Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Immediately afterwards there was an interval. Instead of joining the press of bodies that jammed up the aisle towards the crush bar, he took my arm once again and drew me in the opposite direction. We exited into a back alley via the fire door.

It was dark outside and The Fat Controller pulled up the velvet collar of his overcoat. ‘Did you enjoy the piece?’ he asked, and before I could answer he went on, ‘I myself did not. I found the script tedious and the performances inconsequential. How risible it is that art cannot provide a better imitation of life, when we know that life itself is so illusory. Would you not agree? Furthermore,’ he went on, drawing me in the direction of Pool Valley, ‘one is insistently aware that all of these actors are the meanest of impostors. That that woman who would be a flapper is in fact a naturally be-jeaned fag hag, who will soon be uttering even worse inanities in some adjacent lounge bar. Is this not so?’

I responded to his rhetoric with a question, anticipating rebuttal. ‘The woman who insulted you, the woman sitting in front of us — ‘

‘The one who I said I was going to kill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I have done so.’ He fell silent as if this was of little or no account.

‘But. . but, I didn't see anything. How did you do it?’

‘Curare. No magic to it at all, except insofar as it was a direct transferral of intention to effect with very little attenuation of the causal chain. You observed the hypodermic needle in the ferrule of my cane?’ He tapped the pavement with the stick for emphasis. ‘A method of poisoning which I learnt of during a sojourn in Bulgaria. It struck me at the time that there was something rather apt about such a pedestrian people developing such a pedestrian means of covert assassination —’ He broke off to laugh at his own pun. ‘The curare will paralyse the woman. Rude bitch. I injected her above the hairline. I cannot conceive that the pathologist will trouble to look there for a puncture mark and indeed, prior to that eventuality, it doesn't seem likely that the emergency team of paramedics they'll send out from Brighton General will be well enough acquainted with the action of this drug to hit upon the right antidote in time to prevent her from expiring.’

Perhaps I was in shock but instead of simply feeling horrified by this intelligence I was curious. ‘But when they do the whatsit. .’

‘The post-mortem?’

‘Yeah, when they do the post-mortem, what will they decide was the cause of death?’

‘Suffocation, I should imagine. I admit they will find that something of a puzzle, but given the low critical standards of provincial audiences, they might hit upon the felicitous conclusion that she choked while in the midst of an exaggeratedly hilarious response to that pathetic farce. And now’ — The Fat Controller consulted his watch; an endomorphic gold Rolex had replaced the full hunter — ‘it's getting on for nine-thirty. I warrant that your mama may be wondering where we have got to, we had better enbus for Saltdean. Forward to the terminus.’

That night, as I sat on the edge of my bed, contemplating the tatter of pop posters sellotaped to the flower-patterned wallpaper of my bedroom, I found myself shaking. It couldn't be true, could it? The Fat Controller hadn't really killed the woman, had he? There was no denying that his penetration of my mind, using my eidetic memory to distort the relation between representation and that which was represented, was strident, agressive even. But there was still a world of difference between this and the vicious and arbitrary manner in which he had committed femicide. And he had done it to a woman who had done nothing to him, simply been a little rude and overbearing, not unlike The Fat Controller himself.

My head span. I felt the nausea of awakening to a brand new day of suffering, a dawn of utter exclusion from my fellow mortals. What had I got myself into? I imagined my mentor, beached on his snow-white counterpane, consciouslessly watching Night Thoughts and perhaps improvising his own televisual homily. I wanted to confess everything to somebody, but who? Now my intimations of the complicity between The Fat Controller and my mother grew into the utter certainty that it extended even into these murky areas. I realised that the ‘trust’ which he sought was silence. A comprehensive silence covering all those aspects of our relationship that might appear to an outsider to be improper, or even bizarre. I hated to imagine what the consequences of breaching this trust might be. If a woman who was rude got killed, I would surely be strung up, tortured, cut down and my heart excised.

My cursed eidetic memory summoned up a vision of the medieval rood screen in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the one depicting the martyrdom of St Anthony. St Anthony being boiled in oil with a companionable gaggle of fellow martyrs; St Anthony pierced by crossbow bolts fired by The Fat Controller in chain mail; and in the central, triumphant panel — his white body as flexibly two-dimensional as bacon rind — St Anthony being sawn in half, lengthwise. Instead of the almond eyes of the soon-to-be-beatified, the gaping mouth of welcomed suffering superimposed on the Saint's visage was my own. My own dead-straight mousy fringe and dimpled chin framed my face as it distorted in agony.

Without noticing its onset I found that I was crying and I went on crying until I slept.

The following day was a Saturday. Walking down to the newsagent's in the village I ran through the events of the preceding evening again. I conjured up a vivid representation of the plushy murk in the Theatre Royal, I saw the shiny tip of the hypodermic gleaming against the dark fabric of The Fat Controller's trouser leg. I still wanted to believe that he had been fooling me, or testing my credulousness in a more than averagely cruel manner.

The day was high and bright, the salt tang seasoning the after-pulse of summer heat which still hung in the air, but nothing could shift my sense of despondency, nagging depression. I couldn't even be bothered to look where I was going. I ran straight into the hard bulk of The Fat Controller and was winded by the impact. I had always suspected him of being rather more solid than the average person and this collision provided complete confirmation. He was as rigid and unyielding as the rugby-tackling machine at school.

‘Well, if it isn't my little companion, my theatre-going pal. Where are we off to this morning then, so sunk in our own fantasies and imaginings that we cannot be troubled to look out for vulnerable senior citizens, eh?’ As ever he answered his own question. ‘To the paper shop, I'll be bound, but there's no need to trouble yourself for I have the early edition right here.’

He pulled the local daily paper from under his arm and brandished it in the blue air as if it were a short sword. ‘We made the front page!’ he exulted, holding the rag up so that I could see the headline: ‘WOMAN DIES AT THEATRE ROYAL’. I began to tremble violently and would have fainted, had he not grabbed me by the elbow and guided me to a low wall, where I slumped down.

‘I can see that you're a trifle overcome,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Let me read you the copy: “A woman died last night during the interval at the Theatre Royal.” What appalling style, even twenty years ago one could expect a better standard of English. Anyway, no matter, it's a digression, where was I. . yes: “The woman, who has yet to be named, was among a party of four attending Tea at Five for Six. Her companions alerted theatre staff when it became clear that she was having difficulty breathing. An ambulance was called but efforts made to revive her proved unsuccessful. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Brighton General.”