Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

But the real news is at the very back of the paper. After full-page ads for shock absorbers and such, we find the small ads; and here is the full pathos of life. Pathos that inheres not just in the advertisements themselves:

Travelling suitcase, hardly used, clean inside and out.

£3.00.

671 0042 after 6.00 pm

or,

MFI shelving units. Seven 5′ x 1′6″.

£15.00. Will consider part-ex for coffee table/similar.

229 5389 (days)

and

Tit Bits , Nos 148–546. Suit Collector.

£40.00 ono

229 4917 after 8.30 pm

but also in one’s attitude towards them. I betray myself here. Gavin would never read the small ads in the Hendon Advertiser . He glances only at glossy spreads where women with hips so high they must know Dr Moreau undulate down the Promenades des Anglais, selling smelly water, Euro-box cars, whatever …

The serrated edge of the type on these little advertisements. It drags me down, and what’s worse is that I can see myself reading them and see myself seeing myself. All too vertiginous again. I’ll have to abandon the papers. And pick up a book … How To … How To … something … With a blue cover and white dots. The Dewey decimal system used for bullet points that shoot between my tired eyes. I’ve been up for too long to absorb:

1.21 Infrastructural debits cannot be handled by a day-to-day spreadsheet analysis.

Quite so … quite so … and it follows, so it does, that:

1.22 Invisibles must be separated prior to any medium-term strategic plan.

That’s been my mistake. Not separating those damn invisibles. Here am I, in a position of responsibility, a board member of a fairly substantial import/wholesale outfit, a certified accountant and I’m still really letting those invisibles get to me. Invisibles and intangibles — like the wet, iron-tasting squish of turmeric paste, or the small ads’ pathos, this is a retching matter. And I’m the man for it, with my inexhaustible supplies of salty bile, with my cheddar gorge. I can feel my diaphragm undulate … come now, not in front of the children, pas devant les engafangas . Concentration on some apparently useless but therapeutic task is what I need to pull me through. Rearrange the autodidactic village, so that all the roofs are parallel and rake up at the same angle. Yes, I can just reach them all from my chair. The blood is rushing to my head as I lower my miniature crane of a claw of a hand. Fucking wart! A pox on you wart! Hell’s bolt on my arm, an arm saturated like a sponge with seeping watery infection. The senselessness of the task. Don’t you realise I’m in pain here?

‘I’m not worried about security for this loan at all.’ The Child Banker sat behind the angled blotter, his face worryingly unlined.

‘Everything seems in order as far as already established collateral is concerned and …’ Coffee cooled uselessly in Star Trek beakers. Gavin shifted in his chair, his suit a vague swathe of blue in the Rembrandt brown of the Child Banker’s office, his attache case propped open on the corner of the desk. Inside it a miniature world: memo pad, filofax, brochures for Ocean Ltd, keys, pens and some of our different kinds of children. Currently fostered but, with the Child Banker’s assistance, scheduled for — albeit temporary — adoption. I watched as the Child Banker drew a pad towards him and affectedly added columns of figures with pretty strokes of his fountain pen. A little girl in a pinstripe suit floated in the gloom over his right shoulder, flicking digits on to a green screen that from time to time scrolled upward in bright streaks. The Child Banker turned the sheets of foolscap round so that we could see what he’d written; the bottom line was thirty-eight per cent. Thirty-eight per cent. We would have to bring those children up and send them into the world so fast, so bloody fast.

‘There’s no problem.’ Gavin unlocked the green door and we stepped into the clammy passageway.

‘Look here …’ Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post was loosely stacked, leaning up against the wall, on top of the plywood housing that covered some hernia of the aching house, the gas or electricity meter, bursting from the bellied wall. Gavin snapped open the envelope and scanned the letter.

‘They’re on their way, one hundred gross. The paperwork is with the shipper at the terminal. They’ll be here the day after tomorrow.’

Mr Rabindarath came footing round the bend in the stairs. Sandy, aka ‘Mr Eccles’, padding by his side. Mr Rabindarath wore a very long gaberdine mac that covered him to his feet. He headed on down and passed us, blank eyes recessed into his grey, eroded face. His prescription was clutched in one hand and in the other he held a child’s blue plastic spade which bore Mr Eccles’ toothmarks.

‘Not so good I’m afraid,’ Gavin was reading a letter addressed to Sandy in his capacity as marketing manager of Ocean Ltd, ‘they seem to be getting rather cold feet in Hamburg, I’ll have to go over. I’m sure they’ll be no trouble once I get there, Horst just needs a little babying. You stay here, transship the goods. No sense in warehousing them, it’ll simply eat into our profits. Keep them at your place. It’ll only be for a night …’

We left the house and walked down the North End Road. Gavin seemed not to notice the oppressively low sky, or the sad juxtaposition of tatty mullioned windows with dirty sheet glass. He was erect and going somewhere. But the city held me to it, like some dried and crusty discharge mirroring the Artexed wall, above the meter, where Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post had lain.

* * *

Gavin took me to the Savoy for a farewell tea and we ate crumpets and drank Earl Grey at the bottom of that great sunken swirl of carpeting. Waiters came and went with the softest of footfalls, bringing and taking thick crockery and heavy, stainless steel vessels. The crisp, white linen of the tablecloth and the crisp, white linen of my napkin, folded into each other on my lap. Gavin talked about Ocean Ltd and his sex life as if they were one and the same and chopped the air vigorously with his hands. Stubby hands with spatulate fingers and recessed nails, Gavin’s hands were like someone else’s shoulders.

I couldn’t concentrate. I became fixated by the details: the underside of a leaf on a rubber plant, the ridged rubber rim of a waiter’s shoe, the precise three-button belly bulge of a fat man at an adjacent table, and eventually by the green-gold pelmets capping the great swathes of drapery at the end of the room. A pelmet isn’t a piece of furniture, but nor, on the other hand, is it merely decorative. These pelmets were vast, adult versions of my little purple pelmets at home. The curtains cascaded down from them to the floor. They were fringed with hooks of gold thread. Gavin waved buttered toast about and I couldn’t wait to get home, to my chair and my bubble and the quiet part of the night.

That was thirty-six hours ago. For thirty-two of them, or thereabouts, I have sat here. Excursions to the toilet, the fridge, to supervise the unloading of the children. There has been one phone call from Gavin: everything is going well. I’m just to sit tight and wait for his call and then fill out the pro-forma invoice which coils out of the old Unwin on the dining-room table. An undemanding way to make a living, or so I think. I’m privileged in my house, which is only superficially attached to the other houses strung out alongside an isolated rectangle of green in the midst of the suburbs. My truncated garden is backed up by another, the same and the same to east and west. My house is built into the next one, but only brick deep. Inside it is a tardis, far larger than anyone can imagine. It is an island, separated from the rest of Brent, floating in a viscous bath of salty, crusted fluid.