by Will Self
I was in my caravan, trying to study on a Sunday afternoon in mid-winter. I was reading some gimcrack book about economics, full of those pictograms that fall half-way between diagrams and drawings, when I heard the thudding of a diesel engine running under the roar of the gale coming in off the sea and over the whirr of the fan heater that was marinading my feet.
The rounded rectangle of my little window on the world gave me a television picture of the site. Outside in the howling, flobs of rain were twisting and twining around the few remaining hutches. I felt a sense of profound foreboding and then I saw them, the gyppos. Naturally I recalled who they were at once the hawkish profiles, the jet tangles of hair were doubly outlined as the window of their truck slid by mine.
I was outside in an instant. Their brakes must have locked as they were coming down the slope, for there was a twenty-yard slice of chocolate loam where their wheels had scoured the turf. ‘What are you up to!’ I shouted over the gale. ‘Look what you've done. This is private property, you know.’ Even as I shouted I sensed the utter absurdity of my words and the ludicrous figure I presented, a slovenly, plump young man, so obviously clumsy and ineffectual, rabbit's ears of shirt-tail escaping from my waistband.
They leapt from the cab in just the way I remembered, lithe and dangerous. ‘Gerrart-of-it!’ said the larger of the two, moving purposively towards me. ‘Come fer thass.’ He indicated the shiny fuselage of Mr Broadhurst's caravan.
‘But where is Mr Broadhurst?’
‘I dunno, laddie. S'not a problem. Gor'all pepperworks ‘ere.’ He thrust the edge of a clipboard at me like a weapon.
The other gyppo had come up by his shoulder. He was flexing and twisting his simian arms, as if limbering up for violence. ‘D'jew wanna argue, muvverfuckah,’ he spat.
I broke from them, and ran back up the slope to my mother's house. I ran the length of the new hallway, with its Wilton carpeting, faux hunting prints and brocaded wallpaper. I found her in the back kitchen, standing over the chef who was rolling out pastry. ‘Those gyppos are here,’ I panted. ‘They say they're going to take Mr Broadhurst's caravan.’
She looked at me critically, lifting her new gold-rimmed bifocals on to the bridge of her nose. ‘Try not to track mud into the house, Ian, and don't you think you should drop the term “gyppos” from your vocabulary – it's awfully common. ‘ Thora Hird was dispensing homilies on the television; she was sitting in front of a Grecian urn.
‘But, Mum. He's never said anything to me about moving away from Cliff Top – ‘
‘Ah yes, Ian, but he has to me, he has to me.’
There it was, out in the open. She had no need to give it further emphasis, it could not have been clearer. She knew all about him, she knew all about ‘us'; and she either didn't care, or she approved altogether. My mother was at that time becoming suspiciously youthful in appearance. Her breasts were stranded back in the fifties. Enfolded in the crisp embrace of new money, they were pointed and hard, like the nose cones of rockets about to blast off for planetary exploration, the nurturing of new worlds. And her hair – that hair – still curling wilfully, as if every strand were an ungovernable sexual impulse. How could I ever have trusted her?
The new stripped-pine floor vibrated; through the sash window I could see the black truck pulling up the drive towards the main road, the silver caravan coming behind like a drogue that was preventing the gypsies from submerging, escaping into the very centre of the earth. With them went went whatever chance I ever had of regaining my childhood.
CHAPTER FIVE
REHABILITATION
Illness is the beginning of all psychology.
What? Could psychology be – a vice?
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Here’s how it happened. I went on attending the university, doing my course modules, and avoiding intimacy in whatever way it proffered itself to me. At the same time I practised assiduously my calculus of personal ritual to ward off any kind of eidesis. I was determined to live as far as possible in the now. If ever I was tempted by the seductive stasis of an eidetic image, I punctured its reflecting skin with a dart and tore it away to reveal the structure of habit below. I squinted and transformed the galaxy into the dust of my dead skin; I always read ‘YAW EVIC’ from the glistening macadam and avoided giving way. I came to be capable – as he had said I would – of the most beautifully consistent combinations of apprehensions with little twistles of kinaesthetic intimation. I became – in my own small way – a Cassandra of Ca-ca. The most piddling aspects of my embodiment furnished me with prophecy: hanging on whether the flap of gum skin comes away, then . . . the leaf will fall or not fall, I will die or be immortal, the sun will rise or not.
