Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘Hello! Hello! How are you? How about a little personal interaction here. After all, we’re all stuck in this together. Why don’t we break down some barriers here? My name is Jim. What’s yours?’ Jim was talking to the profiles, but they wouldn’t hear him, they sat on, acquiring verdigris in the wash of light from their fascia. ‘Hi kids, wanna play? Why don’t we start a game of cricket on the central reservation? Six runs if you can hit the ball off the motorway.’ But the kids didn’t want to play cricket. Their little budding mouths were glued to parental shoulders, grouted with congealed Tango and Sprite. And the parental shoulders were set square towards the future. Whenever the steel testudo unbuckled and coiled its way forward a few feet, all the drivers reverted to form and tried to switch lanes to gain the tiniest advantage available — because it was there.

Jim gave up on his attempts to foster communication. He took out his camera and rested it on top of the steering wheel. He squinted through the viewfinder while continuing to murmur under his breath, ‘Very slow exposure and we should get the picture. I’ll be damned, a three-lane jam on the M25 at midnight; this is it. This-is-it. Strained and ruckled, bumper to bumper, immanence and imminence. It’s all here. It’s all here …’ He was clicking away, his voice tending towards falsetto.

I swivelled in my seat and looked back. We had reached the bottom of the depression that the chicane had snaked through and there were as many cars piled up behind as in front of us. I had the strange feeling that there was absolutely no depth to what I could see. In both directions there was simply the flat pattern formed by car shapes. The traffic in the oncoming carriageway grew larger and diminished without extension. The cars were so many globs of multicoloured oil, expanding and contracting in a giant version of one of those risible Sixties lamps. Jim and I were the tiniest slivers of humanity, pressed in the microscope slide of the Sierra.

Jim turned to me, ‘You know why I like this car so much?’ The question was rhetorical. ‘Because of its quiddity, its whatness. It has no other quality; it is. It has no need to come into being — it is already utterly mediocre. They’ve sold 25,000 of these cars in the past year. Twenty-Five thousand! We could be in any one of them. We could still be on the production line inching forward. Any moment now an operative is going to come along and start bolting new prostheses on to you, new forms of biological engineering that you could never imagine. This car is not waiting. Do you understand that? This car has already arrived. We are where we’re going, this …’ He gestured at the Assyrians, the Daihatsus, the Passats, the orange night, ‘is home.’

He sat cradling the wheel for a while, inching forward with the rest. Tirelessly performing the heel-toe dance step of slow locomotion, and then: ‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here,’ and he was gone.

I worked about two streets away from Jim and the following day I walked over to his office during my lunch hour. I was determined to confront him over his behaviour of the night before. Everybody has a certain leeway with everyone else. Everyone is entitled to the odd bout of craziness. But Jim’s stunts were becoming habitual. I had witnessed his preoccupation with ‘waiting’ grow from the occasional rant — always amusing and good value as a party piece — into a full-blown obsession, and like all kinds of obsessional behaviour it was beginning to hurt other people. Jim was becoming a self-centred and destructive egotist. If our relationship was to continue he was going to have to recognise last night for what it really was: a neurotic, knee-jerk reaction. Rather than for what he would have it be: some profound statement concerning The Way We Are and The Way In Which We Live.

I found Jim at his desk, he was taking copy over the phone. The receiver was wedged between his shoulder and his ear, leaving both hands free to type. His fingers riffled over the keyboard at tremendous speed. He grunted into the mouthpiece and occasionally read back a line to check it. When he had finished and hung up he swivelled round to face me and held up his hand.

‘Stop. Don’t say it. Because I know, and I can tell you in advance that I’m ashamed and I’m sorry. I’ve been behaving like a self-centred egotist. I’ve become obsessive and my critique of The Way In Which We Live is nothing but the cynical, sour grapes of an emotional child.’

‘Has Carol been at you already?’

‘Yeah, man. She’s not a happy woman, but she accepts the truth of what I have to say.’

‘Oh, she does, does she. Well I for one don’t want to lose a friend in order to become an audience.’

‘Stop being such a sententious tosser. Come on, I’ll buy you some lunch.’

But I had to wait another ten minutes for lunch. The features editor of Jim’s rag appeared with an obese piece of copy that needed a crash diet. Jim obliged. He was the fastest sub I’ve ever seen at work. It was almost as if he could photograph a whole sheet of text mentally and then work on all the separate parts of it simultaneously. His knowledge of the twisted rules of English usage was also superb; he knew when to judiciously skate away from the received in order to achieve clarity, and how to make sure that every clause was just so.

Wherever Jim worked he soon became an invaluable practical asset, but unfortunately at the same time a devastating emotional liability. He could never hold a job down for long and now he’d managed to outstay his welcome with most of the nationals and was on to magazines.

‘To tell you the truth, I prefer working for Bicycling,’ Jim said as we clattered down the stairs to the street. He paused a few steps below me and struck an attitude. ‘Do you want to know why?’

‘All right, Jim. Why?’

‘Because I don’t have to wait, silly. All the way up to press day I’m keying copy into that little terminal there and I only have to walk around the corner to see it all nicely laid out on another screen. Even at Wapping I had to wait hours to see a completed page. But here it’s all format work. The hacks write absolutely to fit and I know what a page is going to look like even before I’ve started working on it.’

‘But Jim, that’s no fun at all, you might as well be subbing catalogues.’

‘Catalogues, mmm … you might have a point there. I’ve never thought of catalogues before, there’s a certain purity in them.’

I pushed the bar of the fire door and we fell into the street. High Holborn was pulsing and groaning with lunch-time traffic, wheeled and legged. The air was blue with exhaust fumes. People shouldered their way along the pavement and in and out of the cars as they inched towards New Oxford Street. Clerks and secretaries formed straggling knots of protein lacing the arterial strip, constantly harried by cruising antibody-streams of data-processing managers, bank tellers and shop assistants. Looking first up and then down the crowded thoroughfare, I had the same impression that I had had the night before on the M25. It was as if the whole scene were two-dimensional. I existed at a point that had no extension. Either side of me were flat slabs of pulsing colour.

Jim was in his element. He did a little pirouette on the kerb.

‘Look at this. Do you know what these people are doing?’

‘They’re having their lunch hour.’

‘Yes, yes. Of course they are in a manner of speaking. But what are they really doing? Look.’ He held up his hands to conduct an imaginary orchestra. His fingers extended to catch the most delicate modulations of the crowd. He held them there for a beat and a half and then brought them straight down. A forelock of brown hair flipped over his forehead and pointed down directly at the pavement. The passersby paid not the slightest attention.