Will Self - My Idea of Fun

I am a big man, like my father. I have his mousy hair and low forehead. I couldn't possibly be said to be ugly, for my features, in themselves, are shapely enough. The cratered dimple in my chin lines up precisely with the scoop out of my top lip and the narrow bridge of my long nose. No, my problem is the same as Daddy's — my features are marooned, set too far in to the middle of my wide face. Furthermore, the way everything falls away at the edges of my face is rather unpleasant. It gives a sodden, lippy impression, like the margin of a peat bog.

I have my father's figure as well. Sometimes, when I inadvertently catch sight of myself getting out of the bath, I freeze, startled, and think: Who let that Russian peasant woman in here? But it's only me, because — you see — my hips are wider than my shoulders and my solid legs look as if babies could be squeezed out from their confluence as easily as grapefruit pips. I'm built like a babushka.

And another thing, another point of resemblance. When I was a child I was reasonably well co-ordinated, but as I have grown up my sense of body has become both cloudy and diffuse. My fingers and toes are now distant provinces, Datias and Hibernias, cut off for years at a time from the Imperial nervous system. Without The Fat Controller's instruction in the blacker arts of physicality I would undoubtedly have become as hamfisted as Dad was. I certainly look as if I ought to be.

If I mention my father at the outset, it is because I want to get his having been out of the way, out of the way. After all nurture has trumped nature a thousandfold as far as my being is concerned. And if I were to see Dad now (I have no idea if he is alive or dead), I should feel compelled to dispose of him. I have no doubt about that. His presence would be an affront to my body; so, for it, there would be the rare delight of extinguishing an imperfect and distressed version of itself, a prototype, a maquette. I should enjoy the bludgeoning of my own features, the pulverising of my own thick bones and the slashing to ribbons of the nauseating congruence of our flesh — more, perhaps, than I've enjoyed any of my other little outrages.

Why, oh why, oh whyeeee! Why did Daddy abandon me like that? That's the $64,000 question, that's the Golden Shot. Why didn't he care for me, love me? He must — I am forced to conclude — have been a weakling, an emotional eunuch. That much is certain. He stepped aside and indifferently flicked a wet blanket at the raging bull of paternity. For that I can never forgive him.

When I was at university, The Fat Controller saw fit to supplement that version of my father's history that my mother had retailed when I was a child. It is characteristic of The Fat Controller that he should have extemporised in this fashion, dropping bombshells of feeling as casually as crumbs. We were sitting in a café and I recall that he was dunking a doughnut as he spoke, paying no mind to the tea slopping on his cuff, or the granular snowfall on his jacket lapels.

‘Your father — Harrumph! A contemptible Essene and no mistakin’ — I knew him well, of course.’

‘You've never said so before.’

‘Well, why should I? I've had no cause to. But now you are about to embark on a career it is only fair that you should know a little more about him. I dare say that your mother always spoke of him as a “brilliant man”.’

‘She did.’

‘Quite so, quite so. Did ye believe her?’

‘Well, not entirely, I never saw any evidence of it. While he was at home he never left the sun porch. He sat there all day reading the newspapers. Not even the nationals — he didn't seem to have the gumption to deal with anything much but the local advertiser. ‘

‘And then he went on his pilgrimage, by bus, I believe. He did at least understand this much, that the timetable expresses a set of mutable, quasi-astrological relations, the coming and going of ferrous bodies — ‘

‘Aren't you getting off the point?’

‘What point!’ he exploded — he could never abide interruption. ‘Don't be a booby, sir, you know I will not have a booby for an interlocutor!’

‘I'm sorry.’

‘Sorry isn't good enough — never is.’

We sat in silence for a while. The Fat Controller dunked. I looked on as the customers in an adjacent emporium crammed themselves into unsuitable denims. Eventually The Fat Controller spoke. ‘You knew that he was a businessman, of course?’

‘Yes, Mum told me that. I assumed that it was something insignificant, perhaps wholesale dry goods.’

‘Oh no, you've got it wrong there, boy. You probably can't remember but the furniture your mother had in the bungalow when you were a child came from the old St John's Wood house. It was really quite good, perfectly substantial. It dated from the time when you were very small and your father ran Wharton Marketing.’

‘He had his own company then?’

‘Absolutely. Your father was one of the most successful marketeers in sixties’ London. He had a real flair for it. Knew just how to launch a product, what activities were required, sales promotion or advertising. He had a nice line in statistical interpretation as well.’

‘What happened, why did the business fail?’

‘Well, people at the time said that it was mismanagement. They pointed to several large accounts that your father had either lost or failed to win, but that was a facile explanation. The truth was that he got bored.’

‘Bored?’

‘Oh yes — yes indeed. I knew him, as I say. Naturally, for I knew everyone of consequence. I had even done business with him on a number of occasions. I actually went to see him not long before the final collapse. The receivers were champing at the bit, I passed a man with a writ in the vestibule. Your father told me himself: “I just can't be buggered, Samuel,” that's what he said, “I can't even summon up the energy to sign a cheque. I can't engage any more.” That was the whole explanation, he was subject to a kind of fatal ennui. There was no other reason why the business should have gone down at all.’

So my father had retreated into his apathy and my mother moved the family to Saltdean. That much I had known already, and it was because of this that my conscious life began on a cliff. I say a cliff but really the site was more like a monstrous divot, kicked out from some golf course of the gods. On the divot sat the interleaved environs of the twin resorts of Saltdean and Peacehaven. Behind them was the ridge of the South Downs. Their rounded summits had a humanoid aspect, as if they were the grassed-over skulls of long-buried giants. In the lee of the Downs, between Saltdean and Rottingdean, were two contradictory edifices. One was a sprawling red-brick manse, the girls’ public school, Roedean. The other was a hideous Modernist joke, the prefiguration of ten thousand bypass-bound corporate compounds, the blind people's home, St Dunstan's. Both establishments were to play a part in my upbringing, a pivotal part.

Saltdean and Peacehaven, taken together what did they imply? Well — for the property speculators that built them — that the less well-heeled could, like their posher counterparts in Regency Brighton, be pickled into health. Fish in a fabricated barrel. But their heyday had been short-lived; a fifty-year season, during which the dregs of the English middle classes had been washed against the guttering of the Channel, before finally being sluiced down it, out into the Bay of Biscay and the Med.

Even by the time I was a child, the green-and-white picket fences, the pink-and-pebbledashed bungalows, the tea shops and other colourful amenities, all of them were in distempered decline. Psychic tumbleweeds blew down the cul-de-sacs and skittered around the crescents. It had become a landscape where everything that looked temporary was in fact permanent, and where everything that looked permanent was already scheduled for demolition.