by Will Self
The office workers sat canted sideways on the benches. An occasional pigeon hopped up to one of these sandwich eaters, clearly shamed by its capacity to fly and doing its best to hide tattered wings. These exchanges between people and birds were embarrassing to watch. That’s the truth. We have now advanced so far into a zone of the genetically furtive, that office workers, contemplating these flying vermin, feel their own humanity compromised in some way. So they roll up bread pills, and averting their eyes, proffer them to the un-stuck craws.
All afternoon I sat in my office and worked. The straining in my belly grew, swelled, became even more pregnant. I was certain that I was on the verge of getting my period. My nipples were so sensitive that I could feel every bump and nodule on their aureoles, snagging against the cotton of my bra. The afternoon was also punctuated by a series of quite sharp abdominal pains. After every one of them I was convinced I would feel the familiar ultimate lancing. I was poised, ready to head for the toilet – the venue for my imagined impregnation by the VPL man – but no blood came.
Instead I occupied myself with the collation and binding of a series of management briefings that the Department was publishing for the greater edification of the Company as a whole.
Five o’clock found me bending the flexible prongs back on the clean sheets, to house them securely in their plastic covers. My boss hung his face around the doorjamb and grunted approval. I couldn’t see his ear – and this troubled me. I wanted to ask him to take a step into the room, so that I could check on his ear, check that it was still there and still his. But the idea of it was silly, a nitrous oxide thought that giggled in my head. To stop myself from smirking I concentrated on the odd, phallic intervention, made at waist-height, by the black-taped handle of his squash racket.
Then he left. I ordered my desk, and soon afterwards went home.
At home I ate and then had a bath, hoping that it would ease the pre-menstrual tension. It didn’t. I put on a dressing gown and wandered about my flat. Never before had it seemed so claustrophobic. The neat, space-saving arrangement of double-seater sofa and twin armchairs was a cell within a cell. The coffee table, with its stack of magazines and dish of pot-pourri, was part of a set for a chat show that never made it past the development stage. The images on the walls were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest.
I turned on the television, but couldn’t concentrate. I must have slept, squelched down amongst the foam-filled, polyester-covered cushions. Slid into sleep, the surfaces of my eyes grounding quickly on the salty, silty bottom of unconsciousness. There I floated, twisting slowly in the deceptive currents.
Assembled backwards. Quickly. Scherlupppp! The elements of my dream: I arrive for work and see that the organisational chart has been rearranged overnight. The strips, dots and squares have been manipulated so as to form a new configuration, which places a dot I haven’t seen before at the very apex of the Department’s hierarchy. I consult the legend, a small ring-binder dangling from the rail at the bottom of the board by a length of twine, only to discover that the dot is me.
I realise that I will have to move across the corridor into my ex-boss’s office. I am relieved to see him coming through my door; cradled in his arms is his desk blotter and giant mouse mat. On top of these surfaces is a miscellany of objects he has culled from his desk: a Rotadex, a date-a-day diary, a dictaphone, and a collection of plastic beakers, joined at the root, brimming with pens, pencils and paper clips.
He finds it difficult to meet my eye, but I’m wholly unembarrassed. I gesture to the collation and binding exercise that I was undertaking the previous evening, and which is still spread out on my desk. I say, ‘Finish this off, will you?’ He nods, dumbly.
I cross the corridor to my new office. I go behind the broad, black slab of desk and sit down. My former boss has left one object behind on his desk top, an executive toy of some kind, saved from the era when these mini constructions of stainless steel and black plastic had a vogue.
This one takes the form of a Newton’s cradle. But in the place of ball bearings, there are tiny, humanoid figures hanging from the threads by their shiny aluminium hands. The figures are naked, and when I set the cradle in motion, they engage in dangerously athletic congress. There is silence, except for the sound of miniature, metal, intercrural activity.
