Grey Area (7 page)

Some time later he was truly drunk, orbiting his own consciousness in a tiny capsule of awareness that was shooting backwards at speed. He watched, awed, as the dawn of his own sentience sped away from him towards the great slashed crescent of the horizon. Then the toxic confusional darkness came upon him, swallowing him entirely.

The synaptic gimbals had been unslung and Peter’s splendidly meticulous gyroscope of ratiocination fell to the jungly floor of his id. He rose and did not know that he did so. He went to the record player and snapped it off – not knowing that he did so. He quit the room. Standing in the misshapen vestibule, the oddly angled point of entry to this disordered household, the philosopher stared into an old mirror – not knowing that he did so.

From out of the mirror there loomed the face of a Grunter. It was dead white, shaped by the utter foreignness of the distant past. The Civil War recusant looked at Peter for a while and then slid away into the mirror’s bevelled edge. Peter’s head shook itself – hard. His body felt the painful anticipation of the morning and took its mind upstairs.

In the Rood Room Giselle lay in a deep swoon. After climaxing she had relapsed thus, and gone to sleep with the twins’ pop records still sounding in her ears. But the twins were now asleep as well, and her fine body was still banked up on top of the disordered covers, forming cumulus piles of sweet flesh. A beam of starlight fell across her upper thighs, then extended itself towards the rood screen, where it illuminated the central panel, which depicted five Grunters in a loose bundle of copulation, a fasces of fornication.

Giselle was gorgeous, the fullness of her refulgent in the silvery light. Her auburn pubic hair glowing as if lit from within. Her breath disturbed her breast, only just sufficiently to reinforce the impression that she was an artist’s model trapped since the Regency in suspended inanimation.

There was a creaking from the corridor, a groaning of larynx and wood. The door squealed on its hinges and Peter Geddes’s brandy golem entered the Rood Room.

Giselle awoke at once and sat up. The diamond light from the window was scattered across his brow – outsize spangles. The incubus rubbed at them carelessly. She didn’t need to ask who it was, she could see that immediately. She shifted herself back under the covers, adroitly, as if inserting a sliver of ham into a half-eaten sandwich.

‘D-Doctor Geddes, is that you?’

‘Please,’ said the incubus, his voice clear now, unslurred, ‘call me Peter.’ And then he went on, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I must have taken the wrong turning at the top of the stairs. Quite easy to do, y’know – even after many lifetimes’ residence.’

‘Th-that’s OK – are you all right?’

‘Fine, thanks – and you?’ He had turned away from her now and was confronting the rood screen. ‘Not finding it too hard to sleep in this strange old place?’ His voice came to her now as it had done in tutorials, focused, crisply edged by intellect. His outstretched hand traced the line of a Grunter back, in the same way she remembered it tracing the sinuous connectives of his scrawled logical formulae.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the incubus then moved away from the rood screen and towards where Giselle lay.

‘Do you mind if I sit down for a moment?’ he said, looking down at her.

‘No, not at all.’ The words pooted from her kissable lips, inappropriate little farts of desire. The incubus sat, inhabiting the warm vacant V between the ranges of Giselle’s calves and thighs. He canted round, his unfocused eyes squeezing their watery gaze into the dilation of her pupils.

‘If it wasn’t such a trite remark,’ the incubus quipped, ‘I would tell you how vitally lovely you are at this precise moment – right now.’ He bent to kiss her, her urge to resist was as insubstantial as the air that escaped from between their marrying bodies.

His hands unwrapped the covers, her hands unfurled his woolly bunting, until they lay, two tubby people, damp with desire, in the heat of an English summer night.

He kissed her clavicle – the pit of it neatly fitted the trembling ball of his tongue. He tasted the salt of her skin as he ice-cream-licked the whole of her upper body, lapping her up. His face went down on her trembling belly and his hands cupped first her round face, then her round shoulders and lastly her rounded breasts. Cupped and kneaded, cupped and kneaded.

To her, the incubus and his touch were more than a release. She couldn’t have said why – for she had no reason left now – but he was beautiful. His pendulous belly, his bow legs, the scurf on his high forehead, the stubble on his jowls, all of it moved her. She grasped the flesh on his back, feeling moles like seeds beneath her palms; she worked at them to cultivate still more of his lust.

