The Devil's Playground (33 page)

Amsterdam. He wished he could settle for not knowing,

consign the past, bury it, forget it, fuck it.

He took the first rogue disc and put it into his CD player.

He watched the tray withdraw and the machinery humming

as the laser tried to read it. He could hear it spin at some

impossible speed, the light plucking the information from its

surface. He lit a cigarette. Took a deep breath.

Nothing happened.

It kept spinning. There was no display. There didn’t appear

to be anything on it. He cursed silently and then, of course,

he realized.

He took the CD out and walked over to his computer,

waited while it booted up, then placed it in the CD-ROM

tray. He listened to it whir and buzz and watched the black

screen.

The cursor went into its swinging ape ‘wait’ mode, the

media player window popped up, and Jon watched, absolutely

stunned, as Jake’s face appeared on the screen in front of him.

‘I made my first cut at the age of thirteen, in the safe locked-up spaces of my rooms, with a sewing needle I had taken from my

mother’s bureau. I put it through my left nipple. Slowly, measuredly, I let the needle feel its way through to the other side. It took half an hour for it to come out the opposite end, but by the time it did,

everythinghad changed and I knewthat I had somehow inadvertently

stumbled upon my true self.

‘I began to explore my body in this way from then on. Always in

the privacy of my rooms, when Mother and Father were out on one

of their many social engagements. I would lock the door, set up my needles and pins and enter another world.

‘Of course, a psychoanalyst will tell you that it was a reaction,

a reaction to the overbearing controlling impulses of my father

and the dull, grey childhood possibilities of the late fifties and early sixties in England. But it was more than that, more than they could ever imagine - a special door through which only I was

allowed.’

Jon listened as Jake detailed his father’s final disinheritance,

Raphael Kuper, the whole sad story.

‘I hated my father, let me say it again, I hated the old man more than I loved or cherished anything in this world and my life became

structured by this hatred. Its walls were my walls, its breath the breath stuck in my throat.

‘By the time of my teens, my father had become one of the largest

importers of food from the continent, using the connections he’d

made before the war. Money and influence crowded him like bats

fluttering all over our ten-bedroom home.

‘I always knew that I was destined to follow him into the business, into the wheeling, dealing, expense-account trips and boardroom

battles that filled his life. From as early as the age of thirteen I felt that this was not what I wanted to do or to become. Perhaps like all children of a certain age I was seduced by the allure of doing

something different, of changing the world in some way. A couple

of years later I realized that what I really wanted to change was

myself.

‘It started with small things - little burns or scratches on my thighs and torso, small black and purple marks of independence on secret

parts of my body. After yet another argument with him I would run

up to my bedroom, strip off my clothes and take back my body. The

pain took away that other pain - it was cleaner. It was mine.

‘If you’ve never experienced this then you don’t know. And you

will never know. You will sleep until the big sleep slumbers down

upon you. You will never wake up. Never feel the world, move only

like a weakened, bitter ghost through it.

‘There is something pure and fundamental about letting a sharp,

silvery blade ripple across your flesh, watching the first burst bloom of your body creeping across the skin, feeling it in your stomach, your balls and your heart. Feeling on fire for the world. Feeling the world in every last spasm of pain and heartache and hate and

sweetness that it contains. It can take so many years to learn that one is dead. You still don’t understand? Think about it. How when

you step inadvertently on an upturned plug suddenly the world is

right there, electrically and immediately sprung and sprayed in your face, and for a few seconds everything is clear and motionless,

suspended in tremulous space. This is what happens. This is how it begins.

‘Thus, I experimented voraciously through my adolescence, with

fire, with constriction, with scarification.

‘Perhaps you find this weird, inhuman, un-understandable, so far

from your experience of reality that all you can do is dismiss it in a frightened glance. Perhaps people still do, but you must understand that it is only the smallest of differences between that and those other lethal methods of forgetting - alcohol, tobacco and sweat. We all kill ourselves in little ways every day. Paradoxical as it may seem, I do believe it’s what keeps us alive. We need to remember our

bodies. We are thirsting for it. We have lost our bodies, forgotten them, tossed them away, discarded, bedraggled, meaningless,

reduced to function, to nothing. We need to get back to them. We

are aching to feel them. Put the needle in. Try it. Once. Then judge.

Feel every rotten, pulsing, pain-drenched, sizzling little atom in your body. Remember it is yours.

‘After a few years of various improvised techniques and routines,

I began to enjoy the pain, to see that it held something for me that other so-called pleasures did not.

‘I don’t like using words like transcendence, they carry too much

religious baggage, but a transcendence of sorts it seemed, entirely secular and yet infinitely repeatable.

‘Even when I started, pushing sewing needles through my flesh, I

felt that something was happening to my body and mind, something

unexperienced before, a world that I had not even imagined was

suddenly displayed before me. I realized who 1 was in the most

intimate and sensuous way, in the trailing wake of memory awoken

out of slumbrous vein and artery, cortex and bone, the remembered

body alive to itself for the first time, itself for the first time.

‘My father - predictably, inevitably - wanted me to take over the

business from him and so when the time came to think about

university, I was told that I was going to Cambridge to study law and woe betide me if I didn’t get myself accepted there or if I happened to have any fanciful notions of other possible paths. I didn’t argue.

Not with him.

‘When I got there in the beginning of my nineteenth year, I found

that my course covered enough things of sufficient interest to me to balance my father’s holy triumvirate of company law, tax law and

international trade law.

