My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  A bit of sibling bullying never really hurt a child. Not a child as well-loved as Jane. And she was -loved, that is. Her parents were solid people, protective of Jane and Simon. They kept the world of pissy alleyways and shitry behaviour at bay. Jane went to quiet private schools where discipline was unquestioned and the results invariably more of the same. Friends came to play on the great dappled lawn, they peed in the pampas grass as the clouds were peeled away from the sky, rolling back the years.

  Aged five, Jane saved up her lemonade pennies for her adored brother. She knew just what he would want for a special present. Not a birthday present or a Christmas present, but a gift to show him just how much she loved him. Mummy took Jane to the toy shop and there it was, a little painted tin figurine, only a couple of inches high. His cut-away coat was black, as was his top hat. His waistcoat was yellow and his trousers grey. Jane extracted the pennies, three pences and sixpences from her horseshoe-shaped leather purse, one by one. The shop assistant interred the metal minikin in a brown paper bag. She locked him in there with a transparent band of Sellotape. Jane bore him home in her lap, aching with anticipation.

  ‘Whass this?’ said Simon, the understudy of ungraciousness.

  ‘It's a present, a present for you.’

  ‘S'Fat Controller? Yeah, well, I've got one already, you can keep it.’

  Jane did keep it. Not literally, of course. The little tin figurine of the Fat Controller became just a part of the toy-box flotsam and jetsam, recognised by Jane again and again over the years, each time with a shock of humiliation. But in some other place, very near to her yet inaccessible, a big hard presence sprang into being and remained there, like the black nimbus surrounding the sun, or the dark shadow that flirts at the very edge of your eye.

  Jane grew up and the presence grew up with her. It was a masculine presence, of that much she was certain, but beyond that she could not characterise or even picture it. It was just the thing that lingered, the thing that was behind you when you backed behind the tree to hide, leaving the everyday world of children and dogs cavorting on the grass in the sunshine. It was the ineffable sensation of loss that visited Jane on waking from profound sleep. It was the muscle-packed mass, the amorphous leviathan, that nipped around her ankles, under the sloping surface of the sea, as she swam off the beach, at Poole, at Polzeath, at Brighton.

  When she reached puberty and moved from the dames’ school to the ladies’ college at Reigate, the presence went with her. By now the presence was not simply masculine – it was a man, of sorts. Jane was a bright thirteen year old, advanced for her years. She had been brought up in the light of day as far as matters sexual were concerned; her romantic tendencies were circumscribed by clear information. She correctly identified the presence for what it so clearly was, the anima, the Dionysian other, Pan, Priapus.

  Not that Jane actually conceived of the presence as being endowed with a penis. For some reason she couldn't quite formulate this idea. No, the presence was rounded but firm and impenetrable.

  Jane grew up to be an attractive young woman, not striking, because that would have given her an unsuitable complex. Of medium height, with broad hips and heavy breasts, her black hair was usually cut in a neat bob. Her complexion, although sallow in winter, tended to a pleasing olive whenever the sun could get at it. She was demure, attentive, modest, passive, intuitive, all the crap qualities that are ascribed to cipher women, the way rhythm is drummed into the blacks and miserliness deposited with the Jews. And still the presence hovered in the wings.

  Christmas in Surrey and some relations have gathered in the overstuffed drawing room. Jane, aged sixteen, heads out to the kitchen for more cheesy balls. The presence is so clearly in the pantry she can feel him, behind the door waiting and watching. She puts the bowl down gingerly, the cheesy balls rock to a standstill, and sliding across the lino, jerks the door open. Nothing, or maybe not quite nothing, maybe an outline of city shoes on the flour-fall floor.

  After leaving school Jane got a job in a wool shop. That's what interested her, knitting, crochet, appliqué, tapestry, quilting. Any craft that involved the plaiting of strands, their twisting, their knotting. The interior of the wool shop was itself woolly, the atmosphere cloyed with millions of millions of sequacious filaments. Jane sat there on a squishy stool waiting for customers and sensing the presence watching her from behind the ranks of shanks and balls.

