My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  Gyggle entered the ward from the far end, and proceeded towards where Ian lay, barging several spectral forms in hospital-issue dressing-gowns out of his way. The chronics, brains floating in their liquor-filled pans like whitened specimens in formaldehyde, offered but feeble resistance. Gyggle put his bony hands on the rail at the end of Ian's bed and idly scanned the clipboarded notes that dangled there.

  Ian's lips were numb, safety bags that had self-inflated around his risky mouth.

  ‘Bhat bhe buck bas bat ‘bout?’ he mouthed at Gyggle.

  ‘Here, have some water,’ said the shrink. ‘Your mouth is very dry.’ He passed over a plastic beaker, which Ian swilled, cold droplets falling on his neck and chest. ‘Well!’ Gyggle's eagerness was boyish, crass, irritating. ‘Tell me about it, were there any intimations of our old adversary?’

  ‘B-no.’ Ian numbled.

  ‘But dream experience of a very vivid kind – am I right?’

  ‘B-yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Some sort of a place or realm,’ said Ian, clearly now, his lips coming back to life. ‘Difficult to describe, but you know, very obviously how can I put it? Meaningful?’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  Ian told him about Pinky, the Mars Bar gimmick, the Rumpel-stiltskin guessing game, and his subsequent close encounter with the thin man.

  ‘Did you recognise any of these people?’

  ‘N-no. Though it was strange, because I did feel that I might somehow come to know them – ‘

  ‘In the future?’

  ‘That's right. In the future. But I understood where I was even as it was happening. You see, the Mars Bar gimmick and the man with his penis pulled up around his throat, they're nightmare figures culled from old children's jokes. You know, the sick kind, the kind that depend on such awful visualisations.’

  ‘I see, I see, of course, this is brilliant.’

  ‘I knew that it was the Land of Children's Jokes instinctively.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I'm certain we're on to something here. I'm sure that we've begun to penetrate this damaging cathexis of yours. I'm convinced that we must go on.’

  ‘I don't want to go on – it's scary.’ Ian was struggling up from the bed. He still felt very woozy; hardened sleepy dust crackled on the skin around his eyes.

  ‘Oh but you must,’ said Gyggle, ‘you must. Remember, no catharsis, no full genitality. Got that? Got the photo?’ Gyggle was already walking when he said this; he threw it over his handlebar shoulder as he rode his spoke legs off down the ward. Ian couldn't have been certain, but he thought Gyggle also made a peculiar gesture, curling his thumb and his two middle fingers into the palm of his hand, then poking the index and little fingers towards his own testicles. Then he was gone, through the cat-flap doors.

  Monday morning. In the purulent heart of the city heat is smell and smell is heat. The hot haunch of the late-summer day is brazenly insinuating itself against the pallid flanks of the office blocks around Old Street Tube Station. The diurnal heat is crudely importuning ‘Software House'; ‘Television House'; ‘Polystyrene House’ and all the other sad sack commercial premises.

  Ian Wharton popped out of the subway like a champagne cork. He was bounding this morning, full of enthusiasm, geared up for the fray. This was Ian's work self, quite distinct from his haunted other self. No one at work knew about his problems. At D. F. & L. Associates, whereto Ian was bounding, he was perceived as a solid type, a Roseland man, a regular middle-class guy, full of bonhomie and jocularity. He was also a successful marketeer, and on this particular Monday morning there might well be an important new account for him to begin work on. An account that had been provisionally named ‘Yum-Yum’.

  Ian veered off the roundabout, down a path that led in the general direction of Norman House. The path became a passageway that traversed a bomb site between two high wooden fences. To the left of the fence the site had been cleared and building work was in progress, hard hats and JCBs were grunting and grubbing in the dirt, but the site to the right of the fence hadn't been cleared yet. Through chinks in the fence Ian could see a tangle of stringy privet, lanky nettles, wild flowers and triffid weeds, all forming a fuzz of camouflage over the sunken foundations of the bombed-out building. He took a deep breath and sighed. What a marvellous morning to be so stylishly suited and on his way to a stylish job.

