Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘Please,’ said the Money Critic quaveringly, ‘I cannot work if there is any aural pollution —’ He broke off, a discreet chattering of metal on paper was coming from an adjoining room.

Ian looked towards the sound. At the end of the ‘l’ formed by the flat's balcony there was another smaller room, this was choked with softly chattering telex machines, gently grinding fax machines and a bank of VDUs, across the faces of which green and yellow figures played chicken with one another. An enormous tangled knot of printout jerked, waggled and then came towards them; underneath it was a ratty little man wearing an old-fashioned sharkskin suit. He rid himself of the bunch and then emerged from the telecommunications room clutching a fragment of this paper. Making his way to the side of the Money Critic's chair, he made a respectful obeisance before handing the fragment over.

The Money Critic examined the piece of paper for a long time, as if trying to divine its purpose, then he pronounced, ‘Peaty, mulchy, mouldy — almost tetanussy. .’ then fell silent. The little man shuffled back to the networking vestibule and tapped this verdict into the bank of machines.

‘What was that then?’ asked The Fat Controller, who was undeterred by atmospheres of sanctity.

‘Government bond, five-year, Papua New Guinea.’ The Money Critic sounded distracted; all too clearly he regarded it as hack work. His voice trailed away and he fell to regarding a large book of Vermeer colour plates that was propped on a strategically positioned lectern.

Ian stifled a snigger — it was unheard of for anybody to behave like this towards The Fat Controller, yet he seemed to be taking it. He drew a leather briefcase from under his hogshead of an arm and began to pull leaflets and forms out of it. It was, Ian realised, the material produced by D.F. & L. for ‘Yum-Yum’.

‘Well, here it is,’ said The Fat Controller, passing it to the Money Critic. ‘Tell us what you think; and mark my words, don't dissimulate in any way ‘soever. I shall know immediately if you do.’

The Money Critic gave him a withering look but said nothing. He started examining the documentation, occasionally sniffing one of the pages or taking a miserly nibble out of it.

While this was happening The Fat Controller had got out his gunmetal cigar case and opened it. ‘Erm.’ The Money Critic cleared his throat. ‘If you don't mind I'd prefer it if you didn't smoke.’

‘Can't smoke! Can't smoke!’ Despite all the poor man's injunctions The Fat Controller was now trumpeting, ‘What the hell do you expect me to do with myself if I can't smoke, eh? Are you afraid it'll get in your bloody ears?’

To his credit the Money Critic came back at him saying, ‘It's the cigar I object to, you're welcome to smoke a pipe of opium if you like, or a bidi.’

‘A bidi?’ The Fat Controller was nonplussed. The Money Critic gestured to his assistant who hurried off and returned with an ornately carved opium pipe about the size of a baseball bat. This he proceeded to prepare laboriously, taking ages to prime a little ball of grungy opium on a pin. When the mouthpiece was finally pointed at him by the Cratchetty figure, The Fat Controller took a vast neck-swelling pull on it and then exhaled, filling the room with the sweetly moribund smell of the smoke. He chucked the pipe to one side and it clattered amongst some bales of Jaquiri skins.

The Money Critic hadn't been paying any attention to this performance, he just went on reading, smelling and nibbling the ‘Yum-Yum’ literature; every so often he would write a note on a slip of violet paper with a gold propelling pencil.

‘Well,’ said The Fat Controller eventually, his voice a tiny bit calmer, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think it's a silly idea,’ said the Money Critic, ‘and it'll never catch on.’

Ian sidled over to the window and stood gazing out over the large courtyard. Near the entrance to the theatre, at the Moorgate end of the development, a small bar had opened for business although it wasn't yet five. Some twenty or thirty office workers had escaped to have a drink and they stood by concrete tubs full of shrubbery, clutching lagers in their hands. One of them, Ian observed, was a young woman not unlike Jane Carter. He pondered their future together, he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked forward to tearing both it and her, apart.

Jane and I were married within three months of that afternoon when I stood, staring out over the City and listening while The Fat Controller attempted to bully the Money Critic into giving a favourable verdict on ‘Yum-Yum’. Needless to say, the Money Critic's appreciation of it was right, ‘Yum-Yum’ was a total flop. The launch coincided neatly with a recession and a dramatic downturn in the demand for innovatory financial products.

The sixty standing booths commissioned by D.F.& L. and constructed by a team sub-contracted through Steve Souvanis had been erected all over London. For a while they were an oddity, commented upon in the local press. People would stand in them looking out through the perspex sides at the world passing by and grazing on the edible literature provided. But soon the booths became scratched, tarnished and conveniently whited-out, conveniently for the people who became their chief occupants, that is.

The capital's hardcore junkies had already sicked on to the useful character of the booths but once they were partially opaque they became a beacon for every street dragon-chaser, crack head and needle freak in the metropolis. The conveniently sited shelf was ideal for cooking up a shot, or assembling the fag ash needed for the base of a crack pipe; and the booths’ ambiguous transparency — it was far easier to look out of them than to look in — meant that the police could be spotted a mile off.

Soon it was so bad that the booths were overflowing with drifts of used syringes and crumpled up bits of tin foil. D.F.& L.’s site permission was revoked and Souvanis's team had the mournful task of doing the rounds disassembling them. They ended up, back with the other platonic forms, in the dusty Clacton warehouse.

Despite this The Fat Controller didn't give up on ‘Yum-Yum’. He was amused by the junkies’ occupation of the standing booths. In fact, he even encouraged it, exerting influence on his secret cabal of addicts via the redoubtable Dr Gyggle. He remained convinced that the whole débâcle was purely a function of the unfortunate way that ‘Yum-Yum’ had become fixed in the public's mind as a name for the first truly edible financial product and he continued to bully Hal Gainsby at D.F.& L. to set up naming group after naming group, in a vain attempt to come up with something better.

I wanted our wedding to be a subdued registry office affair but Jane's parents were set on a big bash. A marquee was erected on the spacious lawn of their Surrey home, caterers were hired and invitations printed for four hundred. There was hardly anyone that I wanted to invite — my life hadn't exactly tricked me out with a gallery of amusing pals, only a gallimaufry of grotesques.