Elaine, p.1
Elaine, page 1
Elaine
Also by Will Self
NOVELS
Cock and Bull
My Idea of Fun
The Sweet Smell of
Psychosis
Great Apes
How the Dead Live
Dorian, an Imitation
The Book of Dave
The Butt
Walking to Hollywood
Umbrella
Shark
Phone
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Grey Area
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe
Liver: A Fictional Organ with
a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes
The Undivided Self: Selected Stories
NONFICTION
Junk Mail
Perfidious Man
Sore Sites
Feeding Frenzy
Psychogeography
Psycho Too
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
Will
Why Read
First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Grove Press,
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic
Copyright © Will Self, 2024
The moral right of Will Self to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.
No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.
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Hardback ISBN 978 1 80471 046 3
Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 047 0
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Pour Nelly . . .
A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.
Entry from Elaine’s diary, February 1956
Elaine
.1.
November 1955
Standing in the roadway outside 1100 Hemlock Street, Elaine thinks to herself: I’m standing in the road outside my home—our home, one that I make lovingly brand-new every day for the husband and son I love . . . But is this . . . it? Her eyes travel from the buff envelope in her hand to the open mailbox she’s just retrieved it from—then drop: What’s the point in opening one or closing the other, there’s no money to pay the bill, or any of the others already winging in in its wake.
She doesn’t dare look up—yet even the immediate surroundings seem to Elaine an aching void: the vacant lot across the road seethes with ever-greenery—a sinister undulation. An overhead cable, long, low, and swinging between two far-flung posts, soughs in the freshening breeze. Beyond the sparse shrubbery and some isolate trees, the ground falls away, and she senses—rather than sees—the lake below.
Billy delights in telling her just how deep Lake Cayuga is, and how many millions of gallons of fresh water it contains. His mother wishes he wouldn’t—to her it’s only cold . . . and fathomless: an Aegean from which no Odysseus will ever return to claim his Ithaca . . . and his Penelope. While up above? Not only sky, but a metaphysical realm in which man’s fall is inverted so as to become . . . woman’s rise. She seeks the joints of the bricks the road is paved with through the soles of her slippers—and summons the silky touch of riverside sands from summer camps long since struck: With a step that is steady and strong, the Campfire Girls march alo-ong . . .
If only—if only she had skinny, prehensile toes, could cling securely to the earth. But she doesn’t—and she can’t, because the sky is sucking her up: she can feel her body twisting, as, with the assistance of her own whirling mind, she’s helicoptered into the chilly heavens.
You’re not playing in a cloudy playground anymore, she admonishes herself: you’re not in Ohio—and not in New York or Vermont, either, but buried alive here in upstate suburbia—from which the only way out is . . . further up.
Maybe the little house will ascend with her—the wooden cell within which she’s imprisoned. It’s a nice enough cell, at least from the outside—but what difference does that make? You can’t see what color it is when you spend all day inside. Suddenly, she howls aloud: Is this it? Is this fucking it?!
The obscenity is, she thinks, the hairy leg her husband inserted between hers the last time he wanted . . . to take me. And afterwards, he clung to her—although patently not for security, for there’s none of this to be found in the quicksand of her troubled being. Is this it . . . ? Moreover, do it and this refer to the same object: her life, which is full of things that must be wiped, dusted, and ordered. Plaited, plumped, and put out . . . ?
It doesn’t help to say it—but she does anyway, this time aloud, the full pack she smoked yesterday, plus the four or five cigarettes she’s already smoked this morning, muting her voice so it’s halfway between a wheeze and a scream: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able to do my job as a . . . a . . . housekeeper?
Her words—already damp and decaying—fly up into the fall sky. Evelyn Tate, who lives fifty yards along the street, and who—on no basis whatsoever, apart from her bottle-blondeness and her blousy looks—Elaine has decided is a slattern, has at this very moment arrived beside her own mailbox. She opens it and withdraws a manilla envelope with a glassine window: . . . her own overdue bill, then inclines a little in Elaine’s direction, her pale lips forming the shape associated with the sound hi.
Clearly, she didn’t hear me.
So, Elaine says it again: Can . . . it . . . be . . . that the acme of success for me . . . is being able . . . a-ble . . . to do m-my job as a housekeeper?
Her hysteria is mounting—and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp—but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.
From some studious and irrelevant part of her brain this spidery thought comes a-creeping: The great complex of associations that are meant to dissolve trauma no longer obtains . . .
And when it’s retreated to a crevice inside her, Elaine rediscovers herself standing in what they call the front room, thinking for the thousandth time, it’d be the drawing one if they could manage that degree of pretension, or the living one if they gave up any ambitions to better themselves.
