Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Right, that's all, I'm off to bed now. I'm absolutely fagged out, grand opera is too, too fatiguin’. I had to sit next to a monstrously fat man. It was bloody hot in the stalls and his sweat stank. It was as if he were shitting out of every pore.’ He spoke casually and with no sense of irony. Then he stood and gathered his hat, cigar and white gloves together in one hand. Pausing at the door he turned once more and extended the middle finger of his right hand towards the bed. I noticed for the first time that it was dreadfully long. The very tip of the finger began to oscillate. It seemed to be locked on to some invisible beam that was projecting from out of June's vagina. The colour rushed back into her face, her back arched still further, she whimpered and thrashed, her outstretched hands clutching at the edge of the mattress. The Fat Controller addressed me over the sounds of her orgasm, paying no attention to them at all. We might have been in a shopping concourse and her cries some strange species of muzak:

‘Ah! Ahh! Ahhhherrr! O — O. .’

‘. . I have business at the university tomorrow, so I'll come and find you afterwards. It occurs to me’

‘H-h-a hnh. . ha, ha, Ha!. .’

‘. . that I have been neglecting your education. I can be of more service vis-à-vis your ambitions than I have heretofore. Consider it’

‘Yes, oh yes, oh-yesss. . ‘ She was subsiding.

‘. . something by way of a compensation for this.’ He indicated the young woman he was dehumanising on the bed. ‘Now, pop your trews off and give her a cuddle; and make sure she's out of here soon, I don't want her mooning about in the morning.’ He turned to leave but then swivelled back once more. ‘Remember, put your pecker in her or any other doxy and’ — he held up his stogie braced between three fingers — ‘this is what will happen.’ He snapped it in two — gave me a leer — and was gone, as suddenly as he had arrived.

I did as I was told. While I cuddled June I cried, wept hot tears. She was terribly moved. She cleaved to me, slipping her legs between mine. I explained, as gently as possible, that my mother was very old-fashioned and always checked up on me in the morning. About 3 a.m. I managed to get her into the car and drove her back to her aunt's in Hastings.

Powering the skateboard of a car back along the coast road, home to Cliff Top, I felt its wheels skittering on the damp surface and my arms yearned to yank the steering wheel hard round, ending this nightmare. Only The Fat Controller's talk of ‘elective affinity’ prevented me. Now, of course, I wish I had.

The following day June sought me out, after a seminar on management technique. We stood on the concrete set of the main concourse while extras thronged about. ‘How about tonight?’ she said and the pathos in her ignorant unknowing enquiry almost made me gag. My mind flew back to the sight of The Fat Controller's cigar. I had trodden on its shattered corpse that morning on my way out of the caravan.

‘I–I can't, really, not tonight. Sorry.’

‘What's up? Have you got to go visiting with Mummy? I thought we might do some studying together. You know I don't want “us” to get in the way of work.’

‘Haha. No, I'd love to. It's just there's something else I must do. I can't really talk about it now. I'll tell you tomorrow.’ I couldn't bear her look of hurt expectancy any more, so I tore myself away from her face and walked off. I realised that, if I was going to have to break with her, the process of rejection might as well get started right away. As I reached the end of the student union building I looked back and gave a little finger-wiggle. Even from fifty yards away I could see her pained expression.

Turning the sharp corner of toughened glass with its graph-paper patterning of buried wire, I ran into someone — or some thing. Although I was walking at a normal pace the impact stunned me. My head rang with that particular vibration of accidental pain, a tintinnabulating effect that always feels as if it should have preceded its cause — by way of a warning.

‘You're rather good at walking into me, aren't you?’ He was in a Prince of Wales check this morning. The sight of such an expanse of tiny squares, flowing up and around his massive elevation, produced more of an architectural than a sartorial impression. ‘I trust your inattention is a function of scholarly absorption, rather than adolescent spooning.’

‘What difference can it possibly make?’ It was a measure of my despair that I dared to be so disdainful.

‘Don't get chippy, boy, I cannot abide it.’ But although he was terse, he didn't rage at me the way I expected him to. I suppose I half-hoped that he would zap me with extinction the way he had zapped June with orgasm the night before but his horrible middle finger was folded around a reeking cheroot and showed no sign of flexing.

He put my felonious body in the stocks of his arm and led me off in the direction of what passed for a garden at Sussex, a series of brick-edged parallelograms that couldn't have looked more artificial if they had been planted with cathode-ray tubes, instead of hardy perennials. To anyone who was watching we must have looked the very picture of youthful preoccupation and parental concern.

‘What have you been studying this morning then, eh?’

‘Management techniques.’

‘Oh yes, and what are they?’

‘Well’ — I hated myself for responding to his interest — ‘we were looking at different kinds of organisational hierarchy and how to construct optimal decision-making procedures in corporate contexts.’

‘I see. Can you really give any credence to this ordure?’

‘I'm sorry?’

‘This crap.’

‘Well, it's essential, isn't it? I mean somebody has to have an idea of what's to be done and how it should be communicated to the employees.’ I was earnest, like any aspiring young person trying to draw out approval. He seemed to ignore the substance of what I had said.

‘What Is To Be Done?’ he mused. ‘That's what I said to Vladimir Ilyich. Naturally he cribbed it for the title of a pamphlet, when what I actually meant by it was some advice. I urged him to have a few of the young daughters of the gentlefolk before he established the provisional government at the Smolny Institute. He was headstrong enough, although not as cold and passionless as they later made out.’

We went on walking for a while, in silence. Eventually The Fat Controller pulled me up in front of a viciously scalped hedge of box. He took the cheroot from his mouth and peered at its slobbered-on green end, as if it were a reptilian rump about to grow a new tail. ‘I thought you were interested in products,’ he said, a wheedling tone entering his voice. ‘I can help you in that area.’

‘We've done merchandising, purchasing, sourcing and inventory auditing.’

‘That's not what I'm talking about. What I can help you with is an understanding of the nature of a product that goes far beyond these crudities; these academic categories masquerading as truths.’

‘I'm interested in the marketing side of things. How to evolve a strategy to actually sell a product. You know, advertising, sales promotion, that sort of thing.’

‘Of course, chip off the old block, aren't you?’

‘Yeah, I know “contemptible Essene, cloistral nonentity”, that's what you said to me.’

‘You have a fair recollection, boy, I'll grant you that. Tell me, how much of that recollection is visual and how much verbal?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, do you first need to form a picture of the two of us sitting in that café discussing your father — an eidetic image before the words come to you, or not?’

‘I suppose I do need to — ‘