Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Coming out of Trafalgar Square Tube Station, Jane picked her way through the throngs of pigeons and tourists. She found Beatrice half-way up the wide stairway of Grindley's, handing out press packs. Jane's friend was so neat and pretty that she looked as if she might have been plastic-encapsulated along with her name badge.

‘Here,’ she said, thrusting one of the folders at Jane. ‘I think the speeches are about to begin. If you go on up to the Regency Room I'll join you in a moment.’

Jane did as she was told. In the Regency Room she positioned herself by the marble mantelpiece, under the huge gilt-framed mirror, and scanned the other launchers, the apparatchiks of the ulcer.

Jane was still feeling fat. Fat and sweaty. What a delicious irony, feeling fat and attending a press launch for ulcer medication. It wasn't lost on her. Wiley, the Marketing Manager, at least that's who she assumed it was, was droning on about Lilex. Jane couldn't concentrate. She flicked through the press pack, pausing only to admire a photograph of the S.K.K.F. chief executive, with his hands buried in what, according to the caption, was deep-frozen canine semen. She stared up at the ceiling and allowed her eyes to roam across the inverted landscape of plaster furbelows and flutings that gave the Regency Room its name. In these moments of absolute inattention, the presence that haunted her whole life had never been further from her mind.

‘Are these peanuts dry-roasted?’ Someone was talking to her.

‘Oh, err — I don't know. Does it matter?’

He laughed shortly and said, ‘I can't stand the dry-roasted ones, they're coated with all sorts of E-additives and crap, give me the sweats. Are you with the PR agency? I don't think I recognise you.’

He was a large man, Jane noted, with regular features tending to plumpness and square-cut mousy hair. There was something candid in his tone; this inspired candour in Jane. ‘My name's Jane Carter. To tell you the truth I haven't got anything to do with this. My friend just asked me to come and make up the numbers.’

‘Snap,’ he said. ‘My name's Ian Wharton, how do you do?’

Interlude

This is where The Fat Controller's brand of elective affinity leads to.

They were in a darkened corridor. It was musty with old carpet smell. They were naked. Standing like this, close to her, made him feel sharply the different sex that shaped their bodies. He felt that whereas her body was naturally shaped, her round hips and full bottom giving her an appropriate centre of gravity, his was just a long strip dangling from his head and only tentatively anchored to the dark floor. That was that then.

He had an erection. It was a latex thing, bouncy and ductile. She manoeuvred herself around so that she was side-on to him, then grasped his penis, grasped it in the way that she might a kitchen implement, a meat tenderiser or a rolling pin. She pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks, pulled it back and thwacked it against her buttocks. His penis oscillated upon its root, her buttocks wobbled. She had assaulted them both with the possibility of penetration. It was a moment of loss.

Ian and Jane found themselves sitting opposite one another in the Yellow Moon on Lisle Street. Goofy bent-over waiters leant against the half-bar. The tablecloth between them was stained with exactly the kind of yellow additives that gave Ian the sweats. At the next table a German tourist was listing his itinerary with wearying precision: ‘Thaan I haaf a daay foor Haamptoon Coort, yes?’ He was a Swabian, the hayseeds of Germany, and his voice looped the tonal loop like a stunt kite. Ian and Jane exchanged conspiratorial and chauvinistic looks.

‘Do you really believe in marketing?’ Jane asked, thinking to herself: I may as well establish if this man is a complete jerk before we get any further.

Ian took a while in answering, then said, ‘That's a difficult question. At the risk of seeming pedantic, of course I believe in the fact of marketing. I'm not sure that I think it's necessarily a good thing, or even necessary at all.’

‘Well, why do you do it then?’

‘It's all that I know how to do,’ he sighed. ‘I don't think I'm clever enough to do anything else now, even if I wanted to.’

‘What are you working on at the moment?’

‘Oh, something called “Yum-Yum”. It's an edible financial product — ’

Ian was interrupted by the waiter who cocked his ear in the general direction of their table, by way of indicating that he would like to take their order. They told him what they wanted. He didn't write it down but listened inattentively, exchanging an occasional Cantonese bark with his colleagues. When they'd finished he sidled off towards the kitchen without having said a word in English.

‘Service isn't exactly the strong point in these restaurants,’ said Ian, who for some reason felt embarrassed, as if the waiter had been a relative or a friend.

‘Oh I know.’ Jane laughed. ‘That's what I like about them. Everywhere else the waiters pretend to care, when really they couldn't give a shit. It's only the Chinese who refresh you with the sincerity of their contempt.’

‘I'm not sure that it's just contempt. A few months ago a man in the one next door had his arm hacked off by the chef, who was armed with a kitchen cleaver.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he kicked up a row over not being allowed to pay for his meal with a credit card.’

‘But everyone knows that these places are strictly cash. Something to do with the tongs, isn't it?’

‘He was a tourist.’

Their eyes met again, just as the German at the next table launched in on another swooping speech. This time they both laughed. For Ian, this felt as if a wave were breaking against his heart, a wave of warm human contact. He could actually feel this wave pushing out towards his extremities. Strange to relate, Jane could feel it too.

‘You were talking about an “edible financial product”. What the hell does that mean?’

‘The product is edible in two senses: the actual physical material associated with the product comes in an edible form and the interests and other disbursements come to the customer solely in the form of foodstuffs futures.’

‘So, it's a sort of ethically sound investment idea?’

‘Only if you're very greedy. But look, let's not talk about me, let's talk about you. What do you do?’

‘Oh I knit and crochet; and I do macramé and patchwork and appliqué and tapestry and a bit of embroidery and macramé — have I said that before?’

‘I think you might have.’

‘And I write about it for specialist magazines and do a television programme — ’

‘Oh, so I'm dining with a celebrity?’

‘Hardly, but it pays the rent.’

The waiter came back with a whole crispy duck. This he started to shred with mechanical efficiency, tearing at the thing with two forks. Both Ian and Jane felt embarrassed now. There was something venal about this shredding. Ian excused himself and went back through the restaurant to the toilet. He locked himself inside and propped his throbbing head against the paper-towel dispenser.

He thought about his nemesis, he-who-should-not-be-named, he of the capitalised definite article. Was he back? Perhaps this was the elective affinity he had always spoken of, always promised to Ian? Ian hadn't felt so safe in his attraction to anyone for a long time. Not since The Fat Controller had snapped his cigar in two, all those years before at Cliff Top. And even if this isn't arranged by him, thought Ian, why should I hold back now? What if what Gyggle says is true — he never really existed. I can't go on like this any longer, I can't go on feeling this way. If I don't get another person's hands on my body soon, I'm going to cease to exist. He had a vivid sensation of this, his body, like a giant continent, unmapped, unsurveyed, its further portions starting to fade away.