Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘But that's enough theology for one day.’ The Rolex was consulted again. ‘If we don't step on it the inn will have closed for the afternoon, and we won't get a glass of the urine of Culex pipiens. That which passes for beer in these parts. ‘

So it's Broadhurst's Wager that comes to me now, comes to me at three o’ clock in the morning while I harken to the cooling unit. As if I had to ask why it should be that there isn't any fun any more. Me of all people. If I didn't know I doubt I would be sitting here, waiting for the dawn to stream, screaming derision through the louvres, waiting for my wife to die. No, no, there's no fun any more, just my idea of it. Mine and his, his and mine.

We're like coke heads or chronic masturbators, aren't we? Attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of an instrinsically empty and mechanical experience. We push the plunger home, we abrade the clitoris, we yank the penis and we feel nothing. Not exactly nothing, worse than nothing, we feel a flicker or a prickle, the sensual equivalent of a retinal after-image. That's our fun now, not fun itself, only a tired allusion to it. Nevertheless, we feel certain that if we can allude to fun one more time, make a firm statement about it, it will return like the birds after winter.

Waking in our bed one morning, we'll hear a chorus of trills and cheeps; fun has come back to duster in the branches of the tree outside our window. We'll cosy down in joyful anticipation.

But as we rise and dress, as we leave the house to walk to the shop and buy a paper, it ebbs away, this false spring. We pass a playground. A group of kids are on a roundabout, one foot on and one foot off, they are pushing it at a giddy speed, round and around until their faces form a single banded blur. Out of this blur there stares a single set of eyes, eyes as sicklied o'er with cynicism as those of a dying cirrhotic hack, as those of an ecstatic teenager gibbering on a dancefloor, as those of a beaten wife punched in the mouth for the nth time.

Was he right? Have we fallen from grace? Is that it? Have we lost our collective innocence? Sometimes it seems that way, doesn't it? We feel like we've been thrust into, deflowered by the smirking, brutal world. But on the other hand it also feels as if we were the defilers. We've jiggled and joggled, lurched and reared, wee-ha! Wee-hey! Now spent, exhausted, heavier than ever, we pull ourselves off this fun-float, this transport of delight, to see beneath us a crushed flower, a stamped upon camellia, its pollen and sap smeared like blood on the infertile ground, the dry ground, the any old iron, lurking-tetanus ground.

How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement?

I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I tell you what I think, since you ask, since you dare to push your repulsive face at me, from out of the smooth paintwork of my heavily mortgaged heart. I think there was only so much fun to go round, only so much and no more available. We've used it all up country dancing in the gloaming, kissing by moonlight, eating shellfish while the sun shatters on our upturned fork and we make the bon point. And of course, the thing about fun is that it exists solely in retrospect, in retroscendence; when you're having fun you are perforce abandoned, unthinking. Didn't we have fun, well, didn't we? You know we did.

You're with me now, aren't you? We're leaving the party together. We pause on the stairs and although we left of our own accord, pulled our coat from under the couple entwined on the bed, we already sense that it was the wrong decision, that there was a hidden hand pushing us out, wanting to exclude us.

We pause on the stairs and we hear the party going on without us, a shrill of laughter, a skid of music. Is it too late to go back? Will we feel silly if we go back up and announce to no one in particular, ‘Look, the cab hasn't arrived. We thought we'd just come back up and wait for it, have a little more fun. ‘

Well, yes, yes, we will feel silly, bloody silly, because it isn't true. The cab has arrived, we can see it at the bottom of the stairs, grunting in anticipation, straining to be clutched and directed, to take us away. Away from fun and home, home to the suburbs of maturity.

One last thing. You never thought that being grown up would mean having to be quite so — how can I put it? Quite so — grown up. Now did you? You didn't think you'd have to work at it quite so hard. It's so relentless, this being grown up, this having to be considered, poised, at home within a shifting four-dimensional matrix of Entirely Valid Considerations. You'd like to get a little tiddly, wouldn't you? You'd like to fiddle with the buttons of reality as he does, feel it up without remorse, without the sense that you have betrayed some shadowy commitment.

Don't bother. I've bothered, I've gone looking for the child inside myself. Ian, the Startrite kid. I've pursued him down the disappearing paths of my own psyche. I am he as he is me, as we are all. . His back, broad as a standing stone. . My footsteps, ringing eerily inside my own head. I'm turning in to face myself, and face myself, and face myself. I'm looking deep into my own eyes. Ian, is that you, my significant other? I can see you now for what you are, Ian Wharton. You're standing on a high cliff, chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea. You're standing hunched up with the dull awareness of the hard graft. The heavy workload that is life, that is death, that is life again, everlasting, world without end.

And now, Ian Wharton, now that you are no longer the subject of this cautionary tale, merely its object, now that you are just another unproductive atom staring out from the windows of a branded monad, now that I've got you where I want you, let the wild rumpus begin.

The Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs dabbles its soot-stained foundations in the dry gulch of Hampstead Road. It is a confused structure, for the most part laid out like an expanded collection of Victorian alms houses, but in the thirties it was book-ended with further accretions.

To the rear of the hospital, facing the low bluish bulk of Euston Station and bounded by the rentable air-conditioning of the Kennedy Hotel, there is a tangled garden. This space was set out with aristocratic beneficence, to provide the staff and patients with a gentle gravelly progress around a pattern of beds and lawns. Over the years the funding has trickled away, to be replaced — in the garden at least — by dead leaves and sodden pieces of moulded foam, the remains of some forgotten, but no doubt essential, act of packaging.

If you face it from across the Hampstead Road the thirties accretion to the left of the hospital resembles nothing so much as a banking blockhouse. With its facade of grey-yellow dressed stone it would be right at home among similar on Lombard Street. Set into the very corner of this annexe is a solid oaken door. It has no nameplate next to it and there is no other sign to indicate whether this is a subsidiary entrance to the hospital, or nothing to do with it at all.

Behind the oaken door is a reception area divided by two high steps. Beyond this, spreading out higgledy-piggledy along the level are a collection of sepia rooms with distempered walls. The carpet-tiled floors of these rooms are studded with large metal ashtrays that look like tissue boxes that have been mysteriously galvanised. Connecting the rooms are short corridors, their linoleum floors so scarified by cigarette burns that the black gouges give the semblance of a pattern. Off these corridors are urine-scented toilets, equipped with white bars that can be pulled away from the wall should you require assistance in standing. Clamped to the walls of these toilets are white metal boxes that dispense with unflagging regularity, absolutely nothing.