‘I settled into Cambridge comfortably and rather quickly to my

surprise. It was as if being physically further from him had stripped away the residue of years sitting on my chest. I wrote infrequently and came down to London only for Christmas.

‘My father had been raised an Anglican but I believe that after he reached the age of fourteen, religion didn’t mean a thing to him.

Once he started working he realized that his brain had little space or time for what could not yield results in the short term. However, he felt it his duty, for reasons that I could never quite figure out as a child, to instruct me in the ways of our Lord and to make the token gesture of presenting us on the church steps every Christmas Eve. I went with him, uncomplaining, somehow closer to him then - in the

shadow of something we both did not believe in - than I had felt at any other time.

‘I pursued my studies like any earnest young student but I also

pursued my undercover curriculum. You see, until I went to Cambridge I was just a novice, a child eagerly experimenting with no

form or history, just whatever was to hand. I felt it rather than

anything else, I had an instinctual notion as to where to put the

needle in or how tight to tie the waistband. The university libraries proved exceptional places of learning. In the Anthropology

department I read about African tribes who practised scarification, Polynesian tattoo initiations and other esoteric rituals duly recorded for “scientific interest” by awed, bespectacled Victorian explorers.

They did not know that they were in fact writing a manual, a do-it yourself guide for the second half of this century. Across the countless anthropological texts and essays lay a fragmented bible of

the pleasures of the body, pleasures achieved only through steel

and fire.

‘For every hour I studied statutes, I gave an hour to Sioux hanging ceremonies, for every tort there was a slice of flesh, a pierced

membrane, a new world entirely strange and yet impossibly familiar.

‘There were only a few people in the area at the time who were

pursuing a similar course to mine. Sometimes we would bump into

each other at certain lectures or performances though we never

really got together and spoke about what lay beneath our clothes.

There was an imperative secrecy about everything, as if that was part of the force that kept us entranced. We never shared anecdotes,

compared notes or piercings. That kind of community wasn’t to form for another ten years or so and even then … it’s only in this past decade that things have become more organized. Information is now

widely available on the Internet. Where once I had to scour through dusty volumes in Cambridge’s silent libraries, now any fourteen-year old-kid can learn how to pierce his scrotum in twenty-two different ways by clicking a few buttons and, should his mum burst into the

room, he can deftly flick the screen back to Grand Theft Auto and

she’ll think everything’s perfectly all right. It makes it easier for kids now. They can see that they aren’t the only ones, that there are

others out there and that what they perhaps thought was sick and

ugly about themselves is in fact a form of art, a form of freedom.

‘I never stopped experimenting. I wore tight constricting waistbands under my cloak, sat in lectures with a hundred clothes pegs

carefully hanging off my flesh. I read all the literature I could and tried to copy the ancient ceremonies and rituals depicted there. It gave me strength, a deep power that was all the more satisfying

because I knew that I had nurtured and developed it myself. It was perhaps the only thing in my world at the time that I could truly call my own.

‘I continued with my practices after I left university. I also became a businessman. I wore a pinstripe, shaved and shined my shoes every day. I set up delivery contracts and supply networks, negotiated and expanded our field of interests. I became quite feared, a man of

action and all that. My father was impressed and, on reaching his

fiftieth birthday, he set me up in my own business, relieved that I had finally seen sense and “grown up”. I diversified and accrued

more money. I learned how to hang from horizontal flesh hooks for

hours at a time. I flew across the globe, signing contracts and buying stock. I always went to see the “natives”, sat in on tattooing sessions and scarification ceremonies.

‘As time went on I began to meet more people with the same

interests as me, computer executives in California who would perform Olgalga hanging ceremonies on their weekends off and housewives

who cut a scar on their thigh every time their husband beat or

humiliated them.

‘I always wanted to be different from my father. I hated everything he stood for and by the time of my adolescence I hated every minute spent with him. He was always cold, always businesslike and he

poured the hate that had drowned his heart on to me.

‘He hated everyone, thought everyone was about to rip him off or

cheat him in some way and he always looked for ways to screw that

person before he himself would be screwed. He brought down

companies large and small, shook hands with prime ministers and

then planted stories about them in the press. He was a nasty man in every sense of the word. I cannot find anything to mitigate him. I have tried because your father is your father even if he is a monster and I sought some way to understand him, to break through the

cement wall that he’d placed around himself and, if not to agree with him, at least to see why he did what he did.

‘So, as you can imagine, it was the all-time ironic kick in the balls when he died and left that testament. It seemed to me that I had

spent my entire life trying to be different from my father and suppressing and hating the parts of me that I felt were like him and then,

finding out that he wasn’t my father, not the biological one anyway, that was a hell of a thing.

‘I had always been scared that I would turn out like him, that

genetics would out. At the age of twenty-seven I had a vasectomy. I wanted to be certain that I would never have children, never do to them what was done to me, and now I found out that I had fought all my life not to carry on the family line, only to discover that my family line had in fact been wiped out wholesale some fifty years previously.

‘It also opened up another part of my “father” that I had never

thought him capable of. I couldn’t imagine the man that had made

so many people’s lives a misery as the benevolent rescuer of a Jewish child. It was tempting to reassess him on that basis but I knew that the reasons for what he did would remain for ever buried and

obscure and that it was not to be the mitigation that I had searched for all that time.

‘I rarely turned up for work after that. I delegated and disappeared.

Cashed in my chips, as they say, sold my options - all too aware now that I had only one option left. Everything I’d known about myself had suddenly been overturned and I felt an impostor in a suit, walking through the thirty-first-floor office that bore my name, which wasn’t even my real name, on the door.