  Nice boys asked this nice girl out. Took her to films, to discos, to parties. They returned her home to Mummy and Daddy punctually at eleven, after petting sessions on sofas, banquettes, the back seats of cars. What a disappointment, those gauche hands, clumsily clutching at her sensual synchromesh. Jane connected this with the presence. The presence, Jane felt, wouldn't stall in this fashion.

  On account of still living at home with her parents, her virginity was lifted in broad daylight rather than hustled away in fumbling darkness. The boy concerned thought he had achieved a great victory, arguing her into it. But, as is always the case, it was her decision alone and he was merely lust's Sooty swept along. Looking down to where their bellies married under the cover Jane was conscious of his thrusting into her as pure carpentry, tongue and groove. Later they went for coffee in a local cafe. She watched while the fat cook scraped grease from the range with a spatula.

  The following morning Jane awoke in the half-light. She knew the presence was with her first, even before she was aware of the sucking thing fastened on her vagina. There was this awful weight pressing down on her and she had no real sensation in the lower half of her body. She couldn't vocalise either; she was powerless, impotent. The thing, whatever it was, sucked at her with the mechanical insensitivity of a domestic appliance. She cried out, but the scream travelled nowhere, it couldn't even squeeze out of her larynx. The thing went on devouring her vagina. Was it a person, an animal? She couldn't tell, all she could see was a globular object, a head or a ball. Her whole pudendum was being drawn up inside this thing, slurp-slurp-slurp. Metrically, in humanly.

  When she awoke properly, came to consciousness fully, she was screaming and her father was in the room already, with an arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Her mother was standing, bleary in night weeds at the open door. How had they both got there so quickly?

  After this nightmare Jane found that she felt somehow traumatised, sexually constrained by something that lay outside herself, that wasn't part of her at all. The trauma had alighted on her, like the incubus itself.

  She started to create her own patterns. She got a job writing a column on knitting crafts for a women's magazine. Soon after that a friend in television asked her to audition for a programme. She did well. Her low brow was comfortable for the camera and her clear voice recorded excellently. She left home on the strength of the television contract and bought a flat in London, closer to the studios. Daddy dealt with the conveyancing.

  Jane thought of herself as sexually aware. Not liberated, but aware. She had managed to resist the Moloch of promiscuity, in some sense to save herself. For what she wasn't quite sure. Twice a year or so she would contract for a mismanaged relationship of some kind, with a young man of some description. They would go through the tired motions of discovering their basic incompatibility with one another, then, at the very point that this fact had been fully realised by both, they would finally consummate their affair, set a sexual seal on its redundancy notice.

  Jane, naturally enough, connected this with the presence. She could endure a man's touch, a man's stroke, a man's gyrating push. She could just about cope with the mornings, the solicitous apologies, the well-bred regrets. But she could never, ever, ever, let one of these nice young men go down on her. Not since the nightmare. That was the forbidden zone.

  So this is the kind of a young woman that was waiting for Gyggle – a Good Young Woman, cap. ‘G’, cap. ‘Y’, cap. ‘W’. Kind and well motivated. She had a friend who worked for the probation service and it was he who awakened her hibernating social conscience. As an a
dolescent she had helped out at a unit for autistic children run by one of her mother's friends. This was the accepted Surrey way, showing the normal ones their quaking, gibbering accompanists. The righteous feelings engendered by holding these poor souls tight, grasping the writhing uncomprehending terror of their lives, had never really left her. Career established, now was the time to help someone else out. She applied to the probation service and they sent her to Gyggle.

  Coming up Hampstead Road, clouds boiling on the smoked-glass surfaces of the office blocks and the snaggle-toothed row of commercial premises forming a carnivorous urban scape, Jane felt the presence again. She felt it more strongly than she had for years, it was nearly as strong as it had been that dawn in the parental home. She was keenly aware of it as she waited for Gyggle, its bulk was treading cautiously around the DDU, proceeding down the carbolic corridors, pausing in the littered flower beds. The presence pressed its carcass cheek against the window.

  Gyggle came in and without saying anything to the young woman in the heavy black denim dress, inserted his spindly limbs, first one then the next, down the crack between his desk and the wall. He appeared to Jane, at this first encounter, just as he had to Ian Wharton all those years before at Sussex - an arch of tatty ring binders marched up and over him, making a framework of dirty marbling. Outlined like this Gyggle appeared Byzantine, iconic.

