Will 2019, p.1
Will (2019), page 1
Will Self
* * *
WILL
Contents
1. May 1986
2. May 1979
3. April 1982
4. April 1984
5. August 1986
About the Author
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Shark. His most recent novel, Phone, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He lives in south London.
By the same author
NOVELS
Cock and Bull (twin novellas) My Idea of Fun
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (illustrated novella) Great Apes
How the Dead Live
Dorian, an Imitation
The Book of Dave
The Butt
Walking to Hollywood
Umbrella
Shark
Phone
SHORT-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
NON-FICTION
Junk Mail
Perfidious Man, photography by David M. Gamble Sore Sites
Feeding Frenzy
Psychogeography
Psycho Too
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
Pour NK, avec mes plus profonds remerciements
I’ve often thought that there isn’t any ‘I’ at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
– Diary of a Drug Fiend, Aleister Crowley
1
May 1986
Standing in the Clapham Road on a sunny Tuesday morning, Will thinks: You’re standing in the Clapham Road on a May morning in the mid-1980s … Is this … it? The space above him is no only sky but an ice-cream-headaching void, its pale-blue depths tinged lemony by the early-summer sun.
‘Is this is who you are?’ he queries aloud – then runs on in a moaning undertone: ‘A frightened young man of twenty-four … fraying – no! Fuck it – falling apart.’ Will fumbles in his sad little grab-bag of received wisdom and comes up with: When addicts are getting plenty of junk, they look anonymous – but when they start to withdraw, their image sharpens, then disintegrates …
Still standing in the Clapham Road on a bright weekday morning, with the traffic grumbling along beside him, Will feels his sweat-stiffened socks beginning to … melt. Soon, he thinks, I’ll be immobilised: a sick junky, petrified by withdrawal, and sunk deep in silent, solipsistic agony … a suffering of the cells alone. Yes, he’ll be immobilised right here, on the wide pavement beside the shitty little shopping parade.
There’s a bookie’s, a chip shop, and a plastic shop like the one in Burnt Oak Will worked in on Saturdays when he was a teenager. His first real job – if by that is meant a manila wages packet, with inside a well-worn tenner, a fiver, some coin … riches. Crawling around on the dirty chequerboard of linoleum with a sticker gun – pricing up Atrixo hand cream, while lumpy and careworn legs, thickly hosed, shuffled about him: Issat the hand cream, love? Gissa tube, willya?
Yes! Gissa tube – a tube magically metamorphosed into a giant morphine syrette, the sort Brother Bill served his apprenticeship shooting up.
There’s also a chemist’s on the corner of this shabby parade – a small one. No doubt the pharmacist got his qualifications in Kampala, and never imagined he’d end up here, among … stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers … a point where dubious enterprise touches skid row. Soon enough, Will thinks, the locals will come … stumbling … drooling … squealing for their methadone: little green bottles labelled POISON that are, in point of fact, their poison. Mm-mm.
True, there’s nothing remotely euphoric about methadone: it just makes you feel as if you’re buried up to your waist. Buried up to your waist – and possibly by that fact alone … enjoying a happy day. But Will doesn’t have a methadone script – doesn’t have twenty mils of green gloop to pour on the wateriness of his own dissolution.
Why? Because, if he did, he’d be a fucking no-hoper loser junky. Really. The sort of idiot who goes out kiting, scores, cooks up, finds a vein, flushes the works then squirts wide arcs of claret across the dingy wallpaper — Or the kind who jemmies call boxes for smash, like Pete and Mike did before they got nicked, and Mike’s parents sent him to rehab’ … the fucking featherweight.
No – Will doesn’t have a script. He does have fifty-seven pence, though – enough to buy a banana, which he could wrap in a sock. Doing a chemist’s – it has a certain ring to it, such that in the addict world, the men and women who do indeed do them are highly esteemed: brave bandits, stealing from the plutocratic drug companies so they might give to their own poor … habits.
Diconal and Ritalin in pill form – wet and dry amps of diamorphine, Tuinal capsules, Mogadons and other benzos – Tenuate Dospan spansules, uppers, downers, twisters and screamers … God knows what delights might be locked away behind the counter piled high with sponges and Strepsils – certainly the necessary medication for what ails Will: the infected sores he’s fretted into being on his face and body – and the hot wire in the crook of his arm that he speared ten … twenty? maybe as many as thirty times during the short, sodium-stained night.
Will feels them – the sores and the needle-punctures feels them clotting up and scabbing over, as the pus … gleet … ichor congeals. How d’you call an infected cat? Here, pus-pus-pus! And the cat comes, lolloping across London in its dirty-white Volkswagen Fastback, which purrs noisily as it smarms between the off-white stucco terraces running from the Cromwell Road down to the river, then, hearkening to the rising hysteria of the drivetime DJ, bounds up Queenstown Road and pounces on the fraying end of Silverthorne Road.
Yes – Silverthorne Road, where Will remembers attending a party five or six years ago. Mikey Dread the reggae musician had been there – and Hugh, together with his sister, Genie. Genie had been flush from the smuggling run in those days – and she gave Will a wrap of gear, before passing around a spliff spiked with some more. Later, out in the street, slithering along the icy pavements – it’d been winter – he’d almost fallen in front of a bus, so intent had he been on extracting every last toke. And why not?
