Will Self - My Idea of Fun

On this ovenready morning, already damp in his fashionable black shorts (by Barries’ of the King's Road), Si Arkell, the youngest of the three marketeers, was labouring hard at his covert daytime job, the relentless struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. He tried to think of sleeping with men as just something that he did, in much the same way that other people went to the football or faked up corn circles, but it didn't feel like that at all. What it felt like was that his homosexuality had somehow chewed its way through his very being. A cancerous solitary piranha, that was now eating up all his fixity, any ability he had to concentrate.

At night, in the minimalist desert of his fashionable Bayswater apartment, Arkell mugged up on genetics. Each new theory that advanced a structural brain differential for inverts left him feeling queasier and queerer. The more he read, the more alarming the clarity with which he could picture his brain. In dreams, like a toy diver, he swam around its coral-reef efflorescence, observing the mutant formations and the parasitical encrustations that made him what he was. In the morning he awoke sweating — his dreams had been so vivid and so exhausting that he found himself hardly rested.

From time to time poor Arkell would crack, go out cruising, score. Usually with a man he didn't even fancy. He'd let them bugger him, or he'd suck them off. Often they would beat up on him for finishers. So even getting what he wanted was turned into a variety of humiliation. Poor Si.

All of them, all of the marketeers, had compensated for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches. These were Ian Wharton's ideal confrères. For, like him, their cerebella had been fashioned into frozen gondolas, crammed full of frosted thought-items. Theirs was a mental mise-en-scène within which aspirations, yearnings, dreams, ethical confusions, had all become just so many product placements, each jostling for its paid-for moment in the viewfinder of consciousness.

They subjected themselves to marketing methodologies relentlessly and avariciously. They divided themselves internally into socio-economically classifiable sub-sets of assertive homunculi, which were compelled to complete notional surveys, attend focus groupings where phenomena were assessed, and then witness hamfisted demonstrations of the next Little Idea. The marketingspeak had invaded their very ordinary language. Thus, they had adapted the folksy homily to their own usage, proclaiming, ‘There are no such things as strangers, only prospects that we haven't converted, yet.’

These were Ian's colleagues and in his perverse way, the only people he really felt comfortable with.

‘Morning, Hal, Pat, Si, Geoff — ‘

‘Morning, Ian,’ they chorused.

‘Ian, I'm glad you're here. I've had the most extraordinarily good news.’ Gainsby gestured at the surface of the conference table where, Ian now noticed, there lay in front of each of the marketeers a D.F.& L. Associates pitching document. ‘We've won the Bank of Karmarathon account!’ His peculiar Bostonian accent warbled over the exclamation, and at long last he felt able to free himself from the air-conditioner. He took a seat at the head of the table. Ian sat as well.

‘Hal, that's amazing news, congratulations, you deserve every credit.’

‘Nonsense, Ian, this wouldn't have been possible without all of us. We worked well as a team, now I think we're going to be rewarded — handsomely. They've agreed to the budget we proposed for the product launch without any reservations. I don't need to tell any of you that our fee as a percentage of that budget will be very considerable.’

‘What a relief!’ Ian sank heavily into his allotted chair, then instantly regretted it. The chairs were another of the fruits of D.F.& L.’s labour and Hal Gainsby's unfortunate loyalty to the products he marketed. The aluminium S-bend design was ubiquitous, but this particular version had a major fault. The tensility of the aluminium used had been too great; anyone who forgot this fact found themselves bouncing to a standstill as if on a trampoline.

When he had finally settled Ian went on, ‘So what now? How quickly do they want us to proceed?’

‘Well, that's just the thing. I had a call at 4 a.m. this morning from Nat Hilvens in NY. Karmarathon want to push the launch forward to January of next year, which gives us only six months to do all the softening up.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Geoff Cryer muttered. ‘That's going to present huge logistical problems. There's the financial press to be dealt with, for a start. I'd thought that we'd have time to organise quite a number of informal seminars, in order to introduce them to the idea.’

‘Y-yes.’ Arkell was squirming in his seat, thin fingers holding each opposing wrist.’ What about these standing booths we were going to erect? I've only just put the whole thing out to tender, I've no idea how we'll manage to organise the permissions and get them actually built before January.’

For no good reason silence fell around the conference-room table. Ian idly scanned the juncture of the cream skirting board and the beige carpet, noting the druff-falls of paint and plaster fragments, another failure by the staff to keep their itchy fingers away from the Painstyler decoration. Under his own broad palm he could feel the slick folders, the phallic pilots’ pens, the plastic-encapsulated microchip butties, that bulked out his soft, calfskin portfolio. Ian's attention first wavered, then wandered, away even from the silence itself. Outside in the other world of the street, vehicles oozed through the soupy air, a jack hammer drummed on the cakey crust of the earth.

This wouldn't do. He normally felt bound-in here at D. F.& L., secure in his trade persona. In his work he intuited the universe of products as a primary construct, a space-time configuration upon which consciousness-at-large had engrafted itself, like wisteria choking a trellis. That is why — he believed — one's own mind fitted so well into those of others. Every dove of consumer cogitation could marry a tail of vendor awareness. The communality of products was stronger than that of language, of television, of religion, of party, of family, of primogeniture, of Heimat, of Medellin, of retribution, of clout, of face, of latah, of the Four of Anything, of off Broadway, of any of the consistencies that had been used to establish the increasingly arbitrary character of the cottages that made up the global village.

Ian thought for the first time in years of the concept of retroscendence. How it might be possible to enter into the very history of a product, any product, the Porsche or the crisp packet, and flow down its evolutionary folkways, zoom back to the point where it was as yet undifferentiated, unpositioned, unintentional, and therefore not about anything. In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to. . Gainsby was saying something ‘. . feels that he was crucially involved in, so to speak, factoring this to us. It isn't something I've spoken of to you before — ‘

‘No, you haven't, Hal, you haven't seen fit to.’ Patricia Wieiss's voice was snappy, more than piqued.

‘I don't know the guy.’ Hal was unhappy, his voice teetered up a half-octave. ‘I've got no idea of how he could possibly even know about us, but he does. Or at any rate he says he does. He's got some interest in Karmarathon, of course — ‘

‘That's right, of course he bloody does. Isn't that bloody brilliant. This agency limps along, constantly in danger of going out of business altogether. Then finally, at long last, we land something that looks as if it might be a decent account, something that will really underwrite us, not just some fucking wing nut or minority-interest hair cream. And immediately we start to get yanked around, like a toy poodle on a leash. And who's doing the yanking? Some funny-money man, some wheeler-dealer, an asset-stripper, a fat cat, Mister bloody Samuel North —’ Ian didn't hear the last syllable, but he knew what it was. It was the cliff he came from, the one chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea.