by Will Self
‘Feast your peepers on that.’ We were following them at a good clip. ‘Can you imagine what ghastly favours will obtain to the chief baboon, when this band enters a somewhat more farouche environment?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is, where they are going the pecking order they have created will take on a mortal significance, red in tooth and claw.’
‘What, in Hebden Bridge?’
‘No, booby! You know I cannot abide a booby! We are going to Hebden Bridge, they are going to partake in a spot of rather more radical rambling.’ His lycanthropic finger was out again, the triple-jointed middle one. It was rubbing up and down as if he were titillating an unseen erogenous zone.
As he spoke something untoward had begun to occur, something that was at one and the same time obscene and yet oddly natural. Up ahead of the scout-masterish walker, who strode along wielding his shepherd's crook, looking a quarter-century late for Aldermaston, a dilation came into being, a tear in the very air. It appeared to be some disturbance of the atmosphere, a puckering slash of the ethereal epidermis itself. It widened but nothing could be seen in the gap, save for the path ahead, winding on down to the valley. The scout-masterish type strode straight into the mouth of this cavity, and vanished.
I stopped walking and stared wide-eyed as the rest of the senescent strollers proceeded out of this dimension. When the last heel of the last boot had been swallowed up, the shimmering thing pulled its lips together, zipped itself back up and was gone.
‘What did you do to those people?’ I gasped. ‘Where have they gone? You've killed them, haven't you? You've destroyed them out of sheer pettiness!’
‘Nonsense, lad, do endeavour not to succumb to melodramatics.’ He'd stopped walking now as well and was regarding the end of his Montecristo with an expression of faintly weary inappetency. ‘I've merely done a little time-tailoring, simply removed one of the pleats or flares from the ostensibly straight leg of time.
‘They are in exactly the same place, walking down the same path’ – he paused, pulling back a cuff to expose his stone, circle-sized Rolex – ‘some four thousand years ago. No doubt they will find the experience a tad disorienting, but if they manage to avoid the marauding aurochs by day and the preying sabre-toothed tigers by night, they may find much in their new environment that is congenial.
‘I myself, being an arborophile, am delighted by the dense coniferous forests of the Neolithic period. Why, I even had this staff carved from one such, during my last venture there. Each year I whittle away another ring from it, a nice inversion, I may say, of the new science of dendrochronology.’
I had lost him. He might have been speaking Ursprache, for all that I understood. I was firmly in the present, watching the starlings cavort over and under the telegraph wires and the wind shimmer the young leaves into a muzzy Monet.
We walked on in silence for a while. He was smoking concentratedly. To break it up, fill the hiatus, I asked, ‘Why? Why, did you do that?’ And braced myself for the deluge of his anger. But none came.
‘This is, of course, a synecdoche,’ he said. ‘You see, my little licentiate, when these retired schoolmarms and redundant bank officials pitch up in the petrified era, they will be forced to test their high-tech equipment to its very limit. They will soon ascertain whether or not Gore-Tex and Timberland live up to their much-vaunted specifications.
‘More to the point, as they struggle to find their way to the coast – having realised the nature of their predicament, pendant to an encounter with their hairy forefathers that will leave half their number blinded and trepanned and two-thirds of the remainder dying from blood poisoning – they will gradually come to see the uttermost folly of their own moral precepts, their spiritual baggage, their transcendental ballast. They will realise fully the force of Broadhurst's Wager.’
‘I'm sorry?’
‘Broadhurst's Wager is the correct way round of looking at these things, an apt reversal of the sophistries of that anorexic apostate, scribbling on his Post-it notelets. It states: You are a fool to worship the deity. For, if he does exist he will surely forgive you for your dereliction, being such a sop in these matters, a meddling milk toast. And if he doesn't exist, why, at the moment of expiry you will feel an utter ass, the completest of fools. All those hours spent at tiresome tombolas, all those mornings kneeling on lumpy hassocks, all those pathetic agonies – the temporary loss and then short-lived recovery of the small change of faith, faith in a nothing, a nullity, a vacuum.