  Norman House, which contained the offices of D. F. & L. Associates, was set between two similar, somewhere to the north of the twisted rectangle formed by Old Street, City Road, London Wall and Shoreditch High Street. In truth, the only thing Norman about the building was the pseudo-Bayeux lettering on the doorplate that proclaimed ‘Norman House’. Otherwise it was an undistinguished six-storey smogscraper, faced in London brick, its eighteen rectangular windows projected out by double surrounds of leading and yellow stonework.

  Ian bounded up the three steps to the glass doors and pushed them open. In the cramped vestibule by the lift, he encountered Dave, the porter, with his hairy chest oozing up from behind his collar, like some mutant merkin.

  ‘Morning, Mr Wharton,’ said Dave.

  ‘Morning, Dave,’ said Ian, punching the lift-call button.

  ‘Going to be another hot one today.’

  ‘So they say, so they say.’

  The lift doors peeled back on the third floor to reveal the reception area of D.F.& L. Behind a brushed steel bulwark, Vanda, the statuesque black receptionist, sat stroking the keys on her Merlin console. The laquered busby of her hair hid a combined mouth-and-earpiece set, so that, to Ian, it appeared as if she were talking to some spirit guide, deeply familiar with the London club scene.

  ‘Morning, Vanda.’

  ‘Morning, Mr Wharton.’

  Ian barrelled through the reception area and headed on up the stairs. The decor of the D.F.& L. suite was unremarkable, beige-corded carpets and utilitarian strip lighting. The walls were hung with framed display advertisements the agency had been responsible for commissioning, alongside various marketing-award certificates. Set here and there, on the stairs, along the corridors, were freestanding glass cabinets, filled with other kinds of awards. These were symbolic bibelots, pseudo-products. Brushed steel and cedarwood pediments jostled on their baize bottoms, pushing forward on spindles of acrylic tiny metalicised examples of packaging, little rubber stoppers, assortments of diminutive clips, valves and widgets. In amongst them Ian spotted the award given to D.F.& L. for one of its most successful campaigns, the Painstyler.

  The Painstyler was a kind of tool, that could be used by amateur decorators to tease the surface of a particularly thick, plaster-enriched brand of paint into a landscape of petrified fronds. The Painstyler – God knows why – had caught on in a major way. The D.F.& L. billings had been massive, and, as an expression of gratitude, Hal Gainsby, the American senior partner, had the entire offices painstyled. Every single ceiling and vertical surface was fluffed up in this manner, so that to progress around the corridors was to feel one's self to be some kind of human bolus, being peristalsised along a giant gut.

  The employees couldn't abide the painstyled surfaces, which were by way of being a hideously itchy incentive to the scratching and picking of apathetic fingernails. No desk or work station in the whole suite was without its accompanying snowfall of chipped-off paint fragments. This progressive distressing of the office environment sent Gainsby into bubbling furies; some employees had their wages docked, others were fired. The very success of the Painstyler had started to scrape away at the corporate fabric.

  Ian Wharton absorbed all of this and looked out for fresh little snowfalls as he bowled down the corridor towards the fifth-floor conference room. He pushed the heavy door open and confronted his colleagues.

  Together with Hal Gainsby there were Patricia Weiss, Customer Account Manager; Geoff Crier, Media Buyer; and Simon Arkell, Planner. Gainsby, a plump little man who endlessly sought out any point of potential height-advantage, was on top of the air-conditioning unit, set benea
th the rectangular window. His rear end pincered by its two slabs, he was being subjected to a chilly blast, and as his fashionable Barries’ shirt turned into a chilly shroud, he bitterly regretted the posture.

  That was Gainsby all over. He was a man whose millisecond to millisecond disposition was bounded by posture regret. The most obvious form of this was physical, but it extended through his career, on to his anglophilia, and terminated in a sadly pointless emotional loneliness. As it goes, the same was true for the rest of them, these other three marketeers.

  Patricia Weiss was a German-Jewish bombshell, an antithetical Leni Riefenstahl. Her swarthy face was hidden behind a life mask of thick caramel foundation. Her big eyelids were enpurpled, their faux lashes gooey with mascara; her severe lips were raw red and a lurid beauty pimple formed a trigonometric point on the hard plain of her cheek.

