Will Self - My Idea of Fun

They strode towards the corner. The Pentonville Road ski-jumped away from them, lifting off towards the Angel. On the other side of the road in front of the bookie's, there was a mêlée of low-life. Even so, the junkies were holding themselves aloof from the dossers. The dossers had no pride. They built lean-tos out of plastic milk crates, right on the pavement. Then they got inside and pissed themselves. No, those dossers had no pride. But those junkies, on the other hand, what a fine upstanding bunch. There they all were, wavering in a line, necks craned to catch the junk messages from the hot ether. A dosser stands out a mile but a junky is a member of the plainclothes division of debauchery. Officers in this elite echelon are trained to recognise one another by eye-contact alone.

Beetle Billy pointed at a figure in the line. ‘Thass Lena, man, she steers for one of those black geezers from the East End, less give her a try.’

‘You lookin'?’ asked the smallish blackish girl.

‘Yo’ where y’ at, girl? Don’ recognise me nor nuffin’. Iss me, Beetle Billy.’ The girl sighed. ‘Leroy ‘bout, girl?’

From nowhere — or so it seemed to Richard — an immaculately dressed, coal-black young man appeared. Without saying anything, just by little jerks and nods of his flat-topped head, he piloted them across the road and towards the Midland City Line Station. They turned right past the Scala Cinema, crossed the Gray's Inn Road and then dived down a side street.

The coal-black man started to talk. ‘Less get a ways off,’ he said. ‘There's a lot of bother an’ that around an’ I don’ hold wiv it. No, man, no way, no, sir.’ He turned to Richard flicking a penetrating stare. ‘I'm Leroy, man, I'm Leroy, Le-roy. Remember that name, man, because I am the original Leroy, man — don’ ‘cept no substitute an’ that — ‘ cause others may imitate but I o-rig-in-ate. Me come fe’ mash up de area — ’

‘Blud claat, Ras claat!’ exclaimed Beetle Billy. They stopped and gave each other five.

‘Now, what you want, boys?’ Just like that Leroy switched back from patois to Cockney. They were walking through a small estate of four-storey, red-brick blocks. Leroy drew them into a recess where huge rubbish canisters crouched on three-wheeled bases.

‘We just want a bag thanks, Leroy,’ Richard replied.

‘Hey, I like you, man. You remember my name, man, that shows some respect, y'know, you ain't dissin’ me an’ that.’ While he was talking a little white bead or polyp of plastic appeared between two of the gold rings on his hand. He proffered it to them. ‘There you go,’ said Leroy. ‘Thass why I like to get a ways off. So my punters can see what they're gettin’ an’ that, yerknowhatImean?’

‘I can't look at this, Leroy,’ said Richard. ‘It'll take me half an hour to get the packaging off. Why can't you guys ever put your stuff in a good old-fashioned paper bindle?’

‘Hey! You know why that is, man. Anyways you ain't buying the stuff on account of its packaging, now are you?’

‘No, that's true but every product has some kind of packaging and you could say that that effects its saleability — it may even represent added-value to the customer.’

The dealer paused for a moment, obviously taken by Richard's observation on the mechanics of his marketing. There was silence in the garbage recess, except for the faint ‘chk-chk’ noise made by Leroy's rings rubbing together and the distant grating of the traffic.

‘I hear you, bro’, said Leroy at length, ‘but a bit of gear ain't really a product as such. I mean it's not like a Custard Cream or a Painstyler, it's not an original created product. It's just — like — well — “gear”, innit?’

‘Yeah,’ Beetle Billy joined in. ‘Iss like a whatsit, a generik, innit.’

‘A generic?’ queried Richard.

‘Yeah, like an ‘oover. An ‘oover was just a product to begin wiv’. But now everyone calls any thingy thass like an ‘oover, an ’oover.’

‘I see, I see what you mean,’ mused Richard. Leroy shifted uneasily in his penny loafers, his expensively suited shoulders rubbed ‘shk-shk’ against the brickwork. ‘But, Billy, the Hoover was created as an individual product and then through its very ubiquity it became a generic term. Now this stuff’ — he pointed at the bead of heroin between Leroy's knuckles — ‘has a proper name but there are numerous slang terms that refer to it, neither as a product nor as a generic — ’

‘Of course it's a product,’ Leroy broke in. ‘Sheee! Someone grow it, right? Someone pro-cess it, right? Someone even im-port it, right? I know, sure as fuck that someone whole-sale it, right? Now I'm tellin’ you people,’ and here he paused and ran a fluttering hand around the space between the three of them, ‘that I am re-tailin’ this ‘ticular pro-duct. So if you want it — pay for it, an’ if you don't — say so, man, ‘cause I've got to get back out to the front of the store.’

Richard and Beetle Billy scrunged in their jeans’ pockets and pulled out bank notes like used handkerchiefs, together with some pound coins and other change. Leroy stood and withered at them while they accumulated the score for the score. They gave him the money — he gave them the scag. Then he disappeared, evaporating into the thick fructifying air as suddenly as he had materialised in the first place. Further up the courtyard a four-year-old child was ejected from a flat and started to howl.

Some time later Richard was back on his dead bed, staring out over the Heath where schoolchildren screechily played. He set down the 2 ml syringe on the cardboard box that served him as a bedside table and fell back, his mind nuzzling in on itself. He was stoned enough to be blissfully unaware of his role as pacemaker, psychic vanguard, racing ahead of Ian Wharton, back to the Land of Children's Jokes.

Dreamless sleep. No sensation even of having slept. Sleep simply as a gap, an absence. Sleep so blank and black that it shatters the cycle of the eight thousand moments that make up the waking mind. Hume spoke of consciousness as analogous to inertia, transmitted from moment to moment as force is transferred from one billiard ball to the next. In this instance a white-gloved hand of more than average size had come down to seize the pink.

Ian woke up and knew this before he opened his eyes. Then he opened them and found himself back in the Land of Children's Jokes. Pinky stood like some mutant Bonnard in the wash of lilac and lemon light that fell from the tall unshuttered sash windows. He was eating a Barratt's sherbert dip, using the stick of liquorice that plugged the cylindrical paper packet to dig out the yellow powder. He sucked the stick then plunged it back in and each time he drew it out more of the dusty stuff adhered. Pinky was eating the sherbert dip with great concentration and attention to detail but quite clearly he wasn't enjoying it. It was a task for him, to be carried out with diligence and application; nonetheless he had noticed Ian waking up.

‘Are you with us, dearie?’ said the gloriously nude man, and turned to confront Ian with his stubby cock and Tartar's-hat muff of white pubic hair.

Ian kept silent. The last time he visited the Land of Children's Jokes he had an awful time. The key to refusing entry into the delusion — or so he imagined — was not to manifest any kind of lucidity. That had been his downfall before, so he resolved to stay silent.