Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

I remember them best because they’re back, albeit in a different form. I’m sitting in the living-room and there are these solid tubes of brightness wreathing just about everything in sight. A blue haze runs over the back of the leather three-seater sofa against the far wall. It shimmers across the carpet, six inches above the surface of the Wilton twistpile, mimicking, in a ghostly kind of a way, the diamond patterning. Purple haze round the pelmets. Green haze pulsing gently in front of the wall unit. And through the double doors, with their distorting panes of toughened glass, I can see my misbegotten children in the diningroom. They are lying in orderly rows, their backs humped at angles, a militaristic school of miniature cetaceans. Above each one there is a little corona of black light. If I squint I can harden the corona to a cloud. If I strain it fades out to almost nothing, a faint retinal after-image, nothing more.

You see, my feeling is this: I’m going to sit here for some time. Probably for the next three hours. You see, if I move, there’s a little sort of wart of pain — a hard little thing — stuck in the crook of my arm. And I hate the way it bobbles and jostles me when I move. It does it even when I perform a very simple action like taking a sip of beer. God knows what it would do to me if I walked through to the kitchen and fried up some spicy mushrooms. That would be a real mistake.

It’s a mistake I don’t intend to make. I have adjusted my environment. I’ve erected a little bubble here. I’m like one of those children that are allergic to everything. I cannot leave my bubble. I would be risking death. The wrong sort of stimulation could be fatal to me at this point. I mark down especially the spicy mushrooms in this context. Although I am not subject to those mushrooms in any real sense. Nor their foil container.

There are a lot more of my children upstairs. They are sleeping quietly. When the morning comes and Gavin calls … they will be taken away from me. Into Care. Yes, I like that ‘Care’. With a capital ‘C’. They’re sleeping up there swathed in robes of bubbled plastic, girded with corrugated cardboard. But for this wart, this worrisome wart, I would join them. Lie for a while, in the small back bedroom. Go into the second bedroom and then disport myself in the master bedroom. Lie among them like a patriarch. Actually, I could do this. If I really wanted to. But I don’t. I want to be right here when the dawn makes the railings across the road fizz. When an aureole projects out from the statue of the naked woman at Henley’s Corner. When Gavin rings …

Actually. Actually, I think, I think Gavin will ring quite soon. It’s nearly 6.00 a.m. and there’s the time difference to consider. I’m worried about something, no, let me tell you. I’m worried that you think me needlessly cryptic: children, warts, spicy mushrooms, purple pelmets… but let me do it my way. Because I’ve already finished. As far as I can see, each sentence, each clause I utter contains the whole story. Beginning, middle and end. If I were to be true to my vision I’d shut up now. I could always shake my head and subside in a snowflake whirl of fragmented light … so let me be cryptic. If I hold out I can pretend that I haven’t finished telling the story and that makes it worth telling, you see.

There are a lot of books lying around this chair. It’s like a little village. They are all half open, spines upward. Little houses of knowledge. I’ve always liked books about How To Do Things. How To Do Economics, How To Do Finance, How To Form a Company, How To Enamel Jewellery, How To Build a Boat . Within the past hour or so I’ve looked at each of these books in turn. And in the next hour or so I’ll do it again. I’ve done the same thing with the swathe of magazines and newspapers in the wedge of space between my chair and the wall. I’ll come to the records later.

I look at each of the books in turn. I read a sentence or a short paragraph. And then, that’s it. I’ve built the boat. Made the pendant. Floated the company. I have the same problem as I do with my own story. Everything is contained within everything. But I don’t despair, I continue to pick up each of my books in turn, riffle through it, seize on a paragraph and then abandon it. Early on in the night the same was true of other rooms in the house. In the kitchen, before the spicy mushrooms gained their grip, I read cookery. In the toilet, humour. Upstairs it was novels. I daresay the books are all still there, abandoned villages.

I search the books and the newspapers for one fact, one piece of information, that will provide the key … but I already know it. What I’ve neglected to tell you is that I’m old, really old. Inhumanly old. I’m as old as a long-buried culvert. Bricks fall from my walls and expose the mud. I’m a huge wrinkled finger. I’ve been in the bath too long. My flesh hangs on me in wattled pouches. Every part of my clothing is a sweaty gusset. And I haven’t mentioned the pulsing sound. Or the booming sound. The great wash of the ocean that pulls my head around on my neck.

And then again. That’s better. Good to pull taut the clothesline. It’s awfully depressing to see those grey many-times-washed aertex shirts. Trailing their cuffs in the dirt. Ha! Ha, ha … We bought a company, off the shelf. I like that ‘off the shelf’. Makes me think of neat wire boxes full of miniature executives, all stacked on racks. Not quite like that. Our company, that is, Gavin’s and mine: Ocean Ltd. Formerly trading as plankton farmers, for fish food, you see. Pet fish. Estuary — somewhere. Now, ours. And fitted out with new directors: Gavin, myself and Mr Rabindarath. Unwittingly in this last instance. He never leaves his room except to pick up his prescription. Gavin kindly relieves him of the bother of reading any of the correspondence relating to Ocean Ltd. And, indeed, of his responsibility as Financial Director thereof. Good of Gavin. Mr Rabindarath is a hopeless neurotic. He would worry.

I feel a lot better. Well enough to take on the kitchen. The purple edging around everything has stopped furiously oscillating. Either that or it now vibrates with such frequency that it appears static. At any rate, objects have achieved a crystalline purity of line. This beer can, for example. Have you ever seen a purer beer can than this? Why, the drawing of the Castlemaine Brewery in Brisbane is so sharp, one might be standing right outside of it. I drink. That flat taste. Absolute purity of line.

I lift myself from the chair. A little stiff. To be expected. Cigarette ash forms a network of lines pointing to my crotch. It’s a crotch rubbing! Ha! Ha, ha …

Walking, like most other human activities, requires a great deal of assurance. If you want it to look right you have to undertake it with tremendous confidence and verve. You can usually spot a young or inexperienced walker by their lack of style, or their assumption of a style which is too old and complex for them. Pretentious walking can be a real problem. But here, I stride into the hall quite naturally. I’m on my way to the kitchen … ‘Spicy mushrooms,’ you say? Well, to hell with them, is my reply. You were taken in by my bullshit.

There is no discontinuation of floor covering between the front room and the hall, which is comforting. The careful two-cornered ascent of the staircase in the corner is reassuring as well. I bought this watercolour, hung centrally on the wall, over the oval hall table, in Betws-y-Coed. It depicts a stone cottage, in the mid-ground. In the foreground there is a field and a dry-stone wall; in the background, clouds. It’s tremendously homey, this watercolour, as is the table, bought in Beccles, which looks dark and woody in the light that spills through from the front room. It imparts a mahogany, old solidity to my house, which it doesn’t really deserve.