  If Weiss's jewellery indicated membership of a yet-to-be-created tribe of millennarian Amazons, her couture was contrawise: a set of vampish relics left over from the fifties. Under a black cuirass jacket there was no blouse, only a heavily reinforced brassière that coned her breasts into Strangelove projectiles. Weiss's legs were thrust beneath the blond-wood conference lozenge, but anyone could have told you that her stockings were sheer, sheer, sheer, and that her legs were sheerer still. Her skate-blade feet were rapacious and violent to look at, spiked by patent leather at toe cap and high-heel.

  Gainsby may have been sad, but Patricia Weiss thought herself a truant from feeling and that was worse, far worse. Originally married to a bibulous Big Blue manager, she had left the Havant household under a hail of blows from the pissed brute. Then he had the gall to hit her in the divorce court with a desertion rap. The judge was a misogynist and delivered the kids to Daddy and destruction. Consumed with self-hatred Patricia blew for London and had a butterfly tattooed in her groin. The boy and girl were now six and nine respectively. She couldn't stand the blame in their eyes when she fought her way back in to see them. At the bottom of her meticulous heap of hair, the idea fermented that only another child could save her, a new birth.

  Patricia tried to be tough and sexy. She vamped men in, vogued them, cranked them up and then vroomed them out again. But each new coupling brought only fresh despair. Inside her marvellous chest a post-coital she-spider feasted on her dead man's heart.

  Geoff Crier reminded Ian of Hargreaves, his tutor at Sussex. Crier had the same all-over brown beard, which strongly implied the necessity of a daily razure around his raw eyes. He was a throwback to the dandy Ogilvy days of British advertising when copywriters, marketing men, even people in production, sported colourful bow ties, and affected the manners of artists who chanced to be commercial. Crier was none too bright. Life, he contended, kept on crossing the road when it saw him coming. In his late-forties now, the oldest of the three, he was beginning to grow ungracefully young and chippy, like an adolescent on the make. His girlfriend couldn't have been said to be long-suffering. For she was blissfully unaware of how the Crier frustration was strained through the colander of his personality, until all that was left was a stock of watery pretension.

  On this ovenready morning, already damp in his fashionable black shorts (by Barries’ of the King's Road), Si Arkell, the youngest of the three marketeers, was labouring hard at his covert daytime job, the relentless struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. He tried to think of sleeping with men as just something that he did, in much the same way that other people went to the football or faked up corn circles, but it didn't feel like that at all. What it felt like was that his homosexuality had somehow chewed its way through his very being. A cancerous solitary piranha, that was now eating up all his fixity, any ability he had to concentrate.

  At night, in the minimalist desert of his fashionable Bayswater apartment, Arkell mugged up on genetics. Each new theory that advanced a structural brain differential for inverts left him feeling queasier and queerer. The more he read, the more alarming the clarity with which he could picture his brain. In dreams, like a toy diver, he swam around its coral-reef efflorescence, observing the mutant formations and the parasitical encrustations that made him what he was. In the morning he awoke sweating – his dreams had been so vivid and so exhausting that he found himself hardly rested.

  From time to time poor Arkell would crack, go out cruising, score. Usually with a man he didn't even fancy. He'd let them bugger him, or he'd suck them off. Often they would beat up on him for finishers. So even getting what he wanted was turned into a variety of humiliation. Poor Si.

  All of them, all of the marketeers, had compensated for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches. These were Ian Wharton's ideal confrères. For, like him, their cerebella had been fashioned into frozen gondolas, crammed full of frosted thought-items. Theirs was a mental mise-en-scène within which aspirations, yearnings, dreams, ethical confusions, had all become just so many product placements, each jostling for its paid-for moment in the viewfinder of consciousness.

