Will Self - My Idea of Fun

It went around and around. I brought my wine glass lazily to my lips, spotting the stripes on my suit trousers. Jane was opposite me again, situated in a Scandinavian concavity that made up part of the G-plan. She sat knees akimbo, her pregnant belly cupped by body and chair, as if she were proffering it to the gathering. She gave me ‘our look’ again and spoke betwixt the strands of general talk, spoke to me alone, ‘You look all in, love, do you want to get home?’ I affirmed this, because it was the easiest thing to do. No point in saying that I couldn't care less, that I might as well be anywhere. Here or there. Lying on a desert floor under the cold glare of the stars, or slumped against weeping bricks in some shooting alley off the Charing Cross Road — it made no odds.

We said goodbye to our host and hostess and to our fellow guests. I nodded at the woman with the Agadir tan, my never-to-be confessor. She nodded back. Out in the street the lamps were orange-aureoled, damp leaf smell banked the sopping pavements. ‘Did you drink a lot?’ Jane asked. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ I gave her the keys and she pointed the pulsing fob at our car, our steel pod. The central locking chonked, I got in on the passenger side and let my head droop against the headrest.

When Jane got in on her side I was struck once more by the way that things seemed to accommodate her belly. Here the primary function of the car was to support her tumescence. The moulding of the plastic fascia swept around to bracket it, the foam of the seat welled up to support it. When she struggled down and yanked the lever to hunker the seat forward, it was as if she were bringing her unborn child into the very centre of the car's shell, so that cosseted by impact-resistant materials it could be transported safely home. She started the engine and we pulled away from the kerb.

‘They were nice, weren't they?’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘At any rate they put on a good spread. Mind you, I can't stand that friend of hers, what's his name — the one who's into microlights?’ She ran on. We drove. In the artificial light the street furniture had lost its scale, it might just as well have been model bus stop signs and model Belisha beacons that studded our route. How was I going to tell her — that was what preoccupied me — how was I going to broach the subject? I pondered our relationship, plotted its conventional course with my heat-sensitive aerial camera. Our assimilation into one another had been beautifully timed, with each little revelation of unpleasantness acting as a modest baffler, a groyne to our mutual inundation. Now all of this was going to be flooded, drenched in poisonous ichor.

At home I snapped on the lights in the kitchen. While I descended to the eating area, Jane stayed up on the dais which was bounded by our file of white goods. She moved about, propping her belly on clean kitchen surface after clean kitchen surface. In her stretchy black hose she was like some feminine Marcel Marceau, mimicking mime. ‘I'll make you some camomile,’ she said. ‘That'll rehydrate you.’ I grunted and she flicked on the electric jug.

And then it came to me — the way forward, that is. I was sitting at the round kitchen table, my elbows on blond wood, caught in the spectral webs of the natural beiges and greys that consulted together in our living space. I felt foetal, amniotically lulled. I felt as I imagined my son-to-be to be feeling. But that was it, though, he wasn't my son, not remotely. I knew that it couldn't be so, not when I considered the overall shape of things. I couldn't have said how he had done it — The Fat Controller, that is — his powers are so indiscriminate. He might have intervened at any stage. He could have miniaturised himself and crawled down my urethra just prior to the relevant ejaculation and there replaced some of my spermatozoa with his own. Or he could have gone smaller still, small enough to infiltrate the genospace itself. Here he might have uncoupled and relinked the long strings of deoxyribonucleic acid as casually as a farmer mends a fence. But however it was that he had done it I was certain that he had. Usurped my paternity, that is.

Jane's now talking about the new house. ‘I've phoned Radley.’ (That's the solicitor who's handling the conveyancing.) ‘He says he's had the deeds through, so it's only a matter of a few days now.’ I grunt noncommittally. ‘You don't sound very interested.’ She's piqued, fluffed up by it as she pours the boiled water on to the bags.

‘No, I am, really I am, it's just — ‘

‘You're tired, I know. Don't worry, drink this and come to bed.’ She plonks mine down in front of me and taking hers goes on up the angled stair. I can hear her moving about up there. She's stripping off her damp clothes, pausing by the mirror to observe, the darkening swell of her abdomen, the fecund brown stripe from button to mons. She's a stolid young woman, built for bearing children just as a clay vessel is meant to be drunk from. The way the veins on her breasts strike blue lightning, the way her ankles swell with healthy oedema, it all speaks of success, jingle bells maternity and chocolate box consanguinity.

Ah, but if I dive into her, plunge through the drum-tight skin and swim on, I know what I'll find. No unformed Jane-sprog or me-sprog, sucking a vestigial thumb and taking on nutriment by hose, like a baby tanker inside a mummy tender. Instead he will be there, or at any rate his new homunculus. I instantly recognise his smooth impassive face, hairless and football round, his hard-boned eyebrow ridges, his flat-bridged and flaring nose, his vulpine mouth — thick-lipped and sneering — and then that voice:

‘Come inside for a decco, have we, boy?’ He isn't fazed, he never is. His solid body is conservatively clothed, as ever, suited despite the blood heat. And, as if to cock a preemptive snook at the health-and-safety lobby, one of his vile stogies is clamped between his fingers and defying the elements by merrily combusting in fluid. ‘I love it in here, don't you? It's so warm and smoochy. A vat of malmsey would suit me fine but failing that I'm happy to settle for total immersion in liquor.’ To emphasise how at home he is he cuts a weightless caper, like an astronaut clowning it up for the camera, and bats against the soft walls of his capsule.

Sick irony abounds as Jane leans against the doorjamb, poised to enter the bathroom and feeling The Fat Controller's kicks inside her. He harkens to her, sensing her reaction; with a flip of his city shoes he propels himself up to where the placental macaroni ruckles against the wall of her womb. His hand reaches out, shooting a snowy cuff, and grasps at the stuff, plunging into the elastic membrane and clutching a handful. Jane gasps and so do I.

‘It's up to you, boy,’ he's chortling, loving it, revelling in it. ‘You signed on for this. You can have your fun now, or you can wait another month or so, in which case I will take the greatest of pleasure in informing her myself. Which do you prefer?’

It isn't a question worth answering. I'll tell her myself. Because, after all, the telling is a big part of the fun, perhaps even more fun than the fun itself. This, I realise, is what my life has been leading up to, the quiet suburban house, the loving trusting woman and me, sitting down here in the semi-dark knowing that I am about to tear it all apart — tear her apart.

I've courted this moment assiduously, longed for it even. It's all very well getting your kicks from hurting people, defiling them, causing them untold suffering, but it doesn't really amount to anything when they don't even know you. Ignorance is, relatively speaking, bliss, when even as they give up the ghost they can still comfort themselves with the thought that you are some kind of daemon, not human, not like them.