by Will Self
He pulled the local daily paper from under his arm and brandished it in the blue air as if it were a short sword. ‘We made the front page!’ he exulted, holding the rag up so that I could see the headline: ‘WOMAN DIES AT THEATRE ROYAL’. I began to tremble violently and would have fainted, had he not grabbed me by the elbow and guided me to a low wall, where I slumped down.
‘I can see that you're a trifle overcome,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Let me read you the copy: “A woman died last night during the interval at the Theatre Royal.” What appalling style, even twenty years ago one could expect a better standard of English. Anyway, no matter, it's a digression, where was I . . . yes: “The woman, who has yet to be named, was among a party of four attending Tea at Five for Six. Her companions alerted theatre staff when it became clear that she was having difficulty breathing. An ambulance was called but efforts made to revive her proved unsuccessful. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Brighton General.”
‘Well, there you have it. Not a pretty death, but as peaceful as she could have hoped for, given the circumstances. Let me see, let me see, what's this: “A spokesman for the police said that, although certain aspects of the woman's death were unusual, they did not suspect foul play.” Oh yes, oh yes indeed! Ahaha, ha ha. Of course not! Why should they? It was fair play, wasn't it, my lad, absolutely fair play. Wouldn't ye agree, lad, wouldn't ye?’
CHAPTER FOUR
MY UNIVERSITIES
Frigidity has only been better exemplified to me by the first psychotic woman I ever saw, who complained that her vagina contained a block of ice.
Anthony Storr
He was as good as his word. For the five years after the murder of the woman at the Theatre Royal his interventions in my life remained purely educative. He did not, as I had feared, ask me to perform covert assassinations on his behalf and nor did he insist on my using my eidetic capabilities to project myself into the noumenal world that he inhabited with such terrifying ease. Naturally he couldn't forbear from upsetting me, nor ruining what slim remaining chance I had of being like anyone – let alone everyone – else. He messed around with me emotionally, through dropping those bombshells of feeling – concerning my father, amongst other things – that I have alluded to before. Nevertheless this was small beer for him.
In due course I left Varndean and went to do business studies at Sussex University. For the first year I had a room on campus but I wasn't happy there so I returned to Cliff Top, where my mother put one of the caravans at my disposal.
By now there were only a few of them left, grouped like maintenance vehicles around The Fat Controller's wide-bodied jet of a home. The bungalow had been more or less cancelled out by mother's renovations. And arisen, phoenix-like, from its dusty and corrugated remains, was the tastefully false façade of Cliff Top, the hotel.
My time at university was, for a while at least, a happy one. I enjoyed my course of study and felt that the practicalities of business were a perfect antidote to the magic that had dominated my adolescence. Although we were sneered at by the arts and humanities students, those of us who were doing business studies felt, quite reasonably, that we were closer to the spirit of the age than the old hippies of the faculty.
People had begun to feel less ashamed about being greedy and of wanting more than their share of fairness. I wasn't partisan politically but I did think that choice was important, whether it was which brand you chose or which person you decided to deride. Here at least my disparate educations converged.
That first term I was very shy and awkward. I found it almost impossible to mix with my fellow students. I barely understood any of the cultural references that they took for granted. Also I couldn't shake off the imprint of The Fat Controller's locutions. His tendency towards pleonasm had infected me. Often when attempting to explain some aspect of my studies to fellow students who were having difficulties, I would look up from the textbook we were sharing to see an expression of sheer disbelief pass across their faces. I knew why, they had the queer sensation that they were being addressed by someone from a bygone age.
I was the repository for arcana of an exacting kind. The Fat Controller forced upon me the conclusion that things were not at all as they seemed. As yet my understanding of this was inchoate, but I never for a moment doubted that, while I might work hard and comprehend these studies quite thoroughly, the true meaning of my life lay somewhere else.
The laggardly limb of this awareness was tied firmly to the dominant emotion in my life, fear. Together, with fear yanking the way forward, speculation and sentiment ran the three-legged race into the future.