Indeed, it was at this time that, ironically, I turned myself into a genuine adept of the Magus of the Quotidian. So much so that for weeks at a time I could live without eidetiking at all. Ironically, because having shown me what he termed ‘retroscendence’, The Fat Controller was content to let me stew in my own juice for a while.
I actually thought that his technique for unpacking the hidden history of products was despicable. I wanted my understanding of business to be entirely different, based firmly on analysis and deduction rather than any kind of weird visual intuition.
I dimly understood that by holding out to me this realm of material essences, available by an act of will alone, The Fat Controller was condemning me to a cosmos of brand names, a metaphysic of motifs, a logic of logos, and an epistemology based on EPOS (The Electronic Point of Sale method of inventory-keeping, which was just coming into use at this time among major retailers). Mine was to be a psyche available for product placement – that was his intention. The interior of my mind was to be shaped according to his merchandising plan, with circular display racks of concepts standing in aisles of cogitation, flanked by long shelves groaning with brightly coloured little ideas.
I could see that if I were to give way to retroscendence the average supermarket gondola, stuck with myriad products like a hedgehog with spines, would become a mystic test-bed able through its thousand portals to suck me into individual sagas so complex, so durable, that I would perhaps never reemerge.
The very ecosystem I inhabited was also to be one of products, striving against built-in obsolescence to individuate themselves, using whatever human means were at their disposal to advance their branded species. I was conscious that underlying it all there must be some Law of Unnatural Selection, which could prove that the fittest product with the most colourful packaging was the most likely to be pollenated by purchase.
But against all my expectations, the longer he kept away, the more I found I could hack it. I relapsed into a seeming normality. I freed myself from the antiquated strait-jacket of his verbose speech patterns. I even smartened myself up, becoming something of a dandy. The boxer shorts from Barries’ were followed by shirts and socks, then by jackets and trousers from Di Stato (Anzio's high-street chain), and eventually some Hoage's shoes.
I had no vices and I couldn't take anyone out, so I had nothing to spend my student grant on save for clothes. In my mind at least I was already the smartly turned-out, bright and efficient young executive that I aspired to be. I was determined to render myself generic by the time I left university.
A few months of living like this behind me, I almost managed to convince myself that my whole involvement with the man I called ‘The Fat Controller’ had been an elaborate fantasy. After all, what evidence did I really have? There's nothing wrong with a man living under an assumed name and besides that, I couldn't prove that Mr Broadhurst and Samuel Northcliffe were one and the same, any more than I could prove that it was The Fat Controller who had killed the woman at the Theatre Royal with a spring-loaded hypodermic full of curare, rather than anyone else.
As for my eidetic happenings, I found them suspect as well; they were so clearly a product of my own fervid visual imagination. When I came to think about it, it struck me that almost all the aspects of my e
idesis that The Fat Controller played upon had preceded his intervention, rather than followed from it.
I began to wonder whether or not I had been the victim of an extended delusion, which was perhaps the function of an overheated adolescence leading to some kind of psycho-hormonal explosion. I knew little of psychology but enough to be aware of the impact on the unformed ego of an absent father. Could my investiture of Mr Broadhurst with such sinister and wide-ranging powers have been my way of dealing with the chronic lack of a proper role model?
Under the influence of this late surge of rational speculation I tried to view myself in a different light. Perhaps I wasn't the plaything of a mage, who was determined to drag me into a frightening and chaotic world of naked will, only a seriously neurotic person in need of help.
But what kind of help? I didn't know who or where to turn to. So for the meanwhile I continued with my ritualised observances, obsessively counting the number of steps it took me to walk to any given location, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement for fear that the bears of the id might get me, and attending to my bodily functions with the pure metrical devotion of a sadhu.