  They subjected themselves to marketing methodologies relentlessly and avariciously. They divided themselves internally into socio-economically classifiable sub-sets of assertive homunculi, which were compelled to complete notional surveys, attend focus groupings where phenomena were assessed, and then witness hamfisted demonstrations of the next Little Idea. The marketingspeak had invaded their very ordinary language. Thus, they had adapted the folksy homily to their own usage, proclaiming, ‘There are no such things as strangers, only prospects that we haven't converted, yet.’

  These were Ian's colleagues and in his perverse way, the only people he really felt comfortable with.

  ‘Morning, Hal, Pat, Si, Geoff – ‘

  ‘Morning, Ian,’ they chorused.

  ‘Ian, I'm glad you're here. I've had the most extraordinarily good news.’ Gainsby gestured at the surface of the conference table where, Ian now noticed, there lay in front of each of the marketeers a D.F.& L. Associates pitching document. ‘We've won the Bank of Karmarathon account!’ His peculiar Bostonian accent warbled over the exclamation, and at long last he felt able to free himself from the air-conditioner. He took a seat at the head of the table. Ian sat as well.

  ‘Hal, that's amazing news, congratulations, you deserve every credit.’

  ‘Nonsense, Ian, this wouldn't have been possible without all of us. We worked well as a team, now I think we're going to be rewarded – handsomely. They've agreed to the budget we proposed for the product launch without any reservations. I don't need to tell any of you that our fee as a percentage of that budget will be very considerable.’

  ‘What a relief!’ Ian sank heavily into his allotted chair, then instantly regretted it. The chairs were another of the fruits of D.F.& L.’s labour and Hal Gainsby's unfortunate loyalty to the products he marketed. The aluminium S-bend design was ubiquitous, but this particular version had a major fault. The tensility of the aluminium used had been too great; anyone who forgot this fact found themselves bouncing to a standstill as if on a trampoline.

  When he had finally settled Ian went on, ‘So what now? How quickly do they want us to proceed?’

  ‘Well, that's just the thing. I had a call at 4 a.m. this morning from Nat Hilvens in NY. Karmarathon want to push the launch forward to January of next year, which gives us only six months to do all the softening up.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Geoff Cryer muttered. ‘That's going to present huge logistical problems. There's the financial press to be dealt with, for a start. I'd thought that we'd have time to organise quite a number of informal seminars, in order to introduce them to the idea.’

  ‘Y-yes.’ Arkell was squirming in his seat, thin fingers holding each opposing wrist.’ What about these standing booths we were going to erect? I've only just put the whole thing out to tender, I've no idea how we'll manage to organise the permissions and get them actually built before January.’

  For no good reason silence fell around the conference-room table.
Ian idly scanned the juncture of the cream skirting board and the beige carpet, noting the druff-falls of paint and plaster fragments, another failure by the staff to keep their itchy fingers away from the Painstyler decoration. Under his own broad palm he could feel the slick folders, the phallic pilots’ pens, the plastic-encapsulated microchip butties, that bulked out his soft, calfskin portfolio. Ian's attention first wavered, then wandered, away even from the silence itself. Outside in the other world of the street, vehicles oozed through the soupy air, a jack hammer drummed on the cakey crust of the earth.

  This wouldn't do. He normally felt bound-in here at D. F.& L., secure in his trade persona. In his work he intuited the universe of products as a primary construct, a space-time configuration upon which consciousness-at-large had engrafted itself, like wisteria choking a trellis. That is why – he believed – one's own mind fitted so well into those of others. Every dove of consumer cogitation could marry a tail of vendor awareness. The communality of products was stronger than that of language, of television, of religion, of party, of family, of primogeniture, of Heimat, of Medellin, of retribution, of clout, of face, of latah, of the Four of Anything, of off Broadway, of any of the consistencies that had been used to establish the increasingly arbitrary character of the cottages that made up the global village.

  Ian thought for the first time in years of the concept of retroscendence. How it might be possible to enter into the very history of a product, any product, the Porsche or the crisp packet, and flow down its evolutionary folkways, zoom back to the point where it was as yet undifferentiated, unpositioned, unintentional, and therefore not about anything. In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to. . . Gainsby was saying something ‘. . . feels that he was crucially involved in, so to speak, factoring this to us. It isn't something I've spoken of to you before – ‘