My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  And my hands, my heavy hands, they glided over her with careful diffidence, not so much touching or feeling but defining her anatomy. They located her shoulder blades, her spine, the small of her back, and then slid between our compressing bodies and travelled up to the tiny soft immensities of her bosom.

  For the first time since my balls had dropped I felt wholly in the moment, unafflicted by my meddlesome internal projectionist. All my wank footage lay in dusty spirals on the cutting-room floor. I was free.

  Then, somehow, we were in my caravan. The fold-away bed was let down. Without shyness, without hiding ourselves from each other, we undressed. She pulled the leather clasp from her hair and shook it free in a whirl of golden brown. She unbuttoned her blouse. I dropped my trousers. As I stood on one foot to remove them, the little cabin shifted on its suspension but there was no embarrassment, not even in the disparity between the utility of our underwear and the transcendence of our desire. We were alone together in some prelapsarian grotto. Her body was ochre against the light-blue side of the caravan. I held her to me as we fell across the bed, feeling her lithe life-force twitching against me as beautiful as a rainbow trout, leaping from a mill race into my outstretched arms.

  She touched me with confidence. I couldn't believe it. Both her hands around my penis, cosseting it, restraining it. I licked her neck, the backs of my fingers prinked her pink nipples. We sighed. The heel of my hand was firm on her mons, my fingertips strummed gently at her lips, parted them. We rippled on the yellow sheet, the counterpane – and us – long gone.

  She led me on, instructing me, indicating her desires with soft tweaks and softer pats. In due course, it was time. She moved back against the pillow and drew me on top of her. Her legs fell open and oh! The kid softness of her thighs, the honey of her breath, the sweet intensity of it. My urge to enter her, to be inside her, was stronger than anything I had ever felt.

  ‘Yes!’ she sighed. ‘Now!’ she gasped.

  I felt the beginnings of a slithering enfoldment. I looked out of the tiny window over her shoulder, willing myself to make it slow, to make it last. A hard square of orange light sprang on in the darkness. Someone – I realised with a start – was in The Fat Controller's caravan.

  Beneath me June's body froze, becoming utterly immobile, lifeless. Sex time stood still. The little door of my caravan squealed open. He stood there in full evening dress, the shiny black rim of his topper slicing across the bulge of his massive brow. His Partagas perfecto was champed between his inner tube lips, a diamond as big as a buttercup sparkled on the starched front of his dress shirt, a long white silk scarf was casually looped around his lack of a neck.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, as I scuttled like a giant shaved rodent into the furthest corner of the caravan. ‘Trying to have a little fuck-for-real, are we?’ I looked back at the bed, at June rigid in ecstasis, her eyes blank and upturned. ‘No need to worry about her.’ The Fat Controller entered the caravan casually, his eyes darting about taking in my few effects, our scattered clothes, the pile of economics books on the little table. ‘Got an ashtray? No? No matter.’ He flicked two inches of ash on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed I had just vacated. June's body rocked longitudinally on its curved spine, then fell sideways. It was as stiff and brittle as a lifesize plaster maquette.

  ‘Cat got yer’ tongue?’ I was gibbering quietly, I felt the head of my penis stickily retreat back inside its hood of skin. ‘You needn't worry about her,’ he repeated, gesturing at the naked girl. ‘She'll get her climax – which is more than you could have managed. I'll engineer it myself after we've had a little chat. You shan't be shamed for she'll think you a great lover, a real Lothario, a dandy Don Juan. And the very fact that the experience will never ever be repeated will make the remembrance burn for her a hundred times as bright.

  ‘D'ye see that? When she's married ten years hence, she'll compare her husband's performance with yours and he'll come off worse – every time. Memories are cruel to the present in that way and, as far as sexual intercourse is concerned, it is axiomatic that familiarity breeds contempt. ‘ Predictably, he chortled at his own execrable pun.

