Decent Drapery by Will Self
Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them…
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
a miniature pickle lies across a lappet of smoked fish, this: a divisor separating one part of the dead salmon from the other. The fish itself – another “decent drapery” concealing… What? A blini, possibly – or perhaps some cheesy cracker or oatie cake, one only hopes not cheesy… Oysters Mornay, somewhere near Thirroul on a misty midwinter mid-afternoon, the long slimy sweeps of the tarmac ending up on Formica, together with little crusty cups of cheesy fish-goo… So shocked: the restaurant was BYO, so I went next door and got a half-bottle of Bundaberg to wash them –.
‘– down.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You might want something to wash them down. There’s a waiter over there with some drinks.’
Flutes straight out of the box, filled with chain store champers – dumpy tumblers of bloody cranberry juice, the long fizzing plumes of Perrier bubbles, rising up from deep beneath Vergeze only to pop flaccidly a world away. The waiter swirls away from us, it’s an INTERMISSION, the word lain out on the tight ruching of vermillion satin – it’s a night time emission, the sperm spattered out in a close pattern of a million –.
‘– stains.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The floor, it’s covered in stains. Really! You’d think they’d make an effort on that score – the geometric purity of the gallery should reflect the emptiness of pictorial space.’
‘Very faint stains.’ Very faint – the marks created by crated canvases dragged this way and that, and others left behind by the feet of those that dragged them. If the floor were to be raised to the perpendicular and rendered transparent save for these stains, we might look through them, as people peer through a translucent curtain. The paintings would then have superimposed on their surfaces the diagram of their own installation, to scale.
‘There’s what’s his name.’
There indeed is What’s-His-Name, closing in on us, herding a waiter before him, so that Champagne arrives first followed by a cause for celebration:
‘Cheers!’ What’s-His-Name says during a flautist’s fermata, ‘It’s a triumph, wouldn’t you agree?’
How long can I look at What’s-His-Name before I agree? How long can I revel in this uncanniness: the way Nature, in all her infinite wisdom and skill has taken these familiar features, this well-known skin tone, and artfully stretched them, a meat blanket, over such an incomprehensible framework. Two neat almond-shaped holes have been cut out of What’s-His-Face, and inside them shiny eyes brim with sympathetic recognition.
‘I do, absolutely… ’ my companion concedes, ‘although the state of the floor… ’
They rearrange their feet parenthetically – his boldly black, hers hesitantly brown; between them, on the thickly-painted white floor of the gallery the troublesome stains can be interpreted as notating human dissonance: all the effortful grunts and epithets the workers uttered under staling breath. If only we could read them correctly the tale would be told to us: an episode from the life of the marionettes –. Ach! Such fatuous nonsense: for were this to be the case the only readers would be marionettes as well.
‘I am surprised,’ What’s-His-Face says, tracing over these traces with a hand-tooled toe. ‘I mean, it’s not actually that difficult to deal with this sort of thing.’
Maybe not – but it’s difficult for him to deal with this interaction, to deal with every human encounter: each time it begins the same way, deep in the void of him, a perturbation, a minute exchange of energy between one local void and the next, wavelengths stretched, released, coiling into particular forms capable of sustaining this illusion: a world within reflective of a gallery without, a cloud chamber full of individuals revolving in Brownian motion. Between him and them, always, a wavering drapery – sometimes the thick scarlet velvet that heralds the first act, other times the beige fire-retardant canvas, mostly the nicotine-stained nets of childhood; he will always, he fears, be a twitcher. He tears at the curtain – rends it every time with the violence of his assertion, three broad rips, the blood clots beneath the nails, the blind force of the sub cortex howls into my face: ‘D’you think it’s Amtico?’
In the riverfront apartments and the sales offices for those apartments – in the subsurface service centres where the air conditioning hums; on top of newel posts and right along the ledges left between the two parallel sheets of plate glass that meet in eternity; behind fridges and cookers; underneath adulterers’ beds; in the walk-in closet accessed via a service lift; on the garage floor – so that stray oils and glycerines pool then slide across it mercurially; binding my own toes and fingers – a webbing or tegument no sooner grown than torn at with fingernails …like his; bellying out from the risers and humping over the treads of every stair in every case in each concrete core… right to the top, where the hawks curvet above the smokeless aorta of the new pseudo-chimney. From up there we could all see it: worming away from us, a perfect floor-covering, insinuating its way between the buildings, unrolling along arterial roads, filling in parks and other less significant open spaces (the waste ground between the railway line and the frozen food distribution centre); expanding over fields and gluing itself to hillsides. At the coast hot rubbery blobs of linoxyn and pine rosin drop to the shingle and the cliff edge is hessian-fringed, ‘No,’ I say, ‘I think it’s probably lino.’