The mouth of the incubus was presently in her pubic hair, the tip of his tongue describing ancient arabesques and obscure theurgical symbols on her mons, the deep runnels of her groin, the babyflesh of her inner thighs. The incubus drew in a gout of the urine and mucous smell of her, and savoured it noisily, as if it were the nose of some particularly rambuncious Burgundy.

Then his horizontal lips were firmly bracketing her vertical ones, his hands were under her, holding her by the apex of her buttocks, and he ate into her, worried at the very core of her, as if she were some giant watermelon that he must devour to assuage an unquenchable thirst.

Later still the incubus addressed her with the incontrovertible fact of his penis. Entered into her with the logical extension of himself. She was curled up like a copula, a connective, her kneecaps almost in her eye sockets, as he placed himself on top of her. And Giselle went into him, went out of herself, travelled over the curved roof. The incubus was lancing into her from out of that other realm – he was pure, ineffable will, freeing her up with each stroke, dissolving her corporeal self.

His tongue was in her mouth, marauding around the back of her throat. His penis was in her vagina, knocking forcefully at the mouth of her cervix. The shadows of the phalluses on top of the rood screen fell across both their bodies, tiger-striping them in the luminous darkness. The Grunters stared down at the wreckless, wrecking bodies with gnostic inappetency.

She came; and the incubus yanked her up in her orgasm, hooking her higher by the pubic bone, until she span in giddy baroque loops and twirls – pain for pleasure and pleasure for pain. Her cries, her groans, her molar-grinds, all were grace notes, useless embroideries on the fact of her abandonment. ‘S-s-s-sorry!’ It was almost a scream; this remembering, even at the point of no return, the refinements of her upbringing.

They lay in each other’s arms for a while, but only a short one. Then the incubus, kissing her to stay silent, departed. Some while afterwards Giselle heard the sound of a shower pattering in a distant bathroom.

The following morning Giselle went downstairs knowing that this could be the hardest entrance of her life. She had no idea how Peter Geddes was going to play it. His lovemaking the night before had been so demonic, so intense. It had beached her on the nightmare coast of the dreamland. Would he acknowledge what had passed between them in some way? Would he already have confessed to his wife? Would she find herself back at Grantham station within the hour, her vacation job over and her academic career seriously compromised?

Peter and June were altercating in the kitchen of their ugly house as Giselle appeared at the bottom of the stairway.

‘Honestly, Peter.’ The gardener was even more beautiful this morning, her long blonde hair loose in a sheaf around her shoulders. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, getting pissed like that on a weekday. What’s Giselle’ – she gestured towards the guilty research assistant – ‘going to think of this household?’

Peter dropped the upper edge of his
Guardian
and looked straight into those guilty eyes. Looked forthrightly and yet distantly. Looked at her, Giselle realised with a shock, as if she were a member of some other species. He said – and there was no trace of duplicity or guile in his voice, ‘Sleep well, Giselle? Hope Richard and I didn’t disturb you during the night?’

‘R-Richard?’

‘He means Wagner,’ said June, placing a large willow-patterned plate of eggs and bacon on the table. ‘He always plays Wagner when he gets pissed – thinks it’s romantic or something. Silly old fool.’ She rumpled Peter’s already rumpled hair with what passed for affection, then went on, ‘Here’s your breakfast, Giselle, better eat it while it’s hot.’

‘Oh, er . . . sorry, thanks.’ Giselle sat down.

Peter rattled his paper to the next page. He was feeling pretty ghastly this morning. I really oughtn’t, he mused internally, get quite that drunk. I’m not as young as I used to be, not as resilient. Still, lucky the old autopilot’s so efficient, can’t remember a thing after putting on the Idyll . . . He glanced up from the paper and felt the eyes of his research assistant on him, full of warm love. Silly girl, thought Peter wryly.

Difficult to imagine why but she must fancy me or something. His eyes went to the straining spinnakers of her contented bosoms. Still, she is a handsome beast . . . pity that I’m not free – in a way.

Appendix

Peter Geddes’s Truth Table

or:

Peter is a man. All men want to fuck June. Therefore Peter wants to fuck June.

