Will Self - My Idea of Fun

Mr Broadhurst arrived the next weekend. In one way his arrival was a reassurance — he certainly didn't look like a gyppo. But on the other hand it was confusing, because the men who accompanied him most definitely were.

To begin with it was like a rerun of Mr Gardiner's visit. The truck was as big and if anything blacker — an ex-army three-tonner. The mysterious new lodger's mobile home was hitched on behind. And what a caravan it was! Nothing like the cream-and-blue hutches dotted around the site. This one was twice as big and made of mirror-shiny aluminium. It was so long that it had a double set of wheels at the back.

Up on tiptoes while the adults stood chatting in the garden, I peered in on an expanse of fluffy white carpeting, a wide bed covered with a white-lace counterpane, glass shelves lined with newspaper-wrapped ornaments and in the corner a colour television. With its windscreen windows, fore and aft, the caravan was like a storefront display of American opulence.

Mr Broadhurst was a big fat man. He was over six feet tall and bald save for a moustache of fine grey hair shadowing the crease between the third and fourth folds at the back of his thick neck. He was dressed like a part-time undertaker in a down-at-heel black suit. His tie was black as well and his shirt had clearly dripped dry.

Fat was too simple a description of Mr Broadhurst, I knew that as soon as I clapped eyes on him. For he wasn't plump in the way that I was aged eleven. I couldn't imagine poking my finger into him and then drawing it back, having created a pale dimple that sopped up red. His was a fat that implied resistance rather that yielding. If his chest resembled a barrel and his head and limbs five smaller barrels, it was a formal resemblance only. I could tell just by looking that these vessels didn't contain dropsical fluid, or scrungy sponginess. Instead Mr Broadhurst's solidity was clearly founded on enlarged organs that filled him right up; a double heart like a compressed air pump, a liver the size and weight of a medicine ball and hundreds of feet of firehose-thick intestine.

He was sucking at the edge of his blue Tupperware tea cup, as I drew closer to hear what was being said. Supping greedily, as if he were about to take a bite out of the cup's rim. The two gyppo men stood apart, regarding him with expressions that I could not read at the time, but which — with the benefit of hindsight — I would say were full of awe.

Then I caught an earful of what he was saying and it was a revelation. In that moment I knew I was hearing one of the great talkers, the consummate rhetoricians, of all time. For Mr Broadhurst's discourse was as unlike any ordinary conversation as an atomic bomb is unlike a conventional weapon. It was an explosion, a lexical flash, irradiating everything in the immediate area with toxic prolixity. I caught a lethal dose of this, that has been decaying throughout my half-life, ever since.

It was clear, even to a child, that the most mundane tropes, the purely factual statements and flippant asides, that fell from his lips, were more akin to the run-offs and overflow pools of some mighty river than the babbling brooks and cresslined streams of sociable chatter. I could sense that this stream of speechifying was always there — in Mr Broadhurst's mind — and that what we were hearing was simply the muted roar of a currently submerged cataract. When he paused, it seemed to me only as if this great torrent of verbiage had been momentarily blocked by some snag or clotted spindrift of cogitation, and I felt the power of his thought building up behind the dam, waiting to sunder it, so that the sinuous green back of this communicative Amazon or Orinoco might stretch out once more, towards the transcendent sea. No hyperbole, no matter how extreme, could do justice to the strength of the impression that that first encounter with Mr Broadhurst's speech made on my pubescent sensibility.

‘It's a remarkable enterprise that you have here, Dawn,’ he was saying. ‘The hills rearing up behind and’ — he swept his telegraph pole of an arm round in a wide arc — ‘the sea below. Nothing could be finer for a man such as myself, no Epidaurus could provide a more suitable arena within which to lay my tired body. No proscenium could be more delightfully elevated, so as to present the remaining days of my reclusion and retirement.’ He paused, adopting a pensive mien which befitted this fatiloquent observation, and I was transfixed by the thick, almost Neanderthal ridges of bone that took the place of eyebrows on his mondial head. These ran together like the arched wings of a gull and became the high bridge of Mr Broadhurst's prominent nose. But, saving this, his head was peculiarly lacking in other features, such as cheekbones, or the extra chins that might have been expected. Also, there was a depilated, creaseless look to his flesh. His lips were wide, thick and saturnine. His steady basalt eyes were protuberant, amphibian under lashless lids.

‘Muvvat’ ‘van nerr?’ asked one of the gyppos. To me they were stuff of nightmares, clearly beyond the fringe of Saltdean — and perhaps any other society.

‘Do that, do that. Do it now.’ His voice at first merely emphatic, gathered emotional force. ‘Position the machine in the wings, so that the god may be ready to descend on a golden wire.’ The gyppos set down their mugs on the edge of the rockery and, addressing one another with glottal stops and palate-clickings, leapt back up into their truck. Their black bushes of hair, their raven faces, the way they dressed in dark coats fastened at the waist with lengths of rope, the way they spoke and drank and moved, in short, everything underscored their moral insouciance. ‘Do what we will,’ the gyppos seemed to say, ‘that is the whole of our law.’

But Mr Broadhurst, despite his advanced age, dared to order these Calibans about. When he barked, they snapped to. ‘Mind out for my things,’ he shouted after them. ‘My impedimenta, my chattels, my tokens of mortal desire — you'll pay for any breakages! ‘

That winter Mr Broadhurst became a fixture at Cliff Top. I was puzzled by the ambiguity of my mother's relationship with him. She had few friends apart from her sisters, and I had seldom heard her called by her first name by anyone who wasn't a family member. But the more I pressed her over it, the more she demurred.

‘Tush now, luv. Mr Broadhurst is like part of the furniture for me. He's always been around. I can't remember whose friend he is, to be honest.’

‘But, Mummy, you must remember, you must.’ The society of my new school, like that of provincial England as a whole, was so alarmingly codified and stratified that I couldn't conceive of anyone whose provenance and emotional valency weren't absolutely fixed. My mother, with her working-class airs and upper-middle-class graces, only served to point this up still further.

‘You're a great questioner, aren't you? Always questioning and querying.’ She leant down and kissed me. The Mummy smell was overwhelming. I felt the corner of her mouth against mine. ‘You don't get it from me — that's for sure — but I can't imagine it comes from yer father either.’ I was aware that all that she felt was there, bound up in the way she said ‘father’. She pronounced it as another might have said ‘old rope’. Without emphasis, as if this paternity were of no account.

She always got around me in this way, by placing her body against mine whenever she felt herself challenged, mentally assaulted. In doing this, I realised, she was re-presenting the fact of her maternity, her original power, to me. Each time contextualising me with her increasingly ample flesh. Despite myself I was seduced and became a toddler once more. Being chased to be tickled, I subsided into the mummyness.