The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  ‘There’s no problem.’ Gavin unlocked the green door and we stepped into the clammy passageway.

  ‘Look here …’ Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post was loosely stacked, leaning up against the wall, on top of the plywood housing that covered some hernia of the aching house, the gas or electricity meter, bursting from the bellied wall. Gavin snapped open the envelope and scanned the letter.

  ‘They’re on their way, one hundred gross. The paperwork is with the shipper at the terminal. They’ll be here the day after tomorrow.’

  Mr Rabindarath came footing round the bend in the stairs. Sandy, aka ‘Mr Eccles’, padding by his side. Mr Rabindarath wore a very long gaberdine mac that covered him to his feet. He headed on down and passed us, blank eyes recessed into his grey, eroded face. His prescription was clutched in one hand and in the other he held a child’s blue plastic spade which bore Mr Eccles’ toothmarks.

  ‘Not so good I’m afraid,’ Gavin was reading a letter addressed to Sandy in his capacity as marketing manager of Ocean Ltd, ‘they seem to be getting rather cold feet in Hamburg, I’ll have to go over. I’m sure they’ll be no trouble once I get there, Horst just needs a little babying. You stay here, transship the goods. No sense in warehousing them, it’ll simply eat into our profits. Keep them at your place. It’ll only be for a night …’

  We left the house and walked down the North End Road. Gavin seemed not to notice the oppressively low sky, or the sad juxtaposition of tatty mullioned windows with dirty sheet glass. He was erect and going somewhere. But the city held me to it, like some dried and crusty discharge mirroring the Artexed wall, above the meter, where Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post had lain.

  * * *

  Gavin took me to the Savoy for a farewell tea and we ate crumpets and drank Earl Grey at the bottom of that great sunken swirl of carpeting. Waiters came and went with the softest of footfalls, bringing and taking thick crockery and heavy, stainless steel vessels. The crisp, white linen of the tablecloth and the crisp, white linen of my napkin, folded into each other on my lap. Gavin talked about Ocean Ltd and his sex life as if they were one and the same and chopped the air vigorously with his hands. Stubby hands with spatulate fingers and recessed nails, Gavin’s hands were like someone else’s shoulders.

  I couldn’t concentrate. I became fixated by the details: the underside of a leaf on a rubber plant, the ridged rubber rim of a waiter’s shoe, the precise three-button belly bulge of a fat man at an adjacent table, and eventually by the green-gold pelmets capping the great swathes of drapery at the end of the room. A pelmet isn’t a piece of furniture, but nor, on the other hand, is it merely decorative. These pelmets were vast, adult versions of my little purple pelmets at home. The curtains cascaded down from them to the floor. They were fringed with hooks of gold thread. Gavin waved buttered toast about and I couldn’t wait to get home, to my chair and my bubble and the quiet part of the night.

  That was thirty-six hours ago. For thirty-two of them, or thereabouts, I have sat here. Excursions to the toilet, the fridge, to supervise the unloading of the children. There has been one phone call from Gavin: everything is going well. I’m just to sit tight and wait for his call and then fill out the pro-forma invoice which coils out of the old Unwin on the dining-room table. An undemanding way to make a living, or so I think. I’m privileged in my house, which is only superficially attached to the other houses strung out alongside an isolated rectangle of green in the midst of the suburbs. My truncated garden is backed up by another, the same and the same to east and west. My house is built into the next one, but only brick deep. Inside it is a tardis, far larger than anyone can imagine. It is an island, separated from the rest of Brent, floating in a viscous bath of salty, crusted fluid.

  Damn it all, I should make an EEC declaration when I transfer objects from one room of this house to the next, or even mental objects within my own head. Yes, that’s it. Declarations of intent: stating the purpose of the thought, its resale value and so on. The problem is not to attach such a declaration (in triplicate) to each thought. It is simply that there is no one there to check it, no customs men. Nothing new, except mile upon mile of dun-coloured tundra, unrolling under a sky that matches it, for flatness, for billowing featurelessness, excepting for here, and there, the brackish open sore of a peaty pool, fringed with sedge.

