The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  Setting up lines of credit for Ocean Ltd was the easiest thing in the world. Gavin was utterly convincing; there is nothing forced in his manner, he simply makes people want to be his friend. As a consequence people are his friends, and the way friends do, they do Gavin favours. He talks to them with his confident mellow voice, which has only the faintest aftertone of social superiority. It’s all in the after-tone; people don’t hear it, but they absorb it subliminally and respond. Ocean Ltd effortlessly borrowed its operating capital.

  ‘Not everyone responds to a glossy brochure,’ said Gavin, nudging his whisky sour with an extended finger – I noticed the tuberous bulge of plastic flesh where the cuticle should have been – ‘but it has to be there.’ Ocean Ltd had a glossy brochure: receding panels of textured paper, spot-varnished duotones of our babies looking sleek, tiny squares of copy and typefaces pulled this way and that, and the Ocean Ltd logo: one of the babies, stylised with ripping lines.

  There’s a nasty ripple in the air here, in the hall. It’s too close, that’s the problem. I’m becoming absorbed with detail. Gavin tells me that that’s my problem. ‘You’re a classic anal-retentive,’ he says, ‘tirelessly absorbed by minutiae, anankastic in the extreme – it’s lucky you have to deal with the broad sweep of things, to do the abstract thinking.’ That may be so, but Gavin’s abstract thoughts have led to remarkably concrete things, like the Bloomsbury flat, the Oyster Perpetual, the suits from Bromsgrove, shirts from Barries. While my concrete mentality, my eye for detail has led me …

  … to the kitchen. Yaaah! … Bloody fool. A white flash of light. I punched the wall switch, the strips flickered once in too-late warning and then sprung into full, flat light, hammering down on my tissue-paper retinas. I am a pin-hole camera. Ugh! … Everything is lit up. The dresser is exposed in the corner – an old woman taking her clothes off. There are spice jars here like the moon, one side silvered, the other buried in perpetual darkness. Everything in the kitchen is lunar, polarised. On the rectangular melamine table sits last night’s supper; those devilish spicy mushrooms crouch, warbling in their foil. In the flesh they are far less terrifying than I had imagined. I feel a slackening off, my heart surfaces from the bottom of the empty stomach-pool that it jack-knifed into when the light went on. I’ll just go to the sink and get a glass of water.

  Hu, hu, heu, ggh … I’d forgotten. I’m gagging. I can barely contain myself. I feel a bitter sewage-gorge rising up my neck. I can only seize a can from the fridge, hit the light and retreat back across the hall to the front room and my seat by the window. I’d forgotten the tandoori chicken wings, they were lurking on the draining board. Just the sight of those bent red limbs in filmy bondage, wet turmeric paste pressed all around. It was enough to destabilise me. I’m sitting in the chair. And nothing makes any sense. Any more. I’m sitting vertiginously. Tipping forward. Looking down on the looking down, looking down. And how I regret those purple pelmets. And the malignant wart, that little hard nodule of pain in the pit of my arm is throbbing fit to bust. It’s no simple organic pain, this is a pain the insidiousness of which undercuts the very idea of flesh; it’s a pain that speaks of a future when we will have all evolved into cybernauts; the wart is a bolt screwed into the template of my arm, casually mashing rusted tendon cables …

  ‘As you were, as you were.’ I must drill this transitory army of occupation and then set them at ease with myself. When they arrived yesterday afternoon their custodians couldn’t quite believe where they were to take up residence. Standing in their pseudo-denim windcheaters, company names emblazoned on their breasts, the men squinted at my semi and then rang the descending chimes. One of them held in his solid mitt the flapping sheaf of onion-skin invoices.

  With the unhurried ease of labourers everywhere, who seek, on a daily basis, to escape the winding down of their own bodies’ strength, they brought the children in from the truck and stacked them all over the house. Box after box, one hundred gross in all, laid out in all the rooms. After they had gone I amused myself for a while by taking them out and playing with them, forming patterns, marching them up and down, and when that palled I lined them up in ranks. Especially next door in the dining-room where, at this moment, four companies are drawn up in tight formation under the table.

