Grey Area. Уилл Селф

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СКАЧАТЬ journal he even had sex with his dog. I’m writing a narrative from the point of view of Gill’s dog. The book is called Fanny Gill or I was Eric Gill’s Canine Lover.’ Gerard and I were giggling before he’d finished; and the waiter smiled with us.

      ‘That’s very funny,’ I said, ‘I especially like the play on – ‘

      ‘Fanny Hill, yeah. Well, I’ve tried to style it like an eighteenth-century picaresque narrative. You know, with the dog growing up in the country, being introduced to the Gill household by a canine pander. Her loss of virginity and so on.’

      ‘Can you give us a little gobbet then?’ asked Gerard. He was still smiling but no longer ironically. The waiter sat back and struck a pose. With his scraped-back hair and long face, he reminded me of some Regency actor-manager.

      ‘Then one night, as I turned and tossed in my basket, the yeasty smell of biscuit and the matted ordure in my coat blanketing my prone form, I became aware of a draught of turpentine, mixed with the lavender of the night air.

      ‘My master the artist and stone carver, stood over me.

      “Come Fanny,” he called, slapping his square-cut hands against his smock, “there’s a good little doggie.” I trotted after him, out into the darkness. He strode ahead, whilst I meandered in his wake, twisting in the smelly skeins betwixt owl pellet and fox stool. “Come on now!” He was sharp and imperious. A tunnel of light opened up in the darkness. “Come in!” he snapped again, and I obeyed – poor beast – unaware that I had just taken my last stroll as an innocent bitch.’

      Later, when we had paid the bill and were walking up Bow Street towards Long Acre, for no reason that I could think of I took Gerard’s arm. I’d never touched him before. His body was surprisingly firm, but tinged with dampness like a thick carpet in an old house. I said, trying to purge the triumph from my tone, ‘That was really rather good – now wasn’t it?’

      ‘Humph! S’pose so, but it was a “gay” novel, not in the mainstream of any literary tradition.’

      ‘How can you say that?’ I was incredulous. ‘There was nothing obviously gay about it.’

      ‘Really, Geraldine. The idea of using the dog as a sexual object was an allegory for the love that dare not speak its name, only wuffle. Anyway, he himself – the waiter, that is – was an obvious poof.’

      We walked on in silence for a while. It was one of those flat, cold London days. The steely air wavered over the bonnets of cars, as if they were some kind of automotive mirage, ready to dissolve into the tarmac desert.

      We normally parted at the mouth of the short road that leads to Covent Garden Piazza. I would stand, watching Gerard’s retreating overcoat as he moved past the fire – eaters, the jugglers, the stand-up comedians; and on across the parade ground of flagstones with its manoeuvring battalions of Benelux au pair girls. But on this occasion I wouldn’t let him go.

      ‘Do you have to get back to the office? Is there actually anything pressing for you to do?’

      He seemed startled and turning to present the oblong sincerity of his face to me – he almost wrenched my arm. ‘Erm . . . well, no. S’pose not.’

      ‘How about a coffee then?’

      ‘Oh all right.’

      I was sure he had meant this admission to sound cool, unconcerned, but it had come out as pathetic. Despite all his confident, wordy pronouncements, I was beginning to suspect that Gerard’s work might be as meaningless as my own.

      As we strolled, still coupled, down Long Acre, the commercial day was getting into its post-prandial lack of swing. The opulent stores with their displays of flash goods belied what was really going on.

      ‘The recession’s certainly starting to bite,’ Gerard remarked, handing a ten-pence piece to a dosser who sat scrunched up behind a baffler of milk crates, as if he were a photographer at one of life’s less sporting events.

      ‘Tell me about it, mate.’ The words leaked from the gaps in the dosser’s teeth, trickled through the stubble of his chin and flowed across the pavement carrying their barge-load of hopelessness.

      The two of us paused again in front of the Hippodrome.

      ‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘where shall we have our coffee then? Do you want to go to my club?’

      ‘God, no! Come on, let’s go somewhere a little youthful.’

      ‘You lead – I’ll follow.’

      We passed the Crystal Rooms, where tense loss adjusters rocked on the saddles of stranded motor cycles, which they powered on through pixilated curve after pixilated curve.

      At the mouth of Gerrard Street, we passed under the triumphal arch with its coiled and burnished dragons. Around us the Chinese skipped and altercated, as scrutable as ever. Set beside their scooterish bodies, adolescent and wind-cheating, Gerard appeared more than ever to be some Scobie or Brown, lost for ever in the grimy Greeneland of inner London.

      Outside the Bar Italia a circle of pari-cropped heads was deliberating over glasses of caffe latte held at hammy angles.

      ‘Oh,’ said Gerard, ‘the Bar Italia. I haven’t been here in ages, what fun.’ He pushed in front of me into the tiled burrow of the café. Behind the grunting Gaggia a dumpy woman with a hennaed brow puffed and pulled. ‘Due espressi!’ Gerard trilled in cod-Italian tones. ‘Doppio!’

      ‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian,’ I said as we scraped back two stools from underneath the giant video screen swathing the back of the café.

      ‘Oh well, you know . . .’ He trailed off and gazed up as the flat tummy filling the hissing screen rotated in a figure-eight of oozing congress. A special-effect lipoma swelled in its navel and then inflated into the face of a warbling androgyne.

      A swarthy young woman with a prominent mole on her upper lip came over and banged two espressos down on the ledge we were sitting against.

      ‘I say,’ Gerard exclaimed; coffee now spotted his shirt front like a dalmatian’s belly. ‘Can’t you take a little more care?’ The waitress looked at him hard, jaw and brow shaking with anger, as if some prisoners of consciousness were attempting to jack-hammer their escape from her skull. She hiccupped, then ran the length of the café and out into the street, sobbing loudly.

      ‘What did I say?’ Gerard appealed to the café at large. The group of flat-capped Italian men by the cake display had left off haggling over their pools coupons to stare. The hennaed woman squeezed out from behind the Gaggia and clumped down to where we sat. She started to paw at Gerard’s chest with a filthy wadge of J-cloths.

      ‘I so sorry, sir, so sorry . . .’

      ‘Whoa! Hold on – you’re making it worse!’

      ‘Iss not her fault, you know, she’s a good girl, ve-ery good girl. She have a big sadness this days – ‘

      ‘Man trouble, I’ll be bound.’ Gerard smirked. It looked like he was enjoying his grubby embrocation.

      ‘No, iss not that . . . iss, ‘ow you say, a re-jection?’

      I sat up straighter. СКАЧАТЬ