Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Hold up, lads!’ The black man let his hand fall on the bolt of cotton. He pulled a fold of cloth loose and, with tender movements, as if he were sensually unwrapping some erogenous zone, he felt the cloth. He bunched it and pulled at it, finally he pleated it between his knuckles, before letting it fall back. He went off in the direction of some green doors that bore the legend ‘Narcissus Clothing’, muttering, ‘That'll do, that'll do. ‘

‘You see,’ said The Fat Controller once Crispin had disappeared, ‘your shorts already had shape and form — in his mind. Now he's found their substance. Shall we go on?’

We were on the King's Road. The frontage of Barries’ Menswear was pseudo-cottagey, a waist-high tracery of white plaster and black beams surmounted by plate-glass windows. ‘There he is, that's Barry — Barry Mercer.’ A plump man, piscine, his tail end fading to little leather pumps, came out of the shop gesticulating, clutching his sweating ginger head. Crispin followed behind. ‘Of course his real name is Morgenstern. His father was a bespoke tailor on the Mile End Road. You know I was talking of cotton and Repetitive Stress Syndrome? Well, Mercer's father had exactly the same rinds of dead flesh on his hands that we saw in the Delta.

‘Barry couldn't change his name until his father died — and he certainly wouldn't have brought Crispin home. His father would have said, “We sell to schwartzers, we don't do business with them.” But Barry's mother is too polite for that, whenever Crispin goes round he gets schneken and the photo album like anyone else. Shall we listen in?’

‘Accessorise, that's what you do if you want to establish a designer concept,’ said Crispin. His nostrils were cavernous and so finely edged that they seemed made of paper.

‘But what can we accessorise?’ Mercer whined. ‘I had to go up to Clapton yesterday and haggle with Antinou for hours over that bloody Egyptian cotton. Whaddya want it for? We don't have a range of clothes, a collection, that requires accessories.’

‘No matter.’ Crispin was imperturbable, ‘We'll just do the accessories. Antinou can turn out boxer shorts for less than 50p a unit. We can do shirts and socks as well — ‘

His words were abruptly cut off. We were back at the university, sitting on the bench as if nothing had happened. The empty ornamental pond was choked with rotten leaves, starlings blew about the place like avian litter. The Fat Controller had a large gunmetal cigar case open in one hand. He was studying it reverently, as if it were some breviary of tobacco. He said, ‘You have to remember that selecting the right cigar is an act of intuition rather than analysis. It's no good looking at the cigars available and attempting to choose one on the basis of certain criteria. Rather, you must wait for the cigar that is — so to speak — ordained, to speak to you. To say “smoke me”. This one’ — he picked one up gingerly, near to the tip — ‘says it is the reincarnation of Cleopatra's asp. I'll buy that.’ He lit it with his Zippo.

‘I thought connoisseurs never lit their cigars with petrol lighters.’

‘Whassat? Oh well, yes, I suppose strictly speaking that is true but it's a mistake to view a sensual pleasure as being a single datum. Rather, every such experience is manifold. If your palate is sufficiently developed you can distinguish the tobacco from the petrol. I myself have rather a taste for petrol. Picked it up during a little sojourn among the Australian aboriginals. . but anyway, we digress. What did you think of my little lesson: “The History of the Product”?’

‘It was very interesting. Was it an hallucination?’

‘Don't be so bloody stupid! What's the point in my spending time on you, cultivating you, being perfectly decent towards you, if you're going to manifest such infantile credulousness, eh?’

‘I don't call depriving me of my girlfriend being perfectly decent.’

‘Still hung up on that, are you? Come now, you cannot possibly imagine that anything could have come of your relation with that chit. In your heart of hearts you know yourself to be incapable of such mutuality, such abandonment of self — ’

‘But what about my “elective affinity"?’

‘That's altogether different.’

‘Because that's what you want?’

‘Quite so. Now, as to “The History of the Product,” an ability to retroscend in this fashion will be of inestimable value to you, it will mean that when you are engaged in assessing the demand for a particular product you can look at similar and instantly unpack the portfolio of its genesis. There is of course another aspect to this, the cultural superstructure that corresponds to this historical basis. I refer, of course, to the discreet advertisements in the quality press, people mouthing fatuously “Oh Barries"’, when they see what shirt you're wearing, the flyers Mercer manages to insinuate on to the information desks in some of the major London hotels, and so on and so forth.

‘Naturally your shorts are a very simple example of this. When it comes to products that are in more diffuse circulation the retroscendent experience can be considerably more disorientating. Although a skilled retroscender may learn how to pilot himself through all the historical imagery available I fear that lies some way off for you. In the meantime — until you have made your bones, that is — you will needs have to confine yourself to asking my assistance when you wish to retroscend, got that? Good. Now’ — he brought himself face to face with his Rolex — tempus fucks it. I have a plane to catch. I will see you anon.’ He could never say goodbye or hello, he just came — and went. I was left on the memorial bench, more isolated than ever.

Naturally June couldn't understand why it was that I went on cutting her. And cut her I did. I even had to resort to missing seminars and tutorials, so as to avoid having to speak to her. Initially she was simply bewildered by this but soon she was plain angry. She left a series of notes in my pigeonhole that started off plaintively: ‘I'm very confused by what happened between us the other night. I thought you were a caring sort of person, I can't understand why you won't speak to me now. Is it something to do with the sex?’ (how right she was) but ended up abusively: ‘Ian Wharton, you are the fucking male chauvinist pig to end all fucking male chauvinist pigs. You take a woman out and then dump her. Don't you care at all how people feel?’

If only she could have known how much I cared. If only she could have seen me skulking around at Cliff Top, the very picture of melancholy. Sitting drooped over walls, utterly dejected. I felt the full force of her criticism. Somewhere in my abdomen was a sac of warm caring, a bladder of emotional nutrition, distended with the urge to burst and engender another's heart. But I was constrained, fearfully constrained.

Cut off more than ever from the society of my peers, I fell back on my mother. Since I had been at the university we had seen far less of each other. It was an extension — or so I thought — of the tact she had always shown to me as a child that she didn't impose. However, when I took to hanging about in the new house, when I watched her while she chatted to her staff and guests, or entertained the local burghers, or genteely remonstrated with her suppliers and various tradesmen over the phone, I began to see this seeming tact as an extension of that complicity I had long been aware of. Mother, I sensed, didn't just know a little about Mr Broadhurst, she knew all about him. That's why she was the first to know he was moving out.

I was in my caravan, trying to study on a Sunday afternoon in mid-winter. I was reading some gimcrack book about economics, full of those pictograms that fall half-way between diagrams and drawings, when I heard the thudding of a diesel engine running under the roar of the gale coming in off the sea and over the whirr of the fan heater that was marinading my feet.