She stares wildly about at the shopworn props among which they play out their senseless scenes: Billy’s beading lies on top of the pink leather pouf they’ve carried with them since Madison. Elaine remembers buying it in the little secondhand store next to the zoo, where she and John had gone to visit the badgers—because neither of them had ever seen these creatures before, or even knew what they looked like, and since the University’s mascot was a badger . . .
Anyway, they’d looked pretty damn miserable in their empty, cold cage—while the pouf, which John bought to cheer her up, had soon enough become a repository for his notes, when he sat beside it in an armchair, working. It still is—and peering at his crabbed handwriting, she thinks how funny it is he’s been preoccupied for so long, now, with an epic poem written three hundred years ago—one whose subject is a grand battle, fought clear across the cosmos between God and Satan, for the very soul of humanity—while down here in his own backyard . . . the serpent has come a-slithering.
Creatures slimy . . . small . . . hairy—quick and erratic in their movements. At best blundering—at worst quite determinedly aiming for eyes, mouth, hair . . . down there. If metaphors are inventions, poetry is delirium . . .
Which is funny, yes—but funny peculiar, not ha-ha.
Ha, ha! Elaine barks—bitter laughter, bitter as the cud . . . the poor housebound cow chews on as she does the housework.
She picks up the beadwork and puts it in a colorful Mexican bowl John bought for her in Poughkeepsie, the day when they were driving back from New York, and she had a crise de nerfs so bad, he had to stop the car in the main street and, badly panicked himself, ask first one passerby then several more before he could get the name and address of a local doctor.
Elaine remembers how she was curled up sobbing in the hollow beneath the dashboard, and her husband had to laboriously extract her. She recal ls, also, the doctor’s waiting room, which had been the family’s parlor . . . for longer than a generation: a grandfather clock tut-tutted crisply in the corner—there were yellowing mezzotints on the striped flock wallpaper and cat hairs woven into the balding pile of the divan’s velvet upholstery. A detail she’d found reassuring—it takes a slattern’s husband to treat a slut.
When the doctor appeared a few minutes later, having interrupted his luncheon, he was carefully wiping his pudgy hands on a monogrammed linen napkin—and Elaine was already disposed to like him. Rosenbloom had been his name . . .
. . . and her tall frame folded into a little leather-covered easy chair, she’d choked and sobbed it all out to him—from time to time lifting her ugly face up from her ugly fists, tearing her ugly brown curls—until the doctor firmly but forcefully clasped her hands, and . . . the fight went out of me.
Kids had been playing ball in the empty lot behind the house, which was an impressive old pile of a place: its finials and a rooster-shaped weathervane surmounting turrets surmounting bay windows surmounting verandas. On any other occasion, Elaine might’ve made a sally along the lines of, say, The good folks of Poughkeepsie must be sick enough to require your services—but not so sick they can’t afford to pay for them!
Which is the sort of thing people do say, when they’re normal and normally sociable.
She remembers a sterilizer wheezing beneath the open window, and sending out puffs of steam to mingle with the kids’ cries. When Doctor Rosenbloom rolled up the sleeve of her blouse to give Elaine the shot, she swooned again from the very tenderness of his touch.
He’d said, You’re taking Miltown regularly, are you, Mrs. Hancock? In which case, it’s probably best you don’t take any more for a day or two—this is a pretty strong preparation . . .
Calmed, somnolent, Elaine slouched along behind her husband as they went in search of some memento of this queer episode: The red-and-yellow Mexican bowl? Oh, my parents bought that to celebrate the end of an attack of hysteria my mother had . . .
Doctor Rosenbloom’s fee had been four dollars—the bowl another two fifty. With a couple of coffees and sandwiches the unscheduled stop had cost them close to ten bucks . . . and as usual we couldn’t afford it, which was why when they were getting back into the Buick, John had snarled: Next time you bring the goddamn pills with you, right?
Standing in their sitting room, eighteen months later, Elaine looks at her son’s beadwork in the bowl and ruminates bitterly: I have an undistinguished family, and I doubt anything I’ll do will confer distinction upon it. As for my parents, whatever extra energy they’ve had to expend has gone into eradicating their distinctiveness, along with their Jewishness, as a housewife goes after brown and scummy patches in a goddamn pot . . .
Brown and scummy patches in a pot. There are pots waiting for her in the kitchen—ones that’ll have brown and scummy patches in them. And there’ll be bowls with cornflakes cemented to their sides with sugar—not forgetting the coffee cups, each with its staling, stinking residue. Is it the curse? Elaine muses—then, after a brief calculation: If it is, it’s far too early . . . red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish.
