pee in a bush, then kissed him and set him on his side of the buggy. The enquiries continued as they left the grotty park and headed in the direction of swing four. And Stephen did his best to answer them truthfully, while observing the necessary economy of truth: Yes, he and Miss Foster did share a bed, and yes, he would ask their mother if they could come to the flat, but they mustn’t be angry if she didn’t want them to. And yes, he knew that Setutsi looked like him, even though she was black. And yes, she even looked like them, because she was their half-sister.
The leaden weight of Stephen’s depression was lifted. He felt the physical sympathy he’d longed for for months course through him like electricity. He felt tears prick his eyes. He wanted to cuddle them all simultaneously. He pushed the two little ones in the double buggy, and felt the uneven tug of Daniel and Melissa hanging on at either side. He felt the joyful freight of his paternity. He paid no attention to the boarded-up windows of the flats on the estate they were walking through. He didn’t notice the travesty of a recycling bin, which had been set on fire, so that its plastic bowel prolapsed on to the pavement. And he most definitely failed to register Misfortune, who, having taken a detour through the estate – to close the eyes of an overdosing addict, to clutch the aorta of a heart-attack victim, to clout the fontanelle of a suffering baby – chose this moment to rejoin them.
Swing four was floodlit by the time they arrived. A tiny quadrangle of black rubber under bright white lights. The wind was getting up and the cloud cover was breaking up. Most of the equipment here was still smaller than that at the one o’clock club, so small that the children of the estate disdained to use it, preferring to ride their scaled-down mountain bikes in the surrounding roadway, taking it in turns to jump off a ramp that one of them had propped against a speed bump. But there was one larger set of swings, and these were tenanted. A fat black boy, a year or so older than Daniel, dangled listlessly on one. He wore a green tracksuit several sizes too big for him, and assuming this was a hand-me-down, or a garment chosen by his parents to disguise his weight, Stephen pitied him.
As soon as they were all inside the gate the boy became galvanised and began talking at them. ‘My name’s Haile,’ he said. ‘I’m seven an’ I’m big for it, yeah, an’ I go to Penton Infants yeah, an’ I like football an’ I like Gameboy ’cept I ain’t got one but I got my cousin’s some of it, yeah. What’s your name?’ He asked Daniel first, but then he wanted to know all their names and their ages.
‘I’m forty-six,’ Stephen told him, laughing, although close to there was a disquieting air to Haile – his eyes bulged and he was sweating. Perhaps, Stephen thought, he has an untreated thyroid condition. It was only too likely.
Haile kept on harrying them, darting about the place, while Stephen got Josh and Setutsi out of the buggy, lifted them into the little swings. Haile then took it upon himself to push Daniel, staggering forward, his hands pressed hard into the younger boy’s back.
Daniel said, ‘You’re hurting me!’
And Haile suddenly stepped clear so that the swing dropped and rattled on its chain. ‘I gotten stay here most days, but also I get sweets from up by there.’ Haile gestured towards the main road. ‘D’ you like sweets or chocolate?’ He addressed Melissa, but before she could answer he embarked on a nauseating inventory: ‘I like Snickers an’ Starburst an’ Joosters an’ Minstrels an’ all them little fings, an’ chews an’ lollies …’
But even though Haile was a bit crazed none of his lot seemed fazed. It’s the new dispensation, thought Stephen, it’s going to be like this from now on, my big multiracial family absorbing all and sundry, like a mobile melting pot.
He stopped turning every now and then to see what Haile and the older two were doing, and concentrated on the little ones, pushing them and tickling them, touching first Josh’s nose and then Setutsi’s, as if conjuring with their consanguinity. He looked over towards the flats where a couple of black guys the same age as Setutsi’s mother’s brothers were jump-starting a car; one of them was attaching the leads, while the other was gunning the engine of a second car which was drawn alongside. Yeah, thought Stephen, it’s all going to be different now. I’m going to get along with Paul and Curtis, I’ll go to the pub with them, stand them drinks, smoke a little weed. He lost himself in this new vision of familial accord, seeing the three of them, brothers-in-law, arms around each other’s shoulders, full of mutual respect and amity despite their differences.
‘Hey! Don’t do that!’ Melissa’s voice cut through his reverie.
Stephen turned and couldn’t believe what he saw. In the few seconds that had elapsed, Daniel had begun to swing so high and so vigorously that his swing was now twisting and plunging at the top of each arc, in a jangle of chain links. But Daniel seemed powerless to stop the violent motion, he kept on leaning back and plunging forward, the better to see what Haile was doing. The fat kid sat astride the crossbar of the swings, his plump legs hooked around them. He must’ve shinned up there, Stephen realised, although he didn’t look at all capable of such gymnastics, and now he was there he was swaying dangerously.
‘Daniel!’ Stephen shouted, starting towards the swing. ‘Stop swinging now! Stop swinging!’
Melissa had got off her swing and was standing well clear. Daniel began braking himself with his wellingtons.
Stephen walked below the crossbar. ‘Hey, Haile,’ he said, ‘that’s a hell of a dangerous thing to do, you should come down right away.’
‘No bother if it is,’ Haile said, ‘’cause I do it all times, see, t’pull the swings up.’ And he began drawing one of the swing seats up by its length of chain.
‘It’s not a good idea, Haile,’ Stephen pleaded with him. ‘You could lose your balance.’
‘Leave it, mister!’ Haile shouted back, pulling up whole arm-lengths of chain now, looping first one about his shoulders and then a second around his neck, like some grotesquely chunky piece of jewellery. ‘It’s not fucking business, is it? It’s not your fucking bloody business, you cunt!’
The final expletive propelled him backwards, the child rocked, then rolled, then fell. The chain loop rattle-yanked around his soft neck. Haile’s head bulged. The neck snapped. His legs in the green tracksuit bottoms kicked once down towards Stephen’s upturned face, then twice, taking the five-sw
ing walk. Stephen, even in the mad numbness, could feel a tear struggling to detach itself from the trough 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 rubber tiling. All hell broke loose. Misfortune expanded ten thousand times to fill the void.
Scale
Prologue
(to be spoken in conversational tones)
The philosopher Freddie Ayer was once asked which single thing he found most evocative of Paris. The venerable logical positivist thought for a while, and then answered, ‘A road sign with “Paris” written on it.’
Kettle
Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale. Arriving home from London late last night, I found myself unable to judge the distance from the last exit sign for Junction 4 to the slip road itself. Granted it was foggy and the bright headlights of oncoming vehicles burned expanding aureoles into my view, but there are three white-bordered, oblong signs, arranged sequentially to aid people like me.
The first has three oblique bars (set in blue); the second, two; and the third, one. By the time you draw level with the third sign you should have already begun to appreciate the meaning of the curved wedge, adumbrated with further oblique white lines, that forms an interzone, an un-place, between the slip road, as it pares away, and the inside carriageway of the motorway, which powers on towards the Chiltern scarp.