  Breakfast television starts in half an hour. I’ve just checked my watch. There’s two certainties. Two pieces of evidence … that add up to … my control: real evidence of my control over my environment. There’s a certain homeliness about a cardigan … at 6.30 in the morning, worn by an avuncular man … on a screen. It’s the kind of assurance that I need. I must find that bastard child the remote controller … a complete misnomer. There’s nothing remote about the control I exercise with it, one push of the soft stud and the television will spring into life … I can check out the test card and the occasional notices they issue at this hour of forthcoming programmes.

  Where is the bastard child? My fingers skate nervelessly over the carpet, sketching out the faint raggedy afterimage of those once firm and solid purple bars. Gone … gone … gonnie! Nothing now but the grey wash of near dawn and the fading yellow pool around my chair, marking the limit of my bubble. The pictures on the opposite wall, which through the long night appeared thoroughly appropriate … full of meaning … in good taste, are now old postage stamps and curling posters on an adolescent’s bedroom wall: Snoopy, woman in tennis dress scratching her naked buttock and worse. The colour scheme in here is as anonymous and inhospitable as a supermarket aisle, or the neglected lobby of a large corporation.

  My hand is heavy with blood. I long to clutch its slim, cool blackness and feel the play of soft studs … so unlike … the wart! Which throbs in my inner elbow, a hard stud that promises nothing but pain. Imagine pressing it … eugh! Jesus Christ! Jee-suss Kerist! Hard, but squishy … and if I pressed it … what then … not control … but less control. Less control …

  Well, bastard child. So here you are, snug in my hand, as if you’d never left, and the preview screen undulates gently across the room. 6.45 a.m., Good Morning Britain. And good morning to you … I say. A simple salutation. To breathe freely I have opened the window and a fresh draught of privety air is wafting in from the front garden. In the distance I can hear the swish and roar of artics as they make up for lost time along the North Circular.

  It is dawn … If I stretch out from my chair the bubble that encloses me comes too. Stretching stickily around my hand. Cling-film adhesion that turns me into a Cyberman. Time to stand up again, free my clothes where they’ve melded to my body, move around the room a little, gently shaking my limbs. Another night… another dollar. What a doddle. Huh! Futile really to read so many books on self-improvement … Here … I’ll gather them up now and put them away on the shelf. What we need in here is a certain orderliness with which to face the morning. Ch-onk. They fall on to the shelves … and I’ll gather up these album covers that are fanned out over the floor … and stack them here … and now the free newspapers that silt up the wedge between my chair and the wall… voila. Now all I can see is a conventional room in a conventional house, with breakfast television about to be watched, by me: Company Director.

  We went out on the town. That is, those directors of Ocean Ltd who weren’t rocking spasmodically in their rooms, or slavering over blue plastic spades. We had just finished opening the last line of credit we required in order to make the big purchase, and Gavin and I were in high spirits. We were just two more young men out on the town. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That feeling that you’re somehow connected, at the centre of things. You’re walking down Old Compton Street and this is your burgh, your village.

  We fell in with some girls at a pub on Cambridge Circus, the way that sailors on leave do in Hollywood films. It had never happened to me before … I put it down to Gavin. They were red and brown in tailored suits and didn’t make a habit of this kind of thing and laughed a l
ot and had conspiratorial nods and catchwords which passed between them. And Gavin and I were interested in them and talked to them about their jobs and their flats and got to know them, because this was our night already and we were young bucks, as it were, loose on the town.

  And I remember going on from the pub. This less concretely than before, everything still funny, but with an edge. One of the girls said, ‘What do you do then?’ And I said that we had this company, Ocean Ltd, and gave her my card – stupid really – because she wasn’t in business. Sitting in La Capresa scrunching on breadsticks and drinking red wine that grabbed at my throat. When they went off to the toilet – and God knows why I remember this because it really isn’t important – Gavin asked me to sign a guarantor release on the Ocean Ltd fund account. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. At the time I just signed it. He was always giving me things to sign in my directorial capacity, and on this occasion, being a young Turk, it seemed the right thing to be doing in La Capresa, taking out my thick fountain pen and snaking my bloody signature across the hairlined box … and then … that’s it. The rest of the evening was the rest of the evening. And I know I didn’t go home with one of those girls, because I never do … and I know that Gavin probably did, because he always does. And I don’t know why this business of signing the form is swimming at me now out of my memory, because it really isn’t important at all, is it?