Karma the cat comes smarming from somewhere else—and panicky as she is, Elaine’s able to recognize the creature’s ineffable beauty. Because that’s the point, isn’t it: she may see it, but how can she possibly describe it? How can she describe anything but the self she’s sick of?
The cat is a small tortoiseshell, and caught in the low-angled autumn-morning sunlight streaming through the east-facing window, she’s finely etched: every hair of her fur can be distinguished. Finely etched . . . Elaine’s besetting problem is this: she can find a phrase quite as readily as she cracks wise, but it’s putting these phrases together into a passage of euphonious prose that altogether defeats her: the instant she sits down, pen in hand, some ghostly colleague of Doctor Rosenbloom’s shoots her brain full of novocaine, so everything becomes numbly mumbling and dumb.
There’s this—and also these vulgar scenes from her childhood that mock her pretensions, sliding between her smarting eyes and the page: At the age of two . . . maybe three, Elaine had taken to making watery protests by lifting up the rag rug in her bedroom, and peeing underneath it. She did it quite often, she thinks—which was completely crazy. Although she doesn’t, of course, do it anymore . . . that’s Karma’s job . . . and maybe the kitten’s, too.
After the Hucksackers’ party on Saturday night, they’d been so tight they went to bed with an old, half-full wine jug that had been moldering away in the back of the food cupboard for months. In the morning, Elaine’s bare foot, feeling for a slipper, knocked it over and the remains of these dregs spread under the bed. When she got down on hands and knees to mop the mess up, she discovered a cluster of the cat’s turds positioned in the exact center, as if the cunning little bitch had set out deliberately to show just how cursory her mistress’s housecleaning was.
During the night, Elaine had cried Ted’s name out—and also during that night, with dumb, drunken collusion on her part, John had taken her—but it wasn’t because of the latter that the former had occurred. She’d been far too tight for any fakery—and fakery it would’ve been to’ve pretended his caresses had undone her to this extent. No, there’d been no orgasm—there never is: only a crude animal relief.
What’s wrong with that? They are animals—they do need relief, and they’re practiced, if not at pleasuring each other, at least at providing this precious sort of balm. There have been rows and spats, cemented together with bickering so continuous it’s smooth—but on balance, she thinks, they’ve done well to stick together—and who knows, whatever the significance of her thing for Ted, without any actual adultery having taken place, surely they’re both capable of remaining that way—for Billy’s sake, if not their own.
This was waking wisdom, though: it was while asleep that she’d betrayed herself as much as her husband—who was sitting up in bed when she returned from flushing Karma’s turds down the can. Sitting up, and wearing the sleeveless undershirt that proves he’s quite as much a slut as . . . me. He puts on his pyjama bottoms no matter how far gone he is, but he doesn’t bother with his top half. And it was unshaven, reeking of stale sweat and staler booze, yet evincing a certain sly satisfaction—that he’d told her of her own . . . involuntary ejaculation.
Elaine knows he feels humiliated by the fact of Ted quite as much as by Elaine’s passion for him. She assumes John’s heavier-than-usual drinking, together with this dishevelment, is part of some blue-collar fantasy—a he-mannish pose that will make him a bigger, tougher fellow than Ted—and also explains why he’d screwed her through his pyjama bottom fly. Which explains, in turn, why she hadn’t detected any ardor—drunk as she’d been—only a desire to be workmanlike: get it out—stick it in . . . After all, since he’d been screwing her, it made sense to use . . . a screwdriver—or some other tool often employed for the practical jobs needing doing around the house, which he usually very much enjoys . . .
Not for the first time, figuring herself as only her husband’s vessel, Elaine is first revulsed—then convulsed: she lets her legs fold and collapses into a kneeling position, knees pressed deep in the pouf. She sees herself equipped with an erect penis that spurts obscenities all over the cream-painted walls of the sitting room: fucks and shits and dicks and cunts . . . because these are the only words . . . I have to freely give.
Whereas when she makes the necessary preparations—settling on an idea, devising an outline of the narrative, jotting down notes on characterization—and assembles the necessary equipment—pens and pencils, notebook and typewriter, paper and carbon—once she begins, everything becomes hopelessly hazy, as if thick smoke or gas were being pumped into both her eyes and the room, so the blank page is blanked out.
And if she persists? There are no better words to express how worthless and banal her writing is . . . than my own. Only in the past week she’d tried yet again, beginning a short story about a girl having an affair with a mysterious man in Manhattan . . . But when she’d read back the first couple of pages she was appalled: the prose so very much worse than clichéd—while there was no plot, as such, only a feeble gesture to her own . . . pitiful and self-pitying past.
