Will Self - My Idea of Fun

The rounded rectangle of my little window on the world gave me a television picture of the site. Outside in the howling, flobs of rain were twisting and twining around the few remaining hutches. I felt a sense of profound foreboding and then I saw them, the gyppos. Naturally I recalled who they were at once the hawkish profiles, the jet tangles of hair were doubly outlined as the window of their truck slid by mine.

I was outside in an instant. Their brakes must have locked as they were coming down the slope, for there was a twenty-yard slice of chocolate loam where their wheels had scoured the turf. ‘What are you up to!’ I shouted over the gale. ‘Look what you've done. This is private property, you know.’ Even as I shouted I sensed the utter absurdity of my words and the ludicrous figure I presented, a slovenly, plump young man, so obviously clumsy and ineffectual, rabbit's ears of shirt-tail escaping from my waistband.

They leapt from the cab in just the way I remembered, lithe and dangerous. ‘Gerrart-of-it!’ said the larger of the two, moving purposively towards me. ‘Come fer thass.’ He indicated the shiny fuselage of Mr Broadhurst's caravan.

‘But where is Mr Broadhurst?’

‘I dunno, laddie. S'not a problem. Gor'all pepperworks ‘ere.’ He thrust the edge of a clipboard at me like a weapon.

The other gyppo had come up by his shoulder. He was flexing and twisting his simian arms, as if limbering up for violence. ‘D'jew wanna argue, muvverfuckah,’ he spat.

I broke from them, and ran back up the slope to my mother's house. I ran the length of the new hallway, with its Wilton carpeting, faux hunting prints and brocaded wallpaper. I found her in the back kitchen, standing over the chef who was rolling out pastry. ‘Those gyppos are here,’ I panted. ‘They say they're going to take Mr Broadhurst's caravan.’

She looked at me critically, lifting her new gold-rimmed bifocals on to the bridge of her nose. ‘Try not to track mud into the house, Ian, and don't you think you should drop the term “gyppos” from your vocabulary — it's awfully common. ‘ Thora Hird was dispensing homilies on the television; she was sitting in front of a Grecian urn.

‘But, Mum. He's never said anything to me about moving away from Cliff Top — ‘

‘Ah yes, Ian, but he has to me, he has to me.’

There it was, out in the open. She had no need to give it further emphasis, it could not have been clearer. She knew all about him, she knew all about ‘us'; and she either didn't care, or she approved altogether. My mother was at that time becoming suspiciously youthful in appearance. Her breasts were stranded back in the fifties. Enfolded in the crisp embrace of new money, they were pointed and hard, like the nose cones of rockets about to blast off for planetary exploration, the nurturing of new worlds. And her hair — that hair — still curling wilfully, as if every strand were an ungovernable sexual impulse. How could I ever have trusted her?

The new stripped-pine floor vibrated; through the sash window I could see the black truck pulling up the drive towards the main road, the silver caravan coming behind like a drogue that was preventing the gypsies from submerging, escaping into the very centre of the earth. With them went went whatever chance I ever had of regaining my childhood.

Here’s how it happened. I went on attending the university, doing my course modules, and avoiding intimacy in whatever way it proffered itself to me. At the same time I practised assiduously my calculus of personal ritual to ward off any kind of eidesis. I was determined to live as far as possible in the now. If ever I was tempted by the seductive stasis of an eidetic image, I punctured its reflecting skin with a dart and tore it away to reveal the structure of habit below. I squinted and transformed the galaxy into the dust of my dead skin; I always read ‘YAW EVIC’ from the glistening macadam and avoided giving way. I came to be capable — as he had said I would — of the most beautifully consistent combinations of apprehensions with little twistles of kinaesthetic intimation. I became — in my own small way — a Cassandra of Ca-ca. The most piddling aspects of my embodiment furnished me with prophecy: hanging on whether the flap of gum skin comes away, then. . the leaf will fall or not fall, I will die or be immortal, the sun will rise or not.

Indeed, it was at this time that, ironically, I turned myself into a genuine adept of the Magus of the Quotidian. So much so that for weeks at a time I could live without eidetiking at all. Ironically, because having shown me what he termed ‘retroscendence’, The Fat Controller was content to let me stew in my own juice for a while.

I actually thought that his technique for unpacking the hidden history of products was despicable. I wanted my understanding of business to be entirely different, based firmly on analysis and deduction rather than any kind of weird visual intuition.

I dimly understood that by holding out to me this realm of material essences, available by an act of will alone, The Fat Controller was condemning me to a cosmos of brand names, a metaphysic of motifs, a logic of logos, and an epistemology based on EPOS (The Electronic Point of Sale method of inventory-keeping, which was just coming into use at this time among major retailers). Mine was to be a psyche available for product placement — that was his intention. The interior of my mind was to be shaped according to his merchandising plan, with circular display racks of concepts standing in aisles of cogitation, flanked by long shelves groaning with brightly coloured little ideas.

I could see that if I were to give way to retroscendence the average supermarket gondola, stuck with myriad products like a hedgehog with spines, would become a mystic test-bed able through its thousand portals to suck me into individual sagas so complex, so durable, that I would perhaps never reemerge.

The very ecosystem I inhabited was also to be one of products, striving against built-in obsolescence to individuate themselves, using whatever human means were at their disposal to advance their branded species. I was conscious that underlying it all there must be some Law of Unnatural Selection, which could prove that the fittest product with the most colourful packaging was the most likely to be pollenated by purchase.

But against all my expectations, the longer he kept away, the more I found I could hack it. I relapsed into a seeming normality. I freed myself from the antiquated strait-jacket of his verbose speech patterns. I even smartened myself up, becoming something of a dandy. The boxer shorts from Barries’ were followed by shirts and socks, then by jackets and trousers from Di Stato (Anzio's high-street chain), and eventually some Hoage's shoes.

I had no vices and I couldn't take anyone out, so I had nothing to spend my student grant on save for clothes. In my mind at least I was already the smartly turned-out, bright and efficient young executive that I aspired to be. I was determined to render myself generic by the time I left university.

A few months of living like this behind me, I almost managed to convince myself that my whole involvement with the man I called ‘The Fat Controller’ had been an elaborate fantasy. After all, what evidence did I really have? There's nothing wrong with a man living under an assumed name and besides that, I couldn't prove that Mr Broadhurst and Samuel Northcliffe were one and the same, any more than I could prove that it was The Fat Controller who had killed the woman at the Theatre Royal with a spring-loaded hypodermic full of curare, rather than anyone else.