Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Thank you very much.’

‘And that does mean that you would have found your own behaviour pretty upsetting.’

‘Wait a minute, you're saying that you two have brainwashed me in some way, is that it?’

‘Oh absolutely,’ The Fat Controller broke in, the beginnings of one of his mirth eruptions starting to rumble. ‘Ha, ha — ahahahahaha! Oh my word yes! We had to wash your brain, Ian, because it was dirty! Hahaha!’ He spewed laughter and smoke.

‘This is cheap,’ said Ian. ‘I would have expected better of you.’

This pulled the fat man up short. ‘Whassat!’ he barked. ‘You dare to impugn my behaviour in this way, as if I were some pettily corrupt bureaucrat and you an ethical ombudsman? Come, come, I have never made any secret to you of how I regard my position, I have always told you that I hold myself to be above mere human concerns. Why would you imagine that this didn't extend to enmesh you fully — even your very sense of self? Come, come, it's you who are being cheap. Anyway, all of this jawin’ is too, too fatiguin’ — we're not at a college debate. It would all be far better explained by a spot of retroscendence, eh?’

‘I don't want to retroscend,’ said Ian. ‘I don't want anything to do with your banal psychobabble and your hypnotic games. In fact, I don't want anything to do with you at all.’

The Fat Controller didn't respond in quite the way Ian expected to this monumental cheek. For the first time ever Ian saw the big man looking discomfited, a little ashamed even. ‘I don't think,’ he said softly, ‘that that's something you have an option about but perhaps it will be clear to you after the retro, hmm?’ He came over and placing Ian's neck in the iron maiden of his hand said, ‘Let us consider the history of this suit, for example, shall we? Fashionable item, isn't it, I especially admire the leather pocket-facings. I hear they're all the rage at the moment. From Barries’, isn't it, on the King's Road?’

‘It's mine.’

‘It is now but it used to belong to a man called Bob Pinner. Let me explain — ’

And then they retroscended.

Ian Wharton was lying in among the dirty bushes that skirt the easterly edge of Wormwood Scrubs. It was only nine-thirty in the morning but the late-summer day was already prematurely aged and complaining with the heat. In the direction he faced, the cracked ground humped away in a sweeping undulation towards the prison, pushing up a single nodulous copse between the defunct goalposts.

Ian lifted himself up on his elbow and, turning his head, looked out from his enclave towards the corner of the Scrubs. Here, tucked into the elbow of the road where it chicaned under the railway bridge, was a derelict house. It was there that Ian had spent the previous night.

The house had been intended for one of the park-keepers who used to work on the Scrubs. It was a solid manse, three-bedroomed, pebbledashed, with diamond-patterned mullions in the windows and green coping over the doors. The house belonged with others of its own kind in some quiet suburb. It hardly deserved its expulsion to this ragged corner of the urban veldt.

Ian had come to the house at nightfall — leading Fucker Finch's pit bull by the scruff of its thick neck. He had prised away a slab of chipboard from the front door and gone into its warm mustiness. The house was empty save for the banked-up dust of insect and rodent activity. The walls had been worked over by the artistry of decay, wallpaper falling away from wallpaper falling away from wallpaper; flock, patterned in roses, patterned in stripes. Here and there delinquents had used Magic Markers and the ends of charred sticks to describe their zig-zag graffiti.

Ian went from room to room dragging the big black dog. Whenever it tried to bite him — which was often — he cowed it simply and efficiently with a stunning dead-fist thump to its iron skull.

All night long Ian had tortured the dog. He burnt it with matches, lighting them against its eyes. He cut it and scratched it with the old masonry nails he had found in the corners of the empty rooms. He shut it up in cupboards, leaving it to piss itself with terror; and then, when he released it and it ran at its tormentor again, slavering with the eager freshness of poor memory, Ian had beaten it into submission once more. Beaten it with great clouts to the head and shoulders, clouts of an unnatural strength.

The pit bull must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Its taut back and humped shoulders were stuffed with giblet muscle; and when it cried out, yowled with brute incomprehension in the face of this pain, this outrage, its cries were piercing.

As the city put away its toy cars and settled down for the night, Ian had begun to worry that some late walker — or wanker of a policeman beating the cooling meat of the pavemen — might hear the dog. So he waited and listened, listened for the trains, the whisper of grating metal that heralded their coming slowly rising to a howl and then the deafening change in pitch as the coaches exploded on to the bridge next to the derelict house, before being fed, screaming, into the maw of Wilsden Junction.

Ian learnt to anticipate their arrival and he used it to mask the sound of his activities. And so he had worked at his persecution of the dog, as if it were some spy or agent that he had to break — giving it the time off between trains to consider whether or not it should tell him what he wanted to know; break its silence and grass on its species.

At dawn Ian had led the dog, which was by now blinded and shambolic with pain, out of the house and into the bushes. There they had lain together for three hours while the red ring of the rising sun reheated the left-over city. They reclined in each other's legs and paws and as the dog slowly died Ian savoured its meaty breath.

Ian let himself down off his elbows and settled his chest and abdomen deeper into the crushed dry grass. He was sucking on the pit bull's penis, a knotty sea slug of gristle which he eased in and out of his mouth with a combination of suction and jaw movement. The penis was detached from the dog.

It was a placid scene. The pink tip of the dog's penis pushed out from Ian's mouth at the same time as it emerged from its black foreskin, so that the whole motion had a secondary mechanical phase to it, as if the penis were a piston and Ian's jaw the engine. The pit bull itself lay on its back some twenty yards off, hidden deeper in the bushes. Ian had disembowelled it after it had died and its guts lay on the dry grass like coiled grey sausages. In death the dog's fleshy neck and heavy jowls had fallen away from its jaws, which were bared as if in exasperation at this undignified, unmartial end.

Ian went on toying with the pit bull's penis while a little van came bobbing over the grass from the direction of the West London Stadium. The van was rusty red and faintly emblazoned with the Hammersmith Council logo. Two solid men were up in the tiny cab, both talking very loudly. ‘I see the fuckers gone done burn another fuckin’ trash can,’ said one, a dour, heavyset Jamaican.

‘What you expect, man?’ replied his companion, a more sanguine Trinidadian.

‘Ay-yai-yai — ’

‘Leastways they ‘ficient ‘bout the pro-cess.’

The men pulled up about forty feet from where Ian lay in the scrub and got out of the shoebox vehicle. They wore short-sleeved white shirts with epaulettes and serge trousers. ‘See ‘ere.’ The Trinidadian slapped his palate with his tongue. ‘Tch’, tch’, tch’, they put down gas an’ fire lighters, they even pile up some trash jus’ to make sure.’

‘Oh yeah, nex’ ting you say dis ‘ere is a fuckin’ community service.’

‘Sheee, mebbe.’ They fell to with spades taken from the back of the van and began to dig out the melted base of the rubbish bin, where it had sunk down into the knobbled earth.