My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  Praise for My Idea of Fun:

  “Will Self is a very cruel writer—thrillingly heartless, terrifyingly brainy.”

  —Martin Amis

  “Great stuff, full of Updikean just-so observation with a nasty humorous twist . . . the kind of lines you'll laugh out loud at, then be too embarrassed to share with anyone else.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Self's prose is wild and primeval. . . . An invigorating blast of energy . . . pungent and idiosyncratic description . . . Its effect is haunting and inspiring. It makes you feel good about the possibilities of language.”

  —Newsday

  “Impressively deranged . . . a novel that makes you want to laugh and vomit at the same time . . . A parable for a decade when what trickled down was not money but scorn for those without it.”

  —Esquire

  “Self has probably won more praise—and praise of a more uninhibited kind—than any other new writer to have emerged in the last decade.”

  —Vanity Fair

  MY IDEA OF FUN

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE QUANTITY THEORY OF INSANITY

  COCK AND BULL

  GREY AREA

  THE SWEET SMELL OF PSYCHOSIS

  GREAT APES

  TOUGH, TOUGH TOYS FOR TOUGH, TOUGH BOYS

  HOW THE DEAD LIVE

  DORIAN

  MY IDEA OF FUN

  A Cautionary Tale

  Will Self

  GROVE PRESS

  New York

  Copyright © 1993 by Will Self

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in Great Britain in 1993

  by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Self, Will.

  My idea of fun: a cautionary tale / Will Self.

  ISBN 9780802193346

  I. Title.

  PR 6069.E3654M9 1994

  823’ .914—dc20 93-31522

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR ALEXIS

  CONTENTS

  Book One

  The First Person

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  What You See is What You Get

  Chapter Two

  Crossing the Abyss

  Chapter Three

  The Fat Controller

  Chapter Four

  My Universities

  Chapter Five

  Rehabilitation

  Intermission

  Book Two

  The Third Person

  Chapter Six

  The Land of Children's Jokes

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Yum-Yum’

  Chapter Eight

  Reenter The Fat Controller

  Chapter Nine

  The Money Critic

  Chapter Ten

  The North London Book of the Dead (Reprise)

  Epilogue

  At the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station

  BOOK ONE

  THE FIRST PERSON

  I have told myself a thousand times not to be shocked, but every time I am shocked again by what people will do to have fun, for reasons they cannot explain.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Prologue

  ‘So what's your idea of fun then, Ian?’ It was the woman diagonally opposite me, the one with the Agadir tan. For a half-second or more I thought I hadn't heard the question right but then she repeated it. ‘So what's your idea of fun then, Ian?’ It's often things like that that really claim my attention, the things that happen twice. The first time she said it, it sounded to me like, ‘So wus yernidee f'n, ‘n?’ Only the rise in pitch at the end indicated the interrogative. The second time, however, I took it in fully, I sopped up sound and import like intentional Kleenex. And then it pulped me – my idea of fun – took all my layers, my multi-ply selves, and wadded them into a damp mass. I sat there clutching the edge of the table, feeling the linen twist excruciatingly over the polished wood, with everything pushing together, melding inside of me.

  Then Jane looked at me from across the table. Looked at me with her special look, the little moue that means total intimacy, total us-apart-from-the-world, and said, ‘Oh I don't think Ian has much of an idea of fun at the moment, the poor old sod's too bound up in his work.’ But by then the group conversation had passed on; someone further around the table – he'd been introduced to me when we arrived but it hadn't taken – was giving us the benefit of his idea of fun. As I remember it was crass in the extreme, utterly befitting his Silkience hair and onyx spectacle frames. You can imagine, all centred on nude teens, cocaine and a hotel suite in Acapulco. It was adman crap, slick-surface kicks for a magic-screen mentality. But I wasn't paying any, I was lost inside myself, caught up in my own horror show, my private view. I was thinking:

  My idea of fun? This woman – who I don't even know – she wants to know what it is? Hey, if only she did know . . . ur-her-her . . . If only she could see . . . but then, that could never be. See me tearing the time-buffeted head off the old dosser on the Tube. See me ripping it clear away and then addressing myself to his corpse. See me letting my big body flop over his concertinaed torso, and then see me arching like a boy whose hard little belly muscles provide him with a fulcrum when he leaps on to a metal post.

  That's what I was thinking and at the same time I was wondering, idly speculating, how I could convey this particular sensation to her, this idea of fun. She'd probably never even seen a neck without a head on it, let alone felt one. I could have told her, though – using an analogy she'd readily grasp – It's a bit like a mackerel, a bit like a mackerel in that all the tissue, the sinew and the muscle, is packed into the dermis quite tightly. Putting my hand around that neck was just like grasping the silvery skin of a fish and feeling the compact rigidity of its body. That's why I had to hoist myself right up on top, I needed all my weight to penetrate the still-seeping stem. And the dosser's head, that fitted into the analogy as well; as I worked myself up and around, as I sucked in and out of his ribbed ulcerated gullet, I stared down into his face – nose wedged in the rubber runnel that ran along the carriage floor – and watched his personality, his soul, his identity? What you will. I watched it retreating, going away. It was a mackerel's pointed countenance, freshly caught but already dulling, losing its lustre and fading into a potentially battered finger – away from being a life form at all.