‘No, no, realise the full force of Broadhurst's Wager and the Christ-figure's absent father becomes what we all knew him to be. An errant neurotic, failing to keep up the maintenance payments to support his own creation. He's probably squandering the wherewithal on some teleological analysis, reclining on a couch that straddles the firmament. “Why?” he moans to his shrink. “Why did I do it?” But he cannot admit any of it really, oh no, for he's in chronic denial, denial of the existence of the world itself. Although, that being said, during particularly lucid and integrated moments, he will perhaps acknowledge the reality of some small part of it. Liechtenstein, for example.
‘But that's enough theology for one day.’ The Rolex was consulted again. ‘If we don't step on it the inn will have closed for the afternoon, and we won't get a glass of the urine of Culex pipiens. That which passes for beer in these parts. ‘
So it's Broadhurst's Wager that comes to me now, comes to me at three o’ clock in the morning while I harken to the cooling unit. As if I had to ask why it should be that there isn't any fun any more. Me of all people. If I didn't know I doubt I would be sitting here, waiting for the dawn to stream, screaming derision through the louvres, waiting for my wife to die. No, no, there's no fun any more, just my idea of it. Mine and his, his and mine.
We're like coke heads or chronic masturbators, aren't we? Attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of an instrinsically empty and mechanical experience. We push the plunger home, we abrade the clitoris, we yank the penis and we feel nothing. Not exactly nothing, worse than nothing, we feel a flicker or a prickle, the sensual equivalent of a retinal after-image. That's our fun now, not fun itself, only a tired allusion to it. Nevertheless, we feel certain that if we can allude to fun one more time, make a firm statement about it, it will return like the birds after winter.
Waking in our bed one morning, we'll hear a chorus of trills and cheeps; fun has come back to duster in the branches of the tree outside our window. We'll cosy down in joyful anticipation.
But as we rise and dress, as we leave the house to walk to the shop and buy a paper, it ebbs away, this false spring. We pass a playground. A group of kids are on a roundabout, one foot on and one foot off, they are pushing it at a giddy speed, round and around until their faces form a single banded blur. Out of this blur there stares a single set of eyes, eyes as sicklied o'er with cynicism as those of a dying cirrhotic hack, as those of an ecstatic teenager gibbering on a dancefloor, as those of a beaten wife punched in the mouth for the nth time.
Was he right? Have we fallen from grace? Is that it? Have we lost our collective innocence? Sometimes it seems that way, doesn't it? We feel like we've been thrust into, deflowered by the smirking, brutal world. But on the other hand it also feels as if we were the defilers. We've jiggled and joggled, lurched and reared, wee-ha! Wee-hey! Now spent, exhausted, heavier than ever, we pull ourselves off this fun-float, this transport of delight, to see beneath us a crushed flower, a stamped upon camellia, its pollen and sap smeared like blood on the infertile ground, the dry ground, the any old iron, lurking-tetanus ground.
How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement?
I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I tell you what I think, since you ask, since you dare to push your repulsive face at me, from out of
the smooth paintwork of my heavily mortgaged heart. I think there was only so much fun to go round, only so much and no more available. We've used it all up country dancing in the gloaming, kissing by moonlight, eating shellfish while the sun shatters on our upturned fork and we make the bon point. And of course, the thing about fun is that it exists solely in retrospect, in retroscendence; when you're having fun you are perforce abandoned, unthinking. Didn't we have fun, well, didn't we? You know we did.
You're with me now, aren't you? We're leaving the party together. We pause on the stairs and although we left of our own accord, pulled our coat from under the couple entwined on the bed, we already sense that it was the wrong decision, that there was a hidden hand pushing us out, wanting to exclude us.
