Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Before I could take the unfamiliar mental steps necessary for framing such a probing question he had run on. ‘I was up St Dunstan's yesterday, lad, and the Director asked me to clear out some of the old files, you know, defunct paperwork and such. While I was so engaged I came across these.’ He pulled a buff file from the inside of his tightly buttoned jacket. ‘They're yours, aren't they? I wager that you are an eidetiker, like me, aren't you, boy?’

I took the folder gingerly from his banana-bunch hand and opened it. The drawings were the ones I had done for Mr Bateson. They looked familiarly unfamiliar, like some solid form of déjà vu. The personal histories of children have that quality, don't they? They seem only slenderly moored to their possessor, on the verge of drifting away and tethering themselves to another.

‘Y-y-yes. . I s'pose so. I. . I haven't thought about it for so long. It isn't important.’

‘Isn't important!’ he roared. ‘Come, boy, don't cheek me, we both know just how important it is.’ To emphasise this point Mr Broadhurst ground one of the plastic bottles with a foot-long foot inside a two-ton shoe. It rackled against the pebbles.

‘What I mean, Mr Broadhurst, is that I don't use it, I don't do drawings any more. I'm not even going to do art for O level, it's not one of my options.’

‘O level? Oh, I see what you mean, school certificate. No, no, that's not what I meant at all. What these drawings represent is nothing but the merest of gimmickery, freakish carny stuff. Any of us who has real potential soon leaves off turning tricks for psychologists. After all, it is not we who are the performing dogs, but they. No, no, I mean pictures in here.’ Mr Broadhurst tapped the side of his head, forcefully, with his index finger, as if he were requesting admission to his own consciousness.

I was chilled. How much could he know? Did he suspect the uses to which I had put my over-vivid pictorial imagination? Could he perhaps have seen my projected form, hovering through the portals of Roedean? How humiliating.

But Mr Broadhurst said nothing to indicate that he knew. Instead he took the folder of eidetic drawings away from me, tucked them back inside his jacket and invited me to tea in his caravan.

‘Come, lad,’ he said. ‘We will take tea together and speak of the noumenon, the psi and other more heterogeneous phenomena. Behave yourself, comport yourself any more than adequately, and I may be prepared partially to unpack the portfolio of my skill for your edification. Naturally this will be nothing compared with the full compass of my activities, but it will suffice to be, as it were, an introductory offer.’

So began my apprenticeship to Mr Broadhurst. So began, in a manner of speaking, my real life. I had crossed the abyss and henceforth nothing would be the same again. In between The Big Match and Songs of Praise, time turned itself inside out, the loop became a Möbius strip and I was condemned for ever to a life of living on the two sides that were one. Suitable really that this extreme occurrence should be meted out thus: measurable by televisual time.

Many years later, grown up and employed in the marketing industry — like my father before me — I wonder whether or not this could be construed as some kind of Faustian pact? How else can I explain my utter enslavement to the man? But this could not have been. No thirteen year old, untouched by religion — Monist or Manichean — and merely browsing in the secular snack bar, could have known enough even to frame such a possibility.

No, the truth was more disturbing. Mr Broadhurst got me, got me at just the right time. Got me when I was still prey to aimless washes of transcendence, when my consciousness still played tricks with me, when I was a voodoo child who could stand up against the Downs and chop them down with the edge of my hand. Then he played me carefully like a fish, reeling me in slowly to the truth about himself. Slowly and jokily. Rewarding me with commonplace tricks, displays of prestidigitation and telekinesis, against small tasks, errands that I could do for him.

Remember, gentle reader (I say ‘gentle’ but what I really mean is pusillanimous reader, guarded reader, reader walled off against darker suasion), that this boy was like a roll of sausage meat enfolded in fluffy pastry. I had no access to the world of male empowerment. I had no role model. Mr Broadhurst was the solution to this deficiency. Remember also that he was a fixture of the off season, for me naturally conjoined with the worlds of school, formalised friendship, wanty-wanty and getty-getty.

However, that particular afternoon we just had tea together and played eidetic games. It didn't take very long for Mr Broadhurst to prise my secret out of me.

‘You do what you say? You do that? Oh how very clever, how terribly droll!’ The interior of his caravan was capacious enough, but even so Mr Broadhurst turned it into a doll's house. When he moved the whole chassis whoozed on its sprung suspension. ‘And you say that you discover things, boy — things that you could not have known otherwise. Why, you are a bonny little scryer and no mistakin’. Now see here.’ He unbuttoned his lurid check jacket to reveal a lurid check waistcoat. ‘Shut your peepers and give me a demo’. Tell me what I've got in the top pocket of my weskit.’

I shut my eyes. I stared at the frozen image of Mr Broadhurst. I projected myself forward, my eidetic body detached from my physical body, its outline dotted to aid the registration of this figurative tear. I floated thus, across the four feet of intervening space. My invisible fingers, devoid of sensation, plucked at the furred lip of his waistcoat pocket. Mr Broadhurst sat, impassive, his eyes unblinking, his countenance was Rameses stern. I peeked inside the pocket, there was a gold watch coddled there. I had started to withdraw, to pack myself back into the correct perspective, when something happened. Mr Broadhurst — or rather my petrified vision of him — moved. This had never happened before; it was the utter stillness of my eidetic images that gave them their purely mental character. I snapped my eyes open, numbed by surprise, and heard Mr Broadhurst, the real Mr Broadhurst, the thick flesh and cold blood Mr Broadhurst, roaring with delight.

‘By Jove, boy, you are a card and no mistakin’ that! A genuine card. I should not have credited it had I not seen it with my own eyes. Now then, are you sitting comfortably?’ I found that I was — back on the padded banquette, the cool glass of the caravan window feeling less vitrified than my shattered head pressed against it — and nodded my assent. ‘Well then, what's that you have in your hand?’ I felt it at once, how could I have not done so before? It was Mr Broadhurst's full hunter, flat, cold and gold. I goggled at it, uncomprehending. He roared again. ‘Ha-ha! Well, well, there you are, an artful little dodger. Had me watch and me sitting here oblivious. Well I never, now that is a thing, isn't it?’ And I had to concur, although I had no idea how it had happened.

I knew that this was something I shouldn't talk to my mother about. I knew without having to ask that Mr Broadhurst would wish me to remain silent. I wasn't mistaken, for the following day, batting a tennis ball with my hand against the side of the shower block, I was confronted by my mage.

‘I popped in on your mother just now, Ian.’ The big man was back in his undertaking get-up; a brown-paper parcel fastened with string was wedged under his torso-sized arm. ‘We chatted of this and that, of mice — as it were — and their close relations, men. Your mama was as amiable as ever.’

‘Good.’

‘More to the point, however, she had nothing to say to me concerning the events that transpired between us yesterday afternoon.’