It may surprise the reader (who after all is charged with the task of making an important decision), that I should talk of my time at university as a happy one and yet still speak of my dominant emotion as fear, but then the worst is yet to come.
The self-styled Brahmin of the Banal kept my fear-levels up to scratch by manifesting himself unexpectedly. As I have said, even as a teenager I knew without having to ask that sexual intercourse would sap whatever magical powers I might have. Yet I craved physical affection – the raw stuff of touch – perhaps even more than emotional. I felt preternaturally over-sexed, and despite being removed from The Fat Controller's proximate influence I still stuck to this rule. I lubricated my eidetic memory, priming it to summon up still more lurid fantasies, carnal changelings compensating for the real thing.
It got so bad I wasn't able to concentrate on my studies. I couldn't open a book, attend a seminar, lecture or tutorial, even go to the library, without getting an erection. I would have to slip away to toilets, down basement stairs, off into the closed stacks of the library and there strike the flint. The friction burnt me, my imagination incandesced in the limelight of this magic lantern show.
At least these skits had grown in sophistication since my adolescence. I became catholic in my lusts. No longer did I desire conventions of little nymphets, each one wearing Playboy's plastic name badge. Instead I screwed around the crowd, all kinds of people, fat and thin, young and old, male and female. I performed cunnilingus, sodomy, intercrural sex and even safe sex – long before it became fashionable. I had become so eidetically adept that I could make these phantom partners mutate in mid-thrust, so that while I might penetrate a swivel-hipped virgin, clean and childishly scented, I would come in the flabby, dentureless, food-flecked mouth of an octogenarian.
This addiction to self-abuse began to tell on me. I was crazed with wanking. It was the lack of touch that really did me in. Without the feeling of another touching me, I was starting to lose the sense of my own body. I was becoming numb all over. If only real hands could shape my contours, then at least I would know that they were still there.
In my second year matters came to a head. Since moving back to Cliff Top my mother had boosted my grant. I was able to buy a small car in which to make the fifteen-minute drive to the campus each day. I would get up in the morning, step out of my caravan, face the ocean and do my exercises, followed by my ritual routine. I had grown to be a large, lumpy sort of man. My resemblance to my father – which had always been remarked upon when I was a child – was now startling. I knew I wasn't attractive and I didn't help myself by dressing like a young fogey in tweed sports jackets, flannel trousers and open-necked check shirts.
I was stuck in a time warp in every sense, one that encompassed my part of Cliff Top as well. My mother's hotel may have elevated her from the raw stuff of commerce – so much so that she now subscribed to Country Living and other unspecialist periodicals – but the caravan enclosure was decaying anew. They were flaking paint and hadn't been refurbished since I was fourteen. The brake-pad bindweed had returned and everything was seized up in the early-seventies.
The Sussex campus was stuck in the past as well. Built during a period of architectural optimism, when it was assumed that technology would triumph, it had been laid out in a series of oblong paved courtyards, surrounded by long, low, concrete-faced buildings, remarkab
le solely for their brutalism. It always struck me as ironic that these buildings, which had been designed to make that present appear futuristic, now served so well to make this present look exactly like the recent past.
The funding was running down, clumps of weed had pushed up between the paving slabs, and whole layers of rendering were falling off the façades of the buildings, giving them a seedy, leprous aspect. To cap it all most of the student body dressed to complement the period when the university was built. They weren't following fashion – they were trailing far behind it.
Back at Cliff Top The Fat Controller was no longer in permanent residence. The winter after the incident at the Theatre Royal he had started to absent himself. Initially for a few days at a time, then for weeks, and eventually whole months. It was like a rerun of the reel in which my father was edited out. His explanation was ‘business interests’ and indeed, I did start to see discrete references to him, under his working name ‘Samuel Northcliffe’, in the financial and economic sections of the newspaper. It appeared that his alter ego was an international financier of some kind. The name Northcliffe was linked with raising equity on all five continents but not in such a conspicuous way that he himself garnered personal publicity. I never saw a photograph of him published.
