The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  To a recently completed block of studio flats in Brook Green, where Andy was lying with a nearly sixteen-year-old girl called Pandora, whom he’d liberated from a pimp called Bev, so that she could be pressed, by his hand, into the bondage of his thighs. Pandora, who, at this early stage in her misfortunate life, despite the miseries that boxed her in, was still given to the giggles and hair-flicks of girls her age, girls who’d never seen the (men’s) things that she had.

  The mattress sat on a carpet that stank of rubbery underlay. Pandora sprawled across Andy’s thighs and smelt the ghee that Meena, his wife, used liberally in her cooking. The ghee and the traces of urine in his sparse pubic hair. It was taking Andy a long time to get aroused; Pandora’s mouth was available to him whenever he wanted it, so such congress had the ordinary sensuality of squeezing a blackhead. He groped for the chirruping mobile phone without troubling to shuck Pandora off.

  ‘Any poss’ of getting over here firstish?’ Georgie said without foreplay. ‘We’re gagging for some albums – soul and reggae.’ This was the kids’ club encryption they used: heroin was ‘soul’, crack cocaine ‘reggae’. Only if the interceptor of their calls had been a complete ingenue could crew and clients have escaped decoding; of course, such naivety was a given.

  ‘Is anyone else there?’ Andy asked.

  ‘Er, no, not yet – but they probably will be soon. Please, Andy, I –’

  ‘Not now. I haven’t got any albums. I’m busy – it’ll have to be …’ He searched his sparse mental terrain – rancorous swamps, low hills of contempt, the isolated crag of violence – for the name of the runner currently serving Tony’s patch. ‘Quentin. Yeah, give Quentin a call in a couple of hours.’

  Georgie knew it would take at least two hours for Bertram to see the Jamaicans and the Turks, then another for Andy to do the portioning, packaging and distributing. It wouldn’t be until late afternoon that Quentin came padding down the stairs of the mansion block, the complexion of his motorcycle leathers clearer than the hide they hid. It’ll be too late by then! Georgie’s body yowled, I’ll be mush!

  ‘P-Please,’ she sobbed into the phone. ‘Andy, I know you’ve got one or two, you’ve always –’

  ‘Can’t talk now.’ He cut her right off. It was true, Andy held a small stash, enough to keep Pandora … busy, but this was the way it was: the eagle does not hunt flies. The flies would be buzzed into Tony Riley’s trap-flat, and by mid-afternoon Andy would relent and make the drop himself.

  Andy liked to keep Georgie and Tony on a tight leash, feel them tugging as they walked to heel. It was all in the desperate doggy tug of their need and their obedience that Andy’s mastery inhered. Back in Southall he was a nothing, the bad third son who’d been to jail for thieving; but in the Royal Borough it was white women like Georgie who bowed down before him.

  Billy, still slow in the syrupy glow of his get-up fix, enjoyed this time: the elongated hours before the dealer came. It was when the party got under way. The hack combo in the matching blue nylon jackets picked up the beat and strolled with it; the drunk waiter circulated with his drinks tray; the cowboy actor with steer-horn shoulders mock butt-fucked his starlet date, as he pretended to teach her pool; Clutterbuck and his cummerbunded cronies drank cocktails and smoked cigars – ‘I still have a few left over from the pre-Castro days.’ Hrundi V. Bakshi leant on pillars or hid behind bamboo, and shyly observed the gay scene.

  As the guests trickled in, alliances were made and concordats formed. These weren’t minor Hollywood players pretending to be slightly less minor Hollywood players, but the flies who congregated at Tony’s flat and waited for the eagle.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, it is you! Wyoming Bill Kelso!’ Billy said to Bev, Pandora’s old pimp – a big Yardie bulked out still more by a puffa jacket. ‘I am the biggest fan of your movies –’

  ‘What the fuck,’ Bev said, pushing past Billy, who had answered the door. Billy fell back, muttering, ‘Howdie pardner.’

  Bev could pick up where he lived, in Harlesden, but the gear Bertram and Andy’s crew served was reliably better; besides, his girls worked in Earl’s Court. Bev had intellectual pretensions. He was reading Heart of Darkness, and, plonking himself down in an armchair opposite Tony, engaged the suffocating ex-PR man in a conversation about the impact of colonialism.

  Between chuffs on his oxygen Tony was eager to participate; he was wobbly-bubbly, oscillating in his start-the-day steroid high. That he’d never read Conrad’s novella himself didn’t matter in the least.