Piled under the vertical textured-fabric louvres; tucked up against the vents under the storage heaters; squidged sideways to lie along the top of the cable-tracking conduit, which circles the office at knee height; stacked in loose bundles on every flat surface, bar the desk itself, are many many panty liners, tampons and sanitary towels. Staunchers, stemmers, cotton-wool barriers. There is so much plastic-backed absorbent material in my new office that, taken together with the fabric-covered walls and carpet-tiled floor, the effect is of a recording studio. The clicking of the Newton’s cradle has amazing clarity. The shadows of the figurines banging into one another are thrown into sharp relief against the whiteboard on the far wall. A cord of pain, running like a zipper up through the flesh from my vagina to my throat, threatens to undo me, to spill out my interior, like so much offal, or rhino shit, on the carpet tiles.
When I awake Newsnight is on the television. Peter Snow is running the world from his modular grey bunker of a studio. He’s sitting in front of oversized venetian-blind slat panels, and ignoring the micro-computer that has sunk at an oblique angle into the vinyl-veined console he’s sitting behind.
He is speaking with undue emphasis. It’s this undue emphasis that impinges on me first – but it occurs to me immediately afterwards that perhaps everything I have ever heard anyone say has been subjected to undue emphasis.
Snow is talking to two pop academics. I can tell this with some certainty, because one of them is too well dressed for a politician, and the other too badly. Like a dentist with mass appeal, Snow is getting down to extracting the truth from this duo. He cants himself towards the badly dressed, froggy-looking one.
‘Now, Dr Busner, haven’t we been hearing for years now – from you and others – about the possible effects of such a bottoming-out?’
‘Quite so,’ says the man called Busner, ‘although I’m not sure that “bottoming-out” is the right expression. What we have here is a condition of stasis. I’m not prepared to hazard any long-term predictions about its duration on the basis of the sanity quotient figures we currently have; but what I can say is that the Government’s response has been woefully inadequate – a case of too little, too late.’
He falls to rolling and unrolling the ragged strip of mohair tie that flows down over the soft folds of his belly. He does this extremely well, with one hand, the way a card sharp runs a coin through his fingers. Snow now cants himself towards the other man, a virile sixty year old, with intact and ungreying hair, wearing a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. ‘Professor Stein, a case of too little, too late?’
‘I think not.’ Stein steeples his fingers on top of the console. ‘Like Dr Busner, I would reserve the right to comment at some later date. The evidence we have at the moment is sketchy, incomplete. But that being noted, even if the conditions today’s report draws our attention to are fully realised, it only points towards the non-event I am certain will not occur.’
‘So, contrary to what you have said in the past, you now think something may well happen?’ Snow is delighted that he has caught Stein’s double-negative.
‘That’s not what I said,’ Stein fires right back at the lanky television presenter. ‘I appreciate the implications of this data. It is bizarre – to say the least – to have so many people apparently experiencing a lengthy period of climatic and seasonal stasis; but we must bear in mind that, as yet, this is a localised phenomenon, confined to a discrete area. It has only been this way for some six weeks –’
‘More like two months!’ Busner cuts in.
This gives Peter Snow the opportunity to
try and knock the discussion down, so he can drag it somewhere else. ‘How-can-you-Doc-tor-Busner’ – he is in profile, Struwwelpeter-like, fingers splayed, elongated, nose sharp, rapping out the words in a dot-dash fashion, letting his pentameters beat up on each other – ‘be-so-o-certain-about-the-ex-act-time-the-stasis-began?’
‘Well, I admit’ – Busner, far from being cowed, is invigorated by Snow’s tongue-tapping – ‘it can be difficult to ascertain when nothing begins to happen.’ His plump lips twitch, he is sucking on the boiled irony, ‘But not, I think, impossible.
‘Take events – for example. How small does an event have to be before it ceases to be an event?’
‘Yes, yes, that is a very interesting question.’ This from Stein. The three of them are now all canted towards one another, forming a boyish huddle. ‘I myself am intrigued by small events, matters of the merest degree. Perhaps I might give an example?’
‘Please do.’ Peter Snow’s tone has softened, it’s clear that the idea interests him.
‘Can we have the camera in very tight on the surface of the console, please?’
‘Pull right in, please, camera 2.’ Snow makes a come-on-down gesture.
