Will Self - My Idea of Fun

The way we had taken was winding down towards a small lock or tarn. A pool was contained under a miniature cliff, broken half-way up its face by the route the path took in looping round and pressing on down the valley. It was here, under a straggle of dwarf oaks and rowans that a troupe of elderly walkers had decided to halt for their feed. They were all sitting, legs stuck out into the path, backs against the cliff, munching on sandwiches and swigging from plastic cups. Even from across the pool we could hear the yammer of their animated conversation.

‘Harumph!’ He prodded the ground with the tip of his stick. ‘If I'm not far mistaken this must be what is termed “an area of outstanding natural beauty”. It goes without saying that this designation is solely a function of the propensity of such locales to attract the very ugliest examples of Homo erectus. Observe them, lad, consider their raddled aspect married to the sophistication of their ambulatory equipment and garb.’

I did as he said. It was true, the old ramblers were both ugly and kitted out in the very best of outdoor clothing. Gore-Tex cagoules tented over their bony collars and bent spines; plastic map-cases and complicated orienteering compasses dangled against their concave poitrines; their curving shanks were sheathed in fashionable moleskin or corduroy breeches; and their flat feet and weak ankles were shod in flexible casts of the finest shoe leather. If they had been younger, they could have scaled the Rockies in this high-stepping habit.

‘Absurd, isn't it?’ He took a vigorous pull on his Montecristo and French-inhaled an Old Smoky-sized plume of fume. ‘These pensioners’ preposterous kit calls forth from me a paraphrase of one of the toy Alsatian philosophe's most renowned apophthegms, to whit, “Hell is other people's trousers”. D'ye like that? Ahaha, hahaha!’ He disgorged merriment and vapour in equal parts.

‘What's that!?’ He swung back to face the walkers, who were stirring now, as if responding to his pejorative comments. They screwed the caps back on to their thermos flasks, and jammed down the lids of their now empty plastic sandwich containers. Gingerly, they attempted to get up. Liver-spotted hands grasped one another. It was difficult to tell if those who had already risen were trying to help their fellows, or if those still recumbent were actually pulling the feistier ones back down, into the grave.

Eventually they were all standing, dusting off crumbs and twigs. Stringing themselves out in a ragged line, a scout-masterish type at the head, they set off down the valley.

‘Feast your peepers on that.’ We were following them at a good clip. ‘Can you imagine what ghastly favours will obtain to the chief baboon, when this band enters a somewhat more farouche environment?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is, where they are going the pecking order they have created will take on a mortal significance, red in tooth and claw.’

‘What, in Hebden Bridge?’

‘No, booby! You know I cannot abide a booby! We are going to Hebden Bridge, they are going to partake in a spot of rather more radical rambling.’ His lycanthropic finger was out again, the triple-jointed middle one. It was rubbing up and down as if he were titillating an unseen erogenous zone.

As he spoke something untoward had begun to occur, something that was at one and the same time obscene and yet oddly natural. Up ahead of the scout-masterish walker, who strode along wielding his shepherd's crook, looking a quarter-century late for Aldermaston, a dilation came into being, a tear in the very air. It appeared to be some disturbance of the atmosphere, a puckering slash of the ethereal epidermis itself. It widened but nothing could be seen in the gap, save for the path ahead, winding on down to the valley. The scout-masterish type strode straight into the mouth of this cavity, and vanished.

I stopped walking and stared wide-eyed as the rest of the senescent strollers proceeded out of this dimension. When the last heel of the last boot had been swallowed up, the shimmering thing pulled its lips together, zipped itself back up and was gone.

‘What did you do to those people?’ I gasped. ‘Where have they gone? You've killed them, haven't you? You've destroyed them out of sheer pettiness!’

‘Nonsense, lad, do endeavour not to succumb to melodramatics.’ He'd stopped walking now as well and was regarding the end of his Montecristo with an expression of faintly weary inappetency. ‘I've merely done a little time-tailoring, simply removed one of the pleats or flares from the ostensibly straight leg of time.

‘They are in exactly the same place, walking down the same path’ — he paused, pulling back a cuff to expose his stone, circle-sized Rolex — ‘some four thousand years ago. No doubt they will find the experience a tad disorienting, but if they manage to avoid the marauding aurochs by day and the preying sabre-toothed tigers by night, they may find much in their new environment that is congenial.

‘I myself, being an arborophile, am delighted by the dense coniferous forests of the Neolithic period. Why, I even had this staff carved from one such, during my last venture there. Each year I whittle away another ring from it, a nice inversion, I may say, of the new science of dendrochronology.’

I had lost him. He might have been speaking Ursprache, for all that I understood. I was firmly in the present, watching the starlings cavort over and under the telegraph wires and the wind shimmer the young leaves into a muzzy Monet.

We walked on in silence for a while. He was smoking concentratedly. To break it up, fill the hiatus, I asked, ‘Why? Why, did you do that?’ And braced myself for the deluge of his anger. But none came.

‘This is, of course, a synecdoche,’ he said. ‘You see, my little licentiate, when these retired schoolmarms and redundant bank officials pitch up in the petrified era, they will be forced to test their high-tech equipment to its very limit. They will soon ascertain whether or not Gore-Tex and Timberland live up to their much-vaunted specifications.

‘More to the point, as they struggle to find their way to the coast — having realised the nature of their predicament, pendant to an encounter with their hairy forefathers that will leave half their number blinded and trepanned and two-thirds of the remainder dying from blood poisoning — they will gradually come to see the uttermost folly of their own moral precepts, their spiritual baggage, their transcendental ballast. They will realise fully the force of Broadhurst's Wager.’

‘I'm sorry?’

‘Broadhurst's Wager is the correct way round of looking at these things, an apt reversal of the sophistries of that anorexic apostate, scribbling on his Post-it notelets. It states: You are a fool to worship the deity. For, if he does exist he will surely forgive you for your dereliction, being such a sop in these matters, a meddling milk toast. And if he doesn't exist, why, at the moment of expiry you will feel an utter ass, the completest of fools. All those hours spent at tiresome tombolas, all those mornings kneeling on lumpy hassocks, all those pathetic agonies — the temporary loss and then short-lived recovery of the small change of faith, faith in a nothing, a nullity, a vacuum.

‘No, no, realise the full force of Broadhurst's Wager and the Christ-figure's absent father becomes what we all knew him to be. An errant neurotic, failing to keep up the maintenance payments to support his own creation. He's probably squandering the wherewithal on some teleological analysis, reclining on a couch that straddles the firmament. “Why?” he moans to his shrink. “Why did I do it?” But he cannot admit any of it really, oh no, for he's in chronic denial, denial of the existence of the world itself. Although, that being said, during particularly lucid and integrated moments, he will perhaps acknowledge the reality of some small part of it. Liechtenstein, for example.