  Billy, wearing a trim maid’s uniform, checked the video intercom, then buzzed in Jeremy, who came ambling through the upstairs lobby and down the stairs. Jeremy, in Oxfords, jeans, and with a silk handkerchief snotting from the top pocket of his tweed jacket. He appeared every inch the scion of a minor squirearchical house – which is what he was. However, his account at Berry Brothers and Rudd had been stopped and his Purdey pawned; Jeremy’s career in stocks was irretrievably broken, yet still he brayed, such was his sense of entitlement – to drugs.

  Next to the party was Yami, a Sudanese princess as tall, elegant and unexpected in these dismal surroundings as a heron alighting in a municipal boating pond. She stalked along the corridor of the flat, so leggy her legs seemed to bend the wrong way. Everyone assumed that Yami whored, yet her almond eyes, salted with contempt, held no promise of anything.

  Billy followed at her high heels, chuckling, and when Yami rounded on him, Hrundi V. Bakshi said, ‘I missed the middle part, but I can tell from the way you are enjoying yourselves it must have been a very humorous anecdote.’ Yami looked at him with regal hatred.

  Then Gary arrived, a bullocky little geezer, with his hair damped down in a senatorial fringe, and a thick gold chain encircling his thick neck. Gary, who was in jail garb – immaculate trainers, pressed tracksuit and freshly laundered T-shirt – touched fists with Billy as he came in. ‘Safe,’ they said – although it was anything but.

  And so the party filled up. David arrived, a failing screenwriter of spurious intensity, his face dominated by a gnomon nose, its shadow always indicating that this was the wrong time. With him was Tanya, his stylist girlfriend, a jolie laide who had to drop cocaine solution into her blue eyes in order to dilate her pinprick pupils, so her colleagues couldn’t tell she was doing smack. As if.

  Finally, there was an estate agent with boyish bad looks, who tore at the sore in the corner of his mouth with a ragged thumbnail. While he was cluttering up the living room of Tony Riley’s flat, his own prospective buyers were getting soaked in Acton.

  They parked their arses and groaned the same old addict myths: how far they’d shlepped, how hard they’d fought, how the fucking Greeks kept pushing wooden horses within their justifiably guarded walls. They slumped on chairs, floor cushions and couches, a layer of cigarette smoke slow-swirling above their vaporous heads, waiting for Circe and lotus leaves at forty quid a bunch.

  Tony Riley still had a smidgin of heroin left, and each time he spat out his mouthpiece to take up his foil buckler and suck pipe, the double-bores of their withdrawing eyes followed his every move. Tony compounded their anguish by sharing with Bev; they were, after all, far up the River Congo together, with the pimp bamboozled by Conrad’s semantics: ‘Yeah, I mean, like, when ’e calls ’em “niggers”, ’e don’ mean it like “niggaz” do ’e? I mean, ’e weren’t a bruwa, woz ’e?’

  Tony, taking a chuff, aspirated ‘ho’, by which he meant ‘no’.

  On the lesser of the two sofas – an intimate two-seater, deep and softly upholstered – the screenwriter and the stylist were struggling not to touch. From moment to moment they became more mutually repulsed: he could not stand to look upon her needy face, while she was appalled by his pores – so very big, they threatened to engulf her.

  Gary slumped on a floor cushion by the radiator, his fists held in front of him. The knuckles were scrawled upon in blue ink: God, Elvis, Chelsea – the council flat trinity. Scrawled upon with pins, in prison, whic
h for men of Gary’s ilk was only the continuation, by other means, of double maths on a wet Tuesday afternoon.

  Tired of propping herself on a skimpy windowsill, Yami commanded, ‘Shift yersel”, and Gary hunkered over, so that she could curl herself round his back, assuming a child’s nap posture. He may’ve found himself cupped by Yami’s thighs and belly, her breasts snuggling against his back, but Gary experienced no arousal. Like all the other waiters, his libido was further underground than the tube line from Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner: they could sense sex rumbling through the earthy element above them, but down here it was frigid and still.

  Georgie kept nellying in and out of the room to check that her meal ticket was all right: Tony was as thin and translucent as a potato crisp, and might crunch into powder at any time. Every three minutes she nellied down the corridor to the bedroom and called Andy again. ‘This number is currently unavailable, please try again later.’ Georgie sat, the phone cradled in her rotten lap, picturing with ghastly clarity the dealer journeying across the city in his metallic-green Ford Mondeo, a car so anonymous that to look upon it was to see nothing. Her feverish imagination summoned up cops and crooks and tidal waves on Scrubs Lane; anything, in fact, that might get between her vein and the needle.