You might have thought these further disclosures would have had a powerful effect on me but, of course, I was inured to surprise where this man was concerned. I also knew better than to seek him out. On the contrary, given the formidible powers he had shown to me, I rather suspected that even during his absence he was keeping me under observation. I was right.
The autumn of my second university year then. Another autumn and another life-change. Everything of importance has always happened to me in the autumn, every new departure has always presented itself within a dying context.
I saw a girl who I really fancied, I mean really. Well, this was nothing new. I knew what to do, incorporate her into the mass grave of my fantasy world; there her real charms would soon decay and get jumbled up with my rather more rotten visions. Once she had been tarnished by my imagination, she would cease to have any power over me.
But I was slow to get started on this project and before I could something unforeseen happened. She took a liking to me. We were taking the same course module, ‘marketing and statistics’. She was another young conservative, I guessed from a rather sheltered background. Her sensible shoes, neat skirts and pressed blouses spoke of home-baked shortbread and Sunday school but she wasn't as naive as I imagined. She was fine-boned and delicate, with auburn hair tied back in a leather clasp. Her neck was perhaps a trifle long and her head rather small but her features were symmetrical and her brown eyes large. Her name was June Richards.
She sat at the front during seminars and posed questions to our tutor that were more like statements. She would raise her hand to gain his attention and then use a biro to punctuate what she said with a series of invisible bullet points. The other students were all Cro-Magnons, Heavy Metal fans who scrawled graffiti on their course binders. She was different, well informed and, still more attractive, she had a real enthusiasm for the idea of marketing. She could illustrate her arguments with clever examples drawn from the real world of commerce. After only three such seminars I was smitten.
June must have noticed me staring at her. It was true, I couldn't keep my eyes from sprinting up her slim ankles, and fell-walking the contour lines of her sharp shoulders and her breasts, breasts that were improbably close to her scenic collar bone. But when she came up to me after that third seminar I was so shocked and embarrassed that I could barely speak. I started shaking and my shoes squeaked with apprehension as I shuffled on the lino.
‘You're Ian, aren't you?’ There was something clipped and ex-colonial in her accent.
‘Y’ yes.’
‘My name's June. I'm doing the marketing module as well.’
‘I – I know.’
‘I'm sorry to bother you. It's just that Mr Hargreaves says you keep excellent notes and I missed the tutorials last year for the econometrics module. He thought you might be able to help out.’
‘Why weren't you here last year?’ I regretted the question immediately but there was no pulling back. It sounded so intrusive, like the beginning of an interrogation, but she didn't seem to mind.
‘Well, my parents live in Kenya and I was going to study in Nairobi, but Moi has suspended the classes at the university for this year, so I applied to come here.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Kenya, Nairobi, Moi. How exotic, how improbable.
‘These notes then?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I'm afraid I don't have them on me, but I can bring them tomorrow.’
The next day we companionably photocopied the notes together. I had got up early that morning and done my best to make myself look presentable. I still had no thought – for obvious reasons – of making any move on her but I felt it would be enough if she wasn't repelled by me.
She wasn't. Perhaps the toner fluid intoxicated her – there were over a hundred sheets to copy – or maybe it was the lack of air in the photocopying room, but after we had done and she had commented favourably on the comprehensive and detailed nature of the notes, she asked me to go out with her. Like a fool I accepted.
We went to some art-house cinema in Brighton. I couldn't concentrate on the film at all, I was so aware of her presence beside me in the flickering darkness. I had to repeat whole sections of my ‘ritual register’, to stop myself from eidetiking, to stop myself from spoiling her image. I sat tight in my seat, my big knees grating against the row in front, trying to ignore the agonising cramps that tore up my thighs.
