The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  They are mobilizing against us. Pegylated interferon alpha, Ribavirin – crass names, brutal mercenaries. They don’t even know how these drugs work, but let me tell you – it’s not pretty. Figuratively speaking, they cut off our balls and stitch up our cunts … Still, let’s not dwell on the future; for now, it’s still that Tuesday afternoon, in November 1998, and at Tony Riley’s there’re loads of us. Loads in Billy, Georgie and Tony himself. Loads in Bev and Jeremy, loads in Gary and Yami, loads in the screenwriter and his stylist girlfriend. And not forgetting the estate agent – there’re loads of us squatting in him, as well. An abundance of mes, two million in every millilitre of their blood – a whole earth’s population in one individual.

  We bide our time. ‘It is good’, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, said to Claudine Longet as Michele Monet, ‘to be having a good time.’

  ‘What the fuck’re you on about?’ said Tanya, the stylist.

  ‘I am saying to you’ – Billy waggled his head from side to side, his black locks swinging – ‘that it is good to be having a good time.’

  After the encounter with the parrot, and the revelation of its empty dish, this was Billy’s second favourite moment in The Party. The girl, in her filmy, lemon-yellow mini-dress with the spangly bodice, was obviously meant for him – why else the soft focus, her slim yet shapely form, her air of sexualized neurosis, the ski jumps of her hair? Moreover, she was being harassed by her date, who was none other than Herb Ellis (as himself), the boorish director who threw Hrundi off the set out beyond Barstow, with the ringing cliché, ‘You’ll never make another movie in this town again!’

  How many times had Billy heard that before. Still, here he was, looking deep into Tanya’s eyes – which were brimming with sickness – and they’d clicked, hadn’t they? ‘Lissen,’ Billy went on (as himself), ‘I’ve gotta bit of gear if you want, not much …’ He glanced at David, but the screenwriter, unable to cope with his enfeebled conscience – it was his kid who was outside in the car – had dropped a Rohypnol.

  ‘I dunno …’ Tanya muttered. She was chubby-cheeked with gingerish hair – not at all like Michele Monet.

  ‘C’mon,’ Billy said, insistent, ‘meet me in the karzy in five.’ He wandered off, avoiding the sandy-haired waiter, who, having downed most of the drinks on his tray, was now completely pissed.

  But at first the bathroom was locked, and when the synthetic cockatoo who’d been using it emerged – a woman who, earlier in the evening, Billy’s antics had gifted with a roast chicken for a hairpiece – there was a second waiting her turn. Ever gallant, Billy let her go in front of him.

  Hrundi V. Bakshi climbed up a spiral staircase to the second storey of the Clutterbucks’ extensive and ugly dwelling, crept into a bedroom that was an atonal symphony of nylon and velour, then finally found his way into the en suite bathroom. By now he was risibly pigeon-toed, his knees half crossed to sustain his full bladder. He’d been refusing alcoholic drinks throughout the party – but he’d drunk a lot of water. Then there was the strawberry soup he’d sipped sitting on a daft low stool, while to either side of him the sophisticated Hollywood types exchanged banter.

  The Clutterbucks’ bathroom was intimidating to a fake Indian. There was shag-pile carpeting, tiled steps up to a shower and pot plants everywhere; still, at least there was the comic relief, the slackening of Sellers’s funny face.

  Tanya came in. She was wearing a ribbed sweater, one of David’s; the sleeves covered her hands except for her gnawed-upon fingers. She sat on the edge of the bath and peered down at Billy’s silt. Billy busied himself at the sink, setting out works, spoon, wraps of smack and citric acid on the shelf.

  ‘I won’t fuck you, y’know,’ Tanya said dully. Through his filmy lens Billy saw Michele Monet singing of love, while accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar.

  ‘It is good to be having a good time,’ Billy said in his stupid golly-gosh Indian accent, heating the spoon with a Bic lighter. Tanya sighed – she was used to idiots and snapped, ‘Gimme that.’

  But Billy thought this precipitate; he whipped his belt from the loops of his jeans, half garrotted his arm and dowsed for a vein. When, eventually, he handed the syringe to Tanya, the barrel was full of blood. Or should we say boold? The sucked-up back-flow of his circulatory system. Billy’s viral load wasn’t particularly high, and it was only a one-mil’ syringe, yet there we were, a Varanasi’s worth of virions, our isocahedral capsids jostling together in the tube like so many footballs floating down the Ganges.

