Will Self - My Idea of Fun

As for my eidetic happenings, I found them suspect as well; they were so clearly a product of my own fervid visual imagination. When I came to think about it, it struck me that almost all the aspects of my eidesis that The Fat Controller played upon had preceded his intervention, rather than followed from it.

I began to wonder whether or not I had been the victim of an extended delusion, which was perhaps the function of an overheated adolescence leading to some kind of psycho-hormonal explosion. I knew little of psychology but enough to be aware of the impact on the unformed ego of an absent father. Could my investiture of Mr Broadhurst with such sinister and wide-ranging powers have been my way of dealing with the chronic lack of a proper role model?

Under the influence of this late surge of rational speculation I tried to view myself in a different light. Perhaps I wasn't the plaything of a mage, who was determined to drag me into a frightening and chaotic world of naked will, only a seriously neurotic person in need of help.

But what kind of help? I didn't know who or where to turn to. So for the meanwhile I continued with my ritualised observances, obsessively counting the number of steps it took me to walk to any given location, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement for fear that the bears of the id might get me, and attending to my bodily functions with the pure metrical devotion of a sadhu.

I also played with the idea that what afflicted me was some kind of strabismus of the psyche. If I strained I could see the world as others did, stereoscopically, but if I relaxed binocular vision would ensue, and while one ‘eye’ would remain focused, the other would slide away into the clouded periphery where The Fat Controller and his machinations held sway. What was required to hold him at bay was constant vigilance.

Constant vigilance and isolation are a wearing combination, wearing and depressing. I might struggle to hold fast to my course, to become just another off-the-peg person dangling on the idiomatic hook (line and sinker), my voting habits purely a function of minute alterations in fiscal policy, but a moment's relaxation could have a jolting impact.

The Fat Controller — whatever he might be — had ceased to manifest himself. And the human frame on to which I had grafted this delusion had definitely left Cliff Top, but despite this, from time to time I would come across what seemed like obscure messages, quirkily encoded, that threatened to upset my peace of mind.

One day I was browsing in the university library, when for no reason that I could pick upon I drew a biography of Newton from one of the shelves. Flicking through it, I came across a passage that described his psychotic breakdown. Apparently, during the autumn (Ha!) of 1693, Newton — always eccentric and blockaded from the world — became increasingly deluded. He wrote a series of letters to Pepys, Locke and other friends, accusing them of being atheists and Catholics. He even intimated that they had tried to corrupt him by sending female temptresses to seduce him in his Cambridge rooms. The biographer speculated that it may have been failure in his alchemical experiments that led to this breakdown.

It was broad daylight when I read this passage and the sunlight that radiated through the high plate-glass windows illuminated a scene of modernity and order. It didn't matter — as soon as I read the word alchemy, alarm bells began ringing in the fire station of my mind. The engines of ritual, which stood ever ready to staunch any eruption of the magical were speedily limbered up. It was too late, I couldn't prevent myself from eidetiking Mr Broadhurst's unusual caduceus, the one he had made out of an old TV aerial garnished with flex, and I couldn't prevent myself from reading on: Newton wrote to Locke saying that he had ‘received a visit from a certain Divine of monstrous and Toad-like appearance. This man, or beast, claimed cognisance of divers operations in the Science of Alchemie of which I have had no acquaintance. He insisted on examining my alchemical equipment and pronounced that my method of Fixation was inexact. He also drew my Attention to what he claimed were certain impurities in the material of my Cupel. Furthermore he Intimated to me that there was a pure distillate of the very Stone itself buried in precincts of Glastonbury Abbey, to which he alone had access. I cannot do justice to the disagreeable impression that this man, one Broadhurst, had upon me. .

I shut the book with a bang. I clenched out the light and stuck my fingers in my ears. I rotated the nails so that a cheese paring of wax was scoured from the surface of the drum. I rolled the two pellets of wax between the forefingers and thumbs of each hand and then replaced them in the opposite ears, the whole time humming and appreciating the bitable texture of the linoleum beneath my soles.

On opening my eyes I didn't dare to imagine that this would have worked. I expected him to be with me, his stentorian ubiety transmogrifying the spacious library into somewhere shabby and small. But there was no one.

There were other such incidents. Attracted by the cover with its depiction of a colourful Chinese dragon, I leafed through a copy of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. This time I chanced upon a passage where the writer was awakened from his narcotic slumbers by a knocking at his cottage door: The servant girl came into my chamber and told me that there was a ‘sort of demon’ downstairs, jabbering in a strange tongue. I made myself presentable and sallied forth. In the kitchen I found my servant and a stray village child, both dumbstruck by this apparition. I soon established that the ‘jabbering’ they spoke of was none other than classical Greek, of which this portly figure had an exact command.‘You are the Opium Eater?’ said the man.‘I am,’ I replied quaveringly.‘Then, dear fellow, make with the stuff, bring forth a get-up, lay on the gear, give us a decent hit for the love of Mike, for by Zeus I am surely clucking fit to bust.’Strange as it nlay seem, I was struck more by this man's preoccupation with opium than by his appearance or choice of language. I gave him a piece, which to my horror he popped straight into his mouth, for it was surely large enough to kill some half-dozen dragoons together with their horses. Then, without more ado, he turned on his heel and left, slamming the door behind him. It was only later when I came to reflect on this incident, that I recalled the man's appearance. He was excessively fat and had a sinister and agressive expression. Altho’ his physiognomy was European, he was clad in the turban and loose trousers of a Malay.I cannot say whether this manifestation was a product of opium or not but ever after the most excruciating of my opium torments have regularly visited me with his likeness and the haunted corridors of my mind have resounded with his peculiar bombast. Perhaps his aspect was a function of those involutes of memory of which I have spoken; and his combination of these attributes, the brutish apparel of the Malay, the features of a bibulous beadle and his predilection for opium were no mere chance but a deep expression of my own pain?

I no more believed in ‘mere chance’ than De Quincey. The juxtaposition of erudition and slang, the gargantuan habits, the ‘sinister and agressive expression’. Surely this was another clue, another coded reference; either that or my capacity for fantasy, temporarily dislodged from my visual imagination, had taken up residence in another realm, polluting my very ability to comprehend.

In a way, The Fat Controller's new method of checking up on me was even more disturbing than his old. I went into a steep decline. I started to show up for my seminars and tutorials shabbily clad, or not at all. One week I failed to turn in an essay on the trade deficit. This was out of character. At the next seminar Mr Hargreaves — the same tutor who had referred poor June to me — asked me to stay behind.