The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  Billy lunged up in the bath, in time to hear ‘– king door!’ in the calm after the splash. Then he was all action: out on the wet lino, twisting a thin towel round his nethers, then into the corridor. He knelt over Tony. ‘All right, mate? Y’all right, mate?’ A ghastly simulation of Cockney mummy concern.

  ‘Juss, juss, juss –’ Tony shudderingly inhaled, then sputtered, ‘Get the fucking door.’

  Calcium hydroxide, calcium chloride, calcium hypochlorite. In a word: bleach. We don’t altogether fear it – there are too many of us, and we’re too small. Far too small. I’m small even for my kind – maybe fifty nanometres across, which is fifty billionths of a metre. That’s smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so why should I fear bleach? For I can have no colour. Anyway, Georgie doesn’t apply bleach to the insides of syringes or spoons, nor does she dunk razors or toothbrushes in it. All her bleaching activities are confined to the laminated surfaces of Tony Riley’s kitchen. In the days when the disorder in her life was a tea mug unwashed up for the odd hour, or a book left face down on the arm of a chair, Georgie used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter how messy things get so long as you have clean kitchen surfaces.’

  Of course, that was when things weren’t really messy at all. That was during the eight clean years, when Georgie attended her self-help groups, built a career as a television producer, had a couple of happy-then-unhappy relationships, visited her parents, paid her taxes. That was before the craters full of sepsis and the shrinking of her head; that was when she had her own studio flat in Chiswick, not two black plastic bags in the dark corner of Tony Riley’s damp bedroom.

  Now the clean kitchen surfaces were the only ordered thing in the mess that was notionally her life. After cooing, billing and heaving Tony back to his oxygen cylinder, Georgie adjusted her dressings – fallen down around her ankles, obscene crepe parodies of old women’s stockings – before setting to with bucket, hot water, brush and bleach. She didn’t stop until the Formica was lustrous and the aluminium draining board gleamed.

  Shitty disease, emphysema. Admirably shitty: chronic, progressive, degenerative – a bit like civilization. And here we have the gerontocracy of late capitalism that Sam Beckett – himself a sufferer – would undoubtedly have recognized. With their faces – one browned by neglect, the other blued by anoxia – Georgie and Tony were typecast as Nell and Nagg. He nagged her, wheezing demands, while she nellied about the flat, fetching his anti-cholinergics and bronchodilators, administering his steroids and checking the levels on his oxygen cylinder. Setting to one side the ghastliness of a carer almost as sick as her patient, there was a ritualized and stagy desperation to their relationship; because, of course, there is no more painkiller, the little round box is empty, and everything is winding down.

  Yes, a stagy desperation heightened only by their cloying affection and their treacly endearments: Chuckle-Bunny, Sweetums, Little Dove, Ups-a-Boy and Noodly-Toots for each other; and for the drugs: smidgen, pigeon, widgeon and snuff-snuff. To behold them, passionately engaged in the chores of moribundity, was to intrude upon the intimacy of a couple so old, so long together, so time-eroded into a single psychic mass, that they seemed ancient enough to have had children that must’ve grown up, gone away, formed partnerships of their own, had their own children, grown older, then themselves died. Of old age.

  Tony was fifty-three, Georgie forty-one. They had known each other for six months.

  From time to time, Georgie would break out of her stagy desperation and peremptorily order Billy to fetch this or do that. This may have been a ship of fools, but it was a tight one. There was no room on deck for shirkers. Billy had shed his moist breech-clout in favour of a neatly pressed tan linen suit, white shirt and red tie – perfect protective colouring for a hapless Indian actor attending a Hollywood party. The ‘plink-plink-brill-ll-llerowng!’ of his sitar had snagged the twang of an electric guitar; now a snare drum brushed up the tempo, as Billy, in a dinky three-wheeler car, pulled out of the driveway and buzzed off down the boulevard lined with palms. It was an iconic image of Los Angeles, undercut, if only he knew it … Ach! Fuck it! If only he knew anything; and if only he didn’t behave as if his entire life were a pre-credit sequence.

