WILL SELF

Each issue, Esquire commissions an unsparing inspection of Will Self’s body. This month: the neck

Our literary luminary’s monthly anatomical check-up arrives at the neck

The problem with the neck of the species is that it must be just

so — a shade too long, or a shade too short, and the game’s up,

my friend

My mother called her “No-Neck-Nadine”, savouring the alliteration as much as the description, but then, that was my mother: forever wielding epithets as if they were ninja stars. No-Neck-Nadine (henceforth NNN) was the wife of a friend of my much older brother; she wore white roll-neck sweaters which, depending on the way you looked at it, either disguised her no-neckedness, or disproved it altogether. By which I mean to say: was the roll neck of NNN’s roll-neck sweater itself a form of prosthetic neck? Or did it act to separate her indisputably globular head from her equally rotund body?

Aged 13, these problems — at once erotic and Euclidean — tormented me. NNN took me to Canterbury for a weekend. Why? Well, she was a visiting American, so presumably hadn’t yet had her fill of English perpendicular. As to the oddity of a woman in her thirties taking such a distal child away like that? Well, as I never cease trying to impress on my children — a homily they violently resist — it was an innocent era, the Seventies, when, at left-wing and “alternative” jamborees, in community halls, on trestle tables, the Paedophile Information Exchange laid out their leaflets extolling the virtues of “manboy-love”, alongside those of the Socialist Worker calling for revolution and the Hare Krishnas’ enlightenment.

Anyway, I digress: I never found out what

Do we not find an absence of neck in a baby to be a very cute thing indeed? Obviously, this is a less attractive look once the human phenotype becomes upright. I call it morbid obesity

NNN’s roll-neck concealed; never established if she were some sort of one-woman outpost of the Kayan tribe, practising neck-elongation in suburban London and Maryland rather than Myanmar. Or, if once the roll-neck had been peeled up over her face, revealed to my starting, hormonal eyes would have been that utter absence of neck which my mother’s taunt implied. But is it so very bad to have no neck? Need it be some Edgar Allan Poe horror show: a melding of chin into breast in a single fleshy tegument? Rather, do we not find an absence of neck in a baby to be a very cute thing indeed? I, for one, cannot abide a skinny baby; and find them most attractive at that developmental stage when it appears as if twine has been tightly tied around their ankles, wrists, groins and necks, then deeply submerged in their expanding chubbiness. Obviously, this is a less attractive look once the human phenotype becomes upright. I call it morbid obesity.

But not everyone without a neck is overweight, while to be the possessor of a long, elegant, swanlike one is no guarantee of anything. Some of the uncanniest transformations Alice undergoes in Wonderland (well rendered in John Tenniel’s original illustrations), come when she drinks the potion in the imperatively labelled bottle, and at first massively lengthens — her neck becoming a great white shoot — and then “shuts up like a telescope”.

No, the problem with the neck of the species is that it must be just so — a shade too long, or a shade too short, and the game’s up, my friend. (At which point, it’s worth recalling the magnificent Caribbean expression: “His T’s are up”, a reference to the stretched T-shape of the exposed tendons in an older man’s neck.) Not only does a disproportionate neck throw the entire human aspect out of whack — creating such sinister mutants as the “tall-short man”, who appears lofty when seated, though is diminutive once upright — but it also cries out for the noose.

Or the needle. Christiane F, a nasty little junkie-exploitation flick, released just post the innocent Seventies in 1981, followed the doubly eponymous anti-heroine as she sunk through the circles of hell surrounding Berlin’s infamous Zoo Station. The climax of the film comes when the desperate Christiane is deprived of a hypo loaded with smack by a crazed addict who plunges it into his own carotid artery. A pain in the neck, indeed.

The hateful vulnerability of the neck is surely what torments us, once we get past minor quibbling about its aesthetics — it is the promontory which cuts us off from the mainland of our bodies, and while now and then we may fear our internal organs liquefying under the onslaught of the Ebola virus, at a subconscious level we hear the axe whistling about our ears each and every day of our lives. The Grim Reaper’s scythe — Darth Vader’s lightsaber; the guillotine’s demonic certainty; Jihadi John’s carving knife — all are aimed at that densely packed conduit of cabling which carries the following: perceptual data; oxygen; nutrients, between Bonce HQ and the Corps of Man.

For some years now, I’ve been an intermitted client of a gentle and philosophic Iranian physiotherapist, who deftly massages my neck to realign the nerves which have a tendency to get caught between my impacting vertebrae, the legacy of carrying too many chubby babies on my shoulders for too many years. Lying with my face in a padded hole, Nasser’s fingers gently probing, I think of Billie Holiday’s strange fruit, and all the other African Americans strung up by the Klan. Really, mother’s attitude towards NNN was insupportable: to have no neck could well be to your evolutionary advantage. The hangman might well shake his head and cast the noose aside, and the executioner forsake his blade, faced with such a fine cut. Whereas to be the possessor — as I am — of a long neck, is to invite the long drop.

A few years ago, my then six-year-old son and I both woke up one morning with the most terrible cricked necks. We hied ourselves to the local GP’s surgery, where he deftly examined us, then pronounced: “I can tell you this much: it doesn’t matter what I do to you,” he nodded at my son, “you’ll be better by tomorrow.” He turned to me, then continued: “And no matter what I do to you, you won’t be better for three months.”

How right he was. And, as I hunched my way around the neighbourhood for the next 12 weeks, twinging and wincing, gurning and gawping, I thought often of Nadine and her blissful necklessness.