My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  Sick irony abounds as Jane leans against the doorjamb, poised to enter the bathroom and feeling The Fat Controller's kicks inside her. He harkens to her, sensing her reaction; with a flip of his city shoes he propels himself up to where the placental macaroni ruckles against the wall of her womb. His hand reaches out, shooting a snowy cuff, and grasps at the stuff, plunging into the elastic membrane and clutching a handful. Jane gasps and so do I.

  ‘It's up to you, boy,’ he's chortling, loving it, revelling in it. ‘You signed on for this. You can have your fun now, or you can wait another month or so, in which case I will take the greatest of pleasure in informing her myself. Which do you prefer?’

  It isn't a question worth answering. I'll tell her myself. Because, after all, the telling is a big part of the fun, perhaps even more fun than the fun itself. This, I realise, is what my life has been leading up to, the quiet suburban house, the loving trusting woman and me, sitting down here in the semi-dark knowing that I am about to tear it all apart – tear her apart.

  I've courted this moment assiduously, longed for it even. It's all very well getting your kicks from hurting people, defiling them, causing them untold suffering, but it doesn't really amount to anything when they don't even know you. Ignorance is, relatively speaking, bliss, when even as they give up the ghost they can still comfort themselves with the thought that you are some kind of daemon, not human, not like them.

  With Jane it's going to be different. She knows me, she trusts me, she says she loves me, she thinks she is bearing our child. When I tell her that things are not at all as they seem, she will be utterly incredulous; and then, as she comes to believe, what exquisite pain there will be, what complete betrayal. The man she cherishes, the man she butterfly-kisses, the man she sleeps curved around like two spoons in a drawer. It is he who is evil, he who is sworn to destroy her, an emotional quisling of the first water.

  I can bide time now, polish up my adamantine treachery, since I've decided now what I want to do. It's pointless for me to dwell on The Fat Controller's unsportsmanlike tactics. Wasn't evil always thus, banal, pinching its plots from elsewhere and shamelessly bastardising them? This business of cropping up in Jane's womb, it's only the latest in a long procession of shoddy gimmicks. I don't want to react, to show myself to be any weaker than I am, because that's quite weak enough.

  Jane will be asleep soon, she's not a big sitter-upper. She'll probably take a couple of sips of her camomile, read a few lines of a novel and then start sliding down into the dark burrow of sleep. Usually, when I come upstairs, I tuck her in and turn off the lamp on her side of the bed.

  So that leaves me here, I'll be undisturbed whilst I'm being disturbing. Here in the dun kitchen, listening to the fridge, with the whole night ahead of me, I want to try and explain, if I can, how all of this came to be. How it could have been that my idea of fun diverged, so far and so fast, from what might have been expected of someone like me. But I also want it understood by you that this explanation isn't intended as justification of any kind. I don't need to justify myself, I only want to be understood. That's always the cry of the weak man, isn't it? He cries out for understanding when he has none of his own. But I ask you, do you understand, do you really comprehend what has happened to you? If you look at the entire course of your life does it resolve itself into a series of clear-cut decisions, places where the route divided and you took the right way rather than the left? Couldn't it just as easily have been the Hand of Fate, blind or otherwise, that nudged you? Either scenario would make as much sense for anyone. At least it isn't like that for me, I can actually point to my determinants, I can name them even: The Fat Controller for one, Dr Gyggle for two, and if I were pressed for a third it would have to be Mummy.

  Here's the hook. When I'm done we'll decide on it together, you and I. I'll give you the opportunity to participate in the denouement. I'm all for audience participation. After all, what's your fleeting embarrassment set beside my life's work? Don't worry, I intend to give full weight to our deliberations. When we're done I'll either go on upstairs, wake Jane, tell her the truth and have my fun as she expires, or I'll give up on the whole thing, pop my clogs and shuffle off into some other dimension altogether.

