Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

Damn it all, I should make an EEC declaration when I transfer objects from one room of this house to the next, or even mental objects within my own head. Yes, that’s it. Declarations of intent: stating the purpose of the thought, its resale value and so on. The problem is not to attach such a declaration (in triplicate) to each thought. It is simply that there is no one there to check it, no customs men. Nothing new, except mile upon mile of dun-coloured tundra, unrolling under a sky that matches it, for flatness, for billowing featurelessness, excepting for here, and there, the brackish open sore of a peaty pool, fringed with sedge.

Breakfast television starts in half an hour. I’ve just checked my watch. There’s two certainties. Two pieces of evidence … that add up to … my control: real evidence of my control over my environment. There’s a certain homeliness about a cardigan … at 6.30 in the morning, worn by an avuncular man … on a screen. It’s the kind of assurance that I need. I must find that bastard child the remote controller … a complete misnomer. There’s nothing remote about the control I exercise with it, one push of the soft stud and the television will spring into life … I can check out the test card and the occasional notices they issue at this hour of forthcoming programmes.

Where is the bastard child? My fingers skate nervelessly over the carpet, sketching out the faint raggedy afterimage of those once firm and solid purple bars. Gone … gone … gonnie! Nothing now but the grey wash of near dawn and the fading yellow pool around my chair, marking the limit of my bubble. The pictures on the opposite wall, which through the long night appeared thoroughly appropriate … full of meaning … in good taste, are now old postage stamps and curling posters on an adolescent’s bedroom wall: Snoopy, woman in tennis dress scratching her naked buttock and worse. The colour scheme in here is as anonymous and inhospitable as a supermarket aisle, or the neglected lobby of a large corporation.

My hand is heavy with blood. I long to clutch its slim, cool blackness and feel the play of soft studs … so unlike … the wart! Which throbs in my inner elbow, a hard stud that promises nothing but pain. Imagine pressing it … eugh! Jesus Christ! Jee-suss Kerist! Hard, but squishy … and if I pressed it … what then … not control … but less control. Less control …

Well, bastard child. So here you are, snug in my hand, as if you’d never left, and the preview screen undulates gently across the room. 6.45 a.m., Good Morning Britain . And good morning to you … I say. A simple salutation. To breathe freely I have opened the window and a fresh draught of privety air is wafting in from the front garden. In the distance I can hear the swish and roar of artics as they make up for lost time along the North Circular.

It is dawn … If I stretch out from my chair the bubble that encloses me comes too. Stretching stickily around my hand. Cling-film adhesion that turns me into a Cyberman. Time to stand up again, free my clothes where they’ve melded to my body, move around the room a little, gently shaking my limbs. Another night… another dollar. What a doddle. Huh! Futile really to read so many books on self-improvement … Here … I’ll gather them up now and put them away on the shelf. What we need in here is a certain orderliness with which to face the morning. Ch-onk. They fall on to the shelves … and I’ll gather up these album covers that are fanned out over the floor … and stack them here … and now the free newspapers that silt up the wedge between my chair and the wall… voila . Now all I can see is a conventional room in a conventional house, with breakfast television about to be watched, by me: Company Director.

We went out on the town. That is, those directors of Ocean Ltd who weren’t rocking spasmodically in their rooms, or slavering over blue plastic spades. We had just finished opening the last line of credit we required in order to make the big purchase, and Gavin and I were in high spirits. We were just two more young men out on the town. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That feeling that you’re somehow connected, at the centre of things. You’re walking down Old Compton Street and this is your burgh, your village.

We fell in with some girls at a pub on Cambridge Circus, the way that sailors on leave do in Hollywood films. It had never happened to me before … I put it down to Gavin. They were red and brown in tailored suits and didn’t make a habit of this kind of thing and laughed a lot and had conspiratorial nods and catchwords which passed between them. And Gavin and I were interested in them and talked to them about their jobs and their flats and got to know them, because this was our night already and we were young bucks, as it were, loose on the town.

And I remember going on from the pub. This less concretely than before, everything still funny, but with an edge. One of the girls said, ‘What do you do then?’ And I said that we had this company, Ocean Ltd, and gave her my card — stupid really — because she wasn’t in business. Sitting in La Capresa scrunching on breadsticks and drinking red wine that grabbed at my throat. When they went off to the toilet — and God knows why I remember this because it really isn’t important — Gavin asked me to sign a guarantor release on the Ocean Ltd fund account. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. At the time I just signed it. He was always giving me things to sign in my directorial capacity, and on this occasion, being a young Turk, it seemed the right thing to be doing in La Capresa, taking out my thick fountain pen and snaking my bloody signature across the hairlined box … and then … that’s it. The rest of the evening was the rest of the evening. And I know I didn’t go home with one of those girls, because I never do … and I know that Gavin probably did, because he always does. And I don’t know why this business of signing the form is swimming at me now out of my memory, because it really isn’t important at all, is it?

Standing now on the oblong of stairway that is the half-landing. Appalled by the little banks of fluff that have accreted in the gap between the nap of the carpet and the corrugation of underlay. Appalled also by the thin dustfall on my children that dulls them. I’m a pale face at a window on a half-landing … I’m a half-remembered surreal poem, learnt by rote in school, years ago. I’m on my way upstairs to make a tour of inspection, but I can’t get further than this. Transfixed again by a miniature world, where the brass rods that hold tight the tread are Nazca lines on the floor of some delusory desert. Because everything, as it were, contains everything. And this half-landing has as much right to be considered the world as any other, wouldn’t you agree? That’s a rhetorical, rhetorical question, maybe the first of its kind, tee-hee! As long as you can be miserable in good surroundings.

Hoo … It might be a mistake to go upstairs, there’s something a little strange about the giant tortoise that my bed has become, stacked as it is with the fruit of Ocean Ltd’s labours. And I don’t think that I’ll be able to repeat my book-tidying act. I don’t want to be upstairs when Gavin rings, because I hate having to run to answer the phone. As it is I can float downstairs. I feel sustained by lines of credit, that flow like the purple bars, like the bright bars of my childhood, but lighter, filmier, wavier. I float downstairs at the centre of a net of lines of credit, they undulate slackly around me and then gather me together and whisk me back into the living-room. Breakfast television is on the cards and Gavin may phone at any moment. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s wearing lederhosen and standing in an international phone booth that looks like a giant, porcelain-sided stove. We’re in split screen: me in my chair, he in his stove; and he pushes his phone card — emblazoned with a double-headed eagle — into the cast-iron fissure … Clinks and kercherunks and whirrs as the line springs into action triggering circuitry across and over the continent… but no … no ring here. Perhaps he’ll ring in a little while.