  Jane stared at Gyggle's beard and until he spoke roamed its bouncy crevices. Once again, like Ian before her, Jane had a strong urge to detach the beard from Gyggle's face. She longed to lean forward and touch the beard, stroke it a little, then maybe grasp it on either side – near the bottom where it swept the desk – and yank very hard. She was convinced that the beard would come away in her hands, it was just too splendid, too cinematic, to be actually rooted in sorneone's face. Jane sat tight while Gyggle read the letter the probation service had sent him about her.

  At last Gyggle spoke. ‘Have you any idea, Miss Carter, why the probation service should feel that you would enjoy working with addicts?’

  ‘Well, I don't think enjoy is quite the right – ‘

  ‘Maybe not.’ Gyggle didn't cut in, he oozed in. His voice was painfully soft, iterative cotton wool with a needle in it. ‘But there must be some reason why they sent you here, the service is very careful about who they select for sensitive voluntary work. ‘

  ‘Um, well . . . You have my CV there.’

  ‘Yes, yes. And I've read it. You seem to have done a bit of work with the mentally ill, Miss Carter.’

  ‘I was a voluntary worker with autistic children for about four years.’

  ‘Do you imagine that addicts are somehow like autistics? Forgive me for asking – but I myself cannot perceive such a connection.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Perhaps you think that addicts are cut off – like autistics - trapped inside a private world that we cannot access, that they are partaking of some complex but entirely unknown reality?’

  ‘No.’ Jane was emphatic. ‘I don't think that they're anything like autistics.’

  ‘Actually, you could be wrong there,’ Gyggle mused; he seemed unaware that this was a rebuttal of his own opinion. ‘Maybe the two syndromes are in some way related.’ He scrunched out from behind the desk and stood, knees pressed between the Gothic iron pleats of the cold radiator. He stared out of the window, eyes tilted above the station roof beyond the hospital garden, and went on speaking, as if reading psycho-news from some autocue in the sky. ‘Addicts are psychopathic, regressive, they have enfeebled affect. Nevertheless, it could be argued that their stereotypical behaviour is a kind of photograph of normalcy, an eidetic image of what it might be like to be sane, hmm?’

  ‘I'm sorry, I don't quite understand you.’

  ‘Oh well, oh well, no matter – no matter.’ Gyggle grabbed the scruff of the beard and used it to drag himself back to his seat. ‘Anyway, that's besides the point, which is not theoretical but practical, namely, what are we going to do with you?’ He flipped out his bony wrist and shamelessly examined his petrol-station-gifted diver's watch.

  Jane grew a little irritated. ‘I don't want to keep you from your work– ’

  ‘No, no. Please, no.’ Gyggle attempted what might have been a smile, butJane couldn't be sure, because not even a millimetre of lip was freed from its hairy purdah. Gyggle turned his attention to Jane's CV again. ‘You're available for twenty hours a week. That seems like rather a lot of time.’

  ‘I don't need much time for my job. I've made a commitment to myself to spend twenty hours a week on voluntary work.’

  ‘It's lucrative then, your, your’ – he glanced at the CV ‘ knitting programme?’

  ‘Yes, it is. ‘

  ‘Still, criminals, Ms Carter,’ Gyggle piped, ‘not victims but perpetrators. What do you think is wrong with addicts, Ms Carter?’

  ‘I'm not so sure that they aren't victims as well, Dr Gyggle. Perhaps addiction is a disease.’

  ‘If it is, have you any ideas about how it should be treated?’

  ‘I wouldn't presume – ‘

  ‘Oh, come now. It's a field in which my profession hasn't had conspicuous success. They say failed doctors become psychiatrists, and failed psychiatrists specialise in addiction. Have you heard that before?’ Gyggle's dulcet tones threw his patronising manner into still sharper relief.

  ‘No, I haven't. I don't really have any formed opinions on the subject.’

