by Will Self
Crazy intimacy frothed up from the sunken pool of the living room, then shivered along the corridor to the master bedroom, where Billy – as Hrundi – had found a new Michele. What happy mayhem as the Hollywood party descended into anarchy. Billy was still in the swimming pool with the gay young folk, overseeing the bath time, while Pandora sat atop the baby elephant; coincidentally, she was wearing the same clothes – blue jeans and a grey T-shirt – that Michele Monet had been lent after her own dress was soaked.
Yes, Pandora sat on the baby elephant in the room – her own babyishness. It was irresistible. Billy saw them leaving together – leaving the wild party saturated with crack foam, where a Russian balalaika band that had just happened by was whipping the revellers into a frenzy of dreadful dancing. It was dawn, and the LAPD were standing by their squad cars. They had no warrants out on innocent Hrundi, so he and Michele would get into the funny three-wheeler – Michele with her mini-dress back on again – then they’d bumble down the palm-lined boulevards of Kensington and Knightsbridge, searching for a cute bungalow smothered in bougainvillea, where Billy could declare his hapless love.
On a Tuesday afternoon in November?
Andy goaded his mule – ‘Going’ – and handed her the remaining rocks of crack and pellets of heroin, all wrapped up once more. She popped the stoppers in her cheeks. They exited the bedroom, Andy moving with the slow lollop of a creature that knows how to conserve its evil energy. He paused, seeing Bev by the coffee table, and snapped at Georgie, ‘No blacks. I told you no blacks. I won’t come by here if there’re blacks.’ Then he headed for the front door, Pandora walking to heel.
Before he reached it the buzzer went. The foamy, cracky vibe shuddered, then popped. Georgie squeezed past Andy to get to the intercom. ‘Who izzit?’ she demanded. ‘Jones’ crackled back at her.
Jones. She could see him on the poxy screen in his trademark, wide-lapelled velvet jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Jones, partially sighted behind shades-for-all-seasons. Jones, looming on a grey day with his white black man shtick. Jones, who, like a sponging relative, invariably turned up exactly when Sunday lunch was being served. Jones, who sold powders in the West End drinking clubs. Jones, who held court at Picasso’s on the King’s Road with a big bunch of keys squatting on his crotch. Jones … but don’t fret, we’ll soon’ve seen the last of him: split ends on sharp shoulders.
‘Let him in,’ Andy commanded; then they all waited until there came a knock on the front door of the flat. Georgie heaved it open, sucking Jones and another man into the cramped vestibule. They all stood silently for several seconds – Pandora, Georgie, Andy, Billy, Jones and the new man – recompressing in the airlock of their drug paranoia. Presently, Andy – who knew Jones – said, ‘You should’ve called.’ Then he and his mule disappeared off up the carpeted mesa.
It took a while for the party to get back under way. Georgie remonstrated with Jones: no call – and who’s this, then? This was, Jones explained, Cal Devenish, the bad-boy writer, whom he’d picked up at the Plantation Club in Soho. The celebrated Plantation – where there was a wake going on for the world-famous painter Trouget. Jones related these things breathlessly, as if they were momentous: names, reputations, achievements – they meant nothing to him, although he knew they had currency.
Not much with Georgie; she wasn’t impressed by Jones dropping Trouget’s name, despite death being a career move she herself was about to make. As for Devenish, she’d heard his name in her arts programme producing days; seen him at parties as well. She knew nothing of his work, but held fast to the received opinion that it was glib, and that he was an egomaniacal pasticheur. However, his bona fides as an addict weren’t in doubt; he hovered there in the vestibule, his stringy form dangling from his swollen head, its taut, rubbery surface dimpled with acne scars, puckered up with fresh scabs. At night, in front of the mirror, Devenish picked away at what other people thought he was – distressing his public image, while destroying the private individual.
‘I, yeah – sorry,’ he said to Georgie, for he’d immediately grasped that she was the chatelaine. ‘I was looking for a bit of … gear? And Jones –’
‘Come in, come in.’ Georgie was all scary smiles, Billy bowed and scraped, because Andy had left a little smidgen-wigeon-pigeon behind on tick, and that meant there was a mark-up to be had. The beat combo struck up again as they trooped past the Dexion shelving; the Amazonian girl with the Mary Quant crop gyrated by the poolside, the foamy beast reanimated.