  Not that Tanya didn’t have plenty of us, too. When she kicked off her flip-flop – in the fashion industry they dubbed this ‘heroin chic’, but, trust me, it was only junky déshabillé – pulled her foot up in front of her on the bath and, taking the syringe, bent to tend it between her toes, she paused to remark, ‘I can’t have a hit in my arm – they check there.’ Then asked Billy, ‘Are you negative?’ To which the only realistic reply would’ve been, are you fucking joking? This guy is nothing but negation piled upon negation! But once he’d gruntaffirmed ‘Finkso’, she let herself have us.

  How was it for me? Think of that numinous – but, for all that, real – moment in any party, when it all begins to slide into mayhem. The guests are tipsy; the band are getting looser, louder and funkier; darkness has come to press against the picture windows, and shadows swell in the swimming pool; sensual possibilities tickle everyone’s extremities; and the drunken waiter falls backwards into the kitchen, where he knocks off the chef’s toupee.

  That’s when the influx comes: younger, crazier, happier gatecrashers, prancing and dancing, and twisting their minds off, a gay cavalcade with a baby elephant they’ve liberated from the zoo and daubed with corny hippy slogans: ‘The World is Flat!’, ‘Love is a Sugar Cube!’ and ‘Go Naked!’

  That’s what it was like for us as we gatecrashed Tanya.

  No, they didn’t fuck, but they were slung together by the plush impact of the heroin, ribbed pullover against mohair woolly. Tanya thought of little else, and Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, flushed the toilet once, twice, a third time; then, fool that he was, lifted the lid of the cistern and fiddled with the ballcock. One of Alice Clutterbuck’s vile daubs fell off the wall into the cistern; Hrundi pulled it out and jerked the end of the toilet roll for some paper to wipe it. The roll began to spin, disgorging loop after skein of toilet paper on to the fluffy floor of the bathroom. Alarmed, Hrundi stooped to gather up an armful and, in so doing, predictably, dropped the cistern lid. Down below a lump of plaster fell on to the snare drum. The band played on. Hrundi rubbed the blotchy purple painting with the toilet paper; it smeared, but he put it back on the wall anyway, then stuffed the bundle of toilet paper into the toilet, shut the lid and flushed it. The toilet began to overflow; the bidet turned into a fountain. Billy watched – numb, enthralled – as a new interior rill formed a course across the Clutterbucks’ bathroom.

  Five minutes previously, in the catacomb of the master bedroom, cadaverous Georgie was strung up upon the wire for eternity when she heard ‘I’m coming myself.’ Andy had cut through the static, then broken the connection.

  Andy slid through the chicane on Kensington Church Street and stopped at the lights opposite the Polaris bulk of Barker’s. When the feeder light changed, he turned into Kensington Road. This junction had no resonance for him: he thought not of Biba hippies and Kensington Market honking of patchouli; nor, as the Mondeo headed east, did he ruminate on William and Mary’s big move. The previous August, Andy hadn’t so much as registered the cut-flower embankments that, overnight, had piled up along the railings of Kensington Palace – the most expensive compost heap in history.

  For Andy, those strange August days had been business as usual; the same plus c’est la même chose of pick-ups and divvying-ups, of driving and serving, of screwing ruined under-age girls in empty flats, then heading back to Southall to play the overbearing and abusive paterfamilias – a role that Andy performed magnificently.
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br />   There was no prescience for this man, either; he could not sense the future, the coming Muji-Bouji’s-woojie of dizzy dancing on ceaseless credit. No, Andy saw what was there in front of him: sheikhs, transplanted desert blooms, their pot bellies tenting their robes, their masked womenfolk ambling along behind. He saw men in shirtsleeves boring themselves to death in the overheated conference rooms of the Royal Garden Hotel. He saw cabs and buses and a faux-vintage Harrods delivery van. He didn’t feel, as anyone else might, the vapid cosmopolitanism of this quarter of London, where the corner shops sold Swiss watches and the postmen knew no one’s name.

