Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

When Gavin and I first became colleagues he took me out with him to meet his friends. They all had the same kind of manner as him, a sort of unforced and facetious ease. It was the kind of charm that I’ve always found myself a victim of. Gavin and his friends, with their minor public school slang, their games of backgammon and their saloon-car races round London’s arterial roads, reminded me of the nouveau riche kids I went to school with. They had the same consumer’s attitude to the business of living. Like Gavin they went straight to the bottom line without troubling to check the balances. I suppose the difference was that Gavin brought to the whole thing the strong implication of ultimate solidity, a four-square Virginia Water kind of security. Redolent of retrievers and women with seriously quilted clothing. He also had the knack of elevating you, making you feel special: ‘I’m telling you this because I know you can keep a secret and …’ Lengthy pause, ‘well, because I suppose I regard you as one of my closest friends.’ Eyes downcast to denote embarrassment and then briefly flicked upwards into your own to indicate complete faith.

Actually, you know, I’m wrong to rubbish Gavin like this. I’m wrong and I’m stupid. Very stupid. He’s out there alone in a hotel room, he’s staked everything he has on Ocean Ltd. I never had anything to stake to begin with. He’s been a friend to me — if a little capricious. But maybe that’s what friendship is, a slap and then a tickle. I suppose I’m nervous because I’m expecting the call and because the last thing I read in How To Form a Company was ‘Business partnerships can be very thorny indeed, even close friends should ensure that partnership agreements are vetted by an experienced solicitor.’ But of course we don’t have a partnership, we have a limited company, with directors. Mr Rabindarath and, of course, Sandy — although his identity could be said to be problematic.

I can see the corner of the garden out of the corner of my eye. Dawn must be coming. Gavin should call. It’s damp out there, a little wetness glistens in the orange light, on the privet and the flattened grass. In here it’s the same. My chair. The sofa. The wall unit, the triangular area between the side of my chair and the wall, full of loosely piled newspapers. The miniature landscape of the newspaper, up column and down advertisement. Who is to say that it’s really smaller than the room, the garden, or the world? If I rub my hand up and down the arm of the chair the pile on the cover moves from flat to prickily upright, to flat again. Co-ordination is the key here, foolish to look for wisdom in books, because they have nothing new to say. They contain everything in their one long sentence. Everything and nothing. Whereas in this simple ritual — rotating the chair-cover pile with the flat of my hand, whilst rhythmically breathing and, at the same time, running my eye carefully over the newspaper hillocks — I achieve control. I create a tiny ordered universe, which means that Gavin will call. He must call because the universe is ordered. The solid beams can be made to expand and contract in tight ranks. The children have all gone to bed quietly. The mushrooms lie swaddled in batter, the chicken wings subside into the polystyrene mattress. And the wart starts up as a dot, that flares into a portal. A ghastly door. Its subcutaneousness . Urghh … its layeredness . I hate the layers of my skin, because they’re all over and beneath them are layers of viscera . Someone has sprinkled sand between the layers of my viscera. And the beer is flat again. And I have heard this song a thousand times. Where is my control …

Actually, there’s nothing particularly awful about this song. It has a kind of folksy innocence, a wistfulness that rather suits my current mood. It could be ironic — but maybe not. I sit here, looking, I think, rather dapper for someone who’s been up the whole night. My clothes have a rather billowy aspect to them, perhaps it’s the light quality. I sit in the pool thrown down by the standard lamp, washed by the orange from the street lamp and tinged with the palest of grey flushes from the coming dawn. And the beams, those solid beams, which elsewhere in the living-room are orderly and controlled, dance and hum around me, weaving in and out of one another; I am their focus.

I am like some small, brightly coloured fleck of life, caught under a microscope. Beautiful, weightless, shrunk beyond the force of gravity or the effect of the sun, I swim in the amniotic air of the living-room. The wallpaper gently susurrates. And then, without warning, a hostile beam enters the room, plunges through the cornice, a beam unlike the others, not subject to my optical control: a beam of pure anxiety. Which probes me with its needle tip, touches me just once. Pokes a single time, into my soft midriff, the heliotrope heart of my pathetically simple organism. And I contract. I seize up. I clench and ball into a little jelly fist. Slowly, slowly I relax again, blob out, float in the limpid fluid that magnifies my transparent body. It happens again and again. I am but a single-celled creature capable of one, giant, knee-jerk reflex. This is a bit of a digression from my main area of concern, or at any rate the area of discussion, founded, as it were, on words like ‘pallet’ and expressions such as ‘bill of lading’ and ‘pro-forma invoice’. This area is coextensive with tarmac aprons bordered by chain-link fences. The world which Ocean Ltd inhabits is an active world of quantifiable phenomena, not some amoebic fantasy concocted in a suburban living-room at … getting on for 6.30 a.m.

And who exactly is to say that Sandy, Mr Rabindarath’s arthritic old labrador, with greying muzzle and shambolic walk, is not entitled to his place on the board of Ocean Ltd? Even if his identity had to be constructed for him, pieced together from headstone to birth certificate, to passport, to bank account. Mr Sandy Eccles is an accomplished fact now. His name appears on our letterhead. He is casually referred to by one and all and pictured periodically in the eyes of numerous minds, powering his Vauxhall down great swathes of motorway, listening to Radio Two. Shirtsleeved, his jacket dangling from a hook behind his head, confident that he’s going to close that sale …

I must say that I congratulate myself … well done, old chap! This living-room is a bold testament to your struggle against anxiety. Everything seems to be right in its place, there’s nothing that jars the eye. The village of books, the chair set at a precise angle, the wedge of newsprint, the fan of album covers, all good rugs of media. Nicely offsetting the restrained beige of the carpet. Magnolia may not be an inspired choice for wall-covering but it is restful. And as for the furniture, surely it is the right decision to play it down, keep it modern, but not too … After all, the shape of the room, the metal-divided, six-pane windows, none of it would support anything but angularity and pastels.

This folk song. I really hate it, it says nothing to me. But steady now, I’ve tried jazz, flirted with the classics, run through a gamut of rock, reggae, fusion and soul. They didn’t work; they all skittered out of the speakers as so much senseless timpani. I cannot hear rhythm or melody, I must confine myself to songs about battered children and alcoholic old men. They might be real. No time to change the record, anyway. It’s time for what the papers say …

And looking first of all this morning at last month’s Hendon Advertiser we see that St Peter’s Mount held a Bring and Buy Sale that was hugely successful and raised £176.000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Especial congratulations go … apparently … to Mrs Tyler, for organising the event and for baking no less than twenty ginger cakes. Hmmmn, hmm, a powerful lead story, strongly backed by items on new bus shelters, a mobility scheme for the elderly and the retirement of a long-serving school dinner lady. There she is on page five, beaming over an ornamental barometer. Editorial? Let me see … riffle, riffle, riffle. A-ha! Dog mess, as I suspected. That perennial and coiled question. It won’t go away, will it. It affects the polity of the Finchley municipality much as the Irish Question dominated late nineteenth-century Britain.