Will Self - My Idea of Fun

When she awoke properly, came to consciousness fully, she was screaming and her father was in the room already, with an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Her mother was standing, bleary in night weeds at the open door. How had they both got there so quickly?

After this nightmare Jane found that she felt somehow traumatised, sexually constrained by something that lay outside herself, that wasn't part of her at all. The trauma had alighted on her, like the incubus itself.

She started to create her own patterns. She got a job writing a column on knitting crafts for a women's magazine. Soon after that a friend in television asked her to audition for a programme. She did well. Her low brow was comfortable for the camera and her clear voice recorded excellently. She left home on the strength of the television contract and bought a flat in London, closer to the studios. Daddy dealt with the conveyancing.

Jane thought of herself as sexually aware. Not liberated, but aware. She had managed to resist the Moloch of promiscuity, in some sense to save herself. For what she wasn't quite sure. Twice a year or so she would contract for a mismanaged relationship of some kind, with a young man of some description. They would go through the tired motions of discovering their basic incompatibility with one another, then, at the very point that this fact had been fully realised by both, they would finally consummate their affair, set a sexual seal on its redundancy notice.

Jane, naturally enough, connected this with the presence. She could endure a man's touch, a man's stroke, a man's gyrating push. She could just about cope with the mornings, the solicitous apologies, the well-bred regrets. But she could never, ever, ever, let one of these nice young men go down on her. Not since the nightmare. That was the forbidden zone.

So this is the kind of a young woman that was waiting for Gyggle — a Good Young Woman, cap. ‘G’, cap. ‘Y’, cap. ‘W’. Kind and well motivated. She had a friend who worked for the probation service and it was he who awakened her hibernating social conscience. As an adolescent she had helped out at a unit for autistic children run by one of her mother's friends. This was the accepted Surrey way, showing the normal ones their quaking, gibbering accompanists. The righteous feelings engendered by holding these poor souls tight, grasping the writhing uncomprehending terror of their lives, had never really left her. Career established, now was the time to help someone else out. She applied to the probation service and they sent her to Gyggle.

Coming up Hampstead Road, clouds boiling on the smoked-glass surfaces of the office blocks and the snaggle-toothed row of commercial premises forming a carnivorous urban scape, Jane felt the presence again. She felt it more strongly than she had for years, it was nearly as strong as it had been that dawn in the parental home. She was keenly aware of it as she waited for Gyggle, its bulk was treading cautiously around the DDU, proceeding down the carbolic corridors, pausing in the littered flower beds. The presence pressed its carcass cheek against the window.

Gyggle came in and without saying anything to the young woman in the heavy black denim dress, inserted his spindly limbs, first one then the next, down the crack between his desk and the wall. He appeared to Jane, at this first encounter, just as he had to Ian Wharton all those years before at Sussex — an arch of tatty ring binders marched up and over him, making a framework of dirty marbling. Outlined like this Gyggle appeared Byzantine, iconic.

Jane stared at Gyggle's beard and until he spoke roamed its bouncy crevices. Once again, like Ian before her, Jane had a strong urge to detach the beard from Gyggle's face. She longed to lean forward and touch the beard, stroke it a little, then maybe grasp it on either side — near the bottom where it swept the desk — and yank very hard. She was convinced that the beard would come away in her hands, it was just too splendid, too cinematic, to be actually rooted in sorneone's face. Jane sat tight while Gyggle read the letter the probation service had sent him about her.

At last Gyggle spoke. ‘Have you any idea, Miss Carter, why the probation service should feel that you would enjoy working with addicts?’

‘Well, I don't think enjoy is quite the right — ‘

‘Maybe not.’ Gyggle didn't cut in, he oozed in. His voice was painfully soft, iterative cotton wool with a needle in it. ‘But there must be some reason why they sent you here, the service is very careful about who they select for sensitive voluntary work. ‘

‘Um, well. . You have my CV there.’

‘Yes, yes. And I've read it. You seem to have done a bit of work with the mentally ill, Miss Carter.’

‘I was a voluntary worker with autistic children for about four years.’

‘Do you imagine that addicts are somehow like autistics? Forgive me for asking — but I myself cannot perceive such a connection.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Perhaps you think that addicts are cut off — like autistics — trapped inside a private world that we cannot access, that they are partaking of some complex but entirely unknown reality?’

‘No.’ Jane was emphatic. ‘I don't think that they're anything like autistics.’

‘Actually, you could be wrong there,’ Gyggle mused; he seemed unaware that this was a rebuttal of his own opinion. ‘Maybe the two syndromes are in some way related.’ He scrunched out from behind the desk and stood, knees pressed between the Gothic iron pleats of the cold radiator. He stared out of the window, eyes tilted above the station roof beyond the hospital garden, and went on speaking, as if reading psycho-news from some autocue in the sky. ‘Addicts are psychopathic, regressive, they have enfeebled affect. Nevertheless, it could be argued that their stereotypical behaviour is a kind of photograph of normalcy, an eidetic image of what it might be like to be sane, hmm?’

‘I'm sorry, I don't quite understand you.’

‘Oh well, oh well, no matter — no matter.’ Gyggle grabbed the scruff of the beard and used it to drag himself back to his seat. ‘Anyway, that's besides the point, which is not theoretical but practical, namely, what are we going to do with you?’ He flipped out his bony wrist and shamelessly examined his petrol-station-gifted diver's watch.

Jane grew a little irritated. ‘I don't want to keep you from your work— ’

‘No, no. Please, no.’ Gyggle attempted what might have been a smile, butJane couldn't be sure, because not even a millimetre of lip was freed from its hairy purdah. Gyggle turned his attention to Jane's CV again. ‘You're available for twenty hours a week. That seems like rather a lot of time.’

‘I don't need much time for my job. I've made a commitment to myself to spend twenty hours a week on voluntary work.’

‘It's lucrative then, your, your’ — he glanced at the CV ‘ knitting programme?’

‘Yes, it is. ‘

‘Still, criminals, Ms Carter,’ Gyggle piped, ‘not victims but perpetrators. What do you think is wrong with addicts, Ms Carter?’

‘I'm not so sure that they aren't victims as well, Dr Gyggle. Perhaps addiction is a disease.’

‘If it is, have you any ideas about how it should be treated?’

‘I wouldn't presume — ‘

‘Oh, come now. It's a field in which my profession hasn't had conspicuous success. They say failed doctors become psychiatrists, and failed psychiatrists specialise in addiction. Have you heard that before?’ Gyggle's dulcet tones threw his patronising manner into still sharper relief.

‘No, I haven't. I don't really have any formed opinions on the subject.’

‘Very well, very well, perhaps another time. ‘ Gyggle shuffled the papers on his desk, then swivelled round and started to run his finger along the sloppy rows of ring binders ranged on the shelves. He pulled one down and opening it, extracted a buff folder. ‘I'm going to drop you in at the deep end,’ he went on. ‘I do this with all the volunteers who come here. It's not strictly professional. Some might say that it's not even ethical but it gets results. I've tried supervised sessions and induction groups but really, if a volunteer worker is any good, they can do without them. ‘