  Back in Tony Riley’s flat, the chord that seemed as if it might sustain for ten thousand years was chopped off. Georgie jerked into action: all must be as the grim little god wanted it. Bev must cut short his seminar and, together with Yami, go into the small back bedroom, where more relics of Tony’s gift for public relations were stacked and piled. The two black people came to rest on a large leather pouffe, sitting at the feet of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Tony dressed as Wyatt Earp, his six-shooters blazing from the hip, a speech bubble poking from the side of his Stetson. 2-D Tony was saying, ‘Meet me at the OK Corral on Old Brompton Road for fun that should be outlawed!’ Bev and Yami didn’t have speech bubbles.

  Georgie fluttered among the remaining whites. ‘C’mon, get up.’ She ordered the sedated screenwriter: ‘Giss yer money. Tell me what you want – Andy’s coming.’ The junkies dug out their linty notes – Gary even had the shame of change. The binary listing, brown/white, began. Tony left off his oxygen to do the count.

  All at once, the party was in full swing. Jeremy stood and, locating a mirror, held it up so that he could comb his hair. It was as if he were courting drugs. Gary got up, rolled his shoulders and then, leaning against the wall with his arms held out, stretched first one leg then the other, just another bloke in a tracksuit limbering up.

  David tottered off up the corridor. He tapped on the bathroom door. ‘I know you’re in there, Tanya.’ Knew, and didn’t really mind; theirs, like all drug economies, was a hard scrabble for subsistence: you did what you had to. ‘Lissen,’ he continued, ‘Andy’s coming – I’ve put in our order, but I’m gonna get Poppy from the car, so you better come out.’

  Why would anyone bring their small child into this miserable place at the precise moment when the drug dealing – and taking – was about to begin in earnest? Answer: risks incalculable for those to whom responsibility is a given. The child had been in the parked car for over an hour, the rain was slackening off, traffic wardens and dog-walkers would be out on the street. There were these factors, and also the screenwriter’s naive faith in the capacity of a little girl to summon up compassion – credit might be forthcoming.

  But not with this little a girl, and not from Andy, who was riding the clutch at the pelican crossing beside the De Vere Hotel. Riding the clutch and holding Pandora’s crotch, as any other sales rep might fondle the Mondeo’s controls, its gearstick or steering wheel. He knew she was eight days shy of her sixteenth birthday – and felt both more and less secure because of it. Bertram had warned Andy off Pandora sternly; but his business partner pointed out that the girl’s mouth was multipurpose. With the wipers slicing semicircles of London out of the drabness, Pandora sat behind the windscreen, a chipmunk with cheeks stuffed full of Class As.

  We were in Pandora all right – in her for the duration. When those hateful anti-retrovirals became widely available, she wouldn’t have the modicum of self-discipline needed to administer them. Yes, we’ll be in and out of her for decades – and, given what she gets up to, and who gets up her, we have reason to be grateful to this air terminal of a girl, through which our kind transfer with conspicuous ease.

  We were in Pandora – but we weren’t in Andy. I know, I promised you a victim at the outset; but, sad to report, it isn’t Andy. No matter how deserving the dealer may’ve been of a debilitating and progressive disease, he was in no danger of contracting this one. As has been remarked, he didn’t take drugs – except for a joint when a girl was sucking him limp; and for the purposes of fellation, he wore not one but three condoms. Andy didn’t subscribe to the African idiocy that a sweet wasn’t worth having with a wrapper on it; because it wasn’t a sweet for Andy at all, it was a grim staple, sexual sorghum that he had to shovel down because famine might come at any time.

  He parked the Mondeo at the far end of De Vere Gardens. Parked it scrupulously, sending Pandora to fetch a ticket from the machine, while he scoped out the other parked cars, then looked up and down the street for possible tails. Sometimes Andy carried a scanner that flipped automatically through the police frequencies, but mostly he didn’t bother: he knew that when the bust came – and come it would, eventually – he would’ve been set up by a fuck-wit junky.

