Grey Area by Will Self Read Free Book Online

succinct and clearly realised satirical ideas I’ve heard in a long time – ‘
    ‘This is not a satire!’ she screamed at me. ‘That’s what these stupid publishers think. I have written this book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century English novel. I aim to unite dramatically the formation of individual character to the process of social change. Just because I’ve cast the plot in the form of an allegory and set it in the future, it has to be regarded as a satire!’
    ‘Sticky hitch,’ said Gerard, some time later as we stood on the corner of Old Compton Street. Across the road in the window of the catering supplier’s, dummy waiters stood, their arms rigidly crooked, their plastic features permanently distorted into an attitude of receptivity, preparedness to receive orders for second helpings of inertia.
    ‘Come off it, Gerard. The plot sounded good – more than good, great even. And what could be more central to the English literary tradition? She said so herself.’
    ‘Oh yeah, I have nothing but sympathy for her sometime publishers, I know just what authors like that are to deal with. Full of themselves, of their bloody idealism, of their pernickety obsession with detail, in a word: precious. No, two words: precious and pretentious.
    ‘Anyway, I must get – ‘ but he bit off his get-out clause; someone sitting in the window of Wheeler’s – diagonally across the street from us – had caught his eye. ‘Oh shit! There’s Andersen the MD. Trust him to be having a bloody late lunch. I’ll have to say hello to him, or else he’ll think that I feel guilty about not being at the office.’
    ‘Oh I see, negative paranoia.’
    ‘Nothing of the sort. Anyway, I’ll give you a ring, old girl – ‘
    ‘Not so fast, Gerard, I’ll come and wait for you. I want to say goodbye properly.’
    ‘Please yourself,’ he shrugged in the copula of our linked arms.
    I stood just inside the entrance while Gerard went and fawned over his boss. I was losing my respect for him by the second. Andersen was a middle-aged stuffed suit with a purple balloon of a head. His companion was similar. Gerard adopted the half-crouch posture of an inferior who hasn’t been asked to join a table. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Andersen’s companion gestured for the bill, using that universal hand signal of squiggling with an imaginary pen on the sheet of the air.
    The waiter, a saturnine type who had been lingering by a half-open serving hatch in the oaken mid-ground of the restaurant, came hustling over to the table, almost running. Before he reached the table he was already shouting, ‘What are you trying to do! Take the piss!’
    ‘I just want the bill,’ said Andersen’s companion. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’
    ‘You’re taking the piss!’ the waiter went on. He was thin and nervy, more like a semiologist than a servant. ‘You know that I’m really a writer, not a waiter at all. That’s why you did that writing gesture in the air. You heard file talking, talking frankly and honestly to some of the other customers, so you decided to make fun of me, to deride me, to put me down!’ He turned to address the whole room. The fuddled faces of a few lingering lunchers swung lazily round, their slack mouths O-ing.
    ‘I know who you are!’ The waiter’s rapier finger pointed at Andersen’s companion. ‘Mister-bloody-Hargreaves. Mister big fat fucking publisher! I know you as well, Andersen! You’re just two amongst a whole school of ignorami, of basking dugongs who think they know what makes a jolly fucking good read. Ha!’
    Gerard was backing away from the epicentre of this breakdown in restraint, backing towards me, trying to make himself small and insignificant. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said over his shoulder. The waiter had found some uneaten seafood on a plate and was starting to chuck it around: ‘flotch!’ a bivalve slapped against the flock wallpaper,