Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Well, there you have it. Not a pretty death, but as peaceful as she could have hoped for, given the circumstances. Let me see, let me see, what's this: “A spokesman for the police said that, although certain aspects of the woman's death were unusual, they did not suspect foul play.” Oh yes, oh yes indeed! Ahaha, ha ha. Of course not! Why should they? It was fair play, wasn't it, my lad, absolutely fair play. Wouldn't ye agree, lad, wouldn't ye?’

He was as good as his word. For the five years after the murder of the woman at the Theatre Royal his interventions in my life remained purely educative. He did not, as I had feared, ask me to perform covert assassinations on his behalf and nor did he insist on my using my eidetic capabilities to project myself into the noumenal world that he inhabited with such terrifying ease. Naturally he couldn't forbear from upsetting me, nor ruining what slim remaining chance I had of being like anyone — let alone everyone — else. He messed around with me emotionally, through dropping those bombshells of feeling — concerning my father, amongst other things — that I have alluded to before. Nevertheless this was small beer for him.

In due course I left Varndean and went to do business studies at Sussex University. For the first year I had a room on campus but I wasn't happy there so I returned to Cliff Top, where my mother put one of the caravans at my disposal.

By now there were only a few of them left, grouped like maintenance vehicles around The Fat Controller's wide-bodied jet of a home. The bungalow had been more or less cancelled out by mother's renovations. And arisen, phoenix-like, from its dusty and corrugated remains, was the tastefully false façade of Cliff Top, the hotel.

My time at university was, for a while at least, a happy one. I enjoyed my course of study and felt that the practicalities of business were a perfect antidote to the magic that had dominated my adolescence. Although we were sneered at by the arts and humanities students, those of us who were doing business studies felt, quite reasonably, that we were closer to the spirit of the age than the old hippies of the faculty.

People had begun to feel less ashamed about being greedy and of wanting more than their share of fairness. I wasn't partisan politically but I did think that choice was important, whether it was which brand you chose or which person you decided to deride. Here at least my disparate educations converged.

That first term I was very shy and awkward. I found it almost impossible to mix with my fellow students. I barely understood any of the cultural references that they took for granted. Also I couldn't shake off the imprint of The Fat Controller's locutions. His tendency towards pleonasm had infected me. Often when attempting to explain some aspect of my studies to fellow students who were having difficulties, I would look up from the textbook we were sharing to see an expression of sheer disbelief pass across their faces. I knew why, they had the queer sensation that they were being addressed by someone from a bygone age.

I was the repository for arcana of an exacting kind. The Fat Controller forced upon me the conclusion that things were not at all as they seemed. As yet my understanding of this was inchoate, but I never for a moment doubted that, while I might work hard and comprehend these studies quite thoroughly, the true meaning of my life lay somewhere else.

The laggardly limb of this awareness was tied firmly to the dominant emotion in my life, fear. Together, with fear yanking the way forward, speculation and sentiment ran the three-legged race into the future.

It may surprise the reader (who after all is charged with the task of making an important decision), that I should talk of my time at university as a happy one and yet still speak of my dominant emotion as fear, but then the worst is yet to come.

The self-styled Brahmin of the Banal kept my fear-levels up to scratch by manifesting himself unexpectedly. As I have said, even as a teenager I knew without having to ask that sexual intercourse would sap whatever magical powers I might have. Yet I craved physical affection — the raw stuff of touch — perhaps even more than emotional. I felt preternaturally over-sexed, and despite being removed from The Fat Controller's proximate influence I still stuck to this rule. I lubricated my eidetic memory, priming it to summon up still more lurid fantasies, carnal changelings compensating for the real thing.

It got so bad I wasn't able to concentrate on my studies. I couldn't open a book, attend a seminar, lecture or tutorial, even go to the library, without getting an erection. I would have to slip away to toilets, down basement stairs, off into the closed stacks of the library and there strike the flint. The friction burnt me, my imagination incandesced in the limelight of this magic lantern show.

At least these skits had grown in sophistication since my adolescence. I became catholic in my lusts. No longer did I desire conventions of little nymphets, each one wearing Playboy's plastic name badge. Instead I screwed around the crowd, all kinds of people, fat and thin, young and old, male and female. I performed cunnilingus, sodomy, intercrural sex and even safe sex — long before it became fashionable. I had become so eidetically adept that I could make these phantom partners mutate in mid-thrust, so that while I might penetrate a swivel-hipped virgin, clean and childishly scented, I would come in the flabby, dentureless, food-flecked mouth of an octogenarian.

This addiction to self-abuse began to tell on me. I was crazed with wanking. It was the lack of touch that really did me in. Without the feeling of another touching me, I was starting to lose the sense of my own body. I was becoming numb all over. If only real hands could shape my contours, then at least I would know that they were still there.

In my second year matters came to a head. Since moving back to Cliff Top my mother had boosted my grant. I was able to buy a small car in which to make the fifteen-minute drive to the campus each day. I would get up in the morning, step out of my caravan, face the ocean and do my exercises, followed by my ritual routine. I had grown to be a large, lumpy sort of man. My resemblance to my father — which had always been remarked upon when I was a child — was now startling. I knew I wasn't attractive and I didn't help myself by dressing like a young fogey in tweed sports jackets, flannel trousers and open-necked check shirts.

I was stuck in a time warp in every sense, one that encompassed my part of Cliff Top as well. My mother's hotel may have elevated her from the raw stuff of commerce — so much so that she now subscribed to Country Living and other unspecialist periodicals — but the caravan enclosure was decaying anew. They were flaking paint and hadn't been refurbished since I was fourteen. The brake-pad bindweed had returned and everything was seized up in the early-seventies.

The Sussex campus was stuck in the past as well. Built during a period of architectural optimism, when it was assumed that technology would triumph, it had been laid out in a series of oblong paved courtyards, surrounded by long, low, concrete-faced buildings, remarkable solely for their brutalism. It always struck me as ironic that these buildings, which had been designed to make that present appear futuristic, now served so well to make this present look exactly like the recent past.

The funding was running down, clumps of weed had pushed up between the paving slabs, and whole layers of rendering were falling off the façades of the buildings, giving them a seedy, leprous aspect. To cap it all most of the student body dressed to complement the period when the university was built. They weren't following fashion — they were trailing far behind it.