Will Self - My Idea of Fun

That day was a turning point for me and afterwards my life improved immeasurably. The very next morning I arose and, without any premeditation, any thought at all, for the first time in adulthood I went though my morning toilet not noting the precise conformity of my actions to the schema of habit. It was the same in all the other areas of my life; removed from the need to protect myself against the horrors of enhanced eidesis, I began to live as others did, blithely and unconsciously. I didn't even have to bother with understanding that incomprehension is bliss.

I swam through events now, rather than surveyed them. I felt the corporeal elephant on whose back my world was supported amble effortlessly along, rather that it being necessary for me to lean out from the howdah of my head and goad him.

What a relief. Can you imagine it, to have grown up insane and then in one fell swoop to achieve sanity? I doubt it, because it is inconceivable, just as you cannot imagine what it would be like to be blind from birth and then gifted with sight (but of course I can). I had broken the cycle of eight thousand lifetimes and defiled the banal brahmin inside me, polluted him by contact with the testable, the material proofs of induction. I kicked pebbles ahead of me on the path up from my caravan to my mother's hotel and, with each ‘thwok’, my terrible adolescent idealism was refuted.

This all happened just before Easter, at the end of my penultimate term at Sussex. It meant that that summer, despite the pressure of finals, I was able to enjoy human company and gain succour from it, in a way that had previously been denied to me.

I found myself revising with the small colloquia that lay around the grassy precincts of the university. The young are more forgiving than adults, and despite the haughty isolation I had practised, I was far more accepted than I could have hoped for. I got on first-name terms with the other managers-in-the-making. They invited me to punk parties as noisy as tractor factories, where I swigged flat cans of beer, already shaken with a twist of cigarette butt.

In turn I took some of them back with me to Cliff Top. There we descended to the pebbled beach and filtered ourselves, giggling, into the porous sea. My mother instructed her deferential staff to serve us tea on the croquet lawn. We sat stuffing ourselves with smoked-salmon sandwiches, slurping Earl Grey, while she charmed and intimidated them with her stolen airs and purloined graces. They all thought me secure, even if they didn't find Cliff Top exactly homey.

The aunts and cousins arrived for their annual break just after I had finished my finals. By now some of the cousins had children of their own — the pullulating Hepplewhite swarm had leapt to another branch. The new kids were indistinguishable from the old and the new parents were just the same, for the female cousins had all married, or shacked up with, wispy, indefinite, ineffectual men; and the male cousins had simply married their mothers.

My mother kept them away from her country house hotel. They were confined to the ratty quarter-acre of ground, screened off by the landscapers, where the few remaining caravans crouched in shabby senescence. But they didn't seem to mind, or feel remotely affronted.

Here they lay as of old, like a colony of seals, eating scallops and rubbery whelks, swigging glasses of light ale, blowing raspberries on kidflesh sticky with vanilla ice-cream and frosted with sand.

‘Ian's going to London,’ announced my mother to one and all. ‘He's done awfully well at the university and now he's got ajob, an important job as well. Tell your aunts and cousins about your new position, Ian.’

‘Aye, tell us,’ they chorused, an antistrophe of flower-patterned dresses.

‘It's nothing really,’ I said. ‘It's not even in London proper, I'll be staying at a place called Erith Marsh. I'm going to be a marketing assistant for a company there — ‘

‘Oh aye,’ said one of the aunts, who was scrutinising a dicky-looking mussel, as if it were a suspicious traveller and she an immigration officer. ‘What's t’cumpany do then, lad?’

‘Um, well, they make valves.’

‘Valves?’

‘Yeah, valves for the oil industry. They make the shut-off valves that get put in the drill bit to prevent blow-outs.’

The aunt gestured to the far end of the sun porch where one of her sons sat. Of necessity, like all Hepplewhite men, he was shadowy, emasculated. ‘I think our Harry has wun of them, ‘said the aunt. ‘Over a year married an’ our Tracey still isn't knocked up — he must be blowin’ out all over t’place!’

The whole gang subsided into coarse guffaws, thigh-slapping, knee-pounding. It was all the same as it ever was. Except for mother, that is. She stood off to one side, her lips twisted into a grimace of disgust at their vulgarity.

When the autumn came, and I finally packed up my car and made ready to leave Cliff Top, she came over unexpectedly emotional. ‘You'll take care of yourself, now won't you, my darling?’

After a couple of weeks with her sisters, I heard the false note not just in her accent, but in her voice as well. How had my mother transformed herself into this dower-house chatelaine? This scion of the squirearchy? My curiosity was overidden, though, by a more powerful inclination, to get the hell out. So I merely downplayed my reply. ‘Of course I will, Mother, I'm only going up the road, I'll come back at weekends.’

‘Oh you say that but I know better. You'll be sucked up and seduced by the beau monde, I know you will. ‘ Pearly tears seeded themselves in the corners of her eyes.

‘I'd hardly call Erith Marsh the beau monde, Mother.’

‘I don't like to talk about it, Ian, because it's far too painful for me. You know I still miss your father. The way he went away hurts me to this day. You'll not be like him, will you?’ She went up on her toes and kissed me.

I felt the shock of the old, of the Mummy smell, the atomised odour of atavism. It welled up, reclaiming its rightful position in the hit parade of the senses: No.1 with a bullet. The corner of her mouth pressed against mine and in concert with her sharp hand, which clutched at my ample buttock, her sharper tongue slid ever so slightly between my lips.

‘Contemptible Essene, cloistral nonentity’. The Fat Controller's words rung once more in my ears as my rollerskate of a car caromed up the A22 to London. That fucking woman, the kinky Clytemnestra, how I hated her. She'd tied my cock to her apron strings in preparation for flour-dusting and rolling out. She kneaded me, all right, she wanted me transformed into puff pastry just like Daddy.

I had accepted a position with I. A. Wartberg Limited, which, as I had told the aunts, was a company responsible for the manufacture of the deep-bore drilling valves employed in the North Sea oil industry.

Mr Hargreaves at Sussex had been surprised by my choice. My grades were excellent and I had had hands-on work experience with marketing agencies in the West End. This was the early-eighties and Britain was clawing its way out of recession on the back of a demand-led boom. Marketing was the dialectical materialism of the regime and I was in an ideal position to leapfrog my way quickly towards apparatchik status.

However, cautious and pragmatic as ever, I realised that before I could take part in the airier abstractions of my chosen profession I needed to confront the nitty-gritty, the hard business of actually selling things, specific products, to industrial customers. Added to that, there was something about the Wartberg works that I found soothing the first time I went there for the interview.

The great galvanised iron shed where the valves were made was a cacophonous and tumultuous place, full of Stakhanovite workers torturing plugs of super-heavy metal with screaming drill bits. The adjoining suite of offices where I reported was inadequately sound-proofed, so that I felt myself both surrounded and shot through by the very processes that I would be attempting to market.