The camera zooms right down until the veins in the grey vinyl of the console are rift valleys. What must be the very tip of Stein’s fingernail comes into view. I can see the grain of it. It pokes a little at the vinyl, dislodging a speck of something. It could be dust or a fragment of skin, or mica. But the speck is both very small – less than a tenth of the width of Stein’s fingernail – and very grey; as grey as the console itself.
The camera zooms back out in. The three middle-aged men are beaming. ‘So there we have,’ says Peter Snow, addressing a portion of the nation, ‘a very small event. Thank you, Professor Stein, and you, Dr Busner.’ The two pop academics incline their heads, slightly.
The camera moves back in until Snow fills the screen. There are some fresh newspapers, interleaved by his elbow. ‘Well-that’s-about-it-for-tonight-except-for-a-quick-look-at-tomorrow’s-papers.’ His hands pull them out, one at a time, while he recites the headlines, ‘The-Times: “No-New-Developments-in-Stasis-Situation”. The Guardian: “Government-Ministers-Knew-that-Nothing-Had-Happened”. And-Today-with-the-rather-racier: “We’re-in-a-Grey-Area!”.
‘Jeremy-Paxman-will-be-here-tomorrow-night. But-for-now-this-is-Peter-Snow-wishing-you-good-night.’ The grey man on the screen smiles, picks up the pile of papers from the grey console in front of him, and shuffles them together, while the camera pulls up and away.
I pull up and away, and go next door to the bedroom. I take off my dressing gown and hang it on a hook behind the door. I take my nightie from beneath my pillow and put it on. I get a fresh pair of underpants from the chest of drawers and wriggle into them. I set the alarm clock for seven-fifteen. And I get a new sanitary towel and place it in the gusset of my underpants.
My period might start during the night.
The North London Book
of the Dead
I suppose that the form my bereavement took after my mother died was fairly conventional. Initially I was shocked. Her final illness was mercifully quick, but harrowing. Cancer tore through her body as if it were late for an important meeting with a lot of other successful diseases.
I had always expected my mother to outlive me. I saw myself becoming a neutered bachelor, who would be wearing a cardigan and still living at home at the age of forty, but it wasn’t to be. Mother’s death was a kind of a relief, but it was also bizarre and hallucinatory. The week she lay dying in the hospital I was plagued by strange sensations; gusts of air would seem personalised and, driving in my car, I had the sensation not that I was moving forward but that the road was being reeled back beneath the wheels, as if I were mounted on some giant piece of scenery.
The night she died my brother and I were at the hospital. We took it in turns to snatch sleep in a vestibule at the end of the ward and then to sit with her. She breathed stertorously. Her flesh yellowed and yellowed. I was quite conscious that she had no mind any more. The cancer – or so the consultant told me – had made its way up through the meningitic fluid in the spine and into her brain. I sensed the cancer in her skull like a cloud of inky pus. Her self-consciousness, sentience, identity, what you will, was cornered, forced back by the cloud into a confined space, where it pulsed on and then off, with all the apparent humanity of a digital watch.
One minute she was alive, the next she was dead. A dumpy nurse rushed to find my brother and me. We had both fallen asleep in the vestibule, cocooned within its plastic walls. ‘I think she’s gone,’ said the nurse. And I pictured Mother striding down Gower Street, naked, wattled.
By the time we reached the room they were laying her out. I had never understood what this meant before; now I could see that the truth was that the body, the corpse, really laid itself out. It was smoothed as if a great wind had rolled over the tired flesh. And it, Mother, was changing colour, as I watched, from an old ivory to a luminous yellow. The nurse, for some strange reason, had brushed Mother’s hair back off her forehead. It lay around her head in a fan on the pillow and two lightning streaks of grey ran up into it from either temple. The nurses had long since removed her dentures, and the whole ensemble – Mother with drawn-in cheeks and sculpted visage, lying in the small room, around her the loops and skeins of a life-supporting technology – made me think of the queen of an alien planet, resplendent on a high-tech palanquin, in some Buck Rogers style sci-fi serial of the Thirties.