  Because here it was: Ars Gratia Arts captioned a lion roused from torpor and petulantly roar-yawning. But a better motto for Billy would’ve been Pro Aris et Focis; for, as he piloted the joke car of his narcotized psyche down the corridor of Tony Riley’s flat – a boulevard lined with the drooping fronds of old advertising flyers and press releases, the domesticated foliage of Tony’s once wildly successful career in public relations – Billy was reverencing his deity and preserving this hearth.

  The order of the credits for the production was this: Tony, the hotshot producer whose mortgage arrears couldn’t now catch up on him before the repossession of Death. He had the De Vere Gardens flat and a few more quid in the bank to chuck on the pyre. Every day he re-erected the set upon which the film of the party was shot – but he couldn’t do it without Georgie. Georgie was the director: she assembled cast and crew, rehearsed their lines, consulted with script editors and cameramen – without her there would’ve been no action. Since her legs had started to rot – abscesses from shooting up, did you really want to know? – she could no longer act as a runner for a different production, the big one, overseen by Bertram and Andy’s crew.

  Then there was Billy, who lived from hand to hand – because his mouth rarely entered into it. He gofered for Tony and Georgie in return for wheedling rights on the drugs that flowed through the gross anatomy of the flat. Billy, most weeks, couldn’t even get it together to go to pick up his emergency payment from the social in Euston. So, no leech, but by default an exemplary sole trader, engaged in the arbitrage of small quantities of merchandise, while offering piffling services. He probably should have received an Enterprise Allowance – or a British Screen grant.

  At the venue for the party, the capacious and ugly modern home of capacious and ugly Hollywood film producer Fred Clutterbuck, Billy manoeuvred Hrundi V. Bakshi’s three-wheeler between two ordinary-sized cars, and then had to climb out the top because he couldn’t open the door. In this, Peter Sellers was only aping many episodes in Billy’s own life: the insinuation of his simian body into spaces it wasn’t intended for – tiny toilet windows, constricted shafts, tight transoms; and places where it wasn’t wanted – nice teenage girls’ bedrooms, the locked premises of chemists’.

  The Clutterbucks’ front door was answered by a uniformed black maid. Beyond her stretched a long hallway, with a walkway running over an artificial stream that flowed alongside a bamboo screen. When Billy was a kid, it was the insane largesse of this interior rill that made of the Clutterbucks’ home – or, rather, Blake Edwards’s production designer’s conception of the Clutterbucks’ home – a domestic pleasure dome. (Fernando Carrere, died 1998.)

  It might be surmised that with age and experience any child would be disabused of this impression by other, more stylish domains, so that, upon reviewing The Party, he would wince at the tackiness of it all: the painted plywood cladding on the walls, the funnel-like light fitments, the circular fireplace – all of which were to be travestied, and travestied again during the next two decades, until such ‘features’ ended up skulking in chain hotels by motorway intersections, on the outskirts of a thousand cities that no one chooses to visit. Not to mention the stream itself, which was no Alph but a mean little trough, its bottom and sides painted with durable, aquamarine paint.

  Might be surmised – but not by Billy; Billy was never disabused. True, on TVs in the association areas of remand centres, then latterly, on those clamped in the top corners of cells, he had glimpsed these other, more stylish domains. There had also been times, on the out, when, like an anthropoid tapeworm, Billy had lodged himself in the entrails of others’ evenings – usually because he’d sold them a blob of hash or a sprinkling of powder – and so ended up in their fitted flats or architect-designed houses
.

  While his unwitting hosts grew maudlin and clumsy in the kitchen, Billy roamed the other chambers, examining such innovations as rag-rolling and glass bricks with an aficionado’s eye. When he left he’d take with him a silver-framed photograph or leather-bound book in lieu of a going-home present. He’d seldom been invited in the first place – and he was never asked back.

  So, Billy – he wasn’t disabused; for him, Chez Clutterbuck remained the acme of warm and sophisticated hospitality, to which he was invited back again and again, despite the fact that each and every time he arrived with mud coating one of his white moccasins. Oops! What should he do? Billy, as Peter, as Hrundi, had trodden in the oily gunk in the parking area, and then tracked black footprints along the pristine walkway, a dull single-player version of that quintessential sixties party game Twister.

