Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Ian had had enough, he spat the pit bull's penis out with a sharp ‘floop’ noise. The two men left off digging for an instant and then fell to again, striking up the dust with their spade strokes. Ian waited until he was certain that the ‘floop’ was forgotten, then, raising himself on all fours while keeping his focus on the park-keepers, he travelled backwards with extreme rapidity through the undergrowth. He emerged still moving backwards, at the point where the scrub finished and a potholed cinder track bordered the road. There he stood up, dusted himself down, tucked in an errant rabbit's ear of shirt and walked off towards the M40 intersection.

Ian Wharton dropped off the back platform of the bus and fell on his feet in the City Road. He was still wearing the rumpled cavalry twill trousers and filthy Viyella shirt he had spent the night in. There were fragments of dog gristle on his chin and watery brown smudges of blood lurked around his generous mouth. The other passengers who got off the bus at the same time as him rapidly dispersed. Mingling with the heavy foot traffic, they skirted Ian, suspecting him of being a tramp or a schizophrenic.

The object of their repulsion sauntered off towards the Old Street Roundabout; he loosened his cramped shoulders as he walked and took deep breaths of the stale air the city had imprisoned. At the roundabout he veered down a path that led in the general direction of Norman House; the path became a passageway that traversed a bomb site between two high wooden fences. To the left of the fence the site had been cleared and building work was in progress, hard hats and JCBs were moving grunting and grubbing in the dirt, but the site to the right of the fence hadn't been cleared yet. Through chinks in the fence Ian could see a tangle of stringy privet, lanky nettles, wild flowers and triffid weeds, all forming a fuzz of camouflage over the sunken foundations of the bombed-out building.

As Ian walked he tested each section of the fence with his shoulder. Almost half-way along one of the boards flipped obligingly upwards and he scrunged his way through the gap. Ian found himself in a little lost world. The vegetation hummed with insects, spiders had festooned everything with their sticky threads, the leaves were serrated with bites and in amongst the greenery he could make out the cradled pupae of thousands of caterpillars. ‘Perfect,’ said Ian to himself, ‘couldn't be better.’ He turned back to face the fence and squatted down so as to peer through a knothole.

The suit wasn't long in coming. To begin with it only existed in the eye of its psychopathic beholder. Ian scryed his suit into existence. Eyes shut, Fantasia-style, he projected a long tongue of red catwalk into a purple void. Along this catwalk came the shape of the future, the suit shape. To be specific it was a sort of trendy blue suit shape; to be even more accurate, more precise: a blue linen suit, with a light check pattern, single-breasted with narrow un-notched lapels falling cleanly to a single button. The trousers were high-waisted with eight pleats and straight, sharply creased legs. The pocket-facings and cuffs of the suit were reinforced with some kind of soft leather, chamois or Moroccan.

The suit, grotesquely animated, paraded up and down. It raised an arm nozzle and sucked a cream-coloured shirt out of the void, then a leg rose agape and received boxer shorts striped like mattress ticking. Next, pale-blue socks glided down to slot beneath the suit trousers — they were already shod in black leather; finally a tie dropped down from the darkness, like a snake falling from a branch, and garrotted the empty neck. ‘Perfect,’ said Ian again, ‘it couldn't be better.’ He switched his attention to the path once more.

This conduit across the vacant lot was a short-cut for some four thousand workers, all of whom alighted at Old Street and made their way into the outback of office space. They walked through the passageway, men and women of all shapes and sizes, all tripping neatly and quickly. From where Ian squatted he could observe each and everyone of them through his knothole lens, their heads and shoulders encircled by a creosote stain.

Ian savoured the tension, knowing that he had at best a half-hour to come up with the suit, or he would be late for the meeting that was scheduled. Suit succeeded suit succeeded suit, each one unsuitable. Not this chalk stripe, not this stuffy tweed, not this grey serge — yech! Cop that! And then, there it was, the suit hove into view, this time animated by a flesh-and-blood occupant rather than Ian's scrying mind.

Bob Pinner was late for his own meeting. An importer of nusimatical curiosities that were encased in plastic by sweated workers in a tin shed outside Kuala Lumpur, Pinner was on his way to consult with his marketing agency, not D.F. & L. but not dissimilar. Pinner was stunned by the morning sunlight and thinking about nothing at all except the sound that his feet — shod by Hoage's — made on the tarmac.

“Scuse me.’ Pinner heard the voice but couldn't see where it came from. “Scuse me, mate.’ One of the fence boards tilted upwards to reveal the face of Ian Wharton who looked up at Pinner. All the plastics manufacturer could make out were the brown stains around the mouth, the bristle of gristle on the chin and the good trousers gone to seed.

Pinner bent over and said, ‘What d'you want?’ He was irritated, he prided himself on giving money away freely when asked but like a lot of middle-class people he also wanted his acts of beneficence to be on his terms alone. Ian glanced up and down the passageway — fortunately there was no one in sight. They were no more than two feet apart when Ian's hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat.

In this action there was enormous force and precision, as well as speed. Ian clamped the pads of his thumb and index finger down hard on Pinner's cartoid artery, so hard that the plastics manufacturer nearly passed out, then, using the collar of his shirt as a tourniquet, Ian jerked Pinner sideways like a cowboy felling a steer by twisting it horns. Once Ian had got him far enough down he dragged the unresisting suit-donator through the gap.

Ian didn't let go of Pinner for a moment. He carried him into the undergrowth tucked under his arm like a roll of carpet. Pinner was a biggish man — about the same size as Ian — yet his feet didn't even trail. Ian pushed through the foliage until they reached the sloping side of the old building's foundation pit, then they slid down together. It was steep but every few feet or so there was a marooned lump of masonry studded with bricks, which Ian used as a brake. At the bottom the foliage resumed and with it the sharp tang of chlorophyll. Ian took his suit to the farthest corner of the pit from the fence and there attempted to hang it up. Irritatingly, he found that if he let go of the thing's throat it tried to crumple up. That wouldn't do at all, he had to hold it upright by the jacket collar while he talked some sense into it.

‘All I want is your clothes,’ said Ian to the suit. ‘Take them off and I won't hurt you but if you don't comply I'm going to err. . let me see. . I'm going to sexually torture and humiliate you. Then I suppose I'll have to kill you.’

Bob Pinner started to disrobe. Although he was in a red haze his muscles and his nervous system had understood perfectly the message of Ian's strength. He hadn't been carried in that particular way since he was three or four. The choked roaring transit from the fence to the bottom of the foundation pit, grasped firmly by his hip and his throat, had thrust him right back into childhood.

His impression of Ian was that here was a parental giant, carrying little Bobby half asleep, from the leather back of the car to the cotton and linoleum of his bedroom; a giant who moved with a sinuous fluidity, mounting the stairs without disturbing its warm cargo, only perturbing Bobby towards the orange border of sleep far enough for him to sense the slide back into dream.