  Thunder bumped over the rooftops as Billy went from one huddled waiter to the next, asking if they wanted a cup of tea. It was all he could bring to the party. In the kitchen he clicked on the electric jug and lost himself in his reverie. Through the serving hatch he could see the pompous Clutterbuck and his stuffed-dress-shirt pals, while he, Hrundi V. Bakshi, tiptoed along the margins, concealing himself behind shrubberies, pressing himself against fake veneer walls, lurking artlessly below the watery amoebae that were evidence of Alice Clutterbuck’s awful taste in abstract painting. If he approached the guests with ‘Oh, hello, hello, good evening – what a beautiful evening it is, to be sure’, they turned their backs on his naked gaucherie.

  The jug clicked off. Billy slung bags in cups and rained hot death down on them. The rejected Hrundi had found a parrot in a cage. The parrot gave him a hungry look, and the borstal boy playing the manic-depressive comedian playing the washed-up Indian actor cocked his head charmingly, then said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Num-num,’ the parrot clucked. ‘Birdy num-num.’

  ‘Num-num?’ Billy queried aloud, and from the living room came ‘What the fuck’re you on about?’ It was Jeremy, whose well-tailored accent was finally fraying, along with the cuffs of his Turnbull and Asser shirt.

  ‘Birdy num-num,’ the parrot reiterated and rattled its claws in the bars. Looking down, Billy spotted a dish on the floor. He picked it up so that we all could see: it was full of bird food and printed on the side was BIRDY NUM NUM. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Billy chortled, ‘birdy wants num-nums does he? I’ll give him num-nums – I’ll give you your num-nums.’ He began spooning sugar into the mugs lined up along the gleaming counter – squat, fine bone, chipped. ‘Here, birdy, here!’ The parrot pecked at the grain strewn on the bottom of its cage, while Billy poured milk into the mismatched tea set. ‘Num-nums, num-nums, birdy num-nums,’ he continued muttering, as he fetched down from a cupboard the packet of milk chocolate HobNobs.

  Hrundi V. Bakshi was hugely enjoying feeding the parrot; in the ecstasy of interspecific contact he forgot the stuffy Clutterbucks and their snobby guests. His browned-up face glowed with boyish enthusiasm as he sowed the bottom of the cage; but then, ‘Num-num is all gone!’ The num-num was indeed all gone. He had nothing more to offer, so had to put down the bowl and walk away, dabbing his damp palms on his linen jacket, glancing round to check he hadn’t attracted attention.

  Billy lined the teas up in the serving hatch and knocked on the wooden frame. He popped his satchel lips and made a ‘pock-pock’ sound, as a techie does when checking to see that a microphone is working. The waiters strewn across Tony Riley’s living room ignored him; they were listening to something else: the music of their agonized nerves, tortured by craving the way a heavy-metal guitarist tortures the strings of his instrument; they heard their nerves screech – a chord that seemed to have been sustained for ten thousand years.

  Hrundi V. Bakshi had found a control panel sunk in a wall. The array of buttons and dials was connected to he knew not what, but he pressed one anyway, then, hearing a speaker crackle, spoke into a grille: ‘Birdy num-num “pock-pock”. Howdie, pardner.’ This latter an allusion to his cringeworthy encounter with Bev, the Yardie pimp playing the B-actor playing Wyoming Bill Kelso, the cowboy actor.

  Warming to his medium, Hrundi blew on the mic again, ‘pock-pock’, then announced: ‘Waiting for more num-nums. Num-nums is all gone!’

  ‘Bi-lly,’ chided Georgie, who knew all about his counter-life.

  ‘No, seriously,’ Billy said, ‘I’m not fucking handing these round, they can come and get ’em if they want ’em.’

  Birdy num-num. Birdy num-num all gone – this was the key scene in The Party so far as Billy was concerned. The parrot had had his fill, yet still craved more. Much more. Billy came round from the kitchen and, one by one, checking who wanted sugar, handed out the teas. For specially favoured guests he also offered a milk chocolate HobNob.