There was a great whooshing sensation in the room. This persisted as a doctor of Chinese extraction – long, yellow, and divided at the root – felt around inside her cotton nightie for a non-existent heartbeat. The black, spindly hairs on his chin wavered. He pronounced her dead. The whooshing stopped. I felt her spirit fly out into the orange light of central London. It was about 3.00 a.m.
When I began to accept the fact that Mother really was gone, I went into a period of intense depression. I felt that I had lost an adversary. Someone to test myself against. My greatest fan and my severest critic and above all a good talker, who I was only just getting to know as a person – shorn of the emotional prejudices that conspire to strait-jacket the relationships between parents and children.
When my depression cleared the dreams started. I found myself night after night encountering my mother in strange situations. In my dreams she would appear at dinner parties (uninvited), crouched behind a filing cabinet in the office where I worked, or on public transport balefully swinging from a strap. She was quite honest about the fact that she was dead in these dreams, she made no attempt to masquerade as one of the living, rather she absorbed the effect that death had had on her personality much the way she had taken the rest of the crap that life had flung at her: a couple of failed marriages and a collection of children who, on the whole, were a bit of a disappointment to her.
When I tried to remonstrate with her, point out to her that by her own lights (she was a fervent atheist and materialist), she ought to be gently decomposing somewhere, she would fix me with a weary eye and say in a characteristically deadpan way, ‘So I’m dead but won’t lie down, huh? Big deal.’
It was a big deal. Mother had banged on about her revulsion at the idea of an afterlife for as long as I could remember. The chief form that this took was an extended rant aimed at all the trappings of death that society had designed. She despised the undertaking business especially. To Mother it was simply a way of cheating money out of grieving people who could ill afford it.
She had told me a year or two before she died that if it was at all possible I was to try and give her a kind of do-it-yourself funeral. Apparently the Co-op retailed one that allowed you to get the cost of the whole thing down to about £250. You had to build your own casket though and I was never any good at anything remotely practical. At school it took me two years to construct an acrylic string-holder. And even then it wouldn’t work.
So, after Mother died we arran
ged things conventionally, but austerely. Her corpse was burnt at Golders Green Crematorium. My eldest brother and I went alone – knowing that she would have disapproved of a crowd. We sat there in the chapel contemplating the bottom-of-the-range casket. One of the undertakers came waddling down the aisle, he gestured to us to stand and then moved off to one side, conspicuously scratching his grey bottom, either inadvertently or because he considered us of no account. Electric motors whirred, Mother lurched towards what, to all intents and purposes, was her final resting place.
A week or so later when I was going through more of Mother’s papers I found a newspaper clipping about the DIY funeral. I threw it away guiltily. I also found a deposit book that showed that mother had invested £370 in something called the Ecological Building Society. I phoned the society and was told by a Mr Hunt that it was true. Mother had been the owner of a seventh of a traditional Mongolian yurt, which was sited for some reason in a field outside Wincanton. I told Mr Hunt to keep the seventh; it seemed a suitable memorial.
Meanwhile, the dreams continued. And Mother managed to be as embarrassing in them as she had been alive, but for entirely different reasons. With death she had taken on a mantle of candour and social sharpness that I tended to attribute to myself rather than her. At the dream dinner parties she would make asides to me the whole time about how pretentious people were and what bad taste they displayed, talking all the while in a loud and affected voice which, needless to say, remained inaudible to her subjects. After a while I ceased trying to defeat her with the logic of her own extinction; it was pointless. Mother had long since ceased to be susceptible to reasoning. I think it was something to do with my father, a man who uses dialectics the way the Japanese used bamboo slivers during the war.
About six months after Mother’s death the dreams began to decline in frequency and eventually they petered out altogether. They were replaced for a short while by an intense period during which I kept seeing people in the street who I thought were Mother. I’d be walking in the West End or the City and there, usually on the other side of the road, would be Mother, ambling along staring in shop windows. I would know it was Mother because of the clothes. Mother tended to wear slacks on loan from hippopotami, or else African-style dresses that could comfortably house a scout troop. She also always carried a miscellaneous collection of bags, plastic and linen, dangling from her arm. These were crammed with modern literature, groceries and wadded paper tissues.