T = the truth of a component or concluding proposition.

F = the falsity of a component or concluding proposition.

Scale

Prologue

(to be spoken in conversational tones)

The philosopher Freddie Ayer was once asked which single thing he found most evocative of Paris. The venerable logical positivist thought for a while, and then answered, ‘A road sign with “Paris” written on it.’

Kettle

Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale. Arriving home from London late last night, I found myself unable to judge the distance from the last exit sign for Junction 4 to the slip road itself. Granted it was foggy and the bright headlights of oncoming vehicles burned expanding aureoles into my view, but there are three white-bordered, oblong signs, arranged sequentially to aid people like me.

The first has three oblique bars (set in blue); the second, two; and the third, one. By the time you draw level with the third sign you should have already begun to appreciate the meaning of the curved wedge, adumbrated with further oblique white lines, that forms an interzone, an un-place, between the slip road, as it pares away, and the inside carriageway of the motorway, which powers on towards the Chiltern scarp.

The three signs are the run-in strip to the beginning of the film; they are the flying fingers of the pit-crew boss as he counts down Mansell; they are the decline in rank (from sergeant, to corporal, to lance corporal) that indicates your demotion from the motorway. Furthermore, the ability to co-ordinate their sequence with the falling needles on the warmly glowing instrument panel of the car is a sound indication that you can intuitively apprehend three different scales at once (time, speed, distance), and that you are able to merge them effortlessly into the virtual reality that is motorway driving.

But for some obscure reason the Ministry has slipped up here. At the Beaconsfield exit there is far too long a gap between the last sign and the start of the slip road. I fell into this gap and lost my sense of scale. It occurred to me, when at last I gained the roundabout, and the homey, green sign (Beaconsfield 4) heaved into view, that this gap, this lacuna, was, in terms of my projected thesis, ‘No Services: Reflex Ritualism and Modern Motorway Signs (with special reference to the M40)’ – an aspect of what the French call
délire.
In other words that part of the text that is a deviation or derangement, not contained within the text, and yet defines the text better than the text itself.

I almost crashed. By the time I reached home (a modest bungalow set hard against the model village that is Beaconsfield’s principal visitor attraction), I had just about stopped shaking. I went straight to the kitchen. The baking tray I had left in the oven that morning had become a miniature Death Valley of hard-baked morphine granules. The dark brown rime lay in a ruckled surface, broken here and there into regular patterns of scales, like the skin of some moribund lizard. I used a steel spatula to scrape the material up and placed it carefully in a small plastic bowl decorated with leaping bunnies. (After the divorce my wife organised the division of the chattels. She took all the adult-size plates and cutlery, leaving me with the diminutive ware that our children had outgrown.)

I have no formal training in chemistry, but somehow, by a process of hit and miss, I have developed a method whereby I can precipitate a soluble tartrate from raw morphine granules. The problem with the stuff is that it still contains an appreciable amount of chalk. This is because I obtain my supplies in the form of bottles of kaolin and morphine purchased in sundry chemists. If I leave the bottles to sit for long enough, most of the morphine rises to the top. But you can never eradicate all the kaolin, and when the morphine suspension is siphoned off, some of the kaolin invariably comes as well.

Months of injecting this stuff have given my body an odd aspect, as with every shot more chalk is deposited along the walls of my veins, much in the manner of earth being piled up to form either an embankment or a cutting around a roadway. Thus the history of my addiction has been mapped out by me, in the same way that the road system of South-East England was originally constructed.

To begin with, conscious of the effects, I methodically worked my way through the veins in my arms and legs, turning them first the tannish colour of drovers’ paths, then the darker brown of cart tracks, until eventually they became macadamised, blackened, by my abuse. Finally I turned my attention to the arteries. Now, when I stand on the broken bathroom scales and contemplate my route-planning image in the full-length mirror, I see a network of calcified conduits radiating from my groin. Some of them are scored into my flesh like underpasses, others are raised up on hardened revetments of flesh: bloody flyovers.

I have been driven to using huge five-millilitre barrels, fitted with the long, blue-collared needles necessary for hitting arteries. I am very conscious that, should I miss, the consequences for my circulatory system could be disastrous. I might lose a limb and cause tailbacks right the way round the M25. Sometimes I wonder if I may be losing my incident room.

