Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Oh, I don't know — ‘

‘Correction: you do know. It makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed. It is as much due to his neglect as my intervention that you find yourself thus, cut off from normal society. Were I inclined to a sense of responsibility, this factor alone would go no small way towards vitiating it. Still, no mind, here we are at the theatre. And there, if I am not mistaken, is the ignoramus who was so agressively rude to us at Al Forno.’

‘I'm, I'm not quite sure, is it?’ I was hoping that my indecision might somehow communicate itself to The Fat Controller. No such luck.

‘Oh yes, it is,’ he said with heavy emphasis. ‘I should imagine that you are worried — worried that I might cause some sort of scene, humiliate you in front of this jetsam.’ He gestured, encompassing with his shovel-sized hand the precincts of the Theatre Royal which bustled with people, and the roadway where backing and filling vehicles jockeyed for temporary respite. ‘That's not my style, Ian — you should realise that I set great store by not creating “scenes” by not making those that I esteem suffer any unnecessary discomfort, whether it be social, physical, or otherwise.’

With that we swept past the woman and her friends and entered the theatre. The Fat Controller had reserved good seats at the front of the stalls. I refused the offer of an ice-cream but he bought an extra-large cone for himself and then, once we were seated, inserted the whole thing, wafer and all, into his mouth.

‘Nyum-nyum,’ he said. ‘I love the cold ache, the frozen hammering on the. . nyum-nyum. . insides of my temples. Little Peter Quince thought this a symptom of facial neuralgia, or worse, a precursor of the hydrocephalus that carried off his sister. . nyum-nyum. . Puling neurasthenic, used it to justify his laudanum binges. Still, I warrant I must be hydrocephalic anyway, or at any rate inoculated against swollen-headedness, eh?’

I nodded, although I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

We sat in silence while the rest of the audience trickled in. His ice-cream finished, The Fat Controller began to shift around uncomfortably in his seat, puffing and blowing. Eventually he said, ‘This is no good. I can't get comfortable. We shall have to try and swap seats with someone so that I can put my feet in the aisle.’

The couple at the end of the row happily switched with us and we settled down once more. However, as soon as we reached our new vantage I understood the real reason why he had wanted to move. The seats we now occupied were directly behind those of the complaining woman and her companions.

‘Serendipitous, eh?’ he said, and leered at me through the artificial gloom, his rubber lips curling up. ‘We shall have an opportunity now to balance things up a little — would you like that?’

‘I'm not sure,’ I dissimulated.

‘Come, lad, now is the time for you to make up your mind. I have spent a deal of time these past few years on cultivating you, submitting you to a species of metaphysical topiary, clipping, pruning, stunting. I have made no secret of the fact that I consider you to be a boy with potential, a boy I might introduce to some of the wonderful things of this world. Be that as it may, I shall be philosophic if you prove unworthy of this not inconsiderable investment — I can always write it off as a little deficit financing — but if you wish to continue with our relationship you must be prepared to place some real trust in me. Without it I cannot proceed.’ As he was talking I noticed something peculiar. Although his tones were conversational and in his case this naturally meant loud — none of the people in the adjacent seats seemed to be able to hear him. Once again he was addressing my consciousness directly, speaking straight into my inner ear without any sound escaping into the atmosphere.

‘People are not all alike — would you grant me that?’ His tone was now pedagogic.

‘S'pose so.’

‘S'pose so is not quite good enough. The point is, my young friend, that we have certain duties, not in respect of others, but ourselves. We cannot permit the foisting of indignities upon our person without some form of retribution.’ He held the tip of his cane an inch away from the complaining woman's head. ‘This woman here is not a moral agent in the same sense that I am, or that you will become. Her moral responsibilities are not ours and therefore nor are her rights commensurate. I, on the other hand, am in possession of powers which to the man in the street would appear awesome, inhuman, perhaps even godlike. Naturally along with these powers comes an enhanced moral capability.’

While he spoke the auditorium fell silent. At first a few individuals left off talking, then this engendered a positive feedback. more people heard the gathering soundlessness and responded to it so that whole tiers shut up. Eventually there was complete quiet. The house lights went down and the small posse of hack musicians who slouched in the orchestra pit began to saw indifferently at their instruments.

The curtain rose disclosing a set which for strident artificiality compared favourably with the train display in the toy shop. The layering of the paint on the backdrop was clearly visible; the rambling roses were plastic and immobile; the front of the stage was spread with a swathe of fruiterer's mock grass. There was a hiss over the PA, followed by the chirruping of recorded birdsong. I consulted the programme and discovered that what I was regarding was the rose garden of an English country house, circa 1922. A woman entered stage left. She was young and wore a dress that flared out around her calves. Her head was shrunken under a tight-fitting felt hat. She commenced to promenade up and down the stage, punctuating her remarks with hammy gestures of her lorgnette and preposterously long cigarette holder.

The play was a farce. Not that this mattered a great deal to me. I was aware that the threshold of the audience's suspension of disbelieflay far below mine; and that the aching gap between the supposed humour of the script and their exaggerated response was minuscule when set beside that which already separated my reality from theirs. I could also appreciate that the bulk of this supposed humour was meant to derive from the anachronism of the play's sexual mores. But these were only peripheral apprehensions, for the bulk of my attention was occupied by The Fat Controller's mesmerising amoral discourse.

‘When I wish to kill — I kill.’ The voice was lubricious, polite but insistent. ‘And nothing that people say or do can detract from this. Fortunately I am not driven to this expedient that often, because I have many other stratagems that I have devised for attaining the same object. But every so often, such as now, killing does seem the best possible option. Observe the ferrule of my cane.’ I felt something prod my leg and looked down. He was manipulating a kind of toggle or switch on the head of his cane. The woman in front — the woman who was to die — guffawed loudly at an on-stage incident, distracting me. When I looked down once more I saw, gleaming in the darkness, a long pin or needle that projected from the cane's tip. As suddenly as it was there it was gone again, retracted back into the body of the stick.

What happened next was hazy. There was a scene in a panelled drawing room. The pin-headed young woman was being surprised by her husband in the throes of simulated adultery. A Jeeves type, a servile machiavel, providentially hit the lights and the whole auditorium was plunged into darkness. I couldn't be certain but in the hubbub that followed (shrieked squeaks and ‘hahas’ from the audience) I thought I heard a definite mechanical ‘click’, but when the stage lights came up again, nothing had happened. The Fat Controller was sitting Ciceronian amongst the mob, and his intended victim was squeaking with the rest. Squeaking and even gasping with the great good humour of it all.