Will Self - My Idea of Fun

He went on, ‘Of course they do but let me tell yer, in a few years’ time no one will say “food pro-cess-or”, iss too long for one fing, “foo-ood pro-cess-or”.’ He drew it out for all it was worth. ‘Nah, they'll say magimix wiv a little “m”. Now Billy in some ways the whatsit, the thingummy, the whosie, the how's-yer-father, the anything happening? the some, the stuff, the gear, iss jus’ like that, like the magimix, or the ‘oover, for that matter. Soon no one will see it as anyfing but the product, the only one, not just one of a number of types — ‘

‘But, John,’ Billy broke in, making a late bid for casting as Glaucon. ‘Like, there are different kinds of gear, aren't there, mate?’

‘Yes, Billy, there are, just as there are different kinds of domestic cleaning device.’ Then, as if this gnomic comment somehow managed to sum up the whole conversation, John sat back, clasped his hands behind his head and sank into a reverie.

Beetle Billy seemed unconvinced; he fidgeted with the frayed cuffs of his jumper and regarded John balefully. With his silvery hair scraped back severely, his thin nose, high cheekbones and dark eyes, John looked vaguely aristocratic. This was an impression swiftly cancelled whenever he opened his mouth, whereupon spindly yellow canines, knocked in and blackened, slid from behind his lips. There was that demerit and there was also the way the skin of one of his cheeks was all bunched up around his jaw. It looked as if someone had stuck a ratchet into the crease at the top of John's neck and then twisted it. Somebody else — or maybe the same sadist — had then gently smoothed over the spiralled web of fleshy folds with a soldering iron, or at any rate some implement that seared — but slowly.

‘John.’

‘Yes, Billy.’ Billy was canted forward, his face grey with concentration.

‘You know Tony?’

‘Yes, Billy.’

‘Tall Tony?’

‘Yes, Billy.’

‘He told me to come up to Bristol, like — ‘

‘Recently?’

‘Nah, last year.’ John sighed. It was going to be a long story. ‘He knew some bloke from that portis place near Bristol— ‘

‘Portishead?’

‘Is that it? Yeah, anyways, Portishead. Tony and this bloke had done a chemist's the night before and had the cabinet in ‘is ‘ouse, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So Tony called me and told me to drive up an’ get it, on account of how this bloke was like known and he thought the old bill would come an’ see ‘im about it cos this bloke, he was like —’

‘The natural suspect?’

‘Thassit. Anyways, I drove up there. Took me ages cos the only V-dub I had had a leaky case. I was stopping every twenty miles to put in more oil an’ that. Mind d'jew, I managed to sell it on to that dozy brass Ethel the following week — ‘

‘And?’

‘Yeah, well, I got there, like, and it took me ages to find the place, it was right on the edge of town in this little sort of crescent. When I came round the corner I saw that the old bill was there already, parked up right in front of the ’ouse. So I just floored it and kept on going, started looking for the way back to London.

‘I was driving along this road, going past some football pitches, when I saw Tall Tony and this bloke — funny-looking geezer wiv’ an awful squint — they were in the middle of one of the pitches carrying the cabinet between them. Some kids there having a kick-around but they'd stopped, like, to see what Tony and the squinty bloke were doing.’

‘What did you do?’ John yawned the question.

‘I got out of the motor an’ ran out into the middle of the pitch after them. Tony saw me an’ started cursing me for being so late. “Where's the car?” he screams and I point it out to ‘im. “You two break the effing lock on this thing and get the right stuff out of it, I'll pull the car round the other side of the pitch. “

‘So thass what we did. It was comical really cos it took ages to break the lock and all the kids came over to look. Turned out that the bloke with the squint's kids went to this school, so there's these kids saying fings like, “What yer doin’, Mr Anderson, what yer got that bloody great box for?”

‘We got the cabinet open, at last, and everything fell out on the ground. We ‘ad to grovel in the mud trying to work out what was what — by the time we got back to the car we were in a right state, I can tell you. Tony's sitting behind the wheel. “Got it?” he says. “Yeah,” says I and I show him some of what's stuffed in my pockets. “What's that crap?” he says. “Dikes and rits,” says I. “You said just bring the stuff.” Then he explodes like, “Not that stuff, you effing berk, the amps, the fucking amps! The whole thing was full of dry amps you stupid fuck!” He was gutted, wouldn't talk to me for months after that.’

‘Who?’ said John, whose attention had wandered somewhat.

‘Tall Tony, of course, not the squint bloke. I wouldn't of wanted to talk to him again anyway, he was off his trolley on whizz, had the horrors. All the time we were driving round this Portis place, laying low to avoid the filth, he kept blathering on telling me how — if he had a long enough line — he could catch ships in the fucking Bristol Channel by casting from the top window of ‘is ’ouse. ‘

Beetle Billy lapsed into silence, as if the point of this story were self-evident. No one broke it. John was staring up at the ceiling, his lips moving as he counted the fire-resistant tiles. The other junkies might have been dead for all the movement they made. They were all quiescent, locked into the private purgatory of withdrawal, save for one, a lank thing with greasy hair and bifocals who looked like an electrical engineer fallen on hard times. This character was smoking a cigarette with great concentration and using its glowing tip to reduce a Styrofoam cup to a charred lattice. The only sound in the room besides a bluebottle nutting the dirty windowpane was the faint fizz the fag made as it touched the flammable stuff.

‘So?’ said John eventually.

‘Well, the story, Johnnie-boy, it's like, it's like. . err — a whatsit. ‘

‘An example?’

‘Yeah, thassit, an example, cos he said “the stuff’ and I didn't know what he meant. So it can't be true that gear is like whatsit. ‘

‘You mean like the word “Hoover"?’

‘Yeah, thassit, like ‘oover.’

There were several very good reasons why Hieronymus Gyggle had decided to operate from within a drug dependency unit. As he had admitted to Ian Wharton, he viewed the junkies themselves as little more than cannon-fodder to be sent over the top and out on to the battlefields of insanity. However, more importantly, Gyggle needed the junkies the way that a queen bee needs her workers. In their metrical journeyings around the city's dealers and chemists, its shooting alleys and front lines, they collected a property that he required for his more intensive, more unusual incubations.

For the states of consciousness attained by humans in deep sleep or extreme narcosis are not mere brain events, fleeting coalescences of neurones, they are concrete things. Once abandoned by their original occupants these artefacts are left lying about our crowded universe waiting for new tenants to inch into, grubwise. There were plenty of these kicking around the DDU, they were as much a part of the detritus of the place as cigarette butts and the plastic containers used for urine samples. Fortunately they were far more difficult to remove. These cubicles of catalepsy thronged the stairwells and, being negatively buoyant, clustered under the strip lights like invisible cauls.

Ian Wharton, the Omnipom beginning to course through his body, took flight. His dormant psyche drifted up and was netted by the defunct dreamscape of Richard Whittle, one of Gyggle's junkies. It was a fresh reverie, only recently deposited at the DDU, and as such particularly potent, nightmarishly sappy. It acted as a portal, a gateway to the plains of heaven, the awful demesne where his mind — unfettered by identity — could roam where the wild things were.