The hoary old homily – deployed by his mother so many thousands of times throughout his childhood, Will thinks of it as her line – would’ve repeated on him then, just as it does now: Waste not, want not …
Yes, waste not, want not – waste not so much as the tiniest smidgen of gear, lest you find yourself here, on the Clapham Road, shifting from one clammy foot to the other, and deafened by the ultrasonic screaming of your wanting flesh.
And waste not, either, the opportunity when you come fast out of the first bend, and see traffic tailing back from the junction with the Wandsworth Road, to slam your foot on the accelerator. Yes, Will can still hear the fluttery roar of the 1600cc air-cooled engine as he’d swung the car into the opposite lane and the revs picked up.
How long has he been scoring through John? Genie made the introduction early last summer. It was a hot day and they’d been skint apart from their score money, so trudged all the way up the Kennington Road, then the Clapham one, until they reached the squats: a long, low block of flats, vestigially mock-Tudor, with pitched roofs and bits of decorative half-timbering. Up on the central gable there was a plaque with ‘1916’ inscribed on it – a bad omen, Will thought at the time.
In front there was a strip of bare earth, a row of sooty-trunked trees, some fucked-up old caravans up on bricks – broken-down trucks and cars the same. When winter came and rain fell, this area became a soggy morass – churned up by the feet of the traveller kids who lived and played there. Somme hope.
That first time they’d scored off Rosie, a plump-for-a-junky, light-skinned black woman Genie knew. Will remembers shooting up in Rosie’s kids’ bedroom, while sitting awkwardly on the lower bunk – and then shifting to a leaking sagbag, from the hollow of which he’d first retrieved a dog-eared copy of Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend.
He remembers flipping through its pages, while Genie and Rosie talked animatedly in the adjoining kitchen – recalls marvelling at the immemorial quality of the drug culture he was swagged in, its ossified moth-eaten mores and tatty mythology. Will knew perfectly well that until very recently there’d been scarcely any junkies in London, yet now here they all were: thousands of the wheedling, whining fuckers – and all claiming direct descent from the likes of Crowley and Brother Bill, as if they’d been some sort of smack-head Pilgrim Fathers, set sail on a golden-brown sea.
But the Beast had slouched away – most probably to Bedlam – leaving behind only its moulted fur, caught by the hem of a velveteen drape, then draggled back and forth by some warm and oniony draught.
Later on Genie and Will had visited other portions of the labyrinthine squat – and in one of them they’d met John, who had a pencil moustache and said he’d served with the Paras in Ulster. But then you hear a lot of that sort of martial bullshit from junkies.
Still standing … yeah, yeah, yeah in the Clapham Road, with the sky’s chilly-blue w eight bearing down on him, and the glazed buns in the bakery window evilly gleaming, Will thinks of churned-up Derry mud sucking at the teenagers’ platform soles, getting their kicks chucking bottles and bricks – while opposite them, grimly determined to do their duty, is a squad of Johns.
Johns twitching in their khaki battledress while they hold their rifles out to one side, so simultaneously aiming, and making the characteristic, soliciting gesture of junkies the world over. Ye-es, John had served the Queen in Ulster – now he’s serving up smack in Stockwell.
He and Denise and little Amber squat a two-bedroom flat on the lower-ground floor of 1916 – which is how Will thinks of the old block. There’s 1916, and rising up behind its low bulk are two gaunt towers, that preposterously, have been named after Absurdist playwrights. Twenty-two storeys high, Beckett and Pinter loom over the surrounding streets of Victorian terraces – Will’s never been inside either, although he knows that Helen, an old housemate from Oxford, is living in a flat on the tenth floor of Pinter. Living with her boyfriend, Freddy, who Will remembers as Struwwelpeterish, with a huge red hooter, lopsided grin and stiff straw hair.
But he’s a user, isn’t he … a useful fact Will files away as he at last makes a move towards the bakery, while groping in his pocket for the two twenty-pence pieces, a ten and some coppers. Fucking riches …
… so waste not, want not. It’d been around five – at any rate, after dawn – when Will realised work wouldn’t be possible without a proper hit rather than these ersatz ones: Christ! How that fucking citric stings! Appalled by the Tottenham cakes, their lurid pink icing infested with desiccated coconut, Will rubs the crook of his elbow. Stinging didn’t really capture this – no: it’s more of an agonising bite – as if some miniature piranha had swum inside Will’s mainline, and, as he writhed in agony, chomped its way towards his heart … a fantastic journey indeed.
No – don’t dwell on that: go to work. He should be in Chiswick by now – should be parking the Veedub on the short stretch of road that cuts across Turnham Green, the one with no yellow lines. Stupid cars – they’re not really automobiles at all, but for the most part empty metal sheds you’ve to pay ground rent for. Will hasn’t got a parking permit for Kensington, where he’s living. There’d been one on the Scirocco – but the sports coupé is long gone in a puff of … coke, and he hasn’t got his shit together to apply for another one.
