Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Look, see this?’ She took the paper tube and lit one end with the candle. Then she set it in the middle of a saucer. ‘Now watch, this is magic.’ The tube burnt blue and orange transforming the paper into a black filigree. But before it was consumed entirely, it lifted off and shot up towards the painstyled plaster of the ceiling. It fell back towards us and I caught the filmy ash on another plate. I felt elegant, masterful, catching that ash. She looked at me with a smile that implied fusion.

I insisted on paying the bill and on opening the door for her as if I were an ordinary gallant. We were walking along the front towards the Palace Pier when she took my arm. Outside the Metropole she turned to face me and we kissed.

That kiss, my first, sang my mouth into existence. Her conduit arms around my shoulders — as I had suspected threw the switch for a sensation of total embodiment, which surged up to encompass me. I felt vivified by that kiss. Before I had been lifeless jumble of miscellaneous body parts but now I was Frankenstein's monster, shocked by lust into coherence and action.

‘Do you really live in a caravan?’ Her breath was on my neck.

‘Yeah, but it's not a gypsy caravan. The caravanning life isn't all it's painted up to be. This one's a grotty little fibreglass thing, there's nothing romantic about it.’

‘Still, I'd like to see it. Can we go there?’

‘Yeah, all right. It's on our way back to Hastings.’

I fully intended to show her the caravan and then take her home. I felt safe — she seemed like a demure young woman. Even if I tried it on I thought she would stop me. But back at Cliff Top in the crisp violet night, we stood watching the lights of the ships in the Channel and we kissed again. Although I couldn't see her face properly, her tongue was painting my image by numbers. Her cool hands slid up under my jacket, plucking at my shirt, pulling it out at the waist.

And my hands, my heavy hands, they glided over her with careful diffidence, not so much touching or feeling but defining her anatomy. They located her shoulder blades, her spine, the small of her back, and then slid between our compressing bodies and travelled up to the tiny soft immensities of her bosom.

For the first time since my balls had dropped I felt wholly in the moment, unafflicted by my meddlesome internal projectionist. All my wank footage lay in dusty spirals on the cutting-room floor. I was free.

Then, somehow, we were in my caravan. The fold-away bed was let down. Without shyness, without hiding ourselves from each other, we undressed. She pulled the leather clasp from her hair and shook it free in a whirl of golden brown. She unbuttoned her blouse. I dropped my trousers. As I stood on one foot to remove them, the little cabin shifted on its suspension but there was no embarrassment, not even in the disparity between the utility of our underwear and the transcendence of our desire. We were alone together in some prelapsarian grotto. Her body was ochre against the light-blue side of the caravan. I held her to me as we fell across the bed, feeling her lithe life-force twitching against me as beautiful as a rainbow trout, leaping from a mill race into my outstretched arms.

She touched me with confidence. I couldn't believe it. Both her hands around my penis, cosseting it, restraining it. I licked her neck, the backs of my fingers prinked her pink nipples. We sighed. The heel of my hand was firm on her mons, my fingertips strummed gently at her lips, parted them. We rippled on the yellow sheet, the counterpane — and us — long gone.

She led me on, instructing me, indicating her desires with soft tweaks and softer pats. In due course, it was time. She moved back against the pillow and drew me on top of her. Her legs fell open and oh! The kid softness of her thighs, the honey of her breath, the sweet intensity of it. My urge to enter her, to be inside her, was stronger than anything I had ever felt.

‘Yes!’ she sighed. ‘Now!’ she gasped.

I felt the beginnings of a slithering enfoldment. I looked out of the tiny window over her shoulder, willing myself to make it slow, to make it last. A hard square of orange light sprang on in the darkness. Someone — I realised with a start — was in The Fat Controller's caravan.

Beneath me June's body froze, becoming utterly immobile, lifeless. Sex time stood still. The little door of my caravan squealed open. He stood there in full evening dress, the shiny black rim of his topper slicing across the bulge of his massive brow. His Partagas perfecto was champed between his inner tube lips, a diamond as big as a buttercup sparkled on the starched front of his dress shirt, a long white silk scarf was casually looped around his lack of a neck.

‘Good evening,’ he said, as I scuttled like a giant shaved rodent into the furthest corner of the caravan. ‘Trying to have a little fuck-for-real, are we?’ I looked back at the bed, at June rigid in ecstasis, her eyes blank and upturned. ‘No need to worry about her.’ The Fat Controller entered the caravan casually, his eyes darting about taking in my few effects, our scattered clothes, the pile of economics books on the little table. ‘Got an ashtray? No? No matter.’ He flicked two inches of ash on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed I had just vacated. June's body rocked longitudinally on its curved spine, then fell sideways. It was as stiff and brittle as a lifesize plaster maquette.

‘Cat got yer’ tongue?’ I was gibbering quietly, I felt the head of my penis stickily retreat back inside its hood of skin. ‘You needn't worry about her,’ he repeated, gesturing at the naked girl. ‘She'll get her climax — which is more than you could have managed. I'll engineer it myself after we've had a little chat. You shan't be shamed for she'll think you a great lover, a real Lothario, a dandy Don Juan. And the very fact that the experience will never ever be repeated will make the remembrance burn for her a hundred times as bright.

‘D'ye see that? When she's married ten years hence, she'll compare her husband's performance with yours and he'll come off worse — every time. Memories are cruel to the present in that way and, as far as sexual intercourse is concerned, it is axiomatic that familiarity breeds contempt. ‘ Predictably, he chortled at his own execrable pun.

I was still gibbering. Muffled bleats and strangled gurgles leaked from my lips. ‘Oh do can it! Come here, put a pair of trousers on or something. We need to talk and I'm tired. I've just been driven back from Covent Garden and I want to get to bed. You are a very lucky young man indeed. If Tommaso hadn't troubled to have me paged at the opera, you would certainly have performed coitus with this young woman and d'ye know what would have happened then?’

‘N-no.’ Somehow I had managed to squirm back into my trousers. I crouched on the tiny oblong floor, clutching the only breasts that were left for me to clutch — my own.

‘Your penis would have broken right off inside her and I mean that quite literally. I thought you understood about coitus, I thought you appreciated what being my licentiate entailed?’

‘Y-yes, but — ‘

‘My dear boy.’ He was conciliatory. ‘I know this must be difficult for you, perhaps even a little traumatic, but don't take it to heart. All in good time you will have a bed partner and let me tell you, you will care for her far more than you ever could for this one. It's a function of your relationship to me, d'ye see? I have, how shall I put it, organised an elective affinity for you already. Everything in that department is in train, so don't spoil it.’

He was resting his huge hand on June's angled knee as casually as if it were the arm of a chair. He twisted his Redwood trunk on the bed and looked down at her from under his lashless lids. He scrutinised the rictus of her pleasure, which was rendered grotesque by its immobility. We both stared at her vagina. Its slick lips ‘o'ed back at us. The Fat Controller blew a plume of cigar smoke at it from out of the corner of his mouth; the blue strands interleaved with her browner ones.