There’s this matter of the thesis, to begin with. Not only is the subject matter obscure (some might say risible), but I have no grant or commission. It would be all right if I were some dilettante, privately endowed, who could afford to toy with such things, but I am not. Rather, I both have myself to support and have to keep up the maintenance. If the maintenance isn’t kept up, my ex-wife – who is frequently levelled by spirits – will become as obdurate as any consulting civil engineer. She has it within her power to arrange bollards around me, or even to insist on the introduction of tolls to pay for the maintenance. There could be questions in the bungalow – something I cannot abide.

But last night none of this troubled me. I was lost in the arms of Morphia. As I pushed home the plunger she spoke to me thus: ‘Left hand down. Harder . . . harder . . . harder!’ And around I swept, pinned by g force into the tight circularity of history. In my reverie I saw the M40 as it will be some 20,000 years from now, when the second neolithic age has dawned over Europe.

Still no services. All six carriageways and the hard shoulder are grassed over. The long enfilades of dipping halogen lights, which used to wade in concrete, are gone, leaving behind shallow depressions visible from the air. Every single one of the distance markers ‘Birmingham 86’ has been crudely tipped to the horizontal, forming a series of steel biers. On top of them are the decomposing corpses of motorway chieftains, laid out for excarnation prior to interment. Their bones are to be placed in chambers, mausoleums that have been hollowed out from the gigantic concrete caissons of moribund motorway bridges.

I was conscious of being one of these chieftains, these princelings of the thoroughfare. And as I stared up into the dark, dark blue of a sky that was near to the end of history, I was visited by a horrible sense of claustrophobia – the claustrophobia that can come only when no space is great enough to contain you, not the involution that is time itself.

I have no idea how long I must have lain there, observing the daily life of the simple motorway folk, but it was long enough for me to gain an appreciation of the subtlety with which they had adapted this monumental ruin. While the flat expanse of the carriageways was used for rudimentary agriculture, the steeply raked embankments were left for aurochs, moufflon and other newly primitive grazers.

The motorway tribe was divided up into clans or extended families, each of which had made its encampment at a particular junction and taken a different item of the prehistoric road furniture for its totem. My clan – Junction 2, that is – had somehow managed to preserve a set of cat’s eyes from the oblivion of time. These were being worn by the chieftain, bound into his complicated head-dress, when he came to see how I was getting on with decomposing.

‘You must understand,’ he said, observing the Star Trek convention, whereby even the most outlandish peoples still speak standard English, ‘that we view the M40 as a giant astronomical clock. We use the slip roads, maintenance areas, bridges and flyovers azimuthally, to predict the solstices and hence the seasons. Ours is a religion both of great antiquity and of a complexity that belies our simple agrarian culture. Although we are no longer able to read or write ourselves, our priesthood has orally transmitted down the generations the sacred revelations contained in this ancient text. ‘ With this he produced from a fold in his cloak a copy of ‘No Services: Reflex Ritualism and Modern Motorway Signs (with special reference to the M40)’, my as yet unwritten thesis.

Needless to say, this uncharacteristically upbeat ending to my narcotic vision left me feeling more melioristic than usual when I awoke this morning. Staggering to the kitchen I snapped on the radio. A disc jockey ululated an intro while I put on the kettle. The sun was rising over the model village. From where I sat I could see its rays reflected by a thousand tiny diamond-patterned windows. I sipped my tea; it tasted flat, as listless as myself. Looking into the cup I could see that the brown fluid was supporting an archipelago of scale. Dirty grey-brown stuff, tattered and variegated. I went back to the kitchen and peered into the kettle. Not only was the interior almost completely choked by scale, but the de-scaler itself was furred over, transformed into a chrysalis by mineral deposits. I resolved that today I would visit the ironmonger’s and purchase a new de-scaler.

It’s on my route – the ironmonger’s – for I’ve burnt down every chemist in Beaconsfield in the last few months, and now I must head further afield for my kaolin and morphine supplies. I must voyage to Tring, to Amersham and even up the M40, to High Wycombe.