  When they’d all been unloaded and the various invoices signed I wanted to stop the three men as they moved off to their orange truck. I felt a terrible sense of abandonment and strangeness. The whole grey afternoon possessed an awful thin reality that might slice into me. I wanted to call them back, but could think of no pretext. The air brakes hissed and they roared up through the gears and away towards the North Circular.

  You see, I’m not convinced any more by Gavin. That’s the root of it. I’m suspicious. When we met David Hangleton two weeks ago for a ‘little Italian dinner’ in Hampstead, he was so much more convincing. I’ve never pretended to know anything about this. It was never my job to supply front or charisma for Ocean Ltd. I was the back-room boy who would square things away and make them look right on paper. But next to Hangleton, Gavin seemed insubstantial. It was as if, with Gavin, I had witnessed a clever pastiche of the real thing. Everything Gavin did, the gestures he made, the things he said, the suits he wore, was forced, it was a performance. Hangleton on the other hand was clearly a real entrepreneur, he meant it all. He was natural and unforced and his bragging related to funds that were, if not entirely his own, at least not subject to punitive rates of interest.

  ‘Buy something very cheap, with someone else’s money and then sell it, quickly, not so cheap.’ That was Gavin’s maxim and the motto of Ocean Ltd. He even made me get a little sign made up with this written on it and hung it over the computer.

  ‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

  ‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

  ‘And the credit cards.’

  ‘And the credit cards.’

  ‘And the current accounts.’

  ‘And the current accounts.’

  ‘And the charge cards.’

  ‘Yeah, and the frigging charge cards.’

  ‘And pile the capital back into a real enterprise.’

  ‘Of course, this isn’t simply a stupid sting, is it. We’re businessmen, entrepreneurs.’

  Businessmen, entrepreneurs. Gavin had certainly looked and acted the part. At least I had thought so to begin with. He was so good-looking for a start, with his neat sandy hair, his regular, even features. He had a nose that had such a tight little bridge, not like my flat lump of clay; and a flawless complexion, so flawless that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a seam running down the back of his neck.

  When Gavin and I first became colleagues he took me out with him to meet his friends. They all had the same kind of manner as him, a sort of unforced and facetious ease. It was the kind of charm that I’ve always found myself a victim of. Gavin and his friends, with their minor public school slang, their games of backgammon and their saloon-car races round London’s arterial roads, reminded me of the nouveau riche kids I went to school with. They had the same consumer’s attitude to the business of living. Like Gavin they went straight to the bottom line without troubling to check the balances. I suppose the difference was that Gavin brought to the whole thing the strong implication of ultimate solidity, a four-square Virginia Water kind of security. Redolent of retrievers and women with seriously quilted clothing. He also had the knack of elevating you, making you feel special: ‘I’m telling you this because I know you can keep a secret and …’ Lengthy pause, ‘well, because I suppose I regard you as one of my closest friends.’ Eyes downcast to denote embarrassment and then briefly flicked upwards into your own to indicate complete faith.

  Actually, you know, I’m wrong to rubbish Gavin like this. I’m wrong and I’m stupid. Very stupid. He’s out there alone in a hotel room, he’s staked everything he has on Ocean Ltd. I never had anything to stake to begin with. He’s been a friend to me – if a little capricious. But maybe that’s what friendsh
ip is, a slap and then a tickle. I suppose I’m nervous because I’m expecting the call and because the last thing I read in How To Form a Company was ‘Business partnerships can be very thorny indeed, even close friends should ensure that partnership agreements are vetted by an experienced solicitor.’ But of course we don’t have a partnership, we have a limited company, with directors. Mr Rabindarath and, of course, Sandy – although his identity could be said to be problematic.