Billy hustled around, making the introductions, finding Jones and Devenish seats, explaining to Bev that this was a real writer, who had written real books. Billy kept taking sidelong looks at Cal: assessing his financial potential, certainly, but also taken by the other man’s air of hopeless bewilderment.
Cal Devenish was quite drunk, a little coked up and oozing shame. Nowadays, he left a silvery trail of shame wherever he went; and, still more snail-like, he carried his bed of shame with him. He had reached a stage where seconds of euphoria cost him weeks of abject self-loathing. He was on his way to Finland, to promote one of his books that was being published there, and had only dropped into the Plantation to have a single drink and to commiserate with Hilary Edmonds on his great financial loss.
There was Jones with his white lines – and now Cal was sticky with Scotch, bristling with feathery cocaine and being ridden out of town on a rail. He took a seat next to Tony Riley, a bit disgusted by the dying man in the oxygen mask – but then that was only natural. He got out cashpoint-ironed twenties and bought into a rock of crack that Bev was crumbling into the foiled mouth of an Evian bottle pipe. All the while Billy watched.
This Devenish, could he be another Hrundi V. Bakshi? Whited up, and playing his superficial role, while inside of himself he dropped Michele Monet off at her sherbet-yellow Art Deco apartment block? Was Cal, like Billy, suggesting that Michele hang on to the cowboy hat that Wyoming Bill Kelso had given him; suggesting this, so that very soon he could call her up and, on the pretext of getting it back, ask for a date?
Oh, no, Cal Devenish wasn’t at The Party at all. With his first hit on the crack pipe all the fuzzy foam had condensed into icebergs clashing on the frozen Baltic. What would Helsinki be like, Cal wondered. He suspected exactly the same as London, except for better modern architecture, together with publishers, journalists and publicists who appeared troll-like.
Georgie came into the room and passed the writer a pellet of heroin. Billy scampered to fetch the mirror and, placing it on the coffee table in front of Cal, said, ‘Any chance of a little bump, mate?’ Then added, ‘D’you want me to get you some works?’
Cal looked up and then around at the drugged bedlam: Tony, huffing and puffing and blowing his body down; Bev, talking arse about Conrad of all things; Jeremy, squatting in the corner, his eyes saucers that needed washing up. He thought of the late Trouget’s paintings – what might they be worth now? Those solid bourgeois and yelping dogs, upended and gibbeted by his barbed brush, their faces either obscured or rendered far too vividly.
‘No,’ Cal told Billy. ‘No, thanks, I’m gonna snort some, but you can take enough for a hit if you want.’
Billy could take some, because Cal knew there would never be enough to sate himself. He was going to be hungry for ever. Cal tapped some of the beige powder on to the smeary mirror, had elves been skating on it? Billy, by way of being a good egg, rolled up his one remaining fiver and passed it to the writer. The parrot of addiction – unlike the owl of Minerva – will fly at any time of the day or night; so it flapped across the clearing from the serving hatch to land on Cal Devenish’s shoulder.
If Cal had troubled to unroll the banknote, he would have seen the fresh bloodstain that wavered along its edge: an EEG that plotted a fine madness. Whose blood was it? Does this matter? I – we – told you at the outset, this was never a mystery, or a crime procedural – this was never to do with who done it, only who got it. Or us.
Cal bent to
rub noses with his doppelgänger at the same time as he shoved the rolled-up note into his already raw nostril. ‘Slap’, the sharp paper edge, struck the mirror at one end, while ‘stick’, the other end, burrowed into his mucus membrane. Snuffling, feeling the numbing burn, Cal dabbed at the blood that dripped from his nose, then asked Billy, ‘You couldn’t get me a tissue, could you?’
As if he could blow us – me – out!
Where is the redemption in all this? Where is the reformed character on day-release from prison, teaching kids with learning difficulties and through them rediscovering his shared humanity? We don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though, our flight’s been called – and we simply love flying. C’mon, Cal, up you get. That’s OK, you look perfectly presentable – apart from your messed-up face. Still, not much chance of any official interest in a flight to Helsinki.
