Will Self - My Idea of Fun

While describing this acute parasitical predicament, Pinky fell to running his little hands over his tummy, seeking out and emphasising the shape of the worm within him by bunching up and pulling at his flesh. The exercise made the baby-soft man wobble and puff, so much so that at the end of his speech he finally tumbled back on to the carpet with an ‘Oof!’ and a stifled squeak.

Ian relapsed as well, thrusting himself down into the mulch of the big bed. He shut his eyes and struggled to escape the Land of Children's Jokes. He clenched himself, both mind and body, with the effort and dived down and down and down through internal layers, each one successively darker, until he was nothing, just a stray seed in warm soil, or a plastic bottle bobbing in the wake of a ship.

‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha ! Not so fast, kiddo.’ An acute finger probed at the bottom of Ian's eyelid, then pushed it up, peeling back in the pale, early-morning light. ‘Don't even think of leaving us just yet, kiddo, not before the main event anyways — Cha, cha, chal !

The thin man span away from the bed and stopped a few feet off. Ian could not forbear from looking at him. ‘Cha, cha, cha ! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man danced a little jig. He had a long skinny face dominated by a sharp nose marbled with broken blood vessels. His tiny avian eyes flashed and, as he waggled his head from side to side, first one and then the other ear, both of them thick slabs of knotted cartilage, poked into view, jammed down at a forty-five-degree angle by the shiny rim of his shiny topper.

‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ the thin man plain ted in nasal tones. He seemed to Ian to be mimicking the voice of a fiddling entertainer in an auld country bar. With each new phase of the jig he flourished his cane in the air and then brought its fob neatly to rest on the chin in question. ‘D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin? D'ye — ‘ He broke off abruptly.

‘Well? D'ye like my chinny-chin-chin?’ He brought his frightening face down to Ian's and menaced him with it. ‘What d'ye think of it, my little love?’ The thin man wore satin gloves; he palped his chin with one slippery digit. On the very prong end of the chin there was a button of flesh, a soft whorl with a dimpled crater. ‘Come now!’ exclaimed the thin man. ‘D'ye like it or no? Say now!’ The barbed finger poked towards Ian's throat.

‘I–I like it very much,’ he stuttered. ‘It's it's terribly nice.’

‘Ahhh, but now, d'ye recognise it, lad? D'ye know what it is now? Say what it is now, come on, say!’

Ian stared at the chin. The thin man held himself trembling, angled over Ian like a gantry. He continued to agitate his queer chin with his slick finger, flipping the curlicue of skin first to one side and then to the other. Ian couldn't imagine what the thin man was getting at but he understood the importance of the question all right. The thin man was plainly dangerous, there was no telling what he might do if Ian failed to come up with the right answer. For some reason the phrase ‘hair matted with blood’ kept running through his mind.

‘Say now!’ Everything about the thin man was thin. Ian could make out every ridge in his tormentor's windpipe. In the deep gulf underneath his plastic jaw there was a pulse beating like the pedal attachment on a drum kit. The tendons of the thin man's neck were stretched so tight that they could have been twanged, or even strummed. They formed flying buttresses, supporting the gullet where it broke to accommodate the large irregular Adam's apple that was lodged in the thin man's craw.

His neck was long. There was as much of it below as above the Adam's apple. It descended and descended, until it disappeared into the celluloid of a cheap dicky-bow arrangement. Down there, pushing out against the knot of the thin man's spotted bow tie, something stirred. There was a living root amongst the scrawny hairs poking from the pit of his neck, a projection of flesh, which humped back on itself and dived beneath the white rim of the collar.

‘I know!’ Ian was startled by the squeakiness of his voice. ‘At least, I think I know. ‘

‘What d'ye know? Say it, say it now if ye know anything. Come now, have no more ado.’ The thin man span away from the bed and went back to his dance, weaving in and out, and round and around the leguminous furniture of the dank room. ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ The thin man wiggled his head and his hips in opposite directions, he wiggled and waggled like a novelty marathon runner. At a stroke and with complete certainty, Ian knew that the thin man wouldn't hurt him after all.

‘The thing on your chin — ‘

‘Yes, lad?’

‘It's your belly button, isn't it? Your navel, isn't it?’

The thin man didn't reply, he just kept right on cha, cha, cha-ing as if nothing had been said. Then, suddenly, ‘Ta-taa!’ he cried, striking a pose at the foot of the bed. He threw his arms right up and back and thrust his chin forward. The belly button dimple stood out, white and tuberous from its stretched bloody surround, but there was’ worse, far worse below. For, sprung free from the confining collar, a flaccid penis dangled down, flipping and flopping from lapel to lapel of the thin man's spotted satin suit. Its fluid animation contrasted outlandishly with the bow-string quiver of the thin man's pose.

‘I bet you can't guess what happened, though? Now can you? I bet you can't tell me why it should be this way, now can you?’ The thin man was menacing Ian again. As speedily as his sense of safety had arrived it departed again. The thin man dropped his knife-edged knees on to the bed, one either side of Ian's feet, and then his sharp hands came forward and rested on either side of Ian's thighs. The thin man began to edge up the bed on all fours, plunging first one and then another of his implement limbs into the doughy mattress, like spades biting into loam. The action rocked Ian from side to side. The thin man began to mutter, but his words were clearly addressed to himself rather than Ian.

‘He guessed my precious. . Guessed. . How could he now? Rumpelstiltskin is my name, gold thread is my game. . How could he have guessed my little secret, my sorry tale — precious?’

With each lunge forward that the thin man made, the penis at his throat flipped and flopped again. It was quite a small penis, a rather delicate young penis even, and where the foreskin curled back at the tip, the helmet beneath was a deeper pink. A drop of semen glistened in its eye, stretched to a tear and then dropped on to Ian's chest with a warm plash. He wasn't afraid any more as the thin man's thin lips came down to touch his forehead.

Meanwhile, back in the waking world, the no-nonsense world, the nylon-sheet world that snags the hangnails of cogitation; that hated, empty-swimming-pool world; the one that is mere infill, a dusty rubble of time sandwiched between eternities, Gyggle's volunteer is still sitting, still waiting.

Waiting. That is the point of her. She's always waiting for men, this woman, this Jane Carter. And on this summer afternoon at the DDU she cannot complain, because she is now so ingrained, so conditioned, that she's actually volunteered — to wait, that is.

Sitting there, staring out through those murky windows, cataracted with dirt, Jane felt within herself the line of least resistance tethering her to her past. It stretched back into her memory, drawing with it the peculiar torsion of her being. Necessity or contingency, contingency or necessity, which of these had provided the half-twist of fate that had brought her to this strangest of places?

For all her long childhood Jane Carter played on a broad lawn dappled with sunlight. Jane and her brother in matching outfits, she in a plaid pinafore dress, he in plaid trousers, both of them shod in patent leather. Jane chucked the garish rubber ball to Simon and Simon hurled it back, boy-hard.