  I can see the corner of the garden out of the corner of my eye. Dawn must be coming. Gavin should call. It’s damp out there, a little wetness glistens in the orange light, on the privet and the flattened grass. In here it’s the same. My chair. The sofa. The wall unit, the triangular area between the side of my chair and the wall, full of loosely piled newspapers. The miniature landscape of the newspaper, up column and down advertisement. Who is to say that it’s really smaller than the room, the garden, or the world? If I rub my hand up and down the arm of the chair the pile on the cover moves from flat to prickily upright, to flat again. Co-ordination is the key here, foolish to look for wisdom in books, because they have nothing new to say. They contain everything in their one long sentence. Everything and nothing. Whereas in this simple ritual – rotating the chair-cover pile with the flat of my hand, whilst rhythmically breathing and, at the same time, running my eye carefully over the newspaper hillocks – I achieve control. I create a tiny ordered universe, which means that Gavin will call. He must call because the universe is ordered. The solid beams can be made to expand and contract in tight ranks. The children have all gone to bed quietly. The mushrooms lie swaddled in batter, the chicken wings subside into the polystyrene mattress. And the wart starts up as a dot, that flares into a portal. A ghastly door. Its subcutaneousness. Urghh … its layeredness. I hate the layers of my skin, because they’re all over and beneath them are layers of viscera. Someone has sprinkled sand between the layers of my viscera. And the beer is flat again. And I have heard this song a thousand times. Where is my control …

  Actually, there’s nothing particularly awful about this song. It has a kind of folksy innocence, a wistfulness that rather suits my current mood. It could be ironic – but maybe not. I sit here, looking, I think, rather dapper for someone who’s been up the whole night. My clothes have a rather billowy aspect to them, perhaps it’s the light quality. I sit in the pool thrown down by the standard lamp, washed by the orange from the street lamp and tinged with the palest of grey flushes from the coming dawn. And the beams, those solid beams, which elsewhere in the living-room are orderly and controlled, dance and hum around me, weaving in and out of one another; I am their focus.

  I am like some small, brightly coloured fleck of life, caught under a microscope. Beautiful, weightless, shrunk beyond the force of gravity or the effect of the sun, I swim in the amniotic air of the living-room. The wallpaper gently susurrates. And then, without warning, a hostile beam enters the room, plunges through the cornice, a beam unlike the others, not subject to my optical control: a beam of pure anxiety. Which probes me with its needle tip, touches me just once. Pokes a single time, into my soft midriff, the heliotrope heart of my pathetically simple organism. And I contract. I seize up. I clench and ball into a little jelly fist. Slowly, slowly I relax again, blob out, float in the limpid fluid that magnifies my transparent body. It happens again and again. I am but a single-celled creature capable of one, giant, knee-jerk reflex. This is a bit of a digression from my main area of concern, or at any rate the area of discussion, founded, as it were, on words like ‘pallet’ and expressions such as ‘bill of lading’ and ‘pro-forma invoice’. This area is coextensive with tarmac aprons bordered by chain-link fences. The world which Ocean Ltd inhabits is an active world of quantifiable phenomena, not some amoebic fantasy concocted in a suburban living-room at … getting on for 6.30 a.m.

  And who exactly is to say that Sandy, Mr Rabindarath’s arthritic old labrador, with greying muzzle and shambolic walk, is not entitled to his place on the board of Ocean Ltd? Even if his identity had to be constructed for him, pieced together from headstone to birth certificate, to passport, to bank account. Mr Sandy Eccles is an accomplished fact now. His name appears on our letterhead. He is casually referred to by one and all and pictured periodically in the eyes of numerous minds, powering his Vauxhall down great swathes of motorway, listening to Radio Two. Shirtsleeved, his jacket dangling from a hook behind his head, confident that he’s going to close that sale …

  I must say that I congratulate myself … well done, old chap! This living-room is a bold testament to your struggle against anxiety. Everything seems to be right in its place, there’s nothing that jars the eye. The village of books, the chair set at a precise angle, the wedge of newsprint, the fan of album covers, all good rugs of media. Nicely offsetting the restrained beige of the carpet. Magnolia may not be an inspired choice for wall-covering but it is restful. And as for the furniture, surely it is the right decision to play it down, keep it modern, but not too … After all, the shape of the room, the metal-divided, six-pane windows, none of it would support anything but angularity and pastels.