If he were to get a pull? We’re not bothered – we like prison as much as flying. Possibly more. C’mon, Cal, Gate 57, one foot in front of the other, there’s a good chap. Past the windy horse of a cleaner in the shafts of his disinfecting cart; past Dixons and Wetherspoon’s; past W. H. Smith’s and the Duty Free hangar.
No, Cal, that’s not the way to approach a travelator – anyone who’s anyone walks along it, doesn’t just stand there. Ho-hum, we’re going to be with you for a long time – years in all likelihood – so I suppose we better get used to your petty vagaries, your inability to do one thing properly at once.
At least we’re well cushioned in here, buffered by blood and bile in our basket of lobules, ducts and veins. Foie humain, Leberknödel Suppe, Scottie’s Liver Treats – we love ’em all. But most of all we relish birdy num-num. Birdy num-num. Num-num. Num.
The Minor Character
I went to dinner at the McCluskeys’ and the Brookmans were there, as usual – and the Vignoles as well. Bettina Haussman had brought a panettone and a new boyfriend; Phil Szabo mixed cosmopolitans. Of course Johnny Freedman was in attendance, and when we reached the figs and the cheese, he was still rambling on about his plan to farm vicuña in the Aylesbury Hundreds. He talked and talked, detailing forage requirements, wool yields, shearing techniques – I couldn’t believe how the others hung on his every word, when they’d heard Johnny describe scores of such schemes in the past, none of which ever amounted to more than tipsy social blether.
Tiring of it – and perhaps a little drunk myself – I went on to the back terrace to have a smoke. It was a close damp night and the crab apple trees that stood either side of the long narrow garden were shedding their fruit; the loud tapping sounds these made as they struck the teak decking sounded like an idiot messing about with a tom-tom drum.
Cathy McCluskey came through the glass door and leant against me – she smelt of Arpège and ripe Camembert, in that order.
‘Giss a snog, Will,’ she slurred, insinuating an oddly chilly hand under and up my shirt.
‘C’mon, Cathy.’ I disengaged myself and holding her by her bare elbows looked down on the crown of her head and the protrusion of her dewy top lip. ‘You’re just drunk – you love Gerry.’
‘Love?’ She snorted. ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the fucking word.’
Later Rob and Teddy Brookman drove me and Phil Szabo home in their Jaguar. There was the usual I’ll-drive-no-I’ll-drive, then we were all sheathed in the cream leather upholstery and humming past discount furniture warehouses. Teddy took her hands off the wheel at one point – and I remember this quite distinctly – in order to describe the shape of her friends’ sadness, saying ‘I’m worried about the pair of them, aren’t you, Will?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I expect they’ll muddle through.’
It was the following winter that Teddy was diagnosed, and after she’d had the double mastectomy she was determined to have a good time. In May, she and Rob took a couple of boxes at Glyndebourne and invited the whole crowd down to see Werner Herzog’s production of Die Walküre. I remember standing in the rose garden – more than a little bored at the prospect of all that Wagner – and Teddy coming out of the rhododendrons brandishing a spear. She was wearing a winged helmet and a metallic corset equipped with conical breasts.
Dora Vignole laughed so hard she had a coughing fit; Bettina Haussman took photographs while Teddy and Rob – who was similarly attired – struck poses. The McCluskeys were late and looked like they’d been rowing. Phil Szabo went off to find a corkscrew. Johnny Freedman took me to one side and asked whether I had life insurance, but I didn’t let him get to me – it was a magical evening, and we all felt that with chutzpah like that, Teddy must already be in remission.
It must have been a fortnight or so later that Gerry McCluskey called me up in tears.
‘Cathy’s left me, Will,’ he sobbed.
‘Oh, Jesus, Gerry, that’s dreadful.’ I mustered the necessary compassion, although I was preoccupied at the time by the suspicion that the builders who were converting my garage into a studio were ripping me off.
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ Gerry blubbed on.
‘No?’
‘No! It’s Johnny she’s gone off with!’
I was surprised – but pleasantly so – when I discovered how grown-up they were all being about it. Cathy and Johnny moved into a mansion block in town, and the kids, who were six and eleven, spent weekends with them.
‘I didn’t want them uprooted,’ Cathy said, when I went round for Sunday lunch three months after the split.
‘I must say, it’s quite a view you guys have here,’ I said, standing looking out over the bronzed and golden crowns of the autumn trees in the park.
