Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Our dyad looked on as Mohammed Sherif, the co-operative head, aged and bloated by dietary tedium, went through the formalities with the buyer. They drank thé à menthe from dirty glasses, while a charcoal lump fizzed in the clay bowl of the hookah. From time to time Sherif's woolly old head, loosely wrapped in a dirty headdress, would fall back against the fly-speckled surface of the remaining quarter of a red sign. This dolorous thing proclaimed ‘oca-Cola’ in Arabic.

As this went on, the point of view without extension that was myself and The Fat Controller accompanied the product-of-the future as it was unloaded from the truck and heaped in a stall of warped boards. A man with one nostril pulled a stiff tarpaulin over us.

‘There is no other buyer, d'ye see?’ said The Fat Controller. ‘The bargaining isn't even a formality, it's just an empty ritual. Sherif must accept the price he is offered if the five families are to have any hope of paying off their lengthening tab at the provisioner's and if — haha, a'haha — they want their thin children to live to grow thinner! Look here’ — we peeked out — ‘he's thinking to himself: This may be my last harvest. No such luck, I'm afraid.’

The Fat Controller and I next became the cotton entirely. We were jolted from the Delta to the coast, where we disappeared into a giant galvanised iron shed. Here we were subjected to a process of pounding and separating, carding and spinning. Until at last I saw him shooting off ahead of me in the form of a long lumpy thread, vibrating with moisture, which stretched ectoplasmically into the maw of the shuttling frame. He cried out, ‘Here we go!’ and I followed on. The machinery clanked up and over and up and over again, gulping down first him, then the shorts-to-be, then me.

‘Bloody lucky’ — he spoke like a harp out of the strings of half-constructed fabric — ‘that this old Schliemann-Hoffer has already caught its finger quota for today. D'ye see, little hands have to struggle to free the trapped weft before the frame drops? If they aren't quick enough — ouch! Blood as good as yours or mine creatin’ a sort of moiré effect and condemning your shorts to the wastage pile.’

Before we set off again, on along the coast and then across the sea, The Fat Controller saw fit to bifurcate our strange awarenesses. So that, while one part of me remained intimate with the cotton, another separate centre of cartoon existence accompanied those tokens which served, through their concatenation and order, to mirror parallel developments in the world of objects. So it was that I lay in honeycombs of tiny compartments, stacked into loose piles and sheaves with onion-skin leaves of paper. I waited to be clipped and pinned, stamped and spiked. Latterly I was digitalised and pulsed my way across the dark convexities of visual-display units. I thought to myself, even as it happened, that this winking of my very self-consciousness was a nice expression of the value I represented.

Meanwhile my cotton body was wound on to great bolts, each one five metres long. Although the bolts were thick, I still bent in the middle when I was lifted and carried, a man at either of my ends. I was wadded along with my fellows into a container and then — darkness. A long, long, unutterably tedious wait in the lint-filled darkness, until at last I felt the tension of the crane and realised that I was being lowered into the hold.

A juggernaut roaring, an ultrasonic shuddering, the smell of air-borne hydrocarbons, the sensation of pores opening to admit grit.

‘All right?’ asked The Fat Controller. ‘Not a lot to see in the hold of that ratty freighter, was there?’

‘No.’

‘That's why I've brought you here.’

Here was the Old Kent Road. We were looking across it at a slice-shaped building, calcined with pollution. It stood like a slice of stale chocolate cake, marooned in a tar ox-bow, that had become a cul-de-sac when the main throughfare ploughed another course. Over the portico, cut into the rendering, were the words ‘Success House’.

‘Good that, isn't it?’ His voice was muffled by something could it be that he was smoking a cigar even whilst disembodied? ‘A nice irony. The facade proclaims success, but behind it the building dwindles to nothing. Consider those stately columns, regard the coils of plaster vine that trail from the windowsills, meditate on the dados in the shape of fasces that stud its pitted hide.’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Does not the whole ensemble speak to you of imperial confidence, a global network of industry?’

‘S’pose so.’

‘And yet all there is inside is one old Jew. Zekel is his name.

‘I know that. What I mean is, when I was a number on one of those screens, I saw his name alongside me.’

‘Quite so, for it is he who is responsible for importing the schmutter that will be made into your shorts. He is a cotton factor; and look over there.’ I found myself looking. ‘Here, if I am not much mistaken, comes his customer.’

A youngish Greek man was sidling a blue Porsche into the alleyway alongside Success House. The car was so low it looked as if a giant had tried to stub it out and it was clear that getting out of the bucket seat gave the Greek momentary altitude sickness. He looked around warily as he locked up.

‘See him glance round like that? He's worried that if Zekel knows he has a Porsche, the Jew will drive a harder bargain and the haggling between them — which is already prolonged — will become interminable.

‘The Greek’s name is Vassily Antinou and let me tell you, he's an even deeper mine of stupid contradiction than you are. His father quarreled with the Colonels over some detail of graft. Naturally the adolescent Antinou, stranded in plump London, elevated the exile into something political. It's so typically English that this rebel should end up with his own sweat shop in Clapton — you'll see it for yourself in due course. All his socialist rhetoric has faded into spurious concerns over the man-management of twenty women-in-nylon. Poor Cypriots who have no option but to look on, while their boss — who is suited by Anzio, shod by Hoage's, and shirted by Barries’ — rants up and down the linoleum batting at the flexes of their sewing machines, and talking of productivity deals and workers’ share options. Pathetic, eh?’

We were inside Success House looking out. Those selfsame stately columns framed a view of the immense rumpled surface of South London. The factor sat behind a roll-top desk; he was so bent and atrophied by arthritis that he looked like a crustacean clad in a suit.

‘Whaddya want, Vassily?’ He clearly thought the Greek who leant against the doorjam was a hoot. He picked a newly constructed swatch of samples up from the desk in front of him and chucked it at Antinou, who caught the flopping thing one-handed and proceeded to fondle it familiarly.

‘This one,’ said Antinou, pulling out a sample and rubbing it between his finger and thumb.

‘That's called “getting the silk”,’ said The Fat Controller, so tto voce, ’now watch, he'll yank it hard to check the tensility.’ He was right.

‘Egyptian cotton,’ sighed Zekel. ‘I bought it myself at auction — it's still bonded.’ Antinou went on fondling the piece of cloth that was once a fluffy ball on the flat delta.

‘How much?’ he said at length. The Factor named a price, Antinou countered and so it went on for quite a while.

The Fat Controller and I were back inside the bolt when it arrived from the bonded warehouse at Felixstowe. The van doors swung open and as Antinou's lads eased us out we were treated to a 6 a.m. view of Clapton. It looked profoundly underexposed, like a photograph rejected by Quality Control.

‘See him,’ said The Fat Controller. A languid black man was floating around, elegantly suited. ‘That's Crispin. He's the originator of the Barries’ look, he's the man behind your shorts.’