  This folk song. I really hate it, it says nothing to me. But steady now, I’ve tried jazz, flirted with the classics, run through a gamut of rock, reggae, fusion and soul. They didn’t work; they all skittered out of the speakers as so much senseless timpani. I cannot hear rhythm or melody, I must confine myself to songs about battered children and alcoholic old men. They might be real. No time to change the record, anyway. It’s time for what the papers say …

  And looking first of all this morning at last month’s Hendon Advertiser we see that St Peter’s Mount held a Bring and Buy Sale that was hugely successful and raised £176.000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Especial congratulations go … apparently … to Mrs Tyler, for organising the event and for baking no less than twenty ginger cakes. Hmmmn, hmm, a powerful lead story, strongly backed by items on new bus shelters, a mobility scheme for the elderly and the retirement of a long-serving school dinner lady. There she is on page five, beaming over an ornamental barometer. Editorial? Let me see … riffle, riffle, riffle. A-ha! Dog mess, as I suspected. That perennial and coiled question. It won’t go away, will it. It affects the polity of the Finchley municipality much as the Irish Question dominated late nineteenth-century Britain.

  But the real news is at the very back of the paper. After full-page ads for shock absorbers and such, we find the small ads; and here is the full pathos of life. Pathos that inheres not just in the advertisements themselves:

  Travelling suitcase, hardly used, clean inside and out.

  £3.00.

  671 0042 after 6.00 pm

  or,

  MFI shelving units. Seven 5′ x 1′6″.

  £15.00. Will consider part-ex for coffee table/similar.

  229 5389 (days)

  and

  Tit Bits, Nos 148 – 546. Suit Collector.

  £40.00 ono

  229 4917 after 8.30 pm

  but also in one’s attitude towards them. I betray myself here. Gavin would never read the small ads in the Hendon Advertiser. He glances only at glossy spreads where women with hips so high they must know Dr Moreau undulate down the Promenades des Anglais, selling smelly water, Euro-box cars, whatever …

  The serrated edge of the type on these little advertisements. It drags me down, and what’s worse is that I can see myself reading them and see myself seeing myself. All too vertiginous again. I’ll have to abandon the papers. And pick up a book … How To … How To … something … With a blue cover and white dots. The Dewey decimal system used for bullet points that shoot between my tired eyes. I’ve been up for too long to absorb:

  1.21 Infrastructural debits cannot be handled by a day-to-day spreadsheet analysis.

  Quite so … quite so … and it follows, so it does, that:

  1.22 Invisibles must be separated prior to any medium-term strategic plan.

  That’s been my mistake. Not separating
those damn invisibles. Here am I, in a position of responsibility, a board member of a fairly substantial import/wholesale outfit, a certified accountant and I’m still really letting those invisibles get to me. Invisibles and intangibles – like the wet, iron-tasting squish of turmeric paste, or the small ads’ pathos, this is a retching matter. And I’m the man for it, with my inexhaustible supplies of salty bile, with my cheddar gorge. I can feel my diaphragm undulate … come now, not in front of the children, pas devant les engafangas. Concentration on some apparently useless but therapeutic task is what I need to pull me through. Rearrange the autodidactic village, so that all the roofs are parallel and rake up at the same angle. Yes, I can just reach them all from my chair. The blood is rushing to my head as I lower my miniature crane of a claw of a hand. Fucking wart! A pox on you wart! Hell’s bolt on my arm, an arm saturated like a sponge with seeping watery infection. The senselessness of the task. Don’t you realise I’m in pain here?

  ‘I’m not worried about security for this loan at all.’ The Child Banker sat behind the angled blotter, his face worryingly unlined.

  ‘Everything seems in order as far as already established collateral is concerned and …’ Coffee cooled uselessly in Star Trek beakers. Gavin shifted in his chair, his suit a vague swathe of blue in the Rembrandt brown of the Child Banker’s office, his attache case propped open on the corner of the desk. Inside it a miniature world: memo pad, filofax, brochures for Ocean Ltd, keys, pens and some of our different kinds of children. Currently fostered but, with the Child Banker’s assistance, scheduled for – albeit temporary – adoption. I watched as the Child Banker drew a pad towards him and affectedly added columns of figures with pretty strokes of his fountain pen. A little girl in a pinstripe suit floated in the gloom over his right shoulder, flicking digits on to a green screen that from time to time scrolled upward in bright streaks. The Child Banker turned the sheets of foolscap round so that we could see what he’d written; the bottom line was thirty-eight per cent. Thirty-eight per cent. We would have to bring those children up and send them into the world so fast, so bloody fast.