  I was still gibbering. Muffled bleats and strangled gurgles leaked from my lips. ‘Oh do can it! Come here, put a pair of trousers on or something. We need to talk and I'm tired. I've just been driven back from Covent Garden and I want to get to bed. You are a very lucky young man indeed. If Tommaso hadn't troubled to have me paged at the opera, you would certainly have performed coitus with this young woman and d'ye know what would have happened then?’

  ‘N-no.’ Somehow I had managed to squirm back into my trousers. I crouched on the tiny oblong floor, clutching the only breasts that were left for me to clutch – my own.

  ‘Your penis would have broken right off inside her and I mean that quite literally. I thought you understood about coitus, I thought you appreciated what being my licentiate entailed?’

  ‘Y-yes, but – ‘

  ‘My dear boy.’ He was conciliatory. ‘I know this must be difficult for you, perhaps even a little traumatic, but don't take it to heart. All in good time you will have a bed partner and let me tell you, you will care for her far more than you ever could for this one. It's a function of your relationship to me, d'ye see? I have, how shall I put it, organised an elective affinity for you already. Everything in that department is in train, so don't spoil it.’

  He was resting his huge hand on June's angled knee as casually as if it were the arm of a chair. He twisted his Redwood trunk on the bed and looked down at her from under his lashless lids. He scrutinised the rictus of her pleasure, which was rendered grotesque by its immobility. We both stared at her vagina. Its slick lips ‘o'ed back at us. The Fat Controller blew a plume of cigar smoke at it from out of the corner of his mouth; the blue strands interleaved with her browner ones.

  ‘Right, that's all, I'm off to bed now. I'm absolutely fagged out, grand opera is too, too fatiguin’. I had to sit next to a monstrously fat man. It was bloody hot in the stalls and his sweat stank. It was as if he were shitting out of every pore.’ He spoke casually and with no sense of irony. Then he stood and gathered his hat, cigar and white gloves together in one hand. Pausing at the door he turned once more and extended the middle finger of his right hand towards the bed. I noticed for the first time that it was dreadfully long. The very tip of the finger began to oscillate. It seemed to be locked on to some invisible beam that was projecting from out of June's vagina. The colour rushed back into her face, her back arched still further, she whimpered and thrashed, her outstretched hands clutching at the edge of the mattress. The Fat Controller addressed me over the sounds of her orgasm, paying no attention to them at all. We might have been in a shopping concourse and her cries some strange species of muzak:

  ‘Ah! Ahh! Ahhhherrr! O – O . . .’

  ‘. . . I have business at the university tomorrow, so I'll come and find you afterwards. It occurs to me’

  ‘H-h-a hnh . . . ha, ha, Ha! . . .’

  ‘. . . that I have been neglecting your education. I can be of more service vis-à-vis your ambitions than I have heretofore. Consider it’

  ‘Yes, oh yes, oh-yesss . . . ‘ She was subsiding.

  ‘. . . something by way of a compensation for this.’ He indicated the young woman he was dehumanising on the bed. ‘Now, pop your trews off and give her a cuddle; and make sure she's out of here soon, I don't want her mooning about in the morning.’ He turned to leave but then swivelled back once more. ‘Remember, put your pecker in her or any other doxy and’ – he held up his stogie braced between three fingers – ‘this is what will happen.’ He snapped it in two – gave me a leer – and was gone, as suddenly as he had arrived.

  I did as I was told. While I cuddled June I cried, wept hot tears. She was terribly moved. She cleaved to me, slipping her legs between mine. I explained, as gently as possible, that my mother was very old-fashioned and always checked up on me in the morning. About 3 a.m. I mana
ged to get her into the car and drove her back to her aunt's in Hastings.

  Powering the skateboard of a car back along the coast road, home to Cliff Top, I felt its wheels skittering on the damp surface and my arms yearned to yank the steering wheel hard round, ending this nightmare. Only The Fat Controller's talk of ‘elective affinity’ prevented me. Now, of course, I wish I had.

  The following day June sought me out, after a seminar on management technique. We stood on the concrete set of the main concourse while extras thronged about. ‘How about tonight?’ she said and the pathos in her ignorant unknowing enquiry almost made me gag. My mind flew back to the sight of The Fat Controller's cigar. I had trodden on its shattered corpse that morning on my way out of the caravan.