Afterwards we went for a pizza at – of all places – Al Forno. I hadn't set foot inside the place since my visit with The Fat Controller. Despite this I was recognised. Tommaso appeared as we came in from the street, hamming it up just the way I remembered.
‘Ah! Meester Northcliffe's friend, you no come to see us for an age. Whassamatter, you no like our pizza?’
‘Oh no, no, Tommaso . . . ‘ I slipped into character as well.
‘And with heem a pretty lady. Welcome, welcome. You shall have the best table. Meester Northcliffe's special table.’
I could tell June was impressed. Tommaso made me look like a mature man, an important man. I wasn't taken in. There was more complicity in his winks than was warranted. As I had grown some six inches since he had last seen me, I didn't for a moment believe that his recognition was unprompted.
Over food and wine I drifted into intimacy with June. Initially we talked of our course and our fellow students, but soon the conversation veered off into more personal matters. June alluded to an unhappy affair with a boy back in Kenya, plainly giving me a message. I found myself acting the part of a wooer only too well. No matter that I had no experience, I had rehearsed this role for years, blocking everything out right down to the way I would sit, ministering to the words of the desired object – yet never believing that I might actually perform.
‘He was a shit really. I think he just wanted to use me.’ Her fingers drummed the table top. She wore red nail varnish. ‘So I told him it was over. I guess that was just another reason why I wanted to get away.’ Her cuticles were frayed, perhaps the nails were false? I resisted the urge to take an eidetic peek by recollecting the pincered click of my own manicuring habits. ‘My aunt lives in Hastings, so my bloody overprotective parents thought it would be OK for me to come to Sussex. I live with Auntie, she keeps an eye on me.’
‘Oh I see.’
‘You're a local, aren't you, Ian?’
‘Yeah, I live near Saltdean, always have.’
I told her some Cliff Top stuff, about my sort of over-protective mother and my absent father. I knew I shouldn't but I couldn't help it. It seemed so right, the low burr of two voices in the pool of candlelight.
The waiter brought coffee and some amaretti. June unwrapped the flimsy tissue paper from one of the almond biscuits and rolled it caref
ully into a tube. She was tanned and her hair was fairer at the roots. I could make out the tracery of blonde down on the edge of her cheek.
‘Look, see this?’ She took the paper tube and lit one end with the candle. Then she set it in the middle of a saucer. ‘Now watch, this is magic.’ The tube burnt blue and orange transforming the paper into a black filigree. But before it was consumed entirely, it lifted off and shot up towards the painstyled plaster of the ceiling. It fell back towards us and I caught the filmy ash on another plate. I felt elegant, masterful, catching that ash. She looked at me with a smile that implied fusion.
I insisted on paying the bill and on opening the door for her as if I were an ordinary gallant. We were walking along the front towards the Palace Pier when she took my arm. Outside the Metropole she turned to face me and we kissed.
That kiss, my first, sang my mouth into existence. Her conduit arms around my shoulders – as I had suspected threw the switch for a sensation of total embodiment, which surged up to encompass me. I felt vivified by that kiss. Before I had been lifeless jumble of miscellaneous body parts but now I was Frankenstein's monster, shocked by lust into coherence and action.
‘Do you really live in a caravan?’ Her breath was on my neck.
‘Yeah, but it's not a gypsy caravan. The caravanning life isn't all it's painted up to be. This one's a grotty little fibreglass thing, there's nothing romantic about it.’
‘Still, I'd like to see it. Can we go there?’
‘Yeah, all right. It's on our way back to Hastings.’
I fully intended to show her the caravan and then take her home. I felt safe – she seemed like a demure young woman. Even if I tried it on I thought she would stop me. But back at Cliff Top in the crisp violet night, we stood watching the lights of the ships in the Channel and we kissed again. Although I couldn't see her face properly, her tongue was painting my image by numbers. Her cool hands slid up under my jacket, plucking at my shirt, pulling it out at the waist.