Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Mr Broadhurst gave me to understand that this was merely another advance, another introductory offer, and that I shouldn't take it, or myself, too seriously. Nevertheless the ridding of my skin complaint by necromancy coincided with a shift in emphasis as far as my instruction was concerned. It was as if, having seen the contents of Mr Broadhurst's fitted cupboard, he were now prepared to allow me some knowledge of the rituals connected with this apparatus. Henceforth my studies diversified into tarot reading, numerology, Feng-shiu, alchemy, astrology and kabbalah, or at any rate into Mr Broadhurst's somewhat modified versions of these arts.

‘It's all nonsense, you understand — utter bollocks. A pathetic attempt to use proto-scientific methods to ascertain and then apprehend the transcendent. What the Jung-lette called “a massive projection”.’ So said Mr Broadhurst. ‘No matter, it will serve as a useful antidote to what they will try and inculcate you with at school, that's its chief virtue. And added to that, in the future — should you progress in your apprenticeship — it will provide you with a repertory of useful explanations. To use an analogy garnered from the world of espionage, it will give you “cover”.’

He had a set of photocopied notes, which implied that I wasn't his first apprentice. These he would produce with a flourish during our Wednesday- and Sunday-evening sessions. There had always been something of the fairground barker about Mr Broadhurst and during this period he enhanced it. He waved his arms about a lot, wore suits that my mother's old friend Little Jimmy wouldn't have been ashamed to be seen in — barring the size problem — and generally did his best to appear flamboyant.

Each set of notes came with an attached exercise and at his behest I set to, to analyse squares of numbers, using keys to turn them into the letters that described either thaumaturgical entities, or else even the tetragrammaton itself. This had a beneficial side-effect, namely an improvement in my arithmetic. The tarot reading and astrology were presented by my mage at a fairly down-market level. To me, the disciplines involved in relating these random sequences of fixed symbols to potential destinies and character traits were an amusing game. The skill, once learnt, helped make me a little more popular and outgoing at school, where there was a craze on for such things.

As for kabbalah, I found it utterly incomprehensible. I might not have known exactly what rationalism was but it was nevertheless deeply engrained in my picture of the world. Mr Broadhurst browbeat me over it: ‘I will have you know the ancient Hebrew art, its derivation and derogation, its eventual suppuration into the Rosicrucian, even if I have to badger you unmercifully — eurgh! Yuck! Ping!’ This last noise occasioned by a solid pellet of his spittle hitting a brass spittoon.) For nowadays Mr Broadhurst toyed with either ‘chawin” (his own term) tobacco, or ‘takin” snuff. I didn't know which was worse — his snot or his flob.

I was forced to pay more attention to lessons in science and history at Varndean, purely so that I might better understand my other, shadowier tutelage.

As for Feng-shiu, although Mr Broadhurst declared it to be the most ridiculous of all these esoteric studies, it did help my geography. After all, how else can alignments of physical objects be calculated so as to lie along propitious meridians, save by reference to more fixed and less mutable properties of the earth?

Mr Broadhurst himself was something of an alchemist. ‘Just an enthusiastic amateur, you understand, boy.’ Some of what I had glimpsed on the afternoon when he excised my acne was his own miniature collection of alchemical equipment. He responded to my curiosity concerning the transmutation of metals by allowing me to assist him as he experimented with his alembic and his aludel. Many were the afternoons when I found myself priming the athenor with a set of little bellows, while Mr Broadhurst waved a caduceus about. It was one of his own devising, constructed from an old-fashioned television aerial wreathed with flexes. We looked on together as the various hypostatical principles were distillated and redistillated. We were equally disappointed when cohabitation was not effected.

But although he toyed with it, Mr Broadhurst had no patience with the search for the sophie hydrolith. ‘I would wager, boy, that these types never managed to transmute anything, save for their stupidity, into vanity. And anyway, any form of currency is a mutable thing, capable of being magically imbued by the thoughts of those who utilise it. Although, that being said, I do myself possess one of Paykhull's medals.’ He showed this to me and told me to note especially the inscription on the coin's obverse side: ‘O.A. Paykhull cast this gold by chemical art at Stockholm, 1706.’ ‘You know, boy,’ he mused as I hefted the heavy thing, ‘these coins are excessively rare. I have no idea how I might have come by it. No doubt it will transpire that I must have known this Paykhull.’

It was from little hints such as this, undoubtedly consciously dropped, that I began to build a fuller appreciation of what Mr Broadhurst really was.

This was the way I passed through the remainder of my childhood. The zoetrope span smoothly, time's Chief Designer narrowed the legs of trousers and decreed that the cars should be more aerodynamic. If there were changes in the political leadership of the country, they made little impact on me. I was more preoccupied by my O levels. I gained seven and then, with Mr Broadhurst's none too gentle prodding, I opted for economics, maths and business studies as A level courses. At school I remained a solitary. What little human warmth I required I garnered from the aunts and cousins, who still came to Cliff Top for their annual holiday.

They still came but there was a new uneasiness in this department of my life as well. My mother's business success had continued and the bungalow was in the throes of an ongoing transformation that would only end some five years later, when the Cliff Top Country House Hotel opened its register for bookings.

In the meantime, the aunts and cousins were put up in their usual caravans. My mother and I moved between the enterprise zone of the bungalow and the camp where the caravans squatted, adopting a different manner and diction as we did so. We were veritable chameleons of class mobility.

As for girlfriends, it was here that my eidetiking came in particularly useful. Trammelled by my exhaustive cataloguing of habit, which I had continued to practise at Mr Broadhurst's insistence, my visual escapades had become fully manageable. I didn't think I had an option — I was no teenage Lothario — but anyway I knew instinctively, without even having to ask him, that Mr Broadhurst would view the loss of my virginity as incompatible with my apprenticeship. So instead, I refined my masturbation in combination with my hawk-eyed recollection to produce a variety of sexual experience which — (I now realise) — more than compensated for the absence of the real thing.

My fellow schoolboys vied with one another for admission to the cinema, so that they could witness X-rated films. They went to see what they were unable to experience. I went to the cinema not for entertainment, but for cinematography. For it was only by studying the precise rake of extra-long pans, the trajectory of tracking shots and the jejune emotional appeal of the jump-cut, that I could add to the repertoire of my own internal shoots.

One day in the early autumn of my lower-sixth-form year, when the damp leaves were already furring the grassy median strips that cleaved the dual carriageways surrounding Varndean Grammar, I saw a familiar figure from where I sat reading in the school library. Mr Broadhurst had returned from his summer break.