‘It was an investment originally,’ Johnny said, coming in with Phil Szabo, who had a tray of sherry glasses. ‘But what with the way the market is, I thought we might as well make use of it. Still, there are opportunities to be had –’
‘Oh, shut up, Johnny,’ Cathy said, biting his neck in a way that was at once shockingly carnal and distinctly perverse.
I looked on open-mouthed, but said nothing – then the bell rang and we could hear the McLuskeys’ eleven-year-old shriek, ‘Dad-eee!’
‘You’ll be amused,’ Bettina Haussman husked in my ear, ‘to see what Gerry’s been up to.’
‘Really, why’s that?’ I turned to face Bettina and saw that she had a bruise on her neck in exactly the place where Cathy had nipped Johnny.
‘He’s come out,’ Bettina growled. ‘A bit.’
It was one of those Sunday lunches that went on and on, then merged with tea. I didn’t leave until it was dark out, carrying with me the image of Gerry McCluskey, stroking his new glossy-brown goatee while clicking his way through a carousel he had loaded with old-fashioned slides of their six-year-old, Reggie, whose birthday it was that week. Much hilarity had greeted the shots of the McCluskeys taking mud baths at Barton-on-Sea. Everyone was laughing – especially Teddy and Rob; everyone, that is, except Dora Vignole, who was coming out of the bathroom as I opened the front door, an expression at once murderous and frightened on her swarthy, angular face.
I walked across the park with Phil Szabo, but we parted at the main gates – he said he was meeting a friend in a pub nearby.
Gerry said I should come down to the cottage at Barton for New Year’s Eve, and so I arranged to pick Bettina up from her flat in the Barbican and give her a lift. Clearly she’d forgotten, because when I arrived she didn’t answer the door for a long time; then, when it swung open she was in a bathrobe, looking both furtive and hungover.
She was reluctant to let me come in while she got ready, but I barged past her, crying, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bettina, I’ve known you for twenty years – how many times have I crashed out on the bloody carpet here –?’
And I would’ve continued, were it not for the sight of Cathy McCluskey, naked save for a flesh-coloured bra, and sprawled across the double divan bed under the Venetian blinds, her feline body striped dark with shadows and clawed white with stretch marks.
‘OK,’ Bettina drawled, leaning against the
taupe-painted wall, her arms crossed. ‘Had your fill have you, Will?’
Cathy groaned and levered herself up by one elbow. ‘Who is it?’ she asked.
‘Only peeping Will,’ Bettina said, then, picking up the duvet from the floor she tossed it over Cathy, so that for a split second it hung in the air above her like a soft and amorphous ravager.
I was much less embarrassed than they thought I was – and much less intrigued as well. Nevertheless, the drive was spent mostly in silence. I’d never been to the McCluskeys’ ‘cottage’ before – and it turned out to be something of an ironic ascription, given that it was in fact a Victorian rectory with nine bedrooms.
I suppose Gerry had long since absorbed the blow, and he seemed genuinely pleased when Cathy pecked him on the cheek and then ambled off through the rather gloomy, damp-carpet-smelling rooms in search of their kids. There was a platoon of champagne bottles standing to attention on the scullery table, and Bettina picked one up and rolled it across her broad, freckled forehead, leaving behind a smear of watered-down foundation.
Upstairs I found the Brookmans had the bedroom next to mine, and that we would be sharing a bathroom. Teddy already had a glass of champagne, and Rob was recumbent on the bed with the half-empty bottle beside him.
‘Shit, I know all about that,’ Teddy said when I told her about Cathy and Bettina. ‘It’s been going on for an age. Honestly, Will, sometimes I think you must be blind. Speaking of which, d’you wanna see my scars?’
I looked over at Rob, but he only raised his eyebrows with an expression somewhere between resigned, exasperated, and amused. ‘I can hardly accuse you of ogling my wife’s tits,’ he said. ‘Not now that she hasn’t got any.’
Teddy had shrugged off the top half of her dress and her chest was a smooth as a young boy’s, the tan nipples almost recessed. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘that devilishly clever surgeon hid the scar tissue under my rib bone.’ She took my finger in her hand and ran it along the hard rind of the scar, and somehow, in my mind, this was linked with Cathy’s splayed form on the bed at the Barbican – as if this were the foreplay that should, logically, have preceded it.