  Even so, even given my painfully acquired powers of description, such as they are, I don't think I could have done justice to the experience. All that would have struck this woman, this nameless woman, an acquaintance of an acquaintance, adrift with me for a few hours on the sociable sea, would have been – what? The horror of it all, the ghastly anti-human horror? The studied contempt involved in such an action? But could she have seen it, as I do, as the moral equivalent of a cosmological singularity, the Holocaust writ small? Could she appreciate the almost celestial cloud of despair that gusts out from my insides? A cloud bearing catatonic spore, seeds for a new but even more
fatal speciation.

  I doubt it – she was passing me by. This encounter was so slight it might never have been; the very moment we met we were speeding away from one another – goodbyeeeee – screaming children on time's train. A more likely outcome, were I to have vouchsafed to her my idea of fun, would have been for her to say to someone else a week or so hence, ‘I met a man at a dinner party the other night, it was very strange. We were all talking about having fun. You know, “having fun”, really kicking back your heels and letting go, and he said to me that his idea of fun – stressing that this was just one example he could summon up – was fucking the severed neck of a tramp on the Tube. Well I mean black or what! I mean that-is-black, it just is. The things that people will say nowadays, simply because they think that they can get some kind of a rise out of you.’

  No, when this happened, when I took this chance cue and let it usher in the deluge, I didn't think of her because I don't know her. Instead I thought of the person who would really be affected by the truth about my idea of fun, I thought of Jane.

  Because I love Jane, I really do, I love her the way people are meant to love each other, sacrificing themselves over the little things, the inconsequential things, as well as the big ones, the life decisions. And I've also been letting down my personal barriers, you know – the drawbridge to my ego. She's been coming inside me at the same time that I enter her. I've allowed her that, allowed her to see the shyness, the vulnerability in my face as we make love. It sounds corny, doesn't it? Soppy, wouldn't you say? But that's the truth, love is going for that corny burn, running that corny marathon together and keeping right on to the tape. People who are in love with one another look into each other's eyes for a full minute after they've orgasmed without hesitation, without repetition, without deviation. They are like the confluence of two rivers, two processes rather than two objects. Yeah – and that as well – like two verbs rather than two nouns.

  Of course, even in those moments, those very special moments we share, I've kept something back. This tramp-fucking stuff, to be specific, this evil stuff. I've kept it back because I really don't want to hurt her, I don't want to hurt her especially now that she's due and we're about to complete on the house. That's two big uncertainties – or rather two big insecurities – that she has to deal with already. Why give her a third of the form, ‘Oh and by-the-by I'm the devil's disciple – thought you ought to know, old girl, what with bearing my child and all of that stuff.’

  But then I wasn't counting on these odd fish, these throw-away lines that like verbal can openers have prised the lids off all my rotten selves. Mine is after all a worm's-cast identity, a vermiculation of the very soul.

  All the rest of the evening – it blurred by – I had eyes only for Jane. I knew that at long last I would have to give her a fuller account of myself, that I would have to go some way towards telling the truth.

  Coffee succeeded crème brulée. We moved from the dinner table to the sitting room. The talk was of people, mutual friends who were conveniently not present. Their stock rose and fell on the conversational Nikkei with incredible speed. Someone would say of X, ‘Oh I think he's idiotic, there's no point to him at all – ‘ and then someone else would chime in with an anecdote confirming this. Before long almost everyone present would be vying with one another to come up with examples of X's awfulness. Within five minutes it became clear that absolutely nothing could redeem X short of the Second Coming. He was venal, he was dishonest, he was gauche, he was pretentious, he was snobbish and yet . . . and yet . . . Just when X was hammered flat and ready for disposal, the tide turned. Someone said, ‘The thing about X is that he'll always help you out if you're in a real jam, he's loyal in that way.’ The emotional traders swung around to face their dealing screens once more. With X so low he had become worth investing in again. Before long his stock was being snapped up by all and sundry. X was now witty, unassuming, possessed of a transcendent sensibility . . .

  It went around and around. I brought my wine glass lazily to my lips, spotting the stripes on my suit trousers. Jane was opposite me again, situated in a Scandinavian concavity that made up part of the G-plan. She sat knees akimbo, her pregnant belly cupped by body and chair, as if she were proffering it to the gathering. She gave me ‘our look’ again and spoke betwixt the strands of general talk, spoke to me alone, ‘You look all in, love, do you want to get home?’ I affirmed this, because it was the easiest thing to do. No point in saying that I couldn't care less, that I might as well be anywhere. Here or there. Lying on a desert floor under the cold glare of the stars, or slumped against weeping bricks in some shooting alley off the Charing Cross Road – it made no odds.

