Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘What is my name, lad?’

I was nonplussed, I stared at my teacher, never before had his swollen face seemed so replete with indifference, stone ataraxy. ‘Ah. . erm. . Mr Broadhurst, sir?’

‘Wrong!’ An open palm, as big and fattily solid as a Bradenham ham, smote the side of my head with horrific force. I fell to my knees, immediately aware of the sticky saltiness of blood in my saliva. ‘Come on, Ian — don't disappoint me — answer the question.’

‘Y-you. . you are. . you are The Fat Controller?’ I whimpered. I was certain, although I could not have said why, that if I did not answer correctly this might well be the end.

‘Good, good. Well done. . Capital!’ The Fat Controller was helping me to my feet. ‘I'm glad we cleared up that little problem. Some might say, “What's in a name?” but then I doubt an arsehole would smell so sweet. Now, lad, you were curious earlier as to my movements and my changed countenance. The fact of it is that my five years are now up and hence my retirement is over. Before Christ's mass I will be gone, back into the world.

‘And how have I been spending this summer? Why, in refamiliarising myself with what-goes-on. These past five years my pernicious enfeeblement has meant that six months of the year I have had to hibernate, to entomb myself in the disused redoubt beneath Cliff Top, but at last I am free. Free to smell again the sweat on the brow of the bourse; free to bask in the slipstream of wide-bodied jets; free to sit in on the counsels of the alleged good and the alleged great.

‘I have cantered among the hyenas of the Serengeti as they brought down wildebeeste; I have danced the Wellington Boot Dance with the Zulu in the township hostels; I have tiptoed through the Bibliothèque Nationale, listening to the gummy gumming of mundane scholars; I have shelled prawns with slant-eyed androgynes in the polyglot souks of the uttermost East; I have reached the nadir of a nonsensical number of psycho-sexual trances, both in the Amazonian hinterland and the plastic cultures of the Pacific rim; I have subsumed myself to the circuitry of artificial cerebella in the silicone wadis; I have crawled down the barrels of guns on all five continents, only to spring forth again — triumphant; I have tittered in the stalls and tottered by the walls festooned with epicene opera-lovers; I have sallied forth into the salons of the old world and the new; I have hefted steins in the beerhalls and pinched flutes in the Shires; I have raced laggardly protons around the cyclotron, revelling in the sempiternal sciamachy; and — let us not forget — I have also hidden under couches whilst the moneyed pulers petted their kittenish neuroses, imagining themselves trusted, secluded.

‘To cut these many stories short, to tie a knot of reminder in this multifarious narrative: I have reacquainted myself with my domain. And now — let's eat.’

We ate at Al Forno, an Italian restaurant at the bottom of the Lanes. I was subdued after the preprandial violence. Subdued and also cowed by The Fat Controller's manner of consummate self-assurance. This was no longer a slightly eccentric seaside retiree with a portfolio of amusing tricks. He had become something other, or worse still, perhaps he had always been.

As soon as we entered the restaurant the proprietor came out to us from the kitchen, rubbing his hands oilier on a tea towel.

‘Ah! Meester Northcliffe,’ he trilled — and it was a measure of my disorientation that I took this further name-change in my faltering stride. ‘We no see you for an age. Why you no come to Al Forno? Youse find someone who makes a better pizza?’

‘Tommaso, how could that be so?’ The Fat Controller was emollient, masterful. ‘You make the finest pizzas on the Sussex coast — haven't I always said that? No, no, I have been away on business for these past few months.’

‘And who is this, your son?’ Tommaso gave me three-quarters of an ingratiating smile and The Fat Controller's good humour increased by a factor of nine. His trunk swelled up to resemble that of a baobab tree, matching for bulk the whitewashed curvature of the charcoal oven that dominated the restaurant. His voice boomed, ‘Haha, ahahaha, no, no, more like a grandson, I should say, but it's good of you to be so shamelessly flattering — to him.’ Then his good mood evaporated so entirely that it might never have been. ‘Jump to it, boy! Bring us two litres of that vile Chianti and four of your large specials — we'll be upstairs.’

We climbed up a twisting staircase past two floors of tables and then took our place in the bay window on the top floor. In due course Tommaso himself brought the wine. The Fat Controller poured me a glass.

‘Stick that in your laugh-hole,’ he said. ‘You're past the age when you can be forgiven for not holding your liquor. So pour it down your neck.’ I did as I was told.

The ‘special’ turned out to be a cartwheel-sized pizza like a slice of the earth's crust, its five feet of rim volcanically erupting. On top of it there were all the fruits of the forest, the animals of the plain, and a few of the beasts of the sea for good measure. Everything was enmired in thick globs of mozzarella cheese. The Fat Controller ate three of these and I did my best to tackle the fourth. I was stunned by this prodigious feat of consumption. I remembered Mr Broadhurst-that-was mopping up the Sally Lunns but that was a mere warm-up exercise compared to this.

When as a child I had alluded to Mr Broadhurst's corpulence, my mother had snapped at me. ‘It's a disability, Ian, like any other. Mr Broadhurst has glandular problems, that's why he's overweight. He doesn't eat any more than ordinary people.’ As she spoke I had eidetiked the glands in question, embedded in the back of Mr Broadhurst's neck like obese sweetmeats.

‘You're thinking about my glands, aren't you, boy?’ The Fat Controller's voice sluiced me out of my wine haze. He was dissecting a gland-like mushroom as he spoke, clearly in order to illustrate his telepathy. ‘The only reason people are fat,’ he went on, ‘is because they eat too much. After all,’ he continued, deftly manipulating half a loaf of garlic bread to sop up the tomato juice on his last platter, ‘you never saw anybody fat come out of Auschwitz.’

It was two beats before I realised that this was meant to be a very funny joke and then I struggled to match his guffaws, adding my own rather reedy piping to his basso mirth.

He went on to discourse at length on the nature of fat. He reviewed a gallery of the great fatties of all time, from Nero through Falstaff to Arbuckle. He dwelt especially on the insulating and prophylactic properties of excessive flesh, remarking at one point, ‘Without the upholstery of embonpoint the body is a mere skeletal spring, ready to uncoil its very mortality.’ He brushed up my biochemistry, informing me that the long chain fences off at molecules are antipodean in scale set beside the dry stone walls of mere proteins, and that he himself had it as an ambition to contrive that his entire body should be sheathed in one enormous fat molecule. He concluded by reviewing the sexual properties of portliness, noting that, if you are fat enough, you can develop love-handles specially adapted for oral sex, as well as coitus.

During our meal the restaurant had begun to fill up with the pre-theatre crowd, Brighton burghers and their wives. I saw them through The Fat Controller's eyes — they were gauche and dowdy, crammed into suitings so ill-fitting that they looked like bolsters stuffed into pillow cases. They spoke quietly, deliberated over the menu and drank their wine in sips, like dipping birds. One of these types now rose from her chair and came over to where we were sitting. Our coffee had just arrived.