  I don't think I'm being overly dramatic about this and nor do I feel I'm shanghaiing you. After all, you're like all the rest, you like the world on your plate ready to be forked into two chunks, don't you? There's nothing more comforting for you than saying, ‘This is either this, or it's that.’ You do it all the time, it's as primary as breathing for you. I'm merely providing you with another opportunity to exercise your fine discrimination.

  Oh, and another thing before I go, before I sink into my own narrative. About that woman, the one at the dinner party this evening, the one with the Agadir tan. Why was it that what she said got to me so, prompted this gush, this breaking down of the safety bulwarks in my unsinkable Titanic psyche? Well, you see the thing is, I may have killed, I may have tortured, I may even have committed the very worst of outrages, but it hurt me too. Not as much as it hurt my victims, I'll grant you that, but it hurt me. I felt for them, you see, each and every one. From the woman The Fat Controller dispatched with his poisoned cane at the Theatre Royal to Fucker Finch's pit bull, all inclusive. I felt for them as they whimpered, as their bowels loosened – I felt for them as only someone who is precluded from feeling with them could ever feel.

  You catch my drift? Look, I'll make it clearer for you. Indulge me in a little exercise, if you will. What do you think the definition of ‘empathy’ is? Got that? Good. Now, what do you think the definition of ‘sympathy’ is? Jot it down on a scrap of paper if it helps you to fix it in your mind. Now go and look these two definitions up in the dictionary. I think you'll find that you've got them the wrong way round, that what you thought was empathy is really sympathy and vice versa. You see, that's been my problem – all the time I thought I was sympathising I was really empathising. I'm not going to make big claims about this semantic quirk but I do think it's worth remarking on, for when two key terms tumble over one another in this fashion you can be sure that something is afoot.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHAT YOU SEE IS

  WHAT YOU GET

  ‘Why do you call yourself the Beast?’ I asked him on the first occasion of our meeting.

  ‘My mother called me the Beast,’ he replied to my surprise.

  Julian Symonds, Introduction to

  The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

  A word first about a tricky concept that you need to be able to understand if you are to accompany me through what follows without flagging, and without getting lost. Woe betide you if you do, because where we are about to go is virgin territory. It's a wild primeval place, a realm of the id, where the very manifold of your identity can easily be gashed open, sundered, so that all the little reflex actions that you call your ‘self’ will spill out, just so many polystyrene personality pellets, tumbling from a slashed sag-bag. I will not be able to help you in this place and nor, may I say, do I wish to.

  This concept is eidetic memory and I am an eidetiker. Perhaps I was always meant to be one – whatever that means – or maybe it was part of the set-up, something to do with the way my destiny has been queered by you-know-who. But no matter, that is not the issue here.

  Eidetic images are pictures in the head. They are internal images that have the full force of conventional vision, but which are realised solely in the mind of the eidetiker. For me, it is almost impossible to imagine how it could be otherwise than that when I conceive of, say, a philosopher, I can see that philosopher as surely as if he were lying on this table in front of me. He's on his side, the deep notch between his sagging belly and his hard hip for all the world like a pass through mountains to a happier valley.

  Furthermore, if I look closely at this image of a philosopher that I have; I can see all his details, the stitching in his pullover, the ‘druff on his cuff, the very particular gleam of his spectacle frames.
I can even rotate my philosopher, spin him with great rapidity through three hundred and sixty degrees in all three dimensions; and yet stay him stock still again, if I so choose, without disturbing so much as one hair of his beard. It matters not what I do with my philosopher; in my mind's eye he will retain his pictorial integrity, his notable variegation, his subtle interplay of parts and whole.

  I know it's not like that for you. I know that when you imagine a philosopher, any philosopher, for instance the one you saw asleep in the park yesterday, his scalp-scurf merging seamlessly with a mossy wall, your mental image is sharp only when it is hazy and hazy as soon as you attempt to bring it into sharper focus. Isn't that so? The more you concentrate on your visual memory, the more you attempt to fix it securely, the more it slides away, like a quicksilver bead.

