Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Wharton,’ he began nervously, ‘it might not be my place but I have to say that I'm a little worried about you.’

I shuffled uneasily. ‘Well, err. . you know, I've been getting rather anxious about my finals.’

‘Come off it, you do consistently well in all your modules — I've had a word with your course tutor — and as you've been continually assessed, you couldn't flunk now even if you wanted to. What's the problem, lad? Apparently you never have anything to do with your peers, you're a solitary. Perhaps I shouldn't interfere but I hate to see a young man throwing his life away.’

I looked into his face. Hargreaves was a bit like a large rodent, a capybara or coypu. He had a questing snout and thin limbs held bent up against his adipose body. It almost goes without saying that he also had fine, Beatle-cropped brown hair and affected a close-clipped beard with the dense consistency of fur. It ran right up and over his cheekbones, leading one to suspect that it was important for him to shave his eye sockets and forehead daily, if he wanted to avoid becoming altogether bestial.

‘Yeah,’ I muttered at last. ‘I haven't been feeling that great.’ Then the words started to hiss out of me, stale, rubberised air escaping from a subsiding Li-lo. ‘It's just. . it's just. . that I don't have many friends and I do feel sort of isolated, I s'pose — ’ I pulled up short, I was trespassing on forbidden ground, getting close to revealing more than I should. How could I talk of my other world amid the absolute certainties of textured louvres, plastic chair-and-desk combinations and colour-coded felt-tips?

‘If you are feeling depressed’ — Hargreaves was entirely solicitous — ‘it might be an idea for you to see the Student Counsellor. He's there to help you with any problems you have, did you know that?’ I muttered something affirmative. ‘Look, here's what I'm going to do.’ He brightened up, getting the glow of a man who feels himself on the verge of discharging a disagreeable responsibility. ‘I'm going to make an appointment for you to see Dr Gyggle — he's not just a counsellor, he's also a qualified psychiatrist. I'm absolutely sure that a chat with him would help you. You needn't worry’ — he was getting happy now, preening his face with his tiny hands — ‘this conversation we've had will remain just as confidential as anything you may say to him.’

The next day there was a note from Hargreaves in my pigeonhole — I was to see Dr Gyggle that afternoon. There seemed no going back on it without having to retail some further lie and anyway I was sick at heart — without The Fat Controller's gyroscopic girth to encompass it my world was spinning out of control.

The following afternoon as I walked across the campus, I didn't know it but I was about to commence my full rehabilitation. But I did know that Gyggle was the shrink for me the minute I saw him. It was the beard, I suppose, a beard that was the exact opposite of Hargreaves's beard. Whereas his beard was so clearly a compensation, a making up for unachieved virility, Gyggle's beard was positively rampant, priapic. It was only a beard — true enough — but it had been connected to a man's face for many many years. Clearly it was a transitional object, purpose-built to drag me back into the world of men and affairs.

When I was shown into his little office in the administration block Gyggle was sitting reading something. His forearms were lying on the desk and his skinny torso was framed by a proscenium arch of ring binders, set on shelves that marched up and over his head.

The Gyggle forearms were covered all over with a regular pattern of tight ginger curlicues of hair. In fact, it would be true to say that my first impression was of a man entirely dominated by a regular pattern of tight ginger curlicues of hair. His sleeves were rolled up — which was what led me to make such an assumption — but really it was his hair that set the tone. The curlicues massed at his collar and from here a series of well-defined ginger ridges ascended to his nude pate. Waves of this same hair swept around the back of Gyggle's head, from coast to coast of his oval face. They formed galleries, which seemed so regular they might have been the honeycombed nestings of some breed of super-lice that had reached an advanced accommodation with their host. But however striking, the hair had to be viewed as merely a trailer to the main feature of Gyggle's appearance, the beard.

The beard was a kind of super beard, a beard to end all beards, a great reprise on some of the world's finest and most significant beards. Obviously the way it tumbled — nay, cascaded — down on to the Gyggle chest had close associations with those prophetic beards that lingered in my memory from many hours of tilted observation in cathedrals and museums, yet something about the beard's rigidity, its apparent inflexibility, said Assyria, Sumeria. Whispered epics in the bouncing back of war chariots, chanted louder as the warriors attack — entirely in profile, of course.

When he looked up and turned to greet me Gyggle's real profile showed the beard off to even greater effect and teased me with its diversity. Here was the suggestion of the spreading fan of an eminent Victorian, a beard clotted with high-flown phrases and guilty secretions, a beard of mad power that then faded at the edges into the ineffectualness of a declining constitutional monarchy. What a beard, I thought.

‘You must be Ian Wharton.’ He looked up from his reading and the beard parted in such a way as to suggest that there might be an affable grimace lying some way behind it.

‘Yeah.’

‘Tim Hargreaves said that you'd like to have a chat with me about some things. He said you'd been out of sorts recently.’

‘Not so recently.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I've always been out of sorts, I've always felt like this — oh, you know — almost as long as I can remember.’ (As long as the heaving green adumbrates the land, as long as time has refused to be some time but always now, as long as the humungus titles have zipped up from the seam between sea and sky, as long. .)

‘Oh yes.’ His voice was soft, honey soft. It was like a net of sound falling over my mind ready to trawl the truth. ‘And what is “feeling like this” like?’

Everything was happening so fast — he couldn't be aware of the crisis he was dragging me towards. The room was a pressurized cabin suddenly ruptured. I sensed the warmth screaming out of the atmosphere to be replaced with the absolute zero of his clinical persona but I couldn't stop myself. ‘I–I, I'm an eid-eid. . I've got an eidetic memory.’ I stuttered and then blurted. Gyggle steepled his freckled fingers and tucked them under a tier of the beard. He looked at me with yellow feral eyes.

‘You don't say. How fascinating. I've done a little work on eidesis myself. What kind of eidetic memory have you got?’

I was flummoxed. ‘I–I didn't know there were different kinds. ‘

‘Oh yes, there's eidesis that concentrates on form and proportion; eidesis that acts mnemonically, producing near-instant recall through combinations of letters or numerals; there's a kind of mathematical eidesis whereby equations and aspects of calculus are viewed spatially and of course there's common-or-garden eidesis, which people call “photographic memory” — ‘

‘That's me!’ I was embarrassed by my exclamation; it sounded like a yelp of boyish enthusiasm.

‘I see.’ Gyggle was unperturbed. ‘While it's true that an awful lot of eidetikers have problems with communication and some are even autistic, those that aren't don't tend to be overly neurotic or unhappy. On the contrary they usually put their gifts into some satisfying but resolutely unimaginative task. They acquire multiple degrees, purposelessly log facts, or do photoreal drawing after photoreal drawing — each one notable only for its lack of — how can I put it, emotional bite?’ The ragged hole appeared in the beard again; it occurred to me that the shrink was baiting me in some way, teasing me. ‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘these eidetikers are usually terribly ordinary people, unimaginative in the extreme, hmmm?’