I also played with the idea that what afflicted me was some kind of strabismus of the psyche. If I strained I could see the world as others did, stereoscopically, but if I relaxed binocular vision would ensue, and while one ‘eye’ would remain focused, the other would slide away into the clouded periphery where The Fat Controller and his machinations held sway. What was required to hold him at bay was constant vigilance.
Constant vigilance and isolation are a wearing combination, wearing and depressing. I might struggle to hold fast to my course, to become just another off-the-peg person dangling on the idiomatic hook (line and sinker), my voting habits purely a function of minute alterations in fiscal policy, but a moment's relaxation could have a jolting impact.
The Fat Controller – whatever he might be – had ceased to manifest himself. And the human frame on to which I had grafted this delusion had definitely left Cliff Top, but despite this, from time to time I would come across what seemed like obscure messages, quirkily encoded, that threatened to upset my peace of mind.
One day I was browsing in the university library, when for no reason that I could pick upon I drew a biography of Newton from one of the shelves. Flicking through it, I came across a passage that described his psychotic breakdown. Apparently, during the autumn (Ha!) of 1693, Newton – always eccentric and blockaded from the world – became increasingly deluded. He wrote a series of letters to Pepys, Locke and other friends, accusing them of being atheists and Catholics. He even intimated that they had tried to corrupt him by sending female temptresses to seduce him in his Cambridge rooms. The biographer speculated that it may have been failure in his alchemical experiments that led to this breakdown.
It was broad daylight when I read this passage and the sunlight that radiated through the high plate-glass windows illuminated a scene of modernity and order. It didn't matter – as soon as I read the word alchemy, alarm bells began ringing in the fire station of my mind. The engines of ritual, which stood ever ready to staunch any eruption of the magical were speedily limbered up. It was too late, I couldn't prevent myself from eidetiking Mr Broadhurst's unusual caduceus, the one he had made out of an old TV aerial garnished with flex, and I couldn't prevent myself from reading on:
Newton wrote to Locke saying that he had ‘received a visit from a certain Divine of monstrous and Toad-like appearance. This man, or beast, claimed cognisance of divers operations in the Science of Alchemie of which I have had no acquaintance. He insisted on examining my alchemical equipment and pronounced that my method of Fixation was inexact. He also drew my Attention to what he claimed were certain impurities in the material of my Cupel. Furthermore he Intimated to me that there was a pure distillate of the very Stone itself buried in precincts of Glastonbury Abbey, to which he alone had access. I cannot do justice to the disagreeable impression that this man, one Broadhurst, had upon me . . .
I shut the book with a bang. I clenched out the light and stuck my fingers in my ears. I rotated the nails so that a cheese paring of wax was scoured from the surface of the drum. I rolled the two pellets of wax between the forefingers and thumbs of each hand and then replaced them in the opposite ears, the whole time humming and appreciating the bitable texture of the linoleum beneath my soles.
On opening my eyes I didn't dare to imagine that this would have worked. I expected him to be with me, his stentorian ubiety transmogrifying the spacious library into somewhere shabby and small. But there was no one.
There were other such incidents. Attracted by the cover with its depiction of a colourful Chinese dragon, I leafed through a copy of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. This time I chanced upon a passage where the writer was awakened from his narcotic slumbers by a knocking at his cottage door:
The servant girl came into my chamber and told me that there was a ‘sort of demon’ downstairs, jabbering in a strange tongue. I made myself presentable and sallied forth. In the kitchen I found my servant and a stray village child, both dumbstruck by this apparition. I soon established that the ‘jabbering’ they spoke of was none other than classical Greek, of which this portly figure had an exact command.
‘You are the Opium Eater?’ said the man.
‘I am,’ I replied quaveringly.
‘Then, dear fellow, make with the stuff, bring forth a get-up, lay on the gear, give us a decent hit for the love of Mike, for by Zeus I am surely clucking fit to bust.’