  If this example seems contrived to you, why not try it with something a little less abstract than a philosopher, for example, the visage of the one you love most. Come now, there must be someone to whom you can ascribe such status? Why don't you summon them up, enjoy the charming singularity of their countenance. Now, what can you see? That their eyes are such-and-such colour, that they style their hair just so, that their skin has this very fine grain, quite like microscopic hide? I'll grant you all of that – but not all at once. What you've done with Little Love is to describe an outline for them and then fill it in, piecemeal, as required. As it is to the sympathy, so it is to the photography. You cannot tell me that, when you appreciated the hue of those sympatico eyes, you also managed to take in the raw triangle of the Loved One's tear ducts? And if you did, did you perchance notice if they had any rheum on them, any at all?

  That's what's so achingly sad about your love – that's why it bulges in your heart like an incipient aneurism. For the harder you try to cement it to its object, the more that object eludes you.

  Let me reiterate: it's not like that for me. I can summon up faces from my yesteryears and hold a technician's blowtorch to their cheeks. And then, once the skin has started to pullulate, I can yank it away again and count the blisters, one by one, large and small. I can even dig into them and savour the precise whisper of their several crepitations.

  Now that's how eidetiking differs from yer’ average visualising.

  Usually eidetikers are idiots-savants. Many are autistic. It's almost as if this talent were a compensation for being unable to communicate with others. So it's hardly surprising that they don't find much use for their exceptional gifts. From time to time one will crop up on television, giving the donators at home an opportunity to adopt the moral high ground of someone else's suffering. Or else her résumé will appear, boxed in by four-point rules, well stuck in to a fourth-rate chat mag. These prodigies can take one glance at Chartres and then render it in pencil, right down to the grimace of the uppermost gargoyle on the topmost pinnacle. Big deal. That gargoyle might as well be the eidetikers themselves, for all the jollies they'll get out of their unusual abilities.

  I can tell you, it wasn't like that for me. I didn't have to spend my childhood in an institution, slavering on the collar of my anorak, and waiting for parental visits that never happened. I was an exception – an eidetiker who could communicate normally, who didn't have to resort to calculating fifteen digit roots in my head, in order to get some kind of attention.

  That being said, my eidetiking was something that I was virtually unaware of as a child. Indeed, had I not come under the influence of an exceptional man it's doubtful that anything would have come of it at all. After all, who cares whether someone's visual imagery is particularly vivid or not? Furthermore, how can this vividness be accurately described? I've done my best, but I know that I've begged as many questions as I've answered. Suffice to say that as long as I can remember I've been able to call up visual memories with startling accuracy and then manipulate them at will.

  Most of the time I didn't choose to, and for a longish period, in early adulthood, I temporarily lost the ability. But now I've got it back again. Casting behind me, looking over my shoulder, down the crazy mirror-lined passage that constitutes my past, the skill comes in handy. For I find that I only need to summon up one picture, one fuzzy snapshot – serrated of edge, Kodachrome of colour – to be able to access the entire album.

  A place that is not a place and a time that is not a time, that's where I spent my childhood. In a place that was chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea and at a time that was never some time but always Now.

  When I stand in this place, a high chalk bluff that curls down in a collapsing syncline to the bleached bone of a rocky foreshore, what do I see? Not what I saw as a child, for then I had only the raw sense of imminence to project on to that horizon. Time was child's time, the time that is like water, bulging, contained by the meniscus of the present. Now I have become aware – as have we all – of the true Trinity. God the Father, God the Son and God the Cinematographer. And so it is that I await the word rather than the flesh. For only humungus titles, zipping up from the seam between the sea and the sky, will convince me that I have really begun. Without them it is clear to me that my life has been nothing but a lengthy pre-credit sequence, and that the flimsiness of characterisation was all that was required by the Director, for a bit-player such as me.

