Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘What you say has a good deal of emotional force, young man. And I think you may be right — but only in a very limited sense. The involutions of thought and reflection you draw our attention to are just that: thought and reflection. They bear no real relation to the motivation of the great mass of people. A few years ago when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had ground to a halt and before the rise to power of the current General Secretary, there seemed to be some real cause for alarm and the manifestation of some fringe political groupings was undoubtedly millenarian, but now, pshaw! All the political crises of the past forty years have served only to underline the fact that the dialectic imposed by technological advancement is irrefutable, unstoppable; more primary than thought itself. Although you express yourself eloquently, young man, I am more inclined to view the seeming irony you draw our attention to as a perception of marginalised youth, contemplating the grey power of middle age. It is an attitude rather than a timely perception. And perhaps for that reason it is all the more to be admired.’

Jim didn’t wait for the end of Stein’s answer. He was already disappearing through the brown swing-doors. It was left for me to inch my way out of the row of seats where we were sitting, grating past, and offering my bunched crotch to a number of disapproving faces. The last thing I saw as I went out the door was the chairman doodling with a finger on the dusty tabletop.

Jim was pacing back and forth in the lobby, in front of a noticeboard covered with a tatter of posters, flyers and hand-lettered advertisements. A flyer for next week’s open lecture was prominently displayed. ‘An authoritative exposition of recent developments in the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Obviously the School’s policy was to offset one dull, minority interest lecture, against another, popular, general interest one. It was strange, it hadn’t really occurred to me before, but for a culture that was supposedly unaffected by the end of an era we certainly showed a lot of interest in esoteric theories. Jim shot an angry glance at me and shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect anything better from him.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, it didn’t seem like such a bad lecture to me. Admittedly I dozed through a lot of it.’

‘Oh yes, Stein is clever all right, but he just doesn’t understand. He’s an academic. Even if he does study contemporary events, he still renders them microscopic by looking at them through the wrong end of his theoretical telescope. Waiting isn’t like that. It’s an immediate, physical experience. If he saw Carlos in action, then he’d understand.’

Jim turned on his heel and walked off towards the exit. From behind I noticed how strange he looked, with his long muscular torso and silly little legs. He reminded me for a moment of nothing so much as a PG Tips chimp. His millenarian rants could easily have been a voice-over. Perhaps the real Jim had just been going, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ahh! Ahh!’ His tartan shirt was coming out of his trousers and the collar was dandruffy. He wasn’t looking after himself. I followed him out through the lobby feeling guilty, as if Jim had heard my thoughts about him.

Outside on the pavement. In the cold, dark, night-time canyon of Houghton Street, I found Jim standing with the two couriers I’d seen him with at lunch. Ginger was expostulating as I came up, while the character with the triangular hairdo stood back, arms folded. They were all too preoccupied to notice me. I heard the following:

‘Carlos doesn’t want anyone else in on it. Carlos couldn’t give a fuck about anything but the job.’

‘But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to convince. Sooner or later Carlos will need to reveal himself… and then …’

‘And then, cobblers!’

‘I’m not waiting around to listen to this bollocks.’

This was hairdo. He had a peculiar falsetto voice for such a large man. As he voiced the sentiment, he picked his helmet up off the saddle of his bike and pushed it down over his head, with a hermetic ‘plop’. This was effectively the end of the conversation. Ginger put his helmet on as well. And without any farewells the two of them turned over their engines and peeled off, out on to Aldwych. Leaving behind an acrid smell.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked Jim as we turned out of Houghton Street and walked down towards the Strand tube station.

‘Nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.’

‘Come off it Jim, you owe me an explanation. Those blokes weren’t doing a late pick-up. At least I didn’t see you sign for anything. They were talking about me.’

‘Yeah, well I did tell them that you might be interested …’

‘In what? Interested in what?’

‘In meeting this Carlos fellow.’

‘I don’t even know who he is. How do you know I’d be interested in meeting him?’

‘Well, you were interested in Stein’s lecture. And Carlos isn’t dissimilar, excepting that he’s something of a leader, as well as a teacher.’

‘Leading what? Who does he teach?’

‘This little group of motorcycle couriers. I suppose you’d think it was all a little bit cranky. Another facet of my overriding obsession. But these bikeys have cottoned on to almost the same set of ideas as I have myself.’ He paused. ‘They’re fed up with waiting.’

‘Well, I’d be fed up with waiting if I were a despatch rider. It must be an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Doesn’t it have one of the highest occupational death rates? I’m sure that’s because they get frustrated and then they make mistakes.’

‘You don’t understand. These people are operating at the limit.’ Jim was getting worked up. He was going into rant mode. He stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me, arms akimbo, twitching. ‘They’re shooting methedrine, or basing coke, or snorting sulphate. They’re driving at all hours of the day and night, existing at a level of frayed neural response that we can only faintly imagine. They’re operating not at the level of other traffic, a straightforward level of action and anticipation, but at the level of nuance, sheer nuance. They perceive the tiniest of stimuli with ghastly clarity, and respond. Think of it, man. Weaving your way through heavy traffic astride a monstrously overpowered motorcycle, always pressured to meet a deadline, the ether plugged into your helmet. They have to mutate to survive!’

After this little outburst we carried on walking in silence for a while. We were going down Essex Street past one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Between the slats of a three-quarters-closed Venetian blind I could see a man in shirtsleeves. Still crouched, at this late hour, over a flickering monitor in the pool of an Anglepoise. As I glanced at him he pushed a button and the figures on the screen scrolled upwards in a stream of green light.

Jim was breathing heavily, but he’d calmed down a little. I didn’t know what to say, I was curious but I didn’t want to provoke him. For the first time I had the sense with absolute clarity that Jim had teetered over that fine, fine line between eccentricity and madness. Eventually I spoke. ‘These despatch riders, Jim, do they believe in “waiting” as well?’

‘Of course, of course, of course. They are the real waiters. Waiting is ground into them. Every moment could be an arrival, at a pick-up or drop-off, or the ultimate dropoff, death itself! No wonder they understand what is happening. They exist at the precise juncture between the imminent and the immanent! Carlos has seen their potential. He is a man of extraordinary powers, he understands that the future will belong to those who clearly articulate the Great Wait!’

We were standing in the forecourt outside the tube. A few late office workers mingled with the eddy and flow of tourists, who moved in and out of the entrance in their bright pastel, stretchy clothes. It was a clear night and the neon sign above the National blipped its message across the flat water. I took Jim’s upper arm in what I hoped was a firm, avuncular sort of a grasp.