  Billy and Hrundi – they’re both peasants, basically. A stream of water in a house must be for washing arse or hands, so the dabbling of the muddy shoe in the stream was only – like all slapstick – logical. Basic physics. It floated away, a jolly little boat, leaving Billy to encounter that stock character, the drunken waiter, while hopping on one bare, browned-up foot.

  The waiter was young, with sandy hair, and in full fig: tailcoat, high white collar. He dutifully presented his tray of cocktails. Then Billy – as Peter, as Hrundi – got to deliver one of his favourite lines in The Party. Recall, he was a career junky, a professional. Heroin, morphine sulphate, pethidine, methadone – all opiates, synthetic and organic, these were his stock in trade; but alcohol, apart from when he needed it to sedate himself because he couldn’t get any junk and his chicken bones were splintering in his turkey skin, well, ‘Thank you, but I never touch it.’ And so, unsullied, Hrundi hopped off to retrieve his moccasin that, like Moses’s basket, had grounded in some rushes. Behind him the waiter, who was every straight-living hypocrite Billy had ever known, took a glass from his own tray and knocked it back.

  All this – the fragments of remembered dialogue, the off-cuts of scenery, the comedian’s fatuous mugging – was projected on to Tony Riley’s blank basement, while the other two parties to the ill-lit production got set up for the day’s shoot.

  Once wiped down and medicated, ornamental Tony was replaced on his sofa with a cup of tea; and Georgie, having done the surfaces, retired to the bathroom, where, under the bare bulb, she put a bird leg up on the bath and unwound four feet of crêpe bandage to expose the open-cast bacteria mine. In the enamel ravine below lay strewn the rubble of Billy, his horny nail clippings and fuse-wire pubic hairs, the frazil of his dead skin left high and drying on crystalline ridges of old suds.

  Georgie winced as she dusted the gaping hole in her shin with fungicidal powder. It was perhaps a little bizarre that, given the exactitude with which she measured, then administered, palliatives to Tony, she so woefully mistreated herself; but then, by sticking to her story that these septic potholes were ‘just something I picked up’, she could maintain the delusion that she was ‘run down’ and ‘a bit stressed out’, so necessitating certain other medications, which the authorities, in their infinite stupidity, saw fit to deny her.

  The truth was that Georgie was dying as well – and she knew it. She’d been clean for long enough, before relapsing back into the pits, to no longer be able to cloak her mind – once swift, airborne, feathery and beautiful – in the crude oil of evasiveness. She had resolved to die with Tony, to go with him into the ultimate airlessness of the emphysemic’s tomb, as a handmaiden for the afterlife.

  Be that as it may, in the time left to her there was work to be done; so, once the pits had been powdered and crêped, Georgie retreated to the inner sanctum she shared with Tony, the master bedroom, in order to make The Call.

  Georgie had met Tony when she was a runner for Bertram and Andy’s crew. Bertram, at one time a paper-bag manufacturer in Leicester, had been lured down to London ten years before. No one’s saying Bertram’s paper bags were any good: he didn’t maintain the machinery, skimped on glue and abused his Bangladeshi – and largely female – workforce. His bags often split. I know, because I was also in Leicester, in some of Bertram’s workers; remember, I am legion – and non-unionized. Bertram also knocked his own wife around.

  Bertram liked whoring – and he liked whores still more. He panted down the M1 to London on the expensive scent. While in town, he treated his ‘ladies’ like … ladies, just as back home he treated his women like whores. He particularly cherished nice girls from good families who had fallen on to his bed of pain. He bought the fucked-up Tiffanies and Camillas he hired – at first by the hour, then by the night – as if they were nobility, dressing them up so he could take them to Fortnum’s for tea, or to Asprey’s for ugly silver fittings.

  Bertram was a medieval miller of a man, complete with jowls and an extra brace of chins. His great girth suggested the washing down of capons with many firkins of ale. His thick thighs cried out for hosiery, his paunch bellowed for a codpiece. On his first chin was stuck a goatee the approximate size and shape of a Scottie dog. The beard looked as if it had flung itself at Bertram’s face to get at the liverish treat of his tongue.