  We said goodbye to our host and hostess and to our fellow guests. I nodded at the woman with the Agadir tan, my never-to-be confessor. She nodded back. Out in the street the lamps were orange-aureoled, damp leaf smell banked the sopping pavements. ‘Did you drink a lot?’ Jane asked. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ I gave her the keys and she pointed the pulsing fob at our car, our steel pod. The central locking chonked, I got in on the passenger side and let my head droop against the headrest.

  When Jane got in on her side I was struck once more by the way that things seemed to accommodate her belly. Here the primary function of the car was to support her tumescence. The moulding of the plastic fascia swept around to bracket it, the foam of the seat welled up to support it. When she struggled down and yanked the lever to hunker the seat forward, it was as if she were bringing her unborn child into the very centre of the car's shell, so that cosseted by impact-resistant materials it could be transported safely home. She started the engine and we pulled away from the kerb.

  ‘They were nice, weren't they?’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘At any rate they put on a good spread. Mind you, I can't stand that friend of hers, what's his name – the one who's into microlights?’ She ran on. We drove. In the artificial light the street furniture had lost its scale, it might just as well have been model bus stop signs and model Belisha beacons that studded our route. How was I going to tell her – that was what preoccupied me – how was I going to broach the subject? I pondered our relationship, plotted its conventional course with my heat-sensitive aerial camera. Our assimilation into one another had been beautifully timed, with each little revelation of unpleasantness acting as a modest baffler, a groyne to our mutual inundation. Now all of this was going to be flooded, drenched in poisonous ichor.

  At home I snapped on the lights in the kitchen. While I descended to the eating area, Jane stayed up on the dais which was bounded by our file of white goods. She moved about, propping her belly on clean kitchen surface after clean kitchen surface. In her stretchy black hose she was like some feminine Marcel Marceau, mimicking mime. ‘I'll make you some camomile,’ she said. ‘That'll rehydrate you.’ I grunted and she flicked on the electric jug.

  And then it came to me – the way forward, that is. I was sitting at the round kitchen table, my elbows on blond wood, caught in the spectral webs of the natural beiges and greys that consulted together in our living space. I felt foetal, amniotically lulled. I felt as I imagined my son-to-be to be feeling. But that was it, though, he wasn't my son, not remotely. I knew that it couldn't be so, not when I considered the overall shape of things. I couldn't have said how he had done it – The Fat Controller, that is – his powers are so indiscriminate. He might have intervened at any stage. He could have miniaturised himself and crawled down my urethra just prior to the relevant ejaculation and there replaced some of my spermatozoa with his own. Or he could have gone smaller still, small enough to infiltrate the genospace itself. Here he might have uncoupled and relinked the long strings of deoxyribonucleic acid as casually as a farmer mends a fence. But however it was that he had done it I was certain that he had. Usurped my paternity, that is.

  Jane's now talking about the new house. ‘I've phoned Radley.’ (That's the solicitor who's handling the conveyancing.) ‘He says he's had the deeds through, so it's only a matte
r of a few days now.’ I grunt noncommittally. ‘You don't sound very interested.’ She's piqued, fluffed up by it as she pours the boiled water on to the bags.

  ‘No, I am, really I am, it's just – ‘

  ‘You're tired, I know. Don't worry, drink this and come to bed.’ She plonks mine down in front of me and taking hers goes on up the angled stair. I can hear her moving about up there. She's stripping off her damp clothes, pausing by the mirror to observe, the darkening swell of her abdomen, the fecund brown stripe from button to mons. She's a stolid young woman, built for bearing children just as a clay vessel is meant to be drunk from. The way the veins on her breasts strike blue lightning, the way her ankles swell with healthy oedema, it all speaks of success, jingle bells maternity and chocolate box consanguinity.

  Ah, but if I dive into her, plunge through the drum-tight skin and swim on, I know what I'll find. No unformed Jane-sprog or me-sprog, sucking a vestigial thumb and taking on nutriment by hose, like a baby tanker inside a mummy tender. Instead he will be there, or at any rate his new homunculus. I instantly recognise his smooth impassive face, hairless and football round, his hard-boned eyebrow ridges, his flat-bridged and flaring nose, his vulpine mouth – thick-lipped and sneering – and then that voice:

  ‘Come inside for a decco, have we, boy?’ He isn't fazed, he never is. His solid body is conservatively clothed, as ever, suited despite the blood heat. And, as if to cock a preemptive snook at the health-and-safety lobby, one of his vile stogies is clamped between his fingers and defying the elements by merrily combusting in fluid. ‘I love it in here, don't you? It's so warm and smoochy. A vat of malmsey would suit me fine but failing that I'm happy to settle for total immersion in liquor.’ To emphasise how at home he is he cuts a weightless caper, like an astronaut clowning it up for the camera, and bats against the soft walls of his capsule.