Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Now I found that I could also introduce myself into these formerly static visions, as a purposive if disembodied agent, I couldn't stop. The Roedean incident was only the start of eidetic voyaging — soon it was my principal form of travel.

It became a compulsion and a very scary one. Because the discoveries I made were not to my taste at all. While it was true that the human anatomy — as I had suspected — did not conform to either the lurid colours of pornography or the desiccated line drawings of textbooks, I was not prepared for all these revelations of viscous complexity. I wanted human flesh to remain as obvious and undifferentiated as that of fruit. Worse still, I soon found myself eidetiking involuntarily, acting out aggression.

At school Holland, an arrogant and self-satisfied boy, moved to cut me off from the clique in which I had gained some slender acceptance. For two or three days I stalked the woodblock corridors choked with self-pity. Then, caught unawares, I found myself eidetically slamming his gullet against the sharp jam of the classroom door. The vacuum-nozzle ridging of his slashed oesophagus was far more revolting than anything I could have invented. In some lawless and incomprehensible way, although the material, the embodied, Holland was walking free, whistling and swearing, what I had seen had to be real.

Because of these outrages I found myself, once again, feeling marginalised, cut out from the herd. I sought frantically for methods of controlling my gift, ways of staving off chaos. I became certain that if I didn't do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void.

I found salvation in the development of personal rituals. And I would guess that, even had he not rumbled in another way, Mr Broadhurst would have soon spotted what I was up to merely because of my total self-absorption that autumn and winter.

I had no guidelines for these rituals, so they were a creative act on my part — possibly my most creative ever.

I devised a galaxy of interleaved physical and mental acts that it was necessary for me to perform throughout the day. They went all the way from the sublime to the mundane, from the profound to the ridiculous. It became vital for me to piss, belch, wank and shit in a certain manner, while exercising my way through mental scales.

The feelings that people had for me I now saw as ductile things, influenced not just by daisy petals (love and love not in a circle of deceit), but by the number on a bus: if it's a 14 everything will be all right between us, and if it's a 74 the terminus is here.

All of these rituals were important. In perfecting them I glimpsed the many versions that were packed into my one thin reality. I toyed with travel to distant worlds, I even thought of sliding down the spiral banister of time itself.

The purely bodily rituals were the most important. They were crucial if I was to avoid eidetiking myself, with all that that would imply. I was terrified that I might inadvertently compose a view of my own body and then unpack my sense of it from within. Can you imagine a worse torment? No, somehow I doubt it. These rituals were also designed to keep off prying eyes. There might be others like me, similarly endowed. Like any self-conscious boy I had a horror of being seen naked in the changing room, or someone catching an up-and-under view of my snub-snot nose. I was not going to be used as another's plaything.

While it's true that some of the rituals I devised were aimed at empowering me in ways that were not natural, I hardly ever used them. I developed them in response to normal adolescent hungers, for peer-group acceptance, parental approval and the like. When things did go wrong — as with Holland — I resorted to wish-fulfilling pictorial violence, but left the will to power of truly dark ritual right out of it.

My more fantastical rituals need not bother us here, concerned as they were with things that we know to be impossible, or at any rate beyond the reach of a’ Sussex boy in the early seventies. Although the time-travel rituals are of some interest, for my eidetic skill was at least a form of temporal manipulation. This I realised when I found that it didn't matter how long I roamed in my visual fugues, I always returned directly to the appropriate now. Of course this was not time-travel per se, more like time-tailoring, the insertion of a pleat or a flare into the apparently straight leg of time, but it was a beginning.

We come now to the thought-rituals, and if I have had difficulty retaining your credulity so far I may hope now to regain it. By thought-rituals I mean simply those systemised patterns of thought that go with wishing, hoping and desiring. Surely it is these little mental ticks that keep us all functioning, growing, adding rings to our trunks? They are formulae of the kind: Think X and Y will occur — or indeed vice versa: Think Y and X will not occur. Magic formulae. We all have the queasy sense that an all-seeing eye is poised in the best of all possible vantages, whilst we inhabit the worst of all possible worlds; and although we may admit that rationally these mental habits cannot work, nevertheless we cannot abandon them, nor our faith in them.

So much for the rituals. I developed them — as I say — to ward off the intimations of chaos that came along with my revived eidetiking, and I developed them very quickly. Within a month of the Roedean incident most of this schema was in place. That is why my encounter with Mr Broadhurst, the first of his new dispensation, happened as it did.

It was a leaden, autumnal Sunday afternoon; I was standing on the beach beneath Cliff Top. I had come down the concrete stairs with great care, pacing myself according to an arithmetic progression of my own devising. I was silently incanting, running through the chants that I felt certain would exorcise my humiliating spirits. Seaweed and empty detergent bottles garnished my hush-puppied feet. Suddenly I was conscious of having someone with me, standing right next to me. I started and turned to see Mr Broadhurst, but he was only just descending to the beach and at least four hundred yards away.

‘Ah! There you are, Ian,’ he bellowed. ‘I've been looking at you, so I thought I would come and find you.’ The words issued directly from his chest, as if a loud hailer had been set into his ample bosom. I was struck immediately by two things. Firstly, the fluidity of his movements as he came rolling across the shingle towards me. It revived the suspicion I had had that, as I was growing older, Mr Broadhurst had acquired a second wind, or at any rate ascended to a physiological plateau where the ageing process was stilled. When he first came to live at Cliff Top he had complained constantly about the walk to the shops, how the wind and rain seemed to drive right through him, how the winter chill played havoc with his rheumatism. I had only ever observed him making longer forays on his Tuesday and Thursday trips to St Dunstan's and these, he claimed, took it out of him grievously. So much so that he had to spend most of the rest of the time ‘recuperatin”. I had often seen him, deep in recuperation, lying across the great white bed in his caravan. A Cumberland sausage of a man, the lurid colours of the television reflected on his wide screen of a face.

The second thing was his suit, which was a rather snappy hound's-tooth-check item cut fiendishly tight. As I have remarked, Mr Broadhurst's habitual clothing was that of an unsuccessful undertaker. To see him dressed smartly, if archaically, was shocking.

‘Mmm-mm!’ he exclaimed, drawing in a big gout of air and then noisily expelling it through his nose. ‘That does me good. I always miss the seaside when I'm hidden away from it during the summer.’ I was shocked. Why was he doing this, alluding so shamelessly to the on season? Did he want me to ask him where he had been? Since his earlier embargo on the subject I had often tried to imagine where it was that Mr Broadhurst might go, but all the likely alternatives seemed inconceivable. Mr Broadhurst naked on some foreign beach? Mr Broadhurst photographing the Taj Mahal? Mr Broadhurst's relatives? Even I couldn't form the flimsiest mental pictures of the on-season Mr Broadhurst. He was such a conspicuously self-contained person, so poised in the moment. I found it easier to think of him as temporarily entombed in some salty cavern under Cliff Top itself, in a state of suspended animation from Easter through to late September.