  Bertram didn’t do drugs – but his ‘ladies’ were clopping about in the muck. He soon realized he could secure himself cheaper favours if he took up dealing. During a brief sojourn in Pentonville – the result of a contretemps involving an electric kettle lead, his pivotal arm and a girl who wasn’t a ‘lady’ – Bertram met Andy (real name, Anesh), who dissimulated about everything, including his skin colour. At night, even in the nick, he rubbed whitening powder into his tan cheeks – an inverted Hrundi V. Bakshi, playing Peter Sellers. Andy was small Asian fry, but he had big Jamaican and Turkish connections. When they got out, the paper-bag manufacturer and the fraud went into partnership.

  The viral quality of vice, well, we have to stop and admire it – for an instant. Bertram and Andy’s business plan was simplicity itself. This was the early 1990s and crack cocaine, a recent arrival, was stupendously dear. Most of Bertram’s whores used crack with their clients, as it made everything go – if it went at all – quicker; and the clients, many of whom had been as ignorant of hard drugs as Bertram, ended up using smack, too. Through nose-shots and cold-vagina-calls Bertram cemented his client list with blood and mucus.

  They never wrote anything down, and the crew was built up on a cellular basis: Bertram made the wholesale buys; Andy portioned out; the Tiffanies and Camillas brought them runners, addicts who were unemployable, yet still presentable. Best practice was straightforward: they wanted only white clients in good standing – no blacks, no Social Security jockeys. Their delivery area was exclusively the West End, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham. None of their crew would cross the river – although, like motorized rats, they’d make a skulking meet in Oakley Street. Late each morning, Bertram and Andy rendezvoused with their four top runners at an hotel by the Hammersmith flyover, in a room held vacant for them by a compliant and heavily addicted manager. Those four, in turn, subdivided their allocation among other runners, and so on, for as many links as were necessary – drugs rattling in one direction, cash in the other, the entire saleschain cranked by desperate need.

  If the runners used up too much of their stock, they were compelled to sell more; if they grew flaky they were brushed off like the dead skin they were fast becoming. At least, that’s how it was all supposed to work; in practice Bertram and Andy weren’t good managers, and they lacked a Human Resources department. They had their weaknesses – Georgie being one of them. Once the holes in her shins had become too large, and her tinkling accent a church bell that tolled the knell of her; well, by rights she should’ve been given her limping orders, but Bertram had some strange affection for her. Was it sexual, or still more venal? Best not to start out in that direction – let alone go there.

  Aquila non capit muscas – ‘The eagle does not hunt for flies.’ Georgie was pensioned off to this queer care home in De Vere Gardens,
and instead of running drugs she sat still and waited for them. The gloomy basement, squishy with dust, barbed with Tony’s PR tat, was a carnivorous plant into which the flies spiralled, only to trigger the sensitive hairs that ensured their gooey absorption. Eagle-eyed Andy – neither he nor Bertram were fools enough to touch their stock – had only to wait until the trap-flat was full.

  Piles of discarded clothing, together with the previously alluded to black plastic bags, smoothed the corners of the master bedroom. The brocaded drapes muffled the hammering of the rain in the basement area. A bedside lamp illumined the altar of pillows and cushions that had to be constructed just so, then mortared with smaller pillows and cushions, each time that Tony tried to sacrifice himself to sleep. It was Georgie who built the altar, and who had to arrange the stiff loops of Tony’s oxygen line so they wouldn’t kink and block during his provisional oblivion.

  This was a boudoir – we always felt – that, with its huge old water bed, exerted a lunar pull on body fluids, encouraging their wanton exchange. We swing from ape to ape by pricking stick, but sex – especially low down and dirty sex, sex with lesions – will do.

  Georgie picked up the receiver of the antiquated Bakelite phone on the bedside table and made The Call. Georgie never had a get-up; she was lucky if there were a few sugary sips of methadone linctus to stave off withdrawal. The dialling alone was torment to her hurting fingers, with each circuit feeling as if her entire body were being pulled apart on a torturous wheel. Georgie made The Call, and listened with the acuity of great suffering as the impulses nattered away under the London streets.