We pause on the stairs and we hear the party going on without us, a shrill of laughter, a skid of music. Is it too late to go back? Will we feel silly if we go back up and announce to no one in particular, ‘Look, the cab hasn't arrived. We thought we'd just come back up and wait for it, have a little more fun. ‘
Well, yes, yes, we will feel silly, bloody silly, because it isn't true. The cab has arrived, we can see it at the bottom of the stairs, grunting in anticipation, straining to be clutched and directed, to take us away. Away from fun and home, home to the suburbs of maturity.
One last thing. You never thought that being grown up would mean having to be quite so – how can I put it? Quite so – grown up. Now did you? You didn't think you'd have to work at it quite so hard. It's so relentless, this being grown up, this having to be considered, poised, at home within a shifting four-dimensional matrix of Entirely Valid Considerations. You'd like to get a little tiddly, wouldn't you? You'd like to fiddle with the buttons of reality as he does, feel it up without remorse, without the sense that you have betrayed some shadowy commitment.
Don't bother. I've bothered, I've gone looking for the child inside myself. Ian, the Startrite kid. I've pursued him down the disappearing paths of my own psyche. I am he as he is me, as we are all . . . His back, broad as a standing stone . . . My footsteps, ringing eerily inside my own head. I'm turning in to face myself, and face myself, and face myself. I'm looking deep into my own eyes. Ian, is that you, my significant other? I can see you now for what you are, Ian Wharton. You're standing on a high cliff, chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea. You're standing hunched up with the dull awareness of the hard graft. The heavy workload that is life, that is death, that is life again, everlasting, world without end.
And now, Ian Wharton, now that you are no longer the subject of this cautionary tale, merely its object, now that you are just another unproductive atom staring out from the windows of a branded monad, now that I've got you where I want you, let the wild rumpus begin.
BOOK TWO
THE THIRD PERSON
Guilt, I liked the feeling so much I bought the whole damn emotion.
Farrah Anwar
CHAPTER SIX
THE LAND OF CHILDREN'S JOKES
If a person tells me that he has been to the worst places I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me that it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.
Wittgenstein
The Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs dabbles its soot-stained foundations in the dry gulch of Hampstead Road. It is a confused structure, for the most part laid out like an expanded collection of Victorian alms houses, but in the thirties it was book-ended with further accretions.
To the rear of the hospital, facing the low bluish bulk of Euston Station and bounded by the rentable air-conditioning of the Kennedy Hotel, there is a tangled garden. This space was set out with aristocratic beneficence, to provide the staff and patients with a gentle gravelly progress around a pattern of beds and lawns. Over the years the funding has trickled away, to be replaced – in the garden at least – by dead leaves and sodden pieces of moulded foam, the remains of some forgotten, but no doubt essential, act of packaging.
If you face it from across the Hampstead Road the thirties accretion to the left of the hospital resembles nothing so much as a banking blockhouse. With its facade of grey-yellow dressed stone it would be right at home among similar on Lombard Street. Set into the very corner of this annexe is a solid oaken door. It has no nameplate next to it and there is no other sign to indicate whether this is a subsidiary entrance to the hospital, or nothing to do with it at all.
Behind the oaken door is a reception area divided by two high steps. Beyond this, spreading out higgledy-piggledy along the level are a collection of sepia rooms with distempered walls. The carpet-tiled floors of these rooms are studded with large metal ashtrays that look like tissue boxes that have been mysteriously galvanised. Connecting the rooms are short corridors, their linoleum floors so scarified by cigarette burns that the black gouges give the semblance of a pattern. Off these corridors are urine-scented toilets, equipped with white bars that can be pulled away from the wall should you require assistance in standing. Clamped to the walls of these toilets are white metal boxes that dispense with unflagging regularity, absolutely nothing.
For six years this unprepossessing domain had been the fiefdom of Dr Hieronymus Gyggle, psychiatrist, specialist in addictive behaviours and – as he liked to style himself-practical philosopher. Where other people would have seen only the dregs of humanity, their faces and hands scuffed and broken by the hard labour of intravenous drug use, Gyggle saw chirpy Cockney junkies. As his great ginger beard escorted him around the premises he always half expected his clientele to leap up, stick their thumbs in their braces and break into song, ‘Consider yerself at home, consider yerself part of the fa-mi-ly.’
