Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Gyggle was saying, ‘You're all familiar with the form here — let's go round the group and introduce ourselves, shall we? At the same time I'd like you to tell me what stage you're at in your detox, OK?’ The beard wavered around the circle like a bogus divining rod and settled on a thin-featured man who wore his hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘John,’ said the man, ‘eighty mls.’

‘I know who that man is,’ I whispered to The Fat Controller. ‘Can you see his jaw, where it's all kind of bubbling and melted — ’

‘Of course I can, I may be old but I'm not blind.’

‘Well, I did that.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah, I twisted all the loose skin round with a ratchet and then I smoothed over the folds with a soldering iron. Good, isn't it?’

‘It certainly looks like a professional job. I congratulate you.’

‘Billy,’ the next junky round was saying, ‘and I'm down to sixty mls.’ The words slurred together.

‘Now, Billy,’ said Gyggle sternly, ‘are you sure you haven't had any gear? Because if you haven't you're getting too stoned for someone on a reduction detox and we'll have to cut your methadone down a little faster, hmm?’

‘Uhn?’ grunted Billy, then as the realisation dawned on him that he was to be deprived of something, ‘Nah, nah, I'm not, honest, Doc. To tell the truth I'm sick today, I'm clucking.’ His grey-black hands went to his shoulders which he clutched spasmodically by way of illustrating this, but Gyggle had already given up on him and moved on round the circle.

‘I recognise him as well,’ I said, ‘that black guy, the one who's fallen asleep now.’

‘Well of course you do,’ replied The Fat Controller. ‘That's why I asked you to come. All of these junkies were used by Gyggle and me to construct the Land of Children's Jokes, my adipose little acolyte. A whack of heroin-induced hypnogogia is worth a whole year of ordinary dream states. It's because of this that Gyggle took the consultancy here, we wanted to have a good stock of it on hand.’

‘I see.’

‘The spotty one in the sleeveless anorak is Richard Whittle, it's him that your good wife was meant to be befriending. His mind is especially ductile and suggestible — ’

‘Yes, it's coming back to me, the plump woman in the orange skirt is Big Mama Rosie and the gypsy-looking type is her old man.’

‘Martin.’

‘That's right, Martin. It's strange seeing them all here in this place.’

‘Well, my dear boy, if you think that is strange, I wonder what you'll make of this.’ He was struggling to his feet as he spoke and with some difficulty — the plastic chair had become wedged on his behind. I helped him to free it and rise. It was the first time that I had ever seen the big man appear either absurd or ungainly.

He crossed to the other side of the little room and opened the door of another one-way window. ‘Come over here and take a decco,’ he said. ‘I think this will amuse you.’ Through this window there was a very different kind of group going on. Hal Gainsby was there, together with Patricia Weiss from the agency; they had a gang of the usual types who turn out for this kind of thing, a D.F. & L. naming group, that is. ‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘Rather droll, isn't it?’ he said, toying with another cut-price cigar. ‘In one room the junkies and in the other the marketeers. Quite a contrast on the face of it but fundamentally they're all engaged in the same activity — ’

‘We concede,’ Gainsby was saying, his Boston drawl only sounding marginally more distorted by the speaker than I knew it to be anyway, ‘that the test-marketing in London hasn't gone down too well but we don't accept that that has anything to do with the product itself. We feel certain that if we can only — ’

‘You don't mean to say you've set up another naming group for “Yum-Yum”, here at the DDU?’ I was incredulous.

‘I don't see what's so funny about that,’ he snapped. ‘The hospital has to pay its own way now, like any other opt-out trust. Gyggle organises a sideline in room rental which I informed Gainsby about. It's a perfectly convenient place to hold a naming group. Perhaps if you'd paid a little more attention to the edible financial product in the first place we wouldn't be still banging away at it. But this is all by-the-by, Gainsby's isn't the naming group I wanted you to see — ’

‘You mean there's another one?’

‘Oh yes indeed, most definitely, one I think you should sit in on, but we have to bide our time, we need a particular sort of introduction to this naming group.’ He turned back to the other window and sat down again. I joined him.

‘Nah,’ Big Mama Rosie was plainting. ‘Nah, I'm that far gone I can't find a vein any more.’ She regarded her arms balefully as if they had been foisted on her during the night by a wildcat team of transplant surgeons.

‘Bullshit,’ said Gyggle. ‘The only reason you can't find a vein is because you're too damn fat. Anyway, we're not here to talk about your drug taking, we're here for another purpose entirely. How's he getting on?’ He nodded to where Beetle Billy was slumped.

John got up and walked over to him, he reached down and peeled back one of Billy's eyelids with his thumb and then let it fall. Next he felt for a pulse in the VW repair man's neck. ‘He's fading fast,’ said John, ‘there's hardly any pulse.’

‘Excellent,’ said Gyggle. ‘Come on now, you all know what to do.’ The junkies shifted their chairs around until they were grouped in a circle at Billy's head.

I said, ‘What exactly is going on?’ but The Fat Controller just shushed me, one frankfurter finger to the roll of his lips. In the other room the junkies started to mutter — at first I couldn't make out what they were saying but then it began to dawn on me, they were reciting the names of products:

‘Band-Aid,’ said John. ‘Chap Stick,’ said Big Mama Rosie. ‘Hoover,’ said Richard Whittle. ‘Coke,’ said a stringy-looking type in steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘Dunkin’ Donuts,’ said a Lycra-wearer, ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Ethel the brass, ‘Dr Scholl's,’ said Dr Gyggle through the beard and then they went round the circle again: ‘Nintendo’, ‘Biro’, ‘Big Mac’, ‘Painstyler’, ‘Nescafé’, ‘Jiffy bag’, ‘Letraset’ and then again: ‘Perrier’, ‘Polaroid’, ‘Walkman’, ‘Xerox’, ‘Magic Marker’, ‘Visa’, chanting product name after product name until their voices merged into one incantatory hum.

Eventually I said to The Fat Controller, ‘I've got it, I know what they're doing, all these products are generics, aren't they?’

‘Quite so. This is the North London Book of the Dead, a set of instructions to be recited to the dying, in order that they should not return, in order that their immortal souls should be cancelled out, voided, put on the spike, deleted, wiped and erased utterly beyond recall. You see, my dear boy, as you have always suspected, I am the very Lama of Lost Souls, I reduce the human to the material, utterly and completely. And now, if I'm not much mistaken, we're ready for the off.’

The junkies had stopped chanting. John was feeling for Billy's pulse again. He straightened up saying, ‘He's had it, popped his clogs, karked it, he's run down the flag, he's retired to the pavilion, he's collected his watch, he's kicked the proverbial bucket and marked his mortal card, in short, he's elsewhere.’

‘Shall we join him?’ asked my guru.

And then we were back in the Land of Children's Jokes and The Fat Controller was saying to Doug, ‘Give that coon-boy a shake, will you, I can't stand people dropping off in my naming groups.’

‘Hold up,’ I cried, ‘we've been here before, I've heard you say that before.’