  ‘I – I can't, really, not tonight. Sorry.’

  ‘What's up? Have you got to go visiting with Mummy? I thought we might do some studying together. You know I don't want “us” to get in the way of work.’

  ‘Haha. No, I'd love to. It's just there's something else I must do. I can't really talk about it now. I'll tell you tomorrow.’ I couldn't bear her look of hurt expectancy any more, so I tore myself away from her face and walked off. I realised that, if I was going to have to break with her, the process of rejection might as well get started right away. As I reached the end of the student union building I looked back and gave a little finger-wiggle. Even from fifty yards away I could see her pained expression.

  Turning the sharp corner of toughened glass with its graph-paper patterning of buried wire, I ran into someone – or some thing. Although I was walking at a normal pace the impact stunned me. My head rang with that particular vibration of accidental pain, a tintinnabulating effect that always feels as if it should have preceded its cause – by way of a warning.

  ‘You're rather good at walking into me, aren't you?’ He was in a Prince of Wales check this morning. The sight of such an expanse of tiny squares, flowing up and around his massive elevation, produced more of an architectural than a sartorial impression. ‘I trust your inattention is a function of scholarly absorption, rather than adolescent spooning.’

  ‘What difference can it possibly make?’ It was a measure of my despair that I dared to be so disdainful.

  ‘Don't get chippy, boy, I cannot abide it.’ But although he was terse, he didn't rage at me the way I expected him to. I suppose I half-hoped that he would zap me with extinction the way he had zapped June with orgasm the night before but his horrible middle finger was folded around a reeking cheroot and showed no sign of flexing.

  He put my felonious body in the stocks of his arm and led me off in the direction of what passed for a garden at Sussex, a series of brick-edged parallelograms that couldn't have looked more artificial if they had been planted with cathode-ray tubes, instead of hardy perennials. To anyone who was watching we must have looked the very picture of youthful preoccupation and parental concern.

  ‘What have you been studying this morning then, eh?’

  ‘Management techniques.’

  ‘Oh yes, and what are they?’

  ‘Well’ – I hated myself for responding to his interest – ‘we were looking at different kinds of organisational hierarchy and how to construct optimal decision-making procedures in corporate contexts.’

  ‘I see. Can you really give any credence to this ordure?’

  ‘I'm sorry?’

  ‘This crap.’

  ‘Well, it's essential, isn't it? I mean somebody has to have an idea of what's to be done and how it should be communicated to the employees.’ I was earnest, like any aspiring young person trying to draw out approval. He seemed to ignore the substance of what I had said.

  ‘What Is To Be Done?’ he mused. ‘That's what I said to Vladimir Ilyich. Naturally he cribbed it for the title of a pamphlet, when what I actually meant by it was some advice. I urged him to have a few of the young daughters of the gentlefolk before he established the provisional government at the Smolny Institute. He was headstrong enough, although not as cold and passionless as they later made out.’

  We went on walking for a while, in silence. Eventually The Fat Controller pulled me up in front of a viciously scalped hedge of box. He took the cheroot from his mouth and peered at its slobbered-on green end, as if it were a reptilian rump about to grow a new tail. ‘I thought you were interested in products,’ he said, a wheedling tone entering his voice. ‘I can help you in that area.’

  ‘We've done merchandising, purchasing, sourcing and inventory auditing.’

  ‘That's not what I'm talking about. What I can help you with is an understanding of the nature of a product that goes far beyond these crudities; these academic categories masquerading as truths.’

  ‘I'm interested in the marketing side of things. How to evolve a strategy to actually sell a product. You know, advertising, sales promotion, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Of course, chip off the old block, aren't you?’

  ‘Yeah, I know “contemptible Essene, cloistral nonentity”, that's what you said to me.’

  ‘You have a fair recollection, boy, I'll grant you that. Tell me, how much of that recollection is visual and how much verbal?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do you first need to form a picture of the two of us sitting in that café discussing your father – an eidetic image before the words come to you, or not?’