Most mornings – well, a slim majority of them – Will’s up and off to work before the wardens are about. Before he had the job in Chiswick, he’d get up early enough to move the car a few streets away, to where the parking isn’t zoned. Or not. The penalty-charge notices, which are encased in bright yellow-and-black-plastic sachets stuck to the Veedub’s windscreen, are well-nigh impossible to ignore – yet he finds it easy enough: simply tearing them off then shoving them with the others into the glove compartment … waste not, want not.
Will’s mother says her fondness for this expression originates in her hardscrabble childhood, during the depths of the Great American Depression … You kids can have no conception of what it was like – but he thinks this is yet more of her histrionic bull-crap.
Yes, Will should be in Chiswick, parking up his shed full of parking tickets, paper bags gummy with icing, dirty polystyrene cups and fag butts. He should be heading for a different branch of Greggs – the one on the High Road, where, on dutiful days, he buys an apple Danish, a healthy banana and a silvery sachet of Capri-Sun orange juice (from concentrate).
… Concentrate – yes … Will checks his watch, which tells him he’s due to clock in in less than ten minutes. Still, the important thing is I’m not late yet … moreover, so far this morning his timing has been superb: the Veedub picking up speed as it shot up the incline towards the Wandsworth Road. And more speed – such that its air-cooled engine sounded like … a church organ about to blast off for heaven.
Yes! Waste not, want not – waste not the intensity of life, lest you end up as just another dull little bourgeois, queuing with all the others, content to eke out your days waiting for the cheapest lightshow in town!
However, there’d been no rising sound to accompany Will’s ecstatic death, instead, the car’s radio crackled with the tinny beats conjured by soon-to-be-cashiered experimentalists banging an iron bar in a studio: Ting-ting-ting-TING! While a bint with a posh accent cried that she – in common with Will – wanted money. Strongly suggesting that she – like him – had been wasting it.
Ting-ting-ting-TING! Ting-ting-ting-TING! Will’s scabby hands had gripped the vibrating steering wheel as the Veedub raced up the wrong lane: if a car had turned left from the Wandsworth Road, or the lights had changed before Will reached them, he’d’ve been wiped out. As it was … magically … mystically … his arrival at the lights coincided exactly with amber flicking to green. Will expertly dabbed the brakes, wrenched the steering wheel — The car skidded as it cut across the blunt snout of the Transit at the head of the queue, then bounced jauntily away east, to the accompaniment of outraged horns: Mad, mad, maaaad fuck-errrr!
But then the best things in life are free – while the worst retail at a tenner a bag.
A minuscule little envelope, folded out of a scrap of paper torn from a glossy magazine – a dinky heap of beige powder, which, when shot up or snorted or smoked, would sweetly burn away all his pains. But Will doesn’t have a tenner – he has fifty-seven pence. Not quite enough for a couple of apple Danishes. Already, Will sees himself: standing in the cool, stone-smelling vestibule in front of John and Denise’s locked-and-barred front door – already he hears himself cooing, lovelorn, through their letterbox: John … Denise … I’ve brought you some … breakfast, which will surely do the necessary sesame, and open their cave of delights.
This, despite its having been only five minutes since John swore blind through this self-same letterbox he’d only his get-up hit – but he was lying, right? He’s a junky – and junkies lie: that is their nature. They don’t really speak, as such, they just open their mouths to utter what is not … so would be consummate ironists, if they weren’t so intent on being taken … so fucking seriously.
Seriously, Will thinks: You’re seriously going to buy two apple Danishes then take them back across the road? You’re seriously going to offer them to John through the letterbox, then, if he holds out, plead with him, willing him to say what is not … Namely: Only kidding, mate – I picked up last night … Lemme jus’ do the bolts an’ I’ll serve yer …
Greasily, the coins slither between Will’s fingers: I’m sweating, he thinks, and soon enough I’ll be immobilised. He checks his watch again, cursing himself for a fucking, cunting moron: ‘It’s always the multiple profanities with you …’ He continues this admonition aloud – then lapses into another memory of his mother: standing at the stove at Number 43 in her pale-blue Terylene dressing gown, cooking and cursing: fuck, shit, piss, damn … she’s always been so impressively florid. And that, he thinks, is her legacy – along with anxiety, depression, multiple neuroses … I’m feeling neuro, she’d say, having invented her own collective noun to encapsulate the vast swarm of her obsessions and compulsions. Yes. And insomnia too – something she’s also bequeathed him.
So much so that last night –. Well, what night? A bilious one – a jaundiced one: a night sullied by the streetlamps outside the big sash windows of the beautifully appointed flat. Yes, a pale-yellow night – its urinous tang catching in the back of my throat … Heroin and cocaine – you smell them as they enter your veins, proof positive – as if any were needed – that the secondary qualities of things exist not in the phenomena themselves, but only in the mind which perceives them.
Yeah … shooting up the shit coke he’d bought at retail prices from fat old Michael up in Kentish Town. Sixty-fucking-quid a gramme! Cut to fuck – and on tick as well. Cut to fuck the way Will taught the poor old innocent to do it when he sold Michael the connection for a oner.