  Like an army chaplain giving extreme unction on a battlefield, Billy bent down low to present them with their sweetened solution, and while subservient he offered this pathetic intercession: when Andy came, he, Billy, would speak to the dealer on their behalf. Andy always disappeared into the master bedroom with Georgie, who’d taken their orders in advance. Then there would be a further long wait, as she negotiated her and Tony’s cut for concentrating the market, trapping the flies.

  Billy, in return for a pinch of smack here, a crumb of crack there, offered to ensure that their orders would be filled priority, or else suggested other tiny services that he could perform: the feeding of meters, the obtaining of works, pipes and foil; perhaps even the making of calls to employers/wives/husbands/children to explain – in sincere, doctorly tones – the entirely legitimate reasons for so-and-so’s non-arrival. This marginal service sector paid only because of Billy’s preternatural ability to gauge the extent of his clients’ desperation, and so adjust his pricing accordingly.

  They clutched his sleeve and murmured pitiably, ‘I was meant to be in Baker Street at half eleven’ or ‘My kid’s out in the car, go check she’s OK, willya?’ or ‘I gotta have a hit before I leave!’ And Billy would nod gravely, accepting downpayment for these indulgences; the pope of dope with his dirty chuckle of absolution: ‘Er-h’herr.’

  ‘Waiting for more num-num, num-num is all gone,’ Hrundi said to Billy; then Billy said it aloud. The coincidence between the hunger of the parrot in the cage at the party and the cold turkeys in the cage of addiction never ceased to amuse him – like a custard pie thrown in the face of the world.

  And still Tony nagged for breath on the sofa, and still Georgie nellied in and out of the living room. ‘Ha-ha-ha –’ he gasped.

  ‘What’s that, Ups-a-Boy?’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha –’

  ‘What’re you saying, Noodly-Toots?’

  ‘Have you, have you – ?’

  ‘Have I what, Noodly?’

  ‘Have you, have you “euch” called him?’

  ‘Oh, you know I have, Ups-a-Boy, just this second.’ So it was that they conformed to all the ordinary amnesia of the long-term married.

  Every three minutes she would make the same forlorn calculation: their desperation factored against Andy’s irritation; but, whatever the result, she’d still bruise her fingers dialling.

  Billy retreated once more to the kitchen. He opened a cupboard door and the band were all in there smoking a joint. ‘Shut the door, man.’ The sax player comically honked. Next, Billy found the control panel again, and dickered with its switches. At the party in The Party, the statue of the little boy peeing in the ersatz rill increased its flow all over Wyoming Bill Kelso; the fire burning on the circular hearth flared up; the bar where Clutt
erbuck and his cronies were standing retracted into the wall, scattering glasses with tinkly abandon.

  Billy watched these dumb happenings delightedly, superimposing them on Tony Riley’s living room, so that it was Gary and Yami who were slammed against the mouldy wallpaper; Tony’s Dupont that threw flame at Bev’s face; and Jeremy’s mug from which the tea jetted.

  What of us? Does it ever tire us – me – our swarming behind the sightless eyes of the junkies and the tarts? Do I remain as amused as Billy by the slapstick of addiction, the inability of these Buster Keatons to do even one thing properly at once? Well, yes and no. True, I never grow bored with my own imposture; each time I break into a cell, rip off a strand of DNA, patch it into my own RNA and so reproduce myself, I experience anew the thrill of creation.

  Jean Cocteau – a junky, true enough, although before our time – said that all artists are, by nature, hermaphrodites, as the act of creation is one of self-insemination, followed by parthenogenesis. I – we – would concur with this, except that we are far more inventive: we mutate so quickly within the galleries of our patrons, simultaneously gifting them originals and multiples.

  Then there’s time, the most significant dimension of creation. Size may matter, but time diminishes all things, bringing them down to our level. We – I – bide our time; we savour our own side effects, the minor symptoms of accidie and loss of appetite, the insomnia and the biliousness. We aren’t one of those Grand Guignol maladies, half in love with its own horror show. We do not seek to liquidize tissue in seconds, then send blood spouting from every orifice; nor do we see any beauty in the gestural embellishments of the cancers – although, all in good time, we may bring on those cellular clowns. Consider the slapstick of cancer, its crazy capers, the way it messes up the metabolism, chucking buckets full of tumours about the body.

  No, they call what we do disease, but we know it’s art; and the art of life is a process. This is what we do: we hang in there. We loiter – we don’t hurry, we take years – decades, perhaps. For us, human death is a failure; unless, that is, enough of us have blasted off to colonize new worlds.