It doesn’t matter how What’s-His-Essence went – he’s gone. The people-pleats fold and unwind; the parenthetic feet quote yet again the travails of the recent past; meanwhile, in crotches and armpits, around waists and thighs – materials bisect the most intimate portions of our own true selves… Our smoked fish is in a pickle. ‘Come,’ she says – a hateful pressure-drop, this limp imperative. Her hand rests in the crook of my arm; if only I had the strength to straighten it her fingertips would roll along the groove formed between my biceps and triceps, my flexors and extensors, until unsupported she’d fall to the floor in an oddly geometric huddle of flesh and fabric… Oh, the violence we do to one another in the mind-theatre! Where our faked blood comes in capsules and our dagger blades spring-retract! What does she get up to with my manikin in the penal colony she’s undoubtedly established somewhere in her prefrontal cortex? I can imagine… the machinery of punishment has a diabolical complexity: a peeler-and-corer scaled up to fit this strange fruit, which is itself but an arrangement of flexible calcium rods, strung with clicking hooks-and-eyes and swaddled with flesh, muscle and skin. Oh, the delicate brocade of veins! The embroidery of arteries! The heavy and gilded tassel of the human heart! None of it – least of all my proven ability to extend and extend my metaphors until they can be easily plaited together – will count for much once the coring and peeling gets underway. Once the figure I like to cut in public is flensed from me by rotating –.
‘She’s signalling; we’d better go over.’
To understand another is to see the pattern in the curtain of language; to be lost in mutual comprehension is to forget there’s a curtain at all – our curtain no longer has any pattern at all. Once we troubled ourselves with interiors: standing in shops, sorting through swags… It’s been decades now since all our fine damask drapes were replaced with plasticised curtains so stiff that when we yank them open – which is often – they go with us, hastening along their runners with an aggressive shhhk! And when we stop they concertina into rigid folds – such is the violence we enact on each other, in this: the strange ritual of concupiscence without desire.
‘What do you think?’
‘OK, I suppose – certainly better than the last lot.’
‘They were sort of pattern thingies, weren’t they?’
‘Big pattern thingies.’
The big pattern thingy is what we’re always speaking through; it’s the fundamental category without which no categorisation – let alone evaluation – would be possible.
She turns to me: ‘What about you, what do you reckon?’
I reckon up the number of times, each and every day I fail to suspend disbelief in these picayune performances: She stands – our old and good acquaintance – the play of her aging features staged between swags of hair and beneath a pelmet fringe; and it’s impossible for any audience possessing the normal range of human emotions not participate: ‘Yeah, definitely better than the, um, pattern thingies.’
I am my own understudy in this precise sense: if I often forget my lines, I just as frequently recall them. The velvety pile is rubbed this way to create a mark, and then that way to erase it – all is as it was before; the bubble world of the moment has popped, and in the dusty square of Vergeze the boules clink-clank… I remember, staggering up from the bucket seat of a sports car into the lemon light of an early Provencal morning… I remember, my underwear cooked in my clothes sous-vide… Then: the blissful cooling as we stood at the zinc counter, a fat Boyard mais in one hand, a glass of marc de Bourgogne in the other… Then… after that we had bouquet garni in our nostrils as we winched ourselves back down into the car then whacked along the corniche… They’re both looking at me… They think I haven’t delivered my line with enough conviction – I see it in their eyes: fear. Better do it once more, but with feeling: ‘They’re unquestionably an advance on her earlier work… overall.’
‘I believe the Met are interested,’ says our good and old acquaintance. I wonder; does she ever consider the violence we’re doing to one another? I swear, were I to have a stroke right now – were the decent drapery between one blood vessel and the next to be rent, I doubt it’d really make much of an impression on her: me, thrashing about on the scuffed linoleum… The private openeers gathering to gawp, or scattering through the plate glass doors… Come along now, everyone, there’s nothing to see here… There would be a certain frisson, I believe, when the ambulance arrived – the contrast between the paramedics’ uniforms and workaday footwear and our lounge suits and cocktail dresses would suggest new aesthetic possibilities that even the most jaded might apprehend… Not for long, though: my body would be rolled on to the stretcher; the trolley would be rolled away; the electrical storm of their lights and sirens would blow away down the boulevard and my stroke would be there in the smooth soft velvet of their minds for a few moments… until they stroked the anecdotal nap… making of it an event in their own lives, one that was over… gone.
‘They may well be,’ says my life-companion, ‘but I think I’ve seen enough – shall we go?’
There can be no greater intimacy than that between a fingernail and a scab – yet both are entirely lacking in sense; mere nerveless accretions of dried blood and keratin. There can be no greater violence than that enacted by fingernails on scabs – reopening old wounds, that’s what they do, but they do it in darkness, under cloth, not out in the open, not under lights, not in a gallery.
Published 2016 in association with The Bohen Foundation.
Will Self is a writer.