Then Gyggle was no ordinary shrink – as we know – and on this particular hot Friday afternoon in late summer, his activities, in their peculiar diversity, served to underscore this fact.
He was dividing his precious time between three ongoing projects. Firstly, in one of the sepia rooms sat six of his junkies, talking their way through a group therapy session. Gyggle made attendance at these groups mandatory for anyone who wanted to get on the ninety-day methadone reduction programme.
Secondly, in a plastic-curtained cubicle right at the back of the unit lay Gyggle's protégé, his oldest patient, a tall, plump marketing consultant by the name of Ian Wharton. Gyggle had brought Wharton with him from his last job as student counsellor at Sussex University, much in the way that a lesser doctor might have transported a favourite desk ornament or a collection of sporting prints.
Lastly, in the great man's office, which looked myopically through dirt-filmed windows on to the gardens described above, there sat a young woman, one Jane Carter. Jane was fidgeting, searching out the split ends that destroyed the precise line of her bobbed hair. She was also waiting for Gyggle, waiting for him to come and assess her suitability as a voluntary worker.
Gyggle strode through the drug dependency unit. His beard was so long and so rigid that it scouted out the corridors in front of him, possibly trying to draw sniper fire. Every so often he would stop to exchange cheery words with one or other of his colleagues. The smack heads, thought Gyggle bustling on, can wait and so can Ms Carter – what I must get under way is Ian's deep-sleep therapy. He paused and consulted a fake diver's watch which was shackled to his bony wrist. It's four now. I'll have to wake him by four on Sunday afternoon, or else he'll be too dopey for work on Monday and we wouldn't want that, oh no.
The plastic curtain pulled back and Ian looked up from where he lay on the examination couch, outlined in the long thin gap was the long thin form of Dr Gyggle. Gyggle propped himself in the gap, he dangled from the curtain rail on his mantis arms. He was chewing gum and the long fan of the beard swished across his shirt front with each chew. ‘Ah, Ian,’ he fluted. ‘Been here long? Nyum-nyum.’ Swish-swish went the beard.
‘Long enough.’
‘Feeling a little nervous, are we, or just sarky?’
‘I don't know what you mean.’
> ‘Sarky it is. Look, I want it clear, Ian, that I'm not pressurising you to do this. You can get up off that couch and go home if you want. I don't even want to put you under if you haven't got the right attitude.’
‘Oh, and what is the right attitude?’
‘Well, here's how I see it,’ and just like any other ghastly enthusiast Gyggle propped one of his infinitesimal buttocks on the side of the couch and hitched up his trouser legs, preparatory to delivering his lecture. ‘Deep sleep is a logical extension of the role of psychiatrist as shaman. If we consider the act of interpretation – as in either psychoanalysis or dynamic psychiatry – as analogous to the forms of auspication practised by such individuals, then the deep-sleep experience can be equated with their summoning up of a possession trance.
‘In traditional societies the possession trance is invoked to purge demons by putting the subject in touch with his tutelary spirit. So, what I'm hoping for from this is that through protracted exposure to dream sleep your psyche will realise, and then dissolve the cathexis you have built up around this mythical character, this “Fat Controller”.’
‘Please,’ said Ian, hefting himself up on one elbow: ‘You must refer to him as “The Fat Controller” and it's important to capitalise the definite article – even in thought. ‘
‘You see!’ Gyggle exclaimed. ‘You see what a hold this still has on you. Don't you want to be free of him?’
‘Oh for Christ's sake, you know I do.’
‘Well then, the therapy is worth a try. Now slip out of your things, I'm going to give you a pre-med shot.’
‘What?’
‘We'll put you under and keep you there with a sedative, but the sensation of losing consciousness can be unpleasant, so it's a good idea for you to be relaxed beforehand. Now do what I say, Ian, and don't quibble.’