  ‘Very well, very well, perhaps another time. ‘ Gyggle shuffled the papers on his desk, then swivelled round and started to run his finger along the sloppy rows of ring binders ranged on the shelves. He pulled one down and opening it, extracted a buff folder. ‘I'm going to drop you in at the deep end,’ he went on. ‘I do this with all the volunteers who come here. It's not strictly professional. Some might say that it's not even ethical but it gets results. I've tried supervised sessions and induction groups but really, if a volunteer worker is any good, they can do without them. ‘

  Gyggle held the folder vertically and tapped it on the desk for emphasis, ‘These are the case notes of a young addict called Whittle. I want you to have a go at befriending him. He's on a reduction course of methadone, which he collects daily, here at the DDU. He's due for a court appearance in about three weeks. You can help him out, try and keep him straight. ‘

  ‘Why Whittle?’

  ‘Put simply, Ms Carter, it's a quality of life decision. Unlike many of my clients, Whittle has a chance of rehabilitation. He has some solid assets, such as being white, middle class and reasonably educated. ‘

  ‘Is that it, are those the assets?’

  ‘In our society, Ms Carter, they are the only ones that matter.’ He chucked the folder at her. ‘Here you are.’ He clocked his watch again. ‘I must leave you now, I'm supervising a group therapy session, as well as an important experiment. Read the notes, go and see Whittle, if you make out all right I'm certain I'll see you again. If not, well, it's been nice making your acquaintance.’

  He rose. His height made it impossible for him to move with any ease and his departure was in the manner of a removal, his body a piece of furniture positioned vertically for manoeuvring through the door. ’Au revoir then, Ms Carter. I do hope it is au revoir.’

  Jane said, ‘I'm sure it will be, Dr Gyggle,’ but wasn't at all.

  ‘And Ms Carter, just copy down Whittle's address from the folder. Leave it on the desk when you've finished and make sure the Yale is sprung when you leave. The clients here, as we have touched upon, tend to be a tad light-fingered. ‘ He went out.

  After the shrink had gone Jane sat for a while and read the folder. It consisted mainly of appended psychiatric evaluations and medical notes. Whittle was, Jane reflected, some kind of a healthcare recidivist. He had had more ear, nose and throat infections than a school full of Nepalese. He was also partial to abscesses and abrasions, burns and lacerations, cysts and cuts, of a bewildering multiplicity. It was as if his ambition in life were to at
tain a regular pattern of scar tissue over his entire body.

  She sighed. The atmosphere in Gyggle's office was becoming oppressive. As soon as he had exited, the presence had sneaked back to the window. Outside the sun was shining, emphysemic pigeons landed hacking on the windowsill and then dropped off. Jane sat, trying to imagine that this moment was pivotal, that it meant something. Like a child playing with a 3-D postcard, she flicked it this way and that, from destiny to contingency and back again. This was a big mistake.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘YUM-YUM’

  The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialised humanity.

  Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

  Now things speed up. Time is a battered old accordion, abused by a sozzled busker; haplessly it wheezes in and out, bringing events into tight proximity, and then dragging them far, far apart again. And, of course, time is also like this metaphor itself, formulaic, flat, and ill contrived. Time flirts with us in this fashion, entertaining all of us with an inductive peepshow, where cause's coin invariably produces the same routine of cheap effect.

  Ian Wharton and Jane Carter are driving along loving laser beams, straight towards each other. They're hurtling heart-on; their three-millimetre-thick emotional bodywork is about to be buckled, sundered, raggedly split, in the car crash of sexual love. But they know nothing of this yet.

  Loveless, alone, Ian Wharton awoke in the chronic ward of the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs. It was Sunday afternoon – forty-eight hours had elapsed since Gyggle and the sullen nurse had put him under. Coming to was sweet relief for Ian. His experiences in the Land of Children's Jokes remained with him, coherent and narratively intact, in a way that dreams just shouldn't. Around him on the ward, the dying alcoholics mewled like caged kittens. To Ian's right a man with a cirrhotic liver as large and heavy as a bowling ball groaned and thrashed from side to side of his iron cot. His nose was so networked with exploded blood vessels that it resembled nothing so much as a punnet of raspberries, squeezed to a pulp. His hands, Ian noticed, were swathed in mittens of surgical gauze.