  Standing now on the oblong of stairway that is the half-landing. Appalled by the little banks of fluff that have accreted in the gap between the nap of the carpet and the corrugation of underlay. Appalled also by the thin dustfall on my children that dulls them. I’m a pale face at a window on a half-landing … I’m a half-remembered surreal poem, learnt by rote in school, years ago. I’m on my way upstairs to make a tour of inspection, but I can’t get further than this. Transfixed again by a miniature world, where the brass rods that hold tight the tread are Nazca lines on the floor of some delusory desert. Because everything, as it were, contains everything. And this half-landing has as much right to be considered the world as any other, wouldn’t you agree? That’s a rhetorical, rhetorical question, maybe the first of its kind, tee-hee! As long as you can be miserable in good surroundings.

  Hoo … It might be a mistake to go upstairs, there’s something a little strange about the giant tortoise that my bed has become, stacked as it is with the fruit of Ocean Ltd’s labours. And I don’t think that I’ll be able to repeat my book-tidying act. I don’t want to be upstairs when Gavin rings, because I hate having to run to answer the phone. As it is I can float downstairs. I feel sustained by lines of credit, that flow like the purple bars, like the bright bars of my childhood, but lighter, filmier, wavier. I float downstairs at the centre of a net of lines of credit, they undulate slackly around me and then gather me together and whisk me back into the living-room. Breakfast television is on the cards and Gavin may phone at any moment. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s wearing lederhosen and standing in an international phone booth that looks like a giant, porcelain-sided stove. We’re in split screen: me in my chair, he in his stove; and he pushes his phone card – emblazoned with a double-headed eagle – into the cast-iron fissure … Clinks and kercherunks and whirrs as the line springs into action triggering circuitry across and over the continent… but no … no ring here. Perhaps he’ll ring in a little while.

  Here’s the studio swimming into view. And it makes me feel nauseous. The unreal quality of that manufactured space, intended only to contain posturing presenters. Chipboard pouffes encased in oatmeal twistpile, turquoise striped banquettes … It is a slab for displaying human fish … I can’t bear to watch them swim into view and ‘O’ at me fatuously … I’ve more pressing problems, like flatness of taste … and the malignant wart … Have you met one another? I say here – and mark this – that this wart is cancerous. It represents a new and virulent form of cancer that is peculiar to me. This is an implosive cancer, other cancers infect cell after cell in a chain reaction, but this cancer works in on itself, nullifying cells which turn into heavier and heavier dead matter, glutinous matter, nailed into the pit of my elbow. The symptoms? Well, flatness of taste for one, flatness of mouth taste, eye taste, ear taste. Smell? Ferrr-geddit. The only palliative is chemotherapy … and the side-effects can be disturbing …

  What I need to consider, as the television wetly observes me, is some kind of strategy that will make Gavin phone me, now. I’m sick of waiting. I’m aware that there are certain rituals that I can perform which will make him phone me. Never underestimate the power of magic. We may think that cause and effect are billiard balls that strike one another, but we know that we can tip the table. And that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to tip the table.

  What is it that keeps me here, sitting, stiffening, in a repro Queen Anne chair, bought from a mail-order catalogue, when I could be asleep? I could be lying in between warm, brushed cotton sheets, enjoying that special, infinitely sweet, morning sleep, that turns one’s aching body inside out like a sock. Instead, I’m rigid, upright, staring, waiting. I’m going to compile a list of the things that stop me sleeping and act upon them forthwith:

  1. The wart

  2. Lack of appetite

  3. Waiting for Gavin to ring

  Appetite and the wart and Gavin are all intimately linked. I realise this now although it’s been staring me in the face all night. If I can do something about the former, the latter will fall into place. (I’m just kidding about all of this – really, believe me – just to keep me occupied. I don’t really think I can influence Gavin by acts of magic, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?) I see the wart as a hungry thing … actually as a hungry entity. You notice that I can speak quite openly and casually about the wart at this stage? That’s because the wart isn’t hungry at the moment. The wart is the bivalve that determines my cycle, my expansion and contraction. What I need to do is give it some real nourishment, something that will completely assuage it. Since the wart owes its very existence to the founding of Ocean Ltd, the act of sating its relentless hunger will necessarily bring about the completion of Ocean Ltd’s business. You have followed me so far I hope?

