Will Self - My Idea of Fun

With this euphonious eulogy The Fat Controller set off back across the oil-stained floor of the underground car-park, towards the lift. The brown Sansomite suitcase went with him.

Someone had once told The Fat Controller that he bore a distinct resemblance to the character of Gutman, as played by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. This he relished. The truth is that the similarity was quite superficial. Like the Fat Man, The Fat Controller had an interesting bulk, an unusual kind of fatness. However, while it could conceivably be said of Greenstreet, as it is often said of the fat in general, that he was ‘amazingly graceful’, or ‘surprisingly light on his feet'; and indeed that those feet were ‘really quite elegant’, none of these descriptions could have been applied to The Fat Controller, who really was fat. Fat in a heavy and unrelenting manner. Programmatically fat. Fat as if his mammoth aspect were the result of several, consecutively successful five-year eating plans. Wherever he went The Fat Controller's fat surrounded him and marched with him, like a tight huddle of violent men wearing overcoats.

Another point of dissimilarity; unlike Gutman, The Fat Controller was not a true connoisseur — ultimately he gained no more joy from things than he did from people. Whereas Gutman was prepared to spend a lifetime recovering the black bird, The Fat Controller would have eliminated the entire cast within the first half-reel of the film. The Fat Controller's attitudes were born of an uncompromising pragmatism, which those who met him felt as a peculiar sort of emanation. Whilst Gutman had a magnetic quality that he bolstered with rhetorical flair, The Fat Controller was banal. And if you allowed him the chance to get going in his affected way, he became downright boring very quickly.

The desk clerk at Brown's Hotel was certain that he had seen The Fat Controller somewhere before. There was something familiar but unplaceable about the big man's face. He waited, pen poised over register, while The Fat Controller moved towards him in his gang of flesh.

‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such weather, and in England of all places.’ For an instant, the desk clerk tried to imagine The Fat Controller in still sunnier climes — for some reason he couldn't manage it.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ The desk clerk was easy, consummately so.

‘Oh yes, oh yes indeed.’ He paused, clearly trying to remember some important fact, like his name, for example. He ran the five-pack of wieners that constituted his hand around his collar. ‘I have a reservation.’

‘In what name, sir?’

‘Northcliffe, my man, Samuel Northcliffe. Take a look in your little book.’

Jane Carter was crying in her West Hampstead flat. Crying as the evening sunlight fell in gay bars across the flat's bright patterned interior. She breathed heavily and the mucal reeds lining the wet passages of her head gave off little clarinet cries of loneliness. The tears were prompted by an indigestible bubble of self-pity, which had been swelling up in her all afternoon. Now they had started, the tears steadily gained fresh impetus. Like boulders being pushed down a mountainside, they came rolling and tumbling out from her ducts, each one powered by a different slight, a different hurt, failed relationships and relationships that never were but might have been.

At her feet a mess of knitting fell out from the lip of a plastic bag; blue, green and yellow threads forming a soft circuitry. Thrusting out from amongst them, a wooden knitting needle caught her attention. She snatched it up, losing several hundred careful stitches as she freed it from its fluffy embrasure. Taking the knitting needle in her right hand, like a dagger she pulled up the hem of her black denim dress. Her thighs appeared monstrous to her, damning evidence of her failure to achieve sylph-hood. ‘You're fat! Fat! Fat!’ she exclaimed, with each ‘fat’ digging the sharp tip of the knitting needle into the horrible stuff. The final dig drew blood — and enough pain to stop her crying.

She stood up abruptly and began to dance around the flat, singing discordantly, ‘Oh, I'm so a-lone, so a-lone, so bloody fat and a-lone,’ and as she sang, she wished. Wished for a lover, any lover, a daemon or an incubus — the presence could take her now come what may. She didn't care any more. What do I matter? she concluded. I'm a zero, another poor cow in the herd. I wear certain clothes and certain shoes, I put on certain make-up and use certain sanitary towels and I go to a certain dentist and a certain doctor, because of my bloody certain daddy and certain mummy. That's for sure! With this bleak summation she began to dance, kicking out first one fat (according to her) leg and then the other. In this pitiful self-absorption, she felt herself to be just one amongst a multitude of Janes. All of them standing on their oval crocheted rugs, in their recently converted flats. They all looked the same, they all faced in the same direction and they all threw up their arms. They formed the most highly dispersed Busby Berkeley-style chorus line ever — this phantom army of high-kicking Janes.

The phone rang. ‘Jane?’ It was a woman's voice.

‘Yes?’

‘It's Beattie.’ Beautiful brittle Beatrice, the PR girl.

‘Oh hi, Beattie, how're you?’

‘Fine, Jane, and how are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘Jane —’

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered if you were doing anything this evening?’

‘Why?’ Jane, however fat and ugly she felt herself to be, wasn't about to admit her unpopularity.

‘Um, well, OK, it's pretty boring really, but I need a favour — ’ She ran on, sensing that Jane was about to interrupt, ‘. . I'm organising this press launch for S.K.K.F. and I haven't been able to get as many people along as I'd hoped for. The company's entire marketing department will be there — it could be very bad news for me if I can't up the body count.’

‘So, you want me to pretend to be a hack from the medical press?’

‘That's right.’

‘And what is this product they're launching? Is it something I should know about?’ Beattie twittered with laughter, Jane held the phone away from her ear until it had ceased.

‘Not exactly. Though it is rather brilliant, revolutionary even. Lilex is a brand-new drug for the relief of peptic and duodenal ulceration, it's prepared in easy-to-swallow tablets and presented in two by twelve plasticised pop-out packs.’

‘Oh really.’ Jane was underwhelmed by Beattie's enthusiasm. She had seen it before. With every new account, every new product to be launched, the PR girl shifted her allegiance radically and completely. Her belief in a product was a total thing, real and encompassing. It didn't matter if it was a cosmetic or a patent medicine, a motor car or a fashion accessory. Hers was a metempsychosis of novelty, her mind a vapid thing until animated by the next absolute conviction.

‘Look, Jane.’ Beatie was conciliatory. ‘Just do me that favour, will you. You're a journalist. Come along with your notebook and pretend to copy down whatever Wiley — that's the S.K.K.F. marketing manager — says. Then I'll take you out to eat, OK?’

‘Oh, all right. But don't make a habit of this, Beattie, my self-esteem is already quite low enough, without my only invitations being to the press launches for new ulcer medications.’ They both laughed and hung up.

For the next couple of hours Jane operated on her body. She cleaned it and scraped it, patted it and pushed it, painted it and prinked it. She hated herself for deploying these mortician's skills on the lumpy carcass, but what option did she have? She had put herself into two entire outfits then torn them off again, before she was finally satisfied and able to set out for Grindley's. In the end, she went dressed as she had been all that hot day.