  My father was a tenebrous, as well as a taciturn man. When I was a small child, say up until the age of seven, he was little more than a shadowy presence in my life. And soon after my seventh birthday he improved upon this status by beginning to absent himself from the family home. He would go off, initially for days but soon for weeks, along the South Coast, from ville to ville, reading in public libraries. And by the time I was ten he was little more than a ghost in the domestic machine. By the time I was eleven I hadn't seen him for a full year and a half. I don't know precisely when it happened, so attenuated had my relationship with him become, but one day I realised he wasn't coming back. I haven't seen him since.

  As if to underscore his peculiar irrelevance, unlike most of my recollections, my only memories of my father are not of his appearance, his manner, his wit or his wisdom, but solely of his smell. It's true that I only have to look in a mirror to see what he looked like. For as my mother has never tired of telling me, I am his spit, his doppelgänger. But stranger still is that his smell is my smell. Imagine that! When I lift my arm I get a whiff of him in the urine tang of my hardened coils. And if I smooth down the gingerish hairs on my freckled arm, the attic odour of dead skin is his as well. I think I could make out a case for this being sufficient – this nasal inheritance – to explain everything that follows. But as if it weren't enough to have someone else's bodily odour, added to this there is the Mummy smell. For the world has always smelt of Mummy as far as I am concerned. By this I mean that if bacon isn't frying, tobacco burning or perfume scintillating, I am instantly aware of the background taint. It's something milky, yeasty and yet sour, like a pellet of dough that's been rolled around in a sweaty belly button. It is the Mummy smell, the olfactory substratum.

  I'm searching, searching through my portable photo-library for shots of Daddy, evidence of him to support whatever claims his genes may have made to shape and direct me. Ah, here's the bungalow – starker, leaner, than it later became. The trellis-work around the door supports a spindly climber, Mummy holds little Ian – who's one and a half, maybe two? – like a misshapen rugby ball that someone has passed her; and which she wishes she could immediately pass-kick forward, beyond the touchline of maturity. But in place of Daddy, there's just this painted-in glob, this fuzzy outline. Somebody has got at my eidetic memory and retouched it. They've removed Daddy the way that the Stalinist propagandists painted out Trotsky. When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station and mounted the crude, hastily erected rostrum, Lev Davidovich was there. But as Vladimir ranted, Lev, like some Cheshire Cat, began to fade, the planks started to show through his brow; eventually all that was left was a stain.

  It's the same for the rest of my childhood. At all the Party Co
ngresses that we know Daddy to have attended, he has been negated, erased, excised from the picture. Whether propped against the bonnet of the family Mark 1 Cortina (same birthdate as my own), or sprawled on the sheep-cropped and sheep-bedizened grass around the Chantry, it's the same. Only Mummy and Ian, or Mummy, Ian and maternal relatives – plus this Daddy-absence; this Daddy-vacuity; this Daddy-erasure.

  I am a big man, like my father. I have his mousy hair and low forehead. I couldn't possibly be said to be ugly, for my features, in themselves, are shapely enough. The cratered dimple in my chin lines up precisely with the scoop out of my top lip and the narrow bridge of my long nose. No, my problem is the same as Daddy's – my features are marooned, set too far in to the middle of my wide face. Furthermore, the way everything falls away at the edges of my face is rather unpleasant. It gives a sodden, lippy impression, like the margin of a peat bog.

  I have my father's figure as well. Sometimes, when I inadvertently catch sight of myself getting out of the bath, I freeze, startled, and think: Who let that Russian peasant woman in here? But it's only me, because – you see – my hips are wider than my shoulders and my solid legs look as if babies could be squeezed out from their confluence as easily as grapefruit pips. I'm built like a babushka.

  And another thing, another point of resemblance. When I was a child I was reasonably well co-ordinated, but as I have grown up my sense of body has become both cloudy and diffuse. My fingers and toes are now distant provinces, Datias and Hibernias, cut off for years at a time from the Imperial nervous system. Without The Fat Controller's instruction in the blacker arts of physicality I would undoubtedly have become as hamfisted as Dad was. I certainly look as if I ought to be.