  ‘I suppose I do need to – ‘

  ‘. . . So you were being disingenuous. You know exactly what I mean.’ His thumb and forefinger pinched the sides of my neck, one big pad pressing into my carotid artery. My head roared with neon pins and needles, at once visual and sensual. He went on with the conversation, in my mind, ‘Do you remember your underpants then?’ I was slumped against him, almost fainting, conscious only that he had led me behind a red-brick loggia, obviously so that we would be out of sight of the people in the main concourse while he dispatched me. ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘W-what about my underpants?’ I stuttered, coughed. Why wouldn't he get it over with?

  ‘I want you to recall the label of said underpants, summon it up as fully as you possibly can. I want to know whether the legend thereon was printed, or machine-embroidered; whether the label itself was stitched into the pants, or appliquéd in some fashion; whether the label indicates an element of design, or whether the information it retails relates purely to the material constitution of the aforementioned pants. Can you do that?’ He knew I could, he was toying with me. ‘Now when you have the image, let me see it. ‘

  ‘W-whaddya mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He relaxed his death-hold on me and made me sit down with him on a convenient bench. I idly noted that a brass plate declared that this bit of garden furniture was sacred to someone's memory. I wished it was mine.

  I did as he said. The label was sewn on to the crinkled, elasticated hem of the pants, which were boxer shorts, blue-and-white-striped like mattress ticking. The legend on the label read ‘Barries’ Menswear, 212 King's Road, London, 100% Egyptian Cotton.’ It was easy for me to summon up this everyday vision, because whenever I sat on the toilet the hem was stretched between my calves, and if I leant forward it was always the salient object in my view.

  ‘Good. Now, what I am about to teach you is an extension of your eidetic capability which you will find of great use in your intended career. There is no word, at least in current usage, that does justice to this advanced technique, so I have had to coin a term of my own. I call it “retroscendence”.’ He paused and looked at me, as if trying to gauge what kind of impression this hokum was making. ‘Before we retroscend allow me a few prefatory remarks on your pants. Firstly, let us refer to them simply as “shorts”. You are too callow to be aware of this but the term “boxer shorts” is merely a marketing neologism, coined in order to revamp a demand for what in England was perceived as an outmoded type of underwear. In America where the loose, cotton, mid-thigh-length male undergarment has consistently maintained its market shar
e, there has never been any need to call these things anything but shorts.

  ‘A second point, you are not conspicuously dandyish, indeed, I would say that you have grown to adult size with but little appreciation of the value of effective turn-out. Be that as it may, I perceive in your decision to purchase these shorts – you did purchase these shorts, didn't you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An attempt, albeit muted, to get to grips with a world beyond Saltdean. I picture you on a trip up to London, perhaps for a day's work experience at the offices of some conglomerate. Am I right?’

  ‘You're right.’

  ‘In your lunch hour you head down the King's Road from Sloane Square. You walk and walk, staring at the chic emporia. Here's one that sells just belt buckles, here's another exclusively devoted to pointed boots, or country and westernalia, or whatever. It hardly matters. You do not intend to enter. You would feel yourself embarrassed, shy, in front of the shop assistant, who would be so much more metropolitan, more sophisticated, than you. Instead you peer inside and try to calculate the merchandising policy: what value of stock is required, per metre of shelf space, to meet overheads and instill profit? Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was hypnotic, dreamy.

  ‘Of course I am. Nonetheless, you do still have some vanity, don't you? You still have the shame of the short-trousered recent past. You still – God knows why – wish to imagine that someone will inadvertently examine your underwear after the car crash of sexual congress. So after toddling about for a while you go into Barries’ and point out the shorts where they lie in the window, interleaved with their fellows. But I'm getting ahead of myself, when all I really want to teach you is the full history of such a product. That's the title of this lecture: “The History of the Product”, and like all good modern lectures – intended simply to garnish knowledge rather than impart it – this one uses visual aids.’