  No screenwriter, no matter how inventive, could have got down on the page the scenario that unfolded as Andy and Pandora, together with David and his daughter, were buzzed in. As the plausible quartet took the short lift ride down, the junkies crowded into the corridor. Tanya emerged from the bathroom, with Billy snuffling in her train. Georgie came limping at a run along the corridor and herded them all back towards the living room. ‘Get in there! Keep outta Andy’s way!’ Answered the door, then hustled the dealer and his jailbait away. David’s daughter said something fivish, like, ‘How long’re we gonna stay here, Daddy?’ And Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, took a direct hit in the forehead with the sucker dart fired by the Clutterbucks’ kid, who was romping in his plaid pyjamas in his toy-stuffed room. ‘Howdie, pardner,’ Billy mugged, reprising his embarrassing encounter with Wyoming Bill Kelso, and the little girl – traumatized by an hour alone in a parked car in a London residential street on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November – started to cry.

  Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods. Post hoc ergo propter hoc – ‘after this, therefore because of this’. Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once – or even one – will be familiar with this instinctive belief: of course you would try to stop the toilet overflowing by shutting the lid; of course you would stuff all that toilet paper down the pan; of course you would – given your state of shock – allow yourself to be fed with liquor, despite having been refusing drinks all evening; and naturally your obeisance before the great god Necessity would be rewarded with the vestal virgin Michele Monet; she in nothing but a towel, you in an orange jumpsuit because you’ve had your trousers pulled off you by Fred Clutterbuck and Herb Ellis. Of course.

  These effects follow their causes far more surely than night follows day; and so it went: Hrundi decried the desecration of the sacred Ganesh, and the hip protesting young folk decided to wash the slogans off the baby elephant in the pool. Then the drunken Hrundi climbed out of an upper window and rolled down a projecting roof into the deep end, and people dived in to save him. Then the crapulent waiter messed with the controls and the dance floor slid back, dumping more jolly guests into the water – water that was frothing with the washing-up liquid used on the baby elephant. A great glinting-white mass, such as children of all ages delight in, began steadily, like some beautiful and alien organism, to creep up on the band, who kept right on laying down the groove, despite the suds that spattered across the snare drum, each multicoloured bubble – caught by the adequate cinematography of Lucien Ballard (died 1988) – a world. Possibly.

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc – but Billy’s gofering was a triumph of the will. Andy sat at a kneehole desk, banknotes piling up in front of him as he took pellets from the stoppers Pandora had removed from her gob. Georgie fluffed, then stammered, ‘I h-hope y’d-don’t mind, Andy, it’s just that B-Billy was crashing here last night, and he’s a help – what with Tony being so ill … He keeps them in line, and better they pitch up here – doncha think?’ However, this was a conversation that, having only one participant, was going nowhere.

  Bill
y gave Andy the orders in monosyllables – ‘Two brown, one white’ – while Andy uttered profundities such as ‘Here’. Billy darted back into the living room, distributed the goods, watched them being unwrapped, took his cut, returned to the bedroom and did the same again.

  David and his dysfunctional family left at once; as did Yami, Gary and the estate agent. They tucked their stoppers into their gobs and put on workaday faces. They took the lift back up to the lobby of the mansion block, walked past the console table neatly stacked with junk mail, then stepped out the weighty oak door, with its brass fittings, and took the tiled steps down to the geometric street.

  Yami turned right, towards the Brompton Road, moving with the pantherish totter of a tall woman on too-high heels. Gary splashed over to a van that was amorphous with dents and bashes. David, his daughter, and his abetter in her criminal neglect, climbed down into an MG Midget that wasn’t theirs.

  None of them said any goodbyes – what would’ve been the point of that? Nor, of course, were we required to say our farewells; we went with them all – including the kid. Went with them as they horizontally transmitted us across town.

  Now the drugs were on the premises, the party in the basement was in full swing. Bev returned from the back bedroom to resume his seminar on the literature of colonialism. He and Tony sat either side of a coffee table strewn with the apparatus of derangement, and, while Tony battled to insinuate a poot of crack smoke into his lungs, Bev gently coaxed him, ‘C’mon, bruv, thass it, I’ll ‘old the lighter.’

  Jeremy hunched in the furthest corner of the room, his cheap gold hair wreathed in dear fumes. In between hits he interjected: ‘But don’t you see – I mean, Kurtz is – I went to Africa – once.’ Disjointed remarks, made with tremendous sincerity and not intended to be ingratiating, because he had no need to be – the brown and the white had done it for him.