Strange as it nlay seem, I was struck more by this man's preoccupation with opium than by his appearance or choice of language. I gave him a piece, which to my horror he popped straight into his mouth, for it was surely large enough to kill some half-dozen dragoons together with their horses. Then, without more ado, he turned on his heel and left, slamming the door behind him. It was only later when I came to reflect on this incident, that I recalled the man's appearance. He was excessively fat and had a sinister and agressive expression. Altho’ his physiognomy was European, he was clad in the turban and loose trousers of a Malay.
I cannot say whether this manifestation was a product of opium or not but ever after the most excruciating of my opium torments have regularly visited me with his likeness and the haunted corridors of my mind have resounded with his peculiar bombast. Perhaps his aspect was a function of those involutes of memory of which I have spoken; and his combination of these attributes, the brutish apparel of the Malay, the features of a bibulous beadle and his predilection for opium were no mere chance but a deep expression of my own pain?
I no more believed in ‘mere chance’ than De Quincey. The juxtaposition of erudition and slang, the gargantuan habits, the ‘sinister and agressive expression’. Surely this was another clue, another coded reference; either that or my capacity for fantasy, temporarily dislodged from my visual imagination, had taken up residence in another realm, polluting my very ability to comprehend.
In a way, The Fat Controller's new method of checking up on me was even more disturbing than his old. I went into a steep decline. I started to show up for my seminars and tutorials shabbily clad, or not at all. One week I failed to turn in an essay on the trade deficit. This was out of character. At the next seminar Mr Hargreaves – the same tutor who had referred poor June to me – asked me to stay behind.
‘Wharton,’ he began nervously, ‘it might not be my place but I have to say that I'm a little worried about you.’
I shuffled uneasily. ‘Well, err . . . you know, I've been getting rather anxious about my finals.’
‘Come off it, you do consistently well in all your modules – I've had a word with your course tutor – and as you've been continually assessed, you couldn't flunk now even if you wanted to. What's the problem, lad? Apparently you never have anything to do with your peers, you're a solitary. Perhaps I shouldn't interfere but I hate to see a young man throwing his life away.’
I looked into hi
s face. Hargreaves was a bit like a large rodent, a capybara or coypu. He had a questing snout and thin limbs held bent up against his adipose body. It almost goes without saying that he also had fine, Beatle-cropped brown hair and affected a close-clipped beard with the dense consistency of fur. It ran right up and over his cheekbones, leading one to suspect that it was important for him to shave his eye sockets and forehead daily, if he wanted to avoid becoming altogether bestial.
‘Yeah,’ I muttered at last. ‘I haven't been feeling that great.’ Then the words started to hiss out of me, stale, rubberised air escaping from a subsiding Li-lo. ‘It's just . . . it's just . . . that I don't have many friends and I do feel sort of isolated, I s'pose – ’ I pulled up short, I was trespassing on forbidden ground, getting close to revealing more than I should. How could I talk of my other world amid the absolute certainties of textured louvres, plastic chair-and-desk combinations and colour-coded felt-tips?
‘If you are feeling depressed’ – Hargreaves was entirely solicitous – ‘it might be an idea for you to see the Student Counsellor. He's there to help you with any problems you have, did you know that?’ I muttered something affirmative. ‘Look, here's what I'm going to do.’ He brightened up, getting the glow of a man who feels himself on the verge of discharging a disagreeable responsibility. ‘I'm going to make an appointment for you to see Dr Gyggle – he's not just a counsellor, he's also a qualified psychiatrist. I'm absolutely sure that a chat with him would help you. You needn't worry’ – he was getting happy now, preening his face with his tiny hands – ‘this conversation we've had will remain just as confidential as anything you may say to him.’
The next day there was a note from Hargreaves in my pigeonhole – I was to see Dr Gyggle that afternoon. There seemed no going back on it without having to retail some further lie and anyway I was sick at heart – without The Fat Controller's gyroscopic girth to encompass it my world was spinning out of control.