Grey Area. Уилл Селф
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traffic is worse than no bank holiday at all, especially if we’re talking of people who have children. If this is to be the case it’s far better that one direct the greater part of one’s people to stay at home, if only so that a minority can gain greater utility.
You can see how it all shapes up. Like poker players the eight of us assess how many the others are likely to direct out of town, and how many by car, how many by bus or train. Sometimes one of the eight of us will go so far as to keep all of his or her people at home. The entire bunch! It can have only happened once or twice. I did it about five years ago, and the glee, let me tell you, the intense thrill of schadenfreude when I saw everyone else’s: the Bollam sisters, Dooley, Colin Purves, Lechmere . . . damn it all, even a hell of a lot of Lady Bob and the Recorder’s people . . . the whole lemming-load of them trapped sweating and bored in mile after mile of tailback after tailback.
But of course mostly it isn’t so straightforward. I sit there, caressing my volumes and papers and discs, trying to sense the messages in the ether, the subtle modulations of intent that might indicate how many are on the move – and where to. I think about Lady Bob. Will she send her people out of town – and if so, how many? Or will she, like the Bollam sisters who are incorrigibly nervous and stay-at-home, respond to the numerous notices of roadworks on major routes that have been coming in all week, and leave the tarmac shimmering and empty, so most of my lot can make a dash.
Alternatively Lady Bob may react like the Recorder, whose fine lawyerly mind often attracts him to the triple bluff. He almost always sends a fair bunch of his people off, on the basis that we will think that he will think that we will think that he will think that it’s not worth going. While it’s true that this strategy has stood him in good stead, often allowing him to get as many as 694,672 people out of the city for the day (at any rate that’s what he clocked last August bank holiday), I think it’s as much to do with the fact that a high percentage of the Recorder’s people debouch through the east of London as any great tactical achievement on his part.
Not that I mean to be disrespectful to the Recorder – nothing is further from my mind. And why would I? After all, it is the Recorder’s people who have consistently increased the amount of ‘Good mornings’ they’ve bidden to my people over the past ten years. In the early eighties only about 900,000 of his people ever said ‘Good morning’ to my people, but now it more or less averages at that level, representing a compound increase year-on-year of over 0.96 per cent. Far greater – it has to be said – than the increase in salutations from Lady Bob’s people.
It sounds complex, doesn’t it? Quite a lot to take on board. Well, that’s the way I work. But the saddest thing I have to tell you is that I fear it makes hardly any difference to the outcome. Dooley isn’t capable of anything like this degree of foresight and calculation and yet I have to say that all too often as many of his people make it out of the city on bank holidays as mine; as many of his people get late reservations at Quaglino’s as mine; as many of his people get a seat on the tube as mine. It just isn’t fair. Simply by adopting the tactic that is no tactic, a kind of brutish force majeure, Dooley imposes himself on our society.
He farts – and 4,209 children are beaten and buggered. He coughs – and 68,238 sufferers from emphysema get promoted to cancer. He groans, turning on his day bed – and forty-seven of his people lose control of their vehicles and drive into the vehicles of forty-seven of my people. Dooley is a kind of elemental force. His weapons are pain, suffering, loneliness, and deprivation. He sneezes – and seven junkies overdose in squats off the Caledonian Road. Not for Dooley the subtleties of the snub, the cold shoulder, the dropped gaze and the backbite. He has no need of them, because he has no ambition save to remain as he is: Lord of the Underclass.
What is it with Lady Bob? Why is it so hard for me to get into work with her? Sometimes, lying awake on stormy nights, with the street lamps outside shining through the raindrops on the window, and making a stippled pattern across the floor of my bedroom, I begin to get the fear. The fear that somehow Lady Bob has mixed me up in her mind with Dooley. That she hasn’t been paying attention to the infinite deference with which I have courted her favour.
It’s my turn to toss and turn, to knead the duvet with my hands, as if it were some giant wad of sweating dough. Was it the 34,571 Valentine’s Day cards that I sent to several of her many divisions of secretaries and data-processing clerks? Or perhaps the 14,408 ever so slightly forward air-kisses that I bestowed upon 7,204 of her hair stylists, sales assistants and gallery girls? Maybe she felt a deep and lingering rancour when – for reasons that I am unable to divulge – I was obliged to break off 415 of the extra-marital affairs that my people were having with hers?
Who can say. But the fact remains that Lady Bob consistently invites me to fewer dinner parties than even Dooley. That smarts – that hurts. Only 210,542 invitations to meals of any sort last year – and of those a good 40,000 were children’s parties. Children’s parties! I ask you. Worse still, at anything up to 22 per cent of these parties my kids failed to come away with a party bag. Tears before their bedtime – and mine.
What can I do? Any overt move would be misinterpreted, of that much I am sure. I can feel in the very limits of my seething collectivity of consciousness the peculiar inlets and isolated promontories of our interaction. The eight of us – the eight that matter, that is – are like the tectonic plates that cover the earth. If one of us rubs up against any other we produce mighty forces that reverberate, affecting the other six. Given this, perhaps I would do better to concentrate my efforts on the Recorder, once more.
In the past I assiduously courted him. I would even have my people in the City deliberately form shooting syndicates to which the Recorder’s people could be invited. I made sure that the Recorder’s people were always asked to be the godparents of my people’s children. I formed suburban philatelic societies just so as to be able to invite some of the Recorder’s loners along. If one of my people was doing the Samaritans and one of the Recorder’s phoned in . . . well, you can be certain that they were given an excess of sympathy, a beaming out of true caring.
It was all to no avail. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t work (I know the Recorder thinks well of me, viz the ‘Good mornings’), it’s just that he didn’t reciprocate in any meaningful fashion – unless you count 34,876 items of junk mail, far more than my people have ever received from any of the other six’s lot.
I don’t want to have to stoop to the tactics of Lechmere and the Bollam sisters. I don’t want to have to associate with that perverse crew any more than I have to. Of course, I am protected to some degree by my covert association with Colin Purves. He’s a worthy sort of chap – you know the kind – not that imaginative, a plodder really. He’s the only one of the eight of us who commutes. He lives down at Tunbridge Wells with his wife. (He probably refers to her as ‘my lady wife’ whilst propping up the saloon bar in the local pub.) He takes the eight-twenty-two to Charing Cross every morning and then crosses via the footbridge to his office on the South Bank. I believe he’s responsible (if that’s the right word – ‘responsibility’ seems slightly too grand) for the stationery purchasing of one department, of one division, of one subsidiary of a multi-national oil company.
Lucky for Purves – having a desk job. It means that like me he has an opportunity to keep close to him the London phone directories, and the computer discs that hold pirated copies of all the electoral registers for London’s constituencies. Of course, neither of us has to have the physical evidence of all the people we control to hand, oh no. It’s just that Purves – like myself – finds it somewhat easier to get to grips with the job if he has some kind of a record of these multiplying blips of sentience.
I like to hold the directory that contains the listing of the biggest chunk of the people I am manipulating at any given time. It gives me the feeling that I am in some sense holding them, caressing them, tweaking the strings that shift their little arms and little legs, their little mouths and little heads.
I don’t get out a lot any more. Tonight is an exception. It’s nice just to sit here in the snug of the pub and watch the people laughing and drinking. It amuses me to try and guess which of them belongs to whom. That horsey-looking woman, yes her, the strawberry blonde with the Hermes headscarf drinking a ginger-beer