Will Self - My Idea of Fun

But then something moved in the corner of the room. It was too dark there to make out colour, or even shape, but something moved and abruptly.

‘What's that!’ cried Ian involuntarily, lifting himself up on his elbows. It was too late. Although the whatever-it-was had stopped moving he still found himself embodied, centre stage in the awful land.

‘I see you are with us again, dearie, now that the cat has left off your tongue.’ Pinky was welcoming enough, if guarded. He turned back to face the window and went on with his thrusting of liquorice stick into sherbert pond. Ian took a look around the room.

It had changed. It was recognisably the room in which Pinky and the thin man had entertained him before — there were the same high sash windows and there was the same fungal smell. The bed was also the same — huge with curling prows for the foot and headboards. It was even set in the same position, at right-angles to the window. But everything else was different.

The fungus was all gone. The button mushrooms that had clustered in fairy rings on the damp carpets had been dusted up. The giant toadstools and fly agarics that served as tables and chairs had been uprooted and removed. The enormous puff balls, which Ian remembered as being fully six feet across, had been rolled out from the corners of the room and disposed of. Indeed, now that Ian looked more closely, he could see that the room hardly had corners any more to speak of. He had the impression that the room's space had been translated into a vacancy within a far larger structure, some kind of barn, perhaps, or giant warehousing unit. The prevailing colours of the land were now slurry-greys and dried dirt-browns. The air had a sharp tang of high octane and there were lumps of formless detritus scattered around on the carpet.

‘What is this place?’ asked Ian aloud. ‘And why am I here?’

Pinky turned from the window and came and sat on the bed beside him. He went on eating the sherbert dip. On his face brown liquorice stains and plashes of yellow powder had combined, making it look like he'd been subjected to an attack with some new and vile kind of chemical weapon. He regarded Ian with an open but searching expression, not unlike that of a provincial bank manager. ‘I cannot say why you are here.’ He spoke softly. ‘This is not something that can be said. That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’

‘Wittgenstein,’ said Ian — it was one of the few quotations he knew.

Pinky flew into a rage. ‘It wasn't! It wasn't! The frigging little pansified bitch!’ He shook with anger, his ample bosoms swinging from side to side. ‘He stole everything, absolutely everything. All my best lines, all my best gags!’ He was like a child having a tantrum, a tantrum that departed as suddenly as it had arrived.

‘I'm sorry,’ said Ian, ‘I had no idea it was your line.’

‘No, no, it's my fault, I overreacted. I'm sorry, things haven't been going too well with the worm recently and you know how little sympathy I get from him. ’

Ian glanced around quickly, Pinky had given such emphasis to the ‘him’ that he assumed the thin man was about to burst forth, twirling his cane and chanting his mantric ‘Cha, cha, cha !‘ but there was no sign of him. ‘What's the problem with the worm?’ Ian asked. By way of answering Pinky opened his mouth wide and indicated that Ian should look inside. He bent forward. In the red-ribbed recesses of Pinky's gullet he caught a glimpse of something with an alien's head. It was white and diffidently questing. ‘Is that it — is that the worm?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Pinky. ‘He won't have anything to do with chocolate now and he won't deign to come out of my bum any more either. It has to be my mouth and sherbert fountains are his preferred tipple. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the things, they make me feel quite quite nauseous.’

‘What's your name?’ Ian broke in, keen to change the subject.

‘Pinky,’ said Pinky.

‘I knew that,’ said Ian and then, ‘What is this place, Pinky?’

‘This,’ said Pinky, getting up and turning a full circle with his flabby arms outstretched, ‘is the Land of Children's Jokes.’ His Hottentot buttocks hung behind him like a sack. ‘And your host for this evening is — ’ The thing in the corner that had stirred before moved again. ‘The one and only man in the Land of Children's Jokes with a spade in his head. Yes, Ian, with a spade actually in his head. Will you put your hands together, please, and give a big welcome to — Doug!’

Without quite knowing why Ian found himself applauding. His cold hands banged flatly against one another and the split-second echo bounced off the metal walls with a tuning fork's whine. The thing in the corner shifted again, resolving itself into a shape that then took on extension and colour, until it finally became the figure of a man. The man stepped forward — he was in the middle of his middle years and conventionally dressed in a worn but still serviceable single-breasted pin-stripe suit. He was taller than average and slim with sandy hair cut en brosse, his features were symmetrical and fine, his countenance pleasing. Ian found him instantly reassuring.

‘I'm Doug,’ said the man, still standing in the shadows. ‘I've come to give you a look-see around the Land of Children's Jokes, if that's all right with you?’

‘Um, well, err — absolutely.’ Ian struggled to find the words.

‘Good, good, but before we set out I need to — how can I put it, let me think — ’ There was a long and considered pause, clearly Doug wasn't the sort of man to rush into anything. Ian felt relaxed just being in his presence, it was such a contrast to Pinky. So much so that he wasn't surprised when he looked round and saw that Pinky had gone, taking his sherbert fountain with him.

‘I need to familiarise you with my condition,’ Doug said at last.

‘What exactly do you mean?’ Ian was bemused. Doug stepped back further into the shadows and Ian could make out one arm going up to fidget in the sandy hair.

‘You heard what my colleague said?’

‘Oh, you mean about the spade in your head.’

‘Exactly. It's not pretty but there it is and we have to get on with things. It's just that one's first sight of it can be a little disturbing.’ With this he stepped right forward into the wash of light from the high sash windows.

He really did have a spade in his head, a large garden spade. It was the kind with a blond-wood varnished shaft, a two-tone metal blade and a galvanised rubber handle. This was the part of the spade that was furthest from the ground, for the thing had obviously been plunged into the top of Doug's head vertically, as if some sadistic gardener had stood on his shoulders and started digging. The spade's blade ran perpendicular to Doug's forehead like a surreal coxcomb or hair-parting device. Surrounding the point of entry there was about an inch of corrupted flesh, a ditch and dyke of purpled pus, garnished with matted hair and what might have been brain.

Ian gagged and then, sprawling over the side of the great bed, vomited on to the carpet.

‘I am sorry,’ said Doug, who had by now moved right up to the foot of the bed, where he stood playing with his watch chain, ‘but there's very little that I can do to lessen the impact of the thing. It's useless trying to warn people or explain to them what they're about to see.’

Ian couldn't look at him, he looked at the carpet instead and said, ‘Impact would have to be the operative word.’

‘Quite so,’ said Doug. And suddenly Ian found that he could look at the man with the spade in his head, that it hardly bothered him at all.

‘Are you feeling a little better now?’ Doug was solicitous. He had the old-world charm Ian associated with British civil servants of the pre-war period. His mien was compounded of concern, probity and duty, more or less in equal parts. There was also something peculiarly affecting about the waxy patina of his sticky-out ears. ‘You're so right to remark on my use of the word “impact”. You know, I hope I may speak frankly to you, Mr Wharton, for without a certain frankness what is the point of conversation? You see I find this image — ’ he gestured towards the implement buried in his cranium — ‘to be almost integral to any understanding of the modern world. Metal into flesh — the impact of metal on flesh. Isn't that the whole of progress in a nutshell — a spade in the head? I only have to contemplate the world to feel it entering into me as steelily and as surely as this spade bisects my skull. Do you follow me?’