  The wart takes in matter and massively condenses it. If you like, it is the biological equivalent of a black hole, infinitely heavy. And what about the meal it requires? Well, this must be a combination of real food: spicy mushrooms, tandoori chicken wings, stale bagels, morello cherry conserve, squares of processed cheese – and material relating to Ocean Ltd. To whit: invoices, bills of lading, delivery notes, customs declarations, spreadsheet analyses and a couple of brochures, one for the product – the children’s scrapbook – and one for Ocean Ltd itself.

  I will have to travel to assemble the ingredients of my spell. Into the dining-room to fetch the Ocean Ltd material and then to the kitchen to get the food. Before I go, let me take stock. Is this the only course of action left open to me? Or can I get by with a plainer, more matter-of-fact view of my world? I say ‘my world’ advisedly, the truth of the matter is, can I make my world elide gracefully into being ‘the world’ again? A world of housecoats, washing-up brushes, bilateral agreements, tax returns, sexual encounters and stand-up comedians. Can I?

  No. Emphatically not. Things have gone too far. I never should have started that nonsense with the solid tubes of brightness. I’ve made my epiphenomenal bed, now I’ll have to stand in it. Up. And to the dining-room. Gather the necessary papers and continue walking with an easy and unhurried, a supremely natural gait, into the hall. ‘Good morning, watercolour.’ ‘Good morning, table.’ The kitchen is quite light now but I have to see what I’m doing so I’d better put on the strip light. Aha! The mushrooms warble a greeting, the chicken wings hunch on the draining board. Off with their packaging!

  I have everything assembled now. Lain out in a pattern on the table top. One question remains … how to eat it. Oral intake is inconceivable. For one thing there is the flatness … the wart’s fault … and for another the gor
ge which continually deposits freight lift-loads of metallic saliva in my mouth. No, I’ll have to absorb the potion through my skin. Sandwich a spicy mushroom between two invoices, package it like some strange dim sum and press it into the hollow of my neck, rub down its crinkly, greasy softness. Open my tired shirt … take squares of processed cheese and feel them bind into the spindly hairs on my chest … not long now … stale bagels are to be ground up in the hand and the crumbs dropped down the front of my trousers, together with torn squares of laminated 275 gsm art board … morello cherry conserve on my forehead … nothing is sticky when you immerse yourself in it … plaster the triple-leaved invoice on to the gungy mess … the best till last … the wart itself… the chicken wing… like a foetal arm … roll up the sleeve and spread the turmeric paste on to the wart … Jesus, that hurts! But yes it feels good … it feels good … What’s that! A trill in the living-room … a ‘spung’ and then a trill… the phone is ringing … it worked … I rush out of the kitchen … I can feel crumbs falling down around my crotch … the conserve gums up my eyes … emulsifiers and E207 additives are speedily imploding into the wart … I only have a limited amount of time …in the livingroom the first peal is sharp, hectoring, insistent … that was quick! I made it from the kitchen to the living-room in the time it took the phone to fully connect … but where is the phone … Where is the phone! … I can’t see it anywhere … I haven’t used it for two days… I don’t know where it is… Stop. Where’s the ringing coming from … Not in here at all … I can hear it through the floorboards … It’s coming from the bedroom upstairs … And I’m up there before the thought has even taken form … but I can’t find the phone anywhere … The ringing is coming from the testudo that covers the bed … it’s one of the children! I tear the packaging from its sylvan form with scrabbling nails, the plastic bubbles pop between my fingers … the corrugated cardboard is strangely slick … My Children … with their buttons and their bows … with their little rubberised penises … one of them is calling to me … But which one? Not this one … not this one … not this one … I tear off jacket after jacket … And now another one starts … and another … and another … Upstairs and downstairs … in the living-room … in the kitchen … in the hall … in the back bedroom … until all hundred gross of them are pealing away in a synchronous cacophony … pulsing like some insane electronic cicadas … pulsing in and out … expanding and contracting … expanding …